The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Your Mind on Psychedelics — with Michael Pollan

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Michael Pollan, the NYT bestselling author of “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” joins Scott to discuss his research on the psychedelic space, including the changes he has registered over time as well as his own experience with the drugs. Follow Michael on Twitter, @michaelpollan. Scott opens with his thoughts on Elliot Management's stake in Pinterest and what might be coming for other subscale tech companies. He also shares his thoughts on how Peloton could drive its stock up.  Algebra of Happiness: analyze your life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 179. Apocalypse Now premiered in 1979 as did mad max people born in that year kevin hart heath ledger and jordan peele scotsman were outraged an australian played braveheart and i said he's perfect he's an alcoholic and a racist go go go Go! Go! Welcome to the 179th episode of The Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including his most recent,

This Is Your Mind on Plants and How to Change Your Mind. We discuss with Michael his research on the psychedelic space, including the changes he's registered over time, as well as his own experience with the drugs. We also get into all sorts of topics around the things we ingest, regulation, and his approach to long-form writing. Okay, what's happening? Today, we're going to break down a few business stories that grabbed our attention specifically in the biggish tech space. First up, activist investor Elliot Management has taken a 9% stake in Pinterest, making it the social platform's largest investor. This didn't get much play last week, I mean, because everyone's obsessed with the whole weirdness, $44 billion act of mania known as

Musk and Twitter. By the way, I was fat shaming him all weekend, which is totally inappropriate unless you were a total troll, shit poster, bully on the Twitter. I just don't feel bad about that. Anyways, Elliott Management, as you may know by now, is one of the hardest hitting activist firms and often pushes for change and new leadership within media organizations that aren't living up to their potential. Disclosure, I served as an advisor for a short while to Elliott. I think they're very smart. They are essentially the reason that Jack Dorsey is no longer CEO of Twitter. I knew the moment that Elliot got two board seats within like 14 days that Jack Dorsey was done, that they just weren't these, individuals are smart and they just weren't going to put up with this bullshit of not even a part-time CEO, but someone who was a full-time CEO of another company that on evenings and weekends didn't play golf, but played with his plaything, Twitter, a micro

blogging platform. It's unclear at this time what plans Elliott has for Pinterest, but it's obvious that Pinterest needs to make changes or they need to do something. The stock is down 70% over the past year. That's well below where the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq stand, which are down 9% and 19% respectively. Pinterest is essentially trading around where it was in its 2019 IPO price over the last few weeks. Pinterest has always sort of been the engine that couldn't. People like it. It's got a nice brand, but it's just proven to be kind of an unreliable, shitty business. The company recently came under the new leadership of Bill Reddy,

who previously served as the president of commerce and payments of Google. He was also the CEO of PayPal and CEO of Venmo and Braintree. So this guy, Jesus Christ, this guy's got a nice LinkedIn profile. So that should give you some indication of e-commerce or that indicates that e-commerce is the direction that Pinterest is going to move in. I find that Pinterest is great if you're decorating a house, having a wedding, food. It seems like it'd be really well set up for advertising, but their advertising engine or whoever's selling their ads, I just think it's just fairly apparent they have not cracked not only the advertising net, but they haven't even cracked or they haven't cracked anything around e-commerce. Look at what Instagram's done around e-commerce. Some of the

other players are starting to nibble around the edges of e-commerce. What's interesting here is that in social media, if you think about YouTube as social media, and then obviously you have Facebook, which is two-thirds of social media globally, the other players, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snap, have all really disappointed. They've never really grown into their potential. I think all of these companies are trading somewhere around their IPO price. They haven't been great investments. They always flash signs of hope. They always do head fakes that this is the quarter, this is the year that we're going to turn the corner and kind of occupy the space we command because they have tremendously addictive products, great products, huge attention, a ton of influence, and are shitty businesses.

It reminds me when I was at the New York Times Times for a couple years, we used to have all these amazing stats. 40% of world leaders, the first thing they did in the morning was they read the New York Times. If you watch the evening news anywhere in the world, it's like reading the front page of the New York Times. Why? Because the producer of any news program around the world, rather than come up with their own ideas about what's important in the world, they just look at the New York Times and that is essentially their show list or their content programming. The New York Times gets to decide

what the world is going to think is important that day. But, but here's the thing, it's a shitty business. Paying for long form journalism was just always very expensive, very time consuming. And it was a better business, at least for a short while, to just assemble lists of 10 favorite dog breeds or whatever it is that BuzzFeed was doing or to basically be a giant parasite the size of a blue whale drafting off of other people's content. Google doesn't really create content as much as it says, I know, let's have other people create content, and we'll just take 97 cents on the dollar that that content creates. I could not get over the absolute idolatry of innovators we had at the New York Times

where we were willing to make these shitty deals with Apple or with Google such that we could hang out with Steve Jobs or make us feel younger. Like, oh, we're hanging out with the cool crowd. We must be cool because we're having lunch in the quad with the hot guy or the hot girl.

What fucking idiots we were to let Google crawl our content, debase it, slice and dice it, and then take 97 cents on the dollar for the content, for the dollar volume that our content was generating. Anyways, Pinterest, what are they trying to do? They're trying to get into original programming. The firm recently hired former global head of YouTube Originals shortly after they worked out a multimillion-dollar deal with Tastemade to produce 50 new shows, live videos, and events. Think about that, 50 new shows, live videos, and events. In June, Pinterest acquired the Yes, an artificial intelligence-powered shopping tool. The company's Q1 earnings report revealed that its revenue grew 18% year-on-year to $575 million.

That's not bad, 18% growth. But its global monthly active users decreased 9% year-over-year to $575 million. That's not bad, 18% growth. But its global monthly active users decreased 9% year-over-year to $433 million. So its user base is down. That must mean they're getting much more monetization per user. So I guess that's good news. But still, we have Pinterest, we have Snap, we have Twitter, subscales, shitty businesses, signs of hope, signs of life, but always disappoint. What's going to happen? We have the shit poster extraordinaire in a moment of mania decided that he should own Twitter, get rid of the bots, free speech, blah, blah, blah, then realized, wait, I overpaid. I'm coming off my

high. What the fuck have I done? Hey, Skadden, what lie can I tell to get me out of this deal? He has literally painted himself into a corner. The stock is going up. Why? Because every day that ticks by, it's clear this case against Musk from Twitter that will compel him to close at $54.20 has more veracity. And every share on Twitter now represents an underlying claim against $54.20 against the world's wealthiest man. Okay. Okay. Also, Pinterest now has an activist in there. So who's the third? Who's going to drop in the next 12 months or attract some attention? Snap. Get this. Snap is down over 76% in the last year.

That's down more than Netflix. Lost three quarters of its value. They need to do something. They need to do it fast. What's interesting also is these companies are dual-class shareholder companies, so they don't technically, the CEO can just kind of stick up the middle finger. but someone's going to show up or they're going to be forced to do something, I would think. I would think. Okay. Next up, another company that struggled to impress investors, Peloton. Pandemic favorite, Peloton. Connected fitness firm, Peloton. The company announced

it will stop manufacturing its own bikes and treadmills. We often talk about vertical integration, verticalization, but this is a de-verticalization. This makes plenty of sense as Peloton recognizes that its core competency is in the software, not the hardware. The CEO said in a press statement that this is all with the intention to continue reducing the cash burden on the business. Unlike Pinterest, Peloton hasn't been up to much in terms of innovating in the business. In 2019, it introduced a private label brand. And in February, 2022, it rolled out a gamified workout experience, but that's pretty much it.

Peloton is a textbook example of a company that was wildly overvalued. The IPO at 29 bucks a share, and at one point had a valuation around $50 billion. 50 billion, get this today today it trades at $8. That's down over 90% this year, and there's a market cap of less than $3 billion. You really do, and I make this mistake. I think, oh, I like this company. They're an innovator. I buy the stock. You always got to register the value, the growth, the brand equity, your emotion,

your affinity, your goodwill for the stock against valuation. And any reasonable valuation when this thing was at $40 or $50 billion, you would say, okay, it's a connected fitness company. It shouldn't be trading at the multiples of a super hot software company. It's just never going to be able to maintain that sort of margin or growth when you're shipping connected bikes. Today, a market cap of less than $3 billion down over 90%. Despite these frightening numbers, Peloton does in fact have a great product. And by the way, Tesla's a great product. It's a great car. So could it not go down 70%? Easily, it could go down 70%. Look at its goddamn valuation. Again, I'm going

to, that is my Waterloo, the hill I'm going to die on. But at some point, valuation matters. At some point, fundamentals matter. Peloton, the fundamentals came back in a vicious way, and I think we're going to see that happen at Tesla. So in sum, do companies have great products or are they overvalued? In many instances, the answer is yes. What could Peloton do? Peloton has such incredible NPS that I think tapping into the community to come up with new products and services,

whether it's offline, their app is pretty interesting. Their fitness app does pretty well. Again, that's more software-like revenues, much higher margin. I also think they could get into things like dating. The Peloton community is so rabid. And also a group of like-minded individuals who are super into fitness, i.e. hot and young,

would make for good kind of social or a catalyst for people to get together socially. So I think they're experimenting with some of that. But I think that they could absolutely become a big competitor to match, if you will, and sort of through a backdoor means of saying we're a place to make social connections. They could also get into some sort of rundle around nutrition and fitness or partner with other firms. But this is going to be a company that absolutely needs to innovate or announce something. But first, what are they

doing? They're cutting costs, which I think is the right thing to do, and they're outsourcing some of the things they're not good at. What happens when capital is cheap? You decide to forward integrate into stores. You hire your own sales force. When capital gets much more expensive, you decide to leverage someone else's capital, and you partner with people. Case in point, Netflix, whose stock is down 70%. So when they decide to get into an ad-supported-based offering, which they are doing, they're going to have an ad-supported sub-brand. Just a year ago, you can bet they would have built out their own sales team because they have the capital to do it and they want to control it. Now, what do they do? They go to Microsoft, which is a really interesting move. What is the interesting thing about Netflix picking Microsoft

as their advertising partner? Not an obvious choice. Most people don't know this. Microsoft is the fourth largest advertiser in America with about a 3 or 4% share. And then it pops up to 12 with Amazon. Again, people don't think of Amazon as a media company. It is. And then of course, numbers two and one, Facebook and Google. Now, why do they pick Microsoft? It's really interesting. In the last 20 years, 25 years, Microsoft's done a 180. Microsoft used to be the Darth Vader of the tech space and a terrible partner. Now, now the Darth Vaders or the Sith Lords are Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Gosh, I love partnering with Amazon, said no one ever. Oh my gosh, what great partners, honest,

a lot of integrity, really approach the world with a responsible, thoughtful view and concern for the commonwealth, said no one ever about facebook and google good people probably better partners but still at the end of the day so much power that if they see the opportunity to gain another quarter by fucking you over by changing panda whatever it might be you can wake up one morning and they have so much control over the internet that you just might wake up and find out that your business is toast and that's happened to

thousands of businesses at the feet of google and when when I say at the feet, I mean kissing their feet as Google runs its fingers through your hair and tells you what a great partner you are before it executes you. God, that was graphic. Anyway, moving on. Let's wrap with some heat in the search space. Evidently, Google feels threatened by TikTok and Instagram as internal research demonstrated 40% of young people use these social platforms to search for things such as where to eat lunch. This kind of blew me away. I don't know really how you search on Instagram, but then again, when I'm on Snap or Pinterest or TikTok, I feel like I could slip and break a hip. This is something to keep an eye on. Niche modes of search, including Airbnb, Amazon, and the affirmation social platforms,

will increasingly change the way the big search players engage with users. A lot of people constantly, and I do this too, love saying that Amazon is the second biggest search engine in the world, that people start, you know, basically search could be disintermediated. I love the idea of Airbnb being a search engine. I go on Airbnb for fun. I just like to see what's available on Aspen today and how much would it cost. All right. We're going to see what happens in the search space. Couldn't happen to a nicer company. I'd love to see some niche players emerge. I'm an investor in Neva, a subscription-based search company. It has been a challenge to try and get people to pay for search. What we're doing, though, or what they're doing, tapping into email, tapping into original content,

privacy, trying to make it a premium experience. All right, that's a wrap of our business stories for the week. We'll be right back for our conversation with Michael Pollan. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach,

what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. What software do you use at work? you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Michael Pollan,

the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including his most recent, This Is Your Mind on Plants. Michael, where does this podcast find you? I'm in Berkeley, California, where I live. So, let's bust into it. You're essentially the Yoda of the psychedelic space. Walk us through how the discussion of these drugs has changed or evolved over the course of your research and publications. Well, when I started on this topic, which was like 2014, I think, is when I first started hearing about this research. It was a pretty fringe topic. There were very few number of diehards who were committed to doing research.

None of the money was public. It was all private philanthropy, and there wasn't much of it. But the trials that I was reading about and then covered in an initial piece for The New Yorker in 2014 or 15 were pretty mind-blowing. And they were getting these amazing results. They were giving psilocybin, which is the chemical in magic mushrooms, to cancer patients, people with terminal diagnoses and who were suffering from what the researchers called existential distress. It was a combination of anxiety and fear and depression at their diagnosis and their prospects. And I started talking to these people and they had their lives changed

from a single transformative experience. I was also really surprised to learn that serious research into psychedelics had been going on back in the 50s and into the 60s. And that what we think of as this 60s phenomenon, you know, psychedelia, was really a 50s phenomenon. So suddenly this, you know, door opened and here was this whole world that nobody was writing about. It wasn't being taken very seriously in any quarter. And I had it to myself. But there was something happening in the culture, I think. And so when the book hit, This Is How to Change Your Mind in 2018, it shifted things.

And suddenly what had been a taboo topic gradually started to emerge from the closet. And so I think there was some timing. I think the fact that I was not a psychedelic fan when I started, that I was very skeptical and very afraid of them, made me a very good ambassador since I was a proxy for the curious but skeptical viewer. What component or what area of therapeutic use of psychedelics do you think offer the most potential? What are you most excited about? Well, I think that we're still learning that. I'm very excited by work going on right now to treat addiction. We have such a big problem with addiction in this country, and there are very good

results on treating alcohol addiction, cigarette addiction, and cocaine addiction so far. There's work about to get started with opiate addiction. So that's very important. One of the things I'm most excited about is obsessive compulsive disorder. And there is a trial underway now at Yale that's getting very good results, I'm told, treating it with a single experience. I mean, what you see as the common denominator of the disorders that psychedelics may be good for is a kind of rigidity of thought. You know, when you look at depression, anxiety, addiction, OCD, eating disorders, what you're seeing, I think, is a very rigid mind that's trapped in destructive narratives, destructive patterns of behavior and thought, rumination, uncontrollable rumination. And this seems to be where psychedelics are useful,

that they can break those patterns, that they can soften the voice of the punishing ego and give people a chance to give up destructive narratives and perhaps write some new ones. So there's that whole range of disorders that I would put over on the two-ordered side of the mental spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum are things like psychosis and schizophrenia, and there it doesn't appear that psychedelics are useful at all. They tend to increase disorder in a mind that needs a little more disorder rather than order a disordered mind. So it's really, it's hopeful and sort of inspiring to hear that people with terminal illness, and I've heard this a lot through your work and others, that they find peace after psilocybin.

And can you, and this may be impossible to do, can you describe what you think happens? Is it a numbing, a calming? Is it a realization that we're all dealing with a finite nature of life? It's not, yeah. It's not a numbing or calming. This isn't like taking a drug like morphine, which makes you deal with your fate by feeling indifferent and just kind of rolling in the soft euphoria of an opiate.

This is very different. These are very hard experiences. They often involve confrontations with death. In many cases, about two-thirds of the cases, people have what the researchers call a mystical experience. This is an experience that's been described, going back to William James, as an experience of becoming part of something larger than yourself, transcending your sense of self, transcending time and space. And that, for people who are confronting their mortality, is very powerful. It basically is a rehearsal for death, I think. People undergo a death of the ego or the self. And what they realize is that

something survives their ego or self, that they can still be conscious, that they can still perceive. And some have visions of what will, you know, follow. You know, they'll talk about a great plane of consciousness stretching out before them, or going into the earth and becoming part of nature. They have these very powerful images that they find comforting. So I think that some Roman thinkers said, the key to dying well is to die before you die. And certainly people who have near-death experiences talk about that too, that they lose their fear of death.

So it seems to be something like that. What's going on at the brain level appears to be that this very important network of brain activity called the default mode network, which is very much involved in generating your sense of self, your sense of a separate person with a narrative defining their identity is deactivated during a psychedelic experience. And you are relieved of that chattering critical voice that is your ego. Egos are very useful. They get a lot done. I mean, we all know that.

But they also can hobble us. And they're fearful and defensive. And to give your ego a rest can be an enormous blessing. In an interview with Rolling Stone, you explain how a psychedelic trip is for spiritual experience. It's for self-exploration. It's for setting priorities. It's for breaking habits. I love that, by the way.

How should people be thinking about these drugs for spiritual exploration or even just recreational use? Yeah, well, recreational use is, you know, that term gets a bad rap. It's thought to be, you know, careless and frivolous. But recreation is very important, obviously. I mean, look at the word itself, to. So people have very meaningful experiences on psychedelics who are not taking them in a therapeutic context or for a therapeutic purpose. And there are lots of different ways in there. You know, what's amazing about psychedelics is that they don't just do one thing, that they do very different things. And this is not true of all drugs. I mean, if you take cocaine or an opiate, you have pretty predictable set of physiological effects and mood

that you can, you can kind of count on, um, psychedelics on any given day could produce a completely different experience. Um, and, uh, and even in the same person, um, and you know, there's no imagery in the, in the know, there's no imagery in the molecule. There's no spiritual experience or therapeutic experience in the molecule. It's a catalyst. And it brings all sorts of interesting material into your conscious awareness from your subconscious. So I think that the intention that someone brings to it has a decisive effect. I mean, Timothy Leary understood

this. He talked a lot about set and setting. Setting is obvious. It's the physical setting, but set is your mindset. So, if you're looking for a spiritual experience, if that's your orientation, if you want to make contact with something larger than yourself, which is kind of how I define a spiritual experience, there's a good chance that that's what you'll have. If instead you want to work on your relationship with your mother or deal with some issue in your life, you're setting priorities, you have a big decision, there's a good chance that you'll end up dealing with that. And then if you just want to go to a concert and have a good time, that might happen, or you might have a cataclysmic experience and realize you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. So there are many different paths that psychedelics can take you on, and a lot of them has to do with your intention. Although I should say, too,

that it doesn't guarantee anything. You can go in with one intention and come out with another. So you really have to be open. And I think one of the key pieces of advice I heard over and over again from the professionals who administer these drugs and underground guides as well is that the important thing is to surrender to what's happening in your mind and not fight it. And so if you're going down a spiritual path, go with it. If you're going down another kind of path, go with it. Resistance is futile. Yeah. So when I get drunk sometimes, I start texting people or sending them notes, telling them how much they mean to me. And the next morning, I'm a little bit embarrassed. But what I realize or I think is that the alcohol has helped me,

and I love the term you use, surrender my ego. And then the next morning, I'm embarrassed. But two days later, I think, I meant everything I said. And it's when I'm sober that I'm fucked up. And that for some reason, I don't feel our societal pressure or the norms of what it means to be masculine get in the way of me telling people how I feel about them. Are there any parallels here? I've never done psychedelics. There definitely are. I mean, what's different, I think, is that with alcohol, you tend to renounce your feelings or try to cover them up after the fact. With psychedelics, you really do embrace them. There's something that

William James called the noetic quality of mystical experience, which is that whatever occurs to you, whatever insights you have, have a special force. They're not mere passing opinions. They are revealed truths. They're like etched in stone. And that's why I talk, I would talk to people who were in a smoking cessation trial. And I would say, how did as a single four hour experience on mushrooms, you know, allow you to stop this lifelong habit. And they would say, well, you know, I saw some amazing things and I could fly and I went through European history and I saw Shakespeare and Napoleon. And I realized there's so many amazing things to do in life and that killing yourself with cigarettes is really stupid.

Now, any addict has had that feeling that what they're doing is stupid and self-destructive, but they put it aside when the next craving arises. With psychedelics, that insight is something you can reorganize your life around. So it has a kind of enduring power that I don't think those insights on other substances have. And I don't think we understand the neuroscience behind that, but there is something authoritative, uniquely authoritative about the experience. And that, I think, is what allows people to change and to own whatever insights they have on psychedelics. So I want to disclose a fear I have around psychedelics

and have you respond to it. My friend who told me about this got me excited about it. I met Ronan Levy, the founder of Field Trip, that does these guided trips. He struck me as a very thoughtful, responsible guy. I like the idea of going to the Williams-Sonoma of this, such that it's somewhat regulated and nice people and clean setting and all that.

And the thing that scared me, or the thing that's gotten in the way, is that the same individual who advocates for it decided after walking around the bare ocean of his life that he was married to the wrong person and that he was going to leave her. And whatever is going on in my life that's not right, I've managed to suppress it,

and I'm under the delusion maybe that I'm very happy. And I worry about finding out something I don't want to find out. I'm worried about coming to a realization that I would rather not encounter. Do you have any thoughts for people that fear? I shared that fear. I definitely did. I mean, I didn't use psychedelics until I was in my late 50s and into my early 60s.

And there was nothing broken in my life. And one of my fears was that something would come up, that I'd get in touch with a trauma or that something that I had to change, and that I would throw everything into this uproar and upheaval. And in fact, my wife, Judith, shared this. She was nervous about my doing this because I was going to have this big experience and it might change me in some ways. And so I don't think that's an unusual fear. I have heard a couple cases of people making big calls like that, like splitting up. I remember talking to this woman who had a big psychedelic experience guided in one of the trials.

And her husband was supposed to pick her up after. And it was a very clear time he was supposed to be there and he was late. That was it. That was the last straw. That was it. On the way home, she said, this is it. This is our pattern. It's not changing and I'm done. Now, how did that work out? I don't know. Maybe it was a really good call. But I think one of the things any good guide will tell you is don't make any decisions right away. So yeah, I mean, that is a fear. I mean, people do get in touch with traumatic memories every now and then. That happens. I've run into that before. In my own case, I felt reinforced in a lot of things that I'm doing. I haven't felt this like I must change in this way now. after these experiences. So her resistance gradually faded to the point where she,

you know, had some experiences herself and found them very useful. You know, I'm very careful not to proselytize. It's not for everybody. Nobody should feel they're obligated or that they're missing something in life by not doing this. You really have to just arrive on your own at the point where either your curiosity or some need or even desperation tells you that, you know, I need to try this, that the benefit, the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks. Because there are risks. They're the ones you're describing, which I've seldom run into. But some people have very difficult, painful experiences. Now, sometimes after those experiences, they'll conclude that they were incredibly useful, that they learned a lot, and that the idea of a bad trip needs to be rebranded as a challenging

trip, which many therapists believe. But it can be harrowing. And now a good guide can help you work through that by encouraging you to surrender and not fight what's going on. But, you know, some of these experiences are difficult. It's hard work. I think that's one of the reasons that classic psychedelics are not habit forming. You know, your first thought after you finish one of these big experiences is not, when can I do it again? It's like, do I ever have to do it again but for me the value has has exceeded the the fear with that but I have to say every time I've done it I had a sleepless night I

questioned myself and so it's not at all unusual to to have those kind of feelings I you know I don't think it's an accident that a lot of the people who use psychedelics are males in their early 20s who their judgment around risk has not formed yet entirely. And once you're older than that, you realize that you do have to weigh the risks along with the benefits. So, so much of your research focuses on how we interact with and think about the things we put in our bodies. And if you think about thoughts lead to intention, which can lead to actions. As I've gotten older, I try to arrest that process and understand how my chemistry at that point might be influencing those decisions or intentions or actions. Am I hungry? Am I in a period of my life where I'm feeling depressed and that clouds my judgment

and decision-making? You have so much domain expertise, not only around psychedelics, but how it interacts with nutrition, alcohol, THC. Do you have any best practices or advice for the alchemy and the interaction of nutrition and substances? Well, I've come to see that everything we ingest affects us in subtle and profound ways, and that the distinction between food and drugs is pretty mushy. I mean, just look at kids and sugar and you realize that that is a drug for them, but it is for us too. We're not taught to chart our moods after we have a certain kind of food, but if we were, I think we would find that food affects our mood in profound ways. So everything we're taking, is affecting our chemistry, our mental chemistry. And, you know, my own approach to this is that it's very useful to get a handle on how that works by interrupting the daily routine now and then.

And, you know, when I wrote about caffeine for this most recent book, I was challenged by one of the researchers I was interviewing who happens also to be a psychedelic researcher. This is a man named Roland Griffith at Johns Hopkins. And he said something that really stuck with me. He said, you know, you're never going to understand your relationship to caffeine, which is complicated and goes really deep unless you give it up for a period of time. And it was interesting because it was the exact same advice I had gotten from Peter Singer, the philosopher, the utilitarian philosopher, when I was writing about whether it is morally justifiable to eat meat. And I wrote this long essay, this is back in the early 2000s,

seeing if I could defend my meat eating from everything I was learning about how we treat animals in the food system. And he said the same thing. He said, you cannot look at this phenomenon objectively as a meat eater. You will simply, you know, come up with defenses and arguments to continue doing what you're doing. So you need to stop at least during this period of reflection. So you can get a really, you know, look at the landscape with clarity and without interest. And so I thought in both cases, that was superb advice. And so having these fasts from time to time, whether it's caffeine or alcohol or sugar, is I think an interesting exercise. It tells you, I mean, I learned just that how dependent I am on caffeine and that my normal consciousness, the consciousness that, you know,

we're sharing with your listeners right now is a caffeinated consciousness. And if I weren't drinking coffee or tea this morning, I wouldn't be quite myself. And that's a kind of weird idea that your default consciousness is the result of the ingestion of a plant. But so it is. Now, I did resume drinking caffeine, coffee and tea. I found no reason really not to. On balance, they were giving me a lot more than they were taking. But there's always some compensation, right? There's always something given up as well as something gained. I think caffeine is the closest thing we have to a free lunch, though, in drugs that I could think of. We'll be right back.

Hey, it's Scott Galloway. And on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series Thank you. AI reporter for The Verge to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. In business, disruption brings not only challenges, but opportunities. As artificial intelligence powers pivotal moments of change, Alex Partners is the consulting firm chief executives can rely on. Thank you. from across North America and Europe to dig deeper into how tech companies are responding to these changing headwinds. And in their 2024 Digital Disruption Report, Alex Partners found that 88% of executives report seeing potential for growth from digital disruption, with 37% seeing significant or even extremely high positive impact on revenue growth. You can read both reports and learn how to convert digital disruption into revenue growth at www.alexpartners.com. That's www.alexpartners.com.

In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. Microdosing. What are your thoughts on microdosing? Microdosing is the, you know, taking of a tiny dose, a sub-perceptual dose of a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD, basically like a tenth of what would be a really active dose and doing it on some schedule, like one day on, two days off or something like that. Many people report that this has very positive effects on their mood, on their productivity, on their creativity.

There's no solid research to support this yet. We haven't yet done the really well-controlled placebo trials to see if it is really that tiny amount of LSD that's making you feel that way, or is it a kind of a supercharged placebo effect? You know, we impute so much magic to these molecules, molecules like LSD or psilocybin, that if, you know, I hand you a sugar pill and I say, you're going to get a tiny little bit of LSD in this, you will feel something. The placebo effect is real and powerful. And indeed, if I give you a sugar pill and say, here's a sugar pill, it's going to help

your back or your headache. It will help to some extent. Even if I declare it's a placebo and i'm i'm a quack you know it still works um so what we may be seeing with all the reported benefits of of microdosing uh is is a is a wonderful experiment uh in or in the placebo effect um but we don't know for sure so michael you you have kids? I do. I've got a son. Yeah. And what do you, how old's your son? Well, he's now 29. So what is, your son sits down, you're one of the leading authorities in the world on this, not only on psychedelics, but their interaction with nutrition. What is your advice to him? Well, I was kind of lucky that I didn't really get involved in the psychedelic world

or these experiences until he was already, you know, out of college. The conversation, had he been home and in high school would have been, I think, a more complicated one. I would not discourage someone from using psychedelics. I would focus on harm, what's called harm reduction, like doing it in the safest way possible. I started sharing these experiences with him. He was curious about dad's trips and I would share the narrative after I'd had an experience. And he shared some of his own with me. He'd had limited, but a couple experiences with psychedelics. And so our conversation about it has been quite open um but easier done after he's you know 18 or 21 than you know when he's 15. um i i think the risks are higher when

you're younger um you know dissolving your ego before you have a fully formed ego might not be the best idea um i have a throwaway line in how to change your mind that you know it may be that psychedelics are wasted on the young um that i think that they have more value once you're really set in your ways and you have these deep grooves of habit that you use to navigate the world. I think that's when they're really useful. They probably have other use when you're young. I mean, people have had amazing epiphanies as, you know, 20 year olds or even younger, people have discovered their vocation on psychedelics, but people do dumb things at that age. And, you know, it's, you just hear these stories about

people taking high doses and bad situations and getting into trouble and ending up freaking out for days at a time. And so I guess harm reduction is really the key. It's like, okay, how do you minimize the potential risks in a harm? Well, you put yourself in a safe place. You have somebody with you who is not taking the substance, but is really just sitting for you. You make sure you're in a good frame of mind,

and you're not just doing it because you feel bad or bored. You really have to approach it with intention. These kind of rules we've had to discover through trial and error. When psychedelics showed up in the West, really in the 50s, they didn't arrive with any instruction manual, with any instruction manual and we didn't really know what they were good for or how to use them well. And we made a lot of mistakes. People put psychedelics in the punch bowl, you know, at parties, they thought that was a really great idea. Um, that seems to me unspeakably cruel and reckless. Um, uh, the CIA was dosing people under all different kinds of circumstances without their permission.

There was a source of wisdom and knowledge, but we were a little too arrogant to see it. And that was really the traditional cultures who have used psychedelics for, in many cases, thousands of years. And what you learn from them is that you use the drugs always with intent. You surround them with ritual. I think that's really important with drugs and food, by the way. Andrew Weil made this point long ago in a book called The Natural Mind, that people who use drugs in a ritual way or surround their drug use in a ritual container are not the people who usually get in trouble with drugs. Even something like alcohol, people who use it, our rituals around alcohol are you use it socially, you use it at night, you usually drink with food. And those are all protective practices. And so we're in the process, I think, of evolving rituals for the use of psychedelics

that hopefully will be just as protective. So in yoga, they talk about off the mat, and that is when you start practicing yoga, you start being more thoughtful about what you're putting in your body, your approach to life, kindness, flexibility when you're not actually practicing. Have you taken away after your trips or your observation of people of you psychedelics, can it inspire, can you find that some sort of profound observation or behavior and try and incorporate it into your life or the way you, can you rewire your brain to take some of the things that happen to you under the influence while you're not under the influence. Yeah, people do. People bring lessons, very important lessons, new priorities out of the experience. And it seems to have an enduring effect.

It can be a real reset button for people. They can dislodge some of those narratives that torment them. You know, I'm unworthy of love. I can't get through the day without a drink. And all these things seem to have this lasting effect. But I should say that unlike meditation or yoga, psychedelics are not a practice. And I think that's a real problem in that you can't do them that often. You don't want to do them that often. Our lives are not organized to allow you to do them that often. Plus Plus they're illegal, by the way. We haven't mentioned that in most cases outside of these

university trials. But what I find very interesting is how people transition into a practice from a powerful psychedelic experience. My involvement with psychedelics has made me a pretty devoted meditator. Meditation was not something I had a lot of success with. I just didn't have the patience for it. But I found that after psychedelics, and I'm certainly not alone in this, that meditation was a very good way to kind of nurture whatever flame of insight I had had or whatever kind of tranquility or equanimity I had achieved. That in my meditation, I could get back to that state. And not only that, that the psychedelic experience gave me a taste, a sample of the kind of mental space that you want to be in in meditation. I think something people don't appreciate often enough or doesn't get written about, certainly about psychedelics, is that most of the experience is a meditation. And, you know, we focus on the most dramatic moments where

we feel our ego dissolving and we saw incredible things and we meet God and whatever it is. And that's kind of the climax. It's not that long lasting. And after that climax is this denouement, which goes on for hours. And in that state, you are in a deep meditation. You can't be distracted, yet you have regained control of your mind. And you can choose to focus on this or that, to work on this problem, to think about this relationship. And it's kind of a wonderful period because whatever you were afraid of has either happened or hasn't happened. You're over

the hump of the big experience where you can't control your mind and it's just rolling over you. Now you're regaining. Your ego is gradually picking up the pieces and reassembling itself, but still is very soft. And that's a wonderful period, and it is an education for meditation. And Jed Brewer said to me at one point, I wouldn't be surprised if we get to a point when psychedelics are legal, where we use psychedelics to launch a meditation practice, to give people a taste of the territory. Michael, what do you think is going to happen if and when the FDA approves certain psychedelics

for therapeutic use? Are we about to see a great awakening or a surge in corporate or interest in psychedelics? Well, I think that we are going to see, we're going to have a real-world test on whether these tools are as helpful as researchers think they are to deal with mental health problems. I mean, we have a tremendous mental health crisis and psychiatry is in desperate need of new tools. We'll see if the tools work as well in real life as they do in trials. That's not always the case. But I'm very hopeful that we will be able to relieve a lot of human suffering. As the drugs, you know, that's one path to people's access through the medical system. But there are a lot of people, of course, who don't have a diagnosis of mental illness who stand to benefit.

And so there are some interesting questions on how they will have access. One is a religious route. I think there are going to be a whole lot of new churches basically using psychedelics as sacraments. And that this particular Supreme Court, whatever you think about it, is so radical in its interpretation of religious freedom that I think they're going to have trouble shutting these churches down. So I think that that'll be another way. And then they'll just be what happens as the drugs are decriminalized, which is starting to happen.

In Oregon next year, you will be able to get a guided psychedelic experience, whether you have a diagnosis or not. I think that one effect that people don't talk about enough is that the fact that these drugs have been illegal surely shapes the kind of experience people have and contributes to a certain amount of negative or bad trips. And I think that once the drugs are more accepted by society, people may have sunnier experiences. Michael, if you had the ear of the president and Congress and Senate, and you had to advocate for one thing and really ask them to think hard about making this one change, what would it be?

Well, it would be in the food area, which is to say, recast agricultural policy in the interest of both environmental and physical health. And that that should be the measure of every incentive in the system. And that we have a tremendous market failure around food. I mean, we are spending a fortune to produce food that makes us sick that we then spend a fortune to treat. I mean, we're supporting both sides in the war on diabetes. Basically, we're subsidizing high fructose corn syrup and we are treating type 2 diabetes. That's nuts. So that's where I would, if I could get the attention of a president, that's where we need to get some serious work done. One of the reasons I was excited to speak with you is you've written a book every 18 months

approximately for 20 years. And I have the same goal. I'm trying to write a book every 18 months approximately for 20 years. And I have the same goal. I'm trying to write a book every 18 months. And that might be the wrong way to structure a goal. But I find if I don't have a deadline, nothing happens. And one of the things, if you want to understand creativity or a certain amount of self-exploration, I think trying to write a book is a fantastic vehicle for that. Because flipping open your computer and setting out to write something original that's worthy of people's investment and their time, you'll learn a lot about yourself and you'll learn a lot about discipline. And I'm curious, you have written a lot of books that have had a real impact. Do you have a certain practice or methodology for getting into the flow state that has resulted in a dozen books in two decades?

Yeah, I think you've given me credit for writing faster than I do. I don't know that it's 18 months. It usually takes me two or three years. And also, you'll see I intersperse big books with little books, books that I call book-like products, like food rules. So, that helps with the productivity. I call them money makers. I'm not so crass. It's when Helen Mirren is in a spy movie or something, and you think, oh, gosh, why did she do it? And you think, well, she did it for the money. Paying the bills.

Yeah, that's right. Paying the bills. Yeah, that's right. Paying the bills. Yeah, there's some of that. You know, for the whole time I've been a professional working, I have felt that writing is the only honest day's work I do. And that all the other stuff I do, and I do a lot of other things, teaching, editing, advocating, doing political work, doesn't count in quite the same way.

So this creates a certain pressure that if I go too many days or weeks without writing, I feel like worthless. So there's that internal pressure. And I do get a great- Isn't that your ego? Yeah, that is my ego, without question. And I do get a great- Isn't that your ego? Yeah, that is my ego without question. And I rely on him to get these books done. Even though I celebrate ego dissolution in them, I don't tell him.

But I am very disciplined. Well, first of all, I write nonfiction. So there's a lot of time spent researching and reporting, right? And which is great. And I learn a lot and it changes everything, but it's not writing. But when I am in that writing phase, I am very disciplined. I sit down and I give it, my best hours are in the morning after I've meditated and exercised and walked and had some coffee.

And I give those first three hours to the writing project, always. I start out by editing what I wrote the day before. Uh, I find editing is a very good way to kind of reload the RAM and, and, uh, and then move forward. Um, and I write till lunchtime and, um, the beauty about writing is that a short day gets, you, you can get done. And that frees your afternoon for all the other crap, you know, email and returning phone calls and everything. So I try to keep the morning really pristine and not spend time on email.

It's hard living on the West Coast though, because there's, you know, everybody in the East Coast expects to hear from you as soon as you wake up. But I try to avoid that. And I do feel, as frustrating as it can be, I do feel an enormous sense of accomplishment at the end of a day writing. And I feel entitled to take a nice long walk at four o'clock and end my day early. Because if you get 500 words written every day, you'll have a book at the end of the

year. It's the most incredible thing. And there is nothing more satisfying to me. I mean, that is really what I live for. Yeah, I do a week of research and then write a chapter or so, a chapter every two weeks. You touched on this a little bit, and this is how we'll wrap. How is your experience studying food, studying psychedelics and your own experience with those things, how has it impacted your relationship with your wife and your relationship with your son? I would say, and you'd have to ask them, that it's improved those relationships. That Judith, my wife, found that my psychedelic experiences open you up.

I talk more openly about emotions than I used to. I have more patience for conversations about that, about feelings. She's a much more introspective person than I am and is very happy talking about feelings. And so I think she feels it's opened up this space. I mean, you know, we spend so much time not going into our own minds, right? I mean, it's a scary place to go very often. And there's enough distraction out there. I mean, the world is designed to keep you from having to look inside. Um, and there are tremendous businesses devoted to precisely that project. Um, but anything that causes you to, to stop, take a vacation from your

everyday life and routine and delve a little bit is I think going to be very productive for a relationship. Um, and I think that's true with my son too. Um, So I feel like I can be more honest about my feelings. And so on balance, I think that the effects have been very positive. And they have also given me a little bit of distance on my ego, that I am less its slave, I think, than I used to be and can recognize when it's up to its old tricks, because I experienced his dissolution, complete dissolution. And I saw that life went on and consciousness went on and awareness went on so that I realized I'm not identical to that voice in my head. And that's really helpful. Michael Pollan is the author of several books,

including This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, and Defensive Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. In 2020, he co-founded UC Berkeley's Center for the Science of Psychedelics, which will conduct research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception, and emotion and their biological basis in the human brain. He joins us from his home in Berkeley. Michael, this was such a thrill for me.

I think your work is not only entertaining, I think it's meaningful. And I was heartened to know that you're a teacher and that you have a son. I think the term guide is a perfect description for your work and just what you're doing here. Thank you. Thank you for your good work. Oh, thank you, Scott. It was a great pleasure to talk to you. Algebra of Happiness, do a physical on your life. Once a year now, I do a full-body physical, which consists of me and some friends going to some place. And instead of playing golf, we have these different probes shoved up different orifices. And then over dinner, we brag that, oh, I have a prostate of a 42-year-old, as if that's a big badge of honor.

As we come out of COVID, I guess we should, we're not really coming out of COVID. It looks like it's gone. It hasn't even gone endemic. It's just going to be something we live with. When I found out, or when I tested, finally tested positive for COVID after two and a quarter years of managing to avoid it, I remember thinking that I was really happy that I was in good shape. I was also really happy that I was, that I feel mentally strong? Because I've only been sick two or three times in my life on a pivot. We were talking about, I was a sperm donor

when I was younger. And I thought, what happens when someone does 23andMe and finds me? Although I don't think they can because I haven't done 23andMe. But assuming someone shows up at my door, what would I tell them? I think I'd immediately be self-conscious because they'd see I'm bald and they'd go, shit, is that one in store for me? But anyways, what I would tell them? I think I'd immediately be self-conscious because they'd see I'm bald and they'd go, shit, is that one in store for me? But anyways, what I would tell them is that one of the nice things about their genetics is that I've been sick two or three times since the age of 18. I just, knock on wood, don't get sick and started to believe that I was going to be, or that I somehow was immune from COVID. So when I did get it, it really kind of fucked with me and I was upset about it. I wanted to be one of these individuals that never got it. But I was in a good place emotionally, psychologically, and also physically.

What I want you to do or what I'm going to suggest you do is do a physical on your life. And that is try and sit down and objectively assess the relationship one you have with substances, specifically alcohol and THC and trans fats. And recognize that as you move into your 30s and your 40s, it's not the same ballgame. When I was 24, I was working at Morgan Stanley. I would go out, eat shitty food, get ridiculously fucked up, and in the morning have a couple of Advil and a greasy breakfast, and I was back in action. I can no longer do that. If I go out and have a lot of drinks, the next day I feel as if I've gone through a battery of chemotherapy and it takes me two or three days just to get my head straight again. So recognize as you're getting into your 30s and your 40s that your body needs to get more responsible and doesn't have the same bounce

back with substances. So I want you to do a physical on your substances and decide where should I probably dial it down. I want you to do a physical on your stress level. This is what gets a lot of people in their 40s and 50s. And that is, are you managing? Have you become the caregiver for your parents and your kids? Are you the sole income earner? Do you find that work is difficult and stressful and maybe you haven't lived up to your own expectations? You aren't running a company, you're just doing okay, which is what happens to the majority of us, and try and figure out a way to manage that stress or find points of stress that you can begin to starch out, whether it's changing your lifestyle, whether it's changing a job, changing a relationship, finding ways either that's meditation or exercise to cope.

But just as if you smoke under the age of 30, people who smoke and quit by the time they're 30 have no greater incidence of cancer than people who never smoked. But here's the thing, that should start sticking to your lungs after 30. Well, guess what? Stress starts sticking to your physical well-being after 30. You can handle more stress, I think, when you're a younger man or woman. So be cognizant as you age of stress. And then finally, I want you to do a physical on your relationships.

And that is, where can you bring generosity to strengthen a relationship? Are there relationships you should let go, that you should cut out, that are just nothing but stress and upset for you? But do a physical on your life. Do a physical on your actual physical health, your wellbeing. Do a physical on the stressors in your life. Do a physical on your relationships.

And make sure that going into your 30s and your 40s, that you are healthy, that you are ready for a shock, whether it's COVID or something else. You need to be fit. You need to be strong. Do a physical on your life. Our producers are Caroline Chagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow,

download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Profiteer Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week. And by the way, I'm represented by WME, who Ari Emanuel is the CEO of. And I want to know, when is my agent going to hose me off? When does a dog father get a little love, a little shower? Why am I not on the back of a yacht getting hosed off by my agent? Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you? Deliver that feeling to your customers every time.

Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM. Thank you. Discover insights like these by reading Alex Partners' latest technology industry insights, available at www.alexpartners.com. That's www.alexpartners.com. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters.