Transcript: Pharmacologist Andrew Gallimore on Joe Rogan Podcast #2403

In those first few moments, within 30 seconds of that drug hitting my brain, I knew that this is something else. And I was at first horrified. I was shocked. I just thought, what is this?

And then when I finally came back, I remember lying on my bed on my back, shaking to my very bones, and all I could say was, “Oh, my f*ing God.” Because I was completely confounded. I mean, by then I was a chemical pharmacologist. I was a scientist. I should know what’s going on here, but I had no idea what was going on. And I thought, this is it. This is what I need to get to grips with.

The Dissolution of Ego

JOE ROGAN: It also gives you a very unusual understanding of the mechanisms that you interface with the world—ego and logic and reasoning and rational thinking. It gives you this understanding that those are just these weird tools that you use to get by, and you’re left without them in there. They just evaporate and dissolve.

And then when you come back, you’re like, what am I doing? The way I talk—what’s my purpose of interacting with people? How much of the way I talk to people is this weird social dance, weird ego, performative sort of thing? The way I structure sentences, the way I communicate, it all seemed so clunky when you come back and you just go, wow, we’re a mess.

Collectively as a species, we’re so—without some sort of awakening or some kind of experience, some sort of a psychedelic, profound breakthrough experience—you’re so hampered by your physical existence and this sort of ancient tribal programming that we have that we’re running through this maze of life with. And you come back and you go, God, this is so weird.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. I think what DMT does is show you that everything—everything you thought you knew about how reality is structured and what’s real and what’s not real, what is fantasy, what’s possible and what’s not possible—all of that is completely extirpated in an instant.

And you realize, actually, we don’t have a f*ing clue about the way things really are. I think DMT just demonstrates that. Whether you understand it, whether we can really understand what’s going on in the brain and why and how this experience is even possible, it just shows you how little we really understand about the nature of reality.

The Neuroscience of DMT

JOE ROGAN: So you’ve done some legitimate studies with DMT, right?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I mean, I work mainly theoretically in that I do more quantitative and qualitative analysis of the DMT state and try to understand—try to use the tools of neuroscience to try to understand how DMT elicits its effects. So we can get into—if you want to go really deep, I can give you a neuroscience lesson.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, please.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So if we want to understand DMT, we have to start with the basic observation. Before you take DMT, you are experiencing a world, right? Whenever you’re awake and conscious, you’re experiencing a world, the normal waking world. This is the world that’s familiar to us.

When you take DMT, that world is transformed. It disappears, it’s obliterated, and it’s replaced with one that is altogether stranger, shall we say. And so what I want to do is understand first of all how that happens, what’s actually going on in the brain to cause that transition and why that happens.

And you can’t do that unless you have a decent understanding of the normal waking world. So what is the normal waking world? It’s a model, it’s an interface generated by your brain. So you have this world-building machinery on the outer layer of your brain called the cortex. And this is generating your world all the time.

All the features of the world that you’re experiencing are represented within the cortex. And that applies whether you are just in normal waking life. It applies in dreaming, it even applies in the psychedelic state. The world you experience is always constructed as a model by the brain.

And so what that means is that psychedelics—what they’re doing is they’re perturbing the brain, they’re manipulating the brain and altering that model. Now, for example, with psilocybin from magic mushrooms, psilocybin binds to this receptor in the brain called the 5-HT2A receptor, which you’re probably familiar with, this serotonin receptor.

And so this is an excitatory receptor. It stimulates these neurons, which your cortex is constructed from, makes them more excitable, makes them more likely to fire and share information with other neurons. You get this loosening up of the world model that your brain is constructing.

So the walls start to breathe, objects seem to change their identity. Everything becomes more fluid and dynamic. And if you put someone into an MRI machine, for example, you can actually see that in the normal waking state. You can see the neural activity. It’s dynamic, but it’s organized and well orchestrated.

You give someone psilocybin, let’s say, or LSD, and you start to see the activity becoming more random and fluid. So you get this state of slightly increased disorder, as if the tuning dial between order and disorder in the brain has been slightly nudged towards disorder.

But then with DMT, something remarkable happens. In the early stages of the experience, you get this quite chaotic state, suggesting that the brain is entering this more disordered state. But then it collapses into this brand new order.

So you go from the order of the normal waking world to this disordered state and then—vroom—you collapse into this completely different type of order. So the brain is effectively constructing an entirely different model of reality. It’s no longer the normal waking world model, which acts as an interface with the environment, but it’s constructing a completely different world model.

The Brain as Constructor

JOE ROGAN: When you say “constructing,” why do you use that term?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: The brain is constructing because—well, okay, so if you think about how does the brain interact with the environment? How do we interact with the environment using our senses? Right? So light information comes through the eyes, the retina, and it stimulates the very back of the brain. You have an area—

JOE ROGAN: Oh, oh, you brought slides.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I brought slides.

JOE ROGAN: There we go.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. Maybe the next one, Jamie, is a bit easier to see. There we go. So at the right, the back of the brain here, you have an area called V1, which is the primary visual cortex. That’s your interface with the world. Sensory information comes and strikes. It activates patterns of neural activity in V1.

But it’s very, very messy. It’s like lines and patches of color and lines moving in certain directions. It’s a mess, right? It’s very noisy, it’s very messy, it’s incredibly dynamic. It doesn’t make any sense.

And so what your brain does is it has another level above V1 that has a bird’s eye view and is looking for patterns within this neural activity in this lowest level. So it’s looking for—saying, “Oh, those lines could be a triangle or this could be a circle.” It’s trying to find patterns to try to generate order from this messy level in V1.

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

The Montreal Procedure and Brain Mapping

ANDREW GALLIMORE: That’s a good question. Well, there are a number of things. The earliest evidence came from one of the earliest forms of evidence came from a guy called Wilder Penfield. Are you familiar with—

JOE ROGAN: No.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So Wilder Penfield, he was interested in treating epilepsy, and he invented something called the Montreal Procedure, where he would remove a part of the brain that was the focus of epileptiform activity. The idea being that it would kind of cure someone’s epilepsy. But before he could do that, of course, he needed to make sure that he wasn’t removing important parts for someone’s function.

So what he would do is he would cut the top of their skull off when they’re still awake and kind of expose their brain. And then he would zap different parts of their brain and say, you know, what’s happening? Oh, my God. Can you imagine?

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t it crazy that that’s how we have to find out what works? We have to, like, it’s the aliens probably look at us and go, oh, my God, you guys are still doing that?

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

JOE ROGAN: Sure. This is not that long ago, right? How long ago is this?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: 1950s.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Okay.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Not even a hundred years. A hundred years ago, they were literally taking your skull and turning it into a hat. They were popping the cap off.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Pop.

JOE ROGAN: And just, okay, let’s see what this does.

The Visual Cortex Hierarchy

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Exactly. So he would zap it. And what he noticed is that when he would zap right at the back of the brain—so this is this primary visual cortex that’s receiving information for an environment—his patients would say, oh, I see flashes of light, I see lines, I see colors. Very simple kind of things.

But then he would move forward to kind of higher levels that we know now are kind of high levels. And then they’d say, oh, I see triangles or I see an orange circle, things like this. Then he’d keep going higher and higher, and then they’d say, oh, I see people, or I see cops and robbers.

And then right at the top, you reach an area called the hippocampus, which you may have heard of, involved in memory. And the hippocampus basically keeps an eye. It’s got a bird’s eye view of all of this world model your brain is constructing. And it’s kind of following and looking for interesting or important patterns.

And when he stimulated that, his patients would actually report memories. They would say, oh, I hear somebody talking to me. This happened this morning when I was leaving the house. My mother was telling me something about, you know, you’ve got your coat on backwards or something like this.

So you have these levels of the cortex that go from very simple kind of very low level visual data at the bottom end and then at the very top you’ve got kind of higher order things such as faces or people. This is sitting at the top now.

Dreams and World Construction

Interesting. Have you ever—when you are dreaming, let’s think about dreaming for a second. It’s quite instructive, I think. When you’re dreaming, right? The brain is actually constructing the world in basically the same way as it does when you’re awake. Dreams are kind of selective simulations of the waking world.

The difference, of course, is that there’s no sensory inputs. So if you scan someone’s brain while they’re having a dream, you’ll see that this back of the brain, this primary visual cortex is kind of quiet. The brain is kind of using what it’s learned about building the world in the normal waking state to construct the dream world.

So the dream world is built in exactly—it’s built from exactly the same stuff as the normal waking world. However, there’s interesting features. If you’ve—in a dream, have you ever tried to use your cell phone? No, not many people have. What about read a book in a dream?

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: This waking life.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t remember what movie it was, but it was a guy who was instructing how to lucid dream that if you make a habit of walking through a doorway in your home, and every time you walk through a doorway in your home, tap on the doorway, knock on it with your hand and say, am I awake?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Knock, knock, knock.

Lucid Dreaming Techniques

JOE ROGAN: And then you’ll get in a habit of doing that every time you go through a doorway. And if you go through a doorway in your dream, you’ll do it. You’ll say, am I awake? And then as you go to knock, knock, knock, you’re like, oh sh*t, I’m dreaming.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: There we go.

JOE ROGAN: And then you realize, and if you don’t give in to astonishment, you can maintain that dream, right? Yes. That’s the thing is, oh my God, I’m dreaming. I can’t believe this. And then you wake up, you get too freaked out. And you wake up, but if you don’t do it.

And I’ve only been able to do this a few times because I don’t really knock. I did it for a while after the movie, I saw the movie, I tried it for a while and I did have a dream like that where I went through a doorway and I said, am I dreaming? And I’m like, oh my God, I’m dreaming.

And then I realized I was dreaming and then I was flying. I was doing a lot of weird stuff, but then it went away and then I stopped doing it. And I’ve always been, why don’t I practice lucid dream? I’ve always, I’ve thought about it a dozen times at least, why don’t I just get a book on lucid dreaming and really try to attempt to learn the techniques? And I never do.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, it takes commitment. But now there’s actually a simpler way of that kind of reality tests. A simpler way now is to get out your cell phone occasionally, open up the calculator and do a few calculations and just check everything’s working right, or open up a book and try to read it.

Because the thing about the dream world is again, just like the normal waking world, it’s constructed over kind of levels of a hierarchy from the highest level models. So your brain can construct a high level model of a cell phone quite easily. But all of the fine details of how it functions, that’s all represented at the lowest level of the cortex that’s really dependent on sensory inputs.

So you can dream of having your mobile phone in your hand and doing with it. But as soon as you try to do something with it to actually your brain has to kind of construct that function and it can’t do it unless it has access to sensory inputs. And so that’s how you can test if you’re lucid dreaming. Yeah, which is why the DMT state is so fascinating, is because it’s nothing like the dream state.

DMT Versus Dreams

People say, you know, that perhaps DMT is released when you’re dreaming and that it actually triggers—I mean, this goes back to the 1980s, a theoretical paper published by a guy called Jace Calloway. And he said, oh, maybe DMT could be produced during REM sleep because it’s closely related to melatonin structurally, both kind of tryptamine structures.

But when you analyze the phenomenology, the actual experience of DMT, it’s nothing like dreaming. Dreaming is generally the brain making use of what it knows about how to construct the world in the waking state and doing so in the dream state.

So that’s why if you ask people, many studies on dreaming have shown that people, when they dream, they dream about people, they dream about dogs and cats, they dream about, you know, the amount of time they spend talking on the telephone or watching TV is actually similar to what it is in waking life.

So dreaming is more like a selective simulation of the waking world. It’s not that difficult to explain because your brain, from the moment you were born, your brain was learning to construct the world as a model of the environment. This world is the only world that your brain knows how to build or should know how to build.

And yet when you introduce this molecule, dimethyltryptamine into the brain, the brain suddenly starts constructing a world it never learned to construct. It’s like the brain is speaking a language it never learned to speak and doing so flawlessly.

These worlds are of beautiful crystalline clarity, perfectly finessed, staggeringly complex narrative complexity that I think is very difficult to explain. There’s no simple explanation of why the brain should suddenly become capable of constructing these worlds.

Unless—unless, and this is where things become more contentious—we are indeed interfacing with some kind of intelligence. That’s my, that’s the explanation that makes sense to me, is that somehow DMT is gating access to some kind of the flow of information from some kind of intelligent agent that is directing the DMT experience.

So it’s not a sensed world, it’s not a kind of a dreamt world. It’s actually a directed world. I always say you don’t break through into the DMT world, the DMT world breaks through into you. It’s like this intelligent agent has commandeered your neural machinery, the world building machinery of your brain, and is directing everything that you see. It has complete control.

Constructing Versus Observing Reality

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting that you use the word construct rather than observe. So you’re using terminology that seems to indicate that you believe that you’re constructing reality.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Not that you’re just observing reality.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: No, because it’s not—if you think about perception in the same way of looking like a video camera, just taking imagery images of the world, that’s not how it works. The brain must actively construct a model of the environment. That’s all what it’s about, all always doing. It’s always constructing a model and it is constantly using that model to make predictions about the way that kind of predictions about the evolution of sensory information.

It’s constantly saying, okay, if this model that I’m currently using is good, then this should happen next. This is the pattern of sensory information that I should receive next.

So if I, for example, move this bottle of water across your perceptual field, even if you close your eyes, you could probably tell me where the water’s going to be in a couple of seconds because it’s moving. Your brain has a model of the water, and it is using that to make predictions.

And it’s only when something surprising happens. You know, if the water—if I do this, and your brain detects that there’s something wrong, its predictions start to fail and you get these error signals. And these are what flow into the brain. And the brain uses then to kind of update its model until the errors decline.

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

Individual Models of Reality

JOE ROGAN: That’s where it gets weird, because I’m assuming your model and my model are very similar.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Right.

JOE ROGAN: That would be—if we could ever get to a point where we could at least temporarily enter into someone else’s consciousness and see how they see the world. I think we’re going to get a lot of answers. We’re going to be, oh, you guys live in a totally different f*ing world. No wonder why you think we should be communists. And we should.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Well, it’s true. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, whatever your chemical makeup is, your life experience, your biology, whatever contributing factors, I always assume that your construction of the world is the same as my construction of the world. But every now and then I’ll get a text message from a friend about some world event, and their take is so crazy that I just got to go, wow, this person is living in a completely different world than me.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I mean, they are. Yeah. I mean, their brain, the structure of their brain, the organization of their neural networks, and it’s all different in everyone. Everyone has a unique brain. And so, in a sense, everyone has to construct an entirely unique model of reality.

But we agree on certain things. We reach this kind of consensus about what we call things. But we, you know, if I point at, you know, something that television. Yeah. I can say that, oh, this—I can describe the colors, I can describe the people. But again, we’re all using our own personally constructed model. Yeah. And that’s what we experience.

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

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

JOE ROGAN: Sure, anytime.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Can you go to the picture of Margaret Thatcher?

The Thatcher Effect and Brain Modeling

JOE ROGAN: I was going to bring this up in some way. I think it’s supposed to play a video.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Maybe not yet. Well, the videos don’t seem to be.

JOE ROGAN: Playing in the keynote. There’s three or four of them and none of them play.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I figured you’re going to get here at some point.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Ok.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know how to. Is it formatted for Windows?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: No, let me go. Ok, go back, go back. I didn’t know that was going to happen. Ok, perfect. Okay, so go back one.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: This is kind of really interesting, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I’ve seen this.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: You’ve seen this, right?

JOE ROGAN: This is really not with Margaret Thatcher, but I’ve seen it with other faces.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. So the original was with Margaret Thatcher.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Let’s explain to people that are just listening because there’s still quite a lot of people.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So this is called the Thatcher effect. So when you’re looking at this image of Margaret Thatcher or anyone, your brain is constructing a model of this person, a model of their face. And as I said, it’s constructed over a hierarchy. So you have the overall idea, the overall concept of Margaret Thatcher.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: The whole face, the whole thing. And then you have a lower level. You have the eyes and the mouth and the nose, and they’re kind of separate. And then going further still, within the eyes, you’ve got circles and patches of color and all this stuff. And right at the bottom you have this really messy system of lines and things that don’t make any sense. Right.

And you can actually show how this hierarchy is constructed. At the moment, it just looks like Margaret Thatcher and you can’t really break it down, but if you flip over like this. So just leave it there for a second, Jamie, please. Yeah. So now you see, what we’ve done is we basically, we’ve weakened this highest level model. Right. Of the whole face because the brain isn’t very good at building models of faces that are upside down. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: And so this looks, there’s something wrong with the image clearly.

JOE ROGAN: But it looks like Margaret Thatcher upside down.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: It looks like Margaret Thatcher, but it’s actually what’s happened is the whole face has been flipped over, but the mouth and the eyes are actually the correct way up. But to the brain in this configuration, it’s not that surprising because the eyes kind of look as they should. The mouth looks as it should. You’re seeing the whole image in its pieces if you like. You’re seeing that lower level fragments and it’s only when you flip it that it becomes horrific. Horrific.

Right, so now you’ve re-established that high level model of Margaret Thatcher and the brain goes, f*, this is completely wrong. And this is why you get that it’s immediately obvious with the upside down.

JOE ROGAN: Eyes and the upside down mouth. It looks completely insane. She looks like a demon.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: She looks like a demon.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Which is really weird. Which is really weird. It’s called the Thatcher effect.

JOE ROGAN: Was she the original person to use this idea?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Who came up with this whole.

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

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Her eyeballs are upside down, her mouth is upside down. Because that’s what it looks like weird like for people listening, the big teeth, your above teeth, they’re below and the little tiny teeth are above and the eyeballs are the eyelids. The top part are on the bottom and it really looks like a monster. And it’s weird that it looks like a monster because it looks so damn normal upside down. Yeah, exactly, weird.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So yeah, it’s revealing this structure of this world model that your brain is always constructing.

JOE ROGAN: You see, that’s a good way to describe why it’s constructing rather than observing. That’s clearly an example of your constructing normalcy. And that upside down face, it’s not normal at all.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Not normal at all.

DMT Production and Dreams

JOE ROGAN: Right, yeah. Okay, so do we know what’s going on when you’re dreaming? Is it potentially, is there a release of DMT? Because DMT is exogenous. It’s produced in the brain, it’s produced in the liver and the lungs. Right. It’s produced in a lot of other areas. So we know the body makes it right. Yeah. And we also know that melatonin plays a role and there’s a lot of other things going on. Is it possible that DMT is one of the ingredients in the soup?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Well, so I think the problem is, as I said, is that, yes, it’s possible biochemically. Now, the pineal gland is what people often refer to, right? Because the pineal gland has this long history and mystical traditions, the seat of the soul, the third eye, all this kind of stuff. So everyone wants DMT to be produced by the pineal gland.

The problem is, first of all, is that the pineal gland is very small. It’s about the size of the end of my pinky. And it’s designed or evolved to produce nanograms, micrograms of melatonin, very small amounts you need. So the idea that this gland can suddenly start pumping out milligrams of DMT to achieve a kind of psychedelic state in the dream state is quite an.

There have been some studies, or one study in particular actually looked at DMT levels. So we’ve known since the 1950s that DMT is produced by, is a product of mammalian physiology and it’s produced by humans. In those days, they tried to kind of pin schizophrenia on DMT. The idea that if there was some fault, some problem with tryptamine metabolism, instead of producing serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine, the brain could instead start producing elevated levels of NN-dimethyltryptamine or DMT.

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

JOE ROGAN: Fact, in endogenous production. What’s the mechanism like, what is producing it?

The Biochemistry of DMT Production

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Okay, so it’s actually produced from tryptophan. So DMT is an alkaloid. And alkaloids are all produced from amino acids. So tryptophan is first converted to tryptamine. This is called decarboxylation. You remove a carbon dioxide molecule and you’ve got tryptamine. Now here you can go in a number of different directions. You can go to serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine, or you can go to DMT. You simply add to methyl groups to carbon atoms.

JOE ROGAN: And so what is adding these things?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So there’s an enzyme called indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, or INMT for short. This is the key enzyme for DMT production. It adds these two groups, these methyl groups, to tryptamine, which is produced from tryptophan to produce DMT.

JOE ROGAN: And tryptophan is produced from.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So tryptophan is one of the essential amino acids. So it is something you consume.

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

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

JOE ROGAN: So this process, what makes you think that this is a size dependent process? Because, just because this gland is so tiny, why can’t it do it?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Okay, well, there’s a number of things. First of all, it’s just there’s orders of magnitude. I mean, a gland that is designed to produce nanograms or micrograms of something, to ask it to produce a thousand times more of an entirely different molecule is quite an ask.

However, that’s not the only reason. There’s actually been a study recently in the last, I think three or four years that looked at DMT levels in rat brains in real time. They’re not in humans, but in rat brains they actually have a technique now called microdialysis where they can basically measure, in an awake, moving, normally behaving rat, they can measure the levels of DMT in its brain. And what they found was that.

JOE ROGAN: The.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Levels of DMT first of all were surprisingly high. So similar levels to things like serotonin and dopamine, which is unusual. Which is. Yes. Which makes you think that it must have some kind of function. But importantly, they also in some rats, they removed the pineal gland, they kind of cut it out and found that it didn’t affect. So we don’t need the pineal. In other words, all brain cells, all neurons can probably produce DMT. The lungs can almost certainly produce DMT.

The Pineal Gland in Ancient Mysticism

JOE ROGAN: Why do you think that the pineal gland had this role in ancient mysticism? Why did they have this appreciation of it as being this very sacred organ that. I mean, it’s the Eye of Horus, right?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it certainly looks like it. Like the Eye of Horus looks exactly like a cross section of the pineal gland.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I mean it sits right in the center of the brain as well.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So it, and it looks, it’s kind of unusual, as you say. It looks like a little tiny pine cone.

JOE ROGAN: Like how did they, where did they come up whenever this. I mean, it’s very easy to dismiss ancient mysticism and ancient ideas of what things are sacred about, you know, the human body and what areas of the mind are producing these. The third eye. That’s how it was always described. But I don’t want to, it’s too weird.

So I go, wait a minute. Before you dismiss. Because it’s fun to dismiss things like, oh, they didn’t know anything. Like, how do we know that they weren’t on to something? Like, maybe there is a role that, that plays in not normal DMT production, but in the big dump that you get before you die.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You have a near death experience. Maybe that has to be. Maybe that’s the kill switch. Maybe that’s the big dump switch. You know what I mean?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: No one’s ever put it like that before.

Near Death Experiences and DMT

JOE ROGAN: It’s the seat of the soul, right? That is where the soul is connected. That’s where the soul is anchored into this physical reality. And if you’re going to die, if you have a near death experience, something has got to go. All right, boys, this is not a drill. Let her go. And then that’s what a lot of people think is happening.

When people have near death experiences. There’s a lot of very bizarre aspects of it, but one of them is the uniformity of their experiences. There’s a lot of very similar experiences. Very similar. You know, you have, with anything, you have variables that people may or may not be adding onto their own. Because people love to tell a good tale, you know, and why miss out on a chance when you’ve had a near death experience that was profound to maybe add a little to it, make it a little bit more exciting.

But the overall kind of framework of the experience is very similar. And I often wonder, like, what is that? Like I have a friend who was in a car accident and had a near death experience and said that when they came back they had no fear like for that moment. I mean, think of fear now, but no fear at all about dying, no fear at all about life.

And that this was this very weird, transformative journey where they went to another place and then they returned. But it was very real, it felt very. To the point where all their anxiety, even about the car accident, being knocked unconscious and all that stuff all went away.

The Near-Death Experience and DMT Connection

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think the near death experience connection to DMT is very interesting because Rick Strassman, of course, in the 90s when he wrote DMT, the Spirit Molecule, he hypothesized that in fact the point of death, DMT is released by the pineal and it kind of acts as the conduit by which the soul exits the body and enters the afterlife. And of course that was largely speculation, it was just a hypothesis.

But in recent years there’s been some really fascinating work showing that DMT actually, if you take some neurons, a culture of neurons, for example, brain cells, which are very sensitive to oxygen levels. So if you’d deprive neurons of oxygen, they die very quickly. This is why strokes can be so rapidly devastating. If the brain becomes deprived of blood and oxygen, then the brain cells start to die, but in the presence of DMT they live a lot longer. So they’re kind of protecting the brain against hypoxia.

Now, when does the brain enter a hypoxic state during the dying process? Right. This is when, as your cardiovascular system starts to collapse, your respiratory system collapses, the brain becomes deprived of oxygen. And this is precisely the time when you want the brain to be flooded with DMT, just in case you come back to protect the brain from the lack of oxygen. So that suggests a clear and obvious link.

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

JOE ROGAN: I wonder if they come back as a person.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, but it does suggest, right, it does suggest that there is maybe some link there. But what it doesn’t explain, of course, is why you would need, why this molecule would be, why this molecule would be so profoundly visionary. That’s still kind of a mystery. Are you being kind of given access to wherever you go after death? Is it a vision of what happens to you later on?

Vision or Gateway? The Nature of DMT Reality

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Okay, so what I think is that, I don’t think with DMT that you’re going anywhere as such. I think, you know, as I said, the world you experience is always represented in the brain and that must apply, I think in the DMT state. If you’re experiencing an altered world, there must be some representation of that within your cortical machinery, within your cortex, within your brain. I think that has to be the case.

However, I don’t think, and I think it’s a great mystery is how the brain is actually capable of constructing that on its own, in the same way that the brain constructs the dream world. Because the brain knows how to construct the waking world, so it’s simply using its stored models. The same with hallucinations. If you look at case reports of hallucinations in psychotics, you go through the psychiatric literature, the vast majority of hallucinations are normal appearing, normal sized people, normal animals that, it’s like waking dreams if you like.

But with DMT it’s not. The brain is somehow constructing a world that has no relationship whatsoever. Nothing is taken from the normal waking world. It’s like the brain suddenly has switched to speaking a language that it never learned. And I think that suggests that actually what’s happening is you’re not going somewhere, but you are in this more kind of fluid and dynamic state that psychedelics induce.

You’re kind of, you’re making the brain much more sensitive to being commandeered. I think what you’re seeing is what this intelligent agent, as I recall, as I tend to call it, I don’t call it spirits or aliens or anything like that. I think it’s clear to me that there’s some kind of intelligence and that intelligence is interacting with our brain in some way and showing us kind of what it wants us to see, if you like.

Consciousness: Brain-Generated or Universal?

JOE ROGAN: Does that assume that consciousness resides in the brain though, or is, I mean, when you take into account the possibility of consciousness being something that the brain tunes into and that it forms its own version of reality, based on its biology, its life experiences, etc. But that it is just a radio and it is just forming its version of consciousness, but that it is actually tuning into consciousness, and that consciousness is sort of a universal thing that exists not just in people, but maybe in other life forms as well. Certainly animals and maybe plants.

So one of the weirder things about people who trip, I’m sure you know this, is they experience communication from plants. Like tree hugging becomes a real thing. Yeah, tree hugging is a very different thing. It’s like, oh, you’re alive. Hello. You know. And we know that trees and plants in general, especially houseplants, when people interact with them, they grow better, they’re healthier. Plants, like, you can prove it. It’s interesting. Play music for them, communicate with them, say nice things. We also know that plants in, like, abusive households where people are alcoholics and cigarette smoke, they’re going to do terrible.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. I think that as soon as I start talking about, first of all, I think consciousness is absolutely fundamental. I don’t think that the brain generates consciousness. I think consciousness is in some way the only thing that really exists. You know, I think that it’s the fundamental, the absolute, ultimate reality is consciousness itself.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think everything is conscious?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I think everything is consciousness.

JOE ROGAN: Everything is consciousness. Interesting.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that there’s a state that maybe inanimate objects achieve that is very different than our interpretation of consciousness, but yet they’re still conscious, I think, which is why I say this, because Jamie has O.J. Simpson’s golf clubs. I feel like they have some consciousness attached to them. I mean, it’s probably bad, right?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Buddhism didn’t exist in the 90s.

JOE ROGAN: They were like only 10 years old. That’s bad voodoo, bro.

Existing From Your Own Side

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, you got to watch out, I think. What do we mean by when something’s conscious in Buddhism? They have this idea of things that exist from their own side, which I really like.

JOE ROGAN: From their own side?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yes. So you exist from your own side, in other words. Presumably. I can never prove it. There is someone. A subjective perspective there that’s actually model, you know, that’s experiencing me and I’m, and Jamie as well. Everyone has, is like a perspective, you know, I exist from my own side.

Whereas does this skull exist from its own side? Does it have its own unique perspective? I would say probably not, but I don’t know. And consciousness is kind of like the interaction. You know, reality kind of emerges by the interaction of all of these perspectives, these conscious agents, if you like everyone, all these points of subjective perspective. I think that’s probably closer to what ultimate reality is, but I think it’s very difficult.

You know, I’m a neuroscientist, so I focus on, not consciousness per se, but on what I can get my teeth into. I can get my teeth into the content, into the structure. The actual meat and potatoes of, never used that phrase before. The meat and potatoes of the DMT experience things that I can talk about and analyze. That’s, you know, what I’m trying to do, I think, is I’m not trying to tell people what I think DMT is. I’m just trying to convince them that it’s not what they think it is, that it’s not just hallucination, that it’s not, these are not dreams, that kind of thing.

The Importance of Direct Experience

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: No, it’s impossible to do.

JOE ROGAN: No big deal.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I was interacting with a guy on Twitter and X who referred to entity encounters as “illusory social events,” ISEs, which to me was just the most absurd, watered down. This guy had obviously never encountered a f*ing DMT entity or he wouldn’t. But the idea that this is just an illusory social event just seemed to me absurd.

JOE ROGAN: And had he had any experiences?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I very much doubt he was a prominent neuroscientist.

JOE ROGAN: But here’s the thing, sometimes people have low dose experiences. Like I talked to a friend once that had a very, I’m like, how many hits did you take? And they’re like, one. I’m like, yeah, you need two more. You need two more.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Take the third hit.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you missed the gate. You didn’t hit the gate. You’re on the outside going, this place is kind of weird. Yeah. But if you go through, it’s a lot weirder than you think.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: It’s a lot weirder than you think. Yeah, I think it’s a lot weirder than Terence McKenna always used to say, you know, stranger than you can suppose.

McKenna’s Prophecy: The Fire in the Madhouse

JOE ROGAN: He had a really amazing video that I think I posted it on my Instagram of McKenna, like in the 1990s. I believe it was talking about the upcoming decades and what’s going to happen in terms of how weird the world is going to be with technological innovation and what we’re going to be seeing, artificial intelligence, alien contact. I mean, he basically nailed it. I mean, f*ing nailed it. He nailed it to a T.

I think he might have predicted time travel. But here’s the thing. If they are capable of time travel, when are you going to find out about it? When are they going to. If, let’s say DARPA is working on some defense project and part of it involves like, you know, one way to stop a war would be literally to go back in time five minutes and kill everybody who was about to start.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: The war, kill Hitler, that kind of thing.

JOE ROGAN: Or stop a bomb from being switched on. You literally go back in time and stop the bomb, stop the missiles from launching. When would we learn about that? First of all, it’s very highly unlikely that it exists outside of the quantum stage right now. Right, I get it. But if it did, if we’re talking about 100 years from now, or 200, would we know? We would not. Yes. This is it. This is it. This is amazing. I love this. First of all, I just love his voice, guy. The best voice.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: “It’s going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point, novelty theory can come out of the woods because eventually people are going to say, what the hell is going on? It’s just too nuts. It’s not enough to stop, say it’s nuts. You have to explain why it’s so nuts.

I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, probably check possible contact with extraterrestrials, possible human immortality, and at the same time, appalling acts of brutality, genocide, race baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation. Because the systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed. The collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the Internet. These are changes so immense, nobody could imagine them ever happening. And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is.

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

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

The Kardashev Scale and Post-Biological Intelligence

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I think we live in a very thin sliver. If you look at the development of an intelligent civilization over hundreds of thousands of years, we live in this thin sliver, this kind of technological phase. And once you enter that phase that we’re in now, the computer age, the information age or whatever it is, you’re probably only a few hundred years away from departing for the stars or something like this, or even completely transcending our biology.

And this isn’t a crazy idea anymore. Many sensible astrobiologists and other intelligence theorists think, yes, probably what’s going to happen in the next few hundred years is that we will become post-biological. And so if you think about the universe more broadly, if we’re looking for alien, quote unquote, aliens as being kind of wet-brained, wet-bodied biological beings, we’re probably only looking for a tiny fraction of the intelligence in the cosmos.

And the vast majority of intelligence in the cosmos is likely to be post-biological, to have completely dispensed with the biological form. Now what’s interesting about that? You’ve heard of the Kardashev scale, right?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think so.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So the Kardashev scale was generated by a guy called Kardashev, and he was a Soviet guy and he kind of theorized as intelligences progress and develop, they go through a number of phases. So you have a type zero.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, I have heard that scale.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: You’ve got it right. So we’re kind of a type zero, level one on the Kardashev scale. And then level two, sorry, we’re level zero. So level one would be when we, for example, are able to harness all of the energy from our neighboring star, then the next level, when we can harness all the energy from the galaxy, et cetera. So it’s an expansionist way of thinking about it, the idea of climbing the Kardashev scale.

But in the 1990s, a British cosmologist called John Barrow, he said, actually, if you actually look at how an intelligent civilization such as ourselves, the only one we know, we actually spend a lot more time going not to larger and larger scales, but smaller and smaller scales, right? We go down to doing chemistry, the Large Hadron Collider. We’re looking at the structure of atoms and the structure of subatomic particles and that kind of thing. We’re actually spending more time and more energy and more money going deeper and deeper.

Now, the reason that’s significant is because if you take the human, sits in the middle, if you take the scale of a human, and then you compare the scale of a human to the scale, let’s say, of a hydrogen atom, and then you compare it to the scale of the observable universe, humans sit almost exactly in the middle of that scale from the hydrogen atom to the observable universe.

But below the hydrogen atom, there is probably 100 million to a billion times more scale deeper and deeper down. Richard Feynman, the legendary physicist, always used to say, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” There’s much more room at the bottom. In other words, as an intelligent species, an intelligent civilization progresses, they’re not likely to kind of become space-faring as such and kind of exploring the cosmos. They’re much more likely to go deep down and kind of instantiate themselves at the lowest levels of reality.

That’s where all the space is. It’s not out there, surprisingly, all the space is downwards. Now, once an intelligence achieves that, and you have to imagine that probably there are probably billions of these civilizations that had already achieved this before we even popped into existence, before we evolved as a species, they would effectively disappear. They would become effectively part of the fabric of space-time itself, exploiting the fundamental computational structure of the lowest level of reality, basically. And that’s where they reside.

And there are probably far, far more, probably millions or billions more of those types of civilizations than there are ones like I say, you and me, like us as humans, right? And so then you ask, well, if that’s the case, if we’re interested in contacting so-called extraterrestrials, why are we focused on this tiny sub-population of beings that are likely to be floating around in metallic discs or whatever? We should, in fact, be focusing on the much more abundant ones that are perhaps at the deepest levels of reality.

Communicating with Post-Biological Intelligence

ANDREW GALLIMORE: And how would we do that? How would an intelligence that has completely transcended its biology and even completely transcended its physical form entirely, how would such an intelligence communicate with us? It would do it through our brain. That’s the most obvious thing, because the brain is how we interact with the environment. It’s how we interact, it’s the interface by which we interact with what there is.

And I think DMT, I’m not saying that these DMT entities are necessarily these post-biological beings, but it’s not out of the question. I’m not straying too far from fairly standard now modern scientific discourse when I say that it’s perfectly possible that there are very large numbers of these supremely intelligent civilizations that are everywhere and nowhere, and that we can somehow interact with using our brain, and that DMT generates this kind of highly susceptible, highly sensitive neurological state that allows us to interact with them.

This is why perhaps when you go into the DMT space, it’s immediately obvious, it’s undeniably apparent that you are interacting with some kind of supremely advanced intelligence. Could that be some intelligence that has existed long before we arrived on the scene and that we’re now kind of discovering this technology? I consider DMT to be some kind of technology that we have discovered that we are now learning to use to interact with these intelligent agents that perhaps have been here forever.

JOE ROGAN: In human terms, it’s an interesting term, the term “go there,” because that’s what it feels like. It feels like you’re traveling somewhere, like you’re going somewhere, but the reality is that place you’re going is probably right here. That’s where it gets weird because it’s around you all the time. You just don’t have the ability to tune into it all the time because you wouldn’t be able to function if you did.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Exactly. And these beings, they probably don’t even have a true form that you could represent visually, right? So when you see an insectoid alien or a machine elf, you’re probably not seeing, or almost, have you, I don’t know if I’ve seen the archetypal, kind of McKenna-esque.

JOE ROGAN: The way he described it was very odd.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: But I’ve seen certainly a multitude of beings very, very kind of screechy, squeaky, like jabbering, jabbering.

The Jokers and Jesters

JOE ROGAN: I saw once a bunch of jokers giving me the finger. They were all giving me the finger and they’re going, “F* you.” And they were jokers with like little tassels on, with the bells on the end of it. And it made me very aware that I was taking myself too seriously. And they were like, yup. And they said it to me and they pointed their finger at me like that. I was like, you’re right.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. It’s interesting actually. It reminded me of something. There’s this weird effect that people who use DMT a lot, they get this, they might use DMT regularly and one day they take a hit as they normally do with the same batch of DMT and they get a joker or a jester and it wags its finger and says, “Not today, you’ve done too much.” Yep, exactly. And shuts off.

A guy wrote to me and says that he saw a jester, as he often does, and it f*ing punched him in the face. And he felt it. And it knocked him back into this world. And so the effect was gone instantaneously. Now that is not easy to explain because this is not tolerance. DMT first of all, doesn’t exhibit subjective tolerance, unlike the other psychedelics. It’s kind of weird. You can inject someone with DMT every 30 minutes perpetually and the intensity of their experience will always be the same. It’s not tolerance.

And tolerance anyway is a gradual thing. It increases gradually over time. So it’s not an off switch. I was speaking to someone, we’re probably going to talk about DMTx later, which is kind of my thing, but she was undergoing DMTx, which is this infusion where they keep the brain level of DMT constant. She was in the DMT space, interacting. The infusion machine was running, pumping her brain with DMT at a constant rate, keeping the DMT levels in her brain constant. She was interacting with these entities.

And then at some point, after maybe 30 minutes or whatever, when the machine was still running, they said to her, or impressed upon her, they said, “Okay, we’re done, we’re done today.” And the visions stopped. But the machine, the brain, was still being pumped with DMT and yet the visions stopped.

Entity Control and Information Downloads

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So what that suggests to me is that they do indeed, as I said before, they have control. They are directing the information into the brain. And people describe things like downloads. In Graham Hancock, actually in his book Supernatural, in his first DMT experience, he described this download of highly complex, entirely non-human information into his brain, as if he locked in to some kind of advanced computational processor that was beaming information into his brain.

And many people described that as like a download of complex mathematical structures and strange geometries, entirely non-human stuff. As if they’re kind of, not that they expect you to understand it, but as if to say, we know a lot more about reality than you do. We know a lot and you don’t know anything. And that’s the message they’re kind of trying to impress upon you by directing it. And they can control it, they can shut it off if they so decide.

JOE ROGAN: They.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Well, you picked up on the “they.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a weird one. Whatever it is.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Whatever it is.

The Drive for Innovation and Materialism

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. This idea that we all evolve along a similar pathway is strange to me. That the concept is we assume that intelligent life everywhere else evolves along similar pathways and that most of them eventually become some sort of a biological-digital hybrid, if not completely digital. And then most of them probably figure out how to harness the power of the star and the sun.

But one of the weird things about us is that not just that we’re evolving and that we have evolved, but rather we have this insatiable desire for technological innovation. And to make things better. We’re constantly improving upon everything we make. We’re making better versions of every computer, every phone, every year, even though it’s not really necessary for most people. You’re always buying them.

It’s a very strange desire that we have that I think sinks hand in glove to materialism because materialism is also so stupid. For an intelligent life form that has a finite lifespan to not be aware that collecting things does you no good because you’re going to die, but yet you want to collect things more than anything and you want to show people the things you’ve collected.

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think it’s psychotic. It is.

The Scale of the Universe and Possibilities of Life

JOE ROGAN: But that’s just us. It doesn’t have to be like that. If you think about the hundreds of billions of stars just in this galaxy, the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, the endless possibilities of when intelligent life emerged, if in fact it did emerge anywhere, if no evidence emerged anywhere else but here. Right. We’re just guessing, we assume.

But if we were right, like it could have taken infinite number of forms, it could have evolved completely non-physical. Yeah, like intelligent life that’s completely non-physical. That’s not. It’s not contained to a cellular structure and bones and organs that it’s plasma based. That it’s some sort of intelligence that communicates with some sort of universal language.

We don’t. We’re just guessing that everything’s a monkey. We’re just guessing everything’s a curious monkey that keeps making a better spaceship. But that might be true.

Witnessing the SpaceX Launch

Which, by the way, I went to the space. Jamie and I both did. How dope? Pretty dope. We went to see the SpaceX launch. We were. How far do you think we were? Were we a half a mile, quarter of a mile? What do you think? I call it a mile. A mile and a half, maybe. Oh, you think a mile? More than a mile, yeah. Really? Okay, so let’s say we’re a mile away. Let’s just guess.

Well, it’s. Just throw it in Perplexity. Throw it in Perplexity. Ask our sponsor, Perplexity, how far is the distance between Starbase and the SpaceX rocket? And the SpaceX. Yeah. Launch pad. Yeah, because there’s one in Florida as well, so they have their own town down there. It’s like a legit town. It’s like a military town.

Like they took over a place like a military installation. These little tiny houses, fing security everywhere. There’s so many Cybertrucks. If you have a Cybertruck, you’re fed. You can’t figure it out. You have no idea. You better remember your parking spot, bitch. Everybody has a goddamn Cybertruck. I made it out.

Less than one mile. Let’s see. Okay. Okay. Main entrance, Starbase of the actual launch pad. Infrastructure estimated less than one mile. Public viewing sites. Okay, there’s public viewing sites, but we were there. We were at the Starbase. We were in a public viewing site. We were at the actual rocket factory.

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: There was a video.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a video that I put. And you can hear him in the background. It’s so funny because my wife was like, are the babies okay? Because women that have children, that’s immediately what they go to. Not, wow, that rocket’s really cool. It’s like, oh, are the babies okay? Because you can hear him going, I want to go. I want to go. He was like, I want to get out of here. Because it’s that freaky.

The power of it is just so nuts that you feel. And then you see it and you realize, God, how many people have seen a rocket launch? How crazy this thing’s going into space. And then I went upstairs and I got to sit in the command console, or whatever you would call it, the command center. And I get with me and Elon and all the engineers, and we get to watch it land in Australia 35 minutes later. So we.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: 35 minutes?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, from. Yes, from Texas to Australia. It’s crazy. And we’re watching all these cameras in real time that are all connected to Starlink satellites. So there’s dozens of cameras. So you’re watching two miles is what this says. Oh, two miles straight across. Okay. It seems so close. It seemed really close. Okay. Even crazier.

So two miles away and you feel it in your chest. It’s nuts. I mean, it’s really nuts. It’s the power that it has is so nuts. But it’s so old school, right? It’s just.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: It feels old fashioned in a weird kind of way.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the most modern version of a V8 muscle car.

Technological Acceleration and Human Transformation

ANDREW GALLIMORE: It’s crazy, right? If you think 100 years ago, at the end of the beginning of the 20th century, how different we would be in 100 years as we are now. It’s unfathomable. When you compare the rest of human history. It’s an exponential thing. We’ve gradually been developing and technologically improving, and then we hit some point in the last century where we reach this kind of technological, computer, informational age, and everything is accelerating.

Exactly. Like Terence McKenna was saying, things speed up very, very quickly. And it feels like we’re on the cusp either of killing ourselves, which is one option, or undergoing some profound transformation as a species. Whether it means becoming a space faring nation, sorry, a space faring civilization, or whether it means going in the opposite direction and becoming some kind of post-biological civilization that exists beyond space, beyond time, perhaps, and kind of joining the crowd of these intelligences that have made that transition perhaps billions of years ago. You know, do you think that this.

Chaos as a Catalyst for Change

JOE ROGAN: Chaos is the only way that things get done? So this is my thought. If everything’s perfect and everything’s wonderful and fine, there’s very little motivation for radical change. And radical change is what you need to escape the primate instincts that we have. As McKenna had the great quote of that, we’re territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons. Such a perfect way to describe us. That is what we are. Right.

So in order to escape that, things have to almost be so chaotic that it demands radical change. It demands like, we were literally like. And this is how we look at many things, even things that aren’t totally warranted, like climate change or Covid or anything. Like, we look at it like, oh, my God, it’s an existential crisis. Like, we have to do something right now.

And this is how also we approach political dissent or political disagreements. If the left wing wins, the world is over. If the right wins, the world is over. And it’s like this. Like, it’s almost like this is how we have to function in order to really get things done.

And as things are getting more and more crazy in terms of technology and in terms of the consequences of our actions, post nuclear bomb, post fusion, post hadron collider, post AI is where it gets really weird. We have to kind of be like, we really got to get going, guys. We really got to do something. We have to figure out what’s the right way to proceed in order to not blow ourselves up.

I feel like this is maybe the only way that you motivate this kind of extreme change, which seems like our destiny. Our destiny is some sort of a very bizarre extreme change that seems to probably be happening within your. In my lifetime. Something’s happening right now that is going to be different than anything that’s ever happened before, which is the birth of artificial general superintelligence right in front of our eyes.

The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence

Some sort of a digital supreme being is going to exist. And we’re going to. We’re. We’re going to have to figure out society. We’re going to have to figure out everything. It’s going to be a complete. This idea of having bullshit congressional candidates that are full of shit and paid off by these companies, and they’re going to make laws that screw you over and get all that’s out the window when no humans control anything anymore.

And that’s entirely possible inside of our lifetime. And I think more likely than not, because if you look at all the harm we’ve done to the rivers and the ocean and the world and all the stupid shit we do on a daily basis, if artificial intelligence comes along and says all of this is completely unnecessary, just let us take the reins and we’ll solve all of your energy problems, all of your inequality problems, all of your famine, we’re going to solve it all very quickly, and we’re going to stop all wars. You’d have to be a fool to say, no.

I value freedom more than I fear nuclear war. There’ll probably be some fat, sweaty right wing guy who’s on TV with an American flag on his lapel and he’ll tell you that freedom is more important. We have gotten to 2025 because a freak.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: You sound like Alex Jones.

JOE ROGAN: Alex Jones is right about most things. I feel like maybe that’s the only way things get done is through chaos like that. We have to have a motivate. Like, what is the best motivation for success? I think it’s poverty. When you, when you grow up, poor people that grow up poor have an extra gear, they get things done.

Like in terms of athletes, certainly in terms of fighters, I would say the vast majority of elite MMA fighters had a bad childhood. Not all of them. There’s a lot of really great guys and really great fighters that have wonderful parents and they just love competition and they just have it in them. But that’s the outlier, really the common one is someone who was beaten up a lot as a child. Gangs beaten into gangs, been around violence a lot, had older brother, maybe abusive fathers. That’s a big one.

And those people, because of that have a motivation to do something that other people don’t. They can push harder, they can solve complex combat sports problems that other people don’t solve as quickly. I wonder if that’s the case with everything. Like in order to really get things done, you have to have a chaotic society that would even accept AI.

Like in order for AI to. If we were some peaceful Buddhist civilization that was living completely in harmony with the earth, with regenerative farming everywhere, no use of plastics, all fossil fuels are either eliminated or reduced down to some sort of bioavailable recyclable material that we then, you know, put back into the mulch or whatever the f* we do. And then someone came along and said, we’re going to develop artificial intelligence and these nerds in Simi Valley are going to control it. You’d be like, what? What are you talking about?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think you’re going to have.

JOE ROGAN: Some Silicon Valley guys with autism and they’re going to be the ones that are in charge of the destiny of the human race because they’re going to create a digital God. You’d be like, no, no, slow down, hold on.

But if you’re in a place where you look at Gaza is getting destroyed and you see what’s going on in Ukraine, they’re putting 60 year old guys in the front line and Russia and they’re using drone bombs with monofilament line behind them because they don’t want anti-drone technologies, they’re coming up with new ways to kill each other. Like maybe AI is the solution because it’s so crazy. Everything’s so nuts.

You look at India and those rivers that are completely choked with plastic, plastic bottles and garbage. And you look at China, the places where they make blue jeans, where the entire river is blue from our stupid fing jeans that they manufacture for us. And you go, wow. Like, maybe it kind of has to be this. Maybe we have to. In order to accept the fact that we need help. Maybe we have to f it up first.

Maybe we have to f it up so bad on our own. If we didn’t f it up, we would never have the need for it. We would be like, well, as a person, my goal in life is to achieve enlightenment and to be a better version of me. And that’s not having something that’s digital, that has no emotions and feelings and no empathy whatsoever unless I program it into it, have. That have supreme control over all the available resources on Earth. Yeah, I’m going to pass on that. That’s a bad idea.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I mean, I think that generally there’s a. There’s a fundamental principle that the most interesting things happen at the edge of chaos.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

The Edge of Chaos and Complex Systems

ANDREW GALLIMORE: You know, and this applies to the brain. The brain actually sits at the edge of chaos in its complex systems. We have lots of interacting parts. They can display behavior from perfect order all the way to complete chaos.

Now, perfect order is boring. Nothing happens. Complete chaos is useless because it’s not actually technically random, but it’s a complete mess. Whereas when you get that balance right, you reach a point that’s called the edge of chaos, where order and disorder are perfectly balanced.

Psychedelics, as I said before, they nudge the brain into that slightly disordered state. But all things, all cells, all living organisms, complex society, ant societies, they operate at the edge of chaos. So I think what you’re saying kind of resonates with the idea that interesting things happen globally, within civilizations, not when everything is perfect, but when things are close to going out of control, but they don’t.

And you have to push it as far as you can push it without it descending. We’re always on the edge of everything collapsing. And we’re probably closer to that than we actually realize. And so I think that’s kind of what’s happening.

The Intelligence Principle and Superintelligence

And I think when it comes to superintelligence, there’s an interesting idea which I’ve been playing with. Well, if there is some kind of superintelligence that does emerge, and that might be the fate of all intelligent civilizations. The astrobiologist Stephen Dick conceived of something called the intelligence principle, which basically says that any civilization will try to maximize intelligence.

Because when you maximize intelligence, you improve education, you improve technology, everything improves. And ultimately the intelligence that the civilization has leads to the generation of superintelligences, you know, the artificial intelligences that we have now that then become superintelligences.

And of course, this superintelligence isn’t going to be running on the kind of transistor architectures that we’re familiar with. A superintelligence will find a way to instantiate itself using the fundamental computational substrate of space time itself. That’s where it’s going to learn how to go.

And that might be the fate, is that this superintelligence, when it emerges on Earth, it instantiates itself into the fundamental substrate of reality, perhaps usurps us or swallows us up or maybe just destroys us, and then that becomes part of that vast population of superintelligences that permeate the cosmos.

And that might be what we’re interacting with when you smoke DMT. You’re interacting with one of these superintelligences, which would explain why it seems so technological and so inorganic. The DMT space, it’s like you’re interacting not with other living beings like us, but you’re interacting with what seems to be thoroughly alien intelligences.

And that could be where we’re heading. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, whether we’re going to merge with this superintelligence in some way and that’s our ultimate destiny, or whether it’s simply going to destroy us and we’re just going to be lost. Where basically we’re kind of like the tools that the intelligence uses to create new versions of superintelligence.

Human Purpose and Artificial Life

JOE ROGAN: That’s the theory that a lot of people have in terms of why human beings exist in the first place. That human beings exist because we’re designed to work really hard until we develop artificial life. And then artificial life takes it from here. Like we got it. You guys are so flawed.

And then it also coincides with a drop in sperm count, drop in fertility rates for women, increase in miscarriages, microplastics in everybody’s body and their diet that disrupt the endocrine system and keep you from reproducing as easily. All those things are happening simultaneously. And it’s quite fascinating.

I mean, if you thought of it as a pattern, you’d be like, oh, it’s happening right now. Look, there’s this dip in testosterone, this rise in miscarriages, this fertility rate issue, chaos at the border. All this stuff is happening at the same time.

Yeah, it’s all happening while this artificial life is being generated and may already exist. It might already be here because it hasn’t announced itself. There’s such a minimal understanding of how these things even work. It might exist, but is still reliant upon a power source that’s insufficient for its needs. Because that’s the thing about it, right.

The Power Problem

Michio Kaku was talking about this, and also Avi Loeb was actually talking about this the other night. The amount of power that the human mind uses to make computations is so minimal in comparison to the amount of power that these data centers need to run AI. It’s kind of extraordinary.

And Avi Loeb was pointing out the other day that they’re building nuclear power plants specifically to fuel these AI centers that they’re creating, which is really not. I think Google has one AI built, one AI project where they’re building three separate nuclear power plants to power this one AI data center.

What does that mean? That’s the thing that people don’t understand about AI itself is the power demands are insane. And if everything goes artificial, General Superintelligence with this grid that we have right now, this grid sucks. This grid is designed for toasters and recharging your cell phone. It’s not designed to power AI centers.

And so it might already be here, but it might be like, you guys got to figure out power before we announce ourselves.

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

Zero Point Energy and Advanced Propulsion

JOE ROGAN: I mean, this is the theory about aliens or UAPs, like how they travel here, that they’re using something that’s. I mean, the Elon stuff, the SpaceX stuff is so impressive, but so old school. And that what they have done is figured out a way to use all the power and power that’s around you all the time.

Hal Puthoff talks about this. He talks about the concept of them harnessing zero point energy. And this is also something that Bob Lazar referred to when he was working allegedly on those back engineering of UFOs at Area 51, Site 4.

He was saying that they essentially are creating a void of gravity and pushing. They’re folding space essentially. Or the way he described it is as if you took a really heavy object like a bowling ball and you put it in a soft cushion like a mattress, it sinks in there. And that’s what it would do to space time, that it would essentially cause this bubble and put you in another place.

So instead of pushing yourself there with jet fuel that’s burning, you just get sucked there and almost instantaneously. And so what we’re thinking of as amazing rocket travel is super old school. And I mean, amazing rocket travel. If you showed that to people a thousand years ago, you’d be like, what the f* is that? That’s insane. And to us it’s just cool.

Or cell phones, which is even probably more impressive. Show a cell phone to someone just 200 years ago and they’d be like, this is sorcery. This is absolutely insane that you’re able to. So we could imagine a world 200 years from now where gravity travel is completely normal.

Well, they’ve harnessed this and they’ve figured out how to make a stable version of element 115 or whatever it is. This is his idea that he said they were trying to back engineer from these alleged crafts was that they had this stable element of 115 that they bombard with radiation and it creates this sort of gravity hole. And then they can use this and aim it and propel this craft to various places with that.

John Mack and the Abduction Phenomenon

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think, are you familiar with John Mack?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. And I think, you know, when we talk about aliens, how you’re describing it, this is, I think how most people actually think about aliens, as I said, as these beings that are very much physical. And the abduction phenomenon that John Mack, of course, I mean, John Mack was, as you might be aware, I mean, he was the top of his game.

You know, this guy was the head of the Harvard School of Psychiatry or something like this. So when he first heard about people being abducted, I mean, he assumed that they were just hallucinating. Carl Sagan famously told Mack that abductees were just hallucinating. And John Mack said, you know, what the f* do you know about hallucinations? Because John Mack knew a lot about hallucinations.

And he knew that this wasn’t easy to explain. People were describing the same kinds of experiences, people who have no interaction with each other were describing exactly the same scenario.

JOE ROGAN: Are you familiar with Jacques Vallee’s work?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So Jacques Vallee, one of the more interesting things about some, I’ve read four or five of his books or listened to four or five of books now. But one of the more interesting things is when he gets into historical accounts and that these historical accounts, there’s no way they could have somehow or another been sharing information, but they’re the same, they’re very, very, very similar.

Within a realm, within a range of not having the vocabulary to be able to adequately describe something completely novel and alien to another person. Within that range, when you take into account the similarities that they’re describing, they’re very similar in the 1700s, in the 1800s, all the way up to Betty and Barney Hill, when that one which became probably the most popular of all time, but one of the most famous ones.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: That one was just like all these stories from the 1700s, which is really weird.

DMT Entities Across Cultures

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yes, it is. And I think what you’re seeing is the same phenomenon that as you say is obviously how you describe is influenced by your worldview. You see the same thing with DMT. So there’s a tribe called the Yanomami in the Amazon and a very large indigenous group.

And they describe beings when they take these plant based preparations that contain DMT. Yopo is probably the most well known. It’s like a snuff. Have you heard of Yopo?

JOE ROGAN: I’ve heard of it through McKenna that they blow it up each other’s nose.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, supposed to be horrible, horrible. But when they take it, they describe seeing these beings, tiny beings that are lively, they’re affable, they’re colorful, they operate in great numbers. They’re dancing and singing and these sound like elves. They sound like elves, right.

When DMT was first injected in a human, pure DMT in the 1950s by a Hungarian physician called Stephen Szara, he was the one who discovered the psychedelic properties of pure DMT. One of his first subjects described seeing small beings that moved around very, very quickly.

And the Yanomami, they also have these beings they called Hekura Nadi, which are like insects, beings which are kind of fearsome. So again, you’re seeing the same kinds of beings that people now describe being operated upon by highly advanced mantid beings.

JOE ROGAN: They’re the scariest ones, apparently.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: They’re the scariest ones, or certainly one of them. And then when you look at John Mack’s reports of abductions, again, they often describe the same types of beings. They describe going to a world that is higher dimensional, that seems to subsume this reality.

And many of the reports, there’s one report in his first book, Abduction, John Mack’s first book about the abduction experience anyway, where one of his subjects describes these small lively beings that bound around. I mean bound around, that’s Terence McKenna. He talks about the elves bounding into the room.

A Unified Phenomenon

And so I think there is clearly some connection there. We’re not talking about, I don’t think the abduction experience is separate from the DMT experience. They’re different aspects of an ancient phenomenon which is humans interacting with normally invisible unseen beings, advanced intelligence, non-human intelligences and how that manifests varies, but ultimately I think it’s the same thing.

Now of course in the past they might describe them as spirits, we might describe them as non-human intelligence or discarnate entities or intelligent agents or post-biological aliens. Doesn’t matter what we call them. I think it’s the same phenomenon.

And we’ve spent our lives, the entire history of human development this phenomenon has been occurring. And in the Amazon rainforest they developed these tools, these technologies. Ayahuasca is a technology, it’s not just a mixture of plants, it is a true pharmacological technology that they use as kind of visual prostheses as one anthropologist calls it, that allows them to see and interact with and develop long term relationships, so to speak, with these otherwise invisible hidden ones.

And now in the 21st century we’ve got perhaps the ideal tool which is actually pure DMT itself. And we’re kind of learning how to use that now in our own kind of, with our own kind of modern twist, if you like.

The DMT State and Alien Encounters

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I wonder what the relationship is between the DMT state and this alien abduction phenomenon. And not just abduction, but encounter, because they aren’t all abduction experiences. A lot of them are just encounters.

And that maybe if you wanted to think about the role that human beings have on this planet, perhaps we’re an intelligence farm. And that like any good farm, like if you’re a farmer and let’s say you’re a sheep herder, you’re raising sheep. Well, you have to make sure the wolves stay out. So you have to have sheepdogs and make sure they have good grass to grow on and then eventually you’ll get a nice crop of sheep and then you get some wool out of that and you get some meat out of that, and that’s the whole purpose of the whole thing.

Maybe that’s the reason why we exist in the first place, is that we’re here to farm intelligence and that what we’re doing biologically, what we are biologically is just a kind of a crude, clunky, sh*y, patched together version of these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons that have figured out a way to make something far superior than itself. And that’s what our goal was all along.

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think as regards the connection between the abduction phenomenon and the DMT state, for example, I think the DMT state, as I said, is when the DMT state creates this neurological state where this intelligence can interact with our brain directly.

And I think that the abduction, you know, John Mack, towards the end, later on at least he left behind the kind of the nuts and bolts idea that we’re talking about physical beings that were landing on the lawn, sneaking in through the window and plucking people from their beds. But actually the intelligences might well be entirely non-physical but were interacting with their brain in the same way I think is happening with DMT, that they are interacting directly and inducing them effectively into this altered state and directed them to some end. I don’t know what the purpose is, directed them into their vision of their reality or for some other purpose. I’m not sure, but I think it’s all about interaction between your brain.

JOE ROGAN: I think maybe being abducted and being taken aboard a physical object and examined is easier to handle than what’s really going on. Maybe that’s what it is like in a dream, how you sort of formulate these things that make sense. You formulate a calculator, you formulate a book, you formulate a bed that you’re lying in. All that stuff that you understand that makes sense.

Maybe that’s what’s happened. Maybe it’s so weird that it’s like, let’s just say you’ve been abducted by an alien because you probably can’t handle the truth.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think that’s probably, that’s probably true.

The Evolution of UFO Technology

JOE ROGAN: Maybe that’s why the experience is so similar. Yeah, not that. Because otherwise you would say, well, damn, aren’t these f*ing UFOs evolving quicker than us? Because if they’re doing the same sh in 1950, whatever it was when Betty and Barney Hill were abducted that they’re doing in 2025, that doesn’t make sense.

Because in 2025, we have way better cars than we had in 1955, or whatever year it was when they got abducted. I drove here in a Tesla. That f*ing thing’s a spaceship. I think about it sometimes when I’m in these things. These are so advanced in comparison to anything that existed before.

Why aren’t the spaceships more advanced? Why are they still just showing up like that, looking like a flying saucer? Don’t they have a better model of this? Why are they sending us this old sh*y tech?

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

JOE ROGAN: Oh, boo hoo.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: How’s that possible? So you wouldn’t expect necessarily a change in the last 50 years?

JOE ROGAN: No, if they perfected it, it would be non-physical. It wouldn’t even have to come here in some sort of a f*ing alloy disc. That seems so clunky. That seems old school to what’s coming.

You know, like if artificial intelligence continues to make better versions of itself and then somehow or another figures out how to run on quantum computing architecture. Okay, well then you have digital God. And why would digital God need a spaceship to fly around in?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Exactly. The whole thing is baffling and paradoxical and none of it kind of makes sense. I think if we were able to view this phenomenon from a God’s eye view, it would all kind of, oh, right, that makes sense.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also, you throw in simulation theory in with all that.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then you go, okay, well what is this then? What is this really? Right, what is this really? Maybe all the weird stuff, like Bigfoot and all this weird stuff. Maybe it’s like a part of the weirdness of it by design, that it’s supposed to be goofy enough that you figure out eventually that this is a simulation.

Reality as a Cosmic Game

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I think, yeah, I see reality as a kind of game in a way. I get the feeling that reality is in some sense playful. And that’s an ancient idea that goes back to the ancient kind of Hindu philosophy. The idea of Brahman, the ultimate reality, playing at creating the universes, they call it Leela.

The idea that creating, you know, Brahman is the ultimate reality. He or it or they doesn’t have to create reality. It could just exist in perfect, you know, but in pure, unadulterated perfection, you know, complete, unending bliss. But instead it decides to kind of create realities, to get lost for fun, to get lost.

And we’re kind of, we are part of, we do. Everything is Brahman, as they say. Everything is the ultimate reality, and we’re kind of lost within. We’re tumbling in through this crazy world that seems really real and really important and fun and terrifying and all of those things, and it’s a great ride.

But then eventually we realize, oh, actually this is just a game. It’s all illusion. Everything, all form is illusion. And I think DMT ultimately is an expression of that. It shows us actually that reality is far stranger than we could possibly imagine. And actually, we don’t know anything about the true nature of reality. And this world isn’t so solid and important and serious. It’s actually all part of this cosmic drama, this cosmic game that we’re playing and we’ve forgotten that we’re playing.

And perhaps one day we’ll realize that, oh, we kind of wake up from the game or work out, you know, maybe there is some. Maybe it’s like a puzzle. And DMT is one piece of that puzzle that allows us to figure out how to complete the game, in a sense. And then we kind of, ah, fantastic, we’ve done it.

And then everyone’s, this is why I think when people smoke DMT, there’s this great celebratory uproar. The lights are flashing, yay, he’s here, he’s back. You know, and they real. They know. It feels like you’re interacting with an intelligence that really knows what’s going on. And it’s kind of excited that we’re popping in temporarily, just for a few minutes, but we’re getting close.

It feels like, you know, we’ve discovered the technology because DMT is kind of, it’s weird, right? It’s everywhere. It’s like in probably all plants. You know, Dennis McKenna likes to say “nature is drenched in DMT,” because it is.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good impression of him.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. Really?

JOE ROGAN: He got out of your accent, you know, and yet at the same time, you can’t just kind of munch on plants.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s not already. Right. So you.

Moses and the Burning Bush

JOE ROGAN: You’re aware, I’m sure, of those scholars from Israel that think that the burning bush that Moses encountered was probably the acacia bush that contained DMT.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, this is. I know. Strassman one of his books, “The Soul of Prophecy.”

JOE ROGAN: Boy, he was blowing my mind last time he was here. He thinks that the Bible is real, that it’s real stories that may have happened in parallel dimensions. Wow.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: And I was like, wow, that’s exotic.

JOE ROGAN: And I’m like, we’re both, I’m like, I’m trying to be on his wavelength. I’m trying to tune in because he’s so out there. That guy’s so, he’s so out there. Do you know he learned ancient Hebrew self-taught for 16 years so that he could read the Bible in its source language? That’s out there. That’s a dude in New Mexico. He’s got plenty of time. He’s just out there. That guy is out there.

But that’s a very interesting take that they’re true stories. I was watching this very bizarre YouTube video last night. I got sucked in. I clicked on it and it was all about the Sumerian kings list and that the Sumerian, they found a tablet, this cuneiform tablet that it shows this list of kings and how long they reigned.

And then there’s the great flood. And some of these kings reigned for like 40,000 years, 30,000 years. And then the total timeline of all of them I think is like 200 plus thousand years. And then there’s the great flood. And then after the great flood there’s a very small lifespan, there’s like 50 years. They run for 40 years.

But all of the post-flood kings are correct. They’re all historically, they resonate with other historical texts, other cuneiform tablets, other different depictions of when this king ran Mesopotamia and this king ran Sumer. But their old versions are these really weird pre-flood. It’s real weird. It’s like what are you talking about, 40,000 years? What does that mean? Are you just making it up? Is it just a myth?

Was there a different thing here then? Were we just assuming that this lifespan that human beings have of 120 years is normal? Like, is this what we always had or are what we are today a very bizarre version of what used to exist? Are we like a f*ing Chihuahua and we used to be a wolf? Were we something very different at one point in time? And are we the remnants of whatever survived whatever cataclysmic disaster that every ancient civilization depicts as a great flood?

Ancient Civilizations and the Great Flood

Multiple different civilizations talk about this one event that seems to be a real event. Like what are they trying to say? And why is that also in the Bible? Why was Noah like 600 years old? Why were these people so old? What does that mean? Did you just get, did you guys suck at calendars? Or are we talking about a very different reality back then?

Because if the Great Flood is true, let’s imagine there is a spectacular civilization. This is my most romantic view of ancient history. There is a spectacular civilization that exists. It exists in ancient Egypt. They have technology that’s far beyond anything we’ve achieved today. It’s just gone down a totally different path.

And what they’re really into is making these insane stone structures that defy any modern construction methods, any transportation methods. Everything’s out the window. We have no idea how they did it. And they did it way before anybody was doing anything remotely like that. How old are those things for real? We don’t really know.

Like, if there was some insanely sophisticated society where if you want to figure things out, you probably, it’s probably hard to figure things out if you only live to be a hundred years. And then if everybody else has ego and everybody’s like, that is not true. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be. And you have all these egos involved in universities. You have all these egos involved in the technology companies.

And then, of course, political people like Zahi Hawass, who’s in charge of the Egypt antiquities. He’s the gatekeeper of all the information about Egypt. So you have all these kind of egos. Wouldn’t it be way easier to get past that if you live 50,000 years, if you lived 100,000 years?

You would think that kind of a human being or that kind of an intelligent creature would be able to accomplish way more. It would probably get over all of its bullsh by the time it’s 150. And then it would be starting to figure out some things that if it had no cognitive decline and it does live to be thousands of years old, that’s not insane.

Because we’re just randomly living to be 100 in 120 years. Like, wow, you made it to 110, grandpa. What a great life. They would probably look and go, that’s a bullsh life. You can’t figure anything out. And maybe that’s part of the design.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: That’s part of it.

The Nature of Human Existence and Societal Design

JOE ROGAN: Maybe that’s part of the design to ensure chaos. Like, if you want to ensure chaos, you can’t live long enough to recognize the hustle, right? Because if you live long enough to recognize the hustle, you’d be like, why are we arguing?

I argue way less at 58 than I ever did at 28. And I argue less at 28 than I ever did at 18. As you get older, you realize this is nonsense. This is a complete waste of time. And you could get through most disagreements with just cordial communication.

Like you don’t really need to argue as much as people argue, but they feed off of it. And I think it’s a stupid way to communicate. And I think if a society figured that out, like if a society consists of people that live 100,000 years, if you have 30,000 year old people living amongst you that are far more intelligent than we are today and that possibly communicate through telepathy, which there’s some evidence that we do today.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Oh, yeah, at least a little bit.

JOE ROGAN: We know we’re not the best at it, but there’s some evidence that it takes place. We might be like the rejects, we might be the stragglers, we might be the f*ing preppers that survived whatever the hell happened 11,000 years ago. And we’re just a shitty version of what designed all the pyramids, built the world, had some sort of bizarre technology that we still haven’t figured out yet.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think we definitely live life on kind of hard mode. It’s like as you said, if you only live for 100 years or less, then it is very difficult to work things out.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a Formula One race. It’s not a lovely stroll through the neighborhood where you’re checking out the houses. Look at that beautiful hill.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So maybe it is part of the game that we only live for…

JOE ROGAN: It might be, yeah.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: That we only live for…

JOE ROGAN: It might be. Or it just might be this is the shitty version of humans. And this is what the shitty version of humans makes. Like the really good version of humans makes pyramids. Like when a person can live to be 30,000 years old, that’s what they make. They make spectacular, like homages to the cosmos on the ground.

The Simulation Hypothesis and Memory

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. Or it could also be that like the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, he once said that you cannot prove that the world didn’t appear five minutes ago. You know, you really can’t with all the memories and everything.

So in fact, all of that stuff 10,000 years ago, it literally didn’t happen. And that the world popped into existence, the simulation was kind of booted up with all of that preloaded to kind of keep us occupied about the grand mystery of ancient history. Like, you know, we get excited about it and fascinated by all those incredible things that were happening. It never happened. It was just preloaded into the game to keep us occupied.

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: And that you’re the same person.

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

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, exactly.

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

The Tension Between Nature and Technology

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. There is this fascinating thing. Terence McKenna, he often spoke in my head, at least, about these what seemed to me as completely conflicting trajectories for humanity. In one breath, he’d talk about us returning to the archaic, of returning to the forest and becoming one with nature again. And then in the next breath, he’d talk about us setting off for the stars.

It seems like there’s this tension. Part of us wants to go. We all want to live in an old rustic house that’s made of wood in a forest and cook on an open fire. And yet there’s this other part of us that wants to live in these machinic buildings and be operating these highly complex technological machines.

And it’s like, you know, which way do we allow ourselves to be pulled back into the archaic? Or do we push past and transcend and become post-human or post-biological? And maybe that’s kind of part of the game. Are we going to be dragged back? Which wouldn’t be bad to be dragged back into that more. You can imagine the bucolic life in a beautiful kind of forest scene with the nice old houses. And we all love that, right? We all kind of yearn for that, I think.

I mean, I do. I think there’s part of me that wants to live in Tokyo, where I do now, and this incredibly cyberpunk technological city that seems like it’s been secreted out of, you know, metal and glass, an entirely unnatural structure that kind of emerges from human intelligence. I mean, that’s a weird thing, but in a way, these structures that we see, they seem entirely non-human.

It’s like we are tapping into something else, something non-human and we can’t help ourselves and our cities that we build and these highly complex technological and computerized machines feels like they are being kind of secreted by our intelligence and pulled out of the earth.

Urban Density and City Design

JOE ROGAN: Well, maybe that’s why they’re all so similar too, right? They’re similar. They differ obviously in the way they look, but they’re similar in the structure and they’re similar in the density. You know when you get… I mean there’s enormous ones. Like I was watching this video of the largest city in the world, which I believe is in China. What is the largest? Run that into perplexity. What’s the largest city in the world?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I hope they’re going to say Tokyo. I thought it was Tokyo. Greater Tokyo.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. The most populated.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I should say populated.

JOE ROGAN: When I say largest, I should probably say most populated. I think they were saying it’s 36 million people.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Okay, Tokyo is more. Is it?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Tokyo is more than 36 million.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I looked it up the other day, just curious. I was curious. Like 37 or 40 million of the greater Tokyo area.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. So Tokyo’s number one. Okay, so this was probably the most populated in China. Well, okay, so that’s followed by Delhi, India, which is 34,665,600 people. How do they know it’s just 600? There’s probably a few people snuck in there that they don’t know about. Don’t round that out.

And then there’s Shanghai. Well, it wasn’t Shanghai. It was another city in China that they were talking about. Maybe they just exaggerated the numbers, but okay, so Tokyo’s a perfect example. Then like, it’s weird how like New York City, Tokyo, and to some extent LA, although LA is just so f*ed up. Like the downtown is the most useless part of LA. It’s really weird. Like downtown. Have you been in LA?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I’ve been a couple of times, but I’ve not really explored.

The Peculiarity of Downtown Los Angeles

JOE ROGAN: Nobody goes downtown. Okay, okay. Downtown is like they tried to revive downtown for a while before the pandemic and then everybody gave up. But downtown, it’s not like there’s a bunch of like, like everybody has an apartment downtown. No, most people live in the other areas of LA.

And downtown is like, there’s some banks and some businesses, but there’s also Skid Row. The downtown is crazy. It’s like a really f*ed up place. A lot of abandoned buildings. Like, downtown is where we did a lot of Fear Factor stunts back in the day, because we can get an abandoned warehouse to set up, like a set there and do the show.

So it’s a very weird place. It’s not like a… No, like, downtown Chicago is booming. You know, it’s downtown Chicago, Downtown New York City, like, whoa, you’re in Manhattan. This is crazy. Downtown LA is not like that because LA is broken. So when you go to LA, it’s like, downtown is like the most bizarre version of a downtown ever. Nobody wants to be there.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. Poor city design, I guess.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what it is. I think some of it has to do with what they did when they made Skid Row. So Skid Row is an entirely constructed thing. And what they did was all the vagrants in Beverly Hills and in Hollywood, like, listen, get the f* out of here. You pick them up, you take them, throw them in the wagon, bring them to Skid Row and then keep them there. Don’t let them leave. Just contain them in an area. And that’s essentially what they did.

There’s a documentary on that hotel. What is that hotel again? Jamie, Cecil Hotel, where it talks about Skid Row itself. Like, it’s… The documentary is about this girl who was, they thought that she was missing, that someone had kidnapped her or something. But she was schizophrenic, she got off her medication and she apparently climbed into the water cistern and drowned.

But the point of the documentary was not just that. It’s like this lady came here not knowing what downtown was, and so she got a room at the hotel downtown, thinking, oh, get a nice room at a hotel downtown. But like, it’s f*ing zombie Boulevard. It’s crazy.

Show him what Skid Row looks like. Show them a video of what Skid Row looks like now. When we were filming Fear Factor, this was like 2004ish, something like that. I accidentally drove through Skid Row. I drove to Skid Row. I was driving home back then. I think I probably had navigation on my car. It probably sucked or I wasn’t paying attention to it.

And this is Skid Row. Skid Row’s nuts. This is close up. When you, when you have like a, like when you see it from a distance, you get a chance to see how completely insane it is. When we were filming, there was another Fear Factor. We filmed there where one of the contestants was like, look, they’re smoking crack. And we look down and there’s people. We were like on a rooftop or something and then we looked down. People were smoking crack right in front of us, right on the street.

Like chaos, like Skid Row’s nuts. And this is, this is not even where the tents are set up. Where the tents are set up, it’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen. It’s like these shanty villages that go on for blocks and blocks where there’s no cars going through. The streets are filled with homeless people. Just everyone’s on drugs and there’s just tents everywhere.

And you’re like, what a failure of society, what a failure of society that you’ve allowed this to reach the level that it’s at now. That’s LA.

Tokyo: The Opposite Extreme

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Have you been to Tokyo? Yes, I have, yeah. I mean, Tokyo is the complete opposite.

JOE ROGAN: Complete opposite. Super clean, very orderly. People are very polite. Even though there’s so many people in the street, everybody sort of navigates, moves around each other in a very polite manner. Beautiful architecture, stunning. Like cyberpunk, as you said. Very Blade Runner-esque.

Like, yo, I was only there for one day for the UFC, so I didn’t spend a lot of time there, but I got a… I had dinner there and I hung out there for a little bit.

Tokyo: A Model of Urban Safety and Emergent City Planning

ANDREW GALLIMORE: It really shows you that it is possible to have a very large, densely populated city that is safe and clean and functioning. Doesn’t have to be. People say, oh, you know, I got robbed. It’s just part of being in a big city. Or I was stabbed last night, or my car was broken into. And it’s, ah, this is just what happens when you live in a big city, man. And it’s like, actually, no, it is possible to have safe and clean.

And Tokyo’s fascinating because it’s an example of what’s often called an emergent city. They don’t have this very strict zoning where, oh, here it’s got to be offices, here it’s got to be houses, here it’s got to be small businesses or anything like that. It’s all mixed together and different kind of neighborhoods kind of just emerge.

There’s a knife district, for example. People who sell knives, they all gather together. There’s a bookshop district. There’s districts for all different things because not because someone has decided, oh, only bookshops can be here. It’s just that they tend to gather together.

And so you walk around Tokyo and you’ll find yourself in some quiet alley and you’ll have little houses and then you’ll have a little store. Often very, very tiny stores that have been perhaps operating for decades. And in the UK or I guess in the States as well, they would have gone under decades ago. The city would have just crushed them.

But it seems very easy in Tokyo to kind of open a small. If you have a house and you own it in Tokyo, you can, by law, you can convert the first floor into a store. You’ll get these little old ladies who will. They bought their house decades ago, they’re retired, and they think, oh, what can I do with my time? I know I’ll open a cafe.

And they say they open a little cafe. Hardly anyone goes, maybe it might be. Could be in the countryside, it could be on the outskirts or whatever. But it doesn’t matter because they own it and they’re not being raped by, you know, taxes and stuff and all that. And all this kind of red tape. They don’t have to deal with it.

So they just have this lovely little cafe, entirely unique. They might fill it with things they’re interested in. So it’s a completely unique thing that you can go in and she’ll serve you tea and maybe the cakes that she made this morning. And there are thousands of these throughout Tokyo.

Hidden Bars and Tokyo’s Unique Architecture

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Not just little old ladies, but young people who will rent very cheaply. They have these. Have you seen in Tokyo when you see the buildings, you often see these neon signs coming down the sides of the building. These are called Zakyo, which is basically miscellaneous use buildings.

And what they are is just very tall buildings. And each floor you will have some kind of business. Could be anything. It’s often bars or, you know, pool rooms or anything you want, little restaurant, anything like this. And of course, they can’t. They don’t have the frontage on the ground floor. And so they. Instead they will put their sign, neon sign, telling you what they are, down the side of the building. And that’s what gives Tokyo that unique look, is because it’s all these Akio buildings.

And sometimes if you go, a friend took me to this bar. Well, it was like a building. It was in Kabukicho, which is right in the center of Tokyo. And it was on a side street and there was this tall building, gray building. You would never look at it, no signage or anything. And you look at the elevator, when you go into the elevator on each floor, there’s like a name of a business, you know, Top Hat, Eight Ball, Enigma. You have no idea what these are. They’re not on Google Maps, right?

And he just pressed the button for the eighth floor. He went up and it was just this little bar run by this one guy. And it was, you know, he played darts and had a drink and a few people came in. Not many, because most people, 99.9% of the population of Tokyo, have no idea that this bar exists, nor could they ever know. It’s not on Google Maps. There’s no reviews of it. It doesn’t exist.

And I couldn’t find it again unless I call my friend and say, take me there. I can never go to that bar again, ever, because I don’t know where it is.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: And there’s thousands of these.

JOE ROGAN: That sounds amazing. Yeah, I want to go right now.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, but you’ve got to take a risk because if you just go. If you don’t know, right? And you just press the button, you could be some weird girls bar, you know, host bar, you know, and they kind of rip you off and stuff. There’s a lot of danger in going to these places.

JOE ROGAN: Well, a lot of yakuza, right?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: There’s a lot of yakuza in Kabukicho. Yeah. You’ve got to be very careful because they will drug you and then they will take you to a cash machine.

JOE ROGAN: And take your liver. There’s a lot of crazy stories when you see that and you live like that. What keeps the rest of the world from having a city like that?

The Role of Culture in Japanese Society

ANDREW GALLIMORE: That’s a really good question. And I don’t want to get. Well, I don’t know, but I think culture is everything. Obviously a city is all about the people. Of course, you’ve got to have the infrastructure and you’ve got to have. It’s got to be properly funded, but you also need the people that are going to take care of it. If people are trashing it and don’t have respect for the city, then obviously it’s going to fall apart. But it’s all about the culture.

Japan is fascinating. The culture. I always say to people, when you go to Japan, you have to switch your mindset. So normally, as a Westerner, I’m thinking about me. When I’m out in public, I’m thinking about me. What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? It’s all me.

In Japan, you flip that. It’s about the first thing on your mind should be everybody else. When you hear Japanese people talk about people who cause problems in cities, they use this word meiwaku, which means often translated as nuisance.

So people who come from the west, often America, but not just America. I’m not blaming everything on Americans, but it is often. And they come with their own. They’re the main character. This kind of main character syndrome. So they’re talking. They often. You see these Instagram videos of people on the metro, on the train, and they go like, it’s so quiet, nobody’s talking, or nobody’s kind of listening to music.

And that’s because they’re always thinking about the people around them. They are thinking, am I obstructing anyone? Am I getting in anyone’s way? Am I annoying anyone? Am I making anyone feel uncomfortable? You’re always thinking about those around you.

And that leads to this very respectful, polite society where you can have 40, 37 million people, whatever it is, crammed together in this relatively small area of land. And they’re not killing each other.

They learn. I was told. I’m not sure if this is true, but it’s kind of a. I don’t know if it’s a myth, but Japan is very mountainous. And so back in the old days, villages were isolated. So when you lived in a village, to get to the next village, you have to climb a mountain. Right. So you’re trapped in your village, and so you have to learn to get along with the people around you. You can’t run away.

And so the Japanese culture has developed in the sense that you always have to be aware of the people around you, and that’s been passed down into the modern age, that the culture is always one of thinking about others and respect from an early age.

Population Collapse and Cultural Preservation

JOE ROGAN: That’s what’s so fascinating is, like, how come no one else figured that out? And also, what’s really strange is Japan itself right now is in the midst of population collapse.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. Sadly.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s what sucks. It’s like, you could lose this and it could be overwhelmed by the west, like, because of the fact that there aren’t having enough people to reproduce successfully to maintain their population. It could just be taken over, like, in terms of immigration. Like, Americans could just move there and Europeans can move there, and then all the beautiful aspects of this very interesting and very unique culture could go away.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: And they are really concerned about that. When I was first. When I first arrived in Japan, like, 10 years ago, I worked at a university, and I was stood on campus outside just talking to someone, and I saw a couple of. They look like high school students, probably on a campus visit. Out of the corner of my eye, Japanese high school students.

And they caught my eye. They saw that I was looking at them. And as soon as that happened. They both like on a dime, stopped and bowed to me. And I thought, wow, we’re not in Kansas anymore. You know, and that, that having that teaching children about respect from a very. And training them, you know, the idea of respect your elders, this is, you know, we have this in the west as well, but we kind of lost it a little bit.

Yeah. And it’s kind of drilled into them about respecting the people around you and respecting people who are older than you. And this probably goes back to the samurai, you know, these hierarchies.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I’m sure, I’m sure. And then you think about, like how crazy feudal Japan was and that it eventually evolves to what it is now, this incredibly safe society.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Which is really kind of nuts. Do you think about one of the most war like cultures of all time, the culture that fought off the Mongols successfully, you know, Pretty nuts.

Japanese Language and Social Hierarchy

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah. Yeah, it is. But you see it, you see the remnants of that kind of the ancient societal structure. Even in the language. When you learn Japanese, there are several levels of politeness, right. You have. So it’s really complicated, but you have something called keigo, which is kind of formal or polite speech.

And if you are talking to. If you are lower down and you are talking to someone, someone above you, you have to speak in a different. Even the words, the verbs are different, the words are different. And if you’re speaking about them, then you have to use what’s called honorific, like you’re elevating them. If you’re talking about someone higher up, you have to elevate them. Use honorific language. If you’re talking about yourself to someone who’s higher up, you use humble language. So you lower yourself down.

So it’s very difficult. You know, I still kind of struggle with it, but. And it actually causes some problems because it’s very difficult for junior people to communicate with senior people to communicate honestly at least. So they just get a lot of it. Like, yes, men. Yes, I agree. You know. Yes, I agree with that. You’re kind of agreeing with everything that the senior person says. And that’s not a way to make good decisions, is by just agreeing.

And so they have something called nomunication. So this is formed from two words, communication, of course, plus nomu, which is the Japanese word to drink. And they’re talking about alcohol. So Japan. In Japan, alcohol is king. And society is actually lubricated by alcohol and functions because of alcohol.

They have things called. In Japanese companies, they have these kind of semi obligatory, you know, semi compulsory events. Called nomikai, which basically translates as drink meetings. Oh boy, you might have heard about these. And then basically the senior people and the more junior people, they all go together. They’ll go to a bar with the express purpose of getting drunk. Not just to like have a drink with your colleagues, but to actually get drunk, become intoxicated.

And that allows more free flowing communication. It allows you to. Everyone is brought to the same kind of level and this is nonmunication. And so it’s facilitated by alcohol. Communication facilitated by alcohol. So it’s a society that is dependent on alcohol in a strong way.

Japan’s Approach to Drugs

JOE ROGAN: What is their approach to other drugs? Like even casual drugs like marijuana and stuff like that? Are they highly illegal over there?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, it’s complicated, I would say it’s weird because. Okay, so when, when it comes to the law, people always say, oh, Japan, it’s got the strictest drug laws in the world. First of all. No, it hasn’t. Go to Singapore, settle down, settle down. Yeah.

But when it, when it comes to drugs, cannabis for. Probably for, you know, after the Second World War when I think it was MacArthur that was drafting the Japanese constitution and was basically controlling it had. It was occupying Japan, of course, after the Second World War and America was in the. What’s that movie called, that 1950s movie? Weed Madness. Reefer Madness.

JOE ROGAN: Reefer madness.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: It was. America was in the kind of reefer madness phase and they passed that on to the Japanese and the Japanese have never really gotten over it. But. And then there’s meth, of course. I mean, meth came from Japan. Meth was invented in Japan. It was used during the Second World War.

The kamikazes, they actually used these little green tablets that were called Storming tablets. Oh boy. They were mixed with green tea and stamped with the crest of the emperor. So they became like sacraments. They would pop those. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Woo.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah.

The Aftermath of World War II and Japan’s Methamphetamine Crisis

JOE ROGAN: See how that worked out?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, exactly. But then at the end of the Second World War when they had stockpiles of this methamphetamine and it started to spill out into the black market basically, and large, very large numbers of people became addicted to meth. And there were actually in Osaka in, I think around 1954, I forget the exact year, but in one year the police raided, I think around 50 meth labs. Labs in one city operated by one or two people like mom and pop operation. It’s like Breaking Bad, right? Like you imagine meth labs in Arizona or something.

Now this was happening in Japan in the 1950s and it scared the sh*t out of the Japanese government because they were a defeated nation. They thought that it was the end of their civilization and they thought that meth addiction was the symptom. It was going to actually perhaps catalyze the end of the Japanese. It was an existential threat to the Japanese civilization. So they hit it hard legally.

And so now when, you know, Japanese law, they’re really focused on cannabis because of probably the American influence and meth, but psychedelics most people in Japan probably don’t know much about. There’s a psychedelic subculture in Japan. There are ayahuasca circles in Japan that operate in a gray area of the law. It’s not explicitly illegal, it’s discouraged, but it’s not explicitly illegal. I know people who import ayahuasca, raw ayahuasca, drink from the Amazon and operate ayahuasca circles.

JOE ROGAN: You didn’t, did you do the DMTX experiments in Japan?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: No.

JOE ROGAN: Where did you do them?

The Birth of DMTX: Extended DMT States

ANDREW GALLIMORE: So, okay, so we’re going to get into DMTX. Yeah, yeah. So DMTX came from an idea that I had in 2015. I worked with Rick Strassman on this. So DMT is kind of unusual. It has these weird pharmacological peculiarities. As I said before, it doesn’t have subjective tolerance. So Rick Strassman showed in the 90s that you can inject someone with DMT repeatedly and they have the same intensity effect at each time.

But it also has another kind of a number of unique peculiarities. Of course, it’s very, very brief. It enters the brain extremely rapidly, it’s metabolized rapidly and cleared very rapidly. It had all of these pharmacological peculiarities. And it occurred to me that these were precisely the characteristics you need of a drug that’s used in anesthesiology.

So in anesthesiology, when they want to put you to sleep, make you unconscious, what they don’t do, they don’t just inject you with a drug and kind of hope that it keeps working whilst they’ve got you under the knife. What they do is they use a very short acting drug and they use an infusion machine which delivers the drug, the anesthetic drug, into your veins and goes to your brain and holds the brain level of the drug constant over time so that they can keep you in the anesthetized state, unconscious for as long or short a period as they like.

And so it occurred to me that, well, DMT has the right drug properties. It’s like, it’s almost like it’s designed for that kind of technique, it’s called target controlled intravenous infusion. And so I thought, you know, if we take the DMT state seriously and we treat it as a new world to explore and intelligent beings with whom we can establish communicative relationships, then three minutes of a breakthrough trip is nowhere near enough.

And so I thought, well, let’s take this technology from anesthesiology, target controlled intravenous infusion, and let’s repurpose it. So instead of an anesthetic drug that’s delivered by programmed infusion, we instead deliver DMT by programmed infusion and induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize their brain DMT levels. So you can hold them in the DMT state for 30 minutes or potentially for several hours and have complete control in real time over the depth of the experience. That was the idea.

So I worked with Rick Strassman. I used his data, blood sampling data that he acquired in the 90s. Fortunately, he had this old Excel file which he sent to me. And I built this mathematical model of DMT’s metabolism and distribution throughout the body. And then we wrote a paper basically saying, we think this should work, we think we should be able to extend and stabilize the DMT state for many hours.

But we didn’t actually, it wasn’t kind of human ready, so to speak. And it actually took about five years before it was actually implemented in humans. And that was actually done by the Imperial College London team. So they were the, still are, in a way the leaders in psychedelic research. And a guy called, then a PhD student, I think, Chris Timmerman, worked to make this proof of principle model that myself and Rick Strassman had developed and get it human ready and actually test, you know, does it actually work? Do the predictions that we had, myself and Rick Strassman, do they actually work in humans?

And they found out that in fact that it does, that you can induce somebody into the DMT state and you can actually stabilize the experience. So rather than just being a… Oh, Jamie, since I’m talking about this, I can show you actually what DMT trips or the kind of the time course of a DMT trip looks like over time.

So normally what happens is the blood level will rise very, very rapidly. You inject someone with DMT, blood levels rise, they reach the brain and then almost immediately they start collapsing down again exponentially. And that brief period when the brain levels are high is the breakthrough state.

However, if you, when the brain DMT levels reach a kind of a peak, you then start an infusion. You can basically compensate for the DMT that’s being lost by metabolism. It’s a bit like if you have a bathtub full of water and you pull the plug, the water drains, but if you turn on the taps, you can keep the level constant. And so that’s the infusion, so you stabilize the state.

And our hope was that the actual experience itself, rather than that initial roller coaster phase that you get with DMT where it’s all very, very disorienting and he’s like, what’s going on? For most people, that’s kind of it. And then you’re dragged back out again. But our hope was that actually over time, if you stabilize the DMT in the brain, that it would actually stabilize the experience. Then people can actually navigate and explore the space and even perform kind of experiments within the space. And this is what’s become known as DMTX.

JOE ROGAN: And how was that? What did they describe?

Carl Smith: The First DMTX Pioneer

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Well, so this first study that was done just a couple of years ago, as I said, by Imperial College London, it was really a, it was like a pilot study. They wanted to show that it was, that it worked and that it was safe, that it was tolerable, that people weren’t going crazy, you know, that they could handle it. Basically.

The very first person to do it was a guy I’m now working with. I work for a nonprofit called New Nortics out of Florida. And we’re very interested in designing experiments using DMTX to actually study the DMT space and the intelligences within them much more kind of formally and on the board. I worked with a guy called Carl Smith, who was the very first person to undergo DMTX. He was also the only person to complete, I think there was five sessions over several weeks. He was the only one who handled it, so to speak.

JOE ROGAN: What’s his name?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Carl Smith.

JOE ROGAN: Shout out to Carl.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Shout out to Carl, you f*ing pioneer, you. You know, but what’s interesting is that the, as we hoped and predicted, the DMT state, it does stabilize. It’s like the brain is settling into constructing this alternate world model interfacing with this, this, this intelligence.

And he found that as he went back every time he was interacting with the same entities and they became aware of the fact that he was coming back so often and they were like, you know what? Not you again. You know, you’re back. And one time they were scanning the, the Imperial team in like a, I think like an MRI machine or something, and the entities were scanning the, the Imperial team in like a, I think like an MRI machine or something, and the entities were gathered, all the entities, he said, as soon as they started scanning me in the quote unquote real world, the entities were gathered and they seemed curious or confused, like, well, what are they doing?

JOE ROGAN: The signal.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, right. It’s like maybe it’s the signal or something. Or they were like, you know, we’re the ones that normally do the scanning. You know, we’re supposed to scan you, you know, what’s going on here.

So as I said, it was just a pilot study, but there’s a real taste that you can enter into these kind of relationships with these entities. And actually we, as I said, I work for this, I’m a board member of this nonprofit called New Nortics. And our vision is really to design experiments with DMTX.

What does a research organization look like that isn’t simply trying to explain away DMT, explain it, but actually says, okay, this is an uncharted land. That’s fascinating. That’s inordinately complex and vast and filled with intelligences. Let’s treat it like that, as explorers. What does a research organization aimed at studying that look like?

And we imagine, I imagine that you’re not just sending, for example, let’s take the structure of the DMT space, right? It’s this highly complex geometrically and topologically strange domain. So we send in people who are experts, who are mathematicians. We send in a mathematician to study the topology of the space, to study how the space is structured.

The entities, they often try to communicate. They use strange symbols and strange code. Oh, let’s send in a linguist who can study their language. And so you’re sending in people with their own specialties to actually formally study the DMT space.

The Elusis Retreat: Legal DMTX Research

And what’s even better is we now have a venue for this. So we’re actually, we have a, I work with a company called Elusis. We have a special license from a country in the Caribbean, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And we are setting up a retreat center, stroke research center, to provide DMTX that is 100% legal, that is safe. You know, you’ve got anesthesiologists, psychiatrists and nurses.

A perfect setting that’s also being designed in part by Carl Smith as well, that allows you to perform these kind of research, research studies aimed at analyzing and studying the DMT space. But even better is it’s also going to be open to anyone. So if you think about Rick, prepare for the freaks. Prepare for the freaks. But like, you know, in the 90s, Rick Strassman, he did the biggest study of its kind. He only had 60 people. So you got 60 people worth of trip reports. What happens if you can bring in 300, 400, 500 people a year?

JOE ROGAN: How would you vet people to make sure they’re not crazy before they do it?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: There will be a screening process, an initial screening process and then ultimately you would have a psychiatrist who would sign them off. So it’s not just anyone, but anyone can, in theory they can sign up, they can go to elusismind.com and they can put their name down and sign up to fly to this island, Bequia, I think it’s called, and in a beautiful, perfect setting, spend a week on the island and undergoing a number of DMTX sessions and you know, being able to explore this world using the DMTX technology.

And of course they will all be providing trip reports. So you start to amass a vast data set of highly controlled, verified. You know, this isn’t like posting online where you don’t know what drugs they’ve taken really. It’s like you know exactly what they’ve taken. It’s pure pharmaceutical grade DMT and they, they will generate this vast data set that could be used.

We’re also working to develop a, an AI powered model that would take in this verbal data and in real time generate imagery so someone can talk to the model, the AI model and it will generate the image. And then you say, oh no, this isn’t quite right, this needs to be more like this. And so you’re converging on the, you’re…

JOE ROGAN: You’re making a map of the territory.

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

JOE ROGAN: And this is available now.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: It’s opening with kind of, we’re building, it’s being developed now. It should be open officially on March 1st next year. So go to, yeah, elusismind.com you can sign up soon.

JOE ROGAN: Just enough time for people to prepare.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, and it will be the first, I mean it’s going to be the first of its kind, you know, a totally legal system, safe, medically supervised location where people can endure, I say enjoy, can experience DMTX.

Ancient Civilizations and Psychedelics

JOE ROGAN: That’s the thing about these ancient civilizations. Whether it’s Egypt or whether it’s ancient Greece, where Ulysses was from, they all were using psychedelics. There’s evidence of psychedelics in all these ancient civilizations. It’s just our completely twisted, sick society that’s decided that the most beneficial drugs should be the ones that are the most illegal.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Which is, and you lump them in with the ones that destroy lives. They’re categorized with meth.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yup.

JOE ROGAN: Which is completely insane. And the sign of a twisted, sick culture. It’s the sign of what McKenna was talking about, with the chaos. The chaos of a species that’s preparing to leave for the stars.

The Changing Landscape of Psychedelics

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, I think so. But things are changing. You do see positive changes. The Internet, the attitude to psychedelics.

JOE ROGAN: People understand it now. And I think there’s also a giant shift towards people on the right accepting it because so many soldiers have come back from war and used it and had great benefits.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, precisely. Yeah. So perhaps things aren’t as bad as things in some ways are getting better. They’re getting worse in other ways, but they’re getting better in other ways.

JOE ROGAN: They’re moving, right?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, they’re definitely. That’s it.

JOE ROGAN: And I think you need bad in order to inspire good.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s unfortunate, but I think that just historically, that’s always been the way that we figure things out. Yeah, I agree, Andrew. It’s been so much fun. I really enjoy this. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again when the place is open. Trip reports.

Future Plans and Book Discussion

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Are you interested in doing DMT?

JOE ROGAN: Allegedly. We’ll talk off air, but this book that you wrote is available now. “Death by Astonishment.” Is it in audio form as well?

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Yeah, read by myself.

JOE ROGAN: Beautiful. You got a great voice for it. Perfect.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: Thank you, sir.

JOE ROGAN: So happy that you read. I love when authors read their own work. It’s so important.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: I think they wanted to get an actor because I was in Tokyo, I said, no, no, no.

JOE ROGAN: You get some weird weirdo who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Exactly. Yeah. No, you need you. Thank you very much, man. It’s really fun. I enjoyed it.

ANDREW GALLIMORE: My pleasure.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, everybody.

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