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 · last 12 months

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

And you know this history well, but many of the Americans who brought Buddhism to America started with psychedelics and then had a similar realization to what you're talking about, which is that it's not a practice.

It's not something you can sustain day after day.

And they moved into meditation, which was a place you could have a practice, obviously.

But the links are very interesting.

And I think psychedelics may be a very good way to start a meditation practice.

I'm always taken with the fact that most of the experience is not the profound climax, but this long tail, which can go on for hours and is a meditation and often a very good meditation in that you're totally undistracted and you can go really deep, but you still have some control over your mind.

So I think the links are very interesting.

And I do think psychedelics are a legitimate tool for the study of consciousness, the scientific study of consciousness.

You know, the first big study that was done at Johns Hopkins by Roland Griffith was of mystical experience.

That's a very interesting aspect of human consciousness.

And the fact that we have a tool that can pretty reliably induce it opens up all sorts of experimental possibilities.

Yeah, I mean, the reliability, apart from the tiny percentage of people who seem impervious to psychedelics for reasons that, I don't know whether they've been explained at the level of their 5-HT2A receptors or not, but I mean, some people apparently, I never believe this.

I mean, I accept it as a fact, but I just can't believe that there are people who, if given 500 micrograms of LSD, have no experience.

The gurus, the guru stories, yes.

No, I'm not even, I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about just people who are ordinary people who are seeking to have an experience on psychedelics and they, in the presence of a guide, you know, administering whatever five grams of mushrooms.

I mean, I know people like this.

I know at least two people who have taken whopping doses of psychedelics and literally nothing has happened.

And so there are people who just, you know, for whatever reason, don't have the right neurons for better or worse.

I was thinking more of the, you know, the stories, Ram Dass tells the story of his guru.

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