Michael Pollan explores psychedelics in How to Change Your Mind, shifting from food/agriculture after Johns Hopkins’ 2014 psilocybin study revealed 80% reductions in depression/anxiety for terminal cancer patients. His own trips—including a harrowing 5-MeO-DMT encounter and structured psilocybin/LSD sessions—stripped away ego, exposing raw truths like mortality’s weight or nature’s consciousness. Pollan dismisses Terence McKenna’s "stoned ape" theory but embraces psychedelics as cultural mutagens, sparking transformative ideas despite risks. Legalization in Oregon/California remains uncertain, but proper regulation could mitigate dangers like uncut LSD or cardiac risks from ibogaine, offering hope for mental health stagnation since Prozac’s 1980s debut. Ultimately, these substances may rewrite human perception—if wielded responsibly. [Automatically generated summary]
I think your book is coming out right when John Hopkins Research Center is starting to put out these studies on it.
People are starting to recognize that MDMA has amazing results for post-traumatic stress disorder from veterans, and marijuana is becoming legal in more and more states.
Well, I started the research in 2014. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker called The Trip Treatment, which is online.
And it was my first foray into this work.
I went down to Hopkins and spent a lot of time at NYU. And at the time, they were doing this really interesting trial where they were giving psilocybin to people with cancer diagnoses, many of whom were terminal.
And that seemed like such a weird idea to me that I was curious to explore it.
And I spent a lot of time talking to patients, many of whom were dying.
About how this single high-dose psilocybin experience, a guided psilocybin experience, and we should talk a little bit about how the guided changes things.
The image people have is popping some mushrooms in your mouth and maybe going to a concert or going to the beach, but this is a very controlled internal experience.
Completely reset these people's attitude toward death and allowed them to die with equanimity and when these results were published just last year they found that in 80% of the people who had the session they had statistically significant reductions in standard measures of depression and anxiety.
It was one of the most effective psychiatric interventions that these psychiatrists had ever seen.
Which is amazing.
A single experience.
And that a molecule could change the contents of your head to the extent that you would rethink your mortality.
And so as I began talking to these people and hearing their stories, many of which were just remarkable, I realized, you know, this is not just an article.
There's a book here.
And there's so much, you know...
There are two kinds of articles you write as a journalist.
One is, you're sick of the topic by the time you finish and you can't wait to be done.
And the other is, God, I just scratched the surface.
It's a great tragedy, in my opinion, that our culture has demonized these substances and put them in this category of forbidden fruit to the point where you're so nervous about doing them.
Let's try something small and see how you react to it.
And then I think, I don't think people like myself or pot smokers or people who have done psychedelics, I don't think we do it any favors either, because we're always trying to pretend that there is no adverse effects.
And that there's like, you know, people, when they get into something, they want everybody to do it.
It's like childbirth, or how we hear childbirth is.
You can't imagine doing it again, and eventually you do do it again.
So, I do think that we have to find the proper context in which to do it, and I think your point is really important.
We need trained guides.
The experience is completely different when it's guided.
Yeah.
You have a sense of safety.
There's someone looking out for your body while your mind is traveling.
And this allows you to essentially surrender to the experience.
And most bad trips, in my experience, are the result of people resisting what is happening.
Their ego is dissolving, and it's scary.
It feels like a death, and they try to stop it.
And that can make you very anxious.
And so all the guides I worked with and interviewed, they were all like, relax your mind and float downstream.
If you see a door, open it.
If you see a staircase, go down it.
Surrender.
Trust and let go.
And this kind of advice changes everything.
And the chances of a bad trip, I think, in a guided situation are substantially less because they know how to help you deal with it and what to tell you when it's happening.
So I do think that by forcing these drugs underground and into this very kind of unregulated use, reports of bad trips were much fewer before the moral panic about LSD in 1965. And when it was still legal, you didn't hear about bad trips.
you started hearing about it when the culture did this 180 and turned against psychedelics.
So I think you can create situations where the risks are really mitigated.
Well, I think also the fear, like you were talking about right before the podcast, or right as we started, some people worried that they were going to turn into an orange or think they're an orange or all those fears.
If you take something and those things are in the back of your head, you can literally manifest extreme anxiety.
Yeah.
That might not have been there if you just relaxed and just had the experience alone, you know, on its own without all the cultural hysteria attached to it.
And actually, they don't even like the term bad trip.
They call it a challenging trip, because often very interesting material comes up that you then can work on later.
It's like having a nightmare and analyzing it with your shrink.
It actually may be very productive.
So, you know, I was kind of a nervous nelly going into this, and I really looked at the whole risk profile.
And on the physiological side, your body, the risks are remarkably low.
And I'm speaking here of the classic psychedelics.
I'm not talking about MDMA or even pot.
I'm talking about LSD psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms.
DMT, mescaline, they are much less toxic than many of the over-the-counter drugs you have in your medicine cabinet.
There is no lethal dose, which is remarkable.
There was one elephant that was killed with LSD once.
They wanted to see what it would take, and they gave it a massive dose, but to get it To the point where they could administer it, they had to give it a massive dose of tranquilizer.
So it isn't actually clear that the LSD killed it.
It may have been the benzos or whatever they were giving it.
I know.
What a horrible thing, right?
Go online and look up the elephant who died from LSD. What a crazy idea.
You know that classic setup that drug abuse researchers use where they put a rat in a cage and there's a lever and they can administer cocaine or heroin or they can have lunch and they'll press the cocaine lever until they die.
And basically, they thought that this was inevitably what happens.
But in fact, if you give a rat a beautiful cage with some things to play with, some other rats to hang out with, some nature, some shrubs and things, it will not take the cocaine.
I had become, for a couple reasons, I had become very curious about the people I was interviewing, trying to make sense of how they could have these transformative trips on a drug, which seemed implausible to me.
And I also kind of got jealous of the experiences they were having.
They were having these big spiritual experiences.
And I swear, I don't think I've ever had a spiritual experience.
I'm kind of spiritually retarded, actually.
Or was.
And so I realized at a certain point I had to see the experience from inside to describe it in a book.
It's also kind of my brand as a writer.
When I wrote about the cattle industry, I bought a steer.
When I wrote about architecture, I built a house.
I like to get my hands dirty and see things from inside.
There's a quality of wonder you can capture doing something for the first time.
So in a way, the fact I was psychedelically naive, I saw as a positive.
Because people who really know the territory are not going to have quite the same first experience that I was going to have.
There are mushrooms that look exactly like psilocybin that can give you just an agonizing death.
But when you're with Paul Stamets, you feel pretty confident.
And so we found these, and he said to me after we'd found them, we were sitting around the campfire, we were cooking some dinner outside our yurt, and he said, yes, these are almost too strong for me.
I said, really, why?
He says, well, they have a side effect that bothers some people.
I had my first stilocybin experience since my 20s was – and at the time, I was like 60 or approaching 60. Actually, I have to be very vague on when all these things happen.
I made a tea and I had a really powerful experience.
It was very much about being in nature.
I was at our house.
We have a house in New England that we've had for many years.
And I was in my garden.
And, you know, I've written a lot about plants and I've written about plant intelligence and plant consciousness and things like that.
And I've always believed intellectually that plants, domesticated plants, are acting on us.
It's not just...
It's a two-way street.
We change plants.
They change us.
We have been in the same way that, say, the apple tree or the flower is manipulating the bee, making it come pay attention to it, offering it nectar in exchange for it picking up pollen on its legs, and doesn't even realize what it's really doing is being tricked by the plant into pollinating it and carrying its genes down the street or around the world.
That's happening to us, too.
And plants work on us.
And it's a slightly trippy idea, but it's just co-evolution.
That's how co-evolution works.
So during this experience, I felt that in a way I never had.
That idea became flesh.
And I felt that these plants were kind of looking back at me...
And that they were very benign.
They had only good intentions.
But that there were more subjectivities in my garden than I thought.
You know, we go through the world thinking we're the only thinking subject.
Everything else is an object.
One of the things that happens on psychedelics is everything has life in it, has consciousness in it.
And that was a powerful and beautiful experience.
And so that was my dipping my toes in.
And then after that, I sought...
A guide.
Because I was trying to simulate the experience I was hearing about at Hopkins and NYU, where they were doing these studies.
Not just with the dying, they were doing it with smokers and alcoholics and meditators, all these different groups.
But I didn't qualify to enter into those, so I had to go underground.
And one of the things I learned is that there is this thriving network of underground guides all over the country.
I don't know how many there are, but they're very professional people.
They're not drug dealers.
They're therapists.
And some of them are trained psychologists or MDs in some cases, actually.
And they're so convinced of the healing value of these medicines that they're willing to risk their freedom and their livelihood to work underground.
So I found my way into this community and interviewed a bunch of people.
And some of them were not the kind of people you want to trust your mind to.
And no doubt there are lots of charlatans.
Everyone I interview is pretty professional.
But some of them were just a little too casual about something I was kind of, you know, worried about.
There was one guy, I remember this Romanian psychonaut therapist in his 70s who I said, well, what happens if something bad happens?
You know, what if somebody dies, you know, while they're with you getting this trip?
And he said, you bury them with all the other people.
And that kind of casualness really troubled me, so I didn't work with him.
But eventually I found people that I trusted and I had a bond with, and I had some very powerful experiences with them.
And that did change me in ways that I'm still kind of, you know, digesting.
Now, I'd like to take you back to the garden thing when you're having this experience with these plants.
I had a experience once on a very high dose of marijuana edibles.
I went into a grow room that this local dispensary had set up.
It's this big room filled with plants and It was the first time when I walked in.
It was the first time I've ever been around pot plants where I felt like they were aware that I was there.
It was very strange.
And you had this weird feeling of them having much more sensitivity than you imagined.
That they're aware of you, but as you said, they're benign, and they're just sort of sitting there.
But it was almost like they were saying hello to me.
They recognized that I could tune into them because I was so barbecued that I was on their wavelength.
When you're out there with those plants and you said that you felt consciousness from them, now, as an intelligent, rational person, did you start pondering whether or not you were just perceiving this because it was convenient and you were hallucinating and adding all this contextual weirdness to this situation?
You know, I'm sure I was projecting things onto them, but I've looked at this question and the science of it pretty closely.
Right.
How you define consciousness matters here, but plants are conscious in the sense of they're aware of their environment, they have senses.
They're not like our senses, but they're picking up on chemicals in the air and in the soil and light in very specific ways, and they're reacting, not just instinctually, but appropriately.
There are experiments that show that plants can learn in some primitive way.
So we have to understand that we have one kind of consciousness, And other animals and even plants have another kind of consciousness.
So it's real.
It's a real thing.
The idea that they're looking back at me, I'm being metaphorical, but that they're aware of me in the way that...
The plant is aware that the bee is nearby and does certain things, sometimes to trap the bee and hold it there for a longer amount of time to load it up with pollen.
The world as we perceive it is dependent on the particular senses we have.
We've got the big five senses that you always hear about, and there's some other littler ones.
You know, how we locate ourselves in space.
We're pretty good at that, too.
But other creatures have a different set of senses, and therefore they live in a different world.
So the bee, for example, can see ultraviolet light we can't see.
So if you could get inside a bee's head, the world would look very different.
And you'd see patterns like landing markings on flowers in ultraviolet colors that they can see that you've never seen before.
Ditto, they also can experience electromagnetic radiation.
We can't.
It's all around us, but we don't feel it.
They feel it.
And the reason they do is a plant that has a strong electromagnetic field hasn't been visited recently by another bee, so they know you're going to get a lot of nectar here.
And whereas if you're flying by a flower and it's got a soft feel, doesn't have a big feel, it's probably just been visited by someone else, so skip it.
So they're living in a world where they're perceiving cell phone radiation and all the kinds of crap we're putting into the electromagnetic spectrum.
So...
So we have to realize that this is a very specific world that we're perceiving in our normal consciousness that is the one that we need to perceive, that's good for us, that we're designed for, reflecting our bodies and our upright stance, everything about us.
But other creatures are seeing a different world.
And one of the interesting things about psychedelics is...
You get some insight into that.
You sort of feel it.
And it's real, I think, in the sense of...
Sure, you're imagining...
There's still a leap of imagination to understand bee world or octopus world.
That's a really weird world.
Their brains are distributed over eight arms, right?
It's very controversial, but it's from a legit scientist.
And what they're trying to think of is if it's possible that the eggs of these things traveled in comets and somehow they came here hundreds of millions of years ago.
And the reason being is that they can alter their RNA and that this is very specific to octopi or octopuses.
Yeah, here it is.
Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago.
I don't know if they would put it that way, but it's just a theory, but it's a theory that's being bandied about by legitimate scientists.
So this idea that there's something relative about our everyday normal consciousness, that there are other ways to experience the world, is something that psychedelics put you in touch with.
I was just reading this interview with this physicist named Carlo Rovelli.
He's a theoretical physicist from Italy.
He wrote this book a couple years ago called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
Very prominent guy.
And he was telling this interviewer in The Guardian that he got turned on to physics during an LSD trip he had when he was 15. And the interviewer asked him, why was that?
And he said, well, I saw for the first time that there could be another way to think about time instead of past, present, and future, that it might all be simultaneous.
And that's how it appeared to him during this LSD trip.
And when he was back to baseline, he said, you know, I was asking myself, why am I so sure this is the real world?
And that wasn't the real world.
And it was just a hallucination.
And he said, the world as it presents itself to us right now here...
Actually, physics tells us is not the real world.
That space and time are curved, that particles don't exist until they're perceived by a consciousness.
All these crazy ideas of theoretical physics.
He said, it suddenly seemed like worth exploring.
That the world as it presents itself to us is not the only world.
Or necessarily the accurate world.
And I was very interested that a scientist...
Could develop that idea of a beyond in the way you would think of a religious person developing the idea of a beyond.
That there's a scientific beyond and there's a religious beyond.
And psychedelics at least gives us a hint that those worlds exist.
And that was a very powerful, powerful idea for me.
I went in deep enough to know that there are a lot of very serious scholars, and Allegro is one, and Karl Ruck is another, and Gordon Wasson, the guy who kind of brought psilocybin to the West, who I write about at some length in the book, Really believe that it was experience of psychedelics,
which has been in culture for thousands of years, we know, whether you're talking about the Amazon or Africa, and that these experiences may have nurtured the religious impulse.
You know, where do you get the idea of a beyond?
Where do you get the idea of a heaven or a hell if not from some altered state of consciousness?
You know, people talked about visiting the underworld in Homer's time.
So, how did they do that?
Was it dreams?
Dreams don't have the authority that psychedelic experience has.
There's something about psychedelic experience that has this...
It's not just an opinion.
It's not a fantasy.
It's something real.
It's objective truth.
William James called it the noetic quality of the mystical experience.
And that certitude comes from psychedelics.
And so it seems totally plausible to me that at the very earliest stages of humanity, if people were indeed taking psychedelics, this might explain how they came up with these ideas.
There are other alternative theories, and it's not provable.
I just don't know how we would begin to prove it.
But it seems plausible.
And, you know, the ancient Greeks had a psychedelic that they used, we think, they called it the Kikion, K-Y-K-E-O-N. And they had an annual ritual ceremony.
And it was the only time in the year where you could use this drug.
And it was a ritual for demeter and harvest or planting time.
And everybody in Greek society did this.
And people, it was secret.
It was called the mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries.
And you weren't supposed to talk about it.
But there's a few accounts around.
And people talked about visiting the underworld, making contact with the dead.
And Karl Ruck, who's a classicist at BU, says that was a psychedelic potion.
We don't know what they were using, whether it was mushrooms or something else.
The Greek use of drugs is very obscure.
They only talked about wine.
But the way they describe what wine did to you, there was clearly something added to it.
That they were adding other plant drugs to their wine.
Because they would have these tiny little glasses and they'd take these big trips.
Some people, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD or invented LSD, he thought it was ergot, that they'd figured out a way.
Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain, and it was the precursor chemical to LSD comes from ergot.
And ergot is responsible for episodes of mass delirium in European history.
You get a really wet year, the ergot grows on the rye, people eat bread made from it, and they go crazy.
Some people think the Salem Witch Trials came after a wet year and people had absorbed – these women had eaten ergot and were having visions and things like that, which was interpreted as witchcraft, which to them was a very – I thought they were saying that the men had absorbed it and thought they were under spells.
So, anyway, so the thinking is, if you just eat ergot, you're not going to be.
You could get gangrene.
It's not a clean chemical.
But the thinking of Gordon Wasson and Karl Ruck, and they were collaborators on this theory, was that the Greeks perhaps had figured out a way to derive a pure chemical from ergot that could be made into something very much like LSD. But again, nobody has succeeded, and they've tried for the last 20 or 30 years to take ergot and make something, you know, through simple processes that the Greeks could have mastered.
So it may have been a mushroom.
You know, there's a lot of psychedelic plants out there.
It's one of the mysteries of evolution that, you know, DMT is like coursing through the plant world.
They know that humans produce it, and it's endogenous, but they don't know whether or not the pineal gland does.
Obviously, the pineal gland represents the third eye of Eastern mysticism, and that was what also they think.
What is it?
Is the eye of Horus that they connected to the pineal gland?
Have you ever seen those comparisons?
Pull out the comparison between the eye of Horus and the pineal gland.
It's essentially shaped like a cross-section of the pineal gland.
And in the Temple in Man, see if you look at it up there?
And they think, somehow or another, that this is the connection between these two.
A bunch of different things have been written on this connection because this appears in so many different Egyptian hieroglyphs and they think it might have some sort of a connection between the portal to the afterlife that they think the DMT experience is.
I mean, most people who see silliness and hippies and, you know, all these people that are out there doing drugs trying to, air quote, find themselves.
It just seems like a foolish venture.
And then you do it and you go, okay, there's something there.
It's an interesting quote, that quote you just said, because in actual studies of the human mind under the influence of psilocybin, it's actually been shown to shut off parts of the brain.
And so the question is, are we blocking off these constant The frequencies that are around us, or this experience that's around us, it is our own ego, or our own mortality, or our own desire to stay alive and protect ourselves, or whatever the various blockades that we put up, are those diminished by psilocybin that allows this ever-present experience to manifest itself?
The most interesting scientific finding Of this current generation of research is that when they image the brains of people on psilocybin or LSD or ayahuasca, they expected to see fireworks, right?
Lots of activity because the experience has lots of fireworks.
But they found something that they didn't expect, which was a diminishment of activity in a very important brain network called the default mode network.
This is in the midline and it connects parts of your cortex, which is the evolutionarily most recent part, to older, deeper sources of emotion and memory.
And it's a hub in the brain.
And the brain is a hierarchical system.
And this is the orchestra conductor, as one of the neuroscientists put it.
It's a regulator.
So what happens in the default mode network normally?
Well, it's very involved in self-reflection, self-criticism, worry.
It's where your mind goes to wander.
It's involved in time travel, thinking about the future or the past.
It's involved in something scientists call theory of mind, the ability to imagine that another person has mental states and is not just a rock.
It is involved in what's called the experiential or autobiographical self.
The way we kind of take what's happening to us and connect it to the story we tell ourselves about who we are based on the past and the future.
So it's you know if the ego has an address it's in the default mode network.
And what does the ego do for you?
The ego kind of patrols the borders, right?
It's what keeps out things that are threatening to you.
It's responsible for the repression of subconscious thought or strong emotion.
And it's a defense.
It's a set of defenses.
And psychedelics appear to turn this off to one degree or another.
Take the default mode network offline.
When that happens, to go back to your metaphor, whatever is blocking the valve that's blocking lots of information from coming in from outside or up from below in your subconscious...
That's allowed to flow.
And so you are getting more information than you might otherwise.
And this is a metaphor that Aldous Huxley used in Doors of Perception that consciousness is eliminating more than it's creating.
Consciousness is reducing our experience to that thin trickle of information we need to get ahead, to survive.
And that you open the doors of perception on these drugs by turning off this network and lots more information comes in, which can be overwhelming, but also extraordinary.
Is there apprehension in writing a book like this and describing these things?
As you're writing it and you're thinking about all these other people that are sort of cynical, straight-laced, non-drug-using folks who might admire your previous work on agriculture, architecture, whatever, and you're sitting there going, how do I get this through without looking like a guy who's losing his fucking mind or who's going super woo-woo Deepak Chopra on people?
Right?
Like, how do you do this and maintain your position as a serious journalist?
Well, I mean, I was nervous about undertaking this project, but I also came to think it was really important and that there was something here.
And that, you know, when I started this process, Stan Groff, the guy I made reference to earlier, he had said in the 60s something I thought was really outrageous.
He said that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind what the microscope was for biology or the telescope for astronomy.
This is a really outrageous claim to make.
But as time's gone on, that idea seems less crazy to me, that we are learning things about the mind and that these drugs are teaching it in a scientific context and in an individual context.
So just because some people think it's embarrassing or woo-woo is not a reason not to do it.
I have to find a way to describe it.
And, you know, I'm being a little speculative with you talking about origins of religion and stuff, but the book stays pretty close to here's what we really know and here's what I experienced.
I'm a science journalist, you know, and so I try to draw the line between now I'm speculating and now here's something we really know with some certitude.
But without question, I had some misgivings about describing psychedelic experience, their legal issues there, and that, yeah, I have a readership.
I have a big readership that, you know, is happy if I just keep writing books on food.
But I had found something too interesting to pass up.
And I've been gratified that I've been talking about this book on, like, network television.
I didn't think I would be talking to Stephen Colbert about ego dissolution.
So I found though that if I was willing to talk about these issues and my experiences in a matter-of-fact way, mainstream journalists would respond in kind.
And so I've been on like CBS Morning Show and Terry Gross and Fresh Air and And we've had a kind of, you know, conversation where we're looking at these as tools.
What are they good for?
What are they not good for?
Without getting caught up in the usual craziness that's associated with these drugs.
And so that's what I'm trying to do is take that 60s crust off these things and take a fresh look.
Well, for someone like me, who's been a psychedelic advocate for a long time, it was extremely exciting news that a guy like you were stepping into the fray because you're so well-established and well-respected already that I knew your approach on it was going to be very clean and that I knew that people were going to have to start looking at this like, wait, it's Michael Pollan's looking at this.
But the cultural attitudes about psychedelic drugs or drugs in general were so childlike in our view on drugs.
I mean, I have a friend, wonderful person, talks all kinds of crazy shit about people smoking pot and takes Xanax every day.
He's like, people don't, oh, I just need a glass of wine and Xanax and I'm good.
I don't know why you people need drugs.
Why?
Like, you're fucking crazy.
But our cultural attitudes on the substances that are prohibited and that are accepted, they're so strange.
And they, because of our social standing, because we don't want to be perceived as foolish or reckless or in some sort of a midlife crisis or what have you, we're like these journalists that are shutting the microphones off and wanted to talk to you about these profound experiences that they had that they should be shouting about from the rooftops.
Look, it's really, to normalize this, people have to come out of the closet.
And some do.
I was talking to a journalist in Boston who was the local NPR host, and he, on the air, live, talked about his experiences and how important they were in shaping his identity and the experiences he had in college.
So I think we're going to see more people come out of the closet and have this kind of conversation.
And we can actually look at this experience in the same way.
Now, yes, it's still illegal, but the fact that there is all this legal research going on has created a space where you can talk about it.
And I'm interviewing all these people, and they're describing their trips, and they're very straight people, and they've had profound experiences.
And people scare me a little when they say, you know, psychedelic people say, you know, you're going to do for psilocybin what you did for food.
So it's really different.
You know, I mean, or this woman, I was speaking at Google in Seattle and this...
This woman stands up and she says, well, after I read your book, I had to slaughter a pig.
I had to learn how to slaughter a pig.
You made me want to do that.
And when I was driving to work today, I didn't think I'd ever take LSD or psilocybin, but now I feel like I need to.
I don't want to do that to people.
I don't want them to feel they have to have this experience.
You can learn a lot about...
The mind.
This book is as much about the mind as it is about psychedelics.
This is a book that uses psychedelics to explore this really interesting mystery called consciousness.
And it's also exploring the nature of addiction, the nature of depression, all the illnesses that psychedelics turns out to be very helpful.
But I'm not holding a brief that people should do this.
I'm not an advocate.
I'm not an advocate for psychedelics.
I'm an advocate for the research at this point.
I don't know enough to say, yeah, everybody should do this.
This is what our culture needs.
I'm not in that Timothy Leary head.
I think we have a powerful agent that there's good data now that this can help heal people who are really suffering.
And the other reason for the openness that's going on right now that surprised me Because I expected to get a lot of pushback from the psychiatric establishment, and I looked for it.
I called around, you know, I want to hear the critical voice on the Hopkins work or the NYU work.
And what I kept hearing blew my mind.
It was like, I remember calling the head of the National Institute of Mental Health to get what I thought would be a really negative quote about psilocybin research.
And he was like, no, we have to look at this.
This is really interesting research.
Former heads of the American Psychiatric Association.
And the reason they're so open to it is that mental health treatment in this country is just a mess.
I mean, we only reach half of the people who are struggling with mental illness at all, have any exposure to the system.
If you compare mental health treatment to any other branch of medicine, oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, it's accomplished very little.
It hasn't prolonged lifespan.
It's not saving lives.
And yet we have, you know, soaring rates of depression.
Depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide.
There are 300 million people with major depression or treatment-resistant depression in the world right now.
And suicide rates are way up.
Partly it's the vets, but in general, the taboo has come off suicide, and suicide is climbing rapidly, and addiction, as we know, is rampant.
So they need some new tools.
There hasn't really been innovation in mental health treatment since the early 90s, late 80s with the introduction of the SSRI antidepressants, drugs like, you know, Paxil and Prozac.
They need some new tools.
And that's why they're open to this.
And that's why I think it will be embraced eventually by the medical world.
Well, it's all dependent upon getting the word out.
I think if people understand what like the John Hopkins research or just the anecdotal research that some of these people have had these incredibly life-changing experiences.
But I think one of the things that you're saying is I think it's very important.
Is that this isn't for everybody and that if you have problems with normal consciousness, this is likely not for you.
If you're one of those people that has schizophrenia in your family, perhaps...
Yeah, what happens with schizophrenia is if you are at risk for it, either because of inheritance, a psychedelic trip can set you off, can be the trigger.
a life of it.
And other things can too.
A divorce.
Your parents getting divorced sets people off.
Going to graduate school sets people off.
If you're someone who's probably going to get schizophrenia, any kind of mental trauma, if it happens at that window, which is in your early 20s and your late 20s, I think.
And that's why we did see some cases, because that's the age people were using psychedelics in the 60s, of having their first psychotic break.
And, you know, if you are at risk, something's going to do it eventually.
So, you know, we don't have any evidence.
Of someone thrown into a situation of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness as a result of strictly because of a psychedelic experience.
It may have been the trigger, but there might have been it was going to happen anyway.
We just don't know.
But in general, if you've got serious, if you have personality disorder, if you have bipolar, if you are at risk for schizophrenia, they will not accept you into these trials and you should stay away from these drugs.
I don't know of another time where you had a promising line of scientific inquiry all through the 50s and early 60s that just choked off.
And for 30 years, nothing happened.
I mean, think of what we would know if we had 30 more years of research with these drugs.
So now we're picking up the thread and all that research is being resumed.
But your point about prohibition is really important.
When you have prohibition, you can't regulate something.
It's a free-for-all.
Whereas if you did legalize...
Psilocybin, let's take as an example.
You could set rules.
You could say that it can only be administered by licensed guides or in a medical context or that no one under a certain age can have it.
I mean, it gives you a chance to regulate.
And that's why it's saner to legalize, not in a free-for-all kind of way, but in a very considered way.
Than to have the system we have now, where people are going to take the drug, whether they should or not, without any kind of clearance.
And by the way, who knows what you're getting?
You can also regulate the strength.
In the case of LSD, in the 60s, there was this period where there was a lot of pure LSD around, and then the mob got interested in it, and they started cutting it with speed and all sorts of things.
It's also the issue with scheduling, like Schedule 1s for things that have zero medical value, and that's where a lot of these drugs find themselves in.
Psychedelics are all Schedule 1. Yeah, which is just bananas, especially DMT, with the old Terrence McKenna line, everyone's holding.
We all have DMT in our bodies.
We all have a Schedule 1 substance flowing through our veins, which is the most asinine thing in the world to make your body a Schedule 1 substance.
And the fact is that Schedule I means that these drugs have a high potential for abuse, which isn't really true with psychedelics because they're non-addictive, and that they have no accepted medical use, which is now no longer true either because these studies have shown that they do have a medical use.
So, you know, what I hope happens and what we're on track to see happen is that these trials, these drug trials, will expand.
There will be now Phase III drug trials, which is the last step before FDA approval.
If the results of those trials are anywhere near as good as the Phase II trials, the FDA will then approve psilocybin as a medicine and MDMA, which probably happened first.
They're looking at that too, for use in treating people with trauma.
And then we will be in a world where they'll have to reschedule it to two or three.
You know, the opiates are two.
I mean, actually, the drug causing most suffering in our country right now in death is not a schedule one, it's a schedule two.
I think it's two, it might be three.
And so that we may see this in the next five years or so, which is kind of amazing.
Rebecca Mercer has given money to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, for their work on MDMA. And Steve Bannon has spoken out in approval of this research.
And Peter Thiel is investing in a psychedelic pharmaceutical company that's getting started in England.
So I don't think it may not break down in the usual right-left way that we're so accustomed to.
Well I think one of the things that'll help is anyone who has a loved one that's going through a terminal illness and experiences these things and sees the profound alleviation of anxiety and this just lessening of the worry of passing on.
And Larry Hagman was once on like a real straight television show like CBS or Fox News or something like that and they asked him about his life and like what what makes him so happy and he said he had a profound acid trip.
And you see the host going, what?
He goes, yeah, well, I took a really powerful dose of LSD, and it completely alleviated my worries about dying.
And seeing this straight interviewer just trying to uncomfortably move past this subject, okay, well, the guy from Dallas is a fucking drug addict.
It's like they didn't know what to do with it, but he was so warm and smiling and...
I believe it was a piece on his house because he had some crazy off-the-grid sort of life and some eco-friendly house and all solar-powered and used a well and all those different things.
And, you know, they were asking him what made him so happy, and I'll never forget that.
Are you aware of any of the research they're doing now with ketamine and depression?
And there's a lot of people that are getting administered pretty high doses of intravenous and intramuscular ketamine for depression, including one of my good friends, Neil Brennan.
He's gone through it several times and talked about it on the podcast and said it was a real game-changer thing.
Yeah, there's a lot of excitement in psychiatry about ketamine.
Ketamine is an anesthetic.
It's a dissociative.
It makes you feel separated from your body, and that helps with pain.
So I don't know if it's strictly speaking a psychedelic.
It's certainly not a classic psychedelic.
It doesn't work on those brain networks.
But it is legal because it's been used as an anesthetic for years, and it's relatively safe as an anesthetic compared to some of the others that are used.
It's the one they use if you come into the trauma center and you've been shot or you need surgery and they don't have time to check whether you're allergic to any other drugs.
And they don't really understand how it works, but they give people what is kind of a psychedelic dose.
They go way out there.
It's fairly brief, I believe.
And many people with depression have found relief.
It's not permanent.
It looks like they need to do it again every six months or something like that.
But it seems to kind of reset the brain in a way that many people are finding helpful.
And this is all legal.
I mean, there are ketamine clinics where you can go and psychiatrists who are administering it to people.
So for people who are struggling with depression and can't wait for psilocybin therapy to be approved for depression, which is still several years away, ketamine is worth exploring.
He opened it after he had his own personal problems with pills.
He had a back injury, got hooked on pills, was really struggling to get off them, went to Mexico to do Ibogaine, got completely off of it, felt amazing, realized like, oh my god, I have to help people, and then opened up his own clinic.
Well, I think most drugs have been decriminalized in Mexico, including LSD and mushrooms and a lot of other things to try to do something to curb the violence that they're experiencing from the drug cartels.
At least keep it non-local.
A lot of the violence is coming from the drug cartels getting money to ship everything to the United States.
It is very strange that our insistence on prohibition is actually funding one of the largest drug and violence epidemics we've ever seen in terms of what's happening south of the border.
I have something called AFib, atrial fibrillation, which you can manage with medicine or there's a procedure you can get.
It's just a kind of occasional irregularity.
It just happens sometimes.
But my cardiologist warned me off of MDMA because it can raise your heart rate.
Although I've subsequently learned if you take a beta blocker, it's okay.
So anyway, I've never experimented with that.
But anyway, in light of that, I would stay away from Ibogaine.
But I'm really curious about it just because we have such a crisis with addiction.
But psilocybin is being used successfully for addiction.
I talked to smoking people, lifelong smokers who broke their addiction with a single or two psilocybin journeys.
And they had extraordinary stories to tell.
I didn't understand how you could have one trip and then give up a lifelong habit.
And I asked people about this.
And I talked to this one woman.
She was about 60. And she was an Irish book editor.
And I said, so what happened?
How'd you stop?
She said, I... Well, first I grew wings, and I flew through European history, and I visited the site of Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and I saw the Salem Witch Trials, and I died three times, and I saw my body rising from a funeral pyre on the Ganges, and I realized the universe was so amazing, and there were so many incredible things to do, that killing yourself with cigarettes seemed kind of stupid.
I was like, I could have told you that.
But see, it goes back to that noetic quality, that she had a perspective on her life she'd never had, or on the universe, and that she believed that smoking was stupid in a way she knew before, but it didn't have that conviction, that rock-hard, revealed-truth conviction.
And I heard that from many people.
And I asked the doctor about it.
The psychologist who was running the study says, yeah, everybody has these duh moments on their psychedelic trips that end up being transformative.
So I did two psilocybin trips, one guided, one not, an LSD trip guided, a couple ayahuasca circles, and then I had a really weird psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT, which is the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad.
I, you know, you take like one puff and before you exhale, I was, I mean, there's a synthetic version too, right?
I was taking the venom.
You're shot out of a cannon.
There's no lead up.
It's no warm up.
It's like, and I felt like I was actually like strapped to the outside of a rocket, you know, going through space and through clouds and like the G-force was pulling down my cheeks and it was just this mental storm without any...
Nothing to orient myself.
There was no space.
There was no time.
There was no self.
And it was just unendurable, this punishing roar in my ears.
And someone who had done it said eventually it's like a takeoff and you get into orbit and it's very nice at that point.
But what happened with me is I had the...
I had the storm.
I mean, I felt like it was like – the metaphor I use in the book is like – I said, I can't explain this.
You can't tell a story without place, time, and character, right?
I had none of those.
It was just this inchoate energy.
And I said it was like before the Big Bang.
You remember that?
Well, obviously nobody does.
But there was pure energy and no matter yet and no time yet.
I mean, that's where I was.
And it was horrible.
It was terrifying.
And I thought I was dying.
But then you come down.
It was kind of a suborbital flight.
And then I started coming down.
And suddenly I could feel, oh, I've got a body.
You know, I was touching my legs.
I have a body.
And like, oh, there's a floor.
There's space.
And then there's time.
And the universe kind of reconsolidated.
And I had this feeling of incredible gratitude.
Not just for being alive.
Which all of us have had at one point or another, but that anything existed.
I was grateful for the fact that there is something and not nothing, because I'd seen what nothing was like.
And so, in that sense, it ended up kind of positive, but you wouldn't want to go there to have that experience.
So, subsequently, somebody said to me, a very experienced psychonaut who I was telling this story to, he said, you didn't have enough.
And the person I know who did the synthetic version had a very different experience and they felt like they were installed in the firmament as this happy star.
I bought it from some company, American Chemical Company or something, and they send it to you, and I had enough to get the entire state of California high for several days.
Yeah, I brought back a lot about myself and one of the things that I realized like as I was I recorded What I would do is post trip I'd hit a tape recorder right when I became conscious again and start talking about the experience and what I remember saying About the 5-methoxy DMT experience.
It's like, as I'm trying to recount what happened, I feel my ego trying to retake hold of the situation and even use words in a way that might impress you with my ability to describe things.
Or as a professional comedian, too, I was aware that a lot of what you're doing, you're saying things in a way that's pleasing to people so that they get excited about hearing you talk.
And I was very aware of that while I was doing that.
I'm saying, I'm trying to explain things that are not possible to explain because the words that we're using were all invented for a world that doesn't exist in the DMT dimension.
Well, in a way, I mean, it may be really, truly realized that we are in a soup of atoms and that it's not – there's not like Michael Pollan, Joe Rogan, and Jamie Vernon in a room, here's a wood table, there's oxygen between us.
Yeah, and it breaks those – Or at least it gives you a view into that.
And you cease to exist, which is the most bizarre thing, because it's so similar to NN-dimethyltryptamine chemically, but so different in the fact that you're not there.
While you're doing regular NN-dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca.
But suddenly it's infused with like, yes, that is so profound.
And you know what?
It is profound.
But we have these defenses against seeing it that way, because we've heard it so many times.
You know, a sense of banality is just from repetition.
But you're put back in touch with, you know, a platitude...
that's been drained of all emotion.
Yeah.
And the emotion comes back and it becomes really powerful.
So there's a whole riff in the book about platitudes and like, oh, we have to rethink these platitudes.
So it can make you sound like an idiot.
But is that right or is that right?
And I actually think the experience is more truthful than the ironic, cynical perspective that we bring to it in our everyday lives, which is a defense against powerful emotion and being overwhelmed every day by, wow, love, you know, whatever it is.
So you end up revaluing those kind of things.
So that was a really important takeaway for me.
The other was having an experience of ego dissolution.
That, which can be scary, can also be very blissful if it's then followed by emerging with nature or other people.
And I do think that is the therapeutic agent in the people who are healed, that our ego does keep us from perceiving certain things.
And it enforces really destructive stories we tell ourselves.
Like, I can't get through this day without a drink.
I'm unworthy of love.
You know, the voice of self-criticism.
And we get trapped in these loops.
And especially as we get older.
And that's one of the reasons I think psychedelics are actually more valuable the older you get.
Because we are creatures of habit.
And by now we have these mental algorithms that organize our response to everything.
Sure, that's very efficient, but it blinds you to experience.
It blinds you to the everyday wonders.
Psychedelics softens those habits and helps you get out of those grooves.
For me, that was really useful.
I think it's the experience of ego dissolution that allows you to...
because your ego enforces those habits.
And you get a little break.
There's a beautiful metaphor.
One of the scientists I interviewed in the book, a Dutchman working in Imperial College in London, he said, think of your mind as a hill covered in snow, and your thoughts are sleds going down that hill.
And after a while, after a lot of thoughts have gone that hill, there'll be these grooves, and they're going to get deeper and deeper.
And at a certain point, you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves.
That's who we are, as we're like, you know, at this age.
And what psychedelics do, he said, is flatten the snow.
Lots of fresh powder.
And you can then take the sled any way you want to go.
I've always talked about predetermined patterns and grooves that people fall into, so it's amazing hearing him say it that way, but that's a much better way of describing it, like snow.
His theory is that it coincides with climate change and these lower hominids experimenting with different food sources.
So as the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting by flipping over cow patties and finding grubs and perhaps even mushrooms that were growing on these cow patties.
And his theory was that there's a bunch of different benefits.
One, low doses of psilocybin have been shown to increase visual acuity.
Yeah, and it may well be that people were eating everything, right?
Our ancestors, it's amazing what they ate.
And no doubt they ate psychedelic mushrooms, and no doubt.
I mean, he also believed that language was a form of synesthesia, you know, in the way that synesthesia, you can smell a musical note or something like that.
That you're taking a sound, a meaningless sound, you know, and you're attaching it to a concept that maybe that happened on psilocybin.
And there's a podcast called The Psychedelic Salon that my friend Lorenzo hosts that has pretty much every Terrence McKenna lecture and speech he's ever done available for free.
You can You can download it.
And Lorenzo has taken these and digitally remastered them so the sound is better.
And it's really awesome that he's got this resource.
But the idea that these lower hominids experienced, ancient hominids experimented, rather, with psilocybin, and this was what...
Advanced culture, advanced language, advanced their understanding of each other.
And I think, I mean, the way I think about drugs like psychedelics in evolution, in the same way like in genetic evolution, radiation causes mutations.
And some of those mutations turn out to be really valuable.
You know, purely by accident, some great new trait is introduced to the species and it increases fitness in that person or that individual lives on.
In the cultural realm, psychedelics are like radiation.