#2002 - Amanda Feilding

Very much really appreciate, thank you. This lovely to meet you and uh... really really appreciate your life's work and i think what you've done has been really remarkable particularly because of the time period in which you embarked in it and he 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 well i actually got involved in it when it was incredible fun i was incredibly lucky with my timing i think because i was very attracted to uh... the other side through like the mystical because i lived in this very very isolated spot and one had nothing much to do but they kind of moved around in a beautiful place have mystical experiences dream of the future is that your phone? yes when did you first get involved or even interested in what you would call mystical experiences no worries i don't know how to turn these things off do you want me to turn it on mute for you? yes please these wacky kids today they're devices sorry about that no worries no worries at all uh... so how old were you when you first got interested in very young i should say i came uh... i had a kind of in the i grew up in this very isolated place uh... i was very very close to my father who came back from the war a diabetic and she was a very eccentric person and so from three i was his carer three years old which was a lovely role i mean i was his little pet dog i went everywhere with it i adored him and he adored me and he was a very out of the he wasn't in normal society at all how so? he just wasn't he was eccentric and charming did his own thing artist a farmer but not really a farmer he couldn't be really farming yeah anyway so uh... i suppose spiritually i had three my mother was a catholic so i grew up a catholic and then he was whatever agnostic atheist except a thinker and then his best friend who was his kind of he picked up as uh... the person who did all his work when he was at university called Bertie became a Buddhist monk rather famous Buddhist monk but so he was a big influence in the absence because he was my godfather and so i had these three influences and so i kind of dreamt of magic mystical things in the world and had mystical experiences as lots of children do and so then i'm sorry i can't think how to condense it but anyway i grew up in an unusual setting and with the passion for altered states of mystics i started studying them and i was probably about ten really and it became rather a passion in the place we lived with this it got three motes it was very overgrown and in between the motes there was a mound, very beautiful mound i had a kind of pet god who lived in a mound i could see her and my kind of my mission was making this god figure laugh that was the aim of the game so when you say you studied the mystical states at ten like how so how are you doing that well when i started reading i started reading about it but i didn't really i don't know what i meant by that 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 i was very close to Jesus in those days and then whatever but it was a kind of rather wild quite a dangerous upbringing we had to do the farming it was quite it was a mixture between all the kind of beautiful setting quite a mixture with peasant life of looking after the animals and farm animals, pigs cows, all of that sort of thing and then at one point i decided i wanted to leave her and i went to a boarding school it was a terrible mistake and uh... a convent and actually i won the sound sixteen won the sounds prize, it was quite clever but i hated it and lived outside the boundaries of the school all the time and then i wanted to book some Buddhism because for my prize and the nuns said no no we can't give a book some Buddhism and so i said alright i'll leave thanks very much and educate myself which is what i did, i left school at sixteen really? and it was because they wouldn't allow you to study Buddhism yeah that's what i chose to study and they wouldn't say thanks in the original days of the church the incense what they would walk down the aisle with, that was cannabis that was beautiful i mean the one thing i loved about that convent there was a in the chapel they had even song and this Italian nun with a voice of an angel and it really with incense took one into a mystical space and that was very special that was the high point of it they used to use cannabis and then the host, what did the host used to be? the host, i mean obviously originally it was a psychedelic do we know what psychedelic? i think different places are different ones based on mushroom or ergot or those sort of things and if i'm rather keen on making sacred hosts i recently was involved in that, anyway that's a different story but i would love to hear that story, you make sacred hosts? no i don't but i'm going to you're going to? i once actually, the story was very much shock probably a Catholic conference not so, once i was in Paris and we were walking by Notre Dame on a Sunday and very high went into the church and lovely eucharist i hadn't heard all those wonderful songs, they loved those Latin 16th century or 15th century chanting and so i experienced having the host again and it was so delicious spiritually it was wonderful and so i can absolutely see originally the host was a psychedelic experience and with that music and the incense it's a beautiful spiritual experience i'm sure that was probably the root of a lot of those religious ceremonies have you read John Marco Olegros book, the sacred mushroom in the cross? no i haven't, is that a good one? it's an amazing book John Marco Olegros was an ordained minister who was a religious scholar and an expert on language and he was one of the deciphers of the dead sea scrolls so he worked with that for 14 years, they deciphered the dead sea scrolls and then he wrote the sacred mushroom in the cross which was his interpretation of what the dead sea scrolls was really all about and he believed that the origins of christianity were in the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals now i absolutely agree, i'm sure psychedelics were at the root of all of those spiritual practices and part of them so when you were first experiencing these things, what year are we talking about when you first got excited about these things? let me just think, i love it well i first met cannabis when i was 16 and funny enough, the first time i spoke to it, Ray Charles was playing oh wow and i felt this is paradise and i bet millions of people had ray charles and now for the sounding of cannabis but it was wonderful it's amazing what it does to music so i was 16, which was, i was born in 43 so i know who that was anyway, that's when i started smoking cannabis and it was, oh there at Oxford at that point, with a very interesting group of they were older than the other students because they had been in Korea so they were much better educated and they were smokers and introduced me to a lot of wonderful books like Against Nature and Lautreaux-Morte well, rather wonderful material and it was a very creative period and at that point, as i'd left school by then i had somehow got the world's leading expert like, what was the American one? common man anyway, on comparative religions mysticism, someone called Professor Zeina who's at all cells in Oxford and wrote a book called Mysticism of Sacred and Profane and he became my tutor so i went and saw him twice a week which was a very kind of awkward meeting so yeah because i was very shy and he was very shy and it was in all cells and we both sat there cuddling the cats kind of thing 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 loosen everybody up and then it became very friendly and fun but anyway, he'd written this book which i actually didn't agree with which was saying psychedelic mysticism, sacred and profane and he was a Catholic combat actually 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 if we had an endogenous mystical experience which i don't actually think is necessary i think they're the same experience but obviously with different qualities i've heard you say that you believe that what psychedelics do is make the mind more fertile for these experiences yes, that's exactly what i think i think you're at that level where the ego's control has dissolved to some degree and so it's like fertile ground and so if you've whatever pre-trained if you're ready for a mystical experience you're more likely to have it in that experience in that state of mind so the mind is actually restricting us in many ways through the ego from having these experiences yes, i think so and what psychedelics do is release those boundaries yes, i think that due to the um evolution of man homo sapiens and now taking the upright position this is a theory i was introduced to in 1966 and actually i think a lot of the details are probably wrong but in concept i think is true which is the ape standing upright one thing people haven't taken into account is obviously there are hundreds of assets of standing upright you free your hands you can see further all of that but in upright position gravity is against the blood in the brain because in the brain there are two fluid volumes blood and cerebral spinal fluid which is water basically which is made in the brain itself so it has kind of squatters rights in the brain so when you're in the upright position gravity is pulling the blood down so i think probably with the upright position we lost a small proportion of our blood supply i mean some animals if you tie them up right a dog for instance if it's tied up so you can't get down it will start howling and go mad because it hasn't got the valves to keep the blood up and we've obviously got a certain amount but maybe we lost some blood at that upright position 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 obviously all animals do that they have the power to send the blood where it's most important to survival or whatever and i think that through the use of the conditioned sound the word we learnt to control that process more than any other animal and over the millennia we kind of built up our power to do that so i think that's the secret of why humans you know a talking ape got control of the whole game because of our creation of language which enabled us to do all these incredible things we do but it also has a disadvantage that our basic state is slightly low in blood in the dominant organ so we have to keep this this mechanism of tight control where the blood is distributed and that is evolved with the ego which is essential i mean we wouldn't survive without the ego to kind of direct the blood where it's most needed 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 and there was one occasion someone who knew was in Ibiza and he'd flipped out and he put the key in the lock to open the door someone would say goodnight to him he put the key in the lock and left him 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 so we need the words to keep us under control so the words have made us what we are this incredible animal who can have a nuclear war if we want or know all the atoms in the body all those brilliant things we do which is amazing but we're also obviously a very deeply faulted animal at some point where neurotic, psychotic, psychote all of those things because of this shortage of blood and then the dependent on the meaning of the work so if we have a terrible conditioning which a lot of people do the separation from reality is in a sense in the meaning of the word so the danger of our society now in a sense is we're getting further and further away from nature in a sense 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 so I actually think that we're entering a kind of new possible age and that's why for some 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 of blood in the brain which is giving the brain energy the whole thing is about energy the more energy we have parts of the brain can function simultaneously and that obviously can be very creative stimulating and pathic by just having more of the brain functioning 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 through exercise or... Hidotropic breathing Exactly, all breathing exercises I mean all the spiritual training all knew that that's what they were doing in the spiritual disciplines is teaching people how to control their internal ego and also their sense of consciousness and I think at the center of the spiritual experience is forgetting higher and loosening the grip of the ego so you're more in touch with nature 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 Yes, I think more and more the word can become the reality I mean in the creation of words which we all have and have to have and thankful to have but nevertheless it does create a slightly different world it's rather like the shadows on Plato's wall one gets one's internal addition of the world rather than the real experience of the world and so 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 but still that's the way we're going and it has great advantages as well as dangers but I do think that the knowledge of getting high has always been central to the human evolution and at the earliest demonstrations of what we've got of the earliest demonstrations of human culture say the caves in Chauvet which I think they've never been bettered I mean that artwork, the brush strokes of those animals they're alive, you can see the movement no one ever did it better and it's like 30 something thousand years old? Exactly, 35, 40, something around there so I can tell because I'm some respects an artist I know those strokes Let's see, pull up some of those images Jamie Amazing stuff They're just incredible the movement of animals, the feeling They did create a feeling of movement like the animals were running and the lines, I mean anyone who paints, I mean Picasso I think said without them he would have never done what he did I can't remember quite but modern art isn't better it gets as good but not really It's crazy because they're depicting rhinos too really wild, that was rhinos in France Beautiful ones of horses and buffaloes and that's in the bowels of the earth it was obviously very spiritual why go into the bowels of the earth if it's just a kind of magical spiritual experience they're having I think without doubt they were high how they got there, was it through singing, drumming or singing or was it through taking compounds funny enough I've recently been introduced to a charming man who's an archaeologist in charge of the survey and I said I'd love to be able to analyze and see if we can find out if there's any remnants of a psychoactive substance and he said I was very welcome to go there so I'm very excited about the possibility Are you aware of Brian Murrow Rescue's work? Yes I know, I knew him years ago, he approached me at the UN and said he'd do pro bono lawyer work because I never took it up Maybe it would help you better if this was on the top of your head How do you do that? It seems like it's falling Like that? Thank you His work with determining that in Eleusis that they were using, Urgot and some other psychedelics I know the book and I know him The immortality for people of Eleusis and also I know from long ago Carl Rook wrote the original book Do you know that one? The Road to Eleusis Yeah I've heard of it Which is a very good book with Albert Hoffman and the banker What was his name anyway? So they know that those people at least back then the Eleusinian mysteries that they were using psychedelics And do you know it's obvious from the art What I think is that one can sense when the civilization had at its source the use of altered states of consciousness I see the civilization rather like a cutting of a tree You see the rings Some ears are droughts and other light or some rain and they are wide and flourishing In culture, I mean that Eleusis and that Chauvet I mean they must have been high to produce that incredible art And the same at Eleusis and all of that Greek I mean it's never taught at schools and things Both my sons did classics at Oxford None of them, it was never mentioned to Eleusis Do you know what I mean? Yeah Amazing That center of the whole classical world is the mystical experience of death and rebirth Well, Harvard's opened up a field of study about this now Yeah, which is quite interesting But I knew a student 20 years ago who wanted to do his PhD in Eleusis And Harvard told him if you do that you won't get it Yeah, that was a giant problem after 1970, correct? After the sweeping psychedelic back where they made everything Schedule I, psilocybin, the mesculine, everything And when they did that, not only did they ruin 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 Yes, absolutely For 50, it was 50, 60, 70, lost years Which is a criminal thing actually And the untold suffering of the millions of people who went to prison, usually from minorities Yes And had their lives ruined by a record For maybe having been caught for a joint three times or whatever Right I mean, it is horrific, what happened It's horrific Well, there's people in jail right now for that in this country, which is insane It's insane And I mean, I started fighting back whenever, when I started the Beckman Foundation I saw that in order to do research, one had to change the drug policies And the two went hand in hand because doing the research would help change the drug policies And in order to do the research, you had to change the policies I mean, it was a bit of a catch-22, because until you've done the research You can't do it, if you see what I mean Right They make it so difficult to do Well, I think what MAPS has done, which is genius, is their work with MDMA and soldiers And soldiers having PTSD Absolutely Because the general, I mean, when you think of soldiers, when you think of people in the military You generally think of people who are right-wing, who have more authoritarian leanings But yet, these are the people that would be aided the most by these psychedelics, particularly coming back from war So because of that, I believe they've opened up a door to an understanding I think it's very, very important 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 only 65 onwards And as the door of repression came down, one could see it, it kind of disaster for humanity Yes 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 And actually, there are how good to healing and better happiness, more fulfilled life And so I thought that that's why I started doing the sounds To try to, with the language of the modern world, which is sounds, to demonstrate how valuable these compounds are And I think our first, that's why I set up the Beckley Imperial Study And the first study we did was using psilocybin And then we saw that I wanted to do LSD, but we couldn't do LSD in those days I had to be psilocybin, and no one knows what psilocybin is, how it's spelled, what it means It's not so taboo, so we got permission And I wanted to do brain imaging to look into our hypothesis And what they do is increase the volume of blood in the brain capillaries And hopefully with MRI, one would see that 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 the modern expression of the ego, part of the ego And that was very interesting because the default mode network, i.e. the ego Is hyperactive, underlying psychological conditions Like depression or anxiety or addiction, all of those things have a hyperactive ego Saying, I need a drink, I'm so depressed And we saw that psilocybin lowers the blood supply to that part of the brain And so then actually we got a government grant to help us do the next phase of the study 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 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 skies And just total rubbish, which he finally has done Now, at the very centre of the new healing, i.e. psychedelic assisted therapy Is the mystical experience And what we showed is the people who underwent what can be categorized as a mystical experience i.e. loosening of the ego, a feeling of unity Those are the ones who have the best outcomes of overcoming their depression So it's a rather beautiful little, erm, ironical twist That now suddenly the psychedelics are at the centre of this new approach to healing 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 I think it can be very, very useful in different doses Because what is so wonderful about psychedelics is they have different, totally different defects in the different dose And at the mini micro dose, I'm beginning to have evidence and I'm just starting a study Which shows amazing potential results of micro dose for Alzheimer's Really? Interesting Yeah, absolutely amazing, remarkable Really? Yeah I was watching a video yesterday on cannabis and Parkinson's It was incredible There was a gentleman who had horrible loss of control of his body and the shaking And they gave him cannabis oil And he put it under his tongue and a few minutes later he's lying back on the couch And then he holds his hands out and his hands are dead straight I'm like, this is extraordinary And my partner, before, who is the father of my children, he got Parkinson's So I was very well and very fond of him It's mild Parkinson's, but still it was Parkinson's And so I'd heard how, and I studied it, how micro dosing, Ibogaine is very good for minimising So I'm wanting to do, I'm setting up a research into that Interesting You know, I think, and I think also Yeah, this is the gentleman right here, this is exactly the video that I saw So this guy has terrible loss of control of his body He can barely hold the cannabis oil in his mouth Ah, poor man Yeah, I mean, he's struggling so bad But now, it says 1.37pm, this is when he takes it And then you see just a few minutes later, they show him lie back And this is at, go ahead Jamie, that's 1.41pm Look at this, I mean, not even 10 minutes That is magic And look at this, and he's fine, he sits up And he's just blown away by it, he's like it's so quickly And look at his hands, incredible No, that is wonderful 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 Yes, it stops it, the kid can make eye contact, communicate Absolutely, well I could show you, the trouble is I can show you privately, but not The person involved doesn't want it to go out Of a wonderful old lady of 97 who had Alzheimer's for seven years or something But she was very bright, she was a pirate and a padre And was looked after by her son, and then he went away for a week And someone else came and looked after her And when he came back, she was at a kind of acute, vegetative apathy Where she didn't recognise him, so staring into space And they discussed it before, and she'd said, yeah, she knew he sometimes took a psychedelic And so he gave her a microdose of LSD And an hour later, I've got the third world She's a little sparkling old lady with her full contact with him Saying, I feel so wonderful, let's read some poetry now Just like that man And then he contacted me and said, what should he do? Well, first thing would be to get a doctor to help you manage it And then continue with the lower dose that gets that effect Which was 10 micro... which is 10 millionth of a gram I mean, such a small dose, you would hardly think it could have an effect And that does something which I'm doing research on now I think it's to do with the connectivity between the different brain centres Which I think it sparks And it brought her back And her children said it was just remarkable It's incredible You know, and I've noticed the same things I'm very... I'm in the middle of getting going on the autism study Because I think certainly with level one, the layer lower degrees of autism Microdosing LSD can be enormously beneficial 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 I'm getting his advice on the autism level of things 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 What are the mechanisms underlying that makes LSD and associated compounds have the effect it has And obviously then there was no brain imaging It was very difficult to see inside the brain And I theorise about it, make hypothesis And so this Dutch scientist who I had a long relationship with Had this hypothesis that it constricts It's a vasoconstrictor constricting the veins 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 years, as gravity pulls the blood down again So that's... And you go back to normal But during that period of more blood in the brain, you have more energy Now I'm looking into... now how does it make more energy apart from providing more glucose and oxygen And I've got a very, very interesting... something which is coming up Which I'll tell you on my next talk about 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 I think cannabis and the psychedelics have the same underlying mechanisms But at different levels of... I think the constrictions of psychedelics are much stronger Because you obviously get much higher, you can, on the psychedelic But they're going in the same direction And that's what the... endogenously... a lot of the... I'd love to know more about that I really... if I've got time to do that, study into the underlying... you know... serotonin, dopamine All the different enzymes, hormones in the body which can do these things... endogenously I mean we know the saints got top high Saint Teresa, her description of her orgasm with God It's just like a description of a psychedelic trip kind of thing So it's the same experience but I've got endogenously or through other ways I think one thing that's very interesting about cannabis too is the difference between eating it And when your body's producing 11 hydroxy metabolite from the eating of it It can produce a very powerful psychedelic experience Absolutely And my experiences with it where it's been very profound are with the sensory deprivation tank Yes I have a sensory deprivation tank and I do it with edible marijuana Right It's incredible Right and I think there's some... I've got a friend who grows marijuana And I think I'm very interested in the... he always wants me to work with one of the reeds he reads Because it is like a psychedelic And I thought I'd call it the... if I do it... the Beckley Brain Boost Because it brings back his memory And it brings back... I think they're very... I mean we are only beginning to scrape the top of the knowledge Of how these compounds work and how we can use them for humanity Well it's just very unfortunate that research was stopped for so long Yes And we're very fortunate that there's people like yourself and MAPS and so many other groups that have continued research And have really pushed for the legalization of this 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 And therefore it's really criminal not to throw money at this research so we can get it out to the people quicker Because access is what we need for all those people who have got terrible things they're suffering from Which could be helped And I mean I do as much research as I can but I'm a tiny organization, four or five people And tiny amounts of money we've got And to get this study going takes a year of paperwork getting permissions, getting the compounds Which are at the moment doing... because I'm wanting to really civilize LSD Because I think LSD is actually the purest and cleanest of the compounds and in many way the best Not against, I think, the psilocybin and other ones are wonderful and they all have their different characteristics Which are incredibly valuable but it's a complete madness 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 coloring I think LSD is And as it is completely non-toxic you can give it to people forever It's not toxic, they aren't building up toxicity A lot of people are microdosing it now, it's a very very common thing, microdosing of LSD And what they're reporting is an alleviation of anxiety, a heightened state of wellness and of awareness And of being in the moment, clarity Just from a microdose Yes, I mean we actually did the first scientific research on the microdose I was collaborating with Bastryk, Sir Donald, and we did it on 5, 10, 20, I think it was, those doses And I mean it was amazing the results It increases mood, it increases neuroplasticity, it increases neurogenesis, it increases anti-inflammatory It increases tolerance to pain, vigilance, you know, all of these very valuable qualities in a microdose And we could be using that with all sorts of indications which need actually more energy to kind of overcome certain deficits And also to therapy applications because you do it and you're essentially completely sober In the sense of you can communicate, you see things clearly, everything is fine But you have achieved a very elevated state Absolutely, but you say everyone can do it, it's only those very few who know how I come across innumerable people who I know someone who you know who has terrible migraine And he had a microdosing of LSD and he cured it and he has terrible problems in getting it And it's not easy to get So do you see what I mean? And a lot of people don't want to have to go on to the dark web But I have no idea how you do the dark web, do you know what I mean? And what you're opening yourself up to and you get on the dark web Exactly, you don't know what the product is I mean, what I've said about the, 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 science, on harm reduction, on human rights You know, and cost effectiveness, I mean, you know, and not one which is that reverse Right, well that's sort of the problem is cost The real problem is there's a vested financial interest in keeping these things illegal Because there's a lot of psychological medications that people are taking, psychiatric medications that people are taking that they really don't need Yeah, and it keeps companies and also prisons were the second biggest industry Because it's free labor and a lot of funding coming in It's very twisted, it's awful, that aspect of it is terrifying It is terrifying, and I mean, I've been at it, 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 Actually, if only enough, America's the one which is breaking it, but doesn't allow the countries to break it But not one word has been changed in the last 20 years Which is crazy Especially when considering what we know now Yeah, exactly About the benefits of it Were you friends with Terrence McKenna? Did you know him? I knew him, yes, yes, yes What did you think of his stoned ape theory? Now what was that? The stoned ape theory is the theory that ancient hominids, when the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting with different food sources 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 And that they started eating those, and that it increased visual acuity, it increased their arousal states And that they also think glossolalia, and so many different, the formation of language, so many things came about from that I mean, I wouldn't put it exactly the way he put it, but I would say that we know animals, we know that reindeer eat mushrooms And as mushrooms are exactly, as they are toxic, the king reindeer drinks the pee of the drug which has gone through like the big boss of the village Get all the lower members of the village to take the psilocybin first or whatever, and then drink the urine of cleaned out The cleaned version, well reindeer also does that So animals have taken it, and I think that psychedelics were an integral part of Homo sapiens evolution, if you see what I mean 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 And one or two other things, but I think that's a major lift, I think at the center of human culture is the experience of altered states of consciousness He attributed it to the increase in brain size 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 I mean, I definitely think all of those things are showing up I don't, I mean he was a poet, he wasn't, you know, he expressed it, poetically So I mean he talked a lot of rubbish, I know that, because I went to a lot of conferences with him and I knew it What did you think was rubbish? Well I can't remember, but exaggerated things The time zero, the... Whatever, you know Time wave zero Yeah, but at the same time he's a very good poet and he had a lot of very, you know, deep thinking Well he was very compelling Yeah, absolutely, and that's wonderful Yeah, and he got a lot of people to be interested in psychedelics because he was so interesting to hear And a very good presentation Yeah, an unusual voice too Yes, wonderful, Irish, yeah Yes, yes, yes Very, very good, very good Yeah, but yeah, I think these compounds are integral to where Homo sapiens has got to And I think the disaster is that we started repressing it I mean, obviously even at the time of Jesus it was kept secret He was always kept secret, even at a Lucis, which went on for 2,000 years They kept it secret, probably that's why Socrates had to commit suicide Because he had it with his boyfriend at the dinner parties Do you know, it was only to be used sacredly for the ceremonies Yes Which I actually think, I mean, so I think that's an incredibly important part of it, the ceremony But I think also as an elixir, when we get knowledgeable about how to use these compounds They're just amazing health, mental health elixirs And I think, I mean, I'm obviously, as I get older, very, very interested in how one can hopefully delay the And it's all based on blood You know, as we get older the blood supply gets worse to the brain So how does one keep the supply of energy as topped up, basically, in the most beneficial way for the animal And I think, funny enough, the cerebral circulation is out of fashion Because we discovered about the cerebral circulation whenever we did 100, 200 years ago It's considered old-fashioned, so modern sounds really isn't interested in the blood, actually You know, everyone knows blood goes out, blood comes down But there's very little interest in it 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 the cerebral spinal fluid and blood And we worked together for about six years, and then he died in Covid at 80 something 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 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 We should explain trepanation to people, because trepanation is a very ancient practice of drilling holes in one's head And you decided to do it, you were in your 20s when you did this? Yes And what influenced you to do that? What was the motivation? Well, it was the theory of it which induced me to do it And in a way, I prefer not talking too much about it Not because I'm not in favour of researching it, but because I haven't done the research So I can't say, look, this has been proven by science Which until then, people didn't believe psychedelics worked They didn't say that's foreseeable, fancy Only when you were showing science, it worked But anyway, the hypothesis is that when we are born, as we all know, there's the fontanelle, the jowls, which close soon And you can see the pulsation in the fontanelle hole of the baby You can see the brain pulsing And then the holes close, but the sutras, the bones, are quite flexible So there's still the full pulsation, the full systolic pulsation is happening 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 exchange So the hypothesis of trepanation, which has been done now, the earliest skull found, is funny enough The archaeologist at Chauvet told me, near Chauvet, they found a Japan skull of 25,000 years old And you can see if the person lived after the trepanation Because the bones grow Yes, and softens 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 But I long to, because it's very close to what I want to do Do we know the origins of trepanation? Do we know how it was... We know it's the oldest operation in the world, but it's done all around the world It's very much associated with religion, Mr. Silman Very often, the skulls which are trepanned have a special burial They are buried in a pot or with silk around them I'm showing that they were either priest caste or royal caste or some thing But they are very present in every culture, which is interested Not very present, but present And the biggest mass of trepan skulls, funnily enough, I think it's on the German-Dutch border I don't know why From what time period? Prehistory, I'm afraid my memory is back and I haven't been studying it lately 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 thing, is a visualization of the third eye And one of the high, whatever, I can't think of the word, the high aims of Buddhism, spiritually Is by meditation opening your hole in the skull And that's in beautiful old Tibetan art showing energy coming in and out of the hole in the head 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 agate And the danger of getting high when you come down, you have a bad time, maybe flip out, but you have a bad time 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 They became the doctors or the shamans or, it seems to have an advantage Because like in Mexico, skulls, everyone grows up with skulls, you know, they have a skull There's a, there's a These Day of the Dead skulls, they're not real No, right Well, I've seen, I mean because I was interested in, I've seen quite a lot of skulls, in fact I've even got one Which is, I think is, I can't quite remember, 400, 700 BC An hour is chieftain is meant to be, and it's got actually six holes in it And why anyone wants to do six holes, I have no idea Some of them are quite large too Yeah, but I think, I personally think that the change it happens with one hole All you need is for the membrane to be able to expand on the heartbeat And I think what the restoration at the point of trepidation is allowing that expansion on the heartbeat To the full expansion of the systolic pressure, which the child has until it starts to close over Kind of 13 onwards, the child comes down, 21, the average, the skull closes And that's often when the mental problems start after 21, psychosis, all of those things You're just at a slightly lower level in terms of energy for the brain And what I want to do, it's very easy research to do trepidation Because people are doing it in hospitals every day, by the thousand, if there's any brain operation First you have to trapam the skull So it's happening all the time, so we could very easily actually 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 historically, in my father's encyclopedia, which is whatever, 1912 I can't remember what it was, something like that It said trepidation has been done throughout history And it is still currently being done with apparent success for the treatment of mental conditions, migraine So until, in the First World War, they did the first lobotomy And that stopped trepidation as just an old wives' tale So in a sense, they threw out the baby with the bathwater And I think that there is something, it's quite easy to do I'm trying to find the possibilities, and I really want to do this research with trepidation Funnily enough, years ago, I was at Burning Man, and I had to camp in, what was it, Barlow, a father, was an old friend of mine And he got a lot of rather important people to sign up that they wanted to be Japan And we were going to do, you know, getting people to Japan legally in a research program But it never happened But what I want to say is that, for instance, Jamie, my husband, got to Japan And... How long ago did he do that? How long ago How long ago did he do it? Long time ago, I mean, soon after we got together And very difficult to find, 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 And he had terrible headaches all his life He lost a day or two a week on headaches After he trepidation, he doesn't have headaches Wow And I think it just gives back to the body and the brain That extra pulsation, which means... 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 But for those of us who don't do all that exercise, It's good to have alternative ways of keeping the blood going That's got to be a big factor in the runner's high Yeah Because in runner's high, they achieve these states of elevated consciousness Absolutely Yeah, I met one, I'm sure you've met plenty But who runs them, I think he said 140 or so Some enormous number, 100 miles or something And he said at a certain point, he had a breakthrough Where he got into a kind of real altered state of consciousness And I'm sure one day, we can do all these things endogenously Yeah I mean, obviously that's what meditation is doing It's training you to do your own way of getting high And monks and people, they productively spend 30 years of their life doing it And I think that's wonderful 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 Yeah And so I think, funny enough, I think the new, how I look on it It's all about feeding the brain with enough energy, mitochondria working away To produce that mental cell energy So that we can keep our function close to the optimal That's what we want Or anyway, not allowing it to drop too low Right And that's what I think is the purpose in a way They're not the only purpose at all I actually think psychedelics have value in a lot of different nonspecific areas One is self-realization, experience, beauty, love of beauty, love of sound, love of people, love I think it increases compassion and empathy and nature love And all of those rather good human qualities So I think it has 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 to just be able to do it within your own self Like a hot bath and a freezing bath Or any of those techniques obviously change your level of consciousness by bodily reactions But also I think the use of the psychoactive compounds We can tune it so it's a very, very carefully regulated, I mean self-regulated operation You can dial it in Yeah, you can control it I feel very grateful for many things in my childhood But one of them was that I was my father's companion and he was at Arbetic 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 So he always kept his sugar level low So every day he was getting short of carbohydrates, falling in a ditch If he was driving a car, he drove over to the centre of roundabouts You know, he did all sorts of funny things when he was short of carbohydrates And my job was putting the sugar in his mouth And so I got a very good relationship of knowledge of how the glucose level controls your level of concentration if you like And how important it is So when Bart, this Dutch soundist, 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 You use a lot of glucose and the sugar level falls Therefore you need to keep the sugar level normal by increasing the intake And actually, all those years before it was legal We lived on LSD When I say lived, I meant on big doses every day We really lived and I psychoanalyzed myself on myself I was a doctor and patient and it read the whole of whatever, Freud, Mike Did you make notes? Did you take a journal during that time? Not a journal, but I did diagrams of, you know, yeah And I watched myself, I overcame for instance I was very tall as a child I'd rather hate being taller than everyone else So at about 13 I started smoking cigarettes behind the bushes So I was pretty addicted by the time I met Bart when I was 22 or 23, I don't remember I was pretty addicted and he said what a horrible habit it is, was my smoking So then I said, well, I'll give up And so I took a trip of LSD with the intention, I'll stop It's a horrible habit, just give it up And I never smoked another cigarette And so Do you remember when you did that, when you took the LSD with the intention of giving up cigarettes? Yeah Do you remember what happened to you? Do you remember? Yeah, I do What was it like? I remember smoking a cigarette during the trip and thinking, yeah, it was disgusting I remember when I was a child, young child smoking Maybe I'm feeling a bit sick And one had to repress, feeling his sickness And then I realized, gosh, it makes me feel sick Yeah And then, yeah, the smell is horrible It's making you sick, yeah Yeah, so I gave up And 40 years later, whenever, when I was talking to Roland Giffords, funny enough I had, I think it was $10,000 to do a research program So I went to Roland at that time, said, I've got this He said, oh, what would you like to do? What would you suggest? So I said, well, what about overcoming nicotine addiction? I did that with LSD We could do it with psilocybin-type And that was the basis of the study Which is, I mean, I remember the first, it was the first lot It was 80% success rate Yeah, 80% success rate I don't know what it is now But it's an extraordinarily successful Because actually nicotine's more difficult to give up than heroin Because we're always repeating it So I experimented in those years when we were living on LSD We worked, that was our passion We were studying the human brain And the self, and the T-shirt I've got for you is The motto is, know thyself And that was what one was doing Trying to understand how we work better at that level And how we can enhance our working And I just think there's a lot more to be learnt About how we can, if we concentrate more on giving the brain the energy It needs to function optimally How can we help that happen Obviously exercise is one I've always slightly avoided the exercise route Being lazy But I have to say, you know, there are alternatives Which can be used to the health of the person And I think it's a tragedy That one can't talk about things more openly 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 I mean, in order for me to do it I realised I had to stop being a man of fielding No letters after my name, no money So who am I? And become a foundation Funny enough, it was a very clever conceptual artwork Because in England, it's very kind of liberal England You pay whatever it is And you've become a foundation A thousand pounds, I think, or something Suddenly you're a foundation You don't have to have any money You're just a foundation Registered In Scotland, I'm registered And then I got the top scientists in the world 10, 15 of them, including Albert Hoffman and Satish Horgan But the more important ones were the established ones Like... I always forget his name He was wonderful, Colin Blakenall Who was a kind of top neuroscientist in the world at that point And he very much backed what... 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 And various other high-level scientists So I had a very impressive advisory board And so then I gave a seminar, a series of seminars at the House of Lords Where I had presidents and blah blah blah All the head of NIDA, head of the Russian people Asked themselves if they could come So 70 invited people came to discuss global drug policy That made quite a difference That went on for ten years or something And then I went to whatever... National... what would you call it? Um... Um, anyway I invited certain governments and things on drug policy The United Nations went there regularly Trying to change things So through this foundation? Yeah, yeah If you don't mind, when you had your own personal experience with Trepanation What was that like? What did it do for you? Yeah, um, it was... Sorry, can I do one try? Sure Um, I remember I mean, no one wants to drill a hole in their head on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon Right I can tell you, it is not something I'm a very cautious person 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 Then um... My partner, Joe Mellon At that time, he was very keen on Japan himself And he... I was second son, so he was a bit more casual, cavalier about it than I was And so I had quite a few missed shots Oh no Before he finally got through And, um, funny enough, then I did notice a difference And the difference is very subtle You really have to know a person to notice it But how I'd express it is It slightly lowers the neurotic characteristics If you see what I mean They become... I mean, they don't eliminate them in any way But it lowers it And so having seen the difference Because Bart was Japan for I knew him, so I never experienced the change But when I saw the change in Joe, I thought, well, it does make a difference So I had thought I'd find a doctor So I'd spent four years looking for a doctor to talk about me Um, and I had people who said they were, nearly, and then they said, ah, I've got a man just to have a hole in his eye And he would have given half one Or, you know, it could be bad for my career in Harley Street if it came out Or if you died, or, you know, whatever And so it didn't happen And then I thought, well, I'm a sculptor I'll sculpt my own skulls and see what happens So I really studied it because I'm a very, very cautious person And in London, strangely, the shop was called Down Brothers So off Harley Street, and has all the instrumentation for trepanation Very old shop, actually And charming staff there who would show me in detail how you trip hand Because I went in as an interested observer And so I learned how to do it very cautiously They had three layers of bone, and, etc., etc. I learned how to do it, so I felt competent to do it And that took quite a long time, deciding I was competent And confident I could do it 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 And so I made, I, funny enough, my great aunt just died and given me 70 pounds And I bought a lovely little movie, Super 8 Camera, and set it up And I had my beloved birdie, always with me He was an observer of this thing And there was all sorts of stories, which I won't waste the time, which was amazing Because we were asked to a party by rather kind of guardian journalists, top journalists in England For the Saturday night I had been planning on doing it on a Sunday But I moved it forward I thought it would be good publicity for the movement if I, anyway, I moved it forward And then there was the electricity strike in England So if I hadn't moved it forward, the electricity would have been cut Which was just a kind of good little tricker, beating fate to do it So anyway, I did it very, very carefully with a hand-to-hand in the mirror Perfect little operation Was it a drill? Drill, electric drill But I used a ball with a flat bottom so it couldn't damage the membrane Because obviously what was frightening of it is damaging the membrane surrounding the brain 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 And it had a flat bottom so it couldn't I mean, it's not something one wants to do at all But it's kind of like people go skiing, people go horse riding Just the same danger You know, it's a danger Possibly infection is only danger That's a danger And I always say no one should do it themselves It's a foolish thing to do But then when I'd finished, I boundaged up We went out and had a steak for dinner to replace the lost blood And then went to this party And the photograph, which I don't know if you know, with Birdie on my shoulder It was the evening that came out of the Super 8 movie So... I've seen the images But I haven't seen... Apparently you never released the video I never released it And the person who made the film actually, as always, trommed one So I had forbidden to let the images out on public thing Because I didn't want... I didn't want anyone doing it And funny enough... Why did you not want anyone doing it? Because I don't think self-trabecion is a good idea But you did it Yeah, but I'm me I took trouble not to... And funny 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 And I had this exhibition at PS1 of the slides Enormous great It was like an Egyptian tomb It was lovely It's a dorms room they gave me And apparently people were queuing up including people like Warhol And Bernard Bertolucci couldn't get in It was a kind of quite a hot movie at that point And people fainted, it said in the paper It's like ripe plum falling to the ground But then 60 Minutes did a film of it Of me And wanted to film me back at Berkeley With Birdie With my pigeon Who was never in a cage Or was always free And so they flew me home on Concord Because I was pregnant with my oldest son Rocky And to film me with Birdie And Birdie was a very strong sense of justice And I had broken the cold of love By going away So if I went away He punished me Until the punishment had been done So when they flew me back on Concord He wouldn't come down from the house stop Anyway they made this film And he was very pleased, very nice director And then it was as always when one did something which was well done It was not allowed to go out Because the lawyers said there would be an epidemic Of people tripping themselves Were you worried about that? Were people copying you? No, not really Just too crazy Yeah, too crazy What was your personal experience like What was it like after it was over? Sorry, you asked me that How I described it at the time Was it was like the tide coming in There was a kind of stillness in the brain That internal, endless internal conversation Of basically the ego Calm down Now, of course we can explain all of those things Could happen anywhere just from relaxation Of having finished it Blah blah blah So what difference does it make? I would say it makes a slight difference It's slightly like the energy I mean, I watch children Children have that extra energy You know, they do those leaps and downs And play around and that energy Adults don't Energy is a more difficult thing And when I became 21 I'd had one of my trips to Egypt Where I lived very wild I don't know And I thought I got bilhatsia Which is the worm you get And drains your energy And I went when I got, I was 21 I went and got myself tested thinking I'd caught it But I hadn't Then I realised that that was adulthood It's a slightly lower level And very often that's when people have their first Schizophrenic experience Or some mental thing after that It's a down, it's a slight down There's a slight exuberance And that's what I noticed after But the difference is so slight I couldn't swear on it at all How long did the difference last? Well, you don't, you only notice the difference You don't notice the change Do you see what I mean? Yes So now I can't say Have I got any advantage? Is my whole close? Is it open? I can't say Have you ever got it looked at to see if it's closed? No, I tried to actually And it was very difficult to do I'd like to do that It's a very small hole though, right? Well, it was that big Okay, so a quarter of an inch, a couple of millimetres? It was wide enough All you need is for the heartbeat to express itself It's all about the expression of the heartbeat And it takes half an hour If it was shown to increase cranial compliance Which is what I worked on with this professor, Yuri Boskalenko Who was the leading professor in those things He thought, yes, it increases cranial compliance And that's just a slightly healthier state to be in And so it takes half an hour to do And in hospitals, the surgeon doesn't have to do it Do you know what I mean? It's a nothing operation So if that can slightly raise the level of energy going to the brain For the rest of the life, it's a valuable tool 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 done? I should think they had B-grain or some terrible thing Which went on And they were trying to alleviate it And tried to all, yeah, I think something like that Because I don't see the logic of it says you only need one to get the expansion back But that's why I actually don't talk about it now Because it sounds so crazy Right, that's the problem, is this optics Yeah, it's not good optics Until you've got it proven, which I actually seriously want to do Because what I do is on research with people with headaches B-grants, headaches, whatever, some form 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 In the old days, they said it's letting devils out And the other indication is letting light in Because all from people in the mystical tradition were trapped So I actually before I hit the bucket I would really like to have done that research Because maybe no one else would be motivated to do it Right, has anyone been motivated to do self-treponation that you're friends with? Yeah, I know quite a lot, not a lot And then they started saying, oh, would I do it? I certainly won't demand anyone, I wouldn't dream of it You know what I mean? See, that's why I found a very good brain surgeon team in Mexico Who did it for certain people And people wrote back saying it had altered their life I think 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 That's my opinion For instance, it changed my dream pattern after I'd done it I used to have very anxious dreams, which very often were about Birdie, my beloved Birdie Getting killed somewhere after the treponation I didn't have those anxious dreams So that's something which I couldn't control, if you see it with me Anyway, I think it makes a difference So I'm in favor, but we need to do the research Yeah, it's a fascinating subject It's just fascinating that it's existed for so long Yes, and very much associated with religious practice Basically, whatever Very often, funny enough, there's in Mongolia some Japan's skulls And nearby is a very beautiful, this is very early, I forget, BC, long 700 maybe A little beautiful basket with cannabis, rather high THC cannabis in it I think they go together, the treponation, like in Mexico, there were lots of treponations And they went with the kind of spiritual practices It's very fascinating to me that from the moment human beings have discovered altered states of consciousness, whatever 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 Yeah, it's to kind of slightly expand Slightly get back the childhood experience Joy, wonder Joy, wonder, I do think it's that And I think it's still that, and I think that's a very healthy urge Yes And I think therefore, I really seriously think we should do research on treponation, which I can very easily do It just needs ethical approval, that same problem Do you think that it's warranted, do you think that the use of psychedelics and psychedelic therapy can replace that? That it's not necessary? No, I don't think it replaces it, I think there, as we were in the ancient times, they're complementary They're both moving in the same direction of trying to increase the energy supply to the brain Yeah And I think that's very key for our future survival, because at the moment, I think we're at a very critical time Because artificial intelligence is getting greater than our own, etc., etc And there are all sorts of forces which kind of build the danger up So we need internal growth to balance that technological growth Yeah, it's such a strange contradiction that today, in a day where that growth is so necessary, these substances are so demonized Yes, it's a tragedy, and I really think it's a time when America is a force which forced it upon us for all the wrong reasons And we all know it, and America knows it Yeah, it was during the Civil Rights Movement, they were trying to arrest the Black Panthers and the Civil Rights activists Yeah All the anti-war activists, and that was one of the ways they could do it And it's the way to enter any country you want to, like Afghanistan or Latin America Any country you couldn't go and raid and spray and kill and capture You know, it was wonderful, the CIA loved it, and you know, and so it was Which is so ironic, considering that they did so many LSD experiments Yeah, and then threw the people who had troubled them out of the window and said they wanted to fly Yeah It was such a difficult, I mean, it's a tragedy, the history of autocets, I mean, like the, what you call the midwives used psychedelics to help stop bleeding They realized the vasoconstrictive property of these compounds, so they were used in childbirth And the midwives, they were very often the people who were burnt for witchery And the ironic thing is, when the witchers were burnt, then the villagers got a plague They called it the witcher's curse of St. Vitus's Dance, where you shake and then you finally die And that's ergot poisoning, because the witchers went out with their hats at the full moon And their hats would show the glow of the ergot from the light of the moon on the ergot How did the hats do that? Well, they were kind of, well, they hid them, 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 And then the burning of the witchers, which was part of the inquisition, basically Then they had these awful plagues of St. Vitus's Dance, which was called the curse of the poor old witch Who had been using their medication to help childbirth So it's quite ironic how the authorities translate it wrongly 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 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 And they think that that was partially responsible for that whole hysteria Yeah, yeah And it was very much intermingled with the Protestants, the inquisition between the religions and the whole thing And they came at the same time So there's been a kind of tragedy 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 Because they 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 You know, it's pretty common sense Yeah, they didn't want common sense Yeah, so it's a tragedy of the human fate 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 But it also has made us this psychotic animal which is capable of great self-harm And somehow we need to balance it And that's why I rather like the phrase, the psychedelic age In the sense, I don't mean everyone taking a sartic at age and having a party I mean, learning the art of how do you control your level of consciousness And then how do you control that level so you could keep your concentration I don't go in for leery, turn on and drop out I say turn on and drop in, you know, be creative That was the problem with leery 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 It was all bad publicity, badly played And in those early years, in the mid-60s When I started taking psychedelics seriously, we took it for working I mean, the Stones would be playing a half mile away from our flat where I lived And still live in London We didn't bother to go to them because we were having such fun doing our work We were studying the brain on acid I don't know who goes, my bother So, I think that the use of, I'm sure you and some other people know How incredibly inspiring for work the use of psychedelics can be 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, you can see this is the ordinary brain This is the brain on psychedelics I've got those beautiful things came from our study The circus, do you know the ones? I've got a picture of it in my back You can see the difference in the brain And that can be used for whatever you're doing For whatever creative, thoughtful process You suddenly got all that extra brain power to dedicate towards what you feel passionate about It's a superpower for stand-up comedy For stand-up comedy, so many of my comedian friends use it to write Yes, absolutely I have an intimate relationship with Jamaica And the deep, deep divers 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 Because he smokes very heavily before he goes down, cannabis And he said that enables him to stop breathing for a much longer period You know, so I think whatever you do, you've got more passion, more energy So here's the imagery So that's the adult brain On the left On the left And what are these lines representing? It's connectivity between different centers in the brain Wow This is when you're on a psychedelic, it doesn't matter if it's psilocybin or LSD When you're on, you've suddenly got this much more intimate connection between the different parts of the brain And so I think it needs training to learn to control that increased It's like riding an incredibly powerful horse You have to learn how you control it The brain's the same thing If you just go and take that, you can have a wonderful experience looking at the stars or having a love affair Or listed abusing, all of those things can be wonderful But if you want to use it for cognitive discipline, which actually uses a lot of glucose Because it's very late in development So it's not part of the autonomic nervous system It's a part of the cognitive nervous system which burns glucose to get the energy to concentrate And so that's the importance of taking the vitamin C and keeping the sugar level normal Can I ask you a question about that? What about ketones? I know many people, they get on a ketogenic diet and their brain produces ketones And they feel intellectually that's a superior fuel I think probably it is a very good fuel I think there's a lot more, we'll be constantly be learning about how you can energize the brain in better, healthier ways But I think a secret, a basic secret, which I felt, feel I was given the key to in 1966 When I learned about how one can increase the blood supply to the brain And therefore give it all that extra energy to do, have all the brain functioning And then it's a whole new art, how do you use that? Productively But I mean that's like being a magician, a brilliant magician, they have to practice, so it's a skill I always say to take psychedelics you have to be much more disciplined than not to take them It's much easier not to take them in a sense I agree with that, I think people have a misconception about what you're doing when you're taking psychedelics Or when you're taking, including cannabis I think the common misconception is that you are avoiding reality And that you are somehow or another giving yourself a crutch I don't think it's that at all And I think that with discipline, the use of psychedelics through discipline It allows you to experience these states and get something from them And pull something from them and apply it to normal consciousness I totally agree It gives you an extra power, like riding a more powerful horse You've got in your brain power, there's more there 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 optimal I say that all the time I say that because when I go to art galleries, I never go to an art gallery so I quite agree I always get on it No point I also feel that, I mean, people don't like this, but I'm going to say it anyway I like to be high around my children Because when I'm around my children, I'm fascinated by them 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 And you have much more in common with them Because you're on the same wavelength So you stay in contact with them I adored having my children and their greatest pleasure And I remember being at one of those conferences in Pel\u00e9gke or something, a psychedelic conference And I think it was Terrence McKenna's wife actually was giving a lecture, or giving a talk very nicely And how when she was pregnant, she gave up everything And I couldn't, I hate public speaking, 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 I've taken enough of it that I really think it's actually good It's not like alcohol or cigarettes No, and my children, I'm proud of my children And you know, they are children of parents who understood the benefits of altered states of consciousness I've had those conversations with my children, my youngest, who are 13 and 15 And they're at that age where children want to experiment with alcohol, they want to experiment with drugs And I have conversations with them about ones that you should avoid And the dangers of things that may be contaminated with fentanyl And that these organic compounds, as long as you know the source that you're getting them from Whether they're psilocybin or particular marijuana They're not what everybody is telling you they are And that's what's criminal, and I do think criminal, about the government Because all the governments, the knowledge is out there These are non-toxic, the ones which are non-toxic And like in England, people on the mass can only buy, the illegal marketing cannabis Is taken over by certain breeders who breed only rubbish An insensible person would never dream of smoking Very high THC cannabis, which is shit And it's not good for young people to smoke that And it's the authorities which are forcing the young people into that if they choose to smoke And I did a paper for the government saying that if they, as I hope they do, regulate cannabis They should make very low tax for THC CBD balance And as it gets more and more strong, tax it more Because that will incline people to stop smoking this extremely high THC Do you think there's dangers in smoking that are very high? I mean not for grown-ups who know how to handle it But I think it can be dangerous I believe so too, 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 I think it should be encouraged a nice balance of THC CBD Well, it'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 It's just comfortable, not too bad And especially in conjunction with all the cannabinoids with CBD Wonderful, and that's such a wonderful step forward And it's wonderful, it's happening in America But also quite ironic that America is still forbidding the rest of the world To do the same thing And it really does need to change because it's holding up humanity in a sense I'm hoping that with education the younger people are realizing what it actually is And as these people go into public service, they will go into public service with this new understanding And I think I absolutely commend you on the wonderful information you give to people By having such a wide reach and letting people who you think are right say what they think And slowly, slowly it will seep through and come to the top and be the dominant Well, there's a propaganda narrative that's just very unfortunate that has permeated our society And it's incorrect Yeah, exactly That narrative of the brain LSD and cooking the brain and the frying pan Yeah, this is your brain entrance I remember once having lunch with Peter Thiel and he was saying he was grown up with that And couldn't get over it Right Do you know? I mean, what rubbish? Rubbish A thing which is complete, there isn't another compound I think which is so powerful Which is less toxic You can't kill Well, it's fascinating to me that that all took place during the 80s And the 80s, culturally, it's some of the worst artwork and music that the American society has ever produced During the influence of the Just Say No era Yes, and the 60s were a period of cultural growth and change And people always put down the 60s But actually, all the things we loved, not all the things, but a lot of the things we loved came out of the 60s Spirituality, Eastern spirituality, yoga, health, music Music, comedy, yeah Even the automobile design And it was all on LSD It was fueled by changing And so I promised Albert Hoffman, I said, I can't remember what the word was But I'll reinstate your favorite child LSD is a wonderful creation because it's non-toxic, it's so controllable 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, like our children I'm never frightened my children might become addicted Because they know, they're from the earliest days, they know Yes, they've been educated You know, silly And also they benefit from you discussing your addiction to cigarettes and how you got over it Yeah, and they saw how when one did, when it was legal, you see compounds, one was productive with it And it increased one's passion, I mean, I'm a workaholic As am I, and I'm a user It makes one want to achieve the work one can do Yes, yes I'm fascinated with American automobile design I collect old cars And there's a time period between 1965 and 1970 And it's one of the most amazing cars ever And it directly correlates It drops off a cliff after 1970 It's fascinating because those cars from 1965 to 1970 to this day are the most cherished collectors Automatically in the most beautiful designs Yes, that's very interesting Funny enough, in this talk I'm giving a few days time at Denver I'm saying you can see the markings of civilization, you can see which civilizations had integrated altered states of consciousness And which hadn't by their creativity production 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 And that's exactly it, what you're saying in that, in the peak of beauty in cars I want to show you something, just so you can see this I want, Jamie, pull up a 1969 Mustang And then I want to see a 1980 Mustang The difference is so stark, it's amazing 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, they made them forbidden and dangerous And that is a 1969 Mustang, it's one of the most beautiful things in any of these ever designs It's gorgeous, I mean I look at that thing and I'm like, my God, it's perfect, artwork Now show me a 1980 Now this is just disgusting Look at that clunky piece of shit, what is that? What the hell is that? Imagine that you went from that to that What the hell happened to us? Something's wrong Something's very very wrong And people attribute it to, God, it's so gorgeous And people attribute it to so many different things and one of the things they attribute it to is like gas Being more efficient, gas vehicles, but not true because you can still make it beautiful And that is not beautiful, that's an ugly piece of shit You're absolutely right, and I think that's such a beautiful, and I think you can tell it in a culture, I mean like whatever In, well, the beautiful cultures Sure You can see, they were high Yes They had that feeling, those lines in Chauvet Yes Couldn't have been done by people who weren't high You know, it's too intuitive Abstract, it's like yes It's an intuitive expression I think one of the things psychedelics do is increase the intuitive part of the brain 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 So in the high doses I'm wanting to do a research on the mystical experience and anomalous experiences And it will be the first research to use a Tesla 7, do you know what I mean, by MRI Yes It's usually a Tesla 3, all the research I've done is with a Tesla 3 Is this fMRI, functional MRI? 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 So it will only be person by person looking at the data And then it will be 7 Tesla and a Meg And a Meg is the one which does that electrical, you can see which centers the brain or communicating with each other And then we'll have a very deep psychological one So you'll know when the person has some expression of the mystical experience or some other experience And you can see what's happening in the brainwaves and the blood and markers So one will have it much more carefully analyzed than ever before 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 To have that mystical experience So the more we can learn about how does that grow How does one help the fruition of that experience the better And then, say, well that's at the top level looking at those experiences I mean it's going to be so exciting which parts of the brain to look at And the whole different areas, hemispheres, the blood supply The rich parts of the brain are actively activating in the highest way in that experience I once did an experience with a very high level Indian meditator lady And she really wanted to help me and it was in a Meg, one of those ones, Hedra And she told me after she came out beaming She had the most wonderful mystical experience while she was in the machine She said the best experiences I've had with God for a long time And it showed a great burst of gamma in the right cerebellum Which is very fascinating because everyone thinks of cerebellum as just nothing basic balance And all those sort of things But actually I think it's a very highly, much more fascinating than that And so a mystical experience is rather like a toad in the sun sitting on the start And the sun in a state of blissful happiness You know, it'd be very fascinating to actually know about more these different experiences that we can as humans experience And how hopefully we can map them And therefore learn how to get them more One of the things I was fascinated about with you is your discussions of your experiences on LSD playing Go Yes, that's very interesting Which is really interesting because you said it made you a better player And Go is an incredibly complex game And that's why, well for the last 50 years I wanted to and I will do a research on Go But it's very difficult to find Go players who are used to functioning on a high level LSD Because people don't have the whole Right So, but I've got that in place Because Go, as you know, is a pattern recognition It's an intuitive game of pattern recognition I've never played it It's a wonderful game Once you get into it, you rarely get addicted to it Because it's behind everything You can play life on the Go board And you have a handicap So you know exactly where you are with the person you play against A numerical handicap? Yeah The better player plays with white stone So the worst player has it's black Which is slightly psycho It's more obvious, so it's a better visual But it's slightly less good psychologically And then they have handicaps Every three games you win They get one stone Put down on the board first, advance So anyway, we played passionately in the early 60s When LSD was legal And at the end of day, you know, we were doing brain studies all day Or whatever we were doing And then Go was there And we wrote down every game we played So we knew who won and what the score was And anyway, I was a slightly better player than my opponent But if I was an LSD and he wasn't His handicap went up from three to six Hmm You know, so that's a lot of, that's winning nine games That's a big Right Big change And then it would come down again as he saw the patterns Because it's a pattern recognition game Right And it's a wonderful game But I gave it up because you have to be passionate about it to keep playing Right, it's very taxing, right? Yeah, very taxing There's a similar result with Psilocybin in the game of pool Pocket billiards Right You have more feel and you know where the ball is going Right Right And you can understand angles and patterns Yeah, absolutely, absolutely And I think sportsman, I mean like Joe, the father of the by-children He loved cricket And he said he was the better bowler Have you heard of the pitcher who pitched a game on acid, a no-hitter game on acid? No, yeah Who was that again, Jamie? It's a very famous story of a guy who, he made a mistake and got just too high And it didn't wear off and he went to the game Here it is, Doc Ellis Yeah He took acid and pitched a no-hitter So I don't get his ball when he was on acid, which sounds so crazy Well that's exactly it And do you know that picture of the spider, which came out in the 60s The spider's web Yes I'm trying to recreate that study See if you can find that spider, they gave the spider LSD Yeah And you know, the caffeine one was absolutely chaotic, so bad Look at it The cannabis one started off rather well, then you're chaotic, just like cannabis does happen But look at the LSD one And the LSD one was perfect, better than perfect Well look at the normal one though, the normal one's pretty amazing too Yeah, but funny enough, now I know the leading web person in the world is Donald Oxford Who, I've been talking about six years now, to do this research But you wouldn't believe it, to give a spider LSD one has to get ethical approval Oh that's hilarious I mean That's funny And for six, eight years we haven't yet got the ethical approval There's nothing ethical about being a spider I know, you can't believe it Their whole existence is unethical They're trapping other insects Exactly, exactly Anyway, so far we haven't done it, but I really want to do it this year Because, I mean, maybe they were pulling our legs But it's a very interesting concept Sure That even at the spider level, it improves function Yes It would make sense that caffeine would be all over the place too The heart rate would be jacked up, or whatever, their central nervous system Yeah, yeah But it's very, there's so much we could do And that's why I actually feel, having lived with these substances as my passion For 50 or 60 years, and particularly LSD because I think it's the cleanest And I know it the best I've got a very good instinct how to do it I've designed several studies I haven't talked about because I don't They shouldn't come out But I can see how it can help, like the old woman with Alzheimer's Which I'd like to just show you, not to go on the phone, but to show you Because the difference is so big, 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 So from deep apathy, it goes to a sparkling little elderly eddy And there's nothing conventional that would replace that There's no conventional medication, and it's the same sort of application And actually I'm working with a very nice man who's a CEO of the biggest care home in England Which is a national health one, and he'd heard about my research in a very interesting He said 70% of his residents have Alzheimer's And there's nothing you can do 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 And it's stunning that there's something available Yeah, yeah Well, after I'll show you, because it is miraculous And so I've also got a very, very good concept for the perfect place 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, scientists You know, I can design them, I know them, I know how they go And what I can see is it's very similar to a condition which we know historically Which is called terminal lucidity And I've been studying that for the last year or two 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 will come back and just before they die And make jokes about when they were in the nursery And people, you know, who know them know they're there, chop 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 I mean, not probably functioning like this old lady, she came back Her children said it was remarkable, it was getting our mother back She had her wit, her love, her dentistry She said, I feel so wonderful, let's read some poetry, you know Wow From having been this Vegetative state Yeah And I think we can now get that going And what I want is the freedom to design, to make the care home For the Beckley Harbor, where people can go and be treated with these compounds To see if it suits them, see if it has the same effect as it had with this old lady And then we collect the data, and then I would have wonderful trained doulas who entertain them And make it a wonderful place to be, we'd have dogs and children and it would be like home That sounds incredible You know, it would be like being at home with lovely people who look after your emotional humor And you're given a microdose, personally fitted to suit you And what a superior experience that would be to the traditional nursing home And then we'd find out, does it suit, and then one could collect in a year, and not a very big nursing home And this wonderful man in England said, so long as it's legal, he'll give me the nursing home to try it So I want the permissions to be able to do this And then one could get a lot of people coming through and then one would give them home care So one would have someone visiting them at home, as much as they need, to maintain a safe and good program Anywhere, we could do that, you know, this year But it needs, one, the regulatory passport to do it, and two, the funding And both are there, I mean there's so much money around it, you know, and everyone's getting old, either the parents are all there And, you know, we should do these things speedily, not wait ten years until, you know, it takes two years even to get the paperwork done for this research One year, two I wanted to talk to you about near-death experiences, 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 a breakthrough psychedelic experience Yeah, yeah, well what I think is near-death, the body kind of is in a state of extreme turn-on And it naturally, endogenously, lets out these compounds, oxytocin, you know, all the different compounds in the body Which DMT, maybe, maybe there's, you know, probably more than we've even discovered Which gives a shot of something serotonin, which is very similar to a psychedelic And that's why people can suddenly come out of a vegetative state shortly before death And that's what I'm saying, I think that what I'm doing with microdosing is creating that effect without having to wait for the person to die, poor person Right? One can do it on a protocol, and that's what I'd like to research now That would be amazing You know, it's obvious, I've got some, I've got proof of the thing that it happens You can't fake it, you can't fake someone coming back to life again, in the look and the eyes So it's there, and just let's get the space so legally, I can set it up with the best people, you know I can set it up, and we can do it, and then if we get successful data, we can set open clinics, care homes, services, and then hopefully the people can take the treatment home with them One of the more bizarre things that comes out of psychedelic experience is contact with entities In contact with what seems to be some other form of consciousness, what do you think is going on with that? That, I love your entity, flashing across the ceiling Oh, that's a shooting star I have to tell people about that, especially people that have had psychedelic experiences, they think they're having a flashback Sorry, I didn't warn you But what do I think? Certain compounds create it more than others, DMT, much more, LST doesn't really produce entities, strangely I think it's, yeah But psilocybin does Yeah, but that's got DMT in it, which LST, that's why I love LST LST, I think, is more like a flower opening up, i.e. it's more of yourself Whereas DMT, whether it's arwasca or psilocybin to a lesser degree, has this slightly, boom, boom, boom, slightly dominating sound, slightly I don't really like the colors as much You don't? Not quite, those kind of mauves and browns, and I prefer the LST colors You see mauves and browns when you do DMT? Well, I'm not a DMT person, I mean, I've done it, but I don't I've seen very bright, vivid colors, I've not seen mauves and browns Haven't you seen the darker colors? I've found it slightly dark Really? Interesting I was once, quite recently, in a room of session when people were doing it There were only ten people in the room, three of them were in a battleground A poor boy had had too much of a screaming and yelling and getting burnt And the person who looked after him was a very practiced person in these things He then said to me, well, actually, I was in a massacre myself Yeah, I mean, 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 But I actually thought, I don't really, sir, choose compounds which bring the tendency of those sort of experiences But I know people have wonderful experiences Yeah, I've never had those negative experiences like that No, my experience has been very vivid and bright Right, yeah And enlightening Right Yeah, and the entities are very colorful Bright Bright colors and wild, beautiful, loving experiences Right, how lovely Well, that's very lucky because I know people who've had horrible ones too But I mean, obviously, they come and they go Do you think that that's people struggling with the experience and trying to control it? I'm sure trying to control it is not a good detrimental Yeah And I think people are very lucky who've never had a really bad experience I had a really bad experience when someone, right back in the first year of my taking LSD Someone who had actually turned leery onto LSD Who was a kind of freak, not a nice person at all Anyway, he had a vinegar bottle of Sand Doss vitamin C I mean, not the LSD And he offered me some, I said, thanks, I didn't want it Anyway, I didn't want him around And then he poured it into my coffee Oh, God Without telling me Oh, God And thousands of trips Oh, God And so I had a dying experience Oh It was a really bad experience And, you know, once you cut a thing in the soul or the body, you retain that fear The pathway Yeah, that pathway Yeah 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 route Right, do you think that's a memory retention? Like perhaps they remember the bad trip and then they start manifesting it? Yeah, yeah And I think they definitely remember, the question is whether they can remember it In what you call it, I've forgotten the word, epigenetics Which says maybe you can go on for generations of memory of trauma But I don't know if that's true or not But I quite agree with you 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 Most certainly Yeah What do you think you're encountering, like especially on DMT What do you think the entities are? Do you think that's a figment of the imagination? Do you think it's the consciousness expressing itself in different ways through the visual cortex? Yeah What? Yeah What do you think is actually an entity? I know Sean of Arweska Chair And he says he always considered in the Daimi, Centi Daimi Church They consider entities a deflection of attention It's better not to go into the world of entities Really? But a lot of people love the entities Yeah And so I don't know My someone's had an entity experience with Arweska And the entity told him Why do you have so many? Is it a collection of sneakers? Is it a sneaker head? Yes, but he does He's got a passion for sneakers Oh, that's funny So I don't know I'm not an expert on entities I always wondered if maybe that's your own consciousness Recognizing that you're obsessing about a thing Yeah I think there's that element about it I think there's, I'm hoping this research I'm doing on the mystical experience I think anomalous experiences like telepathy Telepathy I know happens to my own satisfaction I'm in no doubt How so? Because with my pigeon lover We were lovers for 15 years Passionate lovers Wasn't Tesla in love with the pigeon as well? Yes, I think he was Yeah Why pigeons? Well, it just so happened that his mother died on the window ledge And Jo and the collector body, we were trying to feed her And there was a little day old fledgling without any feather So you raised it And he, he shouldn't have lived because he didn't at that age But I fed him warm milk and wheat a bit on a paintbrush And he became, I mean he was, he became just obsessive And he became the boss And Jo said to me, let's get rid of this pigeon, this creature We're going to have him, I insist, let's put him out Because we're going to have him forever And he can ruin our lives So I put him out And I thought, I'm not going to put him out, my beloved papa And I went and brought him in again And sure enough, we had him forever How long did he live? And he lived for 15 years Wow But he was then killed I always knew he'd be killed somehow 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, buddy I love you more than anything else in the world And that was the last thing I said to him And then he died And I knew he'd dead I was painting a picture, I was on acid painting a picture And I suddenly had this thing Buddy's dead, buddy's dead And so I did what I had never done I stopped painting and went down to look for him Anyway, it turned out my father was also very kind of in on those sort of things Buddy was very fond of Had lost his temper with the old Carmen we had for 50 years And told him to go and cut these f'ing nettles somewhere And in the nettles was Buddy's still warm body So I knew before it happened And he knew within 10 minutes of it happening I mean how many dead birds do you get? See how many birds dying all the time They get eaten, you'd never trace them Buddy And then once we took Buddy camping years before that Anyway, it's another story But he flew off And then I did a national, I got on English BBC news I said he was a hero and tenu in his new film And because I put adverts in the time But everywhere looking for beloved grey London pigeon I got thousands of people saying they had him And we went all over England collecting these wretched pigeons Which were meant to be Buddy 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 starved antinione in his new film I asked antinione if I could do that and he said yes And so the BBC was jammed with telephones Seeing people finding, seeing Buddy And then I was really upset Because they said they never introduce whatever People who ring in to people looking for fear of something Anyway, so I was incredibly sad Because I thought what the point for the whole thing The whole point was to get Buddy back And then there was one telephone call which came through Which came from the police station And because Buddy had landed on a washing line Of a man who didn't have a telephone So he didn't do his own telephony He sent his son to the police station saying he had Buddy And because it was the police's line It got through to me and that was Buddy So, do you see what I mean? Multiple things of telepathy And other things, I mean I'm in no doubt that telepathy exists Are you all not? I think it probably does in some way I think it's an emergent property of human consciousness That's not quite fully formed I think it's there But because of our egos and we don't sense it I mean because like animals know when there's going to be a sis army No animals die in the sis army They all go up the mountain Well, humans don't have that sense Do you know? Yes Because we've got too much noise in the brain So I think we've got the sense But we don't use it Right If you see it, we don't know how to use it Right So I think it's there And I love those sort of things I'd love to know I think they work with the same centers in the brain As their mystical experience So by learning more about the mystical experience One can hook on to learn more About anomalous experiences You know, like I know a Buddhist monk Who can shoot electricity Kind of thing I mean strange things Which are inexplicable at the moment But it'd be very interesting to find out So you think that these are probably The abilities that we have But they're stifled by ego They're stifled by noise They're stifled by anxiety They're stifled by... Yeah, 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 sis army Right They just have this thing to go up, out of the way Before it happens That they have some understanding Some sense Yeah I think things like telepathy happen With two things Passion, love Love, passion i.e. connection And threat I think they put the The tendency The sense of More likely to sense it If it's like that Mm-hmm And that's why I had passion for birdie And it was when he was in danger On several occasions I found him When his wings were trapped Mm Do you see what I mean? Right, like you sensed it Yeah You had this connection with him Yeah And I've had it with humans too But it's usually A threat to life A kind of adrenal threat Which obviously sends a message Yeah If you're there Ready to receive it One of the things about ayahuasca Was when they were first recognizing it They tried to call One of the compounds of it telepathy Yes Yeah But then they realized that it had already been named It was already Harmin Right, right We did the first I did the first research With Harmin With someone called Jordy Reber Who's a wonderful Spanish Artist On Harmin And on Neurogenesis We showed that it increased Neurogenesis As does psilocybin, right? Yeah Yeah It's interesting Yeah, it's very We're going to find out so much Mm And he committed psilocybin sadly Which is a tragedy Because he was a great scientist But yeah There is so much to understand And I think we're at such an incredibly interesting sphere of investigation Yes Because these things are all on the cusp of where we are And where we can go to in the future Yeah Well, I think that's why it's so wonderful that someone like you is out here With this passion for doing this research And wonderful that you're spreading information about these things to people Because it has to get out there that people are actually interested And then force our politicians in a nice way But you know, to change To release it It really needs to be changed It does And because I do think I mean, I think the use of cannabis and psychedelics Can enhance one's relationship with one's partner One can help see the other viewpoint And help kind of get over difficult periods I think it can do that with walling countries 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 amygdala is lowered, particularly with MDMA Fear So you can approach things which are fearful like trauma better 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 I mean, the number of people I know, and I bet you know many more Who've said it changed their lives, their experience Changed mine Yeah, and mine I mean, I don't think 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 I passionately think psychedelics are a gift of the gods in inverted cons It's a natural gift It shouldn't be expensive We must keep it so it's affordable To the poorest and the rest of the world And that shouldn't be difficult to do They cost nothing Right I've twice started a legal, a Beckley Labs to make top level compounds Which I'd, but both times something happened I never had the money to have a legal, I never had a legal agreement So actually the person always did the dirty on me when he just got going Said it never happened, but I wanted to happen Because the purpose was to keep it low price Yes I mean, people have to make money Getting a compound through phase three costs hundreds of millions So as governments aren't paying, one's very lucky to have people who invest money to do it Yeah But then one wants to try to make sure that the investment doesn't stop other people being able to have benefit Right, but they don't have monopoly over it Yeah And they raise the price 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 So it's not going to be a sport of the rich people only Right It's going to be democratized and available And that's the benefit of the rich people as well And the redundancy Yeah 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 Yes But really, governments should be encouraging I mean, to give the British government, they did fund our depression study second time round to give them their tooth And I know that NIDUS is now funding But I mean, it's a pittance One's needing a lot of money to allow I mean, I do studies I do them fantastically cheap I think since I started the Berkeley 25 years ago I think, it's been 20 years I think she said I've had about, I, the Beckleys, had about five and a half million pounds in total For 25 years, that's amazing Yeah And I've done a lot of the breakthrough research But I'm now the age I am And I can't go on forever working 15 hours a day And I would like to be able to do what I can do now, which is a lot Because I know the compiles so well I know where their strengths, where to use them You know And it's such fun doing, you know, it's like playing Go Well, not playing Yeah And it's a much more interesting game because then maybe one can help deal with Alzheimer's Maybe one can help deal with the, there's all these conditions Which I think these compounds can help Just elevate humanity in general Yeah, exactly And not only for treating people, but elevation I think that's absolutely as important And that's why it has to not have to be, only be a medicine It's a medicine which is essential But it's also an elixir Yeah To make the human animal, the upright talking ape, a bit less of an idiot Yes, yes, I think that's a great way to wrap this up Thank you very much, I really, really appreciate you being here And I really appreciate everything you've done It means so much to just, to the whole world Well, thank you very much for asking me Thank you If someone wants to learn more about your research, where should they go? Well, to the Berkeley 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 And do you see what I mean? Yes What I would, they can help Because I can do a lot of wonderful research I've got a very good, tiny teeth But I want to do more research and make things happen So you want people to contribute I want people to, yeah So there's a donate button If you go to thebeckleyfoundation.org in the upper right hand corner There's a donation button You can support psychedelic research You can donate from anywhere in the world UK tax deductible donations US tax deductible donations Donate via bank transfer, cryptocurrency, Apple Pay Amazing Well, I've never seen it, but well done It's really comprehensive 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 That one could put it in a well which can sprout Yes But I think there's an advantage in philanthropy Because one's not guided by profit at all And guided by the knowledge we can get And then that can become profitable Yes Thank you very much Thank you for being here I really appreciate it And thank you for asking My pleasure Thank you. Bye everybody.