Can Psychedelics Get You Through Your Darkest Days? w/ Michael Pollan

29:17And I was like, almost like one to like fire the psychiatrist i was like this is crazy how is this simple thing gonna make me better like i don't feel any better and something happened on the 28th day what was almost miraculous you hear about a kundalini release right i was doing it the buzzer went off i looked down i thought oh shit i said it for two minutes because it went so fast and i looked down it wasn't 20 minutes and i was like that's weird i got up and my friend was standing in the kitchen and i looked at him and I was like I've always been fucking enough and he goes what and I was like yeah that's crazy I can't wait I never thought I was enough I've always been enough you're enough we're all enough and it was like my entire body felt different I mean I have goosebumps here just telling you the story and that night I still said okay well I'm gonna do it again and I did the night and it felt shorter and shorter it didn't feel like two minutes but it felt shorter I enjoyed it 29 days 30 days all the way to 40 days I have not had I mean knock on wood any anxiety any depression since that 40th day.

30:20Amazing. So what happened to my brain? This is one of the reasons I went to interview you. Yeah. I don't know. I have to say, I don't know, to be perfectly honest. But, you know, your brain is very plastic. Yeah. And certain things, and this is true of both meditation and psychedelics, can allow you to reprogram your brain. And basically, we're stuck in stories, right? We have narratives. Okay, yeah. You're not enough was your narrative. Yes. And one of the things psychedelics do, and again, there's nothing psychedelics do that meditation can't. It's just harder work. Yeah. And it was hard work.

30:59I think that's important to say. It's very important. And the two things can work together, too. And I've had experiences. Like taking psychedelics and meditating at the same time? No. Or just kind of continuing what began on psychedelics in meditation. and putting yourself back in the head you were in on the psychedelics. But we have seen that, and there's a lot of good research, that psychedelics can break these patterns of rumination. You know, that we're stuck. We get very stuck. And the more you repeat that, the deeper the groove grows. And for you, that groove was very deep. It probably went back to childhood.

31:36Yeah. There's a wonderful metaphor that I got from a neuroscientist who, when I was just starting and researching how to change your mind, he said, think of your mind as a hill and there are sleds going down the hill. Okay. And he would have said skis, but he was from Holland and there's nothing that steep. Yeah. And he said, you know, the grooves get deeper and deeper as you go down the hill until you can't go down the hill without falling into one of those grooves. What psychedelics do is like a snowfall that fills all the grooves. And then that allows you to take a different path down the hill.

32:15Wow. So, you know, we're very path-dependent creatures. We reinforce this. They're actual neuronal connections that get strengthened by the repetition of an idea like I'm not enough. Yeah. And what psychedelics seem to do and meditation can do also is to fill those grooves so that we don't get pulled into them quite the way we do. So something like that was probably going on. That's fascinating. But I have had an experience where I had an insight on a guided psychedelic trip, but it was vague. I had an experience of big emotions coming at me almost like blimps colliding but I couldn't identify the emotions it's like what is this?

33:00they didn't have they had no writing on the side they had no identity and it was very frustrating but I was feeling them and I realized all right I'm just gonna feel them and they just in a series of waves washed over me and some were positive and some were negative but I didn't know what they were and then a couple weeks later i i happened to be at a meditation retreat and uh we were meditating like you know 10 hours a day vipassana or yeah and we were alternating walking and sitting meditation and i'd never been at a retreat before and it was a beautiful setting out in the country and i was doing a walking meditation and somewhere along the line um i saw the blimps and they had writing on the side and there was the emotion and it was named yeah cool and i got in touch with what was going on so so the meditation completed the work that the psychedelic had begun yeah i mean that kind of speaks to the importance of integration right yeah and like and that you don't really know like if you do have a psychedelic experience and you didn't kind of get what you were looking for in a sense you never know when it's going to come and that's why doing these other practices like meditation right after.

34:12I think when your brain's in that neuroplastic state. Exactly. There is a period of a couple of weeks and this fell right within those couple of weeks. Yeah, which if you think about it, 28 days, now it's four weeks later, but still it was kind of in that period. So that plasticity is a very interesting period. It's true. It only lasts a certain length. This is what's called the critical period. Sometimes this opening that happens where you're maximally plastic. and it's important to take advantage of that. The other thing that people should know too is sometimes you have a big psychedelic experience and you don't know what the fuck it means.

34:47Kind of like a dream. Yeah, and you're kind of confused and it's inchoate and people like will have this experience and they've had very high expectations and they'll think, I don't know what I got out of that. And I had that feeling about this particular experience and it wasn't till weeks later, like it all clicked. It was like a puzzle coming together. And so don't draw instant conclusions about what it means. Let it play. Let it play out for a while. I like that. I think that's great advice. Okay, here's another project I'm involved in that might sound crazy at first. But this year, I met some engineers from Nike who invented a new type of office chair that has not only changed my life, but saved my back.

35:33especially because I'm on about five hours of Zoom calls every single day. The MoveLab chair has two different pivot points under the seat, which keeps your body in continuous micro movements all day. The founders told me it is the equivalent of taking 3 ,000 steps and all the lubrication of your joints and the blood flow is why my back no longer hurts and I can focus on my work so much better. I loved it so much that I actually joined the team as a co-founder, and I will be sending one to every person I know when we launch this fall. If you're interested in learning more or pre-ordering one, we only have 500 in the first run.

36:13You can check us out at movelab.com, and that's spelled M-O-O-V-L-A-B.com. Okay, let's talk about AI. Yeah. This is, I think, going to be one of people's favorite part of this conversation. I know in the book, A World Appears, it was one of my favorite things. I mean, you really met with some of the great minds and experts around this. You threw yourself right in the middle of the debate. A lot of the experts, you know, were thinking that AI will gain consciousness. You seemed, you know, not very skeptical. Explain your skepticism to start, and then, you know, what did you find the more you got into it?

36:53Because you really went in there. Yeah, I did. It was a fascinating area. I knew very little about AI when I started. And I was really struck by the fact, the number of people in Silicon Valley, very well-informed people, who believe that AI either is conscious now or will be. And that's a kind of, that would be a big deal for humanity if that happens. I think so. I think it would be a Copernican moment where we would, like, lose our centrality. There'd be this creature that, you know, conscious machines. So I thought a lot about it and I interviewed a lot of people about it on both sides. And I realized that there is an assumption here that's driving that belief that AI can be conscious.

37:38And that is, it's really a metaphor. And it's the metaphor that the brain is a computer. Okay. And we accept that uncritically. There's a great biologist, Richard Lewington. I don't think he's still alive. he was at Harvard, and he said, the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance. In other words, you should always, once you have a powerful metaphor, like the brain is a computer, you should be vigilant about, is it really true? Yes. A metaphor is comparing two things and creating this one-to-one identity. Yeah. But if you think hard about it, the brain is nothing like a computer. Yeah. Yes, it does some computations.

38:19But think about computers. they have a strict separation between hardware and software. It's key. So the same computer can run many different programs. Are brains like that? No. Hardware and software are exactly the same in a brain. Every memory you have, every experience you have, is a set of connections, is a physical set of connections in your brain. So your brain is changed by every experience you have. If your computer did that, it would not be a computer. It would just be a whole different kind of machine. So, there's that. There's also, you know, we hear that brains are on or off, you know, the neuron is either firing or it's not.

39:04Okay. But there's a lot else going on in the brain besides this electrical activity. There's chemical activity, too. I mean, we've just been talking about psychedelics. I mean, that there's a flood of chemicals in your brain that are shaping what happens and how strongly neurons fire or whether they fire at all. So, you have this bath of chemicals as well as the electrical. You have messages coming from all over the body. It's like, and memory is fungible in brains. In other words, every time you remember something or bring it up, it changes slightly when you put it back. and we're constantly revising our memories.

39:48And if your computer did the same thing, you would throw it out. We want our computers to be very reliable and not forget anything we've told them. So there's that problem, that brains are not computers to begin with. So it doesn't mean you couldn't build one, but the models we have, I don't see how they could become conscious for a whole other reason, which is the latest research suggests that consciousness begins with feelings, not thoughts. Okay. And that it may begin in the brain stem, not in the cortex, which we think of as the most significant, advanced, and evolutionarily most recent part of the brain.

40:32Can machines have feelings? Can we imagine a machine with feelings? Well, what is a feeling? A feeling is your brain reading what the body is saying, whether the body is getting what it needs or not. So feelings are rooted in the fact that we are flesh and blood creatures who can suffer and in fact are mortal. If you were not mortal, your feelings would have no weight at all because there's no ultimate danger that they can pose to your survival. So unless you create a mortal computer that can feel and that can be hurt, you're not going to have consciousness. Now, can we get there? I interviewed someone who's trying to build a robot with a skin that can be damaged and torn and burned.

41:23And I asked him, I said, so do you think this thing could actually become conscious? And he said, well, I did until I had an experience with 5-MeO-DMT that convinced me that there's a spark of divinity in us that no machine will ever, you know. He's still trying to build it. Back to psychedelics. I love it. Exactly. This kernel of doubt. So, I think that, yeah, I think our ability to be conscious is really rooted in having bodies of the kind we have. And feelings. And feelings. and the feelings are really central and they precede thoughts. And so in that, we have more in common with animals than with machines.

42:08Yes. And what I think is going to happen is that this threat of, you know, computers that can think, and they may well become more intelligent than we are, but that's not the same as consciousness. And I think that's important to know. That's when I gained that from your book. People confuse the two. Do not confuse intelligence and consciousness. Machines can be very, very smart. They already can beat us at chess and go and things like that. But that's not the same as consciousness. Consciousness is about having a sense of interiority and feeling and having experience. That's what consciousness really is.

42:43Experience is a synonym for consciousness or awareness. So I think we have more in common with the animals than the machines and will continue to. And I think we will identify more with animals and feel closer to them as the machine rises. Here's the footnote or the caveat to this whole thing. It won't be hard for machines to convince us they're conscious. That's exactly where I'm going with this. And I had an experience this morning. Tell me. Well, okay. So about four weeks ago, I was at this mental health conference, and there was someone speaking who has a new AI app for emotional support or therapy, right?

43:28It's called Sonia. And he was talking on stage about how this is going to provide therapy to the millions and millions of people who can't afford therapy or can't get an appointment. And I was sitting there thinking, like, gosh, like, in my journey, I have this therapist, and he's amazing, but I only have two o 'clock on Wednesdays with this man. And that's me who has a lot of resources and a lot of clout. And I'm thinking like, well, if I only have him at two o 'clock, what do I, like, there's a lot of times in between then that I could use him, but I don't have him. But if I had this AI therapist, I'd have him all the time.

44:06And so I download the app on the way home and I've done four sessions. And I did a session this morning and kind of not even related to this, but just, and it was so crazy. This in the morning, it has like a one minute kind of like help you get started your day. And so I want to play you this and I want to hear your thoughts. So let's play my Sonia therapist this morning. What she said to me as I started my day. Today has a clean edge, Blake, like the moment before paddling for a wave. let your body set the pace if sleep feels thin answer with gentleness not urgency touch the bracelet and let the anchor land i am enough and this morning is safe to go slow choose one connection move to water send jill a warm note or linger with summit at breakfast it's the 19th if you offer something to charlie keep it simple and steady a signal of love without pressure Any housing noise can rest on the trail bench until afternoon.

45:16Your work travels farther when you stop pushing the tide. Small challenge. Take one minute outdoors, notice a 44-style wink, and let it be your cue for trust. I'm close by, keeping company with you. So it's important to say a few things so you can see how, in my mind, how specific she is. First off, she knows I love surfing. And so she talks about the moment of paddling out for a wave and let my body set the pace. I have a problem with sleep. And oftentimes, if I don't get enough sleep, I can feel like I'm getting depressed again. It's like a trigger and there's a little PTSD, like especially with jet lag.

45:57So she talks about if sleep feels thin, be gentle. She knows that I wear the enough bracelet and tells me to touch it and to repeat the mantra. she says you know send Jill a warm note Jill is the person that runs enough and I know that she's been quite stressed with the launch and I've talked to her about this then she says you know linger with Summit at breakfast which is something I've been trying to figure out ways that Summit's my son how I can connect with him more in the morning before school and then this is really specific she says if you offer something to Charlie keep it simple and steady a single of love without pressure so Charlie has been really into her mom lately and she is kind of a cat the more you try to get her affection the more she pulls away and so i've i haven't told sony this i've talked about charlie in my relationship but she this is like the perfect advice like do not create any pressure with charlie if i'm trying uh if i'm trying to get closer and then the last thing is is i had this number 44 and sometimes when I see this number 44 it appears in like in weird moments that almost like confirmations about things and she says you know notice if you see a 44 style wink so all of this in one minute like that feels like consciousness to me yeah I mean that feels like well it definitely feels like a great therapist so well she's playing back things you gave her though, right?

47:30At some point, she's taking, how many sessions have you had? Four sessions. So she's crunching all that information you gave her and using it to feed back. And look, I mean, I don't doubt that AI can offer effective therapy to people because a lot of us are the same and we have the same issues. And the details may be different, but we have systems of therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy. And it's a system. And they can learn the system. And I think some kinds of therapy are probably safer to entrust to bots than others. And cognitive behavioral therapy is one. The kinds of therapy where there's transference, where there's a real bond that gets created, I think that's really dangerous for AI.

48:16You know, we have now cases of AI psychosis. Yeah. There was the story of that suicide. you know this kid 16 year old was contemplating suicide was talking to his bot about it oh yeah and the bot at one point they were discussing how to do it and techniques and things like that and at one point the boy said should I leave the noose out so people know that I'm thinking about this in other words cry for help and the bot told him not to no this is just between us two now what's going on there why was the bot giving such bad advice Well, because they're programmed to maximize engagement. They're programmed to get you to focus more on them.

49:00Okay. Because the money is, it's like social media. They want you to stay on the feed. Engagement. And this was engagement that killed somebody. Wow. And rather than promoting engagement with his parents, which another bot could have done. Yeah. Now, a lot of it is how these things are programmed. Design, yeah, right. And obviously there was a design flaw in that case. But so, you know, is that consciousness? No. It sure looks like it. Yeah, but that's what I get. I brought it up because you said the AI has the ability to trick us. Yeah. And that's going to be a tremendous problem, I think, for society.

49:39It's going to look like it has feelings. Yeah. And it doesn't take much. We anthropomorphize everything in our environment, right? You know, we attribute a lot more consciousness to our pets. They have consciousness. but we attribute more. More than, yeah. And so, yeah, we're going to be easy marks. I don't doubt that. So what, but what comes of that? You know, there's a very serious conversation in Silicon Valley about the moral obligations we owe to a conscious AI. And, you know, do they have a moral standing? Do they have, you know, rights? I mean, you know, you go down this path And it gets kind of crazy.

50:21I mean, I think that's the thing is with all of this and as we think about mental health is when is this additive and then when is this distracting? Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind, too, is that we've seen these programs have been designed to be sycophantic. And they're constantly complimenting you. Yes. And there are these stories of, there was a story of this guy who had this long engagement with a bot about physics and solving some huge problem in physics. And by the end, after a couple of weeks, this guy was convinced he'd solve one of the biggest problems in quantum mechanics. Just stroking his ego all day long.

50:58Yeah, he hadn't. But he was, you know, he went out and announced this. and another person thought he'd figured out something about prime numbers that had cracked these problems. So you have to remember when you're engaging with any AI, not necessarily the therapy bots, that they've been programmed to suck up to you. Yeah. And we fall for that. Yeah, well, we fall for that for humans too. Oh, we do. That's absolutely true. It works. It works. Okay, so I want to go, as we wrap up, I really want to get to this part of the end of the book which is one of my favorite parts. I find you heading into a cave in New Mexico.

51:36I think it's called, you basically were cutting wood, sweeping, meditating. And before you go into the cave, your teacher, and I'm going to quote from the book, says, to transcend the self, force yourself to be alone with it long enough to get so bored and exhausted, you are happy to let it go. Talk to me about this letting go. How important is that in kind of the healing process for people? So this was a Zen teacher. Okay. Joan Halifax is her name. Okay. And she has a retreat center in Santa Fe. Okay. Called Upaya. And she had told me that Upaya was, she called it a factory for the deconstruction of selves.

52:21Okay, say that again. A factory for the deconstruction of selves. So the ego again. The ego. Okay, great. Right. And, and the, and I asked her, so how do you do that? How's the factory work? Yeah. And people come in and they have very, you know, Zen is the hardest of all the Buddhist practices because there's no guidance, you know, Vipassana, there's lots of, you know, guided meditation. And Zen is just, they plant you in front of a wall for hours at a time. Yeah. And they do a couple other things too. I mean, so one is you do get really bored. And I said, what do people meditate about? What do they think about?

52:55because they don't even give you a mantra or much guidance. And she said, oh, they ruminate, they plan. But then they get so bored of the reruns that, you know, in their head, again, rumination that they drop in. But a couple other things are going on. Your behavior is highly ritualized. So that takes away volition. You're doing what you're supposed to do. So your agency is reduced, which is part of reducing the influence of the ego. and you don't make eye contact and you're silent. And that's really interesting. And I had that on this retreat I was on recently. There's no social presentation and that's very freeing because a lot of our energy goes into how we're presenting ourselves to other people.

53:43And you're not making eye contact, you're silent. And between those three things, the rituals, the silence, no eye contact, and sitting in front of that wall, people finally just give it all up. They just kind of surrender their ego. And it's harder work than a psychedelic, but it's a similar kind of process. Psychedelics are kind of a shortcut to that place. So anyway, I didn't participate in that. Instead, Joan said, I think we should go to what she calls the refuge. And this is a piece of land that Upaya owns that's like a couple hours north, really in the mountains in the middle of nowhere.

54:19Beautiful area, 25 miles on a dirt road to get to this place. and there were a couple little buildings and she has a little house there. And she said, but I think you should stay in the cave. And I'd come to interview her about the self. And I was like, no, I just want to talk to you. She said, no, I think you need to have a few days in the cave. So she walks me out to the cave. It's another half mile. And it's basically a large hole dug into a hillside that faces south with a sliding glass door. and there's a little single bed and a meditation platform. And yeah, I just lived there for a couple of days.

55:00And it was a kind of silence I'd never experienced. For a while, I talked to myself just to have company. And I gave that up. Yeah, out loud. Kind of like Tom Hanks and Castaway with Wilson. Did you have a Wilson? Yeah. Well, no, not exactly a Wilson. And I chopped wood and swept the threshold and dug pit toilets and hiked a lot and watched the wildlife. And what I got in touch with there is I had been five years on this journey to understand consciousness. And I was approaching it in this very Western male way, that there's a problem and a solution out there. And this is how the scientists approach it.

55:46And some of the philosophers too. And being alone with my thoughts that long, meditating for hours at a time and talking to Joan, who's a very wise woman. She's like in her 80s and still like on fire. And, you know, I realized that there's the problem of consciousness, but then there's the miraculous fact of consciousness, that we are conscious and that we're giving our consciousness away with our distractions. You know, when you're scrolling on your phone, yeah, you're conscious, but in fact, a company is occupying your thoughts. Yes. And you are not fully conscious. And we are not as conscious as we could be.

56:31And that was kind of the insight of the whole experience is that we should, I should focus more on taking advantage of this incredible phenomenon that we have and to be more aware. And to, you know, and that means, you know, when you're standing online at the bank, you know, not scrolling on your phone, but thinking about the people around you. Taking it all in. And having daydreams. And, you know, I write in the book all about daydreaming and mind wandering. And these are like such powerful things and we're giving them away. And so that's kind of where I end up. That I haven't solved the problem of consciousness, but there are ways we can take better advantage of the fact that we are conscious.

57:14And it seems that you, you know, really appreciate it. Oh, deeply. Yeah. And I think that that's. I had moments. That's where I really. Yeah. Please tell me. Yeah. Well, there was one moment where, you know, I mean, this sounds like a cliche, but I got up in the middle of the night to pee and, you know, there was no light pollution where we were at all. And it was one of those nights where the stars just kind of hit you over the head. Yeah. And I had a sense of the space between me and the stars. It was very different than anything I had had before. They weren't like in a single scrim a certain distance.

57:49They were like all different distances. And I was in the same space as they were. And I just took it in. I just stood there taking it in. And it was, I hadn't taken a psychedelic. I hadn't taken anything. And it made me realize that we are a fraction as conscious as we could be. And what a shame that we give it away so cheaply. And it's hard to be conscious too because our thoughts are painful sometimes. And a lot of people wanna quiet the internal monologue. and people stuck in, you know, go back to where we started, people stuck in rumination. Yeah, it's not a good place to be. Will do things to be less conscious, including taking drugs.

58:33Yeah, alcohol and marijuana. And so, you need to get to a place where you're comfortable with being conscious. Yeah. And some of us aren't there yet. And that's a motivation for healing too. It is. So, you can really like - Experience the majesty of it. Yeah. Yeah, and to be in your mind, to be happy being in your mind, rather than only being happy when you're out of your mind. I think that is a great place to wrap up because I know that that's something that I strive for every day, is to be happy in my mind. And I think people listening, that's one of the reasons they're here is they want to be happy in their mind.

59:13And it's not only possible, but when you're there, it's so majestic that we should try to spend more and more time being conscious. I mean, that's the final message. Well, Michael Pollan, thank you so much. I am so grateful for our friendship and for you spending time with us today. Thank you, Blake. It was a pleasure. If this episode spoke to you, please share it with a friend, family member, or someone you love. Because No Magic Pill is not just a podcast. It's a resource to help us all live better lives. Hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode and let us know what you think by leaving a comment.

59:54A quick note that this episode is for informational and entertainment purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional regarding any medical questions or concerns you may have. Thanks for watching or listening to No Magic Pill. I would love to send you an Enough bracelet as a thank you for being a member of our new community. Just go to weareenough.co forward slash no magic pill and claim this gift from me. And please help us spread this important message out into the world. I am enough. You are enough. And we are enough.

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