Comparing Ayahuasca and DMTX Experiences

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He's a Cambridge trained chemist and neuroscientist and he spent thirty years studying one molecule, DMT , what he calls the world's strangest psychedelic. Many people report meeting entities when using DMT , and Andrew has a theory about them that's not exactly mainstream. He writes about this in his book Death by Astonishment. Death by astonishment Finally, it causes death. Citizen fell out of a window after questioning the official story at the CIA. He thinks the beings people meet on DMT might not be hallucinations. They might be real, alive , sentient, and living in another dimension . And he makes a pretty good case because there are people who take DMT for years and then one day a creature waves a finger and says 're, not You welcome here. It's called a lockout, and some people stay locked out for years. Our stuff of machine elves have bounces . I better be respectful next time I'm in a machine else champagne room . Today we're covering where DMT comes from, what it does inside your brain, and a new theory he built with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. It connects the whole thing to consciousness itself. After our conversation, I'll come back with a little quick analysis, but until then grab a brain bucket because this one goes deep. Let's go down to the basement. doctor Andrew Gallamore, welcome to the basement. Good to be here, AG . Thank you very much. It's as good as can be . I guess just quick disclaimer before we get started . We're not endorsing anything, any drug use, we're not promoting it , none of that stuff. That being said, we both have experience with psychedelics, so when we're talking about it, we have been there. Yeah , okay, so I thought I heard you say it's seven or eight years old . You're into ghosts, vampires, werewolves, all the paranormal. It looks like you have just upgraded your monsters to a new level . Is that what happened? Is you just you're just the monster kid? That's pretty accurate. I mean, I was into yeah , werewolves, vampires, ghosts, the occult , oija 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 you went writing the teacher said write a story . I would write these most horrific I'm going to I'm going to defend myself a little bit before you were that kid . I was that kid, but I have got quite a big family. So I've got two older brothers and two younger brothers. So I'm rightid in the mdle and the two older brothers obviously were a huge influence on me. My oldest brother, Ian , when I was kind of well, six, seven, eight years old, he was like twelve and And so he was more mature and he was very interested in horror movies. And like in those days there was like banned movies. Remember that? Sure. This one's banned. Faces of death. Faces of death and cannibal cor pse and this kind of thing, right? So you have to watch right. So he mail off for some VHS you know copied and come back and then watch these movies in the living room because there's only one VCR in the h ouse, 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. What were the next Neil Gaiman? What was that last straw story about you want me to say it really? Yeah . So in the story it was a story about an escaped lunatic inspired by the Halloween movies he escaped from the sanitarium and and he murdered several people and then in one instance he came across a god do I want to say this? He came across a woman with her baby in a pram and anyway the baby ends up being diced . And I use that word diced 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 's elementary school anyway and so yeah they used to used to like every day at the end of school he'd come to the classroom he'd checked through my work and checked that I wasn't writing horrible things Yeah, so it was What did your folk say about that story? Yeah , they had a word with me and said maybe you should, you may know,be write about n ice things. But they weren't worried about you being no. They knew where it came from. Right. It was 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 an advanced reader for my age. So I used to go to these old secondhand bookstores and try to find books about ghosts and vampires and things like that. And I really believed in them . I wanted to be a ghost hunter when I grew up . That didn't come true, but in a way, in a way 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 Yeah. 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 crack it open, and standing next to you is the guy who buried it, and he smiles and says, Actually I think most of that is mine. Now you're in a fight over something valuable and the other side already knows every trick in the book. There's a reason you wouldn't want to handle that battle alone. It's the same reason Morgan and Morgan have spent more than thirty five years fighting for the people . They're America's largest injury law firm with more than one thousand lawyers and over one hundred offices nationwide. Morgan and Morgan was founded after John Morgan saw how difficult it was for ordinary families to stand up to powerful interests after his brother suffered a serious injury. Today, they've recovered over thirty billion dollars for their clients, and they'll fight to get you the compensation you deserve. Not all law firms are the same. Hire the wrong one and you may be beat before you even starve. If you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan, and their fee is free unless they win. For more information, you can go to for the people dot com slash w? 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 nineteen ninety six. Your friend shows you a magazine . Yeah , so when I what magazine was it? I don't remember but it was after I graduated from high school so in the two years we called them A levels in the UK so I was sixteen years old , I guess . I started to get interested in psychedelics , reading about psychedelics and talking a lot about psychedelics. I started studying chemistry , biology and I wanted to be a pharmacologist. I wanted to study drugs basically and how they affect the mind. What drew you to psychedelics specifically . Especially for someone who wasn't didn't take them . At the time I didn't know but when I think back , you know, the interest in ghosts and werewolves and vamp ires, it's unusual things, I guess you could put it in the most broad sense, I guess. That's what tracks for me is you've always been into the alternate realities and yeah and because 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 and that kind of thing . I ordered it specially 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 like ESP and UFO's and things like that . So it's not so strange that as I became an adolescent and started to mature that my interest shifted away from just ghosts and werewolves and into more serious things, I guess, you know, more scientific things. And psychedelics seemed to be a way of altering your mind, of alter ing the structure and the 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 he He's I can give his name actually now is Nor Abas his name is he's actually ingly or he was a few years ago the chief designer for Oh what's his name He used to be married to Kim Kardashian . Yezy, easy these are the easy shoes. Everyone's screaming at us right now but I don't remember ? Oh, from the show? No, no, no, he's like a black guy. He's most crazy guy that was on Rogan has been on Rogan. He's been on every one's gonna go crazy after the break. We're going to find that out. We will . Kanye West. Kanye. Kanye . Yeah, Kanye. He was a chief designer. He became a fashion designer, and he was actually Kanye West's chief designer. Anyway, wow. Yeah . He'd be fun to start too . Yeah, Nur Abas. And he brought me this magazine when I was sixteen 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 Terrance McKenna . And this was an interview with him and there 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 . It 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 which you called machine elves. Sure. And I thought this is this is incredible. But it only lasts fifteen 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 remember 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 dimethylterthalate, which is a type of plastic apparently. So for a short period of time DMT in my head was dimethylterthalate . Oops . Yeah. And then we got the internet as you just mentioned. And there's only one internet in the school. Like you had to go collect this big black cable from a guy in a white coat. The password is mushroom, I remember that . That's perfect . And I would spend all my lunch break and any free periods I had. I was the only one who used it. No one else knew what this state was so new . The internet , no one really knew its power . But I kind of did. I had a friend who also had the internet in his house . And so I spent all my time just on out of Vista, as he 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 experien ces. Did you look into the history of it as well during those searches? Or you more interested in what Terrence was talking about? I was more interested in what it did . 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 thir ty year journey trying to understand DMT, you know, what it does in the brain and how it's able to achieve these remarkable effects on consciousness. What did your family think about this new hobby? Because clearly you told your brothers ? Yes . Well, they didn't understand it, you see . I mean, they would if I refer to that as DMT ,' then thats fine. If I use the word drugs, that's different matter. Right, yeah , yeah. So your book, Death by Astonishment, that's a Terrance McKenna quote. That is a Terrance McKenna quote. So is that a book end? Is that a tribute ? Is that a thank you? Why did you choose that? All of those things. Well, initially it had a completely different name that I'm not going to tell you. Okay , which was okay , but I was writing, 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, the MT is this molecule that as Tomas McKenna said, the only risk is death by astonishment. Then I wrote in quote in brackets, though 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 kind of a showstopper title, Death by Astonishment . And of course, it's a beautiful tribute to the late great Terrence McKenna . And so yeah, that's 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 , everything I've come to learn over the last thirty years of 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? You've done your research. Well, that doesn't sound like that sounds like just marine biology and things like that has nothing to do with psychedelics. Nothing to do with psychedelics. So is DMT still sort of this undercurrent while you're working through all this? Yeah, it always has been in a way. You know, I've never worked in a quote unquote psych edelic 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 , you know, as well as psychedelics, but that's been the kind of the foundation that's running through all of it. But with my PhD at Cambridge, yeah, that was biological chemistry. It's basically trying to understand how 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 molecules are 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 specialized 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 postdoc again at Cambridge. And then I thought there's something missing from my 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 belt, shall we say , but I still didn't feel that I was sufficiently sophisticated in the neurosciences. So I thought I need to move up to the kind of the higher level of the neurosciences. And so I did two post docs in computational neuroscience. It's 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 , did two postdocs in computational neuroscience. And then finally my, final postdoc, which actually the longest one, lasted for seven years, was at the Okinaw Institute of Science and Technology in Japan I needed a job after my penultimate postdoc finished and there was this position in Okinawa . So I thought, why not? I didn't have ties in England at the time. So I thought , Oh, why not move to Okinawa? What was the position? Was it a mainstream type of job . It was a post doctoral research fellowship. So basically another postdoc. Okay , but this was in computational neuroscience as well . And I spent seven years kind of modelling very small pieces of the brain, basically sort of individual neurons in the brain, trying to understand how they speak to each other and how they strengthen and weaken their connections, all connected to 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.'re If you a pharmacolog ist, you're interested in drug receptor interactions. And 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 understand all the way from the lowest level the molecules all the way up to global neural activity . So I finished my postdoc 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 bas,ically. We cover a lot of things on this show that the mainstream would rather you not think too hard about. Here's one that's not even controversial . thirty nine trillion dollars in debt, money being printed to cover it. And that dollar buys less every year. So what do you do with that information? Well, some people are moving a portion of their retirement into something physical, something that exists outside the banking system. Gold and silver have been doing that job for a long time, and over the past year , gold is up around thirty five percent, silver over one hundred and twenty five percent. I looked at several precious metals companies, most of them weren't companies I'd feel good recommending. 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That's goldencrest metals. com slash the wi files or call eighty eight, nine four nine nine one seven two for your one hundred percent free info . Cambridge, Oxford, York, Okinawa, you could have had a very successful mainstream career . Do you has there been a professional or personal cost to making the decision? Oh, God yeah. I mean, for sure. I was at the stage in my career where normally what would happen is I would start applying for what are called readership s or lectureships. So when you start taking on graduate students of your own, you become part of the department , wherever you work. But the thought of being that person horrified me. The thought that I would be, you know, like my profess or going to meetings managing funding and managing students, all that stuff . It never had any interest in it. When you're a postdoc, you have a lot of freedom, you kind of do your own thing. But once you get to that level where lecturer, you know, professor , then you have to start taking on all these other responsibilities. It takes over your life and I could never invest as much time as I want ed into my passion which is DMT and writing about DMT. I always wanted to be a writer ultimately. There's a lot of training required to write about these things . So you know, it's twenty 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 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 deep trouble in Tokyo, so I moved from Okinao to Tokyo, which is where I live now and that's where I've been for the last four years. Fortunately, I didn't majorly fuck up and things are okay. Well, I mean, Tokyo is fascinating because Japan has very strict drug laws and they're getting stricter if I mean I think cannabis they just banned . How is it is it a culture issue for you? Is it ? So people I, think when people say Japan is very antidugs, what they're actually referring to is methamphetamine and cannabis. The two biggies , right? Methamphetamine for very specific historical reasons post World War , 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 clandestin laboratories started popping up I think in Osaka in nineteen fifty two in just one year there are like fifty labs that were raided just in one city. You know, it's like breaking bad all these little met labs like in New Mexico or something. I 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 method could be the end of them. It's like an existential threat to their very civilization . And so that there's a kind of I guess I don't hate that word generational gener ational 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 . Well it's certainly amphetamines. So methamphetamine actually was invent ed by Japanese chemists in the late nineteenth 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 everything, of course . But it's actually a Japanese chemist. I didn't know that. Japanese chemist, yes. From Ephrin. So Ephrin is the molecule that you can convert. Pseudefrin, they use basically the same molecule, but slightly different geometrically. But anyway, Efedrin you can convert directly to methamphetamine. And he was working with Ephedrin , at the time, this Chinese herb that had various uses . And then he synthesized methamphetamine. And it was basically forgotten about for a number of decades and wasn't seen to be that important until people started reporting on its effects on alertness and mood and that kind of thing. And the Japanese were using it during the Second World War specifically they used to create these little green tablets that were mixed with green tea. So they're bright green 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 Japanese soldiers were using the kamikaze, for example. Sure , were using methamphetamine, it would elevate their mood, increase their kind of fighting, fighting spirit. Sure . And they don't have to worry about long term effects. They have to worry about long term effects, quite literally, yeah. And then after the war, they had all these stockpiles that made it into the market . And then the government, the Japanese government actually banned powdered forms of method so they started making liquid forms and injecting it. So they had a huge injection problem with meth, which is probably the most intense way to take it, but you know, school children were using it . High school students , housewives, yeah, no laborers, whatever. Everyone was using meth in kind of the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties until it was banned . And then they really cracked down on it. It was like a moral panic . I mean, amphetamine salts seem to be everywhere anyway, right ? . Um , so DMT first synthesized in nineteen thirty one, first found a psychoactive in nineteen fifty six and um that was Stephen Zarar, right? Stephen Zara was the first to reject pure DMT . Now this is at the same time where LSD is a popular psychedelic and psychiatric research. Why did LSD catch on and DMT did basically went disappe ared until McKenna . Right, yeah, I mean that was so yeah you're right. So during that period there was a flurry of these molecules that were either discovered or invented and LSD was the main one at the time. And Zara actually, Stephen Zara was this Hungarian physician working behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Hungary . And he wanted to work with LSD. And he wrote to Sandos , the only company that was producing LSD at the time, said, Can I can I have some LSD please? I want to start working on LSD. No, no, no, no, no . And I was sending LSD into bloody communist , nope . And so he said I need something else . And he thought about mescaline. He ordered some mescaline from the UK, and that arrived safely, and he took his first dose of mescaline on Christmas Day and had this wonderful experience . What was he in church? What was he trying to achieve? What was the purpose of his experiments? Well, he was interested in he was a psychiatrist. Ah, right? So he's interested in, you know , at the most fundamental level he was interested in the human mind and how he might study the human mind, but he's also interested in could these molecules find uses in psychiatry treatment for various sort of neuropsychological disorders . So he tried Mescaline and then he found this paper there was a paper that was so there was this plant called Anadenthera Peregrina , which is this Yopo , this snuff that The 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. They would go to other worlds and they would speak with these strange discarnate beings which they thought were like demons or something . But no one knew how it worked . And so they started to analyze it, kind of the first study analyzing these seeds from this Peregrina plant plant and they found two molecules in there. One was buffotanine , which is five hydroxydimethyl triptamine. It was five ML . No, that's five methoxy. Okay, yeah, so five MEO DMT is five methoxy DMT. If you take that methyl group off, that carbon, you get five hydroxy, just hydroxyl group. That's Bruphotanine. That was a known molecule . And it was known that when you injected it into prisoners, because that's the way you did it in those days, you found a group of 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 Brufotanine 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 central psychoactive molecule in this. They also found another molecule called DMT, dimethyl tripamine, and they just ignored it , which is a huge mistake . Until Stephen Zara read this paper and he thought Boof Hotanino that doesn't make any sense. It's not particularly psychoactive . So why would that be this why would that be regarded as this molecule that would transport you to other worlds and allow you to communicate with discarnate intelligence? That didn't make any sense. So the only other option was DMT. That was also in the seed and it being ignored. So we thought, OK, I'll give it a go. You know, no one has tried this . So he synthesized it . He made ten grams in his laboratory in nineteen fifty six And he started swallowing it first of all, you know, increasing the dosage. You went up to like a gram of DMT. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. We know why now, but that time we didn't know. So he was ready to give up, basically. He didn't try insufflating it. He didn't try. He didn't see snorting it. He didn't snort it. He didn't snort it now. That might have worked, though. No. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That might have worked. It would have been painful, but yeah. It might have worked. So he basically he was like ready to give up. Maybe his hunch was wrong. And then a friend, a colleague, says, have you tried injecting it? I haven't. So he injected it into I think it was a cat or a rabbit. I think it was a cat for some reason . And the cat kind of started behaving strangely, you know? It was having some kind of I don't mean to laugh. I'm a cat. I'm a cat man as well . So you know, satisfied that it wasn't lethal at least in cats . Yeah, yeah, we shouldn't laugh, people. People complain whenever I tell this story because cork and it's true, but different times, different times yeah, so then he ejected it into himself. So sometime in April in nineteen fifty six he injected it into his intramuscularly and yeah the rest as they say is history had this he started seeing these fantastical patterns and rapidly procession of rapidly changing geometric imagery or moving really quickly. He know 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 need to file form wasn't getting an approval. Deade wasn't ironic . Injected it into various people , healthy volunteers and they started describing what we now recognise as the classic effects of DMT. They would start to describe going losing awareness of the normal waking world and going to this strange world filled with gods and spirits and well let me back you up just a second . So why DMT didn't catch on still? So he synthesized it. It works, but LSD still is the one that MK that MK Ultra and everybody Sidney Gotlieb goes there. Yeah . Yeah. So so Sara started publishing these papers. The very first awareness anyone would have had that DMT was even psychoactive as a psychedelic would have been Steven Zara's papers. So that was in the late nineteen fifties from nineteen fifty six up to kind of nineteen sixty, he published several papers in Healthy People in Schizophrenics and that kind of thing. So the data was all there . The problem was that 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 you could, you know, in one gram you've got a hundred thousand doses or something that . And whereas with DMT, and you could swallow LSD, you know, drop it on your tongue, dissolve it in lots of paper, very, very simple to distribute. Whereas with DMT , it was much less potent in terms of the amount you needed. Instead of fifty micrograms, you needed thirty to fifty 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 nineteen sixties, you could find DMT. You know, William Burrs, 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. Yeah, Leary as well. You know , and Burrow's one of the great thinkers of his time. He was, and he had a really important role, actually in working out how asca worked. Did he? Yeah, we can get to that . Okay , yeah, but so yeah, William Burrows took it William Burrows was horrified he took He took too much one day and he found himself in this what we call the white white hot lattice ovens. The soulless insect people were kind of menacing him and he was he was appalled and he thought this is the absolute horror show of all drugs. Nobody should be taking this. And so he wrote this kind of breathless letter of warning to Timothy Leary . And Timothy Leary at the time, it wasn't particularly well known. He was kind of a neophyte , you know, this kind of tweed jacketed Harvard psychologist who had just that year had been to Mexico and had his first experience with Salisippy mushrooms . So he was well primed for DMT , but Boroughs wrote this letter saying stay away from DMT. It's a nightmare. The nightmare, the nightmare drug, the nightmare hallucinogen, he called it. But of course, Timothy Leary said challenge accepted , challenge accepted . And so Leary spoke to a psychiatrist friend who said that, you know, he'd injected people with DMT and ninety percent had a terrible experience . Really? Yeah , yeah . We don't exactly know who this was , but he said a psychiatrist working in LA who was injecting people with DMT in his in his office and he said that ninety percent had a bad experience. We don't know why that is, but Leary said Leary was just kind of formulating his set and setting hypoth esis. That 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, okay, maybe if the set and setting is right, say you're not in a clinician's psychiatrist's office, exchuse where sick people go, right? 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 was 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. 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. Well, most just about everybody listening have they've never taken DMT and probably never will . So we don't have to talk about our personal experiences if you don't want to. I don't mind but can you describe from that first inhale What do you see? How does it feel? So this is not a recreational drug, folks. This is not a recreational drug. It's not a part y 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 reached 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 Terrence McKenna books listened to his lectures and it was like I need to find this molecule and actually try it. Otherwise I'm just talking blindly . And so I managed through unspec ified means to acquire some DMT in an unspecified location, at an unspecified time . And so I'll kind of talk you through what happened to me . So I had a glass pipe and I loaded it with what I thought was around sort of fifty milligrams of DMT . And first of all, I tried to now we have these great vaporization 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, basically. Yeah . And I didn't really know what I was doing. And so I was heating it and it was tasted awful and I was the smell is terrible . A lot of it was burning probably. So it was smoke, you know, horrible acid smoke as well. And I couldn't get enough in my lungs and I basically gave up for the evening. And then just as I was about to go to bed, like two o'clock in the morning, I think it was, I saw the pipe on the desk beside me and I thought, okay, one more quick attempt. And I was a bit more relaxed this time for some reason. And I started inhaling the vapor and then something happened. I just remember this like this ping, this very distinct sound like a very high pitched pinging sound that was completely different early in the evening and somehow I knew that something was happening . So I continued inhaling , then oh you had to put the pipe down. I laid down and I was hurtled at great speed through this indescribably complex geometric im agery. People like I can't English it. It's uninglishable . But straight away and I don't know how I knew this, but I knew this with every fibre 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 had no shadow of a doubt and that's what was so horrifying for me at the time. It was shocking because I was expecting just to kind of go to a dream world and see elves dancing around. You know, I'd got all this stuff from McKenna. Had you done other like magic mushrooms or things before? Mushrooms, MD MA . Okay , not really a psychedelic, but yeah, I was familiar with the effects of drugs when they come on. Right. Not so when you start things start to change, you're like, okay, I've been here before. Yeah It's that breakthrough that's like what is this ? It's so fast. With mushrooms, it builds and you feel the energy and you can you can kind of settle into it . But with this it's like rocket ship, you know, like a roller coas . One moment everything's normal and then literally twenty, thirty seconds later, you're just being fired into this place that's that's completely un you couldn't there's no way I could have predicted it or anticipated what this was going to be like. I could have read all the books about DMT and listened to every single Terence McKenn lecture in existence and I still would n't even be close to what this was. It was truly ontolog ically 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 ent ities dancing around , but I felt the immity of and the undeniability of this presence . And it lasted two or three minutes. I don't remember all the detail s, I remember starting I lost any awareness of not just myself but of the even the concept of humanity and that lasted not long, two, three minutes , and then gradually I started to get these little fragments of memories of having been a human. It's as if my brain was kind of piecing back together my humanity . It's very strange that come down is like that. Yeah, you start to become human again. You become human again. Very that only couple of minutes so yeah, it's because of that janky method where yeah I don't want to give people too much information, but even if vaporized properly, we're talking what fifteen, twenty 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 and then you then you start to come down. And then the after effects will last, yeah, fifteen, twenty 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 I was just I was I was euphoric but shocked at the same time like my God this really is it. You know, Terrence McGenner wasn't joking here. This is this is something wow, I need to. Yeah, this is not melting walls or seeing colors. It is not no . I mean one of the first I read a book had a little section on psychedelics and it described DMT as like a bit like LSD, but much shorter acting like fifteen 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. 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 . That true astonishment your mind cannot even begin to comprehend the immensity of something. That's what DMT delivers. And you can't really explain it. You can't explain that you know your ego kind of dissolves into this oneness with everything and everything makes total sense. At the time it does. It does . Yeah . In psychiatric therapy there's a 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 I wasn't didn't really know what integration was . But in a way it's like it's so fast and although yeah for fifteen, twenty minutes I was shaking and I was shocked by the next morning , it's like my brain had kind of thought, okay, we'll compartmentalize that somewhere . And let's put that away. We'll put that away. Yeah . 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, no, because you're going to be careful just be careful be so careful with it . Best way to try it would be, I think, using DMTX that You and 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 sure . And maybe you can convince us that those entities are not hallucinations. I'll do my best. All right, be right back. So let me see if I can get this right . We've got Tryptophan gets decarboxylated into triptamine , IMNT 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 it's far more complex than DMT. DMT is actually not only the most common naturally occurring psychedelic found in countless plant species, you know, hundreds , but it's also the simplest. As you said, you go from Tryptophan, you go to triptamine and then there's one step. Then you got another step which is this dimethylation by indul n methyl transferrase, INT RI and so it's just two simple steps from Tptryophan, this amino ac id so that's really to me that there's something uncanny about that. You would have this simple molecule that's everywhere . You know, you walk through your local park and there's probably half a dozen different plant species all busily silently constructing the world's strangest psychedelic drug and you've no idea . And it's also found in humans. And we've known that since the nineteen fifties when people started getting schizophrenics to line up and pee in a bottle, basically. Yeah. 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 repell ent or it's it's some kind of it's used to as 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. Yes. Yeah . So the short answer and the not very exciting answer is we don't really know why it's there. We don't know why it's in humans, we don't know why it's implants, but it is and it's very easy to make and it's just two steps from tripophan. So it's not like you know many molecules you have to go through many, many steps of 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 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 know, you can't just munch on plants and have a psychedelic trip like you could with mushroom . 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 like Steven Zara as it did. And that took humans all the way up until the nineteen fifties to actually work out what this molecule was and how to use it, the techniques that it administer it. From a chemistry perspective, what why methyl those bolt on methyl groups so powerful because it's basically a serotonin molecule, yes . Yeah, so serotonin is five hydroxy tripomine . So if you remove that hydroxy group, you get tripomine, which is has no effect. Its doesn't get cross the blood brain barrier very efficiently at all. So if you inject some with serotonin sorry with tripamine , there are no psychoactive effects . So that meat 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 five HT two A receptor and this is responsible for its effects and we want to get into the neuroscience we can, talk through exact ly how that process works. I'd love to if you don't mind. I don't mind . Please yeah, so psychedelic, so what known as the classic psychedelics. So DMT, LSD, psilocybin, escalin, those are the most famous ones . They all work mainly through this serotonin receptor called the five AT two A 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. It can fire what's called an action potential a spike or it can be quiet. It's like a one in a zero . And neurons are generating these action potentials all the time or . And then they have these chemical connections called synapses that allows them to share information. So all of these millions of neurons that are connected in your form your c ortex, 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 recept ors and they affect the way the neuron behaves. They're like tuning dials if you like for the neurons . And the five HT two A 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 in when it receives stimulation from another neuron. So it excites the cortex originally. Are we finding that psychedelics , those neurotransmitters are concentrated in the specific parts of the brain? So the cortex, 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 and 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. And 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, let's say in your visual world , is being constructed by your brain . Your brain isn't like a video camera that'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 you know the true structure of the environment, which we never have direct access to. So you're always living in kind of a like a waking dream in a sense, you know, Anneel 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 Hoffman and his theories which are really interesting. Yeah, absolutely . That's a completely different take on the whole thing. Yeah, much more fundamental. But if you stick to the kind of the brain level, you have this world model that's being 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 outset of the environment changes, but your world changes. I can make you see ourful patterns, it can make you hear voices and just by stimulating different parts of the brain that are responsible for generating different aspects, if you like, of your 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 HT two A receptors that are concentrated in layer five of the cortex, one of the deeper layers of the cortex . And what that does 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 hundred eighty two a receptor . The neurons start firing more often, they start sharing information between each other. And 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, something DMC T seems to kind of transcend all of that goes beyond that . So you can actually measure if you put someone in an MRI machine, this work was initially done by Robin Carhart Harris, who's now at University of California S,an Diego might have got that wrong, but anyway, a university in California . Maybe San Francisco . But anyway if you put someone in 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 psyllocybin , that activity starts to look more random. It's as if the brain is moving more freely from state to state . And so that kind of you mean DMT is more freely? With psy bin or LSD. Okay . 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 it's like heating up a piece of glass, right? The glass is very rigid and then you heat it up and it starts to melt and you can kind of mold it to any kind of shape. Psychedelics are kind of doing that to the brain, doing that to your world model. And that's why you have this the effects of psychedelics . But with DMT, something different seems to happen. You get this initial 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 at 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 our ego? That's on june twenty sixth, super girl arrives in theaters. Let's stop. I'm ready to take a show. Your powers are gonna take in now . Very impressive. Get ready for a movie event unlike any other. Superman, he's the good and everyone. I see the truth. Get your tickets now for the most fun. Practo and fresh movie of the summer. What do you plan to do? Swimming stupid. No, it's a party. DC's super home in theaters june twenty sixth. Get tickets now. RadioG thirteen may be inappropriate for children under thirteen 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 five HD two receptors, those networks start to break down and that order starts to break down. So you have all of these effects, psychological, subjective effects, effects on the world, effects on your sense of self . 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 MT world is not random It is very coherent . It's exquisitely complex , you know, staggering ly 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 crackles through the speakers. And that's kind of what DMT is doing. And you've called 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 you can navigate this world. Yes, yeah. But the problem is the problem I have with the kind of the standard explanation of this DMT state is that this normal waking world is a world that your brain kind of evolved to construct, you know, the moment that you emerge from the womb, your brain is constantly sampling sensory information from the environment through the eyes, et cetc 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 construct ing 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 you know, when people dream , they tend to dream of people. They tend to dream of animals. You know, 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 dre am 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. The 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 kind of makes sense. So why then? DMT? Not DMT. Your brain starts constructing these worlds that it shouldn't know how to build. Well, take us through the take us through the world . So maybe we can talk about DMT X because that's that's the protocol you developed with Brick Straasman and so this is intravenous DMT Yep Keeping you in that state for a long how long? How long? How long is a piece of string is the answer to that question? Okay . So yeah, so Rick Strasman, as many people will know, he did the world's largest DMT study in the nineteen nineties. He injected them with DMT what's called a bolus injection. So all the DMT at once or within like thirty seconds you get a very 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 be metabolized and excreted and so there's this exponential drop off and then when you reach a certain level in the brain you, come out of the DMT state. And so if you really want to study the DMT state, you know, it's geometry, it's topology, 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 twenty fifteen that DMT so I was aware of this technique from anesthesiology called target controlled 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 for as long as they want. As soon as they stop the machine a few minutes later you'll wake up. It's a 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 kind of the requisite properties of the anesthetic dru g 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? Right. So the effect of the drug must remain constant throughout the whilst you anesthetize. Otherwise you'd start to wake up even though the drug was still pumping into your brain . DMT has that as well. Rick Strasman showed that you can inject someone with DMT and you can measure the intensity of the experi ence using his rating scale, then you can inject them again thirty minutes later and they will have the same intensity of experience. And you can repeat that over and over again. So it occurred to me I thought, wait, you know, DMT has all of these properties that we need for target controlled intravenous infusion. So why don't we work together me and Rick and actually develop a model for this? A mathematical model of DMT's distribution , metabolism, excretion that you need to build this kind of target controlled intravenous infusion model, but just replace the anaesthetic drug with DMT. So 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 which he kindly sent to me. And we set to work. We built this model. Did you have to do that? Convince him or talk him into it or explain the protocol? No , I think when he wrote DMT the Spirit Molecule in two thousand , he mentioned towards the end of the book that maybe an infusion would be better. So it wasn't entirely alien idea to him and said 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 they 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 thirty minutes, an hour, two hours, three hours, however long . And then that got a lot of attention . And the Imperial College team in London picked it up and said, Okay, let's do this in humans. Let's see if it actually works. And in I think twenty twenty around that time , they recruited a dozen people for a pilot study and were able to indeed show for just thirty minutes , but thirty minutes is a lot longer than normal DMT trip. They were able to stabilize the DMT state and maintain fairly stable intensity of experience . And since then a number of groups have kind of extended this to two, three hours. I now work with a company called El usis, ELE USIS in the Caribbean. And we've got a special license to actually bring anyone onto the island and to undergo several DMTX sessions with qualified medical practitioners, psychiatrists, anesthesiologist . And anyone now can basically spend as much time as they like, really within the DMT space exploring. And so go to Elusmind. com and you can also kind of sign up and spend a few days inland . Ellus went live in March, right? Yes. So 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 have kind of published reports or anything. But what are we all seeing the waiting room , navigating the space, the entities . So when the imperial college team published their DMTX study, they did an online webinar with all of the or several of the participants, me and Graham Hancock actually chared it . That's still online. People can find that. They say for Andrew Gallimore, Graham Hancock. She better to find that. And we spoke to several of them, including the first subject zero, as I call in Carl Smith . He was the first person to undergo DMTX in a controlled kind of research setting . It was five doses, increasing doses , and I think every couple of weeks they'd go in and they'd be injected , infused with DMT for thirty minutes and then we got to speak to them about their experiences . And the thing about DMT is that it's a very varied experience and no two experiences always the same . However , Carl Smith , particularly , he's one of my colleagues at New Nortics , we're both directors . He found that the entities over the sessions with several five sessions at 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 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 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 . And he was being scanned. His brain was being scanned. And the entities were aware of this. The entities kind of rushed in and they said they seemed a little bit confused like they're the ones normally doing the scanning not whatever this was. They didn't seem to understand what was going on because most people when they take DMT they are,n't being scammed. Right? Either doing it, you know, in the back room or basement or something. Did he describe what they look like? He didn't. No, he didn't describe what they 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 come 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 this wonderful private symposia every few years . And he funded it and he said I want to be a subject since I'm paying for this bloody thing , and not a cheap study by any stretch of the imagination . And he describes an experience where he found himself in like the waiting room kind of place with these morphing 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 he said they always check the back of my neck , always do this. I don't know why he said the only thing I can think is they were checking to see if there was a cord attached, whether I had kind of passed permanently to their side . Wow , yeah . And then when they were satisfied that he hadn't, you know, he was kind of there temporarily , they started showing him things . And one thing that happens quite regular ly is they show you devices that are kind of like electronic some kind of mechanical device or electronic device like a jewel encrusted pad, he described it , which is interesting , right? It's like imagine an iPad I gu,ess, with knobs and wheelss and dial and numbers and all this kind of stuff and try showing it to him as he was supposed to do something with it or make sense of it. But of course he couldn't. But this term jewel encrusted pad is very interesting because Timothy Leary back in the nineteen sixties he wasn't aware of this Anton. But I said to him, dual encrusted pad, is that your terminology? He said, yeah, that's how I describe it. Because Timothy Leary back in the nineteen sixties says that these elf like insect beings were profering this jewel entrusted pad , like a device that was some, you know, some kind of futuristic iPad thing . Would an Amazonian see that ? Because they'd have no context for anything like that . Would they see that? That's a good question. We don't know, right? This is the kind of study that needs to be done is get people who are completely naive to pure injected D MT and bring them in and see, you know, what do they see? Because the experience is like to be very different to Iowaska for a number of reasons, but yeah, do they see the same kind of technolog ical devices ? Or do they not? And you know, what is the reason for that? But yeah, there's always this sense that you're interacting with some kind of extremely advanced species , extremely advanced cognitively intellectually technologically, like a hyper technological kind of species or ecology . And they seem often eager to show you things , devices, multiple impossible things, you know, nine dimensional fabager eggs, as Terence McKenney used to describe them, you know, just weird things liquid light, crystal, machines things , you know, things that you can't really put just things that kind of thing, as if as if they're trying to impart some kind of information or trying to make you understand but you don't understand and that's what's so frustrating about it . And Anton in the same way when he was presented with this dual encrusted pad, he couldn't make any sense of it. And eventually they just gave up and they kind of says there was like a sh , like a swipe as if and that the whole scene completely changed. It was in this completely different environment. Yeah , so lots of very strange experiences coming out . But I think where 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 programmes 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 DNTX, you can bring them out can't you ? Get them to describe what they saw and then put them back? Exactly. So not only can you send in specialists, so if you want to study, you know, the topology or the geometry of the space, you send in a mathematician that's familiar with these kind of things and they can say, oh, this is a seven dimensional space or this are the symmetry groups that are on the walls of this space. They can tell you exactly what's going on mathematically and what's changed compared to the normal waking world. And they can spend yes,, they can spend , you know, it could be deep within the space for an hour or longer, or you can adjust in real time. So they can have a device where they can adjust the infusion rate so the amount of D MT 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 can you look for this or can you ask them this? Okay, I'm going back in and then they 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 it's not a hallucination, that's that it's a realm or yeah, I mean so what I think is going on with DMT is I don't think you're going anywhere and 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, right? So normally what's happening when you're awake and completely sober is your brain is using sensory information, let's say through your eyes and it's using it to kind of tune and keep its model kind of 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 kind of modulating that DMT world. So you're not going anywhere. You don't have to kind of 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 share to channel two and nothing goes anywhere. It's simply that you've changed the receiving. Well, you know , you said that it's like you're receiving an alternate reality , how do you know that you're receiving it and not creating it? Well, you are creating it . You're always creating the world model . But again from the in the normal waking world, you're receiving sensory information , which is informing that creation. So it's like it's 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. And the reason I think that because you could say you're quite right that it's purely constructed, right? There's no other source of information coming in. It's literally like a kind of dream state . But again, you know, the dream state is very different. We can explain the dream state. The DMT state is like this, it's like the brain has started speaking a language it never learned to speak . It's constructing these worlds that have no relationship to the normal waking world, no relationship to the world the brain evolved and learned to construct . And it's hard to explain that. You know, if a five year old British child started speaking some obscure dialect of some South American indigenous rainforest language , right? And doing so fluently , that would be completely confounding unless he'd been taught it in the same way the brain switching to construction this alien world so efficiently is very difficult to explain . And that's kind of the foundation of why I think there's something going on more just than 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 I want to ask you about that before we do that mentioned Robin Carrard His , let's steal man straw man because he disagrees and thinks it's a hallucination. Yes. Why does he think that? And why is he wrong ? I mean, I want you to be right, but 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 the assumption that we're dealing with hallucination. And I think that that's reasonable actually . It should always be your default position Most of my work , I would say eighty percent of what I've done in the last twenty 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 try to 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 I can't say what Robin would say , but 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's he often takes this very Yungian 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. It's because these are embedded archetypal structures in every culture, in every culture as little people. Right, exactly . But I think that would work if the The faint thing is that archetypes are not they're not images first of all, you know, an archetype really we know now anyway that an archetype is really just a it's 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, will see its mother as a s ource of warmth and comfort and safety and will smile when it sees its mother's face, whereas when it sees a stranger it will be naturally kind of scared and will start crying. If it's separated from his mother, it'll 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 that are 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 a few cat hairs into that cage . Right. They freeze, they're scared doesn.'t It work with dog hairs . It works with cat hairs, right? So they have this innate program we might call it a cat archetype. It 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 . And they don't need to be taught that. And that's kind of important. And in the same way, humans have lots of these archetypes , the mother archetype, the father archetype , the stranger, the wise old man. What's the wise old man? Well, it's an elder member of the tribe who has a lot of life experience and wisdom and who you should listen to. The trickster, this is someone probably from outside the tribe maybe who you need to be a little bit careful around. You know, should you reveal your darkest secrets to them or should you remain tight lipped? Should you listen to what they say or should you should we ignore them? You know, these are all types of social interactions that have been essential as social humans for millennia , tens of millennia . And so these are kind of hardwired. And so these become associated with certain types of people we call the archetypes . But they're not images . They don't endow you with the ability to construct images , but you learn to construct images associated with them. As you do is you learn your brain learns to construct the normal waking world, they become associated with certain types of, you know, the mother archetype 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. There's certain types of humans that you're likely to meet in the environment that you should respond to in certain ways. You don't respond to your mother in the same way you respond to a complete stranger in a dark alley. We have these hardwired archetypes that allow us to differentiate those and 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 , you know, they don't give you all of that stuff now. 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 you really are interacting with other intelligences in the DMT state. But I'm just trying to trigger a little sliver of doubt in your mind that actually the maybe 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 a hallucination and our job is simply to explain how this hallucination works because there's so much going on in DMT state that I think remains a true mystery. Do we know if Robin has tried DMT? I don't want to out him. The reason I ask is if you've tried it, then you inherently feel like you're connected to everything else . Yeah, I do know the answer to that question. Okay, I'm not sure if I can. That's fair enough to do it. That's fair enough . Because when I read his quote about hallucinations, I was thinking, Robin, I don't know if you've taken it because it's pretty mind opening . But there are some problems with it that I want to talk about as we move along You mentioned rats, which brought me to a question I wanted to ask . I think we're finding that under cardiac arrest brain's being flooded with DMT. Yeah. What do you think is going on there? 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 nineteen fifties and there's a reason for that because there was this idea that something called the transmethylation hypothesis of schizop hrenia , which was the idea that serotonin also comes from tryptophan and tryptamine . But if you kind of divert off the serotonin production pathway, you can get very easily to DMT. So when people started, when Zara particularly and other people started publishing studies showing that DMT was psychedelic and that it could easily be produced from trypt ophan. They thought, well, maybe what's causing these abnormal psychologies in schizophrenics is that they have this disorder with their triptamine metabolism and that they're producing too much DMT makes sense, right? And so easy to test, they started looking for DMT in urine in blood, in saliva, et cetera. 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 nineteen fifties. And there's never been there's never really convincing evidence that some studies say, oh there's more DMT in schizophrenics. Other studies say no, there isn't. It's certainly not definitive. And does it even make any sense schizophrenics don't tend to , you know, really like schizophrenic visual hallucinations when they're there, mainly they're auditory, they're hearing voices , but when they do have visual hallucinations, they tend to be of normal, appearing normal sized humans. And they tend to be in the same space. Right, where when you're on DMT, you're not here anymore. You are gone. Exactly. Yeah. So it's like, it's like you're in a waking dream. It's like your brain is 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 , but not doing it quite appropriately. That's relatively easy to explain . But anyway, going back to the rats. Yeah. So the idea so opinional gland, this is basically taking us to the opinional gland. So Rick Strasm an in the nineteen nineties he proposed that DMT, we know that the pineal gland is producing melatonin this tiny little gland about the size of the end of my pinky sits right in the center of the b rain. It has this exalted position in mystical traditions for many, many years . And Rick Strasman suggested that perhaps Pinyal Gland was releasing DMT . and that this was responsible for certain altered states of consciousness or very specifically the near death experience . This actually I should give proper credit to Jace Callaway in the nineteen eighties , he proposed that dreaming was due to DMT that when you dream your brain stops the tripomine metabolism changes and your brain stops producing serotonin and basically start producing D MT and that causes dreaming. That was his hypothesis. He have two hypotheses. One is that DMT causes dreams, which I don't think is true either because dreams are nothing like DMT. Right. And then the near death experience, that's more compelling . Yes, it's more compelling. There have been some recent studies that showed there very there is kind of quite a large overlap between the kinds of experiences people have during near death experiences and the DMT phenomen ology, they're not exactly the same. But only ten to twenty percent of those people have that experience. The rest don't. Exactly. Yeah, including Don Hoffman, actually, but that's another story . We were almost like I can't wait. So what do you think is happening? Yeah, why is it why did we evolve to have that there? So is that why we're seeing the tunnel when I see the Virgin Mary or I see my grandmother , my mother, am I seeing an entity? So that's the hypothesis, right? So Rick Drasman said that when you die , when you're in during the dying process , the brain is flooded with DMT , and this is kind of the conduit by which the soul exits the body. It's a very mystical kind of it's not purely a scientific. He's definitely strayed into the mystical realms here. Kind of exited the scientific arena a little bit. You kind of have to. You kind of have to. Yeah , but it was purely hypothetical. It was just a hypothesis that a number of people caught on to. And 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 his biochemist Edie Fresca is working with Rick Strasman and Dennis McKenna , he found that DMT when you if you have some neurons that are deprived of oxygen so brain cells, you deprive them they are very oxygen hungry . If you deprive them from oxygen, depri ve 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 clinical emergency . But what he found is that if you deprived neurons of oxygen and added some DMT to the mix , the neurons survived much longer. Neuroprotective. Neuroprotective. And it's actually a particular receptor called the sigma one receptor. Yes. It's not the serotonin receptor , Sigma one receptor binds to this and it protects the neurons in some way. This biochemical cascade that helps helps the neurons to survive for much longer. So then you think about this, oh wait a minute, what happens during the dying process? Well, your cardiovascular and respiratory systems start to collapse. Your brain is starved gradually more and more starved of oxygen. Now, this is precisely the time when you you know, if do come back, right, if you don't die, this is precisely the time when you need as much DMT in your brain as possible to help protect your brain. So if you do come back , the brain is protected because this is the most oxygen hypoxia sens itive 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 and you get this flood of DMT in the brain which protects the brain. It doesn't explain the experience rather because you can do this with any molecule that binds to the Sigma one receptor . So it suggests there's some connection there with the dying process . And so they recently they tested this in rats. They would they would stop the rat's heart , induce basically cardiac arrest in a rat and they would they have these things called these mic likero , what are they called ? I forget. But anyway, they have these 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. It's kind of a credible thing . And they found indeed that when the rat 's heart stopped, levels of DMT rose very spike in DMT . There was also other neurotransmitters that were spiking as well. So whether it's specific for DMT is not doesn't seem to be . But it kind of fits together, right? When you're dying, the brain or the brain or could be the lungs. We don't know , but levels of DMT in the brain at least rise and this protects the brain. Have they have they been able to test on the rats brain activity ? No. So you're suggesting like they can measure the NDE of them. Right. I'm wondering your experience there. It sounds like all mammals would do this It's what it sounds like. I'm just wondering as every animal when it goes through this process, does their reality change? Do they move to this new dimension? This isn't yeah. Unless unless you kind of undergo a rebirth as a rat , we're not likely to find that out. I mean, you certainly can measure. Couldn't you test you test their brain waves to see? Yes, you can. You can, you can, but whether you can do that at the same time as this micro that's called microdialysis You can do that at the same time as this measuring the levels and you probably have to do it separately. You have these like tiny little MRI machines, very cute little MRI You could probably do that. That's like a barbie MRI . Yeah, I don't think it's been done though. But it's yeah . A quick sidetrack and then I want to get to blue yellow . Vibe MEODMT 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 where Five Meo's a little bit you're more observing and you kind of go into the void . Yeah Yeah , they used to call five MEO and DMT the Power and the Glory . Oh , right . So DMT is the glory. It's very obviously it's characterised by extremely content rich. It's extremely visual . It's full of stuff, more full of stuff than the nor waking world . So it's a beautiful experience in 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 glorious experience. I read a couple that were like those evil motherfuckers or I've read a couple of those dark ones. Oh, there are some dark ones. for sure Jenny, it's less than ten percent. 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 MEO is like the twelfth dimension. Yep . It's like you go past all the form . You transcend form. If you go far enough beyond you can actually go beyond DM T , this highly structured form and content rich state into the void, into pure white light of consciousness itself. That's the five MEO. And he actually said during his DMTX experience that he was able to sometimes see the five MEO space kind of there somewhere away whilst he was in the DMT space as if he could almost reach it as if they were connected in some way. That's it, very interesting. Yeah . That's very interesting. I don't know if you want to say it, but have you experienced five of them now? And I like you, I'm in no hurry. I've got my hands full with DMT. Thank you. Yeah, I'm in no hurry either because yeah . Smart security made simple. That's the new blink two K video door bell lineup. Choose battery powered convenience or hardwired reliability. Whatever suits your home, set up in minutes, then start greeting your guests and seeing your deliveries in detail from anywhere. Leave it on the mat. Thank you. Because whether you're a renter or homeowner, you deserve peace of mind. Shop new blink two K video doorbells at Amazon. com slash blink . And you can buy that online from these churches. Don't do that. Don't buy anything from the churches. Don't go chasing toads down in 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. Did Yeah, it was the church of used to call the Church of Salmut Oxen, then it became the church of the sacred synthesis, I think. Yeah , they're yeah, they're still they're still operating . And yeah, it's a couple of lawyers that are running basically a church farm. I think they've claimed that they've helped create something like eighty to one hundred of these sacram ent 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 it's not legal what they're doing. No , so don't send them money . No, no, I mean they they say that their sacrament doesn't contain they said it doesn't contain any illegal parts of the mushroom is that the psilocybin and the pilocin. They said it doesn't contain any of that and it's just psilomathoxin, this molecule, the sacred molecule that they produce. But actually when people analyze samples of this sacrament , it actually contained no cylothoxin whatsoever and it was purely just it was just magic mushrooms. So they've been shipping that to people , including internationally as well. Oh boy . So you pay a subscription fee and you get shipped these allegedly perfectly legal mushrooms because salamothoxin itself molecule isn't illegal. So it should be completely legal. But actually if someone was to one of these samples was intercepted . It's like, you can get in really serious trouble, depending on where you lived . And it's 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 phymathoxydmt to magic mushrooms, they start converting phymothoxyddmt to silenathoxin ' a simple chemical step. Wasn't that based on debunked research though? It was the Hamilt Morris recently debunked it, yeah. Okay by Geichel Gotts . But anyway, you know, once they'd done that experiment, nothing wrong with doing the experiment . They should have done the obvious thing which was to analy ze, chemically analyze. They shouldn't have been left to some outside person, some independent group to actually analyze their mushrooms and check that it doesn't contain psilocyinb andil picsin actually contains what they say it contains. They just said, Oh, it feels completely different to mushrooms. In a completely biased subjective way of kind of appraising this mushroom. And then when a group did actually analyze it, as I said, there was no cylenathoxin in there whatsoever . And of course they threatened to they tried to sue them for one million one million dollars. Literally it was. You know, several people, lots of people they tried to sue. Well, they're lawyers. They're not chemists. They're not scientists, they're lawyers. So they're going to sue. They lost every case they've sued. Yeah, of course. Yeah, so guys, don't Andrew won't say, but I will. Greg Lake and Ben We stay away from those church es That's the I feel like 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 Dare say, a God given right to alter their consciousness in however they feel fit . And if that includes using solosophy mushrooms or OASCA 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 would try to find loopholes in the law and more power to them to do that . But when you start creating churches, I think, then there's a danger of you getting into kind of cultish territory, starting your own religion . For some people, it's clearly just a way of getting around the law . But for other people, like the Church of Psilimetoxin, for example, it becomes much more than that and they start making big money from this. I mean the fifty thousand dollars a mon th, I think was a number. Don't quote me on that, but it was a big number. I think the lawsuit is one hundred thousand a month. Yeah, okay, there we go. So one hundred thousand dollars a month. And then some guys publish a paper basically saying that you're in the entire foundation of your sacrament. People are paying a hundred dollars a month, whatever it is for thirty grams of dried mushrooms, something that could be obtained for pennies really, if you grow your own someone shows that that's nonsense and that it's not scientifically valid. You go from one hundred thousand dollars a month to a very small number and you can imagine them being pretty pissed off by that. But it's their own fault. Yeah , yeah we'll leave on that upnote about the churches All right , we'll be right back guys. It's gonna get wild . I wanted to ask you about this back in twenty twenty one, something you posted . 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 were you doing? So that's from my second book Reality Switch Technologies Psychedics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds. So that was kind of a concept book. I mean fundamentally it's a book about how do psychedelic molecules alter the structure and dynamics of your world? How do they allow you to explore other worlds basically? It's a it takes you through the all way from the chemistry through to the biochemistry and the pharmacology and the neuroscience and looks at DMT, it looks at the classic psychedelics generally, it looks at salvanorin, it looks at even ketamine, things like that. And basically it's like a manual for understanding psychedelics basically. But it was kind of like a concept book in that I wanted I wanted to give it this kind of this kind of feeling as I guess like this kind of cyberpunk vibe as being this kind of old document from this defunct reality engineering institute in Tokyo that, was the vibe , you know, kind of a kira kind of thing. That's what I wanted 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 st amps on and the retracted bits. No that you could still get that I'm going to I'm going to do that. Yeah, it's a very love. I love that book and that whole reality there's some photos in the center of the book that purported to be from this now defunct secretive reality engineering institute in Tokyo, which of course is just thing of my imagination. I bet a lot of people hopped on board though with that. A lot of people did. Yeah, and they would write it to me as well and say, hey, I think there's a problem with the printing on this board . It looks like it's been photocopied. So, yeah, that's part of the design . I thought it was great . Um , so let's talk about the the blue yellow screen test. Right . How does that work and what are you trying to prove? And is that connected to traces of other with the with Dan and Nifa? Yeah , so obviously you know, 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 . Experiment what are the kind of experimental tests that we can do that can distinguish between actual interfac ing with some kind of intelligence versus pure hallucination . And so in twenty fifteen I started working with a non profit in Florida called Neonaltics and now one of the directors and we're interested in kind of kind of like we describe it as like a setty of the mind kind of program rather than looking for intellig ence out there in the cosmos, we're looking for intelligence inner paths to outer space as Rick Strasman called it . And so we're interested in kind of spearheading and developing 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 Newtics, people can go to the New Nautics website Newtics. org NW NA TIC . org and find out all about the work we do. People can even donate if they want to to help kind of fund that kind of research . And now with the DMTX 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 Ellus earlier , ELEUSIS based on the Elysinian mysteries. So we have this legal setting where people can go and we can actually bring in cohorts. We like the research arm of Ellus at New Nortics . We can design these experiments , and we can actually bring people onto the island in the Caribbean, St. 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 DMP 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's kind of one microp experiment that's going to settle the question once and for all, but you can imagine the various research programmes aimed at testing that. And one broad type of experiment is looking some kind of correlation within the DMT experience that can't be explained in terms of 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 it could be the simplest case is some kind of binary variable right it could be switching between two colours, 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 . The most simplest idea would be two colours, right? A blue screen and a yellow screen, simple as 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 feeling what are the dominant colors within the 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. You know, if the experience becomes brightly colored and yellow , then they would say yellow. But it might be much more subtle than that. They might have to kind of guess a little bit. But the idea basically is simply that when you perform that experiment with a subject you compare the actual random flipping between blue and yellow or whatever other binary variable you choose, is there a correlation statistical correlation that is beyond what would be expected by chance . And if 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 , you know , break down this complex number, this large number into its unique prime factors, basically asking them to perform 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 yeah, we'll 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 sim youp'lyre asking someone to basically say blue or yellow. What makes you think that the entities can see into our world so we don't 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, you know, deposit and retrieval, that's slightly different. Here you're looking at an information channel into and out of the DMT state. This is more tracking an external variable . You might ask the entities to 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 and 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 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 , right? So if it's a hallucination then obviously what that entity can do is limited by what your brain can do right . If the entity starts speaking ancient Greek and you don't know ancient Greek, we've got a problem here. Yes , right ? Now if an entity starts performing mathematical operations, starts doing things, right that your human brain cannot do, then we've got a problem here to explain. Andres Gomez Emilson who works who's art of or founded the Kual a 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 colour 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 butt with the same color. So it comes back to the idea of coloring a map of all the countries you only need four colours to paint every country with a different color so no two countries have the same col our 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 humans a to actually color these surfaces . But what he noticed these entities doing having these exquisitely complex, often higher dimensional or with surfaces with strange topological structures and these entities painting these surfaces with four colours 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, you know, crazy or that was weird or that was beautiful, but they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at. I wouldn't know nor would I nor the would I. You knew would I, nor would I. I was surprised by all the math in traces of other and in Hoffban's theories. There's a lot of math in it. There's a lot of math and I think you need, you need the maths we say maths in the UK I can't bring myself to say math you need the mathematics to really kind of to under the DMT state because it is entirely different it's not the 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? And 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 people of like Andreas . And so those are the kind of things you see where the entities are actually betraying 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 that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with that is beyond the human, shall we say? 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 . So ever think a lyric says one thing and it's actually something totally different ? See, not everything is what it sounds like, but hotels dot com It's exactly what it sounds like. Go to hotels dot com to choose from hundreds of thousands of hotels. Instantly get up to twenty percent off with member prices and earn rewards on every stay. Sign up for free and book today. Hotels dot com It's all in the name . So I've been kind of following Don Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, professor , cognitive scientist at the 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 reality. So rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental then trying to boot up consciousness from dead , inert physical matter , he's going in the opposite direction, which I think is the correct one to assume that consciousness is fundamental to try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agents. So he starts with a conscious agent which I think he got his math to work in 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. They're all interacting via perception. And 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. 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 this what's called the trace logic . The mathematics were 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 to us, but he could also boot up relativity so he could explain within this conscious agent theory and trace logic model , you know, why time dilation and contraction at high speeds and all this kind of stuff that comes from relativity , which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way kind of spacetime works. Actually he can get it from just the interactions of conscious agents. You know, he can get he derived the Schrodinger equation. I mean, it's incredible 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 all this stuff that's floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff. There's no kind of kind of properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on his work and kind of pick up the mantle so to speak . So Gasbard , who's also been following my work , said to Don, you should You should read this guy, Andrew Gallamore, 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 Gasbard quite rightly noted that there seem 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 conflict which we can get into But Gasbard 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 . And 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 pre print just last month, I think, right? Preprint we published just last month and it was 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 we just spoke about Reality Switch Technologies, I developed this concept called the world space . So remember that your brain is always constructing the world . And so there's kind of a vast state space of all possible worlds that your brain can construct, right? Normally we sit within this very small region of what I call the world space. I call 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 of all possible world moments , I call that the world space. And normally we sit within this very narrow region. It's like a well and a tractor basin within this world space , the consensus reality space, and that's the normal waking world. Those are the states that represent the structure, the content and dynamics of the normal waking world. What DMT does, as I postulate in reality switch technologies is it perturbs the brain and it pushes it into a different region of this world based 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 mod el and a mathematician called Nifer Hermansen who was absolutely pivotal in making this all the mathematics work . And we basically we probed the model. We said, okay, if normally we only sit within a 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 base, which is the same idea as the world space . But what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of the experience base is simply a set of states, all possible states that a conscious agent could have, all possible experiences . But what sits on top is this mathematical structure called a markoff kernel, which is called the Kualya kernel. And what that does is it gives dynamical structure to the experience base. So what that means is you're in this state now, what are the probab ility 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 around the experience base. And as I said, you normally we will sit within this very small region of the total experience base, which is the adaptive region where we experience the normal waking world. It's very thin, very, very small location within the experience base . And that's determined by the qualia kernel which is evolved within that region of the experience base to create the world that we experience. However, if you can perturb the brain , perturb the conscious agent, you can knock it out of this region of the experience base into an entirely different region , where the normal rules that are basically applied by this quality 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 base where the dynamics are completely different, the Markovian rules, the Markovian dynamics that determine how you experience the world within this region of the experience base are completely different . Now the qualia kernel that sits as I said that's determining these dynamics is actually composed of three different kernels . The perception, the decision and the action kernels. So there's three parts . So together they determine not just what is your experience like within this region of the experience base, but how are you interacting with the larger the broader conscious agent network, what kinds of other conscious agents can interact with, can you perceive? Because in this region, the consensus reality space you only can only interact with a very , very limited number of conscious agents. But in this region of the experience base, we proposed you might be able to interact with agents that are normally completely imperceptible. Let me ask a question. then Go on. Information theory would say that that other region is just a lossy projection and you can never fully know what's there because it may even be Don's work N can't be greater than M . So brain is finite . We can't perceive other dimensions because our brain just can't do it . So if we're going into these other worlds, it has to just be a shadow of the world because we really can't know. Well, okay, yes, so the world you experience is always it's always the interface. You can never get out of the interface, but the interface would change as you move the different regions of the experience base. So what you see in the interface is determined the dynamics that are imposed by this qualia kernel, right? So in this region , we experience this low d imensional world. We're interacting with this very limited number of conscious agents that 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 three plus one 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 base could also be completely different. So your brain has to also be a projection to make that work. Yeah mathematically. Yes, yes. You always work in conscious agent theory 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 qualia kernel and the Markovian dynamics, all of this stuff. But then we said, Okay , let's let's imagine what that would actually be like if you were knocked out of this region of the experience base and you found yourself in a different region of the experience base where the Markovian dynamics are completely different and the interactions between the broader conscious agent network is completely different. Well, it would be extremely strange . Nothing would seem to make sense. It would look impossible . It would look perhaps high dimensional. The topology, the geometry would be completely different. The beings that you interacted with would seem completely alien. In other words , the entirety of the DMT phenomenology basically fell out of the mathematics. It's elegant. And when that happened , that was like it was a profound moment in my life. Probably one of the most profound moments in my working life studying DMT, that DMT went from something which didn't quite make sense, you know, there's still missing pieces in the way I thought about it, and then suddenly , with Don's model , everything falls into place. It does. But even that world, those entities are still just icons and projections. Yes, yeah. So what you have to think is that so when you perceive another conscious agent, what's happening is that conscious the way that that conscious agent interacts with the conscious agent network changes the states of the conscious agent network and that has an influence on your experience states . It 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 , a 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 the conscious realism model . And that completely changes when you go out of 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 Marcovian 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 agents 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 Kuala Kernel in that region is completely different, so this is a bit complicated, but 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 were unable to interact with or perceive in the whilst you were stuck in this region of the experience base. So it all falls into place. It does quite beautifully, and that's what shocked me and was, you know, a profound, almost religious experience for me. What do you think our icon is in that other world, how are we perceived Normally , I never looked in a mirror but that's the thing is that for most people they would close their eyes and the normal waking world is irrelevant . And 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 that 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 allowing us we have this vast beautiful landscape of possible experiences and DMT is one way, not necessarily the only way certainly not the only way of changing not just the experience , not just the structure and dynamics of your subjective experience of your interface, but allowing you to interact with reality itself, the conscious agent network in completely different ways . And so it's not just a model of DMT or the DMT is the most efficient at delivering that kick to the conscious agent. But people describe very profound encounters with entities and strange alien beings hydocy bin or even ketamine. I mean, John Lilly used to inject high doses of ketamine in a flotation tank and he would describe interacting with strange digital alien consciousnesses . So maybe it's all about finding molecules that will deliver that robust kick to the conscious agent that pushes it out of this very narrow region and allows your world not just to change, but also allows you to enter into two way interactions with other parts and other beings, other conscious agents within the conscious agent network. Do you think that that world is lateral to ours or is that deeper to the source ? Well, we're always at the source. And this is what's kind of beautiful about conscious agent theory is that there is no level deeper than a conscious agent. A conscious agent is the ground of reality itself . Right . But normally we only interact we only see a kind of we're 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 particularly pushes us out of that. And so we're simply within, we're still a conscious agent , but it's just where our way of being in the world and our way of interacting with the broader conscious agent network has changed but we're still at the level we're still a conscious agent. That makes sense. So we're living. Our world is a Mac and you go into a different realm and you're just booting up Windows or Linux . It's a different interface. It's a different interface. Right. It's like changing the headset based. Yeah . When it comes to what your family eats and drinks, you know your choices matter. You're the expert because you know what fits your life . And getting it right starts with good information. That's why' Americas beverage companies are sharing more information about our ingredients at good tonowfacts. org . No spin, no judgments, just the facts, straight from the experts for more than one hundred and forty bevering age redients . Visit good to knowfacts dot org . When was the moment where you abandoned materialism and decided that your brain is an icon . Well, I abandoned materialism many years ago. I mean yeah, people think that I'm a materialist . I thought I did. Yeah, because I write at the level of the brain, I can get my teeth into the brain brain not metaphorical . But you know , the mechanics of it and all that stuff I can understand and get my teeth into. If someone but really I've always been an idealist or for a very long time. I felt the cons ciousness 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 diaphanous 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 is the mathematics of that? You can actually look at the mechanicsics and the dynam of conscious agents and do stuff with it, actual science . And so that's why before I started working with Don, I kind of avoided the question of consciousness sim,ply because I had nothing to get my teeth into . And there's always a danger that you'll end up going off into the more spiritual mystical stuff, which I've generally avoided for the same reasons. Yeah, I don't hear you talk about consciousness itself and and you're familiar with Doug Hamaroff's work . It seems like it would marry Hammaroff. Stewart. It seems like it would marry nicely with the MTX . Yeah, Hamaroff is a physicalist as well. I mean Julio Trinoni, I was quite interested in integrated information theory for a while, even wrote a paper on it connecting it to the psychedelic state. But again, these are all really physicalist theories. They're trying to 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 whate ver, but it's still a physicalist theory. Microtubules is still just another icon. You know, exactly. And so what I love about Don is you said, forget about all of that . Let's start with the 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 and too beautiful for it to be completely wrong. It could be completely wrong, of course. I'm not saying this is I've got the answer , but it's certainly something that needs to be pursued. 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 WiFiles? 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. And so that's why I did the event with Don 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 it's basically the launch of the Trace Institute together with the collaboration between the Trace Institute and New Nortics that I work for, that I'm a director of and we sat on stage for an hour and a half and just having a moderated conversation in LA in Venice Beach and just talking about kind of telling the world that DMT and conscious realism 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 in the paper as well 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 Ellus the Ellus 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 would try ing to avoid connecting ourselves with universities because obviously they might not take kindly to the idea of testing the intelligence of DMT and disc. It looks like a luxury vacation is really what it looks like. Oh, it's a beautiful resort no doubt about it . But it's also a research center as well . Something I couldn't get my mind around was DNT tolerance in DNT X where at some point when the plasma level increases the experience does not get deeper in fact it fades somewhat . Okay yeah, so this is very interesting . So as I said before, Rick Strasman showed that DMT doesn't have subjective tolerance, unlike other psychedelics, if you take psilocybi mushrooms trip, then if you try to take them the following day, you'll have a very very we,ak experience , right? And we know we've known this for a long time DMT . Yes . But with DMT, you don't get that tolerance effect, which is why DMTX works . But on the online forums quite a few years ago this has been going on for a while, but it's a lot of people are starting to talk about it now is though people would have this experience where they take DMT often quite regularly , you know , maybe every day or every few days. Right? They have a vape pen so they're delivering the same DMT every time. And then one day they'll get like a big like a big X in the field of vision says no entry or there'll be an entity that will wag its finger and say 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, alright. 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 for people to give me their experiences . And one guy said that he was using DMT, his same batch, as he always does, vaporized 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 of those kinds of experiences . And it's not pharmacologically this is not easy to explain . No, like tolerance is something that builds gradually and fades. Whereas this is like an off switch . They have, you know, a 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 of Psycholog ist, one of the world's leading experts on DMT and very experienced with DMT. He was locked out for someone told me it was like twenty years . Are you serotonin receptors still absorbing the molecule? Well, serotonin receptors, the thing about serotonin receptors, all receptors really is that there's a turnover. So the receptor itself will sometimes just for a few days will be in the membrane and then it will be removed from the membrane and broken down and recycled. So there's always this replenishment of serotonin receptors. Now we know with light 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? Serotonin syndrome is a real thing. Right. It is a real thing. But what blows my mind is it turning off turning off his receptors should still be active with the molecule. Yeah, just have it turned off. It turns off, yeah. And it's not, it doesn't come back a few days later either. Sometimes it turns off and then the next day you're back . It's like you caught an entity on a bad day, that kind of thing. Sometimes you're locked out for months or 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 in a kind of a private group . And she was undergoing DMTX. She was having this interaction with this entity for twenty minutes or so , DMT flowing into her bloodstream and into her brain, stable DMT state. And then the entity said , Okay, I think we're done for today. The visions just stopped. DMT was still flowing, the refusion machine was still on, DMT levels in her brain still there, and it was just like we're done. Can't explain that? Can't explain that, right ? So we want to study that. Yes. At Elusis, what we plan to do, we're actually beginning to actually to 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 visionary experiences in the past but were locked out and are still locked out and then bring them to the island and infuse DMT bring them through Elusis, bring infuse them with DMT, you know, DMT X and then actually confirm or that would be interesting that basically. If they're still locked out then yeah you're really on to something. Yeah. And then you can actually use, you know, EG, you can in theory, you can use FMRI. You can actually look what is different to a control group. You also have a control group who are normal DMT users who can experience DMT . 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 five percent club , which are people who not who are locked out from birth , shall we say, they can never experience effects of DMT . Five percent of people . Do they have that's very interesting . Is that a serotonin issue? We don't know. Mood disorder. My guess would be is that it's a what's called a receptor polymorphism . So every receptor is a receptor is a protein and it's encoded by gene. We all have different variants of the different genes encoding our receptors in our body. These are called polymorphisms . And my suggestion, prediction, perhaps hypothesis is that certain people have a slightly different variant of the five HT two A receptor that means or some other receptor doesn't necessarily have to be the five HT two A that means that DMT isn't it 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're metabolizing DMT extremely rapidly. But Rick Strasman found that in about five percent, I think it was three people out of sixty, so exactly five percent. Even at the highest dose level, zero point four 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 important. Do genetic work, you know, take samples and actually look at the genome of these people and say, what are the differences? No and that's more that's easier to explain than the lock out. The lockout is very, very difficult. 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 stud y, the aim of it was to kind of look at that, right? Is this safe and is it tolerable? If you're on SSRIs, I don't think you should do this . No . What's with the problem with SSRIs generally is that people don't experience as intense effects, so it kind of blunts the effects because you get changes in the expression of certain serotonin receptors. But yeah, if you're on any kind of of psychiatric medication for whatever condition, then tread carefully. That's a general kind of warning to anyone, not just DMT , but all psychedelics. You need to be very, very careful because they are contradindicated for certain people. These aren't toys . But yeah, I mean DMTX is shown to be safe and tolerable . People broadly were able to handle the experience and come out absolutely , absolutely fine, even though they were in there for. And now there's been Matthius Lechte, I think, in Basel, had his subjects under for I think three hours or something like that at a fairly low level, not the breakthrough level, but he also had like a device where they could adjust the infusion rate so they could control their experiences. So we're going to see more of those kind of studsies where we start to learn how to use the DMTX technology to really not just spend more time but actually be able to navigate the space and increase and adjust the depth of the experience in real time. At the at a low dose, are they responsive ? Yeah, I mean, even at the high dose weirdly, even at the high dose? Yeah, I mean, auditory response, not visual, but during the imperial study, one of the annoying things that for the subjects and Carl talks about this a lot is that they were they were being asked like questions like, you know, what's the intensity now between one and ten? Where's three? What's it now? Do you see entities? Yes or no, you know, what's the entity level? All these questions. So you can never kind of just let go and enjoy or work within the space. You always have to be have one ear to the team waiting on the other . I would be kind of annoyed actually . Yeah. That's the deal because they needed to get all of that data well. Yeah. But Lucas, of course you don't have to you're free to kind of explore for as long as you like. How different is the Ayahuasca experience from DMTX ? This is a very good question, AJ, because one of the kind of the pushbacks that we got me in Rig, when we published this is people would say, well just Ayahuasca, 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 brain, DMT levels rise and then drops down very rapidly. With Ayuascca, because of the monoaminoxaseid inhibitor, the harmine and harmaline within the traditional preparation , that's kind of extended. So it rises slowly and then it starts to kind of tail off gradually over time. So you still have the peak, you still have the drawdown, but it's stretched out. That kind of concentration curve is stretched out . So it's not you , you never achieve a stable brain DMT concentration with IOSI is still at the mercy of your metabolism and pharmace okinet . But also with IOSCA, Dennis McKenna , I think it was, actually, looked at blood concentrations of DMT of people who took Aywasca and people who took like ejected high dose breakthrough level DMT . And the peak of brain or blood DMT concentration in Ayahuasca is only around less than twenty percent of what you achieve with ejected DMT. So wow it's an extended but actually generally it's a much milder, softer experience, whereas what we're doing with DMT 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 much you have real time control over the DMT state. You don't get that with or anything close to that with AyoAstco. That's interesting because in my own experience, sometimes you just can't get there. I just can't break through. I just end up in the in the room of geometric shapes and then I'm back . Usually because I'm stressed or distracted or a dog is barking or something. This is Ayahuasca with no DM DMT just DMT I don't always break through , but I haven't tried it very long time. Pass the statute of limitations. Yeah . You're alien insect online. I am. Why? Well , aliens I like I've been interested in aliens and alien intelligence. Not aliens as like gray beings in metallic disks shimmering in the night sky, that kind of thing. Although it is interesting . But that doesn't connect to this at all. Oh, I think it does, yeah. I think it does. But yeah, I'm interested in the idea of alien intelligence and insects. Well, these are kind of insectoid beings are kind of a common entity within the DMT space. So alien insect, why not? I came up with that name and now it's my handle on X and on Instagram . Did you ever see the mantins during a during a trip? I've never seen a mantra. No, I didn't neither. A lot of people, a lot of people have though. Yeah. Yeah . I don't want to How do so 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 people have relatively pleasant alth,ough extremely bizarre experiences, but they're often the most common type of entity people encounter is actually more of a guiding presence often like described as like a motherly , caring presence that guides you through the space, all the different in my experiences from way back, there's a very strong sense of being taken as if like we've got so little time when I only show you this and this and this and you can't bring any of it back because 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 completely different at all equally strange and baffling and bewildering and then you're kind of deposited back in the real say the real world. You're deposited back in the normal waking world. And you don't really remember those rooms, do you? No, because I don't commit to the shot, tempo, hold your finish . Golf is a mental game, but you can't focus if you're not comfortable. Lululemon golf gear frees your mind and your swing. With fabrics that breathe, wick sweat and block UV. Streamline cuts clear distractions from your backswing and your follow through. So whether it's the first tee or the last hole, your mind stays where it matters. On your next great shot, dial in your game this summer with Lu Lemulon Golf Gear, available in stores and at lululemon. com . Yeah, I remember getting there and coming back. Yeah, that's about it. It's a wild experience. So how do we how do we connect the UFO phenomenon to this I'm starting to think about Jacques Folet now and his theory about UFO's consciousness and why different cultures we perceive the fairies then we perceive this and now we're onto orbs depending on where we are culturally . Yeah , I mean valet John Mac. If you remember John Mat,t you're from Harvard Heroe abduction , you know, he was this hard nose psychiatrist until he started interacting with and working with these so called abductees or experiences. Yeah, Harvard didn't like that. Harvard didn't like that at all understandably , to be honest . But I think his perspective shifted throughout, I mean it did, clearly, shifted from the idea that we're talking that the UAP phenomenon or the non human intelligence phenomenon is about biological beings that are arriving from other areas of the universe. I think that's pretty short sighted and feels kind of outdated now . And 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 in abduction , John Mac's first book, there is an account of this woman who was an abductee who was descri these small lively beings kind of bounding around . I mean , this is a Terence McKenna machine elf trip report . It's exactly the same. Rick Strasman also noted that if they had taken some of his trip reports out of context and put it in a one of John Mac's books, nobody would have questioned it because they were like they seemed like , you know you, have this sophisticated laboratory type environment and you've got these beings got these small beings like workers or orderlies and then you have these more powerful supervising beings that are kind of in . I hear that story all the time. Yeah. That's an abduction experience, and it's also features prominently in DMT reports . So an abduction, could that be like an endogenous DMT experience ? It could be an endogenous DMT experience. It could be at these . I think we need to get away from the idea that an alien something that exists within this reality. This very limited perspective that we're dealing with wet bodied wet brain biological beings and that we're dealing with some kind of some other kind of intelligence that isn't necessarily quote unquote phys ical , 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 not spirits or gods, but some kind of intellig ent agent that normally is always there , but we normally are completely imperceptible and can't interact with . And I think that makes more sense because there's nothing that says that these aliens must be physical beings . And one can imagine that I often talk about the anti kardash scale. You know, the Kardash scale? The idea it's kind of 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? Right. We're the way we think about it. We're like a high level zero. We're high le avel 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 scale. That's true yeah, you know, down to from the molecular to biochemistry and all the way through to the atomic and then the subatomic people talking about strings. People get deeper and deeper down into the ground of reality. That's where all of our kind of technological efforts has been downwards He developed what he called the micro dimensional mastery scale, which is like the Anti Kardash scale, 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. this And is when a technological species is able to actually control and manipulate the very ground of reality itself , whatever that is. So we're past the quantum, we're past perhaps the Plan sckcale past the plank scale, right down, whatever's beyond. Right. Quantum mechanics, of course, stops working plank scale. You know, Don Hoffman would say we're talking about consciousness here. Right. Physicalists would say something else doesn'.t It really matter. But basically when a species is able to work at the fundamental level of reality , that's the kind of the fundamental computational substrate of reality itself . That's where they're going to go. They're going to find a way of instantiating themselves at the ground of reality. They're not going to be trying to 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 don't need more light speed if you get down there. You don't need light speed if you get down there . And there's much more room. There's like, I forget what the exact number is, 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 plank scale , I think it's like millions and millions times bigger down there or times smallerer than it is bigg going up. Ten to the minus thirty five . Yeah, that's the plank scale. Yeah. So in other words, 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 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 our solar system even came to be, how would you communicate with that kind of intelligence or how would they communicate with us they'd do it through our brains because that's how we experience the world. They wouldn't appear necessarily or manifest , if they would simply use our brains to communicate with us. And that would take the form of as Jack Valle said , that would take the form of what we normally describe as hallucinatory experience. Sure , you know,t alered states of consciousness, that's how you do it. So DMT, it's like DMT is in some way facilitating that experience that allows us to interact with these beings that are conscious agents or whatever you want to call them that have been around perhaps forever , but certainly a lot longer than we've been around . It starts to to you can't avoid the question now because it's very interesting. I love when my mind is blown on this show, which has been I hadn't considered looking down if you can get past the plank scale then you don't need light speed tra vel because you're essentially in the dimension where entanglement works so you can go anywhere. Yeah, where physics that we don't have any conception of works basically at the moment we don't have anything deeper than the quantum. Everything stops working there . So what lies beyond that? What is the fundamental substrate of reality? And once you understand that, then you can manipulate and and even instantiate yourselves as intelligent beings at that level and then we have no conception of how that might work. Is that God ? It would well, I wouldn't say it's God, but I would say that we could be dealing with beings that are indistinguishable from gods in that they are 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 even whether they whether they could even take on a visual form in any kind of way. We just have nothing. We have no reference . You know, when we had when we had little beings, we had references, you know, they'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 and the idea that we could actually maybe interface with them by taking this plant alkaloid called DMT that's an even wilder idea. Yeah it is I bet it feels like it's by design to me. It's too convenient . It does feel like that. Yeah, yeah. I would never say that that's the case, but there is something uncanny about DMT, but it's ubiquitous throughout the natural world and yet this incredibly crisply 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 . 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. And there's this brief the lights are on for this briefest of flickers of light for the briefest amount of time and it's off again . And I think it was Allan Watts who said think about the state after you die. You don't exist . Then think about the state before you were born. You don't exist. So those are indistinguishable, right? The state before you were born is identical to the state after you die. So what happened then? Well, we know what happened then . So I don't think I think we're part of something that is we occupy this very, very thin slice of something far grander and far more mysterious and far more profound and strange than we can conceive and I just get the sense this is like I often describe reality certain human reality as some kind of feels like a game of some sort. It's just play , right? And the Hindus will tell you that. They will say, Oh, Brakman is Lila. This is the play, the play at making the world. It's all one cosmic drama . And we take it very, very seriously. And the part of the game is working out that it's a game that it shouldn't be taken seriously. This is just a ride , right ? As Bill Hicks used to say I get that sense that I don't take reality or I don't take life seriously in that I don't think it's a really somber serious important thing. I think it's just a beautiful experience that we have for this brief est periods of time that we should enjoy it like we didn't enjoy any other ride at the fair ground or something like that. And what happens after? I don't know, but it's something we all have to look forward to . Do you subscribe to the idea that there's a 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 this is described as a conscious agent network, but ultimately there is there's nothing but consciousness. So sure. Absolutely. Ultimately there is one unified consciousness. And that's again, that's the oldest message. You know, Brockman, what is Brockman? That's the the ultimate reality and everything else is illusion . You know, and it's all the same illusion. Timothy Leary used to say, it's all the same illusion . And so this reality is an illusion. In a sense, the DMT space is also an illusion. It doesn't mean it's not real. You're still interacting with consciousness, but it's all everything has, all experiences have the same ontological validity. They're all as real as each other in some way . They're just different ways of experiencing . And so eventually you kind of get past these questions of, oh, is DMT real or is it not real? And that question no longer almost doesn't make any sense anymore. I didn't ask it. I don't know. I made it. I wasn't blaming you, AJ here, but people always ask me that, do you believe it's real? And 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 and different tools we can use to explore. We have this vast vast, you know, the 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 the fucking incredible majesty reality that we're part of it. We're inextric ably part of it. You know, 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, you know, is it real or not real? They don't mean anything . They don't. No, 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 Astonishment. It's an amazing book. If you want to read understand the history of DMT all the way back to thousands of years really, in indigenous plant preparations, all the way through to the twentieth century and beyond and what I think about DMT, the neuroscience of DMT, why I think it's not just hallucination and what it could be and all of that stuff. That's everything I've learned about DMT in the last thirty years is in death by astonishment. So please get that . Please follow me on ex , alien insect, as you said, or Instagram or also alien insect. Go to new tics. org if you want to learn about the research programs that we're developing at New Nortics . And if anyone wants to experience DMTX themselves in a perfect hundred percent legal, safe , medically supervised environment go to Ellus mind ELEUSISMIND COM and they can sign up to spend a few days on this beautiful tropical Caribbean island and I think that covers it, AJ. All right, Dr. Andrew Galmore, this has been a treat and a joy. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Bye everybody . That was Dr. Andrew Galibore. 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 thirties and found to be psychoactive in the fifties . But why does it exist? Well, in twenty nineteen, 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 them up on YouTube, especially because he can explain, if not prove, his theory of consciousness with math . And I love that the two of them are working together . Andrew thinks the brain is acting like a radio D.MT switches the channel and suddenly we're tuned into a dimension populated by actual sentient beings. Here's an argument for that. A woman did one of these extended sessions in Colorado. She was twenty minutes in, and the DMT was still pumping into her veins. And she was deep in conversation with one of these beings, then the being said , I think we're done for today . And the vision just stopped. The machine was still running, the drug was still in her system. So pharmacologically, that should be impossible, but it happened. Andrew is a real scientist, Cambridge, Oxford, real credentials. He's asking a question most scientists won't touch. Are these beings real? And he's creating experiments to test it, the blue yellow screen, the lackout studies, all of it, nobody else is doing this. Now, I would ensure that the beings were just in your mind. And I came out less sure . His book Death by Astonishment is fantastic. It's on Amazon. His nonprofit is neonatics. org I'll link that down below, try to spell it properly. The legal DMT retreat is Elusis at Ellusmine. com and the Ellus 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 rumors say it could be anywhere from nine thousand five hundred dollars or more , so I'm just letting you know. But if you're going to explore consciousness , the best way to do that is legally with a doctor present. Don't mess with any of the stuff on your own. It's not fun . I promise . Until next time, be safe . Really, be safe . Be safe, be kind , and know that you are appreciated. Don't mess with it I believe Libya Senario Libya one a secret code inside the Bible said was I love my you epoch and paranormal buns as well as music song sang in the like I but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friend s and it never ends . I know it never ends A fear of the crap guy I got stuck inside Mal's hall with them kilt truck up here only way Did Stanley Cubrid face the moon landing alone on a film set or the shadow creep there ? The Roswell Antiers just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was Cole . 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When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry, so I went on to better help to try to look for a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing. Discover what better help online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp dot com today . When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry so I, went on to better help to try to look for a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot, really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing. Discover what betterHelp online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp dot com today.