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Tonight we have a special episode.

This is somebody who's been on the show a handful of times in the past and has even been featured in our documentary As Within So Without From UFOs to DMT.

He's a really, really interesting guy, super intelligent, and he has a new book out called Death by Astonishment, which I really, really enjoyed.

Of course, I'm speaking about Doctor Andrew Gallimore.

Doctor Andrew Gallimore is a computational neurobiologist, pharmacologist, chemist and writer who has been interested in the neural basis of psychedelic drug action for many years and is the author of a number of research papers on the powerful psychedelic drug NN Dimethyltrypt, or DMT and its effects on the brain and consciousness.

In 2015, he collaborated with DMT pioneer Doctor Rick Strassman, author of DMT The Spear Molecule, to develop a pharmacokinetic model of DMT as the basis of a target controlled intravenous infusion protocol for extended journeys in the bizarre worlds to which DMT gates access.

His current interests focus on DMT and other psychedelic molecules as tools for gathering access to otherwise inaccessible subjective worlds, their neuroscientific underpinning, and their possible ontological and metaphysical implications.

He currently lives and works in Tokyo.

We've had both.

Andrew Gallimore and Doctor Rick Stressman on the show many times and both always bring the fire and the knowledge and I love talking to both of them and picking their brains on these topics.

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Here we go.

Welcome back on Mind Escape.

Andrew, it's been a few years.

I really enjoyed your new book Death by Astonishment, and I have a couple of old favourites here as well.

I actually did the audio book or Audible for Death by Astonishment so I don't have the physical copy, but I really enjoyed it and I appreciate you reading your own book as well.

Yeah, I was.

I insisted upon that.

They, the publisher, wanted to bring in an, an actor first with a British accent.

I said no, no, no, no, I'll do it because I live in Tokyo.

It's a bit of a, a bit tricky to, to, to navigate.

So they wanted to do it in the studio in New York.

But I said no, no, we'll do it by remote, whatever it takes.

So they sent all the equipment to me and covered my room with foam and stuff like that just to be able to do it myself.

So I think it turned out well in the end.

Awesome.

Yeah, no, I, I really enjoyed it.

And you know, they're obviously reading something like the physical copy.

There's something to that, but I also think there's something to listening to it as well.

And like I said, I really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it.

But yeah, it's been, so it's been a few years since we've had you on.

We've had you on a handful of times in the past.

We even included you in the documentary we made, which I'll put a link there too if anybody wants to check that out.

But I just want to kind of jump right in if that's OK.

So the early explorers like Richard Spruce search for the plants such as the the copy vine.

And you know, he documented harmene and harmolene, but it took a lot longer to connect the brew, or I should say the DMT containing elements and alkaloids to the brew because it was just kind of, I guess people were looking at it from the perspective of the MAOI.

Yeah, I mean, well, spruce, Richard Spruce, he discovered.

Well he discovered, well at least discovers a strong word, I mean he discovered from the Western scientists scientific perspective at least the Karpi vine, he named it Banisteriopsis karpi.

And as far as he was concerned, when he first drank the brew and was shown where this vine was growing, this key vegetal component of this ayahuasca Brewer, carpi, as it was known in that area of the Amazon, it was assumed for the next 100 years that there was going to be some alkaloid in the carpi vine that gave it its visionary powers.

It was, it was assumed that it would be as simple as that, that if they were able to extract an alkaloid from the carpi vine, inject this alkaloid into people, then they would have experienced the same effects as ayahuasca.

But it didn't work out.

And we know in hindsight, we know exactly why it didn't work out.

But you have to imagine this was, you know, Spruce discovered the carpy vine and named it in 1852.

It wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century, so over 50 years later, that the alkaloid which was, which went by many names, telepathy was the first name given to it, banasterine, etcetera, etcetera.

And various groups, you know, attempted to recreate the effects of ayahuasca by giving people this alkaloid, which we now know, which was then discovered a few years later to be identical to an already well known set of alkaloids that the the Harmala alkaloids, which came from Paganum harmala, this medicinal shrub which was perfectly well known.

So it was kind of like this.

This doesn't really make any sense because these alkaloids, when you isolate them, they make people a bit dizzy, kind of drunken appearing, they feel a bit drowsy, they fall asleep.

They might have some colorful but fairly unremarkable dreams, and that's about it.

And so it didn't seem to match these fantastical reports that Spruce had heard.

I mean, he'd heard about people travelling to other worlds and seeing, you know, beautiful cities and savage beasts preparing to seize them from one report.

I mean, this was, it was wild stuff.

And you'd never seen anything like it or heard about anything like it.

And say it was kind of like, you know, scientists hit a dead end when they couldn't work out why they couldn't recreate these extraordinary visionary effects by injecting people with the alkaloids isolated from this very vine that spruce had first identified and named.

And that dragged on until really the middle of the 20th century.

Richard Schultz or Schulte's, the world's most famous and important ethnobotanist.

He was very interested in the world's leading expert on ayahuasca.

But he was struggling as as much as anyone, partly because when he, you know, he spoke to indigenous groups that were making ayahuasca, which went by dozens of different names depending on who you spoke to.

And there are dozens of different recipes.

So they've all contained the carpi vine, Banasteriopsis carpi, the ayahuasca vine.

But then they also contained often dozens.

You know, there was like, I think there's more than 100 different plants have been documented used in ayahuasca.

So it was, it was a Herculean task trying to work out what the hell was going on.

And it wasn't really until William Burroughs, you know, the novelist, trekked into the Colombian rainforests with the aim of finding out about this drug that he'd read about in this magazine, Yahe, which was described as the world's most, you know, powerful psychedelic.

And he went into the jungle to find it.

And he found it.

And he had several kind of fairly unimpressive experiences, probably just as infusions of the copy vine alone.

And then finally he was led into this trade secret by this shaman called Saboya, who told him that we use the carpi vine.

But there is this other secret ingredient, another leaf, sorry, a leaf rather than the vine.

There was this leaf from this other plant which was essential, an essential catalysing component is how Burroughs described it.

And he sent these leaves to Richard Schultz and said, I think this could be important.

I think this could be the key.

This is why the experiments have failed before is because you're, you're concentrating only on the harmala alkaloids, whereas there needs to be this other plant.

You know, maybe this other plant contains some other chemical that's really important here.

Richard Schultz ignored his letter and he never replied to William Burroughs, but he did keep the letter and the leaves.

And then it was, I think, more than a decade later, when Richard Schultz is one of his graduate students, a guy called Homer Pinkley was in the rainforest, I think, in Ecuador, but my memory might fail me here.

And he was invited to an ayahuasca ceremony.

He observed the brew being made.

And the following morning, he kind of rooted around in the the cauldron that was used to make the brew.

And he found a few leaves that were that escaped the boiling intact and some seeds.

And he was able to make a formal identification of this plant, which they call oprito, which means little heavenly men, which is kind of a clue in there perhaps knowing what we know about DMT now.

And he identified it as psychiatry of the Ridis, also known as chakruna.

The leaves were sent for chemical analysis and they were found to contain DMT and basically nothing else, so this was the first clue.

Richard Schultz then went back to Burroughs letter that he'd written more than a decade earlier and found that actually Burroughs had indeed collected the same leaf that his graduate student would later identify.

So really William Burroughs should be given the credit for discovering the the important DMT containing component of ayahuasca.

But even that was only that wasn't the end of the story, of course, is because just a, you know, a couple of years before that discovery or a few years before that discovery, Stephen Zara, who discovered the psychedelic, the psychedelic properties of DMT, the Hungarian physician he had realised worked out by swallowing large amounts of pure DMT that it's not already active.

So it didn't make any sense.

Still, the story didn't make any sense because why would you have this visionary drink containing ADMT containing plant which is completely inactive orally and what the hell is this Karpivine doing in there anyway?

You know, why is that there?

And so it took again, more research the pharmacological properties of the harmalo alkaloids because the harmalo alkaloids being studied as a treatment for Parkinson's disease.

And it was noted, discovered, observed that the Harmala alkaloids are very powerful inhibitors of this enzyme that's found in the gut, but also throughout the body, monoamine oxidase and this family of enzymes.

And so it was kind of the, the hypothesis that developed from this was that, oh, maybe the Harmala alkaloids in the vine are inhibiting the monoamine oxidase enzymes, which we knew are important for metabolising amines, which includes tryptamines, which of course includes DMT.

So that was the first, that was, that was the kind of the, the Eureka moment that that's maybe how it worked.

And then it took more work.

And eventually Dennis McKenna, Terence's brother, acquired a sample of pure raw ayahuasca brew made for him by a an indigenous group in the Amazon and was able to isolate harmene and harmoline and demonstrate that the ayahuasca brew was an inhibitor of monoamine oxidase.

And from then there were kind of human studies where people were swallowing harmala alkaloids and DMT, you know, on their own and together and demonstrating finally that this so-called ayahuasca effect was, was responsible for the, the visionary effects of ayahuasca.

So there we go.

There's the history of ayahuasca.

That was a good summary there.

You know, reading the first few chapters, it is kind of frustrating.

It's like you're not how you're not figuring this out, but you're, you're not really taking into the context, the time, how hard it is to get to some of these locations and probably the unwillingness of the Indigenous people to really open up on that end of things.

My question is though, so you mentioned William Burroughs, you mentioned Homer Pinkley and Richard Schulte's.

It seemed like they were doing these MAOI brews but never getting the DMT with were they doing it on their own?

Because I know the William Burroughs, you describe an anecdote where he gets mad at the shaman or whoever was brewing it for him and thought that he was kind of like messing with them or something like that.

Drunken fuck of a witch.

Yeah.

So like, were they doing this on their own or were they getting it from some indigenous people and just not getting the full the full picture, like what was going on there?

Because I know that there's different varieties of concoctions and stuff like that.

Yeah.

I mean, there are some groups that still use, I say still use the assumption being that the original ayahuasca brew would have been the carpy vine and the carpy vine alone.

And Burroughs was searching for the vine and he was basically he was, he acquired the vine and then he was looking for people to make the brew with the vine.

Basically, he assumed as, as everyone else did, that the vine was the key component here and that he just needed someone to prepare the brew, you know, to, to, to prepare the infusion, the decoction.

And that's what he did.

Whether these were reputable ayahuascaros or shamans is, is an open question here.

We don't really know.

All we know is that his first few attempts were kind of nauseating.

You know, he vomited and he passed out and he, he, he, he was extremely paranoid and he was extremely suspicious, even contemptuous, one would say, of these, these shamans.

He didn't believe that they had, they didn't believe that they had secrets or special techniques or anything.

He just thought that they were mixing up boiling up this vine in, in water and charging him a fee, which was normally like a bottle of extremely strong spirits.

I mean, these are so, you know, I don't know the kind of shamans that he was dealing with.

And he tried to make it himself as well using the vine and he failed.

So yeah, that's that's and it wasn't until he found this this this other shaman that did have the secret who was using the, IT turns out was was using the Shakruna as well as the Karpi vine.

What about Schultes, who's an ethnobotanist?

He probably would have had more, I guess, of a history to get in with these indigenous tribes.

How was he not able to kind of have luck with it, if you will?

Well, I think the issue was that nobody knew what what the function of the harmala alkaloids was.

Nobody knew what the Harmala alkaloids did pharmacologically.

So the carpi vine was just one component of a mixture.

It was just a drug mixture as far as anyone could making the pharmacological the pharmacological connection, right, that this is a pharmacological synergy and how it works that requires an understanding of the of the underlying chemical pharmacology, which no one understood.

So Schulte's was doing lots of important work in documenting the different types of plants that were being put into this brew.

But the but the the idea of this minimal binary decoction, this essential 2 components, the Karpivine and the DMT containing plant which might be crooner, it might be Chakrapanga was another one from Banisteriopsis ruz Bianna, although that's disputed.

But anyway, but another DMT containing plant.

So there was no indication that there was something special going on, so to speak.

It was just a visionary drink that was made from one plant and plus often many other different types of plants, you know, tobacco and, and, and other plants containing tropane alkaloids.

So it's not surprising that some of these decoctions were very, very visionary.

But yeah, the the underlying pharmacology.

Apology that we now everyone knows now everyone who knows about ayahuasca will tell you happily and knowingly about Mao inhibitors and stuff.

But at the time this was, this was new, this was, this wasn't known.

It wasn't known.

I think, I think it was the 1950s when monoamine oxidase was first discovered as, as the, this enzyme, this, this group of enzymes that are important in, in amine metabolism, particularly tryptamine metabolism.

So.

So nobody had any possibility.

Doesn't matter how smart you were, it would have been impossible for you or I or anyone else working in the 1940s and early 50s to have worked out what was going on.

Yeah, I guess hindsight's always easier to think, figure these things out.

But I just, I was just saying from like a curiosity standpoint, if Schulte's was studying these tribes and stuff, I would have thought that maybe he'd either sit in or watch kind of what was going on and just, you know, observe from that standpoint, you know, I just, it's.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so.

I don't know, did you know?

And there is there are accounts, particularly in Wade Davies has a wonderful book, 1 River, where he is basically a biography really of Richard Schultz and he describes his experiences.

You know that people used to say that if there's a psychedelic drug that Richard Schultz hasn't taken, it's because it hasn't yet been discovered.

So I mean, he, he wasn't just documenting.

He wasn't just like a botanist who was documenting and naming or whatever these plants, but he was taking them.

He was taking these drugs.

He always tried the drugs that he discovered, but, and that included ayahuasca.

And he, he had actually come across Chakrapunga several years before, like I think almost 16 years before Homer Pinkley discovered Chakruna.

Again, the analysis, the chemical analysis wasn't done.

But even if it had of been done and they found DMT in there at the time, this would have been prior to people knowing what DMT did.

I mean, DMT's psychedelic effects weren't discovered until 1956.

So all of these things are kind of happening at the same time.

Discovery of the psychedelic effects of DMT, the discovery of monoamine oxidase inhibitors, the discovery of Chakruna, all is all.

Within like a decade, all these things came together like a confluence of of these different research outcomes, which then led to within a decade, kind of the first ayahuasca effect hypothesis.

I was.

Really happy that you talked about Virola in there as well, because I remember reading true hallucinations and listening to Dennis McKenna talk about how they were looking for this Virola paste, this like orally active paste.

And on the way they end up finding mushrooms and you know there, that's where the the story goes with that.

But can you describe where Virola paste is used?

And is it still used?

Because you don't really hear much about it.

It's kind of one of those like I.

Don't know.

Like I said, I'm.

I'm glad you mentioned it because I don't really hear too many people talking about it.

Yes, so.

So the Virola Virola is is simply a particular genus of tree that occurs widely throughout the Amazon and there are a number of groups that with Toto is a good example.

So when Richard Schultz, Richard Schultz is credited, I think rightly so with discovering these Virola snuffs.

A Pena is the one that you will most hear about, but there are many different Virola snuffs that are made with the bark of these Virola trees or specifically the resin.

So you you peel the bark off the virola tree and then you get this resin that beads and then you basically not dissimilar to ayahuasca, you boil this bark up and all of the resin is extracted into the water and then you boil it off until it forms a paste.

And then you dry it in the sun until it's completely dry.

And then you can break it up and form a fine powder.

And it looks kind of similar to cinnamon or paprika or something like this.

Then it's used as a snuff.

And Virola contains high concentrations of so these penis snuffs contain high concentrations of tryptamines including DMT, but also sometimes 5 meo DMT, 5 hydroxy DMT, i.e.

Bufotenine.

And interestingly, there are also kind of a mysterious form of the roller, not a snuff, but a pellet.

This is something again, that Richard Schultes discovered was that some groups were making.

Rather than drying out the the resin and forming a powder, they're actually forming little pellets they swallowed.

Now as soon.

As I tell you that you should be thinking, wait a minute, if they're swallowing this, there must be, there has to be some kind of monoamine oxidase inhibitor and that isn't known.

So it's kind of, that's kind of a mystery actually.

I don't talk about in the book because it could lead, it would lead me down the garden path a little bit into thinking about the next book, right?

Yes, the.

Next book.

But yeah, there are pellets.

So there's oral forms in these oral hallucinogens as Schulte's described them, which are these pellets made from Virola resin?

But the question is obvious there is that why?

Why are these?

Why are these active?

Is there some monoamine oxidase inhibitor within the bark?

If so, I've not seen analysis that would suggest that.

Are there add mixtures?

We know that the other major snuff variety principally from the yopo tree Anadenon Thera peregrina.

So this produces the Yopo snuff.

This is from the seeds and these seeds are ground up again to form a snuff and these are inhaled or normally you would have a partner, one with a you'd put the snuff into a long tube, you know, up to a teaspoon of this snuff, quite a lot of it would go into one end of the tube and then your part would blow it forcefully into your nostrils and it kind of explodes into your head and it's very unpleasant.

It's not surprising and it's not particularly popular in the West, but analysis of of these snuffs again find DMT sometimes 5 MEODMT befotonine, but also harmal alkaloids in some, in some analysis.

Again, analysis vary.

You've got a tree that grows over broad areas of, of the, of Amazonia and the Orinoco plains.

And different, you get different subspecies or variants that contain alkaloid concentration and changes over time and throughout the season and growing stage and all this kind of stuff.

But also admixture plants that could be added as well that we know there are certain admixture plants that are added to these yopo snuffs.

It's not just the seeds, but the the presence of these Hamala alkaloids within this Yoppo snuff suggests again that these indigenous peoples are perhaps employing pharmacological synergy to enhance the effects of the snuff.

Richard Spruce way back in 18 you know 525354 he found he was wandering the Orinoco Plains and he came across this man from a tribe called the Guaibo who was who had a pouch of this yopo snuff.

But he also had a piece of carpi vine hanging around his neck, which he used to chew.

And he told Spruce that when you combine the the yopo snuff and the vine together, you chew a bit in the vine, take a bit of yopo snuff that this is that it kind of enhances the visions.

And there are there are groups that will drink a ayahuasca so-called or khaki brew with a vine alone and then take the snuff.

So that rather than having the DMT and the harmala alkaloids within the drink, they have just the harmala alkaloids in the drink which they drink 1st and then they take the snuff and this as they understand it, then they experience it.

They this enhances the vision.

So this, this pharmacological synergy is, is, is not isolated and, and doesn't seem to even be isolated to the same to, you know, to ayahuasca, but also is, is used to enhance Ophena possibly and certainly OPO as well.

So these are sophisticated, you know, I describe them in the book, you know, these aren't just plant based drug preparations.

These are true pharmacological technologies that were developed without an underlying, you know, an understanding of the underlying pharmacology for sure.

But there were, you know, highly sophisticated technologies, pharmacological technologies that were developed perhaps over hundreds of years for the sole purpose of allowing these people to communicate and interact with and form relationships with these normally hidden beings that they can only see by using these various plant based drug technologies.

Yeah, that was a.

Interesting part too.

I mean I've heard of the oppo, but when you're describing it that like shotgun method and the one guy you know that gets the hit all the sudden he's bleeding out of his nose, he's barfing.

It's not just sounds terrible right, like it does not sound like a fun time.

I mean, maybe afterwards, maybe the maybe the the DMT once it hits, you know, takes you and you don't really think about it.

I don't know, But I want to talk about the quote little people now, the little people motif or machine elf like beans or, you know, they show up in multiple traditions.

Do you think these consistent motifs reflect like, you know, and I know that's kind of like the the whole background behind your theories on this, but do you think that that shared vision and experience and realms and everything, Do you think that that speaks to the tradition and the culture?

Like if if the little people that they were seeing on ayahuasca and before Western ethnobotanist and people came over, do you think that those are similar to ones that we're seeing now?

Or do you think they're completely different?

The short answer is I don't know.

We can only go from their descriptions.

Now, there are some good, the most detailed descriptions of these beings.

So first of all, these beings, as you said, they are they.

There are many groups that.

Describe encounters with so-called little people that go by specific names.

They wouldn't necessarily call them little people, but they are.

They're described as small, sometimes humanoid, sometimes not.

Beings that are that.

Operate in.

Great numbers that are colourful and bright and dance and sing, you know, they're very lively and very jovial and to me that is that's the.

The DMT elf.

Motif, you know when people describe now you know what, what, what are the unifying characteristics?

I always say the machine elves or DMT elves or whatever you want to call them.

They're, they come in a variety of forms, but they're unified by their character.

So we can't say everyone's seeing exactly the same form of beings, but they, they all seem to have the same kind of character.

They're, they're jovial, they're cheeky.

There's lots of them.

They like to dance around.

So, So to me, when when I read of Yanomami, Yanomami shamans describing seeing these multitudinous beings with collared headdresses dancing and singing and operating in such great numbers that you can never get to the end of them.

To me, they're describing the same thing, right?

That's the same, but just by a different name.

They, they, they call them the, the Hekkuda.

But to me that's just another name for what, you know, we would describe as a machine out for what other people might describe as Pixies or fairies or or whatever.

I think, I think you're talking about the same kind of is, is it the same?

Ultimately, we don't know, but I it's certainly a it's a Rick.

It's a recurring motif that is not modern.

It's not a Terence McKenna Rism.

Yes, he popularised it, but this thing goes back, you know much you know far, far before McKenna.

It goes back to the first DMT studies in the 1950s and as you say all the way through back various types of indigenous peoples that use tryptamine based drugs.

Mark Mark Plotkin who was one of shorties is another one of I think he was one of his students.

He took the opinion snuff.

So this Virola Snuff for the first time with a shaman, and he suddenly started seeing in the corner of his vision, he started seeing these beings, these lively dancing beings that became more and more lively and more and more of them.

And he asked the shaman and said, you know, what are these small men that I'm seeing?

And the shaman responded instantaneously and said, well, these are the hecker, the spirits of the forest, of course, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

So.

So yeah, I do find that intriguing to say the least, that you have these these groups going back, you know, in entirely different parts of the world and from entirely different backgrounds, entirely different cultures, entirely different world views, religious and mystical traditions.

And yet they're all describing multitudinous, giggling lightly beings that we would we would call elves, but they would they have other names for.

Yeah, the reason why I ask.

Too is I've talked with a few people, one guy never really looked into anything from you know, ancient Mexico or Central America and he said that he the first time he did DMT, he was seen all sorts of like Mayan symbolism and stuff like that.

And I've heard another person similar experience but with like Egyptian stuff.

And I was just curious if you thought that maybe when our consciousness evolves, whatever that archetype or culture currently is, is what's reflective in that experience in that moment?

Or maybe that's where some of that culture comes from, is these altered states that then they bring into their culture and integrate it kind of a thing.

Yeah, I mean for.

Sure.

I mean, if you look at the imagery of, you know, Southern American POT POT traditions, I mean a lot of their.

You know their clothing.

And their art, I mean, this is clearly comes from POT vision.

So that that clearly happens.

And I think the DMT experience to me doesn't it seems to transcend culture in many ways.

It seems to seems to operate orthogonally to the current culture.

Some would disagree on that, but I think it it feels more likely.

And again, I'm, I'm just speculating that this is something that would be brought into a culture and would influence the culture and the kind of imagery that's left behind by certain cultures, rather than them producing the imagery and then seeing the same things in their, their vision.

It makes sense in the opposite direction that if they're having visionary experiences and seeing certain types of imagery, that that would, that would form the basis, you know, perhaps of their, their religious traditions.

I mean, certainly, you know, in in amongst the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, that is the entire basis of their religious mystical traditions and the the stories of the spirits comes largely from ingesting these powerful psychedelic drugs.

You know, which came first?

Were they somehow aware of these beings prior to when they developed the technologies in order to see them more clearly and gain access to them more readily?

Or, you know, I, I imagine actually it's more of kind of these things operating in tandem in some way.

I don't think it's as simple as, oh, they, they took a drug accidentally or something and saw visions and then decided, oh, these must be gods.

I think it's, it's more like something deeper and stranger is going on.

The perhaps as a as a modern Westerner, it's it's it's beyond my ability to comprehend.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And you can look at even what you're doing, you know, with the building alien worlds.

And, you know, from your standpoint, you have all this knowledge now.

You're a neuroscientist, You understand how these compounds work and how they interact with your body and receptors and everything.

And we're talking about aliens and future and technology.

So it's kind of a different thing altogether.

Now is where I don't could could you think somebody in the ancient world do you know, using these comments, I don't even think they could comprehend something like that.

So I do think that culture does inform our idea of what's going on to some degree, yes.

Yes.

I mean, certainly our interpretation and then the implications of what this means, it absolutely has to be influenced by culture.

I mean, you're right.

They could never have imagined, you know, for example, you know, people will smoke DMT and say, oh, this is, this is clear evidence that we're living in some kind of simulation.

That's, you know, some kind of computer program that's been encoded by some alien intelligence.

And this is an idea actually that I, I develop in great detail in, in alien information theory in my first book.

It's not a belief system I'd I'd adhere to in any way at all.

By the way, as I've said 1000 times, but no one listens.

But but of course, you know, Amazonian people's in 1000 years ago, whatever couldn't even imagine such a thing.

Does that mean that we're approaching truth in some way or are we merely reaching for what appears to be the most appropriate cultural tool to explain this?

You know, I think in the end.

You know, I always say in the end the.

The Amazonian.

World view, I say Amazonian, South American, indigenous peoples world view here that we're they're interacting with the spirit world.

And perhaps my interpretation that we're interacting with some kind of intelligent agent, some kind of discounted intelligence, the nature and origin of which I don't know anything about.

I think ultimately, if you, if you, if you look, these things are basically the same.

I'm describing the same thing from two different perspectives.

Whereas if someone talks about a spirit, you know, what's a spirit, It's a discounted being.

It's an intelligent being of some sort that occupy that doesn't occupy A carnate form.

It's not embodied.

It's a disembodied being of some sort, you know, a modern, my modern, less loaded, more neutral term for this and a discount intelligent agent.

I'm, I'm describing the same thing really.

I don't think I'm describing, I don't think I'm saying anything different.

I'm simply using my modern kind of neuroscientific perspective to try and.

To try and.

Understand the nature, I guess of of these intelligences and and to try and convince people that it's worthwhile to actually take them seriously and that we we shouldn't be simply dismissing these beliefs of the so-called savage and uncivilised as being superstitions and nonsense or just hallucinations.

And I think that's.

That's really the aim of the.

Book, I guess is, is not to tell people what DMT is or what DMT represents, but to convince people that that there is something extremely, extremely strange and and extremely difficult to explain with with with with DMT.

I'm not sure if he answered the question no, no, that no.

That was good.

No, you're good.

Rambling's also good sometimes too.

It's, you know, you got to riff a little bit to get something out there.

Riff a little bit.

That's the word, not ramble.

Ramble.

So a common idea or like a way people try and parse out what's going on in these states, is this idea of a like a filter or some sort of perceptional filter when you're under, you know, any sort of psychedelic really, but more of the five HT 2A, you know, or tryptamines.

But when you look at that model, can that is that useful or do you think it hinders progress?

Like where do you currently stand on that idea of this this idea of a filter?

I think it's.

Useful.

I mean, the idea of filter really can be traced, really should be credited to Aldous Huxley.

I mean, he described this idea that that well, you know, psychedelics open the doors of perception, his most famous phrase, right?

And he described this idea that that you have this reduced.

So you call it a reducing valve that effectively filters out all but a measly trickle of information.

That's important and useful survival.

It's a it's broadly valid, I think.

But Aldous Huxley was working in a time we didn't understand the newer mechanisms.

We now kind of understand how that filter works and how it doesn't work.

It's one thing to say, oh, the brain is a filter, but then you have to say, well, how does this filtering work and why?

Why would psychedelics disrupt this filter?

We kind of understand how they do now because we know that the, the, the world that your brain is constructing is this model and, and this model is constantly attempting to predict and filter out to extinguish sensory inputs.

Sensory stimulation is constantly entering the brain.

And that, and the role of this model of the brain does is basically try to predict what this sensory, these sensory inputs are going to be.

And if the model is correct, the predictions are correct, then it it extinguishes, it cancels out.

There's literally, you know, neural information coming down this cortical hierarchy towards the visual cortex, and it's literally cancelling out the information that's coming into the brain.

If it gets it right, if it misses, it does make the wrong prediction, then that that information goes into the brain and must be processed.

It's unpredicted.

It's a prediction error.

So the brain is constantly trying to make these predictions about sensory inputs.

And that's how the filter works.

It's like process, you can imagine trying to work out, you know, where's this information coming from and then cancelling it out because that's cheaper to do that rather than than to than to kind of process all sensory inputs, even sensory inputs that you already kind of know about.

If your model is working, then you don't kind of need to know really.

You don't need much sensory inputs.

If your model of the world and what's going on in the world seems to be functioning, then you don't need much sensory input.

And so that's the idea, that's the filter.

Now when you bind, when psychedelics bind to the five HT 2A receptor, they stimulate neurons.

These are excitatory receptors.

They stimulate neurons, they make them more excitable, they make them more likely to fire.

And so you get this highly excitable cortex where information is flowing much more rapidly and more readily.

So the model, this world model that's constructed by the cortex is disrupted.

It becomes far less stable.

It's nudged towards the chaotic realm, becomes much more complex.

It becomes much more unstable, fluid, dynamic, a little bit more random, sort of entropic as Robin Harris would call it.

And it becomes much worse making predictions, so the model stops functioning as a valid kind of predictor and which means more information makes it past these kind of inhibitory predictions that are coming down the cortical hierarchy.

And so more information gets through.

And that's so that is a, you've lost the filter.

You know, the filter is this is this prediction system.

So you, when you disrupt that prediction system, more information comes in.

So it so yes, the the filter model works, but now we kind of understand at least to a certain extent, at least we have a good working model of how that filter works and indeed how psychedelics disrupt that filter.

Yeah, I think.

Maybe it was two or three times ago when you were on, we went in depth about kind of the hierarchy of the idea of the filter between like tryptamines versus tropanes and even like alcohol.

People can hallucinate on alcohol, doesn't mean you're actually seeing anything important, right?

So, and I think you pointed out too, 'cause I think we were also talking about salvia and the GABA opioid receptors and different things like that and how even those are different too, and they use different parts of the brain and stuff like that.

So there's definitely a lot of weirdness there.

I think if anybody's interested in that, we, like I said, we wouldn't, We riffed on that for a while, one episode a few times back.

But if DMT experiences involve genuinely informative perception beyond personal symbolism, which kind of what we were just talking about, what kinds of experiments or cross checks could you or like?

What would convince you in that regard?

Or like, is there like an experiment or something that you could feel validated on?

On that end of things, I think.

So there are a number of experiments one can devise here.

The classic one, which you might have spoken about before comes from a paper by a guy called Rodriguez back in 2005, maybe a long time ago.

Whereas he suggested, you know, he said, look, if these if these are intelligent beings, what they're we're interacting with.

I mean, that's really what we want to know.

If you want to know, are we interacting with some kind of intelligence here?

Is this, is this not just a projection, projection of my own mind, whatever that might mean?

Or are we dealing with some kind of external intelligence that is non human?

And if so, you know, how, how do we demonstrate that fact, that possibility?

And he suggested this Rodriguez that, well, we give these beings mathematical problems to solve, right?

We give them a large number and say, give me the unique prime factors of this large number.

All numbers have a set of unique prime factors, but they're, they're very difficult, certainly with large numbers to calculate in your head.

Well, they're impossible basically for a human to calculate, work out what these numbers are, this set of prime factors in your head of a large number.

So you, you send someone into the DMT space with this large number, which is very easy to remember, you know, maybe a four digit number or something.

And then you ask the entities, hey, there's this 4 digit number, what are the unique prime factors?

And then the idea being that assuming they're cooperative, that they will go, ah, it's, it's, it's, it's this, you know, 7-7 and 13 and whatever.

The issue with that of.

Course is that there's this assumption that they're going to be cooperative.

There's there's there's something a little bit there's a shade of arrogance implicit in the whole thing that we're going in there and saying, Hey, prove your prove your ontological status.

We don't believe that you're real.

Prove that you're real.

And that and if, if and if they are some kind of intelligence that is orders of magnitude beyond the human, so far beyond the human that it's incomprehensible to the human, you know, they're going to think, oh, fuck off.

You know, I mean, who are you exactly?

And they're more likely to to kind of fuck with those, I would say.

So I'm I'm a little bit and and there are other experiments that one one can one can imagine, you know, sending two different people into the DMT space at the same time and asking, you know, trying to look for at least correlations or parallels.

David Dr.

David Luke, do that.

I think actually something maybe the Dreaming Jaguars.

I remember them talking about something along those lines a while back about trying to connect in that space or getting data.

I thought David Luke was doing something like that.

He might.

Be I'm not sure it's actually being done.

I mean, we've, we've been talking about this kind of thing for a long time.

It wouldn't be a necessary difficult thing to do.

The experiment needs to be well designed.

And the problem is, as David Luke will always tell you, is that that that if you send two people into the DMT space at the same time and get some kind of information share between them, that's basically it's, it's a test of telepathy with extra steps.

So are they 2 extended?

Stays at the same time.

Is that something that could be done?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And again, that's also being being considered as well.

But the problem is, is that how do you rule out simple telepathy?

You know, I can, it's like if we did like a remote viewing test or something like that, you know, we both remote viewed or whatever, some location and some got some information back.

You know, are we really going to the same place or is information is one person being successful and the other person is reading the other's mind?

Do you know what I mean?

So we how to how how do you rule out this just a simple direct connection between two people's minds?

And there's much more evidence, you know, statistical evidence for telepathy.

Now, you know, that's been accumulated over over 100 years or so.

So that would be the first thing you would go to and say, OK, this is a type of telepathy.

So how do we rule that out is the question here.

How do we eliminate the possibility of simple telepathy?

And there might be ways to do that, but again, it would require careful thought about the type of experiment and how that would work.

My current thinking, having spoken, and I've spoken about this in other interviews, but spoken to people like Andres Gomez Emilsson, who you might know, he's a mathematician, he's very interested in DMT, probably.

I think I've seen the world active.

On Acts or Twitter, whatever, Oh, he's very active.

On Acts, yeah.

And he is, I would say, the world's leading kind of DMT phenomenologist.

I think he understands the mathematical structure and the topological structure, the geometry of the DMT space better than almost anyone on the planet, I would guess, including myself.

And and he describes.

Entities.

Performing not giving him information specifically, but performing mathematical feats, mathematical operations that a human brain can't perform.

The simplest example, there are several that he gave me, but the simplest one to explain is the four colour theorem, which is a tiling theorem.

So the if you have a A2 dimensional surface with lots of, you know, tessellating shapes, you can always colour every shape.

With the different colours so.

That No2 shapes of the same colour, but together with four colours.

So it's like if you want to draw a world map, you don't want 2 colours, 2 countries with the same colour and you only need 4 colours to do that.

Doesn't matter how complicated the pattern is, you can always colour it with four colours and no two sides will touch with the same colour.

But it's a very difficult thing to do.

It's a simple idea to understand, but with a very complex map, it's very difficult to colour it.

Whereas he was described beings that were generating these maps like within a fraction of a second, like repeatedly they'd create this incredibly complex map, perfect for colours, delete it or what, whatever, and then paint it again with a different one.

And again, it's like they.

It's like they can't.

Help but betray their intelligence.

So I think I kind of like the idea that we don't go in there kind of probing them, you know, or asking them directly.

We don't we don't require their cooperation.

We simply go in there and observe them.

People go in there who who are mathematically sophisticated.

I mean, if I went in there and I saw them doing that, I would go, wow, that's amazing.

And that would be it.

And I would come out and say they were doing things that were incredible boring.

But he can come out and say they were doing things that were exquisitely mathematically sophisticated.

And I can tell you exactly what they were doing.

They were solving the four colour theorem.

They were solving this theorem.

They were performing this minimization problem, you know, all this mathematical stuff that most people would would, they might recognise it as being fascinating and beautiful or weird.

But being able to send someone in there that can actually tell you exactly why this, this is impossible.

These human brain cannot do this.

And if the human brain cannot do this, then how is it possible that I'm seeing it?

Because we know the world is being constructed by the brain.

That suggests that we're dealing with something external to the brain that is generating that imagery.

That is, in my opinion, that is directing the imagery, that is directing the world model being constructed by your brain.

But it is some kind of intelligence that is very far beyond the human.

So my light shining through, you got this interesting effect.

Oh, you're fine, You're trying.

To avoid it, but I.

Can't.

No, no, you're fine.

It's because your.

Your explanations are so illuminating, but no, but so that I find that interesting in two parts.

So like you could say it, you could go either way on this.

I always think of that, that, you know, that little circle where they show all the psilocybin connections of the, you know, they show the connections happening in the brain on psilocybin versus not on psilocybin.

Let's say that this does something, you know, DMT does something similar.

Or going into those states, you're talking about this guy discovering or analyzing these mathematical feats.

You know, maybe it's a tool.

And if, if, if nothing else, let's say we are communicating with our own subconscious or something deep within ourselves, on one end, you could say, well, then that could be used as a tool maybe to discover, you know, deeper mathematical properties of the universe or whatever.

And on the other end of things, maybe it's not, maybe these are external.

You know, I think on both fronts it it opens up doors to discovery, which I think is exciting.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

I mean, in some respects and for, for some people, they don't care whether it's real or what real even means.

I mean, that's even that question is, is, is not a simple 1.

You know, what do we mean by real?

You know, the, all experiences are real in some ways.

They're all, they're all built from the same stuff.

They're all built from these patterns of neural activity generated by the brain.

So all experiences to some extent real, they all occur in consciousness.

So, you know, does it matter, one might ask, whether we're dealing with something that's outside the brain or inside the brain.

And ultimately we might find that it's kind of a meaningless question, you know, inside and outside.

Ultimately you might find that, you know, if you look at a high enough perspective that actually we're talking about the same thing.

So I'm, I'm very sympathetic for that position.

In which case, sure, we just, we just say, OK, this seems to be potentially, as you say, a tool that could allow us to explore certainly highly unusual states of consciousness, but also highly unusual mathematical structures.

I mean people who you know, you can imagine a topologist or something, or a geometer on algebraic.

Topologist or whatever.

Going into the DMT space and actually being able to experience structures that before he only understood as in the, in the purely abstract, it's impossible even doesn't matter how good you are as a mathematician to imagine a, you know, a nine dimensional manifold or whatever.

I'm just making stuff up here.

But you get the point, right?

You have these high dimensional structures that are impossible to imagine or comprehend and being you go into the DMT state and you're confronted with them.

And, and I think that's that in itself is is incredible and and certainly needs to be to be explored, even if even if.

We decide that you.

Know what?

Certain people aren't particularly interested in this so-called the ontology of this thing.

I mean that's a whole different area of exploration which is far more difficult I think to get our teeth into.

My question is.

Is there benefits other than like the old adage, like, oh, there's no such thing as kind of like a bad trip, you know, because you can learn something from it.

But is there something going on you know, from the standpoint of something more to these nightmare like scenarios or positive scenarios?

Yeah, I mean.

This is a question for a therapist, really, or a psychologist.

You know, I, I think I don't, I don't subscribe the idea that there's no such thing as a bad trick.

I think there are.

I mean, try and tell people, you know, in the book I described this, this guy, this Korean guy who was over 3 ayahuasca trips in the proven Amazon, you know, perfect setting, everything was, was absolutely perfect.

And he was expecting to see mother ayahuasca and he was confronted with these vicious insectoid alien beings who tortured him and, and captured his soul.

And you know, try telling him that it that wasn't a bad trip.

You know there may be.

Some.

I'm not saying there isn't wasn't some deeper message here and that it wasn't pure purely malicious.

You know, maybe they were trying to teach him something, but he certainly didn't come out of the experience with that.

You know, it wasn't like a journey where he was, it wasn't like a the kind of the hero's journey where he, you know, descended to the underworld and had this horrible experiences.

And then he reached a moment of enlightenment when he realised it's all illusion or whatever.

And he came out and he came out, you know, a bigger man than when he went in.

You know, for him, it was pure torture.

I mean, he came out of it.

He was horrified.

And that's why he contacted me, because he was, he was terrified that they captured his soul and that when he died, he was going to be taken to back to that place, you know, eternally perhaps.

I mean, this was a horrifying thought.

I mean, many event people have entertained the idea of, you know, what happens after you die.

What if you go to hell?

You know, and but but having been there, and it must be a horrifying thought, the idea that he, you know, he might be headed back there.

So, I mean, I did my best to assuage him and to convince him that this wasn't the case and that there probably was some deeper message and some lesson there that he hadn't found yet.

But at the same time, I wasn't going to say, oh, you need to get back on the horse, my friend, and go back to the Amazon and drink more Alaska because I might be setting him up for, you know, even worse.

So one has to tread carefully with offering advice to people and saying there's no such thing as bad trips because for some people, there really are such things as bad trips.

And people have, you know, it's rare, but people do have sometimes long lasting negative experiences.

So I'm not averse to the idea of, I don't think anyone in their right mind is averse to the idea of eliminating, not eliminating necessarily, but minimizing the possibility of bad trips and getting the set and the setting right.

I'm also not adverse to the idea of, you know, taking MDMA prior to, you know, psilocybin for certain people.

You know, candy flipping.

Is it candy flipping or is that LSD and MDMA always hippie flipping?

That's hippie flipping.

OK, Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Anyway, great combo by the.

Way fabulous.

Great.

Combo, right.

And, you know, that's been, I remember reading a paper just few years ago where they, they, they tried this technique they, they study it in a research setting and, and found that it, you know, as we kind of understood anyway, but you know, found that, yes, it reduces the, the occurrence of negative experiences.

And I'm not averse to this.

I, I, I kind of don't have much time for people who are always going on about, oh, you need to face your shadow and stuff.

And that's fine if you want to face your shadow, my friend.

But some people just want to have a beautiful, mind expanding, pleasant experience and that they shouldn't be denied them.

They shouldn't.

This idea that you have to go through bad trips.

I don't think it's it's, but they are.

Obviously it's unpredictable.

You can never eliminate the possibility entirely and one should know how to deal with them, but.

But yeah, is it?

A bad trip?

Is it a learning trip?

I think you can frame it in both ways.

But yeah, that's as much as I can say I think about to that anecdote.

What I find interesting is I wonder if that guy was scared of insects because so that's actually not that.

I've heard trip reports.

I know actually the late great Jerry Garcia and actually the Grateful Dead got their name from ADMT experience.

But there's a anecdote where Jerry Garcia is doing this interview and he's talking about smoking DMT and he talks about our insectoid overlords and these mantis like beans.

And he, you know, go.

It's, it's, it's actually kind of a crazy interview.

I recommend people go try and find that on the Internet, if you can.

I'll try and find the link if I can, too.

It's I think it's all typed out.

It's not like recorded or anything.

But yeah, I just wonder how much fear of certain things also play into it too.

It's like somebody that's scared of an insect that maybe another person isn't.

They might have different experiences.

Yeah, I think.

You know, you know, if we are dealing with some kind of intelligence, it wouldn't surprise me if they they take some pleasure in, in in in for want of a better term, kind of fucking with us a little bit.

You know, it does perhaps suggest that if you, if you do have deep seated issues with certain things, whether it is insects or spiders or they might take advantage of that or whether it's, you know, whether it's your subconscious kind of trying to.

Yeah, I've heard.

That too, I've heard people that have like insecurities of some sort being that kind of like the entities throwing that back at in their face kind of a thing or like you said, kind of just messing with them or whatever, which is, you know, kind of crazy, which I that that's definitely part of the trickster element though, too, right?

You know, this idea that it's.

I was just going to say yeah.

Yeah, EMT is Trixie.

It's a Trixie molecule that you should be very careful about what what you take from what they, what they say, what they do or you know, the messages that they give you.

I think you, that you can be LED down down the garden path again by these these beings.

And, and, and you know, I won't talk about specific examples recently, but I think there are certain cases that have become quite well known where people, I get the feeling that people might be being LED down the garden path by, by entities.

Yeah, I'll say no more than that.

People might know what I'm referring to, others might not.

You don't.

Maybe well.

Yeah, we'll, we'll get to some other stuff here in a minute.

I want to just finish.

I have a few more questions that I thought out before we get to this new segment I've been doing.

But so in the later chapters, you suggest DMT isn't just, you know, generating hallucinations, but it also might be tuning their consciousness into an actual, you know, ontological domain.

From your perspective, both the neuroscientist and a theorist, what would you count as a convincing evidence that these realms are real and that the brain is in there, not just brain generated illusions?

I think we kind of touched on this a little bit.

But like, what is the best evidence that you think you have for these realms being real, if you will?

Well.

I mean, you know, the, the, the kind of the second third of the book is devoted to that question really is, is how do we, why can't we just say their hallucinations?

Why can't we just say this is exotic dream imagery or whatever?

And I, and that's, that's really been my approach is to, is to say, OK, these DMT visions, just like all subjective experiences are constructed in some way by the brain.

This is your kind of your, your foundational starting point.

Then the question is, well, is the brain constructing these entirely without any kind of help with any kind of external sensory inputs?

Now, to answer that question, you need to distinguish between the kinds of world models that your brain can construct and those that it can't.

And that requires an analysis of how the world is built by the brain and its limitations.

What are the limitations and what evidence do we have from subjective experience, from dream states, from hallucinations?

We know that the brain is, you know, the brain evolved to construct a model of the world as a model of the environment, and it has its limits.

You know, in the dream state, for example, the dream state tends to be, for the most part, indistinguishable.

You know, studies have been showing this for 100 years, that the dream state is generally continuous with waking.

The brain is using what it's learned about constructing the world in the waking state to construct the world in the in the dream states, people dream about dogs and cats.

They drink, dream about cows and horses.

If they work on a farm, if they like fishing, they might dream about fishes.

If they live in the Amazon rainforest, they might dream of piranha and Anaconda and Panther.

So the the dream, the dream state is a model.

You know, this is the only world your brain knows how to build.

This is how I normally put it, which is the, the world as a model of the environment.

It doesn't know, or shouldn't know in my opinion, how to construct exquisitely complex, you know, staggering, staggeringly complex alternate worlds that have no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world.

And that is what the DMT world represents.

It's a world that is, it's disjoint, I would say from the normal waking world.

It is not just random neural firing.

It is a world that is, you know, exceedingly coherent, staggering narrative complexity.

It is a world that that doesn't bear any relationship to the normal waking world.

And to me that is a great mystery.

And I think that suggests in my opinion that there is some directing of this world.

I don't think that you're seeing you're going to another space.

I don't think you're seeing another world as such or going to another world.

I think there is some kind of intelligent agent that is directing what you see.

I don't know what that whether that intelligent agent is singular or, or there's a multiplicity or you know what, whether it could be faithfully represented or any kind of visual form, I don't know.

But I think it's directing the visions.

And there's, there's evidence from that from a quite widespread effect which I discussed in the book called often called lockout, which is when the beings not only are able to direct the visions, but are actually able to kind of direct entry into the space and control entry into the space.

So people who will use DMT often for long periods have full breakthrough experiences every time, you know, using it, you know, weekly or sometimes daily.

And then suddenly they get a message, you know, they get, you know, a big flashing X that blasts into their brain and they get some kind of entity wagging it's finger at them.

One person described getting punched by some gesture like being and being instantaneously brought back to normal waking consciousness.

So this is to me a pharmacological mystery.

It's not tolerance.

Tolerance developed slowly and gradually over time.

It's not an off switch.

It's so it it seems to be that these.

That the DMT.

State is being directed by a flow of information into the brain when the brain is in this much more fluid and dynamic state induced by DMT and these this intelligence, of course, if they can control the flow of information into the brain, they can also cut off that flow of information.

And that is what this lockout represents in my opinion.

Often it's people who use it too much, abuse it, one would say, or aren't using it with good intention, but that doesn't, that's not a tolerance effect, even though it's often described as such.

You know, the same batch of DMT, the same vaporisation method, everything's the same.

Except one day they get a message that's saying no entry.

And sometimes this lasts for months.

You know, they, they, they, they try again a few, you know, a few weeks later they're still locked out.

And then they have to kind of do some, some work and eventually maybe they get, they get allowed back in the, the effects return.

But this to me is, is, you know, aside from this mathematical operations that I was describing that Emil Andres, Emil Gomez Emilsen was describing to me, this lockout effect is, is truly fascinating because it, it, it really kind of backs up this idea that that the DMT state is being directed.

The DMT state is like, I call it a directed world.

You don't breakthrough into the DMT world.

The DMT world breaks in through into you.

It's just this flow of information coming into the brain, this directing the visions.

And, and if that is cut off, then you are denied entry, no matter how much DMT you smoke.

So that I think those.

Those things to.

Me, you know, aside from the broader properties of the DMT space, which I discuss at length and you know, the, the, the, you know, the, the unlikely, you know, how unlikely it is that the brain can construct these worlds in the absence of some data, external data inputs.

I think these specific cases, I think really are good targets for us to study.

And I'd like to see a study of lockout.

I mean, very difficult to study it, you know, in a lab because you can't, it's kind of unpredictable unless you have someone who is currently locked out and then bring them into the, into the research laboratory and inject them with DMT and ask them about their experiences.

And if and if they have no experience, then, well, this is, you know, with pure, you know, IVDMT, if they, they're not getting any effects from the drug.

I think that would be very cool to demonstrate to someone who had used DMT in the past, who'd had many experiences in the past that were documented in some ways.

We knew that these people were normally perfectly responsive to DMT.

We get an idea of, you know, their usage over time.

And then we bring them into the, into the research, the institution or laboratory or whatever, inject them with, with DMT.

And then if they have no response, you can even look at their neural activity.

I mean, that would be cool to, you know, put them in an MRI machine and actually see, you know, what's going on in the brain when someone is locked out.

What's different about the way that the information flows through the brain?

These kind of that would be a really cool study to do if anyone.

Wants to do it, maybe we'll.

Do it?

I don't know.

Come on.

Guys get on it, guys and gals get out there.

I think it's chapter 15, the intelligence.

In the intelligence you flirt with the idea of a mind like principle underlying reality.

Do you think DMT is revealing that consciousness is primary and matter emerges from it?

Or do you think that we'll still see a path for these experiences from a bottom up materialist framework kind of a thing?

Well, I don't think we're.

Going to get an answer, you know, a solution.

I don't think we're ever going to derive consciousness in a bottom, bottom up fashion from matter.

I think consciousness is fundamental.

That doesn't mean that that studying the brain and how psychedelics work in the brain isn't useful because the brain clearly is.

You know, if consciousness is fundamental, the brain is, this is a highly complex pattern of consciousness fundamental.

I mean, that's how really I, I, I see it.

I see the brain as a complex emergence pattern within consciousness.

I think consciousness is absolutely fundamental.

So what's the.

Yeah, Well, what do you what?

So, so do you think what what do you think's fundamental in the you?

So do you think that consciousness is primary or do you think that matter is primary?

OK, I think that conscious.

Is primary.

And I think the problem we've had over the last several 100 years is, is, is assuming matter to be primary and then basically struggling for the next 400 years or whatever, since they can't really probably earlier to, to try and derive consciousness from matter.

You know, with the taking that as an axiom, the kind of the fundamental axiom that we've been working on is that matter is fundamental, whatever matter is.

And then consciousness emerges at certain high levels of organization of matter, certain levels of complexity or reason, you get consciousness and it's not worked so far.

And I would my guess is that it's not work because it doesn't, it's not going to work.

I think even in principle, the idea of deriving subjective experience from from from matter, I think is is doomed to fail.

And more and more scientists now it's not just kind of woo woo mystical types, but you know, serious scientists, you know, Tanoni is, is kind of 1 Christoph Koch and others.

Tegmark to an extent consider consciousness to be fundamental and that yes, we need to work in the opposite direction basically and work out, you know, how does consciousness behave and how does consciousness complexify and self organise to form these structures.

But fundamentally, it's all about, you know, everything's subjective ultimately, I think, I think subjectivity, consciousness, which means that's what we mean by consciousness, right?

It's subjective.

That subjective experience is consciousness.

And it can be, it can be very, you know, pure consciousness, you know, the pure bright what, what light of pure awareness, you know, that would be conscious.

Or it could be this extremely complex world that we exist in now in a normal waking subjective world.

Or it could be the DMT, well, which is inordinately more complex, but it's still an experience within consciousness.

So yes, that my answer is yes, I think consciousness is fundamental.

Awesome, I have.

One more question and then we'll get to Mike's mind.

Melters.

You describe DMT as a future technology of astonishment if humanity develops the extended state or a reproducible DMT technology.

Do you see primarily as a scientific tool for mapping hidden dimensions?

We talked about like topography and things like that, but do you think that it it will be more of a scientific application or some sort of spiritual initiation device?

Like what do you think the future holds for that?

Well, both, I don't think.

I think that comes a point when the spiritual and the the scientific start to merge.

I don't think they are as as as distant and disconnected as we once assumed.

You know if if if.

Consciousness is absolutely fundamental then.

Then you know.

DMT is a tool for exploring consciousness and is a tool for exploring.

Other types of.

Consciousness and other types of consciousness is or other perspectives or other beings that also exist within consciousness.

And that sounds very spiritual to me.

The idea of, of communicating with normally invisible discount intelligent being, that feels like a very spiritual thing.

Whereas at the same time, you know, I talk in very scientific terms and I, you know, I talk about DMT and fusion, extended state and fusion technologies and, you know, and, and, and neural activity and, you know, pharmacological tool.

This is all very scientific, and yet it feels like the aim is ultimately.

Spiritual in some way.

So I think the word spiritual starts to lose its meaning in a way.

I guess I, I struggle to to give you a precise definition, you know of what, what, what what, What do you mean by spiritual?

It doesn't seem to mean I guess something's.

Beyond, I mean, because like, I think a lot of people perceive stuff that's spiritual.

I mean, you could look at it as just metaphysics, right?

Just stuff that we haven't really figured out yet.

But there's some element that feels spiritual or feels beyond, you know, reality, if you will.

Yeah, I mean, I guess you.

Might say something that exists beyond the physical.

Which is.

You know, basically my fundamental perspective is that the the, the physical emerges from ultimately from consciousness.

So, so yeah, it's it's kind of tricky, but I think the idea of interacting with beings that are non physical or that are normally hidden, you know, I could, you know, 100 years ago I would be calling them spirits, I guess.

And that's obviously would be a spiritual perspective.

So yeah, I think both scientific and spiritual.

All right.

Are you ready to enter Mike's mind melters?

I'm.

Not sure, but let's let's give it a.

Whirl.

All right, Andrew.

I'm going to ask you 5 philosophical questions.

Just please answer them the best you can and we'll go from there.

Number one, what is something you believe in that you know is probably wrong or illogical, but you are just not being honest with yourself?

Oh, I don't know.

I don't know what is something I believe in.

That I think is probably.

Wrong.

Well, I'm going to.

I'm going to give you the boring answer in that.

I would hope.

That if.

If I believed in something.

Which I thought was probably wrong.

I would stop believing in it, but we both.

Know that that's not I don't know, I think.

Generally I'm I'm very open to beliefs, I'm very open to possibilities, so.

Yeah, I, yeah.

I can't answer that question.

I can't think of anything.

I can't think of anything that I.

I believe in that.

I think is probably.

Wrong.

An example would be.

Somebody that's maybe they're like Christian, but they're like yeah, maybe this God thing, you know, not not, you know, something along those lines, right if.

You were asking me about what other people believe in that they know is probably wrong.

I can give.

I'm not.

I can give you some really politically incorrect answers, but I'm not going to because there are better hills to die on.

But.

Yeah, I try to.

Avoid.

I try to avoid getting myself into those kind of belief systems, but I'm there.

I know there are a lot of people in the world that certainly.

Kind of believe.

Things the root of the question.

Is actually just to be honest with yourself about some sort of like hidden cognitive bias that you have that maybe you aren't aware of, but we can move on.

That would mean you kind of gave me the your thoughts on it, which is good enough for me #2 do you think there is an objective purpose for humanity, and if So, what?

Yes and no.

I think I subscribe to the idea.

I mean, really, this really comes from someone like Alan Watts, you know, the idea that that reality is, is ultimately play and, and that's the kind of the point of it rather than a, some kind of grand aim.

I, I, I don't kind of like that idea necessarily that there is some ultimate purpose That's big and important because I think, I think the idea that ultimately it's all about, it's all one big drama.

Reality is, is a grand drama.

And of course, what's got all of this from from Hinduism really, you know, ancient Hindu ideas, you know, Vedanta and Advaita and stuff.

And so I think, yeah, that that resonates with me.

I don't think, I don't think reality is serious.

And I think you get that message a lot on DMT.

If you take it too seriously, then you will often pay the price and you will get mocked for it.

So yeah, that's my feeling.

It's life.

Reality itself is 1 big cosmic drama, cosmic game, perhaps even cosmic joke.

Yeah, I think.

Yeah, that's a, that's a good answer.

I think the common out is usually we create our own purpose or, or telos or whatever.

But yeah, to your point, I think that I like Alan Watts.

I I listen to Alan Watts a lot too.

I think that he offers a lot there.

So that's a good answer #3 do you think humans are special or separate from the rest of nature?

If your answer is yes, please give your best example of why.

I mean, again, I think we're clearly, yes, we are clearly special in some ways.

I mean, this is, you know, cognitively, technologically, we have, we have in many ways, we are clearly different from other animals.

But at the same time, there are also animals that seem to be much happier than us, Dolphins, for example, who are also very intelligent, who also possess language and, and, and seem to, to have a great time more so than we do.

I think our problem in many ways we're our specialness or uniqueness comes with many problems, which again goes back to the last question of taking ourselves too seriously and taking life too seriously and treating it like some journey with some really important goal at the end.

And that leads to all of the a lot of the suffering and the grasping and the accumulation and all of that stuff.

So yes, in some ways we're special.

Is that the right word?

I'm not sure.

But then other, I think other animals are also special in their own way that, you know, they're not, it's a, it's a rabbit.

Hole, you'd be very hard pressed.

It's a rabbit hole.

You'd be very hard pressed to find something that there's no proto version of what we're capable of.

I, I think for me, I tossed this is something, because this is something I ask myself a lot.

And I think that maybe recursion or recursive tool making, you know, we make things that make things where I mean, you might be able to make the argument that maybe primates are making tools, you know, but then we're so far removed from that initial phase that it's, it's very different.

Yes, I guess.

It it hinges on what you mean by special.

I mean unique, more advanced, more sophisticated, more intelligent, all of these stuff definitely apply.

Special is an interesting word which you chose deliberately, I know, but.

These are that's.

Why these are the mind melters bro #4 What do you think happens when we die?

Oh, So what?

I don't think.

I don't think that.

Necessarily.

I don't know is the answer but obviously but.

I don't think we're going.

Necessarily, I don't describe to the idea that we're going to take everything with us and take our identity, you know, who we are, our name and our occupation and our interests and our personality with us.

The idea perhaps, that the consciousness is in some way continuous, that nobody's ever born, nobody ever dies.

Again, this goes back to the idea of consciousness being fundamental, is that there is no such thing as birth and there is no such thing as death.

Ultimately.

There's a great Zen, actually.

A great.

Quote that I used in reality switch.

There we go.

Chance to plug where I said here we go.

When I took my first breath, my world was born with me.

When I die, my world dies with me.

In other words, I wasn't born into a world that was already here before me.

I bring my own world into existence, live it out and take it with me when I die.

So suggest this, this idea of of of that you are, you have your own world now when you die, you know, from your perspective, you kind of.

Have another world.

I don't know, you know, that this is a kind of a continuous process.

You're not born, you don't come into the world.

You kind of bring your world with you.

It's kind of pretty deep stuff.

But but yeah, that's that's kind of what I I don't think that it's a, you know, when you die, you die, you know, that's it.

I don't think that's the case from other people's perspective.

Last question.

For Mike's mind mounters, what do you think is the greatest mystery of all time and why the.

Greatest mystery.

Of all time.

Again, not a particularly imaginative example, but I guess again, going back to Alan Watts, he had this, he often used to talk about the idea of the existence is weird.

Just the fact that things exist is really odd.

It would have been much simpler if there was literally nothing.

Not just nothing as in, you know, quantum foam or, you know, not Lawrence Krauss's idea of nothing.

But like, does anybody like that?

Idea.

I've never met anybody that like Lawrence's Krauss's idea of nothing, no.

No, but I mean, what?

It's the best that he could do, right?

It's to go.

He called it nothing because, you know, a universe from nothing is a great title for a book.

But I think anyone that was that was intellectually honest would know that he's not talking about nothing here.

So yeah.

So the idea of absolute, you know, why?

Why isn't that absolute?

And I've often wondered about this.

And when you, when you're when you're conscious and your brain kind of locks into the idea, it sends a little shiver.

Like what?

Absolute Nothing.

There's never been anything.

Never will be in existence itself.

Is does not exist.

I mean that that is the simplest, purest state, but that's not the state, clearly.

So, yeah, the great mystery, you know, why are what's this all about?

Why?

Why?

What is this thing?

What is reality?

I don't think we're even close to grasping that.

And I guess this is what the the Zen Buddhists do, you know, in the mountains here in Japan, and they sit and face a wall and try and kind of observe that directly.

Because I don't think you're going to reach an answer to that question intellectually.

You kind of have to sit for 20 years and hope that.

It hits you.

It strikes you, you know, some personal, personal revelation, I guess.

Awesome.

Thank you for.

Answering that, I know, I know they're tough.

I put you on the spot.

Nobody knows what the questions are going in.

It's not like I gave you the list and said we're going to talk about this.

But that's what makes them tough.

And I, you know, look, I, I think part of those, why I created these questions is number 1, to put somebody on the spot and #2 I think that it confronts you with questions that we all kind of avoid regularly, but that I think are essential to being a human being.

So.

But I appreciate you answering those.

Is there an ancient psychedelic tradition there in Japan of any sort with like mushrooms or anything or?

Well, there's a modern.

Psychedelic tradition for sure.

It's a good question.

I mean, it's something I'd like to actually study more seriously.

There are many species of psychedelic mushroom in Japan.

Whether there's a history of use is a good question.

The answer is I don't.

Know, I'd like to know, yeah.

But certainly in the modern era, in this ayahuasca circles and things like that, and there's certainly a psychedelic subculture in Japan, is there?

Naturally growing, I mean, there's mushrooms that grow everywhere, but are there, what species do you know, is there any species that grow around there?

I'm, I'm, I couldn't give you the species by name, but but yeah, there are, there are, well, I say many, I say a handful of mushrooms that grow, you know, in, throughout, you know, from mainland Japan, Honshu and, you know, down to Okinawa.

There's a species of mushroom that grows only in in Okinawa.

So yeah, I mean.

There's, there's certainly lots of psychedelics around in, you know, Acacia Confusa grows in Okinawa, lots of it, and in neighboring Taiwan, actually.

But there's certainly plenty of it around.

But how, how much, how far back, I don't know, but that's something I want, I'd like to research.

Yeah.

And Asian and.

Theogenic traditions are kind of a mystery to me.

I don't really know.

There's not really anybody talking about them, at least to, you know, a popular standpoint.

Maybe it's esoteric or maybe you'll find some like you said, some old monk or Buddhist or something that might have some knowledge.

But right that.

Would have to brush up on my kind of old old Japanese, which is, I mean, modern Japanese is, is is tough enough.

But going back to the old books, certainly handwritten.

I mean, it's like.

Have you heard about this new, Not new, but I think the student found the psychedelic component of Morning Glory.

Are you familiar with this?

It's kind of going around.

I can pull up the name.

Yeah, so I.

Mean what he found was the symbiotic fungus.

Yeah, the that's right.

The fungus, yeah, yeah, but within the.

Seeds.

Yeah, I mean this, this was.

The reason?

It was kind.

Of a big result was because it was the same species that Hoffman originally isolated LSA from.

But there are a number of morning glory species that with symbiotic fungi that had been isolated before that produced tryptamines.

Sorry, produced these lysergic acids.

Hawaiian baby.

Woodrows, that kind of stuff.

You're right.

Exactly.

So it's not an entirely new, I think we all we we knew for a long time or suspected that there was some, that it wasn't the morning glory plant the actual seeds themselves that were producing these LSA because they're very, you know, they're complex molecular structures.

It is probably fungus as it's always the fungus.

It's always the fucking.

Fungi, right?

Yeah.

All right.

Last question, I promise we'll, we'll get you out of here.

I've been kind of following a little bit this I was during my hiatus, I started a different channel, a philosophy channel, but I've been following your interactions with it.

Was it Danny Goler and this idea of, you know, he smokes DMT and then, you know, looks in the laser and sees some sort of code and, you know, things that we're in a simulation or that's the hypothesis that he's put forth.

And you've had a little bit of a back and forth with them.

Where do you stand on all that?

Yeah, yeah.

Where do I stand?

I stand there.

It's minimally a very interesting phenomenon in that it allows you to fairly reliably isolate a particular aspect of the broader DMT phenomenology.

Minimally, it's, it's worth of study that that, but the this is therefore this is a simulation and this is the fundamental source code I don't buy again for reasons that I've discussed at length, You know, in many places.

I've got an article in my sub stack why I, I don't subscribe to that.

And of course, why would I, I mean, there's it's, it's you need to, there's a lot of work, scientific work that needs to to to occur before you to the kind of to bring this.

Out of the realm of private revelation.

You see the code and you're convinced this is the source code.

OK, great.

Now you need to bring this outside of private revelation and into actual scientific observations and analysis.

And is anybody looking to do that?

Well, I think Danny is.

Having a go.

You know, when I was out in LA just a couple of months ago, we had a long, a few long conversations about this.

There's a movie coming out, documentary called The Discovery, I think next year, which has got my conversations, my interviews and stuff, as well as, you know, the whole thing.

I think it's fascinating, but I'm not certainly not ready to.

Accept that he's stumbled.

Upon the source code.

I mean, that's.

That's a huge thing to say and there are a number of issues with that hypothesis in my opinion.

You know, in terms of the what the code looks like and you know why there would be a code that was human readable as code if it was a fundamental source code, why it would be running through reality like the matrix.

The unfortunate coincidence that a laser light, when reflected off a surface, tends to produce this this pattern of speckles, this interference pattern on the retina, it's points of sensory inputs which around which imagery can certainly be seeded, which could give the, you know, the could act as like a sensory scaffold for complex imagery generated by DMT.

The fact that this this this speckled pattern has a number of optical properties that make it appear as if it occupies space behind the wall.

This is all without DMT.

So all these things are kind of, they make you think that maybe there's some interaction between the optical properties of the laser and the DMT that's generating this effect rather than you're seeing the source code of reality and distinguishing between those is no easy task, but that's what you need to do.

You know, I'm not, I'm accused of being a hater or dismissing it or, you know, ruling it out.

I'm not, I'm just, I'm just saying, you know, as I do with everything, you, you, you go for more mundane explanations first and then you try to rule them out.

And, and how you, once you've ruled them out, then you start reaching for more exotic explanations.

And the idea that we've discovered the source code of reality is, is about as exotic an explanation as you get, and it doesn't get any grander than that.

So I can understand why people are kind of latching onto this and going, Oh my God, this is like most important discovery in the history of mankind.

And if it was true, then it would be.

But there's a long way to go from an observation under the influence of DMT with this, with this laser, knowing what we know about the optical effects and properties of lasers and other things and, and, and reaching that grandest of conclusions.

So that's all I'm saying is just, and of course we know we were earlier we were talking about the ideas of these intelligences fucking with you.

So what better way to fuck with someone than to convince them that they're they're being shown the ultimate source code of reality?

Yeah, I don't think people have.

To be very careful.

People and I've talked to.

People about this, but like even the you know, you see something let's say you're having an experience and you're watching TV.

If you then close your eyes, you're going to see that TV there for a while and so forth with a lot of things, right.

So like I'm not saying that you were he was, but just the idea of that's the way our brain works.

So it could be holding on to symbols or letters or whatever, and then our brain could be kind of, you know, in that state, putting things together that maybe are not actually there.

I don't know, you know.

The brain is very.

Good at, it's great, good at constructing symbols.

I mean, that's we are very, we are a literary species, a lexical species and our brain is very good.

You know, reading requires your brain to construct, you know, high rate, a series of of, of very small, finely detailed symbol.

This is what reading is.

So your brain is very, very good at that, which is why lexical hallucinations of text, of code, of mathematical symbols, of musical notation, they occur in about, you know, I think it's about 40% of cases of visual hallucinations in people with various neuropsychological, you know, hallucinatory disorders.

In lots of people, seeing code and letters, it's one of the most common forms of hallucination.

And seeing code under the influence of DM T is also common.

That goes back decades.

So how do we distinguish between that?

How do we say that?

How do we?

Confirm this is not.

Just a type of lexical hallucination, you know, highly complex, fascinating form.

But you know, DMT does generate very complex and interesting imagery.

How do we distinguish between that and?

The code of.

Reality.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like.

There's a show called DEVS that was on for a while where they figured out the algorithm for prediction of, of everything of life.

You know, it kind of reminds me of that a little bit.

But yeah, I mean, look, we're human beings.

We've got apophenia and pareidolia and our mind likes to put things together and patterns and pattern recognition, that's what we do, right?

So I'm interested in it.

I'll see you know, what happens.

I'm looking forward to checking this documentary when it comes out.

And you know, I did read your sub stack when you were having that back and forth and there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

If nothing else, it's it's a cool thought experiment, right?

Or just a a way to look at this phenomenon?

Yeah, I think so.

You.

Know minimally, it's fascinating, you know, that you can, you can reliably, as I say, isolate this particular aspect of, of DMT.

That's cool.

And you know, that could be a very cool tool.

You know, if you can, you can imagine expanding this laser to kind of replicate the optical pattern generated by the laser, but on a screen or something that would be cool.

So you could, someone could view the screen with this very specific pattern of of light that would allow them to see code like imagery, you know, and explore the nature of that code.

I can see lots of cool things coming from it, but I'm certainly not ready to to go to the the far most far out conclusions just yet.

Well, Andrew?

It's been a pleasure as always.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for being interested in these topics and sharing your knowledge and death by astonishment.

It's a great book.

I highly recommend it.

If anybody's interested in the history or I should say the non indigenous history of ayahuasca and DMT, please check it out because there's a lot of great information and I consider myself somebody that knows a lot about this topic and even I learned a lot, especially the William Burrow stuff I thought was super fascinating.

I was unaware of all of that pretty much.

I mean, I had heard of Schultes and you know, all that stuff.

But yeah, there's there's a lot of great information in there.

I learned a lot and it's going to be interesting to see where we go from here.

Is there anything you've got coming up or is it just back to the grindstone writing another book?

What's your next move here?

I've got something very big.

Coming up, but I'll say no more.

And then it's back to the.

Grindstone for a new book All right, all right well, I.

Love both of those things.

I'll I'll have to have you back back on when one of those things pops.

I'll be paying attention as always.

But I really appreciate it for real.

And you're very generous with your time and you're an open book, as they say.

And I appreciate you being a good sport about the Mike's Mind Melters.

And yeah, man, that's it.

That's all I got.

All right, well.

Thank you as always, and the way we will end this is the way we end all of our mind escape episodes, which is we love everybody.

Stay safe out there, and we'll catch you next time.

Peace.

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