The Joe Rogan Experience - #1121 - Michael Pollan

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

Michael Pollan is an author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His new book "How To Change Your Mind" is available now. "How To Change Your Mind" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transcendence/dp/1594204225/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

That quickly? Two? One? Boom, and we're live. Mr. Pollan, how are you? Hey, good. Good to be here. Put a sucker about a fist away. There you go. Okay. What's happening, man? How are you? Good. Good to be in L.A. Good to have you here. I've been a fan of your work for a long time, man, and I got really excited when I found out that you were writing a book on psychedelics. were writing a book on psychedelics. And I'm just, I think it's an amazing subject. And I'm glad someone who's respected like yourself is getting it. It's a crackpot subject, right? It's one of

those subjects you're like, oh no, Michael Pollan found drugs. Like, what's he doing? He's having a crisis. He's out there doing mushrooms. It is a bit of a departure. I think that there are people who are expecting another book on food or agriculture and we're a little surprised. But so far, people have been following me who cared about food and ag and there's more overlap than I ever would have guessed. Center is starting to put out these studies on it. People are starting to recognize that MDMA has amazing results for post-traumatic stress disorder from veterans and marijuana is becoming legal in more and more states. It's like you're catching this wave. Yeah. And I didn't know that. I, you know, you never know where the culture is going to be because you start a book years before. How long did you start it? Well, I started the research in 2014. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker called The Trip Treatment, which is online. And it was my first foray into this work. I went down to Hopkins and spent a lot of time at NYU. And at the time, they were doing this really interesting trial where they were giving psilocybin to people with cancer diagnoses, many of whom were terminal. diagnoses, many of whom were terminal. And that seemed like such a weird idea to me that I was curious to explore it. And I spent a lot of time talking to patients, many of whom were dying, about how this single high-dose psilocybin experience, a guided psilocybin experience,

and we should talk a little bit about how the guided changes things for, you know, it's not, the image people have is popping some mushrooms in your mouth and maybe going to a concert or going to the beach. But this is a very controlled internal experience. Completely reset these people's attitude toward death and allowed them to die with equanimity. Just last year, they found that in 80% of the people who had the session, they had statistically significant reductions in standard measures of depression and anxiety. It was one of the most effective psychiatric interventions that these psychiatrists had ever seen, which is amazing. A single experience and that a molecule could change the contents of your head to the extent that you would rethink your mortality. And so as I began talking to these people and hearing their stories, many of which were just remarkable, I realized, you know, this is not just an article, there's a

book here. And there's so much, you know, there are two kinds of articles you write as a journalist. One is you're sick of the topic by the time you finish and you can't wait to be done. And the other is, God, I just scratched the surface. And this was one of those. Did you have any experiences personally with psychedelics before you wrote this book? Very limited. I, for some peculiar reason, never did psychedelics in college. They just weren't around.

They weren't around? No, I went to the wrong school. What school did you go to? And it was like a very kind of progressive hippie school. I went to Bennington College in Vermont. And there was LSD there before me and there was LSD after me, but I was in this little wrinkle in time where there was only alcohol. I need a cup.

There you go. Thanks, Jamie. That's crazy. Only alcohol in college. So I had no experience of psychedelics until I was in my late 20s. And then it was pretty mild. I had a couple of mushroom experiences that would, I now describe as aesthetic experiences, right?

Small doses, one gram, something like that. Yeah. I never even measured it. It was probably one gram. So I'd never had a big trip. And there was another reason. I didn't feel psychologically sturdy enough. And thought he was an orange for the rest of his life. These stories were out there. And I was afraid to.

I was just afraid. Yeah. Well, it's not an unfounded fear. Oh, no. No, people can really get into psychological trouble. I think it's really important that people understand that it's a profound, powerful, destabilizing experience. And depending on your mindset and the situation in which you take it, set and setting, it can be ecstatic or horrific. And, you know, there are many people who had a series of very good trips and then they have that one bad trip. are many people who had a series of very good trips and then they have that one bad trip.

And so, yeah, and I had heard enough stories about that to stay away. So discovering this kind of later in life, you know, I was certainly not something I planned on or expected. It's a great tragedy, in my opinion, that our culture has demonized these substances and put them in this category of forbidden fruit to the point where you're so nervous about doing them. You have to get them from some shady character. And you don't know what you're getting. Yeah, you have to do them in secrecy. You have to be really careful. But we also at the same time are aware of all these incredibly positive benefits from them. And then if we just had professional places where we could go to,

and we have these rehab facilities that are available for people trying to kick opiates and people trying to get their life together. But if we had something similar, like a psychedelic facility with registered professionals who understand this and who could evaluate you psychologically, understand if you were perhaps taking medication that would adversely affect your trip. Try to find out who you are, like what state you're at in your life. Have you had any experiences before? Maybe we should put you on a low-dose THC edible.

Right, let's ramp it up slowly. Let's try something small and see how you react to it. And then I think, I don't think people like myself or pot smokers or people who have done psychedelics, I don't think we do it any favors either because we're always trying to pretend that there is no adverse effects. And that there's like, you know, people, when they get into something, they want everybody to do it. And I've been guilty of this myself. Yeah, people tend to, there's a occupational hazard of, uh, of, uh, irrational exuberance. You know, this is what happened to Timothy Leary, right? I mean, people have an amazing experience. And the first thing they think is everybody's got to do this,

but it isn't for everybody. And I think you're absolutely right. I think that, look, there are risks, but these are not drugs of abuse. They're non-addictive. They're anti-addictive. The first thought after having a big psychedelic trip is not, when can I do this again? Right. It's whoa. It's whoa. The last one I had, I was like, I don't know if I could do that again.

I felt that way every time. It's like childbirth or how we hear childbirth is. You can't imagine doing it again. And eventually you do do it again. So I do think that we have to find the proper context in which to do it. And I think your point is really important. We need trained guides. The experience is completely different when it's guided because you have a sense of safety. There's someone looking out for your body while your mind is traveling. And this allows you to essentially surrender to the experience.

And most bad trips, in my experience, are the result of people resisting what is happening. Their ego is dissolving and it's scary. It feels like a death and they try to stop it. And that can make you very anxious. And so all the guides I worked with and interviewed, they were all like, relax your mind and float downstream. If you see a door, open it. If you see a staircase, go down it.

Surrender, trust and let go. And this kind of advice changes everything. And the chances of a bad trip, I think, in a guided situation are substantially less because they know how to help you deal with it and what to tell you when it's happening. So I do think that by forcing these drugs underground and into this very kind of unregulated use, there were not, reports of bad trips were much fewer before the moral panic about LSD in 1965 and when it was still legal.

You didn't hear about bad trips. You started hearing about it when the culture did this 180 and turned against psychedelics. So I think you can create situations where the risks are really mitigated. the risks are really mitigated. Well, I think also the fear, like you were talking about right before the podcast or right as we started, some people were worried that they were going to turn into an orange or think they're an orange or all those fears. If you take something and those things are in the back of your head, you can literally manifest extreme anxiety that might not have been there if you just relaxed and just had the

experience alone, you know, on its own without all the cultural hysteria attached to it. Or episodes of paranoia. That's common too. But a good guide can work you through this. And actually, they don't even like the term bad trip. They call it a challenging trip because often very interesting material comes up that you then can work on later. It's like having a nightmare and, you know, analyzing it with your shrink. It actually may be very productive. So, you know, I was kind of a nervous Nelly going into this, and I really looked at the whole risk profile. And on the physiological side, your body, the risks are remarkably low. And I'm speaking here of the classic psychedelics. I'm not talking about MDMA or even pot. I'm really, I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin,

which is magic mushrooms, DMT, mescaline. They are much less toxic than many of the over-the-counter drugs you have in your medicine cabinet. There is no lethal dose, which is remarkable. There was one elephant that was killed with LSD once. They wanted to see what it would take, and they gave it a massive dose, but to get it to the point where they could administer it, they had to give it a massive dose of tranquilizer. So it isn't actually clear that the LSD killed it. It may have been the benzos or whatever they were giving it.

I know, what a horrible thing, right? Go online and look up the elephant who died from LSD killed it. It may have been the benzos or whatever they were giving it. I know, what a horrible thing, right? Go online and look up the elephant who died from LSD. What a crazy idea. Yeah, animal cruelty. I wonder what was going through the elephant's mind before it died. Well, animals don't like psychedelics that much.

We know that if you, you know that classic setup that drug abuse researchers use where they put a rat in a cage and there's a lever and they can administer cocaine or heroin or they can have lunch and they'll press the cocaine lever till they die. You put LSD in that setup, they press it once and never again. Well, that setup is always screwy, right?

Because they really shouldn't be in that situation. It's not a natural setup. Like that's been criticized. That's right. And somebody in Vancouver did these really cool rat park in that situation. It's not a natural setup. Like that's been criticized. That's right. And there are somebody in Vancouver, these really cool rat park experiments. Yeah. That's what you're referencing.

And basically they thought that this was inevitably what happens. But in fact, if you give a rat a beautiful cage with some things to play with, some other rats to hang out with some nature, you know, some shrubs and things, it will not take the cocaine. Isn't that interesting?

It tells us that environment has a lot to do with drug addiction. I think for sure with human beings, too. Oh, absolutely. I think human beings in these really fruitless lives that are very, very frustrating. Or think about the people who came back from Vietnam. I mean, I don't know if I should say most, but a very high percentage of the troops in Vietnam were on heroin when they were there. They were seemingly addicted. They were using it all the time.

And they got back and only 10% had a problem. The others were able to kick it really easily. It's very contextual. It's not all biology. It's about environment. Now, when you were researching this book, did you start doing your own personal experimentation? Yeah. I had a series of trips for the book.

I had become, for a couple reasons, I had become very curious about the people I was interviewing, trying to make sense of how they could have these transformative trips on a drug, which seemed implausible to me. And I also kind of got jealous of the experiences they were having. They were having these big spiritual experiences. And I swear, I don't think I've ever had a spiritual experience. I'm kind of spiritually retarded, actually, or was. And so I realized at a certain point I had to see the experience from inside to describe it in a book.

It's also kind of my brand as a writer. When I wrote about the cattle industry, I bought a steer. When I wrote about architecture, I built a house. I like to get my hands dirty and see things from inside. There's a quality of wonder you can capture doing something for the first time. So in a way, the fact I was psychedelically naive I saw as a positive because people who really know

the territory are not going to have quite the same first experience that I was going to have. So that was really helpful. So I did a few things. I went mushroom hunting

with Paul Stamets. Has he been on the show? I saw you had his books out there. Yeah, he's a very cool guy. He's crazy. He's totally crazy. And he took me to a spot where you can find the strongest psilocybin known to man.

The Pacific Northwest? Yeah. It's near the mouth of the Columbia River. I can't be more specific than that. Don't. You know, people with their mushroom spots. Yeah. So we went hunting.

It was like this, you know, forlorn December weather. And he took me to this place. And we spent a couple days outside looking for these mushrooms. And we found psilocybe azurescens, which he found for the first time and named after his son, Azurius. Oh, wow. Who in turn is named after the color of mushrooms when they're bruised. Azure. So there's kind of an interesting dude who's committed to fungus he is he's all in he is all in with fungus and i was very excited when we found a couple and they're

hard i mean i would not recommend do do it yourself with psilocybin just because it's not like looking for chanterelles or morels right there are mushrooms that look exactly like psilocybin that can give you a just an agonizing death yeah but when you're with paul stamets you feel pretty confident right and uh so we found these and uh he said to me after we'd found them we were sitting around the campfire we were cooking some dinner uh outside our yurt and he said, yes, these are almost too strong for me. I said, really, why? He says, well, they have a side effect that bothers some people. I said, what's that? Temporary paralysis. Oh, I don't know why that would bother anybody.

So weird. Yeah, I know. I know. Picky, picky. Oh my God. So I was a little reluctant to take them, I know, I know. Picky, picky. Oh, my God. So I was a little reluctant to take them. So I did. I had my first psilocybin experience since my 20s was, and at the time I was like 60 or approaching 60. Actually, I have to be very vague on when all these things happen.

And I had a kind of wonder. I didn't take a lot of them. I made a tea and I had a really powerful experience. It was very much about being in nature. I was at our house. We have a house in New England that we've had for many years. And I was in my garden. And, you know, I've written a lot about plants. And I've written about plant intelligence and plant consciousness and things like that.

And I've always believed intellectually that plants, domesticated plants are acting on us it's it's not just it's it's a two-way street we change plants they change us we have been um uh in the same way that say the apple tree or the flower is manipulating the bee making it come pay attention to it offering it nectar in exchange for it picking up pollen on its legs. It doesn't even realize what it's really doing is being tricked by the plant into pollinating it and carrying its genes down the street or around the world. That's happening to us too. And plants work on us. And it's a slightly trippy idea, but it's just co-evolution. That's how co-evolution works. So during this experience, I felt that in a way I never had.

That idea became flesh. And I felt that these plants were kind of looking back at me and that they were very benign. They had only good intentions, but that there were more subjectivities in my garden than I thought. You know, we go through the world thinking we're the only thinking subject. Everything else is an object. One of the things that happens on psychedelics is everything becomes, has life in it, has consciousness in it. And that was a powerful and beautiful experience. And so that was my dipping my toes in. And then after that, I sought a guide because I was trying to simulate the experience I was hearing about at Hopkins and NYU where they were doing these studies.

Not just with the dying. They were doing it with smokers and alcoholics and meditators, all these different groups. But I didn't qualify to enter into those. So I had to go underground. And one of the things I learned is that there is this thriving network of underground guides all over the country. I don't know how many there are, but they're very professional people. They're not drug dealers. They're therapists. And some of them are trained psychologists or MDs in some cases, actually. And they're so convinced of the healing value of these medicines that

they're willing to risk their freedom and their livelihood to work underground. So I found my way into this community and interviewed a bunch of people. And some of them were not the kind of people you want to trust your mind to. I mean, and no doubt, there are lots of charlatans. Everyone I interview is pretty professional, but some of them were just a little too casual about something I was kind of, you know, worried about. There was one guy, I remember this Romanian psychonaut therapist in his seventies who I said, well, what happens if something bad happens? You know, what if, what if somebody dies, you know, while they're with you getting this trip? And he said, well, what happens if something bad happens? You know, what if somebody dies, you know,

while they're with you getting this trip? And he said, you bury them with all the other people. And that kind of casualness really troubled me, so I didn't work with him. But eventually I found people that I trusted and I had a bond with, and I had some very powerful experiences with them. And that did change me in ways that I'm still kind of, you know, digesting. Now I would like to take you back to

the garden thing when you're having this experience with, uh, these plants. I had a experience once on a very high dose of marijuana edibles. I went into a grow room that this local dispensary had set up. It's this big room filled with plants. And it was the first time, like when I walked in, it was the first time I've ever been around pot plants where I felt like they were aware that I was there. It was very strange.

You had this weird feeling of them having much more sensitivity than you imagined, that they're aware of you. But as you said, they're benign and they're just sort of sitting there. But it was almost like they were saying hello to me. They recognized that I could tune into them because I was so barbecued that I was on their wavelength. When you're out there with those plants and you said that you felt consciousness from them, now, as an intelligent, rational person, did you start pondering whether or not you were just perceiving this because it was convenient and you were hallucinating and adding all

this contextual weirdness to this situation? You know, I'm sure I was projecting things onto them, but I've looked at this question and the science of it pretty closely. And how you define consciousness matters here, but plants are conscious in the sense of they're aware of their environment. They have senses. They're not like our senses, but they're picking up on chemicals in the air and in the soil and light in very specific ways. And they're reacting, not just instinctually, but appropriately. There are experiments that show that plants can learn in some primitive way. So we have to understand that we have one kind of consciousness and other animals and even plants have another kind of consciousness.

and other animals and even plants have another kind of consciousness. So it's real. It's a real thing. The idea that they're looking back at me, I'm being metaphorical, but that they're aware of me in the way that the plant is aware that the bee is nearby and does certain things, sometimes to trap the bee and hold it there for a longer amount of time to load it up with pollen. There are – the world as we perceive it is dependent on the particular senses we have. We've got the big five senses that you always hear about.

And there's some other littler ones. You know, how we locate ourself in space. We're pretty good at that too. But other creatures have a different set of senses, and therefore they live in a different world. So the bee, for example, can see ultraviolet light we can't see. So if you could get inside a bee's head, the world would look very different. And you'd see patterns like landing markings on flowers in ultraviolet colors that they can see that you've never seen before. Ditto, they also can experience electromagnetic radiation.

We can't. You know, it's all around us, but we don't feel it. They feel it. And the reason they do is a plant that has a strong electromagnetic field hasn't been visited recently by another bee. So they know this is a good, you're going to get a lot of nectar here. hasn't been visited recently by another bee. So they know you're going to get a lot of nectar here. Whereas if you're flying by a flower and it's got a soft field, doesn't have a big field,

it's probably just been visited by someone else, so skip it. So they're living in a world where they're perceiving cell phone radiation and all the kinds of crap we're putting into the electromagnetic spectrum. crap we're putting into the electromagnetic spectrum. So we have to realize that this is a very specific world that we're perceiving in our normal consciousness that is the one that we need to perceive that's good for us, that we're designed for, reflecting our bodies and our upright stance, everything about us. But other creatures are seeing a different world. And one of the interesting things about psychedelics is you get some insight into that. You sort of feel it. And it's real, I think, in the sense of, sure, you're imagining. There's still a leap of imagination to understand bee world or octopus world. That's a really weird world. Their brains are distributed over eight arms right have you seen that recent uh paper that was just put out see if you can find it whether they're hypothesizing that octopus they might have come here from another planet literally not might have

been seeded by another planet it's very controversial but it's from a legit scientist and what they're trying to think of is if it's possible that the eggs of these things traveled in comets and somehow they came here hundreds of millions of years ago. And the reason being is that they can alter their RNA and that this is very specific to octopi or octopuses. Yeah, here it is. Octopuses came to earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago. I don't know if they would put it that way, but it's just a theory, but it's a theory that's being bandied about by legitimate scientists. That's fascinating.

That's crazy. Because they can do so many things that no other animal could do, like instantaneously change their outside. Yes, to blend into their area. Also, each arm can make its own decisions without referring to headquarters. Really? Yeah, they have this distributed intelligence. Wow.

And regenerate as well. Yes. No, they're really crazy. So this idea that there's something relative about our everyday normal consciousness, that there are other ways to experience the world, is something that psychedelics put you in touch with. I was just reading this interview with this physicist named Carlo Rovelli. He's a theoretical physicist from Italy. He wrote this book a couple years ago called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Very prominent guy.

And he was telling this interviewer in The Guardian that he got turned on to physics during an LSD trip he had when he was 15. And the interviewer asked him, why was that? And he said, well, I saw for the first time that there could be another way to think about time instead of past, present, and future, that it might all be simultaneous. And that's how it appeared to him during this LSD trip. And when he was back to baseline, he said, you know, I was asking myself, why am I so sure this is the real world and that wasn't the real world? And it was just a hallucination. And he said, the world as it presents itself to us right now here, actually, physics tells us is not the real world.

That there, you know, that space and time are curved, that particles don't exist until they're perceived by a consciousness, all these crazy ideas of theoretical physics. He said, it suddenly seemed like worth exploring, that the world as it presents itself to us is not the only world, or necessarily the accurate world. And I was very interested that a scientist could develop that idea of a beyond in the way you would think of a religious person developing the idea of a beyond, that there's a scientific beyond and there's a religious beyond. And psychedelics at least gives us a hint that those worlds exist. And that was a very powerful, powerful idea for me. Have you looked into any of the connections between ancient religions and psychedelics, like any of the John Marco Allegro stuff?

Yeah, I did. I didn't go that deep into it. I went in deep enough to know that there are a lot of very serious scholars. And Allegro is one and Karl Ruck is another. And Allegro is one and Karl Ruck is another. And Gordon Wasson, the guy who kind of brought psilocybin to the West, who I write about at some length in the book, really believed that it was experience of psychedelics, which has been in culture for thousands of years. We know whether you're talking about the Amazon or Africa or and that these experiences may have nurtured the religious impulse. You know, where do you get the idea of a beyond? Where do you get the idea of a heaven or a hell, if not from some altered state of consciousness?

You know, people talked about visiting the underworld in Homer's time. So how did they do that? Was it dreams? Dreams don't have the authority that psychedelic experience has. There's something about psychedelic experience that has this, it's not just an opinion, it's not a fantasy, it's something real, it's objective truth. This is, William James called it the noetic quality of the mystical experience. This is William James called the noetic quality of the mystical experience. And that certitude comes from psychedelics.

And so it seems totally plausible to me that at the very earliest stages of humanity, if people were indeed taking psychedelics, this might explain how they came up with these ideas. There are other alternative theories, and it's not provable. I just don't know how we would begin to prove it, but it seems plausible. And, you know, the ancient Greeks had a psychedelic that they used, we think, they called it the Kikion, K-Y-K-E-O-N, and they had an annual ritual ceremony, and it was the only time in the year where you could use this drug. And it was a ritual for Demeter and harvest or planting time. And everybody in Greek society did this. And people, it was secret. It was called the mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries. And you weren't supposed to talk about it, but there's a few accounts around and people talked about visiting the underworld, making contact with the dead. And Carl Ruck, who's a classicist at BU,

says that was a psychedelic potion. We don't know what they were using, whether it was mushrooms or something else. The Greek use of drugs is very obscure. They only talked about wine, but the way they describe what wine did to you, there was clearly something added to it that they were adding other plant drugs to their wine because they would have these tiny little glasses and they'd take these big trips. So we don't know what it was. Yeah. Tiny glasses of wine.

Tiny glasses. And they were very careful about when you used it and, you know, people would completely lose control. And it was just like, no, this isn't wine. This is something else. Yeah, it is. Some sort of a psychedelic from grapes or added to it? Well, I mean.

We don't know. Some people, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD or invented LSD, he thought it was ergot that they'd figured out a way. Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain. And it was the precursor chemical to LSD comes from ergot. And ergot is responsible for episodes of mass delirium in European history. You get a really wet year. The ergot grows on the rye. People eat bread made from it, and they go crazy.

Some people think the Salem witch trials came after a wet year, and people had absorbed, these women had eaten Aragot and were having visions and things like that, which was interpreted as witchcraft, which to them was a very- I thought they were saying that the men had absorbed it

and thought they were under spells. Oh, maybe. Maybe that too. I just- Probably everybody's tripping. Yeah. So anyway, so- So they think that somehow- If you just eat Aragot, you're not going to be, you could get gangrene. everybody's tripping. Yeah. So, anyway, so the thinking is

if you just eat ergot, you're not going to be, you could get gangrene. It's not a clean chemical. And, but the thinking of Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck,

and they were collaborators on this theory, was that the Greeks perhaps had figured out a way to derive a pure chemical from ergot that could be made into something very much like LSD. But again, nobody has succeeded, and they've tried for the last 20 or 30 years,

to take ergot and make something through simple processes that the Greeks could have mastered. So it may have been a mushroom. There's a lot of psychedelic plants out there. It's one of the mysteries of evolution that you know dmt is like coursing through the the plant world yeah thousands of plants yeah yeah so so i i do find it plausible that there's some links between psychedelics i think psychedelics have have influenced cultural history at various points along the way and one of those may have been to kind of nurture this religious impulse. But again, I can't prove it.

The Greeks spent, some of the great Greek scholars spent a lot of time in Egypt as well. Don't know anything about that. Really? Yeah. I was trying to figure, yeah, they were trying to figure out what psychedelics, if any, the Egyptians took. And they never really figured it out.

They made some connections to DMT that is sort of loosely connected to their worship of the pineal gland, which appears- Yeah, right, where we found DMT in rats. Yeah, yeah, the Cottonwood Research Foundation. Yeah. So you did that film about DMT, right? Yeah, that's really interesting stuff. There's been very little follow-up on that.

I mean, this idea that there might be an endogenous psychedelic like DMT, as far as I know, we've only found it in the rat. It's hard to look for it, and the amounts are really tiny. Well, they found DMT in people, but they haven't found it in the pineal gland. They haven't. Oh, is that right? They found it in the liver and the lungs. And that it's being produced there? Yeah, they know that humans produce it, and it's endogenous,

but they don't know whether or not the pineal gland does obviously the pineal gland represents the third eye of eastern mysticism and that was what also they think what is it is the eye of horus that they connected to the pineal gland have you ever seen those comparisons pull up the comparison between the eye of horus and the pineal gland. It's essentially shaped like a cross-section of the pineal gland. And in the Temple in Man, see if you look at it up there? And they think somehow or another that this is the connection between these two. A bunch of different things have been written on this connection because this appears in so many different Egyptian hieroglyphs,

and they think it might have some sort of a connection between the portal to the afterlife that they think the DMT experience is. But how would they know? I mean, what do they know about brains? Well, I don't know. How do they know how to build pyramids? How do they know a lot of things? I mean, they did some pretty incredible shit. We don't know. How did they know how to build pyramids? How did they know a lot of things? I mean, they did some pretty incredible shit.

Yeah. We don't know. Because of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, we lost almost everything. We don't really know what they knew or how they knew it, but we do know that scholars from around the world would go to Egypt to learn. Well, in general, I have a more open mind about many things since I've had these experiences than I did before. I was a kind of staunch materialist. It's normal. I mean, most people see silliness and hippies and, you know, all these people that are out there doing drugs, trying to air quote, find themselves.

You just it seems like a foolish venture. And then you do it and you go, oh, OK, that's what that was about. Yeah. It's just being done by morons. Or being described by morons. Because it's hard to describe. It's also illegal. So people shy away from it. You don't want to lose your family and get locked up in jail and all these different things that people are terrified of. So you're like, look, I'm not going to, I'll have a glass of whiskey with dinner. That's about it.

And also, you know, there's a kind of embarrassment. I mean, one of the really striking things, I've been on the road now for, this is my second week out talking about this book. And I have been struck by how many people have had powerful psychedelic experiences they don't talk to anybody about. And I come along as a kind of, I don't know, credible person who's interested. And they, this is journalists too, they turn off the tape recorder and they say, can I tell you a story? And something happened to them, might've been in their 20s or 30s or earlier that changed the course of their life. And either because there was a stigma attached to it, or it was kind of had this 60s kind of woo thing about it, or there were kids around,

they didn't feel comfortable. And so they kept it in this box labeled weird drug experience. But it's not just a drug experience. This is your mind. The drug may have started the process, but everything you see in this experience, those are real psychological facts. They're from your unconscious or from your interpretation, facts. They're from your unconscious or from your interpretation of your environment. And it's not the molecule that foreordained this experience. As Stanislav Grof, who's one of the pioneering psychedelic psychiatrists in the 60s said that LSD is an unspecific amplifier of mental activity. There's nothing packaged with the drug. And that's important to understand. So you have this big experience

and you put it in this box saying, we're drug experience. But when you take it out, sometimes you find that there's real gold there. There's fool's gold too. It's an interesting quote, that quote you just said, because in actual studies of the human mind

under the influence of psilocybin, it's actually been shown to shut off parts of the brain. Yeah. And so the question is, are we blocking off these constant frequencies that are around us? So this experience that's around us, it is our own ego or our own mortality, our own desire to stay alive and protect ourselves, or whatever the various blockades that we put up, are those diminished by psilocybin that allows this ever-present experience to manifest itself? It's exactly right.

The most interesting scientific finding of this current generation of research is that when they image the brains of people on psilocybin or LSD or ayahuasca, they expected to see fireworks, right? Lots of activity because the experience has lots of fireworks. But they found something that they didn't expect, which was a diminishment of activity in a very important brain network called the default mode network. This is in the midline, and it connects parts of your cortex, which is the evolutionarily most recent part, to older, deeper sources of emotion and memory. And it's a hub in the brain. And the brain is a hierarchical system. And this is the orchestra conductor, as one of the neuroscientists put it. It's a regulator. So what happens in the default mode

network normally? Well, it's very involved in self-reflection, self-criticism, worry. It's where your mind goes to wander. It's involved in time travel, thinking about the future or the past. It's involved in something scientists call theory of mind, the ability to imagine that another person has mental states and is not just a rock. It is involved in what's called the experiential or autobiographical self, the way we kind of take what's happening to us and connect it to the story we tell ourselves about who we are based on the past and the future. So it's, you know, if the ego has an address, it's in the default mode network. And what does the ego do for you?

The ego kind of patrols the borders right it's the it's what keeps out um you know things that are threatening to you it keeps uh it's responsible for the repression of subconscious thought or strong emotion um and it in it uh it's a defense it's a set of defenses and psychedelics appear to turn turn this off to one degree or another. Take the default mode network offline. When that happens, to go back to your metaphor, whatever is blocking the valve that's blocking lots of information from coming in from outside or up from below in your subconscious, that's allowed to flow. And so you are getting more information than you might otherwise. And this is a metaphor that Aldous Huxley used in Doors of Perception, that consciousness is eliminating more than it's creating. Consciousness is reducing our experience to that thin trickle of information we need to get ahead, to survive. And that you open the doors of perception on these drugs by turning off this network,

and lots more information comes in, which can be overwhelming, but also extraordinary. I mean, that's wonder. Is there apprehension in writing a book like this and describing these things like as you're writing it and you're thinking about all these other people that are sort of cynical straight-laced non-drug using folks who might admire your previous work on agriculture architecture whatever and and you're sitting there going how do i how do i get this through without looking like a guy who's losing his fucking mind or who's going super woo-woo Deepak Chopra on people? Right?

Like, how do you do this and maintain your position as a serious journalist? Yeah. Well, I mean, I was nervous about undertaking this project. But I also came to think it was really important and that there was something here. And that, you know, when I started this process, Stan Grof, the guy I made reference to earlier, he had said in the 60s something I thought was really outrageous. He said that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind what the microscope was for biology or the telescope for astronomy. This is a really outrageous claim to make. But as time's gone on, that idea seems less crazy to me, that we are learning things about the mind and that these

drugs are teaching it in a scientific context and in an individual context. So just because some people think it's embarrassing or woo-woo is not a way, is not a reason not to do it. I have to find a way to describe it. And, you know, I'm being a little speculative with you talking about origins of religion and stuff, but the book stays pretty close to here's what we really know. And here's what I experienced. Um, I'm a science journalist, you know, and, um, uh, so I try to draw the line between now I'm speculating and now here's something we really know with some with some certitude. But without question, I had some misgivings about describing psychedelic experience, their legal issues there. And that, yeah, I have a readership. I have a big readership that, you know, is happy if I just keep writing books on food. But I had found something too interesting to pass up. And I've been gratified that I've been talking about this book on like network television. I didn't think I would be talking to Stephen Colbert about ego dissolution.

And here we are. And he actually got the best line off on that whole appearance. What did he say? He said, well, maybe the ego should be a controlled substance. I thought that was pretty good. That is a great line. The man is fast. He's a clever boy.

Oh, yeah. So I found, though, that if I was willing to talk about these issues and my experiences in a matter-of-fact way, mainstream journalists would respond in kind. experiences in a matter of fact way, mainstream journalists would respond in kind. And so I've been on like CBS Morning Show and Terry Gross and Fresh Air. And we've had a kind of, you know, conversation where we're looking at these as tools. What are they good for? What are they not good for? Without getting caught up in the usual craziness that's associated with these drugs. And so that's what I'm trying to do is take that 60s associated with these drugs. And so that's what I'm trying to do is take that 60s crust off these things and take a fresh look. Well, for someone like me, who's been a psychedelic advocate for a long time,

it was extremely exciting news that a guy like you were stepping into the fray because you're so well-established and well-respected already that I knew your approach on it was going to be very clean and that I knew that people were going to have to start looking at this like, wait, Michael Pollan's looking at this. Like this might not be completely crazy. But the cultural attitudes about psychedelic drugs or drugs in general were're so childlike in our our view on drugs i mean i have a friend wonderful person talks all kinds of crazy shit about people smoking pot and take xanax every day it's like do you like people don't oh i just need a glass of wine xanax and i'm good i don't know why you people need drugs like wow like you're fucking crazy but our cultural attitudes on the substances that are prohibited and that are that are accepted they're so strange and they they because of our social standing

because we don't want to be perceived as foolish or reckless or in some sort of a midlife crisis or what have you we were like these journalists that are shutting the microphones off and wanted to talk to you about these profound experiences that they had that they should be shouting about from the rooftops. I agree. Look, it's really to normalize this, people have to come out of the closet. Yeah. And some do. I was talking to a journalist in Boston who was the local NPR host and he on the air live talked about his experiences and how important they were in shaping his identity and the experiences he had in college. So I think we're going to see more people come out of the closet and have this kind of conversation.

And we can actually look at this experience in the same way. Now, yes, it's still illegal. But the fact that there is all this legal research going on has created a space where you can talk about it. And I'm interviewing all these people, and they're describing their trips. And they're very straight people. And I'm interviewing all these people and they're describing their trips and they're, you know, they're very straight people and they've had profound experiences. So I think the culture is changing. I really do. I definitely think it is. I think your book is helping you. Well, I hope so. I didn't write it with that idea that I had this authority that I'd earned in

talking about food and nutrition and I'm going to apply it now to drugs. I don't think that way. I was just like, I was starting from scratch, but I do realize that. And people scare me a little when they say, you know, people, psychedelic people say, you know, you're going to do for, for psilocybin, what you did for food. So it's really different. Um, you know, I mean, or this woman, I was speaking at Google in Seattle and this, this woman stands up and she says, well, after I read your book, I had to slaughter a pig. I had to learn how to slaughter a pig.

You made me want to do that. And when I was driving to work today, I didn't think I'd ever take LSD or psilocybin, but now I feel like I need to. I don't want to do that to people. I don't want them to feel they have to have this experience. You can learn a lot about the mind. This book is as much about the mind as it is about psychedelics. This is a book that uses psychedelics to explore this really interesting mystery called consciousness. And it's also exploring the nature of addiction, the nature of depression, all the illnesses that

psychedelics turns out to be very helpful. But I'm not holding a brief that people should do this. I'm not an advocate for psychedelics. I'm an advocate for the research at this point. I don't know enough to say, yeah, everybody should do this. This is what our culture needs. I'm not in that Timothy Leary head. You know, I think we have a powerful agent that there's good data now that this can help heal people who are really suffering. And the other reason for the openness that's going on right now that surprised me, because I expected to get a lot of pushback from the psychiatric establishment.

And I looked for it. I called around. You know, I want to hear the critical voice on the Hopkins work or the NYU work. And what I kept hearing blew my mind. It was like, I remember calling the head of the National Institute of Mental Health to get what I thought would be a really negative quote about psilocybin research. And he was like, no, we have to look at this. This is really interesting research. Former heads of the American Psychiatric Association. And the reason they're so open to it is that mental health treatment in this country is just a mess. I mean, we only reach half of the people who are struggling with mental illness at all, have any exposure to the system.

If you compare mental health treatment to any other branch of medicine, oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, it's accomplished very little. It hasn't prolonged lifespan. It's not saving lives. And yet we have, you know, soaring rates of depression. Depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide. There are 300 million people with major depression or treatment resistant depression in the world right now. And suicide rates are way up. Partly it's the vets, but in general, the taboo has come off suicide, and suicide is climbing rapidly, and addiction, as we know, is rampant. So they need some new tools. There hasn't really been innovation in mental health treatment since the early 90s,

late 80s, with the introduction of the SSRI antidepressants, drugs like Paxil and Prozac. They need some new tools, and that's why they're open to this. And that's why I think it will be embraced eventually by the medical world. Well, isn't it on the ballot in 2018 in California? They haven't quite gotten it. They're doing their petition drive right now and in Oregon, too. And so I don't know that it'll get through this time.

It's a weird item to put on the ballot because actually a small minority of people know what psilocybin is. When I on this show, you're the first person who said the ingredient and didn't say the ingredient in magic mushrooms. You have some confidence that your audience knows what psilocybin is. But it's an unfamiliar word to most people. So I don't know how people vote on that. Right, yeah. It may be premature is what I'm suggesting. Well, it's all dependent upon getting the word out.

I think if people understand the John Hopkins research or just the anecdotal research that some of these people have had these incredibly life-changing experiences. But I think one of the things that you're saying that I think is very important is that this isn't for everybody

and that if you have problems with normal consciousness, this is likely not for you. If you're one of those people that has schizophrenia in your family, perhaps. Forget it. Yeah, don't do it.

And in fact, those people are screened out of this research very carefully. Schizophrenia, it's a real issue with people with psilocybin and many psychedelics, right? Yeah. What happens with schizophrenia is if you are at risk for it, either for because of inheritance, a psychedelic trip can set you off, can be the trigger for a life of it. And other things can too. A divorce, your parents getting divorced sets people off. Going to graduate school sets people off. If you're someone who's probably going to get schizophrenia, any kind of mental trauma, if it happens at that window, which is in your early

20s and your late 20s, I think. And that's why we did see some cases, because that's the age people were using psychedelics in the 60s, of having their first psychotic break. So yeah, so if you're at risk for that or bipolar- And marijuana as well, by the way. That's right. Oh yeah, marijuana can do it also. I think the numbers, though, mirror the numbers uh in standard populations when in terms of like i think it's one out of ten like one out of ten people have some form of schizophrenia and that's mirrored in marijuana use i didn't know that that's really i think it's

the same i think the problem is you know it can exacerbate it or it can trigger it or, you know, depending upon, I mean, everyone's biology is different and everyone's, the way they absorb these chemicals is different. We don't have any evidence of someone thrown into a situation of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness as a result of strictly because of a psychedelic experience. It may have been the trigger, but there might have been it was going to happen anyway. We just don't know. But in general, if you've got serious, if you have personality disorder, if you have bipolar, if you are at risk for schizophrenia, they will not accept you into these trials and you should stay away from these drugs. Yeah, that is a real problem with it being prohibited. The prohibition has really set back research and understanding decades. I mean, we should have been studying this stuff since the 60s. We had 30 years of hiatus in the research. I don't know of another time where you had a promising line of scientific inquiry all through the 50s and early 60s that's just choked off.

And for 30 years, nothing happened. I mean, think of what we would know if we had 30 more years of research with these drugs. It's crazy. So now we're picking up the thread and all that research is being resumed. But your point about prohibition is really important. When you have prohibition, you can't regulate something. It's a free-for-all. Whereas if you did legalize psilocybin, let's take as an example, you could set rules. You could say that it can only be administered by licensed guides or in a medical context, or that no one under a certain age can have it. I mean,

context or that no one under a certain age can have it. I mean, it gives you a chance to regulate. And that's why it's saner to legalize, not in a free-for-all kind of way, but in a very considered way than to have the system we have now where people are going to take the drug whether they should or not without any kind of clearance. And by the way, who knows what you're getting? without any kind of clearance. And by the way, who knows what you're getting? You know, you can also regulate the strength. And in the case of LSD, you know, in the 60s, there was this period where there was a lot of pure LSD around.

And then the mob got interested in it, and they started cutting it with speed and all sorts of things. And people got into a lot of trouble. It's also the issue with scheduling. Like schedule ones for things that have zero medical value. And that's where a lot of trouble. It's also the issue with scheduling, like schedule ones for things that have zero medical value. And that's where a lot of these drugs find themselves. Psychedelics are all schedule one. Yeah.

Which is just bananas, especially DMT with the old Terrence McKenna line. Everyone's holding. Yes. We all have DMT in our bodies. We all have a schedule one substance flowing through our veins, which is, it's the most asinine thing in the world to make your body a schedule one substance. Yeah, it is. And the fact is that schedule one means that these drugs have a high potential for abuse, which isn't really true with psychedelics because they're non-addictive and that they have no accepted medical use, which is now no longer true either because these studies have shown that they do have

a medical use. So, you know, what I hope happens and what we're on track to see happen is that these trials, these drug trials will expand. There will be now phase three drug trials, which is the last step before FDA approval. If the results of those trials are anywhere near as good as the phase two trials, the FDA will then approve psilocybin as a medicine and MDMA, which probably happened first. They're looking at that too for use in treating people with trauma. And then we will be in a world where they'll have to reschedule it to two or three. You know, the opiates are two. I mean, actually, the drug causing most suffering in our country right now in death is not a schedule one. It's a schedule two.

I think it's two. It might be three. And so that we may see this in the next five years or so, which is kind of amazing. Well, we got to get someone like Jeff Sessions out of there. That guy has some really archaic ideas about marijuana. I agree about marijuana. which is kind of amazing. Well, we got to get someone like Jeff Sessions out of there. That guy has some really archaic ideas about marijuana. I agree about marijuana. You know, I thought that, okay, in this administration,

we're going to have another backlash. But one of the things that surprised me is that there are voices on the right supporting this research. You're seeing more of it. Rebecca Mercer has given money to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, for their work on MDMA. And Steve Bannon has spoken out in approval of this research. And Peter Thiel is investing in a psychedelic pharmaceutical company that's getting started in England. So I don't think it may not break down

in the usual right-left way that we're so accustomed to. And that may give it some protection. Well, I think one of the things that'll help is anyone who has a loved one that's going through a terminal illness and experiences these things and sees the profound alleviation of anxiety and this just lessening of the worry of passing on. And Larry Hagman was once on like a real straight television show like CBS or Fox News or something like that. And they asked him about his life and like what makes him so happy. And he said he had a profound acid trip. And you see the host going, what?

He goes, yeah, well, I took a really powerful dose of LSD, and it completely alleviated my worries about dying. Amazing. And I remember seeing him on television going, wow, they didn't know this was coming. No. And seeing this straight interviewer just trying to uncomfortably move past his subject. Okay, well, the guy from Dallas is a fucking drug addict. It's like they didn't know what to do with it but he was so warm and smiling and i believe it was a piece on his house because he had some crazy

off the grid sort of life and some eco-friendly house and all solar powered and used a well and all those different things and uh you know they were asking him what made him so happy and i'll never forget that he was saying he did acid once, a really powerful experience that changed his life. You know, Cary Grant also had 60 guided LSD trips in the late 50s. And he gave an interview in 1959 to a very famous Joseph Hyams, who was the gossip columnist at that time, saying this had changed his life. He was using a low dose. There were a lot of psychiatrists in L.A. who were giving low dose LSD to people in their normal talk therapy sessions. Essentially, it was called psycholytic therapy because it was mind loosening therapy.

And it would give you more access to your unconscious and make you be able to talk about things that you might otherwise feel very defensive about. And he had 60 of these sessions. and he said he was born again. And he said that it had made him a much better actor because he no longer had an ego. He wasn't crippled by his ego. But then he also said, and it made me irresistible to women, which sounds a little egotistical. Have no ego, but chicks love me. Yeah. Yeah, I have no ego, but chicks love me. That's hilarious. Are you aware of any of the research they're doing now with ketamine and depression?

And there's a lot of people that are getting administered pretty high doses of intravenous and intramuscular ketamine for depression, including one of my good friends, Neil Brennan. He's gone through it several times and talked about it on the podcast and said it was a real game changer for him. Yeah. There's a lot of excitement in psychiatry about ketamine. Ketamine is an anesthetic. It's a dissociative. It makes you feel separated from your body and that helps with pain. So it's, I don't know if it's strictly speaking a psychedelic. It's certainly not a classic psychedelic. It doesn't work on those brain networks. But it is legal because it's been used as an anesthetic for years. And it's relatively safe as an anesthetic compared to some of the others that are used.

It's the one they use if you come into the trauma center and you've been shot or you need surgery and they don't have time to check whether you're allergic to any other drugs. That's the safe one to give you in a crisis. They also would carry it around during times of war. That's right. And then it's turned to people in the field. That's right. Yeah. And they don't really understand how it works, but they give people what is kind of a psychedelic dose. They go way out there. It's fairly brief, I believe. And many people with depression have found relief. It's not permanent. It looks like they need to do it again every six months or something like that. But it seems to kind of reset the brain in a way that many people are finding helpful.

And this is all legal. I mean, there are ketamine clinics where you can go and psychiatrists who are administering it to people. So for people who are struggling with depression and can't wait for psilocybin therapy to be approved for depression, which is still several years away, ketamine is worth exploring. What about ibogaine? Did you look into that at all? A little bit. Ibogaine is a psychedelic from a root of a tree that grows in Africa. And it has been used specifically to treat opiate addiction. And that's, God, if we need something now, a tool to deal with opiate addiction. There are clinics in Mexico where they...

I have a friend who has one down there. Really? He opened it after he had his own personal problems with pills. He had a back injury, got hooked on pills, was really struggling to get off them, went to Mexico to do Ibogaine, got completely off of it, felt amazing, realized like, oh my God, I have to help people, and then opened up his own clinic. That's amazing. I mean, there's a bunch in Guadalajara, I don't know where he is, but there is people doing it. I don't know exactly what the legal status is in Mexico, whether it's legal or just tolerated.

I think most drugs have been decriminalized in Mexico, including LSD and mushrooms and a lot of other things to try to do something to curb the violence that they're experiencing from the drug cartels, at least keep it non-local. You know, a lot of the violence is coming from the drug cartels getting money to ship everything to the United States. Right, and we are driving that violence with our use.

It is very strange that our insistence on prohibition is actually funding one of the largest drug and violence epidemics we've ever seen in terms of what's happening south of the border. Well, yeah. And think about Colombia, too. The Civil War in Colombia was funded by our cocaine interest. So Ibogaine is a very intense drug. It is.

Did you do it for this? No, I didn't. I didn't. And I wouldn't do it, I don't think, because it has big implications for your heart. Really? Yeah. And in fact, when you. So it is more toxic to the body than the so-called classic psychedelics.

And it can last like 36 hours it's a very long trip it's really intense in these clinics they you have to be on a heart monitor while they're while you're doing it um and that was like i had a i had a i have a minor heart issue that that made me stay away from mdma which is an amphetamine um and uh you know i mean i'm the kind of guy who goes to his cardiologist before he has six psychedelic trips to check it all out and make sure it's okay. I have something called AFib, atrial fibrillation, which, you know, you can manage with medicine or there's a procedure you can get. It's just a kind of occasional irregularity. Yeah. It just happens sometimes.

a kind of occasional irregularity. Yeah, it just happens sometimes. But my cardiologist warned me off of MDMA because it can raise your heart rate. Although I've subsequently learned if you take a beta blocker, it's okay. So anyway, I've never experimented with that. But anyway, in light of that, I would stay away from Ibogaine but I'm really curious about it just because we have such a crisis with addiction but psilocybin is being used successfully for addiction I talked to smoking people lifelong smokers who broke their addiction with a single or two psilocybin journeys

and they had extraordinary stories to tell I didn't understand how you could have one trip and then give up a lifelong habit. And I asked people about this. And I talked to this one woman, she was about 60. And she was an Irish book editor. And she said on her, I said, so what happened? How'd you stop? She said, well, first I grew wings and I flew through European history and I visited the site of Shakespeare's Globe Theater and I saw the Salem Witch Trials and I died three times

and I saw my body rising from a funeral pyre on the Ganges and I realized the universe was so amazing and there were so many incredible things to do that killing yourself with cigarettes seemed kind of stupid. I was like, I could have told you that. Wow. But see, it goes back to that noetic quality that she had a perspective on her life she'd never had or on the universe, and that she believed that smoking was stupid in a way she knew before, but it didn't have that conviction, that rock hardhard revealed truth conviction.

And I heard that from many people. And I asked the doctor about it, the psychologist who was running the study. He says, yeah, everybody has these duh moments on their psychedelic trips that end up being transformative. Did you have a duh moment? I had a lot of insights. I don't know if I – yeah, I did actually. How many different trips did you have while you were doing this? I had six lot of insights. I don't know if I, yeah, I did actually. How many different trips did you have while you were doing this? I had six or seven.

So I just, a couple, two psilocybin trips, one guided, one not. An LSD trip guided. A couple ayahuasca circles. And then I had a really weird psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT, which is the smoked venom of the Sonoran desert toad. Who figured that out? You know, should get some kind of prize. That's a pretty potent one. Very potent, and thank God, short-acting, short-lived.

It was actually a horrible experience. Really? You had bad experience? That was my worst, yeah. I had a great experience on it. You did? Yeah. Yeah.

What was wrong with it so i you know you take like one puff and before you exhale um i was i mean there's a synthetic version too right i was taking the venom um you're shot out of a cannon there's no lead up it's no warm-up it's like and i felt like i was actually like strapped to the outside of a rocket, you know, going through space and through clouds and like the G-force was pulling down my cheeks. And it was just this mental storm without any, nothing to orient myself. There was no space. There was no time.

There was no self. And it was just unendurable, this punishing roar in my ears. And someone who had done it said eventually it's like a takeoff and you get into orbit and it, and it's, it's very nice at that point. But what happened with me is I had the, I had the storm. I mean, I felt like it was like the metaphor I use in the book is like, I said, I can't explain this. You can't tell a story without place, time and and character, right? I had none of those. It was just this inchoate energy. And I said,

it was like before the Big Bang. You remember that? Well, obviously nobody does. But there was pure energy and no matter yet and no time yet. I mean, that's where I was. And it was horrible. It was terrifying. And I thought I was dying. But then you come down. It was kind of a suborbital flight. And then I started coming down. And suddenly I could feel, oh, I got a body. You know, I was touching my legs.

I have a body. And like, oh, there's a floor. There's space. And then there's time. And the universe kind of reconsolidated. And I had this feeling of incredible gratitude, not just for being alive, which all of us have had at one point or another, but that anything existed. I was grateful for the fact that there is something and not nothing because I'd seen what nothing was like. And so in that sense, it ended up kind of positive, but you wouldn't want to go there to have that experience. So subsequently, somebody said to me, a very experienced psychonaut who I was telling this story to, he said, you didn't have enough. That's what I was just going to tell you.

Really? Yeah, because you only took one hit. You usually take three. You take three, and the rocket ride leads you somewhere. It takes you to the center of the universe. You take three, three, three? Three in a row. Three in a row. Three in a row.

At the same time. Take a big one, blow it out. Take a big one, blow it out. Take a big one. And as you're taking the third one, you're already seeing the world crystallize in front of you. It already starts turning into geometric patterns. You put the pipe down, lay back in the chair, and you just shoot off to the center of the

universe. The terrifying thing is you cease to exist. Like, it's the one drug that I've ever taken where you're not there anymore. Even NN dimethyltryptamine, which is the difference between 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine is just an oxygen molecule attached to it. But NN dimethyltryptamine is incredibly visually stimulating. 5-methoxy is not. It's just white. It was not. It's just white.

It was white. It was definitely white. I don't know how I could have taken three hits because I hadn't excelled the first one when I was gone. Well, I don't know what you're... I only did the synthetic version of it. You're doing this frog version. And the person I know who did the synthetic version had a very different experience and

they felt like they were installed in the firmament as this happy star. But I didn't get there. So who knows? I did something wrong. Okay. I don't think you did. I just think you had a different experience. And I mean, obviously there's gotta be some sort of chemical difference. I mean, you're probably getting other things in that frog venom as well as pure DMT. That's right. That may be it. I don't know the answer to that. It's fucking frog spit. I mean, do you know how they get it to? No frogs were harmed in the making of this drug. It's excreted on the outside of their body.

What most people do is- You can milk them. Yeah. You rub them on a glass and then let it dry off and then you scrape it off the glass and then you smoke it. It crystallizes. Yeah. I heard you just kind of squeeze them and then it sprays the glass and overnight it

turns into, it looks like brown sugar. Yeah. It's an amazing thing. You're the first person who knows anything about it that I've, who has interviewed me. Well, you used to be able to buy it. You used to be able to buy it. It was legal until recently, 2011. I bought a fucking jug of this shit.

Oh my God. Offline. I bought it from some company, American Chemical Company or something, and they send it to you. And I had enough to get the entire state of California high for several days because it doesn't take much. It doesn't. But it's not something you want to do very often. And I don't think it has the same kind of healing properties because you're not bringing back information that's usable. Oh, I brought back a lot. You did? Yeah. I brought back a lot about myself. And one of the things that I realized, as I recorded,

what I would do is post-trip, I'd hit a tape recorder right when I became conscious again and start talking about the experience. ego trying to retake hold of the situation and even use words in a way that might impress you with my ability to describe things or as a professional comedian too, I was aware that like a lot of what you're doing, you're saying things in a way that's pleasing to people so that they get excited about hearing you talk. Yeah, yeah. And I was very aware of that while I was doing that. I'm saying, I'm trying to explain things that are not possible to explain because the words that we're using were all invented for a world that doesn't exist in the DMT dimension. And once you break through, it is so profoundly alien that any words –

And liberating? Yes. Yeah. Well, in a way, I mean, it made me really truly realize that we are in a soup of atoms and that it's not – there's not like Michael Pollan, Joe Rogan, and Jamie Vernon in a room. Here's a wood table. There's oxygen between us. No. We're in a universal stew of particles.

Yeah. And it breaks those particles down or at least it gives you a view into that. And you cease to exist, which is the most bizarre thing, because it's so similar to NN dimethyltryptamine chemically, but so different in the fact that you're not there. While you're doing regular, like NN dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. Have you done that, the pure version of it? No, not the pure version. which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. Have you done that, the pure version of it?

No, not the pure version. The pure version is like a very short, much more intense ayahuasca experience. I've never done ayahuasca. I've only done the DMT version. By injection or? No, smoking it. But what you get out of it is you're there while this is happening. And you're just blown away. And you're like, I can't believe it.

And that's true in ayahuasca too. You're present present but there's all these entities that are trying to calm you down relax relax take it in settle down settle down they're all trying to calm you down and and and alleviate yeah it's it's it's weird you know and they're also fucking with you like they give you the finger like i had a bunch of jokers that were, like, dancing around me, giving me the finger. Did you have machine elves, too? I don't believe in that thing. I don't know what that is. Like, McKenna had those experiences of machine elves.

I saw what I described as complex geometric patterns that are made out of love and understanding. They seem to me to be like the building blocks of the soul all around you all the time. Wow. Some just gigantic, impossibly large, infinite well of souls. Just these things dancing around you. And they were never one thing. They would be one thing for a second, and they change into something else, and they change into something different. And the more profound the experience is got, the more profound the

next one would be. And they kept saying like, look at this, look at this. But the words weren't real words. That's the other thing. It's like, I'm saying the words, look at this. And I would have that in my head, but I never heard anybody say it. It was almost like it was triggering those, the concept of those words in my mind. Right, right. It's pre or post linguistic, some of these experiences. So you asked about dumb moments, though. But, you know, I had one where I had this like cascading sense of flood of love. I was thinking about my family. I was thinking about my son and my wife and my parents.

And, you know, it sounds like so banal. And one of the things that happens is that these platitudes that love is the most important thing there is, okay? Take that, for example. That could be on a Hallmark card. But suddenly it's infused with like, yes, that is so profound. And you know what? It is profound. But we have these defenses against seeing it that way because we've heard it so many times. You know, a sense of banality is just from repetition. But you're put back in touch with, you know, a platitude is a truth that's been drained of all emotion. And the emotion comes back and it becomes really powerful. So I, there's a whole riff in the book about platitudes and like, Oh, we have to rethink these platitudes. So it can make you sound like an idiot. Um,

but is that right? Or is that right? You know, and I actually think the experience is more truthful than the ironic, cynical perspective that we bring to it in our everyday lives, which is a defense against powerful emotion and being overwhelmed every day by, wow, love, you know, whatever it is. So you end up revaluing those kind of things. And so that was a really important takeaway for me. The other was having an experience of ego dissolution. That, which can be scary, can also be very blissful if it's then followed by emerging with nature or other people.

And I do think that is the therapeutic agent in the people who are healed, that our ego does keep us from perceiving certain things. And it enforces really destructive stories we tell ourselves, like, I can't get through this day without a drink. I'm unworthy of love. You know, the voice of self-criticism. And we get trapped in these loops, especially as we get older. And that's one of the reasons I think psychedelics are actually more valuable the older you get, because we are creatures of habit. And by now, we have these mental algorithms that organize our response to everything. And sure, that's very efficient, but it blinds you to experience. It blinds you to the everyday wonders. And psychedelics,

you know, softens those habits and helps you get out of those grooves. And for me, that was really useful. And it's only, I think it's the experience of ego dissolution that allows you to, because your ego enforces those habits and you get a little break. There's a beautiful metaphor. One of the scientists I interviewed in the book, a Dutchman working in Imperial College in London, he said, think of your mind as a hill covered in snow and your thoughts are sleds going down that hill. And after a while, after a lot of thoughts have gone that hill, there'll be these grooves and they're going to get deeper and deeper. And at a certain point, you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves.

That's who we are as we're like, you know, at this age. And what psychedelics do, he said, is flatten the snow, lots of fresh powder. And you can then take the sled any way you want to go. That's a great way of describing it. I've always talked about predetermined patterns and grooves that people fall into. So it's amazing hearing him say it that way, but that's a much better way of describing it, like snow, the sliding these thoughts down these already existing patterns.

That's amazing. That's, you know, what you said about love and being cynical, that's so important too, because there's something that's something that people are, they avoid sincerity. Like there's something about it that it makes you too vulnerable or too open to criticism or too open to ridicule. And we're worried about being sincere. And I do think that that's one of the primary benefits of psychedelics. Yeah, we live in an ironic culture. And we defend ourselves against strong experience or self-exposure

by adopting this stance that's ironic and cool. And psychedelics is not a cool experience. It's the opposite. Well, it's cool when it's over. Yeah. But yeah, it's serious stuff. And how much did you pay attention to McKenna's theory about the evolution of the human brain, of the stoned ape theory that...

Yeah, I looked at it. But I found... I didn't find it persuasive. And in fact, if you press Terrence McKenna, he didn't find it entirely persuasive. It's an interesting speculation. It's kind of a mind game. I don't see how – I can see how psychedelics would influence the mind and create new ideas, new memes, and might contribute to language. But how does it get into the genes?

That's what I – the genes? The genes. The genes. Because he said it changed us at the genetic level. I see psychedelics as having had a profound effect at the level of cultural evolution. That there are lots of interesting innovations that people who had psychedelic experience introduced to our culture. We talked about religion earlier. That could be one. I had a wonderful interview with Stuart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog.

And his insight, he had this profound insight during a psychedelic trip on the roof of his house in North Beach. And he saw the curvature of the earth in a way he hadn't before. And he said, if we could have a photo, this is 1966. We had never seen a picture of the Earth from space yet. And he said, if we had a picture of the Earth from space and we could see it as this round spaceship, that would change everything. Because if you think of the Earth as flat, as most of us instinctively do, it's endless. There's endless resources. You don't have to worry about limits in any way. But if we had that image and he realized, I have to start a campaign to get NASA

to turn the cameras around. They're on their way to the moon. Show us the earth from space. And he said, I'm going to make a campaign. I know. And he says, this is on LSD. I'll make a button. Very important medium in 1966. I'll make a button. And what should the button say? It should be a little paranoid to get people's attention. Why haven't they shown us an image of the earth from space? Yeah, that's what he would do. And he started a campaign. He started selling these buttons and the campaign got in the newspapers and it goes viral as, you know, as viral as you could get in 1966. And two years later, NASA produced that image and he put it on the whole earth catalog and that image galvanized the environmental movement. So it's those kind of memes that

psychedelics introduces into culture, and that changes culture. That image changed culture. And I think there are hundreds of them. I mean, Steve Jobs talked about, you know, his use of LSD is very important to his formative experience. And in fact, there's a whole tradition of computer engineers going back to the 50s using LSD that I wrote about in the book. But I don't see how we were selected genetically because there was an advantage to the people who were taking a lot of psychedelics. That's where he loses me. I don't think that's necessarily his theory. Maybe I'm misrepresenting it.

His theory is that it coincides with climate change and these lower hominids experimenting with different food sources. So as the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting by flipping over cow patties and finding grubs and perhaps even mushrooms that were growing on these cow patties. And his theory was that there's a bunch of different benefits. One, low doses of psilocybin have been shown to increase visual acuity. And it's given to hunting dogs in certain cultures.

Yes. Make you a better hunter, make you more in tune with what you're doing. That it would make you more – central nervous system arousal, including sexual arousal, make you more horny, which would make you – More productive. create more often and that the the very unusual effect that psilocybin has on the mind could have led to language and could have also led to the expansion of neurons the language could be part of cultural evolution sure yeah the doubling of the human brain size though was the particular thing that it coincided according to mckenna it's been there's a lot of people that disagree with him but his brother makes a very compelling case for it.

His brother Dennis is still alive. Yeah, I know. And he's a brilliant, brilliant guy. He talked about it on this podcast. He talked about his take on the stoned ape theory scientifically, why he believes it's really what happened. But that it does coincide with the change in climate of these ape-like people trying out different things. And that the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years is one of the greatest mysteries in the entire fossil record. Yeah, but they're alternative theories.

I mean, I wrote about one in my last book. But I think they probably all coincide. They may be. Cooking with fire can explain the increase in the brain size because you get more nutritional value from cooked food. The throwing arm, the desire to hunt all these different animals and calculating all these different ways to do that and communication. Right. I think there's probably a bunch of coinciding factors. Yeah, and it may well be that people were eating everything, right? Our ancestors, it's amazing what they ate.

And no doubt they ate psychedelic mushrooms. And no doubt, I mean, he also believed that language was a form of synesthesia. In the way that synesthesia, you can smell a musical note or something like that. That you're taking a sound, a meaningless sound, and you're

attaching it to a concept that maybe that happened on psilocybin. But he had a bunch of ideas that never panned out. He was, you know, he was, look,

he was incredibly creative person and, and, and, and they're all, you know, really interesting to think about. Some of them, I think you could probably discredit based on what we understand about genes and evolution, but others are just really provocative.

that's where his brother comes in. Yeah. His brother's a scientist. Yeah. Strict scientist. He doesn't tolerate any of the woo-woo. And he goes straight to- And he's skeptical of some of his brother's ideas, too.

Oh, yeah. Openly. Yeah. I mean, loved his brother, but he was like, hmm, he said a lot of things that weren't really accurate. But also, Terrence McKenna, too, would say, well, you know, I'm just putting these ideas out there. Well, the guy was a constant pot user.

He was constantly doing psychedelics. And a brilliant talker. Brilliant talker. I mean, he would have a podcast now, right? Oh, for sure. It would be amazing. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'd promote the shit out of it. I would too. Yeah, I mean, he was a fun guy to listen to talk. And there's a podcast called The Psychedelic Salon that my friend Lorenzo hosts that has pretty much every Terrence McKenna lecture

and speech he's ever done available for free. You can download it. And Lorenzo has taken these and digitally remastered them so the sound is better. And it's really awesome that he's got this resource. But the idea that these lower hominids experienced, ancient hominids experienced, experimented rather with psilocybin, and this was what advanced culture or advanced language, advanced their understanding of each other. It's a very compelling idea.

Yeah, it is. And the way I think about drugs like psychedelics in evolution, in the same way like in genetic evolution, radiation causes mutations, and some of those mutations turn out to be really valuable. Purely by accident, some great new trait is introduced to the species and it increases fitness in that person or that individual lives on. In the cultural realm, psychedelics are like radiation. They're mutagens. They create change, variation, and that advances cultural evolution. All that variation, all those wild ideas,

99% of them are stupid and useless, I'll bet. But that 1% can change the world. Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's let you go because I know you got to get out of here. I wish I had more time because we've got a lot more to talk about. Anytime you're back in town, please do, please do.

And the name of your book once again? How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics is Teaching Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. And is it available in audio form as well? Yes. Yeah. And I recorded the audio book. Excellent.

I'm so happy to hear you say that. I hate it when other people read people's books. I did, too. And they told me my first couple books, no, you've got to have an actor do it. And people complained. They said, that's not you. So now I insist on doing it. It takes a week out of my life each time. It's not easy, but I'm very proud of this audio book. So I hope people will check it out. That's awesome. Thank you very much, Michael. Oh, thank you, Joe. This was a pleasure. Michael Pollan, ladies and gentlemen.