← All source episodes Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Michael Pollan on the Science and Sublimity of Psychedelics
15 Aug 2018 23 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 7uncertainty 5evaluation 4recommendation 3prediction 3observation 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
23 published records
“There’s a wonderful sushi restaurant called Kamado Sushi right in the Gourmet Ghetto that I highly recommend — reasonably priced, informal, and excellent for lunch or dinner.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Is that profound or not? It sounds really goofy, but I think the line between profundity and banality is a lot finer than we think.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Other people can produce a book every year or two. I don’t know if I’m that productive.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Five-factor personality theory only captures a small amount of what people are, like any theory. We don’t know, but it’s at least possible one part of your personality changes.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I don’t know that this has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of a social scientist yet, but I do think that there are enormous gains.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think you’d see less of it because now the persecution complex that goes with the guru complex — they’re related.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“First of all, the chapter in Botany of Desire you’re referencing, I think, is mostly about cannabis, even though I quote Huxley.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“The subject-object distinction goes away for a period of time, so everything seems objective, or whatever is subjective is objective. That’s built in, I think, to the mystical experience.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think she does a beautiful job reminding us who’s behind these statistics and these strangers in our town squares.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think in some dimensions, it’s similar. Probably in other dimensions, it’s not.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“One thing, though, people who are on an SSRI to raise their serotonin levels — although actually, we don’t even know that SSRIs do that, believe it or not; it’s incredible what we don’t know about them — but they do occupy the same receptor sites.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I was very suspicious of spirituality. I’m very materialist in my outlook, I realized.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Is that free trade when it’s subsidized? I don’t know. Is it? You know better than I.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“As we age, I think we tend to get stuck in grooves and ideologies and get less good at considering other points of view.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Her distinction between spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness, with adults having this amazing ability to train their attention on something and block out everything else and get a lot of stuff done, versus the kid who doesn’t really stay focused, partly because he or she is taking in information from all directions and is not prioritizing, and there is a strength and a weakness in that.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Here was this mushroom with the power to change what was going on in my mind in a profound way, change my attitude toward it and other plants.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I also don’t think they should be simply and completely legalized and deregulated, just because of their power and some of the risks, and that people do get into trouble with them.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Many people — I don’t know what percentage — emerge from the experience with a subsequent sense of ego inflation, which is weird.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think there are doses where that might apply — low dose, so-called recreational dose, when people take some mushrooms and go to a concert, and they’re high essentially. But the kind of experience I’m describing is a lot more — I won’t use the word profound because we’ve charged that one — that is a very internal and difficult journey that has moments of incredible beauty and lucidity, but also has dark moments, moments of contemplating death.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think the real risks are to people who are at risk of psychosis, whether they have schizophrenia in their genes, in their family background, or personality disorders of various kinds, bipolar.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“The so-called classic psychedelics, like psilocybin, DMT, LSD, have remarkably low toxicity compared to drugs we take routinely, compared to over-the-counter drugs, compared to Tylenol.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Psychedelics, the experience of it, the anecdotal reports of it, and some of this light science about it suggest that they address both those things, which I think is interesting and may explain why there is such interest in it right now.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“There’s a wonderful sushi restaurant called Kamado Sushi right in the Gourmet Ghetto that I highly recommend — reasonably priced, informal, and excellent for lunch or dinner. We’re blessed with many eating possibilities. Or you could come to my house.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler