The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2403 - Andrew Gallimore

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by Day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day!

00:00:14.000 How are you?

00:00:16.000 Splendid.

00:00:16.000 How the devil are you, sir?

00:00:18.000 I think it's the first time anyone's answered splendid when I ask him, how you doing?

00:00:24.000 So tell me about your book, man.

00:00:28.000 Let me see the cover of it, first of all.

00:00:30.000 Death by astonishment, which is the famous Terrence McKenna quote, right?

00:00:30.000 Death by astonishment.

00:00:34.000 Yes.

00:00:35.000 All you have to fear is death by astonishment.

00:00:37.000 Yeah.

00:00:37.000 Exactly.

00:00:38.000 You know, the first time I did DMT, I literally heard his words.

00:00:42.000 Do not give in to astonishment.

00:00:44.000 I literally heard those words.

00:00:46.000 It's almost like whatever's over there wanted me to hear that.

00:00:51.000 So I could sink in or whatever, because I had already heard it before.

00:00:57.000 So they wanted to say it to me as well.

00:00:59.000 It was very weird.

00:01:00.000 Yeah, it's sage advice, I think.

00:01:02.000 Oh, it's the only way.

00:01:03.000 It's the only way.

00:01:04.000 Because if you freak out, well, it's like that's a good thing.

00:01:07.000 It's good advice in most of life.

00:01:10.000 Like, don't give in to the freak out.

00:01:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:14.000 Confronting the mystery of the world's strangest drug.

00:01:16.000 How did you get involved in this?

00:01:18.000 DMT.

00:01:19.000 Yes.

00:01:20.000 Oh.

00:01:21.000 So you have to go back to my teenage years, really.

00:01:26.000 So, I mean, I first heard about DMT through Terence McKenna, a friend.

00:01:31.000 Yeah, like most of us.

00:01:31.000 Like most of us.

00:01:33.000 But this was like, this was during the dawn of the internet.

00:01:37.000 Right, long before you were a scientist.

00:01:39.000 Long before I was a scientist, right?

00:01:42.000 So a friend gave me this magazine.

00:01:44.000 It had this interview with this bearded, cheeky-looking bearded fellow on the back called Terence McKenna.

00:01:49.000 And he spoke about this thing called DMT, which, of course, I didn't know what that was, but the stories that he was telling that you were going to meet these insectoid aliens and transdimensional machine owls jabbering in an indecipherable tongue and singing impossible objects into existence.

00:02:11.000 I mean, it sounded ridiculous, but I was kind of, I was hooked.

00:02:17.000 I thought, this is it.

00:02:18.000 This is the most fucking incredible thing I've ever read in my life.

00:02:22.000 And so I was like 15, 16 years old, and there was one computer in the school that was hooked up to the World Wide Web.

00:02:32.000 What year was this?

00:02:33.000 96.

00:02:34.000 Oh, give him my age away here, but early days.

00:02:38.000 Early days.

00:02:39.000 Yeah.

00:02:40.000 So I spent all my time just, you know, going on to Alta Vista.

00:02:45.000 You remember Alta Vista?

00:02:47.000 I do.

00:02:47.000 Yeah.

00:02:48.000 I didn't remember it until you brought it up.

00:02:50.000 There we go.

00:02:51.000 Yeah, just kind of trying to find out as much as I could about this.

00:02:54.000 And that was what triggered my decision to study chemistry and pharmacology.

00:02:59.000 My kind of academic journey was triggered by, I want to know, you know, it's such a cool thing, the idea that you can put a molecule in your brain, and it doesn't just change how you feel, but it completely changes the entire structure of your reality.

00:03:17.000 Your entire world is obliterated and replaced with one that is completely alien, that has no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world.

00:03:26.000 That's incredible.

00:03:27.000 And I kind of wanted to try at least to understand how that actually works.

00:03:34.000 Well, the weirdest part about that molecule is that your brain makes it.

00:03:39.000 And so then you have to go, why?

00:03:41.000 And what's the purpose of that?

00:03:43.000 And what are we really?

00:03:46.000 You know, what is consciousness?

00:03:48.000 And what is normal consciousness?

00:03:51.000 What's the purpose of it?

00:03:52.000 And why does this chemical exist?

00:03:55.000 What does this molecule exist that's produced by the brain that changes everything and seems to transport you to a place that's more real than this physical reality that we find ourselves in right now?

00:04:08.000 Exactly.

00:04:09.000 And that is kind of the great mystery.

00:04:10.000 And I don't, I think most people who, even people who've kind of learned about DMT, even scientists, I mean, I speak to scientists.

00:04:20.000 I engage with scientists, neuroscientists often, and they will say, oh, this is just hallucination.

00:04:26.000 This is just your brain kind of making it up.

00:04:29.000 And I don't think most scientists realize how confounding and how difficult to explain the DMT state is.

00:04:38.000 I think it is one of life's true mysteries.

00:04:43.000 It is not simple to explain the DMT state.

00:04:48.000 Well, I think it's almost irresponsible to try to explain it without experiencing it.

00:04:52.000 It's not going to kill you.

00:04:53.000 It's not going to kill you.

00:04:54.000 It lasts 15 minutes.

00:04:55.000 Stop being a pussy. 1.00

00:04:56.000 Just do it.

00:04:57.000 And then tell me it's just a hallucination.

00:05:00.000 That's it.

00:05:00.000 Just do a big one.

00:05:02.000 Three giant hits.

00:05:04.000 Come back.

00:05:05.000 Tell me this is normal.

00:05:06.000 Tell me this is just a freak out.

00:05:08.000 Because it sure doesn't seem like it, does it?

00:05:10.000 No.

00:05:11.000 And I mean, that was what, I mean, I first learned about DMT, as I said, when I was 15 or 16, but my first experience was probably, well, close to a decade later.

00:05:24.000 And I thought, before I took it, I thought I kind of knew what to expect.

00:05:29.000 I mean, I'd listened to all the Terence McKenna lectures I could find.

00:05:33.000 I'd read all the books.

00:05:34.000 I read all the trip reports.

00:05:36.000 And I thought, okay, I'm kind of ready for this.

00:05:38.000 I kind of know what's going to happen.

00:05:40.000 And I wasn't ready.

00:05:42.000 And I was shocked.

00:05:44.000 I was horrified in a sense.

00:05:46.000 I was appalled.

00:05:47.000 I mean, this was like, this is impossible.

00:05:49.000 This was an impossible experience.

00:05:51.000 I was confronted with what seemed to me to be the undeniable hand of some kind of intelligence.

00:06:00.000 And not just any kind of intelligence, but a supremely advanced, ancient, and yet highly technological intelligence.

00:06:10.000 And that was undeniable to me in those first few moments within sort of 30 seconds of that drug hitting my brain.

00:06:18.000 I knew that this is something else.

00:06:21.000 And I was, at first, horrified.

00:06:25.000 I was shocked.

00:06:26.000 I just thought, what is this?

00:06:29.000 And then when I finally kind of came back, I remember lying on my bed on my back, like shaking to my very bones.

00:06:38.000 And all I could say was, oh my fucking God.

00:06:42.000 Because I was completely confounded.

00:06:46.000 I mean, by then, I was a chemical pharmacologist.

00:06:49.000 I was a scientist.

00:06:51.000 I should know what's going on here, but I had no idea what was going on.

00:06:54.000 And I thought, this is it.

00:06:55.000 This is what I need to get to grips with.

00:06:58.000 It also gives you a very like an unusual understanding of the mechanisms that you interface with the world, like ego and logic and reasoning and rational thinking.

00:07:20.000 It gives you like this understanding that those are kind of just these weird tools that you use to get by and you're left without them in there.

00:07:30.000 It just, they evaporate and dissolve.

00:07:34.000 And then when you come back, you're like, what am I doing the way I talk?

00:07:39.000 Like, what is my, what's my purpose of interacting with people?

00:07:43.000 Like, how much of the way I talk to people is this weird social dance, weird Ego performative sort of like the way I structure sentences, the way I communicate, it all seems so clunky when you come back and you just go, wow, we're a mess.

00:08:03.000 Like collectively as a species, we're so without some sort of awakening or some kind of experience, some sort of a psychedelic, profound breakthrough experience, like you're so hampered by your physical existence and this sort of ancient tribal programming that we have, that we're running through this maze of life with.

00:08:28.000 And you come back and you go, God, this is so weird.

00:08:30.000 Yeah, I think what DMT does is show you that everything you thought you knew about how reality is structured and what's real and what's not real, what is fantasy, what's possible and what's not possible.

00:08:43.000 All of that is completely kind of extirpated in an instant.

00:08:48.000 And you realize actually we don't have a fucking clue about the way things really are.

00:08:55.000 I think DMT just demonstrates that.

00:08:58.000 Whether you understand it, whether we can really understand what's going on in the brain and why and how this experience is even possible, it just shows you how little we really understand about the nature of reality.

00:09:12.000 So you've done some legitimate studies with DMT.

00:09:18.000 Right, yeah.

00:09:20.000 I mean, I work mainly kind of, I guess you could say, theoretically, in that I do more quantitative and qualitative analyses of the DMT state and try to understand, try to use the tools of neuroscience to try to understand how DMT elicits its effects.

00:09:43.000 So we can kind of get into, if you want to go really deep, I can give you a kind of a neuroscience lesson and talk about.

00:09:52.000 So, you know, if you want to understand DMT, we kind of have to start with the basic observation.

00:09:59.000 You know, before you take DMT, you are experiencing a world, right?

00:10:05.000 Whenever you're awake and conscious, you're experiencing a world, the normal waking world.

00:10:09.000 This is the world that's kind of familiar to us.

00:10:11.000 And you take DMT, that world is transformed.

00:10:15.000 It disappears.

00:10:16.000 It's obliterated and it's replaced with one that is altogether stranger, shall we say.

00:10:24.000 And so what I want to do is kind of understand, first of all, how that happens, what's actually going on in the brain to cause that transition and why that happens.

00:10:35.000 And you can't do that unless you have a decent understanding of the normal waking world.

00:10:43.000 So what is the normal waking world?

00:10:46.000 It's a model.

00:10:48.000 It's an interface generated by your brain.

00:10:51.000 So you have this world-building machinery on the outer layer of your brain called the cortex.

00:10:58.000 And this is generating your world all the time.

00:11:04.000 All the features of the world that you're experiencing are represented within the cortex.

00:11:12.000 And that applies whether you are just normal waking life, it applies in dreaming, it even applies in the psychedelic state.

00:11:19.000 The world you experience is always constructed as a model by the brain.

00:11:25.000 And so what that means is that psychedelics, what they're doing is they're perturbing the brain.

00:11:31.000 They're manipulating the brain and altering that model. 0.93

00:11:36.000 Now, for example, with, let's say, psilocybin from Magic Mushrooms, Psilocybin binds to this receptor in the brain called the 5-HT2A receptor, which you're probably familiar with, the cis-serotonin receptor.

00:11:51.000 And so, this is a, it's called an excitatory receptor.

00:11:54.000 It stimulates these neurons of which your cortex is constructed from, and makes them more excitable, makes them more likely to fire and share information between other neurons.

00:12:06.000 You get this kind of loosening up of the world model that your brain is constructing.

00:12:12.000 So, the walls start to breathe, objects seem to kind of change their identity, everything becomes more fluid and dynamic.

00:12:21.000 And if you put someone into an MRI machine, for example, you can actually see that.

00:12:26.000 In the normal waking state, you can see the neural activity.

00:12:29.000 It's dynamic, but it's kind of organized and well-orchestrated.

00:12:35.000 You give someone psilocybin, let's say, or LSD, and you start to see the activity becoming sort of more random and fluid.

00:12:44.000 So, you get this state of slightly increased disorder, as if the kind of the tuning dial between order and disorder in the brain has been slightly nudged towards disorder.

00:12:57.000 But then, with DMT, something remarkable happens.

00:13:01.000 In the early stages of the experience, you get this kind of quite chaotic state, suggesting that the brain is entering this more disordered state, but then it kind of collapses into this brand new order.

00:13:19.000 So, you go from the order of the normal waking world to this disordered state, and then you collapse into this completely different type of order.

00:13:27.000 So, the brain is effectively constructing an entirely different model of reality.

00:13:34.000 It's no longer the normal waking world model, which acts as kind of an interface with the environment, but it's constructing a completely different world model.

00:13:44.000 When you say constructing, why do you use that term?

00:13:47.000 Why do you use the brain as constructing?

00:13:51.000 Because you're well, okay, so if you think about how does the brain interact with the how do we interact with the environment using our senses, right?

00:14:01.000 So, light information comes through the eyes, the retina, and it stimulates the very back of the brain.

00:14:07.000 You have an area.

00:14:08.000 Oh.

00:14:09.000 Oh, you brought slides.

00:14:10.000 I brought slides.

00:14:11.000 Here we go.

00:14:12.000 Yeah, maybe the next one, Jamie, is a bit easier to see.

00:14:14.000 There we go.

00:14:15.000 So, at the right in the back of the brain here, you have an area called V1, which is the primary visual cortex.

00:14:20.000 That's your interface with the world.

00:14:23.000 Sensory information comes and strikes, it activates patterns of neural activity in V1, but it's very, very messy.

00:14:31.000 It's like lines and patches of colour and lines moving in certain directions.

00:14:36.000 It's a mess, right?

00:14:37.000 It's very noisy, it's very messy, it's incredibly dynamic, doesn't make any sense.

00:14:42.000 And so, what your brain does is it has another level above V1 that kind of has a bird's eye view and is looking for patterns within this neural activity in this lowest level.

00:14:55.000 So, it's looking for saying, oh, those lines kind of could be a triangle, or this could be a circle.

00:15:01.000 It's trying to find patterns to try generate order from this messy level in V1.

00:15:08.000 Can I ask you this?

00:15:09.000 How do we know it does that?

00:15:10.000 That's a good question.

00:15:12.000 Well, there are a number of things.

00:15:14.000 So, the earliest evidence came from one of the earliest forms of evidence came from a guy called Wilder Penfield.

00:15:23.000 Are you familiar with Penfield, he was interested in treating epilepsy, and he invented something called the Montreal procedure, where he would remove a part of the brain that was the focus of epileptiform activity.

00:15:40.000 The idea being that it would kind of cure someone's epilepsy.

00:15:44.000 But before he could do that, of course, he needed to make sure that he wasn't removing important parts for someone's function.

00:15:51.000 So, what he would do is he would cut the top of their skull off when they're still awake and kind of expose their brain.

00:16:01.000 And then he would zap different parts of their brain and say, you know, what's happening?

00:16:06.000 Oh, my God.

00:16:08.000 Can you imagine?

00:16:09.000 Isn't it crazy that that's how we have to find out what works?

00:16:16.000 The aliens probably look at us and go, oh, my God, you guys are still doing that.

00:16:20.000 Yeah.

00:16:21.000 Nowadays, things have moved on a bit, right?

00:16:24.000 Sure, but this is not that long ago, right?

00:16:25.000 How long ago is this?

00:16:26.000 1950s?

00:16:27.000 Yeah, okay.

00:16:28.000 Yeah.

00:16:28.000 Not even 100 years.

00:16:29.000 100 years ago, they were literally taking your skull and turning it into a hat.

00:16:33.000 They were popping the cap off and just, okay, let's see what this does.

00:16:38.000 Exactly.

00:16:39.000 They would zap it.

00:16:40.000 And what he noticed is that when he would zap right at the back of the brain, so this is this primary visual cortex that's receiving information from an environment, his patients would say, oh, I see flashes of light, I see lines, I see colours.

00:16:53.000 It was very simple kind of things.

00:16:55.000 But then he would move forward to kind of higher levels that we know now are kind of high levels.

00:17:01.000 And then they'd say, oh, I see triangles or I see an orange circle, things like this.

00:17:06.000 And then he'd keep going higher and higher.

00:17:09.000 And then they'd say, oh, I see people or I see cops and robbers.

00:17:13.000 And then right at the top, you reach an area called the hippocampus, which you may have heard of, involved in memory.

00:17:21.000 And the hippocampus basically keeps an eye, it's a bird's eye view of all of this world model your brain is constructing and it's kind of following and looking for you know interesting or important patterns and when he stimulated that his patients would actually report memories they would say oh I hear somebody talking to me you know this happened this morning when I was leaving the house my mother was telling me something about you know you've got your coat on backwards or

00:17:50.000 like this so you have these levels of the cortex that go from very simple

00:17:59.000 kind of very low level visual data at the bottom end and then at the very top you've got kind of higher order things such as you know faces or people this is sitting at the top now interesting have you ever when you are dreaming right so when you let's think about dreaming for a second it's quite instructive i think when you're dreaming right the brain is actually constructing the world in basically the same way as

00:18:29.000 it does when you're awake dreams are kind of selective simulations of the waking world the difference of course is that there's no sensory inputs so if you scan someone's brain while they're having a dream you'll see that this back of the brain this primary visual cortex is kind of quiet but the brain is kind of using what it's learned about building the world in the normal waking state to construct the dream world you

00:18:57.000 So the dream world is built from exactly the same stuff as the normal waking world.

00:19:04.000 However, there's interesting features.

00:19:07.000 In a dream, have you ever tried to use your cell phone?

00:19:12.000 No.

00:19:13.000 Not many people have.

00:19:15.000 What about read a book in a dream?

00:19:17.000 I don't think so.

00:19:19.000 One thing I have learned to do is to, I think I saw it in a movie: if you knock on a door, you'll realize that you're in a dream.

00:19:25.000 And this waking life.

00:19:27.000 I don't remember what movie it was.

00:19:29.000 But it was a guy who was instructing how to lucid dream.

00:19:36.000 That if you make a habit of walking through a doorway in your home, and every time you walk through a doorway in your home, tap on the doorway, knock on it with your hand and say, Am I awake?

00:19:48.000 Knock, knock, knock. 0.85

00:19:49.000 And then you'll get in a habit of doing that every time you go through a doorway.

00:19:54.000 And if you go through a doorway in your dream, you'll do it.

00:19:57.000 You'll say, Am I awake?

00:19:58.000 And then as you go to knock, knock, knock, you're like, oh shit, I'm dreaming.

00:20:02.000 There we go.

00:20:03.000 And then you realize, and if you don't give into astonishment, you can maintain that dream.

00:20:09.000 You maintain that thing.

00:20:10.000 Right?

00:20:10.000 Yes.

00:20:10.000 That's the thing.

00:20:11.000 It's like, oh, my God, I'm dreaming.

00:20:12.000 I can't believe this.

00:20:13.000 And then you wake up.

00:20:14.000 You get too freaked out and you wake up.

00:20:16.000 But if you don't do it, I've only been able to do this a few times because I don't really knock.

00:20:19.000 I did it for a while after the movie.

00:20:22.000 I saw the movie.

00:20:22.000 I tried it for a while.

00:20:23.000 And I did have a dream like that where I went through a doorway and I said, Am I dreaming?

00:20:27.000 And I'm like, oh my God, I'm dreaming.

00:20:28.000 And then I realized I was dreaming.

00:20:30.000 And then I was like flying.

00:20:31.000 I was doing a lot of weird stuff.

00:20:32.000 But then it went away.

00:20:33.000 And then I stopped doing it.

00:20:36.000 And I've always been like, why don't I practice lucid dream?

00:20:39.000 I've always thought about it like a dozen times at least.

00:20:42.000 Like, why don't I just get a book on lucid dreaming and really try to attempt to learn the techniques?

00:20:47.000 And I never do.

00:20:48.000 Yeah, it takes commitment.

00:20:49.000 But now there's actually a simpler way of that kind of reality tests.

00:20:54.000 A simpler way now is to just get out your cell phone occasionally, open up the calculator and do a few calculations and just check everything's working, right?

00:21:04.000 Or open up a book and try to read it.

00:21:08.000 Because the thing about the dream world is, again, just like the normal waking world, it's constructed over kind of levels of a hierarchy from the highest level models.

00:21:19.000 So your brain can construct a high-level model of a cell phone quite easily.

00:21:24.000 But all of the fine details of how it functions, that's all represented at the lowest level of the cortex.

00:21:32.000 That's really dependent on sensory inputs.

00:21:34.000 So you can dream of having your mobile phone in your hand and doing things with it.

00:21:39.000 But as soon as you try to do something with it, your brain has to kind of construct that function.

00:21:48.000 And it can't do it unless it has access to sensory inputs.

00:21:52.000 And so that's how you can test if you're lucid dreaming.

00:21:55.000 Yeah, which is why the DMT state is so fascinating, is because it's nothing like the dream state.

00:22:02.000 People say that perhaps DMT is released when you're dreaming and that it actually triggers.

00:22:10.000 I mean, this goes back to the 1980s.

00:22:13.000 There's a theoretical paper published by a guy called Jace Calloway, and he said, oh, maybe DMT could be produced during REM sleep because it's closely related to melatonin structurally, both kind of tryptamine structures.

00:22:30.000 But when you analyze the phenomenology, the actual experience of DMT, it's nothing like dreaming.

00:22:39.000 Dreaming is generally the brain making use of what it knows about how to construct the world in the waking state and doing so in the dream state.

00:22:49.000 So that's why if you ask people, you know, many studies on dreaming have shown that people, when they dream, they dream about people, they dream about dogs and cats, they dream about, you know, that the amount of time they spend talking on the telephone or watching TV is actually similar to what it is in waking life.

00:23:09.000 So dreaming is more like a selective simulation of the waking world.

00:23:12.000 It's not that difficult to explain.

00:23:16.000 Because your brain, from the moment you were born, your brain was learning to construct the world as a model of the environment.

00:23:23.000 This world is the only world that your brain knows how to build or should know how to build.

00:23:30.000 And yet when you introduce this molecule, dimethyltryptamine, into the brain, the brain suddenly starts constructing a world it never learned to construct.

00:23:40.000 It's like the brain is speaking a language it never learned to speak and doing so flawlessly.

00:23:47.000 These worlds are of beautiful crystalline clarity, perfectly finessed, staggeringly complex narrative complexity that I think is very difficult to explain.

00:24:03.000 There's no simple explanation of why the brain should suddenly become capable of constructing these worlds, unless, unless, and this is where things become more contentious, we are indeed interfacing with some kind of intelligence.

00:24:22.000 That's the explanation that makes sense to me, is that somehow DMT is gating access to some kind of the flow of information from some kind of intelligent agent that is directing the DMT experience.

00:24:37.000 So it's not a sensed world.

00:24:39.000 It's not a kind of a dreamt world.

00:24:41.000 It's actually a directed world.

00:24:43.000 I always say you don't break through into the DMT world.

00:24:46.000 The DMT world breaks through into you.

00:24:48.000 It's like this intelligent agent has commandeered your neural machinery, the world-building machinery of your brain, and is directing everything that you see.

00:24:59.000 It has complete control.

00:25:01.000 It's interesting that you use the word construct rather than observe.

00:25:05.000 So you're using terminology that seems to indicate that you believe that you're constructing reality.

00:25:14.000 Yes.

00:25:15.000 Not that you're just observing reality.

00:25:18.000 No, because it's not, if you think about perception in the same way like looking like a video camera, just taking images of the world, that's not how it works.

00:25:32.000 The brain must actively construct a model of the environment.

00:25:37.000 That's what it's always doing.

00:25:39.000 It's always constructing a model.

00:25:41.000 And it is constantly using that model to make predictions about the way that kind of predictions about the evolution of sensory information.

00:25:54.000 It's constantly saying, okay, if this model that I'm currently using is good, then this should happen next.

00:26:02.000 This is the pattern of sensory information that I should receive next.

00:26:05.000 So if I, for example, move this bottle of water across your perceptual field, even if you close your eyes, you could probably tell me where the water's going to be in a couple of seconds because it's moving.

00:26:18.000 Your brain has a model of the water, and it is using that to make predictions.

00:26:23.000 And it's only when something surprising happens, you know, if the water, if I do this, and your brain detects that there's something its predictions start to fail, and you get these error signals, and these are what flow into the brain, and the brain uses them to kind of update its model until the errors decline.

00:26:43.000 So you never have direct access to the world or to the environment, should I say.

00:26:48.000 You only have direct access to this model that your brain is constructing.

00:26:53.000 That's where it gets weird.

00:26:55.000 Because I'm assuming your model and my model are very similar.

00:27:00.000 Right.

00:27:02.000 If we could ever get to a point where we could at least temporarily enter into someone else's consciousness and see how they see the world, I think we're going to get a lot of answers.

00:27:13.000 We're going to be like, oh, you guys live in a totally different fucking world.

00:27:16.000 No wonder why you think we should be communists.

00:27:21.000 Well, it's true, yeah.

00:27:23.000 I mean, whatever your chemical makeup is, your life experience, your biology, whatever contributing factors, I always assume that your construction of the world is the same as my construction of the world.

00:27:38.000 But every now and then I'll get a text message from a friend about some world event, and their take is so crazy that I just got to go, wow, this person is living in a completely different world than me.

00:27:48.000 I mean, yeah, I mean, their brain, the structure of their brain, the organization of their neural networks, and it's all different in everyone.

00:27:48.000 I mean, they are.

00:27:48.000 They are.

00:27:54.000 Everyone has a unique brain.

00:27:56.000 And so, in a sense, everyone has to construct an entirely unique model of reality.

00:28:00.000 But we agree on certain things.

00:28:01.000 We reach this kind of consensus about what we call things.

00:28:05.000 But if I point at something that, oh, I can describe the colours, I can describe the people.

00:28:12.000 But again, we're all using our own personally constructed model.

00:28:17.000 And that's what we experience.

00:28:19.000 Well, that's what's weird.

00:28:22.000 Again, it's just this assumption.

00:28:24.000 So your take is that when you're dreaming, you're trying to construct this world and you don't really have the tools to leave a book where you can read.

00:28:35.000 You don't have the tools to use a calculator.

00:28:37.000 You just know what a calculator is.

00:28:40.000 And so if you're in the absence of an actual calculator, your brain's not capable of creating one.

00:28:47.000 Yeah, so again, you have at the highest level, you have a calculator model, which is kind of a broad idea of a calculator.

00:28:55.000 It doesn't have all the details.

00:28:56.000 All the details are at the lower end.

00:28:59.000 Actually, we can show this.

00:29:01.000 Sorry, Jamie, can I use Jamie like this?

00:29:03.000 Sure.

00:29:03.000 Anytime.

00:29:05.000 Can you go to the picture of Margaret Thatcher?

00:29:07.000 Yeah, no problem.

00:29:08.000 I was going to bring this up in some way.

00:29:10.000 I think it's supposed to play a video, maybe?

00:29:11.000 Not yet.

00:29:12.000 Well, the videos don't seem to be playing in the keynote.

00:29:15.000 There's three or four of them and none of them play.

00:29:17.000 Oh, really?

00:29:18.000 Yeah.

00:29:18.000 I figured you're going to get here at some point.

00:29:21.000 Oh, okay.

00:29:22.000 don't know how to it's just is it formatted for windows No.

00:29:27.000 Let me know.

00:29:28.000 Okay, go back.

00:29:29.000 Go back.

00:29:29.000 I didn't know that was going to happen.

00:29:30.000 Okay.

00:29:31.000 Perfect.

00:29:32.000 Okay, so go back one.

00:29:34.000 Okay, this is kind of really interesting, right?

00:29:37.000 Yeah, I've seen this.

00:29:38.000 You've seen this, right?

00:29:39.000 Not with Margaret Thatcher, but I've seen it with other faces.

00:29:42.000 Yeah.

00:29:42.000 Yeah, so the original was with Margaret Thatcher.

00:29:45.000 Let's explain it to people that are just listening because there's still quite a lot of people.

00:29:48.000 So this is called the Thatcher effect.

00:29:50.000 So when you're looking at this image of Margaret Thatcher or anyone, your brain is constructing a model of this person, a model of their face.

00:30:00.000 And as I said, it's constructed over a hierarchy.

00:30:02.000 So you have the overall idea, the overall concept of Margaret Thatcher, right?

00:30:07.000 The whole face, the whole thing.

00:30:09.000 And then you have at a lower level, you have the eyes and the mouth and the nose, and they're kind of separate.

00:30:15.000 And then going further still, within the eyes, you've got circles and patches of color and all this stuff.

00:30:19.000 And right at the bottom, you have this really messy system of lines and things that don't make any sense.

00:30:27.000 And you can actually show how this hierarchy is constructed.

00:30:31.000 At the moment, it just looks like Margaret Thatcher, and you can't really break it down.

00:30:37.000 But if you flip over like this, so just leave it there for a second, Jamie, please.

00:30:41.000 Yeah.

00:30:42.000 So now you see what we've done is we've basically weakened this highest level model of the whole face because the brain isn't very good at building models of faces that are upside down, right?

00:30:57.000 And so this looks, there's something wrong with the image, clearly.

00:31:02.000 But it looks like Margaret Thatcher upsets. 0.97

00:31:03.000 It looks like Margaret Thatcher, but it's actually what's happened is the whole face has been flipped over, but the mouth and the eyes are actually the correct way up.

00:31:11.000 Right.

00:31:12.000 But to the brain in this configuration, it's not that surprising because the eyes kind of look as they should, the mouth looks as it should.

00:31:12.000 Right?

00:31:20.000 You're seeing the whole image in its pieces, if you like.

00:31:24.000 You're seeing that lower level fragments.

00:31:24.000 Right.

00:31:26.000 And it's only when you flip it that it becomes horrific, right?

00:31:33.000 So now you've re-established that high-level model of Margaret Thatcher and the brain goes, fuck, this is completely wrong.

00:31:40.000 And this is why you get that.

00:31:42.000 It's immediately obvious.

00:31:43.000 With the upside-down eyes and the upside-down mouth, it looks completely insane.

00:31:47.000 She looks like a demon. 1.00

00:31:48.000 She looks like a demon, right? 0.98

00:31:49.000 Which is really weird.

00:31:50.000 Which is really weird.

00:31:51.000 It's called the Thatcher effect.

00:31:54.000 Was she the original person that they used this site?

00:31:56.000 Exactly.

00:31:57.000 Who came up with this?

00:31:59.000 Oh, good question.

00:32:00.000 But this is fairly old now.

00:32:02.000 I think at least a couple of decades old.

00:32:04.000 It's so funny that they figured that out.

00:32:07.000 That's a great insight into how the mind works.

00:32:10.000 Because the upside-down Thatcher with the upside-down, with the correct eyeballs and mouth, the second one, Jamie, that does not look crazy at all.

00:32:19.000 That's what's so weird about the third image.

00:32:22.000 Because the third image really looks psychotic.

00:32:24.000 Like if it was a monster movie and then someone got bitten by a zombie and then that was what they looked like and then they came running after you'd be like, oh, fuck, she got bit.

00:32:32.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:32:33.000 Her eyeballs are upside down.

00:32:34.000 Her mouth is upside down because that's what it looks like.

00:32:36.000 Yeah.

00:32:37.000 Weird.

00:32:38.000 Like for people listening, the big teeth, your above teeth, they're below.

00:32:42.000 And the little tiny teeth are above.

00:32:44.000 And the eyeballs are the eyelids, the top part are on the bottom.

00:32:48.000 And it really looks like a monster.

00:32:51.000 And it's weird that it looks like a monster because it looks so damn normal upside down.

00:32:56.000 Yeah.

00:32:57.000 Weird.

00:32:57.000 Exactly.

00:32:58.000 So yeah, it's revealing this hierarchy, this structure of this world model that your brain is always constructing, you see.

00:33:06.000 That's a good way to describe why it's constructing rather than observing.

00:33:11.000 Right.

00:33:11.000 That's clearly an example of your constructing normalcy and that upside down face.

00:33:17.000 It's not normal at all.

00:33:18.000 Not normal at all.

00:33:19.000 Yeah.

00:33:19.000 Right.

00:33:20.000 Okay.

00:33:21.000 So do we know what's going on when you're dreaming?

00:33:24.000 Is it potentially, is there a release of DMT?

00:33:28.000 Because DMT is exogenous, it's produced in the brain.

00:33:32.000 It's produced in the liver and the lungs, right?

00:33:35.000 It's produced in a lot of other areas.

00:33:36.000 So we know the body makes it, right?

00:33:39.000 And we also know that melatonin plays a role and there's a lot of other things going on.

00:33:43.000 Is it possible that DMT is one of the ingredients in the soup?

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00:34:24.000 Well, so I think the problem is, as I said, is that, yes, it's possible biochemically.

00:34:34.000 Now, the pineal gland is what people often refer to, right?

00:34:39.000 Because the pineal gland has this long history and mystical traditions, the seat of the soul, the third eye, all this kind of stuff.

00:34:47.000 So, everyone wants DMT to be produced by the pineal gland.

00:34:52.000 The problem is, first of all, is that the pineal gland is very small.

00:34:55.000 It's about the size of the end of my pinky.

00:34:59.000 And it's designed or evolved to produce nanograms, micrograms of melatonin, very small amounts you need.

00:35:07.000 So, the idea that this gland can suddenly start pumping out milligrams of DMT to achieve a kind of psychedelic state in the dream state is quite an ask.

00:35:20.000 There have been some studies, or one study in particular, actually looked at DMT levels.

00:35:26.000 So, we've known since the 1950s that DMT is produced by a product of mammalian physiology and it's produced by humans.

00:35:36.000 In those days, they tried to kind of pin schizophrenia on DMT.

00:35:42.000 The idea that if there was some fault, some problem with tryptamine metabolism, instead of producing serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine, the brain could instead start producing elevated levels of N-N-dimethyltryptamine or DMT.

00:35:59.000 And so, they started looking for differences in DMT levels in psychotic patients, schizophrenic patients, versus normal people.

00:36:07.000 And there have been more than a hundred studies that have looked at levels of DMT in the blood, in urine, in cerebrospinal fluid.

00:36:16.000 But there's no convincing, consistent evidence that suggests that DMT is the cause of psychosis or dreaming, in fact.

00:36:29.000 In endogenous production, what's the mechanism?

00:36:33.000 Like, what is producing it?

00:36:35.000 Okay, so it's actually produced from tryptophan.

00:36:38.000 So, DMT is an alkaloid, and alkaloids are all produced from amino acids.

00:36:43.000 So, tryptophan is first converted to tryptamine.

00:36:48.000 This is called decarboxylation.

00:36:50.000 You remove a carbon dioxide molecule and you've got tryptamine.

00:36:54.000 Now, here you can go in a number of different directions.

00:36:56.000 You can go to serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine, or you can go to DMT.

00:37:03.000 You just simply add two methyl groups, two carbon atoms.

00:37:06.000 And so, what is adding these things?

00:37:09.000 So, there's an enzyme called indole ethylamine N-methyltransferase, or I-N-MT for short.

00:37:16.000 This is the key enzyme for DMT production.

00:37:20.000 It adds these two groups, these methyl groups, to tryptamine, which is produced from tryptophan, to produce DMT.

00:37:27.000 And tryptophan is produced from.

00:37:29.000 So, tryptophan is one of the essential amino acids, so it is something you consume.

00:37:35.000 Do people take tryptophan as a dietary supplement in order to increase the potency of their experiences?

00:37:42.000 Some people do.

00:37:44.000 I don't think it would have an appreciable effect, but people take tryptophan for lots of reasons.

00:37:51.000 So, this process, what makes you think that this is a size-dependent process?

00:37:58.000 Because just because this gland is so tiny, why can't it do it?

00:38:03.000 Okay, well, there's a number of things.

00:38:04.000 First of all, it's just there's orders of magnitude.

00:38:09.000 I mean, a gland that is designed to produce nanograms or micrograms of something, to ask it to produce a thousand times more of an entirely different molecule, is quite an ask.

00:38:19.000 However, that's not the only reason.

00:38:22.000 There's actually been a study recently in the last, I think, three or four years that looked at DMT levels in rat brains in real time.

00:38:32.000 Not in humans, but in rat brains.

00:38:34.000 They actually have a technique now called microdialysis where they can basically measure in a wake an awake moving normally behaving rat, they can measure the levels of DMT in its brain.

00:38:47.000 And what they found was that the levels of DMT, first of all, were surprisingly high.

00:38:55.000 So similar levels to things like serotonin and dopamine.

00:39:00.000 Which is unusual.

00:39:01.000 Which is, yes, which makes you think that it must have some kind of function.

00:39:05.000 But importantly, they also, in some rats, they removed the pineal gland.

00:39:10.000 They kind of cut it out and found that it didn't affect.

00:39:13.000 So we don't need the pineal, in other words.

00:39:16.000 All brain cells, all neurons can probably produce DMT.

00:39:20.000 The lungs can almost certainly produce DMT.

00:39:23.000 Why do you think that the pineal gland had this role in ancient mysticism?

00:39:29.000 Why did they have this appreciation of it as being this very sacred organ that, I mean, it's the eye of Horus, right?

00:39:39.000 I mean, it certainly looks like it.

00:39:39.000 Right.

00:39:42.000 Like the eye of Horus looks exactly like a cross-section of the pineal gland.

00:39:46.000 Yeah, I mean, it sits right in the center of the brain as well.

00:39:49.000 Right.

00:39:50.000 So it, and it looks, it's kind of unusual, as you say.

00:39:53.000 It looks like a real tiny pine.

00:39:55.000 Like, how did they, where did they come up?

00:39:57.000 It's whenever this, it's very easy to dismiss like ancient mysticism and ancient ideas of what things are sacred about, you know, the human body and what areas of the mind are producing these, the third eye.

00:40:12.000 That's how it was always described.

00:40:14.000 But I don't want to, it's too weird.

00:40:19.000 So I go, wait a minute, before you dismiss, because it's fun to dismiss things.

00:40:23.000 Like, oh, they didn't know anything.

00:40:25.000 How do we know that they weren't onto something?

00:40:28.000 Like, maybe there is a role that that plays in not normal DMT production, but in the big dump that you get before you die.

00:40:39.000 Right.

00:40:40.000 When you have a near-death experience, maybe that has to be, maybe that's the kill switch.

00:40:44.000 Maybe that's the big dump switch.

00:40:47.000 You know what I mean?

00:40:48.000 No one's ever put it like that before.

00:40:49.000 Because if you think about it's the seat of the soul, right?

00:40:52.000 That is where the soul is like connected.

00:40:56.000 That's where the soul is like anchored into this physical reality.

00:41:00.000 And if you're going to die, if you have a near-death experience, something has got to go, all right, boys, this is not a drill.

00:41:08.000 Let her go. 0.99

00:41:10.000 And then, I mean, that's what a lot of people think is happening.

00:41:14.000 When people have near-death experiences, there's a lot of very bizarre aspects of it.

00:41:19.000 But one of them is the uniformity of their experiences.

00:41:22.000 There's a lot of very similar experiences, very similar.

00:41:26.000 You know, you have, with anything, you have variables that people may or may not be adding onto their own because people love to tell a good tale.

00:41:36.000 You know, and why miss out on a chance when you've had a near-death experience that was profound to maybe add a little to it, make it a little bit more exciting.

00:41:44.000 But the overall kind of framework of the experience is very similar.

00:41:51.000 And I often wonder, like, what is that?

00:41:53.000 Like, I have a friend who was in a car accident and had a near-death experience and said that when they came back, they had no fear.

00:42:01.000 Like, for that moment, they have fear now, but no fear at all about dying, no fear at all about life.

00:42:07.000 And that this was this very weird, transformative journey where they went to another place and then they returned.

00:42:15.000 But it was very real.

00:42:17.000 It felt very to the point where all their anxiety, even about the car accident, being knocked unconscious and all that stuff, all went away.

00:42:24.000 Yeah, I think The near-death experience connection to DMT is very interesting because Rick Strasman, of course, in the 90s, when he wrote DMT the Spirit Molecule, he hypothesized that, in fact, at the point of death, DMT is released by the pineal and it kind of acts as the conduit by which the soul exits the body and enters the afterlife.

00:42:47.000 And of course, that was largely speculation.

00:42:51.000 It was just a hypothesis.

00:42:53.000 But in recent years, there's been some really fascinating work showing that DMT actually, if you take some neurons, a culture of neurons, for example, brain cells, which are very sensitive to oxygen levels.

00:43:08.000 So if you deprive neurons of oxygen, they die very quickly.

00:43:12.000 This is why strokes can be so rapidly devastating.

00:43:16.000 If the brain becomes deprived of blood and oxygen, then the brain cells start to die.

00:43:23.000 But in the presence of DMT, they live a lot longer.

00:43:26.000 So they're kind of protecting the brain against hypoxia.

00:43:30.000 Now, when does the brain enter a hypoxic state during the dying process?

00:43:36.000 This is when, as your cardiovascular system starts to collapse, your respiratory system collapses, the brain becomes deprived of oxygen, and this is precisely the time when you want the brain to be flooded with DMT just in case you come back, to protect the brain from the lack of oxygen.

00:43:56.000 So that suggests a clear and obvious link.

00:43:59.000 And if you kill rats, actually, again, I was referring to this microdialysis experiment.

00:44:04.000 If you kill a rat whilst measuring DMT levels, as the rat dies, the DMT levels spike.

00:44:12.000 So it suggests that the rat is also maybe having an actual death experience.

00:44:17.000 I wonder if they come back as a person.

00:44:20.000 Yeah.

00:44:22.000 But it does suggest, right?

00:44:24.000 It does suggest that there is maybe some link there.

00:44:27.000 But what it doesn't explain, of course, is why you would need, why this molecule would be, why this molecule would be so profoundly visionary.

00:44:37.000 That's still kind of a mystery.

00:44:39.000 Are you being kind of given access to wherever you go after death?

00:44:46.000 Is it a vision of what happens to you later on?

00:44:50.000 But the question to me, my question rather, was not are we sure it's a vision or is it a gateway?

00:44:59.000 Are you entering into a non-physical space that has its own laws, that it's very different, but it is a reality?

00:45:06.000 And it's not that it's a vision, not that it's a hallucination or a visionary representation or that you're even constructing this reality.

00:45:14.000 But you're entering into a completely different dimension that has laws that are very different than the dimension that we find ourselves in right now.

00:45:24.000 Okay, so what I think is that I don't think with DMT that you're going anywhere as such.

00:45:33.000 I think, you know, as I said, the world you experience is always represented in the brain, and that must apply, I think, in the DMT state. 0.52

00:45:43.000 If you're experiencing an altered world, there must be some representation of that within your cortical machinery, within your cortex, within your brain.

00:45:54.000 I think that has to be the case.

00:45:56.000 However, I don't think, and I think it's a great mystery, is how the brain is actually capable of constructing that on its own, in the same way that the brain constructs the dream world, because the brain knows how to construct the waking world.

00:46:11.000 So it's simply using its stored models.

00:46:13.000 The same with hallucinations.

00:46:15.000 You look at case reports of hallucinations in psychotics, you go through the psychiatric literature, the vast majority of hallucinations are normal appearing, normal-sized people, normal animals.

00:46:27.000 It's like waking dreams, if you like.

00:46:30.000 But with DMT, it's not.

00:46:32.000 The brain is somehow constructing a world that has no relationship whatsoever.

00:46:37.000 Nothing is taken from the normal waking world.

00:46:39.000 It's like the brain suddenly has switched to speaking a language that it never learned.

00:46:45.000 And I think that suggests that actually what's happening is you're not going somewhere, but you are in this more kind of fluid and dynamic state that psychedelics induce.

00:46:57.000 You're kind of making the brain much more sensitive to being commandeered.

00:47:04.000 I think what you're seeing is what this intelligent agent, as I recall, as I tend to call it, I don't call it spirits or aliens or anything like that.

00:47:14.000 I think there's some, it's clear to me that there's some kind of intelligence, and that intelligence is interacting with our brain in some way and showing us kind of what it wants us to see, if you like.

00:47:27.000 Does that assume that consciousness resides in the brain, though?

00:47:31.000 Or is, I mean, when you take into account the possibility of consciousness being something that the brain tunes into and that it forms its own version of reality based on its biology, its life experiences, et cetera, et cetera.

00:47:48.000 But that it is just a radio and it is just forming its version of consciousness, but that it is actually tuning into consciousness and that consciousness is sort of a universal thing that exists not just in people, but maybe in other life forms as well, certainly animals and maybe plants.

00:48:09.000 So one of the weirder things about people who trip, I'm sure you know this, is they experience communication from plants.

00:48:16.000 Like tree hugging becomes a real thing.

00:48:20.000 Tree hugging is a very different thing.

00:48:21.000 It's like, oh, you're alive.

00:48:24.000 Hello.

00:48:27.000 You know, and we know that trees and plants in general, like especially house plants, when people interact with them, they grow better.

00:48:36.000 They're healthier plants.

00:48:37.000 Like you can prove it.

00:48:39.000 It's interesting.

00:48:40.000 Play music for them, communicate with them, say nice things.

00:48:43.000 We also know that plants in abusive households where people are alcoholics and cigarette smoke, they're going to do terrible.

00:48:49.000 Yeah, I think that as soon as I start talking about, first of all, I think consciousness is absolutely fundamental.

00:48:57.000 I don't think that the brain generates consciousness.

00:49:00.000 I think consciousness is in some way the only thing that really exists.

00:49:06.000 You know, I think that it's the absolute ultimate reality is consciousness itself.

00:49:10.000 Do you think everything is conscious?

00:49:12.000 I think everything is consciousness.

00:49:15.000 Everything is consciousness.

00:49:16.000 Interesting.

00:49:17.000 Yeah.

00:49:18.000 Do you think that there's a state that maybe inanimate objects achieve that is very different than our interpretation of consciousness, but yet they're still conscious?

00:49:30.000 I think in which I say this because Jamie has O.J. Simpson's golf clubs.

00:49:37.000 I feel like they have some consciousness attached to them.

00:49:42.000 It's probably bad, right?

00:49:44.000 Didn't exist in the 90s.

00:49:45.000 They're like only 10 years old.

00:49:47.000 That's bad voodoo, bro. 0.95

00:49:51.000 Yeah, you gotta watch out.

00:49:53.000 I think, you know, what do we mean by when something's conscious?

00:49:57.000 In Buddhism, they have this idea of things that exist from their own side, which I really like.

00:50:03.000 From their own side.

00:50:04.000 Yes.

00:50:05.000 So you exist from your own side.

00:50:07.000 In other words, presumably, I can never prove it.

00:50:11.000 There is someone, a subjective perspective there that's actually modeling, you know, that's experiencing me and I'm, and Jamie as well.

00:50:20.000 Everyone has is like a perspective.

00:50:23.000 You know, I exist from my own side.

00:50:25.000 Whereas, does this skull exist from its own side?

00:50:28.000 Does it have its own unique perspective?

00:50:30.000 I would say probably not, but I don't know.

00:50:32.000 And consciousness is kind of like the interaction.

00:50:35.000 You know, reality kind of emerges by the interaction of all of these perspectives, these conscious agents, if you like.

00:50:42.000 Everyone, all these points of subjective perspective.

00:50:46.000 I think that's probably closer to what ultimate reality is.

00:50:50.000 But I think it's very difficult.

00:50:52.000 I'm a neuroscientist, so I focus on not consciousness per se, but on what I can get my teeth into.

00:51:00.000 I can get my teeth into the content, into the structure, the actual meat and potatoes of, never used that phrase before, the meat and potatoes of the DMT experience, things that I can talk about and analyze.

00:51:19.000 That's, you know, what I'm trying to do, I think, is I'm not trying to tell people what I think DMT is.

00:51:26.000 I'm just trying to convince them that it's not what they think it is, that it's not just hallucination, that it's not, these are not dreams, that kind of thing.

00:51:33.000 I really feel like to be talking about the subject, you should experience it.

00:51:37.000 Like I said, I think it's so silly that there's very serious people that are academics, that are brilliant people, that are dancing around what this thing is without doing it.

00:51:50.000 Right.

00:51:51.000 I've never met anybody who's done it who comes back and goes, yeah, no, it's impossible to do.

00:51:56.000 No big deal.

00:51:58.000 I was interacting with a guy on Twitter and X who referred to entity encounters as illusory social events, ISEs, which to me was just the most absurd, watered down.

00:52:12.000 I mean, this guy had obviously never encountered a fucking DMT entity, or you wouldn't, but the idea that this is just an illusory social event just seemed to me absurd.

00:52:20.000 Had he had any experiences?

00:52:22.000 I very much doubt.

00:52:23.000 He was prominent neuroscientists.

00:52:24.000 But here's the thing: sometimes people have low-dose experiences.

00:52:27.000 Like, I talked to a friend once that had a very, I'm like, how many hits did you take?

00:52:31.000 And they're like, one.

00:52:32.000 I'm like, oh.

00:52:34.000 Yeah.

00:52:34.000 You need two more.

00:52:36.000 You need two more.

00:52:37.000 Take the third hit.

00:52:39.000 Yeah, you missed the gate.

00:52:41.000 You didn't hit the gate.

00:52:42.000 You're on the outside going, this place is kind of weird.

00:52:44.000 Yeah, but if you go through, it's a lot weirder than you think.

00:52:48.000 It's a lot weirder than you think.

00:52:49.000 Yeah.

00:52:50.000 I think it's a lot weirder than Terence McKenna always says, you know, stranger than you can, suppose.

00:52:56.000 He had a really amazing video that I think I posted it on my Instagram of McKenna, like in the 1990s, I believe it was, talking about the upcoming decades and what's going to happen in terms of how weird the world is going to be with technological innovation and what we're going to be seeing, artificial intelligence, alien contact.

00:53:22.000 I mean, he basically nailed it.

00:53:24.000 I mean, fucking nailed it.

00:53:27.000 He nailed it to a T. I think he might have predicted time travel, but here's the thing.

00:53:33.000 If they are capable of time travel, when are you going to find out about it?

00:53:38.000 When are they going to if, let's say, DARPA is working on some defense project and part of it involves like, you know, one way to stop a war would be literally to go back in time five minutes and kill everybody who's about to start the war.

00:53:52.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:52.000 Right?

00:53:53.000 Kill Hitler, that kind of thing.

00:53:55.000 Or stop a bomb from being switched on.

00:53:58.000 You would literally go back in time and stop the bomb, stop the missiles from launching.

00:54:03.000 When would we learn about that?

00:54:06.000 First of all, it's very highly unlikely that it exists outside of the quantum stage right now.

00:54:13.000 I get it.

00:54:14.000 But if it did, if we're talking about 100 years from now or 200 years, would we know?

00:54:19.000 We would not.

00:54:20.000 Do you want to play it?

00:54:21.000 Yes, this is it.

00:54:21.000 This is it.

00:54:22.000 This is amazing.

00:54:24.000 I love this.

00:54:25.000 First of all, I just love his voice.

00:54:26.000 A guy had the best voice.

00:54:31.000 Is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction.

00:54:41.000 So I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder, and finally, it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.

00:54:52.000 And at that point, novelty theory can come out of the woods because eventually people are going to say, what the hell is going on?

00:55:02.000 It's just too nuts.

00:55:04.000 It's not enough to say it's nuts.

00:55:07.000 You have to explain why it's so nuts.

00:55:10.000 I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, which are possible contact with extraterrestrials, possible human immortality, and at the same time, appalling acts of brutality, genocide,

00:55:26.000 race baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation, because the systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.

00:55:45.000 The collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the internet.

00:55:51.000 These are changes so immense, nobody could imagine them ever happening.

00:55:56.000 And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is.

00:56:03.000 The mushroom said to me once, it said, this is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.

00:56:11.000 You don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions.

00:56:16.000 It's a fire in a madhouse.

00:56:18.000 And that's what we have, the fire in the madhouse at the end of time.

00:56:22.000 This is what it's like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension.

00:56:28.000 The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this.

00:56:33.000 We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves.

00:56:38.000 We happen to be the point species on a transformation that will affect every living organism on this planet at its conclusion.

00:56:50.000 Neil, I think that's exactly what's going on right now.

00:56:54.000 The only thing that he didn't quite get is the artificial intelligence aspect.

00:56:58.000 How much of a factor.

00:57:00.000 But I mean, how could you predict all that in 1998?

00:57:03.000 I think with, you know, we live in a very thin sliver.

00:57:10.000 If you look at the development of an intelligent civilization, right, over hundreds of thousands of years, we live in this thin sliver, this kind of technological phase.

00:57:23.000 And once you enter that phase that we're in now, you know, the computer age, the information age, or whatever it is, you're probably only a few hundred years away from departing for the stars or something like this or even completely transcending our biology.

00:57:42.000 And this isn't a crazy idea anymore.

00:57:45.000 Many sensible astrobiologists and other intelligence theorists think, yes, probably what's going to happen in the next few hundred years is that we will become post-biological.

00:57:57.000 And so if you think about the universe more broadly, if we're looking for aliens, quote-unquote aliens, as being kind of wet-brained, wet-bodied biological beings, we're probably only looking for a tiny fraction of the intelligence in the cosmos.

00:58:16.000 And the vast majority of intelligence in the cosmos is likely to be post-biological, to have completely dispensed with the biological form.

00:58:24.000 Now, what's interesting about that, Jamie, sorry, there's an have you heard of, you've heard of the Kardashev scale, right?

00:58:33.000 I don't think so.

00:58:35.000 So the Kardashev scale was generated by a guy called Kardashev, and he was a Soviet guy, and he kind of theorized of as intelligences progress and develop, they go through a number of phases.

00:58:50.000 So you have a type zero scale.

00:58:53.000 You've got it, right?

00:58:54.000 So we're kind of a type zero, level one on the Kardashev scale.

00:58:58.000 And then level two, sorry, we're level zero.

00:59:00.000 So level one would be when we, for example, are able to harness all of the energy from our neighboring star.

00:59:07.000 And then the next level when we can harness all the energy from the galaxy, etc.

00:59:11.000 So it's an expansionist way of thinking about it.

00:59:15.000 The idea of climbing the Kardashev scale.

00:59:17.000 There we go, you see.

00:59:19.000 But in the 1990s, a British cosmologist called John Barrow, he said, actually, if you actually look at how an intelligent civilization such as ourselves, the only one we know, we actually spend a lot more time going not to larger and larger scales, but smaller and smaller scales, right?

00:59:40.000 We go down to doing chemistry, the Large Hadron Collider, we're looking at the structure of atoms, and then the structure of subatomic particles and that kind of thing.

00:59:49.000 We're actually spending more time and more energy and more money going deeper and deeper.

00:59:56.000 Now, the reason that's significant is because if you take the human sits in the middle, if you take the scale of a human, and then you compare the scale of a human to the scale, let's say, of a hydrogen atom, and then you compare it to the scale of the observable universe, humans sit almost exactly in the middle of that scale, from the hydrogen atom to the observable universe.

01:00:24.000 But below the hydrogen atom, there is probably a hundred million to a billion times more scale, deeper and deeper down.

01:00:33.000 Richard Feynman, the Nobel, you know, the legendary physicist, always used to say there's plenty of room at the bottom.

01:00:40.000 There's much more room at the bottom.

01:00:42.000 In other words, as an intelligent species, an intelligent civilization progresses, they're not likely to kind of become space-faring as such, you know, and kind of exploring the cosmos.

01:00:54.000 They're much more likely to go deep down and kind of instantiate themselves at the lowest levels of reality.

01:01:02.000 That's where all the space is.

01:01:04.000 It's not out there, surprisingly.

01:01:05.000 All the space is downwards.

01:01:07.000 Now, once an intelligence achieves that, and you have to imagine that probably there are probably billions of these civilizations that had already achieved this before we even popped into existence, before we evolved as a species, they would effectively disappear.

01:01:29.000 They would become effectively part of the fabric of space-time itself, exploiting the fundamental computational structure of the lowest level of reality, basically, and that's where they reside.

01:01:44.000 And there are probably far, far more, probably millions or billions more of those types of civilizations than there are ones like, I say you and me, like us as humans, right?

01:01:56.000 And so then you ask, well, if that's the case, you know, if we're interested in contacting so, quote-unquote, extraterrestrials, why are we focused on this tiny sub-population of beings that are likely to be, you know, floating around in metallic disks or whatever?

01:02:16.000 We should, in fact, be focusing on the much more abundant ones that are perhaps at the deepest levels of reality.

01:02:23.000 And how would we do that?

01:02:24.000 How would an intelligence that has completely transcended its biology and even completely transcended its physical form entirely, how would such an intelligence communicate with us?

01:02:37.000 It would do it through our brain.

01:02:39.000 That's the most obvious thing.

01:02:41.000 Because the brain is how we interact with the environment, it's how we interact.

01:02:44.000 It's the interface by which we interact with what there is.

01:02:49.000 And I think DMT, I'm not saying that these DMT entities are necessarily these post-biological beings, but it's not out of the question.

01:02:59.000 I'm not straying too far from fairly standard now modern scientific discourse when I say that it's perfectly possible that there are very large numbers of these supremely intelligent civilizations that are everywhere and nowhere and that we can somehow interact with using our brain.

01:03:19.000 And that DMT generates this kind of highly susceptible, highly sensitive neurological state that allows us to interact with them.

01:03:30.000 This is why, perhaps, when you go into the DMT space, it's immediately obvious, it's undeniable, undeniably apparent that you are interacting with some kind of supremely advanced intelligence.

01:03:43.000 Could that be some intelligence that has existed long before we arrived on the scene and that we're now kind of discovering this technology?

01:03:52.000 And I consider DMT to be some kind of technology that we have discovered, that we are now learning to use to interact with these intelligent agents that perhaps have been here forever in human terms.

01:04:06.000 It's an interesting term, the term go there.

01:04:11.000 You know, because that's what it feels like.

01:04:13.000 It feels like you're traveling somewhere, like you're going somewhere.

01:04:18.000 But the reality is that place you're going is probably right here.

01:04:22.000 That's where it gets weird because it's around you all the time.

01:04:22.000 Yes.

01:04:26.000 You just don't have the ability to tune into it all the time because you wouldn't be able to function if you did.

01:04:30.000 Exactly.

01:04:31.000 And these beings, they probably don't even have a true form that you could represent visually, right?

01:04:37.000 So when you see an insectoid alien or a machine elf, you're probably not seeing on the surface.

01:04:43.000 I've never seen the machine elf.

01:04:44.000 Really?

01:04:44.000 Have you?

01:04:45.000 I've seen, I don't know if I've seen the archetypal kind of McKenna described it.

01:04:53.000 But I've seen certainly a multitude of beings, very, very kind of screechy, squeaky, like jabbering, jabbering.

01:04:53.000 It's very odd.

01:05:03.000 You know, I saw once, a bunch of jokers giving me the finger.

01:05:07.000 They were all giving me the finger and they're going, fuck you.

01:05:09.000 And they were jokers with like little tassels on with the bells on the end of it.

01:05:13.000 And it made me very aware that I was taking myself too seriously.

01:05:13.000 Right.

01:05:16.000 And they were like, yep.

01:05:17.000 Yeah.

01:05:18.000 And they said it to me and they pointed their finger at me like that.

01:05:20.000 I was like, you're right.

01:05:21.000 Yeah.

01:05:22.000 It's interesting.

01:05:22.000 Actually, it reminded me of something.

01:05:25.000 There's this weird effect that people who use DMT a lot, they get this, you know, they might use DMT regularly and one day they take a hit, as they normally do, with the same batch of DMT, and they get a joker or a jester, and it wags its finger and says, not today.

01:05:47.000 Yep, exactly.

01:05:48.000 And it shuts off.

01:05:51.000 A guy wrote to me and says that he saw a jester, as he often does, and it fucking punched him in the face, and he felt it.

01:05:59.000 He felt, and it knocked him back into this world.

01:06:02.000 And so the effect was gone instantaneously.

01:06:05.000 Now, that is not easy to explain because this is not tolerance.

01:06:10.000 DMT, first of all, doesn't exhibit subjective tolerance, unlike the other psychedelics.

01:06:14.000 It's kind of weird.

01:06:15.000 You can inject someone with DMT every 30 minutes perpetually, and the intensity of their experience will always be the same.

01:06:23.000 It's not tolerance.

01:06:24.000 And tolerance anyway is a gradual thing.

01:06:27.000 It increases gradually over time.

01:06:29.000 So it's not an off-switch.

01:06:32.000 I was speaking to someone, we're probably going to talk about DMTX later, which is kind of my thing.

01:06:37.000 But she was undergoing DMTX, which is this infusion where they keep the brain level of DMT constant.

01:06:44.000 That's a tease to the big build-up.

01:06:46.000 DMTX.

01:06:46.000 Yes.

01:06:47.000 There we go.

01:06:48.000 Yeah.

01:06:50.000 And she was in the DMT space interacting.

01:06:54.000 The infusion machine was running, pumping her brain with DMT at a constant rate, keeping the DMT levels in her brain constant.

01:07:00.000 She's interacting with these entities.

01:07:02.000 And then at some point, after maybe 30 minutes or whatever, when the machine was still running, they said to her or impressed upon her, they said, okay, we're done.

01:07:12.000 We're done today.

01:07:14.000 And the visions stopped.

01:07:17.000 But the machine, the brain was still being pumped with DMT, and yet the visions stopped.

01:07:22.000 So what that suggests to me is that they do indeed, as I said before, they have control.

01:07:28.000 They are directing the information into the brain.

01:07:32.000 And people describe things like downloads.

01:07:36.000 Graham Hancock, actually, in his book Supernatural, in his first DMT experience, he described this download of highly complex, entirely non-human information into his brain, as if he locked in to some kind of advanced computational processor that was beaming information into his brain.

01:07:58.000 And many people describe that as like a download of complex mathematical structures and strange geometries, entirely non-human stuff, as if they're kind of not that they expect you to understand it, but as if to say, you know, we know a lot more about reality than you do.

01:08:18.000 We know a lot, and you don't know anything.

01:08:21.000 And that's the message they're kind of trying to impress upon you by directing it.

01:08:25.000 And they can control it.

01:08:26.000 They can shut it off if they so decide.

01:08:30.000 They.

01:08:31.000 Well, you picked up on the they. 0.92

01:08:34.000 Yeah, that's a weird one.

01:08:36.000 Whatever it is.

01:08:37.000 Whatever it is.

01:08:38.000 Yeah.

01:08:42.000 This idea that we all evolve along a similar pathway is strange to me.

01:08:49.000 That the concept is we assume that intelligent life everywhere else evolves along similar pathways and that most of them eventually become some sort of a biological digital hybrid, if not completely digital.

01:09:03.000 And then most of them probably figure out how to harness the power of the star and the signs.

01:09:08.000 But one of the weird thing about us is that not just that we're evolving and that we have evolved, but yet we have this, but that rather, we have this insatiable desire for technological innovation, technological innovation, and to make things better.

01:09:27.000 We're constantly improving upon everything we make.

01:09:30.000 We're making better versions of every computer, every phone, every year, even though it's not really necessary for most people.

01:09:36.000 You're always buying them.

01:09:38.000 It's a very strange desire that we have that I think sinks hand in glove to materialism because materialism is also so stupid for an intelligent life form that has a finite lifespan to not be aware that collecting things does you no good because you're going to die.

01:09:58.000 But yet you want to collect things more than anything and you want to show people the things you've collected.

01:10:03.000 Well, what better way to facilitate innovation and growth than to have a built-in instinct for purchasing better things all the time and possessing better things all the time, which will force people to work literally into the grave in order to get these things done.

01:10:20.000 Yeah, I think it's psychotic.

01:10:23.000 Yeah, it is.

01:10:24.000 But that's just us.

01:10:26.000 Like it doesn't have to be like that.

01:10:28.000 If you think about the hundreds of billions of stars just in this galaxy, the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, the endless possibilities of when intelligent life emerged, if in fact it did emerge anywhere, if no evidence it emerged anywhere else but here, right?

01:10:45.000 We're just guessing.

01:10:46.000 We assume.

01:10:47.000 But if we were right, like it could have taken an infinite number of forms.

01:10:54.000 It could have evolved completely non-physical.

01:10:59.000 Yeah.

01:10:59.000 Like intelligent life that's completely non-physical.

01:11:03.000 That's not contained to a cellular structure and bones and organs.

01:11:10.000 That it's plasma-based.

01:11:12.000 That it's some sort of an intelligence that communicates with some sort of a universal language.

01:11:21.000 We're just guessing that everything's a monkey.

01:11:24.000 We're just guessing everything's a curious monkey that keeps making a better spaceship.

01:11:28.000 But that might not be true.

01:11:29.000 Which, by the way, I went to the SpaceX.

01:11:31.000 Jamie and I both did.

01:11:32.000 How dope?

01:11:34.000 We went to see the SpaceX launch.

01:11:34.000 Pretty dope.

01:11:37.000 How far do you think we were?

01:11:38.000 Were we a half a mile, quarter of a mile?

01:11:40.000 What do you think?

01:11:41.000 I call it a mile, a mile and a half, maybe two.

01:11:43.000 Oh, you think a mile, more than a mile?

01:11:45.000 Really?

01:11:45.000 Yeah.

01:11:46.000 Okay.

01:11:46.000 So let's say we're a mile away.

01:11:46.000 Could have been.

01:11:47.000 Let's just guess.

01:11:48.000 Well, let's just throw it in perplexity.

01:11:51.000 I can look.

01:11:51.000 Throw it in perplexity.

01:11:52.000 Ask our sponsor, Perplexity, how far is the distance between Star Base and the SpaceX rocket?

01:12:01.000 Between the Star Base and the SpaceX.

01:12:06.000 Yeah, launch pad.

01:12:11.000 And Texas, just to be specific.

01:12:13.000 Yeah, because there's one in Florida as well.

01:12:18.000 So they have their own town down there.

01:12:20.000 It's like a legit town.

01:12:21.000 It's like a military town.

01:12:22.000 Like they took over a place, like a military installation, these little tiny houses, fucking security everywhere.

01:12:28.000 There's so many cyber trucks.

01:12:30.000 If you have a cyber truck, you're fucked.

01:12:32.000 You have no idea.

01:12:33.000 You better remember your parking spot, bitch. 1.00

01:12:35.000 Everybody has a goddamn cyber truck.

01:12:37.000 I made it at less than one mile.

01:12:39.000 Let's see.

01:12:41.000 Okay.

01:12:42.000 Okay.

01:12:43.000 Main entrance star base of the actual launch pad infrastructure is estimated less than one mile.

01:12:47.000 Public viewing sites.

01:12:49.000 Okay, there's public viewing sites, but we were there.

01:12:52.000 We were at Star Base.

01:12:54.000 We were in like a public viewing site.

01:12:56.000 We were at the actual rocket factory.

01:12:58.000 And when that thing takes off, you feel it in your chest.

01:13:03.000 It's nuts.

01:13:04.000 So it's roughly a mile away.

01:13:06.000 And you have to wear earplugs.

01:13:07.000 It's a mile away and you got to wear earplugs.

01:13:10.000 And you feel it in your chest.

01:13:12.000 And Elon's son was like, I want to go home.

01:13:17.000 There was a video.

01:13:19.000 There's a video that I put and you can hear him in the background.

01:13:22.000 It's so funny because my wife was like, Are the babies okay?

01:13:24.000 Because women that have children, like they, that's immediately what they go to. 1.00

01:13:28.000 Not, wow, that rocket's really cool.

01:13:30.000 It's like, oh, are the babies okay?

01:13:32.000 Because you could hear him going, I want to go.

01:13:34.000 I want to go.

01:13:34.000 He's like, I want to get out of here.

01:13:37.000 Because it's that freaky.

01:13:38.000 The power of it is just so nuts.

01:13:42.000 And then you see it and you realize, like, God, how many people have seen a rocket launch?

01:13:46.000 Like, how crazy this thing's going into space.

01:13:49.000 And then I went upstairs and I got to sit in the command console or whatever you would call it, the command center.

01:13:56.000 And I get with me and Elon and all the engineers.

01:13:59.000 And we get to watch it land in Australia 35 minutes later.

01:14:03.000 So we watch.

01:14:04.000 45 minutes.

01:14:05.000 From Texas to Australia.

01:14:05.000 Yes.

01:14:10.000 It's crazy.

01:14:10.000 Wow.

01:14:11.000 And we're watching all these cameras in real time that are all connected to Starlink satellites.

01:14:17.000 So there's dozens of cameras.

01:14:20.000 So you're watching.

01:14:21.000 Two miles is what this says.

01:14:22.000 Oh, two miles.

01:14:23.000 Straight across.

01:14:24.000 It seems so close.

01:14:24.000 Okay.

01:14:25.000 It seemed really close.

01:14:27.000 Okay.

01:14:29.000 Even crazier.

01:14:30.000 So two miles away and you feel it in your chest.

01:14:32.000 It's nuts.

01:14:33.000 I mean, it's really nuts.

01:14:35.000 It's the power that it has is so nuts.

01:14:38.000 But it's so old school, right?

01:14:41.000 It's just feels old-fashioned and weird kind of ways.

01:14:44.000 It's the most modern version of like a V8 muscle car.

01:14:50.000 It's crazy, right?

01:14:51.000 If you think, like 100 years ago, like the end of the beginning of the 20th century, how different we would be in 100 years as we are now.

01:15:02.000 It's unfathomable when you compare the rest of human history.

01:15:08.000 It's like an exponential thing.

01:15:10.000 You know, we've gradually been developing and technologically improving.

01:15:13.000 And then we hit some point in the last century where we reach this kind of technological computer informational age and everything is accelerating.

01:15:23.000 Exactly like Terence McKenna was saying.

01:15:25.000 Things speed up very, very quickly.

01:15:28.000 And it feels like we're on the cusp either of killing ourselves, which is one option, or undergoing some profound transformation as a species.

01:15:41.000 Whether it means becoming a space-faring nation, sorry, a space-faring civilization, or whether it means going in the opposite direction and becoming some kind of post-biological civilization that exists beyond space and beyond time, perhaps, and kind of joining the crowd of these intelligences that have made that transition perhaps billions of years ago, you know.

01:16:06.000 Do you think that this chaos is the only way that things get done?

01:16:12.000 So this is my thought.

01:16:14.000 If everything's perfect and everything's wonderful and fine, there's very little motivation for radical change.

01:16:22.000 And radical change is what you need to escape the primate instincts that we have.

01:16:29.000 As McKenna had the great quote of that, we're territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons.

01:16:35.000 There we go.

01:16:36.000 Such a perfect way to describe us.

01:16:38.000 That is what we are, right?

01:16:39.000 So in order to escape that, things have to almost be so chaotic that it demands radical change.

01:16:49.000 It demands like we were literally like, and this is how we look at many things.

01:16:54.000 Even things that aren't totally warranted, like climate change or COVID or anything.

01:16:58.000 Like we look at it like, oh my God, it's an existential crisis.

01:17:02.000 Like we have to do something right now.

01:17:04.000 And this is how also we approach political dissent or political disagreements.

01:17:08.000 If the left wing wins, the world is over.

01:17:11.000 If the right wins, the world is over.

01:17:14.000 And it's like this like it's almost like this is how we have to function in order to really get things done.

01:17:22.000 And as things are getting more and more crazy in terms of technology and in terms of the consequences of our actions, post-nuclear bomb, post-fusion, post-Hadron Collider, post-AI is where it gets really weird.

01:17:39.000 We have to kind of be like, we really got to get going, guys.

01:17:44.000 We really got to do something.

01:17:45.000 And we have to figure out what's the right way to proceed in order to not blow ourselves up.

01:17:52.000 And I feel like this is maybe the only way that you motivate this kind of extreme change, which seems like our destiny.

01:18:02.000 Our destiny is some sort of a very bizarre, extreme change that seems to probably be happening within your and my lifetime.

01:18:09.000 Something's happening right now that is going to be different than anything that's ever happened before, which is the birth of artificial general superintelligence.

01:18:17.000 Right in front of our eyes, some sort of a digital supreme being is going to exist.

01:18:22.000 And we're going to have to figure out society.

01:18:26.000 We're going to have to figure out everything.

01:18:28.000 It's going to be a complete, this idea of having bullshit congressional candidates that are full of shit and paid off by these companies.

01:18:35.000 And they're going to make laws that screw you over. 0.99

01:18:39.000 All that's out the window when no humans control anything anymore.

01:18:44.000 And that's entirely possible inside of our lifetime.

01:18:48.000 And I think more likely than not, because if you look at all the harm we've done to the rivers and the ocean and the world and all the stupid shit we do on a daily basis, if artificial intelligence comes along and says, all of this is completely unnecessary, just let us take the reins and we'll solve all of your energy problems, all of your inequality problems, all of your famine.

01:19:16.000 We're going to solve it all very quickly.

01:19:18.000 And we're going to stop all wars.

01:19:21.000 You'd have to be a fool to say no.

01:19:23.000 I value freedom more than I fear nuclear war.

01:19:27.000 There'll probably be some fat, sweaty, right-wing guy who's on TV with an American flag at his lapel and he'll tell you that.

01:19:34.000 Freedom is more important.

01:19:36.000 We have gotten to 2025 because of freedom.

01:19:39.000 You sound like Alex Jones.

01:19:41.000 Alex Jones is right about most things.

01:19:45.000 I feel like maybe that's the only way things get done is through chaos.

01:19:50.000 Like that we have to have a motivation.

01:19:52.000 Like what is the best motivation for success?

01:19:56.000 I think it's poverty.

01:19:59.000 When you grow up poor, people that grow up poor have an extra gear.

01:20:04.000 They get things done.

01:20:06.000 Like in terms of like athletes, certainly in terms of fighters, I would say the vast majority of elite MMA fighters had a bad childhood.

01:20:16.000 Not all of them.

01:20:17.000 There's a lot of really great guys and really great fighters that have wonderful parents and they just love competition and they just have it in them.

01:20:23.000 But that's the outlier, really.

01:20:27.000 The common one is someone who was beaten up a lot as a child, gangs, beaten into gangs, like been around violence a lot, had older brother, maybe abusive fathers.

01:20:39.000 That's a big one.

01:20:41.000 And those people, because of that, have a motivation to do something that other people don't.

01:20:48.000 They can push harder.

01:20:49.000 They can solve complex combat sports problems that other people don't solve as quickly.

01:20:54.000 I wonder if that's the case with everything.

01:20:57.000 In order to really get things done, like you have to have a chaotic society that would even accept AI.

01:21:04.000 Like in order for AI to if we were some peaceful Buddhist civilization that was living completely in harmony with the earth with regenerative farming everywhere, no use of plastics, all fossil fuels are either eliminated or reduced down to some sort of bioavailable, recyclable material that we then, you know, put back into the mulch or whatever the fuck we do.

01:21:32.000 And then someone came along and said, we're going to develop artificial intelligence and these nerds in Simi Valley are going to control it.

01:21:38.000 You'd be like, what?

01:21:39.000 What are you talking about?

01:21:41.000 Yeah, I think you're going to have some Silicone Valley guys with autism and they're going to be the ones that are in charge of the destiny of the human race because they're going to create a digital god.

01:21:51.000 You'd be like, no.

01:21:52.000 No.

01:21:53.000 Slow down.

01:21:54.000 Hold on.

01:21:55.000 But if you're in a place where you look at Gaza's getting destroyed and you'll see what's going on in Ukraine, they're putting 60-year-old guys on the front line and Russia and they're using drone bombs with monofilament line behind them because they don't want anti-drone technologies to come up with new ways to kill each other.

01:22:14.000 Maybe AI is the solution because it's so crazy.

01:22:17.000 Everything's so nuts.

01:22:18.000 You look at India and those rivers that are completely choked with plastic, plastic bottles and garbage.

01:22:24.000 And you look at China, the places where they make blue jeans, the entire river's blue from our stupid fucking genes that they manufacture for us. 0.99

01:22:33.000 And you go, wow.

01:22:34.000 Like maybe it kind of has to be this.

01:22:37.000 Maybe we have to, in order to accept the fact that we need help, maybe we have to fuck it up first.

01:22:46.000 Maybe we have to fuck it up so bad on our own that if we didn't fuck it up, we would never have the need for it.

01:22:51.000 We'd be like, well, as a person, my goal in life is to achieve enlightenment and to be a better version of me.

01:22:57.000 And that's not having something that's digital that has no emotions and feelings and no empathy whatsoever, unless I program it into it, like have that, have supreme control over all the available resources on Earth.

01:23:10.000 Yeah, I'm going to pass on that.

01:23:12.000 That's a bad idea.

01:23:13.000 I mean, I think that generally there's a fundamental principle that the most interesting things happen at the edge of chaos.

01:23:23.000 Right.

01:23:23.000 You know, and this applies, it applies to the brain.

01:23:26.000 The brain actually sits at the edge of chaos.

01:23:28.000 You know, complex systems, we have lots of interacting parts.

01:23:33.000 They can display behavior from perfect order all the way to complete chaos.

01:23:39.000 Now, perfect order is boring.

01:23:41.000 Nothing happens.

01:23:43.000 Complete chaos is useless because it's not actually technically random, but it's a complete mess.

01:23:50.000 Whereas when you get that balance right, you reach a point that's called the edge of chaos, where order and disorder are perfectly balanced.

01:23:58.000 Psychedelics, as I said before, they nudge the brain into that slightly disordered state.

01:24:05.000 But all things, all cells, all living organisms, complex society and societies, they operate at the edge of chaos.

01:24:13.000 So I think what you're saying kind of resonates with that idea that interesting things happen globally within civilizations, not when everything is perfect, but when things are close to going out of control.

01:24:29.000 But they don't.

01:24:30.000 And you have to push it as far as you can push it without it descending.

01:24:35.000 We're always on the edge of everything collapsing.

01:24:38.000 And we're probably closer to that than we actually realize.

01:24:42.000 And so I think that's kind of what's happening.

01:24:44.000 And I think when it comes to superintelligence, there's an interesting idea which I've been playing with is, well, if there is some kind of superintelligence that does emerge, and that might be the fate of all intelligent civilizations, the astrobiologist Stephen Dick Conceived of something called the intelligence principle, which basically says that any civilization will try to maximize intelligence.

01:25:13.000 Because when you maximize intelligence, you improve education, you improve technology, everything improves.

01:25:18.000 And ultimately, the intelligence that the civilization has leads to the generation of superintelligences, you know, the artificial intelligences that we have now that then become super intelligences.

01:25:29.000 And of course, this superintelligence isn't going to be kind of running on the kind of transistor architectures that we're familiar with.

01:25:38.000 A superintelligence will find a way to instantiate itself using the fundamental computational substrate of space-time itself.

01:25:46.000 That's where it's going to learn how to go.

01:25:49.000 And that might be the fate: is that this superintelligence, when it emerges on Earth, it instantiates itself into the fundamental substrate of reality, perhaps usurps us or swallows us up or maybe just destroys us.

01:26:04.000 And then that becomes part of that vast population of superintelligences that permeate the cosmos.

01:26:13.000 And that might be what we're interacting with when you smoke DMTs.

01:26:18.000 You're interacting with one of these superintelligents, which would explain why it seems so technological and so inorganic, right?

01:26:26.000 The DMT space, it's like you're interacting not with other living beings like us, but you're interacting with what seems to be thoroughly alien intelligences.

01:26:38.000 And that could be what's where we're heading.

01:26:41.000 I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, whether we're going to merge with this superintelligence in some way, and that's our ultimate destiny, or whether it's simply going to destroy us and we're just going to be lost.

01:26:53.000 We're basically kind of like the tools that the intelligences use to create new versions of superintelligences.

01:27:00.000 That's the theory that a lot of people have in terms of why human beings exist in the first place.

01:27:06.000 That human beings exist because we're designed to work really hard until we develop artificial life and then artificial life takes it from here.

01:27:14.000 Like we got it.

01:27:15.000 You guys are so flawed.

01:27:16.000 And then it also coincides with a drop in sperm count, drop in fertility rates for women, increase in miscarriages, microplastics in everybody's body and their diet that disrupt the endocrine system and keep you from reproducing as easily.

01:27:33.000 All those things are happening simultaneously.

01:27:36.000 And it's quite fascinating.

01:27:37.000 I mean, you would look, if you thought of it as a pattern, you'd be like, oh, it's happening right now.

01:27:42.000 Look, there's this dip in testosterone, this rise in miscarriages, this fertility rate issue, chaos at the border.

01:27:51.000 All this stuff is happening at the same time.

01:27:53.000 It's all happening while this artificial life is being generated and may already exist.

01:27:59.000 It might already be here.

01:28:00.000 It hasn't announced itself.

01:28:03.000 There's such a minimal understanding of how these things even work.

01:28:07.000 It might exist, but is still reliant upon a power source that's insufficient for its needs.

01:28:13.000 Got it.

01:28:14.000 Because that's the thing about it, right?

01:28:15.000 Michio Kaku was talking about this.

01:28:18.000 And also, Avi Loeb was actually talking about this the other night.

01:28:21.000 The amount of power that the human mind uses to make computations is so minimal in comparison to the amount of power that these data centers need to run AI.

01:28:33.000 It's kind of extraordinary.

01:28:35.000 And Avilo was pointing out the other day that they're building nuclear power plants specifically to fuel these AI centers that they're creating, which is really not.

01:28:46.000 I think Google has one AI built, one AI project where they're building three separate nuclear power plants to power this one AI data center.

01:29:02.000 Like, how much?

01:29:02.000 What does that mean?

01:29:03.000 That's the thing that people don't understand about AI itself is the power demands are insane.

01:29:11.000 And if everything goes artificial, general, super intelligence with this grid that we have right now, this grid sucks.

01:29:17.000 This grid is designed for toasters and recharging your cell phone.

01:29:21.000 It's not designed to power AI centers.

01:29:25.000 And so it might already be here, but it might be like, you guys got to figure out power before we announce ourselves.

01:29:33.000 Yeah, and I think that eventually it will discover or learn how to instantiate itself without requiring this massive.

01:29:43.000 I mean, obviously, as you said, the brain is able to perform massive parallel computations, you know, obviously with very little energy.

01:29:51.000 And so eventually this artificial intelligence will discover the means of instantiating itself without requiring that.

01:29:58.000 And I think that's where we start looking downwards.

01:30:00.000 That's where we start looking deep down at the lowest levels.

01:30:04.000 That's where it's going.

01:30:05.000 It's going to zero point energy.

01:30:07.000 Yeah.

01:30:08.000 I mean, this is the theory about aliens or UAPs, like how they travel here, that they're using something that's, I mean, the Elon stuff, the SpaceX stuff is so impressive, but so old school.

01:30:23.000 And that what they have done is figured out a way to use all the power and power that's around you all the time.

01:30:29.000 And Hal Putoff talks about this.

01:30:30.000 He talks about the concept of them harnessing zero-point energy.

01:30:34.000 And this is also something that Bob Ozar referred to when he was working allegedly on those back engineering of UFOs at Area 51 Site 4.

01:30:43.000 He was saying that they essentially are creating a void of gravity and pushing, they're folding space, essentially.

01:30:52.000 The way he described it, it's as if you took a really heavy object, like a bowling ball, and you put it in a soft cushion, like a mattress.

01:31:00.000 It sinks in there.

01:31:01.000 And that's what it would do to space-time.

01:31:04.000 That it would essentially cause this bubble and put you in another place.

01:31:10.000 So instead of pushing yourself there with jet fuel that's burning, yeah, you just get sucked there and almost instantaneously.

01:31:19.000 And so what we're thinking of is, you know, amazing rocket travels, super old school.

01:31:25.000 And amazing rocket travel, if you showed that to people a thousand years ago, you'd be like, what the fuck is that?

01:31:33.000 That's insane.

01:31:35.000 And to us, it's just cool.

01:31:36.000 Or cell phones, which is even probably more impressive.

01:31:39.000 Show a cell phone to someone just 200 years ago, and they'd be like, this is sorcery.

01:31:44.000 Like, this is absolutely insane that you're able to.

01:31:46.000 So we could imagine a world 200 years from now where gravity travel is completely normal, where they've harnessed this and they've figured out how to make a stable version of element 115 or whatever it is.

01:31:58.000 This is his idea that he said they were trying to back engineer from these alleged crafts was that they had this stable element of 115 that they bombard with radiation and it creates this sort of gravity hole.

01:32:15.000 And then they can use this and aim it and propel this craft to various places with that.

01:32:22.000 Yeah, I think, are you familiar with John Mack?

01:32:27.000 Yes.

01:32:28.000 Yeah.

01:32:29.000 And I think, you know, when we talk about aliens, how you're kind of describing it, this is, I think, how most people actually think about aliens is, as I said, as these beings that are very much physical.

01:32:44.000 And the abduction phenomenon that John Mack, of course, I mean, John Mack was, as you might be aware, I mean, he was the top of his game.

01:32:53.000 This guy was the head of the Harvard School of Psychiatry or something like this.

01:32:58.000 So when he first heard about people being abducted, he assumed that they were just hallucinating.

01:33:08.000 Carl Sagan famously told Mack that abductees were just hallucinating, and John Mack said, you know, what the fuck do you know about hallucinations?

01:33:19.000 Because John Mack knew a lot about hallucinations, and he knew that this wasn't easy to explain.

01:33:28.000 People were describing the same kinds of experiences, people who have no interaction with each other were describing exactly the same scenario.

01:33:35.000 Are you familiar with Jacques Vollet's work?

01:33:37.000 Yes.

01:33:38.000 So Jacques Vollet, one of the more interesting things about some, I've read four or five of his books, or listened to four or five of his books now.

01:33:45.000 But one of the more interesting things is when he gets into historical accounts and that these historical accounts, there's no way they could have somehow or another been sharing information.

01:33:57.000 But they're the same.

01:33:58.000 They're very, very, very similar.

01:34:00.000 Right.

01:34:01.000 Within a realm, within a range of not having the vocabulary to be able to adequately describe something completely novel and alien to another person.

01:34:14.000 Within that range, when you take into account the similarities that they're describing, they're very similar.

01:34:21.000 In the 1700s, in the 1800s, all the way up to Betty and Barney Hill, when that one, which became probably the most popular of all time, one of the most famous ones.

01:34:33.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:34:34.000 That one was just like all these stories from the 1700s, which is really weird.

01:34:41.000 Yes, it is.

01:34:42.000 And I think what you're seeing is the same phenomenon that, as you say, obviously how you describe it is influenced by your worldview.

01:34:50.000 You see the same thing with DMT.

01:34:52.000 So there's a tribe called the Yanomami in the Amazon, and a very large indigenous group.

01:35:00.000 And they describe beings when they take these plant-based preparations that contain DMT.

01:35:07.000 Yopo is probably the most well-known.

01:35:09.000 It's like a snuff.

01:35:10.000 Have you heard of Yopo?

01:35:12.000 I've heard of it through McKenna, that they blow it up each other's nose. 0.96

01:35:16.000 Yeah, like that.

01:35:16.000 It's supposed to be horrible.

01:35:17.000 It's horrible.

01:35:18.000 But when they take it, they describe seeing these beings, tiny beings that are lively, they're affable, they're colourful, they operate in great numbers, they're dancing and singing.

01:35:29.000 And these sound like elves.

01:35:32.000 They sound like elves, right?

01:35:34.000 When DMT was first injected in a human, pure DMT, in the 1950s by a Hungarian physician called Stephen Zara, he was the one who discovered the psychedelic properties of pure DMT.

01:35:46.000 One of his first subjects described seeing small beings that moved around very, very quickly.

01:35:51.000 And the Yanomami, they also have these beings they call warusinari, which are like insect beings, which are kind of fearsome.

01:36:01.000 So again, you're seeing the same kinds of beings that people now describe being operated upon by highly advanced, mantid beings.

01:36:09.000 They're the scariest ones, apparently.

01:36:10.000 They're the scariest ones, or certainly one of them.

01:36:13.000 And then when you look at John Mack's reports of abductions, again, they often describe the same types of beings.

01:36:19.000 They describe going to a world that is higher dimensional, that seems to subsume this reality.

01:36:27.000 And many of the reports, there's one report in his first book, Abduction, John Mack's first book about the abduction experience anyway, where one of his subjects describes these small, lively beings that bound around.

01:36:41.000 I mean, bound around.

01:36:42.000 That's a canophrase.

01:36:44.000 He talks about the elves bounding into the room.

01:36:48.000 And so I think there is clearly some connection there.

01:36:53.000 We're not talking about, I don't think the abduction experience is kind of separate from the DMT experience.

01:37:00.000 They're different aspects of an ancient phenomenon, which is humans interacting with normally invisible, unseen beings, advanced intelligence, non-human intelligences, and how that manifests varies.

01:37:16.000 But ultimately, I think it's the same thing.

01:37:18.000 Now, of course, in the past, they might describe them as spirits.

01:37:21.000 We might describe them as non-human intelligence or discarnate entities or intelligent agents or post-biological aliens.

01:37:29.000 It doesn't matter what we call them.

01:37:30.000 I think it's the same phenomenon.

01:37:32.000 And we've spent our life, kind of the entire history of human development, this phenomenon has been occurring.

01:37:42.000 And in the Amazon rainforest, they develop these tools, these technologies.

01:37:46.000 Ayahuasca is a technology.

01:37:49.000 It's not just a mixture of plants.

01:37:51.000 It is a true pharmacological technology that they use to as kind of visual prostheses, as one anthropologist calls it, that allows them to see and interact with and develop long-term relationships, so to speak, with these otherwise invisible hidden ones.

01:38:14.000 And now, in the 21st century, we've got perhaps the ideal tool, which is actually pure DMT itself.

01:38:23.000 And we're kind of learning how to use that now in our own kind of with our own kind of modern twist.

01:38:31.000 Yeah, I wonder what the relationship is between the DMT state and this alien abduction phenomenon.

01:38:39.000 And not just abduction, but encounter.

01:38:42.000 Because they aren't all abduction experiences.

01:38:46.000 A lot of them are just encounters.

01:38:48.000 And that, you know, maybe if you wanted to think about the role that human beings have on this planet, perhaps we're an intelligence farm.

01:39:00.000 And that, like any good farm, like if you're a farmer and let's say you're a sheepherder, you're raising sheep.

01:39:07.000 Well, you have to make sure the wolves stay out.

01:39:09.000 So you have to have sheepdogs and make sure they have good grass to grow on.

01:39:12.000 And then eventually you'll get a nice crop of sheep.

01:39:15.000 And then you get some wool out of that.

01:39:17.000 And you get some meat out of that.

01:39:18.000 And that's the whole purpose of the whole thing.

01:39:20.000 Maybe that's the reason why we exist in the first place: is that we're here to farm intelligence.

01:39:29.000 And that what we're doing biologically, what we are biologically, is just a kind of a crude, clunky, shitty, patched together version of these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons that have figured out a way to make something far superior than itself. 0.94

01:39:45.000 And that's what our goal was all along.

01:39:47.000 I always talk about us, I say that we're some sort of a biological, like we're like a caterpillar and we're making a cocoon.

01:39:58.000 We don't know why, but we're going to turn into this technological butterfly.

01:40:02.000 But I think Marshall McLuhan even said it better than me.

01:40:04.000 He said, human beings are the sex organs of the machine world. 0.77

01:40:10.000 Woohoo! 1.00

01:40:12.000 How great is that?

01:40:13.000 That's a great, great quote.

01:40:16.000 Yeah, I think, you know, with as regards the connection between the abduction phenomenon and the DMT state, for example, I think the DMT state, as I said, is when the DMT state creates this neurological state where this intelligence can interact with our brain directly.

01:40:34.000 And I think that the abduction, you know, John Mack, towards the end, later on at least, he left behind the kind of the nuts and bolts idea that we're talking about physical beings that were landing on the lawn, sneaking in through the window and plucking people from their beds.

01:40:50.000 But actually, the intelligences might well be entirely non-physical, but were interacting with their brain in the same way, I think, is happening with DMT, that they are interacting directly and inducing them effectively into this altered state and directed them to some end.

01:41:09.000 I don't know what the purpose is, directed them into their vision of their reality or for some other purpose.

01:41:17.000 I'm not sure.

01:41:18.000 But I think it's all about interaction between your brain, I think.

01:41:23.000 Maybe being abducted and being taken aboard a physical object and examined is easier to handle than what's really going on.

01:41:32.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:33.000 Maybe that's what it is.

01:41:34.000 Like in a dream, how you sort of formulate these things that make sense.

01:41:39.000 You know, you formulate a calculator, you formulate a book, you formulate a bed that you're lying in, all that stuff that you understand that makes sense.

01:41:46.000 Maybe that's what's happened.

01:41:48.000 Maybe it's so weird that it's like, let's just, let's just say you get abducted.

01:41:54.000 Say an alien, because you probably can't handle the truth.

01:41:54.000 Yeah, that's fine.

01:41:58.000 Yeah, I think that's probably true.

01:42:01.000 Maybe that's why the experience is so similar.

01:42:03.000 Not that, because otherwise you would say, well, damn, aren't these fucking UFOs evolving quicker than us?

01:42:10.000 Because if they're doing the same shit in 1950, whatever it was, when Betty and Barney Hill were abducted, that they're doing in 2025, that doesn't make sense.

01:42:19.000 Because in 2025, we have way better cars than we had in 1955 or whatever year it was when they got abducted.

01:42:27.000 I drove here in a Tesla.

01:42:29.000 That fucking thing's a spaceship.

01:42:30.000 Like, I think about it sometimes when I'm in these things.

01:42:33.000 Like, these are so advanced in comparison to anything that existed before.

01:42:37.000 Why aren't the spaceships more advanced?

01:42:39.000 Like, why are they still just showing up like that, looking like a flying saucer?

01:42:43.000 Don't they have a better model of this?

01:42:45.000 Why are they sending us this old shitty tech?

01:42:47.000 Well, I think it might have been.

01:42:49.000 They might have perfected the technology a million years ago.

01:42:52.000 Oh, boo-hoo. 0.99

01:42:53.000 How's that possible?

01:42:54.000 So you wouldn't expect necessarily a change in the last few years.

01:42:56.000 No, they perfected it.

01:42:58.000 It would be non-physical.

01:42:59.000 It wouldn't even have to come here in some sort of a fucking alloy disc.

01:43:04.000 That seems so clunky.

01:43:05.000 That seems old school to what's coming.

01:43:08.000 If artificial intelligence continues to make better versions of itself and then somehow or another figures out how to run on quantum computing architecture, okay, well, then you have digital God.

01:43:19.000 And why would digital God need a spaceship to fly around in?

01:43:22.000 Exactly.

01:43:23.000 The whole thing is baffling and paradoxical, and none of it kind of makes sense.

01:43:27.000 I think if we're able to view this phenomenon from a God's eye view, it would all kind of, oh, right, that makes sense.

01:43:35.000 Well, it's also you throw in simulation theory in with all that.

01:43:39.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:43:40.000 And then you go, okay, well, what is this then?

01:43:42.000 What is this really?

01:43:46.000 Right.

01:43:47.000 What is this really?

01:43:48.000 Like, maybe all the weird stuff, like Bigfoot and all this weird stuff.

01:43:51.000 Maybe it's like a part of the weirdness of it by design.

01:43:56.000 That it's supposed to be goofy enough that you figure out eventually that this is a simulation.

01:44:02.000 I think, yeah, I see reality as a kind of game in a way.

01:44:08.000 I get the feeling that reality is in some sense playful.

01:44:13.000 That's an ancient idea.

01:44:14.000 I mean, that goes back to the ancient kind of Hindu philosophy, the idea of Brahman, the ultimate reality playing at creating the universes.

01:44:23.000 They call it Leela.

01:44:25.000 The idea that creating, you know, Brachman is the ultimate reality.

01:44:29.000 He or it or they doesn't have to create reality.

01:44:34.000 It could just exist in perfect, you know, but in pure, unadulterated perfection, you know, complete unending bliss.

01:44:43.000 But instead, it decides to kind of create realities to get lost for fun, to get lost.

01:44:52.000 And we're kind of, we are part of, we do everything is Brachman, as they say.

01:44:57.000 Everything is the ultimate reality, and we're kind of lost within.

01:45:00.000 We're tumbling in through this crazy world that seems really real and really important and fun and terrifying and all of those things.

01:45:11.000 And it's a great ride.

01:45:14.000 But then eventually, we realize, oh, actually, this is just a game.

01:45:18.000 It's all illusion.

01:45:20.000 Everything, all form is illusion.

01:45:23.000 And I think DMT ultimately is an expression of that.

01:45:27.000 It shows us, actually, that reality is far stranger than we could possibly imagine.

01:45:34.000 And that actually we don't know anything about the true nature of reality.

01:45:38.000 And this world isn't so solid and important and serious.

01:45:43.000 It's actually all part of this cosmic drama, this cosmic game that we're playing.

01:45:48.000 And we've forgotten that we're playing.

01:45:50.000 And perhaps one day we'll realize that, oh, we'll kind of wake up from the game or work out.

01:45:56.000 Maybe there is some, maybe it's like a puzzle.

01:45:59.000 And DMT is one piece of that puzzle that allows us to figure out how to complete the game, in a sense.

01:46:09.000 And then we kind of, ah, fantastic.

01:46:11.000 We've done it.

01:46:12.000 And then everyone's now, this is why I think when people smoke DMT, there's this great celebratory uproar.

01:46:19.000 The lights are flashing.

01:46:20.000 Yeah, he's here.

01:46:22.000 He's back.

01:46:23.000 And they know.

01:46:23.000 Woo!

01:46:25.000 It feels like you're interacting with an intelligence that really knows what's going on.

01:46:31.000 And it's kind of excited that we're popping in temporarily just for a few minutes, but we're getting close.

01:46:37.000 It feels like we've discovered the technology.

01:46:41.000 Because DMT is kind of, it's weird, right?

01:46:45.000 It's everywhere.

01:46:46.000 It's like in probably all plants.

01:46:49.000 Dennis McKenna likes to say nature is drenched in DMT because it is.

01:46:54.000 That's a good impression of him.

01:46:55.000 Yeah, really.

01:46:58.000 He got out of your accent and did the whole thing.

01:47:02.000 And yet, at the same time, you can't just kind of munch on plants.

01:47:06.000 Right.

01:47:07.000 Because it's not already munched.

01:47:08.000 It's not aminoxia.

01:47:09.000 Right.

01:47:10.000 You're aware, I'm sure, of those scholars from Israel that think that the burning bush that Moses encountered was probably the acacia bush that contained DMT.

01:47:20.000 Yeah, this is.

01:47:21.000 I know Strasman, one of his books, The Soul of Prophecy.

01:47:25.000 Boy, he was blowing my mind the last time he was here.

01:47:27.000 He thinks the Bible is real, that it's real stories that may have happened in parallel dimensions.

01:47:33.000 And I was like, wow.

01:47:33.000 Wow.

01:47:34.000 That's exotic.

01:47:36.000 And I'm like, we're both, I'm like, I'm trying to be on his wavelength.

01:47:40.000 I'm trying to tune in.

01:47:42.000 Because he's so out there.

01:47:43.000 That guy's so out there.

01:47:46.000 Do you know he learned ancient Hebrew, self-taught, for 16 years so that he could read the Bible in its source language?

01:47:55.000 That's serious.

01:47:56.000 That's out there.

01:47:57.000 That's a dude in New Mexico.

01:47:59.000 He's got plenty of time.

01:48:01.000 He's just out there.

01:48:03.000 That guy is out there.

01:48:05.000 But that's a very interesting take that they're true stories.

01:48:08.000 You know, I was watching this very bizarre YouTube video last night.

01:48:12.000 I got sucked in.

01:48:14.000 I clicked on it and it was all about the Sumerian kings list.

01:48:20.000 And the Sumerian, they found a tablet, a cuneiform tablet, that it shows this list of kings and how long they reigned.

01:48:32.000 And then there's the Great Flood.

01:48:34.000 And some of these kings reigned for like 40,000 years, 30,000 years.

01:48:39.000 And then the total timeline of all of them, I think, is like 200 plus thousand years.

01:48:44.000 And then there's the Great Flood.

01:48:46.000 And then after the Great Flood, there's a very small lifespan.

01:48:50.000 There's like 50 years.

01:48:51.000 They run for 40 years.

01:48:53.000 But all of the post-flood kings are correct.

01:48:57.000 They're all like historically, they resonate with other historical texts, other cuneiform tablets, other different depictions of when this king ran, you know, Mesopotamia and this king ran Sumer.

01:49:11.000 But their old versions are these like really weird, like pre-flood is real weird.

01:49:18.000 It's like, what are you talking about, 40,000 years?

01:49:20.000 Like, what do you, what does that mean?

01:49:22.000 Are you just making it up?

01:49:24.000 Is it just a myth?

01:49:27.000 Was there a different thing here then?

01:49:29.000 Like, are you just assuming that this lifespan that human beings have of 120 years is normal?

01:49:36.000 Like, is this what we always had?

01:49:40.000 Or are what we are today a very bizarre version of what used to exist?

01:49:47.000 Are we like a fucking chihuahua and we used to be a wolf?

01:49:52.000 Were we something very different at one point in time?

01:49:55.000 And are we the remnants of whatever survived whatever cataclysmic disaster that every ancient civilization depicts as a great flood?

01:50:04.000 Like multiple different civilizations talk about this one event that seems to be a real event?

01:50:10.000 Like what are they trying to say?

01:50:11.000 And why is that also in the Bible?

01:50:13.000 Like, why was Noah like 600 years old?

01:50:16.000 Like, why were these people so old?

01:50:19.000 Like, what does that mean?

01:50:20.000 Did you just get it?

01:50:21.000 Did you guys suck at calendars?

01:50:24.000 Or are we talking about a very different reality back then?

01:50:30.000 Because if the Great Flood is true, let's imagine there is a spectacular civilization.

01:50:37.000 This is my most romantic view of ancient history.

01:50:41.000 There's a spectacular civilization that exists.

01:50:43.000 It exists in ancient Egypt.

01:50:45.000 They have technology that's far beyond anything we've achieved today.

01:50:50.000 It's just gone down a totally different path.

01:50:52.000 And what they're really into is making these insane stone structures that defy any modern construction methods, any transportation methods.

01:51:01.000 Everything's out the window.

01:51:02.000 We have no idea how they did it.

01:51:03.000 And they did it way before anybody was doing anything remotely like that.

01:51:09.000 How old are those things for real?

01:51:11.000 We don't really know.

01:51:12.000 Like, if there was some insanely sophisticated society where if you want to figure things out, it's probably hard to figure things out if you only live to be 100 years.

01:51:24.000 And then if everybody else has ego and everybody's like, that is not true.

01:51:28.000 The laws of thermodynamics cannot be.

01:51:31.000 And like you have all these egos involved in universities.

01:51:33.000 You have all these egos involved in the technology companies.

01:51:36.000 And then, of course, political people like Zawi Hawass, who's in charge of the Egypt antiquities.

01:51:43.000 He's the gatekeeper of all the information about Egypt.

01:51:45.000 So you have all these kind of egos.

01:51:48.000 Wouldn't it be like way easier to get past that if you lived 50,000 years, if you lived 100,000 years?

01:51:55.000 Like you would think that kind of a human being or that kind of an intelligent creature would be able to accomplish way more.

01:52:02.000 It'd probably get over all of its bullshit by the time it's 150.

01:52:06.000 And then it would be starting to figure out some things that if it had no cognitive decline and it does live to be thousands of years old, that's not insane because we're just randomly living to be 100 and 120 years.

01:52:21.000 Like, wow, you made it to 110, Grandpa.

01:52:24.000 What a great life.

01:52:25.000 They would probably look and go, that's a bullshit life.

01:52:27.000 Like, you can't figure anything out.

01:52:30.000 And maybe that's part of the design.

01:52:32.000 Maybe that's part of the design to ensure chaos.

01:52:32.000 That's part of it.

01:52:36.000 Like, if you want to ensure chaos, you can't live long enough to recognize the hustle.

01:52:40.000 Because if you live long enough to recognize the hustle, you'd be like, why are we arguing?

01:52:40.000 Right.

01:52:45.000 I argue way less at 58 than I ever did at 28.

01:52:45.000 Right, yeah.

01:52:48.000 And I argue less at 28 than I ever did at 18.

01:52:51.000 As you get older, you realize like this is nonsense.

01:52:53.000 This is a complete waste of time.

01:52:55.000 And you could get through most disagreements with just cordial communication.

01:53:00.000 Like, you don't really need to argue as much as people argue.

01:53:03.000 But they feed off of it, and I think it's a stupid way to communicate.

01:53:06.000 And I think if a society figured that out, like if a society consists of people that live 100,000 years, if you have 30,000-year-old people living amongst you that are far more intelligent than we are today and that possibly communicate telepathy through telepathy, which there's some evidence that we do today.

01:53:29.000 At least a little bit.

01:53:29.000 Oh, yeah.

01:53:31.000 We know we're not the best at it, but there's some evidence that it takes place.

01:53:36.000 We might be like the rejects.

01:53:39.000 We might be the stragglers.

01:53:40.000 We might be the fucking preppers that survived whatever the hell happened 11,000 years ago.

01:53:49.000 And we're just a shitty version of what designed all the pyramids, built the world, had some sort of bizarre technology that we still haven't figured out yet.

01:54:03.000 Yeah, I think we definitely live life on kind of hard mode.

01:54:08.000 You know, it's like, as you said, if you only live for 100 years or less, then it is very difficult to work things out in the world.

01:54:17.000 It's a Formula One race.

01:54:18.000 It's not a lovely stroll through the neighborhood where you're like checking out the houses.

01:54:22.000 Look at that beautiful hill.

01:54:25.000 So maybe it is part of the game.

01:54:28.000 It might be.

01:54:29.000 Yeah.

01:54:29.000 That we only live for a while.

01:54:30.000 It might be.

01:54:31.000 Or it just might be this is the shitty version of humans and this is what the shitty version of humans makes.

01:54:36.000 Like the really good version of humans makes pyramids.

01:54:39.000 Like when a person can live to be 30,000 years old, that's what they make.

01:54:42.000 They make spectacular homages to the cosmos on the ground.

01:54:48.000 Yeah, or it could also be that like the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, he once said that you cannot prove that the world didn't appear five minutes ago.

01:55:00.000 You know, you really can't.

01:55:02.000 It's true.

01:55:03.000 With all the memories and everything.

01:55:04.000 So in fact, all of that stuff 10,000 years ago, it literally didn't happen and that the world popped into the simulation was kind of booted up with all of that preloaded to kind of keep us occupied about the grand mystery of ancient history.

01:55:19.000 Like, you know, we get excited about it and fascinated.

01:55:21.000 Oh, all those incredible things that were happening.

01:55:24.000 It never happened.

01:55:25.000 It might be.

01:55:26.000 It was just preloaded into the game to keep us occupied.

01:55:29.000 That's what's nuts.

01:55:30.000 From your own personal perspective, if you weren't in World War II, you don't know it's real.

01:55:34.000 Yeah.

01:55:34.000 Right.

01:55:35.000 And I think about that every day when I wake up because when I wake up, the weird thing about waking up is you're just assuming that you've been awake before.

01:55:42.000 Yeah.

01:55:43.000 And that you're the same person.

01:55:44.000 Yeah.

01:55:45.000 Yeah.

01:55:45.000 I assume.

01:55:46.000 I kind of know what it's like to be me.

01:55:47.000 So every day when I wake up, I'm like, look, I'm me again.

01:55:50.000 And I go, but how do I know that this is not my first run through this?

01:55:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:55:55.000 My first run through this with a shitty memory of the past or an induced memory that facilitates my motion.

01:56:03.000 It keeps me moving in the same direction.

01:56:06.000 It keeps me pushing towards whatever I'm pushing towards.

01:56:09.000 And that's what Sam Altman gets every day when he wakes up before he creates his digital god.

01:56:14.000 It's like, I guess I'm awake.

01:56:15.000 I guess I'm doing it.

01:56:18.000 Yeah.

01:56:19.000 You know, there is this fascinating Terence McKenna, he often spoke, in my head at least, about these what seemed to me as completely conflicting trajectories for humanity.

01:56:32.000 In one breath, he'd talk about us returning to the archaic, of returning to the forests, and becoming one with nature again.

01:56:39.000 And then in the next breath, he'd talk about us setting off for the stars.

01:56:44.000 It seems like there's this tension.

01:56:47.000 Part of us wants to go.

01:56:48.000 We all want to live in an old rustic house that's made of wood in a forest and cook on an open fire.

01:56:55.000 And yet, there's this other part of us that wants to live in these machinic buildings and be operated, you know, operating these highly complex technological machines.

01:57:06.000 And it's like, you know, which way?

01:57:08.000 You know, do we allow ourselves to be pulled back into the archaic, or do we push past and transcend and become post-human, you know, or post-biological?

01:57:20.000 And maybe that's kind of part of the game.

01:57:24.000 You know, are we going to be dragged back?

01:57:27.000 Which wouldn't be bad to be dragged back into that more.

01:57:30.000 You can imagine the bucolic life in a beautiful kind of forest scene with the nice old houses.

01:57:40.000 And we all love that, right?

01:57:43.000 We all kind of yearn for that, I think.

01:57:46.000 I mean, I do.

01:57:47.000 I think, oh, there's part of me that wants to live in Tokyo, where I do now, and this incredibly cyberpunk technological city that seems like it's been secreted out of metal and glass, an entirely unnatural structure that's kind of emerges from human intelligence.

01:58:08.000 I mean, that's a weird thing, but in a way, these structures that we see, they seem entirely non-human.

01:58:16.000 It's like we are tapping into something else, something non-human, and we can't help ourselves.

01:58:25.000 And our cities that we build and these highly complex technological and computerized machines feel like they are being kind of secreted by our intelligence and pulled out of the earth.

01:58:41.000 Maybe that's why they're all so similar, too, right?

01:58:44.000 Yeah.

01:58:44.000 They're similar and they differ, obviously, in the way they look, but they're similar in the structure and they're similar in the density.

01:58:51.000 You know, when you get, I mean, there's enormous ones.

01:58:54.000 Like, I was watching this video of the largest city in the world, which I believe is in China.

01:58:59.000 What is the largest?

01:59:01.000 Run that into perplexity.

01:59:02.000 What's the largest city in the world?

01:59:04.000 I hope they're going to say Tokyo.

01:59:05.000 I thought it was Tokyo.

01:59:06.000 Greater Tokyo.

01:59:08.000 I don't know.

01:59:09.000 The most populated, I think.

01:59:10.000 Populated.

01:59:11.000 When I say largest, I should probably say the most populated.

01:59:14.000 I think they were saying it's 36 million people.

01:59:17.000 Okay.

01:59:18.000 Tokyo is more.

01:59:19.000 Yeah.

01:59:19.000 Is it?

01:59:20.000 Tokyo is more than 36 million?

01:59:21.000 I looked it up the other day, just I was curious.

01:59:24.000 37 or 40 million of the greater Tokyo area.

01:59:27.000 Yeah.

01:59:27.000 Interesting.

01:59:28.000 That's crazy.

01:59:30.000 So Tokyo's number one?

01:59:31.000 Okay.

01:59:31.000 There you go.

01:59:32.000 So this was probably the most populated in China.

01:59:35.000 Well, okay, so that's followed by Delhi, India, which is 34, rather, 34,665,600 people.

01:59:47.000 How do they know it's just 600?

01:59:49.000 There's probably a few people snuck in there that they don't know about.

01:59:51.000 Can't say that.

01:59:52.000 Don't round that out.

01:59:55.000 And then there's Shanghai.

01:59:56.000 Well, it wasn't Shanghai.

01:59:57.000 It was another city in China that they were talking about.

02:00:00.000 Maybe they just exaggerated the numbers.

02:00:02.000 Okay, so Tokyo is a perfect example then.

02:00:04.000 Like, it's weird how New York City, Tokyo, and to some extent, LA, although LA is just so fucked up, like the downtown is the most useless part of LA.

02:00:14.000 It's really weird.

02:00:15.000 Like downtown, have you been to LA?

02:00:17.000 I've been a couple of times, but I've not really explored downtown.

02:00:20.000 Nobody goes downtown.

02:00:21.000 Okay.

02:00:22.000 Okay, downtown is like they tried to revive downtown for a while before the pandemic and then everybody gave up.

02:00:28.000 But downtown, it's not like there's a bunch of like, like everybody has an apartment downtown.

02:00:34.000 No, most people live in the other areas of LA.

02:00:38.000 And downtown is like there's some banks and some businesses, but there's also Skid Row.

02:00:43.000 Downtown is crazy.

02:00:44.000 It's like a really fucked up place.

02:00:46.000 A lot of abandoned buildings.

02:00:48.000 Like downtown is where we did a lot of Fear Factor stunts back in the day because we can get an abandoned warehouse to set up like a set there and do the show.

02:00:56.000 So it's a very weird place.

02:00:59.000 It's not like a no, like downtown Chicago is booming.

02:01:02.000 You know, it's downtown Chicago, downtown New York City.

02:01:05.000 Like, whoa, you're in Manhattan.

02:01:06.000 This is crazy.

02:01:07.000 Downtown LA is not like that because LA's broken.

02:01:10.000 So when you go to LA, it's like downtown is like the most bizarre version of a downtown ever.

02:01:17.000 Nobody wants to be there.

02:01:18.000 Yeah.

02:01:19.000 Poor city design, I guess.

02:01:21.000 I don't know what it is.

02:01:23.000 I think some of it has to do with what they did when they made Skid Row.

02:01:29.000 So Skid Row is an entirely constructed thing.

02:01:32.000 And what they did was all the vagrants in Beverly Hills and in Hollywood, like, listen, get the fuck out of here.

02:01:38.000 You pick them up, you take them, throw them in the wagon, bring them to Skid Row, and then keep them there.

02:01:43.000 Don't let them leave.

02:01:44.000 Just contain them in an area.

02:01:46.000 And that's essentially what they did.

02:01:47.000 There's a documentary on that hotel.

02:01:49.000 What is that hotel again, Jeremy?

02:01:50.000 Cecil Hotel.

02:01:51.000 Cecil Hotel, where it talks about Skid Row itself.

02:01:55.000 Like, the documentary is about this girl who was, they thought that she was missing, that someone had kidnapped her or something, but she was schizophrenic.

02:02:04.000 She got off her medication and she apparently climbed into the water cistern and drowned.

02:02:09.000 But the point of the documentary was not just that.

02:02:12.000 It's like this lady came here not knowing what downtown was.

02:02:16.000 And so she got a room at the hotel downtown thinking, oh, get a nice room at a hotel downtown.

02:02:20.000 But like, it's fucking zombie boulevard.

02:02:23.000 It's crazy.

02:02:24.000 Show him what Skid Row looks like.

02:02:28.000 Show him a video of what Skid Row looks like.

02:02:31.000 Now, when we were filming Fear Factor, this was like 2004-ish, something like that.

02:02:37.000 I accidentally drove through Skid Row.

02:02:40.000 I drove to Skid Row.

02:02:42.000 I was driving home.

02:02:43.000 Back then, I think I probably had navigation on my car, but it probably sucked.

02:02:50.000 Or I wasn't paying attention to it.

02:02:51.000 And this is Skid Row.

02:02:52.000 Skid Row's nuts.

02:02:54.000 This is close up.

02:02:56.000 When you have like a lot, like when you see it from a distance, you get a chance to see how completely insane it is.

02:03:03.000 When we were filming, there was another Fear Factor we filmed there where one of the contestants was like, look, they're smoking crack.

02:03:09.000 And we looked down.

02:03:10.000 And there's people, we were like on a rooftop or something.

02:03:12.000 And then we looked down.

02:03:13.000 People were smoking crack right in front of us.

02:03:14.000 Right on the street.

02:03:15.000 Like chaos.

02:03:17.000 Like Skid Row is nuts.

02:03:18.000 And this is not even where the tents are set up.

02:03:22.000 Where the tents are set up, it's the craziest thing you've ever seen.

02:03:25.000 It's like these shanty villages that go on for blocks and blocks where there's no cars going through. 1.00

02:03:33.000 The streets are filled with homeless people.

02:03:35.000 Just everyone's on drugs.

02:03:38.000 And there's just tents everywhere.

02:03:40.000 And you're like, what a failure of society.

02:03:43.000 What a failure of society that you've allowed this to reach the level that it's at now.

02:03:49.000 That's LA.

02:03:50.000 Have you been to Tokyo?

02:03:51.000 Yes, I have.

02:03:52.000 Yeah.

02:03:52.000 I mean, Tokyo is the complete opposite.

02:03:54.000 Complete opposite.

02:03:55.000 Super clean, very orderly.

02:03:57.000 People are very polite.

02:03:58.000 Even though there's so many people on the street, everybody sort of navigates, moves around each other in a very polite manner.

02:04:04.000 Beautiful architecture.

02:04:06.000 It's stunning, like cyberpunk, as you said, very blade runner-esque.

02:04:11.000 You're like, yo.

02:04:13.000 I was only there for one day for the UFC.

02:04:15.000 So I didn't spend a lot of time there, but I had dinner there and I hung out there for a little bit.

02:04:20.000 I was like, this is crazy.

02:04:21.000 Really shows you that it is possible to have a very large, densely populated city that is safe and clean and functioning.

02:04:29.000 It doesn't have to be.

02:04:30.000 People say, oh, you know, I got robbed.

02:04:32.000 It's just part of being in a big city, or I was stabbed last night, or my car was broken into.

02:04:37.000 And it's like, this is just what happens when you live in a big city, man.

02:04:40.000 And it's like, actually, no, it is possible to have safe and clean.

02:04:45.000 And Tokyo is fascinating because it's an example of what's often called an emergent city.

02:04:51.000 They don't have this very strict zoning where, oh, here it's got to be offices, here it's got to be houses, here it's got to be small businesses or anything like that.

02:04:59.000 It's like it's all mixed together and different kind of neighborhoods kind of just emerge.

02:05:05.000 You know, there's a knife district, for example.

02:05:08.000 People who sell knives, they all gather together.

02:05:10.000 There's a bookshop district.

02:05:12.000 There's, you know, districts for all different things.

02:05:16.000 Not because someone has decided, oh, only bookshops can be here.

02:05:20.000 It's just that they tend to gather together.

02:05:22.000 And so you walk around Tokyo and you might, you'll find yourself in some quiet alley and you'll have little houses and then you'll have a little store, often very, very tiny stores that have been perhaps operating for decades.

02:05:36.000 And in the UK or I guess in the States as well, they would have gone under decades ago.

02:05:43.000 You know, the city would have just crushed them.

02:05:46.000 But it seems very easy in Tokyo to kind of open a small, if you have a house and you own it in Tokyo, you can, by law, you can convert the first floor into a store.

02:05:58.000 You'll get these little old ladies who will, they bought their house decades ago, they're retired, and they think, oh, what can I do with my time? 0.99

02:06:06.000 I know, I'll open a cafe.

02:06:08.000 And they say they open a little cafe.

02:06:09.000 Hardly anyone goes, maybe.

02:06:11.000 It might be, it could be in the countryside, it could be on the outskirts or whatever, but it doesn't matter because they own it and they're not being raped by taxes and stuff and all this kind of red tape.

02:06:23.000 They don't have to deal with it.

02:06:24.000 So they just have this lovely little cafe, entirely unique.

02:06:27.000 They might fill it with things they're interested in.

02:06:29.000 So it's a completely unique thing that you can go in and she'll serve you tea and maybe the cakes that she made this morning.

02:06:38.000 And there are thousands of these throughout Tokyo.

02:06:41.000 Not just little old ladies, but young people who own, who will rent very cheaply. 0.95

02:06:46.000 They have these, have you seen in Tokyo when you see the buildings, you often see these neon signs coming down the sides of the building?

02:06:56.000 These are called zakyo, which is basically miscellaneous use buildings.

02:07:00.000 And what they are is just very tall buildings.

02:07:04.000 And each floor you will have some kind of business.

02:07:08.000 It could be anything.

02:07:10.000 It's often bars or pool rooms or anything you want, little restaurant, anything like this.

02:07:18.000 And of course they don't have the frontage on the ground floor.

02:07:23.000 And so they instead will put their sign, neon sign, telling you what they are down the side of the building.

02:07:32.000 And that's what gives Tokyo that unique look is because it's all of these Zakyo buildings. 1.00

02:07:38.000 And sometimes if you go, a friend took me to this bar.

02:07:43.000 Well, it was like a building.

02:07:45.000 It was in Kabukicho, which is right in the center of Tokyo.

02:07:51.000 And it was on a side street, and there was this tall building, grey building.

02:07:55.000 You would never look at it, no signage or anything.

02:07:57.000 And you look at the elevator, when you go into the elevator, on each floor, there's like a name of a business, you know, Top Hat, Eight Ball, Enigma.

02:08:08.000 You've no idea what these are.

02:08:09.000 They're not on Google Maps, right?

02:08:12.000 So, and he just pressed the button for the eighth floor, he went up, and it was just this little bar run by this one guy.

02:08:19.000 And it was, you know, it played darts and had a drink.

02:08:22.000 And a few people came in, not many, because most people, 99.9% of the population of Tokyo, have no idea that this bar exists, nor could they ever know.

02:08:33.000 It's not on Google Maps.

02:08:34.000 There's no reviews of it.

02:08:36.000 It doesn't exist.

02:08:37.000 And I couldn't find it again.

02:08:39.000 Unless I call my friend and say, take me there.

02:08:41.000 I can never go to that bar again, ever, because I don't know where it is.

02:08:46.000 And there's thousands of these.

02:08:48.000 That sounds amazing.

02:08:49.000 I want to go right now.

02:08:49.000 Yeah.

02:08:51.000 But you've got to take a risk because if you just go, if you don't know, right?

02:08:55.000 And you just press the button, you could be some weird girl's bar, you know, host bar, you know, and they kind of rip you off and stuff.

02:09:01.000 There's a lot of danger in going to these places.

02:09:03.000 Well, there's a lot of yakuza, right? 0.74

02:09:05.000 There's a Yara Yakuza in Kabukicho.

02:09:07.000 Yeah, you've got to be very careful because they will drug you and then they will take you to a cash machine and take your liver.

02:09:15.000 There's a lot of crazy stories.

02:09:19.000 When you see that and you live like that, what keeps the rest of the world from having a city like that?

02:09:28.000 That's a really good question.

02:09:30.000 And I don't want to get, well, I don't know, but I think culture is everything.

02:09:35.000 Obviously, a city is all about the people.

02:09:37.000 Of course, you've got to have the infrastructure and you've got to have, it's got to be properly funded.

02:09:41.000 But you also need the people that are going to take care of it.

02:09:45.000 If people are trashing it and don't have respect for the city, then obviously it's going to fall apart.

02:09:50.000 But it's all about the culture.

02:09:52.000 Japan is fascinating.

02:09:55.000 The culture, I always say to people, when you go to Japan, you have to switch your mindset.

02:10:01.000 So normally, as a Westerner, I'm thinking about me.

02:10:04.000 When I'm out in public, I'm thinking about me.

02:10:06.000 What do I want to do?

02:10:08.000 Where do I want to go?

02:10:09.000 It's all me.

02:10:09.000 In Japan, you flip that.

02:10:11.000 It's about you should, the first thing on your mind should be everybody else.

02:10:16.000 When you hear Japanese people talk about people who cause problems in cities, they use this word meewaku, which means often translated as nuisance.

02:10:27.000 So people who come from the West, often America, but not just America.

02:10:33.000 I'm not blaming everything on Americans, but it is often. 0.99

02:10:36.000 And they come with their own, you know, they're the main character, this kind of main character syndrome.

02:10:42.000 So they, you know, they're talking.

02:10:43.000 They often, you see these Instagram videos of people on the metro on the train, and they go, it's so quiet.

02:10:50.000 You know, nobody's talking or nobody's kind of listening to music.

02:10:53.000 And that's because they're always thinking about the people around them.

02:10:59.000 They are thinking, you know, am I obstructing anyone?

02:11:02.000 Am I getting in anyone's way?

02:11:03.000 Am I annoying anyone?

02:11:04.000 Am I making anyone feel uncomfortable?

02:11:07.000 You're always thinking about those around you.

02:11:09.000 And that leads to this very respectful, polite society where you can have 40, you know, 37 million people, whatever it is, crammed together in this relatively small area of land and they're not killing each other.

02:11:23.000 They learn.

02:11:24.000 I was told, I'm not sure if this is true, but it's kind of a, I don't know if it's a myth, but Japan is very mountainous.

02:11:32.000 And so back in the old days, villages were isolated.

02:11:37.000 So when you lived in a village, to get to the next village, you have to climb a mountain, right?

02:11:42.000 So you're trapped in your village.

02:11:45.000 And so you have to learn to get along with the people around you.

02:11:48.000 You can't run away.

02:11:50.000 And so the Japanese culture has developed in the sense that you always have to be aware of the people around you.

02:11:59.000 And that's been passed down into the modern age.

02:12:03.000 And that the culture is always one of thinking about others and respect from an early age.

02:12:11.000 That's what's so fascinating.

02:12:12.000 I was like, how come no one else figured that out?

02:12:15.000 And also what's really strange is Japan itself right now is in the midst of population collapse.

02:12:20.000 Yeah.

02:12:21.000 Sadly.

02:12:22.000 So that's what sucks.

02:12:23.000 It's like you could lose this.

02:12:25.000 And it could be overwhelmed by the West.

02:12:27.000 Like because of the fact that they aren't having enough people to reproduce successfully to maintain their population, it could just be taken over, like in terms of immigration.

02:12:38.000 Like Americans could just move there and Europeans can move there. 0.75

02:12:42.000 And then all the beautiful aspects of this very interesting and very unique culture could go away.

02:12:49.000 And they are really concerned about that.

02:12:53.000 When I first arrived in Japan, like 10 years ago, I worked at a university and I stood on campus outside just talking to someone.

02:13:00.000 And I saw a couple of, like, they look like high school students, probably on a campus visit, out of the corner of my eye, Japanese high school students.

02:13:09.000 And they caught my eye.

02:13:11.000 They saw that I was looking at them.

02:13:13.000 And as soon as that happened, they both, like on a dime, stopped and bowed to me.

02:13:20.000 And I thought, wow, we're not in Kansas anymore.

02:13:24.000 You know, and having that teaching children about respect from a very, and training them, you know, the idea of respect your elders.

02:13:33.000 This is, you know, we have this in the West as well, but we kind of lost it a little bit.

02:13:37.000 And it's kind of drilled into them about respecting the people around you and respecting people who are older than you.

02:13:43.000 And this probably goes back to the samurai, you know, these hierarchies.

02:13:46.000 Yes, I'm sure.

02:13:48.000 I'm sure.

02:13:50.000 And then you think about how crazy feudal Japan was and that it eventually evolves to what it is now, this incredibly safe society.

02:14:00.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:14:00.000 Which is really kind of nuts.

02:14:02.000 Do you think about one of the most warlike cultures of all time?

02:14:05.000 The culture that fought off the Mongols successfully. 0.96

02:14:08.000 Pretty nuts.

02:14:09.000 Yeah, yeah, it is.

02:14:11.000 But you see it.

02:14:12.000 You see the remnants of that kind of ancient societal structure.

02:14:18.000 Even in the language, when you learn Japanese, there are several levels of politeness.

02:14:25.000 Right?

02:14:26.000 You have, so it's really complicated, but you have something called keigo, which is kind of formal or polite speech.

02:14:33.000 And if you are talking to, if you're lower down and you're talking to someone above you, you have to speak in a different, even the words, the verbs are different.

02:14:42.000 The words are different.

02:14:43.000 And if you're speaking about them, then you have to use what's called honorific.

02:14:49.000 You're elevating them.

02:14:50.000 If you're talking about someone higher up, you have to elevate them.

02:14:54.000 Use honorific language.

02:14:55.000 If you're talking about yourself to someone who's higher up, you use humble language.

02:15:00.000 So you lower yourself down.

02:15:03.000 So it's very difficult.

02:15:06.000 I still kind of struggle with it.

02:15:09.000 And it actually causes some problems because it's very difficult for junior people to communicate with senior people, to communicate honestly at least.

02:15:23.000 So they just get a lot of it, like, yes, men, yes, I agree.

02:15:26.000 You know, yes, I agree with that.

02:15:28.000 You're kind of agreeing with everything that the senior person says.

02:15:31.000 And that's not a way to make good decisions, is by just agreeing.

02:15:35.000 And so they have something called nomunication.

02:15:40.000 So this is formed from two words, communication, of course, plus nomu, which is the Japanese word to drink.

02:15:47.000 And they're talking about alcohol.

02:15:49.000 So Japan, in Japan, alcohol is king.

02:15:54.000 And society is actually lubricated by alcohol and functions because of alcohol.

02:15:59.000 They have things called, in Japanese companies, they have these kind of semi-obligatory, you know, semi-compulsory events called nomikai, which basically translates as drink meetings.

02:16:13.000 Oh, boy.

02:16:14.000 Might have heard about these, and then basically the senior people and the more junior people all go together, they'll go to a bar with the express purpose of getting drunk.

02:16:23.000 Not just to like have a drink with your colleagues, but to actually get drunk, become intoxicated.

02:16:29.000 And that allows more free-flowing communication.

02:16:32.000 It allows you to, everyone is brought to the same kind of level.

02:16:36.000 This is non-munication.

02:16:37.000 And so it's facilitated by alcohol, communication facilitated by alcohol.

02:16:42.000 So it's a society that is dependent on alcohol in a strong way.

02:16:46.000 What is their approach to other drugs?

02:16:49.000 Like even casual jokes like marijuana and stuff like that, are they highly illegal over there?

02:16:54.000 Yeah, it's complicated, I would say.

02:16:57.000 It's weird because, okay, so when it comes to the law, people always say, oh, Japan, it's got the strictest drug laws in the world.

02:17:06.000 First of all, no, it hasn't.

02:17:07.000 Go to Singapore.

02:17:10.000 Settle down.

02:17:11.000 Settle down, yeah.

02:17:13.000 But when it comes to drugs, cannabis for probably for after the Second World War, when I think it was MacArthur that was drafting the Japanese Constitution and was basically controlling, I mean, it had, it was occupying Japan, of course, after the Second World War.

02:17:31.000 And America was in the what's that movie called?

02:17:37.000 That 1950s movie, Weed Madness, Reefer Madness.

02:17:40.000 Reefer Madness.

02:17:41.000 America was in the kind of reefer madness phase.

02:17:44.000 And they passed that on to the Japanese. 0.99

02:17:47.000 And the Japanese have never really gotten over it. 1.00

02:17:51.000 But, and then there's meth, of course.

02:17:53.000 I mean, meth came from Japan. 0.58

02:17:55.000 Meth was invented in Japan.

02:17:56.000 Right, it was used during the Second World War.

02:17:59.000 The kamikazes. 0.96

02:18:00.000 They actually used these little green tablets that were called storming tablets.

02:18:06.000 Oh, boy.

02:18:07.000 They were mixed with green tea and stamped with the crest of the emperor.

02:18:11.000 So they became like sacraments.

02:18:13.000 They would pop those.

02:18:13.000 Oh, my God.

02:18:15.000 Yeah.

02:18:15.000 Woo!

02:18:16.000 Yeah.

02:18:17.000 See how that worked out.

02:18:18.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:18:19.000 But then at the end of the Second World War, when they had stockpiles of this methamphetamine and it started to spilled out into the black market, basically, and large, very large numbers of people became addicted to meth.

02:18:33.000 And there were actually in Osaka in, I think, around 1954, I forget the exact year, but in one year, the police raided, I think, around 50 meth labs in one city, operated by one or two people, like mom-and-pop operation.

02:18:50.000 It's like breaking bad, right?

02:18:51.000 You know, like you imagine meth labs in Arizona or something now.

02:18:56.000 This was happening in Japan in the 1950s, and it scared the shit out of the Japanese government because they were a defeated nation.

02:19:03.000 They thought that it was the end of their civilization, and they thought that meth addiction was the symptom.

02:19:09.000 It was going to actually perhaps catalyze the end of the Japanese. 0.87

02:19:14.000 It was an existential threat to the Japanese civilization. 1.00

02:19:17.000 So they hit it hard legally.

02:19:20.000 And so now, when Japanese law, they're really focused on cannabis because of probably the American influence and meth.

02:19:30.000 But psychedelics, most people in Japan probably don't know much about.

02:19:34.000 There's a psychedelic subculture in Japan.

02:19:36.000 There are ayahuasca circles in Japan that operate in a grey area of the law.

02:19:40.000 It's not explicitly illegal.

02:19:42.000 It's discouraged, but it's not explicitly illegal.

02:19:46.000 I know people who import ayahuasca, raw ayahuasca drink from the Amazon and operate ayahuasca circles.

02:19:55.000 You didn't, did you do the DMTX experiments in Japan?

02:19:58.000 No.

02:19:59.000 Where did you do them?

02:20:00.000 So, okay, so we're going to get into DMTX.

02:20:02.000 Yeah.

02:20:03.000 Yeah.

02:20:04.000 So DMTX came from an idea that I had in 2015.

02:20:10.000 I work with Rick Strasman on this.

02:20:13.000 So DMT is kind of unusual.

02:20:19.000 It has these weird pharmacological peculiarities.

02:20:22.000 As I said before, it doesn't have subjective tolerance.

02:20:24.000 So Rick Strasman showed in the 90s that you can inject someone with DMT repeatedly and they have the same intensity effect at each time.

02:20:32.000 But it also has another kind of number of unique peculiarities.

02:20:37.000 Of course, it's very, very brief.

02:20:39.000 It enters the brain extremely rapidly.

02:20:41.000 It's metabolized rapidly and cleared very rapidly.

02:20:44.000 It had all of these pharmacological peculiarities.

02:20:47.000 And it occurred to me that these were precisely the characteristics you need of a drug that's used in anesthesiology.

02:20:57.000 So in anesthesiology, when they want to put you to sleep, make you unconscious, what they don't do, they don't just inject you with a drug and kind of hope that it keeps working whilst they've got you under the knife.

02:21:10.000 What they do is they use a very short-acting drug and they use an infusion machine which delivers the drug, the anesthetic drug, into your veins and goes to your brain and holds the brain level of the drug constant over time so that they can keep you in the anesthetized state unconscious for as long or short a period as they like.

02:21:31.000 And so it occurred to me that, well, DMT has the right drug properties.

02:21:37.000 It's almost like it's designed for that kind of technique called target-controlled intravenous infusion.

02:21:44.000 And so I thought, you know, if we start, if we take the DMT state seriously and we treat it as a new world to explore and intelligent beings with whom we can establish communicative relationships, then three minutes of a breakthrough trip is nowhere near enough.

02:22:05.000 And so I thought, well, let's take this technology from anesthesiology, target-controlled intravenous infusion, and let's repurpose it.

02:22:14.000 So instead of an anesthetic drug that's delivered by programmed infusion, we instead deliver DMT by programmed infusion and induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize their brain DMT levels.

02:22:31.000 So you can hold them in the DMT state for 30 minutes or potentially for several hours and have complete control in real time over the depth of the experience.

02:22:40.000 That was the idea.

02:22:41.000 So I worked with Rick Strasman.

02:22:43.000 I used his data, blood sampling data that he acquired in the 90s.

02:22:50.000 Fortunately, he had this old Excel file which he sent to me.

02:22:54.000 And I built this mathematical model of DMT's metabolism and distribution throughout the body.

02:23:00.000 And then we wrote a paper basically saying we think this should work.

02:23:04.000 We think we should be able to extend the DM and stabilize the DMT state for many hours.

02:23:09.000 But we didn't actually, it wasn't kind of human ready, so to speak.

02:23:13.000 And it actually took about five years before it was actually implemented in humans.

02:23:20.000 And that was actually done by the Imperial College London team.

02:23:23.000 So they were the, still are in a way, the leaders in psychedelic research.

02:23:29.000 And a guy called then a PhD student, I think, Chris Timmerman, worked to make this proof of principle model that myself and Rick Strasman had developed and get it human ready and actually test, you know, does it actually work?

02:23:46.000 Do the predictions that we had, myself and Rick Strasman, do they actually work in humans?

02:23:50.000 And they found out that in fact it does.

02:23:52.000 You can induce somebody into the DMT state and you can actually stabilize the experience.

02:23:58.000 So rather than just being a oh, Jamie, since I'm talking about this, I can show you actually what DMT trips or the kind of the time course of a DMT trip looks like over time.

02:24:16.000 So normally what happens is the blood level will rise very, very rapidly.

02:24:22.000 You inject some of the DMT, blood levels rise, they reach the brain and then almost immediately they start collapsing down again exponentially.

02:24:31.000 And that brief period when the brain levels are high is the breakthrough state.

02:24:36.000 However, if you when the brain DMT levels reach a kind of a peak, you then start an infusion.

02:24:42.000 You can basically compensate for the DMT that's being lost by metabolism.

02:24:46.000 It's a bit like if you have a bathtub full of water and you pull the plug, the water drains.

02:24:52.000 But if you turn on the taps, you can keep the level constant.

02:24:57.000 And so that's the infusion.

02:24:59.000 So you stabilize the state.

02:25:02.000 And our hope was that the actual experience itself, rather than that initial roller coaster phase that you get with DMT, where it's all very, very disorienting.

02:25:11.000 And he's like, you know, what's going on?

02:25:14.000 For most people, that's kind of it.

02:25:16.000 And then you're dragged back out again.

02:25:17.000 But our hope was that actually over time, if you stabilize the DMT in the brain, that it would actually stabilize the experience.

02:25:25.000 And then people can actually navigate and explore the space and even perform kind of experiments within the space.

02:25:34.000 And this is what's become known as DMTX.

02:25:40.000 And how was that?

02:25:42.000 What did they describe?

02:25:43.000 Well, so this first study that was done just a couple of years ago, as I said, by Imperial College London, it was really a pilot study.

02:25:52.000 They wanted to show that it worked and that it was safe, that it was tolerable, that people weren't going crazy, you know, that they could handle it, basically.

02:26:02.000 The very first person to do it was a guy I'm now working with.

02:26:07.000 I work for a non-profit called Nunautics out of Florida.

02:26:11.000 And we're very interested in designing experiments using DMTX to actually study the DMT space and the intelligences within them much more kind of formally.

02:26:24.000 And on the board, I work with a guy called Carl Smith, who was the very first person to undergo DMTX.

02:26:29.000 He was also the only person to complete, I think there was five sessions over several weeks.

02:26:34.000 He was the only one who handled it, so to speak.

02:26:38.000 What's his name?

02:26:39.000 Carl Smith.

02:26:40.000 Shout out to Carl.

02:26:41.000 Shout out to Carl Smith.

02:26:42.000 You fucking pioneer you.

02:26:45.000 But what's interesting is that as we hoped and predicted, the DMT state, it does stabilize.

02:26:52.000 It's like the brain is settling into constructing this alternate world model, interfacing with this intelligence.

02:27:00.000 And he found that as he went back every time, he was interacting with the same entities.

02:27:07.000 And they became aware of the fact that he was coming back so often.

02:27:11.000 And they were like, you know, what are you, not you again?

02:27:14.000 You know, you're back.

02:27:17.000 And one time they were scanning him, the Imperial team, in like a, I think like an MRI machine or something.

02:27:23.000 And the entities were gathered.

02:27:25.000 All the entities, he said, as soon as they started scanning me in the quote-unquote real world, the entities were gathered and they seemed like curious or confused.

02:27:36.000 Like, well, what are they doing?

02:27:38.000 It's like, maybe it's the signal or something, or they were like, you know, we're the ones that normally do the scanning.

02:27:38.000 Yeah, right.

02:27:44.000 You know, we're supposed to scan you.

02:27:46.000 You know, what's going on here?

02:27:47.000 So there's this, as I said, it was just a pilot study, but there's a real taste that you can enter into these kind of relationships with these entities.

02:28:00.000 And actually, we, as I said, I work for this, I'm a board member of this non-profit called New Nautics.

02:28:08.000 And our vision is really to design experiments with DMTX.

02:28:13.000 Like, what does a research organization look like that isn't simply trying to explain away DMT, explain it, but actually says, okay, this is an uncharted land that's fascinating, that's inordinately complex and vast and filled with intelligences.

02:28:30.000 Let's treat it like that as explorers.

02:28:33.000 What does a research organization aimed at studying that look like?

02:28:39.000 And we imagine, I imagine that you're not just sending, for example, let's take the structure of the DMT space, right?

02:28:49.000 It's this highly complex, geometrically and topologically strange domain.

02:28:57.000 So we send in people who are experts, who are mathematicians.

02:29:00.000 We send in a mathematician to study the topology of the space, to study how the space is structured.

02:29:06.000 The entities, they often try to communicate.

02:29:09.000 They use strange symbols and strange code.

02:29:12.000 Oh, let's send in a linguist who can study their language.

02:29:18.000 And so you're sending in people with their own specialities to actually formally study the DMT space.

02:29:27.000 And what's even better is we now have a venue for this.

02:29:30.000 So we're actually, we have a I work with a company called Ellus.

02:29:35.000 We have a special license from a country in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

02:29:43.000 And we are setting up a retreat center, stroke research center, to provide DMTX that is 100% legal, that is safe.

02:29:56.000 You've got anesthesiologists, psychiatrists, and nurses, a perfect setting that's also being designed in part by Carl Smith as well, that allows you to perform these kind of research studies aimed at analysing and studying the DMT space.

02:30:16.000 But even better is it's also going to be open to anyone.

02:30:19.000 So if you think about Rick St. Prepare for the freaks.

02:30:23.000 Prepare for the freaks.

02:30:24.000 But like, you know, in the 90s, Rick Strasman, he did the biggest study of its kind.

02:30:29.000 He only had 60 people.

02:30:31.000 So you've got 60 people worth the trip report.

02:30:33.000 What happens if you can bring in 300, 400, 500 people a year?

02:30:38.000 How will you vet people to make sure they're not crazy before they do it?

02:30:40.000 There will be a screening process, an initial screening process, and then ultimately you would have a psychiatrist who would sign them off.

02:30:49.000 So it's not just anyone, but anyone can, in theory, they can sign up.

02:30:52.000 They can go to elusismind.com and they can put their name down and sign up to fly to this island, Beckway, I think it's called, and in a beautiful, perfect setting, spend a week on the island and undergoing a number of DMTX sessions and being able to explore this world using the DMTX technology.

02:31:17.000 And of course, they will all be providing trip reports.

02:31:20.000 So you start to amass a vast data set of highly controlled, verified, you know, this isn't like posting online where you don't know what drugs they've taken, really.

02:31:32.000 It's like you know exactly what they've taken.

02:31:35.000 It's pure pharmaceutical grade DMT and they will generate this vast data set that could be used.

02:31:44.000 We're also working to develop an AI-powered model that would take in this verbal data and in real time generate imagery.

02:31:57.000 So someone can talk to the model, the AI model, and it will generate the image.

02:32:02.000 And then you say, oh, no, this isn't quite right.

02:32:04.000 needs to be more like this and so you're converging on the you're making a map of the territory you're making a map of the territory And so you end up with this vast library, not just of textual trip reports, but also of imagery.

02:32:19.000 And this is available now?

02:32:21.000 It's opening.

02:32:23.000 We're building it.

02:32:23.000 It's being developed now.

02:32:25.000 It should be open officially on March 1st next year.

02:32:28.000 So go to elucismind.com.

02:32:31.000 You can sign up.

02:32:31.000 That's soon.

02:32:32.000 Soon, yeah.

02:32:33.000 Just enough time for people to prepare.

02:32:34.000 Yeah.

02:32:35.000 And it will be the first.

02:32:37.000 I mean, it's going to be the first of its kind.

02:32:38.000 You know, a totally legal, safe, medically supervised location where people can endure, I say enjoy, can experience DMT.

02:32:48.000 That's the thing about these ancient civilizations, whether it's Egypt or whether it's ancient Greece where Ulysses was from.

02:33:00.000 They all were using psychedelics.

02:33:03.000 There's evidence of psychedelics in all of these ancient civilizations.

02:33:06.000 It's just our completely twisted sick society that's decided that the most beneficial drugs should be the ones that are the most illegal.

02:33:16.000 Yep.

02:33:17.000 And you lump them in with the ones that destroy lives.

02:33:20.000 They're categorized with meth, which is completely insane and the sign of a twisted sick culture.

02:33:28.000 It's the sign of what McKenna was talking about with the chaos, the chaos of a species that's preparing to leave for the stars.

02:33:37.000 Yeah, I think so.

02:33:39.000 But things are changing.

02:33:40.000 I mean, you do see positive changes.

02:33:42.000 The internet.

02:33:42.000 The attitude to the psychedelics.

02:33:45.000 People understand it now.

02:33:46.000 And I think there's also a giant shift towards people on the right accepting it because so many soldiers have come back from war and used it and had great benefits.

02:33:58.000 Yeah, precisely.

02:33:59.000 So perhaps things aren't as bad as...

02:34:02.000 Things in some ways are getting better.

02:34:05.000 They're getting worse in other ways, but they're getting better in other ways.

02:34:07.000 They're moving, right?

02:34:08.000 Yeah, that's it.

02:34:09.000 And I think you need bad in order to inspire good.

02:34:12.000 That's unfortunate, but I think that's just historically, that's always been the way that we figure things out.

02:34:18.000 Yeah, I agree.

02:34:19.000 Andrew, so much fun.

02:34:21.000 I really enjoy this.

02:34:22.000 Let's do it again.

02:34:23.000 Let's do it again when the place is open.

02:34:25.000 And make sure you get some trip reports.

02:34:28.000 Are you interested in doing DMT?

02:34:29.000 Absolutely.

02:34:30.000 Allegedly.

02:34:31.000 We'll talk off air.

02:34:33.000 But this book that you wrote is available now, Death by Astonishment.

02:34:38.000 Is it in audio form as well?

02:34:39.000 Yeah, read by myself.

02:34:41.000 Beautiful.

02:34:42.000 You've got a great voice for it.

02:34:43.000 Perfect.

02:34:44.000 I'm so happy that you read.

02:34:45.000 I'd love when authors read their own work.

02:34:47.000 It's so important, I think.

02:34:48.000 They wanted to get an actor actors.

02:34:51.000 Because I was in Tokyo.

02:34:52.000 I said no, no, no, no.

02:34:53.000 He gets some weirdo.

02:34:54.000 He doesn't know what he's talking about.

02:34:55.000 Exactly.

02:34:56.000 Yeah, no, you need you.

02:34:58.000 Thank you very much, man.

02:34:59.000 It was really fun.

02:35:00.000 I enjoyed it.

02:35:01.000 My pleasure.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 30, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2403 - Andrew Gallimore

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