Michael Pollan

speaker

2,844 appearances 8 recordings 8 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 28 May

Michael Pollan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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Making Sense with Sam Harris · #475 — The Hard Problem of Consciousness · 12 May 2026 podcast

So yeah, I'm not overly concerned about that.

I think there's going to be all sorts of nasty things happening.

There's going to be profiteering and attempts to limit access, attempts to patent things that shouldn't be patented.

I mean, all sorts of things are going on there.

And there's a tremendous hype cycle with lots of capital rushing in and then the capital rushes out and now it's back in.

So it's going to be messy.

Whenever capitalism gets a hold of something like this, it gets really messy.

Yeah.

Well, it's especially obvious in AI at the moment.

We'll talk about the implications there.

I mean, one concern I have about the influence of psychedelics on this conversation is that there's some...

There's some way in which I think that the psychedelic experience, to speak generically, can be indispensable but also misleading.

I mean, it certainly can be with respect to the goal of meditation and what there is to recognize about the nature of consciousness there that is liberative or worth paying attention to.

There's something that I think the...

the experiences, the peak experiences people have on psychedelics while they advertise to them the possibility of living a very different kind of life in the world, they also can give the false impression that freedom is a matter of radically changing the contents of consciousness, radically expanding it and achieving something, some kind of permanent state that is analogous to what you enjoyed on the peak of whatever it was, you know, acid, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, whatever your

whatever your moment was.

And so anyway, we'll talk about that because I think the- Yeah, no, and I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the mystical experiences, which is what, you know, how people kind of assess these experiences.

That a mystical experience that was permanent would probably be schizophrenia.

It's something in the context of everyday life.

It's a period of transcendence, but it's not something you sustain.

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