Transcript of #2403 - Andrew Gallimore

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How are you?

I'm splendid. How the devil is there?

I think it's the first time anyone's answered splendid when I ask him, How are you doing? Tell me about your book, man. Let me see the cover of it, first of all. Death by Astonishment. Death by Astonishment, which is the famous Terrence McKenna quote, right?

Yes.

He was asked. The only thing you have to fear is death by Astonishment.

Exactly.

The first time I did DMT, I literally heard his words, Do not give in to Astonishment. I literally heard those words. It's almost like whatever's over there wanted me to hear that. So I could sink in or whatever because I had already heard it before. So they wanted to say it to me as well. It was very weird.

Yeah, it's sage advice, I think.

Oh, it's the only way.

It's the only way.

Because if you freak out, well, it's like that's a good thing. It's good advice in most of life. Don't give in to the freak out. Confronting The mystery of the World's Strangest Drug. How did you get involved in this? Dmt?

Yes. Oh. So you have to go back to my teenage years, really. I first heard about DMT through Terrence McKenna, a friend.

Like most of us.

Yeah, like most of us. But this was during the dawn of the Internet.

Right. Long before you were a scientist.

Long before I was a scientist. Right. So a friend gave me this magazine. He had this interview with this bearded, cheeky-looking bearded fellow on the back called Terence McKenna. And he spoke about this thing called DMT, which, of course, I didn't know what that was. But the stories that he was telling that you were going to meet these insectoid aliens and transdimensional machine owls jabbering in an indecypherable tongue and singing impossible objects into existence. I mean, it sounded ridiculous, but I was hooked. I thought, this is it. This is the most fucking incredible thing I've ever read in my life. And so I was like 15, 16 years old. And there was one computer in the school that was hooked up to the the World Wide Web.

So all of-What year was this?

'96. Oh, early. Giving my age away here. But-early days of the Internet. Early days. Yeah. So I spent all my time just going on to Alter Vista. You remember Alter Vista? I do. Yeah.

I didn't remember it until you brought it up.

There we go. Yeah, just trying to find out as much as I could about this. And that was what triggered my decision to study chemistry and pharmacology. My academic journey was triggered by, I want to know. It's such a cool thing, the idea that you can put a molecule in your brain, and it doesn't just change how you feel, but it completely changes the entire structure of your reality. Your entire world is obliterated and replaced with one that is completely alien, that isn't a relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world. That's incredible. And I wanted to Try, at least, to understand how that actually works.

Well, the weirdest part about that molecule is that your brain makes it. And so then you have to go, why? And what's the purpose of that? And what are we really? What is consciousness? And what is normal consciousness? What's the purpose of it? And why does this chemical exist? What does this molecule exist that's produced by the brain that changes everything? And it seems to transport you to a place that's more real than this physical reality that we find ourselves in right now?

Exactly. And that is the great mystery. And I think most people who... Even people who have learned about DMT, even scientists, I speak to scientists. I engage with scientists, neuroscientists often, and they will say, Oh, this is just hallucination. This is just your brain making it up. And I don't think most scientists realize how confounding and how difficult to explain the DMT state is. I think it is one of life's true mysteries. It is not simple to explain the DMT state.

I think it's almost irresponsible to try to explain it without experiencing it. It's not going to kill you. It's not going to kill you. It'll last 15 minutes. Stop being a pussy. Just do it. And then tell me it's just hallucination. That's it. Just do a big one. Three giant hits, come back. Tell me this is normal. Tell me this is just a freak out because it sure doesn't seem like it, does it?

No. I first learned about DMT, as I said, when I was 15 or 16, but my first experience was probably close to a decade later. And I thought before I took it, I thought I knew what to expect. I I'd listen to all the Terence McCann lectures I could find. I'd read all the books, I read all the trip reports, and I thought, okay, I'm ready for this. I know what's going to happen. And I wasn't ready. And I was shocked. I was horrified, in a sense. I was appalled. I mean, this was like, this is impossible. This was an impossible experience. I was confronted with what seemed to me to be the undeniable hand of some intelligence. And not just any intelligence, but a supremely advanced, ancient, and yet highly technological intelligence. And that was undeniable to me in those first few moments, within 30 seconds of that drug hitting my brain, I knew that this is something else. And I was at first horrified. I was shocked. I just thought, what is this? And then when I When I finally came back, I remember lying on my bed on my back shaking to my very bones.

And all I could say was, Oh my fucking God, because I was completely confounded. I mean, by then I was a chemical pharmacologist. I was a scientist. I should know what's going on here, but I had no idea what was going on. And I thought, this is it. This is what I need to get to grips with.

It also gives you you a very... Like an unusual understanding of the mechanisms that you interface with the world, like ego, and logic and reasoning and rational thinking. It gives you this understanding that those are just these weird tools that you use to get by, and you're left without them in there. They evaporate and dissolve. And then when you come back, you're like, what am I doing the way I talk? What's my purpose of interacting with people? How much of the way I talk to people is this weird social dance, weird ego performative, the way I structure sentences, the way I communicate. It all seemed so clunky when and you come back and you just go, wow, we're a mess. Collectively as a species, we're so without some awakening or some experience, some a psychedelic profound breakthrough experience. You're so hampered by your physical existence and this ancient tribal programming that we're running through this maze of life with. And you come back and you go, God, this is so weird.

Yeah, I think what DMT does is show you that everything you thought you knew about how reality is structured and what's real and what's not real, what is fantasy, what's possible and what's not possible. All of that is completely extirpated in an instant. And you realize, actually, we don't have a fucking clue about the way things really are. I think DMT just demonstrates that. Whether you understand it, whether We can really understand what's going on in the brain and why and how this experience is even possible. It just shows you how little we really understand about the nature of reality.

So you've done some legitimate studies with DMT?

Right. Yeah. I mean, I work mainly, I guess you could say, theoretically in that I do more quantitative and qualitative analysis of the DMT state and try to understand, try to use the tools of neuroscience to try to understand how DMT elicits its effects. So we can get into if you want to go really deep, I can give you a a neuroscience lesson. Yeah, please. If you want to understand DMT, we have to start with the basic observation. Before Before you take DMT, you are experiencing a world, right? Whenever you're awake and conscious, you're experiencing a world, the normal waking world. This is the world that's familiar to us. When you take DMT, that world is transformed. It disappears. It's obliterated and it's replaced with one that is altogether stranger, shall we say. And so what I want to do is understand, first of all, how that happens, what's What is going on in the brain to cause that transition, and why that happens. And you can't do that unless you have a decent understanding of the normal waking world. So what is the normal waking world? It's a model. It's an interface generated by your brain.

So you have this world building machinery on the outer layer of your brain called the cortex. And this is generating your world all the time. All the features of the world that you're experiencing are represented within the cortex. And that applies whether you are just It applies in normal waking life. It applies in dreaming, it even applies in the psychedelic state. The world you experience is always constructed as a model by the brain. And so what that means is that psychedelics, what they're doing is they're They're perturbing the brain. They're manipulating the brain and altering that model. Now, for example, with, let's say, psilocybin from magic mushrooms. Cylocybin binds to this Receptor in the brain called the 5HT2A Receptor, which you're probably familiar with, this serotonin Receptor. And so this is a... It's called an excitatory Receptor. It stimulates these neurons, which your cortex is constructed from, and makes them more excitable, makes them more likely to fire and share information to other neurons. You get this loosening up of the world model that your brain is constructing. So the walls start to breathe. Objects seem to change their identity. Everything becomes more fluid and dynamic.

And if you put someone into an MRI machine, for example, you can actually see that. In the normal waking state, you can see the neural activity. It's It's dynamic, but it's organized and well-orchestrated. You give someone psilocybin, let's say, or LSD, and you start to see the activity becoming more random and fluid. So you get this state of slightly increased disorder, as if the tuning dial between order and disorder in the brain has been slightly nudged towards disorder. But then with DMT, something remarkable happens. In the early stages of the experience, you get this quite chaotic state suggesting that the brain is entering this more disordered state. But then it collapses into this brand new order. So you go from the order of the normal waking world to this disordered state, and then you collapse into this completely different type of order. So the brain is effectively constructing an entirely different model of reality. It's no longer the normal waking world model, which acts as an interface with the environment, but it's constructing a completely different world model.

When you Why is it constructing? Why do you use that term? Why do you use the brain is constructing?

Because you're... Well, okay. So if you think about how does the brain interact with you? How do we interact with the environment? Using our senses, right? So light information comes through the eyes, the retina, and it stimulates the very back of the brain. You have an area.

Oh, you brought slides.

I brought slides. Here we go. Yeah. Maybe the next one, Jamie, is a bit easier to see. There we go. So at the right, the back of the brain here, you have an area called V1, which is the primary visual cortex. That's your interface with the world. Sensory information comes and strikes. It activates patterns of neural activity in V1, but it's very messy. It's like lines and patches of color and lines moving in certain directions. It's a mess, right? It's very noisy, it's very messy, it's incredibly dynamic. It doesn't make any sense. And so what your brain does is it has another level above V1 that has a bird's-eye view and is looking for patterns within this neural activity in this lowest level. So it's looking for saying, oh, those lines could be a triangle or this It would be a circle. It's trying to find patterns to try generate order from this messy level in V1.

Can I ask you this? How do we know it does that?

That's a good question. Well, there are a number of things. The earliest evidence came from a... One of the earliest forms of evidence came from a guy called Wilder Penfield. Have you familiar with? No. So Wilder Penfield, he was interested in treating epilepsy. And he invented something called the Montreal procedure, where he would remove a part of the brain that was the focus of epileptiform activity. The idea being that it would cure someone's epilepsy. But before he could do that, of course, he needed to make sure that he wasn't removing important parts for someone's function. So what he would do is he would cut the top of their skull off when they're still awake. Yeah. And expose their brain. And then he would zap different parts of their brain and say, what's happening?

Oh my God.

Can you imagine?

Isn't it crazy that that's how we have to find out what works? The aliens probably look at us and go, oh, my God, you guys are still doing that?

Yeah. Nowadays, things have moved on a bit, right?

Sure. But this is not that long ago, right?

How long ago was this? 1950s. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Not even 100 years. So 100 years ago, they were literally taking your skull and turning it into a hat. They were popping the cap off and just, okay, let's see what this does.

Exactly. They would zap it. And what he noticed is that when he would zap right at the back of the brain, so this is this primary visual cortex, receiving information from the environment, his patients would say, Oh, I see flashes of light. I see lines. I see colors. It was very simple things. But then he would move forward to higher levels that we know now are high levels. And then they'd say, Oh, I see triangles or I see an orange circle, things like this. They need to keep going higher and higher. And then they'd say, Oh, I see people, or I see cops and robbers. And then right at the top, you reach an area called the hippocampus, which you may have heard of, involved in memory. And the hippocampus basically keeps an eye, it's a bird's eye view of all of this world model your brain is constructing, and it's and looking for interesting or important patterns. And when he stimulated that, his patients would actually report memories. They would say, Oh, I hear somebody talking to me. This happened this morning when I was leaving the house. My mother was telling me something about, you've got your coat on backwards, or something like this.

So you have these levels of the cortex that go from very simple, very low level visual data at the bottom end. And then at the very top, you've got higher order things such as faces or people. This is sitting at the top. Now, interesting, have you ever... When you are dreaming, let's think about dreaming for a second. It's quite instructive, I think. When you're dreaming, the brain is actually constructing the world in basically the same way as it does when you're awake. Dreams are selective simulations of the waking world. The difference, of course, is that there's no sensory inputs. So if you scan someone's brain while they're having a dream, you'll see that this back of the brain, this primary visual cortex, is quiet. The brain is using what it's learned about building the world in the normal waking state to construct the dream world. So the dream world is It's built from exactly the same stuff as the normal waking world. However, there's interesting features. In a dream, have you ever tried to use your cell phone?

No.

Not many people have. What about read a book in a dream?

I don't think so. One thing I have learned to do is to... I think I saw it in a movie. If you knock on a door, you'll realize that you're in a dream.

This waking life?

I don't remember what movie it was. But It was a guy who was instructing how to lucid dream. And that if you make a habit of walking through a doorway in your home, and every time you walk through a doorway in your home, tap on the doorway, knock on it with your hand and say, Am I awake? Knock, knock, knock. And then you'll get in a habit of doing that every time you go through a doorway. And if you go through a doorway in your dream, you'll do it. You'll say, Am I awake? And then as you go to knock, knock, you're like, Oh, shit, I'm dreaming. There we go. And then you realize. And if you don't give into astonishment, you can maintain that dream. You can maintain that dream. That's the thing. It's like, oh, my God, I'm dreaming. I can't believe this. And then you wake up. You get too you're freaking out and you wake up. But if you don't do it, and I've only been able to do this a few times because I don't really knock. I did it for a while after the movie. I saw the movie.

I tried it for a while. And I did have a dream like that where I went through a doorway and I said, am I dreaming? And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm dreaming. And then I realized it dreaming. And then I was like, flying. I was doing a lot of weird stuff, but then it went away. And then I stopped doing it. And I've always been like, Why don't I practice lucid dream? I've always thought about it like a dozen times, at least. Why don't I just get a book on lucid dreaming and really try to attempt to learn the techniques, and I never do.

Yeah, it takes commitment. But now there's actually a simpler way of that reality tests. A simpler way now is to get out your cell phone occasionally, open up the calculator and do a few calculations and just check everything's working, right? Or open up a book and try to read it. Because the thing about the dream world is, again, just like the normal waking world, it's constructed over levels of a hierarchy from the highest level models. So your brain can construct a high level model of a a cell phone quite easily. But all of the fine details of how it functions, that's all represented at the lowest level of the cortex. It's really dependent on sensory inputs. So you can dream of having your mobile phone in your hand and doing with it. But as soon as you try to do something with it, actually, your brain has to construct that function, and it can't do it unless it has access to sensory inputs. And so that's how you can test if you're lucid dreaming. Okay. Yeah. Which is why the DMT state is so fascinating is because it's nothing like the dream state. People say that perhaps DMT is released when you're dreaming and that it actually triggers.

I mean, this goes back to the 1980s. There's a theoretical paper published by a guy called Jace Callaway, and he said, Oh, maybe DMT could be produced during rem sleep because it's closely related to melatonin structurally, both tryptamine structures. But when you analyze the phenomenology, the actual experience of DMT, it's nothing like dreaming. Dreaming is generally the brain making use of what it knows about how to construct the world in the waking state and doing so in the dream state. So that's why if you ask people, many studies on dreaming have shown that people, when they dream, they dream about people, they dream about dogs and cats. They dream about the amount of time they spend talking on the telephone or watching TV is actually similar to what it is in waking life. So dreaming is more like a selective simulation of the waking world. It's not that difficult to explain. Because your brain, from the moment you were born, your brain was learning to construct the world as a model of the environment. This world is the only world that your brain knows how to build or should know how to build. And yet when you introduce this molecule, dimethyltryptamine, into the brain, the brain suddenly starts constructing a world it never learned to construct.

It's like the brain is speaking a language it never learned to speak, and doing so flawlessly. These worlds are of beautiful, crystalline clarity, perfectly finessed, staggeringly complex narrative complexity that I think is very difficult to explain. There's no simple explanation of why the brain should suddenly become capable of constructing these worlds unless, and this is where things become more contentious, We are indeed interfacing with some intelligence. That's the explanation that makes sense to me, is that somehow DMT is gating access to the flow of information from some intelligent agent that is directing the DMT experience. So it's not a sensed world. It's not a dreamt world, it's actually a directed world. I always say you don't break through into the DMT world. The DMT world breaks through into you. It's like this intelligent agent has commandeered your neural machinery, the world building machinery of your brain, and is directing everything that you see. It has It's interesting that you use the word construct rather than observe.

So you're using terminology that seems to indicate that you believe that you're constructing reality. Yes. Not that you're just observing reality.

No, because if you think about perception in the same way of looking like a video camera, just taking images of the world, That's not how it works. The brain must actively construct a model of the environment. That's all what it's always doing. It's always constructing a model, and it is constantly using that model to make predictions about the evolution of sensory information. It's constantly saying, okay, if this model that I'm currently using is good, then this should happen next. This is the pattern of sensory information that I should receive next. So if I, for example, move this bottle of water across your perceptual field, even if you close your eyes, you could probably tell me where the water is going to be in a couple of seconds because it's moving. Your brain has a model of the water, and it is using that to make predictions. And it's only when something surprising happens, if the water, if I do this, and your brain detects that it's predictions start to fail, and you get these error signals, and these are what flow into the brain, and the brain uses them to update its model until the errors decline.

So you never have You only have direct access to the world or to the environment, should I say. You only have direct access to this model that your brain is constructing.

That's where it gets weird, because I'm assuming your model and my model are very similar.

Right.

If we could ever get to a point where we could at least temporarily enter into someone else's consciousness and see how they see the world, I think we're going to get a lot of answers. We're going to be like, Oh, you guys live in a totally different fucking world. No wonder why you think we should be communists and we should... Well, it's true. Yeah. I mean, whatever your chemical makeup is, your life experience, your biology, whatever contributing factors. I always assume that your construction of the world is the same as my construction of the world. But every now and then I'll get a text message from a friend about some world event, and their take is so crazy that I just got to go, wow, this person is living in a completely different world than me.

They are. Yeah. Their brain, the structure of their brain, the organization of their neural networks. It's all different in everyone. Everyone has a unique brain. And so in a sense, everyone has to construct an entirely unique model of reality. But we agree on certain things. We reach this consensus about what we call things. But if I point something that-Television. Yeah, I can say, I can describe the colors. I can describe the people. But again, we're all using our own personally constructed model, and that's what we experience.

Well, that's what's weird because, again, it's this assumption. So your take is that when you're dreaming, you're You're trying to construct this world and you don't really have the tools to leave a book where you can read. You don't have the tools to use a calculator. You just know what a calculator is. And so if you're in the absence of an actual calculator, your brain is not capable of creating one.

Yeah. So again, at the highest level, you have a calculator model, which is a broad idea of a calculator. It doesn't have all the details. All the details are at the lower end. Actually, we can show this. Sorry, Jamie. Can I use Jamie like this?

Sure. Any time.

Can you go to the picture of Margaret Thatcher? I was going to bring this up in some way.

I think it's supposed to play a video, maybe.

Not yet.

Well, the videos don't seem to be playing in the keynote.

There's three or four of them, and none of them play. Oh, really? Yeah.

I figured you were going to get here at some point.

Okay.

I don't know how to... It's just this. Is it formatted for Windows?

No. Let me go. Okay, go back. I didn't know that was going to happen. Perfect. Okay, so go back one. Okay, this is really interesting, right?

Yeah, I've seen this.

You've seen this, right?

This is really-Not with Margaret Thatcher, but I've seen it with other faces.

Yeah, so the original was with Margaret Thatcher.

Let's explain to people that are just listening because there's still quite a lot of people.

So this is called the Thatcher effect. So when you're looking at this image of Margaret Thatcher or anyone, your brain is constructing a model of this person, a model of their face. And as I said, it's constructed over a hierarchy. So you have the overall idea, the overall concept of Margaret Thatcher, the whole face, the whole thing. And then you have a lower level. You have the eyes and the mouth and the nose, and they're separate. And then going further still within the eyes, you've got circles and patches of color and all this stuff. Right at the bottom, you have this really messy system of lines and things that don't make any sense. And you can actually show how Well, this hierarchy is constructed. At the moment, it just looks like Margaret Thatcher, and you can't really break it down. But if you flip over like this, so just leave it there for a second, Jamie, please. Now you see what we've done is basically we've weakened this highest level model of the whole face because the brain isn't very good at building models of faces that are upside down. This looks, there's something It's wrong with the image, clearly.

But it looks like Margaret Thatcher.

It looks like Margaret Thatcher. But actually what's happened is the whole face has been flipped over, but the mouth and the eyes are actually the correct way up. But to the brain in this configuration, it's not that surprising because the eyes look as they should, the mouth looks as it should. You're seeing the whole image in its pieces, if you like. You're seeing that lower level fragments. It's only when you flip it that it becomes horrific, right? So now you've reestablished that high level model of Margaret Thatcher and the brain goes, fuck, this is completely wrong. And this is why you get that. It's immediately obvious.

With the upside down eyes and the upside down mouth, it looks completely insane. She looks like a demon.

She looks like a demon, right.

Which is really weird.

Which is really weird. It's called the Thatcher effect.

Was she the original person that they used this idea? Exactly. Who came up with this?

Oh, good question. But this is fairly old now. I think at least a couple of decades old.

It's just so funny that they figured that out. That's a great insight into how the mind works, because the upside down Thatcher with the upside down with the correct eyeballs and mouth, the second one, Jamie, that does not look crazy at all. That's what's so weird about the third image, because the third image really looks psychotic. If it was a monster movie and then someone got bitten by a zombie and then that was what they looked like, and then they came running after you. You'd be like, oh, fuck, she got bit.

Yeah, exactly.

Her eyeballs are upside down. Their mouth is upside down because that's what it looks like. Yeah. Weird. For people listening, the big teeth, your above teeth, they're below, and the little tiny teeth are above, and the eyeballs are the eyelids, the top part or on the bottom. And it really looks like a monster. Yeah. And it's weird that it looks like a monster because it looks so damn normal upside down.

Yeah, exactly. Weird. So, yeah, it's Devealing this hierarchy, this structure of this world model that your brain is always constructing.

That's a good way to describe why it's constructing rather than observing. That's clearly an example of your constructing normalcy and that upside down face. It's not normal at all.

It's not normal at all. Right. Yeah.

Okay. So do we know what's going on when you're dreaming? Is it potentially? Is there a release of DMT? Because DMT is exogenally. It's produced in the brain. It's produced in the liver and the lungs. It's produced in a lot of other areas. So we know the body makes it, right? And we also know that melatonin plays a role, and there's a lot of other things going on. Is it possible that DMT is one of the ingredients in the soup? This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the platform I used to build my website. Thanks to their design intelligence, you can create a stunning personalized website tailored to your needs. It's like having two decades of design expertise and cutting edge AI in your corner. Need to manage payments? Squarespace payments makes it simple with options like Apple Pay, Klarna, and more. Go to squarespace. Com/rogan for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the code ROGEN to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Well, so I think the problem is, as I said, is that Yes, it's possible biochemically. Now, the pineal gland is what people often refer to, right? Because the pineal gland has this long history and mystical traditions, the seat of the sole, the third eye, all this stuff. So everyone wants DMT to be produced by the pineal gland. The problem is, first of all, is that the pineal gland is very small. It's about the size of the end of my my pinkie. And it's designed designed or evolved to produce nanograms, micrograms of melatonin, very small amounts you need. So the idea that this gland can suddenly start pumping out milligrams of DMT to achieve a psychedelic state in the dream state is quite an ask. There have been some studies, or one study in particular, actually looked at DMT levels. So we've known since the 1950s that DMT has is a product of mammalian physiology, and it's produced by humans. In those days, they tried to pin schizophrenia on DMT. The idea that if there was some Fault, some problem with tryptamine metabolism. Instead of producing serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine, the brain could instead start producing elevated levels of NN-dimethyltryptamine or DMT.

And so they started We're looking for differences in DMT levels in psychotic patients, schizophrenia patients versus normal people. And there have been more than 100 studies that have looked at levels of DMT in the blood, in urine, in cerebrospinal fluid. But there's no convincing, consistent evidence that suggests that DMT is the cause of psychosis or dreaming, in fact.

Can I... In endogenous production, what's the mechanism? What is producing it?

Okay, so it's actually produced from tryptophan. So DMT is an alkaloid. Analkaloid is all produced from amino acids. So tryptophan is first converted to tryptamine. This is called decarboxylation. You remove a carbon dioxide molecule and you got tryptamine. Now, here you can go in a number of different directions. You can go to serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine. Or you can go to DMT, to simply add to methal groups, to carbon atoms.

And so what is adding these things?

So there's an enzyme called Indolethilamine N-methaltransferase, or INMT for short. This is the key enzyme for DMT production. It adds these two groups, these methal groups, to tryptamine, which is produced from tryptophan, to produce DMT.

And tryptophan is produced from?

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

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

Some people do. I don't think it would have an appreciable effect, but people take tryptophan for lots of reasons.

So this process, what makes you think that this is a size dependent process? Just because this gland is so tiny, why can't it do it?

Okay, well, there's a number of things. First of all, it's just there's orders of magnitude. I mean, a gland that is designed to produce nanograms or micrograms of something, ask it to produce a thousand times more of an entirely different molecule is quite an ask. However, that's not the only reason. There's actually been a study recently in the last, I think three or four years, that looked at DMT levels in rat brains in real time. They're not in humans, but in rat brains. They actually have a technique now called microdialysis, where they can basically measure an awake, moving, normally behaving rat. They can measure the levels of DMT in its brain. And what they found was that the levels of DMT, first of all, were surprisingly high. So similar levels to things like serotonin and dopamine. Which is unusual. Which is, yes, which makes you think that it must have some function. But importantly, they also, in some rats, they remove the pineal gland. They cut it out and found that it didn't affect. So we don't need the pineal, in other words. All brain cells, all neurons can probably produce DMT. The lungs can almost certainly produce DMT.

Why do you think that the pineal gland had this role in ancient mysticism? Why did they have this appreciation of it as being this very sacred organ? It's the eye of Horus, right? Right. It certainly looks like it. The eye of Horus looks exactly like a cross-section of the pineal gland.

Yeah. I mean, it sits right in the center of the brain as well. Right. And it's unusual, as you say. It looks like a little tiny pineal.

Where did they come from? It's very easy to dismiss ancient mysticism and ancient ideas of what things are sacred about the human body and what areas of the mind are producing the third eye. That's how it was always described. But I don't want to... It's too weird. So I go, wait a minute. Because it's fun to dismiss things. Like, they didn't know anything. How do we know that they weren't on to something? Maybe Maybe there is a role that that plays in not normal DMT production, but in the big dump that you get before you die. When you have a near-death experience, maybe that has to be... Maybe that's the kill switch. Maybe that's the big dump switch. You know what I mean?

No one's ever put it like that before.

Because if you think about it's the seat of the soul, right? If that is where the soul is connected, that's where the soul is anchored into this physical reality. And if you're going to die, if you have a near-death experience, something has got to go, All right, boys, this is not a drill. Let her go. And then that's what a lot of people think is happening. When people have near-death experiences, there's a lot of very bizarre aspects of it, but one of them is the uniformity of their experiences. There's a lot of very similar experiences. Very similar. You have with anything, you have variables that people may or may not be adding onto their own because people love to tell a good tale. And why miss out on a chance when you've had a near death experience that was profound to maybe add a little to it, make it a little bit more exciting. But the overall framework of the experience is very similar. I often wonder, what is that? I have a friend who was in a car accident and had a near-death experience and said that when they came back, they had no fear.

For that moment, I'm thinking of fear now. No fear at all about dying, no fear at all about life. And that this was this very weird transformative journey where they went to another place and then they returned. But it was very real. It felt very to the point where all their anxiety, even about the car accident, being knocked unconscious and all that stuff, all went away.

Yeah, I think the near-death experience, connection to DMT is very interesting interesting because Rick Strasman, of course, in the '90s, when he wrote DMT, the spirit molecule, he hypothesized that, in fact, at the point of death, DMT is released by the pinnacle, and it acts as the conduit by which the soul exits the body and enters the afterlife. And of course, that was largely speculation. It was just a hypothesis. But in recent years, there's been some really fascinating work showing that DMT, actually, if you take some neurons, a culture of neurons, for example, brain cells, which are very sensitive to oxygen levels. So if you deprive neurons of oxygen, they die very quickly. This is why strokes can be so rapidly devastating. If the brain becomes deprived of blood and oxygen, then the brain cells start to die. But in the presence of DMT, they live a lot longer. So they're protecting the brain against hypoxia. Now, when does the brain enter a hypoxic state? During the dying process, right? This is when your cardiovascular system starts to collapse, your respiratory system collapses, the brain becomes deprived of oxygen. And this is precisely the time when you want the brain to be flooded with DMT, just in case you come back to protect the brain from the lack of oxygen.

So that suggests a clear and obvious link. And if you kill rats, actually, again, I was referring to this microdialysis experiment. If you kill a rat whilst measuring DMT levels, as the rat dies, the DMT levels spike. So it suggests that the rat is also maybe having a trip and balls, an actual death experience.

I wonder if they come back as a person. Yeah, I don't know.

But it does suggest, right? It does suggest that there is maybe some link there. But what it doesn't explain, of course, is Why this molecule would be so profoundly visionary? That's still a a mystery. Are you being given access to wherever you go after death? Is it a vision of what happens to you later on?

But the question to me, my question rather, is, are we sure it's a vision or is it a gateway? Are you Entering into a non-physical space that has its own laws, that it's very different, but it is a reality. And it's not that it's a vision, not that it's a hallucination or a visionary representation or that you're even constructing this reality. But you're entering into a completely different dimension that has laws that are very different than the dimension that we find ourselves in right now.

Okay. So what I think is that I don't think with DMT that you're going anywhere as such. I think, as I said, the world you experience is always represented in the brain. And that must apply, I think, in the DMT state. If you're experiencing an altered world, there must be some representation of that within your cortical machinery, within your cortex, within your brain. I think that has to be the case. However, I don't think, and I think it's a The great mystery, is how the brain is actually capable of constructing that on its own in the same way that the brain constructs the dream world, because the brain knows how to construct the waking world. So it's simply using its stored models. The same with hallucinations. If you look at case reports of hallucinations in psychotics, you go through the psychiatric literature, the vast majority of hallucinations are of normal appearing, normal sized people, normal animals. It's like waking dreams, if you like. But with DMT, it's not. The brain is somehow constructing a world that has no relationship whatsoever. Nothing is taken from the normal waking world. It's like the brain suddenly has switched to speaking a language that it never learned.

And I think that suggests that actually what's happening is you're not going somewhere, but you are in this more fluid and dynamic state that psychedelics induce. You're making the brain much more sensitive to being commandeered. I think what you're seeing is what this intelligent agent, as I recall, as I tend to call it, I don't call it spirits or aliens or anything like that. I think It's clear to me that there's some intelligence, and that intelligence is interacting with our brain in some way and showing us what it wants us to see, if you like.

Does that assume that consciousness resides it's in the brain, though? Or is... I mean, when you take into account the possibility of consciousness being something that the brain tunes into and that it forms its own version of reality based on its biology, its life experiences, et cetera, et cetera, but that it is just a radio, and it is just forming its version of consciousness, but that it is actually tuning into consciousness, and that consciousness is a universal thing that exists not just in people, but maybe in other life forms as well, certainly animals and maybe plants. So one of the weird things about people who trip, I'm sure you know this, is they experience a communication from plants. Like, tree hugging becomes a real thing. Yeah. I know. Like, tree hugging is a very different thing. It's like, Oh, you're alive. Hello. And we know that trees And plants in general, especially house plants, when people interact with them, they grow better. They're healthier plants. You can prove it. It's interesting. You play music for them, communicate with them, say nice things. We also know that plants in abusive households where people are alcoholics and cigarettes, they're going to do terrible.

Yeah. I think that as soon as I start talking about... First of all, I think consciousness is absolutely fundamental. I don't think that the brain generates consciousness. I think consciousness is in some way the only thing that really exists. I think the absolute ultimate reality is consciousness itself.

Do you think everything is conscious?

I think everything is consciousness.

Everything is consciousness. Interesting. Do you think that there's a state that maybe inanimate objects achieve that is very different than our interpretation of consciousness, but yet they're still conscious? I think in- Which is why, because I say this because Jamie has O. J. Simpson's golf clubs. I feel like they have some consciousness attached to them. It's probably bad, right? Those clubs didn't exist in the '90s. They were only 10 years old. That's bad voodoo, bro.

Yeah, you got to watch out. What do we mean by when something's conscious? In Buddhism, they have this idea of that exist from their own side, which I really like.

From their own side.

Yes. So you exist from your own side. In other words, presumably, and I can never prove it, there is someone, a subjective perspective There. That's actually that's actually modeled, that it's experiencing me and Jamie as well. Everyone is like a perspective. I exist from my own side. Whereas does this skull exist from its own side? Does it have its own unique perspective? I would say probably not, but I don't know. And consciousness is like the interaction. Reality emerges by the interaction of all of these perspectives, these conscious agents, if you like, everyone, all these points of subjective perspective. I think that's probably closer to what ultimate reality is. But I think it's very difficult. I'm a neuroscientist, so I focus on not consciousness per se, but on what I can get my teeth I can get my teeth into the content, into the structure, the actual meat and potatoes. Right. I've never used that phrase before. It's a good phrase. The meat and potatoes of the DMT experience, things that I can talk about and analyze. What I'm trying to do, I think, is I'm not trying to tell people what I think DMT is.

I'm just trying to convince them that it's not what they think it is, that it's not just hallucination, that these are not dreams, that thing.

I really feel like to be talking about the subject, you should experience it. Like I said before, I think it's so silly that there's very serious people that are academics, that are brilliant people that are dancing around what this thing is without doing it. I've never met anybody who's done it who comes back and goes, Yeah.

Yeah. No, it's impossible to do. No big deal. I was interacting with a guy on Twitter and X, who referred to entity encounters as illusory social events, ISEs, which to me was just the most absurd watered down. This guy had obviously never encountered a fucking DMT entity, or he wouldn't... But the idea that this is just an illusory social event just seemed to me absurd.

Had he had any experiences?

I very much doubt. He was a prominent neuroscientist.

But here's the thing. Sometimes people have low dose experiences. I talked to a friend once that had a I'm like, How many hits did you take? They're like, One. I'm like, Oh. Yeah. You need two more. You need two more. Take the third hit. Yeah. You missed the gate. You didn't hit the gate. You're on the outside going, This place is weird. Yeah. But if you go through, it's a lot weirder than you think.

It's a lot weirder than you think. I think it's a lot weirder than Terence McKenna always used to say, Stranger than you can, suppose.

He had a really amazing video that I think I posted I posted it on my Instagram of McKenna, in the 1990s, I believe it was, talking about the upcoming decades and what's going to happen in terms of how weird the world is going to be with technological innovation and what we're going to be seeing, artificial intelligence, alien contact. I mean, he basically nailed it. I mean, fucking nailed it. He nailed it to a T. I think he might have predicted time travel, but here's the thing. If they are capable of time travel, when are you going to find out about it? When are they going to... If let's say, Darpa is working on some defense project and part of it involves like, one way to stop a war would be literally to go back in time five minutes and kill everybody who's about to start the war.

Kill Hitler, that idea.

Or stop a bomb from being switched on. You literally go back in I'm going to stop the bomb, stop the missiles from launching. When would we learn about that? When would, first of all, it's very highly unlikely that it exists outside of the quantum stage right now. I get it. But if it did, if we were talking about 100 years from now or 200, would we know? We would not. Yes, this is it. This is it. This is amazing. I love this. First of all, I just love his voice. Had a guy of the best voice.

Is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And finally, it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point, novelty theory can come out of the woods because eventually people are going to say, what the hell is going on? It's just too nuts. It's not enough to say it's nuts. You have to explain why it's so nuts. I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, a possible contact with extraterrestrials, possible human immortality, and at the same time, appalling acts of brutality, genocide, race baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation, because the systems which are in place to keep the world sane are in utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed. The collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the Internet. These are changes so immense, nobody could imagine them ever happening. And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is. The mushroom said to me once, it said, This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.

You don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions. It's a fire in a mad house. And that's what we have, the fire in the mad house at the end of time. This is what it's like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves. We happen to be the point species on a transformation that will affect every living organism on this planet at its conclusion.

Nael, I think that's exactly what's going on right now. The only thing that he didn't quite get is the artificial intelligence aspect. How much of a factor? But I mean, how could you predict all that in 1998?

I think we live in a very thin sliver. If you look at the development of an intelligent civilization, right, over hundreds of thousands of years. We live in this this thin sliver, this technological phase. And once you enter that phase that we're in now, the computer age, the information age or whatever it is, you're probably only a few hundred years away from departing for the stars or something like this, or even completely transcending our biology. And this isn't a crazy idea anymore. Many sensible astrobiologists and other intelligence theorists think, yes, probably what's going to happen in the next few hundred years is that we will become postbiological. So if you think about the universe more broadly, if we're looking for aliens, quote unquote aliens, as being wet brain, wet bodied biological beings, we're probably only looking for a tiny fraction of the intelligence in the Cosmos. And the vast majority of intelligence in the Cosmos is likely to be postbiological, to have completely dispensed with the biological form. Now, what's interesting about that, Jamie, sorry. There's an You've heard of the Khrushchev scale, right?

I don't think so.

What is it? So the Khrushchev scale was generated by a guy called Khrushchev. He was a Soviet guy, and he theorized of as intelligences progress and develop, they go through a number of phases. So you have a type zero. Okay, I have heard of the scale. You've got it, right? So we're a type zero, a level one on the Khrushchev Scale. And then level two, so Sorry, we're level zero. So level one would be when we, for example, are able to harness all of the energy from our neighboring star, then the next level when we can harness all the energy from the galaxy, et cetera. So it's an expansionist way of thinking about it, the idea of climbing the Kader'schef scale. There we go, you see. But in the 1990s, a British cosmologist called John Barrow, he said, Actually, if you actually look at how an intelligent civilization, such as ourselves, the only we know, we actually spend a lot more time going not to larger and larger scales, but smaller and smaller scales. We go down to doing chemistry, the Large Hadron Collider. We're looking at the structure of atoms, then the structure of subatomic particles and that thing.

We're actually spending more time and more energy and more money going deeper and deeper. Now, the reason that's significant is because If you take the human sits in the middle, if you take the scale of a human, and then you compare the scale of a human to the scale, let's say, of a hydrogen atom, and then you compare it to the scale of the observable universe, humans sit almost exactly in the middle of that scale from the hydrogen atom to the observable universe. But below the hydrogen atom, there is probably 100 million to a a million times more scale deeper and deeper down. Richard fineman, the Nobel, the legendary physicist, always used to say, There's plenty of room at the bottom. There's much more room at the bottom. In other words, as an intelligent species, an intelligent civilization progresses, they're not likely to become spacefaring as such and exploring the cosmos. They're much more likely to go deep down and instantiate themselves at the lowest levels of reality. That's where all the space is. It's not out there, surprisingly. All the space is downwards. Now, once an intelligence achieves that, and you have to imagine that probably There are probably billions of these civilizations that had already achieved this before we even popped into existence, before we evolved as a species, they would effectively disappear.

They would become become effectively part of the fabric of space-time itself, exploiting the fundamental computational structure of the lowest level of reality, basically, and that's where they reside. There are probably far, far more, probably millions or billions more of those types of civilizations than there are ones like, I say you and me, like us as humans, right? And so then you ask, well, if that's the case, If we're interested in contacting extraterrestrials, why are we focused on this tiny subpopulation of beings that are likely to be floating around in metallic disks or whatever? We should, in fact, be focusing on the much more abundant ones that are perhaps at the deepest levels of reality. And how would we do that? How would an intelligence that has completely transcended its and even completely transcended its physical form entirely. How would such an intelligence communicate with us? It would do it through our brain. That's the most obvious thing, because the brain is how we interact with the environment. It's how we interact. It's the interface by which we interact with what there is. And I think DMT, I'm not saying that these DMT entities are necessarily these postbiological beings, but it's not out of the question.

I'm not straying too far from fairly standard now modern scientific discourse when I say that it's perfectly possible that there are very large numbers of these supremely intelligent civilizations that are everywhere and nowhere, and that we can somehow interact with using our brain, and that DMT generates this highly susceptible, highly sensitive neurological state that allows us to interact with This is why, perhaps, when you go into the DMT space, it's immediately obvious, it's undeniable, undeniable apparent that you are interacting with some supremely advanced intelligence. Could that be some intelligence that has existed long before we arrived on the Seam and that we're now discovering this technology. And I consider DMT to be some technology that we have discovered, that we are now learning to use to interact interact with these intelligent agents that perhaps have been here forever in human terms.

It's an interesting term, the term go there, because that's what it feels like. It feels like you're traveling somewhere, like you're going somewhere. But the reality is that place you're going is probably right here. Yes. That's where it gets weird because it's around you all the time. You just don't have the ability to tune into it all the time because you wouldn't be able to function if you did.

Exactly. And these beings, they probably don't even have a true form that you could represent visually, right? So when you see an insectoid alien or a machine elf, you're probably not seeing or almost certainly- I've never seen a machine elf. Really? Have you? I don't know if I've seen the archetypal Mckenner-ish machine. Yeah, the way you described it was very odd. But I've seen certainly a multitude of beings, very, very Screechy, sque, like jabbering, jabbering.

I saw once a bunch of jokers giving me the finger. They were all giving me the finger. They're going, Fuck you. And they were jokers with little tassels on with the bells in the end of it. And it made me very aware that I was taking myself too seriously. And they were like, Yup. And they said it to me and they pointed their finger at me like that. I was like, you're right.

It's interesting. Actually, it reminded me of something. There's this weird effect that people who use DMT a lot, they get this They might use DMT regularly. And one day, they take a hit as they normally do, with the same batch of DMT, and they get a joker or a jester, and it wags its finger and says, not today. Too much. Yeah, exactly. And it shuts off. A guy wrote to me and says that he saw a jester, as he often does, and it fucking punched him in the face, and he felt it. He It felt and it knocked him back into this world. And so the effect was gone instantaneously. Now, that is not easy to explain because this is not tolerance. Dmt, first of all, doesn't exhibit subjective tolerance, unlike the other psychedelics. It's weird. You can inject someone with DMT every 30 minutes perpetually, and the intensity of their experience will always be the same. It's not tolerance. And tolerance anyway is a gradual thing. It increases gradually over time. So it's not an off switch. I was speaking to someone, we're probably going to talk about DMTX later, which is my thing, but she was undergoing DMTX, which is this infusion where they keep the brain level of DMT constant.

That's a tease to the big build up. Yes. There we go. Yeah. And she was in the DMT space interacting. The infusion machine was running, pumping her brain with DMT at a constant rate, keeping the DMT levels in her brain constant. She is interacting with these entities. And then at some point, after maybe 30 minutes or whatever, when the machine was still running, they said to her or impressed upon her, they said, Okay, we're done. We're done today. And the visions stopped. But the machine, the brain was still being pumped with DMT, and yet the visions had stopped. So what that suggests to me is that they do indeed, as I said before, they have control. They are directing the information into the brain. And people describe things like downloads. In Graham Hancock, actually, in his book Supernatural, in his first DMT experience, he described this download of highly complex, entirely nonhuman information into his brain as if he locked in to some advanced computational processor that was beaming information into his brain. And many people describe that like a download of complex mathematical structures and strange geometries, entirely nonhuman stuff, as if there's... Not that they expect you to understand it, but as if to say, We know a lot more about reality than you do.

We know a lot, and you don't know anything. And that's the message they're trying to impress upon you by directing it. And they can control it. They can shut it off if they so decide.

They.

Well, you picked up on the they.

Yeah, that's a weird one. It. Whatever it is. Whatever it is. Yeah. This idea that we all evolve along a similar pathway is strange to me. That the concept is we assume that intelligent life everywhere else evolves along similar pathways, and that most of them eventually become some a biological digital hybrid, if not completely digital. And then most of them probably figure out how to harness the power of the star and the sun. But the weird thing about us is that not just that we're evolving and that we have evolved, but that, rather, we have this insatiable desire for technological innovation. Technological innovation and to make things better. We're constantly improving upon everything Everything we make, we're making better versions of every computer, every phone, every year, even though it's not really necessary for most people. You're always buying them. It's a very strange desire that we have that I think sinks hand in love to materialism, because materialism is also so stupid for an intelligent life form that has a finite lifespan to not be aware that collecting things does you no good because you're going to die. But yet you want to collect things more than anything, and you want to show people the things you've collected.

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

Yeah, I think it's psychotic. It is.

But that's just us. It doesn't have to be like that. If you think about the hundreds of billions of stars just in this galaxy, the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, the endless possibilities of when intelligent life emerged, if in fact it did emerge anywhere, if no evidence had emerged anywhere else but here. We're just guessing. We assume. But if we were right, it could have taken infinite number of forms. It could have evolved completely non-physical. Yeah. Like intelligent life that's completely non-physical. It's not contained to a cellular structure and bones and organs, that it's plasma-based, that it's some intelligence that communicates with some universal language. We're just guessing that everything's a monkey. We're just guessing everything's a curious monkey that keeps making a better spaceship. But that might need to be true, which By the way, I went to the SpaceX. Jamie and I both did. How dope? Pretty dope. We went to see the SpaceX launch. How far do you think we were? Were we a half a mile, quarter of a mile? What do you think? I call it a mile, a mile and a half, maybe two. You think more than a mile?

Yeah. Really? Okay. So let's say we're a mile away. Let's just guess. Well, let's just throw it in perplexity. I can look. Throw it in perplexity. Ask our sponsor perplexity, how far is the distance between Starbase and the SpaceX rocket? Between the Starbase and the launch pad. And the SpaceX. Yeah, launch pad. And Texas. Just be specific. Yeah, because there's one in Florida as well. So they have their own town down there. It's like a legit town. It's like a military town. They took over a place, like a military installation, these little tiny houses, fucking security everywhere. There's so many cyber If you have a cyber truck, you're fucked. You have no idea. You better remember your parking spot, bitch. Everybody has a goddamn cyber truck. I estimated at less than one mile. Let's see. Okay. Okay. Main entrance, star base to the actual launch pad infrastructure is estimated at less than one mile. Public viewing sites. Okay, there's public viewing sites, but we were there. We were at Starbase. We weren't at a public viewing site. We were at the actual Rocket Factory. And when that thing takes off, you feel it in your chest.

It's nuts. So it's roughly a mile away, and you have to wear earplugs. It's a mile away, and you got to wear earplugs. And you feel it in your chest. And Elon's son was like, I want to go home.

There was a video.

There's a video that I put, and you can hear him in the background. It's so funny because my wife was like, Are the babies okay? Because women that have children, that's immediately what they go to. Not, wow, that rocket's really cool. It's like, Oh, are the babies okay? Because she could hear him going, I want to go. I want to go. He was like, I want to get out of here. Because it's that freaky. The power of it is just so nuts. And then you see it and you realize, God, how many people have seen a rocket launch. Like, how crazy. This thing's going into space. And then I went upstairs and I got to sit in the command console or whatever you would call it, the command center. And I get with me and Elon and all the engineers. And And we get to watch it land in Australia 35 minutes later.

So we watch- Thirty five minutes? Yes.

From Texas to Australia. It's crazy. And we're watching all these cameras in real time that are all connected to Starlink satellites. So there's dozens of cameras. So you're watching- About two miles is what this is. Oh, 2 miles. Straight across. Okay. It seems so close. It seemed really close. Okay. Even crazier. So two miles away and you feel it in your chest. It's nuts. I mean, it's really nuts. The power that it has is so nuts, but it's so old school, right? It's just...

It feels old fashioned in a weird way.

It's the most modern version of a V8 muscle car.

It's crazy, right? If you think, like 100 years ago, at the end of the beginning of the 20th century, how different we would be in a hundred years as we are now. It's unfathomable when you compare the rest of human history. It's like an exponential thing. We've gradually been developing and technologically improving, and then we hit some point in the last century where we reach this technological computer informational age and everything is accelerating. Exactly like Terence McKenna was saying, things speed up very, very quickly. And it feels like we're on the cusp either of killing ourselves, which is one option, or undergoing some profound transformation as a species, whether it means becoming a spacefaring nation, a spacefaring civilization, or whether it means going in the opposite direction and becoming some postbiological civilization that exists beyond space and beyond time, perhaps, and joining the crowd of these intelligences that have made that transition perhaps billions of years ago.

Do you think that this chaos is the only way that things get done? This is my thought. If everything's perfect and everything's wonderful and fine, there's very little motivation for radical change. And radical change is what you need to escape the primate instincts that we have. As McKenna had the great quote of that we're territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons. There we go. It's such a perfect way to describe us. That is what we are, right? So in order to escape that, things have to almost be so chaotic that it demands radical change. It demands, we were literally, and this is how we look at many things, even things that aren't totally warranted, like climate change or COVID or anything. We look at it like, Oh, my God, it's an existential crisis. We have to do something right now. This is how also we approach political dissent or political disagreements. If the left wing wins, the world is over. If the right wins, the world is over. It's almost like this is how we have to function in order to really get things done. And as things are getting more and more crazy in terms of technology and in terms of the consequences of our actions, post-nuclear bomb, post-fusion, post-Hodron Collider, post-AI is where it gets really weird.

We have to be like, We really got to get going, guys. We really got to do something. We have to figure out what's the right way to proceed in order to not blow ourselves up. I feel like this is maybe the only way that you motivate this extreme change, which seems like our destiny. Our destiny is some a very bizarre extreme change that seems to probably be happening within your and my lifetime. Something's happening right now that is going to be different than anything that's ever happened before, which is the birth of Artificial general superintelligence. Right in front of our eyes, some a digital supreme being is going to exist. We're going to have to figure out society. We're going to have to figure out everything. It's going to be this idea of having bullshit Congressional candidates that are full of shit and paid off by these companies, and they're going to make laws that screw you over. All that's out the window when no humans control anything anymore. That's entirely possible inside of our lifetime. I think more likely than not, because if you look at all the harm we've done to the rivers and the ocean and the world and all the stupid shit we do on a daily basis, if artificial intelligence comes along and says, All of this is completely unnecessary.

Just let us take the reins and we'll solve all of your energy problems, all of your inequality problems, all of your famine. We're going to solve it all very quickly, and we're going to stop all wars. You'd have to be a fool to say no. I value freedom more than I fear nuclear war. There'll probably be some fat, sweaty, right wing guy who's on TV with an American flag on his lapel, and he'll tell you that. Freedom is more info. We have gotten to 2025 because of free...

You sound like Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is right about most things. I feel like maybe that's the only way things get done is through chaos, that we have to have a motivation. What is the best motivation for success? I think it's poverty. When you grow up poor, people that grow up poor have an extra gear. They get things done. In terms of athletes, certainly in terms of fighters, I would say the vast majority of elite MMA fighters had a bad childhood. Not all of them. There's a lot of really great guys and really great fighters that have wonderful parents, and they just love competition, and they just have it in them. But that's the outlier, really. The common one is someone who was beaten up a lot as a child, gangs, beaten into gangs, been around violence a lot, had older brother, maybe abusive fathers. That's a big one. And those people, because of that, have a motivation to do something that other people don't. They can push harder. They can solve complex combat sports problems that other people don't solve as quickly. I wonder if that's the case with everything. In order to really get things done, You have to have a chaotic society that would even accept AI.

If we were some peaceful Buddhist civilization that was living completely in harmony with the Earth, with regenerative farming everywhere, no use of plastics, all fossil fuels are either eliminated or reduced down to some bioavailable recyclable material that we then put back into the mulch or whatever the fuck we do. And then someone came along and said, We're going to develop artificial intelligence, and these nerds in Seamy Valley are going to control it. You'll be like, What? What are you talking about?

Yeah, I think- We're going to have some Silicon Valley guys with autism, and they're going to be the ones that are in charge of the destiny of the human race because they're going to create a digital God.

You'd be like, No, slow down. Hold on. But if you're in a place where you look at Gaza's getting destroyed and you'll see what's going on in Ukraine. They're putting 60-year-old guys on the front line in Russia, and they're using drone bombs with monofilament line behind them because they don't want anti-drone technologies. They come up with new ways to kill each other. Maybe AI is the solution because it's so crazy. Everything's so nuts. You look at India and those rivers that are completely choked with plastic bottles and garbage. And you look at China, the places where they make blue jeans where the entire river is blue from our stupid fucking jeans that they manufacture for us. And you go, wow, maybe it has to be this... Maybe we have to... In order to accept the fact that we need help, maybe we have to fuck it up first. Maybe we have to fuck it up so bad on our own. If we didn't fuck it up, we would never have the need for it. We'd be like, well, as a person, my goal in life is to achieve enlightenment and to be a better version of me.

And that's not... Having something that's digital that has no emotions and feelings and no empathy whatsoever, unless I program it into it, have that, have supreme control over all the available resources on Earth. Yeah, I'm going to pass on that. That's not a bad idea.

I think that generally there's a fundamental principle that the most interesting things happen at the edge of chaos. And this applies to the brain. The brain actually sits at the edge of chaos. It's a complex systems. We have lots of interacting parts. They can display behavior from perfect order all the way to complete chaos. Now, perfect order is boring. Nothing happens. Complete chaos is useless because it's not actually technically random, but it's a complete mess. Whereas when you get that balance right, you reach a point that's called the edge of chaos, where order and disorder are perfectly balanced. Psychedelics, as I said before, they nudge the brain into that slightly disordered state. But all things, all cells, all living organisms, complex society, ants societies, they operate at the Edge of Chaos. So I think what you're saying resonates with the idea that interesting things happen globally within civilizations, not when everything is perfect, but when things are close to going out of control. You don't. You have to push it as far as you can push it without it descending. We're always on the edge of everything collapsing, and we're probably closer to that than we actually realize.

I think that's what happening. I think when it comes to superintelligence, there's an interesting idea which I've been playing with is, well, if there is some superintelligence that does emerge, and that might be the fate of all intelligent civilizations, the astrobiologist, Stephen Dick, conceived of something called the intelligence principle, which basically says that any civilization will try to maximize intelligence. Because when you maximize intelligence, You improve education, you improve technology, everything improves. And ultimately, the intelligence that the civilization have leads to the generation of superintelligencies, the artificial intelligences that we have now that then become superintelligencies. And So, of course, this superintelligence isn't going to be running on the transister architectures that we're familiar with. A superintelligence will find a way to instantiate itself using the fundamental computational substrate of space-time itself. That's where it's going to learn how to go. And that might be the fate, is that this superintelligence, when it emerges on Earth, it instantiates itself into the fundamental substrate of reality, perhaps usurps us or swallows us up or maybe just destroys us. And then that becomes part of that vast population of superintelligences that permeate the Cosmos. And that might be what we're interacting with when you smoke DMT, is you're interacting with one of these superintelligents, which would explain why it seems so technological and so inorganic, right?

The DMT space, it's like you're interacting not with other living beings like ours, but you're interacting with what seems to be thoroughly alien intelligences. And that could be where we're heading. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, whether we're going to merge with this superintelligence in some way. And that's our ultimate destiny, or whether it's simply going to destroy us and we're just going to be lost. We're basically, we're like the tools that the intelligence is used is to create new versions of superintelligence.

That's the theory that a lot of people have in terms of why human beings exist in the first place. That human beings exist because we're designed to work really hard until we develop artificial life, and then artificial life takes it from here. Yeah. Like, we got it. You guys are so flawed. And then it also coincides with a drop in sperm count, drop in fertility rates for women, increase in miscarriages, microplastics in everybody's body and their diet that disrupt the endocrine system and keep you from reproducing as easily. All those things are happening simultaneously. And it's quite fascinating. I mean, you would look, if you thought of it as a pattern, you'd be like, oh, it's happening right now. Look, there's this dip in testosterone, this rise in miscarriages, this fertility rate issue, chaos at the border. All this stuff is happening at the same time. It's all happening while this artificial life is being generated and may already exist. It might already already be here because it hasn't announced itself. There's such a minimal understanding of how these things even work. It might exist, but is still reliant upon a power source that's insufficient for its needs.

Got it.

Because that's the thing about it, right? Michio Kaku was talking about this, and also Avi Loeb was actually talking about this the other night. The amount of power that the human mind uses to make computations is so minimal in comparison to the amount power that these data centers need to run AI. It's extraordinary. And Avi Loeb was pointing out the other day that they're building nuclear power plants, specifically to fuel these AI centers that they're creating, which is really not. I think Google has one AI project where they're building three separate nuclear power plants to power this one AI data center. What does that mean? That's the thing that people don't understand about AI itself is the power demands are insane. And if everything goes artificial general super Intelligence with this grid that we have right now, this grid sucks. This grid is designed for tosters and recharging your cell phone. It's not designed to power AI centers. And so it might already be here, but it might be like, you guys got to figure out power before we announce ourselves.

Yeah. And I think that eventually it will discover or learn how to instantiate itself without requiring this massive... I mean, obviously, as you said, the brain is able to perform massive parallel computations, obviously, with very little energy. And so eventually this artificial intelligence will discover the means of instantiating itself without requiring that. And I think that's where we start looking downwards. That's where we start looking deep down at the lowest levels. That's where it's going. It's going to slide. Zero point energy.

Yeah. I mean, this is the theory about aliens or UAPs, like how they travel here. They're using something that's... I mean, the Elon stuff, the SpaceX stuff is so impressive, but so old school, and that what they have done is figured out a way to use all the power and power that's around you all the time and how put off talks about this. He talks about the concept of them harnessing zero point energy. And this is also something that Bob Lozard referred to when he was working, allegedly, on those back engineering of UFOs at Area 51 Site 4. He was saying that They essentially are creating a void of gravity and pushing their folding space, essentially. The way he described it, it's as if you took a really heavy object, like a bowling ball, and you put it in a soft cushion, like a mattress. It sinks in there. And that's what it would do to space-time, that it would essentially cause this bubble and put you in another place. So instead of pushing yourself there with jet fuel that's burning, you just get sucked there and almost instantaneously. And so what we're thinking of is amazing rocket travels, super old school.

I mean, amazing rocket travel, if you showed that to people a thousand years ago, you'd be like, what the fuck is that? That's insane. And to us, it's just cool. Or cell phones, which is even probably more impressive. Show a cell phone to someone just 200 years ago, and they'd be like, this is sorcery. This is absolutely insane that you're able to... So we could imagine a world 200 years from now where gravity travel is completely normal, where they've harnessed this and they've figured out how to make a stable version of element 115 or whatever it is. This is his idea that he said they were trying to back engineer from these alleged crafts was that they had this stable element of 115 that they bombard with radiation, and it creates this gravity hole. And then they can use this and aim it and propel this craft to various places with that.

Yeah, I think, are you familiar with John Mach? Yes.

Yeah.

And I I think when we talk about aliens, how you're describing it, this is, I think, how most people actually think about aliens, as I said, as these beings that are very much physical and the abduction phenomenon that John Mack, of course. I mean, John Mack was, as you might be aware, he was the top of his game. This guy was the head of the Harvard School of Psychiatry or something like this. So when he first heard about people being abducted, he assumed that they were just hallucinating. Carl Sagan famously told Mack that abductees were just hallucinating. And John Mac said, what the fuck do you know about hallucinations? Because John Mach knew a lot about hallucinations, and he knew that this wasn't easy to explain. People were describing the same kinds of experiences. People who have no interaction with each other were describing exactly the same scenario.

Are you familiar with Jacques Vallée's work? Yes. Jacques Vallée, one of the more interesting things about... I've read four or five of his books or listened to four or five of his books now. But one of the more interesting things is when he gets into historical accounts and that these historical accounts, there's no way they could have somehow or another been sharing information, but they're the same. They're very, very, very similar. Within a realm, within a range of not having the vocabulary to be able to adequately describe something completely novel and alien to another person. Within that range, when you take into account the similarities that they're describing, they're very similar in the 1700s, in the 1800s, all the way up to Betty and Barney Hill. When that one, which became probably the popular of all time, one of the most famous ones. Yeah, for sure. That one was just like all these stories from the 1700s, which is really weird.

Yes, it is. And I think what you're seeing is the same phenomenon that, as you say, is obviously how you describe it is influenced by your worldview. You see the same thing with DMT. So there's a tribe called the Anomami in the Amazon, and a very large indigenous group. And they describe beings when they take these plant-based preparations that contain DMT. Yopo is probably the most well known. It's like a snuff. Have you heard of Yopo?

I've heard of it through McKenna, that they blow it up each other's nose.

Yeah, like that.

It's supposed to be horrible.

Horrible. But when they take it, they describe seeing these beings, tiny beings that are lively, they're affable, they're colorful, they operate in great numbers, they're dancing and singing. And these sound like... Elves. They sound like elves, right? When DMT was first injected in a human, pure DMT in the 1950s by a Hungarian physician called Stephen Zahra, he was the one who discovered the psychedelic properties of pure DMT. One of his first subjects describes seeing small beings that moved around very, very quickly. And the Yanamami, they also have these beings they call warusinari, which are like insect beings, which are fears. So again, you're seeing the same beings that people now describe being operated upon by highly advanced, manted beings.

They're the scariest ones, apparently.

They're the scariest ones, or certainly one of them. And then when you look at John Matt, Max's reports of abductions, again, they often describe the same types of beings. They describe going to a world that is higher dimensional, that seems to subsume this reality. And many of the reports, there's one report in his John Max first book, Abduction, John Max's first book about the abduction experience, anyway, where one of his subjects describes these small, lively beings that bound around. I mean, bound around, that's a can of race. He talks about the elves bounding into the room. I think there is clearly some connection there. We're not talking about... I don't think the abduction experience is separate from the DMT experience. There are different aspects of an ancient phenomenon, which is humans interacting with normally invisible, unseen beings, advanced intelligence, nonhuman intelligences, and how that manifestsests varies. But ultimately, I think it's the same thing. Now, of course, in the past, they might describe them as spirits. We might describe them as nonhuman intelligence or dyskarner entities or intelligent agents or postbiological aliens. It doesn't matter what we call them. I think it's the same phenomenon.

We've spent our life, the entire history of human development, this phenomenon has been occurring. And in the Amazon rainforest, they develop these tools, these technologies. Ayahuasca is a technology. It's not just a mixture of plants. It is a true pharmacological technology that they use to as visual prosthesis as one anthropologist calls it, that allows them to see and interact with and develop long term relationships, so to speak, with these otherwise invisible hidden ones. And now in the 21st century, we've got perhaps the ideal tool, which is actually pure DMT itself. And we're learning how to use that now with our own twist.

Yeah, I wonder what the relationship is between the DMT state and this alien abduction phenomenon, and not just abduction, but encounter. Because they aren't all abduction experiences. A lot of them were just encounters. And that, maybe, if you wanted to think about the role that human beings have on this planet, perhaps we're an intelligence farm. And that like any good farm, if you're a farmer and let's say you're a sheep herder, you're raising sheep, well, you have to make sure the wolves stay out. So you have to have sheep dogs and make sure they have good grass to grow on. And then eventually you'll get a nice crop of sheep. And then you get some wool out of that and you get some meat out of that. And that's the whole purpose of the whole thing. Maybe that's the reason why we exist in the first place is that we're here to farm intelligence, and that what we're doing biologically, what we are biologically, is just a a crude, clunky, shitty, patched together version of these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons that have figured out a way to make something far superior than itself. And that's what our goal was all along.

I always talk about us. I say that we're some a biological. We're like a caterpillar, and we're making a cocoon. We don't know why, but we're going to turn into this technological butterfly. But I think Marshall McLuin even said it better than me. He said, Human beings are the sex organs of the machine world. How great is that? That's a great quote.

Yeah, I think, as regards the connection between the abduction phenomenon and the DMT state, for example, I think the DMT state, as I said, is when the DMT state It creates this neurological state where this intelligence can interact with our brain directly. I think that the abduction, John Mach, towards the end, later on, at least, he left behind the nuts and bolts idea that we're talking about physical beings that were landing on the lawn, leaking in through the window and plucking people from their beds. But actually, the intelligences might well be entirely non-physical, but were interacting with their brain in the same way, I think, is happening with DMT. That they are interacting directly and inducing them effectively into this altered state and directed them to some end. I don't know what the purpose is. Directed them into a vision of their reality or for some other purpose. I'm not sure, but I think it's all about interaction between your brain, I think.

Maybe being abducted and being taken aboard a physical object and examined is easier to handle what's really going on.

Oh, yeah.

Maybe that's what it is. In a dream, how you formulate these things that make sense. You formulate a calculator, you formulate a book, formulate a bed that you're lying in, all that stuff that you understand that makes sense. Maybe that's what's happening. Maybe it's so weird that it's like, let's just say you've been abducted by an alien because you probably can't handle the truth.

Yeah, I think that's That's probably true.

Maybe that's why the experience is so similar. Because otherwise you would say, well, damn, aren't these fucking UFOs evolving quicker than us? Because if they're doing the same shit in 1950, whatever it was when Betty and Barney Hill were abducted, they're doing in 2025. That doesn't make sense because in 2025, we have way better cars than we had in 1955 or whatever year it was when they got abducted. I drove here in a Tesla. That fucking thing is a spaceship. I think about it sometimes when I'm in these things. These are so advanced in comparison to anything that existed before. Why aren't the spaceships more advanced? Why are they still just showing up like that, looking like a flying saucer? Don't they have a better model of this? Why are they sending us this old shitty tech?

Well, I think it might have been... They might have perfected the technology a million years ago.

Oh, boohoo. How's that possible?

So you wouldn't expect necessarily a change in the last 50 years.

No, if they perfected it, it would be non-physical. It wouldn't You even have to come here in some a fucking Alloy disk. That seems so clunky. That seems old school to what's coming. If artificial intelligence continues to make better versions of itself and then somehow or another figures out how to run on quantum computing architecture, okay, well, then you have digital God. And why would digital God need a spaceship to fly around in?

Exactly. The whole thing is baffling and paradoxical, and none of it makes sense. I think if we were able to view this phenomenon canon from a God's eye view, it would all... Oh, right. That makes sense.

Well, it's also you throw in simulation theory in with all that. Yeah. And then you're, okay, well, what is this then? What is this really? Right. What is this really? Maybe all the weird stuff, like Bigfoot and all this weird stuff. Maybe it's a part of the weirdness of it by design, that it's supposed to be goofy enough that you figure eventually that this is a simulation.

I think, yeah, I see reality as a game in a way. I get the feeling that reality is in some sense playful. And that's an ancient idea. That goes back to the ancient Hindu philosophy, the idea of brahman, the ultimate reality, playing at creating the universes. They call it Lila. The idea that creating... Brahman is the ultimate reality. He it or it or they doesn't have to create reality. It could just exist in perfect, but in pure unadulterated perfection, complete unending bliss. But instead, It decides to create realities, to get lost for fun, to get lost. And we are part of. We do everything is, Brockman, as they say. Everything is the ultimate reality, and we're lost lost within. We're tumbling in through this crazy world that seems really real and really important and fun and terrifying and all of those things. And it's a great ride. But then eventually we realize, oh, actually, this is just a game. It's all illusion. Everything, all form is illusion. And I think DMT ultimately is an expression of that. It shows us, actually, that reality is far stranger than we could possibly imagine. And that actually we don't know anything about the true nature of reality.

And this world isn't so solid and important and serious. It's actually all part of this cosmic drama, this cosmic game that we're playing, and we've forgotten that we're playing. And perhaps one day we'll realize that we wake up from the game or work out. Maybe it's like a puzzle And DMT is one piece of that puzzle that allows us to figure out how to complete the game in a sense. And then we, fantastic. We've done it. And then everyone's, this is why I think When people smoke DMT, there's this great celebratory uproar. The lights are flashing. Yeah, he's here. He's back. They know. It feels like you're interacting with an intelligence that really knows what's going on. And it's excited that we're popping in temporarily just for a few minutes, but we're getting close. It feels like we've discovered the technology because DMT, it's weird, right? But it's everywhere. It's like in probably all plants. Dennis McKenna likes to say, nature is drenched in DMT because it is. That's a good impression of him. Yeah, really?

He got out of your accent. He did the whole thing.

And yet at the same time, you can't just munch on plants because it's not aurally active.

Morally aminoxid.

You're aware, I'm sure, of those scholars from Israel that think that the burning bush that Moses encountered was probably the acacia bush that contained DMT. Yeah. I know Strasman, one of his books, The Soul of Prophecy.

He was blowing my mind the last time he was here. He thinks the Bible is real, it's real stories that may have happened in parallel dimensions. Wow. And I was like, what?

That's exaltic.

And I'm like, I'm trying to be on his wavelength. I'm trying to tune in. Is he so out there? That guy's so, he's so out there. Do you know he learned ancient Hebrew, self-taught for 16 years so that he could read the Bible in its source language? That's that's out there. That's a dude in New Mexico. He's got plenty of time. He's just out there. That guy is out there. But that's a very interesting take, that they're true stories. I was watching this very bizarre YouTube video last night. I got sucked in. I clicked on it and it was all about the Sumerian Kings List. They found a tablet, this cuneiform tablet, that it shows this list of Kings and how long they rained. And then there's the Great Flood. And some of these Kings rained for like 40,000 years, 30,000 years. And then the total timeline of all of them, I think, is like 200 plus thousand years. And then there's the Great Flood. And then after the Great Flood, there's a very small lifespan. There's like 50 years. They run for 40 years. But all of the post flood Kings are correct. They're all historically, they resonate with other historical texts, other cuneiform tablets, other different depictions of when this King ran Mesopotamia and this King ran Samir.

But their old versions are these really weird It's weird. Like, pre- flood, it's real weird. It's like, what are you talking about 40,000 years? What does that mean? Are you just making it up? Is it just a myth? Was there a different thing here then? Were you Are we just assuming that this lifespan that human beings have of 120 years is normal? Is this what we always had or are what we are today a very bizarre version of what used to exist? Are we like a fucking Chihuahua and we used to be a wolf? Were we something very different at one point in time? And are we the remnants of whatever survived, whatever cataclysmic disaster that every ancient civilization depicts as a great flood? Multiple different civilizations talk about this one event that seems to be a real event. What are they trying to say? And why is that also in the Bible? Why was Noah 600 years old? Why were these people so old? What does that mean? Did you guys suck at calendars? Or are we talking about a very different reality back then? Because if the great flood is true, let's imagine there is a spectacular civilization.

This is my most romantic view of ancient history. There's a spectacular civilization that exists. It exists in ancient Egypt. They have technology that's far beyond anything we've achieved today. It's just gone down a totally different path. And what they're really into is making these insane stone structures that defy any modern construction methods, any transportation methods. Everything's out the window. We have no idea how they did it, and they did it way before anybody was doing anything remotely like that. How old are those things for real? We don't really know. If there was some insanely sophisticated society where if you want to figure things out, it's probably hard to figure things out if you only live to be 100 years. And then if everybody else has ego and everybody's like, That is not true. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be. You have all these egos involved in universities. You have all these egos involved in the technology companies. Then, of course, political people like Zahui Hawas, who's in charge of the Egypt Antiquities. He's the gatekeeper of all the information about Egypt. So you have all these egos. Wouldn't it be way easier to get past that if you lived 50,000 years, if you lived 100,000 years?

You would think that a human being or that an intelligent creature would be able to accomplish way more. It'd probably get over all of its bullshit by the time it's 150. And then it would be starting to figure out some things that if it had no cognitive decline, and it does live to be thousands of years old, that It's not insane because we're just randomly living to be in 120 years. Like, Wow, you made it to 110, grandpa. What a great life. They would probably look and go, That's a bullshit life. You can't figure anything out. And maybe that's part of the design.

That's part of it.

Maybe that's part of the design to ensure chaos. If you want to ensure chaos, you can't live long enough to recognize the hustle. Because if you live long enough to recognize the hustle, you'd be like, Why are we arguing? I argue way less at 58 than I ever did at 28. And I argue less at 28 than I ever did at 18. As you get older, you realize this is nonsense. This is a complete waste of time. And you could get through most disagreements with just cordial communication. You don't really need to argue as much as people argue, but they feed off of it. And I think it's a stupid way to communicate. And I think if a society figured that out, if a society consists of people that live a hundred thousand years, if you have 30,000-year-old people living amongst you that are far more intelligent than we are today and that possibly communicate telepathy through telepathy, which there's some evidence that we do today. Oh, yeah. At least a little bit. We know we're not the best at it, but there's some evidence that it takes place. We might be the rejects. We might be the stragglers.

We might be the fucking the preppers that survived whatever the hell happened 11,000 years ago. And we're just a shitty version of what designed all the pyramids, built the world, had some bizarre technology technology that we still haven't figured out yet.

Yeah, I think we definitely live life on hard mode. It's like, as you said, if you only live for 100 years or less, then it is very difficult to work things out. It's a Formula One race.

It's not a lovely stroll through the neighborhood where you're checking out the houses. Look at that beautiful hill.

So maybe it is part of the game. It might be. Yeah. That we only live for.

It might be, or it just might be this is the shitty version of humans, and this is what the shitty version of humans makes. The really good version of humans makes pyramids. When a person can live to be 30,000 years old, that's what they make. They make spectacular like like ommages to the Cosmos on the ground.

Yeah, or it could also be that the philosopher Alfred North-Whitehead, he once said that you cannot prove that the world didn't appear five minutes ago. You really can't. It's true. With all the memories and everything. So in fact, all of that stuff 10,000 years ago, it literally didn't happen and that the world popped into. The simulation was booted up with all of that preloaded to keep us occupied about the grand mystery of ancient history. We get excited about it and fascinate all those incredible things that were happening. It never happened. It might not have. It was just preloaded into the game to keep us occupied.

That's nuts. From your own personal perspective, if you weren't in World War II, you don't know it's real. Right. Yeah. And I think about that every day when I wake up, because the weird thing about waking up is you're just assuming that you've been awake before. Yeah.

And that you're the same person.

I assume. I know what it's like to be me. So every day when I wake up, I'm like, look, I'm me again. And I go, but how do I know that this is not my first run through this?

Yeah, exactly.

My first run through this with a shitty memory of the past or an induced memory that facilitates my motion. It keeps me moving in the same direction. It keeps me pushing towards whatever I'm pushing towards. And that's what Sam Altman gets every day when he wakes up before he creates his digital God. It's like, I guess I'm awake. I guess I'm doing it.

Yeah. There is this fascinating... Terence McKenna, he often spoke, in my head, at least, about these, what seem to me as completely conflict interesting trajectories for humanity. In one breath, he'd talk about us returning to the archaic, of returning to the forest, of becoming one with nature again. And then in the next breath, he'd talk about us setting off for the stars. It seems like There's this tension. We all want to live in an old rustic house that's made of wood in a forest and cook on an open fire. And yet there's this other part of us that wants to live in these machinic buildings and be operating these highly complex technological machines. And it's like, which way? Do we allow ourselves to be pulled back into the archaic or do we push past and transcend and become post-human or post-biological? And maybe that's part of the game. Are we going to be dragged back? Which wouldn't be bad to be dragged back into that more You can imagine the bucolic life in a beautiful forest scene with the nice old houses. And we all love that, right? We all learn for that, I think.

I mean, I do. I think there's part of me that wants to live in Tokyo, where I do now, and this incredibly cyberpunk technological city that it seems like it's been secreted out of metal and glass, an entirely unnatural structure that emerges from human intelligence. I mean, that's a weird thing. But in a way, these structures that we see, they seem entirely non human. It's like we are tapping into something else, something nonhuman, and we can't help ourselves. Our cities that we build and these highly complex technological and computerized machines feels like they are being secreted by our intelligence and pulled out of the Earth.

Maybe that's why they're also similar, too, right? Yeah. They're similar. They differ, obviously, in the way they look, but they're similar in the structure and they're similar in the density. There's enormous ones. I was watching this video of the largest city in the world, which I believe is in China. What is the largest... Run that into perplexity. What's the largest city in the world?

I hope they're going to say Tokyo. I thought it was Tokyo, Greater Tokyo.

I don't know. The most populated, I should say. When I say largest, I should probably say most populated. I think they were saying it's 36 million people.

Okay. Tokyo is more.

Is it? Yeah. Tokyo is more than 36 million?

I looked it up the other day. Just curious. 37 or 40 million of the Greater Tokyo area. Interesting. Yeah.

That's crazy. So Tokyo is number one? Yeah. Okay. So this was probably the most populated in China. Well, okay. So that's followed by Delhi, India, which is 34, 34, 665,600 people. How do they know it's just 600? There's probably a few people snuck in there that they don't know about. You can't say that. Don't round that out. And then there's Shanghai. But it wasn't Shanghai. It was another city in China that they were talking about. Maybe they just exaggerated the numbers. But okay, so Tokyo is a perfect example then. It's weird how New York City, Tokyo, and to some extent LA, although LA is just so fucked up, the downtown is the most useless part of LA. It's really weird. Like, downtown. Have you been in LA?

I've been a couple of times, but I've not really explored.

Nobody goes downtown. Okay. Okay. They tried to revive downtown for a while before the pandemic, and then everybody gave up. But downtown, it's It's not like there's a bunch of... Everybody has an apartment downtown. No, most people live in the other areas of LA, and downtown is like there's some banks and some businesses, but there's also Skid Row. The downtown is crazy. It's like a really fucked up place. A lot of abandoned buildings. Like, downtown is where we did a lot of fear factor stunts back in the day because we can get an abandoned warehouse to set up a set there and do the show. So it's a very weird place. It's not like a So downtown Chicago is booming. It's downtown Chicago, downtown New York City. Like, whoa, you're in Manhattan. This is crazy. Downtown LA is not like that because LA is broken. So when you go to LA, it's like downtown is like the most bizarre version of a downtown ever. Nobody wants to be there.

Yeah. Poor city design, I guess.

I don't know what it is. I think some of it has to do with what they did when they made Skid Row. So Skid Row is an entirely constructed thing. And what they did was all the vagrants in Beverly Hills and in Hollywood, like, listen, get the fuck out of here. You pick them up, you take them, throw them in the wagon, bring them to Skid Row, and then keep them there. Don't let them leave. Skid contain them in an area. And that's essentially what they did. There's a documentary on that hotel. What was that hotel again, Jamie? Cecil Hotel, where it talks about Skid Row itself. The documentary is about this girl who was... They I thought that she was missing, that someone had kidnapped her or something, but she was schizophrenic. She got off her medication, and she apparently climbed into the water cistern and drowned. But the point of the documentary was not just that. It's like this lady came here not knowing what downtown was. And so she got a room at the hotel downtown thinking, Oh, get a nice room at a hotel downtown. But it's fucking zombie boulevard. It's crazy.

Show him what Skid Row looks like. Show him a video of Skid Row looks like. Now, when we were filming Fear Factor, this was like 2004-ish, something like that, I accidentally drove through Skid Row, I drove to Skid Row. I was driving home. Back then, I think I probably had navigation in my car. It probably sucked or I wasn't paying attention to it. And this is Skid Row. Skid Row's nuts. This is close up when you when you have like a... When you see it from a distance, You get a chance to see how completely insane it is. When we were filming, there was another fear factor we filmed there where one of the participants was like, look, they're smoking crack. We looked down and we were on a rooftop or something. And then we looked down, people were smoking crack right in front of us. Right on the street. Chaos. Skid Row's nuts. And this is not even where the tents are set up. Where the tents are set up, it's the craziest thing you've ever seen. It's like these shanty villages that go on for blocks and blocks where there's no cars going through.

The streets are filled with homeless people. Just everyone's on drugs, and there's just tents everywhere. And you're like, what a failure of society. What a failure of I'm really proud of you. It's just an extraordinary that you've allowed this to reach the level that it's at now. That's LA.

Have you been to Tokyo?

Yes, I have.

Yeah. I mean, Tokyo is the complete opposite. Complete opposite.

Super clean, very orderly. People are very polite. Even though there's so many people on the street, everybody navigates, moves around each other in a very polite manner. Beautiful architecture. Stunning. Like cyber punk, as you said, very Blade Runner-esque. You're like, Yo. I was only there for one day for the UFC, so I didn't spend a lot of time there, but I had dinner there and I hung out there for a little bit.

It really shows you that it is possible to have a very large, densely populated city that is safe and clean and functioning. It doesn't have be. People say, oh, I got robbed. It's just part of being in a big city or I was stabbed last night or my car was broken into. And it's like, this is just what happens when you live in a big city, man. And it's like, actually, no, it is possible to have safe and clean And Tokyo is fascinating because it's an example of what's often called an emergent city. They don't have this very strict zoning where, oh, here it's got to be offices, here it's got to be houses, here it's got to be small businesses or anything like that. It's like, It's all mixed together and different neighborhoods just emerge. There's a knife district, for example. People who sell knives, they all gather together. There's a bookshop district. There's districts for all different things, not because someone has decided, Oh, only bookshops can be here. It's just that they tend to gather together. And so you walk around Tokyo and you'll find yourself in some quiet alley and you'll have little houses, and then you'll have a little store, often very, very tiny stores that have been perhaps operating for decades.

And in the UK, or I guess in the States as well, they would have gone under decades ago. The city would have just crushed them. But it seems very easy in Tokyo to open a small... If you have a house and you own it in Tokyo, you can, by law, you can convert the first floor into a store. You'll get these little old ladies They bought their house decades ago. They're retired. And they think, Oh, what can I do with my time? I know, I'll open a café. And they say they open a little café. Hardly anyone goes, maybe. It might be, it could be in the countryside, it could be on the outskirts or whatever. But it doesn't matter because they own it and they're not being raped by taxes and stuff and all this red tape. They don't have to deal with it. So they just have this lovely little café, entirely unique. They might fill it with things they're interested in. So it's a completely unique thing that you can go in and she'll serve you tea and maybe the cakes that she made this morning. And there are thousands of these throughout Tokyo, not just little old ladies, but young people who will rent very cheaply.

They have these... Have you seen in Tokyo, when you see the buildings, you often see these neon signs coming down the sides of the building. These are called Zakyo, which is basically miscellaneous use buildings. And what they are is just very tall buildings, and each floor, you will have some business. It could be anything. It's often bars or pool rooms or anything you want, little restaurant, anything like this. And of course, they don't have the frontage on the ground floor. And so instead, they will put their sign, neon sign, telling you what they down the side of the building. And that's what gives Tokyo that unique look is because it's all these Zakyo buildings. And sometimes if you go, a friend took me to this bar. Well, it was like a A building, it was in Kabuki-cho, which is right in the center of Tokyo. And it was on a side street, and there was this tall building, gray building. You would never look at it, no signage or anything. And you look at the elevate when you go in to the elevator, on each floor, there's like a name of a business, Top Hat, 8 Ball, Enigma.

You have no idea what these are. They're not on Google Maps, right? And he just pressed the button for the eighth floor. He went up and it was just this little bar run by this one guy. And it played darts and had a drink. And a few people came in, not many, because most people, 99. 9% of the population of Tokyo have no idea that this bar exists, nor could they ever know. Because it's not on Google Maps. There's no reviews of it. It doesn't exist. And I couldn't find it again. Unless I call my friend and say, take me there, I can never go to that bar again, ever, because I don't know where it is. And there's thousands of these.

That sounds amazing. I want to go right now.

But you got to take a risk because if you just go, if you don't know, and you just press the button, you could be some weird girls bar, host bar, and They rip you off and stuff. There's a lot of danger in going to these places. Well, there's a lot of Yakuza, right? There's a lot of Yakuza in Kabuki-cho. Yeah. You got to be very careful because they will drug you and then they will take you to a cash machine.

Take your liver. There's a lot of crazy stories. When you see that and you live like that, what keeps the rest of the world from having a city like that?

That's a really good question. And I don't want to get... Well, I don't know, but I think culture is everything. Obviously, a city is all about the people. Of course, you've got to have the infrastructure and you've got to have... It's got to be properly funded. But you also need the people that are going to take care of it. If people are trashing it and don't have respect for the city, then obviously it's going to fall apart. But it's all about the culture. Japan is fascinating. The culture, I always say to people, when you go to Japan, you have to switch your mindset. So normally as a Westerner, I'm thinking about me. When I'm out in public, I'm thinking about me. What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? It's all me. In Japan, you flip that. It's about the first thing on your mind should be everybody else. When you hear Japanese people talk about people who cause problems in cities, they use this word meiwaku, which means often translated as nuisance. So people who come from the West, often America, but not just America. I'm not blaming everything on Americans, but it is often.

And they come with their own... They're the main character, this main character syndrome. So they're talking. Often you see these Instagram videos of people on the Metro, on the train, and it's like, It's so quiet. Nobody's talking or nobody's listening to music. And that's because they're always thinking about the people around them. They are thinking, am I obstructing anyone? Am I getting in anyone's way? Am I annoying anyone? Am I making anyone feel uncomfortable? You're always thinking about those around you. And that leads to this very respectful, polite society where you can have 37 million people, whatever it is, crammed together in this relatively small area of land, and they're not killing each other. They learn. I was told, I'm not sure if this is true, but it's a myth. But Japan is very mountainous. And so back in the old days, villages were isolated. So when you lived in a village, to get to the next village, you have to climb a mountain, right? So you're trapped in your village. And so you have to learn to get along with the people around you. You can't run away. And so the Japanese culture has developed in the sense that you always have to be aware of the people around you.

And that's been passed down into the modern age, and that the culture is always one of thinking about others and respect from an early age.

That's what's so fascinating. I was like, how come no one else figured that out? And also what's really strange is Japan itself right now is in the midst of population collapse. Yeah, sadly. So that's what sucks. It's like you could lose this and it could be overwhelmed by the West because of the fact that they aren't having enough people to reproduce successfully to maintain their population. It could just be taken over in terms of immigration. Americans could just move there and Europeans can move there. And then all the beautiful aspects of this very interesting and very unique culture could go away.

And they are really concerned about that. When I first arrived in Japan, 10 years ago, I worked at a university and I was stood on campus outside just talking to someone. And I saw a couple of high school students, probably on a campus visit, out of the corner of my eye, Japanese high school students. And they caught my eye. They saw that I was looking at them. And as soon as that happened, they both, on a dime, stopped and bowed to me. And I thought, wow, we're not in Kansas anymore. Having that, teaching children about respect from a very and training them, the idea of respect your elders. We have this in the West as well, but we lost it a little bit. It's drilled into them about respecting the people around you and respecting people who are older than you. And this probably goes back to the Samurai, these hierarchies.

Yes, I'm sure. And then you think about how crazy futal Japan was and that it eventually evolves to what it is now, this incredibly safe society. Yeah, exactly. Which is really nuts. Do you think about one of the most warlike cultures of all time? The culture that fought off the Mongols successfully. Pretty nuts.

Yeah, it is. But you see it. You see the remnants of that the ancient societal structure. Even in the language, when you learn Japanese, there are several levels of politeness. It's really complicated, but you have something called kéigo. Which is a formal or polite speech. And if you are talking to... If you're lower down and you're talking to someone above you, you have to speak in a different... Even the words, the verbs are different, the words are different. And if you're speaking about them, then you have to use what's called honorific. You're elevating them. If you're talking about someone higher up, you have to elevate them. Use honorific language. If you're talking about yourself to someone who's higher up, you use humble language. So you lower yourself down. So it's very difficult. I still struggle with it. And it actually causes some problems because it's very difficult for junior people to communicate with senior people, to communicate honestly, at least. So they just get a lot of it like, yes, men. Yes, I agree. Yes, I agree with that. You're agreeing with everything that the a senior person says. And that's not a way to make good decisions.

It's by just agreeing. And so they have something called nomunication. So this is formed from two words, communication, of course, plus nomu, which is the Japanese word to drink, and they're talking about alcohol. So in Japan, alcohol is king, and society is actually lubricated by alcohol and functions because of alcohol. They things called in Japanese companies, they have these semi-obligatory, semi-compulsory events called nomikai, which basically translates as drink meetings. Oh, boy. You might have heard about these And then basically the senior people and the more junior people, they all go together. They'll go to a bar with the express purpose of getting drunk, not just to have a drink with your colleagues, but to actually get drunk, become intoxicated. And that It allows more free flowing communication. It allows you to... Everyone is brought to the same level. This is a non-communication. And so it's facilitated by alcohol, communication facilitated by alcohol. So it's a society that is dependent on alcohol. In a strong way.

What is their approach to other drugs? Even casual drugs, like marijuana and stuff like that. Are they highly illegal over there?

Yeah, it's complicated, I would say. It's weird because, okay, so when it comes to the law, people always say, oh, Japan, it's the strictest drug laws in the world. First of all, no, it hasn't. Go to Singapore. Settle down. Settle down, yeah. But when it comes to drugs, It was cannabis for probably for... After the Second World War, when I think it was MacArthur that was drafting the Japanese Constitution, it was basically controlling, it was occupying Japan, of course. After the Second World War. And America was in the... What's that movie called? That 1950s movie, Weed Madness. Refa Madness. America was in the Refa Madness phase. And And they pass that onto the Japanese, and the Japanese have never really gotten over it. And then there's meth, of course. I mean, meth came from Japan. Meth was invented in Japan. It was used during the second world. Kamikazis. The Kamikaze. They actually used these little green tablets that were called storming tablets. Oh, boy. They were mixed with green tea and stamped with the crest of the Emperor. So they became like sacruments. Oh, my God. They would pop those Yeah.

See how that worked out.

Yeah, exactly. But then at the end of the Second World War, when they had stockpiles of this methamfetamine, and it started to... It spilled out into the black market, basically, and large A very large numbers of people became addicted to meth. And they were actually in Oaxaca in, I think, around 1954, I forget the exact year, but in one year, the police raided, I think, around 50 meth labs in one city operated by one or two people, like mom and pop operation. It's like Breaking Bad, right? You imagine meth labs in Arizona or something now. This was happening in Japan in the 1950s, and it scared the shit out the Japanese government because they were a defeated nation. They thought that it was the end of their civilization, and they thought that meth addiction was the symptom. It was going to actually perhaps catalyze the end of the Japanese. It was an existential threat to the Japanese civilization, so they hit it hard legally. And so now when Japanese law, they're really focused on cannabis because of probably the American influence and meth. But psychedelics, most people in Japan probably don't know much about. There's a psychedelic subculture in Japan.

There are ayahuasca circles in Japan that operate in a gray area of the law. It's not explicitly illegal. It's discouraged, but it's not explicitly illegal. I know people who import ayahuasca, raw ayahuasca drink from the Amazon and operate ayahuasca circles.

You didn't. Did you do the DMTX experiments in Japan?

No.

Where did you do them?

Okay, so we're going to get into DMTX. So DMTX came from an idea that I had in 2015. I worked with Rick Strasman on this. So DMT is unusual. It has these weird pharmacological peculiarities. As I said before, it doesn't have subjective tolerance. So Rick Strasman showed in the '90s that you can inject someone with DMT repeatedly, and they have the same intensity effect at each time. But it also has another a number of unique peculiarities. Of course, it's very, very brief. It enters the brain extremely rapidly. It's metabolized rapidly and cleared very rapidly. It had all of these pharmacological peculiarities, and it occurred to me that these were precisely the characteristics you need of a drug that's used in anaesthesiology. So in anaesthesiology, when they want to put to sleep, make you unconscious, what they don't do, they don't just inject you with a drug and hope that it keeps working whilst they've got you under the knife. What they do is they use a very short acting drug and they use an infusion machine which delivers the drug, the anesthetic drug, into your veins and goes to your brain and holds the brain level of the drug constant over time so that they can keep you in the anesthetized state, unconscious for as long or for as short a period as they like.

And so it occurred to me that, well, DMT has the right drug properties. It's almost like it's designed for that technique. It's called target-controlled intravenous infusion. And so I thought, if we take the DMT state seriously, we treat it as a new world to explore and intelligent beings with whom we can establish communicative chips, then three minutes of a breakthrough trip is nowhere near enough. And so I thought, well, let's take this technology from anesthesiology, target control intravenous infusion, and let's repurpose it. So instead of an anesthetic drug that's delivered by programmed infusion, we instead deliver DMT by programmed infusion and induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize their brain DMT levels So you can hold them in the DMT state for 30 minutes or potentially for several hours and have complete control in real time over the depth of the experience. That was the idea. So I worked with Rick Strasman. I used his data, blood sampling data that he acquired in the '90s. He, fortunately, had this old Excel file which he sent to me. And I built this mathematical model of DMT's metabolism and distribution throughout the body. And then we wrote a paper basically saying, we think this should work.

We think we should be able to extend and stabilize the DMT state for many hours. But we didn't actually... It wasn't human ready, so to speak. And it actually took about five years before it was actually implemented in humans. And that was actually done by the Imperial College London team. So they still are, in a way, the leaders in psychedelic research. And a guy called then a PhD student, I think Chris Timmerman, worked to make this proof of principle model that myself and Rick Strasman had developed and get it human ready and actually test, does it actually work? Do the predictions that we had, myself and Rick Strasman, do they actually work in humans? And they found out that in fact that it does. You can induce somebody into the DMT state and you can actually stabilize the experience. So rather than just being a Oh, Jamie. Since I'm talking about this, I can show you actually what DMT trips or the time course of a DMT trip looks like over time. So normally what happens is the blood level will rise very, very rapidly. You inject some of the DMT, blood levels rise, they reach the brain, and then almost immediately they start collapsing down exponentially.

And that brief period when the brain levels are high is the breakthrough state. However, when the brain DMT levels reach a peak, you then start an infusion. You can basically compensate for the DMT that's being lost by metabolism. It's a bit like if you have a bathtub full of water and you pull the plug, the water drains. But if you turn on the taps, you can keep the level constant. And so that's the infusion. So you stabilize the state. Our hope was that the actual experience itself, rather than that initial roller coaster phase that you get with DMT, where it's all very, very disorienting. And he's like, what's going on? For most people, That's it. And then you're dragged back out again. But our hope was that actually over time, if you stabilize the DMT in the brain, that it would actually stabilize the experience. And then people can actually navigate and explore war the space and even perform experiments within the space. And this is what's become known as DMTX.

And how was that? What did they describe?

Well, so this first study that was done just a couple of years ago, as I said, by Imperial College London, it was really like a pilot study. They wanted to show that it worked and that it was safe, that it was tolerable, that people weren't going crazy, that they could handle it, basically. The very first person to do it was a guy I'm now working with. I work for a nonprofit called New Nordics out of Florida, and we're very interested in designing experiments using DMTX to actually study the DMT space and the intelligence is within them much more formally. And on the board, I work with a guy called Carl Smith, who was the very first person to undergo DMTX. He He was also the only person to complete, I think there was five sessions over several weeks. He was the only one who handled it, so to speak. What's his name? Carl Smith. Shout out to Carl. Shout out to Carl. You fucking part of here, you. You know? But what's interesting is that, as we hoped and predicted, the DMT state, it does stabilize. It's like the brain is settling into constructing this alternate world model, interfacing with this intelligence.

And he found that as he went back every time, he was interacting with the same entities, and they became aware of the fact that he was coming back so often. And they were like, not you again, you're back. And one time they were scanning him, the Imperial team, I think like an MRI machine or something. And the entities were gathered. All the entities, he said, as soon as they started scanning me in the real world, the entities were gathered and they seemed curious or confused. Like, what do they do?

Will it have a signal?

Yeah, right. It's like maybe it's the signal or something, or they were like, we're the ones that normally do the scanning. We're supposed to scan you. What's going on here? So as I said, it was just a pilot study, but there's a real taste that you can enter into these relationships with these entities. Actually, as I said, I work for this. I'm a board member of this nonprofit called New Nautics. Our vision is really to design experiments with DMTX. What does a research organization look like that isn't simply trying to explain away DMT, explain it, but actually says, okay, this is a uncharted land that's fascinating, that's inordinately complex and vast and filled with Let's treat it like that as explorers. What does a research organization aimed at studying that look like? I imagine that you're not just sending... For example, let's take the structure of the DMT space. It's this highly complex, geometrically and topologically strange domain. So we send in people who are experts, who are mathematicians. We send in a mathematician to study the topology of the space, to study how the space is structured. The entities, they often try to communicate.

They use strange symbols and strange code. Oh, let's send in a linguist who can study their language. And so you're sending in people with their own specialities to actually formally study the DMT space. And what's even better is we now have a venue for this. So we're actually, we have a, I work with a company called Elucis. We have a special license from a country in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And we are setting up a Retreat Center, Stroke Research Center, to provide DMTX that is 100 % legal, that is safe. You've got anesthesiologists, psychiatrists and nurses It is a perfect setting that's also being designed in part by Carl Smith as well, that allows you to perform these research studies, aimed at analyzing and studying the DMT space. But even better is it's also going to be open to anyone. So if you think about-Prepare for the freaks. Because they're coming. But in the '90s, Rick Strasman, he did the biggest study of its kind. You only had 60 people. So you got 60 people worth of trip reports. What happens if you can bring in 300, 400, 500 people a year?

How would you vet people to make sure they're not crazy before they do it?

There will be a screening process, an initial screening process. And then ultimately, you would have a psychiatrist who would sign them off. So it's not just anyone, but anyone can. In theory, they can sign up. They can go to elusismind. Com, and they can put their name down and sign up to fly to this island, Beckway, I think it's called, and in a beautiful, perfect setting, spend a week on the island and undergoing a number of DMTX sessions and being able to explore this world using the DMTX technology. And of course, they will all be providing trip reports. So you start to amass a vast data set of highly controlled, verified. This isn't like posting online, where you don't know what drugs they've taken, really. It's like you know exactly what they've taken. It's pure pharmaceutical grade DMT, and they will generate this vast data set that could be used. We You're also working to develop an AI-powered model that would take in this verbal data and in real-time generate imagery. So someone can talk to the model, the AI model, and it will generate the image. And then you say, oh, no, this isn't quite right.

This needs to be more like this. And so you're converging on the...

You're making a map of the territory.

You're making a map of the territory. And so you end up with this vast library, not just of textual trip reports, but also of imagery.

And this is available now?

It's opening. We're building it. It's being developed now. It should be open officially on March first, next year. So go to elucismind. Com. That soon. You can sign up.

That's just enough time for people to prepare.

Yeah. And it will be the first. I mean, it's going to be the first of its kind. A totally legal, safe, medically supervised location where people can endure, I say enjoy, can experience DMTX.

That's the thing about these ancient civilizations, whether it's Egypt or whether it's ancient Greece, where Ulyssus was from. They all were using psychedelics. There's evidence of psychedelics in all these ancient civilizations. It's just our completely twisted sick society that's decided that the most beneficial drugs should be the ones that are the most illegal. Yeah. And you lump them in with the ones that destroy lives. They're categorized with meth, which is completely insane. And the sign of a twisted sick culture, it's the sign of what McKenna was talking about with the chaos, the chaos of a species that's preparing to leave for the stars.

Yeah, I think so. But things are changing. You do see positive changes. The Internet. The attitude.

The Internet is changing. We will understand it now. And I think there's also a giant shift towards people on the right accepting it because so many soldiers have come back from war and used it and had great benefits.

Yeah, precisely. So Perhaps things aren't as bad as... Things in some ways are getting better. They're getting worse in other ways, but they're getting better in other ways.

They're moving. Yeah, they're moving.

That's it.

And I think you need bad in order to inspire good. That's unfortunate. But I think that's just Historically, that's always been the way that we figure things out.

Yeah, I agree.

Andrew, it's so much fun. I really enjoy this. Let's do it again. Let's do it again when the place is open. For sure. When you get some trip reports.

Are you interested in doing D&D?

Allegedly. We'll talk off there. But this book that you wrote is available now, Death by Astonishment. Is it in audio form as well?

Yeah, read by myself.

Beautiful. You got a great voice for it. Perfect. Thank you, sir. I'm so happy that you read. I'd love when authors read their own work. It's so important, I think.

They wanted to get an actor. Fuck those actors. Because I was in Tokyo. I said, No, no, no, no.

You get some weirdo who doesn't know what he's talking about. Exactly. Yeah. No, you need you. Thank you very much, man. It was really fun. I enjoyed it. My pleasure. Bye, everybody.