Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Every generation has a handful of thinkers
Speaker 1: and writers who profoundly shape the way we experience the
Speaker 1: world by tapping into the seitgeist, the spirit of the Times.
Speaker 1: Today's guest, Michael Pollen, is one of those rare individuals. First,
Speaker 1: he did it for food, with a series of important
Speaker 1: and influential books and articles for The New Yorker and
Speaker 1: The New York Times that change the way we thought
Speaker 1: about how our food was made and about what sorts
Speaker 1: of foods we should eat. In recent years, he's been
Speaker 1: doing it again, this time with psychedelics, with books like
Speaker 1: How to Change Your Mind and most recently, This Is
Speaker 1: Your Mind on Plants. Throughout this body of work, Michael
Speaker 1: has focused on the intersecting point between nature and culture,
Speaker 1: and he tries both to tell our stories and to
Speaker 1: guide us directionally and how we ought to experience the world.
Speaker 1: Michael therefore writes about power, one of our central themes
Speaker 1: here on Deep Background this season. But he is also
Speaker 1: someone who, in his own gentle way, deploys a substantial
Speaker 1: amount of power in our culture because here today to
Speaker 1: talk about his new book and the trajectory of his
Speaker 1: career and how it all fits together. Michael, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for being here. There are so many questions
Speaker 1: that I want to ask you, but let me start
Speaker 1: with one aspect of your fascinating new book. This is
Speaker 1: your Mind on Plants. And this book is many different things,
Speaker 1: but one of them is a kind of philosophical meditation
Speaker 1: on the fates of different plant based substances and how
Speaker 1: we end up regulating them. And I'm wondering how you
Speaker 1: came to that thematic arrangement for the book, with your
Speaker 1: three substances and the different status that each has. So
Speaker 1: I looked at three plants and the chemicals they produced,
Speaker 1: the psychoactive chemicals they produced, and I wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure one of them was legal and completely acceptable in
Speaker 1: our society and virtually invisible for that reason, and that
Speaker 1: was caffeine. And I wanted to change the context of
Speaker 1: opium and mescal in two by putting the three together.
Speaker 1: Had the book been all illegal substances, it would have
Speaker 1: been a drug book. But it's much more interested in
Speaker 1: looking past the categories, which are interesting and arbitrary in
Speaker 1: some ways logical and others to this base human drive
Speaker 1: to change consciousness, which I think is such a curious
Speaker 1: thing that we were born with this apparently this desire,
Speaker 1: and it manifests itself even in children who loved to
Speaker 1: spin and get dizzy, to very normal consciousness, to transcend
Speaker 1: the ego or reinforce it in the case of some drugs,
Speaker 1: and we have these remarkable tools presented to us by plants.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to sort of change the context because
Speaker 1: people go right to these categories illicit drug, acceptable drug,
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical drug, but if you go back in time, you
Speaker 1: know they've been upside down. I mean, there was a
Speaker 1: time I described in the Opium chapter where the farmer
Speaker 1: on the land where I now live in Connecticut, he
Speaker 1: was making alcohol from his apples, making hard cider, which
Speaker 1: is a very common drink in rural America for a
Speaker 1: long time. That was a federal crime that could have
Speaker 1: put him in jail. At that very moment, the women
Speaker 1: for temperance were commonly enjoying their women's tonics, which were
Speaker 1: these preparations you could buy at drug stores that contained
Speaker 1: opium and cannabis, and that was perfectly legal, So I'm
Speaker 1: trying to kind of defamiliarize ourselves with these categories a
Speaker 1: little bit and get us to start read thinking them.
Speaker 1: It was really fascinating to me reading the book, because,
Speaker 1: as you've just very well described, we haven't yet gotten
Speaker 1: to a peyote, the third substance you talk about. You
Speaker 1: wanted three substances with different legal categorizations because you were
Speaker 1: trying to move us away from thinking about the legal
Speaker 1: categorizations and towards the plants and the human impulse to
Speaker 1: ingest the psychoactive and yet or maybe, and also the
Speaker 1: book that Emerged spends some time talking about the basic
Speaker 1: human urge, sometime about the experiential relationship we have to
Speaker 1: these different plant based substances, But a lot of the
Speaker 1: book ends up being devoted to telling the story. You're
Speaker 1: such a good storytelling you couldn't help yourself but tell
Speaker 1: the story of how each of these substances came to
Speaker 1: occupy the regulatory category, whether social or legal or both
Speaker 1: that it did come to occupy. So, in a way,
Speaker 1: a book that sets out to be a book about
Speaker 1: the power of plants is also a book about human
Speaker 1: power and the way humans categorize and engage with these
Speaker 1: same plants, Oh, without question. I mean I'm fascinated by that.
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by history and how at different times in
Speaker 1: history we see nature and culture in very different ways.
Speaker 1: And drugs are a great example, since they're constantly evolving
Speaker 1: in our estimation of them. I mean, right now, we're
Speaker 1: in the midst of a re categorization of psychedelics. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's still a Schedule one drug with no accepted medical
Speaker 1: use and a high potential for abuse, neither of which
Speaker 1: is true, but nevertheless that's the official category for psychedelic
Speaker 1: But because of this renaissance of research into their value
Speaker 1: as therapeutic aids to help people deal with mental illness
Speaker 1: and dying, they're undergoing a shift. And I think if
Speaker 1: we did this interview in five or ten years, they
Speaker 1: will no longer be on Schedule one and they will
Speaker 1: be part of the pharmacopeia. And nobody would have guessed
Speaker 1: that back in the late sixties when they were first prohibited.
Speaker 1: So we're in the midst of a sea change right now,
Speaker 1: I think, and obiits are going in the opposite direction,
Speaker 1: of course. But my message is too in the book,
Speaker 1: is it's not all one or the other. We need
Speaker 1: to think about drugs with the kind of negative capability
Speaker 1: or suppleness that the Greeks did. They called all these
Speaker 1: drugs pharmacon, which can mean both poison or medicine, and
Speaker 1: also scapegoat by the way, which is I think not
Speaker 1: an accident, because we tend to blame these drugs for
Speaker 1: all sorts of things. But it's very hard for us
Speaker 1: to hold two contradictory ideas in our head. And around drugs,
Speaker 1: you really have to because they can be very dangerous.
Speaker 1: They can get people into trouble, they can kill people,
Speaker 1: but they also can heal and give people insights into
Speaker 1: existence and shift their consciousness in ways that is very
Speaker 1: productive for them as individuals and for the species I believe.
Speaker 1: Do you have any hope that we would ever reach
Speaker 1: a more rational set of structures for making sense of
Speaker 1: this and governing it? And if so, what would rational
Speaker 1: look like to you? I mean, one could say, well,
Speaker 1: here's the thing about coffee or caffeine. It doesn't leave
Speaker 1: you rampaging in the streets. Right Yet, in your chapter
Speaker 1: on caffeine, you make the point that we can't just
Speaker 1: describe the effects of caffeine as minor or trivial. The
Speaker 1: hope that will ever be rational about this. The evidence
Speaker 1: of history is that we won't, and that there is
Speaker 1: a fundamentally irrational part of human life and of the
Speaker 1: human mind that drugs plays into. We're constantly, you know,
Speaker 1: we're meaning making creatures, and we will make meaning out
Speaker 1: of everything. And then if you take a particularly powerful
Speaker 1: substance that seems to have its own meanings and perhaps does,
Speaker 1: will project all sorts of stuff on that. But again,
Speaker 1: the same drug at different times in history can be
Speaker 1: regarded as encouraging passivity or encouraging violence. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: interesting how inconsistent we are even about the image of
Speaker 1: these drugs and what they do for us. I'm convinced
Speaker 1: that our interpretation of psychedelic experience owes maybe one part
Speaker 1: to the chemical and nine parts to culture and individual psyche.
Speaker 1: I mean, that we construct this experience. I've always wondered
Speaker 1: what would happen if psychedelics hadn't first been written about
Speaker 1: by Aldus Huxley, who puts a very Eastern spin on it.
Speaker 1: It's more like Eastern religion than Christian religion. And that
Speaker 1: orientalizing of psychedelics I think descends from him. It gets
Speaker 1: picked up by Leary, who used the Tibetan Book of
Speaker 1: the Dead to interpret the experience. What if some Christian
Speaker 1: mystics had written the first modern accounts of a psychedelic trip,
Speaker 1: would it have looked very different? I'm guessing it could be.
Speaker 1: It could have been constructed differently. But you have to
Speaker 1: tease apart what's really inherent about the experience. But people
Speaker 1: forget that everything you experience on a psychedelic is not
Speaker 1: in the molecule. The molecule doesn't have anything in it.
Speaker 1: It really is a catalyst for a process in your
Speaker 1: own mind that draws on everything in your memory, from
Speaker 1: your own personal experiences to what you've learned about how
Speaker 1: the world works. And this is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: I'm so interested in drugs. They're one of those interesting
Speaker 1: rubs between nature and culture, between our biology and everything
Speaker 1: we are because of the culture we inhabit. But then
Speaker 1: you have this other tradition though, right, the Native American
Speaker 1: tradition ayahuasca and payote and mushrooms. And I found that
Speaker 1: really fascinating, partly because I didn't know much about it
Speaker 1: and hadn't paid much attention to payote or the Native
Speaker 1: American use of psychedelics before, but they have a different
Speaker 1: construction and it's it's very religious, it's very social, which
Speaker 1: is interesting. I mean, the drug trip is not an
Speaker 1: individual matter, it's it's it's something that happens at the
Speaker 1: level of the community, so they put a different interpretation
Speaker 1: on it. Yeah, I think that's really important, and I
Speaker 1: agree that that's one of the really interesting things in
Speaker 1: your book. And you also show at the same time
Speaker 1: the connection of the history of mescaline and other cactus
Speaker 1: derivatives in resistance to the process of domination and cultural
Speaker 1: and literal genocide perpetrated against Native American peoples, especially in
Speaker 1: North America, but also in South and Central America, and
Speaker 1: the way that payote came to be part of the
Speaker 1: resistance to that story through the immersions of the Native
Speaker 1: American Payote Church in the late nineteenth century, and then
Speaker 1: it's flourishing again in the nineteen seventies and eighties. And
Speaker 1: that's a really rich and important part of your book.
Speaker 1: And I wondered if I could ask you about an
Speaker 1: aspect of that that has struck me when I hear
Speaker 1: contemporary non Indigenous people talking about the use of payote
Speaker 1: and that is, where do you think that fits into
Speaker 1: our discourse around cultural ownership and cultural appropriation, especially cultural
Speaker 1: ownership by indigenous peoples. I mean, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: they are in some sense part of the common legacy
Speaker 1: of all humans, and in another sense, they're very specifically
Speaker 1: connected to particular cultures, cultures that have suffered from destruction.
Speaker 1: So I wonder how you think about that. So I
Speaker 1: struggle with this because I was deciding whether I was
Speaker 1: going to use payote, having learned about the sensitivities about
Speaker 1: it on the part of Native Americans. I had interviewed
Speaker 1: many Native Americans who felt threatened by the white use
Speaker 1: or the non native use of payote. But there are
Speaker 1: two issues there. There's a cultural appropriation issue, and there's
Speaker 1: a material appropriation issue in that there is a shortage
Speaker 1: of payote, and that because of overuse. Because approaching this cactus,
Speaker 1: the sacred plant, which has become so essential to Native
Speaker 1: American identity among many tribes, hundreds of tribes now and
Speaker 1: has been such a powerful tool of healing the unique
Speaker 1: trauma of Native Americans, that I came to the conclusion
Speaker 1: that as a non Native, I should leave it alone.
Speaker 1: That that was the way to respect it. So I decided,
Speaker 1: even though I had some opportunities there were Native Americans
Speaker 1: willing to let me participate, the moral or ethical thing
Speaker 1: to do was not to do it. It's not to
Speaker 1: say I think that use of payote should be illegal.
Speaker 1: I do think we should explore what Native Americans have
Speaker 1: taught us about the healing potential of this compound, mescaline.
Speaker 1: They did discover mescaline. And then there's another argument about
Speaker 1: reparations and reciprocity. So there are companies that want to
Speaker 1: use mescaline in their research and possibly as a treatment
Speaker 1: for alcoholism, which is one of the big ways that
Speaker 1: Native Americans use it. Is there any obligation on the
Speaker 1: part of those companies to return profit or somehow recognize
Speaker 1: or share their intellectual property if they develop it with
Speaker 1: Native Americans. That's a really interesting question. I don't know
Speaker 1: the answer to that. People are struggling with that right now.
Speaker 1: But I do believe that even though all drugs should
Speaker 1: be decriminalized, I think as a matter of individual conscience,
Speaker 1: I would discourage non natives from using payote, especially because
Speaker 1: there are other ways to get it. To get mescaline.
Speaker 1: One is synthetic mescaline doesn't damage native payote stocks. And
Speaker 1: the other is this other cactus I talk about sam
Speaker 1: pedro or watchuma, which grows in South America. Very easy
Speaker 1: to grow here or grow your own payote if you're
Speaker 1: a very patient person and a good gardener. It takes
Speaker 1: fifteen years to get from seed to usable button. But
Speaker 1: I see no problem. I don't see that as cultural
Speaker 1: appropriation if you have some seeds and want to crow it.
Speaker 1: But again, people draw these lines in very different places,
Speaker 1: and Native Americans do. I mean, I talk to Native Americans,
Speaker 1: some of whom would say, you know, use all the
Speaker 1: synthetic mescaline and sam pedro you want, just leave our
Speaker 1: payote alone. And then I talk to others who said,
Speaker 1: if you're going to use mescaline, you owe us reparations
Speaker 1: because we discovered it. So there's not you know, Native
Speaker 1: American opinion on this is not monolithic by any means,
Speaker 1: and my own opinion is not monolithic either, as you
Speaker 1: can tell. We'll be right back. I want to turn
Speaker 1: to the magic word plants, which seems to be something
Speaker 1: that has almost talismanic quality in the body of work
Speaker 1: of Michael Pollen and in the culture at the moment.
Speaker 1: By the way, I mean, have you noticed how many
Speaker 1: products are now plant based in your supermarketing? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that if you know, when future historians
Speaker 1: do an analysis of the evolution of the concept of
Speaker 1: plant based if they won't find you at the very
Speaker 1: beating heart of the birth of that movement. So I
Speaker 1: want to ask you about the about that word, about
Speaker 1: that the power of that word. You're a gardener, and
Speaker 1: that has something to do with your long term interest
Speaker 1: in plants, obviously, because it's famous to everybody. Now you're
Speaker 1: a dictum about what we should eat started with plants
Speaker 1: and was made plant central. I'm not really kidding. I
Speaker 1: think when someday they ask why all these things have
Speaker 1: the word plant based attached, they may come back to you.
Speaker 1: And then this book uses advisedly the word plants. You
Speaker 1: don't say drugs, you don't say medicines, which is a
Speaker 1: word that some users of psychedelics prefer, and that some
Speaker 1: Native Americans don't much like to hear used in this
Speaker 1: context because they take it very seriously and are not
Speaker 1: sure that everybody who uses these substances does. So talk
Speaker 1: to me about the word plants. Well, it's been such
Speaker 1: a kind of common word in my personal vocabulary for
Speaker 1: a long time. I don't have that much perspective on it.
Speaker 1: I used it in the title of this book in
Speaker 1: part to remind people that's where drugs come from, and
Speaker 1: that they are part of our relationship to the natural world,
Speaker 1: and we lose track of that. We think of drugs
Speaker 1: coming from laboratories, and some of them do, but a
Speaker 1: great many of them, of course, come from plants. And
Speaker 1: why do plants produce them? Then that opens up a
Speaker 1: whole conversation about evolutionary objectives of plants as opposed to people,
Speaker 1: the fact that they are geniuses chemistry and neurochemistry in particular,
Speaker 1: and why they are because they can't run away, basically,
Speaker 1: and so they have to use chemistry to either attract
Speaker 1: or repel. And I've been fascinated in that fact about
Speaker 1: plants for a very long time. These are not simple
Speaker 1: molecules they're making. And how incredible is it that a
Speaker 1: plant can hit on precisely the the chemical formula to
Speaker 1: have a profound effect on an animal brain. So I've
Speaker 1: been marveling at plants for a long time. I've been
Speaker 1: trying to win them more respect speak for them since
Speaker 1: they can't speak for themselves. Michael paulin Lorax. We'll put
Speaker 1: that on in the head notes of this interview. That
Speaker 1: did have a big influence on me, the Loax? Did
Speaker 1: it actually say? Would you say something about that? How
Speaker 1: old were you when you first heard of or read
Speaker 1: the Loax? You think, I don't remember. I don't. I
Speaker 1: think it came out a little late in my childhood.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but it was one of my sons
Speaker 1: favorite books, and this whole time I was beginning this
Speaker 1: work in the nineties, I read it to my son
Speaker 1: over and over and over again. I've got it pretty
Speaker 1: much committed to memory. I think at this point i'd
Speaker 1: have to go back and check what year the Lorex
Speaker 1: came out. I think of that as kind of late
Speaker 1: and tied to the environmental movement. It has sentiments in
Speaker 1: it that it's hard to imagine before nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 1: or so, when when the environmental movement is starting. Have
Speaker 1: you found it published June twenty three, nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: So historical analysis is confirmed in a real time. It's
Speaker 1: nice to when that happens. But the language is very
Speaker 1: much you know post Rachel Carson post the First Earth Day.
Speaker 1: So my exposure to it I was fifteen then or
Speaker 1: sixteen then, So I wasn't reading Doctor SEUs at sixteen,
Speaker 1: but I did read it over and over again to
Speaker 1: my son, who loved it. I also know I've written
Speaker 1: a lot about plant intelligence and the whole effort to
Speaker 1: figure out how intelligent are plants? Are they conscious? And
Speaker 1: what does that mean? I mean, I think we're learning
Speaker 1: some incredible things about plant intelligence, plant sociality. This is
Speaker 1: a kind of interesting moment for plant science, which has
Speaker 1: been a very sleepy field for a long time. If
Speaker 1: you talk to botanists, nobody was paying attention to them.
Speaker 1: But now you have all this work on how plants
Speaker 1: connect to one another, and the trees in a forest
Speaker 1: are very social. Suzanne Simard has a new book on
Speaker 1: this that's really interesting. She's done pioneering research showing that
Speaker 1: they can swap nutrients using these fungle networks. They can
Speaker 1: send messages, plants can hear. There's interesting research that if
Speaker 1: you play the sound of caterpillars chomping on leaves to
Speaker 1: other plants, they will arm themselves and produce defense chemicals.
Speaker 1: You know, they don't have ears, but they can hear,
Speaker 1: they don't have eyes, but they can see. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're just bizarre. So it takes a lot of human
Speaker 1: imagination to see the world from their point of view.
Speaker 1: And I've been eager to do that for a very
Speaker 1: long time and wrote a book in fact who's subtitle
Speaker 1: was A Plant's eye View of the World. And it's
Speaker 1: exciting to see there is, though, I worry a slightly
Speaker 1: mystical strain coming into some of this work about trees.
Speaker 1: I mean, there've been books out on trees that are
Speaker 1: more mystical than scientific that really strain credulity, at least mine.
Speaker 1: But in general, I think plants are getting a new
Speaker 1: respect and that does tie into, you know, what we're
Speaker 1: learning about nutrition. However, the twinkie is plant based too,
Speaker 1: I think we need to remember. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of crap sold as plant based in the supermarket right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as is tobacco, as is you know, there are plenty
Speaker 1: of you know, plenty of other substances. I wouldn't put
Speaker 1: a caffe and quite in the tobacco category, but it's
Speaker 1: not in one of the good categories. I mean, as
Speaker 1: one expands the category of the plant, it can come
Speaker 1: to include not everything, but a large percentage of everything.
Speaker 1: I was interested to hear you say that sometimes the
Speaker 1: mystical tone of some of the plant work, the plant
Speaker 1: based work, strains creduli because you're interested in mysticism right
Speaker 1: in your work, there's a kind of you're on the edge.
Speaker 1: You're skirting the edge between giving us a rationalistic, scientific
Speaker 1: and social scientific contextualization, and you're at just at the edge,
Speaker 1: especially in your interest in consciousness. Here of a field
Speaker 1: of endeavor that is fundamentally mystical and that needs presumably
Speaker 1: to be processed mystically to make any sense out of
Speaker 1: it at all. Right, I mean to say meaning making
Speaker 1: is a rationalizing process. No, I mean, one way to
Speaker 1: make meaning is by making something rational. But another way
Speaker 1: to make meaning is to embrace its mystical quality. And
Speaker 1: it seems to me, with respect to psychedelics, that if
Speaker 1: we tried to reduce everything to its rational it seems
Speaker 1: like we would be missing the point. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: flirt with mysticism, but I am very grounded in the
Speaker 1: scientific worldview. I get grief for this from certain people.
Speaker 1: In How to Change Your Mind, there were many people
Speaker 1: who objected to the fact that I didn't take seriously
Speaker 1: enough this idea I presented that consciousness is a field
Speaker 1: outside us, like the electromagnetic field that we tune into.
Speaker 1: That our brains are tuners or television sets. And I
Speaker 1: think that's a beautiful idea. But my mind goes to
Speaker 1: a more materialistic understanding that even though we don't understand how,
Speaker 1: consciousness is the product of our brains, and it's tempting
Speaker 1: to think otherwise. And I'm more open to that idea
Speaker 1: than I was before experience with psychedelics, but I haven't
Speaker 1: yet been persuaded, and I'm curious to learn more about it.
Speaker 1: But psychedelic experience for many people causes them to lose
Speaker 1: faith in the materialist view of consciousness. And it's important
Speaker 1: to mention that that material's view of consciouness is not
Speaker 1: well developed at all. Right, Okay, it's an easy thing
Speaker 1: to lose faith in my view. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: propositions of science that are well established, and if someone
Speaker 1: were to say, you know, I no longer believe in
Speaker 1: Newtonian mechanics, I would say something's not totally right there.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, when it comes to consciousness, there
Speaker 1: isn't really a respectable materialist account of consciousness at all.
Speaker 1: There is simply the commitment to the view that materialism
Speaker 1: must be true in light of what we observe, and
Speaker 1: therefore the consciousness must be reducible to the material which is,
Speaker 1: you know, that's a plausible inference, but it's a form
Speaker 1: of inductive reasoning. It's not deductive or demonstrated reasoning. That's right,
Speaker 1: And I think the Dalai Lama was quite correct when
Speaker 1: he said at the first Mind and Life conference where
Speaker 1: they brought together neuroscientists and Buddhists, that the material theory
Speaker 1: of consciousness is a very interesting hypothesis and we should
Speaker 1: give it no more credit than that. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm open, but it must be my training and background.
Speaker 1: But even when I'm writing about plant intelligence, I'm always
Speaker 1: hanging out with people going a lot further than I'm
Speaker 1: willing to go in terms of saying plants are conscious.
Speaker 1: I have some sense that they have a point of view,
Speaker 1: but I don't think they're conscious the way we are.
Speaker 1: I don't think they're aware that they're aware. I think
Speaker 1: they have an awareness of their environment. I think they
Speaker 1: mostly run algorithms that are set in advance, although there
Speaker 1: is some interesting research that suggests they can learn There
Speaker 1: were some studies done recently that suggests that they can
Speaker 1: learn from experience, remember and apply those lessons to future events,
Speaker 1: which is pretty mind blowing. So, you know it, maybe
Speaker 1: too many years writing for the New York Times and
Speaker 1: the New Yorker and being fact checked that can limit
Speaker 1: your willingness to imagine radical alternatives. Let me ask you
Speaker 1: about that, because you talked just now about your grounding
Speaker 1: and the scientific and then you talked about the institutional
Speaker 1: framework in which a lot of your journalism was embedded.
Speaker 1: You're also writing books pretty much the whole time, but
Speaker 1: the New Yorker and the New York Times embody a
Speaker 1: certain kind of cultural power that's connected to a kind
Speaker 1: of scientific, liberal, rationalist worldview, broadly speaking, still an enlightenment
Speaker 1: you and I guess I wanted to ask you about
Speaker 1: how you conceptualize your role as an idea maker and
Speaker 1: idea disseminator in the world with respect to those different
Speaker 1: kinds of audiences, the kind of Times New York or
Speaker 1: audience versus the bigger world audience. Because you're one of
Speaker 1: the very small number of people who come out of
Speaker 1: journalism who transcend a journalism at a fundamental level. You've
Speaker 1: become a central figure in the culture, and your ideas
Speaker 1: matter to a lot of people in a wide range
Speaker 1: of spaces, and you have moments in your work where
Speaker 1: you sound like a rationalist prophet, still a bit of
Speaker 1: a prophet, though this happens sometimes the climate change writers too.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think Bill mcibbon might be another example
Speaker 1: of somebody who you know, who transcended in some sense
Speaker 1: the rationalist account of what's happening in the climate and
Speaker 1: was both a prophet in the wilderness and now a
Speaker 1: prophet that many people are are listening to. When you
Speaker 1: think of the sort of trajectory of your messages out
Speaker 1: there to the world, how do you think of yourself? Well,
Speaker 1: there's an evolution here. I mean, I used the platform
Speaker 1: of the New York Times and the New Yorker to
Speaker 1: give substance to ideas that were pretty edgy at the time.
Speaker 1: You know, before I wrote How to Change Your Mind,
Speaker 1: I wrote a piece for The New Yorker in twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen called the Trip Treatment, and this presented early research
Speaker 1: on psychedelics being used to treat, not treat, but help
Speaker 1: people who were dying of cancer or you know, had
Speaker 1: a terminal diagnosis, and this research wasn't pure reviewed yet,
Speaker 1: and much to my amazement, David Remnick gave me, you know,
Speaker 1: ten thousand or so words to talk about this, and
Speaker 1: it gave credibility to ideas that had I published them
Speaker 1: first independently, might not have might have struggled for that.
Speaker 1: So having access to those platforms has been critical to
Speaker 1: my career. You know, I was a magazine editor for
Speaker 1: many years, and I have some sense of how the
Speaker 1: media ecosystem works and where the edge of acceptable opinion is,
Speaker 1: having run up against it a couple of times. But
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm free of that now to a
Speaker 1: large extent, and that's kind of liberating. But there's you know,
Speaker 1: you mentioned mckibbon, and there's also an interesting transition or
Speaker 1: evolution that happens from being a journalist to being an advocate,
Speaker 1: and that's an awkward line to follow, and that happened
Speaker 1: with me with my food journalism. I was writing, you know,
Speaker 1: very opinionated pieces about the food system and how fucked
Speaker 1: up it was for the New York Times magazine and
Speaker 1: there was oddly no pushback for a long time, and
Speaker 1: from my editors or from the culture until the industry
Speaker 1: kind of woke up in two thousand and eight and
Speaker 1: realized there's this critique getting currency. We better fight back,
Speaker 1: and they have been fighting back ever since with some success.
Speaker 1: And you're writing also shifted there. I mean you started saying,
Speaker 1: look at the structures and how bad they are, and
Speaker 1: then you went full normative by saying this is what
Speaker 1: you should eat. You know, listen up, world, here's what
Speaker 1: you ought to eat. I mean, it doesn't get more
Speaker 1: vatic and peremptory and voice from one high than that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: although I have to say I sort of felt pushed
Speaker 1: into that position because my first book about food, Omnivorous Dilemma,
Speaker 1: was an attempt to show people the system and let
Speaker 1: them draw their own conclusions based on the system of
Speaker 1: what you should eat and dilemma right right exactly, And
Speaker 1: I was not as vatics as you put it in
Speaker 1: that book at all. But all I heard from people,
Speaker 1: I mean thousands of people, is like, okay, okay, environmental problems,
Speaker 1: animal rights, all this kind of stuff, but what should
Speaker 1: I eat? And nobody would leave me alone until I said, well,
Speaker 1: this is this is how I think we should eat, right,
Speaker 1: so they demanded it of you, that your flock demanded
Speaker 1: it of you, that we hear that story a lot
Speaker 1: from religious leader show. I know it's an old story,
Speaker 1: but I felt awkward doing it. Initially I felt awkward
Speaker 1: becoming an advocate because I had been brought up in
Speaker 1: a different, more innocent time in journalistic history, where you
Speaker 1: didn't do that. But on the other hand, I was
Speaker 1: digging so deeply into the food system that it was inevitable.
Speaker 1: I was drawing conclusions. And this is something that still
Speaker 1: if you're a beat reporter on certain beats, you have
Speaker 1: to pretend you don't have conclusions, even though you're now
Speaker 1: an expert. And so I had moved from this point
Speaker 1: of following my curiosity posing questions to the food system
Speaker 1: to having a pretty good idea what was wrong with
Speaker 1: it and the direction of which it needed to go.
Speaker 1: And gradually you get drawn into that advocacy conversation, which
Speaker 1: is great in one way, and I have done my
Speaker 1: share of lobbying before Congress and things like that on
Speaker 1: various food policy, but it's also awkward, and it sometimes
Speaker 1: can shut you out of the news pages and relegate
Speaker 1: you to the op ed pages, where I don't want
Speaker 1: to be so for the interest of journalism and wanting
Speaker 1: to do narrative journalism, it's sometimes best not to have
Speaker 1: reached that point of advocacy. The same thing happened with psychedelics.
Speaker 1: I mean, my book is the story of an amateur
Speaker 1: really learning about this new world. And I remember my
Speaker 1: first book event at Harvard, at the Harvard Bookstore someone
Speaker 1: saying as well as a leader of the psychedelic movement.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh shit, here we go again. So
Speaker 1: I don't have very mixed feelings about the roles. It's
Speaker 1: how I do my political work on these two topics,
Speaker 1: and that's my biggest contribution politically is advocating for things
Speaker 1: I see as being helpful or necessary. But it's not
Speaker 1: where I started out. I really started out as a
Speaker 1: storytelling and it's odd that both these things turned into movements.
Speaker 1: They didn't have to. I want to thank you for
Speaker 1: your fascinating body of work, and I'm also looking forward
Speaker 1: to finding out what's the next area where you'll start
Speaker 1: at the boundary doing reporting and then gradually shifted into advocacy.
Speaker 1: And I think I will not be the only person
Speaker 1: watching closely, but I realize it we'll have to involve
Speaker 1: the word plants. I'll see what I can do. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much. Thank you know, a great pleasure talking
Speaker 1: to you. We'll be right back. Listening to Michael Pollen,
Speaker 1: I was genuinely fascinated by the story he is telling
Speaker 1: about the human encounter with plants and plants substances, and
Speaker 1: with the human impulse to change our consciousness. This is
Speaker 1: in some way a story about human power, the human
Speaker 1: power through trial and error to discover what plants can
Speaker 1: do for us and what's bad about the things that
Speaker 1: they do for us. But it's also a story about
Speaker 1: the human impulse to regulate. And indeed, Michael took the
Speaker 1: stance that human beings inherently seek to regulate the uses
Speaker 1: of plants to shape consciousness, and that they've been doing
Speaker 1: that for as long as they knew how to do so. Simultaneously,
Speaker 1: I was personally interested in how Michael balances a scientific materialist,
Speaker 1: call it enlightenment worldview. Perhaps it makes sense that for
Speaker 1: someone who thinks about the relationship between nature and culture
Speaker 1: and the human power to shape that the question of
Speaker 1: getting beyond the simple conception of power through the notion
Speaker 1: of the mystical would be in the margins and pushing
Speaker 1: itself back towards the center. Last, and definitely not least,
Speaker 1: I was deeply struck by the way that Michael talked
Speaker 1: about his experience in journalism and using that to shape
Speaker 1: the way we think about ideas by recognizing that there's
Speaker 1: some outer bound of public opinion, and that if you
Speaker 1: push too hard again that outer bound, you lose your audience.
Speaker 1: I can think of almost nobody who's done a better
Speaker 1: job of expanding that outer bound, and it's intriguing to
Speaker 1: hear that from Michael's perspective. He did so very much,
Speaker 1: beginning within the system and gradually moving from the news pages,
Speaker 1: as it were, to the place of advocacy. Those are
Speaker 1: takeaways that are extremely valuable to anybody who's interested not
Speaker 1: just an understanding power, but in altering the way power
Speaker 1: is deployed and what we think is an acceptable point
Speaker 1: of view to hold on a given topic. Until the
Speaker 1: next time I speak to you, Breathe deep, think, deep thoughts,
Speaker 1: and if they'll let you have a little fun. Deep
Speaker 1: background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer
Speaker 1: is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our
Speaker 1: showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband.
Speaker 1: Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin, Thanks to Mia Lobell,
Speaker 1: Julia Barton Idea, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column
Speaker 1: for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot
Speaker 1: com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original Slater podcasts, go
Speaker 1: to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, and if you liked
Speaker 1: what you heard today, please write a review or tell
Speaker 1: a friend. This is deep background