The Jordan Harbinger Show - 81: Michael Pollan | A Renaissance in the Forbidden Science of Psychedelics

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) is a writing professor, a longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and author of many best-selling books -- his latest is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. What We Discuss with Michael Pollan: How psychedelics have been used throughout human history across almost every culture in the world. What psychedelic compounds have in common and how they interact with the human brain on a molecular level. How psychedelics are being used in modern medicine to treat a wide variety of ailments including PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, OCD, anxiety, and dependence on alcohol and nicotine. What it means to expand your subconscious and change your conscious states of mind. Why psychedelic insights are so powerful and perspective-changing long after their physical effects have faded. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. Today we're talking with Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, with The New Science of Psychedelics, teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. Heavy-duty title here.

Today, we'll discuss psychedelics and how they're changing lives and indeed, the entire practice of medicine. Now, before you get your sensibilities offended, you'll want to listen to this. Michael Pollan is a very, in-depth researcher, and he didn't take this stuff lightly. His findings will absolutely surprise and hopefully enlighten you. See what I did there, Jason? We'll also discover what it actually means to expand your subconscious and change your conscious states of mind. It's not just for

tie-dye wearing hippies anymore. And we'll learn who can potentially benefit from the use of psychedelics, from quitting smoking to lowering anxiety and terminal disease and coping with end of life. There's a lot of amazing discoveries in this one, and today's discussion is really something outside the norm, and I know you'll enjoy it. Of course, we also have worksheets for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of all these key takeaways here from Michael Pollan. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, here's Michael Pollan. Let's talk about psychedelics. What do you think? Yeah, sure. Let's define psychedelics, first of all, because I don't even know if a lot of people listening

really know what that is. They go, oh, yeah, I've heard of magic mushrooms, I've heard of that may be the limit of some people's experience when it comes to this stuff. Sure. Well, there's some debate over how broadly to divine psychedelics. And I run into people who kind of define them as psychoactive plants and drugs in general. But the definition that I liked and relied on in the book is a class of so-called classic psychedelics that all operate on the same receptor sites in the brain, seroton 2A receptors. They're triptomines, most of them, not all of them. That's a certain class of molecule.

And they include, basically, for my purposes, LSD, psilocybin, DMT, which is in ayahuasca, and then, you know, some handful of kind of more obscure ones. So I would not include, for example, MDMA or ecstasy, although some people do. Or cannabis that some people consider a mild psychedelic. And the reason I limit it to that class is they have a similar neuroscience story and they have a similar social history. I'm, you know, very much tied to this period in the 50s and 60s of active research followed by a crushing suppression. Yeah. The one I would add to it that's not a tryptamine.

It's a phenylethylene, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, is mescaline. And that's been around for longer, actually, than the others. Really? Yeah. It's in peyote and it was isolated around 1900. And there was some interesting research done in Germany on mescaline. But it's not a substance I have much experience with. Yeah.

Well, we'll talk about our experiences in a little bit. I've also not tried most of these. I shouldn't say most. I have a good portion of them I have not tried. And my experiences have been kind of strange on top of that. I always do wonder, though, how did people find out about these things? You know, mushrooms, okay, you're hungry, you ate it. Whoa, that was not the same mushroom in my head yesterday.

Yeah. I get that. LSD, quote unquote, accidentally ingested, I don't know, 160 times or however many times he had accidentally ingested it. Albert Hoffman? Yeah, didn't he? Oh, no, he just once. Just once?

He accidentally ingested it once, realized, hey, there's something going on here. This is a powerful substance because he had had so little and it got in through his skin, I think, that he then decided, I got to take this deliberately. Deliberally, and to see what was going on. And then he has the first acid trip. Gotcha. But, yeah, mushrooms were, you know, discovered because everybody was trying everything. It was, you know, you were hungry. And they were in very common use in Mexico, Central America, you know, for could be thousands of years, but we know at least 500 years because the Spanish conquest, when they came over to Mexico, that people had mushroom cults and they were using them in their religions and tripping.

It's a documented evidence of people. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're in those accounts. people describe, I quote them in the book, of people having visions and comparing notes on their visions and visiting the dead and everything. But LSD was more, was an accident, but pretty quickly seized on as something that, I mean, a lot of chemistry discoveries are accidents. Mescalin has been in use in traditional, in the form of peyote, which is the natural form. It's the flower on a cactus.

And there's another cactus called San Pedro that also makes it. And those have been used for a long time by Native American groups. We don't know exactly how long. So there's, you know, there's a lot of history behind psychedelics. I mean, the Greeks had a psychedelic, it appears. Siberians use them in their shamanic practices. Amazon Indians used ayahuasca and other things. They used psychoactive snuffs that had DMT in them or something called 5MEO DMT and other kind of DMT.

That's one where I'm like, how did you? you find this? What is it? Well, I think that's a great question. I mean, there is one psychedelic that I experimented with, pretty obscure one, is this 5MEODMT. It's the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Right. Now, you might be tasting everything, but would you be smoking everything? Yeah. Like, were they just like, you know, I would eat this, but I want to, I want to roast it first. I want to make sure I inhale all of the vapor. But if you eat it, it's toxic. So, I mean, the reason you're burning it is to burn off the toxins. So we don't know. exactly how that was discovered. It's not that ancient, that one, but the first scientific articles

are written by Andrew Weil, actually, in Wade Davis in the 70s. And it may be that they were the first to figure it out. The same chemical does show up in plants and is turned into a snuff. That's supposedly very powerful, too. So, you know, it's another story of the ingenuity of our species that we've figured out all the crazy things nature has to offer us. through trial and error by and large. It makes you think about literature, things like books I read in high school, where somebody goes and travels into Hades and you're like, were you just tripping?

Yeah. Well, they may have been tripping. You know, we shouldn't discard that possibility. It's very hard to prove. Yeah. But go ask Homer. Yeah, but the Greeks had this annual right called the Eleusian Mysteries, where everybody, it was in honor of Demeter and the harvest,

and everybody involved, and it was thousands of people every year, went to this one temple, and they had all these rights and rituals, and they all took this substance. We don't know what it was. They called it the Kikian, K-Y-K-E-O-N. And you were supposed to keep it secret what happened. So there's not a lot written about it, but there's a few accounts. And that this substance was very powerful, and you would have visions, and you would visit the dead. You would go to Hades.

And, you know, psychedelics, there's a strong power of suggestions. So if you're telling 5,000 people, we're now going to visit our ancestors, a great many of those people will have that experience. It's that suggestible. You know, for all we know, the whole religious impulse may have been nurtured by these substances or some substances like them. I mean, where else do you get an idea that there's a beyond, that there's another world that's not presented to our senses, but is just as real in us, and you might get to it after you die

or through other means, then through a psychedelic. I have a very open mind that, you know, psychedelics have played a very important role in cultural history and planted ideas, um, Platonism and this idea that there's an ideal form of all the stuff around us. There's an ideal bottle of water, you know, next to this bottle of water somewhere. That's a pretty trippy idea. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of, But when you look at literature or theoretical stuff through the lens of, was that person on some sort of hallucinogenic or psychedelic? You should always be asking that question. You really end up with a lot more like, oh, I can see how they came up with that, right?

Yeah. Do we know what the word actually means? It was invented or coined by Humphrey Osmond, who was an English psychiatrist working in Saskatchewan. And he was one of the pioneering psychedelic researchers. In 1957, he is having an exchange of letters with. with Aldous Huxley, the writer, who he kind of got involved with because he was hoping someone would write a good account of what the experience was like. And he had actually given Huxley Mescalan. And the trip that became the wonderful book, The Doors of Perception, was administered by Humphrey Osmond. The drugs at that time were called psychotomimetics. That was kind of the first name, which meant mimicking psychosis. Yeah, that's more scary and less approachable. Yes, and that's what they thought they were at first. And certainly the symptoms closely resemble psychosis. If I described my experience to a psychiatrist, he would say psychotic episode. And in fact, some psychiatrists have. But they realized at a certain point that these drugs didn't make you crazy. In fact, in some cases, they made you sane. So they needed a new name. And they went back and forth. And actually, it was Osman who came up with the winning idea. And it was psychedelic. And it's two words. It means mind, psyche and delic manifesting. So it's mind manifesting. So it's mind manifesting.

And the idea is that these are amplifiers of mental processes, and they bring to the surface things that are going on in your mind. And it kind of stuck. We think of it as a 60s word. Yeah. Yeah. The psychedelic 60s. Yeah, exactly. But in fact, it's a 50s word.

And it has a lot of baggage. But when I was deciding what word to use in the book, you know, I looked at some others. Some people are trying to call them ethogens, entheogens, which means the divine within. But that's a very specific. It's woo. but it also is saying this is about spirit, this is about religion. It's about a lot of things, and that's just one. So I think psychedelic mind manifesting is general enough in a good word, and people know what it, you know, pretty much know what it means.

Now, my wife saw you in The Vanishing of the Bees. She's a beekeeper, so that was a big sort of moment. And some of your books, most of your books are about like agricultural, botany food, things like that. Why this sort of hard right turn, or at least the appearance of a hard right turn into psychedelics? Yeah. I mean, this book is a departure for me in some way. but it's continuous in other ways. I've always been interested in our engagement

with the natural world and other species and how we use them and how they use us. And in fact, I've written about this abiding and universal desire of humans to change their consciousness for a long time. I wrote about an embodiment of desire. There's a long chapter on cannabis. And I've always been curious about that desire

because it doesn't seem on its face to be so helpful or adaptive. I mean, yes, to relieve pain or boredom of course, but we engage in much more radical forms of consciousness change. And I've always wanted to know what is it good for. And so that's been in the back of my mind as a topic. And then I started learning about this new research, the fact that they were giving, I remember reading this paper, they were giving psilocybin to cancer patients. And that seemed like, you know, to help them deal with their existential distress at their approach of death. And that was such a mind-blowing idea. I thought,

well, I guess it's time to take a look at this class of drugs because I had very little experience of it. I don't know if I'd want to, if I'm facing death, do I want to take something that's going to make me trip, though? Yeah. That's my reaction, too. I would not, I would, you don't want to be so out of control. You would assume your thoughts would go to the darkest possible place. Sure. And they do, actually.

But people have found it enormously helpful. I talked to, I must to talk to a dozen patients in this situation and that they had journey. that really in many cases reset their thinking about their death and made it much less frightening. And we know now that these studies are complete, you know, about 80 people, I think, have been through this, that in a high percentage of cases, most cases, people register statistically significant decreases in their depression and anxiety. It's really remarkable because, you know, antidepressants don't help people in. that situation very well. And we don't have very much to offer them. So what happened? I got very curious. Why? Why should a single drug experience have such a profound effect on someone's

outlook about something as big as death? And after it wears off, too. It's not like they keep doing. No, it endures. It's not a pharmacological effect. It's an experiential or psychological effect. They're having an experience that, and you could think of it as, you know, you could have a trauma and that resets your mind for possibly the rest of your life, a very long time. It's, it's, it's, the way it gets stored in memory and the emotional charge attached to it makes it radioactive. This is kind of the positive flip side of that. Yeah, if you don't have a challenging trip. Yeah, and people do have challenging trips, but actually, if you're having a guided trip,

and it's really important to distinguish the ways in which psychedelics are used, because there's a recreational way to use them, and I use that word of visibly because it's a little unfair, and then there's a kind of regulated therapeutic way to use them, and they're very different experiences. So that if you're having a bad experience on a guided trip, the guide can use it to help you explore difficult material. And in fact, they don't even use the word bad trip. They talk about a challenging trip.

So it just means rich materials coming up, and they know how to help you deal with your fear and the scariness of it in ways that make it more productive than traumatic. So anyway, people would have an experience where they would see themselves in their life and their death from a new perspective. And what's interesting is the perspectives that people acquire on psychedelics, the insights you have have an incredible authority. They're like revealed truth. They're not just an idea.

Like, you know, we have insights all the time. And then they pass and we think, ah, that wasn't such a good idea. something about the way they're consolidated in your memory, they're objectively true. And this is true for the addicts as well as the people who are dying, that they, you know, they come up, they have an insight into their addiction. And it may be very banal. It could be as silly as well, smoking, really stupid thing to do. But suddenly it has, it's like the tablets have come down from the mountain. It's like, yeah, smoking, stupid thing to do.

I'm never going to do it again. And they never do it again. Because they internalize it instead of just going, yeah, yeah, I know that that's true. But there's no distinction between subjective and objective. I think that this is probably the key. This is my own speculation. But, you know, we live in a world where there's a mix of there are things that we understand to be objectively true. At least there used to be.

And then there are things that are subjectively true. And we have our subjectivity. And the world is a world of objects. But on psychedelics, as your ego dissolves to a, a considerable extent or completely. There'd be nothing left to me. Yeah. And so things are all objective because that distinction is gone.

So it's not just your idea. It's the idea. Yeah. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Michael Pollan. We'll get right back to the show after this brief word from our sponsors. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash advertisers.

We also have an Alexa skill so you can get inspirational and educational clips from the show in your daily briefing. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Alexa or search for Jordan Harbinger in the Alexa app. Now let's get trippy with it with Michael Pollan and Jordan. You tried this at age 53, and I applaud you for diving into the subject matter of your books. But I'm 38, right? So I'm getting more and more risk averse. Things I would have done eight years ago. I'm like, hell no, I'm not doing that.

And people go, oh, you went to North Korea four times. Would you ever go back? And I'm thinking, no. And they go, why? Because it's more dangerous now. And I'm like, no, I just don't. It doesn't feel exciting. It feels dangerous, you know.

And so I assume that was the case for you in your 50s doing this. I don't really think doing LSD is on the same plane as going, all right, I'm going to eat organic tomatoes because I'm writing a book about gardening. No, it didn't feel that way. It felt a lot scarier. I was, you know, I was nervous about it. one of the reasons I stayed away from psychedelics in my youth was I was afraid of them. I, you know, I didn't know if I was stable enough to endure this assault. And I had heard all the horror stories in the 60s of people jumping out of windows and, you know, ending up in psych wards.

And, you know, I took a lot of that to heart. It turns out a lot of it was bullshit, but some of it wasn't. And so it's funny that I would become less risk averse as it went on. But I also felt like I had talked to these people who had these amazing experiences. And I was kind of jealous of them. Sure. You know, they were like they had had these spiritual insights. And I don't think I'd ever had a spiritual insight.

And they had had a transformative experience. And there's an extent to which as you get older, you feel a little bit stuck and that you're, you have grooves of mental habit that are just so well worn. and they get the job done. They certainly make you very productive and functional, but you're a little tired of them. And I think the idea of, I remember reading this phrase, one of the researchers I interviewed talked about the experiences akin to shaking the snow globe of your mind. I was like, hmm.

And it's a very gentle image, of course. I mean, you could argue it's a giant storm and everything gets tossed up, but it's settled so nicely. And so. that became more and more compelling. And as the older you get, you do think about spiritual questions and you think about death. And so I think it had to do with where I was in my life. And in your 30s, 40s, there are often kids around. You're not thinking about psychedelics. You're, you know, it's the last thing you're thinking about. And you're at a different point in your career. And so it's,

it's funny. I mean, the time was right for me. And there do seem to be these two windows for a lot of people of, you know, They really get into psychedelics in their 20s or teens. And then they drop it for a period of time because it also, you're busy. It takes a whole day, you know. And there's often some preparation. And then there's the integration session after. And you need some leisure time to do this. So, but I notice a lot of people my age and older getting much more interested in it.

Do you have kids? I do. I have a son. Would you want him to do psychedelics? Well, he has. Okay, well, that's fine. But did you encourage that or no? No, I would have been very concerned, I think, when he was in high school.

But he did experiment, you know, not extensively. And, you know, he told me about a couple of his experiences. And, you know, he was on a frisbee team. So, you know, you get the picture. We play ultimate frisbee. All bets are off. But, and he had one bad experience with a friend who, who could, this is a psilocybin experience.

He told me about right after. And this was in college, early college, where his friend decided, they were hiking somewhere and his friend decided his arm was falling off. Oh, that's in the middle of the woods. Yes. My son tried to convince his friend,

your arm is fine. It's well attached, not to worry, but he couldn't. And this kid was just really freaking out. They finally end up in a parking lot at this trailhead. And they have to persuade this woman, Isaac, my son has to persuade this woman.

Could she drive? drive them to his friend's pediatrician's office. What? They're like 22, you know. Yeah. This lady must have been like, so let me get this straight. You guys ate a bunch of mushrooms. Your friend thinks his arms falling off and now you want to get in the car with me?

Yeah, and they did. And she drove them there and the pediatrician sized things up pretty quickly and said, just sit in the waiting room. You'll be fine. Right. My prescription is you're really high. You need to read some highlights for children in my wing. But in fact, when a doctor tells you're fine, it changes.

He was fine. There's a story I tell in the book about, you know, there was this belief that people were having these psychotic breaks when they would freak out on LSD. And Andrew Weil, the doctor, goes to, just graduated from medical school at Harvard. And he goes out to volunteer at the Hayd Ashbury Free Clinic, 1968. Lots of people having bad trips ending up at this clinic. And he's had a lot of experience. of psychedelics in college and after. And he kind of recognizes what's going on. So he would get one of these kids who thought they were actually going crazy or were going to die into the little cubicle. And he had on his lab coat and his deathoscope around his neck and his clipboard. And he asked him a few questions. And then he would say, well, you excuse me, there's someone in real trouble in the next room. And as soon as they heard that someone was more fucked up than they were, their panic attacks subsided.

Because he realized this is just a panic attack. Panic attacks can be truly scary. Sure, yeah. But that's all they are. And if a doctor, someone with that authority tells you, you're actually not that sick, it will often subside. So he found the cure for at least some kinds of bad trips. He's got Sudoku on the clipboard. The stethoscope hasn't worked in years.

That's right. It's all a costume. Yeah, that is interesting. I like the suggestibility angle. Actually, as a former attorney, well, currently a lawyer, but as a former. practicing attorney, I want to, I don't want to look like we're advocating people do this stuff, especially without property. It's illegal.

Did we mention that? Yeah, it is illegal. And maybe it's not the best of reasons, but it also can be dangerous. I'd love to start with the risks because I think a lot of people go, well, look, psychedelics are non-addictive, and so it's all good, man. Yeah. So they are non-addictive. That's important to understand.

your desire after a big psychedelic experience, your first thought is, gee, when can I do this again? It's really, do I ever have to do it again? Right. Because it's so intense. It's like going to the gym. You don't really want to go work out right after that. You want to lay on the couch. Exactly.

And then, because I looked at this question, I was very concerned about the health effects. I, like, talked to my cardiologist about it, you know, before I did anything. I was really surprised to learn that in terms of your body, physiologically, that you know, They're remarkably low toxicity. There are drugs in your medicine cabinet that have a lethal dose over-the-counter drugs. There's booze in my cupboard that has a lethal dose. That's right, too. And it's present in the cupboard.

That's right. But the Tylenol does, too. And it's not as high as you'd imagine. It's, you know, a dozen pills, something like that. But there are risks. So the risks are not physical. The risks are, except insofar as you might do something stupid and endanger your body. the risks are psychological.

The fact is you are debilitated for a period of time and you don't want to be walking around on city streets and you don't want to put yourself in a car. And so people do stupid things and get hurt or killed on psychedelics. Some people who probably are already at risk for mental illness can be tripped into a psychotic episode. How do you know if we're in that camp? Well, they, you know, they, in the above ground trials, they screen people very carefully, and they look at the, the mental health of people in your genetic line. I mean, they go back and ask you, you know, is there any signs of mental illness in your family, looking for any genetic markers that might signal that you're vulnerable to schizophrenia? Because schizophrenia doesn't show up until you're either you're around 20 or around 30, usually. And this experience, any big experience can trip it off. I mean, divorce of parents can do it. Graduate school can do it commonly. But psychedelics can do it too. So they, so if there's any risk, if there's any kind of personality disorders that you've been diagnosed with, bipolar, usually not recommended. And if you're on psychoactive drugs like SSRIs, it's not that it's dangerous, but it won't work very well. And they kind of, they occupy the same receptor sites. So that blocks. the whole thing. Right. And people have these dud trips sometimes if they're on SSRI. So you're encouraged to get off of SSRIs, but that has its own set of risks, of course, of suicide and

things like that. So the risks are psychological, and that you could have a really terrifying experience. And, you know, I met lots of people who had happy experience with LSD until they didn't. And then they had a terrifying experience that went on way too long. And LSD does last a very long time. And then they just didn't want to go near it again, that it was traumatizing in a way. I think it was Sam Harris who said he had all these great benefits and then he had one time where he was like, this outweighs all of the benefits that I've achieved. I'm never doing this again. Yeah. And that's always out there. And because you had good experiences, doesn't mean you always will have good experiences. That said, though, doing it in the company

of a guide diminishes the odds of having a bad experience. You can't quickly recover. from, you know, they're very good about, you know, they have, they give you these flight instructions that are actually very helpful in that they tell you, if you see anything scary, don't run away, you know, and it's, it's really fighting what's happening in your mind that leads to the kind of anxiety and paranoia people experience. And their main advice is go toward whatever it is, even if it's terrifying, open that, you know, open that doorway, go down that stairs. And if you do that, If you don't resist, it will usually morph into something much more positive and even beautiful. But it is the fight or flight instinct that gets people into trouble.

How do we find a guide? Because what's dangerous is since it's illegal, we've got people, and I get an invite like this in my inbox every other week, hey, my friend is a shaman? And I'm like, is your friend 20 years old and lives in his parents' basement? Because he's not a shaman. And just because you met somebody who speaks Spanish, they're not a shaman either. So what's going on? Yeah.

So, you know, there are two ways to approach this experience or three ways. One is volunteer from one of the trials going on. There's going to be a lot of research going on the next year or two. And then you're doing it at a, you know. And then you're a shaman. Congratulations. But you're doing it at a medical institution, you know, with people who have antidotes and access to hospitals. And it's incredibly safe.

I would have done that in a second. I didn't qualify for whatever they were studying. But there's a big study of alcoholism going on in New York. There are going to be big studies of depression in general, treatment-resistant depression. There may be an eating disorder study. And then there are still studies with healthy normals trying to calculate what the best dose is. So I have a lot of resources on the website, my website, my website, michaelpollin.com, where you can go and see this is how you can find out if there's a trial in your area that you might be eligible for. There's a trial for religious professionals.

If you're a Hindu priest or an imam, they're looking for you. They want to give you psilocybin and see what happens. So that's one way. They're having trouble with those two categories. They've got plenty of rabbis. Yeah, rabbis are like, where do we, yeah, where do we sign up? Half of Brooklyn is in the trial. So it's a very interesting trial, but different religions have different rules about intoxicants

in some regard this as an intoxicant, although I don't know. I don't know if that's a proper word for it. So that's one. Underground, there are, you know, I was surprised to learn that there are, I don't know how many, but probably in the hundreds of very serious professional underground therapists with a lot of experience, even though they're operating illegally. But many of them are trained psychologists, therapists of other kinds, and they really believe in this, and they're willing to take enormous risks to give it to their patients or their

clients. How do you find those people? Well, you know, as a journalist, I did it by asking around. I was, I asked my friends and friend of a friend of a friend, work with somebody and I got an introduction and went and interviewed them. And then you get into a community and people start referring you. And, um, but, um, I can't make any referrals. I, I, I, I've please don't. Yeah, no, it's, it's too dangerous to everybody involved. And, um, but yeah, you should be careful because there are going to be a lot of people now with the popularity of this work, hanging up shingles and saying they're shamans or therapists, and they may not be. And so you have to interview people carefully and feel really comfortable with them.

My worry is with the underground therapy, as it versions, which I think it is about to do, is that it's one-on-one. And so if you're with somebody who isn't trustworthy, I mean, there's risk of sexual assault. You know, bad things could happen. And above ground, there's always a male and a female guide to prevent that kind of thing happening. But, you know, you're not in a position to defend yourself very well. So you're in a very vulnerable position. That's the essence of the experience.

Putting down your defenses, basically, to have a good experience. So people should be really careful. They can travel other places where it is legal. It's legal to use psilocybin in Amsterdam. Oh, yeah. There are truffles there that people use and their groups. The Psychedelic Society of United Kingdom organizes group sessions and it's all legal. You can go to Costa Rica.

There's a mushroom retreat in Jamaica. There's, and I don't know the legal status there, but it's safe. There are places in Mexico where you can go use ayahuasca or Peru or, you know. So there are, you know, there are options. And then there are some people get their friends to guide them. know, if they have a friend who they trust in his, you know, a psychologically skilled person, their manuals on how to guide. There's a very good book called The Psychedelic Explorer's Manual.

Oh, yeah. That, you know, if you want to figure out how to do this or trade that favor with a friend, you could do that. So, you know, I can't recommend any of these things. It's not for everybody. And so I'm very reluctant to proselytize in any way. I've interviewed a lot of people for whom it was enormously high. helpful. And I learned a lot myself. It was a, I'm so happy I went on this journey. I know things that I

didn't know before. I had, you know, some of the more profound experiences of my life due to a molecule. How amazing is that? The experience, though, isn't really in the molecule, right? It's already in your brain. Yeah. So how do these things work, right? That sort of leads to that question. How are they working? Because you're not taking something that's making you feel a certain way. You're shutting some things off and you're going inside your brain and doing this. with all the switches and flipping them up and down kind of. Yeah, or you're removing various inhibiting functions of your brain. There are, you know, the brain is a really complicated system.

It's, you would think it would be anarchic. And there's so much going on. There are hundreds of different networks. They're each putting out electrical impulses, chemical communications. It is probably the most complex thing we know of in the universe in terms of the sheer amount of activity going on and numbers of neurons and what they're each capable of. So to keep things in order, there are these various regulatory devices. And one of them is something called the default mode network, which I write about at some length. It's a really

interesting set of structures that I didn't know about. I'd never heard of the default mode network. And indeed, nobody had 20 years ago. It was discovered fairly recently. There's been a revolution in brain science where they went from thinking their regions that are responsible for specific things, and we can find the region for depression or the region for vision. But it turns out it's everything's networked. Even a memory involves, could involve six or seven different parts of your brain communicating. You know, that's interesting. It's not all localized. So the default mode network is a regulatory set of structures that's in the midline. It connects the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive function where you make decisions to older, deeper structures involved in memory and

emotion. It appears to be involved in functions related to the sense of self, self-reflection, self-criticism, time travel, the ability to think about your future or your past, which is very important to having a sense of self. Without time, you don't have... Seems very human somehow. Very human. And most of the default mode network may be unique to humans. or us in higher primates. Even kids don't have a well-developed until pretty late in childhood.

And it's involved in what's called theory of mind, which is the ability to attribute a mental state to another person, which is very important to moral reasoning, empathy, compassion, things like that. And something called the narrative or autobiographical self.

The place where we generate stories about who we are, where we take information from the world and tie it into whatever we know about ourselves to make a coherent story. Because that's what a self is. It's a coherent story over time. Right. There it is. Yeah, you're a character. You're a character in a story. So what psychedelics appear to do is diminish activity in this network and take it offline temporarily, which is quite surprising. It's not what they expected to find that when they started, and we know this from brain imaging,

fMRI imaging of people on psychedelics, which is not a perfect technology. Sure. the best we have in humans to study what's going on in the brain. And there are a couple other imaging technologies that have also been used to confirm these findings. But this network seems to go quiet. And when it does, basically, as one researcher put it, the rest of the brain is let off the leash. And so parts of the brain that don't ordinarily talk to one another, strike up conversations without going through this central regulating hub. And so you get, say, your sense of sound communicating with your visual cortex. So maybe you can see sounds. You get some synesthesia going on? Synesthesia, yeah. And that's a very powerful effect of it. And memories bubble up.

Repression is gone. So what's going on in your brain is stuff in your brain. It's not stuff in that molecule, as you said. But it's taking the brakes off and lots of material comes up and material comes in because a big part of perception is editing the flood of the, data from the world. Right. Yeah. And we probably block out as much as we let in and because it would be overwhelming the flood of information in any given moment, the things that are going on that you have to block out to function. So you're letting in more information. It's coming up from above and it's very chaotic and confusing. And the brain is interesting that it is, it's always trying to impose order on disorder. And so one of the things it does is create narratives for

what's happening. So you see faces in the clouds. You know, they're not there, but your brain is trying to make sense of this field. And that may contribute to hallucination. And so there's this wonderful push-pull because the brain is always imposing models on reality. And reality is always imposing stuff on brains. And that handshake breaks down. And so basically you're introducing a high level of disorder into this ordered system. And that can be, you know, that can be terrifying, but can also be incredibly productive. We'll be right back with more from Michael Pollan after this microdose of messages from our sponsors. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the

air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash advertisers. And if you'd be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It really helps us out and builds the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, just head on over to jordanharbinger.com slash subscribe. And now for the conclusion of our interview with Michael Pollan. I was talking with Dr. David Eagleman. Are you familiar with him at all?

No. So he's a neuroscientist out of Stanford, and he taught us how senses work. And essentially, and I'm going to just put this all into one sentence. But basically, your brain is interpreting everything around you, right? your eyes are this sort of physical gear, but your eyes don't say, all right, I'm looking at this and this is a camera and da-da-da. They're just saying, here's a bunch of electrical impulses,

and then your brain says, I'm going to ignore all of that because I know what the floor is there. Right. My feet feel it. We're good. I'm not going to bother looking at it, which is why when we leave this room, if I didn't tell you to look at the carpet,

you wouldn't even notice that it was gray because it's completely irrelevant to our current mode of what we're doing. And so when we take things like psychedelics, our brain might try to impose a model on that, but it also might not know what to ignore. And it might also say if you're, if you've got the, the wall down, the curtain between sound and taste down, you think, wow, that, that loud sound really does taste so strongly of, uh, of something that I can't describe and that you've never tasted before.

So it seems novel. And your brain does this all the time. And in fact, in people who don't take psychedelics, also there's elements of synesthesia in certain people. Oh, yeah. They go to the doctor and they say, things that are pink make me feel sick. And it's like, what are you talking about?

They sound crazy, but your brain just, there's a hole in the wall. Yeah. Between sound and touch or taste. Exactly right. And what you're describing are what's called priors. I mean, that we have these, we don't, we take in the minimal amount of information we need to say, oh, face, got these two little black spots. Yeah. And this and this and the, and so it's very efficient.

So you're not, you know, you don't have to like start from scratch. build up a picture every time you see something because you've seen most things before or a version of it. And then there's this error correction feature of, oh, that kind of face, male face, not female face, whatever. And that process breaks down. And it's amazing to what extent our everyday normal perceptions are a hallucination, a controlled hallucination, corrected by reality. But it's an illusion spun in our minds. And there's an experiment I did in the book. I tried to do under the influence of psilocybin. It didn't work out too well.

But if you go online and look for the rotating mask experiment, it's really interesting. So it's an image of that hollowed out mask that's used in the drama, you know, symbol of, you know, Happy and's head. But it's one of those masks and it's on a turntable. And so it begins convex and it starts turning until you see the back of it and it's concave. But it doesn't get more than, I don't know, 20% of the way around that it pops out and it becomes convex again. Because your brain insists on seeing all faces as convex. It's never seen a concave face. And since you were a little baby in your mother's lap, and faces do certain things.

And the brain will lie to you about what it's seeing to make it conform to its model. Well, the theory is it didn't work for me, but other researchers say that, in fact, that pop-out effect doesn't happen on psychedelics, that you've disabled the models. And you're actually seeing, in some cases, more accurately. One of the things people talk about is how your visual field changes and you see traces when you turn your head, say, on psychedelics.

And somebody was explaining to me that a visual image has so much processing involved. I mean, it's what you were saying earlier. Sure, yeah. You're taking in these electrical and light impulses. And it's a chaotic field and you're imposing and you're organizing. And we have all this error correction for movement especially. Otherwise, you couldn't move.

You'd be car sick all the time. And that breaks down. And so what looks like distorted visual field may be accurate. Right. I was going to say maybe the rest of the time we're hallucinating because our brain's gone, you know, these streaks aren't doing anything for you. Let me clean this up. Let me clean those up. Yeah.

Let me Photoshop this whole scene. Yeah. And that's always happening. And so that's what one of the things that's. So interesting about psychedelics is it teaches us these kind of things about the brain by disturbing the normal operations. And one way to understand a complex system is disturb it. That sort of explains why often when people are on any drug, psychedelic or otherwise, but especially psychedelics, they can stare at things. I think it was also Sam Harris, who was like looking at a TV guide or something and going, wow, this is incredible.

It was like Dick Van Dyke or something, right? And, you know, you'll see something. And even the stereotype of the stoner or the tripping hippie is they're looking at something like a rock and they're like, oh, it's so amazing. Look at that. This is the best rock ever. This is the best rock I've ever seen. Well, you know, our brains normally are tuned for novelty, right? I mean, that's the adaptive thing.

See threats. See changes in your environment. And they're tuned to discount the familiar. And one of the things that happens, and this is true on marijuana, too. certainly on psychedelics, is the familiar becomes fascinating. And that tuning changes. And actually in marijuana, they've done this research and found that the novelty centers go down and the whatever centers deal with the attentional networks that deal with familiar stuff in your environment go way up. And that's, that's, you know, yes, there's a Cheech and Chong kind of side to that, definitely.

But on the other hand, the familiar is really important. We take so much for granted. And one of the things I was so struck by is, um, You know, these incredibly banal feelings I had. I described them as like stuff on a hallmark card. I mean, these feelings of love for people in my life. And, you know, it's always there, but I don't think about it because it's familiar. And so to revalue novelty and familiarity in that way is very interesting psychological experience.

Are there non-pharmacological ways to kind of expand our consciousness in this way? Absolutely. I mean, I'm very interested in exploring those, and I may do something on that next. But the one I, well, two that I explore a little bit in this book is one is there is something called holotropic breathwork, which is a breathing exercise that was invented, but it's really Kapachy of lots of traditions, Native American drumming and yogic breathing and things like that, that was invented by Stan Groff, Stanislav, who was a very important psychedelic. psychiatrist in the 60s. And when LSD, which he was using in his practice, was made illegal, he was looking for a legal alternative. And he came up with this. And it's the most uncanny thing that you basically learn this breathing pattern, very rapid breathing with a deeper exhalation than inhalation, with drumming sounds.

And it will put most people into a trance within a few minutes. It's remarkable. That feels a lot like a psychedelic experience. But it has much more physical. your body is moving involuntarily. That's interesting. Very spooky. Meditation for some people.

I mean, if you really do the work and you meditate and you do like silent retreats for 10 days and really immerse yourself in that, people have psychedelic experiences. And they're very similar. And by the way, they're very similar on brain scans. The experienced meditator's mind while meditating looks a lot like someone on psilocybin meditating. The same network I was describing earlier, the default mode network is. deactivated in meditation. And that feeling of selflessness or merging with something larger

than your ego is common to both experiences, even though they feel very different in other ways. Some people, prayer, can get into a psychedelic state or an altered state of consciousness. Starvation. I mean, people who cut way back

or, you know, high altitude. I mean, I think we'll find that there are various things we do that essentially starve the default mode network of oxygen or blood and put us- literally. Yeah. Yeah. And put us into this state.

You know, self-flagellation, all these things that medieval monks did were putting themselves in this state. And so I think we've only begun to understand, you know, all the different ways we can alter consciousness. And that these other states that seem so exotic and are so strange, they're really just like, as William James said, parted by this little filmy curtain from everyday normal consciousness.

Yeah, I think that it's fascinating and important, especially now that the science is coming out, that we're able to use this, at least in the beginning, to treat things like PTSD, depression, mental illness. Can we speak to that a little? Yeah. I know that they even, a while ago, had been trying LSD for things like alcoholism.

You brought up a trial earlier. In the 50s, they did. And now they're doing it, again, with psilocybin. So to me, that's the most important thing. I mean, what you learn about yourself and the mind is great, you know, really, yeah, very compelling. But the fact is a lot of people are suffering. A huge number of people are suffering. Rates of depression are up. Rates of addiction are up. Rates of suicide are up dramatically in this country. And depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the WHO. It's so. And the mental health

health tools we have are just not very good. SSRIs help some people for a while, but over time, they're not as effective. That's why doctors are always changing SSRIs. They have side effects people really hate. They're very hard to get off. And, you know, that's the last big innovation in mental health care going back to the 90s. So, and mental health is only, mental health care is only reaching about half of the people who need it. So we need more tools. And this, these drugs appear so far in what are still preliminary studies, phase one, phase two, they appear to offer a lot to people struggling with anxiety and depression, to people struggling with addiction, to people studying, struggling with obsessions of various kinds that might include OCD or eating disorders,

and that there is a class of mental illness characterized by rigidity in thinking, where people are really stuck. You know, I was talking earlier about these stories we tell ourselves. People get stuck in a story. Like, I can't get through the day without a cigarette. I'm unworthy of love. I'm a bad person. My body, I'm overweight, even when you're not.

I mean, you know, these stories, eating disorders. And what psychedelics appear to do is help people break out of those habits of thought, which are reinforced by the ego in the default mode network. Depression may be the result of an overactive default mode network with this self-rumination that's going on that you can't break out of these loops of thinking about yourself and what's wrong with yourself. And that closes off the world in a way. And so to relax that, to lubricate cognition, as these drugs seem to do, give people a chance to rewrite those stories and realize, get some perspective on them and realize, you know, that story just isn't true. And I don't have to be at slave. It seems useful. I know you'd said something in the book about OCD, which that was surprising to me because I guess when I think of things like OCD, I'm not really imagining the extreme situations.

I'm just thinking about the people I went to law school with, where it was, like, highly functional. And we're like, oh, man, if I only had that much, if I only had Elyas OCD, I would have been so much better off. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, look, all the mental illness I've been describing are on a spectrum, and we're all on that spectrum, right, at one point or another. It just gets out of control for people.

It's when it, it's when that OCD makes it impossible for you to ever leave your house without, you know, going five miles coming back to check the, the burners, you know, or, I mean, all the crazy rituals people get into that debilitate them or suck up all their time in life. And there's a wonderful one-man show by an actor-comedian named Adam Strauss called The Mushroom Cure. And it's all about his OCD. And it's an incredible evocation of OCD and how he used mushrooms to get over it or reduce its effects. It's been playing on and off in L.A. and San Francisco. And I think it's in New York now for a while.

But if you want a taste of that, he evokes OCD in a profound way. But, you know, OCD like these other things may just be a result of rigidity in our minds and that the mind is it can be too chaotic or anarchic, but it also can be too ordered. You can have too much order in your mind. And that, you know, think about creativity. You know, you need a certain looseness in cognition to be really creative to think outside the box. If you're stuck in these narrow grooves of thought, you're not going to have a new idea. You're going to have the old idea over and over and over again.

And so that is very interesting work that remains to be done, looking at psychedelics and creativity. There was some work done in the 60s on that, and they tried to study it. It's hard to do because I don't even think we have a good definition of creativity. Probably not. Yeah. And so it's a very elusive concept. And is creativity in engineering the same as creativity in the arts? I don't know.

Yeah, hardly. Yeah. I'm sure Jeff Sessions is just jonesing, this itching to get these trials kicked off. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just opened up this very interesting frontier. And, you know, I hope it continues. I hope the research is allowed to continue so far. The government hasn't interfered.

And people are getting funding. It's private. I mean, there's no NIH money in studying psychedelics yet. Although in England, some of the big medical charities have been donating to the work. But here it's been private. but mostly, you know, Silicon Valley money that's supporting it. Yeah, no, no big surprise there. No, burners.

Burners are the big supporters. And this has been getting, I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, it's really been trending up. I don't want to say being trendy because that sort of cheapens it. Yeah. But it has been trending up. But I mean, even a couple of years ago, I remember microdosing was the thing. And I was talking with Vice News because I knew, not just I knew some entrepreneurs.

It was like every entrepreneur in the tech space and even adjacent to it was, hey, I want a microdose. Here's the, which bottles are you in all this stuff? And I'll admit, I tried it and I went, I don't need this. It's not for me. All it did was make me feel overcaffeinated. No, jittery, yeah. And I don't need more energy.

Yeah. I need to relax. Right. Microdosing is not the way to do that. Yeah. You know, microdosing, I talk about a little bit in the book, but in the end, I just felt, I really stuck close to the science here in this book, even though there's a personal dimension, historical dimension.

So I didn't want to write about things about which we had no good scientific data. And the fact is we don't have any good scientific data on microdosing. We have anecdotal reports, and some of them are encouraging. But going back to this point about suggestibility, it could well be a placebo effect. Sure. Now, that's fine. And maybe the research will ruin the placebo effect if it doesn't turn up anything. But I don't know what to say about it, except maybe, you know, let's see.

Let's do some research. And there are some trials getting started. I think there's one getting started in England that they're going to look at microdosing. So we may learn a lot more. You know, to me, though, the idea of microdosing seems like you're taking this. It's so of our time because you're taking this transformative, disruptive experience and you're turning it into a productivity drug. Yeah, exactly. Like, what's the minimal amount I can do to get more work done?

Yeah. So it's like, it's the, you know, it's the ingenuity of capitalism once again to like, let's take this. disruptive force and make people work better. Right. Like, you don't need coffee. You don't get at all? You can just microdose twice a week. It seems like a shame.

I mean, it seems like not a great use of this resource. It's a waste of LSD, people. Just save it up and use it all on a Saturday. Yeah. So my book is mostly about macro dosing. Right. Macro dosing, exactly. The smoking stuff, the quitting smoking stuff is really interesting.

I think you had mentioned that it's upwards of 60% effective in the sort of limited trials that they've done. Yeah. So they've done a pilot study that was small, it's 15, 20 people. And it was effective in, you see, there's 60 or 80 percent of people who were absent after, 67 percent were abstinent after a year. Remarkable. That's like three times the best drug. The best drug now is, I don't know what it is, but either the patch or Shantex or something like that is like 20 percent.

It's a really tough addiction to break. And they did well. And I interviewed a lot of these people. these amazing stories that don't really explain anything to me. I remember interviewing this one woman, she was Irish, and she's a book editor. She's in her early 60s. And she said, I sprouted wings and I flew all through European history. And I witnessed these amazing scenes of European history. And I died three times and I saw my body rise from a funeral pyre on the Ganges. And I was there at the dawn of creation. and I realize the world is full of such amazing things to see and do that killing yourself with smoking seem really dumb.

And that's kind of like this really wide. Yeah, long way to go to get that idea, right? But for her, it was, you know, it wasn't her. Somebody else described it was like the camera on the scene of my life had been pulled back to a further place than it ever had before. And I could see what I was doing in this larger context and it didn't make any sense. And it's helping people quit. And I'm really curious to see what happens with this big alcoholism study at NYU. We have such a problem with alcoholism.

And if it can help. And this was an idea hatched in the 50s. Actually, Bill W, the founder, co-founder of AA, had psychedelic therapy in L.A. and he really thought it had a role to play. In fact, even brought it to AA and said this should be part of what we do. and his fellow board members were like, are you crazy? Yeah, they're pseudo-religious, aren't they? Well, they are pseudo-religious, but it's, that, I don't think that was the problem so much of

they're just so hostile to intoxicants. Sure. Because it's sort of the point. Right. That using a drug to deal with an addiction seems, seems wrong, just kind of intuitively, even though it isn't necessarily the case. Well. But, so anyway, so they rejected that idea.

It's a shame. The, you know, the spirituality of AA is a very generic spirituality, and it's totally consistent with the spirituality of psychedelics. So it's all just about a higher power. It's not about God. And I always thought that AA had a Christian overlay. But in fact, it's a psychedelic overlay because Bill W., he got sober on a psychedelic experience in the 30s. And that idea of giving yourself over to the higher power, the hostility to the ego, the idea that you had to surrender and let go, this illusion of control, these are all ideas that come out of psychedelic experience. So it totally changed my understanding of AA.

Well, maybe they'll, when the science comes up and you can get LSD from a doctor, then maybe the tune will change a little bit. It might. Yeah. It absolutely might. I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, you know, we'll see. We'll see if this trial works. In the 50s, they were getting good results in about 50% of people treated with LSD for alcohol.

I mean, that's huge. Yeah, it would be huge. It could be a real game changer on addiction. But as I say, we still need to do more research before we can say this with any kind of certainty. I've heard the FDA's asked for trials with – which I don't – does that happen a lot? It doesn't seem like it happens a lot. Well, you go into the FDA. I mean, what happened was that people who had done pilot studies and small studies of the cancer anxiety study,

and another depression study, go to the FDA and say, now we want to go to phase three on what we were doing, which was treating cancer patients. And apparently what happened is that the people at the FDA, at this, it's kind of an advised meeting,

advice meeting, said, you know, you're getting a real signal here that this may be helpful in depression, and we want you to test it in the general public, not just the dying. So they were actually asked to expand the scope of their ambition. And I think that's a measure of the fact that the FDA knows.

There's not a lot of work being done to come up with new medicines for depression. Big Pharma is not doing this work. They're disinvesting in mental health drugs, if anything. And so the FDA would love to see some new pharmaceuticals involved. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes. You know, there's a reason to believe it would work better in the depression of people dying than in depression in general. that it is an existential or spiritual crisis that's causing the depression.

And depression maybe have a variety of different causes. Sure, yeah. So it may not work equally well on all of them, but we'll see. I mean, there was a small depression study in England of treatment resistant depression that got very good results, but they were short-term. They didn't last very long. People after a month or two started to descend again into their depression. But even a drug that helped people for that first month could avert suicides could be very significant.

Yeah, even if it only works for a few weeks or a few, even a couple of days, it's all it takes to get people through things. You get people through a crisis. And frankly, even if you had a treatment that had to be renewed every six months or every year, you know, that doesn't seem unreasonable. There are worse things than, and worse side effects and worse ways to incur costs than to go to a retreat supervised by a doctor. once every three to six months and wolf down some mushrooms or whatever. Well, they actually use pills in these studies. Yeah, but it's the same chemical. So anyway, I'm excited to see what happens.

I think the next three to five years in this area of research is going to be tell us a lot. And, you know, a lot of the research I'm talking to who are real sober types think we are on the verge of a revolution in mental health care, which is, you know, would be such a boon to humanity at this moment. Because the world's making people crazy and sad and anxious. And we need help. Now, we could change the world, too. That would help, too.

Yeah, of course. In the short term, I think this is important. Why do the, we touched on this earlier in the episode. Why do the effects last so long after the drugs wear off? What's going on there? I think it's that your point of view has changed. And that you've had, I mean, We don't know.

I mean, the real answer your question is, who knows? It should, everything should go away after the experience. But as I said earlier, like a trauma, when you have a powerful experience, it's really engraved in memory. And one of the reasons you go back for an integration session with your guide is to reinforce certain things that happened and say, you know, that insight, that's something you could really apply to your life. the more you exercise that, the more you think about that experience you had, that's learning.

That's how learning works in the brain. And you're creating a new circuit, a new memory, and the more times you think back on it, the stronger it becomes. And so it may be something like that. So this insight about, you know, the world is too wonderful to waste, you know, waste years of your life because you're a smoker. That idea now is accompanied by all that amazing imagery that she had and all those great experiences she had, that it is reinforced and becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. So that's just a theory. It remains to be understood.

There are experiments being done now where you image the brains of people before and after the psychedelic experience to see if there are any changes at the level of cell connections. There was a very interesting study just released in Cell magazine. It was done at Davis where they gave, I think they gave it to insects and rats. or mice, psychedelics, and what they saw is that their neurons branched more. More connections were formed. There was growth in a kind of plasticity that nobody expected to see. And so maybe new connections are forming and that these new connections encode these new insights.

That's incredible. I mean, the idea that we could possibly increase neuroplasticity in adults is huge. Yeah, it is. And it has implications, obviously, for dementia and, you know, failing memories from other causes. Sure. So who knows? I mean, you're talking about a single experience, how much influence could it have on the branching of neurons? Hard to say.

But maybe that would argue for microdosing to get this little vitamin every day that's encouraging your brain cells to branch. But we're speculating at this point. Right. Yeah. We don't necessarily know that that's the case. I think it was Stan Groff, who you'd mentioned earlier, that said psychedelics will be for the study of the mind what the microscope was for biology or the telescope for astronomy. That's a bold statement. It's very exciting, but it's a pretty bold statement.

You know, when I first started this research, I read that statement and I thought, that is so audacious. That's crazy. I don't think it's so crazy anymore. I think that this is opening a window on consciousness. and we have very few windows on consciousness. Consciousness is very hard to study. And it's a huge mystery. We do not know how brains produce consciousness.

The feeling of being you. Where does that come from? And indeed, we do not know for sure that it is brains that produce consciousness. There are many people who believe that consciousness is a property of the universe, that it's in the world. And we access it in some sense. You know, so it's more like electromagnetism or gravity or one of those, or light. and I don't know. That seems implausible to me.

I tend to think brains produce consciousness, but that may be just because that's what everybody's told me. That's what your brain's telling you. Yeah. We always have to be suspicious. That's right. The brain just takes it. It's happy to take credit for everything.

Everything, right? Yeah, that damn ego. Yep, that's right. Yeah, I'm so cautiously optimistic about this. So I don't necessarily think everybody should go out, and I want to be really clear because this is my show. I don't think people who are like, oh, I'm sometimes depressed.

I should go do acid. I'm really not advocating for this stuff, but I'm also not trying to dissuade anyone. I just want to open people's minds to the possibility that there might be something here and to research this further. Because if you've been trying to quit smoking for a long time and you gave up because nothing was working,

maybe you should look into this. If you've been suffering from depression, if there's some trauma that you are consistently trying to get over and you've got a great therapist, but you're not quite there yet. Maybe research this topic a bit more. I just, I'm very constantly. cautiously optimistic with it. And I know that there's just not that much science behind it, not because we've researched it and haven't found anything, but because the research has been stifressed for 30 years. Yeah. And it's just coming back. And so we've learned a lot in the, you know, really the research begins in, you know, late 90s. And since then, it's only been 20 years and we've learned a lot. So by the way, on trauma, the substance or medicine to a

explore is MDMA. And that research, which is not a central part of the book, but I talk about a little bit, is really exciting. And MDMA, ecstasy, is a drug that works on the brain in very different ways and is involved with other receptor networks. But what it appears to do is disable the kind of fight or flight response. And it allows people to take out very charged memories and examine them without feeling, without the associated feelings of terror. And so for trauma victims who have, you know, the re-experiencing of their trauma is just such a painful experience, it allows them to take it out, look at it, analyze it with a therapist, and then put it back. And every time it's put back again, it loses a lot of that charge. So that, there has been a phase two trial that was just published last year that found that in something, like 80% of the trauma cases, after three or four sessions with MDMA, administered by a

psychiatrist, that their markers, there's a scale for PTSD, and they were off the scale. They had fallen off the scale. They essentially didn't have a PTSD diagnosis anymore. And these are cops and firemen and victims of sexual abuse and mostly vets. and, you know, rates of PTSD in the military are very high. We spend a fortune dealing with it. And it's just there's so much misery around it. And that is now, the phase three trial of that is getting underway this summer. And we're only a couple years away from approval of that.

So that's, I think for trauma in particular, that's the medicine that seems to be the most effective. That's a very sympathetic population, too, which will hopefully keep the research going. Well, yes, I think it breaks down the usual right-left attitudes on these drugs. And in fact, people like Rebecca Mercer have funded this research. And Steve Bannon has spoken approvingly of it. And, yeah, I mean, if you can help the vets and the cops, I think you're inoculated from attacks from the right. We hope, yeah. Yeah, we would hope.

We hope. Yeah, this is very. This is very promising and really, really interesting, not just because of what we can learn about solving problems. But if this really is the telescope of astronomy for the mind, that combined with things like mobile fMRI, which Mary Lou Jepson talked about on an episode of the show as well, where we can essentially wear these things and see what the brain is doing, but then, of course, we're going to get the brain to do stuff. This is kind of the other side of that. Yeah. Well, I think that there's potential for neural feedback in this area. I had a really interesting experience where I went to a lab of a man named Judson Brewer, who's a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies meditation. And he's very interested in a part of the default mode network called the posterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in we were talking earlier about the autobiographical or narrative self. and you wear this bathing cap that has 128 sensors, and they're all aimed at this particular structure,

and you can do various exercise to see if you can downregulate the self-obsession, basically. So, for example, this structure, if I show you on a screen, a list of adjectives, and you look at them, and, you know, there's, you know, handsome, young, cheap, courageous, a bunch of adjectives, and you're wearing this thing, that part of your brain will not be firing in any way. But if I then say, think about how these words either apply to you or don't apply to you.

In other words, make a little story about each one. This structure lights up. So it's the kind of enough about you section of your brain, you know. Yeah, yeah. It's self, it's very self-regarding. And you can do various exercise. to tune it down and get yourself out of that self-regard, which can be very destructive. And so I did this experiment with it. So I had this whole, you know, morning with this guy.

And I told me, I wanted to do it. I wasn't going to tell him what was going to do. I was going to do something. And I wanted to see what happened. And I essentially reminisced about my psychedelic experience, one particular psychedelic experience. And it went way down. Wow. I was able to actually, just through remembering a psychedelic experience, not having one, tune down that structure tied to the ego. That's incredible. You know, maybe, you know, you're talking about alternatives to the drugs. Well, maybe neural feedback will be one when we get those kind of sensors in place that we can teach ourselves to think about something else and get some distance on this self-rumination. Yeah, it seems like once we have these types of experience. experiences or we can recall that state, then it's because right now we can't read the label from

inside of the jar, right? So we think, this is our mind. This is not moving. This is how it is. And then you have an experience like that. And the walls come down and you go, oh, maybe I can move the couch and rearrange the furniture a little bit in here. No, I think that's a great metaphor because you're getting distance on something. It's very hard to get distance on. And that's why disturbing normal consciousness helps you understand normal consciousness. And that's that's where Groff might be right. And that's how you change your mind. And that's how you change your mind. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. Oh, Jordan. My pleasure. It was great conversation. This is a lot of fun. The book, How to Change Your Mind, we'll link to it in the show notes as well. A lot of good

stuff in here. Thank you. Jason, not our usual fare, but super interesting. I mean, this isn't some like, hey man, y'all should try some acid. It's really rad type of guy. You know, he's like a botanist or whatever. So he took this really seriously. And then, of course, he dives into the research, like he dives in to all of his research, which is pretty extreme. So it's an interesting, interesting guess that we have here with the idea that, you know what surprised me that the idea

that this could actually have real medical application that isn't just like, oh, some people feel happier in some nebulous way for weeks after taking this stuff. It's like, no, you can, there's potential to cure diseases and afflictions that we have not been able to really make a dent in, period, using these substances. No, it's really cool research.

I really haven't dived into the acid scene, as it were, the psychedelic scene since a very long time ago when I was a kid. And I used to like to play Donkey Kong country on my super NES with a little bit of assistance. And you have to say that you stare at the controller for far too long, so it's not really productive. But I'm just wondering when I can start microdosing my dogs to have them calm the hell down. Wow. Q emails from every animal rights organization. It's a joke, people. Jason would never do that.

Never. Unless it works. Unless it was, you know, approved by the Caesar Milan Foundation, as it were. Right. Yeah. I mean, they could also just go crazy and kill you and then eat you. That's possible. That's true. That's true. I do have a killer dog. So, yeah, I don't want that dog having a bad trip. That would be a bad day indeed. Yeah, I'm not sure you can talk bam bam down or like, you know, hey, just relax, go to sleep. I'm not sure how well you can reason with your rot, Whileers. Yeah, 130 pounds of teeth in bad trip would be a bad day. Yeah, for you especially.

Great big thank you to Michael Pollan. The book title is How to Change Your Mind. And if you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Michael on Twitter. Tell me your number one takeaway from Michael Pollan. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And I'm doing a lot more on Instagram these days. I post little videos of, I guess you would say, productivity and life hacks and things that make me better at getting by day to day.

How to get more things done, observations. I try to post some funny stuff here and there. So I'm mostly on Instagram. Of course, I do see your tweets as well. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you learned today from Michael Pollan, make sure you go grab the worksheets also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty.

Had a guest producer in studio today as we were at UC Berkeley's Journalism Studio. so credit Tofer Ruth for his help today. Rohan Seth for volunteering to help prep for Michael Pollan. Thanks, Rohan. Worksheet by Jimmy Gabani. Booking Back Office and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful,

which should hopefully be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. Lots more like this in the pipeline. Very excited for what we got coming up. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time.

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