In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I chat to legendary psychedelic researcher and author of The Sounds of the Sounds: A Guide to Psychedelics and Psychedelic Experiences, Dr. Robert Kiyosaki. We talk about his life, his research, psychedelics and psychedelics in general, and how he became one of the most influential people in the field of psychedelic research at a time when it was still controversial and difficult to do research. It was a pleasure to have him on the show, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed getting to know him. Joe is a wonderful man and I'm sure you'll agree that he's a wonderful human being. Thank you to him for coming on the pod, and for being kind enough to share his story with us. If you like what you hear, please leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts and I'll read it out to you in the next episode. Cheers, Joe xo - Tom and Sarah xx - Sarah xo Sarah xoxo - Tom & Sarah xxx - Sarah xx - Joe xxo - Sarah xx Joe xxx - Tom xxx Sarah - Joe Xxx (The Joe Rogans Experience by Night by Day by Night, by Day, All Day, By Night, All day) - By Night All Day by Day - All Day All Day By Night by Night - By Day, by Night By Night by Night by Day By Day By Night By Day by By Day - All Day - By Morning - By Day By Evening - Day - by Day by Evening - By Evening Day, By Morning - Evening - Day - Day - Day, Day, Evening - Evening, Evening - etc etc etc, etc etc - etc... etc etc.. etc.. etc etc. etc. - etc., etc.., etc. & etc. - etc.. & so on. etc.. And so on... etc. Thank you for listening to this podcast, I really enjoyed this podcast! - Thank you so much for listening! Love & Blessings, - Yours Truly, Yours, Timestamps: - Olly x - P.S. - Ollie xx - - EJ & Rory - The Taoist Experience?
00:00:17.000And I really, really appreciate your life's work.
00:00:21.000I mean, I think what you've done has been really remarkable, particularly because of the time period in which you embarked in it.
00:00:29.000I 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.
00:00:43.000Well, I actually got involved in it when it was incredible fun.
00:00:51.000I 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,
00:01:07.000very isolated spot, and one had nothing to do but kind of mooch around in a beautiful place, have mystical experiences, dream of the future.
00:03:06.000And then his best friend, who was his kind of...
00:03:09.000He 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.
00:03:20.000So he was a big influence in the absence because he was my godfather.
00:04:45.000Well, when I started reading, I started reading about it, but I don't know what I meant by that.
00:04:51.000But 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.
00:05:00.000I was very close to Jesus in those days.
00:06:32.000I 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.
00:08:48.000He 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.
00:11:50.000And then it became very friendly and fun.
00:11:53.000But anyway, he'd written this book, which I actually didn't agree with, which was saying mysticism, sacred and profane.
00:12:03.000And he was the Catholic combat, actually.
00:12:05.000And 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.
00:12:22.000I think they're the same experience, but obviously with different qualities.
00:12:27.000I've heard you say that you believe that what psychedelics do is make the mind more fertile for these experiences.
00:14:10.000So it has, can squat its rights in the brain.
00:14:14.000So when you're in the upright position, gravity is pulling the blood down.
00:14:22.000So I think probably with the upright position we lost...
00:14:28.000A small proportion of our blood supply.
00:14:30.000I 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.
00:14:42.000It hasn't got the valves to keep the blood up.
00:14:45.000And we've obviously got a certain amount, but maybe we lost some blood at that upright position.
00:14:51.000And 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.
00:15:58.000That our basic state is slightly low in blood in the dominant organ.
00:16:06.000So we have to keep this mechanism of tight control where the blood is distributed.
00:16:13.000And that is evolved with the ego, which is essential.
00:16:19.000I mean, we wouldn't survive without the ego to kind of...
00:16:24.000To direct the blood where it's most needed.
00:16:28.000People 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.
00:16:43.000And there was one occasion of someone we knew who was in Ibiza.
00:16:49.000And he'd flipped out and he put the key in the lock to open the door.
00:17:15.000So, 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.
00:17:31.000But we're also obviously a very deeply faulted animal at some point.
00:17:42.000You 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.
00:17:57.000So 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.
00:18:13.000So, the danger of our society now, in a sense, is we're getting further and further away from nature, in a sense.
00:18:25.000And 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.
00:18:45.000So 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
00:19:15.000of blood in the brain, which is giving the brain energy.
00:19:20.000The more energy we have, the more parts of the brain can function simultaneously.
00:19:26.000And that obviously can be very creative, stimulating, empathic, by just having more of the brain functioning.
00:19:46.000And 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.
00:20:05.000Holotropic breathing, exactly, or breathing exercise.
00:20:08.000I mean, all the spiritual training all knew that.
00:20:12.000That's what they were doing in the spiritual disciplines, is teaching people how to control...
00:20:20.000Their internal ego and also their sense of consciousness.
00:20:28.000And I think at the center of the spiritual experience is the getting higher and loosening.
00:20:37.000The grip of the ego, so you're more in touch with nature.
00:20:41.000Do 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?
00:20:56.000I think more and more the word can become the reality.
00:21:02.000I 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.
00:21:15.000It's rather like the shadows on Plato's wall.
00:21:19.000One gets one's internal edition of the world.
00:21:30.000I 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.
00:23:28.000Yeah, beautiful ones of horses and buffaloes.
00:23:35.000And that's in the bowels of the earth they're doing.
00:23:38.000So 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.
00:23:48.000And so I think without doubt they were high.
00:23:54.000How they got there, was it through singing, drumming or singing, or was it through taking compounds?
00:24:02.000Funny 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.
00:24:14.000If there's any remnants of some psychoactive substance.
00:24:18.000And he said, I'm very welcome to go there.
00:24:20.000So I'm very excited about the possibility.
00:24:23.000Are you aware of Brian Murrow-Rescue's work?
00:26:37.000But I knew a student 20 years ago who wanted to do his PhD in Lucis.
00:26:43.000And Harvard told him, if you do that, you won't get it.
00:26:46.000Yeah, that was a giant problem after 1970, correct?
00:26:51.000Like after the sweeping psychedelic back where they made everything Schedule I, psilocybin, mescaline, everything.
00:26:57.000And when they did that, not only did they ruin...
00:27:02.000The 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.
00:27:12.000It was 50, 60, 70 lost years, which is a criminal thing actually.
00:27:19.000And 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.
00:28:24.000When 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.
00:28:34.000But yet, these are the people that would be aided the most by these psychedelics, particularly coming back from war.
00:28:45.000And 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.
00:29:02.000And as the door of repression came down, one could see it's a kind of disaster for humanity.
00:29:11.000But 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,
00:29:28.000but actually there are How good to healing and better happiness, more fulfilled life.
00:29:40.000And 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.
00:30:20.000And I wanted to do brain imaging to look into...
00:30:24.000Our hypothesis is that what they do is increase the volume of blood in the brain capillaries.
00:30:33.000And hopefully with MRI one would see that.
00:30:36.000But 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.
00:30:53.000And that was very interesting because the default mode network, i.e.
00:30:59.000the ego, is hyperactive underlying psychological conditions like depression or anxiety or addiction or all of those things have a hyperactive ego.
00:31:15.000Saying, I need a drink, I'm so depressed.
00:31:19.000And we saw that psilocybin lowers the blood supply to that part of the brain.
00:31:26.000And so then actually we got a government grant to help us do the next phase of the study.
00:31:34.000So 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.
00:31:49.000And 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.
00:32:07.000Now, at the very centre of the new healing, i.e., Psychedelic-assisted therapy is the mystical experience.
00:32:18.000And what we showed is the people who underwent what's kind of categorized as a mystical experience, i.e.
00:32:25.000loosening of the ego, a feeling of unity, those are the ones who have the best outcomes of overcoming their depression.
00:32:41.000Ironical twist that now suddenly the psychedelics are at the center of this new approach to healing.
00:32:52.000And I think the healing of psychedelics goes much, much farther than what we've touched on so far, which is the psychologically-based conditions.
00:33:08.000I 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.
00:35:23.000I 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.
00:35:39.000The trouble is I can show you privately, but the person involved doesn't want it to go out.
00:35:47.000Of a wonderful old lady of 97 who had Alzheimer's for seven years or something, but she was very bright.
00:35:57.000She was a pirate and was looked after by her son.
00:36:03.000And then he went away for a week and someone else came and looked after.
00:36:06.000And when he came back, she was at a kind of Acute vegetative apathy, where she didn't recognize him, just staring into space.
00:36:19.000And 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,
00:36:40.000saying, I feel so wonderful, let's read some poetry now.
00:37:47.000Microdosing LSD can be enormously beneficial.
00:37:53.000I'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.
00:38:11.000And 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.
00:38:35.000And obviously then there was no brain imaging, so it was very difficult to see inside the brain.
00:38:39.000One could only theorize about it, make hypotheses.
00:38:44.000And so this Dutch scientist who I had a long relationship with had this hypothesis That it constricts, it's a vasoconstrictor,
00:39:00.000constricting 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.
00:39:43.000But 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.
00:39:55.000I 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,
00:40:11.000but they're going in the same direction.
00:40:14.000And that's what the endogenously A lot of the...
00:40:20.000I 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.
00:40:36.000I mean, we know the saint's got top high.
00:40:40.000Saint Teresa, her description of her...
00:40:56.000I 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.
00:41:07.000It can produce a very powerful psychedelic experience.
00:42:06.000And 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.
00:42:16.000Yes, 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.
00:42:40.000It's really criminal not to throw money at this research so we can get it out to the people quicker.
00:42:47.000Because access is what we need for all those people who have got terrible things they're suffering from, which could be helped.
00:42:56.000And, I mean, I do as much of the research as I can, but I'm a tiny organisation, four or five people.
00:43:06.000And 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.
00:43:27.000And the cleanest of the compounds, and in many ways, the best.
00:43:32.000Not against, I think, psilocybin and other ones are wonderful, and they all have their different characteristics, which are incredibly valuable.
00:43:45.000That 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.
00:43:58.000And as it is completely non-toxic, you can give it to people Forever.
00:44:09.000A lot of people are microdosing it now.
00:44:11.000It'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.
00:44:28.000I mean, we actually did the first scientific research on the microdose.
00:44:35.000I was collaborating with Maastricht in Holland.
00:44:38.000And we did it on 5, 10, 20, I think it was, those doses.
00:44:47.000And I mean it was amazing the results.
00:44:50.000It increases mood, it increases neuroplasticity, it increases neurogenesis, it increases anti-inflammatory, it increases tolerance to pain.
00:45:09.000Vigilance, you know, all of these very valuable qualities in a microdose.
00:45:15.000And we could be using that with all sorts of indications which need actually more energy to kind of overcome certain deficits.
00:45:27.000And all sorts of therapy applications because you do it and you're essentially completely sober.
00:46:25.000I 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,
00:46:55.000Because there's a lot of psychological medications that people are taking, psychiatric medications that people are taking that they really don't need.
00:47:22.000I 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.
00:47:35.000Actually, if only enough, America's the one which is breaking it, but doesn't allow other countries to break it.
00:47:41.000But not one word has been changed in the last 20 years.
00:48:02.000The stoned ape theory is the theory that Ancient hominids, when the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting with different food sources.
00:48:13.000One 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.
00:48:20.000And that they started eating those and that it increased visual acuity, it increased their arousal states.
00:48:29.000And that they also think glossolalia and so many different – the formation of language.
00:49:16.000I think that psychedelics were an integral part of Homo sapiens' evolution, if you see what I mean.
00:49:30.000I 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.
00:49:45.000I think at the center of Human culture is the experience of altered states of consciousness.
00:49:56.000He attributed it to the increase in brain size.
00:49:59.000He 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.
00:50:11.000I mean, I definitely think all of those things are showing.
00:51:52.000I mean, so I think that's an incredibly important part of it, the ceremony.
00:51:57.000But I think also, as an elixir, when we get knowledgeable about how to use these compounds, they're just amazing health, mental health problems.
00:52:14.000And I think, I mean, I'm obviously, as I get older, very, very interested in how one can hopefully delay the...
00:52:27.000And it's all based on blood, you know.
00:52:30.000As we get older, the blood supply gets worse to the brain.
00:52:35.000So how does one keep the supply of energy as...
00:52:40.000It has topped up, basically, in the most beneficial way for the animal.
00:52:47.000And I think, funnily enough, the cerebral circulation is out of fashion.
00:52:58.000Because we discovered about the cerebral circulation whenever we did 100, 200 years ago, it's considered old-fashioned.
00:53:05.000So modern South really isn't interested in the blood.
00:53:10.000Actually, you know, everyone knows blood goes up, blood comes down.
00:53:15.000But there's very little interest in it.
00:53:19.000I 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.
00:53:35.000We worked together for about six years, and then he died in COVID at 80-something.
00:53:40.000Which 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,
00:53:56.000which is a very ancient practice, which maybe brings the level of cerebral circulation back to childhood level, which is higher than the adult level.
00:54:07.000We should explain trepanation to people because trepanation is a very ancient practice of drilling holes In one's head.
00:54:27.000Well, it was the theory of it which induced me to do it.
00:54:32.000And 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.
00:54:44.000So I can't say, look, this has been proven by science, which until then, people didn't believe psychedelics worked.
00:54:53.000They would say, that's placebo, fancy.
00:55:00.000But 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.
00:55:20.000And then the holes close, but the sutras, the bones, are quite flexible.
00:55:28.000So there's still the full pulsation, the full systolic pulsation is happening.
00:55:36.000Then, 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.
00:55:47.000So, the hypothesis of Trepanation, which has been done now.
00:55:53.000The earliest skull found is, funny enough, the archaeologists at Chauvet told me, near Chauvet, they found a trepan skull of 25,000 years old.
00:56:09.000And you can see if the person lived after the trepanation.
00:57:25.000Pre-history, I'm afraid my memory's back and I haven't been studying it lately.
00:57:31.000But 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.
00:57:57.000The high aims of Buddhism spiritually is by meditation opening your hole in the skull.
00:58:06.000And that's in beautiful old Tibetan art showing...
00:58:13.000Energy coming in and out of the hole in the head.
00:58:17.000So 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.
00:58:35.000And the danger of getting high is when you come down, you have a bad time.
00:58:42.000And 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.
00:58:55.000They became the doctors or the shamans or...
00:59:44.000But I think, I personally think that the change happens with one whole.
00:59:52.000All you need is for the membrane to be able to expand on the heartbeat.
00:59:58.000And 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,
01:00:14.000kind of 13 onwards, the child comes down, 21, the average, the skull closes.
01:00:20.000And that's often when the mental problems start after 21, psychosis and all of those things.
01:00:28.000You're just at a slightly lower level in terms of energy for the brain.
01:00:33.000And 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.
01:00:42.000If there's any brain operation, first you have to trepan the skull.
01:00:51.000I 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,
01:01:08.000which 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,
01:02:53.000We 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.
01:03:04.000And he had terrible headaches all his life.
01:03:09.000He lost a day or two a week on headaches.
01:03:14.000After his trepanation, he doesn't have headaches.
01:04:38.000But 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.
01:04:54.000And so, I think, funny enough, I think the new...
01:05:01.000How I look on it, it's all about feeding the brain with enough energy, mitochondria, working away, to produce that mental cell energy,
01:05:16.000so that we can keep our function close to the optimal.
01:06:12.000The 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.
01:06:39.000Like a hot bath and a freezing bath or any of those techniques obviously change your level of consciousness by bodily reactions.
01:06:49.000But also I think the use of Of the psychoactive compounds, we can, you know, tune it.
01:08:08.000So 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,
01:08:24.000you use a lot of glucose and the sugar level falls.
01:08:28.000Therefore, you need to keep the sugar level normal by increasing the intake.
01:08:36.000And actually, all those years before it was legal, we lived on LSD. When I say live, I meant on big doses every day.
01:11:32.000And the t-shirt I've got for you is, the motto is, know thyself.
01:11:38.000And that was what one was doing, trying to understand how we work better at that level and how we can enhance our working.
01:11:51.000And 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,
01:12:46.000It'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.
01:12:59.000I mean, in order for me to do it, I realized I had to stop being Amanda Fielding.
01:13:07.000No letters after my name, no money, so who am I? And become a foundation.
01:13:13.000Funnily enough, it was a very clever conceptual artwork.
01:13:17.000Because in England, it's very kind of liberal England.
01:13:20.000You pay whatever it is, and you become a foundation.
01:13:24.000A thousand pounds, I think, or something.
01:15:17.000I remember, I mean, no one wants to drill a hole in their head on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
01:15:26.000I can tell you, it is not something I'm a very cautious person.
01:15:31.000And 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.
01:15:56.000My 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,
01:16:12.000and so had quite a few missed shots before he finally got through.
01:16:21.000And, funny enough, then I did notice a difference.
01:18:21.000So 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.
01:18:29.000And 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.
01:18:39.000And I had my beloved Birdie always with me, so he was an observer of this thing.
01:18:48.000There'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.
01:19:02.000I had been planning on doing it on the Sunday, but I moved it forward.
01:19:08.000So I thought it would be good publicity for the movement if I... Anyway...
01:19:42.000But I used a ball with a flat bottom, so it couldn't damage the membrane, because obviously...
01:19:49.000What one's frightened of is damaging the membrane surrounding the brain.
01:19:53.000I 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.
01:20:05.000And it had a flat bottom, so it couldn't.
01:20:07.000I mean, it's not something one wants to do at all.
01:20:11.000But it's kind of like people go skiing, people go horse riding.
01:21:31.000And 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.
01:21:43.000And I had this exhibition at PS1 of the slides.
01:26:25.000If 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,
01:27:00.000So if that can slightly raise the level of energy going to the brain for the rest of the life, it's a valuable thing.
01:27:13.000But 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?
01:27:22.000I should think they had big grain or some terrible thing which went on.
01:27:51.000Until 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.
01:28:03.000Because that's one of the things that all cultures who did it, one of the things they did it for was headaches and insanity.
01:28:10.000In the old days, they said, it's letting devils out.
01:28:16.000And the other indication is letting light in.
01:28:20.000Because often people in the mythical tradition were trapanned.
01:28:27.000So 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.
01:29:57.000It's just fascinating that it's existed for so long.
01:30:00.000Yes, and very much associated with religious practice.
01:30:07.000Basically, 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.
01:30:26.000With cannabis, rather high THC cannabis in it.
01:30:45.000It'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.
01:31:05.000Yeah, it's to kind of slightly expand.
01:33:09.000It was during the civil rights movement.
01:33:11.000They 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.
01:33:20.000And 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.
01:34:13.000And the midwives, they were very often the people who were burnt for witchery.
01:34:20.000And the ironic thing is, when the witches were burnt, Then the villagers got a plague.
01:34:30.000They called it the witch's curse of St. Vitus' dance where you shake and then you finally die.
01:34:38.000And 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...
01:35:00.000I mean, that's, I think, where the hat story came, because they collect the ergot by night because it's phosphorescence from the moon.
01:35:11.000And 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,
01:35:29.000who had been using their medication to help childbirth.
01:35:44.000I 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.
01:35:55.000Yeah, 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.
01:36:14.000Yeah, and it was very much intermingled with the Protestants, the inquisition between the religions and the whole thing came at the same time.
01:36:29.000I 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.
01:36:40.000Because 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.
01:37:00.000I 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.
01:37:14.000But it also has made us this psychotic animal which is capable of great self-harm.
01:37:26.000And that's why I rather like the phrase, The psychedelic age.
01:37:35.000In the sense, I don't mean everyone taking psychedelics and having a party.
01:37:39.000I 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.
01:37:51.000I don't go in for Leary, you know, turn on and drop out.
01:38:02.000Yeah, 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.
01:38:59.000So, 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.
01:39:13.000You 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.
01:39:30.000I've got those beautiful things came from our study.
01:40:06.000And I have an intimate relationship with Jamaica and the deep, deep divers.
01:40:14.000There'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.
01:40:24.000Because he smokes very heavily before he goes down, cannabis.
01:40:30.000And he said that enables him to stop breathing for a much longer period.
01:41:01.000So this is when you're on a psychedelic.
01:41:03.000It 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.
01:41:14.000And so I think it needs training to learn to...
01:42:16.000I know many people, they get on a ketogenic diet and their brain produces ketones and they feel like intellectually that's a superior fuel.
01:42:26.000I think probably it is a very good fuel, yeah.
01:42:29.000I think there's a lot more we'll constantly be learning about how you can energize the brain in better, healthier ways.
01:42:40.000But I think a secret, a basic secret, which I feel I was given the key to in 1966 when I learned about...
01:42:55.000How one can increase the blood supply to the brain and therefore give it all that extra energy to have all the brain functioning.
01:43:52.000And 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.
01:44:20.000And 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.
01:44:55.000Because when I'm around my children, I'm fascinated by them.
01:44:58.000And 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.
01:45:11.000And you have much more in common with them, because you're on the same wavelength.
01:45:24.000And 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?
01:45:42.000I 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.
01:45:54.000You know, I've taken enough of it that I really think it's actually good.
01:46:00.000And my children, I'm proud of my children.
01:46:03.000And, you know, they are children of...
01:46:08.000Parents who understood the benefits of altered states of consciousness.
01:46:13.000Yeah, 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.
01:46:30.000And the dangers of things that may be contaminated with fentanyl.
01:46:35.000And 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.
01:46:47.000And that's what's criminal, and I do think criminal, about the government, because all the governments, the knowledge is out there.
01:46:57.000These are non-toxic, the ones which are non-toxic.
01:47:09.000The illegal market in cannabis is taken over by certain breeders who breed only rubbish stuff.
01:47:16.000An insensible person would never dream of smoking.
01:47:19.000Very high THC cannabis, which is shit.
01:47:24.000And it's not good for young people to smoke that.
01:47:27.000And it's the authorities which are forcing the young people into that if they choose to smoke.
01:47:35.000And I did a paper for the government saying that if they, as I hope they do, regulate cannabis, they should...
01:47:51.000Make very low tax for THC-CBD balance.
01:47:57.000And 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.
01:48:16.000And 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.
01:48:31.000I think it should be encouraged a nice balance of THC, CBD. Yeah.
01:48:37.000Well, 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.
01:48:48.000It's just comfortable, not too bad, you know, and especially in conjunction with all the cannabinoids with CBD. Yeah, wonderful.
01:48:59.000And that's such a wonderful step forward.
01:50:26.000Well, it's fascinating to me that that all took place during the 80s.
01:50:31.000And 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.
01:51:29.000You 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,
01:52:50.000It drops off a cliff after 1970. How interesting.
01:52:54.000It's fascinating because those cars from 1965 to 1970, to this day, are the most cherished collector's automobiles and the most beautiful designs.
01:53:05.000Funny enough, in this talk I'm giving a few days' time at Denver, I'm saying you can see...
01:53:14.000And the markings of civilization, you can see which civilizations had integrated altered states of consciousness and which hadn't by their creativity production.
01:53:27.000Rather 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.
01:53:56.000And it's so clear that that time period directly correlates with the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970, where they stopped people using these things.
01:54:07.000They made them forbidden and dangerous.
01:55:24.000I think one of the things that psychedelics do is increase the intuitive part of the brain.
01:55:33.000And 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.
01:55:50.000So in the high doses, I'm wanting to do a research on the mystical experience.
01:56:15.000And 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.
01:56:30.000So it will only be person by person looking at the data.
01:56:35.000And then it will be 7 Tesla and a Meg.
01:56:51.000When 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.
01:57:07.000Because 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.
01:57:30.000So the more we can learn about how does that grow, how does one help the fruition of that experience, the better.
01:57:43.000And then, well, that's at the top level, looking at those experiences.
01:57:48.000I mean, it's going to be so exciting, which parts of the brain to look at.
01:57:52.000And the whole different areas, the hemispheres, the blood supply, which parts of the brain are activating in the highest way in that experience.
01:58:04.000I once did an experience with a very high-level Indian meditator lady.
01:58:10.000And she really wanted to help me, and it was an omega, one of those ones, Herdra.
01:58:15.000And she told me after she came out beaming, she'd had a most wonderful mystical experience while she was in the machine.
01:58:24.000She said, the best experience I've had with God for a long time.
01:58:29.000And it showed a great burst of gamma in the right cerebellum.
01:58:36.000Which is very fascinating because everyone thinks the cerebellum is just nothing, basic balance and all those sort of things.
01:58:44.000But actually, I think it's a very highly, much more fascinating than that.
01:58:49.000And so a mystical experience is rather like a toad in the sun, sitting on the sun in a state of blissful happiness.
01:58:59.000You know, it'd be very fascinating to actually know about more...
01:59:07.000These different experiences that we can as humans experience and how hopefully we can map them and therefore learn how to get them more.
01:59:18.000One of the things I was fascinated about with you is your discussions of your experiences on LSD playing Go.
02:03:24.000But 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.
02:05:09.000When 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.
02:05:23.000So from deep apathy, it goes to a sparkling little old lady.
02:05:27.000And there's nothing conventional that would replace that.
02:05:30.000There's no conventional medication that has the same sort of apathy.
02:05:33.000And 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.
02:05:46.000He says 70% of his residents have Alzheimer's and there's nothing you can do.
02:05:54.000And 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.
02:06:04.000And it's stunning that there's something available.
02:06:19.000Because 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,
02:06:37.000scientists, you know, I can design them.
02:06:44.000And what I can see is it's very similar to a condition which we know historically, which is called terminal lucidity.
02:06:55.000And I've been studying that for the last year or two.
02:06:57.000It'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,
02:07:18.000you know, who know them know they're there at the shop.
02:07:22.000And 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.
02:07:36.000I mean, not probably functioning like this old lady.
02:07:58.000And I think we can now get that going.
02:08:02.000And 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,
02:08:19.000see if it has the same effect as it had with this old lady.
02:08:27.000I would have wonderful trained doulas who entertain them and make it a wonderful place to be.
02:08:33.000We'd have dogs and children and it would be like home.
02:08:36.000You 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.
02:08:49.000And what a superior experience that would be to the traditional nursing home.
02:09:55.000I wanted to talk to you about near-death experiences.
02:09:58.000And 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.
02:10:16.000Near death, the body is in a state of extreme turn-on, and it naturally, endogenously, Let's out these compounds,
02:10:35.000oxytocin, 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,
02:10:52.000serotonin, which is very similar to a psychedelic.
02:10:58.000And that's why people can suddenly come out of a vegetative state shortly before death.
02:11:54.000And 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.
02:12:08.000One of the more bizarre things that comes out of psychedelic experience is contact with entities.
02:12:14.000Contact with what seems to be some other form of consciousness.
02:12:20.000What do you think is going on with that?
02:12:25.000I love your entity flashing across the ceiling.
02:14:25.000Yeah, 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.
02:14:34.000But I actually thought, I don't really, sir, choose compounds which bring...
02:14:42.000The tendency of those sort of experiences.
02:14:45.000But I know people have wonderful experiences.
02:15:30.000And I think people are very lucky who've never had a really bad experience.
02:15:35.000I 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...
02:15:57.000Anyway, he had a vinegar bottle of Sandoz vitamin C. Wow.
02:16:39.000So, 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.
02:17:07.000The 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...
02:17:24.000I 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.
02:17:53.000Or do you think it's actually an entity?
02:17:57.000I know Shaman, a ayahuasca chair, and he says he always considered in the Senti Diami Church, they consider entities a deflection of attention.
02:18:11.000It's better not to go into the world of entities.
02:18:15.000But a lot of people love the entities.
02:18:20.000My son once had an entity experience with ayahuasca.
02:18:28.000The entity told him, why do you have so many, such a collection of sneakers?
02:20:34.000And 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.
02:20:51.000And that was the last thing I said to him.
02:20:53.000And then he died, and I knew he was dead.
02:20:57.000I was painting a picture, I was on acid painting a picture, and I suddenly had this thing, Birdie's dead, Birdie's dead.
02:21:03.000And so I did what I had never done, I stopped painting and went down to look for him.
02:21:09.000Anyway, 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.
02:21:31.000And in the nettles was Birdie's still warm body.
02:21:37.000So I knew before it happened and he knew within ten minutes of it happening...
02:21:47.000I mean, how many dead birds do you get?
02:22:14.000I said he was a hero, Antonioni's new film.
02:22:20.000Because I put adverts in the Times and everywhere looking for a beloved grey London pigeon.
02:22:25.000I got thousands of people saying they had him and we went all over England collecting these wretched pigeons which were meant to be birdie.
02:22:33.000LAUGHTER 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.
02:22:48.000I asked Antonioni if I could do that, and he said yes.
02:22:51.000And so the BBC was jammed with telephones, seeing people finding Buddy.
02:23:00.000And then I was really upset because they said they never introduce...
02:23:05.000Whatever, people who ring in to people looking for fear of something.
02:23:10.000Anyway, so I was incredibly sad because I thought, what the point of the whole thing?
02:23:14.000The whole point was to get Bernie back.
02:23:16.000And then there was one telephone call which came through, which came from the police station.
02:23:24.000And 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.
02:23:35.000And because it was the police's line, it got through to me.
02:27:02.000We 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.
02:27:19.000We showed that it increased neurogenesis.
02:27:58.000Well, I think that's why it's so wonderful that someone like you is out here with this passion for doing this research.
02:28:04.000And wonderful that you're spreading information about these things to people because it has to get out there that people are actually interested.
02:28:27.000I mean, I think the use of cannabis and psychedelics can enhance one's relationship with one's partner.
02:28:37.000One can help see the other viewpoint, help kind of get over difficult periods.
02:28:44.000I think it can do that with warring countries.
02:28:49.000I 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,
02:29:04.000so you can approach things which are fearful, like trauma, better.
02:29:09.000I 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.
02:29:27.000I mean, the number of people I know, and I bet you know many more, who've said it changed their lives, their experience.
02:29:40.000I 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.
02:29:56.000I passionately think psychedelics are a gift of the gods in inverted commas.
02:30:03.000It's a natural It shouldn't be expensive.
02:30:10.000We must keep it so it's affordable to the poorest and the rest of the world.
02:30:16.000And that shouldn't be difficult to do.
02:31:43.000And that's the benefit of the rich people as well.
02:31:45.000And 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.
02:31:58.000But really, governments should be Encouraging.
02:32:04.000I mean, to give the British government, they did fund our depression study, second time round, to give them their two.
02:33:59.000Well, thank you very much for asking me.
02:34:02.000If someone wants to learn more about your research, where should they go?
02:34:06.000Well, 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.
02:34:56.000But 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?
02:35:09.000But I think there's an advantage in it.