Michael Pollan explores psychedelics in This Is Your Mind on Plants, debunking 1960s myths like chromosomal damage while acknowledging risks like psychosis, especially for vulnerable users. Oregon’s psilocybin therapy law and California’s decriminalization bill (excluding ibogaine) reflect shifting drug policies, but Pollan warns of commercialization pitfalls. He critiques the "stoned ape" theory, though finds ritualized use—like peyote in Native American traditions or ayahuasca’s symbolic vines—plausible for cultural evolution. Plants’ biochemical intelligence, from caffeine’s bee manipulation to fungi-root symbiosis storing 40% of photosynthetic carbon, mirrors human cognitive tools, suggesting psychedelics may reshape art, medicine, and even late-life perspectives by rewiring entrenched thought patterns. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
You're like a real writer already.
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, you sort of assume that they're trying to justify— Yeah, they have an agenda when they're starting out.
And how you come to your conclusions, that it's the result of having these experiences or talking to these people.
And they see all the armature of journalism.
They see how it works because you're letting them – you're being very transparent about the process.
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.
And that's a turnoff to people.
Especially if you have this resistance, which many, many people do.
There's so much cultural baggage around psychedelics left over from the 60s.
The risks, how disruptive it was to society.
And people still hold these ideas in their head.
People say, well, don't people jump off of buildings?
Or doesn't it scramble your chromosomes?
These are urban legends, by and large.
Although there were some people who jumped off of buildings.
The chromosome thing was not true.
The staring at the sun till you go blind was not true.
But it's amazing the power of these memes just lingering in our culture.
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.
That's what depressed people do.
And especially if you get them off their SSRIs, that increases the risk.
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.
Whereas people routinely commit suicide on SSRIs, and it doesn't make the news.
So it's when a story plugs into an existing narrative in the culture that it really takes off.
It has this incredible power.
And that could happen.
So I think we should be—I think the way you inoculate the culture is talking about risk and say that there were casualties.
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.
Would they have had them anyway?
There's reason to believe they would.
It's not like schizophrenia rates went up during the 60s.
So, the motivation for this book grew out of a long-standing interest in our relationship to plants.
I've been obsessed with plants since I was like an eight-year-old gardener.
And I've written a lot about how we use plants and how plants use us.
And that relationship has been of keen interest.
And I looked at food.
Eating plants is obviously one of the big things we do with them and a big part of our relationship.
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.
And that seemed like a very curious phenomenon.
But every culture on Earth, with one notable exception, has some plant or fungus that they use regularly and often ceremonially to change consciousness.
The exception are the Inuit, the Eskimos.
And it's only because nothing good grows where they live.
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.
DMT. Yeah, DMT is in there.
I don't know if 5-MeO DMT is in there.
I don't think it is.
Mescaline-producing cacti.
And basically, personal use, growing, and social sharing.
Is legal.
No commercialization.
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?
Because in addition to giving you the psychedelic experience, it removes the craving for opium.
So there's a lot of clinics in Mexico who are using it.
However...
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.
And so it's not as benign as some other psychedelics in terms of the physiology.
Anyway, this still has to get through the assembly.
It's amazing.
It got passed.
This just happened June 1st.
And then we also had a whole bunch of decriminalization initiatives.
Washington, D.C. voted to decriminalize plant medicines and entheogens.
So we're getting to this new place where the public has had it with the drug war.
Neither party really wants to fight it anymore.
Even the Republicans are backing off on drug war.
It's not part of the culture wars now, which is fascinating.
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.
We have more overdoses now than we had before the opiate crisis.
The biggest health problem related to the drug war has been...
I'm sorry, the biggest problem since we started this drug war, public health problem, has been the opiate crisis.
800,000 people have overdosed.
Most of them started on legal opiates.
Purdue Pharma did a lot more damage than any illicit drug economy.
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?
How do we fold them into our culture?
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.
Remind people that most of us do have a relationship with a plant drug.
Caffeine being, you know, which I'm enjoying right here.
What do you think are the motivations for keeping these drugs illegal?
I mean, clearly, there's got to be some influence by the pharmaceutical companies.
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.
Yeah, and they may be out lobbying to keep these laws.
But it's interesting, it's the citizens who are overturning them.
A lot of these are ballot initiatives that you can't lobby.
And what happened in Oregon, I mean, there were two things there.
One was decriminalizing personal use of all drugs, even hard drugs.
And directing people who are busted into treatment, harm reduction approach.
And then, even more interesting, was this Proposition 109, which legalizes psilocybin therapy specifically, but does it in a very thoughtful way.
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.
It's kind of an amazing idea that the state will do this.
And so far, the governor has been very cooperative.
Whether the FDA will put up with it, you know, it's kind of usurping their power to regulate drugs.
There's whole lots of complications, but it's going to be really interesting to watch.
But it's the beginning of this process of figuring out a culture around drugs.
Rather than just say no.
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.
And somebody who's got trauma, someone who has alcoholism, spousal abuse, or a big rite of passage.
Someone's going off to the army or whatever it is.
And everyone's attention is focused on that person.
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.
We, meaning white Americans, tried to crush in the 19th century.
And that's when peyoteism arose, is when Indian culture was on the verge of complete collapse.
It was a really dark moment.
They were forcing Indians onto reservations in Oklahoma.
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.
And peyoteism arose at this moment as a way to hold on to culture and heal trauma, and it worked.
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.
And they tested it, and it was peyote.
So it's been around, even if it hasn't been in continuous use among American Indians.
But I just think that's such an interesting model for how to think about it.
And we have to come up with our own cultural container.
We're not going to just take the Indian container.
It doesn't feel right to us, and it would be cultural appropriation.
But that's what we have to figure out.
What are the proper rituals in which to use psychedelics?
And he's writing about evidence of very early use in the old world of psychedelic compounds, ergot.
Which is the fungus from which LSD is derived, was found in some communion cups, right?
In Spain.
That's kind of wild.
And the idea that the Eucharist may have involved psychedelic.
There was also cannabis found in some Jewish sites from that period.
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.
Yeah, and especially wet years when you've got lots of fungus.
But the other effect you can get from eating this stuff is gangrene.
So if it was consumed as a drug, it was processed in some way to make it safe.
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.
There was a potion that they would take called a kikion.
Everyone was sworn to secrecy, so no one talked about this, but they would take this potion and— Kukion, right?
Kukion or Kikion.
I don't know.
My Greek is shitty.
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, and this is just the secondary table.
But how do we prove these things?
These archaeologists are doing interesting work, and there's going to be a new institute at Harvard working on some of these questions.
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, 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?
You know, they didn't know, and now they do know.
It all makes sense, right?
If anybody has ever done a psychedelic drug, it makes sense.
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, being God, was consuming smoked DMT. And that they were having this vision that Moses was...
I mean, it makes sense.
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.
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...
and accounts for the growth of the size of the human brain.
And...
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, often you can see musical notes or taste them or whatever.
And so this is what gave us language.
I still don't get...
So the people who had this tool were more likely to reproduce?
I mean, obviously, this is purely speculative, right?
He's trying to figure out and connect the dots.
And Dennis does a better job, I think, of explaining it from a scientific perspective.
But Terence's position was there was a bunch of things that were happening that coincided with climate change.
So these jungles, these tropical rainforests were receding into grasslands.
As they were receding into grasslands, the primates were climbing out of trees and experimenting with new food sources.
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.
So they would experiment.
By trying these different things to see if they're edible.
In consuming psilocybin, particularly in low doses, psilocybin positively affects visual acuity.
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.
The other thing about psilocybin is that it enhances community.
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.
So, that might have been a protective issue.
So, they were better hunters, more tribal, and It makes them horny.
So they're more likely to have sex, more likely to breed.
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.
The connection of sounds to objects, that it might have initiated that.
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.
You know, chimps spend like six hours a day chewing because they're eating all this uncooked plant material.
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.
And I find that theory, and there's some evidence for that.
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.
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.
So anyway, it's, you know, there's a lot of speculation in this whole area, but it's fascinating.
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.
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.
That it was very toxic and he had a really excruciating day.
It was psychedelic but had a lot of other gastrointestinal...
I'm not sure exactly what it was.
I remember when I was interviewing him for the last book, he talked about it.
Because I've always been curious about it.
This is...
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.
It just keeps showing up that you would think it had some use or religious, you know, value.
But maybe like ergot, the method of processing has just been lost to history.
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.
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.
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.
Some cultures, such as the, oh boy, you want to try that one?
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...
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.
And there's something that teaches you a lot of things.
Yeah.
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?
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.
But I really do think that the kind of cultural container you build around them is the best assurance of safety.
And a lot of people think cannabis is the model, and I really don't think that's true.
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.
And I just think psychedelics are a much more consequential, serious experience that has to be handled with more care.
I mean, one of the problems of the drug war is to put all illicit drugs in the same basket, right?
And they're not.
They're so different.
Psychedelics are different than the opiates, and the opiates are different than cannabis.
And we would never lump anything else together the way we've lumped these drugs.
And so we're going to have to look at each of them on their own terms.
And that process, you know, I think it's beginning, and I think Carl's book is part of that.
And the problem with this is, of course, the cult of personality.
I would love psychedelic centers if there was some place where people could go to have these experiences.
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.
Because there's a potential there, especially for the uninitiated who's meeting the initiated.
And they all have, you know, this kind of way of talking that seems a little contrived and they're wearing wooden beads.
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.
And that's a phenomenon to watch out for.
I agree.
I think someday we will move to—I'm very interested in this process of how psychedelics move into the society.
And I see three paths, basically.
There's the medical path, which is, you know, we're pretty far down that path.
The FDA will probably approve MDMA within, what does Rick Doblin say, two years or something like that?
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.
They're very expensive.
And they're doing this basically to work out the kinks so that they can move to psilocybin and MDMA when it's ready.
So that'll be one kind of elite way that people will have the experience because it'll cost thousands of dollars.
And then there'll be the medical model.
And that'll probably be more clinic-based.
Nobody's figured out exactly.
And then there'll be the religious model.
And I think that's a really interesting one to watch.
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.
And given this Supreme Court and its expansive interpretations of religious liberty, basically they're cutting huge amounts of slack.
That for reasons of religious conscience, you can be exempted from all sorts of federal regulations and laws.
I mean, Hobby Lobby and the decision just the other day.
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.
And there is a group of psychedelic lawyers who are looking for the right cases to bring through the system.
I think he's a big fan of the tryptamines in particular, but LSD as well.
But the artwork, the iconography, the imagery that he portrays is the best interpretation of tryptamine experiences that I've ever seen.
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.
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.
When I was under an experience, I was like, oh, he went...
I wonder if there's little rooms you go into or little places you go into based on...
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.
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.
But I don't think we can say that with confidence yet.
I think we actually have to do science about that to figure out.
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.
There's scores of how connected you feel to the natural world.
And tolerance for authoritarianism goes down.
Openness of personality goes up.
So these are preliminary.
But if you think about who has participated in these studies, they tend to be inclined in that direction already.
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.
Because I think we may be having people on the same side of the culture having reinforcing experiences.
But I don't know.
And it's something I would love to see research done on.
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.
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, and you don't even realize it's harming you.
You think you're getting away with these things, and having these psychedelic experiences, maybe...
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.
And you don't think about it until you're forced into reflection.
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.
So that was a very interesting theme that came up with interviewing Native Americans.
They would talk about psychedelics as if the peyote had a gaze and it saw right into them.
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.
The peyote allows us to see ourselves and see what's wrong and correct it.
And Indians don't believe that cultivated peyote is the same or as good as wild-grown peyote.
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.
And this is a tool that's been really helpful to them in healing in their cultures.
And there are other ways to get mescaline.
So I decided, you know, that would be my tiny contribution is not using it.
And they'd have to pin down the species to make it illegal.
But I think it was just not on their radar when they were drawing up the schedule.
So- It's grown as an ornamental.
You can buy it in nurseries.
You can buy it online.
It grows very quickly compared to other cacti.
It's very pretty.
It's much more vertical.
It's a columnar cactus.
The point at which you break the law is when you start preparing the tea, which is a pretty simple process of essentially making...
It's like a vegetable stock.
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.
I used synthetic mescaline for writing this book in the name of research.
And I also used San Pedro.
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?" And I was so surprised to hear how many people said mescaline because it's not around.
Nobody's doing research with it.
It's like, what happened to mescaline?
It's like the orphan psychedelic.
So I wanted to figure out what that was all about.
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.
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.
It's about the here and now, this intense experience of the present moment that's like nothing I'd ever have.
And it's almost overwhelming There's this sense of the immensity of existence and there's like, oh my god, stuff, existence.
But a lot of it is just very contemplative.
You're very lucid.
It's fairly gentle.
I didn't have any gastrointestinal upset or anything.
I had periods at the peak where I felt a little out of control mentally.
I remember trying to meditate to calm down and Whoever was meditating was someone else, and someone else was in my mind meditating.
It's like Carl Jung's idea of collective unconscious, right?
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.
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.
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.
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, which was exactly what McKenna used to always say.
Do not give in to astonishment.
And then the other thing was, I love you.
But like a child, like, I love you 600 million, 500 thousand times.
They would say it in this crazy way, and then they would go, look at this.
And every time they would go, look at this, they'd show you something more spectacular than you had seen before.
Like every time the visuals, like you would think these visuals are impossible to pass, and they would go, look at this.
I think the idea is you could be so blown away by what's in front of you.
And this is from McKenna's words.
So, again, I don't know how much of what I was experiencing was these things communicating with me.
Because I never heard anybody say that they said, look at this, or I love you 6,500,000 times.
Because they were talking like a child says, I love you a billion, million, trillion times.
You know what I mean?
Like one of my daughters would say something like that.
But it was...
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.
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.
Like it's a way to experience consciousness or something, some force that's around us all the time.
You could pretend that you have the answer, but I don't...
I mean, I tend to think that these are creations of our minds, but that's just a hypothesis.
You know, I mean, when the Dalai Lama sat down with a bunch of neuroscientists, you know, they started this dialogue.
And the neuroscientist started from the assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain.
And the Dalai Lama very commonly said, well, that's an interesting hypothesis.
And he's right.
That's all it is, is a hypothesis.
Consciousness could be fields.
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...
What our brains do is tune in to frequencies of consciousness that exist outside of us.
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.
Our assumption that all the action is there may be wrong.
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.
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.
The other thing is getting really good scientific minds involved who haven't been, who've been afraid to.
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,
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.
And now they want to.
So at Berkeley, last year we started a psychedelic science center to study psychedelics.
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.
We don't do medical research at Berkeley.
We're going to be doing basic science.
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.
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.
So I think we're going to learn a lot.
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.
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.
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.
Like real, legit places where people can go and have an actual way to get out of whatever mental funk they're in.
Look, we have a mental health crisis in this country.
The numbers around depression and with the pandemic, it's gotten a lot worse.
Anxiety, suicide.
And one of the big surprises that I had after How to Change Your Mind came out, I expected a lot of pushback.
I expected mainstream psychiatry, the American Psychological Association, all these kind of groups to like, well, psychedelics, very dangerous.
We don't want to mess around.
I had the opposite experience.
They were so engaged, they would invite me to speak.
They reached out to me.
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.
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.
We're helping with symptoms at best.
And that we're desperate for new tools.
And along comes this one, which has the potential not just to address symptoms, but to actually heal.
And across many different mental disorders.
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.
There are a lot of problems to work out.
It's a weird thing to fit into the system we have now.
Is it a drug?
Is it talk therapy?
Well, it's a package of both.
It isn't just the psychedelic, right?
It's psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy or therapy.
So how do you do that?
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?
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.
And a lot of people had great experiences anyway, but many people crashed and burned, too.
And now's the time to write that instruction manual.
We have more experience, and we're studying these indigenous cultures who have a lot to teach us about how to use them safely.
And it's a really interesting project.
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.
Which is one of the reasons I included caffeine, a totally legal drug that everybody uses.
What does that have to teach us?
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.
You were a mess until you- I was functional after a month.
The first week I was not functional at all.
I felt like I had contracted ADD. I could not stay on track.
Everything, the periphery just kept intruding on my thinking.
I couldn't write.
I mean, writing is the most linear thing you can do, right?
And it's all about concentration, obviously.
And I couldn't concentrate.
And I felt like there was this veil between me and reality that I was not quite seeing, getting, feeling.
And it was weird.
I didn't feel myself for the whole time.
And I thought, what does that mean?
It means your self is caffeinated.
And that is baseline consciousness for me and for many people.
And that's not a bad thing, but I think we have a debt to these plants that we owe them.
And so I spent a lot of time researching that chapter, looking back in history for when caffeine enters the West.
And it doesn't happen until the 1650s in Europe.
So we actually have a before and after, which we don't with a lot of drugs because they just go back millennia.
And before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness.
People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time.
People drank morning, noon, and night because it was safer than water.
Water was really how you got diseases.
If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed all of the microbes.
So people, even kids, you gave your kids hard cider for breakfast.
And this was true in America up until the 1800s, up until Prohibition.
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?
They'd had it from like 1200 or something like that.
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.
Really?
Yeah.
So he kind of like started experimenting or he brought it to these monks and they made a drink and it was like...
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.
So I had this three months that was really unpleasant.
The only things that were positive about it was I slept like a teenager.
It really did improve my sleep.
I had some great sleeps like I remember from when I was a teenager, you know, when you can sleep 14 hours.
That was really good.
I also felt, and I'm not proud of this, self-righteous.
I remember one morning having to get a 6am flight and I had to get up and get myself moving on mint tea.
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.
And I'm looking at these people and they look like junkies you see in Amsterdam.
They look so pathetic.
And, you know, that they were hooked and they needed their fix.
And they look kind of miserable and withdrawal was starting.
Because that first cup of coffee is not about the pleasure it gives us.
It's really about stopping withdrawal symptoms, which are beginning overnight because you haven't had it for 24 hours.
And I felt self-righteous.
I'm not proud of that.
And I knew that I was going to rejoin them as soon as I could.
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, before your body is accustomed to them.
So I had this first cup, and I gave a lot of thought to where I would have it.
I thought about the original Pete's is in my neighborhood, the very first Pete's.
But I don't love their coffee.
It can be kind of burnt tasting.
And so I went to a place called The Cheese Board, which is a cafe, bakery in my neighborhood.
And they have a little pocket park out on the street.
And I got a special, which is, it's sort of like a cappuccino, but more coffee and less milk.
Like a flat white in Australia.
And we sat, my wife and I, Judith, sat there, and I drank this drink, and it was so good!
I mean, I just felt these waves of well-being, and then it turned into euphoria.
And I was like, wow, this is such a strong drug.
I had no idea.
It was like cocaine or something.
And that lasted for maybe 20 minutes.
But then something turned that was kind of interesting.
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.
And it really got under my skin.
I was getting kind of irritable.
And I said to Judith, can we go home?
And I felt like I've got to get something done.
I felt kind of compulsive.
And so we walked home and I went to my office.
And I just had this desire to get shit done.
And so what I did was, this is really weird.
I unsubscribed from like a hundred listservs that I was getting on my email that were really annoying.
I just killed them one after another and after another.
And then after I finished that, I went through the sweater in my closet.
It's probably a third of what you get in a cup of coffee.
It varies amazingly.
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.
So there's a lot of variables that go into it.
The plant is producing caffeine, of course, as a pesticide.
And that was a whole question I looked at.
Why do plants produce these things that have these effects on our minds?
Isn't that amazing that a plant could devise a chemical that can unlock a receptor in your brain?
That's astonishing.
So I started looking at that question.
And most of these alkaloids began as defenses.
They're all very bitter, which is discouraging to insects.
And they fuck with their minds, basically.
I mean, if you think about it, I always thought, well, if you're creating a pesticide, just make it lethal, right?
But plants don't do that.
That's not a great...
I mean, some of them do.
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.
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.
Much cleverer strategy is to just mess with their minds and ruin their appetites.
And think about it, how hungry are you on psychedelics?
It's the last thing.
It's the last thing you think about.
So getting your pest to trip.
And the other thing you do, let's say you're worried about insects.
This is the plant's point of view right now.
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.
You're going to get picked off by a bird.
So that's really clever.
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.
And I should say it was a problem.
He loved catnip.
But he had to have some every day.
We used to live in rural Connecticut, and I had this fenced-in vegetable garden.
And every evening in the summer, I'd go down to harvest some lettuce or food for dinner.
And Frank would follow me into the garden and look up at me.
And the reason he was looking at me is he'd forgotten where the catnip was.
It was in this garden.
He was there every day.
He would go over.
He'd have some catnip, get really fucked up, and roll in the dirt for a while.
It's got a chemical that's very close to a sex hormone and that it has this psychoactive effect on cats.
It doesn't work on anybody else.
But it made me realize that how clever this plant was to make its pest, which the cat was, forget where it was.
And a lot of Drugs make us forgetful.
Cannabis is a great example.
Cannabis may work by making its pests forget where they saw it or tasted it.
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.
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.
We've spread their seeds all over the world.
We've made them precious commodities or cannabis.
I mean, these plants were stuck in their little center of origin.
Now they're everywhere.
So this dance of plant chemicals and human brains has been very much to the advantage of both parties, I think.
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.
So in a forest, say oak trees, if they're being beset by some caterpillar or something, it'll usually start on the edges.
And those plants will send signals through the air.
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.
There's a lot of communication that goes on among plants.
It goes through the air with these volatiles and then it goes on under the ground.
And this is where the mycelium are connecting trees in a forest.
Suzanne Simard just wrote this really interesting book about this called Searching for the Mother Tree.
She's an arborist or a forest scientist in British Columbia.
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.
So a mother tree can take care of baby trees and actually send carbon through this network.
And even two species of different trees can swap nutrients.
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.
And so there's this whole communications network going on underground.
That she showed.
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.
Well, the reason that plants got so good at this is because they couldn't move, right?
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.
And that's all chemistry.
And so that's where all their ingenuity went.
And it's just a limitation of our imagination that we can't see this.
Although if you've ever looked at time lapse of plants, you suddenly get an appreciation for them as active agents.
When I was doing the intelligent plant, the scientist in Italy showed me this video of two beans competing for a steak.
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.
And you see them as personalities, you know, with life experiences, successes and failures in a way you never do.
They recently discovered this really surprising kind of anomaly, which is that there are certain kinds of plants that produce caffeine in their nectar.
Now, nectar is an attractant, right?
You want it to taste good and you want it to draw things to you because you want your pollinators to show up.
So why would you put a pesticide in your nectar?
Well, it's in such tiny quantities that bees really like it.
And it turns out that bees are attracted to caffeine the way we are and that they will...
This woman named Geraldine Wright, an American working in England, did this study.
And she found that bees will prefer plants that give them caffeine.
And they will remember those plants.
They'll be more likely to remember those plants and go back to them.
And they will be more faithful pollinators of that plant.
Which is suggesting that basically the plant is using caffeine the way we do.
I mean, to get better work out of its pollinators.
I mean, in a way, it's sort of like the coffee break story.
There's a psychedelic honey that's very difficult to obtain.
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.
Look at this.
This is this psychedelic honey.
And this psychedelic honey, as they're gathering this stuff up, apparently it's phenomenal stuff that makes you trip balls.
Slave trade began with sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
And, yeah...
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.
And it became a big source of calories in the English diet is the sugar you would put in your tea.
And because it was hot water, it could absorb a lot more sugar.
So...
Anyway, the dark side of coffee and tea is these industries are built on the back of incredible exploitation.
Slavery and, I mean, just, you know, the people who grow our caffeine are historically have been treated really badly.
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.
But we've also learned, though, that they are not solitary creatures.
I mean, as we're learning, we're not solitary creatures.
It's so interesting that, you know, we now know that plants that have a symbiotic relationship with fungus do much better.
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.
As plants that grow with fungus.
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.
And in exchange, the fungus, which can go down and burrow through rock and stuff like that.
Those little mycelium are incredibly strong.
They give minerals to the plant.
And so they have this swap.
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.
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.
They're giving it away.
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.
And that's how you can sequester large amounts of carbon by growing the right crops.
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.
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.
And so now we've seen this on the individual plant being dependent on a fungus.
And now we're seeing in the forest that all these trees have a social life, essentially.
They're all connected to one another.
So it's not every plant for itself.
In the same way it isn't really any person for itself, right?
We are fundamentally social beings.
We do not do well alone.
And so I think that the role of cooperation in nature is finally getting the attention it deserves.
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...
So most of what we think we know about drugs and addiction comes from these rat experiments, right?
And they would take a caged rat.
And this went on all through the 60s, 70s, 80s.
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.
They could get cocaine or heroin or meth, whatever you put in there.
And these cage rats would just keep hitting the lever for the cocaine or heroin until they died or got addicted.
The cocaine killed them and the opiates addicted them.
And this was like proof that, you know, the chemicals have these hooks.
And if you take, you know, that addiction's a disease, you catch from these chemicals, basically.
That was the model.
And then this clever psychologist named Bruce Alexander up in British Columbia...
Thought, well, maybe it's because these rats have such shitty lives that they're taking these drugs.
So he designed another experiment called the Rat Park.
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.
They would still have a little morphine, but instead of like 25 milligrams, they'd have 5 milligrams.
You know, they'd have a safe amount basically.
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.
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.
And I think that's a really telling example.
I mean, it was just our blindness that we just assume rats in cages, natural, you know.
Yeah, well, like we were saying earlier about the opioid crisis.
It's not everywhere.
It's in these really disadvantaged areas.
These areas that were once doing well and no longer are.
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.
They get something they're not getting in their life.
That there is this sense of warmth and comfort and even connectedness for some people.
It's not a healthy adaptation, but it is an adaptation.
It raises questions on whether we should think about addiction as a disease.
That's a very common idea.
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.
But I think it may get things wrong, too, because it may be that the addiction is more of a symptom of the disease.
And the disease may be trauma, poverty, racial discrimination.
Yeah, the Rat Park study is so interesting because imagine if that guy had not put those two pieces together.
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.
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.
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.
All that stuff's great.
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.
The more they can get out of that, the less losers we'll have, which means the better America will be overall.
Whatever I was worrying about, whatever was on my mind.
And I felt like physically that I had just been purged.
And this is tobacco.
This is the same drug that kills 500,000 people that, you know, millions of us are addicted to.
And it's done so much damage.
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.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But even then, I think it was an occasion.
It was not a habit, a daily habit.
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.
And the idea that...
And I was so negative on this idea of doing a tobacco ceremony.
I mean, I smoked when I was younger, and it was really hard to quit, and I'm really happy I quit.
And then I didn't want to go near it.
And the smell of tobacco, you know, I have negative associations.
And in fact, the worst thing in this experience was a little bit of it got down my nasal passages, and I swallowed it.
And I felt like I'd swallowed the contents of an ashtray.
It was really nasty.
And that lasted all night.
But that was my mistake.
I should not have swallowed.
But it really taught me that set and setting, you know, it's not just about psychedelics.
It's about all drugs.
And that even a drug we regard as evil, as tobacco, in the proper context could be very positive.
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.
But tobacco itself, like, I've smoked cigarettes before shows, and I like to do it.
It's just more fascinating and complicated than we think.
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.
I was dealing with some health issues and also what I was learning about the meat industry.
I've done a lot of writing on the cattle industry and pork.
I've worked on documentaries about that.
It's just a hard industry to support.
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.
There are farmers growing meat in really sustainable ways, animals that have good lives on farms and one bad day, as they say.
And I support that kind of agriculture.
But in general, the average meat you find comes at the end of a food chain I just don't want to support.
And then the third reason is climate change.
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.
It's going to take some work and some different agricultural policies.
We have to give farmers incentives, which we already do, of course.
Right now, we give them incentives to grow corn and soy.
That's it.
And they grow a lot of that.
And that's the raw material for all the crap we're eating.
That gets turned into processed food or it's fed to animals and turned into meat.
And that's basically how the food system is organized right now.
We could change those incentives and reward farmers instead for practices that sequester carbon and for practices that improve the diet.
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.
It would have a huge positive effect on the soil microbiome, on carbon sequestration, cover cropping, planting trees on your farms.
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.
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.
One of them is with tryptamines, particularly with ayahuasca, you get a lot of protect nature, protect Mother Earth, some sort of weird connection.
And with psychedelic mushrooms, you almost get...
There's almost like an announcement that there's an other out there.
I had an experience that I described in How to Change Your Mind of being in my garden in Connecticut.
And, you know, I've always...
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.
But it was an intellectual idea.
I understood it intellectually.
On this psilocybin experience, I was in my garden.
It was August...
There were like, you know, dragonflies everywhere and bees everywhere and birds.
And I saw my plants as more alive than I'd ever seen them before.
And they were like returning my gaze.
And I know that sounds crazy, But they were regarding me as I was regarding them.
And I had never felt more part of nature than I did that time.
Normally, as humans, we feel like we've got one foot in nature and one foot definitely out of nature.
We even talk about having a relationship to nature.
That's fucked up, right?
We are nature.
We don't have a relationship to nature.
But that's how we think.
That was all gone.
I was just one species among many, and they all had their own subjecthood, their own personalities.
And my plants were really well disposed to me.
They were very positive.
There was no negative energies going back and forth.
And then the dragonflies were connecting us all, and it was amazing.
So it was that kind of announcement you're describing.
And a lot of people have nature experiences like that on psilocybin.
You're right about ayahuasca, too.
The imagery is right out of the Amazon, right?
And I have a feeling we are bringing that to the experience that jaguars and pythons have been part of like ayahuasca trip reports for a very long time.
But also dragons.
Dragons too.
Flying dragons.
That one is not – I've never seen those in the Amazon.
I had this really weird imagery on ayahuasca that stays with me as kind of like this visual koan.
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.
And this is one for me.
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.
So we were wearing eye shades.
I was with a group of women.
I was the only man there.
The eye shades they had were really tight.
They were black eye shades with these three bands of black elastic going around my head.
And at the height of this experience, I felt like these bars encircling my head, that the things became bars.
And then they started reproducing and there were bars going all the way down my body and I was in this tight little cage.
And I was like, how am I going to get out of this?
And it really was scary.
And then I looked down and I see a little bit of green.
And it's the first two leaves of a vine.
And the vine starts climbing up the cage.
You know, around and around and around and gets to the top and leaves and reaches out to the sun.
And I kept saying to myself, plants can't be caged.
Plants can't be caged.
And I don't know what this means.
It may mean nothing at all.
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.
And it's, you know, sometimes psychedelics just give you things you chew on.
And I've mentioned this in interviews before, and people write me with interpretations of, you're actually the vine.
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.
So I approach those chapters both in this book and in How to Change Your Mind with a lot of nervousness.
Like this is a writing challenge I've never met before.
And everybody says these experiences are ineffable, you know, beyond language.
But I was going to F them.
I was going to try or fail trying.
And it turned out to be the most fun I've ever had as a writer.
Which I didn't expect at all.
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.
I'm not just writing for Psychonauts.
But I found a way to do it which partly involved acknowledging how insane it sounded.
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...
Banalities are just truths that have been drained of any kind of emotion from overuse.
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.
And they trusted you because of your previous work to apply this same sort of strategy I think you're probably right.
Had my first book been about psychedelics, I think things would have gone very differently.
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.
But on the other hand, I came to appreciate that there's a special value to psychedelics late in life.
I said in How to Change Your Mind that it could be that psychedelics are wasted on the young.
And that they offer special things to people.
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.
We know what works.
We go right to the script.
You know, we have a script for everything.
But that kind of dulls us to reality.
We're not taking in information.
We're going right to the solution or the script we want to use.
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.
We're the victim of these narratives that our ego tells us.
And a lot of them are very critical.
You know, your work's shit, you're unworthy, you didn't deserve the success.
Our egos are hectoring us with that kind of stuff all the time.
Psychedelics tunes that down, sometimes turns it off completely.
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, once you've gotten out of those grooves, to start new narratives.
And I think that's what happens in many cases.
There's a wonderful metaphor that someone I interviewed for the book said.
He's a Dutch neuroscientist.
And his image of what psychedelics do is like, imagine a hillside.
He would have said a mountain, but he's never seen a mountain.
He's in Holland.
It's a flat country.
Imagine a hillside covered in snow, and imagine your thoughts as sleds going down that hill.
Over time, the grooves created by those sleds get deeper and deeper.
And over time, it's impossible to go down that hillside without falling into those grooves.
They're attractors.
They'll just suck you right in.
What the psychedelic experience does is it's like a new snowfall, fresh snow.
It fills all the grooves, and that allows you to go down the hill in a new way.