This episode is brought to you by eight sleep. My God, am I in love with eight sleep? Good. Sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer more than 30 percent of Americans struggle with sleep. And I'm a member of that, sad group temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep. And heat has always been my Nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating Ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever, why? Because I'm using a simple device.
Called the Pod Pro cover by eight sleep. It's the easiest. And fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature, it pairs Dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced but most user friendly Solution on the market. I pulled, all of you guys on social media, about the best tools for Sleep, enhancing sleep. And eat sleep, was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this, so I used it and here we are.
Add the Pod Pro cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the Heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side which is exactly what we're doing now for me. And for many people, the result eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32 percent faster, reduce sleep interruptions.
By up to 40% and get more restful sleep. Overall, I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day. Feeling refreshed. And now my dear listeners. That's you guys, you can get 250 dollars off of the Pod Pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eight, sleep.com Tim or use code Tim that's a tall. Spelled out. TIG HT, sleep.com Tim, or use.
Code. Tim TI M8. Sleep.com, Tim for $200 off your pod, Pro cover.
This episode is brought to you by headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations, in an easy to use app. Now, you might ask yourself very reasonably. There are 2,000 plus apps for meditation. Why would I use headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research. Headspace is backed by 25, published studies on its benefits. Six hundred thousand, five star reviews, and more than 60 million downloads,
So, if people keep telling you to try meditation in your like, when would I do that? When would I possibly have time? You should check out headspace? If you have 10 minutes, headspace can change your life. Head. Space offers a really light lifts and a lot of features to keep you going, which is part of the reason that I've used headspace for years now. So whatever, the situation, headspace can really help. You feel better. Overwhelmed. Headspace. As a 3-minute, SOS meditation for you, need some help falling asleep. Hit space. Has wind down sessions, their members, swear.
By and for parents headspace even as morning meditations, you can do with your kids headspace is approach to mindfulness. Can reduce stress, improve, sleep, boost, focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. And it really starts with very, very simple practices. And if you look at my case, for instance, I just went through one of the basics today with the co-founder Andy I think it's put a comb could be pretty calm. I'm not sure but former monk turned into
Of head, space has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable. And I did a three minute, meditation, something like that. It's easy. Its fundamental and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics, even though I've meditated for years. I'm going through the basics once again, and I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting their head space, makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule. Anytime anywhere, we all want to feel happier, we all
More peace and headspace is meditation Made Simple. Go to headspace.com. Tim, that's head space.com, slash Tim for a free one-month trial. With access to head space is full library of meditations for every conceivable possible situation. You can break glass in case of emergency, and almost any situation and find something on headspace. This is the best deal offered right now for headspace. So check it out. Go to head space.com slash Tim today
At this altitude. I can run flat out for a half mile. Before my hands start shaking the millions you've got some questions now. It's a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show and my guest today is one of my favorite guests, Michael Pollan, you know, him on Twitter at Michael Pollan, Pol Lan. He is the author of eight books including how to change your mind, which has changed many Minds indeed, cooked food roles in defense of food, the Omnivore's Dilemma and the Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times Best Sellers a longtime contributor to the New York Times magazine pollen teaches writing at Harvard,
And the University of California Berkeley in 2010 Time magazine named him. One of the 100 most influential people in the world is newest book is this is your mind on plants. You can find him at Michael Pollan.com on Twitter and Instagram at Michael, Pollan at Michael dot pollen, respectively, Michael, welcome back to the
show. Thank you. Tim good to be
back. I thought we would begin in the beginning, go back to the archives and I came across something. Titled my
Two gardens. And I'd like to ask you about your first Garden or Childhood Garden since that will be I think a great launching point for many, many topics in our
conversation. Yeah. Well gardening is really the germ of all my work. It's funny that the piece you're alluding to appeared in Forbes but it was an adaptation from my first book, a second nature, a gardeners education and this came out in 92.
And it was really the story of my learning how to garden, which was also the story of my learning how to think, about nature, and my engagement with the natural world. I Garden as a little kid, I had a garden when I was eight years old, I called it a farm and it was right along the this site, the edge of my parents Suburbans, tract house, on Long Island, and anytime I could, and I had a kid across the street who would do the heavy labor for me? He was, you know,
Always happy to do, what I told him to do. And I would do the planting. And if I could grow two or three strawberries, I'd put him in a Dixie cup and sell them to my mother. So as a business to, but my love of gardening came from my grandfather. My maternal grandfather, who was a Russian immigrant? Who had come here to escape conscription, basically, in tsarist Russia and came in 1917. He started out selling potatoes from a horse-drawn cart on Long.
In the end, gradually got into the produce business and became a wholesaler and then started buying Farms. The Farms of the farmers, he knew who wanted to get out of the business, on Long Island, turn those into shopping centers. It was a classic story but he never lost his love of produce. You know, he grew in his garden, it was huge. I mean, there were just two of them and they grew enough to have a Farm Stand and I loved working in his garden and I loved harvesting more than anything. And I didn't have much in common with him except this
In fact, we didn't get along that well, through the teenage years. He thought I was too much of a hippie and my hair was too long and he really was, you know, kind of a right-wing guy. But in the garden, we really connected and that experience of growing something, and then actually, creating something of value that you could eat or sell in my case, to my mother was was just so gratifying and there began my love of plants. And so this first book was an attempt to look at what? What
I was learning in the garden and I was making a lot of mistakes. I got into a war with a woodchuck, and I was the first essay. I wrote about this woodchuck, I planted my seedlings. One spring, we had bought, we bought a house in Cornwall Connecticut when I was 30, I guess and I started gardening on the weekends there and every time I planted this woodchuck would emerge from his burrow and wipe out everything I planted. So I went to war I mean I you know, I found his
His burrow. I did a lot of research. I understood that I found that they're actually, even though they look like slobs. If you've ever seen a woodchuck or groundhog same thing, they're fat and they can barely see and they kind of tool around with their belly, you know, scraping the ground. But they're, they're, they're clean. They're obsessed about cleanliness. And so, I poured molasses and creosote down their whole and because I found the hole and I thinking that they would be disgusted and move away.
They just dug a new hole right next to it. And I escalated this war, it'd
be like Caddyshack. It
was a lot like Caddyshack when that movie came out, identified completely with Bill Murray. But I got into this escalating series of steps. I got angrier and angrier. That, you know, here, I was the more evolved creature with the bigger brain being thwarted by this idiotic, you know, rodent, I don't know if they're rodents, but I thought it was a road. So it was my Horticultural Vietnam.
Ali and I kept getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. At one point, I was driving along the road nearby and I found a flattened woodchuck on the side of the street and I had an idea and I got a piece of cardboard and I scooped the the roadkill onto the cardboard, brought it home, shoved it into the whole thinking. This would send a message, you know, is kind of like Don, Corleone, you know, with the horse's head in The Godfather didn't work, I was finally reduced to pouring, you know.
Half a gallon of gasoline down the burrow and lighting a match and throwing that in there. And I poured the gasoline down. I know people think of me as an environmentalist writer and and I just gave some time for the gasoline to go through all the different rooms. And I had an image in my head because they have all these different rooms. They have a latrine, they have a food room, they have these elaborate Burroughs, then I threw a match and I never took physics in college. I was in.
English major and I didn't realize that fire would not go away from
oxygen as I wanted it to go.
So the Flames shot the other way. And there was this Fountain of flames that comes out of this hole in my garden and I was, you know, almost incinerated myself thrown back and shocked into a recognition. That this is not the way to deal with the natural world. And what I was doing was very much
In sync with what our species does when we feel supported by nature which is we feel, we have the right and where the smarter creature. And I realized at that moment and I wrote an essay about this originally appeared in the New York Times magazine that what's happening in the garden is a microcosm of our engagement with the natural world for better and worse. And in this case, worse and that I could use the garden and gardening is a place to explore our relationship to Nature.
Nature in general, American nature writers. Go to the Wilderness, right? They go to the, they go to the desert, they go to the forest, they go to places where you just stand back and look, but in the garden like the farm, we have no choice. But to engage we have to act if we're going to get what we want. So how do we act? What are the ethics? What's the morality? And that began this path of, you know, examining our relationship to other species in the garden, including plants.
I am going to come back to gardening quite selfishly.
To ask you for some advice because I am planning on over the next year doing my first gardening. Now we probably don't have the scope to explore that fully in this conversation. But just to plant that seed pun intended, I'm going to show you now have some land. I do you have some land do? Yes. And excellent. We're going to return to the concept of garden as microcosm very shortly. But before we do,
You could write on anything that you choose and this is your mind on Plants. How did you arrive at this particular book?
Because you have carte blanche, you could do whatever you want.
I mean, it's my first love, you know, writing about plants and my interest in psychoactives and my interest in Plants kind of come together in this book, in botany of Desire had there was a chapter which is a book that looks at are the symbiotic relationship of people in Plants how they change us and we change them and I have always been fascinated by this one, weird particular use to, which we put Plants and this is true for
Most cultures, probably 95% of cultures around the world have some plant or fungus. They use to change Consciousness to achieve Transcendent experience. That's a very peculiar thing because if you think about it, why would that be adaptive? It could be the opposite. You know, when we take drugs, when we change Consciousness, we're more vulnerable to accident to predation. We lose our, a lot of our defenses. So there's a danger in
In
Consciousness in a radical way. Anyway, yet we do it and people have always done it. The only culture that's been documented that doesn't have a plan to change. Consciousness are the Inuit in Greenland, because nothing good grows, where they live. That's the only reason that uman desire has been fascinating me since I first grew cannabis when I was, you know, quite young. So I wanted to do a deep dive into it and I wanted to look at three plants that produce important psychoactives and upper a downer and an hour.
Or as I call it so I chose caffeine which is we don't even think of that as a drug as a psychoactive as an addictive substance but of course it is. And I have it right here. I'm consuming it as we speak.
If two of us, I'm holding up a mug of coffee
and then the other two I chose were opium which has a particular relevance now because of the opiate crisis. But that is actually a piece that I wrote many many years ago at the height of the drug war and that piece is kind.
Of a parable of the absurdity of the drug war that we can talk about in more detail. And then the third one, I wanted to do a psychedelic and a psychedelic. I hadn't written about and that nobody's written much about since Aldous Huxley and that is mescaline. And my interest in that one, grew out of all the reporting I did in the Psychedelic community and asking people, what's your favorite psychedelic? And to my surprise, the answer I heard more than any other was
s: and nobody seems to have it. Nobody seems to use it anymore and yet it was everybody's favorite. It was the master material. Somebody told me and I remember, I don't think I should use his name, but somebody we both know who's younger than I am saying. Why have you been hiding this from us? For all these
years, the hippies were hiding the best drug, keeping it all for themselves?
Yeah. So anyway, so I chose those three as representing different dimensions of our relationship to Psycho.
To plants and to remind people that this is part of our engagement with the natural world as much as eating is, is as the much as, you know, clothing ourselves and fibers. The produced by Nature, we use plants to alter our minds and how incredible is it that plants have evolved. The precise molecular key to unlock your Consciousness, that's really weird. That's I think it's one of the great mysteries of nature. So,
Anyway, I thought it'd be fun to write about this book is more of a romp than the last one, you know. There's I mean, yes there's science in history but it's these are really personal stories of my engagement with these plants and what these plants have to teach us. So I wanted to do something that was very close to my heart and that would be enjoyable and take me back to the Garden.
Where there any other plants or molecules that came close as candidates but ultimately didn't make the cut. Did you consider others?
Yeah.
I did well for psychedelics, you know, I thought about writing about 5, m, EO DMT, I thought about it course, is not a plan. It's a toad. I could have done Salvia divinorum, you know, there were a whole lot but I wanted something that had a really rich history that has changed the course of history and mescaline has and not just for our culture, but for Native American culture, we can talk more about that. So actually, it wasn't like when I was writing Botany of desire which is a portrait of for plants that.
I had like 10, I could have done and I had to settle on corn and apples and tulips and cannabis, there was something that Loom large about these three to me, caffeine because that is really the drug. I have the deepest involvement with and it was actually rolling Griffith who we both know who the Psychedelic researcher at Hopkins. Who, you know, before he started working on psilocybin, he was the world's leading researcher on caffeine, and I remember the first time I interviewed him, I saw these books about coffee and is in his study and
I was very curious about his interest. He gave me the idea for the experiment at the heart of that piece which is he said, you can never understand your relationship to a drug to a psychoactive substance unless you get off it and stand back and look at it because if you're an addict, he doesn't use the word addict. But if you're dependent, you will never see it accurately. And so that was the challenge to me, which is at the heart of that piece is like, could I abstain from coffee for three months, without going crazy and losing
My my livelihood as
for writer, which I nearly did, we're going to dig into all of those. It strikes me that those three. As you noted, the three options that you chose allow you to do. In a sense, what you do best, which is take these layers of the scientific philosophical, the political journalistic, the storable and layer them properly, right? So it's not all
candidates are created equal in that sense, know. And they don't
All have the, they don't all have quite enough layers. Right, I think that's exactly right. And that is key to my method, which is not to privilege anyone way of analyzing something. I don't think the scientists have all the answers. I don't think the poets have all the answers, but if you multiply lenses, you suddenly get the full picture. And that's what I love doing is a writer. See, you have
many types of stories in this book, you have the fascinating, the hilarious, you also.
Have as you know, from my my well caffeinated text to you at one point storage that I consider quite terrifying and I wanted to read, this is from page 16 and 17. I'm just going to read a snippet and then I want to talk about Jim hog. Sure, or hog. Shire. And I want you to tell that story. So, this is on page 16 in April 2016 article in Harper's magazine, Legalize It All Dan bomb recounted an interview.
Conducted with John is at early shman or ehrlichman and garlic for alaikum, alaikum. In 1994, ehrlichman is you will recall was President Nixon's domestic policy. Adviser he served time in federal prison for his role. In Watergate bound came to talk to ehrlichman about the drug war of which he was a key architect and this is this is one paragraph and then we're going to hop back to you. This is a quote from ehrlichman quote. You want to know what? This was really all about ehrlichman then explained that the Nixon White House, quote had two enemies, the anti-war
Or left and black people, this is a direct quote. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks, the heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest, their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs of course we did. And quote, that is an insane. Just the fact that those are spoken words, quoted is incredible to me.
It's all you need to know about the drug war. There it is in a colonel, the real reason for it, the fact that had nothing to do with public health, did he mention Public Health? Did he mention people's suffering with addiction? No, or overdosing know, it was simply political and we've known long before Nixon that the drugs that get criminalized, you're the ones that are used by Troublesome populations. I mean, the reason they went after cannabis was because of Mexicans and blacks who were using it and the drug war has always been about politics and there,
Air is about as blunt, a revelation of that fact, as you can imagine. Yeah, I remember reading that and that quote got quite a bit of publicity when it came out. Unfortunately, bound died. And I wanted to interview him about that interview and he died last spring or less fall and I wasn't able to but it's, I think there are two things where the, whatever you think of the drug war, it collapses, when you look at them one, is that looking at Nixon really starts at 1970. There his motives he needs to
Analyze these two Troublesome populations. The other is the fact that while we were fighting this drug war which reaches really its peak in the Clinton Administration, you know, whatever you think about Clinton his crime, Bill led to mandatory minimum sentences and led to mass incarceration. And the drug war is being fought with particular vigour during the 90s and it was all part of Clinton's triangulating to the right. And this is part of the story. I tell in the in the Opium chapter is that
while the DEA and other authorities were going after Small Time drug dealers and individuals, even trying to grow a little opium for themselves. Purdue Pharma was introducing in 1996, Oxycontin, and leading to eventually the opiate crisis because they marketed opiates. So aggressively and convince, the medical establishment that pain was being under medicated. And that this was a safer non-addictive opiate.
When they knew precisely the opposite, this is come out and court cases. So the biggest Public Health crisis During the period of the drug war involved, legal drugs, not illegal drugs. So, you know, the government was looking at the wrong problem and the FDA had approved Oxycontin. And yes, many people who began with legal opiates like most heroin users eventually transition because they can't
Get access to Legal opiates and then they transition to street drugs and then bump into things like Fentanyl and the likelihood or possibility of Overdose. But I think nothing points up the absurdity, the drug war, then the two things that were happening in the year 1996 that I wrote about one of which you haven't heard about, which is Jim Hawk. Sure. And the other is, you know, the opioid crisis. So this is a very
personal. I mean, the the opiate or I mean it really isn't, I guess, opiate opioid.
Discussion is very personal one for me because my best friend from growing up on Long Island, died of a fentanyl overdose. So I have first-hand experience with how easily these and this is obviously simplified but super strength, opioids can do damage. I know another person who had an accidental overdose of fentanyl so this sort of the extent and growth of this problem is pretty staggering.
Ring. I mean, at some point in the book, you compare the stats kind of then, and now, and it's really unbelievable. And I think to jump into the microcosm to explore the macrocosm Jim Hawk. Sure. Could you please tell me? Yeah, and tell the listeners about Jim, and how he came onto your radar.
Yeah. So this story about growing, my own opium began with an editor friend. Sending me an underground press book called opium for the masses. I was writing columns about my garden, the pieces that became second nature and my editor, a fellow austenite named Paul. Tough said, hey, this book is like up your alley and he sends me opium for the masses and I read it and it was like this is so cool. I can grow my own opium, you know.
And like most gardeners, I just want to see if I can do it, you know. I wasn't interested in consuming
opium. Now it just just for clarity because opium is going to sound scary to a lot of people. But when you say grow opium, what do you mean?
Okay, it does sound scary. I guess, it means. Growing poppies papaver somniferum. Which is an annual poppy. You can buy the seeds at a garden center. You can order them online. You can scrape them off a poppy seed. Bagel.
Those are poppy seeds and they grow this plant. This beautiful plant, with, with paper thin petals, and this beautiful, seed pod after the petals fall off, and this gorgeous lettuce like leaves when the petals drop and that seed pod forms. And it looks like a piece of sculpture. If you slit that green skin of that seed, pod with your fingernail or with a blade and wait, 60 seconds. You will see this way.
Latex e, looking sap emerge. Leak out of it, bleed from it, that is opium pure and simple and it dries Brown and you can roll it off and you have opium. Now you need a few thousand of those pods to get a usable amount of opium if you do it that way. And it takes a lot of work and that's one of the reasons. It's grown in places with very cheap child labor who can go through Fields slitting every pot but it grows just
as well in your garden. Anyway, he was explaining all this which I didn't know and he was saying a better much better way to use it is to make a tea from the poppy seed, heads and just let them dry. Put him in a coffee mill or grinder. Somehow and soak them in hot water and you'll have this tea. And in fact, this tea is drunk in the Arab world during funerals and as a mild pain killer, you know, it's not a big experience but it's a very mild narcotic for
taking the sadness. All
right.
For taking the sad, lifting the sadness. Yeah. So I thought well, you know this I get a column out of this. This could be kind of fun. So I order some seeds and I start communicating with hawk. Sure. I got ahold of his email and asking some questions and did he have any seeds? He could spare, and we're going back and forth. And then suddenly I get a call from my friend Paul, who I don't know how he had this information, that Jim has been arrested and charged with Manufacturing.
Ensuring narcotics, the only evidence, the police have this happens in Seattle, they bust into his apartment, they bring a SWAT team, you know, 20 guys with guns and you know ninja suits and this guy is sitting there with his wife and they bust in and throw them up against the wall. What do they get him with? He's got a bunch of dried poppies, from the florist shop, okay? You've seen these flower heads in every floral shop because they
Beautiful and Arrangement and his book, his book, proves his intent to take those poppy seeds and make a narcotic
with this is where things get super crazy. I've yeah, please continue to expand on
this. So it turns out that it's perfectly legal to grow opium poppies possess the seeds and grow the poppies. Unless you have knowledge that you are growing. A scheduled substance in which
case the same act miraculously gets turned into a federal crime of manufacturing narcotics, that carries a 5 to 20 year sentence. So
all your listen, I've adjusted, they know millions of people, no plausible deniability,
they've lost it. Because if they, you know, there's any record that they heard this podcast and they're growing opium poppies. They are at some risk. The risk was a lot greater in the 90s at the height of the drug. Or I might say. So, so suddenly, when I
Your he's been arrested and he is in jail and his wife is in jail. I'm like, oh shit. I've got this paper trail or this digital Trail between him and me because we are exchanging email and they I'm sure seized his computer now. What do I do? Do I rip these things out and thus began the summer of like Fear and Loathing as I as he's going through, the court process and I'm trying to determine how risky my little croissant.
APA poppies are and so I start reporting and I start calling DEA agents and the locals police and I say you know, and asking them questions about. So I want to grow some papaver somniferum it is it, okay? And you know they would say Well yeah if it's just for scenery looks as one, put it to me and I said well what if I slip the poppy heads and he said, oh then we'll bust down your door and I did learn that there was this quiet Crackdown going on all across.
God, led by the DEA who probably alerted by Jim's book. Wanted to make sure this didn't become a fad, because the myth had been spread that you couldn't grow opium poppies in America that it had to be turkey or Afghanistan. And that was simply wasn't true. It was a cash crop for many people in the South for many years. And it turns out there was this Crackdown going on. That the DEA agents were visiting florist shops to tell them to stop carrying dried poppy heads. They were calling
Lling, seed
companies telling them to
remove them even though they were perfectly legal, you know, it was a tense summer for me in the end. I wrote an article about my experience and about Jim Hawk. Sure, I submitted it to Harper's magazine, who had commissioned? It was a long piece. I'd worked on it for a year. It was like fifteen thousand words. And I said, to my editor, look, we have to get this piece lawyered because, you know, I'm confessing to a federal crime here because I did describe not just growing the opium.
Bees. But making poppy tea and something called laudanum, which is how opium was used in the 19th century. Basically, you dissolve the poppy heads in alcohol. So all you do is crush them and put them in vodka and that makes a much stronger. I learned from a USDA ethnobotanist that. Yeah, if you really want to get a strong opium hit dissolve it in alcohol, not, you know, not water, but Jim didn't include that because he's a Muslim and he doesn't drink. So the lawyers
So they send it to a very prominent criminal defense lawyer in the state of
Connecticut. Who is they at the
time? Harper's magazine publisher. I say please, we have to get this piece lawyer before we publish it. And he said, I've got a friend who's, you know, a criminal defense lawyer and Bridgeport, where there's a lot of crime to be defended. And this guy reads, the piece drives up to our house in Cornwall. My son, who's fourth time is often daycare and the lawyer and his young Associates, it has down and say, well, you
It published this piece. This is a confession on the basis of this piece and nothing more. They could arrest you on charges of manufacturing or cot X and possession of Narcotics. They could also take your house away under the asset forfeiture laws, which are still in effect. They've been diluted somewhat but they're still in effect. If a piece of property or a car is involved in the commission of a drug crime, the police May seize it and the standard of proof.
Is not Beyond a reasonable doubt. It's I forget what the one. There's one standard below that, but it's not a very high standard. So there are many cases where even though if you had a son or daughter who is growing marijuana in your backyard. Even if you didn't know about it, your backyard could be guilty of a drug crime and it could be forfeited and these lost and they're absolutely outrageous. And so they could take your house and basically wreck your life and my wife Anna.
Like turning white. I mean first of all that we have a criminal defense lawyer in our living room, you know, because of some gardening crime, I committed was amazing and so I thought, well, that's it. A Year's work down, the drain. I was a freelance writer. I was counting on that paycheck, when the publisher of Harper's, who is a man named Rick MacArthur. Very wealthy man, who kind of keeps the magazine of float. He's descended, from the MacArthur's of MacArthur Foundation, he's a champion of the first amendment when he here.
Hers that this lawyer has advised against publication, his immediate responses, we need a new
lawyer and
so he hires a very prominent First Amendment lawyer in New York named Viktor kovner who represented the nation and bunch of magazines. And this, you know, one of the big voices in that world and Victor reads the article and says, in effect, you must publish this article for the good of the Republic. This is what the First Amendment exists for. This is, this is critical commentary on the
War. And I'm like, really but what about what about the jailing and the loss of my house eventually he says, well you could make it less antagonistic to the government by removing two pieces two sections. One is your recipe where you describe how you make poppy tea and the other is your what we would call the trip report where you describe the effects? He said this is particularly antagonistic to the government given their interests. If you
Take those two sections out. I think your risk is not nil, but it's negligible. So I still wasn't ready to publish because I still heard that other lawyer in my ears. So, I asked Rick, if he would protect me, Rick MacArthur the publisher and he had Victor draw up a contract, the likes of which no writer has ever seen in. Which, he says, if you get arrested, we will not only defend you, we will pay your wife, a salary for the hole.
Amount of time, it takes for you to defend yourself and and if necessary serve your sentence and if they take your house will buy you a comparable new one. So, I was completely indemnified but still terrifying. And that's what we did. And we published it and it was a cover story and 97 called, opium made easy, and
Nothing happened, the piece comes out, I mean Victor calculated. They wouldn't want to go after a well-funded magazine and they would look really stupid doing it. And unlike Jim Hawks, are they left me alone? And that's because I had the protection of, you know, a reputable publication. So I've always wanted to publish the piece, The Way It Was Written and this is another wrinkle. It's hard to recreate the paranoia of 1996-97 around drugs. It was a very different moment.
They were busting. Lots of people. They were 1.1 million arrests in 96 for drug crimes and they were filling the prison's with people who had done things like I had done. So I got the offending pages off the property. I just said to have a brother-in-law, who's a, who's a lawyer? And I said, could you just take these to your office or in your safe or wherever, you know? I just don't want them around and I got them off my computer. I just kind of cleansed everything of these, you know, seven thousand
Words or five thousand words, I forget how much it was. I realized I now had an opportunity to publish it the way I wanted it. And so I went looking for the missing pages and my brother-in-law said, I think I gave him back to you a few years ago and I searched my house in Connecticut which we still own and hidden away in this closet. I found this lawyers brief container, you know with the rubber band around it and in there was a purple floppy Drive. I don't know if you remember, zip drives from the Les, how I do 90s and they were hard, they weren't
The floppy and on the outside, had a list of contents, and one was poppy draft. And I said, oh, I've got it, it's here, but I don't have anything to read of Zip drive, do you? I mean, those are like obsolete media, so I found a computer wizard in a neighboring town. He said, let me see what I've got in my basement and he found a zip drive and he was able to get the file off it, and sent it to me, but it's an early Microsoft Words file that current Microsoft
It can't read. So then I had to find a piece of software, and there is something called Libra office. Which will read any Microsoft file from any era as free software and there it was, and it popped up on my screen. One day, I was able to restore it so that was one reason to publish it to restore those pages. And I was happy to be able to do that and share the recipe and the trip report with people, but the other was learning later what was going on at the same moment? The same summer that the DEA was going around
Terrifying florists and nurseries Purdue Pharma was introducing Oxycontin. And the real opiate crisis was beginning, and the government was looking the wrong way, I just thought that that irony was so telling that it was time to take another look. So the peace now is republished in its entirety but also there's a shell, I built around it about what life was like, in that moment and what was going on with Purdue Pharma
in reading that chapter that
Action.
Coming back to Rick. I kind of fell in love with Rick MacArthur honestly and I know it's described a bit in the book, but why do you think he offered you all of those assurances? If you lose your house, will buy your house. You get put in jail will pay your wife, a salary. I mean, the extent to which he went was willing to go to get this published. Seems extraordinary was because he had complete confidence.
Instant, nothing would happen, was it? I know you said he was a staunch supporter of First Amendment but I can't imagine that he did this all the time. Maybe he did. No, he didn't. I mean,
he was, he's a crusading publisher like a crusading journalist and I shouldn't speak for him. But my guess is I, he was hoping something would happen. He was hoping I would get arrested. This would put Harper's on the map. This would be a, you know, a giant case, he would take it to the Supreme Court and he would, you know,
he has bottomless Pockets. I mean, and Publishing for him as kind of an avocation, he was always looking for the big story that Harper's would get involved with. And we saw that just last year with the Harper's letter around, Free Speech versus the efforts to curb, free speech in the name of various woke values. He's not afraid of controversy. I mean, you shouldn't think of them as publisher. He's not a bean counter. Although I should say he's incredibly cheap as a publisher with his employees, but who
This is like this, he's incredibly generous. So this is a guy, I was lucky to get a one percent raise every year because I was I worked there as an editor first and fighting in many ways, my writing career began, because I couldn't get a raise in Harper's. And one year I asked Lewis Lapham who was the editor instead of a raise this year, will you assign me an article? I wanted to get published in Harper's magazine and I've been an editor there for a couple years and he was delighted to do that instead of having to fight.
With Rick about money that assignment was my first Garden essay. So I have Rick's cheapness to thank for my writing career.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
This episode is brought to you by
wealthfront. Did, you know if you missed 10 of the best performing days after the 2008 crisis? You would have missed out on 50% five, zero percent of your returns. Don't miss out on the best days in the market. Stay invested in a long-term automated Investment Portfolio wealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as Robo advising and they currently oversee 20 billion dollars of assets for their clients.
Well, Frank can help you diversify your portfolio minimize fees and lower your taxes takes about three minutes to sign up. And then, wealthfront will build you, a globally. Diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite and manage it for you. At an incredibly low cost. Wealthfront software, constantly monitors your portfolio day in and day out, so you don't have to. They look for opportunities to rebalance and tax laws Harvest to lower the amount of taxes, you pay on your investment gains. Their newest service is called autopilot and it can monitor any checking account for excess cash.
- to move into savings or an investment account. They've really thought of a ton. They've checked a lot of boxes. Smart investing should not feel like a roller coaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to wealthfront.com Tim and open a wealthfront investment account today, and you'll get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. That's wealthfront.com Tim wealthfront. Will automate your Investments for the long term and you can get started today at wealthfront.com Tim.
The Opium chapter really opened my eyes to so many different facets of the so-called Drug War and the just, the arbitrary nature in some respects at although I guess I should take that back. It's not entirely arbitrary. But the reasons for which certain compounds are vilified or not always obvious at first glance because we have for instance, I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas. If you go to the Austin, why shouldn't I don't want people going to hunt this down but throughout Austin, you
Find something known as the Torah or Jimson. Weed grows easily in many, many places, it is an extremely potent on. Also dangerous, psychoactive plant that has been used by many different civilizations. It's everywhere and people die every year from trying to ingest it or ingesting it, I should say more accurately. So what were some of the points you hoped to underscore in?
The closing portions of this section because it's not toxicity. Clearly that is to
determine. If you go through it, you can find it. There's no rational reason. I mean, if you're, if you're worried about drugs is addictiveness, then cigarette should be illegal. Nicotine should be illegal and caffeine should be illegal. Yeah, highly addictive substances. That, you know, people fairly quickly become dependent on if your concern is about toxicity. Yes, you look at things like data.
If your concern is just Public Health in general, you look at alcohol, you know, alcohol and tobacco are much more dangerous than any of the drugs. We've criminalized. Now, we realize it was a Folly to. Criminalize alcohol, doesn't work as it hasn't worked with drugs. I mean in general, you know the War on Drugs is one by the drugs, they keep flourishing telling people, you can't have them does not stop, it just makes them more dangerous. I mean your friend who died of a fentanyl
Her dose, I don't know the details but that's probably a product of the drug war because there's no regulation of what's in Street heroin and also a lot of people died from fentanyl overdoses because often after they've broken their addiction if people go through withdrawal and then slip and they don't realize that their tolerance has changed dramatically. They're back to Baseline where the drug has a much bigger effect than it does after you're addicted. So, they're many people have fentanyl overdoses.
For that reason. But point is, it's about information and it's about regulation and an illegal drug Market is going to lead to lots of accidental deaths. I mean, this happened during prohibition, you know, people died from Bad, Hooch all the time. And in fact, the government would put methanol in various over-the-counter, I forget where they were putting up, they were using methanol to contaminate sources of alcohol, so people wouldn't drink them and they did drink them. And so,
The idea that a drug war contributes to Public Health and then you have dirty needles and the spread of AIDS. It doesn't contribute to Public Health, it has the opposite effect but there are lots of examples of why is this legal? Why isn't that? And in the end it comes back to. I mean I tell the story in the piece of the person that lived on my land before I bought it as a farmer named Joe matches and he was known they were old apple trees on the property. These wonderful cider apple trees and he made.
Hard cider during prohibition, and he was known for having the best. Applejack Applejack, is basically hard cider that you freeze to get the alcohol fraction and remove it. He made the best Applejack in town, but this was a crime and he was committing it on his property, not hurting anybody, but potentially himself. And in those years when he was making, Applejack, opium was legal, and it was in patent medicines All Over America. And, in fact,
We have evidence that the women's Christian Temperance, Union, and, and those women who were fighting alcohol, we're consuming opium because they would use these patent medicines and cannabis which was also in patent medicines. So it was a complete reversal of the current situation where alcohol is legal and opium and cannabis were illegal. So I wanted to just highlight, it's not totally arbitrary. Your right to catch yourself there in that. We tend to criminalize the drugs used by
I populations that, make the establishment, uncomfortable immigrants and and the poor and and African-Americans, but in terms of the schedule too. I mean, what's, you know, I mean, cannabis is still on schedule one. And so, our psychedelics, this means that the drug has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Neither is true. We've demonstrated the medical utility of psychedelics and to a lesser extent actually
Uh, the medical utility of cannabis and neither are addictive yet. There they are. So, this schedule is an artifact of politics, no Public Health authorities would agree with that schedule and opiates are two or three, scheduled, two or three, because they do have a legitimate medical use. And we should remember, even in the midst of the opiate crisis, what a blessing.
Opiates are morphine surgery would not be bearable without opiates and the passage from this life would be much more painful for people without morphine. So this is, you know, like a lot of drugs opiates are a blessing and a curse and we need to be able to hold both those ideas in our head, at the same time as the Greeks, did you know, they called drugs pharmacon and that meant literally, you know, it was they were both a blessing and a curse depending on how the how they were used a poison.
Ian and an ally. I definitely want to
continue with the discussion or so, the segue of sorts from opium to seems like our morning favorite for both of us right now, 137 Tri, methyl xanthine otherwise known as yeah, Kathy. And makes a little little little less biochemical sounding, but before we get there, I just have to say how much I admire, how to change your mind, your previous book.
Contributed to the National and international conversations about psychedelics. And so I know that you've probably heard that before, but I want to say it here because things do change and conversations change and just as populations have been targeted for persecution sympathetic. Populations can be targeted for treatment, right? So in the case of say, mdma-assisted Psychotherapy or psilocybin, you might
Have those suffering from complex PTSD, like veterans or victims of sexual abuse in the former or the latter is psilocybin. You might have end-of-life to of existential distress and cancer patients and so on and the conversation has dramatically changed in the last few years. And just yesterday, I think there was a news piece that came out covering. I want to give him credit, where credit is due, Francis Collins director of the National Institutes of Health,
That's the NIH expressed positive remarks about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics and this was in a public discussion for that to have happened. This week would have been to my mind. I don't want to say unimaginable but things are happening a lot faster than even, I would have expected. So it's it's so I think instructive to study the history to see how quickly things can change or how.
Quickly things can change because like you said the women's Christian Temperance. Union would relax with their womens tonics with laudanum opium after it to take the edge off after a hard day of fighting alcohol. So I just wanted to give you a pat on the back for really contributing to a deeper more nuanced conversation of psychedelics
specifically thank you. You know it has been remarkable what we've seen in the last three years and you know I'm sure the book played a role but also the
Search, you know, the research is panning out when I wrote that book, A lot of it had been published yet. I knew from talking to the researchers what was coming and the Publications have done a lot to move the conversation along because we have some very good evidence that these work for the various indications you're talking about and we'll have evidence of other indications. It's valued other indications to but culture does change and it can change really quickly. I used to write a lot about food and agriculture.
ER and and that conversation, you know, changed. And you know, there are a lot of people who give me credit in both cases, which is very nice. But as journalists, you know, I think we are, we kind of have a, if we have any Talent, it's that we have a sense of where the culture is moving and that the culture might be ready to hear this. And I had a mentor in publishing many years ago, who said, that as journalists you know, the goal is to be a short-term visionary.
If you're a long-term Basin area,
you know, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and you will not sell any books or articles, but you want to just see around one corner, and I've always kept that in mind. But I have to say that with regard to psychedelics. It's happened, much faster than I imagined. I just see any opposition kind of melting away and that I didn't expect. I expected a lot of pushback, when how to change your mind came out from the, you know, psychiatric establishment and from mainstream
I'm media because there was so much baggage surrounding psychedelics in our culture going back to you know the 1960s but there wasn't and and that's that I think is really interesting. And the reason there wasn't I didn't understand this till later. I think we talked about this last time is that Mental Health Care is in crisis. The people who practice it the psychiatrist in the therapists and psychologists know that they don't have very good tools. They have no tools that
Cure anything at the best, they can alleviate symptoms but the drugs they have to alleviate symptoms are pretty lousy and people don't like taking them and they they're addictive in effect, you can't get off ssris for easily and people put on weight and they lose their sex drive and it's a, you know, the tools are lousy and so the prospect of acquiring new tools to deal with the growing Mental. Health crisis is attractive to just about everyone there.
Is at least curiosity and openness and in many other cases support. So I think it's a measure of desperation as much as anything and then the media to has been so friendly. I mean, there was a cover story in the times two weeks ago, three weeks ago, that how second dogs are going to revolutionize Psychiatry and that's probably what Francis Collins is responding to and then has to do and that piece was inspired by the phase 3, MDMA trial that map's brought out as well as Robin. Carhart Harris is depression, trial, psychedelic research used to end
Been in journals, you've never heard about. I mean that first study that that Hopkins, in NY, you did about existential distress was in the Journal of neuropharmacology or something or psychopharmacology, you know, pretty small Journal based in England. Now they're in, you know, New England Journal of Medicine Robbins, last depression study, and the map study was in what was it? Nature medicine. Our nature. Psychiatry, I
forget one of the one of the nature. Yeah, umbrella, journals.
So now
Now, this research is in the, the top-tier journals. And so the, the respectability. The other measure of acceptance that has really struck me is all these universities, starting psychedelic research centers, that Harvard is starting one at Mass General. I took his particularly surprising. I remember a few years ago, having lunch with the young psychiatrist at MGH who was fascinated by psychedelics and and we had lunch and and he was very eager to start.
Thinking Harvard and I said, well, I'm afraid Harvard is going to be the last place to do this because of the Timothy Leary, you know, embarrassment is that as the Harvard people think of it, but I was wrong. They're doing it to, and they've got a very interesting Center getting started. So, and Yale has a center. And now Berkeley has a center that I'm involved with. And the stigma is washing off, it's wonderful to see it is,
it's really exciting. And I think the the curve of change so that the the
The angle of that inflection is just going to continue to point Skyward by all indications, certainly with the
for-profit. And it's important for people to keep that in mind when you know we get discouraged about politics and change all the time and the model that has always struck me as gay marriage. I mean that how that went from in the course of just the Obama Administration from something that a national politician couldn't touch to one that he had to touch and the culture changed around gay marriage. So
Quickly, so we should, you know, take heart in the fact that when you tell the story in the right way, when you have good research because the gay marriage story was like, oh these people want, what we have, not, they want to be different. They want this basic Human Institution called marriage and that tells a very different story about homosexuality than was in a lot of people's heads. It was, it was a brilliant thing to focus on. It seemed crazy at the time.
I know a lot of activists thought that was a risky move and asking for the sky but it wasn't. It was exactly the right move as was the move of starting with cancer patients, Roland Griffiths and the team at NYU, we're going to use psychedelics to help people who are dying. How can you be against that? And the fact that it worked opened up this Research into depression and anxiety and Obsession and because they were telling a really good story. And all I did was amplify that story and
Find a way to talk about it. That made it much more sympathetic. I think, than it was. I mean, most of the people writing about psychedelics before I did it, we're, you know, in the tank already, right? They were sold on psychedelics, they were users of psychedelics, they were Believers and those are not the people you want to tell your story ever and I was skeptical and I had one foot out and one foot in I was terrified
Out of using psychedelics before I started I hadn't used them at the age appropriate time. So in some ways I was the right messenger because I was more like the average reader then most people who would write about psychedelics and and that, you know, Finding as a writer finding where you stand, who you are in the story, you're telling is everything in terms of getting people to come with you on the journey. Yeah, the
Those steeped in the Kool-Aid, can always be a liability, I remember, yeah, they're kind of
off-putting. Yeah, no one likes. No one likes evangelists except the people who do.
Well, I remember after my first book came out and I was just becoming to engage more publicly. And someone said to me, I wish I could remember who it was but they said, you know, it's not the detractors you need to worry about. Its the die-hard fans who get the message will get the message wrong. And I was like, oh,
I don't know what that means, but it didn't take long to realize how true they had true that is. So let's talk about mescaline. I think that's probably the most natural segue from what we're talking about right now. You suppose gave some preview of this already but what makes mescaline interesting? What makes it different from say psilocybin or LSD? Yeah. Yeah, from any
context. Well, it has a different phenomenology. As the philosophers, say the experience.
Audience has a very different quality, and I was very surprised to discover that I had read Aldous huxley's doors of perception. When I was working on how to change your mind and before I had used a psychedelic, It's a Wonderful essay, I encourage everybody to look at it. It's the first trip report really and it's influenced everybody's trip since then you may not have read this book but what you saw and happened to you on psychedelics key wrote in part because that's the way culture works because we're looking for a vocabulary and names for what's happening.
To us and we take them from literature even indirectly. Anyway, when I read that, I thought it was an account of the earlier, psychedelic experience. You know that this stood for LSD experience it stood for psilocybin experience and that's how I took it and a lot of people take it that way but then I read it again.
After I had used, you know, gone through the menu of psychedelics in my research and I realize, oh, this is very specific. This is not like LSD or psilocybin in this quality, the mescaline experience as described by him. And, and I can confirm this based on my own experience. Although my own experience was probably influenced by him, it doesn't take you out of this world to another world. As people say, talk about DMT, you know, taking you to another dimension of existence or
It takes you deeper into this world, Huxley describes being able to stare at the folds of his trousers for an hour. And it made him think about folds of cloth and Botticelli's paintings. And it just makes the present richer and deeper. And, you know, he uses this metaphor of the reducing valve that he argues in most of Consciousness is editing reality, keeping things from us, because we would be overwhelmed if we took
In all the sensory information available to us at any one time we just couldn't process it. Well on mescaline, those valves open really wide and the sensory information is so intense. The colors are you just see nuances of green or blue in nature or blue in the water that you've never seen before? And you can stare at the most common object and find it. Absolutely fascinating and understand it in a deeper way.
There was no ego dissolution. There were no hallucinations really. It's this here and now drug in a way I wasn't prepared for so it has different quality. Also, you can hold a conversation much more easily. You're not chemically, mescaline is closer to MDMA than it is to LSD. It's a phenylethylamine. So it has that kind of warmth and sometimes, chattiness and heart-opening quality that MDMA has compared
As I think of psilocybin and LSD is is a very solitary Endeavor. You know, somewhere you're going deep into your head, so it had a very different quality, an interesting question is so why isn't it used in research and this points to another difference? It is a very long trip. It can be like 14 hours longer than LSD and if you're really enjoying it it is the most generous of psychedelics. If you're getting a little tired and you'd like to go to bed or have dinner,
It's like, can we stop this now? Is this enough? And I think that makes it very hard in a research context where you need a therapist present, and, you know, 14 hours is two shifts, right? For the for the therapist. So it hasn't been used although there are plans to use it in therapy and I think it has potential. I think it has particular potential in group therapy since there is this ability to talk and that you might be able to administer in a group which would help, but I also think
The reason I was interested in mescaline to is its long history of use in the Native American Community. First of all, it is the oldest known psychedelic and use. I mean, there is evidence 6,000 years ago. In Texas, they found evidence of mescaline use in the form of peyote. The Peyote Cactus and peyote has been used by natives in both Mexico and the United States for a very long time. And they've had great success, treating trauma with it. Treating alcoholism.
Close them with it. And so I think there's a great deal to learn. I was fascinated by the Native American use of mescaline in the form of peyote here. We have a essentially a conservative model of drug use and that kind of blows our minds because we think of, you know, especially psychedelics, we think of disruption of society certainly in the 60s. So the Native American Church, which is developed in the 1880s and kind of made official in 1917 is the
The cultural container, the Native Americans develop for the use of peyote and it's a highly regulated ritual. That is used in what are called peyote meetings to help people in trouble, especially with alcoholism, which has been a huge problem for Native American cultures since it was introduced, but also for spousal abuse as a Rite of Passage to help people deal with trauma. And to help Native Americans deal with their trauma. I mean, this is, you know, a very this is traumatized population.
Elation, and it was particularly, traumatizing the 1880s. This is when Plains Indians were being forced onto. Reservations people who had lived itinerant lives in many cases, following the Buffalo or the bison and suddenly they were forced onto reservations and given rations of corn, they didn't know about corn, these weren't agriculturist, so they fed it to their horses. I mean, imagine how traumatized such a population would be and in the 1880s. Native Americans from Texas.
Brought peyote into Oklahoma, where that was the Indian Territory where a lot of the reservations were and they began using it in a ritual setting and it was they found it enormously helpful and they still find it enormously helpful. So there's a very interesting immoral conservative use of a drug to hold the society together to create cultural cohesion and healing. And it has a lot to teach us and why mescaline was the right substance for that as an
interesting question. So I wanted to explore that and it raised a very hard question for me, though, which is whether I should use peyote, whether any non native person should use peyote, because it's in very short supply, the habitat, which is runs along the Rio Grande, the Texas side, there's a lot more of it, on the Mexican side, but you know between cattle ranching and development and poaching by, you know, Psychonauts and it's
Very slow growing plant. It takes 15 years to get from seed to usable button. It's a low-growing very pretty bluish green cactus looks like a stone or a pin cushion and you actually eat it. You eat the whole thing, but there is a real question about, you know, I mean we have taken so much from these people that if we now take their peyote which has been such an important Aid to them adjusting to the situation, we've put them in. I think there's a real moron
Electrical question about that. I mean it'd be one thing to grow your own peyote and I wouldn't have a problem with that but you see me in 15 years and it'll be ready. And this is, of course, been become a controversy because there's a decriminalized nature movement. That's very vibrant in America right now. And the idea of leaving out peyote is, is offensive to some people in that movement, it kind of complicates their message which is that all these psychoactive plants should be legal and available to people. So there's a there's now
Fight between the Native American church and decrypt nature going on, which is really unfortunate. My basic thinking is, we should leave this one alone and the way you the way you pay respects both to peyote and to Native Americans is not to use their Sacrament and there are other ways to get mescaline. You don't have to use their Sacrament. There are San Pedro, for example, which is another cactus that comes from from South America and is very easy to grow and once I had my eyes on to notice it and knew what it looked like, I see it all over.
Oakley where I live and I bet it's all over Austin to it's all over the place
everywhere. I remember first becoming familiar with its look and I noticed in San Francisco and sort of empty space between two apartments across the street from where I lived bunch of San Pedro cactus and it's it thrives. So like you said and I'll just second your position which is I think there's a lot of good being done by the
Nature movements in various places and I think that that good can exist while reserving peyote for indigenous use and having looked at this quite closely. And spent time as you have with, I PCI the indigenous peyote conservation initiative, which I encourage people to check out I PCI.
Yeah, really important initiative
and having spoken with members of the NAC as you have
And others leaders in the Danae or Navajo communities, like Steve Benelli. The availability of peyote is such that if we continue at current rates of consumption. Also, recognizing that for indigenous, Northern American and Indigenous people Greenhouse grown or hydroponic, grown peyote is not viewed in the same way as a Sacrament necessarily as something grown in the ground, which takes 15 years and
There are other means by which one can get mescaline? A San Pedro? Cactus being one one, good option.
So and it is legal, by the way, is legal to grow of San Pedro. Cactus. Yeah. And it's not legal to grow peyote. So, it's that's another advantage to see a lot of benefits. A lot of benefits. So, what did you do? Well, I had hoped. So, this chapter is very much all three sections of this book have. There's a writing problem, suggesting a
Assuring problem, you know, with opium is it looks like I'm not going to be able to publish and I have to self-censor with caffeine I abstain from caffeine to the point where I can't write and and the Very the very chapter is endangered by the lack of the of the drug. And in mescaline, there was the pandemic and I was looking forward to going to, Texas and participating in a Peyote ceremony before I understood these issues and
All these Native Americans in person and interviewing Native Americans on Zoom is not always easy because they don't have good internet connections on the reservation and sometimes they have to drive four hours to get to a good internet connection so they can talk to you. So it was a piece that was inflicted by that, but I did talk to quite a few Native Americans and I was really struck by first their reluctance to tell me what happens in the tent. How has this helped you. And it was
A real wake-up call to me. I mean, these are normal journalistic, questions. You would ask anybody. And I remember, Steve Bonelli who you just mentioned saying, you know, why should I tell you and white, man, the unspoken next thing and he said, you know, we have a long history of discoverers like you coming to our world and taking things, I was just, you know, kind of shocked, but of course, yeah. Why should he? And ultimately, I found people who would describe what happened in the tent, and, and the value.
To their people. I learned a lot in the course of doing that, and it was very humbling in a way. So I grew San Pedro and I was lucky to get some really good specimens, from the Shogun farm, and in Sasha Shogun. They have a wonderful Sasha Shogun was fascinated by peyote Cactus and San Pedro, and he was always tweaking the mescaline molecule that was his, his favorite one to mess with. And then I have some other friends in Berkeley gave me some, and I, you know, there,
Very easy to take cuttings and the plant is wants to grow. You can just take a length of it, if one Falls, you know, and they fall over in storms and, and leave it anywhere, and it'll send up new columns, it's remarkable, but it's important for your listeners to know that at a certain moment, it does become a very serious crime when you cook your San Pedro. So growing it's fine. It's not scheduled as a plan, but if you prepare it and it's
Essentially like a vegetable stock. You are breaking federal law.
Of
course, has anyone been
line crossed the line, has anyone been arrested for this? I don't think the authorities really know about San Pedro, otherwise, they would have scheduled it. I think it just kind of got lost in the wash, and I think it would be hard to get in trouble using San Pedro. It's a fairly mild psychedelic. Well, I don't want to give bad advice if you could
get in lots of trouble, I don't want to be responsible, Far, We've Come From The Fear and Loathing in Connecticut.
Michael's.
Well, we are in a different
moment and, and masculine for the masses. Here we go.
The drug war is subsiding. It's fading. I mean, you know, what happened in the, the last election I think was really significant. You had Oregon decriminalizing all drugs. Specifically, legalizing psilocybin therapy. You had several States including red States legalizing cannabis and you had D crimp ballot initiative.
Us in Washington, DC, and several other places. So, something is changing and the right doesn't even want to fight the drug war, but I would argue. And this book in a way. One of the subtext of this book is when the drug war ends are confusion and problems. Around drugs are not going to end. In fact, they're going to intensify because, you know, it's one thing to have the government take charge of, you can use this, you can't use this and law-abiding. People follow that or not but each
These drugs, we have to figure out our relationship to them drug. Abuse is a dysfunctional relationship with drugs in my view. So, what's the proper container for mescaline? What's the proper container for caffeine? What's the proper container for alcohol? You know, we've kind of worked out this truce with alcohol and cigarettes. It's not perfect, but we know, prohibition doesn't work. So, we have all these social rules that govern the use of alcohol and we sort of D socialized, the use of tobacco
Do you know only in the last 20 years, right? You can't use it in all these places where you once could there's a stigma now, attached to smoking and lots of places, which I think is a healthy thing. But the point is it's going to be culture rather than the law that is. I think going to shape this and that conversation is going to take place over the next couple decades and it's going to be fascinating. So the question is, after the drug war, what is the drug piece? Look like? That's where we are now. We have to figure that out and we're kind of working on it with psychedelics.
We know there's going to be this FDA approval, you know this medicine path but there's also this religious path there are already some psychedelic churches and they're going to be a lot more and they're going to be tested in the courts. Bob Jesse's idea the betterment of well people, I mean how do we make it available, what's the container for people who are neither religious or sick, that conversation is happening right now, is very exciting and it will happen. I think around opiates. Also there's a real difference between
Making some opium T because you've got a bad back or you're sad and, you know, using fentanyl or shooting up. There's a whole spectrum of ways to use drugs going back to that idea that fundamental Paradox of blessing and curse Ally and poison. We always have to keep that in mind and navigate that path because all drugs can get you in
trouble. The oh yeah. It's you know paracelsus the dose makes the poison certainly applies in many cases and I was I was talking.
To an acquaintance of a new friend recently at a dinner and the topic of the all the topic of drug regulation and Drug development came up, and he mentioned that he grew up somewhat religious and had never used any drugs, except for alcohol and I said, Oh, you mean the civilization Destroyer that just that one. And of course I was joking and you know, we had a laugh but it's tremendous. How
And I don't expect legislation to change, right? I'll call anytime soon, but but but how how much the cultural context can shift the lens through which we look at these things. And mescaline is very interesting for a bunch of reasons and it's also at least at a basic level kind of self.
Limiting in the sense that not only does it last as it stands right now. Let's just say up to 12 14 hours, but a very common side. Effect is feeling extremely nauseous. So, so if one might imagine the most intense seasickness they've ever felt, you may feel that for 6 to 12 hours and of course I think in a
therapeutic this is on synthetic synthetic mescaline or the
office or on plant-derived and
It's sometimes referred to in the communities that use peyote is getting well if you vomit that's getting well, not getting ring, not getting sick. And while I think in that container that is accepted from a psychotherapeutic perspective poses some challenges I do think you could probably take Zofran or some anti-nausea medication, too attenuated. But do you think at least based on your reading and research that there are potential applications outside?
I'd of say alcoholism and addiction. And as you mentioned, I think it's worth underscoring. Part of what is I think attractive about mescaline is that
It does not easily fall, it does not obviously fall into the class of hallucinogen. I know they're people who will disagree with this because at high enough doses. Certainly you can you can experience visuals but it doesn't produce the type of experience that you mentioned these tryptamines. Often involve where you're sent to a parallel Dimension where you're riding mechanical elves, mean that is less The Experience then a sort of heightening.
Of reality and your sensory inputs. So I think it could end up being viewed, very much. The way that MDMA is, is viewed. Yeah. Do you think there, any particular targets are indications for which mescaline or maybe some designer version of mescaline would be
interesting. Alcoholism is the obvious one because that's been where it's had a lot of success in the Native American Community, although they use it. You know, they use it for physical healing to. I mean, they really think it's helpful with various physical. And, and there are stories of, you know, that I did here.
Native Americans about children being cured of cancer and physical elements. I think we know a lot less about it and I think that we need some really basic Research into mescaline that hasn't been done yet and that goes for other substances to, I mean, the the focus has been so narrowly on psilocybin and MDMA and they're good reasons for that. But substances like mescaline have been neglected and you know, Journey collab is a new startup that is hopes to work with masculine and and has a very
elaborate system of reciprocity with Native Americans that certain amount of their revenue is going to go to Native American communities. And there is a researcher University of Alabama, who wants to use mescaline, but in his case, it's going to be alcoholism. I think that will be the first indication. I'm not sure what else would be good but I would guess trauma would be worth looking at. I mean, MDMA has already proven its value there. So I don't know whether they'll be a lot of people willing to invest the resources necessary, but trauma is what?
The MDMA qualities of it, you know, suggest that and the fact that it's been used by Native Americans so successfully. And in fact, they are dealing with trauma in one form or another one, symptom or another. But this raises a very interesting question. Whether Jump Ahead 50 years and psychedelic therapy is a thing, it's just part of mental health treatment, will it be the familiar molecules you know that have been around for a while, mescaline psilocybin?
Reiben DMT or will there be drugs? We haven't, we can't imagine right now tweaked versions and now there's a whole lot of that drug development going on driven in part by desire to control patents, right? Intellectual property. But all these companies even the ones that are, you know, working with psilocybin. They're tweaking psilocybin to trying to come up with something shorter acting perhaps, or without certain side effects, and then you have the development of all these non-psychoactive
Alex, which to me just seems kind of nuts, but for a lot of people that may be the way to go and there, you know, there's a whole effort to prove and there's some evidence. It might work on certain indications that a psychedelic that didn't produce any phenomenological effects. Could nevertheless be a healing substance and that is very attractive to the pharmaceutical industry to large portions of the population. It flies, in the face of the general belief that it is the nature.
Sure, of the experience you have that's curing you not anything pharmacological and that question will be resolved in the next few years. And I understand that rolling Griffith made a bet with somebody who wanted to test this concept by giving a big dose of psychedelics to someone anesthetized like really deeply anesthetized to see if this would actually affect him and Rowland was willing to bet that it would not but you have to have the experience but we are
Learning that there is a pharmacological effect in terms of neurogenesis and and brain plasticity. So who knows? So we may look back on words like mescaline and psilocybin is like ancient history in 50 years when we have all these new substances or not you know Sasha Shogun developed lots of new substances and we're still very interested in the originals. Yeah. What do you think about
that? Well, I think that
And just as a side note for anyone, who's as some passing familiarity with anything in the, to CX class, so to see be if you've ever heard of something like to see be or to see e, which is a much trickier substance to use, the can produce some very dramatic unraveling, so I don't necessarily recommend but to CB would be one of Sasha's, in a sense, one of his Mal accounts Creations. Absolutely. So I think that if I look at the
It forces and incentives of for-profit companies. Much like we have ketamine regularly available and at very low cost. Nonetheless, we now have S ketamine and super Vado through. I think I want to say Johnson & Johnson. I may be getting the Pharma company wrong for ongoing Administration, so I think that we will see
Pressure a lot of pressure by shareholders, by Founders by incentives alone, which then shape behavior and decisions towards non psychedelic.
Versions of psychedelics are close cousins that require constant Administration rather than so rather than conferring potential Curative effects in a handful of sessions. Using it more to mask symptoms or suppress symptoms for Better Business models. I don't want to sound cynical but I do think that if we study our history this is what we see over and over and over.
And over again, and I think the play books that have been used by big Pharma, big tobacco are going to be used in this world as well. We already see that. In fact, we see a lot of the same tactics and strategies being used which are not necessarily the best for the scientific therapeutic Innovation within the ecosystem but that is
For better and For Worse. Often for worse. But not always how the free market game is played. And I, and I do think that the
comments made by Francis Collins are very big deal and hopefully a harbinger of things to come because right now
and I'd love to hear your opinion on this but researchers find themselves in sometimes in between a rock and a hard place with respect to funding because they can either pursue individual philanthropists who take time to Wrangle, often don't have a lot of budget and the fundraising then becomes a part-time / full-time job for these
researchers or
they can take money from for-profit players, which as you
Expect have something to gain in the forms of strings attached and I could be IP ownership. It could be exclusive access to safety data. It could be non-compete clauses or non-disclosure Clauses that act in some way as non-compete. I've seen some really, really bad behavior. So my hope would be that if that happens, which I think is is more of an eventuality. So it's a matter of trying to put safeguards in place or
Or allowing people in different positions to act as countervailing forces, whether that's from a law advocacy perspective, or from a journalistic perspective, let's just say my hope would be that through the efforts of groups and movements like decriminalized. Sure. That at the very least the other better known version so we've been referring to. So let's just say San Pedro, cactus selasa be mushrooms Etc, remain available for use or lie.
On some level to use that would be my hope. How does any of that? Yeah, land for you
that jobs. I mean, I think we're at an inflection point and a huge amount of capital has moved into this space and a very quickly and that the desire to figure out ways to take psychedelics and force them into this model of the pill. You have to take every day. The pill that isn't disruptive. The pill that doesn't take any talking therapy is going to be fierce and as will the desire to make,
Gional intellectual property. Nature will save us though. The selasa be mushrooms will continue to grow the mescaline. Producing cactuses will continue to grow and that as the drug war ends people's access their ability to do it themselves, that's not going to go away. However, Compass Pathways thinks it can control psilocybin through. IP psilocybin will defeat that, I think, maybe not in the business context or the
Sudoku context, but in reality. So I think that, you know, nature is irrepressible and I don't think these substances will go away.
You mentioned for your Harper's piece way back in the day that Rick MacArthur so strongly supported that you worked on it for a year, right? That's a long time. So as I know and easy and that you were counting on that paycheck, right. I don't know if you had mortgage payments at the time but it was I did it was important.
Into your about your livelihood and also therefore a determinant of your ability to continue writing that you had that kind of support. Do you want to maybe this is as good a time as any to mention the fellowship. Do you want to introduce
this? Yeah. Yeah. So as I've continued to stay involved in this area, I'm doing it in different ways and as are you and I was involved with the founding of a psychedelic Research Center at Berkeley that
Gots established last year and we're doing a couple things that we thought would be different than other centers. But that would also help the entire field. So, rather than doing clinical research, which isn't done at Berkeley because we don't have a medical school, we're going to do basic science, we're really going to try to understand the brain mechanisms involved in psychedelic experience and explore what psychedelics have to teach us about things like Consciousness and predictive coding and perception. We're also going to do training
of gods which is understood to be the great bottleneck going forward. I think Maps or the funders collaborative estimates, we're going to need a hundred thousand guides in the next 10 years and then the third thing that I'm most excited about because I'm going to be directly involved and I have something to contribute is we're going to do a major public education initiative. There's a huge amount of curiosity about psychedelics and sources of information are somewhat limited and not always that rigorous. So I see.
Del X as becoming a very important journalistic beat in the next 10 or 20 years in the same way food, and agriculture became an important beat beginning in the early 2000s before then just to use that as a model journalism about food was essentially the recipe page. You know, the page is on Wednesday in the newspaper and journalism about agriculture was trade magazines. You know, like beef today or Progressive grocer. That's where you had to go to learn what was happening in agriculture.
Inning with Eric schlosser's you know important book, fast food nation in 2002 and a couple other books including my Omnivore's Dilemma in 2006, suddenly writing about food and agriculture as a unified whole as a system took off. And now you have a generation of journalists who are good at it and cover the subject. Well, and you can learn a lot about where your food comes from, and its carbon footprint and all this kind of information is out there, so we need to do the same.
For psychedelics, it's a rich beat, it involves many layers. There is science, there is policy. There is business and there is culture and we don't have a lot of people writing about it yet. So how do we attract really talented young journalists to work on it and that will serve everybody. And so we came up with a series of ideas one of which you and I discussed which was what if we created a journalism Fellowship where we would have
have a sum of money, each year to give grants to Young journalists who have cool ideas to report on psychedelics whether it's business or science or culture or whatever. And you very generously funded, it will be called the ferris uc-berkeley journalism Fellowship. I think it is. We're going to assemble a small panel of Judges with expertise in science policy and business and every year will give out grants to people and help fund their journalism, whether they need 5000 or
$15,000 and I know for young journalists, this can make all the difference and that they then can take these pieces and Pitch them to magazines mainstream magazine. So I'm hoping it'll bring more psychedelic journalism into mainstream magazines. Some of which don't have resources to fund expensive reporting. There's been a change in journalism where journalism that's been supported by nonprofit. Organizations can appear in places like the New York Times magazine or
or the Atlantic or Harper's that they're willing to take funded journalism as long as they believe that the source is credible. And the fact that the UC Berkeley journalism school graduate school of Journalism will be the container for this for the ferris Fellowship. I think we'll give our journalists a real leg up in terms of getting published. So that's probably going to launch in the fall. We'll start taking applications and on a rolling basis. So anyway, if you're a, if you're a journalist with a really
Good idea. I hope to get in touch with us and will publicize it. You know how to do it. If you follow my Twitter feed will definitely have it there and perhaps in Tim's newsletter as well. So anyway, I'm very grateful for Tim to, Tim for recognizing, you know, the value of this. We're also hoping to do some other things. We're going to do a newsletter, starting this Summer, that will be free. And we'll have a digestive news about psychedelics about the field. I've just hired a young science writer to do that. I think she's going to be terrific.
Ethic and it'll report on new research as well as other developments eventually. We hope to do a podcast and we're going to do a massive online course, to psychedelic science, 101 that I'm working with my colleagues to develop. So I'm hoping that Berkeley will become a center for, you know, really high-quality journalism related to psychedelics we all at the center, very grateful to to you Tim for, for supporting this effort.
I couldn't be more excited. I have watched this field. So, so closely over the years most recent years and couldn't think of a better person to head it up, and also not sure if you touched on this or if we touched on it, perhaps earlier, but you have sort of experimental data so to speak, this is not the first time that you've offered these types of Grants. So I would love to. Yeah, maybe
Be here about how your experiments in other subject areas have turned out because it will be. This isn't the first rodeo in other words?
No, actually about eight years ago, I started a similar Fellowship, which is the 11th Hour, Wendy Schmidt, Foundation 11th Hour, Berkeley journalism fellowships, and this was to cover food, and Agriculture, and it's organized somewhat differently. We take ten
A year they we get several hundred applications people who have an idea, young journalist, you know, 30s early 30s or 20s and we pick 10 and we give them a ten thousand dollar Grant to report their stories. And we also give them help in shaping those stories pitching them and helping them with the editing and introducing them to editors some of which will do with this grant. It's not going to be quite as Hands-On. Because I think these people are going to be in a slightly different stage in their career.
Career. But we found that this was incredibly helpful to people's careers. I'll give you one example. There was a young journalist named Nikola twillie, who had a really cool idea about the refrigeration Revolution. Coming to China a country without good Refrigeration is only going to develop to a certain level. And Refrigeration has all sorts of implications for the food system, and climate change. Also kinds of things. And she had this cool idea about going to China as there at the
Barking on this Revolution and she wrote a really good pitch and she sent to the New York Times magazine and they said, well is a great story but you know you don't have any experience reporting from China or you know we can't afford to send you if you were named writer whatever we would. So she came to us and we gave her a grant and she went back to the times and she said well what if I can cover all my expenses? And they said great will take your piece. They took her piece, they published. It was very successful.
Cessful and it led to a book which is coming out, I think next year. She also met someone else in that fellowship and they started a very good podcast whose name I'm forgetting
we put it in the show notes also.
Okay, I'll send it to you anyway. So it's, you know, and now she's a New Yorker staff writer and also, you know, and she still writes a lot about food, the right boost at the right moment in. Someone's career can make such a difference. So we're hoping this is, you know, we're going to build a Cadre of
Lee good journalists who have the necessary skills and skepticism and investigative abilities. To hold this space accountable because we're moving from a time where the scientists have held the microphone about psychedelic research to a moment where the entrepreneurs are going to hold the microphone. And as you pointed out, they've got a very different agenda and there's some cool ideas coming and there's some really bad ideas coming and one of the ways you hold
An industry accountable is with good journalism. And we saw that with food that led to real changes in the food system. So we're going to need the same and psychedelics, it's going to get much more contentious and much more complicated in the years to come. So we're hoping that we'll have a group of journalists up to the task of holding everybody's feet to the
fire. Couldn't be coming at a better time. I am. I'm so excited about this. Michael. There are two more things I'd love to touch on.
One is related to the book and one is going to bring us full circle. In a way, I'm holding up my mug because you can't see it. Alright. Alright, Coffee. So as we all know it is always been the case that the Brits drink tea and Americans just love their coffee. What is that a true statement
that? Yeah it is I mean they're definitely a tea culture and we're more of a coffee culture and there's a specific historical reason for it.
Dulce coffee now getting when you're in London. Now you're very aware of coffee and there's a lot of great coffee houses but initially
When coffee, and tea were first introduced to Europe, which happens in the same decade in the 1650s. It was coffee that took off and coffee became this, tremendous fat and England and they were coffee houses, there was one coffee house for every hundred and fifty londoners. I mean there were everywhere and people were spending hours and hours in the coffee house which became much more than a place to drink coffee, it became really a social media, you would go to
Coffee has to get the news. It was about information more than it was about the drug. Although the drug definitely played its role and there were different coffee houses for whatever your interest was. So if you were an artist you would go to this one and Covent Garden. And if you were a scientist, there was one associated with the Royal Institution, the great scientific institution in London. And if you were in business, you might go to Lloyd's, which became Lloyd's of London, because you could actually write a policy on your ship and your cargo there.
And then people would go from one to the other, conveying news. So it was initially a Coffee Culture, but the English colonies weren't good places to grow coffee. They didn't have any coffee growing colonies. They had tea growing colonies like India and they had a foothold in China. So, beginning about a hundred years later, he became so much cheaper and T took over from coffee by and large, and it was just about Colonial politics and the nature of imperialism countries.
With good coffee growing colonies like Amsterdam, like the Netherlands in like France. They were much more coffee. And when America was started, we were at tea culture because we were getting all this tea that the British East India Company was was bringing in. But of course, with the revolution we revolted against all things English, you recall the Tea Party from your high school, history, textbooks and the the tax on tea was so offensive to the colonists that they threw a whole
The shipment of tea into Boston Harbor and switch to coffee. And we have been the coffee country ever. Since caffeine in general, has been very important to capitalism in that it makes us better workers, makes us more efficient. So one of the stories I tell in the chapter on caffeine is is just how important caffeine was to the rise of capitalism. It's important to know just how drunk everybody was before. Caffeine came to Europe, people were drinking.
All day long, they drank for breakfast, they drank for lunch, they drink for dinner. There were alcohol breaks instead of coffee breaks, and on farms, and this was all fine when you're doing physical labor. But once you start operating machines and, and you have to deal with double entry bookkeeping, a drunk Workforce is a serious problem. So enter coffee and caffeine which was it didn't completely displace alcohol, but it became it. Diminished the need for alcohol.
One of the reasons people were drinking. So much was not just to change Consciousness but because alcohol was safer than the water. Then when you ferment you disinfect but coffee and tea were even safer than that because you had to boil water was the first time there was any reason to boil water. And so the countries that adopted hot drinks were much healthier and had much better public health. So, caffeine's is huge Boon to the Industrial Revolution people, who can safely handle machines and also
Can't have a night shift without caffeine, right? We were stuck with the circadian rhythms of the The rhythms of the Sun and only when caffeine comes along, could you extend the work day and, you know, the best proof of this idea is, if you think about it, the institution of the coffee break is like a wild idea. Your employer gives you time off to take a drug and provides the drug. Why do they do that? Well,
It was discovered in only in like the nineteen hundreds that employees, who got coffee breaks at mid-morning and mid-afternoon did more work perform better. And I tell the story of the company where the first coffee break was instituted. So caffeine has changed the course of civilization, and many, many ways it really contributed to the rise of rationalism, in Europe, to a certain way of thinking, that's, very linear, very rational, very logical. And I understood
Impart, when I got off coffee, you know, the reason I got off coffee was I mentioned that Challenge from Roland but I also wanted to see if I could learn reacquaint myself with its power because if we use it every day basically what it gives us a little lift and it stops withdrawal symptoms of withdrawal which are really nasty and every morning, you know, you're starting to go through withdrawal till you have that first cup and then it's like, everything's okay and you get back to Baseline. But if you've been off it for a
A few months that first cup is psychedelic. It is it is as powerful as any drug of had and it was wonderful. And and the the only sad thing is you can't hold on to that
power by the, by the third day. Oh no.
So anyway, I had quite a journey with caffeine as did our our civilization but it's a wonderful substance. There are no good reasons not to consume it.
Well with one exception, I mean, I looked at the whole, all the health issues tied to it. Now you can abuse caffeine, you can have too much till your you know and anxious people will get more jittery sometimes but it's good for your heart. It's good for your blood pressure and prevent certain kinds of cancer or its associated with lower rates of certain kinds of cancer dementia. It improves your memory improves people performance in athletics. It's kind of amazing. The only negative is it messes with your sleep.
Beep. Even if you stop drinking coffee at noon, it has a quarter life of 12 hours. So 1/4 of the caffeine that you ingest. It will still be in your bloodstream at midnight and what it robs you of her kin is deep sleep which is very important for our health. So there are some sleep most of the Sleep researchers, I interviewed, don't consume caffeine, I was like, but on balance, we should
Count ourselves fortunate, and why did this plant produce this chemical that has this effect on us? Well, it began as a pesticide. It is a pesticide not in human brains
and and one way it strikes me that caffeine has changed civilization is by fooling us into thinking or what percentage of US. 90% 90%, use it worldwide, use it
regularly. And by the way, it's the only drug. We give our children, if you think about it in the form of soda,
It's wild. It's convinced 90% of people on the planet that their Baseline, their so-called normal waking consciousness is actually and sober but it's not. It's it's infused with caffeine.
We are, we are creatures of caffeine now, it's so transparent in its effects. It doesn't feel like you're high certainly. But this way we operate, our ability to focus when I was writing how to change your mind. I learned that there are these two different kinds of
- there's Lantern Consciousness and Spotlight Consciousness, Lantern Consciousness, you're taking in information from all sides. It's kind of a little add ish, kids have Lantern Consciousness, the ability to narrow your focus and block out. Everything else is really critical to adult life to work to scientific discovery to writing books to so many things that we do fixing cars that Spotlight Consciousness is nurtured by caffeine.
And that's a huge gift. It's interesting. I asked Roland Griffith. So is this a bun or a bane to our species? And he said, well it's definitely a boon to our civilization because now we have to get up at a certain time and be somewhere at a certain time and perform certain functions but that's not the same as saying, it's a boon to our species. We may have been better off in healthier when we were on the cycles of the sun when we did have a broader, expansive of information. So I thought that was a good.
Cautionary note that he sounded he's a very wise man as you well know,
he is a very wise man. Have you ever this might seem like a non sequitur, but have you ever explored Coffee Culture in Japan? Have you looked at all now? Their coffee cocoa butter. It's really fascinating, which is a, which is a lazy adjective. But you see a lot of the sort of meticulous, attention to detail that you might associate.
With a tea, ceremony brought into these. Elaborate rituals in some places around coffee. Now, of course, you can get your like dime-store shitty coffee. Yeah, first thing in the morning to go to your job. But there are also these, these bespoke hole-in-the-wall places where you can get a 45-minute pour over and they have lots of rules around what, what you can do or can't do with their coffee. They might give you a
Of toast to this place called the inokashira park. You know, co co co and where I remember going to this this coffee shop which it was fancy but it wasn't expensive that if that makes any sense, they took a very very seriously and they sold two things, they sold coffee and they sold. They sold toast. That had the face of a panda bear burned into the side and those were the two things that you could purchase. So
how is the coffee was great? The
car.
He was fantastic. And for those people, interested, there's term, it's Ki satsang or Kisa, sometimes Ki KI SS. A, there are a number of videos that you can find on YouTube looking at this sort of kiss a culture K is sa. And actually, I've been meaning to ask you, have you done anything in video or television related to how to change your mind?
Funny, you should ask. Yes.
Day. I was shooting for a documentary series that we're doing on how to change your mind. I've been working on it for the last several months, and it's going to be a four-part Netflix series. Looking at four different substances. We're going to look at LSD, psilocybin and MDMA and mescaline and do an hour on each. So I'm very excited by it. You know, I've done this with previous books, cooked was a four-part Netflix series and Botany of Desire was on public television and I'm very interested in how you translate one medium into an into another. But also, you know,
No, you just Reach people, you don't reach, not everybody. Reads books, books are the germ but it's really important to reach people where they are. Yeah. So I'm hoping by the end of the year or early next year, it'll be, it'll drop,
that's super exciting. The visual medium also is a great gateway, drug, pun intended for the longer form writing also, I would imagine, a lot of people will discover your writing and have discovered your writing
through without question. Yeah, they start. They
It on television and they realize there's a book. Yeah, that's definitely part of it. Our challenge though in doing this is how do you recreate the Psychedelic
experience? Not using Paisley tight
schedules and, and the instructions to the special effects people that we interviewed. And we found a fantastic firm? That's doing some amazing sequences is no 60s references know, Paisley, no kaleidoscopes? Because that was never right. Anyway? That's just, yeah, that was the technology. They had to make things look.
Weird. So they're coming up with some very new ways to imagine the Psychedelic experience for the screen and that's what I'm most excited about. Can't wait to see it. My
last question I guess is in a way also related to gateway drugs metaphorically, speaking gardening. If I'm going to step into the world of gardening and recognizing that I am prone to starting many things, but I don't continue many things. So if I want to start off on the right foot and not read any text books or anything to begin.
Are there any resources, any suggested starting points things to do? Maybe first projects? How do I even begin to approach this? Because gardening is so broad a term? Yeah, it just includes so much and I will have some property on the East Coast. I can kind of do whatever I want. I could also do something in Texas so I have options available. Where would you suggest that I
start?
Well, are you interested in growing food or growing ornaments or growing? Psych are growing
psychoactives because that's you
know
yeah I mean I would be a I would be open to all of them. I think I'm interested in food kind of depends on the turnaround time on the food since I'm not in one place all year round. Hmm. And I know nothing about harvesting schedules and so on I'm very interested in growing culinary.
Herbs, for instance, I could see growing tobacco. Possibly knife. If that, is kosher your book scared, the shit out of me when I came to Growing. I don't know, it's things lately. I
grow tobacco to and it's a beautiful plant and I unjustly maligned plant. I would argue
beautiful plant that I've seen in travels through Mexico and elsewhere takes a
lot of space. It's a big.
Yeah, I think what would be interesting to me is having a
you plants or a few projects that teach me a lot about different principles of gardening if that makes any sense without biting. Yeah, are often I can chew.
Well one way to start. I mean not having seen your property or know that much I know it gets very hot and Austin in this summer is to build a raised bed, start with one raised bed, which you buy some wood that doesn't Decay easily like cedar or Redwood and you make a box essentially. That's
About a foot high and it can be any length you want, but it shouldn't be so wide that you can't reach every point in it and fill it with soil, you know, which you can either get at the Garden Center or have a dump truck come over. The advantage of a raised bed is its kind of idyllic circumstances for the plants, whatever. The local issues are with your soil are not, you know? And if you're living, if you have an old house, there may be led in your soil. So it's you want to test your soil for you.
To use local soil for food or herbs, and it gives you this ideal growing medium because the land is never stepped on. So it doesn't get compressed. So the roots can really travel and you can plant more densely in a raised bed because the roots can go down rather than sideways. There's a book called square foot, gardening, that's really good. John, jeevan's who's an Englishman who really was one of the pioneers of organic gardening and he was a great believer in raised beds and in that you can experiment and you could take one end and do all.
Herbs and herbs are wonderful in that they don't need a lot of attention. Most of them are pretty tough summer annuals and it'll die every year like basil. You have to replant every year, but many of them will recede or just come up on their own again. And, you know, I have a house that I don't visit that often and all I plant now, there, I used to have this is the house where the Opium story took place. I mean, I still own it and I only plant herbs and garlic now because they can do very well without me. Garlic is the best crop because you planted in the fall.
And ignore it and whether it's dry or wet, it will come up and it has no pest bother it. It's absolutely foolproof and the very easy to plant, you just buy big cloves of garlic in the market, in the fall, and divide them up into single cloves, and stick them in the ground, and they'll do their thing. You need a house call. I have to come. I have to come visit and look at the
situation to come visit. You do need to come visit. I endorse that suggestion.
Yes. Start with John jeevan's, though.
He's it was a big influence on me when I started gardening, and square foot garden and watch out for those woodchucks,
you know, there aren't I. There are no woodchucks that I'm aware of here in Austin but we do have armadillos. I imagine they're pretty enthusiastic about eating anything and everything they can get their prehistoric pause on. But
all dear, you have dear. There are deer here
not nearly as many as you would find. Certainly in a rural part of
Of the East Coast.
So you'll learn pretty quickly. What your pests are because I bet know when the news gets around the neighborhood that there's some good vittles,
everybody shows up
and then you, then you have to start thinking in terms of fences and things like that.
Just a quick Interruption and we'll be right back to the show, the book suggested and referenced by Michael, from John jevons, jevons is Je AV ons is actually titled how to grow more vegetables.
Subtitle is then you ever thought possible unless land with less water than you can imagine? And there is a forward by Alice Waters. So, once again, it is John jevons JEA, vo, + S, and the title is, how to grow more vegetables. Will link to it in the show notes on, Tim dot block / podcast, now, back to the show, Michael, it's always so much fun. People can find you online at Michael Pollan.com at Michael Pollan on Twitter at Michael dot pollen on Instagram. The new book is this is your mind on plants.
It's, it's just a fascinating romp through history, your own personal adventures, and Fear, and Loathing in Connecticut, of course, and one portion. And I always enjoy your writing and also our time and conversation, is there anything else that you would like to say any closing comments, any requests of people listening anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind down this
conversation. I don't think so. I think we've covered a lot of ground as
As
usual, it's always a pleasure talking to you. We have so many interests in common, this is always a labor of love. So anyway, thank you.
Thank you. Michael to be continued. I'm going to take you up on that house call offer and for everybody listening as mentioned earlier, we will have show notes. Copious show notes for everything that we discussed, you can find links to everything descriptions. And so on at Tim dot blog, forward slash podcast just search, Michael Pollan and look for the most recent episode and then
Till next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email for me? And would you enjoy getting a short email for me? Every Friday is that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend and 500, Friday's a very short email, where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week, that could include favorite new albums, that have discovered
Include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric. As I do it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance, and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to four hour work week.com, that's 4-Hour workweek.com. All spelled out and just drop in your
Your email and you'll get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy this episode is brought to you by headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations, in an easy to use app. Now, you might ask yourself very reasonably. There are 2,000 plus apps for meditation. Why would I use headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research, and space is backed by 25. Published studies on its benefits.
Six hundred thousand, five star reviews, and more than 60 million downloads. So, if people keep telling you, to try meditation in your like, when would I do that? When would I possibly have time? You should check out headspace? If you have 10 minutes, headspace can change your life. Head. Space offers a really light lifts and a lot of features to keep you going, which is part of the reason that I've used headspace for years now. So whatever. The situation has faced can really help you feel better overwhelmed, headspace. As a 3-minute.
Is meditation view, need some help falling asleep. Headspace has wind down sessions, their members, swear by, and for parents headspace. Even as morning meditations, you can do with your kids. Hit spaces approach to mindfulness, can reduce stress, improve sleep, lose, focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. And it really starts with very, very simple practices. And if you look at my case, for instance, I just went through one of the basics today with the co-founder Andy
Put a cam could be pretty calm. I'm not sure, but former monk turned into co-founder of head. Space has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable and I did a three minute, meditation, something like that. It's easy. Its fundamental and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics, you know, I've meditated for years, I'm going through the basics once again and I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting their head space, makes it easy for you to build a life changing that a tation practice with mindfulness that works for.
You on your schedule. Anytime anywhere, we all want to feel happier, we all want more peace and headspace is meditation Made Simple. Do to head space.com, slash Tim, that's head space.com. Tim for a free one-month trial with access to head space is full library of meditations for every conceivable possible situation. You can break glass in case of emergency, in almost any situation and find something on headspace. This is the best deal offered right now for headspace. So,
Get out. Good headspace.com /. Tim today. This episode is brought to you by eight sleep. My God, am I in love with eight sleep? Good. Sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer more than 30 percent of Americans struggle sleep. And I'm a member of that. Sad proof temperature is one of the main causes of poor slave and heat has always been my Nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating Ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep.
In record time faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro cover by eights lie. It's easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature, it pairs Dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced but most user-friendly for Solution on the market. I pulled. All of you guys on social media, about the best tools for sleep and handsome, sleep and eight sleep was by far and away the crowd.
Everett and people were just raving fans of us. So I used it in here. We are, add the Pod Pro cover to your current mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the Heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side which is exactly what we're doing. Now for me. And for many people, the result 8,
Sleep users fall asleep up to 32 percent faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep. Overall, I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day. Feeling refreshed. And now my dear listeners. That's you guys, you can get 250 dollars off of the Pod Pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eight, sleep.com Tim or use code Tim that's eight. All spelled out Vig.
HT, sleep.com Tim or use coupon code, Tim TI M8, sleep.com, Tim for $200 off your pod, Pro cover.
