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

Our American Alchemist this week is Andrew Gallimore. Neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore dives deep into the cutting-edge science of DMT, entity encounters, and the structure of alternate realities. In this episode, he breaks down his groundbreaking research, theories on the DMT space being a real, independent realm, and what these “beings” might actually represent. A bold thinker at the edge of neuroscience and metaphysics, Gallimore brings rigorous intellect to one of the most mysterious frontiers of consciousness. | Andrew Gallimore | "DEATH BY ASTONISHMENT" ➤ https://read.macmillan.com/lp/death-by-astonishment-9781250357755/ Apply for DMTX ➤ https://noonautics.org/ Website ➤ https://www.buildingalienworlds.com/ X ➤https://x.com/alieninsect | Sponsors | Ground News: Go to https://ground.news/jessemichels to uncover the truth behind the headlines. Save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan with my link. MASA: Ready to give MASA a try? Go to https://www.masachips.com/pages/jesse... and use code JESSEMICHELS for 25% off your first order. -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Patreon (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://www.patreon.com/c/JesseMichels Discord ➤https://discord.gg/crHc44m3kF Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Website ➤ https://www.jesse-michels.com/ Merchandise ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] #AndrewGallimore #DMT #Aliens #Conciousness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

  There's no way for you to visualize a five-dimensional object in its true form. And yet, when you smoke DMT, you do. It's an extremely intense experience. It's very fast and very, very short. It's not Terence McKenna implanting the idea of machine elves into people's brains. These are intelligent beings that go back thousands of years.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  They will perform beings like elves, or harlequins, or jokers and jesters. And they will display these impossible, higher-dimensional, beautiful objects that kind of morph in front of your eyes.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Can we show that we're actually interfacing with some kind of intelligence that is non-human?

• 1:12Jesse Michels?

  If a lot of people are seeing these architectures outside of their own reality, and they're all consistent, that seems like it would be really important.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  If they want to communicate with us, they're going to do it through our brain.

• 1:24Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that elite members of society have been systematically accessing these other realms, helping to shape our reality?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Why don't we repurpose a technique from anesthesiology called target-controlled intravenous infusion, but with DMT? So we send in mathematicians, we send in geometers or topologists. We send in linguists.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Different parts of the brain have different activities. You know that, don't you?

• 2:14Jesse Michels?

  Before we dive into today's episode of American Alchemy, I want to give a quick shout out to today's amazing sponsor, Ground News. All right, let me show you how I've actually been using this thing. Take this headline that's been all over my feed lately, "Why MAGA Can't Move On From The Epstein Files." Now, say what you want about the headline, but few stories cut closer to the core of power, secrecy, and public amnesia than this one. This is where Ground News genuinely shine. It pulls in 141 different sources on just that story. You get a bird's eye view of what the mainstream media might be pushing, like, "There are no Epstein files, stop asking." And what independent outlets are suggesting, like, "Maybe Epstein was a global honeypot for secret science programs.

• 2:58Jesse Michels?

  Maybe he had financial leverage on all of our elites." Who knows? I choose to believe the latter, but maybe I'm a crazy conspiracy theorist. You also get this coverage bar showing who's reporting and who's mysteriously quiet. The bias distribution visualizes how each outlet frames the story, whether they're steering you toward a left or right narrative or ignoring the real questions altogether. The factuality meter helps you separate solid reporting from whatever half-baked blog your conspiracy cousin swears by. Which, let's admit, in the UFO space, there's also a lot of bullshit circulating out there. And then there's the ownership tab, which shows you who's bankrolling each outlet. This, in my opinion, is the most important feature, whether it's a hedge fund, a media conglomerate,

• 3:42Jesse Michels?

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• 4:26Jesse Michels?

  only promote tools I actually use, and Ground News is one of them. Don't miss out on these important stories. Now, let's get back to the show. Andrew Gallimore, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I have been a fan and follower of yours for a long time now. You've written a couple of great books that I'm aware of, Alien Information Theory, and you are coming out with Death by Astonishment, which is sort of a title is an homage to William Burroughs or Terrence McKenna. And I'm just really excited to talk to you because I feel like a lot of the alien stuff dovetails with psychedelics and psychedelic experiences. And I think a lot of people use that to sometimes

• 5:11Jesse Michels?

  discredit the alien thing as objectively real. I think the psychedelic thing is a really important part of, you know, our everyday waking epistemology, as I'm sure you would agree. And so I'm excited to dive into that with you.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Fabulous. Good to be here, Jesse, in Austin, Texas.

• 5:27Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  My first time in Austin.

• 5:29Jesse Michels?

  For all the way from Japan, which is, I was always like, you know, okay, I'll visit Andrew when I, when I go to Japan. I wanted to do a little Japan tour. So it's cool to thank you for coming out here.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  You're welcome.

• 5:39Jesse Michels?

  Why don't we just start there, actually, with the kind of alien DMT connection? I was actually listening to you on my buddy Michael's podcast, Third Eye Drops, and you were talking about John Mack and alien abductions, and how a lot of these alien abduction experiences really connect or seem to pattern match to what people experience on DMT.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they're not the same, but...

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Really, well, from the beginning of DMT research back in, so DMT was discovered in nineteen fifty six by this Hungarian physician called Stephen Zara. This was when Hungary was a communist state. And from the very first study that he did, I mean, at first he injected himself. I mean, this was kind of the good old days of of of of science, when scientists injected new drugs into themselves. Yeah. So he discovered, after injecting it into his, into himself,

• 6:46Speaker 01

  that it was quite clearly very, very psychedelic. This kind of rush of highly complex geometric imagery that kind of overwhelmed him, seized control of him. So he knew then that this was something special, something quite different to the drugs that were known at the time, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin. This seemed to kind of transcend that and transport you to some alternate reality. So he started injecting with the drug into people, colleagues, basically, who worked at the same hospital. And even in those very first studies, it

• 7:31Speaker 01

  was quite obvious that these individuals were not just being transported to other worlds, but these were populated worlds, and that there were what seemed to be kind of intelligent beings, including little diminutive creatures, multitudinous creatures, lively beings that now we would recognize as elves or machine elves in Terence McAnally. But when Rick Strassmann picked up the mantle in the early nineties, and he did a much larger study with sixty volunteers, various, various doses of DMT, and

• 8:12Speaker 01

  A not insignificant number of these individuals reported experiences that would not raise an eyebrow if they had appeared in books by John Mack. So kind of alien abduction type experiences where people are brought into some kind of highly sophisticated technological environment where there are beings, often a number of like orderly's, less senior beings, who were kind of performing the work and, you know, analyses and measurements, scanning and all this kind of stuff. And then often there was one like top dog who was kind of in the

• 8:52Speaker 01

  background but had a very strong presence, kind of overseeing or supervising the procedure. And then they'd often be taken on kind of a tour of this craft or technological place, meetings with highly intelligent, highly advanced, non-human beings, and then brought safely back into the normal waking world. And this, if you, this kind of scenario is precisely what John Mack's abductees or experiences, as he used to call them, were kind of reporting. So it didn't escape John Mack's attention. And people were asking him,

• 9:37Speaker 01

  you know, have you heard about DMT? Because what you're, what you're talking about sounds a lot like what people are reporting under the influence of DMT. And I think, you know, Rick Strassmann also said, you know, if, if we removed all references to DMT in many of the reports from my volunteers, would anyone be able to distinguish them from the reports of alien abductees? And I think towards the end, you know, as, as John Mack progressed through his

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Abduction career, if you want to put it like that. Um, he's, he, he was, he became less convinced that this was a purely physical nuts and bolts phenomenon where people were actually being removed from their, their beds at night and taken on to actual physical crafts. But he started to feel like this was some kind of non-physical process.

• 10:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  These, many of his subjects reported going to

• 10:50Speaker 01

  alt environments that weren't, that didn't seem to be physical.

• 10:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  So places that were had kind of hu- higher dimensional spaces, uh, beings that were very similar to the types of beings that people encounter uh in D M T. So he, he kind of shifted towards a more spiritual or metaphysical or non-physical explanation for these uh abduction experiences.

• 11:16Jesse Michels?

  And a little context for the audience, John Mack was the head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department in the nineties and he was actually childhood friends with a guy named Bud Hopkins, who was documenting a lot of these sort of abduction experiences. And he started to take a, a deep dive. He was actually friends with um, uh, Thomas Kuhn, who wrote um, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And he was like, I don't know, maybe some of this alien stuff is real. And Kuhn was like, yeah, this, you know, basically you should, you know, try to maintain the null hypothesis for as long as possible, but even though you sit on a respectable perch at Harvard, you should actually dive into this. He started to dive into it. He started to take it very seriously. He was like, these people are reporting events that they feel are very, very real.

• 11:59Jesse Michels?

  They have no mental health history prior or after. And so it's interesting that you say that he sort of, you know, starts to view them as more spiritual or taking place in maybe a realm apart from the the physical. He was also very inspired by Stanislav Grof and holotropic breathwork, where the the goal is actually to, I think, endogenously release DMT or something at the end of the breathwork. And so if that's inspired Mac to that extent, and then Mac would use that in his practice with a lot of the the abductees in order for them to recall their experiences, maybe that adds to your point.

• 12:39Jesse Michels?

  But I will say that some of these abductees have physical marks and things, then implants and stuff where it's like, do you have an explanation for that? Have you thought of that?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I I think the the line between the physical and the non-physical is not always clear.

• 12:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Right? So it's like you can't really, it's hard to get at. There is obviously what we would consider to be a physical aspect, but there also seems to be a very non-physical aspect. And I just don't think we, as humans, we really understand. I think maybe if we were able to observe this from a higher perspective and kind of an overview, like a bird's eye view of reality, we it might be obvious what's going on here. But I just, I just think it's it's it's useful to be able to distinguish between the physical. It's kind of instructive to distinguish between the physical and the non-physical, but actually sometimes you point out, it's maybe a combination of the physical and the non-physical.

• 13:40Jesse Michels?

  And I feel like people, like, if they were to point to a dividing line where the physical and the non-physical sort of divested, it would be Descartes or something in the kind of proverbial, you know. But if you look at Descartes, like, how that divestiture actually occurred is he was talking about, he was doing thought experiments about a demon controlling your entire perceptive epistemology in some almost, you know, proto like VR headset that could be reality. And all you could know is that your own thoughts were were yours or something.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:13Jesse Michels?

  And so that's a pretty trippy thought.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  It is, and I actually, that's kind of an interesting point, because Grof, actually, in one of his books, he said, look, if If there are advanced intelligent beings, you know, aliens that are kind of non-physical, disconnet, everywhere and nowhere, then the way that they would appear to us would be, would be dismissed as hallucination. They would kind of interact with our brain directly. They wouldn't have to kind of materialize, so to speak, in a true, quote unquote, physical form, but they would interact with us directly with our brain. And I think that's actually

• 14:59Speaker 01

  what's going on, whether it's Descartes' demon. But I think the, when you smoke DMT, for example, what I think is happening, or what I've come to believe or lean towards,

• 15:17Speaker 01

  an explanation for what's happening, is that you have these intelligences that don't have a physical form. They don't have a form that could even be represented in any kind of visual form. These are completely non-physical, disconnet beings. But they, DMT somehow gives them access to our neural machinery. And so they are, I believe, directing the visions. I believe the DMT world to be what I call a directed world. I don't, I don't think you're going anywhere. I don't think you're peeking through into another world, because that's not how

• 15:58Speaker 01

  perception works. Perception works by your brain building this model, which is then tested against sensory inputs from the environment. You're, you never have direct access to the so-called external world or the environment. And it's the same in the DMT experience. You're not seeing the DMT world, whatever that might mean. You're simply giving access to these intelligent agents, giving them access to your brain. So you don't break through, I always say you don't break through into the DMT world. It's the DMT world, or the intelligences within. This space that break through into you.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  They have, they seize control, they kind of commandeer this world modeling machinery in your brain and they direct your visions.

• 16:52Jesse Michels?

  Do they have, in your opinion, and this is maybe a philosophical question, do these entities have control prior to you taking D M T and then you are able to notice it through D M T? Or are you like, do they take control like when you take D M T?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Well, I'm going to give the optimistic answer, which is to say it's D M T. I mean, what D M T does is it generates this very fluid and dynamic state of the brain, of the cortex, this outer layer of the brain that can structure a world model. And some very recent neuroimaging data actually show that that D M T makes the brain much more sensitive to being perturbed by external sensory or other types of input. So it becomes primed, if you like, to be commandeered, taken over in this way.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  So I'd like to think that they don't have access in the normal waking state because that's kind of a horrifying thought, right? But in the presence of D M T, they gain access or that it's a, it's, your brain is in a much more vulnerable or susceptible state to being commandeered by these intelligences. And that's clearly what happens. People describe this, this massive overwhelming rush of information that floods their brain, you know, complex imagery, mathematical imagery, blueprints and just completely alien stuff that has no relationship to their normal waking experience.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And I think that is kind of the hallmark of them basically saying.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  You know, we have control now for the next five minutes or so. Um, and, and then they, they kind of show you what they wanna show you, which is sometimes a performance. Um, they kind of, they kind of say, look at this, look, look, look what we can do. Uh, and they will show these, they will often display these impossible, higher dimensional, beautiful objects that kind of morph in front of your eyes, or they were hold up screens with these impossibly complex imagery. They will perform beings like elves or harlequins or jokers and jesters, and they will kind of, they will say, look, look at this, this is impossible,

• 19:24Speaker 01

  and yet we're doing it. You know, they're doing it with your brain. Your brain is like the stage um, that they are using to, for this performance. Um, and then in other cases, it's more serious. There seems to be a, some kind of agenda. People often describe like they were waiting for me. Hmm. Uh, they knew, they weren't surprised. I was very fucking surprised, but they weren't surprised at all. They had a place ready for me and they slotted me in and they started working. There's scanning and lights flashing and beeping and just they knew exactly what to do in the short time available. Yeah, it's um.

• 20:04Jesse Michels?

  So, this brings up a question of like discernment, like if, I don't know, you're talking about harlequin jesters and you know, tricksters and stuff and um, you know, on the other hand, you know, there's things with serious agendas for you. Um, how do you uh, go into a trip like this and be able to, and fend for yourself and go in with a specific intention where you're not, you know, the product being used, but you have a specific goal or intention or? I don't know, it can be heal very healing for a lot of people, for example. Maybe, maybe that's the, the sort of positive outcome version of this, or how do you, how do you sort of dictate that? And is it, is it inherently very risky?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  You don't dictate it. If you try to dictate it, then you're in trouble.

• 20:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Because there's no way you cannot dictate it. I mean, that's the thing.

• 20:55Jesse Michels?

  You have to surrender.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  You have to surrender. I mean, you can go in with intention. And people do, people will go in, they will, you know, they might suffer from, I don't know, chronic headaches or depression. Or something that they're, they're seeking a solution to something. Uh, and they go in with that intention and very often they will find that these beings will get to work on them, literally on their brain. Uh, and they will feel their brain being reprogrammed, um, rewired by these elf-like beings or other or insectoid beings. These are the kind of two of the most, um, common types of, of, of, of being. And they will, they will often achieve great relief from that.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  You know, their headaches stop happening, you know, or, or they feel more positive about life. And if you're like their, their depression has lifted. So that's certainly possible. It's not, it's not like it's, um, you kind of have to accept that you get what you get. Um, but at the end of the day, yes, you kind of do have to accept that. You, you're not going to be able to control this thing. And if you try, that's I think when bad experiences happen. When you go in there with a sense of

• 22:11Speaker 01

  self-assured arrogance that, you know, we humans are the top of the, the intelligence tree.

• 22:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  That DMT will obliterate any, any kind of, um, this anthropocentric belief that humans are the center of reality. And that we are the most intelligent thing and that we've got it all worked out.

• 22:32Jesse Michels?

  It'll humble you.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Oh, it'll humble you within seconds.

• 22:35Jesse Michels?

  Yes. It gives you what you need, not what you want.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:38Jesse Michels?

  When you come in, like, uh, you know, I've dabbled a little bit and I don't do much, but, um, And I did I did ayahuasca once. So I've never done DMT, but I've done the ayahuasca is DMT in some sense. It's a kind of gnarly version of it. I don't know. I feel like the failure mode for me would have been like the universe showing me that, you know, some sort of like ultimate Fibonacci sequence that like, you know, because I'm kind of a truth seeker in that sense. And instead it was like, no, just walk and carry water. You know, your, your, your job is like, like you're way too grandiose about all this stuff. Yeah. Like shut up. Like your family is all that matters.

• 23:17Jesse Michels?

  And it was like, it was great because of that. Um, but it was not what I wanted, you know, I wanted, I wanted some, you know, ultimate secret or something.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Everybody wants the blueprints for the time machine.

• 23:28Jesse Michels?

  That's right.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And they say, why don't we get that? Why don't we get the equations for the grand unified theory?

• 23:33Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  I think humans, we, we have this, this very human centered belief that we know what, what we need. Uh, and, and these beings, they have no interest in that. They know kind of, they know what's going on and we have, we haven't got a clue.

• 23:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  What's going on.

• 23:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Um, we don't know shit, uh, really. Uh, and that's the most important message that we need to get first of all, before we start getting the other messages, I think the first one that we need to take to heart is that, yeah, we haven't got a clue what's going on. We don't know shit.

• 24:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Uh, that we're not, we're not even close. We don't even register on the scale of intelligences, um, that you can encounter within the DMT.

• 24:18Jesse Michels?

  I would agree with that, but you are a human who has dared to create kind of an ontology around both psychedelics. And it's really awesome. And it dovetails with a lot of my instincts where, um, you have this alien information theory. I want to, I want to start with that. Cause I, I love that book and it, it, um, It goes into like these, this idea that, you know, these beings could be in some sense sort of simulating our, our current reality, but it also talks about, you know, there are myths from, you know, Jin and Islam to angels and demons and Christianity or, or, you know, Judaism. And these things sort of having a full wholesale control over our, our realities.

• 25:00Jesse Michels?

  And then, yeah, there's some sort of a bridge that takes place with DMT, but you even get into, you know, the information theory components of, of this and how they're maybe more pure information theoretic, these beings. And you talk about John Wheeler. And so, um, yeah, I do maybe, maybe just for the audience. I'd love, I'd love for you to kind of go through that kind of whole ontology.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the book Alien Information Theory, people read it and think that this is kind of what I believe. It's, it's not what I believe. It's, it's, it's a, it's a work of art. It's a work of metaphysical speculation. I'm simply trying to show people that the world could well be and probably is something, or reality probably is something that we, completely different to what is normally presented to us by the theoretical physicists and the mathematicians and the astronomers and the astrobiologists, et cetera, et cetera. And that actually reality is probably, as Terence McKenna used to say, you know, stranger

• 26:07Speaker 01

  than we can suppose.

• 26:08Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And

• 26:10Jesse Michels?

  I think that was Arthur C. Clarke.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Actually, it was JBS Haldane originally said, he used the word queerer than we suppose. But stranger than we suppose is probably better these days. But yeah, anyway, and, and I think he's right. I mean, 30 seconds after you inhale a lung full of DMT, it's quite obvious that, that reality is far, far stranger than you could possibly have supposed.

• 26:39Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Or anticipated. And the book was really to present one particular way of looking at reality. You know, maybe reality could be something like this. I don't think I got everything right. But I think the idea

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Which I think is broadly correct, or could well be broadly correct, is that this reality, our lower dimensional reality, our three dimensional plus one reality is really a thin slice within a much larger, higher dimensional structure. So we're kind of embedded within this high dimensional structure that we never normally have access to. And for reasons that we don't quite understand, DMT grants us temporary access to this high dimensional structure. And so you, the world you kind of unfold into is,

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I guess, is one way of describing it. Your brain kind of unfolds into this high dimensional structure. And this is why people describe entering a world that is not just strange, but is literally impossible, in that it could not exist within our three dimensional world, world in which there are more dimensions, what appears to be a very higher dimensional space, a kind of reality that our reality, our three dimensional world could only exist within, but it could not exist within our reality, if that makes sense.

• 28:22Jesse Michels?

  It makes total sense. Yeah, I think, and at best, there are little ports or bridges where they connect or something. And you talk about, like, it's like Carl Sagan had this great clip where he's talking about platonic solids, and he talks about a tesseract. And you would never see the tesseract, you'd see a shadow of the tesseract. There's a great book by Sir Edwin Abbott called Flatland, yeah, where it's like a 2D people and how they'd interact with 3D creatures. And, you know, maybe there are ports or whatever whereby, you know, they can somehow connect to the 3D reality, but they're, it's extremely limited. We're seeing sort of the tip of the iceberg. We're not seeing, you know, the iceberg itself.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are kind of trapped within that flatland. And, you know, as Carl Sagan said, you would only, in this world, we would only see the shadow of the tesseract. When you go into the DMT space, people do describe seeing tesseracts, and they will describe them. I saw something that was impossible. It was a Four dimensional cube or five dimensional cube, which is completely impossible for us to comprehend. Only we can only imagine it in as a mathematical abstraction. We there's no way for you to visualize or to see a five dimensional object in its true form. And yet, when you smoke D M T, you do you enter these worlds that appear to be higher dimensional.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And I think, yes, rather than the portal. Well, it is kind of a portal, but I would say it's it's gating the flow of information from. So rather than only receiving information, let's say from this two D flatland, if you're in the flatland, you start to receive information from the third di- the third dimension. And so your the brain temporarily effectively becomes a higher dimensional object. The world that it's constructing is also higher dimensional. So you're seeing more, you're literally seeing a greater expanse of reality than you can in the normal waking state.

• 30:28Jesse Michels?

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• 31:51Jesse Michels?

  That's masa chips dot com slash Jesse Michaels and use code Jesse Michaels for 25% off your first order. You're really helping the channel out when you use that code and this is a product I love and consume just about every day.

• 32:06Jesse Michels?

  You have different models of the brain that might involve sort of, you know, quantum biological processes. Like we have, you know, this burgeoning field of quantum biology where, you know, birds use it to, you know, locate the magnetosphere of the earth and navigate home and, yeah, you know, enzyme creation and you have, you know, photosynthesis is another example. And then you have Roger Penrose saying that the brain might, you know, these microtubules use sort of, you know, quantum biological processes. And that would make sense in this sort of model because that would explain a lot of this sort of pre-sentiment where you're sort of have, you know, some, some sort of access to the future and you see traces of the future or the remote viewing stuff.

• 32:51Jesse Michels?

  All these sort of non-local quote unquote experiences of consciousness would be maybe explained in a model like this. And so even Schrodinger, who's, you know, developed, you know, the wave function that governs all subatomic behavior in quantum mechanics. He had a lecture series called What is Life? Where he talked about aperiodic crystals in the DNA. And he was basically like, these are like ports of like higher consciousness or something like, like there's like some sort of tesseract that like we're tethered to. There's something higher than us and we're like, we're a low level port within what or prism within which this higher thing is, it has to be sort of, you know, reduced into. Like the body is a reduction valve.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like one of the questions that often comes up when I describe this idea that DMT is allowing information to flow from.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Some other place. The question that always comes up is like, how does that work? I mean, we understand how information comes through the sense organs from the the normal three dimensional dimensional environment, but how does that information come from this other place? And I think the answer is at a very low level. So quantum, subquantum, maybe even much deeper levels that we don't even understand. I think it's coming from wherever, however, we are connected to this broader reality structure, this broader higher dimensional structure, wherever that connection is, is obviously going to be kind

• 34:28Speaker 01

  of at the ground of reality, at the quantum or the subquantum. And so the explanation I or the kind of the model that I describe in alien information theory is this idea that the information is coming from the very deepest levels of reality.

• 34:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And flowing upwards through the quantum and then the the subatomic and the atomic and through into these complex networks.

• 34:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And ultimately to this highest level of of the brain where your world model is constructed. So you have information always kind of flowing welling up, if you like, from the deepest level of reality. And that process is somehow gated by the presence of DMT.

• 35:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, Neil's bore would always say, you know, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you definitely don't. It's like extremely confusing. And then if you you look at all the forefathers of quantum mechanics, they all flirted with the idea that the mind had something to do with wave function collapse, often going back and forth on that issue. But it wasn't completely like heretical, like it is sort of today.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:37Jesse Michels?

  And there's a guy named Hal Putoff, actually, who's known to be at the forefront of like all the alien research. And he was just on Joe Rogan and he he ran the government psychic spy program for the CIA. It's a super interesting guy like, but also at the tip of the spear of sort of exotic propulsion modalities, longtime NSA CIA scientist who worked at Stanford Research Institute. And he has a model of extended electrodynamics that involves a vector and scalar potentials. So these subquantum sort of phenomena that might have something to do with dictating wave function collapse. And maybe, you know, if aliens were to communicate, they'd probably communicate like this because apparently they propagate either at one over R, not one over R squared.

• 36:20Jesse Michels?

  So like you don't get the attenuation over spacetime that you do, you don't get the drop off. And it seems like they, they, you know, you get like, you know, effectively like really, really fast, you know, communications and stuff with them. And so, I don't know, it's fascinating. I wonder, I wonder if we can break any ground on this stuff in our lifetime. And if we, or if we get a new model of physics in our lifetime, like, do you think, do you think physics in some ways is sort of, sort of breaking? It feels like all the string theorists are admitting that they're, you know, not, not really getting anywhere.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not a physicist, but I have spoken to physicists. And the problem I think you get is as soon as you start talking about disgruntled intelligence, advanced intelligences, the eyes start to roll and it's like, they already, they've already decided what's possible and what's not possible. And the idea of these advanced, super intelligent agents that you somehow interface with in the DMT state, it's too far from what they can accept.

• 37:31Jesse Michels?

  Well, because they turn science into an all encompassing sort of religion. But if you think about, really what they're calling science is two things. It's predictively useful and it can turn into sort of instrumentalizable technology. That is it, right? It is not an ontological map of reality. And so when you say, I've experienced these beings in a DMT state. When we could say tons of people, like a statistically significant amount of people experienced the same things in the DMT state, they can just write that off because you can't turn it into math and you can't make it repeatable in our sort of waking reality.

• 38:11Jesse Michels?

  But I think that whole mode has limits and that that itself is going to break. Like the that the very idea that that is sort of a satisfactory explanation of all, you know, metaphysics, our reality itself, it has to break at some point.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, what I've, I've been studying DMT for 20 years and my approach has always been to, first of all, take the explanations that I'm given by the kind of mainstream science. These are hallucinations. This is a type of dream imagery. These are, you know, in a kind of archetypal symbols that come from the collective unconscious. And I have to basically deal with them. I have to analyze them, deconstruct them and show why they fail before I can say, okay, we've tried all the explanations that you've given.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  We've tried to kind of make them fit and they don't. They leave the vast majority of the DMT experience completely unaccounted for. So can we now, please, start to think about explanations that would have before seemed to be untenable? And when you do that, you actually find that the idea that there are advanced intelligences that are non-physical, that have transcended the physical, what are often referred to as post-biological beings, that's not far out anymore. I mean, there are very mainstream scientists that are saying, okay, you know, how does a intelligent civilization progress?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Okay, it reaches eventually, after maybe millions of years, it reaches a kind of technological age, the kind of age we're in now, a digital computer age. Then it starts thinking about.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Transcending biology and people are thinking about that already. And many scientists are saying, look, we're probably now maybe only a few hundred years away from dispensing with the biological paradigm and shifting to a post biological paradigm. And you can see it in, you have to kind of ignore, in my opinion anyway, this, this climbing the Carter Chef scale, this kind of Elon Musk idea that we're going to be colonizing Mars. This is a very human idea that we have, that we're simply going to be expanding out into the cosmos and kind of populating other planets and moons or whatever

• 40:59Speaker 01

  as humans. I don't think that's what it's going to look like at all. And actually, if you look at the anti Carter Chef scale proposed by John Barrow in the 1990s, where he said, look, we spend, okay, we spend a lot of money sending objects into orbit or, you know, to distant celestial objects, whatever, but we spend much more time going not outwards but inwards to smaller and smaller scales. If you think about the Large Hadron Collider, this is aimed at trying to understand and manipulate smaller and smaller structures, not larger and larger structures. And so it seems that a more likely trajectory for

• 41:43Speaker 01

  intelligent civilization is not to go out into the cosmos, but to go deeper and deeper levels until you reach what Barrow called the omega minus civilization, which is able to manipulate the fundamental structure of spacetime or the fundamental structure of reality itself. This is where we're going to be, or this is where intelligent civilizations are going to instantiate themselves, not by spawning across the cosmos, but by instantiating themselves at the deepest level, fundamental computational substrate of reality itself. That's where they're going to go. And once they do that, once they make that leap, they

• 42:25Speaker 01

  disappear. They become everywhere and nowhere. They become completely transparent to normal modes of communication and yet they are literally right here, right now. And I think. The idea, if they want to communicate with us, they're going to do it through our brain. That's obvious. Why, why materialize in a physical form? That makes no sense. I mean, maybe they can do that, but it makes much more sense for them to interface directly with our brains. So that idea isn't far out. It doesn't, it doesn't stray too far from modern scientific discourse.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  And that's exactly what I'm suggesting happens with DMT is that you are gating access to some kind of advanced intelligent agent to your brain. Could it be one of these post biological beings that had vanished into the fabric of space time long before we arrived on the scene? Maybe. Could it be beings that exist parallel to our universe in some high level of reality? Maybe. I don't know. But what I'm saying isn't, it's not mystical. It's not magical. It's actually perfectly in line, in my opinion, with what scientists are already talking about in completely different fields.

• 43:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I love that. Well, yeah, even Richard Feynman, you know, famous physicist, well respected by all, you know, conventional or not, said, you know, there's room at the bottom. That was his famous sort of line.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  So much more room.

• 43:59Jesse Michels?

  Much more room.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  At the bottom. I mean, orders, many orders of magnitude.

• 44:03Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Space down there.

• 44:05Jesse Michels?

  Down there. And that's what he meant is what you were talking, is sort of this, you know, similar to the anti-Cartesian scale where, you know, we have to go inwards and not, not just outwards. And even the Elon Musk thing involves all sorts of convoluted, you know, logic that makes no sense because he'll say at the same time as we need to, you know, colonize Mars and then go interstellar and like, you know, endlessly float through Cartesian space to like, you know, make the whole cosmos our empire or whatever. He'll say that and then he'll say, we live in a simulation. You can't believe if like, if you think we live in a simulation, then you have to think, how can we ascend outside of the simulation? That needs to be your first order thing before anything else.

• 44:49Jesse Michels?

  But he's basically saying, no, we have to accept the simulation as it is and then just float through it and find some exoplanet. It's like, what are you talking about, dude? Like, find the computer code. What do you, that makes no sense. So, um, yeah, I find that interesting. And, and another kind of cut at what you're saying with, you know, kind of, um, Large Hadron Collider and finding, you know, really small, you know, subquantum, you know, quarks and that sort of thing is the human being. We take the human out of science. Like, we're not, we are not allowed to view ourselves as a measurement instrument. So it's like the double slit experiment where everybody's always like, it's the quantum detector. It's not the person or whatever. And, you know, the Large Hadron Collider, which is like, it's a, it's

• 45:33Jesse Michels?

  like, you know, an empirical, like, objective thing that we can do. But what about, what about individuals, like epistemology, and especially over, you know, you're studying this stuff systematically, like, can you discount all of that? If a lot of people are seeing these architectures outside of their own reality and they're all consistent, that seems like it would be really important. Like, it's the three, you know, the three body problem, this Chinese science fiction novel, like, it's so great where it talks about like the farmer and the shooter. If we are these 2D things on flatland or whatever, and they're like, you know, metal, metal sheets or something, and you have shooters who are in 3D space, shooting at the metal, you

• 46:13Jesse Michels?

  see these little craters, we just think they're little, you know, holes, little caverns in our, in our flatland. We have no idea that there are literally like people who are like, you know, grading the metal and like, you know, forming our world, that, you know, they're sort of responsible for it. And it's completely at their discretion. And the whole thing is that they literally have particle accelerators that like get different results. And it's like, it's kind of like the physics itself is at the discretion of these like Tricelerian aliens. And it's a real mindfuck. Because there's nothing a conventional physicist can say that's like 100% debunking of that possibility.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, precisely. Yeah. And they develop, you know, when they see these little pockmarks coming, they have, you know, mathematical models for how these arise that are completely wrong, of course, but they kind of maybe hold together and they develop more sophisticated models to explain how these pockmarks appear. And they just have no idea that it's some other intelligence that's generating them. And I think, you know, I strongly lean towards the idea that that's the kind of reality that we live in, that we have all of these models of what's going on. And all models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think sometimes it's...

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Having useful models, which we clearly have useful models because we have all of this technology. So we clearly are models that they're not nonsense. But the idea, it's important not to to mistake a useful model with a true model and that we're actually getting to the the actual true nature of reality. Because I don't think we can say that at all.

• 47:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's the map is not the territory.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:01Jesse Michels?

  And it's like you have, that's why I think string theory is such BS. It's like, I don't need to be a super well respected physicist. I'm not a physicist. But if you have two bad maps, general relativity and quantum mechanics, which are just heuristics for creating technology that's adaptive, so we can, you know, do cool stuff in the world, create, you know, uh, you know, create in the world. Um, why would you put the two jagged maps together with abstract math? That's never going to work. Like, if you just think about that high level, it doesn't make sense.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. I mean, I'm not a physicist. I don't want to start, you know, getting into Ed Witten's territory and things like this.

• 48:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I would lose in a debate to him. But like, but like, again, you just, all you need is that high level common sense thing. Like heterodoxy in unorthodox thinking doesn't scale with IQ. You can have a hyper specialized, extremely intelligent person who has bled into a BS cul-de-sac, like sheep to slaughter. And that that happens all the time.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 49:04Jesse Michels?

  So there's, there's, intelligence is, it's a really finicky, hard, you know, thing where it's like, the, the, the ability to think in a sort of a variant, you know, non consensus way, it doesn't necessarily scale in this perfect way. Like, like, mathletes are not necessarily doing that thing.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:22Jesse Michels?

  You know, and there's a place for both. But like, I don't know.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. But, um, do you think that, you know, there have been, uh, groups, you know, Graham Hancock wrote the, the foreword, uh, to your new book, the Death by Astonishment, uh, which I recommend everybody go buy. And, um, he, Graham's a really interesting guy because he kind of oscillates between. Writing about kind of, you know, more conventional archaeology, but just kind of, you know, his like contrarian views, you know, things like a Beckley Tepe and the younger dry as impact theory. And then he writes these other books that like people don't talk about as much with like Robert Bival about like secret societies, like controlling earth and stuff. And like you have, you know, the Freemasons, I think in Acacia leaf or something is like

• 50:12Jesse Michels?

  in their like, you know, symbology. And you have the Lusianian mystery rituals. Graham also wrote the foreword to Brian Murrescu's book, you know, about, you know, called The Immortality Key about these mystery rituals. Do you think that like elite members of society have been systematically accessing these other realms and either on behalf of or in conjunction with these quote unquote entities or machine elves helping to shape our reality? Are there, are there myth makers?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a very interesting idea. I mean, I, the, the short answer is I don't know, but it's quite clear that there are, there are, there have been civilizations going back thousands of years. I mean, Graham wrote this wonderful book, Supernatural, which is not one of his most well-known, where he, he examined the cave art going back tens of thousands of years and made the compelling argument, as have many other anthropologists, it's not just Graham here, that these civilizations 30, 40,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic,

• 51:23Speaker 01

  if I'm getting my periods right, I don't know. But anyway, they were, the cave art clearly showed beings that were non-human, that were non-animal, or that seemed to be some kind of combination of humanoid and animal form in these pitch black, deep, dark caves. And The question is why? Why, why, you know, were they interfacing? Did they discover a means of interacting with these intelligences all, all those thousands of years ago? Darkness is very interesting as a kind of as an aside here in that many people who like modern day

• 52:09Speaker 01

  darkness retreats where people go into these pitch black rooms for five, six, seven days. Many of them describe, you know, after the fourth, fifth day, describe experiences that they say are DMT experiences or remarkus. I was on his show a few months ago and he's very experienced with DMT. He's also very experienced with darkness retreats and he said, this wasn't like DMT. This was a DMT. I had a DMT experience whilst, you know, after the fourth or fifth day in this darkness retreat. So we're actually doing a study now where we're kind of initiating a study to actually test this.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  So myself and New Nautics, the group that I work with in Florida, we're funding a study where they're going to send people into these darkness retreats, dark rooms, and then take urine samples or saliva samples or blood samples at intervals and see, do these DMT level-

• 53:06Jesse Michels?

  Ah, do you get DMT spikes?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Do we see DMT spikes?

• 53:08Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. Well, you know, there, there were even pre the Eleusinian and other mystery rituals where they would take ergot, you know, this sort of, you know, LSA, you know, psychedelic substance. There were caving rituals. There are pre Socratic caving rituals. A guy named Peter Kingsley writes about this, where they would literally go into a cave for long amounts of time and they would presumably have some pretty transcendent sort of experiences. So that's really interesting.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  So that could be what's, what's going on. And so this is just another technology or another technique that they, they had discovered.

• 53:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And, and you see throughout history whether, you know, it could be the Eleusinian mysteries where they discovered this ergot preparation. Now, whether it's just ergot, whether there are other synergistic plants being added. Some people speculate that, and Brian Murewescu speculated, there are other things going in that enhance or catalyze the experience, but still it's the same thing. You're somehow, you're using some kind of technique, whether it's a molecular technique or darkness or-

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Breathwork or whatever, some kind of technique to manipulate your neurochemistry in some way such that you can access these intelligent beings that you couldn't access otherwise. And so, so the fact that these civilizations have been working with these intelligences for thousands and thousands of years, you kind of have to take that seriously and to just dismiss it and say, oh, they were just deluding themselves, they were just having hallucinations. No, I think that's, that's, it's kind of insulting. The, the Amazonians who developed ayahuasca, for example, you know, this is a true pharmacological

• 54:57Speaker 01

  technology. This is not just an infusion of a plant. This isn't, this is, this is a technology that requires both the D M T, which is orally inactive, plus this plant, Banasteriopsis Carpe, the ayahuasca vine, which contains the M A O inhibitors that allow it to become active. These have to be brought together. And so this is a pharmacological technology that they have developed. And they develop relationships with the beings that they interact with in their ayahuasca state and also with other plant-based preparations, epina, yopo, and others. They develop relationships with these beings. They have names for the

• 55:41Speaker 01

  different types of beings. They see them as members of their tribe. They don't see them as spirits. They don't call them spirits. They say they are not human, they are not animal, they are other. They see them as, but they see them as beings that they can develop relationships with, that will protect them, that they can communicate with, that they can seek answers from. And to dismiss all of that and say,

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Oh, they're just, you know, they're just hallucinating. I think it's, it's, it just speaks to the, this self-assured cocky arrogance that modern post-enlightenment humans have, that we have it all worked out. We have a handle on what's possible.

• 56:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  What's not possible. We know what's real and what's not real. And I'm sorry, but that's not real, I'm afraid.

• 56:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  You're just hallucinating. It's just a kind of dream. No, I'm sorry. But that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Um, and it's kind of insulting to these cultures that have developed these technologies. And I must say, it's a credible technology.

• 56:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's so, it's so fascinating. Just the likelihood of combining those two things, you know, in the Amazon forest are like, if you run through a bunch of permutations or whatever, the likelihood of getting that combination is very low still.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 57:04Jesse Michels?

  Like, it's, it, it had to have been, that itself had to have been sort of downloaded or something as like a recipe for this.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  That's what they will tell you. They will tell you. If you ask them, how did you discover this? They will say, well, the plants told us, you know? When they say the plants, they mean these intelligences which reside within the forest. They told them.

• 57:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  How to, how to do this. And who are we to say?

• 57:28Jesse Michels?

  And they talk about people from the start. It's funny, in the Western context, we have disclosure and we have, you know, uh, you know, government reverse engineering programs. And there they're like, yeah, obviously we have these people that we communicate with from this, you know, they come down from the stars. And I also find it interesting, if you were to go to any Western academic, you know, philosophy department, you know, there's a famous quote, I think, all philosophy is a footnote of Plato or something.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 57:52Jesse Michels?

  And we think of Plato as like the father of, you know, modern Western rationality, like pre-enlightenment. And then you like, look back at like, what he was doing. And it's like, he went to a lucis.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:04Jesse Michels?

  And he was tripping on ergot and like, probably experiencing some like primordial soul version, you know, there's a word for it, noesis, the version of himself. And then he writes about all of that stuff in The Republic, and we ignore that. And we talk about it like it's some like myopic governance manual. And it's just like, what is, like, it's completely retracing the past with our modern kind of disenchantment epistemology.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, Alan Watts used to say that. The modern philosopher would wear a white coat if he thought he could get away with it. Right?

• 58:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Think of themselves as like scientists doing philosophy. They'd come in with their briefcase and they put on their white coat and they do philosophy.

• 58:44Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  They take themselves very seriously.

• 58:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Uh, that they're getting to the, the nitty gritty, the truth of the matter.

• 58:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. And I think there's this like desire for people like Steven Pinker, Richard, Richard Dawkins, or all these people to like defend the status quo. Like, I think the big rift between people like that and like maybe you and me is like, I don't think, I don't, we think that we don't have any of the answers. Like you and me, I think they think that they do. And like, we are putting the final period at the end of a very long sentence of, you know, this enlightenment project. And, uh, we're at the end of history in some ways. Like the final rule in the game of chess is yet to be figured out. Maybe that's string theory, maybe it's some, you know, other thing. But like, we pretty much know how reality works in their, in their model.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Eyes, yeah.

• 59:36Jesse Michels?

  And that is insane to me. It's insane. It's the ultimate cubris.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Well, they were saying that, I forget who said it. Maybe it was like the 19th century that we have based, all of physics has now been worked out. It's now a matter of increasingly precise measurements.

• 59:53Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  And then came relativity and quantum theory and it's changed everything. And, uh, but we, we make the same mistakes even now. You know, many people, not everybody, and, and you have to be a little bit careful. Uh, because there is a lot of, for want of a better term, bullshit.

• 1:00:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Uh, that, that, you know, within this kind of field, right? There are a lot of grifters, uh, and there are a lot of bullshit artists.

• 1:00:23Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  And so you have to.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

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• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  It's really difficult. You have to kind of tread a fine line between not being, there's this tension I always find. And one is pulling you back towards standard materialist orthodox mainstream science. And kind of thinking, yeah, we've got it all worked out. These are just hallucinations, nothing to be concerned about. And then you've got another this, this, this,

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  from the opposite direction, you're being pulled into just a steaming pile of bullshit, right? And it's like, how do you, you have to, it's a constant struggle for me.

• 1:01:28Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  To try and separate myself from the bullshit whilst not being too far out from the sign.

• 1:01:34Jesse Michels?

  If you're engaging in that struggle, then you're doing it right. Yeah, it's, it's a Sylla and Caribdis between excess dogmatism and excess skepticism.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Jesse Michels?

  Or to put it in your, the way you just framed it,

• 1:01:47Jesse Michels?

  new agey, kind of solipsistic.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Jesse Michels?

  You know, everything is everything mushy brain thinking. And then on the other hand, you know, complete radical Cartesian skepticism or something. Like, there has to be some middle path.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:02:03Jesse Michels?

  And that, that is a treacherous place. So you find yourself very alone because it's, it's much easier to snap to grid on either. There's, the tribal dynamics exist in a way that, you know, things coagulate on either end of that kind of, you know, barbell.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So that's what I do. So I, it's, it's a difficult path, but it's the only path, I think. When you're faced with something like DMT, which is so strange and is so, in my opinion, mysterious and inexplicable, you, you're not going to be able to explain it by just. Snapping to the usual explanations because they fail.

• 1:02:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  And that's what I found is that they fail. So I tread careful. I keep one foot firmly planted in the scientific arena.

• 1:02:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  And I, and I then reach out with an outstretched hand into other territory, but I'm very careful about what I say, what I do, and that I try and rationalize and explain my thinking every step of the way. I don't just say, oh, me, maybe these are spirits from the astral plane. Yeah, that'll do.

• 1:03:09Jesse Michels?

  Right, right.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  You know, maybe these are spirits of the departed. Yeah, that will do.

• 1:03:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Um, because you can, anything goes.

• 1:03:17Jesse Michels?

  No, I know.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  And you can't, I try to trace it back and make just, just to kind of convince people that I'm not just nuts. I'm not just kind of going with whatever, but I do explain myself. I think kind of carefully and rationally, you know, piece by piece, step by step.

• 1:03:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, I, I feel the same way. And it's, it's tough because like YouTube, for example, doesn't do nuance well.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:03:43Jesse Michels?

  So I, you know, I have a show and people think it's like an alien show or whatever. I'm like, I don't know if these things are aliens. Like, I don't know if they're, in fact, I would say that there are other hypotheses that better describe them than the sort of, you know, classic extraterrestrial hypothesis, but it's this meme that people can't seem to transcend or something. And so it's, it's, it's wild. But um, on that note of like wanting to keep your, your feet sort of firmly grounded, we were talking before the camera about Christopher Timmerman at, at Imperial College, who you sort of devised some of these extended D M T experiments that he's, you know, executing. We were also talking about a mutual friend. I haven't talked to him in a long time, this guy Anton Bilton,

• 1:04:26Jesse Michels?

  who is thinking of giving people D M T, putting them in adjacent Faraday cages. So there, you know, there's no way of like, you know, traditional signals being communicated, you know, electromagnetically. And seeing if they can telepathically like, you know, transport image, communicate images between them.

• 1:04:44Jesse Michels?

  Are there any experiments like those two or anything else that you are particularly excited about that brings this stuff out of the realm of speculation and more into the scientific mainstream?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so the DMT, the work that Chris Timmerman was doing at Imperial, this what's called extended state DMT or DMTX, it has come to be known for short. So this was a model, a proposal by myself and Rick Strasman back in 2015. Because as everyone knows, who knows anything about DMT, it's, it's an extremely intense experience, you know, you're trying, you're kind of hurtled into this ultimate world. You look around shocked, bewildered, aghast at this thing that's just appeared in front of you and that surrounds you and overwhelms you. And then you're kind of dragged back again very, very quickly.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  It's, it's not a great drug used in that way, you know, vaporized or injected. It's not a great drug to kind of explore. It's not a, the state is, it's very fast and very, very short. So I was kind of looking at DM, DMT is a weird drug, not just in terms of its effects, but it's, it has these pharmacological peculiarities that set it apart. So unlike other drugs, for example, LSD or psilocybin, if you give someone LSD, they will have a certain intensity of experience based upon dose. If you then give them the same dose, let's say a day later, it will be slightly diminished.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  And then a day later in it, you, you rapidly build up tolerance, the same with psilocybin. With DMT, you don't, and it's not fully understood why. But Rick Strasman, there've been, you know, reports going back decades that, you know, you can use DMT in quick succession and not experience intolerance effect. And Rick Strasman studied this during his 1990s studies. He would inject someone with DMT and he'd measure the intensity of the experience using a special rating scale that he developed. Then he'd inject them again 30 minutes later with the same dose and they had the same intensity of experience and on and on. So there was no buildup of tolerance. It's also, of course, because it's so short-acting,

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  it's removed from the brain. It gets into the brain very, very quickly and it's cleared from the brain very, very quickly. It's just this, it's like an, it's almost like it's engineered with precision to kind of slot into the brain's machinery and kind of cause these highly dramatic changes in the structure and dynamics of the world. And so it occurred to me that, well, why don't we repurpose a technique from anesthesiology called target-controlled intravenous infusion, where you, if you want to keep someone in an anesthetized state, what you do is you don't just inject them with a drug and kind of let it kind of get into their brain and then metabolize,

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  because you can't control how long they remain unconscious for. So what you do, you inject them with a very short-acting anesthetic and you infuse it, use a special infusion device, which is programmed based upon the metabolism and distribution, all these kind of properties of the drug that you need a mathematical model for. So you infuse it into their veins and you're able to maintain this fairly stable brain concentration of this anesthetic drug and you can manipulate how deep they are in the anesthetized state for as long as you want. Then you switch off the machine, they may all come out fairly, fairly quickly. So I thought, why don't we just use this technology, but with DMT? Whoa.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  And so I wrote to Rick and I said, I kind of have this idea. I think this might work, but we need to kind of show that it could work. And for that, we needed this, what's called a pharmacokinetic model, which models how DMT is distributed and metabolized, so that we can, we can just show that, yes, this should work, that DMT, the properties of DMT make it amenable for this technique. And so Rick had all of the blood data, blood sampling data from his 90s studies, which he sent to me. And then we got to work and he wrote this paper, which basically said, yes, DMT seems to be amenable to this kind of technology. And it got a lot of attention. People started talking about alien communication machines and the Matrix and this kind of thing,

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  the Matrix machine, whatever. But then, fortunately, Imperial College picked it up.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  And they developed a much better model than than our kind of back of the envelope model and they implemented it in humans and they were able to extend the D M T state stabilize it for thirty minutes. So instead of just two or three minutes within the breakthrough state, they extended it for thirty minutes and it worked very, very well. There was no physiological concerns, the heart rate, blood pressure was normal, anxiety levels kind of peaked at the beginning and then settled down. The the intensity of the experience

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  was perfectly stable throughout the thirty minutes. And another group in Basel, Matthias Leichty, I think he's called, has extended it for ninety minutes. Another group has extended it for six hours at a very low dose level. So this is the technology, right? This is this is how we go from scuba diving to deep sea diving. You have this like you you're able to go to the bottom of the ocean and stay there. You know, you have a direct line back to the boat. You know, that's how I see D M T X. It allows you to explore, to navigate, to perform experiments within the space and to train people to actually spend time within

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  the space. And importantly.

• 1:10:52Jesse Michels?

  It's almost like lucid dreaming or something.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Kind of like that.

• 1:10:55Jesse Michels?

  Like a little in control in a place where you're typically out of control.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, once you get into this space and it stabilizes, then you can begin to think about establishing communication with these intelligences, whatever you think they are, whatever you think about their ontology. Okay, we can establish communication with them, begin to think about, you know, what can we learn from them? And one aspect that I'm particularly interested in is the ontology. Can we demonstrate that these are more than just. Fabrications of the brain, right? Can we show somehow that we're actually interfacing with some kind of intelligence that is non-human?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  And that, if that was possible, and I think it might be, that's I mean, that, the implications of that is almost beyond comprehension. Right? The idea that we can use this drug to communicate with beings and we can show that these are non-human intelligent beings. And I think that's, that's, that could be possible. Back in the early 2000s, a guy called Rodriguez publishes paper and he said, why don't we give these entities, why don't we give them mathematical problems? So we can say, okay, I'll give you a large number, Mr. Alien. I want you to find the unique prime factors of this large number. I can't do this in my head, but you're very, very smart, so you can do that for me.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Now, it's a nice idea, right? And if they gave them the correct answer, we'd know that it was not happening in the brain, that there was actually interaction with some kind of intelligence. The problem with this, of course, is that, you know, finding, it's, it's, it kind of feels again, a bit presumptuous that they're going to want to play our little prove your ontological status games. Prove that you're real, here's some, you know, I don't see, it's very presumptuous to think that they're going to want to kind of play along with that. So I don't think that's necessarily the way to go. It's one way to go.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  But I think what's interesting about these intelligences is that they betray, they can't help but betray their intelligence. Everything they do is, is, is, is a kind of performance and demonstration of their intelligence. You just need people who can recognize it. So I was speaking just a few days ago in Denver at the Psychedelic Science Conference with Andres Gomez Amílson. So he's this very smart mathematician guy, but also very interested in DMT. And he was telling me things that were blowing my mind. I mean, he was, he said, okay, I go into this state, the DMT state, and these beings, they, they, they paint surfaces in four colors.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  They do it repeatedly. Now, to me, if I go in and I see an entity painting surfaces with four colors, I go, that's cool. But he said, actually, there's more to it than this, because painting a surface with four colors, like a map, yeah, a complicated map of shapes, right, with four colors. It's called a four-color theorem. So if you have a map of shapes that are all kind of tessellated, right? You have, you have to color each shape with a color. So one of four colors, no two shapes have the same color, right? So imagine a world map and you have to color every country. You don't want two countries having the same color. You can do it.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  It's been proved that you can do it with just four colors. But if you were given a very complex map and asked to do it by hand, it would take you a long time. I mean, Andres is a very smart guy and he said it would take him all afternoon, right? So for me, that means it would take me all day, right? And yet these entities, they, they do it instantaneously, like less than a second, and they do it repeatedly. So they're, they're performing, you know, in short, they're performing mathematical operations, mathematical algorithms that would take a human brain, a smart human, several hours and they're doing it in a fraction of a second.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  And there are other things that I didn't quite understand, but other operations, finding the distances between two surfaces. Weird stuff, mathematical stuff, right? So most people, when they go into this space, they go, fuck, this is incredible. This is impossible. But they can't tell you why it's impossible. When a mathematician goes into this space, they can say, yes, this is impossible for these reasons, right? These are the mathematical operations required to construct these things and a human brain couldn't do that within a fraction of a second. So it just occurred to me that this is how we do it. We don't. Kind of rely on them to play with us or to kind of to cooperate with our little

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  prove yourself games, but actually they're doing it all the time. They're demonstrating their intelligence. They can't help it. They love performing and we just need to send the right people in. So we send in mathematicians, you send in geometers or topologists.

• 1:16:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Or whatever, right? You send in linguists.

• 1:16:11Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Um, who can look at the kind of, because code and language is also a big part of the experience. And they can say, okay, this seems to be some kind of language. And I can explain why it's some kind of language. It seems to be informationally dense or whatever. You know, adheres to these various rules of how languages are constructed and bringing data back. So you're not just sending people in and going kind of, what happened, man? Right. The kind of the Strassman approach, great for its time, but now we have this D M T X technology. We can send people in with specific skill sets.

• 1:16:44Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Specific, you know, high level expertise in very specific fields. And they can say, okay, I'm going to come in, I'm going to describe the geometric structure of the space. I'm going to describe the topology of the space. I'm going to describe the, the way that these intelligences communicate and all this kind of stuff. It's hard to comprehend the implications, I think, that we could actually demonstrate.

• 1:17:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Pretty soon, you know, or, or at least to a very high level of probability, say, okay, these intelligences are doing things that the human brain can't do. What does that mean?

• 1:17:20Jesse Michels?

  Yes, yes. Do, do we have, you know, in the past, we've had angel hierarchies. Like you have Saint Thomas Aquinas with his angel hierarchy or Imlicus, you know. Who's the other guy? Dionysus of Mariupolgate or something.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:17:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, like we have these sort of, uh, and they literally have taxonomies where they'll have like attributes associated with these different beings, physical characteristics of the beings. Do we have a taxonomy of the D M T world beings? Do we have categories, you know, like a, like a, like an Excel sheet of these things?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Like a bestiary, right?

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  We don't, not a formal one.

• 1:17:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  I mean, there are, there are attempts online, you know, to describe, and there's a book by David J. Brown, Illustrated Field Guide to DMT entities, which is a lot of fun, kind of describing the type of entities that people experience. And there are clearly patterns. So the machine elves, by far the most famous residents of this space, they tend to be jovial, their multitudinous, you know, there's so many of them bouncing around and they're jolly and they like to show you wonderfully strange, high dimensional objects, Terence McKinnon used to call like Faberge eggs, but in nine dimensions or whatever. You know, these kind of beings that that tend to be more about a show, like a circus kind of thing,

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  more about performing and showing you what's possible. And then there are more kind of serious beings, so the insectoids, manted kind of beings, these tend to be a bit more, um, less jovial, shall we say, often. And they, they, those are often the beings that will perform kind of surgery on you and on your brain, on your body and scanning and this kind of thing.

• 1:19:09Jesse Michels?

  That's so common in alien abduction.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  So common, right?

• 1:19:12Jesse Michels?

  And there are always these sort of worker bee, like often short grays, and then there's like a tall gray overseeing it. Or there's a, a tall white, you know, these like sort of blonde Nordic looking beings overseeing, you know, it, there is this sort of hierarchy.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Jesse Michels?

  Always, almost, almost always associated with this.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I actually got, last year I got this email from this Korean guy. Now, there aren't that, I don't think there are that many Koreans who take ayahuasca or travel to Peru to take ayahuasca. So I kind of, it piqued my interest when he emailed me. But he, he went to Peru because he wanted healing. He wanted to meet Mother Ayahuasca and the spirits of the forest. And he didn't, he didn't get that. He got a full blown. Alien experience. He was taken by this, what he described as the alien scientist, through this extremely complex computational tunnel thing into this spacecraft

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  or some kind of highly hyper technological environment. And these beings were torturing him. They were with these smaller beings, again, the hierarchy, these smaller beings that were kind of doing things to him. And then there was this alien scientist, who was not like these little insectoid beings, but was much, much more powerful. And that he describes this being as taking out his soul. This being was torturing him at a deep soul level. I mean, he came out of it thinking that his soul had been captured, like a fish on a hook.

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• 1:21:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  And that's not an uncommon experience when people take, you know, when you take D M T, whether it's in the form of ayahuasca in a forest or whether it's in a, the University of New Mexico Hospital in room 531, where Rick Strasman did his studies, or in your bedroom or basement or back room.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  You cannot, you cannot. Guarantee the kind of being that you're gonna be interacting with. And if you're lucky, you'll get some nice performance from the out. But there's a very deep, you know, not insignificant probability that you encounter beings more objectionable, shall we say?

• 1:22:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, for sure. Well, that brings up this earlier question that we kind of touched on. But it's like, how, you know, is the is DMT a bridge to a world that is separated without the DMT from our waking reality? Or are they always like pre enlightenment? If you were to say there are, you know, machine elves, not call them by that name, but like little beings, sort of like controlling the forces of, you know, reality and like, you know, pre gravity and things like that. We'd be like, yeah, of course, like spirits controlling everything like literally pre Newton, that would have been the sort of conventional explanation. And I saw you on the Danny Jones podcast, which I loved. And I think you guys brought up Philip K. Dick.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:25Jesse Michels?

  And Philip K. Dick would be one of these guys who would extend this sort of DMT world to his model of reality itself, where, you know, he gave this famous speech in Metz, France, where he's, I think it was called, you know, if you if you think this world sucks, you should see the others or something. And he's talking about the man in the high castle, you know, where it's like the Nazis and the Japanese had like annexed, you know, the United States, the World War Two went the other way. And he's, you know, then he's giving this speech in front of all these like, well, respected people or whatever. And he's like, you guys don't get it like that world happened. Like, that's real. Like, that's an all the parallel universe or

• 1:24:05Jesse Michels?

  something. And so he goes into this whole, he has this whole ontology. My friend Riz Verk, who's written, you know, a couple of books about simulation theory is friends with his wife, Tessa Dick. And she talks about how he was just fully bought into the world being a simulation. You know, it's like time froze in Roman time, like, we're still in Roman times. And this, this is all this just sort of modern veneer. But maybe the most interesting book, I think he wrote along these lines is this book called The Adjustment Team. I don't know if you've heard of this. But it's a, it's a book about like, if you had. A group that was in total control of reality and they like froze this, you know,

• 1:24:47Jesse Michels?

  podcast and then they like, you know, moved the water like an inch or whatever. And then you get this, just like, you know, for rockets, like one degrees off course, you get this sort of air propagation. You get this multiplicative butterfly effect that like changes timelines. And if you think about a lot of what you're saying with these DMT entities, if they have any interface with our waking reality, they would have that ability, like the color thing that you mentioned. So it gets into these weird questions of like, are there time editing Archons or beings that are like coming down, freeze framing things, neuralizing us, changing a little

• 1:25:28Jesse Michels?

  variable here and there, and then letting things run their course. And then, okay, you know, some other, some other thing happens where some, you know, a nuke's about to go off, they stop the nuke or whatever, you know, which UFOs show up around nuclear sites.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:42Jesse Michels?

  But they're like weakly entangled with our reality. All they care about are these sort of cosmic scale timeline minor, it's, it's minimal interference.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Jesse Michels?

  Minimal adjustments necessary to like maintain certain timelines, but they are monitoring the timelines.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  I think we, you know, I can't say whether that's true or not, but we can't rule it out. And when you, it's like, when you, when you use DMT and you're confronted with beings that are clearly, to say they're more advanced than humans, it just doesn't do them justice. I mean, you're talking about beings that have, that appear to have that kind of cosmic, um, cosmic abilities, whether that is indeed having, whether they are normally kind of

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  linked to, connected to have some kind of relationship with our, with our reality, but kind of stay back. I don't know, but you.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  The fact that we have this, what I consider to be a molecular technology that allows us to interface with beings that that seem to have those kind of properties that seem to be at that level of intelligence, a level of intelligence that really is beyond our comprehension. We can't, there's no way for us to conceive of what an intelligence like that truly is, or its potential, or its power, or its abilities, then we should use it. And, and going back thousands of years, I mean, these, obviously, these civilizations in the Amazonian rainforest, they didn't have, they weren't talking about things you're talking about, but they were describing the same types of beings which they took very

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  seriously. So they were talking about, the Yanomami, for example, had these, these beings which they called the Warusinadi insect beings, which sound very much, you know, very intelligent, very fearsome creatures, which sound a lot like the insectoid aliens that people are describing in the 21st century. They describe the Hekuda, which are these multitudinous beings. You can never come to the end of them, they say. They come dancing and they're, they're singing and playing flutes and they're just beauty, dance bounding around and jumping into your chest and filling your chest. This is shamanistic mythos going back thousands

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  of years. And then in the modern era, people describe seeing multitudinous, giggling, lively little beings, balls of light or whatever, that jump into their chest. And so clearly, this is not just a, it's not Terence McKenna implanting the idea of machine elves into people's brains. These are motifs, beings, intelligent beings that go back thousands of years. And now we have a technique, we know how to access them. And we need to start taking that seriously and not simply dismissing, you know, my work is not so much about saying, I know what's going on, but really to convince people that they don't have a fucking clue what's going

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  on, and that they, they should stop simply assuming that they understand what DMT is. It's just your brain on drugs, man. This is just your brain making it up, man. You know, that, these kind of explanations, and they don't, they don't work. And I think we need to. We need to draw inspiration from these indigenous peoples who did take them seriously and did see them as beings that they could have relationships with and learn from and bring that into. There's a thread running from these indigenous cultures going back thousands of years and it runs into the 21st century where we're now, we have much better technology. Now we have, as I was just talking about DMTX, we have this technology where

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  we can much more reliably and stably enter the space. We're not relying on drinking extremely bitter, disgusting decoctions. Nothing wrong with that, but we now have techniques the way we can stabilize the state. We can go in there, we can send people and we can actually begin to build relationships with these intelligences and that might be what we need if we're going to progress beyond where we are now. You know, we need to do that probably pretty quickly before we kill ourselves, which is not that unlikely.

• 1:30:13Jesse Michels?

  Right. Do you, do you think, you know, DMT is so fascinating. Do you think that there is something about the fact that it exists in all organic matter that is sort of an important aspect to it?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, that's again, that's another one of its peculiarities, right? It's not, it's the simplest of all the naturally occurring psychedelics. You look at the molecule, it looks perfectly unremarkable. There's nothing interesting about it. If I saw DMT and I didn't know anything about it, I'd say probably not going to be that interesting. It's two steps, enzymatic steps from tryptophan, this amino acid. You decarboxylate in a tryptophan, you get tryptamine, you add two methyl groups, you get DMT. It's as simple as it gets. And as you said, it's not just common, it's ubiquitous. Terrence, Dennis

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  McKenna, Terrence's brother, says that nature is drenched in DMT. He thinks, and he's probably right, that if you looked carefully, you'd find it in basically every plant. Some have higher concentrations than others.

• 1:31:22Jesse Michels?

  You can extract it from like a weight of grass.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Right. So it's this, it's This ubiquitous, very simple molecule that just happens to, when you smoke it or inject it, just happens to get access to this completely alien reality filled with highly intelligent beings. I don't buy that that's just a coincidence. It seems like there is this message implanted in our reality, implanted in the natural world. And it just takes an organism with a certain level of cognitive advancement, right? You can't just eat plants. You can't just munch plants mindlessly and have a DMT trip. You can't do that. You have to isolate

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  it. You have to extract it. You have to learn how to use it, as the Amazonians did with ayahuasca, to bypass this monoamino oxidase in the stomach, that you need an intelligent being to do that, which is another interesting aspect to it. You don't stumble across DMT. You have to learn to, you have to discover it and learn how to use it. And this is not, you know, the technology didn't end with ayahuasca. It didn't end in the 1960s when we learned that you could vaporize it either. And it didn't end in 2015, when myself and Rick Strasman developed the DMTX protocol. I think we're still learning to use this, this technology.

• 1:32:48Jesse Michels?

  That's so interesting. It is like a technology. It's like semiconductors are like, you know, it's like electron differentials or whatever. It's like, this is like, you know, another technology where if you figure out the key to extracting it, like you're, you're opened up to a whole new world.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And what's also very interesting, of course, is that it's not just a product of plant metabolism, metabolism. It's a product of mammalian metabolism as well. So it's found in humans. So we're all carrying DMT at very low levels, which raises the question, and again, this is something that I'm currently working on with, with New Nautics. We've, we've hired the university of, or contracted with a team at the University of Florida to actually

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  Develop techniques to hack the brain's endogenous DMT system, right? So we know that there is, we know the human brain produces DMT, but in very low levels. And we think we found a peptide or a peptide that was first found in the 1970s, but then forgotten about.

• 1:33:53Jesse Michels?

  What's peptide?

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  We don't know. We know it's there. We know it basically it inhibits this enzyme called indolethylamine, N-methyltransferase, INMT.

• 1:34:05Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  It's the key enzyme to produce DMT, basically.

• 1:34:08Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Converts tryptamine to dimethyltryptamine. Now, this enzyme is inhibited by this peptide we all carry and basically keeps DMT levels low. Now, we know this peptide is there. It's in cerebrospinal fluid. It's in mammalian brain. But we don't know how it works. We don't know its structure or its sequence or anything like that. So we're working with University of Florida, New Nortics, to basically to isolate and characterize this peptide and try to understand the regulatory system that controls DMT levels. So what the switch or the slider, right? And so the idea being that we can, if we understand this regulatory system, we can learn how to hack it.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  And so rather than giving someone, injecting someone with DMT, we rather, we can inject them with a small amount of a peptide, for example, that will allow them to naturally slide into, be induced into the DMT state and kept there for, you know, long periods of time. So we call this endo DMTX or E DMTX.

• 1:35:15Jesse Michels?

  Is any of this playing with fire? Like, you know, I think about where, you know, we now can split the atom. We, you know, know the genetic code of, you know, humans or we're still discovering stuff there. But, you know, we're, we're starting to crack that. And then we have, we have the ability to, if you find some peptide where you can, you know, just modulate this. And even with the, the intravenous stuff, can modulate it on and off. Is there something actually adaptive about not being in control of it and? Whoever set up, you know, whatever world we're in, you know, having, having set it up in the, in the right sort of way, the sort of anthropic principle or something, it's, it's, it exists in sort of perfect amounts.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Well, you could take that, many people think that, right? And that's a very cautious attitude to take. But there's nothing natural about extracting from the most hostile root bark with sodium hydroxide and, and, um, and Zippo lighter fluid. You know, this is, this is, this is a, you're employing chemistry, you're employing technology to do this. So, so if, if that was the case, then ayahuasca would, you'd stop at ayahuasca and even not even ayahuasca because that itself is a technology. So then, then you're back to, well, you're, you're back to not knowing what DMT is because you can't just ingest it. So there's no, you can't just consume the, the naturally occurring source of DMT. There's no way to do it.

• 1:36:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Right? You can't do it. Uh, you have to either combine it with, with this monoamine oxydate inhibitor, uh, boil it down, or you have to extract it. And so I don't see why one particular technology, one particular, um, way of using DMT should be seen as the, the all and end all of it. Um, so, okay, we can extract it. This seems to me a stepping stone on the way to further development. And I just think that the, that Rick Strassmann's pure, you know, pharmas, pharmaceutical grade DMT injected directly in the bloodstream was a step beyond extracting plant, um, smoking or vaporizing plant extracts.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  And then now I think that DMTX is just the next iteration along that path. And ultimately, I think, you know, I don't know where this is going, but I don't, I've never got the sense that, oh, we need to stop here. This is the way to use DMT. I don't, I think that doesn't really make any sense to me. Um, so I think in the future.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Who knows how we're going to be using DMT? Will there be combinations of molecules that we're using? Will we be dispensing, as I said, with molecules altogether with exogenous molecules and using hacking our own endogenous DMT production system? And then you would, I can imagine a future where you're, you lie in a pod and all of your bodily needs are taken care of. You're fed, you might, you know, your oxygen supply is managed and your body may be cooled down. Your waste products are dealt with and you spend days, weeks, months, significant portions of your life.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  To anyone observing you, basically asleep in a pod.

• 1:38:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  And to you, you would be interacting with and.

• 1:38:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:38:27Jesse Michels?

  Which is, by the way, what we could be in now.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:30Jesse Michels?

  Like that's, you know, we could be in the Matrix and we could just wake up and you're in some pod or whatever jelly. And you could have whatever the hyper expanded version of DMT that ports you into this world or whatever.

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:42Jesse Michels?

  So it's like you end up in this sort of babushka doll model of reality.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  True, or it could be that you're actually returning and that actually going to the pod is the way to return to your.

• 1:38:52Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Your.

• 1:38:53Jesse Michels?

  Back to the pod.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Back, back to the pod.

• 1:38:55Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  It's kind of interesting because.

• 1:38:57Jesse Michels?

  They say it's realer than real, right?

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Right, realer than real. So this is actually, you're in a pod now.

• 1:39:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  And then when you go into the pod, whatever, and raise the DMT levels, you're actually wake up in back.

• 1:39:09Jesse Michels?

  And it goes to Plato's cave where it's like all we're seeing now is sort of simulacra. In fact, in The Matrix, the movie, he's looking at a book and it's, I think it's Jean Baudelard or whatever, this French.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  Baudelaire.

• 1:39:20Jesse Michels?

  Baudelaire, that's right. You know, simulacra and simulation or whatever. And it's like, you know, it's clearly the Wachowski siblings. They, you know, were paying homage to this sort of, you know, postmodern author that's writing about.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:35Jesse Michels?

  Simulacra, it's just so, so fascinating.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And people do describe very, a very common feeling when they enter the DMT space is one of. I'm back. Welcome. And they, you know, the lights are flashing. It's like, welcome home. What do you mean, welcome home?

• 1:39:49Jesse Michels?

  You do like a life review.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Right. And it's like this very strong sense of deja vu, like I've been here before. Not only have I been here before, but this is my true home. So maybe that's what's happening. Maybe we are on a path towards the state where we return. And does it, does it look like lying in a pod and closing your eyes and raising your D N T levels in your brain through some technology? Maybe, maybe it's something else that we don't yet understand.

• 1:40:17Jesse Michels?

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

• 1:40:58Jesse Michels?

  biology is a, is a collapsing function on a default state of greater omniscience, you're killing that collapsing function temporarily. And the person experiences sort of greater consciousness and awareness. And you'd expect this more sort of.

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

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• 1:41:39Jesse Michels?

  Muted like, oh, it all just shut off and that now I'm back or I got turned back on. But it's not. The mystery ritual kills the collapsing function and you get this sort of greater, you know, ontological reality. And then you come back and there, there's always this translation function issue. I think William James was like writing in his diary about like, you know, some, some trip he had had or something. And like, you, you end up writing mumbo jump, like just, you know, gobbledygook. It's like impossible to translate.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Terence McCann used to say, a secret is not something untold. It is something that cannot be told.

• 1:42:18Jesse Michels?

  Cannot be told. Oh, that is beautiful.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Jesse Michels?

  Oh, that's beautiful. Awesome.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Wish I'd thought of that. Yeah.

• 1:42:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  But the un-Englishable and you have to, you lit, you have to have the direct experience. You can't, you can bring back fragments, lower dimensional projections of this space and talk about it to some extent, but you, you cannot. And this is why it's so difficult spending my life talking about DMT is, is what I really should say is just, just go there.

• 1:42:49Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  And then get back to me. Uh, because people can't comprehend when I'm talking about entities or strange other worlds that in their head, they're seeing this 1970s science fiction movie with little green men on, on a globe. Um, they don't, there's no way for them to even conceive of what's actually going on in my head when I'm talking about this thing, because it's un-Englishable. In a, and so trying to English the un-Englishable, to F the ineffable, the ineffable.

• 1:43:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Put it like that is, is, is very, very difficult. Um, um, but, but it's not a completely hopeless task. At least I can explain to people why, okay, there are certain aspects of this space that, that, that make it impossible and that mean that, that, uh, the only conclusion we can draw from that is that there's more going on. There's more going on here than we can explain. If people come away from my work with that, then

• 1:43:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  Kind of done my job and the rest happens with a glass pipe and. Um, you know, inhaling a couple of lungfuls of D M T vape, but that's the only hundred percent conversion.

• 1:44:01Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Conversion technique.

• 1:44:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's like, oh, I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's no, it's like a lot. If you're studying any of these fields, the work is actually in translating your ontology to the average person. It's not, it's also in, you know, working out the ontology itself, but it's, you have to do both. Otherwise you end up on an island completely, you know, like, and there's just no interface with, you know, the rest of the world. So is there something about D M T? Where, you know, I think it shows up right when you die. Is that right? And then does it show up at the womb, in the womb or around? Like, I remember reading Rick Strassman's, you know, D M T spirit molecule, and he talks about it being maybe a part of identity formation. Is that?

• 1:44:43Jesse Michels?

  Are these things possible? Or has that been debunked? Because this was, you know, like, probably 20 years ago, he was writing this.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Well, it's not been debunked. I mean, I think it's often the idea, so the D M T, the spirit molecule, came from Rick Strassman's idea that it's released at the point of death and is like, provides the conduit by which the soul exits the body and enters the afterlife. This is a very obviously mystical, spiritual hypothesis. But it's often, it's often repeated as if it's fact, right? This, you know, D M T is produces dreams and it's released in small amounts and then it large amounts when you die.

• 1:45:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  But both of these are hypotheses.

• 1:45:25Jesse Michels?

  So we don't know that.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  We don't know that. However,

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  the dream thing, I don't think makes any sense because most dreams are not anything like D M T. So people who think they're going to have a dream like experience when they take D M T, I'm sorry, but it's not going to be anything like any normal dream. So I don't, and there's no evidence that D M T is produced during R E M sleep. So that one, I think is just, that was just, again, a hypothesis put out by a guy called Jayce Callaway in the 1980s. Terence McKenna often repeated it, perhaps giving a, he was a little bit more definitive than he should have been about that. But then the dying thing is more interesting.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  Whether or not it provides the means by which you can enter the afterlife, that's a different question. That's more of a metaphysical question. I don't think science is really going to get to the bottom of that. But the idea that it's released at the point of death, actually, there is good evidence now that it could be. I don't think it's the pineal gland. The pineal gland is what Strassmann thought. The pineal gland is a very, very tiny gland. It's about this big, the end of my little finger. It produces nanograms of melatonin. It's not set up to pump out large amounts of DMT, enough DMT to cause a breakthrough experience. But, as I said, it's DMT is two steps from tryptophan. So, you know, other cells in the brain, potentially all neurons in the brain could produce DMT.

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  You don't need to rely on the pineal. And some recent studies showed some interesting things. Firstly, that DMT levels in rodents, this was, so not humans, but still mammals, DMT levels in awake, living rodents were about the same as other neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. So it's not tiny amounts, it's not a breakthrough psychedelic level, but still produced in the same kind of quantities as other neurotransmitters, which is kind of cool, right? So clearly, the the the brain is diverting resources to producing DMT. Why? We don't know. However. There's something functional. There's something functional there.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  And and what's interesting is that when they sacrifice these rodents, sacrifice is such a weird word. They don't like put them on an altar and light candles. They kill them, right? So when they kill these rats, they they actually have a technique now called microdialysis, where they're able to measure in real time DMT levels in a living rat, which wasn't available, you know, all these decades ago when these hypotheses were originally proposed. But now they can. So they can measure DMT in the brain of a rodent. And then they kill the rodent and as the rodent dies, DMT levels.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  Rise, they spike. Now, you also see this with other neurotransmitters, by the way, so it's not just DMT, but still, okay, DMT levels are rising. That's in line with Strassman's model. No one's done that with a human. If you could get permission with somebody who was end of life, you know, perhaps on a life support machine, and during the dying process, could you get permission from them or their family members to draw their blood? That would be an experiment that could be done ethically. It's difficult, obviously. But it, yeah, but it could be done, right? And what's interesting about DMT is that other studies have shown

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  that when you take neurons, so neurons are very sensitive to oxygen. They need oxygen. You deprive a neuron of oxygen, it dies. This is why strokes, where you lose blood supply to certain areas of the brain are so devastating, because if you don't restore blood supply very, very quickly, areas of the brain die and you end up with severe disabilities or death.

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  What's interesting is that in a oxygen, hypoxic, oxygen deprived environment, neurons will survive longer in the presence of DMT. But they bind to a specific receptor called the sigma, sigma one receptor, which, you know, a few decades ago, we didn't know existed and has no other function. It's called an orphan receptor, and that it's a receptor that's there, but nothing binds to it. We know now that DMT binds to it. So it's not a true orphan receptor, because it binds to an adogenous molecule, DMT. So it binds to this receptor and it initiates a cascade of intracellular signaling that seems to somehow protects the neuron. So you can imagine

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  during the dying process, as your respiratory system is collapsing, blood supply to the brain is diminishing, your brain is being starved of oxygen, DMT ramps up, and should you survive, the DMT has protected your brain during that period where you were dying.

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  Does that make sense? Yeah. And now it doesn't answer the question of why.

• 1:50:28Jesse Michels?

  So like prolong it like it bridges the neurons to your survival state or something.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:50:34Jesse Michels?

  Gives them a little.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Gives them a little wiggle room, right?

• 1:50:37Jesse Michels?

  Exactly.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  So the rest of the body can survive if you kind of resuscitate it, for example. Or your heart restarts or whatever, but your brain, that's going to be in trouble. So it needs a bit of extra protection.

• 1:50:47Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  So the D M T seems to be doing that. So that's fits in with the dying process. So maybe that's why it's released during death. It doesn't answer, of course, why send, why this molecule also just happens to transport you to this alternate reality. So clearly there's a connection there. Does that mean that D M T has this kind of dual function? It's protecting the brain during the dying process. But if you actually do die, it also allows you to directly move into whatever happens after you die. Maybe, maybe you are getting a glimpse. I mean, that's not a particularly nice thought, the idea of going permanently into the D M T space.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, you know, that, I guess that's where the preparation comes in of, of working within this space. Because it is kind of shocking and horrifying for many people. But maybe that's why it's important to work with D M T whilst you're still alive. Because you're going to, this is the kind, maybe this is where you're going to go after you die. I don't know. That's pure speculation.

• 1:51:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  But so, so in short, the whole D M T spirit molecule thing started as a pure speculation. And now, okay, it all seems to hang together. The idea of D M T being released during the dying process, which is kind of cool.

• 1:52:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. Gimo Borgagen at University of Michigan. She studies stuff around, you know, endogenous D M T receptors in the brain and stuff. But she also studies terminal lucidity, which I find very interesting. This idea that sometimes somebody can be in like a coma for a long time. And then right before they die, they seem to sort of wake up, be extremely alert and like back to their old selves. Or have dementia and right before they did, it's this fascinating sort of phenomenology. Does that have anything to do with D M T? I just, I was found it interesting that she both studies D M T and she looks into this. Or is that just a coincidence?

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's a coincidence. It might not be a coincidence, whether this. This terminal lucidity has anything to do with DMT or with something else? I mean, it might, DMT might be part of it. As I said, you get lots of quite dramatic changes in neural activity and these electrical storms and increases in various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators during the dying process. So it's, it's, you know, it's probably some emergent effect from all of this happening and DMT is just a part of it. That's my guess, but I don't really know.

• 1:53:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, very interesting. Do you think, you know, Aldous Huxley, famous British, British author, but also kind of psychonaut?

• 1:53:30Jesse Michels?

  He, I think at the end of his life was, was dying and he asked his wife to give him an extremely high dose of LSD.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:53:38Jesse Michels?

  And he also said something very interesting, which I want to get your take on. He said that in the 21st century, we would see a religion sort of induced by more mass psychedelic use and people would have more of an individual connection with, like almost a gnostic connection with God and the universe through these psychedelics. Do you think that that will happen? You know, it's sort of the Timothy Leary, like if you had LSD in the tap water sort of thing.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean, a religion, I'm slightly fearful of the word religion in that it is a set of doctrines, a set of prescribed beliefs. So I would hope that this, this doesn't take the form of a religion. You, you see that kind of thing happening with DMT specifically, where certain groups of people, often quite influential, who have decided that they've got a handle on things. They understand what DMT represents and they understand the entities and they understand

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  how it connects to reality and how we should use DMT and all of this. And then they bring in followers and there are a number of small pockets. I mean, nothing's ever become, that's kind of consumed the space in any way, the DMT kind of community, if you want to use that word. But, but, but certainly.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  I think the truth is that it's very difficult to not become, I wouldn't say religious, but spiritual, mystical, to accept that actually there's more to reality. And you are confronted with that. It's undeniable when you take DMT that there's more to reality and that we are but a very small fragment of reality. And when large numbers of people begin to accept that, then the question is, is what do we do with that? You know, what do we, what do we do with an elf?

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  McKenna used to say, like, how do we take that fact and move with it? Does it require, does it require some kind of religious doctrinal structure or not? I don't know.

• 1:56:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, that's a question that bothers me. Like, what is this all about? Where's this all going?

• 1:56:22Jesse Michels?

  Bother me too, because I think I have the same inclinations as you, which is to directly experience, to push the boundaries on these things and to sort of like really know stuff for yourself to the extent you can. And then I wonder if it's sort of this horseshoe thing where you start off like super ignorant, then you seek truth in some like more objective sense about, you know, metaphysical reality. And then you realize there's like some overload or something like this is actually not adaptive for like a single human to know. And it's really all about like leading a good life on earth and understanding kind of the bounds of our, of our lives and our epistemology. And then.

• 1:57:03Jesse Michels?

  You become sort of religious and you realize how adaptive religion is or something.

• 1:57:08Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I mean, that's it's like the path will reveal itself. I think I try not to think too far ahead of where this is going because I don't know if I'm being completely honest. But I think we just keep moving forward carefully.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  With humility, and I think the the whole DMTX stuff, in my opinion, has been just another step along that path of using this molecule, trying to understand it as much as we can, not going in with assumptions about what we're dealing with or what the what the the teleology is, you know, what is the the ultimate aim of all of this? I don't I don't I speculate what it might look like, but I don't know. I don't know if it's possible for us to know at this point. There could be some kind of phase transition that's necessary to take place before we can even comprehend. I mean, we don't really know what the next five years is going to look like. People are speculating with AI and stuff, but I don't think anyone really knows

• 1:58:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  where we're headed.

• 1:58:14Jesse Michels?

  I agree. It's always the sort of some adjacent surprise or something. It's never the whenever people make predictions, I'm always skeptical, like these sort of quote unquote futurists that sort of grift off of some, you know, for sure, you know, future vision that never never manifests the way they sort of say. Do you believe in God?

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  Well, that came from left field.

• 1:58:40Jesse Michels?

  Talk about religion.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  Do I believe in God? Well, I'm gonna give the kind of the obvious answer, which is, how do you define God? Fire that question back at you, you know, how do you define God? And people say, do you believe in God? Well, The god that is in your head is probably quite different to the god in my head. So I could answer that yes, I could answer that no and be truthful in both cases, depending on how you define god.

• 1:59:08Jesse Michels?

  But you could use that sort of postmodern breakdown of language to like, you know, retort any sort of question.

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  That's true, and I'm not trying to be annoying postmodernist.

• 1:59:20Jesse Michels?

  No, no, I get it. God is especially undefined.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  Jordan Peterson or something as well, define god.

• 1:59:25Jesse Michels?

  Peter Peterson's hilarious because he hates the postmodernists, but he is so postmodern in the way he speaks.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:59:33Jesse Michels?

  He's so like, he thinks that all that stuff, you know, Foucault or whatever is the reason that like society is in decline. And then when you call him out and you debate him on this stuff, it turns into this postmodern gobbledygook where he's like, what'd you stake your life on everything? What are you talking about, dude? Like, you are making no sense.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  But in this case, I think it's valuable because people do have different conceptions of god. Now, if you mean, do I mean a higher being that created the universe that we should worship? Then no, I don't believe in that. But do I believe that there is some kind of intelligence that is non-human, non-physical, that we can't directly interact with normally perhaps? That has been around a lot longer than we have? Well, I can't help but believe that. I mean, when you smoke DMT, you interact with such intelligences. Do I think there's one grand intelligence?

• 2:00:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  That subsumes all of these? Maybe, maybe. Maybe god is, you know, you could take the more Vedant or ancient Hindu answer that question, which is to say, well, god is everything. God is consciousness, god is the ultimate reality. There is nothing that isn't god. I like that idea as well, and that we are all the million. Who was it?

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  GK Chesterton, GK Chesterton, talks about the million masks of God.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  And that's we're all masks of God. You know, the eye with which I see God is the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. And they were all expressions of, and we, there's no escaping that. We're all part of and expressions of. Masks of the ultimate reality, which you might call God, I, Hindu might call Brahman. Somebody else might call the ultimate reality, that which is. That idea I, I, I kind of sympathetic towards as well. And I kind of feel like that.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  I think consciousness is fundamental in some very deep, profound way. I don't think we're going to explain consciousness in terms of. Physicalism or in terms of neural activity or anything like that. I think it's beyond that. I think it's absolutely fundamental. And so, yes. The answer to your question is, I believe in God, but perhaps not. The God, as you might define it, but as the God as I would define it.

• 2:02:10Jesse Michels?

  What, what do you think about these, this buddy Danny, who does these D M T laser diffraction experiments? I'm sure you get asked this all the time, where people take D M T, there's some sort of, you know, laser intersection and then they look at it and they. Claim to see some sort of almost like code that they, I mean, that's their interpretation, like a code that is, you know. The computation behind the universe or something. What, what do you think about this?

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  Well, do I think that he is and other people are seeing the fundamental code that runs our reality? No, I don't think that at all. I don't, I think the idea that, that reality is computational or is some kind of code. Okay, that's possible. The idea that you could look at it and it would look like. Characters that we recognize, like Japanese katakana and Hebrew and stuff like this. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And that's what they're seeing. And it's no coincidence that the Matrix movie we're talking about, I mean, the Code Rain, that famous green running digital imagery, that's built from Japanese katakana. So it seems like a little bit on the nose there, a little bit.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  So, no, I don't think, I think it doesn't make any sense to me, is the broad thing. And I also think the problem is that lasers, it's an inconvenient coincidence, shall we say, that when you shine a laser on a wall without D M T,

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  it exhibits some very unusual optical effects. So it forms this interference pattern on the retina that looks like kind of a matrix of speckles or matrix of points of light that can appear to extend beyond the surface. This is all without D M T. Now, when you add D M T to the mix, you see this matrix of characters and geometric forms that appear to extend well beyond the surface. And you have to believe that these are completely unrelated. And that's just a coincidence, if you are to accept that you're seeing actual code here. So I think my working hypothesis, which might well be wrong, is that, but needs to be eliminated,

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  is that this, these, this matrix of sensory, you've basically got a matrix of points of light, which on the retina, which act like a sensory scaffold, around which, on the influence of D M T, you see complex forms and characters. Because characters are very common in the D M T space, as are complex geometric structures. So I think it's a very interesting, fascinating phenomenon, and a very important one, in that it allows you to isolate a particular fragment of the broader D M T phenomenology, the reporting of code and geometric forms. That I will get on board with. I think it should be studied.

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  Do I accept, do I think that it, that fundamental code, that he somehow stumbled upon the way, a way of seeing this fundamental code of reality, which just happens to look like code? Yeah. As we would imagine code. I mean, you imagine code, you imagine the matrix, and that's kind of what it's looking at here. I think. I'm not ready to make that leap yet.

• 2:05:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that that seems unlikely to me, too. I think the thing that is interesting about it is you are doing a repeatable physical thing, and then people see, you know, ostensibly similar, you know, a similar phenomena in the form of whatever these symbols are, whatever, which is like, that's cool. And even that is sort of somewhat unprecedented.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  Yes, but then again, the the laser light is providing a very regular pattern of sensory inputs.

• 2:05:56Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  Um, so that's account and the fact that these.

• 2:06:00Jesse Michels?

  But you don't see the symbols when you're not on D M T, right?

• 2:06:03Speaker 01

  You don't see it exactly, exactly.

• 2:06:05Jesse Michels?

  So that's cool. That's interesting.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  That's interesting. Um, but then again, are people seeing, people say, the line that you always hear from these these laser people is everyone sees exactly the same thing. Now, what does that mean? That everyone sees code or everyone sees characters? Fine. Does everyone see exactly the same characters in the same order at the same time? No, we don't know that. There's no way. No one's demonstrated that. It's not even possible. It's not even known if that's possible because they apparently they move very, very quickly. So are people seeing the same thing? Or are people kind of seeing the sort of the same thing? But because again, the language problem, um, I can't take a, you can't take a photograph of this code.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  And so you can't compare. You have to rely on language and you have to rely on little sketches and things that people do. But but there's no way so far to demonstrate that two people, even at the same time, are actually seeing exactly the same code. Uh, and people, as I said, people have been describing code and digits and characters uh in uh in in the D M T state for for decades. So it's like, what's unique and interesting and important about this is that it allows you to kind of isolate that particular aspect of and reliably view that particular aspect of of the broader D M T visual phenomenology. Uh, but anything beyond that to make.

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  You know, deep, deep conclusions about the fundamental structure of our reality that you're seeing the code that runs our reality. I think that is a very, very large leap. And I don't think there's any, there's nothing in the effect, the phenomenon that would, lead one to draw that conclusion. You have to start by eliminating lots of other more mundane hypotheses, which takes time, it takes money, it takes very careful experimental setup and, you know, performing of various experiments to be able to eliminate the influence of this

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  laser interference, speckle effect, as it's called. But that needs to be done because otherwise it's going to be private revelation. There are going to be people who do it and believe. And they're going to form a group who all believe in this, but they have no, they're not able to demonstrate or prove that this is what they are actually seeing, but they all are have convinced themselves that's what they're seeing. They're seeing the fundamental code of reality. And you'd get forms of kind of religion, if you like, where you have the believers and you have the non-believers. I'm not ready to kind of fall in with the believers just yet.

• 2:08:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, what do you think of modern UFO disclosure? Do you track that at all? Do you think it reduces down to these sort of altered states of consciousness? Or do you believe we have saucers and, you know, hangers at places like Area 51?

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the Area 51, that's cool stuff, right? I mean, I don't, I'm not an expert on it. So I don't, I follow certain things. When Bob Lazar speaks, when he was on Rogan, I watched that, thought it was fascinating stuff. But I don't know, I don't know what to make of it all. And so I kind of focus on my thing. My thing is the, not the shimmering metallic discs in the sky, which might not be physical, of course. I mean, they might also be, they also seem to kind of occupy this space between the physical and the non-physical, the forming feats that seem to be beyond what a physical object could achieve. And I think that's perhaps gives us a clue as to their nature. And we might be dealing with intelligences that.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  Don't necessarily exist as physical wet bodied beings on other star systems and are traveling through vast distances to reach our planet, but actually occupy some kind of space that is lying parallel, hidden within amongst whatever, orthogonal to whatever our reality and that they can interface in certain ways with our.

• 2:10:12Jesse Michels?

  Or physics is information theoretic, like you write about.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:10:16Jesse Michels?

  John Wheeler or whatever, and a bunch of people have sort of contemplated, you have all this Wolfram physics and stuff, computational physics, then what if they are just the programmers of our reality, like they, they, they understand the source code in a way that we don't.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:10:31Jesse Michels?

  And there's a lot in physics that kind of points to that. There's like, you know, you have what like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where you know, you can't measure position and momentum, you know, simultaneously in very accurate ways, like one gets more fuzzy as the other gets more accurate. That almost looks like a, like a computational caching function or something where only so much can be stored in local memory, you know, or like anthropic principle where if Planck's constant were slightly different, like we wouldn't really have an atmosphere on it. Like there are all these sort of weird Goldilocks or like Fermat's theory where like, you know, light between two, you know, points or whatever, it takes the most optimal computationally efficient path. There are

• 2:11:11Jesse Michels?

  all these things like that. Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios and stuff. It's like, how do people code? They just transport, you know, code library. I mean, now it's probably mostly like co-pilots and AI, but you know, back in the day it was like, you'd like find like libraries of code and you would, you know, you'd transport code chunks or whatever. And like, that's how they, so it's like you would reuse geometrically efficient patterns like over and over again. Like that's just exists like across nature.

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:11:42Jesse Michels?

  So there's so much.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  The brain as well. I mean, the brain again is this, you have these repeating computational, the fundamental, these columns, you know, the brain, it's like this cortex, you have all of these cylindrical columns, which is the basic computational unit of the brain and you stitch them all together. And, and all of the, the function of your, of your cortex arises from the interaction of all these basic computational units. So it's at every level. At every level, you see that stitching together of simpler units that from which higher order behaviors emerge, and that goes all the way down, perhaps to the ground of reality itself.

• 2:12:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  And you have these very simple rules, you know, and it might, you know, running a universe might be extremely simple if you know the rules.

• 2:12:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  Or if you find a way to run all possible, this is something I explore in alien information theory, the idea that if you, if you, if you know all possible rules, which is just, you know, the permutation on all possible rules, all possible rule sets, you just run them all, you have the computational power, you run all of them. And some, most of them do absolutely nothing. Some of them do something a little bit interesting and then die out. And then maybe a tiny, tiny fraction, you start to develop layered complexity, emergent complexity.

• 2:13:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  And we just happen to be in one of those hundred trillion trillion or whatever universes where, where the rule set gives rise to interesting information.

• 2:13:16Jesse Michels?

  Sure. Yeah, well, Wolfram has this, you know, Stephen Wolfram has this sort of institute where he studies these computational versions of physics and he has this idea of computational irreducibility.

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:26Jesse Michels?

  And there are things that you cannot take as first principle, you know, a priori concept, you need to run a program in order to get that result. And you have cellular automaton, Conway's game of life and all of these things where if you set some initial conditions, yeah, maybe you end up with some final branch that works or whatever, but like there are a lot of branches that don't. And then you have to ask this like meta question of if, you know, is our earthly conflict, you know, Trump just took out, you know, uh, three Iranian nuclear sites with, with, you know, some B twos. Is all of that existing, you know, against some sub Rosa backdrop of like some timeline

• 2:14:10Jesse Michels?

  adjustment conflict or something like is that the true cosmic, you know, the like Upanishad style war or whatever, where, you know, if you really think about like, what's the most scarce commodity, it's not gold, it's not like, like, you know, the last 50 years of American foreign policy has been like, sort of dictated by like, you know, crude oil or whatever, like, it's not those things, right? It's, uh, it's time.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Jesse Michels?

  And it's timelines and it's like literal, like, you know, macro, like events that, that occur on, on, on macro scales. So like, is, are these entities sort of fighting over that or something?

• 2:14:48Jesse Michels?

  Answer that question now, Andrew.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:14:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah, who knows? Well, thank you so much for, uh, I was actually gonna end on that absurd question. Thank, I really appreciate this, man. And I, I, everybody should go buy your book, Death by Astonishment. Anything else you wanna?

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:08Jesse Michels?

  Plug or promote or?

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so Death by Astonishment, that's the book about DMT and describes the history of science's struggle to make sense of it. So if you're really interested in what DMT is about, why it's such an enigmatic and mysterious molecule, read Death by Astonishment. But also if you're anyone who's interested in DMTX, uh, the moment, it's like, it's a small number of academic institutions that are running DMTX, but we actually are developing a retreat center and a research center in the Caribbean. What's it? St. Vincent and the Grenadines, that's it. Um, so we have a research center and retreat center that we're developing now. Um, and the idea being is not just doing research with DMT,

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  but also allowing anyone who wants to, to come and experience DMTX in a beautiful tropical, you know, five star environment with all of the preparation, perhaps several different doses, do at those levels before the, the kind of the breakthrough DMTX experience, all of the setting is just beautiful and the integration afterwards. It will be a unique institute.

• 2:16:20Jesse Michels?

  Do you have any adverse experiences with DMTX? Anybody?

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  So far, so far, um, all of the, the subjects at Imperial College.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  Got through it. Um. There was no major problem. It was very intense.

• 2:16:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  Um. Maybe some of them didn't kind of like it and didn't do the full

• 2:16:41Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  set of of experiments, but no, like severe, you know, physiological adverse effects. And of course, we

• 2:16:48Jesse Michels?

  No severe mental, no, like this really fucked me up.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  Nothing like that. And of course, on the island, we will have anesthesiologists, we have psychiatrists and nurses. Uh. So if people want to sign up, they can go to noonautics.org, N double O, N, A, U, T, I, C, S, noonautics.org, uh, and they can find out, uh, uh, uh, more about it there or a lucid mind. So lucid is the actual name of the, um, um, of the retreat. So it's like

• 2:17:18Jesse Michels?

  That's cool.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  Bringing

• 2:17:19Jesse Michels?

  The new elusive.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  The new elusive. Uh, yeah. So lucidismine.com and they can also, you know, have a look at what the retreat center is going to look like. So, so, yeah, that's kind of an exciting thing to be able to, to kind of bring D M T X to anyone who wants to kind of experience it.

• 2:17:37Jesse Michels?

  Super cool and excited. It's funny. I think, you know, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, Stanislav Grof and Carl Ruck all, maybe this is a rumor, but I think they wanted to create a new elusive. And so it's cool that you're naming it that.

• 2:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it won't be with ergot, uh, but we do have a we, we have a license from the, the government, uh, in the Simvins and the Grenadines to work with any drug that we want. So we, so it's not implausible that we might think about, you know, ergot alkaloids and perhaps recreating, um, the, the true illicinian mysteries. And there are people now working on actually reconstructing that and trying to work out the exact chemistry involved, which is

• 2:18:17Jesse Michels?

  I think Brian Marescu is really trying to, that's, that's a sort of follow up journey. Yeah.

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there are people that followed on from his work as well, chemists and pharmacologists. So it's, it's an exciting time to be interested in psychedelics and an exciting, very interesting time to be alive more generally, of course, but

• 2:18:33Jesse Michels?

  I agree. Everything's spinning out and getting weird, but interesting. Uh huh. Okay. Andrew, I really appreciate this, man. This is a lot of fun and, um, go by death by astonishment and alien information theory. And, uh, yeah, hopefully we can do this again at some point.

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 2:18:48Jesse Michels?

  Awesome.

• 2:18:49Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:18:49Jesse Michels?

  Thank you.

• 2:19:10Speaker 04

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, theHouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.