GROUNDBREAKING DMT research that could change EVERYTHING w/ Dr. Jon Dean and John Chavez | AMP

to the degree that you want something is the degree you're afraid of not having yeah god i wish i started when i was younger i go yeah but you didn't so shut the [ __ ] up let's keep going nobody changes until they change their energy and when you change your energy you change your life because it's not until then that it's really real it's like oh this is way worse than i thought oh yeah it's way way worse than you thought yeah but luckily there's more to you than you think [Music] john and john what's up guys this has been an illuminating conversation we've been getting ready for this podcast so we're just going to dive right in but for people listening uh since you're both named john why don't uh you just give a brief intro of yourself so people can hear your voice and associate that voice with who the [ __ ] you are yeah yeah howdy so i am john 1 i guess uh yeah i'm john one and uh yeah so a pleasure to be here uh so i'm a dude from ohio and then uh did my undergrad in chemistry there and then played in the band for a while and then actually finished the underground in chemistry and then shot over to the university of michigan to do my master's and my phd in physiology and now i'm a postdoc uh which means i'm in like grade 27 or something like that out at ucsd where i'm studying uh mindfulness meditation and psychedelics for chronic pain and promotion of empathy and compassion beautiful and john one is named john dean for anybody who wants to make the correlation and you want to address i'm already confusing people i'm john number two john chavez founder of dmt quest a non-profit dedicated to uh publicizing the the results of all indulgence dmt research as well as uh fundraising for the cause because it's an underfunded field and i feel it's one of the most important fields to study so the reason you guys are both here is because i got forwarded the documentary dmt quest from wimhoff who's featured in the dm in dmt quest and he was like you guys you got to check this out it's right up your alley and it absolutely was right up my alley and um what was really interesting immediately to me there was a lot of interesting you know things presented in the documentary but what was immediately interesting is that i somehow managed to miss the significance of the study that you published in 2019 that was showing endogenous activity of dmt in the brain and this is something that's been highly contested and debated and is still somewhat contested and debated in certain levels but you actually showed something at significant enough levels where at least the baseline question is there dmt endogenously produced in the mammalian brain that has unequivocally been answered yeah i would say so yeah that was that was the uh that was the goal of study i mean so uh it all it all started in like 2013 um where gmo bourgeois who was the senior author on that paper at the university of michigan she was collaborating with a gentleman named steve barker who's an analytical chemist and then also rick strossman who has been involved in the dmt research field and really blowing the door off of psychedelic research again in the 90s to where we are today so they collaborated on a paper i guess the the big thing that was contested prior to that study and then our 2019 study was it's been known for decades that there's trace amounts of dmt and mammalian bodily fluids like urine blood even cerebral spinal fluid they've found it in certain studies but a lot of those techniques were a little bit older analytical methods and so what we kind of set out to do was look directly in the brain in rats and that 2013 study found dmt in the living wrap brain so the way that you do that is you can actually like probe the brain non-invasively so the rats are fine and they're just moving around like they normally would and you're sampling the fluid from the brain and then you can look for any really any compound you want to that you can detect molecularly with the analytical chemistry techniques and what we found was in the 2013 study what gmo and rick and steve found was that there was dmt in the living pineal gland for the very first time so that was exciting enough that gmo started to follow that up and when i came on board we just asked a simple question one is dmt so can we quantify it can we look at the levels and compare it to no neurotransmitters that are established in those brain areas and so we looked at a comparison between dmt and serotonin which serotonin is one of the major neurotransmitters that is established to have a role in mood and several several other things uh several others essentially hundreds of different functions in the brain yeah exactly um and so the real strength of that study was we found dmt in concentrations that were comparable to serotonin so about half a serotonin in the rat visual cortex and then uh one of the other things we did was looked at rats that uh we didn't sample from the pineal gland anymore but the area surrounding the pineal gland because that was like a controversy too can the pineal gland really produce this much dmt et cetera et cetera so what we found was when we sampled from the visual cortex alone we still saw dmt suggesting that although it looks like the pineal gland's producing dmt it's not necessary for dmt production and there were some other things we could talk about but that's the the main finding in the paper what was the reason that you because normally dmt is not considered a neurotransmitter and i guess we should take a you know take one back step and describe for people what dmt is but you were starting to compare it to a neurotransmitter with somewhat of a hypothesis which is something that's presented in the film that dmt acts similar to a neurotransmitter potentially to the point where it could qualify as a neurotransmitter but this is this is revolutionary thinking here right this isn't what dmt was thought to be earlier than that right so first let's take a quick back step and describe you know what is dmt what did people used to think it it was and then what did you guys you know ultimately think of as an alternate hypothesis for what dmt is and how it's acting in the brain sure uh so we could take it way back to like the 50s honestly because psychopharmacology the whole field is kind of really founded on the idea that psychedelics like classical psychedelics like lsd modulate the serotonin system in large part because they're chemical structures similar to serotonin so fitting in these five ht2 receptors exactly right yeah yeah exactly so that really that connection kind of blew the door off of what we know as modern pharmacology and the fact that dmt is very similar in chemical structure to serotonin was always very intriguing but i think the main studies that it was much harder to find a trace on dmt in in bodily fluids so that's why by us looking directly in the brain uh there was no like metabolic breakdown process like we were sampling right from the source of where we anticipated to see dmt based on the gene activity that the genes that are known to synthesize dmt in the brain or in the body i should say because we found them in the brain together for the first time in that study in the rats so placing the gene activity with the concentrations of dmt that were comparable to serotonin i think that kind of like took us to where we are with it today but we still haven't really shown yet and i know that they're working on that at the university of michigan um it's because like i said i'm at ucsd now but so just finding it in those levels doesn't necessitate that it's a neurotransmitter per se so they're doing some studies uh looking at things but it opens the door that it could be yeah it certainly does yeah it opens because the amount so basically the amount that you were able to show what makes it so that it's no longer this artifact that's in trace amounts it's negligible but it's in significant enough amounts that it may play a role of significant equivalence to a neurotransmitter like acetylcholine or serotonin or gaba or one of these other things exactly what do you john think because you're not bound by the rigors of academia to god man just to speak very carefully about these things what do you what do you think this is showing about what dmt actually is doing and john phil john feel free to jump into i mean it's pretty clear reality is a hallucination right i mean if we had psilocybin or lsd floating around in our brains at you know similar concentrations of dmt you would say that somebody was probably tripping so i mean the fact that we're producing dmt at similar levels serotonin that leads me to believe that you know maybe the reality is somewhat of a assimilation to a certain extent right like i think that reality is a little bit more malleable i think the fact that dmt is produced you know the interesting thing is that you guys cite the rats aspect of the study but you guys also looked at in vitro slices of human brains right to look at the machinery the enzymes to show that the human actually have the enzymes to produce dmt throughout the brain as well right yeah that's correct yeah because i think that that's one of the criticisms of the study was that it was only a rat study but it actually wasn't just a rat study it was actually partially human brain sampling as well so i think that needs to be cited pretty clearly for the public to understand that it wasn't just a rat study this dutch translate to humans and it seems as though dmt plays a key role in just modulating our everyday awakened reality and if since we're producing hallucinogen i mean i think it's a natural kind of conversation to really question uh how malleable this reality is and you know just some of the experiences that we have uh you know it's it's it's a tricky conversation i think you know dmt has largely been correlated with near-death experiences dream states but you know the the study that they came out with kind of just changes the whole conversation all together that this whole thing is pretty much a hallucinatory experience at certain things well and hallucinatory is a loaded word being that hallucination may mean it's not real right but this it actually could be everything could be real you know and that's that's the interesting part is like this could actually be building reality either everything's real and nothing's real right right exactly yeah so that's an interesting just kind of note to make and ultimately through my own spiritual exploration when i hear simulation a lot of times people talk about oh some advanced civilization put some kind of computer program together and we're living in this computer program that's not in my reality sphere and my timeline of what the possibility is but the simulation to me is that we are a perspective in the mind of god right like this is all the mind of god and we're just a perspective so the simulation is that this is mind everything is mind of capital everything is capital m mind and so to think that like our mind is just a perspective on the capital m mind so how we're navigating this mind okay you can call that a simulation and so for me that's that's personally my way of understanding this simulation theory is not that oh there's some you know people looking at our you know little computer program and and chuckling as they you know sip on them or excretion fluids in the matrix or whatever the [ __ ] is going on but like that this is actually built into the construct of the universe itself as participatory perspectives in this universal capital m mine yeah and it's interesting i guess in terms of some of the concepts of that we believe are based on upregulating dmt does that allow us to tap into the mind of god or connect with god in a certain way or connect with like supernormal abilities like you know my man wim hof your friend as well you know these are the things that i'm really interested in not just you know the the basics but also the outliers the stuff that is really going to move the needle in terms of society changing in the future and really tapping into the human potential yeah what the dmt has for anybody who's experienced it ayahuasca mimosa um there's a variety of different ways yahei there's uh or no what's the what's the is that the one that you snuff which is the one that you snuff yopo yeah yopo yahei is another word for ayahuasca um but whatever there's a variety of ways that you can get nndmt and anybody who's experienced it in any one of these ways ayahuasca and smoking dmt is probably the most common it's a really unique experience in the pantheon of psychedelics it's doing something that's different so from just a materialist reductionist standpoint what is happening when you actually take exogenous dmt that's different from when you take psilocybin or when you take you know lsd or something like that yeah that's the million dollar question for sure from the science perspective anyways yeah it's uh right it's like how can how can something that more or less binds the same main receptor 5ht2a to have these effects um yeah i think we're sort of in a facile stage of understanding that you know it's like uh yeah i mean so to kind of go in with the conversation that y'all were just having to me one of the really interesting things about endogenous dmt and one of the potential roles for it is in visual perception so in that study we found a high gene activity in the neurons in the visual cortex of the rats for the biosynthetic dmt enzymes and we also found dmt in those areas comparable to serotonin and you said in the eye genes so in the in the visual cortex and the neurons of the rat visual cortex is where we were mainly looking in that study and we basically found a very strong presence of endogenous dmt in that brain area uh since exogenous dmt is such a very powerful visual at least nn experience to me there's some overlap that would be very interesting to pursue from the basic science standpoint of maybe endogenous dmt is playing some sort of role in just mediating visual processing in the brain so i think that's a really cool like foundational question to start probing and in terms of so this is a little more speculative but we're starting to sort of nip at this and i know what you miss this is happening and i'm pushing forward at ucsd2 is looking at what what psychedelics may do to the endogenous dmt system uh so is it that when you take something like psilocybin is it maybe having an effect on the dmt that's being naturally produced in your body in some way shape or form and is maybe that uh a point of convergence for all psychedelic situations oh right that would be really interesting because then what you're saying is you know if i could sum and make sure that i'm saying this correctly but if dmt is involved in modulating what we're able to see and psychedelics are creating these you know visionary experiences perhaps they're all tying in to the dmt mechanism which is allowing us access to these non-ordinary visionary states it very well could be and again we were talking about this a little bit earlier before we mic'd up um just the idea that it's not that far-fetched if you think about endogenous systems that are already in place that have mind-altering properties to them you look at endogenous opioids right there's a reason that when you take a pill that is designed for pain relief that it gives you pain relief in the sense that it binds to receptors and it engages the endogenous opioid system same thing with cannabis there's a whole system mediating when someone smokes cannabis or however they take it you know when when you adjust cannabis there's a whole endogenous cannabinoid system that is interacting with that to produce that effect on not only consciousness but the physiological effects as well uh so it's not in my mind that far-fetched to think that maybe endogenous dmt could be playing some sort of mediating role and maybe not even just with psychedelics but things that are similar like ssris etc so i think that's from a scientific perspective is where it gets interesting and more fundable when you think about what now psychedelics are really becoming mainstay right i mean they're being publicly traded now right so uh yeah so if you or asking the question of like how can we better understand mental states or aberrant mental states or or people's emotional dysfunction or if i hate that word but you get my point right uh yeah i mean so looking at that potential possibility for endogenous dmt i think is is an interesting way to go it's you know this is something that wim hof says all the time like we are our own endogenous pharmacy you know like we're able to produce all of these different things you want to produce opioids you want to produce cannabinoids you want to produce dmt you want to produce any of these things there's methods he recommends the breathwork which was actually shown to actually modulate dmt at least in particular and probably all of these things right like the the wim hof method has shown a little bit inadvertently in the sense where we tied in you know basically the studies that i've looked at in terms of eeg and ayahuasca and dmt and 5mu dmt there's it seems to be a pretty consistent signature of an alpha suppression and a and a gamma spike and we we saw that with the wim hof at least that one pilot and currently we're actually doing more extensive eeg with wim hof and it seems to be rather consistent that you see a similar signature to to the dmt and ayahuasca study so it's not a direct uh dmt i guess um extraction in terms of the wim hof method but it seems correlatory for sure yeah so it's correlating to the different changes that you see from an eeg yeah exactly i think the one thing we got to remember is that in rick strassman's study in the early 1990s uh he had four different levels of dmt that it administered to people two of them were sub psychedelic meaning that there was no visionary experiences and at the lowest level it modulated mood where people were uh describing it as heroin almost like euphoric just from dmt so you know we have to recognize the fact that you know not everything dmt related is going to be so visionary some things are a little bit more subtle and that's where i think the especially the wim hof method correlates with a dmt sort of experience at the lower levels because the euphoric experience is very consistent and i think that that's probably a little bit more closer to to what we're looking at when you saw some rapid eye movements in there too yeah yeah yeah yeah okay like hmm yeah so it's correlation potentially to sleep can't we just observe any more in science yeah must we break it down to the individual photons says the scientist yeah that's the [ __ ] scientist well i mean it's something that saud guru said i'd totally disagree with him on his take on psychedelics but from his perspective he's like i don't know what everybody wants psychedelics for i'm high all the [ __ ] time that's why i'm wearing sunglasses you know he's like like he's he was quite confident that he could produce whatever state that somebody else was looking for externally he could produce it internally you listen to ramdas lectures and he's talking about the same thing that he's activating in meditation that i would act that i would describe in the most intense blast-off you know dmt experience either with ayahuasca or mimosa or whatever so it seems like there's certain outliers who've been able to at least you know functionally for themselves create these experiences that mimic what the subjective experience of somebody who's taking a strong psychedelic would be yeah i mean that's been pretty consistent with the the people that are long-term meditators the eeg they basically walk in and they're exuding much higher gamma than the average so i mean it kind of makes sense it's interesting yeah the the overlap with psychedelics and meditation is that's something i'm super interested in too there's not a lot out there on it but at ucsc they're pretty poised to to start integrating meditation into the still assignment sessions and things like that i think that's really exciting work too yeah for sure that could really help a lot of people as we sort of blow the doors off integrating this into the clinic you know to really help them get through that experience and come out on the other side much better for it yeah you know joe dispenz has done a lot of eeg work with his top meditators and all of the experiences with entities and beings and even you know he talks about full-on monroe institute level paranormal experiences people being able to read the back side of a chalkboard on the other side of the room people you know all of these things were associated with extraordinarily high gamma not like high gamma from what you see in the textbook but like in the thousands and tens of thousands high gamma right like these extraordinarily high gamma states are always correlative to that and then you know i just read recently read jamie wheel's book recapture the rapture he's talking about the like slow one hertz delta also a waking delta also being a really interesting unicity experience too and so it seems like basically whatever you're experiencing subjectively is going to be tied to a variety of different things potentially neurochemically neurobiology neurobiologically and then through your brain wave states as well like you're going to be able to track what you're experiencing to some change in the body well to go back to your earlier comment about what do exogenous psychedelics do um the chris are you familiar with chris timmerman's work from imperial college okay yeah check his stuff out it's really really really pioneering uh sort of basic foundational science of understanding what dmt specifically does that's his main focus but a study put out i believe was in the same year we put out our endodmt paper 2019 and in the same journal he he showed that exogenous emt will give you this like theta rem sleep like increase and this like drop in alpha so there's like a lot of overlap with basically what the visions that people were having on that sort of correlated potentially with something like rem sleep where you also are seeing things and your brain is actually under the impression that hey this is this is real this is what's happening yeah this isn't yeah this is just different but it's being perceived the same way i mean it's a little different than dreams i once and please for people feel free to dream analyze this i suppose i was going to tell you not to but anyways i had a dream the other day that i had to go to the bathroom and i'd take a [ __ ] and there was nowhere to take a [ __ ] and all i had was like a frozen yogurt like a soft-serve cone type of situation and i had to [ __ ] in it and i was like and it was too much for the thing so it was going all it was like spilling all over my hand and there was this like moment of like what is going on how did i get in this situation okay so the reason i'm bringing that up is that's a dream and maybe it's modulated by this but you don't seem to have those dream like those visions on ayahuasca at least i haven't yet i don't know maybe my next time i'm proud of us we made it 45 minutes without a fart joke we're doing good guys so it it seems like it's like it is that but it seems like there's also a way that it's not that you know what i mean like like there's something that's happening in the brain with dreams that can be totally random and sometimes i've had very dreams that were similar i'm not saying that you know i've had encounters and dreams that were very interesting and dreams that i wake up and i'll write them down like holy [ __ ] that was very similar to what i could experience on ayahuasca and i actually told that dream recently there's a really potent dream like that not involving [ __ ] and like but there's other ones that seem just completely random and that doesn't seem to happen in another in kind of like a dmt experience well science is very correlative so yeah duly noted when you look at like dream what what's really known about dream sleep in terms of neurochemistry and so i mean i kind of cut my teeth on neurochemistry because there's also like a lot of changes in brain activity and how the brain communicates but that's kind of the things i'm starting to really get into now learning like fmri et cetera in my postdoc but in terms of neurochemistry like acetylcholine levels are very elevated during rem sleep and also during wake um so there was a really cool study looking at i think it was they took like the eroid vault if you're familiar with the airwood site they they just took the vault of a bunch of different psychedelics and compounds and they just sort of data mined it and correlated different words with different compounds and then they did a cross-examination with nde and then they created this whole thing looking at like the overlap between which compounds would would be sort of the the highest on the list of so i think it was dmt was like third if i remember correctly like it's like ketamine's up there and then there's dmt and also cannabis was pretty high up there so there's a lot of caveats to that study but point being is uh if you think of something like an nde i mean there's again i'm a firm believer that there's going to be a biological imprint for pretty much anything that you're experiencing um but with the whole like dmt correlating to nde thing i think it's a an nd it's probably neurochemically speaking a much larger picture than just like one compound right and that study kind of speaks to that and there are neurotransmitters that are altered by other psychedelics like ketamine is like more glutamatergic than than dmt which is more serotonergic etc and then you get into things like uh salvia i think that was pretty high up there too and that's like a whole another thing mechanistically speaking so stay away from salvia yeah except for that uh hamilton morris thing where they were they were rolling the leaves in water and chewing them and not smoking it did you see that one no what happened so it's like there's a traditional uh salvia preparation where because right now you smoke it and it comes in little packets and i remember my the most hilarious packet i saw was a packet that said panic i just had someone clawing out their face and i was like why would you buy this like but thank you for letting you letting us all know what the intention of this particular compound is just panic but nonetheless like who what [ __ ] sicko wants to do that and it's like sitting next to the marlborough yeah so it's like let's like let's pay attention to regulation and drug education for sure do we want to panic today or do we want to go with something a little easier but uh but yeah but this this preparation was rolled leaves and you chew the leaves and you chew the leaves and and i think you either swallow or form like a wad in your mouth and that seemed like a pretty interesting experience but you know as we know different things interact differently depending on the preparation like five meow so bufo the the frog it is a frog toxin that comes from the buffalo various and they actually reclassified that toad recently but when if you had it just in its raw state like if you just drank it it would be highly toxic but when you smoke it it deactivates the toxins and then you get the 5 muodmt experience which in my mind is the strongest psychedelic experience in the world bar none mike tyson mike tyson agrees yeah mike tyson does agree um but you know so it's it's possible that what the problem is with salvia it's just that everybody's doing it wrong yeah it's possible it's my that's my it's my theory on salvia but anyways i don't know how you get salvia leaves and definitely i agree with you stay away from panic that's not the way you want to go but since i opened the door to 5meodmt what is the difference between nndmt and 5meodmt and what do you know about how it interacts differently because subjectively the experiences pretty dramatically different yeah so i mean from a receptor like pharmacology neurochemical perspective uh there are some subtle differences in terms like affinity at uh 5ht2a so i believe it's a little more potent so it'll it'll definitely trigger the mech whatever the mechanism is uh downstream a little bit easier um and then just chemically it's really only a small tweak to the compound so the five points to like this part of the ring that has this methoxy group on it which is literally just like some carbon hydrogen and an oxygen um so that's they're very similar but i you know ethanol and methanol are also very similar right and i mean i know what i'm drinking later like i had it you're at a cool brewery last night though that might have had some uh nothing all out there yeah i'm feeling kind of floaty today let me ask you a question though this is important because a lot of people describe i've never done five i've only heard about i'm just being straight up honest is that the five is less visionary than the regular dmt but in that barker study where he gave lsd to rats and then they did i think i don't know if it was cerebral spinal fluid sampling of the rest and they actually saw a thousand percent increase in endogenous 5 meo dmt and a 400 increase in regular dmt and lsd is obviously a pretty visionary experience so do you have any thoughts on that yeah i mean that was kind of barker's whole hypothesis i think i i'm pretty sure he came up with that in the 80s you know that there's this endodmt system that's being i'm very interested in that um we just said well i can't speak i can speak to that specifically because i've taken a compound called vilca with don howard and vilca is a combination uh in his it was his own mixture of five meow dmt and nndmt simultaneously and in that mixture the experience is extraordinarily visual extra i mean like visions like you're completely immersed in an alternate reality which can happen in an an experience or an ayahuasca experience but not to this level it was the most extreme visionary experience i've ever had and i've done it i don't know four times or something like that with him and um the strong is then vilka comes from a seed pod that has both but there's different ways you can mix the seed pod and he had the old chaveen recipe from a long time ago and you snort it out of an old shaving shaman finger bone from 3000 years [ __ ] epic this whole experience and you snoring the whole thing is like this whole thing and he always had this joke you snort until it feels like a railroad spike went up your nose like you just you have at it and you go in and have this experience and you're gone in this other world now that said in i've had many many five meo journeys and worked with the siri the siri elders and siri tribe have kind of initiated me in that practice i have never never once had a single visual experience on no matter how heavy the dose no matter how frequent the dose no matter how light the dose on five meo alone i've not had one now other people have i'm not you know there's certainly cases in which that happens so it seems to me my own you know n of one is that for me 5-meo is not correlative to any kind of visual modulation at all it's it's more it's completely somatic it's like every cell of my body turns into everything in the universe bursting with the only thing that you could describe as god or capital l love yeah you know my last experience that's just what i was yelling over and over again even though it's my you know 40th experience it was wow god wow like that's and it's it's indescribable as anything else and there's no there's no other sites or sounds or colors or anything it's just a complete unicity experience so i would say you know and if i was going to continue and i'll certainly open this up for you guys to dive in but what it seems to me is if you looked at this from a map of where something is going to land you and land your brain and tune your radio you know and i want to talk about the brain as well in a nine-dimensional reality which is something proposed by both matthias distefano who's someone i want to have on the podcast really interesting for those of you who want to dive in he has a show on gaia called initiations which mimics what a lot of the south american shamans have talked about almost exactly which is just different realms of the astral that you can gain access to and there's the realms of the fourth through the fourth through the eighth dimension which can be very visual and have different encounters with beings that all represent you know something of articulation from the source but then there's the ninth or the first dimension which is different expressions of the unicity of the all of that point in the universe the big bang when you know astrophysicists presume that everything was condensed down to the size of a thumbnail maybe a pin prick maybe a single atom of pure potential energy and light of oneness of absolute oneness and then it blows out into articulation and matter thought and everything happens from there my hypothesis from my own experience would be that 5meo is the bridge to either you know and i think the first and the ninth they all they all kind of meet up it's like a circle where they both go out in that different realm it brings you to that state the unicity state whereas nn typically well potentially it has the power to get you there but typically it's going to land you somewhere in the optimal brain state the the radio receiver state to access a you know typically probably fifth through you know this fourth is just time but like fifth through eighth dimensional access which is what my hypothesis would be if i accept the premise of the nine-dimensional map and that seems to explain things to me the best that i can possibly explain it yeah i'm super curious about the role of endogenous 5meo i just happen to think that you know your study was super groundbreaking but if we delve into the 5meo aspect that's going to add even more to that that conversation you know just because 5ml is considered like like he said the most powerful psychedelic out there and if we're producing it at comparable levels to serotonin that's pretty wild it would be pretty well if we found that it would be that's why the visual stuff is the just finding finding out what's going on just like at a baseline level with this stuff is to me the most fundamental question to answer going forward to start tying in some of these much more exciting and speculative but more grander implications of what is reality etc right but for me like i said just seeing if there's some correlation or some functional role for it in vision and then like nick g nick linos a colleague at the university of michigan has been working on just establishing it as a neurotransmitter because again just finding it in the levels we found it doesn't necessarily mean it's going it doesn't have to function as a neurotransmitter so can this molecule actually be like packaged into storage vesicles and is there a mechanism in place for it to be taken up in into the neurons and stored there for future release like all these things like quantify something as a neurotransmitter those are sort of like the foundational science questions to to go for but yeah 5meo is uh from my review of all that literature there's way less out there on it in terms of like endogenous some studies have found it for sure um but it's i think it's something again to me all these conversations are important with these indole amines these compounds that look like dmt that that have exogenous administration will like impact your consciousness or your mental health especially in the era where we're starting to administer these compounds to people to try to help them through the rough times like understanding how it interacts with the body is going to be really a big piece of that to navigate the the realm safely is it weird to you that we've spent all of these billions and billions of dollars trying to explore outer space but it's like hard to get a couple hundred thousand or a million bucks to study how the [ __ ] brain works uh i mean yes and no i mean um i don't get too wrapped up in that stuff i mean you know it's it's it's a grind for sure right but um i feel like a lot of that just like falls on the scientists to just be able to put something together that's really concrete that's rational um that that definitely has a reach out to public health which this clearly now is becoming or even the conversation that we had earlier about like kids being able to walk into a gas station and get a hold of something that could potentially go very very wrong for them and just having an education system in place i think is huge um so sort of reforming how we interact with the general public as a society with reshaping our relationship to these compounds and making sure that people are educated and like how they use them i think that's my biggest fear too like moving into this space and starting to work in the realm of like we're doing a study for phantom limb pain psilocybin for phantom limb pain because there's been some interesting case studies of the phantom limb pain being pretty much taken care of with a strong dose of psilocybin coupled with this thing called mir therapy where they sort of put a mirror sagittal to the limb that's intact and then when the participant sees a limb where there was not the presence of a limb before it'll actually alleviate the pain so we're thinking that combining those two things together um so the psychedelics have been shown to sort of increase the the the way the brains uh visual and like sensory motor areas communicate with one another and that's kind of what the mirror therapy is doing too it's basically synesthesia it's really really interesting i'm excited about that project but again i mean to me like having having convert real conversations like i hope that that's where we're progressing especially especially now that there's hundreds of millions of dollars being dumped into this like so just that it keeps people's mental health proper because like not everybody it's not this isn't gonna work for everybody right like psychedelic therapy um and the people that it does work for you know that it may be especially somebody that's naive to it it's gonna be a long road ahead right so it's like just making sure that we're not trying to present it as too much of a panacea maybe i diverged a little bit there but yeah we all do yeah oh it's an important message so you know i mean i think it's an important message it can't be can't be overstated as i think with the excitement around it people can just rush out to go have this experience you know you could have heard me describe five meow and be like where do i get it how do i do it let me smoke as much as i can like don't please don't like it's not even [ __ ] recommending it you know like there's some really challenging experience of my my you know dear brother best friend kyle kingsbury you know he's an experienced psychonaut had a five meow journey that was real rough months of months of integration work you know where there's reactivations every time he would go to sleep like you know it's there's there's you're it's a it's an incredibly potent experience and it's uh you know it's it's something to be mindful of yeah and like the big pharma coming in it's just like i mean every you know there's a lot of good people working in every space so i'm not i'm who am i to judge anyone right or anyone's motives um but yeah you know you got like ibogaine twizzlers and gumballs where are they because uh put a little [ __ ] bell on the little car that goes around i will buy one of those right away i have a gain twizzlers let's go oh no what did i just i do think it is a problem though that endogenous dmt and the whole endogenous hallucinatory system because we actually produce monoming oxidase inhibitors multiple uh ones i think tribulation penalty neural cadden harmon or harman like there hasn't been enough money put in to study like the endowaska system and i think that's the question that you're asking earlier is like not even a million dollars in the past 20 years has gone into studying this system you know endogenously i think that's a disgrace to understanding the human experience a little bit better you know i emailed jc callaway he had published a hypothesis paper and i believe 1988 thinking that dmt and pinoline correlated with the dream state and i asked him did you ever follow that hypothesis up with a study and he said there was there wasn't any funding and then i speak with jima bordigan at university of michigan you know asking her you know can we do this study or that setting she's like there's not any funding and this has been going on for decades so i think so you're talking about maois mai's yeah the body produces maos absolutely and so the endogenous production of maois which may modulate the available amount of these other compounds like potentially endogenous dmt because that's how it works with that body like the reason why dmt trips are so short when you smoke it is if you smoke it it's really short because it floods your body and very quickly maoi clears it from the system and the mao clears it from the center oh yeah yeah and a monoamine oxidase inhibitor so if you have an inhibitor it inhibits the mao from clearing it from the system yeah um and then in ayahuasca it's not actually technically an maoi but it acts in the same way to make it basically orally available for you know i don't know six eight ten hours yeah whatever that is so this is an interesting way and then if you do something like uh anawaska which is syrian ru and psilocybin which you're adding an maoi so you're suppressing mao and then taking it with psilocybin it has a dramatically different quality to it i mean very much much more like an ayahuasca experience which is interesting different but you've done that before i've done that before yeah is there a purge effect as well yes but not in the same way there wasn't a purge through nausea there was a a heavy sweat purge that that actually needed and a movement purge like i was i had to like i was almost like a twitch not twitching a shivering basically but intentionally shivering to the point that i would start sweating and moving and like i had to get energy and i had to get um get stuff out of my system so you know if you talk to the ayahuasca shamans there's many ways to purge you can purchase breath you can purge through tears you can purge through vomiting you can purchase your [ __ ] you can purge through sweat you can purge through any variety of ways i think there's a variety of different ways to purge so was there purge yes absolutely yeah but was it the same as aiwa said no it wasn't though the visions i was in the jungle which was interesting because i've never done ayahuasca i mean i've never done psilocybin and been in the jungle scape but that's frequent experience on ayahuasca right so it was interesting how it kind of took me to a similar one of the reasons why potentially it's called anawaska but the point being that you know maoi plus any psychedelic is going to create an interesting and interesting effect yeah it's an interesting interesting way that this is going to interact and it's not just with you know it's not just with dmt yeah and i've heard you have to be really careful combining um monominoxidase inhibitors with 5mu i think that's why it's a really interesting conversation endogenously because it would lead me to speculate that you need like very low levels of 5-meo and maybe you have elevated levels of maoi that are causing you know some of these spiritual experiences or things like that so hopefully in the future you know we could see some studies that really tie it all in where it's not i mean big props see you john for getting the dmt stuff out but if we could find a way to kind of you know include maoi and 5mu with the dmt and see like the cascade effect if there's a fluctuation in all these chemicals it'll give us a better perspective of what's going on something big is getting a trace on them in human fluids you know that's that's been difficult which the wrath study was a way to circumvent the issue of how rapidly dmt is degraded in the periphery right so having a technique where you can get an accurate read on a dmt signal even if it's not super quantitative in terms of like it's this amount of dmt and we're sure of it because that stuff kind of fluctuates and you have to in my opinion take averages of multiple studies to really kind of see where it sits um and so and measuring um measuring mao is similarly difficult to measuring dmt or just people haven't done so i'm saying well you're measuring you could you could measure sort of enzymatic activity yeah and and that's not as difficult but to sort of link it to the experiential portion of things i would be but i just mean just finding a way to be able to in the human living brain i think is where it's at that's going to be and that's like one of my long-term career goals is working toward imaging dmt in the human brain um and non-invasive yeah well yeah that would take a hell of that that would take a hell of a volunteer that's a big one man that's that's a big real if if that happens that's a game changer john i hope that happens well to go and to just follow up on this point though let's assume that there's a baseline level of all of these compounds in endogenously in the brain so there's a baseline level of dmt for example what may be happening in a lot of these different experiences is a modulation of mao and in some way and that's actually allowing the relatively stable levels of dmt to actually become more available in the brain and more active in the brain i mean this is this is how you know we have our flagship products in nootropic and the nootropic the one of the core ingredients in it is hupergio serrata which has a compound huperzine a b and c which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor so acetylcholine esterase is what breaks down acetylcholine in the brain so by inhibiting the it's you know acetylcholine estrase you have a more available acetylcholine in the brain and that's what we were able to show in our you know clinical research is creating the effects that alpha brain has increase in focus and you know short term memory and a variety of different things that we showed with the boston center for memory but it's the same it's the same idea right like it's not that we're adding any more new stuff and what we do actually in the formula but that compound works because it's just stopping the thing that's naturally breaking down what the body's producing anyways yeah and that's an interesting way to look at what might be happening on a day-to-day basis when somebody's having one of these experience maybe the brain's not all the sudden producing a whole bunch more dmt when you have that abduction experience and you feel like you [ __ ] got lifted up in a spaceship maybe something happened to your mao system yeah and that's what created the surplus at dmt so yeah really interesting to study like both of those things could explain the phenomenon that we're trying to target yeah i've actually seen some studies where i think stress is uh up regulates dmt right have you seen some studies like that where i mean you know our 2019 study was pretty much in the same category but yeah more extreme obviously but yeah there's a lot out there on that yeah i saw studies that uh our monominoxidase inhibitors our endogenous ones are upregulated during stress as well so that's what i'm saying it just needs to be under like one umbrella one study kind of just pushed out comprehensively because right now it's kind of bits and pieces everywhere and we just gotta you know put them all together yeah the endo endodmt potentially being involved in in mood et cetera just like serotonin i think that's another potential role for it especially like some of the studies that have shown micro dosing in rats is so rodent models for depression are a little yeah you know it's it's it's a little tough to translate that to humans in my opinion but nonetheless like depressive behaviors in rats can be overturned with sub psychedelic doses of dmt dmt microdoses yeah yeah which it's like well maybe baseline levels the dmt fluctuating in your brain are involved in certain things like depression or anxiety et cetera so i think that's another potential interesting and then if wim hof method is increasing baseline levels to equivalent you know low level dmt you know increases this could be why you know people who are practitioners show the benefits to mood from breath work practice as well right that could be that one of the mechanisms at play yeah one of the interesting things that um we're kind of setting up for later on this year is actually alzheimer's study with wim hof method because you know alzheimer's they suffer from anxiety and depression and a lack of neurogenesis a lack of neuroplasticity and if you know wim hof method up regulates the endowaska system there's a possibility that it addresses some of the aspects of alzheimer's so i'm really excited for something like that to really present you know some of these concepts of dmt in a very functional grounded way to to help the population i think we're going to see some interesting results yeah i read that study the the whim pianist study the other day finally got some time to check that out it's interesting excuse me with the link to hypoxia and dmt has been shown to be anti-inflammatory and and sort of all that immune stuff kind of goes hand-in-hand with inflammation right yeah yeah and wim hof method is a controlled hypoxia right it's not just like a chronic hypoxia because in alzheimer's or other neuro degenerative diseases you see chronic hypoxia and just to be clear the wim hof method with the the with the breathing and then the retention is actually like a controlled hypoxia so like the hormetic stress version of hybrid yeah exactly it's different that's why we need a way to just get a read on it in in the human even if it's not the brain in the plasma or whatever just a really reproducible technique and then you can start asking questions like is it involved in depression is you know is it involved like does the wim hof method have something to because right now it's just so much scientific speculation unfortunately um but yeah that's why i think it's it's really important to to develop a technique that'll be able to image it reliably in humans dmt endogenously i want to talk about something that we briefly discussed um before and this is alex aldous huxley's theory and he talks about this in doors of perception maybe elsewhere as well that the brain is a reducing valve that is basically taking in the available abundance of information and because of our processing capacity and our necessity to focus on a certain limited amount of things to produce an outcome that is beneficial for the human organism to eat and [ __ ] and do whatever the human organism needs to do that the brain is actually involved in reducing the available amount of information that is that is out there and his theory on psychedelics is that psychedelics are opening these venetian blinds opening up the blinds to allow more information to come in and that's actually what we're seeing so why people think it feels more real is because we're actually getting more data than rather than less data or rather than um you know producing some hallucinogen for example that's coming you know some in some weird way what is the what is the you know you were talking about some of the research that you were you're aware of that's kind of in support of this this kind of understanding of the brain all right yeah i mean it's just these creative folks are ahead of their time man because like it is there's overlap with what's being shown with this with psychedelic administration in terms of what it does to brain entropy um so i don't understand all that that's not exactly my game but like i get the the basic concept of uh basically you're just creating the analogy i use with the music background is like if you you have this like old-school synthesizer that has the big patch bay on it and if you just start taking it and patching it all over the place just randomly that's kind of what it seems like psychedelics may do to some degree and then you know you hit the button and sometimes depending on how it was patched it'll give you a weird sound sometimes it'll give you a chill sound sometimes it'll give you no sound at all so the point being is like entropy so psychedelics definitely are increasing the entropy in the brain there's a metric that a lot of my colleagues at the university of michigan my grad student buds would use um to look at it and it's basically like the same idea as binarizing uh or compressing mp3 so like the the basic like mathematics and physics is that you're taking a in these studies they were we were looking with eeg signals so you're taking an eg electrical signal and you're binarizing it and then you're saying like based on the peaks and the troughs you assign like a one or a zero and then you create strings of words out of ones and zeros and then the more unique strings of words after you do a little processing on it corresponds to higher entropy and what is found is that things like anesthetics or things like disorders of consciousness like coma will decrease that entropy big time and as you progress like back to waking so like waking in rem sleep have the basically the same amount of entropy and then psychedelics even kick it up a little bit higher than that and what is what exactly is entropy as it relates to the brain right so i mean it's really just so again the mathematics i'm not going to try to get into but it really is just a reflection of in terms of things like uh another metric would be like connectivity is like brain areas that don't necessarily normally communicate with one another are starting to do that so it's like breaking down these within network areas communicating with one another and sort of opening up like the whole brain for communication which is kind of philosophically in my mind that's sort of my interpretation of the reducing valve from huxley right because like you said the brain is basically a system that wants to minimize all that so that it can make sense out of things compartmentalization whereas this is breaking down the walls of the compartments and so you're seeing a flood of information and communication amongst different aspects of the brain and then like i was saying there's other studies where they'll it's called pre-pulse inhibition so they'll give like two generally auditory stimuli to participants and basically the how closely they're presented like one will mask the other but when uh psychedelics are involved that masking effect goes away so there's like more information that can get through the system basically yeah i think i saw a presentation of maps from amanda fielding and she was talking about the effect of psilocybin and uh restriction of the default mode network and i think a lot of this has been shown in a variety of psychedelics with that understanding the idea would be that the default mode network is principally involved in the regulation of this information and when you restrict blood flow to that area take it you know quote offline use a computer term um when you take it more relatively offline than the reducing valve capacity the default mode network which is involved the amygdala involved in fear response involved in danger assessment and all of these different attributes when you take that fear response danger assessment default mode network amygdalic processing offline to a certain capacity by restricting blood flow then the rest of the brain now has the training wheels off it's like the regulator's off the go cart and it can travel to you know farther and receive information from different dimensional realities that are always around us and available do you know if there's similarities in terms of the default mode network activity and meditation and psychedelics like does it does meditation quieted down as well uh yeah so there are some overlaps yeah i know that in experienced meditators anyways an older study found comparisons with the reductions that like carhartt harris and colleagues have shown with default mode down regulation we're starting to look into that as well with our connectivity studies at ucsd like the dmn involvement in meditation like i said the overlap of of how meditative states and psychedelic states are the similarity between those two in the brain is is something that i think is is really exciting and it looks like we're heading that direction with those types of studies so that'll be cool and the the interesting challenge too though is that uh you know experienced meditators you know put that as a subject group well what the [ __ ] does that mean you know you sitting there on your cushion thinking about sex or are you like going somewhere you know what i mean like i don't know like it feels like there's a vast discrepancy in in aptitude like an experienced basketball player is not lebron james you know what i mean like he's not necessarily going to dunk on you and reign threes you know like that's there's a there it seems like there's different levels that's valid and uh and so it is it is an interesting it's an interesting phenomenon just because of the seems like different people maybe innately have different access points no matter how much you try and it's not not a knock on anybody for not trying their hardest or anything like that but it's just human beings are we're interesting we have certain people have inequalities certain people who've you know grown up from an early age and they see spirits and they see things that are happening in ways that are inexplicable you know i mean one of the i dated a girl in in high school that was like that that was seeing they could see spirits from when she was young she grew up in a religious house and so they tried to like exercise it out of her and eventually she blocked it out but it was like this is a fundamental thing and some of these things told her invaluable information about like a robbery that was about to happen and she you know like all of these like very interesting like inexplicable phenomenon right so like that person is a it's a human subject you know but the for the fact that humans are just so different it's that's another challenge that uh you know fortunately there's people like you there to to help figure that out but with studying humans that becomes the difficulty because a human being is not reduced and to equivalency to another human being when it comes to these extra sensory capabilities well what i'll say in terms of how how do you define like experience versus an experience one of the things that really blew my mind when i started to research this for my postdoc meditation because i didn't have any experience with with looking at the brain in meditative states until like six months ago really um but was that we look at it in chronic pain so basically uh well now we're looking at it in chronic pain but prior to that there were studies where in healthy subjects healthy individuals they would come in and they would get like a heat stimulus on their calf and after only like four training sessions of like a mindfulness based meditation training so across like four weeks these completely naive people were able to use meditation to significantly reduce pain um so now we're kind of following that up and also looking at like more long term to see if there's like a dosage effect so if you have like weeks and weeks and weeks of training if you'll get better at that and then one of the other things i thought was pretty cool is when you look at the neural correlates of of of people that are really like hardcore practitioners um that are basically devoted to meditation that and um you know that are maybe in and monasteries etc i did practicing it when in the in the participants in these studies that we've had what you find is you find this activation of these like frontal executive brain areas and you find a deactivation of something like thalamus which is like the sensory area which is basically suggesting like that your cognitive ability to sort of turn off this sensory experience is maybe leading to this pain reduction but in these really experienced dedicated practitioners and people meditating you see the opposite of that you see this executive downshift and you see like the sensory upshift and thalamus suggesting that they're just sitting there with their sensory experience so it's pretty cool like there's yeah there's some there's some changes yeah yeah have you heard of any of those uh studies studying people with uh like personality multiple personalities and then different personalities have different sort of allergies and things like that no yeah talks about that a lot okay yeah there's one in particular that's a it's a published published case study of there's an individual i believe he had 13 different personalities and one of his personalities in particular was horribly allergic to orange juice but there was another one of his personalities that loved orange juice so it would put him in this dilemma whereas if the other if the personality that loved orange juice was drinking the orange juice he was fine but if the personality if he switched into the other personality while he was drinking orange juice aware of the fact that he was drinking orange juice he would break out in hives that is so wild yeah and this is you guys can look it up it's a published case study on this since it's i mean it's this is the fun this is the foundation of you know joe dispenza's work saying like this is what the brain is capable of you know and all of the different placebo studies but to understand that when you have just different beliefs and different thoughts you can change something that people would think of as you know just a biological event there's allergens that you're sensitive to in your body and there's nothing you can do about it well maybe not maybe maybe and again maybe we're all just perspectives in the mind of god and when we shift our perspective and our beliefs and our identity we can shift all of the matter and material that's there yeah that seems to be you know what this might be potentially suggesting as a hypothesis yeah i mentioned a cluster of studies on ben stu i was on ben stewart's podcast recently and i decided uh studies from the 70s in which i better get an invite to that [ __ ] podcast you better man um dan if you're listening there's actually i think seven studies uh in which adult women were placed under hypnosis so obviously an altered state of consciousness maybe sedation some people like have a certain perspective of hypnosis that it's not real but it's it's real and it's more like it's similar to meditation not exactly i gotta have somebody hypnotizing me because i'm one of those people and i'm like skeptical of that i just don't know i just don't think it could work on me but that's like my potentially like rampant hubris and overconfidence and like my the the stalwart nature of my brain i think it's probably the opposite because you seem like an intelligent person and a sense that hypnosis has actually been at least from from the studies that i've seen there's a correlation between elevated intelligence and hypnotic ability i see you trying to honeydick me into changing my position here john and it's working listen man well i got to cite the studies that i i we're we're going back to the the mind molding reality and there's actually i think seven studies regarding uh women placed under hypnosis adult women and they were uh the instructions were to visualize like a warm towel on their breasts and to visualize their breasts actually and getting larger and these studies would take place over 12 weeks we just hypnotized all men listening to the podcast listen up visualize the same thing well this is this is extremely important because the implications are are huge you know you know no pun intended for christ i didn't even try to do that but anyway so there was a case study in the late 60s that showed that uh there was actually breast growth from being under hypnosis and visualizing the breast enlarging and there was subsequent follow-up studies that that proved this and then the scientists would see you know other variables of would hypnosis alone induce increases in breast size no it correlated with the visualization and it goes along with concepts like rupert sheldrake morphogenetic field in which maybe in altered states are visualizations uh design an imprint and then the body will go ahead and follow that imprint and the reason anyway the researchers found that the the the breast growth actually stayed after months so after 12 weeks of doing the visualization and hypnosis once a week for an hour it was almost like a permanent change in the physical body of these adult women i there was a study done and i think it was france on french subjects and i talk about this in my book on the day and they had them visualize themselves doing bicep curls and they visualize themselves doing bicep curls and then they measured the growth of the bicep muscle and there was like significant statistically significant growth then they had to visualize lifting even heavier weights with their biceps and there is even higher growth in their in you know muscle genesis without doing any other activities all other you know factors accounted for and it's really interesting you know that just visualizing themselves lifting weights like that and then visualizing themselves living heavier weights had a correlative increase in what was what was capable so you know what is what is possible yeah what is reality i mean the implications for health right are extremely profound i mean he says the patriarchy is all bad i'm just saying right the implications are huge let's say somebody has you know unfortunately pancreatic cancer can they visualize that going away right can you get in an altered state for prolonged periods of time and have a distinct uh effect on your physiology i think i know i'm skeptical of that one the skeptical awareness which one the whole visualizing visualization going away thing listen when you get into dangerous territory with that though because it sounds crazy like i know i know obviously i'm gonna visualize my cancer disappearing well listen there are studies showing that i'm not talking complete i'm not throwing he was very comfortable with visualizing your dick getting bigger or your tits growing you're visualizing there's not cancer man stop writing right there but remember as he saunters out of the room with his 17-inch visual eyes visually enhanced [ __ ] he's like just just hold it right there john when you were at my apartment when i had to do that visualization of your hand getting warm right yeah and that did happen i yeah so that's what i'm saying we do these things incrementally where it's like if you can warm your hand can you can you make your hand cold like how variable is it and like you know there are studies indicating that different temperatures surrounding cancerous cells has an effect on them so you know we're trying to make this as grounded as possible not trying to go too deep into the woo but you know you've interviewed dispenza you know i've been to his summit you'll hear people who you know testify from their heart or in small groups i was in small group breakouts and there's two three people who had cured you know unincurable levels stage four cancer this that and i understand where you're you know also where you're coming from as well like this is not something that you know it's it's tricky right like because you don't want to have this just purely positive thinking i'm going to positive think this away and i'm not even going to do anything else and it's just gonna be okay because dispenza's method is not that it's a very deep and involved and when they talk about it like to actually go there to actually give this a run it's a it's quite a process and uh you know but that said whatever if anybody's listening knows people i encourage you to look at dispenza's work and also look at the emergent work on you know what traffic travis christopherson's done on ketogenic diets and cancer and there's a lot of different ways to look at how to look at these different you know these different things that are these maladies that are happening and i think a combination of all of them might be the way like all right ketogenesis plus you know limited targeted chemo plus dispense a method okay what happens if you stack all of these different things and and so that's something that i would just be really curious about and that book from travis christopherson for anybody interested it's called tripping over the truth it was actually so powerful i did a book review um on aubreymarkets.com cancer so if anybody's interested in that research please check it out because it's uh it's extremely potent and i think it is important to know like all right let's just open this field up for the full conversation of all of the tools that are possible yeah from metabolic modulation to the you know advances in you know science and those different technologies to the the technologies of the mind i mean i do to be fair i do see it every day now you know with with working with the meditation for pain and people start meditating and their pain goes away or it goes down at least and the brain changes so like mind over matter is a real thing yeah i mean there's been a lot of cases at least you know anecdotes of people taking ayahuasca and having remission and you know my perspective is that it's uh you know if you make distinct changes to the brain most likely you're making distinct changes to your central nervous system and your autonomic signaling so i mean it's not that far-fetched to me obviously i'm not a scientist i'm just a random person but i think that you know that's the the foundation of at least the way you can present it to the world in a palatable manner where you're kind of taking the woo a little bit out of it and trying to make it as grounded as possible well it's like dennis mckenna says we are chemicals right yeah so it's like an electricity if you are able to modulate a certain chemical process in your body that would have some or even just like a process like inflammation etc that would have some grounding in how a pharmaceutical would work to treat a malady then yeah to me that that's the logical thing to me it go it goes i've so i've been trying to write a book called master your mind master your life as my follow-up to own the day in your life and it's been the most difficult thing i've ever done period because trying to find the bounds of what is the mind and what is not the mind so that you could try and be the thing that is mastering the other thing you know because the subject object separation of this is mine and this is not mine it was so slippery and impossible that all the maps i built ultimately ended up doubling back on themselves and i was i've scrapped 60 000 words more times in this book than anything else and ultimately what i arrived at is the the way to build the functional map is to build the map as everything is mined which is some place that i originally started that we're a perspective in the universal mind and our mind is connected to all things breaking it out the somatic mind instead of this mind-body spirit okay no no this is your somatic mind it has some atoms and it has no chemicals and it has structures and chemicals and things then there's the story mind the story about our identity what freud would call the ego and the story of you know the superego or the judge what i call the coach that's your story mind and it creates all the stories and helps us navigate through story and then there's the source mind and the source mind is connected to all things through the source from which it came in the field which interconnects all of these different things so it's just three different wings of the same mind instead of mind body spirit it's somatic mind story mind source mind and whether that's true or not true in quotation or accurate from whatever psychological perspective it is it has been the absolute only way that i could explain my own phenomenon or actually try to carve out a map so i think it is important to at least entertain that hypothesis that we're the mind is so much more than we think it is and so the ability of the mind to influence matter of course it's just a different part of the mind the ability for these experiences to external things and fields amongst people and and you know potentially source energy itself is something you're talking about five minutes to impact all of the other things from story to body of course because it's all it's all mind you know so it's not like there's these brick walls built up there's just different compartments that have different rules of modulation and different rules of interaction but everything is everything is mined ultimately yeah it almost seems like you've got to get the ball it almost seems like you get to get out of your mind look up in the sky at night right yeah yeah that's true i mean it almost seems to me like you have to get out of your mind quote unquote to tap into mine to the power of the mind right because you can't just out of a certain section of what you would call the mind and this is this is the trap right you have to get out of the story mind that has a story that this is who you are and this is who you aren't i'm aubrey you're john one you're john two that's a [ __ ] story yeah and if you can get out of that story there's another story that can be told and within that other story what's possible within that story yeah and that's part of the psychedelic conversation right is getting out of your your basic story right so totally that's the intriguing aspect of it all fine this is the that's like the super uh spoiler alert from my book which which hopefully will eventually be available in 2022 but uh yes if anybody's interested keep a look out for that as it as it comes but it's been uh and i think i wouldn't have had any any chance at this if it wasn't for my own experiences with all of these different compounds you know like people ask me you know who do you think you would have been if without psychedelics i'm like i don't [ __ ] know i get so integral it's been 22 years since my first psychedelic journey my vision quest out in the mountains north of santa fe like who would i have been well that's a [ __ ] impossible question like who it's like asking who would i have been if i had different parents like i don't know you know like how are you gonna how are you gonna ask answer that it's been a fundamental it's been a fundamental guide for me for my whole life and uh just grateful that they exist and now grateful that we're at the precipice of this revolution where the access points and the information and the research is opened up i mean the fact that i just talked to anton bilton and he's able to intravenously inject people with dmt to measure whether there's entities are real or not like that wasn't the scientific reality in the late 80s you know well it takes these rogue you know financers to really fund these sort of studies and i think that's the exciting time part of being in this era that you have so much money on the sidelines everybody's looking to put it somewhere interesting and i think everything that we've been talking about thus far from the phantom limb to the entities to even like things like your dark room retreat you know i think all these things need to be funded more and i think there needs to be more media content around them to you know alert people that these things are actually happening and just the narrative changing too about like if you since everything is illegal at a federal level like the number of highly intelligent and highly higher contra contributions to society like doing good things for community etc like psychedelics like as promoting empathy and compassion right like that's something we're very interested in at ucsd and i mean there is uh there's some studies that have shown clearly that anybody who's you know participated or ingested a compound a psychedelic compound knows that it does open you up to the perspective of you or not this individual right there's this like collective community of of people and whatever you do impacts other people so like let's just try to be a little more chill with each other yeah and the fact that we have conversations now that you know people who aren't as afraid to openly discuss their experiences with these substances um compounds i always use these science words man for these psychedelics is the is the right word it seems to me that we're all stuck in the story mind and the story mind is is very sociopathic it's you compared to everybody else and you trying to get ahead and be better than everybody else in some way this is the classic aspect of the ego or what i call the player you know the one with the jersey and the stat sheet and all of the thing trying to maximize contracts and figure out and dominate as much as you can and if you can get away with it when the refs not looking you [ __ ] get away with it why because you're trying to [ __ ] win that's why if you ain't cheating you ain't trying t ortiz you know like this is the idea this is the way that that it is and if you can get away with [ __ ] on the environment but there's nobody else to look at yeah [ __ ] it it's going to increase profits like that's the only thing we're we're locked in this story mind perspective of this bad story and this very egoic you know concept and when you take these compounds it it actually connects you to both the source mind and the somatic mind so your body starts talking to you like hey man all that stress and all this stuff you've been putting in me not so good like we need to chill on that purge you know have you have different ideas about your consumption patterns and your life patterns and then also to the source mind like wow i don't think i'm actually that different than the sea that i'm plundering or the rain forest that i'm burning or the people that i'm [ __ ] on and you start to it just changes the way and kind of rebalances the psyche so that you're not dominant in one aspect and i think that's what needs to happen more than anything else is just breaking us free from this you know unnecessary weighted average of people being in this kind of egocentric story mine totally yeah completely completely agree you know one of the interesting things that was brought up to me in a podcast i did last year was that you know some of the people in silicon valley where i'm from you know they don't necessarily go for the breakthrough dose where you know the ego is kind of shattered and they connect with the you know the greater vision of of the whole world it's like they're taking microdoses or low doses and it's actually helped them being better capitalists that was kind of an interesting concept that was brought to my attention because i was like that's kind of scary in the sense of you know utilizing psychedelics to enhance your cognitive abilities to actually be a better capitalist what do you think about that i think it's kind of scary like you said yeah i mean everything can be used for that i mean looked at what moctezuma's priests were doing at the peak when they were sacrificing people at the top of the top of the pyramid right they were high they're high on mushrooms noctil high on psilocybin mushrooms so that they could pull people's hearts out with their obsidian knife and feed it through the mouth of huis lapochely and kick them down the curb of the [ __ ] steps for 10 hours in a row without getting tired because they're on mushrooms right like so don't think that these things are going to make you good you know cause that's it doesn't get as much more bad as that you know what i mean like just on just a [ __ ] heart ripping assembly line like you're set in setting they just needed a nice fluffy rug at the mountain base yeah for sure for sure that was the opposite set instead he created like meth out kano from mortal kombat which some people get that reference because mortal kombat movie came out but i was old school game player i knew how to do that fatality i don't remember anymore man you want to speak a little bit about your dark room experience i mean i think that's pretty intriguing especially in light of the endo dmt yeah so i reached out to you about that and was talking to you about that and and i think this is something um you know i'm working on a documentary about it and we're trying to get some answers because around day three and this was something that everybody in was describing and telling talking about and again i was skeptical i'm always skeptical to experience something which is why i'm skeptical of hypnosis because i haven't experienced it not that i don't believe it i just i have to i want to know it for myself so everybody's saying oh it's like you have this dmt endogenous dmt experience and it's blah blah i was like yeah yeah yeah i've done a lot of dmt we'll see and then day three i start seeing these pulsing lights coming in i mean you're in absolute pitch dark and these lights start pulsing and you know how there's this kind of when that chrysanthemum hits in a dmt journey there's just there's sometimes like a sound associated with it in in a slight way like it's like this buzzing of the ears or of in this weird way there's like a little bit of that too so it was a slight auditory you know and but more visual than anything and that's how it came on and then eventually it and by the next day it popped me through to a full what i would describe as like the twilight of an ayahuasca journey of the twilight of a dmt journey not peak i never reached peak like the peak concentrations that i would experience in a exogenous dmt experience but it stayed for three days i had visions of my father i had visions of buddha i had visions of different people's souls i could interact with and talk to i had i was in constant a constant immersion with the you know non-physical dimensions and and also when i would eat food like i would have a it was a raw vegan was the diet they were eating so i'd eat a piece of broccoli and then the broccoli would just sprout into my mind in like full 3d like crystal clear hd vision which is the only time i've ever had an experience like that visually was on a boga interestingly like usually they're a little fuzzy like like i could imagine seeing broccoli but it would in a normal like psilocybin or dmt journey the broccoli would be like i know it's broccoli but it's not like i can see with perfect crystal clear detail every different sprout and every piece of the stock and then but on that for whatever reason i could um so it was very like very interesting experience and obviously very emotional and there's a lot of processes that are going on is that part of i'm pretty understudied on indigenous techniques and unfortunately but is that part of like some shamanic rituals to have dark retreats is a big portion okay yeah and different cultures have had it you know i think the the kogi people had you know initiates stay for long periods of their youth in caves before emerging into reality so that they actually spent their formative years with neuroplasticity at the highest levels right the ability to learn and the ability to understand that was spent under constant elevated levels of endogenous dmt and these experiences so when they emerged they were immersed with greater knowledge of the non-physical and non-you know visual world than they were of the visual world and that's what made them the medicine keepers what was your sleep like i mean so did you could you distinguish like dreams from waking visions yeah i uh did you dream still i can't recall any dreams so sleep was really good i think the first night maybe i did sleep was really good for night one night two it felt okay i felt like i got a good amount of sleep but then once the flashing lights hit on day three and i had my aura ring on so i was actually able to measure and see i think i slept 10 hours the first day which is great for me that's like i'm usually like a six hour kind of guy uh and then like it was on down to like seven the night two and then by night three i was at four and then trailing down ever since then four three two and i stayed at around two hours of really awful sleep like the scores that i was getting on my ring were like 20. you know like like for anybody who has a ring that's if you feel super run down after that or because you're in the dark you still felt okay yeah i mean yes it's energetic it was energetically toxic i felt like at a certain point i would have regulated like i would have just had to have slept but i kind of stayed in just long enough that i could i didn't get over the hump you know i think there would have been a hump to get over but um it was and also it's so emotional i mean i was like crying and feeling anger come up and all this different these different emotions that were going so it was uh it was exhausting but there was something about also that active amount of dmt that was energizing as well like there was uh there was this in some way it was restorative to maybe my mood maybe to some other different aspects so it wasn't like i feel like i get one night of three hours of sleep and i'm in way worse shape than i got after four nights there and i think it probably has to do with you know what was happening in my brain have you done this multiple times or just the one time just one time but i made a dark room up in my house it's not quite good enough yet though because like this it's hard it's a technology to get a room completely dark because you need a complete absolute darkness and light tries to come in everywhere yeah and uh so i'm trying to get my own house dark room set up but but my unfortunately the person who's working on it is in california so every time something breaks in my dark room i'd have to wait so we're gonna solve that problem though i feel like i have the ingenuity resource to solve the problem and yeah i intend to do another one and and dive back in and see it would be really interesting to to get a grip on on dmt levels throughout that because um how would you so how would you even test that you have to do in a plasma for something like that i would think is there any other studies like correlated with that have you come across anything in terms of prolonged darkness so i don't that's a gmo question i don't know that literature as much that [ __ ] gets confusing really fast that's circadian research i've been involved with a little bit of it but just from like the for what is in my wheelhouse the neurochemical stuff um the studies are kind of splotchy and i think there were some in humans and they measured melatonin um i believe in urine but it could have been blood too but anyways and then there were like sheep studies that they were able to uh you know it's uh you could dive in a little more um because you don't have to worry about a human being in darkness for that long or whatnot um but my interpretation of them was that so let me back up so we know that just in a normal night of sleep when you when you are about to go to sleep like so the the darkness will generally cue like there's a small nuclei like your hypothalamus that just has like a couple tens of thousands of neurons in it and in the absence of the light it basically triggers like a norepinephrine release onto the pineal and then the pineal will start to it'll give you this serotonin spike and then the precursor for serotonin and melatonin is actually the precursor for dmt too tryptophan dietary tryptophan uh you know the turkey compound that everyone knows it does so what you're saying is we need a turkey diet while we're in the darkness right hashtag gobble um so in a normal night of sleep that's what will happen and you'll get yeah yeah you're the marketing guru you know i'm just look at me right uh so you'll get this spike in serotonin and then it goes down and this was done the same way that we measured uh for dmt a lot of these studies are microdialysis so there's like a probe and the and the wrap brain and you can actually sample this in real time you get these real real consistent peaks for like the serotonin going up and then it comes down and it's pretty much indicative of tryptophan then serotonin going from tryptophan all the way to the melatonin pathway um so in in the literature that i've seen for the constant darkness it seems like at the beginning of it you get this really big increase in melatonin and then it sort of stabilizes and then there are some studies i believe were shown that it like steeply drops the latter is more interesting to me if that would pan out to be the case is because it could be indicative of like tryptophan being shunted from a melatonin pathway to a dmt pathway so the physiology is kind of like there for like the experiential stuff you're describing again so much of this is like speculative at this point from the science perspective just because we don't even know what the hell dmt is doing like normally yeah but having it be involved in like a circadian rhythm like these are all like valid hypotheses and and it's scientific speculation so it would be cool to see some people dive into that but plasma i think is how you would have to do that one at least if you were doing like a human study you could just like have a wrap that you monitor the the dmt in real time across the whole we did that sort of but the study in the 2019 study really wasn't designed like our sampling rate was like every 15 to 30 minutes um and then and rem sleep and a rat is like a minute or two so you just miss it yeah so we saw those really nice circadian face curves like i was saying but the dmt when we looked it was just kind of like spotty all over the place it's a it's an interesting world you know we got to wrap this up but you know one of the problems with our world is that it's been oriented towards capitalism towards money what's going to make the most money what drugs are going to make the most money to treat versus you know other treatment methods that aren't going to earn enough money that you can't galvanize like you know that's been that's been a challenge and now that psychedelics are available into the capitalistic sphere i think we're going to see a flood of science that's going to come out of course the intention is that ultimately the science turns into capitalism and that's what actually allows the funding to flow through and so whatever criticism of the mechanism the mechanism is in favor of a rapid increase of research right now because i can i see it happening i get this you know different imperial college here beckley here this is so-and-so here here here all of these different places are like yeah let's let's research this [ __ ] because now you know there's some there's some real opportunities that are coming up so that's i think uh it's an exciting time not just for you know human health mental health exploration of consciousness but also for just our understanding and from a scientific perspective about what's going on because i think fast forward you know two years from legalization and there's gonna be a lot of [ __ ] papers and that's gonna be uh that's gonna be an exciting time so i appreciate both of you guys contribution to uh to the field and to my understanding and the world's understanding of what's going on here yeah it's been it's been a great talk thanks for having us man yeah right man yeah look look out for the second episode of dmt quest coming out later this year it's gonna be a good one what's uh what's a little what's a little preview what are we gonna what are we gonna see we're gonna build upon the first episode and you know we're gonna delve into dean's vision for his non-invasive uh measurement of non of endogenous dmt we're going to be delving into uh maybe uh blood plasma technology to measure uh fluctuations in the blood of humans and dmt so there's a those that's like a little snippet of what's going to be going on and obviously we're going to be tying in a lot of details in regards to the importance of the gamma wave and you know functionality within the brain so should be fun beautiful well and for anybody who hasn't seen it check out dmt quest as well is it still on youtube yeah still on youtube still for free no ads so just check it out share it out and let's spread the word yup beautiful thank you so much guys thanks everybody for tuning in and thanks for the fit for service academy for watching thanks for checking out this video for more like it please subscribe to my channel and of course the aubrey marcus podcast with new episodes every single week and follow me on instagram aubrey marcus thank you so much

Channel: Aubrey Marcus

Views: 1,240,495

Keywords: aubrey, marcus, aubrey marcus, optimized, personal journey, explore, personal, dmt frequency, DMT Resaerch, DMT study, dmtquest, dmt quest, endogenous dmt, spirit molecule, john chavez, wim hof method, wim hof breathing, psychedelic research, psychedelics, dimethyltryptamine

Id: t2k5HDyGzYc

Length: 94min 20sec (5660 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021