The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2002 - Amanda Feilding

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 Thank you very much for doing this.

00:00:14.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:15.000 Thank you.

00:00:15.000 It's lovely to meet you.

00:00:17.000 And I really, really appreciate your life's work.

00:00:21.000 I mean, I think what you've done has been really remarkable, particularly because of the time period in which you embarked in it.

00:00:29.000 I mean, you sort of got involved in psychedelics and psychedelic research at the very beginning of it and when it was extremely controversial and very difficult to do research.

00:00:43.000 Well, I actually got involved in it when it was incredible fun.

00:00:51.000 I was incredibly lucky with my timing, I think, because I was very attracted to the other side, if you like, the mystical, because I lived in this very,

00:01:07.000 very isolated spot, and one had nothing to do but kind of mooch around in a beautiful place, have mystical experiences, dream of the future.

00:01:19.000 Is that your phone?

00:01:20.000 There we go.

00:01:21.000 When did you first get involved or even interested in what you would call mystical experiences?

00:01:29.000 I'll let you show it.

00:01:30.000 Sorry, sorry, sorry.

00:01:32.000 I don't know how to turn these things off.

00:01:35.000 Do you want me to turn it on mute for you?

00:01:36.000 Yes, please.

00:01:36.000 Okay.

00:01:38.000 These wacky kids today and their devices.

00:01:41.000 Sorry about that.

00:01:43.000 No worries.

00:01:45.000 No worries at all.

00:01:47.000 How old were you when you first got interested?

00:01:53.000 Very young, I should say.

00:01:56.000 I grew up in this very isolated place.

00:02:06.000 I was very, very close to my father, who came back from the war, a diabetic, and he was a very eccentric person.

00:02:14.000 And so, from three, I was his carer.

00:02:18.000 Three years old.

00:02:19.000 Yeah.

00:02:20.000 Which was a lovely role.

00:02:21.000 I mean, I was a little pet dog.

00:02:23.000 I went everywhere with him.

00:02:24.000 I adored him and he adored me.

00:02:27.000 And he was a very out of the...

00:02:30.000 He wasn't in normal society at all.

00:02:33.000 How so?

00:02:34.000 He just wasn't.

00:02:35.000 He was eccentric and charming.

00:02:40.000 Did his own thing.

00:02:41.000 Artist.

00:02:44.000 A farmer, but not really a farmer.

00:02:47.000 He couldn't bear any farming.

00:02:49.000 Yeah, anyway.

00:02:52.000 And I suppose spiritually I had three.

00:02:56.000 My mother was a Catholic, so I grew up a Catholic.

00:02:59.000 And then he was whatever, agnostic, atheist, nothing.

00:03:04.000 Except a thinker.

00:03:06.000 And then his best friend, who was his kind of...

00:03:09.000 He picked up as the person who did all his work when he was at university, called Bertie, became a Buddhist monk, a rather famous Buddhist monk.

00:03:20.000 So he was a big influence in the absence because he was my godfather.

00:03:25.000 And so I had these three influences.

00:03:28.000 And so I kind of dreamt of...

00:03:33.000 Doing magic, mystical things in the world.

00:03:37.000 And had mystical experiences as lots of children do.

00:03:42.000 And so then, I'm sorry, I can't quite think how to condense it.

00:03:51.000 But anyway, I grew up in an unusual setting.

00:03:58.000 And with a passion for altered states, mystics.

00:04:02.000 I started studying them when I was probably about 10. Really?

00:04:05.000 Yeah.

00:04:06.000 And it became rather a passion.

00:04:10.000 And in the place we lived, it got three moats.

00:04:14.000 It was very overgrown.

00:04:17.000 And in between the moats, there was a...

00:04:19.000 A mound, a very beautiful mound, where I had a kind of pet god who lived in the mound.

00:04:27.000 And my mission was making this god figure laugh.

00:04:35.000 So that was the aim of the game.

00:04:38.000 So when you say you studied the mystical states at 10, how so?

00:04:43.000 How were you doing that?

00:04:45.000 Well, when I started reading, I started reading about it, but I don't know what I meant by that.

00:04:51.000 But when I went to church, Catholic church with my mother, and there was incense and all that sort of thing, and I had kind of mystical experiences with Jesus.

00:05:00.000 I was very close to Jesus in those days.

00:05:03.000 And then...

00:05:07.000 Whatever.

00:05:08.000 But it was a kind of rather wild, quite a dangerous upbringing.

00:05:13.000 We had to do the farming.

00:05:15.000 It was a mixture between a rather kind of beautiful setting, but quite a mixture with peasant life of looking after the animals.

00:05:29.000 Farm animals, pigs, cows, all of that sort of thing.

00:05:34.000 And then at one point I decided I wanted to leave home and I went to a boarding school.

00:05:39.000 It was a terrible mistake.

00:05:42.000 And a convent.

00:05:45.000 And actually I won the Sounds, when I was 16, won the Sounds Prize.

00:05:51.000 It was quite clever, but I hated it.

00:05:52.000 It lived outside the boundaries of the school all the time.

00:05:57.000 And then I wanted books on Buddhism for my prize.

00:06:02.000 And the nuns said, no, no, we can't give you books on Buddhism.

00:06:06.000 And so I said, all right, I'll leave.

00:06:10.000 Thanks very much.

00:06:12.000 And educate myself, which is what I did.

00:06:14.000 I left school at 16. Really?

00:06:17.000 And it was because they wouldn't allow you to study Buddhism?

00:06:20.000 Yeah.

00:06:22.000 That's what I chose to study.

00:06:23.000 And they wouldn't.

00:06:24.000 So I said, thanks.

00:06:25.000 In the original days of the church, the incense, what they would walk down the aisle with, that was cannabis.

00:06:31.000 That was beautiful.

00:06:32.000 I mean, the one thing I loved about that convent, there was in the chapel, they had even song, and this Italian nun with the voice of an angel, and it really, with incense, took one into a mystical space.

00:06:49.000 Yeah.

00:06:49.000 And that was very special.

00:06:51.000 That was the high point of it.

00:06:52.000 They used to use cannabis and then the host.

00:06:55.000 What did the host used to be?

00:06:56.000 The host?

00:06:57.000 I mean, obviously, originally, it was a psychedelic.

00:07:01.000 Yes.

00:07:02.000 Do we know what psychedelic?

00:07:05.000 I think different places are different ones, but kind of based on mushroom or ergot or those sort of things.

00:07:14.000 I'm rather keen on making sacred hosts.

00:07:19.000 I recently was involved in that.

00:07:22.000 Anyway, that's a different story.

00:07:24.000 But I would love to hear that story.

00:07:26.000 You make sacred hosts?

00:07:27.000 No, I don't, but I'm going to.

00:07:29.000 You're going to?

00:07:29.000 I'm intending to.

00:07:30.000 I once actually, the story was very much a shock.

00:07:36.000 Probably a Catholic comrade.

00:07:41.000 Once I was in Paris and we were walking by Notre Dame on a Sunday.

00:07:48.000 And very high and went into the church and lovely Eucharist.

00:07:56.000 I hadn't heard all those wonderful songs.

00:07:59.000 I love those Latin, 16th century, 15th century chanting.

00:08:06.000 And so I experienced having the host again.

00:08:10.000 And it was so delicious.

00:08:13.000 Spiritually, it was wonderful.

00:08:15.000 And so I can absolutely see originally the host was a psychedelic experience.

00:08:22.000 And...

00:08:25.000 With that music and the incense, it's a beautiful spiritual experience.

00:08:30.000 Yeah.

00:08:30.000 I'm sure that was probably the root of a lot of those religious ceremonies.

00:08:34.000 I think so.

00:08:35.000 Have you read John Marco Allegro's book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross?

00:08:39.000 No, I haven't.

00:08:40.000 No.

00:08:41.000 Is that a good one?

00:08:42.000 It's an amazing book.

00:08:43.000 Right.

00:08:43.000 John Marco Allegro was an- Oh yes, I remember his name.

00:08:46.000 I remember his name.

00:08:47.000 I don't think I ever read him.

00:08:48.000 He was an ordained minister who was a religious scholar and an expert on language, and he was one of the decipherers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:08:57.000 Right.

00:08:57.000 So he worked with that for 14 years.

00:08:59.000 They deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:09:01.000 And then he wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which was his interpretation of what the Dead Sea Scrolls was really all about.

00:09:07.000 And he believed that the origins of Christianity were in the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.

00:09:13.000 Yeah, I absolutely agree.

00:09:15.000 I'm sure psychedelics were the root of all of those spiritual practices and part of them.

00:09:22.000 Most likely.

00:09:22.000 Yeah.

00:09:23.000 So when you were first experiencing these things, like what year are we talking about when you first got excited about these things?

00:09:31.000 Let me just think.

00:09:33.000 When was it?

00:09:34.000 Well, I first smoked cannabis when I was 16. And funnily enough, the first time I smoked it, Ray Charles was playing.

00:09:46.000 Oh, wow.

00:09:47.000 And I felt this is paradise.

00:09:50.000 Mm, yeah.

00:09:51.000 And I bet millions of people had Ray Charles and their first sounding of cannabis.

00:10:00.000 But it was wonderful.

00:10:01.000 It's amazing what it does to music.

00:10:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:10:04.000 So I was 16, which was...

00:10:07.000 I was born in 43, so I know who that was.

00:10:10.000 Yeah.

00:10:13.000 Anyway, that's when I started smoking cannabis.

00:10:17.000 And I was there at Oxford at that point with a very interesting group of...

00:10:22.000 They were older than the other students because they'd been in Korea, so they were much better educated.

00:10:28.000 And they were smokers.

00:10:30.000 And introduced me to wonderful books like Against Nature and L'Autrement and...

00:10:39.000 Well, rather wonderful material.

00:10:44.000 And it was a very creative period.

00:10:46.000 And at that point, as I'd left school by then, I had somehow got the world's leading Expert.

00:11:00.000 Like...

00:11:00.000 What was the American one?

00:11:03.000 Anyway, on comparative religions and mysticism.

00:11:07.000 Someone called Professor Zainer, who's at all sales in Oxford and wrote a book called Mysticists of the Sacred and Profane.

00:11:15.000 And he became my tutor.

00:11:17.000 So I went and saw him twice a week, which was a very kind of awkward meeting.

00:11:26.000 So...

00:11:29.000 Because I was very shy and he was very shy and it was in all cells.

00:11:33.000 And we both sat there cuddling the cats kind of thing.

00:11:37.000 And then finally I decided the best way forward was to bring my very, very handsome cousin who was a student at Oxford because he was gay. 0.79

00:11:47.000 Loosen everybody up.

00:11:48.000 Yeah.

00:11:49.000 Oh, very smart.

00:11:50.000 And then it became very friendly and fun.

00:11:53.000 But anyway, he'd written this book, which I actually didn't agree with, which was saying mysticism, sacred and profane.

00:12:03.000 And he was the Catholic combat, actually.

00:12:05.000 And he thought that he'd had one experience with mescaline, I think it was, and not liked it, and thought that they were a very different bracket to the experience you could get through an endogenous mescal experience, which I don't actually think is necessary.

00:12:22.000 I think they're the same experience, but obviously with different qualities.

00:12:27.000 I've heard you say that you believe that what psychedelics do is make the mind more fertile for these experiences.

00:12:34.000 Is that a good way to...

00:12:35.000 Yes.

00:12:35.000 That's exactly what I think.

00:12:37.000 I think you're at that level where the ego's control has dissolved to some degree.

00:12:45.000 And so it's like fertile ground.

00:12:48.000 And so if you've...

00:12:50.000 Whatever.

00:12:52.000 If you're ready for a mystical experience, you're more likely to have it in that experience, in that state of mind.

00:12:59.000 So the mind is actually restricting us in many ways through the ego from having these experiences.

00:13:05.000 Yes, I think so.

00:13:06.000 And what psychedelics do is release those boundaries.

00:13:10.000 Yes.

00:13:10.000 I think that due to the evolution of man, homo sapiens, and taking the upright position, this is a theory I was introduced to in 1966,

00:13:28.000 and actually I think a lot of the details are probably wrong, but in concept I think it's true.

00:13:38.000 Which is the ape standing upright.

00:13:43.000 One thing people haven't taken into account is, obviously there are hundreds of acids that are standing upright.

00:13:50.000 You free your hands, you run faster, you see further, all of that.

00:13:53.000 But in the upright position, gravity is against the blood in the brain.

00:14:00.000 Because in the brain there are two fluid volumes, blood and cerebral spinal fluid, which is water, basically.

00:14:06.000 Which is made in the brain itself.

00:14:10.000 So it has, can squat its rights in the brain.

00:14:14.000 So when you're in the upright position, gravity is pulling the blood down.

00:14:22.000 So I think probably with the upright position we lost...

00:14:28.000 A small proportion of our blood supply.

00:14:30.000 I mean, some animals, if you tie them up right, a dog, for instance, if it's tied up so it can't get down, it will start howling and go mad.

00:14:42.000 It hasn't got the valves to keep the blood up.

00:14:45.000 And we've obviously got a certain amount, but maybe we lost some blood at that upright position.

00:14:51.000 And as a compensation for that loss, I think we developed an internal mechanism more than any other animal has done it, which is to direct the blood where it most needs to go.

00:15:07.000 Obviously, all animals do that.

00:15:09.000 They have the power to Send the blood where it's most important to survival or whatever.

00:15:16.000 And I think that through the use of the conditioned sound, the word, we learn to control that.

00:15:32.000 We're good to go.

00:15:58.000 That our basic state is slightly low in blood in the dominant organ.

00:16:06.000 So we have to keep this mechanism of tight control where the blood is distributed.

00:16:13.000 And that is evolved with the ego, which is essential.

00:16:19.000 I mean, we wouldn't survive without the ego to kind of...

00:16:24.000 To direct the blood where it's most needed.

00:16:28.000 People who lose their ego, and in the 60s when people took large doses of LSD as it was then, every day, sometimes they lost their ego, they flipped out.

00:16:43.000 And there was one occasion of someone we knew who was in Ibiza.

00:16:49.000 And he'd flipped out and he put the key in the lock to open the door.

00:16:54.000 Someone would say goodnight to him.

00:16:56.000 He put the key in the lock and left him.

00:16:58.000 And then in the morning he was still there with the key in the door because the head hadn't told him, turn the key to open the door.

00:17:08.000 Wow!

00:17:09.000 We need the words to keep us, you know.

00:17:12.000 Yes.

00:17:13.000 Under control.

00:17:14.000 Yeah.

00:17:15.000 So, the words have made us what we are, this incredible animal who can, you know, have a nuclear war if we want, or know all the atoms in the body, all those brilliant things we do, which is amazing.

00:17:31.000 But we're also obviously a very deeply faulted animal at some point.

00:17:40.000 We're...

00:17:42.000 You know, neurotic, psychotic, psychote, you know, all of those things because of this shortage of blood and then the dependent on the meaning of the work.

00:17:57.000 So if we have a terrible conditioning, which a lot of people do, the separation from reality, Is, in a sense, the meaning of the word.

00:18:13.000 So, the danger of our society now, in a sense, is we're getting further and further away from nature, in a sense.

00:18:25.000 And that in a way is why psychedelics can be a very useful medicine because they increase the connectivity with the senses, with the internal bodily senses and also the outside perceptual senses.

00:18:45.000 So I actually think that We're entering a kind of new possible age, and that's why for fun I call it the psychedelic age, because for the first time we've got or getting the knowledge by which we can actually understand the brain better and understand how we can alter the volume

00:19:15.000 of blood in the brain, which is giving the brain energy.

00:19:18.000 The whole thing is about energy.

00:19:20.000 The more energy we have, the more parts of the brain can function simultaneously.

00:19:26.000 And that obviously can be very creative, stimulating, empathic, by just having more of the brain functioning.

00:19:46.000 And so I think that the knowledge of psychedelics, and when I say psychedelics, I don't actually mean necessarily psychedelics, because as we all know, one can get these experiences endogenously.

00:20:01.000 Through exercise or...

00:20:04.000 Holotropic breathing.

00:20:05.000 Holotropic breathing, exactly, or breathing exercise.

00:20:08.000 I mean, all the spiritual training all knew that.

00:20:12.000 That's what they were doing in the spiritual disciplines, is teaching people how to control...

00:20:20.000 Their internal ego and also their sense of consciousness.

00:20:28.000 And I think at the center of the spiritual experience is the getting higher and loosening.

00:20:37.000 The grip of the ego, so you're more in touch with nature.

00:20:41.000 Do you think that in the absence of these psychedelic experiences, one of the problems with words is that we develop narratives and then we use our ego to reinforce these narratives and we sort of deny objective reality?

00:20:56.000 Yes.

00:20:56.000 I think more and more the word can become the reality.

00:21:02.000 I mean, in the creation of words, which we all have and have to have and are thankful to have, but nevertheless it does create a slightly different world.

00:21:15.000 It's rather like the shadows on Plato's wall.

00:21:19.000 One gets one's internal edition of the world.

00:21:30.000 I think it's good to be in contact with nature and I think It's a dangerous path that we're taking now where it becomes more and more life is the screen.

00:21:50.000 But still, that's where we're going.

00:21:53.000 And it has great advantages as well as dangers, I think.

00:22:01.000 I do think that the knowledge of getting high has always been central to the human evolution.

00:22:12.000 And at the earliest...

00:22:25.000 I think that's incredible.

00:22:37.000 And it's like 30-something thousand years old?

00:22:40.000 Exactly, 35, 40, something around there.

00:22:43.000 Wow.

00:22:43.000 So, I can tell, because I, in some respects, as an artist, I know those strokes.

00:22:51.000 Let's see, pull up some of those images, Jamie, because some of those images are amazing stuff.

00:22:56.000 They're just incredible, aren't they?

00:22:57.000 Yeah.

00:22:58.000 The movement of animals, the feeling.

00:23:00.000 Yeah, they did create a feeling of movement, like the animals were running.

00:23:03.000 Yeah, and the lines, I mean...

00:23:07.000 Anyone who paints, I mean, Picasso, I think, said without them he would have never done what he did.

00:23:13.000 I can't remember quite, but modern art isn't better.

00:23:19.000 It gets as good, but not really.

00:23:21.000 It's crazy because they're depicting rhinos too, which is really wild.

00:23:26.000 There was rhinos in France.

00:23:28.000 Yeah, beautiful ones of horses and buffaloes.

00:23:35.000 And that's in the bowels of the earth they're doing.

00:23:38.000 So it was obviously a very spiritual, because why go into the bowels of the earth if it's just a kind of magical spiritual experience they're having.

00:23:48.000 And so I think without doubt they were high.

00:23:54.000 How they got there, was it through singing, drumming or singing, or was it through taking compounds?

00:24:02.000 Funny enough, I've recently been introduced to a charming man who's an archaeologist in charge of the Chauvet, and I said I'd love to be able to analyse and see if we can find out.

00:24:14.000 If there's any remnants of some psychoactive substance.

00:24:18.000 And he said, I'm very welcome to go there.

00:24:20.000 So I'm very excited about the possibility.

00:24:23.000 Are you aware of Brian Murrow-Rescue's work?

00:24:26.000 Yes, I knew him years ago.

00:24:28.000 He approached me at the UN. Oh, that's great.

00:24:31.000 Pro bono lawyer work for me.

00:24:33.000 Really?

00:24:33.000 But I never took it up.

00:24:36.000 Maybe it would help you better if this was on the top of your head?

00:24:39.000 How do you do that?

00:24:40.000 It seems like it's falling.

00:24:40.000 Like that?

00:24:40.000 Yeah, there you go.

00:24:41.000 There you go.

00:24:42.000 That's bad.

00:24:43.000 Thank you.

00:24:43.000 That way it won't fall down.

00:24:44.000 Yeah, his work with determining that in Eleusis that they were using ergot and some other psychedelics.

00:24:53.000 I know the book and I know him very much.

00:24:56.000 And also I know from long ago, Carl Rook wrote the original book.

00:25:05.000 Do you know that one?

00:25:06.000 No.

00:25:07.000 The Road to Eleusis?

00:25:08.000 Yeah, I've heard of it.

00:25:08.000 Which is a very good book with Albert Hoffman and the banker.

00:25:16.000 What was his name?

00:25:17.000 Anyway.

00:25:18.000 So they know that those people, at least back then, the Eleusinian mysteries, that they were using psychedelics.

00:25:24.000 And, you know, it's obvious from art.

00:25:26.000 What I think is that one can sense when the civilization...

00:25:45.000 Yes.

00:25:47.000 Yes.

00:25:58.000 I mean, that Eleusis, that Chauvet, I mean, they must have been high to produce that incredible art.

00:26:07.000 And the same at Eleusis and all of that Greek. 0.94

00:26:12.000 I mean, it's never taught at schools and things.

00:26:17.000 Both my sons did classics at Oxford.

00:26:19.000 None of them...

00:26:21.000 It was never mentioned to Lucis.

00:26:23.000 Do you know what I mean?

00:26:24.000 Yeah.

00:26:24.000 It's amazing.

00:26:25.000 There at the center of the whole classical world is the mystical experience of death and rebirth.

00:26:33.000 Well, Harvard's opened up a field of study about this.

00:26:35.000 Yeah, which is quite interesting.

00:26:37.000 But I knew a student 20 years ago who wanted to do his PhD in Lucis.

00:26:43.000 And Harvard told him, if you do that, you won't get it.

00:26:46.000 Yeah, that was a giant problem after 1970, correct?

00:26:51.000 Like after the sweeping psychedelic back where they made everything Schedule I, psilocybin, mescaline, everything.

00:26:57.000 And when they did that, not only did they ruin...

00:27:02.000 The possibility of having those experiences for so many people because it was forbidden, because it was very dangerous, you could get arrested, but also it stopped all the research.

00:27:11.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:27:12.000 It was 50, 60, 70 lost years, which is a criminal thing actually.

00:27:19.000 And the untold suffering of the millions of people who went to prison, usually from minorities, And had their lives ruined by a record for maybe having been caught for a joint three times or whatever. 0.61

00:27:36.000 I mean, it is horrific what happened.

00:27:40.000 Well, there's people in jail right now for that in this country, which is insane.

00:27:43.000 It's insane.

00:27:44.000 And I mean, I started fighting them back whenever, when I started the Beckley Foundation.

00:27:49.000 I saw that in order to do research, one had to change the drug policies.

00:27:55.000 And the two went hand in hand.

00:27:59.000 Right.

00:28:09.000 Right.

00:28:11.000 Right.

00:28:12.000 Right.

00:28:14.000 I think what MAPS has done, which is genius, is their work with MDMA and soldiers.

00:28:21.000 Soldiers having PTSD. Absolutely.

00:28:24.000 When you think of soldiers and you think of people in the military, you generally think of people who are right-wing, who have more authoritarian leanings.

00:28:34.000 But yet, these are the people that would be aided the most by these psychedelics, particularly coming back from war.

00:28:39.000 Absolutely.

00:28:40.000 So because of that, I believe they've opened up a door to an understanding.

00:28:43.000 Absolutely.

00:28:43.000 I think it's very, very important.

00:28:45.000 And that's why in the 70s when, because I was involved in it in the 60s mainly, when my passion to change the world started when I first really knew the value of psychedelics, which was probably in 65 onwards.

00:29:02.000 And as the door of repression came down, one could see it's a kind of disaster for humanity.

00:29:11.000 But I thought the only way we could overcome it is by using the language of the establishment to prove that these compounds can actually heal humanity, not be damaging for humanity as they were advertised as,

00:29:28.000 but actually there are How good to healing and better happiness, more fulfilled life.

00:29:40.000 And so I thought that that's why I started doing the science, to try to, with the language of the modern world, which is science, to demonstrate how valuable these compounds are.

00:29:56.000 And I think our first...

00:29:58.000 That's why I set up the Beckley Imperial Study.

00:30:01.000 And the first study we did was using psilocybin.

00:30:05.000 And then we saw that I wanted to do LSD, but we couldn't do LSD in those days.

00:30:11.000 I had to be psilocybin.

00:30:12.000 And no one knows what psilocybin is, how it's spelled, what it means.

00:30:16.000 It's not so taboo.

00:30:18.000 So we got permission.

00:30:20.000 And I wanted to do brain imaging to look into...

00:30:24.000 Our hypothesis is that what they do is increase the volume of blood in the brain capillaries.

00:30:33.000 And hopefully with MRI one would see that.

00:30:36.000 But anyway, what we did see in the first study we did with psilocybin was a decrease of blood in the default mode network, which is a modern expression of the ego, part of the ego.

00:30:53.000 And that was very interesting because the default mode network, i.e.

00:30:59.000 the ego, is hyperactive underlying psychological conditions like depression or anxiety or addiction or all of those things have a hyperactive ego.

00:31:15.000 Saying, I need a drink, I'm so depressed.

00:31:19.000 And we saw that psilocybin lowers the blood supply to that part of the brain.

00:31:26.000 And so then actually we got a government grant to help us do the next phase of the study.

00:31:34.000 So I think it's very important showing how, because as we all know, we're in an epidemic of mental illness now, getting ever more.

00:31:49.000 And rather surprisingly, and in a way rather ironically, science, which has been so determined to prove that the spiritual is an old man in the sky, it's just total rubbish, which he finally has done.

00:32:07.000 Now, at the very centre of the new healing, i.e., Psychedelic-assisted therapy is the mystical experience.

00:32:18.000 And what we showed is the people who underwent what's kind of categorized as a mystical experience, i.e.

00:32:25.000 loosening of the ego, a feeling of unity, those are the ones who have the best outcomes of overcoming their depression.

00:32:35.000 So it's rather a beautiful little...

00:32:41.000 Ironical twist that now suddenly the psychedelics are at the center of this new approach to healing.

00:32:52.000 And I think the healing of psychedelics goes much, much farther than what we've touched on so far, which is the psychologically-based conditions.

00:33:08.000 I think it can be very, very useful in different doses because what is so wonderful about psychedelics is they have totally different effects in the different dose.

00:33:17.000 Right.

00:33:18.000 And at the...

00:33:21.000 Mini micro dose.

00:33:26.000 I'm beginning to have evidence and I'm just starting a study which shows amazing potential results of microdose for Alzheimer's.

00:33:37.000 Really?

00:33:38.000 Interesting.

00:33:39.000 Absolutely amazing, remarkable.

00:33:42.000 Really?

00:33:42.000 Yeah.

00:33:43.000 I was watching a video yesterday on cannabis and Parkinson's.

00:33:47.000 It was incredible.

00:33:48.000 There was a gentleman who had horrible loss of control of his body and the shaking.

00:33:54.000 And they gave him cannabis oil.

00:33:56.000 And he put it under his tongue.

00:33:58.000 And a few minutes later, he's lying back on the couch.

00:34:01.000 And then he holds his hands out and his hands are dead straight.

00:34:04.000 I'm like, this is extraordinary.

00:34:06.000 And my partner, who is the father of my children, he got Parkinson's.

00:34:14.000 So I was very well.

00:34:15.000 I'm very fond of him.

00:34:18.000 Mild Parkinson's, but still it was Parkinson's.

00:34:21.000 And so I'd heard how, and I've studied it, how microdosing Ibogaine is very good for minimizing.

00:34:34.000 So I'm wanting to do, I'm setting up a research into that.

00:34:38.000 Interesting.

00:34:40.000 Yeah, this is the gentleman right here.

00:34:41.000 This is exactly the video that I saw.

00:34:43.000 So this guy has terrible loss of control of his body.

00:34:48.000 He can barely hold the cannabis oil in his mouth.

00:34:51.000 Ah, poor man.

00:34:52.000 Yeah.

00:34:53.000 I mean, he's struggling so bad.

00:34:55.000 But now why?

00:34:56.000 It says 1.37pm.

00:34:58.000 This is when he takes it.

00:34:59.000 And then you see just a few minutes later, they show him lie back.

00:35:04.000 And this is at...

00:35:05.000 Go ahead, Jamie.

00:35:07.000 That's 141. Look at this.

00:35:09.000 I mean, not even 10 minutes.

00:35:11.000 That is magic.

00:35:12.000 And look at this.

00:35:12.000 And he's fine.

00:35:14.000 He sits up.

00:35:16.000 And he's just blown away by it.

00:35:19.000 He's like, it's so quickly.

00:35:20.000 And look at his hands.

00:35:21.000 Incredible.

00:35:22.000 No, that is wonderful.

00:35:23.000 I have a friend who has a child that has pretty severe autism, and when he gives the kid cannabis, when he gives him edible cannabis, it just stops it.

00:35:32.000 It just stops it.

00:35:33.000 The kid can make eye contact, communicate.

00:35:36.000 Absolutely.

00:35:37.000 Well, I could show you.

00:35:39.000 The trouble is I can show you privately, but the person involved doesn't want it to go out.

00:35:47.000 Of a wonderful old lady of 97 who had Alzheimer's for seven years or something, but she was very bright.

00:35:57.000 She was a pirate and was looked after by her son. 0.97

00:36:03.000 And then he went away for a week and someone else came and looked after.

00:36:06.000 And when he came back, she was at a kind of Acute vegetative apathy, where she didn't recognize him, just staring into space.

00:36:19.000 And they discussed it before, and she'd said she knew he sometimes took a psychedelic, and so he gave her a microdose of LSD. And an hour later, I've got the photograph, she's a little sparkling old lady with her full contact with him,

00:36:40.000 saying, I feel so wonderful, let's read some poetry now.

00:36:43.000 Wow.

00:36:44.000 You know, just like that man.

00:36:45.000 Yeah.

00:36:46.000 And then he contacted me and said, what should he do?

00:36:50.000 So I said, well, first thing would be to get a doctor to help you.

00:36:55.000 I manage it and then continue with the lower doses gets that effect, which was 10 micron, which is 10 millionth of a gram.

00:37:08.000 I mean, such a small dose, you would hardly think it could have an effect.

00:37:12.000 And that does something which I'm doing research on now.

00:37:16.000 I think it's to do with the connectivity between the different brain centers, which I think it sparks.

00:37:22.000 And it brought her back.

00:37:24.000 And her children said it was just remarkable.

00:37:27.000 It's incredible.

00:37:28.000 You know, and I've noticed the same things I'm very...

00:37:32.000 I'm in the middle of getting going on the autism study.

00:37:37.000 Because I think certainly with level one, they're lower...

00:37:44.000 Degrees of autism.

00:37:47.000 Microdosing LSD can be enormously beneficial.

00:37:53.000 I've got a friend who's had experience of that and wrote a very good book about it actually called Autism and LSD. And so now I'm designing a study, getting his advice on the autism level of things.

00:38:11.000 And I think that, what I think is, what I'm fascinated in, and this is where I got this interest right back in 1966, are what are the mechanisms underlying That makes LSD and associated compounds have the effect it has.

00:38:35.000 And obviously then there was no brain imaging, so it was very difficult to see inside the brain.

00:38:39.000 One could only theorize about it, make hypotheses.

00:38:44.000 And so this Dutch scientist who I had a long relationship with had this hypothesis That it constricts, it's a vasoconstrictor,

00:39:00.000 constricting the veins, so blood comes into the capillaries, can't get out, the capillaries blow up and squeeze out the cerebral spinal fluid, and then slowly over the hours, gravity pulls the blood down again.

00:39:21.000 That's the theory.

00:39:22.000 Yeah, and you go back to normal.

00:39:24.000 But during that period of more blood in the brain, you have more energy.

00:39:31.000 Now I'm looking into, now, how does it make more energy apart from providing more glucose and oxygen?

00:39:38.000 And I've got a very, very interesting something which is coming up, which I'll tell you on my next talk about.

00:39:42.000 Okay.

00:39:43.000 But I'm very excited because I think people, anyone you talk to would say that the psychedelics or indeed cannabis, they all work on the same direction.

00:39:55.000 I think cannabis and the psychedelics have the same underlying mechanisms, but at different levels of I think the constrictions, the psychedelics are much stronger because you obviously get much higher you can on the psychedelic,

00:40:11.000 but they're going in the same direction.

00:40:14.000 And that's what the endogenously A lot of the...

00:40:19.000 I'd love to know more about that.

00:40:20.000 I will, if I've got time, do that study into the underlying, you know, serotonin, dopamine, all the different enzymes, hormones in the body which can do these things endogenously.

00:40:36.000 I mean, we know the saint's got top high.

00:40:40.000 Saint Teresa, her description of her...

00:40:47.000 Yes.

00:40:56.000 I think one of the things that's very interesting about cannabis too is the difference between eating it and when your body's producing 11-hydroxymetabolite from the eating of it.

00:41:07.000 It can produce a very powerful psychedelic experience.

00:41:11.000 Absolutely.

00:41:12.000 And my experiences with it where it's been very profound are with the sensory deprivation tank.

00:41:18.000 Yes.

00:41:19.000 I have a sensory deprivation tank, and I do it with edible marijuana.

00:41:24.000 Right.

00:41:24.000 And it's incredible.

00:41:25.000 Right.

00:41:26.000 And I think there's some...

00:41:27.000 I've got a friend who grows marijuana, and I think I'm very interested in the...

00:41:33.000 He always wants me to work with one of the breeds, he breeds, because it is like a psychedelic.

00:41:40.000 And I thought I'd call it the, if I do it, the Beckley brain boost, because he...

00:41:47.000 It brings back his memory.

00:41:50.000 I think we're only beginning to scrape the top of the knowledge of how these compounds work and how we can use them for humanity.

00:42:02.000 Well, it's just very unfortunate that research was stopped for so long.

00:42:06.000 Yes.

00:42:06.000 And we're very fortunate that there's people like yourself and MAPS and some of the other groups that have continued research and really pushed for the legalization of this.

00:42:16.000 Yes, and I think now we've got a tipping point where I think we've got enough good research which really shows, without doubt, that we can get better results with using psychedelics to help and cannabis than we can get without it.

00:42:40.000 It's really criminal not to throw money at this research so we can get it out to the people quicker.

00:42:47.000 Because access is what we need for all those people who have got terrible things they're suffering from, which could be helped.

00:42:56.000 And, I mean, I do as much of the research as I can, but I'm a tiny organisation, four or five people.

00:43:04.000 And tiny amounts of money we've got.

00:43:06.000 And to get a study going takes a year of paperwork, getting permissions, getting the compounds which I'm at the moment doing because I'm wanting to re-civilize LSD because I think LSD is actually the purest.

00:43:27.000 And the cleanest of the compounds, and in many ways, the best.

00:43:32.000 Not against, I think, psilocybin and other ones are wonderful, and they all have their different characteristics, which are incredibly valuable.

00:43:40.000 But it's a complete...

00:43:44.000 Madness.

00:43:45.000 That the one which is really, in a way, the purest is kind of opening up a magnification of what we are with very little external colouring, I think LSD is.

00:43:58.000 And as it is completely non-toxic, you can give it to people Forever.

00:44:06.000 It's not toxic.

00:44:07.000 They aren't building up toxicity.

00:44:09.000 A lot of people are microdosing it now.

00:44:11.000 It's a very, very common thing, microdosing of LSD. What they're reporting is an alleviation of anxiety, a heightened state of wellness and of awareness and of being in the moment, clarity.

00:44:26.000 Just from a microdose?

00:44:28.000 Yes.

00:44:28.000 I mean, we actually did the first scientific research on the microdose.

00:44:35.000 I was collaborating with Maastricht in Holland.

00:44:38.000 And we did it on 5, 10, 20, I think it was, those doses.

00:44:47.000 And I mean it was amazing the results.

00:44:50.000 It increases mood, it increases neuroplasticity, it increases neurogenesis, it increases anti-inflammatory, it increases tolerance to pain.

00:45:09.000 Vigilance, you know, all of these very valuable qualities in a microdose.

00:45:15.000 And we could be using that with all sorts of indications which need actually more energy to kind of overcome certain deficits.

00:45:27.000 And all sorts of therapy applications because you do it and you're essentially completely sober.

00:45:32.000 Yes.

00:45:32.000 In the sense of you can communicate, you see things clearly, everything is fine.

00:45:37.000 Yes.

00:45:37.000 But you have achieved a very elevated state.

00:45:40.000 Absolutely.

00:45:41.000 But you say everyone can do it.

00:45:44.000 It's only those very few who know how...

00:45:47.000 I come across innumerable people who I know someone who you know.

00:45:53.000 Who has terrible migraine.

00:45:56.000 And he had a microdose of OST. And it cured it.

00:46:03.000 And he has terrible problems in getting it.

00:46:05.000 And it's not easy to get.

00:46:09.000 So, do you see what I mean?

00:46:11.000 And a lot of people don't want to have to go on to the dark web.

00:46:14.000 I have no idea how you do the dark web.

00:46:16.000 Do you know what I mean?

00:46:17.000 Right.

00:46:17.000 And what you're opening yourself up to when you get on the dark road.

00:46:20.000 Exactly.

00:46:20.000 You don't know what the product is.

00:46:22.000 I mean, what I've said about the...

00:46:25.000 I mean, I spent 10 boring years talking at the UN and places, not totally, but I went there, trying to say we should have a drug policy which is based on SARMs, on harm reduction, on human rights,

00:46:41.000 you know, and cost effectiveness.

00:46:43.000 I mean, you know, and not one which is the exact reverse.

00:46:47.000 Right.

00:46:48.000 Well, that's sort of the problem is cost.

00:46:50.000 The real problem is there's a vested financial interest in keeping these things illegal.

00:46:55.000 Yeah.

00:46:55.000 Because there's a lot of psychological medications that people are taking, psychiatric medications that people are taking that they really don't need.

00:47:03.000 Yeah.

00:47:04.000 Yeah.

00:47:04.000 And it keeps companies and also prisons were the second biggest industry.

00:47:11.000 Yeah.

00:47:11.000 Because it's free labor and a lot of funding coming in.

00:47:15.000 It's very twisted.

00:47:16.000 It's awful.

00:47:17.000 That aspect of it is terrifying.

00:47:19.000 It is terrifying.

00:47:20.000 And, I mean, I've been at it.

00:47:22.000 I wrote a report on the, whatever you call them, the United Nations Convention on Drugs, which is obviously created by America, but 190 countries follow it.

00:47:35.000 Actually, if only enough, America's the one which is breaking it, but doesn't allow other countries to break it. 0.69

00:47:41.000 But not one word has been changed in the last 20 years.

00:47:47.000 Which is crazy.

00:47:48.000 Which is crazy.

00:47:48.000 Especially when considering what we know now.

00:47:51.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:47:51.000 About the benefits of it.

00:47:53.000 Were you friends with Terence McKenna?

00:47:55.000 Did you know him?

00:47:55.000 I knew him, yes.

00:47:57.000 What did you think of his stoned ape theory?

00:48:00.000 What was that?

00:48:02.000 The stoned ape theory is the theory that Ancient hominids, when the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting with different food sources.

00:48:13.000 One of the things they started doing was tipping over cow patties to find grubs and beetles and on those cow patties, psilocybin mushrooms would grow.

00:48:20.000 And that they started eating those and that it increased visual acuity, it increased their arousal states.

00:48:29.000 And that they also think glossolalia and so many different – the formation of language.

00:48:34.000 So many things came about from that.

00:48:36.000 Yes.

00:48:37.000 I mean I wouldn't put it exactly the way he put it.

00:48:39.000 But I would say that we know animals.

00:48:43.000 We know that reindeer eat mushrooms.

00:48:46.000 And as mushrooms – exactly.

00:48:48.000 As they're toxic, the king reindeer – We're good to go.

00:49:14.000 So animals have taken it.

00:49:16.000 I think that psychedelics were an integral part of Homo sapiens' evolution, if you see what I mean.

00:49:30.000 I don't think it's the only feature at all, but I think it's one of the major, you know, the development maybe of the mirror neuron was very important in one or two other things, but I think that's a major lift.

00:49:45.000 I think at the center of Human culture is the experience of altered states of consciousness.

00:49:56.000 He attributed it to the increase in brain size.

00:49:59.000 He believed that, you know, because of the neurogenesis properties also of psilocybin, he thinks that it may have contributed to the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.

00:50:11.000 I mean, I definitely think all of those things are showing.

00:50:17.000 I mean, he was a poet.

00:50:19.000 He wasn't, you know, he expressed it poetically. 0.99

00:50:24.000 So, I mean, he talked a lot of rubbish. 0.91

00:50:26.000 I know that because I went to a lot of conferences with him and I knew it. 0.99

00:50:30.000 What did you think was rubbish?

00:50:31.000 Well, I can't remember, but exaggerated things. 0.91

00:50:33.000 The time zero?

00:50:35.000 Whatever, you know.

00:50:36.000 Yeah, time wave zero.

00:50:42.000 You know, deep thinking.

00:50:45.000 Well, he was very compelling.

00:50:46.000 Yeah, absolutely, and that's wonderful.

00:50:48.000 Yeah, and he got a lot of people to be interested in psychedelics because he was so interesting to hear.

00:50:53.000 Yeah, and a very good presentation.

00:50:55.000 Yeah, an unusual voice too.

00:50:56.000 Yes, wonderful.

00:50:57.000 Irish.

00:50:58.000 Yes, yes, yes.

00:50:59.000 Very, very good.

00:51:02.000 Yeah.

00:51:06.000 Yeah, I think these compounds are integral to where Homo sapiens has got to.

00:51:14.000 And I think the disaster is that we started repressing it.

00:51:21.000 I mean, obviously, even at the time of Jesus, it was kept secret.

00:51:26.000 It was always kept secret, even at Eleusis, which went on for 2,000 years.

00:51:31.000 They kept it secret.

00:51:33.000 Probably that's why Socrates had to commit suicide, because he had it with his boyfriend at the dinner parties.

00:51:40.000 You know, it was only to be used sacredly for the ceremonies.

00:51:48.000 Yes.

00:51:48.000 Which I actually think...

00:51:52.000 I mean, so I think that's an incredibly important part of it, the ceremony.

00:51:57.000 But I think also, as an elixir, when we get knowledgeable about how to use these compounds, they're just amazing health, mental health problems.

00:52:12.000 Elixirs.

00:52:14.000 And I think, I mean, I'm obviously, as I get older, very, very interested in how one can hopefully delay the...

00:52:27.000 And it's all based on blood, you know.

00:52:30.000 As we get older, the blood supply gets worse to the brain.

00:52:35.000 So how does one keep the supply of energy as...

00:52:40.000 It has topped up, basically, in the most beneficial way for the animal.

00:52:47.000 And I think, funnily enough, the cerebral circulation is out of fashion.

00:52:58.000 Because we discovered about the cerebral circulation whenever we did 100, 200 years ago, it's considered old-fashioned.

00:53:05.000 So modern South really isn't interested in the blood. 0.88

00:53:10.000 Actually, you know, everyone knows blood goes up, blood comes down.

00:53:15.000 But there's very little interest in it.

00:53:19.000 I mean, I worked with one of the leading Russian scientists who was on their space program and was the leading world expert on cerebral circulation involving cerebral spinal fluid and the relationship with cerebral spinal fluid and blood.

00:53:35.000 We worked together for about six years, and then he died in COVID at 80-something.

00:53:40.000 Which was a tragedy, actually, because he also was very interested in The kind of related thing of the possible increase in pulsation brought about by trepanation,

00:53:56.000 which is a very ancient practice, which maybe brings the level of cerebral circulation back to childhood level, which is higher than the adult level.

00:54:07.000 We should explain trepanation to people because trepanation is a very ancient practice of drilling holes In one's head.

00:54:16.000 And you decided to do it.

00:54:18.000 You were in your 20s when you did this?

00:54:21.000 Yes.

00:54:21.000 And what influenced you to do that?

00:54:24.000 What was the motivation?

00:54:27.000 Well, it was the theory of it which induced me to do it.

00:54:32.000 And in a way, I prefer not talking too much about it, not because I'm not in favor of researching it, but because I haven't done the research.

00:54:44.000 So I can't say, look, this has been proven by science, which until then, people didn't believe psychedelics worked.

00:54:53.000 They would say, that's placebo, fancy.

00:54:57.000 Only that when you show in science...

00:55:00.000 But anyway, the hypothesis is that when we are born, as we all know, there's the fontanelle, which are holes, which close soon, and you can see the pulsation.

00:55:15.000 In the fontanelle hole of the baby.

00:55:18.000 You can see the frame passing.

00:55:20.000 And then the holes close, but the sutras, the bones, are quite flexible.

00:55:28.000 So there's still the full pulsation, the full systolic pulsation is happening.

00:55:36.000 Then, as you grow and the bones grow together, slowly, slowly, some of the pulsation is suppressed because it hasn't got the room to explain.

00:55:47.000 So, the hypothesis of Trepanation, which has been done now.

00:55:53.000 The earliest skull found is, funny enough, the archaeologists at Chauvet told me, near Chauvet, they found a trepan skull of 25,000 years old.

00:56:09.000 And you can see if the person lived after the trepanation.

00:56:14.000 Because the bone grows.

00:56:15.000 Yes, and softens.

00:56:17.000 So that's kind of, I think, I haven't been studying it for the last 20 years because I've been on to psychedelics too much.

00:56:24.000 But I long to, because it's very close to what I want to do.

00:56:27.000 Do we know the origins of trepanation?

00:56:30.000 Do we know how it was...

00:56:31.000 We know it's the oldest operation in the world, that it's done all around the world.

00:56:38.000 It's very much associated with religion, mysticism, religion, Very often the skulls which are trepanned have a special burial.

00:56:52.000 They are buried in a pot or with silk around them, showing that they're either priest caste or royal caste or something.

00:57:02.000 But they're very present in every culture which is interested.

00:57:09.000 Not very present, but present.

00:57:11.000 And the biggest Massive Japan scalps.

00:57:17.000 Funnily enough, I think it's on the German-Dutch border.

00:57:21.000 I don't know why.

00:57:23.000 From what time period?

00:57:25.000 Pre-history, I'm afraid my memory's back and I haven't been studying it lately.

00:57:31.000 But the thing is, wherever you look, there's, I mean, the third eye, the thing in your picture, the third eye, I was told by a high thing, is a visualization of the third eye.

00:57:50.000 And one of the high...

00:57:55.000 I can't quite think of the word.

00:57:57.000 The high aims of Buddhism spiritually is by meditation opening your hole in the skull.

00:58:06.000 And that's in beautiful old Tibetan art showing...

00:58:13.000 Energy coming in and out of the hole in the head.

00:58:17.000 So it's always been, why I think the priest caste was associated with it, because I think that on the whole it was the priest caste which took the compounds to get high, whatever they were, mushrooms or argot.

00:58:35.000 And the danger of getting high is when you come down, you have a bad time.

00:58:40.000 Maybe flip out, but have a bad time.

00:58:42.000 And I think it was probably observed that the people with a fractured skull or wound or whatever it was, a hole in the head, actually slightly kind of rose to the top in the village, in the thing.

00:58:55.000 They became the doctors or the shamans or...

00:59:01.000 It seems to have an advantage.

00:59:03.000 Because like in Mexico, skulls, everyone grows up with skulls.

00:59:08.000 You know, they have skulls.

00:59:11.000 Like these.

00:59:12.000 These Day of the Dead skulls.

00:59:14.000 They're not real.

00:59:16.000 No.

00:59:17.000 Right.

00:59:18.000 Well, I've seen, I mean, because I was interested in, I've seen quite a lot of scowls.

00:59:24.000 In fact, I've even got one, which is, I think it's, I can't quite remember, 400, 700 BC. An Irish chieftain is meant to be.

00:59:35.000 And it's got actually six holes in it.

00:59:37.000 And why anyone wants to do six holes, I have no idea.

00:59:41.000 Some of them are quite large, too.

00:59:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:59:44.000 But I think, I personally think that the change happens with one whole.

00:59:52.000 All you need is for the membrane to be able to expand on the heartbeat.

00:59:58.000 And I think what the restoration at the point of trepanation It's allowing that expansion on the heartbeat to the full expansion of the systolic pressure, which the child has until it starts to close over,

01:00:14.000 kind of 13 onwards, the child comes down, 21, the average, the skull closes.

01:00:20.000 And that's often when the mental problems start after 21, psychosis and all of those things.

01:00:28.000 You're just at a slightly lower level in terms of energy for the brain.

01:00:33.000 And what I want to do, it's very easy research to do, trepanation, because people are doing it in hospitals every day, by the thousand.

01:00:42.000 If there's any brain operation, first you have to trepan the skull.

01:00:47.000 Right.

01:00:47.000 So it's happening all the time.

01:00:49.000 So we could very easily, actually.

01:00:51.000 I work with some very top-level scientists in Mexico, and I want to get that study going again, and particularly doing it for headaches, migraine, because it used to historically, in my father's encyclopedia,

01:01:08.000 which is, whatever, 1912, I can't remember when it was, something like that, It said trepanation has been done throughout history, and it is still currently being done with apparent success for the treatment of mental conditions,

01:01:27.000 migraine, and da-da-da.

01:01:28.000 So, until in the First World War, they did the first lobotomy.

01:01:35.000 And that stopped trepanation as just an old wives tale.

01:01:40.000 So in a sense, they threw out the baby with the bathwater.

01:01:45.000 And I think that there is something...

01:01:49.000 It's quite easy to do.

01:01:51.000 So I'm...

01:01:52.000 My...

01:01:55.000 I'm trying to find the possibilities and I really want to do this research with trepanation.

01:02:05.000 Funnily enough, years ago I was at Burning Man and I had a campaign What was it?

01:02:11.000 Barlow.

01:02:12.000 Barlow was an old friend of mine and he got a lot of rather important people to sign up that they wanted to be trepanned.

01:02:19.000 And we were going to do, you know, so getting people trepanned legally in a research program.

01:02:25.000 But it never happened.

01:02:26.000 But what I want to say is that, for instance, Jamie, my husband, got trepanned.

01:02:38.000 How long ago did he do that?

01:02:41.000 How long ago?

01:02:42.000 How long ago did he do it?

01:02:46.000 A long time ago.

01:02:47.000 I mean, soon after we got together.

01:02:51.000 And very difficult to find.

01:02:53.000 We were looking for someone in Egypt and found a wonderful surgeon there actually who did it, who was very interested in the kind of mathematics of pyramids and things.

01:03:04.000 And he had terrible headaches all his life.

01:03:09.000 He lost a day or two a week on headaches.

01:03:14.000 After his trepanation, he doesn't have headaches.

01:03:17.000 Wow.

01:03:17.000 And I think it just gives back to the body and the brain that extra pulsation, which means...

01:03:29.000 I mean, you have it from all that exercise you do, so constantly you're getting that extra blood to the brain through your exercise.

01:03:36.000 Wow.

01:03:37.000 But for those of us who don't do all that exercise, it's good to have alternative ways of keeping the blood going.

01:03:45.000 That's got to be a big factor in the runner's high.

01:03:48.000 Yeah.

01:03:49.000 Because in runner's high, they achieve these states of elevated consciousness.

01:03:54.000 Absolutely.

01:03:55.000 Yeah.

01:03:55.000 I met one, I'm sure you've met plenty, but who runs, I think he said 140 or some enormous number, 100 miles or something.

01:04:06.000 And he said at a certain point he had a breakthrough where he got into a kind of real altered state of consciousness.

01:04:15.000 And I'm sure one day we can do all these things endogenously.

01:04:21.000 I mean, obviously that's what meditation is doing.

01:04:24.000 It's training you to do your own way of getting high.

01:04:29.000 And monks and people, they productively spend 30 years of their life doing it.

01:04:36.000 And I think that's wonderful.

01:04:38.000 But for those of us who would like a quicker technique, I think there's nothing wrong than learning to use a non-toxic substance to help us get up there.

01:04:54.000 And so, I think, funny enough, I think the new...

01:05:01.000 How I look on it, it's all about feeding the brain with enough energy, mitochondria, working away, to produce that mental cell energy,

01:05:16.000 so that we can keep our function close to the optimal.

01:05:23.000 That's what we want.

01:05:25.000 Or, anyway, not allowing it to drop too low.

01:05:29.000 And that's what I think is the purpose, in a way.

01:05:35.000 Not the only purpose at all.

01:05:38.000 I actually think psychedelics have Value in a lot of different non-specific areas.

01:05:47.000 One is self-realizations, experience, beauty, love of beauty, love of sound, love of people, love.

01:05:57.000 I think it increases compassion and empathy and nature love and all of those rather good human qualities.

01:06:09.000 So I think it has...

01:06:12.000 The sensible use of the psychedelics, and by that I also mean cannabis, I mean the consciousness-altering techniques And I think those people who do it purely by meditation are to be very much admired because it's wonderful not to need an outside thing just to be able to do it within your own self.

01:06:39.000 Like a hot bath and a freezing bath or any of those techniques obviously change your level of consciousness by bodily reactions.

01:06:49.000 But also I think the use of Of the psychoactive compounds, we can, you know, tune it.

01:07:00.000 So it's a very, very I think?

01:07:23.000 And he was an artist, so he didn't like his sugar level going high because then you lose your sight and his terror was going blind.

01:07:32.000 So he always kept his sugar level low.

01:07:34.000 So every day he was getting short of carbohydrates, falling in a ditch.

01:07:40.000 If he was driving a car, he drove over the centre of roundabouts.

01:07:44.000 You know, he did all sorts of funny things.

01:07:46.000 When he was short of carbohydrates, my job was putting the sugar in his mouth.

01:07:51.000 And so I got a very good relationship of knowledge of how the glucose level controls your level of concentration, if you like.

01:08:06.000 And how important it is.

01:08:08.000 So when Bart, this Dutch scientist, told me his hypothesis of psychedelics increasing the volume of blood in the brain capillaries, and particularly if you're doing a cognitively demanding activity,

01:08:24.000 you use a lot of glucose and the sugar level falls.

01:08:28.000 Therefore, you need to keep the sugar level normal by increasing the intake.

01:08:36.000 And actually, all those years before it was legal, we lived on LSD. When I say live, I meant on big doses every day.

01:08:49.000 We really lived.

01:08:51.000 And I psychoanalysed myself.

01:08:54.000 I was doctor and patient and read the whole Freud, Reich.

01:09:00.000 Did you make notes?

01:09:02.000 Did you take a journal during that time?

01:09:04.000 Not a journal, but I did diagrams of, you know.

01:09:07.000 And I watched myself.

01:09:09.000 I overcame, for instance.

01:09:11.000 I was very tall as a child.

01:09:14.000 I hated being taller than everyone else.

01:09:19.000 So at about 13 I started smoking cigarettes behind the bushes.

01:09:26.000 So I was pretty addicted by the time I met Bart when I was 22 or 23, I can't remember.

01:09:33.000 I was pretty addicted.

01:09:34.000 And he said, what a horrible habit it was, mine, smoking.

01:09:38.000 So then I said, well, I'll give up.

01:09:40.000 And so I took a trip of LSD with the intention, I'll stop.

01:09:47.000 It's a horrible habit.

01:09:48.000 Just give it up.

01:09:50.000 And I never smoked another cigarette.

01:09:53.000 Do you remember when you did that, when you took the LSD with the intention of giving up cigarettes?

01:09:59.000 Yeah.

01:09:59.000 Do you remember what happened to you?

01:10:02.000 Do you remember?

01:10:02.000 Yeah, I do.

01:10:04.000 I remember smoking a cigarette during the trip and thinking, yak, it's disgusting.

01:10:09.000 I remember when I was a child, young child smoking, made one feel a bit sick.

01:10:14.000 One had to repress the feeling of sickness.

01:10:17.000 And then I realized, gosh, it makes me feel sick.

01:10:19.000 Yeah.

01:10:20.000 Yeah, it's horrible.

01:10:21.000 It's making you sick.

01:10:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:10:23.000 So I gave up.

01:10:24.000 And 40 years later, whenever, when I was talking to Roland Giffith, funny enough, I had, I think it was $10,000 to do a research program.

01:10:38.000 So I went to Roland at that time, said, I've got this.

01:10:44.000 He said, oh, what would you like to do?

01:10:45.000 What would you suggest?

01:10:46.000 Yeah.

01:10:47.000 So I said, well what about overcoming nicotine addiction?

01:10:50.000 I did that.

01:10:52.000 With LSD, we could do it with psilocybin try.

01:10:55.000 And that was the basis of the study.

01:11:01.000 I mean, I remember the first lot was 80% success rate.

01:11:06.000 Yeah, 80% success rate.

01:11:08.000 I don't know what it is now.

01:11:10.000 But it's extraordinarily successful because actually nicotine is more difficult to give up than heroin because you're always repeating it.

01:11:19.000 So I experimented in those years when we were living on LSD. We worked.

01:11:27.000 That was our passion.

01:11:28.000 We were studying the human brain.

01:11:31.000 And the self.

01:11:32.000 And the t-shirt I've got for you is, the motto is, know thyself.

01:11:38.000 And that was what one was doing, trying to understand how we work better at that level and how we can enhance our working.

01:11:51.000 And I just think There's a lot more to be learned about how we can, if we concentrate more on giving the brain the energy it needs to function optimally,

01:12:14.000 how can we help that happen?

01:12:18.000 Obviously exercise is one.

01:12:23.000 I've always slightly avoided the exercise route, being lazy.

01:12:31.000 But I have to say, you know, there are alternatives which can be used to the health of the person.

01:12:37.000 And I think it's a tragedy.

01:12:41.000 That one can't talk about things more openly.

01:12:45.000 Yes.

01:12:46.000 It's not easier to carry out research, because I know, having done it for now over 20 years, or over 50 years, trying to do research into psychedelics, how difficult it is.

01:12:59.000 I mean, in order for me to do it, I realized I had to stop being Amanda Fielding.

01:13:07.000 No letters after my name, no money, so who am I? And become a foundation.

01:13:13.000 Funnily enough, it was a very clever conceptual artwork.

01:13:17.000 Because in England, it's very kind of liberal England.

01:13:20.000 You pay whatever it is, and you become a foundation.

01:13:24.000 A thousand pounds, I think, or something.

01:13:26.000 Suddenly you're a foundation.

01:13:27.000 You don't have to have any money.

01:13:29.000 You're just a foundation.

01:13:31.000 Registered.

01:13:33.000 In Scotland, I'm registered.

01:13:35.000 And then I got the top scientists in the world, 10, 15 of them, including Albert Hoffman and Sascha Shorgan.

01:13:45.000 But the more important ones were the established ones like...

01:13:53.000 I always forget his name.

01:13:55.000 He was wonderful.

01:13:56.000 Colin Blakemore, who was a kind of top neuroscientist in the world at that point.

01:14:02.000 And he very much backed what...

01:14:04.000 We were going to start a centre at Oxford studying it, but that was going to cost four million and we couldn't get it.

01:14:10.000 And various other high-level scientists.

01:14:13.000 I had a very impressive advisory board.

01:14:18.000 And so then I gave a series of seminars at the House of Lords where I had presidents and blah, blah, blah.

01:14:25.000 All the head of NIDA, head of the Russian people, asked themselves if they could come.

01:14:32.000 So 70 invited people came to discuss global drug policy.

01:14:36.000 That made quite a difference.

01:14:38.000 That went on for 10 years or something.

01:14:40.000 And then I went to the whatever national, what would you call it...

01:14:49.000 Anyway, I advised certain governments and things on drug policy.

01:14:54.000 The United Nations went there regularly trying to change things.

01:14:59.000 So through this foundation?

01:15:00.000 Yeah.

01:15:01.000 If you don't mind, when you had your own personal experience with trepanation, what was that like?

01:15:08.000 Yeah.

01:15:08.000 What did it do for you?

01:15:10.000 Yeah.

01:15:12.000 It was—sorry, can I do my drive?

01:15:15.000 Sure.

01:15:17.000 I remember, I mean, no one wants to drill a hole in their head on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

01:15:26.000 I can tell you, it is not something I'm a very cautious person.

01:15:31.000 And so I... I had a deep interest in it because I had a very deep understanding of the hypothesis of blood supply and I was interested in researching it.

01:15:56.000 My partner, Joey Mellon, at that time, he was very keen on Japan-ing himself, and he was a second son, so he was a bit more casual, cavalier about it than I was,

01:16:12.000 and so had quite a few missed shots before he finally got through.

01:16:21.000 And, funny enough, then I did notice a difference.

01:16:25.000 And the difference is Very subtle.

01:16:30.000 You really have to know a person to notice it.

01:16:33.000 But how I'd express it is it slightly lowers the neurotic characteristics, if you see what I mean.

01:16:43.000 They become, I mean, they don't eliminate them in any way, but it lowers it.

01:16:49.000 And so having seen the difference, because Bart was Japan before I knew him, so I never experienced a change. 0.71

01:16:59.000 But when I saw the change in Joe, I thought, well, it does make a difference.

01:17:03.000 So I had thought I'd find a doctor.

01:17:05.000 So I'd spent four years looking for a doctor to tell me.

01:17:09.000 And I had people who said they would nearly, and then they said, I've got man dust to have a hole in his head.

01:17:15.000 He would have given us one.

01:17:18.000 Or, you know, it could be bad for my career on Harley Street if it came out or if you died or, you know, whatever.

01:17:26.000 And so it didn't happen.

01:17:27.000 So then I thought, well, I'm a sculptor.

01:17:30.000 I'll sculpt my own skull and see what happens.

01:17:33.000 So I really studied it because I'm a very, very cautious person.

01:17:37.000 And in London, strangely, there...

01:17:40.000 The shop was called Down Brothers.

01:17:43.000 It's off Harley Street and has all the instrumentation for trepanation.

01:17:47.000 Very old shop, actually.

01:17:50.000 And charming staff there who showed me in detail how you trepan because I went in as an interested observer.

01:17:58.000 And so I... Learned how to do it very cautiously.

01:18:04.000 There are three layers of bone, etc., etc.

01:18:07.000 I learned how to do it.

01:18:08.000 So I felt competent to do it.

01:18:12.000 And that took quite a long time, deciding I was competent and confident I could...

01:18:21.000 No, do it.

01:18:21.000 So I decided to make a film of it because I thought that would kind of separate me from the unpleasantness of doing such a silly thing.

01:18:29.000 And so I made, funnily enough, my great aunt just died and given me £70 and I bought a lovely little movie, Super 8 camera, and set it up.

01:18:39.000 And I had my beloved Birdie always with me, so he was an observer of this thing.

01:18:48.000 There's all sorts of stories, which I won't waste the time, which was amazing because we were asked to a party by a rather kind of guardian journalist, top journalist in England, for the Saturday night.

01:19:02.000 I had been planning on doing it on the Sunday, but I moved it forward.

01:19:08.000 So I thought it would be good publicity for the movement if I... Anyway...

01:19:16.000 I moved it forward.

01:19:17.000 And then there was an electricity strike in England.

01:19:21.000 So if I hadn't moved it forward, the electricity would have been cut, which was just a kind of good little trick or beating fate to do it.

01:19:32.000 So anyway, I did it very, very carefully with a hand to pan in the mirror.

01:19:37.000 Perfect little operation.

01:19:38.000 Was it a drill?

01:19:40.000 Drill.

01:19:41.000 Electric drill.

01:19:42.000 But I used a ball with a flat bottom, so it couldn't damage the membrane, because obviously...

01:19:49.000 What one's frightened of is damaging the membrane surrounding the brain.

01:19:53.000 I mean, I don't want to go into detail with it at all, but all I can say, I did it, I knew the second I was through, because the second you're through, there's no resistance.

01:20:05.000 And it had a flat bottom, so it couldn't.

01:20:07.000 I mean, it's not something one wants to do at all.

01:20:11.000 But it's kind of like people go skiing, people go horse riding.

01:20:15.000 Just the same danger.

01:20:17.000 You know, it's a danger.

01:20:19.000 Possibly infection is the only danger.

01:20:21.000 That's the danger.

01:20:23.000 And I always say no one should do it themselves. 0.96

01:20:26.000 It's a foolish thing to do.

01:20:28.000 But then when I'd finished, I bandaged up.

01:20:34.000 We went out and had steak for dinner to replace the lost blood and then went to this party.

01:20:42.000 And the photograph, which I don't know if you know, the birdie on my shoulder was the evening that came out of the Super 8 movie.

01:20:53.000 So...

01:20:53.000 I've seen the images.

01:20:55.000 Yeah.

01:20:55.000 But I haven't seen...

01:20:57.000 Apparently you never released the video.

01:20:59.000 I never released it.

01:21:01.000 And the person who made the film actually, as always, conned one.

01:21:06.000 So I had forbidden to let the images out on public thing because I didn't want anyone doing it.

01:21:18.000 And funnily enough...

01:21:19.000 Why did you not want anyone doing it?

01:21:21.000 Because I don't think self-travelation is a good idea.

01:21:24.000 But you did it.

01:21:24.000 Yeah, but I'm me.

01:21:29.000 You know, I took trouble not to.

01:21:31.000 And funnily enough, when I did an artwork in New York about it at PS1, because at that period I was trying to educate the world through art.

01:21:43.000 And I had this exhibition at PS1 of the slides.

01:21:47.000 Norm was great.

01:21:48.000 It was like an Egyptian tomb.

01:21:51.000 It was lovely.

01:21:52.000 Norm's womb they gave me. 1.00

01:21:56.000 Apparently people were queuing up, including people like Warhol and Bernardo Bertolucci couldn't get in, blah, blah, blah.

01:22:05.000 It was a kind of quite a hot movie at that point.

01:22:09.000 And people fainted, it said in the papers, like ripe plums falling to the ground.

01:22:15.000 But then 60 Minutes did a film of it, of me, and wanted to film me back at Beckley.

01:22:25.000 With Birdie, who was my pigeon, who was never in a cage, who was always free.

01:22:32.000 And so they flew me home on Concord, because I was pregnant with my oldest son, Rocky, to fill me with Birdie.

01:22:41.000 And Birdie was a very strong sense of justice.

01:22:48.000 And I'd broken the cold of love by going away.

01:22:51.000 So if I went away, he punished me Until the punishment had been done.

01:22:59.000 So when they flew me back from Concord, he wouldn't come down from the house top.

01:23:05.000 Anyway, they made this film, and he was very pleased, very nice director.

01:23:09.000 And then it was, as always, when one did something which was well done, it was...

01:23:19.000 Not allowed to go out.

01:23:21.000 Because the lawyers said there'll be an epidemic of people traveling themselves.

01:23:26.000 Were you worried about that?

01:23:27.000 Were people copying you?

01:23:28.000 No, not really.

01:23:30.000 Just too crazy.

01:23:31.000 Yeah, too crazy.

01:23:32.000 What was your personal experience like?

01:23:35.000 What was it like after it was over?

01:23:37.000 Sorry, you asked me that.

01:23:40.000 How I described it at the time...

01:23:45.000 It was like the tide coming in.

01:23:50.000 There was a kind of stillness in the brain, that internal, endless internal conversation of basically the ego.

01:24:01.000 Calm down.

01:24:05.000 Of course, one can explain all of those things could happen anywhere just from relaxation of having finished it, blah, blah, blah.

01:24:17.000 So, what difference does it make?

01:24:20.000 I would say it makes a slight difference.

01:24:25.000 It's slightly like the energy.

01:24:27.000 I mean, I watch children.

01:24:30.000 Children have that extra energy.

01:24:31.000 You know, they do those leaps and rounds and play around and that energy.

01:24:37.000 Adults don't. 0.71

01:24:41.000 Energy is a more difficult thing.

01:24:42.000 And when I became twenty-one, I'd had one of my trips to Egypt where I lived very wild.

01:24:49.000 And I thought I got Bill Hartz here, which is a worm you get and drains your energy.

01:24:56.000 And I went, when I got, I was 21, I went and got myself tested thinking I'd caught it, but I hadn't.

01:25:04.000 Then I realised that that was adulthood.

01:25:06.000 It's a slightly lower level.

01:25:10.000 And very often that's when people have their first schizophrenic experience or some mental thing after that.

01:25:20.000 It's a down.

01:25:22.000 It's a slight down.

01:25:24.000 There's a slight down.

01:25:28.000 Exuberance.

01:25:28.000 And that's what I noticed after.

01:25:31.000 But the difference is so slight, I couldn't swear on it at all.

01:25:37.000 How long did the difference last?

01:25:38.000 Well, you only notice the difference.

01:25:42.000 You don't notice the change.

01:25:45.000 Do you see what I mean?

01:25:46.000 So now I can't say, have I got any advantages?

01:25:50.000 Is my hole closed?

01:25:51.000 Is it open?

01:25:52.000 I can't say.

01:25:54.000 Have you ever got it looked at to see if it's closed?

01:25:59.000 No.

01:25:59.000 I tried to, actually, and it was very difficult to do.

01:26:04.000 I'd like to do that.

01:26:05.000 It's a very small hole, though, right?

01:26:07.000 Well, it was that big.

01:26:09.000 Okay, so a quarter of an inch, a couple of millimeters?

01:26:12.000 It was wide enough.

01:26:13.000 All you need is for the heartbeat to express itself.

01:26:17.000 It's all about the expression of the heartbeat.

01:26:21.000 And it takes half an hour.

01:26:25.000 If it was shown to increase cranial compliance, which is what I worked on with this professor, Yuri Boskalenko, who was a leading professor in those things, he thought,

01:26:40.000 yes, it increases cranial compliance.

01:26:44.000 And that's just a slightly healthier state to be in.

01:26:49.000 And so it takes half an hour to do it.

01:26:52.000 In hospitals, the nurse does it. 1.00

01:26:54.000 The surgeon doesn't have to do it.

01:26:56.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:26:57.000 It's a nothing operation.

01:27:00.000 So if that can slightly raise the level of energy going to the brain for the rest of the life, it's a valuable thing.

01:27:13.000 But do you think that these people that have multiple holes in their head, is there like a point of diminishing returns when they're doing it?

01:27:22.000 I should think they had big grain or some terrible thing which went on.

01:27:27.000 And they were trying to alleviate it.

01:27:30.000 Yeah, I think something like that.

01:27:33.000 Because I don't see the logic of it says you only need one to get the expansion back.

01:27:40.000 But that's why I actually don't talk about it now because it sounds so crazy.

01:27:46.000 Right.

01:27:47.000 That's the problem is the optics.

01:27:48.000 Yeah, it sounds crazy.

01:27:49.000 Yeah, it's not good optics.

01:27:51.000 Until you've got it proven, which I actually seriously want to do, because what I do is on research with people with headaches, migraines, headaches, whatever, some form.

01:28:03.000 Because that's one of the things that all cultures who did it, one of the things they did it for was headaches and insanity. 1.00

01:28:10.000 In the old days, they said, it's letting devils out.

01:28:16.000 And the other indication is letting light in.

01:28:20.000 Because often people in the mythical tradition were trapanned.

01:28:27.000 So I actually, before I hit the bucket, I would really like to have done that research because maybe no one else will be motivated to do it.

01:28:39.000 Right.

01:28:39.000 Has anyone been motivated to do self-trepanation that you were friends with?

01:28:45.000 Yeah, I know quite a lot.

01:28:47.000 Not a lot, but a few.

01:28:48.000 I mean, and then they started saying, oh, I certainly wouldn't Japan anyone.

01:28:54.000 I wouldn't dream of it.

01:28:54.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:28:55.000 See, that's why I found a very good surgeon, brain surgeon and team in Mexico who did it.

01:29:03.000 So he did it for certain people.

01:29:06.000 And people wrote back saying it had altered their life.

01:29:09.000 You know, I think...

01:29:13.000 If I was asked, do I think it has effect or not, I would say I wouldn't be humiliated if it didn't, but I think it does.

01:29:23.000 That's my opinion.

01:29:26.000 For instance, it changed my dream pattern after I'd done it.

01:29:31.000 I used to have very anxious dreams, which very often were about Birdie, my beloved Birdie, getting killed in some way.

01:29:42.000 After the tribulation, I didn't have those anxious dreams.

01:29:45.000 So that's something which I couldn't control.

01:29:48.000 Anyway, I think it makes a difference.

01:29:51.000 So I'm in favor.

01:29:53.000 But we need to do the research.

01:29:55.000 Yeah, it's a fascinating subject.

01:29:57.000 It's just fascinating that it's existed for so long.

01:30:00.000 Yes, and very much associated with religious practice.

01:30:07.000 Basically, whatever, you know, very often, funny enough, there's in Mongolia some Japan skulls, and nearby is a very beautiful, this is very early, I forget, BC, long, 700 maybe, a little beautiful basket.

01:30:26.000 With cannabis, rather high THC cannabis in it.

01:30:30.000 I mean, I think they go together.

01:30:33.000 The trepanation, you know, like in Mexico, there are lots of trepanations.

01:30:40.000 And they went with...

01:30:44.000 The kind of spiritual practices.

01:30:45.000 It's very fascinating to me that from the moment human beings have discovered altered states of consciousness, whenever that was, that it's always been a part of this desire to sort of escape the confines of modern consciousness or of natural consciousness.

01:31:05.000 Yeah, it's to kind of slightly expand.

01:31:08.000 Yes.

01:31:09.000 Slightly get back the childhood experience.

01:31:12.000 Yeah, joy, wonder.

01:31:14.000 Yeah, joy, wonder.

01:31:15.000 I do think it's that.

01:31:17.000 And I think it's still that.

01:31:18.000 And I think that's a very healthy...

01:31:22.000 Yes.

01:31:23.000 And I think, therefore, we should...

01:31:26.000 I really seriously think we should do research on trepanation, which I can very easily do.

01:31:33.000 It just needs ethical approval.

01:31:35.000 That's the only problem.

01:31:37.000 Do you think that it's warranted...

01:31:39.000 Do you think that the use of psychedelics and psychedelic therapy can replace that?

01:31:45.000 That it's not necessary?

01:31:47.000 Yes.

01:31:47.000 No, I don't think it replaces it.

01:31:49.000 I think they're, as they were in the ancient times, they're complementary.

01:31:55.000 They're both moving in the same direction of trying to increase the energy supply to the brain, basically.

01:32:07.000 And I think that's very key for...

01:32:13.000 Our future survival, because at the moment I think we're at a very...

01:32:21.000 Critical time because artificial intelligence is getting greater than our own, etc., etc.

01:32:29.000 There's all sorts of forces which kind of build the danger up.

01:32:38.000 So we need internal growth to balance that technological growth.

01:32:46.000 Yeah.

01:32:46.000 It's such a strange contradiction that today, in a day where that growth is so necessary, these substances are so demonized.

01:32:55.000 Yes.

01:32:55.000 It's a tragedy.

01:32:57.000 And I really think it's a time.

01:33:01.000 It's a force which forced it upon us for all the wrong reasons and we all know it and America knows it.

01:33:08.000 Yeah.

01:33:09.000 It was during the civil rights movement.

01:33:11.000 They were trying to arrest the Black Panthers and the civil rights activists and all the anti-war activists and that was one of the ways they could do it. 0.91

01:33:20.000 And it's the way to enter any country you want to, like Afghanistan or Latin America or any country you can go and raid and spray and kill and capture. 0.97

01:33:31.000 You know, it was wonderful.

01:33:33.000 The CIA loved it.

01:33:34.000 And, you know, and so it was...

01:33:38.000 Which is so ironic considering that they did so many LSD experiments.

01:33:42.000 Yeah, and then threw the people who were troublesome out of the window and said they wanted to fly.

01:33:46.000 You know, that's such a typical...

01:33:48.000 I mean, it's a tragedy, the history of altered states.

01:33:53.000 I mean, like...

01:33:57.000 The midwives used psychedelics to help stop bleeding.

01:34:04.000 They realized the vasoconstrictive property of these compounds.

01:34:09.000 So they were used in childbirth. 0.98

01:34:13.000 And the midwives, they were very often the people who were burnt for witchery.

01:34:20.000 And the ironic thing is, when the witches were burnt, Then the villagers got a plague.

01:34:30.000 They called it the witch's curse of St. Vitus' dance where you shake and then you finally die.

01:34:38.000 And that's ergot poisoning because the witches went out with their hats at the full moon and their hats would show the glow of the ergot from...

01:34:52.000 The light of the moon on the ergot.

01:34:55.000 How did the hats do that?

01:34:57.000 Well, they hid them.

01:35:00.000 I mean, that's, I think, where the hat story came, because they collect the ergot by night because it's phosphorescence from the moon.

01:35:11.000 And then the burning of the witches, which was part of the Inquisition, basically, Then they had these awful plagues of St. Vitus' Dance, which was called the Curse of the Poor Old Witch,

01:35:29.000 who had been using their medication to help childbirth.

01:35:36.000 So it's quite ironic how...

01:35:39.000 The authorities translate it wrongly.

01:35:44.000 I mean, basically it was because the witch wasn't gathering the ergot off the wheat, so the villagers were eating the poison and therefore getting sick from the bread.

01:35:55.000 Yeah, that was, to me, one of the most fascinating things about the Salem witch trials, is that they found out that there was a late frost, and when they examined whatever crops that they could find back then, they did find ergot in them.

01:36:08.000 Right, right.

01:36:08.000 And they think that that was partially responsible for that whole hysteria.

01:36:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:14.000 Yeah, and it was very much intermingled with the Protestants, the inquisition between the religions and the whole thing came at the same time.

01:36:25.000 So there's been a kind of tragedy.

01:36:29.000 I mean, the point is, those in power actually don't want other people taking these compounds, like the Americans didn't want their soldiers taking acid.

01:36:40.000 Because it made the soldiers say, gosh, actually, I prefer to be in the park with my girlfriend than in some bloody wood far away getting shot.

01:36:48.000 It's pretty common sense.

01:36:51.000 Yeah, they didn't want common sense.

01:36:53.000 Yeah.

01:36:54.000 So...

01:36:57.000 It's a tragedy of the human fate.

01:37:00.000 I mean, the tragedy of humanity, us, is that we've developed this compensatory mechanism which has made us the genius that we are and we can do all these brilliant things we do.

01:37:14.000 But it also has made us this psychotic animal which is capable of great self-harm.

01:37:23.000 And somehow we need to balance it.

01:37:26.000 And that's why I rather like the phrase, The psychedelic age.

01:37:35.000 In the sense, I don't mean everyone taking psychedelics and having a party.

01:37:39.000 I mean learning the art of how do you control your level of consciousness and then how do you control that level so you can keep your concentration.

01:37:51.000 I don't go in for Leary, you know, turn on and drop out.

01:37:56.000 I say, turn on and drop in.

01:37:59.000 Yes.

01:38:00.000 You know, do, be creative.

01:38:02.000 Yeah, that was the problem with Leary, that his philosophy and what he was espousing to people was, people felt like it was dangerous to civilization, that people were going to ruin their lives, they were going to drop out, and they were going to become part of these hippie communes.

01:38:18.000 Yes.

01:38:19.000 It was all bad publicity, badly played.

01:38:25.000 Yeah.

01:38:26.000 And in those early years, in the mid-60s, when I started taking psychedelics seriously, we took it for working.

01:38:37.000 I mean, the Stones would be playing about half a mile away from our flat where I lived and still live in London.

01:38:45.000 We didn't bother to go to them because we were having such fun doing our work which studying the brain on acid.

01:38:53.000 I don't know, Hugo, my bother.

01:38:59.000 So, I think that the use, I'm sure you and millions of other people know, how incredibly inspiring for work the use of psychedelics can be.

01:39:13.000 You can see things you never saw before, you see, because suddenly having more of the brain simultaneously active, as our images showed, the two circuits, you can see this is the ordinary brain, this is the brain on psychedelics.

01:39:30.000 I've got those beautiful things came from our study.

01:39:33.000 The circuits, do you know the ones?

01:39:35.000 I've got a picture of it in my back.

01:39:38.000 You can see the difference in the brain.

01:39:42.000 And that can be used for whatever you're doing, for whatever creative, thoughtful process.

01:39:51.000 You've suddenly got all that extra brain power to dedicate towards what you feel passionate about.

01:39:58.000 It's a superpower for stand-up comedy.

01:40:00.000 For stand-up comedy, so many of my comedian friends use it to write.

01:40:04.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:40:06.000 And I have an intimate relationship with Jamaica and the deep, deep divers. 1.00

01:40:14.000 There's someone on the beach who said the one who wins that prize is his best friend, and she can stay down there much longer than the best friend can.

01:40:24.000 Because he smokes very heavily before he goes down, cannabis.

01:40:30.000 And he said that enables him to stop breathing for a much longer period.

01:40:35.000 You know, so I think whatever...

01:40:40.000 You do.

01:40:42.000 You've got more passion or energy.

01:40:46.000 So here's the imagery.

01:40:47.000 So that's the adult brain.

01:40:50.000 On the left.

01:40:51.000 On the left.

01:40:53.000 And what are these lines representing?

01:40:55.000 It's connectivity between different centers in the brain.

01:41:00.000 Wow.

01:41:01.000 So this is when you're on a psychedelic.

01:41:03.000 It doesn't matter if it's suicide but on LSD. When you're on, you've certainly got this much more intimate connection between the different parts of the brain.

01:41:14.000 And so I think it needs training to learn to...

01:41:22.000 Control that increased...

01:41:24.000 It's like riding an incredibly powerful horse.

01:41:27.000 You have to learn how you control it.

01:41:31.000 The brain is the same thing.

01:41:33.000 If you just go and take that, you can have a wonderful experience looking at the stars or having a love affair or listening to music.

01:41:40.000 All of those things can be wonderful.

01:41:41.000 But if you want to use it for cognitive discipline, which actually uses a lot of glucose because it's very late in...

01:41:50.000 In development.

01:41:51.000 So it's not part of the autonomic nervous system.

01:41:57.000 It's a part of the cognitive nervous system which burns glucose to get the energy to concentrate.

01:42:04.000 And so that's the importance of taking the vitamin C. And keeping the sugar level normal.

01:42:11.000 Can I ask you a question about that?

01:42:13.000 What about ketones?

01:42:16.000 I know many people, they get on a ketogenic diet and their brain produces ketones and they feel like intellectually that's a superior fuel.

01:42:26.000 I think probably it is a very good fuel, yeah.

01:42:29.000 I think there's a lot more we'll constantly be learning about how you can energize the brain in better, healthier ways.

01:42:40.000 But I think a secret, a basic secret, which I feel I was given the key to in 1966 when I learned about...

01:42:55.000 How one can increase the blood supply to the brain and therefore give it all that extra energy to have all the brain functioning.

01:43:07.000 And then is a whole new art.

01:43:09.000 How do you use that productively?

01:43:15.000 But I mean, that's like being a magician.

01:43:17.000 Brilliant magicians aren't.

01:43:19.000 They have to practice.

01:43:20.000 So it's a skill.

01:43:22.000 I always say, to take psychedelics, you have to be much more disciplined than not to take them.

01:43:30.000 It's much easier not to take them in a sense.

01:43:33.000 I agree with that.

01:43:35.000 I think people have a misconception about what you're doing when you're taking psychedelics or when you're taking, including cannabis.

01:43:42.000 I think the common misconception is that you are avoiding reality and that you are somehow or another giving yourself a crutch.

01:43:50.000 I don't think it's that at all.

01:43:52.000 And I think that with discipline, the use of psychedelics with discipline, it allows you to experience these states and get something from them and pull something from them and apply it.

01:44:07.000 I totally agree.

01:44:09.000 Normal consciousness.

01:44:10.000 I totally agree.

01:44:11.000 It gives you an extra power, like riding a more powerful horse.

01:44:16.000 Yes.

01:44:17.000 You've got in your brain power, there's more there.

01:44:20.000 Yes.

01:44:20.000 And so, I mean, I find if I'm in a really beautiful place, if I'm in Egypt or all those wonderful places with incredible beauty, it's almost an insult to the place not to be at your optimum.

01:44:36.000 LAUGHTER I say that all the time.

01:44:38.000 I say that because when I go to art galleries, I never go to an art gallery sober.

01:44:43.000 No, I quite agree.

01:44:44.000 Yeah, I always get on it.

01:44:45.000 No point.

01:44:46.000 I also feel that, I mean, people don't like this, but I'm going to say it anyway.

01:44:51.000 I like to be high around my children.

01:44:54.000 Yeah.

01:44:55.000 Because when I'm around my children, I'm fascinated by them.

01:44:58.000 And things that maybe would be frustrating, perhaps, if I was sober, instead are charming, and I find them interesting, and I'm fascinated by their mindset and talking to them.

01:45:11.000 And you have much more in common with them, because you're on the same wavelength.

01:45:16.000 So you stay in contact with them.

01:45:19.000 I adored having my children.

01:45:23.000 The greatest pleasure.

01:45:24.000 And I remember being at one of those conferences in Palenque or something, psychedelic conferences, and I think it was Terence McKenna's wife actually was giving a lecture, or giving a talk, very nicely, and how when she was pregnant, she gave up everything, right? 0.73

01:45:40.000 And I couldn't...

01:45:41.000 I hate public speaking.

01:45:42.000 I remember putting up my finger because I wanted to say, well, actually, when I was pregnant, I didn't because I actually think it's good for my health.

01:45:54.000 You know, I've taken enough of it that I really think it's actually good.

01:45:57.000 It's not like alcohol or cigarettes.

01:45:59.000 No.

01:46:00.000 And my children, I'm proud of my children.

01:46:03.000 And, you know, they are children of...

01:46:08.000 Parents who understood the benefits of altered states of consciousness.

01:46:13.000 Yeah, I've had those conversations with my children, my youngest, who are 13 and 15, and they're at that age where, you know, children want to experiment with alcohol, they want to experiment with drugs, and I have conversations with them about ones that you should avoid.

01:46:30.000 And the dangers of things that may be contaminated with fentanyl.

01:46:34.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:46:35.000 And that these organic compounds, as long as you know the source that you're getting them from, whether they're psilocybin or particularly marijuana, they're not what everybody is telling you they are.

01:46:47.000 And that's what's criminal, and I do think criminal, about the government, because all the governments, the knowledge is out there.

01:46:57.000 These are non-toxic, the ones which are non-toxic.

01:47:02.000 And like in England...

01:47:05.000 People on the mass can only buy... 0.62

01:47:09.000 The illegal market in cannabis is taken over by certain breeders who breed only rubbish stuff.

01:47:16.000 An insensible person would never dream of smoking. 1.00

01:47:19.000 Very high THC cannabis, which is shit. 1.00

01:47:24.000 And it's not good for young people to smoke that. 0.99

01:47:27.000 And it's the authorities which are forcing the young people into that if they choose to smoke.

01:47:35.000 And I did a paper for the government saying that if they, as I hope they do, regulate cannabis, they should...

01:47:51.000 Make very low tax for THC-CBD balance.

01:47:57.000 And as it gets more and more strong, tax it more, because that will incline people to stop smoking this extremely high THC. You think there's dangers in smoking a very high THC? I mean, not for grown-ups who know how to handle it and things.

01:48:11.000 But I think it can be dangerous.

01:48:15.000 I believe so, too.

01:48:16.000 And I think there's also some correlations between that and schizophrenic breaks, that people who perhaps have a tendency towards schizophrenia when they have high doses of THC, they've had very traumatic experiences.

01:48:30.000 Yeah.

01:48:31.000 I think it should be encouraged a nice balance of THC, CBD. Yeah.

01:48:37.000 Well, that's one of the good things about the legalization in California in particular, because They've relegated these edibles in particular to 10 milligrams, which is a very sensible dose.

01:48:48.000 It's just comfortable, not too bad, you know, and especially in conjunction with all the cannabinoids with CBD. Yeah, wonderful.

01:48:59.000 And that's such a wonderful step forward.

01:49:02.000 And it's wonderful.

01:49:03.000 It's happening in America, but also quite ironic that America is still forbidding the rest of the world to do the same thing.

01:49:11.000 And it really does need to change because it's holding up humanity in a sense.

01:49:18.000 Well, I'm hoping that with education, the younger people are realizing what it actually is.

01:49:24.000 And as these people go into public service, they will go into public service with this new understanding.

01:49:29.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:49:29.000 And I think I absolutely commend you on the wonderful information you give to people by having such a wide reach.

01:49:38.000 And letting people who you think are right say what they think and slowly, slowly...

01:49:46.000 It will seep through and come to the top and be the dominant.

01:49:50.000 Well, there's a propaganda narrative that's just very unfortunate that has permeated our society, and it's incorrect.

01:49:57.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:49:58.000 That narrative of the brain, LSD, cooking the brain in the frying pan.

01:50:08.000 Yeah, this is your brain.

01:50:16.000 Right. 1.00

01:50:17.000 I mean, what rubbish. 1.00

01:50:18.000 Rubbish. 1.00

01:50:19.000 A thing which is complete. 0.99

01:50:20.000 There isn't another compound, I think, which is so powerful, which is less toxic.

01:50:26.000 You can't kill.

01:50:26.000 Well, it's fascinating to me that that all took place during the 80s.

01:50:31.000 And the 80s, culturally, some of the worst artwork and music that the American society has ever produced during the influence of the Just Say No era.

01:50:41.000 Yes.

01:50:42.000 And the 60s, We're a period of cultural growth and change.

01:50:47.000 And people always put down the 60s.

01:50:49.000 But actually, all the things we love, not all the things, but a lot of the things we love came out of the 60s.

01:50:56.000 Spirituality, Eastern spirituality, yoga, health, music, comedy.

01:51:03.000 Even the automobile design.

01:51:05.000 And it was all on LSD. It was fueled, that change.

01:51:10.000 And so I promised Albert Hoffman, I said, I'll, I can't remember what the word, but I'll reinstate your favorite child.

01:51:19.000 You know, LSD is a wonderful creation because it's non-toxic.

01:51:26.000 It's so controllable.

01:51:29.000 You know, if the governments were doing what a government should do, which is basically looking after their citizens like a good mother or father looks after their children and therefore teaching them what they need to know,

01:51:45.000 like our children...

01:51:48.000 I'm never frightened my children might become addicted because they know.

01:51:52.000 They're from an earlier stage.

01:51:53.000 They know.

01:51:53.000 Yes.

01:51:54.000 They've been educated.

01:51:55.000 Don't.

01:51:56.000 You know. 1.00

01:51:57.000 Silly. 1.00

01:51:57.000 Right. 1.00

01:51:58.000 And also they benefit from you discussing like your addiction to cigarettes and how you got over it.

01:52:04.000 Yeah.

01:52:04.000 Yes.

01:52:05.000 And they saw how one When one did, when it was legal, use e-compounds, one was productive with it.

01:52:14.000 And it increased one's passion.

01:52:17.000 I mean, I'm a workaholic.

01:52:19.000 As am I. And I'm a user.

01:52:23.000 It makes one want to Achieve the work one can do.

01:52:28.000 Yes, yes.

01:52:29.000 I'm fascinated with American automobile design.

01:52:33.000 I collect old cars.

01:52:36.000 And there's a time period between 1965 and 1970 where there's some of the most amazing cars Oh, really?

01:52:46.000 How interesting.

01:52:47.000 Ever.

01:52:47.000 And it directly correlates.

01:52:49.000 How interesting.

01:52:50.000 It drops off a cliff after 1970. How interesting.

01:52:54.000 It's fascinating because those cars from 1965 to 1970, to this day, are the most cherished collector's automobiles and the most beautiful designs.

01:53:04.000 Yes, that's very interesting.

01:53:05.000 Funny enough, in this talk I'm giving a few days' time at Denver, I'm saying you can see...

01:53:14.000 And the markings of civilization, you can see which civilizations had integrated altered states of consciousness and which hadn't by their creativity production.

01:53:27.000 Rather like in a tree, you can see by the rings which are the years of drought and which are the years of rain and sunshine.

01:53:35.000 Right.

01:53:35.000 And that's exactly it, what you're saying in that, in the peak of beauty in cars.

01:53:42.000 I want to show you something, just so you can see this.

01:53:44.000 Jamie, pull up a 1969 Mustang, and then I want to see a 1980 Mustang.

01:53:52.000 The difference is so stark.

01:53:55.000 It's amazing.

01:53:56.000 And it's so clear that that time period directly correlates with the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970, where they stopped people using these things.

01:54:07.000 They made them forbidden and dangerous.

01:54:09.000 And that is a 1969 Mustang.

01:54:11.000 It's one of the most beautiful things that anybody's ever designed.

01:54:13.000 It's gorgeous.

01:54:15.000 I mean, I look at that thing and I'm like, my God, it's perfect.

01:54:19.000 Artwork.

01:54:20.000 Now, show me a 1980. Now this is just disgusting.

01:54:26.000 Look at that clunky piece of shit. 1.00

01:54:28.000 What is that? 1.00

01:54:29.000 What the hell is that?

01:54:32.000 Imagine that you went from that to that.

01:54:35.000 Absolutely.

01:54:36.000 What the hell happened to us?

01:54:37.000 Something's wrong.

01:54:38.000 Something's very, very wrong.

01:54:40.000 And people attribute it to so many different things.

01:54:46.000 And one of the things they attribute it to is like gas Yeah.

01:54:49.000 Being, you know, more efficient gas vehicle.

01:54:51.000 But not true, because you could still make it beautiful.

01:54:53.000 And that is not beautiful. 1.00

01:54:54.000 That's an ugly piece of shit. 1.00

01:54:56.000 You're absolutely right. 1.00

01:54:58.000 And I think that's such a beautiful – and I think you can tell it in a culture.

01:55:02.000 I mean, like, whatever, in – well, the beautiful cultures.

01:55:08.000 Sure.

01:55:09.000 You can see they were high.

01:55:11.000 Yes.

01:55:11.000 They had that – those lines in Chauvet.

01:55:14.000 Yes.

01:55:15.000 Couldn't have been done by people who weren't high.

01:55:18.000 You know, it's too intuitive.

01:55:21.000 It's an intuitive expression.

01:55:24.000 I think one of the things that psychedelics do is increase the intuitive part of the brain.

01:55:33.000 And now, I've got a new program at the moment I'm doing, which is Looking at LSD, both in high doses and micro doses, in the best and latest technology in the world can give.

01:55:50.000 So in the high doses, I'm wanting to do a research on the mystical experience.

01:55:56.000 And anomalous experiences.

01:55:59.000 And it will be the first research to use a Tesla 7, do you know what I mean by MRI? Yes.

01:56:08.000 It's usually a Tesla 3. All the research I've done is with a Tesla 3. Is this fMRI?

01:56:14.000 Functional MRI? Yeah.

01:56:15.000 And then one does whatever, how many people, let's say 20, and one averages the results between the 20. What I'm going to do in this other one is use a 7 Tesla and personalize the data.

01:56:30.000 So it will only be person by person looking at the data.

01:56:35.000 And then it will be 7 Tesla and a Meg.

01:56:38.000 The Meg is the one which does that. 0.86

01:56:40.000 Electrical, you can see which centers of the brain are communicating with each other.

01:56:45.000 And then we'll have a very deep psychological one.

01:56:49.000 So you'll know...

01:56:51.000 When the person has some expression of the mystical experience or some other experience, and you can see what's happening in the brain waves and the blood and markers, so one will have it much more carefully analyzed than ever before.

01:57:07.000 Because apart from just pure fascination, interest, It's valuable to know how do we encourage people who are having a psychedelic-assisted experience to overcome treatment-resistant depression or whatever.

01:57:28.000 To have that mystical experience.

01:57:30.000 So the more we can learn about how does that grow, how does one help the fruition of that experience, the better.

01:57:43.000 And then, well, that's at the top level, looking at those experiences.

01:57:48.000 I mean, it's going to be so exciting, which parts of the brain to look at.

01:57:52.000 And the whole different areas, the hemispheres, the blood supply, which parts of the brain are activating in the highest way in that experience.

01:58:04.000 I once did an experience with a very high-level Indian meditator lady. 1.00

01:58:10.000 And she really wanted to help me, and it was an omega, one of those ones, Herdra.

01:58:15.000 And she told me after she came out beaming, she'd had a most wonderful mystical experience while she was in the machine.

01:58:24.000 She said, the best experience I've had with God for a long time.

01:58:29.000 And it showed a great burst of gamma in the right cerebellum.

01:58:36.000 Which is very fascinating because everyone thinks the cerebellum is just nothing, basic balance and all those sort of things.

01:58:44.000 But actually, I think it's a very highly, much more fascinating than that.

01:58:49.000 And so a mystical experience is rather like a toad in the sun, sitting on the sun in a state of blissful happiness.

01:58:59.000 You know, it'd be very fascinating to actually know about more...

01:59:07.000 These different experiences that we can as humans experience and how hopefully we can map them and therefore learn how to get them more.

01:59:18.000 One of the things I was fascinated about with you is your discussions of your experiences on LSD playing Go.

01:59:25.000 Yes.

01:59:26.000 That's very interesting.

01:59:27.000 Which is really interesting because you said it made you a better player.

01:59:31.000 And Go is an incredibly complex game.

01:59:35.000 Yeah.

01:59:35.000 And that's why for the last 50 years I wanted to and I will do research on Go.

01:59:40.000 But it's very difficult to find Go players Who are used to functioning on a high-level LSD. Do you see?

01:59:49.000 Because people don't on the whole.

01:59:51.000 Right.

01:59:52.000 But I've got that in place.

01:59:54.000 Because Go, as you know, is a pattern recognition.

01:59:58.000 It's an intuitive game of pattern recognition.

02:00:03.000 I've never played it.

02:00:04.000 It's a wonderful game.

02:00:05.000 Once you get into it, you rarely get addicted to it.

02:00:09.000 Because it's behind everything.

02:00:11.000 You can play life on the Go board.

02:00:13.000 Mm-hmm.

02:00:14.000 And you have a handicap, so you know exactly where you are with the person you play against.

02:00:20.000 A numerical handicap?

02:00:21.000 Yeah, the better player plays with white stone.

02:00:28.000 So the worst player has black, which is slightly more obvious, so it's a better visual, but it's slightly less good psychologically.

02:00:37.000 And then they have handicaps. 0.96

02:00:41.000 Every three games you win, they get one stone.

02:00:46.000 Put down on the board first.

02:00:48.000 Advance.

02:00:49.000 So anyway, we played passionately in the early 60s when LSD was legal.

02:00:57.000 And at the end of day, you know, we were doing brain studies all day or whatever we were doing.

02:01:03.000 And then Go was there.

02:01:06.000 And we wrote down every game we played so we knew who won and what the score was.

02:01:11.000 And anyway, I was a slightly better player than my opponent.

02:01:17.000 If I was an NSD and he wasn't, his handicap went up from three to six.

02:01:26.000 So that's winning nine games.

02:01:28.000 That's a big change.

02:01:32.000 And then it would come down again as he saw the patterns because it's a pattern recognition game.

02:01:40.000 And it's a wonderful game.

02:01:42.000 But I gave it up because you have to be passionate about it to keep playing.

02:01:48.000 Right.

02:01:49.000 Very taxing, right?

02:01:50.000 Yeah, very taxing.

02:01:51.000 There's a similar result with psilocybin and the game of pool, pocket billiards.

02:01:57.000 Right.

02:01:58.000 You have more feel and you know where the ball is going more.

02:02:04.000 Right.

02:02:05.000 And you can understand angles and patterns.

02:02:08.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:02:09.000 Absolutely.

02:02:09.000 And I think sportsmen, I mean like Joe, the father of my children, he loved cricket.

02:02:15.000 And he said he was the better bowler.

02:02:17.000 Have you heard of the pitcher who pitched a game on acid, a no-hitter game on acid?

02:02:24.000 No.

02:02:25.000 Who was that again, Jamie?

02:02:26.000 It's a very famous story of a guy who made a mistake and got just too high.

02:02:33.000 It didn't wear off and he went to the game.

02:02:36.000 Here it is, Doc Ellis.

02:02:39.000 He took acid and pitched a no-hitter.

02:02:42.000 So no one could hit his ball when he was on acid, which sounds so crazy.

02:02:46.000 That's exactly it.

02:02:48.000 And do you know that picture of the spider, which came out in the 60s?

02:02:54.000 The spider's web.

02:02:56.000 Yes.

02:02:57.000 I'm trying to recreate that study.

02:03:00.000 See if you can find that.

02:03:01.000 They gave the spider LSD. Yeah.

02:03:04.000 And, you know, the caffeine one was absolutely chaotic.

02:03:09.000 It was so bad.

02:03:10.000 Look at it.

02:03:11.000 The cannabis one started off rather well then you're chaotic, just like cannabis does happen.

02:03:16.000 But look at the LSD one.

02:03:17.000 And the LSD one was perfect.

02:03:18.000 Better than perfect.

02:03:20.000 Well, look at the normal one, though.

02:03:21.000 The normal one's pretty amazing, too.

02:03:22.000 Yeah.

02:03:24.000 But funny enough, now I know the leading web person in the world is a Don at Oxford who I've been talking about six years now to do this research.

02:03:36.000 But you wouldn't believe it.

02:03:37.000 To give a spider LSD, one has to get ethical approval.

02:03:44.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

02:03:45.000 That's funny.

02:03:46.000 And for six, eight years, we haven't yet got the ethical approval.

02:03:49.000 There's nothing ethical about being a spider.

02:03:51.000 I know.

02:03:52.000 You can't believe it.

02:03:54.000 Their whole existence is unethical.

02:03:57.000 They're trapping other insects.

02:04:00.000 Exactly.

02:04:01.000 Anyway, so far we haven't done it, but I really want to do it this year.

02:04:05.000 Because, I mean, maybe they were pulling our legs. 0.78

02:04:09.000 But it's a very interesting concept.

02:04:11.000 Sure.

02:04:12.000 That even at the spider...

02:04:15.000 It improves function.

02:04:17.000 Yes.

02:04:17.000 It would make sense that caffeine would be all over the place too.

02:04:21.000 The heart rate would be jacked up or whatever, their central nervous system.

02:04:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:04:26.000 But it's very...

02:04:27.000 There's so much we could do.

02:04:29.000 And that's why I actually feel having lived with these...

02:04:38.000 Substances is my passion for 50 or 60 years, and particularly LSD, because I think it's the cleanest and I know it the best.

02:04:48.000 I've got a very good instinct how to do it.

02:04:51.000 I've designed several studies I haven't talked about because they shouldn't come out.

02:04:57.000 But I can see how it can help, like the old woman with Alzheimer's.

02:05:03.000 Which I'd like to just show you, not to go on, but to show you.

02:05:07.000 Because the difference is so big.

02:05:09.000 When I showed it to the professor of geriatrics in Switzerland, Within an hour, he said he wanted to do collaboration with me to do an Alzheimer's study because you can't fake someone's expression.

02:05:23.000 So from deep apathy, it goes to a sparkling little old lady. 1.00

02:05:27.000 And there's nothing conventional that would replace that.

02:05:30.000 There's no conventional medication that has the same sort of apathy.

02:05:33.000 And actually I'm working with one very nice man who's the CEO of the biggest care home in England, which is a national health one, and he'd heard about my research and is very interested.

02:05:46.000 He says 70% of his residents have Alzheimer's and there's nothing you can do.

02:05:54.000 And the suffering it causes them and their relations and their carers is devastating and it's getting worse and worse as we live longer and longer.

02:06:04.000 And it's stunning that there's something available.

02:06:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:06:07.000 And, well, after I'll show you because it is miraculous.

02:06:11.000 And so I've also got a very, very good concept for...

02:06:17.000 The perfect place.

02:06:19.000 Because what I would like to do is, with these conditions, like I'd like to do Alzheimer's, I also want to do autism, also Parkinson's, you know, I want to be able to fast forward these researches with the best doctors available,

02:06:37.000 scientists, you know, I can design them.

02:06:42.000 I know them.

02:06:42.000 I know how they go.

02:06:44.000 And what I can see is it's very similar to a condition which we know historically, which is called terminal lucidity.

02:06:55.000 And I've been studying that for the last year or two.

02:06:57.000 It's a well-known fact that people quite often just before death who are in coma or paralyzed or one of those conditions out of the picture for years, Suddenly we'll come back and just before they die and make jokes about when they were in the nursery and people,

02:07:18.000 you know, who know them know they're there at the shop.

02:07:22.000 And I think what can happen with a microdose is that you light up the connectivity between these different brain centers so suddenly the brain is functioning again.

02:07:36.000 I mean, not probably functioning like this old lady. 1.00

02:07:41.000 She came back.

02:07:42.000 Her children said it was remarkable.

02:07:44.000 It was getting our mother back.

02:07:45.000 She had her wit, her love, her attention.

02:07:49.000 She said, I feel so wonderful.

02:07:52.000 Let's read some poetry, you know, from having been this...

02:07:57.000 Vegetative state.

02:07:58.000 Yeah.

02:07:58.000 And I think we can now get that going.

02:08:02.000 And what I want is the freedom to design, to make the care home called the Beckley Harbour, where people can go and be treated with these compounds to see if it suits them,

02:08:19.000 see if it has the same effect as it had with this old lady. 0.56

02:08:27.000 I would have wonderful trained doulas who entertain them and make it a wonderful place to be.

02:08:33.000 We'd have dogs and children and it would be like home.

02:08:35.000 That sounds incredible.

02:08:36.000 You know, it would be like being at home with lovely people who look after your emotional humor and da-da-da-da and you're given a microdose personally fitted to suit you.

02:08:49.000 And what a superior experience that would be to the traditional nursing home. 0.61

02:08:53.000 Yeah.

02:08:53.000 And then we'd find out, does it suit?

02:08:55.000 And then one could collect in a year in not a very big nursing home.

02:08:59.000 And this wonderful man in England said, so long as it's legal, he'll give me the nursing home to try it.

02:09:05.000 So I want the permissions to be able to do this.

02:09:09.000 And then one could get a lot of people coming through and then one would give them home care.

02:09:13.000 So one would have someone visiting them at home as much as they need to maintain a safe and good place.

02:09:24.000 Anyway, we could do that, you know, this year.

02:09:27.000 But it needs, one, the regulatory passport to do it, and two, the funding.

02:09:35.000 And both are there.

02:09:36.000 I mean, there's so much money around it.

02:09:38.000 You know, and everyone's getting old.

02:09:40.000 Either their parents are or they are.

02:09:41.000 And, you know, we should do these things speedily.

02:09:46.000 Not wait 10 years until...

02:09:50.000 You know, it takes two years even to get the paperwork done for this research.

02:09:54.000 One year.

02:09:55.000 I wanted to talk to you about near-death experiences.

02:09:58.000 And there's a lot of speculation about what happens in the brain during near-death experiences because many people report things that are very similar to what is like a breakthrough psychedelic experience.

02:10:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:10:14.000 Well, what I think is...

02:10:16.000 Near death, the body is in a state of extreme turn-on, and it naturally, endogenously, Let's out these compounds,

02:10:35.000 oxytocin, you know, all the different compounds in the body, which DMT may be, you know, they're probably more than we've even discovered, which give a shot of something,

02:10:52.000 serotonin, which is very similar to a psychedelic.

02:10:58.000 And that's why people can suddenly come out of a vegetative state shortly before death.

02:11:07.000 And that's what I'm saying.

02:11:09.000 I think that what I'm doing with microdosing is creating that effect without having to wait for the person to die, poor person.

02:11:19.000 Right?

02:11:20.000 One can do it on a protocol.

02:11:24.000 And that's what I'd like to research now.

02:11:27.000 That'd be amazing.

02:11:28.000 You know, it's obvious.

02:11:29.000 I've got proof of the thing that it happens.

02:11:33.000 You can't fake it.

02:11:34.000 You can't fake someone coming back to life again, in the look in the eyes.

02:11:40.000 So it's there.

02:11:44.000 Just let's get the space so legally, I could set it up with the best people.

02:11:51.000 I can set it up and we could do it.

02:11:54.000 And then if we get successful data, we can open clinics, care homes, services, and then hopefully the people can take the treatment home with them.

02:12:08.000 One of the more bizarre things that comes out of psychedelic experience is contact with entities.

02:12:14.000 Contact with what seems to be some other form of consciousness.

02:12:20.000 What do you think is going on with that?

02:12:25.000 I love your entity flashing across the ceiling.

02:12:28.000 Oh, that's a shooting star.

02:12:31.000 I have to tell people about that, especially people that have had psychedelic experiences.

02:12:35.000 They think they're having a flashback.

02:12:37.000 Sorry, I didn't warn you.

02:12:40.000 But what do I think?

02:12:43.000 Certain compounds create it more than others.

02:12:46.000 DMT, much more.

02:12:48.000 LSD doesn't really produce entities, strangely.

02:12:54.000 I think it's...

02:12:57.000 Yeah.

02:12:58.000 But psilocybin does.

02:12:59.000 Yeah, but that's got DMT in it.

02:13:01.000 Right.

02:13:02.000 LSD. That's why I love LSD. LSD, I think, is more like a flower opening up, i.e.

02:13:10.000 it's more of yourself.

02:13:13.000 Whereas DMT, whether it's ayahuasca or psilocybin to a lesser degree, has this slightly Boom, boom, boom.

02:13:25.000 Slightly dominating sound.

02:13:28.000 I don't really like the colours as much.

02:13:31.000 You don't?

02:13:31.000 Not quite.

02:13:32.000 Those kind of mauves and browns.

02:13:34.000 I prefer the LSD colours.

02:13:37.000 You see mauves and browns when you do DMT? Well, I'm not a DNT person.

02:13:45.000 I mean, I've done it, but I don't...

02:13:47.000 Because I've seen very bright, vivid colors.

02:13:50.000 I've not seen mauves and browns.

02:13:52.000 Haven't you seen the darker colors?

02:13:54.000 I find it slightly dark.

02:13:56.000 Really?

02:13:56.000 Interesting.

02:13:57.000 I mean, I was once quite recently in a room of a session when people were doing it.

02:14:03.000 There were only ten people in the room.

02:14:05.000 Three of them!

02:14:07.000 We're in a battleground.

02:14:10.000 A poor boy had had too much and was screaming and yelling and getting burnt.

02:14:13.000 And the person who looked after him was a very practiced person in these things.

02:14:20.000 He then said to me, well, actually, I was in a massacre myself.

02:14:24.000 A massacre?

02:14:25.000 Yeah, I mean, do you know, he was, while he looked after the person, but he's very well contained with his massacre, so he still managed to look after the young.

02:14:34.000 But I actually thought, I don't really, sir, choose compounds which bring...

02:14:42.000 The tendency of those sort of experiences.

02:14:45.000 But I know people have wonderful experiences.

02:14:48.000 Yeah.

02:14:48.000 I've never had those negative experiences like that.

02:14:51.000 No, my experiences have been very vivid and bright.

02:14:55.000 Right, yeah.

02:14:56.000 And enlightening.

02:14:57.000 Right.

02:14:58.000 Yeah, and the entities are very colorful.

02:15:01.000 Right.

02:15:01.000 Bright colors and wild, beautiful, loving experiences.

02:15:05.000 Right.

02:15:06.000 How lovely.

02:15:06.000 Yeah.

02:15:07.000 Well, that's...

02:15:09.000 That's very lucky because I know people who've had horrible ones too, but I mean obviously they come and they go.

02:15:15.000 Do you think that that's people struggling with the experience and trying to control it?

02:15:18.000 I'm sure trying to control it.

02:15:25.000 Is not a good...

02:15:27.000 Detrimental.

02:15:28.000 Yeah.

02:15:30.000 And I think people are very lucky who've never had a really bad experience.

02:15:35.000 I had a really bad experience when someone, right back in the first year of my taking LSD, someone who had actually turned Leary on to LSD, who was a kind of freak, not a nice person...

02:15:57.000 Anyway, he had a vinegar bottle of Sandoz vitamin C. Wow.

02:16:05.000 And he offered me some.

02:16:08.000 I said, thanks.

02:16:08.000 I didn't want it.

02:16:09.000 Anyway, I didn't want him around.

02:16:11.000 And then he poured it into my coffee.

02:16:14.000 Oh, God.

02:16:15.000 Without telling me.

02:16:17.000 Oh, God.

02:16:17.000 And thousands of trips.

02:16:19.000 Oh, God.

02:16:20.000 And so I had...

02:16:22.000 A dying experience.

02:16:25.000 It was a really bad experience.

02:16:28.000 And, you know, once you cut a thing in the soul or the body, you retain that fear.

02:16:37.000 The pathway.

02:16:38.000 Yeah, that pathway.

02:16:39.000 Yeah.

02:16:39.000 So, I think people who've had really bad experiences and have got pathways cut are more likely, if they're given a psychedelic, are fearful of getting down that.

02:16:57.000 Right.

02:16:57.000 Do you think that's a memory retention?

02:17:00.000 Like perhaps they remember the bad trip and then they start manifesting it?

02:17:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:17:05.000 And I think they definitely remember.

02:17:07.000 The question is whether they can remember it in, what do you call it, I've forgotten the word, epitogenics, which says maybe you can go on for generations of memory of trauma, but I don't know if that's...

02:17:20.000 Yeah.

02:17:21.000 But I quite agree with you.

02:17:24.000 I mean, if you're someone who's never had a really bad experience, you're much less likely to have it, and that's a great gift, and that's what we want everyone to be like.

02:17:35.000 Most certainly.

02:17:37.000 What do you think you're encountering, especially on DMT? What do you think the entities are?

02:17:43.000 Do you think that's a figment of the imagination?

02:17:45.000 Do you think it's the consciousness expressing itself in different ways through the visual cortex?

02:17:50.000 Yeah.

02:17:53.000 Or do you think it's actually an entity?

02:17:57.000 I know Shaman, a ayahuasca chair, and he says he always considered in the Senti Diami Church, they consider entities a deflection of attention.

02:18:11.000 It's better not to go into the world of entities.

02:18:15.000 But a lot of people love the entities.

02:18:20.000 My son once had an entity experience with ayahuasca.

02:18:28.000 The entity told him, why do you have so many, such a collection of sneakers?

02:18:38.000 He has a sneaker head?

02:18:40.000 Yes, which he does.

02:18:41.000 He's got a passion for sneakers.

02:18:42.000 Oh, that's funny.

02:18:44.000 I don't know.

02:18:45.000 I'm not an expert on entities.

02:18:47.000 I always wondered if maybe that's your own consciousness, recognizing that you're obsessing about a thing.

02:18:52.000 Yeah, I think there's that element about it.

02:19:00.000 I'm hoping this research I'm doing on the mystical experience I think anomalous experiences like telepathy.

02:19:09.000 Telepathy, I know, happens to my own satisfaction.

02:19:13.000 I'm in no doubt.

02:19:15.000 How so?

02:19:16.000 Because with my pigeon lover, we were lovers for 15 years, passionate lovers.

02:19:24.000 Wasn't Tesla in love with a pigeon as well?

02:19:26.000 Yes, I think he was.

02:19:27.000 Why pigeons?

02:19:28.000 Well, it just so happened that his mother died on the window ledge.

02:19:36.000 And Joe went to collect her body.

02:19:39.000 We were trying to feed her. 0.85

02:19:40.000 And there was a little day-old fledgling without any feather.

02:19:44.000 Oh, so you raised it.

02:19:46.000 And he shouldn't have lived because he didn't at that age, but I fed him warm milk and wheatabix on a paintbrush.

02:19:55.000 Wow.

02:19:57.000 And he became, I mean, he was, he became just obsessive and he became the boss.

02:20:04.000 And Jerry said to me, let's get rid of this pigeon, this creature.

02:20:09.000 We're going to have him, I insist, let's put him out because we're going to have him forever.

02:20:15.000 And then I thought, I'm not going to put him out, my beloved little papa.

02:20:21.000 And I went and brought him in again.

02:20:23.000 And sure enough, we had him forever.

02:20:25.000 How long did he live?

02:20:27.000 He lived for 15 years.

02:20:29.000 Wow.

02:20:30.000 But he was then killed.

02:20:31.000 I always knew he'd be killed somehow.

02:20:34.000 And the interesting thing, I won't tell the story because it's too long, but I knew before he died, And I said out loud to him as he flew by, I said, Birdie, I love you more than anything else in the world.

02:20:51.000 And that was the last thing I said to him.

02:20:53.000 And then he died, and I knew he was dead.

02:20:57.000 I was painting a picture, I was on acid painting a picture, and I suddenly had this thing, Birdie's dead, Birdie's dead.

02:21:03.000 And so I did what I had never done, I stopped painting and went down to look for him.

02:21:09.000 Anyway, it turned out my father, who was also very kind of in on those sort of things, but he was very fond of, had lost his temper with the old cowman we had for 50 years and told him to go and cut these effing nettles somewhere.

02:21:31.000 And in the nettles was Birdie's still warm body.

02:21:37.000 So I knew before it happened and he knew within ten minutes of it happening...

02:21:47.000 I mean, how many dead birds do you get?

02:21:50.000 See, hardly ever.

02:21:51.000 I mean, birds are dying all the time.

02:21:53.000 They get eaten.

02:21:54.000 You'd never trace them.

02:21:57.000 Birdie.

02:21:58.000 And then once we took Birdie camping, years before that.

02:22:03.000 Anyway, it's another story.

02:22:04.000 But he flew off.

02:22:05.000 And then I did a national...

02:22:08.000 I got on English BBC. News.

02:22:14.000 I said he was a hero, Antonioni's new film.

02:22:20.000 Because I put adverts in the Times and everywhere looking for a beloved grey London pigeon.

02:22:25.000 I got thousands of people saying they had him and we went all over England collecting these wretched pigeons which were meant to be birdie.

02:22:33.000 LAUGHTER And then I went up to the television and did this petition for Buddy on the television, on the news, because I said he was the star of Antonioni's new film.

02:22:48.000 I asked Antonioni if I could do that, and he said yes.

02:22:51.000 And so the BBC was jammed with telephones, seeing people finding Buddy.

02:23:00.000 And then I was really upset because they said they never introduce...

02:23:05.000 Whatever, people who ring in to people looking for fear of something.

02:23:10.000 Anyway, so I was incredibly sad because I thought, what the point of the whole thing?

02:23:14.000 The whole point was to get Bernie back.

02:23:16.000 And then there was one telephone call which came through, which came from the police station.

02:23:24.000 And because Birdie had landed on a washing line of a man who didn't have a telephone, so he didn't do his own telephoning, he sent his son to the police station saying he had Birdie.

02:23:35.000 And because it was the police's line, it got through to me.

02:23:39.000 And that was Birdie. 0.86

02:23:41.000 Do you see what I mean?

02:23:43.000 Multiple things of telepathy.

02:23:46.000 And other things.

02:23:47.000 I mean, I'm in no doubt that telepathy exists.

02:23:51.000 Are you or not?

02:23:53.000 I think it probably does in some way.

02:23:56.000 I think it's an emergent property of human consciousness that's not quite fully formed.

02:24:00.000 I think it's there, but because of our egos, we don't sense it.

02:24:08.000 I mean, because animals know when there's going to be a tsunami.

02:24:13.000 No animals die in the tsunami.

02:24:15.000 They all go up the mountain.

02:24:17.000 Well, humans don't have that sense.

02:24:21.000 Yes.

02:24:22.000 Because we've got too much noise in the brain.

02:24:25.000 So I think we've got the sense, but we don't use it.

02:24:30.000 Or don't know how to use it.

02:24:33.000 So I think it's there.

02:24:35.000 And I love those sort of things.

02:24:39.000 I'd love to know.

02:24:40.000 I think they work with the same senses in the brain as their mystical experience.

02:24:45.000 So by learning more about the mystical experience, one can hook on to learn more about anomalous experiences.

02:24:54.000 You know, like I know a Buddhist monk who can shoot electricity.

02:25:03.000 I mean, strange things which are unexplicable at the moment, but it'd be very interesting to find out.

02:25:12.000 So you think that these are probably abilities that we have, but they're stifled by ego.

02:25:19.000 They're stifled by noise.

02:25:21.000 They're stifled by anxiety.

02:25:23.000 I think they're probably skills that you have to design I mean, it is a funny thing that animals Aren't ever killed by his army.

02:25:37.000 Right.

02:25:37.000 They just have the instinct to go up, out of the way before it happens.

02:25:43.000 That they have some understanding.

02:25:44.000 Something, some sense.

02:25:46.000 Yeah.

02:25:47.000 I think things like telepathy happen with two things.

02:25:54.000 Passion, love, love, passion, i.e.

02:25:57.000 connection, and threat.

02:26:00.000 I think they put the The tendency, the sense of more likely to sense it if it's like that.

02:26:13.000 I mean, that's why I had passion for Bernie.

02:26:16.000 And it was when he was in danger on several occasions I found him when his wings were trapped.

02:26:23.000 Do you see what I mean?

02:26:25.000 Right, like you sensed it.

02:26:26.000 Yeah.

02:26:26.000 You had this connection with him.

02:26:28.000 Yeah.

02:26:28.000 And I've had it with humans too.

02:26:30.000 But it's usually...

02:26:33.000 A threat to life, a kind of adrenal threat, which obviously sends a message if you're there ready to receive it.

02:26:43.000 One of the things about ayahuasca was when they were first recognizing it, they tried to call one of the compounds of it telepathine.

02:26:55.000 Yes.

02:26:56.000 Yeah, but then they realized that it had already been named.

02:26:59.000 It was already Harmin.

02:27:00.000 Right, right.

02:27:02.000 We did the first, I did the first research with Harmin, with someone called Jordi Reba, who's a wonderful Spanish I'm a scientist on Hameen and On neurogenesis.

02:27:19.000 We showed that it increased neurogenesis.

02:27:23.000 As does psilocybin, right?

02:27:24.000 Yeah.

02:27:26.000 It's interesting.

02:27:27.000 We're going to find out so much.

02:27:30.000 And he committed psilocybin, sadly.

02:27:33.000 Which is a tragedy, because he was a great scientist.

02:27:36.000 But, yeah, there is so much to understand.

02:27:40.000 And I think we're at such an incredibly interesting Sphere of investigation.

02:27:49.000 Yes.

02:27:50.000 Because these things are all on the cusp of where we are and where we can go to in the future.

02:27:57.000 Yeah.

02:27:58.000 Well, I think that's why it's so wonderful that someone like you is out here with this passion for doing this research.

02:28:04.000 And wonderful that you're spreading information about these things to people because it has to get out there that people are actually interested.

02:28:12.000 Yes.

02:28:13.000 And then force our politicians...

02:28:17.000 In a nice way.

02:28:18.000 But you know, to change.

02:28:19.000 To release it.

02:28:19.000 It really needs to be changed.

02:28:22.000 It does.

02:28:23.000 Because I do think...

02:28:27.000 I mean, I think the use of cannabis and psychedelics can enhance one's relationship with one's partner.

02:28:37.000 One can help see the other viewpoint, help kind of get over difficult periods.

02:28:44.000 I think it can do that with warring countries.

02:28:49.000 I think, you know, empathy, it increases empathy, it increases the possibility, we know from research we've done and other people have done too, that the amygdala is lowered, particularly with MDMA, the fear,

02:29:04.000 so you can approach things which are fearful, like trauma, better.

02:29:09.000 I mean, there's so many different pathways that these compounds can Help enable humanity to get to their healthier, nobler, more creative expressions of themselves.

02:29:27.000 I mean, the number of people I know, and I bet you know many more, who've said it changed their lives, their experience.

02:29:35.000 Changed mine.

02:29:36.000 Yeah, and mine, and mine.

02:29:39.000 I mean, I don't think...

02:29:40.000 I know I couldn't have done what I've done without what I got from these compounds giving me the extra energy and understanding, and that's what I think should be there.

02:29:56.000 I passionately think psychedelics are a gift of the gods in inverted commas.

02:30:03.000 It's a natural It shouldn't be expensive.

02:30:10.000 We must keep it so it's affordable to the poorest and the rest of the world.

02:30:16.000 And that shouldn't be difficult to do.

02:30:18.000 They cost nothing.

02:30:19.000 I started, I've twice started a legal, a Beckley Labs, to make top-level compounds, which I did.

02:30:34.000 But both times something happened.

02:30:36.000 I never had the money to have a legal, so I never had a legal agreement.

02:30:39.000 So actually the person always did the dirty on me when he just got going.

02:30:44.000 So it never happened.

02:30:45.000 But I want it to happen because the purpose was to keep it low price.

02:30:51.000 Yes.

02:30:52.000 I mean, people have to make money getting a...

02:30:56.000 A compound through phase three costs hundreds of millions.

02:31:01.000 So, as governments aren't paying, one is very lucky to have people who invest money to do it.

02:31:09.000 But then one wants to try to make sure that the investment doesn't stop Other people being able to have benefit from it.

02:31:20.000 Right, but they don't have monopoly over it. 0.99

02:31:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:31:22.000 So how we work out how you do the research, get it done, and the whole thing is maintained in an ethical sort of way.

02:31:35.000 So it's not going to be a sport of the rich people only.

02:31:39.000 Right.

02:31:39.000 It's going to be...

02:31:43.000 And that's the benefit of the rich people as well.

02:31:45.000 And the rich people are the ones who hopefully are those who take the risk of, as the governments don't do it, of putting their money in to make the studies happen.

02:31:58.000 But really, governments should be Encouraging.

02:32:04.000 I mean, to give the British government, they did fund our depression study, second time round, to give them their two.

02:32:12.000 And I know that NIDERS is now funded.

02:32:16.000 But, I mean, it's a pittance one's needing.

02:32:20.000 A lot of money to allow.

02:32:23.000 I mean, I do studies.

02:32:24.000 I do them fantastically cheap.

02:32:26.000 I think since I started the Beckley 25 years ago, I think she said I've had about five and a half million pounds in total.

02:32:40.000 For 25 years.

02:32:42.000 That's amazing.

02:32:42.000 Yeah.

02:32:43.000 And I've done a lot of the breakthrough research.

02:32:45.000 But I'm now the age I am.

02:32:48.000 And you know, I can't go on forever working 15 hours a day.

02:32:51.000 And I would like to be able to do what I can do now, which is a lot, because I know the compound so well.

02:32:59.000 I know, well, their strengths, where to use them.

02:33:03.000 Do you know?

02:33:03.000 And it's such fun doing it.

02:33:06.000 It's like playing Go.

02:33:08.000 One loves playing Go.

02:33:09.000 And it's a much more interesting game because then maybe one can help Deal with Alzheimer's.

02:33:16.000 Maybe one can help.

02:33:19.000 There's all these conditions, which I think these compounds can help.

02:33:22.000 Just elevate humanity in general.

02:33:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:33:26.000 And not only for treating people, but elevation.

02:33:28.000 I think that's absolutely as important.

02:33:31.000 And that's why it has to not have to be only be a medicine.

02:33:35.000 It's a medicine, which is essential. 0.99

02:33:38.000 But it's also an elixir to make the human animal, the upright talking ape, a bit less of an idiot. 1.00

02:33:48.000 Yes, yes. 0.99

02:33:49.000 I think that's a great way to wrap this up.

02:33:52.000 Thank you very much.

02:33:53.000 I really, really appreciate you being here.

02:33:54.000 And I really appreciate everything you've done.

02:33:56.000 It means so much to the whole world.

02:33:59.000 Well, thank you very much for asking me.

02:34:02.000 If someone wants to learn more about your research, where should they go?

02:34:06.000 Well, to the Beckley Foundation, but I have, we have, you know, we're a tiny organization, so we can never, I mean, I hardly ever look at the website.

02:34:17.000 Do you see what I mean?

02:34:18.000 Yes.

02:34:19.000 What I would, they can help, because I can do a lot of wonderful research.

02:34:24.000 I've got a very good, tiny team, but I want to do more research and make things happen.

02:34:31.000 So you want people to contribute.

02:34:33.000 So there's a donate button.

02:34:34.000 If you go to thebeckleyfoundation.org in the upper right hand corner, there's a donation button.

02:34:39.000 You can support psychedelic research.

02:34:41.000 You can donate from anywhere in the world.

02:34:43.000 UK tax-deductible donations, US tax-deductible donations.

02:34:48.000 Donate via bank transfer, cryptocurrency, Apple Pay.

02:34:52.000 Amazing.

02:34:53.000 Well, I've never seen it, but well done.

02:34:54.000 There it is.

02:34:54.000 It's really comprehensive.

02:34:56.000 But it'd be lovely if it starts to work because it's particularly difficult now that business – because people think, why put money in a bottomless well when one could put it in a well which can sprout?

02:35:09.000 But I think there's an advantage in it.

02:35:19.000 Yes.

02:35:21.000 Thank you very much.

02:35:25.000 Thank you for being here.

02:35:26.000 I really appreciate it.

02:35:27.000 And thank you for asking.

02:35:28.000 My pleasure.

02:35:29.000 Thank you.

02:35:30.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 27, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #2002 - Amanda Feilding

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