Michael Pollan: Are You Losing the Ability to Think for Yourself?

I wanted to start, Michael, with actually at the beginning, when you were a child, I wanted to go back to that time.

And at this point, you obviously have been incredibly successful as an author.

But when you were a child, what did success look like to you? And I'm curious who your role models were that you considered successful.

Well...

Literary success, success as a writer was something that I didn't, I was completely unfamiliar that it was even a possibility.

I got very interested in writing when I was in middle school and I had teachers who told me I was a good writer.

And that had a big influence.

But the path from being a good writer in seventh grade and having a career as a writer, I never considered that as a possibility.

I also got very interested in magazines and publishing.

Even then, I was editor of the literary magazine.

It was called Point Blank Magazine.

in eighth grade, I think it was.

But I loved the feeling of print.

I loved opening a magazine or a book.

And print had a certain magic for me.

I don't know where that came from, except my mother was a big reader.

I can remember as a kid going up in the attic of our house where she had kept boxes of her papers that she'd written in college.

And I was kind of mystified by these, too.

They're carefully typed papers about Dostoevsky or Joyce.

And that all seemed very magic world to me.

So being near writing, around writing, was very appealing to me from an early age.

But again, I couldn't imagine how you made a living doing that.

So what I did...

When I got to college on my summers, and I went to a school that had a non-resident term in the winter where we could go to New York City and get jobs or internships, was work at magazines.

That was the next best thing.