EP.265 - LUCY WALKER

Speaker 1 I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Speaker 1 Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Speaker 1 Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

Speaker 1 My name is Ad Buxton, I'm a man.

Speaker 1 I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Speaker 1 Hey,

Speaker 2 how are you doing, podcats? It's Adam Buxton here. I'm reporting to you from a farm track in the east of England, Norfolk County.
It's the middle of November 2025.

Speaker 2 Sun is shining brightly in a very blue sky. We've got a few clouds, but they're very pretty.
It's cold. Just in the last few days, the temperature has plummeted.

Speaker 2 I got my gloves, I got my woolly hat, I got my thermal cycling top, I I got my ski jacket, Doglegs has got her furry coat on. That's Rosie, of course, I'm referring to there.

Speaker 2 She's my best dog friend and one of the best people I know. She's half whippet, half poodle, all mensch.

Speaker 2 She is doing well, despite the fact that less than a week ago, she was at the vet

Speaker 2 getting quite a few teeth taken out. She is an elderly dog lady at this point.
I looked on the chart in the vet and it said that for her breed and weight in human years she is 82.

Speaker 2 But she is a beautiful old lady. If you carry on patronising me like that I'm going to puke.
I apologize. It's good to see you're perkier though Rosie.

Speaker 2 You were in trouble after the dentist weren't you?

Speaker 2 Well I was high on drugs, bleeding from the mouth, didn't understand why I was there in the first place.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, I'm doing better now. Oh, it was awful to see you unhappy, Rosie.

Speaker 2 The vet said it was normal for a dog of your age to have a lot of teeth out, but I feel like we could have done better on the teeth brushing for you.

Speaker 2 But you really don't like having the old teeth brushed, do you? No, not really. Do you like it when several people hold you down and forcibly brush your teeth? Well, we don't hold you down.

Speaker 2 I mean, you're making it sound very coercive.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I'm glad you're feeling better. Yeah, yeah.
Can I have a tune now, please?

Speaker 2 Well, look, we need to talk about that.

Speaker 2 how you doing anyway podcasts I hope you're getting by if not absolutely smashing it let me tell you about podcast number 265 this one features a conversational ramble with British American documentarian Lucy Walker here's some Lucy facts for you we're going to start at university with Lucy she went to Oxford and then won a Fulbright scholarship to attend NYU's graduate film program.

Speaker 2 It's raining now, it suddenly started raining from nowhere. A big old cloud appeared.

Speaker 2 Nice rainbow over there. Got rains, we got planes.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 2 So while she was in New York, Lucy, as well as studying, made a living as a DJ. She's quite a successful trendy DJ.

Speaker 2 On her website, you can see her on the cover of Wire magazine sometime in the mid-90s. Towards the end of that decade, Lucy landed a job directing episodes of the Nickelodeon kids show Blues Clues.

Speaker 2 All the while she was developing ideas for documentaries.

Speaker 2 Her first feature in 2002 was called Devil's Playground, which examined the struggles of Amish teenagers during Rumspringer, their period of experimentation when more wayward behavior is tolerated before they are baptized and settle into church life as adults.

Speaker 2 A few of Lucy's other films that I've enjoyed since that one have included Wasteland from 2010 in which she followed the Brazilian artist Vic Muniz

Speaker 2 as he made an art piece in collaboration with garbage picking workers at the world's largest landfill outside Rio de Janeiro.

Speaker 2 Currently you can see the whole of that documentary on YouTube and I've put a link to that one and as many of the others as I can find.

Speaker 2 When the whole documentary is not available, I've put links to some of the trailers.

Speaker 2 Wasteland was nominated for an Academy Award, we call them Oscars, as was Lucy's 2011 short film, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, which focused on Japan's recovery after the devastation caused by the 2011 tsunami.

Speaker 2 Last year, 2024, saw the release of Lucy's ninth documentary feature, Mountain Queen, which told the story of Lakpa Sherpa, a pioneering Nepali mountaineer who returns to Mount Everest to redeem her life's purpose and inspire her own daughters.

Speaker 2 Lucy was also one of the directors of a four-part Netflix series from 2022 called How to Change Your Mind, which explores the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs.

Speaker 2 The specific drugs talked about in that series, How to Change Your Mind, were LSD, psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, of course, mescaline, and MDMA.

Speaker 2 As you'll hear, Lucy herself is what is known as a psychonaut. I hadn't heard that phrase before meeting Lucy.
I guess I need to listen to more Joe Rogan.

Speaker 2 And Lucy has taken part in several medical trials that explored the human psyche using controlled doses of various psychoactive substances. I'm fascinated by that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 It's a subject that sometimes comes up on the podcast, but I've always felt quite strongly that I am probably the wrong kind of person to get the most out of psychedelics.

Speaker 2 And for the time being at least, I'm on a quest to make the best of my consciousness as it currently exists. And it never really seems like the right moment to plunge into the void

Speaker 2 and commune with machine elves.

Speaker 2 That's the name given to the creatures that users of the drug DMT sometimes see during a trip.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 2 it's suddenly just gone heavily inclement.

Speaker 2 And yet, up ahead it's blue sky. Big rainbow now.

Speaker 2 I'm soaked.

Speaker 2 My conversation with Lucy was recorded in September 2024, a few weeks after we'd bumped into each other at a party thrown by an old school friend of mine, who was also an old school friend of Lucy's because Lucy went to the same school that I did, Westminster, a fee-paying school right next to Westminster Abbey in central London.

Speaker 2 I wrote about being at that school and the financial implications for my parents in my book Ramble Book, but I also talked about the friends I made there.

Speaker 2 That's where I met several people who are close friends to this day, like Joe Cornish and Louis Thoreau.

Speaker 2 That's where we met Zach Sandler as well who worked with me and Joe on the Adam and Joe show and helped write timeless classic songs like The Footy Song.

Speaker 2 I remember Lucy from Westminster but I didn't know her very well. She was in the year below and part of a different social scene

Speaker 2 and my friend's party last year was the first time that we had seen each other since we left. Westminster.
I left in 1987.

Speaker 2 I told her that I'd been following her career with great great admiration, especially as she's continued to succeed despite personal challenges that have included the loss of friends and family members to illness and overcoming her own bout of cancer, which she mentions in passing in our conversation but which we didn't really dwell on.

Speaker 2 Instead, we reminisced a bit about school, we talked about psychedelic therapy, and we talked about whether life's happiness curve is not a downward slide to the end, but is actually U-shaped.

Speaker 2 But we began with me asking Lucy about the mix of transatlantic influences at play in her accent. I'll be back at the end with a bit more waffle and a book recommendation.

Speaker 2 But right now, with Lucy Walker, here we go.

Speaker 2 Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.
Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and mind your talking hat.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing: I don't know what my accent is supposed to be. I didn't grow up knowing how I should speak.

Speaker 1 In a quest to find more stimulating schools, I moved schools a few times, and my parents were very lovely people, but hadn't been to university themselves and didn't really understand the social implications of sending me between state schools and private schools and girls' boarding schools or Westminster.

Speaker 1 And I sort of wound up, when we wound up, if I may mention that, both going to the same unique school. I was there for the last two years in the sick form.

Speaker 2 I was going to drop that bomb on people halfway through.

Speaker 1 But my journey to get there had been through different establishments, and I sort of had been bullied for having the wrong accent a few times along the way.

Speaker 1 I'd moved a few times, so I didn't know if I was supposed to be speaking with a London Twang or

Speaker 1 at the time we'd have said Sloan Ranger yar or a sort of London-inflected RP, you know, had all that. So I'd say.
Or for that matter, Mockney.

Speaker 2 There was a few Mockneys at Westminster.

Speaker 1 Were there?

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course. People who were embarrassed by their accent.
Because we were in the centre of London. Yeah.
You're not so isolated from the way people are and how they behave and how they speak.

Speaker 2 So you're suddenly aware, like, ooh, we're posh or we sound posh.

Speaker 1 The class system, the accents, it's a, it's intense, isn't it? And when I got to New York, I

Speaker 1 was really young I was 22 and I didn't know any other Brits and it seemed silly not to make myself understood if someone says to me what would you like to drink and you've just sat down and you say I'd just like a glass of water they can't understand that water means water it's easy to not be understood and I sort of feel oh god I couldn't have time for that I'm very pragmatic so I'm like just say it that so they'll understand it and so I sort of think anywhere I go I accommodate it and then I also work a lot of places with people who don't speak very good English.

Speaker 1 And I will make some accommodations to that.

Speaker 1 I also try to learn their language sometimes to sort of put them at ease with how bad my attempts at their language are so they feel more comfortable in English. But one thing I'll also do is speak in

Speaker 1 a certain way that actually makes it easier for them to understand. And so I'm often doing things like that.
And I'm just so pragmatic that I don't even know how I'm supposed to speak.

Speaker 1 And it veers around depending on talking to and it's like that mid-Atlantic accent that we used to tease Madonna for.

Speaker 1 But I studied linguistics at Oxford University, and I'm here to tell you that, well, obviously, one shouldn't denigrate people for accents, but people do, especially in this country.

Speaker 1 They're famous for it. I can't think of another place that's like it in terms of having this kind of class accent, the RP Trumps regional dialects,

Speaker 1 RP being received pronunciation, which is the posh.

Speaker 2 It's posh BBC pronunciation.

Speaker 1 Hello. It is.
And then there's pronounced RP, PRP, which is the Queen's English, which marbles in your mouth, and you could probably do that one better than me.

Speaker 2 That's very, very posh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. But other places don't have that.
They don't have the kind of overlay of a posh and a very posh, which is kind of the middle class and the.

Speaker 2 I suppose so. But I mean, everyone, they all have their forms of prejudice one way or another.

Speaker 2 It might just be a different set of values that they're based on or a different set of cues that they're responding to.

Speaker 1 I do feel like that the idea that you could, you know, one vowel sound and people people have pegged you. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Was something that I almost left the country to get away from because I found it so confining. And moving to New York at 22, the idea that people didn't have a story about me was really good.

Speaker 1 I went to New York to go to NYU for graduate film school on a Fulbright scholarship. It was fantastic.

Speaker 1 You're the queen of scholarships. Yeah, totally.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a good one, though.

Speaker 1 I cashed in all my academic chips and said I want to go to film school in New York and it worked wow got a ticket got over there yeah it was pretty amazing and when I got there it was a lovely time New York in the 90s was just this really it was cheap it was sort of recovering from the crime wave but the crime wave kind of kept it cheap and there was lots of fun empty spaces and people squatting and lofts and it was still kind of grimy and fun it hadn't been sort of taken over by hedge fund people.

Speaker 2 Did you ever come across Bowie in New York?

Speaker 1 I did. I was about 30

Speaker 1 and I met him a few times because we had some mutual friends for a bit.

Speaker 1 The first time I found myself sitting at a table at dinner, about eight people, and two of them being Bowie and Aman, I was really having trouble keeping the feeling of the chair being under me.

Speaker 1 And I don't often get starstruck. And I'm sitting there looking at the vinyl justice sticker and having a bit of being starstruck right now because I have to.
I have a car with me, and

Speaker 2 there's a vinyl justice sticker on it. Vinyl Justice was a segment from the Adam and Joe show, which Lucy used to watch, apparently.

Speaker 1 I did, I did, I watched it.

Speaker 1 And, of course, you know, you being older than me at school and at a boys' school and in the art labs, because we used to do art together, I mean, you couldn't have been more fascinating as boys who did art in the years above me.

Speaker 1 And you and Joe and Louie and zach all being quite striking creatures and very alive amongst yourselves and and that's how i describe myself yes yeah it was fun to observe you as a younger person i don't want to derail the bowie yeah but it's actually more fun i mean i think it's more fun to talk about being a fan of you than being fan obviously i was a mega fan of bowie i mean my god you know i was a music nut and how good was that right and suddenly you're sitting opposite him and he's a person and you're in New York, and he thinks you're cool and interesting, too.

Speaker 1 And it's sort of just very confusing.

Speaker 2 Did you talk to him?

Speaker 1 Yeah, a bit, yeah,

Speaker 1 but it was all a bit,

Speaker 1 I didn't crack through to anything

Speaker 1 dynamic.

Speaker 2 The thing is, dinners with eight people in a restaurant, you're lucky if you have any meaningful exchanges, don't you?

Speaker 1 Yeah, we weren't in a restaurant.

Speaker 1 I had to,

Speaker 1 I had,

Speaker 1 I wasn't in a restaurant, I was at a house, but yeah, the first time I was at Anna Winter, editor of Vogue's house, at an engagement dinner. So it's a bit different, but still, you feel terrible.

Speaker 1 You can't come up with anything interesting to say.

Speaker 1 And then you feel rather just, it feels awful, doesn't it? I just felt rather disappointing all around. But we should talk about.

Speaker 1 It has been fun following your career and always looking up to you and finding myself here. And I found myself wanting to interview you because, of course, I'm usually the one doing the interviewing.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I'm uncomfortable being here.

Speaker 2 When we were together then, me and Joe and Louis and Zach, were we annoying?

Speaker 1 Not at all. Oh, good.
Not at all. You seemed like highly creative.
And how fun that you were doing art stuff in this academic context, right?

Speaker 2 Did you and I chat in those days?

Speaker 1 I think we did, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a couple of memories.

Speaker 2 Because there wasn't that much cross-pollination between the years.

Speaker 1 No, not at all, no.

Speaker 2 And also, the girls were a different class, really, in that school, because they only arrived in the sixth form. They were like celebrities.
You sort of knew all of them.

Speaker 2 There was two years' worth of girls only.

Speaker 1 The gender ratio, I mean, the male-to-female ratio was, was it four to one, five to one, something like that? Yeah, I mean, three to one, four to one, five to five.

Speaker 2 You tell me, it couldn't have been easy being a girl coming into that all-male environment in the sixth form. You've got all these 16-year-old boys around you.

Speaker 1 I tell you what was really easy, and I think that Westminster was a bit different because we were all,

Speaker 1 it was a school of

Speaker 1 sort of spooky, smart people generally, weren't we?

Speaker 1 Speak for yourself.

Speaker 1 I think the girls were. Well, here you are, fabulously successful, etc., doing yourself down, you British people, self-denigrating.

Speaker 1 You want to move to America and pump yourself full of your own smoke here and there.

Speaker 2 No, listen, I'm obviously a genius, but to be real, though,

Speaker 2 the girls were in in a different class in that way too, because

Speaker 2 they

Speaker 1 had

Speaker 1 super selective. Yeah, super selective.

Speaker 2 They'd been through a much more rigorous.

Speaker 1 Because so many girls wanted to go to a school with boys, and Westminster was the most academic of any of the schools that did that. And so they had their pick of a lot of very academic girls.

Speaker 1 And so we were all really good exam performing types. But here's what was really easy about it.
I thought that

Speaker 1 the girls girls were great. And I walked in and I instantly felt really comfy with so many of those girls.
And we were really supportive and really interesting.

Speaker 1 And the same thing with the boys, actually. But the whole thing was so strange because suddenly you're in the middle of London and wandering around the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

Speaker 1 And it was, for me, a lot. And I'd come from the countryside and I hadn't had,

Speaker 1 I didn't know anybody from this sort of milieu. And I took up smoking instantly, even though I kind of hated it.

Speaker 1 So I must have been very, I must have been sort of desperate to fit in and succumbing to peer pressure. And the girls were always smoking, and the girls loo, and that's probably how we all bonded.

Speaker 2 There was a lot of smoking, I remember.

Speaker 1 Oh, a lot of smoking. And drinking,

Speaker 1 you know, just all that. So, and, and frankly, drug taking, which became a real problem for a lot of people.
Oh, really?

Speaker 2 I wasn't aware of any of that. I mean, like, towards the end, people started smoking joints, but I didn't because I was too frightened.

Speaker 1 Lots of people in my year got in real trouble with heroin afterwards. And then, do you remember my kid tragically died of an overdose?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 But several others are, like, big NA goers still today. Heroin.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Lymey. I wasn't aware of that in our year, I must say.

Speaker 1 Perhaps your year didn't quite have it to the extent that mine did. I definitely smoked a tremendous amount of part.
I would say I smoked my tits off from 16 to 19.

Speaker 2 But you didn't have any heroin or dinosaurs?

Speaker 1 No, I did not. I did not want heroin or cocaine for that matter.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's in the late 80s. You would think after that heroin screws you up campaign, that's what put me off.
I'm a simple boy. I watched that and I thought, oh, great.

Speaker 1 I won't have any. No, I was with you.

Speaker 1 I was absolutely with you. I did experiment with LSD and psilocybin and MDMA, which

Speaker 1 I think are very interesting.

Speaker 2 In your late teens. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. God, that's so precocious.

Speaker 2 I mean, that just, I didn't know anyone who was doing anything like that.

Speaker 1 But on the bright side, I have to say, it had great teachers. I loved it.
I couldn't believe that I got to run around London and go to real art galleries and real theatres and real cinemas.

Speaker 1 And we just had so much freedom. I was...
boarding. So we had these like incredible

Speaker 1 house in Westminster, you know,

Speaker 1 the only downside of which you could hear Big Ben every 15 minutes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 Each ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong. I remember that so clearly.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 First night there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, every 15 minutes.

Speaker 2 Suddenly you're thinking, like, is this a joke?

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 But then you forget it. Like, it's when we moved to the country, there was a load of rooks in the tree right next to our house.
And our first night there, I was like, oh, you're joking, aren't you?

Speaker 2 Is it going to be like this every night? With this big rook gang going absolutely squawk. And it was so loud.
But within the week, I'd screened it out and I don't think about it ever anymore.

Speaker 2 Sometimes people come to visit and go, whoa, loud rooks. And I'm like, oh, I don't notice it.

Speaker 1 And it was like that with

Speaker 1 Big Ben. Exactly.

Speaker 2 So you didn't screw up your exams then because you were experimenting with crazy drugs?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 You're pretty impressive, I must say.

Speaker 1 Like you. Well, how long have we got? We might go to the other stuff.
Oh, I feel so unimpressive. I was, when I was, yeah, my.

Speaker 2 Tell me the unimpressive things, because so far on the surface of it,

Speaker 2 you've made 10 films.

Speaker 1 Well, I failed to procreate.

Speaker 1 I've completely failed in the

Speaker 1 happy family department here. I feel very sad about that.
I didn't want to have children. Yeah, I wanted to have children.
I mean, some of it wasn't my fault.

Speaker 1 I had infertility, which turned out to be cancer. So it was, you know, I have excuses, but other people figured it out.
I haven't figured out the, I haven't figured out that bit.

Speaker 1 I don't know where I was supposed to live. I don't know.
I have a really nice time. I have to say, I really enjoy my life, but it's very unconventional.

Speaker 1 I didn't quite intend it to be this unconventional in terms of still behaving like I'm about 24

Speaker 1 generally. But maybe that's a good thing.

Speaker 2 I mean, from my perspective, I would say from the perspective of most people, you are more, you're a year younger than I am, I think. Yeah, probably.
You're 54.

Speaker 1 Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 Cut that bit out.

Speaker 2 You don't look 54. You don't have the kind of life that most 54-year-olds have.

Speaker 1 I don't feel it. It's absolutely strange to me that I went to a wedding.
So I didn't go to any reunions or anything because I moved to the US when I was 22 and I kind of missed a lot of that stuff.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I went to a wedding.

Speaker 1 It was the wedding of someone who'd actually been to Westminster, although he'd been thrown out before I got there.

Speaker 1 But somehow, even though he'd been thrown out before I got there, he'd actually stayed in touch with everybody. And so this was the kind of reunion that I'd never been to.

Speaker 1 And it was like an acid trip in which everyone I knew was dressed as their fat parents.

Speaker 1 I was like, and there was one guy who said,

Speaker 1 Lucy, and I said, yes.

Speaker 1 And he said, Didn't you study English with this particular teacher? And I said, Yes.

Speaker 1 And he said, Oh, do you remember that boy? He mentioned someone's name. I said, Oh, yes.
Didn't he go off to law school? And he said, Yes.

Speaker 1 And now he's a judge. And he grinned at me.
And I said, Wait. Your honour?

Speaker 1 And of course, we were at sort of at the age where our parents were when we were that age. And I kept thinking, like, no.
And then someone said, You live in Los Angeles. Do you work out?

Speaker 1 And I said, Yeah, but you could too. They have things to, you know, be active everywhere.
You know, I just thought, oh my god, it's optional, people. It's optional.
Aging is optional.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!

Speaker 1 I've made this amazing film, which I hope will come out, about ibergane. Ibogaine.

Speaker 1 Ibogaine is, yeah, comes from iboga, which is a shrub from West Africa, which is a really interesting and strong psychedelic, not a recreational, well-known one, but it has a unique property of removing opiate addiction from the body without cold turkey.

Speaker 1 It's kind of absolutely remarkable. Nobody knows how it does it, but it does do that.

Speaker 1 And it's very powerful, and it's just beginning to be studied.

Speaker 1 But a lot of people with substance use disorder will turn to it and have this experience that it restores the power of choice so that they can quit drugs. But it's very interesting.

Speaker 1 So I've made a whole film

Speaker 1 about this, actually.

Speaker 2 When did ibogaine become a thing?

Speaker 1 Well, it was discovered in 1972 by this one guy, Howard Lotsoff, in New York, who was just a kind of,

Speaker 1 I say just, but there were quite a few young psychonauts and they weren't legal back then,

Speaker 1 just experimenting with different chemicals.

Speaker 1 And he had also been playing around with heroin, and he's 19, he'd just gotten addicted to heroin when he tried this drug and observed that he didn't want heroin.

Speaker 1 which was very surprising because he should have been going into withdrawal.

Speaker 1 And in fact, he noticed that his whole attitude to heroin had changed from like seeking it desperately for comfort and you know answering his problems.

Speaker 1 Instead, he associated it with death and thought of it as something to just avoid. And he remembered that he really wanted to live.

Speaker 1 And it was such an astounding 180 for him that he got a hold of some more and gave it to some other people who were addicted.

Speaker 2 Ibergain, not heroin.

Speaker 1 Ibergain, yeah, exactly. Deliberately gave it to them.
And they too had that experience, seven people that they didn't want to use again.

Speaker 1 And so he dedicated his whole life to trying to get the government and doctors to pay attention to the potential of this. And the film's about that.
And I hope it can come out.

Speaker 1 We've just about finished it and we did some sneak peeks of it, but it's a Trobeca film festival.

Speaker 2 Why hasn't I Bogain been more of a

Speaker 1 well? There's been this whole psychedelic repression. So in 1970, Nixon scheduled everything and sort of forced the rest of the world, you know, most of it, to do the same.

Speaker 1 So he made all these substances that previously were thought of as really interesting research chemicals for potential psychotherapeutic drugs, like LSD was used by Kerry Grant, all these people for interesting psychological help sessions, right?

Speaker 1 And they're experimenting with LSD and mushrooms have this whole other history of sacred and therapeutic and spiritual use, right?

Speaker 1 And Nixons have quelled all that because they do open people's minds and they were causing people to not want to go to Vietnam and protest and so forth.

Speaker 1 And they are disruptive to society, I think, these drugs. You know, I think the 60s was a time of enormous kind of mind opening that you can trace to those drugs.

Speaker 1 And I think about, though, the things that came out of like, you know, civil rights and feminism. And I think there was a great social change that perhaps could have swept from this great opening.

Speaker 1 I think about our parents being so repressed, right? And that post-war generation having such trouble articulating emotion.

Speaker 1 And it actually really tragically, I think, you know, hindered their happiness and connectedness, right, and connectedness with kids and stuff.

Speaker 1 I think about our generation, I think about all that MDMA, all that E that we were taking. Do you remember when the head of Scotland Yard

Speaker 1 said defending why they couldn't sort of stop E in the sort of new summer of lava and all that sort of stuff around the late 80s, early 90s was like,

Speaker 1 stop it. They may as well put it in the water.
It's just, there was so, it was so pervasive. I said, at one point, there's 20 million pills being popped a week in the UK or something like that.

Speaker 1 But I think about

Speaker 1 our generation. I look at our generation of dads and how much more involved and emotionally available and emotionally showing up.

Speaker 1 And I think about all these lovely, honest conversations we're having and

Speaker 1 how cool we are actually with our kids.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's the positive spin. Yeah, definitely.
There's obviously a negative one if you dared to make it. Well, I mean,

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 psychedelics and recreational drugs frequently turn out to have negative effects.

Speaker 1 You know, less than you think, you know, because I made a whole series about this, I sort of Netflix. So the sort of night and night about ibergain is not out.

Speaker 1 But what is out, and it's on Netflix, is a series called How to Change Your Mind.

Speaker 1 It's got four episodes: one about LSD, one about magic mushrooms, active ingredients, so you could call it psilocybin, one about MDMA, aka ecstasy, or or E, and one about basically mescaline, well, mescaline-containing cacti, chiefly peyote, also San Pedro.

Speaker 1 So, I also sort of studied, I said, made a whole series about this.

Speaker 1 And I'm actually also doing tomorrow. I'm going to Imperial College to do a

Speaker 2 load of drugs.

Speaker 1 Load of drugs as part of a research trial, actually, which is my second research trial. I was also in a trial where they injected me with extended-state DMT.
And they keep you in

Speaker 2 Because DMT normally lasts for 15 minutes or something. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you got injected.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How long does that last? Well, obviously, you know,

Speaker 1 infinity. I mean, you know, it's like you do lose track of time in there, and it may as well be eternity.

Speaker 1 But, you know, about now.

Speaker 2 You are laughing about what is my absolute worst nightmare. I can sort of get my head around that being fun, but only if you know you're coming home quite soon.

Speaker 1 I have a really I've been meditating since I was 20 and I think that's really helped me but I also have

Speaker 1 a really firm trust in

Speaker 1 the process of taking

Speaker 1 these trips and I have a really nice confidence that daunting as it can be to sort of jump off the diving board and there are definitely moments where it feels it can feel a bit overwhelming

Speaker 1 that actually I sort of for me I don't think touching the word but I do I don't I don't just touch the word I feel there's no such thing as a bad trip I mean a bad trip is you sort of freaking yourself out and if you sort of do have a profound trust in the goodness of things as I do which I think comes from probably Buddhism and also just years of introspection, I don't think it can go that far wrong.

Speaker 1 I think you can have a bad trip if you freak yourself out that you are having a bad trip.

Speaker 1 And if you don't, if you sort of follow the basic flight instructions, which is if something scary happens, embrace it, you know, be curious about it.

Speaker 1 I was once, you know, on a heroic dose of mushrooms, for example, and I decided to do a body scan, and in my body, I found death, which could be not what you want to find.

Speaker 2 How do you mean body scan?

Speaker 1 I was sort of just thinking, I was sort of playing this game where I thought, oh, I'll scan my body and I saw death, which is not what you want to find when you're looking inside your body and you've had cancer and your sister's eye and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 But actually,

Speaker 1 I, instead of thinking, ah, it's death, come for me, terrifying screaming, get me out of here, not death.

Speaker 1 I was like, ooh, how interesting.

Speaker 1 And I went, hello, death. And good music's playing.
I started having a little dance with death. And I realized that life is nothing but a dance with death.

Speaker 1 What else are we here to do but dance with death? How amazingly fascinating is that? And what happens when you actually think, oh, death, I'm dancing with it. Super interesting.

Speaker 1 So that sort of approach, you know, just embrace

Speaker 1 what might come up that makes you fearful, but with curiosity and openness,

Speaker 1 actually sort of just stands you in good stead. And otherwise, I wouldn't be able to participate in these trials because they are quite hardcore.
It's like altered states.

Speaker 1 You are going in and you are voyaging to realms that not many people have had the privilege to do. I mean, you really.

Speaker 2 So, that is actually what you're going to do tomorrow.

Speaker 1 And tomorrow I'm actually doing one of those, yeah. Tomorrow I'm doing five MEO DMT, which is different intranasally.
And before I did extended state, NM DMT

Speaker 1 long did it

Speaker 1 last the one that you're going to do tomorrow I don't know I have to tell you I have to tell you yeah but it is quite interesting thinking oh it's like it's Thursday tomorrow but I am going to kind of sort of go out into the cosmos and sort of just like outside of the normal consciousness the truth is that honestly not many people have experienced it and

Speaker 1 done thorough reporting of it. So I think we're really in our infancy of understanding it.

Speaker 1 There's also the idea that there are machine elves in there and people have these fantastic entity encounters.

Speaker 2 They feel that they've met, when they're tripping, they suddenly meet these kind of extra-dimensional beings.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Are they from the future? What is going on?

Speaker 2 Suddenly, you've opened a portal.

Speaker 1 Yeah, are they conjured by our brain?

Speaker 1 Or are these perturbations of our consciousness actually revealing quite how desperate the brain is to turn mushy brain electricity into, you know, creatures conversing

Speaker 1 even if we get it a bit wrong you know I mean it's just like loads of different theories and we don't know and it's really interesting are you able to control your thoughts then when you're in the the last experiment that I did was extended DMT so intravenously and every minute you've got headphones and every minute the researcher's voice comes on and says intensity one through ten entities yes or no

Speaker 1 and so you have to report and if you can't can't speak for more than two consecutively of these, if you can't speak for more than two minutes, they kind of pull you out, altered state style.

Speaker 1 That's nice.

Speaker 1 And the first couple of minutes of the last experiment that I participated in, I couldn't speak for the first two minutes.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was just sort of like the roller coaster was just shooting downhill so fast. And

Speaker 1 I wasn't. Do you even hear them? The people who are in the middle of the day.
I don't know. You actually sort of black out.

Speaker 1 It was so intense. You black out.

Speaker 1 And it's a very, very very high dose they kind of tipped you off the diving board in that case uh with a very high initial what they call bolus and then it was a settled dose but I think they were a bit anxious about making sure that you kind of broke through and so actually it was a very high dose perhaps especially for a woman I think I'm the only woman that hadn't been pulled out I think I might be the only woman still that hasn't tried to get out of that one.

Speaker 1 So I sort of didn't speak for a couple of minutes, but after that, I was like, oh, this is great. And I was able to somewhat understand the context I was in.
I can't recommend it highly enough.

Speaker 1 I find it absolutely fascinating and the privilege of doing in like a sort of very, very safe context in a hospital bed with experts around you and lots of like machines there to you know resuscitate you, etc.

Speaker 1 Not that you need it because they're kind of physiologically pretty safe. But

Speaker 1 I found it really fascinating that opportunity to go into the completely altered state of consciousness. And you do learn about yourself and what comes up.

Speaker 1 And if you are like me, really interested in how your mind works and have this feeling that actually the more that you befriend how it works, the happier and calmer you can be, which I think is sort of one way of thinking about Buddhist practice.

Speaker 1 And I've had, you know, partly, of course, because I've made a series about them, but I made a series about psychedelics because I had had positive experiences with them.

Speaker 1 And yet, also, there are dangers. And so I had a kind of, I felt I was better qualified than the other documentary filmmaker probably to make that series for Netflix.

Speaker 1 And so I wanted to do it because I felt like I wanted it was important to me to get the information right because I do think there's a lot to be gained if these medicines can be researched properly and we can find out how to do them.

Speaker 1 But even just as a like very high-dose ketamine, a k-hole, if you're very safe, etc., is the most fascinating psychological experience. And I began, I found it fantastically therapeutic.

Speaker 1 So I have had this sort of privilege of experiencing these things and also

Speaker 1 making films about them. And I guess that is sort of as a documentary filmmaker, it's not very objective, you know, and it is also a sort of way of having an interesting life.

Speaker 1 I sort of feel very dilettante sometimes because I'm not a scientific researcher, which I'd like to be sometimes, or I'm not adopting blind children from Tibet, which when I'm in Tibet, working at a blind school, I think this would be a fantastic thing to do, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 I'm definitely not an Everest mountain climber. But yeah, I'm absolutely fascinated by psychedelics.

Speaker 2 I mean, it is absolutely fascinating.

Speaker 1 But I say you'd find it fascinating too. I'm sure

Speaker 1 you're not.

Speaker 2 I do find it fascinating. I do.
You know, Altered States, we're referring to the concept, but also the film a little bit, is one of my favourite films.

Speaker 2 And I responded to it when I saw it so much because it did tap into a lot of my fears of just

Speaker 2 going to some mad place mentally and then not being able to get back. I mean, when you talk about the dangers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we should talk about that. That's actually much less new thing.

Speaker 1 We had somebody in our class at school who sadly didn't didn't come back and I think weed is actually you know in a way perhaps in his case more he sort of whether was it weed or was it the LSD that he took marijuana I should say that that triggered his bipolar or would it have come on anyway at that age the same age as we were when we were experimenting with those things it's really hard to tell I can say that in cultures which use psychedelics routinely, they have less mental health problems than in cultures that don't, to the point where there's a really interesting researcher at Stanford, Nolan Williams, who speculates that it could almost be that psychedelics are kind of like a missing vitamin in our diet.

Speaker 1 I mean, think about the mental health problems that we have in our culture, right? And all the anxiety and depression and PTSD and struggles that we have. And

Speaker 1 what if generally psychedelics could be helpful?

Speaker 1 in addressing all those things. And I think that there's tremendous promise there for psychedelics.

Speaker 1 And I hope that the research continues to go, which is why I'm sort of personally contributing to it.

Speaker 1 They struggle to recruit women for their trials and it can be a bit intimidating but actually even though there are terrible scare stories about people losing their mind on these things when you look at the statistics I think that's misleading and I think in general it's possible that there is many more people who are managing mental health challenges that could otherwise really cause them to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 I believe that.

Speaker 2 But did you, for example, go through a screening process, a mental screening process, before you took part in these trials?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 there's quite a lot of checks and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 exactly. And you have to have a node.

Speaker 2 Because I would fail that screening, let me tell you.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, you might not be eligible for this stuff. But there's...

Speaker 1 In general, I think that

Speaker 1 you assume that you couldn't

Speaker 1 do things. And I think that you might surprise yourself by how much you could grow that muscle if you so chose.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I believe it. I mean, this is the thing, I'm slightly tortured by it because I know a lot of people who've had very positive experiences with that kind of thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But they tend to be people who

Speaker 2 don't have the same level of neurosis that I do. Do you know what I mean? They tend to be people who are quite positive in their lives anyway.

Speaker 1 There's amazing studies right now, for example, going on, which you would not expect, seems very counterintuitive, of LSD for anxiety, for example, which sounds like a terribly bad idea, right?

Speaker 1 However,

Speaker 1 seems to be effective. Now, might not want to jump off the deep end with a big old heroic dose of LSD to test that out.
That could be not the good approach.

Speaker 1 But I would say that that's interesting, right? And actually, I do think that there's something to that.

Speaker 2 I believe it. Yeah.
Listen, one day, who knows? I'm definitely not ruling it out.

Speaker 2 It's a compulsion that leads you to explore that bleeding edge all the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm still

Speaker 1 a curiosity seeker.

Speaker 1 Looking at the idiosyncrasies of things.

Speaker 1 A mountain

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 a tree

Speaker 1 is the manifestation of forces that we are not capable of dealing with.

Speaker 1 I'm very drunk in this.

Speaker 2 You sent me me a link to a nice piece before we met today. We were talking about how did we get into the U-bend of life?

Speaker 2 Oh yeah, because you were saying should I be nervous about being on the podcast? And I said, no, don't worry about it. It'll be fine.
Let's have a nice chat. And you said, you referred to Ira Glass

Speaker 2 and said that he likes to start interviews with a laugh and then end on something moving. And for me, it tends to be start funny, get a bit weepy, and then hopefully laugh at the end.

Speaker 2 I said, I hoped my life was following a similar trajectory. And you sent me a link to an article from The Economist in 2020.

Speaker 1 Well, there's lots of them. That was just the first image that I just image searched the U-bend of happiness in life.
Oh, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 Because this idea that in happiness in life, you start out as a kid, you're a bit more happy, but surprisingly, your 30s, which you would think might be peak, good times years, because there you are, like generally happy and attractive and all the rest of it, actually tend to be the least happy statistically.

Speaker 1 And then, ironically, sort of like starting slowly at 40 and then faster at 50, you actually get happier and happier and happier until like people in their 70s and up tend to be the happiest, which is good news, really, for ages.

Speaker 2 It's good news. I'll put a link, I think this particular article that I'm looking at in The Economist is Behind a Paywall, but I will.

Speaker 1 There's loads of, there's loads of images like that, yeah.

Speaker 2 You, Ben, it's all based on various studies about happiness. I mean, I always feel you have to take some of these with a picture sort because how do you really measure happiness?

Speaker 2 There's so many variables. But broadly speaking, they all do seem to agree that a lot of the time

Speaker 2 there is this

Speaker 2 curve that takes place and you dip in the middle, which is good news for me because I definitely felt the dip.

Speaker 1 No, I did too. I thought the thought 30s were rude, of course.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I thought they were tough, man. And looking back, plus also the way I responded to them, I'm not proud of.
Do you you know what I mean? Like,

Speaker 2 I didn't, I was not my best self. Would you concur with that, or did you?

Speaker 1 Well, we say that from this vantage point of now when we are wiser, dare I say?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's not like I'm absolutely brilliant now, but I

Speaker 2 do look back, particularly at that, at my 30s.

Speaker 1 Oh, you are tough, you're very tough in yourself, aren't you?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, no, me too, totally.

Speaker 2 But it's nice to read this thing about the old you bend.

Speaker 2 They also say neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings, they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships.

Speaker 2 And that in turn makes them unhappy. So I mean, I do think I'm probably neurotic, pretty sure.
But

Speaker 2 I've always felt like my emotional intelligence was...

Speaker 2 Fairly reasonable.

Speaker 1 I think so. I think you're being very hard on yourself.
But listen, I'm the adoring girl in the years below you at school that thought that

Speaker 1 you were one of the very cool

Speaker 1 fascinating creatures. You had everything sorted because you were 17.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well that's true. That's true.
I think I did have it sorted then.

Speaker 2 I'm looking forward to the upswing of the U-bend.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 As long as I find out the meaning of life by going on an infinite DMT trip.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I'll have to report back on this one.

Speaker 1 I'm not entirely... I'm not sure what this one will hold.

Speaker 2 Holy Moses, what time are you doing it?

Speaker 1 I have to be there at 9:20.

Speaker 2 9:20.

Speaker 1 9:20. It takes quite a lot of prep before you actually get in there.
But yeah, it is such a, they call it the God molecule, this one.

Speaker 1 So it is quite funny that you have this sort of appointment for a kind of peak spiritual experience.

Speaker 2 The God molecule. Yeah.
I'll be doing a poo and then going to Liverpool Street Station around that time.

Speaker 2 That's my God molecule.

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Speaker 2 Hey, welcome back, Podcasts. That was Lucy Walker talking to me there.

Speaker 2 Very grateful indeed to Lucy for coming and sitting down and chatting with me. I've put links to some of her documentaries.
A couple of them will take you to the films in their entirety.

Speaker 2 Others are links to the trailers. But I think one of the links is to the film Wasteland,

Speaker 2 about the Brazilian artist collaborating on an art piece with workers at the giant Brazilian landfill site known as Jardín Gramacho

Speaker 2 just outside Rio de Janeiro.

Speaker 2 But the film also deals in part with the ethical quandary of whether disrupting the lives of the garbage pickers to make them part of this art project which gets quite a lot of media attention

Speaker 2 is ultimately in their best interests. It's a really interesting dock.

Speaker 2 Just one of many that Lucy has made.

Speaker 2 And by the way when I got in touch with Lucy to tell her that I was uploading our conversation I asked her how that 5 MEO DMT trip went that she was having the morning after we spoke.

Speaker 2 She said she couldn't really remember.

Speaker 2 It was a long time ago, and she said it was actually kind of a personally turbulent time for her at that point in her life, so it rather overwhelmed the DMT experience.

Speaker 2 So, anyway, I guess she came back all right.

Speaker 2 Certainly think you've got to be really careful with that

Speaker 2 and shouldn't go experimenting

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 2 uncontrolled environments if you're someone who is prone to anxiety or I mean it's Russian roulette that's what my mum always used to say anyway and I still feel that way but I have put a link in the description to an interview with a neuroscientist Dr.

Speaker 2 Christoph Koch

Speaker 2 and he describes his experience on 5 MeO DMT

Speaker 2 Which certainly didn't make me feel that I really, really want to do that. This is a bit of the beginning of the video.
Bright light,

Speaker 2 no self, no Christophe, no memories, no thought, no future, no past, no time, no space.

Speaker 2 There was just terror and ecstasy. What if you're one of the world's most famous neuroscientists having studied consciousness theoretically all of your life?

Speaker 2 And then you have this profound transcendent experience. It felt like a near-death experience.

Speaker 2 My field of view start breaking up into hexagonals, black,

Speaker 2 and I couldn't take the fourth breath anymore because I was going down this black hole. Yeah, thanks, I'm fine.
I'm fine for the moment.

Speaker 2 Never say never,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 certainly in the short term, I'll hold off. Thank you so much.
Lucy Walker's film about that other psychedelic she mentioned, which is being used in the treatment of drug addiction.

Speaker 2 is called Of Night and Light and it's played at a few festivals but I don't know if it's possible to watch it online yet.

Speaker 2 You can find out more information about Lucy's films on her website, which I've linked to in the description as well.

Speaker 2 Someone who never took psychedelic drugs, perhaps surprisingly given some of the imagery in his films, was the director David Lynch.

Speaker 2 I think he had a couple of joints when he was younger, but mainly it was the odd glass of wine, a lot of coffee, a lot of cigarettes, and for a seven-year period of his life, a very sugary milkshake every day at a diner called Bob's Big Boy in Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 I just finished reading a very enjoyable little book about David Lynch by a friend of the podcast, John Higgs.

Speaker 2 The book is called Lynchian,

Speaker 2 The Spell of David Lynch. I'm quoting from the blurb now.
The loss of David Lynch in January 2025 produced an extraordinary outpouring of love and grief that revealed how deeply he mattered.

Speaker 2 And actually, Richard Iwadi, speaking on this podcast earlier this year, gets quoted in the book. But, continues the blurb, the strength and size of this reaction came as a surprise to many.

Speaker 2 In life, Lynch was a wilfully obtuse cult filmmaker who had been unable to get a film financed for the last two decades of his life.

Speaker 2 In death, both the man himself and his work are unquestionably in the pantheon of all-time greats. So why does his work affect people so deeply?

Speaker 2 And why do some find it haunting and unforgettable while others dismiss it as meaningless? Answering that question takes us into the strange realms of psychology, art and theology.

Speaker 2 We will discover why ambiguity and mystery are so seductive, how Lynch's creative and meditative practices overlapped, and why a director whose work contains so much abuse of women has such a female skewing fanbase?

Speaker 2 Getting a phone call here, which is suspected spam.

Speaker 3 Hello?

Speaker 3 Yeah, Graf, sir. I'm calling you from Tesco Mobile Network.
How are you doing today?

Speaker 2 Where? Sorry, where are you calling from?

Speaker 3 Calling you from Tesco Mobile Network, right?

Speaker 3 Oh.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the reason of my call is as you know, Tesco and O2 are collaborating with each other, right?

Speaker 3 So the same SIM card you are using right now, it will be stopped working in the next four to five days.

Speaker 3 So, we are here to provide you a new 5G boosted SIM card without any kind of changes or charges at your doorstep, right?

Speaker 3 Okay, all right, perfect. Albert says, So, you just confirmed me, are you facing any kind of signal issues like bad reception and bad internet from our site?

Speaker 2 No, I don't think so.

Speaker 3 Everything will be okay.

Speaker 2 I hope so.

Speaker 3 Perfect. Albert Sir, let me check in my system.
Stay with me online. Let me proceed your application further.

Speaker 2 I'm going to end that call.

Speaker 2 That didn't sound like he was really jumping through all the security hoops to me. Anyway, yes, I was saying I just started watching Twin Peaks for the first time.

Speaker 2 My son, Nat, said, let's watch Twin Peaks. He's seen it before.

Speaker 2 And he couldn't believe that I'd never seen it. Well, I've been reading John Higgs' book and been thinking a lot about David Lynch after his death one way or the other.

Speaker 2 So I thought, yeah, great, let's give it a go. And we've watched only the pilot episode so far.
It's a feature-length episode of Twin Peaks.

Speaker 2 And I must say, I struggled and remembered why I think I started watching it when it came out in the 90s and then didn't stick with it.

Speaker 2 I was put off by, well, I was put off by the fact that the subject matter is so grim. It starts with the...

Speaker 2 discovery of a woman's dead body and obviously since then that's become kind of a standard trope for a lot of TV shows like The Bridge and The Killing and True Detective and

Speaker 2 so many others. But yeah I found that too grim really and couldn't adjust to the soapy tone of the whole thing.

Speaker 2 I am assured by Nat that we just need to stick with it and then everything's going to click. Anyway we'll see

Speaker 2 but it's certainly the big gap in my appreciation of David Lynch.

Speaker 2 But anyway, if you're a fan or just Lynch curious, then I really recommend John Higgs' book, Lynchian.

Speaker 2 There's a link in the description. Okay, that's it for this week.
Thank you very much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support on this episode.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Helen Green, she does the artwork for the podcast. Thanks to everyone at ACAST for all their work liaising with my sponsors.
But thanks most of all to you for coming back.

Speaker 2 for exploring another episode. And before you go back out there, I got you something.
It's a creepy hug. Hey, how are you doing?

Speaker 2 Good to see you.

Speaker 2 And until next time, we share the same sonic space. Please go carefully out there.
And for what it's worth,

Speaker 2 I love you.

Speaker 3 Bye.

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Speaker 2 I hope so.