Full transcript: Amanda Feilding on London Real
5:20 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Amanda Feilding, who is the founder and director of the Beckley Foundation, a UK-based think tank that has been at the forefront of global drug policy reform and scientific research into the potential medical benefits of psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and ayahuasca. Amanda, you studied comparative religions and mysticism at Oxford and later did extensive research into altered states of consciousness, physiology, psychology and neuroscience.
5:47 The Feilding family is descended from the House of Habsburg and is intermarried with the British aristocracy, making you the Countess of Waymus in March. Amanda, welcome to London Real.
5:59 Amanda Feilding: Thank you.
6:00 Brian Rose: You know, we’ve had big names in the fields of psychedelic research on this show. We’ve had Rick Doblin, who I know you know very well from MAPS.
6:09 We’ve had Professor David Nutt. We’ve had Professor Robin Carhartt Harris. And I’ve had countless episodes into my own personal experiences with ayahuasca, DMT, psilocybin, MDMA. But I’m wondering what drew you into dedicating your foundation and your life into this specific type of research?
6:30 Amanda Feilding: Yes, I think it’s very core to human nature.
6:33 And I got involved in it at a very early age, because I lived in a house which is completely isolated, surrounded by three moats on the edge of a bog. And so all I had to do was think about consciousness or things. And my godfather had gone to a salon and become a very famous Buddhist monk. I never met him, but he was a kind of idea. So I was always interested in Buddhism, and then I had mystical experiences, little ones, and this kind of secluded, beautiful setting.
7:02 And then I went and wanted to study mysticism, Buddhism. I won the sams prize at school. The kombu wouldn’t give me books on Buddhism. Gave me books on art, so I left and went travelling without any money, heading for slum, and never got there. So my whole life has been kind of directed towards the quest of altered states of consciousness and how we can understand them.
7:27 And it’s an interesting quest, and I’m still on it. And I love it, and I think it’s important, because I think modern society has mistakenly shut out these states, and I think it’s to the detriment of society to have done this. So exploring these altered states is not for everyone, but I think it’s valuable for the society to enable those who it is for to do so, because it can bring back new ideas. I think it can propensiate creativity and healing and a different insight.
8:08 It can be valuable for the individual and society. I think at many levels it’s a very important study, and it’s been prohibited very strongly for 50 years, but tacitly for whatever. Christianity is likely in an inquisition, and it’s been kind of closing in the doors of repression on this area of experience.
8:35 Brian Rose: Right, about as far as our own consciousness exploring that has been repressed in many ways.
8:43 Amanda Feilding: Absolutely.
8:44 I mean, what’s his name? He said that the study of consciousness was impossible 15, 20 years ago. One invented DNA.
8:56 Brian Rose: Oh, was it? Frick, yeah.
8:58 Right.
8:59 Amanda Feilding: You know, he said you can’t study consciousness. You can’t get grants to study consciousness, not altered consciousness. So then consciousness became okay, but altered consciousness is still too far. But actually it’s breaking open the doors of the repression in order to study it because it’s such a rich field.
9:21 It’s filled with new knowledge of how to treat things, how to understand consciousness, how to overcome problems, you know, mental, physical. I think it’s a very rich area to research.
9:33 Brian Rose: I think it was Terrence McKenna that always said that, you know, what did he always say? He said, I don’t know who discovered water, but it definitely wasn’t a fish. And I think his point was is that the best way, or one way to study consciousness is to perturb it.
9:50 And like you said, even someone like Frick, who was obviously a highly advanced thinker, a very smart genius, but it’s kind of one of those intangible pieces that’s hard to figure out how to study, but we know we can perturb it.
10:05 Amanda Feilding: Yes, perturbing it is an incredibly valuable way. And Frick, by the way, was a keen LSE user. But I think probably after he made his great discovery, then he turned his thought to consciousness.
10:17 Brian Rose: You were at Oxford in the 60s, is that right?
10:20 Amanda Feilding: I was at Oxford. I wasn’t at Oxford. I was studying with the top, two of the top professors, one in all cells, who was Professor Zane, who was the kind of world expert on mysticism. And he’d written a book called Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, which was basically saying he was a Catholic convert and he had taken some LSD and not had a nice time. So the book was saying that no way is there LSD experiences within 50-something, similar to the mystical experience.
10:55 And then, whatever, about the time I was studying with him, after that, I took some LSD and I thought it does propensiate the same potential. The mystical experience is much closer to reach.
11:12 Brian Rose: Right, and it was still legal in the 60s.
11:15 Amanda Feilding: It was legal then, yes.
11:18 Brian Rose: And then in 60s, was it 66 or something like that?
11:22 Amanda Feilding: Around 66, I think it was 67.
11:24 Brian Rose: You’ve seen, it’s weird when you fast-forward 50 years and you look at, some people say currently and today, that we’ve almost gone forward head-on into consumerism and sometimes forget our own consciousness and trying to understand it. How has the world changed since that time, in your opinion?
11:47 Amanda Feilding: I think it’s all a terrible mistake, what’s happened, because one could see it. I mean, the war on drugs approach of prohibiting people to change their consciousness.
11:59 One, it just doesn’t work. Obviously, there’s always ways around it. Two, it’s fair against human rights not to be allowed to experience one’s own consciousness. But the most important thing is that it’s a disaster for human happiness. I think more than anything else in the world, almost, it causes suffering at so many different levels.
12:26 You know, it’s mad. It deprives, it makes people criminals, shuts them in jail. It creates illegal money, corruption, violence, war. It funds the worst type of violence. It deprives patients of treatment.
12:46 I mean, I could go on for five minutes of the disadvantages of this, and it doesn’t work. That’s a tragedy. We have more use of illegal drugs now, I mean, multifold, and a carefully regulated market. Of course, you don’t want them available at Tesco’s and children just coming in and taking them. So when governments with experts need to work out, what is the best way to minimise the harms at every level?
13:16 And each drug has different categories of harms and potential harms and benefits. And one needs to develop one’s understanding of what these are and how one tries to educate people and prevent irresponsible and dangerous use kind of thing.
13:34 Brian Rose: Is the war on drugs a US phenomenon? Is it always something we look to the US as being the ones that have to ultimately change their mind, or is it something you think we can battle in Britain, or is Britain a beachhead?
13:51 Amanda Feilding: It’s definitely a US thing. I mean, the US speaks through the UN. It’s not directly US, but it is total US language and prohibition because the war on drugs enabled America to get into all the countries they couldn’t otherwise get into. It was a wonderful excuse to interfere in Afghanistan, all those countries you can get into if they grow drugs, because they all do transport, they all do something with them. And also it’s a hidden source of vast income for the CIA as well as the other side.
14:28 And then it produces a lot of income for a lot of people. The prison industry is one of the biggest growing industries in America. And they’re all the police. And I mean, most of the people are very well-meaning. They’re doing it because they’re terrified of drugs.
14:44 But that’s the kind of myth which got exaggerated. And when I got into this area, I just saw what a disaster it was. And I mean, I don’t like drug policy at all, but I saw what awful suffering it was causing around the world and felt, well, I should do what I can, specifically in the areas of the substances, that I know their potential value, which was cannabis and the psychedelics. You know, I knew the potential value if used well. Like in India, I know the minister of everything here at the Foreign Fair, blah, blah, blah.
15:29 He actually keeps cannabis and some opium in his study, because he said in the days in India 25 years ago when it was legal, there was no word for addiction. No addiction’s a big problem. You know, the way to control these things is to educate and contain everything.
15:46 Brian Rose: Do you think it’s an issue of language in a big way? Because when you were talking there, I kept thinking about, you know, Nancy Reagan just saying no to drugs.
15:56 I mean, we have a program here and I talk about all sorts of issues, and I’m a former banker and I have a degree from MIT, and when I talk to people about ayahuasca, sometimes they just turn off and they say that’s a drug, Brian. And I’m like, well, that’s a language issue.
16:14 Amanda Feilding: Yes, it is a language issue, I quite agree. And I think the word drug has caused almost more damage than any other word, because these substances, which are termed under that umbrella, are totally different substances, and to club them all together as one dangerous thing.
16:32 I mean, when I started the Beckley in 98, there was no word for drug use. All drug use was misuse. And there was no evidence base. It was completely done on prejudice. It got there, prohibition.
16:51 No one questioned it. You know, the whole thing was how many people would you catch, how many times do you get hold of. It didn’t relate to the reality. It didn’t look at how many people are we, lives are we ruining, how many addicts are we creating, et cetera. And then at a certain point I noticed that I went into kind of numbers, and actually they’re tiny numbers.
17:18 We used the most damaging drugs, comparatively. And without the cannabis, which is 4% of the world’s population, there was something like one point something percentage of the world’s population use illicit illegal drugs. So cannabis was never mentioned in any of the UN talks, any drug policy talk I attended, part of. Cannabis was a kind of elephant in the room, which no one mentioned. So then I commissioned the leading drug policy analyst in the world, and with me we formed a commission, and then wrote a book on cannabis policy and harms and how it’s dealt with around the world, which had never been looked into.
18:00 And that actually created, at a certain level, a realisation because these experts, by the end of the book, were saying we have to decriminalise and move towards regulation. Each substance has its own kind of biography and history.
18:15 Brian Rose: I mean, cannabis with its prohibition in America, in the early days when it was the hemp farm issue, and now it’s the federal crime, and Rick Doblin talked to me about how frustrating it is for him just to get an approved sample that he can use for study because federally it’s illegal and they can’t provide him with…
18:36 Amanda Feilding: They can’t get any use in cannabis. Right. It’s really, really incredibly low-level stuff. It’s provided by NIDA, I think, and it doesn’t have any CBD, which is an incredibly vital part of cannabis, which has come out of partly our research, other research. It’s an amazing substance.
19:00 The NIDA cannabis doesn’t have CBD.
19:02 Brian Rose: Right. Even though you can go to Colorado and Washington State and probably buy the…
19:06 Amanda Feilding: And get hundreds of different varieties. Over-the-counter now, but yet you can’t get it for a federally sanctioned clinical trial.
19:13 And it’s the same here. We’ve had… I mean, I work… Dave Nutt is my partner in researching up this research, Beckley Imperial Psychedelic Research Program, and we got government funding two years ago for psilocybin study, psilocybin principle of magic mushroom, and it hasn’t started. I mean, it’s meant to be started in a week or two because of all the regulations make it so impossible to get it.
19:45 You have to have a quality, which is insane. Do you know what I mean? 98% is good. That would have to be 99% or whatever. So once you get the approval for the study, which, again, is not an easy thing to do…
19:58 We’ve got the approval, then we get that. Then you have to source the substance… Which can be ticked in all the boxes. I mean, psychedelics… Psychedelic substances are more carefully guarded than nuclear weapons.
20:15 Brian Rose: I remember it was Terence McKenna that said, psychedelic substances are known to cause mass hysteria in those who don’t take them. That’s what he used to say. And so it is such… It is, again, that has that alarm bell of the drugs or of the 60s. You just mentioned Professor David Nutt, who was our guest a couple of years ago, and the incredible research he’s doing at Imperial.
20:38 I always look to that. I think it’s more advanced than what’s being done in the States and the fascinating studies that you fund, many, many of those studies.
20:49 Amanda Feilding: Well, actually, I don’t only fund, I initiate and am part of the team with Dave and Robin planning the research and how to do it kind of thing. So it was me, because of me, we set up this programme, because I had approached Dave long ago when he was at Bristol. And we started at Bristol, but he’d never done psychedelic work.
21:11 So we had to start on cannabis, which we did. And then, you know, it takes years, all these years. And then finally he moved to Imperial, and then we started at the Beckley Imperial. Psychedelic research program.
21:24 Brian Rose: And you started with cannabis, then you moved to the psilocybin.
21:28 Amanda Feilding: Then psilocybin, because no one knows what the word means. So there’s not so much to boo about it. Isn’t that strange?
21:33 Brian Rose: Yeah. So again, back to language.
21:35 Amanda Feilding: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been interested in getting to LSD, because I think it’s the most interesting in many ways.
21:40 Brian Rose: Right. And you’re now getting to LSD.
21:41 Amanda Feilding: Now we’re on LSD.
21:42 Brian Rose: You are on LSD now.
21:44 Amanda Feilding: We’ve just completed the first pilot study. Well, we’ve got the data, having to be analysed. Right. It’s very exciting.
21:53 And then you have all the problems which come from the search. You know, say it’s the first of a series of researches.
22:02 Brian Rose: It’s tireless, thankless work, isn’t it?
22:05 Amanda Feilding: Well, I think it’s tireless, but it’s very thankful, because it’s exciting what you unravel, if you’re interested in that game. Yeah.
22:15 And it’s like football. If you’re interested in football, it’s very fascinating.
22:22 Brian Rose: And as you were saying, by perturbing the brain before, the study of consciousness was dependent on wakefulness, adult wakefulness, and sleep, and psychosis, and then possibly meditation starts coming in at the door. But that was very taboo 20 years ago. But by using a psychoactive substance like a psychedelic, you perturb the brain in a very strong, or you can dose it so it’s not so strong, but it’s potentially a very strong way.
22:57 And then you can study the changes with brain imaging, which is fantastic, although not at all accurate. I mean, you know, it’s a science at the beginning of its journey.
23:06 Brian Rose: Right. And you use the NMRI studies, which is kind of a real-time way of looking at the brain. Yeah.
23:12 And I might even be incorrectly. But one of the great summaries that you find, I think, in one of your psilocybin studies, was actually that parts of the brain was shutting down. Yeah. I think either David Nutter or Robin Carhart-Harris said it was almost like an orchestra not having a conductor. Absolutely.
23:28 Amanda Feilding: Absolutely. And it’s the ego, what used to be called the ego, which is the part of the brain which was shut down. And by shut down, that means the private ox, glucose, the oxygenate blood supply. The blood was reduced to that part of the brain. And that, funny enough, was my original interest in this field, was in 1966 when I was a Dutch artist.
23:57 And one of his major, most fascinating hypotheses was about the ego mechanism being a conditioned reflex mechanism which controls the distribution of the blood in the brain dependent on recognition of the word. And it’s a top-down system which controls from the top, the cortex, down to the subcortical areas. And funny enough, our psilocybin research showed that. So that was very interesting. But now the terminology is different, which is the default mode network being a part of it, which is the part, it’s very fascinating, these systems in the brain, these networks.
24:42 Brian Rose: Right. And this is an idea you were thinking about 50 years ago.
24:48 Amanda Feilding: Yes, without the knowledge of exactly how the networks work. But it was the knowledge of how the self controls the circulation of the blood to control behaviour and what is happening in here. And through conditioning, we learn to control, to constrict, to direct, to censor experience, to channel down, to simplify.
25:17 And so that’s what the whole of conditioning is doing. Until one gets adult when the skull seals. And then on the whole, there’s a tendency to become slightly more rigid, although not for everyone. And that’s what we were studying, the ego mechanism, and describing it as the small mechanism, brain blood volume, the distribution of blood and how it’s controlled in the brain. Right.
25:46 Because it needs to be controlled in order that we do all the clever things we do. We didn’t. And survive and those kind of things, right. But when you introduce psilocybin, then those pathways get blocked down a bit. Then the controlling, censoring hubs of this control, this default mode network, which is a lot of hubs and centres where stimulation comes in and is sorted and censored and passed on.
26:13 If the functions in those centres are reduced or turned off, the sense of ego disappears. So it becomes more primal consciousness, the consciousness of a baby, of an infant, when consciousness is more part of the whole and the kind of sense of the ego has dissolved somewhat. And the fascinating thing, as you know about our study, was as people reported the loss of the ego, and going into the sense of eternity or whatever, one could observe parts of the brain, particularly the posterior cingulate cortex, being deprived of blood.
27:11 And so it became much more anarchical, the brain. And all these different systems, networks, likewise they slightly lost internal communication, but they gained communication with each other. So it became more chaotic but more open. And that has quite a lot of potential benefits. It’s a benefit for psychotherapy, if you’re trying to get to a trauma and move an inflexible pattern of behaviour.
27:52 Normally with therapy, the person can keep the repressions in place. So it’s almost impossible, it’s like water on a duck’s back. But with this kind of dissolving of the repressive network, it gets through so you can reach the trauma and hopefully it can wash it out. And it also propensiates creativity, because creativity in a sense is distant associations, connections between different parts of the brain which aren’t normally connected. Suddenly you get an aha moment of oops.
28:38 And so the loss of this censorship, which is part of what civilisation has put on us, Freud is so good on the ego and the end. He was searching for this sort of knowledge kind of thing, particularly his early books on physiology, but never got there. And then I think Bart, who was the Dutch scientist, got a very new picture of how it might work with his picture of the ego and the control. And I think our study in Psilocybin has given us an empirical look where one actually sees what does Hadley expressed.
29:21 Brian Rose: Right, does part of you think I knew this all the time? Yes. But now we have the science to show you that I was right.
29:30 Amanda Feilding: Yes, and that’s why I set up the Becky Foundation, was to see if it’s so or not, because one never knows if something’s true or what I suggest or what’s got it wrong. But in this case, it is very much reflecting what was expected to be the story.
29:48 Brian Rose: You mentioned trauma, and I know we’ve had a soldier on the show that suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and I know that you’re now looking into MDMA as a way of being able to confront that trauma in a way where the brain doesn’t shut down when it try to relives it. And I believe the idea, and tell me if I’m wrong, MDMA is the idea where you can relive that trauma and go through it and process it, whereas in the past you couldn’t do that. Are you doing studies with MDMA?
30:17 Is that a trickier, I hate to use the word, I’m not going to use the word drug, is that a trickier substance to work with for approval?
30:27 Amanda Feilding: I think it’s probably less tricky, actually. It doesn’t have the phobias associated with it. It doesn’t have the phobias of LSD, and it’s easier to take, because it has a little bit of a psychedelic quality, a little bit of an amphetamine quality, and then the empathic quality. And it’s perfect for psychotherapy because it makes you love yourself more, but also love the therapist, love other people, be more compassionate, more loving, more forgiving.
31:02 And our brain imaging study on MDMA showed that we got the people to write autobiographical memories of painful things and also happy things. And compared with controls, we noticed that the painful memories were less painful, and the happy memories were happier. So it kind of moves the mood up, and by the empathy with a therapist and feeling more secure in yourself, you couldn’t face the trauma and wash it out and bring it into consciousness, which is obviously the whole aim of overcoming a trauma.
31:47 And also, I think this is what we’re going to study now. We’re going to do a study in Cardiff with war veterans, and this will be not so much a full psychotherapeutic session. It will be slightly more just what are the acute effects of MDMA on a post-traumatic stress disorder. And it affects the amygdala and all parts of the brain associated with that, i.e. fear.
32:19 The amygdala is hyperactive, so the small little bang sparks a reaction of fear or little tiny cubes bring on much stronger reactions than they should for the person’s happiness kind of thing.
32:34 Brian Rose: Do you think MDMA is going to be as important as LSD or psilocybin, say, 50 years out from now when it comes to helping people?
32:44 Amanda Feilding: I think they all have their different qualities. I think it’s not neither all. I think, you know, they work on slightly different but related themes, centres, and different things can be slightly better for different problems you’re trying to overcome.
33:03 And it’s not to say that in certain circumstances a combination wouldn’t be quite beneficial, but we haven’t got there. I mean, LSD and MDMA could be, because LSD is amazingly non-toxic. You can’t actually kill someone with LSD, which is amazing.
33:21 Brian Rose: There isn’t a lethal dose that we know of, is what you’re saying.
33:26 Amanda Feilding: No, there’s not a lethal dose.
33:28 There was a story about an elephant dying, but actually it didn’t die of that. It died what the people injected it in something, and it killed that killer.
33:36 Brian Rose: I heard that story recently, yeah, that it wasn’t. And that’s something that David Nutt was famous about talking about was dosage and the lethal dose, you know, the LD50, I think, is what it talks about. You know, he was made famous when he spoke about, what was it, ecstasy and equacy, and just comparing these horse-riding to taking ecstasy, and when he ran the numbers, like any good scientist done, is that the horse-riding is more dangerous.
34:00 Amanda Feilding: And he actually did that, because I’d asked him to talk at my cannabis. I gave these seminars in the House of Lords. This was to launch the cannabis report. And so he was one of the people’s chair of the advisory council. So I asked him to talk, and he was an old friend.
34:17 We’ve been working together for a long time. And he said, no, it wouldn’t be proper, but I’ll talk about MDMA and ecstasy, and that’s what got him to sack.
34:28 Brian Rose: So why was he sacked? And what does that say about drug policy and politics?
34:34 Amanda Feilding: It says very bad news, isn’t it?
34:36 I mean, as he rightly says, it’s kind of Galileo being… I mean, at least he wasn’t sent to the guillotine, or actually it was very… He, being a master at things, turned it to his own advantage and made the government look completely ridiculous.
34:51 Brian Rose: Right. And the research you two have done together since might not have happened otherwise.
34:57 Amanda Feilding: I think it would have happened. It was happening anyhow. It was in the middle of our research. But I don’t think it did it any harm. I think, in fact, it elevated him to a superhero in the drug world because he’d stood up and not everyone asked the truth.
35:14 He wasn’t saying anything. He was saying alcohol and nicotine’s more dangerous than cannabis and LSD. And we know that, so. Do you know it’s scientifically so. It’s not that he’s saying a new fact.
35:26 He was just saying what is so. And that was not permitted. And it’s very frightening that even now the truth is not permitted to be spoken out loud. You have to… I’ve always made a point, very carefully, working with governments.
35:43 I try to give them the best evidence base one can with the best experts. But it’s a fairly crazy situation that when you land in Singapore, you’re told anyone with drugs can receive the death penalty. Do you know someone might just have a bit of cannabis? I don’t know. Do you know what I mean?
36:07 It’s a mad situation.
36:08 Brian Rose: Do you feel a change in the last five years? Do you think David would have been sacked today? Is there enough?
36:15 Amanda Feilding: No.
36:15 There is enormous change. There is enormous change. In the last two years.
36:19 Brian Rose: Okay. Two, three.
36:20 Yeah. That’s a big statement for you to make. A enormous change. A enormous change. Okay.
36:25 Amanda Feilding: I would say the intellectual war is won. The war to overcome the war. I mean, the battle is won in the sense.
36:33 Brian Rose: How was that won?
36:34 Amanda Feilding: I think it was a slow buildup.
36:36 It was partly slowly working away to make a hole in the dam of the taboo by providing evidence. And the Berkeley was very early on. We were one of the first to start doing that. But there were other bodies doing it around the world. And so slowly the evidence started to build up.
37:02 And then in 2011, I mean, whatever. I mean, I did a long time by then. But one thing was that there was a global commission was formed for drug policy reform, which was very good because it was people the world knew. And at the same time, I did a public letter which was signed by nine presidents. President Columbia, Sting, Yokoono, Richard Branson.
37:38 Brian Rose: Was this his letter?
37:40 Amanda Feilding: Yeah. But also 2-2 and eight presidents, President Saunto, President Otto Perez Molina, President, blah, blah. I can’t even remember. Lots.
37:50 Brian Rose: What was this letter all about? What was it stated in that letter?
37:55 Amanda Feilding: It was just saying it’s time to change. The war on drugs has failed. We’ve run it for 50 years.
38:01 It has failed in all its intentions. And it’s time for us to change and look at other options. I actually can’t remember. But that sort of thing it said. It was just plain common sense.
38:19 If it was a business, no business would be allowed to run at a loss of billions of dollars a year and appalling things happening through wars, the spread of AIDS. I mean, so many horrible things. Young people being deprived of a livelihood because they get a prison record and no one would employ them. I mean, at every level there’s horror. I mean, there’s horror in Mexico and, you know, transit countries all around the world.
38:49 Horror because of the drug laws. Collateral horror, devastating. And any child can get it at any street corner. Easier than getting a drink because it’s not licensed. So it doesn’t work.
39:04 And it’s not licensed and the dosage is not known. And what they get in England, how many people smoke cannabis, I have no idea. But they get the most disgusting stuff, skunk, you know, which no one should have to smoke. It’s very nice to have a balance. It’s, you know, it’s a plant which has a lot of connoisseurship.
39:30 It’s an incredible plant which has something like 400 regions, 80, 60, 80 cannabinoids, some with a high medical benefit. And the one which is really absolutely fascinating, which had been bred right out of it by the illegal market, called cannabidiol, with CBD for short. And it can treat almost every known condition. I mean, it’s anti-psychotic, anti-anxolytic, anti-cancerous, anti-inflammatory, anti… You know, you just go on and on and on.
40:05 And because of the illegal market, which goes for always to make drugs stronger because you get more money for stronger substances, less bulk, more money. You always go stronger. Opium to heroin, coca to crack. And now, lovely, old-fashioned cannabis with a mixture of CBD and turbines and all other things you’ve got in it when it grew up in the Himalayas has gone to skunk grown under lights with insecticides and things, high THC, no mixture. You know, it’s a tragedy that this has been allowed to happen and we need to reverse it.
40:46 And that’s what’s beginning to happen in America.
40:49 Brian Rose: But you said in America, I mean, the prison system is being commercialized and seems almost as an all-time high. You know, the narco… The narco lords in Mexico and the amount of violence is just kind of in a shocking way. We had a filmmaker on named Adam Scorgy who had a movie called The Culture High, which, you know, had Richard Branson in there and Graham Hancock and a few others.
41:08 And it was just examining this whole phenomenon as it’s gone full circle. Yes, in Colorado and Washington state we have the legalization. Yet at the same time… Yeah. Yeah.
41:18 Amanda Feilding: But that’s typical in a way. It’s compensation, isn’t it? I mean, they… The drug war is an American phenomenon. They created it to fill the gap which was left by the end of prohibition.
41:32 There were all sorts of factors. It was a way of getting minorities and it had a lot of factors which made it happen. But it was totally an American phenomenon which they spread with total determination. So not one of the countries dared break this convention, which are completely unscientifically grounded. And then when poor little Bolivia tried to break it a few years ago, led by America, but the UK in quick pursuit, said, no, they mustn’t be allowed to smoke to the Coker leaf.
42:12 Do you know, it’s madness. So I’ve been through the bacteria working at the UN level and we’ve written a report of how you would adapt the conventions so that individual countries or groups of countries can experiment with one decriminalization, but secondly with careful regulation. Because we’ve got no evidence based on regulation because no one has been allowed to do it, except in America, because America is the only country in the world which doesn’t have to obey the UN regulations because there are internal regulations about the UN and they are the ones who made the UN regulations.
42:52 I mean, it’s very kind of catch-22. I guess you have to be a political scientist at a certain level to try to deal with some of this because there’s so many levels of policy and you have to kind of understand.
43:04 Brian Rose: I know, we’ll leave that to Rick and what he does. Amanda, what if there’s one study you could do and you wouldn’t have to worry about getting the approval or finding the substances? Is there one where you would say, Brian, I want to take 100 people and I want to do this or this or this?
43:20 Do you have your, I don’t know, your bucket list study?
43:24 Amanda Feilding: Yes, but it would have a lot of elements in it. I mean, in fact, I’m working towards it now, you know, I think, I mean, for me, the two components I find particularly interesting are LSD and cannabis. I mean, but mind you, each one has its different characteristics. I wasca has DMT, which brings about a different, and that in itself is fascinating, is seeing why do the different classic psychedelics in cannabis have their different effects?
43:57 What are they, what parts of the brain are they stimulating to bring about the particular effects that they bring? There’s a combination of those two. Yes. Cannabis and LSD or cannabis. No, not again, or either, but then I’d like to, I mean, there are a lot of things, I want to know more about how it works in the brain.
44:13 I think it does change the blood supply. This was my old hypothesis that I learned from the Dutch scientists, and I still think I haven’t investigated carefully enough to have decided it’s definitely not true. So I want to look at that more and how it’s distributed in the blood. I mean, at the moment brain imaging is quite crude. I don’t think it can see changes in capillary volume.
44:44 That’s just what I want to start doing now, looking at how one would look at changes in capillary volume and the other nuts work I’m doing with this leading professor in Russia, who is the kind of leading specialist, especially on cerebral circulation. We’ve been working for about eight years, developing a non-invasive monitor to read different things. But to look how LSD propensiates meditation, I think that’s a very fascinating area. And indeed, cannabis, they move in the same direction.
45:29 Meditation also reduces the blood supply to the default mode network. And that’s why people experience unity.
45:42 Brian Rose: And you said even 20 years ago meditation was taboo. That’s hard for me to hear because these days it’s quite…
45:55 Amanda Feilding: It was taboo.
45:56 Brian Rose: Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting because you’ve seen so many different levels of all. I mean, you’ve seen LSD being legal and then being made illegal and then vilified and now kind of almost come full circle with you being able to…
46:11 Amanda Feilding: Almost coming back again. That’s what I promised Albert Hoffman, who made it. I promised him that I would open the doors to serious research to his problem child. But I promised that I’d do it by his 100th birthday. And actually it was all online and then something happened.
46:29 But anyway…
46:30 Brian Rose: Tell me about you. Tell me about growing up on Beckley Park, which is where you live now. It’s a Tudor house. It has the moats and the towers.
46:40 But you didn’t necessarily grow up wealthy. What was that like and how did that shape the Amanda we know today?
46:50 Amanda Feilding: Well, it was totally shaping. It was incredibly beautiful. In a rundown, hey, rundown sort of way.
46:58 Overgrown, rundown, beautiful place with three moats, all kind of steed coming off the moats and all overgrown. And in the house it was very beautiful. But there was no heating. We didn’t have heating. We had a farm.
47:16 We didn’t have hot water. We only had a cook’s joy, which made the water. And downstairs next to the kitchen. We never went into Oxford because petrol was expensive. And I didn’t have school uniforms because the theory was they were a waste of money.
47:34 But we had beautiful things. It was a strange contrast. It was very full of contrast. And my father was… They were both lovely.
47:45 It was his turn on with beauty, that his big adrenal sweep came with beauty. So that’s… But he had no money and he went to farm and he hated farming and we’d go out at night with candles to the harvesting and then blah, blah, blah, you know, the track. It was all kind of prehistoric. But it was quite an odd upbringing.
48:11 It was a world on its own, do you know what I mean? And so it was rather lovely in a way. It was lonely, you could say. Different, but it had its beauty.
48:23 Brian Rose: And what is it like being a countess?
48:26 Amanda Feilding: A big disadvantage in many fields, such as the science field or the communication field because one’s always thought to be some rich. It’s so much easier to see one as a check signer, not as someone who works 15 hours a day, made this whole thing work, has been passionately dedicated here for the last 40 years, blah, blah, blah, dinner with men. So it’s a bit of a drag. But funnily enough, my husband’s name is Weems, W-E-M-Y-S-I, which means cave. So I’d rather like that.
49:04 Brian Rose: Countess of the cave, I think that’s true. Like in the old days, having… It’s interesting, I guess… Things happened in the cave, what? People can bring a lot of preconceptions when they hear that title.
49:15 I guess we all do it even subconsciously. Again, language again.
49:19 Amanda Feilding: Yeah, language, isn’t it? Drugs, titles, yeah. Titles.
49:22 And especially to the Americans, they don’t even know what a certain title means and they probably assume things. I think it’s quite an advantage in certain places because I advise the Guatemalan president on drug policy reform, and the most outspoken of all the presidents, he was the first to say, we have to reform our drug policies. And there they think it’s something slightly exotic, they rather like the title. It’s like you can remove one from the backpacker or something.
49:56 Brian Rose: Right. So you could use it to your advantage.
49:59 Amanda Feilding: I have occasionally, but more it’s to the disadvantage, I think, but I don’t know.
50:04 Brian Rose: Either way. I bet you were a very interesting young woman.
50:08 I have to ask you, at least briefly, about the self-trepidation video. And I just see a young woman that’s really bold and doing something that she believes in. And the more I read about it, I’m more fascinating with this than being a cultural thing that’s been done for thousands of years. I was just wondering, was that a scary thing for you to do? Was that a statement that you wanted to make, or how did that come about?
50:32 Amanda Feilding: Right. Well, I think it’s fascinating. I’m still, in fact, I’m saying to myself, no, the drug policy solved and the psychedelics are pretty well, the door’s opening. Next thing is opening the door to research and to trepidation. Because the hypothesis is it improves the cerebral circulation by giving back the possibility for the blood to express itself on the heartbeat.
51:02 And that little bit of extra blood pressure makes the cerebral spinal fluid, which is other fluid, have a better circulation. So it’s a little bit more active, more alive, the cerebral circulation. And after all, everything happens in the brain. And it’s known that from 13 to 21, that can period of growing up, but particularly the kind of n-bit, 21 to 24, is a very kind of tricky period and that’s when the skull finally seals, becomes a solid, more or less solid, case.
51:38 And the pulsation continues, but in a limited expression. So the hypothesis, which actually has been done, as you rightly say, since whatever, 10,000 B.C. They found evidence of that. And it was quite often with the leaders, it was the priests or something, because you found several trypan skulls buried in pottery with a bit of silk or something.
52:05 Brian Rose: So the holy people or the shamans were doing it to themselves?
52:10 Amanda Feilding: The shamans, the priest cast, the kind of leaders around the world, and nearly, not every culture, but fairly enough, not Egypt, where the body was sacrosanct, but India, a lot on the German-Dutch border in prehistoric times. They’re clustered, a lot in Latin America, a lot in pre-Columbian America.
52:30 Brian Rose: And what does the process involve, or what did it involve back then? How do they do it? Is it a small, a whole?
52:38 Amanda Feilding: Well, it’s unknown territory. What is known is that it was used until the First World War as a treatment for migraine, epilepsy, insanity, depression. Actually, anything that goes, if you couldn’t think what to do, I was an Indian neuroscientist, a very nice man, and I said, anyway, he said he gave his rich patient the pills and the poor ones he trapped. I said, it seemed to work. He said, well, I never came back.
53:14 Brian Rose: And how long does the procedure take to do?
53:18 Amanda Feilding: Well, what I want to make absolutely clear, and this is what I make clear at the time, is completely insane doing a self-trepination. I stood for parliament on the platform of trepanation for the national health. What I wanted to do was communicate that this should be investigated scientifically to see if there’s a reality in the hypothesis that by giving back the skull its expansability, one could improve the cerebral circulation to a little bit.
53:57 Maybe it’s to the level pre-13, a little bit more energy, a little bit more cerebral energy, a little bit more buoyancy. So that’s the hypothesis, and it would be very easy to research. And I started researching it in Mexico and then in Russia. And in Russia, we did a study with Professor Moskalenko on people who were going to get trepanned anyhow for brain tumor or whatever, which aren’t perfect subjects, but they were the only ones we could get ethical approvals for.
54:38 And it showed a change in cranial compliance, the index of cranial compliance, which is a measure we do with this device to measure it, and high index is healthy, no, it’s unhealthy. When people get Alzheimer’s, the index of cranial compliance goes down. And it was shown that trepanning increased the index of trepanation. And when a couple of participants had their health blocked, it fell down again. But that was a very small study.
55:11 So now I want to, in time, get back, enlarge the studies, get healthy populations. There are plenty of people who want to be trepanned, elected trepanation, and then the best scientific technology, one study, and see if it brings about changes. I mean, it’s interesting that the shamans and the priests and leaders used to be at Japan, because definitely in certain countries, they were particularly in pre-Columbian America, they were the ones who took the psychoactive substances, and in India, places like that.
55:53 Brian Rose: Right, so there’s a link there. There’s a link there.
55:57 Amanda Feilding: And what I think is it raises the floor a little bit. So your ratio of blood to cerebral spinal fluid is what it was in childhood, which is a little bit higher than when you’d come out, you’d stand up and all that. But, you know, it all has to be researched.
56:14 Brian Rose: And you didn’t win office based on that for the NHS?
56:17 Amanda Feilding: No, but I increased the vote the second time.
56:20 Brian Rose: I bet you raised some awareness, to say the very least. I mean, I always have people on here, and I always want to ask them a few kind of secrets of their success. And so I want to ask you just a few questions.
56:32 I know you work a lot, you know, 12 to 15 hours a day. You run the whole Beckley Foundation. It’s interesting. When you put the word foundation on the end, everyone assumes there’s 400 people there, which I guess can help you sometimes too. But I was wondering if you could tell me a few things.
56:47 What are your success habits, as in what are the crucial parts of your daily routine that you find, you know, allows you to do the work that you do? These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show.
57:21 Amanda Feilding: I mean, I think there are a lot of people out there who know the value, the potential value of the area that we’re exploring.
57:31 I mean, this area has been taboo, no entry. And that, in my opinion, is a great sadness for society. And so, you know, all I can say is if people want to fund the research one’s doing, all the policy one’s doing, they can put it in a pocket which is absolutely for that, all that. And I could be doing much more incredibly exciting and valuable research which can help treat so many things, addictions, depressions, post-traumatic stress disorder. I mean, it goes on and on and on, cancer, you know, cluster headaches.
58:15 There are so many things one can research and it looks as though these substances can help in the treatment of. And then, apart from healing, which is obviously an incredibly important area, there’s also the area of fun, creativity. Right, that whole aspect. Why do we always have to scorn that, you know? Yeah, it’s interesting.
58:43 We can’t talk about that almost, right? The spirituality, compassion, good housekeeping of the world, you know, music, art, you know, all the good things. And our research has shown, and more research will show it more, how LSD increases the force of sensation, whether it’s beauty of transcendence or peace or spirituality. When you do, people do research and you have controls and then the two states, the LSD takers have a much higher reaction of wonder, transcendence, these things.
59:36 So it shows that these substances, which so fundamentally alter the functioning of the brain, allow parts of the human consciousness to blossom when they’re usually kept down by just the confines of conditioning. And, you know, these are the best parts of humans, not to say you want everyone on them all the time, you don’t at all. You want, you know, just the few seekers to be able to, in a safe situation, not being persecuted or sent to prison or able to go down those paths, open doors, do research, do art, you know, make money for the country, you know.
1:00:27 I actually would rather like to launch our LSD study an exhibition of artists who have benefit from entheogens, maybe at the Tate or something. Lovely, you know. Lots of artists have taken entheogens and it increases the visual perception and pleasure, you know. It increases association, which is what creativity is, putting new concepts together. It increases hearing.
1:01:05 You can hear all different sorts of noises. I mean, surely all of those things can be good.
1:01:10 Brian Rose: It’s fascinating because, like you said, there’s so many people that are in the, that call it the psychedelic closet, you know. But, you know, even Stephen Jobs said that the LSD was pivotal in his designing of his products. And so many people have tried with success, you know, these substances, including my own ayahuasca experiences.
1:01:28 Brian Rose: And yet we still aren’t able to talk about it.
1:01:32 Amanda Feilding: Exactly. And what I think is, I mean, we thought this back in the 60s, actually, if you could show that people could make more money on it, then you’d win. So I’d rather want to do the creativity study, but it’s quite difficult to set up with LSD, with go players, go pure intellect, no luck in go. It’s just the best player wins, basically.
1:01:57 And anyway, that’s what I wanted to do. I used to be, long ago, a very keen go player, and I played better when high, if you kept your sugar level normal, because you’d need that for the concentration. Otherwise the men would come off the board. And it would be a very good test to see if it increases cognitive, spatial intelligence kind of thing. I think it increases the potential to play the game, to see what it means, or can.
1:02:27 Brian Rose: I would like to see that study. Amanda, I always ask everyone that comes here, a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Amanda Feilding, and give that young lady a bit of advice, what would you tell her?
1:02:47 Amanda Feilding: Gosh. Go for it, because your dreams can come true, something like that.
1:02:52 Brian Rose: Would she have listened to you? What? Would she have listened to you?
1:02:57 Amanda Feilding: I think so. I always slightly went for it, if you know what I mean, thinking it might come true.
1:03:04 Brian Rose: I think you have a history of going for it, I think. What is the best advice you’ve ever received, whether it be personal or, you know, with business, with your foundation?
1:03:18 Amanda Feilding: What? I think the advice about how to keep control of your consciousness, and by that I mean your disciplined cognitive happenings when I’m getting high, by keeping the sugar level normal. I keep taking vitamin C and keep your glucose level normal.
1:03:38 So, because to concentrate, you have to constrict the blood vessels going away. You have to keep your intent where it’s going. That was an amazingly valuable bit of consideration. So, keep your glucose level, so you can continually function mentally. So, you can function mentally at a higher state.
1:03:55 Because people forget about that sometimes, and their glucose drops. I think there are a few people in the world who follow that logic. And then they don’t get the great effects they could be getting out of that experience. They don’t get the… I mean, if you follow that logic, you can read the whole of Freud on LSD, you can do work, you can build better buildings, or you can concentrate.
1:04:21 It enables you to concentrate at the changed level of consciousness. I think that’s very important. And that means you need to be eating kind of regularly or have some… You have to have sweetmeats around. I mean, like when we used to play girls, one ate glucose tablets, because I didn’t like losing.
1:04:38 And fruits. Now, we are so healthy, we don’t eat fruits. And I have a very good bit of advice I got from my father. He said, and I was really young, whatever the government tells you, do the opposite. And that was kind of…
1:04:51 Brian Rose: Is that generally true?
1:04:53 Amanda Feilding: Yeah. Well, I don’t want to be nasty to the former government, but I don’t think people should respect authorities more than they respect their own whatever.
1:05:05 Brian Rose: Yeah. It took us ahead 50 years really quickly.
1:05:08 And say we could just close our eyes now and then walk out onto the streets and see what drug policy is like then or what’s going on. I mean, what do you think that world would look like? You know, in 2065. And what would we walk into? I would imagine it will be have balanced out and it will be as if it was insane, the prohibition, I mean, people think.
1:05:32 Right. I mean, no one would be interested in it, because it’s just a silly idea. How could anyone have gone like that? We’ll look at it the way we looked at alcohol prohibition in the 20s and we’ll look at the violence then, like something ridiculous. Yeah, it was just a terrible, terrible madness of humanity.
1:05:45 Okay. Which is a kind of, which is a characteristic of man that he’s capable of such madness. Right. And you can see the horrible consequences and it makes no difference. He just charges on in the same direction.
1:05:59 Brian Rose: Right. And at that point in 50 years where we have clinics that we can book and instead of taking a trip to the Maldives, we can go out into the Cotswolds and enjoy a two-day experience.
1:06:09 Amanda Feilding: Yeah, I would think so. Yeah.
1:06:10 Brian Rose: Maybe even the NHS prescribes it.
1:06:12 Amanda Feilding: Yeah, absolutely. I would think so.
1:06:15 Brian Rose: Right. It’s cheaper for the NHS, basically. Yeah.
1:06:18 Amanda Feilding: And that’s why I called my thing Trepanation for the National Health because it saves money if, that was a joke. Right. But I mean, to enable people to be healthier, obviously the brain very largely controls one’s health, saves money. It’s good. It’s good for society.
1:06:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, and it’s fascinating because with this post-traumatic stress disorder sufferer that I had in here, and he’s on heavy amounts of opiates and these regular occurring drugs that he’s going to pay for the rest of his life. Yes. And yet, you could argue with potentially a few sessions with MDMA or some other substances. He might be free from that. Yeah, yeah.
1:06:57 That’s why the people who make the drugs hate psychedelics and things because it’s not a big market because you don’t have to take it every day.
1:07:09 Amanda Feilding: Right. And the evidence is beginning to build that these substances can bring about treatments, cures, which, I mean, we did help support a study at Johns Hopkins using psilocybin in the therapy, with therapy, to overcome tobacco addiction, which is one of the most difficult ones to overcome actually. And we had in a little pilot study and 80% success rate, which is considered very successful to have 10%, you know, 80%.
1:07:45 And these results are beginning to come in and we’re about to start to do an LST with alcohol addiction. We’re looking for permissions at the moment.
1:07:55 Brian Rose: Fascinating, those two drugs going up against each other with the histories and the corporate history. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m guessing that’s one that, yeah, that the alcohol companies don’t want to see the results of.
1:08:10 But they’ll change, then they’ll, you know, they’re already chewing up to get into the gold rush, of the green rush, of the cannabis.
1:08:18 Amanda Feilding: Right. So the business will shift.
1:08:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, the business machine is working. It’s the new fastest-growing industry in America, cannabis.
1:08:26 Amanda Feilding: Yeah, yeah. But I think the mistake that it gets to financialized, to financialized, if one doesn’t want it to advertise, I mean, again, if it’s possible in America, in England, the rest of the world, you know, one would stop advertising, one wouldn’t permit advertising. Right. And there’s all sorts of, I mean, I’m doing a report at the moment on the regulation of high substances. And when you figure it out, also we’re doing the first ever report, which is really hard to believe, on how would one regulate cocoa, cocaine, and derivative.
1:09:05 How would one regulate that market? No one, although it destabilizes the whole world, the cocaine market, is two to three, and no think tank, no one, has done a report, like he did the cannabis one, into how would he regulate it. So, now I’m doing that, I sit and put two and a half minutes.
1:09:25 Brian Rose: Yeah. That sounds fascinating.
1:09:27 Amanda Feilding: It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?
1:09:29 Brian Rose: That’s fascinating. The last part of my question is, to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us or watching us somewhere around the world, what advice do you give to them if they want to make a difference in this, when he’s a fight, I guess, or in this opening of our consciousness and all these substances that can help us move forward as a race? What can they do?
1:09:54 Amanda Feilding: Well, it’s an open field, and there’s so much to do at so many different levels, depending if they’re horticulturists, to get the best grain, the best cannabis for cancer.
1:10:06 There’s so many levels where one needs to slowly, carefully, beautifully thought out, make changes, be artists, express it. There’s a massive, and there is a large proportion of you doing these things, I mean, expressing it through art work or whatever, looking after nature and doing some art or music or… You know, I think it’s a… I think society mustn’t criminalise this activity. And by that, I mean love it.
1:10:49 It’s not a love activity. It’s not for everyone, it’s for a minority. But, you know, to have more sensation, more perception of music, better perception of beauty, more capacity to love maybe, you know, there are all potential benefits, so it shouldn’t be despised. Right. And what I would like is slowly to change society so it has the respect of that area of experience and lets it be.
1:11:25 And, you know, it’s woven into the fabric of society. It used to be in India and lots of other countries. Had it as their centre. If you look back through civilisation, if it’s like a tree, you suddenly see a kind of ring which was particularly productive, wonderful art, whatever, productions. I mean, look at ancient Greece.
1:11:49 I mean, totally suppressed from the history books. But at the core of the classical world was the Etysinian Mysteries, which is a temple 19 miles out of Athens where everyone in the classical world went to take an inebriating drink which made them experience death and rebirth. And it was absolutely, it was a mystery. If you talked about it, it was a death sentence. And maybe that’s why Socrates got the death sentence because he played with it at the dinner parties with the young friends kind of thing.
1:12:27 Why are we so scared of our own consciousness as humans? It’s very odd, isn’t it?
1:12:31 Brian Rose: It is odd, yeah. It’s very, very odd. It’s odd.
1:12:34 Amanda Feilding: Because it shakes the norm, I think. Yeah, that’s what it is. And the people who are in power feel, God, with this new shake, will we still be in power? I didn’t quite know. And then churches get frightened of it.
1:12:46 Brian Rose: Does it threaten their viewpoint of spirituality?
1:12:50 Amanda Feilding: Actually, it is the spiritual ground which is opening up. I mean, all great religions have techniques of altering their consciousness at the very center, like whatever, those caves, their spiritual temples. And they were done on psychoactive substances or changed consciousness. You can see that from the lines and everything.
1:13:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s fascinating. It’s something to think about because we always look at these war on drugs and these constructs of politicians and large countries, and we think, ah, they’re going out of their way to do this and this. But part of me always thinks it’s part of the human subconscious that maybe we’re ultimately afraid of instability. And so we shy away from these things that, in fact, are the antidotes.
1:13:38 Amanda Feilding: Yes, I think so.
1:13:39 And I think, I mean, society is a projection of the brain. I used to do pictures of the brain with society, you know, civilization inside the brain, and all we do is project it out. So humans are very neurotic, partly because I think they’re based on so much repression, i.e. they’re constricting their blood vessels and directing blood to this area. Don’t go left to right.
1:14:05 And that causes a certain myopic blindness. They go down the tunnel. They’re going without kind of taking a higher view and thinking, is this good or bad? And so we project our ego limitations out into the society we create. And the great societies have been more, a little bit looser, a bit higher, a bit more open.
1:14:32 And that’s another quality which psychedelics are showing to increase is the quality of openness. I mean, just back to the nearest sounds, what it does is increase the chaos. It makes, there’s more happening. There’s more stimulation. So you get different things coming together.
1:14:54 It’s looser. And that has benefits of new things coming out.
1:14:58 Brian Rose: That’s the best takeaway from me today, is that our society is reflected, you know, by what we do to our own brains. And you talk about the ego. Ego is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but it’s these hundreds and thousands of years of culture that kind of then push us in this one direction.
1:15:15 We repress these other things, which we know when you repress something, it’s got to come out somewhere else in some manifest form. And the ego projected is the government, which wants to keep in control like the ego does. So it’s all, you know, doing what’s in here, as the buffs say below. We’re forcing our internal mistakes out. So, you know, obviously Buddha and all of those mystics had it best and they’re advised probably.
1:15:49 Amanda Feilding: But I think what we’re playing at leads into that sort of area, but in a more kind of physiological and scientific way, which is the kind of vocabulary of the times, that’s where I think science is so valuable. It’s hard for the modern age to contradict it. I mean, actually it can be completely wrong, science can make all the mistakes and it’s always the truth is only relative to the moment. You know, new truth comes in and throws out the old relevance. But modern society takes out seriously and it can reveal things that you can’t see without it.
1:16:30 Brian Rose: Right, and in this way it’s a great way, kind of a gateway that you can get in, where you might not be able to get in somewhere else. But you’re right, it’s funny, it is very trendy right now, we don’t see the fallacies and I know Rupert Sheldrake talks a bit about this too, is that we’ve almost gone full circle where we trust science so much.
1:16:49 Amanda Feilding: Much too much. I mean, I can see from inside, you know, just as I was sort of, it shouldn’t really be trusted. But at the same time, it’s a valuable tool.
1:16:57 I think, I mean, I used to be, I consider myself an artist more than an artist. And I gave up painting and creating artworks in order actually to create the Beckley Foundation, which is a, Mr. Autosociety, said that all of this becomes an acceptable part of society, part of the Weber Society.
1:17:23 Brian Rose: Is this your work of art?
1:17:25 Amanda Feilding: Yeah, yeah.
1:17:26 That’s how I look at it. But I mean, it was a lot more fun painting, I’d say.
1:17:30 Brian Rose: Amanda, it’s been a real pleasure having you here. Thank you. The work you’ve done with the Beckley Foundation is, it’s really incredible when you look at all of the different studies that you’re working on, whether it’s nicotine addiction or alcohol addiction or the psilocybin studies, the LSD studies, the cannabis research, it’s a very long list and it’s just amazing that that’s all happening from you and the foundation.
1:17:54 I know you fly under the radar a little bit. I know that’s kind of by choice, but for me in the know and once I speak with Professor Nutt and a lot of these people like Rick Doblin, they speak very highly of you and I just want to thank you so much for our work.
1:18:07 Amanda Feilding: Thank you very much. Lovely to be here with your lovely new dog.
1:18:10 Brian Rose: Thank you.
1:18:11 Winston’s here and thanks for being here. Very good company. Yeah, with our new design. I hope you enjoyed this. Great to talk to you in really a conversational way and hear kind of the why of what you do because it makes a big difference to understand it that way and so now when I think of the Beckley Foundation, I’ll be thinking of you.
1:18:29 Amanda Feilding: Well, I hope I want to build the Beckley Foundation off by your good questions of mine.
1:18:34 Brian Rose: No, I think this is going to be fantastic. For people that want to find out more about the foundation or get involved in some of your crowdfunding campaigns, is there a website that’s the best thing to go to?
1:18:45 Amanda Feilding: Yes, it’s slightly outdated. It’s in the process of being redone.
1:18:48 BeckleyFoundation.org.
1:18:50 Brian Rose: Okay. Okay. Fantastic. Again, thank you so much.
1:18:55 You’ve done a ton. It’s been a topic that, to be honest, London Real was really created on my own journey with ayahuasca and it was something that was taboo because I was 10 years in the banking industry and I had never had any real psychedelic experiences and we did it on the show. We did a before and after show and we were very public about doing our ceremony in London, which of course is technically illegal and so it’s been a part of the show and so even though we delve into fascinating personalities, every week I’ve talked about ayahuasca and we’ve had a DMT show and things like that.
1:19:31 Amanda Feilding: Brilliant. And I actually think it’s very like the Beckley which started with one person, do you know what I mean, and tried to reveal things and communication is such an important thing. That’s what I haven’t been into the other fields but I think it’s really and I would like to get more into it. I think it’s such a valuable area because politicians don’t change without the people telling them to change. And many people are very supportive of what you do.
1:19:58 They just don’t necessarily can talk about it but they can spend two hours with you and they’ll be like, wow.
1:20:04 Brian Rose: Right. And that came out through the crowdfunding. We were surprised at the, you know, what a nice positive reaction we got for the LSD study. Right.
1:20:13 Amanda Feilding: So that was nice. Yeah. But yeah, well, thank you.
1:20:15 Brian Rose: I think this is wonderful work you’re doing. Good. Thank you so much, Amanda.
1:20:18 Amanda Feilding: Thank you.
1:20:19 Brian Rose: As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you all and yours. Thank you. Thanks so much for your time.
1:20:24 Amanda Feilding: Thank you very much. Sorry. Thank you.
