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

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