Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Andrew Gallimore
Andrew Gallimore
Date this lecture was recorded: June 17, 2019.
Today’s podcast features an interview with Dr. Andrew Gallimore regarding his protocol for extending DMT experiences with a drip technology. This conversation was recorded during one of our weekly live salons. Dr. Gallimore joined us from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology where he based. Andrew is a neurobiologist, chemist, and pharmacologist who is interested in the relationship between psychedelic drugs, the brain, consciousness and the structure of reality. His current focus is on developing a methodology whereby a detailed study of the DMT experience can be made.
Andrew Gallimore Website
Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game
https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic-Technologies/dp/1527234762
A Model for the Application ofTarget-Controlled IntravenousInfusion for a Prolonged Immersive DMT Psychedelic Experience
Dr. Andrew Gallimore - Talking with Aliens Pt 1
DMT Nexus
STARMAKER
https://www.amazon.com/Star-Maker-Olaf-Stapledon/dp/0486466833/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=starmaker&qid=1561401442&s=books&sr=1-2
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And I think that you are really going to come away from today’s podcast with a lot of new ideas about using DMT.
00:00:40 ►
You see, since DMT is the most widespread psychoactive molecule found in nature, and, well, it’s even endogenous to our brains,
00:00:45 ►
so maybe it’s time for us to become, well become a little more at home with DMT.
00:00:52 ►
Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Gallimore, and he has developed an interesting new protocol for extending an NMDMT trip well beyond the normal five minutes or so that smoking brings
00:00:58 ►
us.
00:00:59 ►
The conversation that we’re about to listen in on took place last Monday evening in the
00:01:04 ►
live salon that I host each week for my Patreon supporters.
00:01:08 ►
As you will hear, Andrew is a computational neurobiologist, which sounds to me like it’s a notch above rocket scientist.
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And in today’s program notes, which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com, I’ve added links to his website and to the paper that he refers to in
00:01:25 ►
this conversation. As you and I listen to Andrew’s ideas about prolonging the DMT experience, I think
00:01:33 ►
that it’s important to also remember how very little we actually know about what’s going on in
00:01:39 ►
our minds during that experience. If you follow some of the links in today’s program notes, or Thank you. science and mathematics that Dr. Gallimore brings to this discussion. However, for me, the main
00:02:06 ►
reason I’m interested in this potential research is that, well, just like you, I certainly would
00:02:12 ►
like some confirmation either for or against the proposition that when under DMT intoxication,
00:02:19 ►
there really are other sentient beings that we come into contact with. Like many of us here in the salon,
00:02:26 ►
some of the times when I’ve smoked NNDMT, I’ve come back with vivid memories of interacting
00:02:32 ►
with other entities. And at the time, I’ve been quite certain that it wasn’t just a hallucination.
00:02:39 ►
However, well, now it’s been several years since the last time I smoked DMT,
00:02:43 ►
and I have to admit that I now have doubts about what I saw or thought that I encountered.
00:02:50 ►
You see, these experiences fade over time, as well as you well know.
00:02:54 ►
So, wouldn’t it be great if we had teams of scientists, psychologists, artists, musicians, writers,
00:03:01 ►
and a lot of us everyday people who could help build a large data set
00:03:06 ►
that we could mine to help us better understand what it is that we are seeing when we are under
00:03:11 ►
the influence of DMT. What I’m still wondering is whether these experiences actually are
00:03:17 ►
interstellar communications with an alien species. You see, without some scientific investigation on the scale being proposed
00:03:25 ►
here, I, for one, just can’t completely rule that out. So now let’s listen in on last Monday’s
00:03:33 ►
Live Salon and see if there are some new ideas here that will spark yet more new ideas in that
00:03:39 ►
wonderful mind of yours. Yeah, we’ve got a few of us in here and Andrew
00:03:46 ►
has made it in here and of course
00:03:48 ►
one of the people we’re waiting for
00:03:50 ►
is Kevin. Andrew,
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we’ve been doing this for over
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a year now and
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almost every Monday night
00:03:58 ►
that I guess all but one of
00:04:00 ►
them, Kevin, who’s the one that
00:04:02 ►
put us in contact with you.
00:04:05 ►
Kevin comes in, he’s who’s the one that put us in contact with you. Kevin comes in.
00:04:06 ►
He’s driving in the middle of Ohio, driving home from work in this truck, I think.
00:04:12 ►
And I always worry about him on the road and distracting him and stuff like that.
00:04:17 ►
Well, a few weeks ago, we didn’t really have much to talk about.
00:04:20 ►
About a quarter after 7, I said, you know, we’re just here.
00:04:23 ►
Let’s not waste time.
00:04:24 ►
Let’s call it quits.
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We signed off.
00:04:27 ►
And a minute later, a huge tornado went across the road right behind him.
00:04:32 ►
Wow.
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The next day they had snowplow equipment getting the debris off the road.
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He had just missed that.
00:04:38 ►
Wow.
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Kind of interesting.
00:04:40 ►
Yeah.
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In fact, speak of the devil kevin i just told andrew your story about
00:04:48 ►
missing a tornado here one monday night uh oh yeah yeah that was pretty crazy
00:04:55 ►
really nuts around here now you know i i kind of hope that that you do a little introduction
00:05:03 ►
of andrew tonight but you know i always worry about you driving, Kevin.
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You’re on the road.
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And, you know, I’m old and conservative.
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And so I worry about that.
00:05:13 ►
I want to make sure you take care of yourself first, you know?
00:05:16 ►
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:05:18 ►
I mean, I trust that you can probably do that for me.
00:05:23 ►
You know, when I was working as a sailor,
00:05:26 ►
we always said one hand for yourself
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and one hand for the ship.
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And so you just keep both hands on the wheel
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and your eye on the road
00:05:33 ►
and we’ll do the best we can here.
00:05:36 ►
All right.
00:05:37 ►
So is Andrew on then?
00:05:39 ►
Yeah, he’s first one up.
00:05:41 ►
If you all go up to gallery view,
00:05:44 ►
you can see the whole list of us.
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There’s 17 of us here right now.
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You’re in Okinawa right now?
00:05:51 ►
Yeah, yeah, Okinawa, deep south of Japan.
00:05:55 ►
Yeah, I’ve been there one time.
00:05:58 ►
I was there for, you know, speaking of weather, I was there for a day.
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I flew in from Tokyoo and i did some work
00:06:06 ►
at the military base and then a uh a typhoon was on its way so as soon as i got done work and i
00:06:12 ►
jumped on a plane went back to tokyo so i was there for only a few hours but yeah throughout
00:06:18 ►
the summer we have a string of them like one after the other sometimes you know it’s pretty
00:06:22 ►
crazy it’s been getting worse in recent years as well so yeah so so andrew what what are you what do you do in in taiwan
00:06:31 ►
in okinawa i mean um i’m a computational neurobiologist i work at the there’s kind of a
00:06:37 ►
new university well fairly new it’s been i think it’s been around about 10 years now um but it’s
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um kind of a new it’s called the okinawa institute of science and technology so it’s been around about 10 years now, but it’s kind of a new,
00:06:46 ►
it’s called the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
00:06:49 ►
So it’s a graduate university, graduate kind of research university,
00:06:52 ►
and I’m interested in kind of modeling, using mathematical
00:06:57 ►
and computational models to try and understand how the brain works, basically.
00:07:01 ►
You know, computational neuroscience, to me, makes a rocket scientist sound like a first grad know, you know, computational neuroscience to me makes a rocket scientist sound
00:07:06 ►
like a first grader, you know, and I watched, I watched part of one of your videos where you were
00:07:12 ►
showing brain changes under various psychedelic states and all how, I don’t know how we’re going
00:07:19 ►
to get to that before, but before we’re done tonight, I would like to talk about that.
00:07:22 ►
But before we’re done tonight, I would like to talk about that.
00:07:23 ►
Sure.
00:07:29 ►
You know, we first learned about you and your work, of course, through Kevin.
00:07:31 ►
And he’d been talking about it for some time. And, you know, he sent me one of these patches.
00:07:35 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:07:36 ►
And I gave the first one he sent me to Bruce Dahmer,
00:07:39 ►
who put it on his flight suit for the talk he gave at Convergence on Orcas Island in March.
00:07:47 ►
And so that’s really how most of us know much about you.
00:07:52 ►
And other than the links that I sent out that I hope some of them check.
00:07:56 ►
But where do you want to start?
00:07:58 ►
What is it that you want to talk about?
00:08:00 ►
Let me give you an idea of the audience.
00:08:02 ►
I don’t want to speak for everybody here.
00:08:04 ►
I only speak for myself.
00:08:07 ►
I’ve got quite an extensive use of DMT and many other things.
00:08:12 ►
And most of the people here at least have a working knowledge or a talking knowledge of all these things.
00:08:17 ►
And we’re really fascinated with what we’ve heard of some of the future directions that you want to head with a project.
00:08:25 ►
So maybe you can start with how you got to where you are now and then where you’re going.
00:08:31 ►
Yeah, sure. No problem, Lorenzo.
00:08:34 ►
So I have kind of a quite a varied academic past.
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I mean, I’ve been interested in psychoactive drugs really since I was a teenager I was interested
00:08:45 ►
in the way that these kind of molecules can interface and interact with the body and
00:08:52 ►
particularly with the brain and the mind it can cause kind of dramatic changes in consciousness
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I always found that to be really really fascinating and from a both a scientific kind of
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academic perspective but also from a subjective
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perspective you know how on earth when you take a tiny amount of this this substance uh can it
00:09:14 ►
affect such dramatic uh life-changing effects on consciousness and so i knew really from when i
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was 15 16 years old when i first became kind of interested in these chemicals,
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that I was going to kind of try and devote my life to trying and understanding them.
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And so I, you know, this just was out when I was starting to think about going to college
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and, you know, what was I going to study and that kind of thing.
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What was I going to study and that kind of thing. And so I initially moved towards chemistry and pharmacology
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because I was interested in the molecules
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and interested in how they interact with the body and with the brain.
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And then throughout my doctoral work,
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I moved towards sort of biochemistry,
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became more interested in the deep levels of the human organism.
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And now I’ve moved to the last five or six years,
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I’ve been interested in neurobiology and actually trying to understand the brain
00:10:14 ►
and trying to understand a kind of a deep level, what is actually going on?
00:10:18 ►
What is actually happening when you have a trip?
00:10:21 ►
And most importantly, what is actually happening when you have a trip and most importantly what is actually happening when you have a dmt trip which
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is the trip of trips um in that it is this this 100 reality switch you know how is it possible
00:10:35 ►
that 30 milligrams of this extremely simple extremely common natural plant alkaloid can affect the most indescribably bizarre alterations of consciousness
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such that the world shifts from the normal consensus waking reality that we’re all familiar
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with and then suddenly the world is altogether different and not in a kind of chaotic way not
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in a way where the world is kind of jumbled up or or becomes a
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maelstrom of confusion and chaos um but actually as if the channel has been switched the channel
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has not just been nudged out of tune but as if the actual there is there is another hidden channel
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there as if in the brain and that somehow dmt causes that that very theT causes that switch in a very efficient manner.
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So that’s where I am now and where I’ve been for the last few years
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is trying to get a handle on as far as is possible what the hell this is.
00:11:38 ►
You know what you call a channel, which I’m sure is more accurate.
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I’ve always thought of our brain being able to set up different networks, different circuits and everything. I saw Dean locking in different
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circuits. But one of the questions I have, you know, you are following an intellectual path that,
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you know, I’ve known a lot of people who have dreamt of following something like this. How did
00:12:00 ►
you get support along the way? I mean, have to go you know stealth and not tell them what
00:12:05 ►
you’re really doing or how did you pull this off yeah to an extent yeah I mean I’ve certainly never
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received any direct funding for this kind of DMT psychedelic stuff that I do that’s always been
00:12:17 ►
in parallel but kind of on the side all the kind of the academic work that I do has always has a kind of a kind of a mainstream
00:12:28 ►
academic reason for doing it you know just like any other scientist but on the side I’ve always
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been I’ve had this kind of psychedelic thing and so I’ve never really gone into academic positions
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without thinking about well how can I relate this to what i’m doing in terms of psychedelics so this is why
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you know i’m i worked in pharmacology and chemistry and now neuroscience because i knew
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that this could this is always going to help me on this kind of path towards developing some kind
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of broad understanding of what these psychedelics do because you know psychedelics that they’re
00:13:03 ►
extremely difficult things because they they
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work on at so many different levels they work the chemical level um you know how do they interact
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with these proteins inside the brain um you know what effects do they cause at this protein level
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uh binding to these serotonin receptors for example example but then you have to think well how does that
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cause these dramatic changes in this global brain activity and in fact changes in the this network
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activity exactly what you referred to lorenzo you know that’s actually more accurate actually
00:13:37 ►
neuroscientifically than this idea of a channel the idea of activating different network and
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stabilizing different sets of network is actually uh what these psychedelics uh particularly dmt um seems to do and and uh you know it’s
00:13:52 ►
interesting your your path uh reminds me of that of a close friend of mine who’s no longer with us
00:13:58 ►
but he did a similar thing and and uh he he followed a professional chemistry career and became a top chemist for a big drug company and, you know, did work that got patents and stuff.
00:14:13 ►
But as a result, he got a private lab in one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies and did a lot of private chemistry.
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Yeah. You know, and and not just creating stuff for us he did some research in
00:14:27 ►
there too and and uh so i i think that uh you have many brothers uh in arms that you probably don’t
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even know about yeah yeah well shulgin of course i mean that was i mean shulgin was yeah that was
00:14:38 ►
that his case kind of path and it is difficult to try and forge a path, particularly if you need access to scientific kind of equipment and, you know, resources to actually do it entirely independently.
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You know, if you just want to write books, that’s great.
00:14:53 ►
You can do that on your own. and to laboratories even, and high-power computational resources,
00:15:11 ►
then you kind of have to be at least loosely attached to an institution without becoming too wedded to it.
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I’ve always been in the position that I’m slowly extricating myself away from it.
00:15:21 ►
I’m slowly deinstitutionalizing myself over time,
00:15:27 ►
away from the i’m slowly de-institutionalizing myself over time and i don’t want to be part of a university institution for you know for the for the entire future you know it’s something i’m
00:15:34 ►
kind of pulling myself away from slowly yeah well i know i know that sasha shulgin made great use
00:15:40 ►
of the mass spectrometer at cal berkeley but he, he was able to stay to, you know, at distance from the university.
00:15:48 ►
I think he did a lot of favors for some of the professors up there.
00:15:52 ►
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. And like that. So, so now, now you have,
00:15:58 ►
have picked up on the protocol that Rick Strassman was doing for a slow, slow motion, I guess, DMT trip.
00:16:10 ►
That’s, that’s how I kind of picture it. And, and Kevin’s never really had a chance to describe
00:16:16 ►
much of it. And I know he’s done a lot of reading and listening to your work and all like that but uh from what i understand you know it’s uh it’s well let me ask you just to
00:16:29 ►
explain it because uh i probably don’t understand anything yeah well actually it’s it’s my protocol
00:16:35 ►
actually i actually i had the idea back in 2015 and i actually approached rick Rick to ask him if he wanted to collaborate.
00:16:56 ►
Because, OK, so basically the idea is that, as everybody knows, the DMT experience, particularly with the normal modes of administration,
00:17:02 ►
whether it’s vaping it in a little glass pipe or injection, is a very brief experience.
00:17:06 ►
And then the peak is within a couple of minutes, really.
00:17:08 ►
And then you’re already starting to come down.
00:17:12 ►
So you’re only within this, what we call the DMT space,
00:17:14 ►
for maybe five minutes.
00:17:18 ►
And then you’re kind of dragged out again. And for me, I’ve always felt that DMT was more than just a drug.
00:17:25 ►
I’ve always seen it as a tool or a technology.
00:17:29 ►
And, you know, we’re an intelligent species.
00:17:32 ►
And I think that we should, if we find or locate some kind of technology,
00:17:37 ►
we should bring our best tools to the table and try and develop that technology.
00:17:43 ►
You know, as humans, when we, as humans,
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when we first discovered fire and now we think what we do, you know,
00:17:49 ►
then we think about the internal combustion engine or something like that.
00:17:52 ►
You don’t just stop with sitting around a campfire,
00:17:55 ►
you develop the technology.
00:17:56 ►
And I kind of see DMT like that in that it’s, you know,
00:18:01 ►
it’s really quite recently discovered.
00:18:04 ►
The pure form of DMT was discovered in 1956.
00:18:07 ►
So we’ve had just over half a century of kind of working out what this thing is and what it can do.
00:18:14 ►
And I think my feeling has been that we need to start thinking about what’s the best way to use it.
00:18:20 ►
And I don’t think that smoking it in a little glass pipe is the be-all and end-all of this.
00:18:25 ►
I think it’s a perfectly valid and efficient way of using DMT and I particularly like these little
00:18:30 ►
vape pens that people are using now. I think this is really a cool way of administering DMT.
00:18:36 ►
But I think we have to think beyond the obvious and people get wedded. There’s kind of this kind
00:18:44 ►
of romanticism attached to the
00:18:45 ►
idea of using a little glass pipe and lighting incense and that kind of thing but i’ve always
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felt we need to push forward um so i thought you know if if if we treat dmt as a technology
00:18:56 ►
and if we actually take seriously the idea that it does grant access to uh you know hidden
00:19:03 ►
orthogonal dimensions of reality within which there are actually intelligent, extremely intelligent beings.
00:19:11 ►
I thought, well, we need to do better. It’s impolite for a star to burst into somebody’s space and then, you know, look around wide eyed and then disappear again just as quickly. That’s a terribly, terribly, you know, uncivilized way of behaving.
00:19:29 ►
So I thought, you know, well, we need to develop a way of entering this space reliably,
00:19:35 ►
you know, not just using ayahuasca, by the way, which is a whole different type of technology,
00:19:40 ►
but entering this space and maintaining our presence within this space and and it occurred
00:19:47 ►
to me that the type of technology that is used in anesthesiology so in anesthesiology of course
00:19:55 ►
is the the art of putting people to sleep basically it’s a lot more than that of course
00:19:59 ►
but but basically the idea is that you know when you go for an operation surgery and they put you put you put you out for two or three hours, what they normally do is they don’t just inject you with the drug and kind of hope that you remain asleep those two or three hours. programmable infusion device which delivers a precise precisely measured
00:20:28 ►
rate of drug goes into the bloodstream over time and this what the idea here is
00:20:35 ►
that it actually maintains a specific level of drug concentration in the brain
00:20:40 ►
this keeps you at a certain level of anesthesia and you can bring yourself they can bring you out or they can push you a little bit deeper if they’re doing an
00:20:48 ►
incision, that kind of thing. So they have some quite high degree of control over the level of
00:20:55 ►
drug in the brain. And I thought, well, DMT actually exhibits some of the specific pharmacological
00:21:03 ►
characteristics of these anesthetic drugs.
00:21:06 ►
So these anesthetic drugs, they have to be very short-acting drugs.
00:21:09 ►
They have to be metabolized pretty quickly, broken down quite quickly.
00:21:13 ►
They have to leave the body quite quickly.
00:21:15 ►
They can’t build up.
00:21:16 ►
They can’t show what’s called subjective tolerance,
00:21:18 ►
which means that the effect of the drug must remain constant with a continuous dose.
00:21:26 ►
Otherwise, the person might kind of wake up.
00:21:29 ►
And it struck me that DMT has precisely these qualities.
00:21:33 ►
Of course, it’s very fast acting and it doesn’t last very long.
00:21:38 ►
And it’s very rapidly and efficiently cleared from the body.
00:21:43 ►
And as Rick Strassman actually demonstrated in his study in the 90s,
00:21:47 ►
it doesn’t exhibit subjective tolerance,
00:21:49 ►
which means you can give someone a dose of DMT
00:21:52 ►
and then 30 minutes later or 15 minutes later or whatever,
00:21:56 ►
give them the same dose and the intensity of the experience
00:22:00 ►
is going to be the same every time, which is quite unusual.
00:22:05 ►
And this is kind of one of these unique pharmacological peculiarities of DMT.
00:22:10 ►
So I thought, well, why not use this, what’s called target-controlled intravenous infusion,
00:22:17 ►
which is basically this anesthesiology technology.
00:22:21 ►
Why not use that with DMT?
00:22:27 ►
anesthesiology technology why not use that with dmt um and so i thought well what i need to do that first of all to actually test that idea you need uh what’s called a pharmacokinetic model
00:22:32 ►
which is a a mathematical model that describes that explains describes the way that the drug
00:22:38 ►
when it enters the body distributes and spreads throughout the body and the brain, how it is broken down and removed from the body, all that kind of thing.
00:22:47 ►
And to develop that model, you need blood data.
00:22:51 ►
So you need blood samples taken at 30-second intervals or whatever
00:22:58 ►
from someone who has just received a dose of DMT,
00:23:02 ►
and you need that for quite a lot of people.
00:23:09 ►
So you get a measure. You can see exactly how the levels of DMT rise and then fall and I knew that Rick Strassman had taken that kind of data during his 90s study because I’ve seen
00:23:18 ►
I’ve seen charts that he had published in some of his papers. So I knew he must have had that data at some point.
00:23:25 ►
So I fired off an email to Rick and I said, I have this idea.
00:23:30 ►
However, it would be really helpful if you had this data.
00:23:34 ►
And luckily enough, tucked away in an old hard drive somewhere,
00:23:39 ►
Rick had this Excel file which he duly passed on to me.
00:23:43 ►
And then I developed this model model and then we kind of wrote
00:23:46 ►
this paper together uh explaining how it would work and you know its potential uses and you know
00:23:52 ►
both therapeutic and otherwise um and yeah and then it kind of took off and then other people
00:23:57 ►
have become very interested in it and um have you know some people are even trying to implement it now but you know i’ve got a question
00:24:06 ►
but first i’ve got a comment i want to make i’ve talked to hundreds of people about dmt and most
00:24:12 ►
of them who have used it even but you are the first person that i’ve heard say this and i sure
00:24:18 ►
wish terence mckenna was here to hear it that nobody else has ever thought about what they looked to the elves
00:24:25 ►
when they got into it. And it never occurred to me that, you know, like you said, it’s kind of rude
00:24:32 ►
just to pop in. That’s an interesting perspective. My question is, and I know there’s a huge
00:24:42 ►
difference, but I’ve never been able to talk to anybody that really has given some thought and would know something about it but i you know that
00:24:49 ►
the the strassman original protocol of the the drip you know the long-term dmt uh compared with
00:24:56 ►
an ayahuasca experience which is a dmt experience of over a long term but nothing like a smoke DMT. What’s the difference in these things?
00:25:08 ►
Yeah, so one of the most common criticisms of this paper that we wrote is, well, you know,
00:25:16 ►
isn’t, aren’t you just, isn’t this just ayahuasca? You know, we’ve had this for thousands of years,
00:25:20 ►
and that’s kind of, it’s half true true but it’s also completely as you point out
00:25:25 ►
you know the ayahuasca state is not the same as a breakthrough dmt state and we you know this
00:25:31 ►
you know phenomenologically in terms of the actual effect people they’re very different
00:25:35 ►
but oh it’s going on there but also there is um you actually you can uh people have studied
00:25:43 ►
ayahuasca quite extensively and studied the actual levels of DMT in people’s blood.
00:25:48 ►
And if you actually measure the level of DMT in people’s blood at the peak of an ayahuasca experience,
00:25:54 ►
it’s normally only less than 20% of the level you reach with smoke DMT or with DMT that’s injected.
00:26:02 ►
So ayahuasca delivers a slow rise to a peak and then a
00:26:07 ►
slow decline uh but it never reaches these this very high levels with uh with uh with smoke dmt
00:26:13 ►
or injected dmt so we’re not suggesting you know this kind of thing we’re suggesting much higher
00:26:18 ►
and then actually maintained um so imagine being at the peak of a breakthrough DMT experience and then being held there for several hours.
00:26:29 ►
That’s what we’re able to do.
00:26:31 ►
But one doesn’t have to go that deep that quickly.
00:26:33 ►
The great thing about this technique is that you can control the level.
00:26:41 ►
So you could push someone into kind kind of a sub threshold sub breakthrough
00:26:45 ►
level um experience and then you know once they’re comfortable push them a little deeper
00:26:51 ►
and then push a little deeper then bring them out again and you could even have communication
00:26:55 ►
uh between uh the people in still in the room so to speak um delivering the infusion and and
00:27:01 ►
the actual individual undergoing the experience so you could deliver information information there like, you know, push me deeper.
00:27:06 ►
I need to go deeper or I need to come out. This is getting a bit too intense.
00:27:09 ►
You know, so,
00:27:09 ►
so the idea is that you would have control within really a few seconds.
00:27:14 ►
You could start to pull someone back. Whereas of course in ayahuasca,
00:27:20 ►
it’s what, you know, once you’ve swallowed it and,
00:27:23 ►
and vomited it out again and then swallowed it again or whatever, you know once you’ve swallowed it uh and and vomited it out again and then swallowed
00:27:26 ►
it again or whatever uh you know that it’s it’s largely out you have to kind of you know
00:27:31 ►
relinquish control over to the to the drug and and you know the levels that will be reached in
00:27:38 ►
your brain of dmt will vary you know this is this is a relatively crude plant decoction where, you know, levels of DMT are going to vary from batch to batch.
00:27:49 ►
And it’s certainly not a precise way of controlling or keeping DMT levels steady in the brain, which is what we’re proposing here.
00:27:57 ►
Well, you know, that’s interesting because really it looks like what your research is heading toward are these experiences.
00:28:04 ►
what your research is heading toward or these experiences,
00:28:11 ►
you really want to find more subjective data than just, you know,
00:28:16 ►
objective data like, oh, they had so many milligrams per kilogram, et cetera,
00:28:19 ►
that this is more like push me more, push me more.
00:28:22 ►
And the communication, this is something that’s totally different from what I’ve heard of other research tests.
00:28:26 ►
Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, for me personally, it’s always been about ultimately it’s been about the subjective experience.
00:28:34 ►
The you know, the tool that you use is not so important as long as it works.
00:28:38 ►
So I’m interested in developing this as a technology as a tool.
00:28:42 ►
But ultimately, it will be, you know know what is the actual what is the experience what is the person undergoing here and you
00:28:48 ►
know how can we how can we use the experience to try and understand the
00:28:51 ►
nature of the experience try and understand the nature of these beings
00:28:56 ►
that one meets and you know can we establish stable communication with
00:29:00 ►
these beings you know can we you know normally you would spend two or three minutes
00:29:05 ►
maximum in communication with some this is whilst this maelstrom is beginning to stabilize you know
00:29:11 ►
it takes normally for most people by the time they’ve kind of um oriented themselves best they
00:29:19 ►
can within the dmt space they’re already coming back um And so, and for many, that’s a blessing. But, you know,
00:29:27 ►
if you really want to treat this as a place to explore and to, you know, I use the word guardedly,
00:29:33 ►
but to map and actually try and, you know, Terence McKenna wrote that essay, New Maps of
00:29:38 ►
Hyperspace, way back now. So, you know, this is kind of perhaps what he was talking about, right?
00:29:45 ►
back now so you know this is kind of perhaps what what he was talking about right you know these are maps of a completely novel domain that has never been mapped before and how would you even go about
00:29:53 ►
mapping a place like this that’s really an interesting question some people say oh it’s
00:29:58 ►
impossible you can’t map the dmt space but i i think that’s a little bit presumptuous i think
00:30:04 ►
yes it’s going to probably going to take
00:30:06 ►
people with a range of disciplines you’re going to require mathematicians you’re going to require
00:30:10 ►
anthropologists you can require linguists and pharmacologists and neuroscientists and
00:30:15 ►
you know you name it a few artists i think two musicians absolutely yeah for sure you’re
00:30:21 ►
definitely going to need artists to actually try and render some of these
00:30:26 ►
ideas into a meaningful form you know for sure yeah you know all of these poets physicians you
00:30:31 ►
know farmers scientists musicians absolutely you know you know if if i understood you correctly
00:30:37 ►
that there i’m not saying this is a way to do it good or bad but there’s the potential for let’s say i was i was hooked up to
00:30:47 ►
your drip and i was saying okay push it a little bit more okay that’s i need to come down and then
00:30:55 ►
i could come down i could journal write talk whatever and an hour later i could go back is
00:31:01 ►
that true yeah yeah yeah you could come back just you could true? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could come back. Just you could basically,
00:31:05 ►
I kind of imagine it like, um,
00:31:08 ►
like you’re a diver or a deep sea diver or a free diver perhaps.
00:31:12 ►
And you’re going down deep and then you can kind of pop up,
00:31:16 ►
take a few breaths, you know,
00:31:19 ►
say whatever you need to say and then come back down again.
00:31:22 ►
And that could be controlled.
00:31:24 ►
And so you wouldn’t have to come out entirely.
00:31:27 ►
You know, you wouldn’t have to get back in the boat, so to speak.
00:31:29 ►
You know, you could remain in the water, but, you know, come to the surface
00:31:34 ►
or close enough to the surface such that communication becomes possible
00:31:38 ►
and then go back down.
00:31:40 ►
And then, you know, you might even receive instructions from the people,
00:31:43 ►
you know, still in the room and you could pass back information so you know it becomes a much more um uh what word
00:31:53 ►
am i looking for you know you you construct the experience and you you could rather than just
00:31:59 ►
giving way to the experience which is one way but actually being much more interactive and actually
00:32:06 ►
saying okay i’ve met these beings here these and i’m asking these questions and they’re giving
00:32:12 ►
this information you’re relaying that back you know and they they might feed you back some
00:32:17 ►
information you can’t make sense of but perhaps that you can relay to the um the mathematician
00:32:23 ►
standing there and going okay you
00:32:26 ►
need to ask them this or you need to do this or you need to do don’t do this do this you know and
00:32:31 ►
you have anthropologists and you have all these psychologists all at the and so it’s it’s it’s
00:32:36 ►
you’re the intermediary really uh between between the worlds uh i think that’s really kind of a cool
00:32:42 ►
way you know what what i was thinking of as you’re
00:32:46 ►
describing this is Terrence McKenna’s thought of a time machine. And the first time somebody
00:32:51 ►
creates a time machine, everybody in the future is going to show up there back to that person.
00:32:56 ►
Well, the first time you kick this thing off, I expect Terrence McKenna to show up.
00:33:01 ►
Oh, wouldn’t that be great? Yeah. load and all that stuff but something like this I can see myself still you
00:33:25 ►
know if I qualified physically to do it this is something that would interest me
00:33:29 ►
simply because that’s a space that that really is almost impossible to explore
00:33:36 ►
ayahuasca space while it is DMT is a totally different substance I mean it’s
00:33:41 ►
it’s the synergistic result of, result of, of several plants, you know,
00:33:46 ►
but, uh, smoke and in DMT is so unique. And if you could, if I could go there and spend a little
00:33:55 ►
time and take a breath and come back and spend some more time, uh, you know, that’s, that’s
00:34:00 ►
something worth, worth, uh, you know, I’ll help you help you you know see if we can push this thing forward because i would like to see uh what people come back with and and i have a feeling that that
00:34:13 ►
what all of us here tonight and you have been thinking all this time i think that there’s
00:34:17 ►
probably some things going to come out of this that are so far beyond any of our imaginations
00:34:22 ►
we’d be surprised because this is this is not only the most powerful psychedelic there is,
00:34:27 ►
it’s in our brains too. There’s something really important about it.
00:34:31 ►
Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, DMT is,
00:34:33 ►
it has a number of these special characteristics that really just scream out
00:34:38 ►
and say, you know, I, this is, this is not just another natural psychedelic.
00:34:43 ►
This is something very, very special um you know the
00:34:46 ►
fact that it’s it’s everywhere you know dennis mckenna always says nature is drenched in dmp
00:34:51 ►
um exactly right you know it is everywhere you look you know you it’s hard to look without
00:34:57 ►
seeing a plant that contains some dmt of course levels vary widely but but it’s as if it’s a message that’s been scattered throughout our reality.
00:35:09 ►
And it’s just waiting for some intelligent being that reaches a certain level of cognitive sophistication that they can actually decode the message. We are that species. We have discovered this secret message embedded in our reality,
00:35:28 ►
embedded in the natural world,
00:35:30 ►
and we’re now starting to actually decode it.
00:35:33 ►
They say, what is this message actually telling us?
00:35:36 ►
And the message is a tool.
00:35:37 ►
It’s a technology that allows us to escape this limited,
00:35:42 ►
lower-dimensional slice of this insane bizarre hyperdimensional reality
00:35:49 ►
you know and our reality sits as this i think is this little slide like in the same way they’re
00:35:54 ►
like a 2d slice of a cube uh like a 2d plane it’s just a slice of that reality we’re like a
00:36:02 ►
you know a three or four dimensional slice of this incredibly complex
00:36:06 ►
hyperdimensional reality. And DMT is this tool, this message that’s been planted and say, hey,
00:36:12 ►
you know, there is a way out. You know, this is, there is another place to go to beyond
00:36:18 ►
this parochial little universe that you think is everything. You know, it really isn’t everything.
00:36:24 ►
Well, let’s see if somebody else has
00:36:26 ►
some questions you’d like to ask here.
00:36:28 ►
Anybody want to raise your hand
00:36:30 ►
or speak up?
00:36:31 ►
I would like to ask a question.
00:36:33 ►
Go ahead, Houston. This is Houston Power.
00:36:36 ►
Hi, Houston Power. Wow.
00:36:38 ►
I appreciate what you’re doing.
00:36:40 ►
It’s awesome. I love the
00:36:42 ►
idea. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens
00:36:43 ►
in the years to come.
00:36:52 ►
Do you have any direct experience with an actual medical team setting up an IV with an infusion pump and doing this?
00:36:54 ►
Or is it all just theory?
00:36:55 ►
It’s all just theory at the moment.
00:37:09 ►
So the paper that I wrote with Rick was really a what I call a kind of proof of principle so the idea was to demonstrate that DMT has the required pharmacological characteristics that would allow this technology to actually work and but to
00:37:14 ►
actually go from there to actually doing it in humans this there’s quite a lot of
00:37:19 ►
additional work needs to be done it’s not kind of a plug-and-play kind of thing
00:37:23 ►
you need to develop
00:37:25 ►
first you need to refine the pharmacokinetic model um using a lot more data and a lot more
00:37:30 ►
careful analysis um so so there is actually a team that’s working with the imperial college
00:37:37 ►
psychedelic research group is actually doing a much more detailed analysis uh of rick’s blood
00:37:44 ►
data and hopefully we’ll get a much
00:37:46 ►
more refined model which they will then publish and will be you know publicly available and so
00:37:51 ►
they’re kind of thinking about using the technology developing this technology and then there’s of
00:37:55 ►
course there’s the medicinal mindfulness team the DMTX team over in Colorado who are also pushing it from a completely different kind of perspective.
00:38:06 ►
So I expect that this will be implemented in humans in the not too distant future.
00:38:13 ►
Now, there are people that have told me that they have done it, they have used my protocol,
00:38:21 ►
but whether I believe them them i’m not sure and and there was there was
00:38:26 ►
actually a study back in 2005 that actually did use an infusion of dmt uh they didn’t use it
00:38:34 ►
wasn’t the same as our they didn’t use it wasn’t informed by a kind of a pharmacokinetic model
00:38:40 ►
so they didn’t have the level of control and actually a lot of the subjects dropped out of the study but they were they were actually doing looking at the subjective
00:38:49 ►
effects of dmt versus ketamine so um so some of the subjects will have received a ketamine infusion
00:38:56 ►
uh and some of them received dmt infusion but they it was it was if you actually look at the
00:39:02 ►
read the paper um the a number of the subjects dropped
00:39:06 ►
out because the effects were just too intense so i think you know you have to you have to get get
00:39:11 ►
it right um getting the infusion rate right is not that straightforward if you’re if the infusion
00:39:19 ►
rate is too slow then the levels will continue to drop in the brain then the person will just
00:39:23 ►
come come out and if they’re too high then they will build and build and build and then the levels will continue to drop in the brain then the person will just come come out and if they’re too high then they will build and build and build and then the person basically has
00:39:29 ►
overwhelmingly intense effects and then just blacks out essentially so getting that level right and
00:39:34 ►
having that level right across individual uh based you know based upon their their weight or their
00:39:41 ►
age or their sex or their you know their metabolic profile all these kind
00:39:46 ►
of things all these things need to be worked out so it it’s a simple idea uh but the actual
00:39:50 ►
technicalities of it are a little bit more complex than that yeah i’d have to go through the same
00:39:56 ►
process as ketamine for example has over the years and it’s very complex like you said you
00:40:01 ►
hit all the all the points on that so that’s what’s up
00:40:05 ►
yeah um i just can i’m a little bit concerned about the psychology result of this so if you
00:40:12 ►
send somebody into that space and they go in for a long time as you well aware of the you know side
00:40:19 ►
effects of psychedelics with the messiah complex and stuff and they have this powerful experience of you
00:40:25 ►
know oh there’s like other dimensions and and they’re yeah as external not from them
00:40:31 ►
it can literally change them and not for the better oh yeah there’s there’s always a risk
00:40:38 ►
of that right you know like we all have good experiences with dmp and psychedelics but
00:40:44 ►
it could be detrimental
00:40:46 ►
to some people so yeah it seems a little bit like that would have you’d have to have like
00:40:51 ►
thousands of people go through trials and then you’d have to have it obviously in a legal
00:40:56 ►
situation where doctors could prescribe it yes yes so i think you’re right. I mean, this is not something that I’m expecting you to go to Walmart, pick up one of these machines and start going.
00:41:11 ►
Well, not at first, but it’s just like any any kind of dangerous expedition.
00:41:17 ►
You know, you would you would have to receive adequate training.
00:41:20 ►
You know, you don’t go deep diving um having never gone in the water before
00:41:25 ►
um and you know there are risks of course involved now we do know that the physiological risks of dmt
00:41:33 ►
are minimal um in that it is completely non-toxic but you’re you’re right about psychological risks
00:41:40 ►
these are car of course are completely they’re not unrelated to what’s going on in the brain in
00:41:46 ►
fact they’re highly correlated to what’s going on the brain and certainly when you when whenever you
00:41:52 ►
whenever you open your eyes and you’re having an experience and you’re experiencing the world
00:41:58 ►
information is entering the brain and it’s changing your brain and that’s happening all
00:42:03 ►
the time if you learn a new word if you’re learning a new language your brain has changed and this also applies in the dmt state
00:42:11 ►
if you’re entering this this higher dimensional space and you’re interacting with this entirely
00:42:16 ►
new world the brain is receiving completely novel patterns of data and perhaps over extended periods of time and so if someone was to enter this space
00:42:26 ►
for hours or days even um you know i am thinking far ahead here but you know it’s not out of the
00:42:34 ►
question then one does have to think about how it’s actually going to change the brain
00:42:38 ►
uh and that the brain essentially becomes locked in a sense in into constructing this very very strange bizarre
00:42:45 ►
hyperdimensional reality over extended periods of time and then you have to think about well
00:42:50 ►
how’s that going to affect when they have to kind of switch back to their normal waking world and
00:42:56 ►
that’s the these are sort of things that will present themselves either as problems or not as
00:43:01 ►
problems as um as the research continues.
00:43:09 ►
And I think you’re absolutely right that risks cannot be discounted.
00:43:12 ►
But nothing ventured, nothing gained.
00:43:14 ►
One question.
00:43:18 ►
The effects of DMT.
00:43:25 ►
Now, when you take ayahuasca, you get a little drunk and feel very heavy.
00:43:29 ►
Is that the DMT or is that something else in the ayahuasca?
00:43:34 ►
I would say that’s more likely to be something else in the ayahuasca.
00:43:36 ►
You’ve got these Mao inhibitors, basically.
00:43:40 ►
So the Mao inhibitor itself, you think about harming, harmaline,
00:43:44 ►
these have mild psychoactive effects. But you’re also you’re you’re inhibiting
00:43:47 ►
the breakdown of other amines in the body. And so it’s not surprising you’re going to get
00:43:52 ►
additional effects. The DMT itself normally doesn’t cause any kind of heaviness or drowsiness.
00:44:00 ►
It’s very, you know, it’s remarkable. And this is one of its remarkable characteristics. And
00:44:04 ►
that’s something that Terence McKenna used to speak about a lot in the way that he said
00:44:07 ►
said in a way dmt doesn’t affect the mind in that it you know you’re in that space
00:44:12 ►
in a in a completely clear head and you can wander around look around um in the same in a way in a
00:44:20 ►
kind of the same um mindset as when you’re awake normally and that’s what makes it
00:44:25 ►
more startling is that you don’t have that buffer um of of slight intoxication um you know which
00:44:32 ►
kind of can be quite nice sometimes um this is why people some people often drink wine before they um
00:44:39 ►
or beer or whiskey or whatever before they take dmt trip it helps to take the edge off that it gives that
00:44:45 ►
slight intoxication or whatever you know or smoke a joint or something something that gives that
00:44:50 ►
intoxication and slightly separates you from the experience because it is so bizarre and if you go
00:44:58 ►
into the DMT state with a completely clear head it’s even more astonishing because it’s like, well, I’m perfectly normal.
00:45:06 ►
I’m not stoned in any way or, you know, I don’t feel intoxicated.
00:45:10 ►
And yet I’m in this really bizarre place.
00:45:14 ►
You know, that’s, yeah, so that’s kind of one of the remarkable
00:45:18 ►
characteristics of DMTs.
00:45:19 ►
It doesn’t induce that kind of stoning or intoxication type of effect,
00:45:23 ►
really.
00:45:23 ►
And that’s remarkable because it’s such a simple chemical and simple chemicals generally as a rule of thumb
00:45:30 ►
tend to tend to often have quite broad effects they they tend to cause intoxication
00:45:38 ►
but DMT doesn’t so I say with ayahuasca I think yeah it’s the other things in there that are
00:45:43 ►
causing those effects so part of the the neat thing about this technology is you would actually avoid those secondary effects.
00:45:50 ►
So you’re not vomiting and having diarrhea and sweating and all these kind of additional kind of side effects, purging, that you get with ayahuasca.
00:46:00 ►
Aaron, you have a question?
00:46:02 ►
Oh, I do. Thank you.
00:46:04 ►
Sorry, I’m late.
00:46:06 ►
And so if anything I ask has already been covered, forgive me.
00:46:11 ►
But have you read Andrew Olaf Stapleton’s book, Star Maker?
00:46:18 ►
I haven’t.
00:46:19 ►
No, it’s something that I feel like is really relevant to what you’re doing.
00:46:25 ►
It’s a 1937 book, but in it he speaks of there are disembodied,
00:46:32 ►
starts with a disembodied human who goes out throughout the galaxy
00:46:35 ►
and gathers up other disembodied intelligences,
00:46:38 ►
and they are somehow free from time and space,
00:46:40 ►
and then they are able to chart different races throughout the entire universe
00:46:45 ►
who are evolving at different speeds and all that point being there as races evolve past a certain
00:46:52 ►
point species rather they start being able to psychically scan the universe and subtly affect
00:47:01 ►
other species in their development and it’s usually very benign.
00:47:05 ►
And so something I think about,
00:47:08 ►
when you think about the impracticality
00:47:10 ►
of physical space travel on an interstellar level,
00:47:16 ►
so I’m just thinking about the way that psychedelics
00:47:19 ►
can tune your brain to a frequency
00:47:21 ►
that would be receptive to an alien species, a more advanced species
00:47:26 ►
that’s sending out signals and broadcasting thoughts, ideas, concepts to lesser species.
00:47:39 ►
And that, sorry, this is, I’m not phrasing this well, but it’s just an interesting book
00:47:43 ►
that he goes into that a lot without the psychedelics as a way of species evolving throughout the galaxies.
00:47:53 ►
But to me, it would make sense that psychedelics can alter our brain patterns enough to be receptive to these things.
00:48:03 ►
So, yeah yeah go on yeah yeah so i think you’ve
00:48:07 ►
hit on a number of interesting ideas there and the idea first of all the idea of uh of
00:48:13 ►
diverse types of intelligence and that the intelligence may not take the form of uh species
00:48:20 ►
with with skulls with this kind of gelatinous information-generating machine. But actually, information could take forms that we simply cannot consider
00:48:28 ►
or cannot even comprehend.
00:48:32 ►
And really, to understand that, you really need to think about
00:48:34 ►
what we mean by intelligence.
00:48:36 ►
They need to think about ideas about complexity theory and things like that.
00:48:39 ►
So yeah, I think we don’t really have the ability to even comprehend, I think,
00:48:47 ►
what an intelligence from that is, let’s say, a million years ahead of us in terms of advancement,
00:48:54 ►
you know, what that even look like. It almost certainly wouldn’t be still doing it, you know, doing it on meat, so to speak.
00:49:01 ►
And that you might have these more diffuse types of intelligence
00:49:05 ►
um and that these could exist not only within this universe but actually could exist in other
00:49:12 ►
universes and that they and there’s no reason why they haven’t discovered a means of transferring
00:49:17 ►
information between universes um and i think the key point that i always kind of stress when trying to think about
00:49:28 ►
um you know how how is it possible for dmt to allow us to go to another reality um people often
00:49:35 ►
have this idea that dmt must somehow transport one to this place and i i always try and emphasize
00:49:42 ►
the fact that it’s all about information it’s all about can information from this alternate reality somehow access get into the brain is there
00:49:53 ►
some way that dmt changes the brain to exactly as you say to allow it to receive information
00:49:59 ►
from this alternate reality whatever that alternate reality is. That is enough.
00:50:10 ►
That is sufficient, necessary and sufficient, almost,
00:50:12 ►
to allow us to enter that space.
00:50:15 ►
You know, wherever you are,
00:50:18 ►
if you’re having an experience as a human being,
00:50:23 ►
you’re experiencing a world that is being actively constructed,
00:50:27 ►
moment by moment, by your brain, by information.
00:50:31 ►
And your world is essentially information experienced subjectively.
00:50:33 ►
And that information is generated by your brain. And what sensory information from the environment does is it modulates and guides that to an extent
00:50:40 ►
that allows you to construct a kind of stable and predictable version of model of reality
00:50:46 ►
that kind of makes sense and that you can make judicious decisions about behavior.
00:50:51 ►
But being in another world simply requires that information can somehow be gated into the brain
00:51:01 ►
from that other space, wherever that might might be whether it’s somewhere else in
00:51:05 ►
the universe whether it’s in a completely different orthogonal universe entirely and
00:51:11 ►
that the brain can actually start to try and make sense of that and build a model of
00:51:14 ►
that reality which would be experienced as the dmt space um so yeah i think what dmt really shows you
00:51:22 ►
is first of all is that that there is this broad range and variety, this panoply of intelligences that exist and that we can actually communicate with. intelligence may well have been around long before our universe even existed.
00:51:46 ►
And that, you know, you can’t even comprehend the kind of the level of intelligence we’re dealing with here.
00:51:52 ►
And that doesn’t seem to be, there’s no upper limits of possible intelligence.
00:52:00 ►
You know, you simply can’t imagine it.
00:52:02 ►
And what DMT does, I think, is allows you to actually confront some of these intelligences. You know, if you take a good hit of DMT, often you will confront an intelligence that is so beyond your comprehension, so far beyond any level of intelligence you could even consider.
00:52:25 ►
stranger and weirder, grander, more powerful than you could ever suppose.
00:52:30 ►
And it’s right there and it wants to communicate.
00:52:35 ►
It wants to communicate with this little ape, really,
00:52:36 ►
that’s barely come down from the trees.
00:52:40 ►
This is what makes the whole thing just so much more astonishing.
00:52:42 ►
So, yeah, I would definitely check that book out. That sounds like a…
00:52:44 ►
Andrew, I want to i
00:52:45 ►
want to back up what darren said because when you after what you just now said when you get the copy
00:52:52 ►
of that book you’re not going to be able to put it down you’ll read it straight through yeah the
00:52:57 ►
first time i went to a terence mckinnon lecture he talked about that book and he said that he
00:53:02 ►
thinks every science fiction book in the world is based
00:53:06 ►
on that one that’s the granddaddy of them all you’ll see what he means when you see it and he’d
00:53:11 ►
lost his copy and so i bought bought a copy and sent it to him and that’s really how he got to
00:53:16 ►
know who i was so wow that book had played a role in my life too but you you will uh truly enjoy
00:53:23 ►
that and anybody else if you haven’t read star maker by Olaf Stapleton,
00:53:27 ►
and I think you can get it almost for free now it’s all over the place,
00:53:31 ►
but it’s, it’s really, I’ve read it maybe three times already.
00:53:34 ►
I’d forgotten about it. I haven’t read it in several years.
00:53:37 ►
I’m going to pick it up again tomorrow. Thanks for that, Derek.
00:53:40 ►
Oh, you’re welcome. I, I, I’m going to,
00:53:42 ►
I know I’m going to read it a couple of times and I just put it in the chat section if anyone’s interested.
00:53:47 ►
Good, good.
00:53:48 ►
Thank you.
00:53:49 ►
So who else has a question? Anyone?
00:53:52 ►
Yeah, I got two quick questions, Andrew.
00:53:55 ►
First of all, thanks for coming on.
00:53:56 ►
I just discovered you recently, and I’m fascinated to delve in your work, your books on the way.
00:54:02 ►
Awesome.
00:54:03 ►
So two quick things.
00:54:06 ►
to delve in your work, your book’s on the way. So two quick things. The first one, and maybe this is a question out of ignorance, but in terms of the administration route and the intravenous DMT,
00:54:12 ►
does that subvert the need to have the MAOI inhibitors to allow for the longer absorption
00:54:18 ►
of it and the longer experience? Exactly, yeah. Because the MAO inhibitor is specifically to allow DMT to be absorbed orally.
00:54:28 ►
So these enzymes are present in the gastrointestinal system.
00:54:34 ►
So when you swallow DMT normally, it’s normally broken down very quickly.
00:54:39 ►
So you take this MAO inhibitor to prevent that.
00:54:42 ►
And also you’ve got these enzymes in the blood as well so you
00:54:46 ►
so you know absorption orally is very very slow process so you know as quickly as the dmt is
00:54:53 ►
getting into the bloodstream any that is it’s being broken down so it never can reach
00:54:57 ►
psychedelic concentrations in the brain unless you take an mao inhibitor but of course if you
00:55:03 ►
if you inject it then you bypass all of that so you’re you’re getting going straight into a vein um and this you know
00:55:09 ►
within seconds the dmt is starting to flood the brain yeah yeah i i thought that’s what it was i
00:55:15 ►
didn’t want to speak out of turn and i remember reading the dmt spirit molecule book and being
00:55:19 ►
envious of these people who would be administered the ivDMT because of that factor. And just,
00:55:25 ►
you know, thinking about what could be if you did not have to have only 5, 10, 15 minutes in that
00:55:32 ►
space, like you’re saying. So the fact that here we are, and you’re in the academic realm fighting
00:55:36 ►
for the right to get this done and doing it within the means that potentially could, you know, get to
00:55:41 ►
a place where we’re conducting this type of research is fascinating to me. And then just a quick follow up, just out of curiosity, in terms of the research that you’ve
00:55:50 ►
been doing, and maybe even your own personal experience, is there a, you know, one of the
00:55:55 ►
most, an antidote that stands out or a fact you’ve learned about the drug, whether it’s,
00:56:01 ►
you know, it’s chemical structure or anything anything or maybe an experience that you had that you could share with us oh good question I don’t
00:56:11 ►
know it’s hard to say what do I think what do I think I don’t know it’s
00:56:17 ►
difficult question fair enough yeah I don’t know. I mean, you know, I’ve been reading experiences about DMT for 20 years.
00:56:29 ►
And, you know, the first couple of years, well, no longer really.
00:56:33 ►
I’ve been reading experiences about DMT trip reports for probably seven or eight years before I actually first tried DMT.
00:56:47 ►
eight years before I actually first tried DMT. And I think what’s, I guess, most remarkable about DMT, actually, to answer your question, is that the subjective experience is all and the,
00:56:58 ►
you can read 1000 trip reports, and they sound amazing. And um you know you think oh my god this is
00:57:05 ►
incredible this is the most astonishing thing you know this is how could a drug do this um you can
00:57:10 ►
have all of these ideas and thoughts you can listen to these terence mckenna lectures where
00:57:14 ►
he waxes lyrical uh about dmt for hours on end and then you think wow this is amazing but nothing
00:57:20 ►
can prepare you um for the actual experience of dmtnt it really is a drug that can only be
00:57:28 ►
truly understood from the inside this is why i’m suspicious of people that study dnt all of their
00:57:35 ►
lives and never take it um you know and there are people who do that right you know people who study
00:57:40 ►
psychedelics and say oh i’ve never touched them um i think you know it should be a prerequisite
00:57:46 ►
if you’re gonna if you’re gonna be in the academic arena with these with these chemicals that you
00:57:51 ►
should actually try them and certainly if you’re gonna go on uh on stage um you know the twitter
00:57:57 ►
stage or the um the instagram stage or whatever um or the tedx stage uh and say that this this is this is just hallucinations and can be explained
00:58:09 ►
in terms of changes in brain brain activity I would say well first of all have you actually
00:58:17 ►
taken DMT that would be my question because I think it’s very easy to actually dismiss DMT as hallucination,
00:58:27 ►
unless you’ve actually been there.
00:58:28 ►
Then it becomes very, very difficult, very, very quickly to dismiss it.
00:58:34 ►
So yeah, that’s the most astonishing thing about DMT.
00:58:37 ►
The most astonishing thing about DMT is the DMT experience.
00:58:41 ►
There is this array of other peculiarities that I often
00:58:47 ►
talk about, you know, the ubiquity of DMT, the fact that it’s everywhere, the fact that it’s so
00:58:52 ►
simple, the fact that it is, you know, so rapidly cleared from the brain, the fact that the brain is
00:58:58 ►
so at home with DMT, you know, all of these, these things are, you know, that set DMT apart as being different. But it’s the experience itself is absolutely fundamental, I think. And anyone who wants to discuss DMT really needs to have tried it, in my opinion. Would you agree?
00:59:50 ►
And, you know, just to follow up on that point, I think one of the things that’s fascinated me now, especially having listening to you just tonight, to have the extra skin in the game by having the sort of profound appreciation for the experience, but also trying to delve in it in the academic manner and learn more about what it has to offer, puts you in a unique position, in my opinion, that I’ve seen recently in this space, because there are a lot of people who easily dismiss it or maybe have had one years and years ago and they’re so far removed to kind of really remember how much it is awe-inspiring so I think that’s something that will give you a leg up in
00:59:55 ►
this space moving forward. Yeah I think I think it’s important I there are there are obviously
01:00:01 ►
a lot of people who are interested in DMT,
01:00:10 ►
and some of them are interested purely from an academic perspective and perhaps have never tried DMT.
01:00:11 ►
And that’s fine.
01:00:12 ►
If you want to run brain scans of DMT, this is really important stuff,
01:00:15 ►
and it certainly has helped me enormously in my work
01:00:18 ►
in trying to understand DMT,
01:00:20 ►
is actually having access to the scientific literature.
01:00:23 ►
People who have been in fMRI machines with DMT or with LSD or psilocybin, whatever,
01:00:28 ►
and all the pharmacological work is really, really important.
01:00:31 ►
And that’s essential. And so I draw on that a lot.
01:00:35 ►
I think it’s really important for me to be anchored within, at least keep one foot very firmly planted
01:00:43 ►
within kind of established neuroscience and
01:00:47 ►
neuropharmacology. Because if you don’t do that, you end up flying away. You’re up in the clouds
01:00:53 ►
in woo-woo land, I’m afraid, and anything goes. And I have no problem with mystical traditions
01:01:01 ►
or shamanistic ways, worldviews at all all i really don’t uh but what i do
01:01:07 ►
have a problem is people who kind of think that they know it all um because they they’ve done a
01:01:11 ►
couple of dmt hits and then they think they understand it and they kind of they kind of
01:01:17 ►
cherry pick from these often quite ancient traditions to kind of generate this kind of loose picture,
01:01:26 ►
loose kind of worldview.
01:01:28 ►
And that really explains nothing.
01:01:33 ►
And, you know, I think we have to, and again, going back to Terence McKenna,
01:01:33 ►
why not?
01:01:37 ►
You know, we have to learn to know the difference between shit and shinola.
01:01:38 ►
Right.
01:01:41 ►
And there is a lot of shit out there. And you really, you have to learn, you know,
01:01:46 ►
lot of shit out there and you really you have you have to learn you know and there is this fluffy kind of bad ideas bad fuzzy woolly thinking is is a huge problem in the dmt space um and yes dmt is
01:01:56 ►
is astonishing yes it’s bizarre yes it’s almost unfathomable and and it feels like it’s impossible
01:02:01 ►
to explain but i think if we’re going to attempt something like trying to get a handle on it, we really should bring our best tools to the table, whether this is scientific, philosophical, you know, at least have some kind of maintain some kind of rationality and have some kind of way of connecting all of our ideas together.
01:02:21 ►
So they kind of form some kind of coherent worldview or narrative.
01:02:26 ►
of our ideas together so they kind of form some kind of coherent worldview or narrative um and and and there’s a big danger i think within this sort of dm and you only have to go on to
01:02:32 ►
facebook groups you know people some of the stuff people come out yeah you know it’s outrageous and
01:02:38 ►
and if you if you kind of disagree with them then you get shot down you know i i stay out of it now
01:02:44 ►
you know when people say oh you know has anyone successfully decalcified shot down you know and i i stay out of it now you know when
01:02:45 ►
people say oh you know has anyone successfully decalcified their pineal gland and i i have to
01:02:51 ►
stay out of it you know and say okay whatever you know and and people people do say a lot of things
01:02:56 ►
that are just completely unfounded and actually they they hinder progress i think um so yeah
01:03:04 ►
it’s difficult.
01:03:05 ►
You don’t want to offend people
01:03:06 ►
because people are quite wedded
01:03:07 ►
to their own particular kind of mystical ideas
01:03:12 ►
about what DMT is.
01:03:14 ►
And so, who am I to kind of destroy that
01:03:18 ►
and say that what you’re saying is nonsense?
01:03:20 ►
Because, you know, that’s entirely up to them.
01:03:23 ►
But for me personally,
01:03:24 ►
I’ve always tried to to keep one foot i mean certainly i i reach out into territories that
01:03:30 ►
most scientists wouldn’t even touch and most scientists would would describe what i do as
01:03:35 ►
you know pseudoscience they would say you know ideas that my book you know they would say oh
01:03:40 ►
this is this is you know amusing but obviously it nonsense. That’s what they would say.
01:03:46 ►
And that’s fine.
01:03:47 ►
It doesn’t bother me, but at least trying.
01:03:50 ►
I’m happy to reach out into bizarre kind of territory,
01:03:54 ►
but I always try and keep one foot planted on the ground.
01:03:59 ►
Otherwise, you might as well just write science fiction
01:04:01 ►
because anything goes.
01:04:04 ►
Chris, I appreciate you asking Andrew that question
01:04:07 ►
because that really points out something important in our whole community
01:04:11 ►
is what I call psychedelic tourists.
01:04:16 ►
I’ve known several people who have come and had one or two hits of something
01:04:19 ►
and decided they’re going to write books and change the world.
01:04:24 ►
Andrew said he spent seven years reading about DMT before he tried it.
01:04:28 ►
And he’s obviously tried it.
01:04:30 ►
I shouldn’t say that.
01:04:32 ►
That might be illegal.
01:04:33 ►
But in any event, you know, Terrence described the psychedelic tourist, the person who’s really an evangelist but has only tried it once,
01:04:42 ►
as somebody who’s flown into Paris into paris at orly airport and
01:04:45 ►
changed planes there and says yeah i’ve been to paris uh with a guy who moved to paris and spent
01:04:51 ►
30 years there learned the language got a job had a couple lovers and that’s the difference between
01:04:57 ►
somebody who’s who’s done the work you know and yeah i think andrew you really bring a lot to this
01:05:03 ►
whole discussion in the community and and and both the research crowd and then the people like me that are the ones who are interested in all this but don’t have the technical is something that has to be done to show the naysayers that, you know, there’s really a lot more to this.
01:05:31 ►
Oh, yeah.
01:05:32 ►
Fortunately, somebody like you is doing this.
01:05:34 ►
You know, we’re kind of running out of time here, but what can we all do to help you move forward in your work?
01:05:41 ►
Well, I think it’s i i work largely independently there are a couple of teams
01:05:48 ►
that are as i said that are kind of developing this this this dmt um infusion technology but a
01:05:56 ►
lot of the work that i do is is on a purely theoretical sense and that i’m i’m i’m i think
01:06:01 ►
a lot about dmt i i write a lot about DMT,
01:06:05 ►
and I try and use kind of the neuroscience to understand what’s going on.
01:06:11 ►
But, of course, as I always say, the subjective experience is absolutely fundamental.
01:06:17 ►
So what people need to do, of course, is keep taking DMT
01:06:21 ►
and keep writing about their experiences
01:06:24 ►
taking DMT and keep writing about their experiences.
01:06:34 ►
Because this pool of trip reports that has been accumulating now on places like Erewit or on the DMT Nexus, now it’s numbers in the thousands.
01:06:40 ►
And that’s probably just a drop in the ocean.
01:06:42 ►
And people really need to spend some time, I think,
01:06:47 ►
actually writing down their experiences
01:06:50 ►
in as much detail as possible,
01:06:53 ►
describing the types of entities that they meet,
01:06:56 ►
the type of places, what’s the structure of the place like,
01:06:59 ►
what was the character and the intent of the entities,
01:07:02 ►
what were the type of the entity, all that kind of thing.
01:07:05 ►
And then they form this huge data set where we can go in and say,
01:07:11 ►
actually, is the DMT experience, you know, how varied is it?
01:07:16 ►
And what are the commonalities?
01:07:19 ►
Yes, the DMT, we know the DMT state is extremely variable
01:07:23 ►
and not everyone has the same experience.
01:07:25 ►
And yet one cannot help but be struck
01:07:27 ►
that very, very large numbers of people
01:07:31 ►
describe going to the same kind of place.
01:07:35 ►
And it’s as if you’re within this,
01:07:38 ►
people are going to,
01:07:39 ►
as if they’re going to different areas
01:07:40 ►
of the same kind of universe or omniverse or whatever you want to call it right
01:07:46 ►
um it’s i i always say you know if you dropped an alien on on earth at a random position um he would
01:07:54 ►
he would he might have very very different experiences you know whether he landed on the
01:07:58 ►
siberian tundra or whether he landed on the street during rush hour in hanoi in vietnam
01:08:03 ►
he would he would very very experienced, very, very different worlds.
01:08:07 ►
And he would report back to his alien kin up on the spaceship,
01:08:11 ►
having seen very, very different worlds.
01:08:14 ►
And yet there would be something very Earth-like about that world,
01:08:17 ►
sort of an underlying characteristic, you know, the way that the colors,
01:08:22 ►
the structures, the way that the entities, the structures, the way that the entities,
01:08:26 ►
the beings, the humans, and the variety that they met
01:08:31 ►
would mark it out as being a characteristically Earth experience.
01:08:38 ►
And I expect something similar with DMT.
01:08:41 ►
If individuals are going to a different realm or different parts of
01:08:47 ►
a different kind of space, they would have different experiences, perhaps, but they would
01:08:54 ►
have some underlying characteristic and some underlying kind of DMT motif. And that is what
01:09:02 ►
we seem to get. People often seeking seeing the same type of
01:09:06 ►
experiences the same type of entities the same type of places you know almost to the point now
01:09:11 ►
where people um you know will go on to the dmt nexus and say hey has anyone been to this place
01:09:16 ►
has anyone been to the the alien bar uh people go yeah i’ve been there you know and then
01:09:21 ►
people really do and they say oh yeah i saw this and
01:09:25 ►
i saw this and that’s quite remarkable uh that people are even with it within a space that is
01:09:30 ►
you know astonishingly much more complex than our lower dimensional universe that actually people
01:09:36 ►
are actually starting to experience the same kind of places and so yeah these this is really
01:09:41 ►
important you know everyone you don’t have to be a scientist to contribute this.
01:09:45 ►
Everybody who’s actually going into this space
01:09:47 ►
and having an experience and coming back
01:09:50 ►
and bringing something back, however small,
01:09:52 ►
and then writing it down and putting it onto the DMT Nexus
01:09:56 ►
or whatever site one wants to use as a kind of repository,
01:10:01 ►
as this data pool for future generations to sift through and say, you know, analyze.
01:10:08 ►
No, you’re absolutely right, Andrew.
01:10:10 ►
Once that becomes essentially big data, I don’t know if it’ll ever get that big,
01:10:15 ►
but if it becomes a large block of data, then you really can chip away at it
01:10:19 ►
and see the common foundation.
01:10:21 ►
Because I’ve also heard that with Sal salvia divinorum a lot of common
01:10:26 ►
experiences uh people have seen same things so uh i think that’s really uh uh worthwhile uh to
01:10:32 ►
to explore a little bit more also you know we we’ve been talking about uh stapleton’s book don’t
01:10:38 ►
you have a book coming out or is it out now yeah yeah yeah alien information theory yes there we go yeah so this is my
01:10:47 ►
so yeah for the last seven or eight years i’ve been kind of writing about dmt that’s when i
01:10:54 ►
really got serious so to speak um and um i’ve written quite a few papers academic articles
01:11:00 ►
and more kind of popular articles about dmt and And this really is the kind of the culmination of everything that I’ve been
01:11:08 ►
kind of thinking about in the last, in the last seven or eight years.
01:11:13 ►
And this is, so this is basically my, my magnum, my magnum opus,
01:11:18 ►
I guess you would call it.
01:11:19 ►
Your first, your first volume of your magnum opus.
01:11:22 ►
The first volume of my magnum opus, exactly,
01:11:25 ►
in which I describe basically all of my thinking.
01:11:28 ►
So all of those videos that you’ve watched where I describe
01:11:32 ►
how I think DMT works in the brain,
01:11:34 ►
how I think it relates to the structure of reality,
01:11:38 ►
and what is DMT, where did it come from,
01:11:41 ►
and how does it work in the brain, and all these kind of things.
01:11:44 ►
It’s all brought together in kind of things um it’s all
01:11:45 ►
brought together um into this in this book so it’s heavily illustrated the title again alien
01:11:51 ►
information theory alien information theory and next monday i’m going to uh put a recording of
01:12:00 ►
this uh conversation here on our podcast so i’ll be be sure the link is in the program notes, but, you
01:12:06 ►
know, having watched your videos, you know, I found myself pausing them periodically, because you were
01:12:10 ►
covering so much information with your diagram, so I now have a copy of your book, of course, too, and
01:12:16 ►
I can go through more slowly, and start to understand it, but I certainly appreciate
01:12:22 ►
all the work that you’re doing, and especially coming in from Okinawa this morning for us to be here.
01:12:29 ►
That’s nice of you to use your time to do that.
01:12:31 ►
And we’ll get your message out here.
01:12:35 ►
And by email, why don’t you let me know if there’s contact information that I should put in the program notes and all, too,
01:12:43 ►
so that I don’t want you to get swamped,
01:12:45 ►
but sometimes you wish you would get swamped too, you know? So yeah, yeah,
01:12:49 ►
yeah, for sure. So in any event first of all, Kevin,
01:12:53 ►
thank you for putting us on to Andrew and Andrew.
01:12:57 ►
Thank you so much for being here tonight.
01:13:00 ►
I have a feeling we’re going to see you here in the salon again before too long.
01:13:06 ►
That’d be delighted.
01:13:07 ►
Thanks again.
01:13:08 ►
And everyone, thank you all for being here.
01:13:11 ►
Till next time, keep the old faith and stay high.
01:13:14 ►
That’s it.
01:13:15 ►
Thanks all.
01:13:16 ►
See you, Andrew.
01:13:17 ►
Thank you.
01:13:18 ►
Thank you.
01:13:18 ►
Bye.
01:13:18 ►
Thank you, everybody.
01:13:20 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:13:24 ►
Be well, my friends.