Thank you very much. It's good to be back. This was my first time I spoke actually in this room. A breaking of the bench in 2013 I think.
It was even warmer than it is now. I've taken my shoes off, it's kind of a... I kind of like this room a bit more, it's a bit more kind of intimate vibe.
It feels more kind of like Esalen or something. I'm half-tensioned to kind of sit cross-legged but, um... benefit of the cameraman, I won't.
My book... which Bernd kindly spoke about. He has a handful of copies that we almost sold out now.
So please do buy that. Okay, so this morning, for those of you who were in my talk, if you weren't, it doesn't really matter, but I was talking about the DMT state and the nature of the DMT state and really why it's so important that we study the DMT state. I think Pascal beautifully illustrated...
why the DMT state is such an important thing to study. So I think you should all be convinced now that what I'm going to talk about, at least part of it, kind of makes some sense. I haven't timed this talk, so I'll just kind of get as far as I can.
Some of the weirder stuff comes at the end, so we'll see how we go. So this morning I was asking questions like, you know, is the DMT world a real world? Or is it a hallucinated world?
You know, apart from the kind of the conceptual and philosophical problems of trying to understand that question, first of all, let alone trying to answer it, there is also the problem with the DMT state that it is an extremely... brief state, Lars, peak of the experience is only a few minutes, normally about five minutes really. By the time you've kind of oriented yourselves in a state, you're normally being dragged back into the consensus world. This is kind of, I think, kind of a nice illustration of kind of the initial phase of the DMT trip. It completely overwhelms you.
And, you know, by the time you've got your intellective tools in order, the algorithm is going to are waving goodbye. So, you know, the usual mode of administration of DMT, the kind of the vaping route, is perfectly fine and I'm a big fan of it. But in terms of actually studying the state, taking seriously the idea that the DMT state might actually contain intelligences, extreme intelligences, way beyond anything within this universe, perhaps. If we take that idea seriously, I think... we should drop this sometimes kind of this attractive romanticism surrounding DMT I've got nothing against you know hand-woven rugs and hand-blown glass pipes and this kind of the ritual I think that's a beautiful thing but I think we need to bring our best tools to the table to treat DMT as a technology and so today I'll talk about how my small contribution to that endeavor in treating DMT as a technology for interdimensional communication.
So this guy you all know of course, this is Rick Strassman. So about five years ago I emailed Rick and I said, Rick I've got this idea. I want to give people this continuous infusion, which I'll talk about in a minute, of DMT. I want to keep them in the DMT space for hours, days.
But I need your data. Because I'd seen his data in the papers that he published back in the 90s, so I knew the data existed. So I fired off an email to Rick and within 30 minutes I got an excellent result.
Excel file which had the goods. So that was kind of the beginning of my collaboration with Rick. This culminated in a paper which I published with Rick in 2016, which described this proof of principle model for prolonged immersion in the DMT state using something called target control intravenous infusion. This was then picked up by a number of popular outlets including Vice.
and some guys in Colorado as well. And there's a little bit of kind of hype surrounding this. But, you know, the hype isn't important here. What's really important is the technology and how we use it and the potential for it. So my idea was, I was kind of thinking about the properties of DMT, these kind of pharmacological peculiarities that DMT has.
Reminding me of the pharmacological characteristics that are required for drugs used in anesthesiology. If you want to put somebody to sleep for several hours what you don't do is just give them injection of a long-acting drug because the drug tends to rise. and then begins to fall and it's very difficult to control so what you actually do is inject them with a short acting drug that is metabolized rather quickly and use a programmed infusion device which looks kind of like this where you can within this is a computer that you can program to deliver a controlled rate of continuous infusion of the drug into the bloodstream and thus into the brain.
Sounds like a very simple idea, but of course, simple ideas often behind them have rather complex science, and that's the case here. So, yeah, this is another. So you can see the syringe here.
This is for a propofol, which is a general anesthetic. But. And the idea is that this would deliver a, this would be controlled, this pump would be controlled by this program which you input.
So whenever a drug enters the body, immediately things start happening. The body starts responding. The drug starts, first of all, to be distributed to various tissues in the body.
The body starts to metabolize it, starts to break it down with the aim of getting rid of it as a toxin. And so that means really... generally that whenever you give someone a drug, you are putting that drug into an extremely complex system.
And so trying to kind of maintain a stable level of DMT in the brain, which is really what's required here, in the same way that during anaesthesia the idea is that you bring the level of the anaesthetic drug to the correct level, not too high, you don't want someone dying on the operating table, you also don't want them waking up. So there's a window of brain drug concentration. we need to maintain the drug within.
And it's the same with this idea of DMT, is that you would bring someone to the DMT state and then you would maintain the DMT level in the brain over time, potentially an indefinite period of time. Initially it would be, as Dave suggested, perhaps 30 minutes. But then there's no theoretical end to that.
So this is a little bit technical, I won't go into too much detail. Basically this is kind of what we need to think about when we're introducing drugs into the body. We basically introduce drugs into what's called the central compartment, this is your main vasculature.
So when you introduce drugs... into your, normally your renal system, your veins, then it starts to distribute with other compartments. So this is like smaller blood vessels with, perhaps with fats and other tissues. And eventually it makes its way. to what's called the effect compartment, which in the case of psychedelic drugs and with anesthetic drugs, of course, the effect compartment is the brain itself.
So the idea is that by understanding the various rates at which the drug moves and shifts and distributes and metabolizes, eliminated here, you can actually try and control the level of drug in the brain. So this is what a target control, so the target control here refers to the desired target concentration of DNA. EMT in the brain and intravenous infusion self-explanatory. So we can see here initially when the drug is given, you get a spike in plasma concentration, a spike in the blood, and then this dotted line shows the effect side concentration.
That's the concentration in the brain. And this is not really a realistic example. It never works as well as this.
This is just to illustrate. You notice that the dotted line here shows the concentration in the brain, so you can bring it up to a desired level, and then you can... raise it higher.
You have actually real-time control, if your model is good, a real-time control over the level of the drug in the brain. Of course in the case of DMT that would mean you could bring someone into a light state and you can push them further gradually and bring them back as well if they're having a tough time. For a drug to be amenable to target control intravenous infusion, it needs to have certain pharmacological properties.
It needs to have a rapid onset of clinical effects. It needs to be a drug of short duration. it's a sticky drug or a drug that's not metabolized very quickly then it tends to build up and build up and build up.
It's very difficult to control the level of drug in the body and the brain. It needs to have a low tolerance. This means that the effect of the drug, the desired effect of the drug, whether it's anesthesia or the DMT state, the breakthrough DMT state, mustn't diminish over time.
And of course it needs to have a favourable side effect profile, you can't have toxic metabolites and things like that because you are delivering the drug continuously over a long period of time. So DMT, yes, very rapidly active, short duration of activity of action, check, we're good. Favourable side effect profile, fabulous.
DMT, doesn't have any toxic metabolites, very clean, very cleanly removed from the body. No known toxic effects. So the only one on the left is this issue of tolerance.
That, until Rick did his work, that was not quite clear actually. Anecdotally, people say, oh, DMT has, if you go on various Facebook DMT sites, they will tell you quite knowledgeably that DMT has very rapid tolerance, etc, etc. That's bullshit. With LSD and psilocybin, for example, your first dose might be the desired effect.
you repeat the same dose perhaps the following day or a couple of days later, you often find that the effect is much diminished. Whereas what Rick Strassman was able to show, this is a really important result from his very large study, which everyone of course is very familiar with, from the 90s. Perhaps this result is less well known, but he demonstrated that there was no subjective tolerance of DMT, so he would give DMT... to people over 30 minute intervals the same dose and then measure the intensity of the experience using his who's in the gym rating scale and he found that the effect was the same every time so that's really cool so that means that the repeated doses of dmt don't have diminished effects so this is means we can kind of complete our requirement so we're kind of good to go so then the task is to actually create a pharmacokinetic model So this is a mathematical computational exercise, which is really my contribution to this, apart from having the idea.
And this was based upon Rick's blood data. So Rick, as well as recording all these beautiful trip reports which formed part of DMT, the spirit molecule, he also was taking blood samples of the subjects at intervals, which turned out to be the key data that I required. So I have the blood concentrations of all of these participants at timed intervals. And this data can then be used to generate this what's called a pharmacokinetic model, with the aim being then that you would be able to, as I said, bring someone into the DMT state, hold them within the DMT space, within the DMT reality for an extended period of time, and then bring them out again.
Now, people always say this to me, haven't you heard of ayahuasca? As if I hadn't. But of course, whilst the ayahuasca experience is an extended DMT experience to an extent, it's not a pure DMT experience.
It's not the level of DMT in the brain is not regulated. It rises and it falls, yes, over a much longer time scale, but there's certainly no stable concentration of DMT in the brain. So ayahuasca is not a substitute.
I'm afraid. Also, quite pertinently, the average, and again, people have looked at the blood concentration of ayahuasca over time, and the average peak in an ayahuasca experience, the average DMT blood concentration, is about 15 to 18 nanograms per millilitre, where it goes to about 100 with IV DMT. Or just smoking, if you smoke DMT in a pipe, you will achieve this kind of level.
If you achieve breakthrough, you will achieve these kind of levels. levels much higher than achievement by us so this is this is next-level stuff so the next task was the fixed Strassman's data to this mathematical model I won't bore you with the details but this is shows Rick's data points in red here this is my mathematical model you see it fits the data quite nicely This allowed us then to actually model a typical dose and using the mathematical model to actually see well what does that predict is actually happening in the brain and we noticed that around just about a minute into the experience. sorry after the DMT is administered it like this is just a normal regular injection by the way you reach around 69 grams per millilitre in the in the brain this trigger this is basically the threshold for entry into the DMT space then continues to rise and then begins to fall the peak is around three minutes then begins to fall and you exit the DMT space about sort of the eight minute mark. This kind of matches very very closely what Rick Strassman actually found in his study so it seems that the model that I've developed seems to work. So then we can take the model and think about actually applying it to this continuous infusion protocol.
So for this I used what's called the BOLUS elimination transfer protocol. Funny sounding name, but basically the idea is that the initial BOLUS, which is just the initial injection of the drug is used to bring the brain level of DMT to the point where the individual breaks through, and then you start the infusion. So this is the elimination transfer, the idea being that you would compensate for the drug being lost through metabolism and excretion in order to maintain the level of DMT in the brain. So in the case of this model, you would begin the infusion at around two minutes after the initial... very brief infusion of the initial bolus of 25 milligrams of DMT.
So when you look at that, the results of that, you can see you get a huge spike in the plasma levels, but the levels of DMT in the brain, shown on the red line here, kind of rise and then settle. This is around kind of a breakthrough dose. So with this protocol in a living human being, we would expect an average human being, you would ideally be able to hold them within the DMT space.
for as long as you want it. So the Imperial team have already, as Dave mentioned, kind of taken up the mantle here and said, okay, let's see if we can work this in humans. They have a kind of a very academic approach to this, as you would expect, being the kind of really most important psychedelic research group in the world, I would say.
There he is. And there's another group in Colorado called DMTX.org who are coming at this from a different angle where they're actually recruiting people already. So if you want to get involved, don't email me.
Just email Hintcard. Go to their website and email them and they will get back to you. So... Earlier when I was talking, I was talking about this idea that the brain is always constructing a model of reality and that the brain essentially learned to construct your model of the world over time.
Now when you're thrust into the DMT space, the brain is initially, this is why within the first five minutes or often throughout the whole of a normal kind of smoked DMT here, you're kind of, you're very, very disoriented. What I would expect to happen over time, perhaps over several hours, is that the brain is hours it will begin to stabilize as the brain learns to construct a model of that environment this would then make the dmt state amenable to proper exploration uh and you know testing and all that kind of stuff that you might do and we would i imagine uh teams of various disciplines mathematicians anthropology psychologists cartographers perhaps linguists artists neuroscientists physicians theologians a variety of people would perform this this team this exploration team that would help the A and B to map and explore this new domain as you would any other kind of union. We all know who this guy is.
Actually, Timothy Leary. Back in the 60s, everyone associates him with... and flowers in his hair and that kind of stuff.
But actually Timothy Leary was kind of interested in trying to bring back information from the DMT space and that's really what this is about, it's about going into the DMT space and trying to bring back information. And Timothy O'Leary wrote this lovely little paper in the Psycho Review where he actually was in real time delivering the information back. So I imagine a time when you would actually put someone into the DMT space and they would actually transmit information directly to the expert, if you like, waiting on the other side. And he had this equipment that he invented to actually enable you to communicate whilst you're in this space.
these are? Mezzner, Alpert, yeah so this is Mezzner with Timothy Leary's experiential typewriter. So in the future future future I really do imagine a time where maybe you're going to lie down in some kind of pod and you will input your journey time and you will ...off to the universe next door. Now for extended periods, if you want to go in there for several days you need to think about a number of issues here.
You've got nutrition first of all, you've also got waste to deal with. There are... ways of dealing with that.
I'll just talk about nutrition. So total parenteral nutrition is basically a means of delivering food, all the nutrients required by a human into their bloodstream directly. So you can put someone into this machine, into this part hooked up to the Demetrix machine for days or weeks or months or years.
And we could be in one now! Sorry, scared myself. Okay, weirdly this is...
yeah I've got a couple minutes. My friend David Chou Jay Brown wrote quite a few books on psychedelics. He messaged me. I finished his presentation, messaged me just a couple of weeks ago and he said, I read this report from DM Turner, not his real name, the late DM Turner.
I think he fell off a roof. Oh he drowned in the bath. Got off the roof anyway.
Anyway he's dead. So he describes this trip report where he enters this place. The place he enters was some type of research centre. The attention was focused on these large metallic pods. And these pods were something like an isolation chamber.
They were shaped like large coffins about 8 feet long. And the beings who use these pods looked exactly like humans. And then... many scribes, how the nutrition was delivered, and heat, and all that kind of stuff. These images of the pods don't sound familiar.
Maybe. No, this was pre-Metrix. 1996. Yeah, and the whole purpose of these pods and this research study was that this was the method the people here used to increase the level of DMT in the brains of the pod sleepers. So we're unfortunate enough to be a research study. to a pod for weeks or months at a time, the DT levels in their brain would be significantly increased and they would spend their time having the most fascinating dreams.
So that's the future. Mark, when he was giving a talk, was talking about this idea perhaps that you would, my idea really, that ultimately, as this Soviet rocket scientist said and has been echoed many times by Tony. The earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever. And whilst he was talking about perhaps leaving the earth, I'm talking about something much more dramatic, as I describe in the book, the idea of actually leaving the material world.
material realm completely. Now it's not suicide, it's only suicide if you die, and this would be transference, this would not be, this would be leaving the material world completely, and perhaps we could leave this earth to kind of recover from our rather toxic presence, I don't know. But whether you agree with that or not, that's a whole different topic of discussion.
I think we can all agree with E.E. Cummings, who said, listen, there's a hell of a universe next door, let's... Let's go! Thank you.