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[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at [Music] arcades.in conversations withth
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tyler.com [Music] I'm here today with Michael pollen at UC Berkeley Michael is most recently the author of how to change your mind what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about Consciousness dying addiction
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depression and Transcendence every word in that subtitle is indeed important this is a broad book a very important book it has skyrocketed to being a number one bestseller Michael has many other achievements he is one of our very
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best and most widely read food writers he is faculty at Berkeley and Harvard and has written books on building gardening and many other topics Michael welcome thank you Tyler good to be here my first question your book considers psychedelics and the benefits we might
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reap from psychedelics if people have a status quo bias that they're not so willing to try new things what other kind of Freel lunch changes should we make with our minds or do you think there's just this one psychedelics I
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don't know what you mean by Freel lunch changes things we could do that would be as simple as taking micro do say that would make us much more open or smarter or less depressed that I guess meditation is is a very important thing
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that's available to everybody you can get download an app to learn how to do it and uh you know it's been shown to reduce blood pressure and and and I found in my own practice it's uh it's it's you know a good way to reduce
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stress so I mean that's pretty free lunch it's about as free lunch as it gets you just need 20 minutes you have to invest time which is actually hard for people so it's meditation and psychedelics but otherwise I'm sure given some time I could come up with
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other things eating differently uh is a free lunch change it's a lunch change but I think in terms of if we're talking about people's emotional well-being or psychological well-being I think one of the areas that we have much to learn
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about is the links between mood and food the the kind of junk food diet you know this this energy dense food that we're eating lots of carbohydrates puts people on an emotional roller coaster and I'm sure it's tied to their insulin levels
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and things like that and that uh a healthy diet tends to make people feel better I don't know that this has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of a social scientist yet but but I do think that there are enormous gains exercise
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is another one oh there's God there's a whole list as good social scientists we want to look for the cross-sectional variation so I once remarked that John lennin benefited from psychedelics more than Paul McCartney did Paul McCartney
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was into Studio expertise Len needed a certain kind of creativity what do you think are the cross-sectional claims about who benefits most is it the complacent or the young who are already creative and looking to take some more chances yeah
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that's a good question um well and it's and I think it's people struggling with certain kinds of mental illness too benefit the most I mean demonstrating creativity is very difficult first I don't know that we have a good
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definition of creativity there have been efforts to study the impact of psychedelics on creativity and there's lots of anecdotal evidence uh people report I mean Steve Jobs famously reported it had an influence on him steuart brand I mean there's a whole lot
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of uh engineers in Silicon Valley there are a lot of artists there are theoretical physicists who have reported that it helped them with their work biologists Carrie Mullis famously you know said he uh he saw the structure he
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had the Insight that allowed him to come up with PCR the the the method for polymeris chain reaction reproducing DNA and during an LSD experience this is all anecdotal it'd be really interesting to figure out how to study it uh I I tend
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to think that it makes sense that there would be a an effect in that psychedelics disrupts the grooves of habit and habitual thought and if creativity somehow involves reaching for nonobvious so-called hotter searches to
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use an AI term ones further out in the space of Po possibility which have a a lesser chance of being successful but sometimes include the most radical new solutions to problems uh it appears that psychedelics encourages the brain in
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that direction but I would say in terms of those who stand to gain the most it's people struggling with habit negative habits habits of thought habits of behavior whether it's addiction or a depressive mode of thinking Obsession
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things like eating disorders I will I would bet will yield to this it's people on this end of the mental Spectrum where they're overly rigid in their thinking anecdotally if I look at the history of popular music I see Donovan Jefferson
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Airplane the early birds as possibly having benefited from psychedelics Grateful Dead Grateful Dead find it harder to find examples from the history of painting and it even seems to me psychedelics might make bad poets worse
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do you agree I think it makes bad painters worse I can say that with some confidence in general uh if you just search psychedelic art on online you'll see some real crap uh I think I don't know why I think it's very hard to do in terms of poets
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that's a good question uh a lot of it depends on your opinion of Alan Ginsburg I guess though that's what I was referring to okay well yeah I mean he he wrote some really terrible poetry he wrote a couple great poems but you know
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I think if you picked one of his poems at random but can we blame that all on psychedelics he may have been writing bad poetry before psychedelics let me try a very philosoph opical question let's say I could take a pill or a
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substance and it would make everything seem profound my receptivity to finding things profound would go up greatly I could do very small events and it would seem profound to me is that in fact real profundity that I'm experiencing doesn't
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real profundity somehow require Excavating or experiencing things from actual society and our psychedelics like taking this pill they don't give you real profundity you just feel that many things are profound but at the end of
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The Experience you don't really have I guess it depends if you define profundity or the profound as exceptional you have a point but I I think one of the things that's very interesting about psychedelics is that you know our brains are tuned for
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novelty right I mean we and for good reason it's very adaptive to be to respond to new things in the environment changes in your environment threats in your environment and we're tuned to disregard the familiar or take it for
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granted which is indeed what most of us do one of the things that happens on psychedelics and on cannabis interestingly enough and there's some science on it in the case of cannabis I don't think we've done this science yet with psychedelics is that the familiar
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suddenly takes on greater weight and there's an appreciation of the familiar I think a lot of familiar things are profound if looked at in the proper way so I think the the feelings of love I have for people in my family are
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profound but I don't always feel that profundity I think psychedelics kind of changes that balance and I I talk in the book about having emotions that it could be on Hallmark cards and we don't think of Hallmark cards as being profound but
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in fact a lot of those sentiments are properly regarded so I think I I wouldn't discount I mean yes there are those moments you know youve you you you you've smoked cannabis and you're looking at your hand and you go man hands they're they're incredible and
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you're you're just taken with this is that profound or not it sounds really goofy but I think the line between fund and banality is is a lot finer than we than we think you mentioned the bach Jello suets in your work so one way you
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might try to get a more profound understanding of them is to listen to them with a score you could buy many recordings of them try to hear them in concert you could try to learn to play them yourself I've done that with two of
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them for guitar and at the end of that experience I felt I have a more profound understanding of them yeah or you could listen to them under the influence of psychedelics right but in the latter case are you actually coming away with a
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better understanding of the Box Jello Suites well yes and no I mean I you know I think what you're getting at is that it feels to us descendants of purans that it's cheating to use a pill to achieve any kind of important mental
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effect and that's a that's a point of view I mean it's at a point of view there is a sense in which using drugs to achieve any of this stuff is a shortcut ditto with meditation meditation is is is really hard work to get to a point of
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a Kind Of Consciousness that you can get to pretty quickly with psychedelics does that make meditation better most of us feel instinctively it does all I'm just saying is we should we should question the assumptions behind that I'm not sure
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either way the fact is any big experience mental experience is mediated by chemicals and so is the distinction between the endogenous and the exogenous ones should that be so important you know and I'm not sure of the answer I
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mean I think you would have a more lasting appreciation of what's going on I mean just like you read a poem five times you're going to understand it in a different way it's going to be somewhat more intellectual perhaps and a little
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less emotional so there there's a kind of understanding that I had of B I mean I'm incapable of reading sheet music I can't play an instrument I could go to a lot of concerts and I was disappointed to learn I'm going to miss yoi Ma's
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going to be performing them right here in Berkeley at the end of the month and I'm going to be out of town but the powerful emotional connection to that music and I can't even use the word connection cuz I was identical to it in
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this experience that kind of listening I don't know that that's available any other way feel free to pass on this one but Timothy ly once wrote that sex was the major advantage or Revelation from taking LSD do you have an opinion on this as a
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scientist you know I i' I know that quote and it's always surprised me there's something asexual about the experience I think and sex was very important to liri you know whether it involved anything talk LSD alcohol he was a highly sexualized person and the LSD experience is highly constructed right so maybe for him it was but my sense and the sense of other people is that that's not what you're thinking about and and afterward you're kind of a
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little too tired to think about so I I'd be curious what other people think but it it's not something I've run into nor have I found an erotic charge I was interviewing somebody recently who was a uh a rabbi who had taken uh had a
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profound mystical experience on psychedelics there's a really interesting study going on at Hopkins at NYU now where they're giving psilocybin into religious professionals it's a little vague on exactly why but I think they're curious to know whether they'll
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find evidence of a perennial philosophy some kind of Common Core of religious experience which is an interesting idea it was Aldis huxley's idea and also when maybe it would help them with burnout there are lots of religious people who
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get so absorbed in the work of running an organization and ministering to people people that the spiritual Dimension diminishes that that at least I think is their assumption and this woman talked about having an encounter
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with the Divine her idea the go God and this merging with it and and I asked her and someone else who'd interviewed many of these volunteers had said that many people describe being ravished by the Divine which I thought was well that's a
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pretty erotic term and I asked her if in her case there was any kind of erotic charge it was a funny question to ask a rabbi about their uh SS I've an experienced but um and she said no not at all it wasn't like that at all so
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it's something that I'm alert to but I think that my guess is L is unique in that I've never myself tried psychedelics but I've asked the question well if I were to try how would I think about what is the stopping point so for
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my own life I have a sense I like actually to do the same things over and over again read books yeah eat food spend time with friends you can just keep on doing them basically till you die and I I feel I'm in a very good groove on all of those
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and if you take it and say find it entrancing ores or attractive what the process how do you model what happens next yeah well that's one of the really interesting things about them you have this you have this big experience often
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positive not always though and I had on balance all the experience I describe in the book with the with one notable exception uh were very positive experiences but I did not have a powerful desire to do it again it it doesn't have that self-reinforcing
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quality you know the the dopamine release I don't know what it is that comes with things that we like doing you know eating and sex and sleeping and all this kind of stuff that you and your first thought after a big psychedelic
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experience is not work when can I do it again it's like do I ever have to do it again and um it doesn't sound fun though or well I don't what am I missing it's not fun it's not fun it's I mean for me it's not fun I think their doses where
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that might apply I mean kind of low dose so-called creational dose that when people take some mushrooms and go to a concert and they're high you know essentially but the kind of experience I'm describing is a lot more well I
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won't use the word profound um because we've charged that one but um that is a very internal and difficult Journey that has moments of incredible beauty and lucidity um but also has dark moments um moments of contemplating death nothing
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you would describe as recreational except in the the actual meaning of the word which is never used you know it's not addictive and I think that's one of the reasons and there I I did just talk to someone though who came up to me at a
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book signing a guy probably in his 70s and he said I've got to tell you about the time I took LSD 16 days in a row and that was striking you know you can meet plenty of people who have had marijuana or a drink 16 days in a row but that was
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extraordinary and I don't know why he did it I I'm curious to find out exactly what he got out of it but in general uh there's a lot of space that passes now for the Grateful Dead I don't know maybe it was a nightly thing for them
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but for most people it doesn't seem to be but say I I tried it and I found it fascinating but not fun shouldn't I then think there's something wrong with me that the fascinating is not fun shouldn't I like downgrade my curiosity
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or my are there many fascinating things that aren't fun I all the ones I know I find fun this is what's striking to me about your answer it's very surprising I think it's the it's the the lightness of the word fun that I object to I mean it
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was uh deep fun pleasure there and there was pleasure there were moments of great pleasure of just being overwhelmed by the beauty of things of you know you mentioned that that my engagement with that Bach unaccompanied cell Suites it
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wasn't fun it was bigger than that it was but it was deeply pleasurable it was uh it was ecstatic in a sense so there there are moments of ecstasy so so ecstatic you don't want to do it again it's almost like the sublime in 18th
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century Aesthetics it's it is like the terrible it is it is um beautiful and terrible at the same time and and I think it is the sublime is a very good frame to to understand it it's it's a kind of awe that can be overwhelming and
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we do seek out awesome experience but it's if you did it every day it wouldn't be awesome so the issue of Personality change there's evidence that may help people with depression Scott Alexander cites a study he interprets it as some
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psychedelics they increase your openness in terms of five Factor personality theory up to about half a standard deviation which is a large effect because people's personalities don't change much after a certain age do you agree with this evidence I can't agree
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or disagree the the study in question hasn't been reproduced so I would be you know I have an open mind about that there was another study recently done in England that looked at personality change and found some changes on other
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metrics too including n ISM um I wasis going down up up I think it was up well theime ought to do that to you right no but um uh and it also found some evidence of openness but it was one of these take you know it's a very small
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sample you know I didn't look at the statistical analysis very closely um but it's it's it's interesting it's it coincides with what people report whether that's a strong enough study to hang our hats on I'm not sure but let's
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say had this fear so five Factor personality theory only captures a small amount of what people are like any Theory yeah so we know or we don't know but it's at least possible one part of your personality changes there are many
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other parts of your personality we don't measure we can't measure it would seem weird if only one part of you changed that quite possibly three four other more parts of you are changing you don't know what it's going to be if you like
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how you are and you're risk averse why go down this path yeah I think that you have to to be open to the idea that you could be better and that on the and certainly on the dimension of openness I think most of us could stand to be somewhat more
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open as we as we age I think we tend to get stuck in grooves and ideologies and and uh get less good at considering other points of view uh and plus points of view come up that didn't exist when our personalities were formed right and
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new information the our environment changes so being open seems to me I think I think we all have room for improvement on that Dimension lowering neuroticism if indeed that is the case that seems like a positive I mean I like
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myself too and I I was pretty satisfied with who I was but I had some problems with being so satisfied with who I was so so I was kind of open and I you know I had a lot of curiosity but I guess I didn't set out to change myself I set
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out to learn about myself so it was a kind of aspiration you didn't know what would be at the end of the path but you felt you wanted to be at a somewhat different point yeah I mean you know well it was several things it was
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Journal journalistic curiosity very important driver of this whole project and you know that curiosity is not necessarily about personal change right it's just kind of how how we think it was also realizing that there was
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something perhaps missing in my life uh that these people I was interviewing had uh which was a much stronger sense of spiritual experience spirituality than I had I really saw that as an undeveloped dimension of my character and a rejected
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dimension of my character I was very suspicious of spirituality I you know I I I saw it as I'm very materialist in my Outlook I realized and I I saw spiritual as a synonym for Supernatural and I didn't I don't accept anything Supernatural and but I was so even now
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you don't believe in God well as defined how I mean you know I'm I'm I don't believe there's a being in the sky there's a betting Market on in trade does God exist yeah how's that going no I'm joking uh I guess I give one in 20
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odds that God exists but you're not because that's high that's very high and what about for an afterlife lower lower I think absolutely yeah there could be a god sound like a Jewish are you worried about dogmatism so some people after psychedelics you
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get the feeling they say well I've seen how things really are and that makes me suspicious so maybe we're measuring openness incorrectly that some forms of their openness go up but other forms go down and with respect to their own
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psychedelic experiences they're more dogmatic what's your view yeah I mean one of the related Paradox is ego dissolution versus ego inflation people have an experience of ego dissolution on high does psychedelic experience which
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is can be quite profound uh it was for me but many people I don't know what percentage emerg from the experience with subsequent sense of ego inflation which is weird I mean you have these gurus emerging from this ego destroying
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experience people who uh you know liri is a great example I mean he was a complete egomaniac and uh yet he had had repeated experiences of losing his ego what happens well there is and this is I guess the the dogmatism point you've had
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such a a profound experience of that you think has told you what the the key to youve found a key to reality and you feel very special because you hold this key to reality and I think that's a very dangerous thing I don't know that what
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you experien is absolute reality in any sense and that the experience to come out of it with confidence that you've solved some riddle of the universe that's always dangerous thing and that does lead to dogmatism and it leads to
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the guru complex and and and we've seen that too of course you tend to you know the people who come out of the experience deciding they're gurus and they're dogmatic about it they tend to hold the cultural microphone longer than
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the people who just kind of went off to their corner and enjoyed what they learned and Shar sh it with their friends and you know didn't didn't get dogmatic but certainly it is an occupational hazard of uh of messing
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around with psychedelics that kind of dogmatism LSD and some other psychedelics they do seem as you mentioned correlated with the phenomenon of gurus do you think that's deeply structural and if we had what in your view would be a more rational set of
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policies towards some psychedelics that the guru would persist or is that a kind of artifact of illegality or it being underground yeah that's interesting question uh I think it's it's probably both I mean there is something you know William
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James spoke of the noetic quality of the mystical experience uh to the extent that people have mystical experiences on psychedelics what he meant is the authority of the ideas the insights the opinions that that occur to you during a
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mystical experience is very special it doesn't seem subjective to you it seems like an objective truth of the Universe I mean that's always a dangerous way to think and that is a quality that people have that and it may have to do with the
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the dissolving of subjectivity you know the subject object distinction goes away for a period of time so everything seems objective or whatever is subjective is objective and that's built in I think to the mystical experience um and so yes
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but on the other side will you restate your question again the fact that gurus seem closely connected to someity is that structural or just temporary con partly structural um but what if these drugs were routinely used in psychiatric
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care I think you'd see less of it um because now the the persecution complex that goes with the guru complex right they're related ly thought he was a guru and and and he loved the persecution because it it enhanced his sense that he
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was special he was a prophet he was dangerous he was a threat to the system so yes I think the illegality psychiatrists are not that different from gurus right no yeah they they're more institutionalized but in the broad a smaller scale I mean nobody
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beyond their Patient Group feels that right but but L's on you know he's on television he's on college campuses he's speaking before giant crowds doing his Guru thing but yeah I mean I think psychiatrists have a certain Guru uh
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aspect whether they whether it's imputed to them or they you know they feel it I don't know would you feel better if psychedelics were maybe packaged with a ceremonial SL religious experience or or packaged with big agriculture it' be a large commercial corporation like the Facebook of LSD and the guru would be taken away but the power and status of LSD if if the positive claims are correct it's going to lie somewhere right where do you want
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to put it with religion with psychiatrists with the military the CIA yeah uh big companies you have a lot of choices what do you see is the best way this could work out I don't think there's one choice to be made um I think
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it has a role to play you know and and I say this assuming that the phase three trials you know have the kinds of results we've seen on the smaller studies assuming the positive scenario works out um I think there is a place in
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medicine for this uh in Psychotherapy and that that is one cultural container that seems like the most likely I also see it having a role in religion um it does already I mean the uh Native American Church uses peyote in their ceremonies and San Pedro and it's
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allowed you know under the religious freedom restoration act uh they've they've gained the right to do that uh the iasa church there two iasa churches that have the right and I could see more of that I mean I think it it it does
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have a sacramental role for people who you know believe and uh so that's another but I would hope that there's another cultural container for the rest of us who are not part of a religion who are uh not by the DSM diagnoses you know
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mentally ill but are struggling with things they don't like about themselves with a sense that they're they're dealing with death and they want to think about their mortality and and who are uh intellectually curious who are
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creatively curious so that's the that's the big how do you deal with that how what what one of my sources one of the research was called the betterment of well people I love that phrase these drugs seem to offer something to those
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people but I also don't think they should be simply and completely deregulated you know legalized and deregulated just because of their power and some of the risks and that people do get into trouble with them and so I don't know what that container is I
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think it's a really interesting cultural project to to develop what that would be now lots of people go to psychotherapists without being mentally ill right people go because they're unhappy they're in the midst of a divorce they they they don't know how to
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deal with their kids you know all the different reasons and these people benefit from it's not mental illness treatment it's something else and so you you could imagine a situation where institutions would be built Mental
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Health Spas for example where there is a doctor involved in some way and they're prescribing to some they're they're ascribing to some set of protocols that you know guided trips with people who've been trained some guarantees of the
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purity of the drugs all this kind of stuff that you know maybe that is it maybe but but it's going to take the work of designers therapists you know a whole lot Architects to create this other container and I I don't have an
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outline for it but do you think L but I'd like to see it do you think LSD in particular could pass current FDA guidelines that you have to show a drug is both safe and effective or are those guidelines too strict no I don't think
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they're too strict for in this case um well let's talk about psilocybin though because because you know it's a very similar drug the duration of action is much longer with LSD it's about twice as long and it's one of the reason it's not
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used in in the current research the other is it has it has much more political baggage so it's much more Radioactive in Congress and you know the kinds of people who might shut it down uh know about LSD they don't know about
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psilocybin I think that efficacy you know will be demonstrated for certain indications we've seen already that it can reduce anxiety and depression in people who have a cancer diagnosis uh we've seen that uh some promising evidence in in smaller studies that it
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helpful with addiction so I think there's a very good chance we'll find efficacy uh if we get half the treatment effect we've seen in that in the cancer anxiety study it would be better than a lot of things out there and safety yeah
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I I don't think it's that hard to I mean one of the Striking things about these drugs and and and when I say these drugs I don't mean everything people are calling psychedelics like I wouldn't put MDMA under this umbrella or um cannabis
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the classic so-called classic psychedelics uh like CB and DMT uh LSD have remarkably low toxicity compared to drugs we take routinely compared to over-the-counter drugs compared to Tylenol uh there doesn't appear to be a
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lethal dose which is one measure of toxicity in a drug so I don't think they're going to have too much trouble with that as for safety there's something as you know called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder yeah that some percentage of
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people they take psychedelics possibly LSD and then for years afterwards they have tortions in their field of vision almost like mini trips ongoing yeah what's your your view on that evidence you know I couldn't find a lot of good
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research on so-called acid flashbacks I went looking for it and it's it's actually hasn't been studied and and I mean you know that giving a name to something happens in the DSM and it may not mean anything right and and five years later they take it out or they
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change it or so as authoritative as that sounds it isn't clear exactly what that phenomenon is there does seem to be some phenomenon I'm anecdotally I hear about it but sometimes people describe it as a state they will themselves into or that
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they use meditation because they want to get back to that other people say it's kind of this unbidden sense of defamiliarization that happens but it's not like you're driving the car and you go into a full-blown hallucination I
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mean there they're not accounts of that that I've been able to find so I don't know how real acid flashbacks are uh it's a really interesting question and why there hasn't been more research on it I don't know know that in the trials
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they've found it with psilocybin and is it specific to LSD LSD persists in The receptors for remarkably long time uh but whether it would be months seems hard to believe there's something about the LSD molecule that gets caught under
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this little hood on the uh on the receptor and sticks around even longer than serotonin yeah I don't know what to say about that I mean I think the real risks are to people who have uh are at risk of psychosis whether they have
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schizophrenia and their genes in their family background or personality disorders of various kinds bipolar you know people in that category of mental illness these drugs can have very negative effects on and some people will
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have uh psychotic breaks and so that's a that's a serious risk and a lot of work is done to screen those people out of the of the University trials other people though using drugs outside of a supervised clinical situation simply do
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stupid things cuz their debility itated they walk into traffic cuz they believe you know maybe they're having hallucination they do jump out of buildings I mean there are occasional suicides on LSD it becomes a very big story because it fits into a narrative
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of this incredibly Dangerous Drug there are a lot of suicides on ssris and it's a recognized side effect I mean the number of drugs we administer to people for which suicide is a side effect listed is is kind of remarkable and and
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some people blame the increase in suicide in recent years to prescription drugs um that have that as a risk factor so it's a risk factor for LSD also but as I say it it just it becomes a huge story when it happens many psychedelics
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operate through the serotonin system if I have a serotonin imbalance am I at some kind of special risk or do we not even know uh I we do not even know um one thing though people who are on a SSRI to correct to raise their serotonin
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levels although actually we don't even know that that ssris do that that believe it or not it's it's incredible what we don't know about them but they do occupy the same receptor sites and people on an SSRI will not be admitted
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to these trials and the reason is not that there's a counter indication that it would make you sick or do something bad to you but it won't work the Psychedelic often won't work if you're on an SSRI so people who want to take
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them would need to taper off them but that carries its own risks of course of of suicide so in general want you not to be on an SSRI for that reason you cite the work of psychologist Allison gopnik who Compares being on LSD to the
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consciousness of children do you agree with their View and if you do how does it fit in to there being this not so fun Sublime yet somewhat terrible aspect of psychedelics I found her argument compelling you know I thought it was a
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good way to understand what's happening that there is a there is a I mean she doesn't use a loaded word like regression but other other psychedelic researchers like Robin carart Harris says that we regress to what Freud called a primary Consciousness which is
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uh less sophisticated has more magical thinking and kids certainly you know have more magical thinking than adults do but her distinction between Spotlight Consciousness and Lantern Consciousness with adults having this amazing ability
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to train their attention on something and block out everything else and get a lot of stuff done versus the kid who doesn't really stay focused partly because he or she is taking in information from all directions and is
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not prioritizing it and that there is a there is a strength and a weakness in that and that psychedelics I mean my own gut is yeah there is something childlike about the about the Consciousness at certain stages in the trip I mean just
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judging from the experience of having had a kid that there levels of sensitivity to the environment that children have that we lose as adults because of our desire to focus and we shut things out but also I'm sure they're physiological reasons that kids
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taste with a lot more and smell with a lot more Acuity and that you you recover some of that uh sometimes you recover some of that sensory sensitivity that you know I I think so much of growing up is about blocking out too much sensory
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information so we can focus and and we can use our intellects and so we pay less attention to the physical senses than kids do so yeah I find her argument compelling kopnick says it's like having tea with a four-year-old but I have a
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sense that a tea party with a four-year-old the four-year-old will insist on all kinds of rules the four-year-old yeah will be a quicker learner than the adult it seems fundamentally like a very different thing to me yeah well I think in some
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Dimensions it's similar and probably in other dimensions it's not I know about that rule based kid but I also know the kid you sit down with the four-year-old who spins out some imaginative tale of such implausibility and Beauty you know
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it's crazy talk but it's incredibly Charming so there's that four-year-old too but maybe we shouldn't be generalizing uh about four-year-olds you've written that you tried some things earlier in your life an in botony of desire you write about
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psychedelics you sound actually somewhat negative and you've come to the point you're at now which is quite different what is it you think you you learned in between putting a anything having to do with actual
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experience but sort of intellectually what is it that got you from one point of view to the other well I don't know that I was anti- psychedelic the chapter in botney and desire you're referencing I think is is mostly about cannabis even
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though I quote Huxley and and this idea of a reducing valve this idea that Consciousness is about eliminating material rather than you know letting it in all that I found very compelling and and wonder the importance of wonder that
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sometime one of of the things drugs can do is give you that to go back to the sublime idea but I have to say I was just afraid of them I was afraid of a big psychedelic experience I didn't think I was mentally sturdy
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enough to endure it so when I used mushrooms in my late 20s it was it was pretty low dose I wasn't taking enough to really have an ego dissolving experience I was afraid to do that um so what changed is a couple things one is getting older and that
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feeling like there was some work I could be done on my on my personality or my attitude toward things and an openness to trying and the confidence I got learning about these studies I mean here were you know I was interviewing you
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have to remember I I I did a lot of research before I decided to try them myself I wrote this piece for the New Yorker on the it's called the trip treatment about the uh cancer anxiety study and I was meeting people like Roland Griffith and and Steve Ross and
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Tony bosis and these were these were you know people people just you know you meet someone and you have some confidence in them and that they're that they're they have integrity they're honest they're good scientists and I was
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learning that it was not exactly what I thought it was that there was uh seriousness to the whole process that I I wasn't aware of so I think I gained a certain Confidence from them you know and and their work and their papers that
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and then there was this when I when I was dabbling in my 20s the idea of a guided psychedelic trip um we haven't really distinguish between a psychedelic trip and a guided psychedelic trip and they're substantially different
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experiences so when you have when you are with a guide who's preparing you very carefully telling you what to do if things get frightening is sitting with you during the entire duration and then is helping you make sense of what you
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learned in an integration session that gives you if you're nervous about these drugs as I was that gives you a great deal of confidence you're not going to be alone there's someone who has really knows the territory well and if you do
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freak out they know what to tell you and they know how to you know get you through that so I think that the Psychedelic experience available to me in my 20s and the one available to me in my 50s and 60s was substantially different and it's even though it's the
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same molecule I can't emphasize enough what a fundamentally different kind of experience it is do you think psychoactive drugs affect people's political views Timothy ly seemed to think they did Nixon himself he thought it made people like inami are somehow not American and they ought to be drinking instead that would make them more conservative what is your opinion I think it's really an interesting area to explore there's some preliminary
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research that suggests that it might have a political impact Robin carart Harris the neuroscientist at at Imperial College who I profile in the book you know raises the question do does LSD create hippies or does hippies create
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LSD and he thinks LSD might create hippies and he's worked with it quite a bit the thinking is that there's something fundamentally anti- hierarchical about it it makes you question things you know since you're having an unmediated experience of some
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sort of possibly Divine Authority or some other kind of authority you you're very suspicious of Priests of all kinds people who mediate Authority for us this is his theory liry did say he said kids the kids who take LSD aren't going to
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fight your Wars and they aren't going to uh join your operations and indeed a lot of people who took LSD did drop out doesn't that also mean if they're not going to fight Nixon's Wars maybe they're not going to fight other Wars
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either they're not going to fight Civil Wars they're not going to fight as much for social justice is it part of like a new breden circus's equilibrium well it could be I mean does it depoliticize people would be an interesting question
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I mean and you can ask that of all contemplative practice right I mean people who meditate become Buddhists you know who who become so enlightened that they're less dissatisfied with the world as it is I mean I think that's a risk
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definitely of contemplative practices of all kinds but going back to the the political question too the other the other issue is the attitude toward the environment and he has done a study and you could tell me better than I can
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judge whether it has any kind of Merit or weight measuring something called nature relatedness which is a scale that um psychologists use and how much do you feel a part of nature or stand stand apart from it and before and after
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psychedelics nature relatedness scores go up now I think what might be going on is that the kinds of powerful connections that people feel whether to other people love or to Nature on psychedelics may be the result of the lowering of ego defenses that walls us
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off from other people and that's why I do think that you know to the extent our big problems in my view are the environmental crisis and tribalism right now they do psychedelics the experience of it the anecdotal reports of it and
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some of this you know light science about it suggest that they address both those things which I think is interesting and may explain why there is such interest in it right now but I also am very alert to the possibility that
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the Psychedelic experience is completely constructed and that in the60s because of other things that were going on it tended to increase anti-authoritarian feeling it's equally plausible to me that these drugs could be brainwashing agents and that was certainly how
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Charlie Manson used them right he used them to keep his posi you know in line and I don't know exactly how or what he told them and and the CIA thought it could be a mind control agent for a long time the fundamental fact that these
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drugs are so suggestible in their effects that set and setting so heavily in influence the experience if you took it in the context of a cult if you took it in the context of someone trying to change your your thinking it might work
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so it increases the power of those who control the context in the environment perhaps yeah so you know we have this interesting situation where the American researchers who tend to have a somewhat spiritual orientation Roland Griffith
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got into this work because he was he was a practicing Hindu and and uh had had a mystical experience and and it draws people with a spiritual orientation in America which is a more religious country than England in England they
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don't see so much mystical experience as they do here in their results so there's a there's a very strong cultural component there's this phenomenon where the the theoretical orientation of the therapist administering the drug is
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reflected in the kind of imagery people have if a youngian therapist gives you psychedelics you're going to see archetypes and so so all of which is to say I you know I can I can argue both sides that in many ways they're does
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seem to be certain consistency but unless we've done real cross-cultural work and given LSD to people who who live in a very different world or for a very different purpose than healing people I mean maybe the CIA found a powerful tool and they just haven't told
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us so I don't know I I have an open mind about that the proper I told you my openness was inreased the proper balance between nature and culture it's a running theme in in many of your books arguably all of your books after this
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most recent book you have not explicitly readdressed that General theme again is there anything you would add to your overall take on the proper balance between nature and culture now that you are more open and have learned more
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about psychedelics well you know one of the things that got me into this is this abiding interest in nature and our engagement with the natural world and part of that engagement for as as long as we've been around has been using
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plants and fungi to change Consciousness and I'm really interested in that desire and why it should be adaptive if indeed indeed it is and you know I've always played with this idea that what what is this Duality about how could we possibly
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how could culture be an opposite term for nature we are nature too right but we don't feel like we are so I had an experience that I described in the book an unguided trip where I felt a connection with nature that I'd never
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felt before and I have toyed around with the the conceit that you know plants manipulate us even as we manipulate them plants are evil right they just grow they take things over they're worse than carnivores in a way they're more
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unthinking well you come from the land of kudu don't you I do but whatever space I felt between myself as someone operating in nature but not quite feeling of nature closed down on on this experience and I had an experience of
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feeling like one among the plants in my garden that I had a sense that they were they had a benign affect toward me and that we were all in this Garden together in this in this really profound way so for me the nature culture divide
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completely closed down for a period of time is this auser you know what's the status of that experience I I I can't tell you but I was I'm always alert to I mean nature is my big subject as a writer I'm I'm just endlessly fascinated
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by it and our attitudes toward it and and the complexity of this relationship that we're in with other species and here was this mushroom with the power to change what was going on in my mind in a profound way change my attitude toward
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it and other plants and or I mean it's not a plant but it's it's a funi and I think that's really interesting now there are people who go further and say that these molecules are bringing us a message from nature you know I think
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that's a fanciful notion but the fact that these plants and fungi would fundamentally change one's sense of the natural world to the extent we objectify nature we can uh extract from it we can exploit it we can do lots of negative
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things to it right we can put animals in in in tiny little crates and you know have brutal animal agriculture because we've objectified it if you have an experience that doesn't allow you to objectify it and and suddenly you realize oh my God there's there are
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multiple subjectivities in nature Consciousness has spread more democratically than I thought I think it makes it harder to do that a few questions about food yeah where is the second best place to eat in Berkeley I would recommend a place forry
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called aari which is a kind of a Japanese fusion restaurant it's excellent I wouldn't Overlook shapanese Cafe um which is less formal and and you can choose what you want it's consistently very good so I I would have
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to put that number one there's a wonderful sushi restaurant called kodo sushi on uh right in the Gourmet ghetto that I highly recommend reasonably priced informal and excellent for lunch or dinner we're we're blessed with many
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eating possibilities or you come to my house the world probably needs to to double its production of food to feed what is still for an hour growing population how well do you think that process will go well you know the feed the world
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issue is is a very complicated one and is it true we need to double production there are other ways to address the growing need for more food and one is to change diets and the one of the assumptions in these in these questions
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as they're usually framed is we're stuck with the Western diet that the world wants to eat as much meat as we do and so we have to we have to assume that these are the rate this is the Baseline we have to deal with how do we give a
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western diet to everybody who wants it and I don't think we'll be able to so that'll get messy there's not enough we we can't we can't provide meat to the Chinese at the rates we provide it to ourselves and um and why should they not
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have it if we have it so I think though that if you look at uh the output of food a whole lot of it is not being eaten by people I mean huge am amount is being fed to animals for both milk production and meat production and if
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you're willing to address that and charge the real price for meat without all the externalities that we tolerate in meat production if you're willing to take some of that grain and not feed it to cars which doesn't make sense uh
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ethanol is just a terrible use of grain you don't have to double food production because we can't double the land right and yes we have to achieve more efficiency but we have to do it in a way that doesn't destroy the soil which we're in danger of doing right now so
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what I'm suggesting is that this whole question has is not just a matter of production it's a matter of distribution and it's a matter of what kind of food are we growing what are we have this limited land base arable soil we can
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expand it dramatically and so what is the most efficient way to use it not by pounds of grain or you know bushels of grain but by food that humans need to eat and you know I mean Francis Mor Lee made this point Back in 1970 and there's
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going to be a reckoning so I don't think it's going to be a smooth linear you know are we going to have breakthroughs in yield due to GMOs and things like that one of the most striking things about GMOs has been how little they've
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accomplished since they were introduced in 1996 they're still selling you know herbicide tolerant crops that don't increase yield that have a yield drag uh and BT crops that arguably have a slight yield gain so that was supposed to be
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the Magic Bullet for yield and and it's just not what GMOs do will crisper be able to do it maybe I mean the dream has been could we increase the efficiency of photosynthesis very complicated problem with that you and that might change the
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game but are more efficient plants what's their relationship to the soil going to be are they going to need more nutrients fertilizer is another limit I mean we could we could go we could do a whole hour on this the last piece of
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yours I read on GMOs was from 2012 New York Times you seem to call for mandatory labeling where are you now on GMOs what's the revised Michael pollen view if it's changed at all well I've been a Critic of GMOs since 1998 I think I wrote my
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first piece about it and my criticisms involved the environmental implications of them and the political implications the fact that GMOs lead to control of the seed seed supply by a very small number of companies they've led to Great
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consolidation in the seed industry which I think is really unfortunate and they have also not they've failed in their promises I mean they were sold to us as a more sustainable way to grow food as it turns out we've had huge increases in
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in application of pesticides Roundup glyphosate in particular um since Monsanto chose to use its technology mostly on herbicide tolerance which is you know that's just not the most creative use of this technology so my basic take on GMOs is they've been a
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hype and a disappointing hype so far but you think they're safe I don't have reason to believe they're dangerous it's not quite saying the same thing um and I haven't looked at the food safety question recently but I don't think
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that's the primary uh objection I have to them is if it's not a food safety argument I I think that the way they were tested at the beginning was really slip shot I think that they were given a a pass on real you know real testing and
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regulation um people assume that you know lots of GMOs were fed to lots of rats and they were proven to be safe but that's not what happened GMOs were given to cells in C in uh test tubes to see if they prompted an allergic reaction um so
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it was a it was a really slipshod testing process um no big problems that I'm aware of have emerged there are real questions about glyphosate though I mean you can't just take the seed in oppos in in isolation and say okay the soybean
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produced by this GMO seed is safe well what about the fact that it's got high levels of glyphosate in it now because of so much glyphosate being sprayed is that do we have to look at the food safety of that too when we're talking
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about GMOs it's a package it's sold as a package and it should be judged as a package in the past you've been critical of free trade and agriculture Today We Live in an era of rising protectionism does free trade look better to you now
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or what's your current take on free trade in agriculture the question is is not free trade or or not free trade it's it's really was it really free trade when we were dumping heavily subsidized crops on Mexico and other countries is
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that free trade you know when it's subsidized I don't know is it I you know better than I you're an economist most of the subsidies go to just a few crops right yeah and some of those are price supports rather than dumping yes there's
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well there's there now and now now crop insurance is the way we subsidize most of it we've changed it it's we're we're cutting less checks directly to Farmers per bushel of corn and soy and we're giving crop insurance favorably to
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certain crops but the net result is that Americans can sell at various times not all the time can sell corn and soy overseas for a price lower than the actual cost of production that doesn't seem like if it's free trade it's unfair
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trade in your second book called a place of my own the architecture of Daydreams you argue that a writer's second book is the key to understanding that writer given where you are now today do you still think that's true and how would
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you explain yourself in terms of your second book well yeah I do think it's true um you know my first book was all about nature and I used what was happening in my garden as a place to explore these nature culture questions
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we were just talking about and then I thought well I'm done with that you know I'm a writer what am I interested in now maybe I'll look at architecture maybe at some point I'll look at computers I don't know technology I was just a freelance writer
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and in the course of writing that second book which I thought was such a departure I kept veering back to the nature questions in architecture to what extent does nature dictate the way we build or should it dictate the way we
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build what about the wood what about these materials what about this relationship to the Earth and Foundation I was really torn because thought I thought God are you repeating yourself why why are you going back to these nature questions and then at a certain
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point I realized oh those are just my questions that's what I really you know I think every writer has a set of kind of final questions that all their work if you keep going we'll we'll come back to that and it might be you know Michael
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Lewis it's success right crossmen demand he's really interested in success and some people are interested in love and some people are interested in power and money and and you know are these big big topics and that's when you dis you
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discover your final questions I think in the second book the struggles the horrors trying to complete a second book and then you kind of let go you realize okay I'm interested in nature and um and and God I still am I mean nature is a
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big element in how to change your mind the last barrage of questions are about what I call the Michael poen production function so you've been highly productive are there things you think you know about productivity that maybe
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other people people under value that you could instruct us with well I I thank you for thinking I'm so productive but you know my last book was 5 years ago I don't know if that's I'm not you know there are people who can produce a book
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every year or two so I don't know if I'm that productive per copy soled and per thought stimulating you are highly productive both metrics I should add are important yeah you know I've been very fortunate in my writing career on many
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dimensions one is my the editing I've gotten I don't write in isolation I have a a brilliant book editor both in New York and in my house my wife who reads every sentence before it leaves the house I mean not my emails and stuff God
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forbid but but any kind of book or thing for publication and she's not only is she a really good reader she doesn't read a lot of non-fiction she reads fiction so she's used to a higher Pros quality than your average non-fiction
55:43
writer and she edits everything but she also keeps me from publishing really stupid things and and then I have a wonderful book editor in New York an godof who has been really supportive even when I I've changed Direction so to me you know yeah writing is a very
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isolating solitary Pursuit but if you've got a really good sounding board you're not going to go as deep down those uh unproductive rabbit holes as you might otherwise and so I I think I've been saved from that at various key moments
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and then the other is just kind of like routine you have a routine I have a routine you stick to it I do and that you know these mornings I write and I write from this time to that time and even if it's hard I don't give up and
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I'll produce some crap that day but I'm going to sit there and do it till lunchtime and I I just I just stick to my routine and then I print out the pages I I wrote that day I waste a lot of paper unfortunately and I begin my
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day editing what I wrote the day before so I'm editing constantly uh I you know I learned I I started as an editor and became a writer um so I have very much of an editor's perspective so I spent a lot of time I spend more time probably
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editing than I do writing final question let's say a young person comes to you and says I want to be the next Michael pollen not exactly a duplicate of what you do but some version of what that will be 30 years from now other than
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marry well have great editors and have a routine be lucky what skill do you tell them to invest in I tell them to read a lot I I'm amazed how many writing students don't read and it's it's it's criminal and also read better writers
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than you are in other words read great fiction cultivate your ear you know writing is a form of music music and we don't pay enough attention to that and so I tell my students you know you should and when I'm drafting I mean
57:32
there's a period where I'm reading lots of research and scientific articles and you know history and undistinguished Pros but as soon as I'm done with that and I've started drafting a chapter or or an article I stop reading that kind
57:46
of stuff and before I go to bed I read a novel every night uh I read several pages of of really good fiction and that's because I think you do a lot of work in your sleep and I want my brain to be in a rhythm of of of good Pros
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very last question recommend a novel to us maybe your favorite but just something people ought to read I just finished a wonderful book called go went gone by a German writer named Jenny erpenbeck I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly it's about the refugee crisis
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and it's a very contemporary book set in Germany in um you know since Angela Merkel has led in lots of refugees in the and the culture struggling with that and I think she does a beautiful job reminding us who's behind these statistics and these strangers in our town squares and um and that's really how the book begins is a a retired Professor trying to come to terms with who are these people and um and he gets deeper and deeper into that world
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beautifully written very well-controlled writer and it does what fiction should do which is expand the circle of your sympathy and empathy Michael pauland thank you very much thank you Tyler it was a great pleasure [Music]
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