Michael Pollan: How To Change Your Mind | E158

Depression, anxiety, addiction, mental disorders that involve a rigidity of thought, what psychedelics appear to do is break those habits of thought.

What is the cost of this though?

That's a great question. (dramatic music) One of the 100 most influential people in the world. Please welcome Michael Pollan.

You've written six New York Times bestsellers.

Yeah.

And they're on such a diverse range of topics.

Two of the topics I've worked on have turned into movements. I was writing a piece on the meat industry and how fucked up it is, and it led to this movement to try to reform agriculture. Then I got into psychedelics. They're much better than the results for antidepressants when they came on the scene, and we're talking about potential cures, not simply symptoms. There are risks with this, and we don't talk about them nearly enough, and people are gonna get hurt.

One of the immersive journalistic pursuits you embarked on was this topic of caffeine.

It allows us to function better. It allows us to work harder, longer. You're feeling the clearing of the mental fog.

I can tell you the cost of doing heroin every day, but no one can seem to tell me the cost of having three cups of coffee a day.

If you really want to understand your relationship to this drug, you have to- (record screeches)

So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO USA Edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. (upbeat music) Michael, I have to say, it's a real, a huge honor to speak to you. When I departed from my company and I started investigating what I was interested in, one of the things, alongside DJing and this podcast and many others, was psychedelics. I was so compelled by, um, this apparent, and I didn't have confirmation, this apparent increase in mental health disorders in my country.

Mm-hmm.

In the UK, as you know, as I know you've talked about many times, is that suicide is the single biggest ki- uh, killer of men under the age of 45. And I thought that the most sort of fulfilling thing I could do with the next chapter of my life was start a company in that space. That's how I came to the psychedelics industry.

Mm-hmm.

That's how I came to actually work in the psychedelics industry. And when I arrived in that industry, people said your name over and over and over again, and they told me, and I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, they told me that I had to... it was like I wasn't allowed in the industry until I'd read your book.

(laughs)

Right? Um, How To Change Your Mind, it was that much of a pivotal book for my colleagues at the time. You've written six New York Times bestsellers, and they're on such a diverse arrange of topics. To be so successful in such a diverse range of topics in writing, my first question to you that I wanted to ask is, as you look back on your life and your career, why were you successful? What was it about you that made you successful?