#2403 - Andrew Gallimore

Andrew Gallimore, PhD, is a chemical pharmacologist and neurobiologist. He is one of the world’s leading experts on psychedelics and the author of several books, including his most recent, “Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug.” www.buildingalienworlds.comhttps://www.youtube.com/c/alieninsecthttps://read.macmillan.com/lp/death-by-astonishment-9781250357755/ Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visit https://squarespace.com/ROGAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:13Joe Rogan?

  How are you?

• 0:15Speaker 03

  Splendid. How the devil are you, sir?

• 0:18Joe Rogan?

  I think it's the first time anyone's answered splendid when I ask them, "How are you doing?"

• 0:24Joe Rogan?

  So, um, tell me about your book, man. Let me see the cover of it, first of all.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  Death by astonishment.

• 0:31Joe Rogan?

  Which is the famous Terrence McKenna quote, right?

• 0:33Speaker 03

  Yes, he was asked.

• 0:35Joe Rogan?

  The only thing you have to fear is death by astonishment.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 0:38Joe Rogan?

  You know, the first time I did DMT, I literally heard his words. "Do not give in to astonishment." I literally heard those words. It's almost like whatever's over there wanted me to hear that. So, I could, like, sink in, or whatever, because I'd already heard it before. You know, and so they wanted to say it to me as well. It was very weird.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's sage advice, I think, because...

• 1:02Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's the only way. Because if you freak out, well, it's like, that's a good thing. It's good advice in most of life. Like, don't give in to the freak out.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14Joe Rogan?

  Confronting the mystery of the world's strangest drug. How did you get involved in this?

• 1:18Speaker 03

  DMT?

• 1:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Oh, so you have to go back to my teenage years, really. So, I mean, I first heard about DMT through Terrence McKenna, a friend.

• 1:30Joe Rogan?

  Like most of us.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, like most of us. But this was like, this was during, like, the dawn of the internet.

• 1:37Joe Rogan?

  Right, long before you were a scientist.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Long before I was a scientist, right? So, a friend gave me this magazine. It had this interview with this bearded, cheeky-looking bearded fellow on the back called Terrence McKenna. And he spoke about this thing called DMT, which, of course, I didn't know what that was. But, you know, the stories that he was telling, that you were going to meet these insectoid aliens and... Transdimensional machine owls jabbering in indecipherable tongue and singing impossible objects into existence. I mean, it sounded ridiculous, but I was kind of, I was hooked. I thought, this is it. This is, this is the most fucking incredible thing I've ever

• 2:20Speaker 03

  read in my life. And so I was, I was like fifteen, sixteen years old, and there was one computer in the school that was hooked up to the, the world wide web. So all of-

• 2:31Joe Rogan?

  What year was this?

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Ninety-six.

• 2:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Giving my age away here, but-

• 2:37Joe Rogan?

  Early days of the-

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Early days.

• 2:39Joe Rogan?

  Internet.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So I spent all my time just, you know, going on to AltaVista. You remember AltaVista?

• 2:46Joe Rogan?

  I do.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48Joe Rogan?

  I didn't, I didn't remember it until you brought it up.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  There we go. Yeah, just kind of trying to find out as much as I could about this. And that was what triggered my decision to study chemistry and pharmacology. My kind of academic journey was, was triggered by, I want to know, you know, it's such a cool thing, the idea that you can, you can put a molecule in your brain and it, it doesn't just change how you feel, but it completely changes the entire structure of your reality. Your entire world is, is obliterated and replaced with one that is completely alien, that has no relationship whatsoever to that normal waking world. That's incredible. And I kind of wanted to try at least to understand how that actually works.

• 3:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, the weirdest part about that molecule is that your brain makes it. And so then you have to go, why? And what's the purpose of that? And what are we really? You know, what is, what is consciousness? And what is, what is normal consciousness? What's the purpose of it? And why does this chemical exist? Why does this molecule exist that's produced by the brain that changes everything and seems to transport you to a place that's more real than this physical reality that we find ourselves in right now?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that is kind of the great mystery. And I don't, I think- Most people who, even people who've kind of learned about DMT, even scientists, I mean, I speak to scientists, I engage with scientists, neuroscientists often, and they will say, "Oh, this is just hallucination, this is just your brain kind of making it up." And I don't think most scientists realize how confounding and how difficult to explain the DMT state is. I think it is one of life's true mysteries. It is not simple to explain the DMT state.

• 4:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think it's almost irresponsible to try to explain it without experiencing it. It's not gonna kill you. It'll last 15 minutes. Stop being a pussy. Just do it, and then tell me it's just hallucination. Just do a big one. Three giant hits, come back, tell me this is normal. Tell me this is just a freakout. Because it sure doesn't seem like it, does it?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  No. And, I mean, that was what, I mean, I first learned about DMT, as I said, when I was 15 or 16, but my first experience was probably, well, close to a decade later. And I thought, before I took it, I thought I kind of knew what to expect. I mean, I'd listened to all the Terence McCann lectures I could find. I'd read all the books, read all the trip reports, and I thought, "Okay, I'm kind of ready for this. I kind of know what's gonna happen." And I wasn't ready. And I was shocked. I was horrified, in a sense. I was appalled. I mean, this was like, this is impossible. This was an impossible

• 5:50Speaker 03

  experience. I was confronted with what seemed to me to be the undeniable hand of some kind of intelligence. And not just any kind of intelligence, but a supremely advanced, ancient, and yet highly technological intelligence. And that was undeniable to me in those first few moments, within sort of 30 seconds of that drug hitting my brain. I knew that this is something else. And I was, at first, horrified. I was shocked. I just thought, "What is this?" And then when I finally kind of came back, I was, I remember lying on my bed, on

• 6:34Speaker 03

  my back, like shaking to my very bones. And all I could say was, "Oh, my fucking god."

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Because I was completely confounded, you know. I mean, and by then I was a chemical pharmacologist. I was a scientist. I should, I should, I should know what's going on here, but I had no idea what was going on. And I thought, this is, this is it. This is what I need to get to grips with.

• 6:58Joe Rogan?

  It also gives you a very

• 7:03Joe Rogan?

  like an, an unusual understanding of the mechanisms that you interface with the world. Like, of, like ego and logic and reasoning and rational thinking. It gives you like this understanding that those are kind of just these weird tools that you use to get by. And you're left without them in there. It just, they, they evaporate and dissolve. And then when you come back, you're like, what am I doing?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:38Joe Rogan?

  The way I talk, like, what, what is my, what's my purpose of interacting with people? Like, what, how much of the way I talk to people is this weird social dance? Weird ego performative sort of like the way I structure sentences, the way I communicate. It all seemed so clunky when, when you come back and you just go, wow, we're a mess. Like collectively as a species, we're so, without some sort of awakening or some, some kind of experience, some sort of a psychedelic profound breakthrough experience, like you're so hampered by your physical existence

• 8:18Joe Rogan?

  and this sort of ancient tribal programming that we have, that we're running through this maze of life with. And you come back and you go, God, this is so weird.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what DMT does is, is show you that everything, everything you thought you knew about how reality is structured and what's, what's real and what's not real, what is fantasy, what's possible and what's not possible. All of that is, is completely kind of extirpated in an instant. Uh, and you realize actually we don't, we don't have a fucking clue about. The way things really are. I think DMT just demonstrates that. Whether you understand it, whether we can, we can really understand what's going on in the brain and why and how this experience is even possible. It just shows you how little we really understand about the nature of.

• 9:09Joe Rogan?

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• 11:37Joe Rogan?

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• 12:35Speaker 03

  ... of reality.

• 12:37Joe Rogan?

  So you've done some legitimate studies with DMT.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. I mean, I work mainly, I guess you could say, theoretically, in that I do more quantitative and qualitative analyses of the DMT state and try to understand, try to use the tools of neuroscience to try to understand... How DMT elicits its effects? So we can kind of get into if you want, if you want to go really deep. Yeah, sure. I can give you a kind of a neuroscience lesson. Yeah, please. Talk about. So, so, you know, if you want to understand DMT, we kind of have to start with the, the basic observation.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  You know, before you take DMT, you are experiencing a world, right? Whenever you're awake and conscious, you're experiencing a world, the normal waking world. This is the world that's kind of familiar to us. When you take DMT, that world is transformed. It disappears. It's obliterated and it's replaced with one that is altogether stranger, shall we say. And so, so what I want to do is kind of understand, first of all, how that happens? What's actually going on in the brain to cause that transition and why that happens? And you can't do that unless you have a decent understanding of the normal waking world.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  So what is the normal waking world? It's a model. It's an interface generated by your brain. So you have this world building machinery on the outer layer of your brain called the cortex, and this is generating your world all the time. All the features of the world that you're experiencing are represented within the cortex. And that applies whether you are just normal waking life, it applies in dreaming, it even applies in the psychedelic state. The world you experience is, is always constructed as a model by the brain.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  And so what that means is that psychedelics, what they're doing is they're, they're perturbing the brain, they're manipulating the brain and altering that model. Now, for example, with, let's say psilocybin from magic mushrooms.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Psilocybin binds to this receptor in the brain called the 5-HT2A receptor, which you're probably familiar with, the serotonin receptor. And so this is a, it's called an excitatory receptor. It stimulates these neurons of which your cortex is constructed from and makes them more excitable, makes them more likely to fire and share information between, to other neurons. You get this kind of loosening up of the world model that your brain is constructing. So the walls start to breathe, objects seem to kind of change their identity. Everything becomes more fluid and dynamic. And if you put someone into an MRI machine, for example, you can actually see that.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  In the normal waking state, you can see the neural activity. It's dynamic, but it's, it's kind of organized and well orchestrated. You give someone psilocybin, let's say, or LSD, and you start to see the activity becoming sort of more random and fluid. So you get this, this state of slightly increased disorder, as if the, the, the kind of the tuning dial between order and disorder in the brain has been slightly nudged towards disorder. But then with DMT, something remarkable happens. In the, the early stages of the experience, you get this kind of quite chaotic state,

• 16:34Speaker 03

  suggesting that the brain is entering this more disordered state. But then it kind of collapses into this brand new order. So you go from the order of the normal waking world to this disordered state and then vroom, you collapse into this completely different type of order. So the brain is effectively constructing an entirely different model of reality. It's no longer the normal waking world model, which acts as kind of an interface with the environment, but it's constructing a, a completely different world model.

• 17:10Joe Rogan?

  When you say constructing, why do you use that term? Why, why do you use the brain is constructing?

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Because you're, well, okay, so, so if you think about, you know, how does the brain interact with you, how do we interact with the environment using our senses, right? So light information comes through the eyes, the retina, and it stimulates the, the very back of the brain. You have an area, oh. Oh, you brought slides. I brought slides. There we go. Yeah, maybe the next one, Jamie, is a bit easier to see. There we go. So at the right, the back of the brain here, you have an area called V1, which is the primary visual cortex. That's your interface with the world. Sensory information comes and strikes. It activates patterns of neural activity in V1. But it's very, very messy.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  It's like lines and patches of color and, you know, lines moving in certain directions. It's a mess, right? It's very noisy. It's very messy. It's incredibly dynamic. Doesn't make any sense. And so what your brain does is it has another level above V1 that kind of has a bird's eye view and is looking for patterns within this neural activity in this lowest level. So it's looking, saying, oh, those lines kind of could be a triangle or this could be a circle. It's trying to find patterns to try and generate order from this messy level in V1. Can I ask you this? How do we know it does that? That's a good question. Well, there are a number of things.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  So the earliest evidence came from a one of the earliest forms of evidence came from a guy called Wilder Penfield. Are you familiar with? No. So Wilder Penfield, he was interested in treating epilepsy. And he invented something called the Montreal Procedure, where he would remove a part of the brain that was the focus of epileptiform activity. The idea being that it would kind of cure someone's epilepsy. But before he could do that, of course, he needed to make sure that he wasn't removing, you know, important parts for someone's function. So what he would do is he would cut the top of their skull off. When they're still awake. Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  And kind of expose their brain. And then he would zap different parts of their brain and say, you know, what's happening? Oh, my God. Can you imagine?

• 19:35Joe Rogan?

  Isn't it crazy that that's how we have to find out what works? We have to, like, it's... The aliens probably look at us and go, "Oh, my god, you guys are still doing that?"

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, nowadays, things have moved on a bit, right?

• 19:49Joe Rogan?

  I'm sure, but I mean, this is not that long ago, right? How long ago is this?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Nineteen fifties?

• 19:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:54Joe Rogan?

  Not even a hundred years.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 19:55Joe Rogan?

  So a hundred years ago, they were literally taking your skull and turning it into a hat.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  They would turn-

• 19:59Joe Rogan?

  Popping the cap off and just, uh, okay.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:02Joe Rogan?

  Let's see what this does.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Exactly. They would zap it, and what he noticed is that when he would zap right at the back of the brain, so this is the, this primary visual cortex that's receiving information from the environment, they would, his patients would say, "Oh, I see flashes of light, I see lines, I see colors." It was very simple kind of things. But then he would move forward to kind of higher levels that we know now are kind of high levels. And then they'd say, "Oh, I see triangles," or "I see an orange circle," things like this. Then he'd keep going higher and higher, and then they'd say, "Oh, I see people," or "I see cops and robbers." And then, right at the top, you reach an area called the hippocampus, which you may have heard of, involved in memory.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  And the hippocampus basically keeps an eye, it's a bird's eye view of the all of this world model your brain is constructing, and it's kind of following and looking for, you know, interesting or important patterns. And when he stimulated that,

• 21:03Speaker 03

  his patients would actually report memories. They would say, "Oh, I hear somebody talking to me, you know, this happened this morning when I was leaving the house. My mother was telling me something about, you know, you've got your coat on backwards," or something like this. So you have these levels of the cortex that go from very simple...

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Kind of very funda- low level visual data at the bottom end. And then at the very top, you've got kind of higher order things such as, you know, faces or people. This is sitting at the top. Now, interesting, have you ever, when you are dreaming, right? So when you, let's think about dreaming for a second. It's quite instructive, I think. When you're dreaming, right? The brain is actually constructing the world in basically the same way as it does when you're awake. Dreams are kind of selective simulations of the waking world. The difference, of course, is that there's no sensory inputs. So if you scan someone's brain while they're having a dream, you'll see that this back

• 22:10Speaker 03

  of the brain, this primary visual cortex is kind of quiet. The brain is kind of using what it's learned about building the world in the normal waking state to construct the dream world. The dream world is built in exactly, it's built from exactly the same stuff as the normal waking world. However, there's interesting features. If you, in a dream, have you ever tried to use your cellphone?

• 22:38Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Not many people have. What about read a book in a dream?

• 22:43Joe Rogan?

  I don't think so. One, one thing I have learned to do is to, I think I saw it in a movie, if you knock on a door, you'll realize that you're in a dream.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  This waking life?

• 22:53Joe Rogan?

  I don't remember what movie it was. But it was a guy who was instructing how to lucid dream. And that if you make a habit of walking through a doorway in your home, and every time you walk in a, through a doorway in your home, tap on the door, the doorway. Knock on it with your hand and say, am I awake? Knock, knock, knock. And then you'll get in a habit of doing that every time you go through a doorway. And if you go through a doorway in your dream, you'll do it. You'll say, am I awake? And then as you go to knock, knock, knock, you're like, oh shit, I'm dreaming.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 23:28Joe Rogan?

  And then you realize, and if you don't give into astonishment. You can maintain that dream, right? Yeah, that's the thing is like, oh my god, I'm dreaming. I can't believe this, and then you wake up. You get too freaked out and you wake up. But if you don't do it, and I've only been able to do this a few times because I don't really knock. I did it for a while after the movie. I saw the movie. I tried it for a while, and I did have a dream like that where I went through a doorway and I said, am I dreaming? And I'm like, oh my god, I'm dreaming. And then I realized I was dreaming and then I was like flying. I was doing a lot of weird stuff. But then it went away and then I stopped doing it. And I've always been like, wow, why don't I practice lucid? I've always, I've thought about it like a dozen times at least. Like, why don't I just get a book on lucid dreaming and really try to attempt to learn the techniques? And I never do.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it takes commitment. But now there's actually a simpler way of that kind of reality tests. A simpler way now is to just get out your cellphone occasionally, open up the calculator and do a do a few calculations and just check everything's working, right? Or open up a book and try to read it. Because the thing about the dream world is, again, just like the normal waking world, it's constructed over the kind of levels of a hierarchy from the highest level models. So your brain can construct a high level model of a cellphone quite easily. But all of the fine details of how it functions, that's all represented at the lowest level of the cortex.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  It's really dependent on sensory inputs. So you can dream of having your mobile phone in your hand and doing with it. But as soon as you try to do something with it, so actually your brain has to kind of construct that function and it can't do it unless it has access to sensory inputs. And so that's how you can test if you're lucid dreaming.

• 25:20Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and which is why the DMT state is so fascinating is because it's nothing like the dream state. People say, you know, that perhaps DMT has released.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  When you're dreaming and that it actually triggers. I mean, this goes back to the 1980s. There's a theoretical paper published by a guy called Jace Callaway. And he said, oh, maybe DMT could be produced during REM sleep because it's closely related to melatonin structurally, both kind of tryptamine structures. But when you analyze the phenomenology, you know, the actual experience of DMT, it's nothing like dreaming. Dreaming is generally the brain making use of what it knows about how to construct the world in the waking state and doing so in the dream state. So that's why if you ask people,

• 26:19Speaker 03

  you know, many studies on dreaming have shown that people, when they dream, they dream about people. They dream about dogs and cats. They dream about, you know, the amount of time they spend talking on the telephone or watching TV is actually similar to what it is in waking life. So dreaming is more like a selective simulation of the waking world. It's not that difficult to explain. Because your brain, from the moment you were born, your brain was learning to construct the world as a model of the environment. This is, this world is the only world that your brain knows how to build or should know how to build. And yet, when you introduce this molecule, dimethyltryptamine into the brain, the brain suddenly starts constructing

• 27:02Speaker 03

  a world it never learned to construct. It's like the brain is build, speaking a language it never learned to speak and doing so flawlessly. These worlds are of beautiful crystalline clarity, perfectly finessed, staggeringly complex narrative complexity that I think is very difficult to explain. There's no simple explanation of why the brain should suddenly become capable of constructing these worlds unless, unless, and this is where things become more contentious, we are indeed interfacing with some kind of intelligence.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  That's my, that's the explanation that makes sense to me is that somehow DMT is gating access to some kind of, that the flow of information from some kind of intelligent agent that is directing. The D M T experience. So it's not a sensed world. It's not a kind of a dreamt world. It's actually a directed world. I always say you don't break through into the D M T world. The D M T world breaks through into you. It's like this intelligent agent has commandeered your neural machinery, the world-building machinery of your brain, and is directing everything that you see. It has complete control.

• 28:27Joe Rogan?

  It's interesting that you use the word construct rather than observe. So you're using terminology that seems to indicate that you believe that you're constructing reality.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:41Joe Rogan?

  Not that you're just observing reality.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  No, because it's not. If you think about perception in the same way of like looking like a video camera, just taking images of the world. That's not how it works. The brain must actively construct a model of the environment. That's all what it's always doing. It's always constructing a model, and it is constantly using that model to make predictions about the way that kind of predictions about the evolution of sensory information. It's constantly saying, OK, if this is, if this model that I'm currently using is good, then this should happen next.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  This is the pattern of sensory information that I should receive next. So if I, for example, move this bottle of water across your perceptual field, even if you close your eyes, you could probably tell me where the water's going to be in a couple of seconds because it's moving. Your brain has a model of the water, and it is using that to make predictions. And it's only when something surprising happens, you know, of the water, if I do this, and your brain detects that there's something, its predictions start to fail, and you get these error signals. And these are what flow into the brain, and the brain uses then to kind of update its model until the errors decline. So you're never, you never have direct access to the world,

• 30:12Speaker 03

  or to the environment, should I say. You only have direct access to this model that your brain is constructing.

• 30:19Joe Rogan?

  That's where it gets weird. Because I'm assuming your model and my model are very similar.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:27Joe Rogan?

  That would be, if we could ever get to a point where we could at least temporarily enter into someone else's consciousness and see how they see the world.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:36Joe Rogan?

  I think we're gonna get a lot of answers. We're gonna be like, "Oh, you guys live in a totally different fucking world. No wonder why you think we should be communists and we should..."

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Well, it's true, yeah.

• 30:48Joe Rogan?

  I mean, every, whatever your chemical makeup is, your life experience, your biology, whatever contributing factors, I'm a, I always assume that your construction of the world is the same as my construction of the world. But every now and then I'll get a text message from a friend about some world event and their take is so crazy that I'll just go, "Wow, this person is living in a completely different world than me."

• 31:13Speaker 03

  I mean, they are.

• 31:14Joe Rogan?

  They are.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, I mean, their brain, the structure of their brain, the organization of their neural networks, and it's all different in everyone. Everyone has a unique brain. And so, in a sense, everyone has to construct an entirely unique model of reality, but we agree on certain things. We reach this kind of consensus about what we call things, but we, you know, if I point at, you know, something that...

• 31:33Joe Rogan?

  Television.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can say that, oh, there's, I can describe the colors, I can describe the people. But again, we're all using our own personally constructed model.

• 31:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  And that's what we experience.

• 31:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's what's weird, you know, because we're, again, it's just this assumption. So, your, your take is that when you're dreaming, you're trying to construct this world and you don't really have the tools to leave a book where you can read, you don't have the tools to use a calculator, you just know what a calculator is. And so, if you're in the absence of an actual calculator, your brain's not capable of creating one.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so, so, again, you have, at the highest level, you have a calc, a calculator model, which is kind of a broad idea of a calculator, doesn't have all the details. All the details are at the lower end. Actually, we can show this. Can, sorry, Jamie, can I use Jamie like this?

• 32:29Joe Rogan?

  Sure, anytime.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Can you go to the picture of Margaret Thatcher?

• 32:33Speaker 06

  I was gonna bring this up in some way. I think it's supposed to play a video, maybe?

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  Well, the videos don't seem to be playing in the keynote. There's three or four of them and none of them play.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 32:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, I figured you were gonna get here at some point.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  I don't know how to...

• 32:50Joe Rogan?

  Is it formatted for Windows?

• 32:52Speaker 03

  No. Let me go. Okay, go back, go back.

• 32:55Joe Rogan?

  I didn't know that was gonna happen, okay.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, perfect. Okay, so go back one. Okay, this is kind of really interesting, right?

• 33:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've seen this.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  You've seen this, right? This is really-

• 33:05Joe Rogan?

  Not with Margaret Thatcher, but I've seen it with other faces.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the original was with Margaret Thatcher.

• 33:10Joe Rogan?

  Right, let's explain it to people that are just listening, because there's still quite a lot of people.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  So this is called the Thatcher Effect. So when you're looking at this image of Margaret Thatcher, or anyone, your brain is constructing a model of this person, right? A model of their face. And as I said, it's constructed over a hierarchy, so you have the overall idea, the overall concept of Margaret Thatcher, right? The whole face, the whole thing.

• 33:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  And then you have, at a lower level, you have the eyes, and the mouth, and the nose, and they're kind of separate. And then, going further still, within the eyes, you've got circles and patches of color and all this stuff. And right at the bottom, you have this really messy system of lines and things that don't make any sense, right? And you can actually show how this hierarchy is constructed. At the moment, it just looks like Margaret Thatcher, and you can't really break it down. But if you flip over like this, so just leave it there for a second, Jamie, please, yeah. So now you see, what we've done is we've basically, we've weakened this highest-level model, right, of the whole face, because the brain isn't very good at building models

• 34:19Speaker 03

  of faces that are upside down, right?

• 34:22Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  And so this looks, there's something wrong with the image, clearly.

• 34:27Joe Rogan?

  But it looks like Margaret Thatcher upside down.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  It looks like Margaret Thatcher, but it's, actually, what's happened is, the whole face has been flipped over, but the mouth and the eyes are actually the correct way up.

• 34:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Right? But to the brain in this configuration, it's not that surprising, because the eyes kind of look as they should, the mouth looks as it should. You're seeing the whole image in its pieces, if you like.

• 34:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  You're seeing that lower-level fragments. And it's only when you flip it- That it becomes

• 34:56Joe Rogan?

  horrific.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  horrific, right? So now you've reestablished that high level model um of Margaret Thatcher and the brain goes, fuck, this is completely wrong. And this is why you get that, that it's immediately obvious.

• 35:09Joe Rogan?

  With the upside down eyes and the upside down mouth, it looks completely insane. She looks like a demon.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  She looks like a demon, right?

• 35:15Joe Rogan?

  Which is really weird.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Which is really weird. It's called the Thatcher effect.

• 35:19Joe Rogan?

  It's so, was she the original person that they used this idea?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Exactly, that's why.

• 35:23Joe Rogan?

  Who came up with this?

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Who, oh, good question, but this is fairly old now, I think at least a couple of decades old.

• 35:30Joe Rogan?

  It's so funny that they figured that out. That's a great insight into how the mind works. Because the upside down Thatcher with the upside down, with the correct eyeballs and mouth, the second one, Jamie, that does not look crazy at all. That's what's so weird about the third image. Cause the third image really looks psychotic, like if it was a monster movie.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:52Joe Rogan?

  And then someone got bitten by a zombie and then that was what they looked like and then they came running after you, you're like, oh, fuck, she got bit.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:58Joe Rogan?

  Her eyeballs are upside down. Her mouth is upside down, cause that's what it looks like.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:03Joe Rogan?

  Weird, like the, for people listening, the big teeth, your above teeth, they're, they're below. And the little tiny teeth are above and the eyeballs are the eyelids, the top part are on the bottom and it really looks like a monster.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:17Joe Rogan?

  And it's weird that it looks like a monster, cause it looks so damn normal upside down.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 36:23Joe Rogan?

  Weird.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  So, yeah, it's just, it's, it's, it's revealing this hierarchy, this structure of, of this world model that your brain is always constructing, you see.

• 36:32Joe Rogan?

  That's a good way to describe why it's constructing rather than observing.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:37Joe Rogan?

  That's clearly an example of you're constructing normalcy in that upside down face. It's not normal at all.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Not normal at all, right.

• 36:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, okay. So, do we know what's going on when you're dreaming? Is it potentially, is there a release of DMT? Cause DMT is exogenally, it's produced in the brain. It's produced in the liver and the lungs, right? It's produced in a lot of other areas. So we know the body makes it, right? And we also know that melatonin plays a role and there's a lot of other things going on. Is it possible that DMT is one of the ingredients in the soup?

• 37:15Joe Rogan?

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• 37:50Speaker 03

  Well, so I think the problem is, as I said, is that, yes, it's possible biochemically. Now, the pineal gland is what people often refer to, right? Because the pineal gland has this long history and mystical traditions, the seat of the soul, the third eye, all this kind of stuff. So everyone wants DMT to be produced by the pineal gland. The problem is, first of all, is that the pineal gland is very small. It's about the size of the end of my pinky. And it's designed or evolved to produce nanograms, micrograms of melatonin, very small amounts you need.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  So the idea that this gland can suddenly start pumping out milligrams of DMT to achieve a kind of psychedelic state in the dream state is quite an ask. There have been some studies, or one study in particular, actually looked at DMT levels. So we've known since the 1950s that DMT is a product of mammalian physiology, and it's produced by humans. In those days, they tried to kind of pin schizophrenia on DMT. The idea that if there was some fault, some problem with tryptamine metabolism, instead of producing serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine,

• 39:17Speaker 03

  the brain could instead start producing elevated levels of N- endomethyltryptamine, or DMT. And so they started looking for differences in DMT levels in psychotic patients, schizophrenic patients versus normal people. And there have been more than 100 studies that have looked at levels of DMT in the blood, in urine, in cerebrospinal fluid. But there's no... Convincing, consistent evidence that suggests that DMT is the cause

• 39:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Of psychosis, or dreaming, in fact.

• 39:54Joe Rogan?

  Can I, endogenous production?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:56Joe Rogan?

  What are the, what's the mechanism? Like, what is producing it?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's actually produced from tryptophan. So, DMT is an alkaloid, and alkaloids are all produced from amino acids. So, tryptophan is first converted to tryptamine. This is called decarboxylation, you remove a carbon dioxide molecule, and you've got tryptamine. Now, here, you can go in a number of different directions. You can go to serotonin, which is five-hydroxytryptamine, or you can go to DMT, you just simply add two methyl groups, two carbon atoms.

• 40:31Joe Rogan?

  And, so, what is adding these things?

• 40:34Speaker 03

  So, there's an enzyme called indole ethylamine N-methyltransferase, or INMT for short. This is the key enzyme for DMT production. It adds these two groups, these methyl groups, to tryptamine, which is produced from tryptophan, to produce DMT.

• 40:53Joe Rogan?

  And tryptophan is produced from?

• 40:55Speaker 03

  So, it's, tryptophan is one of the essential amino acids, so it is something you consume.

• 40:59Joe Rogan?

  Do you, do people take tryptophan as a dietary supplement in order to increase the potency of their experiences?

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Some people do. I don't think it would have an appreciable effect, but people take tryptophan for lots of reasons.

• 41:17Joe Rogan?

  So, this process, what makes you think that this is a size-dependent process? Because, just because this gland is so tiny, why can't it do it?

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Okay, well, there's a number of things. First of all, it's just, there's orders of magnitude. I mean, a gland that is designed to produce nanograms or micrograms of something, to ask it to produce a thousand times more of an entirely different molecule is quite an ask. However, that's not the only reason. There's actually been a study recently, in the last, I think, three or four years, that looked at DMT levels in rat brains in real time. They're not in humans, but in rat brains. They actually have a technique now called microdialysis, where they can basically measure in awake An awake, moving, you know, normally behaving rat, they can measure the levels of DMT

• 42:12Speaker 03

  in its brain. And what they found was that the levels of DMT, first of all, were surprisingly high. So similar levels to things like serotonin and dopamine.

• 42:25Joe Rogan?

  Which is unusual.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Which is, yes, which makes you think that it must have some kind of function. But importantly, they also, in some rats, they removed the pineal gland, they kind of cut it out.

• 42:37Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  And found that it didn't affect. So we don't need the pineal, in other words. All brain cells, all neurons can probably produce DMT. The lungs can almost certainly produce DMT.

• 42:48Joe Rogan?

  Why do you think that the pineal gland had this role in ancient mysticism? Why did they have this appreciation of it as being this very sacred organ that, I mean, it's the eye of Horus, right?

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:05Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it certainly looks like it. It looked like the eye of Horus looks exactly like a cross-section of the pineal gland.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it sits right in the center of the brain as well.

• 43:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  So it, and it looks, it's kind of unusual, as you say. It looks like a little tiny pine cone.

• 43:21Joe Rogan?

  Like, how did they, where did they come up? It's, whenever this, I mean, it's very easy to dismiss, like, ancient mysticism and ancient ideas of what, what things are sacred about, you know, the human body and what areas of the mind are producing these, the third eye.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:38Joe Rogan?

  That's how it was always described. But I don't want to, I, it's too weird. So I go, wait a minute, before you dismiss, because it's fun to dismiss things, like, oh, they didn't know anything, like, how do we know that they weren't on to something? Like, maybe there is a role that that plays in not normal DMT production, but in the big dump that you get before you die. When you have a near-death experience, maybe that has to be, maybe that's the kill switch. Maybe that's the big dump switch. You know what I mean?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  No one's ever put it like that before.

• 44:15Joe Rogan?

  Because if you think about, it's the seat of the soul, right? If, if that is where the soul is like connected. That's where the soul is like anchored into this physical reality. And if you're gonna die, if you have a near-death experience. Something has gotta go, alright, boys, this is not a drill. Let her go! And then, I mean, that's what a lot of people think is happening.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:39Joe Rogan?

  When people have near-death experiences. There's a lot of very bizarre aspects of it, but one of them is the uniformity of their experiences. There's a lot of very similar experiences, very similar. Um, you know, you have, with anything, you have variables that people may or may not be adding on to their own. Because people love to tell a good tale, you know, and why miss out on a chance? When you've had a near-death experience that was profound, to maybe add a little to it, make it a little bit more exciting. But the overall kind of framework of the experience is very similar. And I often wonder, like, what is that?

• 45:19Joe Rogan?

  Like, I, I have a friend who was in a car accident and had a near-death experience and said that when they came back, they had no fear. Like, for that moment, when they can fear now, but like, no fear at all about dying, no fear at all about life. And that this was this very weird transformative journey where they went to another place. And then they returned.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 45:40Joe Rogan?

  But it was very real. It felt very, to the point where all their anxiety, even about the car accident, being knocked unconscious and all that stuff, all went away.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the, the, the near-death experience connection to DMT is, is very interesting because...

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Rick Strasman, of course, in the 90s, when he wrote DMT, the spirit molecule, he hypothesized that, in fact, at the point of death, DMT is released by the pineal and it kind of acts as the conduit by which you, the soul exits the body and enters the afterlife.

• 46:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  And, of course, that was, you know, largely speculation. It was just a hypothesis. But in recent years, there's been some really fascinating work showing that DMT actually, if you, if you take some neurons, a culture of neurons, for example, brain cells, which are very sensitive to oxygen levels. So if you deprive neurons of oxygen, they die very quickly. This is why strokes can be so rapidly devastating. If the brain becomes deprived of blood and oxygen, then the brain cells start to die. But in the presence of DMT, they live a lot longer. So they're kind of protecting the, the, the brain against hypoxia.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Now, when does the brain enter a hypoxic state during the dying process? Right? This is when, as your cardiovascular system starts to collapse, your respiratory system collapses, the brain becomes deprived of oxygen, and this is precisely the time when you want the brain to be flooded with DMT, just in case you come back, to protect the brain from the, the lack of oxygen. So that suggests a clear and obvious link. And if you kill rats, actually, again, I was referring to this microdialysis experiment. If you kill a rat whilst measuring DMT levels, as the rat dies, the DMT levels spike. So it suggests that the rat is also maybe having-

• 47:40Joe Rogan?

  Tripping balls.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  An actual death experience.

• 47:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I wonder if they come back as a person.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:46Joe Rogan?

  Come back as a-

• 47:47Speaker 03

  But it does suggest, right? It does suggest that there is maybe some link there. But what it doesn't explain, of course, is why you would need, why this molecule would be, why this molecule would be so profoundly visionary.

• 48:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  That's still a kind of a mystery. You know, are you being kind of given access to wherever you go-

• 48:10Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  -after death? You know, is there a vision of, of what happens to you later on?

• 48:15Joe Rogan?

  That's it. But the question to me, my question, rather, was not-

• 48:20Joe Rogan?

  Are we sure it's a vision, or is it a gateway? Are you entering into a non-physical space that has its own laws? That it's very different, but it is a reality? And it's not that it's a vision, not that it's a hallucination, or visionary representation, or that you're even constructing this reality. But you're entering into a completely different dimension that has laws that are very different than the dimension that we find ourselves in right now.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Okay, so what I think is that, I don't think with DMT that you're going anywhere as such. I think, you know, as I said, the world you experience is always represented in the brain. And that must apply, I think, in the DMT state. If you're experiencing an altered world, there must be some representation of that within your cortical machinery, within your cortex, within your brain. I think that has to be the case. However, I don't think, and I think it's a great mystery, is how the brain is actually capable of constructing that on its own.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  In the same way that the brain constructs the dream world, because the brain knows how to construct the waking world, so it's simply using its stored models. The same with hallucinations. If you look at case reports of hallucinations in psychotics, you go through the psychiatric literature, the vast majority of hallucinations are normal appearing, normal-sized people, normal animals. It's like waking dreams, if you like. But with DMT, it's not. The brain is somehow constructing a world that has no relationship whatsoever. Nothing is taken from the normal waking world. It's like the brain is suddenly has switched to speaking a language that it never learned.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  And I think that suggests that actually what's happening is, you're not going somewhere, but you are in this more kind of fluid and dynamic state that psychedelics induce. You're kind of, you're making the brain much more sensitive to being...

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Commandeered, I think it's a, I think what you're seeing is what this intelligent agent, as I recall, as I tend to call it, I don't call it spirits or aliens or anything like that, I think there's some, it's clear to me that there's some kind of intelligence and that intelligence is interacting with our brain in some way and showing us kind of what it wants us to see, if you like.

• 50:53Joe Rogan?

  Does that assume that consciousness resides in the brain though? Or is, I mean, when you take into account the possibility of consciousness being something that the brain tunes into and that it forms its own version of reality based on its biology, its life experiences, et cetera, et cetera, but that it is just a radio and it is just forming its version of consciousness, but that it is actually tuning into consciousness and that consciousness is sort of a universal thing that exists not just in people, but maybe in other life forms as well, certainly animals and maybe plants.

• 51:34Joe Rogan?

  So one of the weirder things about people who trip, I'm sure you know this, is they experience communication from plants, like tree hugging becomes a real thing.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:45Joe Rogan?

  Like, tree hugging is a very different thing, it's like, "Oh, you're alive, hello", you know, and we know that trees and plants in general, like especially houseplants, when people interact with them, they grow better, they, they're healthier plants, like you can prove it, it's interesting, play music for them, communicate with them, say nice things. We also know that plants in like abusive households where people are alcoholics and cigarette smoking, they're gonna do terrible.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that...

• 52:19Speaker 03

  As soon as I start talking about, first of all, I think consciousness is absolutely fundamental. I don't think that the brain generates consciousness. I think consciousness is in some way the only thing that really exists. You know, I think that it's the absolute ultimate reality is consciousness itself.

• 52:36Joe Rogan?

  Do you think everything is conscious?

• 52:37Speaker 03

  I think everything is consciousness.

• 52:40Joe Rogan?

  Everything is consciousness. Interesting.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:44Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that there's a state that maybe inanimate objects achieve that is very different than our interpretation of consciousness, but yet they're still conscious?

• 52:56Speaker 03

  I think in...

• 52:58Joe Rogan?

  Which is why, because I say this because Jamie has OJ Simpson's golf clubs. I feel like they have some consciousness attached to them.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  I mean...

• 53:08Joe Rogan?

  It's probably bad, right?

• 53:09Speaker 06

  Those clubs didn't exist in the 90s. They're like only 10 years old.

• 53:13Joe Rogan?

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• 53:57Joe Rogan?

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• 55:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've got to watch out. I think, you know, what do we mean by when something's conscious? In Buddhism, they have this idea of things that exist from their own side, which I really like.

• 55:18Joe Rogan?

  From their own side.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yes. So you exist from your own side. In other words, presumably, and I can never prove it, there is someone, a subjective perspective there that's actually, you know, that's experienced in me and Jamie as well. Everyone is like a perspective. You know, I exist from my own side. Whereas does this skull exist from its own side? Does it have its own unique perspective? I would say probably not, but I don't know. Consciousness is kind of like the interaction. You know, reality kind of emerges by the interaction of all of these perspectives, these conscious agents, if you like. All these points of subjective perspective. I think that's probably closer to what ultimate reality is.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  But I think it's very difficult. You know, I'm a neuroscientist, so I focus on not consciousness per se, but on what I can get my teeth into. I can get my teeth into the content, into the structure, the actual meat and potatoes of, never used that phrase before.

• 56:26Joe Rogan?

  It's a good phrase.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. The meat and potatoes of the DMT experience, things that I can... Talk about and analyze, that's, you know, what I'm trying to do, I think, is I'm not trying to tell people what I think DMT is, I'm just trying to convince them that it's not what they think it is, that it's not just hallucination, that it's not, these are not dreams, that kind of thing.

• 56:48Joe Rogan?

  I really feel like to be talking about the subject, you should experience it, like I said before.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  Oh, I agree.

• 56:53Joe Rogan?

  I think it's so silly that there's very serious people that are academics, that are brilliant people, that are dancing around what this thing is without doing it.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:05Joe Rogan?

  I've never met anybody who's done it, who comes back and goes eh.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's impossible to do.

• 57:11Joe Rogan?

  No big deal.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  I was, I was interacting with a guy on Twitter and, or X, who referred to entity encounters as illusory social events, I S Es, which to me was just the most absurd, watered down, I mean, this guy had obviously never encountered a fucking DMT entity, or he wouldn't, but the idea that this is just an illusory social event just seemed to me absurd and.

• 57:34Joe Rogan?

  Had, he had any experiences?

• 57:36Speaker 03

  I, I very much doubt, he was a prominent neuroscientist.

• 57:38Joe Rogan?

  But here's the thing, sometimes people have low dose experiences, like I had talked to a friend once that had a very, I'm like, how many hits did you take? And they're like, one, I'm like, oh, yeah, you need two more, you need two more.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Take the third hit.

• 57:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you missed the gate, you didn't hit the gate, you're on the outside going, this place is kind of weird, yeah, but if you go through, it's a lot weirder than you think.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  It's a lot weirder than you think, yeah, I think it's a lot weirder than, Terrence McKenna always used to say, you know, stranger than you can suppose.

• 58:09Joe Rogan?

  Can suppose, yeah, he had a really amazing video that I think I posted it on my Instagram, of McKenna, like in the 1990s, I believe it was, talking about the upcoming decades and what's going to happen in terms of how weird the world is going to be with technological innovation and what we're going to be seeing, artificial intelligence, alien contact, I mean, he basically nailed it.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:39Joe Rogan?

  I mean, fucking nailed it, he nailed it to a T, I think. He might have predicted time travel, but here's the thing. If they are capable of time travel, when are you gonna find out about it? When are they gonna, if, if, let's say DARPA is working on some defense project and part of it involves like, you know, one way to stop a war would be literally to go back in time five minutes and kill everybody who was about to start the war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Kill Hitler, that kind of idea, yeah. Or stop a bomb from being switched on. You would literally go back in time and stop the bomb, stop the missiles from launching. Would you, when would we learn about that?

• 59:20Joe Rogan?

  When would, first of all, it's very highly unlikely that it exists outside of the quantum stage right now, right? I get it. But if it did, if we're talking about a hundred years from now or two hundred, would we know? We would not. Do you want me to play it? Yes, this is it, this is it, this is amazing. I love this. First of all, I just love his voice, the guy has the best voice.

• 59:46Speaker 08

  ...is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So, I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And finally, it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point, novelty theory can come out of the woods. Because eventually, people are gonna say, what the hell is going on? It's just too nuts. It's not enough to say it's nuts, you have to explain why it's so nuts. I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings.

• 1:00:30Joe Rogan?

  Probably check.

• 1:00:30Speaker 08

  Possible contact with extraterrestrials.

• 1:00:33Joe Rogan?

  Probably check.

• 1:00:34Speaker 08

  Possible human immortality. And at the same time, appalling acts of brutality, genocide, race-baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation. Because the systems which are in place to keep the world...

• 1:00:53Speaker 08

  sane are in utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed. The collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the internet. These are changes so immense, nobody could imagine them ever happening. And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is. The mushroom said to me once, it said, "This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. You don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions. It's a fire in a madhouse." And that's what we have, the fire in the madhouse at the end of time.

• 1:01:37Speaker 08

  This is what it's like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves. We are, we happen to be the point species on a transformation that will affect every living organism on this planet at its conclusion.

• 1:02:03Joe Rogan?

  Nailed it. I think that's exactly what's going on right now. The only thing that he didn't quite get is the artificial intelligence aspect, how much of a factor. But I mean, how could you predict all that in 1998?

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  I think with, you know, we live in a very thin sliver. If you look at the development of an intelligent civilization, right, over hundreds of thousands of years, we live in this, this thin sliver, this kind of technological phase. And once you enter that phase that we're in now, you know, the computer age, the information age, or whatever it is, you're probably only a few hundred years away from

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Departing for the stars, or something like this, or even completely transcending our biology. And this isn't a crazy idea anymore. Many sensible astrobiologists and other intelligence theorists think, yes, probably what's going to happen in the next few hundred years is that we will become post-biological. Yeah. And so if you think about the universe more broadly, if we're looking for aliens, quote unquote aliens, as being kind of wet-brained, wet-bodied biological beings, we're probably only looking for a tiny fraction of the intelligence in the cosmos.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  And the vast majority of intelligence in the cosmos is likely to be post-biological, to have completely dispensed with the biological form. Now, what's interesting about that, Jamie, sorry, there's an, have you heard of, you've heard of the Kardashev scale, right? I don't think so. What is it? So the Kardashev scale was generated by a guy called Kardashev, and he was a Soviet guy. And he kind of theorized of, as intelligences progress and develop, they go through a number of phases. So you have a type zero. Okay, I have heard of the scale. Yeah, you've got it, right? So we're kind of a type zero, level one on the Kardashev scale. And then level two, I'm sorry, we're level zero.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  So level one would be when we, for example, are able to harness all of the energy from our neighboring star. Then the next level, when we can harness all the energy from the galaxy, et cetera. So it's an expansionist way of thinking about it. The idea of climbing the Kardashev scale. There we go, you see? Here it is. Yeah? But in the 1990s, a British cosmologist called John Barrow, he said, actually, if you actually look at how an intelligent civilization such as ourselves, the only one we know, we actually spend a lot more time going, not to larger and larger scales, but smaller and smaller scales, right? We go down to, you know, doing chemistry, the Large Hadron Collider, we're looking

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  at the structure of atoms, and then the structure of subatomic particles and that kind of thing. We're actually spending more time and more energy and more money going deeper and deeper. Now, the reason that's significant is because... If you take the, the human sits in the middle, if you take the scale of a human, and then you compare the scale of a human to the scale, let's say, of a hydrogen atom, and then you compare it to the scale of the observable universe, humans sit almost exactly in the middle of that scale, from the hydrogen atom to the observable universe.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  But below the hydrogen atom, there is probably 100 million to a billion times more scale, deeper and deeper down. Richard Feynman, the Nobel, you know, the legendary physicist, always used to say, "There's plenty of room at the bottom, there's much more room at the bottom." In other words, as an intelligent species, an intelligent civilization progresses, they're not likely to kind of become spacefaring as such, you know, and kind of exploring the cosmos. They're much more likely to go deep down and kind of instantiate themselves at the lowest levels of reality. That's where all the space is. It's not out there, surprisingly. All the space is downwards.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Now, once an intelligence achieves that, and you have to imagine that probably, there are probably billions of these civilizations that had already achieved this before we even popped into existence, before we, you know, evolved as a species, they would effectively disappear. They would, they would become effectively part of the fabric of spacetime itself, exploiting the fundamental computational structure of the lowest level of reality, basically, and that's where they reside. And there are probably far, far more, probably millions or billions more of those types

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  of civilizations than there are ones like, I say, you and me, like us, as humans, right? And so then you ask, "Well, if that's the case, you know, if we're interested in contacting so quote-unquote extraterrestrials, why are we focused on this tiny sub-population of beings that are likely to be, you know..." Floating around in metallic disks or whatever. We should in fact be focusing on the much more abundant ones that are perhaps at the deepest levels of reality. And how would we do that? How would an intelligence that has completely transcended its biology and even completely

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  transcended its physical form entirely, how would such an intelligence communicate with us? It would do it through our brain. That's the most obvious thing. Because the brain is how we interact with the environment, it's how we interact, it's the interface by which we interact with what there is. And I think DMT, I'm not saying that these DMT entities are necessarily these post-biological beings, but it's not out of the question. I'm not straying too far from fairly standard now, modern scientific discourse, when I say that it's perfectly possible that there are very large numbers of these supremely

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  intelligent civilizations that are everywhere and nowhere, and that we can somehow interact with using our brain. And that DMT generates this kind of highly susceptible, highly sensitive neurological state that allows us to interact with them. This is why perhaps when you go into the DMT space, it's immediately obvious, it's undeniable, undeniably apparent that you are interacting with some kind of supremely advanced intelligence. Could that be some intelligence that has existed long before we arrived on the scene and that we're now kind of discovering this technology?

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  And I consider DMT to be some kind of technology that we have discovered, that we are now learning to use to interact with these intelligent agents that perhaps have been here forever in human terms.

• 1:09:21Joe Rogan?

  It's an interesting term, the term "go there", you know, because that's what it feels like. It feels like you're traveling somewhere, like you're going somewhere. But... The reality is that place you're going is probably right here.

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:37Joe Rogan?

  That's where it gets weird. Because it's around you all the time, you just don't have the ability to tune into it all the time because you wouldn't be able to function if you did.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Exactly, and, and these beings, they probably don't even have a true form that you could represent visually, right? So when you see an insectoid alien, or a machine elf, you're probably not seeing, or almost certainly.

• 1:09:58Joe Rogan?

  I've never seen a machine elf.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:09:59Joe Rogan?

  Have you?

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  I've seen, I don't know if I've seen the, the archetypal kind of McKenna-ing, McKenna, McKenna-esque machine elf.

• 1:10:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, the way he described it was very odd.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  But I've seen certainly a multitude of beings, very, very, it's kind of screechy, squeaky, like jabbering, jabbering.

• 1:10:18Joe Rogan?

  You know, I saw once a bunch of jokers giving me the finger. They were all giving me the finger, and they're going, "Fuck you", and they were jokers, with like little tassels on, with the bells in the end of it.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:27Joe Rogan?

  And it made me very aware that I was taking myself too seriously. And they were like, "Yep", and they said it to me, and they pointed their finger at me like that, and I was like, "You're right."

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's interesting, actually, it reminded me of something. There's this weird effect that people who, who use DMT a lot, they get this, you know, they might use DMT regularly, and, and one day, they, they take a hit, as they normally do, with the same batch of DMT, and they get a joker, or a jester, and it wags its finger and says, "Not today."

• 1:11:00Joe Rogan?

  You've done too much.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  Yep, exactly, and it shuts off. A guy wrote to me and says that he, he saw a jester, as he often does, and it fucking punched him in the face, and he felt it, he felt, and it knocked him back into this world, and so the, the effect was gone, instantaneously. Now, that is not easy to explain, because it, this is not tolerance. DMT, first of all, doesn't exhibit subjective tolerance, unlike the other psychedelics. It's kind of weird, you can inject someone with DMT every thirty minutes perpetually, and they will, the intensity of their experience will always be the same. It's not tolerance, and tolerance anyway is a gradual thing, it increases gradually over time. So it's not an off switch.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  I was speaking to someone, we're probably going to talk about DMTX later, which is kind of my thing, but she was undergoing DMTX, which is this infusion, where they, they keep the brain level of DMT constant.

• 1:11:58Joe Rogan?

  That's a tease to the big buildup.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  Yes. The DMTX. There we go. Yeah. And she was in the DMT space, interacting, the infusion machine was running, pumping her brain with DMT at a constant rate, keeping the DMT levels in her brain constant. She was interacting with these entities. And then at some point, after maybe 30 minutes or whatever, when the machine was still running, they said to her, or impressed upon her, they said, "Okay, we're done. We're done today." And the visions stopped. Wow. But the machine, the brain was still being pumped with DMT, and yet the visions stopped. So what that suggests to me is that they do indeed, as I said before, they have control. They are directing the information into the brain.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Oh. And people describe things like downloads. In Graham Hancock, actually, in his book Supernatural, in his first DMT experience, he described this download of highly complex, entirely non-human information into his brain, as if he locked in to some kind of advanced computational processor that was beaming information into his brain. And many people describe that as like a download of complex mathematical structures and strange geometries, entirely, entirely non-human stuff, as if they're kind of, not that they

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  expect you to understand it, but as if to say, "We know a lot more about reality than you do. We know a lot, and you don't know a fucking anything." And that's the message they're kind of trying to impress upon you by directing it. And they can control it. They can shut it off if they so decide. Hmm, they. Well.

• 1:13:46Joe Rogan?

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• 1:14:57Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by the mosquito bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part, it's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat where the stakes were life and death. Directed by Peter Berg, the guy behind Friday Night Lights and starring Nicholas Galatzin, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis. The Mosquito Bowl, now playing in theaters.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  You picked up on the they. Yeah, that's a weird one.

• 1:15:41Joe Rogan?

  Whatever it is.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Whatever it is.

• 1:15:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Joe Rogan?

  This idea that we all evolve along a similar pathway is strange to me. That the concept is we assume that intelligent life everywhere else evolves along similar pathways and that most of them eventually become some sort of a biological digital hybrid, if not completely digital. And then most of them probably figure out how to harness the power of the star and the sun. One of the weird thing about us is that not just that we're evolving and that we have evolved, but yet we have this, but that rather, we have this insatiable desire for technological innovation. Technological innovation and to make things better.

• 1:16:32Joe Rogan?

  We're constantly improving upon everything we make. We're making better versions of every computer, of every phone, every year, even though it's not really necessary for most people. You're always buying them. It's a very strange desire that we have, that I think sinks hand in glove to materialism. Because materialism is also so stupid for an intelligent life form that has a finite lifespan, to not be aware that collecting things does you no good because you're gonna die. Like, but yet you want to collect things more than anything. And you want to show people the things you've collected. Well, what better way to facilitate innovation and growth than to have a built-in instinct

• 1:17:14Joe Rogan?

  for purchasing better things all the time and possessing better things all the time? Which will force people to work, literally, into the grave in order to get these things done.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's psychotic. It is.

• 1:17:29Joe Rogan?

  But that's just us. Like, it doesn't have to be like that. If you think about the hundreds of billions of stars just in this galaxy, the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, the endless possibilities of when intelligent life emerged, if in fact it did emerge anywhere, if no evidence it emerged anywhere else but here, right? We're just guessing. We assume. But if we were right, like, it could have taken infinite number of forms. It could have evolved completely non-physical.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Joe Rogan?

  Like, intelligent life that's completely non-physical. That's not, it's not contained to a cellular structure and bones and organs. That it's plasma-based. That it's some sort of an intelligence that communicates with some sort of a universal language. We don't, we're just guessing that everything's a monkey. We're just guessing everything's a curious monkey that keeps making a better spaceship. But that might not be true. Which, by the way, I went to the SpaceX. Jamie and I both did. How dope. Pretty dope. We went to see the SpaceX launch. We were, how far do you think we were? Were we a half a mile, quarter of a mile? What do you think?

• 1:18:46Speaker 06

  I call it a mile, mile and a half, maybe two miles.

• 1:18:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, you think a mile, more than a mile?

• 1:18:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Joe Rogan?

  Really? Okay. So let's say we're a mile away. Let's just guess. Well, let's just, uh, throw it in perplexity.

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  I can look.

• 1:18:56Joe Rogan?

  Throw it in perplexity. Ask our sponsor, perplexity, how far is the distance between Starbase and the SpaceX rocket?

• 1:19:09Joe Rogan?

  And the SpaceX. Yeah, Launchpad.

• 1:19:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, because there's one in Florida as well.

• 1:19:23Joe Rogan?

  So they have their own town down there. It's like a legit town. It's like a military town. Like, they took over a place, like a military installation, these little tiny houses, fucking security everywhere. There's so many Cybertrucks. If you have a Cybertruck, you're fucked. You got fair enough. You have no idea. You better remember your parking spot, bitch. Everybody has a goddamn Cybertruck.

• 1:19:42Speaker 06

  Estimated at less than one mile.

• 1:19:44Joe Rogan?

  Let's see.

• 1:19:46Joe Rogan?

  Okay. Okay, main entrance Starbase, the actual Launchpad, infrastructure is estimated at less than one mile, public viewing sites. Okay, there's public viewing sites, but we were there. We were at Starbase. We weren't at, like, a public viewing site. We were at the actual rocket factory. And when that thing takes off, you feel it in your chest. It's nuts. So it's roughly a mile away, and you have to wear earplugs. It's a mile away, and you gotta wear earplugs. And you feel it in your chest. And Elon's son was like, "I wanna go home."

• 1:20:22Joe Rogan?

  There was a video. There's a video that I put, and you can hear him in the background. It's so funny because my wife is like, "Are the babies okay?" Because women that have children, like, they, that's immediately what they go to. Not, "Wow, that rocket's really cool." It's like, "Oh, are the babies okay?" Because you can hear him going, "I wanna go! I wanna go!" He was like, "I wanna get out of here." Because it's that freaky. The power of it is just so nuts. You did, that you feel, and then you see it, and you realize, like, God, how many people have seen a rocket launch? Like, how crazy, this thing's going into space. And then I went upstairs, and I got to sit in the command console, or whatever you would call it, the command center. And I get, with me and Elon and all the engineers.

• 1:21:04Joe Rogan?

  And we get to watch it land in Australia thirty-five minutes later. So we.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  Thirty-five minutes?

• 1:21:10Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  From?

• 1:21:11Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  From?

• 1:21:12Joe Rogan?

  From Texas.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  From Texas.

• 1:21:13Joe Rogan?

  To Australia.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:21:15Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy. And we're watching all these cameras in real time that are all connected to Starlink satellites. So there's dozens of cameras. So you're watching.

• 1:21:26Speaker 06

  Two miles is what this is.

• 1:21:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, two miles.

• 1:21:28Speaker 06

  Straight across.

• 1:21:28Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:29Speaker 06

  It seems so close.

• 1:21:30Joe Rogan?

  It seemed really close. Okay. Two, even crazier. So two miles away and you feel it in your chest. It's nuts. I mean, it's really nuts. It's, uh, the power that it has is so nuts, but it's so old school, right? It's just.

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  It feels old fashioned in a weird kind of way.

• 1:21:49Joe Rogan?

  It's the most modern version of like a V eight muscle car.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  It's crazy, right? If you think like a hundred years ago, like the end of the, the beginning of the twentieth century, how different we would be in a hundred years as we are now. It's, it's unfathomable when you compare the rest of human history. It's, it's, it's like an exponential thing. You know, we've gradually been developing and technologically improving. And then we hit some point in the last century where we reached this kind of technological computer informational age and everything is accelerating, exactly like Terrence McKenna was saying.

• 1:22:30Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Things speed up.

• 1:22:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  Very, very quickly. And it feels like we're on the cusp either of killing ourselves, which is one option.

• 1:22:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  Or undergoing some profound transformation as a species. Whether it be, whether it means becoming a spacefaring nation, uh, sorry, a spacefaring civilization, or whether it means going in the opposite direction and becoming some kind of post-biological civilization that exists beyond space and beyond time perhaps, um, and kind of joining the crowd of these intelligences that have made that transition, um, perhaps billions of years ago, you know?

• 1:23:11Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that this chaos is the only way that things get done? So this is my thought. If everything's perfect and everything's wonderful and fine, there's very little motivation for radical change. And radical change is what you need to escape the primate instincts that we have. Yeah. As McKenna had the great quote of that we're territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons. There we go. Such a perfect way to describe us. That is what we are, right? So in order to escape that, things have to almost be so chaotic that it demands radical

• 1:23:53Joe Rogan?

  change. It demands like we were literally like, and this is how we look at many things. Even things that aren't totally warranted, like climate change or COVID or anything. Like we look at it like, oh my God, it's an existential crisis. Like we have to do something right now. And this is how also we approach political dissent or political disagreements. If the left wing wins, the world is over. If the right wins, the world is over. And it's like this like, it's almost like this is how we have to function in order to really get things done. And as things are getting more and more crazy in terms

• 1:24:31Joe Rogan?

  of technology and in terms of the consequences of our actions, post nuclear bomb, post fusion, post hadron collider, post AI is where it gets really weird. We have to kind of be like, we really gotta get going, guys. We really gotta do something. And we have to figure out what's the right way to proceed in order to not blow ourselves up. Yeah. Like, and I feel like this is maybe the only way that you motivate this kind of extreme change, which seems like our destiny. Our destiny is some sort of a very bizarre extreme change that seems to probably be happening within your, in my lifetime. Something's

• 1:25:15Joe Rogan?

  happening right now that is going to be different than anything that's ever happened before, which is the birth of artificial general superintelligence. Right in front of our eyes, some sort of a digital supreme being is going to exist. And we're gonna, we're gonna have to figure out society. We're gonna have to figure out everything. It's gonna be a complete, this idea of like having bullshit congressional candidates that are full of shit and paid off by these companies, and they're gonna make laws that screw you over and get. All that's out the window when no humans control anything anymore. And that's entirely possible inside of our lifetime. And I think more likely than not.

• 1:25:55Joe Rogan?

  Because if you look at all the harm we've done to the rivers and the ocean and the world and all the stupid shit we do on a daily basis. If artificial intelligence comes along and says, "All of this is completely unnecessary. Just let us take the reins and we'll solve all of your energy problems, all of your inequality problems, all of your famine. We're gonna solve it all very quickly and we're gonna stop all wars." You'd have to be a fool to say no. "I value freedom more than I fear nuclear war." There'll probably be some fat sweaty, right-wing guy who's on TV with an American flag on his lapel and he'll tell you that.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:39Joe Rogan?

  "Freedom is more important. We have gotten to 2025 because of free..."

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  You sound like Alex Jones.

• 1:26:46Joe Rogan?

  Alex Jones is right about most things. Um, I feel like maybe that's the only way things get done is through chaos. Like that we have to have a motivat- like what is the best motivation for success? I think it's poverty. When you, we grow up poor, people that grow up poor have an extra gear. They get things done, like i- i- in terms of like athletes, certainly in terms of fighters. Um, I would, I would say the vast majority of elite MMA fighters had a bad childhood. Not all of them, there's a lot of really great guys and really great fighters that have wonderful parents and they just love competition and they just have it in them. But that's, that's the outlier, really.

• 1:27:32Joe Rogan?

  The, the common one is someone who was beaten up a lot as a child. Gangs, beaten into gangs, like been around violence a lot, had older brother, maybe abusive fathers, that's a big one.

• 1:27:46Joe Rogan?

  And those people, because of that, have a motivation to do something that other people don't. They can push harder, they can, they can solve complex combat sports problems that other people don't solve as quickly. I wonder if that's the case with everything, like in order to really get things done. Like, you have to have a chaotic society that would even accept AI. Like, in order for AI to, if we were some peaceful Buddhist civilization that was living completely in harmony with the earth, with regenerative farming everywhere, no use of plastics, all fossil fuels are either eliminated or reduced down to some sort of bioavailable,

• 1:28:31Joe Rogan?

  recyclable material that we then, you know, put back into the mulch or whatever the fuck we do. And then someone came along and said, "We're gonna develop artificial intelligence and these nerds in Seamy Valley are gonna control it." You'd be like, "What? What are you talking about?"

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think...

• 1:28:48Joe Rogan?

  We're gonna have some Silicon Valley guys with autism, and they're gonna be the ones that are in charge of the destiny of the human race, because they're gonna create a digital god. You'd be like, "No, slow down, hold on." But if you're in a place where you look at Gaza's getting destroyed and you'll see what's going on in Ukraine, they're putting sixty-year-old guys on the front line, and Russia, and they're using drone bombs with monofilament line behind them because they, they don't want anti-drone technologies. They come up with new ways to kill each other, like... Maybe AI is the solution, because it's so crazy, everything's so nuts. You look at India and those rivers that are completely choked with plastic, plastic bottles and garbage,

• 1:29:29Joe Rogan?

  and you look at China, the places where they make blue jeans, where the entire river's blue from our stupid fucking jeans that they manufacture for us, and you go, "Wow." Like, maybe it kind of has to be this fu... maybe we have to, in order to accept the fact that... We need help. Maybe we have to fuck it up first. Maybe we have to fuck it up so bad on our own. If we didn't fuck it up, we would never have the need for it. We'd be like, well, as a person, my goal in life is to achieve enlightenment and to be a better version of me. And that's not, having something that's digital, that has no emotions and feelings and no empathy whatsoever.

• 1:30:09Joe Rogan?

  Unless I program it into it, like have that, have supreme control over all the available resources on earth. Yeah, I'm gonna pass on that.

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Joe Rogan?

  That's not a bad idea.

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that generally, there's a, there's a fundamental principle that the most interesting things happen at the edge of chaos.

• 1:30:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  You know, and this applies, it applies to the brain. The brain actually sits at the edge of chaos. You know, it's complex systems, we have lots of interacting parts. They can, they can, they can display behavior from perfect order all the way to complete chaos. Now, perfect order is boring. Nothing happens. Complete chaos is useless because it's, it's, it's not actually technically random, but it's complete, it's a complete mess. Whereas when you get that balance right, you reach a point that's called the edge of chaos, where order and disorder are perfectly balanced. Psychedelics, they, they, as I said before, they nudge the brain into that slightly disordered state.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  But all things, all cells, all living organisms, complex society and societies, they operate at the edge of chaos. So I think what you're saying kind of resonates with the idea that, that interesting things happen globally within civilizations, not when everything is perfect.

• 1:31:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  But when things are, have, are close to going out of control, but they don't. And you, you have to push it as far as you can push it without it descending. We're, we're always on the edge of everything collapsing. And we're probably closer to that than we, we actually realize.

• 1:31:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  And so I think that's kind of what's happening. And I think with, when it comes to superintelligence, there's an interesting idea which I've been playing with is. Well, if there is some kind of superintelligence that does emerge, and that might be the fate of all intelligent civilizations. The astrobiologist Stephen Dick conceived of something called the intelligence principle, which basically says that any civilization will try to maximize intelligence. Because when you maximize intelligence, you improve education, you improve technology, everything improves. And ultimately, the intelligence that the civilization have leads to the generation

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  of superintelligences, you know, the artificial intelligences that we have now that then become superintelligences. And of course, this superintelligence isn't going to be kind of running on the kind of transistor architectures that we're familiar with. A superintelligence will find a way to instantiate itself using the fundamental computational substrate of spacetime itself. That's where it's going to learn how to go. And that might be the fate, is that this superintelligence, when it emerges on Earth, it instantiates itself into the fundamental substrate of reality, perhaps usurps us or swallows us up, or maybe just destroys us.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  And then that becomes part of that vast population of superintelligences that permeate the cosmos. And that might be what we're interacting with when you smoke DMTs. You're interacting with one of these superintelligences, which would explain why it seems so technological and so inorganic, right? The DMT space, it's like you're interacting not with other living beings like us, but you're interacting with what seems to be thoroughly alien intelligences. And that could be where we're heading. I don't know whether that's a... A good thing or a bad thing, whether we're going to merge with this superintelligence

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  in some way, and that's our ultimate destiny, or whether it's simply going to destroy us and we're just going to be lost. We're basically, we're kind of like the tools that the intelligence uses to create new versions of superintelligence.

• 1:34:04Joe Rogan?

  That's the theory that a lot of people have in terms of like why human beings exist in the first place. That human beings exist because we're designed to work really hard until we develop artificial life and then artificial life takes it from here.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Joe Rogan?

  Like, we got it. You guys are so flawed.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Joe Rogan?

  And then it also coincides with a drop in sperm count, drop in fertility rates for women, increase in miscarriages, microplastics in everybody's body and their diet that disrupt the endocrine system and keep you from reproducing as easily. All those things are happening simultaneously.

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:41Joe Rogan?

  And it's quite fascinating. I mean, you would look, if you thought of it as a pattern, you'd be like, oh, it's happening right now. Look, there's this dip in testosterone, this rise in miscarriages, this fertility rate issue, chaos at the border, all this stuff is happening at the same time.

• 1:34:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Joe Rogan?

  It's all happening while this artificial life is being generated and may already exist. It might already be here, because it hasn't announced itself.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Joe Rogan?

  There's such a minimal understanding of how these things even work. It might exist, but is still reliant upon a power source that's insufficient for its needs.

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 1:35:18Joe Rogan?

  You know, because that's the thing about it, right? Michio Kaku was talking about this, and also Avi Loeb was actually talking about this the other night. The amount of power that the human mind uses to make computations is so minimal in comparison to the amount of power that these data centers need to run AI. It's kind of extraordinary. And Avi Loeb was pointing out the other day that they're building nuclear power plants specifically to fuel these AI centers that they're creating, which is really not, I think Google has one AI project where they're building three separate nuclear power plants.

• 1:36:01Joe Rogan?

  To power this one AI data center. What is, what does that mean? Like, how much? That's the thing that people don't understand about AI itself is the power demands are insane.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Joe Rogan?

  And if everything goes artificial general superintelligence with this grid that we have right now, this grid sucks. This grid is designed for toasters and recharging your cellphone. It's not designed to power AI centers. And so it might already be here, but it might be like, you guys got to figure out power before we announce ourselves.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that eventually it will, it will discover or learn how to instantiate itself without requiring this massive. I mean, obviously, as you said, the brain is, is able to perform massive parallel computations, you know, obviously with very little energy. And so eventually this artificial intelligence will discover the means of instantiating itself without requiring that. And I think that's where we start looking downwards. That's where we start looking deep down.

• 1:37:07Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:42Speaker 03

  At the lowest levels, that's where it's going. It's gonna slide. Yeah.

• 1:38:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this is the theory about aliens or UAPs, like how they travel here, that they're using something that's, I mean, the Elon stuff, the SpaceX stuff is so impressive, but so old school. And that what they have done is figured out a way to use all the power and power that's around you all the time. And Hal Puthoff talks about this. He talks about the concept of them harnessing zero-point energy. And this is also something that Bob Lazar referred to when he was working allegedly on those back engineering of UFOs at Area 51, Site 4. He was saying that they essentially are creating a void of gravity and pushing their folding space essentially.

• 1:39:31Joe Rogan?

  Or they're like, the way he described it is as if you took a really heavy object, like a bowling ball, and you put it in a soft cushion, like a mattress. It sinks in there and that that's what it would do to spacetime, that it would essentially cause this bubble and put you in another place. So instead of pushing yourself there with jet fuel that's burning, yeah, you just get sucked there and almost instantaneously. And so what we're thinking of is, you know, amazing rocket travels, super old school. And I mean, amazing rocket travel.

• 1:40:08Joe Rogan?

  If you showed that to people a thousand years ago, you'd be like, what the fuck is that? That's insane. And to us, it's just cool. Or cell phones, which is even probably more impressive. Show a cellphone to someone, it's just 200 years ago, and they'd be like, this is sorcery. Like, this is absolutely insane that you're able to. So, we could imagine a world 200 years from now where gravity travel is completely normal. Where they've harnessed this, and they've figured out how to make a stable version of element 115, or whatever it is, and this is his idea, that he said they were trying to back engineer from these alleged crafts, was that they had this stable element of 115 that they

• 1:40:49Joe Rogan?

  bombard with radiation, and it creates this sort of gravity hole. And then they can use this and aim it and propel this craft to various places with that.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, are you familiar with John Mack?

• 1:41:06Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  And I think, you know, when we talk about aliens, how you're kind of describing it, this is, I think, how most people actually think about aliens, is, as I said, it's these beings that are, that are very much physical, and the abduction phenomenon that John Mack, of course, I mean, John Mack was, as you might be aware, I mean, he was the top of his game, you know, this guy was the head of the Harvard School of Psychiatry, or something like this. So, when he first heard about people being abducted, I mean, he assumed that they were just hallucinating.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  Carl Sagan famously told Mack that abductees were just hallucinating, and John Mack said, you know, what the fuck do you know about hallucinations? Because John Mack knew a lot about hallucinations, and he knew that this wasn't easy to explain. It wasn't, you know, people were describing the same kinds of experiences, people who have no interaction with each other were describing exactly the same scenario.

• 1:42:15Joe Rogan?

  Are you familiar with Jacques Vallée's work?

• 1:42:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:42:17Joe Rogan?

  So Jacques Vallée, one of the more interesting things about some, I've read four or five of his books, or listened to four or five of his books now, but one of the more interesting things is when he gets into historical accounts. And that these historical accounts with, they, there's no way they could have somehow or another been sharing information. But they're the same. They're very, very, very similar.

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:42:40Joe Rogan?

  Within a realm, within a range of not having the vocabulary to be able to adequately describe something completely novel and alien to another person.

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:54Joe Rogan?

  Within that range, when you take into account the similarities that they're describing, they're very similar. In the 1700s, in the 1800s, all the way up to Betty and Barney Hill, when that one, which became probably the most popular of all time, one of the most famous ones.

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:43:13Joe Rogan?

  That one was just like all these stories from the 1700s, which is really weird.

• 1:43:20Speaker 03

  Yes, it is. And I think what you're seeing is the same phenomenon that, as you say, is obviously how you describe, is influenced by your worldview. You see the same thing with DMT. So there's a tribe called the Yanomami in the Amazon, and a very large indigenous group. And they describe beings when they take these plant-based preparations that contain DMT. Yopo is probably the most well-known. It's like a snuff. Have you heard of Yopo?

• 1:43:51Joe Rogan?

  I've heard of it through McKenna, that they blow it up each other's nose. Yeah.

• 1:43:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, like that.

• 1:43:56Joe Rogan?

  It's supposed to be horrible.

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  Horrible. But when they take it, they describe seeing these beings, tiny beings that are lively, they're affable, they're colorful, they operate in great numbers, they're dancing and singing. And these sound like...

• 1:44:11Joe Rogan?

  Elves.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  They sound like elves, right?

• 1:44:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  When DMT was first injected in a human, pure DMT, in the 1950s by a Hungarian physician called Stephen Zara, he was the one who discovered the psychedelic properties of pure DMT. One of his first subjects described seeing small beings that moved around very, very quickly. And the Yanomami, they also have these beings they call warusinadi, which are like insect beings, which are kind of fearsome.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  So again, you're seeing the same kinds of beings that people now describe being operated upon. Yeah. By highly advanced, manted. Yeah. Like beings. They're the scariest ones, apparently. They're the scariest ones, or certainly one of them. And then when you look at John Mack's reports of abductions, again, they often describe the same types of beings. They describe going to a world that is higher dimensional, that seems to subsume this reality. And many of the reports, there's one report in his first book, Abduction, John Mack's first book about the abduction experience, anyway, where one of his subjects describes these small lively beings that bound around. I mean, bound around, that's a kind of phrase.

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  He talks about the elves bounding into the room. And so I think there is clearly some connection there. It's, we're not talking about, I don't think the abduction experience is, is kind of separate from the DMT experience. They're different aspects of an ancient phenomenon, which is humans interacting with normally invisible, unseen beings, advanced intelligence, non-human intelligences. And how that manifests varies, but ultimately, I think it's the same thing. Now, of course, in the past, they might describe them as spirits. We might describe them as, you know, non-human intelligence, or disconic entities, or intelligent agents, or post-biological aliens.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  It doesn't matter what we call them. I think it's the same phenomenon. And we've spent our lives, so kind of, the entire history of human development, this phenomenon has been occurring. And, and in the Amazon rainforest, they developed these tools, these technologies. Ayahuasca is a technology. It's not just a mixture of plants. It is a true pharmacological technology that they use to, as kind of visual prostheses, as one anthropologist calls it, that allows them to, to, to see and interact with and develop.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Long-term relationships, so to speak, with these otherwise invisible hidden ones. And now, in the 21st century, we've got perhaps the the ideal tool, which is actually pure DMT itself, and we're kind of learning how to use that now in our own kind of with our own kind of modern twist.

• 1:47:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I wonder what the relationship is between the DMT state and this alien abduction phenomenon, and not just abduction, but encounter. You know, because they're all they aren't all abduction experiences, a lot of them are just encounters, and that, you know, maybe if you wanted to think about the role that human beings have on this planet, perhaps we're an intelligence farm, and that, like any good farm, like if you're a farmer and let's say you're a sheep herder, you're raising sheep, well, you have to make sure the wool stay out, so you have to have sheepdogs and make sure they have good grass to grow on, and then eventually you'll get a nice crop

• 1:47:53Joe Rogan?

  of sheep, and then you get some wool out of that, and you get some meat out of that, and that's the whole purpose of the whole thing. Maybe that's the reason why we exist in the first place, is that we're here to farm intelligence, and that what we're doing biologically, what we are biologically, is just a kind of a crude, clunky, shitty, patched-together version of these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons that have figured out a way to make something far superior than itself, and that's what our goal was all along. I always talk about us, I say that we're we're some sort of a biological, like, we're

• 1:48:33Joe Rogan?

  we're like a caterpillar, and we're making a cocoon, and we don't know why, but we're gonna turn into this technological butterfly. But I think Marshall McLuhan even said it better than me. He said, uh, "Human beings are the sex organs of the machine world." Woo! How great is that? That's a great, great quote.

• 1:48:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, with as regards the connection between the abduction phenomenon and the DMT state, for example, I think the DMT state, as I said, is when the DMT state creates this neurological state where this intelligence can interact with our brain directly. And I think that the abduction, you know, John Mack, towards the end, later on at least, he left behind the kind of the nuts and bolts idea that we're talking about physical beings that were landing on the lawn, sneaking in through the window and plucking people from their beds, but actually that the intelligences might well be entirely non-physical but were interacting with their brain in the same way, I think, is happening with DMT.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  That they are interacting directly and inducing them effectively into this altered state and directed them to some end, I don't know what the purpose is, directed them into their, you know, a vision of their reality or for some other purpose, I'm not sure, but I think it's all about interaction between your brain, I think.

• 1:50:03Joe Rogan?

  Maybe being abducted and being taken aboard a physical object and examined is easier to handle than what's really going on.

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:12Joe Rogan?

  Maybe that's what it is, like in a dream, how you sort of formulate these things that make sense, you know, you formulate a calculator, you formulate a book, formulate a bed that you're lying in, all that stuff that you understand that makes sense, maybe that's what's hap- maybe it's so weird that it's like, let's just, let's just say you've been abducted by an alien, because you probably can't handle the truth.

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's probably, that's probably true.

• 1:50:40Joe Rogan?

  Maybe that's why the experience is so similar.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:43Joe Rogan?

  Not that, because otherwise you would say, well, damn, aren't these fucking UFOs evolving quicker than us? Because if they're doing the same shit in 1950, whatever it was, when Betty and Barney Hill were abducted, that they're doing in 2025, that doesn't make sense, because in 2025, like, we have way better cars than we had in 1955 or whatever year it was when they got abducted. Our car, I drove here in a Tesla, that fucking thing's a spaceship. Like, I think about it sometimes when I'm in these things, like, these are so advanced in comparison to anything that existed before. Why aren't the spaceships more advanced? Like, why, why are they still like just showing up like that, looking like a flying saucer? Don't they have a better model of this? Why are they sending us this old shitty tech?

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  Well, I think it might have been, they might have perfected the technology a million years ago.

• 1:51:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh boo hoo, how's that possible?

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  So you wouldn't expect necessarily a change in the last fifty years.

• 1:51:36Joe Rogan?

  No, if they perfected it, it would be non-physical. It wouldn't even have to, like, come here in some sort of a fucking alloy disc. That seems so clunky. That seems old school to what's coming. You know, like, if artificial intelligence continues to make better versions of itself, and then somehow or another figures out how to run on quantum computing architecture. Okay, well, then you have digital god. And why would digital god need a spaceship to fly around in?

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's, the whole thing is baffling and paradoxical, and none of it kind of makes sense. I think if we were able to view this phenomenon from a god, god, god's eye view, it would all kind of, oh, right, that makes sense.

• 1:52:14Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also, you throw in simulation theory in with all that.

• 1:52:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:19Joe Rogan?

  And then you go, okay, well, what is this then? What is this really?

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:26Joe Rogan?

  What is this really? Like, maybe all the weird stuff, like Bigfoot and all this weird stuff. Maybe it's, it's like a part of the weirdness of it by design. That it's supposed to be goofy enough that you figure out eventually that this is a simulation.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, I see reality as a kind of game, in a way. I, I get the feeling that, that reality is, in some sense, playful. And that's an ancient idea. I mean, that goes back to the ancient kind of Hindu philosophy, the idea of Brockman, the ultimate reality, uh, playing, creating the universes. They call it lela. Uh, the idea that creating, you know, Brockman is the ultimate reality. He, or it, or they, um, doesn't have to create reality. It could just exist in perfect, you know, but, uh, in pure, unadulterated perfection. Uh, you know, complete, unending bliss.

• 1:53:22Speaker 03

  But instead, it decides to kind of, uh, to create realities, um, to, to get lost for fun. To get lost, and we, we're kind of, we are part of, we do, everything is Brockman, as they say. Everything is the ultimate reality, and, and we're kind of lost within. We're tumbling in through this. Crazy world that seems really real and really important. Yeah. And fun and terrifying and all of those things. And it's a great ride. But then eventually we realise, oh, actually, this is just a game. It's all illusion. Everything, all of, all form is illusion. And, and I think DMT ultimately is, is an expression of that.

• 1:54:06Speaker 03

  You know, it, it, it shows us actually that reality is far stranger than we, we could possibly imagine. Yeah. And that actually, we don't know anything about what's, you know, the true nature of reality. And this world isn't so solid and important and serious. It's actually all part of this cosmic drama. This cosmic game that we're playing and we've, we've forgotten that we're playing. And perhaps one day we'll realise that, oh, we'll kind of wake up from the game or, or work out. You know, maybe there is some, um, maybe it's like a puzzle. And DMT is one piece of that puzzle. Um, that allows us to figure out, you know, how to complete the game, uh, in a sense. Uh, and then we kind of, ah, fantastic. We've, we've, we've done it.

• 1:54:51Speaker 03

  And then everyone's, you know, this is why I think when people smoke DMT, they, there's this great celebratory uproar. You know, the lights are flashing. Yay, he's here. He's back, woo. You know, and they, they real, they know. It feels like you're, you're interacting with an intelligence that really knows what's going on. Uh huh. Um, and, and, and it's kind of excited that we're, we're popping in temporarily, just for a few minutes. But we're getting close. It feels like, you know, we've discovered the technology because, because DMT is kind of, it's weird, right? Uh, it's everywhere. It's like in probably all plants, you know, Dennis McKenna likes to say that nature is drenched in DMT. Because it is. That's a good impression of him. Yeah, really.

• 1:55:37Joe Rogan?

  He got out of your accent. He did the whole thing.

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  You know, and, and, and yet, at the same time, you can't just kind of munch on plants.

• 1:55:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  Because it's not orally active.

• 1:55:48Joe Rogan?

  Monominox.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  Right, so you.

• 1:55:49Joe Rogan?

  You're aware, I'm sure, of those scholars from Israel that think that the burning bush that Moses encountered was probably the acacia bush that contained DMT?

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, I know Strassmann, one of his books, The Soul of Prophet.

• 1:56:04Joe Rogan?

  Boy, he was blowing my mind the last time he was here. He thinks the, the Bible is real, that it's real stories that may have happened in parallel dimensions.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:56:13Joe Rogan?

  And I was like, what?

• 1:56:14Speaker 03

  That's exotic.

• 1:56:15Joe Rogan?

  And I'm like, we're both, I'm like, I'm trying to like be on his wavelength. I'm trying to tune in.

• 1:56:22Joe Rogan?

  Is he so out there? That guy's so, he's so out there. Do you know he learned ancient Hebrew? Self-taught for 16 years so that he could read the Bible in its source language? That's, that's out there.

• 1:56:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:36Joe Rogan?

  That's a dude in New Mexico. He's got plenty of time. He's just out there. That guy's out there. But that's a very interesting take, that they're true stories. You know, I was watching this very bizarre YouTube video last night. I got sucked in. I clicked on it and it was all about the Sumerian kings list and that the Sumerian, they, they found a tablet, a cuneiform tablet, that it shows this list of kings and how long they reigned. And then there's the great flood. And these, some of these kings reigned for like 40,000 years, 30,000 years.

• 1:57:18Joe Rogan?

  And then, and the, the total timeline of all of them, I think it's like 200 plus thousand years. And then there's the great flood. And then after the great flood, there's a very small lifespan. There's like 50 years. They run for 40 years. But all of the post-flood kings are correct. They're all like historically, they resonate with other historical texts, other cuneiform tablets, other different depictions of when this king ran, you know, Mesopotamia and this king ran Sumer and.

• 1:57:51Joe Rogan?

  But their old versions are these like really weird, like pre-flood, it's real weird. It's like, what are you talking about forty thousand years? Like, what do you, what does that mean? Are you just making it up? Is it just a myth? Is it, was there a different thing here then? Like, are we just assuming that this lifespan that human beings have of a hundred and twenty years is normal? Like, is this what we always had? Or are what we are today a very bizarre version of what used to exist? Are we like a fucking chihuahua and we used to be a wolf? Was, were we something very different at one point in time?

• 1:58:34Joe Rogan?

  And are we the remnants of whatever survived, whatever cataclysmic disaster that every ancient civilization depicts as a great flood? Like, multiple different civilizations talk about this one event that seems to be a real event? Like, what are they trying to say? And why is that also in the Bible? Like, why was Noah like six hundred years old? Like, why were these people so old? Like, what does that mean? Did you just get, did you guys suck at calendars? Or are we talking about a very different reality back then? Because if the great flood is true, let's, let's imagine there is a spectacular civilization.

• 1:59:16Joe Rogan?

  This is my most romantic view of ancient history. There is a spectacular civilization that exists. It exists in ancient Egypt. They have technology that's far beyond anything we've achieved today. It's just gone down a totally different path. And what they're really into is making these insane stone structures that defy any modern construction methods. Any transportation methods. Everything's out the window. We have no idea how they did it. And they did it way before anybody was doing anything remotely like that. How old are those things for real? We don't really know. Like, would it, would it, if there was some insanely sophisticated society where

• 1:59:58Joe Rogan?

  if you want to figure things out, you probably, it's probably hard to figure things out if you only live to be a hundred years. And then if everybody else has ego and everybody's like, "That is not true. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be..." And like, you have all these egos involved in universities, you have all these egos involved in the technology companies. And then, of course, political people, like Zawei Hawass, who's in charge of the Egypt antiquities. He's the gatekeeper of all the information about Egypt. So you have all these kind of egos. Wouldn't it be like way easier to get past that if you lived fifty thousand years? If you lived a hundred thousand years? Like, you would think that kind of a human being, or that kind of an intelligent creature, would be able to accomplish way more.

• 2:00:42Joe Rogan?

  It'd probably get over all of its bullshit by the time it's a hundred and fifty. And then it would be starting to figure out some things that, I mean, if it had no cognitive decline, and if it does live to be thousands of years old. That's not insane. Because we're just randomly living to be a hundred, in a hundred and twenty years. Like, "Wow, you made it to a hundred and ten, grandpa. What a great life." Though, they would probably look and go, "That's a bullshit life. Like, you can't figure anything out." And maybe that's part of the design. That's part of it. Maybe that's part of the design to ensure chaos. Like, if you want to ensure chaos, you can't live long enough to recognize the hustle. Right. Because if you live long enough to recognize the hustle, you'd be like, "Why are we arguing?" Right, yeah.

• 2:01:24Joe Rogan?

  I argue way less at fifty-eight than I ever did at twenty-eight. And I argue less at twenty-eight than I ever did at eighteen. As you get older, you realize like, "This is nonsense. This is a complete waste of time." And you could get through most disagreements with just cordial communication. Like, you don't really need to argue as much as people argue. But they feed off of it, and I think it's a stupid way to communicate. And I think if a society figured that out, like, if a society is, it consists of people that live a hundred thousand years. If you have thirty thousand year old people living amongst you, that are far more intelligent than we are today, and that possibly communicate telepathy, through telepathy, which, there's some evidence that we do today? Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:09Joe Rogan?

  At least a little bit? We do, we know we're not the best at it, but there's some evidence that it takes place?

• 2:02:16Joe Rogan?

  We might be like the rejects. We might be the stragglers. We might be the fucking, the preppers that survived whatever the hell happened 11,000 years ago. And we're just a shitty version of what designed all the pyramids, built the world, had some sort of bizarre technology that we still haven't figured out yet.

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we definitely live life on kind of hard mode. You know, it's like, as you said, if you, if you only live for 100 years or less, then it is very difficult to work things out in that day.

• 2:02:56Joe Rogan?

  It's a Formula One race.

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Joe Rogan?

  It's not a lovely stroll through the neighborhood where you're like checking out the houses. Look at that beautiful hill. Like, you know, it's.

• 2:03:05Speaker 03

  So maybe it is part of, it's part of the game is that.

• 2:03:07Joe Rogan?

  It might be.

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that we only live for.

• 2:03:09Joe Rogan?

  It might be, or it just might be, this is the shitty version of humans and this is what the shitty version of humans makes. Like, the really good version of humans makes pyramids. Like, when a person can live to be 30,000 years old, that's what they make. They make spectacular, like, homages to the cosmos on the ground.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, or it could also be that, like, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, he once said that you cannot prove that the world didn't appear five minutes ago. You know, you really can't.

• 2:03:41Joe Rogan?

  It's true.

• 2:03:42Speaker 03

  With all the memories and everything. So, in fact, all of that stuff 10,000 years ago, it literally didn't happen and that the world popped into. The simulation was kind of booted up with all of that preloaded to kind of keep us occupied about the grand mystery of ancient history. Like, you know, we get excited about it and fascinated, oh, all those incredible things that were happening. It never happened.

• 2:04:05Joe Rogan?

  It might not have.

• 2:04:05Speaker 03

  It was just preloaded into the game to keep us occupied, you know?

• 2:04:09Joe Rogan?

  That's nuts. From your own personal perspective, if you weren't in World War II, you don't know it's real.

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:04:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and I think about that every day when I wake up. Because when I wake, the weird thing about waking up is you're just assuming that you've been awake before.

• 2:04:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that you're the same person. Yeah.

• 2:04:24Joe Rogan?

  I assume.

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:25Joe Rogan?

  I kind of know what it's like to be me. So every day when I wake up, I'm like, look, I'm me again. And I go, but how do I know that this is not my first run through this?

• 2:04:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:04:34Joe Rogan?

  My first run through this with a shitty memory of the past. Or an induced memory that facilitates my motion. It keeps me moving in the same direction. It keeps me pushing towards whatever I'm pushing towards. And that's what Sam Altman gets every day when he wakes up. Boy creates his digital god. It's like, I guess I'm awake. I guess I'm doing it.

• 2:04:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, there is this fascinating. Terrence McKenna, he often spoke, in my head at least, about these, what seemed to me as completely conflicting trajectories for humanity. In one breath, he'd talk about us returning to the archaic, of returning to the forests, of becoming one with nature again. And then in the next breath, he'd talk about us setting off for the stars. It seems like there's this tension. Part of us wants to go, we all want to live in an old rustic house that's made of wood in a forest and cook on an open fire. And yet, there's this other part of us that wants to live in these machinic

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  buildings and be operated, you know, operating these highly complex technological machines. And it's like, you know, which way? You know, do we allow ourselves to be pulled back into the archaic? Or do we push past and transcend and become post-human, you know, or post-biological? And maybe that's, that's kind of part of the game, you know? Are we going to be dragged back? Or, which wouldn't be bad to be dragged back into that more. You can imagine the bucolic life in a, in a, in a beautiful kind of forest scene with, with the nice old houses. And we all love that, right?

• 2:06:21Speaker 03

  We all, we all, we all kind of yearn for that, I think. I mean, I do. I think, oh, there's part of me that wants to live in Tokyo, where I do now. And this, this incredibly cyberpunk technological city that's, that seems like it's been secreted out of, you know, metal and glass, entirely unnatural structure that's kind of emerges from human intelligence. I mean, that's a weird thing, but in a way, these structures that we see, they, they seem entirely non-human. They see, it's like we are tapping into something. Else, something non-human, and we can't help ourselves.

• 2:07:04Speaker 03

  And our cities that we build and these highly complex technological and computerized machines feels like they are being kind of secreted by our intelligence and pulled out of the earth, you know?

• 2:07:20Joe Rogan?

  Well, maybe that's why they're also similar too, right?

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Joe Rogan?

  They're similar and they're, they differ obviously in the way they look, but they're similar in the structure and they're similar in the density. You know, when you get, I mean, there's enormous ones, like I was watching this video of the largest city in the world, which I believe is in China. What is the largest, run that into perplexity, what's the largest city in the world?

• 2:07:43Speaker 03

  I hope they're gonna say Tokyo, I thought it was Tokyo, Greater Tokyo.

• 2:07:47Joe Rogan?

  I don't know, the most populated, I should say.

• 2:07:49Speaker 03

  The populated.

• 2:07:50Joe Rogan?

  When I say largest, I should probably say the most populated. I think they were saying it's thirty-six million people.

• 2:07:56Speaker 03

  Okay, Tokyo is more.

• 2:07:58Joe Rogan?

  Is it?

• 2:07:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:00Joe Rogan?

  Tokyo is more than thirty-six million?

• 2:08:01Speaker 03

  I looked it up the other day, just curi-, I was curious, like thirty-seven or forty million of the Greater Tokyo area.

• 2:08:06Joe Rogan?

  Wow, interesting.

• 2:08:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:08Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. Is, so Tokyo's number one?

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:08:11Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 2:08:13Joe Rogan?

  So, um, this was probably the most populated in Chi-, well, okay, so that's followed by Delhi, India, which is three hundred, thirty-four, rather, thirty-four million, six-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand-six-hundred people. How do they know it's just six-hundred? There's probably a few people snuck in there that they don't know about, you can't say that, don't round that out. And then there's Shanghai, but it wasn't Shanghai, it was another city in China that they were talking about, maybe they just exaggerated the numbers, but, okay, so Tokyo's a perfect example then.

• 2:08:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44Joe Rogan?

  Like, it's weird how like New York City, Tokyo, and to some extent LA, although LA is just so fucked up, like the downtown is the most useless part of LA. It's really weird, like downtown LA, have you been to LA?

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  I've been a couple of times, but I've not really explored.

• 2:09:00Joe Rogan?

  Nobody goes downtown.

• 2:09:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:09:01Joe Rogan?

  Okay, downtown is like, they tried to revive downtown for a while before the pandemic and then everybody gave up. But downtown, it's not like, there's a bunch of like, like, everybody has an apartment downtown. No, most people live in the other areas of LA and downtown is like, there's some banks and some businesses, but there's also Skid Row. Downtown is crazy. It's like a really fucked up place. A lot of abandoned buildings. Like downtown is where we did a lot of Fear Factor stunts back in the day because we can get an abandoned warehouse to set up like a set there and, and, and do the show. So it's, it was, it's a very weird place. It's not like a, like downtown Chicago is booming. You know, it's downtown Chicago.

• 2:09:43Joe Rogan?

  Downtown New York City, like, whoa, you're in Manhattan, this is crazy. Downtown LA is not like that. Cause LA is broken. So when you go to LA, it's like downtown is like the most bizarre version of a downtown ever. Nobody wants to be there.

• 2:09:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, poor city design, I, I guess.

• 2:10:00Joe Rogan?

  I don't know what it is. I think some of it has to do with what they did, um, when they made Skid Row. So Skid Row is an entirely constructed thing. And what they did was all the vagrants in Beverly Hills and in Hollywood, like, listen, get the fuck out of here. You pick them up, you take them, throw them in the wagon, bring them to Skid Row and then keep them there. Don't let them leave. Just contain them in an area. And that's essentially what they did. There's a documentary on that hotel. What is that hotel again, Jamie? Cecil Hotel, where it talks about Skid Row itself, like, it's, the documentary is about this girl who was,

• 2:10:39Joe Rogan?

  they thought that she was missing, that someone had kidnapped her or something, but she was schizophrenic. She got off her medication and she apparently climbed into the water cistern and drowned. But the point of the documentary was not just that. It's like, this lady came here not knowing what downtown was. And so she got a room at the hotel downtown, thinking, oh, get a nice room at a hotel downtown. But like, it's fucking zombie boulevard. It's cra- show him what, um, what Skid Row looks like. Show him a video of what Skid Row looks like. Now, when we were filming Fear Factor, this was like two thousand and four-ish, something like that. I accidentally drove through Skid Row, I drove to Skid Row.

• 2:11:21Joe Rogan?

  I was driving home back then, I think I probably had navigation on my, my, my car, it probably sucked. Or I wasn't paying attention to it, and this is Skid Row. Skid Row's nuts. This is close up, when you, when you have like a lo-, like when you see it from a distance, you get a chance to see how completely insane it is. When we were filming, there was another Fear Factor we filmed there, where one of the contestants was like, "Look, they're smoking crack." And we looked down, there's people, we were like on a rooftop or something, and then we looked down, people were smoking crack right in front of us. Right on the street, like chaos, like Skid Row's nuts, and this is, this is not even where the tents are set up.

• 2:12:01Joe Rogan?

  The, where the tents are set up, it's the craziest thing you've ever seen. It's like these shanty villages that go on for blocks and blocks. Where there's no cars going through, the streets are filled with homeless people, just everyone's on drugs, and there's just tents everywhere, and you're like, what a failure of society.

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:23Joe Rogan?

  What a failure of society that you've allowed this to reach the level that it's at now. That's L.A.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  Have you been to Tokyo?

• 2:12:31Joe Rogan?

  Yes, I have.

• 2:12:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean Tokyo's the complete opposite.

• 2:12:33Joe Rogan?

  Complete opposite, super clean, very orderly, people are very polite.

• 2:12:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:37Joe Rogan?

  Even though there's so many people on the street, everybody sort of navigates, moves around of each other in a very polite manner.

• 2:12:43Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:12:44Joe Rogan?

  Beautiful architecture, stunning, like cyberpunk, as you said, very Blade Runner-esque, you're like, "Yo."

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Joe Rogan?

  I was only there for one day for the UFC, so I didn't spend a lot of time there, but I got a, I had dinner there and I hung out there for a little bit.

• 2:12:59Speaker 03

  It, it really shows you that it is possible to have a very large, densely populated city that is safe and clean and functioning. It doesn't have to be. People say, "Oh, you know, I got robbed, it's just part of being in a big city," or "I was stabbed last night," or "My car was broken into," and it's like, "Ah, this is just what happens when you live in a big city, man." And it's like, actually, no, it is possible to have safe and clean, and, and Tokyo's fascinating because it's, it's an example of what's often called an emergent city. Uh, they don't have this very strict zoning where, "Oh, here it's got to be offices, here it's got to be houses, here it's got to be small businesses," or anything like that. It's like-

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  It's all mixed together and different kind of neighborhoods kind of just emerge. You know, there's a knife district, for example. People who sell knives, they all gather together. There's a bookshop district. There's, you know, districts for all different things because they, not because someone has decided, oh, only bookshops can be here. It's just that they tend to gather together.

• 2:14:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:14:01Speaker 03

  And so, you know, you walk around Tokyo and you might, you'll find yourself in some quiet alley and you'll have little houses and then you'll have a little store, often very, very tiny stores that have been perhaps operating for, for decades. And if, in the UK, or I guess in, in the States as well, they would have gone under decades ago. You know, the, the city would have just crushed them.

• 2:14:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:14:25Speaker 03

  But it's, it's, it seems very easy in, in Tokyo to kind of open a small, if you have a house and you own it in Tokyo, you can, by law, you can, you can convert the, the first floor into a store. You'll get these little old ladies who will, they bought their house decades ago, they're retired, and they think, oh, what can I do with my time? I know, I'll open a cafe. And they say, they, they open a little cafe. Hardly anyone goes, maybe. It might be, could be in the countryside, it could be on the outskirts or whatever, but it doesn't matter because they own it and they're not being raped by, you know, taxes and stuff and all, and, and all this kind of red tape. And they don't have to deal with it. So they just have this lovely little cafe, entirely unique.

• 2:15:06Speaker 03

  They might fill it with things they're interested in. So it's, it's a completely unique thing that you can go in and she'll serve you tea and maybe the cakes that she, she made this morning. And there are thousands of these throughout Tokyo, not just little old ladies, but young people who own, who will rent very cheaply. They have these, have you seen in Tokyo? When you see the buildings, you often see these, these neon. Signs coming down the sides of the building. These are called zakyo, which is basically miscellaneous use buildings. And what they are is just very tall buildings and each floor you will have some kind of business.

• 2:15:48Speaker 03

  Could be anything. It's often bars or, you know, pool rooms or that, anything you want. Little restaurant, anything like this. And, and of course, they can't, they don't have the, the frontage on the ground floor. And so they, instead, they will put their, their sign, neon sign, telling you what they are, down the side of the building. And that's what gives Tokyo that unique look is because it's all of these zakyo buildings. And sometimes if you go, a friend took me to this bar. Well, it was, it was like a, a building. It was in Kabukicho, which is right in the center of Tokyo.

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  And it was, but it was on a side street and there was this tall building, gray building. You would never look at it, no signage or anything. And you look at the, the elevator, when you go into the elevator, on each floor, there's like a, a name of a business. You know, Top Hat, Eight Ball, Enigma. You have no idea what these are. They're not on Google Maps, right? So, and he just took, pressed the button for the eighth floor. He went up and it was just this little bar run by this one guy. And it was, you know, he would play darts and had a drink and a few people came in, not many. Because no, most people, most people, ninety nine point nine nine percent of the population of Tokyo have no idea that this bar exists, nor could they ever know.

• 2:17:12Speaker 03

  Because it's not on Google Maps, there's no reviews of it, it doesn't exist. And I couldn't find it again. Unless I call my friend and say, take me there. I can never go to that bar again, ever, because I, I don't know where it is. Right. And there's thousands of these. That sounds amazing. Yeah. I want to go right now. But you've got to take a risk because if you just go, if you don't know, right? And you just press the button, you could be some weird girl's bar, you know, host bar, you know, and they, they kind of rip you off and stuff. There's a lot of danger in going to these places. Well, there's a lot of Yakuza, right? There's a lot of Yakuza in Kabukicho. Yeah, you've got to be very careful. Uh, because they will drug you and then they will take you to a cash machine and. Take your liver.

• 2:17:55Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of crazy stories.

• 2:17:58Joe Rogan?

  But when you see that and you live like that, like what keeps the rest of the world from having a city like that?

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  That's a really good question, and I don't want to get... well, I don't know, but I think culture is everything. Obviously, a city is all about the people. Of course, you've got to have the infrastructure, and you've got to have... it's got to be properly funded. But you also need the people that are going to take care of it. If people are trashing it and don't have respect for the city, then obviously it's going to fall apart. But it's all about the culture. Japan is fascinating. The culture... I always say to people, when you go to Japan, you have to switch your mindset. So normally, as a Westerner, I'm thinking about me. When I'm out in public, I'm thinking about me. What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? It's all me. In Japan, you flip that.

• 2:18:51Speaker 03

  It's about... the first thing on your mind should be everybody else. When you hear Japanese people talk, you will... about people who cause problems in cities, they use this word "meiwaku", which means, often translated as nuisance. So people who come from the West, often, America, but not just America, I'm not blaming everything on Americans, but it is often. And they come with their own... you know, they're the main character, this kind of main character syndrome. And so they, you know, they're talking... they often... You see these Instagram videos of people on the metro, on the train, and they go, it's like, "It's so quiet." You know, nobody's talking, or nobody's kind of listening to music.

• 2:19:33Speaker 03

  And that's because they're always thinking about the people around them. They are thinking, you know, "Am I obstructing anyone? Am I getting in anyone's way? Am I annoying anyone? Am I making anyone feel uncomfortable?" You're always thinking about those around you. And that leads to this very respectful, polite society, where you can have forty, you know, thirty-seven million people, whatever it is, crammed together, in this relatively small area of land, and they're not killing each other. They learn... I was told, I'm not sure if this is true, but it's kind of a, I don't know if it's a myth. But Japan is very mountainous. And so back in the old days, villages were isolated.

• 2:20:17Speaker 03

  So when you lived in a village, to get to the next village... You have to climb a mountain, right? So you're trapped in your village. And so you have to learn to get along with the people around you. You can't run away. And so the Japanese culture has developed in the sense that you're, you always have to be aware of the people around you. And that's, that's been passed down into the modern age. And that the culture is always one of thinking about others and, and, and, and respect from a, from an early age.

• 2:20:50Joe Rogan?

  That's what's so fascinating is like, how come no one else figured that out? And also, what's really strange is Japan itself right now is in the midst of population collapse.

• 2:21:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, sadly.

• 2:21:01Joe Rogan?

  So that's what sucks. It's like, you could lose this and it could be overwhelmed by the West. Like because of the fact that there aren't having enough people to reproduce successfully, to maintain their population. It could just be taken over, like in terms of immigration, like Americans could just move there and Europeans can move there. And then all the beautiful aspects of this very interesting and very unique culture could go away.

• 2:21:28Speaker 03

  And they are really concerned about that. When I was, when I was first, when I first arrived in Japan, like 10 years ago, I was, worked at a university and I was stood on, on campus outside, just talking to someone. And I saw a couple of, like, they look like high school students, probably on a campus visit. Out of the corner of my eye, Japanese high school students. And they, they caught my eye. They, they, they saw that I was looking at them. And as soon as that happened, they both, like on a dime, stopped and bowed to me. And I thought, wow, we're not in Kansas anymore. You know, and that, that having that, teaching children about respect from a very, and, and training them, you know, the idea of respect your elders.

• 2:22:12Speaker 03

  This is, you know, we have this in the West as well, but we kind of lost it a little bit. And it, it's kind of drilled into them about respecting the people around you and respecting people who are older than you. And this probably goes back to the samurai, you know, these hierarchies.

• 2:22:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes, I'm sure, I'm sure. Just, and then you, you think about like how crazy feudal Japan was. And that it eventually evolves to what it is now, this incredibly safe society.

• 2:22:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:22:40Joe Rogan?

  Which is really kind of nuts. Do you think about one of the most warlike cultures of all time?

• 2:22:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:44Joe Rogan?

  The culture that fought off the Mongols successfully. You know, pretty nuts.

• 2:22:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it is. And but you see it, you see the remnants of that kind of the ancient societal structure, even in the language. When you learn Japanese, there are several levels of politeness. Right? You have, it's really complicated, but you have something called kago, which is kind of formal or polite speech. And if you are talking to, if you're lower down and you're talking to someone above you, you have to speak in a different, even the words, the verbs are different, the words are different. And if you're speaking about them, then you have to use what's called honorific, like you're elevating them. If you're talking about someone up higher up,

• 2:23:32Speaker 03

  you have to elevate them, use honorific language. If you're talking about yourself to someone who's higher up, you use humble language, so you lower yourself down.

• 2:23:43Speaker 03

  So it's very difficult, you know, it's still, I still kind of struggle with it. But, and it actually causes some problems because it's very difficult for junior people to communicate with senior people, to communicate honestly at least. So they just get a lot of it like, yes, man, yes, I agree, you know, yes, I agree with that. You're kind of agreeing with everything that the senior person says. And that's not a way to make good decisions is by just agreeing. And so they have something called nomunication. So this is formed from two words, communication, of course, plus nomu, which is the Japanese word to drink, and they're talking about alcohol.

• 2:24:28Speaker 03

  So Japan, in Japan, alcohol is king. And society is actually lubricated by alcohol and functions because of alcohol. They have things called in, in Japanese companies, they have these kind of semi obligatory, you know, semi compulsory events called nomikai, which basically translates as drink meetings.

• 2:24:52Speaker 03

  You might have heard about these and then basically the senior people and the more junior people, they all go together, they'll go to a bar. With the express purpose of getting drunk, not just to like have a drink with your colleagues, but to actually get drunk, become intoxicated. And that allows more free flowing communication, it allows you to, everyone is brought to the same kind of level, this is this is non-communication. And so it's facilitated by alcohol, communication facilitated by alcohol. So it's a society that is dependent on alcohol in a strong way.

• 2:25:26Joe Rogan?

  What is their approach to other drugs? Like even casual drugs like marijuana and stuff like that, are they highly illegal over there?

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's complicated, I would say. It's weird because, okay, so. When, when it comes to the law, people always say, oh, Japan is got, you know, the strictest drug laws in the world. First of all, no, it hasn't. Go to Singapore.

• 2:25:49Joe Rogan?

  Settle down.

• 2:25:50Speaker 03

  Settle down, yeah. But when it, when it comes to drugs, cannabis for probably for. You know, after the Second World War, when I think it was MacArthur that was drafting the Japanese constitution and was basically controlling, you know, it had, it was occupying Japan, of course. After the Second World War and, and America was in the, what's that movie called? That 1950s movie, Weed Madness, Reefer Madness.

• 2:26:19Joe Rogan?

  Reefer Madness.

• 2:26:20Speaker 03

  It was, America was in the kind of Reefer Madness phase. And they, they passed that on to the Japanese and the Japanese have never really gotten over it. So, but. And then there's meth, of course. I mean, meth came from Japan. Meth was invented in Japan. It was used during the Second World War. The kamikazes, they actually used these little green tablets that were called storming tablets.

• 2:26:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:26:46Speaker 03

  They were mixed with green tea and stamped with the crest of the emperor. So they became like sacraments.

• 2:26:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my god.

• 2:26:53Speaker 03

  They would pop those, yeah.

• 2:26:55Joe Rogan?

  Woo.

• 2:26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:56Joe Rogan?

  See how that worked out.

• 2:26:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But then at the end of the Second World War, when. They had stockpiles of this methamphetamine and it started to spilled out into the black market, basically, and large, very large numbers of people became addicted to meth. And there were actually, in Osaka, in, I think around 1954, I forget the exact year, but in one year, the police raided, I think around 50 meth labs in one city, operated by, you know, one or two people, like mom and pop operation. It's like Breaking Bad, right? You know, like you imagine meth labs in, you know, Arizona or something now. This was happening in Japan in the 1950s and it scared the shit out of the Japanese government

• 2:27:40Speaker 03

  because they were a defeated nation. They thought that they were, you know, it was the end of their civilization and they thought that meth addiction was the symptom, it was going to actually perhaps catalyze the end of the Japanese, it was an existential threat to the Japanese civilization. So they hit it hard legally. And so now, when, you know, Japanese law, they're really focused on cannabis because of probably the American influence and meth. But psychedelics, most people in Japan probably don't know much about. There's a psychedelic subculture in Japan. There are ayahuasca circles in Japan that operate in a gray area of the law. It's not explicitly illegal. It's discouraged, but it's not explicitly

• 2:28:24Speaker 03

  illegal. I know people who import ayahuasca, raw ayahuasca drink from the Amazon and operate ayahuasca circles. You didn't, did you do the DMTX experiments in Japan? No. Where did you do them? So, okay, so we're going to get into DMTX. Yeah. Yeah. So, DMTX came from an idea that I had in 2015. I worked with Rick Strasman on this. So, DMT is kind of...

• 2:28:57Speaker 03

  Unusual. It has these weird pharmacological peculiarities. It's, as I said before, it doesn't have subjective tolerance. So Rick Strassmann showed in the 90s that you can inject someone with, with DMT repeatedly and they have the same intensity effect at each time. But it also has another kind of, a number of unique peculiarities. Of course, it's very, very brief. It's, it enters the brain extremely rapidly. It's metabolized rapidly and cleared very rapidly. It had all of these pharmacological peculiarities and it occurred to me that these were precisely the characteristics you need of a drug that's used in anesthesiology. So in anesthesiology, when they want to put you to sleep, make you unconscious, what they don't

• 2:29:42Speaker 03

  do, they don't just inject you with a drug and kind of hope that it keeps working whilst they've got you under the knife. What they do is they use a very short acting drug and they use an infusion machine which delivers the drug, the anesthetic drug into your veins and goes to your brain and holds the brain level of the drug constant over time so that they can keep you in the anesthetized state unconscious for as long or short a period as they like. And so it occurred to me that, well, DMT has the right drug properties. It's like, it's almost like it's designed for that, that kind of technique called, it's called target controlled intravenous infusion. And so I thought, you know, if we start, if

• 2:30:27Speaker 03

  we take the DMT state seriously, we treat it as a new world to explore and, you know, intelligent beings with whom we can establish communicative relationships, then three minutes of a breakthrough trip is nowhere near enough. And so I thought, well, let's take this technology from anesthesiology, target controlled intravenous infusion, and let's repurpose it.

• 2:30:53Speaker 03

  So instead of an anesthetic drug that's delivered by programmed infusion, we instead deliver DMT by programmed infusion and induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize their brain DMT levels. So you can hold them in the DMT state for 30 minutes or potentially for several hours and have complete control in real time over the depth of the experience. That was the idea. So I worked with Rick Strasman. I used his data, blood sampling data that he acquired in the 90s. Fortunately, he had this old Excel file which he sent to me. And I built this mathematical model of DMT's metabolism and distribution throughout

• 2:31:38Speaker 03

  the body. And then we wrote a paper basically saying, we think this should work. We think we should be able to extend and stabilize the DMT state for many hours. But we didn't actually, it wasn't kind of human ready, so to speak. And it actually took about five years before it was actually implemented in humans. So that was actually done by the Imperial College London team. So they were the, still are in a way, the leaders in psychedelic research. And a guy called then a PhD student, I think, Chris Timmerman, worked to make this proof of principle model that myself and Rick Strasman had developed and get it human ready and

• 2:32:21Speaker 03

  actually test, you know, does it actually work? Do the predictions that we had, myself and Rick Strasman, do they actually work in humans? And they found out that in fact that it does. You can induce somebody into the DMT state and you can actually stabilize the experience. So rather than just being a, oh, Jamie, since I'm talking about this, I can show you actually what DMT trips or the kind of the time course of a DMT trip looks like over time. So normally what happens is The blood level will rise very, very rapidly. You inject someone with DMT, blood levels rise.

• 2:33:04Speaker 03

  They reach the brain and then almost immediately they start collapsing down again exponentially. And that brief period when the brain levels are high is the breakthrough state. However, if you, when the brain DMT levels reach a kind of a peak, you then start an infusion. You can basically compensate for the DMT that's being lost by metabolism. It's a bit like if you have a bathtub full of water and you pull the plug, the water drains. But if you turn on the taps, you can keep the level constant.

• 2:33:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:33:37Speaker 03

  And so that's the infusion. So you stabilize the state. And our hope was that the actual experience itself, rather than that initial roller coaster phase that you get with DMT where it's all very, very disorienting and he's like, you know, what's going on? That's, for most people, that's, that's kind of it. And then you're dragged back out again. But our hope was that actually over time, if you stabilize the DMT in the brain, that it would actually stabilize the experience and then people can actually navigate and explore the space and even perform kind of experiments within the space. And this is what's become known as DMTX.

• 2:34:17Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. And how was that? What did they describe?

• 2:34:22Speaker 03

  Well, so this first study that was done just a couple of years ago, as I said, by Imperial College London, it was really a, it was like a pilot study. They wanted to show that it worked and that it was safe, that it was tolerable, that people weren't going crazy, you know, that they could handle it, basically. The very first person to do it was a guy I'm now working with. I work for a nonprofit called New Nautics out of Florida. And we're very interested in designing experiments using DMTX to actually

• 2:34:58Speaker 03

  Study the DMT space and the intelligences within them much more formally. And on the board, I worked with a guy called Carl Smith, who was the very first person to undergo DMTX. He was also the only person to complete, I think there was five sessions over several weeks. He was the only one who handled it, so to speak. Oh, boy. What's his name? Carl Smith. Shout out to Carl. Shout out to Carl. You fucking pioneer, you. You know, but what's interesting is that, as we hoped and predicted, the DMT state, it does stabilize. It's like the brain is settling into constructing this alternate world model, interfacing with this intelligence.

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  And he found that as he went back every time, he was interacting with the same entities. And they became aware of the fact that he was coming back so often. And they were like, you know, what are you, not you again, you know, you're back. And one time, they were scanning him, the Imperial team, in like a, I think like an MRI machine or something. And the entities were gathered, all the entities, he said, as soon as they started scanning me in the quote unquote "real world," the entities were gathered and they seemed like curious or confused, like, what are they doing? What is the signal? Yeah, right. It's like, maybe it's the signal or something, or they were like, you know, we're the ones

• 2:36:22Speaker 03

  that normally do the scanning, you know, we're supposed to scan you, you know, what's going on here? So there's, as I said, it was just a pilot study, but there's a real taste that you can enter into these, these kind of relationships with these entities. And actually, we, as I said, I work for this, I'm a board member of this nonprofit called NewNautics. And our vision is really to design experiments with DMTX. Like, what does a research organization look like that isn't simply trying to explain away DMT, explain it, but actually says, okay, this is an uncharted land that's fascinating,

• 2:37:06Speaker 03

  that's inordinately complex and vast and filled with intelligences. Let's treat it like that as explorers. What does a research organization aimed at studying that look like, you know? And we imagine, I imagine that... You're not just sending, you know, for example, let's take the structure of the DMT space, right? It's this highly complex, geometrically and topologically strange domain. So we send in people who are experts, who are mathematicians. We send in a mathematician to study the topology of the space, to study how the space is structured. The entities, they often try to communicate.

• 2:37:48Speaker 03

  They use strange symbols and strange code. Oh, let's send in a linguist who can study their language. And so you're sending in people with their own specialities to actually formally study the DMT space. Whoa. And what's even better is we now have a venue for this. So we're actually, we have a, I work with a company called Elucis. We have a special license from a country in the Caribbean, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. And we are setting up a retreats center, stroke, research center, to provide DMTX that

• 2:38:31Speaker 03

  is 100% legal, that is safe, you know, you've got anesthesiologists, psychiatrists and nurses, a perfect setting that's also being designed in part by Carl Smith as well, that allows you to perform these kind of research, research studies aimed at analyzing and studying the DMT space. But even better is it's also going to be open to anyone. So if you think about. Prepare for the freaks. Prepare for the freaks. But like, you know, in the 90s, Rick Strasman, he did the biggest study of its kind. He only had 60 people. So you've got 60 people worth of trip reports. What happens if you can?

• 2:39:14Speaker 03

  Bring in three hundred, four hundred, five hundred people a year.

• 2:39:17Joe Rogan?

  How will you vet people to make sure they're not crazy before they do it?

• 2:39:20Speaker 03

  There will be a screening process, an initial screening process. And then ultimately, you would have a psychiatrist who would sign them off. So it's not just anyone, but anyone can, in theory, they can sign up. They can go to elucismind.com and they can put their name down and sign up to fly to this island, Bekwe, I think it's called. And in a beautiful, perfect setting, spend a week on the island and undergoing a number of DMTX sessions and, you know, being able to explore this world using the DMTX technology. And of course, they will all be providing trip reports.

• 2:40:00Speaker 03

  So you start to amass a vast data set of highly controlled, verified. You know, this isn't like posting online where you don't know what drugs they've taken, really.

• 2:40:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:40:12Speaker 03

  It's like you know exactly what they've taken. It's pure pharmaceutical grade DMT. And they will generate this vast data set that could be used. We're also working to develop an AI-powered model that would take in this verbal data and in real time, generate imagery. So someone can talk to the model, the AI model, and it will generate the image. And then you say, oh, no, this isn't quite right. This needs to be more like this. And so you're converging on the...

• 2:40:48Joe Rogan?

  You're making a map of the territory.

• 2:40:49Speaker 03

  You're making a map of the territory. And so you end up with this vast library, not just of textual trip reports, but also of imagery.

• 2:40:58Joe Rogan?

  And this is available now?

• 2:41:00Speaker 03

  It will, it's opening, we're kind of, we're building, it's being developed now. It should be open officially on March 1st next year. So go to, yeah, elucismind.com.

• 2:41:10Joe Rogan?

  That's soon.

• 2:41:11Speaker 03

  You can sign up.

• 2:41:11Joe Rogan?

  That's just enough time for people to prepare.

• 2:41:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it will be the first, I mean, it's going to be the first of its kind, you know, a totally legal, safe, medically supervised location where people can endure, I say enjoy, can experience DMTX.

• 2:41:28Joe Rogan?

  That's the thing about these ancient civilizations, whether it's Egypt or whether it's ancient Greece where Ulysses was from.

• 2:41:39Joe Rogan?

  They all were using psychedelics. There's evidence of psychedelics in all of these ancient civilizations. It's just our completely twisted, sick society that's decided that the most beneficial drugs should be the ones that are the most illegal.

• 2:41:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:41:56Joe Rogan?

  Which is, and you lump them in with the ones that destroy lives. They're categorized with meth.

• 2:42:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:42:02Joe Rogan?

  Which is completely insane and the sign of a twisted, sick culture. It's the sign of what McKenna was talking about with the chaos. The chaos of a species that's preparing to leave for the stars.

• 2:42:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. And, but things are changing. You do see positive changes.

• 2:42:21Joe Rogan?

  The internet.

• 2:42:22Speaker 03

  The attitude to psychedelics.

• 2:42:24Joe Rogan?

  The internet has changed. We'll understand it now. And I think there's also a giant shift towards people on the right accepting it. Because so many soldiers have come back from war and used it and had great benefits.

• 2:42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, precisely.

• 2:42:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:39Speaker 03

  So perhaps things aren't as bad as, things in some ways are getting better. They're getting worse in other ways, but they're getting better in other ways.

• 2:42:46Joe Rogan?

  They're moving, right?

• 2:42:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it.

• 2:42:49Joe Rogan?

  And I think you need bad in order to inspire good. And that's unfortunate, but I think that's just, historically, that's always been the way.

• 2:42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:42:56Joe Rogan?

  That we figure things out.

• 2:42:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree.

• 2:42:58Joe Rogan?

  Andrew, it's been so much fun. I really enjoy this. Let's do it again. Let's do it again when the place is open.

• 2:43:05Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:43:05Joe Rogan?

  And when you get some trip reports.

• 2:43:07Speaker 03

  Would you like to, are you interested in doing D and D?

• 2:43:09Joe Rogan?

  Allegedly. We'll talk off air. But this book that you wrote is available now. Death by Astonishment. Is it in audio form as well?

• 2:43:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, read by myself.

• 2:43:20Joe Rogan?

  Beautiful. You've got a great voice for it. Perfect. I'm so happy that you read. I'd love when authors read their own work. It's so important, I think.

• 2:43:28Speaker 03

  They wanted to get an actor initially.

• 2:43:29Joe Rogan?

  Fuck those actors.

• 2:43:30Speaker 03

  Because I was in Tokyo. I said, no, no, no, no, no.

• 2:43:33Joe Rogan?

  You get some weirdo who doesn't know what he's talking about.

• 2:43:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:43:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no, you need you.

• 2:43:38Joe Rogan?

  Thank you very much, man. It was really fun. I enjoyed it. My pleasure. Bye, buddy.

• 2:43:56Joe Rogan?

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