Michael Pollan - How To Change Your Mind With Psychedelics

Full transcript: Michael Pollan on London Real

6:41 This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose. My guest today is Michael Pollan, the award-winning author, activist and journalist named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. For 25 years you’ve been writing about the intersection of nature and culture, selling millions of copies with your bestsellers The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food and Cooked, which is now a successful Netflix series. Your new book, How to Change Your Mind, dives deep into the world of psychedelics through meetings with shamans, magic mushroom hunts, and using yourself as a guinea pig to take your readers on a journey to the frontiers of the human mind.

7:13 Michael, welcome to London Real. Thank you, very succinct. It’s a pleasure having you here. First, I want to know, what is it like being in London for you? What does this city kind of represent?

7:23 And even in the field that you’re writing about, how are we different than, like, the LA and the New Yorks of the world? Uh, that’s a good question. I mean, I always love coming here, and I usually come here when I’m publishing a book, and any excuse I get. So I’m very comfortable here. I haven’t approached it with the lens of someone who’s thinking about psychedelics, and I’m just starting to meet people in the community.

7:45 I did an event last night with Robin Carhart-Harris at the Royal Institution, and it was really interesting meeting people on the signing line and the variety of people who are, you know, in a very kind of subterranean, quiet way deeply interested in the subject. Some are therapists, some are scientists. It was an incredible range of people, computational neuroscientists. So, you know, I just sort of feel like it’s a community that I’m just kind of learning about.

8:11 I’ve only, you know, been here for a day. Does that demo look different than the people in the lines in America? Not fundamentally. No, I would say here, at least this sample isn’t representative, but it seemed a little more professional here, the people who are interested, than the kinds of people who are interested in California. But even within America, it’s very different in California and the East Coast.

8:38 I would say the West Coast, there’s a much greater amount of knowledge, bigger community of underground guides, for example. You know, I and the funders are all on the West Coast. The funders of the research, which is substantially the tech community in the Bay Area. Um, the Burning Man crowd. You know, it’s a slightly different demographic.

9:01 Yeah, well, you know, I got a preface before we get going, which is that for me, you know, London Real has been a seven-year adventure, and I’ve got to sit down with a lot of different people. And now people see me in a suit and tie, but it actually started off kind of around an ayahuasca ceremony back in the day, and I remember we did a before and after episode, and I was terrified. And I had had, like, many people kind of the Amsterdam mushroom experience with no ceremony, no set, no setting, and I’d sworn to never do it again.

9:29 Um, I came from banking, where it’s about, not about ego, destroying it. It’s about building, building. And I just wasn’t ready. Um, the community said, “Don’t put this on YouTube. I don’t know if we get arrested.”

9:39 I figured I can never go back into banking. The Bank of England would bar me or throw me out as an American citizen, but we went in and, um, we did it, and then that’s how I ended up going to talk to Carhart-Harris and David Nutt and Amanda Feilding and Rick Doblin and a lot of the people you mentioned in your book, and I went on also to do a DMT episode called DMT Before and After, which is actually our most-watched episode of all time. This is up against Neil deGrasse Tyson and Eddie Izzard, and it’s me literally going in blind and then talking about it afterwards.

10:08 And so there’s people that really want to know about this stuff. Without question, it’s a very quiet community, but there are people I’ve been surprised by. I mean, having just published this book, it came out about a month ago in the United States. Uh, the depth of interest and also the number of people in the closet. Um, one of the effects of this book, you know, kind of the first mainstream book on this subject, has been to almost license people to tell their stories.

10:36 I’ve been really struck by how many journalists reach over and turn off the tape recorder and say, “Can I tell you a story?” And it’s usually of a transformative psychedelic experience they had maybe 20, 30, 40 years ago that they’ve kept in a little box for all that time, because there was such a stigma about talking about it, or there were kids around, or whatever it was, or professional worries, reputational worries. Um, but the experience stayed with them.

11:05 It had a con, kind of… they knew it meant something to their, to the course of their… it was part of their autobiography and an important part, and they hadn’t had an opportunity to talk about it, and the stories come out. And I heard one after another, or I get emails. It’s just really remarkable, the outpouring and they’re really interesting stories, many of them. And in fact, I worked with, um, a website called Medium, which is kind of a literary blogging website, and we created a space where people could post their stories.

11:33 And we solicited them. We got 200 stories within a few days, and we put up the best ones, and some of them were fascinating. I mean, stories of transformation, not just trip reports. And, um, so I’ve been really struck by, there’s a world out there that many people are not aware of. You’ve been on it, though, for a long time, because my introduction to your show came when I just began this research, and I was very curious about a neuroscientist named Robin Carhart-Harris, and I started doing web searching, and up comes this endless interview with you on London Real.

12:07 And I watched it very closely. I think I watched it more than once, and that was kind of my introduction to his work, which led to multiple interviews with him, first for a piece for The New Yorker, and then from my book. He’s one of the heroes of the book. So I have to thank you for that introduction. My pleasure.

12:26 Virtual introduction, my pleasure. And speaking of heroes, I mean, you’re on a bit of a hero’s journey here, and at some point you crossed the threshold, but that wasn’t always the plan. It started off with that article in The New Yorker, right? Yeah, which was a straight-ahead piece of science journalism, no first person. Uh, but as in the course of reporting, and The New Yorker didn’t want first person.

12:46 They wouldn’t have published if it had any first person. They really wanted white coats, you know. This was science. Um, but in the course of writing that, I kept getting inklings that there was there was an underground, and that I was interviewing people who had had such incredible experiences that I became intensely curious to have the experience. And I realized when I decided I wanted to write a book after I finished that article, I sent it to my agent.

13:14 I sent it to my editor, actually. I said, “I think this is my next book. I’ve just scratched the surface. There’s so much more here. It’s very rich.

13:20 There’s the history, there’s the neuroscience, and, um, but I think I’ve got to, you know, put myself in the story. And, um, for a couple of reasons. One is it’s kind of what I do as a writer. I’m an immersion journalist. When I wrote about the cattle industry, I bought a cow.

13:36 When I wrote about architecture, I built a house. So if I’m going to write about psychedelics, I think my readers expect me to see what it’s like from the inside, and I love working with that perspective as a writer, and the fact that I was pretty psychedelically naive before this. I hadn’t had a big psychedelic experience. I had a couple so-called museum experiences with psilocybin, like low-dose, low-dose, aesthetic, interesting, but not transformative, not ego-dissolving, nothing like that.

14:06 And they weren’t present in college for you. You kind of, you know, they were later. Yeah, yeah. Me too. I happened to go to the wrong college at the wrong time or something, and, uh, it wasn’t around.

14:15 But I frankly, I wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t feel I was sturdy enough psychologically at that point to do it, and I had absorbed the scare stories of the ’60s, that, you know, this could make you go crazy. Um, so the premise that it could actually make you go sane, which is the premise of the research, was, you know, sort of hard to grok. But, um, so, but I really like the what you get as a writer doing something for the first time. I mean, and I learned this from reading a book when I was 13 by George Plimpton called Paper Lion.

14:49 He was a sportswriter, editor of The Paris Review, wonderful writer. And he wanted to reinvent sportswriting, which was kind of stuck in a been-there-done- that kind of mode, you know, written from the sidelines by guys chomping on cigars. And he said, “I want to get on the field.” He was writing about football, and he persuaded the Detroit Lions to let him go through summer training and actually play quarterback in an exhibition game. Something would get him killed now.

15:15 I mean, the guys are so much bigger, and the play is so much rougher. This is in the ’60s. And, um, but he acquired a perspective that allowed him to see football with completely new eyes that even a very experienced football player doesn’t have anymore, because they’ve forgotten what it’s like. It’s just routine for them, and someone on the sidelines doesn’t have it, but the person doing it for the first time has a lens that no one else has, and a sense of wonder and awe that you’ll never get again.

15:45 And so I thought that this experience lent itself to that, and that I needed to do it. And also, I was jealous of the people I was interviewing. They were having experiences I had never had. A spiritual experience, I didn’t think. And here they were having these, you know, these big spiritual experiences, and I wanted one.

16:02 “Were you frightened the first time you went in?” “I was frightened every time.” “Every time, good answer.” “Yeah, every time. I mean, every one of my…

16:09 I had six guided journeys: two ayahuasca circles, one LSD, one psilocybin, one 5-MeO-DMT, and, um, and then a kind of unguided, uh, high-dose psilocybin experience at home, at home, and, um, with the exception of that one, every, which was somewhat spontaneous. The night before, every one of these experiences was sleepless. I was just I was arguing with myself. I was like, you’re, you really want to go up on this mountain with this guy you barely know, whose father was a Nazi?

16:46 And, um, allow yourself to, you know, completely, like, give up control of your mind. What if you have a heart attack? You know, I wasn’t a kid. Um, is this guy gonna call for an ambulance and risk his own freedom? Um, you could die up there.

17:03 And then this other voice saying, “Well, you know, don’t… aren’t you curious about this experience? This could be transformative. And by the way, you have a book to write, and that doesn’t hurt either, right?” Getting you over the line. It did, and that kind of got me over the line.

17:17 I realized later that that voice, the cautionary voice, was my ego trying to protect itself against an assault, and that I was about to mount on it. And, um, of course, your ego has command of your rational faculties, so it makes really good arguments, right? And it manifests in all sorts of ways. Right, it’s so insidious. “Oh, I just stubbed my toe.

17:37 I broke my foot. I can’t go.” Yeah, it’s a bad day. Yeah, come up with a variety of things you could have. And, um, but in every case I got there still very nervous and not having had any sleep, and once I got past the point of no return and put the blotter paper on my tongue or ingested them, you know, started eating the mushroom, the worry vanished, and I really was able to let go.

18:05 And I, that surprised me. Um, I, you know, I just, I’m very fatalistic, and I don’t look back very much generally, and I knew that, okay, well, you’ve started, you’re on the journey, might as well get with it. And I did. And, um, uh, and in the end, you know, it’s so important to surrender to the experience. I mean, the worst thing you can do is resist what’s happening, especially as you watch your ego kind of fall apart.

18:29 Um, it’s a death. It’s a kind of death, and you fight it. Um, every, every, you know, nerve in your body wants to fight it, but if you’ve been properly prepared, you’re going to surrender to it and trust and let go, and I was able to do that, luckily, and I didn’t get into any of those kind of resistance scenarios that, you know, we call bad trips very often. Did you have guidance during, or just kind of before, to prepare you? “Look, if this happens, go with it, breathe.”

18:58 So, you know, your viewers and listeners probably know this, but there’s a substantial difference between a guided psychedelic journey and the usual recreational, so-called recreational use of these drugs. In a guided journey, whether it’s aboveground in clinical trials at Imperial College or NYU or Johns Hopkins, or underground, where there’s, in at least in America, I’m sure it’s true here too, there’s a network of very professional underground guides, many of whom are trained therapists. There are three stages to it.

19:28 There’s the preparation, where they tell you what’s going to happen and how it’s going to play out to the extent that they can, and they offer you a set of flight instructions, as many of them call it, which is what to do if you see anything scary. If you see a monster, don’t try to run away, stand your ground, ask it what does it have to teach you, what are you doing in my mind? If you see a staircase, go up it. If you see a door, open it. Um, basically, surrender to the experience.

19:58 Uh, you know, relax your mind and float downstream, as John Lennon memorably put it in Tomorrow Never Knows. And, um, you actually do get better at this process, don’t you? The more you do, well, those skills you internalize that advice, and certainly later, when I did have some difficult experiences, I could call on those mantras, trust and let go and surrender. And it can be very helpful. So that’s really useful.

20:25 They also very often will ask you to set an intention, so do you want to deal with your mortality, in the case of the cancer patients in that trial? Do you want to quit an addiction? And in my case, I didn’t have a problem I wanted to fix. I wanted to just learn more about my mind and learn whatever this substance had to teach me. And then, during the experience, they’re with you the whole time.

20:49 The underground guides, there’s usually one, overground, there’s two. There’s always a man and a woman. Um, and you are, you know, you have to trust this person, because you’re putting, you’re putting down, you’re laying down your defenses. Um, you’re in a very vulnerable state, and if you don’t feel safe, you’re gonna have a bad reaction. And, um, so you have to pick someone that you really trust, and I had that rapport with people I interviewed.

21:14 People that I was like, not trusting my mind to this person. “Somebody told you they put the dead body somewhere?” “Right, yeah.” “Joke, yeah.” It wasn’t a joke, but a bad, bad habit.

21:22 You know what it was? I said, “What if someone dies?” And he said, “Well, we bury him with all the other dead people.” It’s like, that’s not what I wanted to hear. So he was out.

21:30 I interviewed a guy about iboga experience one time, which we could talk about later, but I just didn’t get a vibe from him, and I’m thinking, I’m going to be physically incapacitated for 36 hours. “No, yeah, I know.” “You had trust. You really have to trust this person. You’re, I mean, this is a profound relationship for that period of time, and it’s got to be a good one.

21:50 Um, during the experience, you know, you’re wearing eye shades. It’s a very internalized experience. I was trying to simulate what was happening in the university trials, to understand them. And they’re playing music, and you can still hear them a little bit if they need to talk to you.” “Oh yeah, oh yeah.”

22:03 They’ll ask you. They’ll check in every half hour, and they’ll say, “Like, where are you?” Not how you’re doing, but often say, “Where are you?” Um, and you can, it reminds you to, you know, take stock of where you are at that moment. So it’s useful, but it’s just a reminder that someone’s there, if you get into trouble.

22:21 Right. And with a comforting hand, or, you know, a pat on the shoulder, whatever it is. The equivalent in the ayahuasca ceremony is kind of the icaros. “You hear from the shaman?” “Yeah, just lets you know someone’s there.”

22:32 And then, but they don’t actually really get involved much, but they’re there. You know, they’re there. It’s just a presence. And in fact, they don’t want to direct you too much, because the experiences can be shaped by suggestions so powerfully that a word from them could send you down a path that may or may not be the path your mind needs to take. And so they have a… there’s a fundamental trust in the brain’s ability to heal itself, in the same way your body, if you cut yourself, you don’t have to teach your body how to heal.

23:01 It knows. And many of these therapists believe the same is true of the mind. And so the… that you shouldn’t direct the psychedelic experience too much. You should let it unfold. It will have its own inherent logic.

23:14 Um, so they’re very quiet. They’re playing the music. The difference between the underground and the overground is, um, the aboveground therapists have a set playlist, since they’re conducting scientific trials. They don’t want to change the variables, so everybody hears the same playlist, and they’re quite beautiful. You know, some argue that the Johns Hopkins playlist is kind of old white dead guys.

23:37 Um, isn’t it like rock and roll or classical? “No, I don’t know. It’s classical, a lot of classical music, a lot of choral music. It’s quite beautiful, but it also has a kind of religious tint to it.” “Okay, I think Prime’s a kind of mystical experience.

23:49 Other ones are much more kind of neutral, spatial music: Philip Glass, Brian Eno, people like that.” “Okay, and it makes a difference. I mean, it makes it huge. I remember having my iPod on like, uh, shuffle when I went in, and, uh, it was a psilocybin experience, and a hip-hop song came up, and I was just like, “Oh my gosh, no, no, no, no!” “It could be the wrong music.

24:09 And also, if you” “I see, I don’t think you should use your own music because you have too many associations with it.” “Okay, I think that there’s something to be said for someone else choosing the music, it being somewhat neutral, no vocals.” “Um, but anyway, the underground guides tend to play DJ, and they change the music depending on what they think, and” “I actually got into arguments with some of the music, which I really didn’t like. There was a lot of New Age.”

24:34 “During, you said, ‘Please turn that off.'” “Yeah, or can we put on something else?” “Or this is like music for a massage in the spa, you know? I’m having a big mental experience, right? It’s not what I want.” Um, but anyway, and then, and then the last stage of the guiding afterwards is the integration, and that’s really, really important.

24:52 Uh, the idea there is to help you make sense of what happened. You tell the story. Um, and they underscore certain themes that, you know, perhaps relate to your intention. Um, and they basically also help you extract any lessons that you can then apply to your life, and that’s, I found that’s really useful. And they’re not all that good at it, but some are.

25:13 That’s where being a good therapist comes in. Okay, so that’s the kind of experience I was seeking. I also had a couple ayahuasca circles, uh, which have similar practices, because at the end you actually always have a conversation. “Yeah, you go, you, shaman?” “Yeah.”

25:24 I did it in a group, and there were about 12 people, and we would go around the circle, and everybody would talk a little bit about their experience and what they learned from it. And it’s a very interesting, useful exercise. There’s a kind of energy you get from the group that’s very distinctive, and my first group was all women. I was lucky to be invited to this circle, and all very powerful, accomplished women, and there was this incredible female energy in the room.

25:49 Um, and, uh, yeah, it was a, that was, um, that was very positive. It wasn’t as, um, overwhelming as I’d been prepared to think ayahuasca would be, but it was nevertheless very productive. They say, “Mother ayahuasca is gentle on the first one,” but I don’t know, is that right? It’s just wives’ tales. But that’s, yeah, I had a second one that was less gentle, but still, um, bearable.

26:14 One of the things I’ve learned about myself is I metabolize all these drugs much faster than anyone around me. I don’t know why. So they hit you fast. They hit me fast, and then there, I have a very intense period, but I come out of it really quickly. Like, even, even an LSD trip, I was done in a couple hours instead of the usual 10 or 12.

26:31 “Wow.” “So I don’t know what that is.” “It’s something about my liver and ayahuasca as well.” “I was like, ayahuasca as well, yeah.” I was like twiddling my thumbs while everyone else was still flying.

26:41 “Do you think there are bad trips?” “I mean, yeah. You know, it’s not a good term to use, and most of the good guides I talk to say, ‘We call them challenging trips.'” And I see their point, because a lot of very valuable things can be learned on a bad trip if it’s correctly processed and integrated. “Why did you have it? What was going on?”

27:06 “It’s like having a nightmare that you sit down with your therapist and try to sort through as they’re happening. They can feel pretty awful. I had… I had what I thought of as a terrible trip on 5-MeO-DMT. It was just horrifying.”

27:20 Um, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. On the other hand, some positive things came out of it. Um, so it’s a real phenomenon. I mean, people get into either a very dark place or a place where they want to be done. I mean, I hear that the most people on LSD is like, “I want this to be over.”

27:38 And of course it goes on for a very long time, and you can’t turn it off, and, um, and that can make people feel claustrophobic, that they’re trapped somewhere. And I’ve had that sensation. I understand what that is, but one of the things that I learned from guides is, “Move toward that pain, move toward it, and go in and through,” as they say at Imperial College. And that’s good advice, and to look at whatever is horrifying you, and if you really do go toward it rather than fight it, you pass through it very often.

28:12 And, um, can get to a much happier place. “Yeah, I interviewed, back in these early Carhart-Harris days, an author of a book called The Psilocybin Solution. He said a few things I’d always remember. I remember when I’m inside, and he said, first one was, just be with it. If you’re having the pain, if you’re having that experience, be with it.

28:31 Don’t try to run from it, escape from it. And it’s actually a great metaphor for life as well. You know, be with the pain, be with the anger, and listen and process. You know, don’t drink it away or, um, pull out the mobility away. You know, be with it.

28:42 And the other thing he said is, there are no bad trips. You are just learning at a rate that you are not accustomed to.” “No, that’s great, and I thought that was always good. You know, I mean, we’ve had a breakup with a girlfriend, and that’s the same thing. You’re learning at a rate you’re not accustomed to.

28:55 And so I always try to frame it that way. That being said, you should make intelligent decisions about set and setting. Yes, and there’s a different kind of bad trip that happens because you’re really careless about the way you’re using the drugs. We’ve heard about set and setting since Timothy Leary’s time. He’s the first person to start using those terms, but they can’t be underestimated.

29:15 The inward and outward circumstances, your mindset and where you physically are, will shape the experience to a remarkable extent. So if you are using these drugs to escape a bad situation, it’ll get worse. People tell me amazing stories about how they took acid in the parking lot before they went to school in high school. It’s like, “Really? That’s that’s that…”

29:42 “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” “No, I can’t even imagine.” “I can’t either, and they had a horrible experience and they never went near it again.” So there was a kind of bad trip born of doing it in the wrong circumstance, where you have to be together, you have to sit in a chair in the classroom, whatever it is. So these aren’t like cannabis.

30:03 These are very powerful substances, and they have to be used with great care, and I think with a certain amount of supervision. Actually, even if you’re going to be guided by a peer, having someone who’s staying close to ground level is really important. So yeah, when we figure out what to do with these substances in terms of the law, I don’t at all… I don’t have a clear answer. I do think one of the lessons if you think about the traditional cultures who’ve used these substances, or ones like it, for thousands of years, look how they did it.

30:40 They had many more centuries of experience than we’ve had, because these drugs have only been around really since the ’50s, psychedelics. And they always have a ceremony. There’s always an elder, or a shaman, or a healer, or a curandera, somebody who knows the territory and is organizing the experience. Very seldom are the drugs ever taken alone. There’s somebody there, or a group there.

31:09 And it has this cultural container, and that flows from the recognition that they’re very powerful, very destabilizing substances that should not be used in a blithe or thoughtless manner. And the molecules arrived in the West without that package, right? Gordon Wasson goes to Mexico, tries psilocybin, writes this rave article about it in Time magazine. Timothy Leary tells everybody to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” No one took the trouble to devise a proper container.

31:43 It was all trial and error, throwing it up against the wall and seeing what worked. Uh, do you take these drugs at a party? Do you take them alone? I mean, all the different ways they were used in the ’60s: concerts at the beach, whatever. And the traditional container may not be right for Western civilization.

32:00 We may not ascribe the same authority to shamans as traditional people do. Our doctors are our shamans to some extent. But we need to devise a proper container. In ayahuasca, we see people adopting the Amazonian container and its various permutations, but I think it’s one of the most interesting cultural projects to be working on right now, which is to figure out what that container is. There’s a medical container that’s getting developed for mental health treatment, and that’s proving to be very promising.

32:35 But is that going to be the one for people who aren’t sick? I don’t know. So I have no doubt that you need a container, and simply legalizing these drugs, as we’re doing in the United States with cannabis, state by state, doesn’t seem to me the right way. The virtue of legalizing something is you can regulate it, whereas if it’s prohibited, anything goes. Oddly enough, I know LSD was legal for a long period.

33:01 It was until 1970, or the last years of the ’60s, in some states. So all these issues need to be attended to. I have a lot of respect for these molecules, and that involves not wanting to see them used in a careless way. Do you think 50 years from now there’ll be kinds of clinics in America where Grandma can go, as opposed to going down to Mexico for a week? She can go to the clinic and have a guided ceremony.

33:30 “Yeah, I think there’s a good chance.” I think there’s a good chance. I mean, right now we’re not on the same path that cannabis is on. Cannabis was decided by popular referendum in various states. First we had medical marijuana, which changed the image from Cheech and Chong to something a little more serious and healing.

33:49 And then we submitted it to the voters, and people approved it. They got used to the idea, and they realized that it was better regulated than unregulated, as it had been under prohibition. That path is not the one we’re on with psilocybin. Psilocybin is the psychedelic most likely to receive approval and become common, and it’s not because it’s natural or simple. It’s going to be psilocybin because that’s what the researchers use, and there are two reasons they use it.

34:20 One is that it’s more obscure. It doesn’t have all the baggage that attaches to LSD. Your average politician has never heard of psilocybin. If he got up and made a speech railing about the government supporting psilocybin research, no one would know what he’s talking about. Whereas if he got up and said the government’s supporting LSD research, everybody would know, and so it would be too controversial.

34:44 LSD has too much baggage. The other reason, though, is psilocybin fits into the workday a little better. If you’re a therapist, I mean, if you’re administering LSD, that could be 10 hours. You’re not going to get home for dinner. So the researchers are happier to work with a medicine whose action is five or six hours.

35:05 You can fit that into the therapeutic day. So those are the reasons, and psilocybin is on a track, along with MDMA, ecstasy, for FDA drug approval and EMA drug approval. And when that happens, doctors, the drugs will have to be reclassified. They’re no longer Schedule I, which says no recognized medical use and a drug of high potential for abuse. Well, it will have a recognized medical use, so it’ll be rescheduled to two or three, and then doctors will have the ability to prescribe it.

35:42 It’ll be approved first for depression, probably psilocybin, or post-traumatic stress with MDMA. But doctors can prescribe off-label. Once a drug is legal, they can use it in other ways, and that’s what’s happening with ketamine right now. It’s approved as an anesthetic, but it’s being used, at least in the States, I don’t know if it’s true here, as a treatment for depression. So at that point, you can imagine a clinic starting where people come, and there’s a doctor employed by the clinic who’s writing the prescriptions.

36:16 And there might be mental health spas, you know, that people go to like gyms, and they go occasionally to have this experience. Or you might find that the doctor in charge at a hospice would have the ability to prescribe psilocybin to someone who’s dying, or perhaps their caregivers. Let’s talk about death. Why? I think Johns Hopkins was the one who originally started looking at giving psilocybin to their terminal cancer patients.

36:43 There’s a lot. I mean, we could spend a whole episode talking about death, how these drugs allow someone to decrease anxiety and accept their own death. We can talk about all the human decisions we make today based on our own fear of our own death. Death is a big issue. “Yeah, it’s a great book called The Denial of Death.

37:01 It says everything we construct around us is just to kind of deny that it’s there.” “That’s right.” “What’s your read on what you’ve seen so far? What’s happening?” So that’s really what got me interested.

37:10 It was hearing about that trial, which sounded initially so implausible. I mean, here they were giving people, many of them with terminal cancer diagnoses. They all had cancer diagnoses. Originally it was all going to be terminal, but they were having trouble recruiting, so they opened up to people with serious diagnoses that might survive. And they were giving them a guided psilocybin trip, and that seems so counterintuitive to me.

37:34 I can’t imagine if I had a terminal diagnosis, the first thing I would want to do is have a trip that would take me to these very dark places and force me to confront what was going on. But in fact, a great many people who suffer from what the doctors call existential distress, which is their term for the combination of depression, anxiety and fear that accompanies contemplation of your imminent death, were looking for relief and willing to try this. And so I interviewed a lot of these people, and their stories were remarkable.

38:12 Just to give you an example, I interviewed this one woman. Her name is Dinah Bazer. She’s 60-ish, no psychedelic experience, had been a figure skater, is still, I guess, a figure skating instructor in Manhattan. And she had ovarian cancer, and had been treated for it, and was in remission. But nevertheless, she was terrified of recurrence, and debilitated, paralyzed by it.

38:38 She couldn’t do anything. She just thought the next day, the other shoe would drop. And she heard about this trial at NYU, New York University, and had a guided psilocybin trip. And what happened was, and this happens in a lot of the cancer patients, the experience is kind of this imaginative, interior psychic movie. And in her case, it took her inside her body.

39:02 And in many cases, people go in and see their cancer, confront their cancer. And what she saw, though, was a black mass under her rib cage. So it wasn’t her cancer. It was something else, and she recognized immediately what it was. It was her fear.

39:17 And when she saw it, she screamed out. Now remember, she’s got two guides there. They don’t know what’s going on in her head, and she screams, “Get the f*** out of my body!” And it evaporates, just like that. And afterwards, I wrote about her, and I said, after her experience, her fear of recurrence was substantially diminished.

39:39 This is in the New Yorker piece, and the New Yorker fact checkers called her and read her the line: “Is this true?” And she said, “No, that’s not true. He got it wrong. The fear was eliminated completely, eliminated.” And she also told me something that I found so perplexing, which was that she told me she was an atheist, but nevertheless, during the experience she felt as though she’d been bathed in God’s love.

40:04 And I said, “Are you still an atheist?” She says, “Yes.” I said, “So why are you using this God language?” She says, “Because we don’t have a word big enough for what I felt. That’s the biggest word we have.”

40:13 I thought that’s quite beautiful. So I talked to a series of people like that, and those conversations to me were very meaningful, in part because my dad at the time had gotten a terminal diagnosis for lung cancer, and he was going through his own process, which was very internal, and he really didn’t want to talk about it, and I sort of needed to talk about it because I was dealing with it. And the fact that I didn’t realize this until after the book was even done, that that was kind of the personal subtext of the book, was thinking about death and talking to people who could talk openly about death and what they imagined it to be like, and they were working on it through their psilocybin journeys and their work with their therapist before and after.

41:01 And my dad was processing it in a very different, very internal way. So a friend read the book after it was done and surprised me by saying, “Wow, your father’s on every page.” And it wasn’t until then that I realized, oh, that’s why I was so interested in this. That’s why I had to know what these people were dealing with. “It’s dedicated to your father.”

41:20 “It is dedicated. I wonder why.” “And now I know why.” “Yeah, no, that is why. He was grappling with these issues, and I, to this day, and he passed in January.

41:28 I don’t know exactly how he processed it. It was a generational thing. He just wasn’t going to talk about it. It’s interesting how you say that, because, for example, maybe he could have processed it better, but also, by doing that, everyone around him might have been able to process that better. So yes, I think that’s true.

41:48 And I think, you know, Catherine McLean is one of the early researchers at Hopkins who worked on this. She felt strongly that the value of the psilocybin journey should not be restricted to the patient. The caregivers too would get a benefit from it, because they too are facing death at one remove, but it’s very much on their mind. And the relief people got was, you know, I heard lots of different stories, and the common thread: some people did have an image of an afterlife, and they had a sense that they were going to enter some great plane of consciousness, or that there was a plane of love that awaited them, and they were pulling back from that, but they saw what they saw, what was coming, and that was enormously comforting.

42:39 Others, though, had a more naturalistic idea. I remember this one woman, also in her 60s, and also in the New Yorker, told me about going underground. She was passing through underground, and she hit this wall, and she realized it was the wall of a crematorium, and that she died. And that she then kind of was dissolved in the soil and taken up by the plants, and it was okay. Now, is that a vision of the afterlife?

43:11 That’s actually what happens very often, right? I mean, that’s you know, we do dissolve, and we are taken up by life, whether we’re cremated or whatever it is. But what was going on is her sense of who she was had dissolved, and her sense of self-interest had expanded. It wasn’t just this bag of bones that we are. It wasn’t this narrow idea of myself.

43:40 And this is what Bertrand Russell said when he was asked how to die well. He said, to the extent you can, expand your sense of what the boundaries of yourself are. What is your self-interest? Take in first your family, your offspring, perhaps your community, perhaps the natural world, perhaps the universe. The wider you make that sense of self, the less consequential your own extinction becomes.

44:08 And I think that’s what’s happening. I think that on the psychedelic experience, people are experiencing a consciousness that’s less bound by their bodies, less bound by their narrow ego, by their ego, and that you can see the world, at least temporarily, from a much broader perspective that feels to some people like a consciousness that extends beyond your head. I mean, that you’re partaking in something that’s in the world. And some people do come to the conclusion that consciousness exists outside the mind, and that we tune into it.

44:44 That’s a very common psychedelic insight, but it’s also a philosophical position of Henri Bergson and people like that. I have trouble crediting it. I mean, I tend to think consciousness is still produced by minds, but I can understand how you might think that, because there is this other consciousness that you’re borrowing in the experience. And I think that is an enormous comfort to the people who are dying, that that consciousness you have, a feeling that it’s, uh, permanent.

45:10 “You described yourself as a materialist before this book started. You’ve also spent a lot of your life studying plants in many different ways, and you had some new relationships with plants, you know, when you were in your backyard for that non-guided experience.” “And I’ve had some amazing relationships with plants. I’m not, but when I’m on psychedelic experiences, I have them, and then now, even without them, when I’m in the Hampstead Heath here, I just find myself very much attracted to, and seeing wisdom in, these plants.

45:40 And again, I was trained in engineering, so none of this stuff comes natural to me, but what now, that when I see it, I have a tendency to really stare at trees when I’m having a psilocybin experience in nature, and I can stare at them for hours, and I just really have a lot of realizations that you’ve come to in some of your work, like, wow, look at this tree. It’s been here for a few hundred years. It’s gonna be here for a few hundred years. It must look down at us humans and say, look at all you silly little animals running around, flashing your bling, trying to get on the New York Times bestseller list, and guess what?

46:11 We’re gonna be here. It’s fun to watch you guys. And then, by the way, could you plant me over there? Thank you very much.” “And so I’m curious what you saw.

46:18 Did you see spirituality there? And what is that to you?” “Well, we have to talk about the definition of spirituality, but I had a very profound experience with plants in my garden on this psilocybin trip. Now, you should understand, I’ve always given plants a lot of credit. I’ve written about plant intelligence.

46:37 I wrote a piece for The New Yorker a couple years ago, and in The Botany of Desire, my third book, I wrote about the reciprocal relationship we have with plants. We think we’re working on them and they’re doing what we want, you know, when we mow the lawn or whatever. But in fact, the grasses have manipulated us into mowing that lawn so the trees can’t come up and shade them and ruin their habitat. So they’re manipulating us too. They have not intentionally.

47:02 This is just evolution. This is how evolution works. This is co-evolution, that they use us, we use them. That’s how co-evolution works. We’re not aware of how we’re used, in the same way the honeybee is not aware when it’s going, breaking into the flower on the apple tree and stealing the nectar, that in fact it’s been manipulated to do exactly that, and without its knowledge it’s carrying pollen on its legs and taking it to some other flower.

47:29 We’re much more like the bee than we realize. And so I understood this intellectually. This was an idea I developed in The Botany of Desire, but man, I felt it for the first time, that these plants in my garden were regarding me in some sense. They don’t have eyes or anything, but they were just like, their presence, the sense that they did have, that I wasn’t the only subject. You know, normally we think we’re the only subject, everything else is an object.

47:55 No, they were subjects too. There were spirits in that sense everywhere. And it’s a very common phenomenon on psychedelics, to have the sense that consciousness is more evenly spread over the world and not just locked in here, and that other beings are more alive than you realized. And I definitely had that with these plants, and I felt like I was one character among many in this garden, rather than the human overseeing the garden. And it was a deeper connection to nature than I’d ever felt.

48:29 I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about that. I would say it’s spiritual in this sense. And this will just take a minute to develop, but what happened to me, as I said earlier, I hadn’t really… I didn’t think I’d had a spiritual experience. “Which kind of surprised me.”

48:46 “Yeah, I know.” “But I didn’t feel like I had. I mean, the way I talked about plants sounds kind of spiritual, just what I was saying, but” I assumed that spiritual meant supernatural in some sense, that you had to leave the laws of nature and science, and it was an experience that refuted them by showing you that there was some divine force you weren’t aware of, or God, or whatever it was. And I didn’t buy that. But I came to understand spirituality in a different way over the course of writing this book, and that was that the opposite of spiritual is not material, as I had thought.

49:28 The opposite of spiritual is egotistical. It is ego, and the ego defenses, that wall us off from the kinds of really powerful connections that constitute spiritual experience. I’m talking about the experience of love for someone else, or for nature. I’m talking about feeling like you’re part of nature, that deep connection with nature. The ego keeps us, you know, puts these walls up.

49:55 It patrols the boundary between self and other. It tends to encourage us to objectify the other and not see that there are other subjects looking back at us all over the world, like your tree. And so when I came to understand that that was the opposite, that I was having spiritual experiences, that there were experiences of deep, powerful connection. And that’s what I think spirituality is. Now, for some people, that connection is with some idea of the divinity and higher power, and I can totally even see that in a naturalistic sense.

50:34 So I don’t think I’ve given up my materialism, but I have acquired a spirituality without giving it up, and that was a big surprise for me and a big turn. And I’ve realized since that to the extent I can lower the voice of my ego, I can make available those kinds of connections. “You say in the book that the ego is not what we think it is.” “And you said that, you know, as you kind of drop it down, you realize that the ego, it’s not us, and that was a really interesting observation.

51:05 I never heard anyone say it that way, because usually we’re like, oh, it’s my ego doing this, and when I dissolve my ego, I’m getting away from it. But like you said, the ego is kind of the patrol mechanism, and it gives us this feedback that’s not who we really are, and yet we identify with it on a regular basis as us.” “Well, that’s part of the cleverness of the ego, right? And he’s not always the most attractive person, and we still identify with him or her.”

51:25 “Yeah, we do. Well, it’s that voice that’s always chattering to us. It’s the voice that’s the perfectionist. It’s the voice that has regrets about the past and worries about the future. It engages in a lot of time travel.

51:40 And I always thought that was me. I was identical to that, and of course the Buddhists have been trying to tell us that for a long time. That’s not you. That’s just an illusion. And psychedelics can make that insight vivid and real.

51:58 And I realized, and this was on a psilocybin trip, a high-dose psilocybin guided trip, where I did have a feeling of complete ego dissolution for the first time, and the last time. I haven’t had it since. And I was reduced to a cloud of Post-it notes. I’d been dispersed into little slips of paper. And this other eye, this more disembodied eye, was fine with it.

52:25 I wasn’t… I didn’t have this urge to pile them all back together. “That’s yourself? Are those the pages of your books?” “Yeah, it’s a good question.

52:32 I’m a writer, and then it was pages. I don’t know what it was. And then the next thing I saw was myself again, not here, but out there, and it was like a coat of paint over the landscape.” “Now, someone just sent me a direct message on Twitter saying, ‘Well, that sounds pretty egotistical, that you’re covering the world with yourself.'” “And I said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t know what that means.’ I don’t, and my wife’s a painter, so I had the paper and I had the paint, and I don’t know, but I wasn’t me.

53:06 I would… and I… the insight was that, oh, there’s another ground on which to stand, that’s not this full, fulsome identification with the ego. And that was a huge insight, because I’ve been freed from that voice for a period of time, and I realized I’m not identical to that voice, and I don’t have to be. And I acquired a kind of perspective on it, a distance, an alienation, in a way that I didn’t know what to do with it. In fact, in my integration the next day with my guide, I told her what had happened, and I said, “I realized you don’t have to be your ego all the time.”

53:47 And she said, “Well, isn’t that worth the price of admission?” And I said, “Yeah, but my ego’s back in uniform and on patrol and doing its thing, so what good was that?” And she said, “Well, you’ve had a taste of another way to respond, react. The ego reacts in a trigger-happy, very defensive way to slights and all sorts of stuff.” She says you can cultivate that.

54:10 And I asked her how, and she said through meditation. And, you know, of course, the goal… I know we’re not supposed to have a goal in meditation, but the goal of meditation is also to quiet the voice of the self and realize that there is a kind of more objective awareness you can bring to everything, and you can let these defensive reactions just go. And so I took her advice, and, you know, it doesn’t always work, but I can occasionally reconnect to that perspective, and that perspective is very untroubled by almost everything.

54:48 And it is worth cultivating. It’s hard to do, but you can’t do psychedelics every day, and you don’t want to. So meditation becomes the way I think you transport these insights into your daily practice. Yeah, I’ve heard people from two camps. One, they have an eye-opening experience and then they do 30 more.

55:07 And the ones of the people that I’ve usually spoken with, they have one, and then they get a meditation practice, and they actually try to implement the lessons they learned through that practice. It’s not easy. It’s the slow grind. And then maybe they’ll go back in a year. Yeah.

55:23 And those are the ones that, for me, seem to have it right. And again, if you’re not… if your knees aren’t knocking before you go into the ceremony, I think I’m ripping one of Terence McKenna’s quotes: is it that you’re doing the wrong thing, or you’re not doing the dosage, or I don’t know, just being too casual about a momentous experience? Every time I go in, I’m just like, oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m ready. I’m nervous. Well, it is part of you defending against what you’re about to do.

55:50 Right, right. Have you thought more about this as a greater societal issue? I mean, I had Amanda Feilding in here, and she said that politics is the reflection of our own egos, and the fact that, you know, even drug politics is a funny thing, and maybe even from a Puritan lens, it’s like, no, you can’t have this pleasurable experience that drugs give you, and we’re like, no, these are medicines. And it’s like, in a weird way, the politics are almost a reflection of our own egos trying to say no to allowing us to have these experiences, or even having pleasure.

56:20 That’s not okay in certain cultures. Yeah. Um, have you gone there? Yeah, I’ve given a lot of thought to that. I mean, I think Amanda’s right, and she’s a very wise person on these issues, with a lot of experience.

56:31 And, um, the hierarchy in the brain, with the ego writing hard on everything, is not so different than the hierarchies in society, and psychedelics break down those hierarchies temporarily. And that may be why, actually, Robin and I were talking about this last night. That may be why there was such a… they were so destabilizing in the ’60s. They were a threat to the hierarchy. The people were thinking for themselves.

56:58 People at the bottom were thinking, “No, you know, the president wants to send me off to war? That’s crazy. I’m not going to go fight that war.” So there may be something to it. I do see these medicines as addressing some of the big problems we face as a society.

57:17 I mean, in my conception, the two biggest problems are the environmental crisis, which flows from our disconnection from nature, and tribalism, which flows from our disconnection from people unlike ourselves. In both cases, I think it’s very ego consciousness, in that we’re objectifying the other. Whether the other is the natural world, which, once you objectify it, you’re free to exploit it, extract it, do whatever you want. You can justify putting pigs in brutal confinement situations and torturing them for their entire lives, which we do routinely, and everyone who eats pork is complicit in that situation.

58:00 But that’s ego consciousness that allows us to do that. And then, on the tribalism side, we objectify other people, and that allows us to discriminate, put up walls against them, detest them, act in a racist manner, which we’re seeing more of in the last few years, much more. And so this tribalism and this environmental disconnection, both, are addressed by psychedelics in the individual. As we were saying earlier, nature is hard to objectify anymore, because it’s very alive suddenly to you, in a way that certain behaviors seem unacceptable now.

58:39 And I think that LSD had something to do with the environmental movement, the rise of that in the ’60s. Something to do with it. There were a few other factors. And then, on the tribalism thing, people get this outpouring of love and a sense of connection to everybody, to humanity, that is so foreign to how our politics are operating right now. So I do think there’s a contribution here that these medicines make.

59:10 The difficulty becomes, how do you administer a drug to a whole culture? We don’t have a model. They used to put it on postage stamps back in the day, and the Leary days. So we’re not going to put LSD in the water supply like fluoride. And then how many people do you have to turn on to actually change things?

59:30 Or who do you turn on? A good question. So, you know, back in the ’60s or ’50s, you had two models of how to do this. The researchers, then people like Timothy Leary, got really bored with treating individuals, and they wanted to treat the whole society. And his idea was, tell everybody to use it, “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

59:50 He’d give lectures before thousands of kids saying we should all do this right now. And Ken Kesey too, the Acid Test: everybody should do this. Then you have these elitists, people like Al Hubbard, who’s a very important character in the book, who, I think, is as important, if not more important, than Leary, and nobody’s heard of him. He’s a very mysterious figure. He was very conservative compared to Leary, and he hated Leary for being too much of a populist.

1:00:13 He wanted to shoot Leary, and he always carried a gun. He was a very weird dude, but he actually made a huge contribution to psychedelic therapy, and he was a very gifted psychedelic therapist. He was also like an OSS agent, possibly a CIA agent, double agent, gun runner, inventor. I mean, he’s an amazing, wonderful character, and I had the most fun writing about him in the book. But anyway, he had a different theory: turn on the best and the brightest.

1:00:38 He had his satchel of LSD that he got right from Sandoz, where it was invented, and he turned on 6,000 people, supposedly, in his life. But he went to engineers in Silicon Valley before it was called Silicon Valley. He went to people high up in the church, Catholic church, he was a Catholic. He went to corporate presidents. He went to artists, actors, and he believed you would turn on the elite, and they would, that new consciousness that they had acquired, would filter down to everybody.

1:01:11 So you have these two models: one’s populist, one’s mandarin or elitist, and I don’t know which one is right. Neither, maybe. You’re right. Um, I don’t know how this works. We got into trouble trying it.

1:01:21 You know, we… it’s one of the reasons we had the moral backlash, was the fact that Leary was telling everybody to do this, and he was letting the drugs escape the laboratory. So, uh, you can argue whether that was a good or bad thing, but it certainly led to this hiatus and serious research that goes on for 30 years because of the backlash. Rick Doblin would say, well, what Leary did also allowed the research to resume, in that he created a culture where so many people had been turned on that there are now no doubt regulators at the FDA who know the territory and are not going to freak out when a serious researcher says, “I think psilocybin is a medicine.”

1:02:03 So he created the backlash, and he created the conditions for the revival of psychedelic research. And we must know our history to know the future, which is why you spend so much time in the book on this stuff. Yeah, history is really important. It explains so much. It always does.

1:02:17 I mean, as a journalist, I’m constantly, and I teach, I teach my students. I teach journalism at Berkeley, that you can’t understand anything without knowing the history, and it will surprise you, and it will enlighten you. So the book is, I mean, the book is not a travelogue. As you might deduce from our conversation, that’s part of it, but as a writer, I really like to bring a variety of different lenses to a topic to really understand it. I don’t think that science has the last word on a topic, nor do I think personal anecdote has the last word.

1:02:48 But if you combine science with personal experience, with history, with natural history, and I do a lot on the natural history of the psilocybin mushroom, with case studies, then you begin to get a whole picture. Um, because you know, scientists, sometimes the poets got there first, or the philosophers got there first. And I don’t believe any one framework of understanding is adequate. So in all my work, I like to layer those different perspectives. What do you make of the reception?

1:03:17 You were on CBS News recently, and it was kind of funny, because they introduced you and then they had to stick a little disclaimer, disclaimer, right? Right, which I thought was fascinating just to see. And yet everyone on that desk was very interested in listening to what you had to say. Then you go on to Stephen Colbert. Yeah, and you’re having a very frank discussion with him about this.

1:03:36 Did you see this coming? No, I I mean, the fact that we got any mainstream press… It didn’t have to happen. It was something’s going on. The culture’s ready to have this conversation.

1:03:50 I think we’re at an inflection point right now, and I didn’t see it coming. This book was a, you know, pretty high-risk venture for my publisher, and to some extent for me. I had a good reputation writing about food and stuff. I didn’t have to change, but we took a flyer, and lo and behold, it worked. I mean, the United States reception’s been remarkable, and, uh, the mainstream media, that appearance actually was, like, the first on network television to talk about psychedelics, you know, I don’t know how long.

1:04:23 And um, and you’re right, there was this incredible nervousness. This is really weird. We’re going to put this on with disclaimers, but the evident fascination of the people, I was with Gayle King, you know, Oprah’s friend. You know, she’d I met her in the green room, and she’d been through that book and underlined it and had Post-its everywhere. So it was like, this is really weird, but hey, this is really interesting.

1:04:50 Over the course of three minutes, I saw that evolve. I think what really opened up the American media to a conversation about this was the fact that the first launch piece, the first thing I did, the kind of adaptation from the book I did for the Wall Street Journal, and that increased the comfort level that the Wall Street Journal was willing to give 2,500 words to talk about psychedelic therapy. It was a signal to the rest of the media that you could go into that water without you know, getting too cold.

1:05:19 And why were they, in your opinion, willing to do that? Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know. They almost weren’t. They kind of got cold feet about this article, um, and, uh, finally, you know, made the right call as far as I was concerned.

1:05:33 I mean, I wrote a very careful piece for them that wasn’t so threatening, and it was in a really you know, if you’re talking about healing, the conversation changes. If you’re talking about just mind expansion, mind exploration, that’s okay, but that’s kind of, there’s no urgency to that. Okay, for the culture at large, but the center of this book, and the work we should be talking about if we’re hoping to normalize these medicines, is the fact that they heal people, and that we have a mental health crisis.

1:06:06 And that, you know, there are 300 million people with depression around the world. 100 million are treatment resistant. They’re not getting relief, or they’re not getting any treatment. You have a suicide rate that’s climbing rapidly. You have addiction rampant, and mental health care has very few tools to address this.

1:06:27 Um, the last serious innovation was in the early ’90s with the SSRI antidepressants. Mental health care only reaches about half the people who need it. If you compare mental health care to any other branch of medicine, whether you’re talking about oncology, cancer treatment, cardiology, infectious disease, they’ve all extended lifespan. They’ve all come up with major innovations that have changed our lives and help people dramatically with these conditions.

1:06:59 Many more people survive with cancer now than they did just 10 years ago. There’s nothing like that in mental health care. We are not extending lives with our mental health treatments. We’re giving people psychiatric drugs that are incredibly toxic, much more toxic than LSD or psilocybin. So if you talk about that, people will listen, and they’ll get over their ’60s stereotypes of these drugs and realize, okay, there are risks, but look at the benefits.

1:07:28 And that’s what we do with other drugs. I mean, oncology drugs are incredibly toxic, but we put up with that. They kill a lot of people, by the way, but we put up with that because they heal people. Here are drugs that are remarkably non-toxic. There’s no lethal dose of LSD or psilocybin.

1:07:47 There’s a lethal dose of many drugs in your medicine cabinet that you bought without a prescription. Um, so I think that’s how you engage the mainstream, and lead with the science, and lead with the people that are being helped, because everyone’s got a sister or a grandmother, an aunt or an uncle that’s suffering. Yes, and that’s when there are years… or someone. Yeah, or someone who’s dying. And that’s how I led.

1:08:13 That’s what this piece in the Wall Street Journal was about, and it was hard to, you know, it was innovation in mental health care, and um, and they understood it that way. So yeah, the surprise, the reception of the book has been a tremendous surprise. I didn’t know that people would buy a book about psychedelics, because, you know, I’d written a lot of successful books about food. We all know how to go out and buy a book about food. We feel okay doing it.

1:08:36 We buy cookbooks or history, whatever it is, but most people haven’t bought a book about psychedelics, and they don’t know how to do that, and they don’t know how to feel. Do they feel comfortable having that in their house, having that on their bedside? We didn’t know. Um, turns out they do. This is your best-selling book.

1:08:52 It’s certainly the fastest selling. We’ll have to see. I mean, it went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. That was a shock. Uh, and it’s still up there.

1:09:00 Um, so Netflix series. You know, there’s so many filmmakers who want to make this film. It’s a very challenging film to make. I mean, how do you put the psychedelic experience on the screen without being incredibly cheesy or using ’60s imagery that’s simply not right? So I’m talking to some filmmakers who have some interesting ideas on how to do this.

1:09:25 Um, I would not be surprised if it’s a Netflix series. Okay. Big pharma, they’re not exactly calling you for the speaking gigs anytime soon. Have you thought about this? You’re you’re a measured guy.

1:09:37 Did you think about this a couple years ago, that this is pretty much laying out the gauntlet for them? Yeah, I mean, I talked to someone the other day. I met someone who is from big pharma who was head of R&D for one of the big pharma companies, and I said, what’s their attitude toward this? She basically said, they’re gonna let little companies figure it out, and then they’ll buy them. Okay, and that’s how they work.

1:09:58 They don’t really innovate anymore, especially with so-called CNS drugs, central nervous system drugs. They’re, it’s like the food industry, frankly. The big food companies, they don’t innovate anything. They just look for people who have innovated and buy them. They’re watching this space.

1:10:13 It’s an enormous challenge to them, though, because how do you make money selling a drug that you only have to take once or twice? They’re in the business of selling drugs you take every day for the rest of your life. That’s their business model. So, do they charge fifty thousand dollars for a psilocybin pill? Well, that’s crazy when you can find mushrooms in Hampstead Heath, right?

1:10:36 Um, they used to. They exterminated them all. They did. Yeah, what happened? They just…

1:10:41 I think they literally exterminated them. You can’t find them now on the Heath. You don’t think they were just overharvested? I think they specifically took them out of the Heath and out of Richmond Park so people couldn’t pick them. Wow.

1:10:51 Yeah. I had a guest on one time that said, “Brian, if you… if back in the day, if you went to go pick the mushroom and then put it in your mouth, you were in possession of an illegal drug. But if you just bent down and bit it off the ground, you never broke the law.” Um, but it’s interesting. I don’t know that that would wash, but you can try that.

1:11:12 Um, so I think psychedelic therapy, which we really should call psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, because it’s a package. It’s not just giving people the pill they need to have the experience for it to be effective, the mystical or ego-dissolving experience. And so that involves the guide, the room, you know, the set and setting. So it’s a package, and that too is very hard for big pharma to get its head around. That’s not how they’ve worked in the past.

1:11:41 It’s also not how psychotherapists have worked in the past. Excuse me, I have allergies, which psilocybin doesn’t seem to do anything for. Allergies. Um, you got water there if you need it? Yeah.

1:11:53 And even for psychotherapists, they’re in the business of someone coming back every week for years on end, so it’s a threat to them too. Yet it is expensive, because you need these two therapists for the whole length of, and all the preparation. So there are companies, I mean, I know of one based in London that’s trying to figure out this package. Peter Thiel is an investor. Yeah, Compass Pathways, and they’re trying to figure out a package that they would sell to mental health services, clinics that deal with behavioral health.

1:12:24 Um, and we’ll see. You know, maybe they’ll figure it out, so they’re not just selling a pill, they’re selling this whole package. And, um, how we fold this into mental health care as it exists, or our culture as it exists, is a big question mark. I mean, I think there’s really important work to be done. Um, there, I… somebody from IDEO, the design firm, was at my event last night, and he said, wow, we could really help designing the container you’re talking about, and they probably could be wonderful, like a pod.

1:12:55 Yeah, right. So, um, there’s lots of work to be done. We have a long way to go. This isn’t going to happen overnight, and one of the things that concerns me is, especially when you talk about the therapeutic implications, is that I’m offering a lot of hope, but it’s really not available yet, and that must be enormously frustrating to people who are suffering now, whether it’s with depression or a cancer diagnosis. And, um, I’ve been really kind of heartbroken at the number of people who, hearing me speak on programs like this, write me or try to get in touch and say, how can I find an underground guide?

1:13:33 I need this for this reason. I have multiple myeloma. I just got this very touching email this morning, and I can’t… I can’t help people. And there will be trials, though, and I encourage people to sign up on the Compass website, or the Usona website in America, or the MAPS website, where they’re starting to take names for people who might want to volunteer for trials that are not far off.

1:13:56 Yeah, but you had to go underground in the book. I got similar emails five years ago. “Who’s your shaman? Who’s your shaman?” I even had to make up a name for for the show.

1:14:04 We call her Susie. And I just can’t reply. Not a very shamanic name. No, I mean, it was kind of a joke, but, um, but you know, again, I felt helpless, because the only other way is to go on the low, and then you don’t know what you’re getting, and you know, there are going to be a lot of charlatans posing as guys. And we’ve seen that happen.

1:14:20 Oh yeah. So I worry about all that. And, and I, you know, I don’t want to oversell the experience. There is a strong signal that there’s value here. We still have many more tests to do.

1:14:32 There are psychological risks to doing this on your own. People need to be careful, and, um, and be patient. Yeah. Michael, you teach journalism. Why do people like you so much?

1:14:43 Why do they like your writing? I’m curious. Because I don’t write like a journalist. Okay, interesting. Do you teach your students the same thing?

1:14:52 Yeah, I do. Um, I write as a curious person. I write in the first person. I am… I don’t pose as the investigative journalist.

1:15:01 I’m the curious, normal person. And, uh, I don’t like to write as an expert. One of the reasons I switched subjects is because I’d become an expert on food after three or four books on food. And I don’t like books written by experts. They’re oracular.

1:15:16 They’re, you know, they’re lectures. I like books where you learn alongside the writer. So if you read almost all my pieces, I start out as a total idiot, who knows nothing, is naive. Um, and gradually learn. And so they’re all stories of education.

1:15:36 The subtitle of every one of my books could be “The Education Of,” and in fact it was the subtitle for one or two of them. So here, the fact that I was kind of a newbie to the psychedelic community was a plus, because I could bring in people who were afraid of it or didn’t know it. I was a very reluctant psychonaut. Yeah, I mean, I already described the kind of fears I had, but there were other things I was really turned off by, the New Age lingo of these people, and the shitty music, and there were so many things that I had to get over to do this.

1:16:10 And so I think that made it much more accessible to other people. You know, there were a couple reviews that took me to task for my naivete, and that, you know, people would start the reviews, “I’ve had a hundred ego-dissolving experiences. What am I going to learn from this newbie?” And that reviewer didn’t understand that was precisely the point. That’s why a lot of people are going to read this book, because I have one foot in and one foot out, and the one foot out is really important.

1:16:41 So I like writing closer to the beginning of the learning curve. That’s my sweet spot as a writer, I think, that’s what I can do well. And I’m approaching you as someone just like you, who’s curious and perhaps has more time to do this exploration than you do. I’m your designated inquirer. Um, which is the opposite of what most authors do.

1:16:59 Yeah, they’re just, you know, they know the answer. They’re telling you what to do, and I hate that voice. So I think that, you know, I have a persona on the page that I’ve developed over the years that I’m comfortable in, and I put myself in situations, and we learn together. So that’s, and it’s very personal. You know, I always write in the first person.

1:17:24 I’m always have skin in the game. That’s the other thing. A lot of journalists don’t have skin in the game. They write from this high, high perspective. When I was writing about the cattle industry, I bought a cow and followed it through, because it’s very easy for a journalist to say, oh, you shouldn’t give hormone implants to your cow, which puts weight on them a little more quickly, and you get 50 more pounds at market, say.

1:17:51 But as an owner of the cow, I had to do the calculation. Well, let’s see: if I don’t put those extra 50 pounds on, I’m not going to make any money on this cow. I’m not even going to break even, because it only cost 15 to do that. So suddenly I’m seeing it through the rancher’s eyes, and I don’t have that easy condescension that journalists have, because they don’t have skin in the game. So I think that’s part of it too.

1:18:16 And you know, I do, I also think audiobooks are really important, and they’re growing very quickly. I always insist on reading my own audiobooks, because it’s me. It’s this persona. So even though it’s a tremendous amount of work to take a week out of your life, yeah, it’s, but it’s important, because I want to talk to the reader directly, and that’s a place you get to do it. How do you write?

1:18:40 Do you have a practice? A discipline? You laugh. Everybody is what your students ask you all the time. Yeah, um, are you reluctant to answer?

1:18:47 Because I know I’m happy to answer. I’m happy to answer. I write with great difficulty, like most people. It doesn’t get easier. Um, I always thought at this point in my career I would have the kind of ease that a great woodworker who’s been doing it his whole life has.

1:19:00 It’s still hard every day. Um, I’m very disciplined when I’m in the drafting phase. You know, there’s a whole research phase, right, that’s different, where you’re just making lots of notes and having experiences and talking to people on the phone or going to interview them and collecting a ton of information that you don’t even see in the book. I would say I interviewed 10 people for every one I quote, and some people feel left out as a result, because they’ve given me hours of their time, and they, it informs what I’m doing.

1:19:32 Their fingerprints are on the final product, but their quotes may not be. Um, they’re they’re increasing my sense of confidence and saying X or Y. My authority is built on all those people I’ve talked to. So a lot of journalists feel compelled to put everyone they’ve interviewed on the page to show their editor or show somebody how much work they did. I don’t do that.

1:19:50 I just put the people that I can actually turn into characters. Um, you know, so, and you can’t have, you can’t have a hundred names in a book. It’s a blizzard to people. You have to say, finally, even though there are lots of other important researchers, Robert Carhart-Harris, Roland Griffiths. You know, there’s a handful of people, and I’m going to focus on them because they have the most interesting or most representative stories.

1:20:14 Um, so that’s one thing. You come from a journalism background, not a writing background. A writer wouldn’t be as precise, right? As that. Okay.

1:20:22 Oh no, it is fundamentally journalism. I mean, make no mistake, I work very hard to get my facts straight and fact-check everything. I mean, you make mistakes occasionally, but um, the fact that the information is authoritative, that’s baseline. It has to be. I mean, I published in places where they fact-check everything very carefully.

1:20:40 My books are very carefully fact-checked. I pay somebody a lot of money to fact-check them. So, but the writing process, once I’m writing, I stop reading. Um, and I have these spiral notebooks with all my interview notes and article clips and scientific articles, and I try to write, you know, from like 9:30 in the morning till lunchtime, which is around one o’clock, and um, don’t go online. That’s really important.

1:21:06 Um, trap. It’s such a trap. Don’t check your email. Don’t look at Twitter. Um, turn off the Wi-Fi, or do you have tricks?

1:21:14 I don’t, because I need the Wi-Fi to look things up. Okay, you know, especially with, like, what is 5-MeO-DMT? What’s the name for it? What’s the full name? Five-methoxy…

1:21:24 I see you. You’re hitting Wikipedia all the time, getting definitions and facts, because I’m doing science journalism. You know, I’m out of my depth very often. I’ve never written about neuroscience before. I didn’t know where the posterior cingulate cortex was, and I had to go online and see, oh, there it is.

1:21:44 Um, it’s exciting, and that’s another thing. I’m never very far ahead of my reader in terms of my knowledge. You know, I’ve done a few days more research on the past on the default mode network than they have, so I’m not using the jargon with confidence, which is very off-putting, I think, to readers. So I basically write every morning. I start the day by editing what I wrote the day before, always.

1:22:07 Um, so at the end of my writing session, I write on a computer, and I print out, though, which is, I know, very wasteful of the trees that we both so much respect, but I need to see it fresh. And I begin my writing session by penciling it up. Actually, I use a pen, and refining it, and refining it, and then I get to the end, and then I start writing again, and that kind of reloads it. It gets the rhythms. The rhythms of speech are very important to good writing.

1:22:32 The best advice I have for writers is read great prose, which may not be journalism. Read it out loud. Read it out loud. Read whatever you write out loud. It’s a musical process, and when you read something and you find it pleasing, it’s the music that you’re hearing.

1:22:47 And some writers have a tin ear, and it’s very hard to write well if you have a tin ear. And you’re usually pleasantly surprised when you go to the audiobook, and you’re like, yeah, this is why I put the work in. Although I have to say, when I read my audiobook, I spot terrible sentences that are too long or too formal, and sometimes I can fix them. It’s not too late, and sometimes it’s too late. So the advice to read your stuff aloud, which I give all my students, I don’t always follow myself.

1:23:14 I should. There’s no better way to find a problem than to read a piece of writing aloud, but I do have an ear, and I hear what I’m saying, and that’s how I read too. And so reading great prose is really important. In fact, while I’m writing, I stop reading all the boring scientific articles, and I pick up a novel, and I’m hearing good prose before I go to sleep, whenever I have a break in the day, during, you know, if I’m having lunch alone. So I’m swimming in that sea of beautiful word sounds, and that gets into your own writing.

1:23:50 So then I write for a couple hours, and then, you know, it’s a nice life, because you have the afternoon off, and I take a long hike, you know, when I’m drafting. The reporting days are very long, but the writing days are, you know, good. I shouldn’t say that. Some of them are horrible, right? Um, sometimes it just doesn’t come, but I always get a couple thousand words down, and so that you’ll do that for six, eight, ten weeks.

1:24:11 I’ll do it chapter by chapter. I’ll research a chapter and then write it, and the writing will take about a month or two, a month, depending how long it is, and then I’ll go back into research mode. I go back and forth. I can’t research a whole book and write it through. Every chapter in my books has its own logic and identity.

1:24:30 I get bored by books that have the same kind of drone throughout. So if you’re reading my book, you’re, you’ll be in a very personal, memoiristic section, and then you’ll be in a very, you know, learning-all-about- neuroscience section, and it’s a slightly different voice, slightly different set of concerns. So I don’t know. I think there are too many nonfiction books that feel like blown-up magazine articles. I want real parts that are different.

1:24:55 Yeah, this is refreshing. There’s like six parts, and then we’re in history, and then we’re out, and then we’re back, and then each one has… if you don’t like the history, you can skip to the travelogue, or if you’re really into neuroscience, you can read that. And people don’t always read it in order, and I don’t penalize them for that. Great writers you admire? Oh god, well, one just died.

1:25:16 Philip Roth was a great hero of mine. Novelist. You know, not everything he wrote was great, but he was just so unflinching in his honesty, and he’s willing to make himself look like a schmuck. And, you know, being unembarrassed as a writer is very important. And I had a, you know, there’s, we have a desire to kind of look cool and look smart, and we all have that.

1:25:38 It’s the ego again. And I realized I couldn’t tell a true story about these experiences without being willing to expose myself, expose emotions that might seem trite. You know, I talk a lot about, like, some of the insights you have could be on a Hallmark card, like, love is the most important thing. So how do you write about that? You have to be unembarrassed.

1:25:57 There’s a lot of self-exposure that happens if you’re writing well, and writing certainly about a psychedelic experience, where it’s about the contents of your mind, and you don’t want to edit it. You want to show people without boring them. I mean, you are editing it, but you’re not censoring it. And so, he’s a great hero for non-fiction writers. Joan Didion, I think, is just a brilliant writer.

1:26:28 She, luckily, is still with us. Oh, who do I like? Um, that’s such a hard question. I should, you know, I read so many things. At least she didn’t say Hemingway.

1:26:43 I don’t know, that’s what, like, writers… yeah, Hemingway. I admire his prose. I love the way he can construct a sentence, and I’m jealous of his short sentences, because my sentences tend to be a lot longer, and I love how few commas you see in his work. It’s so clean. And the reason he doesn’t need a lot of commas is he’s writing these short sentences, but he has short sentences that still have music.

1:27:08 But I love Faulkner too, who’s the opposite. He’s a writer who, uh, he’s a maximalist, and Hemingway’s a minimalist, and I’m a little more of a maximalist, I guess. But I’m jealous of the minimalists and what they can do with short sentences. Okay, what scares you? Uh, you know, I say in the book, actually, I’m quoting Wilhelm Reich.

1:27:33 He said there are three things that scare people. One is other people. The other is the contents of their own mind, and the third is death. So the latter two. I’m not afraid of other people.

1:27:42 I like other people, but the contents of my own mind, I was more scared of that before I did this. I went on this journey, because, and that’s one of the reasons I hadn’t done it until now, I think, is I had that fear of what would I find? Would I find this deep well of madness? Would I find really ugly emotions? And the fact that I didn’t was kind of reassuring.

1:28:08 And I actually remember saying to Mary, my psilocybin guide, “Well, one of the things I took out of this was maybe I’m sturdier than I thought.” And she was like, “On any given day, you could have a very different experience.” So, um, so I’m less frightened of the contents of my own mind. Am I less frightened of death? I… perhaps, perhaps I am.

1:28:35 Um, I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought. I kind of held it at bay, but, you know, when you turn 60, you really start thinking about it in a different way. And the conversations I’ve had and the people I’ve watched die have given me a lot of occasion to think about it. Um, I do think that psychedelics can teach us important things about death, and I’ve learned some of them, but there’s definitely… I’m not there yet.

1:29:06 What would we be surprised to learn about Michael Pollan, something you don’t do? Do you like me doing media? Do you kind of want to get back and write? You know, it’s been a lot of media in the last month. You can hear it in my voice.

1:29:24 Um, I enjoy it, actually. I do enjoy being on book tour. I love meeting readers. You’re in this room alone for so long, and to meet people who’ve actually, like, let you occupy their minds. This is pretty psychedelic, I know, but when you read a book, you’re letting someone else occupy your mind.

1:29:42 You’re surrendering in a way. And that, at this moment, there are tens of thousands of people who are letting me occupy their minds. That sounds very egotistical, but it’s why we do it. It’s why we do it. Um, we’re colonizing people’s minds with our minds, and sort of like the plants, and to hear back from them and hear what they get out of it is wonderful.

1:30:07 I mean, I love the feedback, and I get a lot of information. I often get story ideas. It was the reception to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was my first kind of big bestseller, and the questions I heard from audiences, like, okay, you’ve told me about the environmental and the ethical implications of eating, but what about my health? What should I eat for my health? I realized that was really people’s obsession, and that led directly to writing In Defense of Food.

1:30:33 So for me, it’s also market research. I really learn where my readers are and what they want to know, what they’re confused about, and that may happen here. So it’s a wonderful opportunity to meet your readers and sign lines, hearing questions. So I love that. Um, it’s pretty tiring, and, you know, but anything’s easier than writing, including book tour.

1:31:00 Amen to that. Uh, what keeps you awake at night? Oh god, Trump. Right now, Trump. We’re in a very bad place in our country right now, and we are facing the most consequential decision as a country, which is the fall midterm elections.

1:31:20 We will either say no to this and defend our democracy, because our democracy is under threat, make no mistake, or we will certify it, that we’re happy to go this way, and if that happens, we may lose this republic that we’ve had now for, you know, more than 200 years. Um, it’s never, I don’t think, has ever been in such jeopardy. Is this tribalism taken to the extreme, or is it the politics of resentment? And certainly the elites f***ed up and allowed this to happen.

1:31:54 I think that, um, the flowing of wealth to such a narrow strata of society, which both Democrats and Republicans abetted, has led to this. But there’s also, yeah, a lot of just tribal resentment. The country’s not as white as it was, people feeling left behind, and a failure of education. I don’t think people have we’ve been educating people for the workforce for the last, since the Reagan administration, not for citizenship. The reason you have education is to train… this is what Jefferson said, to train citizens so they recognize despots in advance.

1:32:36 And that’s why you study history. That’s why you study, you know, great men and not-so-great men, evil men. And we stopped doing that. And the left is as responsible as the right for that. The right wanted education to feed workers to the machine.

1:32:50 The left wanted to talk about social and economic forces and not great men. Um, but that study, that old-fashioned study of history, is about political education, and we’re not doing that. I didn’t even have it growing up. We had social studies, the stupid thing that was. Um, so yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s, I worry about that.

1:33:11 Do you think that all of this stuff is interrelated when it comes to going into the science of the mind, the psychedelics? The plant intelligence, respecting the plants, respecting the other. I mean, it’s without question. Yeah. Without, older I get, it’s becoming more and more clear.

1:33:26 Yeah, I mean, you know, these problems, um, you know, I’ve been sensitized to them by psychedelics, and I see that there are other ways to think, and that we need to experiment, and that it’s going to take some consciousness change to get us out of the box we’re in. I mean, the other thing I worry about is the environmental crisis, um, which I worry about the fact we’re not worrying about it enough. It’s really serious. Um, I’ve been, you know, studying climate change for a long time, and, um, yeah, there’s been some progress, um, but I don’t think people realize just how urgent the situation is, and, uh, it’s here.

1:34:09 You know, in… I remember the first time I wrote about it at all was, uh, in 1989. I was working on my first book, Second Nature, and talked a little bit about climate change. This was a problem for our grandchildren then. Okay, this is only 1989.

1:34:23 Um, and now it’s here. It’s here. We are confronting it with the weather we’re having, with the droughts we’re having, and it’s arrived faster than we thought, and it’s going to be more violent than we think. Um, so, uh, yeah, I worry about that too, and it will take a change of consciousness, um, a reset. And how we do that, you know, psychedelics can help, but we need politics too.

1:34:54 We need good storytellers. We need, um, leaders willing to take a chance. Michael, I always ask a couple of questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, uh, if you already have been, uh… Yeah, I know.

1:35:06 I’ll ask you a few more. Okay. Uh, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year- old Michael and give that young man a bit of advice, especially after you’ve written this book, what would you tell them? I would have encouraged them, probably, to explore psychedelics earlier, not that I think that’s necessarily the best time to do it. Um, there’s a throwaway line in the book where I say psychedelics may be wasted on the young.

1:35:27 It’s really after we get kind of ossified in our patterns of thought and behavior. We all get more rigid over time. Our brains are less entropic and more certain about everything. We think we’ve got it all figured out, and you need to shake that confidence. You need to inject some noise in the system.

1:35:48 And, uh, um, nevertheless, I think that I was wrong to be afraid of it, and might have learned interesting things about it. I would have told my 20-year-old self, “Go ahead, you can be a writer.” Because at that age, I didn’t think I could. I didn’t know anyone who made a living as a writer. It didn’t seem like a job.

1:36:09 So I became a magazine editor, and I did that for many years. I didn’t really become a full-time writer until I was almost 40. And so there was some lost time there, although, as a magazine editor, I did learn some skills, definitely editing other people’s work. I edited some very fine writers, and I watched them go through this process, and that was very useful. I was at Harper’s Magazine for 10 years, but I was afraid to be a writer, because I didn’t know how you would support yourself, support a family, have a mortgage, all these kinds of things.

1:36:41 And it took me a while, and I wrote my first couple books, kind of moonlighting on the side, before I took the plunge. So, um, I guess I wish I took the plunge a little earlier. There would be another book or two under my belt. I don’t know if they’d be any good, but, and finally the advice to that 20-year-old, that’s watching us, listening to us from somewhere around the world, basically, you know, 30, 40 years ago, what advice do you give them about everything we talked about today?

1:37:07 You know, what can they do, or what’s something they can focus on today? Yeah, very much so. Michael, really enjoyed having you here. Really enjoyed this book, How to Change Your Mind.

1:37:42 I’ve actually just bought my digital copy in San Diego, California, and he’s going to get it tomorrow. Oh, that’s great. I’m really excited, because, funny enough, he’s a Caltech engineer, old school, and, um, when he first saw my ayahuasca episode seven years ago, he said to me, “It’s something that shocked me,” and he said, “I might try that.” And this is a guy that, you know, never drank or smoked or anything, and so I know he’ll enjoy this. Well, especially because I talk about the tradition of engineers using psychedelics, which goes back way before Steve Jobs.

1:38:09 There’s something about the mind of the engineer that finds psychedelics useful. One engineer told me it’s because it’s the challenge with being an engineer is finding pattern. You have these irreducible variables, many of them, and psychedelics can help you find pattern. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’d be really curious to hear what your dad has to think. A lot of psychonauts are giving the book to their parents to, um, explain what they’re up to, right?

1:38:32 I know. All right, Dad, I hope you’re listening. That’s a completely legitimate use of the book. Yeah, now that’s fantastic, and I really think this is part of a big solution to this global, perplexing problem, and I think we need to talk about this. So thank you for doing that.

1:38:44 Uh, it was an honor that you watched the Carhart-Harris interview in preparation for this, so it was a big part of my education. It’s amazing to know we played a small part there. And yeah, I just love what you’re doing with this. Um, let’s definitely stay in touch, because I feel like every conversation I have is a bit about this message of trying to get everyone together to reduce the objectivity of everything. And the older I get, the more conversations I have with people, whether they’re writers or even talking about these subjects, the more I realize that we need to really start thinking about the whole and think about it a lot more.

1:39:17 So that’s what we’re doing. Yeah, and one of the great virtues of psychedelics is they make you think about the big questions. Yeah, definitely. I look forward to the Netflix piece of this, and, uh, on London Real we say it’s about the journey. I wish you well, Michael.

1:39:32 Thank you. Thank you very