The Basement: Andrew Gallimore | DMT Didn't Take You Somewhere New — It Unlocked What's Always There

-If you’re ever injured in an accident, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. You can start your claim in just a click without having to leave your couch: https://ForThePeople.com/WHY -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. -The Basement: Andrew Gallimore | DMT Didn't Take You Somewhere New — It Unlocked What's Always There Dr. Andrew Gallimore has spent 30 years studying the world's strangest molecule — one your body already produces. As a neurobiologist and pharmacologist, he's built a scientific case that what people encounter on DMT isn't hallucination. It's contact. In this conversation, Gallimore walks through the neuroscience of how DMT hijacks the brain's world-building system, and why that distinction matters enormously. He also shares his recent collaboration with consciousness theorist Don Hoffman — work that produced a mathematical model of the DMT state that Gallimore calls one of the most profound moments of his career. From machine elves to the Barrow Scale, from near-death experiences to the nature of alien intelligence — this one covers ground most conversations never reach. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00AJ Gentile?

  Today, we're talking with Dr. Andrew Gallimore. He's a Cambridge-trained chemist and neuroscientist, and he spent 30 years studying one molecule: DMT, what he calls "the world's strangest psychedelic." Many people report meeting entities when using DMT. And Andrew has a theory about them that's not exactly mainstream. He writes about this in his book, "Death by Astonishment."

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Death by astonishment. Finally, a cause of death that isn't fell out of a window after questioning the official story at a CIA.

• 1:30AJ Gentile?

  He thinks the beings people meet on DMT might not be hallucinations. They might be real, alive, sentient, and living in another dimension. And he makes a pretty good case, because there are people who take DMT for years, and then one day, a creature waves a finger and says, "You're not welcome here." It's called a lockout. And some people stay locked out for years.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Oh, is that a machine elf's head bounces? I better be respectful next time I'm in a machine elf's champagne room, eh?

• 2:00AJ Gentile?

  Today, we're covering where DMT comes from, what it does inside your brain, and a new theory he built with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. It connects the whole thing to consciousness itself. After our conversation, I'll come back with a little quick analysis. But until then, grab a brain bucket, because this one goes deep. Let's go down to the basement.

• 2:27AJ Gentile?

  Dr. Andrew Gallimore, welcome to the basement.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Good to be here, AG. Thank you very much for having me.

• 2:34AJ Gentile?

  As good as can be.

• 2:38AJ Gentile?

  I guess just quick disclaimer before we get started. We're not endorsing anything, any drug use, we're not promoting it. None of that stuff. That being said, we both have experience with psychedelics, so when we're talking about it, we have been there.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51AJ Gentile?

  Okay. So, I thought I heard you say at seven or eight years old, you're into ghosts, vampires, werewolves, all the paranormal. It looks like you have just upgraded your monsters to a new level. Is that what happened? Is you're just, you're just the monster kid?

• 3:11Speaker 03

  That's pretty accurate. I mean, I was into, yeah. Werewolves, vampires, ghosts, the occult, Ouija boards. My parents were horrified. I mean, it's like, the headmaster of the school had to call in my parents, my father specifically.

• 3:29AJ Gentile?

  What were you doing that the headmaster got involved? What was that specific?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Stories.

• 3:35AJ Gentile?

  You were telling stories?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I was writing, so when, when the teacher said, "Write a story", I would write these most horrific, because I'm gonna, I'm gonna defend myself a little bit.

• 3:47AJ Gentile?

  You were that kid!

• 3:49Speaker 03

  I was that kid, but my, I have, I've got quite a big family, so I've got two older brothers,

• 3:56Speaker 03

  two younger brothers, so I'm right in the middle. And the two older brothers, obviously, were a huge influence on me. My oldest brother, Ian, when, when I was kind of, oh, six, seven, eight years old, he was like 12, and, so he was more mature, and he was very interested in horror movies, and like, in those days, there was like banned movies, remember that?

• 4:18AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  This one's banned.

• 4:19AJ Gentile?

  Faces of Death.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Faces of Death, and Cannibal Corpse, and this kind of thing, right?

• 4:24AJ Gentile?

  So you have to watch them.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Right, so he'd mail off some VHS, you know, copied, pirated.

• 4:31AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  And come back, and then he would watch these movies in the living room, because there's only one VCR in the, in the, in the house, of course, in those days. And I would sit and watch them. My, my parents were very relaxed about this. Until I started kind of reproducing these kind of things in my stories at school. And I think my headmaster was slightly concerned that I was... You know, gonna be the next Michael Myers or something like that.

• 4:57AJ Gentile?

  Or the next Neil Gaiman. What was that, what was that last straw story about?

• 5:02Speaker 03

  You want me to say it, really?

• 5:03AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  So in the story, it was a story about a, an escaped lunatic, inspired by the Halloween movies. He escaped from the sanitarium and he murdered several people. And then in one instance, he came across a, God, do I want to say this? He came across a woman with her baby in a pram. And anyway, the baby ends up being diced.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  And I use that word. Diced with a spade. And the headmaster was understandably, in retrospect, thought, this is like a, I mean, I was like seven years old.

• 5:42AJ Gentile?

  Oh, God.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  It was elementary school, anyway. And so, yeah, they, they used to, he used to like, every day at the end of school, he'd come to the classroom. He'd check through my work and check that I wasn't writing horrible things. Yeah, it was.

• 5:59AJ Gentile?

  What did your folks say about that story?

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, they had a word with me and said, maybe you should, you know, maybe write about nice things.

• 6:07AJ Gentile?

  But they were worried about you being?

• 6:09Speaker 03

  No, they, they knew where it came from.

• 6:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  It was just the influence of my older brothers. But, but still, at that time, it wasn't just that story. It was that I was interested in the occult, things that seven-year-olds aren't normally interested in. And I was quite an advanced reader for my age. So I, I used to go to these, you know, old secondhand bookstores and try to find books about ghosts and vampires and things like that. And I really believed in them. I wanted to be a ghost hunter when I grew up. And that didn't come true, but in a way.

• 6:38AJ Gentile?

  In a way, it did.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  In a way, it did.

• 6:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 6:41AJ Gentile?

  When I was nine, I bought a mail-order book on witchcraft and the occult. And I had quite a sit-down over that book.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 6:49AJ Gentile?

  So I get it. Picture this, you've spent years searching for a hidden treasure. You followed the clues, crossed deserts, climbed mountains, and finally found the chest. You crack it open, and standing next to you is the guy who buried it. And he smiles and says, "Actually, I think most of that is mine." Now you're in a fight over something valuable, and the other side already knows every trick in the book. There's a reason you wouldn't want to handle that battle alone. It's the same reason Morgan & Morgan has spent more than 35 years fighting for the people. They're America's largest injury law firm, with more than 1,000 lawyers and over 100 offices nationwide. Morgan & Morgan was founded after John Morgan saw how difficult it was for ordinary families

• 7:33AJ Gentile?

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• 8:02AJ Gentile?

  So take us from there to, I know you've told the story a million times, but I have some follow-ups. Take us from there to 1996, your friend shows you a magazine.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when I...

• 8:16AJ Gentile?

  What magazine was it?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  I don't remember.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  But it was after I graduated from high school, so in the two years, we call them A-levels in the UK. So I was 16 years old, I guess.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  I started to get interested in psychedelics, reading about psychedelics, and talking a lot about psychedelics. I started studying chemistry, biology, and I wanted to be a pharmacologist, wanted to study drugs, basically, and how they affect the mind.

• 8:50AJ Gentile?

  What drew you to psychedelics specifically?

• 8:54AJ Gentile?

  Especially for someone who didn't take them?

• 8:57Speaker 03

  At the time, I didn't know.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  But when I think back, you know, the interest in ghosts and werewolves and vampires, it's unusual things, I guess you could put it, in the most broad sense, I guess.

• 9:11AJ Gentile?

  That's what tracks for me, is you've always been into the... Alternate realities and.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and because I I I used to collect a magazine called The Unexplained. It was one of those ones that came out every week and you got the binders. That kind of thing. Um, I ordered it specially from the the newsagent. And within there, there was a lot about ghosts and all that kind of stuff. But then there was stuff about like ESP and UFOs and things like that. So it's not so strange that as as I became, you know, an adolescent and started to mature. That my interest shifted away from just ghosts and werewolves and into more serious things, I guess, you know, more scientific things. Psychedelics seem to be a way of of altering your mind, of altering the structure, the dynamics of your reality. And so that kind of excited me.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Wanted to know how that uh worked. So I'd been talking about it a lot at school. And then one day, my friend. He's I can give his name actually now. He's Noor Abbas. His name is. He's actually, interestingly. Well, he was a few years ago, the chief designer for.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Oh, what's his name? He used to he used to be married to um Kim Kardashian.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yeezy, Yeezy. He used to have the Yeezy shoes.

• 10:32AJ Gentile?

  Everyone's screaming at us right now, but I don't remember.

• 10:37AJ Gentile?

  Oh, from the show.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  No, no, no. He's he's like a black guy. He's most crazy guy that was on Rogan. Has been on Rogan. He's been on. Every it's most, everyone's gonna go crazy. After the break, we're gonna find that out. We will. Kanye West.

• 10:51AJ Gentile?

  Kanye, Kanye.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, Kanye. He was a chief designer. He became a fashion designer and he was actually Kanye West's chief designer. Anyway.

• 11:00AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:01AJ Gentile?

  He'd be fun to talk to.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, Noor Abbas. And he brought this magazine when I was sixteen years old and and said, you know, look on the back page. There's something I think you'd be interested in. And I rolled it up and later in the day I I I opened it and it was a picture of this bearded fellow. Uh, called Terrence McKenna. And it this was an interview with him. Um, and there was lots. I don't remember the much of the details. But I remember him being asked about his quote unquote favorite drug, this thing called DMT. Didn't say what it was, other than that, when you take it, it takes you to this other world that's nothing like this world and that's filled with these strange beings called machine elves. Sure. And I thought, this is, this is incredible, but it only lasts fifteen minutes.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  You know, this fast-acting drug that will instantaneously transport you to some other reality that's just as real or more real than this world. I thought, well, you know, that's even more interesting than psychedelics generally, is this particular psychedelic. So my next task was to find out what DMT even meant. You couldn't just Google it in those days. I remember I went to the local library in my city, the central library, and found one of those books of acronyms, initialisms, and looked at DMT and found dimethylterothalate, which is a type of plastic, apparently. So for a short period of time, DMT in my head was dimethylterothalate. Oops. Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Then we got the internet, as you just mentioned, and there's only one internet in the school. Like, you had to go collect this big black cable from a guy in a white coat. Give you the password. The password is mushroom, I remember that. That's perfect. And I would spend all my lunch break and any free periods I had, I would, I was the only one who used it. No one else knew what this, it was so new, the internet, no one really knew its power. But I kind of did. I had a friend also had the internet in his house. And so I spent all my time just on AltaVista, as you said, before Google, just trying to

• 13:11Speaker 03

  find out all about DMT and how to, how to extract it, how to, you know, which plants you can get it from and all that kind of stuff. All these different crazy experiences.

• 13:25AJ Gentile?

  Did you look into the history of it as well during those searches? Or you're more interested in what Terence was talking about?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  I was more interested in what it did. I became more interested in the history later on, but at that time, this was just this naturally occurring molecule that seemed to have almost magical properties. And that was the beginning, really. That was the beginning of what turned out to be a 30-year

• 13:53Speaker 03

  journey, trying to understand DMT, what it does in the brain and how it's able to achieve these remarkable effects on consciousness.

• 14:02AJ Gentile?

  What did your family think about this new hobby? Because clearly you told your brothers.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, they didn't understand it, you see. I mean, they, I would, if I refer to that as DMT, then that's fine. If I use the word drugs, that's different matter.

• 14:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:21AJ Gentile?

  So your book Death by Astonishment, that's a Terence McKenna quote.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  That is a Terence McKenna quote.

• 14:27AJ Gentile?

  So is that a bookend? Is that a tribute? Is that a thank you? Why did you choose that?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  All of those things. Well, initially, it had a completely different name that I'm not going to tell you.

• 14:36AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Which was okay, but I was writing, I was writing the book proposal with my editor to submit to the publishing house. And in part of the proposal, I said, you know, DMT, this molecule that as Terence McKenna said, the only risk is death by astonishment. And then I wrote in, in, in brackets, although actually, that's a pretty good title, right? And I realize in retrospect, it's the perfect title. I mean, that's, I mean, it's a kind of a showstopper title, Death by Astonishment. And of course, it's a beautiful tribute to the late, great Terence McKenna.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, that's, that's kind of how that name came, came about. And I think it's, it's a perfect name for the book, I think. That is, you know, it's all about, it's everything I know about DMT. Everything I've come to learn over the last 30 years of studying DMT.

• 15:33AJ Gentile?

  So this sparks interest in chemistry.

• 15:39AJ Gentile?

  Your PhD thesis, let me see if I can get this right. Is it the, um, the biogenesis of terrestrial and marine polycyclic ether?

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 15:48AJ Gentile?

  Is that what it was?

• 15:49Speaker 03

  You've done your research, dude.

• 15:50AJ Gentile?

  Well, that doesn't sound like, that, that sounds like just marine biology and things like that. Has nothing to do with psychedelics.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Nothing to do with psychedelics.

• 16:01AJ Gentile?

  So is DMT still sort of this undercurrent while you're working through all this?

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it, it always has been in a way. You know, I've never worked in a quote unquote psychedelic research group. Or any kind of psychedelic lab or anything like that. It's always been, you know, I've kind of, I have many interests in, in chemistry and in pharmacology. As well as psychedelics, but that's been the kind of the foundation that's running through all of it. But, but my PhD at Cambridge, yeah, that was biological chemistry. It's basically trying to understand how these often exquisitely complex molecules that are produced by plants and microorganisms. You know, how are they actually stitched together and made inside microorganisms?

• 16:49Speaker 03

  That's something that I really fell in love with during my first degree. The kind of the, it's called biosynthesis. How complex organic molecules are constructed inside living beings. And I, I thought, I want to study that for my PhD. And so I went up to Cambridge and worked in a group that specialized in that thing. But all the time still, I was thinking and writing about DMT. And then, um, after I finished my PhD, I did a postdoc again at Cambridge. And then I thought, there's something missing from my intellectual repertoire. Shall we put it like that?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  In that I, I, I understood the chemistry, I understood the pharmacology. You know, that kind of low level stuff, molecules interacting with living systems. That was all kind of under my belt, shall we say? But I still didn't feel that I was. Sufficiently sophisticated in the neurosciences. So I thought I need to, I need to move up to the kind of the higher level of the neurosciences. And so I did two postdocs in computational neuroscience, kind of the forefront, I think, of neuroscience, trying to understand how the brain works by using computational and mathematical models. So I went to the University of York and then University of Oxford, did two postdocs

• 18:16Speaker 03

  in computational neuroscience. And then finally, my final postdoc, which actually the longest one, lasted for seven years, was at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. So I needed a job after my penultimate postdoc finished, and there was this position in Okinawa. So I thought, why not? I didn't have ties in England at the time, so I thought, oh, why not move to Okinawa?

• 18:42AJ Gentile?

  What was the position? Was it a mainstream type of job?

• 18:45Speaker 03

  It was a postdoctoral research fellowship, so basically another postdoc.

• 18:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  But this was in computational neuroscience as well. And I spent seven years kind of modeling very small pieces of the brain, basically, individual neurons in the brain, trying to understand how they speak to each other and how they strengthen and weaken their connections, all connected to memory and neural function generally.

• 19:12AJ Gentile?

  So you were building this DMT research foundation the whole time?

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yes, that's how I, I see it, is that I was, you know, most people kind of specialize at one level, you know, if you're a chemist, you, you study the molecules. If you're a pharmacologist, you're interested in drug receptor interactions. If you're a neuroscientist, you're interested in how, kind of the global effects on neural activity. But I think really to understand psychedelics, you need to kind of span all of those, you need to understand.

• 19:37AJ Gentile?

  You do.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  All the way from the lowest level, the molecules, all the way up to global neural activity. So I finished my postdoc in Okinawa after seven years, and I thought, right, I'm leaving the academy. I sort of graduated, and I don't want to be, I wanted to kind of de-institutionalize myself and just focus on writing, basically.

• 20:03AJ Gentile?

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• 20:47AJ Gentile?

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• 21:28AJ Gentile?

  One more time, that's goldencrestmetals.com/theyfiles or call 888-949-9172 for your 100% free info kit. Cambridge, Oxford, York, Okinawa, you could have had a very successful mainstream career. Has there been a professional or personal cost to making the decision?

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Oh, God, yeah. I mean, for sure. I was at the stage in my career where normally what would happen is I would start applying for what are called readerships or lectureships. So when you start taking on graduate students of your own, you become a part of the department, wherever you were. But the thought of being that person horrified me, the thought that I would be like my professor, going to meetings and managing funding and managing students, all that stuff.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  It never had any interest in it. When you're a postdoc, you have a lot of freedom. You kind of do your own thing. But once you get to that level where you're a lecturer, a professor, then you have to start taking on all these other responsibilities that takes over your life. And I could never invest as much time as I wanted into my, my passion, which is DMT and writing about DMT. I always wanted to be a writer ultimately. There's a lot of training required to write about these things.

• 22:46AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  So, you know, 20 years, I guess, before I was able to kind of make the leap. Give up my fairly well-paid position in Okinawa and basically go from decent salary to absolute zero salary in, in, in a single day. That, that's kind of scary. You know, and there's no option to move back to my parents if I fuck up, because they're over in the UK. So it's like, if this goes wrong, I'm, I'm in deep trouble in Tokyo. So I moved from Okinawa to Tokyo, which is where I live now. And that's where I've been for the last four years. Fortunately, I didn't majorly fuck up. Things are okay.

• 23:25AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, Tokyo is fascinating because Japan has very strict drug laws and they're getting stricter if I, I mean, I think cannabis, they just banned. How is it, is it a culture issue for you? Is it?

• 23:41Speaker 03

  So people, I think when people say Japan is very anti-drugs, what they're actually referring to is methamphetamine.

• 23:47AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  And cannabis. These are the two biggies, right? Methamphetamine for very specific historical reasons. Post-World War II, there was this huge wave of methamphetamine use throughout the nation. A lot of the military supplies

• 24:04Speaker 03

  kind of were released onto the public market. It was perfectly legal at the time.

• 24:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  There were millions of people in Japan using meth regularly. And then they, they banned it. And then all of these little clandestine laboratories started popping up. I think in Osaka in 1952, in just one year, there are like 50 labs that were raided, just in one city. You know, it's like Breaking Bad all These little meth labs.

• 24:31AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Sure. Like in New Mexico or something.

• 24:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  People don't imagine that that's possible in Japan, but it really was. Um, so, and this was a time when the Japanese were literally a defeated nation. Uh, and they thought this meth could be the end of them, like an existential threat to their very civilization. Uh, uh, and so that is a kind of, I guess, gen, I hate that word, generational, generational trauma. Uh, but it feels like that. You mentioned meth and people, there's still that sense of, meth.

• 25:02AJ Gentile?

  Um. Yeah, cause you have to figure the Americans brought it there.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  What, meth?

• 25:07AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Well. And certainly amphetamines.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  So methamphetamine actually was invented by a Japanese chemist in, in the late 19th century.

• 25:16AJ Gentile?

  It was.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Nagai, yes, Nagayoshi Nagai. Yeah, everyone thinks it's either the Americans or the Germans, people I get. Uh, but it was actually.

• 25:25AJ Gentile?

  Well, those are two countries everybody blames for everything.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 25:28AJ Gentile?

  But it's actually a Japanese chemist. I didn't know that.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Japanese chemist, yes, from Ephedrine. So Ephedrine, um, is the molecule that you can convert. You know, Sudephedrine they use is basically the same molecule, but slightly different geometrically. But anyway, uh, Ephedrine you can convert directly to methamphetamine. And he was working with Ephedrine, um, this, at the time, this, you know, Chinese herb that had various uses. Um, and then he synthesized methamphetamine. And it was basically forgotten about for a number of decades and wasn't seen to be that important. Until people started reporting on its effects on, um, alertness and mood and that kind of thing. And the Japanese were using it during the Second World War specifically. They, they used to create these little green tablets that were mixed with green tea.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  So they're bright green and they would stamp them with the emperor's crest. Um, so it almost became like, um, um, what's the word I'm looking for? Um, but, but anyway, it was very much sanctioned by the authorities. You know, the imperial, imperial Japanese authorities at the time. Japanese soldiers were using the kamikaze, for example.

• 26:38AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Were using methamphetamine, it would elevate their mood, increase their kind of fighting, fighting spirit.

• 26:45AJ Gentile?

  Sure. And they don't have to worry about long-term effects.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  They don't have to worry about long-term effects, quite literally, yeah. And then after the war, they had all these stockpiles that made it into the market. And then the government, the Japanese government, actually banned powdered forms of meth. So they started making liquid forms, injecting it. So they had a huge injection problem with meth. Probably the most intense way to take it, but, and you know, schoolchildren were using it. High school students, housewives.

• 27:15AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Laborers, whatever. Everyone was using meth in kind of the late 1940s and early 1950s until it was banned. And then they really cracked down on it. It was like a moral panic.

• 27:27AJ Gentile?

  I mean, amphetamine salts seem to be everywhere anyway, right?

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:33AJ Gentile?

  So DMT first synthesized in 1931, first found to be psychoactive in 1956. And that was Steven Zara, right?

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Steven Zara was the first to inject pure DMT.

• 27:49AJ Gentile?

  Now, this is at the same time where LSD is a popular psychedelic in psychiatric research. Why did LSD catch on and DMT did, basically disappeared until McKenna?

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. I mean, that was, so, yeah, you're right. So during that period, there was a flurry of these molecules that were either discovered or invented, and LSD was the main one at the time. And Zara, actually, Steven Zara was this Hungarian physician, working behind the iron curtain, in communist Hungary. And he wanted to work with LSD. And he wrote to Sandoz, the only company that was producing LSD at the time. Said, can I have some LSD, please? I want to start working on it. And they said, no, no, no, no. We're not sending LSD into bloody communists.

• 28:38AJ Gentile?

  No, no.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Nope. And so he said, I need something else. And...

• 28:46Speaker 03

  He thought about mescaline, he ordered some mescaline from the UK and that arrived safely and he took his first dose of mescaline on Christmas Day and had this wonderful experience in a church.

• 28:59AJ Gentile?

  What was he trying to achieve, what was the purpose of his experiments?

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Well, he was interested in, he was a psychiatrist.

• 29:07AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Right, so he's interested in, you know, at the most fundamental level, he was interested in the human mind, how we might study the human mind, but he was also interested in, you know, could these molecules find uses in psychiatry, as treatment for various sort of neuropsychological disorders. So he tried mescaline and then he found this paper, there was a paper that was, so there was this plant called Anadenanthera peregrina, which is this yoppo, this snuff, that scientists

• 29:45Speaker 03

  had just come to understand, you know, had been used by various tribal peoples, indigenous peoples in South America for perhaps thousands of years and was said to induce what seemed to be like psychedelic effects. They would go to other worlds and they would speak with these strange, discarnate beings, which they thought were like demons or something. But no one knew how it worked and so they started to analyze it, this kind of the first study analyzing these seeds from this peregrina plant and they found two molecules in there. One was buphothanine, which is five hydroxy dimethyltryptamine.

• 30:30AJ Gentile?

  Five M E O.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  No, that's five methoxy.

• 30:34AJ Gentile?

  Ah, okay.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so five M E O D M T is five methoxy D M T. If you take that methyl group off, that carbon, you get five hydroxy, just hydroxyl group, that's buphothanine. That was a known molecule and it was known that when you injected it into prisoners, that's the way you did it in those days, you found a group of prisoners that were normally imprisoned for using drugs, normally young black men, basically, and you would inject them with drugs and see what happened. And buphothanine was one that had already been tested and was found to have

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Mildly mind altering effects. Generally it made people very nauseous and their face went purple, they started vomiting and it's very unpleasant. But they found that molecule in this, this Yopo seed. And they thought, well, that must be the kind of the central psychoactive molecule in this. They also found another molecule called DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and they just ignored it. Which is a huge mistake. Until Steven Zahra read this paper. And he thought, Buufotinine, no, that doesn't make any sense. It's not particularly psychoactive. So why would that be this, why would that be regarded as this molecule that would transport

• 31:56Speaker 03

  you to other worlds and allow you to communicate with discon intelligence? That didn't make any sense. So the only other option was DMT. That was also in the seed and it being ignored. So he thought, okay, I'll just, I'll give it a go. You know, no one has tried this. So he synthesized it. He made 10 grams in his laboratory in 1956. And he started swallowing it, first of all, you know, increasing the dosage. He went up to like a gram of DMT.

• 32:24AJ Gentile?

  Nothing happened.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Nothing happened. We know why now, but that time we didn't know. So he was ready to give up, basically.

• 32:30AJ Gentile?

  He didn't try encephalating it?

• 32:32Speaker 03

  He didn't try.

• 32:33AJ Gentile?

  He didn't snort it?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  He didn't snort it, no.

• 32:36AJ Gentile?

  That might have worked though, no?

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:39AJ Gentile?

  That might have worked.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  It would have been painful, but.

• 32:41AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  It might have worked. So he basically, he was like, ready to give up. Maybe his hunch was wrong. And then a friend, a colleague says, have you tried injecting it? I haven't. So injected it into, I think it was a cat or a rabbit. I think it was a cat for some reason. And the cat kind of started behaving strangely, you know, it was having some kind of effect.

• 33:06AJ Gentile?

  I don't mean to laugh, I'm a cat guy.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm a cat man as well.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  So, you know, satisfied that it wasn't lethal, at least in cats. Yeah, we shouldn't laugh. People complain whenever I tell this story because, poor cat. And it's true, but different times, different times. Yeah, so then he injected it into himself. So sometime in April in 1956, he injected it into his intramuscularly and yeah, the rest, as they say, is history. He had this, he started seeing these fantastical patterns and rapidly procession of rapidly changing geometric imagery all moving very quickly. He was having a DMT trip.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  And so then he started recruiting colleagues, so doctors, nurses from where he worked. Things were much simpler in those days. You didn't need to fill out forms and get ethical approval.

• 34:05AJ Gentile?

  DEA'd, wasn't he, right?

• 34:08Speaker 03

  And injected it into various people, healthy volunteers, and they started describing what we now recognize as the classic effects of DMT. They would start going to describe going, losing awareness of the normal waking world and going to these strange world filled with gods and spirits and...

• 34:31AJ Gentile?

  Well, let me back you up just a second. So why DMT didn't catch on still? So he's synthesized it, it works, but LSD still is the one that MKUltra and everybody, Sidney Gottlieb goes there.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So after, so Zara started publishing these papers. So the very first awareness anyone would have had that DMT was even psychoactive as a psychedelic would have been Steven Zara's papers. So that was in the late 1950s. From 1956 up to kind of 1960, he published several papers in healthy people, in schizophrenics and that kind of thing. So the data was all there. The problem was, is that...

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Well, LSD had its foothold by then. It was extremely potent, potent meaning you need a very small amount of the molecule to achieve the desired effect. So you could, you know, in one gram, you've got, you know, a hundred thousand doses or something like that. And whereas with DMT, and you could swallow LSD, you know, drop it on your tongue, dissolve it in lots of paper, very, very simple to distribute. Whereas with DMT, one, it was much less potent in terms of the amount you needed. Instead of 50 micrograms, you needed, you know, 30 to 50 milligrams, and you needed to inject it. That was a

• 35:57Speaker 03

  big issue. People didn't like to mess with needles, certainly in the West. And so it was, it was kind of a, an exotic psychedelic. You know, if you were in the know, and you had access to a well-stocked dealer, in the 1960s, you could find DMT. You know, William Burroughs, for example, he was probably the first person to take DMT outside of a clinical setting. He injected it.

• 36:22AJ Gentile?

  That's right. I forgot about that.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, Leary as well.

• 36:26AJ Gentile?

  And he's, Burroughs was one of the great thinkers of his time.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  He was, and he had a really important role, actually, in, in, in working out how ayahuasca worked.

• 36:36AJ Gentile?

  Did he?

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can get to that.

• 36:38AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, um, so yeah, William Burroughs took it, William Burroughs was horrified. He, he took too much one day and he found himself in this, what he called the white, white hot lattice ovens. The soulless insect people were kind of menacing him. And he was, he was appalled and he thought, this is the, the absolute horror show of all drugs. Nobody should be taking this. And so he wrote this kind of breathless letter of warning to Timothy Leary. And Timothy Leary at the time, he wasn't particularly well known. He was kind of a neophyte. You know, this kind of tweed jacketed Harvard psychologist who had just that year had been to Mexico and had his first experience with solos- solosopy mushrooms.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  So he was well primed for DMT. But Burress wrote this letter saying, stay away from DMT. It's the, it's a nightmare. The nightmare, the nightmare drug, the nightmare hallucinogen, he called it. But of course Timothy Leary thought-

• 37:38AJ Gentile?

  Leary said, challenge accepted.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Challenge accepted. And so Leary spoke to a psychiatrist friend who said that, you know, he'd, he'd injected people with DMT and 90% had had a terrible experience.

• 37:54AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. We don't exactly know who, who this was. But he said, a psychiatrist working in LA,

• 38:04Speaker 03

  who was injecting people with, with DMT in his, in his office. And he said that 90% had a, had a bad experience. We don't know why that is, but Leary said, Leary was just kind of formulating his set and setting hypothesis. That really came from Leary, the idea that, that the nature of your psychedelic experience comes down to the setting, where are you, who is with you, and also your mindset. And so he thought, okay, maybe if the set and setting is right, so you're not in a clinician's psychiatrist's office. She's where sick people go, right? Where crazy people go. But in fact, in a beautiful environment, can you actually induce a more pleasant experience? And so Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert,

• 38:50Speaker 03

  who was one of his kind of partners in crime, shall we say, during, during that era. They were both injected with DMT and both had incredible, beautiful experiences.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Timothy Leary described these angelic beings like elf-like insects.

• 39:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  He was the first person to really use that term elf

• 39:13Speaker 03

  in, in describing the DMT state. And now elves are the most famous beings within the DMT space.

• 39:21AJ Gentile?

  Most, just about everybody listening.

• 39:25AJ Gentile?

  They've never taken DMT and probably never will.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 39:29AJ Gentile?

  So, we don't have to talk about our personal experiences if you don't want to. I don't mind, but can you describe from that first inhale? What, what do you see? How does it feel?

• 39:42Speaker 03

  So.

• 39:43AJ Gentile?

  And this is not a recreational drug, folks.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  This is not a recreational drug. It's not a party drug.

• 39:49AJ Gentile?

  No, it is not.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  No, it is not. Um, it's a, it's a dark, quiet room, lying on your bed kind of drug. So my first experience with DMT way, way back, um, in a place where it was completely legal.

• 40:07AJ Gentile?

  Well, if we're going to talk about yours, then you have to tell me what led up to it. Why, how did you get the courage? Were you just like, well, I, I have to do it now?

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'd reached the stage where I'd, I'd been studying DM. I'd been fascinated by DMT for the best part of a decade. And I'd read all, by that point, all the Terence McKenna books, listened to his lectures. And it was like, okay, I need to find this, this molecule and actually try it. Otherwise I'm just talking blindly. And, and so I managed through unspecified means to acquire some DMT in an unspecified location at an unspecified time.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  And I, so I'll, I'll kind of talk you through what happened to me.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  So I had a glass pipe and I loaded it with what I thought was around sort of 50 milligrams of DMT. And I, I, first of all, I, I tried to, now we have these great vaporization systems. In those days, I just had a lighter.

• 41:10AJ Gentile?

  No volcano bag.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  No, nothing like that. It was all very, very basic, you know, like a crack pipe, basically.

• 41:16AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Um, and I didn't really know what I was doing. And so I was heating it and it was, it tasted awful and I was coughing.

• 41:23AJ Gentile?

  The smell is terrible.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  And a lot of it was burning probably. So it was smoke, you know, horrible acrid smoke as well. And I couldn't get enough in my lungs and I was, I basically gave up for the evening. And then just as I was about to go to bed, like two o'clock in the morning, I think it was, I saw the pipe on, on the desk beside me and I thought, okay, just one more quick attempt. And I was a bit more relaxed this time for some reason.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  I started inhaling the vapor and then something happened. I just remember this ping, this very distinct sound, like a very high pitched pinging sound that was completely different to early in the evening. Somehow I knew that something was happening, so I continued inhaling. Then I had to put the pipe down, I laid down and I was hurtled at great speed through this indescribably complex geometric imagery. People, I can't English it, it's un-Englishable, but straight away, and I don't know how I

• 42:32Speaker 03

  knew this, but I knew this with every fiber of my being, that I was, I wasn't just in a place, but I was in a place that was constructed by the hand of an immense and timeless intelligence that was vast, much older, far, far, billions, trillions of years older than our universe, than our reality, more advanced, just indescribably strange.

• 43:05AJ Gentile?

  And when you're there, you know it to be true?

• 43:07Speaker 03

  You know it to be true, I had no shadow of a doubt. And that's what was so horrifying for me at the time. It was shocking because I was expecting just to kind of go into a dream world and see elves dancing around. You know, I'd got all this stuff from McKenna.

• 43:21AJ Gentile?

  Had you done other, like, magic mushrooms or things before?

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Mushrooms, MDMA, not really a psychedelic, but yeah, I was familiar with the effects of drugs when they come on, but not that fast.

• 43:34AJ Gentile?

  So when you start, things start to change, you're like, okay, I've been here before. It's that breakthrough, that's like, what is this?

• 43:41Speaker 03

  It's so vast. With mushrooms, it builds and you feel the energy and you can kind of...

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Settle into it, but with this, it's like rocket ship, you know, like a roller coaster. One moment, everything's normal and then literally 20, 30 seconds later, you're just being fired into this place that's completely on, you couldn't, there's no way I could have predicted it or anticipated what this was going to be like. I could have read all the books about DMT and listened to every single Terrence McKenna lecture in existence and I still wouldn't even be close to what this was. It was truly ontologically shocking.

• 44:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  That this place existed and it was right there and it was far more advanced and it was, it was this hyper technological space that was built by the hand of an alien intelligent. I didn't see entities dancing around, but I felt the immensity of and the undeniability of this presence. And I, it lasted two or three minutes. I don't remember all the details. I remember start, I lost any awareness of not just myself, but of even the concept of humanity.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  And that lasted not long, two, three minutes. Then gradually I started to get these little fragments of memories of having been a human and as if my brain was kind of piecing back together my humanity.

• 45:12AJ Gentile?

  It's very strange that that come down is like that.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:16AJ Gentile?

  You start to become human again.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  You become human again.

• 45:18AJ Gentile?

  It's very, that only a couple of minutes. So.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:21AJ Gentile?

  It's because of that janky method where.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:25AJ Gentile?

  I don't want to give people too much information, but even if vaporized properly, we're talking what 15, 20 minutes most.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the peak itself, I mean, you get into the peak within a minute, inside a minute. Then you're there in the breakthrough state, probably between three, four, five, six, seven minutes. And then you, then you start to come down and then the after effects will last, yeah, 15, 20 minutes. You know, when, when I came back, I, I just laid on my bed on my back. All I could say was, I was shaking and I said, oh my fucking God. That's all I could say. Like I couldn't believe what had just happened to me. I could not believe it. I remember writing a message to my.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Brand, you know, Facebook Messenger or something. This is the most, I was just, I was, I was euphoric but shocked at the same time. It's like, my God, this really is it, you know, Terrence McKenna wasn't joking here. This is, this is something that wow, I need to.

• 46:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, this is not melting walls or seeing colors. It is not.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, the one of the first, I read a book. I had a little section on psychedelics and described DMT as like a bit like LSD, but, but much shorter acting like 15 minutes. And people, some people will go into it thinking that's what it is, just like taking LSD, but very short duration, but it's not.

• 46:51AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  You're, you're, you cannot be prepared for it in a way. I don't think, um, you can't anticipate or predict what it's going, going to be like, and it will shock you. You know, death by astonishment, you know, going back to that. He was only half joking when he said that, um, because true astonishment, I think is a very rare emotion. Now we kind of use it to mean mildly surprised.

• 47:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  That true astonishment, uh, where your mind, you cannot even begin to comprehend the immensity of something. That's what DMT delivers.

• 47:27AJ Gentile?

  And you can't really explain it. You can't explain that, you know, your ego kind of dissolves into this oneness with everything and, and everything makes total sense.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, at the time it does.

• 47:36AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:38AJ Gentile?

  Um, in psychedelic therapy, there's a, there's something called integration. Did you do any type of integration work post-trip?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  No, I mean, this was, um, integration's a big thing now, but at the time, maybe it was in certain specialist circles. But at the time it wasn't, didn't really know what integration was. Uh, but in a way it's like, it's so fast. And, and although, yeah, for 15, 20 minutes I was shaking and I was shocked by the next morning. Um, it's like my, my brain had kind of thought, okay, we'll get, we'll compartmentalize that somewhere.

• 48:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, let's put that away.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  We'll put that away. Um, so there wasn't any lingering after effects or anything like that, you know, it's, it's neurologically, it's a very benign molecule. It's not going to hurt you physiologically.

• 48:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  But your world, your entire.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Ontological foundation of your reality is going to be obliterated. That's the problem.

• 48:40AJ Gentile?

  Yes. And I don't recommend doing it alone. Definitely not with open flame.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no.

• 48:47AJ Gentile?

  Because you're going to be careful. Just be careful, guys. Be so careful with it. Best way to try it would be, I think, using DMTX that you and Strassmann created. It's probably a good way to explore it. Coming up on a break, when we come back, I want to talk a little bit of chemistry.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 49:07AJ Gentile?

  And maybe you can convince us that those entities are not hallucinations.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  I'll do my best.

• 49:12AJ Gentile?

  All right, I'll be right back. So let me see if I can get this right. We've got tryptophan gets decarboxylated into tryptamine. IMNT gets involved. Then we've got two stages of methylating to get to DMT. Is that about right?

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:31AJ Gentile?

  That sounds like a pretty expensive process to keep in human biology or all biology. So what is the evolutionary purpose of DMT in all these living things?

• 49:45Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, so it's actually, you know, compared to most molecules. I mean, let's say LSD, right? LSD is not natural. It's semisynthetic, but it's derived from lysuric acidamide, which is natural and is far more complex than DMT. DMT is actually not only the most common naturally occurring psychedelic. It's found in countless plant species, hundreds. But it's also the simplest. You go, as you said, you go from tryptophan, you go to tryptamine, and then one step, then you got another step, which is this dimethylation by indole N-methyltransferase, IMNT.

• 50:27AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  And so it's just two simple steps from tryptophan, this amino acid. So that's really.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  To me, that's, there's something uncanny about that. You would have this simple molecule that's everywhere. You know, you walk through your local park and there's probably half a dozen different plant species all busily silently constructing the world's strangest

• 50:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  psychedelic drug and you've no idea. And it's also found in humans. And we've known that since the 1950s when people started getting schizophrenics to line up and in a bottle, basically.

• 51:08AJ Gentile?

  Sure. Yeah, they found it with urine tests.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. So why is it there? I don't think anyone's got a definitive answer, so I can't give you a definitive answer. Usual answers are, well, it's an insect repellent or it's, you know, it's some kind of, it's used to, as kind of an anti-feeding, an anti-predation kind of molecule. It affects the neurochemistry of insects, let's say. We know that psilocybin does that, for example.

• 51:38AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  That it would dissuade organisms, you know, predators from feeding on a plant by producing DMT.

• 51:47AJ Gentile?

  I don't like, I don't like that one.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  I don't like that either. It doesn't explain why.

• 51:51AJ Gentile?

  Because even, because any mammal's stomach would break it down.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  That's what you'd think, you see, as well.

• 51:57AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  So the short answer, and the not very exciting answer, is we don't really know why it's there. We don't know why it's in humans. We don't know why it's in plants. But it is, and it's very easy to make, and it's just two steps from tryptophan. So it's not like, you know, many molecules, you have to go through many, many steps. Something like morphine, for example, there's many steps to get to morphine. But to get to DMT, it's very simple. So basically, all living organisms probably have the enzymatic machinery to make DMT, including humans. So it feels almost like you have this.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Message in some way about this other place that's kind of embedded within our reality, but it takes a certain amount of intelligence in order to decode that message. You can't just munch on plants and have a psychedelic trip like you could with mushrooms. You can eat as many plants as you like, never going to have any effect. You need to isolate the molecule and actually, like Steven Zara's it did, and that took humans all the way up until the 1950s to actually work out what this molecule was and how to use it, the techniques that are administered.

• 53:12AJ Gentile?

  From a chemistry perspective, why are those methyl, those bolt-on methyl groups so powerful? It's because it's basically a serotonin molecule, yes?

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so serotonin is five hydroxytryptamine. So if you remove that hydroxy group, you get tryptamine, which is, has no effect. It doesn't get across the blood-brain barrier very efficiently at all. If you inject someone with serotonin, sorry, with tryptamine, there are no psychoactive effects. So that methylation makes the molecule slightly more fatty, shall we say, more lipid, oil-soluble. Allows it to get very, very rapidly into the brain. And then it binds to this specific set of receptors, the most famous one being the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. And this is responsible for its effects.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  And we want to get into the neuroscience, we can talk through exactly how that process works.

• 54:14AJ Gentile?

  I'd love to, if you don't mind.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  I don't mind.

• 54:16AJ Gentile?

  Please.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so psychedelics, so what are known as the classic psychedelics, so DMT, LSD, psilocybin, escalin, those are the most famous ones. They all work mainly through this serotonin receptor called the 5-HT2A receptor. So there are many serotonin receptors, and they all have different functions. What a... Receptor does broadly, receptors are embedded in the membrane of neurons. The neurons are these information generating cells of your brain. They, they generate little electrochemical spikes, which you can think of as like binary digits, almost, you know, on and off.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  That's all a neuron really can do. It can fire what's called an action potential spike, or it can be quiet. It's like a one and a zero. And, and, and neurons are generating these action potentials all the time, or, or not. And then they have these chemical connections called synapses that allows them to share information. See, all of these millions of neurons that are, that are connected in your, that form your cortex, cerebral cortex in your brain. And the receptors, of all different types of receptors, for all different types of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators and other neurochemicals, these chemicals bind to these receptors and they affect the way the neuron behaves. They're like tuning dials, if you like, for the, the neurons.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  And the 5-HT2A receptor specifically is what's called an excitatory receptor. It excites the neuron. It makes it more likely to fire these electrochemical spikes, and it makes it more likely to, to fire in, when, when it receives stimulation from another neuron. So it excites the cortex broadly.

• 56:11AJ Gentile?

  Are we, are we finding that psychedelics, those neurotransmitters are concentrated in the specific parts of the brain?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  So, so the cortex, so let's talk a little bit about the cortex. So you have this outer layer of your brain, this folded outer layer, which is called the cerebral cortex, in the newest part of the brain, evolutionary. And it has several layers, kind of six layers broadly. And each layer of the cortex has different function in terms of its connectivity, whether it's receiving input, or it's more like an output layer, or it's more of an interconnection layer, that kind of thing. And the cortex is, is responsible for constructing your world model. This is the, this is absolutely fundamental.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  The world you experience now, the subjective world you experience, the structure, the content, the dynamics, everything you're experiencing that's in your visual world is being constructed by your brain.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Your brain isn't like a video camera that's kind of taking pictures of the outside world. It has to construct a model of the environment that may or may not resemble what the true structure of the environment, which we never have direct access to. So you're always living in kind of like a waking dream in a sense. Anil Seth calls it a waking hallucination. I don't really like that term, but anyway.

• 57:41AJ Gentile?

  But later I think we'll get into your work with Donald Hoffman and his theories, which are really interesting.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a completely different take on the whole thing. Much more fundamental. But if we stick to the kind of the brain level, you have this world model that's being always being constructed by your brain. And we know this because you can manipulate your brain. If I remove the top of your skull and start playing around with an electrode in there, I can change your world.

• 58:09AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  Right? Nothing in the outside of the environment changes, but your world changes. I can make you see colorful patterns. I can make you hear voices just by stimulating different parts of the brain that are responsible for generating different aspects, if you like, of your world. So we know that that's the case. And if you take a psychedelic, what does that do? It changes your world. It binds to these 5-HT2A receptors that are concentrated in layer five of the cortex, one of the deeper layers of the cortex. And what that does is it kind of shakes up your world model.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  The world model stops being kind of very rigid and well-defined and becomes much more fluid and dynamic because these neurons are being stimulated by this 5-HT2A receptor. The neurons start firing more often. They start sharing information between each other. And so this very, very rigid and precisely constructed world model, which is the one you're using to kind of make sense of the environment, starts to change. Things start to loosen up. Objects might start to morph or change their identity. This is happening. Because of this stimulation by the psychedelic.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  But with DMT, something, DMT seems to transcend all of that, goes beyond that. So you can actually measure, if you put someone in an MRI machine, this work was initially done by Robin Carhart-Harris, who's now at University of California, San Diego, might have got that wrong, but anyway. A university in California, maybe San Francisco, but anyway, if you put someone in an MRI machine and give them, inject them with psilocybin, for example, you can actually see how their brain activity changes. So normally, you can see the brain moving between states in a very controlled manner, as your brain is constructing your world.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  But then, when you give psilocybin, that activity starts to look more random, as if the brain is moving more freely from state to state. And so that kind of...

• 1:00:25AJ Gentile?

  You mean DMT is more freely?

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  With psilocybin, right, or LSD.

• 1:00:31AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  But, and so you can measure the entropy, so the randomness in neural activity.

• 1:00:39AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  What you see is you go from this baseline level, where the brain is ordered, and then you start to see this increase in randomness, it goes up like this.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  And this maps quite well with the subjective experience, the world becomes more fluid, your thinking becomes much more fluid and dynamic. It's like you're heating up a piece of glass, right? The glass is very rigid and you heat it up and it starts to melt and you can mold it to any kind of shape. Psychedelics are kind of doing that to the brain, doing that to your world model, and that's why you have the effects of psychedelics. But with DMT, something different seems to happen. You get this initial increase in randomness, but it's as if the brain suddenly collapses into this new order. So you go from the old order, the original order, which is the normal waking world model, into this more fluid and dynamic state.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  And then, at the breakthrough, it's like the brain has collapsed into this entirely new order, which is this entirely new, novel, entirely alien world.

• 1:01:45AJ Gentile?

  Is that when we start to lose our ego?

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  That's...

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

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• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Part of what's going on, yeah. The ego is an interesting concept in that it's not that well-defined, but there are certain networks in the brain that we think are responsible. The default mode network is the one that's spoken about a lot.

• 1:02:34AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Responsible for the sense of self as distinct from the other, from the environment. And what psychedelics do is because of this stimulation of these five HD2A receptors, those networks start to break down and that order starts to break down. So you have all of these effects, psychological, subjective effects, effects on the world, effects on your sense of self, they all start to break down. And the higher the dose becomes, the more pronounced those effects appear to be. But with DMT, it's not like there's just an increase in randomness, because the DMT world is not random.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  It is very coherent, exquisitely complex, staggeringly coherent narrative complexity. It's like, literally as if the normal waking world has been switched off.

• 1:03:27AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  And a new world. It's like those old radio sets where you go from dial, you get one channel, then you twist it and it's kind of noisy. Yeah, that's kind of psychedelics. And then finally, if you twist it enough, this entirely new, crisp, clear channel crackles through the speakers, and that's kind of what DMT is doing.

• 1:03:48AJ Gentile?

  And you've called that world navigable.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  It is navigable, yeah. Excuse me. For most people, it's not navigable. For most people, it's just like, hold on.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  But with with experience, yes, you can you can navigate this world.

• 1:04:05AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  But the problem is.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  The problem I have with the kind of the standard explanation of this D M T state is that that this normal waking world is is a world that your brain kind of evolved to construct. You know, the moment that you emerge from the womb, your brain is constantly sampling sensory information from the environment through the eyes, et cetera, and and using it to kind of construct this world model. That's the only world model your brain knows how to build or should know how to build. It's like, you know, if you you grow up speaking English, you can't speak any other languages unless you learn them. And in the same way, this normal waking world should be the only world your brain knows how to construct.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  But when you take D M T, your brain starts constructing these entirely alien worlds that are that are far more complex, far more intricate, far more coherent, and far more real feeling than the normal waking world. It's not like dream. You know, when people dream, they tend to dream of people. They tend to dream of animals. You know, people in the Midwest will dream of people. They will dream of dogs and cats, right? If you ask someone who lives in the Amazon rainforest what they dream of, they'll dream of catching stingrays, they'll dream of the animals that they will find in their environment. This is obvious in a way.

• 1:05:29AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  When you dream, your brain is simply constructing the normal waking world. Dream is like continuous, really, with the normal waking world. Your brain is using those models that it knows to construct a world in the absence of sensory inputs, which is what dreaming is. So that's kind of makes sense. So why then?

• 1:05:46AJ Gentile?

  Not D M T.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Not D M T. Your brain starts constructing these worlds that it shouldn't know how to build.

• 1:05:51AJ Gentile?

  Well, take us through the take us through the world. So and maybe we can talk about D M T X because that's.

• 1:06:02AJ Gentile?

  That's the protocol you developed with Rick Strassman. And so this is intravenous DMT.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:06:08AJ Gentile?

  Keeping you in that state for a lo- how long?

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  How long? How long is a piece of string? If you answer that question.

• 1:06:16AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so Rick Strassman, as many people will know, he did the world's largest DMT study in the 1990s. He injected them with DMT, what's called a bolus injection. So all the DMT at once, or within like 30 seconds. You get a very- rises in the brain.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  They are- they have this breakthrough experience and then almost as soon as it reaches the peak in the brain, it starts to metabolize and excrete. And so there's this exponential drop off. And then when you reach a certain level in the brain, you come out of the DMT state. And so it's if you really want to study the DMT state, you know, it's geometry, it's topology, the entities, the language, all that kind of stuff, you need to be in there for a lot longer.

• 1:07:02AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  And so it occurred to me back in sort of 2015 that DMT, so I was aware of this technique from anesthesiology called target controlled intravenous infusion, which is a technique they use in anesthesiology during surgery. So what they don't do, when someone puts you to sleep, they don't just inject you with a drug. They inject you with a very fast acting anesthetic. If they just injected it, you'd be asleep for a few minutes. But they use what's called an infusion device, infusion machine. So they deliver using a programmed infusion protocol, they deliver the anesthetic into your bloodstream. The aim being to keep your brain anesthetic concentration fairly constant.

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  So they can keep you anesthetized for as long as they want. As soon as they stop the machine, a few minutes later, you'll wake up. Beautiful thing. And they can manipulate the depth of your anesthesia as well. So this is, has been the mainstay of anesthesiology for decades. And it occurred to me that the kind of the requisite properties of the anesthetic drug are the same as DMT, needs to be sure. Acting it needs it can't build up in the bloodstream it can't have subjective tolerance right

• 1:08:17AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  So the effect of the drug must remain constant throughout the whilst you're anesthetized otherwise you'd start to wake up even though the drug was still pumping into your brain. DMT has that as well Rick Strassman showed that you can inject someone with DMT and you can measure the intensity of the experience using his rating scale then you can inject them again thirty minutes later and they will have the same intensity of experience you can do repeat that over and over again so it occurred to me I thought wait you know DMT has all of these properties that we need for target controlled intravenous infusion so why don't we work together me and Rick and actually develop a model for this a mathematical model of the of DMT's distribution metabolism excretion that you need to build this kind

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  of target controlled intravenous infusion model but just replace the anesthetic drug with DMT so I wrote to Rick and I said I have this idea and I need your data his blood data because you need blood sampling data to build this model and he had it on some old hard drive this old Excel file she kindly sent to me and we set to work we built this model

• 1:09:25AJ Gentile?

  Did you have to convince him or talk him into it or explain the protocol?

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  No I think he when he wrote DMT the spirit molecule in two thousand he he mentioned towards the end of the book that maybe an infusion will be better so it wasn't entirely alien idea to him and said you know when I came along with this very concrete proposal to write this paper we'd call it extended state DMT later it became known as DMTX

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  and we published this model kind of a proof of principle basically to say this should work we didn't know if it would work but it should work we should be able to stabilize the DMT state and hold someone there for thirty minutes an hour two hours three hours however long and then that got a lot of attention and the Imperial College team in London

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Picked it up and said, okay, let's do this in humans. Let's see if it actually works. And they, in, I think, 2020, around that time, they recruited a dozen people for a pilot study and were able to indeed show for just 30 minutes. But 30 minutes is a lot longer than a normal DMT trip. They were able to stabilize the DMT state and maintain fairly stable intensity of experience. And since then, you know, a number of groups have kind of extended this to two, three hours. I now work with a company called Eleusis, E-L-E-U-S-I-S, in the Caribbean. And we've got a special license

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  to actually bring anyone onto the island and to undergo several DMTX sessions with qualified medical practitioners, psychiatrists, anesthesiologists. And, and anyone now can basically spend as much time as they like, really, within the DMT space, exploring. And so, you know, go to eleusismind.com and you can also, you know, kind of sign up and spend a few days on the island.

• 1:11:26AJ Gentile?

  And Eleusis went live in March, right?

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Yes. So the first cohort was in March.

• 1:11:32AJ Gentile?

  First cohort. So what are people seeing?

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Well, we, it's very early days. So we don't kind of have a kind of published reports or anything, but the-

• 1:11:44AJ Gentile?

  But are we all seeing the waiting room, navigating the space, the entities?

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  So when the Imperial College team published their DMTX study, they, we actually, I actually did a, like an online webinar with all of the, or several of the participants, me and Graham Hancock actually chaired it. That's still online. People can find that. Basically, for Andrew Gallimore, Graham Hancock, you should be able to find that. And we spoke to several of them, including the first-

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Subject Zero, as I call him, Carl Smith, he was the first person to undergo DMTX in a controlled kind of research setting. It was five doses, increasing doses, and I think every couple of weeks they'd go in, they'd be injected, infused with DMT for 30 minutes, and then we got to speak to them about their experiences. And the thing about DMT is that it's a very varied experience, and no two experiences are always the same. However, Carl Smith particularly, he's one of my colleagues at NewNautics, we're both

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  directors, he found that the entities, over the sessions, with those several, you know, five sessions of DMTX, the entities started to notice that he was coming back rather too often and spending a little bit too much time in there. And he describes the sense that the entities were saying, "Not you again, you're back again," you know, as if there was this kind of continuity between the experiences. They weren't totally isolated experiences, but there was this continuity between the experiences. And during one experience, one DMTX session, he was being scanned by some machine, this is in the normal waking world, right? Right.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Like an MRI machine or something. Right. He was being scanned, his brain was being scanned, and the entities were aware of this. The entities kind of rushed in, and he said they seemed a little bit confused, like they're the ones normally doing the scanning, and not whatever this was, they didn't seem to understand what was going on. Most people, when they take DMT, they aren't being scanned. Right. They're doing it in the back room or basement or something. Did he describe what they looked like? He didn't, no, he didn't describe what they looked like, but he said there were very, very large numbers of, they were crowding in, as if they'd seen something going on, and they came crowded in.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  And there was another guy called Anton Bilton, he actually funded the study. He has this great institute called the Tiringham Institute and has these wonderful private symposia every few years. And he funded it and he said, "I want to be a subject, since I'm paying for this bloody thing." And not a cheap study by any stretch of the imagination. And he described an experience where he found himself in like the waiting room kind of place with these morphing geometric walls. And these beings were looking down upon him, he called them the gingerbread men, these elfish-like beings, small beings.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  And they seemed to be, he said, "They always check the back of my neck, always do this. I don't know why." He said, "The only thing I can think is they were checking to see if there was a cord attached, whether I had kind of passed permanently to their side." Wow. Yeah. And then when they were satisfied that he hadn't, that he was kind of there temporarily, they started showing him things. And one thing that happens quite regularly is they show you devices that are kind of

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  like an electronic, some kind of mechanical device or electronic device, like a jewel encrusted pad, he described it, which is interesting, right? It's like, imagine an iPad, I guess, with knobs and wheels and dials and numbers and all this kind of stuff, and trying to showing it to him as if, as if he was supposed to do something with it or make sense of it. But of course he couldn't. But this term jewel encrusted pad is very interesting because Timothy Leary back in the 1960s, he wasn't aware of this, Anton, but I'd said to him, "Jewel encrusted pad, is that your terminology?" He said, "Yeah, that's how I describe it." Because Timothy Leary back in the 1960s says that these elf-like insect beings were

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  proffering this jewel encrusted pad, like a device that was some, you know, some kind

• 1:16:40Speaker 03

  Futuristic iPad thing.

• 1:16:42AJ Gentile?

  Would an Amazonian see that? Because they'd have no context for anything like that. Would they see that?

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  That's a good question. We don't know, right? That's this is the kind of study that needs to be done is get people who are completely naive to pure injected DMT.

• 1:16:57AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  And bring them in and see, you know, what do they see? Because the experience is like to be very different to ayahuasca. For a number of reasons, but, but, but yeah, do they see the same kind of technological devices? Or do they not? And, you know, what, what is the reason for that? But, um, but yeah, there's, there's always this sense that you're interacting with some kind of extremely advanced species, extremely advanced cognitively, intellectually, technologically, like a hyper technological kind of species or ecology. And they, they, they seem often eager to show you things, devices, multiple impossible

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  things, you know, nine dimensional Faberge eggs. Terence McKenna used to describe them, you know, just weird things, liquid light crystal machine strings, you know, things that you can't really, but just things, that kind of thing, as if, as if they're trying to impart some kind of information or trying to make you understand, but you don't understand. And that's what's so frustrating about it. Um, and Anton in the same way, when he was presented with this jewel encrusted pad, he couldn't make any sense of it. And eventually they just gave up and they kind of, there's there was like a, like a swipe as if, and the whole scene completely changed and he was in this completely different environment.

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so lots of very strange experiences coming out. But I think what, where DMTX really comes into its own is being able to spend. Imagine if you'd sent in, you know, a mathematician or a linguist who was, who was familiar with strange symbolisms and languages or, or, or whatever, somebody who could spend.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  An hour within the space, interacting with these beings and trying to extract certain types of information from these beings. I think that's how I see the future of a DMTX program as opposed to research programs of the past, which have generally been, have you taken psychedelics before? Yes, good. Do you have any heart conditions? No, okay. There you go. Go in, tell us what you see. But it's not-

• 1:19:12AJ Gentile?

  But with DMTX, you can bring them out, can't you? Get them to describe what they saw and then put them back?

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  Exactly. So not only can you send in specialists, so if you want to study the topology or the geometry of the space, you send in a mathematician that's familiar with these kind of things. And they can say, oh, this is a seven dimensional space, or these are the symmetry groups that are on the walls of this space. They can tell you exactly what's going on mathematically, and what's changed compared to the normal waking world. And they can spend, yes, they can spend, it could be deep within the space for an hour or longer, or you can adjust in real time. So they can have a device where they can adjust the infusion rate. So the amount of DMT being infused into their bloodstream, they can manipulate that in real time. Because DMT is so short acting, if you bring down

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  the infusion rate, within just a minute or so, you start to come out. And then you can communicate with the team and say, I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this. And they might say, oh, can you look for this? Or can you ask them this? Okay, I'm going back in. They go back down again. So you have this ability to manipulate the depth in real time.

• 1:20:22AJ Gentile?

  It's fascinating. What got you thinking that maybe what people are seeing is connected? And it's not a hallucination? That it's a realm?

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so what I think's going on with DMT is, I don't think you're going anywhere. That's really important. It's not like another dimension or something like that. Even in the DMT state, the brain is constructing this model, right? So normally, what's happening when you're awake and completely sober is your brain is using sensory information, let's say through your eyes, and it's using it to kind of tune and keep its model kind of tuned to the environment, basically. Now, when you take DMT, the brain starts constructing this alternate world model. And it's as if there's some alternate source of sensory information coming into the brain that's kind of modulating that DMT world.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  So you're not going anywhere. You don't have to kind of travel anywhere. It's simply like switching the channel, right? If you have a TV set and you're watching channel one, then you switch the TV set to channel two and nothing goes anywhere. It's simply that you've changed the receiving.

• 1:21:34AJ Gentile?

  Well, you said that it's like you're receiving alternate reality. How do you know that you're receiving it and not creating it?

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Well, you are creating it. You're always creating the world model. But again, from the normal waking world, you're receiving sensory information, which is informing that creation. So it's like, it's always being created by the brain, but it's mapped to the environment, the normal waking world, right? It's modulated and it's kind of constrained by sensory information coming from the environment, right? Now, in the DMT state, what I think is happening is that your brain is constructing this alternate world, but it's being constrained by some other source of sensory inputs, which I think distinguishes it from a hallucination. The reason I think that, because you could say, you're quite right, that it's purely constructed, right?

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  There's no other source of information coming in. It's literally like a kind of dream state. But again, you know, the dream state is very different. We can explain the dream state. The DMT state is like this, it's like the brain has started speaking a language it never learned to speak. It's constructing these worlds that have no relationship to the normal waking world, no relationship to the world the brain evolved and learned to construct. And it's hard to explain that. You know, if a five-year-old British child started speaking some obscure dialect of some South American indigenous rainforest language, right, and doing so fluently, that

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  would be completely confounding unless he'd been taught it in the same way. The brain switching to constructing this alien world so efficiently is very, very, very difficult to explain. And that's kind of the foundation of why I think there's something going on more than just mere hallucination with DMT, but we need to test it. Now...

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  There are a number of ways you might do that, for example. You might look for, you know, if two people, for example, are going, let's say, interacting with the same entity as some people claim to be able to do, can you kind of pass information through that entity? Can someone deposit information into the DMT state?

• 1:23:51AJ Gentile?

  I want to ask you-

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  And someone else retrieve it?

• 1:23:53AJ Gentile?

  I want to ask you about the blue-yellow test. Blue-yellow test.

• 1:23:57Speaker 03

  Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:58AJ Gentile?

  I want to ask you about that. Before we do that, mentioned Robin Card Harris. Let's steel man, straw man, because he disagrees and thinks it's hallucination.

• 1:24:06Speaker 03

  He does, yeah.

• 1:24:07AJ Gentile?

  Why does he think that? And why is he wrong? I mean, I want you to be right, but it's, you know, logically, parsimoniously, it seems like hallucination is what it is. But I prefer your theory because it's just more interesting.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I'm not going to say that Robin is wrong, but I think, I think Robin and all kind of mainstream, button-down, neuroscience to start with, that the assumption that we're dealing with hallucination. And I think that that's reasonable, actually. It should always be your default position. In most of my work, I would say 80% of what I've done in the last 20 years, is not actually trying to convince people what DMT is, but actually trying to convince people what it's not. I actually try to explain to people why I don't think it's hallucination, rather than telling them that I have the answer, that, you know, it's the spirit world or whatever, the astral plane.

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  I really try to focus on kind of why I think it's very difficult to explain DMT purely as a hallucination. And Robin would say, well, this is just, well, I can't say what Robin would say, but it's, Robin assumes that we're dealing with some kind of information, some kind of, some kind of hallucination that your brain, when perturbed by DMT, is constructing these-

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  Worlds perhaps informed by archetypal structures, that's a big thing I know with Robin. He's, he often takes this very Jungian angle. He thinks that, well, we can, these are archetypal structures. That's where they're coming from. These are inherited patterns. That's why everyone sees certain types of entities. It's because these are embedded archetypal structures.

• 1:25:58AJ Gentile?

  In every culture.

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  In every culture.

• 1:26:00AJ Gentile?

  Has little people.

• 1:26:01Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. But I, I think that would work if.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  The thing is that archetypes are not, they're not images, first of all. You know, an archetype, really, we know now, anyway, that an archetype is really just a, it's a, an inherited mode of social interaction. So you're born with certain, in animals, we just call them instincts, right? A baby, for example, will want to be close to its mother. Will see its mother as a source of warmth and comfort and safety. And will smile when it sees its mother's face. Whereas when it sees a stranger, it will, it will be naturally kind of scared and start crying. If it's separated from its mother, it will start crying. These are instinctive behaviours that are essential, right?

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  In, in animals, we have certain instinctive behaviours that don't need to be learned. If you take a pair of young rats in a cage, they're entirely raised alone. Put them together in a cage, they will start playing. They will start scrapping and all this kind of stuff. All instinctive. They don't need to be taught how to play. It's just instinctive. You put a cat, a few cat hairs into that cage.

• 1:27:24AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  They freeze, they're scared. It doesn't work with dog hairs.

• 1:27:29AJ Gentile?

  Huh.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  It works with cat hairs, right? So they have this innate programme, we might call it a cat archetype. Doesn't mean they can dream of cats or that they can imagine cats. They can't, but they have this innate response to a cat.

• 1:27:42AJ Gentile?

  They know what that smell is.

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  They know that that smell, they don't know what it is, but they know that instinctively, that they need to be a little bit careful because there's something. Unsettling, there's something dangerous here. And they don't need to be taught that, and that's kind of important. And in the same way, humans have lots of these archetypes. The mother archetype, the father archetype, the stranger, the wise old man. What's the wise old man? Well, it's an elder member of the tribe who has a lot of life experience and wisdom and who you should listen to. The trickster, this is someone probably from outside the tribe, maybe, who you need to be a little bit careful around. You know, should you reveal your darkest secrets to them? Or should you remain tight lipped? Should you listen to what they say?

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  Or should you ignore them? You know, these are all types of social interactions that have been essential in social humans for millennia, tens of millennia. And so these are kind of hardwired. And so these become associated with certain types of people we call the archetypes. But they're not images. They don't undow you with the ability to construct images. But you learn to construct images associated with them. As you do, as you learn, your brain learns to construct the normal waking world. They become associated with certain types of... The mother archetype becomes associated with your mother and that kind of thing. So archetypes are kind of limited in what they give you.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  They give you these very kind of quick and dirty ways of responding to humans. There are certain types of humans that you're likely to meet in the environment that you should respond to in certain ways. You don't respond to your mother in the same way you respond to a stranger in a dark alley. We have these hardwired archetypes that allow us to differentiate those, respond in an appropriate way. But they don't give you hyperdimensional worlds filled with non-human, non-animal beings that are far more complex than humans. You know, they don't give you all of that stuff. And so it still doesn't explain, even if you invoke the archetypes, why and how the brain is able to construct these things so reliably.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  But again, I understand that not everyone is going to be convinced by this. And I don't necessarily expect them to be convinced by it. I'm not trying to convince them that the DMT world, really, you really are interacting with other intelligences in the DMT state. But I'm just trying to trigger a little... A little sliver of doubt in your mind that actually there maybe is something slightly unusual going on that we need to study. We need to really study this space and study these entities with an open mind and not just assume from the get-go that it's just hallucination and our job is simply to explain how these

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  hallucinations works because there's so much going on in DMT state that I think remains a true mystery.

• 1:30:39AJ Gentile?

  Do we know if Robin has tried DMT? I don't want to out him. The reason I ask is if you've tried it, then you inherently feel like you're connected to everything else.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do know the answer to that question, but I'm not sure if I can.

• 1:30:56AJ Gentile?

  That's fair enough. That's fair enough. Because when I read his quote about hallucinations, I was thinking, Robin, I don't know if you've taken it because it's pretty mind-opening. But there are some problems with it that I want to talk about as we move along. You mentioned rats, which brought me to a question I wanted to ask. I think we're finding that under cardiac arrest, brain's being flooded with DMT.

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26AJ Gentile?

  What do you think is going on there?

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Ah, okay, there's a bit of a story there.

• 1:31:30AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  So again, the reason I mentioned earlier that people have been looking for DMT in humans since the 1950s, there's a reason for that because there was this idea that something called the transmethylation hypothesis of schizophrenia, which was the idea that, you know, serotonin also comes from tryptophan and tryptamine, but if you kind of divert off the serotonin production pathway, you can get very easily to DMT. So when people started, when Zara particularly started and other people started publishing studies showing that DMT was psychedelic and that it could easily be produced from tryptophan, they thought, well, maybe...

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  What's causing these abnormal psychologies in schizophrenics is that they have this disorder with their tryptamine metabolism, that they're producing too much DMT.

• 1:32:25AJ Gentile?

  Interesting.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  Makes sense, right? And so, easy to test, they started looking for DMT in urine, in blood, in saliva, et cetera. And they found it. But the problem is that they found it in basically everyone.

• 1:32:38AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  And there are some studies that, I think there's been over a hundred studies now looking at DMT levels in humans since the 1950s. And there's never been, there's never really convincing evidence that some studies say, oh, there's more DMT in schizophrenics, other studies say, no, there isn't. It's certainly not definitive. And does it even make any sense? Schizophrenics don't tend to, you know, really like schizophrenic visual hallucinations when they're there, mainly they're auditory, they're hearing voices. But when they do have visual hallucinations, they tend to be of normal appearing, normal-sized humans.

• 1:33:13AJ Gentile?

  And they tend to be in the same space.

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:33:17AJ Gentile?

  Where when you're on DMT, you're not here anymore. You are gone.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. So it's like, it's like you're in a waking dream. It's like your, you know, your, your brain has inserted a human into your world model inappropriately.

• 1:33:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  They interact with the environment, they sit on chairs, they don't, they walk through doors, they don't walk through walls. They do, they seem to obey the laws of physics, right? That's your brain kind of, again, using its stored object models and models of the world, but not doing it quite appropriately. That can, that's relatively easy to explain. But anyway, going back to the rats, yeah, so

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  the, the idea, so the pineal gland, this is basically taking us to the pineal gland. So Rick Strasman in the 1990s, he proposed that DMT, we know that the pineal gland is producing melatonin, this tiny little gland, about the size of the end of my pinky, sits right in the center of the brain. It has this exalted position in mystical traditions for many, many years. And Rick Strasman suggested that perhaps pineal gland was releasing DMT.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  And that this was responsible for certain old states of consciousness, or very specifically, the near-death experience. This, actually, I should give proper credit to Jace Calloway in the 1980s. He proposed that dreaming was due to DMT, that when you dream, your brain stops, the tryptamine metabolism changes and your brain stops producing serotonin and basically starts producing DMT and that causes dreaming. That was his hypothesis. He had two hypotheses. One is that DMT causes dreams, which I don't think is true either, because dreams are nothing like DMT.

• 1:35:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  And then the near-death experience, that's more compelling.

• 1:35:11AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  It's more compelling. There have been some recent studies that showed there are very, there is kind of a, quite a large overlap between the kinds of experiences people have during near-death experiences and the DMT phenomenology. They're not exactly the same.

• 1:35:25AJ Gentile?

  But only 10 to 20% of those people have that experience, the rest don't.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. Including Don Hoffman, actually, but that's another story.

• 1:35:33AJ Gentile?

  We were almost up to die, I can't wait. So, so what do you think is happening?

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38AJ Gentile?

  Why is it, why, why did we evolve to have that there?

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:35:44AJ Gentile?

  Is that why we're seeing the tunnel, when I see the Virgin Mary, or I see my grandmother, my mother, am I seeing an entity?

• 1:35:52Speaker 03

  So that's the hypothesis, right? So Rick Strasman said that when you die, or when you're in, during the dying process, the brain is flooded with DMT, and this is kind of the conduit by which the soul exits the body. It's a very mystical kind of, it's not purely a scientific, he's definitely strayed into the mystical realms here, kind of exited the scientific arena a little bit.

• 1:36:13AJ Gentile?

  You kind of have to.

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  You kind of have to, yeah. But it was purely hypothetical. It was just a hypothesis that a number of people caught on to. And so the DMT dream, DMT death thing has become kind of embedded in, in public consciousness, but they're both purely hypotheses. However, more recently, a guy called a biochemist, I think he's a biochemist, Edie Fresker, is working with Rick Strasman and Dennis McKenna, he found that DMT, when you, if you. If you have some neurons that are deprived of oxygen, so brain cells, you deprive them, they are very oxygen hungry. If you deprive them from oxygen, deprive them of oxygen,

• 1:36:56Speaker 03

  they die very quickly. This is why strokes are so devastating. In a very short period of time, blood flow to certain parts of the brain is compromised, that part of the brain starts to die. It's why strokes need to be treated so, so rapidly. It's an absolute critical, you know, clinical emergency. But what he found is that if you deprive neurons of oxygen and added some DMT to the mix, the neurons survived much longer.

• 1:37:23AJ Gentile?

  Neuroprotective.

• 1:37:24Speaker 03

  Neuroprotective. And it's actually a particular receptor called the sigma-1 receptor.

• 1:37:31AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  It's not the serotonin receptor, sigma-1 receptor binds to this and it protects the neurons in some way. There's some biochemical cascade that helps the neurons to survive for much longer. So then you think about this, oh, wait a minute, what happens during the dying process? Well, your cardiovascular and respiratory system start to collapse, your brain is starved, gradually more and more starved of oxygen. Now, this is precisely the time when, you know, if you do come back, right, if you don't die, this is precisely the time when you need as much DMT in your brain as possible to help protect your brain. So if you do come back, the brain is protected because this is the most oxygen, you know, hypoxia sensitive organ in the body. And so it would make sense that if you're dying,

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  that somehow endogenous DMT production is ramped up very, very rapidly, you get this flood of DMT in the brain which protects the brain. It doesn't explain the experience, however, because you can do this with any molecule that binds to the sigma-1 receptor. So it suggests there's some connection there with the dying process. And so they... Recently, they they tested this in in rats. They would they would stop the rat's heart, induce basically cardiac arrest in in a rat. And they would they have these things called these like micro, what are they called? I forget. But anyway, they have this system where they can actually measure, they can put this device, this probe directly

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  into a rat's, living rat's brain and actually measure in real time the levels of various molecules, kind of a credible thing.

• 1:39:06AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  And they found indeed that when the rat's heart stopped, levels of D M T rose very, very kind of this spike in D M T. There was also other neurotransmitters that were that were spiking as well. So whether it's specific for D M T is not, doesn't seem to be. But it it kind of fits together, right? That when you're dying, the brain or the brain or could be the lungs, we don't know. But levels of D M T in the brain at least rise, this protects the brain.

• 1:39:36AJ Gentile?

  Have they have they been able to test on the rats, different brain activity?

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  No. So you're suggesting like they can measure the the N D E of them?

• 1:39:47AJ Gentile?

  Right, I'm wondering.

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

  What kind of experience there?

• 1:39:49AJ Gentile?

  It sounds like all mammals would do this. Or it's what it sounds like. I'm just wondering, does every animal, when it goes through this process, does their reality change? Do they move to this new dimension?

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  This is, yeah. Unless unless you you kind of undergo a rebirth as as a rat, we're not likely to find that out. I mean, you certainly you can measure.

• 1:40:11AJ Gentile?

  Couldn't you test, couldn't you test their brainwaves to see?

• 1:40:13Speaker 03

  Yes, you can.

• 1:40:14AJ Gentile?

  You can?

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  You can. But whether you can do that at the same time as this micro, it's called micro dialysis. You can do that at the same time as this measuring the levels. I think you probably have to do it separately. You have these like tiny little M R I machines, very cute little M R I machine.

• 1:40:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I've seen those.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  You could probably do that.

• 1:40:32AJ Gentile?

  It's like a Barbie M R I.

• 1:40:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think it's been done there. But it's, yeah.

• 1:40:37AJ Gentile?

  A quick sidetrack, and then I want to get to blue yellow. Five M E O D M T is something that I'm not interested in doing.

• 1:40:49AJ Gentile?

  But that seems to be real dark ego death very quickly. Where with DMT, there's some ego dissolving, but you're still, you're still narrating. And you're still remembering. So there is, you're still kind of driving. Where 5-MEO is a little bit, you're more observing and you kind of go into the void.

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, they used to call 5-MEO and DMT, the power and the glory.

• 1:41:16AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  Right. So DMT is the glory. It's very, it's, it's obviously, it's characterized by extremely content-rich, extremely visual, it's full of stuff, more full of stuff than the all-waking world. So it's a beautiful experience and it can be horrifying as well, but it is a beautiful, rich, incredibly exquisitely rich and complex kind of experience.

• 1:41:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, not everybody from DMTX had a, had a glorious experience. I read a couple that were like, those evil motherfuckers, or I read a couple of those dark ones.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  There are some dark ones, yeah, for sure. But generally, it's less than 10%.

• 1:41:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's a bad trip.

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  It's a bad trip. But yeah, Carl Smith, going back to him, he was subject zero Imperial College. He said to me many years ago, he says, if DMT is like the fourth dimension, 5-MEO is like the 12th dimension.

• 1:42:06AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  It's like you go past all the form, you transcend form, if you go far enough beyond, you can actually go beyond DMT, this highly structured form and content-rich state into the void, into pure white light of consciousness itself. That's the 5-MEO. And he actually said during his DMTX experience that he was able to sometimes see the 5-MEO space kind of there, some way away, whilst he was in the DMT space, as if he could almost reach it, as if they were connected in some way.

• 1:42:44AJ Gentile?

  That's very interesting.

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:48AJ Gentile?

  That's very interesting. Um, I don't know if you want to say, but have you experienced five of them yet?

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  And I like you, I'm in no hurry. I've got my hands full with DMT.

• 1:42:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I'm in no hurry either because, yeah.

• 1:43:04Speaker 04

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• 1:43:34AJ Gentile?

  And you can buy that online from these churches. Don't do that. I don't buy anything from the churches.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  Don't go chasing toads down in...

• 1:43:43AJ Gentile?

  What was that church that you criticized? They're still in business, by the way.

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  Are they really?

• 1:43:49AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yes. Yes, yes.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was the Church of, it used to be called the Church of Silomethoxine. Then it became the Church of the Sacred Synthesis, I think.

• 1:43:59AJ Gentile?

  Yep. Yeah, they're still, they're still operating. And it's a couple of lawyers that are running basically a church farm. I think they've claimed that they've helped create something like 80 to 100 of these sacrament churches. They, I mean, they wrote a couple of books on how to do it to get around being able to buy drugs in the mail.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:24AJ Gentile?

  But I just want people to know that that's, it's not legal what they're doing.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:44:28AJ Gentile?

  So, so don't send them money.

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  No, no. I mean, they, they say that their sacrament doesn't contain, they said doesn't contain any, the illegal parts of the mushroom is that the psilocybin, the psilocin, they said it doesn't contain any of that and it's just Silomethoxine, this molecule, sacred molecule that they produce. But actually, when people analyzed samples of the sacrament, it actually contained no Silomethoxine whatsoever and it was purely just, it was just magic mushrooms. They've been shipping that to people, including internationally as well.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  Boy, um, so you pay a, you know, a subscription fee and you get shipped these allegedly perfectly legal mushrooms. Cause psilocybin itself molecule isn't illegal, but should be completely legal. But actually, if someone was to, if one of these samples was was intercepted. It's like you can get in really serious trouble depending on where he lived. Um, it's and and it's such a, what really annoys me about them is that it's such a simple thing to do. Um, you know, he had this vision that, um, if you feed five methoxy D M T to magic mushrooms. They start converting five methoxy D M T to psilocybin, a simple chemical step.

• 1:45:41AJ Gentile?

  Wasn't that based on debunked research though?

• 1:45:43Speaker 03

  It was the Hamilton Morris recently debunked it, yeah.

• 1:45:46AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  By a guy called Gartz. Uh, but anyway, you know, once they'd done that experiment, nothing wrong with doing the experiment. Um, they should have done the obvious thing, which is to analyze chemically analyze. It shouldn't have been left to some outside person, some independent group to actually analyze their mushrooms. And and check that it doesn't contain psilocybin and psilocin and actually contains what they say it contains. They just said, oh, it feels completely different to mushrooms, you know, completely biased, subjective way. Uh, um, um, uh, of kind of appraising this this mushroom. And then when a a group did actually analyze it, as I said, there was no psilocybin in there whatsoever.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Um, and of course they threatened to, they tried to, um, sue them for one million, one million dollars.

• 1:46:37Speaker 03

  Literally it was, you know, several people, lots of people they tried to sue.

• 1:46:40AJ Gentile?

  Well, they're lawyers, they're not chemists, they're not scientists, they're lawyers, so they're, they're gonna sue. They lost every case they've sued.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:46:48AJ Gentile?

  Um, yeah, so guys, don't, that's, um, I'm.

• 1:46:54AJ Gentile?

  Andrew won't say it, but I will. Um, Greg Lake and Ben Wee. Stay away from those churches.

• 1:47:03AJ Gentile?

  That's the uh.

• 1:47:06AJ Gentile?

  I feel like those churches kind of cloud the legitimate research. Don't you?

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  Well, it depends on the church, I guess. I mean, I think. I think humans really do have a.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  Dare I say, a God-given right to alter their consciousness, however they feel fit. And if that includes using psilocybe mushrooms, or ayahuasca, or DMT, or whatever, I don't think that should be a crime. And I think there's something extremely wrong with the idea that certain states of consciousness are basically illegal. I mean, yes, it's the molecule, but really, not the molecule, you know, what's important is what it does to you, what it does to your consciousness. And so it basically means that the LSD-induced state of consciousness is illegal. The DMT-induced state of consciousness is an illegal state of consciousness.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  So I think, I can fully understand people who would try to find loopholes in the law and, you know, more power to them to do that. But when you start creating churches, I think then you, there's a danger of you getting into kind of cultish territory, starting your own religion. For some people, it's clearly just a way of getting around the law. But for other people, like the Church of Salem of Oxen, for example, it becomes much more than that. And they start making big, big money from this. I mean, the $50,000 a month, I think, was a number, don't quote me on that, but it was a big number.

• 1:48:34AJ Gentile?

  I think in the lawsuit, it was $100,000 a month.

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, there you go. So $100,000 a month, and then some guys publish a paper basically saying that your, the entire foundation of your sacrament. You know, people are paying $100 a month, what it is for 30 grams of dried mushrooms, something that could be obtained for pennies, really, if you grow your own.

• 1:48:56Speaker 03

  Someone shows that that's nonsense, that it's not scientifically valid.

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  You go from $100,000 a month to a very small number. You can imagine them being pissed off by that, but it's their own fault.

• 1:49:08AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10AJ Gentile?

  We'll leave on that, that up note about the churches. All right. We'll be right back, guys. It's gonna get wild. I wanted to ask you about this. Back in 2021, something you posted.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  Going back.

• 1:49:26AJ Gentile?

  Retrieved and carefully restored from the archives of the highly secretive and now allegedly defunct Laboratory for Reality Engineering Tokyo. With its own Psychedelic Molecular Technology Technical Manual. That is not a paper. That is not a scientific paper. What is that? A world building? An ARG? What were you doing?

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  So, that's from my, so my second book, Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds. That was kind of a concept book. I mean, fundamentally, it's a book about how do psychedelic molecules alter the structure and dynamics of your world? How do they allow you to explore other worlds, basically? It's a, it takes you through the, all the way from the chemistry through to the biochemistry and the pharmacology and the neuroscience and looks at DMT, it looks at the classic psychedelics generally, it looks at salvinorin, it looks at even ketamine, things like that. Basically, it's like a manual for understanding psychedelics, basically.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  But it was kind of like a concept book in that I wanted, I wanted to give it this kind of, this kind of feeling as, I guess, like, this kind of cyberpunk vibe as being this Yes. This kind of old document from this defunct Reality Engineering Institute in Tokyo. That was the vibe. You know, kind of Akira kind of thing. That's what I wanted, so if you, if you actually buy that book, the whole book looks like it's been kind of photocopied. It's like one of these declassified CIA documents with all the stamps on and the retracted bits.

• 1:51:07AJ Gentile?

  I know that, you could still get that I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that.

• 1:51:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I love, I love that book. And that whole reality, there's some photos in the center of the book that purported to be from this now defunct secretive Reality Engineering Institute in Tokyo, which of course is just big in my imagination.

• 1:51:25AJ Gentile?

  I bet a lot of people hopped on board, though, with that.

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  A lot of people did. And they would write to me as well and say, hey, I think there's a problem with the printing on this board. It looks like it's been photocopied. So, yeah, that's part of the design.

• 1:51:39AJ Gentile?

  I thought it was great.

• 1:51:43AJ Gentile?

  So let's talk about the blue-yellow screen test.

• 1:51:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:51:48AJ Gentile?

  How does that work and what are you trying to prove? And is that connected to traces of other with Don and NIFA?

• 1:51:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so obviously, you know, I can talk until the cows come home, until, you know, explaining why I think DMT is more than hallucination. But we really need real tests. What are the kind of experimental tests that we can do that can distinguish between actual interfacing with some kind of intelligence versus pure hallucination? And so in 2015, I started working with a nonprofit in Florida called NewNautics, and now one of the directors.

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  We're interested in kind of, kind of like, we describe it as like a SETI of the mind kind of program, rather than looking for intelligence out there in the cosmos. We're looking for intelligence, you know, inner paths to outer space, as Rick Strasman called it. And so we're interested in kind of spearheading and developing research, various research projects within this kind of psychedelic arena, to actually study things that other people don't study, right? Actually, most people assume it's hallucination, and so they wouldn't dream of doing these kind of experiments, trying to actually test that. And so NewNautics, people can go to the NewNautics website, newnautics.org, N-O-O-N-A-U-T-I-C-S.org,

• 1:53:21Speaker 03

  and find out all about the work we do. People can even donate if they want to, to help kind of fund that kind of research. And now with the DMTX technology, now that we have this ability... To extend the DMT state, we can actually do experiments now. And now we even have the venue, I mentioned Eleusis earlier, E L E U S I S, based on the Eleusinian mysteries. So we have this legal setting where people can go and we can actually bring in cohorts. We're like the research arm of Eleusis at New Nautics. We can design these experiments and we can actually bring people on to the island in the Caribbean, St Vincent and the Grenadines,

• 1:54:04Speaker 03

  and perform experiments aimed at studying the DMT space and testing the DMT space, doing experiments within the DMT space. And so this blue-yellow, so basically what we want to know is when someone goes into the DMT space and they're interacting with some kind of entity, let's say, are they really interacting with some kind of independent agency? And how do we test that? And it's, one can imagine a whole suite of different experiments that one could do. I don't think there is kind of one mic drop experiment that's going to settle the question once and for all. You can imagine various research programs aimed at testing that.

• 1:54:46Speaker 03

  And one broad type of experiment is looking for some kind of

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

  correlation within the DMT experience that can't be explained in terms of that the subject couldn't know, right? So I mentioned earlier this idea of someone depositing information into the DMT space and someone else retrieving it later on, that would show there's some sort of communication channel. Another type of experiment, which is this blue-yellow one you mentioned, is can a DMT entity, can they track some kind of external variable that the subject doesn't know?

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  Right, so it could be the simplest case is some kind of binary variable, right? It could be switching between two colors, right? So in another room, completely isolated from the subject, you have a computer screen that's set to randomly switch at random intervals between two different variables. Most simplest idea would be two colors, right? A blue screen and a yellow screen, simple as that. What we want to know is can some entity, can their behavior in some way be tracked to that variable, right? So for example, the subject goes into the D M T space, starts interacting with an entity. Here we've got trained people who can reliably interact with certain entities.

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  And then basically, we can ask the subject to basically, at intervals, at set intervals, they need to say, okay, is the screen blue or yellow, right? Based upon your experience, right? They could be asking the entity directly, is it blue or yellow? Now, or it could be just like, what feeling, what are the dominant colors within the space? Maybe they're not even interacting with an entity. Just what vibe do you get? Based upon your experience, are you leaning more towards blue now or leaning more towards yellow? And sometimes that might be obvious, you know, if the experience becomes brightly colored yellow, then they would say yellow. But it might be much more subtle than that, and they might have to kind of guess a little bit.

• 1:56:58Speaker 03

  But the idea basically is simply that, when you, when you perform that experiment with the subject, you compare the actual random flipping between blue and yellow, or whatever other binary variable you choose, is there a correlation, statistical correlation that is beyond what would be expected by chance? And if, if so, if you achieve that, then that suggests that, yes, the D M T state, the entities within the D M T state can somehow track. So it's not, it's not like, many people have proposed experiments where you go into the D M T space and you say to an entity, if you're so smart, you know, break down this complex number, this, this large number into its unique prime factors, basically

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  asking them to perform.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  Perform things, perform mathematical operations. I think that's, that's quite an ask.

• 1:57:51AJ Gentile?

  They don't want to do that.

• 1:57:51Speaker 03

  They probably don't want to do that.

• 1:57:53AJ Gentile?

  Didn't you have one entity who just said, "We're done for today"?

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah, that's to do with the lockout effect. Very interesting. I didn't mention that, actually. That's another reason why I don't think, but we'll get to that.

• 1:58:04AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:58:04Speaker 03

  But yeah, so, so I think this is a much simpler experiment in that you're simply asking someone to basically say blue or yellow.

• 1:58:13AJ Gentile?

  What makes you think that the entities can see into our world so easily?

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  We don't, we don't know that. We don't know that, which is why you have a number of experiments. So you might be asking, again, deposit and retrieval, that's slightly different. Here you're looking at an information channel into and out of the DMT state. This is more tracking an external variable. You might ask the entities to, or sometimes rather than giving the entities tasks, this is something I really struggle with, is that you requiring the cooperation of an entity, for them even to know what you mean, there's nothing guaranteed, and we'll get to this when we talk about Don Hoffman.

• 1:58:54Speaker 03

  There's nothing guaranteed in my current model of DMT that's, that requires or even implies that these entities are highly intelligent in the human sense. But they seem to occupy a space that is geometrically, dimensionally, and topologically very, very different. And so they're doing things within that space that cannot be done within the normal waking world. And they kind of betray their intelligence in a way. You don't need to ask them to do things. They just do things that the human brain can't, right?

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  So if it's hallucination, then obviously what that entity can do is limited by what your brain can do.

• 1:59:42AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:59:43Speaker 03

  If the entity starts speaking ancient Greek, and you don't know ancient Greek, we've got a problem here.

• 1:59:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:59:52Speaker 03

  Now, if an entity starts performing mathematical operations, starts doing things, right, that your human brain cannot do, then we've got a problem here to explain. Andres Gomez Emilson, who works, who's part of or founded the Qualia Research Institute, probably the most important group on the planet now, who's really studying the mathematics of the DMT state and the topology and the dimensional structure and all of that stuff. He describes entities doing things that a human can't do mathematically, like painting surfaces with certain colors. So there's something called the four-color theorem, which states that whenever you have a surface that's got different shapes, all perfectly tessellated,

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  like a map, you can color every shape with four colors so that no two shapes are but with the same color. So it comes back to the idea of coloring a map of all the countries. You only need four colors to paint every country with a different color, so no two countries have the same color, kind of butting up against each other. It's called the four-color theorem. You can do it with any kind of map. But the more complex the map becomes, the more cognitively demanding it becomes. Eventually, it becomes impossible for a human to actually color these surfaces. But what he noticed these entities doing was having these exquisitely

• 2:01:19Speaker 03

  complex, often higher-dimensional, surfaces with strange topological structures, and these entities painting these surfaces with four colors just perfectly, as if demonstrating their abilities. And he said, "I couldn't do this. It would take me hours or longer to do what they were doing in a fraction of a second." And repeatedly, they paint the surface, and then they would reset it, and then paint it again, and then do it again, repeatedly. And most people, if they saw that, they would go...

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  That was, you know, crazy, or that was weird, or that was beautiful, but they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at.

• 2:01:58AJ Gentile?

  I wouldn't.

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  No, no, nor would I, nor the would I, nor the would I.

• 2:02:03AJ Gentile?

  I was, I was surprised by all the math in traces of other and in Hoffman's theories. There's a lot of math in it.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  There's a lot of math, and I think you need, you need the maths to, so we say maths in the UK, I can't, I can't bring myself to say maths. You need the mathematics to really kind of, to understand the DMT state, because it is entirely different. It's not the simple three plus one dimensional world that we live in. It's very, very different. And being able to go in there and say how it's different, why it's different, what's going on, and send, this is why I said earlier, you send in specialists into the DMT state, you send in people like Andres, who can say, look, what these entities are doing is not just beautiful or strange, it's impossible for a human brain to do, or far beyond normal human cognitive capacities, even in the most intelligent of people like Andres.

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  And so those are the kind of things you see, where the entities are actually betray their intelligence, displaying it. They're not giving you numbers, or giving you blueprints for the time machine. I don't think it works like that. But they're, they're doing things that you just have to recognize are beyond human capabilities. And, and in that way, you, you know, that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with something that is beyond the human, shall we say.

• 2:03:24AJ Gentile?

  That's very interesting. Can you give us just a simple example of how the maths apply to this work?

• 2:03:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so.

• 2:03:36AJ Gentile?

  I'm just trying to get a foundation before we get into Don Hoffman.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, well, we can get into Don Hoffman, because the mathematics definitely applies there.

• 2:03:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:03:46Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:03:49Speaker 03

  So I've been kind of following Don Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, professor, cognitive scientist, the University of California at Irvine for decades. And he has this mathematical model that he calls conscious agent theory. It's what he calls conscious realism, which posits that consciousness is fundamental and that reality consists of and only of conscious agents interacting. So everything we see and perceive is the result of the interaction of these conscious agents. And he has this precise mathematical model from which he can kind of boot up physical

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  reality. So rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental and then trying to boot up consciousness from dead inert physical matter, he's going in the opposite direction, which I think is the correct one. Assume that consciousness is fundamental, try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agents. He starts with a conscious agent, which is a very...

• 2:05:00AJ Gentile?

  I think he got his math to work through game theory. Like the math legitimately works.

• 2:05:06Speaker 03

  The mathematics legitimately works and it's incredible really that he starts with a very simple kind of minimal assumption model of a conscious agent. A conscious agent is an agent that can do basically three things. It can perceive other conscious agents, it can make decisions based upon what it perceives, and it can perform actions which affect other conscious agents. So you have this kind of network emerges of conscious agents, so all interacting via perception. And what we see, what we observe, is this interface. We never perceive the conscious agent network directly because it's far too complex, effectively this infinite network of conscious agents.

• 2:05:51Speaker 03

  What we see is this interface that allows us to interact in adaptive ways with the environment.

• 2:05:58AJ Gentile?

  Everything's an icon.

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  Everything's an icon.

• 2:06:00AJ Gentile?

  So this is the fitness before truth method.

• 2:06:02Speaker 03

  This is fitness before truth. And so that was his original idea that he's been developing and testing various ways over the last few decades. And most recently, he started, he came up with this, what's called the trace logic. The mathematics are a little bit sophisticated, I don't want to get too much into that. I'll get out of my depth pretty quickly as well. But what he found is that using this new model, he could actually kind of boot up,

• 2:06:35Speaker 03

  not just the world as it appears to us, but he could also boot up relativity. So he could explain within this conscious agent theory, trace logic model, why time dilation and contraction at high speeds and all this kind of stuff that comes from relativity, which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way his kind of spacetime works. Actually, he can get it from just the interactions of conscious agents. He can get, he derived the Schrödinger equation. I mean, it's incredible stuff.

• 2:07:06AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Speaker 03

  Just from basic conscious agents. And so just a few months ago, actually, I got an email from a guy called Gaspar who's working with Don. He's, he's kind of built this thing called the Trace Institute, based upon Don Hoffman's work, to kind of start to build Don's legacy. Because Don Hoffman's kind of disorganized in some ways, and there's all this stuff floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff. There's no kind of, kind of properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on his work and kind of pick up the mantle, so to speak. So Gaspar, who's also been following my work, said to Don, you should...

• 2:07:52Speaker 03

  You should read this guy, Andrew Gallimore, you know, read his book Death by Astonishment, because a lot of the ideas in here, you know, I talk about intelligent agents in a very neutral way. I don't talk so much about aliens or spirits or that kind of thing. I'd say we're dealing with some kind of intelligent agent in the DMT state. Don Hoffman talks about conscious agents. So Gaspard, quite rightly noted that there seemed to be some overlap here. There is perhaps some cross-fertilization between our different ways of looking at reality.

• 2:08:24AJ Gentile?

  There is, but there's some conflict as well.

• 2:08:26Speaker 03

  There might be some conflict we can get into. But Gaspard said, you know, would you like to meet Don Hoffman? Don would like to meet you and have a discussion and see where there is that overlap. And so we met online and straight away I said, should we write a paper on this? See if we can see where the connection is. And it was honestly, and I don't say this lightly, it was one of the most profound few months of my life.

• 2:09:00AJ Gentile?

  And this was a preprint just last month, I think, right?

• 2:09:03Speaker 03

  Preprint we published just last month. And it was, it was, I kind of had this working model of what DMT was doing, that it was, that it was kind of gating access to some other source of sensory information. But I never, within the physicalist framework, there was no way for me to explain, how does information come from somewhere else? It's not coming through the normal sensory organs. Where's that information coming from? I didn't have an answer to it until I started working with Don's model. So in my second book, which we just spoke about, Reality Switch Technologies, I developed this concept called the world space. So

• 2:09:46Speaker 03

  Remember that your brain is always constructing the world. And so there's kind of a vast state space of all possible worlds that your brain can construct, right? Normally, we sit within this very small region of what I call the world space. I call this the consensus reality space. But there are all these other worlds, world moments. A world is just everything you're experiencing at a particular moment. And your brain is constantly moving between these states. If you take this vast landscape of all possible world moments, I call that the world space. And normally, we sit within this very narrow region. It's like a well and a tractor basin within this world space, the consensus reality space. And that's the normal waking world.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Those are the states that represent the structure, the content, and the dynamics of the normal waking world. What DMT does, as I postulate in Reality Switch technologies, is it perturbs the brain and it pushes it into a different region of this world space landscape. And this is where the DMT worlds are represented. But what I didn't have in that model was how information comes in to actually kind of modulate that, you know, modulate that experience. It was just how does the brain go from building the normal waking world to the DMT world? So then I started working with Don's model and a mathematician called Niffa Hermansen, who was absolutely pivotal in making this, all the mathematics work.

• 2:11:13Speaker 03

  And we basically, we probed the model. We said, okay, if normally we, we only sit within a narrow, very small region of what Don Hoffman calls the experience space. It's the same idea. A conscious agent has this vast set of states, vast numbers of different experiences. And we sit within this very narrow region of this experience space. It's the same idea as the world space. But what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of, the experience space is simply a set of states, all possible states that a conscious agent could have, all possible experiences.

• 2:11:53Speaker 03

  But what sits on top is this mathematical structure called a Markov kernel, which is called the Qualia kernel. What that does is it gives dynamical structure to the experience space. So what that means is, if you're in this state now, what are the probability that you'll move to this state, or this state, or this state? So it gives that dynamics. It determines the dynamics of how you move through around the experience space. And as I said, you normally, we will sit within this very small region of the total experience base, which is the adaptive region where we experience the normal waking world. It's very thin, very, very small location within the experience space.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  And that's determined by the Qualia kernel, which has evolved within that region of the experience base to create the world that we experience. However, if you can perturb the brain, perturb the conscious agent, you can knock it out of this region of the experience base into an entirely different region, where the normal rules that are basically applied by this Qualia kernel, they no longer apply. So you enter a type of experience, a type of being within the world that is completely different, right? This is purely abstract at the moment. We're not thinking about DMT. You enter a region of the experience base where the dynamics are completely different.

• 2:13:19Speaker 03

  The Markovian rules, the Markovian dynamics that determine how you experience the world within this region of the experience base are completely different. Now, the Qualia kernel that sits, as I said, that's determining these dynamics is actually composed of three different kernels, the perception, the decision, and the action kernels. So there's three parts. So together, they determine not just what is your experience like within this region of the experience base, but how are you interacting with the larger, the broader conscious agent network? What kinds of other conscious agents can you interact with? Can you perceive?

• 2:14:01Speaker 03

  Because in this region, the consensus reality space, you only, can only interact with a very, very limited number of conscious agents. But in this region of the experience space, we proposed, you might be able to interact with agents that are normally completely imperceptible.

• 2:14:16AJ Gentile?

  Let me ask a question then.

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Go on.

• 2:14:18AJ Gentile?

  Information theory would say that that other region is just a lossy projection and you can never fully know what's there because it may even be Don's work and N can't be greater than M. So, brain is finite, we can't perceive other dimensions because our brain just can't do it. So if we're going into these other worlds, it has to just be a shadow of the world because we really can't know.

• 2:14:47Speaker 03

  Well, okay, yes, so the world you experience is always, it's always the interface. You can never get out of the interface, but the interface would change as you move the different regions of the experience space. So what you see in the interface is determined by the dynamics that are imposed by this qualia kernel, right? So in this region, we experience this low dimensional world. We're interacting with this very limited number of conscious agents that are, through our perception channel, our perception kernel, we're able to kind of render that information in a way that makes sense to us. But once you move into this other region of the experience space, so we propose, the dynamical constraints

• 2:15:30Speaker 03

  are completely different. So the world wouldn't necessarily be three plus one dimensional. It could be completely different. It could be completely alien. The geometry, the topology could be completely alien and the conscious agents that you can interact with in that region of the experience space could also be completely different.

• 2:15:48AJ Gentile?

  So your brain has to also be a projection to make that work?

• 2:15:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:15:51AJ Gentile?

  Even mathematically?

• 2:15:52Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. You always were, in conscious agent theory, the brain itself is part of the interface.

• 2:15:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:15:59Speaker 03

  You're a conscious agent or a set of conscious agents and we're talking purely about, at the level of the ground of reality, if you like. But what's beautiful is you can actually, this was purely initially a kind of a mathematical abstraction that we were doing, talking about how the qualia kernel and the Markovian dynamics, all of this stuff. But then we said, okay, let's imagine what that would actually be like if you were knocked out of this region of the experience space and you Found yourself in a different region of the experience space where the Markovian dynamics are completely different. And the interactions between the broader conscious agent network is completely different. Well, it would be extremely strange. Nothing would seem to make sense. It would look impossible.

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  It would look perhaps high dimensional. The topology, the geometry would be completely different. The beings that you interacted with would seem completely alien. In other words, the entirety of the DMT phenomenology basically fell out of the mathematics.

• 2:16:58AJ Gentile?

  It's elegant.

• 2:16:59Speaker 03

  And when that happened, that was like, it was a profound moment in my life. Probably one of the most profound moments in my working life studying DMT. That DMT went from something which didn't quite make sense. You know, there's still missing pieces in the way I thought about it. And then suddenly with Don's model, everything falls into place.

• 2:17:20AJ Gentile?

  It does. But even then, that world, those entities are still just icons and projections.

• 2:17:27Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah. So, so what you have to think is that, so when you perceive another conscious agent, what's happening is that conscious, the way that that conscious agent interacts with the conscious agent network changes the states of the conscious agent network. That has an influence on your experience states. Doesn't mean you're, that you can map the actual conscious agent dynamics directly into your experience space. You can't, but you, there is some influence, a statistical influence on how your world states, how your experience states kind of update. That's, that's what perception is. And we form these icons, you know, I never have access to your internal dynamics.

• 2:18:12Speaker 03

  I have this highly simplified icon. And when you're, I'm perceiving you, basically what you are doing as a conscious agent is, is affecting my experience. And that's basically what perception is in the conscious realism model. And that completely changes when you go out of the consensus reality space, this very limited region of the experience space. I can no longer see you and I can no longer represent you or anything. But I start to be able to represent highly unusual exotic Markovian dynamics that I simply couldn't do in this state. And that's why we think you're able to interact with other conscious agents that aren't simply are.

• 2:18:57Speaker 03

  Beyond the agents, our representational reach, if you like. We simply have no way to represent what they are doing in any way. Once you move into this other region of the experience base, because the qualia kernel in that region is completely different. This is a bit complicated. But you can you can start to interact with the conscious agent network in completely different ways. And that's what DMT is. You're interacting with. It feels like you're in another world because in a sense you are. It's like the headset has been changed. You're in a completely different region of the experience base and you're interacting with other conscious agents that you weren't. You were unable to interact with or perceive in the whilst you were stuck in this region of the of the experience base.

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  So it all falls into place.

• 2:19:43AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  Quite beautifully. And that's what shocked me and was, you know, a profound, almost religious experience.

• 2:19:50AJ Gentile?

  What do you think our icon is in that other world? How are we perceived?

• 2:19:58Speaker 03

  Normally.

• 2:19:59AJ Gentile?

  I never looked in a mirror.

• 2:20:01Speaker 03

  That's the thing is that for most people, they would close their eyes and the normal waking world is irrelevant. And that's it's clear that the brain is kind of losing its ability very, very rapidly. If you take a low dose, you will see dramatic changes in the way that other people in the world appears to you. But normally, once you get, once you deliver that robust perturbation of the brain of the conscious agent with DMT, this world is gone. There's no representation of it whatsoever. Even if you have your eyes open, it's like you're interacting with the conscious agent network

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  in conscious realism theory in a completely different way. And so you're, it makes us, what DMT is doing is allowing us. We have this vast, beautiful landscape of possible experiences. And DMT is one way, not necessarily the only way, certainly not the only way of changing not just the experience, not just the structure and dynamics of your subjective experience, of your interface, but allowing you to interact with. Reality itself, the conscious agent network in completely different ways. And so it's not just a model of DMT, or the DMT is the most efficient delivering that

• 2:21:23Speaker 03

  kick to the conscious agent, but people describe very profound encounters with entities and strange alien beings, high dose psilocybin, or even ketamine. John Lilly used to inject high doses of ketamine in the flotation tank, and he would describe interacting with strange digital alien consciousnesses. So maybe it's all about finding molecules that will deliver that robust kick to the conscious agent that pushes it out of this very narrow region and allows your world not just to change, but also allows you to enter into two-way interactions with other parts

• 2:22:07Speaker 03

  and other beings, other conscious agents within the conscious agent network.

• 2:22:12AJ Gentile?

  Do you think that that world is lateral to ours, or is that deeper to the source?

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  Well, we're always at the source. And this is what's kind of beautiful about conscious agent theory, is that there is no level deeper than a conscious agent. A conscious agent is the ground of reality itself.

• 2:22:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:22:30Speaker 03

  But normally, we only interact, we only see a kind of a, we're only influenced by a very thin slice of that conscious agent network. We're kind of held constrained by this qualia kernel that's been sculpted by evolutionary pressures. And what psychedelics do, DMT in particular, pushes us out of that. And so we're simply within, we're still a conscious agent, but it's just where our way of being in the world and our way of interacting with the broader conscious agent network has changed. But we're still at the level, we're still a conscious agent.

• 2:23:05AJ Gentile?

  That makes sense. So we're living, our world is a Mac, and you go into a different realm, and you're just booting up Windows or Linux. It's just a different interface.

• 2:23:14Speaker 03

  It's a different interface. Right. It's like changing the headset, basically.

• 2:23:18AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:23:20AJ Gentile?

  When was the moment where you abandoned materialism and decided that your brain is an icon?

• 2:23:27Speaker 03

  Well, I abandoned materialism many years ago.

• 2:23:30AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:31Speaker 03

  I mean, people think that I'm a materialist.

• 2:23:33AJ Gentile?

  I thought I did.

• 2:23:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I write at the level of the brain. I can get my teeth into the brain. Not metaphorically, of course. But, you know, the mechanics of it and all that stuff I can understand and get my teeth into. If someone... But really, I've always been an idealist, or for a very long time. I mean, I felt that consciousness was absolutely fundamental. This is the oldest message, you know, from all of the mystical traditions, going back to ancient Hinduism and stuff, saying that consciousness itself is fundamental. I've always felt that. But there was nothing really to get my teeth into until Don's work came along. Because Don said, hey, if consciousness is fundamental, that doesn't mean it's just

• 2:24:15Speaker 03

  this kind of diaphanous mist or fog or whatever. You can actually do mathematics with it. You can, just like you can with material physics, you can think about, okay, how do these conscious agents interact? What is the mathematics of that? You can actually look at the mechanics and the dynamics of conscious agents, do stuff with it. Actual science. And so that's why, before I started working with Don, I kind of avoided the question of consciousness, simply because I had nothing to get my teeth into. And there's always a danger that you'll end up going off into the more spiritual mystical stuff, which I've generally avoided for the same reasons.

• 2:24:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I don't hear you talk about consciousness itself. And you're familiar with Doug Hameroff's work?

• 2:25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:03AJ Gentile?

  It seems like it would marry...

• 2:25:05Speaker 03

  Stuart Hameroff.

• 2:25:06AJ Gentile?

  Stuart. It seems like it would marry nicely with DMTX.

• 2:25:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, Hameroff is a physicalist as well. I mean, Giulio Tononi, I was quite interested in integrated information theory for a while. I even wrote a paper on it, connecting it to the psychedelic state. But again, these are all really physicalist theories. They're trying to, they assume that the physical is fundamental and that somehow consciousness is generated, whether it's when integrated information is non-zero, whether it's these...

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  Effect, quantum effects in microtubules or whatever, but it's still a physicalist theory.

• 2:25:39AJ Gentile?

  And microtubules is still just another icon.

• 2:25:41Speaker 03

  You know, exactly. And so what I love about Don is you said, forget about all of that. Let's start with the one thing that we can't deny, which is our consciousness. Let's start with that. Let's assume that's fundamental, then try to boot up the appearance of physical reality. And he's, yeah, what he's achieved, I think, in the last year or so is remarkable. Being able to explain so much about what's going on. And it all makes perfect sense to me. And when you connect it to DMT, it just all falls into place. As I said, the DMT phenomenology kind of falls out of the mathematics, which is so beautiful, too beautiful for it to be completely wrong. It could be completely wrong, of course.

• 2:26:23Speaker 03

  I'm not saying this is, I've got the answer, but it's certainly something that I think needs to be pursued.

• 2:26:31AJ Gentile?

  So you and Don just gave a talk together a day or two ago?

• 2:26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we wrote the paper, worked on it for several months, me, Don and Nifa. And then I said, hey, I've been invited onto, have you heard of the Y Files? I've been invited on this podcast and I'm going to be there in June, the middle of June. And so Gaspard said, oh, we need to do an event. So that's why I did the event with Don because

• 2:26:57AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's incredible. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

• 2:27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so we arranged it on Saturday. So it's just a couple of days before today. And we, it's basically the launch of the Trace Institute, together with the collaboration between the Trace Institute and New Nautics that I work for, that I'm a director of. And we sat on stage for an hour and a half, just having a moderated conversation in LA, in Venice Beach, and just talking about, you know, kind of telling the world that DMT and conscious realism and kind of fit together in this beautiful way. And it was recorded, so it's not been released yet, but people will hopefully soon be able to actually watch

• 2:27:46Speaker 03

  this conversation. And in the paper as well, we did that. Blue-yellow experiment, we proposed that as well. So it wasn't just a theoretical, there's a lot of mathematics within the paper, there's a theoretical model, but also at the end, we say, okay, how can we test these things? And now that we've got, as I said, the Eleusis Retreat Research Centre in the Caribbean, we can actually pretty quickly start raising money to actually fund some projects on the island in a legal setting, without having to do the whole university route, which we're trying to avoid connecting ourselves with universities, because they obviously, they might not take kindly to the idea of testing the intelligence of DMT.

• 2:28:32AJ Gentile?

  It looks like a luxury vacation, is really what it looks like.

• 2:28:36Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a beautiful resort, no doubt about it. But it's also a research centre as well.

• 2:28:43AJ Gentile?

  Something I couldn't get my mind around was DMT tolerance in DMTX, where at some point, when the plasma level increases, the experience does not get deeper, in fact, it fades somewhat.

• 2:28:58Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, so this is very interesting. So, as I said before, Rick Strassman showed that DMT doesn't have subjective tolerance, unlike other psychedelics. If you take psilocybin mushrooms, trip, then if you try to take them the following day, you'll have a very, very weak experience, right? And we know, we've known this for a long time, with DMT, yes. But with DMT, you don't get that tolerance effect, which is why DMTX works. But on the online forums, quite a few years ago, this has been going on for a while, but a lot of people are starting to talk about it now, is that people would have this experience

• 2:29:37Speaker 03

  where they take DMT, often quite regularly, you know, maybe every day or every few days, right? They have a vape pen, so they're delivering the same DMT every time. And then one day, they'll get like a big X, in a field of vision that says, no entry. Or there'll be an entity that will wag its finger and say, no, no, no. Or they get some kind of message, like...

• 2:30:06Speaker 03

  You know, you're not welcome here. We're not letting you in. And this is called a lockout. You've been locked out of the DMT space.

• 2:30:12AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:30:12Speaker 03

  Right? And so they, they say, okay, that's pretty startling.

• 2:30:18Speaker 03

  And, and a guy wrote to me, actually, because I kind of probed this a little bit on the online forums and asked for people to, to give me their experiences. And one guy said that he was using DMT, his same batch as he always does, vaporized in the same manner. And then one day, some, I forget, it was like a mantis being or some kind of being, just as he entered the space, punched him in the face and he felt the punch. And he snapped back and he was back baseline consciousness. The effect was just gone like that. And you get many, many of those kinds of experiences. And it's not pharmacologically, this is not easy to explain.

• 2:30:59AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:31:00Speaker 03

  Right? Like tolerance is something that builds gradually and fades. Whereas this is like an on off switch. They have, you know, a string of perfectly visual psychedelic DMT states. And then one day they're told you're not coming in. And, and sometimes that can last for months or years. A friend of mine, David Luke, a professor at Greenwich University, psychologist, one of the world leading experts on DMT and very experienced with DMT. He was locked out for, someone told me it was like 20 years.

• 2:31:33AJ Gentile?

  Are you serotonin receptors still absorbing the molecule?

• 2:31:37Speaker 03

  Well, serotonin receptors, the thing about serotonin receptors, all receptors really, is that there, there's a turnover. The receptor itself will sometimes, just for a few days, will be in the membrane. Then it will be removed from the membrane, broken down and recycled. So there's, there's always this replenishment of serotonin receptors. Now, we know with like LSD, as it sits on the receptor, the receptor becomes what's called desensitized. It stops working. That's why you have to wait a few days or a week or so, until the receptors have been recycled. You've got new receptors.

• 2:32:11AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:32:11Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:32:12AJ Gentile?

  And serotonin syndrome is a real thing.

• 2:32:14Speaker 03

  Right, that it is a real thing.

• 2:32:17AJ Gentile?

  But what, but what blows my mind is it turning off.

• 2:32:20Speaker 03

  Turning off.

• 2:32:21AJ Gentile?

  Because his receptors should still be active with the molecule. You just have it turned off.

• 2:32:26Speaker 03

  It turns off, yeah. And it's not, it doesn't come back a few days later either. Sometimes it turns off and then the next day you're back. It's like you caught an entity on a bad day, that kind of thing. Sometimes you're locked out for months or even years.

• 2:32:39AJ Gentile?

  That's insane.

• 2:32:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I can get an even more incredible account that I got from a woman during DMTX. She was doing DMTX in Colorado, kind of a private group. And she was undergoing DMTX. She was having this interaction with this entity for, you know, 20 minutes or so. DMT flowing into her bloodstream and into her brain, stable DMT state. And then the entity said, okay, I think we're done for today. The vision's just stopped. DMT was still flowing. The infusion machine was still on. DMT levels in her brain still there. And it was like, we're done.

• 2:33:21AJ Gentile?

  Can't explain that?

• 2:33:22Speaker 03

  Can't explain that, right? So we want to study that.

• 2:33:25AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:33:26Speaker 03

  At Eleusis, what we plan to do, we're actually beginning to actually try and get funding for this, is to actually bring people on the island who are either locked out, who have been for a long time, who have repeatedly been unable, who could have visionary experiences in the past, but were locked out and are still locked out. And then bring them to the island and infuse DMT into, bring them to Eleusis, bring, infuse them with DMT, you know, DMTX, and then actually confirm or deny that, basically.

• 2:34:01AJ Gentile?

  If they're still locked out, then yeah, you're really on to something.

• 2:34:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then you can actually use EEG, in theory you can use fMRI. You can actually look, what is different through a control group? You also have a control group who are normal DMT users who can experience DMT. And then you look, what are the differences between their neural activity? How is that changing? Is there, what's going on here? And then you might look for changes in their...

• 2:34:29Speaker 03

  Differences in their genetics. There's also this thing called the five percent club, which are people who are locked out from birth, shall we say. They can never experience effects of DMT. Five percent of people.

• 2:34:42AJ Gentile?

  Do they have, that's very interesting. Is that a serotonin issue?

• 2:34:48Speaker 03

  We don't know.

• 2:34:48AJ Gentile?

  Mood disorder?

• 2:34:49Speaker 03

  My guess would be, is that it's a, what's called a receptor polymorphism. So, every receptor is, a receptor is a protein and it's encoded by a gene. We all have different variants of all the different genes encoding our receptors in our body. These are called polymorphisms. And my suggestion, prediction, perhaps hypothesis, is that certain people have a slightly different variant of the 5-HT2A receptor that means, or some other receptor, doesn't necessarily have to be the 5-HT2A, that means that DMT isn't, either isn't binding to the receptor, or it's not activating the receptor in the

• 2:35:29Speaker 03

  same way. It could also be a metabolic issue. It could be that they are, they're metabolizing DMT extremely rapidly. But Rick Strasman found that in about five percent, I think it was three people out of 60, so exactly five percent, even at the highest dose level, 0.4 milligrams per kilogram, which was a, more than a breakthrough dose, they experienced no effects whatsoever of DMT. So we want to study that as well.

• 2:35:56AJ Gentile?

  Yes, that's very interesting.

• 2:35:57Speaker 03

  Do genetic work, you know, take samples and actually, actually look at the genome of these people and say, what are the differences? And that's more, that's easier to explain than the lockout. The lockout is very, very difficult.

• 2:36:11AJ Gentile?

  I had never heard that before.

• 2:36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16AJ Gentile?

  What's happening to the serotonin in the, in the brain while they're under for so long? Is it just getting metabolized? Are they having mood issues?

• 2:36:27AJ Gentile?

  When they come back?

• 2:36:29Speaker 03

  Um, no, I mean, people, the Imperial College study, the aim of it was to kind of look at that, right? Is this safe and is it tolerable?

• 2:36:38AJ Gentile?

  Because if you're on SSRIs, I don't think you should do this.

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  No. What's, the problem with SSRIs generally is that people don't experience as intense effects. So it kind of blunts the effect because you get changes in the expression of certain serotonin receptors. But yeah, if you're on any kind of psychiatric medication for whatever condition, then tread carefully. That's a general kind of warning to anyone, not just DMT, but all psychedelics. You'd be very, very careful because they are contraindicated for certain people. These aren't toys. But yeah, I mean, DMTX, it's shown to be safe and tolerable. People broadly were able to handle the experience and come out absolutely,

• 2:37:25Speaker 03

  absolutely fine, even though they were in there for. And now there's been, Mateus Leek, I think, in Basel had his subjects under for, I think, three hours or something like that.

• 2:37:38AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:37:38Speaker 03

  At a fairly low level, not the breakthrough level, but he also had like a device where they could adjust the infusion rate so they could control their experiences. We're going to see more of those kind of studies where we start to learn how to use the DMTX technology to really not just spend more time, but actually be able to navigate the space and increase and adjust the depth of the experience in real time.

• 2:38:03AJ Gentile?

  At a low dose, are they responsive?

• 2:38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, even at the high dose, weirdly.

• 2:38:09AJ Gentile?

  Even at the high dose?

• 2:38:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, auditory response, not visual, but during the Imperial study, one of the annoying things is that for the subjects, and Carl talks about this a lot, is that they were, they were being asked like questions, like, you know, what's the intensity now between one and 10? It's three. What's it now? Do you see entities? Yes or no? You know, what's the entity level? All these questions. So you can never kind of just let go and... Enjoy your, you know, work within the space. You always have to be, have one ear to the team waiting on the other side.

• 2:38:45AJ Gentile?

  I would be kind of annoyed, actually.

• 2:38:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the deal because they, they needed to get all of that data as well. Yeah, but at LUSAS, of course, you, you don't have, you're free to kind of explore for as long as you like.

• 2:38:58AJ Gentile?

  How, how different is the ayahuasca experience from DMTX?

• 2:39:03Speaker 03

  This is a very good question, AJ, because one of the kind of the pushbacks that we got, me and Rick, when we published this is people would say, well, just ayahuasca, that's an extended DMT state. And in a sense, they're right. But in several other senses, they're wrong. So with a regular DMT experience, blood, brain DMT levels rise and then drops down very rapidly. With ayahuasca, because of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor, the harmine and harmaline within the traditional preparation, that's kind of extended. So it rises slowly and then it starts to kind of tail off gradually over time. So you still have the peak, you

• 2:39:46Speaker 03

  still have the drawdown, but it's, it's stretched out. That kind of concentration curve is, is stretched out. So it's not, you don't, you never achieve a stable brain DMT concentration with ayahuasca. You're still at the mercy of your metabolism, pharmacokinetics. But also with ayahuasca, Dennis McKenna, I think it was, actually looked at blood concentrations of DMT of people who took ayahuasca and people who took like injected high dose breakthrough level DMT. And the, the peak blood, a brain or blood DMT concentration in ayahuasca is only around less than 20% of what you achieve with injected DMT. So

• 2:40:30AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:40:30Speaker 03

  It's an extended, but actually generally it's a much milder, softer experience. Whereas what we're doing with DMTX is to push someone right into the breakthrough state. If they want to, you don't have to, you can have lower levels as well. But in theory, you can, you can bring them up into the breakthrough state and then hold them there in the breakthrough state for as long as possible. So you have much, you have real time control over the DMT state. You don't get that with. Or anything close to that with ayahuasca?

• 2:41:00AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting, because in my own experience, sometimes you just can't get there. You just, I just can't break through. I just end up in the, in the room of geometric shapes.

• 2:41:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:41:11AJ Gentile?

  And then I'm back.

• 2:41:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13AJ Gentile?

  Usually because I'm stressed or distracted, or a dog is barking or something.

• 2:41:17Speaker 03

  This is ayahuasca or with?

• 2:41:18AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:41:19Speaker 03

  Just DMT?

• 2:41:20AJ Gentile?

  Just DMT. I don't always break through. But I haven't tried in a very long time. Past the statute of limitations.

• 2:41:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:28AJ Gentile?

  You're Alien Insect Online?

• 2:41:30Speaker 03

  I am.

• 2:41:31AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 2:41:33Speaker 03

  Um, well, aliens, I like, I've been interested in aliens and alien intelligence. Not aliens as like gray beings and metallic disks shimmering in the night sky, that kind of thing. Although it is interesting, but yeah.

• 2:41:49AJ Gentile?

  That stuff doesn't connect to this at all?

• 2:41:50Speaker 03

  Oh, I think it does, yeah. I think it does, but yeah, I've been interested in the idea of alien intelligence and insects. While these are kind of insectoid beings, a kind of a common entity within the DMT space. So Alien Insect, why not? I came up with that name and now it's my handle on X and Instagram.

• 2:42:07AJ Gentile?

  Did you ever see the mantids during a, during a trip?

• 2:42:09Speaker 03

  I've never seen a mantid.

• 2:42:11AJ Gentile?

  I didn't either.

• 2:42:12Speaker 03

  A lot of people, a lot of people have, though.

• 2:42:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. I don't want to. Um, how to, so, how to? It's another problem with breaking through is if you go in anxious, it's also not advisable, so.

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's, um, most, most people have relatively pleasant, although extremely bizarre experiences, but they're often, this, the most common type of entity people encounter is actually more of a guiding presence, often like described as like a motherly, caring presence that guides you through the space, all the different, you know, in my experiences from way back, there's a very strong sense of being taken, as if like we've got so little time, we're only going to show you this and this and this. You can't bring any of it back, because it's so short. Uh, but this very real sense of, of being guided very, very rapidly through all these different rooms,

• 2:43:08Speaker 03

  I want to say rooms, are all completely different and all equally strange and baffling and bewildering. And then you're kind of deposited back in the real, say, the real world. You're deposited back in the normal waking world.

• 2:43:21AJ Gentile?

  And you don't really remember those rooms, do you?

• 2:43:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:43:23AJ Gentile?

  Because I, I don't. Yeah, I remember getting there and coming back.

• 2:43:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:28AJ Gentile?

  That's about it. It's a wild experience. So how do we connect the UFO phenomenon to this? I'm starting to think about Jacques Vallée now and his theory about UFOs, his consciousness, and why different cultures, we perceive the fairies, then we perceive this, and now we're on to orbs, depending on where we are culturally.

• 2:43:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Vallée, John Mack, if you remember John Mack.

• 2:43:59AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:44:00Speaker 03

  He wrote Abduction.

• 2:44:02AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:44:02Speaker 03

  You know, he was this hard-nosed psychiatrist until he started interacting with and working with these so-called abductees or experiences.

• 2:44:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, Harvard didn't like that.

• 2:44:16Speaker 03

  Harvard didn't like that at all.

• 2:44:19Speaker 03

  Understandably, to be honest. But I think his perspective shifted throughout, I mean, it did, clearly, shifted from the idea that we're talking of, that the UAP phenomenon or the non-human intelligence phenomenon is about biological beings that are arriving from other areas of the universe. I think that's pretty short-sighted and feels kind of outdated now. And he started to think that actually we're talking, the abduction experience was more of a altered state of consciousness, as if they were being, these experiences were being induced into some altered states of consciousness and interacting with normally

• 2:45:02Speaker 03

  imperceptible beings. And of course, this fits perfectly with, that's DMT. I mean, if you read, in Abduction, John Mack's first book, there is an account of this woman who was an abductee, who was described these small, lively beings kind of bounding around. I mean, this is a Terence McKenna machine-elf trip report. It's exactly the same. Rick Strassman also noted that if they had taken some of his trip reports out of context and put it in a... One of John Mack's books, nobody would have questioned it because they were like,

• 2:45:41Speaker 03

  it seemed like, you know, you have the sophisticated laboratory type environment and you've got these beings, you've got these small beings like workers or orderlies and then you have these more powerful supervising beings that are kind of in the background.

• 2:45:57AJ Gentile?

  I hear that story all the time.

• 2:45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's an abduction experience and it's also features prominently in DMT reports.

• 2:46:05AJ Gentile?

  So, so an abduction, could that be like an endogenous DMT experience?

• 2:46:09Speaker 03

  It could be an endogenous DMT experience. It could be that these, I think we need to get away from the idea that an alien is something that exists within this reality. This very limited perspective that we're dealing with, wet-bodied, wet-brained biological beings, that we're dealing with some kind of, some other kind of intelligence that isn't necessarily quote unquote "physical", but operates in some other domain, in just the same way that now we think about, or some people like me, think about the DMT entities. It's not spirits or gods, but some kind of intelligent agent that normally is always there,

• 2:46:51Speaker 03

  but we normally are completely imperceptible and can't interact with. And I think that makes more sense because there's nothing that says that these aliens must be physical beings. And one can imagine that, you know, I often talk about the anti-Kardashian scale. You know the Kardashian scale?

• 2:47:13AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:47:14Speaker 03

  The idea, it's kind of an expansive idea, the idea that we, first we occupy the single planet, then we start harvesting the energy from the nearest star and then it's kind of, it's the idea that as an intelligent species progresses technologically and cognitively, they start to occupy larger and larger areas of the cosmos, right? That's the way we think about it.

• 2:47:36AJ Gentile?

  We're like a high level zero.

• 2:47:38Speaker 03

  We're a high level zero. But John Barrow, the cosmologist, noted quite correctly that actually most of our tech, we do, of course, we send probes and rockets up into elsewhere in the solar system, et cetera. But actually, most of our technological advances have been not. Outwards but inwards to smaller and smaller scales, right?

• 2:48:01AJ Gentile?

  That's true, yeah.

• 2:48:02Speaker 03

  You know, down to, from the molecular to biochemistry and all the way through to the atomic and then the subatomic.

• 2:48:09AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:48:10Speaker 03

  And now people are talking about strings, people get deeper and deeper down into the ground of reality, that's where all of our kind of technological efforts has been downwards.

• 2:48:20AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:48:21Speaker 03

  He developed what he called the micro-dimensional mastery scale, which is like the anti-Kardashian scale, the Barrow scale, John Barrow. And the kind of the, he had the minus one, minus two, minus three, minus four, rather than plus one, right? And he posited something, which is, he referred to as the omega minus level. And this is when a technological species is able to actually control and manipulate the very ground of reality itself, whatever that is. So we're past the quantum, we're past even perhaps the Planck scale.

• 2:48:56AJ Gentile?

  Past the Planck scale.

• 2:48:57Speaker 03

  Right down, whatever's beyond, right? Quantum mechanics, of course, stops working at the Planck scale. You know, John, Don Hoffman would say we're talking about consciousness here.

• 2:49:06AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:49:07Speaker 03

  Physicalists would say something else, doesn't really matter. But basically, when a species is able to work at the fundamental level of reality, that's the kind of the fundamental computational substrate of reality itself, that's where they're going to go. They're going to find a way of instantiating themselves at the ground of reality. They're not going to be trying to, to kind of approach light speed and expand through the cosmos, they're going to try to go downwards. And there's a lot more room downwards.

• 2:49:36AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:49:36Speaker 03

  You don't need light speed if you get down there. You don't need light speed if you get down there, right? And there's much more room, there's like, I forget what the exact number is, but, but if you look at the distance in terms of relative size, from human size to the size of the universe, or from human size to the Planck scale, I think it's like millions and millions times bigger down there, or times smaller than it is bigger going up there.

• 2:50:02AJ Gentile?

  Ten to the minus thirty-five, I think.

• 2:50:04Speaker 03

  Something, yeah, that's the Planck scale, right? So in other words, there's, there's a lot more room. At the bottom than there is up there. Um, much more room, uh, which means that that's the direction we go. That's where, that's where we look for intelligence. And how do you do that? How would an intelligent species that had instantiated itself at the ground of reality, perhaps billions of years before the, our solar system even came to be? How would you communicate with that kind of intelligence? Or how would they communicate with us? They'd do it through our brains because that's how we experience the world. They wouldn't appear necessarily or manifest. They would simply use our brains to communicate with us. And that would take the form of, as, um, Jack Vallée said, um, that would take the form

• 2:50:47Speaker 03

  of what we normally describe as hallucinatory experiences.

• 2:50:51AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:50:51Speaker 03

  You know, altered states of consciousness. That's how you do it. So DMT, it's, it's like DMT is in some way facilitating that experience that allows us to interact with these beings that, or conscious agents, or whatever you want to call them, uh, that have been around perhaps forever. Um, but certainly a lot longer than we've been.

• 2:51:15AJ Gentile?

  It starts to, um, you can't avoid the question now. It's very interesting. I love when my mind is blown on this show, which has been. I hadn't considered looking down. Cause if you can get past the Planck scale, then you don't need light speed travel because you're essentially in the dimension where entanglement works. So you can go anywhere.

• 2:51:39Speaker 03

  Where, yeah, where, where physics that we don't have any conception of works basically. At the moment, we don't have anything deeper than the quantum. Everything stops working there. Uh, so what lies beyond that? What is the fundamental substrate of reality? And once you understand that, then you can manipulate, uh, uh, and even instantiate yourselves as intelligent beings at that level. And then we have no conception of how that might work.

• 2:52:02AJ Gentile?

  Is that God?

• 2:52:04Speaker 03

  Well, I wouldn't say it's God, but I would say that we could be dealing with beings that are indistinguishable from gods. In that they are, they are so advanced that we simply cannot conceive of how advanced they are.

• 2:52:21Speaker 03

  That would be my suggestion. So we have no conception of what they would be like, or whether they even, whether they, whether they could even take on a visual form in any kind of way. We just have nothing, we have no reference. You know, when we had, when we had little beings, we had references, you know, they've got head, they've got big eyes, and that kind of made sense. We can, we can slot it into our, our picture of reality, but we're talking about intelligences that we simply have no conception of what they might be like. And that's a wild idea. And the idea that we could actually maybe interface with them by taking this plant alkaloid called DMT, that's an even wilder idea.

• 2:53:00AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it is. It feels like it's by design to me. It's too, it's too convenient.

• 2:53:06Speaker 03

  It does feel like that.

• 2:53:07AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would never say that that's the case, but there is something uncanny about DMT. But its ubiquity throughout the natural world, and yet this incredibly crisply efficient tool by which we can access these, these other realms and these beings.

• 2:53:23AJ Gentile?

  It feels like they want us to find them, but I've never heard of a lockout before. That's very interesting, as you've seen enough.

• 2:53:34AJ Gentile?

  What do you think happens to us when we die?

• 2:53:38Speaker 03

  Well, that came from left field. I wasn't expecting that question.

• 2:53:44Speaker 03

  The short answer is, I don't know, but I certainly don't think, I'm, I'm past the idea that there was this infinite period of time before I was born, when I simply didn't exist, and that there's this brief, the lights are on for this briefest of flickers of light for a briefest amount of time, and it's off again.

• 2:54:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:07Speaker 03

  And I think it was Alan Watts who said, "Think about the state after you die, you don't exist. Then think about the state before you were born, you don't exist." So those are indistinguishable, right? The state before you were born is identical to the state after you die. So what happened then? Well, we know what happened then. So I don't think, I think, I think we're part of something that is...

• 2:54:34Speaker 03

  We occupy this very, very thin slice of something far grander and far more mysterious and far more profound and strange than we can conceive. And I just get the sense that this is like, I often describe reality, certain human reality, as some kind of, feels like a game of some sort. It's just play, right? And the Hindus will tell you that. They will say, oh, Brockman is Lila. This is the play, the play at making the world. It's all one cosmic drama. We take it very, very seriously. And the part of the game is working out that it's a game that it shouldn't be taken seriously. This is just, just a ride, right? As Bill Hicks used to say.

• 2:55:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:55:17Speaker 03

  I get that sense that we, I don't take reality, I don't take life seriously in that I don't think it's a really somber, serious, important thing. I think it's just a beautiful experience that we have for these briefest periods of time, that we should enjoy it like we didn't enjoy any other ride at the fairground or something like that. What happens after? I don't know, but it's something we all have to look forward to.

• 2:55:48AJ Gentile?

  You subscribe to the idea that there's a sort of a universal consciousness? And when we're born, we're kind of spawned out of that. We come here, we have experiences, and we bring it back to the source.

• 2:56:01Speaker 03

  Well, that's what conscious realism says as well, is that there is one, it's described as a conscious agent network, but ultimately, there is, there's nothing but consciousness. So sure, absolutely, ultimately, there is one unified consciousness. And that's, again, that's the oldest message. You know, Brockman, what is Brockman? That's the ultimate reality, and everything else is illusion.

• 2:56:24Speaker 03

  And it's all the same illusion. Timothy Leary used to say, "It's all the same illusion." And so this reality is an illusion. And in a sense, the DMT space is also an illusion. It doesn't mean it's not real. You're still interacting with consciousness. But it's all, everything has, all experiences have the same ontological validity. They're all as real as each other in some way. They're just different ways of experiencing. And so eventually, you kind of get past these questions of, "Oh, is DMT real or is it not real?" And that question no longer, almost doesn't make any sense anymore.

• 2:57:03AJ Gentile?

  I didn't ask it.

• 2:57:04Speaker 03

  I know you did. I wasn't blaming you, AJ, here. But people always ask me that, "Do you believe it's real?" And before, I would give long arguments. I'm maturing now, where I actually think, actually, I'm kind of past that now. There's a part of me that thinks it's all part of this grand cosmic drama. And there are different ways to play it, and different tools we can use to explore. We have this vast, vast, you know, the playground of reality that we can explore. And DMT and other psychedelics and other tools are ways that we can get out of this very small

• 2:57:46Speaker 03

  region of this vast playground and enjoy it and experience it and think, "Wow, the fucking incredible majesty of reality, that we're part of it. We're inextricably part of it. You know, we are a conscious agent or built from conscious agents, as is everything else. And everything else is experiencing the world in its own way." That's an incredible thing to realize. And then these little questions about, "Is it real or not real?" They don't mean anything anymore.

• 2:58:15AJ Gentile?

  They don't, no. That's why I love interface theory. Anything else you want to discuss before we go? This has been wonderful.

• 2:58:22Speaker 03

  I'd just like to say, well, I certainly would like, you know, if anyone wants to...

• 2:58:29Speaker 03

  Learn more about my work, certainly read my book Death by Astonishment.

• 2:58:32AJ Gentile?

  It's an amazing book.

• 2:58:32Speaker 03

  If you want to read, understand the history of DMT all the way back to thousands of years, really, in indigenous plant preparations, all the way through to 20th century and beyond, and what I think about DMT, the neuroscience of DMT, why I think it's not just hallucination, and what it could be, and all of that stuff. That's everything I've learned about DMT in the last 30 years is in Death by Astonishment, so please get that. Please follow me on X, Twitter, Alien Insect, as you said, or Instagram also, Alien Insect. Go to newnautics.org if you want to learn about the research programs that we're developing at New Nautics. And if anyone wants to experience DMTX themselves in a 100% legal, safe, medically supervised

• 2:59:17Speaker 03

  environment, go to eleusismind, E-L-E-U-S-I-S-mind.com, and they can sign up to spend a few days on this beautiful tropical Caribbean island. And I think that covers it, AJ.

• 2:59:32AJ Gentile?

  All right. Dr. Andrew Gallimore, this has been a treat and a joy. Thank you so much.

• 2:59:36Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 2:59:37AJ Gentile?

  Bye, everybody. That was Dr. Andrew Gallimore. We covered the history of DMT, what it does to your brain, and his theory that the beings people meet are real. Now, there's not much to challenge here. DMT is a real compound that's found in most living things. It was first synthesized in the 30s and found to be psychoactive in the 50s. But why does it exist? Well, in 2019, a University of Michigan lab induced cardiac arrest in rats and measured a surge of DMT in the dying brain. So one theory is that when brain cells are running out of oxygen, DMT can protect those cells. Maybe that's why we produce it. Maybe not, nobody really knows. The real question is whether the experience is more than a hallucination. Still no proof, but Andrew's looking.

• 3:00:22AJ Gentile?

  Then there's Andrew's work with Donald Hoffman. Hoffman argues we never see reality, only an interface, like icons on a screen. And I'm a fan of Donald Hoffman's work. Look him up on YouTube. Especially because he could explain, if not prove, his theory of consciousness. With math, and I love that the two of them are working together. Now Andrew thinks the brain is acting like a radio. DMT switches the channel and suddenly we're tuned into a dimension populated by actual sentient beings. Here's an argument for that. A woman did one of these extended sessions in Colorado. She was 20 minutes in and the DMT was still pumping into her veins. And she was deep in conversation with one of these beings. Then the being said, "I think we're done for today." And the vision just stopped.

• 3:01:07AJ Gentile?

  The machine was still running. The drug was still in her system. So pharmacologically, that should be impossible, but it happened. Andrew is a real scientist. Cambridge, Oxford, real credentials. He's asking a question most scientists won't touch. Are these beings real? And he's creating experiments to test it. The blue-yellow screen, the lockout studies, all of it. Nobody else is doing this. Now, I would ensure that the beings are just in your mind. And I cannot less sure. His book, Death by Astonishment, is fantastic. It's on Amazon. His nonprofit is newanotics.org. I'll link that down below. Try to spell it properly. The legal DMT retreat is [email protected].

• 3:01:51AJ Gentile?

  And the elucis retreat is basically a luxury vacation in the Bahamas. But I have to be honest, it's not cheap. It's hard to find pricing, and I wasn't gonna ask him. But rumors say it could be anywhere from $9,500 or more. So I'm just letting you know. But if you're gonna explore consciousness, the best way to do that is legally with a doctor present. Don't mess with any of this stuff on your own. It's not fun. I promise. Until next time, be safe. Really, be safe. Be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. Don't mess with it.

• 3:02:43Speaker 05

  I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. Songs singing like I should. Within another conspiracy theory, it comes to truth, my friends. And it never ends, no it never ends.

• 3:03:21Speaker 05

  I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside Mel's home with MKO truck. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Cuprid fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadows people there? The Rockwell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And one more love me all through the night.

• 3:04:01Speaker 05

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more love me all through the night.

• 3:04:27Speaker 05

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come. To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planet circle to Project Stargate. And what the dark watchers found.

• 3:04:45Speaker 05

  In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black nights that a light has told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with a fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And one more love will beat all through the night.

• 3:05:07Speaker 05

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more love will beat all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And one more love will beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more love will beat all through the night.

• 3:05:46Speaker 05

  Girlie loves to dance. Girlie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel and camels love to dance. When the feeling is right on wasting time.

• 3:06:21Speaker 00

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• 3:07:04Speaker 00

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