October 20, 2021 • 34 mins
Author Michael Pollan discusses the psychedelic powers of plants and the history of how humans have harnessed, ignored, and controlled these powers. He also discusses his prolific career and his most recent book, This is Your Mind on Plants.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
I'm Noah Feldman. Every generation has a handful of thinkers
and writers who profoundly shape the way we experience the
(00:37):
world by tapping into the seitgeist, the spirit of the Times.
Today's guest, Michael Pollen, is one of those rare individuals. First,
he did it for food, with a series of important
and influential books and articles for The New Yorker and
The New York Times that change the way we thought
about how our food was made and about what sorts
(00:58):
of foods we should eat. In recent years, he's been
doing it again, this time with psychedelics, with books like
How to Change Your Mind and most recently, This Is
Your Mind on Plants. Throughout this body of work, Michael
has focused on the intersecting point between nature and culture,
(01:18):
and he tries both to tell our stories and to
guide us directionally and how we ought to experience the world.
Michael therefore writes about power, one of our central themes
here on Deep Background this season. But he is also
someone who, in his own gentle way, deploys a substantial
amount of power in our culture because here today to
(01:39):
talk about his new book and the trajectory of his
career and how it all fits together. Michael, thank you
so much for being here. There are so many questions
that I want to ask you, but let me start
with one aspect of your fascinating new book. This is
(02:02):
your Mind on Plants. And this book is many different things,
but one of them is a kind of philosophical meditation
on the fates of different plant based substances and how
we end up regulating them. And I'm wondering how you
came to that thematic arrangement for the book, with your
(02:26):
three substances and the different status that each has. So
I looked at three plants and the chemicals they produced,
the psychoactive chemicals they produced, and I wanted to make
sure one of them was legal and completely acceptable in
our society and virtually invisible for that reason, and that
was caffeine. And I wanted to change the context of
(02:48):
opium and mescal in two by putting the three together.
Had the book been all illegal substances, it would have
been a drug book. But it's much more interested in
looking past the categories, which are interesting and arbitrary in
some ways logical and others to this base human drive
(03:10):
to change consciousness, which I think is such a curious
thing that we were born with this apparently this desire,
and it manifests itself even in children who loved to
spin and get dizzy, to very normal consciousness, to transcend
the ego or reinforce it in the case of some drugs,
and we have these remarkable tools presented to us by plants.
(03:34):
So I wanted to sort of change the context because
people go right to these categories illicit drug, acceptable drug,
pharmaceutical drug, but if you go back in time, you
know they've been upside down. I mean, there was a
time I described in the Opium chapter where the farmer
on the land where I now live in Connecticut, he
was making alcohol from his apples, making hard cider, which
(03:59):
is a very common drink in rural America for a
long time. That was a federal crime that could have
put him in jail. At that very moment, the women
for temperance were commonly enjoying their women's tonics, which were
these preparations you could buy at drug stores that contained
opium and cannabis, and that was perfectly legal, So I'm
(04:22):
trying to kind of defamiliarize ourselves with these categories a
little bit and get us to start read thinking them.
It was really fascinating to me reading the book, because,
as you've just very well described, we haven't yet gotten
to a peyote, the third substance you talk about. You
wanted three substances with different legal categorizations because you were
(04:42):
trying to move us away from thinking about the legal
categorizations and towards the plants and the human impulse to
ingest the psychoactive and yet or maybe, and also the
book that Emerged spends some time talking about the basic
human urge, sometime about the experiential relationship we have to
(05:02):
these different plant based substances, But a lot of the
book ends up being devoted to telling the story. You're
such a good storytelling you couldn't help yourself but tell
the story of how each of these substances came to
occupy the regulatory category, whether social or legal or both
(05:23):
that it did come to occupy. So, in a way,
a book that sets out to be a book about
the power of plants is also a book about human
power and the way humans categorize and engage with these
same plants, Oh, without question. I mean I'm fascinated by that.
I'm fascinated by history and how at different times in
(05:44):
history we see nature and culture in very different ways.
And drugs are a great example, since they're constantly evolving
in our estimation of them. I mean, right now, we're
in the midst of a re categorization of psychedelics. I mean,
there's still a Schedule one drug with no accepted medical
use and a high potential for abuse, neither of which
(06:05):
is true, but nevertheless that's the official category for psychedelic
But because of this renaissance of research into their value
as therapeutic aids to help people deal with mental illness
and dying, they're undergoing a shift. And I think if
we did this interview in five or ten years, they
will no longer be on Schedule one and they will
(06:26):
be part of the pharmacopeia. And nobody would have guessed
that back in the late sixties when they were first prohibited.
So we're in the midst of a sea change right now,
I think, and obiits are going in the opposite direction,
of course. But my message is too in the book,
is it's not all one or the other. We need
to think about drugs with the kind of negative capability
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or suppleness that the Greeks did. They called all these
drugs pharmacon, which can mean both poison or medicine, and
also scapegoat by the way, which is I think not
an accident, because we tend to blame these drugs for
all sorts of things. But it's very hard for us
to hold two contradictory ideas in our head. And around drugs,
you really have to because they can be very dangerous.
(07:11):
They can get people into trouble, they can kill people,
but they also can heal and give people insights into
existence and shift their consciousness in ways that is very
productive for them as individuals and for the species I believe.
Do you have any hope that we would ever reach
a more rational set of structures for making sense of
(07:34):
this and governing it? And if so, what would rational
look like to you? I mean, one could say, well,
here's the thing about coffee or caffeine. It doesn't leave
you rampaging in the streets. Right Yet, in your chapter
on caffeine, you make the point that we can't just
describe the effects of caffeine as minor or trivial. The
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hope that will ever be rational about this. The evidence
of history is that we won't, and that there is
a fundamentally irrational part of human life and of the
human mind that drugs plays into. We're constantly, you know,
we're meaning making creatures, and we will make meaning out
of everything. And then if you take a particularly powerful
(08:20):
substance that seems to have its own meanings and perhaps does,
will project all sorts of stuff on that. But again,
the same drug at different times in history can be
regarded as encouraging passivity or encouraging violence. I mean, it's
interesting how inconsistent we are even about the image of
these drugs and what they do for us. I'm convinced
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that our interpretation of psychedelic experience owes maybe one part
to the chemical and nine parts to culture and individual psyche.
I mean, that we construct this experience. I've always wondered
what would happen if psychedelics hadn't first been written about
by Aldus Huxley, who puts a very Eastern spin on it.
(09:06):
It's more like Eastern religion than Christian religion. And that
orientalizing of psychedelics I think descends from him. It gets
picked up by Leary, who used the Tibetan Book of
the Dead to interpret the experience. What if some Christian
mystics had written the first modern accounts of a psychedelic trip,
would it have looked very different? I'm guessing it could be.
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It could have been constructed differently. But you have to
tease apart what's really inherent about the experience. But people
forget that everything you experience on a psychedelic is not
in the molecule. The molecule doesn't have anything in it.
It really is a catalyst for a process in your
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own mind that draws on everything in your memory, from
your own personal experiences to what you've learned about how
the world works. And this is one of the reasons
I'm so interested in drugs. They're one of those interesting
rubs between nature and culture, between our biology and everything
we are because of the culture we inhabit. But then
(10:09):
you have this other tradition though, right, the Native American
tradition ayahuasca and payote and mushrooms. And I found that
really fascinating, partly because I didn't know much about it
and hadn't paid much attention to payote or the Native
American use of psychedelics before, but they have a different
construction and it's it's very religious, it's very social, which
(10:34):
is interesting. I mean, the drug trip is not an
individual matter, it's it's it's something that happens at the
level of the community, so they put a different interpretation
on it. Yeah, I think that's really important, and I
agree that that's one of the really interesting things in
your book. And you also show at the same time
the connection of the history of mescaline and other cactus
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derivatives in resistance to the process of domination and cultural
and literal genocide perpetrated against Native American peoples, especially in
North America, but also in South and Central America, and
the way that payote came to be part of the
resistance to that story through the immersions of the Native
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American Payote Church in the late nineteenth century, and then
it's flourishing again in the nineteen seventies and eighties. And
that's a really rich and important part of your book.
And I wondered if I could ask you about an
aspect of that that has struck me when I hear
contemporary non Indigenous people talking about the use of payote
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and that is, where do you think that fits into
our discourse around cultural ownership and cultural appropriation, especially cultural
ownership by indigenous peoples. I mean, on the one hand,
they are in some sense part of the common legacy
of all humans, and in another sense, they're very specifically
connected to particular cultures, cultures that have suffered from destruction.
(12:02):
So I wonder how you think about that. So I
struggle with this because I was deciding whether I was
going to use payote, having learned about the sensitivities about
it on the part of Native Americans. I had interviewed
many Native Americans who felt threatened by the white use
or the non native use of payote. But there are
two issues there. There's a cultural appropriation issue, and there's
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a material appropriation issue in that there is a shortage
of payote, and that because of overuse. Because approaching this cactus,
the sacred plant, which has become so essential to Native
American identity among many tribes, hundreds of tribes now and
has been such a powerful tool of healing the unique
trauma of Native Americans, that I came to the conclusion
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that as a non Native, I should leave it alone.
That that was the way to respect it. So I decided,
even though I had some opportunities there were Native Americans
willing to let me participate, the moral or ethical thing
to do was not to do it. It's not to
say I think that use of payote should be illegal.
I do think we should explore what Native Americans have
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taught us about the healing potential of this compound, mescaline.
They did discover mescaline. And then there's another argument about
reparations and reciprocity. So there are companies that want to
use mescaline in their research and possibly as a treatment
for alcoholism, which is one of the big ways that
Native Americans use it. Is there any obligation on the
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part of those companies to return profit or somehow recognize
or share their intellectual property if they develop it with
Native Americans. That's a really interesting question. I don't know
the answer to that. People are struggling with that right now.
But I do believe that even though all drugs should
be decriminalized, I think as a matter of individual conscience,
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I would discourage non natives from using payote, especially because
there are other ways to get it. To get mescaline.
One is synthetic mescaline doesn't damage native payote stocks. And
the other is this other cactus I talk about sam
pedro or watchuma, which grows in South America. Very easy
to grow here or grow your own payote if you're
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a very patient person and a good gardener. It takes
fifteen years to get from seed to usable button. But
I see no problem. I don't see that as cultural
appropriation if you have some seeds and want to crow it.
But again, people draw these lines in very different places,
and Native Americans do. I mean, I talk to Native Americans,
some of whom would say, you know, use all the
(14:43):
synthetic mescaline and sam pedro you want, just leave our
payote alone. And then I talk to others who said,
if you're going to use mescaline, you owe us reparations
because we discovered it. So there's not you know, Native
American opinion on this is not monolithic by any means,
and my own opinion is not monolithic either, as you
can tell. We'll be right back. I want to turn
(15:16):
to the magic word plants, which seems to be something
that has almost talismanic quality in the body of work
of Michael Pollen and in the culture at the moment.
By the way, I mean, have you noticed how many
products are now plant based in your supermarketing? Yeah? And
I'm not sure that if you know, when future historians
do an analysis of the evolution of the concept of
(15:37):
plant based if they won't find you at the very
beating heart of the birth of that movement. So I
want to ask you about the about that word, about
that the power of that word. You're a gardener, and
that has something to do with your long term interest
in plants, obviously, because it's famous to everybody. Now you're
a dictum about what we should eat started with plants
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and was made plant central. I'm not really kidding. I
think when someday they ask why all these things have
the word plant based attached, they may come back to you.
And then this book uses advisedly the word plants. You
don't say drugs, you don't say medicines, which is a
word that some users of psychedelics prefer, and that some
Native Americans don't much like to hear used in this
context because they take it very seriously and are not
(16:22):
sure that everybody who uses these substances does. So talk
to me about the word plants. Well, it's been such
a kind of common word in my personal vocabulary for
a long time. I don't have that much perspective on it.
I used it in the title of this book in
part to remind people that's where drugs come from, and
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that they are part of our relationship to the natural world,
and we lose track of that. We think of drugs
coming from laboratories, and some of them do, but a
great many of them, of course, come from plants. And
why do plants produce them? Then that opens up a
whole conversation about evolutionary objectives of plants as opposed to people,
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the fact that they are geniuses chemistry and neurochemistry in particular,
and why they are because they can't run away, basically,
and so they have to use chemistry to either attract
or repel. And I've been fascinated in that fact about
plants for a very long time. These are not simple
molecules they're making. And how incredible is it that a
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plant can hit on precisely the the chemical formula to
have a profound effect on an animal brain. So I've
been marveling at plants for a long time. I've been
trying to win them more respect speak for them since
they can't speak for themselves. Michael paulin Lorax. We'll put
(17:53):
that on in the head notes of this interview. That
did have a big influence on me, the Loax? Did
it actually say? Would you say something about that? How
old were you when you first heard of or read
the Loax? You think, I don't remember. I don't. I
think it came out a little late in my childhood.
I'm not sure, but it was one of my sons
favorite books, and this whole time I was beginning this
work in the nineties, I read it to my son
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over and over and over again. I've got it pretty
much committed to memory. I think at this point i'd
have to go back and check what year the Lorex
came out. I think of that as kind of late
and tied to the environmental movement. It has sentiments in
it that it's hard to imagine before nineteen sixty nine
or so, when when the environmental movement is starting. Have
you found it published June twenty three, nineteen seventy one,
(18:38):
So historical analysis is confirmed in a real time. It's
nice to when that happens. But the language is very
much you know post Rachel Carson post the First Earth Day.
So my exposure to it I was fifteen then or
sixteen then, So I wasn't reading Doctor SEUs at sixteen,
but I did read it over and over again to
my son, who loved it. I also know I've written
a lot about plant intelligence and the whole effort to
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figure out how intelligent are plants? Are they conscious? And
what does that mean? I mean, I think we're learning
some incredible things about plant intelligence, plant sociality. This is
a kind of interesting moment for plant science, which has
been a very sleepy field for a long time. If
you talk to botanists, nobody was paying attention to them.
But now you have all this work on how plants
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connect to one another, and the trees in a forest
are very social. Suzanne Simard has a new book on
this that's really interesting. She's done pioneering research showing that
they can swap nutrients using these fungle networks. They can
send messages, plants can hear. There's interesting research that if
you play the sound of caterpillars chomping on leaves to
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other plants, they will arm themselves and produce defense chemicals.
You know, they don't have ears, but they can hear,
they don't have eyes, but they can see. I mean,
they're just bizarre. So it takes a lot of human
imagination to see the world from their point of view.
And I've been eager to do that for a very
long time and wrote a book in fact who's subtitle
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was A Plant's eye View of the World. And it's
exciting to see there is, though, I worry a slightly
mystical strain coming into some of this work about trees.
I mean, there've been books out on trees that are
more mystical than scientific that really strain credulity, at least mine.
But in general, I think plants are getting a new
respect and that does tie into, you know, what we're
(20:31):
learning about nutrition. However, the twinkie is plant based too,
I think we need to remember. And there's a lot
of crap sold as plant based in the supermarket right now. Yeah,
as is tobacco, as is you know, there are plenty
of you know, plenty of other substances. I wouldn't put
a caffe and quite in the tobacco category, but it's
not in one of the good categories. I mean, as
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one expands the category of the plant, it can come
to include not everything, but a large percentage of everything.
I was interested to hear you say that sometimes the
mystical tone of some of the plant work, the plant
based work, strains creduli because you're interested in mysticism right
in your work, there's a kind of you're on the edge.
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You're skirting the edge between giving us a rationalistic, scientific
and social scientific contextualization, and you're at just at the edge,
especially in your interest in consciousness. Here of a field
of endeavor that is fundamentally mystical and that needs presumably
to be processed mystically to make any sense out of
(21:36):
it at all. Right, I mean to say meaning making
is a rationalizing process. No, I mean, one way to
make meaning is by making something rational. But another way
to make meaning is to embrace its mystical quality. And
it seems to me, with respect to psychedelics, that if
we tried to reduce everything to its rational it seems
like we would be missing the point. Yeah, so I
(21:57):
flirt with mysticism, but I am very grounded in the
scientific worldview. I get grief for this from certain people.
In How to Change Your Mind, there were many people
who objected to the fact that I didn't take seriously
enough this idea I presented that consciousness is a field
outside us, like the electromagnetic field that we tune into.
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That our brains are tuners or television sets. And I
think that's a beautiful idea. But my mind goes to
a more materialistic understanding that even though we don't understand how,
consciousness is the product of our brains, and it's tempting
to think otherwise. And I'm more open to that idea
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than I was before experience with psychedelics, but I haven't
yet been persuaded, and I'm curious to learn more about it.
But psychedelic experience for many people causes them to lose
faith in the materialist view of consciousness. And it's important
to mention that that material's view of consciouness is not
well developed at all. Right, Okay, it's an easy thing
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to lose faith in my view. I mean, there are
propositions of science that are well established, and if someone
were to say, you know, I no longer believe in
Newtonian mechanics, I would say something's not totally right there.
On the other hand, when it comes to consciousness, there
isn't really a respectable materialist account of consciousness at all.
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There is simply the commitment to the view that materialism
must be true in light of what we observe, and
therefore the consciousness must be reducible to the material which is,
you know, that's a plausible inference, but it's a form
of inductive reasoning. It's not deductive or demonstrated reasoning. That's right,
And I think the Dalai Lama was quite correct when
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he said at the first Mind and Life conference where
they brought together neuroscientists and Buddhists, that the material theory
of consciousness is a very interesting hypothesis and we should
give it no more credit than that. And so, you know,
I'm open, but it must be my training and background.
But even when I'm writing about plant intelligence, I'm always
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hanging out with people going a lot further than I'm
willing to go in terms of saying plants are conscious.
I have some sense that they have a point of view,
but I don't think they're conscious the way we are.
I don't think they're aware that they're aware. I think
they have an awareness of their environment. I think they
mostly run algorithms that are set in advance, although there
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is some interesting research that suggests they can learn There
were some studies done recently that suggests that they can
learn from experience, remember and apply those lessons to future events,
which is pretty mind blowing. So, you know it, maybe
too many years writing for the New York Times and
the New Yorker and being fact checked that can limit
your willingness to imagine radical alternatives. Let me ask you
(24:47):
about that, because you talked just now about your grounding
and the scientific and then you talked about the institutional
framework in which a lot of your journalism was embedded.
You're also writing books pretty much the whole time, but
the New Yorker and the New York Times embody a
certain kind of cultural power that's connected to a kind
of scientific, liberal, rationalist worldview, broadly speaking, still an enlightenment
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you and I guess I wanted to ask you about
how you conceptualize your role as an idea maker and
idea disseminator in the world with respect to those different
kinds of audiences, the kind of Times New York or
audience versus the bigger world audience. Because you're one of
the very small number of people who come out of
(25:30):
journalism who transcend a journalism at a fundamental level. You've
become a central figure in the culture, and your ideas
matter to a lot of people in a wide range
of spaces, and you have moments in your work where
you sound like a rationalist prophet, still a bit of
a prophet, though this happens sometimes the climate change writers too.
I mean, I think Bill mcibbon might be another example
(25:52):
of somebody who you know, who transcended in some sense
the rationalist account of what's happening in the climate and
was both a prophet in the wilderness and now a
prophet that many people are are listening to. When you
think of the sort of trajectory of your messages out
there to the world, how do you think of yourself? Well,
there's an evolution here. I mean, I used the platform
(26:15):
of the New York Times and the New Yorker to
give substance to ideas that were pretty edgy at the time.
You know, before I wrote How to Change Your Mind,
I wrote a piece for The New Yorker in twenty
fourteen called the Trip Treatment, and this presented early research
on psychedelics being used to treat, not treat, but help
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people who were dying of cancer or you know, had
a terminal diagnosis, and this research wasn't pure reviewed yet,
and much to my amazement, David Remnick gave me, you know,
ten thousand or so words to talk about this, and
it gave credibility to ideas that had I published them
first independently, might not have might have struggled for that.
(26:59):
So having access to those platforms has been critical to
my career. You know, I was a magazine editor for
many years, and I have some sense of how the
media ecosystem works and where the edge of acceptable opinion is,
having run up against it a couple of times. But
I feel like I'm free of that now to a
large extent, and that's kind of liberating. But there's you know,
(27:22):
you mentioned mckibbon, and there's also an interesting transition or
evolution that happens from being a journalist to being an advocate,
and that's an awkward line to follow, and that happened
with me with my food journalism. I was writing, you know,
very opinionated pieces about the food system and how fucked
(27:44):
up it was for the New York Times magazine and
there was oddly no pushback for a long time, and
from my editors or from the culture until the industry
kind of woke up in two thousand and eight and
realized there's this critique getting currency. We better fight back,
and they have been fighting back ever since with some success.
And you're writing also shifted there. I mean you started saying,
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look at the structures and how bad they are, and
then you went full normative by saying this is what
you should eat. You know, listen up, world, here's what
you ought to eat. I mean, it doesn't get more
vatic and peremptory and voice from one high than that. Yeah,
although I have to say I sort of felt pushed
(28:27):
into that position because my first book about food, Omnivorous Dilemma,
was an attempt to show people the system and let
them draw their own conclusions based on the system of
what you should eat and dilemma right right exactly, And
I was not as vatics as you put it in
that book at all. But all I heard from people,
(28:47):
I mean thousands of people, is like, okay, okay, environmental problems,
animal rights, all this kind of stuff, but what should
I eat? And nobody would leave me alone until I said, well,
this is this is how I think we should eat, right,
so they demanded it of you, that your flock demanded
it of you, that we hear that story a lot
from religious leader show. I know it's an old story,
(29:08):
but I felt awkward doing it. Initially I felt awkward
becoming an advocate because I had been brought up in
a different, more innocent time in journalistic history, where you
didn't do that. But on the other hand, I was
digging so deeply into the food system that it was inevitable.
(29:28):
I was drawing conclusions. And this is something that still
if you're a beat reporter on certain beats, you have
to pretend you don't have conclusions, even though you're now
an expert. And so I had moved from this point
of following my curiosity posing questions to the food system
to having a pretty good idea what was wrong with
(29:49):
it and the direction of which it needed to go.
And gradually you get drawn into that advocacy conversation, which
is great in one way, and I have done my
share of lobbying before Congress and things like that on
various food policy, but it's also awkward, and it sometimes
can shut you out of the news pages and relegate
(30:12):
you to the op ed pages, where I don't want
to be so for the interest of journalism and wanting
to do narrative journalism, it's sometimes best not to have
reached that point of advocacy. The same thing happened with psychedelics.
I mean, my book is the story of an amateur
really learning about this new world. And I remember my
(30:34):
first book event at Harvard, at the Harvard Bookstore someone
saying as well as a leader of the psychedelic movement.
I was like, oh shit, here we go again. So
I don't have very mixed feelings about the roles. It's
how I do my political work on these two topics,
and that's my biggest contribution politically is advocating for things
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I see as being helpful or necessary. But it's not
where I started out. I really started out as a
storytelling and it's odd that both these things turned into movements.
They didn't have to. I want to thank you for
your fascinating body of work, and I'm also looking forward
to finding out what's the next area where you'll start
at the boundary doing reporting and then gradually shifted into advocacy.
(31:19):
And I think I will not be the only person
watching closely, but I realize it we'll have to involve
the word plants. I'll see what I can do. Thank
you so much. Thank you know, a great pleasure talking
to you. We'll be right back. Listening to Michael Pollen,
(31:46):
I was genuinely fascinated by the story he is telling
about the human encounter with plants and plants substances, and
with the human impulse to change our consciousness. This is
in some way a story about human power, the human
power through trial and error to discover what plants can
do for us and what's bad about the things that
(32:08):
they do for us. But it's also a story about
the human impulse to regulate. And indeed, Michael took the
stance that human beings inherently seek to regulate the uses
of plants to shape consciousness, and that they've been doing
that for as long as they knew how to do so. Simultaneously,
I was personally interested in how Michael balances a scientific materialist,
(32:33):
call it enlightenment worldview. Perhaps it makes sense that for
someone who thinks about the relationship between nature and culture
and the human power to shape that the question of
getting beyond the simple conception of power through the notion
of the mystical would be in the margins and pushing
itself back towards the center. Last, and definitely not least,
(32:55):
I was deeply struck by the way that Michael talked
about his experience in journalism and using that to shape
the way we think about ideas by recognizing that there's
some outer bound of public opinion, and that if you
push too hard again that outer bound, you lose your audience.
I can think of almost nobody who's done a better
job of expanding that outer bound, and it's intriguing to
(33:17):
hear that from Michael's perspective. He did so very much,
beginning within the system and gradually moving from the news pages,
as it were, to the place of advocacy. Those are
takeaways that are extremely valuable to anybody who's interested not
just an understanding power, but in altering the way power
is deployed and what we think is an acceptable point
(33:40):
of view to hold on a given topic. Until the
next time I speak to you, Breathe deep, think, deep thoughts,
and if they'll let you have a little fun. Deep
background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer
is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our
showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband.
(34:04):
Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin, Thanks to Mia Lobell,
Julia Barton Idea, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor,
Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on
Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column
for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot
com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original Slater podcasts, go
(34:26):
to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, and if you liked
what you heard today, please write a review or tell
a friend. This is deep background
Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
I'm Noah Feldman. Every generation has a handful of thinkers
and writers who profoundly shape the way we experience the
(00:37):
world by tapping into the seitgeist, the spirit of the Times.
Today's guest, Michael Pollen, is one of those rare individuals. First,
he did it for food, with a series of important
and influential books and articles for The New Yorker and
The New York Times that change the way we thought
about how our food was made and about what sorts
(00:58):
of foods we should eat. In recent years, he's been
doing it again, this time with psychedelics, with books like
How to Change Your Mind and most recently, This Is
Your Mind on Plants. Throughout this body of work, Michael
has focused on the intersecting point between nature and culture,
(01:18):
and he tries both to tell our stories and to
guide us directionally and how we ought to experience the world.
Michael therefore writes about power, one of our central themes
here on Deep Background this season. But he is also
someone who, in his own gentle way, deploys a substantial
amount of power in our culture because here today to
(01:39):
talk about his new book and the trajectory of his
career and how it all fits together. Michael, thank you
so much for being here. There are so many questions
that I want to ask you, but let me start
with one aspect of your fascinating new book. This is
(02:02):
your Mind on Plants. And this book is many different things,
but one of them is a kind of philosophical meditation
on the fates of different plant based substances and how
we end up regulating them. And I'm wondering how you
came to that thematic arrangement for the book, with your
(02:26):
three substances and the different status that each has. So
I looked at three plants and the chemicals they produced,
the psychoactive chemicals they produced, and I wanted to make
sure one of them was legal and completely acceptable in
our society and virtually invisible for that reason, and that
was caffeine. And I wanted to change the context of
(02:48):
opium and mescal in two by putting the three together.
Had the book been all illegal substances, it would have
been a drug book. But it's much more interested in
looking past the categories, which are interesting and arbitrary in
some ways logical and others to this base human drive
(03:10):
to change consciousness, which I think is such a curious
thing that we were born with this apparently this desire,
and it manifests itself even in children who loved to
spin and get dizzy, to very normal consciousness, to transcend
the ego or reinforce it in the case of some drugs,
and we have these remarkable tools presented to us by plants.
(03:34):
So I wanted to sort of change the context because
people go right to these categories illicit drug, acceptable drug,
pharmaceutical drug, but if you go back in time, you
know they've been upside down. I mean, there was a
time I described in the Opium chapter where the farmer
on the land where I now live in Connecticut, he
was making alcohol from his apples, making hard cider, which
(03:59):
is a very common drink in rural America for a
long time. That was a federal crime that could have
put him in jail. At that very moment, the women
for temperance were commonly enjoying their women's tonics, which were
these preparations you could buy at drug stores that contained
opium and cannabis, and that was perfectly legal, So I'm
(04:22):
trying to kind of defamiliarize ourselves with these categories a
little bit and get us to start read thinking them.
It was really fascinating to me reading the book, because,
as you've just very well described, we haven't yet gotten
to a peyote, the third substance you talk about. You
wanted three substances with different legal categorizations because you were
(04:42):
trying to move us away from thinking about the legal
categorizations and towards the plants and the human impulse to
ingest the psychoactive and yet or maybe, and also the
book that Emerged spends some time talking about the basic
human urge, sometime about the experiential relationship we have to
(05:02):
these different plant based substances, But a lot of the
book ends up being devoted to telling the story. You're
such a good storytelling you couldn't help yourself but tell
the story of how each of these substances came to
occupy the regulatory category, whether social or legal or both
(05:23):
that it did come to occupy. So, in a way,
a book that sets out to be a book about
the power of plants is also a book about human
power and the way humans categorize and engage with these
same plants, Oh, without question. I mean I'm fascinated by that.
I'm fascinated by history and how at different times in
(05:44):
history we see nature and culture in very different ways.
And drugs are a great example, since they're constantly evolving
in our estimation of them. I mean, right now, we're
in the midst of a re categorization of psychedelics. I mean,
there's still a Schedule one drug with no accepted medical
use and a high potential for abuse, neither of which
(06:05):
is true, but nevertheless that's the official category for psychedelic
But because of this renaissance of research into their value
as therapeutic aids to help people deal with mental illness
and dying, they're undergoing a shift. And I think if
we did this interview in five or ten years, they
will no longer be on Schedule one and they will
(06:26):
be part of the pharmacopeia. And nobody would have guessed
that back in the late sixties when they were first prohibited.
So we're in the midst of a sea change right now,
I think, and obiits are going in the opposite direction,
of course. But my message is too in the book,
is it's not all one or the other. We need
to think about drugs with the kind of negative capability
(06:48):
or suppleness that the Greeks did. They called all these
drugs pharmacon, which can mean both poison or medicine, and
also scapegoat by the way, which is I think not
an accident, because we tend to blame these drugs for
all sorts of things. But it's very hard for us
to hold two contradictory ideas in our head. And around drugs,
you really have to because they can be very dangerous.
(07:11):
They can get people into trouble, they can kill people,
but they also can heal and give people insights into
existence and shift their consciousness in ways that is very
productive for them as individuals and for the species I believe.
Do you have any hope that we would ever reach
a more rational set of structures for making sense of
(07:34):
this and governing it? And if so, what would rational
look like to you? I mean, one could say, well,
here's the thing about coffee or caffeine. It doesn't leave
you rampaging in the streets. Right Yet, in your chapter
on caffeine, you make the point that we can't just
describe the effects of caffeine as minor or trivial. The
(07:59):
hope that will ever be rational about this. The evidence
of history is that we won't, and that there is
a fundamentally irrational part of human life and of the
human mind that drugs plays into. We're constantly, you know,
we're meaning making creatures, and we will make meaning out
of everything. And then if you take a particularly powerful
(08:20):
substance that seems to have its own meanings and perhaps does,
will project all sorts of stuff on that. But again,
the same drug at different times in history can be
regarded as encouraging passivity or encouraging violence. I mean, it's
interesting how inconsistent we are even about the image of
these drugs and what they do for us. I'm convinced
(08:42):
that our interpretation of psychedelic experience owes maybe one part
to the chemical and nine parts to culture and individual psyche.
I mean, that we construct this experience. I've always wondered
what would happen if psychedelics hadn't first been written about
by Aldus Huxley, who puts a very Eastern spin on it.
(09:06):
It's more like Eastern religion than Christian religion. And that
orientalizing of psychedelics I think descends from him. It gets
picked up by Leary, who used the Tibetan Book of
the Dead to interpret the experience. What if some Christian
mystics had written the first modern accounts of a psychedelic trip,
would it have looked very different? I'm guessing it could be.
(09:28):
It could have been constructed differently. But you have to
tease apart what's really inherent about the experience. But people
forget that everything you experience on a psychedelic is not
in the molecule. The molecule doesn't have anything in it.
It really is a catalyst for a process in your
(09:48):
own mind that draws on everything in your memory, from
your own personal experiences to what you've learned about how
the world works. And this is one of the reasons
I'm so interested in drugs. They're one of those interesting
rubs between nature and culture, between our biology and everything
we are because of the culture we inhabit. But then
(10:09):
you have this other tradition though, right, the Native American
tradition ayahuasca and payote and mushrooms. And I found that
really fascinating, partly because I didn't know much about it
and hadn't paid much attention to payote or the Native
American use of psychedelics before, but they have a different
construction and it's it's very religious, it's very social, which
(10:34):
is interesting. I mean, the drug trip is not an
individual matter, it's it's it's something that happens at the
level of the community, so they put a different interpretation
on it. Yeah, I think that's really important, and I
agree that that's one of the really interesting things in
your book. And you also show at the same time
the connection of the history of mescaline and other cactus
(10:56):
derivatives in resistance to the process of domination and cultural
and literal genocide perpetrated against Native American peoples, especially in
North America, but also in South and Central America, and
the way that payote came to be part of the
resistance to that story through the immersions of the Native
(11:17):
American Payote Church in the late nineteenth century, and then
it's flourishing again in the nineteen seventies and eighties. And
that's a really rich and important part of your book.
And I wondered if I could ask you about an
aspect of that that has struck me when I hear
contemporary non Indigenous people talking about the use of payote
(11:38):
and that is, where do you think that fits into
our discourse around cultural ownership and cultural appropriation, especially cultural
ownership by indigenous peoples. I mean, on the one hand,
they are in some sense part of the common legacy
of all humans, and in another sense, they're very specifically
connected to particular cultures, cultures that have suffered from destruction.
(12:02):
So I wonder how you think about that. So I
struggle with this because I was deciding whether I was
going to use payote, having learned about the sensitivities about
it on the part of Native Americans. I had interviewed
many Native Americans who felt threatened by the white use
or the non native use of payote. But there are
two issues there. There's a cultural appropriation issue, and there's
(12:25):
a material appropriation issue in that there is a shortage
of payote, and that because of overuse. Because approaching this cactus,
the sacred plant, which has become so essential to Native
American identity among many tribes, hundreds of tribes now and
has been such a powerful tool of healing the unique
trauma of Native Americans, that I came to the conclusion
(12:49):
that as a non Native, I should leave it alone.
That that was the way to respect it. So I decided,
even though I had some opportunities there were Native Americans
willing to let me participate, the moral or ethical thing
to do was not to do it. It's not to
say I think that use of payote should be illegal.
I do think we should explore what Native Americans have
(13:15):
taught us about the healing potential of this compound, mescaline.
They did discover mescaline. And then there's another argument about
reparations and reciprocity. So there are companies that want to
use mescaline in their research and possibly as a treatment
for alcoholism, which is one of the big ways that
Native Americans use it. Is there any obligation on the
(13:37):
part of those companies to return profit or somehow recognize
or share their intellectual property if they develop it with
Native Americans. That's a really interesting question. I don't know
the answer to that. People are struggling with that right now.
But I do believe that even though all drugs should
be decriminalized, I think as a matter of individual conscience,
(13:58):
I would discourage non natives from using payote, especially because
there are other ways to get it. To get mescaline.
One is synthetic mescaline doesn't damage native payote stocks. And
the other is this other cactus I talk about sam
pedro or watchuma, which grows in South America. Very easy
to grow here or grow your own payote if you're
(14:19):
a very patient person and a good gardener. It takes
fifteen years to get from seed to usable button. But
I see no problem. I don't see that as cultural
appropriation if you have some seeds and want to crow it.
But again, people draw these lines in very different places,
and Native Americans do. I mean, I talk to Native Americans,
some of whom would say, you know, use all the
(14:43):
synthetic mescaline and sam pedro you want, just leave our
payote alone. And then I talk to others who said,
if you're going to use mescaline, you owe us reparations
because we discovered it. So there's not you know, Native
American opinion on this is not monolithic by any means,
and my own opinion is not monolithic either, as you
can tell. We'll be right back. I want to turn
(15:16):
to the magic word plants, which seems to be something
that has almost talismanic quality in the body of work
of Michael Pollen and in the culture at the moment.
By the way, I mean, have you noticed how many
products are now plant based in your supermarketing? Yeah? And
I'm not sure that if you know, when future historians
do an analysis of the evolution of the concept of
(15:37):
plant based if they won't find you at the very
beating heart of the birth of that movement. So I
want to ask you about the about that word, about
that the power of that word. You're a gardener, and
that has something to do with your long term interest
in plants, obviously, because it's famous to everybody. Now you're
a dictum about what we should eat started with plants
(16:01):
and was made plant central. I'm not really kidding. I
think when someday they ask why all these things have
the word plant based attached, they may come back to you.
And then this book uses advisedly the word plants. You
don't say drugs, you don't say medicines, which is a
word that some users of psychedelics prefer, and that some
Native Americans don't much like to hear used in this
context because they take it very seriously and are not
(16:22):
sure that everybody who uses these substances does. So talk
to me about the word plants. Well, it's been such
a kind of common word in my personal vocabulary for
a long time. I don't have that much perspective on it.
I used it in the title of this book in
part to remind people that's where drugs come from, and
(16:44):
that they are part of our relationship to the natural world,
and we lose track of that. We think of drugs
coming from laboratories, and some of them do, but a
great many of them, of course, come from plants. And
why do plants produce them? Then that opens up a
whole conversation about evolutionary objectives of plants as opposed to people,
(17:06):
the fact that they are geniuses chemistry and neurochemistry in particular,
and why they are because they can't run away, basically,
and so they have to use chemistry to either attract
or repel. And I've been fascinated in that fact about
plants for a very long time. These are not simple
molecules they're making. And how incredible is it that a
(17:29):
plant can hit on precisely the the chemical formula to
have a profound effect on an animal brain. So I've
been marveling at plants for a long time. I've been
trying to win them more respect speak for them since
they can't speak for themselves. Michael paulin Lorax. We'll put
(17:53):
that on in the head notes of this interview. That
did have a big influence on me, the Loax? Did
it actually say? Would you say something about that? How
old were you when you first heard of or read
the Loax? You think, I don't remember. I don't. I
think it came out a little late in my childhood.
I'm not sure, but it was one of my sons
favorite books, and this whole time I was beginning this
work in the nineties, I read it to my son
(18:14):
over and over and over again. I've got it pretty
much committed to memory. I think at this point i'd
have to go back and check what year the Lorex
came out. I think of that as kind of late
and tied to the environmental movement. It has sentiments in
it that it's hard to imagine before nineteen sixty nine
or so, when when the environmental movement is starting. Have
you found it published June twenty three, nineteen seventy one,
(18:38):
So historical analysis is confirmed in a real time. It's
nice to when that happens. But the language is very
much you know post Rachel Carson post the First Earth Day.
So my exposure to it I was fifteen then or
sixteen then, So I wasn't reading Doctor SEUs at sixteen,
but I did read it over and over again to
my son, who loved it. I also know I've written
a lot about plant intelligence and the whole effort to
(19:01):
figure out how intelligent are plants? Are they conscious? And
what does that mean? I mean, I think we're learning
some incredible things about plant intelligence, plant sociality. This is
a kind of interesting moment for plant science, which has
been a very sleepy field for a long time. If
you talk to botanists, nobody was paying attention to them.
But now you have all this work on how plants
(19:26):
connect to one another, and the trees in a forest
are very social. Suzanne Simard has a new book on
this that's really interesting. She's done pioneering research showing that
they can swap nutrients using these fungle networks. They can
send messages, plants can hear. There's interesting research that if
you play the sound of caterpillars chomping on leaves to
(19:47):
other plants, they will arm themselves and produce defense chemicals.
You know, they don't have ears, but they can hear,
they don't have eyes, but they can see. I mean,
they're just bizarre. So it takes a lot of human
imagination to see the world from their point of view.
And I've been eager to do that for a very
long time and wrote a book in fact who's subtitle
(20:09):
was A Plant's eye View of the World. And it's
exciting to see there is, though, I worry a slightly
mystical strain coming into some of this work about trees.
I mean, there've been books out on trees that are
more mystical than scientific that really strain credulity, at least mine.
But in general, I think plants are getting a new
respect and that does tie into, you know, what we're
(20:31):
learning about nutrition. However, the twinkie is plant based too,
I think we need to remember. And there's a lot
of crap sold as plant based in the supermarket right now. Yeah,
as is tobacco, as is you know, there are plenty
of you know, plenty of other substances. I wouldn't put
a caffe and quite in the tobacco category, but it's
not in one of the good categories. I mean, as
(20:52):
one expands the category of the plant, it can come
to include not everything, but a large percentage of everything.
I was interested to hear you say that sometimes the
mystical tone of some of the plant work, the plant
based work, strains creduli because you're interested in mysticism right
in your work, there's a kind of you're on the edge.
(21:14):
You're skirting the edge between giving us a rationalistic, scientific
and social scientific contextualization, and you're at just at the edge,
especially in your interest in consciousness. Here of a field
of endeavor that is fundamentally mystical and that needs presumably
to be processed mystically to make any sense out of
(21:36):
it at all. Right, I mean to say meaning making
is a rationalizing process. No, I mean, one way to
make meaning is by making something rational. But another way
to make meaning is to embrace its mystical quality. And
it seems to me, with respect to psychedelics, that if
we tried to reduce everything to its rational it seems
like we would be missing the point. Yeah, so I
(21:57):
flirt with mysticism, but I am very grounded in the
scientific worldview. I get grief for this from certain people.
In How to Change Your Mind, there were many people
who objected to the fact that I didn't take seriously
enough this idea I presented that consciousness is a field
outside us, like the electromagnetic field that we tune into.
(22:18):
That our brains are tuners or television sets. And I
think that's a beautiful idea. But my mind goes to
a more materialistic understanding that even though we don't understand how,
consciousness is the product of our brains, and it's tempting
to think otherwise. And I'm more open to that idea
(22:38):
than I was before experience with psychedelics, but I haven't
yet been persuaded, and I'm curious to learn more about it.
But psychedelic experience for many people causes them to lose
faith in the materialist view of consciousness. And it's important
to mention that that material's view of consciouness is not
well developed at all. Right, Okay, it's an easy thing
(23:00):
to lose faith in my view. I mean, there are
propositions of science that are well established, and if someone
were to say, you know, I no longer believe in
Newtonian mechanics, I would say something's not totally right there.
On the other hand, when it comes to consciousness, there
isn't really a respectable materialist account of consciousness at all.
(23:20):
There is simply the commitment to the view that materialism
must be true in light of what we observe, and
therefore the consciousness must be reducible to the material which is,
you know, that's a plausible inference, but it's a form
of inductive reasoning. It's not deductive or demonstrated reasoning. That's right,
And I think the Dalai Lama was quite correct when
(23:41):
he said at the first Mind and Life conference where
they brought together neuroscientists and Buddhists, that the material theory
of consciousness is a very interesting hypothesis and we should
give it no more credit than that. And so, you know,
I'm open, but it must be my training and background.
But even when I'm writing about plant intelligence, I'm always
(24:03):
hanging out with people going a lot further than I'm
willing to go in terms of saying plants are conscious.
I have some sense that they have a point of view,
but I don't think they're conscious the way we are.
I don't think they're aware that they're aware. I think
they have an awareness of their environment. I think they
mostly run algorithms that are set in advance, although there
(24:24):
is some interesting research that suggests they can learn There
were some studies done recently that suggests that they can
learn from experience, remember and apply those lessons to future events,
which is pretty mind blowing. So, you know it, maybe
too many years writing for the New York Times and
the New Yorker and being fact checked that can limit
your willingness to imagine radical alternatives. Let me ask you
(24:47):
about that, because you talked just now about your grounding
and the scientific and then you talked about the institutional
framework in which a lot of your journalism was embedded.
You're also writing books pretty much the whole time, but
the New Yorker and the New York Times embody a
certain kind of cultural power that's connected to a kind
of scientific, liberal, rationalist worldview, broadly speaking, still an enlightenment
(25:09):
you and I guess I wanted to ask you about
how you conceptualize your role as an idea maker and
idea disseminator in the world with respect to those different
kinds of audiences, the kind of Times New York or
audience versus the bigger world audience. Because you're one of
the very small number of people who come out of
(25:30):
journalism who transcend a journalism at a fundamental level. You've
become a central figure in the culture, and your ideas
matter to a lot of people in a wide range
of spaces, and you have moments in your work where
you sound like a rationalist prophet, still a bit of
a prophet, though this happens sometimes the climate change writers too.
I mean, I think Bill mcibbon might be another example
(25:52):
of somebody who you know, who transcended in some sense
the rationalist account of what's happening in the climate and
was both a prophet in the wilderness and now a
prophet that many people are are listening to. When you
think of the sort of trajectory of your messages out
there to the world, how do you think of yourself? Well,
there's an evolution here. I mean, I used the platform
(26:15):
of the New York Times and the New Yorker to
give substance to ideas that were pretty edgy at the time.
You know, before I wrote How to Change Your Mind,
I wrote a piece for The New Yorker in twenty
fourteen called the Trip Treatment, and this presented early research
on psychedelics being used to treat, not treat, but help
(26:37):
people who were dying of cancer or you know, had
a terminal diagnosis, and this research wasn't pure reviewed yet,
and much to my amazement, David Remnick gave me, you know,
ten thousand or so words to talk about this, and
it gave credibility to ideas that had I published them
first independently, might not have might have struggled for that.
(26:59):
So having access to those platforms has been critical to
my career. You know, I was a magazine editor for
many years, and I have some sense of how the
media ecosystem works and where the edge of acceptable opinion is,
having run up against it a couple of times. But
I feel like I'm free of that now to a
large extent, and that's kind of liberating. But there's you know,
(27:22):
you mentioned mckibbon, and there's also an interesting transition or
evolution that happens from being a journalist to being an advocate,
and that's an awkward line to follow, and that happened
with me with my food journalism. I was writing, you know,
very opinionated pieces about the food system and how fucked
(27:44):
up it was for the New York Times magazine and
there was oddly no pushback for a long time, and
from my editors or from the culture until the industry
kind of woke up in two thousand and eight and
realized there's this critique getting currency. We better fight back,
and they have been fighting back ever since with some success.
And you're writing also shifted there. I mean you started saying,
(28:06):
look at the structures and how bad they are, and
then you went full normative by saying this is what
you should eat. You know, listen up, world, here's what
you ought to eat. I mean, it doesn't get more
vatic and peremptory and voice from one high than that. Yeah,
although I have to say I sort of felt pushed
(28:27):
into that position because my first book about food, Omnivorous Dilemma,
was an attempt to show people the system and let
them draw their own conclusions based on the system of
what you should eat and dilemma right right exactly, And
I was not as vatics as you put it in
that book at all. But all I heard from people,
(28:47):
I mean thousands of people, is like, okay, okay, environmental problems,
animal rights, all this kind of stuff, but what should
I eat? And nobody would leave me alone until I said, well,
this is this is how I think we should eat, right,
so they demanded it of you, that your flock demanded
it of you, that we hear that story a lot
from religious leader show. I know it's an old story,
(29:08):
but I felt awkward doing it. Initially I felt awkward
becoming an advocate because I had been brought up in
a different, more innocent time in journalistic history, where you
didn't do that. But on the other hand, I was
digging so deeply into the food system that it was inevitable.
(29:28):
I was drawing conclusions. And this is something that still
if you're a beat reporter on certain beats, you have
to pretend you don't have conclusions, even though you're now
an expert. And so I had moved from this point
of following my curiosity posing questions to the food system
to having a pretty good idea what was wrong with
(29:49):
it and the direction of which it needed to go.
And gradually you get drawn into that advocacy conversation, which
is great in one way, and I have done my
share of lobbying before Congress and things like that on
various food policy, but it's also awkward, and it sometimes
can shut you out of the news pages and relegate
(30:12):
you to the op ed pages, where I don't want
to be so for the interest of journalism and wanting
to do narrative journalism, it's sometimes best not to have
reached that point of advocacy. The same thing happened with psychedelics.
I mean, my book is the story of an amateur
really learning about this new world. And I remember my
(30:34):
first book event at Harvard, at the Harvard Bookstore someone
saying as well as a leader of the psychedelic movement.
I was like, oh shit, here we go again. So
I don't have very mixed feelings about the roles. It's
how I do my political work on these two topics,
and that's my biggest contribution politically is advocating for things
(30:56):
I see as being helpful or necessary. But it's not
where I started out. I really started out as a
storytelling and it's odd that both these things turned into movements.
They didn't have to. I want to thank you for
your fascinating body of work, and I'm also looking forward
to finding out what's the next area where you'll start
at the boundary doing reporting and then gradually shifted into advocacy.
(31:19):
And I think I will not be the only person
watching closely, but I realize it we'll have to involve
the word plants. I'll see what I can do. Thank
you so much. Thank you know, a great pleasure talking
to you. We'll be right back. Listening to Michael Pollen,
(31:46):
I was genuinely fascinated by the story he is telling
about the human encounter with plants and plants substances, and
with the human impulse to change our consciousness. This is
in some way a story about human power, the human
power through trial and error to discover what plants can
do for us and what's bad about the things that
(32:08):
they do for us. But it's also a story about
the human impulse to regulate. And indeed, Michael took the
stance that human beings inherently seek to regulate the uses
of plants to shape consciousness, and that they've been doing
that for as long as they knew how to do so. Simultaneously,
I was personally interested in how Michael balances a scientific materialist,
(32:33):
call it enlightenment worldview. Perhaps it makes sense that for
someone who thinks about the relationship between nature and culture
and the human power to shape that the question of
getting beyond the simple conception of power through the notion
of the mystical would be in the margins and pushing
itself back towards the center. Last, and definitely not least,
(32:55):
I was deeply struck by the way that Michael talked
about his experience in journalism and using that to shape
the way we think about ideas by recognizing that there's
some outer bound of public opinion, and that if you
push too hard again that outer bound, you lose your audience.
I can think of almost nobody who's done a better
job of expanding that outer bound, and it's intriguing to
(33:17):
hear that from Michael's perspective. He did so very much,
beginning within the system and gradually moving from the news pages,
as it were, to the place of advocacy. Those are
takeaways that are extremely valuable to anybody who's interested not
just an understanding power, but in altering the way power
is deployed and what we think is an acceptable point
(33:40):
of view to hold on a given topic. Until the
next time I speak to you, Breathe deep, think, deep thoughts,
and if they'll let you have a little fun. Deep
background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer
is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our
showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband.
(34:04):
Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin, Thanks to Mia Lobell,
Julia Barton Idea, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor,
Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on
Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column
for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot
com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original Slater podcasts, go
(34:26):
to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, and if you liked
what you heard today, please write a review or tell
a friend. This is deep background
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