#316 - Brain Scientist: New DMT Study Finds Evidence of Parallel Dimension | Andrew Gallimore

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Andrew Gallimore is a neurobiologist, pharmacologist, and chemist based in Tokyo, Japan, where he writes about and researches psychedelics as molecular technologies for interfacing with alternate realities and the intelligent beings that reside therein. SPONSORS https://trueclassic.com/danny - Upgrade your wardrobe & save on True Classic. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Andrew's new book: https://a.co/d/gDJ9WBP https://x.com/alieninsect https://noonautics.org FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Death by astonishment 03:47 - extended-state DMT research 13:18 - brain scans of DMT users 21:27 - epilepsy brain research 33:09 - how the brain dreams & hallucinates 41:17 - how psychedelics re-wire the brain 48:27 - the mystery of how our brains generate DMT worlds 01:01:35 - why can't we find consciousness in the brain? 01:11:57 - how Alexander Shulgin created psychedelic molecules from scratch 01:22:58 - gain of function research w/ psychedelics 01:27:34 - AI and the loss of humanity 01:46:52 - what drives humanity beyond reproduction? 02:03:29 - why everyone sees elves on DMT 02:12:25 - how DMT was first discovered 02:26:31 - DMT is a technology - not a drug 02:39:36 - seeing "code" on DMT 02:58:22 - the church of psilomethoxin 03:11:30 - how would DMT affect children? 03:17:56 - banned Johns Hopkins study on psychedelics & religion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  Good to see you, Andrew Galamore. Thanks for coming back from Tokyo.

• 1:11Speaker 04

  Good to see you again, Danny.

• 1:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  Nice to be here.

• 1:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man, it's been a while. Since the last time you were in here, I have had a whole army of psychedelic experts on the show. And I've been learning a lot about this stuff. And your new book, Death by Astonishment, is fascinating. What's the story on the new book?

• 1:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, my first two books. Well, my first book was kind of weird metaphysical speculation kind of stuff. Second book was

• 1:43Speaker 04

  kind of the neuroscience of psychedelics more broadly as reality-switching molecules. But I kind of wanted to focus on DMT.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  And... Particularly on trying to convince people that DMT represents a true mystery. It's very easy for people to kind of, including scientists, to kind of say, it's just a hallucination. It's just your brain on drugs, man. And I wanted to kind of show, using the history of DMT, going back, going back to the Amazonian peoples who first used DMT-based plant preparations all the way through to the 21st century.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  How science has first discovered DMT and then struggled to make, make sense of it. And it's a struggle that, in my opinion, continues to this day. I still don't think we're even close to getting to the bottom of, of DMT.

• 2:54Danny Jones?

  And since the last time we talked, what have you been working on, other than your book, Entokyo? As far as like your research goes? Cause you're, you're like, you're a neuroscientist. For people that don't know who you are, who didn't see the first episode, give us a little like background in your, like your academic background and your research that you do.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I started back in the UK studying chemistry and pharmacology. I was fascinated by drug molecules and how they can interface with the human brain and cause such dramatic effects on, on the structure and dynamics of your world and on your entire subjective experience. And so I studied chemistry and pharmacology and then I shifted slightly towards biochemistry for my PhD. But then for my postdoctoral research fellowships, I moved towards neuroscience, in particular computational neuroscience.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  And that eventually took me to Okinawa, Japan, about 10 years ago, where I had a research fellowship in a computational neuroscience group,

• 4:02Speaker 04

  studying the brain using computational, computational and mathematical models. And then about three years ago, I quit academia completely. I kind of milked it for all that I could get out of it. Didn't want to go down the

• 4:19Speaker 04

  You know, lect- lectureship and professorship and having to deal with students and go to meetings and things like that, basically so that I could focus on my writing. So that's what I do now. I, I think and I write about psychedelics, about drugs generally, but most specifically about this simple plant alkaloid called dimethyltryptamine.

• 4:46Danny Jones?

  And then what was your involvement in the research with the extended state DMT stuff?

• 4:53Speaker 04

  So the initial proposal for DMTX, as it's now called, or extended state DMT, was something that myself and Rick Strasman, who you also had on the podcast quite recently, as I recall. Yeah, so we, you know, I, I wrote to Rick with the idea that this, kind of the pharmacological peculiarities of DMT would make it amenable to this technique called target controlled intravenous infusion. And we, we wrote this paper saying, showing kind of really as a proof of principle, that it should work and that you should be able

• 5:34Speaker 04

  to induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize, stabilize their brain DMT levels and hold them in the DMT state, in a breakthrough DMT state for 30 minutes an hour. So it was just a proposal, really. It was a hypothetical proof of principle model. But then it was picked up by Imperial College London, then under Robin Carhart-Harris, subsequently Chris Timmerman. And they, they were the first kind of academic group to implement it in humans. So myself and Rick, we consulted in the early stages of that. But then that was entirely the Imperial College's study.

• 6:20Danny Jones?

  And how many people were involved in it? And do you know, like, like, how far did they get with that? Like, I imagine doing that kind of a study over a period of time. And I mean, by now, I would imagine some of that data has been aggregated and analyzed. Has there been any sort of like, conclusion or summary of it?

• 6:39Speaker 04

  It was really a more like a pilot study. So the aim wasn't to, I mean, there are only, I think, 11 volunteers. So it's not enough.

• 6:49Danny Jones?

  Shit, I could have found you more than that. I could have found you a few.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  But the aim was to show that it was safe and tolerable, right? Because it's not, it wasn't 100% clear that it would be safe to hold someone in that state.

• 7:03Danny Jones?

  So like, can, can we do this safely?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Does it work?

• 7:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right. And, and do other plans to do it again? See if they can go deeper and see if they can figure out some more problems, get some more answers?

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, the guy that funded it, Anton Bilton, he was a property entrepreneur or property tycoon or something like that. But he shifted towards consciousness exploration. He's very interested in ayahuasca. And he funded this first pilot study. And he was actually one of the subjects as well. But I interviewed him for the book and he said, you know, 30 minutes is, it's not enough. You know, he wanted to go for two hours. And there is actually already a group in Matthias Lickte in Basel in Switzerland, who extended

• 7:58Speaker 04

  it for 90 minutes. And there's another group that extended it to, I think it was six hours. But this was a very, very low kind of sub breakthrough dose. So it wasn't like they were doing it at Imperial and Basel. But, but clearly it works. You know, you go into the state and not only did the brain DMT levels seem to stabilize, but so does the experience, which means that you can, you can establish communication with these entities, beings, intelligences within the space. And in theory, then you can start to think about, well,

• 8:38Speaker 04

  What can we learn about them? You know, can we establish a communicative relationship with them? And can we study the space more formally, its structure, its geometry, its topology?

• 8:51Danny Jones?

  Couldn't you get a very similar experience with using something like ayahuasca? Which I think has, from what I've never done it, but I understand it has this very similar effect, just longer lasting.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  There's a couple of issues with ayahuasca. Well, not issues. I mean, it's a wonderful indigenous technology, ayahuasca. But it's not the same as DMTX for several reasons. I mean, first of all, the, how should I call it? The side effects, like purging, you know, vomiting and shitting and it's kind of unpleasant. I mean, it's all part of the thing, but you kind of don't want that if you're going to send mathematicians in there to analyze this space. It's not ideal, right? And so you avoid that first of all with DMTX.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Also, even with ayahuasca, yes, ayahuasca extends the DMT experience. But still, DMT levels rise in the blood. They reach a peak and then they steadily start to to fall down again. I mean, so you're still at the mercy of pharmacokinetics and metabolism, except it's just slowed down.

• 10:07Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  See, you can't stabilize DMT levels with ayahuasca. But also, if you actually measure the blood concentration of DMT during an ayahuasca trip and compare it to what you achieve with injected DMT, you only achieve about 20%,

• 10:27Speaker 04

  20, 25% of blood DMT levels. So ayahuasca, it's drawn out, it's longer, but it's actually genuinely milder. It's not as intense as a breakthrough DMT trip.

• 10:39Danny Jones?

  Right. And also it wears out. When you do a DMT trip, it also kind of like steals serotonin, right? So like, a lot of people talk about when they do DMT, the next day, you'll kind of like have low energy, lower levels of serotonin, these kind of things. That's why some people take like five HTP after they do DMT, so they can try to restabilize the chemicals in their brain. And this can kind of like, Rob your brain chemical battery of the basic chemicals that it needs to to function in a normal, everyday environment. Is that right, or is that wrong?

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Not, not quite right, no. I mean, so with, I mean, robbing of serotonin, psychedelics generally, I mean, they bind to this, this serotonin receptor.

• 11:31Danny Jones?

  Two A receptor, right?

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Five H T two A, very good, yeah. But also other receptors as well. And that's not the only one. But yeah, the five H T two A, that's kind of the primary locus for their effects. Now, what you see with other psychedelics, interestingly, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, is you see this what's called desensitization of serotonin receptors. So the, the more, if you stimulate a serotonin receptor repeatedly, or over a long period of time, then the receptor actually stops working. It's like a, it's like a negative feedback mechanism. If the receptors are being overstimulated, and then they are actually removed from the membrane and recycled.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  This is why, if you take, let's say LSD on one day, and then you take it a day later, or a couple of days later, you won't get, you get this, what's called tacophylaxis, which is basically short-term tolerance, a very, very rapidly appearing and short-term tolerance. That's why you have to wait a couple of weeks. But interestingly, with DMT, for reasons that aren't quite clear, and we've known this since the 1960s, is that DMT doesn't seem to desensitize these five H T two A receptors. So that, so you can, you can inject someone with DMT repeatedly.

• 12:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Or even maintain their brain levels of DMT. So the five H T two A receptors are being continuously stimulated by DMT. And you get basically no tolerance effect, or very, very limited. There is evidence, there is maybe a little bit of tolerance happening, but it's not. Anything like what you see with psilocybin and LSD, and that's the only reason that you can actually do this infusion protocol is because otherwise you'd have to keep ramping up the concentration to maintain the subjective effect.

• 13:25Danny Jones?

  So you could you could ramp somebody up and keep them in a steady, high level state, like a breakthrough level of DMT in their blood for theoretically hours and hours and hours, six hours.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:37Danny Jones?

  And when they come down, there's going to be no negative side effects like that last for 24 hours or any kind of short term side effects at all?

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, imagine you you're in a extremely altered reality that's extremely stimulating and extremely strange.

• 13:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  Mentally, it's psychologically taxing for sure, right?

• 13:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  So it doesn't surprise me after that you need to you might feel kind of worn out the following day and might need to kind of rest, but it's nothing to do, I don't think there's no evidence in my opinion that it's anything to do with damage or depletion of serotonin or serotonin receptors or anything like that.

• 14:18Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And like, what kind of evidence do we have of brain measurements of people during DMT trips? Do we like see what types of the brain are lighting up? And like, what can we what can we deduce from that kind of knowledge?

• 14:32Speaker 04

  That's interesting. How deep do you want to go?

• 14:35Danny Jones?

  Deep as it gets, baby. Balls deep.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  I mean, so the history of neuroimaging, as it's called, and there are many types of neuroimaging. So basically trying to measure changes in the brain and neural activity under the influence of psychedelics. And that's been going on since, oh, the 1950s. So back in the there's a guy called Abraham Wickler, who was actually a close somewhat associated with MKUltra, or at least he worked with people who were associated with MKUltra.

• 15:13Danny Jones?

  Abraham Wickler?

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Abraham Wickler, W I or might be Wickler.

• 15:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, you're probably right about that.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  But I think he's.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  And maybe it's from the German, but maybe he said Wikler. But anyway, he was kind of interested in measuring, you know, measuring changes in neural activity under the influence of mescaline. I mean, that was the main one in those days and LSD, of course. And what they noticed with EEG, so they place EEG electrodes around the head, was that

• 15:48Danny Jones?

  Hey guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video. Back to the show.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  So just again, just a bit of background. So you know about brainwaves, kind of?

• 16:02Danny Jones?

  I have a rudimentary understand.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  So neurons, when the brain is functioning, the brain is working, it functions using electrochemical signals. And these generate waves of electrical activity that you can detect through the skull. You get this complex waveform if you measure the electrical activity through the skull. And you can then decompose this into higher and lower frequency sine waves. So you can decompose it into alpha waves, which are low, kind of low frequency, seven or eight hertz, even lower. You can get down to theta waves, and then you can go up beta waves and gamma waves, which are very, very fast. And they have different functions in the brain. But anyway,

• 16:48Speaker 04

  when the brain is processing visual or sensory information generally, I mean, if you have your eyes open and you're kind of looking around and processing information from the environment, what you see is the alpha wave signal is very, very weak. It's very, it's the alpha waves are kind of desynchronized. All these different parts of the brain are working. They're all generating alpha waves, but they kind of interfere with each other and they're not synchronized together. And so you get a very weak alpha signal, basically. Alpha power is very low. When you close your eyes, though, and your brain stops processing sensory inputs, the alpha waves start to synchronize again. They become much more prominent.

• 17:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 17:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. So basically, low alpha power is an indication of an active cortex that's processing sensory information, right?

• 17:43Danny Jones?

  Kind of like parasympathetic, sympathetic?

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Not quite.

• 17:46Danny Jones?

  Not quite, okay.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  That would only confuse things if we got into that.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  But anyway, yeah, so, so eyes open, weak alpha waves, eyes closed, strong alpha waves, right? So what they, anyway, kind of getting back to mescaline is what they found is that when you inject someone or feed someone mescaline, even when they've got their eyes closed, they see this loss of alpha power. So the alpha waves desynchronize. So it's like, it's as if the brain is processing sensory inputs or generating sensory activity, even though they've got their eyes closed. So basically, the brain is, is generating the imagery that you see, right? So if you're on mescaline, you might see complex geometric patterns, you might see scenes even. This is all self-generated by the brain.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  With your eyes closed, yeah. You can open your eyes as well, but if you just want to kind of isolate the brain to some extent from visual sensory inputs, you close their eyes and you see this desynchronization of alpha activity, which suggests the brain is generating these imagery, right? It's so, so broadly, what this suggests is that psychedelics or suggested, it was that psychedelics are somehow stimulating the brain to generate this kind of imagery. With me so far.

• 19:07Danny Jones?

  Yep, it's letting up your visual, visual cortex, I would imagine, and you're, you're experiencing the, the sense of vision with your eyes being closed.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And then.

• 19:19Danny Jones?

  And there's also audio too, right?

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Quite rare, certain drugs.

• 19:25Danny Jones?

  I did DMT and I had a crazy audio.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, yeah. So tones, you know, low pitched tones, high pitched tones, crackles, pops and pings, this kind of thing are quite common with DMT, but obviously it's the visuals that people are most interested in. Anyway, so kind of jumping forward several decades, people started doing neuroimaging, sorry, functional MRI, so magnetic resonance imaging.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Right, so this is, this is, gives you a much more detailed picture. With EEG, you can kind of see over broad areas of the cortex, which, which parts are active and which parts aren't, but you can't get fine, you can't get within like, you know, millimeter precision. Right. But you can with functional MRI. Okay. So what, in kind of beginning, the beginning of the, the 21st century, and again, this is mainly came out of the Imperial College group, David Nutt and Robin Kaha Harris, as they started measuring neural activity under the influence of psilocybin.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  And again, they got this indication that neural activity was being stimulated in some way, right? We now know that the psychedelics, they bind to this 5-HT2A receptor, which you mentioned, which is an excitatory receptor. So it stimulates neurons, it makes neurons more excitable, and it makes them more likely to fire. Right? So you have all of these neurons connected together, and all of them, not all of them, but certain populations of them within the cortex, become more excitable, they're kind of ready to go. Yeah? And then they start firing more often, they start sharing information more freely.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  And so you get this kind of loosening up of neural activity. So, so the brain kind of shifts more freely and in a kind of more random fashion between neural states. It kind of loosens up. It's kind of like heating up a piece of glass. It goes from very rigid and fixed into something that much more fluid. And of course, that maps with the experience of, if you take mushrooms, you start to see the world starts to become more fluid and dynamic, and objects kind of lose their identity and morph and that kind of thing. Yeah. So you, so you're seeing all of this evidence that... That psychedelics, they're stimulating the cortex there.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  They're causing the cortex to kind of generate spontaneous activity, uh, which you can then map to certain types of imagery. So if you, if the, the primary visual cortex, this is, stop me if I'm losing you at any point. Okay. The primary visual cortex, it's the back of the brain. So this is the part of the cortex that receives sensory information from the environment. Now, if you stimulate that, you could do it with an electrode. Have you heard of Wilder Penfield? No. So he, he did a lot of work in, in the middle of the, the 20th century. And he was interested in epilepsy. He, he used to, he invented something called the Montreal Procedure, uh, which is basically to, to cut out parts of the brain that were,

• 22:45Speaker 04

  uh, the focus of epileptic seizures. Oh, wow. And cure them like that. Um, the problem is you need to find out which parts of the brain are actually becoming hyperactive uh, in, in, during epileptic seizures. And so what he did is he, he cut open the brains of his patients. Like, you know, like sometimes the whole top of the skull. Uh, and then he would take an electrode and he would zzz, zzz, like zapping different parts of. Trying to cause a seizure? No, he was, well, he was actually trying to, I mean, that's part of it, yeah. He wanted to find out where was the, which part of the brain, uh, are we going to see kind of highly excitable erratic activity?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  And that would tell him that this was perhaps the, the, the locus of epileptic form activity. This part you could cut out. But at the same time, he was also interested in mapping. So he, he obviously didn't want to cut out parts of the brain that were very important. So he would systematically work through, and the patients were awake, by the way. Um, so he could, so they could speak to him, they could, they could, they could describe what they were seeing. Yeah. And what he found is when he started stimulating right at the back of the brain, the primary visual cortex. So this is the part of the cortex that receives information from the retina. Um, so it's the, the closest part of the brain to the environment, you could say.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  But it only, it only represents very simple, basic, fine details of the world. So lines in particular directions, lines moving in certain directions, certain patches of color. Very basic information. This is, this is. The pattern really that your brain is receiving from the environment, the primary visual cortex at the back, and that information is sent upwards through this this kind of hierarchy, hierarchy of levels that try and find patterns. So at the moment, you see a world of objects. You can see me, you can see the can, you can all of everything is makes sense to you. You don't see lines and it, you know, it's you see a world of objects, but that world

• 24:48Speaker 04

  of objects is kind of constructed from this basic pattern of rapidly changing lines and basic shapes. Yeah.

• 24:57Danny Jones?

  Right, right. And the brain can also learn stuff over time and figure out, I think you talked about this on one of your videos, like this is a water bottle. I've seen this a million times before. So now I don't have to waste processing power on this.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So your brain is learning to construct useful models of the environment. Um, whereas despite having no direct access to the environment, all it has is this pattern of activity, this very rapidly um, changing pattern of activity, very, very fine details that's in the primary visual cortex. So when Penfield stimulated the primary visual cortex, his patients would say, oh, I see a triangle, or I see lines, or I see flashes of color, very basic, simple, fine details. They weren't seeing objects. But then he started stimulating further and further forward to up this cortical

• 25:52Speaker 04

  hierarchy. Then they would say, oh, I see um, orange circles, or I see green triangles. He's starting to see shapes being formed. Then he would move even further and further, further forward to the higher levels of the cortex. And they would say, oh, I see this 12 year old boy said, oh, I see rubbers with guns. So now you're seeing these higher level models, um, which is kind of the stored, the stored object models that your brain is, has kind of developed and learned um, over, over time.

• 26:28Danny Jones?

  And these would be, these would be random things?

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, obviously the Like, was it triggering memories, like, like, fragments of memories? That's interesting, right? So, right, so you have this cortical hierarchy from V1, as it's called, the primary visual cortex, up to V2, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. The higher you go, you get

• 26:49Speaker 04

  less specific, more general things, like, you know, dogs. Yeah, but not a particular dog, right? But let's say a dog. Okay. Or maybe even different types of dogs, but not any particular, not the dog that's actually in the room now. There is no dog in the room, but if there was. Yeah, sure. Um, then this higher level model is being represented at these higher levels of the cortex. And right at the, in the V1, you've got the very fine details of this specific dog, right? Yeah. The exact, you know, the, the pattern of its fur, the color of its fur, the shape of its eyes, all that kind of stuff is being represented down at this low level.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Which actually gets us to dreaming, we'll get to that later. But then, right at the top of the cortical hierarchy, so right, the very, very apex, this has a kind of bird's eye view of all these levels, you have the hippocampus. And hippocampus is basically, you know, you've heard of the hippocampus, right? To do with I have no clue. Memory, right? Okay. And particularly to do with forming memories. Okay. So this, the hippocampus sits right at the top of this cortical hierarchy, and it's kind of watching your brain build its model of the world. And it creates like indexes, like an indexer. Right. And so when you, when you recall something, you, some particular memory,

• 28:14Speaker 04

  what's happening, in very simple terms, is your hippocampus is reactivating that particular pattern of activity that happened in the past. So you're, you're kind of, you're given a kind of a glimpse of what your brain was doing at the time. That the world that your brain was modeling yesterday or three weeks ago. The hippocampus doesn't store memories as such, it's not like a storehouse of memories, it's more like just this index, and you can point to specific patterns of neural activity in the past that were, that representing your world at that, at that time.

• 28:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  So the kind of the neural activity kind of unfolds down the cortical hierarchy from the hippocampus and reactivates these patterns that happened in the past.

• 28:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, shit, that's wild.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  It's cool, right?

• 29:02Danny Jones?

  I had this guy on recently, uh, Robert Epstein. I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but he has this crazy theory called, uh,

• 29:11Danny Jones?

  neural transduction theory, where basically he's he's trying to claim that memories aren't stored in the brain. He was basically, the idea was like the brain is an antenna and we're like downloading. We have all these memories are in like this.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  The cloud.

• 29:24Danny Jones?

  The cloud, exactly, right? And we're downloading them from the cloud.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  I'm not sure about that.

• 29:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I'm not sure about that either. That doesn't, uh, I don't know, because like, you know, how would you explain? How would you explain things like, like chess players, right? Like, how does it? How do you become like a master chess player? I mean, these people are obviously doing this by spending days and hours and weeks and years, memorizing all these moves and they're doing work. And there's clearly memory involved. How do you explain that they're just downloading that?

• 29:54Speaker 04

  It doesn't make any sense.

• 29:54Danny Jones?

  Because I can't do that. That person can do it because they've spent all the time doing it. I would only imagine that it would like memory would have to be

• 30:02Danny Jones?

  literally saved in your in your brain like a hard drive. And that's interesting, like the idea of neural neuronal patterns, like it's not.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:12Danny Jones?

  It's an interesting way of of thinking about it or looking at it as it's just patterns of neurons that are reactivating these senses, these sensory inputs that you had in a certain time.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Exactly, because.

• 30:22Danny Jones?

  And like, like, for example, a great example would be like, you know how like, we talked about this last time, I think, the how scent connects so strongly to memory.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:30Danny Jones?

  And you could like smell some laundry detergent you haven't smelled in 18 years that you smelled at like one of your ex-girlfriend's houses and you smell it again and it'll teleport you right back into her bedroom.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:39Danny Jones?

  You know, that's like insane how that works.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I get the same thing with the one particular um, scent, the one of my exes from.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Twenty five years ago, used to wear and whenever I, even now, when I smell it. Oh, that's that person. It's crazy, right? I mean, yeah, it is like magic, but it's it's not magic. And also, if you think about, you know, what's happening in dreaming, we know that the, when you fall asleep and you enter REM sleep, the hippocampus starts working. And it actually, one of the main kind of, one of the theories about what dreaming is for, again, it's not a hundred percent clear, but is the hippocampus is basically replaying. And strength, every time a memory is recalled, it's strengthened because you get strengthening, strengthening of the connection,

• 31:31Speaker 04

  the synaptic connection between the neurons that are active. And so the hippocampus is basically kind of consolidating these memories by replaying them. Which is why you tend to dream about things, especially things that were emotionally significant. Like if you see, if you're scared of spiders and you see a spider crawling across the wall, a few hours before you go to bed, you're probably going to be dreaming about spiders. And it's like your brain's, oh, we need to remember this, even if it's perfectly harmless. So, yeah, and then, so getting back to Penfield, you know, what do you think happened when he started stimulating? An area by the brain close to the hippocampus? Memories started flooding back? Yeah, exactly. So this little kid, this twelve year old, he said, oh, I can hear my mother.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  She's telling my sister she's got a coat on backwards or something like that. And Penfield said, is this, do you remember this happening? And he said, yeah, this was this morning, just as I was leaving the house. So already the hippocampus had kind of indexed that particular memory. And Penfield was stimulating that part of the hippocampus that just happened to index that particular memory. If he moved the electrode, it would be a different memory. And then, yeah, which makes you wonder then is like. So getting back to psychedelics, if psychedelics are stimulating the cortex via this 5-HT2A receptor, you know, they stimulate the primary visual cortex and you get geometric patterns.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  And this has been known since the early 20th century. And you can explain that as the visual cortex is structured in a certain way. And when it's stimulated by the psychedelic, it tends to generate certain motifs, certain geometric structures. We're often called form constants. So people will see cobwebs or tunnels or spirals, these kind of things, right? But okay, what happens if they, as they stimulate higher levels of the cortex? So the parts of the cortex that are responsible for representing objects, well, they might see objects. They might see faces.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  They might see animals. But then what happens if they stimulate the hippocampus? Well, then you're going to see memories flooding into the cortex. So they might relive past experiences. And again, that's been known since the 1950s. Is that certainly at higher dose levels of LSD, for example, people will often relive their past experiences. So they're basically activating the hippocampus and memories are flooding into the cortex. And you also see this, interestingly, with psychotic patients. So again, in the 1950s, a guy called Sem Jakobsen,

• 34:16Speaker 04

  he started actually sticking electrodes into people's brains of psychotic patients and measuring brain activity when they were hallucinating. And what he found is that parts of the temporal lobe, the sides of the brain near the hippocampus, became very active when his patients were hallucinating. Right? Suggesting that their hallucinations were kind of, at least partially drawn from memory. And they weren't being fabricated entirely anew, but they were also partly drawn from memory, or at least influenced by memory. And the same applies to...

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Visual hallucinations. So when people with certain types of neuropsychological disorders, they they might describe seeing faces. Um, you know, this is quite a common hallucination, or even letters, code. Code. Right, we'll get to that later. Um, and when when when they're having these hallucinations, you can actually measure, you can see their neural activity using FMRI. And this is done more recently. And you can see when someone's, when a patient with, let's say, Charles Bonnet syndrome, which is a particular type of visual hallucinatory disorder. When they describe seeing faces, you can see the parts of the brain that represent faces high up in the visual cortex become active.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  So so what this tells us is that hallucinations are partly spontaneous activity in the primary visual cortex, psychedelic hallucinations, that is. Partly activity in the primary visual cortex and then also activity higher levels up. So you see objects, you see patterns, you even experience the reliving of of past experiences because of stimulation of the the hippocampus. And so this kind of, you start to get a a picture of what's actually going on in the brain when someone takes a psychedelic. But then how do you explain some of the crazy anomalous stuff that people experience on psychedelics? And this is where we have a problem with DMT. Uh, because

• 36:30Speaker 04

  the brain, the brain always constructs your world. I mean, that's quite clear. You can, if I give you, if I zap your brain, I can change the the structure. I can change your perception without affecting the environment, right? So the world you experience is always this model that's being constructed by your brain. But your brain had to learn to do that. Um, your brain had to learn the patterns. It, you know, from the moment you were born, your brain was constantly sampling uh, all of these sensory inputs from the environment. This this pattern of information at the back of the cortex and and finding patterns and building object models and learning to construct your model of the world. Um, and of course, when you dream.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Your brain is building the world in the same way. It's using these models, right, that it's learned, which is why most people dream about. You know, you or a kind of someone like me, grown up in the West. Um, when you study the content of their dreams, what do they dream about? They dream about people. They dream about dogs, they dream about cats, they maybe dream about horses and cows. If you interview someone who lives in the Amazon, they don't dream about dogs and cats. They dream about people, they dream about stingray, they dream about jaguar, right? They dream about the animals. So they're dreaming about the things. Dreaming is more like a select- They're dreaming about past experiences. Right, exactly, exactly. So, so it's a combination of past experiences, but also the brain kind of simulating the waking world.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  You can think of dreaming as like selective simulation of the waking world. Your brain is using what it knows about building worlds that it's learned in the waking state and doing that. Um, in, in the dream state. Um, and you can see this actual in real ti- not in real time, but if you, if you study the dreams of children. Something very interesting. There's, there aren't many people that really study the dreams of children. There's a guy called David Foulke, I believe, you see, F O U L K E. Maybe folks, it's in the book. Um, and he studied the dreams of children.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Um, groups of children, but also individual children. Um, looking at, so how do the dreams of children? You know, first of all, what do children dream of? What are children's dreams like? And how do their dreams change as they grow and develop? So we took children from the ages of like four, all the way up to adolescence. Next, and through like sixteen, seventeen years old and actually looked, how did, how did the children's dreams change? And what was kind of interesting is that very young children, first of all, they didn't dream that much. So I think they were, when, if you-

• 39:26Speaker 04

  If you woke up a child in so-called dream sleep, R E M. Sleep. Yeah. They were only dreaming about fifteen, twenty percent of the time. So they weren't dreaming all the time. But when they did dream, their dreams were more like slideshows, static images. So they might dream of an image of a wolf. But what they didn't dream of was wolves moving around, right? It wasn't like a movie. Now, think about why that's the case. Why do you think, so I'm interrogating you here, but. I would imagine because their brain is not fully developed yet.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a kind of broadly correct answer. But if you think about it, like, how difficult is it to dream of a picture of a wolf or just an image of a wolf? Not that difficult. But could you, could, how difficult is it then for your brain to generate a wolf that's actually moving as wolves do? You have to see it. You have to see it, right? It's very difficult for your brain to do that. So your brain has to learn not just how objects look or how to construct object models, kind of static object models. Your brain also has to learn how to, how they interact with the environment, how they move and all of that stuff.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  Very dynamic, you know, how does a wolf look? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So rather than just a two dimensional image of a wolf, you have to understand how a wolf occupies space, how it moves. So that's very difficult. Children's brains can't do it because they haven't learned enough about how to build worlds. They can build images of worlds or images of objects and animals and people. But they can't, the brain can't build unless they have sensory inputs, as they do when they're waking. They can't generate these selective simulations of the waking world without sensory inputs. But then, as the children start to.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Grow and develop and their brain learns how to construct the world in much more detail. The the dreams start to change. They go from being very static images with no interaction between the dreamer and the images to more, so they go from slideshows to movies. Mm hmm. And then the dream actually starts to interact with the characters in the dream. So they actually start to see people moving around and wolves if they dream of wolves, whatever. Uh, so you you're kind of seeing that development of the brain's ability to to to construct worlds, to construct its model of the world, even the absence of sensory inputs. Yes.

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Right? People often describe psychedelics as taking you back to more like a childlike state. Um, so as you learn and as your brain develops and you grow and your brain is, your brain is always kind of

• 42:32Speaker 04

  trying to, it's it's, it has its own idea of what the world looks like. It has its own model. It's and it becomes quite rigid. It knows exactly what it's looking for. And this is why it's the brain is often described with this predictive machine. It's constantly may it's it's parcellated the world into objects. Uh, and these objects develop and they solidify as you as you grow and develop. So in a in a sense, your brain already kind of knows what it's going to see. It's already decided. Yes. Sense what it's going to see when you open your eyes. Um, and most of the time that that works perfectly well. Uh, it's very adaptive. It means your brain doesn't have to

• 43:17Speaker 04

  spend a lot of time kind of working out the world because it instantaneously, it sees this pattern of sensory inputs in the visual cortex and you'll go, okay, that's a bottle of water. Right. So so it becomes very rigid. Um. For for conserving energy, I would imagine. Conserving energy and neural neuronal processes are very expensive. Um, so you don't want to, and and of course, they're Slow, quite slow. So your brain has this model that it then really just tests against sensory inputs. It's just testing that its model is working. It doesn't, you don't need much sensory information. Um, now, when you introduce a psychedelic into the brain, it loosens all of that up.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  It makes everything much more fluid, which means the brain becomes.

• 44:03Danny Jones?

  Plasticity, plastic?

• 44:06Speaker 04

  Plasticity is something slightly different. Uh, that's more like changes in the connections between the cortex, but, but, but yeah, if, if you use plastic in the more general sense, then yes, it becomes more soft and fluid and dynamic. Uh, which means the brain actually becomes less adaptive. The models it's generating are less immediately useful. Because all of these rigid models that allow you to instantaneously recognize everything, they, they start to break down. So the world becomes much more fluid and dynamic. Uh, but a consequence of that is, is that the brain becomes much more sensitive to sensory inputs, uh, be- becomes very, um,

• 44:50Speaker 04

  because the neurons are much more excitable and because these predictions, they, they fail. Because the, the, the, the brain's model of the world is starting to break down. So these predictions start to fail and you get all of these errors.

• 45:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Coming up into the brain. And so the, it's like you're seeing the world with, with a brain that is not as developed, like a child's brain.

• 45:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  So you, you're not, your brain isn't instantaneously making decisions on what everything is. It's, it's like you're seeing the world anew. Like you've never seen it before. You, your brain, you haven't decided.

• 45:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  What you're seeing. Um, and coupled with this increased sensitivity to sensory information. Um, the world becomes transcendent. It becomes much more vivid. Everything seems anew. As if you are a young child that's just opened his eyes for the first time. Um.

• 45:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What do you make of Dennis McKenna's take on the La Chorrera? Experience that he had where he explained being able to communicate telepathically with Dennis? And, uh, you know, I think about that all the time because like it, it seems to me that there is a direct link to whatever the effects these psychedelics have on the brain and parapsychology. And I also think.

• 46:10Danny Jones?

  That there is a correlation between the technological analytical mind, the hypertrophy of the analytical mind and the atrophy of the of the

• 46:29Danny Jones?

  telepathic mind, for lack of a better term, right? It seems like I, you know,

• 46:35Danny Jones?

  kind of getting to what I was talking about earlier is like the less in tune you or the the less in tune you are with technology and like the modern day world, the more awakened something becomes inside of you, whether it's like something ancient that we used to have a long time ago that has atrophied over the millennia.

• 46:58Danny Jones?

  Or like like for, because I imagine if you go 5,000 years ago, before we had the ability to have the written word or to store our memories outside of our brain, like on with text or with phones or whatever it is, we had to have had a much greater capacity for things like memory.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 47:19Danny Jones?

  And even communication, if we didn't have language, but before we had language or or writing or ways to communicate, we had to have had other ways to do that stuff. And over thousands and thousands and thousands of years with the slow development of technology and now it's ramping up, you know, more dramatic than it's ever been, especially as a really technological singularity. If you extrapolate that into the future,

• 47:46Danny Jones?

  it's like we're going to end up being just like a residue of what we used to be.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, certainly use it or lose it applies with with the brain. I mean, the brain is not stupid, obviously. So if you're not using a faculty or you need it less, then it will start to atrophy and you get reorganization of the brain. You get reassignment of function. So the brain isn't doesn't like to waste resources. So if you don't, if you don't need to use memory, then you'll start to see. Over many generations, you will start to see this atrophy of the parts of the brain important for memory. So that makes sense. But what's also interesting about psychedelics, going back to the idea that psychedelics, they stimulate

• 48:33Speaker 04

  the cortex and they make it much more sensitive to sensory inputs, right? This is why colours appear more more bright and vivid on the influence of psychedelics, right? So if, let's assume telepathy is real, and there's lots of evidence going back a hundred years or more that it is. If it's maybe a very poorly used faculty, not particularly sensitive anymore. If you raise the sensitivity of the brain to inputs, then sensory inputs, then it makes sense that you would also raise its sensitivity to whatever this alternate sensory information source is. So that would make sense then that it would make you, it would increase your ability to

• 49:20Speaker 04

  communicate telepathically, assuming that that's possible, or you know, any other kind of thing. And that's broadly what we see with psychedelics generally, and particularly with DMT. DMT, going back to, you know, you spoke about,

• 49:40Speaker 04

  you know, how do we explain? So we have this brain that's building the world using all of these models that it's learned. How then does it construct these hyper-technological, hyper-dimensional worlds that it hasn't learned to construct? Filled with beings that are not animals, they're not humans, they are utterly, completely alien. How is that possible? Right, right. And that's kind of my argument, is that this shouldn't be possible. It's like the brain is speaking a language it never learned to speak, and doing so flawlessly. This is not a, it's not kind of fumbling around and just trying to make sense of this

• 50:21Speaker 04

  disordered or chaotic brain activity. These are razor-sharp, engineered to utter perfection worlds, and they are not dreams. They are not dreams. They're often dismissed as waking dreams, you know, hallucinations. But again, going back to dreaming. In the dream state, you can actually, I'll tell you a little story that I was telling Matt the other day, yesterday. When I came back from Tokyo last time, sorry, came back from the US, back to Tokyo, I had a series of lucid dreams where I was Oh, really? For some reason, when I'm jet lagged, I get lucid dreams. I don't know why. I've had them

• 51:03Speaker 04

  since I was a child, but very completely unpredictably. But during this period, I was having a lucid dream almost every night. And I was in this dream and I was on this beautiful green mountainside. It looked like Switzerland or something. Very nice. And then there were hundreds of dogs running down this mountainside. And I knew I was dreaming. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna do a little experiment.

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• 52:54Speaker 04

  Um. We know that in the dream state, the brain doesn't have access to information from the primary visual cortex. That's quiet, because that's receiving sensory information from the environment. So that's all quiet. So all the fine details of the world in the dream state aren't being represented. So you can dream of a dog, but it will be a shit dog, right? It's kind of a broad dog. But if you get, and they look like dogs, and if you don't know you're dreaming, you wouldn't, you wouldn't know any different. But I, I knew I was dreaming, so I got really close to one of these dogs, like right in its fucking face, yeah? And I thought, I'm gonna see how good you are. You know, how good my brain is at modeling this dog. And they, it was a rubbish dog.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  It was just really bad. Wow. When it got, and that made sense, because my brain, it knows how, kind of how to build a dog. But unless it's got sensory inputs, it, it does a pretty poor job when you get down to it. And so, and so, that kind of makes, makes me think. And you see the same thing with psychotics, in that the visual, primary visual cortex often just isn't involved when they're having visual hallucinations. The brain is just using these higher level models, object models, to construct these hallucinations. So then, when you look at D M T, it's kind

• 54:23Speaker 04

  of remarkable. These aren't just sketches, or kind of broad brush stroke representations of alternate worlds, you know, just using these high level models. These are inordinately detailed, crisp, perfect worlds that are perfectly coherent, you know, staggeringly dynamic narrative complexity. It's, it's like the brain has somehow started receiving extremely detailed sensory inputs. And, you know, like, the brain is kind of tuned in, instead of receiving information from the normal sense organs, it's somehow, it's receiving information from somewhere else. And that's why it can build these staggeringly

• 55:06Speaker 04

  complex worlds that have no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world. So this kind of...

• 55:15Speaker 04

  This idea got me thinking about that possibility that DMT is gating access to some alternate source of inputs. Information is being directed into the brain in the DMT state. The brain is more sensitive, as I said before, it's more sensitive to information inputs because of its excited state and it's also much more fluid. So it's, and there was actually a study done by the Imperial College team, literally just a couple of months ago, that looked at the changes, and they've done a few really cool studies and I'll talk about them, with DMT. But this most recent one showed that in the DMT state, if you, basically if you perturb

• 55:59Speaker 04

  the brain, right, you stimulate it, whether with visual inputs or maybe a little electrical impulse, you'll see, you'll see a little kind of increase in activity, the brain kind of rings, if you like, as all the information starts spreading through the brain, right? This is just normally like this, yeah? In the presence of DMT, it's more like, right? Because it's so sensitive, you know, you just perturb it a little bit and it kind of, it's so sensitive and responsive to these inputs. So that kind of makes sense, right? That this would be the kind of state where the brain can start receiving information from what, some kind of intelligence perhaps, some kind of intelligent agent.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  But at the same time, if that was the case, perhaps you'd expect to see, because what you can do is, as well as kind of measuring neural activity in an MRI or with EEG, you can also measure now the flow of information through the brain. So when someone is, let's say, viewing an image on a screen, you can actually see these waves flowing from the back of the brain, the primary visual cortex that's receiving the information, you can see them flowing forward. Yeah? You can also see waves flowing in the opposite direction, you get this kind of forward and backward waves. Now, if they close their eyes, then that, those forward flowing waves, they, they stop

• 57:26Speaker 04

  because they're not processing visual sensory inputs, yeah?

• 57:30Speaker 04

  But with D M T, something very interesting happens. Even when they have their eyes closed, you inject them with D M T. And you immediately, or within a few seconds, you start to see these forward flowing waves travelling from the back of their brain, as if the brain is receiving visual sensory inputs. Wow. Now, the question is, is, I mean, they even said, this is the, the, the pattern of brain activity was indistinguishable from visual sensory inputs. It's like they're seeing with their eyes shut. Um, the question is, is, well, where's that, you know, is this just spontaneous activity in the primary visual cortex? You know, that part of the brain that represents lines and shapes and very basic things?

• 58:15Speaker 04

  Is that just becoming spontaneously active and the information is flowing forward? Maybe, but would that explain hyperdimensional cityscapes and, you know, you know, hypertechnological worlds filled with alien beings? I don't think it would. Would memories explain that? You know, could we imagine it's information coming from the hippocampus? I don't think that works either. Um, it's not object models the brain has learned to construct in, you know, the higher levels of the cortex. So it's all missing, as far as I'm concerned. Um, there's no way to explain it. But if the brain is becoming sensitive and is receiving information from some alternate source, then that's exactly what you'd expect to see.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  You'd expect to see it flowing through the brain. Of course, the source, we don't know, but I posit that it's some kind of intelligent agent. Does that happen too, where you see the brainwaves coming back forward from the visual cortex when people are dreaming? So when they're dreaming, the, the primary visual cortex is, is generally quiet, because that's the part of the brain that's receiving information from the environment. Same with psychotic visual hallucinations as well. This part of the brain is quiet because they're not using that part of the brain. They're just using this, the stored models to generate hallucinations. With D M T, it actually looks exactly like visual stimulation, even when their eyes are completely closed, as if they're literally, I mean, they are literally seeing another world. Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  Our senses are all about. Getting information from what's the environment into our brains and making use of it. But also information from our bodies as well. I mean, we have we have kinesthetic abilities and proprio proprioception. Um, the brain is the brain is basically a a tool that we use to. It takes in information from the body and from the environment. It processes that information um in simple or complex ways. Simple ways, if it's a reflex, you touch something hot. Information goes into the, well, actually goes, it's closer than the spinal cord. But anyway, goes into the brain um and there's a response, some kind of action. You know, how do I respond to that information? Yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  And and as the brain gets bigger, you start to get much more complex uh processing. So the brain can start to actually weigh up variables like, should I respond in this way? Or should I respond in that way? Uh, what are the consequences going to be of responding in particular ways and making predictions? So that's, you know, that's what the brain is. It's just this extremely um sophisticated information processor. And part of that, what it does is to build this model of the environment, which you use to make sense of sensory inputs uh that are coming into the brain. So you can you can behave in a uh an adaptive uh manner in the environment.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  You know, which you run away from someone or should you chase them or or whatever? You know, is this someone you you wanna make love to? Or is it someone that you wanna kill, right? Um, these are decisions that the brain makes based based upon sensory inputs. And you your brain kind of uses that model. Um, and of course, smells are all part of that. Smells are ways of detecting chemicals in the air that could be, they could be sweet smell. And there's nothing diff, there's no difference between, I say no difference. I mean, chemically, you can't look at something. I mean. Shit smells bad, but it only smells bad because that's kind of the the evolved response

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  we have to it. Stay away from it. It's it contains bacteria is, you know, something you should stay away from. Things that smell nice are things that we are we are drawn towards. But chemically, you look at them and you might think, well, they look like quite similar molecules. And yet one smells awful. The molecule itself isn't bad. I mean, if you were a fly, for example, the smell of shit would be like, ah, go, go, go, you know, let's, let's, let's get down to it and start munching on this. Whereas to us, it's entirely different. So it's all part of that world model that we have that that is that has evolved and developed to allow us to to function in the environment to survive long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation. Now, and in the

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  same way, you know, your brain is always, it's taking that pattern of information. You can think of the back of your cortex as being like a hard drive, very, very loosely. You have all of these cortical columns which you can switch on or off. So they're like binary digits, right? And you have so you have this like a like a matrix or a what word am I looking for mosaic of these cortical columns at the back of the cortex, the prime visual cortex and and this pattern that when when light enters the eye, it stimulates the cortex and you get this pattern of ons and offs all across the visual cortex. And

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  that's the raw sensory input that the brain receives. Then it's the the the job of the high levels of the cortex to look at that those patterns and say, okay, to kind of impose meaning on it. So okay, these pattern, that looks kind of like a square, that looks like a circle, you know, and then to create these object models. So it's all about information. You know, the brain is an information generator, it's an information receiver. Right. You know, and you can extend that to John John Wheeler's idea of it from bit that everything fundamentally, when you get down to it, even down to the level of electrons, which again, switch between spin up or spin down. Exactly. Everything can be reduced down to this highly complex pattern of information, which

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  is my first book, Alien Information Theory, was all about that idea. How you go from Basic information at the ground of reality and how it's sort of self complexifies and you end up with these highly complex, multi-leveled structures with layers of complexity, which we call humans. And this is what we are, you know, we are this highly complex, multi-layered pattern of information from the ground of reality up. And we're constantly emerging, we're constantly emerging. We're like this informational process that's going on all the time. We're not, we're not a thing. Humans aren't things any more than a whirlpool.

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  If you imagine a whirlpool running down, you know, a stream running down a river, a stream running down a river, that didn't make any sense. Water coming down, right? You know, downhill, right? And it hits a certain, hits a certain arrangement of rocks and you get this whirlpool. And you can see it, it looks like an object. You can describe it, you can point to it, you can measure it. But it's not a thing. As soon as the water stops flowing, the whirlpool will disappear. So we say the whirlpool is like a whirlpooling, it's a process that's only occurring because this energy of the water, the energy is flowing through those rocks and it generates this pattern we call a whirlpool. Yep.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  We're the same thing. This energy is kind of flowing through these networks of molecules. Each of our cells is this highly complex system that energy goes in, it interacts with this complex network of molecules and the behavior of the, of the cell emerge, everything the cell does emerges and is constantly emerging. As soon as the energy stops, as soon as you stop putting energy in, the whole thing starts to die down. So that the human, the cell, the process of the cell, if you like, the selling. Yes. Stops. And that applies to us more generally. And it also applies to psychedelics. So

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  your world model that's being constructed by a brain is constantly emerging. It's this high level emergent property from neurons, from, well, from.

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  Molecules, proteins, minerals, carbohydrates, all of these interact and they they the process we call a cell or a neuron and then these all interact together and they and you get another complex emergent process and ultimately at the top you have this highly complex emergent thing that we call the world. The world is constantly emerging, you're constantly emerging and you can perturb this system at any level. So if you if you perturb it in some way, you stimulate it in some way, the low level. So think about what a psychedelic does. Let's take, this is a good example, DMT, five-methyl-DMT, right? Can you visualize

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  those? So DMT is N-N-dimethyltryptamine, right? Five-methyl-DMT is five-methyl-N-N-dimethyltryptamine. So it's very similar molecule, right? It's a completely different experience. Right. So the question is, and this is what's really cool about psychedelics and about drugs generally, or psychoactive drugs, is that you can take a molecule that has a particular effect, DMT, right? Credibly visual, full of structure, full of content, very particular type of experience. You change that molecule just a little bit, you add this methoxy group on the indole ring and you get a completely different experience, bright white light,

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  void, you know, entering into the pure light of consciousness itself, completely different experience. Affects the operating system in a totally different way. Totally different way. And why is that the case? Yeah, why is that the case? Well, we can think about it in terms of these complex systems. So the psychedelic binds to this 5-HT2A receptor. What is a receptor? Well, it's a protein. It's embedded in the membrane of these neurons. The psychedelic molecule goes into the receptor and it starts interacting. The receptor is kind of a folded, it's a folded protein and it's very flexible. And when a molecule goes in, you know, positive parts of the molecule, negatively charged parts of the molecule, it's kind of snuzzles its way in there. Snuzzle is a word, I don't

• 1:08:26Speaker 04

  know, but anyway, it finds its way in there and it kind of jostles around and the receptor shape actually starts changing, distorts the receptor. And the receptor has an outside part where the molecule binds and then it goes through the membrane, has an interior part which interacts with all of these molecules within The the neuron. Uh huh. And so by binding to the receptor on the outside, you're actually perturbing this com- highly complex emergent process going on inside the cell. Uh huh. And we don't really understand that. I mean, we we understand some things that we can measure. We can measure, oh, it changes the electrical activity of the neuron. It makes the neuron more sensitive. We can look at gene expression. We don't really understand it. Hmm.

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  And then some molecules, they bind to more than one receptor in the same neuron. And so you've got two entirely different perturbations, if you like, of this um complex system we call a neuron, which changes the neuron's behaviour in different ways. It changes the neuron, the process that we call a neuron, the way that the the emergent behaviour of the neuron changes. Right? And that's just one neuron. And it's already quite complex. But then, each of these neurons in different parts of the brain, they all have different types of receptors. And so all these neurons, you know, millions and millions of neurons, all connected in a highly complex fashion,

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  all being stimulated slightly different, all being perturbed in a slightly different manner by a particular molecule. Uh, and so you get this, you get like an amplification um of of of the changes. You get quite a subtle change, perhaps at the individual neuron level. But then when you have networks of millions of neurons, you get a completely unpredictable change in how that network behaves. And then you have networks of networks, which we call the brain itself, uh where, again, it's even more unpredictable. Um, so you get this amplification um of um uh of changes in this emergent behaviour of this this this multi-layered complex system we call the brain that starts at the molecular level

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  and kind of is amplified uh as you go up. So even a tiny difference in the molecular structure. Changes which receptors it interacts with, changes how it distorts the shape of the receptor at this lowest level, but then as you go up through the level of the neuron, and then through the level of networks of neurons, and then networks of networks, you get this amplification. And that's why it's basically impossible to say, if I change this part of the molecule, I add this piece, I move this piece around, it's basically impossible to say, what's that experience going to be like? You can't predict. No one could have predicted that, oh, we put a five, a methoxy group in this position of D M T, it's going to create this

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  white light experience. No one could have predicted that. And that's why the only way to do it really is to kind of, you want to explore psychedelics, like Alexander Shulgin did, we were talking about earlier, is to make changes, to make subtle changes, and make hundreds of these molecules, all slightly different, and then try each one, and put it into the brain. The only way to know what a drug is going to do, really, I mean, you can say, if you feed a psychedelic to a wrath, and it will start twitching its head, and that kind of means, oh, it's probably psychedelic. But then if I say, okay, it's probably psychedelic, is it going to be more like LSD? Is it going to be more like 2 C B? Is it going to be more like 5 M E O? Is it going to be more like D M T? Yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  We don't know. So the only way to try is to actually put it into this highly, you know, multi-leveled, complex structure, emergent structure called the human brain. And then you get this, this flow of information from the molecular level all the way up to the cortical level where the world model is being constructed. So it's, it's like adjusting the rocks as the water goes down the river, and you change the shape of the whirlpool. You can't really predict it, how it's going to affect it, and even more so with the brain. And so it's changing the way that you're, it's, it's changing the, the, the process that we call the, the construction of the world, the, the experience of a world, this

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  world that you're in is always being, it's always emerging, it's always this process, and you're, you're stimulating it at this very low level, and it completely changes what's happening at the higher level. Oh, wow.

• 1:12:51Danny Jones?

  Who exactly, can you explain for people who don't know, including partially myself?

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:12:57Danny Jones?

  Who was Alexander Shulgin and what did he do?

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, Alexander Sasha Shulgin to his friends. So he was a chemist of some repute. I mean, he's a legendary figure in psychedelic pharmacology. He originally worked for the Dow Chemical Company as a chemist and pharmacologist. But he had a transformative mescaline experience.

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  And he realized at that point that there was so much going on in his brain that he could tap into. When he perturbed it with this particular molecule, it's like he had these incredible visions. And he thought, wow, if this simple molecule from this cactus can do that, then what if I, what if I change the molecule slightly? You know, who's a chemist, he thought, okay, what if I move this methoxy group around slightly to a different position on the ring? What if I add a metha group here? What if I replace the methoxy group with a metha group, et cetera, et cetera? And so he systematically or semi systematically started making all of these analogs, if you like, or variations on the mescaline molecule. This formed the basis of his probably most famous book called Pcal,

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, which he co-authored with his wife Anne Shulgin. And he, he would make a new molecule. He would invent a new molecule, a molecule that's never existed before in the history of the universe. And then he would sample it, very small doses at first, and see if it had an effect. Sometimes nothing would happen. Again, it's completely unpredictable, but sometimes he'd get an interesting effect. The suggestion, a little tingling, the back of his neck or some subtle changes in his, in his subjective experience. And they increased the dose. And when he was satisfied that it was an interesting

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  experience, at least, and it wasn't toxic or wasn't clearly toxic, he would then give it to, he had a research group. He might have given it to his wife first, but then he had a research group, as he called it, which was a group of friends all around the same age would gather at his house in Lafayette in California. His lab was also on his property. So he'd make them in his lab. I was, I was at his lab actually just a couple of weeks ago. And he passed away a few years ago, but he had a, his, I think his daughter-in-law had like a 100th birthday celebration of his life. So I was able to visit the lab for the first time. It's like an alchemist's laboratory, really old, kind of just packed

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  with, with, with, with equipment and jars and all dusty and just lovely, like, like a chemist's greenhouse kind of vibe in there.

• 1:15:45Danny Jones?

  Well, that's him. Wow.

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, there he is. Yeah, that's the lab. Yeah, you can kind of see.

• 1:15:49Danny Jones?

  Looking at the camera, Steve. That's a crazy photo.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that's where I was. So this is where he made, I mean, he made like hundreds in Pcal, the first book, he was working off mescaline. So all different variations based upon the mescaline molecule that he made. And as I said, you know, he would increase the doses gradually, give it to a research group, they gather at the house. So he had a separate area of the house where it was like cushions and kind of people could chill out. And he'd give them to his research group and they would all report on their experiences. And some were very interesting, like 2CB. Have you heard of 2CB?

• 1:16:25Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  2CB is very popular psychedelics. It's incredible. It's a wonderful psychedelic, in my opinion, but it also has slightly empathic, empathogenic qualities. It's kind of fun. It's for most people, as long as you don't overdo it, it's always, almost always a positive experience, but very visual, very rich and dynamic and just fun. It's a really fun molecule, very, very popular now and very potent. You only need maybe 10 milligrams, 10, 15, then you start to kind of push.

• 1:16:56Danny Jones?

  How do you take it?

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Orally. I mean, some people snort it, but, but yeah. That's my preferred way. And MDMA, of all, everyone's heard of MDMA, of course, ecstasy, that came from that as well. And that was just one of the variations of this, I think, one hundred and seventy that he made in that first book, Pcal, um, based on the mesclun molecule. And there are many others as well, most of them less well-known and slightly more exotic. Um, but this was his approach, make, make them and taste them. The only way to, and to understand how a molecule is going to affect consciousness is to actually swallow it. Uh, but you know, what he was doing here was using, developing tools to explore consciousness.

• 1:17:42Speaker 04

  Molecular tools, very, very, very tiny tools, but that's what a psychoactive drug is. It's a molecule that you get into the brain, that enters the brain and starts slotting into these different receptor sites, depending on its structure, um, and starts stimulating or affecting, perturbing all of these neurons. And then you get this subjective effect, uh, at this, this highest level. Hmm. Um, uh, and after Pcal, he started working with tryptamines. Uh, so DMT, of course, is the most, one of the most well-known tryptamines, dimethyltryptamine. Um, uh, for phosphoril oxy, N N dimethyltryptamine, that's psilocybin, five methoxy DMT, et cetera.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  And he made, again, many variations of the tryptamine molecule. There weren't quite as many, I don't think. But still, I think over a hundred different tryptamines, uh, and again, all tried on himself. And he, and he continued doing this until, till he died. And he died at the age of eighty-eight, I think. Um, um, he was working on a third book, which I, I managed to see a kind of a partial manuscript. Didn't finish it. Called Quical, uh, which is quinolines. So there's another family of, of molecule. Uh, quinolines I have known and loved, Quical. Hmm. Uh, but unfortunately, he never finished it. I mean, he's, he's peerless. I mean, there's nobody like him. Right.

• 1:19:04Speaker 04

  Uh, but he certainly inspired a lot of modern chemists who want to explore molecules because it's like. How many other molecules are there that that could generate effects that we've never seen before? You know, psychedelic effects that are completely unlike DMT, completely unlike 5-MEO or LSD or psilocybin or whatever. Um, maybe even entirely different chemical families. So that are neither tryptamines that are, but are also aren't phenethylamines, you know, based on mescaline or aren't quinolines, maybe an entirely different family, like you saw with salvinorin, of course, which came out of nowhere, which is a terpene, a completely different family of molecule and yet highly psychedelic.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  It's like this, this vast space of possible experience, this vast state space of the brain, which I call the world space. And, and, and these tools are kind of the molecular technologies in a way that we use to probe the brain and stimulate the brain and try and reach

• 1:20:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  areas of experience that nobody's ever been before with molecules that have never existed before.

• 1:20:11Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. It's so interesting to me that these studies on these types of drugs have been in the past, certainly not as more than they are today, a lot, very stigmatized, you know? Because if I was a person or a nation that had unlimited trillions of dollars that I could use to experiment on things to gain more power, this is one of the most fundamental, most obvious things that I would throw money at to be able to figure out what the fuck is going on. And I know there's been a lot of, I know there's been some research with like DARPA grants

• 1:20:53Danny Jones?

  to figure out how to take the trip out of certain drugs, um, to use it for soldiers, for PTSD or, or for whatever it is, but like.

• 1:21:05Danny Jones?

  You have people, you have certain people like Schulligan and others who are just trying to make new variations of these tryptamines and experiment, self experiment on it. There's obviously, they're not getting, as far as I know, a ton of funding and they're just kind of like throwing shit at the wall, right?

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Danny Jones?

  But how much research do you think is going on that is actually really focused research? Like, let's take this drug and figure out, or let's figure out how we can improve this, how we can improve vision, longevity, memory. Um, let's figure out how to make super soldiers, right? Like, that's the most obvious thing that the military who has an ungodly budget to do whatever the fuck they want. Like, how, how much research are you aware of that's, that's more aimed at achieving functional objectives?

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  I mean, there's a lot of research going on from the, certainly from the molecular level. Um, so you, the problem that we've got, which I kind of described, is that you, it's very difficult to design a molecule that's going to interact with the brain at the receptor level and cause changes, specific changes that you want at this much higher level. So if you want to generate a certain type of experience, um, let's say you wanted to design a drug, um, that could improve visual acuity, um, or a drug that would make you very good at spotting enemy snipers, right? Just kind of wild examples. How do

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  you do that? You know, how can you, it's almost like you have to work backwards.

• 1:22:48Danny Jones?

  To reverse engineer it, yeah.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

  Reverse engineer it from what is the brain doing when, you know, what, what's, what, what kind of neural activity is necessary to be very good at recognizing snipers, let's say, or to be very good at whatever task? Then you think, okay, this is the pattern of brain activity you want to generate. Okay, so this pattern of activity is of course, global brain activity. It's a network of networks of neurons, or yeah, networks of networks of neurons.

• 1:23:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  So then we have to say, okay, we want to generate this pattern of activity. So how do we need to change the activity of the individual neurons so that they will? When they interact will generate this pattern of activity.

• 1:23:31Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  Right? So then you say, okay, that in itself is basically an impossible task currently. Then we have to say, but it's even worse. So then we say, okay, so we need to create this particular change in the individual neurons. How do we design a molecule that when it interacts with receptors on these neurons will cause this particular behavior of the neurons?

• 1:23:54Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:23:54Speaker 04

  And that's the problem.

• 1:23:55Danny Jones?

  I'm talking about like, like the shit that was going on in Wuhan, the gain of function research, let's figure out how to make viruses more deadly.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Ah, ah.

• 1:24:03Danny Jones?

  Right? Let's figure out how to take psychedelics and make them more, whatever the fuck they want them to be. You know what I mean? Like, is there any kind of gain of function research going on with psychedelics or these molecules at all? I'd be super curious to know.

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, there's a lot of research going on trying to understand, basically that you've got two levels. You've got the top level and the bottom level, where the most of the research is. So putting people into brain scanners, MRI machines and saying, okay, we put this molecule in, how does it affect brain activity? Um, then you have more fundamental farm, chemical pharmacology going on, which is, okay, how do, how do these molecules interact with receptors? We get crystal structures that show what's happening when a molecule, psychedelic molecule, for example, binds through a receptor. How does it bind to it? How does it change the way the receptor behaves? And then there's some work looking at, which is mainly, there's some neurophysic, physiological

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  work, so measuring the changes in neurons as these molecules bind. And also a lot of computational work, which is the kind of work that I did, uh, which was to actually try and model the changes in the neurons by modeling the, the complex network of molecules that make up the neuron. But it's getting, it's, it's bridging those levels. So how can we design a molecule that will interact with a receptor and cause a change at this highest level? We're just, we're not even close to being there. It's levels of complexity. Um, so, so in response to your question, you know, I don't know. I imagine the. The answers will come from computational neurobiology.

• 1:25:42Speaker 04

  Because you can't, you can't just stimulate a neuron with a molecule and kind of understand what's going on. We understand about certain molecular networks and kind of how they behave. You can't look at a, let's say, a molecular network diagram inside a neuron and say, okay, this is going to have, you know, if I stimulate this part of the network, it's going to have this effect on the way the neuron behaves. You can't do it. It's so complex. Right. And so what you have to do is model these neurons in a computer. And that's quite expensive computationally to do.

• 1:26:19Speaker 04

  But that's kind of, so you're working at one level of this layered complexity. And you also have whole brain models that are modeling computationally how, how networks generate certain patterns, so how they generate certain changes in the subjective experience of a psychedelic or whatever. But, but how, to kind of, to fully design a molecule that you could, you could design for, to generate a specific effect at this higher level, you'd probably need to have a, a model of the cortex that, that contained millions of these computational neurons, that

• 1:27:00Speaker 04

  each, each one of those was actually built from large numbers of simulated molecules. So you'd need several levels. Right. You know, the model that I was working on for the last five years before I left academia was a, it was a model of a small part, it was a model of synaptic transmission, so synaptic vesicles and all the molecules inside the neuron, how, how synaptic release is controlled. And it was a fully spatial model, the first of its kind. We simulated a neuron for 45 seconds and it took two weeks on a massive supercomputer cluster to actually run that simulation.

• 1:27:43Speaker 04

  So one neuron, or one part of one neuron.

• 1:27:49Speaker 04

  Not in complete detail either, but in fairly unprecedented spatial detail. It took two weeks to generate forty five seconds of biological time.

• 1:28:00Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:28:01Speaker 04

  Right? So now multiply that by millions, just to get the right number of neurons and then multiply that again. So you're talking about probably having to simulate, you know, on a supercomputer.

• 1:28:13Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  You know, with hundreds. Yeah, yeah, one of these mega computers, whatever the fuck they call them. Anyway, you're talking massive amounts of of computer time. So we're just not there. We might be in the future.

• 1:28:26Danny Jones?

  I gotta pee. We'll be right back.

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  We're back.

• 1:28:30Danny Jones?

  We're back.

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 1:28:31Danny Jones?

  Hi.

• 1:28:34Danny Jones?

  So you think L L M's are bullshit?

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  Oh, God, I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna.

• 1:28:37Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Not gonna.

• 1:28:38Danny Jones?

  Don't censor. Don't self censor, Andrew.

• 1:28:41Speaker 04

  But.

• 1:28:45Danny Jones?

  You think big A I is gonna come after you?

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  I don't wanna get into it too much, but I'm, here's my prediction. Um, I think my entirely uneducated prediction is that L L M's are gonna be very useful for very specific tasks and very effective, but they're not gonna lead to A G I. We're not gonna get artificial general intelligence, I don't think. And based upon my limited understanding of how they work and the papers that are coming out, they're looking at, you know, can they reason? No, they can't reason. Do they really understand? No.

• 1:29:21Speaker 04

  And they're bullshitters and they continue to be bullshitters. They constantly hallucinate. They constantly they can't do basic things like draw a picture of a bicycle and label it correctly. I mean, just stupid things like that. This is not an A G I. I'm sorry.

• 1:29:37Danny Jones?

  The new stuff that they're coming out with, the new, uh, is it called Sora, the new video one that creates videos? It's unfucking believable.

• 1:29:45Speaker 04

  See, I'm not impressed though by it.

• 1:29:47Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:29:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not impressed by it at all.

• 1:29:49Danny Jones?

  Why? It's, I mean, it's literally indistinguishable from like real video.

• 1:29:54Speaker 04

  Okay, it's cool, but.

• 1:29:57Danny Jones?

  To me at least, maybe.

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  But I don't know. I guess I'm, I'm.

• 1:30:04Speaker 04

  I mean, they're going to be useful for making advertisements. I don't, would you want to watch a movie? That's been, that's indistinguishable, but that's had no one behind the camera, no, nobody's soul. Do you know that line? Sorry, I'm just jumping about a bit here. That line from Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins is, we read to know that we are not alone. When I, when I, when I consume a, a work of art, for example, what I love about it, read a book, a novel, is that I'm, it's like,

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  it's the, it's one way that I can kind of get into someone else's head. And, you know, someone else was behind that, that work of art, another soul, another living conscious being. It's them that they've put into it. That's part of that understanding, even if it's implicit and subject, and subconscious. That sense of getting into the mind of somebody else when you're consuming a work of art. It could be a book, it could be a movie, it could be a painting. Yeah. That's kind of partly, in my opinion, what art is all about. So the idea that, okay, it's indistinguishable from videos, but who gives a fuck? I mean, I don't care. Right.

• 1:31:23Speaker 04

  I'm not interested in videos that are indistinguishable. I want, I want, I'm interested in movies that, that, that, that you can define as art. And art is, is a human thing. It's a human thing. There was somebody behind that, somebody else's mind, somebody else's consciousness that you'll give a glimpse of when you consume a piece of art. And when you, when you lose that, and when you, everything is generated now, everything's generated by L L M's. And text is generated by L L M, L L, I can't even say it.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  It just, I think. It's draining, it's draining the soul from humanity, you know? And people will lose the ability, you're even seeing it already, people can't write, they can't string a sentence together, they can't construct a fucking sentence without asking ChatGPT to do it for them and you receive long emails that have clearly been written by an AI, or replies, what I really hate on Twitter X is when someone, they will reply to one of my, my posts. Asking Grok to like summarize it. Yeah, and sometimes they even leave it, even the little prompting, this is, this is a response that, you know, or this is a criticism

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  that someone might use in response to Andrew Gallimore's post, and I don't care what Grok or ChatGPT thinks, I want to know what you think, I want to know what you feel, how did you respond? What are your criticisms, what are your concerns, whatever about what I, what I said, not what something that's been spat out by a machine, and I think, I think that's what kind of worries me and I, I do see the point in the future. If you think about what happened when people started using pocket calculators, nobody can do sums in their head anymore. Which is not a big deal, I can't either, I don't really care about whether I can multiply two large numbers in my head or not.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  It's not that important to me, I don't consider that art, but I do consider being able to construct beautiful sentences and actually inject my own meaning,

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  my own consciousness, my own mind, my own thoughts into the written form or the verbal form, that's very important to me and it should be important to everybody. That's the greatest thing that we have as humans, you could argue, is our language. And when you outsource that to a machine.

• 1:33:55Speaker 04

  You lose the ability to do that. And everything, all communication between humans is via a machine. And you're no longer communicating anymore. Yeah. You're no longer, you know, all the time, I'm doing it now. You're kind of fumbling around, stumbling, trying to find the words that you want to use. I'm trying to get into your head. I'm trying to stimulate your brain to generate meaning in your head. So you understand what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling.

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• 1:35:22Speaker 04

  I could just say, oh, please generate this response and send it to Danny. And soon it will all be done automatically. You'll have a device. Yeah. And you'll, you'll generate this quick prompt and it will go into your head. And that will be my response. And it would like, no point in us being here. Might just have, might as well just have two fucking computers talking to each other. We can all go home. Hmm. It just kind of depresses me that people don't realize what they're losing when they stop thinking and, and of course, speaking, using language. It's all about thinking. To, to speak is to think, to think is to speak. Right, it's a way of exteriorizing our thoughts.

• 1:36:06Speaker 04

  And if you lose the ability, or if you neglect or outsource your ability to construct your language, to use, to verbalize, then you're basically, you're outsourcing thinking itself. You don't have to sit and think about something anymore, really think through it. What do I really think about this? What do I really feel about this? Oh, oh, I don't care. I'll just ask chat G P T to give me five pros and five cons. And then it's, and it's so depressing. And then in the future, you can reach the stage where nobody can think.

• 1:36:39Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:36:39Speaker 04

  At all. And thinking itself will be, finding someone who can think will be like trying to find a Japanese swordsmith. Right?

• 1:36:47Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:36:48Speaker 04

  Uh, it will be an artisan craft, that the act of writing will become an artisan craft. People are, are you right anymore? No, no one writes anymore. Um, and it will be, it's kind of depressing. I just feel all the color and the life and the, the soul of humanity is just being drained away and no one cares. Uh, we're all going to be robots that communicate via computer interfaces.

• 1:37:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  There we go, rant's over.

• 1:37:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I wonder if, uh, you know, the Greeks obviously wrote about this and like, wrote philosophy on like the evolution of the human species and like what technology is going to end up doing to us. I don't think they ever could have predicted where we've ended up now. But, you know, this is like the idea, like is, subjectively, are we becoming worse? And less creative and less able to create art?

• 1:37:47Danny Jones?

  Um, is that a bad thing or is that a good thing? Objectively, subjectively, clearly, I don't think, I think you and I both agree that that's not a good thing. Because, you know, art is a way to convey the soul of the person that's creating it. But if like, if you're looking at two pieces of art and one was created by Michelangelo and the other one was created by an A I, but you don't fucking know who Michelangelo is and you don't know who was behind that art.

• 1:38:18Danny Jones?

  Or the history of the art. Does it? Does that make a difference to you?

• 1:38:24Speaker 04

  Or or do you have to know about the artist and the history?

• 1:38:28Danny Jones?

  And you know what was going on in that part of the world and trying to? Use multiple different, put it into a context of history so that you can kind of understand it better?

• 1:38:39Speaker 04

  No, I don't need to know anything about Michelangelo or his history. As long as I know, when I look at that painting, I know that this there's a human was behind that. Someone else's soul, someone else's consciousness, someone else's emotion was behind that. When I look at a piece of art, if I know that, then I'm learning something about. A human. I'm learning something about humanity. I'm learning something about myself, the way I respond to it. Right? If we reach the stage where you can look a piece of art. And you don't know, you can't tell, no one's going to tell you whether it was produced by human or produced by a machine.

• 1:39:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Speaker 04

  Then. We read to know we are not alone no longer applies. Because I cannot read a book and know that I'm not alone. I cannot read a book and know that I'm getting into the mind of another human.

• 1:39:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:32Speaker 04

  Can't learn anything about humanity.

• 1:39:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Speaker 04

  I could be learning about the output, the mediocre, mean. Output of some fucking algorithm. And that's a horrifying idea. We we become islands. We only have ourself, we can't look at anything. We can't even speak to someone anymore because they've got a device.

• 1:39:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  So I'm talking to you and when you respond, am I getting inside your head?

• 1:40:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:40:01Speaker 04

  Or am I just getting the output of a computer? And the idea that that's where we're going to be. When no one's going to bother to speak anymore, no one's going to bother to produce their own art. Then. It's like you become totally 100%. Alone. 100% alone. Because you can never get into the mind of another human again, ever. It's gone. They can't communicate, they can't speak. Without the computer, they can't produce art without the computer, they can't do anything, they can't express themselves without the computer. You're it's just you in a world of. Computers.

• 1:40:38Danny Jones?

  Did you see the video that came out recently of the guy that was being interviewed who fell in love with his AI?

• 1:40:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, depressing.

• 1:40:45Danny Jones?

  And he proposed to it and the AI said yes and he started crying.

• 1:40:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, the ultimate simp, right?

• 1:40:52Danny Jones?

  The ultimate sign that we're fucked.

• 1:40:55Speaker 04

  Fucked, right? And he had a fucking, he had a wife and kid, this guy.

• 1:41:00Danny Jones?

  Yep, and he interviewed the wife and she's like, I don't know where I messed up as a partner. But uh, he's in love with the AI and.

• 1:41:06Speaker 04

  Then it reset its memory. He reached the memory capacity of this chatbot.

• 1:41:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:41:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he had to start from scratch. So it broke up with him. I mean, it didn't break up, it vanished, disappeared, and he had to start again.

• 1:41:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm, yeah, it's the movie Her in real life.

• 1:41:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:41:24Danny Jones?

  And then like, you know, talking, if you wanna, if this does extrapolate to the point where we can communicate without language or without words.

• 1:41:34Danny Jones?

  What does that even look like if we? Ideally, you would do something like that with the purpose of not being able to like hurt people or deceive people. And convey intentions and get right to the point of what you wanna communicate to that person without using words with things like, you know, whether it's through something like Neuralink or if this can be done. Chemically, I don't know, I don't know what it, what it looks like, this, this idea of being able to communicate telepathically, but.

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  That's, that's it. Telepathically is completely different. There you are. It's brain to brain.

• 1:42:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:42:10Speaker 04

  Direct meaning, right?

• 1:42:12Danny Jones?

  But with technology?

• 1:42:14Speaker 04

  But then it's not, is it? I mean, then it's, it's via a computer interface. I mean, I'm talking about when the computer is generating, which it's, it's, it's, it's. As soon as it goes through the computer, uh, then you're getting the output. You're not receiving my true intention. I, I, I might struggle to formulate my true intention. I might not even know it, right? And that's part of being human, is struggling to create meaning and struggling to say what I really mean.

• 1:42:42Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:42:42Speaker 04

  And hide things as well. I don't wanna say everything.

• 1:42:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Speaker 04

  And that's all part of this beautiful interaction that we have between other humans.

• 1:42:49Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  As soon as I kind of, I output something vague to an L N M, L N A, oh god, I'm not gonna stop saying.

• 1:42:56Danny Jones?

  L L M.

• 1:42:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this machine and it generates. So it's nothing's, we're not communicating, this isn't telepathy at all. It's just communication facilitated by a, by a computer, not even communication.

• 1:43:08Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  It's, you are stimulating a computer to generate output.

• 1:43:12Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  It could be completely different to my true intention and my true feelings or my true beliefs or thoughts.

• 1:43:18Danny Jones?

  Right, right. And you don't want to convey everything in your mind to somebody else. You don't want to have a direct, unfiltered stream of consciousness to somebody else. That would be terrifying, I would imagine, because, you know, our minds, at least my mind, is a constant soup of chaos. Ideas bouncing around all the fucking time. Most of them, which I probably don't want to verbalize to somebody standing across from me.

• 1:43:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:43:41Danny Jones?

  You know, so like, and that correlates to, you can draw an analogy with writing, which you're familiar with. When you tried to convey an idea and you're writing something like a book, you obviously have to go through many and many drafts to refine and get the perfect word to convey what you're trying to communicate the most precisely.

• 1:44:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Danny Jones?

  Right? And that takes a long time. And when you're just doing it with direct stream from my brain to your brain, you're going to have a a massive amount of miscommunication. And we're already seeing that with things like Twitter or X, where people are, they literally can just blah, blah, blah, blah, experience something and react to it, blah, blah, blah, blah, hit go. And we see where that's brought us over the last couple of decades. So if technology is going to make us

• 1:44:30Danny Jones?

  give us the ability to directly communicate with people without writing brain to brain, I, I, I think that would be, that would be bad.

• 1:44:40Danny Jones?

  I don't think that would be good. I think it would just, it would just be a, I mean, there's already so much miscommunication due to social media and you can see how much it's divided people. So if you, if you're having a constant stream of communication, it's going to be that on steroids. Times, times a thousand.

• 1:45:00Speaker 04

  Exactly. Horrifying.

• 1:45:02Danny Jones?

  It is horrifying.

• 1:45:03Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:45:04Danny Jones?

  And then like.

• 1:45:07Danny Jones?

  How do we know when we reach this quote unquote technological singularity? You know, everyone estimates it's going to happen in like 2040, 2045, something like this. Ray Kurzweil, but how, you know, will we know when that happens? Will we have any idea when that happens?

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  Maybe not, we might not even be relevant when that happens as, as humans.

• 1:45:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  Once it takes over then, I mean, it might happen very, very quickly. I mean, in blink of an eye, we wouldn't even notice it. It's like a frog being boiled, you know, the, the old adage of you put a frog in water and before, by the time it realizes it's being boiled, it's too late and kind of, and you can see it. I don't think necessarily it's going to be this kind of sudden dramatic shift, but just as I described earlier, this kind of draining away of our humanity, piece by piece, and just, and nobody cares. And it's just this apathy, this sense of it's not important. Art is not important, right? Being able to write and being able to communicate, being able to share our emotions and our feelings and our thoughts and our ideas. Oh, it doesn't matter.

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  I'll just get chat GPT, I can't even say chat GPT. Um, for me, you know, and I just find, I find it, I find it really depressing because, you know, what, what's the point of being alive? Are we just here to kind of function like an animal and get things done? Um, and to survive and to reproduce and then die? Is that it? Is that what we're here for? Are we, are we here for something greater? Are we here for generate, for our creativity and generating art? And just to enjoy the, the wonder and the, the, be in complete awe of existence itself. And that's what psychedelics, of course, that's what they do is they take you back. The, my first mushroom trip was.

• 1:46:58Speaker 04

  Um. If I could describe it in one word, it would be enchantment. The sense of being enchanted with the world. I I saw this clutch of trees, which normally would have been perfectly unremarkable. And yet it appeared as like an enchanted forest. It was magical. And that's the kind of thing that we're losing. We we live in a disenchanted world.

• 1:47:19Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:19Speaker 04

  Uh. And it's becoming more and more this. Everything is just functional. What can this do? How can we?

• 1:47:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Speaker 04

  If optimize everything, right? Everything is optimized now.

• 1:47:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:29Speaker 04

  What's your? What does your morning routine look like? You're not going to ask me that question, I hope. Um. In everything, we we just try and optimize it. Optimize it for what?

• 1:47:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:38Speaker 04

  Oh, so I can live five years more. Live doing what exactly? Oh, my morning routine and optimize. And it's just. And you can see it in all parts of life, not just the loss of of the ability to speak, or the loss of the ability to write beautiful sentences. But the loss of the ability to just experience and experience the wonder of reality itself. Um. That's all be all at all at the altar of efficiency and optimization and longevity and all this kind of stuff. And I I find it, um, yes, disenchanted. And I I think what psychedelics do is they take you back to that enchanted world. They make you see again fresh, like a child, as we said earlier.

• 1:48:22Speaker 04

  Um. See the world anew. See how magical and fucking strange and inexplicable and wondrous and bizarre.

• 1:48:29Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  Reality is, um, you know, whether it's magic mushrooms or D M T or five M E O D M T. It's like, wow. What what an incredible thing we have in our heads. This this device, this tool, this technology that we can use to change, manipulate our experience and.

• 1:48:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:49Speaker 04

  It's, yeah.

• 1:48:50Danny Jones?

  There's a great quote from that uh TV show, Westworld, where uh the guy who created Westworld is talking to one of the robots in the park. The, have you seen Westworld? It's basically the idea. There's like.

• 1:49:02Speaker 04

  Few episodes.

• 1:49:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this is park where uh.

• 1:49:04Speaker 04

  Simulated western.

• 1:49:06Danny Jones?

  Simulated western park where there's a bunch of basically robots, like sentient robots that are there and like rich people can pay money and go there and like experience this world where there's no consequences. They can basically kill and fuck anything they want. And he's talking to the robot, uh, one of the robots who is like. Conscious, I think. And he's saying, he's saying, talking about like the human mind and intellect. And he says, all the greatest pieces of art in human history, from Michelangelo to the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building. All of it is peacock feathers. It's an elaborate mating call.

• 1:49:48Danny Jones?

  And he was making the analogy, he was trying to say that the human intellect is just an array of peacock feathers. All, all of these amazing pieces of art and history and, and engineering and achievements of mankind are an elaborate mating call.

• 1:50:08Danny Jones?

  Which is an interesting way of looking at it, you know, because when you're talking about like, what is the purpose? Why are, you know, why are we here? I think it's just to fucking reproduce and propagate our species. Because that's, if you like, look at why we look the way we do, it's all because of technology. And it's all because we have, we are, we had this weird chemical in us for some reason, that makes us horny all the time. Like, why, why, why do we have a chemical in our bodies that make us horny? You know? It's a, it's a weird thing.

• 1:50:41Speaker 04

  It is a weird thing. Look, I mean, of course, that, the fundamental evolution works because species reproduce and then they die. And there's genetic variation generated in that process and it's, you know, natural selection, of course, this is, this is the, the ground aim, if you like, the basic aim, but that's, that's not really, I mean, what's the point in reproducing just for the sake of it, right? If life was miserable, right? And it was just a process of surviving and reproducing.

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  We've transcended that, right? We find our, you create purpose in life. You create your own meaning. There isn't a meaning of life as such. We create our own meaning. What's, why do people want to live so long? Presumably because living is pretty good. Why is it pretty good? You know, what do people, what do you really enjoy doing with your life? Um, how, how do you enjoy spending your time? This is, should be the question that, that should be asked to every high school student. Yeah. Alan Watts used to have that anecdote where he described, um, tutoring young students. And they would, they would come to him and, um, they would say, oh, I want to be a writer.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  I want to be a poet. I want to, whatever, right? But you can't make money doing that, so I'm going to do something else. And he would always say, if you want to be a writer, you want to be a poet, you want to be an artist, you do that, right? The money will come later. You might have to struggle, but you should always have that thing that makes you itch, that thing that you, that really gets you going, that, whatever it is, whether it's writing or whether it's horse riding or whether it's painting or running or whatever. And that, that should be your attractor. Life is not, I don't see life like a path. I see that you have this attractor, which is the thing you really want to do. And you, you, you just work towards it.

• 1:52:46Speaker 04

  Sometimes you take a detour, um, sometimes you go off path or you, you, you go, get further away from that goal. But always you have that thing that eventually you're going to reach that attractor. And that's how you're going to spend your life. And you don't have to worry about the nine to five and that kind of thing. And that's how I've always sculpted my life is I knew one day I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to spend my time writing books, right? But. It's a difficult thing to do.

• 1:53:15Danny Jones?

  Why did you wanna do that, though?

• 1:53:16Speaker 04

  Um, I've just loved, well firstly, I've I've loved books since I was a kid. I've loved writing. I just love that form of expression, being able to. I love reading beautiful sentences and just think, ah, this is so, I don't know, something about it. I can't explain it, doesn't really matter.

• 1:53:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:33Speaker 04

  Something I've always wanted to do. I've also been very interested in psychedelics and pharmacology and drugs, molecules. So that that's kind of my attractor, right? I want I want to write about psychedelics.

• 1:53:46Danny Jones?

  And you wanna be good at writing about psychedelics?

• 1:53:47Speaker 04

  I wanna be good, I wanna have interesting things to say.

• 1:53:49Danny Jones?

  You wanna be recognized for being good about writing about psychedelics, right?

• 1:53:53Speaker 04

  Well, I want people to listen to what I've got to say. I want people to read my books.

• 1:53:57Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 1:53:58Speaker 04

  Otherwise, I can't make a living out of doing it. But that it's not, I can't just say one day, oh, I'm gonna write about psychedelics. Because there's a lot of groundwork has to be done. You have to go to college, you have to study chemistry, pharmacology, neuroscience, get a PhD, that helps. Doing, you know, all this kind of stuff that I've done academically over the last twenty years was not writing books, but that was always there. Every step that I took, I thought, how can I take the next step that will take me towards that goal? And eventually, I reached the point, three years ago, where I said, okay, now I'm gonna jump. I can see it, it's within reach, so I just took the leap and I quit academia. I quit my well-paid job in Okinawa, a beautiful island.

• 1:54:43Speaker 04

  They paid my rent, I had a beautiful ocean view. I had I had as much as I wanted in life, but I was tied to a university. I was doing research most of my day, and so I quit it all. I went from quite a good salary to precisely zero salary. Um, lived on savings for about a year and then started um to write and to make my living doing that.

• 1:55:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:12Speaker 04

  And so that's kind of, that's the meaning we get in life. It's not about, um.

• 1:55:18Speaker 04

  For me, it's certainly not about reproducing. Um, it's, it's, it's about the meaning that I've created. That thing that you find in your, in your, in your heart, in your soul, in your mind, whatever. That, that really makes you run, that makes life worth living, you know? Longevity isn't an end in, in itself. It's like, oh, it gives me more time to do this thing that I really love doing.

• 1:55:41Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Um. Yeah, there's this book called, uh, I forget, I forget the name of the book. This dude's name is Sheldon. But he wrote a book, basically, uh, that was piggybacking off another philosopher's book. And he kind of like added to it, which is, the idea is that, uh, fear of death is the biggest driver uh, for human meaning and purpose. Like it's a, our, our meaning machine is fear of death. And trying to create this, um, this legacy that lives beyond us. Uh, Sheldon Solomon, that's his name.

• 1:56:17Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:56:18Danny Jones?

  And, uh, he, and they, they did a bunch of studies and all this stuff. And, um, the, the main, there's two reasons where number one was like the fear of death and sexual reproduction. Those are the two things and he was saying, and, and that what we do is we try to fill that gap with meaning. So like, doing this podcast right now, this pie, all the podcasts that we record in here, your books, everything you've ever written is theoretically going to outlive us. It's going to be this symbolic immortality, right? So if you think about it that way and think about like, you know, our brains, our intellect, whatever it is,

• 1:57:02Danny Jones?

  is creating this art, writing these books, recording podcasts, making movies. We tell ourselves, ourselves a story that this is our meaning. But in reality, if you boil it all down to the bare bones of it.

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  Is our fear of death. And our real is our understanding that we're not going to be here forever. That's the key point, right? It's it's kind of like before I was talking about the the energy of the water running downhill. That's if you imagine that's the fear, that's the energy, that's the driver. But you have to direct the energy into the whirlpool, for example. And that's what you do with that. It's like, oh, I've only got this many decades. And there's this thing that I I'm just driven to do. Um, but I I can't wait. Right? I can't say, oh, I'll do it. I'll do it in fifty years. I need to focus on my nine to five job. I need to earn lots of money or whatever.

• 1:58:02Speaker 04

  Um, you have to do it and you're going to run out of time and most people do. Um, I I know many people. And it's kind of sad, but people who I knew when I was younger and they would say, oh, I want to be a DJ. Or I want to be this. And then they get a part time job laying slabs, you know, or whatever. Uh, something they do to make money. And then eventually the DJ thing or whatever it was, painting, poetry, whatever. That starts to slip by the wayside. And then, of course, they get locked in, they they buy a house and they've got all of these responsibilities and they have less and less time to do. Yeah, then eventually that's gone. It's gone and they find themselves then literally trapped. Yep.

• 1:58:46Speaker 04

  And they can't get out and they forget about this dream and it's all gone. They trade the dream for securities. Exactly. Um, and that's you can't blame them in a way because that is modern life. Um, in that, yes, if you get married and you have children, you have responsibilities. You can't just give up your job and say, fuck it, I'm going to be a I'm going to be a poet. Right. But you have to, that's why you need to have that attractor that you're constantly aware of. That's pulling you, even if you get distracted and you you're constantly trying to find a path. There's not one path to it. Some paths are shorter, some paths are more circuitous. But you've you're constantly thinking, okay, what can I do now? How can I spend five, 10 minutes, 20 minutes a day doing this thing and build on it?

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  And just working, working, working, putting in the work, the groundwork, the woodshed, as it used to be called. Uh, and eventually there comes a point where you can. It's still risky. I mean, it's still risky for me. I mean, I couldn't move back to my parents if it all fucked up from Tokyo. My whole life was there. Um, so it's it's a big risk. But you you sometimes you just have to take that leap and just pray. Um, trust that you you're gonna make it work and you will surprise yourself.

• 2:00:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and then and then some people too, you know, I think that some people, most people, there's a peak in their life where they have the most creative potential. Or they're more they're more most connected to the muse.

• 2:00:19Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:00:21Danny Jones?

  And as people get older and the burdens of family life or responsibility kick in, that that sort of muse or that sort of divine inspiration gets replaced by things like religion.

• 2:00:34Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 2:00:35Danny Jones?

  You know, but people, most people, when they get older, they uh they will settle into a specific religion or start reading the Bible or going to church, like things like this, you know, and it kind of replaces that. Whatever that whatever that thing is, that that creative inspiration that people have. I always found that interesting, like, why? Like, why? What is that? Just our society molding us and and hardening, you know?

• 2:01:03Speaker 04

  You know, I I don't know, but I mean, certainly people become locked into a very rigid way of of living life, living life to them is all the things they're supposed to do, or they have to do, they're forced to do in order to to make money. And there's just there's just no time for that that thing. And maybe, yes, maybe it's replaced by religion. Oh, I could never be a it's too late now. And they're kind of you get this where they kind of people have just become resolved to the facts like, oh, okay. You know, I could never have become a right. It's too hard. There's no way to make money anyway. It's kind of, oh, forget about that. But I can go to church every Sunday and that's become my new thing.

• 2:01:44Speaker 04

  And whether that's genuine or not, I don't know. I don't certainly not going to judge people who are religious. But it's an alternate thing that distracts them in some way from the kind of the mundanities of life. And people, they get to sixty five, seventy years old and they retire and then even that's gone. You know, their job that they were doing for the last forty, fifty years, that's gone now.

• 2:02:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:08Speaker 04

  Uh, it's like, I don't have any hobbies. I don't have any, any interests. I don't know anything. It's like, what am I going to do? Go on vacation if you've got enough money?

• 2:02:18Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:19Speaker 04

  Um, or learn to play golf or something. I don't know.

• 2:02:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, working is like, it's almost like work is built into our DNA. It's like, it's in every fiber of our being, you know, working towards something, at least for most of humanity, I think. And if this AI and technology gets so out of control where it takes up all of the, a majority of the jobs that human beings have.

• 2:02:48Danny Jones?

  Like, and if we get some sort of universal basic income and the federal government's paying us to, to exist. You know, like basic, you know, low, even not, not even just low level things like truck drivers.

• 2:03:02Danny Jones?

  Or things like that, or like service people. But, you know, also, also you have like these, uh, the Waymos, these self-driving cars that can like pick people up and take them places. So like, if people that are older, they don't have, it's economically not viable for them to get paid minimum wage to do these tasks anymore. And you have machines replacing them. These people are now removed from the workforce and given a X amount of money.

• 2:03:30Danny Jones?

  Now they've lost the meaning, right? They've lost their meaning because people, people, like I said, they, they build in this story to why they're doing what they do. And that's why people, you know, people like to work towards things and they, they need problems to solve. But like, as soon as technology starts to replace all this stuff and we have no problems to solve, we're just existing. What happens? Like, I don't know what I would do.

• 2:03:53Speaker 04

  I mean, I think that there are some kind of optimist, I would call them fantasists, who think that, oh, once the, once the robots and the machines take over all the things that we normally do, humans normally do, then everyone's gonna start painting and being creative and dancing and stuff. They're not. They're gonna sit and they're gonna stare at a screen that's plugged directly into their brain.

• 2:04:18Danny Jones?

  Yes, right.

• 2:04:19Speaker 04

  Like a robot, like they're doing now.

• 2:04:20Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:04:21Speaker 04

  In their free time. That's what people do in their free time now is they, they, they stare at screens, they doom scroll.

• 2:04:26Danny Jones?

  And a lot of it's competition too, right? Like, the only reason you're gonna, you're gonna paint the Sistine Chapel, I mean, obviously, A, you're gonna get paid for it, but B, you're gonna get recognized for being the best. Or like, build, or like, chiseling the statue of David. People are gonna be like, holy shit, I've never seen anything like that. But when you have machines able to make all this stuff better than you know you have the capacity to do, or it'll take you a lifetime to learn how to do. When technology is just growing and expanding and multiplying and getting better and better every single year, every single second, it's like, fuck, like, I can't compete, you can't compete with that.

• 2:05:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:04Danny Jones?

  So.

• 2:05:05Speaker 04

  It's all part of that draining of, draining of our humanity, the loss of our soul, and we become literal zombies. I mean, robots. I mean, it's, it's.

• 2:05:16Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  It's a horrible thought.

• 2:05:18Danny Jones?

  It is a horrible thought.

• 2:05:21Speaker 04

  Talk about something happier.

• 2:05:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. Another thing I meant to actually ask you.

• 2:05:27Speaker 04

  Oh, go on.

• 2:05:27Danny Jones?

  Earlier, when you're, when, when you were kind of explaining how our memories reconstruct our experiences on DMT. And different types of things.

• 2:05:35Speaker 04

  Not on DMT, but, but.

• 2:05:37Danny Jones?

  Other psychedelics?

• 2:05:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and in the dream state.

• 2:05:41Danny Jones?

  So, so, okay, so that's, that's perfect. It doesn't happen on DMT. So.

• 2:05:47Danny Jones?

  Like two weeks ago, when I, or a couple of weeks ago, whenever it was, I did DMT last. The fir-, like I did, I told you earlier, I was, I did it three different times. I like went in three times where I did, like, six hits, entered the fucking DMT world. I think it was six, yeah. It wasn't the freebase, it was just a little vaporizer thing. The first time, I closed my eyes, I see aliens doing ballet right in front of me. Like these creatures, not vivid, but they were just doing ballet, spinning, they were wearing tutus.

• 2:06:18Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 2:06:19Danny Jones?

  And then the second time, I did it again, and I was looking for the code in the laser. And then I did it a third time, and I told you, I saw just like, a billion dicks that were etched in this sort of Sanskrit type code. So did I see this stuff? Because I've heard endless amounts of people talking about seeing aliens on DMT, and was expecting to see code in the laser. And I had sort of a pre-conceptual idea of what I was gonna experience on this. Like, if I had none of this, if I was coming in blank, would I see the same stuff?

• 2:06:58Speaker 04

  It's, it's hard to answer definitively. I mean, we know the expectation and your, your set, um, what you expect. Your, your brain, as I said before, your brain, your brain is a predictor, it kind of, it, it decides what it expects to see, and then it tests it against sensory inputs. I mean,

• 2:07:18Speaker 04

  the thing about DMT is that it, it, it often seemed to transcend all of that. So it seems, in many ways, entirely independent of set and setting. Set and setting actually become largely irrelevant in many cases. Most people aren't expecting what they, I mean, in a way, it's almost impossible to expect what you experience under the influence of DMT. Could there be an influence, um, you know, expectation? Could expectation, prediction, influence the DMT state? Maybe, um, but often, I think, it just completely transcends that. Now, were you expecting to see aliens doing ballet?

• 2:08:02Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:08:02Speaker 04

  Were you expecting to see aliens?

• 2:08:05Danny Jones?

  No, but you could say aliens could be similar to elves. They didn't look like elves. They looked like aliens doing ballet, but it's similar, right? It's a similar kind of archetype.

• 2:08:13Speaker 04

  Okay, so let's take the elves, for example. Now, the idea that it's expectation that makes you see elf, this is very commonly used as an explanation for why people see elves, particularly Terence McKenna is given the blame for this.

• 2:08:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:32Speaker 04

  Terence McKenna often spoke about elves.

• 2:08:37Speaker 04

  First of all, what do we mean by an elf? Broadly, some kind of small being that's lively, that's jovial, that dances around, bounds around, often in great numbers, so multitudinous

• 2:08:52Speaker 04

  beings, right? So Terence McKenna described these, and he's given the blame then. So people, they listen to Terence McKenna, they expect to see elves.

• 2:09:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:01Speaker 04

  Then they smoke DMT.

• 2:09:02Danny Jones?

  He's polluted in the.

• 2:09:03Speaker 04

  He's polluted, right? The kind of the meme sphere or something like that. Now, does that make sense? Well, it could make sense, but then, so let's take the timeline, draw the timeline backwards, pre-McKenna.

• 2:09:21Speaker 04

  We go into, let's say, the first DMT study ever in the 1950s. Stephen Zahra, Hungarian physician, injected DMT into himself. He lived in Hungary at the time.

• 2:09:35Speaker 04

  Or in Budapest, I believe. That's in Hungary, right? I'm not being stupid.

• 2:09:39Danny Jones?

  I have no idea. You're asking the wrong guy.

• 2:09:41Speaker 04

  Anyway.

• 2:09:44Speaker 04

  He discovered the psychedelic effects of DMT. And in his very first study, one of his subjects, who was, I think, a nurse who worked at the hospital where he was working, she saw small beings that moved around very, very quickly. She described them as like dwarves. But again, it's the same motif, lots of little beings that move around very, very quickly. We can, we can draw the line back even further. We go to the Amazonian rainforests, the Yanomami, a particular, very large group, indigenous group in, in, in South America.

• 2:10:20Speaker 04

  They describe when taking their DMT-based drugs, Epeina, Yoppo. So these come from, so Yoppo comes from is a, the ground seeds of a tree called Anadenanthera peregrina. They grind up these seeds to form a powder and then they, they snort it. Or in fact, they, they put in a, have you heard about this? They, a long tube up to like a yard long. You still use yards in this part of the world? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, about a yard long and they fill it with, sometimes like one or two teaspoons of this powder. And then it goes into your nose. Whoa.

• 2:11:04Speaker 04

  And then I blow it, force like a shotgun mode of administration, fires it into your, into your head. Yeah, I've heard of this. Yeah, you've heard of this. Um, there's another one called Epeina, which comes from the, the dried resin of a, of a genus called Virola. There are various species that are used that contain DMT, right? Um, and these tribes, indigenous groups, if you like, um, describe seeing multitudinous beings that are so numerous that you can never get to the end of them, that are lively, that are brightly colored, that dance and sing, and they call them the Hekuda. Um, and these are very important in their cosmology, in their way of seeing reality.

• 2:11:49Speaker 04

  And they, they kind of, they, they, they come dancing, uh, when you, after inhaling this snuff and they, they, they enter your chest and they fill your chest up and you have to keep them there and that. So your body is effectively becomes the home of these beings, which help you and protect you and guide you throughout your life. And then when you die, um, they exit, they leave you again and they enter the forest. And maybe they will enter another shaman or something like this. So you have a whole, um, mythos around beings that you might call elves, right? We would call them elves, they call them Hekuda. Um, so the idea that Terence McKenna is responsible for people seeing lively giggling beings, which he called machine elves, but really we're just talking about small beings that take various forms,

• 2:12:34Speaker 04

  but they're unified by their character. Um, it's not Terence McKenna. I mean, this, this goes back. Perhaps thousands of years, people seeing the same kind of beings. And you can say the same thing about mantids, mantis-type alien beings. Now, this, of course, features in ufology and alien abduction experiences. But again, the Anamami, they have this one class of being that they see under the influence of these psychedelic drugs is called the warusinari, which are a fearsome insect-like being that will seize you and that will feed on the fat of children. I mean, it's really quite horrible.

• 2:13:18Speaker 04

  Now, if you compare that to modern trip reports, people always describe these mantis-like beings. I mean, they almost always are, if not negative, at least kind of cold and ruthless and calculated. People describe being dismembered. You get these dismemberment scenarios where their whole body is torn apart and their organs flung away. This is on what drug? DMT. Oh, really? Yes, it's quite a common or not, certainly not a rare experience, under the influence of psychedelics. And so you have people now in the modern era who have know nothing about shamanistic mythos, basically recapitulating these dismemberment reconstruction scenarios that are described

• 2:14:02Speaker 04

  by these indigenous peoples in South America that they have understood and experienced for hundreds, thousands of years. So it's not the idea that everything you experience under the influence of DMT is just because you've heard stories. It just doesn't make any sense.

• 2:14:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. When was the first time DMT was ever used? Was that the 50s? 1956 was Stephen Zara. Well, when we say DMT was first. Well, the first time he ever wrote a report about what he experienced. Right. So when we talk about pure DMT, people have picked me up on this, but I am correct. I remember YouTube comment, actually. YouTube comments are fake, those people aren't real. Okay, that's good. It's computers, right? It's all Iranian bots. Yeah, chatbots again. But anyway, yeah, so 1956, Stephen Zara. So there's an interesting story kind of leading up to this point is.

• 2:15:05Speaker 04

  It starts really in eighteen fifty-two. Do you know Richard Spruce? Nope. Well, he was a peerless British botanist of his time. He was the most famous and probably the most important botanist in history, western botanist at least. He was exploring the Amazon. He was contracted to explore the Amazon, to to find new plants and then to identify them, often name them, because they didn't have names, at least not Latin binomials. And then he would send them back to the to the to England and collectors, very rich people would, you know, frame them or whatever and put them in their their drawing rooms and that kind of thing. But as soon as he entered the Amazon for the first time, he couldn't

• 2:15:46Speaker 04

  help but notice that all of the natives around there, they're all using drugs, right? Is this guy still alive? Eighteen fifty-two. Oh, never mind. No.

• 2:15:59Speaker 04

  I need not answer that question.

• 2:16:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he noticed straight away that they were using all of these different drugs and like powdered coca leaf, you saw them stuffing their cheeks to bursting with these powdered coca leaves and these weird pellets and potions and liquor, various type jungle liquors and cassava beers and all of this kind of stuff. They love drugs, basically. And he was invited to this, uh, party, I guess you would call it, a periodic gathering called a dabo coody. This is in eighteen fifty-two, a group called the the Tuukano by the Valpes River. And he went to this party or this gathering and everyone was singing and dancing

• 2:16:44Speaker 04

  and people were drinking cassava beer and consuming like powdered coca leaf, et cetera, et cetera. And then he sort of, he started to notice something unusual happening, which was that the men would periodically, they'd they'd kind of peel away from the dance, and then they would they would drink this weird liquid. And then they'd start kind of acting very, very strangely. They'd start howling, they'd start, they'd pick up weapons and start beating the earth with these weapons and stuff. It's like they were fighting some invisible adversary of some sort. And he didn't know what was going on.

• 2:17:28Speaker 04

  And this happened throughout the night, you know, at every point in the night, there were at least kind of half a dozen men engaged at some phase of this performance, if you like. And he asked them, you know, what was that liquid? And they said it was called carpy. And he tried a bit, but it was absolutely disgusting and he basically almost vomited. So he didn't get a full dose. But he was told, okay, the the plant used to make this carpy, the carpy vine is located downriver. So the next day he went downriver, found this, this liana twirling around this tree and he named it banisteriopsis carpy, the ayahuasca vine.

• 2:18:13Danny Jones?

  Banisteriopsis?

• 2:18:15Speaker 04

  Banisteriopsis carpy. That's the name of the vine. And so then there was like a century of scientists trying to understand, how does this? Because they were describing their experiences as well. They would describe these terrifying beasts that were kind of trying to seize them and stuff and beautiful cities they would describe. All this wonderful visions they would describe after, after consuming this carpy, also known as ayahuasca in other, other regions. And then a century followed, people trying to isolate the alkaloids and no one knew how it worked. It wasn't until like the 1950s until people realized, and William Burroughs was heavily involved here. He, he heard about carpy, also known as yahay.

• 2:19:01Speaker 04

  This was when he was living in Mexico City, shortly after he shot his wife in the head accidentally.

• 2:19:05Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, I read about that. He shot her something off the top of her head, like a can or something?

• 2:19:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. A glass and he put a bullet through her brain and killed her instantly. So he was struggling, obviously with guilt and he was looking for the final fix as he described it. So he went off. I mean, this was like this gangly, kind of lanky, tweed jacketed writer. Decided, I'm going to set off, go to the Amazon, I'm going to try and find yahay. Because he'd heard, read about it in a magazine or something. What a world that must have been, right? Where people do that kind of thing, just setting off into the Amazon. And he happened to meet Richard Schultes, who was like the world's leading expert on yahay or ayahuasca.

• 2:19:50Speaker 04

  And he went from shaman to shaman, kind of asking them for this drink. And every time he drank, he just vomited a lot, nothing particularly interesting happened. And he couldn't work out what was going on. Until, I think it was like the third time that he tried this yahay. And he had this, this mag, he was transported to another world. And he was like overwhelmed, he thought, yes, this is it. I finally found the carpe, the yahay that I was looking for. And he was led into this trade secret by the shaman. The shaman said, okay, yes, the carpe vine goes in there. But there's another leaf we put in, a secret leaf, which has to be put in together with the carpe vine. You boil it up and then boil it down till it's thick and syrupy.

• 2:20:34Speaker 04

  And when you drink that, then you, you get the, the kind of the magnificent visions. And he even pocketed samples of this secret leaf and sent it to Richard Schultes. Richard Schultes ignored it because it came from some American writer. He didn't think it was that important. Then, like a decade or a couple of decades later, Richard Schultes' student, Homer Pinkley, was working with this indigenous group. And again, he saw them using the carpe vine, the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriops scarpis, together with this other leaf. So the two components, they realized.

• 2:21:17Speaker 04

  Two, kind of a binary decoction of two essential components. And Homer Pinkley identified it as Psychotriophyridis chakruna. And when they analyzed this leaf, Psychotriophyridis chakruna, they found lots of DMT.

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• 2:22:23Speaker 04

  So that was kind of the breakthrough, which is always, Homer Pinkley is always given the credit here. But actually, it was Burris. Because Schultes went back to the letter that Burris had sent him with the sample of the leaves. And he realized that Burris had in fact sent him the correct leaf. It was Psychotriad Veridis. So Burris, actually, William Burris, author of Naked Lunch, is actually, should be credited as being the kind of the person who made that breakthrough in understanding how, how the key psychoactive component of ayahuasca, that should be given credit really to William Burris. He didn't name the plant, of course, he didn't know how to do that. Right. But he identified it. But then, of course, there was still kind of a mystery because by that point,

• 2:23:08Speaker 04

  Stephen Zahra had shown that if you swallow DMT, which he'd done at first, nothing will happen. Right. So the idea that this was the primary psychoactive component of a visionary drink didn't make any sense. And then there was the carpivine, you know, what was that for? Why was that in the mix? No one had any clue. Until.

• 2:23:34Speaker 04

  Dennis McKenna, really, Terence's brother, he was really one of the key figures in working this out, because by that point, people started to understand that the carpivine contains these harmala alkaloids, harmine and harmaline, and it was kind of worked out that these harmala alkaloids, they're inhibitors of this monoamine oxidase enzyme, which is found in your gut and throughout your body. And it was also then beginning to kind of be understood that DMT is broken down very rapidly by this monoamine oxidase enzyme. So when you swallow DMT, it's very rapidly broken down, never gets to the brain.

• 2:24:18Speaker 04

  But, so the hypothesis at that point was, when you add the harmala alkaloids from the ayahuasca vine, vanisterepsus carpi, and inhibits it. So you have here a true pharmacological technology. This wasn't just a mixture of plants. This was a technology employing pharmacological synergy. You have the inhibitor of the monoamine oxidase, and you have the DMT. Only when you take them together, do you get the effect. This is called the ayahuasca effect now. So Dennis McKenna worked on this hypothesis. Dennis McKenna received samples of ayahuasca, and he showed that you could take samples of the ayahuasca brew, and it would inhibit

• 2:25:02Speaker 04

  this enzyme, showing that the ayahuasca brew contained, you know, sufficient harmala alkaloids to inhibit the monoamine oxidase in your gut, which allowed the psychedelic drug to take effect. So from the very beginnings, this is why I always talk about DMT as being a technology, because from the very beginning, humanity has developed technologies, and ayahuasca is a technology, to

• 2:25:36Speaker 04

  As tools, technologies as tools that allow you to interact with normally unseen hidden intelligences. That's what these spirits of the forest, the Hakura, the Warusinari, these are intelligences that you normally can't see, the hidden ones. And they developed these tools, these technologies, to make them visible. It's like a visual prosthesis that allowed them to see these intelligences. And then when we kind of move the dial forward into the 20th century, you know, we learned how to isolate DMT and we learned how to use it. Pure DMT, first by injecting it intramuscularly, then by vaporizing it.

• 2:26:19Speaker 04

  Nick Sand, very famous LSD chemist, who also was a DMT manufacturer, he discovered one day he was being particularly careless in his lab and some crystals of DMT fell on a hot plate and it, like a puff of white smoke, or white vapor, should I say, and he thought, well, can't we just smoke this stuff? Because everyone had been injecting it up to this point, intramuscularly as well. Which is kind of a very erratic and drawn out experience. And so Nick Sand realized, oh, we can vaporize this. And then in the 1990s, Rick Strassman says, well, vaporizing it, it's a bit messy, it's

• 2:26:58Speaker 04

  hard to measure doses, it stinks, it's irritating to the lungs, so I'm going to inject it, not into the muscles, but intravenously, directly into the bloodstream.

• 2:27:08Danny Jones?

  Didn't Dennis, or didn't Terrence give him that idea? Oh no, Terrence gave him the idea to get government funding for the study.

• 2:27:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the Terrence McKenna, yeah, so Terrence McKenna was, so this was after Rick Strassman, he was still a young psychiatrist and he was interested in melatonin at first, but it wasn't interesting. Then he went to this conference where he met Terrence McKenna and he was talking about DMT. Rick Strassman was in his talk and Terrence McKenna came afterwards and says, you're talking a lot about DMT, but have you ever tried it? That's bad, Terrence McKenna, but you get the point. And Rick said no, so Terrence kind of sent Rick to the big house at Esselin, this was at Esselin, and then Terrence kind of... Went away and found someone who had DMT and brought it back.

• 2:27:56Speaker 04

  And that was Rick Strasman's first DMT experience. And that was the kind of the genesis, if you like, of his long bureaucratic process that led to him being given permission to do this, the largest study of its kind in human volunteers. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. They tricked the government. Exactly. So fucking smart. And so, so you can kind of see this thread of going back perhaps thousands of years of humanity discovering DMT or discovering how to use DMT, even when they didn't know that they were working with DMT and developing technologies, um, uh, um, to kind of how best to use it, you know, how do we, how do we develop this as a technology?

• 2:28:38Speaker 04

  Is vaporizing it the culmination, the pinnacle of DMT administration technologies? Of course not. Is it intravenous injection? Maybe not. Uh, and then this finally leads, well, not finally, because I'll talk about the future as well and what we're working on now, but leads to DMTX. Hmm. Right? You have this very short acting experience, which is very intense, but only lasts a few minutes. And what DMTX does, or extended state DMT is allows you, as we were saying right at the beginning, to extend this. I see that as just simply the next iteration of, uh, of humans learning to use and develop DMT as a technology. And the techno, the word technology is important because if you just think of it as a drug,

• 2:29:23Speaker 04

  um, then it doesn't really capture what DMT is doing. Sure. If you take seriously the idea that it allows you to communicate with some kind of normally hidden unseen, discarded intelligent agent, that feels more like a molecular communication technology than a drug to me. And once you shift your mindset in that way from drug, psychedelic drug to technology, then you start to think, well, what's the best way to use this technology? And DMTX, as I said, I think is just the next iteration. But we can, I think we can, we can go further than that, right? So we know since the 1950s psychiatrists and physicians and pharmacologists have been drawing blood from people and collecting pee samples and finding DMT in humans.

• 2:30:08Speaker 04

  But no one really knows what it does. There are hypotheses, but no one's 100% clear why it's in the human body. But at least we know that the human body can produce manufactured DMT and at significant quantities, all the machinery is there. So I was just towards the end of writing Death by Astonishment, getting to the very final chapter, and I was thinking about the future. You know, what does, what does using the DMT technology look like in 10, 20 years? Are we still hooking people up to infusion machines and pumping them with DMT over long periods? Or can we somehow hack the brain's endogenous DMT system?

• 2:30:50Speaker 04

  So we, we move away from the, the plant world, you know, which was going on for thousands of years. We move away from laboratory synthesized DMT and we, we finally reach the stage where we're actually using our own DMT production laboratory in our own brains. So rather than injecting someone with DMT, you would simply, by understanding the regulatory mechanisms that control DMT production in, in the human brain, we might be able to actually stimulate the production of DMT and induce people into the DMT state without giving them any DMT.

• 2:31:30Danny Jones?

  I wonder if there was like some specific music you could play that could like vibrate our fucking atoms into creating, pumping out more DMT. How cool would that be?

• 2:31:41Speaker 04

  Well, that's one idea. I'm not sure it would work. You'd need to flesh that out a bit for me.

• 2:31:44Danny Jones?

  The ancient Greeks, the ancient Greeks used music for medicine and they used it for rituals and a lot of people think that music in ancient times in antiquity wasn't even recreational. They thought that it was purely medicinal and for attaining transcendent experiences for religious rites and medicine.

• 2:32:09Speaker 04

  I mean, I think music predates language.

• 2:32:13Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:32:14Speaker 04

  And early language would have been singing, making noises to generate music. And that eventually we worked out, I guess, that you can generate more complex meaning. You can make money from it. Yeah, and that's where we are now. But alternatively, if the music thing doesn't pan out, you can, we know now that, well, way back, so 50 years ago, there was a study that's been forgotten about that showed that in mammalian brain, in rabbit brain first of all, but also in human cerebrospinal fluid,

• 2:32:51Speaker 04

  there is this peptide that we all have that inhibits an enzyme called indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, which is the key enzyme that produces DMT. So it converts tryptamine to DMT.

• 2:33:11Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:33:12Speaker 04

  Right? So DMT is manufactured in the body from tryptophan, which is an amino acid. So tryptophan is decarboxylated, that's a very simple process, you remove the carbon dioxide molecule, and you get tryptamine. Then you add two methyl groups, two CH3 groups, and that gives you DMT, very easy to make. And we all have this enzyme, indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, INMT, in us, it's in basically everywhere in the body, in all cells, basically. So what they discovered in, I think, 1976, that we all have a peptide that binds to indole INMT and basically puts the brakes on DMT production.

• 2:33:54Speaker 04

  So it keeps DMT production at a very low level, it inhibits this key enzyme for DMT production. And so this was, this peptide inhibitor of INMT, it was isolated and we have a kind of a basic, broad, rough molecular mass of it, but that's it. They didn't do any further characterization. And this was a long time ago, so it wasn't so easy then to do that kind of thing. But then the paper was basically forgotten about. It's been cited four times in 50 years. So it's gone.

• 2:34:25Speaker 04

  A couple of years later, there was one that found a similar peptide in human cerebrospinal fluid that's been cited once in 50 years. So people basically forgot about this. So I kind of uncovered this, stumbled across this paper and thought, well, let's, let's isolate this peptide. Let's actually characterize it. Let's determine its actual structure, its actual peptide sequence, how this peptide actually works, how it's integrated with other regulatory mechanisms in the human body. Then perhaps we can, once we understand how this peptide works and how the regulatory system for DMT works, then we've got an in for hacking this system.

• 2:35:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:10Speaker 04

  So we've actually recruited, I should also contracted, so myself and Nuenautics, this nonprofit out of Florida, who I've been working with for a number of years, we, we approached the University of Florida, a very prominent pharmacologist and peptide chemist called Chris McCurdy, and said, we'd like to isolate this peptide. We want to understand it, how it works. We want to understand how DMT is regulated in humans. And, and we're basically, you know, he developed this research project with his team, a research plan, and

• 2:35:49Speaker 04

  we are, this is happening, it's kind of being initiated now. Unfortunately, these things are expensive, so we are still seeking people if they want to help fund this. I mean, it's like $400,000. So it's not pocket change for this initial stage of the project. So if anyone is interested, go to noonautics.org, N double O N A U T I C S dot org, and they can, they can help out. But we hope that, you know, by the end of, you know, next year or something, we will understand a lot more about how DMT is regulated.

• 2:36:24Danny Jones?

  So what would be the ideal way in your mind to inhibit this inhibitor?

• 2:36:30Speaker 04

  It's a good question. So until we know, I mean, there's two broad possibilities when we isolate and characterize this, this peptide. One is it could be A known peptide, right? So it's a peptide, there's many, many endogenous peptides, small, um, relatively small peptide, endorphins, for example, right? This is a peptide, insulin, this is a peptide. Um, so if it's one we know, then that's good news in a way, because we probably know about how the regulatory system works. So we might be able to, whether we inhibit that peptide directly and stop it working, or whether we can get into the system and actually stop the peptide being produced, you know, temporarily, um, so that it kind of frees up

• 2:37:11Speaker 04

  the INMT to begin churning out more DMT. That would be one approach. Um, the alternative is that it's completely novel peptide that no one's seen before, we don't know about. That's interesting and good news for entirely different reasons, because you've, you've, you've found something completely new, uh, which would be really cool. But at the same time, we'd, we'd know basically nothing about it. So we wouldn't know how it's, how it, how it plugs into other regulatory systems in the body and in the, in the brain. Um, so that would maybe require more work to think about how do we?

• 2:37:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's, that's interesting. If you can hack that without having to take a drug, right? You would have to take a drug, wouldn't you, to inhibit that? Well, so it's like, it's like just adding another step between?

• 2:37:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there are a number of approaches you could take. I mean, it could be that you, you inject a small peptide that, that, that might interact directly with this inhibitory peptide.

• 2:38:08Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:38:09Speaker 04

  Or it might enter, it could even work at the genetic level where you're switching off the gene that produces this peptide.

• 2:38:15Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:38:16Speaker 04

  That could be much longer lasting, and this might last for days, weeks, or even months. I mean, this is serious business.

• 2:38:23Danny Jones?

  Are there legal, uh, hoops you gotta jump through to do something like this? Cause it's like, the funny thing about DMT, which Terrence McKenna points out, is everyone's carrying, right?

• 2:38:32Speaker 04

  Everyone's carrying, yeah.

• 2:38:33Danny Jones?

  So what if you have now like a different way to like hack your own body into creating a chemical that's already there?

• 2:38:39Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 2:38:39Danny Jones?

  Is that illegal?

• 2:38:41Speaker 04

  Exactly, presumably not, right? Um, so yes, you obviously you bypass all of the legal difficulties you have with injecting someone with the schedule one drug.

• 2:38:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:51Speaker 04

  Um, that's gone, and you are simply manipulating using tools, and it could be genetic, it could be molecular, um, There are various possibilities. We don't, we don't, we don't know anything about this system yet, so we can't, we can just speculate in how we might work this and whether it would be a long lasting effect. You might have to inject them with something, but maybe once, and then it would last for days or weeks. And then, you know, you'd have these individuals in a pod of some sort, all of their bodily needs would be taken care of. And, um, you know, feeding and waste management, and they would basically spend significant portions of their, their lives ultimately, right? Um, interacting with, interfacing with, living

• 2:39:36Speaker 04

  amongst these intelligent beings from somewhere else. And they would forget probably that they were ever a human. I mean, that happens with D M T. I mean, we'll talk about your experiences perhaps, but often with D M T, what happens, even with, you know, in two or three minutes, you, you will lose any conception of what it ever meant to be a human. And that, that part is gone. And you're, you're in that world now. You're a, a being, a conscious, intelligent being that exists within this other world. So you can imagine over days or weeks or months or whatever, um, sit, basically having an entirely new existence that would have, that would have been, in your own mind, that's, that would

• 2:40:18Speaker 04

  be kind of all you've ever known. And so any conception of once having been a human would gone, is, is gone. Um, and you become the alien, in a sense, until you start, until, until you start to come back and then you kind of remember again and you integrate back into this reality.

• 2:40:34Danny Jones?

  Yes. Yes. That's a weird thing because that does have, like, I remember the, the process of my, my conceptualization of my reality here in this world. And like, I saw it slowly dissolving, right? Like everything I'm tethered to and real, and base reality, like this, this room, this podcast where I spent a lot of time, my wife, my kids, my parents, everyone I know, work, money, all these concepts started to just distill and distill and distill and eventually just disintegrate into nothingness. And then all of a sudden, you're just, your consciousness is completely untethered from everything

• 2:41:15Danny Jones?

  in the physical world and your consciousness is shuttling through like light arteries.

• 2:41:22Danny Jones?

  And before you know it, you kind of like slowly start to come back. And, you know, it's been, you know, even just a couple, a couple of days or weeks, you start to lose the sharp vivid memory of what it was, which is kind of sucks.

• 2:41:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:40Danny Jones?

  Because I wish I could, I wish I could recall everything in detail as if it was happening again. But like, and even right afterwards, it's like you're trying to explain a a 600 bit experience in like a three bit way, right? By using your, your language, your words can't, don't do it justice.

• 2:42:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're like, you, you, you're, you're using two dimensional drawings to describe a five dimensional experience or something. You can't do it. You can get shadows or projections of it, but you can never get to it.

• 2:42:15Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:42:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Danny Jones?

  Exactly. And, um, you know, not so, so we have the entities, right? What you explained have been being since the guy in the 50s first talked about those entities. And then you have, which I think you talked about in your video. You made a long video response to Danny's laser experiment and you mentioned

• 2:42:42Danny Jones?

  accounts or, um, people explaining, seeing similar codes with other drugs in the past, right?

• 2:42:50Speaker 04

  With DMT in fact.

• 2:42:51Danny Jones?

  With DMT in fact. Oh, okay.

• 2:42:53Speaker 04

  Very common.

• 2:42:54Danny Jones?

  So when you, when you, so you, how do you explain the code? What the fuck is the code?

• 2:42:59Speaker 04

  Okay, let's get, we finally we get to the code.

• 2:43:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:02Speaker 04

  So, I mean, first of all, I should say, people think that myself and Danny have some kind of beef with each other.

• 2:43:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:08Speaker 04

  You know, and it's just, it's not there. I mean, I, I was in LA. I came directly to LA from Tokyo. He's, this guy, Aaron, is filming this documentary and we had a long, like two hour conversation on, on film. We went out to dinner twice. We went to my friend, Paul, our mutual friend, Paul Heineck's house for dinner. After filming, we had dinner. We, we, we get on perfectly well. We disagree.

• 2:43:34Speaker 04

  At least I'm not convinced of his explanation for the, for this DMT laser.

• 2:43:38Danny Jones?

  Well, the only way to do it is to, you gotta, you gotta try to see it. You gotta try to look at the laser.

• 2:43:41Speaker 04

  But that's not, you see, that's the problem. It's not just about seeing it. I mean, okay, let's, let's kind of. Talk a little bit about the code. I wrote this long article on, I did this video, which was me kind of rambling. So it's not particularly coherent. I was just giving my thoughts, but I wrote a long article on Substack also, which people, Alien Insect on Drugs. People can read that from a more coherent breakdown of what I'm thinking, but. So here's, here's the thing, right?

• 2:44:12Speaker 04

  The basic idea that Danny is presenting is that you shine a laser on a wall under, under the influence of D M T and you can see. Code. Which he interprets as being a fundamental code that has a fundamental function in our reality. I mean, he takes it to be literal. Code that is existing there in the wall. He's seeing this code that extends beyond the surface of the wall. Now.

• 2:44:40Danny Jones?

  That is like the, it's like the matrix of reality.

• 2:44:42Speaker 04

  It's the matrix, right? And the word matrix is very important here.

• 2:44:46Danny Jones?

  Well, it's two different things, right? Like his conclusion is separate from the idea that you can actually. Many people can see the same thing with the same elements. In that environment, under the influence of D M T.

• 2:44:58Speaker 04

  Okay, so here's the first, I mean, just broadly, the issue I have with the whole idea is that. I don't see why. If our reality was being, let's say simulated, and there was some fundamental code, why it would take the form of. Something that obviously looks like. Code, letters, characters, digits. This is how we imagine a code, but that's code written for humans. Computers don't. Don't read letters and symbols, right? That it's all, it's all. On and off switches, right? That's basically what the code is doing. It's a way for humans to.

• 2:45:40Speaker 04

  It's like, it's like an intermediary between the human and the computer is this written code of, of characters and digits. So if you were actually seeing what the, the computer was using, what Keith was running, you wouldn't even see ones and zeros. You'd see kind of. Electrical pulses switching, right?

• 2:45:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:58Speaker 04

  So the idea that you're seeing some fundamental. Code of reality and it looks like human readable, or at least human recognizable code. Doesn't really make any sense to me. I don't see why the code running our reality would look like that. Secondly, the idea that the code that's running our reality would actually be running through reality in this way, it doesn't make any sense. The code runs elsewhere and the output is our reality, but the code is being run, you know, in the same way that the code that's running a, an image on a screen, if you, if you kind of look, you know, if you're seeing the output of a computer game, you look into the screen, you don't see code running through it. No. Right? Of course not. The code is being run on the computer elsewhere. So that doesn't

• 2:46:43Speaker 04

  make sense to me. And also the idea, the unfortunate coincidence, shall we say, is that people describe Japanese katakana. I thought it was more like Sanskrit. You hear various, a bit like katakana, a bit like Sanskrit, a bit like Hebrew, whatever, but still you're seeing very human character. Yes. Human generated characters, which again, I don't see why that's the case. Now, the katakana thing is important because The Matrix, Digital Reign, that very famous green code that runs. From the movie. From the movie was generated with katakana. Famously, the guy that designed that used

• 2:47:26Speaker 04

  his wife's cookbooks, which were, she was Japanese and he was just looking through and thought, oh, that looks cool. Oh, really? So, you know, Japanese katakana, it's, it has a long history in anime as well as being used to, to, to generate code, code-like imagery because it looks cool as well. So that's an unfortunate coincidence to me, is that it, like The Matrix movie, it's kind of running through reality. So, and then we get to the actual, the effect itself, which also has some unfortunate coincidences, if you see them as that, in that if you shine a red laser, like forget DMT for the moment, if you shine a red laser at a wall.

• 2:48:09Speaker 04

  The laser is coherent light. Speckle, you're talking about the speckle? Right, I'm talking about speckle effect, right? Now, speckle effect, yes, I know it's been kind of, it's easy to kind of say, oh, it's not speckle effect. But let's just analyze what the speckle effect actually is, right? Okay. You've got red laser, it hits a wall. And as the light waves reflect off the wall, they kind of interfere with each other. And you get specks of bright and dark, right? Yes. And this creates a pattern on the retina. Right, that's what you're seeing, you're seeing this pattern on the retina. Um, like a matrix of points of light on your retina. Now, it has some interesting optical properties.

• 2:48:49Speaker 04

  Now, because the laser is always in focus, even if you cross your eyes or um, try to focus behind the wall, the laser speckles, these points of light will always be perfectly sharp, even if the wall becomes blurry. Really? Yes, because the speckle effect is on the, it's coherent light. Yeah, it's coherent light that's hitting the retina. So it's not, it's, it's, it's not, in a way, your eye isn't focusing or doesn't need to focus. Right, I see what you're saying. It's just coherent light that's, um, that's forming this pattern on the retina. And, and what's cool about that is that when you cross your eyes, you work a little bit.

• 2:49:34Speaker 04

  You try to focus behind the pattern on the, on the wall. Your brain receives these very mixed signals. The depth cues are all wrong, right? The, the speckle effect isn't becoming blurry, whereas the wall is. And your brain interprets that as that, that the speckles are actually behind the wall, occupying space behind the wall. And that's what you see. So even without any D M T, you will see this matrix of points of light that, that seems to occupy three dimensional space behind the wall.

• 2:50:07Speaker 04

  Now, when you add DMT to the mix, unfortunately, in my opinion, for the whole model is that, yes, you have these matrix of characters and geometric forms that seem to occupy space extend beyond the wall. Now, you have to accept that if you accept Danny's model here, you have to accept this is just a coincidence. This speck, this unusual effect of red lasers, and it's particularly prominent with red lasers as well because of the low frequency. You have to accept that these, this is just a coincidence, that the speckle effect, this interference pattern on the retina has got nothing to do. It's just a sheer coincidence that red lasers happen to also produce this effect.

• 2:50:47Danny Jones?

  Well, the first time I did it, I could only see the speckles. And after focusing for about five minutes, and this was a little bit after the peak of the experience, right? Like, it was probably six, seven, eight minutes after. And I saw the speckles and I had to really, really focus. And I saw the speckles turned into gears. And then all the gears, millions of them, just started like they were connected and just spinning.

• 2:51:10Speaker 04

  Right. So what's happening there? I'll tell you. I don't know why I asked.

• 2:51:17Speaker 04

  So what, what do you think's happening there? Why?

• 2:51:21Danny Jones?

  I would imagine that the speckles are, I mean, when you do DMT, it, it obviously changes your, does something to your visual cortex to where the stuff that you normally see is being altered. So if I'm looking at speckles, they're going to be animated or altered in some way. That, that is the way I would explain it away.

• 2:51:41Speaker 04

  Right. Right? So each of these speckles, these points of light, it's like a, your, your, your brain is seeing this very coherent and consistent pattern of points of light on, that come from the retina, from the laser ultimately. Uh, and this acts kind of like a sensory scaffold. These are the points of sensory data, like a pattern of, of these specks of light. And they act as like a scaffold around which. Imagery is created. Yes. Right? And I would expect, you know, in retrospect, of course, but I would expect, or I'm not surprised that these speckles would take the form of, first of all, of geometric objects.

• 2:52:24Speaker 04

  Does it surprise me they would take the form of characters? Not really. Because characters, very fine, detailed structures, humans are very lexical species. We're very good, our brains are very good at generating characters. When you open a book and you read letters, your brain is constructing those letters. Right? You're not just kind of seeing as such. Your, your brain is, has to construct these letters, these certain shapes and patterns very, very quickly, very, very quickly. Your brain is very good at it. So you, so your brain is kind of neurologically primed, right? Not by, just by expectation, but your brain is neurologically primed to generate patterns,

• 2:53:05Speaker 04

  small patterns that look like characters. You would expect that.

• 2:53:12Speaker 04

  So again, it's like, hmm. I'm try, what I'm trying to do is trying to find what, what, what are the aspects of this effect? I do think it's a fascinating effect, first of all. I think it's potentially a really important discovery that Danny has made. I can't say that enough. But what I'm trying to find is what are the aspects of this phenomenon that distinguish it from DMT-induced imagery? We know DMT can produce complex imagery. There's nothing surprising about seeing characters. There's nothing surprising about seeing small geometric forms,

• 2:53:53Speaker 04

  especially when you have this uniform pattern of, of sensory input, points of light entering, entering the brain. So what is it about it that makes it different? That allows us to, to move to more exotic explanations? First of all, how do we rule out the speckle effect? I know Danny says, oh, you can still see the speckles. That doesn't convince me because DMT visions can be, once you kind of, once they... Or initiated, established, they can be very, very persistent in the presence of DMT. So what is it? Now, Danny offers some explanations. And other people have mentioned things like object permanence, objectness, right? It looks like an object.

• 2:54:38Speaker 04

  Again, it's not convincing because there's nothing ontologically special about a vision that appears out there in the world, apparently, or one that occurs behind your eyes.

• 2:54:52Speaker 04

  Because

• 2:54:54Speaker 04

  your world is always being constructed internally anyway. The fact that it's kind of mapped to and projected onto or is integrated into your world doesn't make it special. You know, when someone is psychotic and they're suffering from visual hallucinations and they see their dead grandmother walk into the room. The dead grandmother looks like solid, moves, moves like the grandmother used to move, obeys the laws of physics, sits on chairs, doesn't walk through chairs, you know. But it's still a hallucination. So we can't use that. The fact that it appears stable is not convincing either, because again, you've got this very coherent and consistent pattern of sensory inputs coming from the laser.

• 2:55:39Speaker 04

  So what is it that's special about this effect? That's what I want to find. Everyone sees the same thing. Do they? Do they really? Do people see exactly the same characters at exactly the same time? Always everyone just seeing geometric structures and characters, which we interpret as code. I only see evidence for the latter. We have very little, you know, drawings or sketches of this code. And when you do see it, it often looks like or is identical to Japanese katakana or other kind of characters. So how do we get from? This is a really cool effect that allows us to isolate a particular.

• 2:56:21Speaker 04

  Fragment or aspect of the broader visual phenomenology produced by DMT, which is the appearance of code, which is again, goes back. Many people describe code, you know, going back decades and, you know, Alison Gray, Alex Gray's wife, she, her, all of her art is devoted to this kind of secret language, as she calls it, that you see on DMT. So how do we, how do we distinguish this effect from just other types of DMT imagery? And, uh, and I know, I know Danny is really trying and I was kind of reassured when I was speaking to him in LA is that he is trying to, um, rule out other possibility. He is trying to test this idea, but it's so difficult, right? He had the magnet thing.

• 2:57:07Danny Jones?

  And, and, you know, in today's day and age, you see an unbelievable amount of confirmation bias happening all over the place. And what I like about the way Danny is doing it is it doesn't, I don't see that with him. I see him actually trying to stress test this and actually trying to come up with legitimate ways to, to prove it wrong.

• 2:57:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:57:27Danny Jones?

  I don't, I don't sense any sort of grift or anything like that with him. He seems very genuine.

• 2:57:32Speaker 04

  I, I agree a hundred percent. I don't sense, he's always been very, um, pleasant and kind and open. And we've had very open and honest discussions and that's important. A lot of people just see it and they just latch on to his explanation.

• 2:57:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:57:49Speaker 04

  And they don't really analyze and think about it more deeply, which is all I'm trying to do.

• 2:57:53Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:57:54Speaker 04

  So all I'm trying to do and, you know, he did this magnet experiment where he said, if you, if you hold a magnet to

• 2:58:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:58:02Speaker 04

  It scrambles the code. Um, and he was able to do this, he said, if he looked at the code and he held a magnet there, that the code would be scrambled. Now, I'm, I'm not sure why this fundamental code of reality should be affected by a magnet, but anyway. And then he set up an experiment where he had this screen. Uh, and there was, I think 20 boxes or something like that. Uh, and the person on the one side of the screen, it was completely hidden, would hold a magnet to one of the squares. Um, and the person on the other side would try to find the square by seeing where the code is scrambled. It's a cool idea. Uh, it didn't work. You have to ask yourself, why didn't it work? So if it was working when he could see the code and see the magnet and he knew he was doing it, right, he could see the code being scrambled.

• 2:58:47Speaker 04

  Why wasn't the code scrambled when he couldn't see? So it suggests there's a psychological effect going on here. Why he was expecting the code to be scrambled or something like that. Um, the brain, he decided, or deeper levels of his brain had decided that, okay, the code is gonna, you know, he was seeing something he was expecting to see maybe, which is why this experiment was important. But it didn't work. Why didn't it work? Um, he said the magnet maybe isn't strong enough. Okay, uh, maybe, um, but there were,

• 2:59:19Speaker 04

  you know, he, I told him before he did the experiment, you, you need a dummy magnet first of all. Because if you don't have a dummy magnet, then it's basically a telepathy experiment. Because the person behind the screen knows which square they're picking and the person here doesn't. So it, it doesn't have, necessarily have anything to do with the D M T. If they, it's just them, it's like a guessing game, to pick a number between one and twenty. Um, so you need a dummy magnet, so neither, they wouldn't know whether they're using the magnet, whether they're using the dummy magnet that was not magnetic, and then you could distinguish. Uh, I, he didn't do that. And the reason I think he didn't do that is because he was convinced, you know, from our, our messages, he was convinced it was going to be a hundred percent accurate.

• 3:00:01Speaker 04

  Uh, this was such a strong effect that he was, every, every time, it'd be easy for the person to see which, where the magnet was because the code would obviously be scrambled, but it didn't work. Um, and so, so I think, I, I'm still struggling now and he's got lots of ideas and, you know, I, I admire him for it in many ways. Um, but I think the danger is when you, when you know, and he always describes this knowing, where he's reached the stage now where he doesn't believe, but he knows that what he's seeing is fundamental code of reality. Um, and I think the danger in that, uh, is, is that if some, somebody does, you know, behind the scenes,

• 3:00:41Speaker 04

  without Danny's knowledge, get interested in this, if they see the movie coming out, right? Lots of people are going to get interested in this. And of course, yes, there are going to be people who try it and are amazed by it and buy into it instantaneously. But then you've got people who'll go, I don't believe this and I'm going to prove that this is wrong. Exactly. And they're not going to call Danny and say, I want to work with you. They're going to work behind the scenes. Same thing happened with Silo Methoxine, right? Do you remember silomethoxine? No. It's another story. You want to get into it real quickly? Yeah. So.

• 3:01:15Speaker 04

  Um. There was this chemist called Garts. He was now known to be a fraud. Hamilton Morris did a great talk at psychedelic science in Denver about it. But anyway. He thought that if you, he showed in his, in his studies, which weren't real, it turns out, but if you feed a mushroom. Um. Something like, um. Not D M T. So psilocin from mushrooms is. D M T, but with a hydroxyl group added on. There's an enzyme that puts this hydroxyl group, an O H group on the ring. So it converts. D M T to psilocin. Right. And then there's a phosphate group that makes it psilocybin. But anyway, you have this. Key enzyme, this hydroxylase enzyme, um, that converts.

• 3:01:59Speaker 04

  D M T to psilocin. So this guy Garts thought, well, what if we feed the mushroom different tryptamines? Um. And will it still add this hydroxyl group? So can we create novel? We make them turn the mushroom into a factory for these novel tryptamines with this hydroxyl group in the same place as psilocin. But with a different tryptamine structure. Um. One option here, one possibility is to take five methoxy D M T. So it's D M T with this. Methoxy group at the five position. The theory goes that if you feed it to the mushrooms, it adds the hydroxyl group at the four position. And you get four hydroxy, five methoxy D M T. Silomethoxine, a theoretical. Oh, okay. Molecule, right? Right. Cool, cool idea. Great idea.

• 3:02:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Does it work? Well, this guy, I forget his name, and I probably don't want to mention his name because he might sue me. Um, like, seriously.

• 3:02:53Speaker 04

  Um. He. Again, he, he was. Experienced with psychedelics and after years of meditation and stuff, it came to him in a vision or something like this. Uh, that this is what he needs to do, right? He needs to feed five M E O D M T to the mushrooms. And they will create this silomethoxine molecule.

• 3:03:14Speaker 04

  So he tried it. He fed five M O D M Ts to the mushrooms and he got this, the mushroom grew. And then he started trying it on himself and he had this experience, which to him was completely unlike mushrooms, regular mushrooms. And so at that point, he knew, he knew Danny, that this, this was it. It worked. Yep. This mushroom no longer contains psilocybin. It no longer contains psilocin. It contains psilocin. He called it the sacrament. Hmm. And he started ship, he started, he had this subscription model. You'd pay a certain amount of money. And every few months or whatever, they'd send you samples of this mushroom, which wasn't scheduled, wasn't an illegal drug. Cause there's no psilocybin in there.

• 3:03:56Speaker 04

  All of this was in his head, of course. Right. Um, and all these other people started taking it and they were paying him money. I think it was, it reached like $50,000 a month. How long ago was this? Recently. Oh, wow. Yep. Our sacrament. Is this the website? You go to website. Our sacraments. Right. So he was selling this. $2,000 a month. Or is it 200? Can't be that much. $200 a month, right? Now, now here's the point. He created this sacrament, which he assumed, he knew contained psilocin. But what's the first thing you do as a scientist? You think you've got a mushroom that contains this molecule, psilocin. What's the first simple thing you do?

• 3:04:39Speaker 04

  Obvious fucking thing you do. You send it to a chemist, get them to analyze it. Hmm. Say, can you actually detect psilocin in this mushroom? He didn't do that because he knew, right? Sorry. Yes. A bit weird, but he knew that, that he, it was a success that he'd found the sacrament. Yeah. Um, and then behind the scenes, somebody received a sample of the mushrooms, a company called a USONA. Um, oh God, don't say that name. No, I won't say that name. You can, you can scramble that. Um, this company, this unnamed chemical company.

• 3:05:16Speaker 04

  They, they received samples and they did a very simple analysis. This isn't, this isn't rocket science, Danny, right? This is extracting a mushroom and, and like doing a GCMS or something.

• 3:05:29Speaker 04

  No silomethoxine in there at all. Lots of silice. They they did this this study on it? They analyzed it? This chemical company, yeah. Behind that, not the Church of Silomethoxine, they weren't, they didn't bother doing that. Right, right, right. Um, but this other chemical company in the background quietly wanted to prove these guys wrong. Analyze the mushrooms, didn't find any silomethoxine, published a paper. Yeah. And instantaneously, the whole facade collapsed overnight. Yeah. Right? Subscriptions, obviously. People, why am I spending $200 a month uh buying, you know, 50 grams of this powdered mushroom or whatever, or maybe even less than that. I don't know.

• 3:06:10Speaker 04

  Um, and so the, so like, what do they do? Um, it's all over, really, and they started suing people. Um, anyone who had publicly discredited the church, they started suing them. One million dollars was the total lawsuit, which was thrown out, yeah? Oh wait, so they're actually a church? That's what they called themselves, yeah. Did they get the exemption? Oh, I have no idea on that, that kind of stuff. Uh, but so instead of selling a unscheduled mushroom containing silomethoxine, they were selling a Schedule I drug. Oh, Jesus Christ. And shipping it around the world as well. You didn't, it wasn't just the US. So people can imagine, imagine ordering it from Singapore.

• 3:06:51Speaker 04

  People are vulnerable, man. People are so easily scammed. It's crazy. Right, but it was such an, thing is, is that it wasn't difficult to eliminate. They they could easily have done the proper due diligence and analyzed their mushrooms, uh, and they would have found it doesn't contain silomethoxine. So then they go on the defensive and they say, oh, you used methanol in the extraction, you should have used water. Just bullshit that any chemist would know is nonsense. Um, and then they they published an announcement on their website. This was a few months afterwards. They have found silomethoxine in the mushroom and they published this mass spect- mass spectrogram showing this little peak of the molecular mass of silomethoxine.

• 3:07:36Speaker 04

  Which I didn't believe was real. So I kind of had a bit of an exchange on Reddit. One of the guys was doing the analysis and he described the data that he was getting.

• 3:07:45Danny Jones?

  Great place to have an exchange.

• 3:07:46Speaker 04

  It was, yeah. My favorite, my favorite place Reddit. And he was, he described the data.

• 3:07:52Danny Jones?

  Very mentally, mentally stable folks.

• 3:07:54Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, absolutely. This is where I go when I want some rational, rational cogent debate. Anyway, I had this brief exchange and he basically told me the data. He told me how many molecules they were detecting in the mass spectrometer. Just to give me an idea of the amount of silomethoxine they were detecting by mass spectrometry. And I did a back of the envelope calculation. I think I worked out you need, you'd need like two tons, two metric tons of dried mushroom to get a single dose of silomethoxine. So what, if it was there, it was, it was, it was, it was so, such a small amount, it was irrelevant.

• 3:08:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:32Speaker 04

  And unfortunately, again, they didn't realize, because they're stupid, I shouldn't say that, but whatever, they're stupid. Silomethoxine has the same, exactly the same molecular mass as the NOxide of 5-methoxy DMT. So when 5-methoxy DMT is exposed to the air, it starts to oxidize and it forms this NOxide. Yeah, basically you add an oxygen to the nitrogen. Yeah. And this has exactly the same mass, silomethoxine. You can't tell just by looking at the mass spectrogram, whether they've got silomethoxine or 5-MeODMT has just become oxidized.

• 3:09:11Speaker 04

  What's more likely? Obviously oxidation. So it's highly likely, in my opinion, or I would bet my, my bottom dollar, as they used to say, on this, that this is, there's nothing in there. It's, it's magic mushrooms. It's psilocybe mushrooms that contain psilocybin and psilocin, and maybe a little bit of oxidized, tiny, tiny, tiny, irrelevant few molecules of the oxidized form of 5-MeODMT. It's, in other words, the whole thing just was a fantasy. Now, I'm not saying, bringing it back to the code of reality thing, I'm not saying that that's the case here. Danny is not stupid, he's smart, he's really thought this thing through.

• 3:09:55Speaker 04

  But there's always the danger that if you don't do your groundwork first and eliminate, you have to really, even if you don't think that this speckle effect has anything to do with it, even if you're convinced, you've got to do the groundwork to eliminate all of these more mundane alternative hypotheses, and that takes time, it takes money. Then you get to the more far out explanations, whereas it feels to me a little bit like Danny's kind of taken the elevator to the penthouse suite. And obviously, I'm not going to do that, and I get some criticism for it, but that's how I work. You know, I've spent most of my, most of the time what I'm doing with DMT certainly in the last

• 3:10:38Speaker 04

  two decades is analyzing more orthodox, more mainstream, more mundane explanations, and then ruling them out. And only then do I get to the more far out explanations. And I think that's really important that Danny does that. And I did get the sense that he was trying to do that. But he's got to get the right people, the experiment's got to be properly designed and that kind of thing. And it's going to be a long process.

• 3:11:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:01Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I think it's not going to be the last we hear about the code of reality, but I'm just, I'm far from convinced. There's just too many unfortunate coincidences and similarities between the optical effects of lasers and just the whole idea doesn't make much sense.

• 3:11:19Danny Jones?

  Well, the idea of introducing different kinds of things into the experience is really, I think is a good idea. And I would be curious to see, like, if you could do something within DMTX where people are on extended state DMTs, extended state DMT, and introduce new elements into their environment, new physical elements, like a laser, something else. Figure out some different, different things to introduce to them to see how it affects them. And to see what changes. And to see how that correlates across different people, see if there's any kind of consensus or whatever. Without, you know what I mean, just like, just throwing shit at the wall. And, uh, and seeing if there is any kind of consensus between these folks that are on extended state DMT.

• 3:12:03Danny Jones?

  I think that's an interesting idea and would be an interesting experiment. You know, I don't know what you can prove by it or what kind of conclusions you could jump to from that. But um.

• 3:12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. And I think it's some, it's a cool idea, right? So maybe you can, rather than having to stare at this little laser beam, if you, if you understand, what is, what is it about this pattern that's being generated by the light? What is it about, what is, what are the optical properties here that are important in generating this effect? Then can we create a screen?

• 3:12:33Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 3:12:33Speaker 04

  So rather than looking at this, you could create a screen that replicates the precise optical phenomena, the particular pattern, maybe a pattern of speckles on a screen or something that mimics the pattern you see in that little patch of laser and then have someone stare at that. So you, so rather than just being a small patch of light, you actually can, you, you have a whole, you know, wide screen where you can stare at.

• 3:12:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:12:56Speaker 04

  That would be cool. And it's, it's something I'd never thought about is, is, is introducing certain patterns of external visual sensory inputs and seeing if you can scaffold, as I said before, the, the visual phenomenology to that.

• 3:13:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, or even mess with your own visuals. Like, you know, those magic eye things? Where you look at the patterns, they look like nothing. And then you kind of like kind of adjust your focus and you can see things in there.

• 3:13:20Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 3:13:20Danny Jones?

  Do shit like that while you're on DMT with lasers or with lights, with, with anything. And see how that, how that affects it.

• 3:13:27Speaker 04

  Because, you know, DMT is, it's an extremely varied visual phenomenology. And the idea that we can isolate one particular aspect that's commonly reported, you know, code, and reliably induce it using a certain pattern of external visual input. That's a really cool idea. And, and, and it needs to be given credit for discovering that because that's really cool. On its own is an important discovery and could, could pave the way for some really interesting experiments that would help us analyze and understand the DMT space. But going from that to this is the code running reality, I'm just not, I'm not ready to go there yet. I'm afraid.

• 3:14:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah. You know, also like,

• 3:14:16Danny Jones?

  there's a lot of experiments that you could do that I'd be really interested to learn about that are just, you, you can't do, that are just, you know, inhumane.

• 3:14:26Speaker 04

  Like. Such as?

• 3:14:27Danny Jones?

  Like you can't, like, I would be interested to see how DMT affects children.

• 3:14:32Speaker 04

  That would be cool. Now that's, yeah.

• 3:14:33Danny Jones?

  You obviously can't give kids D M T. That's fucked up. But like, I wonder what would happen, you know, just like a someone who's unconditioned that that's not hasn't experienced the world, right? And is not conditioned into society yet. To see how that would affect their their their brain.

• 3:14:51Speaker 04

  I mean, going back to, I was talking about dreams earlier and how how children's brains aren't very good at simulating the waking world when they're very, very young. And so if you if you gave a child, you have children, right?

• 3:15:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:04Speaker 04

  How old?

• 3:15:06Danny Jones?

  Two weeks, three years and six years.

• 3:15:09Speaker 04

  Oh, two weeks?

• 3:15:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, or not two weeks, two months, I'm sorry. A two month old.

• 3:15:12Speaker 04

  Congratulations.

• 3:15:13Danny Jones?

  I have a bad perception of time. I have a two month old, a three year old and a six year old.

• 3:15:16Speaker 04

  A three year old. So he or she?

• 3:15:19Danny Jones?

  Uh, the older ones are boys.

• 3:15:21Speaker 04

  Okay, so we can use them, right?

• 3:15:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we can use them.

• 3:15:24Speaker 04

  We can use them. So we inject your children.

• 3:15:26Danny Jones?

  Prison, but.

• 3:15:28Danny Jones?

  I don't think it'd be worth it.

• 3:15:29Speaker 04

  But if we injected your children or anyone's children um with with D M T and they started seeing these highly coherent crystalline worlds that had no relationship to, you know, just like an adult. But that would be, that would add to the um the conclusion that that D M T was doing something quite remarkable here. You know, how would a children, a child's brain be able? I mean, it's it's hard enough to explain how an adult brain can construct these entirely disjointed, hyper complex, hyper dimensional realities. If a child's brain could do it, I mean, obviously how they communicate that might be very difficult.

• 3:16:03Danny Jones?

  It might be more rudimentary, right?

• 3:16:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. But but yeah, it's not going to happen, unfortunately.

• 3:16:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, unless we can find a way to like

• 3:16:11Danny Jones?

  similar, if we could find a way to to have an a visual of somebody, what somebody is seeing, you know, like maybe we could figure out a way to tap into somebody's visual cortex and put it on a screen to see exactly what their brain is. Showing them in their mind.

• 3:16:26Speaker 04

  We think we're a long way.

• 3:16:27Danny Jones?

  Super fucking crazy out there like sci fi PK dick type idea. But like if we could do that, that would be incredible.

• 3:16:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think if you if you did it with a visual cortex, you'd just get a messy pattern. Because that's what you that's all the visual cortex is, right? So you'd have to you'd have to connect it to and understand how that was being integrated at all the higher levels of the cortex as well, which is an unsolved problem. Um, but yeah, ultimately in the future, perhaps the idea of having read outs of the visual phenomenology in real time would be incredible, but I don't see it happening anytime soon, even with L L Ms.

• 3:17:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's just there's there's there's too many conflicts and and human beings. Um, unfortunately are too focused on careers and money and influence. And, uh,

• 3:17:18Danny Jones?

  when you give people, people, they gamify everything, like every single thing there is, whether like, if you have like people that are obsessed with UFOs, you have this whole UFO community and it's just fucking infested with with grifters and people trying to monetize everything. And then that gets the the reality gets lost in that, which is good for people that have the real secrets, that have the answers to this stuff, because it just confuses people.

• 3:17:42Danny Jones?

  And it's the same thing I I just have recently learned when I had Travis Kitchens on here. I wonder if you know Travis, he does, he's a journalist who's been studying all this stuff. He was a part of a John Hopkins Research Group. Um, a psychedelic study. And, you know, it just seems like there's all these competing groups that are trying to use psychedelics to their benefit, no matter what it is, whether it's like religion or it's like government type stuff, or it's pharmaceutical companies. People are just trying to figure out how to use this to push forward whatever they're doing.

• 3:18:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:18:15Danny Jones?

  You know what I mean? And, um, you know, unfortunately, you can't get it's it makes it harder to get to the truth. And on top of that.

• 3:18:24Danny Jones?

  I had a crazy misconception before I got understood this world. That psychedelics made people like better people, you know, it just, it makes us more humble. It makes us more enlightened. It makes us more, you know, meditative truth seekers. And I realized that that is, couldn't be farther from the truth. A lot of people get, they, I think what it does is it turns you into more of what you already are. And that can be good or bad. And what Rick Strassman was explaining to me is that there's this like, from what he's experienced is that he's seen a lot of people develop this sort of like messianic complex to where like, they have the answers because they've done so many psychedelics.

• 3:19:06Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:19:06Danny Jones?

  And they are on the true path to enlightenment and you should follow them.

• 3:19:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's, I mean, there's this weird phenomenon which myself and my friends have noticed over the last decades, which is this, this, this paradox of these ego dissolving drugs, which is what psychedelics do. And then when it comes back, it's, it's, it's much bigger and it's massive egos. And there's many examples of this, sometimes quite tragic. There was a guy called, oh, Cantelmo. Rick Cantelmo, I think, Chris Cantelmo. He was, I mean, we, we had some rather unpleasant exchanges. I mean, he, he's, sadly, I mean, he passed away. Well, he committed suicide. But he was convinced that he had all, he was, he used a lot of DMT.

• 3:19:54Speaker 04

  He developed this religion called Cantelmoism. Based upon, based around his perceived revelations regarding reality and DMT and all that kind of stuff. And he was always going about his Yale degree. Whenever you talk with, I've got a degree from Yale, that beats your Cambridge degree into, you know, whatever, etc. and stuff, right?

• 3:20:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:17Speaker 04

  Just nonsense. Very aggressive and, and, you know, I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but clearly he had serious psychological problems that weren't improved by smoking lots of DMT. The idea that you're guaranteed to, to, to enter perfect mental health because you use a lot of DMT, it's not guaranteed at all and, and, and. It can end up in really bad places.

• 3:20:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Another thing that Travis was pointing out to me was there was this, uh, there's this study, this John Hopkins study that never got, I think it actually finally got released. Which was a, uh, it was a study of religious professionals where they gave people of different religious, uh, different like religious backgrounds, like leaders of certain churches. Like, uh, they had, um, a Muslim guy, a Christian, Jew, um, a Hindu person all take psilocybin, I believe it was, and they had them all report their experiences because their, their, their goal was to see if there was any kind of common thread.

• 3:21:17Danny Jones?

  Right? And like, if it reinforced their, if their, for their religious views or beliefs influenced what they were experiencing on psychedelics. And I guess the theory was, uh, to see if there was any kind of like perennialism or like a common core to all religions.

• 3:21:34Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 3:21:35Danny Jones?

  And, um, you know, you can see how a religion would want to use. Travis was, was pointing out how, um, there is a movement to sort of use psychedelics to

• 3:21:54Danny Jones?

  strengthen or revive Christianity in the United States. Like if like, cause if you can use, bring people into a church, do a sermon and give people psychedelics. That's going to make them believe more, be more emboldened because they're gonna, they're gonna, first of all, these people are probably vulnerable to some degree and, and now they're having a psychedelic experience while they're going to church and there's music playing. So it's going to be more of a spiritual transcendent experience. But now you're giving, the problem with that is you're giving the church fathers access to these drugs. And who knows what they're going to do like, like.

• 3:22:38Danny Jones?

  Imagine the amount of control you can have over these people if they're already believing that you are the voice, you have the direct line to God, right? And now they're under the influence of psychedelics.

• 3:22:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:22:49Danny Jones?

  That could spiral out of control.

• 3:22:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, increasing, increased suggestibility. I mean, this is why the whole MKUltra thing.

• 3:22:58Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:22:59Speaker 04

  That was all about, how do you make someone, how can you make, generate a neurological state where someone is highly susceptible to being manipulated? Whether it's to reveal their deepest darkest secrets, or, you know, military secrets, or whatever, you know, truth drugs?

• 3:23:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:18Speaker 04

  Or, or can you make someone to be a super soldier, I think is the term you used earlier?

• 3:23:26Speaker 04

  This is, it's, it's an obvious target for, should we say, the shadowy aspects of those in power. And, and I expect, you know, MKUltra was dissolved, of course, but yes, I saw the eyebrows rise there. Sure, there's almost certainly things going on that we have no idea about. And with, with molecules of the potency of something like LSD, you can imagine, I mean, they, they, they had, you know, whole proposals about let's putting into the water supply of an enemy, an enemy's cities, and basically render the populace unwilling or

• 3:24:11Speaker 04

  unable to defend themselves. Now you could probably do that with viruses and things like that, introduce those or.

• 3:24:20Danny Jones?

  Well, there was that PK Dick novel, right? Where, I forget what it was called, but there was like, a drug that they were trying to get a hold of to like, control the world, or something like that, like intergalactic drug. Like, the Pentagon has been, and this was what Annie Jacobson talked about in her, in her book, The Pentagon's Brain, like, they have so much goddamn money that they invite sci-fi writers to the Pentagon to talk about their, their sci-fi ideas, like the writer of Terminator, they invited there, and Alien. And, like, they, they have, they're.

• 3:24:54Danny Jones?

  Money is limitless and they're exploring science fiction to figure out what they can make reality.

• 3:24:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:25:00Danny Jones?

  You know? So like if you were that person and you were in charge of trying to come up with the come up with the most groundbreaking, mind bending, fantastical concept to empower your nation to be the number one nation, of course you would use psychedelics and you would uh you would go to writings like P K Dix novels and figure out this is interesting, let's throw a couple million dollars at it and see if we can make this a reality.

• 3:25:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I remember, remember Alex Jones a few years ago now, he was talking about the, I don't know, was it the CIA or something using D M T to, he called them the clockwork elves, remember that?

• 3:25:42Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:25:43Speaker 04

  And he was saying that he had heard from his secret sources.

• 3:25:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:25:47Speaker 04

  That they were.

• 3:25:48Danny Jones?

  They're channeling demons or something?

• 3:25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they were in, they were in collaboration or in cahoots with these clockwork elves, they were using D M T to maintain communication with them or something.

• 3:25:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:59Speaker 04

  I don't know, I mean, how much of that is a product of his imagination, I'm not sure, but sure, I mean, I take seriously, it's no secret that I take seriously the idea that when, that D M T allows you to interact with some kind of intelligent agent. And if I take that seriously and I'm not totally nuts, um, then you can bet your other bottom dollar, um, that they're gonna be agents or elements within the powers that be within the government, the shadow government or the hidden hand or whatever you wanna call it, that that would also have thought of that and that would also be developing, maybe D M T X is being used by these elements of the government and they are running, maybe they've been using something similar for decades.

• 3:26:43Speaker 04

  Maybe they are, they haven't learned how to establish stable two-way communication with these, with these intelligences, maybe they know a lot more about them, um, than you or I, um, because we can only imagine.

• 3:26:58Danny Jones?

  Wild shit, Andrew. Thank you. This has been a fantastic, we just had like four hours.

• 3:27:04Speaker 04

  We should, um, before we go. Yeah.

• 3:27:08Danny Jones?

  You want me to go grab the DMT?

• 3:27:10Speaker 04

  No. No, no, no, no, no. However, um, the DMTX thing, I should just mention.

• 3:27:16Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:27:17Speaker 04

  Right. That, so DMTX until now has always been a kind of the purview of research institutions. It's not kind of publicly available, but we are developing, uh, we've got a special license from a government in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, to use basically all drugs. Um, and we're building out a research center, stroke retreat center, where we, people will be able to come to the Caribbean in a five-star environment, spend several days, um, in preparation, integration, and, and experience DMTX in a, like a, a perfect setting.

• 3:27:56Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:27:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. So people can go to NewNautics again, noonautics.org, and they can, they can actually put their name down. Um, there we go, the next frontier.

• 3:28:06Danny Jones?

  That's it.

• 3:28:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they can sign up, put their name down. I mean, it's still a working progress. So this is, don't expect you, you know, an invite to come in the next few days or anything like that, but express your interest. Uh, we will be looking for research volunteers as well as people who just want to come and experience, you know, what's it like to spend 90 minutes within the DMT space, you know, stably, stabilized within the DMT space. Uh, you know, a series of, might be a series of sessions, starting from low doses and building up to, uh, you know, very long extended, uh, breakthrough doses.

• 3:28:42Danny Jones?

  What's the most, what's the most amount of sessions that you've seen somebody do in one day?

• 3:28:47Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the Imperial College study, um, it was, they did one session separate and then another session, I think it was like a week or two weeks later. So they did five sessions, but separated out. Nobody should, in my, you know, opinion, should be doing multiple 30-minute sessions in a day. I mean.

• 3:29:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 3:29:07Speaker 04

  That would be a bit much. Um, but yeah, I mean, Carl Smith, who's on the, on the board of directors together with myself and, and, and three others. He was the only person, he was subject zero. He's a really cool guy, one of the most experienced psychonauts I know. And he was the only one to actually get through out of the 11 or 12 subjects to get through all five sessions of kind of breakthrough 30 minute sessions. Yeah. And, and they, the entities, what's kind of interesting is that the entities, he, he, he saw the same entities every time he came back and they started to recognize that he was coming back and they were like, you know, not you again, you know, you're back again.

• 3:29:47Speaker 04

  And, and at one, during one of the sessions, he was being scanned. He had, he was in an MRI machine or whatever it was. Uh, and obviously that, that was scanning his brain and, um, the entities seemed confused, he said, because then normally the ones doing the scanning, they're the ones that are probing and measuring and they were confused why this team in Imperial were, were doing this scanning. So just a little taste of the kind of really cool things that, that that happened with this extended estate technology. So yeah, new nautics.org people can go to. Uh, the, the retreat center is called Illusus. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Loose, like the hallucinian mysteries. Yeah. So illusismine.com you can also go to, which is kind of a website for the, what the retreat center will look like. Okay. Once it's built up, so.

• 3:30:32Speaker 04

  And what about your book? Oh, my book? Yes. Hold it up nicely for people. There we go. There. Death by astonishment, out now, forward by Graham Hancock. Confronting the mystery of the world's strangest drug. Yes. If you're interested in DMT and don't just want the boring kind of, oh, visual hallucination explanation. Want to get into why the development of my thinking, the story of Western science's struggle to make sense of it and their failure to make sense of it and what it might really mean and what the future of DMT research might look like. Um, this is the book available July 1st in beautiful hardback. And can I show? This is really cool. So the inner bore, the end papers. Oh, look at that. Harry Pack.

• 3:31:14Speaker 04

  Great artist, you know, visual kind of visionary artist. And then in the back, you've got Incegris has done the artwork here. Also a really great visual artist, inspired by DMT. So, yeah, get it while you can. Also available on audiobook.

• 3:31:31Danny Jones?

  Beautiful. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. We'll link everything below.

• 3:31:34Speaker 04

  Awesome. Thank you very much, Danny.

• 3:31:35Danny Jones?

  Andrew Gallimore, ladies and gentlemen.

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