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Episode 53: Beckley Retreats CEO Neil Markey on guided psychedelic retreats
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Neil Markey, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, used meditation for years to deal with depression and PTSD. He is currently CEO of Beckley Retreats, a group that runs retreats to Jamaica and the Netherlands for guided psychedelic experiences. He talks about his path from the military to consulting to his work with Beckley, how guided psychedelic retreats are run (including work to prepare in advance, as well as to integrate after), and how he envisions the future of psychedelics for both treatment of disorders and for enhancing quality of life for those without disorders.
Special Guest: Neil Markey.
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Transcript
Introduction of Neil Markey
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm your host, Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy. And today we have a very special guest, Neil Markey.
Neil's Background and Military Experience
00:00:19
Speaker
Neil is co-founder and CEO of Beckley Retreats. He is passionate about sharing the benefits of psychedelics in conjunction with contemplative practices that support holistic well-being.
00:00:31
Speaker
As a captain in the US Army Special Operations Second Ranger Battalion, Neil was deployed once to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. After, as an MBA master's student at Columbia University, he suffered from depression and PTSD.
Career Journey to Beckley Retreats
00:00:46
Speaker
This led him to alternative wellbeing practices and marked the start of a profound healing journey with mindfulness and psychedelics. Prior to Beckley retreats, Neil worked in private equity and consulting.
00:00:59
Speaker
Neil, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Yeah. So do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, how you, how you got to where you are to be CEO of Beckley retreats. Yeah. I'll try and give the short version and then you can kind of drill into any spot. But I, uh, I was an undergrad studying math.
00:01:20
Speaker
And then September 11th happened. Long story short, I ended up in the service. I went to Iraq once Afghanistan twice. Um, I got out in 2012 and was really struggling. Um, I got introduced to meditation and, and then through that community, I had the chance to have some psychedelic experiences and those experiences felt like they were accelerating what I was trying to
The Evolution of Beckley Retreats
00:01:44
Speaker
do with meditation. And I still very much believe that. Um, I went on.
00:01:48
Speaker
to finish my master's degrees and then went and did a teacher certification in meditation and was teaching meditation for a while. And over the course of a few years, I actually ended up in a pretty good place. I was taking better care of myself. I had good practices. I had good community. I was working on things that mattered.
00:02:09
Speaker
And then the pivot point for me was I had been deferring this job with McKinsey and Company and asked for another deferral. And they basically said no. And I ended up going there. And part of me loved it. But the reality is, is it probably wasn't a good fit for me in terms of the work they were doing. And over the course of a few years there,
00:02:30
Speaker
And then another kind of boutique consultancy afterwards. I ended up in almost as bad a place as I was coming out of the service after knowing better and like really finding a different way to live. And so a little over three years ago I left and I really
00:02:50
Speaker
didn't know what I was going to do professionally, but I just got back to teaching meditation. And through that, this whole Beckley project has kind of evolved. So I think that that's a bit of the good signal, you know, that feels quite organic. And I really do. I believe it's my life's work. I love this stuff. It's I'm so fascinated by it. And it's a real honor to get to work with Amanda Fielding and her family.
Structure of Beckley Retreats
00:03:12
Speaker
So tell us a little bit more about Beckley retreats and in its position and sort of what it what it does, what it stands for. And
00:03:20
Speaker
And then what, even what one of the retreats that, uh, that you or others lead might be like. Yeah. Um, so we, we run holistic, comprehensive wellbeing programs. And so a few years ago, you know, when we kind of got started, we, we saw the world was changing and we saw that many more people were interested in this work. You know, we saw that there was some amazing,
00:03:48
Speaker
operators and providers out there, but there's also a lot of not so great operators out there. And so we wanted to really kind of professionalize this work and bring high standards, but without overclinicalizing it, I think you can kind of overdo it too. And so we developed the program over the, you know,
00:04:09
Speaker
course of a few years and looked at adult learning and habit change science and Western psychotherapy and the best clinical research around psychedelics and also what was happening in different indigenous traditions.
Retreat Locations and Community Focus
00:04:23
Speaker
And we put together an 11-week program, which is four weeks of digital preparation that you can do from anywhere in the world. And in those four weeks,
00:04:32
Speaker
We teach a lot of these basic well-being practices. We teach meditation, we teach mindful movement, we teach breath work. All of our programs are done in groups, so it's a bit of a cohort approach. We think community is a really important part of this work and most optimal to do it with others.
00:04:48
Speaker
And so in that first four weeks, you get access to our catalog of content. And a lot of the work you can kind of do on your own, the prep work, you can do it wherever you are in the world. But you do get to meet the group and get to meet your other participants in a couple of different Zoom calls.
00:05:06
Speaker
We bring everyone down for an immersive experience for five nights. We either do those programs in Jamaica or the Netherlands. We're in those two countries because it's the two places where it's clearly legal. We can do everything above board. We think that's very important because any time you start doing things in the gray area or on the underground, you got to ask more questions. Not that you can't do it safely, it's just they're, you know,
00:05:32
Speaker
You got to be even more cautious when you're dealing with gray area. And then in the immersive portion, we're doing all of those things that we taught in the prep, but now we're doing them together, deep in nature, beautiful locations. It's a bit of a digital detox, but we're doing meditation and mindful movement we're getting in nature.
00:05:54
Speaker
And then, you know, the highlight I would say is the two psilocybin sessions or, or ceremonies. There's usually start on like day two and day four, mid-afternoon, they're done in a group setting. Um, everyone gets their own custom amount of, uh, naturally grown mushroom or truffle tea. Um, I can maybe not just kind of give the rest of the program that we can kind of drill into wherever you guys have interest, but
00:06:21
Speaker
There's also really amazing food on site. It's all organic, locally grown. And then we use Western psychotherapy informed approaches for the group work, right? Because a lot of it is doing a lot of these sessions with others. And then on the back end, we do six weeks of digital integration or follow up. And those are a series of group calls and then more access to our content and our practical exercises.
00:06:48
Speaker
We think that this is really important because from a neuroscience perspective, although we don't understand the mechanics of the brain super well, what it looks like is these high dose experiences put the brain and central nervous system and body into a more malleable or neuroplastic state. So that's great. You have this new potentiality, but you got to do something with it. So we try and give people the tools that can lay in these new patterns, right?
00:07:17
Speaker
we think this kind of comprehensive longer form approach is gonna have better outcomes for people longer term. So that's kind of the overview of the program and I can drill into any piece of it if you'd like. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm especially interested in the group-based aspect of it. Why do you think that's important and what do you think that benefit that brings to the table? Well, I think that it's a few things. One,
00:07:46
Speaker
I'm still a big supporter of one-on-one work. I don't think that that needs to go away. But sometimes I think what we're correcting is an over-indexing on self. And the problem is you go in to see a mental health therapist or professional, and you're already thinking about yourself too much, right? And then they get you to think about yourself even more from different angles. And before you know it, you can be in this loop where it can get nuts.
Psychedelic Therapy Approaches
00:08:15
Speaker
And so I think self-reflection and things, it's very important, but there needs to be some balance. And I think that when you do this work within a group,
00:08:25
Speaker
You get out of your own self a bit. You see that it's not just you having these issues, it's actually just part of being human. And you see the humanity in others and you can't help but be softened up by it. It helps develop this empathy when you express and are witnessed by other human beings and vice versa. So I think that this heart work, it's best done with others, with peers.
00:08:55
Speaker
And then from an economic or a scalability perspective, you can actually get cost efficiencies, you know what I mean? Where it's really expensive to do the maps kind of MDMA protocol. I think it's excellent and it's great, but like how do we get that to everyone? We've got to come up with other models, right? So I think that
00:09:20
Speaker
you know, that we're working on models that are, that are more scalable and more community based, more peer based that I think have a better user outcome, better, you know, we'll have better metrics as we track them. And they're just more efficient, you know, it's just, they're, they're more scalable. So one, one thing you mentioned was that you want to provide a setting without overclinicalizing it too much. And it's sort of,
00:09:46
Speaker
It's kind of an interesting question right now what a clinical setting is for taking psychedelics and you know, some, you know, maybe it's a little, it's a little weird and out of place to maybe overclinicalize it a bit. But, you know, on the other hand, you want sort of the legitimacy of, you know, a controlled clinical setting and, and that sort of thing. One thing I'm wondering is, what kind of maybe, because you wouldn't, you wouldn't
00:10:14
Speaker
do this in response to a diagnosis, as you would in a clinical setting. So if someone comes to, they are more interested in the experience or the event than necessarily direct treatment for one of their diagnoses. But at the same time, we know that there's been so much good news about how effective psychedelics are in treating so many different conditions. And I think
00:10:42
Speaker
know, you yourself found it very useful for for your condition. So I guess I'm, this is a long way of asking, you know, what, what sorts of things do people go to the retreat treats, looking to, to help or, you know, you know, looking to process through? Is it often one, is it often things that are sort of
00:11:02
Speaker
they're diagnosed with, or is it maybe just a constellation of things that they might be interested in? Yeah, so it's a good question. Our programs are explicitly non-medical, so we don't diagnose or treat anything, and we actually screen people out where the clinical model, you'd have to meet some level of
Veterans and Psychedelics
00:11:23
Speaker
indication to be screened in to be able to receive the treatment. Our programs are for people that are looking for personal, professional, spiritual development. So it's generally people that are well, that are looking to become more
00:11:36
Speaker
empathetic or more creative or more connected. And most of our guests are coming because they want to make some change in their life. We hear oftentimes people say something like, I've just wanted to make shifts and I just haven't been able to do that. I kind of want to really make a real effort to make some positive shifts in my life. Sometimes people will have just experienced some type of loss.
00:12:03
Speaker
so death of a loved one or a divorce or lost a job and they're like i want to honor it but i want to move on you know like i can't have that weighing on me and not to cheapen it but just like to process it and then you know get get back to you know living a full life um a lot of guests come down very openly on a spiritual path you know whether they're a yogi or a meditator or a
00:12:30
Speaker
whatever, you know, and this feels like the next logical step for them for them to develop their spiritual practices. And then we also have guests that are just, you know, adventurers and seekers and just want while they're in this body to kind of explore all there is to explore of being human. And this is a big, you know, a big
00:12:53
Speaker
a big thing and they want to do it safely and they want to learn about different spiritual traditions and indigenous traditions and cultures and different ways of thinking about this work. So if you were to get somebody that were to come to you and say, I've got a major depressive disorder and I want this retreat to help out, is that something where you might say, well, maybe this isn't the right path for you, maybe a clinical setting might be better?
00:13:22
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. We screen out quite a few people because we're managing for a group dynamic and
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, the higher the trauma history and the current presentation of trauma, the reality is the larger the risk. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Not that you can't benefit. The clinical research, it's pretty overwhelming to be clear, there's something here for sure with
00:13:55
Speaker
treatment resistant to prescient or PTSD, but you need another level of infrastructure in place. That's where it makes sense maybe to have a more two on one facilitator to guess ratio. You need to have kind of in geography follow up. You need to just think about it differently and make sure that you're given the guess what they need. That makes a lot of sense.
00:14:19
Speaker
Thinking about trauma and PTSD, I'm curious to hear more about your experiences with that and how psychedelics specifically helped you and how you, how that kind of reads on what you do in the retreat settings. Yeah. I mean, you know,
00:14:39
Speaker
Comparing trauma is always an interesting thing because it's relative, but I always feel like I should say that I got quite lucky in the service relative to most. I came out all my fingers and toes and I had quite a few close calls, but I left intact. A lot of my, I think,
00:15:04
Speaker
trauma ended up coming from this kind of like low grade intensity, right? Like being constantly in a state of alert for years. And then add to that, I had a pretty significant head injury from a jump. And next thing you know, your central nervous system is in this like state of fight or flight, you know?
00:15:28
Speaker
And it's just, you know, you're training to do work that, um, is really horrible. I mean, it's, it's awful war is awful. And, um, man, when I was, when I was there, I didn't realize it, but everybody in the entire ranger regiment had some level of PTSD, you know? Um, and.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yeah. It kind of gets to this point where we're almost, you know, you kind of, you're in this fight or flight and then, and then it can almost, it can, sometimes it'll tip over into this state of just like dullness and apathy. You just, you just, you don't have any feeling for anything anymore. Your, your body and central nervous system is basically just shut down. You're just, you're just struggling to kind of get through the, through the days and, um,
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah, it can be really hard to reset. But what I found with psychedelics is for me, yeah, they have some way of getting into the body, central nervous system, subconscious at like a very deep level and allowing for some type of reset. And I always describe
00:16:45
Speaker
My kind of central nervous system at one point was like a bunch of rubber bands that were stretched and twisted to the point of where some were snapping and It felt like those first few psychedelic experiences really just allowed that like to release at that like cellular level almost but it wasn't one and done, you know, it takes time and There isn't there's a saying that I really like which is you know, the deeper the trauma more times it needs to be let go you know, but these can be kind of
00:17:14
Speaker
very important events and walking down that path. For me, I couldn't drive down the street without
00:17:25
Speaker
Passing trash and feeling my body tense thinking that it would explode even years after being back You know what I mean? And now I'm happy to say 11 years later with lots of work and lots of effort I don't have that body response. I can I drive by traffic and or drive by trash and And I don't feel it in my
00:17:50
Speaker
gut in my, you know, that instant tense in my body anymore. So something has been able to come to the surface and be released. So I'm curious where, so where were you introduced to the idea of psychedelics as something that might help for PTSD? Is it something that other army bodies or? Yeah, it well, I kind of going around in the culture
00:18:13
Speaker
I got introduced to meditation first and that was really powerful for me and I just had this intuitive sense. I was like, I need this. And this was after cycling through lots of different kind of traditional approaches, SSRIs and anti-anxiety medications and a bunch of different stuff, much of which worked for a while and then the side effects would be worse than the symptoms. I mean, I'm sure you guys have heard this story many times.
Psychedelics in Psychiatric Treatment
00:18:44
Speaker
And then through that group of meditators that I met, I got introduced to some doctors that were using psilocybin kind of on the underground to treat veterans and then got connected into that community. But yeah, the veteran community,
00:19:04
Speaker
has been pretty active in this world because it's working. I mean, it's not for everyone and it's not a panacea, but damn, we should be trying it. I mean, without a question, I've seen it radically change guys' lives in a positive way. Do you see vets on the retreats that
00:19:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, most of our programs are not for veterans explicitly. But yeah, just on this last program, we had two veterans down. One guy was in for 30 years. And then we do a couple programs a year that are especially for veterans with Imperial College London and heroic hearts. And so we're kind of doing observational research and we're looking at
00:19:52
Speaker
our programs and how they can benefit veterans with TBI which is obviously close close to my heart because I think the TBI and the PTSD are actually like they're they're very interlinked, you know Yeah, and TBI is a traumatic brain injury. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so that that's you know, that's that's fascinating and I mean when you think about who it benefits and who it who it doesn't
00:20:18
Speaker
Do you guys have a way to think about that ahead of time? Who might be likely to benefit or not? Yeah. We have a very thorough screening process, so we're looking for fit.
00:20:33
Speaker
You know, for many, many years the kind of the consensus was if you had kind of extreme psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or multi-personality disorder that you needed to really stay clear of psychedelics.
00:20:51
Speaker
There's some, you know, more innovative doctors that are out there that are actually saying, no, you can still use psychedelics, but it's just, you know, it's a riskier approach and you just need to have more care. I'm probably in that camp. I think that there's potential here. And especially if someone's already, you know, if you look at them from like a risk reward standpoint, if someone is already just like, you know, really, really, really struggling, you know, what's the
00:21:18
Speaker
What's the risk? You know, I think that, you know, as indications get more severe, you know, we should generally be open to taking a bit more risk in the treatment if we've tried other things and there's no, you know, nothing else is, nothing else has worked. Yeah. That's sort of a little bit where some of the research in this phase of the psychedelic like Renaissance kind of started right with patients who had life-threatening illnesses and what, you know,
00:21:47
Speaker
It's an opportunity because maybe, yeah, to your point of risk, it's like they're already in a life-threatening situation. So there was the thought that maybe it might be worth a try. Yeah. Well, and I also do want to, I think it's important, there are risks. And I think that people need to be eyes wide open about those risks.
00:22:14
Speaker
But I also think that we need to have a sober view of the risks and it needs to be relative if you look at the incident rates for kind of negative outcomes versus incident rates for negative outcomes compared to alcohol or living in a city for 20 years or you name it. There's a lot of things that we do on a very regular basis that have pretty risky probabilities.
00:22:43
Speaker
And we do them anyways, all the time. And so, and many of them don't have this like potentially radical positive benefit either. So, you know, I think it's important to hold those ideas at the same time in our head that there are risks and we need to be careful and we need education.
Integration and Personal Growth
00:23:01
Speaker
And, you know, at least with psilocybin, it's like, you know, it's pretty low risk if you do the right screening and you do it in a controlled environment. I mean, it's, it's pretty incredibly low risk.
00:23:14
Speaker
And you would also have time for integration afterwards too if there was something that was, you know, if someone had a really negative experience, they also do have some time to process afterwards because you said you're still meeting with group work for a few weeks after the trip too. So maybe you could say something more about that integration process too. So, you know, when we've talked before on this show about
00:23:42
Speaker
psychedelics in their use in clinical settings, that the setting is incredibly important, that it's not just taking the drug as an effect, it's that it has to be in a very particular setting. And then also, some work needs to be done to sort of understand what's going on beforehand and after. And it sounds like in these trips, you're not taking it lightly. I mean, they do many weeks of prep beforehand and afterwards too. So maybe you could just speak a little bit about why
00:24:13
Speaker
why you do that and how it plays out. Well, I think it's a bit of risk reduction. I think you can even further mitigate the risk with proper prep and integration. But then it's also just like optimization and getting the most out of the experience. And I really think what we're doing is really what we want is some habit change.
00:24:40
Speaker
Um, I think that these compounds, they do, they, they, they, they create potential that in a way that may have never been there before in a person's entire life. And so there's this window of opportunity. And what we're trying to do is help people to lay in some new patterns. But, you know, by the time you get to be middle aged or even, you know,
00:25:04
Speaker
a young adult, a lot of how we're showing up in the world becomes these kind of subconscious emotional patterns. And then by the time, you know, you're middle age, they're pretty deeply warm. You know, they're in there. They're really deep. And so you can have these experiences, but if you just like go right back to the way you were living before, um,
00:25:27
Speaker
for same environment, no new practices, it's likely you're gonna go back to that old way because there's just so much momentum in our bodies and then in our life. So you have to use that window as an opportunity to try and lay in some new patterns from a mental perspective. And that's why we do the group work and the journaling and the intention setting. Really, I'm hopeful that people develop a daily, if not
00:25:56
Speaker
multiple times a day, meditation practice and commit to getting in nature more and try and figure out is the work that they're doing aligned? Do they need to make some changes in the community that they're spending time with? Like all those things, you have this like really kind of beautiful opening to be able to make shifts, but we think that we all need a little help from our friends to be able to kind of put some of those new habits in place.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we had Robin Carr at Harrison a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about his theory of canalization, which
00:26:32
Speaker
is sort of like the neuroscientific view on, I think, exactly what you're saying. There's these deep ruts in terms of the way that patterns of neurofiring happen as you get into years-long habits, and psychedelics creates this big burst of entropy.
00:26:54
Speaker
There's an opportunity to flatten those ruts for a moment, and then potentially create new patterns out of that. And if you just leave it open to just take the medicine and then go back to what you were doing before, yeah.
00:27:15
Speaker
try the same thing again and again and expect different results. I'd be curious to hear more about your thoughts on contemplative practice and meditation and how that integrates with psychedelics and how those traditions are similar and different. Well, I think if you look through history and you find psychedelic usage, it's usually pretty related to some type of meditation or awareness practices.
00:27:44
Speaker
I think they're pointing at the same thing. I think they're trying to do the same thing and they're complementary. Yeah, there are some who have said that psychedelics are like a shortcut to long-term meditative practices. Yeah, there's different ways of looking at it. There's one that's like where meditation, you're climbing a mountain and
00:28:07
Speaker
you know, maybe even after 20 to 30 years, you don't get to the top of the mountain, but psychedelics are like a gondola and they can take you bam right up to the top for a bit of time and then you come back down and you at least know where you're going or you get it.
Meditation and Psychedelics
00:28:20
Speaker
And the thing is, is like meditation is beyond mind. It's not mind. It's doing something different. And so it's really hard to, to describe what the heck it's for and like get people to understand it with words because it's, it's, it's doing something that is beyond words. And then psychedelics are similar, right? So you give people some direct experience with what the heck this thing is, you know, and, um,
00:28:48
Speaker
And yeah, so they're related. I think meditation in some way gets you closer to this idea of source or spirit or whatever people have been calling it, God probably for many years. And I think psychedelics do that as well. They like thin the veil and allow for a more direct connection. So my hope really is
00:29:10
Speaker
And I can kind of talk about some of the other things that are really interesting with meditation and psychedelics. But my real hope is that people develop a meditation practice through these programs, and then they rely on that. And you don't need to take a lot of external substances to have that kind of groundedness and peace. I don't know how much follow-up you do with people, maybe months or even a year later.
00:29:40
Speaker
But have you noticed, have you noticed people, you know, what, what, what they're up to later? Do they follow it up with meditation? Are they interested in, in further retreats or? Well, it's like one of these things. It's tough. You know, everybody's so different. Their history is so different. So it's different, right? Um, but yeah, we just had a program this two weeks ago where we had our first guest back for the third time. So this is going to be an annual thing for him.
00:30:09
Speaker
because he can either spend his time and his money and go kind of like drink margaritas on the beach, or he can come and do some good, meaningful, personal work and reset, recommit with other like-minded people. So, you know, there's people that...
00:30:22
Speaker
We'll do it. We'll do it frequently. I think sometimes it, you know, it kind of runs the gamut. I mean, some people come down, have a really transformative experience, go back home. They notice they're showing up differently for six, eight, 12 weeks. And then we'll hear that they feel like they've slipped a little bit.
00:30:43
Speaker
You know, I mean, it's just life doesn't stop coming at you. So, you know, sometimes the psychedelic world gets a little bit of hate because the changes aren't permanent. And it's like, well, OK, well, show me anything where the changes are permanent. You know, like what they what do you want? Like these the changes are real, but they can slip if you don't, you know, cultivate the benefits. Right. Like so instead of taking a pill once every day, you take a pill once every year or once every couple of years.
00:31:15
Speaker
Maybe, but I don't even think you necessarily need to continue relying on a substance if you really kind of get to the practices. I think that, yeah, I think we really want people to rely on meditation and nature and positive work, you know, and the compounds become less relevant.
00:31:34
Speaker
But that's not a good business model. That's the problem. You need them to return again and again. Yeah. And I have a really good friend who runs a nonprofit that teaches veterans meditation. And so I've stayed close to them for years and I was catching up with him.
00:31:54
Speaker
But he says he'll do groups of 20 to 25 veterans. He's been doing it for years. He's like, if I can get one veteran to adopt a practice, he's like, that's success for me. And I just set that as the bar. Six months later, I check in. If I get one, I'm happy. I know the rest are going to fade away. And God bless someone that keeps pushing on something like that because it's a noble thing.
00:32:17
Speaker
I was just catching up with him this past summer and he said now like there's so many veterans that are out there having these experiences on their own that he actually is kind of recruiting now for veterans that have had recent psychedelic experiences and says hey now come through this meditation program.
00:32:33
Speaker
And he doesn't have like a huge body of data. So this is anecdotal, but I see that to me it's true and I'd love to study it. He said it's almost reversed. He says you check in with 25 veterans six months later and he's like 20 of them are meditating because it does something. And so then, you know, I mean to me that that's wow, right? Because we know for sure there's incredible benefit if you get people to meditate regularly.
00:33:00
Speaker
but who can get people to meditate regularly? No one can. So if nothing else, psychedelics give people this like this, this understanding of what the heck they're doing it for. And that's really, really important. Yeah. I think I also, I think about the idea of trait openness. So the psychological concept of openness to experience and you know, certainly people who are rate highly on openness to experience are much more likely to be in meditators.
00:33:25
Speaker
and benefit from that. And psychedelics actually has this characteristic of really opening people up in that way and actually changing their ratings on trade openness. I think that's like a kind of complimentary way to think about that. And you guys have seen this documentary, Descending the Mountain? No, I haven't seen that. You guys should check that out.
Beckley Foundation and Legal Challenges
00:33:48
Speaker
You want to see some cool stuff about meditation and psychedelics. Cool.
00:33:54
Speaker
So do you want to tell us a bit about, um, Beckley, the organization, the broader organization and Amanda a little bit, uh, about how that all came together? Yeah, Amanda, my God. I mean, what a legend. I love that woman. She's just such a, she's iconic and it's so, I'm so humbled to work with her. It's the coolest thing I've ever gotten to do. Um, she just had a birthday this year. Um,
00:34:20
Speaker
I won't say how old she is because she might get frustrated with me, but she's as sharp as can be. She's been doing this work for 60 years, over 60 years, and she started the Beckley Foundation in 1998.
00:34:37
Speaker
And through the Beckley Foundation, she's been doing kind of international drug policy reform and research. And her brilliance was she knew you needed to do both. You can't do good research if the drug laws don't allow it, and you can't change the laws if you don't have good data. So she was kind of pushing everywhere to try and do both. And yeah, she deserves a lot of credit. Her, a few others, some of these indigenous communities that have kind of kept the dream alive, like they deserve a lot of credit because they kept
00:35:06
Speaker
doing the work while the rest of the world thought it was nuts. And now everybody's like, Oh, okay. Maybe they were, maybe they were onto something. Um, and the fast money is coming in and they're trying to, um, capitalize off of it. And we really should pause and just thank, um, those that, that, um, went against the grain and kept it alive.
00:35:28
Speaker
But yeah, and then so the Beckley Foundation is kind of the start of it all. But then Amanda has two sons, one named Rock and one named Cosmo, which checks out for like a woman that's been in the psychedelics world for her whole life. And yeah, they did. They had a cannabis company and Cosmo now runs Beckley SciTech, which is doing drug development.
00:35:57
Speaker
looking for novel psychedelic compounds. And then there's Beckley Academy, which is doing facilitator training. They just purchased New Life, which is a telehealth kind of psychedelic enabled company. And then yeah, I run the retreats business. So it's kind of a family of companies that are all kind of around the foundation and all have the spirit of Amanda in them.
00:36:24
Speaker
And you sort of alluded to the reform in terms of laws and regulations and such. Where do you see this going as a business in the next few years, particularly in the context of reforms to the legal code and how these things are treated? Do you see doing retreats in the US at some point? Do you think that's in the future? Yeah, I think it's in the future. I think it's a little bit further down the road. I mean, in Oregon and Colorado,
00:36:55
Speaker
You know, Oregon's already having their, some of their psilocybin sessions now, but from a business perspective, it's still very clearly in violation of the federal controlled substances act. And so we don't know what's going to happen. Honestly, there's still very senior people in the DEA, um, that think this is going in the wrong direction. And the problem is, is they don't need much to lock all your assets up and your business is just kind of dead in the water. So.
00:37:25
Speaker
We'll probably stay doing what we're doing for a while and see how things develop. We're not in a hurry. But yeah, ultimately, we will have programs in the United States as the laws allow. I think that's the only way to really get this work to be truly accessible is you need to get it near the people. So I envision a world where we have centers
00:37:51
Speaker
you know, all over near major metropolitan areas and then you can have a more of what we would call a regenerative economic model. So that center, I do think they need to be in nature, nature matters. I wanna do them outside the cities. But then they're mostly staffed by that local population and they're mostly served that local population and all the resources stay nearby. You know, I think that's what we need to move towards. It'll just take a bit of time. Yeah, you were talking about outdoors and being in nature.
00:38:20
Speaker
Why do you think that's so important in the context of psychedelics and what's that like at the retreat centers that you have? Like what kind of physical environment are we looking at?
00:38:30
Speaker
Um, yeah, well, you know, we are nature. We forget that sometimes. I mean, I just love looking at, um, you look at the cross section of a lung and then you look at a tree. Um, they look exactly the same and they do the reciprocal function. One takes oxygen, carbon turns to carbon dioxide and the vice versa. So like, so we're part of this thing, but.
00:38:51
Speaker
for us city folk particularly, we've really disconnected from that. And that in and of itself is a big problem, right? And if you look at what the Japanese are doing, they're doing nature bathing. They're literally like with a doctor's prescription, just taking people into the woods and sitting them there because something is happening and we're starting to see and starting to be able to measure this kind of like very real exchange that happens when we're in nature.
00:39:21
Speaker
And I believe, I think many others believe that then when you're using these compounds, that opens up even more. So not that you can't get benefit in clinics. Again, I'm super supportive of people doing this in safe ways in cities, but I think it's even better if you can get people in nature and get them off the devices and give them some space so that there's actually time for things to shift between the experiences.
Music and Communal Experiences
00:39:46
Speaker
If you have an experience and then an hour later you're back home with the TV on, it's like the body is just going to want to revert back to what it knows. So creating kind of space around the experiences I think is more optimal for things to be able to really shift long term.
00:40:01
Speaker
And then our properties, we're just thoughtful about the properties that we use. We get stuff that's away from everything. So when you're on one of our programs, all you see is other guests and the staff. It's not like it's right next to some other facility or something. We just really like that because we think it's meaningful to have nature as a partner.
00:40:23
Speaker
I'll ask a similar question too, because I noticed that you had someone on your staff who is a musician and facilitator. So what's the role of music? We've heard this before that music can be important for psychedelic experiences, and even clinically, it gets used a lot. Just curious as to what your thoughts are about how music plays a role.
00:40:50
Speaker
Yeah. Well, if you look in how this work is done traditionally in different spiritual indigenous traditions, music is a big, big part of it. So people that have been doing things for thousands of years and iterating, it's like, we should probably pay attention to that. They might have learned something along the way that's meaningful.
00:41:11
Speaker
And so we really love live music. I think, you know, there's some really great recorded playlists out there. But if you've never had one of these experiences with, you know, trained facilitators that play live music and sing, it'll blow your mind. It's so unbelievable. That's a normal part of retreats is live music.
00:41:34
Speaker
For ours are, yeah, yeah. A lot of places will play a playlist on the boombox. Again, I think that can be okay. It's not like it's a risk thing, but yeah, the live music and allowing the artistry of it to, like our musicians, they have a playlist in their mind, but they're improving.
00:41:59
Speaker
They're going with the group. The group is having an experience. And they're playing in relation to that group. And sometimes they want to bring the group up. And sometimes they want to take the group over this way. And they do that with the music. And it's absolutely fascinating to watch. It's really fun to watch. I think about some of the experiences I've had following some of the jam bands out there, like the Grateful Dead.
00:42:27
Speaker
and those types of live performances and how there's that interaction between the people experiencing the music and the musicians. And it kind of really, yeah, there's a way in which, to me, I see there's a real connection with that and contemplative practice. And of course, also psychedelics. Just tuning into something, the fundamental connectedness of all things, right? That we're not fundamentally separate, that you can feel the connection. Exactly, exactly.
00:42:57
Speaker
I'm sure there's some evolutionary explanation, in fact, I'm sure of it, an explanation of music as a cohesive force, something that is a social bond.
Safety and Accessibility in Retreats
00:43:10
Speaker
I want to move in a slightly different direction too. Two places that you hold the retreats now, and correct me if there are other ones too, are the Netherlands and Jamaica. Have you led trips in both of these places?
00:43:27
Speaker
What do you mean? Like me personally? Yeah, I go on a lot of the programs. I'm not a facilitator. So when I'm on site, I go to meals. I mean, I'll join meditations, but then generally I go to my little office and
00:43:50
Speaker
I'm figuring out boring things like insurance and fundraising and legal stuff while the facilitators do the magic and run the program. You're like the producer, right? Okay. I'm something like that. Yeah. I guess what I'm wondering is, are there any issues that you've run into in either of these countries where
00:44:16
Speaker
I don't know, citizens of the United States might have problems or are there any concerns that people might have? Well, the one concern, I mean, so everything we're doing
00:44:28
Speaker
is legal from a local perspective in Jamaica and the Netherlands and from a US federal perspective, because the way the laws work federally is so long as what you're doing in the countries where you're operating, it's legal. Then from a US federal perspective, it's legal. So we're completely above board. The things that people need to be concerned about, I mean,
00:44:54
Speaker
One, do your own research. See if our approach is the right fit. Talk to a facilitator. Join one of our Q&As. Ask a bunch of questions. Take it seriously. If you're going to take the time and the money to do it, then do it. Then do it right. But you're not breaking any laws in any ways. The place where it can be a bit complicated is people that have employment agreements.
00:45:23
Speaker
where there might be some stipulation around drug use, you got to check that. And then security clearances can get a bit funky too. So you got to check that. But generally, you're not doing anything legally wrong. And I hope that that keeps you shifting. To me, it's a human right to be able to use these compounds. It's kind of crazy that we have to ask
00:45:46
Speaker
a big federal government, whether we can use these things that grow from the earth that people have been using for thousands of years to connect. It's just a bit nuts to me, but we are where we are. Yeah, absolutely. With that in mind, how do you think about access? Because obviously, if you have to fly somewhere and all that, it's going to be expensive and time consuming and like that. So if we think that this is something that's important for a lot of people to experience, how do you think about getting it out to more people?
00:46:17
Speaker
Yeah, you know, this will take time, right? Because we're kind of in this new stage. And so that requires things are more expensive now than they hopefully will be in the future because we're going to learn things and we'll get some efficiencies. But we're a public benefit corporation. So we have a clear dual mandate to become sustainable and to increase accessibility.
Data and Efficacy Measurement
00:46:39
Speaker
And we've got the right people around the table that believe in that, you know, like our
00:46:45
Speaker
small group of investors are not just trying to maximize return. They want to do some good in the world. They want to show that a company can be heart-centered.
00:46:59
Speaker
You know, we have scholarships on almost all of our programs. And we also have a fiscal sponsor nonprofit. So we are in the process of taking donations into a scholarship fund that'll go directly to funding people on the programs. But we've already been funding people even out of our own money. We've done two programs that were fully funded for veterans. We've done over a dozen.
00:47:27
Speaker
scholarship spots. We did a program for all women, mostly spouses of veterans. We have an all women's, all black women's program next year that's fully funded. That's what my team's most excited about me is getting this work to more people and the individual transformation, but also being an example of what a company can be like
00:47:51
Speaker
that is trying to do some good in the world and isn't just trying to make as much money as fast as possible. It's so boring to do that. We've just got to get out of that mindset. It's ridiculous. It's such a myth. We're trying to do it right. Are we going to make some mistakes? Yes. Is it hard to figure out?
00:48:16
Speaker
how to find that middle path and be sustainable and do good work and kind of manage all of these different things that we wanna incorporate. Yeah, but I think we're doing a pretty good job. How do you guys think about outcomes? You mentioned the observational study that you're a part of with Imperial College. Do you regularly collect other outcomes measures just to see how people are doing?
00:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, we do. I would say it's kind of Gen 1 right now. It's a pre-survey and a post-survey, and then we're starting to do some longer-term follow-ups. The problem is getting people to fill out the surveys. If you guys have ever done any type of studies, then you know that that's the challenge. So we're trying to figure out how to do that. I think we're going to probably have to start paying people.
00:49:09
Speaker
to complete these follow-ups just so we can show the long-term efficacy, which I'm pretty confident will be pretty clear to show. And this next year, we're in conversations with a few very interesting data partners, so some research institutions that are interested in partnering with us to say, okay, are we gathering the right data?
00:49:33
Speaker
Are we using the right surveys that people will care about? And then helping us think through how we kind of look at the data and maybe publish the data together. So I'm hopeful in the next six to nine months, we'll have something like official in place so that we can kind of be a standard bearer in the nonclinical side of this work and gather good data. And so it's a bit of a work in progress, but the plan is to really get out in front of that and really professionalize that.
00:50:03
Speaker
And it looks like there's a lot of brewing interest in the nonclinical side of this work now. How does it affect communities? How does it help people with spiritual development, things that you might not do in the clinical model? Yeah. In my experience with that, I can imagine it's a challenge when people are paying for it, and then you're asking them to also participate in the study and fill out forms, because it's a bit of work for people. So they're like, I just paid for this.
00:50:33
Speaker
Yeah, but I think a lot of our guests after they do the program, they're like, oh man, the world needs this. And then they get to know our company and then they're like, okay, these folks are trying to do it right. And so I think we've just got to make it easier on people. But I think generally people are pretty up for being
00:50:56
Speaker
for being in the research. And then we're doing surveys now, but you can do a lot of stuff with people's phones if people are up for using. Everybody's got Fitbits and things now. And I think that there's quite a few different biomarkers that we could measure over time that I think we would have meaningful impacts on HRV.
Preventative Health and Future Optimism
00:51:16
Speaker
I think being one of them, sleep quality being another, that people wouldn't even have to fill out surveys. It would just be,
00:51:23
Speaker
you know, track the, track the data. Would people come in? Would people come in with specific goals like that? I wonder, do you have people talking about goals that they're interested in meeting when you start out? Like, you know, I want to, I want to sleep better. I want to, you know, things that would be measurable like that. Yes, you know, but more it's kind of,
00:51:48
Speaker
And it's probably not as common that people are saying, I want to sleep better. Right. Right. That sounds a little specific. Yeah. Yeah. People are like, I want to feel better. I want more energy. I want to be happier. Those types of things, which they might not know is a big function of like sleep quality and kind of how their body's resting and repairing and things like this. Yeah. Yeah. So you can get almost indirect markers of how people are doing if you're checking on things like that, I see.
00:52:16
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you can improve people's sleep and you can improve HRV, man, you're, you're making a huge difference in that person's life. Right. Heart rate variability. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like a pretty good indicator of the health of the central nervous system and like a word, kind of a check on resiliency. So you want a higher number. Um, and the, the lower, you know, generally the HRV drops with age. Um,
00:52:44
Speaker
because we get older, it's like a rubber band gets kind of worn out over time. But it looks like these practices, meditation, likely these compounds and a lot of this other work, they help with this vagal tone, HRV, your ability to take stress, release stress, right? Go back into that parasympathetic state, recover, all that is really important for kind of overall health and wellbeing.
00:53:13
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see a lot of that as it's being collected too, because as we talked about earlier, I think a lot of interest is in around curing negative symptoms, depression, anxiety, all that stuff. But I think a lot of what you've been involved in, you say, is more positive psychology, looking at
00:53:31
Speaker
increasing function for normally functioning people. So I think... Yeah. Well, and I think too that, I mean, geez, the Western medical system, like, my God, man, it's so fundamentally broken. It's horrible. I mean, it's criminal in some ways. It's disgusting, you know? And there's parts of it that are good. I mean, in some ways we have, you know, maybe some of the most innovative healthcare, but like on average across the board for average person. I mean, it's terrible. It's not preventative at all.
00:54:00
Speaker
All it does is treat things once it gets to a crisis point where you look at many other countries, it's just a different model and it's more preventative.
00:54:10
Speaker
right? And I think we in the West have to move to a more preventative model where we teach people earlier how to take better care of themselves and get them the right food and we get them the right practices and we get in the right community. So we stop having to do these really expensive interventions that are often too late and are traumatic on their own. But the problem is, is the way the system set up right now is that there's a lot of people making a lot of fricking money off this dumb way of doing it, you know? And so it's going to be,
00:54:39
Speaker
it's gonna be challenging. But I think I'm an optimist. There's positive shifts that are happening. People are kind of starting to question the ways of the past. And so I think we'll see some positive shifts in the next 10 years.
00:54:56
Speaker
That's great. Well, maybe that's a good place to kind of wrap it up. You know, Markey, thank you so much. I'm going to ask you one last question. What are you really excited about going in the next upcoming month's year, you know, year plus, you know, that you guys are working on or that you're working on personally that you're just really excited about? I'm really excited that it just feels like the world is opened up to this work. And I think that there's tremendous benefit that can come through that. And I think that
00:55:26
Speaker
you know, all this change, all this challenge that we see in the world and all the change that we're hoping for, it starts with individuals, you know, and people taking better care of themselves and, you know, healing and, um, and then, you know, going back to their families, better husbands and sons and daughters and, and better members of the community. And it all starts trickling out, you know? And I think that we could be at this kind of watershed moment where, where we see some really positive shifts. I hope so.
00:55:57
Speaker
That's great. Well, Neil, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it.