Dr. Rosalind Watts - Psychedelic Medicine: How DMT & LSD Treat Addiction & Anxiety

Full transcript: Dr. Rosalind Watts on London Real

4:24 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Rosalind Watts, the scientist, TED speaker and clinical psychologist at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. Your groundbreaking research utilizes psychedelic medicines such as LSD, magic mushrooms and DMT, many of which are still illegal, to treat debilitating diseases such as depression, addiction and anorexia. You work alongside the pioneers Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and Professor David Nutt, both former guests here, and you have developed a therapeutic framework for the challenging integration process involved when using psychedelics.

4:59 Roz, welcome to London Real. Thank you. So glad to have you here. I feel like you know you’re part of like the trifecta over at Imperial of doing all these great things, and so thanks for being here. I appreciate it.

5:12 Also, you’ve just watched our latest movie, Reconnect, last night, so that’s kind of exciting because very few people have. And so I’d love to maybe talk about any things that come up here. You know, I always assumed that people who may be watching this might not know much about psychedelics or even the work you’re doing, and so I always think, like, if my grandma is in Arizona watching this, maybe we start off with kind of a bigger picture. You know, if you ever meet someone on the streets and tell them, like, why do you spend your life researching psychedelics?

5:45 I know you used to work in the NHS. And why do you think they’re important? Hmm. I guess I would probably say that, having been a therapist for many years, that talking therapy doesn’t always get deep enough. That it is often not effective enough for people, and that psychedelics are a tool to help people get down to the nitty-gritty of where they really need to go, and they can go there quite quickly.

6:09 And people tend to understand that idea, that, you know, it’s a catalyst for a deeper process. It can make a therapy more effective. Okay. And we’re kind of used to that traditional therapy route, where if someone has kind of a problem, they go, when they speak to a therapist, that can be years. They kind of try to walk them through what blockages and past traumas.

6:32 And you were part of that business for a while. Yes, yes. And I guess what happens is people come in and they, they will tell you their story, the story that they may have been telling for many, many years to themselves, to other people, and actually telling that story over and over again often doesn’t help. It doesn’t lead to any change. They might feel better temporarily, that they have someone to listen to that, but it doesn’t.

6:56 They don’t feel themselves. They don’t feel rid of that story. It stays, right? And we see that in our study, because we’re comparing psilocybin with an antidepressant medication, and both groups get kind of talking therapy the whole way through, and we see the difference with the psilocybin group. In the antidepressant group is that the with the people, the antidepressant, good, but the story still is there.

7:18 They might find that the depression is a little bit alleviated, that the symptoms aren’t so severe, that the story is still there, and they still, the last session they’ll be kind of speaking from the same place as they were at the beginning. But with psilocybin, the story completely changes. It’s like the story is on this level, it’s like a cognitive story, and then they dive deep in, and then they they transform. There’s, there’s a, the story is like just, like almost just like fragments, and, and they, the story has changed to a new story at the end of the process.

7:50 So, yeah, that’s what they can do. When did you first become aware that these might be tools that could be used and that you might want to be involved with? Well, so, actually, when I went to university magic mushrooms were legal. So, in, I actually lived above a shop called Amsterdam of London, which was in Birmingham, because I was at university in Birmingham, and so yeah, we lived above this magic mushroom shop. So it was kind of at that time, it was what people would use more than alcohol, potentially, in some, some people, I guess, that more.

8:23 So that’s why I was first introduced to it, but that wasn’t really in a therapeutic setting, and also I think, yeah, the, the mode of doing it, with ceremonially or therapeutically, is so completely different. In a way it’s almost a completely different thing, but I was first introduced to the therapeutic use of psychedelics when my friend went to take ayahuasca. So when I was at university, she was at a different university, and she left, because she was suddenly depressed.

8:57 Depression just bowled her over. It kind of felt like it came out of nowhere, this really severe depression and anxiety, and she left university, moved home, was really, really struggling. So whereas the rest of our friend, we, the group of friends, were all off doing their thing in different places, she was in crisis, and she decided after trying lots of different things and therapy and seeing psychiatrists, she decided to go to Peru and have ayahuasca, which at the time I was really, really concerned about, and thought it was a really terrible idea.

9:32 I didn’t even know what it was. I couldn’t pronounce it. I thought, you know, my sister googled it and said she might die, and I phoned my friend and said, please, please don’t do this. It’s a crazy idea. You know, we can help you.

9:43 We’ll find another way, but don’t do this. The doctor and psychologist and yeah, saying that this is like ’90s, maybe, so that was my motive, been, yeah, a little bit later than that. It would have been like the year 2000. I think, yeah, around that time. All right.

9:56 And then so yeah, I felt like it was a, it was dangerous, and that reaction. Do you still get that reaction from many doctors and psychologists? Okay. And is that the official reaction, I would say, like the NHS, to this stuff? Unfortunately, at the moment.

10:15 Well, it’s changing now, but it has been so. With my, with my cohort of clinical psychologists, everyone I trained with there was one person out of 42 that was a little bit interested in psychedelic work, but most of the others, when I’ve talked to them about it, have, have, you know, felt that maybe it overwhelms the defenses too quickly, if they’re more psycho- analytically trained, or, you know, people who work in CBT, they might feel that they really believe in the model that they’re using, and that this is, it’s also potentially quite threatening, if something is coming along that’s claiming to, I think, part of it is that there’s a threat, if there’s a whole industry around therapy, and something’s coming along saying, hey, that we’re much more effective, that’s threatening.

10:57 But there’s also that idea of, like, they’re kind of quack, saying, hey, I can fix the magic cure, I can fix you in a day, and that, quite rightly, they’re a bit suspicious about that, because they know that trauma takes a long time to heal, and they are, they’re protective of their patients, their clients, they don’t want them to, you know, fall into some kind of quackery. And that’s what we’re really trying to show with our research, that it’s, that this is real change, this is real, deep, scientifically backed transformational process. Yeah.

11:30 Okay. So back to 2000, you said don’t go. She went anyway. She went anyway, she sold her car. I think it’s not good, afford to go, and she came back, and she just, you know, it’s, the eyes are the light in the eyes when someone, when someone is really suffering from depression, and you see the light kind of going out, and that they there’s that kind of disconnection and flatness, and they try and do something about it but they just can’t.

12:00 And she came back and it was like the light switch had been turned back on again, and she just was radiating her, her true self. Her old self, the way she always has been. We grew up together, his neighbors. She was just back to her old, old self, and she’s still now she’s still well now. Mm-hmm.

12:19 And so that opened your mind and said maybe there’s something here? Yeah. Okay, even though your your colleagues and cohorts from your class, yeah, did not feel that way, you were like, hmm, yeah, let me look into this more. Yeah, okay. So it took a long time, actually.

12:35 So she had that experience first of all, but then it took, then I, that I knew that had happened and I was very interested, and I started looking into psychedelic research a little bit more, because it was just about starting up around that time. But then I, it took for me to be on maternity leave for me to actually have time to really do the research, because after my clinical training I went straight into the NHS. That’s how it works, they pay for you to train, you go into the NHS, and I loved working for the NHS, I loved all my colleagues, but the services were so poorly funded that we were working such long hours and so hard that you would see like seven or eight patients a day, so at the end of the day I’d come home completely exhausted.

13:11 I certainly wasn’t going over my laptop and do some extra research. I was just trying to kind of keep afloat, really. Okay. So, so it was only when I was on maternity leave and I suddenly had time, I was being paid my maternity leave and I was at home with my, my, my dog was pregnant, and I had my daughter, and I was doing lots of breastfeeding at night, and so lots of research when I was breastfeeding, and yeah, I found a, it was an article by Michael Pollan called The Trip Treatment.

13:41 It’s a brilliant summary article, and I was just reading it, and I just, yeah. It talks all about the Imperial research. It was happening around the corner, and I emailed Robin, and he replied, and it all just flowed. Wow, life change there. Yeah, okay.

13:59 And so for people that are watching that either struggle with depression or know someone with depression, like you’re, you’re kind of an expert in depression, and a lot of the work you do is on the depression study, yeah, at Imperial. I mean, what are some things that maybe people don’t understand about depression, or I guess the typical thing, if you’re in America, as you go to your doctor and your say you’re depressed, yeah, they write you a prescription. Yeah, so I don’t know, what should we know about it?

14:27 So I think, well, firstly, there’s the medical model understanding of depression, which is that it’s a particular disorder, and that you can be diagnosed by a doctor, GP, or a psychiatrist, and if you have certain of the symptoms, then you can, you know, you fulfil the criteria for that diagnosis, and that’s the medical model. That’s one way of understanding it. I think that, in that model, things that have happened to you in your life, traumatic experiences when your childhood and don’t come into it.

14:57 So the way I understand depression is that everybody that comes to see us, or everybody that you contacts us, because they want to be part of the study, they, when they talk about their life, when they feel safe enough to talk about their life, there are, there are things that have happened to them in their childhood that have had lasting impacts on them, and referred for most of us, for all of us really, but for some people those events that have happened, those things have happened, have, for whatever reason, we’re all, were all, why differently? There’s so many different factors at play, and how something unfolds, epigenetics, you know, all of these different factors, but that for some people those events seem to prevent them from moving forward in their life, and they seem to lead to the development of a very so if you think about your, your kind of mental chatter, your, your ego structure, your default mode Network, it can also be called, it, the, the self-preservation system that we developed to keep us in line, keep us safe.

16:01 So when things happen to us when we, when we’re young, things that feel scary, or just things that make us feel that we’re not good enough, often we will develop a self-protection system that is really trying to course-correct, trying to make us better, trying to make us more likable, or less likely to be abandoned, or less like to be bullied. It’s a huge factor. So we will develop this internal system which says, don’t do this, do this, you’ve done that wrong, don’t do that, and it’s this kind of critical inner voice.

16:29 It’s trying to keep us in line. So what we develop as a safety mechanism to try and make us better and more safe and be able to be accepted by our peers and our families becomes a harsh prison, because that internal safety mechanism becomes the ruminating voice of never ending critical punitive directions. And that is what depression is for many people. It’s being, you know, they can be in any setting and they might look like they’re okay, because they’ve learned how to smile and be nice, and you know, laughs, and but inside what’s going on is that the, the protective system is just attacking them constantly until they feel so hopeless and desperate, because they just, they feel like they’re worth nothing because they’re constantly being attacked by that, that in a voice.

17:22 Wow, you know, this wall, because you spent many years the NHS talking to, for example, every day. So yeah, you know this very well. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I guess also, I mean, I’m, I’m very lucky that I’ve never suffered from depression. It’s not something I’ve ever really understood personally, although no, have been moments where I’ve had an insight of what it, of what it can feel like, but I’ve had people very close to me that have suffered it, and so I’ve been able to see through, you know, what, what it’s like for people when they’re waking up all the way through the night, being wracked by, I think people think depression is like a passive thing.

17:58 It’s like being sad, and often it’s not. It’s often this full of rage towards the self, and and it’s active. It’s struggle. It’s not just simple sadness. Simple sadness can be beautiful for people.

18:11 If it’s like, for example, of psychedelic, can help someone access that kind of more simple, pure Sanus, where they can just weep, and that can be a beautiful experience, but depression is more like a very complicated, very muddy, hopeless feeling of constant self-attack. Yeah. It’s weird when you say that word, depression. Yeah, I always think of, oh, someone’s just dull and sad today, but it’s not. Is it, is it nice?

18:35 Whole tumultuous thing that, on the surface, looks like very disconnected. Yeah, but there’s actually really not a very not nice time going on in their brain. Yes, exactly. Well, exactly. It’s funny how you just described this whole defense mechanism.

18:50 So I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a depressive state, but I’ve had that inner critic my whole life, and like, oh, maybe some of those behaviors come out in the movie, but I’ve been so critical of myself that I think that’s why alcohol always appealed to me, because it just shut me up for a few hours at night, or I could just have some peace. Yeah, because otherwise I was taking shots at myself all day, every day, and it didn’t matter that everyone else thought I was accomplished. For me it was never good enough, and it’s still never good enough, but I’m still finding some peace.

19:22 Yeah, and so that was my coping mechanism, not not by any means any better than a depressive state, but it’s interesting how you talked about a lot of this as childhood trauma related. Do you think it all is? Well, also I don’t think traumas understood very well. People think, oh, that means that you were sexually abused, or you were punched in the head, or you, you know, there was a bomb went off in your city. But I mean, from what I understand, I went trauma, it’s, it’s usually something that it’s just unresolved, and you’re never able to talk about, and that incident could be something so simple.

20:00 I’ve heard people, their dad said one thing to them when they were 10, yes, and they never got to resolve it, never got to talk to anyone about it, and that thing sat inside of them and caused them to go, you know, do we be a CEO of a company or rob a bank or something? Yeah, crazy. So trauma is another word I think sometimes we don’t define very definitely, because it’s exactly that they, so it could be one comment that somebody made once, but if that becomes part of your inner critical system, you could say that yourself every day, and so it becomes a huge part of your inner furniture.

20:33 So yeah, it’s a complete different for each person, what was causing that kind of trauma. But I think many of us are essentially a little bit traumatized by our culture here, because we we often, well, there’s a kind of striving and loneliness and disconnection from nature and feeling of competition. It’s that in the background. You know, I remember being at school and just that kind of all. In fact, my friend who got so depressed, in a way it was like a kind of delayed response to what happened in school, which is essentially, you know, this feeling of we must, even though we went to a nice school, it’s like we’ve got to get good A-levels, otherwise we’re not gonna, we’re gonna be failures you know, we’re not gonna be able to have a happy life, and we worked really hard and got incredibly stressed, and just thinking about, so how often we were in, like, a soothe state.

21:25 I often think it would be really interesting if we had some kind of device that could, like, tell us what we really do. We have them now, as you’re looking at heart rate variability, but, like, how often we’re going to sue the state where we feel like, I’m okay, I feel relaxed, and how often we’re in a kind of not quite breathing properly, you’re feeling like there’s some threat, but we don’t really know what it is, but that we’re not quite safe. The parasympathetic, well, it’s that.

21:47 Yeah, and you’re saying it’s probably like 95. Yeah. totally right, and so I think when we grow up with that, and our parents are also in that kind of, like, because I do things, got to do this, you know, we’re kind of in fight, fight or flight a lot of the time. We don’t have that kind of so much of that expansive, just here we are together, a community in our beautiful setting, and we’re just going to dance. And we do, you know, we don’t do so much of that.

22:09 So we’re all kind of a bit frayed, and I think that kind of burnout is a kind of, yes, part of our culture. I think, and that’s always been an issue, probably in urban environments, but you’re not connected. It’s a high population density, a high comparison factor. Yes, but of course, now with Internet and mobile, it seems like you can get that anywhere you are. Yeah.

22:32 You could literally be in a town of about 50 people, and now compare yourself to 250 million people. Yeah, and that’s so it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a rise in depression. teenage suicide rates. And you see all this coming. Yeah, and that’s why you’re thinking we, we need to talk about psychedelic medicines as a solution, but we also need to be thinking about these bigger issues here, because otherwise we’re gonna have an even bigger problem.

22:56 Absolutely, and also because otherwise we have this situation where we have this kind of discrete thing of psychedelic medicine or psychedelic therapy, but then people coming back from those experiences back into the kind of toxic culture, toxic system, really, and then it’s very difficult to maintain the benefits. But also it doesn’t change that system. We need to, in order for a psychedelic to work more effectively and have more long-term benefits, because in our studies we have this amazing instantaneous effect on depression, then the depression comes back.

23:23 And I think that if we were in a different context, that it would be more possible for people to maintain that sense of wellness and connectedness, because there would be in communities that help them foster that. We’re often going back to a community where, or going back to a living environment where the life just kind of drains out of you. You can just feel that kind of positive, that connected feeling, just that’s kind of zapping by the day. Yeah, and anyone who’s had an experience and come back to an urban environment, I mean, it’s very tricky.

23:52 Um, my first ayahuasca experiences were in the old London Real studios, on the sofa. People always shock when they say that, but I mean, it was my, was my apartment for a while, my flat, and I remember having to, like, walk outside after that, and that was really difficult to just go near traffic. And even coming back from Costa Rica last year was, was very difficult, and that that was on a very surface level. So what’s going on with all the psychological cues and the things we don’t even notice?

24:21 And now I’m thinking about my stepdaughter and our private school, and how she is as well. And again I think there’s there’s a place for that. Yeah, I don’t want it consuming these people, and we know what’s going to go in that way, just like finished up on the trauma and something that the government, a talked a few times with me here, and I think was in, in last year. I did a movie called The Iron Mind, and there was a guy, one of my mentors, was John Joseph, and he was, you know, sexually abused in foster care, like repeatedly over years.

24:51 And I had a divorce experience when I was seven, and I said, gobbler, my trauma is not as bad as John’s, and he said he said, hold on a second, Brian, that’s not true. He said everybody experiences trauma in some way, and like you said, it could have been something your dad said to you at 10 that puts in a process, and someone else might have something that sounds like a traumatic experience, but they were able to process it. Yes, and so it’s not fair to point out my trauma was harder or better or worse than yours.

25:18 Everybody is dealing with something from their childhood, whether they grew up, I was about to say, whether they grow up in Buckingham Palace that brings its own, don’t like, watch The Crown. Yeah, so everybody has some things that happen to them that can be triggered. Yeah, yeah, and things people in their psychedelic experiences do often go back to early, early childhood, very, very near early years, because we’re so vulnerable in those times. We don’t understand, we don’t have the mechanisms for processing and understanding things, so when things happen they feel incredibly, they feel kind of demonic and scarier, thing, like when things happen to a little, a small child that’s defenseless, and you don’t have any way of knowing that if your mum’s gone that she’s gonna come back.

25:57 You just feel completely like abandoned and scared, and like you’re gonna die. So I think just, Bert, the process of birth and the process of being a babies can be really quite traumatic, and lots of people go back to those experiences in their psychedelic journeys. So yeah, alright. So the last few years you’ve been working on the depression study, which is using these psychedelic medicines to combat depression, and you do this again very scientifically.

26:24 That’s what I love about Imperial, and did not is that you are by the book with the science, because you want to prove this to the world that this is effective. So you’re doing parallel treatments alongside antidepressants, yeah, and your, your things, and really tracking what’s happening with these people. Yeah. And so for people that are used to maybe getting an SSRI or an antidepressant, you know, pill, versus what the experience is like on your study, can you break it down as far as like what happens, and maybe even talk about what’s happening in the brain here?

26:57 Yeah, that could allow such leaps, yeah, in in treatment. Yes. Well, the first thing, it’s different for everybody. That’s the first thing, but there is a, there is a broad, there’s a kind of broad trajectory of what happens. So if you, if you’re taking antidepressants, essentially what we think is happening is that it’s it’s helping you.

27:21 It’s taking the peaks and troughs off your experience a little bit, so it might make the lows a little bit less low, but it also might make the highs a little bit less high. And people describe, people’s accounts are that it’s, they feel a little bit numb sometimes, but that they can cope a bit better, and that they don’t have the worst part of the real despair. It’s taken away, so they’re buffered. It’s almost like there’s some padding in their life, and they feel a bit supported, and for some people that was a really great thing, especially if they’re going through a crisis, that buffering, that support can get them back on track, can get them back doing the things they were doing before, and can be the beginning of their recovery, and they can get well again afterwards.

28:00 Often that doesn’t happen that way. Often people stay on the antidepressants and stay on them for many years. Many of the people in our study have been on them for like decades, and often one won’t work, so the doctor will try them on like ten different types of antidepressant, sometimes, and they often have really, really serious side effects, such as intense agitation, kind of physical symptoms. Other people have, like, a dry mouth, so it might feel a bit kind of like, you know, at like kind of physical shaky, sleep problems, sex drive severely limited.

28:35 Sometimes people feel numb. And I guess the emotional blunting is the one that people really struggle with the most, and so, you know, we’ve had people, if it, if it raises up your troughs, that’s good, but if you also aren’t getting any kind of, yeah, highs or stimulation from the environment over time, that must just again disconnect you from everything. Yes, and and people feel that they, and that they don’t feel them about their real selves because they can’t, you know, there’s something about just the highs and lows of life.

29:05 Is there when they’re real, they’re real, and you’re learning from them. They’re their teachers. You know, our pain is our teacher. We can learn about what’s not working for us, but if everything’s just buffered, people’s son has described, they’re kind of like, they feel a bit better, but they’re just kind of like bumping along through life, and they’re not. It just feels like a meaningful and we’ve had people in our study, having to, a few people have had to come off the antidepressants because their side effects have been so bad, and it felt so awful, they just haven’t been able to stay.

29:29 But then I guess for me the thing that I’m most concerned about with antidepressants is that they are, they are supposed to be a kind of temporary thing to get you back on track, rather than a long lifetime treatment, because you know that’s, that’s the opposite of a treatment. A treatment’s supposed to make something better, but if you have to keep taking it forever, then it’s not actually, it’s just like a crutch. It’s not actually healing the problem.

29:50 It’s not working at the root cause. People often, just like one of the participants of our first study said that antidepressants are like taking a painkiller for a toothache. It just numbs the pain, but the infection is still there, whereas he describes psychedelics as like a kind of antibiotic that actually stops the infection at the root. So people describe this feeling of, it’s not doing anything for the root cause. It’s just helping me, the helping the symptom, helping the pain, it’s numbing me.

30:14 But yes, so it’s, it’s a kind of temporary numbing thing rather than a deep treatment, so it’s not supposed to be for life, but people often stay on them because when they tried to come off them, the withdrawal can be absolutely horrific. And I was amazed in the first study. I had no idea, but some of the people, their withdrawal processes were unbearable to watch, wetting the bed, electric shocks going off in the brain. It can be really, really tough, and it can be supported with the health, you know, health care professionals can really support people through that, so anyone going through that, I urge people to get psychological support, and really, you know, stay in contact with their, with their GP, and really ask for the help they need, because it’s, it’s, it requires a lot of courage, sometimes, not always.

30:56 Some people find, OK, but I was surprised, and so I think for many people because we’ve drawl is so hard they stay on them. OK, and it’s an amazing business model. It’s an amazing business model, unlike the psychedelic business model, which maybe will catch on at the end, which is kind of a few doses of sometimes a plant is not patented, and whether they’re big bad pharma companies or not, I mean, if whether they’re bad, or not, we don’t have to debate, but if someone’s going to be taking something for 20 years, then probably people are gonna be interested in prescribing them, that whether they are, it’s intentional or not, or complicit or not and I even know doctors in the States.

31:39 I mean, writing a prescription is an easy thing to do, right? Yeah, and I think it’s often because our mental health services in the UK completely overrun in the NHS, and so psychiatrists, you know, all the psychiatrists I know are wonderful people that went into that profession to help and to heal, and they have so many people to see, they don’t have time to do therapy, and many of them aren’t trained to do therapy anyway. All they can do is write prescriptions, and GPs, GPs is so that they’re so overwhelmed, you know, with how many people they need to see, the suffering that they see, that they, and I can relate to that.

32:13 I remember what it was like in the NHS, you know, they, they, if they can write someone a prescription. There’s a placebo effect there as well, that someone feels that they’ve got something that makes sense rather than saying, hey, why don’t I refer you for talking therapy when the talking therapy waiting list is like a year? So it makes sense to give them something, like the time when they need it. And maybe for some people it will just help them and nip something in the bud and help them get back on track, but for many people it’s the beginning of a descent into more and more medication.

32:37 We’ve had people. My last participant in the study was in her early 20s. She had been on so many different medications, she’d put on so much weight from all the different medications, and it’s only through being in the psilocybin study and like stopping all those medications, and all the weight just falling off her, because she feels like she feels happy, and she knows what she wants to do with it, and she’s exercising and feeling good. She’s, she looks like a completely different person.

32:59 So there is this descent into more and more medication, and so, so antidepressants, yeah, they’ve, they definitely have a role for some people, and some people say that they’ve really saved their life. And if someone is feeling really desperate and taking some, some pills they’re accessible, can stop them from feeling that desperate. They really can save lives. So I’m not, you know, I’m not saying that they’re useless, but just that our use of them has become problematic.

33:24 So, and yeah, what we see in the study now is, so the people in the antidepressant condition are, you know, for some of them the antidepressants give them lots of terrible side effects. They come off, or they feel incredibly depressed still and they just don’t work at all. Some of them make them feel worse. Some of them they do work, but when they work, they work in a way that people say, yeah, I suppose I do feel a bit better, but you know, nothing’s really changed in their life, and they don’t really know if they want to keep going, because maybe it’s like had some negative side effects too, and they, you know, they don’t feel that that positive about the treatment.

34:02 But in the psilocybin condition it’s a completely different paradigm, and it’s one that I feel so strongly about, because I, for me, it’s, it’s open my eyes to, not just, it’s not just about psychedelics. It’s not just about psilocybin or any of the others. It’s about a new way of approaching our suffering, and rather than numbing and taking a tablet, it’s about going towards the suffering, and that’s what often happens in a psilocybin experience. So the preparation we do the day before, there’s a long screening process, but when someone’s been accepted we do a preparation day the day before, and that’s really all about building trust and preparing somebody for something incredibly courageous, because they have to be so willing to sit with things.

34:46 Well, you know, from your experiences, they can be the hardest things you’ve ever done in your life. They can be, you can feel so lonely and so scared and petrified, you know, there, and you know, all your normal frames of reference have gone. It’s so hard to explain what it’s like for someone that hasn’t done it, but essentially it’s, it can be like a kind of battle. It can be a, it’s like a hero’s journey, for sure, but the dark parts of it can feel very confusing.

35:15 So, and again, no frame of reference. So you’ve never been there before, whereas the other times in your life when you’ve experienced maybe something so painful, you could, you know, run away from the social situation, you could have a drink, you could watch a movie, now you can work out, you could cry, you could take a hot shower. In this situation you can’t. It’s right there and you have to be with it, and if you’d never had a frame of reference, it’s a shocking, and that’s why people talk about sometimes they’re, for a secular, they’re a bad trip, or I was here, because they just never expected to deal with it and didn’t know how to deal with it.

35:49 Yeah, because there’s not this, you have to just, there’s nothing you can do to stop it, and if you try and stop it, it makes it much, much worse, right? So resisting it, the real stuff of difficulty. Okay, and so you’re briefing the person on this the day before, and you’re telling them the same kind of things you’re telling me now. Well, so what we do is we talk a lot about the idea of going in and through the experience, and little ways they can, if it does get challenging, how they can accept that challenge, and know that challenging experiences can lead to great transformation and amazing benefits afterwards, and loads of insight, so that we really encourage people to trust that what’s coming up is what they need to see, and trust this idea of an inner healing mechanism.

36:32 And in your homeostatic principle, I was thinking, actually, as I was watching a film, Reconnect last night, the other word as well, as we, Reconnect, the other word that feels to me really important is, we balance, because there’s something about, we get out of balance with our lives in some way, and that the psychedelic experience can rebalance you, and that there is this kind of homeostatic principle at play. So if there’s a blockage or something you haven’t been looking at, it’ll just take you there. And so that can be tough, that we really encourage that.

37:02 The key fact, the one key factor for the preparation is, know that if you’re going there and it’s really hard, that that’s in you, and you need to go there, and that’s how it gets better. So it’s gratitude for the opportunity rather than wanting to run away. That’s a really good way to frame it, and then the movie Dennis says, you know, ayahuasca doesn’t always get you what you want, but it gives you what you need, and back to that homeostasis, like it is showing you this, ’cause it knows you need to process this.

37:31 Yeah, you could spend 20 years trying to process, or we could do it right now. And so it’s great if you can frame people, and then they can try to remember that in that situation, to think, okay, this is good. Yeah, breathe. Remember, one of my very early guests on the show, his name is Simon Powell. He had a book called Psilocybin Experience or something.

37:50 He said, be with it. That’s what he would say, be with it, just be with it, and breathe and be with it, and don’t fight it. You just try to be with that pain, that sadness, that elation, that joy, that whatever, and breathe and be there with it. And there was something I always go back to. Yeah, in normal life.

38:07 Yes, you know, and that’s what I think you’re talking about. This protocol, it’s not just for the psychedelic experience. Yeah, absolutely. It is that idea of yes. So in our model, what we do in the preparation session is we use this analogy of diving, going for a dive, and this, in forms of meditation exercise we do with people to prepare them.

38:32 And it talks them through six stages, and these six stages are essentially the six stages of psychological flexibility. So there are six processes that, when you take them together, make up this thing called psychological flexibility, and we’ve ordered them so that they describe what a psychedelic journey is like, and we take people through those six stages to help them strengthen those abilities, and also so that they’re prepared for what it might be like. And the key part of that is going towards the difficulty.

39:02 And then our, I guess, our protocol is kind of around building those six processes of psychological flexibility. Okay, can you talk us through those? Psychological flex, the political face? I’ve never heard that term. Yeah, I think what’s really amazing is that the team at Johns Hopkins just found that it’s psychological flexibility that is mediating the reduction in depression with people after psychedelic use.

39:26 So that is the key mechanism. In this new paper that has just come out, so they did a really big survey study of lots of people. We need to do a kind of causal study before and after, but they looked at this big survey data, and they found that actually, and with people undergoing psychedelic experiences, when their depression scores are coming down, the key mediator of that is psychological flexibility starts going up. So I think people will be talking a lot more about psychological flexibility in future.

39:52 So essentially, psychological flexibility is a term that’s been developed by the have you heard of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy? No, so it’s a type of therapy based around contextual behavioral science. It’s very interesting. It’s kind of based on Buddhism, loosely, and it’s, yeah, it’s a developing mode of therapy which aims to help people recover from whatever they’re going through via strengthening psychological flexibility rather than focusing on that particular thing.

40:24 So rather than focusing on the depression per se or anxiety per se, it’s more about building somebody’s, was also stored, psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility overall is about somebody being able to respond to moment-by-moment experience with their full self, and respond to it in a way that enables them to act in line with their values. So it’s like, who am I really, and being able to be yourself with whatever comes up and respond to life.

40:53 It’s basically responding to life flexibly and maintaining your sense of who you are. So it’s not shutting off pain, but when pain happens, it’s responding to it in a way that enables you to find the best path through, so that you can do what you need to do. Okay, which takes some amount of, a being able to observe yourself in that situation too, so you don’t react with the anger, the pain, or whatever. You’re able to see yourself in it, and then say, how do I respond, and be the fullest me?

41:23 Mm-hmm. And something I’ll be happy with later. Yeah, exactly. Okay, and, but what’s interesting about is, it’s rather than a cognitive process, a lot of this happening on an embodied level. Okay, so I’ll talk to you through the six processes.

41:33 So I’ll talk it through in the way we talked about it in the study, in the psychedelic, like the psychedelic dive. So the first layer is diffusion, and so for that process, if you imagine a sea, and if you imagine the waves away VC, and that’s life, life with all of the stimulation and all the challenges and all the things we have to do, the busyness, and the waves hit, the waves hit, and so often we feel that we’re just like swimming against the tide of the waves, and we’re in, caught in that. And what we do in order to get through that life is we have this internal guidance system, this cognitive, ego, protective safety system, which tells us, do this, you didn’t do that, right, do that better, why are you such an idiot, God, murder all.

42:21 Of that stuff that we all have. Essentially, I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t have any of it. Well, maybe some very experienced meditators and Buddhist monks, but people that haven’t worked with it have got it. It’s like the monkey mind, and so diffusing is bringing some awareness to, oh my god, my mind has gone into that, da, da, da, da, da, bringing a, like you say, it’s their awareness of it, and choosing to diffuse from it. So rather than being your thoughts, rather than being lost in that wave of, I’m s*** and rubbish, I’m never gonna be better, why do I always get everything wrong, nobody likes me, I’ve need to do that, oh, I forgot this, up.

42:59 Rather than being caught in that, it’s stepping out, looking at that, and choosing to dive beneath the surface of those waves and dive into the body and the senses. So that’s step one, diffusion. So we ask people to imagine that they’ve been on a boat, and that boat drops them in the middle of the sea, and that they go down and they’re in those waves. And this is like the beginning of the psychedelic session. They decide to take those capsules.

43:27 They choose to take those capsules. It’s their choice, and when they take them, they’re diving down below that surface of the mind, because psychedelics essentially dissolve those ego structures. They dissolve the default mode network for a while, so that shattered just disappears, so most of the time it can happen different ways for different people, but essentially it’s deactivating that ego, the deserved mind. You dive down into the body. So the second process, and one is diffuse, diving down from those waves of mental chatter.

43:57 The second process is present moment focus, and being in your senses. So just this one is sense, and that is about bringing awareness to your body, breathe, your breath, how your heart feels, how your stomach feels. So to do that, when we ask people to, like, this is all in the preparation day, this visualization exercise. So we say, imagine that you’re diving down through the water, and as you dive down, imagine that you’re diving down from your fingers to your toes.

44:25 You do a body scan, so as you dive down through that water, you bring your awareness to the tips of your fingers, and all the way down through your arms and your head and your heart, and you bring your awareness down through your whole body. You do it a couple of times, and they imagine they’re diving down, and that helps people tune into their body, and really helps with this process of disengaging from that mental chatter and going into their felt sense, because this is where we carry our emotions. This is where we carry how we really are feeling.

44:52 When we’re so stuck in our heads we don’t know how we’re feeling, because we’re just in our defenses. We’re not in our real, our real tenderness, and our real physical, fleshy reality of how it feels to be us. So that helps them connect to their emotion and their bodies, and then we ask them to dive down to the bottom of the sea. And this is the third process, and this one is called acceptance, and this is about going towards the difficult feelings. So when they’ve got more in tune with their body, they’ve done the body scan, we often did, almost to visualize, that they’re down at the bottom of the seabed, and there are some beautiful corals and some lovely things that they could look at, but there’s also these piles of big dark oyster shells, and those are the traumas.

45:36 Those are the things that have happened to us in our lives. Those are the things that fill our shame, the painful things, the things about ourselves we don’t like, the things that we want to avoid, the ugly parts of ourselves, the shadow parts of ourselves. And you see that pile of oysters, and instead of swimming away from it, you swim right towards it, and you take up an oyster, and you open it up, and in opening up that shell you’re accepting it, and you’re opening up, and you’re wanting to learn from it.

46:05 And the shell is like this. The shell is like the outer layer. It’s like the anger, and they’re like, don’t go here, the tough stuff. And then inside there’s all the vulnerability, like the shame, and the, you know, the kind of abandonment and the fear and feeling small and feeling like a child. All these layers of kind of gunky, flying, like in an oyster.

46:28 Underneath that spiky layer there’s all this kind of gunk, you slimy stuff. And then you just, you just ask people to be with it, stay with it, like you said, you know, be with what’s there, open yourself up, let the feelings wash over you, be with that difficult stuff. And then when you search through that pain and that vulnerability, if you’ve allowed yourself to really open up to it, that’s when you find the pearl, because the pearl in the oyster is so the way a pearl forms in an oyster is that a bit of grit gets into the shell, like an irritant, and over time gently it covers it with mother-of-pearl, that shiny stuff.

47:09 So rather than getting rid of it, the oyster accepts it in, and very slowly over time it coats with this mother-of-pearl. So it turns what was a grit, annoying, gritty irritation, trauma, into something beautiful and precious. And I think that’s what happens, isn’t it? Because when those things happen to us, we do learn so much, and we learn about what we need, what we didn’t have, and what we need, and it gives us meaning. So we ask people to, like, imagine that they’re searching through these oysters, and that they’re looking for pearls, and then when they find a pearl, which is essentially the lesson in their pain, when they’ve really sat with it, what is that pain showing them?

47:42 They always can do it. This is the visualization of the day before the psychedelic journey, and I was amazed by how much people go into it. They dive down, they find those oysters, and they find the pearls, and they will say, this is the, this is my learning. And often we ask them to think about how they’re feeling right now, so it, said the day before their psychedelic session they’ll often feel a lot of anxiety. I’m not good enough, I’m not gonna be able to do it, right?

48:04 I’m so hopeless. It, what if it doesn’t work for me? And they look for the pearl, their lesson, and that’s their intention for the next day. And so then the next so that’s the first three processes, and that’s the kind of acceptance part of psychological flexibility. It’s diving down from your mind into your body, and feeling your feelings in your body, and really opening up to pain.

48:23 And then the next half of it, when they’ve got that pearl, they swim up to the surface, and they burst up through the surface, and then they see this big sun and the big surface of the water, and it’s all calm, and we ask people just to imagine that feeling of, like, expansive sky, and they connect to an idea of an observer self. And that observer self is like being the sky, not the weather. This is an idea from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Sometimes in life you know, storms will happen, lightning, rain, rainbows, sunshine.

48:53 Life is constant weather, changing patterns, and we can feel that we’re caught up in that storm, and that the storm is going to break the sky, or we can realize that we are the sky, and that we hold all those different things, and it will never break us. That there’s no amount of lightning can ever burn the sky. So people get that feeling of, I’ve been on this dive, and I felt this pain, and here I am. I’m the sky and I’m the sea, and all of this, this observer self that is unchanging.

49:18 In a way it’s a spiritual concept as well, although it doesn’t have to be, but it’s part of the self that’s developed in meditation, the bigger self, the, the, the unchanging self, and could be your soul, I guess, in a way. And then they then ask. The next stage of it is they look in their hand, they look at the pearl, and they remember the lesson that the pearl told them, and that’s all about connecting to their values and connecting them to meaning. So that’s the next day.

49:49 So there’s, so there’s the first three all about acceptance, then they come up to the surface, and the step four is about observer self. Step five is connecting to meaning and values, and then the final step is, okay, what am I going to do with it? And that is about connecting to an intention, or connecting to actions, how am I going to put in action what I’ve learnt. So that’s psychological flexibility, being able to accept, go into feelings, accept them, realize what the message is, what the teaching is, what the meaning is, and then doing something about it.

50:21 Hmm, wow, I never heard that before. It’s powerful. And so this word that we hear, integration, is kind of part of the sixth step of that. Yes, which also can be a process that takes a long time. Yeah, my case.

50:35 Yeah, yeah. Okay, and that’s the tail end, where you’re now trying to bring those lessons back. Yes, into this world that might might have some latent toxicity. Yeah, now trying to implement this stuff. Exactly.

50:48 It can be just as difficult as the experience itself. Yeah, okay. And so just for more semantics, so you talk them through this process the day before, they’re feeling some trepidation, as is quite normal for it. Then when it comes on the day, what actually happens in that session? Because you’re with them as well, and I think it might be really interesting for people to know.

51:10 Yeah. And I’ve never actually met someone who’s been with someone, so what is that like, and what do you call yourself? And hmm, because I don’t think Robin or David does that. No, yeah, no, they don’t. So we call ourselves guides, which is what Bill Richards, who was doing this, and he, who’s been doing this since the ’50s, while he was doing in the ’50s, and it was illegal, and then he started again when it was, when, there, in Baltimore and Johns Hopkins.

51:33 Okay, so he is one of the, he’s been one of our teachers, because he’s been doing it for a very long time, and has developed lots of really helpful practices, and he calls himself a guide, and so it’s what we adopted, ’cause he helped to train us. I’m sometimes wonder if guide is a bit, it’s a little bit confusing, because actually we’re not guiding people at all. We’re witnessing people, so I don’t know, maybe like attendant is, I don’t know, because it is ultimately their experience.

52:05 It’s, it’s like you said, it’s custom tailored for, exactly. Yeah, we think what they need. Yeah, so you’re there to help them. Yeah, and it’s essentially just knowing that somebody’s there if you need them. So so it’s a, it’s the trust.

52:22 It’s really, it’s the trust that the whole process they go through is their own. We often have no idea where they are. So, so I’ll talk you through it from the beginning. So we, what does it feel like? Yeah.

52:32 So I mean, it’s the most, it’s the most incredibly beautiful. I just, I can’t believe I get to do it for a living, for my job. It’s the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever, it’s incredible. It’s like it’s such an honor to be there with people. It is so moving.

52:51 It’s gonna make me cry when I talk about it. It’s so moving. It’s like it’s amazing, because people come in and they’re really suffering, and they’re stuck, and have been stuck for years, and they come in and it requires such a lot of them to take this step, because it’s so, it’s scary, and they take these capsules, and you sit there. There’s two of us. There’s always two of us.

53:08 We started off just having one, because it’s cost saving purposes. Think about when it rolls out, it’d be better to have one, but we realized that it is much better with two, and although it might be a bit luxurious, and it might not make the cut when this becomes a therapy. I hope it does, because there’s something about having three of you that feels very different to just being, okay, so two of these guides, you guys, one on either side of you. One, I decide, often, men, often a man and a woman.

53:33 Okay. And the thought process behind that? Yeah, because I, people so often go back to infancy, and it’s like, most, like your mom and dad, you know, there’s something, who doesn’t have a deep craving for like a really corrective experience, of like the feminine and the masculine, loving them and telling them they’re okay, like, you know, we’re holding their hands. So they’re lying on the bed, they take the capsules, they’re in an extremely vulnerable position, and they’ve got like a man and a woman that represent that holding their hands, and I think it can be quite reparative for people.

54:05 Wow, it’s amazing. And in their line, in a bed, in a room that’s kind of a pleasant to be in? Yeah, that’s just kind of a calm, calm in space. Yeah, yeah. Lots of nice lamps and very low lighting, and we have a playlist, which is a key.

54:20 I mean, the playlist is absolutely key. And why is that? Why is music important? Because we see that in traditional ceremonies. Obviously there’s a shaman in the ayahuasca experience that sings the carros, and so we are, what’s that all about?

54:32 Or do we, you know, well, when there’s no music playing, it can feel like free fall. Like, I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, that there’s something incredibly soothing when the music comes. It’s like a handrail. It guides you. It takes you places, so the music is like the landscape of the whole experience.

54:48 It can change what you see and feel, but it doesn’t, it provides the landscape, but it’s still your story that plays out. But it can, it provides some of the scenery, almost, and it can really just, that soothing, beautiful music, it can just really carry people along. What kind of tracks are you playing? So, um, I was helped making the playlist by a musician called John Hopkins, who’s made a music album with music for psychedelic experiences based around his own psychedelic experiences.

55:19 So he helped a lot with making the playlist, but I say overall, it’s, there’s, there’s a lot of just incredibly beautiful, spacious, reassuring music. It’s definitely not the time for hardcore hip-hop. I mean, it was taken for really, I just think, I’m a right, how does Psilocybin Experience, and I was trying to play the calm music, and I went on shuffle, and it was, it’s not, it wasn’t good. I had to get back off that quickly. But I know what you mean.

55:45 If there’s no music, you can really feel like you lose your sense of time anyways, but you can, a lot more if you don’t have, I guess, kind of a beat or, yeah, some kind of structure. It can feel very supportive, and also it just feels beautiful. I mean, another part where I’m talking all about the pain, but most of the time the experience is just absolutely beautiful for people, and these are people that I haven’t had any pleasure in their lives for years and years, and they’re suddenly in the grip of beauty and joy and awe and bliss, and the music is part of that, because the music is so wonderful, and they just feel like it’s washing over them.

56:18 Yes, sometimes I forget to talk about that stuff. Yeah, yeah. I remember these incredible moments where I’m just like, wow, like wonder and just an amazement and just deep respect for this incredible world. When, but then I always talk about the death, then a few minutes later we go through the dark. But there are almost always those experiences for me with psilocybin as well as ayahuasca.

56:40 So yeah, that’s true. All right, so they’re sitting, handed, each, they have the capsules. How long is this experience? So it’s, we’re there the whole day, and it’s using about six hours if it’s a high dose, but we, people, it usually takes about, like, half an hour, 45 minutes or something like that before people start to feel something, and then, I mean, it’s so different every time for people, but usually we don’t do so much, because it’s an inner experience, and for them to communicate with us what’s going on would break the experience.

57:11 So we encourage people just to stay with it, and if they need us, we’re there, but most of the time it’s something that they do on their own, and we just, we stay present, we stay focused on what they’re doing, and we observe little changes in the body sometimes. People will be going through the most incredible battles within, and they’re lying there completely, you’d never know. Hmm. Sometimes people are weeping, and you think that maybe they’re in, their suffering, and they’re just feeling complete pleasure and joy, and yes, it’s difficult to know.

57:42 It’s difficult to know what they’re, that you do. Develop there is this lovely feeling in the room where you do, you all kind of tune into some kind of deep frequency together, that you, you feel quite empathically linked to them, and at the end of the day, when I come out of one of those days, I feel really, yeah, it’s kind of deep meditative space you get into, and you listening to the music as well, because they listen to on the headphones, and also on a speaker, so that we’re listening to the same playlist. Okay.

58:10 Wow, so we’re with them, or with them? Yeah, the crying. I do a lot of crying. I remember doing a lot of crying, but but it would not actually a bad crying. Yes, the release, but um, I remember one ceremony when I was on my back, and and going back to my childhood experiences, it, I cried so much that I, I could actually feel the tears drip down my face, and then they were actually dripping from my ears, and I was like, I’ve just never cried that.

58:36 Yeah, but again, it was like a healthy cry. Very healthy. Yeah. All right, so you’re there with them, you’re with the music, you’re in tune, and they’re there if they want to talk to you, but usually they’re not. Yeah, and then that’s the end of the experience, and they might be going for some big doses there, which are these kind of heroic experiences, or they could be confronting some difficult things, and could have some joyous things.

59:01 Yeah, and, and sometimes people don’t respond to the high dose. We’ve had a few cases where people don’t, will, you’d mention before about, you never saw most people, and I ask the ceremonies, will just having no, no experience really, or maybe it takes a long time to get the meaning of it, but sometimes people, yeah, they don’t feel so much. It’s rare, but it does happen. Okay. Yeah, and then what happens afterwards?

59:22 And so towards the end of the day they start to kind of come back, and they might say a few things like, what time is it? They’re coming back to this kind of reality, and they might be hungry, so they might want a cup of tea or just some fruit, and then they want to talk about where they’ve been, but they don’t have the words, so that can be frustrating for people, and we encourage them just in a way kind of just stay with it, and stay with the, with the beauty of what they felt, or whatever the meaning they’ve, they’ve experienced, because we’ve got the next day to go through all of it. So, but people usually want to share it, so they will try and, you know, give you some sense.

59:59 And then, then we have lots of questionnaires for people to fill in, because we’re looking at so many different variables, so they fill in like, an hour, well, 45 minutes worth of questionnaires, which is gonna give us the most amazing dataset when we finish the study. So, so many papers will come out of it because of all these questionnaires. And then they go and they sleep in the accommodation just opposite the clinic, and then they come back the next morning, and then we have our first integration session, and they lie down back on this couch, and we summarize, play the playlist, and we encourage them really just to go back to that place as much as possible and talk us through, kind of, for the beginning, and talk us through what happened.

1:00:37 Wow, okay, this feels very unmedicated. Elegiggle. Yeah, even though you are using compounds. Yeah, okay. And then the integration process starts.

1:00:51 Yeah, okay. And for people that don’t know, what is that like for people over the next few weeks and months? So most of the time, for most the people with who’ve had the, the high dose, the integration is, people are, tend to be pretty amazed by what’s happened, and, and really very positive about it. The majority of people, and then they set to trying to integrate some of the, learn some of the pearls that they’ve got from the bottom of the sea into their life, and it can be really difficult for people, because it’s, they live in worlds that are very, very different.

1:01:36 You know, that often they will come out, out of it and say, I realize that we’re all interconnected, and, oh, I felt such a strong sense of love, and I want to, and then they go back to their lives and their jobs, and it’s just hard to, to keep going with those things. Yeah, and I kind of showed this in the movie, because I got a lot of those pearls. I got, like, specific. I got, like, ten pearls, and it was very specific with me with ayahuasca, and of course I come back and, you know, take my wife out for dinner.

1:02:04 I still remember, and I was like, I got it all figured out, honey. Yeah, this is what you’re gonna do, and this is what I’m gonna do, and this is what the kids are gonna do, and this is what London Real is gonna do. And first of all, I mean, that, that should be, and was, jarring for anyone here. Yes, it just is like, what are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

1:02:22 And then on top of that, the double whammy is six months later you can’t even implement it. Yeah, now you look like a hypocrite. On top of that, yes, and so yeah, it’s, it’s tricky, that’s been ejected that being said, but I look at my life on a longer timeline. I usually say, wow, actually, you were able to move that ship much closer to those goals. It just didn’t happen as immediate as you wanted it to.

1:02:48 Yes, yeah, yeah. Definitely. I mean, when I think about the people in, in the study, yeah, like one person’s written a book. So he’d never, he’d only ever read a couple of books ever, before, like a couple of novels, and he, in his session, he connected with Toni Morrison, the novelist, and he’s now written a really quite amazing book about his experiences, beautifully written. Absolutely, beautifully written.

1:03:19 Another person has done all sorts of really great stuff with her. So she’s studying, she’s doing a PhD, and she’s done loads of really good things to help other PhD students manage their stress better and come together as a community and support each other. Another person has gone back to work. She had been off work for a very, very long time, gone back to work and thinking about all sorts of, yeah, positive changes in her life. People, do they do in a way, it’s almost like, if you imagine that pearl’s like planting the pearl of the seed, and seeing, seeing that seed grow, but it takes a lot, takes a lot of watering.

1:03:58 And I guess in a way it’s a lot about like expectations, like you were saying. If you try and do all of it in one go, you can feel really demoralized and like hypocrite, but if you had lower your expectations, and they take the pressure off yourself a bit, and think it’s okay if I do a couple of things this time, don’t have to keep all of it, and that the intention is there, and that if the intention is, I want to be better to my loved ones, and I walk, because so often it’s like, I see this all the time, like in a psychedelic, and I’m guilty of this myself. Like my ex, the father of my daughter, was just like, you know, he’s, I’m always going off and doing talks about psychedelics and doing all the stuff, and I’m going around the world and busy, and I’m, you know, come home and I’m stressed, and I’m like, he’s like, oh great, so you really, you know, like you’re really a model for, like, this, like really enlightened, you know, you’re not so calm right now, are you?

1:04:45 And I’m like, oh my god, I haven’t, you know, and being completely mindless with my daughter and not present at all, because I’m just all over the place. Like I fully don’t integrate and embody the whole model. It’s called accept, connecting, body. I live in my head most of the time. I am NOT doing the thing that I am like preaching, but I want to move towards it, so I’m trying, and I care, and I’m willing.

1:05:13 And this is the thing for everyone. What he likes to do is they, like, crack open, that she’ll, like, the diffuse process, like diving under those waves. It’s diving down from, I’m fine, I’m, I’m the best, I’m fine, I’m gonna be defensive, I’m just angry at you, you’re wrong, I’m right, that self-right, just position of strength, outward strength, like the mask. It’s diving down from that and cracking open and being all mushy and vulnerable, and a bit being able to be there.

1:05:40 So if that’s what psychedelics do, they kind of like crack open the shell and help you be in your vulnerability. Then even if you, after a psychedelic experience, even if you don’t do all the things you wanted to do, you’re not yet a perfect human being, if you’re willing to continue to try and open and own your faults, own your things that you’re not doing, even if you haven’t fixed them yet, but at least acknowledge that you’re doing them. Right, that’s, I think, the key, ’cause that’s what helps you stay open and keep doing the work.

1:06:09 It’s only when we close up again, the oyster shell shuts, and we say, no, actually I’m fine, you’re all the problem. That it’s like, just owning that, that it’s in, ass, you know, right? So there’s a lot of potential wins there. You don’t have to completely remake yourself. Yeah, no, Jesus Christ incarnate.

1:06:25 Yeah, just being aware that maybe there’s some work that you can do, or you can be more open-minded, or, yeah, be more loving. This is a great result. Yeah, and maybe don’t go tell everybody. I mean, you, it’s up to you, obviously, but maybe keep it with your therapists in the beginning and not tell everyone, because that might just, might just make you more frustrated later. Absolutely, yeah.

1:06:49 I mean, I think there’s a balance, because for a certain point we also need people to talk about it. Yeah, and change, change, you know, the stigma. But yes, I think it’s good to keep, hold it close. I’m not very good at doing that, but yes, holding it close, in and holding it in there. Yeah, holding it tenderly, in like sewing those seeds gradually and letting people see their benefit.

1:07:07 It’s, in like, wow, he seemed different, rather than a lot of people on the study say that their loved ones and colleagues and family members say, you look really different, and that they often haven’t told them they’ve been in the study. And they say, ah, yes, done this thing, and then people listen with a completely different set of ears, because rather than like, oh great, yeah, you did this thing, it’s like, so that’s what’s made you like this. Yeah, yeah, people don’t want to be preached to, and they notice behavior far more than anything.

1:07:33 Yeah. Every, I mean, like when I first started, learning, real, I thought we would put all these interviews out and everyone would get the information, but what they do is they watch me, knowing what’s Brian doing. It well, that seemed to have changing, or that was this, and then, and then when they see it, then they will be open-minded to maybe some new ideas. Yeah, which makes sense. Take time.

1:07:52 Survive. Yeah, and and so how, what do the numbers look like? I mean, you’re really, you’re really excited by what you’re seeing with these statistics. So wow, what do, what, what do the results look like, and what does this mean for what the world is gonna be like in 10 years or 50 years, if everything goes the way you want it to? So we don’t know the results for the current study yet.

1:08:15 We haven’t looked at the data yet, so we’re, we’re gonna have 60 people, 30 in each condition. So 30 psilocybin high-dose versus 30 antidepressants with, with a low-dose psilocybin experience. So they’re getting antidepressants plus therapy, in a way. So it’s not, yeah, so I, we don’t, we don’t know the numbers yet, but, and we don’t know the brain scan data, because the primary outcome measure is, is we’re looking at the amygdala response to fearful faces, with antidepressants, versatile aside, in the idea that potentially it might be more reactive with psilocybin and less reactive with antidepressants.

1:08:52 The whole idea of, like, numbing, emotional numbing versus, like, going into your pain, kind of thing. Okay, which would show that they’d work in very different ways, but we’ll have to see with that. So we don’t know what the outcomes are, in the numbers, but from what I’m seeing, in a way, it sounds very unscientific, but I’ve seen all I need to see just from sitting with the people. I know that it’s, I know that it works, and you should know, because you spent yeah, how many, your life?

1:09:20 Yeah, do we, well, I was working, yeah, like I was working in the NHS for six years doing talking therapy. So, okay, yeah, and what you’re seeing right away is completely a different ball game. It’s a game changer. And we had, we had, we did. So what I’m starting to focus now is on community building, psychedelic community building, to prepare the ground for when this comes in, because you asked about what it looked like in, like, ten years’ time.

1:09:45 Well, I think if the studies continue to show such positive effects, I mean, in our first study it was only 20 people, but the effect sizes were huge. Like, silicide was incorrect. It was incredibly effective. Basically, people’s depression was going down straight away, and so, you know, they were going to remission, staying in remission for months without any support follow-up. So the data looks fantastic, and people love it.

1:10:10 People love it as a way of working, even though it takes a lot of courage, and could be quite, people, really, they often say, oh, I wouldn’t want to do that for a long time, but also they, they feel so positive about this, is a new way of working, that they’re really supportive. So I think it’s going to, you know, the studies will keep going, and I hope this will become a treatment for people, but that I hope it becomes something that will be used to regenerate our communities, rather than just be something that is, is a medical treatment that is. I think we, we need to change the way we deal with mental health, with the suffering, you know, so that we’re in an epidemic of depression.

1:10:49 The rates of depression are going up all the time. Our current model for dealing with it is not working, and I think that what we’re losing, it’s because we’re so disconnected. Like, depression is linked to disconnection, addiction is linked to disconnection. We’re disconnected in our communities. We don’t know our neighbors anymore.

1:11:03 We know people used to go to church and have those things. I mean, in the UK, I mean, in America perhaps that’s still more of a community thing, but in the UK we’re pretty atomized. We don’t really, we don’t, especially in cities, we don’t really know each other, and I think there was that, that’s even in America, there’s increasing levels of disconnection, I’m sure. Yeah. So this isn’t just about psychedelic solutions.

1:11:26 This is just, this is about humans. Yes, a community solution. Yeah, and what is this, ACE framework? So, so the ACE stands for accept, connecting, body, and those, that’s essentially psychological flexibility. So I did some qualitative research looking at the mechanisms of what was happening in psychedelic experiences for people.

1:11:45 I interviewed our participants, and from that I got these two themes of acceptance and connection, and then I mapped those two themes onto the six psychological flexibility processes, and realized that they were the same thing. So there are these three acceptance processes and three connection processes. So ACE, I’ve added the E on, because the whole thing takes place in the whole body, and psychological flexibility is a lot about being with your present moment, your senses, rather than just in your head.

1:12:10 Being psychologically flexible is a whole body process, and psychedelics work on the whole body. You know, people often will say, I’ve got this funny feeling there, and it’s representing this, and traumas, they hold them in the body, and that unblocking of those traumas happens in a very somatic way. So ACE, connecting body, is essentially this psychological framework for supporting people through the study, but I’ve also developed one for collective, for helping people integrate psychedelic experiences as communities.

1:12:42 And so we did our first ACE at the community level, we recently, and so people that have been on the first study came, some of the people that were being in the early stages of the current study came, and lots of people that were using psychedelics on their own, a bit like you and your sofa in your old flat, for therapeutic purposes, for exploration, but they didn’t have a community of people to talk to about it. So we advertised it. It was a beautiful place in Devon.

1:13:12 People just, Kate, it was in, right, in nature. People just came. It sold out really quickly, and we had a weekend together where we did, exception, acceptance, connection, and embodiment, as a collective focus around the psychedelic experience, integrating it and connecting with each other. So the community level, ACE, the acceptance is all about ritual. So the acceptance part of the model is about going into your pain.

1:13:38 The acceptance part is diving down to the bottom of the sea and opening up the oyster shells. So that’s, in the therapy model, it’s the diving down into the pain. What do you do when you’re in a collective, in a community, with all of our collective shared grief about the things that we go through that are painful? We come together with a ritual and help us, each other, deal with it. So what we did is we had a big fire and a big pile of wood, and we went around in a group, and this is actually, they used to do this, while they do this in San Pedro ceremonies, so people take this, on petrol, and they sit in a circle, and they do this with the wood, and that’s where I learned this.

1:14:13 Actually, it says you take peace of words, another psychedelic medicine people, you should take during the day, sometimes in between days of ayahuasca ceremony. Yes, I haven’t had it. So, and yeah, so in the traditional indigenous way of using it, but you sit around a fire, you take a piece of wood. So we did this without the San Pedro, it’s just the ritual. I take a piece of wood, and we ran around in a circle, and you tell the group what this piece of wood represents, something of yours that you want to, that no longer serves you, that you want to release.

1:14:41 It’s, you say, this piece of wood represents the relationship that I’ve been having with my mother recently, and you say a little bit, as much or as little as you want to say about it. You share it with the group, feel the emotion of it, and then you put it in the fire and you burn it, and you’re not burning the relationship with your mother. You’re burning the parts of the relationship that you know you haven’t been fully honoring, something, or that you’ve been causing difficulties, or something that you’re doing that you want to release.

1:15:06 So we went round in a circle, and it was amazing, because there’s all these shared themes, like the theme about the relationship with the mother was basically everybody. So one person said, I’m burning like this aspect of my relationship with my mother, and then somebody else, and, like, 20 people, all burning, and it’s so good to have that shared sense of, oh, it’s not just me. We all suffer and struggle, and we all get frustrated with ourselves for being annoying, and, and we all want to do better, but we have to give ourselves a break and just allow ourselves to release, rather than holding it all there, and that safety mechanism that goes, be better, don’t do this, because that doesn’t really work.

1:15:43 So we did this beautiful releasing ceremony, and then we did some other rituals as well, all about processing grief and transformation. So some planting, some seeds, and watching them, and all about the aspects of ourselves that we want to nurture, in the parts of ourselves we want to transform. So that’s the acceptance. So the acceptance on the group level is ritual, and then the connectedness part was all about values, and people mapped out their values, and then they compared that to a map of their life, or what they’re actually doing, who they’re seeing, what they’re spending the time on, and comparing the two.

1:16:16 This is what really matters to me. This is what I’m doing with my week. Okay, if they’re in balance, and there usually is, and then people spend some time thinking about what their values are. For many people it was about ecological restoration, because of the crisis that we’re in, and how to connect to community groups where they live. Like, there are loads of Wildlife Trusts, local places where people can go and, and help their local Wildlife Trust or river, and you know, people can go on and volunteer with a local river preservation, and clear the river, or, like where I am, your canal, or whatever, so you can be part of, you can connect the people that have the same values as you, and give back, because service is one of the best things for our mental health.

1:16:58 Feel so good to be able to do that. So, so that the connection part was all about, what are my values, how can I connect to communities that have the same values as me? And then the third part of the weekend was all about the E, the embody, and that was all, we did dancing together, and we also did this thing called dynamic meditation, which is this dynamic meditation practice you do in a group, and it’s all about. I don’t think I’ve heard of it. You know, Oliver Alone, I had Elliott Hulse, um, many years ago, and he showed it to us in the act of meditation.

1:17:28 Then, of course, the Osho documentary came out. I know we still did. We had a thousand-person event a couple months ago. We all do it. Oh, we love it.

1:17:36 Yeah. So people haven’t heard. If I’m so glad you have. I used to do it in Primrose Hill, until one time the police came back, so I was screaming. Yes, so I moved to the, the Beef Belly.

1:17:47 You can scream in the Heath. He can’t scream in a Royal Park. Alright, so you did that, active dynamic meditation, grounding, and then, yeah, and all that. One of the, one of the participants from our first study, whose depression had come back since the first study, he said that he felt, in the dynamic meditation with everybody, like he did on his psychedelic experience at Imperial in the first study. Connectedness, you know, because everyone is there and you’re all going through this together.

1:18:14 So the, the E, the embodiment, is all about. I’ve called it active togetherness. We need to do things using our bodies in groups, whether it’s dancing, whether it’s, I don’t know, sometimes sports, on those keen gamers can do it, but yeah, we sit in our offices, in individually, in our heads, and you know that feeling of, like, communal active body moving is so healthy. So at the end of the weekend, we, we’ve done the three parts of it, and it was just beautiful to watch.

1:18:43 So, and it felt like, if we could do this with communities, and if this could be the hub, if this could be the structure within which psychedelics are actually, end up being given, around these kinds, in these communities where you’re integrating together, then that will change our culture enough so that psychedelics can really be effective, because when people have done them, they’re going back to a culture that’s how these kinds of practices and this kind of vulnerability sharing of feelings, rather than, yeah, shut down, that we’re in right now. But if we had these group experiences, maybe you wouldn’t need as many psychedelics. Right, and maybe that would be the structure.

1:19:20 I mean, I keep thinking about, you know, Rupert Sheldrake’s book, The Science of Spiritual Practices. I know you’re a fan as well, and you know Rupert, if you haven’t seen the show with him, watch it. But, you know, he states that, as we’ve got to reject religion because of some of the bad things it brings, we’ve also rejected all of this cultural engineering that we discovered as humans over tens of thousands of years, that we all like to get together and sing and do service and give back and learn and do pilgrimages, and all these things that connect us, and we’ve not thrown that out the window, and now we don’t do it, and we don’t, and something’s missing.

1:19:59 Yeah. So we have to find some way of putting these basic yeah, it is. It’s like cultural technology. Yeah, it’s like we didn’t just stumble on it, ya know. So I really loved this idea this week, because it’s also naive to think the psychedelic experience is gonna fix everything, because the truth is, it doesn’t scale very well, and not everyone is interested in doing it, and they’re not interested, and you probably shouldn’t do it.

1:20:26 Yes. The first time I drank ayahuasca, I thought everybody needed to drink it, just like the first time you go vegan, and the last time you do, you do CrossFit. I think everyone should do it, but the truth is, is that everyone needs to be called to it. And I mean, if you look at a centre like I went to in Costa Rica, I mean, you can only do 20 people at a time, so it needs more than that, doesn’t it? It needs this gap, this connectivity, this community, and these rituals and practices in combination, and the awareness as well.

1:20:56 Yes. You mentioned climate crisis. Is that something on your mind a lot? You’re not the typical person from Imperial, you know. Well, everyone’s different over there.

1:21:09 I like it. Well, I can give you, it’s only because it was a while ago that you met Robin and David. I think if you, if they were sitting here with me now, I think Robin is also, really, in fact, there’s an amazing paper that’s just been published by a really good friend of mine, and who’s working with the Imperial team, so Robin worked in that paper too, and looking at data we’ve got from a psychedelic survey. So this is people doing psychedelic ceremonies in lots of different contexts.

1:21:28 Yeah, I love this. We were promoting some of this on social media. Yeah, people don’t understand it. It’s a survey of anyone who’s having a psychedelic experience, and this mass data can be really helpful to the researchers at Imperial and Johns Hopkins and all yes. Yeah, and so what were they saying?

1:21:42 So if anyone’s, so yes, so is it, if anyone’s gonna go and do a second, I think, experience, you do before and after questionnaire, so it can show causal changes, so it’s not just, yeah, it’s not just like a survey study where we’re looking at trends. We can actually show that a psychedelic is actually changing something in a particular way, because we have them before and after. So the key thing with the psychedelic surveys, you fill it in before you go and then afterwards as well.

1:22:00 So with a really big data set, they’ve shown that actually psychedelic experiences increase nature connectedness, so we kind of need that anyway, but this is the first causal study to show that. We know that use of psychedelics is correlated with a higher nature connectedness and more nature-protective behaviors, but now we’ve shown that actually a psychedelic experience directly causes it. I mean, we see, and I study all the time, that people stop eating meat after, you know, after psychedelics, and people become so much more connected to nature.

1:22:30 They say, I’m part of it, I am nature, I’m part of this web of life. Oh my god. You know, yep, yep. I was, I was there, and then you’re back to an urban environment where you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re there. Yeah, but you like the urban environment, you get on Twitter.

1:22:47 Yeah, and you start overworking yourself, and then you go and dip your toe into politics, and that’s all gone, because you were talking about that monkey mind, where you’re right, I’m wrong, you’re right. Along that, reminds me of the Twitterverse. Yeah, where that’s, that’s, rises to the top, I guess, me and survival, the competitiveness up there, and then we think that maybe that’s normal, but that’s not gonna get us what we need. Yeah. So the environment is important, and we need to connect to it, and anybody who’s had those experiences is, that’s important.

1:23:18 Yeah, and, and just stress you out, that were you, I mean, actually I struggled to stay connected enough to the tragedy of, enough, that we have these mechanisms that we, I, connect us. I remember I read Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, years ago. It’s an amazing book. When I read it, I read it with some friends, and we were all just, complete, we said we’re gonna, we’re completely committed to doing whatever we could to avert the ecological crisis, but then I found myself, forgetting it.

1:23:46 There’s almost like a natural protective thing, right? I can’t hold on to the, the panic for too long, because I just think about my life, my daughter, and, you know, my psychedelics. So I wouldn’t say I’m in a kind of constant state of, like, emergency about it, which is the problem, because if we all were, we’d all be doing more about it. But also, I do also think that being in a state of, like, panic and anxiety about it, that it probably isn’t that helpful either, that actually we need to connect to that feeling of, we are interconnected, the love of everything, how amazing we feel, we’re in a, we’re connected to that feeling of love for nature, because that will help us stay strong and positive and do the work we need to do and protect nature because we love it, not because, like, oh my god, it’s burning, catastrophe, because then we’ll just be in you know, fight/flight, freaking out.

1:24:34 Yeah. There was a book by Charles Eisenstein, who I had on a long time ago, but recently he wrote, and my director Lewis was reading it throughout the making of the film, and he makes similar arguments. It’s, we can’t, we don’t have to fix climate change. Yeah, we have to be connected with the environment. It’s like, almost like fixing climate change is almost like taking an antidepressant.

1:24:53 Yeah, yes, symptoms, I’m not fixing the cause. Yeah, just that connected feeling, and yeah, if you’ve been to psychedelics, you know that. Yeah, but again, it’s a, it’s still a struggle. It’s still an integration to keep, keep yourself abreast of that, and it’s hard. I was thinking about it.

1:25:09 It’s like, it’s hard in the UK, because, um, you know, often I have really rubbish weather, like it’s often really rainy and cold, and people don’t live that near kind of a beautiful place. So it’s like, if you’re in a beautiful rainforest, and you know, you feel it’s like an incredible place to be. But if you’re in a kind of, like, slightly dingy, rainy field, on the outskirts of the city, you might not feel that you’re really in, that easy to connect to nature, especially if you didn’t grow up with it.

1:25:32 So if you go up in nature, then it’s easier. But so I think we need to work at it. We need to find ways of helping us connect to nature. And actually this colleague of mine, that was, that was right in the paper, is starting to do nature connectedness workshops, and I think that’s something we all need to do. It’s so good for our mental health to be, and like, it’s amazing, that feeling of, like, getting, you know, getting in the mud, and that even if it’s raining, just like the calm that can come over you, and you’re just in a field.

1:25:58 But we need to work at it, and, like, yeah, I mean, I think it can all work together, because I do imagine these kinds of community hub centres, where people can use psychedelics and other technologies, breathwork, dancing, the community space, a bit like your church used to be, to come together and inquire with each other, witnessing each other’s feelings, being vulnerable, all that stuff, and I do imagine these places being in nature and that they would be stewarding the nature around them, and that when people go to those places and they connect to their values, so often it will be about protecting nature, and so then they can get linked up to other communities and have big tree-planting parties and big river-cleaning parties, and be so much fun to be with, loads of people, and all have some music on and all be planting loads of trees.

1:26:41 I mean, I want to do that. Then I should definitely do. Duh. This is all part of that solution. You know, it needs to happen, like grassroots, and in so many different ways.

1:26:51 It’s not just about, I guess, the psychedelics. Speaking of psychedelics, what, what, what will those look like in ten years from a legal standpoint? Obviously you’ve seen in America some decriminalization, yeah, in places like, I think, Oakland and a few others, but that is still just decriminalization. Should they be legal? Will they, would they be easier to experiment with, if they are?

1:27:15 How do you feel about that, or where do you want to go? I’d like them to be legal. I’d like us to have a route to start building now, really good structures of community support, education, lots of people that can train people, a network of therapists that have expertise in this area, and to create a really, really good infrastructure for, for supporting the emergence of this. But I would like it to be legal, because it doesn’t make, it doesn’t make any sense to me that they’re, they’re not.

1:27:45 I mean, in terms of, yes, you can have a really terrifying experience, and if you, there have been cases, well, there are anecdotes of people taking, like, psychedelics with loads of other drugs and settings where they felt unsafe, or they’ve had really shocking experiences, and might have suffered from, you know, kind of that, might not have really been able to move on from it, because they’ve done some real psychological damage. And so that’s what people are scared about with psychedelics, the idea that you could have, like, flashbacks, or, like, break your brain in some way. But what we’ve seen in all the research, when it’s done safely and in a controlled environment, we haven’t seen that happen at all.

1:28:14 I mean, there’ve been tens of thousands of patients who have gone through studies, and participants, they’ve gone through modern psychedelic studies, and we haven’t had any medical emergency. So they are non-addictive. The only side effect we’ve seen so far is a headache, when they use with a therapist there. You know, I feel very confident that they’re relatively safe, and, you know, when David Nutt has done, who’s, like, charts all the harms of different drugs, like alcohol and cocaine, and all those ones that you use commonly, are really, really harmful, and then you’ve got, like, psilocybin there at the end, with the, the cost of harms to the individual and society, tiny, like this, the lowest one.

1:28:50 So why is this one illegal and this one’s legal? Why is that? And why was David not fired from his job? Because there’s, because they are, transformative, me, because they have the power. They enable you to see things in a different way, and the way they are dangerous is that they, have a dangerous transformation, and that transformation is very threatening for people that stand to gain by the current status quo: governments, corporations.

1:29:17 Yes, maybe a conscious effort to keep away, or it’s a subconscious. He knows. Okay, and the baggage from the ex from making the middle Eagle many years, yeah. What, or is it more of the former? I think it all kind of worked together, because I think probably they were made illegal, probably because people were kind of not going to Vietnam and saying no.

1:29:35 Like, I think that’s probably. Yeah, and then all those stories about, like, the health problems, and with all the media kind of found those stories to, you know, support the case for making them illegal. So I sometimes feel desperately sad if I let myself go there, but because they were made illegal, we’ve lost all those decades of research. There was such promising findings in the ’50s, that if that hadn’t happened, if our society had become more connected to nature, more connected to ourselves and each other, if we’d had rates of addiction, or much lower rates of depression, much, much lower, that the, it, that we would be much more likely to survive as a species than we are going on right now.

1:30:12 And that makes me sad, and that makes me just think that any, the longer we carry on with them being illegal, is just minimizing our chances of adapting as a society in the way we need to, to become more interconnected. So I want them to be legal, and I, doesn’t mean I’m, you know, kind of think they should just be recklessly used everywhere, and that the, you know, I think they should be used with utmost caution, because, like we’ve been talking about the whole way through, these can be terrifying experiences, but yeah, I think there’s also something important about us being resilient and having those kinds of initiation practices and building our resilience. It’s interesting being a country like England, where, you know, drinking as part of the culture, as part of the history.

1:30:55 It’s just like, whatever one does. When I first got here as an American, I was like, you know, and I wasn’t, banking, is like, you’re drinking at lunch. It’s like, that’s what we do. Yeah, and, and if you look at David, that’s, that’s, I mean, it’s just one of the most damaging drugs out there. And yet, compare that.

1:31:09 Psilocybin and Warren is a bad drug, that your grandma would get mad at you for. The other one is something that she would be drinking. Yeah, and it’s just this weird, you know, cultural hangover, topsy-turvy. But that’s what, that’s what feels so great, because it’s so the wrong way around. There’s so much potential, because it, it needs to rewrite itself.

1:31:28 It needs to rebalance, and when that rebalancing and that naturally balancing happens, we’ve, we’ve got it so wrong for so long, but it’s just waiting in the wings. This rebalancing is just waiting for us, and when that happens, it’s gonna, it’s going to change things for so many people. Everyone’s affected by mental health problems, addiction in some way, and everybody is affected by ecological breakdown, and, by us all operating in our heads in that competitive world.

1:31:53 I mean, particularly at the moment, like, though, if you look at the political sphere, what’s happening there, the polarization, and the kind of, like, you know, the clashing everywhere, and the polarity, like, we’re all affected by that, and we all, we all stand again, so much, by diving down from that, with that choppy sea. Diving down, and that’s how we’re gonna come out the other side. So it’s just like, come on, just wait, it’s right there. Yeah. How do you feel about some of these people that want to make a business out of the psychedelics?

1:32:26 I’m sure you get phone calls sometimes. I’ve been here, in some of the marijuana, oh, the psilocybin business. There’s a long view of people, like, okay, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was very concerned about the future of it, because the way I, what I could see happening was that there’s this beautiful thing with all the potential to radically change things for the better for everybody, and I could just think, oh, it’s gonna end up being corrupted, it’s gonna end up just being absorbed into that system, where that kind of, that corporate system, where there’ll be a tiny amount of people making loads of money out of them, and essentially everybody else doesn’t really change, our society, because essentially it’s just the medical model.

1:33:08 Stays. This is a treatment that people will be given in a clinic, a bit like any other treatment, and that it’ll lose its ability to connect communities and, and, and enact cultural, deep cultural and social change, and if you incorporate psychedelics into our existing medical model, in our pharmaceutical model, then nothing, it won’t change really. I mean, sometimes people argue that it would still change, but I don’t think it would. I think we need to be more radical than that.

1:33:34 So, and also that very system is what causes, for so many people, depression. Any, like, it’s one of the factors. It’s that system, that extractive system, and social inequalities, is a major predictor of mental, mental illness, and if you look at the maps of social inequality, a map on, um, mental, mental health trends as well. So if the, the very container that we’re in, they’re, kind of, the corporate model, and, you know, the idea of, like, the, I don’t know, the 1%, you know, the 1%, you know, having so much wealth, and that so many other people are struggling, and in austerity, then it’s that model that is causing so much unhappiness, and is a factor in mental illness.

1:34:20 So we can’t just incorporate psychedelics into the very model that is causing the problems that they’re trying to treat. Okay, so I’ve been worried about this for a long time, like, how’s this gonna work? And then I saw a presentation at a conference in New York this autumn, which has completely, like, it was, it was a ten-minute presentation. There’s a longer presentation linked to it, but that ten minutes, it was it was like one of the best ten-minute segments of my whole life.

1:34:50 I was beaming through it, because this guy came up on stage. It was a psychedelics conference, and it was all about different models for expanding psychedelic use. There was someone talking about the kind of corporate model, where it’s going to be from a for-profit company. There was somebody, like, a big, sigh, he, that psilocybin producing, my, like, manufacturing kind of company, with shareholders and profit-making plans. And there was somebody else from a smaller retreat center, which I actually really, I think it’s a really good retreat center, and they were talking about their model, which is also for-profit, but with kind of social goals, and that was kind of like a mid, mid, you know, kind of in the middle.

1:35:28 And then there was this guy, Bennett. He was an economics professor, and he was, he’s been looking at the whole thing, and he’s had his own psychedelic experiences that were really incredibly eye-opening for him, and he realized how important this kind of work was, but thinking, yeah, this is going to get sucked into our current problematic system. And he was very much part of that problematic system, so, but the psychedelic helps him critique it and realize there was something wrong with it.

1:35:56 And he was looking at social inequality. He was looking at the, you know, the extractive, extractive design model, where community wealth gets siphoned off to, kind of, shareholders somewhere else, and communities are kind of suffering, and, like, their social capital and their human capital is kind of going somewhere else, and our communities are being depleted. So he’s got this model called a pollinator model, and in this model you have the idea that psychedelics bring this openness with people, the psychological flexibility, connecting to their values.

1:36:35 You have community centers, could be a hospital, with a link to this kind of franchise. This franchise is linked to a not-for-profit psilocybin-producing company, so there is a not-for-profit. There’s this organization called Usona, who are making synthetic psilocybin, not-for-profit, and that’s the key. There, their idea, where he’s working with them, is that they would be able to provide service, either not-for-profit, to these kinds of community centers, like a franchise, and these communities would be working in their own way, for their own community.

1:37:04 Every community’s different. To have these treatment clinics and hospitals, when people have had psilocybin therapy for whatever it is, whether it’s, like, addiction or depression or whatever, and they’re feeling open afterwards, there’s an intervention that connects people in their community with the things that matter to them. They’ve found their values, so whether it’s connecting in with ecological things, or work things, or business things, or different social groups, and there’s a model for this, and there’s a town in the UK called Frome in Somerset, and there was a GP there that realized that all of the patients were, you know, really they’ve basically been suffering from loneliness, and there were really high healthcare costs on each person’s loneliness, because they’re giving different medical treatments, and all the different, like, I think also the, the cost, I can’t remember the stat, but the cost to the, in the U.S., the cost of, like, people not working because of mental health conditions or depression, whatever, is like 80 billion or something per year.

1:37:59 There’s a massive cost to society of people who are feeling so disconnected that they’re not contributing. So she saw this on a micro-level in this little town, and she started doing social prescribing, prescribing the people in her town connection, getting them together in groups, starting up on projects. I’ve heard of this, the area, and the healthcare costs of, um, went right down, and their spending on healthcare was minimal, and the satisfaction and well-being is growing.

1:38:24 So the idea is that you mix psychedelics with these community hubs, with community-building programs that work reciprocally with psychedelics. And so I guess that’s given me, I mean, you talk about how animated I am. I’m so excited about it, because I feel like it finally gives us a template for regenerating communities, increasing connection, at the same time as providing a model. The psychedelics can be used not-for-profit. Psilocybin, ya know, it’s, and that is good to see, because the before-profit model, it just doesn’t feel right.

1:38:59 And yeah, I think Dennis was talking to me, or someone else, I was getting contacted by one of these, I think, kind of like these successful cannabis companies that want to get into psilocybin. Yeah, and, or maybe was Paul Stamets, who was saying that he talked, when he said, have you ever had a heroic dose? And they’re like, no, I’ve actually never tried them, but I want to get in the business. And he’s just like, had this, has already sounds wrong. You’re starting to cry.

1:39:21 Yeah, yeah. But um, this pollinator model sounds really interesting. Very interesting. It is. What’s next for Imperial?

1:39:27 I know I’ve been reading a little bit about this intravenous DMT study you guys might be doing, which I don’t think has ever been done before. We like prolong states of yes, yes. One, I don’t, because I work in the clinical studies. I don’t know so much about those ones, but I have heard a little bit, so yeah, there’s gonna be some. So normally the DMT, the body breaks it down quickly, so it’s a very quick experience, but this is about, so, has somehow maintaining the levels of DMT, so that people have a prolonged experience.

1:39:53 So, um, I, yeah, that’s about all I know. And the other things that Imperial wants to tell me, like I heard of, like, of studies with anorexia. Yeah, like I was totally shocked by that. That sounds fascinating. And yeah, an addiction studies as well, so we’re gonna be looking at the next thing.

1:40:09 We’ll be looking at psilocybin, Fredericks, yeah, and then after that we’ll hope to look at potentially psilocybin for chronic pain. Okay, um, and we were, have also talked about some way of looking at psilocybin on its own, and, like, the weird way we do it now, compared to psilocybin with community interventions, a bit like the kind of pollinator model, because I think you could save a lot of money that way, because people would stay well for longer, potentially, so we are thinking about some kind of study looking at the community intervention and how that can maximize the benefits of psilocybin. Okay, all right, so plenty of work to be doing, right?

1:40:42 And we need, we need, we need support for this, right? Yes, we need people to write some checks, we really, really, really do, to Imperial College Center for Research. So, in order for them to do that, what’s the best way to do that? So we have, we have somebody in charge of that. They have somebody from the, I can’t remember, it’s what the office call, but we have a kind of office.

1:41:05 Yeah, which I can give you the details of. Okay, but if we go to their website, we can contact someone. Yeah, Amy’s the one. Yeah, I spoke to you. So yeah, so we made a donation to you guys, and we’re just big supporters.

1:41:15 This year, and obviously we’ve been trying to feature a lot of your great ideas for the past seven years, but this is really important, and it could be one of the greatest investments if you’re concerned about the planet. Yes, funding some of this psychedelic research, because it has the way of changing ideas, in a way of, you know, this is powerful as media. I think in order to get these ideas and change people’s experiences, and maybe train not just the symptom but the problem.

1:41:45 Yeah, absolutely, and that every, every donation where we give, and we make so much out of it, because we have a really big team of incredibly dedicated people, who are many of them are volunteering, who would just, we’re all completely committed to this. We work around the clock, we just, we live and breathe it. It is our whole life, and so every bit of money that comes in, you know, it’s, it’s just a little bit of money goes a long way, because we’ve got such a big team of people that, and we’ve got, like, the data set for our current study.

1:42:12 We’ve got so many different measures, we’ve got so many different papers, so many different things that can emerge from it, and so many different psilocybin studies that can develop in other places if we help set them up. So a little bit goes incredibly long way. Okay, all right, mind that everyone hit the website, well, the links below. Um, tell me about you. I mean, what, uh, what you know, obviously the community thing is super important for you, and I guess more research, but um, you know, what else, what else is important for you?

1:42:40 I mean, it’s so, I have my daughter, so I have four and a half- year-old daughter. He’s amazing. She knows what mom does. She she knows something to do with mushrooms. She’s been, she’s been to the treatment room.

1:42:54 She’s met all the team, and she knows it’s something to do with, like, helping people feel better in a room that’s like, kind of funny-looking, and it’s something with mushrooms. But I mean, yeah, I guess balancing those two things, because in a way I guess I’m kind of like doing this all for her, really, because it’s gonna be her, you know, I want, I really want us to build a better world, where people were more, it was a, a, farewell that, you know, people can thrive in. So like, but, but it’s also difficult, because in order to do that, it’s so absorbing that I find myself, I mean, in some ways, if I could, I would work 24 hours a day, every day, because there’s so much to do, and it’s, I love it, and I just, so much, and there aren’t that many of us that are working in this field yet.

1:43:42 It’s a very, you know, it’s a small field, so I have to remember sometimes to, like, stop working, and, like, you know, fierce aurochs, someone in a movie I just watched. It’s like me, maybe. So you love the work. You know, it’s so important, and yet you also know that you can’t be, that you don’t want to be, that work. It’s not present, for, exactly, because when I look at myself through her eyes, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, whether it’s for her or whatever, whether it’s important work.

1:44:13 She just sees me there on my phone and my laptop, going, yes, yes, in a minute, you know. And I don’t want to be, I didn’t want to be that one. So I, my goals are to do something about the community model, and something about that weekend that we did in Devon, where she wasn’t with me that weekend, but one of the next ones I’ll take her with me, and people will bring their families. It’s about bringing this work to the community so that we can all be fully in it, so that it’s not like work and home, but that we integrate the two, so that we can all work together as a community on this stuff with our whole selves, and it involves singing and breathing and Nate and dancing and sharing, and almost my daughter would love all that stuff.

1:44:56 Of course, of course. It’s funny, we teach active meditation in one of my Academy courses, and a lot of people, we all do it on these live video calls, jumping up and down and screaming, and a lot of people grab their kids. The kids get it immediately. They love it. Yeah, and they’re jumping up and down.

1:45:12 They love the expression. They love the connection, because it’s just so, it’s so human. Yeah, and yet we’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t need to do that. Why should, maybe do it with, I’ve always worried that how she’d feel if she saw me screaming that much, but she, I guess she’ll just be screaming to have a great time. Yeah.

1:45:27 Um, tell me about you. If I were to ask Robin and David and a few of your friends and colleagues, like, what are Roz’s superpowers? How are you able to get everything done that you do? What would they say they are? I mean, I suppose I’m, I’ve got a lot of energy and creativity.

1:45:49 I think, like, I have ideas all the time, and I kind of act on them, you know, the energy and the kind of commitment to, and also, I suppose, a certain level of impulsivity as well, which is sometimes a blessing and a curse, but, you know, just go, go, go. I mean, it definitely has its shadow side. Yeah. Okay, I can see that. What was the best day of your life, and the worst day of your life?

1:46:14 I mean, the best day of my life has to be the day my daughter was born. The yeah, we had, I was saying before, we, she was born on my houseboat, in the water, and it was the most sublime, beautiful meeting when I met her and held her up and saw that little face. I could still remember exactly, like, that was the most amazing, beautiful experience, worthy day of my life. For the worst day of my life, I mean, you know, it’s funny, I actually just went back to, I wouldn’t have thought that I would say this, but I think I was talking to someone about this recently.

1:47:00 When I went to school, there was a boy at the school who killed himself, and I remember he was, he was not a very close friend of mine, but I, he was kind of friends with my friends, and I knew him, and we went to a private school, boys’ forum and a girls’ school. I remember what I found, the news, like, found out the news that day, and the way in our school we didn’t normally talk about it. And I remember, like, cut. I was in, like, home economics last May, making a skirt.

1:47:28 We did all this, like, needlework and stuff, sounds really Victorian. I remember, like, cutting up my skirt, like, desperately feeling desperate, like all these emotions I didn’t know what to do with them. I was quite young, I think. I was, like, 12 or something, thirteen. Didn’t know what to do, and, and there was no, there was, I was given detention, like, two weeks, because I’d cut up my skirt, and there was no acknowledgment of it.

1:47:56 It was all just, it was all just tied. It was all silence, all that suffering. And I think it’s one thing going through there, like, you know, there’s, like, that difference of clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is like when there’s something that’s painful but pure. Like, that, his, his death felt like so incredibly sad, but there was something about it.

1:48:15 It was like I don’t know, like, it was like I just wanted to cry. I just wanted to cry and be with other people and that, and remember him, and it was something beautiful about that. Like, that’s deep grief that was pure and human, and then the dirty pain of that being not allowed and silenced, and the rage that was in me because of that, and the confusion. So I think I don’t know whether it’s the worst day of my life that I remember feeling. What I’m empty and confused and jagged, like broken glass, as I can really ever remember feeling that day.

1:48:53 Yeah, it’s like that, unprocessed. Yeah, okay, coming back to that, maybe definition of trauma, you know, where you couldn’t express it, talking about it, get it out. It was just one, everybody move on. Yeah, that’s powerful. What scares you?

1:49:19 That’s, even though I, the, the, the forgetting, how easy it is to forget, and how easy it is to go back into separation and ego, and that even though I’m immersed in the stuff every day, I still forget all the time, and that scares me, that in our human nature it’s hard for us to be in our hearts and to be vulnerable, and that we just go, that scares me. And in a way that’s interesting, because in a way I always think of it. It’s like, it’s like the simplification of, like, in any given situation in life, we can respond from love or fear, and with things that have happened, and it’s like, for me, it feels like fear is in here and love is in the heart.

1:50:08 And what frightens me is that I so often go to fear. So I know that the antidote of that is light, you know? Just remembering to trust and coming back to that. Like, but yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard when you’re in a city, when you’re a mother, when you have deadlines, when you’re trying to get research published.

1:50:32 Yeah, is so important, isn’t it? Yeah, and when you talk about it, it’s hard to remember sometimes, hard to remember. Trust, trust. I was showing you the movie posters outside, in the first movie we did with Dorian Yates, the, you know, the bodybuilder who talked about DMT, some seven years ago. I was in my brain, and I was like, what, we’re gonna come down, are you sure you can be ready on this day?

1:50:56 We’re gonna bring all these cameras. And I kept sending him email after email, ’cause this was the first time we ever done this, and it was like a lot of money for us to go down there, and he wrote back, what word, he said, trust. That’s why I need you, which is all about, yeah, exactly. That was really about love. Yeah, it was about.

1:51:13 So I sometimes feel like I need to have some kind of hat, we’d like a metal thing, like a big signer saying, like, remember, like, trust and love, and just, like, complete, like, remember to keep looking at it, because I just forget all the time. Like, I know to trust. I know that things were evolving, and they’re moving, and that whatever is happening in our current situation, that there’s a process of, like, you know, trying to, you know, transcendence.

1:51:36 It can, we’ll talks about, like, transcend and include. These waves of, like, development, and that things are expanding. I know all that, and then it can feel tough, but there’s a bigger trajectory at play, but I can get lost in, you know, I can have, arguing about politics, and completely lose that, like, over, overview. Yeah, yeah, and sometimes you need that side of you. Yeah, I mean, hi, Graham, Kat, Graham Hancock in here, and Michael Pollan was sitting there, and he said, if the ego got the book done.

1:52:00 Yeah, yes, yes. So there’s something to that too, isn’t there? Yeah. What keeps you awake at night? Actually, thankfully, nothing.

1:52:10 I’m sleep very well, which is a very good, and that’s one of the reasons why I managed to get so much done, perhaps, and I’m blessed with good sleep, but I guess probably, like, the essence of that idea, of, like, why I’m really, what I’m really worried about is, is, is, you know, like my daughter, and, like, being, being a good enough mother. Like, I will berate myself for the times I’ve shouted at her. Oh my goodness me. Like, the, the inner critic goes wild, and, like, you know, oh my god.

1:52:42 Yeah. I, I can feel very guilty for not being a good enough mother at times. Yeah, join the club. Oh yeah. So I guess, look, we’re aware of it.

1:52:53 Yeah, it’s good to be aware of all this stuff, and then it would just be a constant dance. Yeah, don’t get better at dancing. Yeah, that’s where it is, all these things. Yes. Roz always, ask few questions at the end.

1:53:04 I’m gonna ask you now, if you could pick up the phone and call up the 20-year-old Rosalind, who did that, young lady, advice. I love it. Let’s build these communities, because that’s really what’s gonna make the change, and it’s also gonna connect us in so many other ways. So I really love this advice.

1:53:48 You’re very unique, Rosalind. I’m really glad we finally sat down, and, and I just want to give, like, a lot of shout-outs and blessings to you and Robin and David. I mean, you guys are doing God’s work. You’ve been doing it for a long time, and I mean, I’m sure you get a lot of people that thank you behind closed doors, but I’m just gonna do it here now, because it’s really important work that you’re doing, and, like, game-changing stuff, and stuff that can really reverberate across the whole planet.

1:54:13 And I know you guys work hard, and I know sometimes it’s thankless. All the night you guys are turning into rock stars, which is good, but, you know, I owe you guys have been doing that work from the beginning, and I know it’s also hard work. I know it looks glamorous with all the cool fMRIs and stuff, but, you know, holding someone’s hand for six hours, it takes a lot of emotional investment. So really appreciate you guys, and look forward to just supporting you guys in any way possible going forward, and for anybody watching this, if this resonates, reach out and see how you can help.

1:54:44 I love the idea of starting one of these groups, learn more about this stuff. I think education is so important, and just pull the string and learn more and talk about it. Yeah, let’s just see if these things can help us. Yeah, make these big changes we need. So, to be continued.

1:55:00 Thanks so much. Thanks for watching the movie. Really appreciate that, and yeah, we’ll, to be continued on this, definitely. Alright, thank you very much.