Making Sense with Sam Harris - #127 — Freedom from the Known

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Pollan about his new book “How to Change Your Mind.” They cover the the resurgence of interest in psychedelics in clinical practice and end-of-life care, the “betterment of well people,” the relationship between thinking and mental suffering, the differences between psychedelics and meditation, the non-duality of consciousness, the brain’s “default mode network,” their experiences with various psychedelics, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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My guest today is Michael Pollan. Michael's the author of seven previous books, which include Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. And he's a longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. And in 2010, Time Magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Today, we're speaking about his new book, which is titled How to Change Your Mind, what the new science of psychedelics teaches usaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. And as I say in the outset of this conversation, many of us have been waiting for somebody to write this book, and it was really perfect that Michael was that person. Anyway, I could have spoken to Michael for many hours about this, but he was in the middle of a punishing book tour.

So I got about an hour and 20 minutes or so of his time. And I hope you think we put it to good use. And now I bring you Michael Pollan. I'm here with Michael Pollan. Michael, thanks for coming on the podcast. Great to be here, Sam. I am so grateful that you wrote this book. I think this must be a sentiment that has been expressed to you many times. This book you have written, How to Change Your Mind, which is your deep exploration into both the current science and clinical use of and your own personal experience with psychedelics, it really couldn't be more timely. And I just got the sense while waiting for the book, in the aftermath of your New Yorker article, which came out a few years ago, and in reading it,

that this was just perfect. You were just the person to do this, and you really delivered on a lot of promise that was laid out in your article. First, just thank you for doing this. Oh, thanks for those generous words. I do feel, I mean, the book's only been out for a few days, but I do feel like this was a conversation that the culture was waiting to have. And I'm just really surprised. First, how many people have come forward to tell me about their own experiences, which are often profound and maybe have not been taken out of that box labeled weird drug experience for 30, 40 years. But also the fact that it seems like we're ready to have a kind of more matter of fact discussion of these things and look at them as tools,

what they're good for, what they're not good for, rather than, you know, the usual kind of instantaneous reaction, you know, invoking all the problems of the 60s. So I've been hopeful by, you know, and encouraged by the response. Yeah, and you were especially well-placed, in my view, to write this because not only your background as a writer and journalist, but because the 60s had sort of passed you by, you were born right in this valley where you were young enough to kind of miss the summer of love. So you were not this old acid head who is now dusting off his interest in altered states of consciousness. You are exploring this for the first time. I guess the first question is,

what was that like? You're 60 now or you're 61? I'm 63 now. I was in my late 50s when I started working on this. So that is precisely the time where people's risk aversion seems to be kicking into high gear. And, you know, as someone who has done a fair amount of psychedelics in his youth, but has since done none for precisely the reasons that might have given you some trepidation to do this in the first place. to do this in the first place. What was that like? How long did you have to negotiate with yourself and with your wife and your agent? What was the process before you jumped? Well, I definitely didn't tell my agent about it. Not at the beginning.

You know, I was a very reluctant psychonaut. I hadn't really had experience with these drugs, except for a couple of very mild, so-called aesthetic experiences with psilocybin in my late 20s. I came of age at a moment where the moral panic was in full flower and I heard all the horror stories. And honestly, I didn't feel like I was a psychologically sturdy enough person to do this. And so I stayed away. Then to approach it later, I mean, it's true. When you're 20, you know, when you were having your experiments in Nepal, you believe you're immortal. And you are, you know, I mean, men that age are great risk takers. That's why we send them to war. And, um, but here I was

approaching 60 and, you know, it was not unhappy and had a pretty good life and why mess with it? Uh, and on the other hand, um, uh, so I had to overcome a lot of reluctance, uh, so many things. I mean, the fear of the drugs and the experience, the new age kind of woo-woo vocabulary of my guides, the music that they played, so many things just rubbed me the wrong way. You're unusually hung up on the music. I know. I don't know why. It's kind of adorable that that was such a sticking point. It really got to me. It was the kind of music you might hear at a high-end spa while you're getting a massage. For some reason, this is profound to some people. I argued with myself before every one of my trips. I had an awful sleepless night where part of me was arguing,

are you crazy? You're going to go up to the top of this mountain. You're going to be with someone you barely know. You could have a heart attack, and he's not going to call 911 because it's going to get him into trouble. And, um, and then the other half would be saying, but aren't you curious? You know, you've never had a spiritual experience, aren't you? Um, uh, you know, plus you got a book to write. And, um, so it was, uh, you know, this ping pong match, but every night. And I realized eventually that that was my ego trying to stop me from what was going to be a full assault on it. So I fortunately I overcame that reluctance.

I mean, I'm very glad I did, but I could see how easily you would not do this. Now, you hadn't taken any trip yourself when you wrote the New Yorker article. Is that right? That's right. I hadn't done it then. And that article was kind of straight ahead science writing. I think the New Yorker would have been frightened off had I said, hey, and I'm going to have a trip too. I had to stick to the people in white coats, you know, that's to get it into the New Yorker. It was hard enough to get a piece on psychedelics into the New Yorker in 2014. That enough to get a piece on psychedelics into the New Yorker in 2014. That's interesting.

That actually took some negotiation with your editors? Well, I mean, think about it. There was, I mean, I did, I proposed it to them and they bit, but then I handed in 14,000 words on science that had not yet been peer reviewed. So I could see why it was a bit of a stretch. And there was this very interesting moment two or three days before close where I got word from my editor that I had to find a prominent psychiatrist or somebody who thought this was all bullshit. And so I spent a day dialing, you know, dialing around until I found, I thought Tom Insel, the former head of the

National Institute of Mental Health, would give me the establishment cautions. But when I reached him in Davos, he was like- He was on acid? No, this research is really interesting. I think we need to do it. And I finally got the head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse to give me the quote I needed, which was, these drugs can be abused, which we know. I don't disagree with that. That's the squarest quote you could find? Yeah, that was the best I could do. That's funny. Well, so I think we should probably give our own disclaimer here. It's certainly clear

if listeners have read anything I've written about psychedelics, and it would be clear to anyone reading your book that there's potential downside. First, we have to acknowledge that the word drugs names a very wide spectrum of compounds that are significantly different, both psychologically and physically. So much of what we're going to say about the classic psychedelics doesn't necessarily apply to something like MDMA, which has also therapeutic value and people have derived a lot of benefit from it. But unlike the classic psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin being the most common here, but you would add DMT as well, you can make the case that MDMA is physically not good for you. It's very hard to make that case with LSD and psilocybin. They

seem to be impressively non-toxic, but they produce such a strong experience psychologically for good or for ill that you can't recommend this without serious caveat to people. And people who can't afford, as I think I said when I wrote about this, to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug, really shouldn't. And so if someone's at risk for schizophrenia or worries that they could be destabilized in some permanent way by experiences like this, this isn't just a matter of what one would want to say about psychedelics. This applies to even long-term meditation practice. I wouldn't recommend that someone go into silence for a month and do nothing but meditate if they're at risk for a condition

like schizophrenia. So we're about to say some very positive things, and we should just anchor that particular disclaimer. Yeah, I'd like to say an additional word about risk. I think it's very important to preface any conversation with a sense of risk. The risks are, as you suggest, less physiological than they are psychological. Physiologically, the drugs, as you say, are relatively non-toxic. I mean, there are lethal doses of all sorts of over-the-counter drugs that you have in your medicine cabinet, and there doesn't appear to be lethal doses of the classic psychedelics. And I agree with you that I would take MDMA out of that, that it is more toxic. experiments, you know, in the classic setup where the rat has a lever that administers cocaine to itself and another lever for food, it will press the lever endlessly for cocaine until it

dies. Whereas if you do that setup with LSD, it'll press it once and never again. No, the first reaction after a big psychedelic trip is not, where can I get some more? It's just too powerful an experience. But psychologically, some people do get into trouble. And I'm hearing those stories when I talk to audiences about this. I can't, you know, it's anecdotal, but there are casualties. And we don't know whether psychedelics have ever created a case of mental illness where there was no predisposition for it. That's really not clear. But certainly people have very powerful reactions. They can be just panic reactions sometimes, but they can also be psychotic episodes and in some very few cases,

psychotic breaks. So in the trials that are going on, people are screened very carefully. And if they have a family history of schizophrenia, they're just not allowed in. And some personality disorders, too. I think people who have bipolar, they accounts of psychedelics, especially in Waking Up, were incredibly important to me as I was deciding what to do in this book, and that they really emboldened me, that a person of your reputation and evidence sanity, and that you would be willing to describe your experiences so openly, made it a little easier for me to do that, too. So I'm grateful for that. Oh, nice, nice. Well, I was glad to see that you didn't take 400 micrograms of acid in the middle of a canoe in the middle of a lake in the middle of Nepal.

I'm not 20. It wasn't good even if you were 20. But yeah, so that's great. I'm very happy to hear that. But yeah, so that's great. I'm very happy to hear that therapeutically for people who are in one or another state of obvious unwellness, but also, as you phrase it many times in the book, the betterment of well people. And that's the more controversial side of this, that people who are experiencing ordinary levels of happiness and well-being still stand a lot to gain from these sorts of experiences. I mean, that's certainly been my

experience and it's been yours. Again, we'll dive into that, but the disclaimer still stands and people need to find whatever experts in their life to consult before they take any implicit advice coming from us here. And also, ideally, I mean, one way to mitigate the risk is to work with a guide, someone who is a professional, someone who really knows the territory. And we'll talk a little later about how a guided experience differs from a so-called recreational experience. But I think it's a profound difference, and it definitely mitigates the risk. I guess let's start with a snapshot of the landscape here. I guess I've distinguished two aspects to it here. There's the renewed clinical interest.

Maybe you can describe how that looks now and the conditions for which people are, you know, marshalling psilocybin and other drugs. And then we can talk about the notion of the betterment of well people as well. Sure. Well, what's happening right now and has been happening now for really almost two decades is a renaissance of research that was going on in the 1950s that I was not aware of. I think many people, I mean, even I talked to young psychiatrists, they never heard about this in their education, but that in the 50s, there was a really fertile period of experimentation by,

you know, serious psychiatrists and academics to try to figure out what LSD and then a little later psilocybin might have to contribute to mental health treatment. And the work that's been going on now since the late 90s is really attempt to pick up that thread that was dropped during the moral panic that led to the backlash against psychedelics in the 60s. And, you know, we had this 30-year hiatus in research, which is, I don't know if I can think of another example of a promising line of inquiry that scientists were very excited about. I mean, many people thought this was going to be a psychiatric wonder drug that was completely suppressed for a period of time and then resumed. And we can only imagine

what we might know had we continued and had that other 30 years of time and then resumed. And we can only imagine what we might know had we continued and had that other 30 years of experience and research with these drugs. But anyway, the work that's going on now so far is mostly repeating experiments that were done in the 50s, but doing them to much better standards. The randomized double-blind controlled trial doesn't really come into common use until 1962 or three after the solitimide scandal or tragedy. And that's when we had an experience with a drug that was being given to pregnant women that led to birth defects. It was a horrible episode. And it was only then that we started regulating the drug approval process the way we do it now. And so these trials that were done in the 50s by modern standards aren't adequate.

They often weren't controlled. And it is hard to control a psychedelic experiment because you usually can tell who got the acid and who got the placebo. The double blind thing becomes unblinded pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. And so the kinds of indications they're using the drugs for now are the anxiety and depression felt by cancer patients after they get that life, either that terminal or life-threatening diagnosis. That was done in the 60s, also in the 50s,

and it is being done now with remarkable success. These studies that I wrote about in that New Yorker piece have been published since in December 2016, and they were done at Johns Hopkins and NYU. that in 80% of the volunteers, there were statistically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression. Quite remarkable. Results you can't get with an antidepressant. So very high effect size. Now, these are just phase two trials. We're talking about 80 volunteers, and they need to be replicated on a much wider scale. And that will happen fairly soon. So that's been one promising area of research and perhaps the most advanced in terms of scale and rigor of the experiments. There's also been a pilot study of smoking cessation. You know, smoking is a very hard addiction to break. And in 15 people, very hard addiction to break. And in 15 people, 67% of them were abstinent after a year,

which is quite remarkable. I think the standard of care for that, I think it's Shantex or something like that, is 20% after a year success rate. So that's pretty remarkable, but again, needs to be and is being repeated on a larger scale. There have been, there was one study for obsessive compulsive disorder that showed encouraging results. Another pilot study in New Mexico for alcohol addiction that was encouraging enough in its results to lead to a very large phase two trial that's underway right now at NYU. So it's addiction, depression, anxiety, obsession. I think there's great potential for eating disorders. And I know the people at Hopkins are looking at that. It seems to do best in disorders that are characterized by kind of obsessive thinking, rigid thinking, people

getting trapped in a narrative about themselves that is, you know, unhelpful. And that one of the most striking things to me is the drug, the success of psilocybin. And by the way, I should point out that today they use psilocybin almost exclusively and stay away from LSD for two reasons, even though LSD was used a lot in the 50s and 60s. The effects are quite similar. The psilocybin trip is much shorter, though. It's only like five or six hours, as opposed to a potential 10 or 12 with LSD. And that's very hard to fit into the therapeutic workday. I mean, if the... You can't get home for dinner.

Yeah, they want to get home for dinner. And then there is also the fact that LSD carries so much more cultural baggage, and that you're much more likely to excite a reaction on the part of some, you know, congressman standing up and saying, why are we doing research with LSD? He can't get the same bang talking about psilocybin, which he might not be able to pronounce and his audience doesn't know what it is. So psilocybin can operate under the cultural radar a little bit, at least so far. So the indications that it works best, you realize, have something important in common, which is that the ego or the self is kind of stuck in these stories, these narratives that are really unhelpful. You know, narratives like, I can't get through the next hour without a cigarette, or narratives like, I'm worthless, or narratives that, you know, I'm't get through the next hour without a cigarette. Or narratives like, I'm worthless. Or narratives that, you know, I'm about to die, and what's the meaning of life? And,

you know, I'm confused. And so they kind of dope slap people out of their stories. And I think that's a very, I mean, it's kind of a new model for psychotherapy, right? Because you're really administering an experience, not just a chemical. Yeah, well, so you remark on this at some point in your book that it may at first glance seem surprising that a single antidote is being proffered for all of these diverse conditions. But when you boil it down, and I guess my experience in meditation would tempt me to boil it down even further. All of these conditions, as you say, have this common feature of the mind being imprisoned by certain patterns of thinking. And, you know, I would say that basically all of mental suffering has this feature that it's really

significantly or entirely mediated by thinking and one's relationship to one's thoughts. And so you're left with a few options. You can either change your thoughts or change the world so as to be convinced by it that a change in your thinking is warranted. You can change your relationships, you can change your career, you can change your health, you know, you can rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, or you can change your relationship to your thoughts. And there's something about a psychedelic experience that I would argue does both. Meditation is, and we'll talk about the differences here, because I think as, you know, in the Venn diagram of remedies for existential problems, I think that meditation and psychedelics

overlap significantly, but not entirely. Meditation is much more weighted on the side of changing your relationship to thoughts in a pure way without really changing content. And the thing about a psychedelic experience is the contents of consciousness change so radically that you can't help but be shoved into different patterns of thinking about yourself and your place in the world and what it is to be an ape confronted by the cosmos. It's not actually a surprise that these experiences change people's suffering with respect to many different conditions and probably many conditions that are not on anyone's list yet. I want to come back to a few things you mentioned here, because in your book, there are these fascinating anecdotes. Well, first, you mentioned the application to treatment-resistant depression. I was astonished to hear

from you that that idea actually came from the FDA. That was thrust upon researchers who were looking for a more narrow application, and the FDA opened the door to that. Yeah, that was fascinating. So when the researchers from Hopkins at NYU brought the results of these phase two trials to their meeting at the FDA, they were hoping to get approval to do a phase three study of the same thing, depression and anxiety in cancer patients. But it was the regulators at the FDA, and this reporting is based on what the researchers told

me. The FDA wouldn't say a word about it because they don't disclose anything about drug approval processes. But that they said, you know, there's a strong signal here that this is effective with depression. And we have a tremendous problem with depression and very few tools to treat it. The SSRIs, antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, you know, there are a lot of problems with them. There was recently a meta-analysis that showed they only do slightly better than placebo and that their effects fade over time and that they're very hard to get off. And people really hate the side effects very often. So the FDA was very open to studying depression in a larger population. In America, it's not, just to correct you, it's not going to be treatment-resistant depression. It's going to be major depression. In Europe is where they're going to do treatment-

resistant depression. These are depressions that have failed to respond to two courses of treatment. And so that was, as one researcher described it to me, he said it was a surreal moment. And one of the reasons they had worked, wanted to work with cancer patients is they thought it was a particularly sympathetic population that we had very little for because antidepressants really don't help very much if you're, you know, facing your mortality, if you have what they call psycho-spiritual distress. So yeah, that was another indication, I think, that there is a receptivity to this work right now that really flows from the desperate straits of the population and the limitations of mental health care right now. And, you know, Tom Insull, the former head of the National Institute of

Mental Health, he was really the one who sensitized me to this. And he points out that if you compare mental health treatment, which, by the way, only reaches half the population of people who need access to it right now, if you compare it to any other branch of medicine, to oncology or cardiology or infectious disease, it's achieved very little. And there is a tremendous amount of sufferings out there. You know, the rates of depression are climbing, suicide is going up alarmingly, and addiction is, rates of addiction are raising, and addictive behavior is, you know, rampant rampant. And big pharma, the pharmaceutical industry, apparently has very few what are called CNS drugs, central nervous system

drugs in the pipeline. So I think even the FDA is a little desperate when it comes to looking for innovation in mental health treatment. And there really hasn't been much innovation since the early 90s. So I think psychedelics come along now at a very propitious moment. Yeah, I want to spend a couple of minutes on the end-of-life care and the cancer patient stories you tell, because there's one in the book that is fairly arresting and inspiring. And also, I just had recent experience with this. Someone close to me in my family recently died of pancreatic cancer. And I was, you know, for the first time in many, many years in the situation of being close to someone who was dying and just

being taken through every stage of the medicalization process of death, where treatment is no longer treatment and you go into a hospice situation. And I was struck at every stage along the way that the promise of bringing equanimity to the person who's dying, it's really not just about the person who's dying. The state of mind of the person who's dying affects everyone around him or her. And to some degree, this is just luck of the draw. I mean, it's just, you know, you're lucky not to have dementia. You're lucky not to be in excruciating pain. And, you know, there are treatments for both of those things are, in the first case, basically non-existent, in the second, imperfect. But, you know, as it happened, my family member got very lucky and he died in a state of just virtually unbroken gratitude and

love. And it was just, he won the death lottery, essentially. And the effect... Why? What happened? He was not someone who was at all overcome by regret. He was just feeling gratitude and love for seemingly every conscious moment that was left to him. And the experience of being with him and mourning the loss of him was totally different than if he had been in some radically different state of, you know, being terrorized by the contents of his own mind, which is the way many people die. And you tell a story in your book of a cancer patient who, you know, on the basis of, I think it was one psilocybin experience, was set on course to have an extraordinarily beautiful process of dying,

which affected everyone around him. Yeah, you're talking about Patrick Metis, who was a journalist in New York, worked for MSNBC, was about my age at the time in his 50s, and he had bile duct cancer that had spread to his lungs. He was really paralyzed by anxiety and depression. And he read about the trial at NYU in the same article I first heard about it, actually, in the New York Times. And he immediately called them and applied to get in. It's interesting, his wife, Lisa, was against it and thought that this represented a surrender to death and that he had given up fighting. And that's a very common reaction. And indeed, most oncologists, at least when that study was

going on, reacted the same way. They had a lot of trouble getting referrals because the oncologists see any acceptance of death as a defeat, and they take it personally as if it were their defeat. as a defeat. And they take it personally, as if it were their defeat. But he went ahead anyway. And he had a profound experience that involved a rebirth. He suddenly started shuddering and lifted his legs and held on for dear life with one of his guides and where he said, and he said to them, life, dying and being born is a lot of work. And he was being born or he was giving birth and he was giving birth to himself, he felt after it had happened. And there was a very rich kind of feminine principle at work. Michelle Obama showed up in his trip and his late sister-in-law. And he had an interesting experience with his mother, who I think he had problems with.

I never really understood what those problems were. But he had an epiphany that a mother had to love her child. And so perhaps what he had failed to understand as love was love. And then he had this interesting experience, and I'm cutting out lots of things. Derek Jeter showed up. He had this whole riff on aesthetics and why we need to simplify everything we do,

that we put too many notes in the songs, too many elements in the TV program, and that we needed to focus on love, and that love was the most important principle. And I'll get back to that because the problem of platitudes on the psychedelic experience is interesting, if it is a problem. And then he had this experience of kind of climbing up to this precipice that was made of stainless steel and it was kind of sharp and looking out over it and seeing this plane of consciousness that was infused with love. And he saw that as

a form of consciousness outside of himself that would survive him. And he could go there now, he realized. He could go over to that side, but chose not to, that he didn't want to leave his wife yet and that he still had some time that he wanted to spend in this world. When the trip ended, he was sweaty, exhausted. His wife said he looked like he'd run a marathon. And he wrote a beautiful account of it that his wife and his doctor allowed me to quote at length. And it's extraordinary. And he spent the next 17 months in a very different frame of mind. He, at one session, I had the therapeutic notes with his palliative care psychologist. He spent his days walking around Brooklyn, finding interesting places to have

lunch, savoring every moment, like the family member you were describing. And in one session with his shrink, he said he'd never been so happy in his life as in those last months because of the gratitude he had for the time he had left. And his focus turned from the quality of his time to the quantity. And in fact, he did stop chemo eventually, not because he wanted to die, he said, but because he didn't want to live that way while he was still alive. Toward the end, his lungs began to fail, and he went into the hospital at Mount Sinai. And Lisa, his wife, and Tony Bosis, his therapist, said that his room in the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai became this gravitational field in the hospital. Everybody on the floor wanted to spend time in that room because he was putting out so much love. His wife said it was like he was a yogi. They all wanted

to be near this presence. Here is someone facing death within a matter of days, yet is putting out this energy that we normally turn away from the dying. We have to work very hard not to. But this was quite the opposite. I never met him. Everything I know about him came from interviews and reading these notes. He had died before I wrote about him. But there's a moment where his wife sent me a photograph that she'd taken four or five days before he died. And I remember vividly the moment I clicked it open on my computer screen. And here was this man. I had never seen a picture of him. He was emaciated. He was very, very thin. He had an oxygen clip and was wearing that blue hospital scrubs. And he has shining blue eyes

that he had. And he was beaming, absolutely beaming. And it just took my breath away. absolutely beaming. And it was, it just took my breath away. And he died, you know, in a very deliberate way. He was ready. And with what appeared to everybody around him to be complete equanimity. But your point about the caregivers and how important it is to them too, because it's very hard to take care of someone who is suffering in that existential way, let alone the pain and all the physical problems of dying. And actually, there are some of the therapists who've done this work thinks that there's a place for giving it to the caregivers also, and that it could help them. So what happened in the mind of Patrick Metis is a question that I became intensely

concerned with. I wanted to understand that. Had he had a glimpse of an afterlife? Was that what it was? I don't think exactly, but he'd had a glimpse of a kind of consciousness that was literally selfless. It was a consciousness that was outside of him, that was universal in some ways, and that he was part of and would continue to be part of even when he died. Now, you can argue if that's a form of immortality or not, but it is a transcendence of the self. And I think part of what's going on here is people are, they're rehearsing their death. You know, an ego death is a death. And it can feel like a death.

And it can be agonizing or ecstatic, depending on your preparation and your set, your mindset. And that rehearsal, I think, and what you're rehearsing is letting go also, and that's very important, because we cling, you know, we cling to all sorts of things, and to let go of yourself and have that experience, I think, equips you to die. Well, I want to talk about the experience, and your experiences in particular, and what they may or may not mean, kind of the metaphysics lurking at the back here. But I think we should deal with this problem of platitudes that you raised a moment ago. And this relates to the so-called and much remarked ineffability of the psychedelic experience. It's not that it is, I mean, it can certainly be hard to remember. Many psychedelic states have somewhat the quality of dreams where, you know,

they can be incredibly intense, but paradoxically, very hard to remember even a few moments later. But I don't think they're as ineffable as all that. You do a good job of effing in this book. If anyone's heard Terence McKenna talk for 14 hours about any of his drug experiences, he's quite articulate on all the details. So you can capture many of the features of interest here. The problem of platitude, and again, you remark on this at several points in the book, and it's something I'm sensitive to also as a writer. You hate to boil it all down to a sentence that belongs on a Hallmark card, I think, as you put it. But I think there's a principle of charity you have to extend

to the other person and even to your former self when you're trying to capture these experiences, because a statement like love is the principle of being, say, right? Love is everything that is the only thing that matters. Right. That like if you actually do the work to capture what that state of mind is, it's worth doing. Yeah. So I have a slightly different take on the platitudes.

Like, I think they're true. I think that a platitude is a truth after you've drained out all the important things. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.