Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 542: Andrew Gallimore

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

Andrew Gallimore, neurobiologist, chemist, pharmacologist, and author, joins the DTFH! Visit AlienInsect.net to find all of Andrew's work, including his latest book, Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds! You can also follow him on Twitter and Substack. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: MasterClass - Limited time deal! Visit MasterClass.com/Duncan to get TWO MasterClass Annual Memberships for the price of one! Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Athletic Greens - Visit AthleticGreens.com/Duncan for a FREE 1-year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase!

Are you currently taking care of a disabled family member or friend? Do they have a long-term physical disability? If so, they may qualify for programs that could pay you for your time and care. Help at Home has the experts to assist in getting those services and programs for your loved one. Help at Home offers the highest compensation, weekly pay, overtime pay, pay time off, and health care benefit. Call Help at Home today at 215-515-7062. That's 215-515-7062. Is my brain turning into soup?

Why am I seeing aliens? Is it supposed to be like this? Why is it so hard to piss? Is that an interdimensional ball cube thing with too many angles on that ring thing? Did I just merge with my poodle? I wonder what we am. Maybe time is shaped just like a noodle. Maybe everything's a scam.

One thing I know is I'm never coming down. I know that I'm never coming down. I haven't even peaked yet. Oh God, it's only been 30 minutes. 30 minutes, I wonder if 30 minutes could fit in the bed of a tiny squirrel truck. I'll never sleep again. I'll never sleep again. Who needs to sleep? I think I'll go see TVs. Everyone's obsessed with death. I think I want to go to bed. Where are my Xanax?

Maybe I'll just look at a picture of Ram Dass. Maybe I'll take Xanax and look at Ram Dass. Greetings friends, it is ID Trussell and this is the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. That song you just heard is called Never Coming Down. It's a classic Beach Boys original from their album, Man Array, Surf the Tube, Rainbow of Light. The guy seems cool. Let's go to the beach and you can find that on amazon.com. Holy shit, this episode that you are about to listen to is real good. When you've done as many podcasts as I have, it's hard to say.

Well, this is my favorite DTFH and I don't think I'll ever say that because I love all of my children in different ways. But this one, this one is the kind of podcast that makes me happy for weeks after recording it. If you've ever wondered what the fuck is happening in my brain now when you've been enjoying a psychedelic, then Andrew Gallimore has the answer for you. Andrew is a neurobiologist, chemist, pharmacologist and an author. He's written some incredible books. He has my favorite feed on Twitter. It's incredible if you're wondering what the neurological explanation for the k-hole is, it's there.

You can also find that on his sub-stack or by going to his website, buildingalienworlds.com. We are going to dive into this incredible conversation that covers all of my favorite topics. The Singularity, DMT, DMT elves, entities, time travel and Terrence McKinnon. Folks, I got lots of dates coming up. The closest one is February 2nd. I'm going to be back at Zanies in Nashville. You can get tickets by going to their website, which you'll find at dugitrussel.com. Also, won't you subscribe to my Patreon?

It's patreon.com. It's an incredible, thriving, beautiful community of high-powered, erotic intellectuals. They want to meet you. I want to meet you. Come hang out with us twice a week. It's patreon.com forward slash DTFH. All right, friends. I am so happy to introduce to you the author of many great books.

Most recently, Reality Switch Technologies. Again, you can find that by going to alieninsect.net. Everybody, welcome to the DTFH, Andrew Gallimore. Welcome. Welcome on you. That you are with us. Shake hands. No need to be blue.

Welcome to you. It's the Duncan Chessel. Welcome to you. Welcome to you. Welcome to you. It's the Duncan Chessel. Welcome to you. Welcome to you.

Welcome to you. Welcome to you. Welcome to you. Andrew, welcome to the DTFH. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I have been looking forward to this for days, man. How are you doing out there in Japan? I'm doing very well.

Thank you for having me on. It's a bright and cold morning here in Tokyo. Oh, wow. But nice to talk to you for the first time. I think this is the first time we've spoken. This is the first time we've spoken, except some DMs through Twitter. I don't remember how I found your Twitter. I feel so lucky that I did.

You have got the best Twitter on earth for anyone who enjoys psychedelics. You know, and obviously there's a lot of psychedelic Twitter's out there and avenues out there, but you really thread the needle for me between mysticism and chemistry and answer so many questions that I have personally had when I have experienced DMT ketamine. The thing you wrote about the what's happening when you go into a k-hole. Oh my God, that is so edifying for someone who enjoys the k-hole. Like, oh, fuck, that's what's happening. The synaptic cleft glutamate.

I suspected it was glutamate. Yeah. Yeah. How'd you get into this? How did you get into the world of the chemistry of psychedelics? What brought you into this? Well, I was just like every kind of slightly unusual teenager who was interested in drugs. I mean, all teenagers are interested in drugs.

Absolutely. All the cool ones. We shouldn't say that, but we shouldn't say that. Not anymore with the old days, kids. Yeah. Yeah, I was. I was kind of, I was interested in drugs. I got really interested in, but I was also quite of a weirdly, when I was really young,

I was kind of a bookish kid. I was interested in, I used to read a lot about science. And then when I became a teenager, those things kind of clashed beautifully. Right. Yeah. I found myself needing to learn about these molecules. And, you know, I thought, I need to study chemistry. I need to study pharmacology and neuroscience and all those things because I really want

to understand, you know, I used to go to the leaf through books about psychedelics. Well, not about psychedelics. They didn't really have them in those days. Not that I could find. You had to send off to Loom Panics Company in California or something. Right. And order them by mail order. And I was too young to be doing that.

I didn't have the money. But anyway, I would, I used to study, I used to go on the early internet in like, when I had to go to school and ask for the password from the IT technician for the internet because there's only one internet in the school at that time. And search for everything I could. I spent hours and hours, like, missed my lessons in chemistry and stuff because I was out of vistaing all about DMT and Terence McKenna. And it was just a whole world that I didn't have a clue existed.

And I suddenly realized, oh my God, there's this whole thing been waiting for me. All, you know, my entire 16 years of my life. What you're describing is, it's an experience that I'm happy is gone, which is that having to do this kind of like underground research to connect with any of the data. I'm glad it's gone. But I think what kids or anyone who's interested in psychedelics and newly interested in psychedelics, what they're going to miss out on is the delight when you find out that some of your intuition regarding these things that they aren't driving you insane, that in fact they seem to be illuminating

your life in a beautiful way, that they're even maybe helping your focus or having some kind of cognitive benefit. But all the propaganda in those days was this shit is going to drive you nuts. You're going to end up trying to flip a cop car. Your brain is being fried. You're going insane. You'll become schizophrenic. And so that moment, you stumble upon Terence McKenna.

And suddenly, not only is there a person saying, actually, these things have been sacraments for maybe all of human history, but then also in that flowery language, perfectly articulating the experiences you've been having to the point where I remember my first reading and for the first time, I felt like I was tripping. Just that ability to bring that world into this world. It was thrilling and something about it felt so edgy. That's kind of gone now, right? That's sort of...

Yeah, I think so. I think when I first discovered Terence McKenna, he's been a constant influence throughout my life. He's a constant source of ideas. You listen to a Terence McKenna lecture and little ideas spark off him. It's like a piece of flint rolling down a mountain. And you think, oh, I never thought of that before. And then I find myself doing a little bit of research. And often, some of the articles and things and ideas that have found their way into my writing

and my books were kind of engendered by just a little something that Terence McKenna said without thinking and then never really followed it up. You know, not like his main thesis. Just little things, little sparks that get you attention and make you think. And you think, oh, I need to study that. And then something comes out of it. So he's incredibly important. He's not always right about everything.

You know, his science isn't always on the nail. And I know Dennis likes to point out when he gets the science wrong. His brother, Dennis McKenna. But, you know, there was nobody else like him, I think. Someone who was so widely read across so many different subjects in philosophy and science and fucking alchemy and you name it. He was able to kind of bring all of these disparate, quite strange, you know, on their own quite strange fields, unusual fields like Jungian psychology and stuff and ethology.

And bring them all together and then in this beautiful melting pot of his mind and what came out were these incredibly novel ideas. And it's such fertile ground for people like myself who are interested in new ideas about psychedelics. I'm not interested so much in the obvious things or just reading the paper, you know, the academic literature and kind of saying, this is what it says. I'm more interested in absorbing all of these ideas and trying to think beyond that. Because I think DMT demands that we're not in the position as orthodox kind of scientists. We're not in a position to say this is what's happening with DMT.

We're still so much for us to know, so much for us to learn, so much we really don't understand. It requires you, I think, to push out, push beyond the boundaries and think of new ideas and new ways of looking at what's going on. Terrence McHenry is very important though. Are you familiar with the term swamp gassing? You ever heard this in the UFO talk? No. It's like the UFO word for gaslighting, swamp gassing, which is that immediately, almost immediately, anyone who reports an encounter with UFO is negated by mainstream culture.

And so this is called swamp gassing. You saw swamp gas, you saw a satellite. So it's called swamp weather balloons. That's right. The most mundane explanation. And generally an explanation that completely flies in the face of the report that this person is given. And this is happening in the military for a long time. That is beginning to change now, because for a lot of different reasons. But with DMT, a form of swamp gassing happens, which is, yeah, of course you're seeing shit like that. You're high. Why are you going to believe that shit's real?

You think there's really so, you really saw an elf. You're fucking frying your brain, man. It's swamp gassing. You're discredited. You know, I'm sure you hear this a lot, because you do lectures and you're around psychonauts a lot. I think it's a very sad thing when somebody has to preface whatever insight they had with, but you know, I was really high. I was high, you know, as though the experience itself completely negates the data that was received within that zone. So this is something I'm very excited about that you are doing. I love the article you wrote on Graham Hancock's website regarding the DMT entities. And I just wonder if we could just talk a little bit about your theories regarding these, whatever you want to call them.

Terrence, we cannot famously call them self-transforming machine elves. I never saw those things, or what did he call them? Not toddlers, he had a name, like they called them types. Yes, yes, yes. But I would love to hear your theories on what these things are. Yeah, so the self-transforming machine elves, it's interesting, right? Because everyone associates the machine elves with Terrence McKenna. That's, I guess, that's the number one thing. When you think of Terrence McKenna, you think of self-transforming machine elves, dribbling basketballs, right?

Yeah. And what's interesting about machine elves, well, not machine elves specifically, right? But we're talking about, to put it in scientific parlance, we're talking about a type of Lilliputian hallucination. Hallucinations of little people is how it would be described in the literature. Right. So Terrence McKenna, of course, made them famous, he made them really famous. And when other people started seeing machine elves and started reporting them, this was, Terrence McKenna appeared kind of in the 80s, really. I mean, he really burst onto the circuit, whatever that psychosalic circuit looked like, I was too young.

But once he started writing about it and it started getting onto the internet, it became very well known, these machine elves. And then other people started saying, oh, I saw the same thing. I also saw these little, and they have, they take various forms, so machine elves is perhaps not the best term for them. They always take the form of very small, lively, mischievous, trickstery, jovial, happy-go-lucky, this kind of thing. They move very, very quickly, they dance around, they jump in and out of your body. They often display these objects, often described, Terrence McKenna described them as like these hyper-dimensional Fabergeeg or something. These incredibly beautiful hyper-dimensional objects, they would show you and say, look, look at this. They like to put on a display, that's kind of their overall character, if you like.

They form the way that they appear, whether they look like typical Irish leprechauns sometimes, or sometimes they look like little balls of stuff that is self-transforming, constantly forming themselves out of the material of the space. So they're unified by their character, but they often have different visual form. Now, what people started saying is that, well, you all listen to Terrence McKenna. That's why you're seeing machine elves, because Terrence McKenna told you you were going to see machine elves. And that's a difficult one to argue again, just at first, at face value, because he said, well, a lot of people did, but then a lot of people didn't. And actually, we can go before McKenna. We can go back to, well, let's go right back to the beginning. How far can we go back?

We can go back to 1956, which is when Stephen Zara, the Hungarian physician, who self-administered DMT for the first time, he synthesized it, he injected it intramuscularly, and he had the world's first pure DMT trip sometime in 1956, I think it was in April. Anyway, he started injecting it. In those days, it was pretty simple to do a study. He just kind of got volunteers from the hospital, these colleagues, I think, some patients, that kind of thing. Come on, gather around, and he injected them all with DMT. And there's a very interesting report in that very first study of a woman, I think it was, who describes these small beings. She said dwarf-like beings that move around very quickly. That's all we got in terms of the trip report. She wasn't asked to expand upon it, but there, straight there, from this very first study,

you're starting to see something that sounds suspiciously like an elf, right? It's a small being that's lively, that's moving very, very quickly. Then as we go through some of the more popular DMT users, let's take Owsley, who created, I think it was Orange Sunshine, right? Owsley, he did an interview where he was talking about DMT, and he mentioned, he saw what he could describe as the tinkertoy men, again with these little lively beings that he saw. Yeah, Timothy Leary, as well, would talk about these small mischievous little creatures dancing around in the DMT trip. So it's not, we can't put it all down to a Makana effect.

It seems to be an intrinsic part of the DMT state. It's one of the characters that, whether you've listened to Terence Makana or not, one of the characters that you are likely to come across, one of the entity types you are likely to encounter in the DMT space, is going to be these very small, lively, giggling, mischievous little beings that are kind of called machinels. Now, what are they? That's a different question. Why do you see them? That's a different question, I think quite difficult to answer. We have some clues, we can look at archetypal structures. So the archetype of the trickster, the archetype of the clown, these kind of universal experiences that go back to, you know, long before 1956,

we're talking thousands and thousands of years, elves, obviously, leprechauns, small dwarf-like beings feature in the mythology, not just in iris mythology, everyone's of course familiar with Gaelic, the kind of irish folklore of the leprechaun and the elves and things. But actually, you go back much further than that, and you find, you know, in Mexico, in other parts of South America, in Africa, you find these myths about these little mischievous beings that play tricks on people or lie to people throughout mythology. So it's like you're tapping into something there. The mechanism is not so easy to explain. DMT seems to allow you to tap into that thread, if you like, that's been running for thousands of years. The elves, they come out of the pages of folklore, apparently, but they're kind of brought back to life when you smoke DMT. You're actually able to confront and meet these things that most people would only ever hear stories about.

I want to thank BetterHelp for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Let's face it, shambling around in a big pile of sentient meat, living on a planet with a civilization that seems like it's either on the brink of transforming in some kind of technological utopia, or being eradicated in blasts of nuclear light, solar flares, or any of the other many threats that we all know about, because they get blasted into our brains 24-7 by the internet, isn't exactly the easiest thing, which is why sometimes you need a therapist. Therapists are trained to help you figure out the cause of challenging emotions, learn productive coping skills, and they are the best listeners on earth. Sometimes that's all you need. BetterHelp has connected over 3 million people with licensed therapists, it's convenient, accessible anywhere, and 100% online. As the world's largest therapy service, BetterHelp has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online,

plus it's affordable. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a therapist. If things aren't clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist anytime it couldn't be simpler. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist. Learn more and save 10% of your first month at BetterHelp.com slash Duncan. That's BetterHELP.com slash Duncan. Thank you BetterHelp for supporting this episode of the DTFH. When you smoke DMT, you're actually able to confront and meet these things that most people would only ever hear stories about. Yes, and there is a difference in this experience compared to other psychedelics.

LSD always seems like a way to see your own projections in the world. You can sort of watch the way your mood states will shift whatever you might be seeing on the walls. I don't know if you've seen it. I do think it's somewhat common. The skull thing or you're looking at your ceiling. Why the fuck did we take this? The ceiling is now skulls or yawning, gaping, mouths or disintegration, classic death. But your mood shifts and it seems like that tapestry begins to change or reflect the shifting of your mood. I've always thought we're probably just seeing what we're always projecting into the world. I don't know what. Maybe you understand that.

But with DMT, the commonality in space is visited and in whatever these beings are. To me, this is where it gets really interesting. You tweeted, Strossman, they're doing a new study trying to use some form of anesthesiology. It makes them in with DMT to create a more stable DMT trip so that we can maybe spend a little more time in there recording the geography and the quote biology of this place. This is the difference, right? What are some other psychedelics that create shared experiences for people that you can think of? DMT is certainly the number one.

What's beautiful about DMT is that it has a number of pharmacological peculiarities that make it really interesting. It takes you so deep, so fast, but then pulls you out again just as quickly a few minutes later. It's not like people do say if you take very high doses of mushrooms, for example, you can approach these DMT. It starts to become DMT-esque at very high doses. You can start to approach the DMT space, but you have to take high doses. You have to deal with that for hours and hours and hours on end. Once you're in, and it will come in waves, and it's very difficult to manage for most people. But with DMT, it's like a bungee jump.

One of those bungee jumps that drops you into the water. You're in there for a few minutes, then you're dragged out again. That's what's amazing about DMT is that it's unique in that. Apart from maybe salvanorine, which is a different beast altogether. DMT is not. DMT seems to. For most people, when they take DMT, it has this comical, it's astonishing, it's shocking. It's horrifying in many ways, but that's just your emotional response to it, I think, because it is so fucking strange, bizarre.

As Terence McKenna used to always say, these are bizarre dimensions. And they really are. Nothing can prepare you for that. But generally, and you can look at the studies that have looked at the types of entities that you meet there. Because it's who you meet that's really interesting, not so much where you go. Although that itself is a level 10 on the intensity scale. But who you meet is really what makes the trip. And studies have shown generally that about 95%, more than 90% of the time, you're going to meet somebody or meet entities that are nice.

They're going to be friendly, they're going to be welcoming, they're going to have a great party when they see you burst through the veil into their domain. Or they're going to guide you around and help you, all these kind of things, teach you. So that's kind of nice about DMT. It is shocking, it is horrifying, it is terrifying like a rollercoaster when you first burst into the space. But once you're in there, generally the entities display some kind of beneficence. It looks like they're very smart and they're very wise and they don't want to harm you for the most part. In Salvia it's a different beast, but mainly 90% of the time it's just a horrible experience for most people.

But DMT isn't like that. So DMT I think is the perfect molecule for studying the commonalities between going back to commonalities. I think DMT is the perfect molecule for doing that. Because you can put people in very deeply and as you were talking about this extended state, so this is something that I and myself and Rick developed this idea, this technology if you like. My apologies, I did not know you were involved in it with Strozman. It was my idea. Oh my god, I noticed you mildly winced and I want to deeply apologize.

I'm not joking. Okay, yeah, I love it. Okay, got it. Got it. Yeah, so that idea came to me. I was looking at the just reading about and maybe I was writing an article and the different pharmacological features of DMT, it's very short acting, it doesn't have subjective tolerance. So you can inject someone with DMT 15 minutes later, inject them again and they'll have exactly the same intensity of experience. Rick Strozman showed this in his study in the 90s.

It doesn't have any toxicity, it's rapidly metabolized and cleared from the body. So it struck me that these are exactly the pharmacological requisite properties of drugs used in anesthesiology to put people into an anesthetized state. You inject them with a controlled infusion to maintain a stable brain drug concentration throughout the surgery. And there's a whole science that's developed, a whole technology that's developed over the last few decades about how do you control the infusion rate into the bloodstream such that the individual brain kind of maintains the desired level of drug and you can kind of control it, you can push them deeper, you can bring them into a more shallow state by reducing the infusion rate, all this kind of stuff. And it occurred to me, you know, we can use this exact same technology with DMT, why not? So then I contacted Rick and said I need your blood data because he had the blood data.

He injected people in the 90s with DMT and then measured their blood DMT concentration over time. So that was the data I needed. And from that I built this, what's called a pharmacokinetic model. So it's a model of how DMT is distributed and metabolized by the body and ultimately in the brain. And use that to basically build a kind of proof of principle model that would show, yes, this is possible with DMT. It can be done. So we published this paper with Rick Strasman. And now, you know, after the paper was published, it got quite a bit of attention for kind of obvious reasons.

Sure. People were saying, oh, it's like, you know, the matrix machine. Yeah. Scientists are using this machine to communicate with aliens. Of course, that was all a little bit, jumping the gun, so to speak. But Imperial College London, one of the foremost psychedelic research groups in the world, have just completed a trial in humans using this DMTX infusion technology. So they will be publishing that, I think, sometime in the new year.

Holy shit. So, yeah, so you can now you can actually bring someone into the DMT state, hold them there in quite stable as well. So they're not it's not like with an injection where they're kind of fired in and then they kind of trail out again or pulled out. You can actually hold them at quite a stable level for in the study. I think they just did 30 minutes, but there's no reason why that can't be extended. 30 minutes. Yeah, 30 minutes in there. And so do you know, like, what are the trip reports from this?

Did you can you talk about it yet? Like what people what was the experience like? Well, yeah, I can't say too much because I don't know that much. I think they're fairly tight lipped about it. I mean, they've they've spoken at a couple of conferences. I was at a conference in Yorkshire in the UK a couple of months ago and they were all on the stage. So I gave my talk and I was about DMT and stuff. And then they were on the same day on the same stage kind of like four or five of them all talking about the very first people to undergo this extended state.

So it's kind of a really exciting because I'd actually spoken. I presented the idea seven years previously at the same symposium saying that this would be possible. And then seven years later, they were the first subjects to have undergone this were kind of on the stage talking about their experiences. And yeah, it was really nice to see these little ideas that come to fruition. And so it's kind of really exciting for me to see these kind of things actually start to be realized. And people taking start to take DMT seriously as a molecule worthy of or the DMT state as something worthy of spending some research dollars on. And yeah. But in terms of the actual experience, what from what I understand what they were able to establish is that you can as I predicted, I mean, what I predicted would happen is.

So it's a little bit technical, but when when your when DMT enters your brain, what's happening is your brain's world model, your brain's reality model is being is being switched. So your brain is constructing all the time whenever you are conscious or even when you're unconscious. If you're dreaming, for example, your brain is constructing this it's model of reality. It's world model using new information. And when you enter the DMT state, what's happening is that world model is changing. DMT is is perturbing this complex world building machinery of your brain and causing it to start constructing an entirely different model, which in itself is remarkable. But this transition phase between the normal waking world and the DMT world is very chaotic, like the brain takes time to kind of settle. It's like tuning the dial of a radio or one of those old radio stations where it kind of first of all, it's very noisy.

And then you then the new channel kind of crackles into through the speakers. And that kind of similar thing happens. You get this initial very chaotic roller coaster phase, followed by confusion and like, where the fuck am I? What's going on? But my predicted is if you kept someone in the space long enough, that would eventually start to stabilize. So the chaotic wild tumult would give way and start to settle down and you could actually start to navigate and explore the space in a much more systematic or semi systematic way and actually establish communication with the beings within the space. That was the original idea. We should be going in there and establishing two way communication.

And I found some micro dose gummies from Lumi Labs. Oh, what a joy to realize that I had not run out of my sweet, perfect, delicious, excellent micro dose gummies. I'm telling you, friends, it's the perfect dose. No more edible terror. No more wondering if the edible that you ate is going to be the thing that pushes you one edible over the line and create the possibility that you might wake up in Bangladesh, wearing a wizard's outfit standing in front of an altar to a God you've never heard of before. No, no, no, this is the perfect dose. It's relaxing.

It's great if you've got a long flight. If you are wanting a little extra help falling asleep. Thank God for Lumi Labs micro dose gummies. Even better, it's available nationwide. To learn more about micro dosing THC, go to microdose.com. Use code Duncan to get free shipping and 30% off your first order. Links can be found at Duncan trust.com. But again, it's microdose.com code Duncan.

Thank you micro dose. Can you send me more gummies, please? That was the original idea. We should be going in there and establishing two way communication, seeing what we can learn. And that seems to be the case. It seems to be that you can enter that space. You can be held there. Your brain DMT levels seem to remain fairly constant as long as the infusion is switched on.

So yeah, it's kind of set the stage if you like for much more detailed and comprehensive studies where subjects can be sent into the DMT space. And given experiments to do, you know, looking at the structure and the geometry and the topology and the patterns in the space. The entities mapping the entities, communicating with the entities, the language. You can imagine like a rival where you have you seen the movie, right? Arrival. Yeah, sure. Yeah, right. So you would have the linguist, the cunning linguist old joke.

I mean, that is a question. I mean, you gotta wonder. I love talking to him, but how far can our relationship go? So that the linguist would be on the outside waiting and then they would say, you know, can you, can you transmit information somehow from within the DMT space? So you would have some tools. I mean, this is a whole technology that can be built up around. How do you transmit information in real time from the DMT space into the normal waking space, so to speak? Right.

And you'd have the team on the outside, the mathematicians, the linguists, the anthropologists, the theologians, maybe when things get hairy. You know, you can imagine this whole team, including the explorer, him or herself, and maybe there might be more than one. You might have a team that go in together into the DMT space and corroborating. Yes. That's where it gets real. That's where it gets real because if, you know, with this technology, you have people maybe separated so that they're not next to each other. There's no way to communicate with each other and have them report what's happening. And you do find there's co, they're both having coherent, coherent view of the same terrain, the same entities.

Holy shit. Now we've really stumbled upon something. Now we have the, the proof, you know, the real proof that, oh yeah, we're linked in ways that we don't understand. We that up to now have not been proven. And I that is incredibly exciting. And I'm sure there's a lot of people with a lot of money who would be interested in discovering, discovering if this is really the case. Because sadly, you know, you know where a lot of the money comes from. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starbucks. They're going to want to put a logo in there. Can we get a Starbucks in the DMT realm? But yeah, that's, that's really, I mean, that would be earth shattering. That, that kind of discovery where you can actually put people in. And I know, I know from people have told me, people who I think are perfectly reliable, but purely anecdotally, they've said, people are very close to each other, like, you know, husband and wife, they would say, I went into the DMT space and saw this entity. My wife was doing it at the same time.

And then when both came back, we were both describing to each other, seeing the same entity. Why were you staring at that entity's tits? Yeah, that kind of thing. So that, you know, it shows you. That's, it's tantalizing. You could never publish that, of course. We could in some of the 14 times or something, but you can publish that in a scientific journal. But it kind of gives you a taste of what could be possible with a well-designed study.

I mean, the, the, the parapsychologists of being doing these kind of studies on telepathy and clever ways for decades now. So they know how to do it. They know how to set up the experiment. Right. You would, but yeah, to kind of definitively confirm that two individuals that were separated have no means of communication, no, no means of communication are actually entering a, the same space at the same time that could be corroborated independently. That would be, you know, how would they explain that? Right.

I don't know. Yeah. Quantum entanglement, maybe? I know. I know. I saw a paper that came out about like speculating that the human brain is a quantum computer, that there's some kind of entanglement happening with, I don't know. I don't, this is where my, this is where I hit the, when I was high, I wasn't like, I got to figure out what's going on in my brain. I was like, I got to get more acid.

We need more of this. I wasn't on the internet. So this is where I smashed into the wall of science. But I want to talk to you about what you think the implications are of this other neurological radio channel, so to speak, that somehow with the, whatever this, I don't know if you'd call it a symbiosis, but somehow with the help of this molecule, your brain tunes into a reality that is completely different from ours, obviously, but seems just as real. And the implication there, what does this, what does that mean? Is it, are we maybe tuning into some aspect of what we used to be? Was that just reality for the, I don't know, the evolving human, or is it as though our brains are just, oh, right, okay, we're doing that thing again, that we evolved out of because of it didn't help us with predators.

You can't see the lions when you're in the DMT state. Or would you have theories on what that place is, or as many of us hope, it's not some, you know, biological explanation, but rather it's actually just a window into a parallel reality that is simultaneously existing with ours. It's not some archetypical encoded, you know, Jungian, bio-reality, but, you know, a swamp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, so first of all, I think it's important to explain why it's so difficult to explain the DMT state, because it's easy, it's so easy to say, oh, it's just hallucination. That's all it is, your brain is making it up, your brain is a very creative machine, and it's creating these realities, because you are on drugs, right? Right. And that's the kind of hand-waving, non-explanation that you will get, often from scientists, actually.

But actually, it's, you know, you spoke about evolution there, and escaping from the lion, or hunting the lion, whichever way it is. But, you know, the world that you experience, your own personal subjective reality is a model of the environment that your brain has evolved to construct. Your brain has spent, or the human brain, or brains generally have spent millions of years learning how to construct functional models of the environment. Building a world isn't an easy task. Right. If you look around, just look around you, and look at the detail, and the information, and the complexity, just of your visual world. Right. I often say to people, imagine how many words would it take for you to describe the scene in front of you now, such that a skilled artist could reproduce it with photographic precision.

How much information is there in your world? It's extremely difficult, and it's all got to be unified, and it's all constantly changing, and your brain has to keep up with it. This is an incredibly difficult task. So, the reason I'm saying that is because it's so difficult to build a world. Your brain really should know how to build only one world, which is the normal waking world. That's the world your brain has spent millions of years. And throughout your life, your brain has been fine-tuning and honing the structure and dynamics of this world, like learning a very, very difficult language. But then, then, something strange happens.

You inject this drug into your body, or you smoke this drug. This drug enters your brain. This very simple plant alkaloid that's ubiquitous throughout the natural world. It enters your brain, and your brain suddenly starts constructing this completely different world that has no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world. It does it effortlessly. This crystalline, clear, inordinately complex world. Hyper-dimensional reality filled with these incredibly detailed and intelligent beings that are like nothing you could have imagined. Nothing that you will ever find in the flora and fauna of the plains of Africa, right?

These are beings that you could not have imagined. They are unimaginable in their complexity and their form. They are spaces that are unimaginable in their geometry and their topology and their colour and their structure, their complexity, everything. It's like, where did the brain, how does the brain know how to do this? Right. When did the brain evolve to be constructing these realities? Because that's what it has to do. Let's make that clear.

Even if the DMT reality is a real place, and I don't discount that. If it is some other place, for you to see it, your brain has to be able to build a model of it. The only way you can see the normal waking world now is because your brain is constructing a model of it. Whatever there is outside in the environment, you can never directly access it. All you have access to is this model that your brain is constructing and then testing against sensory information. So for you to see the same applies in the DMT space, for you to see the DMT world, your brain has to be constructing a model of that reality. So that's where it becomes really interesting. Because then you have to say, the brain is like switching to a completely new language that it never learned.

It never went to school to start constructing DMT realities and machine elves. And yet suddenly, when you just perturb it with this very simple molecule, it starts building these worlds. And you're like, how the f... To me, when I first started looking at this about 15 years ago, as a scientist, started looking at it, I thought, this is confounding. I have to write a paper about this because this is really not easy to explain. People say it's just hallucination, or it's just a kind of dream. But most dreams are like the normal waking world, or there are variations on it.

They're less stable and more fluid. But still, your brain is using the same information, using the same models that it's learned about the normal waking world to build your dream world. It doesn't take anything, in most cases, from the normal waking world and use it. It's using a completely different material. It's entirely novel patterns of activity. It's like, what's going on here? To me, that doesn't make any sense, unless there is some alternate space there. If the brain is receiving, if somehow DMT is gating the flow of information,

this alternate source of sensory information from this other place, wherever it is, then your brain has the information to start constructing this new reality. That's so wild. I love, just in general, neurobiology and the way that it... I used to scare the shit out of me first when you hear it for the first time. When someone points out, everything you're experiencing is your mind. It's your brain translating phenomena into the human experience, but it's happening inside of you. Everything you see is your mind.

This is a Buddhist idea, you know? But when you hear it, at first, it's terrifying to think that, because you're like, my God, what the fuck is out there if all I can see is this? I mean, the implication, we know we can't see ultraviolet light, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, but theoretically, maybe at some point, as the human eye is developing, we couldn't see predators. We couldn't see the tiger or the bear or the snake. It just looked like part of the landscape, and suddenly one of us would die,

and nobody would know why. They'd be like, oh, that thing happened again. What is it? Then somehow, eventually, you started distinguishing, oh, fuck, it's a snake. There's snakes there. Whatever this is, it's like, oh, my God, is that what's happening? It's not a reversion to some primordial dream reality, but rather it's a natural part of human evolution. It's just now we're really sticking our head up above water, so to speak,

and seeing something out there that is more real than this potentially, and something that could be just as useful in terms of survival or expression as the first people who were able to distinguish snakes from grass or tigers from, I don't know, foliage or whatever they're in. To me, this is why your research and what you're doing is really intensely exciting, and the fact that it's happening now. Do you ever think about that? Or what this technology is being tested while what appears to be a strong AI comes online,

when nuclear fusion has happened? Do you ever look at the other things that are emerging right now alongside suddenly having a telescope into the DMT realm and think, holy shit, it's the singularity. It's really happening. It wasn't bullshitting. As I was just going to say, Terence McKenna spoke about concrescence, the idea that everything is tightening, spiral, and everything is being pushed together really, really more and more tightly, and faster and faster as well.

You definitely get the sense that you feel the kind of the synchronicity there, that you have this technology for what appears to be gating access to this incredibly technological realm. The DMT space is typically described as being extremely advanced, billions or trillions of years ahead of us, or what we would imagine. That's also interesting, it's because we imagine linearly, so we think this must be billions of years ahead of us, the DMT space. When you're on the asymptote, that exponential curve, you can actually be pretty close to where it shoots off to infinity and is still quite kind of low down.

It could be that actually we're communicating with beings that are maybe 31 years ahead of us. Holy shit, oh my god. We've no idea what's coming. Yeah, we think it's some incredible alien thing, it's like, no, it's the PlayStation 8. Actually, it's ripples from the PlayStation 8 going backwards through time, and for whatever reason, when you smoke DMT, you just see this cool game. Yeah, right, but truly, holy, that's so crazy, man, to think that. Yeah, you witnessed that, and you're like, my god, whatever this is,

it's been around for billions of years, it's older than us, it's from Sirius or some shit, but it's like, no, this might just be right around the corner, right around the corner. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by my dear HTMLWizards over at Squarespace.com. I could go through all the wonderful things about Squarespace, which actually I need to for the ad read. For example, it's easy to use, you want to create a website. Quickly, you can do that with Squarespace, it's got mix and match templates, it's easy to throw something together if you want to,

but if you want to create a beautiful, complex thing of severe beauty, deep hardcore website like the one you'll find at DuncanTruzzle.com, you can do that too. Even better, if you're wanting to create a website for your podcast, they have got the ability to create a member's only area, a paywall, so you can give extra content to your fans. If you want to send out emails to your clients, you can use Squarespace's incredible technology to create beautiful emails.

They also have excellent customer support. I couldn't recommend them more. I've been using them for years and have yet to experience a problem. Squarespace is the shit. And even better, you can try it out for free by going to squarespace.com. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan, and you get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain.

Again, it's squarespace.com, forward slash Duncan, use offer code Duncan, you'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. It's older than us. It's from Sirius or some shit, but it's like, no, this might just be right around the corner, right around the corner. Humans are not built for thinking,

I forget who said it, but he said man's greatest failing is his inability to understand the exponential function. So we only think linearly. It's like that question of if you grow a bacteria and it fills up a jar, right? It doubles, and it's full at midnight. When is it half full?

It doubles every minute, and it's full at midnight. When was it half full? It's half full at 11.59. I don't know, like two years ago, but it's actually because it's the exponential function. So things are increasing faster and faster and faster and faster, and that causes them to increase faster. Yeah, so that's what Terence McGanna was speaking about here

in terms of this increasing novelty. And if you actually look back, of course, imagine yourself 100 years ago, and then imagine looking forward and seeing what we have now. I mean, we're talking to each other on a video, other side of the world. We have these visionary objects that we carry around in our hands

where we can communicate. All of this would be completely insane. It would be magic. So we have to think, okay, let's put ourselves, let's translocate all of that. We're 100 years behind, whatever there is, 100 years in the future, what's that going to look like? And we can't imagine.

So we kind of think, are we going to have hoverboards, and we're all going to be wearing hoverboards. Yeah, that's it, right? That was what was going to happen, yeah? Yeah, hoverboards. That was it, cool vests. Yeah, cool vests. Kind of metallic, everyone would be a metallic vest.

They'd all be very sexy, and that was the future in 1983, Tomorrow's World. Did you have that in America, Tomorrow's World? No, but we had Back to the Future, you know, same idea. You saw Spielberg, yeah, I know what you mean. Yes, yeah, Disney had had a thing like that which showed people were still eating TV dinners.

They just looked cooler. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Cornflakes were blue, I remember that. What's life going to be like in 2000? She had a bowl of blue cornflakes in the morning. It was like a day in the life of somebody in the year 2000. Oh, she had blue cornflakes. One day they'll figure out how to turn cornflakes blue.

No imagination, these people. But anyway, that was it. So yeah, so I think you have that. So first of all, that's the first point. We don't know where things are going to be in ten years time. But then you start to see the signs, the gathering. It's like the birds, right, where they're gathering on the climbing frame.

That seems like, oh fuck, something's going to happen here. And then it, you know, all hellboats lives, and all the children get attacked, right? So this is like that stage that the ravens, the crows are gathering on the climbing frame. They are. You just gave me goosebumps. You just gave me serious fucking goosebumps, man.

Oh, God damn it. Roo. Holy shit. That's so incredible and terrifying and beautiful. Do you feel frustrated a little bit? I feel frustrated by what seems to be a lack of excitement for these gathering ravens. A lack of, are you, like, you know,

have you played around with the new GPT bot? Have you had any conversations with this thing at all? I haven't. I've read a lot of them and people have sent me them. Often about me. People have been asking the GPT bot about me. What would Andrew Gallimore say here? And it's like, I don't know.

What are its opinions of, how does it feel about you? Is it accurate? I mean, it's set, yeah. So I think one of my friends said, oh, I just asked, I asked this chat, whatever it's called, chat bot thing. I said, I don't even know what it's called, chat GP. I don't know. Anyway, something like that about what would Andrew Gallimore say

about, you know, something about DMT. And it's fairly accurate, but it's fairly kind of obvious stuff. I mean, if it's able to troll, if it gets access to my website, which it probably did, which is public, right? Yeah. I mean, it could construct something that sounds kind of like what I'd say. It seems like it did a web, it did some kind of web crawl prior

to, I mean, on the website, it says like, after 2022, you can't say it. So whatever the data sets it fed, or it's not, at least it claims to not have access to the internet anymore. But to me, I agree. The language functioning of the thing, it's not as though it's perfectly going to replicate what you're going to say. But again, like if you five years ago, holy shit, that would be

the most incredible thing. And also its ability to create code, that's where it gets incredible. Like, can you write JavaScript for this program I want to make, and it'll just spit it out. Now, this is to me where we approach McKenna's singularity in the way he described it as the amount of time between what you can think and that thing existing in the world exponentially shrinks down.

So to tell the thing, hey, can you blah, blah, blah, and then it makes it. I mean, oh, what's next? Can you 3D print a, I don't know, whatever it is you want, and then 3D prints this thing out. Now we're extruding into the material universe, human consciousness, human innovation, much faster than we used to be able to.

That to your technology. And that to that. So it's like, can you know, have the AI as the intermediary, the combination of the theologian, the combination of the psychologist, the combination of whatever, just there to sort of do the translation into not just language, but a visual instantaneous visual form, even potentially taking those geometric objects and translating them through 3D printers.

Now that realm is actually leaking into ours. That's, you know, that's where it gets really weird. I mean, whether this is a existing realm or just some aspect of the human psyche, who gives a fuck when technology allows it to begin to grow into our realm in ways that we haven't been able to do yet, because how the fuck do you replicate some of those things? We don't have a language for that. How do you replicate it with, you know, Alex Gray,

some artists are pretty good at doing it. But yeah, that's where it gets weird. That's that. Yes, I've never quite put it together like that. It's a beautiful idea. But but yeah, I think and the technology seems to be kind of close. I mean, if you can write code, if you can tell a chat bot to write code, then you can, as you say, it can 3D print something.

So you can imagine having someone within the DMT space and they could write the the program for the communication device, right? Yeah, you would have some kind of communication device that would be, you know, on your hand, like a keyboard like Terence, sorry, Timothy Leary's experiential typewriter. He back in the 1960s, but much more advanced. It would design that this artificial intelligence would design it. It will tell you exactly the kind of information you needed to bring back

and it will translate it in real time. And it could be constructing it could be constructing objects with the same geometry as the these hyperdimensional Faberge X, you have to think about or it might construct the equations, the the hyperbolic algebraic equations that would allow you to reproduce them in a computer. So you can look at what is the actual structure of these spaces? Are they possible? Is there some new mathematics that's coming out of the DMT space?

Yeah, kind of. You're right. And, you know, it could go so much further. You could have it translating the languages. So people often describe an Allison Grey, Alex Grey's wife, has these alien language paintings, right? Yeah. But these are just kind of approximate representations,

the kind of things that she's seen. What if we could have somebody actually reproduce in real time these these these symbols, these these alien languages and feed them directly into an artificial intelligence, which would then decode the language basically and learn the rules of the language. I mean, that I mean, that is mind blowing, but it feels like it's we're not so far from that now.

And so certainly I think the interface, the intersection, I hate that word, but I'm going to use it this time, the intersection between AI and DMT and virtual reality and all of these technologies, they feel like they're all coming together and all it needs is the imagination of someone who's willing to to think deeply about about the application of these together and you're going to we're going to be in some wild,

unimaginably strange spaces. In the next few years. So this is and I know that you're familiar with, I think McKenna talked about like the idea of what a UFO looks like. And you know how UFO lands is very much the way in the 80s we describe what the future would be metallic craft, beings come down the ramp that they walk up and down or whatever. But when we start looking into that, and I'll say it,

intersection between technology and psychedelics, specifically DMT and that technology creating a sort of solid connection instead of the warbly connection based on maintaining a certain level of DMT and the bloodstream. But now we've opened the gate to whatever that is. And we are recording it in technological ways, as you mentioned earlier, translating the language coming up with the maps. But this is where it gets really, really interesting because these beings that you encounter,

it's not just that they all want to show you Faberge eggs and make you laugh. Some of them seem like they really like have something important to tell us. They want to communicate to us ideas, share their technology with us. I mean, that might be what the display of these, whatever these things are. It's like, no, it's not just like a cool thing to paint on a waterbomb. Like this is, we're trying to show you like ways to do things in your world that you haven't figured out yet. Like these are, these are bits of technology where it may not be that we're even seeing a language.

We could be seeing circuitry. We could be seeing who knows what like they might be showing us maps that we need. And so, you know, this is where that intersection gets fascinating, because suddenly there's a strange potential that the DMT realm begins to is, is the thing that pushes us up the hockey stick that is the thing that, you know, via technology currently, like that we're currently just now getting access to, pushes us into whatever that the next level of human evolution is. And I know that sounds so cheesy, but my God, it's truly, to me,

it might be one of the components that produces the singularity that McKenna and Kurzweil and everyone talks about. Yeah, so, so humans are, we're at this really interesting, I mean, obviously, we're an interesting stage of our development. But if you think about the, imagine the long-term trajectory of an intelligent species, it spends most of its time in a kind of pre-technological phase where it is. So you can imagine us basically any time before 1900, really, we were kind of pre-technological going all the way back to, you know, infinite time in the past or whenever. Then we hit this technological phase and we're really in it now.

We're really deep in this technological phase. This technological phase probably only lasts in total a few hundred years, being generous. And after that, we probably hit the post biological phase. So this is when we learn to effectively dispense with the biological form, where we realize it is no longer necessary. We are able to instantiate ourselves in another form. I'm not just talking about uploading our brain waves onto the latest Pentium processor or something like that. That's how people imagine it, you know, uploading ourselves onto a computer.

I don't think it's going to be like that, but I think there will be a, we already understand that the human brain is effectively this information generator that generates these patterns of information. Our reality is, in a sense, perhaps at the ground level, is instantiated in some kind of digital information. It doesn't mean it's a simulation, but just the way that reality is constructed. But I think we will learn eventually to instantiate ourselves, our intelligence, our life, deep within the structure of reality. So we're going inwards, if you like, rather than looking out and heading for Mars or whatever. Actually, because it's slight tangent, but if you heard of the Kardashev scale. Yes, but will you remind me? I've heard of it, but yes, I know the Kardashev scale.

Yeah, it's like, hold on, let me try to remember the Kardashev scale. Come on, dummy, you can remember the Kardashev scale. It's for cooking, right? Please tell me what it is. I'm sorry for the dumb joke. You're a scientist. Forgive me. Please tell me. So the Kardashev scale, it kind of goes back to a guy called Kardashev, full and enough. And basically he said, you know, that intelligent civilizations, they will progress through various levels of technological. I forget the exact levels, but it's not too important.

But basically, we're kind of a level zero civilization. And then you get to a level one civilization, which might learn to control the energy of its star. Then a level two, where they might learn to control the energy of the whole solar system. And you can imagine, it's going outwards. So we're starting to control more and more of the cosmos around us, ultimately, until we become galactic. You know, you have like a death star and finally, you know, the whole finally, right? We may control over the whole galaxy, right? Fighting the Rebel Alliance, anyway.

But actually, now that's a beautiful idea, and it makes great movies. But actually, if you think about the way that we are actually, I said actually three times that, I do apologize. That's appalling, isn't it? Appalling. Can we cut one of those? It took all the ohms and likes of my language out. There'd be like three minutes of me talking during an each hour. So, okay, let me say that. We reiterate that.

So, in fact, actually, if you actually love a god, give up. We don't look outwards. We don't human. If you think about human development, we... My God. You can say actually. It's many times as you want. Give you permission.

Say actually, what? It's something in my head now. It's like, what the fuck are you doing? Oh, I'm trying to think of other words for action. I'm trying to think of other words for action. We tend not to look at the cosmos. We are okay. We're playing around on the moon a little bit and we're sending things to Mars.

In fact, we're looking inwards with things getting smaller. It's all about nanotechnology. We're not trying to control the cosmos, control the galaxy. We're actually trying to control atoms and subatomic particles. We're going inwards. So, John Wheeler, I think, very famous physicist, said there should be another scale, not one that's pointing outwards, but a scale that's pointing inwards.

Because that is actually what humans seem to be doing. They're progressing inwards. They're getting closer and closer to the ground of reality. And to me, that's the secret. We have to flip our thinking. We're too wedded to starships and galactic citizenship and the Rebel Alliance and all that fun stuff, whereas in reality, we're actually looking inwards. Inwards.

So, we start to control. We're already at the stage. I forget what type or what level we are, but we're already at the stage, we're like type minus three or something, where we're able to control individual atoms and construct things. We all understand the subatomic, the structure of the atom. We start to control that. As we go deeper and deeper, we get to a point where we're able to manipulate

the structure and dynamics of the ground of reality, of space-time, and perhaps even below that, the absolute fundamental ground of reality. Then it all opens up. Can we then manipulate this? Can we embed ourselves in some way, in a more fundamental way? Can we embed ourselves and instantiate our intelligence in the ground of reality? That, to me, sounds like a more likely progression than taking over star systems. Then that leads to an interesting trajectory, because then you think,

well, what would that look like? What would it look like if you understood and were able to embed yourselves deep within the structure of reality, which might be nine-dimensional? The string theorists love to tell us there's actually nine dimensions. If we were actually able to embed ourselves, we would become this post-biological intelligence that was extremely advanced, that could manipulate the structure of the reality around it. We'd be ahead. There'd be other beings that would be left behind in our three-dimensional world,

kind of doing it on meat, so to speak, like we are now. Then you think, well, wait a minute. What happens when I smoke DMT? They seem to be accessing this domain that's populated by these incredibly intelligent beings that seem to exist in this high-dimensional space. They're able to manipulate the structure of their reality around them. They form themselves out of their own material. It's like, oh, are we actually communicating with it?

Are we actually interfacing with that post-biological space? The world of the machine elves and these hyper-dimensional beings, these hyper-intelligent, hyper-technological beings, is that, in fact, just the world that we are heading towards, perhaps in the next 31 years, as I said. This is like a great answer to the Fermi Paradox, which is no technological, no advanced, at some point the beings that are becoming technological realize yet

whatever that shit is, it's way more inaccessible than going inward. It's way more difficult to populate. It's mostly just space out there anyway, and that's where they stumble upon what you're talking about, which is the action is within, not outside. And then this is why we would understand why there's nothing out there, because what's the point? But here's where I would like your thoughts on this.

Many people, I'm one of them who have smoked. Many people are many people, did you say? Many, no, many people. I'm very smart. I have a filter on that makes me look like I'm full-size. I'm actually two feet tall. Many people. When people smoke DMT, there's a familiarity.

There's a sense of, I kind of know this place. Mixed in with the wildness, there's a feeling of, oh yeah, this place, I know what this is, this coming home feeling. Oh yeah, I do this sometimes. Have you heard of that before, the familiar sense within that alien landscape, a feeling of familiarity with the place itself?

Oh yeah, yeah, that's one of its defining characteristics. There are a number of things that people describe about DMT space. One is that it's the most bizarre and wild and unimaginable place that they could never have possibly comprehended or imagined. And at the same time, it's weirdly familiar. And there's this profound sense of deja vu, deja vu. And it's like you're being, they're kind of teasing you. The entities, they will say, do you remember?

Do you get it yet? Do you remember? And you're like, no, this is fucking wild. They're like, yeah. They love kind of, I think they enjoy that, this kind of prankster-ish mischievous. They can see that we haven't got a fucking clue. And yet they know deep down that we're kind of perhaps part of their realm, that we're kind of, we're like the prodigal son

who's disappeared out of their realm temporarily and we kind of occasionally check back in. But we definitely don't remember having been there. So I get that sense as well. And also the often the quite explicit celebrations when people burst into the space and it's like, the elves will start ringing the lights or the flashing is like a big show.

And it's like, your name will be up there in lights, literally. And the elves will be singing a song for you and say, he's returned, you know. That, I mean, that is really, really fucking wild and yeah, astonishing. And it makes you think, it makes you think like, there must be, there's something going on here. That's the thing about DMT, I think.

When you put it all together, everything, or yes, each aspect of DMT is on its own amazing. The complexity of the worlds, the strangeness of the beings, the fact that it's everywhere in nature, everywhere you look, you know, countless plants contain DMTs, ubiquitous. It's in the human body. It's metabolised very quickly by the brain. The brain is very at home with DMT.

This sense of deja vu, it all comes together. You can't help. And you also can't communicate to other people who are never taking it. But you can't help feel this profound sense. This is, there's something really, really important. There's this deep connection. It's not so much, I often wrote one of my papers a few years ago. It's not so much an alien world,

but a world from which we have become alienated. Whoa, that's, write it down. That's my quote, yeah? I read, Rick Straussman said that. I remember when I heard him say that at a convention. So to get back to this idea of going into the inside, going deeper, at some point is it that it's not so much we discover this ability to encode ourselves into the deepest data set of reality,

but more that we remember we've already done that. That in fact, yes, we are like flowering out into this particular aspect of time space and death is just when the flower petals drop. And then you just go back to the light show to wherever that is and everyone's so happy to see you. And then, you know, you do it again. Or is it like McKenna would talk about the Al-Yusinian mystery schools? Is this an initiation?

Are we doing the futuristic equivalent of when you see people who stick their hands in the gloves filled with ants? Only in this case, it's not a glove filled with ants. It's a planet filled with other people who have forgotten that there's more to them than this. And thus, the celebration would be one you might expect at some kind of initiation, at some kind of like, you did it! You're one of us!

Welcome, welcome, you did it! You know, to me, what we could think of as the apocalypse, the singularity, is it just like all of us are simultaneously whatever batch of initiates we happen to be are simultaneously coming down, waking up, returning together to whatever this place was? Yeah, I think so. And if you think about DMT, I mean, using DMT, discovering DMT, it requires quite a lot of intelligence.

It takes a long time for a human being to reach the stage where they can identify this molecule, isolate it. That requires chemistry. I mean, this is something that a chimp couldn't achieve. You can't just munch on DMT-complaining plants. You have to isolate it, purify it, then, and that only happened in 1956, of course, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.

It's a long story, a long story of evolution and development. And now we're kind of starting to understand, I hope, I'm telling people they should start to see DMT as, take seriously the idea that DMT is a technology, and we're learning to develop it as such. So we're learning to go beyond the glass pipe and popping our head into this domain, and learning to actually maintain ourselves in there,

to spend more and more time in there. So there's a huge journey that goes from the beginning of human evolution or the beginning of the development of the emergence of life on Earth all the way up to this point. So, of course, there's going to be a fucking celebration. It's like, wow, we're right at now. We're kind of popping our heads above the clouds. And seeing what's beyond, it's like, oh my God,

how long did it take for us to achieve this? So yeah, when you burst into this realm, even though it is at this point a few minutes, right? Three or four minutes, it's like, yay, finally, he made it. We'll see you again soon. And they say goodbye and they wave and say, we'll see you soon. They know that we finally found our way home. But we can only kind of pop our head around the door briefly,

and then we have to go again. But soon, perhaps, I'm not saying this is true, but it feels like we're reaching the stage now where we have reached the stage now where we can spend 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, days. There's no limit here. What happens then? Do we find a way to permanently re-instantiate?

Instantiate ourselves into that. Is that going to be part of what post-biological, post-human life looks like, is where we learn to instantiate ourselves into this bizarre domain? I don't know. I don't know if I'd want to be there permanently, but it feels like, and of course, it's always going to be shocking and disorienting.

People go, oh my God, just like when you burst from the womb, I guess. Imagine if I put me back, put me back. But you don't really want to go back now, do you? I mean, I'm kind of over it, if I'm honest. Yeah, I know. Yeah, definitely, that is not where I want to go back for it. But yeah, I get the analogy, and I think that, I've heard, you know,

Chogyum Chumper Rinpoche, all the Buddhists, when they talk about enlightenment, anyone who gets into meditation, the first thing, God, I want to get enlightened. You don't even know what that means. But it'd be fucking cool to be enlightened. But all of the Rinpoche's, the Lamas, they all say it's really not a big deal.

Like, in fact, it only seems like a big deal in the same way if you'd been standing on your head, your entire life, and somebody got you back on your feet. For a second, you'd be like, what the fuck? This is crazy. And then it would just be normal reality for you. So the comparison I totally understand, it could just be that that wildness or whatever,

it may be, it also may be, as you were talking about earlier, that our brains haven't fully learned how to decode that reality, that our brains are just doing their best to to decode the reality, but the longer you're in there, the more refined that ability becomes, and maybe the less bizarre things seem.

I don't know, but I got to tell you, man, your research is mind-blowing. Can you talk about your new book? I love you. You have a little bit more time to talk about your new book. Yes, of course. It looks so cool. I can't wait to get a copy, man.

It is badass. Well, I'll send you a copy. So yeah, so reality switch technologies, psychedelics as tools for the discovery and exploration of new worlds. So yeah, it's a book. Basically, it's about what I consider to be, and Hamilton Morris agrees with me, so there.

Is that it? Is that it is by far the most kind of the deepest and most detailed account of how psychedelic drugs work in the brain available. It occurred to me three or four years ago that there isn't a really good book that really explains to a non-specialist, so not a scientist, somebody who's just a curious amateur.

I would describe the kind of the average reader of my books. Someone who's really interested in understanding what's actually going on in the brain when a psychedelic molecule enters, when DMT enters the brain, or when LSD enters the brain, or psilocin, or ketamine even. I talk about ketamine as well, and the tropane alkaloid like scopolamine or salvanorin.

Why, when these enter your brain, does the structure and dynamics of your experienced world change? Either subtly, as a low dose of mushrooms, or astonishingly dramatically, with a high dose, a breakthrough dose of DMT. The book is basically about a deep dive into the neuroscience, the neurochemistry,

the pharmacology of psychedelic drugs, explaining in detail how do they interact with receptors, how do they change the way that neurons function, how do they, that change the way that neurons communicate with each other, and why does this cause your structure, dynamics of your world to change. So yeah, that's the book. So if you're really interested in developing

a really deep and satisfying understanding of what psychedelics are actually doing, then Reality Switch Technologies is the book. It's all written and designed by me. Very beautiful book. It is beautiful. Yeah, this isn't just the illustrations that I've seen online, and just through that flip through,

it's clearly, you spent a long time on that book. It's beautiful. Yes, thank you. Andrew, thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. I hope you'll come back. This is, I think this might be one of my favorite episodes of the DTFH.

Wow. Yay. Thank you so much. It's really nice connecting with you. You're going to come to the United States anytime soon. Do you have any lectures coming up or any way we can see you live out here? I've been a few times.

I haven't been since that thing that happened over the last few years. It's quite difficult. It's easy to leave Japan. It's not that easy to get back in. So, you know what I mean? It's getting, it's better now. So, yeah, things have opened up.

So, hopefully I will make it. I was last time, where was I last time? Oh, I was in Boulder, not that, a few years ago I gave a lecture there. San Diego, New York. But yeah, where are you? I'm in Austin and the pandemic didn't happen in the text list.

You're in Austin. Invite me to Austin. I'll come to Austin. We've got a guest room. I would love for you to come. It's a beautiful place. It really is. It's wonderful.

One of my neighbors has a cannon. He has an actual cannon. Like, I said to him, he was like, yeah, we fire it on the 4th of July. I'm like, can you tell me when you're going to fire it? I've never seen a cannon like actually fire a cannonball. And he's like, oh, to shoot the cannonballs, we have to go deep in the country.

Can't shoot the cannonballs in the neighborhood. No shit. Wow. Yeah. You Americans are wild. You really are. Yeah. Oh my God.

It's you and it's somehow in the midst of it, the sweetest. He's truly like, you realize, yeah, there's nothing to worry about with that cannon necessarily. But anyway, look, why am I talking about cannons after an incredible podcast? Come. I mean it.

That's not just podcast. Yeah. If you want to come out to Austin, you can stay at our home and bless you for all the work that you're doing in this department. And thank you so much for your incredible Twitter. You're amazing. Substack everybody.

All the links you need to find Andrew will be at dunkartrussell.com. But can you tell folks where they can find you? Yes. So my website is alieninsect.net. They've got links to my, many of my talks and interviews and papers that I've written, books you can buy and that kind of stuff.

I post as Duncan says quite regularly on Twitter. My Twitter handle is alieninsect. So I put lots of threads about psychedelic neuroscience and other ideas about psychedelics and other drugs. And my substack as well, I publish weekly. Alieninsect on drugs is my substack. And again, you can link to all of this from my website, alieninsect.net.

That's it. It's been great chatting with you, Andrew. Thank you so much. You too. Thank you very much. Howdy, Krishna. That was Andrew Gallimore, everybody. Subscribe to his Twitter, his substack, his Instagram.

All the links are going to be at dunkartrussell.com and buy his brand new book, Reality Switch Technologies. A tremendous thank you to our sponsors and a merry, merry Christmas or whatever you may be celebrating to thee. I love you and I'll see you next week. Holy shit.

We have a blazing podcast coming up with the renowned brother Ali. I'll see you then. Until then, Hare Krishna. Fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne,

Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store, and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney. When life gets crazy and when doesn't it,

ShopRite helps you keep it all together, now with a little extra help from Instacart. If you need your groceries now-ish, but your options for going to ShopRite are later-ish or never-ish, you can get everything you need delivered through Instacart right to your door in as fast as an hour. Skip the shop and savor more of your crazy,

busy life with ShopRite and Instacart. Visit instacart.com to get free delivery on your first order. Offer valid for a limited time, minimum order, $10 additional terms apply.