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

35:36But it wasn't completely like heretical like it is sort of today. And there's a guy named Hal Puthoff, actually, who's known to be at the forefront of all the alien research. And he was just on Joe Rogan, and he ran the government psychic spy program for the CIA. He's a super interesting guy, but also at the tip of the spear of sort of exotic propulsion modalities, longtime NSA CIA scientist who worked at Stanford Research Institute. And he has a model of extended electrodynamics that involves vector and scalar potential. So these sub quantum sort of phenomena that might have something to do with dictating wave function collapse.

36:16And maybe, you know, if aliens were to communicate, they'd probably communicate like this because apparently they propagate either at one over R, not one over R squared. So like you don't get the attenuation over space time that you that you do. You don't get the drop off. And it seems like they they you know, you get like, you know, effectively like really, really fast, you know, communications and stuff with them. And so, I don't know. It's fascinating. I wonder if we can break any ground on this stuff in our lifetime. And if we or if we get a new model of physics in our life, do you think physics in some ways is sort of breaking?

36:53It feels like all the string theorists are admitting that they're not really getting anywhere. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a physicist, but I have spoken to physicists. And the problem I think you get is as soon as you start talking about discarnate intelligent, advanced intelligences, the eyes start to roll. And it's like they already they've already decided what's possible and what's not possible. And the idea of these advanced, super intelligent agents that you somehow interface with in the DMT state, it's too far from what they can accept. Well, because they turn science into an all encompassing sort of religion.

37:41But if you think about really what they're calling science is two things. It's predictably useful and it can turn into sort of instrumentalizable technology. That is it. It is not an ontological map of reality. And so when you say I've experienced these beings in a DMT state, when we could say tons of people, like a statistically significant amount of people experience the same thing in the DMT state, they can just write that off because you can't turn it into math and you can't make it repeatable in our sort of waking reality. But I think that whole mode has limits and that itself is going to break.

38:21Like the very idea that that is sort of a satisfactory explanation of all metaphysics, our reality itself, has to break at some point. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, what I've been studying DMT for 20 years, and my approach has always been to, first of all, take the explanations that I'm given by the kind of mainstream science. These are hallucinations. This is a type of dream imagery. These are archetypal symbols that come from the collective unconscious. And I have to basically deal with them. I have to analyze them, deconstruct them, and show why they fail before I can say, okay, we've tried all the explanations that you've given.

39:17We've tried to kind of make them fit, and they don't. They leave the vast majority of the DMT experience completely unaccounted for. So can we now please start to think about explanations that would have before seemed to be untenable? And when you do that, you actually find that the idea that there are advanced intelligences that are non-physical, that have transcended the physical, what are often referred to as post-biological beings. that's not far out anymore i mean there are very mainstream scientists that are saying okay um you know how does a intelligent civilization progress okay it reaches eventually after maybe millions of years it reaches a kind of technological age the kind of age we're in now a digital computer age, then it starts thinking about transcending biology.

40:20And people are thinking about that already. And many scientists are saying, look, we're probably now maybe only a few hundred years away from dispensing with the biological paradigm and shifting to a post-biological paradigm. And you can see it in, you have to kind of ignore, in my opinion anyway, this climbing the Kardashev scale, this kind of Elon Musk idea that we're going to be colonizing Mars. This is a very human idea that we're simply going to be expanding out into the cosmos and kind of populating other planets and moons or whatever as humans. I don't think that's what it's going to look like at all.

41:07And actually, if you look at the anti-Kardashev scale proposed by John Barrow in the 1990s, where he said, look, we spend, okay, we spend a lot of money sending objects into orbit or, you know, to distant celestial objects, whatever. But we spend much more time going not outwards, but inwards to smaller and smaller scales. If you think about the Large Hadron Collider, this is aimed at trying to understand and manipulate smaller and smaller structures, not larger and larger structures. And so it seems that a more likely trajectory for intelligent civilization is not to go out into the cosmos, but to go deeper and deeper levels until you reach what Barrow called the omega minus civilization, which is able to manipulate the fundamental structure of space time or the fundamental structure of reality itself.

42:05this is where we're going to be or this is where intelligent civilizations are going to instantiate themselves not by spawning across the cosmos but by instantiating themselves at the deepest level fundamental computational substrate of reality itself that's where they're going to go and once they do that once they make that leap they disappear they become um everywhere and nowhere They become completely transparent to normal modes of communication, and yet they are literally right here, right now. And I think the idea, if they want to communicate with us, they're going to do it through our brain.

42:50That's obvious. Why materialize in a physical form? That makes no sense. Maybe they can do that, but it makes much more sense for them to interface directly with our brains. So that idea isn't far out. It doesn't stray too far from modern scientific discourse. And that's exactly what I'm suggesting happens with DMT is that you are gating access to some kind of advanced intelligent agent to your brain. Could it be one of these post-biological beings that had vanished into the fabric of space-time long before we arrived on the scene? Maybe. Could it be beings that exist parallel to our universe in some higher level of reality?

43:35Maybe. I don't know. But what I'm saying isn't, it's not mystical. It's not magical. It's actually perfectly in line, in my opinion, with what scientists are already talking about in completely different fields. Yeah, I love that. Well, yeah, even Richard Feynman, famous physicist, well-respected by all, you know, conventional or not said you know there's room at the bottom that was his famous sort of line so it's much more room much more room at the bottom i mean orders many orders of magnitude yes space down there down there and that's what he meant is what you were taught is sort of this you know similar to the anti-kardashev scale where you know we have to go inwards and not not just outward and even the elon musk thing involves all sorts of uh convoluted you know uh logic that makes no sense Because he'll say at the same time as we need to, you know, colonize Mars and then go interstellar and like, you know, endlessly float through Cartesian space to like, you know, make the whole cosmos our empire or whatever.

44:40He'll say that. And then he'll say we live in a simulation. Right. You can't believe if like if you think we live in a simulation, you have to think how can we ascend outside of the simulation? That needs to be your first order thing before anything else. but he's basically saying, no, we have to accept the assimilation as it is, and then just float through it and find some exoplanet. It's like, what are you talking about, dude? Like find the computer code. What do you, it makes no sense. So yeah, I find that interesting. And another kind of cut at what you're saying with, you know, kind of large hadron colliders and finding, you know, really small, you know, sub quantum, you know, quarks and that sort of thing is the human being.

45:20we take the human out of science. Like we're not, we are not allowed to view ourselves as a measurement instrument. So it's like the double slit experiment where everybody's always like, it's the quantum detector. It's not the person or whatever. And you know, the large hydron collider, which is like, it's a, it's like a, you know, an empirical, like objective thing that we can do. But what about, what about an individual's like epistemology and especially over, you know, You're studying this stuff systematically. Can you discount all of that? If a lot of people are seeing these architectures outside of their own reality and they're all consistent, that seems like it would be really important.

46:00Like the three-body problem, this Chinese science fiction novel. It's so great where it talks about the farmer and the shooter. If we are these 2D things on flatland or whatever, and they're like metal sheets or something, and you have shooters who are in 3D space shooting at the metal, you see these little craters. We just think they're little, you know, holes, little caverns in our flatland. We have no idea that there are literally like people who are like, you know, grading the metal and like, you know, forming our world that, you know, they're sort of responsible for it. And it's completely at their discretion.

46:37And the whole thing is that they literally have particle accelerators that like get different results and it's like it's kind of like the the physics itself is at the discretion of these like trisolarian aliens and it it's a real mind fuck yeah because there's nothing a conventional physicist can say that's like a hundred percent debunking of that possibility yeah yeah and and they develop you know when they see these little pockmarks coming they have you know mathematical models for how these arise that are completely wrong of course but but they kind of maybe hold together and they develop more sophisticated models to explain how these pockmarks appear and they just have no idea that it's it's some other intelligence that's generating them and i think you know i i strongly lean towards the either idea that that's the kind of reality that we live in, that we have all of these models of what's going on.

47:34And all models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think sometimes it's having useful models, which we clearly have useful models because we have all of this technology. So we clearly, our models, they're not nonsense. But the idea, it's important not to mistake a useful model with a true model and that we're actually getting to the act the actual true nature of reality because i don't think we can say that at all yeah it's the map is not the territory exactly and it's like you have that's why i think string theory is such bs it's like i don't need to be a super well-respected physicist i'm not a physicist but if you have two bad maps general relativity and quantum mechanics which are just heuristics for creating technology that's adaptive so we can you know do cool stuff in the world create you know uh you know create in the world um why would you put the two jagged maps together with abstract math that's never going to work like if you just think about that high level it doesn't make sense right exactly i mean i'm not a physicist i don't want to start you know getting into ed witton's territory and things yeah yeah yeah i would lose in a debate to him but like yeah But like, again, you just, all you need is that high level common sense thing.

48:52Like heterodoxy and unorthodox thinking doesn't scale with IQ. You can have a hyper specialized, extremely intelligent person who is bled into a BS cul-de-sac like sheep to slaughter. And that happens all the time. Oh yeah, absolutely. So there's, there's intelligence is, it's a really finicky hard, you know, thing where It's like the ability to think in a sort of a variant, you know, non-consensus way. It doesn't necessarily scale in this perfect way. Like like mathletes are not necessarily doing that thing. Yeah. You know, and there's a place for both. But like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. But do you think that, you know, there have been groups, you know, Graham Hancock wrote the foreword to your new book, The Death by Astonishment.

49:42which I recommend everybody go by. And Graham's a really interesting guy because he kind of oscillates between writing about kind of more conventional archaeology, but just kind of his contrarian views, things like Gobekli Tepe and The Younger Dryas Impact Theory. And then he writes these other books that people don't talk about as much with Robert Beval about secret societies controlling Earth and stuff. And like you have, you know, the Freemasons, I think in acacia leaf or something is like in there, like, you know, symbology. And you have the Eleusinian mystery rituals. Graham also wrote the foreword to Brian Moore Rescue's book, you know, about, you know, called the Immortality Key about these mystery rituals.

50:28Do you think that like elite members of society have been systematically accessing these other realms and either on behalf of or in conjunction with these quote unquote entities or machine elves helping to shape our reality? Are there myth makers? Oh, that's a very interesting idea. I mean, the short answer is I don't know. But it's quite clear that there have been civilizations going back thousands of years. I mean, Graham wrote this wonderful book, Supernatural, which is not one of his most well known, where he examined the cave art going back tens of thousands of years and made the compelling argument.

51:13as have many other anthropologists it's not just graham here um that these civilizations 30 40 000 years ago during the upper paleo upper paleolithic if i'm getting my periods right but anyway um they were the cave art clearly showed beings that were non-human that were non-animal or that seem to be some kind of combination of humanoid and animal form in these pitch black, deep, dark caves. And the question is, why? Why, you know, were they interfacing? Did they discover a means of interacting with these intelligences all those thousands of years ago? So darkness is very interesting as a kind of as an aside here in that many people who like modern day darkness retreats where people go into these pitch black rooms for five, six, seven days.

52:19Many of them describe, you know, after the fourth, fifth day, describe experiences that they say are DMT experiences. Aubrey Marcus, I was on his show a few months ago, and he's very experienced with DMT. He's also very experienced with darkness retreats. And he said, this wasn't like DMT. This was a DMT. I had a DMT experience whilst, you know, after the fourth or fifth day in this darkness retreat. So we're actually doing a study now. We're kind of initiating a study to actually test this. So myself and New Nautix, the group that I work with in Florida, we're funding a study where they're going to send people into these darkness retreats, dark rooms, and then take urine samples or saliva samples or blood samples at intervals and see do these DMT levels.

53:11How do you get DMT spikes? Do we see DMT spikes? That's fascinating. Well you know there there were even pre the Eleusinian and other mystery rituals where they would take ergot you know this sort of you know LSA you know psychedelic substance there were caving rituals there are pre-Socratic caving rituals a guy named Peter Kingsley writes about this where they would literally go into a cave for long amounts of time and they would presumably have some pretty transcendent sort of experiences so that's really interesting so that could be what's what's going on and so this is just another technology or another technique that they they had discovered yeah um and and you see throughout history whether you know it could be the elicinian mysteries where they discovered this ergot preparation now whether it's just ergot whether the other synergistic plants being added some people speculate that and brian muresco speculated there are other things going in that enhance or catalyze the experience but still it's the same thing you're somehow you're using some kind of technique whether it's a molecular technique or darkness or breath work or whatever some kind of technique to manipulate your neurochemistry in some way such that you can access these intelligent beings that you couldn't access otherwise.

54:32And so the fact that these civilizations have been working with these intelligences for thousands and thousands of years, you kind of have to take that seriously and to just dismiss it and say, oh, they were just deluding themselves. They were just having hallucinations. No, I think it's kind of insulting. The Amazonians who developed ayahuasca, for example, this is a true pharmacological technology. This is not just an infusion of a plant. This is a technology that requires both the DMT, which is orally inactive, plus this plant, Banisteriopsis carpi, the ayahuasca vine, which contains the MAO inhibitors that allow it to become active.

55:21These have to be brought together. And so this is a pharmacological technology they have developed. And they develop relationships with the beings that they interact with in their ayahuasca state and also with other plant-based preparations, epena, yopo, and others. They develop relationships with these beings. They have names for the different types of beings. They see them as members of their tribe. They don't see them as spirits. They don't call them spirits. They say they are not human. They are not animal. They are other. They see them as, but they see them as beings that they can develop relationships with, that will protect them, that they can communicate with, that they can seek answers from.

56:12And to dismiss all of that and say, oh, they're just, you know, they're just hallucinating. I think it just speaks to the self-assured, cocky arrogance that modern post-enlightenment humans have, that we have it all worked out. We have a handle on what's possible and what's not possible. We know what's real and what's not real. And I'm sorry, but that's not real, I'm afraid. You're just hallucinating. It's just a kind of dream. No, I'm sorry. That doesn't stand up to scrutiny. and it's kind of insulting to these cultures that have developed these technologies and i was there's a credible technology yeah it's amazing yeah yeah it's so it's so fast and just the likelihood of combining those two things you know in the amazon forest are like if you run through a bunch of permutations or whatever the likelihood of getting that combination is very low still exactly like it's it had to have been that itself had to have been sort of downloaded or something as like a recipe for this that's what they will tell you they will tell you if you ask them how did you discover this they will say well the plants told us you know when they say the plants they mean these intelligences which reside within the forest they told them yeah how to how to do this and who are we to say and they talk about people from the start it's funny in the western context, we have disclosure and we have, you know, you know, government reverse engineering programs.

57:40And there they're like, yeah, obviously we have these people that we communicate with from the, you know, they come down from the stars. And I also find it interesting if you were to go to any Western academic, you know, philosophy department, you know, there's a famous quote, I think all philosophy is a footnote of Plato or something. Right. Yeah. And we think of Plato as like the father of you know modern western rationality like pre-enlightenment and then you like look back at like what he was doing and it's like he went to elusis right and he was tripping on ergot and like probably experiencing some like primordial soul version you know it's there's a word for it noesis the version of himself and then he writes about all that stuff in the republic and we ignore that and we talk about it like it's some like myopic governance manual and it's just like what is like it's completely retracing the past with our modern kind of disenchantment epistemology yeah alan watts used to say that the modern philosopher would wear a white coat if he thought he could get away with it right yeah think of themselves as like signed it's doing philosophy they come in with their briefcase and they put on their white coat and they do philosophy yes they take themselves very seriously yeah that they're getting to the the nitty-gritty the truth of the matter yeah exactly that's exactly right and i think there's this like desire for people like stephen pinker richard richard dawkins or all these people to like defend the status quo like i think the big rift between people like that and like maybe you and me is like i don't think i don't we think that we don't have any of the answers like you and me i think they think that they do and like we are putting the final period at the end of a very long sentence of you know this enlightenment project and uh we're at the end of history in some ways like the final rule in the game of chess is yet to be figured out maybe that's string theory maybe it's some you know other thing but like we pretty much know how reality works in their in their eyes yeah and that is insane to me it's insane it's the ultimate cubris well they were saying that i forget who said it uh maybe it was like the 19th century that we have based all of physics has now been worked out with it's not now a matter of increasingly precise measurements right and then came relativity and quantum theory and it's like changed everything and and but we we make the same mistakes even now you know many people not everybody and and you have to be a little bit careful uh because there is a lot of for want of a better term bullshit yeah um that you know within this kind of field right there are a lot of grifters uh and there are a lot of bullshit artists yeah and so you have to push your limits train with precision see the results at equinox that's high performance loving iconic spaces that Inspire.

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1:00:59It's really difficult. You have to kind of tread a fine line between not being, there's this tension, I always find. And one is pulling you back towards standard materialist orthodox mainstream science and kind of thinking, yeah, we've got it all worked out. These are just hallucinations, nothing to be concerned about. And then you've got another, this, this, this, from the opposite direction, you're being pulled into just a steaming pile of bullshit. Right. And it's like, how do you, you have to, it's a constant struggle for me. Yes. To try and separate myself from the bullshit. Well, it's not being too far out from the sign.

1:01:42If you're engaging in that struggle, then you're doing it right. Yeah. It's, it's a Scylla and Charybdis between excess dogmatism and excess skepticism. Yeah. Or to put it in the way you just framed it, new agey kind of solipsistic, you know, everything is everything mushy brain thinking. And then on the other hand, you know, complete radical Cartesian skepticism or something like there has to be some middle path. Exactly. And that is a treacherous place that you find yourself very alone. Oh, yeah. It's much easier to snap to grid on either. The tribal dynamics exist in a way that, you know, things coagulate on either end of that kind of, you know, barbell.

1:02:26Yeah, exactly. So that's what I do. So it's a difficult path, but it's the only path, I think. When you're faced with something like DMT, which is so strange and is so, in my opinion, mysterious and inexplicable, you're not going to be able to explain it by just snapping to the usual explanations because because they fail yeah and that's what i found is that they fail so i tread carefully i keep one foot firmly planted in the scientific arena yeah and i and i then reach out with an outstretched hand into other territory but i'm very careful about what i say what i do and that i try and rationalize and explain my thinking every step of the way.

1:03:12I don't just say, oh, maybe these are spirits from the astral plane. Yeah, that'll do. Right, right. You know, maybe these are spirits of the departed. Yeah, that will do. Yeah. Because you can, anything goes. No, I know. And you can't, yeah, I try to trace it back and make, just to kind of convince people that I'm not just nuts. I'm not just kind of going with whatever, But I do explain myself, I think, kind of carefully and rationally, you know, piece by piece, step by step. Yeah, no, I feel the same way. And it's tough because like YouTube, for example, doesn't do nuance well. No. So, you know, I have a show and people think it's like an alien show or whatever.

1:03:55I'm like, I don't know if these things are aliens. Like, I don't know if they're in fact, I would say that there are other hypotheses that better describe them than the sort of, you know, classic extraterrestrial hypothesis. but it's this meme that people can't seem to transcend or something. And so it's, it's, it's wild. But, um, on that note of like wanting to keep your, your feet sort of firmly grounded, we were talking before the camera about Christopher Timmerman at Imperial college, who you sort of devised some of these extended DMT experiments that he's, you know, executing. We were also talking about a mutual friend.

1:04:31I haven't talked to him in a long time, This guy, Anton Bilton, who is thinking of giving people DMT, putting them in adjacent Faraday cages. So there's no way of like, you know, traditional signals being communicated, you know, electromagnetically and seeing if they can telepathically like, you know, transport image, communicate images between them. Are there any experiments like those two or anything else that you are particularly excited about that brings this stuff out of the realm of speculation and more into the scientific mainstream? Yeah, I mean, so the DMT, the work that Chris Timmerman was doing at Imperial is what's called extended state DMT or DMTX.

1:05:17It has come to be known for short. So this was a model, a proposal by myself and Rick Strassman back in 2015. Because as everyone knows, who knows anything about DMT, it's an extremely intense experience. You know, you're kind of hurtled into this ultimate world. You look around shocked, bewildered, aghast at this thing that's just appeared in front of you and that surrounds you and overwhelms you. And then you're kind of dragged back again very, very quickly. It's not a great drug used in that way, you know, vaporized or injected. It's not a great drug to kind of explore. The state is it's very fast and very, very short.

1:06:04And so I was kind of looking at DMT as a weird drug, not just in terms of its effects, but it has these pharmacological peculiarities that set it apart. So unlike other drugs, for example, LSD or psilocybin, if you give someone LSD, they will have a certain intensity of experience based upon dose. If you then give them the same dose, let's say a day later, it will be slightly diminished. And then a day later, you rapidly build up tolerance. The same with psilocybin. With DMT, you don't. And it's not fully understood why. but Rick Strassman, there have been reports going back decades that you can use DMT in quick succession and not experience intolerance effect.

1:06:54And Rick Strassman studied this during his 1990s studies. He would inject someone with DMT and he'd measure the intensity of the experience using a special rating scale that he developed. Then he'd inject them again 30 minutes later with the same dose and they had the same intensity of experience and on and on. So there was no buildup of intolerance um it's also of course because it's so short-acting um it's it's removed from the brain it gets into the brain very very quickly and it's cleared from the brain very very quickly it's it's just this it's like an engine almost like it's engineered with precision to kind of slot into the brain's machinery and kind of cause these highly dramatic changes in the structure and dynamics of the world.

1:07:37And so it occurred to me that, well, why don't we repurpose a technique from anesthesiology called target controlled intravenous infusion, where you, if you want to keep someone in an anesthetized state, what you do is you don't just inject them with a drug and kind of let it kind of get into their brain and then metabolize because you can't control how long they remain unconscious for. So what you do, you inject them with a very short-acting anesthetic, and you infuse it, use a special infusion device, which is programmed based upon the metabolism and distribution, all these kind of properties of the drug that you need a mathematical model for.

1:08:20So you infuse it into their veins, and you're able to maintain this fairly stable brain concentration of this anesthetic drug, and you can manipulate how deep they are in the anesthetized state for as long as you want. Then you switch off the machine and they will come out fairly, fairly quickly. So I thought, why don't we just use this technology, but with DMT? And so I wrote to Rick and I said, I kind of have this idea. I think this might work, but we need to kind of show that it could work. And for that, we needed this, what's called a pharmacokinetic model, which models how DMT is distributed and metabolized so that we can just show that yes this should work the DMT the properties of DMT make it amenable for this technique and so Rick had all of the blood data blood sampling data from his 90s studies which he sent to me and then we got to work and we wrote this paper which basically said yes DMT seems to be amenable to this kind of technology and it got a lot of attention people started talking about alien communication machines and matrix and this kind of thing the matrix machine whatever but But then fortunately, Imperial College picked it up and they developed a much better model than our kind of back of the envelope model.

1:09:40And they implemented it in humans. And they were able to extend the DMT state, stabilize it for 30 minutes. So instead of just two or three minutes within the breakthrough state, they extended it for 30 minutes. And it worked very, very well. There was no physiological concerns. The heart rate, blood pressure was normal. Anxiety levels kind of peaked at the beginning and then settled down. The intensity of the experience was perfectly stable throughout the 30 minutes. And another group in Basel, Matthias Liechti, I think he's called, has extended it for 90 minutes. Another group has extended it for six hours at a very low dose level.

1:10:29So this is the technology, right? This is how we go from scuba diving to deep sea diving. You have this, like you're able to go to the bottom of the ocean and stay there. You know, you have a direct line back to the boat. You know, that's how I see DMTX. It allows you to explore, to navigate, to perform experiments within the space. and to train people to actually spend time within the space. And importantly... It's almost like lucid dreaming or something. Kind of like that. A little in control in a place that's typically out of control. Exactly. And so once you get into this space and it stabilizes, then you can begin to think about establishing communication with these intelligences, whatever you think they are, whatever you think about their ontology.

1:11:19Okay, we can establish communication with them, begin to think about, you know, what can we learn from them? And one aspect that I'm particularly interested in is the ontology. Can we demonstrate that these are more than just fabrications of the brain, right? Can we show somehow that we're actually interfacing with some kind of intelligence that is non-human. And that, if that was possible, and I think it might be, that's, I mean, that, the implications of that is almost beyond comprehension, right? The idea that we can use this drug to communicate with beings, and we can show that these are non-human intelligent beings.

1:12:06And I think that's, that's, that could be possible. Back in the early 2000s, a guy called Rodriguez published his paper. And he said, why don't we give these entities, why don't we give them mathematical problems? So we can say, okay, I'll give you a large number, Mr. Alien. I want you to find the unique prime factors of this large number. I can't do this in my head, but you're very, very smart. So you can do that for me. Now, it's a nice idea, right? And if they gave him the correct answer, we'd know that it was not happening in the brain, that there was actually interaction with some kind of intelligence.

1:12:42The problem with this, of course, is that finding... It kind of feels, again, a bit presumptuous that they're going to want to play our little prove your ontological status games, prove that you're real. Here's some... I don't see... It's very presumptuous to think that they're going to want to kind of play along with that. So I don't think that's necessarily the way to go. It's one way to go. But I think what's interesting about these intelligences is that they can't help but betray their intelligence. Everything they do is a kind of performance and demonstration of their intelligence. You just need people who can recognize it.

1:13:29So I was speaking just a few days ago in Denver at the Psychedelic Science Conference with Andres Gomez-Emilson. So he's this very smart mathematician guy, but also very interested in DMT. And he was telling me things that were blowing my mind. I mean, he said, OK, I go into this state, the DMT state, and these beings, they paint surfaces in four colors. They do it repeatedly. Now, to me, if I go in and I see an entity painting surfaces with four colors, I go, that's cool. but he said actually there's more to it than this because painting a surface with four colors like a map yeah a complicated map of shapes right with four colors called the four color color theorem so if you have a map of shapes that are all kind of tessellated right um you have you have to color each shape with a color so one of four colors so no two shapes have um the same color right so imagine a world map and you have to color every country, but you don't want two countries having the same color, right?

1:14:36You can do it. It's been proved that you can do it with just four colors. But if you were given a very complex map and asked to do it by hand, it would take you a long time. I mean, Andres is a very smart guy and he said it would take him all afternoon, right? So for me, that means it would take me all day um right uh and yet these entities they they do it instantaneously like less than a second and they do it repeatedly so they're performing you know in short they're performing mathematical operations mathematical algorithms that would take a human brain um a smart human several hours and they're doing it in a fraction of a second And there are other things that I didn't quite understand, but other operations finding the distances between two surfaces.

1:15:29Weird stuff. Mathematical stuff, right? So most people, when they go into this space, they go, fuck, this is incredible. This is impossible. But they can't tell you why it's impossible. When a mathematician goes into this space, they can say, yes, this is impossible for these reasons. These are the mathematical operations required to construct these things. and a human brain couldn't do that within a fraction of a second. So it just occurred to me that this is how we do it. We don't kind of rely on them to play with us or to kind of cooperate with our little prove-yourself games. But actually, they're doing it all the time.

1:16:07They're demonstrating their intelligence. They can't help it. They love performing. And we just need to send the right people in. So we send in mathematicians. You send in geometers or topologists or whatever. You send in linguists who can look at the kind of, because code and language is also a big part of the experience. And they can say, OK, this seems to be some kind of language. And I can explain why it's some kind of language. It seems to be informationally dense or whatever. It adheres to these various rules of how languages are constructed and bringing data back. So you're not just sending people in and going kind of, what happened, man?

1:16:44Right. Kind of the Strassman approach, which is great for its time. But now we have this DMTX technology. We can send people in with specific skill sets. Whoa. Specific, you know, high-level expertise in very specific fields. And they can say, okay, I'm going to describe the geometric structure of the space. I'm going to describe the topology of the space. I'm going to describe the way that these intelligences communicate and all this kind of stuff. It's hard to comprehend the implications, I think, that we could actually demonstrate. pretty soon you know or or at least to a very high level of probability say okay these intelligences are doing things that the human brain can't do what does that mean yes yes do we have you know in the past we've had angel hierarchies like you have saint thomas aquinas with this angel hierarchy or iamblichus you know who's the other guy dianysus of mariapagite or something something like that yeah like we have these sort of uh and they literally have taxonomies where they'll have like attributes associated with these different beings physical characteristics of the beings do we have a taxonomy of the dmt world beings do we have categories you know like like a like an excel sheet of these things like a bestiary right um we don't not a formal one yeah I mean, there are attempts online to describe, and there's a book by David J.

1:18:13Brown, Illustrated Field Guide to D &D Entities, which is a lot of fun, kind of describing the type of entities that people experience. And there are clearly patterns. So the machine elves, by far the most famous residents of this space, they tend to be jovial. They're multitudinous. There's so many of them bouncing around, and they're jolly. and they like to show you wonderfully strange, high-dimensional objects, what Terence McKenna used to call like Fabergé eggs, but in nine dimensions or whatever. You know, these kind of beings that tend to be more about a show, like a circus kind of thing, more about performing and showing you what's possible.

1:18:55And then there are more kind of serious beings, so the insectoids, mantid kind of beings. These tend to be a bit more less jovial, shall we say, often. And those are often the beings that will perform kind of surgery on you, on your brain, on your body and scanning and this kind of thing. That's so common in alien abductions. It's so common. And there are always these sort of worker bee, like often short grays, and then there's like a tall gray overseeing it, or there's a tall white, you know, these like sort of blonde Nordic looking beings overseeing, you know, there is this sort of hierarchy.

1:19:35Yes. Always, almost, almost always associated with this. Yeah, I actually got, last year, I got this email from this Korean guy. now there aren't that i don't think there are that many koreans who take ayahuasca who travel to peru to take ayahuasca so i kind of it piqued my interest when he emailed me but he he went to um peru because he wanted healing he wanted to meet mother ayahuasca and the spirits of the forest and he didn't get that he got a full-blown alien experience he he was taken by this what he described as the alien scientist through this extremely complex computational tunnel thing into this spacecraft or some kind of highly hyper technological environment and these beings were torturing him they were happy with these smaller beings again the hierarchy um these smaller beings that were kind of doing things to him and then there was this alien scientist um who was not like these little insectoid beings but was much much more powerful and that that he describes this being as taking out his soul this being was torturing him at a deep soul level i mean he came out of it thinking that his soul had been captured like a fish on a hook push your limits train with precision see the results at equinox that's high performance loving everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox.

1:21:13Start today at equinox.com. He described it by these beings, and it went on and on. First experience, the aliens came. Second experience, more of the same. Third experience, more every single ayahuasca session while he was in Peru, it just got worse and worse. They showed him horrible things. They showed him humanity being destroyed and trapped in this matrix-like structure or whatever. I mean, it was horrible. It was completely alien. It was nothing like he was expecting. He was expecting his brain was primed to see the spirits of the forest. He got something completely alien. And he was horrified by it.

1:22:01And that's not an uncommon experience when people take, you know, when you take DMT, whether it's in the form of ayahuasca in a forest or whether it's in a the university of new mexico hospital in in room 531 where rick strassman did his studies or in your bedroom or basement or back room um you you cannot you cannot guarantee the kind of being that you're going to be interacting with and if you're lucky you'll get some nice performance from the eld but there's a very deep you know not insignificant probability that you encounter beings more objectionable shall we say yeah for sure well that brings up this earlier question that we kind of touched on but it's like how you know is the is dmt a bridge to a world that is separated without the dmt from our waking reality or are they always like pre-enlightenment if you were to say there are, you know, machine elves, not call them by that name, but like little beings sort of like controlling the forces of, you know, reality and like, you know, pre-gravity and things like that.

1:23:09We'd be like, yeah, of course. They're like spirits controlling everything. Like literally pre-Newton, that would have been the sort of conventional explanation. And, um, I saw you on the Danny Jones podcast, which I loved. And I think you guys brought up Philip K. Dick, right. And Philip K. Dick would be one of these guys who would extend this sort of DMT world to his model of reality itself, where, you know, he gave this famous speech in Metz, France, where I think it was called, you know, if you if you think this world sucks, you should see the others or something. And he's talking about the man in the high castle, you know, where it's like the Nazis and the Japanese had like annexed, you know, the United States of World War II, went the other way.

1:23:51and he's you know then he's giving this speech in front of all these like well-respected people or whatever and he's like you guys don't get it like that world happened like that's real like that's an all the parallel universe or something and so he goes into this whole he has this whole ontology my friend Riz Virk who's written you know a couple of books about simulation theory he's friends with his wife Tessa Dick and she talks about how he was just fully bought into to the world being a simulation. You know, it's like time froze in Roman time, like we're still in Roman times. And this, this is all this just sort of modern veneer, but maybe the most interesting book I think he wrote along these lines is this book called the adjustment team.

1:24:33I don't know if you've heard of this, but it's a, it's a book about like, if you had, um, a group that was in total control of reality and they like froze this, you know, podcast and then they like, you know moved the water like an inch or whatever and then you get this just like you know for rockets like one degrees off course you get this sort of air propagation you get this multiplicative butterfly effect that like changes timelines and if you think about a lot of what you're saying with these dmt entities if they have any interface with our waking reality they would have that ability yeah like the color thing that you mentioned so it gets into these weird questions of like, are there time editing archons or beings that are like coming down, freeze framing things, neuralizing us, changing a little variable here and there, and then letting things run their course.

1:25:29And then, okay, you know, some other, some other thing happens where some, you know, a nuke's about to go off. They stop the nuke or whatever, you know, which UFOs show up around nuclear sites. Right. But they're like weakly entangled with our reality. all they care about are these sort of cosmic scale timeline minor it's it's minimal interference yeah minimal adjustments necessary to like maintain certain timelines but they are monitoring the timelines i think we you know i can't say whether that's true or not but we can't rule it out and And when you use DMT and you're confronted with beings that are clearly, to say they're more advanced than humans, it just doesn't do them justice.

1:26:18I mean, you're talking about beings that appear to have that kind of cosmic abilities, Whether that is indeed having, whether they are normally kind of linked to, connected to, have some kind of relationship with our reality, but kind of stay back. I don't know. But the fact that we have this, what I consider to be a molecular technology that allows us to interface with beings that seem to have those kind of properties, that seem to be at that level of intelligence, a level of intelligence that really is beyond our comprehension. We can't, there's no way for us to conceive of what an intelligence like that truly is, or its potential, or its power, or its abilities.

1:27:11Then we should use it. And going back thousands of years, I mean, obviously these civilizations in the Amazonian rainforest, they weren't talking about things you're talking about. But they were describing the same types of beings, which they took very seriously. So they were talking about the Yanomami, for example, had these beings which they called the warusinari, insect beings, which sound very much, you know, very intelligent, very fearsome creatures, which sound a lot like the insectoid aliens that people are describing in the 21st century. They describe the Hekura, which are these multitudinous beings.

1:27:55You can never come to the end of them, they say. They come dancing and they're singing and playing flutes and they're just bouncing around and jumping into your chest and filling your chest. This is shamanistic mythos going back thousands of years. And then in the modern era, people describe seeing multitudinous, giggling, lively little beings, balls of light or whatever, that jump into their chest. And so clearly this is not just a, it's not Terence McKenna implanting the idea of machine elves into people's brains. These are motifs, beings, intelligent beings that go back thousands of years. And now we have a technique, we know how to access them.

1:28:41And we need to start taking that seriously and not simply dismissing. My work is not so much about saying I know what's going on, but really to convince people that they don't have a fucking clue what's going on and that they should stop simply assuming that they understand what DMT is. It's just your brain on drugs, man. This is just your brain making it up, man. These kind of explanations, they don't work. And I think we need to draw inspiration from these indigenous peoples who did take them seriously and did see them as beings that they could have relationships with and learn from and bring that into.

1:29:22There's a thread running from these indigenous cultures going back thousands of years. And it runs into the 21st century where we now we have much better technology. Now we have, as I was just talking about DMTX, we have this technology where we can much more reliably and stably enter the space. We're not relying on drinking extremely bitter, disgusting decoctions. Nothing wrong with that. But we now have techniques where we can stabilize the state. We can go in there. We can send people. And we can actually begin to build relationships with these intelligences. is uh and that might be what we need if we're going to progress beyond uh where we are now you know we need to do that probably pretty quickly before we kill ourselves which is not uh that unlikely right do you do you think um you know dmt is so fascinating do you think that there is something about the fact that it exists in all organic matter that is sort of an important aspect to it i mean that's that's again that's another one of its peculiarities right it's not it's the simplest of all the naturally occurring psychedelics um you look at the molecule it looks perfectly unremarkable there's nothing interesting about it if i saw dmt and i didn't know anything about it i'd say probably not going to be that interesting uh it's two steps enzymatic steps from tryptophan, this amino acid.

1:30:51You decarboxylate in tryptophan, you get tryptamine, you add two methyl groups, you get DMT. This is as simple as it gets. And as you said, it's not just common, it's ubiquitous. Dennis McKenna, Terrence's brother, says nature is drenched in DMT. He thinks, and he's probably right, that if you looked carefully, you'd find it in basically every plant. Some have higher concentrations than others. You can extract it from a weight of brass. You can extract it, right. So it's this ubiquitous, very simple molecule that just happens to, when you smoke it or inject it, just happens to get access to this completely alien reality filled with highly intelligent beings.

1:31:38I don't buy that that's just a coincidence. It seems like there is this message implanted in our reality, implanted in the natural world. And it just takes an organism with a certain level of cognitive advancement, right? You can't just eat plants. You can't just munch plants mindlessly and have a DMT trip. You can't do that. You have to isolate it. You have to extract it. You have to learn how to use it, as the Amazonians did with ayahuasca, to bypass this monoamine oxidase in the stomach, that you need an intelligent being to do that, which is another interesting aspect to it. You don't stumble across DMT.

1:32:21You have to discover it and learn how to use it. And this is not, you know, the technology didn't end with ayahuasca. It didn't end in the 1960s when we learned that you could vaporize it either. And it didn't end in 2015 when myself and Rick Strassman developed the DMTX protocol. I think we're still learning to use this technology. That's so interesting. It is like a technology. It's like semiconductors are like, you know, it's like electron differentials or whatever. It's like this is like, you know, another technology where if you figure out the key to extracting it, like you're opened up to a whole new world.

1:33:01Exactly. And what's also very interesting, of course, is that it's not just a product of plant metabolism, metabolism, it's a product of mammalian metabolism as well. So it's found in humans. So we're all carrying DMT at very low levels, which raises the question. And again, this is something that I'm currently working on with New Nautics. We've hired a university of, or contracted with a team at the University of Florida to actually develop techniques to hack the brain's endogenous DMT system, right? So we know that there is, we know the human brain produces DMT, but in very low levels. And we think we found a peptide or a peptide that was first found in the 1970s, but then forgotten about.

1:33:51What's a peptide? We don't know. We know it's there. We know it basically it inhibits this enzyme called indolethalamin-N-methyltransferase, INMT. It's the key enzyme to produce DMT, basically. Converts tryptamine to dimethyltryptamine. Now, this enzyme is inhibited by this peptide we all carry and basically keeps DMT levels low. Now, we know this peptide's there. It's in cerebrospinal fluid. it's in mammalian brain um but we don't know how it works we don't know its structure or its sequence or anything like that so we're working with university of florida new nautics um to basically to isolate and characterize uh this peptide and try to understand the regulatory system that controls dmt level so what the switch or the slider right and so the idea being that That's we can, if we understand this regulatory system, we can learn how to hack it.

1:34:50And so rather than giving someone, injecting someone with DMT, we rather we can inject them with a small amount of a peptide, for example, that will allow them to naturally slide into, be induced into the DMT state and kept there for, you know, long periods of time. So we call this endo DMTX or EDMTX. Is any of this playing with fire? Like, you know, I think about where, you know, we now can split the atom. We, you know, know the genetic code of, you know, humans or we're still discovering stuff there, but, you know, we're starting to crack that. And then we have we have the ability to if you find some peptide where you can, you know, just modulate this and even with the intravenous stuff, you can modulate it on and off.

1:35:36Is there something actually adaptive about not being in control of it? And whoever set up, you know, whatever world we're in, you know, having set it up in the right sort of way, the sort of anthropic principle or something, it exists in sort of perfect amounts. Well, you could take that. Many people think that, right? And that's a very cautious attitude to take. But there's nothing natural about extracting from the most hostilus root bark with sodium hydroxide and Zippo lighter fluid. You know, this is a, you're employing chemistry, you're employing technology to do this. So if that was the case, then ayahuasca would, you'd stop at ayahuasca and even not even ayahuasca because that itself is a technology.

1:36:23So then you're back to, well, you're back to not knowing what DMT is because you can't just ingest it. So there's no, you can't just consume the naturally occurring source of DMT. There's no way to do it. Yeah. Right? You can't do it. You have to either combine it with this monoamine oxidase inhibitor, boil it down, or you have to extract it. And so I don't see why one particular technology, one particular way of using DMT should be seen as the be all and end all of it. So, OK, we can extract it. This seems to me a stepping stone on the way to further development. And I just think that Rick Strassman's pure pharmaceutical grade DMT injected directly in the bloodstream was a step beyond extracting plant, smoking or vaporizing plant extracts.

1:37:20And then now I think that DMTX is just the next iteration along that path. And ultimately, I think, I don't know where this is going, but I've never got the sense that, oh, we need to stop here. This is the way to use DMT. I think that doesn't really make any sense to me. So I think in the future, who knows how we're going to be using DMT? Will there be combinations of molecules that we're using? Will we be dispensing, as I said, with molecules altogether, with exogenous molecules and using, hacking our own endogenous DMT production system? And then you would, I can imagine a future where you're, you lie in a pod and all of your bodily needs are taken care of, you're fed, you might, you know, your oxygen supplies man is then your body may be cooled down um your waste products are dealt with um and you spend days weeks months significant portions of your life to anyone observing you basically asleep in a pod yeah uh and to you you would be interacting with and yeah you know which is by the way what we could be in now right like that's you know we could be in the matrix and we could just wake up and you're in some pod or whatever jelly and you could have whatever the hyper expanded version of DMT that ports you into this world or whatever.

1:38:39Right. So it's like you end up in this sort of babushka doll model of reality. That's true. Or it could be that you're actually returning and that actually going to the pod is the way to return to your... Sure. Back to the pod. Back to the pod. Yes. And people, it's kind of interesting because... They say it's realer than real, right? Right. It's realer than real. So this is actually, you're in a pod now. Yeah. And then when you go into the pod, whatever, and raise the DMT levels, you actually wake up in back. And then it goes to Plato's cave where it's like all we're seeing now is sort of simulacra.

1:39:11In fact, in The Matrix, the movie, he's looking at a book and it's, I think it's Jean Baudelaire or whatever, this French. Beauvillard. Beaujillard, that's right. You know, simulacra and simulation or whatever. And it's like, you know, it's clearly the Wachowski siblings. they um you know were paying homage to this sort of you know post-modern author that's writing about right simulacra it's just so so fascinating yeah yeah and people do describe very a very common feeling when they enter the dmt space is one of and back welcome and they you know the lights are flashing it's like welcome home what do you mean welcome home you do like a life review right and it's like this very strong sense of deja vu like i've been here before not only have i been here before but this is my true home so maybe that's what's happening maybe we are on a path towards the state where we return and does it does it look like lying in a pod and closing your eyes and raising your dmt levels in your brain through some technology maybe maybe it's something else that we don't yet understand i think you know consciousness is a sort of it's a reduction mechanism on a default state of greater omniscience or something.

1:40:25And so I think it's this is consciousness locally produced or is it sort of transmitted and ported into a receptor that's inherently limited? And I would I would say the latter. But, you know, yeah, it does bring up all these all these sorts of questions. But it goes back to this sort of Plato thing where in all these sort of mystery rituals across time and space, whether, you know, they deal with psychedelics or not. Sometimes they just deal with sheer amounts of pain, like putting your hand in a glove full of bullet ants or whatever. You are temporarily – if biology is a collapsing function on a default state of greater omniscience, you're killing that collapsing function temporarily.

1:41:03And the person experiences sort of greater consciousness and awareness. And you'd expect this more sort of – Push your limits. Train with precision. See the results. At Equinox, that's high performance loving. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com. Muted like, oh, it all just shut off and that now I'm back or I got turned back on. But it's not. The mystery ritual kills the collapsing function and you get this sort of greater, you know, ontological reality. And then you come back and there's always this translation function issue. I think William James was like writing in his diary about like, you know, some trip he had had or something.

1:41:49And like you end up writing mumbo jumbo, like just, you know, gobbledygook. It's like impossible to translate. And Terrence McKenny used to say, a secret is not something untold. It is something that cannot be told. Cannot be told. Oh, that is beautiful. Yeah. Isn't that beautiful? Awesome. Wish I'd thought of that. Yeah. Yeah. But the un-Englishable, and you have to have the direct experience. You can bring back fragments, lower dimensional projections of this space and talk about it to some extent, but you cannot. And this is why it's so difficult spending my life talking about DMT is what I really should say is just go there and then get back to me.

1:42:37because people can't comprehend. When I'm talking about entities or strange other worlds, in their head, they're seeing this 1970s science fiction movie with little green men on a globe. There's no way for them to even conceive of what's actually going on in my head when I'm talking about this thing because it's un-Englishable. So trying to English the un-Englishable to F the ineffable, put it like that, is very, very difficult. But it's not a completely hopeless time. At least I can explain to people why, okay, there are certain aspects of this space that make it impossible and that mean that the only conclusion we can draw from that is that there's more going on.

1:43:29There's more going on here than we can explain. uh if people come away from my work with that then yeah kind of done my job and the rest happens with a glass pipe and um you know inhaling a couple of lungfuls of dmc vapor that's the only 100 conversion sure conversion technique yeah it's like oh i get it yeah yeah yeah no there's no it's like a lot if you're studying any of these fields the work is actually in translating your ontology to the average person. It's not, it's, it's also in, you know, working out the ontology itself, but it's, it, you have to do both. Otherwise you end up on an Island completely, you know, like, and there's just no interface with, you know, the rest of the world.

1:44:11So is, is there something about DMT where, you know, I think it, it, it shows up right when you die. Is that right? And then does it show up at the womb in the womb or around? Like I remember reading Rick, Rick Strassman, you know, DMT spirit molecule, and he talks about it being maybe a part of identity formation is that are these things possible or has that been debunked because this was you know like probably 20 years ago he was writing this well it's not been debunked i mean i think it's often the idea so the dmt the spirit molecule came from rick strassman's idea that it's released at the point of death and he's like provides the conduit by which the soul exits the body and enters the afterlife this is a very obviously mystical spiritual hypothesis hypothesis um but it's often it's often repeated as if it's fact um right there's you know dmt is produces dreams and when it's released in small amounts and then a large amount when you die yeah but both of these are hypotheses uh so we don't know that we don't know that however um the dream thing i don't think makes any sense because most dreams are not anything like dmt so People who think they're going to have a dreamlike experience when they take DMT.

1:45:25I'm sorry, but it's not going to be anything like any normal dream. So I don't, and there's no evidence that DMT is produced during REM sleep. So that one I think is just, that was just, again, a hypothesis put out by a guy called Jace Calloway in the 1980s. Terence McKenna often repeated it, perhaps giving, he was a little bit more definitive than he should have been about that. But then the dying thing is more interesting. um whether or not it provides the means by which you can enter the afterlife that's a different question that's more of a metaphysical question i don't think science is really going to get to the bottom of that but the idea that it's released the point of death actually there is good evidence now that it could be i don't think it's the pineal gland the pineal gland is what strassman thought the pineal gland is a very very tiny gland it's about this big the end of my little finger it produces nanograms of melatonin it's it's not set up to pump out large amounts of dmt enough dmt to cause a breakthrough experience but as i said it's dmt is two steps from tryptophan so you know other cells in the brain potentially all neurons in the brain could produce dmt you don't need to rely on the pineal and some recent studies showed some interesting things firstly that um dmt levels in rodents this was so not humans but still mammals um dmt levels in in awake living um rodents were about the same as other neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine so it's not tiny amounts it's not a breakthrough psychedelic level but still produced in the same kind of quantities as of other neurotransmitters, which is kind of cool, right?

1:47:12So clearly the brain is diverting resources to producing DMT. Why? We don't know. However, there's something functional. There's something functional there. And what's interesting is that when they sacrifice these rodents, sacrifice is such a weird word. They don't like put them on an altar and light candles. they kill them right so when they kill these rats they actually have a technique now called micro dialysis where they're able to measure in real time dmt levels in a living rat which wasn't available you know all these decades ago when these hypotheses were originally proposed but now they can so they can measure dmt in the brain of a rodent and then they kill the rodent and as the rodent dies, DMT levels rise.

1:48:03They spike. Now, you also see this with other neurotransmitters, by the way. So it's not just DMT, but still, okay, DMT levels are rising. That's in line with Strassman's model. No one's done that with a human. If you could get permission with somebody who was end of life, perhaps on a life support machine, and during the dying process, could you get permission from them or their family members to draw their blood? That would be an experiment that could be done. Ethically, it's difficult, obviously. Great. Yeah, but it could be done, right? And what's interesting about DMT is that other studies have shown that when you take neurons, neurons are very sensitive to oxygen.

1:48:47They need oxygen. You deprive a neuron of oxygen, it dies. This is why strokes, where you lose blood supply to certain areas of the brain, are so devastating because if you don't restore blood supply very, very quickly, areas of the brain die and you end up with severe disabilities or death. What's interesting is that in an oxygen-hypoxic, oxygen-deprived environment, neurons will survive longer in the presence of DMT. Whoa. But they bind to a specific receptor called the sigma, sigma-1 receptor. which, you know, a few decades ago, we didn't know existed and has no other function. It's called an orphan receptor, and that it's a receptor that's there, but nothing binds to it.

1:49:32We know now that DMT binds to it. So it's not a true orphan receptor, because it binds to an endogenous molecule, DMT. So it binds to this receptor, and it initiates a cascade of intracellular signaling that seems to somehow protect the neuron. So you can imagine during the dying process uh as your respiratory system is collapsing blood supply to the brain is diminishing your brain is being starved of oxygen dmt ramps up and should you survive the dmt has protected your brain during that period where you were dying does that make sense yeah and now it doesn't answer the question of why so like prolong it like it bridges the neurons to your survival state or something exactly gives them a little gives them a little reserve right exactly so the rest of the body can survive if you kind of resuscitate it for example um or your heart restarts or whatever uh but your brain that one that's going to be in trouble so it needs a bit of extra protection so the dmt seems to be doing that so that's fits in with the dying process so maybe that's why it's released during death it doesn't answer of course why it send why this molecule also just happens to transport you to this alternate reality.

1:50:49So clearly, there's a connection there. Does that mean that DMT has this kind of dual function? It's protecting the brain during the dying process. But if you actually do die, it also allows you to directly move into whatever happens after you die. Maybe you are getting a glimpse. I mean, that's not a particularly nice thought the idea of going permanently into the dmt space i mean it's you know that i guess that's where the preparation comes in of working within this space because it is kind of shocking and horrifying for many people but maybe that's why it's important to work with dmt whilst you're still alive because you're going to this is the kind maybe this is where you're going to go after you die i don't know that's pure speculation yeah but so so in short the whole dmt spirit molecule thing started as a pure speculation and now okay it all seems to hang together the idea of dmt being released during the dying process which is kind of cool yeah it's fascinating jimo borgigen at university of michigan she studies stuff around you know endogenous dmt receptors in the brain and stuff but she also studies terminal lucidity which i find very interesting this idea that sometimes somebody can be in like a coma for a long time and then right before they die they seem to sort of wake up be extremely alert and like back to their old selves or have dementia and right before they did it's this fascinating sort of um phenomenology uh does that have anything to do with dmt i just i found it interesting that she both studies dmt and she looks into this or is that just a coincidence i don't know if it's a coincidence It might not be a coincidence whether this terminal lucidity has anything to do with DMT or with something else.

1:52:43I mean, DMT might be part of it. As I said, you get lots of quite dramatic changes in neural activity and these electrical storms and increases in various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators during the dying process. So it's probably some emergent effect from all of this happening, and DMT is just a part of it. that's my guess but i don't really know yeah yeah very interesting do you think you know aldous huxley uh famous british british author but also kind of psychonaut he um he i think at the end of his life was uh was dying and he asked his wife to uh give him an extremely high dose of lsd that's right and um he also said something very interesting which i want to get your take on He said that in the 21st century, we would see a religion sort of induced by more mass psychedelic use and people would have more of an individual connection with like almost a Gnostic connection with God and the universe through these psychedelics.

1:53:46Do you think that that will happen? You know, sort of the Timothy Leary, like if you had LSD in the tap water sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, a religion. I'm slightly fearful of the word religion in that it is a set of doctrines, a set of prescribed beliefs. So I would hope that this doesn't take the form of a religion. You see that kind of thing happening with DMT specifically where certain groups of people often quite influential who have decided that they've got a handle on things. They understand what DMT represents and they understand the entities and they understand how it connects to reality and how we should use DMT and all of this.

1:54:40And then they bring in followers and there are a number of small pockets. I mean, nothing has ever become that's kind of consumed the space in any way. the DMT kind of community, if you want to use that word. But certainly, I think the truth is that it's very difficult to not become, I wouldn't say religious, but spiritual, mystical, to accept that actually there's more to reality. And you are confronted with that. It's undeniable when you take DMT that there's more to reality and that we are but a very small fragment of reality. And when large numbers of people begin to accept that... Then the question is, what do we do with that?

1:55:38What do we do with an elf? As McKenna used to say, how do we take that fact and move with it? Does it require some kind of religious doctrinal structure or not? I don't know. yeah i don't know i mean that's a question that that that bothers me like what what is this all about where is this all going bothers me too because i i think i have the same inclinations as you which is to directly experience to push the boundaries on these things and to sort of like really know stuff for yourself to the extent you can and then i wonder if it's sort of this horseshoe thing where you start off like super ignorant then you seek truth in some like more objective sense about you know metaphysical reality and then you realize there's like some overload or something like this is actually not adaptive for like a single human to know and it's really all about like leading a good life on earth and understanding kind of the the bounds of of our of our lives and our epistemology and then you become sort of religious and you realize how adaptive religion is or something right yeah i mean that's it's like the path will reveal itself i think i try not to think too far ahead of where this is going because i don't know if i'm being completely honest um but i think we just keep moving forward carefully um with humility um and i think the the whole dmtx stuff in my opinion has been just another step along that path of using this molecule trying to understand it as much as we can not going in with assumptions about what we're dealing with or what the what the the teleology is you know what is the the ultimate aim of all of this i don't i don't i speculate uh and what it might look like but i don't know um i don't know if it's possible for us to know at this point we there could be some kind of phase transition that's that's necessary to take place before we can even comprehend i mean we don't really know what the next five years is going to look like people are speculating on with ai and stuff but i don't think anyone really knows yeah where we're headed i agree uh it's always sort of some adjacent surprise or something it's never the whenever people make predictions i'm always skeptical like these sort of quote-unquote futurists that sort of grift off of some yeah you know for sure you know future vision that never never manifests the way they sort of say yeah um do you believe in god well that came from left field talk about religion do i believe in god well i'm gonna give the kind of the obvious answer which is how do you define god fire that question back at you you know how do you define god and people say do you believe in god well the god that is in your head is probably quite different to the god in my head so i could answer that yes i could answer that no and be truthful in both cases depending on how you define god but you could use that sort of post-modern breakdown of language to like you know retort any sort of question that's true and i'm not trying to be an annoying post-modernist no no i get it god is especially undefined jordan peterson or something yeah yeah peter peterson's hilarious because he hates the post-modernists but he is so post-modern in the way he speaks right he speaks he's so like he hate he thinks that all that stuff you know foucault or whatever is the reason that like society is in decline and then when you call him out and you debate him on this stuff it's it turns into this post-modern gobbledygook where he's like what'd you stake your life on what are you talking about dude like you're you are making no sense but in this case i think it's valuable because people do have different conceptions of god now if you mean do i mean a higher being that created the universe yeah that we that we should worship then no i don't believe in that but do i believe that there is some kind of intelligence that is non-human, non-physical, that we can't directly interact with normally perhaps, that has been around a lot longer than we have.

2:00:06Well, I can't help but believe that. I mean, when you smoke DMT, you interact with such intelligences. Do I think there's one grand intelligence that subsumes all of these? Maybe, maybe. Maybe God is, you know, you could take the the more Vedanta or ancient Hindu answer that question which is to say well God is everything God is consciousness God is the ultimate reality there is nothing that isn't God I like that idea as well and that you we are all the million um who was it um G.K. Chesterton uh that he talks about the million masks of God um um and that's we're all masks of god you know the eye with which i see god is the the eye with which i see god is the same eye with which god sees me and they were all expressions of and we there's no escaping that we're all part of and expressions of masks of the ultimate reality which you might call god i a Hindu might call Brahman somebody else um might call the ultimate reality that which is that idea I I kind of um sympathetic towards as well and I kind of feel like that I think consciousness is fundamental in some very deep profound way I don't think we're going to explain consciousness in terms of physicalism or in terms of neural activity or anything like that I think it's beyond that i think it's absolutely fundamental and so yes i the answer your question is i believe in god but perhaps not the god yeah as as you might define it but as the god as i would define it what what do you think about these um this buddy danny who does these dmt laser diffraction experiments i'm sure you get asked this all the time where people take dmt There's some sort of, you know, laser intersection, and then they look at it and they claim to see some sort of almost like code that they, I mean, that's their interpretation, like a code that is, you know, the computation behind the universe or something.

2:02:22What do you think about this? Well, do I think that he is and other people are seeing the fundamental code that runs our reality? No, I don't think that at all. I think the idea that reality is computational or is some kind of code, okay, that's possible. The idea that you could look at it and it would look like characters that we recognize, like Japanese katakana and Hebrew and stuff like this, well, that doesn't make any sense. That's what they're seeing. And it's no coincidence that the Matrix movie we're talking about, I mean, the Code Reign, that famous green running digital imagery that's built from japanese katakana so it seems like a little bit on the nose there a little bit so no i don't think i think it doesn't make any sense to me is is the broad thing and i also think the problem is that lasers it's an inconvenient coincidence shall we say that when you shine a laser on a wall without dmt um it exhibits some very unusual optical effects.

2:03:28So it forms this interference pattern on the retina that looks like kind of a matrix of speckles or matrix of points of light that can appear to extend beyond the surface. This is all without DMT. Now, when you add DMT to the mix, you see this matrix of characters and geometric forms that appear to extend well beyond the surface. And you have to believe that these are completely unrelated that's just a coincidence if you are to accept that you're seeing actual code here um so i think my working hypothesis which might well be wrong uh is that but needs to be eliminated uh is that this these this matrix of sensory and you've basically got a matrix of points of light which on the retina which act like a sensory scaffold around which, under the influence of DMT, you see complex forms and characters.

2:04:25Because characters are very common in the DMT space, as are complex geometric structures. So I think it's a very interesting, fascinating phenomenon, and very important one, in that it allows you to isolate a particular fragment of the broader DMT phenomenology, the reporting of code and geometric forms. That I will get on board with. I think it should be studied. Do I accept, do I think that fundamental code, that he somehow stumbled upon a way of seeing this fundamental code of reality, which just happens to look like code, as we would imagine code. I mean, you imagine code, you imagine the matrix, and that's kind of what it's looking at here.

2:05:11I think I'm not ready to make that leap yet. Yeah, that seems unlikely to me, too. I think the thing that is interesting about it is you are doing a repeatable physical thing. And then people see, you know, ostensibly similar, you know, a similar phenomena in the form of whatever these symbols are, which is like, that's cool. I mean, even that is sort of somewhat unprecedented. yes but then again the the laser light is providing a very regular pattern of sensory inputs sure um so that account and the fact that these but you don't see the symbols when you're not on dmt right you don't see exactly exactly so that's cool that's interesting that's interesting yeah um but then again are people seeing people say the line that you always hear from these these laser people is everyone sees exactly the same thing now what does that mean that everyone sees code or everyone sees characters fine does everyone see exactly the same characters in the same order at the same time no we don't know that there's no way no one's demonstrated that it's not even possible it's not even known if that's possible because they apparently they move very very quickly so are people seeing the same thing or are people kind of seeing the sort of the same thing.

2:06:29But because, again, the language problem, you can't take a photograph of this code. And so you can't compare. You have to rely on language and you have to rely on little sketches and things that people do. But there's no way so far to demonstrate that two people, even at the same time, are actually seeing exactly the same code. And people, as I said, people have been describing code and digits and characters in the DMT state for decades. So it's like what's unique and interesting and important about this is that it allows you to kind of isolate that particular aspect and reliably view that particular aspect of the broader DMT visual phenomenology.

2:07:16But anything beyond that to make deep conclusions about the fundamental structure of our reality, that you're seeing the code that runs our reality, I think that is a very, very large leap. And I don't think there's any, there's nothing in the effect, the phenomenon that would lead one to draw that conclusion. You have to start by eliminating lots of other more mundane hypotheses, which takes time. It takes money. It takes very careful experimental setup and performing of various experiments to be able to eliminate the influence of this laser interference speckle effect, as it's called. But that needs to be done because otherwise it's going to be private revelation.

2:08:09they're going to be people who do it and believe and they're going to form a group um who all believe in this but they have no they're not able to demonstrate or prove that this is what they are actually seeing but they all are have convinced themselves that's what they're seeing they're seeing the fundamental code of reality and you you'd get it forms a kind of religion if you like uh where you have the believers and you have the non-believers um i'm not ready to kind of fall in with with the believers just yet yeah well what do you think of modern uh ufo disclosure do you track that at all do you think it reduces down to these sort of altered states of consciousness or do you believe we have saucers and you know hangers at places like area 51 well i mean the area 50 i mean that's cool stuff right i mean i don't i'm not an expert on it so i don't i follow certain things right when bob lazar speaks when he's on rogan i watched that thought it's fascinating stuff but i don't know i don't know what to make of it all um um and so i kind of focus on my thing my thing is the not the the shimmering metallic discs in the sky which might not be physical of course i mean they might also be they also seem to kind of occupy this space between the physical and the non-physical the forming feats that seem to be um beyond what a physical object could achieve and i think that's perhaps gives us a clue as to their nature and and we might be dealing with intelligences that don't necessarily exist you know as physical wet-bodied beings on other star systems and are traveling through vast distances to reach our planet but actually occupy some kind of space that is lying parallel hidden within amongst whatever you know orthogonal to whatever our reality and that they can interface in certain ways with our or physics is information theoretic like you write about exactly you know john wheeler or whatever and you know a bunch of people sort of contemplate you have all this like a wolfram physics and stuff computational physics then what if they are just the programmers of our reality like they they they understand the source code in a way that exactly and there's a lot in physics that kind of points to that there's like you know you have um what like heisenberg's uncertainty principle where you know you can't measure position and momentum you know simultaneously in very accurate ways like one gets more fuzzy as the other gets more accurate that almost looks like a like a computational caching function or something where only so much can be stored in local memory you know or like anthropic principle where if planks constant were slightly different like we wouldn't really have an atmosphere on it like there are all these sort of weird Goldilocks or like Fermat's theory where like, you know, a light between two, you know, points or whatever, it takes the most optimal computationally efficient path.

2:10:57There are all these things like that. Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios and stuff. It's like, how do people code? They just transport, you know, code library. I mean, now it's probably mostly like co-pilots and AI, but you know, back in the day it was like, you'd like find like libraries of code and you would you know you'd transport code chunks or whatever and like that's how so it's like you would reuse geometrically efficient patterns like over and over again like that just exists like across nature exactly so there's so much in the brain as well i mean the brain again is this you have these repeating computational the fundamental these columns you know the brain it's like this the cortex you have all of these cylindrical columns which is the basic computational unit of the brain and you stitch them all together um and and all of the the the function uh of your of your cortex arises from the interaction of all these basic uh computational units so it's at every level at every level you see that uh stitching together of of simpler units that from which higher order behaviors emerge and that goes all the way down perhaps to the ground of reality itself.

2:12:10And you have these very simple rules. And running a universe might be extremely simple if you know the rules. Or if you find a way to run all possible, this is something I explore in alien information theory, the idea that if you know all possible rules, which is just the permutation on all possible rule sets, you just run them all. You have the computational power. You run all of them. and some most of them do absolutely nothing some of them do something a little bit interesting and then die out and then maybe a tiny tiny fraction um you start to develop layered complexity emergent complexity and we just happen to be in one of those hundred trillion trillion or whatever universes where where the rule set gives rise to interesting information yeah well wolfram has this you know, Stephen Wolfram has this sort of institute where he studies these computational versions of physics.

2:13:08And he has this idea of computational irreducibility. And there are things that you cannot take as first principle, you know, a priori concepts, you need to run a program in order to get that result. And you have cellular automatized, Conway's game of life, and all of these things where if you set some initial conditions, yeah, maybe you end up with some final branch that works or whatever, but like there are a lot of branches that don't. And then you have to ask this like meta question of if, you know, is our earthly conflict, you know, Trump just took out, you know, three Iranian nuclear sites with with, you know, some B2s.

2:13:49Is all of that existing, you know, against some sub Rosa backdrop of like some timeline adjustment conflict or something? Like, is that the true cosmic, you know, that like Upanishad style war or whatever, where, you know, if you really think about like what's the most scarce commodity, it's not gold. It's not like like, you know, the last 50 years of American foreign policy has been like sort of dictated by like, you know, crude oil or whatever. Like it's not those things. Right. It's it's time. Yeah. And it's timelines. And it's like literal like, you know, macro like events that that occur on on on macro scales.

2:14:27so like is are these entities sort of fighting over that or something answer that question now i don't know yeah yeah who knows well thank you so much for uh i'm just gonna end on that absurd question thank you i really appreciate this man and i everybody should go buy your book death by astonishment anything else you want to yeah plug or promote or yeah i mean so death by astonishment that's the book about dmt and describes the history of science's struggle to make sense of it so if you're really interested in what dmt is about and why it's such a enigmatic and mysterious molecule read death by astonishment but also if you're anyone who's interested in dmtx uh the moment it's like it's a small number of academic institutions that are running dmtx but we actually are developing a retreat center and a research center in the caribbean what's it St.

2:15:27Vincent and the Grenadines, that's it. So we have a research center and retreat center that we're developing now. And the idea being is not just doing research with DMT, but also allowing anyone who wants to, to come and experience DMTX in a beautiful, tropical, you know, five-star environment with all of the preparation, perhaps several different doses at those levels before the kind of the breakthrough DMTX experience all of the setting is just beautiful in the integration afterwards it will be a unique institute do you have any adverse experiences with DMTX anybody so far great so far all of the the subjects at Imperial College got through it there was no major problem it was very intense yeah maybe some of them didn't kind of like it and didn't do the full set of experiments but no like severe you know physiological adverse effects and i mean of course we've no severe mental no like this really fucked me up nothing like that and of course on the island we will have anesthesiologists we have psychiatrists and nurses uh so if people want to sign up they can go to newnautics.org n-double-o-n-a-u-t-i-c-s newnautics.org and they can find out uh more about it there or elusis mind so elusis is the actual name of the um um of the retreat so it's like that's bringing the new elusis the new elusis uh yeah so elusismind.com and they can also have a look at what the retreat zone is going to look like.

2:17:14So yeah, that's kind of an exciting thing to be able to kind of bring DMTX to anyone who wants to kind of experience it. Super cool and exciting. It's funny, I think, you know, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, Stanislav Grof, and Karl Ruck, all, maybe this is a rumor, but I think they wanted to create a new Eleusis. And so it's cool that you're naming it that. Yeah, it won't be with Ergot, But we do have a license from the government in St. Vincent and the Grenadines to work with any drug that we want. So it's not implausible that we might think about burgot alkaloids and perhaps recreating the true Illusinium mysteries.

2:17:58And there are people now working on actually reconstructing that and trying to work out the exact chemistry involved. I think Brian Orescu is really trying to sort of follow up journey. Exactly. And there are people that followed on from his work as well, chemists and pharmacologists. So it's an exciting time to be interested in psychedelics and an exciting, very interesting time to be alive more generally, of course. I agree. Everything's spinning out and getting weird, but it's interesting. Okay, Andrew, I really appreciate this, man. This is a lot of fun. And go by Death by Astonishment and Alien Information Theory.

2:18:31And yeah, hopefully we can do this again at some point. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

2:19:08at equinox.com.