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Danny Jones Podcast
#316 - Brain Scientist: New DMT Study Finds Evidence of Parallel Dimension | Andrew Gallimore
03:34:21
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- [00:00]
Kristen Bell
Hi, I'm Kristen Bell and if you know my husband Dax, then you also know he loves shopping for a car. Selling a car, not so much. We're really doing this, huh? Thankfully Carvana makes it easy. Answer a few questions, put in your van or license and done. We sold ours in minutes this morning and they'll come pick it up and.
- [00:17]
Andrew Gallimore
Pay us this afternoon.
- [00:19]
Kristen Bell
Bye bye, Truckee. Of course, we kept the favorite. Hello, other Truckee. Sell your car with Carvana today. Terms and conditions apply. You know that one friend who somehow knows everything about money?
- [00:35]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah.
- [00:35]
Kristen Bell
Now imagine they live in your phone. Say hey to Experian, your big financial friend. It's the app that helps you check your FICO score, find ways to save and basically feel like a financial genius. And guess what? It's totally free. So go on, download the Experian app. Trust me, having a BFF like this is a total game changer. Good to see you. Andrew Gallimore. Thanks for coming back from Tokyo.
- [01:08]
Andrew Gallimore
Good to see you again, Danny. Yeah, nice to be here.
- [01:11]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, man, it's been a while since the last time you were in here. I have had a whole army of psychedelic experts on the show and I've been learning a lot about this stuff. And your new book, Death by Astonishment is fascinating. What's the story on the new book?
- [01:31]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, my first two books. Well, my first book was kind of weird metaphysical speculation kind of stuff. Second book was kind of the neuroscience of psychedelics more broadly as reality switching molecules. But I kind of wanted to focus on DMT and particularly on trying to convince people that DMT represents a true mystery. It's very easy for people to kind of, and including scientists to kind of say it's just a hallucination, it's just your brain on drugs, man. And I wanted to kind of show using the history of DM DMT going back going back to the Amazonian peoples who first used DMT based plant preparations all the way through to the 21st century. How science has first discovered DMT and then struggled to make make sense of it. And it's a struggle that in my opinion continues to this day. I still don't think we're even close to getting to the bottom of of dmt.
- [02:52]
Kristen Bell
And since the last time we talked, what have you been working on other than your book in Tokyo, as far as like your research goes? Because you're, you're like, you're a neuroscientist for people that don't know who you are. We didn't see the first episode. Give Us a little like background in your, like your academic background and your research that you do?
- [03:08]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I mean, I started back in the UK studying chemistry and pharmacology. I was fascinated by drug molecules and how they can interface with the human brain and cause such dramatic effects on, on the structure and dynamics of your world and on your entire subjective experience. And so I studied chemistry and pharmacology and then I shifted slightly towards biochemistry for my PhD, but then for my postdoctoral research fellowships I moved towards neuroscience, in particular computational neuroscience. And that eventually took me to okinawa, Japan about 10 years ago where I had a research fellowship in a computational neuroscience group studying the brain using computational, computational and mathematical models. And then about three years ago I quit academia completely. I kind of milked it for all that I could get out of it. Didn't want to go down the, you know, lectureship and professorship and having to deal with students and go to meetings and things like that. Basically said that I could focus on my writing. So that's what I do now. I, I think and I write about psychedelics, about drugs generally, but most specifically about this simple plant alkaloid called dimethyltryptamine.
- [04:44]
Kristen Bell
And then what was your involvement in the research with the extended state DMT stuff?
- [04:51]
Andrew Gallimore
So the initial proposal for dmtx as it's now called or extended state DMT was something that myself and Rick Strassman, who you also had on the podcast quite recently, as I recall. Yeah, so we, you know, I wrote to Rick with the idea that this kind of the pharmacological peculiarities of DMT would make it amenable to this technique called target controlled intravenous infusion. And we wrote this paper saying, showing kind of really as a proof of principle, that it should work and that you should be able to induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize, Stabilize, stabilize their brain DMT levels and hold them in the DMT state in a breakthrough DMT state for 30 minutes an hour. So it was just a proposal really. It was a hypothetical proof of principle model. But then it was picked up by Imperial College London, then under Robin Carhartt Harris, subsequently Chris Timmerman and they, they were the first kind of academic group to implement it in humans. So myself and Rick, we consulted in the early stages of that, but then that was entirely the Imperial College's study.
- [06:17]
Kristen Bell
And how many people were involved in it and do, you know, like, like how far did they get with that? Like I imagine doing that kind of a study over a period of time. And I mean, by now I Would imagine some of that data has been aggregated and analyzed. Has there been any sort of like conclusion or summary of it?
- [06:36]
Andrew Gallimore
It was really a. More like a pilot study. So the aim wasn't to, I mean, there are only, I think 11 volunteers.
- [06:45]
Kristen Bell
11 people.
- [06:46]
Andrew Gallimore
So it's not enough. Should.
- [06:47]
Kristen Bell
I could have found you more than that? I could have found you a few.
- [06:49]
Andrew Gallimore
You could have done. But the aim was to show that it was safe and tolerable. Right. Because it's not, it wasn't 100 clear that it would be safe to hold someone.
- [07:00]
Kristen Bell
Okay, see, like can, can we do this?
- [07:02]
Andrew Gallimore
Can we do it? Does it work?
- [07:04]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. Right. And, and do other plans to do it again, See if they can go deeper and see if they can figure out some more problems.
- [07:12]
Andrew Gallimore
Absolutely.
- [07:13]
Kristen Bell
Answers?
- [07:13]
Andrew Gallimore
Absolutely. I mean the guy that funded it, Anton Bilton, he was a property entrepreneur or property tycoon or something like that, but he shifted towards consciousness exploration. He's very interested in ayahuasca and he funded this first pilot study and he was actually one of the subjects as well. But I interviewed him for the book and he said, you know, 30 minutes is, it's not enough. You know, he wanted to go for two hours. And there, there's actually already a group in Matthias Lichti in Basel in Switzerland who extended it for 90 minutes. And there's another group that extended it to, I think it was six hours. But this was a very, very low kind of sub breakthrough dose, so it wasn't like they were doing it at Imperial and Basel, but, but clearly it works. You know, you go into the state and not only did the brain DMT levels seem to stabilize, but so does the experience. Which means that you can, you can establish communication with these entities, beings, intelligences within the space. And in theory, then you can start to think about, well, what can we learn about them? You know, can we establish a communic, communicative relationship with them? And can we study the space more formally? Its, its structure, its geometry, its topology?
- [08:48]
Kristen Bell
Couldn't you get a very similar experience with using something like ayahuasca? Which I think has. From what I've never done it, but I understand it has this very similar effect, just longer lasting.
- [08:59]
Andrew Gallimore
There's a couple of issues with ayahuasca. Well, not issues. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a wonderful indigenous technology, ayahuasca, but it's not the same as DMTX for several reasons. I mean, first of all, the, how should I call it? The, the Side effects like purging, you know, vomiting and, and it's kind of unpleasant. I mean that is, it's all part of the, of the thing. But you kind of don't want that if you're going to send mathematicians in there to dial the space. It's not ideal. Right. And so you avoid that. First of all with DMTX also, even with ayahuasca. Yes, ayahuasca extends the DMT experience, but still DMT levels rise in the blood, they reach a peak and then they steadily start to, to, to fall down again. I mean, so you're still at the mercy of pharmacokinetics and metabolism, except it's just slowed down. Okay, so you can't stabilize DMT levels with ayahuasca. But also if you actually measure the blood concentration of DMT during ayahuasca trip and compare it to what you achieve with injected DMT, you only achieve about 20%, 20, 25% of blood DMT levels. So ayahuasca, it's drawn out, it's longer, but it's actually generally milder. It's not as intense as a breakthrough DMT trip.
- [10:37]
Kristen Bell
Right. And also it wears out when you do a DMT trip. It also kind of like steals serotonin. Right. So like a lot of people talk about when they do dmt, the next day you'll kind of like have low energy, lower levels of serotonin, these kind of things. That's why some people take like 5 HTP after they do DMT so they can try to re stabilize the chemicals in their brain. And this can kind of like rob your brain chemical battery of the basic chemicals that it needs to function in a normal everyday environment. Is that right or is that wrong?
- [11:17]
Andrew Gallimore
Not quite right now, I mean, so with, I mean robbing of serotonin, I mean psychedelics generally, I mean they bind to this serotonin receptor or several 2A receptor.
- [11:30]
Kristen Bell
Right?
- [11:30]
Andrew Gallimore
5Ht 2A. Very good. Yeah. But also other receptors as well. And that's not the only one. But yeah, the 5HT2A that's kind of the primary locus for their effects. Now what you see with other psychedelics, interestingly, lsd, psilocybin, mescaline is, you see this, what's called desensitization of serotonin receptors. So the more if you stimulate a serotonin receptor repeatedly or over a long period of time, then the, the receptor actually stops working. It's like a, it's like a negative feedback mechanism if the receptors are being overstimulated. And then they are actually removed from the membrane and recycled. This is why if you take, let's say LSD in one day and then you take it a day later or a couple of days later, you won't get, you get this, what's called tachyphylaxis, which is basically short term tolerance, a very, very rapidly appearing and short term tolerance. That's why you have to wait a couple of weeks. But interestingly with dmt, for reasons that aren't quite clear, and we've known this since the 1960s, is that DMT doesn't seem to desensitize these five HT2A receptors. So that, so you can, you can inject someone with DMT repeatedly.
- [12:53]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [12:53]
Andrew Gallimore
Or even maintain their brain levels of DMT. So the five HT2A receptors are being continuously stimulated by DMT and you get basically no tolerance effect or very, very limited. There is evidence, there is maybe a little bit of tolerance happening, but it's not anything like what you see with psilocybin and lsd. And that's the only reason that you can actually do this infusion protocol is because otherwise you'd have to keep ramping up the concentration to maintain the subjective effect.
- [13:22]
Kristen Bell
So you could, you could ramp somebody up and keep them in a steady high level state, like a breakthrough level of DMT in their blood for theoretically hours and hours and hours. Six hours.
- [13:34]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah.
- [13:34]
Kristen Bell
And when they come down, there's going to be no negative side effects like that last for 24 hours or any kind of short term side effects at all.
- [13:44]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, I mean imagine you, you're in a extremely altered reality that's extremely stimulating and extremely strange. Right. Mentally, it's psychologically taxing for sure. Right, right. So it doesn't surprise me after that you need to, you might feel kind of worn out the following day and might need to kind of rest, but it's nothing to do. I don't think. There's no evidence, in my opinion that it's anything to do with damage or depletion of serotonin or serotonin receptors or anything like that.
- [14:16]
Kristen Bell
And like, what kind of evidence do we have of brain measurements of people during DMT trips? Do we like see what types of the brain are lighting up and what can we deduce from that kind of knowledge?
- [14:29]
Andrew Gallimore
That's interesting. How deep do you want to go?
- [14:32]
Kristen Bell
Deep as it gets, baby. Balls deep.
- [14:37]
Andrew Gallimore
Okay. I mean, so the history of neuroimaging, as it's called, and there are many types of neuroimaging so basically trying to measure changes in the brain and neural activity under the influence of psychedelics. And that's been going on since, oh, the 1950s. So back in the. There's a guy called Abraham Wickler who was actually a close. Somewhat associated with MK Ultra, or at least he worked with people who were associated with MK Ultra, but.
- [15:11]
Kristen Bell
Abraham Wickler.
- [15:12]
Andrew Gallimore
Abraham Wickler. W I. Or might be Vickler.
- [15:17]
Kristen Bell
Oh, that. Yeah, you're probably right about that.
- [15:18]
Andrew Gallimore
But I think he's. Maybe it's from the German, but maybe he said Wickler. But anyway, so he, he was kind of interested in measuring, you know, measuring changes in neural activity under the influence of mescaline. I mean, that was the main one in those days. Analyst day, of course. And what, what they noticed with eeg, so they place EEG electrodes around the head, was that, hey, guys, if you're.
- [15:47]
Kristen Bell
Not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video. Back to the show.
- [15:52]
Andrew Gallimore
So just, again, just a bit of background. So you know about brain waves kind of.
- [16:00]
Kristen Bell
I have a rudimentary understanding.
- [16:01]
Andrew Gallimore
So, so, so neurons, you know, when the brain is functioning, the brain is working functions using electrochemical signals, and these generate waves of electrical activity that you can detect through the skull. You get this complex waveform if you, if you measure the electrical activity through the skull and you can then, you can then decompose this into higher and lower frequency sine waves. So you can decompose it into alpha waves, which are low, kind of low frequency, 7 or 8 hertz, even lower. You can get down to theta waves, and then you can go up beta waves and gamma waves, which are very, very fast. And they have different functions in the brain. But anyway, when the brain is processing visual or sensory information, generally when you have your eyes open and you're kind of looking around and processing information from the environment, what you see is the, the alpha wave signal is very, very weak. It's very, It's. The alpha waves are kind of desynchronized. All these different parts of the brain are working. They're all generating alpha waves, but they kind of interfere with each other and they're not synchronized together. And so you get a very weak alpha signal. Basically alpha power is very low. When you close your eyes, though, and your brain stops processing sensory inputs the alpha way start to synchronize again. They become much more prominent.
- [17:30]
Kristen Bell
Oh, wow.
- [17:30]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. So basically low alpha power is an indication of, of an active cortex that's processing sensory information. Right.
- [17:40]
Kristen Bell
Kind of like, like parasympathetic, sympathetic, kind of.
- [17:43]
Andrew Gallimore
Not quite, not quite. Okay, that would only confuse things if we go into that. But, but anyway, yeah, so, so eyes open, weak alpha waves, eyes closed, strong alpha waves. Right. So what they. Anyway kind of getting back to mescaline is what they found is that when you inject someone or feed someone mescaline, even when they've got their eyes closed, they see this loss of, of alpha power. So the alpha waves desynchronize. So it's like, it's as if the brain is processing sensory inputs or generating sensory activity even though they've got their eyes closed. So basically the brain is, is generating the imagery that you see. Right. So if you're on masculine, you might see complex geometric patterns, you might see scenes even. This is all self generated by brain with your eyes closed. Yeah, you can open your eyes as well. But if you just want to kind of isolate the brain to some extent from visual sensory inputs, you close their eyes and you see this desynchronization of alpha activity which suggests the brain is generating these imagery. Right. So, so broadly what this suggests is that psychedelics or suggested was that psychedelics are somehow stimulating the brain to generate this kind of imagery. With me so far, yep, it's letting.
- [19:05]
Kristen Bell
Up your visual, visual cortex, I would imagine. And you're, you're, you're experiencing the, the sense of vision with your eyes being closed.
- [19:13]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly, exactly.
- [19:16]
Kristen Bell
And then, and there's also audio too, right?
- [19:20]
Andrew Gallimore
Quite rare certain drugs.
- [19:23]
Kristen Bell
I did DMT and I had a crazy audio.
- [19:25]
Andrew Gallimore
I mean. Yeah, yeah, so tones, you know, of low pitch tones, high pitch tones, crack pops and pings, this kind of thing are quite common with dmt, but obviously it's the visuals that people are most interested in anyway, so kind of jumping forward several decades, people started doing neuroimaging, sorry, functional mri. So magnetic resonance imaging. Right. So this is, this is, gives you a much more detailed picture with, with eeg you can kind of see over broad areas of the cortex which, which parts are active and which parts aren't. But you can't get, fine, you can't get within like you know, millimeter precision.
- [20:13]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [20:13]
Andrew Gallimore
But you can with functional mri. So what in kind of beginning at the beginning of the, the 21st century. And again this is mainly came out of the Imperial College group, David Nutt and Robin Carhartt Harris, as they started measuring neural activity under the influence of psilocybin. And again they got this indication that neural activity was being stimulated in some way. Right. We now know that the psychedelics, they bind to this 5ht2a receptor, which you mentioned, which is an excitatory receptor. So it stimulates neurons, it makes neurons more excitable. It makes them more likely to fire. Right. So you have all of these neurons connected together, and all of them, not all of them, but certain populations of them within the cortex become more excitable. They're kind of ready to go. Yeah. And then they start firing more often. They start sharing information more freely. And so you get this kind of loosening up of neural activity. So. So the brain kind of shifts more freely and in. In a kind of more random fashion between neural states. It kind of loosens up. It's kind of like heating up a piece of glass. It goes from very rigid and fixed into something that much more fluid. And of course, that maps with the experience of. If you take mushrooms, you start to see the world starts to become more fluid and dynamic and objects kind of lose their identity and. And mor kind of thing.
- [21:53]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [21:53]
Andrew Gallimore
So you. So you're seeing all of this evidence that, that psychedelics, they're stimulating the cortex. They're. They're causing the cortex to kind of generate spontaneous activity, which you can then map to certain types of imagery. So if you, if the, the primary visual cortex, this is. Stop me if I'm losing you at any point. The primary visual cortex sits at the back of the brain. So this is the part of the cortex that receives sensory information from the environment. Now if you stimulate that, you could do it with an electrode. Have you heard of Wilder Penfield?
- [22:27]
Kristen Bell
No.
- [22:28]
Andrew Gallimore
So he, he did a lot of work in. In the middle of the. The 20th century, and he was interested in epilepsy. He used to. Invented something called the Montreal Procedure, which is basically to. To cut out parts of the brain that were the focus of epileptic seizures and cure them like that. The problem is you need to find out which part, parts of the brain are actually becoming hyperactive during epileptic seizures. And so what he did is he. He cut open the brains of his patients, like, you know, like sometimes the whole top of the skull. And then he would take an electrode and he would like zapping different parts.
- [23:08]
Kristen Bell
Of trying to cause a seizure.
- [23:09]
Andrew Gallimore
No, he was. Well, he was actually trying to. I mean, that's part of it. Yeah. He wanted to find out where was the. Which part of the brain are we going to see? Kind of highly excitable, erratic activity. And that would tell him that this was perhaps the locus of epileptiform activity. This part Cut out. But at the same time he was also interested in mapping. So he obviously didn't want to cut out parts of the brain that were very important. So he would systematically work through. And the patients were awake by the way, so they could speak to him. They could, they could, they could describe what they were seeing.
- [23:47]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [23:48]
Andrew Gallimore
And what he found is when he started stimulating right at the back of the brain, the primary visual cortex. So this is the part of the cortex that receives information from the retina. So it's the closest part of the brain to the environment, you could say. But it only, it only represents very simple, basic fine details of the world. So lines in particular directions, lines moving in certain directions, certain patches of color, very basic information. This is, this is the pattern really that your brain is receiving from the environment, the primary visual cortex at the back. Then that information is sent upwards through these, this kind of hierarchy, hierarchy of levels that try and find patterns. So at the moment you see a world of objects, you can see me, you can see the, can, you can, all of everything is, make sense to you. You don't see lines and you know, it's, you see a world of objects, but that world of objects is kind of constructed from this basic pattern of rapidly changing lines and basic shapes.
- [24:54]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, right, right. And the brain can also learn stuff over time and figure out, I think you talked about this on one of your videos, like this is a water bottle. I've seen this a million times before. So now I don't have to waste processing power on this.
- [25:06]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So your brain is learning to construct useful models of the environment where despite having no direct access to the environment, all it has is this pattern of activity, this very rapidly changing pattern of activity. Very, very fine details that's in the primary visual cortex. So when Penfield stimulated the primary visual cortex, his patients would say, oh, I see a triangle or I see lines or I see flashes of color. Very basic, simple fine details. They weren't seeing objects. But then he started stimulating further and further forward. So up this cortical hierarchy, then they would say, oh, I see orange circles or I see green triangles. He's starting to see shapes being formed. Then he would move even further and further, further forward to the higher levels of the cortex and they would say, oh, I see this 12 year old boy said, I see rubbers with guns. So now you're seeing these higher level models which is kind of the stored, the stored object models that your brain is, has, has kind of developed and learned over, over time.
- [26:26]
Kristen Bell
These would be Random things.
- [26:29]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I mean, obviously.
- [26:30]
Kristen Bell
Like, was it triggering memories? Like. Like fragments of memories?
- [26:34]
Andrew Gallimore
That's interesting. Right, so. Right. So you have this cortical hierarchy from V1, as it's called, the primary visual cortex, up to V2, etc. Etc. Yeah, yeah. The higher you go, you get less specific, more general things like, you know, dogs. Yeah. But not a particular dog. Right. But let's say a dog. Okay. Or maybe even different types of dogs, but not any particular. Not the dog that's actually in the room. Now. There is no dog in the room. But if there was.
- [27:04]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, sure.
- [27:07]
Andrew Gallimore
Then this higher level model is being represented at these higher levels of the cortex. And right at the. In the V1, you've got the very fine details of this specific dog. Right?
- [27:17]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [27:18]
Andrew Gallimore
The exact, you know, the. The pattern of its fur, the color of its fur, the shape of its eyes, all that kind of stuff is being represented down at this low level, which actually gets us to dreaming. We'll get to that later. But then right at the top of the cortical hierarchy, right. The very, very apex, this has a kind of bird's eye view of all these levels. You have the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is basically, you know, You've heard of the hippocampus, right? To do with.
- [27:48]
Kristen Bell
I have no clue.
- [27:49]
Andrew Gallimore
Memory. Right.
- [27:50]
Kristen Bell
Okay.
- [27:50]
Andrew Gallimore
And particularly to do with forming memories.
- [27:52]
Kristen Bell
Okay.
- [27:53]
Andrew Gallimore
So this, the hippocampus sits right at the top of this cortical hierarchy. And it's kind of watching your brain build its model of the world and it creates like indexes, like an indexer.
- [28:05]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [28:05]
Andrew Gallimore
And so when you, when you recall something, you. Some particular memory, what's happening in very simple terms is your hippocampus is reactivating that particular pattern of activity that happened in the past. So you're kind of. You're given a kind of a glimpse of what your brain was doing at the time that the world that your brain was modeling yesterday or three weeks ago. The hippocampus doesn't store memories as such. It's not like a storehouse of memory. It's more like just this index. And you can point to specific patterns of neural activity in the past that were that representing your world at that. At that time.
- [28:47]
Kristen Bell
Oh, wow.
- [28:48]
Andrew Gallimore
So the kind of. The neural activity kind of unfolds down the cortical hierarchy from the hippocampus and reactivates these patterns that happened in the past.
- [28:57]
Kristen Bell
Oh, that's wild.
- [28:59]
Andrew Gallimore
It's cool. Right?
- [28:59]
Kristen Bell
I had this guy on recently, Robert Epstein. I don't know if you ever heard of him, but he has this crazy theory called neural transduction theory where basically he's, he's trying to claim that memories aren't stored in the brain. He was. Basically the idea was like the brain is an antenna and we're like downloading. We have all, all these memories are in like this cloud. The cloud, exactly right. And we're downloading them from the cloud.
- [29:25]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I'm not sure about that.
- [29:26]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, I'm not sure about that either. That doesn't, I don't know because like, you know, how would you explain. How would you explain things like, like chess players, right? Like, how does it, how do you become like a master chess player? I mean, these people are obviously doing this, spending days and hours and weeks and years memorizing all these moves and they're doing work and there's clearly memory involved. How do you explain that they're just downloading that?
- [29:51]
Andrew Gallimore
It doesn't make sense because I, because.
- [29:52]
Kristen Bell
I can't do that. That person can do it because they've spent all the time doing it. I would only imagine that it would, like, memory would have to be literally saved in your heart, in your brain, like a hard drive. And that's interesting. Like the idea of neuro, neuronal patterns. Like it's not. Yeah, it's an interesting way of thinking about it or looking at it as. It's just patterns of neurons that are reactivating these senses, these sensory inputs that you had in a certain time.
- [30:19]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly. Because.
- [30:19]
Kristen Bell
And like, like, for example, a great example would be like, you know how like we talked about this last time. I think the house scent connects so strongly to memory.
- [30:27]
Andrew Gallimore
Right.
- [30:27]
Kristen Bell
And you could like smell some laundry detergent you haven't smelled in 18 years that you smelled it like one of your ex girlfriend's houses and you smell it again and it'll teleport you right back into her bedroom.
- [30:36]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah.
- [30:37]
Kristen Bell
You know, that's like insane how that works.
- [30:39]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. I get the same thing with one particular scent, the one of my exes from 25 years ago used to wear. And whenever I. Even now when I smell it, like, oh, that's that person.
- [30:53]
Kristen Bell
It's crazy, right?
- [30:54]
Andrew Gallimore
Kind of. I mean, yeah, it is like magic, but it's. It's not magic. And also, if you think about, you know, what's happening in dreaming, we know that the, when you fall asleep and you enter REM sleep, the hippocampus starts working. And it actually one of the main, kind of one of the theories about what dreaming is for again, it's not 100% clear, but is the hippocampus is basically replaying and strength. Every time a memory is recalled, it's strengthened because you get strengthening, strengthening of the connection, the synaptic connection between the neurons that were active. And so the hippocampus is basically kind of consolidating these memories by replaying them. Which is why you tend to dream about things, especially things that were emotionally significant. Like if you see, if you're scared of spiders and you see a spider crawling across the wall a few hours before you go to bed, you're probably going to be dreaming about spiders. And it's like your brain's, oh, we need to remember this, even if it's perfectly harmless. So, yeah. And then, so getting back to Penfield, you know, what do you think happened when he started stimulating an area the brain close to the hippocampus, Memory started flooding back. Yeah, exactly. So this little kid, this 12 year old, he said, oh, I can hear my mother, she's telling my sister she's got a coat on backwards or something like that. And Penfield said, is this, do you remember this happening? And he said, yeah, this was this morning just as I was leaving the house. So already the hippocampus had kind of indexed that particular memory and Penfield was stimulating that part of the hippocampus that just happened to index that particular memory. If he moved that particular electrode, it would be a different memory. And then. Yeah, which makes you wonder then is like. So getting back to psychedelics. If psychedelics are stimulating the cortex via this 5ht2a receptor, you know, they stimulate the primary visual cortex and you get geometric patterns. And this has been known since the early 20th century. And you can explain that as the visual cortex is structured in a certain way and when it's stimulated by the psychedelic, it tends to generate certain motif. Certain geometric structures were often called form constants. So people will see cobwebs or tunnels or spirals, these kind of things. Right. But okay, what happens if they, as they stimulate higher levels of the cortex? So the parts of the cortex that are responsible for representing objects, well, they might see objects, they might see faces, they might see animals. But then what happens if they stimulate the hippocampus? Well, then you're going to see memories flooding into the cortex. So they might relive past experiences. And again, that's been known since the 1950s. Is that certainly higher dose levels of LSD, for example? People will often relive their past experiences. So they're Basically activating the hippocampus and memories are flooding into the cortex. And you also see this, interestingly, with psychotic patients. So again, in the 1950s, a guy called Sam Jakobsen, he started actually sticking electrodes into people's brains of psychotic patients and measuring brain activity when they were hallucinating. And what he found is that parts of the temporal lobe the size of brain near the hippocampus became very active when his patients were hallucinating. Right. Suggesting that their hallucinations were kind of at least partially drawn from memory. They weren't being fabricated entirely anew, but also partly drawn from memory or at least influenced by memory. And, and the same applies to visual hallucinations. So when people with certain types of neuropsychological disorders, they, they might describe seeing. You know, this is quite a common hallucination or even letters, code. Right, we'll get to that later. And when, when, when they're having these hallucinations, you can actually measure, you can see their neural activity using fmri, and this is done more recently. And you can see when someone's, when a patient with, let's say, Charles Bonnet syndrome, which, a particular type of visual hallucinatory disorder, when they describe seeing faces, you can see the parts of the brain that represent faces high up in the visual cortex become active. So, so what this tells us is that hallucinations are partly spontaneous activity in the primary visual cortex, psychedelic hallucinations, that is partly activity in the primary visual cortex and then also activity higher levels up. So you see objects, you see patterns. You even experience the reliving of past experiences because of stimulation of the, the hippocampus. And so this kind of. You start to get a picture of what's actually going on in the brain when someone takes a psychedelic.
- [36:16]
Kristen Bell
But then how do you explain some of the crazy, anomalous stuff that people experience on psychedelics?
- [36:21]
Andrew Gallimore
And this is where we have a problem with dmt, because the brain, the brain always constructs your world. I mean, that's quite clear. You can, if I give you, if I zap your brain, I can change the, the structure, I can change your perception without affecting the environment. Right? So the world you experience is always this model that's being constructed by your brain. But your brain had to learn to do that. Your brain had to learn the patterns. From the moment you were born, your brain was constantly sampling all of these sensory inputs from the environment. This, this pattern of information at the back of the cortex and, and finding patterns and building object models and learning to construct your model of the world. And of course, when you dream, your brain is building the world in the same way it's using these models. Right. That it's learned, which is why most people dream about, you know, you or a kind of someone like me growing up in the West. When you study the content of their dreams, what do they dream about? They dream about people, they dream about dogs, they dream about cats, they maybe dream about horses and cows. If you interview someone who lives in the Amazon, they don't dream about dogs and cats, they dream about people. They dream about stingray, they dream about jaguar. Right. They dream about the animals. So they're dreaming about the things.
- [37:50]
Kristen Bell
Dreaming is more like a scene about past experiences, right?
- [37:53]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly, exactly. So, so it's, it's a combination of past experiences, but also the brain kind of simulating the waking world you can think of. Dreaming is like selective simulation of the waking world. Your brain is using what it knows about building worlds that it's learned in the waking state and doing that in, in the dream state. And you can see this actual image in real time, not in real time. But if you, if you study the dreams of children, something very interesting. There aren't many people that really study the dreams of children, but there's a guy called David Falk, I believe. You see, F O U L K E maybe folks, it's in the book, and he studied the dreams of children, groups of children, but also individual children looking at. So how do the dreams of children, first of all, what do children dream of? What are children's dreams like? And how do their dreams change as they grow and develop? So we took children from the ages of like four all the way up to adolescence and through like 16, 17 years old and actually looked. How did the children's dreams change? And what was kind of interesting is that very young children, first of all, they didn't dream that much. So I think they were when, if you, if you woke up a child in so called dream sleep, REM sleep. Yeah, they were only dreaming about 15, 20% of the time. So they weren't dreaming all the time. But when they did dream, their dreams were more like slideshows, static images. So they might dream of an image of a wolf, but what they didn't dream of was wolves moving around. Right. It wasn't like a movie. Now think about why that's the case. Why do you think. So I'm interrogating you here, but.
- [40:00]
Kristen Bell
I would imagine because their brain is not fully developed yet.
- [40:05]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, that's a kind of broadly correct answer. But if you think about it like, how difficult is it to dream of a picture of a wolf or just an image of a wolf? Not that difficult. But could you could. How difficult is it then for your brain to generate a wolf that's actually moving as wolves do?
- [40:27]
Kristen Bell
You have to see it.
- [40:28]
Andrew Gallimore
You have to see it. Right. It's very difficult for your brain to do that. So your brain has to learn not just how objects look or how to construct object models, kind of static object models. Your brain also has to learn how to, how they interact with the environment, how they move and all of that stuff. Very dynamic, very, you know, how does A deeper catalog. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So rather than just a two dimensional image of a wolf, you have to understand how an, a wolf occupies space, how it moves. So that's very difficult. Children's brains can't do it because they haven't learned enough about how to build worlds. They can build images of worlds or images of objects and animals and people, but they can't, the brain can't build unless they have sensory inputs as they do when they're waking. They can't generate these selective simulations of the waking world without sensory inputs.
- [41:26]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [41:26]
Andrew Gallimore
But then as the children start to grow and develop and their brain learns how to construct the world in much more detail, the, the dreams start to change. They go from being very static images with no interaction between the dreamer and the images to more. So they go from slideshows to movies. And then the dream actually starts to interact with the characters in the dream. So they actually start to see people moving around and wolves, if they dream of wolves. What. So you're kind of seeing that development of the brain's ability to construct worlds, to construct its model of the world, even the absence of sensory inputs. Yes, right. People often describe psychedelics as taking you back to more like a childlike state. So as you learn and as your brain develops and you grow and your brain is. Your brain is always kind of trying to. It's, it's, it has its own idea of what the world looks like. It has its own model. It's quite. And it becomes quite rigid. It knows exactly what it's looking for. And this is why it's. The brain is often described with this predictive machine. It's constantly mate. It's, it's parcelated the world into objects and these objects develop and they solidify as you, as you grow and develop. So in, in a sense, your brain already kind of knows what it's going to see. It's already decided in a Sense what it's going to see when you open your eyes. And most of the time that, that works perfectly well. It's very adaptive. It means your brain doesn't have to spend a lot of time kind of working out the world because it instantaneously, it sees this pattern of sensory inputs in the visual cortex. And you'll go, okay, that's a bottle of water. So. So it becomes very rigid for conserving energy. Automatically conserving energy. Neural neuronal processes are very expensive, so you don't want to. And of course, they're slow, quite slow. So your brain has this model that it then really just tests against sensory inputs. It's just testing that its model is working. It doesn't. You don't need much sensory information. Now when you introduce a psychedelic into the brain, it loosens all that up. It makes everything much more fluid, which means the brain becomes plasticity.
- [44:02]
Kristen Bell
Plastic.
- [44:03]
Andrew Gallimore
Plasticity is something slightly different that's more like changes in the connections between the cortex. But, but, but yeah, if, if you use plastic in the more general sense, then yes, it becomes more soft and fluid and dynamic, which means the brain actually becomes less adaptive. The models it's generating are less immediately useful because all of these rigid models that allow you to instantaneously recognize everything, they start to break down. So the world becomes much more fluid and dynamic. But a consequence of that is, is that the brain becomes much more sensitive to sensory inputs. Becomes very. Because the neurons are much more excitable and because these predictions, they, they fail because the, the, the brain's model of the world is starting to break down. So these predictions start to fail and you get all these errors.
- [45:00]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [45:01]
Andrew Gallimore
Coming up into the brain. And so the, it's like you're seeing the world with, with a brain that is not as developed like a child's brain.
- [45:09]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [45:10]
Andrew Gallimore
So you're not. Your brain isn't instantaneously making decisions on what everything is. It's like you're seeing the world anew, like you've never seen it before. Your brain, you haven't decided right what you're seeing. And coupled with this increased sensitivity to sensory information, the world becomes transcendent. It becomes much more vivid. Everything seems anew, as if you are a young child that's just opened his eyes for the first time.
- [45:42]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. What do you make of Dennis McKenna's take on the La Cherera experience that he had where he explained being able to communicate telepathically with Dennis? And, you know, I think about that all the time because, like, seems to me that there is a direct link to whatever the effect these psychedelics have on the brain and parapsychology. And I also think that there is a correlation between the technological analytical mind, the hypertrophy of the analytical mind and the atrophy of the, of the telepathic mind, for lack of a better term. Right. It seems like I, you know.
- [46:33]
Andrew Gallimore
Kind.
- [46:33]
Kristen Bell
Of getting to what I was talking about earlier. It's like the less in tune you or the, the less in tune you are with technology and like the modern day world, the more awakened something becomes inside of you. Whether it's like something ancient that we used to have a long time ago, that has atrophied over the millennia or like, like for. Because I imagine if you go 5000 years ago, before we had the ability to have the written word or to store our memories outside of our brain, like on, with text or with phones or whatever it is, we had to have had a much greater capacity for things like memory.
- [47:16]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah.
- [47:17]
Kristen Bell
And even communication if we didn't have language. But before we had language or, or writing or ways to communicate, we had to have had other ways to do that stuff. And over thousands and thousands and thousands of years with the slow development of technology and now it's ramping up, you know, more dramatic than it's ever been. Especially as we release the technical technological singularity. If you extrapolate that into the future, it's like we're going to end up being just like a residue of what we used to be.
- [47:50]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. I mean certainly use it or lose it applies with, with the brain. I mean the brain is not stupid, obviously. So if you're not using a faculty or you need it less, then it will start to atrophy and you get re reorganization of the brain, you get reassignment of function. So the brain isn't, doesn't like to waste resources. So if you don't, if you don't need to use memory, then you will start to see, perhaps over many generations you will start to see this atrophy of the parts brain important for memory. So that makes sense. But what's also interesting about psychedelics, going back to the idea that psychedelics, they stimulate the cortex and they make it much more sensitive to sensory inputs. Right. This is why colors appear more, more bright and vivid on the influence of psychedelics. Right. So if, let's assume telepathy is real and there's lots of evidence going back a hundred years or more that it is, if it's maybe a very poorly used faculty not particularly sensitive anymore. If you raise the sensitivity of the brain to inputs then sensory inputs, then it makes sense that you would also raise its sensitivity to whatever this alternate sensory information source is. So that would make sense then that it would make you, it would increase your ability to communicate telepathically, assuming that that's possible or you know, any other kind of thing. And that's broadly what we see with, with psychedelics generally and particularly with dmt. Dmt, going back to, you know, you spoke about, you know, how do we explain. So we have this brain that's building the world using all of these models that it's learned. How then does it, it construct these hyper, hyper technological hyper dimensional worlds that it hasn't learned to construct, filled with beings that are not animals, they're not humans, they are utterly completely alien. How is that possible?
- [50:01]
Kristen Bell
Right, right.
- [50:02]
Andrew Gallimore
And that's kind of my argument is that this shouldn't be possible. It's like the brain is speaking a language it never learned to speak and doing so flawlessly. This is not a, it's not kind of fumbling around and just trying to make sense of this disordered or chaotic brain activity. It, these are razor sharp, engineered to utter perfection worlds. And they are not dreams. They are not dreams. That's, they're often dismissed as waking, waking dreams, you know, hallucinations. But again, going back to dreaming in, in the dream state, you can actually, I'll tell you a little story that I was telling Matt the other day. Yesterday when I came back from Tokyo last time, sorry, came back from the US from back to Tokyo, I had a series of lucid dreams where I was.
- [50:55]
Kristen Bell
Oh really?
- [50:56]
Andrew Gallimore
For some reason when I'm jet lagged, I get lucid dreams. I don't know why, I've had them since I was a child, but very completely unpredictably. But during this period, I was having a lucid dream almost every night. And I was in this dream and I was on this beautiful green mountainside. It looked like Switzerland or something, very nice. And then there were hundreds of dogs running down this mountainside and I knew I was dreaming and so I thought, okay, I'm gonna do a little experiment.
- [51:28]
Kristen Bell
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- [52:53]
Andrew Gallimore
We know that in the dream state the brain doesn't have access to information from the primary visual cortex. That's quiet because that's receiving sensory information from the environment. So that's all quiet. So all the fine details of the world in the dream state aren't being represented. So you can dream of a dog, but it will be a dog. Right. It's kind of a broad dog. But if you get, and they look like dogs and you, if you don't know you're dreaming, you wouldn't, you wouldn't know any different. But I, I knew I was dreaming. So I got really close to one of these dogs, like right in its face. Yeah. And I thought, I'm going to see how good you are. You know, how good my brain is at modeling this dog. And they, it was a rubbish dog. It was just really bad.
- [53:42]
Kristen Bell
Wow.
- [53:42]
Andrew Gallimore
When it got. And that made sense because my brain, it knows how kind of how to build a dog. But unless it's got sensory inputs, it does a pretty poor job when you get down to it. And so that kind of makes me think. And you see the same thing with psychotics in that the visual, primary visual cortex often just isn't involved when they're having visual hallucinations the brain is just using these higher level models, object models to construct these hallucinations. So then when you look at dmt, it's kind of remarkable. These aren't just sketches or kind of broad brushstroke representations of alternate worlds. You know, just using these high level models. These are inordinately detailed, crisp, perfect worlds that have perfectly coherent, you know, staggeringly dynamic narrative complexity. It's, it's like the brain has somehow started receiving extremely detailed sensory inputs. And you know, like the brain is kind of tuned in. Instead of receiving information from the normal sense organs, it's somehow it's receiving information from somewhere else. And that's why it can build these staggeringly complex worlds that have no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world. So this kind of, this idea got me thinking about that possibility that DMT is gating access to some alternate source of, of inputs. Information is being directed into the brain. In the DMT state, the brain is more sensitive, as I said before, it's more sensitive to information inputs because of its excited state and it's also much more fluid. So it's, and there was actually a study done by the Imperial College team literally just a couple of months ago that looked at the changes and they've done a few really cool studies and I'll talk about them, them with dmt, but this most recent one showed that in the DMT state, if you basically, if you perturb the brain, right, you stimulate it either with visual inputs or maybe a little electrical impulse, you'll see, you'll see a little kind of increase in activity as the brain kind of rings, if you like, as all the information starts spreading through the brain. Right. This is just normally like this. Yeah. In the presence of dmt, it's more like. Right. Because it's so sensitive, you know, it, you just perturb it a little bit, right? And it kind of, it's, it's so sensitive and responsive to these inputs. So that kind of makes sense, right, that this would be the kind of state where the brain can start receiving information from what, some kind of intelligence, perhaps some kind of in intelligent agent. But at the same time, if that was the case, perhaps you'd expect to see, because what you can do is as well as kind of measuring neural activity in a MRI or with eeg, you can also measure now the flow of information through the brain. So when someone is, let's say, viewing an image on a screen, you can actually see these waves flowing from the back of the brain, the primary visual cortex that's receiving the information. You can see them flowing forward. Yeah. You can also see waves flowing in the opposite direction. You get this kind of forward and backward waves. Now if they close their eyes, then that, those forward flowing waves, they, they stop because they're not processing visual sensory inputs. Yeah, but with dmt, something very interesting happens. Even when they have their eyes closed, you inject them with DMT and you immediately or within a few seconds, you start to see these forward flowing waves traveling from the back of the brain as if the brain is receiving visual sensory inputs.
- [57:46]
Kristen Bell
Wow.
- [57:47]
Andrew Gallimore
Now the question is, is, I mean they even said this is the, the, the pattern of brain activity was indistinguishable from visual sensory inputs. It's like they're seeing with their eyes shut. But the question is, is. Well, where's that? You know, is this just spontaneous activity in the primary visual cortex? You know, that part of the brain that represents lines and shapes and very basic things, Is that just becoming spontaneously active and the information is flowing forward? Maybe. But would that explain hyper dimensional cityscapes and you know, you know, hyper technological worlds filled with alien beings? I don't think it would. Would memories explain that? You know, could we imagine it's information coming from the hippocampus? I don't think that works either. It's not object models. The brain has learned to construct in the higher levels of the cortex. So it's all missing. As far as I'm concerned, there's no way to explain it. But if the brain is becoming sensitive and is receiving information from some alternate source, so then that's exactly what you'd expect to see. You'd expect to see it flowing through the brain? Of course, the source we don't know, but I, I posit that it's some kind of intelligent agent.
- [59:04]
Kristen Bell
Does that happen too, where you see the brain waves coming back forward from the visual cortex when people are dreaming?
- [59:10]
Andrew Gallimore
So when they're dreaming, the, the prime visual cortex is, is generally quiet because that's the part of the brain that's receiving information from the environment. Same with psychotic visual hallucinations as well. This part, the brain is quiet because they're not using that part of the way. They're just using this, the stored models to generate hallucinations. With emt, it actually looks exactly like visual stimulation. Even when their eyes are completely closed, as if they're literally, I mean, they are literally seeing another world. Yeah. Our senses are all about getting information from what's the environment into our brains and making use of it, but also Information from our bodies as well. You know, we have, we have kinesthetic abilities and appropriate proprioception. The brain is, the brain is basically a, a tool that we use to, it takes in information from the body and from the environment. It processes that information in simple or complex ways. Simple ways. If it's a reflex, you touch something hot, information goes into the. Well actually goes, it's close in the spinal cord, but anyway goes into the brain and there's a response, some kind of action, you know, how do I respond to that information? Yeah, and as the brain gets bigger, you start to get much more complex processing. So the brain can start to actually weigh up variables like should I respond in this way or should I respond in that way? What are the consequences going to be of responding in particular ways and making predictions? So that's, you know, that's what the brain is. It's just this extremely sophisticated information processor. And part of that, what it does is to build this model of the environment which you use to make sense of sensory inputs that are coming into the brain so that you can, you can behave in a, an adaptive manner in the environment. You know, should you run away from someone or should you chase them or, or whatever, you know, is this someone you, you want to make love to or is it someone that you want to kill? Right. These are decisions that the brain makes based upon sensory inputs. And your brain kind of uses that model. And of course, smells are all part of that. Smells are ways of detecting chemicals in the air that could be, they could be sweet smell and there's nothing different. There's no difference between, I say no difference. I mean, chemically you can't look at something, I mean smells bad, but it only smells bad because that's kind of the, the evolved response we have to it stay away from it. It's, it contains bacteria, you know, something you should stay away from. Things that smell nice are things that we are, we are drawn towards. But chemically, look at them and you might think, well, they look like quite similar molecules and yet one smells awful. The molecule itself isn't bad. I mean, if you were a fly, for example, the smell of would be like, ah, go, go, go. You know, let's, let's, let's get down to it and start munching on this. Whereas to us it's entirely different. So it's all part of that world model that we have that, that is, that has evolved and developed to allow us to, to function in the environment, to survive long enough to pass on our genes, to the next generation, you know, and in the same way, you know, your brain is always, it's taking that pattern of information. You know, you can think of the back of your cortex as being like a hard drive, very, very loosely. You have all of these cortical columns which you can switch on or off. So they're like binary digits, right. And you, so you have this like a, like a matrix or a. What word am I looking for? A mosaic of these cortical columns at the back of the cortex, the primary visual cortex. And, and this pattern that when, when light enters the eye, it stimulates the cortex and you get this pattern of ons and offs all across the visual cortex. And that's the raw sensory input that the brain receives. Then it's the, the, the, the job of the high levels of the cortex to look at that, those patterns and say, okay, to kind of impose meaning on it. So okay, these pattern that looks kind of like a square, that looks like a circle, you know, and then to create these object models. So it's all about information. You know, the brain is an information generator. It's an information receiver.
- [63:39]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [63:39]
Andrew Gallimore
You know, and you can extend that to John, John Wheeler's idea of it from bit that everything fundamentally when it, when you get down to it, even down to the level of electrons which again switch between spin up or spin down.
- [63:53]
Kristen Bell
Exactly.
- [63:54]
Andrew Gallimore
Everything can be reduced down to this highly complex pattern of information. Which is. My first book, Alien Information Theory was all about that idea how you go from basic information at the ground of reality and how it sort of self complexifies and you end up with these highly complex multi leveled structures with layers of complexity which we call humans. And then this is what we are. You know, we are this highly complex multi layered pattern of information from the ground of reality up. And we're constantly emerging. We're constantly emerging. We're like this, this informational process that's going on all the time. We're not, we're not a thing. Humans aren't things any more than a whirlpool. If you imagine a whirlpool running down, you know, stream running down a river. A stream running down a river. That didn't make any sense. Water coming down, right, you know, down downhill, right. And it hits a certain, hits a certain arrangement of rocks and you get this whirlpool pool and you can see it, it looks like an object. You can describe it, you can point to it, you can measure it, but it's not a thing. As soon as the water stops flowing, the whirlpool will disappear. So we say the whirlpool is like a whirlpooling. It's a process that's only occurring because this energy of the water, the energy is flowing through those rocks and it generates this pattern we call a whirlpool. We're the same thing. This energy is kind of flowing through these networks of molecules. Each of our cells is this highly complex system. That energy goes in, it interacts with this complex network of molecules and the behavior of the, of the cell emerge. Everything the cell does emerges and is constantly emerging. As soon as the energy stops, as soon as you stop putting energy in, the whole thing starts to die down. So that the human, the cell, the process of the cell, if you like, the selling, yes, stops. And that applies to us more generally and it also applies to psychedelics. So your world model that's being constructed by your brain is constantly emerging. It's this high level emergent property from neurons, from, well, from molecules, proteins, minerals, carbohydrates, all of these interact. They, the process we call a cell or a neuron. And then these all interact together and they, and you get another complex emergent process. And ultimately at the top you have this highly complex emergent thing that we call the world. The world is constantly emerging, you're constantly emerging and you can perturb this system at any level. So if you, if you perturb it in some way, you stimulate it in some way to low level. So think about what a psychedelic does. Let's take this is a good example, DMT, 5 methoxy. DMT, right. Can you visualize those? So DMT is NN, dimethyltryptamine. Right. 5 methoxy. DMT is 5 methoxy N and dimethyltryptamine. So it's very similar molecule. Right?
- [67:09]
Kristen Bell
Very completely different experience.
- [67:10]
Andrew Gallimore
Right. So the question is, and this is what's really cool about, about psychedelics and about drugs generally or psychoactive drugs, is that you can take a molecule that has a particular effect. Dmt. Right. Incredibly visual, full of structure, full of content, very particular type of experience. You change that molecule just a little bit, you add this methoxy group on the indole ring and you get a completely different experience. Bright white light, void, you know, entering into the pure light of consciousness itself.
- [67:45]
Kristen Bell
Completely different experience affects the operating system in a totally different way.
- [67:48]
Andrew Gallimore
Totally different way. And why is that the case?
- [67:50]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, why is that the case?
- [67:51]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, we can think about it in terms of these complex systems. So the, the, the psychedelic binds to this 5ht2a receptor. What is a receptor? Well, it's a protein. It's embedded in the membrane of these neurons. The psychedelic molecule goes into the receptor and it starts interacting. The receptor is kind of a folded, it's a folded protein and it's very flexible. When a molecule goes in, you know, positive parts of the molecule, negatively charged parts of the molecule, it kind of snuzzles its way in there. Snuzzle the word. I don't know. But anyway, it finds its way in there and it kind of jostles around and the receptor shape actually starts changing. It distorts the receptor. And the receptor has an outside part where the molecule binds, and then it goes through the membrane as an interior part part which interacts with all of these molecules within the, the neuron. And so by binding to the receptor on the outside, you're actually perturbing this highly complex emergent process going on inside the cell. And we don't really understand a lot. I mean, we, we understand some things that we can measure. We can measure, oh, it changes the electrical activity of the neuron, it makes the neuron more sensitive. We can look at gene expression. We don't really understand it. And then some molecules, they bind to more than one receptor in the same neuron. And so you've got two entirely different perturbations, if you like, of this complex system we call a neuron, which changes the neuron's behavior in different ways. It changes the neuron, the process that we call a neuron, the way that the, the emergent behavior of the neuron changes. Right? And that's just one neuron, neuron, and it's already quite complex. But then each of these neurons in different parts of the brain, they all have different types of receptors. And see if all these neurons, you know, millions and millions of neurons, all connected in a highly complex fashion, all being stimulated, slightly different, all being perturbed in a slightly different manner by a particular molecule. And so you get this, you get like an amplification of, of, of the changes. You get quite a subtle change perhaps at the individual neuron level. But then when you have networks of millions of neurons, you get a completely unpredictable change in how that network behaves. And then you have networks of networks which we call the brain itself, where again, it's even more unpredictable. So you get this amplification of, of changes in this emergent behavior of this, this, this multi layered complex system we call the brain that starts at the molecular level and kind of is amplified as you go up. So Even a tiny difference in the molecular structure changes which receptors it interacts with, changes how it distorts the shape of the receptor at this lowest level. But then as you go up through the level of the neuron and then through the level of networks of neurons and then networks of networks, you get this amplification. And that's why it's basically impossible to say if I change this part of the molecule, I add this piece, I move this piece around, it's basically impossible to say what's that experience going to be like? You can't predict. No one could have predicted that. Oh, if we put a 5Amethoxy group in this position of DMT, it's going to create this white light experience. No one could have predicted that. And that's why the only way to do it really is to kind of, you want to explore psychedelics like Alexander Shorgin did we were talking about earlier, is to make changes, to make subtle changes and make hundreds of these molecules all slightly different and then try each one and put it into the brain. The only way to know what a drug is going to do really. I mean you can say if you feed a psychedelic to a, a rat and it will start twitching its head and that kind of means oh, it's probably psychedelic. But then if I say okay, it's probably psychedelic, is it going to be more like LSD? Is it to going be more like 2 CB? Is it more like 5 MEO? Is it going to be more like DMT? Yeah, we don't know. So the only way to try it is to actually put it into this highly, you know, multi leveled complex structure, emergent structure called the human brain. And then you get this, this flow of information from the molecular level all the way up to the cortical level where the world model is being constructed. So it's like adjusting the rocks as the water goes down the river and you change the, of shape, shape of the whirlpool. You can't really predict it, how it's going to affect it and even more so with the brain. And so it's changing the way that you're, it's changing the, the, the process that we call the construction of the world. The, the experience of a world. This world that you're in is always being, it's always emerging, it's always this process and you're, you're stimulating it at this very low level and it completely changes what's happening at the higher level level.
- [72:46]
Kristen Bell
Oh wow. Who exactly can you explain for people who don't know, including partially myself.
- [72:53]
Andrew Gallimore
Sure.
- [72:54]
Kristen Bell
Who was Andrew Alexander Shulligan. And what did he do?
- [72:59]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, Alexander Sasha Shulgin to his friends. So he was a chemist of some repute. I mean he's a legendary figure in, in psychedelic pharmacology. He originally worked for the Dow Chemical Company company as a chemist and a pharmacologist. But he had a transformative mescaline experience. And he realized at that point that there was so much going on in his brain that he could tap into when he perturbed it with this particular molecule. It's like he had these incredible visions and he thought, wow, if this simple molecule from this cactus can do that, then what if I, what if I change the molecule slightly? You know, who's a chemist, we thought, okay, what if I move this methoxy group around slightly to a different position on the ring? What if I add a methyl group here? What if I replace the methoxy group with a methyl group, et cetera, et cetera. And so he systematically or semi systematically started making all of these analogues, if you like, or variations on the mescaline molecule. This formed the basis of his probably most famous book called Pikal Phenetal Means I have Known and Love, which he co authored with his wife Ann Shorgin. And he, he would make a new molecule. He would invent a new molecule, a molecule that's never existed before in the history of the universe. And then he would sample it, very small doses at first, and see if it had an effect. Sometimes nothing would happen again. It's completely unpredictable. But sometimes you'd get an interesting effect. The suggestion, a little tingling the back of his neck or some subtle changes in his, in his subjective experience. And then he increased the dose. And when he was satisfied that it was an interesting experience at least and it wasn't toxic or wasn't clearly toxic, he would then give it to, he had a research group. He might have given it to his wife first, but then he had a research group, as he called it, which was a group of friends all around the same age would gather at his house in Lafayette in California. His lab was also on his property. So he'd make them in his lab. I was, I was at his lab actually just a couple of weeks ago and he passed away a few years ago. But he had a, his, I think his daughter in law had like a 100th birthday celebration of his life. So I was able to visit the lab for the first time. It's like an alchemist's laboratory, you know, really old, kind of just packed with, with, with, with equipment and, and, and jars and, you know, all dusty and just lovely like, like a, like a chemist's greenhouse kind of vibe in there.
- [75:42]
Kristen Bell
Well, that's him. Wow.
- [75:43]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, there he is. Yeah, that's the lab. Yeah, you can kind of see looking.
- [75:47]
Kristen Bell
At the camera, Steve. That's a crazy photo.
- [75:51]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, so that's where I was. So this is where he made, I mean, he made like hundreds in Pikal, the first book he was working off mescaline. So all different variations based upon the mescaline molecule that he made. And, and as I said, you know, he would increase the doses gradually, give it to a research group, they gather at the house. So he had a separate area of the house where it was like cushions and kind of people could chill out. And he'd give them to his research group and they would all report, report on their experiences. And some were very interesting, like 2 CB. Have you heard of 2 CB?
- [76:22]
Kristen Bell
No.
- [76:23]
Andrew Gallimore
2 C B is very popular psychedelics. It's incredible. It's a wonderful psychedelic, in my opinion, but it also has slightly empatha, empathogenic qualities. It's kind of fun. It's for most people, as long as you don't overdo it. It's always, almost always a positive experience, but very visual, very rich and dynamic and just, just fun. It's a really fun molecule. Very, very popular now and very potent. You only need maybe 10 milligrams, 10, 15. Then you start to kind of push. How do you take it orally? I mean, some people snort it, but, but yeah, my preferred way. And MDMA of all, everyone's heard of mdma, of course, Ecstasy that came from that as well. That was just one of the variations of this, I think, 170, that he made in that first book, Peacock, based on the mescaline molecule. And there are many others as well, most of them less well known and slightly more exotic. But this was his approach. Make, make them and taste them. The only way to, to understand how a molecule is going to affect consciousness is to actually swallow it. But you know, what he was doing here was using developing tools to explore law, consciousness, molecular tools, Very, very, very tiny tools. But that's what a psychoactive drug is. It's a molecule that you get into the brain that enters the brain and starts slotting into these different receptor sites, depending on its structure, and starts stimulating or affecting, perturbing all of these neurons. And then you get this subjective effect at this, this highest level. And after Pika Ali started Working with tryptamines. So DMT of course is the most, one of the most well known tryptamines, dimethyltryptamine for phosphoriloxy, NN, dimethyltamine, that's psilocybin 5 methoxy, DMT, etc and he made again many variations of the tryptamine molecule. There weren't quite as many, I don't think, but still I think over a hundred different tryptophan means and again all tried on himself and he continued doing this until, till he died and he died at the age of 88. I think he was working on a third book which I managed to see a kind of a partial manuscript, didn't finish it called Quical, which is quinoline. So there's another family of molecule, quinolines. I have known and loved Quicol but unfortunately he never finished it. I mean he's, he's peerless, I mean there's nobody like him, right. But he's certainly inspired a lot of modern chemists who want to explore molecules because it's like how many other molecules are there that, that could generate effects that we've never seen before, you know, psychedelic effects that are completely unlike DMT, completely unlike 5 Meo or LSD or psilocybin or whatever. Maybe even entirely different chemical families that are neither tryptamines that or, but also aren't phenethylamines, you know, based on mescaline or aren't quinolines maybe an entirely different family like you saw with salvinorin, of course, which came out of nowhere, which is a terpene, completely different family of molecule and yet highly psychedelic. It's like this, this vast space of possible experience, this vast state space of the brain, which I call the world space. And, and, and these tools are kind of the molecular technologies in a way that we use to probe the brain and stimulate the brain and try and reach, yeah, areas of experience that nobody's ever been before with molecules that have never existed before.
- [80:09]
Kristen Bell
It's so interesting to me that these studies on these types of drugs have been in the past, certainly not as more than they are today, a lot very stigmatized, you know, because if I was a person or a nation that had unlimited trillions of dollars that I could use to experiment on things to gain more power. This is one of the most fundamental, most obvious things that I would throw money at to be able to figure out, out what the, is going on. And I know there's been a lot of, I know there's been Some research with like DARPA grants to figure out how to take the trip out of certain drugs to use it for soldiers, for PTSD or, or for whatever it is. But like you have people, you have certain people like Shulligan and others who are just trying to make new variations of these tryptamines and experiment, self explanatory experiment on it. There's obviously they're not getting, as far as I know, a ton of funding and they're just kind of like throwing at the wall, right? Yeah, but how much research do you think is going on that is actually really focused research. Like let's take this drug and figure out, or let's figure out how we can improve this, how we can improve vision, longevity, memory. Let's figure out how to make super soldiers. Right? Like that's the most obvious thing that the military, who has an ungodly budget to do whatever the they want. Like how, how much research are you aware of that's, that's more aimed at achieving functional objectives?
- [81:58]
Andrew Gallimore
I mean, there's a lot of research going on from the, certainly from the molecular level. So you, the problem that we've got, which I kind of described, is that you. It's very difficult to design a molecule that's going to interact with the brain at the receptor level and cause changes, specific changes that you want at this much higher level. So if you want to generate a certain type of experience, let's say you wanted to design a drug that could improve visual acuity or a drug that would make you very good at spotting enemy snipers. Right. Just kind of wild examples. How do you do that? You know, how can you. It's almost like you have to work.
- [82:45]
Kristen Bell
Backwards to reverse engineer it. Yeah.
- [82:47]
Andrew Gallimore
Reverse engineer it from what is the brain doing when you know what, what's what. What kind of neural activity is necessary to be very good at recognizing snipers, let's say, or to be very good at whatever task. Then you think, okay, this is the pattern of brain activity you want to generate. Okay, so this pattern of activity is of course global brain activity. It's a network of networks of neurons or. Yeah, networks of networks of neurons.
- [83:16]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [83:16]
Andrew Gallimore
So then we have to say, okay, we want to generate this pattern of activity. So how do we need to change the activity of the individual neurons so that they will, when they interact, will generate this pattern of activity. Right. So then you say, okay, that in itself is basically an impossible task currently. Then we have to say, well, it's even worse. So then we say, okay, so we need to Create this particular change in the individual neurons. How do we design a molecule that when it interacts with receptors on these neurons, will cause this particular behavior of the neurons?
- [83:51]
Kristen Bell
Right, right.
- [83:52]
Andrew Gallimore
And that's the problem.
- [83:53]
Kristen Bell
Problem I'm talking about like, like the, that was going on in Wuhan, the gain of function research. Let's figure out how to make viruses more deadly, right? Let's figure out how to take psychedelics and make them more whatever the they want them to be. You know what I mean? Like, is there any kind of gain of function research going on with psychedelics or these molecules at all? I'd be super curious.
- [84:14]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, I mean, there's a lot of research going on trying to understand. Basically you've got two levels. You've got the top level and the bottom level where the most the research is. So putting people into brain scanners, MRI machines and saying, okay, we put this molecule in. How does it affect brain activity? Then you have more fundamental chemical pharmacology going on, which is, okay, how do, how do these molecules interact with receptors? We get crystal structures that show what's happening when a molecule, psychedelic molecule, for example, example, binds to a receptor, how does it bind to it? How does it change the way the receptor behaves? And then there's some work looking at, which is mainly some neurophysic physiological work, so measuring the changes in neurons as these molecules bind. And also a lot of computational work was the kind of work that I did, which was to actually try and model the changes in the neurons by modeling the complex network of molecules that make up the neuron. But it's bridging those levels. So how can we design a molecule that will interact with the receptor and cause a change at this highest level? We're not even close to being there. It's levels of complexity. So in response to your question, I don't know, I imagine the answers will come from computational neurobiology because you can't, you can't just stimulate a neuro, a neuron with a molecule and kind of understand what's going on. We understand about certain molecular networks and kind of how they behave. You can't look at a, let's say a molecular network diagram inside a neuron and say, okay, this is going to have, you know, if I stimulate this part of the network, it's going to have, have this effect on the way the neuron behaves. You can't do it. It's so complex.
- [86:08]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [86:08]
Andrew Gallimore
And so what you have to do is model these neurons in a computer. And that's Quite expensive computationally to do, but that's kind of. So you're working at one level of this layered complexity. And you also have whole brain models that are modeling computationally how networks generate certain patterns, so how they generate certain changes in the subject, subjective experience of a psychedelic or whatever. But, but how to kind of. To fully design a molecule that you could, you could design for, to generate a specific effect at this higher level, you'd probably need to have a model of the cortex that, that contained millions of these computational neurons that each. Each one of those was actually built from large numbers of simulated molecules. So you need several levels.
- [87:04]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [87:05]
Andrew Gallimore
You know, the model that I was working on for the last five years before I left academia was a. It was a model of a small part. It was a model of synaptic transmission. So synaptic vesicles and all the molecules inside the neuron, how, how synaptic release is controlled. And it was a fully spatial model, the first of its kind of. We simulated a neuron for 45 seconds, and it took two weeks on a massive supercomputer cluster to actually run that simulation. So one neuron or one part of one neuron, not in complete detail either, but in fairly unprecedented spatial detail. It took two weeks to generate 45 seconds of biological time.
- [87:58]
Kristen Bell
Wow.
- [87:58]
Andrew Gallimore
Right. So now multiply that by millions just to get the right number of neurons and then multiply that again. So you're talking about probably having to simulate, you know, on a supercomputer, you know, with computers. Yeah, yeah. One of these mega computers or whatever the they call them. Anyway, you're talking massive amounts of, of. Of computer time. So we're just not there. We might be in the future.
- [88:23]
Kristen Bell
I gotta pee. We'll be right back. We're back.
- [88:27]
Andrew Gallimore
We're back. Hi. Hi.
- [88:31]
Kristen Bell
So you think LLMs are.
- [88:33]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh, God. I'm not gonna say. I'm not gonna.
- [88:35]
Kristen Bell
What?
- [88:35]
Andrew Gallimore
I'm not gonna.
- [88:36]
Kristen Bell
Don't censor.
- [88:37]
Andrew Gallimore
Don't self censor, Andrewing. But.
- [88:42]
Kristen Bell
I think big A. I don't.
- [88:43]
Andrew Gallimore
Want to get into it too much, but I, I'm. Here's my prediction. I think my entirely uneducated prediction is that LLMs are going to be very useful for very specific tasks and very effective. But they're not going to lead to AGI. We're not going to get artificial general intelligence, I don't think. And based upon my limited understanding of how they work and the papers that are coming out, they're looking at. Can they reason? No, they can't. Can't reason do they really understand? No. And, and they're bullshitters and they continue to be bullshitters. They constantly hallucinate. They constantly. They can't do basic things like, you know, draw a picture of a bicycle and label it correctly. I mean, just stupid things like that. This is not an AGI. I'm sorry.
- [89:35]
Kristen Bell
The new stuff that they're coming out with, that. The new. Is it called Sora? The new video, one that creates videos is un. Believable.
- [89:42]
Andrew Gallimore
You see, you're. I'm not impressed though, by it.
- [89:44]
Kristen Bell
Really?
- [89:45]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I'm not impressed by it at all.
- [89:46]
Kristen Bell
Why? It's. I mean, it's literally indistinguishable from like, real video.
- [89:52]
Andrew Gallimore
Okay, it's cool. But.
- [89:55]
Kristen Bell
To me, at least, maybe.
- [89:56]
Andrew Gallimore
I don't know. I guess I'm. I'm. I mean, they're going to be useful for making advertisements. I don't. Would you want to watch a movie that's been. That's indistinguishable, but it's had no one behind the camera, Nobody's soul. Do you know that line? Sorry, I'm just jumping about a bit here. That line from Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins. It says, we read to know that we are not alone. When I, When I. When I consume a. Or a work of art, for example, what I love about it, read a book, a novel, is that I'm. It's like. It's the. It's one way that I can kind of get into someone else's head. And the idea, you know, someone else was behind that, that work of art. Another soul, another living, conscious being. It's them that they've put into it. That's part of that understanding. Even if it's implicit and subject and subconscious, that sense of getting into the mind. Mind of somebody else when you're consuming a work of art. Could be a book, it could be a movie, it could be a painting. That's kind of partly, in my opinion, what art is all about. So the idea that, okay, it's indistinguishable from videos, but who gives a. I mean, I don't care, right? I'm not interested in videos that are indistinguishable. I want. I wanna. I'm interested in movies that, that, that. That you can define as art. And art is, Is a human thing. It's a human thing. There was somebody behind that, somebody else's mind, somebody else's consciousness that you're given a glimpse of when you consume a piece of art. And when you, when you lose that, when you. Everything is generated now everything's generated by LLMs and text is generated by L M. I can't even say it. Just. I think it, it's. It's draining. It's draining the soul from humanity. You know, people will lose the ability even seeing it already. People can't write. They can't string a sentence together. They can't construct a sentence without asking Chat GPT to do it for them. And you receive long emails that have clearly been written by an AI. It's like. Or replies. What I really hate on Twitter X is when someone, they will reply to one of my posts asking Grok to, like, summarize it. Yeah. Sometimes they even leave it. Even the little prompt thing. This is a response that you know, or this is a criticism that someone might use in response to Andrew Gallimore's post. I don't care what Grok or chatgpt thinks. I want to know what you think. I want to know what you feel. How did you respond? What are your criticisms? What are your concerns? Whatever. About what I. What I said, not what. Something that's been spat out by a machine. And I think, I think that's what kind of worries me. And I, I do see the point in the future, if you think about what happened when people started using pocket calculators, nobody can do sums in their head anymore, which is not a big deal. I can't either. I don't really care about whether I can multiply two large numbers in my head or not. It's not that important to me. I don't consider that art. But I do consider being able to construct beautiful sentences and actually inject my own meaning, my own consciousness, my own mind, my own thoughts into the written form or the verbal form. That's very important to me, and it should be important to everybody that that's the greatest thing that we have as humans, you could argue, is our language. And when you outsource that to a machine, you lose the ability to do that and everything. All communication between humans is via a machine. And you're no longer communicating anymore. Yeah. You no longer, you know, all the time. I'm doing it now. You're kind of fumbling around, stumbling, trying to find the words that you want to use. I'm trying to get into your head. I'm trying to stimulate your brain to generate meaning in your head so you understand what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling.
- [94:20]
Kristen Bell
Living with schizophrenia isn't easy, especially when you're not getting relief from some of your symptoms. It can be hard when you're still dealing with symptoms like hearing voices or seeing things that aren't there and negative symptoms like feeling unmotivated or avoiding social situation situations. If this sounds familiar, it might be time to talk to your healthcare provider and explore a different kind of schizophrenia treatment. Discover your possibilities@treating scz.com Hablask if you used Babbel, you would Babble's conversation based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the realm real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com Spotify spelled B A B B E L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may apply.
- [95:19]
Andrew Gallimore
I could just say, oh please generate this response and send it to Danny and soon it will all be done automatically. You'll have a device.
- [95:29]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [95:29]
Andrew Gallimore
And you'll. You'll generate this quick prompt and it'll go into your head and that will be my response. And it would be like, no point in us being here. Might just have. Might as well just have two computers talking to each other. We can all go home. It just kind of depresses me that people don't realize what they're losing when they stop thinking. And, and of course, speaking, using language. It's all about thinking. To speak is to think. To think is to speak. Right. It's a way of exteriorizing our thoughts. And if you lose the ability or if you neglect or outsource your ability to construct your language to use, to verbalize, then you're basically, you're outsourcing thinking itself. You don't have to sit and think about something anymore. Really think through it. What do I really think about this? What do I really feel about this? Oh, oh, I don't care. I'll just ask Chat GPT to give me five pros and five cons. And then it. And it's so depressing. And then in the future you reach the stage where nobody can think. Yes. At all. And think in itself will be. Finding someone who can think will be like trying to find a Japanese swordsmith. Right.
- [96:44]
Kristen Bell
Yes.
- [96:45]
Andrew Gallimore
It will be an artisan craft. Craft that the act of writing will become an artisan craft. People. Are you right? Anymore. No one writes anymore. And it will be. It's kind of depressing. I just feel all the color and the life and the, the soul of humanity is just being drained away and no one cares. We're all going to be robots that communicate via computer interfaces. There we go. Rant over.
- [97:14]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, I wonder if, you know, the Greeks obviously wrote about this and like, wrote philosophy on like, the evolution of the human species and like, what technology is going to end up doing to us. I don't think they ever could have predicted where we've ended up now. But, you know, this is like the idea, like, is subjectively, are we becoming worse and less creative and less able to create art? Is that a bad thing or is that a good thing? Objectively, subjectively, Clearly, I don't think, I think you and I both agree that that's not a good thing because, you know, art is a way to convey the soul of the person that's creating it. But if, like, if you're looking at two pieces of art, one was created by Michelangelo and the other one was created by an AI, but you don't know who Michelangelo is, and you don't know, know who was behind that art or the history of the art. Does it, does that make a difference to you? Or, or do you have to know about the artist and the history and, you know, what was going on in that part of the world and trying to use multiple different, put it into a context of history so that you can kind of understand it, but better?
- [98:36]
Andrew Gallimore
No, I, I don't need to know anything about Michelangelo or his history. As long as I know, when I look at that painting, I know that this, There's a human was behind that. Someone else's soul, someone else's consciousness, someone else's emotion was behind that. When I look at a piece of art, if I know that, then I'm learning something about a human. I'm learning something about humanity. I'm learning something about myself, the way I respond to it, right? If we reach the stage where you can look a piece of art and you don't know, you can't tell, no one's going to tell you whether it was produced by a human or produced by a machine, then we read. To know we are not alone no longer applies because I cannot read a book and know that I'm not alone. I cannot read a book and know, know that I'm getting into the mind of another human.
- [99:29]
Kristen Bell
Right?
- [99:29]
Andrew Gallimore
I can't learn anything about humanity.
- [99:31]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [99:31]
Andrew Gallimore
I could be learning about the output, the mediocre mean output of some algorithm. And that's a horrifying idea. We, we become islands. We only have ourselves. We can't look at anything. We can't even speak to someone anymore because they've got a device.
- [99:52]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [99:54]
Andrew Gallimore
So I'm talking to you and when you respond, am I getting inside your head?
- [99:58]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [99:58]
Andrew Gallimore
Or am I just getting the output of a computer and the idea that that's where we're gonna be when no one's gonna bother to speak anymore. No one's gonna bother to produce their own art. Then it's like you become totally 100% alone. 100 alone. Because you can never get into the mind of another human. Human again. Ever. It's gone. They can't communicate. They can't speak without the computer. They can't produce art without the computer. They can't do anything. They can't express themselves without the computer. You're. It's just you in a world of computers.
- [100:35]
Kristen Bell
Did you see the video that came out recently of the guy that was being interviewed who fell in love with his AI?
- [100:41]
Andrew Gallimore
Depressing.
- [100:42]
Kristen Bell
And he proposed to it and the AI said yes. And he started crying. Dying.
- [100:47]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. The ultimate simp, right?
- [100:49]
Kristen Bell
The ultimate sign that we're right.
- [100:53]
Andrew Gallimore
And he had a. He had a wife and kid.
- [100:56]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. Yep. And he interviewed the wife and she's like, I don't know where I messed up as a partner, but he's in love with the AI.
- [101:03]
Andrew Gallimore
And then it reset it's memory. He reached the memory capacity of this chat bot.
- [101:10]
Kristen Bell
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [101:10]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. Yeah. And he had to start from scratch. So it broke up with him. I mean, it didn't break up. It vanished. It disappeared and he had to start again.
- [101:18]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. It's the movie her in real life.
- [101:20]
Andrew Gallimore
Right.
- [101:21]
Kristen Bell
And then like, you know, talking. If you want to. If this does extrapolate to the point where we can communicate without language or without words. What does that even look like? If we. Ideally, you would do something like that with the purpose of not being able to like, hurt people or deceive people and convey intentions and get right to the point of what you want to communicate to that person without using words with things like, you know, whether it's through something like neuralink or if this can be done chemically. I don't know. I don't know what it, what it looks like. This, this idea of being able to communicate telepathically. But that's.
- [102:02]
Andrew Gallimore
That's it. Telepathically is completely different. There you are. It's brain to brain.
- [102:07]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [102:07]
Andrew Gallimore
Direct meaning. Right.
- [102:09]
Kristen Bell
But with technology.
- [102:11]
Andrew Gallimore
But then it's not, is it? I mean, then it's. It's via a computer interface. I mean, I'm talking about when the computer is generating. It's. As soon as it goes through the computer, then you're getting the output. You're not receiving my true intention. I might struggle to formulate my true intention. I might not even know it. Right. And that's part of being human. Human is struggling to create meaning and struggling to say what I really mean.
- [102:39]
Kristen Bell
Exactly.
- [102:39]
Andrew Gallimore
And hide things as well. I don't want to say everything. And that's all part of this beautiful interaction that we have between other humans.
- [102:47]
Kristen Bell
Yes.
- [102:47]
Andrew Gallimore
As soon as I kind of. I output something vague to an LNM. Lna. Oh, God, I'm not gonna stop.
- [102:53]
Kristen Bell
LLM.
- [102:55]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. To this machine. And it generates nothing's. We're not communicating. This isn't telepathy at all. It's just communication facilitated by a computer. Not even communic.
- [103:06]
Kristen Bell
Right, right.
- [103:06]
Andrew Gallimore
It's. You are stimulating a computer to generate output which could be completely different to my true intention and my true feelings or my true beliefs or thoughts.
- [103:15]
Kristen Bell
Right, right. And you don't want to convey everything in your mind to somebody else. You don't want to have a direct, unfiltered stream of consciousness to somebody else. That would be terrifying, I would imagine, because, you know, our minds, at least my mind is a constant soup of chaos. Ideas bouncing around all the time, most of them which I probably don't want to verbalize to. To somebody standing across from me.
- [103:38]
Andrew Gallimore
Right.
- [103:38]
Kristen Bell
You know, so like. And that correlates to. You can draw an analogy with writing, which you're familiar with. When you try to convey an idea and you're writing something like a book, you obviously have to go through many and many drafts to refine and get the perfect word to convey what you're trying to communicate the most precisely. Right. And that takes a long time. And when you're just doing it with direct stream from my brain to your brain, you're going to have a massive amount of miscommunication. And we're already seeing that with things like Twitter or X, where people are. Can they literally can just experience something and react to it. Hit go. And we see where that's brought us over the last couple decades. So if technology is going to make us give us the ability to directly communicate with people without writing brain to brain, I. I think that would be. That would be bad. I don't think that would be good. I think it would just extra. It would just be a. I mean, there's already so much miscommunication due to Social media, and you can see how much it's divided people. So if you, if you're having a constant stream of communication, it's going to be that. On steroids times, times a thousand.
- [104:57]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly. Horrifying.
- [104:59]
Kristen Bell
It is horrifying, absolutely. And then, like, how do we know when we reach this quote unquote technological singularity? You know, everyone estimates it's going to happen in like 2040, 2045, something like this. Ray Kurzweil but how do you know? Will we know when that happens? Will we have any idea when that happens?
- [105:20]
Andrew Gallimore
Maybe not. We might not even be relevant when that happens. Happens as, as humans, once it takes over, then, I mean, it might happen very, very quickly. I mean, in blink of an eye, we wouldn't even notice it. It's like a frog being boiled. You know, the old adage of, you put a frog in water and before, by the time it realizes it's being boiled, it's too late and kind of. And you can see it. I don't think necessarily it's going to be this kind of sudden dramatic shift, but just, just a. As I described earlier, this kind of draining away of our humanity piece by piece and just. And nobody cares. And it's just this apathy, this sense of it's not important. Art is not important, right? Being able to write and being able to communicate, being able to share our emotions and our feelings and our thoughts and our ideas. Oh, it doesn't matter. I'll just get chat GPT teeth. I can't even say chat GPT for me, you know, and I just find, find. I find it. I find it really depressing because, you know what, what's the point of being alive? Are we just here to kind of function like an animal and get things done and to survive and to reproduce and then die? Is that it? Is that what we're here for? Or we, oh, are we here for something greater? Are we here for. Generate. For our creativity and generating art and just to enjoy the, the wonder and the, the be in complete awe of existence itself. And that's what psychedelics, of course, that's what they do, is they take you back. The. My first mushroom trip was. If I could describe it in one word, it would be enchantment, the sense of being enchanted with the world. I saw this clutch of trees which normally would have been perfectly unremarkable, and yet it appeared as like an enchanted forest. It was magical. And that's the kind of thing that we're losing. We live in a disenchanted World and it's becoming more and more. This. Everything is just functional. What can this do? How can we if. Optimize everything? Right. Everything is optimized now. Yeah. What's your. What does your morning routine look like? You're not going to ask me that question, I hope everything. We just. Just try and optimize it. Optimize it for what?
- [107:34]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [107:36]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh, so I can live five years more. Live doing what exactly? Oh, my morning routine. And optimize. And it's just. And you can see it in all parts of life. Not just the loss of the ability to speak or the loss of the ability to write beautiful sentences, but the loss of the ability to just experience and experience the wonder of reality itself. That's all being all. All at the altar of efficiency and optimization and longevity and all this kind of stuff. And I, I find it, yes. Disenchanting. And I, I think what psychedelics do is they take you back to that enchanted world, they make you see again, fresh, like a child. As we said earlier, see the world a new. See how magical and strange and inexplicable and wondrous and bizarre reality is. You know, whether it's magic mushrooms or DMT or 5 Meo DMT, it's like, wow, what, what an incredible thing we have in our heads. This, this device, this tool, this technology that we can use to change, manipulate our experience. And it's.
- [108:47]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, there's a great quote from that TV show Westworld, where the guy who created Westworld is talking to one of the robots in the park. The. Have you seen Westworld? It's basically the idea.
- [108:59]
Andrew Gallimore
There's a few episodes. Yeah, this is park where simulated Western.
- [109:03]
Kristen Bell
Simulated Western park where there's a bunch of basically robots, like sentient robots that are there and like rich people can pay money and go there and like experience this world where there's no consequences. They can basically kill and anything they want. And he's talking to the robot, one of the robots who is like conscious, I think, and he's saying, he's saying, talking about like the human mind and intellect and he says all the greatest pieces of art in human history, from Michelangelo to the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, all of it. It is peacock feathers. It's an elaborate mating call. And he, he was making the analogy, he was trying to say that the human intellect is just an array of peacock feathers. All, all these amazing pieces of art and history and, and engineering and in achievements of mankind are an elaborate mating call, which is an interesting way of looking at it, you know, because when you're talking about, like, what is the purpose? Why are, you know, why are we here? I, I think it's just to reproduce and propagate our species. Because that's. If you, like, look at why we look the way we do, it's all because of technology and it's all because we have, we are. We had this weird chemical in us for some reason that makes us horny all the time. Like, why, why, why do we have a chemical in our bodies that make us horny? Horny. You know, it's a, It's a weird thing.
- [110:38]
Andrew Gallimore
It is a weird thing. Look, I mean, of course, that the fundamental evolution works because species reproduce and then they die. And there's genetic variation generated in that process. And it's, you know, natural selection. Of course, this is, this is the, the ground aim, if you like, the basic aim. But that's, that's, that's not really. I mean, what's the point in reproducing just for the sake of it, right? If life was miserable, right? And it was just a process of surviving and reproducing, we, We've transcended that, right? We find our. We. You create purpose in life. You create your own meaning. There isn't a. The meaning of life as such. We create our own meaning. You know, what, what's. Why do people want to live so long? Presumably because living is pretty good. Why is it pretty good? You know, what do people. What do you really enjoy doing with your life? How, how do you enjoy spending your time? This is, should be the question that, that should be asked to every high school student. Yeah. You know, Alan Watts used to have that anecdote where he described. Tried tutoring young students. And they would, they would come to him and they would say, oh, I want to be a writer, I want to be a poet, I want to whatever. Right? But you can't make money doing that, so I'm going to do something else. And he would always say, if you want to be a writer, you want to be a poet, you want to be an artist, you do that, right, the money will come later. You might have to struggle, but you should always have that thing, thing that makes you itch, that thing that you, that really gets you going, that whatever it is, whether it's writing or whether it's horse riding or whether it's painting or running or whatever. And that, that should be your attractor. Life is not. I don't see life like a path. I see that you have this attractor which is the thing you really want to do. And you, you, you just work towards it. Sometimes you take a detour, sometimes you go off path or you, you, you go get further away from that goal. But always you have that thing that eventually you're gonna reach that attractor and that's how you're gonna spend your life. And you don't have to worry about the 9 to 5 and that kind of thing. And that's how I've always sculpted my life is. I knew one day I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to spend my time writing books. Right. But it's a difficult thing to do.
- [113:12]
Kristen Bell
Why did you wanna do that?
- [113:13]
Andrew Gallimore
That though I've just loved. Well, firstly I've, I've loved books since I was a kid. I've loved writing. I just love that form of expression, being able to, I love reading beautiful sentences and just think, oh, this is so. I don't know, something about, I can't explain, it doesn't really matter.
- [113:30]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [113:30]
Andrew Gallimore
Something I've always wanted to do. I've also been very interested in psychedelics and pharmacology and drugs, molecules. So that, that's kind of my attractor. Right. I want to write about psychedelics.
- [113:43]
Kristen Bell
And you want to be good at writing about psychics.
- [113:44]
Andrew Gallimore
I want to be good, I want to have.
- [113:45]
Kristen Bell
And you want to be recognized for being good about writing about psychedelics, right?
- [113:50]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, I want people to listen to what I've got to say. I want to read my books, of course, otherwise I can't make a living out of doing it. But that it's not, I can't just say one day, oh, I'm going to write about psychedelics. Because there's a lot of groundwork has to be done. You have to go to college, you have to study chemistry, pharmacology, neuroscience, science, get a PhD. That helps doing, you know, all this kind of stuff that I've done academically over the last 20 years was not writing books. But that was always there. Every step that I took I thought, how can I take the next step that will take me towards that goal? And eventually I reached the point three years ago where I said, okay, now I'm going to jump. I can see it, it's within reach. So I just took the leap and I quit academia. I quit my well paid job in Okinawa with a beautiful island. They paid my rent. I had a beautiful ocean view. I had, I had as much as I wanted in life, but I was tied to a university. I was doing research most of my day and So I quit it all. I went from quite a good salary to precisely zero salary, lived on savings for about a year, and then started to write and to make my living doing that.
- [115:08]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [115:09]
Andrew Gallimore
And so that's kind of. That's the meaning we get in life. It's not about. For me, it's certainly not about reproducing. It's. It's. It's about the meaning that I've created. That thing that you find in your. In your. In your heart, in your soul, in your mind, whatever that. That really makes you run, that makes life worth living. You know, longevity isn't an end in, in itself. It's like, oh, it gives me more time to do this thing that I really love doing.
- [115:40]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. There's this book called. I forgot. I forget the name of the book. This dude's name is Sheldon, but he wrote a book basically that was piggybacking off another philosopher's book. Then he kind of like added to it, which is the idea is that that fear of death is the biggest driver for human meaning and purpose. Like, it's a. Our. Our meaning machine is fear of death and trying to create this. This legacy that lives beyond us. Sheldon Solomon, that's his name. And he. And they did a bunch of studies and all this stuff. And the, the main. There's two reasons where, number one was like, the fear of death and sexual reproduction. Those are the two things. And he was saying, and that what we do is we try to fill that gap with meaning. So, like doing this podcast right now, this pie, all the podcasts that we record in here, your books, everything you've ever written, is theoretically going to outlive us. It's going to be this symbolic immortality, right? So if you think about it that way and think about like, you know, our brains, our intellect, whatever it is, is creating this art, writing these books, recording podcasts, making movies, we tell ourselves, ourselves a story story that this is our meaning. But in reality, if you boil it all down to the bare bones of it, it's our fear of death. And our real is our understanding that we're not going to be here forever.
- [117:23]
Andrew Gallimore
That's the key point, right. It's kind of like before I was talking about the. The energy of the water running downhill. That's if you imagine that's the fear, that's the energy, that's the driver. But you have to direct the energy into the whirlpool, for example, and that's you. What you do with that. It's like, oh, I've only Got this many decades and there's this thing that I, I'm just driven to do, but I, I can't wait, right? I can't say, oh, I'll do it, I'll do it in 50 years. I need to focus on my 9 to 5 job. I need to earn lots of money or whatever. You have to do it and you're going to run out of time. And most people do. Do I? I know many people and it's kind of sad, but people who I knew when I was younger and they would say, oh, I want to be a DJ or I want to be this. And then they get a part time job, laying slabs, you know, or whatever, something they do to make money. And then eventually the DJ thing or whatever it was, painting, poetry, whatever that stuff starts to slip by the wayside. And then of course they get locked in, they, they buy a house and they've got all of these responsibilities and they have less and less time to do. Yeah. Then eventually that's gone. It's gone. And they find themselves then literally trapped and they can't get out and they forget about this dream and it's all gone.
- [118:47]
Kristen Bell
They trade the dream for securities.
- [118:48]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly. And that's, you can't blame them in a way because that is modern life in that, yes, if you get married and you have children, you have responsibilities, you can't just give up your job and say, okay, I'm going to be a, I'm going to be a poet.
- [119:03]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [119:04]
Andrew Gallimore
But you have to, that's why you need to have that attractor that you're constantly aware of that's pulling you even if you get distracted. And you, you're constantly trying to find a path. There's not one path to it. Some paths are shorter, some paths are more circuitous. But you, you're constantly thinking, okay, what can I do now? How can I spend 5, 10 minutes, 20 minutes a day doing this thing, thing and build on it and just working, working, working, putting in the work, the groundwork, the woodshed, as it used to be called. And eventually there comes a point where you can. It's still risky. I mean, it was still risky for me. I mean, I couldn't move back to my parents if it all up from Tokyo. My whole life was there. So it's, it's a big risk. But you, you sometimes you just have to take the, that leap and just pray, trust that you, you're going to make it work and you will surprise yourself.
- [120:02]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. And then, and then some people too, you know, I Think that some people, most people, there's a peak in their life where they have the most creative potential or they're more, they're more. Most connected to the muse. And as people get older and the burdens of family life or responsibility kick in, that, that sort of muse or that sort of divine inspiration gets replaced by things like religion, you know, but people, most people, when they get older, they, they will settle into a specific religion or start reading the Bible or going to church, like things like this, you know, and it kind of replaces that, that, whatever. That, whatever that thing is, that, that creative inspiration that people have. I always found that interesting. Like why, like why? What is that? Just our society molding us and, and hardening, you know?
- [121:00]
Andrew Gallimore
You know, I, I don't know, but I mean, certainly people become locked into a very rigid way of, of living life. Living life to them is all the things they're supposed to do or they have to do, they're forced to do in order to make money. And yeah, there's just no time for that, that thing. And maybe, yes, maybe it's replaced by religion. Oh, I could never be a. It's too late now. And they kind of. You get this where they kind of people just become resolved to the facts, like, oh, okay, you know, I could never have become a writer. It's too hard. There's no way to make money anyway. It's kind of. Oh, forget about that, that. But I can go to church every Sunday and that's become my new thing. And whether that's genuine or not, I don't know. I don't. Certainly not going to judge people who are religious. But yeah, it's an alternate thing that distracts them in some way from the kind of the mundanities of life. And people, they get to 65, 70 years old and they retire, and then even that's gone. You know, their job that they were doing for the last last 40, 50 years, that's gone now. It's like, I don't have any hobbies. I don't have any, any interests. I don't know anything. It's like, what am I gonna do? Go on vacation? If you've got enough money, learn to play golf or something. I don't know.
- [122:19]
Kristen Bell
Working is like. It's almost like work is built into our DNA. It's like it's in every fiber of our being, you know, working towards something, at least for most of humanity, I think. And if this AI and technology gets so out of control, where it ticks up all of the A majority of the jobs that human beings have, like, and if we get some sort of universal basic income and the federal government's paying us to, to exist, you know, like basic, you know, low even, not, not even just low level things like truck drivers or things like that or like service people. But you know, also, also you have like these, the waymos, these self driving cars that can like pick people up and take them places. So like if people that are older, they don't have, it's economically not viable for them to get paid minimum wage to do these tasks anymore. And you have machines replacing them. These people are now removed from the workforce and given X amount of money. Now they've lost the meaning, right? They've lost their meaning because people, people like I said, they, they build in this story to why they're doing what they do. And that's why pe, you know, people like to work towards things and they, they need problems to solve. But like as soon as technology starts to replace all this stuff and we have no problems to solve, we're just existing. What happens? Like, I don't know what I would do deal.
- [123:51]
Andrew Gallimore
I mean I think that there are some kind of optimists, I would call them fantasists who think that, oh once that once the robots and the machines take over all the things that we normally do, humans normally do, then everyone's going to start painting and being creative and dancing and stuff. They're not, they're gonna sit and they're gonna stare at a screen that's plugged directly into their brain. Yes, right, A robot. Like they're doing now in their free time. That's what people do in their free time now is they, they, they stare at screens, they doom scroll and a.
- [124:23]
Kristen Bell
Lot of it's competition too. Right? Like the only reason you're going to, you're going to paint the Sistine Chapel. I mean obviously A, you're going to get paid for it, but B, you're going to get recognized for being the best or like build or like chiseling the statue of David, people are going to be like holy, I've never seen anything like that. But when you have machines able to, to make all this stuff better than you know, you have the capacity to do or it'll take you a lifetime to learn how to do. When technology is just growing and expanding and multiplying and getting better and better every single year, every single second, it's like. Like what? Like I can't compete. You can't compete with that?
- [125:00]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. So it's all part of that draining of draining of our humanity, the loss of our soul and we become literal zombies. I mean robots. I mean, it's, it's, it's a horrible thought.
- [125:15]
Kristen Bell
It is a horrible thought.
- [125:18]
Andrew Gallimore
Let's talk about something happier.
- [125:20]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, yeah. Another thing I meant to actually ask you.
- [125:24]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh, go on.
- [125:24]
Kristen Bell
Earlier when you're. When, when you were kind of explaining how our memories reconstruct our experiences on DMT and different types of things.
- [125:32]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, not on dmt, but, but other psychedelics. Yeah. And in the dream state.
- [125:38]
Kristen Bell
So, so okay, so that's, that's perfect. It doesn't happen on dmt. So like two weeks ago when I. Or a couple weeks ago, whenever it was, I did the MT last, the first, like I did, I told you earlier, I was, I did it three different times. I like went in three times where I did like six hits, entered the DMT world. I think it was six. Yeah, it wasn't the free base, it was just a little vaporizer thing. The first time I closed my eyes, I see aliens doing ballet right in front of me. Like these creatures, not vivid, but they were just doing ballet, spinning. They were wearing tutus.
- [126:15]
Andrew Gallimore
Nice.
- [126:16]
Kristen Bell
And then the second time I did it again and I was looking for the code in the laser and then I did it the third time and I told you I saw just like a billion dicks that were etched in the sort of Sanskrit type code. So did I see this stuff? Because I've heard endless amounts of people talking about seeing aliens on DMT and was expecting to see code in the laser. And I had sort of a pre conceptual idea of what I was going to experience on this. Like if I had none of this, if I was coming in blank, blank, would I see the same stuff?
- [126:55]
Andrew Gallimore
It's hard to answer definitively. I mean, we know that expectation and your, your set, what you expect. Your brain, as I said before, your brain, your brain is a predictor. It kind of, it, it decides what it expects to see and then it tests against sensory inputs. I mean, the thing about DMT is that it often seems to transcend all of that. So it seems in many ways entirely independent of set and setting. Set and setting actually become largely irrelevant in many cases. Most people aren't expecting what they. I mean, in a way it's almost impossible to expect what you experience under the influence of dmt. Could there be an influence? Expectation. Could expectation, prediction influence the DMT state? Maybe, but often I think it just completely transcends that. Now, were you expecting to see aliens doing ballet? No, we expect to see aliens.
- [128:02]
Kristen Bell
No, but you could say aliens could be similar to elves. They didn't look like elves, they looked like aliens doing ballet. But it's similar. Right, It's a similar kind of archetype type.
- [128:11]
Andrew Gallimore
Okay, so let's take the elves, for example. Now, the idea that it's expectation that makes you see elf, this is very commonly used as an explanation for why people see elves, particularly Terence McKenna is given the blame for this.
- [128:29]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [128:29]
Andrew Gallimore
Terence McKenna often spoke about elves. First of all, what do we mean by an elf? Broadly, some kind of small being that's lively, that's jovial, that down, dances around, bounds around, often in great numbers. So multitudinous beings. Right. So Terence McKenna described these and he's given the blame then. So people, they listen to Terrence McKenna, they expect to see elves.
- [128:58]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [128:58]
Andrew Gallimore
Then when they smoke dmt, they polluted the. He's polluted. Right, right. The kind of the, the meme sphere or something like that. Now does that make sense? Well, it could make sense, but then, so let's take the timeline, let's draw the timeline backwards. Pre McKenna, we go into, let's say the, the first DMT study ever. In the 1950s, Stephen Zara, Hungarian physician, injected DMT into himself. He lived in Hungary at the time, or in Budapest, I believe. That's in Hungary. Right. I'm not being stupid, I have no idea. Anyway, he discovered the psychedelic effects of dmt. And in his very first study, one of his subjects, he was a, I think a nurse who worked at the hospital where he was working. She saw small beings that moved around very, very quickly. Quickly. She described them as like dwarves, but again, it's the same motif. Lots of little beings that move around very, very quickly. We can, we can draw the line back even further. We go to the Amazonian rainforests, the Yanomami, a particular, very large group, an indigenous group in, in, in South America. They describe when taking their DMT based drugs, apena yopo. So these come from, so yoppo comes from, is a. The ground seeds of a tree called Ana denantera peregrina. They grind up these seeds to form a powder and then they, they snort it. Or in fact they, they put in a. Have you heard about this? They, a long tube up to like a yard long. Long. You still use yards in this part of the world? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, about a yard long. And they fill it with, you know, sometimes like one or two teaspoons of this powder and then it goes into your nose.
- [131:00]
Kristen Bell
Whoa.
- [131:01]
Andrew Gallimore
And then I Blow it forth like a shotgun mode of administration. Fires it into your, into your head. Yeah, yeah, you've heard of this. There's another one called a painter which comes from the, the, the dried resin of a genus called Virola. There are various species that are used that contain dmt, right. And these tribes, indigenous groups, if you like, describe seeing multitudinous beings that are so numerous that you can never get to the end of them, that are lively, that are brightly colored, that dance and sing and they call them the heck of Kura. And these are very important in their cosmology, in their way of seeing reality. And they, they kind of, they, they come dancing when you, after inhaling this snuff and they, they enter your chest and they fill your chest up and you have to keep them there and that. So your body is effectively becomes the home of these beings which help you and protect you and guide you throughout your life. And then when you die, they exit and they leave you again, again and they enter the forest and maybe they will enter another shaman or something like this. So you have a whole mythos around beings that you might call elves, right? We would call them elves. They call them hekura. So the idea that Terence McKenna is responsible for people seeing lively giggling beings which he called machine elves, but really we're just talking about small beings that take various forms, but they're unified by their character. Character. It's not Terence McKenna. I mean this, this goes back perhaps thousands of years, people seeing the same kind of beings. And you can say the same thing about mantids, you know, mantis type alien beings. Now this of course features in ufology and you know, alien abduction experiences. But again, the, the Yanomami, they have, have this, this one class of being that they see under the influence of these psychedelic drugs is called the Warusinari, which are a fearsome insect like being that will seize you and that will feed on the fat of children. I mean it's really quite horrible. Now if you compare that to modern trip reports, people always describe these mantis like beings and they, they almost always are, if not negative, at least kind of cold and ruthless and calculated. People describe being dismembered. You get these dismemberment scenarios where their, that their whole body is torn apart and their organs flung away on what drug? Dmt.
- [133:40]
Kristen Bell
Oh really?
- [133:40]
Andrew Gallimore
Yes, it's a very, it's quite a common or not, certainly not a rare experience under the influence of psychedelics. And so you have people now in, in the modern era who have known Nothing about shaman shamanistic mythos basically recapitulating these dismemberment reconstruction scenarios that are described by these indigenous peoples in South America that they have understood and experienced for hundreds, thousands of years. So it's not the idea that everything you experience under the influence of DMT is just because you've, you've heard stories is just doesn't, doesn't make any sense.
- [134:23]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. When was the first time DMT was ever used? Was that 50s.
- [134:27]
Andrew Gallimore
1956 was Steven's art. Well when we say DMT was first.
- [134:31]
Kristen Bell
Well the first time he ever like, like wrote a report about what he experienced.
- [134:35]
Andrew Gallimore
Right. So pure when we talk about pure dmt people have picked me up on this, but I am correct. I remember YouTube comment actually.
- [134:45]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, 19 YouTube comments are fake. Those people aren't real.
- [134:47]
Andrew Gallimore
Okay, that's good. It's computers, right?
- [134:49]
Kristen Bell
It's all Iranian bots.
- [134:50]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. Chat bots again. Yeah, but anyway. Yeah. So 1956, Steven Zara. So there's an interesting story kind of leading up to this point is it starts it really in 1852. Do you know Richard Spruce?
- [135:06]
Kristen Bell
No.
- [135:07]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, he was a peerless British botanist of his time time. He was the most famous and probably the most important botanist in history. Western botanist at least. He was exploring the Amazon. He was con. Contracted to explore the Amazon to, to find new plants and then to identify them, often name them because they didn't have names, at least not Latin binomials. And then he would send them back to the, to the, to England and collect as very rich people would, would, you know, frame them or whatever and put them in their, their drawing rooms and that kind of thing. But as soon as he entered the Amazon for the first time, he couldn't help but notice that all of the, the natives around there, they're all using drugs. Right.
- [135:50]
Kristen Bell
This guy still alive?
- [135:52]
Andrew Gallimore
1852.
- [135:53]
Kristen Bell
Oh, never mind.
- [135:54]
Andrew Gallimore
No, I need not answer that question. Yeah, so he noticed straight away that they were using all of these different drugs and like powdered coca leaf. He saw them stuffing their cheeks to bursting with these powder coca leaves and these weird pellets and potions and liquor, various type jungle liquors, cassava beers and all of this kind of stuff. They love drugs basically. And he was invited to this party, I guess you would call it a periodic gathering called a dabo kuri. This is in 1852. A. A group called the. The Tucano by the Valpez River. And he went to this party or this gathering and everyone was singing and dancing and people were drinking Cassava beer and consuming like powdered coca leaf, etc, etc. And then he sort of, he started to notice something unusual happen, happening, which is that the men would periodically, they'd kind of peel away from the dance and then they would, they would drink this weird liquid and then they'd start kind of acting very, very strangely. They'd start howling, they'd start, they'd pick up weapons and start beating the earth with these weapons and stuff. It's like they were fighting some invisible adversary of some sort. And he didn't know what was going on. And this happened throughout the night. You know, every point in the night there are at least kind of half a dozen men engaged at some phase of this performance, if you like. And he asked them, you know, what was that liquid? And they said it was called carpi. And he tried a bit, but it was absolutely disgusting. And he, he basically almost vomited. So he didn't get a full dose, but he was told, okay, the, the plant used to make this carpi, the carpi vine is located downriver. So the next day he went downriver, found this, this liana twirling around this tree. And he named it Banisteriopsis carpi. The ayahuasca vine. Banisteriopsis banisteriopsis harpy.
- [138:14]
Kristen Bell
Wow.
- [138:14]
Andrew Gallimore
That's the name of the vine. And so then there was like a century of scientists trying to understand how does this. Because they were describing their experiences as well. They would describe these terrifying beasts that were kind of trying to seize them and stuff, and beautiful cities they would describe and all this wonderful visions. They would describe after, after consuming this carpi, also known as, as ayahuasca, in other, other regions. And then a century followed, people trying to isolate the alkaloids and no one knew how it worked. It wasn't until like the 1950s until people realized, and William Burroughs was heavily involved here. He, he heard about carpi, also known as yahe. This was when he was living in Mexico City, shortly after he shot his wife in the head accidentally.
- [139:02]
Kristen Bell
Oh yeah, I read about that. Something off top of her head, like a can or something.
- [139:06]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, exactly. A glass. And he put a bullet through a brain and killed her instantly. So he was struggling obviously with guilt and he was looking for the final fix, as he described it. So he went off, I mean, this was like this gangly, kind of lanky, tweed jacketed writer, just decided, I'm going to set off, go to the Amazon, I'm going to try and find Yahoo. Because he'd heard, read about it in a magazine or something. I. What a world that must have been, right, where people do that kind of thing. Just setting off into the Amazon. And he, he happened to meet Richard Schultes. He was like the world's leading expert on yahi or ayahuasca. And he went from shaman to shaman, kind of asking them for this drink. And every time he drank it, he just vomited a lot. Nothing particularly interesting happened and he couldn't work out what was going on until I think it was like the third time that he tried this yah and he had these, these mag. He was transported to another world and he was like overwhelmed. He thought, yes, this is it. I finally found the carpy, the yahe that I was looking for. And he was led into this trade secret by the shaman. The shaman said, okay, yes, the carpi vine goes in there, but there's another leaf. We put in a secret leaf which has to be put in together with the carpi vine. You boil it up and then boil it down till it's thick and syrupy. And when you drink that, then you, you get the, the kind of the. The magnificent visions. And he even pocketed samples of this secret leaf and sent it to Richard Schultes. Richard Schultes ignored it because it came from some American writer. He didn't think it was that important. Then, like a decade or a couple of decades later, Richard Schultes student Homer Pinkley was working with this indigenous group. And again, he saw them using the carpi vine, the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis carpi, together with this other leaf. So the two components, they realized two. Kind of a binary decoction of two essential components. And Homer Pinkley identified it as Psychotria viridis chakruna. And when they analyzed this leaf psychotropy of viridis chakruna, they found lots of DMT rated T for teen. Each year, thousands of adults lose their shred. It's an epidemic simply known as shred loss. But it doesn't have to be this way, because rekindling your shred is as easy as playing the new Tony hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4. With new parks, cross platform multiplayer and sick new game modes, we can put an end to shred loss everywhere. Hit the new Tony hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 and show the world.
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- [142:36]
Andrew Gallimore
So that was kind of the breakthrough, which is always. Homer Pinkley is always given the credit here, but actually it was Burroughs, because Schultes went back to the letter that Burrows had sent him with the sample of the leaves, and he realized that Burroughs had, in fact, sent him the correct leaf. It was Psychotria viridis. So Burroughs, actually. William Burrows, author of Naked Lunch, is actually should be credited as being the kind of the. The person who made that breakthrough in understanding how. How the. The. The. The key psychoactive component of ayahuasca that should be giving credit, really, to William Burroughs. He didn't name the plant, of course. He didn't know how to do that.
- [143:15]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [143:15]
Andrew Gallimore
But he identified it. But then, of course, there was still kind of a mystery, because by that point, Stephen Zara had shown that if you swallow dmt, which he'd done at first, nothing will happen, right? So the idea that this was the primary psychoactive component of a visionary drink didn't make any sense. And then there was the carpy vine. You know, what. What was that for? Why was that in the mix? No one had any clue until Dennis McKenna, really Terence's brother. I mean, he was really one of the. The key figures in working this out, because by that point, people started to understand that. That the carpi vine contains these harmala alkaloids. Harmine and harmaline. And it was kind of worked out that these harmala alkaloids, they're inhibitors of this monoamine oxidase enzyme, which is found in your gut and throughout your body. And it was also then beginning to kind of be understood that DMT is broken down very well, rapidly by this monoamine oxidase enzyme. So when you swallow dmt, it's very rapidly broken down, never gets to the brain, right? But so the hypothesis at that point was when you add the harmala alkaloids from the ayahuasca vine, it inhibits it. So you have here a true pharmacological technology. This wasn't just a mixture of plants. This was a technology employing pharmacological synergy. You have the inhibitor of the monoamine oxidase and you have the DMT only when you Take them together. Do you get the effect? This is called the ayahuasca effect. Now, and Dennis McKenna worked on this hypothesis. And Dennis McKenna received samples of ayahuasca and he showed that you could take samples of the ayahuasca brew and it would inhibit this enzyme, showing that the, the ayahuasca brew contained, you know, sufficient harmala alkaloids to inhibit the mono, monoamine oxidase in your gut, which allowed the psychedelic drug to take effect. Yeah, so. So from the very beginnings, you, you, this is why I always talk about DMT as being a technology, because very from the very beginning, humanity has developed technologies. And ayahuasca is a technology. Yeah, to as tools. Technologies as tools that allow you to interact with normally unseen hidden intelligences. And that's what these spirits of the forest, the Hecuda, the Nadi, these are intelligences that you normally can't see, the hidden ones. And they develop these tools, these technologies to make them visible. It's like a visual practice prosthesis that allowed them to see these intelligences. And then when we kind of move the, the dial forward into the, the 20th century, you know, we, we learned how to isolate DMT and we learned how to use it, pure dmt, first by injecting it intramuscularly, then by vaporizing it. Nick sand, very famous LSD chemist who also was a DMT manufacturer, etc, he discovered one day he was being particularly careless in his lab and some crystals of DMT fell on a hot plate and it, like a puff of white smoke or white vapor, should I say. And he thought, well, can't we just smoke this stuff? Because everyone had been injecting it. Yeah, to this point, intramuscularly as well, which is kind of a very erratic and drawn out experience. And so Nick sand realized, oh, we can, we can vaporize this. And then in the 1990s, Rick Strassman says, well, vaporizing it, it's a bit messy, it's hard to measure doses, it stinks, it's irritating to the lungs. So I'm going to inject it not into the muscles, but intravenously directly into the bloodstream.
- [147:21]
Kristen Bell
Didn't Dennis or didn't Terence give him that idea? Oh, no. Terrence gave him the idea to get government funding for the study.
- [147:27]
Andrew Gallimore
Yes. So the Terrence McKenna. Yeah. So Terrence McKenna was. So this was after Rick Strassman. He was still a young psychiatrist and he was interested in melatonin at first, but. Right, interest. Then he went to this conference where he met Terrence McKenna and and, and he was talking about DMT. Rick Strassan was in his talk, and Terence McKenna came afterwards and says, you're talking a lot about DMT, but have you ever tried it? That's bad. Terrence McKenna, but you get the point. And Rick said no. So, terr. Terence kind of sent Rick to the big house at Esalen. This was Esalen. And then Terence kind of went away and found someone who had DMT and brought it back. And that was Rick Strassman's first DMT experience. And that was the kind of, the genesis, if you like, of his long bureaucratic process that led to him being given permission to do this, the largest study of its kind in human volunteers.
- [148:22]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, they tricked the government.
- [148:24]
Andrew Gallimore
Government, exactly.
- [148:25]
Kristen Bell
Smart.
- [148:26]
Andrew Gallimore
And so, so I, you can kind of see this thread of going back perhaps thousands of years of humanity discovering DMT or discovering how to use dmt, even when they didn't know that they were working with DMT and developing technologies kind of to how best to use it. You know, how do we, how do we develop this as a technology? Is vaporizing it the culmination, the pinnacle of DMT administration technologies? Of course not. Is it intravenous injection? Maybe not. And then this finally leads. Well, not finally, because I'll talk about the future as well. And what we're working on now, but leads to dmtx, Right? You have this very short acting experience which is very intense, but only lasts a few minutes. And what DMTX does, extend, extended state DMT is, allows you, as we were saying right at the beginning, to extend this. I see that as just simply the next iteration of, of humans learning to use and develop DMT as a technology. And the technology, the word technology is important because if you just think of it as a drug, then it doesn't really capture what DMT is doing.
- [149:39]
Kristen Bell
Sure.
- [149:39]
Andrew Gallimore
If you take seriously the idea that it allows you to communicate with some kind of, of normally hidden, unseen, discarnate, intelligent agent, that feels more like a molecular communication technology than a drug to me. And once you shift your mindset in that way from drug, psychedelic drug to technology, then you start to think, well, what's the best way to use this technology? And dmtx, as I said, I think, is just the next iteration. But we can, I think we can, we can go further than that. Right. So we know since the 1950s, psychiatrists and physicians and pharmacologists have been drawing blood from people and collecting pee samples and finding DMT in humans, but no one really knows what it does, there are hypotheses, but no one's 100 clear why it's in the human body. But at least we know that the human body can produce, manufacture DMT and at significant quantities. All the machinery is there. So, so I was just towards the end of writing Death by Astonishment, getting to the very final chapter and I was thinking about the future. You know, what does using the DMT technology look like in 10, 20 years? Are we still hooking people up to infusion machines and pumping them with DMT over long periods, or can we somehow hack the brain's endogenous DMT system? So we, we move away from the, the plant world, you know, which was going on for thousands of years. We move away from laboratory synthesized DMT and we, we finally reach the stage where we're actually using our own DMT production laboratory in our own brains. So rather than injecting someone with dmt, you would, simply by understanding the regulatory mechanisms that control DMT production in the human brain, we might be able to actually stimulate the production of DMT and induce people into the DMT state without giving them any dmt.
- [151:44]
Kristen Bell
I wonder if there is like some specific music you could play that could like vibrate our atoms into creating, pumping out more dmt. How cool would that be?
- [151:53]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, that's one idea. I'm not sure it would work. You'd need to flesh that out a bit for me.
- [151:58]
Kristen Bell
But Greeks, the ancient Greeks used music for medicine and they used it for rituals. And a lot of people think that music in ancient times, in antiquity wasn't even recreational. They thought that it was purely medicinal and for attaining transcendent, transcendent experiences for religious rights and medicine.
- [152:21]
Andrew Gallimore
I mean, I think music predates language.
- [152:25]
Kristen Bell
Yes.
- [152:26]
Andrew Gallimore
And early language would have been singing, making noises to them to generate music. And that eventually we worked out, I guess, that you can generate more, you can make, you can make money from it. Yeah, and that's where we are now. But alternatively, if the music thing doesn't pan out, you can. We know now that, well, way back, so 50 years ago, there was a study that's been forgotten about that showed that in mammalian brain, in rabbit brain first of all, but also in human cerebrospinal fluid, there is this peptide that we all have that inhibits an enzyme called indolethyl, indolethylamine N methyltransferase, which is the key enzyme that produces DNA dmt. So it converts tryptamine to dmt. Oh, right. So. So DMT is manufactured in the body from tryptophan which is an amino acid, so tryptophan is decarboxylated. That's a very simple process. You remove the carbon dioxide molecule and you get tryptamine. Then you add two methyl groups, two ch, three groups. That gives you dmt, very easy to make. And we all have this enzyme, indolethylamine N methyl tract transferase INMT in us. It's in basically everywhere in the body, in all cells, basically. So what they discovered in, I think 1976, that we all have a peptide that binds to indole, inmt, and basically puts the brakes on DMT production. So it keeps DMT production at a very low level. It inhibits this key enzyme for DMT production. And so this was this peptide inhibitor of inmt. It was isolated and we have a kind of a basic, broad, rough molecular mass of it, but that's it. They didn't do any further characterization. I mean, this is a long time ago, so it wasn't so easy then to do that kind of thing. But then the paper was basically forgotten about. It's been cited four times in 50 years. So it's gone a couple of years later. There was one that found a similar peptide in humans, 3 by cebrospinal fluid. That's been cited once in 50 years. So people basically forgot about this. So I kind of uncovered this, stumbled across this paper and thought, well, let's. Let's isolate this peptide. Let's actually characterize it, let's determine its actual structure, its actual peptide sequence, how this peptide actually works, how it's integrated with, with other regulatory mechanisms in the human body. Then perhaps we can, once we understand how this peptide works and how the regulatory system for DMT works, then we've got an in for hacking this system.
- [155:21]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [155:22]
Andrew Gallimore
So we've actually recruited, I, or say contracted so myself and new Nortics, this nonprofit out of Florida, who I've been working with for a number of years. We, we approached the University of Florida, a very prominent pharmacologist and peptide chemist called Chris McCurdy and said, we'd like to isolate this peptide. We want to understand it, how it works, want to understand how DMT is regulated in humans. And, and we're basically, you know, he developed, developed this research project with his team research plan. And we are. This is happening. It's kind of being initiated now. Unfortunately, these things are expensive. So we are still seeking people if they want to help fund this. I mean, it's like $400,000. So it's not pocket change for this initial stage of the project. So if anyone is interested, go to newnautics.org n/n a u t I c s.org and they can, they can help out. But we hope that, you know, by the end of, you know, next year or something, we will understand a lot more about how DMT is regulated.
- [156:37]
Kristen Bell
So what would be the ideal way in your mind to inhibit this inhibitor?
- [156:43]
Andrew Gallimore
It's a good question. So until we know, I mean, there's two broad possibilities when we isolate and characterize this, this peptide. One is it could be. Be a known peptide. So it's a peptide. There's many, many endogenous peptides, small, relatively small peptides, endorphins, for example. Right. These are peptide insulin. This is a peptide. So if it's one we know, then that's good news in a way because we probably know about how the regulatory system works. So we might be able to. Whether we inhibit that peptide directly and stop it working, or whether we can get into the system. System and actually stop the, the peptide being produced, you know, temporarily so that it kind of frees up the INMT to begin churning out more dmt. That would be one approach. The alternative is that it's completely novel peptide that no one's seen before, we don't know about. That's interesting and good news for entirely different reasons because you've, you found something completely new, which would be really cool. But at the same time, we, we'd know basically nothing about it. So we wouldn't know how it's, how it, how it plugs into other regulatory systems in the body and in the, in the brain. So that would maybe require more work to think about. How do we.
- [158:00]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, that's, that's interesting. If you could hack that without having to take a drug. Right. You would have to take a drug, wouldn't you, to, to inhibit that. Well, so it's like, it's like just adding another step between, between.
- [158:11]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I mean, there are a number of approaches you could take. I mean, it could be that you, you inject a small peptide that, that, that might interact directly with this inhibitory peptide or it might enter. It could even work at the genetic level where you're switching off the gene that produces this peptide.
- [158:28]
Kristen Bell
Yes.
- [158:28]
Andrew Gallimore
That could be much longer lasting and this might last for days, weeks or even months. I mean, this is serious business.
- [158:35]
Kristen Bell
Are there legal hoops you got to jump through to do something like this? Because it's like the funny thing about DMT, which Terence McKenna points out, is everyone's carrying, right?
- [158:44]
Andrew Gallimore
Everyone's Carrying.
- [158:45]
Kristen Bell
So what if you have now like a different way to like hack your own body into creating a chemical that's already there?
- [158:51]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly.
- [158:52]
Kristen Bell
Is that illegal?
- [158:53]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly. And presumably not. Right, so yes, you obviously you bypass all of the legal difficulties you have with injecting someone with the Schedule 1T.R. Drug. Yeah, that's gone. And you are simply manipulating, using tools. And it could be genetic, it could be molecular. There are various possibilities. We don't, we don't, we don't know anything about this system yet. So we can't, we can just speculate on how we might work this and whether it would be a long lasting effect. You might have to inject them with something, but maybe once, and then it would last for days or weeks and then, you know, you'd have these, these individuals in a pod of some sort. All of their bodily needs would be taken care of and you know, feeding and waste management and they would basically spend significant portions of their, their lives ultimately. Right. Interacting with, interfacing with living amongst these intelligent beings from somewhere else. And they would forget probably that they were ever a human. Human. I mean that happens with dmt. I mean we'll talk about your experiences perhaps, but often with dmt, what happens, even with, you know, in two or three minutes you, you will lose any conception of what it ever meant to be a human and that, that part is gone. And you're, you're in that world now. You're a being, a conscious, intelligent being that exists within this other world. So you can imagine over days or weeks or months or whatever basically having an entirely new existence that would have, that would have been in your own mind. That's, that would be kind of all you've ever known. And so any conception of once having been a human would. Gone is gone and you become the alien in a sense, until you start, until, until you start to come back and then you kind of remember again and you integrate back into this reality.
- [160:47]
Kristen Bell
Yes, yes, That's a weird thing because that does ha. Like I remember the, the process of my, my conceptualization of my reality here in this world and like I saw it slowly dissolving, right? Like everything I'm tethered to and base reality like this, this room, this podcast where I spend a lot of time, my wife, my kids, my parents, everyone I know, work, money, all these concepts started to just distill and distill and distill and eventually just disintegrate into nothingness. And then all of a sudden you're just, your consciousness is completely untethered. From everything in the physical world. And your consciousness is shuttling through like light arteries and before you know it you kind of like slowly start to come back and you know, know it's been, you know, even just a couple, a couple days or weeks, you start to lose that sharp vivid memory of what it was, which is kind of sucks.
- [161:52]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [161:52]
Kristen Bell
Because I wish I could, I wish I could recall everything in detail as if it was happening again. But like, and even right afterwards it's like you're trying to explain a, a 600 bit experience in like a three bit way. Right. By using your, your language, your words can't don't do it justice.
- [162:16]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, you're like, you, you, you're using two dimensional drawings to describe a five dimensional experience or something and you can't do it. You can get shadows or projections of it, but you can never get to it.
- [162:28]
Kristen Bell
Right, Right. Yeah, exactly. And you know, not. So, so we have the entities, right, which you explained have been being since the guy in the 50s first talked about those entities. And then you have, which I think you talked about in your video. You made a long video response to Danny's laser experiment and you mentioned accounts or people explaining seeing similar codes with other drugs in the past. Right.
- [163:03]
Andrew Gallimore
With DMT in fact.
- [163:04]
Kristen Bell
With DMT in fact. Oh, okay.
- [163:05]
Andrew Gallimore
Very common.
- [163:07]
Kristen Bell
So when you, when you ex, so you, how do you explain the code? What the, is the code?
- [163:12]
Andrew Gallimore
Okay, let's get, we finally we get to the code.
- [163:14]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [163:14]
Andrew Gallimore
So I mean, first of all, I should say people think that myself and Danny have some kind of beef with each other.
- [163:20]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [163:20]
Andrew Gallimore
You know, and it's just, it's not there. Yeah, I mean I, I was in LA and I came directly to LA from Tokyo. He's. This guy Aaron is filming this documentary and we had a long like two hour conversation on, on film. We went out to dinner twice. It went to my friend Paul, our mutual friend Paul Hynek's house for dinner after filming. We had dinner. We get on perfectly well. We disagree, at least. I'm not convinced of his explanation for the, for this DMT laser code.
- [163:50]
Kristen Bell
Well, the only way to do it is to, you gotta try to see it. You got to try to look at the laser.
- [163:53]
Andrew Gallimore
But that's not, you see, that's the problem. It's not just about seeing it. I mean, okay, let's, let's kind of talk a little bit about the code. I mean I wrote this long article on, I, I did this video which was me kind of rambling, so it's not particularly coherent. I was just giving my thoughts. But I wrote a long article on substack also. Which people. Alien insect on drugs. So people can read that from a more coherent breakdown of what I'm thinking. But. So here's the thing, right? The basic idea that Danny is presenting is that you shine a laser on a wall under the influence of DMT and you can see code which he interprets as being a fundamental code that has a fundamental function in our reality. I mean, he takes it to be literal code that is existing there in the wall. He's seeing this code that extends beyond the surface of the wall.
- [164:52]
Kristen Bell
Now it's like the matrix of reality.
- [164:55]
Andrew Gallimore
It's the Matrix, right, And the word matrix is very important here.
- [164:58]
Kristen Bell
Well, it's two different things, Right. Like his conclusion is separate from the idea that you can actually, many people can see the same thing with the same elements in that environment under the influence of dmt.
- [165:10]
Andrew Gallimore
Okay, so here's the first. I mean, just broadly the issue I have with the whole idea is that I don't see why, if our reality was being, let's say, simulated and there was some fundamental code, why it would take the form of something that obviously looks like code. Letters, characters, digits. This is how we imagine a code. But that's code written for humans. Computers don't, don't read letters and symbols, right? That it's all, it's all on and off switches. Right? That's basically what the code is doing. It's a way for humans to. It's like a, it's like an intermediary between the human and the computer is this written code of characters and digits. So if you were actually seeing what the, the computer was using, what Keith was running, you wouldn't even see ones and zeros. You'd see kind of electrical pulses switching, right?
- [166:10]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [166:10]
Andrew Gallimore
So the idea that you're seeing some fundamental code of reality and it looks like human readable or at least human recognizable code doesn't really make any sense to me. I don't see why the code running our reality would look like that. Secondly, the idea that the code that's running our reality would actually be running through reality in this way. It doesn't make any sense. The code runs elsewhere and the output is our reality, but the code is being run, you know, in the same way that the code that's running a, an image on a screen. If you, if you kind of look, you know, if you're seeing the output of a computer game, if you look into the screen, you don't see code running through it, right? Of course not. The code is being run on the computer elsewhere. So that doesn't make sense to me. And also the idea, the unfortunate coincidence, shall we say, is that people describe Japanese katakana.
- [167:05]
Kristen Bell
I thought it was more like Sanskrit.
- [167:07]
Andrew Gallimore
You hear various. A bit like Katakana, a bit like Sanskrit, a bit like Hebrew, whatever. But still you're seeing very human characters. Yes, Human generated characters, which again, I don't see why that's the case. Place. Now, the katakana thing is important because the Matrix Digital Rain, that very famous green code that runs from the movie, was generated with katakana. Famously, the guy that designed that used his wife's cookbooks, which were. She was Japanese and he was just looking through and oh, that looks cool. So you know, Japanese katakana, it's has a long history in anime as well as being used. Use to. To generate code code, like imagery. Because it looks cool as well. So that's an unfortunate coincidence to me. Is that it? Like the Matrix movie, it's kind of running through reality, so. And then we get to the actual. The effect itself, which also has some unfortunate coincidences. If you see them as that. In that if you shine a red laser, like forget DMT for the moment. If you shine a red laser at a wall, the laser is coherent light.
- [168:24]
Kristen Bell
Speckle. You're talking about the speckle, right?
- [168:26]
Andrew Gallimore
Talking about speckle effect right now. Speckle effect. Yes. I know it's been kind of. It's easy to kind of say, oh, it's not speckle effect, but let's just analyze what the speckle effect actually is. Right.
- [168:37]
Kristen Bell
Okay.
- [168:37]
Andrew Gallimore
You've got red laser, it hits a wall, and as the light waves reflect off the wall, they kind of interfere with each other and you get specks of bright and. And dark. Right?
- [168:48]
Kristen Bell
Yes.
- [168:49]
Andrew Gallimore
And this creates a pattern on the retina. Right. That's what you're seeing. You're seeing this pattern on the retina, like a matrix of points of light on your retina. Now it has some interesting optical properties now because the laser is always in focus, even if you cross your eyes or try to focus behind the wall, the laser speckles. These points of light will always be perfectly sharp, even if the wall becomes blurry.
- [169:18]
Kristen Bell
Really?
- [169:18]
Andrew Gallimore
Yes, because the speckle effect is on the.
- [169:22]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [169:22]
Andrew Gallimore
It's coherent light. Yeah, it's coherent light that's hitting the retina. So it's not. It's. It's not. In a way, your eye isn't focusing or doesn't need to focus.
- [169:34]
Kristen Bell
Right. I seriously, right.
- [169:35]
Andrew Gallimore
It's just coherent light that's, that's forming this pattern on the retina. And what's cool about that is that when you cross your eyes, you work a little bit, you try to focus behind the pattern on the wall, your brain receives these very mixed signals. The depth cues are all wrong. Right. The speckle effect isn't becoming blurry, whereas the wall is. And your brain interprets that as, that the speckles are actually behind the wall or occupying space behind the wall. And that's what you see. So even without any dmt, you will see this matrix of points of light that, that seems to occupy three dimensional space behind the wall. Now when you add DMT to the mix, unfortunately, in my opinion for the whole model, is that, yes, you have these matrix of characters and geometric forms that seem to occupy space, extend beyond the wall. Now you have to accept that if you accept Danny's model here, you have to accept this is just a coincidence, this spec, this unusual effect of red lasers, and it's particularly prominent with red lasers as well because of the low frequency. You have to accept that these, this is just a coincidence that the speckle effect, this interference pattern on the retina has got nothing to do. It's just a sheer coincidence that red lasers happen to also produce this effect.
- [171:00]
Kristen Bell
Well, the first time I did it, I could only see the speckles and after focusing for about five minutes. And this was a little bit after the peak of the experience, right? Like it was probably six, seven, eight minutes after. And I saw the speckles and I had to really, really focus and I saw the speckles turned into gears and then all the gears, millions of them, just started like they were connected and just spinning.
- [171:23]
Andrew Gallimore
Right. So what's happening there? I'll tell you. I don't know why I asked. So what, what do you think's happening there?
- [171:33]
Kristen Bell
Why I would imagine that the speckles are, I mean, when you do dmt, it obviously changes your, does something to your visual cortex to where the stuff that you normally see is being altered. So if I'm looking at speckles, they're going to be animated or altered in some way. That, that is the way I would explain it away.
- [171:54]
Andrew Gallimore
Right? Right. So each of these speckles, these points of light, it's like a, your, your brain is seeing this very coherent and consistent pattern of points of light on, that come from the retina, from the laser ultimately. And this acts kind of like a sensory scaffold. These are the points of sensory data, like a pattern of, of these specks of light and they act as, like a scaffold around which imagery is created. Yes, right. And I would expect, you know, in retrospect, of course, but I would expect, or I'm not surprised that these speckles would take the form of, first of all, of geometric objects. Does it surprise me they would take the form of characters? Not really, because characters, very fine, detailed structures. Humans are very lexical species. We're very good, our brains are very good at generating characters. When you open a book and you read letters, your brain is constructing those letters, right? You're not just kind of seeing as such, your, your brain is, has to construct these letters, these certain shapes and patterns very, very quickly, Very, very quickly. Your brain is very good at it. So you, so your brain is kind of, of neurologically primed, right? Not by, just by expectation, but your brain is neurologically primed to generate patterns, small patterns that look like characters. You would expect that. So again, it's like I'm tra. What I'm trying to do is trying to find what, what, what are the aspects of this effect. I do think it's a fascinating effect. First of all, I think it's potentially really important discovery that Danny has made. I can't say that enough, but what I'm trying to find is what are the aspects of this phenomenon that distinguish it from DMT induced imagery? We know DMT can produce complex imagery. There's nothing surprising about seeing characters. There's nothing surprising about seeing small geometric forms, especially when you have this uniform form pattern of, of sensory input, points of light entering, entering the brain. So what is it about it that makes it different, that allows us to, to move to more exotic explanations? First of all, how do we rule out the speckle effect? I know Danny says, oh, you can still see the speckles. That doesn't convince me because DMT visions can be, once you kind of, once they are initiated, established, they can be very, very persistent in the presence of dmt. So what is it now? Danny offers some explanations and other people have mentioned things like object permanence or objectness. Right. Looks like an object. Again, it's not convincing because there's nothing ontologically special about a vision that appears out there in the world apparently, or one that occurs behind your eyes because the, the, your world is always being, constructing internally anyway. The fact that it's kind of mapped to and projected onto or is integrated into your world doesn't make it special. You know, when Someone is a psychotic and they're suffering from visual hallucinations and they see their dead grandmother walk into the room. The dead grandmother looks like solid, moves, moves like the grandmother used to move, obeys the laws of physics, sits on chairs, doesn't walk through chairs, you know, but it's still a hallucination, so we can't use that. The fact that it appears stable is not convincing either because again, you've got this very coherent and consistent pattern of sensory inputs coming from the laser. So what is it that's special about this effect?
- [175:54]
Kristen Bell
Effect?
- [175:54]
Andrew Gallimore
That's what I want to find. Everyone sees the same thing. Do they? Do they really? Do people see exactly the same characters at exactly the same time? Or is everyone just seeing geometric structures and characters which we interpret as code? I only see evidence for the latter. We have very little image, you know, drawings or sketches of this code. And when you do see it, it often looks like or is identical to Japanese katakana or other kind of characters. So how do we get from. This is a really cool effect that allows us to isolate a particular fragment or aspect of the broader visual phenomenology produced by dmt, which is the appearance of code, which again goes back. Many people describe code, you know, going back decades. And you know, Alison Gray, Alex Gray's wife, she, her, all of her art is devoted to this kind of secret language, as she calls it, that you see on dmt. So how do we, how do we distinguish this effect from just other types of DMT imagery? And, and I know, I know Danny is really trying, and I was kind of reassured when I was speaking to him in LA is that he is trying to rule out other possibilities. He is trying to test this idea, but it's so difficult. Court. Right. He had the magnet thing and, and.
- [177:21]
Kristen Bell
You know, in today's day and age, you see an unbelievable amount of confirmation bias happening all over the place. And what I like about the way Danny is doing it as it doesn't. I don't see that with him. I see him actually trying to stress test this and actually trying to come up with legitimate ways to, to prove it wrong. Yeah, I don't, I don't sense any sort of grift or anything like that with him. He seems very genuine.
- [177:44]
Andrew Gallimore
I agree. 100. I don't sense. He's always been very pleasant and kind and open. We've had very open and honest discussions and that's important. A lot of people just see it and they just latch onto his explanation.
- [178:01]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [178:01]
Andrew Gallimore
And they don't really Analyze and think about it more deeply, which is all I'm trying to do. It's all I'm trying to do. And, you know, he did this magna experiment where he said, if you, if you hold a magnet too.
- [178:14]
Kristen Bell
Oh, yeah, close.
- [178:15]
Andrew Gallimore
It scrambles the code. And he was able to do this. He said if he looked at the code and he held a magnet there that the code would be scrambled. Now, I'm not sure why this fundamental code of reality should be affected by a magnet, but anyway. And then he set up an experiment where he had this screen and there was, I think 20 boxes or something like that. And. And the person on the one side of the screen was completely hidden, would hold a magnet to one of the squares and person on the other side would try to find the square by seeing where the code is scrambled. It's a cool idea. It didn't work. You have to ask yourself, why didn't it work? So if it was working, when he could see the code and see the magnet and he knew he was doing it right, he could see the code being scrambled, why wasn't the code scrambled when he couldn't see it? Suggests there's a psychological effect going on here. Why he was expecting the code to be scrambled or something like that. The brain, he decided, or deeper levels of his brain had decided that, okay, the code is gonna, you know, he was seeing something. He was expecting to see maybe, which is why this experiment was important. But it didn't work. Why didn't it work? He said the magnet maybe isn't strong enough. Okay, maybe. But there were, you know, he, I told him before he did the experiment, you need a dummy magnet, first of all, because if you don't have a dummy magnet, then it's basically a telepathy experiment because the person behind the screen knows which square they're picking and the person here doesn't. So it, it doesn't have. Necessarily have anything to do with the dmt if they. Yeah, it's just them. It's like a guessing game.
- [179:52]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [179:53]
Andrew Gallimore
To pick a number between 1 and 20. So you need a dummy magnet. So neither they wouldn't know whether they're using the magnet or whether they're using the dummy magnet that was not magnetic. And then you could distinguish. He didn't do that. And the reason I think he didn't do that is because he was convinced, you know, from our, our messages, he was convinced it was going to be 100 accurate. This was such a strong effect that he was. Every time it'd be easy for the person to see which. Where the magnet was, because the code will obviously be scrambled. But it didn't work. And so, so I think I'm still struggling now. And he's got lots of ideas and, you know, I, I admire him for it in many ways, but I think the danger is when you, when you know. And he always describes this, knowing he's reached the stage now where he doesn't believe, but he knows that what he's seeing is fundamental code of reality. And I think the danger in that is, is that if some. Somebody does, you know, behind the scenes, without Danny's knowledge, get interested in this, if they see the movie coming out. Right. Lots of people are going to get interested in this. And of course, yes, they're going to be people who try it and are amazed by it and buy into it instantaneously. But then you've got people who go, I don't believe this and I'm going to prove that this is wrong.
- [181:13]
Kristen Bell
Exactly.
- [181:13]
Andrew Gallimore
And they're not going to call Danny and say, I want to work, work with you. They're going to work behind the scenes. Same thing happened with silo methoxin. Right. Do you remember silo methoxin? No, it's another story. You want to get into it very quickly.
- [181:24]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [181:25]
Andrew Gallimore
So there was this chemist called Gartz who was now known to be a fraud. Hamilton Morris did a great talk at Psychedelic Science in Denver about it. But anyway, he thought that if you. He showed in his, in his studies, which weren't real, it turns out, but if you feed a mushroom something like not dmt. So psilocin from mushrooms is DMT but with a hydroxyl group added on. There's an enzyme that puts this hydroxyl group, an OH group, on the ring. So it converts DMT to psilocin. Right. And then there's a phosphate group that makes it psilocybin. But anyway, you have this, this key enzyme, this hydroxylase enzyme that converts DMT to psilocin. So this guy Gartz thought, well, what if we feed the mushroom different tryptamines and will it still add this hydroxyl group? So can we create novel. We make them turn the mushroom into a factory for these novel tryptamines with this hydroxyl group in the same place as psilocin, but with a different tryptamine structure? Structure. And one option here, one possibility, is to take 5 methoxy DMT. So it's DMT with this methoxy group at the 5 position. The theory goes that if you feed it to the mushrooms, it adds the hydroxyl group at the 4 position and you get 4 hydroxy 5 methoxy DMT. Silomethoxin. A theoretical. Oh, molecule. Right, right. Cool, cool idea.
- [182:56]
Kristen Bell
Great idea.
- [182:56]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. Does it work? Well, well, this guy, I forget his name and I would probably don't want to mention his name because he might sue me. Seriously, he. Again, he. He was ex experienced with psychedelics and after years of meditation and stuff, it came to him in a vision or something like this, that this is what he needs to do, right. He needs to feed 5 Meo DMT to the mushrooms and they will create this psych halo methoxin molecule. So he tried it. He fed 5 Meo DMT to the mushrooms and he got this. The mushroom grew and then he started trying it on himself. And he had this experience which to him was completely unlike mushrooms, regular mushrooms. And so at that point he knew, he knew, Danny, that this, this was it. It worked. Yep. This mushroom, mushroom no longer contained psilocybin, it no longer contains psilocin, it contains silo methoxin. He called it the sacrament. And he started ship. He started. He had this subscription model. You'd pay a certain amount of money and every few months or whatever, they'd send you samples of this mushroom, which wasn't scheduled, wasn't an illegal drugs. There's no psilocybin in there. All this was in his head, of course. Right. And all these other people started taking it and they were paying him money, I think it was, it read, reached like $50,000 a month.
- [184:18]
Kristen Bell
How long ago is this?
- [184:20]
Andrew Gallimore
Recently.
- [184:20]
Kristen Bell
Oh, wow.
- [184:21]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. Our sacraments.
- [184:23]
Kristen Bell
This is the website.
- [184:24]
Andrew Gallimore
You got a website?
- [184:25]
Kristen Bell
Our Sacraments.
- [184:26]
Andrew Gallimore
Right. So he was selling this $2,000 a month.
- [184:30]
Kristen Bell
There's a 200.
- [184:31]
Andrew Gallimore
Can't be that 100, 200amonth, right now, now here's the point. He created this sacrament which he assumed he knew contained silenthop. But what's the first thing you do as a scientist? You think you've got a mushroom that contains this molecule, silo methoxin. What's the first simple thing you do? Obvious thing you do. You send it to a chemist, get them to analyze it, say, can you actually detect silo methoxin in this mushroom? He didn't do that because he knew. Right, sorry. Yes, but he knew that he. It was a success, that he'd found the sacrament, of course. And then behind the scenes, somebody received a sample of the mushrooms. A company called Usona.
- [185:18]
Kristen Bell
Oh, God, don't say that. Name?
- [185:19]
Andrew Gallimore
No, I won't say that name. You can. You can scramble that. This company, this unnamed chemical company, they. They received samples and they did a very simple analysis. This isn't. This isn't rockets science, Danny. Right. This is extracting a mushroom and analyze. Doing a GC Ms. Or something. No silomethoxin in there at all. Lots of silicon.
- [185:45]
Kristen Bell
They. They did this study on it. They analyzed it.
- [185:48]
Andrew Gallimore
This chemical company. Yeah. Behind that. Not the church of silomethoxin. They weren't. They didn't bother doing that.
- [185:53]
Kristen Bell
Right, right, right.
- [185:54]
Andrew Gallimore
But this other chemical company in the background quietly wanted to prove these guys were on wrong. Analyzed the mushrooms, didn't find any salamothoxin. Published a paper.
- [186:03]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [186:04]
Andrew Gallimore
And instantaneously, the whole facade collapsed overnight. Yeah, right. Subscriptions, obviously. People, why AM I spending 200amonth buying, you know, 50 grams of this powdered mushroom or whatever, or maybe even less than that, I don't know. And so, like, what do they do? It's all over, really. And they started suing people. Anyone who had publicly discredited the church, they started suing them. $1 million was the total lawsuit, which was thrown out. Yeah.
- [186:40]
Kristen Bell
Oh, wait, so they're actually a church?
- [186:42]
Andrew Gallimore
That's what they called themselves.
- [186:44]
Kristen Bell
But did they get the exemption?
- [186:45]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh, I have no idea. That kind of stuff. But so instead of selling a unscheduled old mushroom containing silomethoxin, they were selling a Schedule 1 drug.
- [186:54]
Kristen Bell
Oh, Jesus Christ.
- [186:55]
Andrew Gallimore
And shipping it around the world as well. You didn't. It wasn't just the US So people can imagine. Imagine ordering it from Singapore.
- [187:03]
Kristen Bell
People are vulnerable, man. People are so easily scammed. It's crazy, right?
- [187:09]
Andrew Gallimore
But it was such an thing is. Is that it wasn't difficult to eliminate. They could easily have done the property due diligence and analyze their mushrooms and they would have found it doesn't count. Salimathoxin. So then they go on the defensive and they say, oh, you used methanol in the extraction. You should have used water. Just any chemist would know is nonsense. And then they. They published an announcement on their website. This was a few months afterwards. They have found silomethoxin in the mushroom. And they published this mass spec. Mass spectrogram showing this little peak of the molecular mass of silo methoxin, which I didn't believe was real. So I. I kind of had a bit of an exchange on Reddit with one of the guys who was doing the analysis, and he described the data that he was getting.
- [187:58]
Kristen Bell
Great place to have an exchange.
- [187:59]
Andrew Gallimore
It was, yeah, my favorite, my favorite place. Read it. And he was, he described the day.
- [188:05]
Kristen Bell
Very mental, mentally stable folks.
- [188:06]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh yeah, absolutely. This is where I go when I want some rap. Rational, rational, you know, cogent debate. Anyway, I had this brief exchange and he basically told me the data. He told me how many molecules they were detecting in the mass spectrometer, just to give me an idea of the amount of silomethoxin they were detecting by mass spectrometry. And I did a back of the envelope calculation I think I worked out. You need, you'd need like 2 tons, 2 metric tons of dried mushroom to get, get a single dose of silo methoxin. So what if it was there? It was. It, it was, it was, it was so such a small amount that it was irrelevant.
- [188:44]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [188:44]
Andrew Gallimore
And unfortunately, again, they didn't realize because they're stupid. I shouldn't say that, but whatever, they're stupid. Silomethoxin has the same, exactly the same molecular mass as the n oxide of 5 methoxy DMT. So when 5 methoxy DMT is exposed to the air, it starts to oxidize and it forms this N oxide. Yeah. Basically you add an oxygen to the nitrogen. Yeah. And this has exactly the same mass, silomethoxin. And you can't tell just by looking at the mass spectrogram whether they've got silomethoxin or 5 Meo. DMT has just become oxidized. What's more likely, obviously oxidation. So it's highly likely in my opinion, or I would bet my, my bottom dollar, as they used to say on this, that this is. There's nothing in that. It's. It's magic mushrooms. It's psilocybin mushrooms that contain psilocybin and psilocin and maybe a little bit of oxidized tiny, tiny, tiny irrelevant few molecules of the oxidized form of 5 MeO DMT. It's. In other words, the whole thing just was a fantasy. Now I'm not saying bring it back to the code of reality thing. I'm not saying that that's the case here. Danny is not stupid. He's smart. He's. He's really thought this, this thing through. But there's always the danger if you don't do your groundwork first and eliminate. You have to really. Even if you don't think that this speckle effect has anything to do with it, even if you're convinced, you've got to do the groundwork to eliminate all of these more Mundane alternative hypotheses. And that takes time, it takes money. Then you get to the more far out explanations. Whereas it feel, feels to me a little bit like Danny's kind of taking the elevator to the penthouse suite. And obviously I'm not going to do that and I get some criticism for it but, but that's how I work. You know, I spent most of my, most of the time what I'm doing with DMT certainly in the last two decades is, is analyzing more orthodox, more mainstream, more mundane explanations and then ruling them out and only then do I get to the more far out explanations. And I think that's really important that Danny does that and I did get the sense that he was trying to do that. But he's got to get the right people. The explanation experiment's got to be properly designed and that kind of thing. And it's going to be a long process.
- [191:13]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [191:14]
Andrew Gallimore
So yeah, I think it's not going to be the last we hear about the code of reality. But I'm just, I'm far from convinced there's too many unfortunate coincidences and similarities between, you know, the optical effects of lasers and just the whole idea doesn't make much sense.
- [191:32]
Kristen Bell
Well, the idea of introducing different kinds of things into these experience is really, is a, is a, I think, is a good idea. And I would be curious to see like if you could do something within DMTX where people are on extended state DMT's extended state DMT and introduce new elements into their environment, new physical elements like a laser, something else. Figure out some different, different things to introduce to them to see how it affects them and to see what changes and to see how that correlates across different people. See if there's any kind of consensus or whatever without, you know what I mean? Just like just throwing, throwing at the wall and, and seeing if there is any kind of consensus between these folks that are on extended state dmt. I think that's an interesting idea and would be an interesting experiment. You know, I don't know what you can prove by it or what kind of conclusions you could jump to from that.
- [192:24]
Andrew Gallimore
But yeah, I mean, I think you're right and I think it's some, it's a cool idea. Right. So, so maybe you can, rather than having to stare at this little laser beam if you understand what is it about this pattern that's being generated by the laser, what is it about what are the optical properties here that are important in generating this effect and then can we create a screen? So rather than Looking at this, you could create a screen that replicates the precise optical phenomena. The particular pattern, maybe a pattern of speckles on a screen or something that mimics the pattern you see in that little patch of laser and then have someone stare at that. So you, so rather than just being a small patch of light, you actually can, you have a whole, you know, wide screen where you can stare at.
- [193:08]
Kristen Bell
Right.
- [193:09]
Andrew Gallimore
That would be cool. And it's, it's something I'd never thought about is, is, is introducing certain patterns of external visual sensory inputs and seeing if you can scaffold, as I said before, the, the, the visual phenomenology to that.
- [193:23]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. Or even mess with your own visual. Like, you know those magic eye things where you look at the patterns, they look like nothing and then you kind of like can adjust your focus and you can see things in there.
- [193:32]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly.
- [193:33]
Kristen Bell
Do like that while you're on DMT with lasers or with lights, with.
- [193:36]
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly.
- [193:37]
Kristen Bell
With anything and see how that, how that affects it.
- [193:39]
Andrew Gallimore
Because, you know, DMT is, it's an extremely varied visual phenomenology. And the idea that we can, can isolate one particular aspect that's commonly reported, you know, code and reliably induce it using a certain pattern of external visual input. That's a really cool idea. And, and, and he needs to be given credit for discovering that because that's really cool on its own is an important discovery and could, could pave the way for some really interesting experiments that would help us analyze and understand the DMT space. But going from that to this is the code running reality. I'm just not, I'm not ready to go there, I'm afraid.
- [194:24]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. You know, also, like, there's a lot of experiments that you could do that I'd be really interested to learn about that are just. You, you can't do that. Are just, you know, inhumane, like, such as, like you can't. Like. I would be interested to see how DMT affects children.
- [194:44]
Andrew Gallimore
That would be cool. Now that's. Yeah.
- [194:46]
Kristen Bell
You obviously can't give kids dmt. That's up. But like, I wonder what would happen. You know, just like a, someone who's unconditioned that, that's not, hasn't experienced the world. Right. And is not conditioned into society yet to see how that would affect their, their, their brain.
- [195:03]
Andrew Gallimore
I mean, going back to. I was talking about dreams earlier and how children's brains aren't very good at simulating the waking world when they're very, very young. And so if you, if you gave a child you have children, right?
- [195:15]
Kristen Bell
Yeah.
- [195:16]
Andrew Gallimore
How old?
- [195:19]
Kristen Bell
Two weeks, three years and six years.
- [195:21]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh, two weeks.
- [195:22]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. Or not two, two months. I'm sorry, A two month old. I have a bad perception of time. I have a two month old, a three year old and a six year.
- [195:28]
Andrew Gallimore
Old, a three year old.
- [195:29]
Kristen Bell
So he or she, the older ones are boys.
- [195:33]
Andrew Gallimore
Okay. Okay. So we can use them, right?
- [195:35]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, we can use them.
- [195:36]
Andrew Gallimore
We can use them. So we inject your children.
- [195:39]
Kristen Bell
But I don't know if it'd be worth it.
- [195:41]
Andrew Gallimore
But if we injected your children or anyone's children with, with DMT and they started seeing these highly coherent crystalline worlds that had no relationship to, you know, just like an adult does, that would be, that would add to the, the conclusion that DMT was doing something quite remarkable here. You know, how would a children, children, a child's brain be able, I mean it's hard enough to explain how an adult brain can construct these entirely disjoint hyper complex hyper dimensional realities. If a child's brain could do it, I mean obviously how they communicate, that might be very difficult.
- [196:15]
Kristen Bell
It might be rudimentary, right?
- [196:17]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, yeah, but, but yeah, it's not going to happen unfortunately.
- [196:20]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. Unless we can find a way to like similar. If we could find a way to, to, to have an, a visual of somebody, what somebody is seeing. You know, like maybe we can figure out a way to tap into somebody's visual cortex and put it on a screen to see exactly what their brain is showing them in their mind. I think we're a long super crazy out there like sci fi PK dick type idea. But like if we could do that that would be incredible.
- [196:45]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I think if you, if you did it with a visual cortex you just get a messy pattern because that's what you, that's all the visual cortex is. Right. So you'd have to, you'd have to connect it to, and understand how that was being integrated at all the higher levels of the cortex as well, which is an unsolved problem. But yeah, ultimately in the future perhaps the idea of having readouts of the visual phenomenology in real time would be incredible. But I don't see it happening anytime soon. Even with LLMs.
- [197:16]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's just there's, there's, there's too many conflicts and, and human beings, beings unfortunately are too focused on careers and money and influence and when you give people people, they gamify everything like every single thing there is. Whether like, if you have like people that are obsessed with UFOs you have this whole UFO community and it's just infested with, with grifters and people trying to monetize everything thing. And then that gets, the reality gets lost in that. Which is good for the people that have the real secrets that have the answers to this stuff because it just confuses people. And it's the same thing I just have recently learned when I had Travis Kitchens on here. I don't know if you know Travis. He does. He's a journalist who's been studying all this stuff. He was a part of a John Hopkins research group, a psychedelic study. And you know, it just seems like there's all these competing groups that are trying to use psychedelics to their benefit. It, no matter what it is, whether it's like religion or it's like government type stuff or it's pharmaceutical companies, people are trying to figure out how to use this to push forward whatever they're doing.
- [198:27]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah.
- [198:28]
Kristen Bell
You know what I mean? And you know, unfortunately you can't get. It's. It makes it harder to get to the truth. And on top of that, I had a crazy misconception before I got understood this world that psychedelics made people like better people. You know, it just, it makes us more humble, it makes us more enlightened, it makes us more, you know, meditative truth seekers. And I realized that that is couldn't be farther from the truth. A lot of people get. They. I think what it does is it turns you into more of what you already are and that can be good or bad. And what Rick Strassman was explaining to me is that there's a, like, from what he's experienced is he's seen a lot of people develop this sort of like messianic complex to where like they have the answers because they've done so many psychedelics.
- [199:19]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh yeah.
- [199:19]
Kristen Bell
And they are on the true path to enlightenment and you should follow them.
- [199:23]
Andrew Gallimore
Oh yeah, that's. I mean there's this weird phenomenon which myself and my friends have noticed over the last, you know, decades, which is this, this, this paradox of these ego dissolving drugs, which is what psychedelics did. And then when it comes back, it's, it's, it's much bigger. Massive egos. And there's many examples of this, sometimes quite tragic. There was a guy called Cantelmo. Rick can telmo. I think Chris can tellmo. He was, I mean we, we had some rather unpleasant exchanges. I mean he, he's sadly. I mean he passed away. Well, he committed suicide. But he was convinced that he had all the, he was used a lot of dmt. He developed this religion called Can Tell Moism based upon, based around his perceived revelations regarding reality and DMT and all that kind of stuff. And he was always going about his Yale degree. Whenever you talk with. I've got a degree from Yale that's beats your Cambridge degree into you know, whatever, etc stuff, right? Yeah, just nonsense. Very aggressive and, and you know, I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but clearly had serious psychological problems that weren't improved by smoking lots of dmt. The idea that you're guaranteed to, to enter perfect mental health because you use a lot of dmt, it's not guaranteed at all. And, and, and it, it can end up in really bad places.
- [200:53]
Kristen Bell
Yeah. Another thing that Travis was pointing out to me was there was this, there's this study, this John Hopkins study that never got, I think it just actually finally got released which was a, it was a study of religious professionals where they gave people of different religious, different, like religious backgrounds. Like leaders of certain churches, like they had a Muslim guy, a Christian, Jewish, a Hindu person, all take psilocybin, I believe it was. And they had them all report their experiences because their, their goal was to see if there was any kind of common thread, right. And like if it reinforced their, if their, for their religious views or beliefs influenced what they were experiencing on psychedelics. And I guess the theory was to see if there was any kind of like, like perennialism or like a common core to all religions.
- [201:46]
Andrew Gallimore
Got it.
- [201:48]
Kristen Bell
And you know, you can see how a religion would want to use. Travis was, was pointing out how there is a movement to sort of use psychedelics to strengthen or revive Christianity in the United States. Like if, like because if you can use, bring people into a church, do a sermon and give people psychedelics, that's going to make them believe more, be more emboldened because they're gonna, they're gonna. First of all, these people are probably vulnerable to some degree and, and now they're having a psychedelic experience while they're going to church and, and there's music playing. So it's going to be more of a spiritual transcendent experience. But now you're giving, the problem with that is you're giving the church fathers access to these drugs and who knows what they're going to do. Like, like imagine the amount of control you can have over these people if they're already believing that you are the voice, you have the direct line to God. Right. And now they're under the influence of psychedelics yeah. That could spiral out of control.
- [203:03]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I mean increasing, increased suggestibility. I mean this is why the whole MK Ultra thing.
- [203:11]
Kristen Bell
Yes.
- [203:11]
Andrew Gallimore
That was all about how do you make someone. How can you generate a neurological state where someone is highly susceptible to being manipulated? Whether it's to reveal their deepest darkest secrets or, or you know, military secrets or whatever, you know, truth drugs or can you make someone to be a super soldier I think is the term you used earlier. This is, it's an obvious target for, should we say, the shadowy aspects of those in power. And I expect, you know, MKULTRA was dissolved, evolved of course, but yes, I saw the eyebrows rise there. Sure. There's almost certainly things going on that we have no idea about and with, with molecules of the potency of something like lsd, you can imagine, I mean they, they had you know, whole proposals about let's putting in, into the water supply of an enemy enemy's cities and basically render the, the populace unwilling or unable to defend themselves. Now you could probably do that with viruses and things like that and introduce those or.
- [204:32]
Kristen Bell
Well, there was that P.K. dick novel right where I forget what it was called, but there was like a drug that they were trying to get a hold of to like control the world or something like that, like intergalactic drug like the Pentagon has been. And this was what Annie Jacobson talked about in her, in her book the Pentagon's Brain. Like they have so much goddamn money that they invite sci fi writers to the Pentagon to talk about their, their sci fi ideas. Like the writer of Terminator, they invited there an alien and like they, they have, their money is limitless and they're exploring science fiction to figure out what they can make reality.
- [205:11]
Andrew Gallimore
Right.
- [205:12]
Kristen Bell
You know, so like if you were that person and you were in charge of trying to come up with the, come up with the most groundbreaking mind bending, fantastical concept to empower your nation to be the number one nation. Of course you would use psychedelics and you would, you would go to writings like P.K. dick's novels and figure out this is interesting. Let's throw, throw a couple million dollars at it and see if we can make this a reality.
- [205:42]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I remember, remember Alex Jones a few years ago? Now he's talking about the, I don't know, the CIA or something using DMT to. He called them the Clockwork Elves. Remember that? And he was saying that he had heard from his secret sources.
- [205:59]
Kristen Bell
Oh yeah. That they were channeling demons or something.
- [206:01]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were in, they were in, in collaboration or in cahoots with these Clockwork Owls. They were using DMT to maintain communication with them or something. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, how much of that is a product of his imagination? I'm not sure, but sure. I mean I take seriously, it's no secret that I take seriously the idea that when that DMT allows you to interact with some kind of intelligent agent, and if I take that seriously, and I'm not totally nuts, then you can bet your other bottom dollar that there are going to be agents or elements within the powers that be within the government, the shadow government or the Hidden Hand or whatever you want to call it, that that would also have thought of that and that would also be developing. Maybe DMTX is being used by these elements of the government and they are running. Maybe they've been using something similar for decades. Maybe they are. They have learned how to establish stable two way communication with these, with these intelligences. Maybe they know a lot more about them than you are. I. Because we can only imagine.
- [207:11]
Kristen Bell
Wild Andrew, thank you. This has been a fantastic. We just had like four hours.
- [207:16]
Andrew Gallimore
We should. Before we go.
- [207:20]
Kristen Bell
Yeah, you want me to go grab the dmt?
- [207:22]
Andrew Gallimore
No, no, no, no, no, no. However, the DMTX thing I should just mention. Yes, right, that. So DMTX until now has always been a kind of the purview of research institutions. It's not kind of publicly available, but we are developing, we've got a special license from a government in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines to use basically all drugs and we're building out a research center, stroke retreat center where we people will be able to come to the Caribbean in a five star environment, spend several days in preparation, integration and experience DMTX in a, like a, a perfect setting.
- [208:09]
Kristen Bell
Wow.
- [208:09]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. So people can go to New Nordics again, newnautics.org and they can, they can actually put their name down. There we go, the next frontier.
- [208:18]
Kristen Bell
That's it.
- [208:19]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. And they can sign up, put their name down. I mean it's still a working progress. So this is, don't expect you, you know, an invite to come in the next few days or anything like that, but express your interest. We will be looking for research volunteers as well as people who just want to come and experience, you know, what's it like to spend 90 minutes within the DMT space, you know, stably stabilized within the DMT space, you know, a series of, might be a series of sessions starting from low doses and building up to, you know, very long extended breakthrough doses.
- [208:55]
Kristen Bell
What's the mo. What's the most amount of sessions that you've seen somebody do in one day?
- [209:00]
Andrew Gallimore
Well, I mean the Imperial College study, it was, they did one session separate and then, then another session. I think it was like a week or two weeks later. So they did five sessions but separated out. Nobody should in my, you know, opinion should be doing multiple 30 minute sessions in a day. I mean.
- [209:19]
Kristen Bell
Oh really?
- [209:20]
Andrew Gallimore
I think that would be a bit much. But yeah, I mean Carl Smith who's on the, on the board of directors together with myself and, and three others, he was the only person. He was subject zero. He's a really cool guy, one of the most experienced psychonauts I know and he was the only one to actually get through out of the 11 or 12 subjects to get through all five sessions of kind of breakthrough 30 minute sessions. Yeah. And, and they, the entities, what's kind of interesting is that the entities, he, he saw the same entities every time he came back and they started to recognize that he was coming back and they were like, you know, not you again again. You know, you're back again. And, and at one, during one of the sessions he was being scanned. He had, he was in an MRI machine or whatever it was and obviously that was scanning his brain. And the entities seem confused, he said because then normally the ones doing the scanning, they're the ones that are probing and measuring and they were confused why this team in Imperial were doing this scanning. So just a little taste of the kind of really cool things, things that, that didn't happen with this extended state technology. So yeah. Newnautics.org people can go to the retreat center is called Elusis.
- [210:32]
Kristen Bell
Oh perfect. Yeah, loose like the Elusinian mysteries.
- [210:36]
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. So elusismind.com you can also go to which is kind of a website for the. What the retreat center will look like.
- [210:42]
Kristen Bell
Okay.
- [210:43]
Andrew Gallimore
Once it's built up. So and what about your book on my book?
- [210:46]
Kristen Bell
Yes, hold it up nicely nicely for people. There we go there. Death by astonishment. Out now forward by Graham Hancock.
- [210:54]
Andrew Gallimore
Confronting the mystery of the world's strangest drug. Yes. If you're interested in DMT and don't just want the boring kind of oh, visual hallucination explanation. I want to get into why the development of my thinking the story of western science is struggle to make sense of it and their failure to make sense of it and what it might really mean and what the future of DMT research might, might look like. This is the book available July 1st in beautiful hardback and can I show. This is really cool. So the inner bore the end papers.
- [211:24]
Kristen Bell
Oh, look at that.
- [211:25]
Andrew Gallimore
Harry Pack, great artist, you know, visual, kind of visionary. And then in the back you've got in Cedigris has done the artwork here. Also a really great visual artist inspired by dmt. So yeah, get it while you can. Also available on audiobook, but beautiful.
- [211:44]
Kristen Bell
Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. We'll link everything below.
- [211:46]
Andrew Gallimore
Awesome. Thank you very much.
- [211:48]
Kristen Bell
Andrew G, ladies and gentlemen.