On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the legendary journalist and author Michael Pollan joins me to discuss his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, and we talk about psychedelics, the dangers of psychedelic use, and why we should all be using psychedelics. This episode is sponsored by Psilocybin, a psychedelic painkiller used to treat depression, anxiety, and PTSD. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/TheJoeRoganExperience and use the promo code: "joejoe" to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the offer code: JOE10 at checkout. Thanks to Pale Fire and Mossy Creek for sponsoring this episode. Thank you Pale Fire for sponsoring the show. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a patron patron of the show and/or leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts by clicking the link below. You can also support the show on iTunes and leave us a review on your favorite streaming platform. Thank you so much for all the support we've gotten over the past few years, we really appreciate it. Go Joe Rogans Podcast. It's been a pleasure. -Jon Sorrentino And if you like the show, please leave a review and tell a friend! if you're feeling generous, I'll be sure to check out the show next week! - Jon's new book: This Is My Mind on Plante is out soon! Timestamps: 4: 5:00 - What's your mind on psychedelics? 6:00 7:30 - Why psychedelics are real? 8:30 9:40 - How do you feel about LSD? 11:00 | What do you need to be on drugs? 13:30 | What's the risk? 16:00 // How can I use them? 17: How do I know they're dangerous? 18: What are you going to get the most of it? 19:20 - What can I do with psychedelics in my life? 21:00 -- How do they help me? 22:30 -- What do they change my mind? 26:00 Is there a good thing? 27:40 -- What s my mind on drugs in the future? 25:00 + + +?
00:00:31.000Since you've been on, I have to say that out of all of the people that have discussed psychedelics, I think you've been one of the most important ones because you were a respected, esteemed journalist.
00:00:48.000And for you to introduce the world of psychedelics to people that maybe would have been skeptical of someone's intentions, like, there's a lot of folks that, like, you read something about drugs, and even if it's from someone that has credentials,
00:01:05.000you sort of assume that they're trying to justify— Yeah, they have an agenda when they're starting out.
00:01:40.000In all my journalism, that's what I try to do.
00:01:43.000I start out as unknowing or ignorant as the reader and then gradually work my way into the world of whether it's food and agriculture or psychedelics.
00:01:56.000So in all my books, I kind of start out like an idiot and gradually move toward a state of knowledge or more knowledge.
00:02:04.000I think it's incredibly relatable to people because it just lets people know what you're learning, how you're learning it, why you're learning it.
00:02:13.000And how you come to your conclusions, that it's the result of having these experiences or talking to these people.
00:02:18.000And they see all the armature of journalism.
00:02:22.000They see how it works because you're letting them – you're being very transparent about the process.
00:02:27.000And also, I think that most of the stuff that had been written about psychedelics and most of the stuff I was reading was written from inside the world, already convinced that these were great things that were going to change human consciousness.
00:03:46.000If you're trialing a couple thousand people for depression, which they're doing, these clinical trials to see if psilocybin can help with depression, some of those people are going to commit suicide.
00:03:58.000And especially if you get them off their SSRIs, that increases the risk.
00:04:03.000But that narrative, when someone in a clinical trial for depression with psychedelics gets out there, it'll plug into this old narrative about people jumping off the buildings.
00:04:14.000Whereas people routinely commit suicide on SSRIs, and it doesn't make the news.
00:04:19.000So it's when a story plugs into an existing narrative in the culture that it really takes off.
00:04:31.000So I think we should be—I think the way you inoculate the culture is talking about risk and say that there were casualties.
00:04:38.000There are people who, you know, did, you know, I don't want to say fry their brains because it's pretty imprecise, but people had some psychotic breaks on psychedelics.
00:07:08.000Eating plants is obviously one of the big things we do with them and a big part of our relationship.
00:07:13.000And then when I started working on psychedelics, I was really struck by the fact that one of the things humans have used plants for forever is to change consciousness.
00:07:24.000And that seemed like a very curious phenomenon.
00:07:27.000But every culture on Earth, with one notable exception, has some plant or fungus that they use regularly and often ceremonially to change consciousness.
00:07:37.000The exception are the Inuit, the Eskimos.
00:07:40.000And it's only because nothing good grows where they live.
00:09:20.000Well, the specifics are that the substance in the bill, which are LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, ibogaine, which is troubling given the specific risks associated with ibogaine, which we can talk about.
00:09:55.000Although that gets a little weird because if a guide, let's say an underground guide, charges you $1,500 for her services and just gives you the psilocybin, is that commercialization or not?
00:10:51.000The medical advice is you should be on a heart monitor the whole time you're using it because it can lead to various cardiovascular events.
00:10:59.000And so it's not as benign as some other psychedelics in terms of the physiology.
00:11:05.000Anyway, this still has to get through the assembly.
00:11:13.000And then we also had a whole bunch of decriminalization initiatives.
00:11:19.000Washington, D.C. voted to decriminalize plant medicines and entheogens.
00:11:24.000So we're getting to this new place where the public has had it with the drug war.
00:11:30.000Neither party really wants to fight it anymore.
00:11:33.000Even the Republicans are backing off on drug war.
00:11:35.000It's not part of the culture wars now, which is fascinating.
00:11:38.000We are recognizing how much damage was done, how many people's lives were ruined, how many people we've incarcerated around the drug war, and it hasn't worked.
00:11:49.000We have more overdoses now than we had before the opiate crisis.
00:11:54.000The biggest health problem related to the drug war has been...
00:11:58.000I'm sorry, the biggest problem since we started this drug war, public health problem, has been the opiate crisis.
00:12:27.000So we're at this new moment where we have to figure out, okay, if we're not going to just make them illegal, what are we going to do with them?
00:12:38.000And one of the things I wanted to do in this book was start this conversation, this kind of more grown-up conversation about how we use drugs in our lives, how we've used them in the past.
00:12:49.000Remind people that most of us do have a relationship with a plant drug.
00:12:52.000Caffeine being, you know, which I'm enjoying right here.
00:13:33.000What do you think are the motivations for keeping these drugs illegal?
00:13:38.000I mean, clearly, there's got to be some influence by the pharmaceutical companies.
00:13:42.000There has to be, because there are alternative treatments to a lot of different things, and if they looked at their bottom line, and if they were being shrewd, like very cold-calculated money assassins, they would probably say, you know, it's not a good idea for us for all these drugs to be legal.
00:13:59.000Yeah, but they don't They don't have a leg to stand on after starting the opioid crisis.
00:14:02.000But it doesn't matter if they have a leg to stand on.
00:14:04.000If there's no moral correct argument for their stance, they're still doing it to make money.
00:14:11.000Yeah, and they may be out lobbying to keep these laws.
00:14:13.000But it's interesting, it's the citizens who are overturning them.
00:14:16.000A lot of these are ballot initiatives that you can't lobby.
00:14:20.000And what happened in Oregon, I mean, there were two things there.
00:14:22.000One was decriminalizing personal use of all drugs, even hard drugs.
00:14:27.000And directing people who are busted into treatment, harm reduction approach.
00:14:33.000And then, even more interesting, was this Proposition 109, which legalizes psilocybin therapy specifically, but does it in a very thoughtful way.
00:14:43.000The proposition basically obligates the state health department to set up an institution that will regulate guides, train, regulate, and certify guides, And regulate the growing of psilocybin.
00:14:57.000It's kind of an amazing idea that the state will do this.
00:15:00.000And so far, the governor has been very cooperative.
00:15:03.000Whether the FDA will put up with it, you know, it's kind of usurping their power to regulate drugs.
00:15:09.000There's whole lots of complications, but it's going to be really interesting to watch.
00:15:12.000But it's the beginning of this process of figuring out a culture around drugs.
00:15:21.000And I think that's going to be the cultural work that we're going to be doing over the next couple decades, is figuring out a safe way, a productive way to use these substances instead of simply banning them.
00:15:32.000Yeah, I think that's what's really important, is people do have to understand the risks involved in all these different things.
00:18:29.000And somebody who's got trauma, someone who has alcoholism, spousal abuse, or a big rite of passage.
00:18:36.000Someone's going off to the army or whatever it is.
00:18:39.000And everyone's attention is focused on that person.
00:18:44.000And Native Americans say it is incredibly therapeutic and it has been vital to the survival of Indian culture, which, as you know, we tried to stamp out.
00:18:56.000We, meaning white Americans, tried to crush in the 19th century.
00:19:00.000And that's when peyoteism arose, is when Indian culture was on the verge of complete collapse.
00:19:08.000They were forcing Indians onto reservations in Oklahoma.
00:19:11.000They were taking boys, young boys, cutting their hair and sending them off to boarding school with the explicit goal of, this was what the superintendent of one of these schools said, to kill the Indian and save the man.
00:19:25.000And peyoteism arose at this moment as a way to hold on to culture and heal trauma, and it worked.
00:19:32.000Yeah, I don't think there's a particularly long history of peyoteism.
00:21:11.000I mean, I don't know which group it was, but there was evidence that there were these religious objects that they created, and they actually made them out of peyote.
00:21:21.000And they tested it, and it was peyote.
00:21:24.000So it's been around, even if it hasn't been in continuous use among American Indians.
00:21:30.000But I just think that's such an interesting model for how to think about it.
00:21:36.000And we have to come up with our own cultural container.
00:21:39.000We're not going to just take the Indian container.
00:21:41.000It doesn't feel right to us, and it would be cultural appropriation.
00:21:45.000But that's what we have to figure out.
00:21:47.000What are the proper rituals in which to use psychedelics?
00:21:51.000Are you aware of the book, The Immortality Key?
00:22:15.000And the idea that the Eucharist may have involved psychedelic.
00:22:21.000There was also cannabis found in some Jewish sites from that period.
00:22:26.000And I've always wondered about wine in Greece, you know, that they would talk about these wild Dionysian revels, and they drank wine out of glasses like this big.
00:23:25.000And there are episodes all through European history of these outbreaks.
00:23:29.000St. Vitus d'Ange was another term that was used for this.
00:23:33.000And those outbreaks coincide with core samples that show particularly late frosts.
00:23:37.000Yeah, and especially wet years when you've got lots of fungus.
00:23:42.000But the other effect you can get from eating this stuff is gangrene.
00:23:46.000So if it was consumed as a drug, it was processed in some way to make it safe.
00:23:51.000And the Eleusian mysteries that Brian talks about in that book, too, which was this rite in Greece that went on for thousands of years, and every great Greek writer, politician participated in this.
00:24:05.000There was a potion that they would take called a kikion.
00:24:09.000Everyone was sworn to secrecy, so no one talked about this, but they would take this potion and— Kukion, right?
00:24:19.000K-Y-K-E-O-N. And they would go to the underworld and visit with their ancestors and have these visions— And it kind of makes sense when you think of Plato's idea that there's an unseen realm right next to this one where the real table is,
00:24:45.000These archaeologists are doing interesting work, and there's going to be a new institute at Harvard working on some of these questions.
00:24:51.000Yeah, and it is all sparked by Brian's work and Brian's appearance on this podcast, in fact, initiated these discussions because they realized, like, when you hear him talk about it and you understand the amount of research this guy has done for over a decade pursuing this,
00:25:07.000and it was a big risk because until they found the samples that indicated there was ergot inside these vessels, they really didn't know if this was speculative, Is this all horseshit?
00:25:19.000You know, they didn't know, and now they do know.
00:26:26.000In fact, there's been some work at one of the universities in Israel where they're trying to connect the acacia tree with the burning bush that Moses saw, because the acacia tree apparently is rich in DMT. And their connection they're making is the burning bush,
00:26:47.000being God, was consuming smoked DMT. And that they were having this vision that Moses was...
00:26:56.000If you're translating things from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek to whatever the fuck they're doing, you're going to lose a lot of whatever they're trying to say.
00:27:03.000And you're going to not know what's a metaphor and what's literal.
00:28:10.000Well, I think drugs of all kinds played a very important role at certain key moments in the evolution of that thing we call the imagination.
00:28:18.000Well, I think the last time you were here, we talked about Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory, which is the most fascinating.
00:29:49.000And the idea that people were exposed to psychedelics on the savanna, which they probably were in the form of mushrooms, and that it was a form of synesthesia in that sounds got associated with ideas and meanings in the same way when you take a psychedelic,
00:30:07.000often you can see musical notes or taste them or whatever.
00:30:24.000I mean, obviously, this is purely speculative, right?
00:30:26.000He's trying to figure out and connect the dots.
00:30:28.000And Dennis does a better job, I think, of explaining it from a scientific perspective.
00:30:31.000But Terence's position was there was a bunch of things that were happening that coincided with climate change.
00:30:37.000So these jungles, these tropical rainforests were receding into grasslands.
00:30:42.000As they were receding into grasslands, the primates were climbing out of trees and experimenting with new food sources.
00:30:48.000One of the things that they've recognized is that primates in the presence of undulates will flip over their manure and look for these cow patties and look for beetles and grubs because they know that there's always something that's under bugs oftentimes are under there and of course mushrooms are growing on them.
00:31:20.000Better hunters, more accurate in edge detection.
00:31:24.000So there's been studies where if you have two parallel lines, if the parallel line shifts slightly, the people who are on psilocybin are far more likely to be able to detect that than people that are on the match.
00:32:15.000The other thing about psilocybin is that it enhances community.
00:32:22.000So, the idea that all these primates were doing it together, they were more loving, more connected, more loyal to each other, and this might have enforced tribal behavior.
00:32:32.000So, that might have been a protective issue.
00:32:34.000So, they were better hunters, more tribal, and It makes them horny.
00:32:39.000So they're more likely to have sex, more likely to breed.
00:32:42.000And then with the creativity involved, the idea was the creativity might have also enhanced their hunting, might have also enhanced tool making, and then of course the language aspect of it.
00:32:53.000The connection of sounds to objects, that it might have initiated that.
00:33:17.000So Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, And his argument is that when we learned to cook, which essentially meant we had to spend less metabolic capital digesting food, chewing especially.
00:33:32.000You know, chimps spend like six hours a day chewing because they're eating all this uncooked plant material.
00:33:39.000And when we moved to cooked meat in particular, but cooked food of all kinds, we didn't need as big a gut and we could afford to run a bigger brain.
00:33:49.000And I find that theory, and there's some evidence for that.
00:33:52.000I mean, like, if you feed snakes, you know, some on cooked food, some on uncooked food, they grow much faster on the cooked food.
00:33:59.000One of the reasons our dogs are so fat these days is we're giving them cooked food when they're not evolved for it, because most of the stuff in cans has been cooked.
00:34:09.000So anyway, it's, you know, there's a lot of speculation in this whole area, but it's fascinating.
00:34:47.000Yeah, and then psilocybin grows in the manure.
00:34:49.000Yeah, there's several cultures where cows are divine.
00:34:51.000My friend Duncan, he grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and they used to put something in the feed of cows to try to get cows to stop producing psychedelic mushrooms.
00:35:02.000Because there were so many psychedelic mushrooms and these college kids were running out onto the fields just picking them and tripping balls all the time.
00:38:09.000And there is a way to process it, even...
00:38:13.000Drying it apparently gets rid of the toxins, but there's a specific way that they think it was processed that made it a usable hallucinogen.
00:38:23.000Paul Stamets knows a lot more about this than I do.
00:38:25.000And he's had an experience with it that he said he would never repeat.
00:38:57.000This is, you know, the mushroom of the old world in particular that is associated with lots of shamanic rituals and the imagery, you know, from, you know, Lewis Carroll to the Santa Claus idea.
00:39:08.000It just keeps showing up that you would think it had some use or religious, you know, value.
00:39:18.000But maybe like ergot, the method of processing has just been lost to history.
00:39:26.000Yeah, McKenna believed that it was different, that it varied genetically, and it also varied seasonably, and that it possibly varied dependent upon the environment.
00:39:40.000I mean, mushrooms produce different metabolites, depending on what they're growing on, to some extent.
00:39:45.000The other thing that I wanted to say was, like, in some cultures, in the absence of psychedelics, they would do something called ordeal poisoning.
00:40:12.000Yeah, so what they would do is, in the absence of psychedelics, they'd put themselves through this ritual, meaning that on the other end of it, there would be some kind of life-changing revelation, just sort of like a real near-death experience.
00:40:25.000But that this was reliably repeatable, because this poison didn't kill you, but it fucked you up so bad you thought you were going to die, and in the middle of these sweats, like Stamets was talking about with Amanita Muscaria.
00:40:39.000Some cultures, such as the, oh boy, you want to try that one?
00:41:46.000I think they used to do things like that to try to figure out whether or not someone was hiding things, like whether or not they had knowledge of a crime or...
00:42:01.000Whether they were guilty, but I think they also did it as rites of passage, you know, for certain cultures that didn't have access to psychedelics, but they recognized that it was important to have some sort of a moment.
00:42:45.000So it's interesting, you know, people have put their bodies in these extreme places, whether it's with chemicals, fasting too, you know, the people who go, or isolation, right?
00:42:56.000People who go out on vision quests, right?
00:43:09.000So it's part of human nature, and I think it's a really interesting part of human nature, the desire for these transcendent experiences that we don't talk about enough or acknowledge or teach our children about, that they're going to have these desires and that there are safe ways to obtain them and unsafe ways to obtain them.
00:43:29.000But I really do think that the kind of cultural container you build around them is the best assurance of safety.
00:43:37.000It's one of the problems that we have in this culture is that we've suppressed this information for so long and lied...
00:45:39.000And because of his brilliance and because of the fact that he's a professor at Columbia, but yet has the courage to talk about regular use of drugs.
00:46:48.000And a lot of people think cannabis is the model, and I really don't think that's true.
00:46:54.000And a lot of people in the cannabis business who say psilocybin is the next cannabis, and they imagine it being sold next to the THC gummy bears in these dispensaries.
00:47:06.000And I just think psychedelics are a much more consequential, serious experience that has to be handled with more care.
00:47:16.000I mean, one of the problems of the drug war is to put all illicit drugs in the same basket, right?
00:48:39.000And the problem with this is, of course, the cult of personality.
00:48:42.000I would love psychedelic centers if there was some place where people could go to have these experiences.
00:48:48.000But what I worry Is that the person who is giving out these psychedelics and the person who is, you know, maybe setting the set and setting for the people becomes a guru or it becomes cult-like.
00:49:02.000Because there's a potential there, especially for the uninitiated who's meeting the initiated.
00:49:07.000And they all have, you know, this kind of way of talking that seems a little contrived and they're wearing wooden beads.
00:49:13.000And they have the answer and they know the key to the universe.
00:49:25.000And, you know, we've seen that in the culture and that people who are so, you know, have had a revelation about psychedelics and they want to share it with the world and they become gurus.
00:49:37.000And that's a phenomenon to watch out for.
00:50:04.000And ketamine is currently in use pretty widely right now for therapy.
00:50:07.000For many people, that is suggesting a model.
00:50:11.000So there's Field Trip Health, this company that's building ketamine clinics all around the country, very lavish spa-like places where you can get a ketamine experience with a nurse or a doctor present.
00:50:50.000And then there'll be the religious model.
00:50:52.000And I think that's a really interesting one to watch.
00:50:55.000In the same way the Native American church and two ayahuasca churches have the constitutional right to use a psychedelic as their sacrament, there are a lot of other new churches forming now.
00:51:08.000And given this Supreme Court and its expansive interpretations of religious liberty, basically they're cutting huge amounts of slack.
00:51:21.000That for reasons of religious conscience, you can be exempted from all sorts of federal regulations and laws.
00:51:28.000I mean, Hobby Lobby and the decision just the other day.
00:51:32.000That when some of these psychedelic churches find their way up to the Supreme Court, this Supreme Court's going to have a hard time saying no.
00:51:41.000And there is a group of psychedelic lawyers who are looking for the right cases to bring through the system.
00:53:46.000I think he's a big fan of the tryptamines in particular, but LSD as well.
00:53:50.000But the artwork, the iconography, the imagery that he portrays is the best interpretation of tryptamine experiences that I've ever seen.
00:54:02.000Because he's figured out how to express the visions In normal consciousness like you try to repeat what you saw and you try to express it with words.
00:54:14.000Words are the most crude and clumsy tools to express psychedelics, but there's something about like pull up some of it like the one where there's this weird gold and I think it's golden blue one that I swear I saw something entirely similar to that.
00:54:34.000When I was under an experience, I was like, oh, he went...
00:54:38.000I wonder if there's little rooms you go into or little places you go into based on...
00:54:44.000None of those, but all of those are great.
00:55:57.000I mean, out of all the people, if everybody who is a proponent of psychedelics was that guy, this is the image of what it's going to look like.
00:56:06.000So see, it looks on the outside very similar to his artwork.
00:59:31.000I think one of the benefits of – cross your fingers – Of these psychedelics is the enhancement of the feeling of love and community, which is what everybody needs right now.
00:59:42.000So I think that's a really interesting theme.
00:59:46.000And my gut says, yes, I mean, that the nature of the psychedelic experience could make people better people, make them feel more connected, more compassionate.
00:59:57.000But I don't think we can say that with confidence yet.
01:00:01.000I think we actually have to do science about that to figure out.
01:00:04.000I mean, there's some preliminary research, for example, that was done at Imperial College in London that shows that people's nature connectedness goes up.
01:00:12.000There's scores of how connected you feel to the natural world.
01:00:15.000And tolerance for authoritarianism goes down.
01:00:22.000But if you think about who has participated in these studies, they tend to be inclined in that direction already.
01:00:29.000You really have to get like the Koch brothers or Trump or somebody who's not inclined to like nature especially and do it to them and see if it changes their attitudes.
01:00:42.000Because I think we may be having people on the same side of the culture having reinforcing experiences.
01:00:49.000And it's something I would love to see research done on.
01:00:52.000That would be a great thing to do as a therapy for someone who is, like maybe you've been a sexual harasser at work and they make you go to some place and have a psychedelic experience to realize the error of your ways.
01:01:07.000And be much gentler than the chemical castration they used to talk about.
01:01:11.000Well, we don't have to go that far, but maybe that's even a bad example, but maybe someone who's been accused of fraud, or maybe someone who's embezzling money, or maybe someone who's done something really unethical, and you can pull it aside and say, listen, this is harming you,
01:01:27.000and you don't even realize it's harming you.
01:01:29.000You think you're getting away with these things, and having these psychedelic experiences, maybe...
01:01:34.000Because that's one of the more confusing but illuminating things that you do learn from psychedelics is that things that you've done to other people have also harmed you.
01:01:46.000And you don't think about it until you're forced into reflection.
01:01:51.000And one of the things about psychedelics is the ruthlessly introspective nature of some of the journeys that you go on, where you really are forced to look at yourself and your actions.
01:02:15.000So that was a very interesting theme that came up with interviewing Native Americans.
01:02:19.000They would talk about psychedelics as if the peyote had a gaze and it saw right into them.
01:02:26.000And they also use the metaphor of a mirror, that in the same way this one Native American had this beautiful image, he said, in the same way, you know, you step up to the mirror to make sure you don't have spinach in your teeth or something like that, and you check and make sure you're ready to go out into society.
01:02:41.000The peyote allows us to see ourselves and see what's wrong and correct it.
01:02:46.000And I thought that was a very powerful idea.
01:04:52.000And Indians don't believe that cultivated peyote is the same or as good as wild-grown peyote.
01:04:59.000So I finally decided after interviewing quite a few Native Americans that I shouldn't use it and that non-Natives should stay away from peyote because we've taken so much from Native Americans.
01:05:14.000And this is a tool that's been really helpful to them in healing in their cultures.
01:05:20.000And there are other ways to get mescaline.
01:05:22.000So I decided, you know, that would be my tiny contribution is not using it.
01:05:31.000Is there an effort to reintroduce it in terms of like to plant it places?
01:05:36.000Part of this initiative is that they're starting peyote in nurseries and then planting it in the wild.
01:08:33.000You know, you remove all the thorns and slice it, and you get these beautiful stars because it's a six-spine thing, and then you boil it for like three days.
01:09:31.000And I got interested in mescaline in part because everybody I knew in the psychedelic community, when I was researching how to change your mind, I'd say, so what's your favorite psychedelic?
01:09:41.000And I was so surprised to hear how many people said mescaline because it's not around.
01:10:23.000And in the same way some psychedelics take you out of yourself and out of this world to another world, this one immersed you more deeply in the world in front of you than you ever have been before.
01:10:37.000So that you get completely absorbed in material life and you could spend an hour thinking about this cup or looking at a flower or Huxley famously, Aldous Huxley, you know, stared at the folds of his trousers for an hour and like had all these revelations.
01:10:55.000It's about the here and now, this intense experience of the present moment that's like nothing I'd ever have.
01:11:02.000And it's almost overwhelming There's this sense of the immensity of existence and there's like, oh my god, stuff, existence.
01:11:13.000But a lot of it is just very contemplative.
01:12:24.000You know, McKenna had a really weird idea about psychedelic experiences.
01:12:29.000We always want to think of each individual psychedelic experience we have as being our experience.
01:12:36.000But he believed that there was a database connected to each entheogen.
01:12:41.000And so each one of these substances, you weren't just experiencing it, you were experiencing the trips of millions of people over thousands of years.
01:12:50.000It's like Carl Jung's idea of collective unconscious, right?
01:12:53.000That there's this imagery that is now hardwired in our bodies, and that's why cultures produce art that has all these kind of recurring motifs.
01:13:01.000Well, we know the DMT story, right, with the machine elves and the various, you know, a lot of people have the same imagery on that drug.
01:13:10.000Now, whether Terence McKenna started that, because that was a meme he introduced to the culture, you'd have to find some innocent culture and see if they have the same experience that had never heard about that idea.
01:13:21.000I did not have machine elves in my consciousness, but I did hear literally, not even hearing it, like when they would say things to you, but one of the things they said was, do not give in to astonishment,
01:13:37.000which was exactly what McKenna used to always say.
01:14:38.000I wasn't sure if I was hearing this because I was preparing, because I'd read and listened to McKenna talk about it, or if what was going on was some sort of a concerted effort to get you to just pay attention to this and don't freak out.
01:14:58.000Don't go, oh my god, this is too much.
01:16:55.000I don't know if that's your subconscious.
01:16:58.000I don't know if that's something about your imagination, your visual cortex, interacting with these alkaloids, or if what's really going on is it's a pathway to something else.
01:17:08.000Like it's a way to experience consciousness or something, some force that's around us all the time.
01:17:16.000You could pretend that you have the answer, but I don't...
01:17:46.000It could be something Aldous Huxley believed, and other people, Henri Bergson, the philosopher, that we should think of our minds as like radio receivers or TV receivers, and that the consciousness...
01:18:00.000What our brains do is tune in to frequencies of consciousness that exist outside of us.
01:18:06.000And in the same way you wouldn't look in the TV to find the woman giving you the weather report, you know she's not there.
01:18:14.000Our assumption that all the action is there may be wrong.
01:18:34.000Yeah, I mean, he believes consciousness is a field, morphogenetic fields, and that the communication you see, say, around fish, you know, schools of fish and how they turn, or flocks of birds, yeah, that they're communicating, they're participating in a field of consciousness in some way.
01:19:34.000And they kind of distance ourselves from it, and suddenly you're asking questions about consciousness.
01:19:40.000I've been really struck by how many neuroscientists got into their field because of psychedelic experience.
01:19:46.000That it suddenly made them think, hey, this is interesting, and we shouldn't assume what we assume.
01:19:53.000So I'm very interested in that whole conversation around neuroscientists and psychedelics.
01:19:59.000Well, I'm really interested in more people experiencing it that are these brilliant people that maybe have these- Right, can bring something to it.
01:20:07.000Dawkins has never had a psychedelic experience, which to me is crazy.
01:20:13.000I have a list of people who could use one.
01:20:16.000But see, I think this is another, you know, we talked about this efflorescence of art that may come out of this uncloseting of psychedelics.
01:20:24.000The other thing is getting really good scientific minds involved who haven't been, who've been afraid to.
01:20:33.000And, you know, there is this core of scientists, you've had some of them on the show, who've promoted psychedelic research, got it off the ground, you know, brilliant people like Roland Griffith and Matt Johnson at Hopkins and Grobe, Charles Grobe at UCLA. But then there's this other kind of scientists who are not so much committed to psychedelics,
01:20:55.000but committed to understanding consciousness in the brain, who have not had psychedelic experience or haven't had the opportunity to do research on psychedelics.
01:21:05.000So at Berkeley, last year we started a psychedelic science center to study psychedelics.
01:21:14.000And we're not going to be doing the kind of clinical research that people are doing at Hopkins and NYU, which is really important, but we don't have a medical school.
01:21:21.000We don't do medical research at Berkeley.
01:21:22.000We're going to be doing basic science.
01:21:24.000We're going to be trying to use psychedelics to understand real basics about how we construct visual perception, the mechanisms by way they work.
01:21:32.000And what's really struck me is some really top-rate neuroscientists who've never touched psychedelics Well, they probably have in their lives, but not in their work, are going to work on it and bring their tools and their analytical chops.
01:21:47.000So I think we're going to learn a lot.
01:21:49.000Psychedelics is going to teach us things about consciousness, teach us things about how the brain constructs its picture of reality that we don't know now.
01:21:59.000So I think it's a really exciting initiative.
01:22:01.000I'm very excited about all this and I think we have a unique opportunity to form an operating manual for how to use these things based on real science, based on people with experiences with these psychedelic compounds, and also now I think more so than ever based on a real understanding of human psychology.
01:22:22.000These things have never been really applied in a form where we have a possibility, specifically because of the work of MAPS and Doblin and some of the amazing people that he works with, we have a possibility of setting up centers.
01:22:38.000Like real, legit places where people can go and have an actual way to get out of whatever mental funk they're in.
01:23:01.000And one of the big surprises that I had after How to Change Your Mind came out, I expected a lot of pushback.
01:23:08.000I expected mainstream psychiatry, the American Psychological Association, all these kind of groups to like, well, psychedelics, very dangerous.
01:23:27.000And I realized at a certain time, and it was actually talking to Tom Insel, a psychiatrist, formerly head of the National Institute of Mental Health.
01:23:35.000And he said, well, you don't understand how broken our field is, that we don't have good tools, that we're not healing people.
01:23:46.000And that we're desperate for new tools.
01:23:49.000And along comes this one, which has the potential not just to address symptoms, but to actually heal.
01:23:56.000And across many different mental disorders.
01:24:00.000And I think that that embrace, embrace may be too strong a word, but that openness to what psychedelics has to contribute is going to hasten its acceptance.
01:24:14.000There are a lot of problems to work out.
01:24:17.000It's a weird thing to fit into the system we have now.
01:24:33.000The FDA doesn't regulate therapy, so how do they attach the approval of psilocybin with the need for a guide and somebody to prepare you and help you integrate?
01:24:42.000There are a lot of really hard questions to work out here, but your point about operating manual is really right because I think the problem in our culture with psychedelics It was reckless.
01:25:10.000And a lot of people had great experiences anyway, but many people crashed and burned, too.
01:25:14.000And now's the time to write that instruction manual.
01:25:18.000We have more experience, and we're studying these indigenous cultures who have a lot to teach us about how to use them safely.
01:25:25.000And it's a really interesting project.
01:25:29.000And one of the things I'm trying to do with This Is Your Mind on Plants is start that post-drug war conversation about drugs.
01:25:36.000Which is one of the reasons I included caffeine, a totally legal drug that everybody uses.
01:27:18.000And that is baseline consciousness for me and for many people.
01:27:23.000And that's not a bad thing, but I think we have a debt to these plants that we owe them.
01:27:30.000And so I spent a lot of time researching that chapter, looking back in history for when caffeine enters the West.
01:27:38.000And it doesn't happen until the 1650s in Europe.
01:27:42.000So we actually have a before and after, which we don't with a lot of drugs because they just go back millennia.
01:27:49.000And before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness.
01:27:54.000People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time.
01:27:59.000People drank morning, noon, and night because it was safer than water.
01:28:04.000Water was really how you got diseases.
01:28:06.000If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed all of the microbes.
01:28:12.000So people, even kids, you gave your kids hard cider for breakfast.
01:28:16.000And this was true in America up until the 1800s, up until Prohibition.
01:28:22.000But anyway, caffeine comes along in the 1650s, and tea and chocolate and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, which is kind of like a great decade, right?
01:28:48.000They'd had it from like 1200 or something like that.
01:28:51.000Supposedly it was discovered in 800s by a herder in like Ethiopia who noticed that his goats were getting very frisky when they ate this particular berry and would stay up all night.
01:29:04.000So he kind of like started experimenting or he brought it to these monks and they made a drink and it was like...
01:29:10.000It makes sense that it was in the Arab world, because if you think about all the science that was being done in the Arab world, all the literature back then, all the writing.
01:29:17.000So one theory is that the Arab world had coffee first and had this incredible golden age.
01:29:39.000And he said this was the perfect drug for the culture that invented mathematics and had this incredible...
01:29:47.000And it helped the culture in two ways.
01:29:49.000One was, as safe as alcohol made water, boiling it made it much safer.
01:29:55.000And coffee and tea, of course, both require boiling water.
01:29:58.000No one drank boiling water or hot beverages before.
01:30:03.000So this gave this incredible public health boost to these places.
01:30:07.000And then you have the drug that basically fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking.
01:30:15.000And so there is a lot of evidence linking coffee and tea consumption with the Enlightenment in France and with the Age of Reason in England.
01:30:26.000And people in the 1600s started writing about it.
01:30:28.000So they're like, wow, people, you know, we have this new civil and sober drink.
01:30:33.000And it was so popular because it was new that people drank less and they used more caffeine.
01:30:39.000And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution.
01:30:46.000When you're doing physical labor outdoors, which was most of history, you could be buzzed.
01:30:52.000You didn't have to know what time it was.
01:33:57.000I also felt, and I'm not proud of this, self-righteous.
01:34:03.000I remember one morning having to get a 6am flight and I had to get up and get myself moving on mint tea.
01:34:14.000And I get to the airport and it's just when they're opening the pizza and the Starbucks and the line is like snaking for those people getting on 6am flights.
01:34:24.000And I'm looking at these people and they look like junkies you see in Amsterdam.
01:34:54.000And I knew that I was going to rejoin them as soon as I could.
01:34:57.000So when I hit the three-month mark, I decided, and I needed for the ending of the piece, to have a cup and see this was going to tell me, you know, because drugs are very different the first time you take them, right,
01:35:12.000before your body is accustomed to them.
01:35:14.000So I had this first cup, and I gave a lot of thought to where I would have it.
01:35:18.000I thought about the original Pete's is in my neighborhood, the very first Pete's.
01:36:08.000But then something turned that was kind of interesting.
01:36:11.000Across the street, there was a garbage truck that was grabbing hold of two plastic garbage cans and shaking them like this and making this horrible racket.
01:40:07.000But if you think about it, if you put out a lethal pesticide and you kill whoever's eating you, whether it's a deer or a beetle, You're gonna select for resistant members of the pest population.
01:40:20.000Natural selection will, you know, there'll be some that won't be affected and then they'll take over and then your pesticide no longer works.
01:40:26.000Much cleverer strategy is to just mess with their minds and ruin their appetites.
01:40:31.000And think about it, how hungry are you on psychedelics?
01:41:02.000What made me realize this, and this is my theory, I don't have any science to point to, and I'm not a scientist, but I had a cat named Frank who had a problem with catnip.
01:42:19.000Cannabis may work by making its pests forget where they saw it or tasted it.
01:42:25.000So anyway, this idea that plants have developed really neurochemistry to mess with our minds is a product of evolution, and it's an amazing skill.
01:42:37.000And the fact that these pesticides turn into attractants that at high doses Create problems at low doses do these interesting things in our minds has also been an evolutionary strategy because look what we've done with coffee and tea.
01:42:53.000We've spread their seeds all over the world.
01:42:55.000We've made them precious commodities or cannabis.
01:42:58.000I mean, these plants were stuck in their little center of origin.
01:43:03.000So this dance of plant chemicals and human brains has been very much to the advantage of both parties, I think.
01:43:11.000And it's quite an astonishing fact of evolution that plants should have figured out how to mess with our minds to the extent that they have.
01:43:20.000How much have you studied when plants change their flavor profile because they're aware that other plants near them are being eaten?
01:43:32.000So in a forest, say oak trees, if they're being beset by some caterpillar or something, it'll usually start on the edges.
01:43:40.000And those plants will send signals through the air.
01:43:44.000And alert other members, other oak trees, to actually start producing these defense chemicals, alkaloids, that have bad taste and ruin the taste for the pest.
01:43:57.000There's a lot of communication that goes on among plants.
01:44:01.000It goes through the air with these volatiles and then it goes on under the ground.
01:44:06.000And this is where the mycelium are connecting trees in a forest.
01:44:11.000Suzanne Simard just wrote this really interesting book about this called Searching for the Mother Tree.
01:44:16.000She's an arborist or a forest scientist in British Columbia.
01:44:22.000And she has shown how the trees in a forest are actually connected by these threads of mycelium and the trees can use that passageway to send nutrients to other trees.
01:44:34.000So a mother tree can take care of baby trees and actually send carbon through this network.
01:44:40.000And even two species of different trees can swap nutrients.
01:44:44.000So a deciduous tree that loses all its leaves needs maximum nutrients in the spring to get started, and it can borrow from the bank of an evergreen tree.
01:44:54.000And so there's this whole communications network going on underground.
01:45:00.000And she did it by, she'd give radioactive isotopes to one tree and watch sugar, you know, with a radioactive isotope and follow it with a Geiger counter through the forest and follow the trail.
01:47:09.000And so that's where all their ingenuity went.
01:47:13.000And it's just a limitation of our imagination that we can't see this.
01:47:17.000Although if you've ever looked at time lapse of plants, you suddenly get an appreciation for them as active agents.
01:47:26.000When I was doing the intelligent plant, the scientist in Italy showed me this video of two beans competing for a steak.
01:47:36.000And it was in time lapse and you see them and they're like fighting with each other and they're going like this and then one of them wins and the other one gets limp and just depressed.
01:47:48.000And you see them as personalities, you know, with life experiences, successes and failures in a way you never do.
01:47:57.000We live in a very specific dimension of time, and other creatures live in different dimensions of time.
01:48:04.000And, you know, so we need to be able to imagine these other dimensions.
01:48:08.000But the tool of time-lapse photography is a powerful one for showing this.
01:48:12.000David Attenborough did a Secret Life of Plants kind of show once, where he did tons of time-lapse.
01:48:19.000And suddenly, you know, you've seen the ones of the Venus flytraps and stuff like that, but...
01:48:23.000Suddenly you realize, oh, they're thinking.
01:48:26.000And they're not thinking the way we think, but they do think.
01:48:29.000And there has been research also showing that they can learn.
01:48:34.000There's a woman named Monica Gagliano who's a botanist who's done really cool experiments With sensitive plants, you know the sensitive plants?
01:48:43.000It looks like a fern and you touch it and it goes limp.
01:48:45.000And it does this whenever it's touched.
01:48:48.000And she would take a bunch of sensitive plants and drop them a couple inches in their pots.
01:48:54.000And at first, they thought that drop was a touch and they would shrink down, collapse.
01:49:03.000And then after she did it five or six times, they realized it was a false signal.
01:51:02.000They recently discovered this really surprising kind of anomaly, which is that there are certain kinds of plants that produce caffeine in their nectar.
01:52:24.000There's a psychedelic honey that's very difficult to obtain.
01:52:29.000These bees grow it on the side of cliffs, and so these people, they have this perilous route where they have to dangle off the side of the cliff in a rope to gather up.
01:54:09.000Wow, so it's made by bees that feed on rhododendron flowers, which give it psychoactive effects.
01:54:15.000But again, it's one of those things where I think it's only in Nepal where they find this stuff and harvest this stuff, but rhododendrons are here.
01:54:23.000Yeah, so if you put some bee boxes in a rhododendron nursery, you could try that.
01:54:28.000See if you can find a video on it, because when you watch these guys collect it, it is wild.
01:55:37.000And the sugar trade was driven in large part by the tea trade because the English would put so much sugar in their tea because they had kind of very bitter tea.
01:55:49.000And it became a big source of calories in the English diet is the sugar you would put in your tea.
01:55:54.000And because it was hot water, it could absorb a lot more sugar.
01:55:59.000Anyway, the dark side of coffee and tea is these industries are built on the back of incredible exploitation.
01:56:05.000Slavery and, I mean, just, you know, the people who grow our caffeine are historically have been treated really badly.
01:56:14.000Well, historically, whenever there's been a commodity, people have always abused other people in order to either harness that commodity, achieve it, like salt.
01:56:23.000How many people were murdered for salt?
02:02:04.000We have to realize that, you know, that these drugs are powerful.
02:02:09.000They're tools and they can be used well or used badly.
02:02:12.000And a lot of the work of culture is figuring out which and how.
02:02:17.000Yeah, it seems like we're just learning over the last few decades about the, I don't want to call it consciousness, about the intelligence of plants.
02:02:27.000I mean, would you call it consciousness?
02:05:08.000But we've also learned, though, that they are not solitary creatures.
02:05:12.000I mean, as we're learning, we're not solitary creatures.
02:05:14.000It's so interesting that, you know, we now know that plants that have a symbiotic relationship with fungus do much better.
02:05:22.000And if you if you put them in like, I don't know, you know, just water, you grow them hydroponically or grow them in a sterile soil, they will never do as well.
02:05:34.000And there's a wonderful relationship between the mushrooms and the plants where the plants produce sugars that they exude from their roots that the fungus needs.
02:05:45.000And in exchange, the fungus, which can go down and burrow through rock and stuff like that.
02:05:51.000Those little mycelium are incredibly strong.
02:05:57.000And, you know, when you hear about using plants to sequester carbon in the soil, which is a big conversation around climate change, you know, we think, oh, you're growing trees and that holds a lot of carbon.
02:06:08.000But in fact, what's happening is about 40% of the sugars that are produced during photosynthesis go down through the plant, into the roots, and out into the soil.
02:06:20.000And that carbon goes into the soil food chain and gets eaten by various microbes and mycelium and stays in the soil in the form of the dead bodies of all those microbes.
02:06:31.000And that's how you can sequester large amounts of carbon by growing the right crops.
02:06:38.000So they're somehow or another sharing or giving.
02:06:44.000You know, we learned the original take on Darwin was nature, red, and tooth and claw, even though that wasn't his phrase, and that it was all about competition.
02:06:52.000But science of the last 50 years or so keeps finding more evidence for cooperation as being key in evolution, taking care of your kin, but also your community.
02:07:05.000And so now we've seen this on the individual plant being dependent on a fungus.
02:07:10.000And now we're seeing in the forest that all these trees have a social life, essentially.
02:07:28.000And so I think that the role of cooperation in nature is finally getting the attention it deserves.
02:07:34.000Is there a way to measure the health of a plant that is potted alone versus the health of a plant that is out in nature in a garden?
02:07:45.000I wonder if a plant that's in a pot is similar to a polar bear that's at the zoo.
02:07:53.000Yeah, it's alive, but it's not supposed to be there trapped like that.
02:07:59.000I could imagine an experiment where you'd get at that, which is keep a potted plant in the same environment as you have a plant growing in the garden.
02:08:06.000I mean, I have both potted plants and then plants that are in my garden.
02:08:09.000My sense is the ones in the garden do a lot better.
02:08:12.000They're more likely to get whatever they need because they can put their roots where they want.
02:08:20.000I wonder if there's a communication issue going on, too, because if the mycelium is really somehow or another facilitating communication between all these plants and there's some sort of a network that's going on...
02:08:42.000Please talk about those because it's really amazing because people have this perception about rats and cocaine and rats and heroin because of this.
02:08:49.000So most of what we think we know about drugs and addiction comes from these rat experiments, right?
02:08:57.000And this went on all through the 60s, 70s, 80s.
02:09:00.000And they would give it a choice, and it was hooked up with IVs, and they could press a lever and get either sucrose, sugar, which was a nutrient, or they could get a drug.
02:09:13.000They could get cocaine or heroin or meth, whatever you put in there.
02:09:16.000And these cage rats would just keep hitting the lever for the cocaine or heroin until they died or got addicted.
02:09:24.000The cocaine killed them and the opiates addicted them.
02:09:27.000And this was like proof that, you know, the chemicals have these hooks.
02:09:31.000And if you take, you know, that addiction's a disease, you catch from these chemicals, basically.
02:09:37.000And then this clever psychologist named Bruce Alexander up in British Columbia...
02:09:44.000Thought, well, maybe it's because these rats have such shitty lives that they're taking these drugs.
02:09:51.000So he designed another experiment called the Rat Park.
02:09:55.000And he built a bigger cage and he put toys in it and, you know, Plants and other rats to, you know, to have sex with or play with and really good food and then gave them a choice between water laced with morphine and clean water.
02:10:15.000They would still have a little morphine, but instead of like 25 milligrams, they'd have 5 milligrams.
02:10:21.000You know, they'd have a safe amount basically.
02:10:23.000And this was a really strong evidence for the fact that addiction is an adaptation to conditions, to the quality of your cage, if you will.
02:10:33.000And that if you could improve people's circumstances, if you could create a park for them or something like a park, they would be much less likely to get addicted.
02:10:45.000And I think that's a really telling example.
02:10:47.000I mean, it was just our blindness that we just assume rats in cages, natural, you know.
02:10:51.000But, I mean, they were in solitary confinement.
02:11:13.000It's in these really disadvantaged areas.
02:11:15.000These areas that were once doing well and no longer are.
02:11:18.000And people's sense of their life prospects are so dim that, you know, and as Karl Hart makes the point, They do get pleasure from these drugs.
02:11:32.000They get something they're not getting in their life.
02:11:35.000That there is this sense of warmth and comfort and even connectedness for some people.
02:11:43.000It's not a healthy adaptation, but it is an adaptation.
02:11:47.000It raises questions on whether we should think about addiction as a disease.
02:11:54.000And it's useful in the sense that it takes away the shame, and that's a healthy thing, I think, the shame of being addicted or the guilt of being addicted.
02:12:03.000But I think it may get things wrong, too, because it may be that the addiction is more of a symptom.
02:12:31.000Yeah, the Rat Park study is so interesting because imagine if that guy had not put those two pieces together.
02:12:41.000We would still have this narrative that cocaine and heroin are so addictive because of science that we've proven that people that get it, they just take it until their life falls apart.
02:12:52.000And then it's all biology and it's predestined and inevitable.
02:12:57.000And I think addiction is a lot more complicated.
02:12:59.000And I think, you know, some of these harm reduction strategies going on, you know, in Portugal and Switzerland is an interesting case.
02:13:07.000They, you know, if you're a heroin addict there and you enter into their system, they will write you a prescription for heroin.
02:13:17.000So you'll get it at the drugstore, which removes the risk of overdose because you know what you're getting.
02:13:23.000There's not going to be any fentanyl in it, and you're not going to be using a dirty needle, so you're not going to have the contamination issues.
02:13:28.000I mean, a lot of the harms of using these drugs come from the fact they're illegal in the black market and sharing needles and everything.
02:13:35.000And then they'll go to work on making sure you have a good job, giving you therapy, Essentially improving your cage.
02:13:44.000And then they try to get you off the drug.
02:13:47.000But they realize they have to get the life circumstance right before you can attack the problem.
02:13:53.000The only way we're going to figure out how to do that here is to make it super profitable.
02:14:07.000The idea that we would reward addicts by improving their lives, giving them good jobs while we gave them a prescription, I don't see Americans sitting for that idea.
02:14:17.000Well, think of the self-righteousness you had walking through the airport.
02:14:38.000And we also lose sight of the big picture, like all these America First people, these hard-nosed sort of people that think that people need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and we need to emphasize hard work and discipline.
02:14:57.000But if you can help people, the more people that can get out of this trap, the more people we can educate and provide therapy and provide a helping hand.
02:15:07.000The more they can get out of that, the less losers we'll have, which means the better America will be overall.
02:16:42.000And caffeine, we're kind of de-socializing the use of caffeine in a way that is lowering the number of people smoking, and that's been helpful.
02:16:53.000But this has to happen in the culture.
02:19:27.000But that was how Westerners took this plant when they got to the New World and they turned it into cigarettes and they decided to smoke it.
02:20:00.000And there you have the example of a drug leaving a social context and then becoming highly individualized where you're alone with this thing and you're smoking all your body's telling you to smoke.
02:20:50.000And that even a drug we regard as evil, as tobacco, in the proper context could be very positive.
02:20:57.000I think tobacco, the real issue is people smoking it all the time, and the real issue is the fact that it causes lung cancer and all these different things.
02:21:07.000But tobacco itself, like, I've smoked cigarettes before shows, and I like to do it.
02:21:12.000I like to smoke a cigarette before a show.
02:22:50.000No, I knew there was a documentary about a guy who was traveling around to all these different schools because he had had extreme facial cancer.
02:23:31.000Yeah, there's so many of those intellectuals from that day, like Bertrand Russell was a gigantic pipe smoker.
02:23:38.000I think it was de rigueur, if you were like an academic of a certain generation, that you had to smoke a pipe or you wouldn't be taken seriously.
02:24:01.000It's just more fascinating and complicated than we think.
02:24:06.000But as a writer, I love moving toward the ambiguities, moving toward the uncertainties, and this idea that you have to be able to hold these contradictory ideas in your head is something I'm always trying to teach in my writing.
02:24:21.000Was there anything in studying this book and preparing to do this book, was there anything that was surprising to you about what you learned?
02:24:29.000There were a lot of things that were surprising.
02:25:03.000That just tells you how few vegetables we're eating.
02:25:06.000That's just a measure of how bad our diet is.
02:25:09.000We're eating meat and sugar, and we're just not getting plants.
02:25:14.000Because the only thing that produces antioxidants, which we need for our health, which we need to prevent cancer, Plants produce antioxidants.
02:25:22.000And so we're getting a lot of them from coffee and tea.
02:25:25.000That may explain a lot of the health benefits of coffee and tea.
02:25:29.000That, you know, coffee has been shown to be protective against several cancers, against Parkinson's disease, against cardiovascular problems.
02:27:10.000It's just so brutal, both to the workers and the animals, that I don't really want to have anything to do with it.
02:27:15.000There are farmers growing meat in really sustainable ways, animals that have good lives on farms and one bad day, as they say.
02:27:25.000And I support that kind of agriculture.
02:27:28.000But in general, the average meat you find comes at the end of a food chain I just don't want to support.
02:27:35.000And then the third reason is climate change.
02:27:38.000I've learned a lot about how our dietary choices affect the climate, and meat-eating is the biggest part of your climate footprint, if you're a big meat-eater.
02:27:48.000The biggest part of your climate footprint.
02:28:37.000And that's the raw material for all the crap we're eating.
02:28:40.000That gets turned into processed food or it's fed to animals and turned into meat.
02:28:44.000And that's basically how the food system is organized right now.
02:28:48.000We could change those incentives and reward farmers instead for practices that sequester carbon and for practices that improve the diet.
02:28:56.000So even if you added one crop to that corn-soy rotation, I don't know, pigeon peas or something like that that are being used to make these meat substitutes.
02:29:08.000It would have a huge positive effect on the soil microbiome, on carbon sequestration, cover cropping, planting trees on your farms.
02:29:18.000There's a lot that could be done and that it could make a substantial difference to climate change if we worked on our agriculture.
02:29:24.000One of the weirder things about psychedelic experiences is that different compounds or different types of experiences have different almost like standard icons or standard narratives.
02:29:40.000One of them is with tryptamines, particularly with ayahuasca, you get a lot of protect nature, protect Mother Earth, some sort of weird connection.
02:29:52.000And with psychedelic mushrooms, you almost get...
02:29:56.000There's almost like an announcement that there's an other out there.
02:30:17.000I mean, as we've been talking about, I've always given plants a lot of credit, right, for being actors, you know, agents, having their own subjectivity, right, their own point of view.
02:32:25.000I had this really weird imagery on ayahuasca that stays with me as kind of like this visual koan.
02:32:31.000And I find one of the things that happens in psychedelic experience is that sometimes there's an image you can take with you and use in your meditation or just when you're just daydreaming.
02:32:43.000It was a weird ayahuasca circle because it took place during the day because our shaman was losing her sight and wanted to do it during the day.
02:33:53.000But that image, that difference between us and the plants and our limitation and the fact that they can take a cage and use it for their own purposes and reach to the sun and go where they need to go, unimpeded, was just a powerful image for me.
02:34:09.000And it's, you know, sometimes psychedelics just give you things you chew on.
02:34:13.000And I've mentioned this in interviews before, and people write me with interpretations of, you're actually the vine.
02:34:20.000You're showing us how to get out of the cage.
02:35:07.000You know, I think I found a way to do it.
02:35:10.000It was very, it was challenging at first because, you know, we've all read boring trip reports or heard people and hearing people's dreams is like always puts you to sleep.
02:35:22.000So I approach those chapters both in this book and in How to Change Your Mind with a lot of nervousness.
02:35:28.000Like this is a writing challenge I've never met before.
02:35:33.000And everybody says these experiences are ineffable, you know, beyond language.
02:35:51.000Once I found The Voice, and I knew I was writing for people who hadn't tripped, as well as for people who had, because I'm trying to reach the general reader.
02:36:07.000But I found a way to do it which partly involved acknowledging how insane it sounded.
02:36:13.000So I would tell an image like that or say something that happened or discovering how important love is and say, look, I know how banal that sounds, but remember...
02:36:25.000Banalities are just truths that have been drained of any kind of emotion from overuse.
02:37:46.000And, you know, I paid no penalty for telling my trip reports in two books so far.
02:37:51.000Well, I think it's because you establish yourself, again, as a real writer before that, where in The Omnivore's Dilemma and all your other books, it's like you're a guy who investigates topics and thoroughly researches them and then gives an accurate and intelligent assessment of what's going on.
02:38:12.000And they trusted you because of your previous work to apply this same sort of strategy I think you're probably right.
02:38:20.000I think I did bring a certain credibility.
02:38:22.000Had my first book been about psychedelics, I think things would have gone very differently.
02:38:26.000It's funny, the whole time I was working on psychedelics and interviewing all these people in the scientific community, in the underground community, they would say to me, you know, so I think you're going to do for psychedelics what you did for food.
02:41:18.000I didn't really start until I was in my late 50s.
02:41:22.000I didn't do it at the age-appropriate time.
02:41:24.000But on the other hand, I came to appreciate that there's a special value to psychedelics late in life.
02:41:34.000I said in How to Change Your Mind that it could be that psychedelics are wasted on the young.
02:41:40.000And that they offer special things to people.
02:41:43.000When you are not just older, but more set in your ways, you know, when you've developed all these habits, as we get older, we develop these algorithms to get us through any situation, you know, dealing with our kids or our employer.
02:42:29.000You know, your work's shit, you're unworthy, you didn't deserve the success.
02:42:35.000Our egos are hectoring us with that kind of stuff all the time.
02:42:39.000Psychedelics tunes that down, sometimes turns it off completely.
02:42:42.000We know all about the default mode network and the part of the brain where those stories are originating and how they go offline during psilocybin experience or LSD. And then, you know, there is an opportunity once you've softened the hold of those narratives,
02:42:59.000once you've gotten out of those grooves, to start new narratives.
02:43:02.000And I think that's what happens in many cases.
02:43:05.000There's a wonderful metaphor that someone I interviewed for the book said.