Why should you take acid? Michael Pollan will give us some very good reasons when he joins

us to talk about his new book, How to Change Your Mind. In an era in which it seems like

everyone's personal information is being exploited everywhere, what can't big data do?

Edward Tenor will be here to talk about his new book, The Efficiency Paradox. Alexander

Alta will give us an update from the literary world. Plus, we'll talk about what we and the

wider world are reading. This is the Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. I'm Pamela Pollan.

Michael Pollan, whose latest book is called How to Change Your Mind, what the new science of psychedelics

teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence joins us now from

Berkeley. Michael, thanks so much for being here. Sure, Pamela, good to be here. So I think the first

obvious question is how you got to this subject from the subject that I think most readers probably

associate you with, which is food. Yeah, I mean, in one way it's a real departure for me and it's

certainly involved learning a whole new subject and having a whole different kind of set of experiences.

But there's also a lot of continuity. People have been reading my books from before I really embarked

on food. We'll know that my abiding interest is really nature and our engagement with the

net for the world, how we use nature both plants and fungi and even animals and how they use us

in this symbiotic relationship. And back when I was working on botany of desire,

I got very interested in the desires that other species gratify enough as part of their

evolutionary strategy. And one of, you know, some of them are obvious like food,

nourishment, beauty, sweetness, things like that. But then there's some weird ones like we use

plants to change consciousness. Most of the people listening to this podcast probably used the

plant to change consciousness today, whether it was smoking cigarette, having a coffee or

eating a bite of chocolate or something more serious. And I've always found that to be a very

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