The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1678 - Michael Pollan

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast.

00:00:02.000 Check it out.

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day.

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00:00:13.000 All right.

00:00:14.000 Mr. Pollan.

00:00:15.000 Yeah.

00:00:15.000 Hey.

00:00:15.000 Good to see you, man.

00:00:16.000 Good to be here.

00:00:17.000 Good to be back.

00:00:17.000 Good to see you again.

00:00:18.000 And good to see you in the...

00:00:20.000 You're done with the headphones, huh?

00:00:22.000 I'm done with the headphones, yeah.

00:00:23.000 In and out instantaneously.

00:00:25.000 Your new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants.

00:00:28.000 Yeah, right here.

00:00:29.000 Yeah, I like it.

00:00:31.000 Since 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.

00:00:45.000 You're like a real writer already.

00:00:48.000 And 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,

00:01:05.000 you sort of assume that they're trying to justify— Yeah, they have an agenda when they're starting out.

00:01:11.000 I think you're right.

00:01:12.000 I think that made a huge difference.

00:01:13.000 I was coming at that world from outside.

00:01:16.000 I'd had very little experience of psychedelics, virtually none as a kid.

00:01:21.000 I'd heard about this research.

00:01:23.000 I was curious.

00:01:23.000 I was skeptical.

00:01:24.000 And so I went on this journey that brought me into this community.

00:01:29.000 And I think that allowed people to follow me, to come with me.

00:01:33.000 I think people would much rather go on a journey with you than have you lecture at them.

00:01:38.000 Oh, for sure.

00:01:40.000 In all my journalism, that's what I try to do.

00:01:43.000 I 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. 0.97

00:01:56.000 So in all my books, I kind of start out like an idiot and gradually move toward a state of knowledge or more knowledge. 0.86

00:02:04.000 I 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. 0.92

00:02:13.000 And how you come to your conclusions, that it's the result of having these experiences or talking to these people.

00:02:18.000 And they see all the armature of journalism.

00:02:22.000 They see how it works because you're letting them – you're being very transparent about the process.

00:02:27.000 And 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.

00:02:43.000 And that's a turnoff to people.

00:02:45.000 Especially if you have this resistance, which many, many people do.

00:02:49.000 There's so much cultural baggage around psychedelics left over from the 60s.

00:02:54.000 The risks, how disruptive it was to society.

00:02:59.000 And people still hold these ideas in their head.

00:03:02.000 People say, well, don't people jump off of buildings?

00:03:05.000 Or doesn't it scramble your chromosomes?

00:03:09.000 These are urban legends, by and large.

00:03:11.000 Although there were some people who jumped off of buildings.

00:03:15.000 The chromosome thing was not true.

00:03:17.000 The staring at the sun till you go blind was not true.

00:03:20.000 But it's amazing the power of these memes just lingering in our culture.

00:03:25.000 Well, there's a great fear of losing your mind.

00:03:27.000 I mean, you know about the guy from Pink Floyd and people hear about, you know, some guy in the neighborhood that did too much acid.

00:03:33.000 The thing is, they are real.

00:03:35.000 There are real people that have lost.

00:03:37.000 And I think we have to acknowledge that. 0.99

00:03:39.000 And I think unless we're really frank about the risks, we risk another backlash because bad shit will happen. 0.99

00:03:45.000 Yes. 0.99

00:03:46.000 If 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.

00:03:56.000 That's what depressed people do.

00:03:58.000 And especially if you get them off their SSRIs, that increases the risk.

00:04:03.000 But 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.

00:04:14.000 Whereas people routinely commit suicide on SSRIs, and it doesn't make the news.

00:04:19.000 So it's when a story plugs into an existing narrative in the culture that it really takes off.

00:04:27.000 It has this incredible power.

00:04:29.000 And that could happen.

00:04:31.000 So I think we should be—I think the way you inoculate the culture is talking about risk and say that there were casualties.

00:04:38.000 There 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.

00:04:48.000 Would they have had them anyway?

00:04:50.000 There's reason to believe they would.

00:04:51.000 It's not like schizophrenia rates went up during the 60s.

00:04:55.000 Do you think it triggers schizophrenia, though?

00:04:56.000 Yes.

00:04:56.000 I think that's probably what happens.

00:04:59.000 Any kind of traumatic experience can do it.

00:05:04.000 Divorce of parents can do it.

00:05:05.000 If you're at that age and you have that vulnerability, going to graduate school for a certain number of people does it.

00:05:12.000 Extreme stress.

00:05:13.000 And it can be an extreme experience.

00:05:16.000 So there is a good reason that people, even second-degree relatives who have schizophrenia, you can't participate in any of these trials.

00:05:25.000 They're screening people.

00:05:26.000 And also for manic depression, they're screening you out.

00:05:29.000 And there are good reasons for that.

00:05:31.000 Yeah, there's this discussion about cannabis that's been going on for a while now.

00:05:38.000 What happens to people, particularly when they eat edibles?

00:05:43.000 Is it something that triggers schizophrenia?

00:05:47.000 And I think the numbers, as you're saying, they really do mirror the numbers that just happen in a general population.

00:05:53.000 It's one out of a hundred.

00:05:55.000 And one out of a hundred people seem to have a significant problem.

00:05:59.000 Yeah, I mean, people, a certain number of people are at risk.

00:06:03.000 They're bound to get schizophrenia at those windows.

00:06:06.000 I think it's in, you know, right around 20 and right around 30 years old seems to be the window.

00:06:12.000 Really?

00:06:13.000 There's a very specific window right now?

00:06:14.000 Oh, yeah.

00:06:14.000 No, it happens at a very specific time.

00:06:17.000 Do they think it's like transitionary periods in your life with additional stress, like you have a breaking point or something?

00:06:23.000 It isn't really clear.

00:06:24.000 It may be a developmental issue.

00:06:26.000 You know, boys or men are still developing into their 20s, right?

00:06:30.000 Their brain development is incomplete.

00:06:31.000 I think into their 50s.

00:06:32.000 Well, yeah, that's true, too.

00:06:34.000 But there's certain brain structures that are not, you know, finished at that age.

00:06:41.000 Honestly, I don't know.

00:06:42.000 I'm out of my depth here.

00:06:43.000 Yeah.

00:06:44.000 What was the motivation to write this new book?

00:06:48.000 So, the motivation for this book grew out of a long-standing interest in our relationship to plants.

00:06:54.000 I've been obsessed with plants since I was like an eight-year-old gardener.

00:06:57.000 And I've written a lot about how we use plants and how plants use us.

00:07:04.000 And that relationship has been of keen interest.

00:07:07.000 And I looked at food.

00:07:08.000 Eating plants is obviously one of the big things we do with them and a big part of our relationship.

00:07:13.000 And 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.

00:07:24.000 And that seemed like a very curious phenomenon.

00:07:27.000 But every culture on Earth, with one notable exception, has some plant or fungus that they use regularly and often ceremonially to change consciousness.

00:07:37.000 The exception are the Inuit, the Eskimos. 1.00

00:07:40.000 And it's only because nothing good grows where they live.

00:07:43.000 That's interesting.

00:07:44.000 Do they change their consciousness at all?

00:07:46.000 Do they use breathing exercises?

00:07:47.000 They may well.

00:07:48.000 I don't know.

00:07:49.000 Because there are many ways to change your consciousness.

00:07:51.000 You're right.

00:07:51.000 Breathing can do it.

00:07:53.000 Fasting can do it.

00:07:54.000 Extreme exertion can do it.

00:07:56.000 So there are other tools for doing it.

00:07:59.000 But most humans have used plants.

00:08:02.000 And, of course, there's alcohol, too, which changes consciousness.

00:08:06.000 Alcohol is not produced by plants.

00:08:08.000 It's actually produced by a fungus.

00:08:11.000 So I've always wanted to explore this issue of why do we do this?

00:08:15.000 What good is it to change consciousness?

00:08:17.000 Because you would think from an evolutionary point of view, it might be a bad idea.

00:08:22.000 You know, when you change consciousness, you're more likely to have accidents.

00:08:25.000 You're more vulnerable to predators.

00:08:28.000 And, you know, so you would think that it would be kind of edited out by natural selection, but it hasn't been.

00:08:38.000 If drug taking were really bad, the drug takers would be gone from evolution, and they're not.

00:08:43.000 And so I started thinking, well, what are they good for?

00:08:45.000 How do we use drugs?

00:08:46.000 Why are they part of our lives?

00:08:48.000 And we're at this very interesting moment where the drug war is starting to end.

00:08:52.000 I think we can see the end of the drug war.

00:08:55.000 The voters have spoken, and they've essentially sued for peace.

00:08:58.000 You know, we've had all these...

00:09:01.000 Ballot initiatives.

00:09:02.000 What happened in Oregon last fall was amazing.

00:09:04.000 I think something just happened in California.

00:09:06.000 Yes.

00:09:07.000 The California State Senate voted to legalize psychedelics and also MDMA. Legalize or decriminalize?

00:09:14.000 You know, they sell it as decriminalized, but if you read the bill, it's legalized.

00:09:19.000 What is the specifics?

00:09:20.000 Well, 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.

00:09:34.000 DMT. Yeah, DMT is in there.

00:09:36.000 I don't know if 5-MeO DMT is in there.

00:09:38.000 I don't think it is.

00:09:40.000 Mescaline-producing cacti.

00:09:43.000 And basically, personal use, growing, and social sharing.

00:09:50.000 Is legal.

00:09:52.000 No commercialization.

00:09:55.000 Although 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?

00:10:09.000 Right.

00:10:09.000 Is it legal to be a guide?

00:10:12.000 Like that seems commercialized.

00:10:14.000 Even if someone brings their own.

00:10:15.000 Yeah.

00:10:16.000 Right?

00:10:16.000 I mean, you're sort of profiting off of the use.

00:10:19.000 Frankly, some aspects of this bill do not strike me as being completely well thought out.

00:10:24.000 I mean, including Ibogaine, where you really should have a health examination before you use it.

00:10:29.000 Why?

00:10:30.000 Why is that?

00:10:31.000 Well, Ibogaine has shown some...

00:10:32.000 This is an African shrub that is a psychedelic used in Africa for a long time.

00:10:37.000 Which is apparently phenomenal for people with...

00:10:40.000 Opiate, yeah.

00:10:41.000 Because in addition to giving you the psychedelic experience, it removes the craving for opium.

00:10:46.000 So there's a lot of clinics in Mexico who are using it.

00:10:49.000 However...

00:10:51.000 The 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.

00:10:59.000 And so it's not as benign as some other psychedelics in terms of the physiology.

00:11:05.000 Anyway, this still has to get through the assembly.

00:11:08.000 It's amazing.

00:11:09.000 It got passed.

00:11:10.000 This just happened June 1st.

00:11:13.000 And then we also had a whole bunch of decriminalization initiatives.

00:11:19.000 Washington, D.C. voted to decriminalize plant medicines and entheogens.

00:11:24.000 So we're getting to this new place where the public has had it with the drug war.

00:11:30.000 Neither party really wants to fight it anymore.

00:11:33.000 Even the Republicans are backing off on drug war.

00:11:35.000 It's not part of the culture wars now, which is fascinating.

00:11:38.000 We 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.

00:11:49.000 We have more overdoses now than we had before the opiate crisis.

00:11:54.000 The biggest health problem related to the drug war has been...

00:11:58.000 I'm sorry, the biggest problem since we started this drug war, public health problem, has been the opiate crisis.

00:12:04.000 800,000 people have overdosed.

00:12:07.000 Most of them started on legal opiates.

00:12:10.000 Purdue Pharma did a lot more damage than any illicit drug economy.

00:12:16.000 Didn't Johnson& Johnson just decide to get out of the opiate game?

00:12:19.000 Yeah, and they settled with the government and said they're going to stop telling them.

00:12:22.000 It sounds like $230 million or whatever it was.

00:12:26.000 That's nothing for them.

00:12:27.000 So 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?

00:12:36.000 How do we fold them into our culture?

00:12:38.000 And 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.

00:12:49.000 Remind people that most of us do have a relationship with a plant drug.

00:12:52.000 Caffeine being, you know, which I'm enjoying right here.

00:12:56.000 Tea, just a small amount of caffeine.

00:12:58.000 Yeah, relatively small.

00:12:59.000 This is a black rifle coffee espresso.

00:13:02.000 That's some serious stuff.

00:13:03.000 That's 300 milligrams.

00:13:04.000 You didn't offer me any of that.

00:13:05.000 You want one?

00:13:07.000 No, I think it'd be a bad idea, but thank you.

00:13:10.000 300 milligrams, that's serious.

00:13:13.000 I think you're a teetotaler.

00:13:16.000 I'm a lightweight on caffeine, but I am dependent, as I learned in the course of the book.

00:13:21.000 So I wanted to talk a little bit about our relationship to drugs.

00:13:26.000 What's a healthy relationship?

00:13:27.000 Drug abuse is a bad relationship to a drug.

00:13:30.000 Right.

00:13:31.000 It's not about breaking the law.

00:13:32.000 It's a bad relationship.

00:13:33.000 What do you think are the motivations for keeping these drugs illegal?

00:13:38.000 I mean, clearly, there's got to be some influence by the pharmaceutical companies.

00:13:42.000 There 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.

00:13:59.000 Yeah, but they don't They don't have a leg to stand on after starting the opioid crisis.

00:14:02.000 But it doesn't matter if they have a leg to stand on.

00:14:04.000 If there's no moral correct argument for their stance, they're still doing it to make money.

00:14:11.000 Yeah, and they may be out lobbying to keep these laws.

00:14:13.000 But it's interesting, it's the citizens who are overturning them.

00:14:16.000 A lot of these are ballot initiatives that you can't lobby.

00:14:20.000 And what happened in Oregon, I mean, there were two things there.

00:14:22.000 One was decriminalizing personal use of all drugs, even hard drugs.

00:14:27.000 And directing people who are busted into treatment, harm reduction approach.

00:14:33.000 And then, even more interesting, was this Proposition 109, which legalizes psilocybin therapy specifically, but does it in a very thoughtful way.

00:14:43.000 The 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.

00:14:57.000 It's kind of an amazing idea that the state will do this.

00:15:00.000 And so far, the governor has been very cooperative.

00:15:03.000 Whether the FDA will put up with it, you know, it's kind of usurping their power to regulate drugs.

00:15:09.000 There's whole lots of complications, but it's going to be really interesting to watch.

00:15:12.000 But it's the beginning of this process of figuring out a culture around drugs.

00:15:19.000 Rather than just say no.

00:15:21.000 And 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.

00:15:32.000 Yeah, I think that's what's really important, is people do have to understand the risks involved in all these different things.

00:15:38.000 And it's not simple.

00:15:39.000 It's not clean.

00:15:40.000 And we have to understand dosages.

00:15:43.000 We have to understand...

00:15:44.000 The set and setting, what's the right way to use them, when not to use them.

00:15:48.000 Certain people will be vulnerable, especially people that are psychologically vulnerable.

00:15:52.000 They shouldn't be experimenting with these things.

00:15:57.000 Because of all of the years of suppression, unfortunately, we don't have a lot to go on in terms of a roadmap.

00:16:05.000 Exactly.

00:16:05.000 And that's why it's going to be hard work.

00:16:07.000 And that's one of the reasons in the third section of this book on mescaline, I spent a lot of time looking at the Native American church.

00:16:14.000 Because I think indigenous use of psychedelics has a lot to teach us.

00:16:19.000 I don't think we can just borrow their methods, lock, stock, and barrel.

00:16:23.000 But there are certain principles that are really interesting and helpful.

00:16:26.000 One is you seldom do it alone.

00:16:30.000 You always do it with intention, purpose.

00:16:35.000 There is usually an elder involved to guide you.

00:16:39.000 And it's always surrounded by ritual.

00:16:42.000 And I think that's really significant.

00:16:45.000 And people who use drugs in a ritual way seldom get into trouble.

00:16:49.000 Even alcohol.

00:16:51.000 I mean, alcohol does more damage than any of these drugs we're talking about.

00:16:57.000 And so people who use alcohol in a ritual way, which is to say, you know, think of the social rituals we have.

00:17:05.000 You don't drink till the evening, right?

00:17:07.000 You don't start off in the morning drinking.

00:17:10.000 Or toast to a wedding or something like that.

00:17:12.000 Right.

00:17:12.000 Yeah, that's a ritual that we – and then also that we have alcohol with food very often.

00:17:19.000 We don't drive after we drink.

00:17:23.000 You know, it's a social thing.

00:17:24.000 People who drink that way are not the ones who get in serious trouble with it if they can stick to those rituals and rules.

00:17:31.000 And that's true across the board.

00:17:33.000 So I spent a lot of time interviewing Native Americans about the peyote ceremony and how they use it.

00:17:40.000 And, you know, we think of psychedelics as incredibly disruptive to society.

00:17:43.000 And in some ways it was in the 60s, right?

00:17:46.000 I mean, you know, it fed the anti-war movement.

00:17:49.000 It led to the generation gap.

00:17:51.000 And lots of, you know, tensions came out of it.

00:17:53.000 A lot of productive things came out of it, too.

00:17:55.000 But we think of it as very disruptive.

00:17:59.000 But in the Native American community, you have this model of drug use that's incredibly conservative and moral. 1.00

00:18:06.000 It's this very rigid ceremony.

00:18:08.000 Everybody sits around the fire, stares at the fire.

00:18:11.000 There are rules about which way the basket of peyote passes around the room.

00:18:15.000 There's songs you sing in certain ways.

00:18:18.000 There's drumming.

00:18:20.000 Did you do it?

00:18:21.000 No, I didn't.

00:18:22.000 And I'll tell you why in a second.

00:18:23.000 And the focus is on healing somebody.

00:18:29.000 And somebody who's got trauma, someone who has alcoholism, spousal abuse, or a big rite of passage.

00:18:36.000 Someone's going off to the army or whatever it is.

00:18:39.000 And everyone's attention is focused on that person.

00:18:44.000 And 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. 1.00

00:18:56.000 We, meaning white Americans, tried to crush in the 19th century.

00:19:00.000 And that's when peyoteism arose, is when Indian culture was on the verge of complete collapse. 1.00

00:19:06.000 It was a really dark moment.

00:19:08.000 They were forcing Indians onto reservations in Oklahoma.

00:19:11.000 They 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.

00:19:25.000 And peyoteism arose at this moment as a way to hold on to culture and heal trauma, and it worked. 0.52

00:19:32.000 Yeah, I don't think there's a particularly long history of peyoteism.

00:19:35.000 It's not ancient.

00:19:36.000 Well, with North American Indians, peyoteism really begins in the 1880s. 0.89

00:19:43.000 Really?

00:19:43.000 Yeah.

00:19:44.000 And the church is not actually established until 1918. But it's in the 1880s.

00:19:50.000 However, there were Indians in Texas and many more in Mexico that had been using peyote continually for thousands of years. 0.99

00:20:00.000 Do you know what specific tribes?

00:20:01.000 The Huichel in Mexico.

00:20:03.000 I don't know which the Texas tribes were.

00:20:07.000 But And they were using it in the same ritual fashion?

00:20:10.000 We don't know exactly what the ritual was, but they were using it.

00:20:13.000 So the oldest archaeological evidence is from Texas.

00:20:15.000 It's on the Rio Grande.

00:20:17.000 There's something called the Shumla Caves, which is an archaeological dig that was discovered a few decades ago.

00:20:23.000 And they found there peyote effigies, little dolls made out of peyote.

00:20:28.000 And evidence that they were being used ceremonially.

00:20:31.000 So it's the oldest psychedelic.

00:20:33.000 So even though that chain was broken with some North American tribes, because it only grows, by the way, in Texas.

00:20:39.000 There's a very small band near Laredo where the peyote gardens are.

00:20:45.000 And so it was kind of rediscovered and moved up to Oklahoma, and then it spread around the country from there.

00:20:54.000 When you say it's the oldest psychedelic, do you mean...

00:20:56.000 That we know of, that we have evidence it was being used 6,000 years ago.

00:21:01.000 Really?

00:21:02.000 Yeah.

00:21:02.000 There may be older ones, but I haven't seen the record of that.

00:21:05.000 What is the evidence?

00:21:06.000 It's the North American?

00:21:07.000 The Native American Indian?

00:21:08.000 Oh, so that's 6,000 years old.

00:21:10.000 6,000 years ago.

00:21:10.000 Wow.

00:21:11.000 I 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.

00:21:21.000 And they tested it, and it was peyote.

00:21:24.000 So it's been around, even if it hasn't been in continuous use among American Indians.

00:21:30.000 But I just think that's such an interesting model for how to think about it.

00:21:36.000 And we have to come up with our own cultural container.

00:21:39.000 We're not going to just take the Indian container.

00:21:41.000 It doesn't feel right to us, and it would be cultural appropriation.

00:21:45.000 But that's what we have to figure out.

00:21:47.000 What are the proper rituals in which to use psychedelics?

00:21:51.000 Are you aware of the book, The Immortality Key?

00:21:55.000 Yeah.

00:21:55.000 Brian Moralescu's book?

00:21:57.000 Yeah.

00:21:57.000 Fascinating.

00:21:58.000 And he's writing about evidence of very early use in the old world of psychedelic compounds, ergot.

00:22:06.000 Which is the fungus from which LSD is derived, was found in some communion cups, right?

00:22:12.000 In Spain.

00:22:13.000 That's kind of wild.

00:22:15.000 And the idea that the Eucharist may have involved psychedelic.

00:22:21.000 There was also cannabis found in some Jewish sites from that period.

00:22:26.000 And 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.

00:22:34.000 Right.

00:22:35.000 It had to be something else.

00:22:36.000 Oh, for sure.

00:22:36.000 And also, did you know wine back then had a very low alcohol content?

00:22:40.000 I didn't know that.

00:22:41.000 Yeah, so did beer.

00:22:41.000 All the more reason to suspect that.

00:22:44.000 They were spiking it.

00:22:45.000 They were spiking it with something.

00:22:46.000 We don't know what.

00:22:47.000 I mean, and we don't know how you would use ergot because ergot can also give you gangrene.

00:22:53.000 Really?

00:22:53.000 Oh, yeah.

00:22:54.000 When you take it orally, it would give you gangrene?

00:22:56.000 I don't know.

00:22:57.000 Well, I don't know how else you'd take it.

00:23:00.000 So ergotism was this disease people got when they ate.

00:23:03.000 In a wet year, the rye crop would get all this ergot on it.

00:23:07.000 But people were desperate.

00:23:08.000 They would still make bread from it.

00:23:10.000 And it would make people kind of crazy.

00:23:13.000 Well, they think that that is the Salem witch trial.

00:23:15.000 Right.

00:23:16.000 That's one theory.

00:23:17.000 And that you have these outbreaks of what was called witchcraft, which is just people having visions and...

00:23:22.000 Tripping.

00:23:23.000 Tripping, basically.

00:23:24.000 Yeah.

00:23:25.000 And there are episodes all through European history of these outbreaks.

00:23:29.000 St. Vitus d'Ange was another term that was used for this.

00:23:33.000 And those outbreaks coincide with core samples that show particularly late frosts.

00:23:37.000 Yeah, and especially wet years when you've got lots of fungus.

00:23:42.000 But the other effect you can get from eating this stuff is gangrene.

00:23:46.000 So if it was consumed as a drug, it was processed in some way to make it safe.

00:23:51.000 And 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.

00:24:05.000 There was a potion that they would take called a kikion. 0.69

00:24:09.000 Everyone was sworn to secrecy, so no one talked about this, but they would take this potion and— Kukion, right? 0.86

00:24:16.000 Kukion or Kikion.

00:24:17.000 I don't know. 0.97

00:24:18.000 My Greek is shitty. 0.92

00:24:19.000 K-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, 0.98

00:24:36.000 and this is just the secondary table.

00:24:41.000 But how do we prove these things?

00:24:45.000 These archaeologists are doing interesting work, and there's going to be a new institute at Harvard working on some of these questions.

00:24:51.000 Yeah, 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, 0.71

00:25:07.000 and 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?

00:25:19.000 You know, they didn't know, and now they do know.

00:25:21.000 It all makes sense, right?

00:25:23.000 If anybody has ever done a psychedelic drug, it makes sense.

00:25:26.000 You know, look, I think psychedelics have had a very profound effect on cultural evolution in many, many ways.

00:25:35.000 The encounter of these molecules with a certain mind produces memes, new ideas, metaphors, theories, and visions.

00:25:45.000 That sometimes, not always, ends up changing everything.

00:25:51.000 You know, 99% of the things people, insights people have on psychedelics are probably not that valuable, you know.

00:25:56.000 I mean, they may be personally useful, you know, love is everything, whatever it is.

00:26:01.000 But every now and then, in a certain mind, there's an idea.

00:26:05.000 And it might be a vision of an afterworld.

00:26:07.000 It might be the idea of an unseen otherworld, a beyond.

00:26:12.000 And then that person tells that story, and suddenly this enters culture.

00:26:15.000 Yeah, somebody had a vision.

00:26:16.000 They went up on a mountain and they saw God.

00:26:19.000 It's a very plausible explanation for how religion might get started.

00:26:24.000 It completely makes sense to me.

00:26:26.000 In 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,

00:26:47.000 being God, was consuming smoked DMT. And that they were having this vision that Moses was...

00:26:55.000 I mean, it makes sense. 0.81

00:26:56.000 If 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.

00:27:03.000 And you're going to not know what's a metaphor and what's literal.

00:27:07.000 Exactly.

00:27:08.000 And that's what they think.

00:27:09.000 That's fascinating.

00:27:10.000 I haven't heard about that.

00:27:11.000 I have to follow up on that.

00:27:12.000 So I'm very interested in the role that psychedelics have played.

00:27:14.000 And it's true in science, too, right?

00:27:16.000 I mean, we just took a PCR test, I think, you know, COVID test.

00:27:20.000 And who invented PCR? A scientist named Carey Mullis, who got the idea on an LSD trip in Northern California.

00:27:29.000 And he's talked about it.

00:27:31.000 And he said, LSD allowed me to sit on the molecule and watch and see what was going on.

00:27:36.000 And so that encounter of that molecule with that mind gave us this amazing tool that all of genetics depends on.

00:27:43.000 Yeah.

00:27:44.000 We took a rapid antigen test, by the way.

00:27:46.000 Oh, okay.

00:27:46.000 We didn't take a PCR test.

00:27:48.000 Thanks for the fact check.

00:27:49.000 He's spoken out about that.

00:27:50.000 He just said it's not what it's for.

00:27:53.000 It shouldn't be used in that regard.

00:27:54.000 Interesting.

00:27:55.000 Yeah.

00:27:56.000 But he found it again, figured it out.

00:27:59.000 And there are many stories through history.

00:28:01.000 I mean, I think the human imagination has a natural history, right?

00:28:06.000 It has to.

00:28:06.000 Everything has a natural history.

00:28:08.000 So what is that natural history?

00:28:10.000 Well, 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.

00:28:18.000 Well, I think the last time you were here, we talked about Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory, which is the most fascinating.

00:28:24.000 I know.

00:28:25.000 And the one I have the most trouble getting my head around...

00:28:29.000 Have you talked to Dennis about it?

00:28:31.000 Dennis McKenna?

00:28:31.000 Yeah.

00:28:31.000 Oh, yeah.

00:28:32.000 We've talked about it.

00:28:32.000 We're doing an event together, actually, in a couple weeks, and I'm sure it'll come up.

00:28:36.000 Dennis is the most convincing.

00:28:38.000 Yeah.

00:28:38.000 When he discusses it.

00:28:39.000 I haven't heard his whole rap on it, but I need to.

00:28:41.000 I'll send you a video of him saying it from this podcast.

00:28:44.000 Great.

00:28:45.000 Dennis is brilliant.

00:28:47.000 I totally agree.

00:28:49.000 He's well versed in the world of psychedelics.

00:28:52.000 And in the world of his brother.

00:28:54.000 Yes, yes.

00:28:55.000 And good and bad, right?

00:28:57.000 And his brother was just such an important figure in the psychedelic world of just spreading the gospel.

00:29:04.000 I so regret I got into it too late to meet him.

00:29:08.000 Yeah, me too.

00:29:09.000 I mean, to have him on this podcast would have been...

00:29:11.000 Oh my God.

00:29:13.000 Lost opportunity.

00:29:14.000 That would be the guy, yeah.

00:29:15.000 People always say, like, living or dead, who's a person you wish you could have gotten?

00:29:19.000 Is that on the list?

00:29:21.000 Terrence, yeah.

00:29:21.000 Bill Hicks and Terence McKenna.

00:29:23.000 Those would be my two guys.

00:29:24.000 So, you know, the issue with that is that how...

00:29:27.000 I understand how the impact of psychedelics finds its way into cultural evolution pretty easily.

00:29:33.000 Yeah.

00:29:34.000 But he's saying it's part of genetic evolution and that it actually changed the genome, as I understand it, and that people's...

00:29:43.000 and accounts for the growth of the size of the human brain.

00:29:47.000 And...

00:29:49.000 And 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,

00:30:07.000 often you can see musical notes or taste them or whatever.

00:30:11.000 And so this is what gave us language.

00:30:15.000 I still don't get...

00:30:16.000 So the people who had this tool were more likely to reproduce?

00:30:20.000 How does it actually get into the genome?

00:30:22.000 There's a bunch of things that he...

00:30:24.000 I mean, obviously, this is purely speculative, right?

00:30:26.000 He's trying to figure out and connect the dots.

00:30:28.000 And Dennis does a better job, I think, of explaining it from a scientific perspective.

00:30:31.000 But Terence's position was there was a bunch of things that were happening that coincided with climate change.

00:30:37.000 So these jungles, these tropical rainforests were receding into grasslands.

00:30:42.000 As they were receding into grasslands, the primates were climbing out of trees and experimenting with new food sources.

00:30:48.000 One 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.

00:31:06.000 So they would experiment.

00:31:08.000 By trying these different things to see if they're edible.

00:31:11.000 In consuming psilocybin, particularly in low doses, psilocybin positively affects visual acuity.

00:31:18.000 So they were better hunters?

00:31:20.000 Better hunters, more accurate in edge detection.

00:31:24.000 So 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.

00:31:37.000 Fascinating.

00:31:38.000 Yeah, so that's one.

00:31:39.000 There's some cultures that give psilocybin to their hunting dogs.

00:31:42.000 It makes sense.

00:31:43.000 Yeah.

00:31:43.000 It makes sense.

00:31:44.000 There's a clarity involved in consumption of psilocybin where it sort of eliminates anxiety.

00:31:52.000 It focuses you on tasks at hand, specifically in lower doses.

00:31:58.000 Yeah.

00:31:58.000 Like one of the things that people are doing that I have a lot of friends that are doing it right now is microdosing.

00:32:03.000 Yeah.

00:32:03.000 It's very, very popular.

00:32:05.000 And their perspective is that there's something about microdosing that allows them to be more present.

00:32:09.000 It allows them to feel better and be less anxious.

00:32:13.000 Work better and feel more creative.

00:32:15.000 Yeah.

00:32:15.000 The other thing about psilocybin is that it enhances community.

00:32:22.000 So, 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.

00:32:32.000 So, that might have been a protective issue.

00:32:34.000 So, they were better hunters, more tribal, and It makes them horny.

00:32:39.000 So they're more likely to have sex, more likely to breed.

00:32:42.000 And 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.

00:32:53.000 The connection of sounds to objects, that it might have initiated that.

00:32:58.000 That's a very good restatement.

00:33:00.000 Thank you.

00:33:00.000 Excellent.

00:33:00.000 That's better than the version in Terence's book.

00:33:03.000 Well, it's over the course of two million years that the human brain size doubled, which is crazy.

00:33:09.000 But there are other explanations.

00:33:10.000 I dealt with one of them.

00:33:11.000 I don't think there's only one.

00:33:12.000 No, and it may have been several things happening at the same time.

00:33:15.000 Have you heard about the cooking hypothesis?

00:33:16.000 Yes, I have.

00:33:17.000 So 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.

00:33:32.000 You know, chimps spend like six hours a day chewing because they're eating all this uncooked plant material.

00:33:39.000 And 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.

00:33:49.000 And I find that theory, and there's some evidence for that.

00:33:52.000 I mean, like, if you feed snakes, you know, some on cooked food, some on uncooked food, they grow much faster on the cooked food.

00:33:59.000 One 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.

00:34:09.000 So anyway, it's, you know, there's a lot of speculation in this whole area, but it's fascinating.

00:34:13.000 It is fascinating.

00:34:15.000 And there is a long history of human use of psychedelics.

00:34:19.000 Yeah.

00:34:19.000 And it kind of makes sense that if you probably keep going, you're going to deal with ancient man using it somewhere along the line.

00:34:26.000 Yeah, there's no historical record, but there's no reason to think people just figured it out 6,000 years ago.

00:34:30.000 People ate everything.

00:34:31.000 They had to.

00:34:32.000 Except things that are connected to psychedelics.

00:34:35.000 And this is where it gets really weird when you get cultures that are really, they don't have a lot of food, but yet they worship cows.

00:34:41.000 Yeah.

00:34:41.000 You know, and why would they roast your cows?

00:34:44.000 Well, the speculation is the cows, the manure...

00:34:46.000 The cow patties?

00:34:47.000 Yeah, and then psilocybin grows in the manure.

00:34:49.000 Yeah, there's several cultures where cows are divine.

00:34:51.000 My 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.

00:35:02.000 Because 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.

00:35:09.000 Did it work?

00:35:10.000 I don't know if it worked, but it's a terrible tragedy, even the fact that they did it.

00:35:13.000 Like, what are you doing?

00:35:16.000 Some antifungal or something?

00:35:18.000 I don't know what they're doing, but he said that they would all go out to the fields. 0.99

00:35:23.000 And find cow shit. 0.99

00:35:24.000 And it was apparently just insanely common. 1.00

00:35:27.000 Yeah.

00:35:27.000 It is in the Pacific Northwest.

00:35:28.000 I have a brother-in-law who grew up in Vancouver and he said, yeah, they were out there all the time finding them.

00:35:36.000 But I've, you know, I spent a lot of time hiking in Northern California and I go through a lot of cattle and I've never found one.

00:35:43.000 Really?

00:35:43.000 It may have to be moist, very moist conditions.

00:35:46.000 Our cow patties get kind of desiccated.

00:35:48.000 Mushrooms are interesting, right?

00:35:49.000 They have different kind of specific conditions.

00:35:52.000 Morel mushrooms are really, really delicious.

00:35:55.000 And apparently they favor places where it's been burned.

00:35:58.000 I went hunting for them a couple years ago for my last book.

00:36:03.000 After fires, big forest fires, you can reliably go out there.

00:36:09.000 In the spring, just as the snow is melting, they pop up in huge quantities.

00:36:15.000 We were like 10, 20, 30 pounds of morels, and you know that's a lot of morels.

00:36:20.000 That's crazy.

00:36:21.000 It was always on firelands.

00:36:22.000 And the reason, the theory is that, you know, these fungi, first of all, most of them, you know, live underground, right?

00:36:29.000 I mean, the part we see is just the fruiting body.

00:36:32.000 It's like the apple on the tree.

00:36:34.000 Everything else is underground.

00:36:35.000 That they're happily doing their thing, and then suddenly there's a crisis, and they've lost their hosts.

00:36:40.000 Their hosts are dead.

00:36:41.000 So they have to get out of the forest.

00:36:43.000 So they put up these fruiting bodies and hope that their spores will move them to a place that hasn't burned.

00:36:48.000 Oh, that's what it is.

00:36:51.000 Yeah, it's their escape strategy.

00:36:53.000 Wow.

00:36:53.000 And we're helping them by picking it and moving them around.

00:36:56.000 Oh, wow.

00:36:57.000 That's fascinating.

00:36:58.000 Did you dehydrate them and save them?

00:36:59.000 Yeah, we dried as many.

00:37:00.000 We ate a lot of them.

00:37:02.000 They're so good.

00:37:02.000 I was hunting with a guy who hunts for restaurants in Northern California.

00:37:05.000 So he sold most of them and I took a couple pounds home.

00:37:09.000 But I didn't dehydrate.

00:37:10.000 I've done that with porcini when I found too many porcini.

00:37:13.000 But I didn't do it with morels.

00:37:15.000 I just ate them really quickly.

00:37:16.000 The only way I've ever gotten them is buy them from distributors online that sell them dried out.

00:37:21.000 Dried, yeah.

00:37:21.000 They're so good, though.

00:37:22.000 They're fantastic, but fresh, they're amazing.

00:37:25.000 And I haven't had too many occasions.

00:37:28.000 But we had a lot of fires last year in California, so there'll be a lot of morels. 1.00

00:37:32.000 That's the one good thing you can say.

00:37:34.000 Yeah.

00:37:35.000 Is there a place where the Amanita muscaria reliably grows, where it does have a psychedelic property to it?

00:37:47.000 Because that's one of those really debatable mushrooms, really debatable fungi.

00:37:56.000 Some people don't put any faith in the idea that it was involved in Christianity or in Santa Claus or any of that stuff.

00:38:05.000 And some people put all their money on that.

00:38:08.000 They put it all on red.

00:38:09.000 And there is a way to process it, even...

00:38:13.000 Drying 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.

00:38:23.000 Paul Stamets knows a lot more about this than I do.

00:38:25.000 And he's had an experience with it that he said he would never repeat.

00:38:30.000 He would never repeat it?

00:38:31.000 Yeah, it was such a bad experience.

00:38:33.000 Oh, not repeat like verbally.

00:38:36.000 No, no, no, no.

00:38:37.000 It's not a secret.

00:38:38.000 So he had a bad experience.

00:38:39.000 Yeah, he did.

00:38:41.000 That it was very toxic and he had a really excruciating day.

00:38:44.000 It was psychedelic but had a lot of other gastrointestinal...

00:38:49.000 I'm not sure exactly what it was.

00:38:50.000 I remember when I was interviewing him for the last book, he talked about it.

00:38:54.000 Because I've always been curious about it.

00:38:56.000 This is...

00:38:57.000 This 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.

00:39:08.000 It just keeps showing up that you would think it had some use or religious, you know, value.

00:39:18.000 But maybe like ergot, the method of processing has just been lost to history.

00:39:26.000 Yeah, McKenna believed that it was different, that it varied genetically, and it also varied seasonably, and that it possibly varied dependent upon the environment.

00:39:36.000 Or the substrate.

00:39:37.000 Yeah.

00:39:38.000 Well, that's possible.

00:39:40.000 I mean, mushrooms produce different metabolites, depending on what they're growing on, to some extent.

00:39:45.000 The other thing that I wanted to say was, like, in some cultures, in the absence of psychedelics, they would do something called ordeal poisoning.

00:39:54.000 What is that?

00:39:54.000 You know what that is?

00:39:55.000 It's like you would almost go through a near-death experience that you could get out of.

00:40:01.000 Like it was reliable.

00:40:02.000 Through suffocation?

00:40:03.000 No, through this poison.

00:40:05.000 Through some sort of plant toxin or some...

00:40:08.000 See if you can Google ordeal poisoning.

00:40:11.000 Trial by ordeal.

00:40:12.000 Yeah, 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.

00:40:25.000 But 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.

00:40:39.000 Some cultures, such as the, oh boy, you want to try that one? 1.00

00:40:45.000 Afikuburutu?

00:40:46.000 Present-day Nigeria would administer poisonous Calabar bean, known as Aseri in Efik, which contains phisostigmine.

00:41:01.000 Phisostigmine?

00:41:02.000 In an attempt to detect guilt, a defendant who vomited up the bean was innocent.

00:41:07.000 A defendant who became ill or died was considered guilty.

00:41:10.000 Residents of Madagascar could...

00:41:12.000 Well, I don't think this is the same.

00:41:14.000 This isn't it.

00:41:14.000 This is it.

00:41:14.000 Did you Google ordeal poisoning?

00:41:16.000 Uh-huh.

00:41:17.000 Yeah.

00:41:18.000 Ordeal poisoning rituals?

00:41:23.000 This is a whole Wikipedia on trial by ordeal, and this is the part about poisoning.

00:41:27.000 So this is a different kind of trial.

00:41:28.000 I think it's a trial by ordeal.

00:41:32.000 Ordeal poisoning as, I don't know, how would you Google that?

00:41:39.000 As a psychedelic ritual?

00:41:41.000 It wouldn't be psychedelic.

00:41:44.000 Poison induced near-death experience.

00:41:46.000 I 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...

00:42:01.000 Whether 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.

00:42:13.000 Right.

00:42:13.000 A liminal experience, right?

00:42:15.000 Yeah, a definable moment where you got through it and you go, congratulations, Michael, you passed through the gate.

00:42:20.000 Well, you know, look, I mean, for a lot of people, that is the psychedelic experience becomes a sort of rehearsal for death, right?

00:42:28.000 Yeah.

00:42:28.000 I mean, they feel like they're dying or they're, you know, I had an experience of my ego completely detonating and it was gone.

00:42:35.000 And it's a death you come back from.

00:42:39.000 Yeah.

00:42:39.000 And there's something that teaches you a lot of things.

00:42:43.000 Yeah.

00:42:45.000 So 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?

00:42:56.000 People who go out on vision quests, right?

00:42:58.000 And they go five days without food.

00:43:01.000 They enter an altered state of consciousness.

00:43:03.000 And that becomes part of the right.

00:43:06.000 Even just staying awake.

00:43:07.000 Yeah.

00:43:09.000 Yeah.

00:43:09.000 So 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.

00:43:29.000 But I really do think that the kind of cultural container you build around them is the best assurance of safety.

00:43:37.000 It's one of the problems that we have in this culture is that we've suppressed this information for so long and lied...

00:43:42.000 Because of the drug war.

00:43:43.000 Yeah, and lied about the effects of it while we were supporting drugs that did irreparable harm.

00:43:48.000 So much damage, yeah.

00:43:50.000 I agree.

00:43:50.000 I think that there's so much misinformation that came out of the drug war.

00:43:54.000 It's still coming out of the drug war.

00:43:56.000 I mean, on the nature of addiction, for example, that it's all about chemicals.

00:44:00.000 It's not all about chemicals.

00:44:02.000 There are many people who can use an addictive drug without getting addicted.

00:44:05.000 When we were in Vietnam, 20% of the soldiers had a heroin addiction in country while they were there.

00:44:14.000 20%?

00:44:14.000 20%, okay?

00:44:15.000 They were all using heroin, or a lot of them were, and 20% were addicted.

00:44:19.000 When they got home, 95% just stopped using.

00:44:22.000 No treatment, just stopped, because the environment had changed.

00:44:27.000 They didn't need it.

00:44:28.000 They didn't need to medicate themselves anymore.

00:44:30.000 The withdrawal from opiate addiction is not as it's depicted in the drug war.

00:44:36.000 It's a bad flu.

00:44:38.000 It's actually withdrawal from alcohol is a lot worse.

00:44:41.000 Withdrawal from alcohol can kill you.

00:44:42.000 And benzos, right?

00:44:44.000 Yeah.

00:44:44.000 Oh, yeah.

00:44:44.000 That's a really dangerous one, too.

00:44:47.000 But addiction is, I mean, look at the geography of the opioid crisis, right?

00:44:53.000 I mean, these are places where the opportunities have dried up.

00:44:57.000 There are no jobs.

00:44:58.000 People's prospects are terrible.

00:45:01.000 And they're rightly called deaths of despair.

00:45:06.000 Whereas people in other environments can use opiates without a problem.

00:45:09.000 And we don't pay enough attention to that.

00:45:14.000 It's contextual, whether people get addicted or not.

00:45:17.000 Or it's a function of their history.

00:45:20.000 Most addicts, according to a lot of research, had trauma in their lives at some point.

00:45:25.000 And they're dealing with that.

00:45:26.000 Have you talked to Dr. Carl Hart?

00:45:29.000 Yes, I have.

00:45:29.000 Well, I've exchanged email with him and I just read his book.

00:45:32.000 Yeah, Drug Use for Grown-Ups.

00:45:34.000 It's a really interesting and courageous book.

00:45:36.000 He's a fascinating person.

00:45:37.000 Yeah.

00:45:38.000 And brilliant.

00:45:39.000 And 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.

00:45:49.000 Yeah.

00:45:49.000 Hard drugs, so called.

00:45:50.000 He loves heroin.

00:45:52.000 Yeah.

00:45:52.000 He sniffs heroin.

00:45:54.000 He said it makes him closer to his wife.

00:45:56.000 It makes him a kinder person.

00:45:57.000 Yeah.

00:45:58.000 And it's so easy to dismiss coming from someone, you know, who maybe is not an academic and someone who's not just so articulate.

00:46:07.000 And when it comes from a guy like him, you got to go, what, Pete?

00:46:10.000 Yeah.

00:46:10.000 I know.

00:46:11.000 I know. 1.00

00:46:11.000 You do fucking heroin? 1.00

00:46:12.000 Like, heroin's bad for you. 1.00

00:46:14.000 I mean, we've learned that heroin is just the most evil chemical going.

00:46:17.000 He loves Coke.

00:46:18.000 He loves cocaine.

00:46:19.000 Yeah.

00:46:19.000 He said nice things to say about meth.

00:46:21.000 He said it's very similar to MDMA. I know.

00:46:24.000 It's a pretty wild book to read.

00:46:27.000 You should talk to him.

00:46:28.000 I should.

00:46:29.000 Because he's a fascinating guy to talk to him.

00:46:31.000 Yeah, I should interview him.

00:46:31.000 Because he's so open.

00:46:33.000 Yeah.

00:46:33.000 He's so open with it all.

00:46:35.000 And a genuinely good person.

00:46:38.000 And he's trying to open this same conversation, right?

00:46:41.000 Yes, yes.

00:46:41.000 On how these substances are going to become decriminalized.

00:46:45.000 How do we fold them into our culture?

00:46:47.000 What are our models?

00:46:48.000 Yeah.

00:46:48.000 Yes.

00:46:48.000 And a lot of people think cannabis is the model, and I really don't think that's true.

00:46:54.000 And 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.

00:47:06.000 And I just think psychedelics are a much more consequential, serious experience that has to be handled with more care.

00:47:16.000 I mean, one of the problems of the drug war is to put all illicit drugs in the same basket, right?

00:47:20.000 And they're not.

00:47:21.000 They're so different.

00:47:22.000 Psychedelics are different than the opiates, and the opiates are different than cannabis.

00:47:27.000 And we would never lump anything else together the way we've lumped these drugs.

00:47:32.000 And so we're going to have to look at each of them on their own terms.

00:47:36.000 And that process, you know, I think it's beginning, and I think Carl's book is part of that.

00:47:41.000 I think culturally we're going to deal with an issue if we combine psilocybin and cannabis.

00:47:47.000 Because cannabis can be used so easily and lightly and recreationally.

00:47:51.000 You can smoke a joint and go see a movie with your friends and laugh and giggle.

00:47:55.000 Mushrooms can be used that way if you microdose.

00:48:00.000 Microdosing, you know, I wouldn't have an issue with.

00:48:03.000 But tripping balls, like full on, eat a bag, go to another dimension, that's a life-changing experience. 0.98

00:48:13.000 When I go to a pot store in L.A. and I see the purple haze right next to the AK-47 or Alaskan Thunderfuck. 0.97

00:48:23.000 It seems weird to have mushrooms right there, too.

00:48:27.000 It's like, do you know what you're selling these people?

00:48:29.000 You're literally selling the gateway to God.

00:48:31.000 We should be a little more careful with this, or at least...

00:48:34.000 And approach it with a little more reverence.

00:48:36.000 Yes, yes.

00:48:36.000 That's what I would like.

00:48:37.000 What I would like is...

00:48:39.000 And the problem with this is, of course, the cult of personality.

00:48:42.000 I would love psychedelic centers if there was some place where people could go to have these experiences.

00:48:48.000 But 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.

00:49:02.000 Because there's a potential there, especially for the uninitiated who's meeting the initiated.

00:49:07.000 And they all have, you know, this kind of way of talking that seems a little contrived and they're wearing wooden beads.

00:49:13.000 And they have the answer and they know the key to the universe. 1.00

00:49:16.000 Fuck, man. 1.00

00:49:16.000 That's a problem. 1.00

00:49:17.000 There's a weird phenomenon with psychedelics.

00:49:19.000 You know, we talk a lot about ego dissolution on psychedelics, but there's also ego inflation.

00:49:24.000 Yes.

00:49:24.000 And that happens.

00:49:25.000 And, 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.

00:49:37.000 And that's a phenomenon to watch out for.

00:49:40.000 I agree.

00:49:42.000 I think someday we will move to—I'm very interested in this process of how psychedelics move into the society.

00:49:47.000 And I see three paths, basically.

00:49:49.000 There's the medical path, which is, you know, we're pretty far down that path.

00:49:53.000 The FDA will probably approve MDMA within, what does Rick Doblin say, two years or something like that?

00:49:59.000 Yeah.

00:50:00.000 Maybe three for psilocybin or four.

00:50:02.000 So it's not far away at all.

00:50:04.000 And ketamine is currently in use pretty widely right now for therapy.

00:50:07.000 For many people, that is suggesting a model.

00:50:11.000 So 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.

00:50:26.000 They're very expensive.

00:50:28.000 And they're doing this basically to work out the kinks so that they can move to psilocybin and MDMA when it's ready.

00:50:35.000 So that'll be one kind of elite way that people will have the experience because it'll cost thousands of dollars.

00:50:42.000 And then there'll be the medical model.

00:50:44.000 And that'll probably be more clinic-based.

00:50:48.000 Nobody's figured out exactly.

00:50:50.000 And then there'll be the religious model.

00:50:52.000 And I think that's a really interesting one to watch.

00:50:55.000 In 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.

00:51:08.000 And given this Supreme Court and its expansive interpretations of religious liberty, basically they're cutting huge amounts of slack.

00:51:21.000 That for reasons of religious conscience, you can be exempted from all sorts of federal regulations and laws.

00:51:28.000 I mean, Hobby Lobby and the decision just the other day.

00:51:32.000 That 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.

00:51:41.000 And there is a group of psychedelic lawyers who are looking for the right cases to bring through the system. 0.92

00:51:48.000 Right.

00:51:49.000 Boy, does that sound like an oxymoron.

00:51:50.000 Yeah, psychedelic lawyers.

00:51:53.000 It really is.

00:51:54.000 They call themselves that.

00:51:55.000 I'm not calling them that.

00:51:55.000 That's great.

00:51:56.000 I love it.

00:51:57.000 I'm glad they're out there.

00:51:58.000 They're based in Boulder, as you would guess.

00:52:00.000 I mean, it's the ultimate jumbo shrimp, you know?

00:52:03.000 Of course they're based in Boulder. 0.97

00:52:06.000 I fucking love Boulder. 0.96

00:52:07.000 It's too good. 0.99

00:52:08.000 It's too good.

00:52:09.000 But it's going to be like an exploding cigar for, you know, Justice Alito when one of these cases come up.

00:52:14.000 Because they're going to have trouble saying no.

00:52:16.000 Because the precedents are being established.

00:52:18.000 So I think we'll have this religious path, we'll have this retreat center path, and we'll have this medical path.

00:52:24.000 And the most accessible may be the medical path, since it'll get, presumably, if it really works, get covered by insurance.

00:52:31.000 Yeah, especially for people that have PTSD, soldiers, police officers, things along those lines.

00:52:36.000 Women have been abused. 0.99

00:52:37.000 People have been abused, yes.

00:52:38.000 Are you aware what Alex Gray is doing?

00:52:41.000 Not right now.

00:52:42.000 Do you know who Alex Gray is, the artist?

00:52:43.000 Yeah, sure, the artist.

00:52:43.000 He has formed a church.

00:52:45.000 He has religious tax-exempt status, and he's building this insane, spectacular chapel in upstate New York.

00:52:55.000 He bought a bunch of land.

00:52:57.000 And he was in some sort of a dispute with the town, but I think they've settled that because he's not paying any taxes.

00:53:03.000 He's a church.

00:53:04.000 I'm sure they're pleased about that.

00:53:05.000 But I mean, if anybody can do that, it's outskirt.

00:53:08.000 Yeah, he'll get the iconography down.

00:53:10.000 Oh my God, you've got to see what the place looks like.

00:53:12.000 Have you been there?

00:53:13.000 No, I have not, but I must.

00:53:15.000 I must go.

00:53:16.000 Well, I spend part of the year in that part of the world, so I will check it out.

00:53:19.000 I've had Alex on a couple of times, and he's a genuine gem of a human being.

00:53:23.000 I've never met him.

00:53:25.000 He's the real deal, man.

00:53:28.000 When you're around him, first of all, he's so kind.

00:53:33.000 And as an artist, he's phenomenal.

00:53:35.000 He's so brilliant as an artist.

00:53:37.000 But that's him.

00:53:38.000 He's walking the walk.

00:53:40.000 So is LSD a sacrament in this church?

00:53:44.000 You'd have to ask him.

00:53:45.000 I wouldn't want to speak.

00:53:46.000 We don't want to get him in trouble.

00:53:46.000 I think he's a big fan of the tryptamines in particular, but LSD as well.

00:53:50.000 But the artwork, the iconography, the imagery that he portrays is the best interpretation of tryptamine experiences that I've ever seen.

00:54:02.000 Because 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.

00:54:14.000 Words 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.

00:54:34.000 When I was under an experience, I was like, oh, he went...

00:54:38.000 I wonder if there's little rooms you go into or little places you go into based on...

00:54:44.000 None of those, but all of those are great.

00:54:50.000 They're all great.

00:54:51.000 There's an Albert Hoffman one there.

00:54:53.000 He's got a great version of the Stoned Apes. 0.99

00:54:55.000 That one in the upper left-hand corner is super similar to some stuff I've seen before.

00:55:00.000 Super similar.

00:55:02.000 Like, as they expand and move, and those things are all constantly moving and shifting.

00:55:07.000 That's what it looks like.

00:55:08.000 So his place is called...

00:55:10.000 I think the place in New York City was called the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, and I think that's what he's calling...

00:55:16.000 He's calling it a Cosm, right?

00:55:20.000 Are there pictures of the building?

00:55:23.000 It's crazy.

00:55:25.000 Because it's basically his art 3D printed outside of the building.

00:55:30.000 So if you would go to an ancient Egyptian temple, their temple would be covered in all this incredible artwork, sculpture.

00:55:38.000 He's doing a similar thing, but with his vision interpreted into 3D sculpture. 0.99

00:55:45.000 So it's wild, wild shit. 0.99

00:55:48.000 I don't know how he's doing it. 1.00

00:55:49.000 I mean, I think people are donating.

00:55:51.000 I think there's a lot going on.

00:55:54.000 I have to make a field trip.

00:55:56.000 He's just so genuine.

00:55:57.000 I 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.

00:56:06.000 So see, it looks on the outside very similar to his artwork.

00:56:11.000 Yeah, it does.

00:56:12.000 But it also has these feelings of Egypt in it.

00:56:16.000 I don't know.

00:56:17.000 It's very Egyptian. 0.53

00:56:18.000 Yeah, and like this alien language he's got scrolled across.

00:56:22.000 That probably means something to him.

00:56:25.000 I don't even know what it means.

00:56:28.000 That interior down there is not the interior, I don't think, of the actual place.

00:56:32.000 I can't find pictures.

00:56:33.000 They might still be making it.

00:56:35.000 I don't know.

00:56:36.000 He's amazing, though.

00:56:38.000 And what he does is...

00:56:40.000 Oh, there it is.

00:56:41.000 It's called Entheon.

00:56:42.000 That's what it is.

00:56:43.000 Entheon.

00:56:43.000 Right.

00:56:43.000 Yeah, hit that video.

00:56:44.000 Let's see what it looks like.

00:56:46.000 It's a computer.

00:56:49.000 Sorry, it's not built yet.

00:56:51.000 Well, they're in the middle of building it, though.

00:56:54.000 I do know that some work has been done.

00:56:58.000 Last time he was on was how many years ago, Jamie?

00:57:01.000 Three?

00:57:02.000 Sure.

00:57:03.000 Somewhere around there?

00:57:04.000 Yeah.

00:57:04.000 So, yeah, okay.

00:57:06.000 So he is in the middle of this.

00:57:07.000 So they're building it.

00:57:08.000 Yeah.

00:57:09.000 I mean, this has got to be crazy expensive.

00:57:11.000 It's probably taking a long-ass time.

00:57:13.000 But it's going to be a lot of galleries, a lot of...

00:57:16.000 Think of the craftsmen.

00:57:17.000 You need to do what we saw on the exterior.

00:57:19.000 Yeah, and again, most of it is being done, I think.

00:57:22.000 Secret writing.

00:57:23.000 With 3D printing, but I'm just glad he's out there.

00:57:26.000 Well, you know, this is kind of one of the benefits of psychedelics coming out of the closet after all these years, right?

00:57:32.000 I mean, people can use them in their art.

00:57:34.000 They can use them in their architecture.

00:57:35.000 Have you ever heard of a house called Aceto Dorado in Joshua Tree?

00:57:39.000 No.

00:57:39.000 There's an LSD-inspired house.

00:57:41.000 You can rent it.

00:57:43.000 Really?

00:57:43.000 Is it on Airbnb?

00:57:44.000 I stayed there.

00:57:45.000 Yeah.

00:57:46.000 I don't know if it's on Airbnb, but you can rent it.

00:57:48.000 And we were shooting for a documentary there.

00:57:52.000 It is so trippy.

00:57:54.000 It's golden mirrors.

00:57:56.000 Every surface is mirrored, so you don't know what's up and down.

00:57:59.000 It would actually be kind of a scary...

00:58:00.000 Yeah, there it is.

00:58:01.000 Thank you.

00:58:02.000 Aceto Dorado.

00:58:03.000 Anyway, it's on the edge of the desert in Joshua Tree.

00:58:07.000 And I actually can't recommend it as a place to stay.

00:58:10.000 It was too disorienting.

00:58:13.000 Why was it disorienting?

00:58:14.000 The mirrors?

00:58:15.000 Yeah, because you'd look down at the floor and you'd see a reflection of the dining room table in six dimensions.

00:58:23.000 Sounds perfect.

00:58:24.000 I love all the cactus around it, too.

00:58:26.000 That's awesome.

00:58:27.000 Anyway, it's pretty cool.

00:58:29.000 Wow.

00:58:29.000 It fits into the landscape.

00:58:31.000 That place is so strange.

00:58:32.000 Joshua Tree is so bizarre.

00:58:34.000 It's one of the trippier landscapes.

00:58:36.000 And in fact, people go there to trip all the time.

00:58:38.000 Oh, yeah.

00:58:38.000 All my friends do.

00:58:39.000 Yeah.

00:58:39.000 That's the place, right?

00:58:40.000 My friend Ari Shafir runs a festival every year, an informal festival called Shroom Fest.

00:58:47.000 In Joshua Tree?

00:58:48.000 Yeah.

00:58:49.000 Well, he does it.

00:58:49.000 They do it a lot of times out of Joshua Tree, but he encourages people to do it everywhere they are.

00:58:53.000 You don't have to go to a place.

00:58:54.000 But is that in August?

00:58:56.000 Is that when Ari's- I believe so.

00:58:57.000 What a terrible time to go to Joshua Tree.

00:59:00.000 It's awfully hot.

00:59:01.000 I don't know if they're going to Joshua Tree.

00:59:03.000 Ari's living in New York City now, so I don't think he's doing it out there.

00:59:06.000 But a lot of the trips that they've done, they have done out there.

00:59:11.000 Joshua Tree.

00:59:12.000 But I think we're going to see now, you know, an explosion of writing, of art.

00:59:16.000 It's just like people are coming out of the closet talking about their experiences in a way that you just couldn't do a few years ago.

00:59:23.000 Right.

00:59:23.000 Or you did it at great risk to your reputation.

00:59:25.000 And it's going to affect art.

00:59:27.000 It's going to affect culture.

00:59:29.000 It's going to affect everything.

00:59:29.000 Yeah.

00:59:29.000 And I think in a good way.

00:59:31.000 I 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.

00:59:42.000 Yeah.

00:59:42.000 So I think that's a really interesting theme.

00:59:46.000 And 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.

00:59:57.000 But I don't think we can say that with confidence yet.

01:00:01.000 I think we actually have to do science about that to figure out.

01:00:04.000 I 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.

01:00:12.000 There's scores of how connected you feel to the natural world.

01:00:15.000 And tolerance for authoritarianism goes down.

01:00:19.000 Openness of personality goes up.

01:00:21.000 So these are preliminary.

01:00:22.000 But if you think about who has participated in these studies, they tend to be inclined in that direction already.

01:00:29.000 You 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.

01:00:42.000 Because I think we may be having people on the same side of the culture having reinforcing experiences.

01:00:49.000 But I don't know.

01:00:49.000 And it's something I would love to see research done on.

01:00:52.000 That 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.

01:01:07.000 And be much gentler than the chemical castration they used to talk about.

01:01:11.000 Well, 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,

01:01:27.000 and you don't even realize it's harming you.

01:01:29.000 You think you're getting away with these things, and having these psychedelic experiences, maybe...

01:01:34.000 Because 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.

01:01:46.000 And you don't think about it until you're forced into reflection.

01:01:51.000 And 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.

01:02:04.000 And come to Jesus with it.

01:02:07.000 You really have to.

01:02:09.000 Because they don't allow you any of that.

01:02:11.000 And people call it bad trips.

01:02:13.000 No, that's not the right term.

01:02:15.000 So that was a very interesting theme that came up with interviewing Native Americans.

01:02:19.000 They would talk about psychedelics as if the peyote had a gaze and it saw right into them.

01:02:26.000 And 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.

01:02:41.000 The peyote allows us to see ourselves and see what's wrong and correct it.

01:02:46.000 And I thought that was a very powerful idea.

01:02:48.000 And the idea that peyote had a gaze.

01:02:52.000 And they teach their children this.

01:02:54.000 That the peyote can see into you.

01:02:56.000 And they're socialized in this belief.

01:02:59.000 And that it's sort of like a superego, right?

01:03:02.000 It becomes a conscience.

01:03:04.000 And that's also a very powerful idea.

01:03:06.000 It's fascinating that it was so late in their history.

01:03:10.000 In the nick of time, really.

01:03:12.000 An incredibly desperate time for their culture, which is eradicated by these intruding Europeans. 1.00

01:03:20.000 Just one point on that, too.

01:03:22.000 I would hate if my discussion of peyote and Native Americans started a fad for using peyote.

01:03:29.000 There's just not enough peyote.

01:03:31.000 Really?

01:03:32.000 Yeah, no.

01:03:32.000 It's in very short supply.

01:03:35.000 The peyote lands, you know, there's ranching on it.

01:03:39.000 They're building windmills.

01:03:40.000 There's poaching that's going on.

01:03:43.000 And you asked me earlier whether I... Poaching of San Pedro cactus?

01:03:47.000 Yeah.

01:03:48.000 No, not San Pedro.

01:03:49.000 Peyote cactus.

01:03:50.000 What does a San Pedro grow?

01:03:52.000 I'll talk about that in a second.

01:03:54.000 It's a different cactus that's not endangered at all.

01:03:56.000 Do you get mescaline from that?

01:03:58.000 Yes.

01:03:58.000 Okay, so mescaline.

01:03:59.000 So there's another way, if you're interested, and I'll talk about that.

01:04:02.000 But mescaline and peyote are really similar, right?

01:04:05.000 So mescaline is the chemical produced both by peyote and San Pedro.

01:04:09.000 Oh, okay.

01:04:10.000 So they're two very different cacti that happen to produce the same alkaloid, which is called mescaline.

01:04:15.000 There is a big effort underway in the Native American community to save peyote.

01:04:21.000 It's a conservation movement.

01:04:23.000 It's something called the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative, IPCI, and they really deserve our support.

01:04:29.000 They're trying to buy up these ranch lands so that the Native Americans can pilgrimage down there, pick their own peyote. 1.00

01:04:36.000 There's a very Safe way to cut it, to harvest it, where it will regenerate.

01:04:41.000 And there's another way that's often used where it doesn't regenerate.

01:04:44.000 And it takes 15 years from seed to button, usable button.

01:04:48.000 Wow.

01:04:49.000 So cultivating it is a challenge.

01:04:52.000 And Indians don't believe that cultivated peyote is the same or as good as wild-grown peyote.

01:04:59.000 So 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. 1.00

01:05:14.000 And this is a tool that's been really helpful to them in healing in their cultures.

01:05:20.000 And there are other ways to get mescaline.

01:05:22.000 So I decided, you know, that would be my tiny contribution is not using it.

01:05:31.000 Is there an effort to reintroduce it in terms of like to plant it places?

01:05:36.000 Part of this initiative is that they're starting peyote in nurseries and then planting it in the wild.

01:05:42.000 And we'll see how that works.

01:05:45.000 It's a pokey.

01:05:46.000 I grew it in my garden for a while.

01:05:48.000 It is the pokiest plant.

01:05:50.000 It just doesn't do anything.

01:05:52.000 It just sits there.

01:05:53.000 It's very slow growing.

01:05:54.000 It looks like a stone.

01:05:55.000 It's very low to the ground.

01:05:56.000 It's quite beautiful.

01:05:57.000 Can you pull up?

01:05:58.000 I don't think I know what it looks like.

01:05:59.000 I know what the San Pedro looks like.

01:06:00.000 And check out if there's flowering peyote, too.

01:06:02.000 It flowers beautifully.

01:06:05.000 But it's just so precious.

01:06:08.000 There's more on the Mexican side of the border.

01:06:10.000 But even that is under threat from mining and all these tomato greenhouses that they're building.

01:06:15.000 So they're just kind of...

01:06:16.000 We need to take care of it.

01:06:19.000 Well, it's crazy that it's so slow growing.

01:06:21.000 I know.

01:06:22.000 15 years.

01:06:23.000 I mean, that is nuts.

01:06:24.000 I know.

01:06:24.000 Well, it grows in a...

01:06:25.000 Oh, wow.

01:06:27.000 See?

01:06:27.000 It looks like a stone.

01:06:29.000 Or it looks like a pincushion.

01:06:31.000 Wow.

01:06:33.000 Now that's...

01:06:34.000 Somebody's growing it.

01:06:37.000 There's a big one with its babies.

01:06:39.000 They spin off these little babies. 0.98

01:06:41.000 And if you harvest it correctly, like you cut right underneath the button, there is a taproot.

01:06:46.000 Yeah, you see the taproot's there.

01:06:48.000 And if you preserve the taproot, it'll regenerate.

01:06:51.000 But a lot of poachers and others just pull out the whole plant, like a carrot, and then that destroys it.

01:07:00.000 Wow.

01:07:00.000 But you see, all the action's underground.

01:07:02.000 In a way, it's like a mushroom, right?

01:07:03.000 Yeah.

01:07:04.000 It's doing a lot of work underground and not much above ground.

01:07:07.000 And it has the, instead of spines, it has this kind of furry flower or furry, I don't know what you call that thing.

01:07:15.000 It's in place of spines.

01:07:16.000 What a fascinating looking creature.

01:07:18.000 Yeah.

01:07:18.000 It almost looks like a sea creature.

01:07:21.000 Yeah.

01:07:23.000 Cactus alone, I mean, cacti are so wild.

01:07:26.000 I've just started growing them.

01:07:27.000 So I have a lot of San Pedro in my garden now, which is legal to grow.

01:07:30.000 I should point out, also, peyote is illegal to grow.

01:07:33.000 Illegal?

01:07:34.000 Illegal to grow.

01:07:35.000 Really?

01:07:35.000 Yeah.

01:07:35.000 So you're breaking the law.

01:07:36.000 You're manufacturing a Schedule 1 substance.

01:07:39.000 But San Pedro is legal.

01:07:41.000 Weirdly enough, San Pedro is illegal.

01:07:43.000 I think it just- Is legal?

01:07:45.000 Is legal to grow.

01:07:46.000 It had just escaped notice.

01:07:48.000 They just never- Sort of like salvia?

01:07:51.000 Yeah, kind of like that.

01:07:53.000 The taxonomy of San Pedro is a mess.

01:07:55.000 There are three or four different species.

01:07:57.000 They've all interbred.

01:07:59.000 And they'd have to pin down the species to make it illegal.

01:08:03.000 But I think it was just not on their radar when they were drawing up the schedule.

01:08:08.000 So- It's grown as an ornamental.

01:08:10.000 You can buy it in nurseries.

01:08:11.000 You can buy it online.

01:08:12.000 It grows very quickly compared to other cacti.

01:08:16.000 It's very pretty.

01:08:17.000 It's much more vertical.

01:08:18.000 It's a columnar cactus.

01:08:22.000 The point at which you break the law is when you start preparing the tea, which is a pretty simple process of essentially making...

01:08:31.000 It's like a vegetable stock.

01:08:33.000 You 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.

01:08:43.000 Three days?

01:08:44.000 Yeah.

01:08:46.000 Why'd I have to boil it for so long?

01:08:47.000 I don't know.

01:08:48.000 I think it may be...

01:08:49.000 I can't believe you can't get all the mescaline out of it and less than that, but I was told three days.

01:08:56.000 That was the recipe.

01:08:56.000 And what do they do once they boil it?

01:08:58.000 After you boil it, then it kind of turns to mush, so you have to filter it.

01:09:03.000 And then you have this tea.

01:09:05.000 And it's a fairly mild psychedelic, I would say.

01:09:11.000 And peyote is, too.

01:09:12.000 They're not...

01:09:13.000 So, it's a very different phenomenology than other psychedelics.

01:09:17.000 Have you ever used mescaline?

01:09:18.000 No, I haven't.

01:09:31.000 And 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?

01:09:41.000 And I was so surprised to hear how many people said mescaline because it's not around.

01:09:46.000 Nobody's doing research with it.

01:09:48.000 It's like, what happened to mescaline?

01:09:49.000 It's like the orphan psychedelic.

01:09:51.000 So I wanted to figure out what that was all about.

01:09:53.000 And there are a couple reasons.

01:09:56.000 A big problem with it is it takes about 14 hours.

01:09:59.000 Oh, wow.

01:10:00.000 And you're done with mescaline before mescaline is done with you.

01:10:05.000 And so I just remember at the end of this very long day, I was like, I just want to have some dinner and go to bed.

01:10:10.000 But it wasn't happening.

01:10:12.000 Wow.

01:10:13.000 So for me, it was like 12 hours.

01:10:16.000 And what was the experience like?

01:10:17.000 What did it take?

01:10:17.000 So it was a really interesting experience.

01:10:20.000 There were not hallucinations.

01:10:23.000 And 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.

01:10:37.000 So 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.

01:10:55.000 It's about the here and now, this intense experience of the present moment that's like nothing I'd ever have.

01:11:02.000 And it's almost overwhelming There's this sense of the immensity of existence and there's like, oh my god, stuff, existence.

01:11:13.000 But a lot of it is just very contemplative.

01:11:16.000 You're very lucid.

01:11:17.000 It's fairly gentle.

01:11:18.000 I didn't have any gastrointestinal upset or anything.

01:11:23.000 I had periods at the peak where I felt a little out of control mentally.

01:11:27.000 I remember trying to meditate to calm down and Whoever was meditating was someone else, and someone else was in my mind meditating.

01:11:35.000 I was like, that's not working.

01:11:36.000 In what way?

01:11:38.000 I just closed my eyes, and I was this South American woman, peasant woman, meditating.

01:11:45.000 I was like, where did she come from?

01:11:47.000 I had been doing research on San Pedro, and it's a South American cactus from Peru, and it was this Peruvian woman who just showed up.

01:11:56.000 Do you think that was just like you had this idea of who used it and that was imprinted in your memories?

01:12:03.000 I'm guessing.

01:12:04.000 Yeah, I'm guessing that I had an association of mescaline with it.

01:12:08.000 I've been interviewing people in Peru who used it ceremonially and I had this image of this...

01:12:15.000 I work with this healer who works with San Pedro, and she was kind of cut into that image, too.

01:12:22.000 It was a little bit of her, too.

01:12:24.000 You know, McKenna had a really weird idea about psychedelic experiences.

01:12:29.000 We always want to think of each individual psychedelic experience we have as being our experience.

01:12:36.000 But he believed that there was a database connected to each entheogen.

01:12:41.000 And 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.

01:12:50.000 It's like Carl Jung's idea of collective unconscious, right?

01:12:53.000 That 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.

01:13:01.000 Well, 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.

01:13:10.000 Now, 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.

01:13:21.000 I 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,

01:13:37.000 which was exactly what McKenna used to always say. 0.98

01:13:41.000 Do not give in to astonishment.

01:13:43.000 And then the other thing was, I love you.

01:13:46.000 But like a child, like, I love you 600 million, 500 thousand times.

01:13:51.000 They would say it in this crazy way, and then they would go, look at this.

01:13:55.000 And every time they would go, look at this, they'd show you something more spectacular than you had seen before.

01:14:01.000 Like every time the visuals, like you would think these visuals are impossible to pass, and they would go, look at this.

01:14:06.000 And it would be even more insane.

01:14:08.000 Now, why not give in to astonishment?

01:14:10.000 What's the idea behind that?

01:14:11.000 I think the idea is you could be so blown away by what's in front of you.

01:14:15.000 And this is from McKenna's words.

01:14:17.000 So, again, I don't know how much of what I was experiencing was these things communicating with me.

01:14:23.000 Because I never heard anybody say that they said, look at this, or I love you 6,500,000 times.

01:14:29.000 Because they were talking like a child says, I love you a billion, million, trillion times.

01:14:33.000 You know what I mean?

01:14:34.000 Like one of my daughters would say something like that.

01:14:35.000 But it was...

01:14:38.000 I 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.

01:14:58.000 Don't go, oh my god, this is too much.

01:15:00.000 I can't do this.

01:15:01.000 I can't do this.

01:15:02.000 Because it's so mind-blowing.

01:15:04.000 You've had the experience.

01:15:06.000 It's so freaky that don't give in to astonishment is almost like it's a good primer, a good code to follow.

01:15:15.000 Like, let's just...

01:15:17.000 Just let it happen.

01:15:18.000 Just give in to it.

01:15:19.000 Whatever you do, don't try to fight it.

01:15:21.000 Well, that's key.

01:15:22.000 I mean, the most important lesson I learned from both my experience and all the teachers that I worked with is surrender.

01:15:30.000 And psychedelics teach us how to surrender, which is useful in a lot of other contexts, too.

01:15:35.000 But when you surrender to the experience is when you're least likely to have a bad time, when you're not going to fight.

01:15:43.000 When you feel your ego dissolving, your natural reaction, your ego's natural reaction is to hold on and defend itself.

01:15:50.000 But when I learned that, no, you just got to go with that.

01:15:54.000 If you're going crazy, if you think you're going to melt or die, go with it.

01:16:01.000 And you'll pass through into something better.

01:16:03.000 And that reliably works.

01:16:05.000 The last time I did it, there was like a fractal of jesters.

01:16:12.000 There was like an infinite number of jesters giving me the finger.

01:16:15.000 Like this.

01:16:17.000 And I was like, what, really?

01:16:18.000 On a trip? 1.00

01:16:19.000 Like, fuck you. 1.00

01:16:21.000 This is my head. 1.00

01:16:22.000 But I realized what they were trying to say to me.

01:16:25.000 I was realizing they're saying, you take yourself too seriously.

01:16:29.000 Ah.

01:16:29.000 And then I went, oh, and then they were like this.

01:16:32.000 They were like nodding at me.

01:16:34.000 I was like, oh, okay, you're right.

01:16:36.000 Thank you.

01:16:39.000 Yeah, I was like, okay, you're right, you're right, you're right. 1.00

01:16:41.000 Because someone's saying, fuck you, you're like, no, fuck you. 1.00

01:16:44.000 And then they were like, come on. 1.00

01:16:46.000 And I was like, oh, you're right, you're right.

01:16:47.000 And they were like nodding at me.

01:16:49.000 So you were having a defensive reaction and you got over it.

01:16:52.000 Well, they were letting me know.

01:16:53.000 Whatever that they is.

01:16:55.000 I don't know if that's your subconscious.

01:16:58.000 I 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.

01:17:08.000 Like it's a way to experience consciousness or something, some force that's around us all the time.

01:17:16.000 You could pretend that you have the answer, but I don't...

01:17:19.000 No, we don't know.

01:17:20.000 We really don't know.

01:17:21.000 I mean, I tend to think that these are creations of our minds, but that's just a hypothesis.

01:17:27.000 You know, I mean, when the Dalai Lama sat down with a bunch of neuroscientists, you know, they started this dialogue.

01:17:33.000 And the neuroscientist started from the assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain.

01:17:38.000 And the Dalai Lama very commonly said, well, that's an interesting hypothesis.

01:17:41.000 And he's right.

01:17:42.000 That's all it is, is a hypothesis.

01:17:45.000 Consciousness could be fields.

01:17:46.000 It 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...

01:18:00.000 What our brains do is tune in to frequencies of consciousness that exist outside of us.

01:18:06.000 And 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.

01:18:14.000 Our assumption that all the action is there may be wrong.

01:18:20.000 Yeah.

01:18:22.000 There's a lot of people that want to attach consciousness to inanimate objects as well, which is very strange.

01:18:30.000 Consciousness and even memories.

01:18:31.000 I think it was Sheldrick.

01:18:33.000 I think Rupert Sheldrick.

01:18:34.000 Yeah, 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.

01:18:52.000 I don't totally understand.

01:18:52.000 He's a very interesting thinker.

01:18:54.000 Yeah.

01:18:55.000 And you know his son, Merlin?

01:18:57.000 No.

01:18:58.000 What a great name.

01:18:59.000 You should get him on.

01:18:59.000 Merlin?

01:19:00.000 He named his kids Merlin and Cosmo.

01:19:04.000 Well, I've had him on.

01:19:05.000 He was great.

01:19:06.000 He was a fascinating guy.

01:19:07.000 Merlin wrote a beautiful book called Entangled Life about fungi.

01:19:10.000 He's a scientist.

01:19:12.000 And it's all about the relations that fungi create among other species.

01:19:18.000 Other than being a magician, what are your other choices for jobs?

01:19:20.000 Yeah, I know.

01:19:20.000 That's right.

01:19:21.000 Mycologist.

01:19:24.000 Merlin!

01:19:25.000 But, you know, what I love about psychedelics is they raise these questions of consciousness.

01:19:29.000 You know, this thing we just take for granted.

01:19:30.000 We have this everyday, ordinary consciousness.

01:19:33.000 We don't think about it.

01:19:34.000 And they kind of distance ourselves from it, and suddenly you're asking questions about consciousness.

01:19:40.000 I've been really struck by how many neuroscientists got into their field because of psychedelic experience.

01:19:46.000 That it suddenly made them think, hey, this is interesting, and we shouldn't assume what we assume.

01:19:53.000 So I'm very interested in that whole conversation around neuroscientists and psychedelics.

01:19:59.000 Well, I'm really interested in more people experiencing it that are these brilliant people that maybe have these- Right, can bring something to it.

01:20:07.000 Dawkins has never had a psychedelic experience, which to me is crazy.

01:20:11.000 Yeah, I think you could use one.

01:20:12.000 Yeah, I think so too.

01:20:13.000 I have a list of people who could use one.

01:20:16.000 But see, I think this is another, you know, we talked about this efflorescence of art that may come out of this uncloseting of psychedelics.

01:20:24.000 The other thing is getting really good scientific minds involved who haven't been, who've been afraid to.

01:20:33.000 And, 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,

01:20:55.000 but committed to understanding consciousness in the brain, who have not had psychedelic experience or haven't had the opportunity to do research on psychedelics.

01:21:03.000 And now they want to.

01:21:05.000 So at Berkeley, last year we started a psychedelic science center to study psychedelics.

01:21:14.000 And 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.

01:21:21.000 We don't do medical research at Berkeley.

01:21:22.000 We're going to be doing basic science.

01:21:24.000 We're going to be trying to use psychedelics to understand real basics about how we construct visual perception, the mechanisms by way they work.

01:21:32.000 And 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.

01:21:47.000 So I think we're going to learn a lot.

01:21:49.000 Psychedelics 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.

01:21:59.000 So I think it's a really exciting initiative.

01:22:01.000 I'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.

01:22:22.000 These 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.

01:22:38.000 Like real, legit places where people can go and have an actual way to get out of whatever mental funk they're in.

01:22:47.000 And there's a real pathway.

01:22:49.000 It's possible.

01:22:50.000 It could help you.

01:22:51.000 Oh, without question.

01:22:52.000 Look, we have a mental health crisis in this country.

01:22:55.000 The numbers around depression and with the pandemic, it's gotten a lot worse.

01:22:59.000 Anxiety, suicide.

01:23:01.000 And one of the big surprises that I had after How to Change Your Mind came out, I expected a lot of pushback.

01:23:08.000 I expected mainstream psychiatry, the American Psychological Association, all these kind of groups to like, well, psychedelics, very dangerous.

01:23:18.000 We don't want to mess around.

01:23:19.000 I had the opposite experience.

01:23:21.000 They were so engaged, they would invite me to speak.

01:23:25.000 They reached out to me.

01:23:27.000 And 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.

01:23:35.000 And 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.

01:23:43.000 We're helping with symptoms at best.

01:23:46.000 And that we're desperate for new tools.

01:23:49.000 And along comes this one, which has the potential not just to address symptoms, but to actually heal.

01:23:56.000 And across many different mental disorders.

01:24:00.000 And 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.

01:24:14.000 There are a lot of problems to work out.

01:24:17.000 It's a weird thing to fit into the system we have now.

01:24:20.000 Is it a drug?

01:24:21.000 Is it talk therapy?

01:24:22.000 Well, it's a package of both.

01:24:24.000 It isn't just the psychedelic, right?

01:24:26.000 It's psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy or therapy.

01:24:32.000 So how do you do that?

01:24:33.000 The 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?

01:24:42.000 There 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.

01:25:10.000 And a lot of people had great experiences anyway, but many people crashed and burned, too.

01:25:14.000 And now's the time to write that instruction manual.

01:25:18.000 We have more experience, and we're studying these indigenous cultures who have a lot to teach us about how to use them safely.

01:25:25.000 And it's a really interesting project.

01:25:29.000 And 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.

01:25:36.000 Which is one of the reasons I included caffeine, a totally legal drug that everybody uses.

01:25:42.000 What does that have to teach us?

01:25:43.000 In a way, one of the most powerful drug experiences I've had in my life was the first cup of coffee after three months off.

01:25:51.000 Really?

01:25:51.000 It was psychedelic.

01:25:52.000 Really?

01:25:53.000 It was incredible.

01:25:54.000 Come on.

01:25:54.000 Try it.

01:25:55.000 Try getting off caffeine for a while.

01:25:57.000 Three months?

01:25:57.000 Three months without caffeine.

01:25:58.000 How am I going to do a podcast?

01:26:00.000 You may have to take a hiatus.

01:26:02.000 I'm going to run out of things to talk about.

01:26:03.000 I'll fall asleep.

01:26:04.000 It was really hard.

01:26:05.000 I did it, actually.

01:26:06.000 It's a suggestion of Roland Griffith, the psychedelic researcher, who before that was the world's leading expert on caffeine.

01:26:15.000 And I was interviewing him about caffeine for this chapter.

01:26:19.000 And he said, well, you're never going to understand your relationship to caffeine until you get off it.

01:26:23.000 So it was kind of a dare.

01:26:25.000 And it was really hard.

01:26:26.000 It was one of the hardest things I've done.

01:26:27.000 Really?

01:26:28.000 I was a mess.

01:26:30.000 For how long?

01:26:31.000 Three months.

01:26:33.000 You were a mess until you- I was functional after a month.

01:26:37.000 The first week I was not functional at all.

01:26:39.000 I felt like I had contracted ADD. I could not stay on track.

01:26:46.000 Everything, the periphery just kept intruding on my thinking.

01:26:50.000 I couldn't write.

01:26:51.000 I mean, writing is the most linear thing you can do, right?

01:26:53.000 And it's all about concentration, obviously.

01:26:56.000 And I couldn't concentrate.

01:26:58.000 And I felt like there was this veil between me and reality that I was not quite seeing, getting, feeling.

01:27:06.000 And it was weird.

01:27:08.000 I didn't feel myself for the whole time.

01:27:11.000 And I thought, what does that mean?

01:27:13.000 It means your self is caffeinated.

01:27:18.000 And that is baseline consciousness for me and for many people.

01:27:23.000 And that's not a bad thing, but I think we have a debt to these plants that we owe them.

01:27:30.000 And so I spent a lot of time researching that chapter, looking back in history for when caffeine enters the West.

01:27:38.000 And it doesn't happen until the 1650s in Europe.

01:27:42.000 So we actually have a before and after, which we don't with a lot of drugs because they just go back millennia.

01:27:49.000 And before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness.

01:27:54.000 People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time.

01:27:59.000 People drank morning, noon, and night because it was safer than water.

01:28:04.000 Water was really how you got diseases.

01:28:06.000 If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed all of the microbes.

01:28:12.000 So people, even kids, you gave your kids hard cider for breakfast.

01:28:16.000 And this was true in America up until the 1800s, up until Prohibition.

01:28:22.000 But 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?

01:28:32.000 And things start to change.

01:28:35.000 In the form of coffee?

01:28:36.000 Coffee and tea and chocolate, which also has caffeine in it.

01:28:40.000 And so they had never experienced coffee before the 1600s?

01:28:45.000 That's right.

01:28:46.000 They had in the Arab world.

01:28:48.000 They'd had it from like 1200 or something like that.

01:28:51.000 Supposedly 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.

01:29:03.000 Really?

01:29:04.000 Yeah.

01:29:04.000 So he kind of like started experimenting or he brought it to these monks and they made a drink and it was like...

01:29:10.000 It 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.

01:29:17.000 So one theory is that the Arab world had coffee first and had this incredible golden age.

01:29:24.000 Yes.

01:29:25.000 And there is a historian of psychoactives named Wolfgang Schivelbush, and he correlates.

01:29:32.000 What a name.

01:29:32.000 Isn't that wonderful?

01:29:33.000 German, of course.

01:29:34.000 Wolfgang Schivelbush.

01:29:36.000 It's a great book.

01:29:36.000 It's called Tastes of Paradise.

01:29:38.000 Highly recommend it.

01:29:39.000 And he said this was the perfect drug for the culture that invented mathematics and had this incredible...

01:29:47.000 And it helped the culture in two ways.

01:29:49.000 One was, as safe as alcohol made water, boiling it made it much safer.

01:29:55.000 And coffee and tea, of course, both require boiling water.

01:29:58.000 No one drank boiling water or hot beverages before.

01:30:03.000 So this gave this incredible public health boost to these places.

01:30:07.000 And then you have the drug that basically fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking.

01:30:15.000 And 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.

01:30:26.000 And people in the 1600s started writing about it.

01:30:28.000 So they're like, wow, people, you know, we have this new civil and sober drink.

01:30:33.000 And it was so popular because it was new that people drank less and they used more caffeine.

01:30:39.000 And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution.

01:30:46.000 When you're doing physical labor outdoors, which was most of history, you could be buzzed.

01:30:52.000 You didn't have to know what time it was.

01:30:53.000 You worked from sunup to sundown.

01:30:55.000 There were beer breaks actually on farms in England.

01:30:57.000 They would give you beer because it gave you calories and made you happy.

01:31:01.000 But when you start moving into, like, running machines and doing double entry bookkeeping, you need a clearer head.

01:31:10.000 And when you start moving toward night shifts and overnight shifts, you couldn't do that without caffeine.

01:31:17.000 And that's when it begins.

01:31:18.000 There's a whole new, like, it freed us from the rhythms of the sun, which dictated everything in Western culture.

01:31:25.000 You could only work till the sun went down.

01:31:29.000 So it had a profound effect on capitalism, the rise of capitalism.

01:31:33.000 And the clearest illustration of that that I came across is the coffee break.

01:31:39.000 Where did that come from?

01:31:40.000 The coffee break actually has a history.

01:31:42.000 We know the company that came up with it.

01:31:45.000 And it was a necktie manufacturer in Denver called Wigwam Weavers.

01:31:51.000 Really?

01:31:51.000 And wigwam weavers made these very intricate silk neckties.

01:31:56.000 And during World War II, they lost all their best loom operators to the war effort.

01:32:00.000 So they hired these old guys to do it, you know, who weren't getting drafted, and they couldn't do it very well.

01:32:06.000 Then they hired these women to do it, and they could do it beautifully.

01:32:10.000 And there were very intricate patterns, very complicated looms.

01:32:13.000 I mean, you've seen how they, you know, the patterns on neckties.

01:32:15.000 And the women could do it really well, but only for about four or five hours. 1.00

01:32:19.000 So they called a meeting and the owner said to the workers, what could we do?

01:32:25.000 We have to improve your efficiency and we need more output.

01:32:28.000 And the women said, well, give us a coffee break. 1.00

01:32:31.000 They didn't call it that initially.

01:32:33.000 And give us some time at like 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon and give us some coffee and tea.

01:32:39.000 So we started doing it.

01:32:41.000 And overnight, their productivity and efficiency goes up.

01:32:45.000 Quality control goes up.

01:32:47.000 And so he institutes the coffee break.

01:32:49.000 And think about it.

01:32:51.000 Your employer gives you a drug and then gives you time off in which to ingest it during the workday.

01:32:59.000 Why would they do that?

01:33:01.000 Because it contributes mightily.

01:33:03.000 So the coffee break might seem like it's something your boss is giving you, but it's a way to extract more value from you.

01:33:09.000 And I'm sure employees that have little breaks and get to enjoy just a little bit of free time, they'll be happier employees.

01:33:21.000 They'll probably be more productive.

01:33:23.000 Calling Mr. Bezos, man.

01:33:25.000 I don't know if he has coffee breaks.

01:33:27.000 He wants you to be on Adderall 24-7, running to the next package.

01:33:31.000 Tell me about your experience, what your experience was like with the three months off and then having the caffeine.

01:33:38.000 So I had this three months that was really unpleasant.

01:33:42.000 The only things that were positive about it was I slept like a teenager.

01:33:47.000 It really did improve my sleep.

01:33:49.000 I had some great sleeps like I remember from when I was a teenager, you know, when you can sleep 14 hours.

01:33:55.000 That was really good.

01:33:57.000 I also felt, and I'm not proud of this, self-righteous.

01:34:03.000 I remember one morning having to get a 6am flight and I had to get up and get myself moving on mint tea.

01:34:14.000 And 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.

01:34:24.000 And I'm looking at these people and they look like junkies you see in Amsterdam. 0.98

01:34:29.000 They look so pathetic. 1.00

01:34:31.000 And, you know, that they were hooked and they needed their fix. 1.00

01:34:34.000 And they look kind of miserable and withdrawal was starting.

01:34:39.000 Because that first cup of coffee is not about the pleasure it gives us.

01:34:42.000 It's really about stopping withdrawal symptoms, which are beginning overnight because you haven't had it for 24 hours.

01:34:49.000 And I felt self-righteous.

01:34:52.000 I'm not proud of that.

01:34:54.000 And I knew that I was going to rejoin them as soon as I could.

01:34:57.000 So 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,

01:35:12.000 before your body is accustomed to them.

01:35:14.000 So I had this first cup, and I gave a lot of thought to where I would have it.

01:35:18.000 I thought about the original Pete's is in my neighborhood, the very first Pete's.

01:35:21.000 But I don't love their coffee.

01:35:23.000 It can be kind of burnt tasting.

01:35:25.000 And so I went to a place called The Cheese Board, which is a cafe, bakery in my neighborhood.

01:35:30.000 And they have a little pocket park out on the street.

01:35:34.000 And I got a special, which is, it's sort of like a cappuccino, but more coffee and less milk.

01:35:41.000 Like a flat white in Australia.

01:35:43.000 And we sat, my wife and I, Judith, sat there, and I drank this drink, and it was so good!

01:35:52.000 I mean, I just felt these waves of well-being, and then it turned into euphoria.

01:35:58.000 And I was like, wow, this is such a strong drug.

01:36:01.000 I had no idea.

01:36:02.000 It was like cocaine or something.

01:36:05.000 And that lasted for maybe 20 minutes.

01:36:08.000 But then something turned that was kind of interesting.

01:36:11.000 Across 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.

01:36:22.000 And it really got under my skin.

01:36:23.000 I was getting kind of irritable.

01:36:26.000 And I said to Judith, can we go home?

01:36:28.000 And I felt like I've got to get something done.

01:36:31.000 I felt kind of compulsive.

01:36:32.000 And so we walked home and I went to my office. 0.99

01:36:36.000 And I just had this desire to get shit done. 0.58

01:36:39.000 And so what I did was, this is really weird. 0.81

01:36:42.000 I unsubscribed from like a hundred listservs that I was getting on my email that were really annoying.

01:36:47.000 I just killed them one after another and after another.

01:36:50.000 And then after I finished that, I went through the sweater in my closet. 0.95

01:36:56.000 All the sweaters in my closet.

01:36:58.000 And I threw out some.

01:36:59.000 I gave some away.

01:37:00.000 This sounds like meth behavior.

01:37:03.000 This is what I hear.

01:37:05.000 I had a friend of mine who used to date a girl who was on meth, and she always would clean.

01:37:09.000 She would come home and organize and clean things. 0.95

01:37:12.000 He's like, so if your girl starts cleaning incessantly, she might be on amphetamines.

01:37:16.000 You have a problem.

01:37:17.000 Yeah, I was really compulsive and very productive.

01:37:22.000 Did you keep drinking it throughout the day?

01:37:27.000 No, but I was tempted to.

01:37:29.000 So I said to myself, how can I hold on to this power that this drug has?

01:37:33.000 Because if I start using it every day, I'm going to lose it.

01:37:35.000 I'm just going to be another caffeine addict.

01:37:38.000 And I came up with this idea.

01:37:40.000 Only do it on Saturdays.

01:37:42.000 Once a week.

01:37:44.000 And I did that for a while.

01:37:46.000 So that very day, after cleaning out my closet, I worked in the garden and there were some plants that needed replacement.

01:37:53.000 And so I started driving down to this garden center called Flowerland.

01:38:00.000 And I realized, why did I pick that nursery and say, oh, they have this Airstream where they sell espresso drinks right out in front.

01:38:08.000 It was the voice of the addict putting me in position to get another cup the same day.

01:38:15.000 And so I resisted that.

01:38:17.000 And I did this Saturday thing for a while, and it worked pretty well.

01:38:21.000 I really look forward to Saturdays, and I got a lot done.

01:38:24.000 On Saturday.

01:38:25.000 On Saturday.

01:38:26.000 On Saturday.

01:38:29.000 But I wasn't addicted anymore, so I could get through the week.

01:38:31.000 It wasn't hard.

01:38:33.000 But then gradually it was like, you know, it's Thursday and I got a deadline.

01:38:38.000 And this would really help me get over the deadline.

01:38:41.000 So I started making exceptions.

01:38:43.000 It was complete addict thinking, right?

01:38:45.000 Did you try any other forms of caffeine?

01:38:48.000 Yeah, I would do green tea as I'm drinking now.

01:38:52.000 Green tea is a very good source of caffeine because it's really even.

01:38:57.000 There's another alkaloid in it that stretches out the effect.

01:39:00.000 So you don't get a jolt, but it kind of keeps you nicely titrated.

01:39:04.000 What is the caffeine content of green tea?

01:39:08.000 The average cup?

01:39:09.000 It's probably a third of what you get in a cup of coffee.

01:39:13.000 It varies amazingly.

01:39:14.000 If the tips were plucked when they're brand new, first flush green tea, that has a lot more caffeine in it and is a lot more valuable.

01:39:23.000 So there's a lot of variables that go into it.

01:39:25.000 The plant is producing caffeine, of course, as a pesticide.

01:39:29.000 And that was a whole question I looked at.

01:39:32.000 Why do plants produce these things that have these effects on our minds?

01:39:36.000 Isn't that amazing that a plant could devise a chemical that can unlock a receptor in your brain?

01:39:43.000 That's astonishing.

01:39:45.000 So I started looking at that question.

01:39:48.000 And most of these alkaloids began as defenses.

01:39:51.000 They're all very bitter, which is discouraging to insects. 0.99

01:39:55.000 And they fuck with their minds, basically. 0.99

01:39:58.000 I mean, if you think about it, I always thought, well, if you're creating a pesticide, just make it lethal, right? 0.99

01:40:04.000 But plants don't do that. 0.81

01:40:05.000 That's not a great...

01:40:06.000 I mean, some of them do.

01:40:07.000 But 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.

01:40:20.000 Natural 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.

01:40:26.000 Much cleverer strategy is to just mess with their minds and ruin their appetites.

01:40:31.000 And think about it, how hungry are you on psychedelics?

01:40:35.000 It's the last thing.

01:40:36.000 It's the last thing you think about.

01:40:38.000 So getting your pest to trip.

01:40:42.000 And the other thing you do, let's say you're worried about insects.

01:40:47.000 This is the plant's point of view right now.

01:40:50.000 I'm going to give you a drug that makes you act really recklessly and dance around and lose control of your sense of survival.

01:40:58.000 You're going to get picked off by a bird.

01:41:00.000 So that's really clever.

01:41:02.000 What 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.

01:41:16.000 And I should say it was a problem.

01:41:18.000 He loved catnip.

01:41:20.000 But he had to have some every day.

01:41:22.000 We used to live in rural Connecticut, and I had this fenced-in vegetable garden.

01:41:28.000 And every evening in the summer, I'd go down to harvest some lettuce or food for dinner.

01:41:32.000 And Frank would follow me into the garden and look up at me.

01:41:35.000 And the reason he was looking at me is he'd forgotten where the catnip was.

01:41:39.000 It was in this garden.

01:41:41.000 He was there every day.

01:41:42.000 He would go over. 0.99

01:41:43.000 He'd have some catnip, get really fucked up, and roll in the dirt for a while. 0.99

01:41:48.000 And then, you know... 0.98

01:41:50.000 What does catnip do to a cat?

01:41:52.000 It's got a chemical that's very close to a sex hormone and that it has this psychoactive effect on cats.

01:42:01.000 It doesn't work on anybody else.

01:42:03.000 But it made me realize that how clever this plant was to make its pest, which the cat was, forget where it was.

01:42:14.000 And a lot of Drugs make us forgetful.

01:42:18.000 Cannabis is a great example.

01:42:19.000 Cannabis may work by making its pests forget where they saw it or tasted it.

01:42:25.000 So 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.

01:42:37.000 And 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.

01:42:53.000 We've spread their seeds all over the world.

01:42:55.000 We've made them precious commodities or cannabis.

01:42:58.000 I mean, these plants were stuck in their little center of origin.

01:43:01.000 Now they're everywhere.

01:43:03.000 So this dance of plant chemicals and human brains has been very much to the advantage of both parties, I think.

01:43:11.000 And 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.

01:43:20.000 How much have you studied when plants change their flavor profile because they're aware that other plants near them are being eaten?

01:43:29.000 Right.

01:43:29.000 Yeah, I have looked at that.

01:43:31.000 It's really amazing.

01:43:32.000 So in a forest, say oak trees, if they're being beset by some caterpillar or something, it'll usually start on the edges.

01:43:40.000 And those plants will send signals through the air.

01:43:44.000 And 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.

01:43:57.000 There's a lot of communication that goes on among plants.

01:44:01.000 It goes through the air with these volatiles and then it goes on under the ground.

01:44:06.000 And this is where the mycelium are connecting trees in a forest.

01:44:11.000 Suzanne Simard just wrote this really interesting book about this called Searching for the Mother Tree.

01:44:16.000 She's an arborist or a forest scientist in British Columbia.

01:44:22.000 And 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.

01:44:34.000 So a mother tree can take care of baby trees and actually send carbon through this network. 1.00

01:44:40.000 And even two species of different trees can swap nutrients.

01:44:44.000 So 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.

01:44:54.000 And so there's this whole communications network going on underground.

01:44:59.000 That she showed.

01:45:00.000 And 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. 1.00

01:45:12.000 Wow.

01:45:13.000 So I've written about plant intelligence before.

01:45:16.000 I did a piece on it for the New Yorker several years ago.

01:45:19.000 If you search the intelligent plant, it comes up.

01:45:22.000 I got a new respect for how clever plants are.

01:45:25.000 I mean, they're geniuses in their own way.

01:45:27.000 You know, we got good at language and consciousness and art.

01:45:31.000 We do all these cool, and tool making, and we think that's the height of evolution.

01:45:35.000 That whole time, actually longer, because they've been around longer than we have, they were working on biochemistry.

01:45:40.000 And they are the masters of biochemistry.

01:45:42.000 We cannot produce drugs as good as what plants can produce.

01:45:45.000 We cannot produce psychoactives as good as what plants can produce.

01:45:50.000 Yeah, I don't think we think of them as intelligent because they're not mobile.

01:45:53.000 That's right.

01:45:54.000 It's just a limitation of our own biology, the way we perceive things.

01:45:57.000 Exactly.

01:45:57.000 No, we think...

01:45:58.000 I mean, our standards for what constitutes intelligence are based on us, but there are other ways to be intelligent.

01:46:04.000 If you define intelligence as the ability to solve the problems that confront you in life, They're really intelligent.

01:46:09.000 Or communication.

01:46:11.000 Yeah.

01:46:11.000 Because they clearly communicate.

01:46:13.000 They communicate in many different ways.

01:46:15.000 And they send signals when they're being preyed upon.

01:46:18.000 Yeah.

01:46:18.000 And not just signals in terms of, like you were saying, they send them through the air.

01:46:22.000 There's also studies that they've done where they've played sounds of caterpillars chewing leaves next to plants.

01:46:28.000 Yes, I know the guy who does that work, yeah.

01:46:30.000 Which is even more insane.

01:46:31.000 So somehow or another they can hear.

01:46:33.000 They hear.

01:46:33.000 And they can recognize a very specific pattern.

01:46:36.000 So they hear the sounds of the caterpillar.

01:46:38.000 Just a recording.

01:46:39.000 So it's not a real...

01:46:41.000 This is where it gets really crazy.

01:46:43.000 It's not real caterpillars actually eating real leaves where the trees are communicating through the mycelium.

01:46:48.000 It's a sound.

01:46:49.000 And they're like, uh-oh, we know what this is.

01:46:51.000 Trouble.

01:46:52.000 And then they send the...

01:46:53.000 And they produce this chemical.

01:46:54.000 Yeah, which is wild.

01:46:55.000 I know, I know.

01:46:56.000 Well, the reason that plants got so good at this is because they couldn't move, right?

01:47:01.000 If you can't run away, and if you can't go to what you want, you have to make it come to you or repel it.

01:47:08.000 And that's all chemistry.

01:47:09.000 And so that's where all their ingenuity went.

01:47:13.000 And it's just a limitation of our imagination that we can't see this.

01:47:17.000 Although if you've ever looked at time lapse of plants, you suddenly get an appreciation for them as active agents.

01:47:26.000 When I was doing the intelligent plant, the scientist in Italy showed me this video of two beans competing for a steak.

01:47:36.000 And 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.

01:47:48.000 And you see them as personalities, you know, with life experiences, successes and failures in a way you never do.

01:47:55.000 It's just a timeline issue.

01:47:57.000 It is.

01:47:57.000 We live in a very specific dimension of time, and other creatures live in different dimensions of time.

01:48:04.000 And, you know, so we need to be able to imagine these other dimensions.

01:48:08.000 But the tool of time-lapse photography is a powerful one for showing this.

01:48:12.000 David Attenborough did a Secret Life of Plants kind of show once, where he did tons of time-lapse.

01:48:19.000 And suddenly, you know, you've seen the ones of the Venus flytraps and stuff like that, but...

01:48:23.000 Suddenly you realize, oh, they're thinking.

01:48:26.000 And they're not thinking the way we think, but they do think.

01:48:29.000 And there has been research also showing that they can learn.

01:48:34.000 There's a woman named Monica Gagliano who's a botanist who's done really cool experiments With sensitive plants, you know the sensitive plants?

01:48:43.000 It looks like a fern and you touch it and it goes limp.

01:48:45.000 And it does this whenever it's touched.

01:48:48.000 And she would take a bunch of sensitive plants and drop them a couple inches in their pots. 1.00

01:48:54.000 And at first, they thought that drop was a touch and they would shrink down, collapse.

01:49:03.000 And then after she did it five or six times, they realized it was a false signal.

01:49:08.000 And they stop doing it.

01:49:10.000 And they permanently learn not to respond to that.

01:49:13.000 Oh.

01:49:13.000 So how are they remembering that?

01:49:15.000 Where do they store that information?

01:49:19.000 Oh my god.

01:49:20.000 It's pretty mind-blowing.

01:49:22.000 God, it's so wild.

01:49:23.000 Yeah.

01:49:24.000 So there are other ways to be on this planet, right, than the way animals do it.

01:49:28.000 And plants deserve our...

01:49:32.000 Respect.

01:49:33.000 And that's why I've spent so many decades thinking about them and writing about them and growing them.

01:49:39.000 There's a relationship that we have with them, too, where they change your perception.

01:49:44.000 Like, if I go outside and I see trees and everything's green and lush, I have a feeling.

01:49:51.000 A feeling hits you.

01:49:53.000 Whatever it is that is about being a person, when a person is around something that's green and vivid, I guess it represents life.

01:50:05.000 I guess it represents bounty, potential food.

01:50:09.000 Health.

01:50:10.000 Yes.

01:50:10.000 And you gravitate towards that.

01:50:12.000 And I feel I feel like that's how people are with forests.

01:50:15.000 You see all these trees and there's a feeling you get when you're in, air quotes, nature.

01:50:21.000 You go out there and it's like, ah!

01:50:24.000 It's a nourishing feeling.

01:50:26.000 Your body has a great reaction to it.

01:50:28.000 Yeah, I think we're wired for it.

01:50:31.000 I think it connotes a sense of health.

01:50:34.000 When nature is healthy, there's probably food to be found.

01:50:38.000 All these trees are producing things you might eat.

01:50:42.000 And I'm very interested in this forest bathing movement, you know, where people go into the forest and just kind of meditate there.

01:50:49.000 And it's a powerful experience.

01:50:52.000 So, yeah.

01:50:55.000 Plants are amazing.

01:50:57.000 One more example.

01:50:59.000 So, caffeine, you know, I said is a pesticide?

01:51:02.000 Yes.

01:51:02.000 They recently discovered this really surprising kind of anomaly, which is that there are certain kinds of plants that produce caffeine in their nectar.

01:51:12.000 Now, nectar is an attractant, right?

01:51:15.000 You want it to taste good and you want it to draw things to you because you want your pollinators to show up.

01:51:21.000 So why would you put a pesticide in your nectar?

01:51:23.000 Well, it's in such tiny quantities that bees really like it.

01:51:29.000 And it turns out that bees are attracted to caffeine the way we are and that they will...

01:51:34.000 This woman named Geraldine Wright, an American working in England, did this study.

01:51:40.000 And she found that bees will prefer plants that give them caffeine.

01:51:44.000 And they will remember those plants.

01:51:48.000 They'll be more likely to remember those plants and go back to them.

01:51:52.000 And they will be more faithful pollinators of that plant.

01:51:56.000 Which is suggesting that basically the plant is using caffeine the way we do.

01:52:02.000 I mean, to get better work out of its pollinators.

01:52:06.000 I mean, in a way, it's sort of like the coffee break story.

01:52:08.000 Jamie, we talked about this before and I never did anything about it.

01:52:12.000 How do I get a hold of that mad honey? 1.00

01:52:16.000 You can buy that psychedelic honey?

01:52:18.000 Yeah.

01:52:19.000 You know about the psychedelic honey?

01:52:21.000 No, tell me about that.

01:52:21.000 Is it in Tibet?

01:52:23.000 Nepal. 0.59

01:52:24.000 Nepal. 0.59

01:52:24.000 There's a psychedelic honey that's very difficult to obtain. 0.59

01:52:29.000 These 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.

01:52:39.000 Look at this.

01:52:40.000 This is this psychedelic honey.

01:52:42.000 And this psychedelic honey, as they're gathering this stuff up, apparently it's phenomenal stuff that makes you trip balls.

01:52:50.000 So what's the plant that they're getting the pollen and nectar from?

01:52:55.000 I was hoping you knew.

01:52:55.000 That's it right there.

01:52:56.000 I mean, this guy's just hanging on to it.

01:52:57.000 We should start with the plant.

01:52:59.000 Mad Honey, the hallucinogenic honey that can sell for over $60 a pound on the black market.

01:53:04.000 Yeah, let's find out what they do.

01:53:07.000 I'm sure you can get it on Amazon.

01:53:09.000 I think you can.

01:53:12.000 This is all the stuff.

01:53:13.000 This is mad honey.

01:53:15.000 We need to, like, do it and see what it does.

01:53:18.000 What does it say?

01:53:19.000 It says 300 grams of it, but it doesn't say.

01:53:22.000 What is the most potent mad honey available?

01:53:24.000 Why don't you Google what is the psychoactive component of mad honey?

01:53:31.000 What's the alkaloid in mad honey?

01:53:33.000 What a great name, by the way, mad honey. 0.96

01:53:34.000 That should be a band. 0.67

01:53:38.000 There it is.

01:53:39.000 It's an alkaloid.

01:53:40.000 Here it is.

01:53:42.000 Okay.

01:53:42.000 Bees that collect pollen and nectar from granotoxin...

01:53:46.000 Granotoxin-containing plants.

01:53:48.000 ...often produce honey that also contains granotoxins.

01:53:51.000 The so-called mad honey is the most common use of granotoxin poisoning in humans.

01:53:56.000 Poisoning?

01:53:56.000 How dare you?

01:53:57.000 Well, it's about dose, right?

01:53:58.000 Yes.

01:53:59.000 I mean, like all drugs.

01:54:00.000 Mad honey in Turkey is known as deli ball.

01:54:03.000 It's also used as a recreational drug in traditional medicine.

01:54:08.000 Rhododendrons.

01:54:09.000 Wow, so it's made by bees that feed on rhododendron flowers, which give it psychoactive effects.

01:54:15.000 But 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.

01:54:23.000 Yeah, so if you put some bee boxes in a rhododendron nursery, you could try that.

01:54:28.000 See if you can find a video on it, because when you watch these guys collect it, it is wild.

01:54:33.000 Yeah.

01:54:33.000 Well, it must be worth it.

01:54:35.000 It must be worth it, but how did they ever figure this out?

01:54:37.000 Because it's on the side of cliffs.

01:54:39.000 I know.

01:54:40.000 Like, they have to literally risk their life and dangle off cliffs, and you've got to assume they're doing this with, like...

01:54:45.000 I mean, how long have they been doing it?

01:54:47.000 Did they start with homemade ropes?

01:54:48.000 You've got to really trust a rope maker.

01:54:50.000 Well, the lengths people go to collect honey, I mean, we did a documentary based on Cooked.

01:54:58.000 Based on Cooked?

01:55:00.000 Cooked was a book I wrote a few years ago about cooking and the cooking hypothesis.

01:55:03.000 And we went to Africa to shoot it. 0.56

01:55:06.000 I didn't go, but the crew went to Africa to shoot it.

01:55:09.000 And the hunt for honey is, like, more prestigious than the hunt for animals.

01:55:13.000 And people, and they would send these young boys up, you know, ridiculously high trees to get it.

01:55:20.000 I mean, look, you know, sweetness is a driver for human society, right?

01:55:25.000 We do a lot for sugar.

01:55:26.000 I mean, we started the slave trade for sugar, right?

01:55:29.000 I mean, it was insane what we would do to get sugar.

01:55:31.000 They started the slave trade for sugar?

01:55:32.000 Slave trade began with sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

01:55:36.000 And, yeah...

01:55:37.000 And 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.

01:55:49.000 And it became a big source of calories in the English diet is the sugar you would put in your tea.

01:55:54.000 And because it was hot water, it could absorb a lot more sugar.

01:55:58.000 So...

01:55:59.000 Anyway, the dark side of coffee and tea is these industries are built on the back of incredible exploitation.

01:56:05.000 Slavery and, I mean, just, you know, the people who grow our caffeine are historically have been treated really badly.

01:56:14.000 Well, historically, whenever there's been a commodity, people have always abused other people in order to either harness that commodity, achieve it, like salt.

01:56:23.000 How many people were murdered for salt?

01:56:26.000 Yeah, that's true.

01:56:27.000 Which sounds insane because you go to the store.

01:56:29.000 Or in the spice trade.

01:56:30.000 Yeah, it's right there.

01:56:31.000 Or you go to a diner, it's on the table.

01:56:32.000 Well, Once Upon a Time, it's rare in nature.

01:56:35.000 That's one of the reasons we love it.

01:56:36.000 It's those things that are rare in nature, salt, sugar, fat.

01:56:41.000 And that's why we crave them, because they were special occasions.

01:56:44.000 And now we can get them, of course, anytime we want.

01:56:46.000 And you can get them all in one source, and that's why we're so fat.

01:56:50.000 The rhododendron is the national flower of Nepal.

01:56:53.000 The hills and mountainside ranges of Nepal are decorated with different colors and shapes.

01:56:57.000 The genison species, which is the dark red color in rhododendron, Arborium, which is called the Laligurans in Nepali.

01:57:07.000 So there's over a thousand different kinds of rhododendron, though.

01:57:10.000 Oh, wow.

01:57:10.000 And they also grow, you can get mad honey from the Pacific Northwest.

01:57:13.000 Oh, really?

01:57:14.000 According to this article.

01:57:16.000 See if you can get a video of them collecting the mad honey, though, because the video is wild.

01:57:21.000 When you see these guys swarmed by bees trying to harvest these, and they're very strange-looking honeycombs.

01:57:30.000 Yeah, they don't look neat or organized at all.

01:57:32.000 Well, they're tripping balls while they're making them. 1.00

01:57:36.000 And you wonder what effect it's having on the bees. 0.84

01:57:38.000 I'll bet nobody's studied that.

01:57:40.000 Yes, right?

01:57:40.000 I mean, in the same way we figured out that they like caffeine.

01:57:44.000 Yeah, so...

01:57:44.000 They may like this stuff.

01:57:46.000 Yeah, so these guys...

01:57:47.000 Here it is.

01:57:48.000 So these guys have a ladder.

01:57:50.000 And they send this rope ladder off the top of a cliff...

01:57:55.000 And as they're climbing down, I mean, it is just, the possibility of death is always there.

01:58:01.000 Yeah, and look at the swarms of bees. 0.97

01:58:04.000 So they cut the nest off and they attach it to a rope and they slowly lower it down.

01:58:08.000 Why isn't this guy being stung to death?

01:58:09.000 I think he is.

01:58:10.000 He's being stung like crazy, for sure.

01:58:12.000 I think they just develop an ability to tolerate- Well, it looks like they're putting smoke into that.

01:58:17.000 Oh, okay, to calm them down.

01:58:18.000 Oh, look at the thing he's wearing.

01:58:20.000 Well, either way, he's getting lit up, let's be honest.

01:58:23.000 There's no way he's gonna get through this without any stings.

01:58:26.000 They're probably trying to mitigate the amount of stings.

01:58:28.000 But yeah, they are using smoke, just like a normal beekeeper would do.

01:58:32.000 Look how they're doing it, though.

01:58:33.000 This is wild, man.

01:58:35.000 I wonder if he's bringing embers with him or- He must be.

01:58:39.000 It doesn't seem like he has anything on him, but God, this is so risky.

01:58:42.000 He's hanging off of that thing.

01:58:44.000 Look at the dude up there holding onto the rod. 1.00

01:58:46.000 I don't trust that motherfucker. 1.00

01:58:48.000 Jesus Christ, these people are risking so much. 1.00

01:58:51.000 I know.

01:58:52.000 It's why it's so crazy.

01:58:53.000 Look at the guy on the top.

01:58:53.000 He's literally holding the rope that is helping this guy.

01:58:58.000 Oh my God, it's so crazy.

01:59:00.000 And now he's going to raise up the honey.

01:59:03.000 And the ladder's just tied to a tree or something.

01:59:06.000 That ladder doesn't inspire confidence.

01:59:07.000 Oh, it looks like terrible ladders. 1.00

01:59:10.000 Yeah, and if you fall, you're fucked. 1.00

01:59:12.000 And I bet a lot of people fall. 1.00

01:59:14.000 Yeah.

01:59:16.000 Really amazing.

01:59:17.000 So you think this is being driven by the desire for the honey or the money that you can get for the honey?

01:59:21.000 I wonder.

01:59:22.000 Well, now I'm probably sure.

01:59:24.000 It's the money.

01:59:24.000 Yeah.

01:59:25.000 But I bet initially the way they found out about it was the honey.

01:59:28.000 Oh yeah, and they were using it.

01:59:29.000 See, and these guys are eating it.

01:59:30.000 Oh, they're going to.

01:59:31.000 They're chomping down on it.

01:59:33.000 And honey and honeycombs, there's a lot of nutrients in that as well. 0.89

01:59:40.000 Look at them, they're eating the pollen.

01:59:46.000 They don't seem to be tripping.

01:59:47.000 Or maybe they are.

01:59:49.000 Maybe that's what they- Give them 20 minutes.

01:59:50.000 Yeah.

01:59:51.000 Look how cool those honeycombs look, too.

01:59:54.000 Like really strange looking.

01:59:55.000 Strange looking hives.

01:59:56.000 You can see, though, they're not very neat, which suggests maybe it is psychoactive on the beach.

02:00:02.000 Have you ever seen those experiments NASA did giving spiders various drugs to see what their webs would look like?

02:00:09.000 No.

02:00:09.000 Oh, I did see that, but I don't remember that.

02:00:11.000 So they gave LSD, but the weirdest, worst one was caffeine.

02:00:20.000 Really?

02:00:20.000 Yeah.

02:00:21.000 Look at the NASA spiderweb caffeine.

02:00:23.000 It was all just murderous?

02:00:25.000 It was just a mess.

02:00:27.000 It was like there were holes that a bug could get through.

02:00:30.000 Oh, wow.

02:00:31.000 Normal.

02:00:33.000 Marijuana looks like a guy telling you a stoned idea.

02:00:38.000 Benzedrine looks similar to marijuana.

02:00:40.000 But look at caffeine.

02:00:41.000 It's complete chaos.

02:00:42.000 Yeah.

02:00:43.000 What's chloral hydrate?

02:00:45.000 I don't know.

02:00:47.000 Whatever it is that makes you lazy.

02:00:50.000 Anyway, that's a really weird...

02:00:52.000 I don't see the LSD one, but that's very strange.

02:00:56.000 And so that suggests that caffeine is disordering the minds of the insects that eat it.

02:01:01.000 Well, it kills dogs. 0.95

02:01:03.000 Caffeine does?

02:01:04.000 Yeah.

02:01:05.000 That's why you can't give a dog chocolate.

02:01:07.000 It's the caffeine.

02:01:08.000 Yeah.

02:01:08.000 I did not know that.

02:01:09.000 I thought it was something else.

02:01:11.000 Yeah.

02:01:11.000 I mean, it takes quite a bit.

02:01:12.000 Yeah.

02:01:13.000 But if you give a dog chocolate- Yeah, I've heard you never should do that, but I didn't know that.

02:01:18.000 That's why.

02:01:19.000 Yeah.

02:01:19.000 Yeah, it's caffeine.

02:01:20.000 It really fucks dogs up. 0.95

02:01:21.000 Caffeine is a strong chemical. 0.84

02:01:23.000 I mean, I think we don't really appreciate it.

02:01:25.000 But we never think of chocolate as being a significant- No, it's not a great quantity of caffeine.

02:01:32.000 It's enough to kill a dog.

02:01:33.000 Yeah, I'm surprised.

02:01:34.000 Maybe there's something else.

02:01:35.000 Maybe I've been misled.

02:01:36.000 There are a few other alkaloids in chocolate, but I don't know.

02:01:39.000 I haven't studied it that closely.

02:01:40.000 But yeah, other animals are not really big on caffeine.

02:01:44.000 No.

02:01:45.000 It's a human thing for the most part.

02:01:45.000 We figured out how to use it.

02:01:47.000 And you know, the dose makes the poison, as they say.

02:01:50.000 So the same thing that can be...

02:01:51.000 I mean, this is a key thing to understand about all drugs.

02:01:54.000 You know, the Greeks had this word for them.

02:01:56.000 They called them pharmakom.

02:01:57.000 And that word meant both blessing and curse.

02:02:00.000 And they could hold these two conflicting ideas in their head.

02:02:03.000 And we have to do the same thing.

02:02:04.000 We have to realize that, you know, that these drugs are powerful.

02:02:09.000 They're tools and they can be used well or used badly.

02:02:12.000 And a lot of the work of culture is figuring out which and how.

02:02:17.000 Yeah, 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.

02:02:27.000 I mean, would you call it consciousness?

02:02:28.000 How would you?

02:02:29.000 No, I don't think I would.

02:02:30.000 I mean...

02:02:31.000 I'm more comfortable with intelligence.

02:02:33.000 I mean, maybe we'll find there's something like consciousness, but consciousness implies a self-awareness and an eye, a perceiving eye.

02:02:40.000 So let's call it intelligence.

02:02:43.000 So this wasn't even a concept a few decades ago.

02:02:48.000 When was the concept of plant intelligence?

02:02:50.000 When did it first emerge in the literature?

02:02:52.000 Well, there was a group that got started in the early aughts called the Institute or Center for Plant Neurobiology.

02:03:01.000 It was a very aggressive name because there are no neurons and it pissed off so many botanists.

02:03:07.000 And this is a group of people, Stefano Moncuso is involved, Monica Gagliano, a handful of others.

02:03:14.000 I wrote this piece about them years ago.

02:03:16.000 And this is when you first started getting a lot of research into plant communication, plant problem solving.

02:03:23.000 You know, they were working with these, what is the creature?

02:03:26.000 There's a slime mold that can navigate a labyrinth, okay?

02:03:32.000 Yeah.

02:03:33.000 Really?

02:03:33.000 Yeah.

02:03:34.000 So that's not a plant, obviously.

02:03:36.000 That's a fungus.

02:03:37.000 But yeah, they would put food here and a mold here, this slime mold that kind of grows in this...

02:03:43.000 How long would it take?

02:03:44.000 I don't know.

02:03:45.000 I didn't stick around to watch it.

02:03:46.000 Wow.

02:03:47.000 But...

02:03:49.000 So I would date it to 2000 or so when you get a lot more attention.

02:03:53.000 There was that book written in the 70s, I don't even remember, The Secret Life of Plants, where they were using plants as lie detectors.

02:04:00.000 They would bring criminals in to see if they got an electrical response. 0.99

02:04:04.000 It was all bullshit. 0.99

02:04:05.000 I mean, that book has been completely discredited. 0.99

02:04:07.000 And that slowed down research into plant intelligence.

02:04:10.000 It was interesting.

02:04:11.000 Nobody wanted to touch it when that book was exposed.

02:04:15.000 But now it's kind of coming back, and it's a respectable subject.

02:04:19.000 And I think we're going to learn a lot more in the next few years.

02:04:22.000 Is there real data on using music and talking to plants and the change that it has in the way they grow?

02:04:28.000 Not that I know of.

02:04:30.000 Not real data.

02:04:30.000 That was part of The Secret Life of Plants.

02:04:32.000 Oh, was it?

02:04:32.000 Yeah, if you played Beethoven or Mozart, they had preferences.

02:04:36.000 I wonder if there's something to that, though.

02:04:39.000 They don't like to be touched.

02:04:41.000 Most plants would rather you didn't touch them.

02:04:44.000 Oh, interesting.

02:04:45.000 They take it as a threat.

02:04:47.000 Right.

02:04:48.000 But maybe like the dropping ferns, maybe they get accustomed to it.

02:04:52.000 Maybe they get used to it if you pet your rhododendron.

02:04:54.000 Or if you touch them when you spray them with mist and water and moisten them.

02:04:57.000 Or associate it with fertilizer.

02:04:59.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:05:00.000 I wonder if that's possible, like a Pavlov's dog type situation.

02:05:04.000 Yeah, that's a good question.

02:05:06.000 That'd be wild.

02:05:07.000 It would be.

02:05:08.000 But we've also learned, though, that they are not solitary creatures.

02:05:12.000 I mean, as we're learning, we're not solitary creatures.

02:05:14.000 It's so interesting that, you know, we now know that plants that have a symbiotic relationship with fungus do much better.

02:05:22.000 And 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.

02:05:31.000 As plants that grow with fungus.

02:05:34.000 And 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.

02:05:45.000 And in exchange, the fungus, which can go down and burrow through rock and stuff like that.

02:05:51.000 Those little mycelium are incredibly strong.

02:05:53.000 They give minerals to the plant.

02:05:55.000 And so they have this swap.

02:05:57.000 And, 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.

02:06:08.000 But 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.

02:06:19.000 They're giving it away.

02:06:20.000 And 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.

02:06:31.000 And that's how you can sequester large amounts of carbon by growing the right crops.

02:06:38.000 So they're somehow or another sharing or giving.

02:06:43.000 Yeah, they're sharing.

02:06:43.000 It's a more cooperative relationship.

02:06:44.000 You 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.

02:06:52.000 But 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.

02:07:05.000 And so now we've seen this on the individual plant being dependent on a fungus.

02:07:10.000 And now we're seeing in the forest that all these trees have a social life, essentially.

02:07:15.000 They're all connected to one another.

02:07:17.000 So it's not every plant for itself.

02:07:20.000 In the same way it isn't really any person for itself, right?

02:07:23.000 We are fundamentally social beings.

02:07:26.000 We do not do well alone.

02:07:28.000 And so I think that the role of cooperation in nature is finally getting the attention it deserves.

02:07:34.000 Is 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?

02:07:45.000 I wonder if a plant that's in a pot is similar to a polar bear that's at the zoo.

02:07:53.000 Yeah, it's alive, but it's not supposed to be there trapped like that.

02:07:59.000 I 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.

02:08:06.000 I mean, I have both potted plants and then plants that are in my garden.

02:08:09.000 My sense is the ones in the garden do a lot better.

02:08:12.000 They're more likely to get whatever they need because they can put their roots where they want.

02:08:18.000 They're not limited.

02:08:20.000 I 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...

02:08:30.000 It's broken by the pot itself.

02:08:32.000 Yeah.

02:08:32.000 Yeah, they're not getting through the pot.

02:08:33.000 So it's like, again, like a polar bear in a zoo.

02:08:36.000 Like, yeah, it's alive.

02:08:37.000 You familiar with the Rat Park experiments?

02:08:40.000 Yes.

02:08:40.000 Yeah.

02:08:41.000 It reminds me of that.

02:08:42.000 Please talk about those because it's really amazing because people have this perception about rats and cocaine and rats and heroin because of this.

02:08:49.000 So most of what we think we know about drugs and addiction comes from these rat experiments, right?

02:08:56.000 And they would take a caged rat.

02:08:57.000 And this went on all through the 60s, 70s, 80s.

02:09:00.000 And 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.

02:09:13.000 They could get cocaine or heroin or meth, whatever you put in there.

02:09:16.000 And these cage rats would just keep hitting the lever for the cocaine or heroin until they died or got addicted.

02:09:24.000 The cocaine killed them and the opiates addicted them.

02:09:27.000 And this was like proof that, you know, the chemicals have these hooks.

02:09:31.000 And if you take, you know, that addiction's a disease, you catch from these chemicals, basically.

02:09:35.000 That was the model.

02:09:37.000 And then this clever psychologist named Bruce Alexander up in British Columbia... 0.99

02:09:44.000 Thought, well, maybe it's because these rats have such shitty lives that they're taking these drugs. 0.90

02:09:51.000 So he designed another experiment called the Rat Park. 0.74

02:09:55.000 And 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.

02:10:15.000 They would still have a little morphine, but instead of like 25 milligrams, they'd have 5 milligrams.

02:10:21.000 You know, they'd have a safe amount basically.

02:10:23.000 And 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.

02:10:33.000 And 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.

02:10:45.000 And I think that's a really telling example.

02:10:47.000 I mean, it was just our blindness that we just assume rats in cages, natural, you know.

02:10:51.000 But, I mean, they were in solitary confinement.

02:10:53.000 They were miserable.

02:10:55.000 They were probably suicidal. 0.60

02:10:57.000 It makes sense with people.

02:10:58.000 You don't see people at the top of their life.

02:11:01.000 They're doing fantastic that wasted all the way with drugs.

02:11:04.000 It's usually there's some sort of depression and some, you know, abuse or anxiety.

02:11:09.000 Yeah, well, like we were saying earlier about the opioid crisis.

02:11:11.000 It's not everywhere.

02:11:13.000 It's in these really disadvantaged areas.

02:11:15.000 These areas that were once doing well and no longer are.

02:11:18.000 And 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.

02:11:32.000 They get something they're not getting in their life.

02:11:35.000 That there is this sense of warmth and comfort and even connectedness for some people.

02:11:43.000 It's not a healthy adaptation, but it is an adaptation.

02:11:47.000 It raises questions on whether we should think about addiction as a disease.

02:11:52.000 That's a very common idea.

02:11:54.000 And 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.

02:12:03.000 But I think it may get things wrong, too, because it may be that the addiction is more of a symptom.

02:12:18.000 That's Gabor Monte's take.

02:12:31.000 Yeah, the Rat Park study is so interesting because imagine if that guy had not put those two pieces together.

02:12:41.000 We 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.

02:12:51.000 So keep it out of your life.

02:12:52.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:12:52.000 And then it's all biology and it's predestined and inevitable.

02:12:57.000 And I think addiction is a lot more complicated.

02:12:59.000 And I think, you know, some of these harm reduction strategies going on, you know, in Portugal and Switzerland is an interesting case.

02:13:07.000 They, you know, if you're a heroin addict there and you enter into their system, they will write you a prescription for heroin.

02:13:17.000 So you'll get it at the drugstore, which removes the risk of overdose because you know what you're getting.

02:13:23.000 There'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.

02:13:28.000 I 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.

02:13:35.000 And then they'll go to work on making sure you have a good job, giving you therapy, Essentially improving your cage.

02:13:44.000 And then they try to get you off the drug.

02:13:47.000 But they realize they have to get the life circumstance right before you can attack the problem.

02:13:53.000 The only way we're going to figure out how to do that here is to make it super profitable.

02:13:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:13:57.000 Good luck.

02:13:58.000 I mean, right?

02:14:00.000 We're so hell-bent on profit and so hell-bent on capitalism.

02:14:05.000 And we're such moralists, too.

02:14:07.000 The 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.

02:14:17.000 Well, think of the self-righteousness you had walking through the airport.

02:14:20.000 With no caffeine in your system.

02:14:22.000 Touché.

02:14:22.000 It's like, everybody has that.

02:14:24.000 We do. 1.00

02:14:25.000 Fucking losers hooked on drugs. 1.00

02:14:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:14:27.000 Get your shit together like me. 0.99

02:14:28.000 But the thing is, everybody's path is different. 0.99

02:14:32.000 Everyone's path is different, but we do moralize drug addiction in a way that just is not helpful.

02:14:37.000 No, it's not.

02:14:38.000 And 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.

02:14:56.000 All that stuff's great.

02:14:57.000 But 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.

02:15:07.000 The more they can get out of that, the less losers we'll have, which means the better America will be overall.

02:15:12.000 And more people who are contributing.

02:15:13.000 We'll have more people contributing and more competition.

02:15:16.000 More competition amongst us, which will elevate everybody.

02:15:18.000 It's good for everybody.

02:15:20.000 The people that are competitive, capitalistic people should be embracing this, because it's better for the market overall.

02:15:28.000 You'll have more contributors.

02:15:30.000 Right, and more consumers.

02:15:31.000 Yes!

02:15:32.000 And less crime!

02:15:34.000 Yeah.

02:15:34.000 Well, that's a big thing.

02:15:35.000 And of course, so much crime is the result of drugs being illegal.

02:15:40.000 Right.

02:15:41.000 And all we're doing are feeding the cartels.

02:15:46.000 Yes, which is insane.

02:15:48.000 I mean, everyone wants to go overseas to deal with these criminals in these foreign lands that are doing terrible things. 0.99

02:15:56.000 Oh, look what the drug war's done to Mexico. 0.98

02:15:58.000 Look what it's done to Colombia.

02:15:59.000 I mean, it's just destroyed these governments.

02:16:05.000 Yeah.

02:16:05.000 Anyway, there are a lot of reasons to end the drug war.

02:16:08.000 I think people see it.

02:16:10.000 I don't see the right even defending it anymore.

02:16:12.000 And, you know, one of the things I'm trying to do with this work and this book is let's start this post-drug war conversation.

02:16:20.000 Yeah.

02:16:21.000 And figure out a better way to deal with it.

02:16:24.000 Because addiction will always be with us.

02:16:26.000 There will still be overdoses.

02:16:28.000 You know, look, we legalize tobacco and alcohol and I think about 80,000 people die from alcohol every year.

02:16:36.000 And that's a cost that we've just decided we're going to bear as a society.

02:16:40.000 We do our best with these rituals.

02:16:42.000 And 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.

02:16:53.000 But this has to happen in the culture.

02:16:56.000 And it's not going to be perfect.

02:16:58.000 It's going to be an uneasy piece.

02:17:00.000 Well, there's also personal responsibility and choice.

02:17:04.000 Cigarettes are a big one, right?

02:17:06.000 Cigarettes kill a half a million people every year in this country.

02:17:08.000 They die prematurely because of the use of cigarettes.

02:17:13.000 Tobacco is a very interesting example of how contextual, though.

02:17:18.000 Drug uses.

02:17:19.000 In this book, I did a tobacco ceremony, which is really interesting.

02:17:26.000 Many traditional cultures in the New World use tobacco as a sacred plant medicine.

02:17:32.000 Some people think it's the most powerful plant medicine of all.

02:17:35.000 They don't smoke them every day.

02:17:37.000 They use them ceremonially on special occasions.

02:17:40.000 They're not addicted to it.

02:17:43.000 And it's a powerful drug when used that way.

02:17:46.000 So this tobacco ceremony, I was working with this healer, this curandera. 0.97

02:17:51.000 And basically, it's liquefied tobacco.

02:17:55.000 They take a tobacco rustica, which grows in South America, I guess.

02:18:00.000 And they make this brown liquid from it.

02:18:04.000 I don't know how they cook it.

02:18:05.000 I don't know how they make it.

02:18:06.000 And you close one nostril, and she has a syringe, and she shoots it up the other nostril. 1.00

02:18:14.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:18:16.000 So it's like a snuff.

02:18:18.000 And you just feel this wave of flame, like starting in your forehead and then moving back through your head and then down your spine.

02:18:27.000 It's like, whoa!

02:18:29.000 And you start moving in this involuntary way, and you're shaking out your legs and your arms.

02:18:34.000 You look kind of spastic. 1.00

02:18:35.000 I did this in front of a camera.

02:18:39.000 I regret to say.

02:18:42.000 And I'm working on a documentary about psychedelics, but I'm not going to trip on camera.

02:18:48.000 It's just too dangerous.

02:18:50.000 It's a bad idea.

02:18:52.000 But a tobacco ceremony we could do, because it's legal.

02:18:54.000 It's totally legal.

02:18:55.000 And it only lasts about 10 or 20 minutes, but it is such a powerful purgative.

02:19:01.000 Like, I just felt like emptied out and refreshed when it was over.

02:19:06.000 Really?

02:19:07.000 And it's just like everything just went.

02:19:10.000 Whatever I was worrying about, whatever was on my mind.

02:19:13.000 And I felt like physically that I had just been purged.

02:19:16.000 And this is tobacco.

02:19:19.000 This is the same drug that kills 500,000 people that, you know, millions of us are addicted to.

02:19:25.000 And it's done so much damage.

02:19:27.000 But 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. 0.94

02:19:35.000 I don't know.

02:19:44.000 I don't know.

02:19:54.000 But even then, I think it was an occasion.

02:19:56.000 It was not a habit, a daily habit.

02:20:00.000 And 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.

02:20:13.000 And the idea that...

02:20:14.000 And I was so negative on this idea of doing a tobacco ceremony.

02:20:18.000 I mean, I smoked when I was younger, and it was really hard to quit, and I'm really happy I quit.

02:20:22.000 And then I didn't want to go near it.

02:20:24.000 And the smell of tobacco, you know, I have negative associations.

02:20:27.000 And in fact, the worst thing in this experience was a little bit of it got down my nasal passages, and I swallowed it.

02:20:34.000 And I felt like I'd swallowed the contents of an ashtray.

02:20:37.000 It was really nasty.

02:20:38.000 And that lasted all night.

02:20:40.000 But that was my mistake.

02:20:41.000 I should not have swallowed.

02:20:42.000 But it really taught me that set and setting, you know, it's not just about psychedelics.

02:20:49.000 It's about all drugs.

02:20:50.000 And that even a drug we regard as evil, as tobacco, in the proper context could be very positive.

02:20:57.000 I 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.

02:21:07.000 But tobacco itself, like, I've smoked cigarettes before shows, and I like to do it.

02:21:12.000 I like to smoke a cigarette before a show.

02:21:13.000 It sparks my brain.

02:21:15.000 Yeah.

02:21:16.000 Like caffeine, it does some very positive things for your cognition.

02:21:19.000 Yeah, it gives you a weird head rush, like a very unusual head rush.

02:21:22.000 If you're not using it habitually.

02:21:24.000 Yes, if you're not using it habitually.

02:21:26.000 Yeah.

02:21:26.000 Yeah, I don't think it gives that head rush to people that are constantly on it.

02:21:29.000 But I know a lot of writers that have had a real problem quitting.

02:21:33.000 When I quit, I had to relearn how to write.

02:21:36.000 It involved a lot of coffee. 0.70

02:21:39.000 And sucking on sucking candies and all sorts of other oral fixations. 0.97

02:21:43.000 Different nicotine candies?

02:21:44.000 No, I never did that.

02:21:45.000 That wasn't really in use then.

02:21:47.000 But an interesting fact about that is that you would think, if it was strictly a chemical addiction to nicotine, that patches would work.

02:21:56.000 And they only work for 17% of people.

02:21:59.000 So that means that you have all these other people, a majority of tobacco users, that it isn't just about the drug.

02:22:06.000 It's about the experience, the association, the feeling.

02:22:10.000 I don't know.

02:22:10.000 I mean, they're getting their nicotine, but they still want their cigarettes.

02:22:14.000 And that's an interesting finding.

02:22:17.000 Because if addiction was all about the molecule, it should work 90% of the time.

02:22:22.000 Yeah.

02:22:23.000 Another thing that doesn't work that good is chew.

02:22:26.000 Yeah, nicotine gums.

02:22:28.000 Yeah.

02:22:28.000 Well, not just gums, but the chewing tobacco and the stuff they put.

02:22:32.000 What's that shit called? 1.00

02:22:33.000 What do they call it? 1.00

02:22:34.000 Dip?

02:22:34.000 Dip.

02:22:36.000 A friend of mine gave me one of these little packets.

02:22:38.000 You put a packet.

02:22:39.000 Like a tea bag?

02:22:40.000 Yeah, it looks like a little tea bag. 1.00

02:22:42.000 It was fucking disgusting. 1.00

02:22:43.000 It made me nauseous. 1.00

02:22:45.000 I got nervous.

02:22:46.000 I was like, whoa, what is this?

02:22:47.000 Well, people do get oral cancers from those things.

02:22:49.000 Oh, I'm sure.

02:22:50.000 Yeah.

02:22:50.000 No, 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.

02:23:00.000 Really?

02:23:01.000 And he wanted to show the kids?

02:23:02.000 Like, extreme mouth cancer.

02:23:02.000 He had part of his tongue removed, part of his jaw removed, and he was like this handsome, strapping guy.

02:23:07.000 And then, you know, he was disfigured afterwards because, like, literally they had to remove a bunch of his bone for his jaw.

02:23:14.000 It's like Sigmund Freud.

02:23:15.000 That happened to him.

02:23:16.000 Did it really?

02:23:16.000 Yeah.

02:23:16.000 Yeah, he had jaw cancer.

02:23:18.000 It was just the last, I don't know how many years of his life, and had a big piece of his jaw removed.

02:23:22.000 What did he, was he smoking?

02:23:25.000 Yeah, he was a big, well, the classic, him in the pipe.

02:23:30.000 Pipe?

02:23:30.000 Yeah.

02:23:31.000 Yeah, there's so many of those intellectuals from that day, like Bertrand Russell was a gigantic pipe smoker.

02:23:38.000 I 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.

02:23:44.000 Yeah.

02:23:45.000 But it's less cancerous, as are cigars, less cancerous than cigarettes.

02:23:51.000 Yeah.

02:23:51.000 But probably because you're just not taking in the same amount of chemical.

02:23:54.000 Well, yeah, you're not inhaling as much.

02:23:56.000 Yeah, and then the irritants.

02:23:57.000 Less likely to get lung cancer.

02:23:58.000 Yeah.

02:23:59.000 Anyway, it's...

02:24:01.000 It's just more fascinating and complicated than we think.

02:24:06.000 But 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.

02:24:21.000 Was there anything in studying this book and preparing to do this book, was there anything that was surprising to you about what you learned?

02:24:29.000 There were a lot of things that were surprising.

02:24:32.000 Well, one, that bees like caffeine.

02:24:35.000 And it improves their memory.

02:24:36.000 And it does improve our memory, by the way.

02:24:38.000 If you study, if you learn a subject or study something and then have a cup of coffee or tea after, you're more likely to remember it.

02:24:45.000 So there's a reason to use it in college.

02:24:49.000 One of the most surprising facts is that the largest source of antioxidants in the American diet comes from coffee and tea.

02:24:59.000 Really?

02:25:00.000 In the American diet?

02:25:02.000 American diet.

02:25:03.000 That just tells you how few vegetables we're eating.

02:25:06.000 That's just a measure of how bad our diet is.

02:25:09.000 We're eating meat and sugar, and we're just not getting plants.

02:25:14.000 Because the only thing that produces antioxidants, which we need for our health, which we need to prevent cancer, Plants produce antioxidants.

02:25:22.000 And so we're getting a lot of them from coffee and tea.

02:25:25.000 That may explain a lot of the health benefits of coffee and tea.

02:25:29.000 That, you know, coffee has been shown to be protective against several cancers, against Parkinson's disease, against cardiovascular problems.

02:25:38.000 And it may not be the caffeine.

02:25:40.000 It may be the antioxidants.

02:25:42.000 Wow.

02:25:42.000 So that was a big surprise.

02:25:44.000 How much antioxidants are in coffee?

02:25:46.000 I mean, I know there's resveratrol that's in wine.

02:25:49.000 Yeah.

02:25:49.000 I don't know.

02:25:50.000 I don't know how many or which ones, but it is the biggest source.

02:25:53.000 And so if you're not eating vegetables, you should, you know, bottoms up on your coffee and tea.

02:25:58.000 That's pretty crazy.

02:25:59.000 Yeah, it is.

02:25:59.000 I mean, you know, we should probably be getting them from plants, eating plants.

02:26:04.000 Yeah, or at least supplementing.

02:26:06.000 I just imagine that whatever you're getting from coffee, it's just a little bean.

02:26:12.000 Yeah, I know.

02:26:13.000 I know that it has so much.

02:26:14.000 And you're not getting the leaves, and there are antioxidants you get from the leaves of plants.

02:26:18.000 Of course, you get that in tea.

02:26:19.000 Right.

02:26:20.000 So with tea, you're drinking the leaves, and with coffee, it's the seed.

02:26:26.000 Has this book affected the way you eat or affected the way you think about what you eat?

02:26:33.000 Because you're talking about all the positive and negative benefits of plants, all the compounds.

02:26:41.000 I'm pretty much down to a plant-based diet at this point.

02:26:44.000 I have a little bit of fish from time to time.

02:26:47.000 I haven't had meat in two years, probably.

02:26:50.000 What made you make that decision?

02:26:52.000 It was a combination of health.

02:26:54.000 I was dealing with some health issues and also what I was learning about the meat industry.

02:27:00.000 I've done a lot of writing on the cattle industry and pork.

02:27:04.000 I've worked on documentaries about that.

02:27:08.000 It's just a hard industry to support.

02:27:10.000 It's just so brutal, both to the workers and the animals, that I don't really want to have anything to do with it.

02:27:15.000 There are farmers growing meat in really sustainable ways, animals that have good lives on farms and one bad day, as they say.

02:27:25.000 And I support that kind of agriculture.

02:27:28.000 But in general, the average meat you find comes at the end of a food chain I just don't want to support.

02:27:35.000 And then the third reason is climate change.

02:27:38.000 I'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.

02:27:48.000 The biggest part of your climate footprint.

02:27:50.000 But what about transportation?

02:27:52.000 Transportation and the food system are about the same, at around 18 to 20%.

02:27:58.000 And it's the hardest for a lot of us to change.

02:28:04.000 Or in some ways it's the easiest because it's just a different kind of choices.

02:28:07.000 But, you know, you can buy your electric car, you know, you make these big moves.

02:28:12.000 But beef eating in particular has a tremendous impact on the climate.

02:28:17.000 Have you looked at all into these regenerative farms and whether or not they're scalable?

02:28:23.000 Yeah.

02:28:23.000 The evidence is that they are.

02:28:25.000 It's going to take some work and some different agricultural policies.

02:28:28.000 We have to give farmers incentives, which we already do, of course.

02:28:32.000 Right now, we give them incentives to grow corn and soy.

02:28:35.000 That's it.

02:28:36.000 And they grow a lot of that. 0.99

02:28:37.000 And that's the raw material for all the crap we're eating. 0.90

02:28:40.000 That gets turned into processed food or it's fed to animals and turned into meat. 0.89

02:28:44.000 And that's basically how the food system is organized right now.

02:28:48.000 We could change those incentives and reward farmers instead for practices that sequester carbon and for practices that improve the diet.

02:28:56.000 So 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.

02:29:08.000 It would have a huge positive effect on the soil microbiome, on carbon sequestration, cover cropping, planting trees on your farms.

02:29:18.000 There's a lot that could be done and that it could make a substantial difference to climate change if we worked on our agriculture.

02:29:24.000 One 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.

02:29:40.000 One of them is with tryptamines, particularly with ayahuasca, you get a lot of protect nature, protect Mother Earth, some sort of weird connection.

02:29:52.000 And with psychedelic mushrooms, you almost get...

02:29:56.000 There's almost like an announcement that there's an other out there.

02:30:04.000 Yes, yes, exactly.

02:30:05.000 Right?

02:30:06.000 Yeah, I had that on psilocybin.

02:30:08.000 I had an experience that I described in How to Change Your Mind of being in my garden in Connecticut.

02:30:15.000 And, you know, I've always...

02:30:17.000 I 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.

02:30:27.000 But it was an intellectual idea.

02:30:28.000 I understood it intellectually.

02:30:30.000 On this psilocybin experience, I was in my garden.

02:30:34.000 It was August...

02:30:35.000 There were like, you know, dragonflies everywhere and bees everywhere and birds.

02:30:41.000 And I saw my plants as more alive than I'd ever seen them before.

02:30:47.000 And they were like returning my gaze.

02:30:49.000 And I know that sounds crazy, But they were regarding me as I was regarding them.

02:30:54.000 And I had never felt more part of nature than I did that time.

02:31:00.000 Normally, as humans, we feel like we've got one foot in nature and one foot definitely out of nature.

02:31:05.000 We even talk about having a relationship to nature. 0.98

02:31:08.000 That's fucked up, right? 0.98

02:31:10.000 We are nature. 0.99

02:31:11.000 We don't have a relationship to nature.

02:31:14.000 But that's how we think.

02:31:16.000 That was all gone.

02:31:17.000 I was just one species among many, and they all had their own subjecthood, their own personalities.

02:31:25.000 And my plants were really well disposed to me.

02:31:28.000 They were very positive.

02:31:30.000 There was no negative energies going back and forth.

02:31:33.000 And then the dragonflies were connecting us all, and it was amazing.

02:31:39.000 So it was that kind of announcement you're describing.

02:31:43.000 And a lot of people have nature experiences like that on psilocybin.

02:31:48.000 You're right about ayahuasca, too.

02:31:49.000 The imagery is right out of the Amazon, right?

02:31:53.000 And I have a feeling we are bringing that to the experience.

02:32:06.000 Yeah.

02:32:07.000 Yeah.

02:32:10.000 Yeah.

02:32:12.000 Yeah.

02:32:14.000 Yeah.

02:32:20.000 I know.

02:32:20.000 I had a lot of vine imagery on ayahuasca.

02:32:23.000 And that's common too.

02:32:25.000 I had this really weird imagery on ayahuasca that stays with me as kind of like this visual koan.

02:32:31.000 And 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.

02:32:40.000 And this is one for me.

02:32:43.000 It 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.

02:32:53.000 So we were wearing eye shades.

02:32:56.000 I was with a group of women. 0.99

02:32:57.000 I was the only man there.

02:32:58.000 The eye shades they had were really tight.

02:33:01.000 They were black eye shades with these three bands of black elastic going around my head.

02:33:06.000 And at the height of this experience, I felt like these bars encircling my head, that the things became bars.

02:33:15.000 And then they started reproducing and there were bars going all the way down my body and I was in this tight little cage.

02:33:21.000 And I was like, how am I going to get out of this?

02:33:22.000 And it really was scary.

02:33:24.000 And then I looked down and I see a little bit of green.

02:33:28.000 And it's the first two leaves of a vine.

02:33:32.000 And the vine starts climbing up the cage.

02:33:35.000 You know, around and around and around and gets to the top and leaves and reaches out to the sun.

02:33:42.000 And I kept saying to myself, plants can't be caged.

02:33:46.000 Plants can't be caged.

02:33:48.000 And I don't know what this means.

02:33:51.000 It may mean nothing at all.

02:33:53.000 But 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.

02:34:09.000 And it's, you know, sometimes psychedelics just give you things you chew on.

02:34:13.000 And I've mentioned this in interviews before, and people write me with interpretations of, you're actually the vine.

02:34:20.000 You're showing us how to get out of the cage.

02:34:22.000 Thank you, but I don't know.

02:34:25.000 People always have their own wacky interpretations of what you're experiencing.

02:34:29.000 I know, I know.

02:34:30.000 You know the people that interpret dreams?

02:34:33.000 Yeah.

02:34:33.000 Imagine people that interpret trips.

02:34:34.000 Trips, yeah.

02:34:35.000 That kind of shenanigans, those kind of shysters, they're coming.

02:34:38.000 Yeah, that'll be a job, I guess.

02:34:39.000 Oh, for sure.

02:34:40.000 Just like psychic healers.

02:34:42.000 And they'll be called integration therapists.

02:34:43.000 Yes.

02:34:43.000 I mean, there's healers out there.

02:34:45.000 That's what they do.

02:34:45.000 I'm a psychic healer.

02:34:46.000 And that's how they pay their rent, you know, which is just...

02:34:49.000 It's true. 0.97

02:34:49.000 Yeah, no, watch out for those charlatans. 0.97

02:34:51.000 But I have to say, the whole...

02:34:53.000 I've had a very interesting experience as a writer writing about trips.

02:34:58.000 I mean, it's really risky and hard.

02:35:01.000 And I really was nervous about doing it.

02:35:03.000 I think you've gotten through the net, though.

02:35:05.000 Maybe.

02:35:06.000 I think you have.

02:35:07.000 You know, I think I found a way to do it.

02:35:10.000 It 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.

02:35:22.000 So I approach those chapters both in this book and in How to Change Your Mind with a lot of nervousness.

02:35:28.000 Like this is a writing challenge I've never met before.

02:35:33.000 And everybody says these experiences are ineffable, you know, beyond language.

02:35:38.000 But I was going to F them.

02:35:41.000 I was going to try or fail trying.

02:35:45.000 And it turned out to be the most fun I've ever had as a writer.

02:35:49.000 Which I didn't expect at all.

02:35:51.000 Once 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.

02:36:03.000 I'm not just writing for Psychonauts.

02:36:07.000 But I found a way to do it which partly involved acknowledging how insane it sounded.

02:36:13.000 So 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...

02:36:25.000 Banalities are just truths that have been drained of any kind of emotion from overuse.

02:36:29.000 It doesn't mean they're false.

02:36:31.000 That's a great way to describe it.

02:36:32.000 And we need to relearn these banalities, right?

02:36:37.000 And psychedelics takes us there.

02:36:38.000 So I would just kind of turn, it was like turning to the audience, right, in a play and say, I know how this sounds to you, but consider.

02:36:45.000 And I do that repeatedly when I'm doing one of these trip reports.

02:36:49.000 And so once I could let go that fear that the reader thought I was absolutely nuts, I could really get into it.

02:36:57.000 And it became sort of like what I imagine novelists get to do, which is essentially transcribe the fantasies in their head.

02:37:06.000 Without having to worry about fact checkers or, you know, plausibility.

02:37:10.000 And I was just, I had these memories.

02:37:12.000 And as you know, the memories stay with you for a long time.

02:37:15.000 It's not like dreams in that sense, where dreams are constantly like, you're trying to hold on to it as it flees.

02:37:24.000 But they were still very vivid to me.

02:37:26.000 And telling those stories actually became my favorite thing, I mean, in the writing of the book.

02:37:33.000 And the Mescaline story here that I tell was just, I don't know, it just takes you to a really interesting place as a writer.

02:37:39.000 And I'm looking forward to more people doing it.

02:37:42.000 I think we will see it.

02:37:46.000 And, you know, I paid no penalty for telling my trip reports in two books so far.

02:37:51.000 Well, 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.

02:38:12.000 And they trusted you because of your previous work to apply this same sort of strategy I think you're probably right.

02:38:20.000 I think I did bring a certain credibility.

02:38:22.000 Had my first book been about psychedelics, I think things would have gone very differently.

02:38:26.000 It'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.

02:38:39.000 And I'm like...

02:38:41.000 I don't think so.

02:38:42.000 This is a different kind of topic. 0.65

02:38:43.000 I thought it was really silly, actually.

02:38:46.000 Really?

02:38:46.000 Before you got involved?

02:38:47.000 You thought it was silly?

02:38:49.000 I didn't imagine the potential for this field to become so legitimate, so fast.

02:38:56.000 What year was it?

02:38:57.000 I published that book three years ago.

02:38:59.000 Well, what year was it when you started thinking about writing?

02:39:01.000 Oh, 2013-14, I started writing about psychedelics.

02:39:05.000 I did a piece for The New Yorker.

02:39:06.000 And what psychedelic experiences, if any, had you had before that?

02:39:10.000 I had had a couple psilocybin experiences in my 20s.

02:39:16.000 They were not high dose, I now know, having had high dose.

02:39:19.000 They were kind of what people sometimes call museum experiences, where everything just looks kind of filmic or interesting or arty.

02:39:28.000 They were pleasant.

02:39:30.000 Well, one was pleasant.

02:39:31.000 It was in a rural situation with my wife, and that was wonderful.

02:39:35.000 And then the other was, you know, on Riverside Drive in Manhattan.

02:39:39.000 It was like, no, you don't do it there.

02:39:42.000 And that was not pleasant.

02:39:44.000 And then I fell away from it.

02:39:46.000 I had no interest.

02:39:48.000 But I didn't do them in college.

02:39:49.000 It was weird.

02:39:50.000 I went to a college where there was no psychedelics.

02:39:52.000 And this is in the 70s.

02:39:53.000 I don't know what I did wrong.

02:39:55.000 What college?

02:39:55.000 Bennington College in Vermont.

02:39:57.000 And there was like one pothead and everyone else drank.

02:40:03.000 And it was an odd place that way.

02:40:04.000 And there had been a lot of LSD on campus, I heard, years before and then after I was there.

02:40:09.000 But I was in this little window of, like, no psychedelics.

02:40:12.000 But frankly, I was too afraid.

02:40:14.000 I did not think I was stable enough to take LSD. And I had absorbed all the cultural fear.

02:40:23.000 You know, the stories about your genes and what would happen.

02:40:26.000 And, you know, because this is...

02:40:27.000 I didn't get to college until 1973, so...

02:40:32.000 In 1968, when the backlash begins, I'm only 15. No, I'm 13. So I brought all this fear.

02:40:42.000 And I didn't think of myself as a stable enough person to take a chance.

02:40:45.000 And I didn't want to explore my mind.

02:40:47.000 I was afraid of what I'd find there.

02:40:49.000 And, I mean, the mind is a very scary place to go for most of us, I think.

02:40:53.000 But it was particularly scary when I was that age.

02:40:55.000 So I stayed away.

02:40:56.000 I remember writing a short story when I was in 10th grade about a kid who took LSD and broke a bottle and slit his wrist.

02:41:04.000 You wrote a story about this?

02:41:06.000 Wow.

02:41:06.000 Yeah.

02:41:07.000 So that's what was in my head about it.

02:41:09.000 What was that based on?

02:41:10.000 Just folklore?

02:41:11.000 Yeah.

02:41:12.000 Stuff that was out there and fears that I had.

02:41:16.000 So I was coming to it fresh and...

02:41:18.000 I didn't really start until I was in my late 50s.

02:41:22.000 I didn't do it at the age-appropriate time.

02:41:24.000 But on the other hand, I came to appreciate that there's a special value to psychedelics late in life.

02:41:34.000 I said in How to Change Your Mind that it could be that psychedelics are wasted on the young.

02:41:40.000 And that they offer special things to people.

02:41:43.000 When 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.

02:42:00.000 We know what works.

02:42:01.000 We go right to the script.

02:42:02.000 You know, we have a script for everything.

02:42:04.000 But that kind of dulls us to reality.

02:42:07.000 We're not taking in information.

02:42:08.000 We're going right to the solution or the script we want to use.

02:42:12.000 And one of the things I think psychedelics are really good for is melting those habits and creating a space where new narratives can form.

02:42:24.000 We're the victim of these narratives that our ego tells us.

02:42:27.000 And a lot of them are very critical. 1.00

02:42:29.000 You know, your work's shit, you're unworthy, you didn't deserve the success. 1.00

02:42:35.000 Our egos are hectoring us with that kind of stuff all the time. 1.00

02:42:39.000 Psychedelics tunes that down, sometimes turns it off completely.

02:42:42.000 We 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,

02:42:59.000 once you've gotten out of those grooves, to start new narratives.

02:43:02.000 And I think that's what happens in many cases.

02:43:05.000 There's a wonderful metaphor that someone I interviewed for the book said.

02:43:09.000 He's a Dutch neuroscientist.

02:43:13.000 And his image of what psychedelics do is like, imagine a hillside.

02:43:18.000 He would have said a mountain, but he's never seen a mountain.

02:43:21.000 He's in Holland.

02:43:22.000 It's a flat country.

02:43:24.000 Imagine a hillside covered in snow, and imagine your thoughts as sleds going down that hill.

02:43:31.000 Over time, the grooves created by those sleds get deeper and deeper.

02:43:36.000 And over time, it's impossible to go down that hillside without falling into those grooves.

02:43:41.000 They're attractors.

02:43:42.000 They'll just suck you right in. 0.96

02:43:44.000 What the psychedelic experience does is it's like a new snowfall, fresh snow.

02:43:48.000 It fills all the grooves, and that allows you to go down the hill in a new way.

02:43:52.000 That was a beautiful image.

02:43:54.000 That is beautiful.

02:43:55.000 Yeah.

02:43:56.000 Let's end with that.

02:43:57.000 That's perfect.

02:43:58.000 Sounds good.

02:43:59.000 All right.

02:43:59.000 This book is out July 6th.

02:44:02.000 Audio as well.

02:44:03.000 Audio as well.

02:44:04.000 And Kindle.

02:44:04.000 It's...

02:44:05.000 This is your mind on plants.

02:44:07.000 The great and powerful Michael Pollan.

02:44:10.000 Thanks, Chuck.

02:44:11.000 I really, really appreciate that.

02:44:12.000 Great pleasure.

02:44:12.000 It was awesome.

02:44:13.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:44:14.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 05, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1678 - Michael Pollan

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