Berkeley Talks: It’s not just psychedelics that change minds, says Michael Pollan. Storytelling does, too.

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

(Music fades out)

Geeta Anand: Welcome to Michael Pollan in Conversation with Mina Kim. I’m Geeta Anand. I’m dean of the Journalism School at Berkeley. It was my dream, when Michael Pollan decided to retire a couple of years ago, that we should honor him and honor his teaching, his mentorship, and his writing with an event like this, to celebrate all that he brought here, all the thinking, all the knowledge and the legacy that he leaves.

It was also my dream that we should use this event to raise funding for a narrative journalism program in his honor, to keep his legacy of incredible narrative writing and deep thinking alive at the Journalism School. So this is that event, and I could not be more thrilled that you’re all here to celebrate Michael Pollan with us and help build a legacy program at the Journalism School. So thank you so much for being here, and my first job is to welcome Chancellor Carol Christ. 

She’s a great champion of journalism. As you all know, she’s an extraordinary leader. I consider her a mentor and a role model for how to lead with courage and compassion. She’s a champion of free speech and she is now moving into the next chapter of her life where we hope she will finally have a chance to retire and have some fun. And even though these are her final weeks in office, she really wanted to be here to celebrate Michael Pollan with you. So let me welcome Chancellor Christ. 

(Audience applauding) 

Carol Christ: Good evening. Among the great pleasures and privileges that come of being a member of UC Berkeley’s community are the opportunities we have to meet, interact with and really get to know an incredibly diverse, interesting and wonderfully stimulating group of thinkers, teachers and researchers.

Suffice it to say that Michael Pollan fits that bill and then some. In so many ways, he embodies the very best attributes of our university. His questioning of the status quo, his readiness and ability to explore the depths of new intellectual vistas, his interest in and dedication to the greater good, his ability to connect and resonate with the general public, and the list goes on. 

Michael Pollan’s insights into how we think about our environment, our bodies and our minds, and how we fit as individuals into a larger ecosystem have had an indelible impact on society. Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals has won multiple awards and was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

More recently is this thrilling chronicle of the history of psychedelics and their modern renaissance, How to Change Your Mind, proved to be a classic example of the impactful participatory journalism at its very finest. With all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that in 2010 Michael was named a Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. 

And while he has clearly contributed to society and the public good, tonight, I wanna particularly thank him for what he has given and still gives to our university.

Michael came to Berkeley more than two decades ago thanks to the visionary recruitment of Berkeley Journalism’s former Dean Orville Schell. Michael was our first Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism. He was a teacher, mentor and role model to hundreds of Berkeley students. He’s a connector of science and health, of complexity and simplicity, the individual and the community.

To top it all off, he’s a generous and warm person whose work has touched and engaged so many of us in a deep and profound way. As the song goes, who could ask for anything more? Michael, you and I are both on the verge of a transition soon to become emeriti, but I’m quite confident that you, like me, could never truly leave Berkeley behind. So thank you so much for your marvelous contributions to the university. Thank you. 

(Audience applauding)

Geeta Anand: Thank you, Chancellor Christ. Tonight we are so grateful to have journalist Mina Kim with us. As the host of KQED Forum, Mina is in conversation multiple times a week about the most pressing issues we face as a state and as a nation. She’s an award-winning journalist, a former first grade teacher, the mother of three children and a Canadian. She was born in Newfoundland.

In the past few weeks alone on Forum, Mina has hosted shows about topics as disparate as death doulas, the Supreme Court’s decision on criminalizing homelessness, relations with Russia, and conversation with an actor from The Office about why we need a spiritual revolution. Thank you for being with us, Mina. 

I know many of you are here because Michael Pollan has touched your life in some way. It’s truly hard to know if he’s tapping into the zeitgeist or somehow inspiring our collective curiosity and mood, whether about plants, foods, psychedelics or the threads that run through all our natural world.

Michael Pollan wrote one of his early books, Omnivore’s Dilemma, during his first years on the faculty at UC Berkeley as Knight Chair in Science Journalism. This groundbreaking book made us question the fundamentals of our food system and its demands on animal welfare, the environment, and health. And then with In Defense of Food a few years later, he went even further into how we can understand that Omnivore’s Dilemma on a practical level in our lives. The long-form narrative journalist words were distilled into what most of us now associate with Michael Pollan: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Michael’s latest work on psychedelics and his co-founding of the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics is opening up a whole new world, but also one that has ancient roots and is pertinent to depression and addiction, as well as to our grappling with dying and consciousness. And through all of this important writing, nine books, many bestsellers, Michael has been a teacher and a mentor to our journalism students. He has helped build a program in narrative journalism that is critical in the field of journalism.

We’re using the proceeds from this event and other fundraising to create a Narrative Lecturers Fund to bring powerhouse writers and deep thinkers like Michael to our school each year as lecturers to continue his tradition in narrative writing. Welcome, Michael Pollan. Welcome, Mina Kim. 

(Audience applauding)  

Michael Pollan: Thank you. 

(Audience continues applauding) 

Mina Kim: Wow.

Michael Pollan: Thank you very much. Thank you, Mina. And thanks to the dhancellor for that overgenerous introduction. I really appreciate it. 

Mina Kim: A beautiful introduction, and you were saying backstage that it’s too generous, but honestly you are the man who made me reevaluate my entire relationship with food. And I’m sure I am not the only one in the audience that you did that for. And I am so delighted to get to interview you because I always did whenever you had appearances on Forum. But Michael Krasny always pulled rank when it was you. 

(Michael laughs) 

Mina Kim: And also … 

Michael Pollan: Well, I look forward to being on your show. 

Mina Kim: Well, yes, absolutely. We’d love to have you. And you know, it is though, really incredible that it’s this conversation that I get to have with you celebrating an incredible career that you’ve had with so much more to come, celebrating the launch of the Michael Pollan Narrative Journalism Fund here at Berkeley Journalism where you taught for so many years. And you never even went to j-school. 

Michael Pollan: No, and I understand you didn’t either. 

Mina Kim: I didn’t, I didn’t either. 

Michael Pollan: Yeah. 

Mina Kim: Yeah, who needs to, no, I’m just kidding. 

Michael Pollan: I went to graduate school in English. 

Mina Kim: Yeah, that’s right, you were an English major. 

Michael Pollan: Yeah, but that served me. 

Mina Kim: Yeah. Well, so it was Orville Schell, I understand who recruited you after you did that piece in The New York Times about the cattle industry? 

Michael Pollan: Yeah, that was actually, so that was the story I did in 2002 that I presented as my job talk, actually, when I came to campus. And I remember Alice Waters sitting in the front row taking notes avidly. 

Mina Kim: Oh, wow. 

Michael Pollan: But I hadn’t published it yet. It came out a few weeks later. But I was working on Omnivore’s Dilemma. And so moving here, then in 2003, when we finally moved, was really important to that book because here I was in a community that took food seriously. And in 2003, that wasn’t too many places in the United States. And I got enormous leads from the community here, from Orville who had been in the food business himself. I don’t know everybody remembers, but it used to be Niman Shell Ranch, not Niman Meats. And Orville actually helped me navigate into that story on the cattle industry. But the contacts I made, especially around the Chez Panisse community of forages and hunters and that all kind of ended up in that book. So it was really good timing to come out here. 

Mina Kim: How did you know there was something sort of in the current about food beyond this group of people that you’d met? 

Michael Pollan: Well, the moment I knew there was really something going on, that there was a politics or political energy rising around this was very soon after I got here. So as part of being the Knight Professor, you have a fund to put on events and do programming, research funds.

And I thought as the first thing, it would be very interesting to do an event around food issues. So I put together this really all-star panel that included Wendell Berry, who was a great hero of mine, both as a farmer and as a writer. Carlo Petrini, who was the head of Slow Food, Marion Nestle, great food studies scholar at NYU, Eric Schlosser, Alice Waters. We had like seven people. And these were all the people I most admired in this space. And we started, we had a little kind of cocktail reception that Alice Waters catered at the Journalism School. And then we started walking over to Wheeler. And I had booked Wheeler thinking that would be plenty of space, seats 700, twice as much as this room. 

So we’re walking there and as we get close, I see there’s a giant crowd in the plaza in front of Wheeler. And I’m like, “Is this a protest? What’s going on here?” And between 2,000 and 3,000 people had shown up for this event, and I hadn’t planned for. And I had no, and it was free. I mean, we should say that, but still, and I was really nervous that people would be pissed off that they weren’t gonna get in because we didn’t have camera overflow rooms or anything.

But it was an incredibly festive atmosphere. And the crowd cheered the panelists as they came through and they were like, they were fine. And it was a memorable night. And I realized, “Wow, this place is different than New York.” People are really passionate about this issue. So that was my inkling that something called the food movement was being born. 

Mina Kim: Yeah. And I love Geeta’s point in the introduction where she was saying whether or not you sort of have a sense of the zeitgeist or whether or not you’re shaping it. 

Michael Pollan: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve had two kind of remarkable occasions in my career where what I was working on, merely because I was curious about it, somehow plugged into the zeitgeist. And don’t ever underestimate the importance of luck in journalism because it’s very important.

But in the case of food, the first time, and you know, it wasn’t the first book about food politics. Eric Schlosser had published Fast Food Nation a couple years before, Marion Nestle had published Food Politics. And then psychedelics, which that was kind of more surprising to me because there was this stir around food issues. But when I was writing How to Change Your Mind, I was like, where is everybody? You know, as journalists, we always feel there’s somebody breathing down our neck and we feel pressure. And I felt pressure writing Omnivore’s Dilemma, like, there’s something going on, I gotta get this book out. And it took a long time. But in psychedelics there was nobody, I was like, where is everybody? And that made me really nervous. 

Mina Kim: Well, maybe that’s an instance where you have shaped it. You do get asked a lot how or why, I guess, you went from food to psychedelics. And you often say that when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. Why not? 

Michael Pollan: Well, it is and it isn’t. I thought of it as like 180-degree turn when I was doing it, but the readership didn’t. And I think that that had something to do with the fact that because of the food books, some people thought I actually had something of value to say about their health. I’m not a doctor, but people are very quick to attribute authority to people who write books even if they don’t know anything. 

(Audience laughing) 

So, but I eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And that book was all about, I mean, I was telling people what to eat, I guess. And so, they saw me as somebody who had something to say to them about health. And now it was mental health. And in their minds, these two things flowed together. So I think that’s part of it.

The reason I switched was, and I only realized this in retrospect, as a journalist, I much prefer to write near the beginning of my learning curve, and not after I’ve become an expert. And most of my work, and this is something I teach my students, has the very simple narrative, which is the narrative of my education.

So if you look at like the first page of almost every book I’ve written and every article, I’m kind of an idiot. And I have questions, I’m curious, but I really don’t know. I don’t write as an expert and I don’t like writing as an expert. But eventually you write three or four books on a topic and damn, you’re an expert. And so then you can write op-eds and things, which isn’t much fun and isn’t very lucrative either. And so, I was eager to learn something new. And it is what I love about journalism. We get paid as adults to learn whole new subjects. 

Mina Kim: Yes. 

Michael Pollan: That’s incredible. Where else does that happen? I mean, people in academia, have to stay in their silo more or less, maybe late in their career, they can change. So here was a subject that I did have some earlier interest in. If you look at Botany of Desire, there is that where I’m looking at the desires that plants have evolved to gratify the human desires as their evolutionary strategy.

Mina Kim: Right.

Michael Pollan: There’s a chapter on cannabis, and I looked at what is this weird human desire we have to change consciousness? Why would that be adaptive? It sounds kind of maladaptive. So I’d always had a question about that. Why do we like to change consciousness? 

Mina Kim: Like why did we evolve and maintain that? 

Michael Pollan: Right. And given the fact that if you take drugs, you’re gonna be more accident prone, more likely to be preyed on. There are a lot of risks involved. So why weren’t the drug takers edited out by natural selection? And they weren’t. They’re here. 

(Mina and audience laughs) 

Believe me, they’re here. So anyway, so that question was in the back of my mind when I started hearing about these new experiments using psilocybin, the ingredient magic mushrooms to treat people with addiction and people with terminal cancer diagnoses, to help them deal with their existential distress. So I knew that that was something I wanted to write about. And I’m very fortunate in my book editor, I’ve had the same book editor for nine books. 

Mina Kim: Wow. 

Michael Pollan: And rather than like, Why don’t you do another book on food that I can sell? She was like, “Go for it.” She was, you know, very supportive. 

Mina Kim: Yes, yes. 

Michael Pollan: So I’ve been very fortunate in that way. But I do like, I like starting from scratch with a subject and dramatizing the process of mastering it and that I’m not a natural storyteller. I really …  

Mina Kim: Really? 

Michael Pollan: It’s really the, I mean, I look at someone like Michael Lewis who like, sees the world in story terms, or Jack Hitt, they’re often southerners. And I don’t see the world that way. I wish I did. So the hard part for me is finding the narrative line through a subject. And the one I’ve often used is a detective story where I’m the detective trying to figure something out. 

Mina Kim: Right. And I wanna get into how that serves the reader as well. But I do wanna ask you about, you talk about you have the good fortune of having a great editor that wasn’t pushing you to write another book about food that they knew that they could sell. But you also have the good fortune of a readership that went with you and it embraced this turn to psilocybin. But did you worry that you might be taking a risk by switching? Were you worried about it being, I don’t know, reputational risk or a career risk? 

Michael Pollan: Yeah, I should have worried more about the reputational risk because I was having these experiences as part of my research. But I don’t know. I was too fixed on the experiences themselves to worry about it too much.

Mina Kim: Maybe the experiences themselves.

Michael Pollan: I thought about it.

Mina Kim: Made you less concerned about a reputational risk?

Michael Pollan: Maybe it did. I did think about, how am I gonna explain this to my mother who reads everything I write? My father I knew wouldn’t read it, but my mother would.

(Audience laughing) 

So I thought about that, but I felt I had to do that. I mean, it really, I mean, I had participatory journalism is something that I like. And that speaks to the narrative problem I was describing. If you don’t see the world in terms of stories, you have to make a story. And that’s one way to make a story.

And that’s why in that cattle piece I was referring to, I bought a steer and followed it through the whole process. I’ve done that repeatedly. George Plimpton, who was a wonderful journalist who I read when I was like 13, my parents gave me a copy of Paper Lion. And he was the editor of The Paris Review and he basically reinvented sports writing with that book. And the way he did it was he persuaded the Detroit Lions to let him actually start as quarterback in an exhibition game. And he went through summer training and suddenly you saw football in a way you had never seen it because normally it was written by guys in the press box chomping on cigars who’d seen everything, incredibly cynical.

And as soon as he put himself in the middle of the story, there was this wonder, this awe, that you could only get the first time you did that. So it was even better than if you happen to have a quarterback who could write, that person’s memoir wouldn’t be as good, wouldn’t see things as freshly, because that person had probably done it since they were 8 years old.

So that book I realized in retrospect, had a huge influence on me. And so I was gonna do psychedelics as part of it. I think my readers expected it. And I was really curious because I had been interviewing people, cancer patients. The first piece I did on psychedelics was about terminal cancer patients who were given psychedelic, not to cure them, but to help them deal with their death or their fear of recurrence in some cases. And these people had been completely transformed in the course of an afternoon by a single dose, high dose of psilocybin. And it had reset their thinking about death in a variety of ways, not in one way. And it allowed several of them that I wrote about to die with equanimity. What a gift. I mean, we don’t have much to give people in that, you know, we have morphine, which has the opposite effect, numbs people. So I was deeply curious to see what that was all about from the inside. But no, I guess I didn’t worry about reputational risk. Maybe I should have.

Mina Kim: Well, I guess, you know, my joke earlier about the fact that maybe it was tripping out on psychedelics that made you less worried about it, is because you talk about the effect of it essentially obliterating the ego, or you mentioned death right now, it’s almost a rehearsal for death because it extinguishes the self. And so, if there isn’t this self that you’re trying to protect …

Michael Pollan: Oh, I see. Yeah, no, and it’s true. And I did have an experience of complete ego dissolution.

Mina Kim: Yeah, talk about that. Describe that experience for anyone who may not have read it, it’s a pretty incredible visual.

Michael Pollan: Well, I had a series of experiences. One was a guided psilocybin trip with a woman, a therapist on the East Coast. There’s a network of underground therapists, I think most people in the room probably know this. And I felt very safe in that environment. I mean, one of the virtues of working with a guide is since someone’s looking out for your physical being, your mental self can travel. And in the midst of this trip, I had some interesting experiences. At one point, I had to get up and use the bathroom. And I went in there and there’s a common piece of advice around tripping, not to look in mirrors. Very good advice. And I mentioned this once to a group, and somebody in the first row said, “Oh, yes, trip face.”

(Mina laughing)

It’s apparently an occupational hazard. And I looked at, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t see my face, I saw my grandfather’s face, which was kind of spooky. I then used the toilet, I produced a spectacular crop of diamonds returned to the futon where I was laying down.

(Audience laughing)

And the woman who guided me, who I call Mary in the book, she had been transformed. And she’s a blonde woman, kind of Nordic looking with high cheekbones and blonde hair parted in the middle. And she had turned into an Indian, Mexican Indian with black hair and very kind of leathery brown skin. And I knew exactly who it was.

There’s a legendary figure in this world called, whose name was Maria Sabina. And she had actually given the first westerner psilocybin back in 1955, a story I tell in the book. And Mary had turned into her and she offered me a higher dose, a booster. And I took it. And I remember her crouching next to me, and she looked like a peasant woman. And I took the dose. And when that kicked in, something very weird happened, which is, and these pronouns are somewhat confusing. I don’t know exactly how to get around it, but I saw myself explode in a cloud of blue Post-It notes, it was just this detonation. And then they kind of trickled down to the ground and they coalesced in a pool of blue paint. And that was me. It was clear it was me. And I was observing the scene from a perspective I had never had before. It wasn’t me. And it was completely disinterested. And it felt, this is all fine. This is right.

And then the guide put on a piece of music that I had asked her to put on. And it was a Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suite, very sad piece of music I’d heard at funerals. But we had a big argument about music, because she didn’t have a lot of classical music. She had a lot of sort of the kind of music you might enjoy getting a massage at a really good spa, but was like not right for psychedelic experience. It was just too manipulative. And so she put on this other piece, and I had, at that point, so without an ego, there’s no subject/object. And you merge, the walls are down. So you merge with whatever you’re experiencing. And in that case, I was experiencing this piece of music, and I merged with the piece of music. I was it, I felt the vibrations in my body. It was the most profound experience of music I’d ever had. But I was no more, and it was not frightening.

Mina Kim: Yeah, you were totally okay with it.

Michael Pollan: So yeah. So maybe that took care of the reputational risk.

Mina Kim: Well, I think there’s a lot more there, right? Because I mean, what did you learn about the power of the ego to sort of manipulate our daily way of looking at the world as a result of experiencing its total dissolution and …

Michael Pollan: Well, I think that experience, which is common on psychedelics at high dose, it’s also common in what William James called mystical experiences. This loss of ego. And it’s very powerful because it is ego that often traps us in some of the knots of being a self. It’s a defensive structure. You know, Jacques Lacan I think said that every ego is paranoid, basically. And I think that’s true. And the ego is a protective structure, and it stands between you and the world, though. I mean, it does a lot of good things. It gets books written, and you know, I mean, egos are adaptive or we wouldn’t have them, but it also traps us. And it can also be a intensely self-critical voice. It is what tells people that they’re bad people or their body image is wrong, or whatever it is. I mean, and being free of that, even for a period of time, allows a lot of change to take place.

And I think has a lot to do with the fact that people who are using psychedelics in an intentional way, especially with guides, can change their minds, can break habits, for example. And we see that with depression and anxiety and OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, and addictions of all kinds. These are all diseases of a very rigid mind that’s trapped in loops of rumination.

And the psychedelics kind of inject a little bit of chaos into that in a positive way and allow people to break those patterns. And then it also, and we see this even at the cellular level, the neuronal level, that there’s a plasticity that comes with it. So it allows for change. And in my case, it gave me a kind of perspective or distance on my ego that I hadn’t had before.

And you know, that’s the goal of a lot of conventional therapy is to get a healthier sense of your ego. Not let it push you around or build it up depending on where you are. But I kind of, I started looking at it in a different way and realized I wasn’t identical to it. That there were other voices in my head I could listen to.

Mina Kim: That’s a pretty incredible thing. I could definitely hear the individual benefit of that. But what is the social benefit? Like if a lot of us have that experience, what do you think can come of it?

Michael Pollan: Well, in the psychedelic community, there’s a lot of optimism about that. That if enough people took psychedelics, we would have much more respect for nature. I think those are interesting ideas to test. But I’m a little dubious.

Mina Kim: Why?

Michael Pollan: Well, you know, as much as I’m talking about ego dissolution, we have many cases of ego inflation coming out of psychedelic experience. I mean, Timothy Leary is an example. And the community is full of people like that. Not full, but there are other people like that. On the nature question, there has been some interesting research that suggests that something psychologists call nature connectedness, the degree to which you feel you’re in nature rather than standing outside, alienated from it, and it’s like a one through five scale and a single psilocybin experience increases your nature connectedness.

But who volunteers for psychedelic experiments? You know, it’s not a representative sample of, you know, when you give psilocybin to the Koch brothers and they decide, they see the light about coal, I’ll be ready to dose, put LSD in the water supply, but not yet. So I mean, they do have a social effect. I mean, I think that they, LSD did have something to do with the rise and the character of the counterculture.

So it’s not without, yeah, there may be, but it’s very complex. And the politics could go either way. And you know, the thing about psychedelics is that they are unspecific in their effects and very variable. And people can react in a lot of different ways depending on, what Timothy Leary memorably called, set and setting, that it is shaped by your intention and who you are. And I remember during the last administration, everybody was like, oh, we just have to give psychedelics to Trump. I would not support that. That’s scary.

(Audience laughing) 

Mina Kim: Well, at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, this is something that you would really like to see do more in terms of answering some of these questions that you have. So is that what it’s designed to do? Research these kinds of questions, but also support maybe journalistic interrogation?

Michael Pollan: That’s a big part of what we’re doing. So the Berkeley Center, which was founded two years ago by me and Dacher Keltner, and Michael Silver, and a couple other faculty members who had gotten together and all had an interest in studying psychedelics. And there was a window that was opening, I mean, talk about reputational risk.

When I wrote How to Change Your Mind, none of the scientists would admit to me on the record that they had ever used psychedelics. Now they talk about it. And so a lot has changed. And it’s a safe, even respectable subject to study now. I mean, there are people doing it at UCSF and Stanford and Harvard. And I mean, it’s remarkable actually how quickly it has achieved a kind of acceptability. What we’re doing at Berkeley is unique in that most of the psychedelic research is clinical. It’s designed around therapeutic applications. And that’s really important. We have a mental health crisis. And this may be a very useful tool in psychiatry, but Berkeley doesn’t have a medical school and we’re not set up for doing clinical drug trials.

So we decided we would focus on basic research and answering these kind of really interesting questions about how do they work in the brain? We don’t really know. What can it teach us about consciousness, about perception. Michael Silver, who’s a neuroscientist here on campus, is doing a really interesting study looking at visual perception.

And, you know, visual perception is our eyes are not cameras just taking in information. We are inferring what we’re seeing before we see it. We’re constructing it. And there are these priors that influence perception. And his theory is that the high level priors that shape our perception of the world are relaxed under psychedelics. So he’s testing that, just about to start. And we have a bunch of other interesting experiments. The other two things we’re doing is we have a training program to train psychedelic facilitators.

Mina Kim: The guides or …

Michael Pollan: Yeah, the guides. And I think we’re on our third cohort of people who are going through that.

Mina Kim: How many people in a cohort, just curious.

Michael Pollan: This next year I think is gonna be 60. It was 30 to start. And considering this isn’t a job yet, it’s a lot of people.

(Audience laughing) 

I mean, some of the people go work for clinical trials at the universities. Some of them move to Oregon, however, where you can get a legal psilocybin experience from a licensed guide with mushrooms grown by a licensed mycologist. So I think we’re training people for that. But this may happen in California. There’s a bill before the legislature, so they may have work here at some point.

And then the third thing, and the thing that’s dearest to me and has run out of the Journalism School is our public education program. And we have a biweekly newsletter that’s free. We have a journalism fellowship. We’re giving grants to people with good ideas. We’re trying to essentially educate the public with some really good journalistic information about psychedelics ’cause a lot of the information out there is very much the product of people with interests. And we’re starting a podcast too, this fall.

Mina Kim: Wow. You’ve done a lot in two years.

Michael Pollan: Considering I’m retired, yeah. Basically, retirement for me has gone from like salary to volunteer. Same amount of work.

(Audience laughing)

Mina Kim: Well if it does turn out after a lot of this research and investigation that there really is quite a benefit for the masses to be able to engage in this in a very safe and guided way, how do you make that accessible?

Michael Pollan: Well, I think it’s gonna be the big challenge. And actually I was in Oregon a couple weeks ago, and they’re really dealing with this because they’re charging, they have to charge thousands of dollars for a single experience. And I asked why. And they said, “Well, it was passed by ballot initiative” and there was no appropriation attached to it. So they have to, so the bureaucracy that’s running this needs to operate entirely on license fees.

And somebody got up at my event in Corvallis and said, who is a doctor, a radiologist, and he said, “It costs me $800 a year to keep my medical license. And for a psychedelic guide it’s like $2,500.” So that’s, I think that’s a big part of the problem. I think that the way to make it accessible is for the FDA to approve it, which is probably gonna happen in the case of MDMA before the end of this year. They have phase three, which is the last phase in clinical trials. And they’re evaluating this and have promised a decision, I think in August, and this would be MDMA, which is ecstasy is the street name, that would be used to treat trauma. And it’s proven very effective in the treatment of trauma.

And at that point, I mean, if it’s approved by the FDA and it is more effective than whatever treatment we’re using now, and we really are just throwing SSRIs at it, and we have a couple other things, it’ll be paid for by insurance. So that’s how you make it accessible, it’s the only way I can see. And psilocybin, which is being tested, trialed for depression is probably another, I don’t know, two years behind.

So I think that’s how you make it accessible. It shouldn’t be that expensive except that it takes, to be properly guided, takes a lot of therapeutic time. There are usually two guides in the room with you, and one of them is the licensed therapist of some kind. And they have to prepare you very carefully and figure out what your intention is and get to know you. Then they sit with you for a very long day. And then you come back for an integration session where they basically help you make sense of what can be a very chaotic …

Mina Kim: What you saw while you were on …

Michael Pollan: Yeah, exactly.

Mina Kim: … On your flight.

Michael Pollan: Exactly. And draw lessons, you know, for the conduct of your life or whatever it is. So nobody’s figured out the business model. I think that’s the really interesting challenge because it’s also a combination. It’s a package of a drug, one pill, and all this therapeutic time.

So how does big pharma make any money off that? And it’s, by the way, the drugs are public domain, so big pharma is not interested so far. But even the FDA, they don’t regulate therapy, yet they’re gonna have to require some sort of supervision. So it’s a real knot.

Mina Kim: Yeah.

Michael Pollan: And whoever figures it out, how to make it work, as a business model will, well, they’ll be bought by big pharma. That’s how innovation works now in America.

(Audience laughing) 

Mina Kim: Well, I mean, you wouldn’t think, I guess what it’s making me think about is accessibility is always the issue, right? You don’t need the FDA and a whole system to be set up to be able to let people access sustainable food, for example. But we still really struggle with making it sustainable and affordable for people to access.

So I’m curious, I guess, where you think we are on the sustainability or the sustainable food movement with regards to accessibility of good quality food in the places that need it most as well because it does feel like there’s still some, some places we really need to go.

Michael Pollan: And healthy food tends to be more expensive than unhealthy food is part of the problem. It’s a really complicated issue. And there is a couple ways at it. Part of the problem is that the industrial food system is subsidized by the public at large. It’s really a case where the costs have been socialized and the profits have been privatized. So you have a situation where a very high percentage, I don’t have the number at hand, but at least a third of Walmart or McDonald’s employees are receiving public benefits because they only make $15,000 a year, the average fast food worker.

So they’re on food stamps and other programs. So we are subsidizing that food. And that does make it, that food can compete better with food where you’re paying the real price. Now we could remove those subsidies. The other big subsidies, we don’t make feedlots clean up their waste. You know, a city of 50,000 or 100,000 has to have a sewage treatment, septic system. And we have feedlots with 100,000 head of cattle that don’t have to do anything. For all intents and purposes, they’ve been exempted from the environmental loss.

So let’s say we go back to that idea we had in the early environmental movement, the polluter pays. That was, everybody understood that. And it didn’t completely work, but it took us some distance. You could make these meat companies pay the real cost of doing business, but then the prices go up. And so you have to address the buying power of people at the same time.

That’s why I think that the recent California move to a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers is that’s the right idea even though the fast food companies are screaming bloody murder. But I think they’re gonna find something interesting, which is if you pay your employees better, they’ll buy more of your products. Remember Fordism, I mean, Henry Ford figured out if you give people a good wage, they’ll be able to afford your cars. So we have to restart that virtuous circle. But without question, in the case of both food and psychedelic therapy, working on access is very important.

And people in the movements are very aware of this. The other thing that I would mention too, in terms of making good food sustainable is that to the extent you can get the public schools to start buying local food and supporting local farms and having higher quality food that they’re actually cooking, you are feeding two meals a day, in many cases, people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford that food.

Mina Kim: They can be the resistance.

Michael Pollan: And this is, as you know, this is work that Alice Waters has been, she’s been fighting for a very long time. And the idea of a school-supported agriculture, if that all that procurement money in a given state or even in a school district, a certain percentage of it had to be used to support local agriculture. It would not only benefit agriculture, but benefit the kids.

Mina Kim: Yeah. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of key things that need to shift to be able to see or untie this knot as you called it. But at the same time, it is pretty incredible. I don’t know if you’ve ever stepped back and thought I really did change and push shifts in this conversation about food, our relationship to it, how it’s connected to so many things.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wasn’t the only one working on this.

Mina Kim: Sure.

Michael Pollan: And I learned from people like Alice Waters and Wendell Berry and there’ve been people who’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. I mean, I feel very fortunate that every now and then, I mean this is why I think long-form journalism is so important.

Mina Kim: Well, that’s what I was gonna say. But they’re not long-form, I mean, your superpower is your long-form journalism, right?

Michael Pollan: Yeah, and so why is, and you know, there’s a history of long-form journalism driving change. I mean, think about Rachel Carson, right, think about Joan Didion’s work on the counterculture or any number of other things.

Mina Kim: But what is it that you think long-form journalism can do that short-form journalism can’t? Because it seems like these days the pressures to get your message out in something that’s the length of a TikTok video, you know?

Michael Pollan: So I think the difference is that, I mean, we’re wired for story. We’re a storytelling and consuming people and we remember better and we’re moved more by narrative than we are by information or argument. And the shorter journalism gets, the more it relies on argument to get any kind of heat. And I just don’t think that’s how you change minds. I think changing minds has to work at all levels. You know, it has to work at the intellectual level, it has to work at the emotional level, and at even probably subliminal levels, and story does that.

So when you look at great pieces of narrative journalism, people don’t even realize their minds have been changed by the time they get to the end of it. And so, it’s character. And for me, I know when I was writing about psychedelics, it wasn’t what I had to say about it. It was the stories I was telling of people’s transformations.

And we’re always interested in stories of transformation. And then in the case of food, it was bringing back into focus something people had lost, which was the farmer. You know, food came from the supermarket. The whole idea of omnivore’s dilemma was to follow a meal or several different meals back to the source, back to the land and remind people that food begins with soil, it doesn’t begin with Safeway.

And we are, and I’ve said this often, the idea that you could write a book, a bestseller that tells people where their food comes from, if you had a time machine and went back 100 years, people would say, “That’s so stupid. I wouldn’t buy that book,” because everybody knew where their food came from. They were farmers, you know, 40% of Americans were farmers at the turn of the last century. Or they knew farmers, or they went to farms to buy their food. And then lo and behold, we find ourselves in a place where you need an investigative journalist to find out where your food came from. How crazy.

And you really do, I mean, a friend of mine is a photographer, George Steinmetz, who has illustrated some of my pieces for the Times magazine about food. And he was flying, he’s doing this fantastic new book about the food system, photographic book. And he flies an ultralight. And he was flying over a feedlot in Garden City, Kansas, which happens to be where the story of my steer took place. The inaptly named named Garden City, Kansas, has neither a garden or a city, it just has just feedlots wall to wall.

And he lands, he’s done, he’s taken his pictures and the police are there and they arrest him and they throw him in jail. He’s violated a law on the books in Kansas. And there are 14 other states that have these laws. They’re called veggie-libel laws or something like that for, he’s disparaged a feedlot. And even taking photographs of feedlots from a public right of way is illegal in several of these states. So yeah, that’s where we are. I mean, that’s where we’ve come.

Mina Kim: What are they trying to hide?

Michael Pollan: Well, good question. No, I think that nothing would change the food system more if, I talked to a group of eighth graders last week, or this week when I was in, where was I, I forgot. And they were asking what I ate and they’re meat eating and everything. But now, in eighth grade or fifth grade, you very often have a field trip to a farm. If you could have field trips to feedlots and slaughter houses, we’d change the food system overnight. But they won’t let us in.

Mina Kim: So if narrative long-form journalism has the capacity to really change minds, how do you approach teaching it?

Michael Pollan: By doing it. I mean, my teaching is very untheoretical. I mean, it really is one of the things …

Mina Kim: I never went to j-school, so. (Laughs)

Michael Pollan: I don’t know how they do it at other j-schools, frankly. But one of the things I really felt sympathetic to about the Journalism School here when I came is the pedagogy. The philosophy of teaching was very similar to what I had had in college at Bennington, which was that you don’t write papers, you write a work of history or a work of literary criticism. You’re like a baby version of your professors. And it’s a kind of a John Deweyan approach to learning.

And at the J-School, you know, there’s nothing, there’s very little criticism, there’s very little theory. There’s no theory that I’m aware of. We teach people how to do what we do, which has been a very interesting exercise because a lot of what you do, of course, is second nature. So you have to really think through how do I solve that problem?

Mina Kim: So they’re almost like apprentices.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, they’re apprentices, exactly. And so in my long-form writing class, everybody writes a long-form story. And we go through the whole process from how do you find ideas? How do you pitch ideas, writing queries? I would often bring in an editor from New York to hear their queries live. And then we go through how do you structure a story? How do you find a narrative? You have all this information, usually you have more information than story.

Mina Kim: And as you were saying, build suspense, which was so key to keep people in it as well.

Michael Pollan: And that’s, thinking narrative is partly like not giving everything away on page one, which is like what academics learn to do with abstracts. It’s the craziest thing. (audience laughing) No, really. I mean, like, would you tell a joke by putting the punchline in the first, no. – But thank God for abstracts. I mean, if you’re prepping for multiple …

Mina Kim: As a journalist, I rely on them all the time.

Michael Pollan: … topics.

Mina Kim: It’s true.

Michael Pollan: You need abstracts.

Mina Kim: So, what do you withhold, what do you include that gets people interested? And then what do you withhold because you want to have something at the end. I mean, a big difference between narrative journalism and, say, short-form journalism is endings matter.

Whereas, historically, in newspaper journalism, you just put, you kept writing and you put your least important material at the end because you never knew where they were gonna cut it off. And that had to do with the type setters and things like that. So there are no endings in those.

But in long-form, you want a memorable ending. You wanna like hit a bell that’s gonna reverberate. And I work as hard on my last lines as I do on my first lines and teach my students to do the same thing. And whether people get to the end or not is really the test of a successful piece.

But you always want also, I understand, a hopeful ending. You wanna leave your reader with …

Michael Pollan: If possible. I mean, you know, if you’re writing about Abu Ghraib, you’re not gonna have a hopeful ending. My colleague Mark Danner specializes in pieces without hopeful endings.

(Mina laughs)

But where you can find hope, I think it’s really important. I have found that it’s kind of where investigative journalism and the public part ways. Which is, I think people really want hope. I feel it in my public speaking, talking to people, but I also feel it among readers.

And you know, we started off talking about that cattle story. And one of the most satisfying things that happened at the end of that story, so it was eight or 9,000 words. Very long piece. And, Sunday morning, getting people in Times readers we’re gonna look at the meat industry, we’re going to a feedlot. You know, that’s like not something you wanna do necessarily on Sunday morning.

But I had learned along the way that there was an alternative of grass-finished beef, of animals that never went onto the feedlot and ate the food they were designed to eat. And it was a much more sustainable food chain instead of a food chain that was based on corn, which was fed with fossil fuel and made the animal sick and required pharmaceuticals and all that. Here was a beautiful food chain with the sun feeding the grass and the grass feeding the animals, the animals feeding us.

And I just had like three paragraphs about this. And I acknowledged that yes, it could be tougher meat, it wasn’t necessarily as buttery soft. And I fought with my editors to keep this because it was the obvious thing to cut because there was no real big market for grass finished beef at the time.

And anyway, the piece came out and I go to this, that butcher shop on College Avenue, I forget what it’s called. And I go in, I’m just kind of curious, it’s like five days after the article comes out and I said, “Do you have any grass-finished beef?” And the butcher looks at me and goes, “What the hell is going on here?” He’d apparently been asked four times that week for grass-finished beef. And I’m like, “Yes!” But it wasn’t about the ranchers, it was about writer’s vanity. They got to the end of the piece. It’s very satisfying.

(Audience laughing)

Mina Kim: Well I think it is really valuable to give hope at the end if you can actually give it at the end of something like that.

Michael Pollan: I mean yeah, if you’re, I mean, if it’s not realistic, but I tend to gravitate towards stories that have it and that’s a matter of temperament. I mean, one of the things that was so exciting about psychedelics was that it was offering hope to people who are suffering in a variety of ways. And people are so thirsty for hope. They really are. And it’s one of our jobs as journalists is to find where we can, where it’s hiding.

Mina Kim: I know, this is a hard moment. So the Michael Pollan Narrative Journalism Fund is designed to support journalists who want to do the work.

Michael Pollan: Yes.

Mina Kim: Want to force us all to have very long attention spans and make it through.

Michael Pollan: We’re not requiring people to have hope, but I hope they do. The idea is to have a guest lectureship one semester a year where a notable journalist who does narrative would come and teach a masterclass.

Mina Kim: Very cool.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, I think so. I think it would be a great thing for the school. I mean, the school already has strong narrative journalism. It really is one of the things it does well, but it could do it even better.

Mina Kim: So what are you now, you talked about being in retirement, but you are sort of describing so much of ways that you are teaching, trying to spread sort of what you’ve learned through your career, right?

Michael Pollan: Well, I’m still teaching …

Mina Kim: Yes, at Harvard.

Michael Pollan: I teach at Harvard in the fall semester. Judith and I both do, my wife.

Mina Kim: So there’s that. But I guess I mean a little …

Michael Pollan: It’s kinda weird because I live here and I teach there. But there are reasons for it. And I found that I really enjoyed teaching undergraduates, which I couldn’t really do here, because it’s a Graduate School of Journalism.

Mina Kim: Why undergraduates?

Michael Pollan: Why undergraduates? They’re just more … I don’t want to offend anybody.

(Mina laughing)

There are probably more graduate students here than undergrads. I don’t know. There’s just a quality to undergrads. They haven’t made decisions about their career yet. There’s a quality of openness.

Mina Kim: Yeah.

Michael Pollan: They’re very teachable. I don’t know, I just kind of enjoy it.

Mina Kim: But do you think of it that way that you’re wanting to, I don’t know where you feel like you are. What is it that you …

Michael Pollan: Well, you know.

Mina Kim: What do you do with everything that you’ve done?

Michael Pollan: I mean, retirement, it’s a joke. I mean, for me it’s a joke. I just had too many responsibilities and I had to eliminate one and I decided that this would be the one to eliminate.

Mina Kim: I was struck by you using that word because I hadn’t actually associated it with you, retirement.

Michael Pollan: I don’t associate it with me either. No, I’m working on another book. I’m working on the center. I’ve been working on documentaries. We just released Food, Inc. 2, a sequel to Food, Inc. You know, did a Netflix series based on How to Change Your Mind.

But mentoring has always been an important part of what I do. I really enjoy it. I really feel renewed and refreshed working with young people, but now I don’t have to teach to find them. I mean, I have all the ones that I’ve taught over the years many of whom are still in touch and are in regular contact. And so yeah. I mean I enjoy mentoring a lot.

Mina Kim: Do you wanna say anything about the book that you’re working on? You don’t have to go in depth because I know how this works, but …

Michael Pollan: Well, this is a book that was inspired by the psychedelic work, but is a departure from it. It’s a book about consciousness, which I’m looking at from several different perspectives. It’s famously called The Hard Problem and it’s the hard book for sure. But yeah, that’s what I’m working on.

Mina Kim: And you’re at that stage that you like to be at where you are the learner again? 

Michael Pollan: Where I don’t know anything, yeah. No, I’ve gotten a little past the I don’t know anything. What’s different about this story though is that the experts don’t know anything either. So I’m starting, I was intimidated at first, but they know a lot more science, but they don’t really know much more. I mean, it’s amazing what we don’t know about consciousness.

Mina Kim: You mean whether or not it’s …

Michael Pollan: Well, how matter produces it.

Mina Kim: Is it our minds?

Michael Pollan: If it does. The other thing that’s very interesting is that to a person, the people I am interviewing who consists of philosophers and scientists mostly are all using psychedelics. And I thought, is this a selection bias? Like they feel they can talk to me about this because I’ve published about my own experience? No.

Mina Kim: Interesting.

Michael Pollan: It’s because they’re stuck. (Laughs)

They’re really stuck. And I had lunch the other day with a very prominent consciousness researcher who’s been at it since 1994, and he might be the best known consciousness researcher. And he’s been looking for the neural correlates of consciousness, and what parts of the brain are responsible. And he’s associated with a very recondite, very mathematical theory of consciousness.

And he told me he’d just gotten back from Brazil where he had an ayahuasca, a series of ayahuasca experiences that acquainted him with what he called ala Aldous Huxley, the mind at large. And that consciousness was outside of his head, it was in the universe and he experienced it. Now for a brain guy, that’s a crisis. (Laughs)

I don’t know what he’s gonna do with it except tell me “It’s not a crisis.” He actually said that. So anyway, this has been, so, I thought I was getting far away from psychedelics, but it turns out it’s gonna be part of the story in a different way.

Mina Kim: Yeah, well, I look forward to reading that.

Michael Pollan: I do, too.

Mina Kim: I look forward to seeing what that does.

Michael Pollan: I’ve got a ways to go.

Mina Kim: Yeah. I mean, you said this earlier, but I don’t know, give hope, because a lot of people are really thirsty for hope. How do you see that? How do you feel that?

Michael Pollan: I was speaking in Orange County the other night and in a theater like this, and there was a question period after and people lined up to ask questions. And some were about food and some were psychedelics. People said, they could not have been more bald about it. They said, “Can you say anything hopeful?”

Mina Kim: Really?

Michael Pollan: Yes, three or four people. And that’s why they’d come and they were starved and it was hard to answer those questions because they they were thinking about the political situation, not just …

Mina Kim: Oh, yes.

Michael Pollan: Not just food and psychedelics, but is there anything hopeful you can tell us about X?

Mina Kim: So you were actually …

Michael Pollan: I’m not reading between the lines here, this is straight up.

Mina Kim: I’m reminded actually of the message in Omnivore’s Dilemma and even in Food, Inc. 2, about how we are so bombarded these days. And this relates to narrative journalism as well with just these quick takes or just these decontextualized sort of snippets of information that we’re supposed to somehow make sense of it all. And I remember hearing or reading you say something along the lines of when a public is confused, they’re so much more susceptible to propaganda or they’re so much more susceptible to marketing or they’re just, and I do feel like that’s where we are.

Yeah, well, yeah. When there’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. Anyone offering certainty is, and that’s why you have to be careful in what you tell people, ’cause it has to be legitimate hope.

Mina Kim: Right. No, we are drawn to the loudest voices and the shiniest objects.

Michael Pollan: And the simplest answer.

Mina Kim: And the simplest, and the simplest answer.

Michael Pollan: And that’s another, I mean, another very important feature of long-form narrative is that you don’t have to turn away from ambiguity or even ambivalence. You can explore them. And I know that was something I learned from one of my editors at the Times magazine, Gerald Marzorati, who’s been out here to speak many times and his son is a colleague of yours, yeah.

And I’d get into a place with a piece and I wasn’t sure to go this way or this way, or this is confusing. And he was like, “No, the ambiguity’s really interesting. Explore it.” You can’t do that in short-form. And yet, and many issues are ambiguous. And so it’s the right tool for that job. And it’s true that, look, attention spans are shorter. There are fewer places to publish these pieces. The rates of pay for these pieces have not budged or they’ve gone down since I started out. So there’s a lot against it.

But nevertheless, it’s really important, I think, to support it, sustain it, nourish it, this kind of journalism because it’s just so important. And so anyway, that’s one of the reasons we’re all here …

Mina Kim: Ambiguity as an opportunity feels like a lesson for life. We’re at the end of the conversation. I’ve been seeing the time warning, so since we are at the end, leave us with some hope, Michael.

(Michael laughs)

Michael Pollan: Oh, listen, I do feel hopeful. Certainly about the fields I’ve been writing about, I see positive, the new Food, Inc. is actually darker than the first one because it deals with, just as an example, it deals with the fact that the food industry is even more concentrated in fewer hands today than it was when we did the original Food, Inc. in 2008.

On the other hand, on the hopeful side, the food movement has allies it did not have in 2008. Two of the stars of the film are U.S. Senators, Cory Booker and Jon Tester, who were really fighting the good fight. And the food movement did not have powerful allies like that last time around. So that gives me hope.

And a lot of the research around psychedelics and talking to people who have been healed by psychedelics, that definitely gives me hope. National politics, I’ll leave that to somebody else.

Mina Kim: Has the common denominator of your work been wellbeing? It was one of the ways that this conversation was sprang, would you say that it is?

Michael Pollan: I don’t think of it as being wellbeing. I mean, it’s interesting. It’s turned out to be true. It wasn’t my goal. No, for me, the common denominator is nature. Our engagement with the natural world, psychedelics are part of that. It’s something that nature produces that has this remarkable effect on us. Food obviously is part of that. And I’ve always been interested, I mean, all my work began in the garden, as a gardener.

And I’ve always been interested in Americans’ kind of odd, interesting attitudes toward nature. The idea we have a relationship with nature. I mean, what an odd phrase. No, we are nature, but we don’t feel that way. That nature connectedness question. And so a lot of my work has been simply reminding people where things come from. And so yeah, nature, our relationship to other species, that is the common denominator that underlies all the work.

Mina Kim: Well, thank you. Thank you for the work.

Michael Pollan: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much, Mina.

(Audience applauding)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Mina Kim: Thank you all so much for being here with us for this conversation. Please join me in thanking some of the people who helped put this together. I want them to raise their hands or pop out from behind, Leah Swindle.

(Audience applauding)

Anh Tran, Steve Katz and other students and members of the staff and faculty at the Journalism School. So thank you all. It’s been such a thrill to celebrate Michael Pollan, the writer, the thinker, the mentor, the teacher, the tripper (laughs). All of you, as you leave, please take with you the note cards and think about contributing to the Michael Pollan Fellowship Narrative Fund, if you can. And join me to give a huge thanks to Mina Kim and Michael for this wonderful.

(Audience applauding)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)