Michael Pollan on Politics, Plants, Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Future
He's changed minds with bestselling books on psychedelics and on botany and desire. Now he’s tackling consciousness | Also from from my archives: Ketamine backlash; Silicon Valley and Trump
In this issue of FUTURES
Theme: The Writer, Politics, and Consciousness
· Essay: Michael Pollan: Politics, Plants, Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Future—the Writer at Age 70: Michael Pollan has changed minds with books about botany and desire, psychedelics, building a dream house, and more. Now he’s tackling consciousness. By David Ewing Duncan.
· Q&A: Michael Pollan
· From my Archives:
Ketamine’s long, strange Journey (Vanity Fair, 2024)
Silicon Valley and Trump (Daily Beast, 2016)
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FUTURES is a column and a newsletter about possible futures at a pivotable moment in history, where the future could turn out wondrous—or not. I’m asking the most interesting people I can find what they are most excited about and most afraid of for the future, and why.
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New Essay
Michael Pollan: Politics, Plants, Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Future—the Writer at Age 70
Michael Pollan has changed minds with books about botany and desire, building a little dream house, psychedelics, and more. Now he is tackling consciousness.
By David Ewing Duncan—June 21, 2025
“This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.”
- Michael Pollan in conversation with Gwen Ifill, PBS
Michael Pollan has a Goldilocks touch as a writer. He finds topics on the cusp of breaking out big, arriving not too early and not too late, but just right. It’s a gift of zeitgeist that makes other writers like me jealous as Pollan time and again pops up with a book or article that not only captures a rising trend with meticulously researched and eloquent prose, but also at times becomes part of the story itself as his reporting and ideas accelerate the buzz and adoption of the new thing.
He did this 25 years ago with plants and what we eat when food that originates in the soil and on trees, vines, and bushes—and not in a test tube—was about to have a moment. His book, Botany of Desire, published in 2001, captured a powerful cultural shift from au naturel being the passion of a few slow food enthusiasts to a major gastro-philosophical movement. The book quickly became a bible for the culinarily restless and the gastro-dispossessed, a clarion call for those who were rejecting the industrialization of what we eat to embrace “real” food.
A quarter-century later this movement has changed nutritional expectations for millions of people. Restaurant menus, what grocery stores stock, and what we eat at home for many have shifted to fresh and more natural even as processed foods continue to proliferate and to feed a crisis in obesity and metabolic disaster—which Pollan also has investigated and written about.
Pollan did the same thing in 2006 for the omnivores among us by investigating the confusion of foods available in the modern world, including industrial, organic, home grown, and hunter-gatherer. Omnivore’s Dilemma links up good nutrition with the science of what’s behind these different approaches to food while providing a passionate argument to consider the ethical and environmental implications of the foods we eat. He advocated for a mindful approach to food that for many people has reframed their relationship with what they put into their mouths.
In 2015, Michael Pollen used the title of his new book, How to Change a Mind, to describe not only how psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA alter one’s gray-matter, but also to report on another burgeoning cultural and scientific shift that at the time was under the radar for most people. He reported on a quiet trend among mental health professionals who had rediscovered the power of psychedelics as effective therapies for depression, PTSD, and mood disorders after decades of vilification and criminalization.
Hailed by researchers in the 1960s for their healing potential, psychedelics back then were drawn into the counterculture politics of the era by an “establishment” that didn’t appreciate the use of acid and shrooms to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” in the words of the Harvard Psychologist Timothy Leary. His advocacy of tripping recreationally and his many arrests for possession landed him in jail in 1970. Soon after, the federal government listed most psychedelics as “Schedule 1” drugs—those defined as having “high potential for abuse, no medical use and lack of accepted safety.”
Describing how criminalization gave way to psychedelics being used to heal traumatized brains, Pollan’s book became a catalyst for a societal mood shift from the war on drugs to psychedelics as miracle meds. His success helped to inspire the creation of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, which Pollan co-founded in 2020.
I experienced my own mind change when long-haul COVID struck me down in 2020 with a deep brain fog and struggling breaths and the psychedelic ketamine helped cure me. (I wrote a story about this for Vanity Fair titled “Stolen Words: COVID, Ketamine, and Me”).
Recently, the previous hype around psychedelics as a wonder drug has given way to a certain skepticism in the wake of actor Matthew Perry’s death and the alleged abuse of ketamine by the former “special government employee” Elon Musk. This backlash is the subject of my archival article last year in Vanity Fair, Ketamine’s Long Strange Journey, which is excerpted below and included comments about Michael Pollan and How to Change a Mind.
Pollan tells me that his next book is on consciousness, which we discuss below. He has some interesting thoughts on AI and consciousness—whether it ever will be conscious, and what our belief that machines could be conscious means. He thinks we’re confused between intelligence and consciousness, “which are not the same thing.” Check out our conversation below for more on this.
Another thread to keep an eye out for in our discussion is politics, which Pollan jumped to immediately as his greatest fear for the future when I asked him my usual opening question for this column (“what is your greatest hope and greatest fear for the future?”). Note that I spoke with Pollan late last year just before the presidential election, before everything that has happened since the election of Donald Trump. “I take a pretty apocalyptic view of what might happen if Trump is reelected,” he said back then,” a view I can only imagine has been reinforced by the Trump presidency since Pollan I talked. I did ask him if he wanted to update his answer to the my question and he responded by saying he still stands by what he said earlier.
Also in this issue of Futures. From my archives is a Vanity Fair article I wrote that talks about a backlash of sorts to the use of psychedelics, especially ketamine, in the wake of this drug being implicated in the death of actor Matthew Perry and alleged abuse of K by former First Buddy Elon Musk. I also have included a curious time capsule of a commentary I wrote for the Daily Beast in 2016 about why then first term president elect Donald Trump should be taken seriously by Silicon Valley and others at a time when many people considered a lightweight and a clown.
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Q&A: Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is a Professor at Harvard University and at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, and many more books.
I visited Pollan in his office on the top floor of the Lamont Library on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 2024, a few weeks before the 2024 election. In his first answer, Pollan refers to the upcoming election on November 5. Since some time had passed since we spoke, I asked Pollan if he had any updates he wanted to make to his answer to my first question about his greatest hope and greatest fear for the future. He said no, he was okay with what he said last fall.
First, I asked Michael Pollan the question I ask everyone for this column on possible futures.
David Ewing Duncan. What are you most excited about and most afraid of for the future, and why?
Michael Pollan: There are different horizons of the future, right? There's November 5th…
That’s coming in the very near future.
I take a pretty apocalyptic view of what might happen if Trump is reelected. I didn't feel apocalyptic about him until the Supreme Court essentially removed all guardrails from what he can do in office. I mean that they have issued this license to become a dictator if he wants to punish and kill his enemies. So, I would say that's what I'm most worried about today. Hopefully on November 6th, we could have this conversation and we could talk about some less proximate worries.
What are you most hopeful about?
I need to give that some thought.
Okay, then what else are you worried about that’s not politics?
One thing I've been thinking about and writing about is AI with particular attention to the idea, which is common in AI circles, that it would be possible to create an AI that is conscious, that has feelings, has a perspective, has agency. I don't think this is possible. I could be wrong, but I think the belief flows from a confusion of intelligence and consciousness, which are not the same thing. They're kind of orthogonal, actually. You can be conscious and really stupid and simple. There are many animals that are probably conscious that aren't so bright. The problem here is that AI’s will be able to fool us very easily because of their cleverness combined with our tendency to anthropomorphize everything—our cars, our pets. So I think it's going to lead to a lot of confusion because if we believe something is conscious, that in many ethical frameworks entitles it to a moral consideration, and I don't think machines should get it. So that's a worry.
Humans are already falling in love with chatbots like in the movie Her, where the Joaquin Phoenix character falls in love with the voice of Scarlett Johansson.
Yeah, exactly. I don't think that's very good for the species, when you consider the reproductive impossibilities.
That’s a problem for sure. What else concerns you?
I just feel that it's going to confuse us about some very important values. Who is and is not conscious is a hugely important ethical issue. I've written about animals quite a bit and feel strongly that our failure to extend moral consideration to them is a problem. I think what's going to happen with machines as they get more intelligent and seem more conscious is that we may begin to think of ourselves as more like how we think now about animals—as less intelligent maybe, or less exalted. Humans have spent thousands of years separating ourselves from animals and puffing ourselves up with a sense of importance that we can do things they can't do—we're smarter and more conscious, we have self-reflection, have language. We have all these great things and that's been how we define ourselves. I think what's going to happen is we're now going to try to define ourselves in opposition to our machines and feel like we come up short, which will draw us closer to the animals, for us all to be on the same biological team.
Isn't it equally possible that we could become closer to the machines, and that could pull us away from nature?
Sure. I mean, the whole idea of thinking of machines as conscious is already pulling us out of nature without question.
Despite your misgivings about machines and consciousness, will there be pressure to give AI the same moral consideration as any other creature or entity that might be conscious?
Yes. I think you'll have the PETA equivalent defending this and throwing bombs. And instead of Molotov cocktails, I don't know, maybe it'll be in silicon. I think we're confused as it is in terms of our ethics and morality with other species. And I think that this is just going to add to our confusion. That's my main concern. And I strongly believe that consciousness is a property of life, and that's part of my interest in nature going way back. And I don't think we should muddy that.
Setting aside machines and AI for the moment, where are we in the broader conversation about consciousness beyond humans?
I think we're in the midst of a very interesting discussion about extending consciousness down to animals. I don't know if you've read the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness. The first one came out in 2014, and they just issued a new one saying we have to keep an open mind about insects and fish. And I mean, they're just keep extending it down. What that may mean is a subdivision of the concept of consciousness, that there may be kinds of consciousness that are so substantially different than ours.There is a serious conversation about giving legal standing to rivers and trees and things like that.
How do you feel about this? Are rivers conscious?
My sense is we keep an open mind. Thinking this way, that we don’t have a monopoly as a species on consciousness and the moral consideration that I think comes with this could act as a curb on the ease with which we exploit nature and extract from nature. And so I see something very positive going on there, that we're opening up to the idea that we're more like other creatures than unlike them.
I just co-wrote a book about the microbiome of the planet, the invisible world of microbes that control and connect everything on our planet—which to me is the physical manifestation of what Rachel Carson said about the fabric of life that humans mess with at our peril. There are more microbes on earth than there are stars in the universe, and I believe collectively they are the super intelligence of our planet, although it’s probably not conscious in the way that we think of consciousness.
I haven't thought or written about this very much, but as I'm watching this phenomenon of granting consciousness based on our scientific research encompassing a broader and broader circle of creatures that are conscious, we're going to have to deal with the kind of collective consciousness or intelligence of things like the microbiome—and Gaia, the idea that the planet itself acts in an intelligent way, which is a conversation that used to be regarded as very new age and Woo.
Oh yeah, the Gaia theory in the 1970s.
And in general, as you also know, the idea of symbiosis and cooperation among species and the planet, which were not taken seriously by most scientists.
And yet we now know there are these massive systems and networks that undergird life on our planet.
These ideas are getting more and more traction. I've also worked on the mycelial networks, and they suggest a different view of life that's less about the individual and more about the collectivity and relationships. This has the potential to become a very different philosophy that heads in a better direction in terms of the environment. And also the kind of philosophy that we've always extracted from our understanding of nature—certain social ideas, certain political ideas, the social Darwinian argument, which was never Darwin's argument, but he was used to promote those ideas of survival of the fittest, a phrase he didn't use. But I also see a lot of intellectual work going in the other direction, about cooperation and the rest. The attention of the microbiome is a great example.
Okay. I still want to get a little bit more into what you're hopeful about. We could talk about psychedelics if you want to.
I continue to believe in the face of some more skeptical journalism that's emerging about psychedelics that it’s a very powerful tool to deal with mental illness, several kinds of mental illness. And as one of my sources in how to Change Your Mind put it, a tool for the betterment of people, a phrase I love. That was from Bob Jesse. It's very hard to change people as adults, change their personality, change their habits of thought. That's why we get stuck in addictions for our whole adult lives, get stuck in unhelpful beliefs and psychedelics, or I should say psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, can help.
So you come down on the side of psychedelic assisted therapy rather than the other trend in psychedelics, especially Ketamine, where patients just get the drug with little or no therapeutic guidance?
Yes, because it isn't simply the chemical, it's the context in which it's administered that has the potential to change us and to take us out of our assumptions. I mean, there is mechanistic action with all of it, but there's a lot of reason to believe that in the case of psilocybin, for example, that the experience is very important, too. People come out of a session with so much confusing material they’ve experienced—they need help interpreting it. And that's when you need somebody with some psychoanalytic chops to guide them.
Some drug companies and researchers are trying to redesign these drugs chemically to remove the elements that bring on the trips and hallucinations.
I think this effort to redesign these molecules, so to treat the trip as a side effect to be removed, is ridiculous. But it's so symptomatic of a culture that wants a pill you can hand to people and let 'em get in their car and drive away. It's all about ease. It's all about the business model.
How will this end up?
I don’t know. There's much research to be done, and we're doing some of it at Berkeley, at the Berkeley Psychedelic Center, [which Pollan co-founded], but I've interviewed too many people, whether they were people dying of cancer or people addicted to cigarettes or alcohol or cocaine, who were changed by a single psychedelic experience. So there's a lot of work we have to do to understand the mechanisms, but this does give me a lot of hope.
What about ketamine?
I haven't written anything about it. It's not a psychedelic,* but when I was writing that book, I had to put some guardrails on it, otherwise it would sprawl. I also didn't write about MDMA. I decided I would stick to the so-called classic psychedelics. But I'm curious about ketamine. I've talked to many people who've been helped by it.
But these drugs can of course be abused.
Yes, and this can be scary. But we've approved a lot of drugs that can be abused. Ketamine we know is being abused. Opiates are abused. Benzos are abused, and Adderall. I mean, that's not the reason to reject these drugs or to not approve them. But you have a story like what happened to Matthew Perry, a sad case, and journalists write all these negative stories. Journalists are a herd animal, and when the herd gets spooked, it changes direction.
It really does, happens with many drugs and technologies, a cycle of irrational exuberance followed by, as you say, an apocalyptic fear.
With AI, too.
Which brings us back to consciousness and your hopes and fears about where we’re headed with consciousness in machines and animals and the Earth. Where are we with this right now, and where do psychedelics fit in?
I expect these cycles of exuberance and fear to continue. It’s the way we work.
*This is a debate. Officially ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic with psychedelic-like effects.
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From My Archives
Vanity Fair
Ketamine’s Long, Strange Trip: The Cred of This Miracle Med Has Gotten Murkier and, Somehow, More Promising
An assessment of K by a science writer who has used the drug to combat depression and long-haul COVID.
By David Ewing Duncan, July 12, 2024
K is a wonder drug. K is addictive. K is transcendental. Beware the K-hole. Matthew Perry drowned in his hot tub while on ketamine.
Six years ago, Michael Pollan published How to Change Your Mind, a brain-bending bestseller (made into a recent Netflix series) about how scientists have been using psychedelics to heal depression and mental trauma. For many, the book was a shocker after LSD, magic mushrooms, and MDMA’s half century of being vilified as corruptors of youth—not to mention targets of the “war on drugs” declared by the likes of Richard Nixon and Nancy Reagan. This “war” included an infamous 1987 TV ad that showed a dour man holding an egg and saying: “This is your brain.” He cracks the egg and the insides drop into a hot frying pan. “This is your brain on drugs,” he intones as the egg sizzles.
Subtitled What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Pollan’s book captured a growing movement among psychiatrists, therapists, and scientists around the idea that psychedelics—besides being party drugs—were fast becoming potent remedies to treat various mental maladies. For some patients, they work more quickly and decisively than traditional antidepressants like Prozac, Pollan reported, with fewer troublesome side effects. Ketamine wasn’t mentioned in his book, but he has since written about how it has healing properties similar to those of other psychedelics.
Seemingly overnight, these trippy molecules went from being Nancy Reagan’s worst nightmare to being seen as miracle meds, a trend that accelerated as pandemic lockdowns and viral anxieties clobbered delicate gray matter—including my own—already bruised by the stresses of modern life, including everything from FOMO on social media to climate change to politicians running amok.
Psychedelics changed my mind…
Now has come the inevitable backlash…
For the rest of the article click here.
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Daily Beast
Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast
Silicon Valley, Wake Up! Trump Matters
By David Ewing Duncan, Dec 10, 2016
A few months ago, the former CEO of a multi-billion-dollar tech company in Silicon Valley told a private gathering that it didn’t matter who was elected President of the United States. “The President doesn’t have much power,” he said, according to someone who was there.
This was a curious thing to say about the man (or woman) controlling America’s nuclear codes. Yet the notion that the U.S. President’s oomph is trifling doesn’t surprise me coming out of this part of the world. People here tend to consider government as a far less potent force in the world than technology…
For more of this commentary go here.
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