Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #69 Michael Pollan: Could Psychedelics Solve the Mental Health Crisis?

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

CAUTION ADVISED: this podcast contains swearing. Many of you will know Michael Pollan as a world-renowned food writer but now he has written a book that brings psychedelic drugs into mainstream consciousness. But why? Long before they gained a bad reputation, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as though psychedelics were going to be the new wonder drugs for mental illnesses. They promised to treat conditions like alcoholism, depression and anxiety without the side effects associated with conventional drugs. But unfortunately, in the 1960’s, there was a backlash against the counter-culture who had embraced psychedelics and all further research was banned. Now, decades later, the world is in the grip of a mental health crisis. But thankfully, there is a glimmer of hope – research has recently begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, DMT and psilocybin. This week, I sit down with Michael Pollan to take a deep dive into this extraordinary world. We explore the remarkable history of psychedelics, the findings of the current research in this area and Michael shares his own personal experiences with psychedelics under the guidance of therapists. Whilst larger scale studies are still needed, we talk about how therapist-guided psychedelic drug therapy could potentially change the way healthcare is delivered for mental illnesses – perhaps meaning a resolution of not only symptoms for patients, but also in many cases, the fundamental root causes. Finally, we discuss the potential wider use of psychedelics as a tool for social change. This really is a gripping and eye-opening conversation – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/changeyourmind Click here for Michael's book How to Change your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. Click here for Dr Chatterjee's books The 4 Pillar Plan and The Stress Solution. Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you compare the treatment of mental illness with the treatment of physical illness, if you compare mental health care to oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, all those areas of medicine have made enormous strides in extending people's lifespan, reducing human suffering. You cannot say that about mental health care or psychiatry. The tools that they have are really rudimentary. They address symptoms for the most part. The drugs that they use have really difficult side effects for people. People don't like taking them. And here you have the potential of a completely different paradigm where you're

not administering a drug, a toxic drug every day. You're administering an effect and experience that this one administration of a drug gives you. And it is that experience that is not just relieving symptoms, but in many cases addressing fundamental causes. That's a really big deal. far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome to episode 69 of my Feel Better Live More podcast.

My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. I've been so excited about releasing today's episode ever since I recorded it a few weeks back when I was down in London. Today's guest is someone who I have admired for many years, the one and only Michael Pollan. Michael is probably regarded as one of the world's premier authors, with multiple New York Times bestsellers to his name. In fact, Time magazine has previously named him as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world. He has written many brilliant books on food, including The Omnibore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. But more recently, has turned his attention to a different topic in his latest book, How to Change Your Mind.

I believe that this book will go down as one of the most important books of the last decade. And in it, Michael brings the exciting science of psychedelic drugs into the mainstream consciousness. Now, some of you may be asking yourself, why on earth am I doing a podcast on psychedelic drugs? And if you are starting out as a skeptic, I would highly encourage that you listen on with an open and inquisitive mind, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised by what you hear. Long before they gained a bad reputation, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as though psychedelics were going to be the new wonder drugs for mental illness. They promised to treat conditions like alcoholism, depression,

and anxiety without the side effects associated with conventional drugs. But unfortunately, in the 1960s, there was a backlash against the counterculture who had embraced psychedelics and all further research was banned. Now, decades later, the world is in the grip of a mental health crisis, but thankfully there is a glimmer of hope. Research has recently begun again on the amazing potential of drugs such as LSD and psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. On this week's podcast, Michael and I take a deep dive into this extraordinary world. We explore the remarkable history of psychedelics, the findings of the current research in this area, and Michael shares his own personal experiences with psychedelics

under the guidance of therapists. Now, whilst larger scale studies are still needed, we talk about how psychedelic drug therapy could potentially change the way healthcare is delivered for mental illnesses, potentially meaning a resolution of not only symptoms for patients, but also in many cases, the fundamental root causes. root causes. Finally, we discussed the potential wider use of psychedelics as a tool for social change. This really is a gripping and eye-opening conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Before we get started, I do need to give a quick shout out to the sponsors of today's episode who are essential in order for me to put out weekly episodes like this one. I'm delighted to announce that my favorite meditation app, Calm, are one of the sponsors of today's show. As many of you will know from listening to previous podcasts and reading my books, I think that meditation is one of the most impactful things that we can do for our health. It can help our moods, our sleep quality, reduce feelings of

anxiety and even enhance productivity. But many of us find meditation super tricky as did I. Calm is a meditation app that makes meditation easy. All you have to do is load up the app and play the meditation of your choice. I start most mornings with a calm meditation and in my latest book, The Stress Solution, I wrote about the three M's that a well-structured morning routine should contain. The first M is mindfulness and I managed to tick that off by doing a meditation on the Calm app as soon as I wake up. If you have been thinking about trying meditation or if you've tried before but have fallen off the wagon, I would highly encourage you to check out the Calm app. Right now,

listeners to my podcast get 25% off a Calm premium subscription. That's calm.com forward slash live more. 40 million people have downloaded Calm so far. Find out why at calm.com forward slash live more. Athletic Greens continue their long-term support on my podcast. I absolutely prefer that people get all of their nutrition from foods but for some of us this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. So if you are looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to

athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. So Michael, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you, Rangan. I've got to say, since this has been in the diary, maybe about two months

since this was in the diary, I have been so excited about having the opportunity to talk to you. So glad we managed to get a mutually agreeable time to get this sorted. There's so much to cover today, but I guess where I wanted to start is with food, because the first time I came across your work was back in 2013. I was in America, it was a conference on food, and you were being interviewed on stage. And I was blown away by what you were saying, by the insight you gave on foods. And I went out to that conference. I bought three of your books straight away outside at the bookstore and started to devour them on the plane back.

So, you know, my initial foray into the world of Marco Polo was all around foods. And you have written probably what is regarded as seven of the most seminal words ever written on foods eat food not too much mostly plants and i'm just wondering you know we're here we're sitting here in 2019 i can't remember when it was exactly you wrote those words but do you 2008 or I think. So over 10 years ago, do you still stand by those words? Do you think they still have the same relevance today as they did then? And also, as a writer, I would love to understand, when you came up with those seven words, do you remember where you were? Did you know at the time, I've got it, I've absolutely nailed it

in those seven words? Or was it something that just grew after that? Well, to answer your first question, there is nothing I would change. I've thought about it. And I think that advice holds up pretty well. I mean, it's pretty broad. But the advice to eat food, by which I meant real whole food and not what I call edible food-like substances, which is a lot of what passes for food in the supermarket these days, ultra-processed foods of various kinds. I mean, the evidence in favor of that and against processed food has never been stronger. And there have been studies recently that really drive home the point that the degree of processing really has a huge bearing on the healthfulness of food and whether you put on weight or not. That processed foods, even when they have the same amount of calories, fiber, sugar in them, people tend to not get full on them and to eat more of them. And so that part, definitely. Mostly plants. You know, the word mostly is probably the most controversial of those seven.

It's pissed off vegetarians and it's pissed off carnivores equally. But I was trying to be reasonable. There's, you know, there's no health objection to meat per se. It's nutritious food, but we're eating too much of it, and we're pushing vegetables off the plate by doing so. And we know, and we know more now than 10 years ago, that vegetables have all sorts of protective qualities and are very good for us. The jury's still out on meat per se, whether it has health problems. There may be some issues with it. From an environmental point of view, you know, we could go more radical and say no meat.

But from a health point of view, I think mostly is still the kind of sane, you know, reasonable approach to basically make meat a flavoring, make it an occasional thing. But a plant-based diet is one of the things we're most sure of, is a route to healthy eating. And not too much is obvious. So, in crafting those seven words, I do remember it. I was writing an article called Unhappy Meals for the New York Times magazine. They had asked me after Omnivore's Dilemma came out, this was my first full-scale, full-dress book on food in 2006. And that book dealt with the food system. And that was my deep dive into how we produce beef and chicken and the whole system and how it worked and what was screwed up about it, basically, and also presenting some very positive models of ways to grow food, organic and beyond organic.

My editor said, well, you didn't really deal with nutrition in that. And the reader really, you know, fine about the environmental ethics of food, but they really want to know what they should eat for their own health. So, would you write us a big cover story? And that became In Defense of Food. And I was, so I did this deep dive into nutrition research. I read paper after paper. I talked to nutritionists, public health advocates. I did everything I could to master this subject and bring a fresh eye to it. And when I was sitting down to write, and I was a little bit overwhelmed by the mass of information and all the disagreements, are eggs good for you? Are eggs bad for you? There's just so much static out there and so

much bad research out there that I was like, well, can I boil this down? And I sat there and I wrote for the very first sentence of the article, eat food. That seems to be the bottom line, eat real food. And then I thought, well, I have to elaborate that a little bit because you could eat too much food. So, eat food, not too much. And then, well, this meat vegetable thing, this really does matter. And that, you know, better off with a plant-based diet, but there's no argument that you have to be vegan or vegetarian for your health. I mean, there's nothing wrong with meat per se. So eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And it was the very first line of the article. And then I thought to myself, wow, you've given it all away, right? You have another 8,000 words to write. And so, the rest of the article is backing into that. And how did I arrive there?

And that then became the beginning of the book. So, it's one of those things that, you know, you're not supposed to give away the punchline at the beginning of the joke. But I decided in this case to cut through the miasma, the confusion. I just had to deliver it. And so anyway, that's, yeah, those are, I guess, the most famous words I've written. I hope I can improve on them at some point. I think they still stand the test of time and particularly today where there's probably never been certainly from what i can tell there's never been this level of

disharmony around the conversation around food people are you know entrenched in their separate camps and you know it's quite toxic actually some of the conversations that happen and i really think it's ideological at this point and people are it's about toxic, actually, some of the conversations that happen. And I really think… It's ideological at this point. And people are… It's about their identity. Yeah. And once you start associating, you know, your position on dietary issues with your identity, you're going to be, you know, inflexible and not be able to hear anything that doesn't agree.

And, you know, I was also trying to kind of transcend the nutrient wars. Because that's really what a lot of, you know, we fight over good and bad nutrients. And so it was very important to me to phrase that in terms of food and move the conversation away from nutrients to food because humans don't eat nutrients. We eat food. And scientists need to understand nutrients to do experiments, obviously. But we don't. And for hundreds of thousands of years, we've been eating food. It's only in the last hundred or so that we eat nutrients.

And when we think about the omega-3s in our food or the vitamin C or the fiber, and that reductive approach, I think, has gotten us into trouble because it tends to favor the processors. They always can adjust nutrients up and down, whatever the fat is. They can add fiber to things, they can take out fat, and it makes their food appear healthier than real food, which of course can't change its stripes as easily. I mean, the avocado is a great example. The poor avocado, you know, when we went on this low-fat or no-fat binge, it was neglected completely because it's relative for a vegetable, it's relatively fatty. And then suddenly monounsaturated fats were a good kind of

fat and the avocado came back. And now I think it's actually in trouble again. So I feel for the avocado, which can't re-engineer itself. But that's why I think those seven words have stood the test of time, because by and large, no matter what dietary camp you fit into, by and large, I think eating real foods, not too much, mostly plants. I think vegetables are regarded in most cultures, even paleo. You need to talk to someone like Lauren Cordain. A lot of the early work that I was familiar with is talking about maybe your diet, 70%, 80% is actually plant-based. But yes, they would have some wild meats and animal protein in there as well. So I think it's consistent with many

different dietary tribes. I think it helps to unify people. And I've got to say on some level, it's probably been an inspiration to me in terms of how I've described food in my first two books. So I have to thank you for that. I want to move on from food to your new work, Michael, because you have this reputation around the world as one of the sort of most influential food writers. Yet your new book, How to Change Your Mind, The New Science of Psychedelics, appears superficially at least to have nothing to do with food. How do you get from writing about food to writing about psychedelics? Yeah, it seems like quite a right angle turn.

But if you go back a little bit and look at the work I was doing before food, my passion as a writer is about nature and our engagement with the natural world. So if that's the trunk of my work and it is rooted in my experience as a gardener and as a student of natural history, food, if you care about the human engagement with the natural world, you're going to write about food because we change

nature more through our eating than anything else we do. Your dietary choices affect the world more than the kind of car you drive or how you heat your home, because agriculture changes the landscape dramatically. Agriculture changes the composition of species. The reason there's so many cattle in the U.S. and so few wolves has to do with the fact that we eat cattle and so do wolves, and we compete with them for it. So we've exterminated the wolves. And the climate. We now know that food contributes probably about 20% of the food system to greenhouse gases. So that's a very important branch off the tree of my interest in nature. But another branch is looking at what plants do to us, how they change us, we change them, and the various interesting things we use them for.

And so we use plants to feed ourselves, obviously very important. We use them for beauty, obviously also very important. But curiously, we use them also to alter our consciousness. Every culture on earth has had a plant or fungus that they use to change consciousness. It could be as mild as tea and coffee up to, say, the opiates for pain relief. Alcohol. Alcohol is another one, and that comes from plants too, and fungi, the fungi who ferment it. And then you've got these really radical cases, these psychedelic plants, ones that really alter consciousness. And, you know, a great many cultures have used those for thousands of years. So I've always been curious about that human desire. What's behind it? Is it adaptive? And why would it be adaptive? What is it good for? about this renaissance of research going on using psychedelics, specifically psilocybin,

which is the ingredient in magic mushrooms, to treat people for various mental forms of mental distress and mental illness. And I was like, wow, I think this is a good time to revisit this interest. Because I'd written about cannabis way back when as a very important mind-changing substance. So to me, it's of a piece. There are also things we ingest that have a profound effect on us, as does food. And there's also is the, they're also about health. And, you know, I'm passionately interested in human health and in the same way food affects our physical health and our mental health, by the way, these substances, these mind-changing substances we take into our bodies affects our mental health. A lot of people listening to this may have an idea about psychedelics, something that they heard about in the past, maybe in the 1960s,

but it doesn't really necessarily play a part in their day-to-day lives. There's certainly, well, clearly not everyone, but many listeners will not have heard about psychedelics in the context of human health. I think that's right. And while I'm intrigued to understand what conditions did you come across or illnesses did you come across initially where you thought, wow, that's pretty exciting reaches that compelled you to go on this odyssey over a number of years, which has culminated in your book? You know, what was it that you first got excited about? I had the idea that you might use psychedelic drugs to heal in any way was completely foreign to me and really news. I, like most people, had an image of psychedelics very much rooted in the 1960s and the counterculture

and that these were drugs being used recreationally that were very disruptive to individual lives and to the culture's life. And so I thought, and even the word psychedelic, I thought was a 60s word. So I was very surprised to learn that long before it became this counterculture sacrament in the mid-60s, there had been this very serious, active, fertile period of research looking at psychedelic compounds such as LSD and psilocybin as a treatment for alcoholism, for depression, for anxiety, for what's called existential distress of people with a cancer diagnosis. And this work had been going on from 1950 well into the 60s, and it had produced some remarkable successes. And, you know, it was this LSD and psilocybin looked like new psychiatric wonder drugs to the mental health community and to psychiatry. And the word psychedelic, in fact, was coined by an English psychiatrist in 1956 or 57.

And it means simply mind manifesting. So, you know, it's become associated in our minds with a certain kind of graphics and color and music. But it was pretty serious medicine for a period of time. And then we had this backlash in the 60s that basically deep-sixed all the research for 30 years. in the 60s that basically deep-sixed all the research for 30 years. So the first indication I heard about that it was being used for was to treat people with cancer. Basically, when the research got restarted around 2000, after this cold freeze that it had been in for 30 years, they went back and looked at the research that had been done in the 50s. These are researchers at Johns Hopkins in NYU, UCLA, and at Imperial College in London. And they were looking at what

they had had success with in the past and sought to reproduce that research because the standards done for psychiatric research were not as rigorous as they were in the 50s. After the thalidomide scandal in 1962, we really tightened up how we approved drugs and the kinds of testing you need to do before they can be approved. the drug to people who were dying. And it sounds like a weird idea, but in fact, that's a spiritual predicament in many ways. And the drugs actually sponsor a spiritual experience, a mystical experience, where people have an experience of their self or ego dissolving in a way that allows them to merge with something larger than themselves, whether it's nature or the universe. allows them to merge with something larger than themselves, whether it's nature or the universe. And it can be, under the right circumstances, an incredibly positive and reassuring experience that the death of your ego, the death of yourself, isn't the death of all of you, that something survives in some sense, your consciousness, your legacy.

And so I talked to these volunteers who were really having these transformative experiences that in many cases remove their fear of death and help them overcome their anxiety and depression. And these studies that I started looking at, and that was my first foray into doing journalism about this um produced successful outcomes in 80 of the um the volunteers they had um market decreases in their scores on surveys for um for depression and anxiety that's a staggering statistic 80 i mean and for people who are listening to this who this is new information for know, what you're talking about is the potential of a substance, a natural substance to potentially improve the health significantly of 80% of the people who are taking it. And the numbers for some other indications are closer to the two-thirds mark. It's being used in addiction to smoking cessation. It had very good success in a pilot study.

Alcoholism, also very good success in a pilot study. And so the effect sizes have been impressive also. I mean, when you compare it to other psychiatric meds, things like SSRI antidepressants, the effect size, at least in these phase two trials, are much more dramatic. And so there's a really strong signal here that we've got a valuable medicine. We still need to go through the larger trials, and we need to determine exactly what are the best illnesses to treat with it. But this looks to be a very promising new tool for psychiatry. And boy, does psychiatry need it right now. You mentioned quite a lot of different conditions, if you will, you know, depression, PTSD, cancer, smoking cessation, alcohol addiction. And it strikes me that how can a natural substance potentially treat so many different conditions if they are all separate conditions?

Well, that's the big if. Exactly. There's, you know, I had the same idea when I was researching this. I was like, this sounds like a panacea. How could it work for such different things as anxiety, depression, and addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, some people think will be a good thing to try, which would be fantastic because eating disorders are the most dangerous psychiatric illness. More people die of that. And it's the hardest to treat of all psychiatric illnesses. Well, I asked some people that. I asked, I remember having an

interview with Tom Insell, who was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health in America, a very prominent psychiatrist. And he said, well, don't be so sure all those illnesses are so different. They may be different manifestations of a similar brain or mind. They're all characterized by a kind of mental stuckness, by a mind that's trapped in loops of rumination. They're all, in a way, forms of bad habits, bad habits in terms of behavior or thought processes. In all cases, you've got an individual who is stuck in really destructive narratives about themselves. You know, I can't get through the day without a cigarette or a beer. I'm unworthy of love. My work is crap. And so, in a way, they all need to

have this kind of, these deep grooves of thought disturbed and to be shaken out of them. And that appears to be what the medicines do. You know, we operate on the basis of beliefs, beliefs about ourselves, beliefs about the world. The depressive has a set of beliefs about themselves and the world that are, you know, not true and very destructive about their self-worth, about other people and their relationship to them. And the thinking is that the psychedelics, by temporarily suppressing the sense of self or ego, which they seem to do reliably on a high dose, jog those beliefs, make them more plastic, more amenable to change, especially with therapeutic help. It's important, though, to point out that we're not talking about simply taking a drug and having these effects. We're

talking about a package where there's a lot of psychotherapeutic support um you're you know you're working with therapists the whole time and they're helping you prepare for what's what's about to happen when you have this journey they sit with you during the whole time and they help you interpret it afterwards so um it's not getting together with your friends having a few beers and taking some mushrooms it's so different than that i mean the molecules are molecule is the same. I think that's key for us to emphasize, really. The molecule is the only thing that it has in common with that. And the molecule is, you know, doesn't determine everything. You know, Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who introduced psychedelics to a lot of people

in the 60s, said that, you know, what's notable about these drugs is the importance of set and setting, by which he meant the kind of internal environment and external environment in which you have this experience, your mindset going into it. And so the therapist essentially create an optimal mindset and environment for you to have a very inward journey in fact you're wearing eye shades also um you're not you're not just looking at the you know sensory fireworks that are going on you're you're encouraged to move inside and and have your mind go to what's troubling you and and if it's your cancer for example many of the um uh volunteers would would go into their body in in their imaginations and uh and have an encounter with their

cancer or their fear. And you tell a nice story about that in the book, don't you? Could you share that? Yeah, you know, I was trying to understand how this single experience on a psychedelic could change one's outlook on their cancer. And I interviewed a woman named Dina Baser, who was a New Yorker. She was about 60. She was a figure skating instructor by profession. And she had had ovarian cancer that had been successfully treated. It was in remission. But she was paralyzed by fear it was going to come back any day and that the other shoe was going to drop. And so she enrolled in the program at NYU, New York University, where they were doing this trial. And during her psilocybin trip, she, like many of the other cancer patients, went into her body and she saw this black mass.

She sort of took a tour of her body and she saw this black mass, ugly black mass under her rib cage. And she knew it wasn't her cancer because it was in the wrong place. It was not, you know, where your ovaries are. And, um, but she recognized what it was immediately. She said, this is my fear. And she screamed at it. She said, get the fuck out of my body. And as soon as she said that, it vanished. And so did her fear. And even after the experience was over, the fear was gone and it has not come back. And she said, it helped me to understand, and this was kind of the insight she carried

from the experience, that although I cannot control my cancer, it's either gonna come back or not although I cannot control my cancer, it's either going to come back or not, I can control my fear. That's about my response to it. And that distinction liberated her. And when I published this in the New Yorker magazine, this story, the fact checkers called her to confirm everything as they do. And they read her the line. And I had said something like, and Dina's fear was substantially diminished. And she said, she corrected them.

She said, no, that's wrong. My fear was eliminated. That's quite remarkable. One experience. And there is something about the psychedelic experience that whatever insights you have, whatever truths you connect with during that time, they're very sticky. They don't feel like opinions. They don't feel subjective. They feel like objective truths. This is revealed knowledge. And that, I think, is what makes the insights people have on psychedelics

so useful in behavior change and in changing attitudes, that you have this authority in the experience that we seldom have. Because I talked to smokers who would tell me, I'd say, so how did one psilocybin trip allow you to quit smoking? They say, well, I saw my life from a new perspective. It was as though the camera were pulled back further than it ever had. And I saw what I was doing and I realized smoking is really stupid. Now, most of them I'm sure had thought that before and other people had told them that, their doctors had told them that. But the next day they were doing it again. And yet, having had that thought on psychedelics, it felt like tablets handed down from God. It just had that kind of weight. And it was the kind of weight that people could act on.

But it sounds like it gives you a different perspective on your own life. But it sounds like it gives you a different perspective on your own life. You're still living your life, but you get a completely new view on what's going on day to day. And it reminds me of one of the earlier guests I maybe 20 30 years and i've got a lot of respect for frank and what he's been doing and i i asked him why do you think frank that you have always been so open-minded for the last 20 30 years and he said two reasons one is because i grew up in apartheid in south africa so i've always questioned authority because of the culture I grew up in. But he also said at that time, I also took LSD as a teenager. And I think that's also contributed to my view. And I don't think I quite got it at the time because I wasn't familiar with this research. I hadn't read your book. I didn't think I quite got it in the same way, but it's now all starting to make a bit more sense that maybe that experience changed him and he could no longer view life and his day-to-day actions in the same way. You know, I think there's something to that.

I think that psychedelics do induce a kind of perspectival shift in people And they don't accept what they've been handed, basically. And I mean, this is the same reason that it was so disruptive in the 60s. People didn't accept, American boys weren't accepting the draft. They were trying to send them off to war, and they were like, wait, wait a minute, this is an unjust war that we're losing anyway. Why am I going to do that? So there is a willingness to question your beliefs, the beliefs you've been given, the beliefs you've been taught. And if your beliefs are in that knot of depression or anxiety where you're going over the same, you can't escape your beliefs about yourself or the world, it's exactly what you need is a real shift in perspective,

a powerful shift in perspective. And it's true. I mean, your conventional beliefs are reinforced by your ego. It's your self, which is telling you stories about who you are and how the world works and defending you against change. And the most notable thing that happens on a high-dose psychedelic trip is your ego dissolves, or at least becomes much more soft or permeable. And that allows other thoughts to enter into your consciousness. You connect the dots in new ways. And so I've interviewed a great many people, like the doctor you're describing, who have had big changes in their life and their outlook as a result of a single trip or multiple trips. And that I've met artists who found their vocation doing this. I've met scientists, a great many scientists.

I'm surprised how many psychiatrists and neuroscientists had their interest in the mind kindled by a psychedelic experience. Physicists too, software engineers. You know, Steve Jobs famously talked about how one of the most formative experiences of his life was his work with LSD, and he believed it really allowed him to think outside the box aesthetically and think about the computer in a different way. But I think it's important to emphasize that a lot of the research you're talking about now is being done in very prestigious institutions, you know, in America. With government approval and IRB approval, Institutional Review Board approvals. And right here in London where we're chatting now, there's some of the sort of leading research going on. Yeah, Imperial College is one of the leaders in this area. There is a young scientist there named Robin Carhart-Harris who's doing some really path-breaking work.

He's doing clinical work. He's working on depression right now. He has a big trial. But he's also doing brain imaging to figure out what's going on in the brain during this experience and to make sense of it. And he's doing very, very provocative theoretical work trying to explain how this might be, the psychological and brain mechanisms behind these changes. And it's, you know, look, it's one of the most exciting areas in neuroscience right now. And more and more institutions and smart scientists are getting involved. So we're going to know a lot more in five years than we do now. Do you think this is the next big frontier in

the treatments of mental health, but potentially also in all human health? You know, that's a big claim. I think there's a good chance that will be the case. I think that I didn't understand when I started this project how much mental health care and psychiatry need a revolution. This field is broken, to quote Tom Insell again. It's not working for people. If you compare the treatment of mental illness with the treatment of physical illness, of mental illness, with the treatment of physical illness, if you compare mental health care to oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, all those areas of medicine have made enormous strides in extending people's lifespan, reducing human suffering. You cannot say that about mental health care or psychiatry. The tools that they

have are really rudimentary. They address symptoms for the most part. The drugs that they use have really difficult side effects for people. People don't like taking them. They're very hard to get off of. And I'm not, you know, SSRIs, but also the antipsychotic drugs are really hard on the body, and you have to take them every day. And here you have the potential of a completely different paradigm where you're not administering a drug, a toxic drug every day. You're administering an effect, an experience that this one administration of a drug gives you. That this one administration of a drug gives you, and it is that experience that is not just relieving symptoms, but in many cases addressing fundamental causes. That's a really big deal. There are bigger trials that need to happen. Depression, which is now being trialed in both the United States and all over Europe and England, hundreds of people will be treated in the next couple of years. And we'll really know whether depression is the best indication or should we be working on something else.

But we have a mental health crisis, make no mistake. We have rising rates of depression worldwide. Depression now is the leading cause of disability worldwide. 300 million people struggle with depression. It's a huge number. Suicide rates are up dramatically. It's the second leading cause of death in people from 15 to 25. That's just, we have to address that. And addiction. In America, we have a huge problem with opiate addiction. 75,000 people died the year before last from opiate addiction, more than were killed in the whole of the Vietnam War. So psychiatry needs new tools. And I think that's one of the reasons that psychiatry has been, to me, surprisingly receptive to what was once a very fringe approach or a taboo approach. But, you know, we're taking another look here. You alluded to this in your question. What about the rest of us? Does this have relevance for the health of people who don't have a clinical diagnosis for mental illness? And I would say yes, based on my own experience and the experience of many other people. That, look, we're all on the spectrum with people who are dying. We are all dying.

We're all mortal. We all suffer from depression from time to time, from anxiety. We're all addicted to something, some kind of behavior, whether it's our iPhones or substances or just bad habits. So I do think there is a relevance. And, you know, I think we need to work toward a system or a structure in which people who are not mentally ill, per se, get benefit from talking therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy for milder forms of mental distress, whether it's problems in relationships, family problems. It seems to me this should be available in the same way, that your normal neurotic, as they're sometimes called, benefits from psych that your your normal neurotic as they're sometimes called benefits from psychotherapy that normal neurotic might benefit from psychedelic therapy as well

but just to be clear these most of these psychedelics and maybe you could list off some of the common ones for people so they understand what exactly these substances are many of them are illegal yes uh very important to point point that out. And they're all illegal, except in a very few jurisdictions. I mean, in Amsterdam, psilocybin is legal, for example. But basically, there's Schedule 1 or Schedule A, which means that these are drugs that, in the government's view, have no medical use and a high potential for abuse. Both those facts are not true. We're finding that they do have medical use and they don't have high potential for abuse.

I don't know that people realize, but psychedelic drugs, which have this very dangerous image in our heads, the classic psychedelics, in which I would include psilocybin, LSD, DMT. And DMT is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, but it's also synthesized and used. It's common in many plants, but these medicines are virtually non-toxic. There is no lethal dose for psilocybin or LSD. That's remarkable because you have drugs in your medicine cabinet that you bought over the counter that have a lethal dose. You know, Tylenol's lethal dose is in the couple dozen pills. You can go to the pharmacy, buy paracetamol and kill yourself.

Yeah. With not that much. It's remarkable. And here we have these drugs that they've never been able to establish a lethal dose. So what's going on there? Why is it that these drugs, which are natural, which have no lethal dose, that are not addictive, that have such therapeutic potential for a range of different conditions? It seems madness. How did we it seems madness how did we get here

how do we get here where they are illegal so people will be listening to this thing why that sounds exciting i'd love to get going yeah but actually the system out there will not allow the majority of people to get going should they choose to well you have to go back to the 60s and this um uh that when at a time when the drugs were being widely used by people in the counterculture and they scared the hell out of both parents and adults. Timothy Leary was out proselytizing for LSD in a really reckless way, telling everybody to turn on, tune in and drop out. President Nixon believed that the drugs were sapping the will of American boys to fight and fueling the counterculture. And he waged war on them. He begins the drug war in 1970.

And that's when they go on to Schedule I. They were disruptive. And in ways that, you know, you could argue based on your politics were either good or bad. I mean, they contributed to the anti-war movement. They contributed to the environmental movement and feminism. I mean, the, you know, the 60s were a period of enormous social tumult and upheaval, and much good came out of it. But it was also, there was a powerful backlash against it. And part of that backlash was a kind of moral panic against psychedelics. It was a weird moment because you had the kids having a kind of experience that

the adults were not having and didn't understand. You know, normally in a culture, if you think of the acid trip, the LSD trip is a rite of passage. Normally in a culture, rites of passage are organized by the adults to bring the young into adult society. So you have, you know, whether it's a vision quest in Native American traditions or a bar mitzvah in Judaism, it's a set of obstacles you have to get over organized by the elders, and the adolescent crosses the river and ends up in adult society. That's how it's supposed to work. They're unifying. Here you had a rite of passage organized by the kids for the kids, and they ended up in a place very different than where the adults were. And this was very

threatening. And, you know, the words turn on, tune in, drop out sound kind of silly, like a bumper sticker to us. But those were frightening words at that point. And then there were these scare stories. I mean, there were some casualties. A lot of people were taking LSD. Sometimes it was bad material. It was contaminated with other drugs, speed very often. And some people were ending up in the psych ward. There were a couple suicides. And then there were scare stories deliberately put out there that weren't true, such as college kids would stare at the sun until they went blind. That was completely fabricated. and in the way of the suggestibility of these drugs, the more people heard those scare stories,

the more bad things happened. It's very interesting. You don't read about a lot of bad trips until the mid-60s. People had some difficult times on psychedelics and that is a real risk of them, especially when you're not supervised. But the more you heard about it, the more people had bad experiences.

So there was a powerful reaction against it. And the drugs were made illegal. And the research was shut down. And just imagine what we might know now if we'd had 30 additional years of research. Yeah, it's mind-blowing to think how far we may have stagnated in our understanding of the human mind, really, because ultimately that's... Yeah, that's really what's exciting here. mind is, you're saying we look back on the 60s, a very tumultuous time, lots of social upheaval, lots of things going on in culture. And I thought, I wonder if people will look back at this current decade in the same way, because we have, obviously, in the US, you've got Trump here, we've got the

whole Brexit situation going on, that people are, you know know having tribal wars over which camp you fit into we seem to have lost the ability for nuance and subtlety we have the environmental crisis which seems to be getting worse and more and more urgent by the day and it strikes me on one level will we look back at this decade in the same way as being quite a toxic decade but also is it is is there something in this that we're looking now to nature again when the environment is struggling when we are you know killing the world on so many ways as humans and we're looking potentially to a natural substance to to heal us and bring us together although there seems to be some sort of circularity to it yeah well i mean i think the 60s are different than today in in important respect, which is, yes, there was a lot of upheaval.

But there was a powerful utopian direction, trajectory. I mean, people were really working to build a better world to end the war. There was a powerful movement. I mean, as is now rising around climate change, but it's so much darker now than it was then. There was a lot of optimism that we could remake the world in the 60s. And that optimism is what's missing now. So could psychedelics, therefore, give us the optimism? That's an interesting question. I mean, it's often come up. It came up in the environmental crisis, the fact that we are

really reaching a tipping point into utter environmental disaster, and then tribalism, the fact that we are breaking down into tribes and nations and religions and races and can't see over these barriers. And we're erecting walls between ourselves and other people. Interestingly enough, and this may explain why psychedelics are having their renaissance right now, they address both those questions, at least in the individual. So that when people have that psychedelic experience, I described the sense of ego dissolution followed by this what's called unitive consciousness, this sense that you're part of something larger, that you're merging. The walls come down and you feel very connected to the natural world. The natural world seems more alive than it ever has. And, you know, that's not just a subjective opinion. The group at Imperial College has actually done measurements to see,

and there's something called a nature connectedness scale that psychologists use to judge, how much do you feel you're part of nature or how much do you feel you stand outside nature? And those scales change after a single psychedelic experience. People feel much more connected to nature. And on the other side, on the political side, the tribalism side, connected to nature. And on the other side, on the political side, the tribalism side, people have much less tolerance for authoritarian ideas after psychedelic experience. And they feel this positive flow of love toward the other, whether the other is nature or other people. And you feel like you're more like others. You know, our tendency, the ego's tendency, when the ego is ascendant, is to objectify the other, that it is the only thinking, feeling subject, and everything else

is an object. When you think that way, you can be abusive, you can be exploitive of the other, you can control and manipulate nature and do the same to other people. And this drug is a medicine for both those conditions. Everything feels like another subject out there. And there is this rush of empathy for the other that you've never felt before. And it's very powerful. So in a way, yes, exactly the right drug for what ails us. But I have to add a big question mark, which is how do you prescribe a drug to a culture? We have no model for that. The only model we have is, you know, vaccinations and fluoride in the water supply. And we're not going to put LSD in the water supply. That would not be a good idea. That would not be a good idea. So then is the question to offer the experience to as many people as possible? Will that actually change society? I don't know. We haven't tried anything like that. Or do you perhaps make it available to influential people, world leaders, corporate chiefs, religious leaders, with the hope that that way of thinking, that fresh perspective would filter down to everybody else. So there's kind of an elitist and a populist approach to this question. You know, I just think you get onto very tricky territory when you talk about that.

But there's no question that these medicines, at least in the individual, take us where in many ways we need to go. You mentioned dissolving the ego. And it's funny, you know, I've been practicing now for nearly 20 years. And, you know, the last years, it's really become quite clear to me that many of my patients who are struggling with their health in some sort of chronic form, something that I don't think I was quite as aware of as a younger doctor when I first qualified is how much our emotions and the way we view ourself and our lives plays a role in our health. And it's become more and more clear to me, literally year on year, how a lot of people with chronic illness, either it's the chronic illness that's made them and more clear to me literally year on year how a lot of people with chronic

illness either it's the chronic illness that's made them feel this way or actually there are some emotional barriers that keep people locked in certain patterns something i found in my own life not particularly for a chronic illness but since my dad died um what maybe six six and a half years ago now i've been doing a lot of personal growth work a lot of you know you know, we were out for dinner last night, I was telling you about IFS, internal family systems, a form of psychotherapy that I've been doing that really helps me understand myself better. It starts to help me dissolve bits of my ego, helps me understand why I make the choices I make in certain situations, why certain things bother me and trigger me. And once I understand that and process it, often I change my behavior and it seems to be quite a permanent change. And I can look back with clarity and go, wow, that used to trigger me every time.

I now know why it used to trigger me, but it doesn't anymore. So I guess what I'm getting to is on one level, what you appear to be describing is understanding ourselves better. You're turning down the noise of this voice in our head that has maybe accumulated emotional baggage for 20, 30, 40 years, however long we've had it. And we think that's who we are, but actually it may not be who we really are. It may just be that ego that's been developed. So it's a long winded way of asking this question, but is, or do psychedelics in some way get to the same states that one might be able to attain through a lot of psychotherapy or a lot of counseling or, you know, can you access that state in other ways? The short answer is yes. You know, I see psychedelics

as a shortcut. You know, some people often say after they've had a psychedelic session with a therapist, that was like 10 years of therapy rolled into one day. And so, yeah, what you do in therapy very often is get a little distance on your ego and recognize you don't always have to listen to that voice. It isn't always acting in your best interest and you're not identical to it. I mean, this is a very important therapeutic insight. So to answer your question, the short answer is yes, there are other ways to get to the same place. And psychedelic therapy is really a shortcut to achieving some of the perspectives and insights you might in conventional psychotherapy. in my experience, was when I had on a high-dose psilocybin, guided psilocybin trip, I had an experience of utter ego dissolution. I saw myself burst into a little cloud of post-it notes, and then I saw myself and I was a coat of paint on the ground. And that was myself and I was gone. And yet I was perceiving it from another perspective. And that perspective was not troubled in any way. It was just like the most natural thing in the world. It had perfect equanimity about what had just happened. I don't know what that new perspective was, but what it taught me in a very visceral way where I felt it was like, wow, I'm not identical to my ego. There is another ground on which to stand

and confront life's challenges. And I didn't understand that. I thought I was identical to that voice in my head. And that told me I don't have to listen to it all the time. And in the years since this happened, I have a little bit of a healthy distance on my ego. I can recognize when he's up to his old tricks, when he's being triggered by something, and I don't have to be triggered by that. So it is a kind of psychoanalytic insight. And by the same token, psychedelics are a shortcut to the insights that meditators achieve. People who've done, you know, thousands of hours of meditation have really worked on also dissolving their ego and making their mind a space where what had been charged thoughts and emotions simply pass through

without being grasped at. And so again, it's a perspectival shift on consciousness. And so I don't think it's fundamentally different. I think the benefit of psychedelics is that it's so fast and frankly, takes less work. And I think in our culture, that's a big plus. Because we can't afford to give long-term psychotherapy to that many people. And many people don't have the discipline to meditate. So I do see that, though, as being really central. And this idea of not letting your ego fool you into thinking he's the whole show and his voice has to be listened to. Do you think it's hard for some people to get their heads around that?

So if someone is listening and they've never heard of this term of ego before and the separation between your ego and yourself, it might be quite a foreign thought to me. I mean, what do you mean? I am who I am. The way I think is the way I think. What do you mean? That's a separation and I'm not who I think. Yeah, but we all are familiar with conflicting voices in our heads, I think, right? When we're deciding to do something and on the one hand is this voice and on the other hand, one voice is maybe the rational voice saying this isn't wise. And the other voice is this would really be fun. And so we're not singular. There are conflicts in our heads. And we sometimes identify with one voice rather than another. And, you know, I mean, the guilt we suffer after we do certain things, you know, that is, you know, I mean, the guilt we suffer after we do certain things, you know, that is, you know, Freud said it was the superego, which is a component of the ego that has moral and ethical values attached to it. These are obviously all constructs. You know,

Buddhism tells you that if you look in your mind for that eye, for that driver in the seat that's, you know, yourself, you cannot find it. It's not really there. It's an illusion. And that's a weird idea to get your head around, too. Consciousness is generally a weird area. But what's funny, what's interesting about it for me is that once you do get your head around it, and once you've, you know, peaked your ears into that world, you can't go back. Yeah, that's right. And it strikes me as that's almost what you're saying about psychedelics, and for some people, is that once you've done it, you just don't view things in the same way anymore. You can't, because you've had your eyes opened.

Yes. And that, you know, it's interesting. After I had that experience of ego dissolution, which was a happy thing, because when my ego went away, I felt very merged with what was around me. I had this great sense of well-being. But afterwards, I said to the guide, I said, well, you know, I did have this interesting experience. And I realized my ego, I'm not identical to my ego. And she said, isn't that worth the price of admission? I said, yeah, but my ego's back now. You know, he's on patrol. He's in his uniform.

And she said, well, having had a sample of that way of thinking, and that's essentially what psychedelics gives you, is a sample of a new way of thinking. You can cultivate it. You know, that's what learning is. It's a new way of thinking. You can cultivate it. You know, that's what learning is. It's a new set of connections in the brain. And the more you exercise those connections, the stronger they get. And so I asked her, how? How could I cultivate this way of being? And she said, meditation. She said, meditation is a great way to take those insights you've had on psychedelics and reinforce them by practicing a kind of quieting of your thoughts, of your egos, you know, chatter. So like a bit of a post-experience homework, as it were.

In a way it is, yeah. And it's about reinforcement and consolidation. The more we remember something, the stronger it becomes. And I have certain images from my psychedelic trips that I often think about in meditation, and they get stronger and stronger. So there are ways to carry this forward into your life. I don't think most people realize, but when Buddhism came to the West and to America, especially in the 70s and 80s, And to America, especially in the 70s and 80s, you had these Americans who kind of brought these ideas that were very foreign at the time to mainstream culture. All of those prominent Buddhists had begun on psychedelics. They had had these big psychedelic experiences, had experienced a new kind of consciousness, and then wanted to find a way to keep it going in their lives because you can't make psychedelics are not a practice you can't you can't take them every day you can't take them every week um how how could they do that and they realized well

buddhist meditation um was a way to cultivate that kind of consciousness on a daily basis so fascinating to hear that we would not not have Buddhism in America right now. And it's quite popular. And we would not have mindfulness, mindful meditation, if not for psychedelics. I mean, that's incredible. And I really do feel it's reflective of where we are in society now that Buddhism, mindfulness, meditation, you know, they are really growing in popularity because they appear to be the perfect antidote to the modern worlds and they're entering medicine too

i mean in america now you know mindfulness meditation is is an accepted reimbursed treatment for high blood pressure and uh stress and um And they have a kind of mainstream acceptability. There's mindfulness is being taught in schools to young children. And so, but the DNA of that goes back to this psychedelic consciousness. In your research, Michael, have you come across any cultures where this is a rite of passage between childhood and adulthood? And also, have you come across this being used in children, for example, in any cultures? Yeah. In Brazil, there are ayahuasca churches. These are basically congregations of people who get together and as part of their worship every week, they take ayahuasca, and not in large doses, but in medium or small doses, and they give it to the children as well. So the children are brought into this culture early. You know, again, it's non-toxic.

To us, it seems like an outrageous idea to give children these kind of things. But it's interesting, you know, if psychedelics get approved for use, the first thing the FDA often asks you is, how young can you give it to people? And then you start having, the next step is you do tests on adolescents and then younger kids to see if you can get the same beneficial effects. And we do have a lot of teen suicides. So if indeed this is a good treatment for depression, the researchers will probably be encouraged to look at that. But there are many ancient cultures that have made use of psychedelics, both for religious purposes as a kind of sacrament and also for healing. Shamanism often uses psychedelics. Psychedelics have been used for thousands of years and, you know, all over the world. And we don't know a lot about it.

It was sometimes shrouded in secrecy or the practices have died out since along with the cultures. But there was a recent discovery in Bolivia of this in a cave, you know, an inhabited cave where they found this kit of tools and pouches and things. And they did some analysis and discovered that there were residues from ayahuasca, DMT, and cocaine. And the interesting thing about the ayahuasca though is the plants that they found there that contained it were not local plants. So there was trade in South America more than a thousand years ago in psychoactive, psychedelic plants. They also have been used in Mexico for thousands of years by the native, the indigenous populations. There are shamans in Siberia who were using another kind of mushroom that's psychoactive. And the ancient Greeks had a, appear to have a psychedelic they used in some of their rituals.

There's some recent research that suggests it was a derivative of the same fungus from which LSD comes. And so they've been used for a very long time. And why? Well, I think that psychedelics may have had a lot to do with nurturing that spark of religiosity in humans. The idea that there's another world, that there's a beyond, that you go somewhere after you die, that there are other dimensions, basically. that there are other dimensions, basically, that's a really weird idea to come to. And you could see how use of psychedelics would nurture that idea. And so, you know, psychedelics may be at the root of the religious impulse. And that sounds like, you know, a heretical idea to suggest that, wait, a chemical is at the root of religion? But of course, to traditional peoples, these weren't chemicals. This was nature. This was nature speaking to us. This is nature you

take into your body and you get visions. And they wouldn't find that heretical at all. On so many levels, it feels that what's exciting about this is that we're looking at spirituality and we're also looking at cutting-edge modern science. And it feels as though this work that's now being done in these established institutions is starting to bring those two worlds together. Those two often very separate worlds are starting to combine, and that's really exciting. Yeah. separate worlds are starting to combine. And that's really exciting. Yeah. I mean, we think of, when I first started doing this work, there was a paper that I read, one of the first papers of this Renaissance, and it blew my mind. It had a title like,

psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences in healthy, normal people with lasting positive effects. And like, wow, scientists studying mystical experience? But those worlds are coming together and we're starting to understand the biology of spiritual experience, the parts of the brain that are deactivated that make you feel a sense of spirituality. And I think that's really exciting that science is gonna give us insight into spirituality

and spirituality may give insight to science and medicine. Yeah, really exciting. And I know in the book, you go into detail about something called the default mode network that listens to this podcast. I've heard me talk about on multiple occasions, but you really sort of take a deep dive into what goes on there when someone is having a psychedelic experience. Michael, I've got a billion other questions to ask you, but I know we're almost out of time. So one thing I want to just bring up, if I may, is you mentioned that psychedelics aren't the sort of thing you can take every few days, you know, and take regularly, like you can practice meditation or deep breathing or something like that. But there is this growing trend of something called microdosing. I wonder if you could explain what microdosing is and then what your views are on

this as well. Sure. So microdosing is essentially using psychedelics in a routine way in small doses, usually a tenth of a normal dose. It might be 10 micrograms of LSD taken once every three or four days. You can't take it every day because you build up a tolerance and it doesn't work after a while. And there are a great many people I know in the United States, and I gather from my trip here, many people here who are convinced that this use of psychedelics helps with their sense of well-being, relieves depression, improves their productivity and their creativity. But it's important, and that may all be true, but it's important to understand there's really no research yet to support it. We haven't yet done the placebo-controlled trials that would allow us to say, this is a real effect of that medicine versus this is just a placebo effect. The placebo effect on psychedelics is very powerful.

We impute so much magic to these molecules that if I gave you a little bit of LSD and told you you're going to feel X or Y, you're very likely to feel that way. Our minds have a, I mean, the placebo effect in general is amazing. I could even give you a sugar pill or you could give me a sugar pill as a doctor and tell me it's going to help my knee and it would. Yeah, it's incredible. The power of the mind. It is. It's exactly that, the mind, the mind, it is, it's exactly that the power of the mind. And I do think there is a role for psychedelics in addressing psychosomatic illness of various kind and autoimmune illness of various kinds, because Andrew Weil has made a very compelling case that things like allergy might be susceptible to psychedelics and autoimmune disease, which is quite remarkable. It makes perfect sense to me because if you, you know, something we alluded to at the start of this podcast is I think there's been, you know, we've overly focused in medicine on diagnosis, on, you know, what do we, what's the name we give to this condition? What's the name we give to this

condition? I understand how that evolved, i i think we've really missed a big piece which is a lot of the root causes of many different manifestations of disease are actually quite similar yeah um you know our collective lifestyle has been a huge driver you know you've written about food for donkey's years you know food can impact a whole variety of different illnesses not just whether you're overweight or not. And food can, of course, affect your mood in profound ways. Your genetic expression, all kinds of things can be impacted by food, which can obviously have an impact on multiple different conditions. There's trials going on at the moment, well, one in 2017 showing how food, a randomized control trial in Australia,

how food can improve our moods. And so the interesting thing for me is thinking as a doctor, how food can improve our moods and so the interesting thing for me is thinking as a doctor i can see once we've got some you know really robust research let's say for depression which it looks as though that might be the first thing to come through then that will hopefully open the floodgates as to you know many other therapeutic uses of them um, look, changing our minds often means changing our bodies, right? These things are not separate. And the fact that we have this now, this powerful tool for changing minds could have a huge impact on all those diseases that are implicated by our mental condition and vice versa. So I think it's going to open up some fascinating research in basic science about the mind, about the body,

and that we are just at the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of the mind and our ability to treat the mind. Nothing could be more exciting. Yeah, absolutely. And really, from the bottom of my heart, I need to thank you for writing a frankly brilliant book, a book that could be regarded as controversial in many ways. But I think when people read it, the way you've put everything

together, the story, the journey you've taken us on, the science, the personal anecdotes, really, I think, bring this topic to life in a very important way. And really, I think it's needed somebody as esteemed and as respected as yourself to go and take a deep dive, to have a psychedelic experience for the first time in your, what, late 50s? Yeah. You know, that I think is very powerful for people. So I hope people have had their appetite whetted by our conversation to go

actually and read more about it. Final thoughts, I normally leave people, I normally finish off the podcast with some top tips for people because I normally have a health expert on or, you know, and how people can improve the quality of their lives. But I'm sort of thinking it doesn't necessarily lend itself naturally to the subject matter that we've been talking about. I presume you're not going to recommend that everyone goes out and gets hold of some psychedelics to take. Although some people have suggested I coin a new motto that would be take drugs, not too much, mostly psychedelics. But I don't, to bring our conversation full circle. I don't, to bring our conversation full circle. But it's too momentous a decision to tell people to go out and try psychedelics. Follow the research. If you have one of the problems that are being addressed, go on the websites of these and look what's being offered. I know the trial in England, in London, is seeking depressed patients to work with.

They still have some openings in the trial. And I have a lot of resources on my website, michaelpollin.com, if you want to explore psychedelics further and find psychedelic societies in your town, which is a good way to get more information. And so anyway, that's where you can look. I mean, a lot of people hear this and feel that, many of whom are at their wit's end dealing with depression, dealing with anxiety, and they hear this and they think this could be it. But there isn't much yet that we can offer. And that's very frustrating to me. And I've heard from hundreds of people who have really upsetting stories to hear. But it's coming and it's going to be in the next five years or so. And any final words for somebody who may still be skeptical on how valuable psychedelics could be? I would read this book, How to Change Your Mind. I mean, I was skeptical too. It's very important to understand. I mean, I probably sound

like I'm being evangelical about this, but I went into this with lots of skepticism, lots of reluctance. I was terrified to take psychedelics at. Um, and I had my mind changed on this subject. Um, and, uh, you know, I, I'm hoping if you get a chance to read the book that, uh, the same will happen to you. Well, thanks for your time, Michael. If people want to connect with you on social media, are you active? I'm active on Twitter, uh, at Michael Pollan and, um, and my website has lots of resources, all my articles, uh, including articles on psychedelics, that are available for free. And yeah, but that's my main social media. And I'm on Instagram too, but I don't talk about psychedelics there.

Michael, thank you for your time today. Enjoy the rest of your trip to London and the UK. And I hope to see you again soon. Oh, thanks so much. This was a great pleasure. I hope to see you again soon. Oh, thanks so much. This was a great pleasure.

That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. How was that for you? Did you enjoy it? Were you surprised by what you heard? I totally appreciate that there were less take-home actual tips in this conversation than in my usual ones, but I hope you got value from it nonetheless.

I really do think that we are at the beginning of a revolution in understanding how our minds really work. I think that this is a super important topic to be talking about. And what I love about doing my podcast is that I can talk to guests about topics like this one and communicate this information directly to my listeners. As always, but particularly with this episode, please do let Michael and myself know what you thought of the show today by letting us know on social media.

Michael is on Twitter at Michael Pollan and I am on the same platform at Dr. Chatterjee UK as well as Facebook and Instagram at Dr. Chatterjee. Please do use the hashtag FBLM so that we can keep this conversation going and that I can easily see your comments. The more you talk about it on social media, the more you help to amplify the reach of what I think is an incredibly important yet under-discussed topic. Feel free to take a screenshot of this episode right now and share it with your friends and family on social media. Everything that Michael and I

discussed today will be on the show notes page for this episode, which is drchastity.com forward slash change your mind. Here, you'll find articles on the latest research, helpful resources, and to michael's books and websites so do check it out if you wish to continue your learning experience now that the podcast is over i just want to reiterate that the use of psychedelic drugs is currently illegal and that the research was promising is still in its infancy and what we really need is more large-scale studies. I also want to emphasize that the content in this podcast is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always

seek the advice of a healthcare professional with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. As Michael mentioned, the regular practice of meditation is another way to change your mind and access an altered perspective on your everyday life. And this is just a quick reminder that one of the world's most popular meditation apps, Calm, are sponsoring today's show and have got a great offer for my listeners right now. You can get 25% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com forward slash live more. So if you have been sitting on the fence about meditation, it could be a great way to get started. On today's show, we discuss mental health problems a lot. And as you well know, we are facing a mental health crisis at the moment. My latest book, The Stress Solution,

is full of simple and actionable tips on how you can lower your own stress levels and live a happier and calmer life. There have been over 150 reviews so far on Amazon with an incredible average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars. So if you feel that you would benefit or that you know someone who might, please do consider picking up a copy. The Stress Solution is available on paperback, ebook and as an audiobook, which I am narrating. If you enjoy my weekly shows, please do consider supporting them

by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. You can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now and sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels. Or you could do it the good old-fashioned way and simply tell your friends and family about the show. I really do appreciate your support. One more request. I'm feeling a little bit overloaded at the moment with the amounts that I have on. So I'm looking to expand my team so that I can keep producing content and get my message out to as many people as possible. I'm looking for a videographer who might be interested in helping me video my podcasts and

do some social media videos. Ideally, this videographer would be someone who lives in the northwest of England, but that is not an absolute requirement. I'm also on the lookout for a copywriter to help me with a variety of projects. If you are a fan of the podcast and want to help me reach more people with my message do send a brief email to info at drchatterjee.com i hope to hear from you soon a big thank you to richard hughes for editing and vidar chatterjee for producing this week's podcast that is it for today i hope you have a fabulous week make sure that you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest episodes. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.

I'll see you next time. Thank you.