Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1121 - Michael Pollan
Uploaded: 2018-05-24T22:01:26.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1121 - Michael Pollan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-05-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1121 - Michael Pollan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-05-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1121 - Michael Pollan

that quickly two one
boom and we're live mr pollen how are you hey good good to be here fist away
there you go okay
what's happening man how are you uh good good to be in la uh good to have you
here i've been a fan
of your work for a long time man and i got really excited when i found out that
you were writing a
book on psychedelics and uh um i'm just uh i think it's a an amazing subject
and i'm glad someone
who's respected like yourself is getting it's a crackpot subject right it's one
of those subjects
you're like oh no michael pollen found drugs like what's he doing he's having a
crisis you know it
was it is a bit of a departure i think that there are people who are expecting
another book on food
or agriculture and uh we're a little surprised um but so far people have been
following me you know
who cared about food and ag and they're there's more overlap than i ever would
have guessed i think you
caught the perfect wave i think your book is coming out right when john hopkins
research center is
starting to put out these studies on it people are starting to recognize that mdma
has amazing results
for post-traumatic stress disorder from veterans and marijuana is becoming
legal in more and more states
it's like you're catching this wave yeah and i didn't know that i you know you
never know where
the culture is going to be because you start a book years before how long did
you start well i started
the research in uh 2014 i wrote a piece for the new yorker called the trip
treatment uh which is
online um and it was uh my first foray into this work i went down to hopkins
and spent a lot of time
at nyu and at the time they were doing this really interesting trial where they
were giving psilocybin
to people with cancer diagnoses many of whom were terminal and that seemed like
such a weird idea to
me that i i was curious to explore it and i spent a lot of time talking to
patients many of whom were
dying about how this single high dose psilocybin experience a guided psilocybin
experience and we
should talk a little bit about how the guided changes things for you know it's
not the the image people
have is popping some mushrooms in your mouth and maybe going to a concert or
going to the beach but
this is a very controlled internal experience uh completely reset these people's
attitude toward
death and and allow them to die with equanimity and um uh and when these
results were published um
just last year they found that um that in 80 percent of the people who had the
session uh they had
statistically significant reductions in standard measures of depression and
anxiety it was one of
the most effective psychiatric interventions that these psychiatrists had ever
seen uh which is amazing
a single experience and that a molecule could change the contents of your head
to the to the extent that
you would rethink your mortality uh and so as i began talking to these people
and hearing their stories
many of which were just remarkable i realized you know this is not just an
article there's a book here
and there's so much you know there are two kinds of articles you write as a
journalist one is
you you you you're sick of the topic by the time you finish and you can't wait
to be done and the other is
god i just scratched the surface and this was one of those did you have any
experiences personally with
psychedelics before you wrote this very limited um i for some peculiar reason
never did psychedelics in
college they just weren't around i went to they weren't around no i went to the
wrong school
what school did you go to and it was like a very kind of progressive hippie
school i went to bennington
college in vermont and there were there was lsd there before me and there was lsd
after me but i was in
this little wrinkle in time where there was only alcohol i need a cup there you
go thanks jamie so that's crazy
only alcohol in college and i had no so i had no experience of psychedelics uh
until i was in my late
20s and then it was um pretty mild i had a couple mushroom experiences that
would i now describe as
aesthetic experiences right once small doses yeah they were something like that
yeah i never even
measured it was probably one gram um so i'd never had a big trip and um and
there was another reason i
was i i didn't feel psychologically sturdy enough and i came of age just when
the the the scare stories
about psychedelics were everywhere in the culture you know they would scramble
your chromosomes you'd stare
at the sun till you went blind um you know the person who took all the orange
sunshine and thought
he was an orange for the rest of his life you know these stories were out there
and i was afraid to
i was just afraid yeah well that's it's it's not an unfounded fear oh no i'm no
people can really get
into psychological trouble i think it's really important that people understand
that uh it's a it's a
profound powerful destabilizing experience and depending on your mindset and
your and the situation in which
you take it set and setting it can be um ecstatic or horrific and um and you
know there are many people
who had a series of very good trips and then they have that one bad trip and uh
so yeah i and i had
heard enough stories about that um to to stay away uh so so discovering this
kind of later in life uh
you know i was the certainly not something i planned on or expected
it's a great tragedy in in my opinion that our culture has demonized these
substances and put them
in this category of forbidden fruit to the point where you you're so nervous
about doing them you have
to get them from some shady character and you don't know what you're getting
yeah you have to do them
in the you know in secrecy you have to be really careful but we also at the
same time are aware of all
these incredibly positive benefits from them and then if we just had
professional places where we
could go to and when we have these rehab facilities that are available for
people trying to kick opiates
and people trying to get their life together but if we had something similar
like a psychedelic facility
with registered professionals who understand this and who could evaluate you
psychologically
understand if you were perhaps taking medication that would adversely affect
your trip
try to find out who you are like where what state you're at in your life have
you had any experiences
before maybe we should put you on a low dose THC let's ramp it up uh slowly let's
try something
small and see how you react to it and then i think i don't think people uh like
myself or pot smokers or
people have done psychedelics i don't think we do it any favors either because
we're always trying to
pretend that there is no adverse effects and that there's like you know people
when they get into
something they want everybody to do it and i've been guilty of this myself yeah
people tend there's a
there's a occupational hazard of uh of uh irrational exuberance you know this
is what happened to
timothy leary right i mean people it's they people have an amazing experience
and the first thing they
think is everybody's got to do this yeah but it isn't for everybody and i think
you're absolutely
right i think that look there are risks but these are not drugs of abuse right
they're non-addictive
they're anti-addictive the first thought after having a big psychedelic trip is
not when can i do
this again right whoa it's whoa the last one i had i was like i don't know if i
could do that again
yeah i felt that way every time it's like childbirth or how how we hear childbirth
is you can't imagine
doing it again and eventually you do you do do it again um so i do think that
we have to find the
proper context in which to do it and i i think your point is really important
we need trained guides
um the experience is completely different when it's guided yeah um because you
have a sense of safety
there's someone looking out for your body while your mind is traveling and this
allows you to
essentially surrender to the experience and most bad trips in my experience are
the result of people
resisting what is happening their ego is dissolving and it's scary it feels
like a death and they try to
stop it and that can make you very anxious and so all the guides i worked with
and interviewed they
were all like relax your mind and float downstream if you see a door open it if
you see a staircase go
down it um uh surrender trust and let go and this kind of advice changes
everything and the chances of
a bad trip i think in a guided situation are substantially less because they
know how to help you deal with it
and and what to tell you when it's happening um so i i do think that um by by
forcing these drugs
underground and into this very kind of unregulated use um there were not
reports of bad trips were much
fewer before the moral panic about lsd in 1965 and when it was still legal um
you didn't hear about bad
bad trips um you started hearing about it when the culture did this 180 and
turned against uh psychedelics
so i think you can create situations where the the the risks are really mitigated
well i think also the
fear like you were talking about right but right before the podcast of or right
as we started with some
people worried that they were going to turn into an orange or think they're an
orange or all those fears
if you take something and those things are in the back of your head and you're
you can you know literally
manifest extreme anxiety yeah that might not have been there if you just
relaxed and just had the
experience alone you know on its own without all the cultural hysteria attached
to it yeah or or episodes
of paranoia that's that's that's common too so but a good guide can work you
through this and actually
they don't even like the term bad trip they call it a challenging trip because
often very interesting
material comes up that you then can work on later yeah uh it's like having a
nightmare and you know
analyzing it with your shrink it actually may be very productive um so so you
know i i was kind of a
nervous nelly going into this and i really looked at the whole risk profile and
on the on the physiological
side your body the risks are remarkably low and i'm speaking here of the
classic psychedelics i'm not
talking about mdma or even pot i'm really i'm talking about lsd psilocybin
which is magic mushrooms
um dmt mescaline um they are much less toxic than many of the over-the-counter
drugs you have in your
medicine cabinet there is no lethal dose which is remarkable yeah um there was
one elephant that was
killed with lsd once they wanted to see what it would take and it was this they
gave it a massive dose but
to get it to the point where they could administer it they had to give it a
massive dose of tranquilizer so it isn't
actually clear that the lsd killed it it may have been the the benzos or
whatever they were giving
it i know what a horrible thing right go online and look up uh the elephant who
died from lsd what a crazy idea
yeah uh animal cruelty was going through the elephant's mind before it died
well animals don't like psychedelics that
much um we know that if you you know that classic setup that drug abuse
researchers use where they they put a rat in a cage and they
and there's a lever and they can administer cocaine or heroin uh or they can
have lunch and they'll press
the cocaine lever till they die right you put lsd in that setup they press it
once and never again
well that setup is always screwy right because they really shouldn't be in that
situation it's not a
natural setup like that's been criticized that's right and they're somebody in
vancouver these really
cool rat park experiments yeah yeah that's what you're referencing and um
basically they thought
that this was inevitably what happens but in fact if you give a rat a beautiful
cage with some things
to play with some other rats to hang out with some nature you know some shrubs
and things it will not
take the cocaine isn't that interesting it it tells us that environment h