Membership

The Man Who Can ‘Prove’ Life Is a Simulation—With Just a DMT Vape and a Laser

Danny Goler claims he can show you how to read the code that underpins human reality—and his movement of followers is growing.

A man follows Danny Goler's method for seeing the 'Code of Reality'. (All photos courtesy Danny Goler)

You may have seen him recently, while doom-scrolling your phone. The man with the messiah haircut, a DMT vape, and the laser, claiming to have uncovered the secret ‘Code of Reality’ lurking beneath the fabric of human existence.

You may have seen him… or maybe you haven’t. Perhaps there’s a reason for that, say his converts and supporters, who grow in number with each passing day. They suspect there are certain forces who would rather you didn’t see what Danny Goler has got to show you.

At which point, it’s probably worth gathering breath, and adding for context that Goler is first and foremost a psychonaut; that is, someone who habitually trips on psychedelics. By his count, he’s racked up more than 7,000 voyages with the fast-acting conjuror of alien visions, DMT. (Yes, he is aware that this equates to an average of one a day for around 20 years.) Yet it’s not all been for naught. Since he first entered the DMT realm in 2010, Goler claims to have forged friendly relationships with extraterrestrial beings. While most would dismiss these as hallucinatory, Goler insists they are real, and has devoted his life to trying to prove it to other people.

It was this intrepid quest that led Goler to his big discovery. He spent years getting lost in Google search rabbit holes, cutting-edge physics papers and, of course, many more DMT journeys. At points, his faith wavered; in one of his regular sermons on X, he acknowledged that the visionary beings could be “fucking with me.” But then, one fateful day in August 2020 at a Thai restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, Goler says he had an epiphany: he needed to smoke DMT and stare into the cross-shaped reflection that a diffracted 650nm red laser produces when you point it at a wall. Soon, he was doing exactly that—and he believes that the things he witnessed will change the course of history.

“I saw the code,” says Goler, a Russian-born former mandatory-service Israeli soldier who now lives in Los Angeles. Like the cascading digital green script in The Matrix, Goler says that “the code” appears to feature the katakana-esque characters which form the Japanese language. This is “proof that we live in a simulation,” he announced on YouTube, echoing the far out theory popular with figures like Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Kanye West. “If anybody ever asks themselves what it would be like to know you live in The Matrix,” intoned Goler, “well, I know for sure. I’m convinced.”

It would be easy to dismiss Goler as just another psychedelic casualty desperately in search of meaning and self-worth. But here’s where it gets interesting. 

Armed with his epiphany, Goler—a small-time actor, minor skate brand owner, parkour enthusiast, and 2014 Ninja Warrior contestant—went forth and reinvented himself as a thought leader. He purchased the domain name codeofreality.com, launched “Project Veilbreak,” and began selling trip-ready laser bundles for $153 each. At this stage, more than 300 people have followed this laser-toting, dimension-hopping Pied Piper into the DMT-verse and witnessed “the code” for themselves, according to Goler. (Several such people do so, mostly coached and primed by Goler, during a forthcoming documentary called The Discovery, whose trailer has 4.7 million views on TikTok.)

Goler’s crusade to lift the veil on our purported alien-manipulated simulation has sparked interest in high places. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advisor Charles Eisenstein appeared on his podcast, while Joe Rogan, DMT’s most prominent advocate, initiated a discussion about the phenomenon with clinical psychiatrist and DMT expert Rick Strassman. “If you look very carefully at it, from what I understand, you can see the matrix,” Strassman told Rogan in December, citing the testimonies made online. 

“I’ve been under the influence of mind-altering substances a lot, and I’ve never seen anything like that,” one of the men featured in the documentary trailer says, after staring intently into the reflection of the laser under a low dose of DMT. “It looks like code,” confirms a separate man, squinting and motioning with his fingers. “It’s definitely saying something and I just want to take a picture of it and translate it,” another claims, somehow appearing as nonplussed as he is fascinated. 

Of course, there are skeptics, even within the DMT-adjacent community. David Luke, co-founder of the psychedelics conference Breaking Convention, says that he tried it and witnessed “a glimmer of a possibility of something code-like emerging on the edge of my perception if I were to fixate on it hard enough.” However, in the absence of a robust scientific study, personal anecdotes from people who’ve almost been talked into seeing “the code” by Goler should be taken with more than a pinch of salt, Luke adds, describing his own experience as “tantalizing, but strenuous, and massively front loaded with expectation.”

Others have seen nothing. Neuroscientist Zeus Tipado, a PhD candidate at the University of Maastricht, is scathing in his critique of the amateur experiment, which he says is an optical illusion “Whenever a person begins to define reality based on fictitious films, you already suspect BS,” he says. “I tried it four different times, at different angles, while tripping on DMT, and I didn’t see anything. And I wanted to see it.”

Where psychedelic visions come from is ultimately a mystery. Scientists suggest that fractal visions could reflect the brain’s geometric architecture, or even hexagons within the eye, while others proffer theories related to the retina and serotonin. Many have visions of Aztec art while tripping. This may indicate that people who use mushrooms or DMT today are tapping into some kind of common consciousness with Mexican ancients. Less poetically, they may just be remembering a piece of art they saw one time.

“I’m not gonna back down from these claims.”

Danny Goler

Neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore says that his main hypothesis for “the code” is that a laser speckle effect—a pattern of dark and light spots on the retina—leads the DMT-altered brain to conjure images featuring the katakana-esque characters. Andres Gómez Emilsson, founder of the Qualia Research Institute, adds that plenty of people haven’t even seen “the code” despite their best attempts, undermining the claim that the experience has a universal neurovisual signature.

For his part, Goler is adamant that “the code” is not merely a vision but actually out there in the ether, something that only becomes perceptible to the underpowered human eye thanks to his DMT-laser combo. “I know whatever it is that we’re looking at is real,” he says, over the phone. “That’s the first claim that I’m claiming with absolute certainty. Second, that whoever is communicating [through ‘the code’] is as real as you and me. I’m not gonna back down from these claims.”

That “the code” is some kind of indecipherable “alien symbolism” is another given for Goler, who claims extra terrestrials are communicating with him through the number 42. After I first spoke to Goler at the end of December, he sent me a series of Signal messages detailing various recent occasions when he’d felt the number had pursued him—printed on the side of hacky sacks, the timestamps of moments he is mentioned in YouTube videos, and scrawled on sidewalks. (He also claims it was his 42nd birthday on January 28: the date my editor at VICE chose to publish this story.)

He attributes this unique connection with otherworldly forces to his years spent traveling “further than most have ever ventured into these territories,” seemingly imbuing him with singular insights into the nature of consciousness, and life itself.

“What is the value that I see the code potentially providing for humanity? I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but I do know it’s a real structure that contains language of some sort that does something we were not aware of. That’s an enormous leap in understanding what the world really is. And since creating accurate maps is one of the most useful skills we’ve ever encountered, I’d claim that just the knowledge of its reality provides an enormous value.”

danny goler

His ideas may seem far-fetched, but if anything Goler has refined his theories and dialed down some of his wilder assertions lately. He even recently had a pilot paper published to lay the groundwork for a future scientific study. But his “strong conviction” remains, which is this: “The code is some form of tracking of the unfoldment of realities in our local region. It almost creates a stable environment based on algorithms that allow it to create a coherent environment for conscious beings.”

“Goler is a distinctly modern type of prophet,” wrote Ed Prideaux for the Ecstatic Integration blog. “While transhumanism has struggled to produce compelling spiritual exemplars… Goler’s experimental spirituality is reminiscent of 19th-century spiritualists experimenting with Ouija boards or ‘spirit photography’ to try and peer beyond the veil.”

Not all emerge from the potentially gnosis-inducing search for the code unscathed. One podcaster who tried out the experiment with Goler in Costa Rica said that afterwards, he endured “two months of nihilism, maybe longer, to the point where I didn’t see the point of living.” He’d already been grappling with the idea that life might be a simulation and after seeing Goler’s code, recalled asking himself, “What’s the fucking point, then?” However, Goler maintains the podcaster actually experienced “a spontaneous awakening” unrelated to his DMT-laser technique. In the long run, the individual in question (who, despite the information being public, asked not to be named by VICE) has said the realisations he gained were ultimately “reassuring,” allowing him to make peace with the apparent nature of reality. Another person, prior to Goler’s surge to subcultural prominence, had reported seeing “secret codes” with the help of a laser and DMT. They were soon experiencing visions of “all these little demon programmers assembling the secret codes” and claimed to have experienced a psychotic break, which led them to be detained by the police. The original Simulation Theory subreddit, meanwhile, was shut down by its moderator after many commenters reported mental distress.

For his part, Goler recommends that only long-time DMT users try out his technique. “DMT is not a joke,” he warned in a video. “The experience can be very confounding and even scary at times. I would say that unless you’re a seasoned experiencer with DMT, don’t try this.”

The announcement served as a rare note of caution for Goler, who views “the code” as some sort of panacea for a society lacking in meaning. “It’s true that we postulate all kinds of extravagant things, even in physics,” he says. “Extra spatial dimensions, parallel universes, the holographic principle… but I don’t think anyone has ever imagined, me included, that in our lifetime we will have any experiential access to these more hypothetical portions of reality.

“And yet, here we are.”

Whether we are really there or not, Danny isn’t going to stop staring into the red light.

Follow Mattha Busby on Instagram @matthamundo