Michael Pollan says that every writer has a “final question,” an irreducible topic to which all their work tends. For Pollan, that topic has always been nature — specifically, the ways in which the natural world and humans have co-evolved to mutual benefit. So it’s funny to hear Pollan talk about his failed attempt at incinerating an animal that was giving his garden a hard time. He tells host Alec Baldwin how this experience denuded him of the pastoral notions of nature found in Emerson and Thoreau, and goes on to talk about drunk elephants, his new Netflix series Cooked, the failed Bloomberg soda ban, and psychedelic drugs.