Michael Pollan: belief

Transcript context

…Gopnik says it’s like having tea with a four-year-old. I have a sense that a tea party with a four-year-old, the four-year-old will insist on all kinds of rules. The four-year-old will be a quicker learner than the adult. It seems fundamentally like a very different thing to me. I think in some dimensions, it’s similar. Probably in other dimensions, it’s not. I know about that rule-based kid, but I also know the kid you sit down with, the four-year-old who spins out some imaginative tale of such implausibility and beauty. It’s crazy talk, but it’s incredibly charming. There’s that four-year-old, too. Maybe we shouldn’t be generalizing about four-year-olds. You’ve written that you tried some things earlier in your life. In Botany of Desire, you write about psychedelics. You sound actually somewhat negative. You’ve come to the point you’re at now, which is quite different. What is it you think you learned in between, putting aside anything having to do with actual experience? Intellectually, what is it that got you from one point of view to the other?…

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