The Basement: Andrew Gallimore | DMT Didn't Take You Somewhere New — It Unlocked What's Always There

Summary

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

The Basement: Andrew Gallimore | DMT Didn't Take You Somewhere New — It Unlocked What's Always There

Release Date: June 22, 2026
Guest: Dr. Andrew Gallimore (chemist, neuroscientist, author of Death by Astonishment)
Hosts: The Why Files

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the mysterious world of DMT—the “strangest psychedelic,” famed for the bizarre, sentient-seeming realms it unlocks. Dr. Andrew Gallimore, a Cambridge-trained chemist and neuroscientist with 30 years specializing in DMT, explains the chemistry, neuroscience, and phenomenology of the substance, drawing on his new collaboration with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. The core question: When people encounter "entities" or other worlds on DMT, are these mere hallucinations, or could the brain be tuning into an alternate, always-present reality?

Gallimore discusses his extraordinary career trajectory, his personal experiences with DMT, the evolving scientific understanding of the molecule, and the innovative experimental protocols (like DMTX infusions and the Blue-Yellow entity test) that may finally answer whether these experiences are hallucinations—or contact.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Childhood & Origins of Obsession with the Unexplained

• Early fascination: Gallimore was the "monster kid," obsessed with ghosts, horror, and the occult at age 7–8. He wrote macabre stories that drew school and parental concern.
  • “I was interested in the occult... ghosts, vampires... I wanted to be a ghost hunter when I grew up. That didn’t come true, but in a way, it did.” (04:49)
• As an adolescent, this fascination shifted toward more scientific mysteries—ESP, UFOs, and eventually psychedelics.

2. Discovery of DMT & Academic Path

• First exposure (1996): Introduction to DMT via a Terence McKenna interview, Krnows as “the world’s strangest psychedelic,” and the idea of “machine elves.”
  • “When you take it, it takes you to this other world ... filled with these strange beings called machine elves.” (11:17)
• Academic journey: Studied chemistry, biology, then pharmacology; PhD at Cambridge in biological chemistry, then computational neuroscience at York, Oxford, Okinawa.
  • “I’ve always been interested in how these complex molecules are actually stitched together inside microorganisms... [but] DMT was always the thread.” (15:41)
• Professional risk: Left academia for independent writing, focusing full-time on DMT, despite financial insecurity.
  • “To go from a decent salary to absolute zero salary in a single day... that’s kind of scary, you know.” (22:22)

3. History & Chemistry of DMT

• Natural ubiquity: DMT occurs in hundreds of plants, in animals, and in humans—biosynthesized in just a couple of steps from tryptophan.
  • “DMT is the most common, naturally occurring psychedelic ... and also the simplest.” (49:20)
• Evolutionary enigma: The evolutionary purpose for DMT in living things is unknown; theories (insect deterrent, anti-predation, anti-feeding molecule) are unconvincing.
  • “The short answer and not very exciting answer is, we don't really know why it’s there.” (51:24)
• Historical research: Discovered in the 1930s, made famous in the West by McKenna in the 1980s-1990s, with early clinical research by Szára in the 1950s.

4. DMT Experiences & The Entity Question

• Personal breakthrough: Gallimore recounts his own first DMT trip—an overwhelming sense of contact with a timeless intelligence, “ontologically shocking.”
  • “I wasn’t just in a place, I was in a place constructed by the hand of an immense and timeless intelligence... far more advanced... than our universe.” (42:40)
• Contrast with LSD/mushrooms: DMT is not just a quick version of LSD; the “world” experienced is alien, coherent, and real-feeling.
  • “It’s not melting walls or seeing colors ... this place existed and it was right there...” (46:04)
• Conventional neuroscience: Psychedelics disrupt normal world-modeling networks; DMT seems to allow the brain to “tune into” a new, coherent world—much more than just a scrambled waking reality.
  • “With DMT, the brain suddenly collapses into this entirely new order, which is this entirely new, novel, entirely alien world.” (61:21)
• Navigability & continuity: In DMTX studies, subjects experienced recognizably repeated worlds and remembered by entities, suggesting these are not random hallucinations.
  • “He found that entities over sessions started to notice he was coming back rather too often...” (72:13)

5. DMTX: Pushing the Edge of Psychedelic Science

• DMTX protocol: Extended DMT state via target-controlled IV infusion, developed with Rick Strassman; allows for stable, minutes-to-hours-long trips and real-time communication.
  • “We should be able to stabilize the DMT state and hold someone there for ... two, three hours...” (68:35)
• Unusual phenomena: “Lockout” effect—long-term exclusion from the DMT realm by entities, not explained pharmacologically; ~5% of people are naturally blocked from any DMT effects.
  • “One day, an entity will say, ‘You’re not welcome here’—it’s called a lockout... some stay locked for years.” (148:47)

6. Scientific Challenges & Entity Experimentation

• Is it a hallucination? Mainstream scientists, like Robin Carhart-Harris, argue for archetypal hallucination theories, but Gallimore points out DMT entities exhibit complex, non-human mathematic or cognitive abilities beyond the taker’s capacity.
  • “They’re doing things ... that a human brain can’t do mathematically, like painting surfaces with certain colors according to the four-color theorem.” (118:17)
• Experimental tests:
  • Blue-Yellow Test: Testing if DMT entities can track a changing variable (e.g., a screen color unseen by the subject)—suggesting information transfer from “outside.”
    • “The idea is, can the entity’s behavior in some way be tracked to that variable?” (110:33)
  • Deposit & Retrieval: Can two people interact with the same entity and pass information?
  • Topology/Mathematical analysis: Use of specialists (mathematicians) as DMTX subjects to analyze the observed geometry/topology.

7. The Deep Theory: Consciousness, Information, and Reality Interfaces

• Donald Hoffman collaboration: Gallimore teams up with Hoffman (UC Irvine cognitive scientist); Hoffman’s “conscious realism” equates all of reality to a network of interacting conscious agents.
  • “Everything we see and perceive is the result of the interaction of these conscious agents.” (122:14)
• DMT’s role: DMT, viewed in Hoffman’s mathematics, kicks the conscious agent (us) out of the “consensus reality” region into a new “experience space,” modulated by totally different rules—enabling interaction with otherwise imperceptible agents/entities.
  • “DMT went from something which didn’t quite make sense... then suddenly with Don’s model, everything falls into place.” (135:34)
• Implications: Reality is always an interface—“icons on a screen.” On DMT, the icons change, and new “other” agents may become visible.
  • “It all falls into place quite beautifully ... when you connect it to DMT, it just all falls into place.” (144:17)

8. Speculations & The UFO Connection

• UAPs as consciousness phenomenon: Speculates that some “alien” encounters are contact with intelligences instantiated at the substrate of reality—not necessarily from “elsewhere” in physical space, but much deeper “downward.”
  • “We need to get away from the idea that alien is something that exists within this reality ... we’re dealing with beings at the ground of reality.” (164:44)
• Downward mastery: Reference to Barrow's microdimensional mastery scale—the most advanced intelligence would manipulate reality’s substrate itself, not expand outward.

9. Death, Near-Death Experience, and Universal Consciousness

• DMT & death: Surges in DMT may help protect the dying brain; connections with near-death experiences—though only 10–20% of people experience those.
• What happens when we die? Gallimore is philosophically agnostic but leans toward a mystical interpretation akin to ancient Eastern philosophy—“Brahman is Lila, the play.”
  • “It's just a beautiful experience ... a game that shouldn’t be taken seriously.” (172:12)
• Ultimate unity: Cites Hoffman again: consciousness is the ground; individual selves are interface projections of a unified field.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the “realness” of DMT entities:
  “It's like the brain has started speaking a language it never learned to speak. … The brain switching to constructing this alien world so efficiently is very, very difficult to explain.” (80:49)
• On astonishment:
  “Death by astonishment ... true astonishment is a very rare emotion now. … That’s what DMT delivers.” (46:50)
• On the interface of reality:
  “Everything’s an icon... the interface theory of perception ... At some point, it almost doesn’t matter if it’s ‘real’—it’s all an illusion, but all as real as each other.” (144:17, 175:46)
• On DMT lockout:
  “Some people take DMT for years, and one day a creature waves a finger and says, ‘You're not welcome here.’ It's called a lockout.” (03:03, 148:47)
• On risk and research in Japan:
  “To go from a decent salary to zero salary ... there’s no option to move back to my parents in the UK if I fuck up because they’re there and I’m in Tokyo!” (22:22)
• On the Barrow Scale & “going down”:
  “Most of our technological advances have been not outwards but inwards... that’s where we look for intelligence. And how do you do that? ... They would use our brains to communicate with us.” (166:36)

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• Gallimore’s childhood & horror obsession: [02:26]–[05:49]
• Initial fascination with DMT & McKenna’s “machine elves”: [07:38]–[11:50]
• Academic path & career risk: [15:09]–[22:22]
• What DMT is, where it’s found, why it’s puzzling: [49:20]–[53:49]
• First DMT experience described: [39:42]–[44:48]
• Psychedelic impact on neural modeling, DMT's unique “other world”: [55:46]–[64:56]
• DMTX infusion technology & DMT retreat: [64:56]–[70:32]
• Repeating worlds, entity memory, DMT “waiting room”: [70:32]–[75:54]
• Are the entities real? The “Blue-Yellow” experiment and mathematical/linguistic evidence: [79:27]–[122:00]
• Gallimore/Hoffman “conscious realism” theory explained: [122:09]–[141:40]
• UFOs, abductions & DMT entities’ connection: [161:56]–[169:26]
• What happens when we die, DMT & consciousness: [172:12]–[175:46]
• Final thoughts, resources, and plugs: [176:50]–[178:13]

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Further Reading & Resources Mentioned

• Dr. Gallimore’s book: Death by Astonishment: Everything I Know About DMT After 30 Years of Study
• Legal DMTX retreat: elusismind.com
• Nonprofit for psychedelic research: newnautics.org
• ** Reality Switch Technologies* (Gallimore’s second book): Cyberpunk/cypher archive-style manual on psychedelic-induced world-building.
• Collaboration & research with Donald Hoffman: See pre-print papers and the Trace Institute for math-inclined listeners.

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Takeaway

Gallimore’s decades of research and novel collaboration with Hoffman paint a radically open-minded, but empirically searching, picture. The DMT world's strange order, repeating spaces, and persistent “entity” behaviors challenge the standard hallucination model—Gallimore proposes our brains might be constructing an interface that can, under certain conditions, render other “agents” normally invisible.

Is this real? “The question almost doesn’t make sense anymore,” Gallimore argues. For now, the mystery of “death by astonishment” remains, as science inches closer to “testing the elves.”

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"Every experience has the same ontological validity. … There are different ways to play [the game]. DMT and other psychedelics and other tools are ways that we can get out of this very small region ... and enjoy it and experience it and think, ‘Wow, the fucking incredible majesty of reality that we're part of.’"
— Dr. Andrew Gallimore (175:38)

Transcript

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

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[Podcast Host 1]

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[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

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[Podcast Host 2]

Today we're talking with Dr. Andrew Gallimore.

[Podcast Host 1]

He's a Cambridge trained chemist and neuroscientist, and he spent 30 years studying one

[Podcast Host 2]

molecule, DMT, what he calls the world's strangest psychedelic.

[Podcast Host 1]

Many people report meeting entities when using dmt, and Andrew has a theory about them that's not exactly mainstream. He writes about this in his book, Death by Astonishment. Death by astonishment. Finally, a cause of death that hasn't

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

fell out of a window.

[Podcast Host 1]

After questioning the official story of the CIA, he thinks the beings people meet on DMT might not be hallucinations. They might be real, alive, sentient, and living in another dimension. And he makes a pretty good case because there are people who take DMT for years and. And then one day a creature waves a finger and says, you're not welcome here. It's called a lockout. And some people stay locked out for years. Oh, so the machine elves have bounces. I better be respectful next time I'm in a machine elf champagne room, huh? Today we're covering where DMT comes from, what it does inside your brain, and a new theory he built with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. It connects the whole thing to consciousness itself. After our conversation, I'll come back with a little quick analysis, but until then, grab a brain bucket because this one goes deep. Let's go down to the basement.

[Podcast Host 2]

Doctor Andrew Gallimore, welcome to the basement.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Good to be here, ag. Thank you very much for having me.

[Podcast Host 2]

As good as can be, I guess. Just quick disclaimer before we get started, we're not endorsing anything, any drug use, we're not promoting it, none of that stuff. That being said, we both have experience with psychedelics, so when we're talking about it, we have been there.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yep.

[Podcast Host 2]

Okay, so I thought I heard you say at 7 or 8 years old, you're into ghosts, vampires, werewolves, all the paranormal. It looks like you have just upgraded your monsters to a new level. Is that what happened, is you're just. You're just the monster kid that's Pretty accurate.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I mean, I was into, yeah, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, the occult, Ouija boards. My parents were horrified. I mean, it's like the headmaster of the school had to call in my parents, my father specifically.

[Podcast Host 2]

What were you doing that the headmaster got involved? What was that? Specific

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

stories you were telling? Stories I was writing. So when, oh, when the teacher said write a story, I would write these most horrific. Because I'm going to. I'm going to defend myself.

[Podcast Host 2]

You were that kid?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I was that kid. But my. I have got quite a big family, so I've got two older brothers, two younger brothers. So I'm right in the middle. And the two older brothers obviously were a huge influence on me. My oldest brother Ian, when. When I was kind of 6, 7, 8 years old, he was like 12. And so he was more mature and he was very interested in horror movies. And like in those days there was like, banned movies. Remember that?

[Podcast Host 2]

Sure.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

This one's banned. Faces of Death, Faces of Death and Cannibal Corpse and this kind of thing.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right. So you have to watch them.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Right. So he'd mail off for some vhs, you know, copied, pirated.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And we come back and then you watch these movies in the living room. Because only one VCR in the. In the, in the house, of course, in those days. And I would sit and watch them. My parents were very relaxed about this until I started kind of reproducing these kind of things in my stories at school. And I think my headmaster was slightly concerned that I was, know, going to be the next Michael Myers or something

[Podcast Host 2]

like that, or the next Neil Gaiman. What was that, what was that last straw story about?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

You want me to say it really?

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So in the story, it was a story about a. An escaped lunatic inspired by the Halloween movies. He escaped from the sanitarium and he murdered several people. And then in one instance, he came across a. God, do I want to say this? He came across a woman with her baby in a pram. And anyway, the baby ends up being diced and I use that word with a spade. And the headmaster was, understandably, in retrospect, thought, this is like a. I mean, I was like 7 years old. Oh, God, as elementary school, anyway. And so, yeah, they. They used to. He used to, like every day at the end of school, he'd come to the classroom, he'd check through my work and check that I wasn't writing horrible things. Yeah, it was.

[Podcast Host 2]

What did your folks say about that story?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, they had a word with me and said maybe you should, you know, maybe Write about nice things.

[Podcast Host 2]

But they weren't. You weren't worried about you being.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, they knew where it came from. It was just the influence of my older brothers.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

But.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

But still at that time it wasn't just that story. It was that I was interested in the occult. Things that seven year olds aren't normally interested in. And I was quite an advanced reader for my age. So I used to go to these old secondhand bookstores and try to find books about ghosts and vampires and things like that. And I really believed in them. I wanted to be a ghost hunter when I grew up. That didn't come true, but in a

[Podcast Host 2]

way, in a way it did. Yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

There we go.

[Podcast Host 2]

When I was nine, I bought a mail order book on witchcraft and the occult and I had quite a sit down over that book.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, I'm sure.

[Podcast Host 2]

So I get it.

[Podcast Host 1]

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[Podcast Host 2]

So take us from there to the. I know you've told the story a million times, but I have some, some follow ups. Take us from there to 1996. Your friend shows you a magazine.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, so when I.

[Podcast Host 2]

What magazine was it?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I don't remember but it was after I graduated from high school. So in the two years we call them A levels in in the UK so I was 16 years old, I guess I, I started to get interested in psychedelics. Reading about psychedelics and talking a lot about psychedelics. I started studying chemistry, biology, and. And I wanted to be a pharmacologist. I wanted to study drugs, basically, and how they affect the mind.

[Podcast Host 2]

What drew you to psychedelics specifically, especially for someone who didn't take them?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

At the time, I didn't know. But when I think back, you know, the interest in ghosts and werewolves and vampires, it's unusual things. I guess you could put it in the most broad sense.

[Podcast Host 2]

I guess that's what tracks for me is you've always been into the alternate realities and.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, and because I used to collect a magazine called the Unexplained, it was one of those ones that came out every week and you got the binders, that kind of thing, ordered it specially from the news agent. And within that there was a lot about ghosts and all that kind of stuff. But then there was stuff about like ESP and UFOs and things like that. So it's not so strange that as I became, you know, an adolescent and started to mature, that my interest shifted away from just ghosts and werewolves and into more serious things, I guess, you know, more scientific things. And psychedelics seem to be a way of altering your mind, of altering the structure and the dynamics of your reality. And so that kind of excited me. I wanted to know how that worked. So I'd been talking about it a lot at school, and then one day, my friend, he's. I can give his name actually now is Noor Abbas. His name is. He's actually interestingly, or he was a few years ago, the chief designer for. Oh, what's his name? Used to. He used to be married to Kim Kardashian. Easy. Easy. Used to the Easy shoes.

[Podcast Host 2]

Everyone's screaming at us right now, but I don't remember. Oh, from the show.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, no, no. He's like a black guy. He's most crazy guy that was on Rogan. Has been on Rogan. He's been on. Everyone's Gonna Go Crazy.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

After the break, we're gonna find that out.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

We will.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Kanye West.

[Podcast Host 2]

Kanye. Kanye.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, Kanye. He was a chief designer, became a fashion designer, and he was actually Kanye west, chief designer. Anyway.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Wow.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, he'd be fun to talk to. Yeah. No robbas. And he brought this magazine when I was 16 years old and said, you know, look on the back page. There's something I think you'd be interested in. And I rolled it up, and later in the day I opened it, and it was picture of this bearded fellow called Terence McKenna. And this was an interview with him, and there was lots I don't remember much of the details, but I remember him being asked about his quote, unquote favorite drug, this thing called dmt. Didn't say what it was other than that when you take it, it takes you to this other world that's nothing like this world and that's filled with these strange beings called machine elves.

[Podcast Host 2]

Sure.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And I thought, this is, this is incredible. But it only lasts 15 minutes. You know, this fast acting drug that will instantaneously transport you to some other reality that's just as real or more real than this world. I thought, well, you know, that's even more interesting than psychedelics generally is, this particular psychedelic. So my next task was to find out what DMT even meant. You couldn't just Google it in those days. I remember I went to the local library in my city, the central library, and found one of those books of acronyms, initialisms, and looked at DMT and found dimethyl terephthalate, which is a type of plastic, apparently. So for a short period of time, DMT in my head was dimethyl terephthalate. Um, oops, yeah. Then we got the Internet, as you just mentioned, and there's only one Internet in the school. Like you had to go collect this big black cable from a guy in a white coat. The password is mushroom. I remember that.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's perfect.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And I would spend all my, my lunch break and any free periods I had. I would, I was, I was the only one who used it. No one else knew what this. It was so new, the Internet. No one really knew its power, but I kind of did. I had a friend who also had the Internet in his house. And so I spent all my time just on AltaVista, as you said before Google, just trying to find out all about DMT and how to, how to extract it, how to, you know, which plants you can get it from and all that kind of stuff and all these different crazy experiences.

[Podcast Host 2]

Did you look into the history of it as well during those searches or you're more interested in what Terrence was talking about?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I was more interested in what it did. I became more interested in the history later on. But at that time, this was just this naturally occurring molecule that seemed to have almost magical properties. And that was the beginning, really, that was the beginning of what turned out to be a 30 year journey trying to understand DMT, you know, what, what it does in the brain and how it's able to achieve these remarkable effects on consciousness.

[Podcast Host 2]

What did your family think about this new hobby? Because clearly you told your brothers?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yes, well, they didn't understand it, you see. I mean, they. I would. If I refer to that as dmt, then that's fine. If I use the word drugs, that's different matter, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

So your book, Death by Astonishment, that's a Terrence McKenna quote.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

That is a Terrence McKenna quote.

[Podcast Host 2]

So is that a bookend? Is that a tribute? Is that a thank you?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Why did you choose that, all of those things? Well, initially it had a completely different name that I'm not gonna tell you. Okay. Which was okay, but I was writing. I was writing the book proposal with my editor to submit to the publishing house. And in part of the proposal I said, you know, DMT this molecule that, as Thomas McKenna said, the only risk is death by astonishment. And then I wrote in quote in brackets, I thought, actually that's a pretty good title, right?

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

And

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I realize in retrospect, it's the perfect title. I mean, that's, I mean, it's such a kind of a showstopper title, Death by Astonishment. And of course it's a beautiful tribute to the late, great Terence McKenna. And so, yeah, that's, that's kind of how that name came, came about. And I think it's, it's a perfect name for the book. I think that is, you know, it's all about. It's everything I know about DMT, everything I've come to learn over the last 30 years studying DMT.

[Podcast Host 2]

So this sparks interest in chemistry. Your PhD thesis. Let me see if I can get this right. Is it the biogenesis of terrestrial and marine polycyclic ether?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Wow.

[Podcast Host 2]

Is that what it was?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

You've done your research, dude.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, that doesn't sound like. That sounds like just marine biology and things like that has nothing to do with psychedelics.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Nothing to do with psychedelics.

[Podcast Host 2]

So is DMT still sort of this undercurrent while you're working all this?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, it, it always has been in a way. You know, I've never worked in a quote unquote, psychedelic research group or any kind of psychedelic lab or anything like that. It's always been, you know, I've kind of. I have many interests in, in chemistry and in pharmacology, you know, as well as psychedelics. But that's been the kind of the foundation that's running through all of it. But my PhD at Cambridge, yeah, that was biological chemistry. It's basically trying to understand how these often exquisitely complex molecules that are produced by plants and microorganisms, you know, how are they Actually stitched together and made inside microorganisms. That's something that I really fell in love with during my first degree. The kind of the, it's called biosynthesis, how complex organic molecules are constructed inside living beings. And I thought, I want to study that for my PhD. And so I went up to Cambridge and worked in a group that specialized in that thing. But all the time still I was thinking and writing about DMT. And then after I finished my PhD, I did a postdoc again at Cambridge. And then I thought, there's something missing from my intellectual repertoire. Should we put it like that? In that I understood the chemistry, I understood the pharmacology, you know, that kind of low level stuff, molecules interacting with living systems. That was all kind of under my belt, shall we say. But I still didn't feel that I was sufficiently sophisticated in the neurosciences. So I thought I need to, I need to move up to the kind of the higher level of the neurosciences. And so I did two postdocs in computational neuroscience. It's kind of the forefront, I think, of neuroscience, trying to understand how the brain works by using computational and mathematical models. So I went to the University of York and then University of Oxford, did two postdocs in computational neuroscience. And then finally my final postdoc, which actually the longest one lasted for seven years, was at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. So I needed a job after my penultimate postdoc finished and there was this position in Okinawa. So I thought, why not? I didn't have ties in England at the time, so I thought, why not move to Okinawa?

[Podcast Host 2]

What was the position? Was it a mainstream type of job?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It was a postdoctoral research fellowship. So basically another postdoc. Okay, but this was in computational neuroscience as well. And I spent seven years kind of modeling very small pieces of the brain, basically sort of individual neurons in the brain, trying to understand how they speak to each other and how they strengthen and weaken their connections, all connected to memory and neural function generally.

[Podcast Host 2]

So you were building this DMT research foundation the whole time?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yes, that's how I, I see it, is that I was. You know, most people kind of specialize at one level. You know, if you're a chemist, you, you study the molecules. If you're a pharmacologist, you're interested in drug receptor interactions. If you're a neuroscientist, you're interested in how kind of the global effects on neural activity. But I think really to understand psychedelics, you need to kind of span all of Those you need to do all the way from the lowest level, the molecules, all the way up to global neural activity. So I finished my postdoc in Okinawa after seven years, and I thought, right, I'm leaving the academy. I've sort of graduated and I don't want to be. I wanted to kind of de. Institutionalize myself and just focus on writing.

[Podcast Host 1]

Basically, we cover a lot of things on this show that the mainstream would

[Podcast Host 2]

rather you not think too hard about.

[Podcast Host 1]

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[Podcast Host 2]

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[Podcast Host 2]

Cambridge, Oxford, York, Okinawa. You could have had a very successful mainstream career. Has there been a professional or personal cost to making the decision?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Oh, God, yeah. I mean, for sure. I was at the stage in my career where normally what would happen is I would start applying for what are called readerships or lectureships. So when you start taking on graduate students of your own, you become a part of the department wherever you work. But the thought of being that person horrified me. The thought that I would be, you know, like my professor, going to meetings and managing Funding and managing students, all that stuff. It never had any interest in it. When you're a postdoc, you have a lot of freedom, you kind of do your own thing, but once you get to that level where you're a lecturer, professor, then you have to start taking on all these other responsibilities that takes over your life. And I could never invest as much time as I wanted into my passion, which is DMT and writing about dmt. I always wanted to be a writer. Ultimately there's a lot of training required to write about these things.

[Podcast Host 2]

Sure.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So, you know, 20 years I guess, before I was able to kind of make the leap, give up my fairly well paid position in Okinawa and basically go from decent salary to absolute zero salary in a single day. That's kind of scary, you know, and there's no option to move back to my parents if I fuck up because they're over in the uk. So it's like this goes wrong. I'm in deep, deep trouble in Tokyo. So I moved from Okinawa to Tokyo is where I live now. And that's where I've been for the last four years. Fortunately, I didn't majorly fuck up and things are okay.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, I mean, Tokyo is fascinating because Japan has very strict drug laws and they're getting stricter. If I, I mean, I think cannabis, they just banned. How is it, is it a culture issue for you?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Is it so people. I think when people say Japan is very anti drugs, what they're actually referring to is methamphetamine.

[Podcast Host 2]

Okay.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And cannabis. These are the two biggies, right? Methamphetamine for very specific historical reasons. Post World War II, there was this huge wave of methamphetamine use throughout the nation. A lot of the military supplies kind of were released onto the public market. It was perfectly legal at the time. Then there were millions of people in Japan using meth regularly. And then they, they banned it. And then all of these little clandestine laboratories started popping up, I think In Osaka in 1952, in just one year, there are like 50 labs that were raided just in one city. You know, it's like Breaking Bad. All these little meth labs. Sure, sure. Like in New Mexico or something. People don't imagine that that's possible in Japan, but it really was. So. And, and this was a time when the Japanese were literally a defeated nation and they thought this meth could be the end of them. It's like an existential threat to their very civilization. And so that there's a kind of. I guess I hate that word, Generational. Generational trauma. But it feels like that you mentioned meth and people. There's still that sense of meth. Yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

Because you have to figure the Americans brought it there.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

What, meth?

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah. Well, and certainly amphetamines.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So methamphetamine actually was invented by a Japanese chemist in the late 19th century. It was Nagai. Yes, Nagayoshi Nagai. Yeah. Everyone thinks it's either the Americans or the Germans. People I get, but it's actually.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, those are two countries everybody blames for everything, of course. But it's actually a Japanese chemist.

[Podcast Host 1]

I didn't know that.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Japanese chemist, yes, from ephedrine. So ephedrine is the molecule that you can convert. Sudephedrine, they use basically the same molecule, but slightly different geometrically. But anyway, ephedrine you can convert directly to methamphetamine. And he was working with ephedrine at the time, this Chinese herb that had various uses, and then he synthesized methamphetamine and it was basically forgotten about for a number of decades and wasn't seen to be that important. And until people started reporting on its effects on alertness and mood and that kind of thing. And the Japanese were using it during the Second World War, specifically, they would. They used to create these little green tablets that were mixed with green tea, so they're bright green, and they would stamp them with the emperor's crest. So it almost became like. What's the word I'm looking for? But anyway, it was very much sanctioned by the authorities, the Imperial Japanese authorities at the time. And Japanese soldiers were using the kamikaze, for example, were using methamphetamine. It would elevate their mood, increase their kind of fighting. Fighting spirit.

[Podcast Host 2]

Sure. And they don't have to worry about long term effects.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

They don't worry about long term effects, quite literally. Yeah. And then after the war they had all these stockpiles that made it into the market. And then the government, the Japanese government actually banned powdered forms of meth. So they started making liquid forms, injecting it. So they had a huge injection problem with meth, probably the most intense way to take it, but. And you know, school children were using it, high school students, housewives, laborers, whatever. Everyone was using meth in kind of the late 1940s and early 1950s until it was banned. And then they really cracked down on it. It's like a moral panic.

[Podcast Host 2]

I mean, amphetamine salts seem to be everywhere anyway.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Right? Yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

So DMT, first synthesized in 1931, first found to be psychoactive in 1956. And that was Stephen Zahara. Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Stephen Zahra was the first to inject pure dmt.

[Podcast Host 2]

Now, this is at the same time where LSD is a popular psychedelic and psychiatric research. Why, why did LSD catch on and DMT did. Basically wouldn't know it disappeared until McKenna.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Right, yeah. I mean, that was so. Yeah, you're right. So during that period there was a flurry of these molecules that were either discovered or invented. And LSD was, was the main one at the time. And Zara, actually, Stephen Zara, was this Hungarian physician working behind the Iron Curtain in communist Hungary. And he wanted to work with lsd and he wrote to Sandoz, the only company that was producing LSD at the time, said, can I have some LSD, please? I want to start working on it. I said, no, no, no, no, no, we're not sending LSD into bloody communists. Nope. And so he said, I need something else. And he thought about mescaline. He ordered some mescaline from, from the uk and that arrived safely. And he, he took his first dose of mescaline on Christmas Day and had this wonderful experience.

[Podcast Host 2]

What was church, what was he trying to achieve? What was the purpose of his experiments?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, he was interested in. He was a psychiatrist. Ah, right. So he's interested in, you know,

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

at

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

the most fundamental level, he was interested in the human mind and how he might study the human mind. But he's also interested in, you know, could these molecules find uses in psychiatry as treatment for various sort of neuropsychological disorders. So he tried mescaline and then he found this paper. There was a paper that was. So there was this plant called anadenantheira peregrina, which is this yoppo, this snuff that scientists had just come to understand, you know, had been used by various tribal peoples, indigenous peoples in South America for perhaps thousands of years, and was said to induce what seemed to be like psychedelic effects. They would go to other worlds and they would speak with these strange discarnate beings which they thought were like demons or something, but no one knew how it worked. And so they started to analyze it. This kind of. The first study, analyzing these seeds from this peregrina plant. And they found two molecules in there. One was bufotonine, which is 5 hydroxy dimethyltryptamine.

[Podcast Host 2]

5 MeO.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, that's 5 methoxy. Ah, okay, yeah, so 5 MeO. DMT is 5 methoxy DMT. If you take that methyl group off that carbon, you get 5 hydroxy. Just hydroxyl group, that's bufotanine, that was a known molecule and it was known that when you injected it into prisoners, because that's the way you did it in those days. You found a group of prisoners that were normally infected, imprisoned for using drugs, normally young black men basically, and you would inject them with drugs and see what happened. And bufotanine was one that had already been tested and was found to have mildly mind altering effects. Generally it made people very nauseous and their face went purple, they started vomiting and it's very unpleasant. But they found that molecule in this, this Yopo seed and they thought, well, that must be the kind of the central psychoactive molecule in this. They also found another molecule called dmt, dimethyltryptamine, and they just ignored it, which is a huge mistake. Until Steven Zara read this paper and he thought, boothoteny, no, that doesn't make any sense. It's not particularly psychoactive. So why would that be this? Why would that be regarded as this molecule that would transport you to other worlds and allow you to communicate with discarnate intelligences? That didn't make any sense. So the only other option was dmt, that was also in the seed and it being ignored. So we thought, okay, I'll just, I'll give it a go, you know, no one has tried this. So he synthesized it, he made 10 grams in his laboratory in 1956 and he started swallowing it first of all, you know, increasing the dosage, he went up to like a gram of dmt.

[Podcast Host 2]

Nothing happened.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Nothing happened. We know why now, but that time we didn't know. So he was ready to give up, basically.

[Podcast Host 2]

He didn't try insufflating it?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

He didn't try.

[Podcast Host 2]

He didn't snort it.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

He didn't snort it, no.

[Podcast Host 2]

That might have worked though, no. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that might have worked.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It would have been painful, but yeah, it might have worked. So he basically, he was like ready to give up. Maybe his hunch was wrong. And then a friend, a colleague says, have you tried injecting it? I haven't. So injected it into. I think it was a cat or a rabbit. I think it was a cat for some reason. And the cat kind of started behaving strangely, you know, it was having some kind of effect.

[Podcast Host 2]

I don't mean to laugh. I'm a cat.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yes, but I'm a cat man as

[Podcast Host 2]

well,

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

so, you know, satisfied that it wasn't lethal, at least in cats. Yeah, yeah. We shouldn't laugh. People, people complain whenever I tell this Story because. Poor cat. And it's true. But different, different times. Different times, yeah. So then he ejected into himself. So sometime In April, in 1956, he injects it into his intramuscularly and yeah, the rest as they say is history. Had this. He started seeing these fantastical patterns and rapidly procession of rapidly changing geometric imagery or moving very quickly. He, you know, he was having a DMT trip and so then he, he started recruiting colleagues, so doctors, nurses from where he worked. Things were much simpler in those days. You didn't need to fill out forms getting ethical approval.

[Podcast Host 2]

DEA wasn't Iran.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, no, no. Injected it into various people, healthy volunteers and they started describing what we now recognize as the classic effects of dmt. They would start going to describe going, losing awareness of the normal waking world and going to these strange world filled with gods and spirits and.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, let me back you up just a second. Yeah, so why, why DMT didn't catch on still. So he's synthesized it, it works. But LSD still is the one that MK Ultra and everybody, Sidney Gottlieb goes there.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yep, yep. So, so after, so Sara started publishing these papers. So the very first awareness anyone would have had that DMT was even psychoactive as a psychedelic would have been Steven Zara's papers. So that was in the late 1950s, from 1956 up to kind of 1960, he published several papers in healthy people, in schizophrenics and that kind of thing. So the data was all there. The problem was is that, well, LSD had its foothold by then. It was extremely potent. Potent meaning you need a very small amount of the molecule to achieve the desired effect. So you could, you know, in one gram you've got 100,000 doses or something like that. And whereas with DMT and you could swallow lsd, you know, drop it on your tongue, dissolve it in blotting paper, very, very simple to, to distribute. Whereas with DMT1 it was much less potent in terms of the amount you need. Instead of 50 micrograms you needed, you know, 30 to 50 milligrams and you needed to inject it. That was a big issue. People didn't like to mess with needles, certainly in the West. And so it was kind of an exotic psychedelic. If you were in the know and you had access to a well stocked dealer in the 1960s, you could find DMT, you know, William Burroughs for example, he was probably the first person to take DMT outside of a clinical setting. He injected it.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's right, I forgot about that.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, Leary as well, you know, and

[Podcast Host 2]

he's Burrow's one of the great thinkers of his time.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

He was. And he had a really important role actually in working out how ayahuasca worked.

[Podcast Host 2]

Did he?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, we can get to that.

[Podcast Host 2]

Okay.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. But so, yeah, William Burroughs took it. William Burroughs was horrified. He took too much one day and he found himself in this, what he called the white, white hot latticed ovens. The soulless insect. People were kind of menacing him. And he was, he was appalled. And he thought, this is the absolute horror show of all drugs. Nobody should be taking this. And so he wrote this kind of breathless letter of warning to Timothy Leary. And Timothy Leary, at the time, it wasn't particularly well known. He was kind of a neophyte, you know, this kind of tweed jacketed Harvard psychologist who had just that year had been to Mexico and had his first experience with psilocybin mushrooms. So he was well primed for dmt. But Burroughs wrote this letter saying, stay away from dmt. It's. It's a nightmare. The nightmare, the nightmare drug. The nightmare hallucinogen he called it. But of course, Timothy Leary.

[Podcast Host 2]

Leary said, challenge accepted.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Challenge accepted. And so Larry spoke to a psychiatrist friend who said that, you know, he'd injected people with DMT. 90% had had a terrible experience.

[Podcast Host 2]

Really?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, yeah. We don't exactly know who, who this was, but he said a psychiatrist working in L. A who was injecting people with, with DMT in his, in his office. And he said that 90% had had a bad experience. We don't know why that is. But Leary said. Leary was just kind of formulating his set and setting hypothesis. That really came from Larry. The idea that the nature of your psychedelic experience comes down to the setting, where are you, who is with you, and also your mindset. And so he thought, okay, maybe if the set and setting is right, so you're not in a clinician's psychiatrist's office. She's where sick people go.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Where crazy people go. But in fact, in a beautiful environment, can you actually induce a more pleasant experience? And so Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who was one of his kind of partners in crime, shall we say, during, during that era, they were both injected with DMT and both had incredible beautiful experiences.

[Podcast Host 2]

Theoretically.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Timothy Leary described these angelic beings like elf, like insects. He was the first person to really use that term elf in describing the DMT state. And now elves are the most famous beings within the DMT space.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, most. Just about everybody listening. They've never taken DMT and probably never will. So we don't have to talk about our personal experiences. If you don't want to, I don't mind. But can you describe from that first inhale what, what do you see? How does it feel? So, and this is not a recreational drug, folks.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

This is not a recreational drug. It's not a party drug.

[Podcast Host 2]

No, it is not.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, it is not. It's a, it's a dark, quiet room, lying on your bed kind of drug. So my first experience at dmt, way, way back in a place where it was completely legal.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, if we're going to talk about yours, then you have to tell me what led up to it. How did you get the courage? Were you just like, why I have to do it now?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, I mean, I'd reached the stage where I'd been studying dm. I've been fascinated by DMT for the best part of a decade and I'd read all by that point, all the Terrence McKenna books, listened to his lectures and it was like, okay, I need to find this, this molecule and actually try it, otherwise I'm just talking blindly. And. And so I managed through unspecified means to acquire some DMT in an unspecified location at an unspecified time.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

And

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I. So I'll kind of talk you through what happened to me. So I had a glass pipe and I loaded it with what I thought was around sort of 50 milligrams of DMT and I, first of all I tried to. Now we have these great vaporization systems but in those days I just had a lighter. No volcano bag, no, nothing like that. It was all very, very basic, you know, like a crack pipe basically.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And I didn't really know what I was doing and so I was heating it and it was. Tasted awful, smell is terrible. A lot of it was burning probably. So it was smoke, you know, horrible acreage smoke as well. I couldn't get enough in my lungs and I was, I basically gave up for the evening. And then just as I was about to go to bed, like 2 o' clock in the morning I think it was, I saw the pipe on, on the desk beside me and I thought, okay, one more quick attempt and I was a bit more relaxed this time for some reason and I started inhaling the vapor and then something happened. I just remember this, like this ping, this very distinct sound, like a very high pitched pinging sound that was completely different to early in the evening. And somehow I knew that something was happening so I continued inhaling. Then I had to put the pipe down, I laid down and I was hurtled at great speed through this indescribably complex geometric imagery. People like, I can't English it, it's unenglishable, but straight away. And I don't know how I knew this, but I knew this with every fiber of my being that I was, I was, I wasn't just in a place, but I was in a place that was constructed by the hand of an immense and timeless intelligence that was vast, much older, far, far billions trillions of years older than our universe, than our reality, more advanced, just indescribably strange.

[Podcast Host 2]

And when you're there, you know it

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

to be true, you know it to be tried, no shadow of a doubt. And that's what was so horrifying for me at the time. It was shocking because I was expecting just to kind of go into a dream world and see elves dancing around. You know, I'd got all this stuff from McKenna.

[Podcast Host 2]

Had you done other, like magic mushrooms

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

or things before mushrooms? Mdma. Okay. Not really a psychedelic, but yeah, I was familiar, familiar with the effects of drugs when they come on. Right.

[Podcast Host 2]

So when you start, things start to change. You like, okay, I've been here before. It's, it's that breakthrough that's like, what is this?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It's so fast with mushrooms, it builds and you feel the energy and you can, you can kind of settle into it. But with this, it's like rocket ship, you know, like a roller coaster. One moment you, everything's normal and then literally 20, 30 seconds later you're just being fired into this place that's, it's completely on. You couldn't, there's no way I could have predicted it or anticipated what this was going to be like. I could have read all the books about DMT and listened to every single Terence McKenna lecture in existence, and I still would, wouldn't even be close to what this was. It was truly ontologically shocking, yes, that this place existed and it was right there and it was far more advanced and it was, it was this hyper technological space that was built by the hand of an alien intelligence. I didn't see entities dancing around, but I felt the immensity of, and the undeniability of this presence. And I. It lasted two or three minutes. I don't remember all the details. I remember start. I lost any awareness of not just myself, but of even the concept of humanity. And that lasted not long, 2, 3 minutes. Then gradually I started to get these little fragments of memories of having been a human, as if My brain was kind of piecing back together my humanity.

[Podcast Host 2]

It's very strange that come down is like that. You start to become human again.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

You become human again at that.

[Podcast Host 2]

Only a couple of minutes. So, yeah, it's because of that janky method where. Yeah, yeah, I don't want to give people too much information, but even vaporized properly, we're talking what, 15, 20 minutes most.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, I mean the peak itself, I mean you get into the peak within a minute, inside a minute, then you're there in the breakthrough state, probably between 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 minutes. And then you, then you start to come down and then the after effects will last year, 15, 20 minutes. You know, when, when I came back, I just laid on my bed on my back. All I could say was I was shaking and I said, oh my fucking God. That's all I could say. Like I couldn't believe what had just happened to me. I could not believe it. I remember writing a message to my friend, you know, on Facebook messenger or something. This is, this is the most. I was just, I was, I was euphoric but shocked at the same time. It's like, my God, this really is it. You know, Terence McKenna wasn't joking here. This is, this is something. Wow. I need to.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah. This is not melting walls or seeing colors. It is not.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, no. I mean, one of the first. I read a book, had a little section on psychedelics and described DMT as like, bit like LSD but much shorter, acting like 15 minutes. And people, some people will go into it thinking that's what it is, just like taking lsd, but very short duration, but it's not, you cannot be prepared for it in a way, I don't think. You can't anticipate or predict what it's going to be like and it will shock you. Death by astonishment. Going back to that. He was only half joking when he said that, because true astonishment, I think, is a very rare emotion now. We kind of use it to mean mildly surprised.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

That true astonishment, where your mind cannot even begin to comprehend the immensity of something. That's what DMT delivers.

[Podcast Host 2]

And you can't really explain it. You can't explain that. Know, your ego kind of dissolves into this oneness with everything and, and everything makes total sense.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. At the time.

[Podcast Host 2]

It does, it does, yeah. In psychedelic therapy there's a, there's something called integration. Did you do any type of integration work post trip?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No. I mean this was. Integration's a big thing now, but at the time, maybe it was in certain specialist circles, but at the time it wasn't. Didn't really know what integration was. But in a way, it's like, it's so fast. And although, yeah, for 15, 20 minutes I was shaking and I was shocked by the next morning, it's like my, my brain had kind of. Okay, we'll get, we'll compartmentalize that somewhere.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, let's put that away.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

We'll put that away. So there wasn't any lingering after effects or anything like that? You know, it's neurologically, it's a very benign molecule. It's not going to hurt you physiologically.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

But your world, your entire ontological foundation of your reality is going to be obliterated. That's the problem.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yes. And I don't recommend doing it alone. Definitely not with open flame.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, no, no, no.

[Podcast Host 2]

Because you're gonna be care. Just be careful, guys. Be so careful with it. Best way to try it would be, I think using DMTX that you and Strassman created is probably a good way to explore it. Coming up on a break. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit of chemistry and then.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Sure.

[Podcast Host 2]

And maybe you can convince us that those entities are not hallucinations.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I'll do my best.

[Podcast Host 2]

All right, I'll be right back. So let me see if I can get this right. We've got tryptophan gets decarboxylated into tryptamine, IMNT gets involved. Then we've got two stages of methylating to get to dmt. Is that about right? Yeah, that sounds like a pretty expensive process to keep in human biology or all biology. So what is the evolutionary purpose of DMT in all these living things?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Okay, yeah, so it's actually, you know, compared to most molecules, I mean, let's say lsd, Right. LSD is not natural, it's semi synthetic. But it's derived from lysergic acid amide, which is natural and is far more complex than dmt. DMT is actually not only the most common naturally occurring psychedelic, it's found in countless plant species, you know, hundreds. But it's also the simplest. You know, you go, as you said, you go from tryptophan, you go to tryptamine and then there's one step, then you got another step, which is this dimethylation by indole N methyltransferase, inmt.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And so it's just two simple steps from tryptophan, this amino acid. So. So that's really, to me, that's. There's Something uncanny about that. You would have this simple molecule that's everywhere. You know, you walk through your local park and there's probably half a dozen different plant species all busily, silently constructing the world's strangest psychedelic drug. And you've no idea. And it's also found in humans, and we've known that since the 1950s when people started getting schizophrenics to line up and pee in a bottle, basically. Sure, yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

Urine tests, right?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Exactly. So why is it there? I don't think anyone's got a definitive answer, so I can't give you a definitive answer. Usual answers are, well, it's an insect repellent or it's, you know, it's some kind of. It's used to kind of an anti feeding and anti predation kind of molecule. It affects the neurochemistry of insects. Let's say we know that psilocybin does that, for example.

[Podcast Host 1]

Sure.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

That it would dissuade organisms, you know, predators from feeding on, on a plant by producing dmt.

[Podcast Host 2]

I don't like. I don't like that one.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I don't like that either. It doesn't explain why even.

[Podcast Host 2]

Because any mammal's stomach would break it down.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

That's what you'd think you see as well. Yeah. So the short answer and the not very exciting answer is we don't really know why it's there. We don't know why it's in humans, we don't know why it's in plants, but it is. And it's very easy to make. And it's just two steps from tryptophan, so it's not like they, you know, many molecules, you have to go through many, many steps. Something like morphine, for example. There's many steps to get to morphine, but to get to dmt, it's very simple. So basically all living organisms probably have the enzymatic machinery to make dmt, including humans. So it feels almost like you have this message in some way about this other place that's kind of embedded within our reality. But it takes a certain amount of intelligence in order to decode that message. You can't just munch on plants and have a psychedelic trip like you could with mushrooms. You can eat as many plants as you like, never going to have any effect. You need to isolate the molecule and actually, like Steven Zara's, it did. And that took humans all the way up until the 1950s to actually work out what this molecule was and how to use it, the techniques that to

[Podcast Host 2]

administer it From a chemistry perspective, what, why are those methyl, those bolt on methyl groups so powerful? It's because it's basically a serotonin molecule. Yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. So serotonin is 5 hydroxy tryptamine. So if you remove that hydroxy group, you get tryptamine, which is, has no effects, it doesn't get crossed the blood brain barrier very efficiently at all. So if you inject someone with serotonin, sorry, with tryptamine, there are no psychoactive effects. So that methylation makes the molecule slightly more fatty, shall we say more lipid, oil soluble, allows it to get very, very rapidly into the brain and then it binds to this specific set of receptors, the most famous one being the serotonin 5 HT2A receptor. And this is responsible for its effects. And we want to get into the neuroscience, we can talk through exactly how that, that process works.

[Podcast Host 2]

I'd love to, if you don't mind.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I don't mind, please, yeah. So, so psychedelics, so what, what are known as the classic psychedelics. So dmt, lsd, psilocybin, mescaline, those are the most famous ones. They all work mainly through this serotonin receptor called the 5ht2a receptor. So there are many serotonin receptors and they all have different functions. What a receptor does, broadly, receptors are embedded in the membrane of neurons. So the neurons are these information generating cells of your brain. They, they generate little electrochemical spikes which you can think of as like binary digits almost, you know, on and off. That's all a neuron really could do. It can fire what's called an action potential, a spike, or it can be quiet, it's like a one and a zero. And neurons are generating these action potentials all the time or not. And then they have these chemical connections called synapses that allows them to share information. See all of these millions of neurons that are, that are connected in your, that form your cortex, cerebral cortex in your brain, and the receptors of all different types of receptors for all different types of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators and other neurochemicals. These chemicals bind to these receptors and they affect the way the neuron behaves. They're like tuning dials, if you like, for the, the neurons. And the 5ht2a receptor specifically is what's called an excitatory receptor. It excites the neuron, it makes it more likely to fire these electrochemical spikes and it makes it more likely to fire when it receives stimulation from another neuron. So it excites the cortex, broadly.

[Podcast Host 2]

Are we finding that psychedelics, those neurotransmitters, are concentrated in specific parts of the brain.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So. So the cortex. So let's talk a little bit about the cortex. So you have this outer layer of your brain, this folded outer layer, which is called the cerebral cortex, in the newest part of the brain, evolutionary. And it has several layers, kind of six layers, broadly. And each layer of the cortex has different function in terms of its connectivity, whether it's receiving input or more like an output layer, or it's more of an interconnection layer, that kind of thing. And the cortex is responsible for constructing your world model. This is the. This is absolutely fundamental. The world you experience now, the subjective world you experience, the structure, the content, the dynamics, everything you're experiencing, let's say in your visual world is being constructed by your brain. You're not. Your brain isn't like a video camera that's kind of taking pictures of the outside world. It has to construct a model of the environment that may or may not resemble what the true structure of the environment, which we never have direct access to. So you're always living in kind of a. Like a waking dream in a sense, you know. Anil Seth calls it a waking hallucination. I don't really like that term, but anyway.

[Podcast Host 2]

But later I think we'll get into your work with Donald Hoffman and his theories, which are really interesting.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, absolutely. That's a completely different take on the whole thing. Yes, much more fundamental. But if we stick to the kind of the brain level, you have this world model that's being always being constructed by your brain. And we know this because you can manipulate your brain. If I remove the top of your skull and start playing around with an electrode in there, I can change your world.

[Podcast Host 1]

Sure.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Right. Nothing in the outs. The environment changes, but your world changes. I can make you see colorful patterns. I can make you hear voices just by stimulating different parts of the brain that are responsible for generating different aspects, if you like, of your world. So we know that that's the case. And if you take a psychedelic, what does that do? It changes your world. It binds to these five HT2a receptors that are concentrated in layer 5 of the cortex, one of the deeper layers of the cortex. And what that does is kind of shakes up your world model. The world model stops being kind of very rigid and well defined and becomes much more fluid and dynamic. Because these neurons are being stimulated by this 5ht2a receptor, the neurons start firing more often. They start sharing Information between each other. And so this very, very rigid and precisely constructed world model, which is the one you are using to kind of make sense of the environment, starts to change. Things start to loosen up. Objects might start to morph or change their identity. This is happening because of this stimulation by the psychedelic. But with dmt, something. DMT seems to kind of transcend all of that, goes beyond that. So you can actually measure if you put someone in an MRI machine. This work was initially done by Robin Carhartt Harris, who's now at University of California, San Diego, might have got that wrong. But anyway, a university in California, maybe San Francisco. But anyway, if you put someone in an MRI machine, give them, inject them with psilocybin, for example, you can actually see how their brain activity changes. So normally you can see the brain kind of moving between states in a very controlled manner as your brain is kind of constructing your world. But then when you give psilocybin, that activity starts to look more random. It's as if the brain is moving more freely from state to state. And so that kind of. You mean DMT is more freely with psilocybin? Okay, Right. Or lsd.

[Podcast Host 2]

Okay.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

But so you can kind of measure the. The entropy. So the randomness in neural activity.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

What you see is you go from this baseline level where the brain is kind of ordered, and then you start to see this increase in randomness. So it goes up like this. And this kind of maps quite well with the subjective experience. Your. The world becomes more fluid, your thinking becomes much more fluid and dynamic. It's like you're kind of, you're. It's like heating up a piece of glass, right? The glass is very rigid and you heat it up and it starts to melt, and you can kind of mold it to any kind of shape. Psychedelics are kind of doing that to the brain, doing that to your world model. And that's why you have this. The effects of psychedelics. But with dmt, something different seems to happen. You get this initial increase in randomness, but it's as if the brain suddenly collapses into this new order. So you go from the old order, the original order, which is the normal waking world model, into this more fluid and dynamic state. And then at the breakthrough, it's like the brain has collapsed into this entirely new order, which is this entirely new, novel, entirely alien world.

[Podcast Host 2]

Is that when we start to lose the.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Our ego, that's part of what's going on? Yeah, the ego is an interesting concept in that it's not that well defined. But there are certain networks in the brain that we think are responsible. The default mode network is the one that's spoken about a lot, responsible for the sense of self as this, as distinct from the other, from the environment. And what psychedelics do is because of this stimulation of these five HT2A receptors, those networks start to break down and that order starts to break down. So you have all of these effects, psychological, subjective effects, effects on the world, effects on your sense of self, they all start to break down. And the higher the dose becomes, the more pronounced those effects appear to be. But with dmt, it's not like there's just an increase in randomness because the DMT is not dmt world is not random. It is very coherent. It's exquisitely complex, you know, staggeringly coherent narrative complexity. It's like literally as if the normal waking world has been switched off. Yep. And a new world. It's like those old radio sets where you go from dial, you get one channel, then you twist it and it's kind of noisy. Yeah, that's kind of psychedelics. And then finally, if you twist it enough, this entirely new crisp, clear channel crackles through the speakers. And that's kind of what DMT is doing.

[Podcast Host 2]

And you've called that world navigable.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It is navigable, yeah. Excuse me, for most people it's not navigable. For most people it's just like, hold on. But with, with experience, yes, you can, you can navigate this world. Yes, but the problem is, the problem I have with the kind of, the standard explanation of this DMT state is that that this normal waking world is, is a world that your brain kind of evolved to construct. You know, the moment that you emerge from the womb. Your brain is constantly sampling sensory information from the environment, through the eyes etc. And using it to kind of construct this world model. That's the only world model your brain knows how to build, or should know how to build. It's like, you know, if you grow up speaking English, you can't speak any other languages unless you learn them. And in the same way this normal waking world, the should be the only world your brain knows how to construct. But when you take dmt, your brain starts constructing these entirely alien worlds that are, that are far more complex, far more intricate, far more coherent, and far more real feeling than the normal waking world. It's not like dream. You know, when people dream, they tend to dream of people, they tend to dream of animals. You know, people in the Midwest will dream of people. They will dream of dogs and cats. Right. If you ask someone who lives in the Amazon rainforest what they dream of. They'll dream of catching stingrays, they'll dream of the animals that they will find in their environment. This is obvious in a way. You know, when you dream, your brain is simply constructing the normal waking world. Dream is like continuous really with the normal waking world. The brain is using those models that it knows to construct a world in the absence of sensory inputs, which is what dreaming is. So that kind of makes sense. So why then not dmt? Your brain starts constructing these worlds that it shouldn't know how to build.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, take us through the, take us through the world. So, and may, and maybe we can talk about DMT X because that's, that's a protocol you developed with Rick Strassman. And so this is intravenous dmt. Yeah, Keeping you in that state for a long.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

How long, how long, how long is a piece of string is the answer to that question. Okay, so, yeah, so, so Rick Strassman, as many people will know, he did the world's largest DMT study in the 1990s, injected them with DMT, what's called a bolus injection. So all the DMT at once or within like 30 seconds, you get a varied rises in the brain. They have this breakthrough experience and then almost as soon as it reaches the peak in the brain, it starts to metabolized and excreted and so there's this exponential drop off. And then when you reach a certain level in the brain, you come out of the DMT state. And so it's. If you really want to study the DMT state, you know, it's geometry, it's topology, that the entities, the language, all that kind of stuff, you need to be in there for a lot longer. And so it occurred to me back in 2015 that DMT, so I was aware of this technique from anesthesiology called target controlled intravenous infusion, which is a technique they use in anesthesiology during surgery. So what they don't do when someone puts you to sleep, they don't just inject you with a drug, they inject you with a very fast acting anesthetic that if they just injected it, you'd be asleep for a few minutes. But they use what's called an infusion device, infusion machine. So they deliver, using a programmed infusion protocol, they deliver the anesthetic into your bloodstream. The aim being to keep your brain anesthetic concentration fairly constant so they can keep you anesthetized for as long as they Want as soon as they stop the machine, a few minutes later you'll wake up, beautiful thing. And they can manipulate the depth of your anesthesia as well. So this has been the mainstay of anesthesiology for decades and it occurred to me that the kind of the requisite properties of the anesthetic drug are the same as DMT needs to be short acting, it can't build up in the bloodstream, it can't have subjective tolerance. Right, right. So the effect of the drug must remain constant throughout the whilst you anesthetize, otherwise you'd start to wake up even though the drug was still pumping into your brain. DMT has that as well. Rick Strassman showed that you can inject someone with DMT and you can measure the intensity of the experience using his rating scale. Then you can inject them again 30 minutes later and they will have the same intensity of experience. You can repeat that over and over again. So it occurred to me, I thought, wait, DMT has all of these properties that we need for target controlled intravenous infusion. So why don't we work together, me and Rick, and actually develop a model for this, a mathematical model of DMT's distribution, metabolism, excretion, that you need to build this kind of target controlled intravenous infusion model, but just replace the anesthetic drug with dmt. So I wrote to Rick and I said, I have this idea and I need your data, his blood data, because you need blood sampling data to build this model. And he had it on some old hard drive, this old Excel file which he kindly sent to me. And we set to work, we built this model.

[Podcast Host 2]

Did you have to convince him or talk him into it or explain the protocol or.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, I think he, when he wrote DMT, the Spirit Molecule in 2000, he, he mentioned towards the end of the book that maybe an infusion will be better. So it wasn't an entirely alien idea to him and said, you know, when I came along with this very concrete proposal to write this paper, we'd call it extended state dmt. Later it became known as DMT X. And we published this model, kind of a proof of principle basically to say this should work. We didn't know if it would work, but it should work. We should be able to stabilize the DMT state and hold someone there for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, hours, three hours, however long. And then that got a lot of attention and the Imperial College team in London picked it up and said, okay, let's do this in humans, let's see if it actually works. And they, In I think 2020, around that time, they recruited a dozen people for a pilot study and were able to indeed show for just 30 minutes. But 30 minutes is a lot longer than normal DMT trip. They were able to stabilize the DMT state and maintain fairly stable intensity of experience. And since then, you know, a number of groups have kind of extended this to two, three hours. I now work with a company called Elusis ela USIS in the Caribbean and we've got a special license to actually bring anyone onto the island and to undergo several DMT X sessions with qualified medical practitioners, psychiatrists, anesthesiologists and anyone now can basically spend as much time as they like really within the DMT space exploring. And so, you know, go to elusismind.com and you can also kind of sign up and spend a few days on the island.

[Podcast Host 2]

Elyses went live in March, right?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yes. So the first cohort was in March.

[Podcast Host 2]

First cohort. So what are people seeing?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, we, we, it's very early days, so we don't kind of have kind of published reports or anything, but the,

[Podcast Host 2]

but are we all seeing the waiting room, navigating the space, the entities.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So when the Imperial College team published their DMTX study, they, we actually, I actually did a, like an online webinar with all of the or several of the participants, me and Graham Hancock actually chaired it. That's still online. People can find that basically for Andrew Gallimore, Graham Hancock, you should be able to find that. And we spoke to several of them, including the first subject, Zero, as I call him, Carl Smith. He was the first person to undergo DMTX in a controlled kind of research setting. It was five doses, increasing doses, and I think every couple of weeks they'd go in and they'd be injected, infused with DMT for 30 minutes. And then we got to speak to them about their experiences. And so think about DMT is that it's, it's a very varied experience and no, no, no two experiences are always the same. However, Carl Smith particularly, he's one of my colleagues at New Nordics, we're both directors.

[Podcast Host 2]

He,

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

he found that the entities over the sessions, because there's several, you know, five sessions of dmtx, the entities started to notice that he was coming back rather too often and spending a little bit too much time in there. And he describes the sense that the entities were saying, not you again, you're back again. As if there was this kind of continuity between the experience they weren't totally isolated experiences, but there was this continuity between the experiences and during one experience, one DMTX session, he was being scanned by some machine. This is in the normal waking world, right? Like an MRI machine or something. He was being scanned, his brain was being scanned and the entities were aware of this. The entities kind of rushed in and they, he said they seemed a little bit confused, like they're the ones normally doing the scanning and not. Whatever this was. They didn't seem to understand what was going on. Most people when they take dmt, they aren't being scam, right? They're doing it, you know, in the back room or basement or something.

[Podcast Host 2]

Did he describe what they look like?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

He didn't, no, he didn't describe what they looked like, but he said there were very, very large numbers of. They were crowding in as if they'd seen something going on. And they come, came crowded in and there was another guy called Anton Bilton, he actually funded the study. He has this great institute called the Tyringham Institute and has these wonderful private symposia every few years and he funded it and he said, I want to be a subject since I'm paying for this bloody thing. Not a cheap study by any stretch of the imagination. And he describes an experience where he found himself in like the waiting room kind of place with these morphing geometric walls and these beings who were looking down upon him, he called them the gingerbread men. These elfish like beings, small beings, and they seemed to be said they, they always checked the back of my neck, always do this. I don't know why. He said. The only thing I can think is they were checking to see if there was a cord attached, whether I had kind of passed permanently to their side.

[Podcast Host 2]

Wow.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. And then when they were satisfied that he hadn't, that, you know, he was kind of there temporarily, they started showing him things. And one thing that happens quite regularly is they, they show you devices that are kind of like, like electronic, some kind of mechanical device or electronic device, like a jewel encrusted pad. He described it, which is interesting, right? It's like imagine an iPad, I guess, with knobs and wheels and dials and numbers, all this kind of stuff. And try showing it to him as if, as if he was supposed to do something with it or make sense of it, but of course he couldn't. But this term jewel encrusted pad is very interesting because Timothy Leary back in the 1960s, he wasn't aware of this Anton. But I said to him, Dual encrusted pad, Is that your terminology? He said, yeah, that's how I describe it. Because Timothy Leary back in the 1960s says that these elf like insect beings were proffering this jewel encrusted pad like a device that was some, you know, some kind of futuristic iPad thing.

[Podcast Host 2]

Would an Amazonian see that? Because they'd have no context for anything like that. Would they see that?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

That's a good question. We don't know. Right. This is the kind of study that needs to be done, is get people who are completely naive to pure injected dmt, right. And bring them in and see, you know, what do they see? Because the experience is likely to be very different to Ayahuasca for a number of reasons. But, but, but yeah, do they see the same kind of technological devices or do they not? And you know, what, what is the reason for that? But, but yeah, there's, there's always this sense that you're interacting with some kind of extremely advanced species, extremely advanced cognitively int, intellectually, technologically, like a hyper technological kind of species or ecology. And they, they, they, they seem often eager to show you things, devices, multi impossible things, you know, nine dimensional Faberge eggs. Terence McKenna used to describe them. You know, just weird things, liquid light crystal machines, strings, you know, things that you can't really, but just things that kind of thing. As if, as if they're trying to impart some kind of information or trying to make you understand, but you don't understand. And that's what's so frustrating about it. And Anton in the same way, when he was presented with this dual encrusted pad, he couldn't make any sense of it. And eventually they just gave up. And they kind of says there was like a, like a swipe as a. And that the whole scene completely changed. He was in this completely different environment. Yeah. So lots of very strange experiences coming out. But I think where DMTX really comes into its own is being able to spend. Imagine if you'd sent in, you know, a mathematician or a linguist, it was familiar with strange symbolisms and languages or, or whatever. Somebody who could spend an hour within the space interacting with these beings and trying to extract certain types of information from these beings. I think that's how I see the future of a DMTX program as opposed to research programs of the past which have generally been. Have you taken psychedelics before? Yes. Good. Do you have any heart conditions? No. Okay, there you go. Go in, tell us what you see.

[Podcast Host 2]

But with dmtx you can bring them out, can't you get them to describe what they saw and then put them back?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Exactly. So you, so not only can you send in specialists, so if you want to study, you know, the topology or the geometry of the space, you send in a mathematician that's familiar with these kind of things and they can say, oh, this is a seven dimensional space, or this, these are the symmetry groups that are on the walls of this space. They can tell you exactly what's going on mathematically and what's changed compared to the normal waking world. And they can spend, yes, they can spend, you know, it could be deep within the space for an hour or longer, or you can adjust in real time. So they can have a device where they can adjust the infusion rate so the amount of DMT being infused into their bloodstream, they can manipulate that in real time. Because DMT is so short acting, if you bring down the infusion rate within just a minute or so, you start to come out and then you can communicate with the team and say, I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this. And they might say, oh, can you look for this? Or can you ask them this, okay, I'm going back in. Then you go back down again. So you have this ability to manipulate the depth in real time.

[Podcast Host 2]

It's fascinating. What got you thinking that maybe what people are seeing is connected and it's not a hallucination, that, that it's that it's a realm or.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, I mean I. So what I think's going on with DMT is I don't think you're going anywhere. That's really important. You know, it's not like another dimension or something like that. Even in the DMT state, the brain is constructing this model. Right. So normally what's happening when you're awake and completely sober is your brain is using sensory information, information, let's say through your eyes, and it's using it to kind of tune and keep its model kind of tuned to the environment basically. Now when you take dmt, the brain starts constructing this alternate world model and it's as if there's some alternate source of sensory information coming into the brain that's kind of modulating that DMT world. So you're not going anywhere, you don't have to kind of travel anywhere. It's simply a like switching the channel, right? If you have a TV set and you're watching channel one, then you switch the TV set to channel two and nothing goes anywhere. It's simply that you've changed the receiving

[Podcast Host 2]

well you, you said that it's like you're receiving an alternate reality. How do you know that you're receiving it and not creating it?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, you are creating it. You're always creating the world model, but again from the, in the normal waking world you're receiving sensory information which is informing that creation. So it's, it's like it's, it's always, it's always being created by the brain, but it's mapped to the environment, the normal waking world, right? It's modulated and it's kind of constrained by sensory information coming from the environment. Right. Now in the DMT state, what I think is happening is that your, your brain is constructing this alternate world, but it's being constrained by some other source of sensory inputs which I think distinguishes it from a hallucination. Now the reason, I think that because you could say you're quite right, that it's purely constructed, right? There's no other source of information coming in. It's literally like a kind of dream state. But again, you know, the dream state is very different. We can explain the dream state. The DMT state is like this. It's like the brain has started speaking a language it never learned to speak. It's constructing these worlds that have no relationship to the normal waking world, no relationship to the world the brain evolved and learned to construct. And you, it's hard to explain that. You know, if a five year old British child started speaking some obscure dialect of some South American indigenous rainforest language, right? And doing so fluently, that would be completely confounding unless he'd been taught it in the same way. The brain switching to constructing this alien world so efficiently is very, very, very difficult to explain. And that's kind of the foundation of why I think there's something going on more than just mere, than mere hallucination with dmt. But we need to test it. Now there are a number of ways you might do that. For example, you might look for, if two people for example, are going, let's say interacting with the same entity as some people claim to be able to do, can you kind of pass information through that entity? Can someone deposit information into the DMT state? I want to ask you to retrieve it.

[Podcast Host 2]

I want to ask you about the blue yellow test.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Blue yellow test.

[Podcast Host 2]

I want to ask you about that before we do that mentioned Robin Carter Harris. Let's steel man, straw man. Because he disagrees and thinks it's hallucination.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

He does, yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

Why does he think that and why is he wrong? I mean, I want you to be right. But it's, you know, logically, parsimoniously, it seems like hallucination is what it is. But I prefer your theory because it's just more interesting.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, I think, I'm not going to say that Robin is wrong, but I think Robin and all kind of mainstream button down neuroscientists start with the assumption that we're dealing with hallucination. And I think that that's reasonable actually. It should always be your default position. Most of my work, I would say 80% of what I've done in the last 20 years is not actually trying to convince people what DMT is, but actually trying to convince people what it's not. I actually tried to explain to people why I don't think it's hallucination. Rather than telling them that I have the answer that, you know, it's the spirit world or whatever, the astral plane. I really tried to focus on kind of why. I think it's very difficult to explain DMT purely as a, as a hallucination. And Robin would say, well, this is just. I can't say what Robin would say, but it's. Robin assumes that we're dealing with some kind of information, some kind of, some kind of hallucination, that your brain, when perturbed by DMT is, is constructing these worlds, perhaps informed by archetypal structures. That's a big thing. I know with Robin. He's, he often takes this very Jungian angle. He thinks that, well, we can. These are archetypal structures. That's where they're coming from. These are inherited patterns. That's why everyone sees certain types of entities because these are embedded archetypal structures.

[Podcast Host 2]

In every culture.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

In every culture has little people. Right, exactly. But I, I think that would work if. The thing is that archetypes are not, they're not images, first of all, you know, an archetype really, we know now anyway that an archetype is really just a, it's a, an inherited mode of social interaction. So you're born with certain. In animals we just call them instincts. Right. A baby, for example, will want to be close to its mother, will see its mother as a source of warmth and comfort and safety and will, you know, smile when it sees its mother's face. Whereas when it sees a stranger, it will, it will be naturally kind of scared and start crying. If it's separated from his mother, it'll start crying. These are instinctive behaviors that are essential. Right. In, in animals we have certain instinctive behaviors that don't need to be learned. If you take a pair of young rats in a cage that have instinct entirely raised alone, put them together in a cage, they will start playing, they will start scrapping and all this kind of stuff, all instinctive. They don't need to be taught how to play, it's just instinctive. You put a cat, few cat hairs into that cage, right, they freeze, they're scared. Doesn't work with dog hairs, it works with cat hairs, right? So they have this innate program, we might call it a cat archetype. Doesn't mean they can dream of cats or that they can imagine cats, they can't. But they have this innate response to a cat.

[Podcast Host 2]

They know what that smell is, they

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

know that that smell, they don't know what it is, but they know that instinctively that they need to be a little bit careful because there's something unsettling, there's something dangerous here and they don't need to be taught that. And that's kind of important. And in the same way, humans have lots of these archetypes, the mother archetype, the father archetype, the stranger, the wise old man. What's the wise old man? Well, it's an elder member of the tribe who has a lot of life experience and wisdom and who you should listen to that, the trickster. This is someone probably from outside the tribe, maybe who you need to be a little bit careful around. You know, should you reveal your darkest secrets to them or should you remain tight lipped? Should you listen to what they say or should you, should we ignore them? You know, these, these are all types of social interactions that have been essential in social humans for millennia, tens of millennia. And so these are kind of hardwired. And so these become associated with certain types of people we call the archetypes. But they're not images. They don't endow you with the ability to construct images, but you learn to construct images associated with them as you do, as you learn, your brain learns to construct them. The normal waking world, they become associated with certain types of, you know, the mother archetype is, becomes associated with your mother and that kind of thing. So archetypes are kind of limited in what they give you. They give you these very kind of quick and dirty ways of responding to humans. There's certain types of humans that you're likely to meet in the environment you should respond to in certain ways. You don't respond to your mother in the same way you respond to a complete stranger in a dark alley. We have these hardwired archetypes that allow us to differentiate those respond in an appropriate way, but they don't give you hyper dimensional worlds filled with non, non, human, non animal beings that are far more complex than humans. You know, they don't give you all of that stuff. And so it's still, it still doesn't explain, even if you invoke the archetypes, why and how the brain is able to construct these, these things so reliably. But, but again, I understand that not everyone is going to be convinced by this and I don't necessarily expect them to be convinced by it. I'm not trying to convince them that the DMT world really, you really are interacting with other intelligences in the DMT state, but I'm just trying to trigger a little, little sliver of doubt in your mind that actually there maybe is something slightly unusual going on that we need to study. We need to really study this space and study these entities with an open mind and not just assume from the get go that it's just hallucination. And our job is simply to explain how this hallucination works because there's so much going on in DMT state that I think remains a true mystery.

[Podcast Host 2]

Do we know if Robin has tried dmt? I don't want to out him. The reason I ask is if you've tried it, then you inherently feel like you're connected to everything else.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, I do know the answer to that question. I'm not sure if I can.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's fair.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Give you it.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's fair enough. Because when I read his quote about hallucinations, I was thinking, Robin, I don't know if you've taken it because it's pretty mind opening, but there are, there are some problems with it that I want to talk about as we move along. You mentioned rats, but brought me to a question I wanted to ask. I think we're finding that under cardiac arrest, brain's being flooded with dmt.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

What do you think is going on there?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Okay, there's a bit of a story there. Okay, so again, the reason I mentioned earlier that people have been looking for DMT in humans since the 1950s and there's a reason for that because there was this idea that something called the transmethylation hypothesis of schizophrenia, which was the idea that, you know, serotonin also comes from tryptophan and tryptamine, but if you kind of divert off the serotonin production pathway, you can get very easily to dmt. So when people started, when Zara particularly started, and other People started publishing studies showing that DMT was psychedelic and that it could easily be produced from tryptophan. They, they thought, well, maybe what's causing these abnormal psychologies in, in schizophrenics is that they're, they have this disorder with their tryptamine metabolism and that they're producing too much dmt. Interesting. Makes sense. Right? And so easy to test. They started looking for DMT in urine and in blood, in saliva, et cetera, and they found it, but the problem is that they found it in basically everyone.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And there are some studies that, I think there's been over a hundred studies now looking at DMT levels in humans since the 1950s and there's never been, there's no really convincing evidence that. Some studies say oh, there's more DMT and schizophrenics. Other studies say no there isn't, it's certainly not definitive. And does it even make any sense? Schizophrenics don't tend to, you know, really like schizophrenic visual hallucinations when they're there. Mainly they're auditory, so hearing voices. But when they do have visual, visual hallucinations, they tend to be of normal appearing, normal sized humans and they tend

[Podcast Host 2]

to be in the same space Right. Where when you're on dmt, you're not here anymore, you, you are gone.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Exactly, yeah. So, so it's like that, it's like you're in a waking dream. It's like, you know, your, your brain is inserted a human into your world model inappropriately.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

They interact with the environment, they sit on chairs that, they walk through doors, they don't walk through walls, they, they seem to obey the laws of physics. Right, so that's your brain kind of again using its stored object models and models of the world, but not doing it quite appropriately. That can, that's relatively easy to explain. But anyway, going back to the rats. Yeah. So the, the idea, so the pineal gland, this is basically taking us to the pineal gland. So Rick strassman in the 1990s, he proposed that DMT, we know that the pineal gland is producing melatonin. This tiny little gland, about the size of the end of my pinky sits right in the center of the brain. It has this exalted position in mystical traditions for many, many years. And Rick Strassman suggested that perhaps pineal gland was releasing DMT and that this was responsible for certain alter states of consciousness or very specifically the near death experience. This actually I should give proper credit To Jace Calloway in the 1980s, he, he proposed that dreaming was due to DMT, that when you dream your, your brain stops, the tryptamine metabolism changes and your brain stops producing serotonin and basically starts producing dmt. And that causes dreaming. That was his hypothesis. So you have two hypotheses. One is the DMT causes dreams, which I don't think is true either because dreams are nothing like dmt.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And then the near death experience, that's more compelling. Yes, it is, it's more compelling. There have been some recent studies, studies that showed there are very, there is a kind of a, quite a large overlap between the kinds of experiences people have during near death experiences and the DMT phenomenology. They're not exactly the same, but only

[Podcast Host 2]

10 to 20% of those people have that experience.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

The rest don't exactly. Yeah, including Don Hoffman actually. But that's another story.

[Podcast Host 2]

We were almost up to dawn. I can't wait. So, so what do you think is happening? Yeah, why is it, why did we evolve to have that there? So is that why we're seeing the tunnel? When I see the Virgin Mary or I see my grandmother, my mother, am I seeing an entity?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So that's the hypothesis. Right. So Rick Strassman said that when you die, when you're in, during the dying process, the brain is flooded with DMT and this is kind of the conduit by which the soul exits the body. It's a very mystical kind of, not purely a scientific. He's definitely strayed into the mystical realms here. Kind of exited the scientific arena a little bit.

[Podcast Host 2]

You kind of have to.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Kind of have to, yeah, but it was purely hypothetical. It was just a hypothesis that a number of people caught onto. And so the DMT dream, DMT death thing has become kind of embedded in public consciousness. But they're both purely hypotheses. However, more recently a guy called a biochemist, I think he's a biochemist, Edie Fresca, he's working with Rick strassman and Dennis McKenna. He found that DMT, when you, if you, if you have some neurons that are deprived of oxygen, so brain cells, you, you deprive them, they are very oxygen hungry. If you deprive them from oxygen, we deprive them of oxygen, they die very quickly. This is why strokes are so devastating. In a very short period of time, blood flow to certain parts of the brain is compromised, that, that part of the brain starts to die, which is why strokes need to be treated so, so rapidly as an Absolute critical, you know, clinical emergency. But what he found is that if you deprive neurons of oxygen and added some DMT to the mix, the neurons survived much longer.

[Podcast Host 2]

Neuroprotective.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Neuroprotective. And it's actually a particular receptor called the sigma 1 receptor.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It's not, not the serotonin receptor. Sigma 1 receptor binds to this and protects the neurons in some way. There's some biochemical cascade that helps the neurons to survive for much longer. So then you think about this. Oh, wait a minute. What happens during the dying process? Well, your cardiovascular and respiratory system start to collapse. Your brain is starved gradually more and more starved of oxygen. Now this is precisely the time when, if you do come back, right, if you don't die, this is precisely the time when you need as much DMT in your brain as possible to help protect your brain. So if you do come back, the brain is protected because this is the most oxygen, you know, hypoxia sensitive organ in the body. And so it would make sense that if you're dying that somehow dmt, endogenous DMT production is ramped up very, very rapidly and you get this flood of DMT in the brain which protects the brain. It doesn't explain the experience, however, because you can do this with any molecule that binds to the sigma 1 receptor. So it suggests there's some connection there with the dying process. And so they, recently they, they tested this in rats. They would, they would stop the rat's heart, induce basically cardiac arrest in a rat. And they would, they have these things called, these like micro, what are they called? I forget. But anyway, they have this system where they can actually measure, they can put this device, this probe directly into a rat's living rat's brain and actually measure in real time the levels of various molecules, kind of a credible thing. And they found indeed that when the rat heart stopped, levels of DMT rose very, very kind of spike in dmt. There was also other neurotransmitters that were spiking as well. So whether it's specific for DMT is not, it doesn't seem to be, but it kind of fits together, right? When you're dying, the brain or the brain or could be the lungs, we don't know. But levels of DMT in the brain at least rise. And this protects the brain.

[Podcast Host 2]

Have they, have they been able to test on the rats different brain activity?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No. So you're suggesting like they can measure the NDE of them, Right?

[Podcast Host 2]

I'm wondering, it sounds like all mammals would do this or it's what it sounds like. I'm just wondering, does every animal, when it goes through this process, does their reality change? Do they move to this new dimension?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

This is. Yeah. Unless, unless you kind of undergo a rebirth as a rat, we're not likely to find that out. I mean you certainly, you can measure,

[Podcast Host 2]

couldn't you test effects? Could you test their brainwaves to see.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yes, you can, you can, you can. But whether you can do that the same time as this micro. It's called microdialysis. That's it. You can do that the same time as this. Measuring the levels. I think you probably have to do it separately. You have these like tiny little MRI machines. Very cute little MRI machines. You could probably do that.

[Podcast Host 2]

Looks like a Barbie mri.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. I don't think it's been done though. But it's. Yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

A quick sidetrack and then I want to get to blue yellow, 5 Meo. DMT is something that I'm not interested in doing, but that seems to be real dark. Ego death very quickly where with DMT there's some ego dissolving but you're still narrating and you're still remembering. So there is, you're still kind of driving refive. The MIO is a little bit, you're more observing and you kind of go into the void.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, they, they used to call 5CEO and DMT the power and the glory. Oh, right. So DMT is the glory. It's, it's very, it's, it's obviously it's characterized by extremely content rich, it's extremely visual, it's full of stuff, more full of stuff than the nor waking world. So it's a beautiful experience in many, can be horrifying as well, but it is a beautiful, rich, incredibly exquisitely rich and complex kind of experience.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah. Not everybody from DMTX had a, had a, had a glorious experience. I read a couple that were like those evil motherfuckers or I read a couple of those dark ones.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

There are some dark ones, sure. For sure. But Jenny's less than 10.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, it's a bad trip.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It's a bad trip. But yeah, I, Carl Smith, going back to him, he was Subject 0, Imperial College. He said to me many years ago, he says if DMT is like the 4th dimension, 5 Meo is like the 12th dimension. Yeah, it's like you go past all the form, you transcend form. If you go far enough beyond, you can, you can actually go beyond dmt. This highly structured form and content rich state into the void, into pure white light of consciousness itself. That's the 5 Meo. And he actually said during his DMT X experience that he was able to sometimes see the 5 Meo space kind of there some way away whilst he was in the DMT space, as if he could almost reach it, as if they were connected in some way.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's very interesting.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah,

[Podcast Host 2]

that's very interesting. I don't know if you want to say, but have you experienced five of meow?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And like you, I'm in no hurry. I've got my hands full with dmt, thank you.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, I'm in no hurry either because. Yeah. And you can buy that online from these churches. Don't do that. I don't. Don't buy anything from the churches.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Don't go chasing toads down in.

[Podcast Host 2]

What was that church that you criticized? They're still in business, by the way.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Are they really?

[Podcast Host 2]

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It was the church of. Used to be called the Church of Salemothoxen, then it became the Church of the Sacred Synthesis, I think.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yep. Yeah, they're still, they're still operating and it's a couple of lawyers that are running basically a church farm. I think they've claimed that they've helped create something like 80 to 100 of these sacrament churches. I mean, they wrote a couple of books on how to do it to get around being able to buy drugs in the mail.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

But I just want people to know that that's. It's not legal, what they're doing.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No.

[Podcast Host 2]

So don't send them money.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, no. I mean, they say that their sacrament doesn't contain. They said it doesn't contain any. The illegal parts of the mushroom. Is that the psilocybin and the psilocin. They said it doesn't contain any of that. And it's just psylomethoxin, this molecule, sacred molecule that they produce. But actually when people analyze samples of the sacrament, it actually contained no silomethoxin whatsoever. And it was purely just. It was just magic mushrooms. So they've been shipping that to people, including internationally as well.

[Podcast Host 2]

Oh boy.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So you pay a subscription fee and you get shipped these allegedly perfectly legal mushrooms because thalamethoxin itself, the molecule, isn't illegal. That should be completely legal. But actually if someone was to one of these samples was. Was intercepted, it's like you can get in really serious trouble depending on where he lived. It's. And it's such a. What really annoys me about them is that it's such a simple thing to do. You know, he had this vision that if you feed 5 methoxy DMT to magic mushrooms, they start converting 5 methoxide DMT to sily methoxin. It's a simple chemical step.

[Podcast Host 2]

Wasn't that based on debunked research though?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It was the research. Hamilton Morris recently developed it. Yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

Okay.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

By a guy called Gartz. But anyway, you know, once they'd done that experiment, nothing wrong with doing the experiment they should have done. The obvious thing, which is to analyze, chemically analyze. It shouldn't have been left to some outside person, some independent group to actually analyze their mushrooms and check that it doesn't contain psilocybin. And psilocin naturally contains what they say it contains that. They just said, oh, it feels completely different to mushrooms. Completely biased, subjective way of kind of appraising this, this mushroom. And then when a group did actually analyze it, as I said, there was no silomethoxin in there whatsoever. And of course they threatened to, they tried to sue them for 1 million, $1 million. Literally. It was, you know, several people, lots of people they tried to sue.

[Podcast Host 2]

Well, they're lawyers, they're not chemists, they're not scientists, they're lawyers. So they're, they're going to sue. They lost every case. They. Yeah, of course, yeah. So guys, don't, that's. Andrew won't say it, but I will. Greg Lake and Ben. We stay away from those churches. That's the. I feel like those, those churches kind of cloud the legitimate research, don't you?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, it depends on the church, I guess. I mean, I think, I think humans really do have a, dare I say, a God given right to alter their consciousness in however they feel fit. And if that includes using psilocybe mushrooms or ayahuasca or DMT or whatever, I don't think that should be a crime. And I think there's something extremely wrong with the idea that certain states of consciousness are basically illegal. I mean, yes, it's the molecule, but really not the molecule. You know, what's important is what it does to you, what it does to your consciousness. And so it basically means that the LSD induced state of consciousness is illegal. The DMT induced state of consciousness is an illegal state of consciousness. So I think people, I can fully understand people who would try to find loopholes in the law and you know, more power to them to do that. But when you start creating churches, I think then you, there's a danger of you getting into kind of cultish territory, starting your own religion. For some people, it's clearly just a way of getting around the law. But for other people, like the Church of Silo Methoxin, for example, it becomes much more than that and they start making big, big money from this. I mean, the $50,000 a month, I think was a number. Don't quote me on that, but it was a big number, I think in

[Podcast Host 2]

the lawsuit is 100,000amonth.

[Podcast Host 1]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Okay, there you go. So $100,000 a month. And then some. Some guys publish a paper basically saying that you're the entire foundation of your sacrament. You know, people are paying $100 a month, what it is for 30 grams of dried mushrooms, something that could be obtained for pennies. Really, if you grow your own, someone shows that that's nonsense and that it's not scientifically valid. You go from $100,000 a month to a very small number. You can imagine them being pretty pissed off by that, but it's their own fault.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, yeah, we'll leave on that, that up note about the churches. All right, we'll be right back, guys. It's going to get wild. I wanted to ask you about this. Back in 2021, something you posted,

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

going

[Podcast Host 2]

back, retrieved and carefully restored from the archives of the highly secretive, now allegedly defunct Laboratory for Reality Engineering Tokyo, with its own Psychedelic Molecular Technology Technical Manual. That is not a paper. That is not a scientific paper. That's.

[Podcast Host 1]

What is that, a world Building an

[Podcast Host 2]

argument were you doing?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So that's from my. So my second book, Reality Switch Technologies, Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds. So that was kind of a concept book. I mean, fundamentally, it's a book about how do psychedelic molecules alter the structure and dynamics of your world? How do they allow you to explore other worlds? Basically, it's a. It takes you through the. All the way from the chemistry through to the biochemistry and the pharmacology and the neuroscience, and looks at dmt, looks at the classic psychedelics generally. It looks at salvinorin, it looks at even ketamine, things like that. And basically it's like a manual for understanding psychedelics, basically. But it's. But it was kind of like a concept book in that I wanted. I wanted to give it this kind of. This kind of feeling as, I guess like this kind of cyberpunk vibe as being this.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

This kind of old document from this defunct Reality Engineering Institute in Tokyo. That was the vibe, you know, kind of Akira kind of thing. That's what I wanted. So if you if you actually buy that book, the whole book looks like it's been kind of photocopied. It's like one of these declassified CIA documents with all the stamps on and the retracted bits.

[Podcast Host 2]

Know that you could still get that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, it's.

[Podcast Host 2]

It was a very love.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I love that book and that whole reality. There's some photos in the center of the book that purported to be from this now defunct secretive reality engineering institute in Tokyo, which of course is just a figure of my imagination.

[Podcast Host 2]

I bet a lot of people hopped on board though, with that.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

A lot of people did. And they would write to me as well and say, hey, I think there's a problem with the printing on this board. Looks like it's been photocopied. So yeah, that's part of the design.

[Podcast Host 2]

I thought it was great. So let's talk about the, the blue yellow screen test.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Right?

[Podcast Host 2]

How does that work? And what, what are you trying to prove? And is that connected to traces of other with, with Don and nifa?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, so. So obviously I can talk until the cows come home. Until explaining why I think DMT is more than hallucination, but we really need real tests. What are the kind of experimental tests that we can do that can distinguish between actual interfacing with some kind of intelligence versus pure hallucination? And, and so in 2015 I started working with a non profit in Florida called New Nortics. And now one of the directors, we, we're interested in kind of, kind of like, we describe it as like a SETI of the mind kind of program. Rather than looking for intelligence out there in the cosmos, we're looking for intelligence, you know, inner paths to outer space, as Rick Strassman called it. And so we're interested in kind of spearheading and developing research, various research projects within this kind of psychedelic arena to actually study things that other people don't study. Right. Actually most people assume it's hallucination and so they wouldn't dream of doing these kind of experiments trying to actually test that. And so New Nortics people can go to the New Nortics website, newnautics.org n O-O-N a u t I c s.org and find out all about the work we do. People can even donate if they want to, to help kind of fund that kind of research. And now with the DMTX technology, now that we have this ability to extend the DMT state, we can actually do experiments now. And now we even have the venue I mentioned Eleusis earlier. El Usis based on, you know, the Elusinian mysteries. So we have this legal setting where people can go and we can actually bring in cohorts. We're like the research arm of Elusis at New Nordics. We can design these experiments and we can actually bring people onto the, the island in, in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and perform experiments aimed at studying the DMT space and testing the DMT space, doing experiments within the DMT space. And so this. Blue, yellow. So basically what we want to know is when someone goes into the DMT space and they're interacting with some kind of entity, let's say, are they really interacting with some kind of independent agency? And how do we test that? And it's. One can imagine a whole suite of different experiments that one could do. I don't think there is kind of one mic drop experiment that's going to settle the question once and for all. You can imagine the various research projects, programs aimed at testing that. And one broad type of experiment is looking for some kind of correlation within the DMT experience that can't be explained in terms of the subject couldn't know. Right. So I mentioned earlier this idea of someone depositing information into the DMT space and someone else retrieving it later on that would show there's some sort of communication channel. Another type of experiment, which is this blue, yellow one you mentioned, is can a DMT entity, can they track some kind of external variable that the subject doesn't know? Right. So it could be, the simplest case is some kind of binary variable, right? It could be switching between two colors. Right. So in another room completely isolated from the subject, you, you have a computer screen that's set to randomly switch at random intervals between two different variables. The simplest idea would be two colors, right? A blue screen and a yellow screen. Simple as that. What we want to know is can some entity, can their behavior in some way be tracked to that variable? Right. So for example, the subject goes into the DMT space, starts interacting with an entity. So here we've got trained people who can reliably interact with certain entities. And then basically we can ask the subject to, basically, at intervals, at set intervals, they need to say, okay, is the screen blue or yellow? Right. Based upon your experience. Right. They could be asking the entity directly, is it blue or yellow now? Or it could be just like what, what feeling what, what are the dominant colors within the space? Maybe they're not even interacting with an entity. Just what vibe do you get based upon your experience? Do you. Are you leaning more towards blue now or leaning more towards yellow? And sometimes that might be obvious, you know, if the experience becomes brightly colored yellow, then they would say yellow. But it might be much more subtle than that. They might have to kind of guess a little bit. But the idea basically is simply that when you perform that experiment with the subject and you compare the actual random flipping between blue and yellow or whatever other binary variable you choose, is there a correlation, statistical correlation that is beyond what would be expected by chance. And if so, if you achieve that, then that suggests that, yes, the DMT state, the entities within the DMT state can somehow track. So it's not, it's not like many people have proposed experiments where you go into the DMT space and you say to an entity, if you're so smart, you know, break down this complex number, this, this large number into its unique prime factors, basically asking them to perform, perform things, perform mathematical operations. I think that's, that's why they don't

[Podcast Host 2]

want to do that.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

They probably don't want to do that.

[Podcast Host 2]

Didn't you have one entity who just said we're done for today?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Oh yeah, we'll get to that. Okay, yeah, that's to do with the lockout effects. Okay, very interesting. I didn't mention that actually. That's another reason why I don't think. But we'll get to that. Okay, but yeah, so, so I think this is a much simpler experiment in that you're simply asking someone to basically say blue or yellow.

[Podcast Host 2]

What makes you think that the entities can see into our world so easily?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

We don't know that. We don't know that. Which is why you have a number of experiments. So you might be asking again, again, deposit and retrieval. That's slightly different here. You're looking at an information channel into and out of the DMT state. This is more tracking an external variable. You might ask the entities to, or sometimes rather than giving the entities tasks. This is something I really struggle with, is that requiring the cooperation of an entity for them even to know what you mean. There's nothing guaranteed. And we'll get to this when we talk about Don Hoffman. There's nothing guaranteed in my current model of dmt. That's that that requires or even implies that these entities are highly intelligent in the human sense, but they seem to occupy a space that is geometrically, dimensionally and topologically very, very different. And so they're doing things if they. Within that space that cannot be done within the normal waking world and they kind of betray their intelligence in a way. You don't need to ask them to do things, they just do things that the human brain can't. Right. So if it's a hallucination, then obviously what that entity can do is limited by what your brain can do.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

The entity starts speaking ancient Greek and you don't know ancient Greek. We've got a problem here right now. If an entity starts performing mathematical operations, starts doing things right, that your human brain cannot do, then we've got a problem here. To explain Andres Gomez Emilson, who works, who's part of or founded the Qualia Research Institute, probably the most important group group on the planet now, who's really studying the, the mathematics of the DMT state and the topology and the dimensional structure and all of that stuff. He describes entities doing things that a human can't do mathematically, like painting surfaces with certain colors. So there's something called the four Color theorem, which states that whenever you have a surface that's got different shapes all perfectly tessellated like a map, you can color every shape with this, with, with four colors so that no two shapes are. But with the same color. So comes back to the idea of coloring a map of the, of all the countries. If you only need four colors to paint every country with a different color so no two countries have the same color kind of butting up against each other. It's called the four Color Theorem. You can do it with any kind of map. But the more complex the map becomes, the more cognitively demanding it becomes. Eventually it becomes impossible for a human to actually color these surfaces. But what he noticed these entities doing was having these exquisitely complex, often higher dimensional surfaces with strange topological structures and these entities painting these surfaces with four colors just perfectly, as if demonstrating their abilities. And he said, I couldn't do this. It would take me hours or longer to do what they were doing in a fraction of a second. And repeatedly they paint the surface and then they would reset it and then paint it again and then do it again repeatedly. And most people, if they saw that, they would go, that was, you know, crazy or that was weird, or that was beautiful, but they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at.

[Podcast Host 2]

I wouldn't?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No. Nor would I. Nor would I. Neither would I.

[Podcast Host 2]

Nor would I. I was surprised by all the math in Traces of Other and in Hoffman's theories. There's a lot of math in it.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

There's a lot of math and I think you need the maths to. So we Say maths in the uk, I can't bring myself to say math. You need the mathematics to really kind of to understand the DMT state because it is entirely different. It's not the simple three plus one dimensional world that we live in, it's very, very different. And being able to go in there and say how it's different, why it's different, what's going on. And this is why I said earlier, you send in specialists into the DMT state, you send in people like Andres who can say, look, what these entities are doing is not just beautiful or strange, it's impossible for a human brain to do or far beyond normal human cognitive capacities, even in the most intelligent of people like Andreas. And so those are the kind of things you see where the entities are actually betray their intelligence displaying it. They're not giving you numbers or giving you blueprints for the time machine. I don't think it works like that. But they're doing things that you just have to recognize are beyond human capabilities. And in that way that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with something that is beyond the human, shall we say.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's very interesting. Can you give us just a simple example of how the maths apply to this work?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, well, so I'm just trying to

[Podcast Host 2]

get a foundation before we get into Don Hoffman.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Okay, yeah, well we can get into Don Hoffman because the mathematics definitely applies there. So, so I've been kind of following Don Hoffman, Donald Hoffman Professor Cognitive Scientist the University of California at Irvine for decades and he has this mathematical model that he calls conscious Agent theory. It's what he calls conscious realism, which posits that consciousness is fundamental and that reality consists of and only of conscious agents interacting. So everything we see and perceive is the result of the interaction of these conscious agents. And he has this precise mathematical model from which he can kind of boot up physical reality. So rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental, then trying to boot up consciousness from dead inert physical matter, he's going in the opposite direction, which I think is the correct one. Assume that consciousness is fundamental. Try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agents. So he starts with a conscious agent,

[Podcast Host 2]

which I think he got his math to work through game theory, like, like the math is legitimately works, the mathematics

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

legitimately works, and it's, it's incredible really that he starts with a very simple kind of minimal assumption model of a conscious agent. A conscious agent is an agent that can do basically three Things it can perceive other conscious agents. It can make decisions based upon what it perceives, and it can perform actions which affect other conscious agents. So you have this kind of network emerges of conscious agents all interacting via perception. And what we see, what we observe, is this interface. We never perceive the conscious agent network directly because it's far too complex, effectively, this infinite network of conscious agents. What we see is this interface that allows us to interact in adaptive ways with the environment.

[Podcast Host 2]

Everything's an icon.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Everything's an icon.

[Podcast Host 2]

So this is the fitness before truth method.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

This is fitness before truth. And so that was his original idea that he's been developing and testing various ways over the last few decades. And most recently he started. He came up with this, what's called the trace logic. The mathematics are a little bit sophisticated. I don't want to get too much into that. I'll get out of my depth pretty quickly as well. But what he found is that using this new model, he could actually kind of boot up not just the world as it appears to us, but he could also boot up relativity. So he could explain within this conscious agent theory, trace logic model, why time dilation and contraction at high speeds and all this kind of stuff that comes from relativity, which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way kind of space time works. Actually, he can get it from just the interactions of cons, conscious agents. He derived the Schrodinger equation. I mean, it's incredible stuff, just from basic conscious agents. And so just a few months ago, actually, I got an email from a guy called Gaspard who's working with Don. He's kind of built this thing called the Trace Institute based upon Don Hoffman's work to kind of start to build Don's legacy. Because Don Hoffman's kind of disorganized in some ways, and there's all this stuff floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff. There's no kind of, kind of properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on his work and kind of pick up the mantle, so to speak. So Gaspard, who's also been following my work, said to Don, you should. You should read this guy, Andrew Gallimore, you know, read his book Death by Astonishment, because a lot of the ideas in here, you know, I talk about intelligent agents in a very neutral way. I don't talk so much about aliens or spirits or that kind of thing. I'd say we're dealing with some kind of intelligent agent in the DMT state. Don Hoffman talks about conscious agents. So Gaspard quite rightly noted that there seemed to be some overlap here. There is perhaps some cross fertilization between our different ways of looking at reality.

[Podcast Host 2]

There is, but there's some conflict as well.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

There might be some conflict we can get into. But Gaspard said, you know, would you like to meet Don Hoffman? Don would like to meet you. We can have a discussion and see where there is that overlap. And so we met online and straight away I said, should we write a paper on this and see, see if we can see where the connection is. And I. It was honestly, and I don't say this lightly, it was one of the most profound few months of my life.

[Podcast Host 2]

And this was a preprint just last month, I think, right, Preprint.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

We published just last month. And it was, it was. I. I kind of had this working model of what DMT was doing that it was that it was kind of gating access to some other source of sensory information. But I never. Within the physicalist framework, there was no way for me to explain how does information come from somewhere else? It's not coming through the normal sensory organs. Where's the information coming from? I didn't have an answer to it until I started working with Don's model. So in my second book, which we just spoke about Reality Switch Technologies, I developed this concept called the world space. So remember that your brain is always constructing the world. And so there's kind of a vast state space of all possible worlds that your brain can construct. Right. Normally we sit within this very small region of what I call the world space. I call this the consensus reality space. But there are all these other worlds, world moments. A world is just everything you're experiencing at a particular moment. And your brain is constantly moving between these states. So if you take this vast landscape, all possible world moments, I call that the world space. And normally we sit within this very narrow region. It's like a well, and attract a basin within this world space, the consensus reality space. And that's the normal waking world. Those are the states that represent the structure, the content, the dynamics of the normal waking world. What DMT does, as I postulate in Reality Switch Technologies, is it perturbs the brain and it pushes it into a different region of this world space landscape. And this is where the DMT worlds are represented. But what I didn't have in that model was how information comes in to actually kind of modulate that, you know, modulate that experience. It was just, how does the brain go from building the normal waking world to the DMT world? So then I started Working with the Don's model and a mathematician called Nifa Hermanson, who's absolutely pivotal in making this, all the mathematics work. And we basically, we probed the model, we said, okay, if normally we only sit within a narrow, very small region of what Don Hoffman calls the experience space, it's the same idea. A conscious agent has this vast set of states, vast, vast numbers of different experiences, and we sit within this very narrow region of this experience base. It's the same idea as the world space. But what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of the experience base is simply a set of states, all possible states that a conscious agent could have, all possible experiences. But what sits on top is this mathematical structure called a Markov kernel, is called the qualia kernel. What that does is it gives dynamical structure to the experience space. So what that means is if you're in this state now, what are the probability that you'll move to this state or this state or this state? So it gives that dynamics, it determines the dynamics of how you move through, around the experience base. And as I said, normally we will sit within this very small region of the total experience base, which is the adaptive region where we, we experience the normal waking world. It's very thin, very, very small location within the, the experience base. And that's determined by the qualia kernel, which has evolved within that region of the experience base to create the world that we experience. However, if you can perturb the brain, perturb the conscious agent, you can knock it out of this region of the experience base into an entirely different region where the normal rules that are basically applied by this qualia kernel, they no longer apply. So you enter a type of experience, a type of being within the world that is completely different. Right? This is purely abstract. At the moment, we're not thinking about dmt. You enter a region of the experience base where the dynamics are completely different. The Markovian rules, the Markovian dynamics that determine how you experience the world within this region of the experience base are completely different. Now, the qualia kernel that sits, as I said, that's determining these dynamics, is actually composed of three different kernels, the perception, the decision, and the action kernels. So there's three parts. So together they determine not just what is your experience like within this region of the experience base, but how are you interacting with, with the larger, the broader conscious agent network. What kinds of other conscious agents can you interact with, can you perceive? Because in this region, the consensus reality space, you only can only interact with a very, very limited Number of conscious agents. But in this region of the experience space we proposed, you might be able to interact with agents that are normally completely imperceptible.

[Podcast Host 2]

Let me ask a question then.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Go on.

[Podcast Host 2]

Information theory would say that that other region is just a lossy projection and you can never fully know what's there because it may even be Don's work where N can't be greater than m. So brain is finite. We can't perceive other dimensions because our brain just can't do it. So if we're going into these other worlds, it has to just be a shadow of the world because we really can't know.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, okay, yes. So the world you experience is always, it's always the interface. So you can never get out of the interface, but the interface would change as you move the different regions of the experience base. So what you see in the interface is determined by the dynamics that are imposed by this qualia kernel. Right. So in this region we experience this low dimensional world where interacting with this very limited number of conscious agents that are that through our perception channel, our perception kernel, we're able to kind of render that information in a way that makes sense to us. But once you move into this other region of the experience space, so we propose the dynamical constraints are completely different. So the world wouldn't necessarily be three plus one dimensional. It could be completely different, it could be completely alien. The geometry, the topology could be completely alien. And the conscious agents that you can interact with in that region of the experience base could also be completely different.

[Podcast Host 2]

So your brain has to also be a projection to make that work? Yes, mathematically, yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yes. You always were in conscious agent theory, or the brain itself is part of the interface. Right. You're a conscious agent or a set of conscious agents. And we're talking purely about at the level of the ground of reality, if you like. But what's beautiful is you can actually this was purely initially a kind of a mathematical abstraction that we were doing, talking about how the qualia kernel and the Markovian dynamics, all of this stuff. But then we said, okay, let's imagine what that would actually be like if you were knocked out of this region of the experience space and you found yourself in a different region of the experience base where the Markovian dynamics are completely different and the interactions between the broader conscious agent network is completely different. Well, it would be extremely strange. Nothing would seem to make sense. It would look impossible, it would look perhaps high dimensional. The topology, the geometry would be completely different. The beings that you interacted with would seem completely alien. In other words, the entirety of the DMT phenomenology basically fell out of the mathematics.

[Podcast Host 2]

It's elegant.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And when that happened, that was like. It was a profound moment in my life, probably one of the most profound moments in my working life studying dmt. That DMT went from something which didn't quite make sense. You know, there's still missing pieces in the way I thought about it. And then suddenly with Don's model, everything falls into place.

[Podcast Host 2]

It does. But even then, that world, those entities are still just icons and projections.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. So, so what you have to think is that. So when you perceive another conscious agent, what's happening is that conscious. The way that, that conscious agent interacts with the conscious agent network changes the states of the conscious agent network that has an influence on your experience states. Doesn't mean you're you, that you can map the actual conscious agent dynamics directly into your experience base. You can't, but you. There is some influence, statistical influence, on how your world states, how your experience states, kind of update. That's, that's what perception is. And we form these icons. You know, I never have access to your internal dynamics. I have this highly simplified icon. And when you're. I'm perceiving you, basically what you are doing as a conscious agent is, is affecting my experience. And that's basically what perception is in the conscious realism model. And that completely changes when you go out of the, the consensus reality space, this very limited region of the experience base. I can no longer see you, I can no longer represent you or anything, but I start to be able to represent highly unusual, exotic Markovian dynamics that I simply couldn't do in this state. And that's why we think you're able to interact with other conscious agents that aren't simply beyond the agents, our representational reach, if you like. We simply have no way to represent what they are doing in any way. Once you move into this other region of the experience base, because the qualia kernel in that region is completely different. This is a bit complicated, but you can, you can start to interact with the conscious agent network in completely different ways. And that's what DMT is you're interacting with. It feels like you're in another world because in a sense you are. It's like the, the headset has been changed. You're. You're in a completely different region of the experience base and you're interacting with other conscious agents that you weren't, you were unable to interact with or perceive in the. Whilst you were stuck in this region of the, of the experience base. So it all falls into place quite beautifully. And that's what shocked me and was, you know, a profound, almost religious experience for me.

[Podcast Host 2]

What do you think our icon is in that other world? How are we perceived

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

normally?

[Podcast Host 2]

I never looked in a mirror.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

That's the thing is that for most people they would close their eyes and the normal waking world is irrelevant. And that's, it's clear that the brain is kind of losing its ability very, very rapidly. If you take a low dose, you will see dramatic changes in the way that other people in the world appears to you. But normally once you get, once you deliver that robust perturbation of the brain of the conscious agent with dmt, that this world is gone. There's no representation of it whatsoever. Even if you have your eyes open, it's like you're interacting with the conscious agent network in conscious realism theory in a completely different way. And so you're, it makes us, what DMT is doing is allowing us, we have this vast beautiful landscape of possible experiences. And DMT is one way, not necessarily the only way, certainly not the only way of changing not just the experience, not just the structure and dynamics of your subjective experience of your interface, but allowing you to interact with reality itself, the conscious agent network, in completely different ways. And so it's not just a model of DMT or the DMT is the most efficient delivering that kick to the conscious agent. But people describe very profound encounters with, with entities and strange alien beings, high dose psilocybin or even ketamine. John Lilly used to inject high doses of ketamine in the flotation tank and he would describe interacting with strange digital alien consciousnesses. So maybe it's all about finding molecules that will deliver that robust kick to the conscious agent that pushes it out of this very narrow region and allows your world not just to change, but also allows you to enter into two way interactions with other parts and other, other beings, other conscious agents within the conscious agent network.

[Podcast Host 2]

Do you think that that world is lateral to ours or is that deeper to the source?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, we're always at the sort, and this is what's kind of beautiful about conscious agent theory is that there is no level deeper than a conscious age. A conscious agent is the ground of reality itself.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

But normally we only interact. We only see a kind of a. We're only influenced by a very thin slice of that conscious agent network. We're kind of held constrained by this qualia kernel that's been sculpted by evolutionary pressures and what psychedelics do, DMT particularly is. Pushes us out of that. And so we're simply within. We're still a conscious agent, but it's just where our way of being in the world and our way of interacting with the broader conscious agent network has changed. But we're still at the level. We're still a conscious agent.

[Podcast Host 2]

That makes sense. So we, we're living. Our world is a Mac and you go into a different realm and you're just booting up Windows or Linux. It's just a different interface.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It's a different interface.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It's like changing the headset, basically. Yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

When was the moment where you abandoned materialism and decided that your brain is an icon?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, I abandoned materialism many years ago. I mean, people think that I'm a materialist.

[Podcast Host 2]

I thought I did, yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Because. Because I, I write at the level of the brain. I can get my teeth into the brain. Not metaphorically, of course, but, you know, the mechanics of it and all that stuff. I can understand and get my teeth into if someone. But really, I've always been an idealist or for a very long time. I mean, I felt that consciousness was absolutely fundamental. This is the oldest message, you know, from all of the mystical traditions going back to, you know, ancient Hinduism and stuff, saying that consciousness itself is fundamental. I've always felt that. But there was nothing really to get my teeth into until Don's work came along. Because Don said, hey, if consciousness is fundamental, that doesn't mean it's just this kind of diaphanous mist or fog or whatever. You can actually do mathematics with it. You can, just like you can with material physics. You can, you can, you can think about, okay, how do these conscious agents interact? What is the mathematics of that? You can actually look at the mechanics and the dynamics of conscious agents and do stuff with it. Actual science. And so that's why before I started working with Don, I kind of avoided the question of consciousness simply because I had nothing to get my teeth into. And there's always a danger that you'll end up going off into the more spiritual, mystical stuff, which I've generally avoided for the same reasons.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, I don't hear you talk about consciousness itself. And, and you're familiar with Doug Hameroff's work. Yeah, it seems like it, it would marry Stuart. It seems like it would marry nicely with dmtx.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. Hameroff is a physicalist as well. I mean, Giulio Tononi. I was quite interested in integrated information theory for a while. I even Wrote a paper on it, connecting it to the psychedelic state. But again, these are all really physicalist theories. They're trying to. They assume that the physical is fundamental and that somehow consciousness is generated, whether it's when integrated information is non zero, whether it's these effect quantum effects in microtubules or whatever. But it's still a physicalist theory.

[Podcast Host 2]

The microtubules are still just another icon, you know.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Exactly. And so what I love about Don is you said, forget about all of that, let's start with the own. The one thing that we. We can't deny, which is our consciousness. Let's start with that, let's assume that's fundamental and then try to boot up the appearance of physical reality. And he's. Yeah. What he's achieved, I think, in the last year or so is remarkable in being able to explain so much about what's going on. And it all makes perfect sense to me. And when you connect it to dmt, it just all falls into place. As I said, the DMT phenomenology kind of falls out of the mathematics, which is so beautiful and too beautiful for it to be completely wrong. It could be completely wrong. Of course, I'm not saying this is. I've got the answer, but it's certainly something that I think needs to be pursued.

[Podcast Host 2]

So you and Don just gave a talk together a day or two ago.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. So we wrote the paper, worked on it for several months, me, Don and nifa, and then I said, hey, I've been invited onto. Have you heard of the why Files? I've been invited on this podcast and I'm going to be there in June, middle of June. And so Gaspard said, oh, we need to do an event. So that's why I did the event with Don, because.

[Podcast Host 2]

Oh, that's great. I didn't know that.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I didn't know that. Yeah. And so we arranged it on Saturday, so it's just a couple of days before today. And we basically. The launch of the Trace Institute together with the collaboration between the Trace Institute and New Nordics that I work for, that I'm a director of, and we sat on stage for an hour and a half and just having a moderated conversation in la, in Venice beach and just talking about, you know, kind of telling the world that DMT and conscious realism and that kind of fit together in this beautiful way. And it was recorded, so it's not been released yet, but people will hopefully soon be able to actually watch this conversation. And in the paper as well, we did that blue yellow experiment we proposed that as well. So it wasn't just a theoretical. There's a lot of mathematics within the paper. There's a theoretical model. But also at the end we say, okay, how can we test these things now that we've got, as I said, the Elusis, the elusive retreat research center in the Caribbean, we can actually pretty quickly start raising money to actually fund some projects on the island in a, you know, in a legal setting without having to do the whole university.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Route. Which would try trying to avoid connecting ourselves with universities because they obviously, they might not take kindly to the idea of testing the intelligence of DMT entities.

[Podcast Host 2]

It looks like a luxury vacation is really what it looks like.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Oh, it's a beautiful resort, no doubt about it.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

But it's also a research center as well.

[Podcast Host 2]

Something I couldn't get my mind around was DMT tolerance, DMT X, where at some point when the plasma level increases, the experience does not get deeper. In fact, it fades somewhat.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Okay, yeah, so this is very interesting. So as I said before, Rick Strassman showed that DMT doesn't have subjective tolerance, unlike other psychedelics. If you take psilocybin mushrooms trip, then if you try to take them the following day, you'll have a very, very weak experience. Right. And we know, we've known this for a long time with dmt. Yes. But with DMT you don't get that tolerance effect. Which is why DMTX works. But on the online forums quite a few years ago, it's been going on for a while, but it's. A lot of people are starting to talk about it now Is though, people would have this experience where they, they take DMT often, quite regularly, you know, maybe every. Every day or every few days. Right. They have a vape pen, so they're delivering the same DMT every time. And then one day they'll get like a big, like a big X in the field of vision that says no entry. Or there'll be an entity that will wag its finger and say, no, no, no. Or they get some kind of message like, you know, you're not welcome here, we're not letting you in. And this is called a lockout. You've been locked out of the DMT space.

[Podcast Host 2]

Wow.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Right. And so they say, okay, that's pretty startling. And a guy wrote to me actually, because I kind of probed this a little bit on the online forums and asked people to give me their experiences. And one guy said that he was using dmt, he's same batch as he always does vaporized in the same manner. And then one day, some, I forget it was like a mantis being or some kind of being, just as he entered the space, punched him in the face and he felt the punch and he snapped back and he was back. Baseline consciousness, the effect was just gone like that. And you get many, many those kinds of experiences and it's not pharmacologically this is not easy to explain. No, like tolerance is something that builds gradually and fades, whereas this is like an off switch. They have, you know, a string of perfectly visual psychedelic DMT states and then one day they're told you're not coming in. And sometimes that can last for months or years. A friend of mine, David Luke, a professor at Greenwich University, psychologists, one of the world leading experts on DMT and very experienced with dmt. He was locked out for. Someone told me it was like 20 years.

[Podcast Host 2]

Are you serotonin receptors still absorbing the molecule?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, serotonin receptors, the thing about serotonin receptors, all receptors really is that they're, there's a turnover. So the receptor itself will sometimes, just for a few days will be in the membrane and then it will be removed from the membrane, broken down and recycled. So there's always this replenishment of serotonin receptors. Now we know with like lsd, as it sits on the receptor, the receptor becomes what's called desensitized, it stops working. That's why you have to wait a few days or a week or so until the receptors have been recycled. You got new receptors, sure, right.

[Podcast Host 2]

Serotonin syndrome is a real thing, right?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It is a real thing, but.

[Podcast Host 2]

But what blows my mind is it turning off, Turning off because his receptors should still be active with the molecule. You just have it turned off?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It turns off, yeah. And it's not, it doesn't come back a few days later either. Sometimes it turns off and then the next day you're back. It's like you caught an entity on a bad day, that kind of thing. Sometimes you're locked out for months or.

[Podcast Host 1]

That's insane.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

And I can get an even more incredible account that I got from a woman during DMTX that she was doing DMTX in Colorado, kind of a private group, and she was undergoing dmtx. She was having this interaction with this entity for you know, 20 minutes or so, DMT flowing into her bloodstream and into her brain, stable DMT state. And then the entity said, okay, I think we're done for today. The vision's just stopped. DMT was still flowing the fusion machine was still on DMT levels in a brain, still that. And it was like, we're done. Can't explain that, can't explain that. Right, so we want to study that.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yes.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

At Elusis. What we plan to do, we're actually beginning to actually try and get funding for this, is to actually bring people on the island who are either locked out, who have been for a long time, who have repeatedly been unable, who could have visual experiences in the past, but were locked out and are still locked out, and then bring them to the island and infuse DMT into. Bring them to Eleusis, infuse them with dmt, you know, dmtx and then actually

[Podcast Host 2]

confirm or that would be interesting, that basically if they're still locked out, then yeah, then, yeah, you're really onto something.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. And then, then you can actually use, you know, eeg, you can, in theory, you can use fmri, you can actually look what is different to a control group. You also have a control group who are normal DMT users who can experience dmt. And then you look, what are the differences between their neural activity, how is that changing? Is there, you know, what's going on here? And then you might look for changes in differences in their genetics. There's also this thing called the 5% club, which are people who are locked out from birth, shall we say, they can never experience effects of DMT. 5% of people do.

[Podcast Host 2]

They have. That's very interesting. Is that a serotonin issue?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

We don't know.

[Podcast Host 2]

Mood disorder.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

My guess would be is that it's a, what's called a receptor polymorphism. So every receptor is a receptor, is a protein and it's encoded by a gene. We all have different variants of all the different genes encoding our receptors in our body. These are called polymorphisms. And my, my suggestion, prediction, perhaps hypothesis, is that certain people have a slightly different variant of the 5ht2a receptor. That means. Or some other receptor doesn't necessarily have to be the 5ht 2a. That means that DMT isn't either isn't binding to the receptor or it's not activating the receptor in the same way. It could also be a metabolic issue. It could be that they're metabolizing DMT extremely rapidly. But Rick Strassman found that in about 5%, I think it was three people out of 60, so exactly 5%. Even at the highest dose level, 0.4 milligrams per kilogram, which was a more than a breakthrough dose, they experienced no effects Whatsoever of dmt. So we want to study that as well.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yes, that's very.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Do genetic work, you know, take samples and actually, actually look at the genome of these people and say, what are the differences? You know, and that's more, that's easier to explain than the lockout. The lockout is very, very difficult.

[Podcast Host 2]

I had never heard that before.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host 2]

What's happening to the serotonin in the brain while they're under for so long? Is it just getting metabolized? Are they having mood issues when they come back?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No, I mean, people. The Imperial College study, the aim of it was to kind of look at that. Right. Is this safe and is it tolerable

[Podcast Host 2]

if you're on SSRIs? I don't think you should do this.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

No. What, what's with the problem with SSRIs generally is that people don't experience as intense effects. So it kind of blunts the effect because you get changes in the, the expression of certain serotonin receptors. But yeah, if you're on any, any kind of psychiatric medication for whatever condition, then tread carefully. That's a general kind of warning to anyone. Not just dmt, but all psychedelics. You would be very, very careful because they are contraindicated for certain people. These aren't toys. But yeah, I mean, DMTX is shown to be safe and tolerable. People broadly were able to handle the experience and come out absolutely, absolutely fine, even though they were in there. For now. There's been Matthias Leichti, I think, in Basel, had his subjects under for three hours or something like that. Wow. At a fairly low level, not the breakthrough level, but they also had like a device where they could adjust the, the infusion rate so they could control their experiences. So we're going to see more of those kind of studies where we start to learn how to use the DMT X technology to really not just spend more time, but actually be able to navigate the space and increase and adjust the depth of the experience in real time.

[Podcast Host 2]

At a low dose. Are they responsive?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. I mean, even at the high dose.

[Podcast Host 2]

Weirdly, even at the high dose, Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I mean, auditory response, not, not visual. But during the, the Imperial study, one of the annoying things is that for the subjects, and Carl talks about this a lot, is that they were, they were being asked like questions like, you know, what's the intensity now? Between 1 and 10, it's 3. What's it now? Do you see entities? Yes or no? You know, what's the entity level? All these questions. So you can never kind of Just let go and enjoy or you know, work within the space. You always have to be have one ear to the team waiting on the other side.

[Podcast Host 2]

I would be kind of annoyed actually.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, that's the deal. Because they need to get all of that data as well.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

But elusive, of course, you don't have to, you're free to kind of explore for as long as you like.

[Podcast Host 2]

How different is the ayahuasca experience from dmtx?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

This is a very good question, AJ because one of the kind of the pushbacks that we got, me and Rick when we published this is people would say, well, just Ayahuasca, that's an extended DMT stay. And in a sense they're right, but in several other senses the wrong. So with a regular DMT experience, blood brain DMT levels rise and then drops down very rapidly. With ayahuasca because of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor, the harmine and harmony within the traditional preparation that's kind of extended, so it rises slowly and then it starts to kind of tail off gradually over time. So you still have the peak, you still have the drawdown, but it's, it's stretched out. That kind of concentration curve is, is stretched out. So it's not, you don't, you never achieve a stable brain DMT concentration with ayahuasca. You're still at the mercy of your metabolism and pharmacokinetics, but also with ayahuasca. Dennis McKenna I think it was actually looked at blood concentrations of DMT of people who took ayahuasca and people who took like ejected high dose breakthrough level dmt and the peak blood brain or blood DMT concentration in ayahuasca is only around less than 20% what you achieve with ejected DMT. So wow. It's an extended, but actually generally it's a much milder, softer experience. Whereas what we're doing with DMTX is to push someone right into the breakthrough state if they want to. You don't have to, you can have lower levels as well. But in theory you can, you can bring them up into the breakthrough state and then hold them there in the breakthrough state for as long as possible. So you have much, you have real time control over the DMT state. You don't get that with or anything close to that with, with ayahuasca.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's interesting because in my own experience, sometimes you just can't get there. I just can't break through. I just end up in the room of geometric shapes and then I'm back usually because I'm stressed or distracted or a dog is barking or something.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

This is ayahuasca or with.

[Podcast Host 2]

No, just dmt. I don't always break through, but I haven't tried it in very long time. Pass the statute of limitations.

[Podcast Host 1]

You're alien insect online?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I am.

[Podcast Host 2]

Why?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, aliens I like. I've been interested in aliens and alien intelligence, not aliens is like gray beings and metallic discs shimmering in the night sky, that kind of thing. Although it is interesting, but that stuff

[Podcast Host 2]

doesn't connect to this at all.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Oh, I think it does. Yeah, I think it does. But, yeah, I've been interested in the idea of alien intelligence and insects, while these are kind of insectoid beings, are kind of a common entity within the DMT space. So alien insect. Why not? I came up with that name and now it's my handle on X and Instagram.

[Podcast Host 2]

Did you ever see the mantids during a. During a trip?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I've never seen a mantid.

[Podcast Host 2]

I didn't either.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

A lot of people. A lot of people have, though.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, I don't want to. How so how do. It's another problem with breaking through is if you go in anxious, it's also not advisable.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

So, yeah, I mean, it's most. Most people have relatively pleasant, although extremely bizarre experiences, but they're often this. The most common type of entity people encounter is actually more of a guiding presence, often like described as, like a motherly, caring presence that guides you through the space. All the different, you know, in my experiences from way back, there's a very strong sense of being taken as if, like, we've got so little time. When I need to show you this and this and this, you can't bring any of it back because it's so short, but this very real sense of being guided very, very rapidly through all these different rooms, I want to say rooms all completely different and all equally strange and baffling and bewildering and then you're deposited back in the real, say, the real world. You're deposited back in the normal waking world.

[Podcast Host 2]

And you don't really remember those rooms, do you? Because I don't. Yeah, I remember getting there and coming back. Yeah, that's about it. It's a wild experience. So how do we. How do we connect the UFO phenomenon to this? I'm starting to think about Jacques Vallee now and his theory about UFOs is consciousness and why different cultures perceive. We perceive the fairies, then we perceive this, and now we're onto orbs, depending on where we are culturally.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. I mean valet John Mack, if you remember John Mack, he wrote Abduction. You know that he was this hard nosed psychiatrist until he started interacting with and working with these so called abductees or experiences.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, Harvard didn't like that.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Harvard didn't like that at all. Well, understandably to be honest. But I think his, his perspective shifted throughout. I mean it did clearly shifted from the idea that we're talking of that the, the UAP phenomenon or the non human intelligence phenomenon is a, about biological beings that are arriving from other areas of the universe. I think that's pretty short sighted and feels kind of outdated now. And, and he started to think that actually we're talking the abduction experience was more of a altered state of consciousness, as if they were being, these experiences were being induced into some altered states of consciousness and interacting with normally imperceptible beings. And of course this fits perfectly with that's dmt. I mean if you read there was in, in Abduction, John Mack's first book, there is an account of this woman who was an abductee who has described these small lively beings kind of bounding around. I mean this was, this is a Terence McKenna machine elf trip report. It's exactly the same. Rick Strassman also noted that if they had taken some of his trip reports out of context and put it in a, one of John Mack's books, nobody would have questioned it because they were like this seemed like, you know, you have the, this sophisticated laboratory type environment and you've got these being of these small beings like workers or orderlies and then you have these more powerful supervising beings that are kind of in the background.

[Podcast Host 2]

I hear that story all the time.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, that's an abduction experience and it's also features prominently in DMT reports.

[Podcast Host 2]

So, so an abduction, could that be in like an endogenous DMT experience?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It could be an endogenous DMT experience. It could be that these. I think we need to get away from the idea that an alien is something that exists within this reality, this very limited perspective that we're dealing with wet bodied, wet brain biological beings, that we're dealing with some other kind of intelligence that isn't necessarily quote unquote physical but operates in some other domain in just the same way that now we think about, or some people like me think about the DMT entities is not spirits or gods but some kind of intelligent agent that normally is always there, but we normally are completely imperceptible and can't interact with. And I think that makes more sense because there's nothing that says that these aliens must be physical beings. And one can imagine that. You know, I often talk about the Anti Kardashev scale. You know, the Kardashev scale. The idea, it's kind of a, an expansive idea. The idea that we first we occupy this single planet, then we start harvesting the energy from the nearest star and then it's kind of. It's the idea that as an intelligent species progresses technologically and cognitively, they start to occupy larger and larger areas of the cosmos. Right. That's the way we think about it.

[Podcast Host 2]

We're like a high level zero.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

We're a high level zero. But. But John Barrow, the cosmologist noted quite correctly that actually most of our tech, we do, of course, we send probes and rockets up into elsewhere in the solar system, et cetera. But actually most of our technological advances have been not outwards, but inwards to smaller and smaller scales.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's true, yeah.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

You know, down to, from the molecular to, you know, biochemistry and all the way through to the, the atomic and then the subatomic people talking about strings, people get deeper and deeper down into the ground of reality. That's where all of our kind of technological efforts has been downwards.

[Podcast Host 2]

That's right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

He developed what he called the Micro Dimensional Mastery scale, which is like the Anti Kardashev scale, the Barrow scale, John Barrow and the kind of the. He had the minus one, minus two, minus three, minus four rather than plus one. Right. And he posited something which is. He referred to as the omega minus level. And this is when a technological species is able to actually control and manipulate the very ground of reality itself, whatever that is. So we're past the quantum, we're past even perhaps the Planck scale.

[Podcast Host 2]

Past the Planck scale.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Right down. Whatever's beyond. Right. Quantum mechanics, of course, stops working. Planck scale. You know, John Don Hoffman would say we're talking about consciousness here.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Physicalists would say something else doesn't really matter. But basically when a species is able to work at the fundamental level of reality, that's the kind of, the fundamental computational substrate of reality itself. That's where they're going to go. They're going to find a way of instantiating themselves at the ground of reality. They're not going to be trying to, to kind of approach light speed and expand through the cosmos. They're going to try to go downwards and there's a lot more room downwards.

[Podcast Host 2]

Right. You don't need more light speed. If you, if you get down there,

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

you don't need light speed. If you get down there, right, and there's much more room. There's like. I forget what the exact number is, but. But if you look at the distance in terms of relative size from human size to the size of the universe, or from human size to the Planck scale, I think it's like millions and millions times bigger down there or times smaller than it is bigger.

[Podcast Host 2]

Going up the 10 to the minus 35, something.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah, that's the Planck scale. Right. So in other words, there's. There's. There's a lot more room at the bottom than there is up there. Much more room. Which means that that's the direction we go. That's where. That's where we look for intelligence. And how do you do that? How would an intelligent species that had instantiated itself at the ground of reality perhaps billions of years before the. Our solar system even came to be, how would you communicate with that kind of intelligence? Or how would they communicate with us? They do it through our brains because that's how we experience the world. They wouldn't appear necessarily or manifest. They would simply use our brains to communicate with us. And that would take the form of. As Jack Vallee said, that would take the form of what we normally describe as hallucinatory experience.

[Podcast Host 2]

Sure.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

You know, altered states of consciousness. That's how you do it. So dmt, it's like DMT is in some way facilitating that experience that allows us to interact with these beings, that. Or conscious agents or whatever you want to call them that have been around perhaps forever, but certainly a lot longer than we've been around.

[Podcast Host 2]

It starts to. You can't avoid the question now because it's very interesting. I love when my mind is blown on this show, which has been. I hadn't considered looking down because if you can get past the Planck scale, then you don't need lightspeed travel because you're essentially in the dimension where entanglement works. So you can go anywhere.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Yeah. Where physics that we don't have any conception of works basically at the moment, we don't have anything deeper than the quantum. Everything stops working there. So what lies beyond that? What is the fundamental substrate of reality? And once you understand that, then you can manipulate and even instantiate yourselves as intelligent beings at that level, and then we have no conception of how that might work.

[Podcast Host 2]

Is that God?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, I wouldn't say it's God, but I would say that we could be dealing with beings that are indistinguishable from gods in that they are. They are so advanced that we simply Cannot conceive of how advanced they are. That would be my suggestion. So we have no conception of what they would be like or whether they, even. Whether they. Whether they could even take on a visual form in any kind of way. We just have nothing. We have no reference. You know, when we had. When we had little beings, we had references. You know, they've got head and they've got big eyes and that kind of made sense. We can, we can slot it into our picture of reality, but we're talking about intelligences that we simply have no conception of what they might be like. That's a wild idea. And the idea that we could actually maybe interface with them by taking this plant alkaloid called dmt. That's an even wilder idea.

[Podcast Host 2]

Yeah, it is, but it feels like it's by design to me. It's too convenient.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

It does feel like that, yeah. I would never say that that's the case, but there is something uncanny about dmt. But it's ubiquity throughout the natural world, and yet this incredibly crisply efficient tool by which we can access these. These other realms and these beings, it

[Podcast Host 2]

feels like they want us to find them. But I've never heard of lockout before. That's very interesting. You've seen. What do you think happens to us when we die?

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, that came from left field. I wasn't expecting that question. The short answer is I don't know. But I certainly don't think I'm past the idea that there was this infinite period of time before I was born when I simply didn't exist. And there's this brief. The lights are on the. This briefest of flickers of light for briefest amount of time, and it's off again. And I think it was Alan Watts who said, think about the state after you die. You don't exist. Then. Think about the state before you were born. You don't exist. So those are indistinguishable. Right. The state before you were born is identical to the state after you die. So what happened then? Well, we know what happened then. So I don't think. I think. I think we're part of something that is. We occupy this very, very thin slice of something far grander and far more mysterious and far more profound and strange than we can conceive. And I just get the sense that this is like. I often describe reality, certain human reality, as some kind of. Feels like a game of some sort. It's just play, right? And the Hindus will tell you that. They will say, oh, brahman, is Leela. This is the play, the play at making the world. It's all one cosmic drama and we take it very, very seriously. And the part of the game is working out that it's a game, that it shouldn't be taken seriously. This is just. Just a ride, right? As Bill Hicks used to say. I get that sense that we. I don't take reality, I don't take life seriously in that. I don't think it's a really somber, serious, important thing. I think it's just a beautiful experience that we have for this briefest periods of time, that we should enjoy it like we didn't enjoy any other ride at the fairground or something like that. And what happens after? I don't know. But it's something we all have to look forward to.

[Podcast Host 2]

Do you subscribe to the. The idea that there's a sort of a universal consciousness, and when we're born, we're kind of spawned out of that. We come here, we have experiences, and we bring it back to the source.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Well, that's what conscious realism says as well, is that there is one. This is described as a conscious agent network. But ultimately there is. It.

[Podcast Host 2]

There's.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

There's nothing but consciousness. So, sure, absolutely. Ultimately there is one unified consciousness. And that's, again, that's the oldest message, you know, Brockman. What is Brockman? That's the ultimate reality. And everything else is illusion, you know, and it's all all the same illusion. Timothy Leary used to say it's all the same illusion. And so this reality is an illusion, in a sense, the DMT space is also an illusion. It doesn't mean it's not real. You still interacting with consciousness. But it's all. Everything has. All experiences have the same ontological validity. They're all as real as each other in some way. They're just different ways of experiencing. And so eventually you kind of get past these questions of always, is DMT real or is it not real? And that question no longer almost doesn't make any sense anymore.

[Podcast Host 2]

I didn't ask it. I don't.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I know you didn't. Wasn't blaming you, AJ here, but people always asked me that, do you believe it's real? And before I would give long arguments, I'm maturing now where I actually think. Actually, I'm kind of past that now. There's a part of me that thinks it's all part of this grand cosmic drama, and there are different ways to play it and different tools we can use to explore. We have this vast Vast, the kind of the playground of reality that we can explore. And DMT and other psychedelics and other tools are ways that we can get out of this very small region of this vast playground and enjoy it and experience it and think, wow, the fucking incredible majesty of reality that we're part of it. We're inextricably part of it. We are a conscious agent or built from conscious agents, as is everything else. And everything. Everything else is experiencing the world in its own way. That's an incredible thing to realize. And then these little questions about, you know, is it real or not real? They don't mean anything.

[Podcast Host 2]

They don't, no. That's why I love interface theory. Anything else you want to discuss before we go? This has been wonderful.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

I'd just like to say. Well, I certainly would like, you know, if anyone wants to learn more about my work, certainly read my book Death by Astonishment.

[Podcast Host 2]

It's an amazing book if you want

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

to read, understand the history of DMT all the way back to thousands of years, really, in indigenous plant preparations all the way through to the 20th century and beyond. And what I think about DMT, the neuroscience of DMT, why I think it's not just hallucination and what it could be and all of that stuff, that's everything I've learned about DMT in the last 30 years is in death by astonishment. So please get that. Please follow me on X Twitter alien insect, as you said, or Instagram, also alien insect. Go to newnautics.org if you want to learn about the research programs that we're developing at New Nautics. And if anyone wants to experience DMTX themselves in a perfectly 100% legal, safe, medically supervised environment, go to eleusismind e l e s I s mind.com and they can sign up to spend a few days on this beautiful tropical Caribbean island. And I think that covers it. A.J.

[Podcast Host 2]

all right, Dr. Andrew Galmore, this has been a treat and enjoy. Thank you so much.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Thank you very much.

[Podcast Host 2]

Bye Everybody.

[Podcast Host 1]

That was Dr. Andrew Gallimore. We covered the history of DMT, what it does to your brain, and his theory that the beings people meet are real. Now, there's not much to challenge here. DMT is a real compound that's found in most living things. It was first synthesized in the 30s and found to be psychoactive in the 50s. But why does it exist? Well, in 2019, a University of Michigan lab induced cardiac arrest in rats and measured a surge of DMT in the dying brain. So one theory is that when brain Cells are running out of oxygen. DMT can protect those cells. Maybe that's why we produce it, maybe not. Nobody really knows. The real question is whether the experience is more than a hallucination. Still no proof, but Andrew's looking. Then there's Andrew's work with Donald Hoffman. Hoffman argues we never see reality, only an interface, like icons on a screen. I'm a fan of Donald Hoffman's work. Look him up on YouTube, especially because he can explain, if not prove, his theory of consciousness with math. And I love that the two of them are working together. Andrew thinks the brain is acting like a radio. DMT switches the channel, and suddenly we're tuned into a dimension populated by actual sentient beings. Here's an argument for that. A woman did one of these extended sessions in Colorado. She was 20 minutes in, and the DMT was still pumping into her veins. And she was deep in conversation with one of these beings. Then the being said, I think we're done for today. And the vision just stopped. The machine was still running. The drug was still in her system. So pharmacologically, that should be impossible.

[Podcast Host 2]

But it happened.

[Podcast Host 1]

Andrew is a real scientist. Cambridge, Oxford, real credentials. He's asking a question most scientists won't touch. Are these beings real? And he's creating experiments to test it. The blue yellow screen, the lockout studies, all of it. Nobody else is doing this now. I would ensure that the beings were just in your mind. And I came out less sure. His book, Death by Astonishment, is fantastic. It's on Amazon. His nonprofit is nunotics.org I'll link that down below. Try to spell it properly. The legal DMT retreat is [e-mail] and the elusive retreat is basically a luxury vacation in the Bahamas. But I have to be honest, it's not cheap, it's hard to find pricing, and I wasn't going to ask him, but rumors say it could be anywhere from $9,500 or more. So I'm just letting you know. But if you're going to explore consciousness, the best way to do that is legally with a doctor present. Don't mess with any of this stuff on your own. It's not fun. I promise. Until next time, be safe.

[Dr. Andrew Gallimore]

Really be safe.

[Podcast Host 1]

Be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. Don't mess with it.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

The Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music, song singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends. I feel the crap out I got stuck inside mel's home with mkotra of being only 2 aware did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set or were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold But I can't believe I'm dancing with the bitches and we'll fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 and Whammy all through the night All I ever wanted was to just be the troops of the the one falls on my feet all through the night. The madman sightings and the solar storms still come to Agatha the secret city underground Mysterious number stations planet circle to project Stargate and what the Dark Watchers foundation don't you worry though the Black Knight satellite. Me all through the night. To dance yeah girly loves to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is right Always in time. Sa.