Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 380: Psychedelics and Meditation | Michael Pollan

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Michael Pollan has done more than perhaps anybody else in recent history to change the conversation on the use of psychedelic drugs, or plant medicine. He is author of the best selling book called How to Change Your Mind and he recently followed up with another book called This is Your Mind on Plants. Pollan is also the co-founder of the University of California Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, along with another recent podcast guest, Dacher Keltner.  In this conversation we talk about whether psychedelics and meditation can mix and the links between psychedelics, meditation and Buddhism; the universal human drive to change consciousness; and his experiences with the three plants that he focuses on in his new book: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Please note: this episode contains conversations about depression, suicide, and substance use.  Here are the steps for sending us a question for our upcoming Work Life Series: 1. Go to a quiet place and open the default voice memo recording app on your phone. 2. Hold the phone about 8-10 inches from your face, then tap “record.” 3. Tell us your name, where you’re from, and what your question is. Try to keep it to about a minute or so. 4. Stop the recording, then check it to make sure it sounds clear. 5. Email it to us at: [e-mail] by September 27, 2021. Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/install Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/michael-pollan-380 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Ola, hello, my guest today has done more than perhaps anybody else in recent memory to change the conversation on the use of psychedelic drugs or plant medicine. Today, we're going to talk about whether psychedelics and meditation can mix among other things with Michael Pollan, who is the author of a mega best-selling book called How to Change Your Mind, and who recently followed up with another book called This Is Your Mind

on Plants. Michael is also the co-founder of the University of California Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, along with the recent podcast guest, Decker Keltner. They're working together on that one. To be clear, neither of us, neither Michael Norai, is here to encourage anybody to use these substances.

Michael's goal, from what I can tell, is really just to spread the word about the fascinating encourage anybody to use these substances. Michael's goal from what I can tell is, is really just to spread the word about the fascinating new science, about the potential benefits to human beings from these molecules. But he, as you will hear in this conversation, he does so with real caution. You're going to hear us talk about the link

between psychedelics and meditation and Buddhism, the dissolution of the self on psychedelics, how to avoid bad trips, relieving human suffering from mental illness through psychedelics. His experiences with the three plants that he focuses on in his new book, Opium, Caffeine, and Mescalon, the history of indigenous use of psychedelics, the seemingly universal human drive to change our consciousness, and how to try psychedelics safely. Just a few content warnings. The conversation does include a few references to sensitive topics, including suicide, substance abuse, and depression. I will also say that it's a real pleasure to talk to somebody who's a very big deal and have them be so down to earth and friendly.

So I really enjoyed this conversation and you're going to hear it in a moment. First though, one quick item of business. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you've probably heard me talk about our companion meditation app, which is also called 10% happier. The app is a place you can go to practice. What we talk about here on the podcast, and you can do so with meditations that are led by some of our most popular podcast guests. It's sort of like science, class, and college.

The podcast is the lecture, and the app is the lab. So whether you're interested in treating yourself with a little bit more compassion, having hard conversations without hurting your relationships, or pausing and taking a breath instead of snapping at your children, you can learn about the skills here and then practice them over there in the app. But just like that college lab section, motivating yourself to actually put in the practice time is hard. Those few milliseconds between closing the podcast app and firing up the meditation app are rife with possibilities for distraction, a new email, a breaking news alert, the temptation to doom scroll on Twitter, whatever.

It can all derail you pretty quickly. That's why this show, the 10% happier podcast, is now available inside our companion app so that you can toggle seamlessly between listening and practicing, learning and doing. Now when you subscribe to the app, you'll be able to transition very easily to meditation right after listening to the podcast. Not to mention, you'll receive access to our many courses, our sleep meditations, and the podcast episodes are ad-free. And good news has promised the ad-free podcast is available. Now both on iOS and Android. So to get started, download the 10% happier app,

wherever you get your apps and then tap on the podcast, tab at the bottom of your screen. OK, that said. Here we go now with Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan, welcome to the show. This is a big get for us. They're really excited to have you on. Thanks Dan.

It's really good to be here. I'm a big fan of your podcast. Thank you. That genuinely means a lot. I don't say that in a perfunctory way. You suggested and I strongly agree that it might be smart to talk a little bit about the overlap between psychedelics and meditation. I'd love to hear you just sort of free associate on that front. What overlap is there? Well, I can free associate personally because it certainly was the path I took. And it turns out to be a path a lot of people have taken.

After some powerful psychedelic experiences that I had for my last book, How to Change Your Mind, I got much more interested and much more successful at meditating. It is something I tried at various times in my life and with mixed results and a lot of impatience. And one of the things I found, and I'm certainly not alone in this, is that psychedelic experience gives you a taste of kind of where you're trying to get. And I know this aspiring language is all wrong for mindfulness. Success is all wrong for mind. So just cut me some slack there. But, um, you know, one of the things about the psychedelic experience that doesn't get talked about nearly

enough is that there is a kind of peak experience where you've lost control of your mind to a certain extent. And it's just taking you wherever it's going to take you. And that's usually what people write about and what gets discussed. But in fact, there's a long tale. There's a long day new month to the experience. It can last hours. And it's a really interesting state that you enter,

where you've regained the ability to channel your mind where you want, or attend to what you want, to attend to, to work on problems, even, or to attend to your breath, or whatever it is. And that this is a, this wonderful state of focus where you're not easily distracted. You don't have the squirrels running, you know, around in the cages. And for me, that space, kind of like, oh, this is what meditation is about. And I found that after having a couple of these experiences and I certainly didn't have very many,

I found that I enjoyed meditating a lot more that I could kind of put myself back in that state. And that, you know, the mind, every experience we have lays down groups, right? I mean, those synaptic connections get reinforced the more we think on that path, for good or for bad. And so having had an experience of thinking in a certain way, you can kind of return to it. The other thing that's been interesting is some imagery that I had during psychedelic experiences, imagery that I was perplexed by is something I think about. I use it as kind of a visual mantra sometimes. And it's really interesting how that can put me back

in that state. Now, so that's me, but I interviewed a lot of kind of prominent Buddhists when I was doing this book, people like Jack Cornfeld and Joan Halifax and a couple of others, and many of them said, and of course we know the story of Ramdas, that they had had experiences of mind expansion, consciousness expansion on psychedelics, and we're trying to figure out a way to turn it into a practice. Because taking psychedelics is not going to be a practice for most people.

And that brought them to Buddhism. of practice, because taking psychedelics is not going to be a practice for most people. And that brought them to Buddhism. I mean, this may be a little bit of a stretch, but I don't know that American Buddhism would exist, if not for psychedelics. I mean, I think that that generation in the 70s and 80s, O'John Kabat's in, is another person who's spoken openly about his psychedelic experiences. That was kind of where a lot of those people got started. So I think that there's a really rich two-way traffic between meditation, Buddhism, and psychedelics. Yeah, I think it's really true that a lot of the Western convert Buddhists who went over to Asia

in the 60s and 70s, starting, I think, probably with Rambdas, then known as Professor Richard Alpert on the same campus where you currently sit at Harvard and before he got kicked out for misadventures with psychedelics, went over to India and found a Hindu guru. And then there were many others who went in his wake. I think it's probably true that we might not have this Western convert Buddhist scene where it not for psychedelics. I think the probably the Asian American Buddhist tradition which predates the Western convert Buddhists

that would probably still be here. I just want to go back to your description, though, of the sort of peak experience followed by the long tail and see if I can restate it to you, principally because I want to make sure that I understand it. That on psychedelics, we have, you have this big experience of, you know, kind of this ego death as it sometimes called, I don't know if that's the kosher term, but.

Or yeah, or non-dual experience or yeah, dissolution of self. Disolution of self. And then the self sort of re-emerges, but not so much, and not in such a problematic way for the long tail. And it is that period, that place that you feel is what you're to put it in, and maybe overly striving style language, what you're trying to get back to in meditation.

Yeah, I think it's a period of where the ego is not gone, but it's softened. It's influence is softened. It's still licking its wounds from having been completely obliterated. And yes, and that that is a comfortable, interesting place to reside. And it's just another form of consciousness, and it's one we're not ordinarily aware of. And I think the fireworks of psychedelics get all the attention, but that actually is a very interesting period.

One of the more interesting interviews I did was with Judd Brewer, who is a studies mindfulness, and now at Brown, I guess. And I did a couple interesting things with Judd, who's been on your show and to talk about his book on anxiety. But he was imaging the brains of experienced meditators, doing FMRI a couple years ago. And he would put people who had 10,000 hours in the machine and they would meditate and he would look at their brains.

Around the same time, Robin Carrhart Harris, a psychedelic researcher in England, was imaging the brains of people on psilocybin and LSD. And I think he published first and Judd saw those scans and they had this incredible overlap that the same brain network, the default mode network, was downregulated or deactivated in both cases. This is a part of the brain, a very interesting network that was only discovered 15, 20 years ago. That is involved in things like time travel and being able to imagine the future in the past, the narrative memory, the place where we construct the narrative of our lives and

fit the events of our life into that narrative, it's basically, you know, this simplifying a bit, it's the address of the ego in the brain to the extent that we can identify it. And in both cases, even though the phenomenology is somewhat different, this seemed to be the brain network that was deactivated. And so there may be a neurological correlate to this likeness between psychedelic experience and meditation. And I remember Judd saying to me, and he got very interested in psychedelic research and got connected with some of the researchers

at Johns Hopkins, but he said he could imagine a time where we would use psychedelics to launch a meditation practice, to help people get over that hump of like, am I doing it right? What is this? And just kind of put them in the deep end right away. And I thought that, well, that's a very interesting idea. So who knows? You know, these substances will be approved for medical use fairly soon and perhaps be legal. And so perhaps they could be used that way. Either that's fascinating. Just to get back to this kind of, nobody can see me do this because I've for you, this graph that I'm imagining of the experience on a psychedelic

on a plant where the peak experience is really high, sort of top of the experience on a psychedelic on a plant, where the peak experience is really high, sort of top of the mountain, and then the sort of long tail, or as you called it, the long, day new mont, where the ego does start to reassert itself as we discuss in a less problematic way. You said that was where you think

you're trying to get in meditation, but I would have thought that where you're trying to get in meditation is to the top of thought that where you're trying to get in meditation is to the top of the mountain, to the non-dual experience. Yeah, I'm a relative piker at this, compared to you or a lot of people. I haven't gotten anywhere near ego dissolution on meditation experience, but I understand that that is the goal. There's a kind of quiet that I imagine to that that is not typical of at least my psychedelic experiences where they were very busy and lots of things happening.

Although, well, I should perhaps rephrase that because I've only had two experiences of ego dissolution on psychedelics. One of them was just terrifying. It was on something called 5MEODMT. This is the Sonoran Desert Toad, where you ingest this toxin that it produces. It's a very short acting. And to my mind, pretty terrifying psychedelic experience,

where any sense of self, any sense of anything, I felt like I was in the middle of the big bang, you know, that this was this. And it was thunderous. It was, I felt like I was also in a rocket taking off that was, you know, shuddering and making all this noise. So as ego dissolution goes, it's not what I imagine the experienced meditator is going through. It's a very noisy experience. But there was another one that was much more happy and pleasurable, and that was on psilocybin.

And I described in how to change your mind of seeing my usual self explode in a cloud of blue-posted notes and then fall to the earth and become this this coat of paint and this is going to sound weird using this pronoun but I was looking at this. I was beholding this but from a perspective that was completely new to me that was untroubled objective, disinterested and I don't know what that perspective was. It wasn't exactly me. It was something more general.

And I described this to ordained Buddhist priest and he said, well, you had awareness without self. And maybe that's what it was. And that was a beautiful experience. Because what happens after the walls of ego come down is that there's nothing between you and what's outside you. So there's this merging.

It's what William James described, this kind of unitive consciousness, this sense that you are one with whatever's out there. And in my case, it was this piece of music that I completely merged with, this unaccompanied cello suite by Bach number two and D minor I think it was, which is a very sad piece of music. And the guide was playing it. And there was no difference.

There was no subject object. I was it. I was one with this music. I was one with this instrument. I could feel the horse hair on the bow going across my skin. It was just the most remarkable, beautiful experience. So, I guess the ego dissolution on meditation, I at least imagine never having attained that peak, that it's more like the latter, but still might be a more white out experience. I guess that's how I picture it.

Let me assure you, you are talking to a fellow Piker. So I have no idea. Maigo is alive and well, no death. There's no post-mortem to be done. And my understanding from, and I'm probably wrong about this, but my understanding from just being around is that there's quite a variety of experiences of flavors of non-dual experience where the ego,

where you don't feel like there's a subject and object where the ego is transcended that can come in all different flavors. Yes, and there's also the influence of set and setting, which the Liri and Ramdus talked a lot about. And the fact that whatever is coming up in one of these psychedelic experiences is not the product of a drug.

It's in those images and is not contained in that molecule. The molecule is merely a catalyst. All this material is in you, presumably. Or if you believe that consciousness exists outside of our bodies as a property of the universe that exists there. But we shouldn't credit it at all to the molecule. The molecule is starting a process. That is utterly fascinating. Can you say more about set in setting? So set in setting returns coined by Timothy Leary, set means the mindset you bring to something.

If you're in a bad state of mind and you're anxious and you take marijuana or a psychedelic, you could well have a bad trip. So you want to optimize the mindset, you know, which, and then involves things like your intentions in doing it. What's your purpose? Having one at all, you know, beyond thrills, and setting is the physical setting, the environment, which also has a big bearing. You know, if you use psilocybin walking around the streets of Manhattan, it's going to be very different than if you use it on the beach or walking around the woods

and you're more likely to have a challenging experience. So the experience is heavily constructed by the user, the contents of their mind and the whole attitude they bring to it. And that was really important to establish that. I think it is true of all drugs, but it's particularly true of psychedelics where the effects are much more variable. We can say with some consistency what happens to people who take an infetamine or cocaine or alcohol, they're predictable, phenomenological consequences of that. It's much more variable with psychedelics.

The range, the spectrum of what can happen is, and that's frightening to people. I mean, it's definitely you're entering a zone of, you know, deep uncertainty. It's a leap into the void. And I was also afraid. And had I not been interviewing people who volunteers in some of these experiments going on in the in the 20 teens and had I not been so impressed and almost jealous about their experiences. I mean, these were people having powerful spiritual insights who were changing their attitude toward death, losing their fear of death entirely. Their testimony made my trying inevitable. It was like, wait a minute. There's no way I can understand this, unless I do it. And by the way, I've never had a powerful spiritual experience.

What's that like? So in the end, my curiosity overcame my fear. But without question, my fear was front and center for a long time. I had a series of these guided and one or two unguided psychedelic experiences for the book, and I've had one or two cents. I don't think there was a single time where I didn't have a sleepless night before it happened, that I was really anxious, that I was making a huge mistake, that I was going to either discover something horrible about myself,

mistake that I was going to either discover something horrible about myself or that it was just going to be so painful. But I think that a lot of that risk is obviated by having a guide. And basically, the guide's job is to help you with the set and setting and optimize the set and setting. So the way it works for listeners who aren't familiar is that in a, and this is, and this is the way it's working in the research trials going on right now, as well as in the underground. There's a very large underground of psychedelic therapists and guides. They prepare you for a couple hours. You have a meeting with

them and you talk a lot of, they get your history, medical history, your psychological history, but they also work with you on your intention. Why are you doing this? What are you hoping to gain? What questions do you want answered? And that's a very useful exercise. And they learn about you and your siblings and your parents. And so they can understand what's happening when it happens. And then on a subsequent day, you come back and they give you the medicine. There's often some ceremony involved, even in the research, it has a quasi-religious feeling. Sometimes the pill will be in a chalice and there'll be images of Buddha around

or nature paintings and things like that. And then they'll sit with you. They won't say very much, but they'll be there and be available, and it's very reassuring, essentially, to know that someone's looking out for your body while your mind is traveling. And you don't have to. As one of the researchers at Hopkins would tell people, we're mission control. We're going to stay here on the ground and we'll be tracking you the whole way,

but go as far as you want wherever you want. And we've got you covered back here on planet earth. And that's very reassuring to hear. And then after the experience, where of course they don't really know what's happened internally because you're not talking that much. You might say a few things. You might ask for a change in music. Oh, I should mention too that you're not talking that much. You might say a few things. You might ask for a change in music. Oh, I should mention too, that you're playing music for you. And they're these very carefully curated psychedelic playlists that you either like or you detest. And it depends on the guide.

People have very strong feelings about it because music becomes a very important part of the experience. Since you can see musical notes and things like that. I mean, it just becomes, it shapes the experience in lots of ways and is part again of the set and setting. And you're wearing eye shades too. That's another thing that sounds weird to people, but the idea is that you go inside, that you're not just responding to all the sensory information coming in, but you're actually having this internal process, which is very different. I mean, in a way, those eye shades are one of the most powerful technologies

of the whole experience, I think. Anyway, so after the experience, which lasts four or five, six hours, the next day you'll come back or two days later, and they'll help you what they what they call integrate it, which is to say you tell you get to tell the story start turning it into narrative, which is a really interesting process because it isn't necessarily in a linear it doesn't come at you in a linear way. It can be very confusing, but as you

tell the story you go through that editing function and gradually things fall away and things become more salient. And they help you with that process. What does it mean? How to interpret something that happened? And then how to apply it to your life? What are these insights good for? How could you live differently having learned what you learned?

So that is a very unique way to use a psychedelic. It's not what is commonly done, but in my experience, it made it much more manageable. It gave me the confidence. I had trust in these people to make the leap. And there is that leap of faith. And I was very happy I did. With the exception of that five MEO DMT experience, which I would not do again, all my experiences taught me interesting things. And you know, we're some of the more meaningful experiences in my life, and they were occasioned by a fungus,

a mushroom. How incredible is that? How has it changed you? Well, I did not go into this trying to solve a problem beyond understanding myself better than I do. So I don't have the benchmark of I had PTSD and now I don't or I was depressed and now I'm not. So in some ways my response was not as dramatic as some of the people I was interviewing

for the book. However, I do feel it changed me and my wife, if she were here, I think would concur. In terms of making me more open and less close-minded, The experience of ego dissolution had a very interesting effect of giving me a kind of distance or perspective on my ego. Having survived its dissolution, I was less identified with it. So I have a little space there that's really useful. And I know when my ego's up to his old tricks, and I know it's a very important voice in my head. It gets a lot done for me. It's served me in all sorts of ways,

but I also know I don't have to listen to it all the time. And that I can ignore it or point to it and say, ah, that's my ego doing that. I don't have to pay attention. That's kind of the stuff you would learn in psychotherapy, I think, to, that's my ego doing that. I don't have to pay attention. That's kind of the stuff you would learn in psychotherapy, I think, to get that kind of space between you and your ego. But this happened in the course of a single afternoon, and that's quite remarkable. So I would say that's the, for me, the biggest legacy. And this other one we talked about at the beginning,

which is approaching meditation with more enthusiasm and doing it more regularly. And I think that is some, you know, that benefit you described of having some distance and maybe even warmth, like a warm sense of humor about the old tricks of the ego. I think that is, that is a benefit of the technology of meditation and part of why they work so well in concert. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I think getting that sort of that perspective on your mind, on the working of your mind,

and just being aware that it's working, and that there's something going on there, and that transparency of consciousness that we usually have, that whatever is going through our mind is inevitable, we're in charge just kind of defamiliarizing that whole mental process. Meditation does and psychedelics can do too. If and when psychedelics plant medicine, when it becomes widely available and legal.

What kind of impact you think it would have on culture or society, the planet? Hard to say, I mean, possibly profound. I think the most important impact and the one I'm most interested in, there are a lot of people in the psychedelic community who talk about bringing about a change of consciousness that our species sorely needs, especially with regard to the environment. And it's, and one of the interesting consequences that's been measured and individuals who take

psychedelics is that their measures of nature connectedness go up. This is a standard measure of how much do you feel you're in nature or standing outside of nature. And that seems to change in a positive direction. Tolerance for authoritarianism seems to change. But I'm kind of skeptical of those studies just because they've been small. And the kinds of people willing to participate, my guess, is they're inclined in that direction anyway.

I think we should withhold our enthusiasm for that. It could accentuate negative tendencies. It's unpredictable. I'd really want to do a lot of research before I put any of this in the water supply and give it to everybody. I think, though, the most important benefit that is on the horizon is relieving human suffering from mental illness. That I think is going to happen. I think we have enough research, the use of MDMA or ecstasy to treat trauma. We already have phase three studies that suggest that in about two-thirds of cases, people no longer qualify as having

PTSD after two, I think, two or three experiences on MDMA. That's remarkable. We don't have anything that strong. And then the use of psilocybin to treat depression is also showing really encouraging results. OCD, I think, is there's a research program at Yale that, although it hasn't published yet, has had very impressive results. The treatment of alcoholism. So if psychedelics do know more, then relieve the burden of this mental health crisis,

to some extent, and I think that would be an incredible gift to humanity. As you know, rates of depression or I think they're 300 million cases worldwide, the levels of anxiety, suicidality, I mean, mental health is in crisis and it's only gonna get worse. And psychiatry is in a bad place. The mental health establishment,

or the mental health treatment in this country, is really broken, badly broken. And most psychiatrists will tell you that, that the tools they have are not up to the challenge. SSRIs, which are the main tool for treating depression and anxiety, and OCD, are not working as well as they did when they were introduced. People don't like to take them, they don't like the side effects, they're addictive for all intents and purposes, very hard to get off. And people would rather

not take a drug every day of their lives, whereas if psychedelics become common in psychiatry, it's an experience you have once or twice. And so you're not, it's not toxic to your body, the way most other psychiatric drugs are. So, I mean, if you talk to psychiatrists, they'll admit that, you know, look, compared to any other branch of medicine, they have achieved very little.

They've alleviated some symptoms. They're not curing anybody. to any other branch of medicine, they have achieved very little. They've alleviated some symptoms. They're not curing anybody. And that I think explains the openness of psychiatry and psychology to psychedelics right now, which is one of the bigger surprises since I published my book. I thought there'd be all sorts of pushback from psychiatrists, but in fact, the response has been the opposite. It's like, okay, this is really promising.

We need new tools, show me the results. And those results are coming. Much more of my conversation with Michael Pollan right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wunder's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears.

When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which sets its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or

The Wondery app. I don't want to find myself in a position where we've gotten very, very close to the end of our time together, and I haven't had an opportunity to ask you some questions about your new book, which is a follow up to, I think, a book that really truly put a dent in the universe, how to change your mind. And now you have this amazing new book, this is your mind on plants. Can you just sort of describe the overarching thesis and then we'll walk through some of the specifics? Sure. Well, you know, I've always been interested in plants and that got me into writing about food. It's the common thread and all my work. I began writing as a gardener and it was what was happening in my garden that engaged me as a writer. And so I've been writing about plants for a long time, and that's what got me into food

and then psychedelics because incredibly enough, this is something else plants do. And fungus, we don't want to forget the mushrooms. But in this book, it's a series of long kind of profiles of three molecules, three amazing molecules that are produced by plants. The first is morphine or opium in the opium poppy. And that chapter is actually a revised version of a piece I wrote and published in the 90s. When I sought to grow my own opium and make my own opium, I had read an underground press book called Opium for the Masses that said, hey, these are legally available seeds.

The plants are legal unless they can prove that you're trying to turn them into something. And as a young gardener, a new gardener, I was like, hey, make my own opium, that sounds cool. I'm going to try that. And it embroiled me in this weird front in the drug war at the time. The DEA was trying to crack down on home opium production, but they wanted to do it in the quietest way possible. So they were quietly busting people for doing something that was not exactly illegal. I mean, at a certain point, there's a weird little or well-earned fudge here where the seed of the opium poppy is legal. The plant is legal unless you have the idea in your head of ingesting it as a drug, in which case it becomes a

schedule one violation, a very serious federal crime. So it's all about what's in your head. So now that you know that growing opium for that purpose is that that that that that plant can become that drug you can no longer legally grow opium poppies. I'm sorry to have ruined that opportunity for you. On the other hand, they have to prove that you know that and possession of my book would be one way. So that's not exactly a selling argument. No, your publicist is lighting their hair on fire right now, yes. Anyway, so it was a very interesting, I got involved and started investigating what was going on and wrote this piece that filled me with much paranoia that ultimately lawyers advised

me not to publish. I had done it for Harper's Magazine. And one lawyer said it was a confession to a federal crime. You can't possibly publish it. They can confiscate your house, which they can do under the drug laws. If your house is involved in any way in a drug crime, and they can throw you in jail,

they can basically wreck your life, all of which was true. In the end, I published it in an kind of expirgated version. I took out two scenes that the lawyers judged would be most antagonistic to the government, which was the recipe for how to turn opium poppy heads into opium tea and the trip report, as we call it, in drug journalism. What the experience was like. I was like six or eight pages.

So I published it without that, but I always wanted to republish it in its proper form. And this was an opportunity. And the other thing I wanted to do, though, was something unbeknownst to me at the time, this is 1996, when I had this adventure, was that that very same year Purdue pharma was introducing oxycotin and beginning the opioid crisis. So while the cops were looking this way, corporate pharmaceutical industry was going that way and starting a disaster that did not exist

until they got involved, which is to say the opioid crisis, which has killed, you know, a half a million Americans since then. And I think is important parable about the drug war because the biggest public health crisis we've had tied to drugs has involved legal drugs, not illegal drugs. And so anyway, that's what that section is about.

The second one is about caffeine, a wonderful chemical produced by both the coffee and the tea plant and a handful of other plants. And I wanted to include a legal drug that all of us, or almost all of us, are involved with on a daily basis, 90% of us, a drug we give our children in the form of soda, most sodas, are caffeinated. And a drug we don't even think of as a drug, because it's a fixer, kind of transparent. I think that being caffeinated is an altered state of

consciousness. It's one of our society's smiles on. For good reason, caffeine has been a huge boon to capitalism, to the rise of science and rational thinking. It's given us the civilization we have in many ways. So there's a long story about caffeine and my efforts to get off it. So usually I take drugs in my journalism about drugs, but this was a case where the challenge, and it was just as big a challenge, was abstaining. And I went cold turkey and stayed off caffeine for three months, and it was really one of the harder things I've done. You don't realize what a powerful role caffeine plays in your life until you get off it.

And I encourage everybody to do it, even in the knowledge you'll get back on, just to see what happens. It's so interesting. And I've been drinking coffees since I was 10. And that is my default consciousness and I didn't realize that till I lost it and I sorely missed it. And I'm very happy to be back on and enjoying it more than ever.

And there no health, there no good health reasons to avoid caffeine unless you're someone for whom it makes jittery or you're using eight or ten cups a day and then you have a problem. But for most of us, it's not a problem unless it interferes with your sleep. And that is a problem for some people. And then the third one, third plant chemical. And by the way, I chose these because one is an upper, one is a downer, and one is an outer. And the outer or psychedelic is mescaline, which is a really interesting molecule produced by a couple different kinds of cactus, including the peyote cactus, but also another one called sand padeira.

And I wanted to write about mescaline because I, in how to change your mind, I hadn't written about the indigenous use of psychedelics. You know, in the West, we discovered them in the 40s and 50s and 60s. They're relatively new. They arrived without an instruction manual of any kind, and we didn't know what to do with them, and we made a lot of mistakes. But had we paid attention, we would have seen that there are traditional cultures that have been using them for thousands of years.

And Mescalin has been used in South America and in Mexico and in Southern United States for a very long time and used in a very different way than we use psychedelics. Used essentially to heal in a group setting. And so I did a lot of research on the Native American community and how they've used peyote to heal their cultural and individual traumas. And that's been, you know, quite remarkable to learn about that. And how much wisdom we manage to overlook in our use of psychedelics. And I still think we have a lot to learn from. But there's a shortage of peyote. And I

think non-natives, if only as a gesture of respect, if only as a form of recognition for how much we've taken from Native Americans, should lay off peyote. I just, it's really important to that community. It's in short supply. So in the end, I never took it. But I did use Mescalin in a synthetic form, which was very interesting, and used Mescal masculine from San Pedro, which is a very easy to grow cactus, that you can legally

grow in your garden as long as you don't turn it into masculine tea. So that was a long answer to your question, but that's the book. It's great. You make my life easy. It's, you know, it's these three long essays with adventures in the middle of them and it was great fun to write. It was somewhat easier to write than how to change your mind,

but it took me to new places and the characters I met were amazing. It's part of my project to make us appreciate how much plants, how intelligent plants are. I mean, think of it. They've figured out how to make these molecules that completely change human consciousness. And they're doing it for their own purposes. And just, I don't know, just part of my love affair

with the plant world. What are their own purposes? Well, these three chemicals are all alkaloids. And they are produced by plants as pesticides essentially. That's their first use and all of them taste very bitter, which is a turn-off to most creatures, and all of them kind of mess with the minds of a pest. I'd always wondered why if you are a plant creating a pesticide, why you wouldn't just go DEF CON 5 and kill your predator,

your pest. But of course, if you know anything about natural selection, that's a bad approach, because if you kill your pests, you're going to select for resistant members of the pest population. And eventually, your pesticide will be rendered useless. But if you just discombobulate the minds of your pests, if you confuse them, if you louse up their memory,

if you lose their appetite, you're much better off. And so they've focused on these neurochemicals, essentially, that mess with animal minds at the insect level and up. And so that's the best theory that I've been able to find. Also, plants can repurpose chemicals. They may invent one for one purpose, and then they discover another purpose. Caffeine is a good example in that sense.

Although caffeine is a pesticide in nature, certain classes of plants, citrus among them, have figured out if you put a little bit of caffeine in the nectar of your flowers, bees will prefer your flowers to other uncaffeinated ones. Bees apparently get a buzz from caffeine too. And they will, if they're given caffeine as a reward, they will remember your species more reliably and return more reliably. They become more as the scientists say, more faithful pollinators and more hard working pollinators. So basically, it does for them what it does for us. It makes us better workers. So anyway, the cleverness of plants is just boundless. Pizzy peas. You say something in the book that I would love to hear you theorize about,

which is you say that human beings have always and still really do love changing our consciousness. love changing our consciousness, getting out of our heads, being blown away. What is that, do you think? It's a really good question. I'm not sure of the answer, but changing consciousness appears to be a universal human desire or drive, along with the drive for sex and food. The reasons for it are a little harder to find than in the case of those others. Some of it may have to do with pain relief. You know, for most of human history, they're really, they couldn't cure things very well,

but the function of medicine was essentially relieving pain and they use plants like opium to do that. And that's very important. I think there's a social dimension to drug use. We know this from alcohol and small doses, lubricate social situations, makes people more pro-social. I don't think it's true psychedelics, but I think it's true of a lot of other drugs

that they break down barriers between people and as a social species that may be very important. Although lots of animals like to use drugs too and even ones that aren't social. I think too we just want to transcend ourselves and egos and connect to something larger from time to time and that, you know, the egos something of a cage or can be. And the desire for transcendence just seems to be a very deep human desire. So I don't think anyone's figured out exactly why it is,

but the other thing that I think is really valuable about drugs in general and psychedelics in particular is that by messing with minds, they produce a certain amount of variation in cultural evolution. In the same way that radiation causes mutations in the DNA, that lead to most of which are terrible and lead to the death of the creature. But every now and then one becomes a very interesting new trait and benefits the creature, but every now and then one becomes a very interesting new trait and benefits the creature.

In the realm of culture, I see drugs as mutagens, as like that force of radiation, that is introducing ideas. Many of them crazy and useless, just like mutations, but every now and then, the encounter of one of these molecules and a human mind produces a scientific breakthrough, a new metaphor, a work of art, a vision that perhaps underwrites a religion. All sorts of new memes are thrown up by this dabbling with plants that change consciousness. And I think that that has, you know, it would be very hard to nail it down, but if you were to write a natural history of the human imagination,

I think there would be critical moments of change, of new ideas that could be connected to someone's ingestion of a mind-changing drug. Now, that's pretty speculative theory, and it's only mine, connected to someone's ingestion of a mind-changing drug. Now, that's pretty speculative theory, and it's only mine, and I'm just a journalist, I'm not a scientist, but I'm sticking by it. I'm not gonna hold you accountable, it's a safe place for all sorts of wild speculation.

Speaking of safe, I think I imagine a lot of people are listening to you and thinking about, this is an experience that I would like to have. If you want to do it safely and maybe even legally, what are the options? So I don't want to recommend it to anybody. I feel like that's a not a responsible course because of the risks involved and there are people who should stay away from these substances and you should be somebody should qualify you to do a high dose experience. That said, I would seek out a guide if you want to do this.

I think that it diminishes the risk dramatically and increases the benefit of the experience. Now how do you find a guide? Well, you just have to do what we journalists do, which is ask around until you find somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, and you get an introduction. And another way to do it is there are now, in many, many cities, people who kind of build themselves

as integration therapists, these are people who work of build themselves as integration therapists. These are people who work with you after you've had psychedelic experiences. They don't administer them. But the safest and most legal way to do it is to enroll as a volunteer in one of the trials going on. There are trials for depression, OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, alcoholism, and some basic research trials at Berkeley, we're going to start doing that in the next year or so. And we'll be looking for healthy normals for our trials, because we're doing basic research. So the government maintains a list.

I forget where it is, but there's a website of all clinical trials, and you can search it by drug or condition. And you can simply apply. And I've met many people who have managed to find their way into one of the legal trials. And that would be the safest way to approach it. It's not necessary to have a guide. People have good experiences without one, but I I'm going to be using a high dose. Again, the lessons of the Native Americans and other indigenous cultures are there should always be an elder involved, someone who knows the territory. You shouldn't do it alone. You should do it with a clear sense of intention.

And this will sound weird, but it should be surrounded by ritual. People who use drugs of all kinds in a ritual way, and this goes for alcohol as opposed to a wountain way, tend not to get in trouble with them. The rituals themselves are protective. I mean, you know, like our social rituals around drinking that you don't drink alone, you drink in the evening with other people, with food, all these kinds of things have a, you know, culture has

its own rules, and those rules often are the result of trial and error and can be very protective. So I think, you know, paying attention to those lessons, and that's the lessons from indigenous peoples on how to safely use these drugs because they've been added a lot longer than we have Michael as I hope you know you're doing amazing work You've had a lot an impact a positive impact on many made of people including your current interlocutor So thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Dan was my pleasure. It's great to be here. Thank you We do have one last order of business before we let you go here. And it's a little invitation to participate in this show.

We here on the 10% happier podcaster are very busy preparing a series of episodes that will be posting in the coming weeks about how to navigate one of the most complex and dominant forces in many of our lives work. Many of us spend more time with our colleagues than our family. And yet sometimes we forget to treat these relationships with any level of intentionality.

Add into the mix the changing nature of work, at-will employment, remote work, the gig economy, and you have a recipe for frustration, burnout, and more. So in this series of podcast episodes, we're going to explore how to better handle your co-workers, to boost your resilience in the face of what can sometimes seem like a syphien mountain of work, and how to cultivate skills to handle the combination of these two dynamics. We don't want to do these shows without your participation, however. So we're right now, officially inviting you to send us some questions so that we can

learn more about what kinds of challenges you're facing so that we can better craft these episodes to help you out. And we'd like to hear your questions via voice memos so that we can play the questions right here on the show for our experts. To submit a question, just follow the five easy steps that are listed in the show notes. And yeah, thanks. I encourage you to participate. steps that are listed in the show notes. And yeah, thanks. I encourage you to participate. Big thanks to Michael. I really enjoyed that. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justine Davy, Maria Wertel, and Jen Poient with Audio Engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. And as always, a shout out to my ABC News comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode

and really good one with a psychologist by the name of Scott Barry Kaufman. We talk about a lot of concepts that have devolved into cliche but are incredibly important, including self-actualization and authenticity. It's coming up on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus

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