EP.265 - LUCY WALKER

Adam talks with British/American documentarian Lucy Walker about being at the same school, psychedelic drug therapy and whether life's happiness curve is not a downwards slide to the end, but is actually 'U' shaped. Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on 04 September, 2024 Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support Podcast illustration by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/ Listen to Adam's album 'Buckle Up' https://adambuxton.lnk.to/BuckleUp Order Adam's book 'I Love You Byeee' https://lnk.to/iloveyoubyeee_ Sign up for the newsletter on Adam's website https://www.adam-buxton.co.uk/ (scroll down on homepage) RELATED LINKS LUCY WALKER WEBSITE https://lucywalkerfilm.com/ WASTELAND https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrlbdK28szs Directed by Lucy Walker - 2010 (YOUTUBE) DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xlKFkoB9Bg Directed by Lucy Walker - 2002 (YOUTUBE) BLINDSIGHT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMQraBQ3j2Y (OFFICIAL TRAILER) Directed by Lucy Walker - 2006 (YOUTUBE) THE TSUNAMI AND THE CHERRY BLOSSOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApPsxYpuhG4 (OFFICIAL TRAILER) Directed by Lucy Walker - 2011 (YOUTUBE) THE CRASH REEL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KkFZ-QC53Q(OFFICIAL TRAILER) Directed by Lucy Walker - 2013 (YOUTUBE) MOUNTAIN QUEEN: THE SUMMITS OF LHAKPA SHERPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yz5F9WtmsI (OFFICIAL TRAILER) Directed by Lucy Walker - 2024 (YOUTUBE) HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8LRb4jfZ9g (OFFICIAL TRAILER) Netflix 4-part series about the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs presented by Michael Pollan, directed by Lucy Walker and Alison Ellwood FAMOUS SCIENTIST OF 5-MeO-DMT AND INTEGRATED INFORMATION THEORY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V-5t0ZPY7E - 2025 (YOUTUBE) IS LIFE'S HAPPINESS CURVE REALLY U SHAPED? https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2015/jun/24/life-happiness-curve-u-shaped-ageing by Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman - 2015 (GUARDIAN) LYNCHIAN https://www.waterstones.com/book/lynchian/john-higgs/john-higgs/9781399637312?sv1=affiliate&sv_campaign_id=626889&awc=3787_1763410957_1236bfe35d631d699c30f7e9283b1044&utm_source=626889&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=adstrong by John Higgs - 2025 (WATERSTONES) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Adam Buxton?

  I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buckston, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, podcasters? It's Adam Buckston here. I'm reporting to you from a farm track in the east of England, Norfolk County. It's the middle of November 2025. 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. I got my gloves, I got my woolly hat, I got my thermal cycling top, I got my ski jacket. Dog Legs has got her furry coat on. That's Rosie, of course I'm referring to there. She's my best dog friend and one of the best people I know. She's half whippet, half poodle, all mensch.

• 1:14Adam Buxton?

  She is doing well, despite the fact that less than a week ago, she was at the vet 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. But she is a beautiful old lady. If you carry on patronising me like that, I'm going to puke. I apologise. It's good to see you're perkier though, Rosie. You were in trouble after the dentist, weren't you? Well, I was high on drugs, bleeding from the mouth, didn't understand why I was there in the first place. So, yeah, I'm doing better now.

• 1:57Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it was awful to see you unhappy, Rosie. 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. But you really don't like having your 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. I mean, you're making it sound very coercive. Anyway, I'm glad you're feeling better. Yeah, yeah. Can I have a chew now, please?

• 2:27Adam Buxton?

  Um, well, look, we need to talk about that. How are you doing anyway, podcats? 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. It's raining now. It suddenly started raining from nowhere. A big old cloud appeared. Nice rainbow over there. Got rains, we got planes. All right.

• 3:12Adam Buxton?

  Uh, so while she was in New York, Lucy, as well as studying, made a living as a DJ. She was quite a successful trendy DJ. 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. All the while, she was developing ideas for documentaries. Her first feature in 2002 was called Devil's Playground, which examined the struggles of Amish teenagers during Rumspringa,

• 3:50Adam Buxton?

  their period of experimentation when more wayward behaviour is tolerated before they are baptised and settle into church life as adults. 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, as he made an art piece in collaboration with garbage picking workers at the world's largest landfill outside Rio de Janeiro. 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. When the whole documentary is not available, I've put links to some of the trailers.

• 4:36Adam Buxton?

  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. Last year, 2024, saw the release of Lucy's ninth documentary feature, Mountain Queen, which told the story of Lhakpa Sherpa, a pioneering Nepali mountaineer who returns to Mount Everest to redeem her life's purpose and inspire her own daughters. Lucy was also one of the directors of a four-part Netflix series from 2022 called How to Change

• 5:17Adam Buxton?

  Your Mind, which explores the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs. 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. As you'll hear, Lucy herself is what is known as a psycho-naut. I hadn't heard that phrase before meeting Lucy. I guess I need to listen to more Joe Rogan. 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.

• 6:00Adam Buxton?

  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. 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 and commune with machine elves. That's the name given to the creatures that users of the drug DMT sometimes see during a trip.

• 6:36Adam Buxton?

  Oh, it's suddenly just gone heavily inclement. And yet, up ahead, it's blue sky. Big rainbow now. I'm soaked. My conversation with Lucy was recorded in September twenty twenty four, 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. I wrote about being at that school and the financial implications for my parents

• 7:19Adam Buxton?

  in my book, Ramble Book, but I also talked about the friends I made there. That's where I met several people who are close friends to this day, like Joe Cornish and Louis Theroux. 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. 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. And my friend's party last year was the first time that we had seen each other since we left Westminster. I left in nineteen eighty seven. I told her that I'd been following her career with great admiration,

• 8:00Adam Buxton?

  especially as she has 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. 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. 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.

• 8:43Adam Buxton?

  But right now with Lucy Walker, here we go.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Here's the thing is, I don't know what my accent's supposed to be. I didn't grow up knowing how I should speak. 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. And I sort of wound up, and 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 sixth form.

• 10:04Adam Buxton?

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

• 10:08Speaker 02

  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. I'd moved a few times, so I didn't know if I was supposed to be speaking with a London twang or at the time we'd have said Sloane Ranger yar or a sort of London-inflected RP. You know, I had all that, so I.

• 10:32Adam Buxton?

  Or for that matter, Mokni, there was a few Moknies at Westminster.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Were there?

• 10:37Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, of course, people who were embarrassed by their accent because we were in the centre of London.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:42Adam Buxton?

  You're not so isolated from the way people are and how they behave and how they speak. So you're suddenly aware like, ooh, we're posh or we sound posh.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, the class system, the accents, it's a, it's intense, isn't it? And when I got to New York, I. Was really young, I was twenty two, 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 like, God, I couldn't have time for that. I'm very pragmatic, so I'm like, just say it 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.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  And I will make some accommodations to that. 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 a certain, 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. And it veers around depending on who you're talking to and it's, it's like that mid Atlantic accent that we used to tease Madonna for. 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, they're famous for it. I, I can't think of another place that's like it in terms of having this kind of class

• 12:17Speaker 02

  accent, the RP trumps regional dialects, RP being received pronunciation, which is the posh accent.

• 12:25Adam Buxton?

  BBC pronunciation, hello.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:33Adam Buxton?

  That's very, very posh.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  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, the.

• 12:44Adam Buxton?

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

• 12:56Speaker 02

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

• 13:01Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Was something that I almost left the country to get away from because I found it so confining and moving to New York. New York at twenty two, the idea that people didn't have a story about me was really good. I went to New York to go to NYU for graduate film school on a Fulbright scholarship. It was fantastic. And.

• 13:22Adam Buxton?

  You're the queen of scholarships.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a good one. I cashed in all my academic chips and said I want to go to film school in New York and it worked.

• 13:32Adam Buxton?

  Wow.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  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 nineties. 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 taken over by a hedge fund people.

• 14:00Adam Buxton?

  Did you ever come across Bowie in New York?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  I did. I was about thirty and I met him a few times because we had some mutual friends for a bit. The first time I found myself sitting at a table at dinner, about eight people and two of them being Bowie and Iman. I was really having trouble keeping the feeling of the chair being under me. 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.

• 14:31Adam Buxton?

  I have a guitar with me and the, um, 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.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  I did, I did, I watched it. 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, in the years above me. And you and Joe and Louis and Zach all being quite striking creatures and very alive amongst yourselves and, and.

• 15:06Adam Buxton?

  That's how I describe myself, yes.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was fun to observe you as a younger person.

• 15:12Adam Buxton?

  I don't want to derail the Bowie.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  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 a fan of. 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. And it's sort of just very confusing.

• 15:35Adam Buxton?

  Did you talk to him?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bit, yeah. But it was all a bit. I didn't crack through to anything dynamic.

• 15:43Adam Buxton?

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

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, we weren't in a restaurant. We were, we were, I had to, I had that, I had, I wasn't in a restaurant, I was at a house. But yeah, the first time was at Anna Winter, editor of Vogue's House at an engagement dinner. So it's a bit different, but still, you feel terrible. You can't come up with anything interesting to say. And then you feel rather, just, it feels awful, doesn't it? I just felt rather disappointing all around. But we should talk about, i- i- 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, but ah.

• 16:25Adam Buxton?

  Were we.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Uncomfortable being interviewed.

• 16:27Adam Buxton?

  When we were together then, me and Jo and Louis and Zach, were we annoying?

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 16:34Adam Buxton?

  Oh, good.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Not at all. You seemed like a highly creative and how fun that you were doing art stuff in this academic context, right?

• 16:44Adam Buxton?

  Did you and I chat in those days?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  I think we did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a couple of memories of that.

• 16:51Adam Buxton?

  There wasn't that much cross pollination between the years.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  No, not at all, no.

• 16:55Adam Buxton?

  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. There was two years' worth of girls only.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  The gender ratio, I mean, the, the male to female ratio was, was it four to one, five to one, something like that?

• 17:15Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Three to one, four to one, probably four to one.

• 17:17Adam Buxton?

  Couldn't have been easy being a girl coming into that all male environment in the sixth form. You've got all these sixteen year old boys around you.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  I tell you what was really easy, and I think that Westminster was a bit different because we were all, it was a school of.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  So spooky, smart people generally, weren't we?

• 17:38Adam Buxton?

  Speak for yourself. I think the girls were.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Well, here you are, fabulous, successful, et cetera, doing yourself down, you British people, self denigrating. You've got to move to America, pump yourself, fully grown smoke, here and there.

• 17:53Adam Buxton?

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

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:58Adam Buxton?

  The girls were in a different class in that way, too, because they had.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, super selective, yeah, super selective.

• 18:07Adam Buxton?

  They'd been through a much more rigorous.

• 18:09Speaker 02

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

• 18:50Speaker 02

  And it was, for me, a lot. And I'd come from the countryside and I hadn't had, I didn't know anybody from this sort of milieu. And I took up smoking instantly, even though I kind of hated it. 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 smoking in the girls' loo, and that's probably how we all bonded.

• 19:12Adam Buxton?

  There was a lot of smoking, I remember.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Oh, a lot of smoking and drinking, you know, just all that. So, and frankly, drug taking, which became a real problem for a lot of.

• 19:24Adam Buxton?

  Oh, really? 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.

• 19:32Speaker 02

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

• 19:40Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  But several others are like big N A goers still today.

• 19:46Adam Buxton?

  Heroin?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:47Adam Buxton?

  Blimey, I wasn't aware of that in our year, I must say.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Uh I perhaps your year didn't quite have it to the extent that mine did. I definitely smoked a tremendous amount of pot. I would say I smoked my tits off from sixteen to nineteen.

• 20:02Adam Buxton?

  But you didn't have any heroin?

• 20:04Speaker 02

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

• 20:09Adam Buxton?

  I mean, that's in the late eighties. 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. I won't have any of that.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  No, I was with you. I I uh I was absolutely with you. I did experiment with LSD and psilocybin and MDMA, which uh I think very interesting.

• 20:29Adam Buxton?

  In your late teens?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:31Adam Buxton?

  Really?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:34Adam Buxton?

  God, that's so precocious. I mean, I I that just, I didn't know anyone who was doing anything like that.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  But on the bright side, I have to say, I 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. And we just had so much freedom. I was boarding. So we had these like incredible house in Westminster, you know, the only downside of which you could hear Big Ben every fifteen minutes.

• 21:04Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Uh the ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong.

• 21:09Adam Buxton?

  I remember that so clearly from my first night there.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, every fifteen minutes.

• 21:14Adam Buxton?

  Thinking like, is this a joke?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 21:17Adam Buxton?

  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? Is it gonna be like this every night? With this big rook gang going absolutely squawky? And it was so loud. But within the week, I'd screened it out and I don't think about it ever anymore. Sometimes people come to visit and go, whoa, loud rooks. And I'm like, oh, I don't notice it. And it was like that with.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Big Ben.

• 21:50Adam Buxton?

  Big Ben.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 21:52Adam Buxton?

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

• 21:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:00Adam Buxton?

  You're pretty impressive, I must say.

• 22:02Speaker 02

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

• 22:09Adam Buxton?

  Tell me the unimpressive things, because so far on the surface of it, you've made ten, you've made ten films.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Well, I failed to procreate. I'm like, I've completely failed in the, you know, 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. I had infertility, which turned out to be cancer. So it was, you know, I had, I have excuses. But other people figured it out. I haven't figured out the, I haven't figured out that bit. 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. I didn't quite intend it to be this unconventional in terms of still behaving like I'm about twenty four generally. But maybe that's a good thing.

• 22:52Adam Buxton?

  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.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably.

• 23:00Adam Buxton?

  You're fifty four.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Oh, shh, cut that bit out.

• 23:04Adam Buxton?

  You, you don't look fifty four. You don't have the kind of life that most fifty four year olds have.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  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 twenty two and I kind of missed a lot of that stuff. And I went to a wedding. It was, it was the wedding of someone who'd actually been to Westminster. Although I'd been thrown out before I got there, but somehow, even though I'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. And it was like an acid trip in which everyone I knew was dressed as their fat parents.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  I was like, and there was one guy who said, Lucy. And I said, yes. And he said, um, didn't you study English with this particular teacher? And I said, yes. 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. And now he's a judge. And he grinned at me. And I said, wait.

• 24:20Adam Buxton?

  Your honour.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  And of course, we were 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? 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.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Well, I've made this amazing film, which I hope will come out about ibogaine.

• 25:05Adam Buxton?

  Ibogaine.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Ibogaine is, yeah, comes from iboga, which is 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. It's kind of absolutely remarkable. Nobody knows how it does it, but it does do that. And it's very powerful and it's just beginning to be studied. But a lot of people with substance use disorder will turn to it and, and have this experience that it restores the power of choice so that they can quit drugs. But it's very interesting. So I've made a whole film about, about this, actually.

• 25:46Adam Buxton?

  When did ibogaine become a thing?

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Well, it was discovered in 1972 by this one guy, Howard Lotsoff, in New York. He was just a kind of, I said just, but there were quite a few young psychonauts and they weren't legal back then, just experimenting with different chemicals. And he had also been playing around with heroin and he's 19, he's just gotten addicted to heroin, when he tried this drug and observed that he didn't want heroin, which was very surprising because he should have been going into withdrawal. 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. Instead, he's associated with death and thought of it as something to just

• 26:33Speaker 02

  avoid. And he remembered that he really wanted to live. And it was such a... Astounding one eighty for him, that he got a hold of some more and gave it to some other people who were addicted.

• 26:47Adam Buxton?

  Ibogaine, not heroin.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Ibogaine, yeah, exactly. Deliberately gave it to them.

• 26:51Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  And they too had that experience, seven people, that they didn't want to use again. And so he dedicated his whole life to trying to get um the government and doctors to pay attention to the potential of this. And the film's about that. I hope it can come out. We've just about finished it and we did some sneak peeks of it, but it's a Trebekka Film Festival.

• 27:14Adam Buxton?

  Why hasn't Ibogaine been more of a?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Well, there's been this whole psychedelic repression. So nineteen seventy Nixon scheduled everything. And sort of forced the rest of the world, you know, most of it to do the same. 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 Cary Grant, all these people for interesting, you know, psychological help sessions, right? And they're experimenting with LSD and mushrooms have this whole other history of sacred and therapeutic and spiritual use, right? And Nixon's 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. And they are disruptive

• 27:59Speaker 02

  to society, I think, these drugs, you know, I think the sixties was a time of enormous kind of mind opening that you can trace to those drugs. 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. I think about our parents being so repressed, right? And that that post-war generation having such trouble articulating emotion and actually really tragically, I think, you know, hindered their happiness and connectedness, right? And connectedness with kids and stuff. I think about our generation. I think about all that MDMA, all that E that we were taking. Do you remember when they

• 28:43Speaker 02

  head of Scotland Yard, they said defending why they couldn't sort of stop E in the um sort of New Summer of Love and all that sort of stuff around the late eighties, early nineties was like, 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 twenty million pills being popped a week in the UK or something like that. But I think about. Our generation, I look at our generation of dads and how much more involved and emotionally available and emotionally showing up. And I think about all these lovely, honest conversations we're having and um and how cool we are actually with our kids.

• 29:22Adam Buxton?

  I mean, that is, that's the positive spin.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely.

• 29:25Adam Buxton?

  There's obviously a negative one if you cared to make it. Well, I mean, that psychedelics and recreational drugs frequently turn out to have negative effects.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  You know, less than you think, you know, because I've, because I made a whole series about this, it's all on Netflix. So the, the sort of night and night about I begin is not out. But what is out and it's on Netflix is a series called How to Change Your Mind. It's got four episodes, one about LSD, one about magic mushrooms, active ingredient. So you could call it psilocybin, one about MDMA, AKA ecstasy or E, and one about basically mescaline, well, mescaline containing cacti, chiefly peyote, also San Pedro. So I also sort of studied this and made a whole series about this. Um, and I'm actually also doing, tomorrow I'm going to Imperial College to do a.

• 30:17Adam Buxton?

  Load of drugs.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Um, load of drugs as part of a research trial, actually, which is my second research trial. I was also in a trial where they um injected me with extended state D M T.

• 30:27Adam Buxton?

  Holy Moses. Because D M T normally lasts for fifteen minutes or something.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:34Adam Buxton?

  So you got.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  You get injected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:37Adam Buxton?

  How long does that last?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Well, obviously, you know, infin- infinity. I mean, you know, it's like, you do lose track of time in there and it may as well be eternity. Um, but uh, yeah, about an hour.

• 30:49Adam Buxton?

  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.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  I have a really, I've been meditating since I was twenty and I think that's really helped me. But I also have a really firm trust in the process of taking 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.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  That actually I sort of made, 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. I think you can have a bad trip if you freak yourself out that you are having a bad trip. 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. I was once, you know, on a heroic dose of mushrooms, for example, and I decided to do a body scan.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  And in my body, I found death, which could be not what you want to find.

• 32:15Adam Buxton?

  How do you mean body scan?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  I was sort of just thinking, I was sort of playing this game where I thought, oh, I'll scan my body. And I, and I saw death, which is not what you want to find when you're looking inside your body and you've had cancer in your sister's eye and all this kind of stuff. But actually, I, instead of thinking, ah, it's death, come for me, terrifying screaming, get me out of here, not death. I was like, ooh, how interesting. And I had no death and there were good music was playing. I started having a little dance with death. I realized that life is nothing but a dance with death. 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. So that sort of approach, you know, just embrace and what you might, might come up

• 33:00Speaker 02

  that's makes you fearful, but with curiosity and openness, 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. You are going in and you are voyaging to realms that not many people have had the privilege to do. I mean, you really are.

• 33:19Adam Buxton?

  So that is actually what you're going to do tomorrow?

• 33:20Speaker 02

  And tomorrow I am actually doing one of those. Yeah. Tomorrow I'm doing five M E O D M T, which is different intranasally. And before I did extended state and M D M T.

• 33:29Adam Buxton?

  How long does that last, the one that you're going to do tomorrow?

• 33:32Speaker 02

  I don't know. I'll 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 done thorough reporting of it. So I think we're really in our infancy of understanding it. Um, there's also the idea that there are machine elves in there and people have these fantastic entity encounters.

• 34:02Adam Buxton?

  They feel that they've met, when they're tripping, they suddenly meet these kind of extradimensional beings.

• 34:09Speaker 02

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

• 34:14Adam Buxton?

  Suddenly you've opened a portal.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, are they conjured by our brain? Is it, 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. Um, 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.

• 34:36Adam Buxton?

  Are you able to control your thoughts then, when you're in there?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  The last, uh, experiment that I did was extended D M T so intravenously. And, uh, every minute you, you've got headphones and every minute the researcher's voice comes on and says, uh, intensity one through 10, entities, yes or no? And so you have to report and if you can't speak for more than two of the consecutively of these, if you can't speak for more than two minutes, they kind of pull you out, altered state style.

• 35:07Adam Buxton?

  Nice.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  And, uh, the first couple of minutes of the last experiment that I participated in, I couldn't speak for the first two minutes. I mean, it was just sort of like the roller coaster was just shooting downhill so fast and, uh,

• 35:21Adam Buxton?

  Could you even hear them?

• 35:23Speaker 02

  I don't know, you actually sort of black, blackout. It was so, it was so intense, you blackout. And it's a very, very high dose. They kind of tipped you off the diving board in that case 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, there 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. So I, 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. I find it absolutely fascinating and the privilege of doing it in, like you said, a very, very safe context

• 36:05Speaker 02

  in a hospital bed with experts around you and lots of like machines there to, you know, resuscitate you, et cetera. Not that you need it because they're kind of physi- physiologically pretty safe. But um, I've 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. 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. And I've had, you know, partly of course, because I've made a series about them, but I made a series about psychedelics

• 36:48Speaker 02

  because I'd had positive experiences with them. 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. And so I wanted to do it. Because I felt like I want, 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. But even just as a like very high dose ketamine, a K-hole, if you're very safe, et cetera, is the most fascinating psychological experience. And I began, I found it fantastically therapeutic. So I have had this sort of privilege of experiencing these things and also.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Making films about them. And I guess that is, as a documentary filmmaker, it's not very objective, you know, and it is also sort of way of having an interesting life. 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 fantastic thing to do, whatever it is. I'm definitely not an Everest mountain climber. But yeah, I'm absolutely fascinated by psychedelics.

• 37:57Adam Buxton?

  I mean, it is absolutely fascinating, but, but.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  But I say you'd find it fascinating, too.

• 38:01Adam Buxton?

  I'm sure. I, I, 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 favorite films. And I responded to it when I saw it so much because it did tap into a lot of my fears of just going to some mad place mentally and then not being able to get back. I mean, when you talk about the dangers.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should talk about that. That, that's actually much less than you think. We had somebody in our class at school who sadly didn't come back. And I think weed is actually, you know, in a way, perhaps in his case, more 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

• 39:06Speaker 02

  diet. 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 what if generally psychedelics could be helpful in addressing all those things? And I think that there's tremendous promise there for psychedelics. And I hope that the research continues to go, which is why I'm sort of personally contributing to it. 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 I think in general, it's possible that there is many more people who are managing

• 39:50Speaker 02

  mental health challenges that could otherwise really

• 39:53Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I believe that.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:55Adam Buxton?

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

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's quite, there's quite a lot of checks and stuff like that.

• 40:05Adam Buxton?

  Of what your

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And you have to have a note.

• 40:09Adam Buxton?

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

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, you might not be eligible for this stuff, but there's a, but in general, I think that you uh you assume that you couldn't

• 40:22Speaker 02

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

• 40:29Adam Buxton?

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

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:38Adam Buxton?

  But they tend to be people who 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.

• 40:48Speaker 02

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

• 41:15Adam Buxton?

  I believe it.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:16Adam Buxton?

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

• 41:20Speaker 03

  It's a compulsion that leads you to explore that leading edge of the

• 41:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, just do a curiosity seek and looking at the idiosyncrasies of things.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  A mountain or a tree is the manifestation of forces that we are not capable of dealing with. I'm very drunk in this.

• 41:59Adam Buxton?

  You sent 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? 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.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:16Adam Buxton?

  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. I said, I hoped my life was following a similar trajectory. And you sent me a link to an article from The Economist in 2010.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Well, there's lots of them. That was just the first image. I just image searched the U bend of happiness or something.

• 42:43Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, there you go.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  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. 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 aged people.

• 43:16Adam Buxton?

  It is 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.

• 43:23Speaker 02

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

• 43:25Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, U bend. It's all based on various studies about happiness. I mean, I always feel you have to take some of these with a pinch of salt because how do you really measure happiness? There's so many variables. But broadly speaking, they all do seem to agree that a lot of the time.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:42Adam Buxton?

  There is this curve that takes place and you dip in the middle, which is good news for me because I definitely felt the dip. And I'm.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I did too. I thought 30s were really difficult.

• 43:54Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I thought they were tough, man. Looking back, plus also the way I responded to them, I'm not proud of. Do you know what I mean? Like. I didn't, I was not my best self. Would you concur with that or did you?

• 44:07Speaker 02

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

• 44:12Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I mean, it's not like I'm absolutely brilliant now, but I, I do look back particularly at that, at my thirties.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Oh, you are tough. You're very tough on yourself, aren't you? Oh, yeah, no, me too, totally.

• 44:25Adam Buxton?

  But it's nice to read this thing about the, the old U-bend. 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, and that in turn makes them unhappy. So I, I mean, I do think I'm probably neurotic, pretty sure, but I don't, I've, I've always felt like my emotional intelligence was fairly reasonable.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  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, at school that thought that you were, you, you were one of the very cool.

• 45:06Adam Buxton?

  And it was sorted.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Fascinating creatures. You had everything sorted because you were seventeen.

• 45:11Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, well, that's true. That's true. I think I did have it sorted then. I'm looking forward to the upswing of the U-bend.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:19Adam Buxton?

  As long as I find out the meaning of life by going on an infinite D M T trip.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  I don't know. I'll have to report back on this one. I, I'm not entirely, I'm not sure what this one will hold.

• 45:30Adam Buxton?

  Holy Moses. What time are you doing it?

• 45:32Speaker 02

  I have to be there at nine twenty.

• 45:33Adam Buxton?

  Nine twenty?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Nine twenty. It takes, 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. So it's quite funny that you have this sort of appointment for a kind of peak spiritual experience.

• 45:46Adam Buxton?

  The god molecule.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:48Adam Buxton?

  I'll be doing a poo and then going to Liverpool Street Station around that time. It's my god molecule.

• 46:12Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back, podcast. That was Lucy Walker, talking to me there. Very grateful indeed to Lucy for coming and sitting down and chatting with me. I've put links to some of her documentaries. Couple of them will take you to the films in their entirety. Others are links to the trailers. But I think one of the links is to the film Wasteland. About the Brazilian artist collaborating on an art piece with workers at the giant Brazilian landfill site known as Jardim Gramacho. Just outside Rio de Janeiro.

• 46:52Adam Buxton?

  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. Is ultimately in their best interests. It's a really interesting doc. Just one of many that Lucy has made. 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 five MEO DMT trip went that she was having the morning after we spoke. She said she couldn't really remember. It was a long time ago and she said it was actually kind of a personally turbulent time for her

• 47:38Adam Buxton?

  at that point in her life. So it rather overwhelmed the DMT experience. So anyway, I guess she came back alright. Certainly think you've got to be really careful with that. And shouldn't go experimenting in 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 Christoph Koch.

• 48:15Adam Buxton?

  And he describes his experience on five M E O D M T. 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.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Bright light, no self, no Kristoff, no memories, no thought, no future, no past, no time, no space. There was just terror and ecstasy.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  What if you're one of the world's most famous neuroscientists, having studied consciousness theoretically all of your life? And then you have this profound transcendent experience?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  It felt like a near-death experience.

• 48:53Adam Buxton?

  In how many seconds?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Free breath, my field of view start breaking up into hexagonals, black. And I couldn't take the force breath anymore because I was going down this black hole.

• 49:04Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, thanks, I'm fine, I'm fine for the moment. Never say never, but certainly in the short term, I'll hold off, thank you so much. You can find out more information about Lucy's films on her website, which I have linked to in the description as well. Someone who never took psychedelic drugs, perhaps surprisingly, given some of the imagery in his films, was the director David Lynch. I think he had a couple of joints when he was younger, but mainly it was the odd glass of wine, lot of coffee, lot of cigarettes, and for a seven-year period of his life,

• 49:45Adam Buxton?

  a very sugary milkshake every day at a diner called Bob's Big Boy in Los Angeles. I just finished reading a very enjoyable little book about David Lynch by a friend of the podcast, John Higgs. The book is called Lynchian: The Spell of David Lynch. I'm quoting from the blurb now. David Lynch in January twenty twenty five produced an extraordinary outpouring of love and grief that revealed how deeply he mattered. And actually, Richard Iawadi, 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.

• 50:30Adam Buxton?

  In life, Lynch was a willfully obtuse cult filmmaker who had been unable to get a film financed for the last two decades of his life. 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? 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. We will discover why ambiguity and mystery are so seductive, how Lynch's creative and meditative practices overlapped.

• 51:11Adam Buxton?

  And why a director whose work contains so much abuse of women has such a female skewing fanbase.

• 51:20Adam Buxton?

  Getting a phone call here which is suspected spam. Hello?

• 51:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, good app. So I'm calling you from Tesco Mobile Network. How are you doing today?

• 51:30Adam Buxton?

  Where, sorry, where are you calling from?

• 51:33Speaker 05

  Calling you from Tesco Mobile Network, right?

• 51:36Adam Buxton?

  Oh.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, the reason of my call is as you know Tesco and O2 are collaborating with each other, right? So the SIM card we are using right now, it will be stopped working next four to five days. So we are here to provide you a new five G boosted SIM card without any kind of changes or charges at your doorstep, right?

• 51:55Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 51:55Speaker 05

  Alright, perfect. Alright, sir, so you just confirmed me. Are you facing any kind of signal issues like bad reception and bad internet from our side?

• 52:03Adam Buxton?

  No, I don't think so.

• 52:05Speaker 05

  Everything will be okay.

• 52:08Adam Buxton?

  I hope so.

• 52:09Speaker 05

  Perfect. Alright, sir, let me check in my system. Stay with me online. Let me proceed your application further.

• 52:15Adam Buxton?

  I'm gonna end that call. 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. My son Nat said, let's watch Twin Peaks. He's seen it before. And he couldn't believe that I'd never seen it. Well, I've been reading John Higgs's book and been thinking a lot about David Lynch after his death, one way or the other. So I thought, yeah, great. Let's give it a go. And we watched only the pilot episode so far. It's feature length episode of Twin Peaks. And I must say, I struggled and remembered why I think I started watching it when it came out in the nineties and then didn't stick with it.

• 53:01Adam Buxton?

  I was put off by, well, I was put off by the fact that it's the subject matter is so grim. Starts with the 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 so many others. But yeah, I found that too grim really and couldn't adjust to the soapy tone of the whole thing. I am assured by Nat that we just need to stick with it and then everything's going to click. Anyway, we'll see. But it's certainly the big gap in my appreciation of David Lynch.

• 53:41Adam Buxton?

  But anyway, if you're a fan or just Lynch curious, then I really recommend John Higgs's book, Lynchian. 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. 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, for exploring another episode. And before you go back out there, I got you something. It's a creepy hug. Hey, how you doing? Good to see you. And until next time, we share the same sonic space.

• 54:24Adam Buxton?

  Please go carefully out there, and for what it's worth, I love you. Bye! Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. I shake a pan when me bums up. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. I shake a pan when me bums up. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. I shake a pan when me bums up. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up.

• 55:08Adam Buxton?

  I shake a pan when me bums up. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  Please like and subscribe.

• 56:03Speaker 05

  Everything will be okay.

• 56:06Adam Buxton?

  I hope so.