Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2403 - Andrew Gallimore
Uploaded: 2025-10-30T17:00:26.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2403 - Andrew Gallimore' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2403 - Andrew Gallimore' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2403 - Andrew Gallimore

How are you I'm splendid how the devil are you sir I think it's the first time
anyone's answered splendid when I ask how you doing so tell me about your book
man let me see the cover of it first of all death by death by astonishment
which is
the famous Terrence McKenna quote right yes you have to fear is death by
astonishment exactly yeah you know the first time I did DMT I literally heard
his words do not give in to astonishment I've literally heard those words it's
almost like whatever's over there and wanted me to hear that mmm so I could
like sink in or whatever cuz I already heard it before you know like so they
wanted to say it to me as well it was very weird yeah it's sage advice I think
because it's the only way because if you freak out well it's like that's a good
thing it's good advice in most of life like don't give in to the freak out yeah
confronting the mystery of the world's strangest drug how did you get involved
in this DMT yes oh so you have to go back to my teenage years really so I mean
I
first heard about DMT through Terrence McKenna a friend like most of us yeah
like
most of us but this was like this was joined like the dawn of the internet
right
so before you were a scientist long before I was a scientist right so a friend
gave me this magazine and had this interview with this bearded cheeky
looking bearded fellow on the back called Terrence McKenna and he spoke
about this thing called DMT which of course I didn't know what that was but you
know the stories that he was telling that you were going to meet these insectoid
aliens and trans-dimensional machine owls jabbering in an indecipherable tongue
and
singing impossible objects into existence I mean it sounded ridiculous but I
was kind
of I was hooked I thought this is it this is this is the most fucking
incredible
thing I've ever read in my life and say I was I was like 15 16 years old and
there
was one computer in the school that was hooked up to the the world wide web so
all of
what year was this 96 oh we're giving my age away here but early days early
days
yeah yeah so I spent all my time just you know going on to Alta Vista you
remember
Alta Vista I do yeah I didn't I didn't remember it until you brought it up
there
we go yeah just kind of trying to find out as much as I could about this and
that
was what triggered my decision to study chemistry and pharmacology my kind of
academic journey was triggered by I want to know you know it's such a cool
thing the idea that
you can you can put a molecule in your brain and it doesn't just change how you
feel but
it completely changes the entire structure of your reality your entire world is
obliterated
obliterated and replaced with one that is completely alien the relationship
whatsoever to
that normal waking well that's incredible and I kind of wanted to try at least
to
understand how that actually works well the weirdest part about that molecules
that
your brain makes it and so then you have to go why and what's the purpose of
that and what are we really
you know what is what is consciousness and what is what is normal consciousness
what's the purpose of it and why does this chemical exist what is this molecule
exist that's
produced by the brain that changes everything and seems to transport you to a
place that's more real
than this physical reality that we find ourselves in right now
exactly and that is kind of the great mystery and I don't I think most people
who even people who've
kind of learned about DMT even scientists I mean I speak to scientists I engage
with scientists
neuroscientists often and they will say oh this is just hallucination this is
just your brain kind of making it up
and I don't think most scientists realize how
Confounding and how difficult to explain the DMT state is I think it is one of
One of life's true mysteries. It is not simple to
Explain the DMT state. I think it's almost irresponsible to try to explain it
without experiencing it. It's not gonna kill you
It's not gonna kill you. It lasts 15 minutes. Stop being a pussy. Right. Just
do it and then tell me it's just hallucination
That's it. Just do do a big one
Three giant hits come back. Tell me this is normal. Tell me this is just a
freak out because it sure doesn't seem like it does it?
No and I mean that was what I mean I
First learned about DMT as I said when I was 15 or 16
But my first experience was probably well close to a decade later
and I thought
Before I took it I thought I kind of knew what to expect
I mean, I'd listened to all the Terence McKenna lectures I could find
I'd read all the books I read all the trip reports and I thought okay, I'm kind
of ready for this
I kind of know what's gonna happen
And I wasn't ready and I was shocked. I was
Horrified in a sense. I was appalled. I mean this was like this is impossible.
This was an impossible experience
I was confronted with an what seemed to me to be the the undeniable hand of
some kind of intelligence
I'm not just any kind of intelligence, but a supremely advanced ancient and yet
highly technological
intelligence and that was undeniable to me in those first few moments within
sort of 30 seconds of that drug hitting my
My brain I knew that this is this is something else and I was
First horrified I was shocked I just thought this what is this and then when I
finally kind of came back I wish I was I remember lying on my bed on my back
like shaking to my very bones and all I could say was oh my fucking God
because I
I was completely confounded, you know, I mean by then I was a chemical pharmacologist.
I was assigned it
I should I should know what's going on here, but I had no idea what was going
on and I thought this is this is it
This is what I need to get to grips with it also gives you a very
like an unusual understanding of the mechanisms that you interface with the
world like
like ego and
logic and reasoning and rational thinking it gives you like this
Understanding that those are kind of just these weird tools that you use to get
by and you're left without them in there
It just they they evaporate and dissolve and then when you come back you're
like, what am I doing?
Yeah, the way I talk like what it what is my what's my purpose of interacting
with people like what how much of the way
I talk to people is this weird social dance weird
Ego performative
Sort of like the way I structure sentences the way I communicate it all seemed
so clunky
When when you come back and you just go wow, we're a mess like collectively as
a species. We're so without
some sort of awakening or some some kind of experience some sort of a psychedelic
profound breakthrough experience like
You're so hampered by your physical existence and this sort of ancient tribal
Programming that we have
That we're running through this maze of life with and you come back and you're
god. This is so weird
Yeah
I think what DMT does is is show you that everything everything you thought you
knew about how reality is structured and what's what's real?
And what's not real? What is fantasy? What's possible and what's not possible?
Yeah, all of that is is completely kind of extirpated in an instant
and you realize actually we don't we don't have a fucking clue about
the way things really are I
think DMT just
Demonstrates that whether you understand it whether we can we can really
understand what's going on in the brain and why and how this experience is even
possible
It just shows you how little we really understand about the nature of reality
so
You've done some like legitimate studies with DMT
Right, yeah, I mean I work
Mainly kind of I guess you could say
Theoretically in that I do more quantitative and qualitative analysis of the DMT
state
And try to understand try to use the tools of neuroscience to try to understand
How DMT elicits its its effects so we can kind of get into if you want if you
want to go really deep
I can give you a kind of a
Neuroscience lesson. Yeah, please talk about how so so
You know if you want to understand DMT we kind of have to start with the the
basic observation
You know before you take DMT
You are experiencing a world right whenever you're awake and conscious you're
experiencing a world the normal waking world
This is the world that's kind of familiar to us when you take DMT that world is
transformed
It disappears. It's obliterated and it's replaced with one. That is
Altogether stranger shall we say and so
So what I want to do is kind of understand first of all how that happens
What's actually going on in the brain to cause that transition and why that
happens?
and you can't do that unless you have a
Decent understanding of the normal waking world. So what is the normal waking
world?
It's a model. It's an interface generated by your brain. So you have this
World-building machinery on the outer layer of your brain called the cortex and
this is
Generating your world all the time
All the features of the world that you're experiencing are represented within
the cortex
And that applies whether you are just normal waking life it applies in dreaming
It even applies in the psychedelic state the world you experience is is always
constructed as a model
by the brain and so what that means is that
Psychedelics what they're doing is they're mean they're perturbing the brain.
They're manipulating the brain
And altering that model now for example with let's say psilocybin from magic
mushrooms
Psilocybin binds to this
Receptor in the brain called the five HT to a receptor which you probably
familiar with the cis serotonin receptor and so this is a it's it's called an
exciter tree receptor
It stimulates these neurons which your cortex is constructed from and makes
them more excitable makes them more likely
To fire and share information between two other neurons you get this kind of
loosening up of
Of the the world model that your brain is constructing so the walls start to
breathe
Objects seem to kind of change their identity everything becomes more fluid and
dynamic
And if you put someone into an MRI machine for example, you can actually see
that in the normal waking state
You can see the neural activity. It's it's dynamic
But it's it's kind of organized and well orchestrated you give someone psilocybin
let's say or lsd
And you start to see the activity becoming sort of more random and fluid
So you get this this state of slightly increased disorder as if the the the the
kind of the tuning dial between order and disorder in the brain has been
slightly nudged towards
disorder
But then with DMT something remarkable happens
In the early stages of the experience you get this
Um kind of quite chaotic state suggesting that the rain is entering this more
disordered
State but then it kind of collapses into this brand new order
So you go from the order of the normal waking world to this disordered state
and then
You collapse into this completely different type of order so the brain is
effectively
Constructing an entirely different
Model of reality it's no longer the normal waking world model which acts as
kind of an interface
With the environment, but it's constructing a
A completely different world model when you say constructing why do you use
that term?
What what do you use the brain is constructing?
Because you're well, okay, so
So if you think about you know, how does the brain interact with you?
How do we interact with environment using our senses, right?
So light information comes through the eyes
Uh the retina and it stimulates the the very back of the brain you have an area.
Oh
Oh, you brought slides. I brought slides. There we go. Yeah, maybe the next one
jamie is a bit easier to see. There we go
So at the right the back of the brain here
You have an area called v1 which is the primary visual cortex. That's your
interface with the world
Sensory information comes and strikes it activates
Patterns of neural activity in v1, but it's very very messy
It's like lines and patches of color and you know lines moving in certain
directions
It's a