Begin Again Moments: Psychedelics

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1:06It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Just before I was made redundant from the Sunday Times, I had been on a retreat in Jamaica where I'd taken some magic mushrooms. And during, it was a kind of therapeutic retreat. It wasn't just like taking them for lots.

1:43It was medicine. It was medicine. It was seen as a medicine where you could learn from it. It was a properly spiritual journey where you were going into taking the magic mushrooms, asking it some questions and you do three heroic doses in a week and they call them heroic doses because they want you to reach that point of kind of singularity where your ego does that mean the amount so it's quite a lot a heroic dose is really gonna be so i took eight grams of psilocybin um and you know then i know and everyone was doing that too so it was a it was a lot and what it did was it kind of on the last day they said um you know take away throw away everything you don't you no longer need in your life um and or kind of blow it up and I had the sense of completely melting when I took the mushrooms I had the sense of completely kind of melting into a golden that it was like being at the time I described as being like in a big bowl of golden cream and I felt like I'd been recharged by the universe with this kind of golden light and what I came out of the trip with was just this really strong sense of the possibility of renewal and reinvention at this point and I came out of it with a sense that that was what I wanted to do that I wanted to help people to catalyze that change because would you mind if I asked you a bit more about that retreat because I think there might be lots of people watching who have no idea about what magic mushrooms do what a retreat would be like did had you ever had experience of that before well i'd taken loads of ecstasy and stuff back when the in the yeah you know back in back in the day back in day we did it we all did our like jumping around i did a lot of jumping around in fields yeah exactly we were the rave generation so yeah back in the 90s i did my hands but not since then at work and everything not really and i'd always been scared of taking acid so we took e and that kind of thing but i would not hallucinogen no hallucinogen seemed a bit scary we were really brought up with you know we had zammo just say no didn't we on yes totally and then we had on on acid everyone said if you took acid you'd try and jump out of a window yeah you jump out of a window and think you could fly so i was like i don't think i want to do that so but you went from nothing to hero dose in jamaica yeah i went with my i went with a friend who'd had really bad ptsd and she wanted to go because she'd read the michael poland book how to Change Your Mind, which is all about...

4:06And there's an amazing documentary, isn't there? Incredible documentary, which people should watch on Netflix, which is basically the book, kind of in film version. But he talks about actually the neuroscience of what the psilocybin, which is the active bit of magic mushrooms, does in your brain. And I've talked to a lot of neuroscientists about it as a good journalist. And what they say about it is it's a bit like if you're going skiing and there were really deep ruts in the snow because it's all been carved up and they haven't been stayed for a while, What taking the psilocybin does is it kind of like a fresh fall of snow and it allows you to create new paths in your brain.

4:42That's brilliant. Which I think is a really clever way of describing it. It really stuck with me. And so it's very good for people. If you're on PTSD, you're kind of stuck in grooves or it's good for people who are anorexic or obsessive compulsive or depressed where their brain has got into deep grooves. and this just allows you and when you see it under um under brain scanners you can see new connections being made because it takes offline something the default mode network which is the front bit of your brain which basically tries to control everything all the time and it allows your brain to make new connections um so i think it's a really worthwhile thing for people to do at this point and it is quite scary but i think if you go and do it in a therapeutic way and what they have is they have what they call trip sitters or psychedelic ninjas who are with you all the time who are there to kind of be as your guardian angels and you do it so they talk about set and setting so you do it in a very careful place where you can't jump off a balcony and somebody kind of looks after you but I think what it allows you to do is to really kind of reset your sense of yourself and for me it opened me up to a whole kind of spiritual aspect of the world which I I think I'd been very resistant to.

5:58So because what I find interesting is that you're not somebody who would naturally go out and seek narcotics. No. But this was something completely different. And I think it is worth knowing for people, obviously, it's not legal here. But in Jamaica, it is legal. It's a class A drug, but in Jamaica, it is. They never got around to making it illegal. And so you can, you know, you can do it there. But if you're going to go and do it, I really recommend doing it under controlled conditions because it can be quite frightening. And you want to be in a situation where you can completely surrender to what you're being shown.

6:32And that capacity to kind of open up. I mean, I've done it a few times since. And every time I've been shown something which is then, maybe I didn't even understand in the moment, which has gone on to be what Coleridge or Wordsworth would describe as a vivifying virtue, you which is i.e it kind of stokes your capacity for kind of joy or aliveness in your life afterwards so how long did the effects of that trip stay with you did they expand and grow I think they're still with me and actually quite a lot of research which they've done in America shows that for a lot of people there they put this experience of having done psilocybin up there with like giving birth or getting married, that it can be completely transformational in terms of how you see yourself and your place in the world.

7:22And for me, it gave me a great sense of connectedness to everything, the sense of a life force chugging through me, but also through the insects and the trees and the waves and the sunshine and just feeling linked to it all. What I discovered was having been given a glimpse of that sense of connectedness and goldenness, I could find it again than it without the mushrooms you could recall it I could recall it so it really I started meditating and I would think about the golden light and these the light that I'd seen through the waves or that sense of connectedness and I could find my way back to that place through meditation and I did silent retreats and I've done kind of I've done all sorts of silent retreats consternations you know I decided I quite like my silent self because you stop you stop telling yourself stories.

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9:41Love ya. So good, you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. So I just want to get on to magic mushrooms because we were talking about that being put in class A. Yes. And I was absolutely astonished to see LSD and mushrooms right at the bottom. Yes. Mushrooms being the least risky or that causes the least harm. The least harm. That's it. The least harmful to you and to society. In fact, I think, would I be right in saying no harm to yourself? Well, nothing is completely harmless. Harmless. As I like to point out, between about five and ten people a year in Britain die of water poisoning.

10:25Right. Which is drink so much. Okay. But at least a million people a year are using mushrooms. The government's own data going back last 20 years says there might have been one death. Right. Yeah, that's the, I mean, you know, tiny, tiny, if you take that as obviously the most serious arm. But some people have panic attacks, some people get anxious as they're enjoying the trip. But the thing is that they're intending to be used once, twice, three, four times a year. So you don't get dependent. And, you know, if you don't like them, you don't use them. And that's why the safety is proven by this very, very wide use.

11:07The first clinical study we did with psilocybin, which is the active ingredient, magic mushroom juice, the first scientific study we did, we started in 2012. and to get a clinical study approved you have to go to an organization called the MHRA, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority, and we'd like to do this study. And they said, well, how do you know that cytosine is safe? Because you haven't done any animal research, you know, typically drugs, you've got to do animal research, toxicology. And we said, well, no, we're an academic group and we can't afford to do that. And actually, I don't think we need to because we know from your own government data, there's a million people a year using it without harm.

11:55He said, OK, that seems sensible. Is it quite hard because psilocybin is a class A drug to get any research done? Or is it becoming easier? It's still a nightmare. That has got worse. Theresa May, I think, was angry that we started doing this research. And then she brought in an extra level of regulation. But let me just tell you before I get on to her. Let me tell you at the beginning. So in 2012, the study of psilocybin, we had to write a grant. We got a grant from the Medical Research Council in Britain. You know, it's a pioneer in a lot of medical studies. And I was surprised. You know, it's, I think this is quite radical, you know, illegal drugs.

12:37And why did we get it? We got it because they made a special call for helping people who depression was not responding to conventional treatments. So we said, well, we think based on brains, science, and also based on what some of the healthy volunteers have told us, psilocybin will improve mood. So we got the grant. It was a three-year grant. It took a year to get ethics approval. The ethics, he said, well, it's far too dangerous to cure psilocybin to depress people. We said, why? And they said, well, they might get mad. And I said, no, no, people, they might kill themselves. The third time I sat in this ethics committee and I thought, if they said no now, it's gone.

13:25So I said, okay, well, look, what do you want? And they said, well, you have to do a safety study. And that means you have to give it to 12 people and then follow them up for six months. And if they don't die, then you can do a proper status controlled study. But I thought, well, we have to say yes, because otherwise we wouldn't do anything. So we said yes. Okay. So the main outcome for a first study was whether they lived or died. And the secondary outcome was their move. But that was the easy bit. Getting the drug, this controlled class A social war drug, there's only one place we could find in the world that would make it.

14:02It took 32 months. No! Of a 36-month grant. Just to get it? To get it. Oh, my God! I mean, and that's all because, well, it's a very dangerous drive, isn't it? I had to have a special safe put in my office, bolted to the floor and the wall, with a camera to make sure I wasn't going in there and licking the left mushrooms. And I said to the, hang on, guys, there's a pharmacy here that's got heroin and fentanyl. Why can't I just put it there? And they said, oh, no, no, because those are Schedule 2, this is Schedule 1. I mean, if anyone's going to break in, they're not going to steal washrooms. They're going to steal.

14:46But it's this kind of unthought, you know, the perverse consequences of regulation. So you know that to be true now, that psilocybin can help treat depression? Yeah. We've done two studies. Not only have we done studies showing it treats depression that other treatments don't work for, But it works in a very different way in the brain. It's actually another way of lifting depression. It's an alternative. I mean, I think that's quite important, really. If you've got high blood pressure, you've got a choice of five different kinds of ways of lowering your blood pressure. And if one doesn't work, the other might.

15:30For depression and two psychedelics, you have one. Or ECT, which most people don't want. Now you've got two, and they work in different parts of the brain, on different receptors, at different speeds. Psychedelics work almost immediately. So they're potentially transformational. But we can use them clinically, except in research. And so we can only treat people who are in a study. And people, well, we haven't got money to keep, You can't keep doing studies because you know the answer. So you've got to change the regulations and get it to more people. I saw something where somebody had cancer. It was a young man and he was really struggling with leaving his wife and child.

16:13And he talked through this experience that he'd had where he turned into a tree and his kid and his wife walked past and touched him. And it helped him so much realise that he would still be there even when he'd gone. That is what, I mean, historically, psychedelics were often used to help people come to terms with death and dying. I mean, generally not known, but hopefully, you know, the great intellect, the great writer about a psychedelic thing, his partner gave him LSD as he died. And to me, that's actually something I think should be available to anyone that wants it. And there have been studies now.

16:58There have been two control studies done in the States. People with terminal illnesses like motor neurone disease or cancer who've been given psilocybin and it's helped them come to terms with dying for the exact reason you elucidated there. Under psychedelics, you see that you are part of the universe. But under psychedelics, you see that people often talk about their bodies sort of atomizing, they're going into another universe, another place, often to somewhere like heaven or a mountain. And that realization that, you know, you never disappear, you know. And I suppose it's sort of a bit back to the old sort of Christian thing, you know, we come from the ground and we go, but we don't completely die, we just, we configure somehow.

17:53And people find that really quite reassuring. We all want to know, what makes people tick? How will they make decisions? Handle feedback. And work as a team. The Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment reveals how employees actually think, work, and thrive. Like how Marcus fits in a role with structure. And Margo's strength is collaborating with others. Because when we understand each other, work just works. Take the behavioral assessment today at try.predictiveindex.com.