YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Pollan

lines on the record: 120
first: 2021-06-30
most recent: 2021-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't think so. I think we've covered a lot of ground 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you'll learn pretty quickly what your pests are When the news gets around the neighborhood that there's some good vitals, everybody shows up.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ignore it. And whether it's dry or wet, it will come up. And it has no pests bother it. It's absolutely foolproof. And they're 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 visit and look at the situation.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Jeevans, who is 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. Some are annuals and it'll die every year, like basil you have to replant every year, but many of them will reseed or just come up on their own again. And, you know, I have a house that I don't visit that often.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without biting Well, one way to start, I mean, not having seen your property or know that much, I know it gets very hot in 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 it's 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 lead in your soil. So you want to test your soil if you're going to use local soil for food or herbs. And it gives you this ideal growing medium.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, no Paisley, no kaleidoscopes, because that was never right anyway. That's just, 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without question, yeah, they start, they watch it on television and then 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?”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny, you should ask. Yesterday 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, MDMA, and Mescalin, 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 another, but also, you know, 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 drop.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 boon 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 consciousness. There's lantern consciousness and spotlight consciousness”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 unbalance, 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, I had quite a journey with caffeine, as did 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 all the health issues tied to it. Now, you can't abuse caffeine. You can have too much till you're, you know, and an anxious people will get more jittery sometimes, but it's good for your heart. It's good for your blood pressure. It prevents certain kinds of cancer, or it's associated with lower rates of certain kinds of cancer, dementia. It improves your memory. It improves people's performance in athletics. It's kind of amazing. The only negative is it messes with your sleep. Even if you stop drinking coffee at noon, it has a quarter life of 12 hours. So a quarter of the caffeine that you ingested will still be in your bloodstream at midnight. And what it robs you of or can is deep.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many ways. It really contributed to the rise of rationalism in Europe too. A certain way of thinking that's very linear, very rational, very logical. And I understood this in part 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 it gives us a little lift and it stops withdrawal, the 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 few months, that first cup is psychedelic.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“this huge boon to the industrial revolution people who can safely handle machines and also you can't have a night shift without caffeine right we were stuck with the circadian rhythms of the of the rhythms of the sun and only when caffeine comes along could you extend the workday and you know the best proof of this idea is if you think about it the institution of the coffee break is like a what 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 1900s that employees who got coffee breaks at mid morning and mid afternoon did more work performed better and i tell the story of the company where the first coffee break was instituted so caffeine has changed the course of civilization in many”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People were drinking all day long. They drank for breakfast. They drank for lunch. They drank for dinner. There were alcohol breaks instead of coffee breaks on farms. And this was all fine when you're doing physical labor. But once you start operating machines and you have to deal with double entry bookkeeping, a drunk workforce is a serious problem. 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. It 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boston Harbor and switched 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 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 100 years later, tea became so much cheaper and tea 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 and like France, they were much more coffee. And when America was started, we were a tea culture because we were getting all this tea that the British East India Company was bringing in. But of course, with the revolution, we revolted against all things English. You'll recall the Tea Party from your high school history textbooks. And the tax on tea was so offensive to the colonists that they threw a whole shipment of tea into...”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When coffee and tea were first introduced to Europe, which happens in the same decade in the sixteen fifties, it was coffee that took off. And coffee became this tremendous fad in England. And there were coffee houses. There was one coffee house for every 150 Londoners. I mean, they 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 the coffee house 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 in Covent Garden.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I do see 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,”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I'll send it to you. Anyway, so it's, you know, and now she's a New Yorker staff writer. Wow. So, 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 really 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 in psychedelics. It's going to get much more contentious and much more complicated in the years to come.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 can put it in the show notes.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Young journalist named Nicola Twilly, 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, all kinds of things. And she had this cool idea about going to China as they're at the embarking on this revolution. And she wrote a really good pitch. And she sent it to the New York Times magazine and they said, well, it's a great story, but you don't have any experience reporting from China or, you know, we can't afford to send you. If you were a name writer or 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, well, take your piece. They took her piece. They published it. It was very successful. And it led to a book.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, actually about eight years ago, I started a similar fellowship, which is the 11th hour. Wendy Schmidt's Foundation, 11th hour Berkeley Journalism Fellowships. And this was to cover food and agriculture. And it's organized somewhat differently. We take 10 people a year. We get several hundred applications, people who have an idea, young journalists, you know, 30s, early 30s or 20s. And we pick 10 and we give them a $10,000 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 we'll 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. But we found that this was incredibly helpful to people's careers. I'll give you one example. There was a, you know,”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 digest of 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. And it'll report on new research as well as other developments. Eventually, we help to do a podcast and we're going to do a massive online course too. Psychedelic science 101 that I'm working with my colleagues to develop. So I'm hoping that Berkeley will become a center for really high quality journalism related to psychedelics. We all at the center are very grateful to you, Tim, for supporting this effort.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 journalist with a really good idea, I hope you'll get in touch with us. And we'll publicize it how to do it. If you followed my Twitter feed, we'll definitely have it there. And perhaps in Tim's newsletter as well. So anyway, I'm very grateful to Tim for recognizing the value of this.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And every year we'll give out grants to people and help fund their journalism. Whether they need $5,000 or $10,000 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 magazines. 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 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 will give our journalists a real lego.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It will be called the Ferris UC Berkeley.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Including my omnivores 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. 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 a sum of money each year to give grants?”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 is a huge amount of curiosity about psychedelics and sources of information are somewhat limited and not always that rigorous. So I see psychedelics 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 pages on Wednesday in the newspaper, and journalism about agriculture was trade magazines, like beef today or progressive grocer. That's where you had to go to learn what was happening in agriculture. Beginning with Eric Schlosser's important book, Fast Food Nation in 2002 and a couple other books.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 just got 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 guides, which is understood to be the great bottleneck going forward. I think maps or the funders collaborative estimates we're going to need 100,000 guides in the next 10 years. And then the third thing that I'm most”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That jibes. I mean, I think we're at an inflection point and a huge amount of capital has moved into this space and 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 original intellectual property. Nature will save us, though. The Salasopy 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 pharmaceutical context.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Roland 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 Roland was willing to bet that it would not, that you have to have the experience. But we are learning that there is a pharmacological effect in terms of neurogenesis and brain plasticity. So, who knows? So we may look back on words like mescaline and psilocybin as like ancient history in 50 years when we have all these new substances or not. You know, Sasha Shulgin developed lots of new substances and we're still very interested in the originals.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 working with psilocybin, they're tweaking psilocybin too, 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 psychedelics, which to me just seems kind of nuts, but for a lot of people, that may be the way to go. And there's a whole effort to prove. And there's some evidence it might work uncertain 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 of the experience.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wants to use mescaline. But in his case, it's going to be alcoholism. I think that'll 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 there'll be a lot of people willing to invest the resources necessary. But trauma is what it's, the MDMA qualities of it, you know, suggest that, and the fact that it's been used by Native Americans so successfully. And in effect, 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 that have been around for a while, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT? Or will there be drugs we can't imagine right now?”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 too. I mean, they really think it's helpful with various physical and their stories of, you know, that I did hear from Native Americans about children being cured of cancer and physical ailments. 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 too. I mean, the focus has been so narrowly on psilocybin and MDMA, and there are good reasons for that. But substances like mescaline have been neglected. And Journey Colab is a new startup that hopes to work with Mascaline and has a very elaborate system of reciprocity with Native Americans that a certain amount of their revenue is going to go to Native American communities. And there is a researcher at University of Alabama who”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 there are going to be a lot more, and they're going to be tested in the courts. Bob Jesse's idea of 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. It's very exciting. And it will happen, I think, around opiates also. There's a real difference between making some opium tea 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Abuse is a dysfunctional relationship with drugs, in my view. So, what's the proper container for masculine? 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 desocialized the use of tobacco 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 in 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 does the drug peace look like? That's where we are now. We have to figure that out. And we're kind of working on it with psychic.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The drug war is subsiding, it's fading. I mean, you know, what happened in 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 decrim ballot initiative pass in Washington, D.C. and several other places. 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 subtexts of this book is when the drug war ends, our 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 of these drugs, we have to figure out our relationship to them.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. You could get in lots of trouble.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 plant. But if you prepare it and it's prepared essentially like a vegetable stock, you are breaking federal law.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 Shulgin farm, Anne and Sasha Shulgin. They have a wonderful Sasha Shulgin was fascinated by Peyote Cactus and San Pedro, and he was always tweaking the mescaline molecule. That was his favorite one to mess with. And then I have some other friends in Berkeley gave me some. And they're very easy to take cuttings. And the plant just wants to grow. You can just take a length of it if one falls, you know, and they fall over in storms and leave it anywhere. And it'll send up new columns. It's remarkable. But it's important.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Binelli, 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I had hoped. So this chapter is very much all three sections of this book have there's a writing problem. It's interesting or a publishing problem. With opium, 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 the very chapter is endangered by the lack 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 meeting 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 for hours to get to a good internet connection so they can talk to you. So it was a piece that was inflected 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 town.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it is legal. By the way, it's legal to grow San Pedro Cactus. Yeah. And it's not legal to grow peyote. So that's another advantage to San Pedro.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a decriminalized nature movement that's very vibrant in America right now. And the idea of leaving out peyote 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 now a fight between the Native American Church and Decrim nature going on, which is really unfortunate. My basic thinking is we should leave this one alone. And 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 masculine. You don't have to use their sacrament. There is San Pedro, for example, which is another cactus that comes from South America and is very easy to grow. And once I had my eyes on to notice it and knew what it would look like, I see it all over Berkeley where I live. And I bet it's all over Austin too.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which runs along the Rio Grande on the Texas side, there's a lot more of it on the Mexican side. But between cattle ranching and development and poaching by, you know, psychonauts, and it's a 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. It looks like a stone or a pincushion, and you actually eat it. You eat the whole thing. 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 moral and ethical question about that. I mean, it'd be one thing to grow your own peyote. I wouldn't have a problem with that, but you see me in 15 years and it'll be ready. And this has, of course, been become a controversy.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 a society together to create cultural cohesion and healing. And it has a lot to teach us. And why Meskelyn was the right substance for that is 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.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of made official in 1917 is the container, the cultural container that 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 culture 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 a very, this is a traumatized population. And it was particularly traumatized in the 1880s. This is when planes and 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 agriculturalists.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I was interested in masculine too is its long history of use in the Native American community. First of all, it is the oldest known psychedelic in 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 with it. And so I think there's a great deal to learn. I was fascinated by the Native American use of masculine in the form of peyote. Here we have 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 just disruption of society, certainly in the 60s. So the Native American church, which is developed in the 1880s and kind of”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT