In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and writer joins me to talk about his new book, DMT: The Strangeest Drug in the World, and why it s one of the most fascinating things he s ever written.
00:01:44.000It had this interview with this bearded, cheeky-looking bearded fellow on the back called Terence McKenna.
00:01:49.000And 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.
00:02:11.000I mean, it sounded ridiculous, but I was kind of, I was hooked.
00:02:51.000Yeah, just kind of trying to find out as much as I could about this.
00:02:54.000And that was what triggered my decision to study chemistry and pharmacology.
00:02:59.000My 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.
00:03:17.000Your entire world is obliterated and replaced with one that is completely alien, that has no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world.
00:03:55.000What 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?
00:05:11.000And 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.
00:05:24.000And I thought, before I took it, I thought I kind of knew what to expect.
00:05:29.000I mean, I'd listened to all the Terence McKenna lectures I could find.
00:06:55.000This is what I need to get to grips with.
00:06:58.000It 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.
00:07:20.000It 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.
00:07:34.000And then when you come back, you're like, what am I doing the way I talk?
00:07:39.000Like, what is my, what's my purpose of interacting with people?
00:07:43.000Like, 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.
00:08:03.000Like 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.
00:08:28.000And you come back and you go, God, this is so weird.
00:08:30.000Yeah, 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.
00:08:43.000All of that is completely kind of extirpated in an instant.
00:08:48.000And you realize actually we don't have a fucking clue about the way things really are.
00:08:58.000Whether 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.
00:09:12.000So you've done some legitimate studies with DMT.
00:09:20.000I 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.
00:09:43.000So 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.
00:09:52.000So, you know, if you want to understand DMT, we kind of have to start with the basic observation.
00:09:59.000You know, before you take DMT, you are experiencing a world, right?
00:10:05.000Whenever you're awake and conscious, you're experiencing a world, the normal waking world.
00:10:09.000This is the world that's kind of familiar to us.
00:10:11.000And you take DMT, that world is transformed.
00:10:16.000It's obliterated and it's replaced with one that is altogether stranger, shall we say.
00:10:24.000And 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.
00:10:35.000And you can't do that unless you have a decent understanding of the normal waking world.
00:10:48.000It's an interface generated by your brain.
00:10:51.000So you have this world-building machinery on the outer layer of your brain called the cortex.
00:10:58.000And this is generating your world all the time.
00:11:04.000All the features of the world that you're experiencing are represented within the cortex.
00:11:12.000And that applies whether you are just normal waking life, it applies in dreaming, it even applies in the psychedelic state.
00:11:19.000The world you experience is always constructed as a model by the brain.
00:11:25.000And so what that means is that psychedelics, what they're doing is they're perturbing the brain.
00:11:31.000They're manipulating the brain and altering that model.
00:11:36.000Now, 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.
00:11:51.000And so, this is a, it's called an excitatory receptor.
00:11:54.000It 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.
00:12:06.000You get this kind of loosening up of the world model that your brain is constructing.
00:12:12.000So, the walls start to breathe, objects seem to kind of change their identity, everything becomes more fluid and dynamic.
00:12:21.000And if you put someone into an MRI machine, for example, you can actually see that.
00:12:26.000In the normal waking state, you can see the neural activity.
00:12:29.000It's dynamic, but it's kind of organized and well-orchestrated.
00:12:35.000You give someone psilocybin, let's say, or LSD, and you start to see the activity becoming sort of more random and fluid.
00:12:44.000So, 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.
00:12:57.000But then, with DMT, something remarkable happens.
00:13:01.000In 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.
00:13:19.000So, 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.
00:13:27.000So, the brain is effectively constructing an entirely different model of reality.
00:13:34.000It'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.
00:13:44.000When you say constructing, why do you use that term?
00:13:47.000Why do you use the brain as constructing?
00:13:51.000Because 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?
00:14:01.000So, light information comes through the eyes, the retina, and it stimulates the very back of the brain.
00:14:37.000It's very noisy, it's very messy, it's incredibly dynamic, doesn't make any sense.
00:14:42.000And 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.
00:14:55.000So, it's looking for saying, oh, those lines kind of could be a triangle, or this could be a circle.
00:15:01.000It's trying to find patterns to try generate order from this messy level in V1.
00:15:14.000So, the earliest evidence came from one of the earliest forms of evidence came from a guy called Wilder Penfield.
00:15:23.000Are 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.
00:15:40.000The idea being that it would kind of cure someone's epilepsy.
00:15:44.000But before he could do that, of course, he needed to make sure that he wasn't removing important parts for someone's function.
00:15:51.000So, 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.
00:16:01.000And then he would zap different parts of their brain and say, you know, what's happening?
00:16:40.000And 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.
00:16:55.000But then he would move forward to kind of higher levels that we know now are kind of high levels.
00:17:01.000And then they'd say, oh, I see triangles or I see an orange circle, things like this.
00:17:06.000And then he'd keep going higher and higher.
00:17:09.000And then they'd say, oh, I see people or I see cops and robbers.
00:17:13.000And then right at the top, you reach an area called the hippocampus, which you may have heard of, involved in memory.
00:17:21.000And 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
00:17:50.000like this so you have these levels of the cortex that go from very simple
00:17:59.000kind 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
00:18:29.000it 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
00:18:57.000So the dream world is built from exactly the same stuff as the normal waking world.
00:19:29.000But it was a guy who was instructing how to lucid dream.
00:19:36.000That 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?
00:20:49.000But now there's actually a simpler way of that kind of reality tests.
00:20:54.000A 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?
00:21:08.000Because 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.
00:21:19.000So your brain can construct a high-level model of a cell phone quite easily.
00:21:24.000But all of the fine details of how it functions, that's all represented at the lowest level of the cortex.
00:21:32.000That's really dependent on sensory inputs.
00:21:34.000So you can dream of having your mobile phone in your hand and doing things with it.
00:21:39.000But as soon as you try to do something with it, your brain has to kind of construct that function.
00:21:48.000And it can't do it unless it has access to sensory inputs.
00:21:52.000And so that's how you can test if you're lucid dreaming.
00:21:55.000Yeah, which is why the DMT state is so fascinating, is because it's nothing like the dream state.
00:22:02.000People say that perhaps DMT is released when you're dreaming and that it actually triggers.
00:22:13.000There'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.
00:22:30.000But when you analyze the phenomenology, the actual experience of DMT, it's nothing like dreaming.
00:22:39.000Dreaming 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.
00:22:49.000So 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.
00:23:09.000So dreaming is more like a selective simulation of the waking world.
00:23:16.000Because your brain, from the moment you were born, your brain was learning to construct the world as a model of the environment.
00:23:23.000This world is the only world that your brain knows how to build or should know how to build.
00:23:30.000And yet when you introduce this molecule, dimethyltryptamine, into the brain, the brain suddenly starts constructing a world it never learned to construct.
00:23:40.000It's like the brain is speaking a language it never learned to speak and doing so flawlessly.
00:23:47.000These worlds are of beautiful crystalline clarity, perfectly finessed, staggeringly complex narrative complexity that I think is very difficult to explain.
00:24:03.000There'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.
00:24:22.000That'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.
00:24:43.000I always say you don't break through into the DMT world.
00:24:46.000The DMT world breaks through into you.
00:24:48.000It's like this intelligent agent has commandeered your neural machinery, the world-building machinery of your brain, and is directing everything that you see.
00:25:15.000Not that you're just observing reality.
00:25:18.000No, 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.
00:25:32.000The brain must actively construct a model of the environment.
00:25:41.000And it is constantly using that model to make predictions about the way that kind of predictions about the evolution of sensory information.
00:25:54.000It's constantly saying, okay, if this model that I'm currently using is good, then this should happen next.
00:26:02.000This is the pattern of sensory information that I should receive next.
00:26:05.000So 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.
00:26:18.000Your brain has a model of the water, and it is using that to make predictions.
00:26:23.000And 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.
00:26:43.000So you never have direct access to the world or to the environment, should I say.
00:26:48.000You only have direct access to this model that your brain is constructing.
00:27:02.000If 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.
00:27:13.000We're going to be like, oh, you guys live in a totally different fucking world.
00:27:16.000No wonder why you think we should be communists.
00:27:23.000I 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.
00:27:38.000But 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.
00:27:48.000I mean, yeah, I mean, their brain, the structure of their brain, the organization of their neural networks, and it's all different in everyone.
00:28:24.000So 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.
00:28:35.000You don't have the tools to use a calculator.
00:29:42.000Yeah, so the original was with Margaret Thatcher.
00:29:45.000Let's explain it to people that are just listening because there's still quite a lot of people.
00:29:48.000So this is called the Thatcher effect.
00:29:50.000So 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.
00:30:00.000And as I said, it's constructed over a hierarchy.
00:30:02.000So you have the overall idea, the overall concept of Margaret Thatcher, right?
00:30:42.000So 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?
00:30:57.000And so this looks, there's something wrong with the image, clearly.
00:31:02.000But it looks like Margaret Thatcher upsets.
00:31:03.000It 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.
00:31:12.000But 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.
00:32:02.000I think at least a couple of decades old.
00:32:04.000It's so funny that they figured that out.
00:32:07.000That's a great insight into how the mind works.
00:32:10.000Because 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.
00:32:19.000That's what's so weird about the third image.
00:32:22.000Because the third image really looks psychotic.
00:32:24.000Like 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.
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00:34:24.000Well, so I think the problem is, as I said, is that, yes, it's possible biochemically.
00:34:34.000Now, the pineal gland is what people often refer to, right?
00:34:39.000Because the pineal gland has this long history and mystical traditions, the seat of the soul, the third eye, all this kind of stuff.
00:34:47.000So, everyone wants DMT to be produced by the pineal gland.
00:34:52.000The problem is, first of all, is that the pineal gland is very small.
00:34:55.000It's about the size of the end of my pinky.
00:34:59.000And it's designed or evolved to produce nanograms, micrograms of melatonin, very small amounts you need.
00:35:07.000So, 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.
00:35:20.000There have been some studies, or one study in particular, actually looked at DMT levels.
00:35:26.000So, we've known since the 1950s that DMT is produced by a product of mammalian physiology and it's produced by humans.
00:35:36.000In those days, they tried to kind of pin schizophrenia on DMT.
00:35:42.000The 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.
00:35:59.000And so, they started looking for differences in DMT levels in psychotic patients, schizophrenic patients, versus normal people.
00:36:07.000And there have been more than a hundred studies that have looked at levels of DMT in the blood, in urine, in cerebrospinal fluid.
00:36:16.000But there's no convincing, consistent evidence that suggests that DMT is the cause of psychosis or dreaming, in fact.
00:36:29.000In endogenous production, what's the mechanism?
00:37:44.000I don't think it would have an appreciable effect, but people take tryptophan for lots of reasons.
00:37:51.000So, this process, what makes you think that this is a size-dependent process?
00:37:58.000Because just because this gland is so tiny, why can't it do it?
00:38:03.000Okay, well, there's a number of things.
00:38:04.000First of all, it's just there's orders of magnitude.
00:38:09.000I 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.
00:38:34.000They 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.
00:38:47.000And what they found was that the levels of DMT, first of all, were surprisingly high.
00:38:55.000So similar levels to things like serotonin and dopamine.
00:39:55.000Like, how did they, where did they come up?
00:39:57.000It'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.
00:41:10.000And then, I mean, that's what a lot of people think is happening.
00:41:14.000When people have near-death experiences, there's a lot of very bizarre aspects of it.
00:41:19.000But one of them is the uniformity of their experiences.
00:41:22.000There's a lot of very similar experiences, very similar.
00:41:26.000You 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.
00:41:36.000You 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.
00:41:44.000But the overall kind of framework of the experience is very similar.
00:41:51.000And I often wonder, like, what is that?
00:41:53.000Like, 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.
00:42:01.000Like, for that moment, they have fear now, but no fear at all about dying, no fear at all about life.
00:42:07.000And that this was this very weird, transformative journey where they went to another place and then they returned.
00:42:17.000It felt very to the point where all their anxiety, even about the car accident, being knocked unconscious and all that stuff, all went away.
00:42:24.000Yeah, 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.
00:42:47.000And of course, that was largely speculation.
00:42:53.000But 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.
00:43:08.000So if you deprive neurons of oxygen, they die very quickly.
00:43:12.000This is why strokes can be so rapidly devastating.
00:43:16.000If the brain becomes deprived of blood and oxygen, then the brain cells start to die.
00:43:23.000But in the presence of DMT, they live a lot longer.
00:43:26.000So they're kind of protecting the brain against hypoxia.
00:43:30.000Now, when does the brain enter a hypoxic state during the dying process?
00:43:36.000This 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.
00:43:56.000So that suggests a clear and obvious link.
00:43:59.000And if you kill rats, actually, again, I was referring to this microdialysis experiment.
00:44:04.000If you kill a rat whilst measuring DMT levels, as the rat dies, the DMT levels spike.
00:44:12.000So it suggests that the rat is also maybe having an actual death experience.
00:44:17.000I wonder if they come back as a person.
00:44:24.000It does suggest that there is maybe some link there.
00:44:27.000But 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.
00:44:39.000Are you being kind of given access to wherever you go after death?
00:44:46.000Is it a vision of what happens to you later on?
00:44:50.000But the question to me, my question rather, was not are we sure it's a vision or is it a gateway?
00:44:59.000Are you entering into a non-physical space that has its own laws, that it's very different, but it is a reality?
00:45:06.000And 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.
00:45:14.000But 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.
00:45:24.000Okay, so what I think is that I don't think with DMT that you're going anywhere as such.
00:45:33.000I 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.
00:45:43.000If you're experiencing an altered world, there must be some representation of that within your cortical machinery, within your cortex, within your brain.
00:45:56.000However, 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.
00:46:11.000So it's simply using its stored models.
00:46:15.000You 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.
00:46:32.000The brain is somehow constructing a world that has no relationship whatsoever.
00:46:37.000Nothing is taken from the normal waking world.
00:46:39.000It's like the brain suddenly has switched to speaking a language that it never learned.
00:46:45.000And 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.
00:46:57.000You're kind of making the brain much more sensitive to being commandeered.
00:47:04.000I 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.
00:47:14.000I 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.
00:47:27.000Does that assume that consciousness resides in the brain, though?
00:47:31.000Or 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.
00:47:48.000But 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.
00:48:09.000So one of the weirder things about people who trip, I'm sure you know this, is they experience communication from plants.
00:48:16.000Like tree hugging becomes a real thing.
00:48:20.000Tree hugging is a very different thing.
00:49:18.000Do 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?
00:49:30.000I think in which I say this because Jamie has O.J. Simpson's golf clubs.
00:49:37.000I feel like they have some consciousness attached to them.
00:50:52.000I'm a neuroscientist, so I focus on not consciousness per se, but on what I can get my teeth into.
00:51:00.000I 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.
00:51:19.000That's, you know, what I'm trying to do, I think, is I'm not trying to tell people what I think DMT is.
00:51:26.000I'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.
00:51:33.000I really feel like to be talking about the subject, you should experience it.
00:51:37.000Like 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.
00:51:58.000I 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.
00:52:12.000I 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.
00:52:50.000I think it's a lot weirder than Terence McKenna always says, you know, stranger than you can, suppose.
00:52:56.000He 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.
00:53:27.000He nailed it to a T. I think he might have predicted time travel, but here's the thing.
00:53:33.000If they are capable of time travel, when are you going to find out about it?
00:53:38.000When 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.
00:54:31.000Is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction.
00:54:41.000So 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.
00:54:52.000And at that point, novelty theory can come out of the woods because eventually people are going to say, what the hell is going on?
00:55:10.000I 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,
00:55:26.000race 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.
00:55:45.000The collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the internet.
00:55:51.000These are changes so immense, nobody could imagine them ever happening.
00:55:56.000And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is.
00:56:03.000The mushroom said to me once, it said, this is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.
00:56:11.000You don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions.
00:57:00.000But I mean, how could you predict all that in 1998?
00:57:03.000I think with, you know, we live in a very thin sliver.
00:57:10.000If 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.
00:57:23.000And 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.
00:57:45.000Many 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.
00:57:57.000And 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.
00:58:16.000And the vast majority of intelligence in the cosmos is likely to be post-biological, to have completely dispensed with the biological form.
00:58:24.000Now, what's interesting about that, Jamie, sorry, there's an have you heard of, you've heard of the Kardashev scale, right?
00:58:35.000So 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.
00:59:19.000But 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?
00:59:40.000We 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.
00:59:49.000We're actually spending more time and more energy and more money going deeper and deeper.
00:59:56.000Now, 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.
01:00:24.000But below the hydrogen atom, there is probably a hundred million to a billion times more scale, deeper and deeper down.
01:00:33.000Richard Feynman, the Nobel, you know, the legendary physicist, always used to say there's plenty of room at the bottom.
01:00:42.000In 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.
01:00:54.000They're much more likely to go deep down and kind of instantiate themselves at the lowest levels of reality.
01:01:07.000Now, 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.
01:01:29.000They 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.
01:01:44.000And 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?
01:01:56.000And 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?
01:02:16.000We should, in fact, be focusing on the much more abundant ones that are perhaps at the deepest levels of reality.
01:02:24.000How 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?
01:02:41.000Because the brain is how we interact with the environment, it's how we interact.
01:02:44.000It's the interface by which we interact with what there is.
01:02:49.000And 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.
01:02:59.000I'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.
01:03:19.000And that DMT generates this kind of highly susceptible, highly sensitive neurological state that allows us to interact with them.
01:03:30.000This 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.
01:03:43.000Could that be some intelligence that has existed long before we arrived on the scene and that we're now kind of discovering this technology?
01:03:52.000And 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.
01:04:06.000It's an interesting term, the term go there.
01:04:11.000You know, because that's what it feels like.
01:04:13.000It feels like you're traveling somewhere, like you're going somewhere.
01:04:18.000But the reality is that place you're going is probably right here.
01:04:22.000That's where it gets weird because it's around you all the time.
01:05:22.000Actually, it reminded me of something.
01:05:25.000There'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.
01:06:50.000And she was in the DMT space interacting.
01:06:54.000The infusion machine was running, pumping her brain with DMT at a constant rate, keeping the DMT levels in her brain constant.
01:07:00.000She's interacting with these entities.
01:07:02.000And 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.
01:07:17.000But the machine, the brain was still being pumped with DMT, and yet the visions stopped.
01:07:22.000So what that suggests to me is that they do indeed, as I said before, they have control.
01:07:28.000They are directing the information into the brain.
01:07:32.000And people describe things like downloads.
01:07:36.000Graham 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.
01:07:58.000And 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.
01:08:18.000We know a lot, and you don't know anything.
01:08:21.000And that's the message they're kind of trying to impress upon you by directing it.
01:08:42.000This idea that we all evolve along a similar pathway is strange to me.
01:08:49.000That 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.
01:09:03.000And then most of them probably figure out how to harness the power of the star and the signs.
01:09:08.000But 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.
01:09:27.000We're constantly improving upon everything we make.
01:09:30.000We're making better versions of every computer, every phone, every year, even though it's not really necessary for most people.
01:09:38.000It'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.
01:09:58.000But yet you want to collect things more than anything and you want to show people the things you've collected.
01:10:03.000Well, 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.
01:10:28.000If 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?
01:15:10.000You know, we've gradually been developing and technologically improving.
01:15:13.000And then we hit some point in the last century where we reach this kind of technological computer informational age and everything is accelerating.
01:15:23.000Exactly like Terence McKenna was saying.
01:15:28.000And it feels like we're on the cusp either of killing ourselves, which is one option, or undergoing some profound transformation as a species.
01:15:41.000Whether 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.
01:16:06.000Do you think that this chaos is the only way that things get done?
01:17:14.000And it's like this like it's almost like this is how we have to function in order to really get things done.
01:17:22.000And 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.
01:17:39.000We have to kind of be like, we really got to get going, guys.
01:17:45.000And we have to figure out what's the right way to proceed in order to not blow ourselves up.
01:17:52.000And I feel like this is maybe the only way that you motivate this kind of extreme change, which seems like our destiny.
01:18:02.000Our destiny is some sort of a very bizarre, extreme change that seems to probably be happening within your and my lifetime.
01:18:09.000Something'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.
01:18:17.000Right in front of our eyes, some sort of a digital supreme being is going to exist.
01:18:22.000And we're going to have to figure out society.
01:18:26.000We're going to have to figure out everything.
01:18:28.000It's going to be a complete, this idea of having bullshit congressional candidates that are full of shit and paid off by these companies.
01:18:35.000And they're going to make laws that screw you over.
01:18:39.000All that's out the window when no humans control anything anymore.
01:18:44.000And that's entirely possible inside of our lifetime.
01:18:48.000And 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.
01:19:16.000We're going to solve it all very quickly.
01:20:17.000There'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.
01:20:27.000The 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.
01:20:49.000They can solve complex combat sports problems that other people don't solve as quickly.
01:20:54.000I wonder if that's the case with everything.
01:20:57.000In order to really get things done, like you have to have a chaotic society that would even accept AI.
01:21:04.000Like 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.
01:21:32.000And then someone came along and said, we're going to develop artificial intelligence and these nerds in Simi Valley are going to control it.
01:21:41.000Yeah, 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.
01:21:55.000But 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.
01:22:14.000Maybe AI is the solution because it's so crazy.
01:22:18.000You look at India and those rivers that are completely choked with plastic, plastic bottles and garbage.
01:22:24.000And 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.
01:22:37.000Maybe we have to, in order to accept the fact that we need help, maybe we have to fuck it up first.
01:22:46.000Maybe 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.
01:22:51.000We'd be like, well, as a person, my goal in life is to achieve enlightenment and to be a better version of me.
01:22:57.000And 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.
01:23:43.000Complete chaos is useless because it's not actually technically random, but it's a complete mess.
01:23:50.000Whereas when you get that balance right, you reach a point that's called the edge of chaos, where order and disorder are perfectly balanced.
01:23:58.000Psychedelics, as I said before, they nudge the brain into that slightly disordered state.
01:24:05.000But all things, all cells, all living organisms, complex society and societies, they operate at the edge of chaos.
01:24:13.000So 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.
01:24:30.000And you have to push it as far as you can push it without it descending.
01:24:35.000We're always on the edge of everything collapsing.
01:24:38.000And we're probably closer to that than we actually realize.
01:24:42.000And so I think that's kind of what's happening.
01:24:44.000And 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.
01:25:13.000Because when you maximize intelligence, you improve education, you improve technology, everything improves.
01:25:18.000And 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.
01:25:29.000And of course, this superintelligence isn't going to be kind of running on the kind of transistor architectures that we're familiar with.
01:25:38.000A superintelligence will find a way to instantiate itself using the fundamental computational substrate of space-time itself.
01:25:46.000That's where it's going to learn how to go.
01:25:49.000And 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.
01:26:04.000And then that becomes part of that vast population of superintelligences that permeate the cosmos.
01:26:13.000And that might be what we're interacting with when you smoke DMTs.
01:26:18.000You're interacting with one of these superintelligents, which would explain why it seems so technological and so inorganic, right?
01:26:26.000The 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.
01:26:38.000And that could be what's where we're heading.
01:26:41.000I 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.
01:26:53.000We're basically kind of like the tools that the intelligences use to create new versions of superintelligences.
01:27:00.000That's the theory that a lot of people have in terms of why human beings exist in the first place.
01:27:06.000That human beings exist because we're designed to work really hard until we develop artificial life and then artificial life takes it from here.
01:27:16.000And 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.
01:27:33.000All those things are happening simultaneously.
01:28:18.000And also, Avi Loeb was actually talking about this the other night.
01:28:21.000The 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.
01:28:35.000And 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.
01:28:46.000I 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.
01:30:08.000I 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.
01:30:23.000And that what they have done is figured out a way to use all the power and power that's around you all the time.
01:30:30.000He talks about the concept of them harnessing zero-point energy.
01:30:34.000And 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.
01:30:43.000He was saying that they essentially are creating a void of gravity and pushing, they're folding space, essentially.
01:30:52.000The 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.
01:31:36.000Or cell phones, which is even probably more impressive.
01:31:39.000Show a cell phone to someone just 200 years ago, and they'd be like, this is sorcery.
01:31:44.000Like, this is absolutely insane that you're able to.
01:31:46.000So 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.
01:31:58.000This 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.
01:32:15.000And then they can use this and aim it and propel this craft to various places with that.
01:32:22.000Yeah, I think, are you familiar with John Mack?
01:32:29.000And 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.
01:32:44.000And 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.
01:32:53.000This guy was the head of the Harvard School of Psychiatry or something like this.
01:32:58.000So when he first heard about people being abducted, he assumed that they were just hallucinating.
01:33:08.000Carl Sagan famously told Mack that abductees were just hallucinating, and John Mack said, you know, what the fuck do you know about hallucinations?
01:33:19.000Because John Mack knew a lot about hallucinations, and he knew that this wasn't easy to explain.
01:33:28.000People were describing the same kinds of experiences, people who have no interaction with each other were describing exactly the same scenario.
01:33:35.000Are you familiar with Jacques Vollet's work?
01:33:38.000So 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.
01:33:45.000But 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.
01:34:01.000Within a realm, within a range of not having the vocabulary to be able to adequately describe something completely novel and alien to another person.
01:34:14.000Within that range, when you take into account the similarities that they're describing, they're very similar.
01:34:21.000In 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.
01:35:18.000But 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.
01:35:34.000When 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.
01:35:46.000One of his first subjects described seeing small beings that moved around very, very quickly.
01:35:51.000And the Yanomami, they also have these beings they call warusinari, which are like insect beings, which are kind of fearsome.
01:36:01.000So again, you're seeing the same kinds of beings that people now describe being operated upon by highly advanced, mantid beings.
01:36:09.000They're the scariest ones, apparently.
01:36:10.000They're the scariest ones, or certainly one of them.
01:36:13.000And then when you look at John Mack's reports of abductions, again, they often describe the same types of beings.
01:36:19.000They describe going to a world that is higher dimensional, that seems to subsume this reality.
01:36:27.000And 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.
01:36:44.000He talks about the elves bounding into the room.
01:36:48.000And so I think there is clearly some connection there.
01:36:53.000We're not talking about, I don't think the abduction experience is kind of separate from the DMT experience.
01:37:00.000They'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.
01:37:16.000But ultimately, I think it's the same thing.
01:37:18.000Now, of course, in the past, they might describe them as spirits.
01:37:21.000We might describe them as non-human intelligence or discarnate entities or intelligent agents or post-biological aliens.
01:37:51.000It 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.
01:38:14.000And now, in the 21st century, we've got perhaps the ideal tool, which is actually pure DMT itself.
01:38:23.000And we're kind of learning how to use that now in our own kind of with our own kind of modern twist.
01:38:31.000Yeah, I wonder what the relationship is between the DMT state and this alien abduction phenomenon.
01:38:39.000And not just abduction, but encounter.
01:38:42.000Because they aren't all abduction experiences.
01:39:18.000And that's the whole purpose of the whole thing.
01:39:20.000Maybe that's the reason why we exist in the first place: is that we're here to farm intelligence.
01:39:29.000And 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.
01:39:45.000And that's what our goal was all along.
01:39:47.000I 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.
01:39:58.000We don't know why, but we're going to turn into this technological butterfly.
01:40:02.000But I think Marshall McLuhan even said it better than me.
01:40:04.000He said, human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.
01:40:16.000Yeah, 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.
01:40:34.000And 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.
01:40:50.000But 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.
01:41:09.000I don't know what the purpose is, directed them into their vision of their reality or for some other purpose.
01:41:34.000Like in a dream, how you sort of formulate these things that make sense.
01:41:39.000You 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.
01:42:01.000Maybe that's why the experience is so similar.
01:42:03.000Not that, because otherwise you would say, well, damn, aren't these fucking UFOs evolving quicker than us?
01:42:10.000Because 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.
01:42:19.000Because in 2025, we have way better cars than we had in 1955 or whatever year it was when they got abducted.
01:43:05.000That seems old school to what's coming.
01:43:08.000If 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.
01:43:19.000And why would digital God need a spaceship to fly around in?
01:44:14.000I mean, that goes back to the ancient kind of Hindu philosophy, the idea of Brahman, the ultimate reality playing at creating the universes.
01:47:10.000You'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.
01:48:53.000But all of the post-flood kings are correct.
01:48:57.000They'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.
01:49:11.000But their old versions are these like really weird, like pre-flood is real weird.
01:49:18.000It's like, what are you talking about, 40,000 years?
01:49:20.000Like, what do you, what does that mean?
01:50:45.000They have technology that's far beyond anything we've achieved today.
01:50:50.000It's just gone down a totally different path.
01:50:52.000And what they're really into is making these insane stone structures that defy any modern construction methods, any transportation methods.
01:51:12.000Like, 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.
01:51:24.000And then if everybody else has ego and everybody's like, that is not true.
01:51:48.000Wouldn't it be like way easier to get past that if you lived 50,000 years, if you lived 100,000 years?
01:51:55.000Like you would think that kind of a human being or that kind of an intelligent creature would be able to accomplish way more.
01:52:02.000It'd probably get over all of its bullshit by the time it's 150.
01:52:06.000And 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.
01:52:21.000Like, wow, you made it to 110, Grandpa.
01:52:55.000And you could get through most disagreements with just cordial communication.
01:53:00.000Like, you don't really need to argue as much as people argue.
01:53:03.000But they feed off of it, and I think it's a stupid way to communicate.
01:53:06.000And 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.
01:53:40.000We might be the fucking preppers that survived whatever the hell happened 11,000 years ago.
01:53:49.000And 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.
01:54:03.000Yeah, I think we definitely live life on kind of hard mode.
01:54:08.000You 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.
01:54:31.000Or it just might be this is the shitty version of humans and this is what the shitty version of humans makes.
01:54:36.000Like the really good version of humans makes pyramids.
01:54:39.000Like when a person can live to be 30,000 years old, that's what they make.
01:54:42.000They make spectacular homages to the cosmos on the ground.
01:54:48.000Yeah, 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.
01:55:04.000So 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.
01:55:19.000Like, you know, we get excited about it and fascinated.
01:55:21.000Oh, all those incredible things that were happening.
01:55:35.000And 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.
01:56:19.000You 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.
01:56:32.000In one breath, he'd talk about us returning to the archaic, of returning to the forests, and becoming one with nature again.
01:56:39.000And then in the next breath, he'd talk about us setting off for the stars.
01:56:48.000We all want to live in an old rustic house that's made of wood in a forest and cook on an open fire.
01:56:55.000And 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.
01:57:08.000You 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?
01:57:20.000And maybe that's kind of part of the game.
01:57:24.000You know, are we going to be dragged back?
01:57:27.000Which wouldn't be bad to be dragged back into that more.
01:57:30.000You can imagine the bucolic life in a beautiful kind of forest scene with the nice old houses.
01:57:47.000I 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.
01:58:08.000I mean, that's a weird thing, but in a way, these structures that we see, they seem entirely non-human.
01:58:16.000It's like we are tapping into something else, something non-human, and we can't help ourselves.
01:58:25.000And 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.
01:58:41.000Maybe that's why they're all so similar, too, right?
01:59:57.000It was another city in China that they were talking about.
02:00:00.000Maybe they just exaggerated the numbers.
02:00:02.000Okay, so Tokyo is a perfect example then.
02:00:04.000Like, 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.
02:00:48.000Like 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.
02:01:51.000Cecil Hotel, where it talks about Skid Row itself.
02:01:55.000Like, 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.
02:02:04.000She got off her medication and she apparently climbed into the water cistern and drowned.
02:02:09.000But the point of the documentary was not just that.
02:02:12.000It's like this lady came here not knowing what downtown was.
02:02:16.000And so she got a room at the hotel downtown thinking, oh, get a nice room at a hotel downtown.
02:04:30.000People say, oh, you know, I got robbed.
02:04:32.000It's just part of being in a big city, or I was stabbed last night, or my car was broken into.
02:04:37.000And it's like, this is just what happens when you live in a big city, man.
02:04:40.000And it's like, actually, no, it is possible to have safe and clean.
02:04:45.000And Tokyo is fascinating because it's an example of what's often called an emergent city.
02:04:51.000They 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.
02:04:59.000It's like it's all mixed together and different kind of neighborhoods kind of just emerge.
02:05:05.000You know, there's a knife district, for example.
02:05:08.000People who sell knives, they all gather together.
02:05:12.000There's, you know, districts for all different things.
02:05:16.000Not because someone has decided, oh, only bookshops can be here.
02:05:20.000It's just that they tend to gather together.
02:05:22.000And 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.
02:05:36.000And in the UK or I guess in the States as well, they would have gone under decades ago.
02:05:43.000You know, the city would have just crushed them.
02:05:46.000But 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.
02:05:58.000You'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?
02:06:11.000It 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.
02:07:45.000It was in Kabukicho, which is right in the center of Tokyo.
02:07:51.000And it was on a side street, and there was this tall building, grey building.
02:07:55.000You would never look at it, no signage or anything.
02:07:57.000And 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.
02:08:12.000So, 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.
02:08:19.000And it was, you know, it played darts and had a drink.
02:08:22.000And 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.
02:10:11.000It's about you should, the first thing on your mind should be everybody else.
02:10:16.000When you hear Japanese people talk about people who cause problems in cities, they use this word meewaku, which means often translated as nuisance.
02:10:27.000So people who come from the West, often America, but not just America.
02:10:33.000I'm not blaming everything on Americans, but it is often.
02:10:36.000And they come with their own, you know, they're the main character, this kind of main character syndrome.
02:11:04.000Am I making anyone feel uncomfortable?
02:11:07.000You're always thinking about those around you.
02:11:09.000And 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.
02:12:25.000And it could be overwhelmed by the West.
02:12:27.000Like 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.
02:12:38.000Like Americans could just move there and Europeans can move there.
02:12:42.000And then all the beautiful aspects of this very interesting and very unique culture could go away.
02:12:49.000And they are really concerned about that.
02:12:53.000When I first arrived in Japan, like 10 years ago, I worked at a university and I stood on campus outside just talking to someone.
02:13:00.000And 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.
02:14:26.000You have, so it's really complicated, but you have something called keigo, which is kind of formal or polite speech.
02:14:33.000And 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.
02:15:09.000And it actually causes some problems because it's very difficult for junior people to communicate with senior people, to communicate honestly at least.
02:15:23.000So they just get a lot of it, like, yes, men, yes, I agree.
02:15:54.000And society is actually lubricated by alcohol and functions because of alcohol.
02:15:59.000They 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.
02:16:14.000Might 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.
02:16:23.000Not just to like have a drink with your colleagues, but to actually get drunk, become intoxicated.
02:16:29.000And that allows more free-flowing communication.
02:16:32.000It allows you to, everyone is brought to the same kind of level.
02:17:13.000But 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.
02:17:31.000And America was in the what's that movie called?
02:18:19.000But 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.
02:18:33.000And 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.
02:20:39.000It enters the brain extremely rapidly.
02:20:41.000It's metabolized rapidly and cleared very rapidly.
02:20:44.000It had all of these pharmacological peculiarities.
02:20:47.000And it occurred to me that these were precisely the characteristics you need of a drug that's used in anesthesiology.
02:20:57.000So 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.
02:21:10.000What 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.
02:21:31.000And so it occurred to me that, well, DMT has the right drug properties.
02:21:37.000It's almost like it's designed for that kind of technique called target-controlled intravenous infusion.
02:21:44.000And 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.
02:22:05.000And so I thought, well, let's take this technology from anesthesiology, target-controlled intravenous infusion, and let's repurpose it.
02:22:14.000So 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.
02:22:31.000So 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.
02:22:43.000I used his data, blood sampling data that he acquired in the 90s.
02:22:50.000Fortunately, he had this old Excel file which he sent to me.
02:22:54.000And I built this mathematical model of DMT's metabolism and distribution throughout the body.
02:23:00.000And then we wrote a paper basically saying we think this should work.
02:23:04.000We think we should be able to extend the DM and stabilize the DMT state for many hours.
02:23:09.000But we didn't actually, it wasn't kind of human ready, so to speak.
02:23:13.000And it actually took about five years before it was actually implemented in humans.
02:23:20.000And that was actually done by the Imperial College London team.
02:23:23.000So they were the, still are in a way, the leaders in psychedelic research.
02:23:29.000And 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?
02:23:46.000Do the predictions that we had, myself and Rick Strasman, do they actually work in humans?
02:23:50.000And they found out that in fact it does.
02:23:52.000You can induce somebody into the DMT state and you can actually stabilize the experience.
02:23:58.000So 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.
02:24:16.000So normally what happens is the blood level will rise very, very rapidly.
02:24:22.000You inject some of the DMT, blood levels rise, they reach the brain and then almost immediately they start collapsing down again exponentially.
02:24:31.000And that brief period when the brain levels are high is the breakthrough state.
02:24:36.000However, if you when the brain DMT levels reach a kind of a peak, you then start an infusion.
02:24:42.000You can basically compensate for the DMT that's being lost by metabolism.
02:24:46.000It's a bit like if you have a bathtub full of water and you pull the plug, the water drains.
02:24:52.000But if you turn on the taps, you can keep the level constant.
02:25:02.000And 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.
02:25:11.000And he's like, you know, what's going on?
02:25:43.000Well, 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.
02:25:52.000They 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.
02:26:02.000The very first person to do it was a guy I'm now working with.
02:26:07.000I work for a non-profit called Nunautics out of Florida.
02:26:11.000And 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.
02:26:24.000And on the board, I work with a guy called Carl Smith, who was the very first person to undergo DMTX.
02:26:29.000He was also the only person to complete, I think there was five sessions over several weeks.
02:26:34.000He was the only one who handled it, so to speak.
02:27:25.000All 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.
02:27:47.000So 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.
02:28:00.000And actually, we, as I said, I work for this, I'm a board member of this non-profit called New Nautics.
02:28:08.000And our vision is really to design experiments with DMTX.
02:28:13.000Like, 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.
02:28:30.000Let's treat it like that as explorers.
02:28:33.000What does a research organization aimed at studying that look like?
02:28:39.000And we imagine, I imagine that you're not just sending, for example, let's take the structure of the DMT space, right?
02:28:49.000It's this highly complex, geometrically and topologically strange domain.
02:28:57.000So we send in people who are experts, who are mathematicians.
02:29:00.000We send in a mathematician to study the topology of the space, to study how the space is structured.
02:29:06.000The entities, they often try to communicate.
02:29:09.000They use strange symbols and strange code.
02:29:12.000Oh, let's send in a linguist who can study their language.
02:29:18.000And so you're sending in people with their own specialities to actually formally study the DMT space.
02:29:27.000And what's even better is we now have a venue for this.
02:29:30.000So we're actually, we have a I work with a company called Ellus.
02:29:35.000We have a special license from a country in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
02:29:43.000And we are setting up a retreat center, stroke research center, to provide DMTX that is 100% legal, that is safe.
02:29:56.000You'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.
02:30:16.000But even better is it's also going to be open to anyone.
02:30:19.000So if you think about Rick St. Prepare for the freaks.
02:30:31.000So you've got 60 people worth the trip report.
02:30:33.000What happens if you can bring in 300, 400, 500 people a year?
02:30:38.000How will you vet people to make sure they're not crazy before they do it?
02:30:40.000There will be a screening process, an initial screening process, and then ultimately you would have a psychiatrist who would sign them off.
02:30:49.000So it's not just anyone, but anyone can, in theory, they can sign up.
02:30:52.000They 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.
02:31:17.000And of course, they will all be providing trip reports.
02:31:20.000So 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.
02:31:32.000It's like you know exactly what they've taken.
02:31:35.000It's pure pharmaceutical grade DMT and they will generate this vast data set that could be used.
02:31:44.000We're also working to develop an AI-powered model that would take in this verbal data and in real time generate imagery.
02:31:57.000So someone can talk to the model, the AI model, and it will generate the image.
02:32:02.000And then you say, oh, no, this isn't quite right.
02:32:04.000needs 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.
02:33:46.000And 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.