# What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael Pollan

- **Show:** Huberman Lab
- **Published:** 28 Sep 2026
- **Source:** https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/what-humans-animals-and-plants-tell-us-about-consciousness-michael-pollan
- **Transcript:** https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/huberman-lab/what-humans-animals-and-plants-tell-us-about-consciousness-michael-pollan-edc046/
- **Provider:** OpenNash Podcasts (machine-generated)

## In brief

Michael Pollan argues that science still has no real explanation of consciousness. The popular idea that it simply emerges from brain complexity has little support. Drawing on plants, animals, gut microbes and psychedelic experience, he suggests awareness may start in bodily feelings rather than in the thinking cortex. He also entertains the idea that brains might filter or receive consciousness rather than create it.

The tension is between humility and practicality. Pollan admits nobody knows how matter becomes experience, yet he keeps a materialist starting point and refuses to dismiss stranger ideas. The same balance runs through his views on the ego, which he calls both necessary and a trap. It also shapes his hopes for food reform, psychedelic medicine and a bipartisan politics that can actually change policy.

## Key insights

1. **Plants show intelligence without anything like human consciousness** Pollan cites corn roots finding fertilizer in a maze and Venus flytraps that stop responding under anesthetic gas. He calls this sentience, a basic awareness of good and bad changes, rather than consciousness.
2. **Consciousness may start in bodily feelings, not thought** Pollan describes the Damasio and Solms view that feelings like hunger register in the brain stem before the cortex interprets them. If true, many more animals are conscious, and a computer without a vulnerable body probably cannot be.
3. **Ego dissolution can leave lasting perspective, not permanent change** Pollan describes high-dose psilocybin turning him into blue paint and then a Bach piece. Afterward he can notice his ego's 'old tricks', but the ego remains available when he needs it.
4. **Bipartisan alliances are driving food and psychedelic change** Pollan points to veterans, Rick Perry and Joe Rogan pushing ibogaine, and to MAHA activists joining food reformers to strip a pesticide-lawsuit shield from a bill. In his view, left-right coalitions get things done now.
5. **Quitting caffeine revealed how much it shapes identity** During about three months off caffeine, Pollan could not focus or write, and he did not feel like himself. His first cup afterward felt better than any psychedelic experience he had had, which taught him how a habitual drug works.

## Questions this episode answers

### What is the difference between sentience and consciousness?

Pollan describes sentience as the basic ground floor: awareness of your environment and whether changes are good or bad. Consciousness is the more elaborate version humans have, with self-reflection and emotion added.

### Do plants actually think or feel?

Pollan says plants show real problem-solving, such as roots finding fertilizer in a maze, and they react to anesthetics. He would call that sentience rather than consciousness.

### Could AI become conscious?

Pollan doubts it. He argues feelings depend on a vulnerable, mortal body, and treating the brain as a computer is a faulty metaphor. He says attempts to build a conscious AI could teach us about consciousness whether they fail or succeed.

### What does it mean that the brain might be like a radio receiver?

It is a 'filter theory': consciousness might exist outside brains, and brains tune into it the way a TV picks up a broadcast. Pollan doesn't claim it is true but says he no longer dismisses it.

### Why does Pollan think psychedelics are about to become approved medicines?

He says the Trump administration is fast-tracking ibogaine, MDMA and psilocybin, helped by support from veterans' groups and Joe Rogan. He expects approval to be 'an earthquake', and he warns of risks such as psychosis.

## Facts

- **Michael Pollan** [0:04:36]: "when I was writing my first book, Second Nature, I was trying to figure out how to behave in the garden"
- **Michael Pollan** [0:07:54]: "wrote a a brilliant essay called What is it like to be a bat? And his point was, if it is like anything, then you're conscious."
- **Michael Pollan** [0:11:32]: "You can give it a maze and and put some, uh, fertilizer, some ammonium nitrate, in one, like, corner of it, and the roots will find the fastest, uh, path to that ammonium nitrate."
- **Michael Pollan** [0:12:41]: "you take a plant with a really fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and you put it in a bell jar, and you put some anesthetic gas in"
- **Michael Pollan** [0:23:55]: "Cannabis, too, cannabis was, you know, this plant, you know, located in western China, I guess, and now it's everywhere."
- **Michael Pollan** [0:25:04]: "They didn't originally make these chemicals for us. They're probably defense chemicals."
- **Michael Pollan** [0:31:58]: "skin cells from tadpoles, and he puts it in a solution, and they clump together, and they form a new organism"
- **Michael Pollan** [0:38:33]: "more genes, more bacterial genes in our body than we have human genes, and we need those genes"
- **Michael Pollan** [0:43:17]: "It's only, I think, in 1970, the first experiment mirror test, uh, on a on a chimp, and we started thinking, Oh, these primates are conscious also."
- **Michael Pollan** [0:43:17]: "starting with, uh, Antonio Damasio, in the nineties, and going through Mark Solms more recently."
- **Michael Pollan** [0:52:20]: "I think 80% of the traffic is going from body to brain, not the other way around."
- **Michael Pollan** [0:55:03]: "the people who had taken the ginger were less judgmental. Because their stomachs were calmed, ginger calms the stomach"
- **Michael Pollan** [1:02:15]: "it was a piece of music that the guide was playing, this Bach, uh, cello, unaccompanied cello suite, and I became this piece of music"
- **Michael Pollan** [1:03:47]: "He took them river rafting or something like that, and then he had them do it again, and they would they would draw a picture of themselves at, like, 1/3 of the size"
- **Michael Pollan** [1:06:52]: "he was head of Allen Brain Institute for many years. He had a experience on ayahuasca that he shared publicly."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:10:11]: "the idea was that there's more consciousness out there than we can handle, and that, um, there is a filter or or what what Huxley called a reducing valve"
- **Michael Pollan** [1:22:43]: "took some watermelon seeds, and I just covered it with dirt. I was, like, really young, and then forgot about it."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:29:23]: "I followed this one cow through the whole process, you know, from s insemination to slaughter."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:30:54]: "I walked into a butcher shop on College Avenue in Oakland, and I just I was kinda curious."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:39:12]: "we subsidize corn, which gives us high fructose corn syrup, which gives us diabetes."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:43:18]: "they were members of something called the Weston Price Society"
- **Michael Pollan** [1:44:02]: "Shelley Pingree, who's a food movement leader and an organic farmer from Maine in Congress, she got together with Maha activists, and they got it stripped out of the bill, and they did it twice."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:47:59]: "They've put forward MDMA, uh, in the treatment of, uh, trauma, and they were turned down once, but they've resubmitted with some additional d data."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:48:32]: "Joe Rogan texted the president and said, This is really important. He had done a show on ibogaine."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:53:59]: "he's he's the was the, uh, psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins who did the initial work on psilocybin and really launched the psychedelic renaissance."
- **Michael Pollan** [1:55:45]: "I did it for about three months. And all the while, I'm researching caffeine and learning about it"

## Transcript

**[0:00:00] Michael Pollan:** I came out of this experience of studying consciousness and looking at all the theories of consciousness. I don't wanna give it away, but we have no f- idea about consciousness, really, how it's how how brain matter generates consciousness, if indeed that's how it happens, and there are people who doubt that's how it happens. It could be that the brain channels consciousness, right? I mean, that if you conceive of consciousness as, like, electromagnetic waves, um, brains are like radio receivers or TV receivers.

**[0:00:29] Michael Pollan:** You wouldn't you wouldn't look in the TV set for the woman who gave you the weather report. You know, she's not there, she's somewhere else. So, I don't know that that's true, but coming out of this e- experience of studying this, I don't dismiss an idea like that. You have to keep an open mind because our presumption that, you know, consciousness is an emergent property of bl- brain complexity, that idea doesn't have much traction.

**[0:00:55] Andrew Huberman:** Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Michael Pollan, author of landmark books, including How to Change Your Mind, which is about psychedelics, The Botany of Desire, which is about how humans and plants co-evolved and collaborated to thrive, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is an incredible book about food and nutrition, and most recently, the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

**[0:01:31] Andrew Huberman:** Michael Pollan is considered by many, including me, to be one of the most learned and thoughtful people on topics that matter to all humans and the things that we can do to improve the human experience. Today, we talk about many topics, but mostly we focus on consciousness, and Michael brings forward a new perspective that integrates the best science on this topic as well as philosophy and beyond. And we get deep into this notion of the ego, meaning our notion of self, and how the ego is both important for and limits our understanding of ourselves and life.

**[0:02:02] Andrew Huberman:** I should emphasize that the conversation is not as abstract as I'm making it sound. What I love about Michael Pollan is he makes these topics very clear and very concrete, and in many cases, actionable. Thanks to Michael, by the end of today's conversation, you'll be placed at the front edge of the conversation and the data on this thing that we call consciousness. You'll also be versed on the latest of plant, or what is sometimes called psychedelic medicine, and perhaps most importantly, what you can do in your life to gain new perspective on yourself, others, and the planet at large.

**[0:02:31] Andrew Huberman:** Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Michael Pollan, Michael Pollan, welcome.

**[0:02:52] Michael Pollan:** Thank you, good to be here.

**[0:02:53] Andrew Huberman:** Longtime fan of your books, of you, I've had the privilege of s speaking on stage next to you, although, mostly, I was just listening to you, because you are this amazing intersection of science, writer, you've written about food, psychedelics, now consciousness, you'll tell us about your new work on microbiome. I feel like there's also some Wendell Berry woven in there. big Wendell Berry Good, I didn't insult fan. Not you, I didn't trip

**[0:03:19] Michael Pollan:** at all.

**[0:03:20] Andrew Huberman:** out on that. We just He

**[0:03:20] Michael Pollan:** lost him, too.

**[0:03:21] Andrew Huberman:** Oh, is that right?

**[0:03:22] Michael Pollan:** He died, like, two weeks ago.

**[0:03:23] Andrew Huberman:** Oh. Oh my goodness.

**[0:03:23] Michael Pollan:** Yeah, I know.

**[0:03:24] Andrew Huberman:** I'm a I'm like a huge Wendell Berry Really? Me fan. I too. He mean, oh my he taught me how goodness.

**[0:03:29] Michael Pollan:** to write, and he taught me how to think about s certain things. But I and he had a huge influence on I was very fond of him. We Did you ever did we

**[0:03:36] Andrew Huberman:** meet him?

**[0:03:37] Michael Pollan:** Oh, yeah, we had. We. I interviewed him on stage a few times, he interviewed me, uh, in Lexington, Kentucky, and, um, about one of my books. And I went to his house, uh, and saw the long-legged house where he writes on the river. He was always trying to convince people like us about the beauty of the tobacco culture. And he kinda bracketed the cigarette piece and the lung cancer piece, but the culture was so beautiful. And it was the one time where the whole community got together, and racial lines were crossed, and the and the barns are gorgeous, the, you know, the the the tobacco barns with the slats for drying.

**[0:04:17] Michael Pollan:** So he he wanted me to see those, uh, when I when I came there.

**[0:04:20] Andrew Huberman:** Amazing. Yeah, I I was feeling a little anxious about bringing in that reference in case you weren't a fan or you didn't like his work, but clearly, uh, he was calling in because, um He was and for those who don't know, Wendell Berry is this, uh, just magnificent poet who and farmer and and farmer.

**[0:04:36] Michael Pollan:** essayist, yeah. And he, um, you know, a actually, when I was writing my first book, Second Nature, I was trying to figure out how to behave in the garden, um, which is a microcosm of how do we behave in nature, right? In other words, I had pests, uh, I had problems, I had fertility issues, and the American tradition of thinking about nature, which goes back to Thoreau and John Muir and Emerson, is all about celebrating the w- the wilderness and being a spectator in nature.

**[0:05:08] Michael Pollan:** And, of course, the gardener can't afford to do that. You have to act or you're not gonna have anything to eat. I had a head full of Thoreau and Emerson from college and graduate school, and I was kinda stymied about, like, what do I do about weeds? You know? There, you know, Thoreau's telling me weeds have just as much right to be in your garden as the bean plant, which is crazy. But it was Wendell who who i i w- would write these essays, and he and he convinced me, you know, he said, We have a legitimate quarrel with nature, and that our relationship is, you know, we do have to make changes in nature to to for us to

**[0:05:42] Michael Pollan:** survive, and that's kinda who we are is, um, the species who remakes nature in various ways. But it has to be done, uh, sort of more like a marriage than a domination. And, uh, so he just had a new way of thinking about how to relate to nature that really helped me and and clarified my whole view of environmentalism. So, yeah, he's a great hero.

**[0:06:05] Andrew Huberman:** Amazing. I'm saddened to hear that he passed, but h- he certainly left behind And he was an amazing ninety-two. Um, well, that's a pretty good run.

**[0:06:12] Michael Pollan:** Yeah, he had a very good run.

**[0:06:14] Andrew Huberman:** we will put some links to his work for those that aren't familiar, and I encourage anyone listening t to just and even those who are familiar with Wendell to go read some of his poems. They're they're they're an incredible journey and s uh, full stop.

**[0:06:28] Michael Pollan:** yeah. Yeah, I'm with you.

**[0:06:30] Andrew Huberman:** Let's talk about consciousness. As a neuroscientist, I was taught to avoid this issue.

**[0:06:36] Michael Pollan:** I hear it was the kiss of death at a certain point, right?

**[0:06:38] Andrew Huberman:** Neuroscientists who e- were already very accomplished and famous in some specific domain, like memory or neuromuscular junctions or whatever, could talk about it. They had permission once they had their prizes and their, um, stature. But some people have died on the bed of nails, that is the consciousness discussion.

**[0:06:56] Michael Pollan:** I almost did.

**[0:06:58] Andrew Huberman:** Clearly not, but, uh, yeah, but maybe you can tell us why it why it's so so precarious, but it's hard to define, I think, is part of it. And, uh, kudos to you for jumping in with, uh, both feet, uh, on this one. So, after having written a book about consciousness, essentially, do you think that we can describe it in a sentence? Can we give it an operational definition? Or

**[0:07:22] Michael Pollan:** It's such a strange phenomenon cause there is nothing we know with more certainty than the fact that we're conscious. It's the only thing we can be sure of. Everything else we know through consciousness, right? Everything else is an inference, but we have this thing that we know we have. But defining it is difficult. So, there are some very simple definitions, like subjective experience. Um, that's pretty good. Uh, your toaster doesn't have subjective experience, and I would argue AIs don't have subjective experience, but we can talk about that later.

**[0:07:54] Michael Pollan:** Another popular I don't know if it's a definition exactly, is, uh, Thomas Nagel, the, uh, the f- the philosopher in the 1970s, wrote a a brilliant essay called What is it like to be a bat? And his point was, if it is like anything, then you're conscious. So, even though we don't know exactly what it's like to be a bat, we can kind of imagine a creature that navigates the world through sonar, through sound waves instead of, uh, light photons.

**[0:08:23] Michael Pollan:** And so, okay, we can imagine that. So, yes, bats are conscious by that definition. Um, so is it like something to be a computer, is a real question that I think we're gonna have to face. That's kind of what I use as a definition. There's a lot of bells and whistles that that human consciousness has above that. We're not just aware, but we're aware that we're aware. We have self-reflection or metacognition, emotion, you know? Add that in.

**[0:08:50] Michael Pollan:** So, I I think humans have a very elaborated kind of consciousness compared to some other creatures. I make a distinction in the book between sentience and consciousness that some scientists make, and I find really useful. Sentience being a more basic kind of ground floor of consciousness that that, uh, includes awareness of your environment and a recognition of changes, and whether they're good or bad. And that may be universal. I mean, that may be a property of life.

**[0:09:23] Michael Pollan:** Um, you can make a case that, uh, plants have sentience, that single-celled creatures have sentience, and it may be something you need to survive in an environment that's constantly changing, that you can't program instinctually everything you need to know so that this would be very useful. And consciousness is how we do sentience, you know, we've added on all these things, and every creature has its own version of sentience based on their body type, their sensorium, their the scale of s uh, at which they live in in time and space.

**[0:09:57] Michael Pollan:** Cause it's kind of to to to take our i our our version of consciousness and make that the standard for everybody seems kinda crazy,

**[0:10:04] Andrew Huberman:** this thing about being able to respond to the environment being some key component of consciousness? Um, a plant can respond to the environment. A a barnacle can respond to the environment. A A bacteria last can. bacteria can. They can light sense. It's they actually know the difference between morning and evening. And they have They, you know,

**[0:10:21] Michael Pollan:** chemotaxis, they know between the difference between something that's good to eat and something that's toxic.

**[0:10:26] Andrew Huberman:** do you think they know they know? This is the piece that I feel like, the the res- the responding and the awareness that one is responding is maybe where, in my mind, I wanna draw the line for some reason. Like, a plant will, you know, you know, furl and unfurl, uh, when in the presence of light, but does it know it's responding, and why? I mean, I suppose we all the time respond to things and don't know why, but usually, like, I if I take a sip of this tea and and it's too hot, um, I have some sense of what I'm going to do next, and why, whereas I feel like the the other stuff is just reflexive.

**[0:11:00] Michael Pollan:** yeah, it's reflexive, but it I I don't think it's it's, uh, always programmed. I think that there are novel situations that even a plant confronts where they have to have an intelligent response that isn't necessarily, um, something programmed in their genes. I mean, I I took a deep dive into, uh, this field of plant intelligence, which is fascinating. I mean, the things we're learning, um, that plants can do that you would not have guessed. I mean, you can take a corn plant and, uh, it can navigate a maze.

**[0:11:32] Michael Pollan:** You can give it a maze and and put some, uh, fertilizer, some ammonium nitrate, in one, like, corner of it, and the roots will find the fastest, uh, path to that ammonium nitrate. That's not a a situation it really experiences in nature. It has to, um that takes a certain kind of intelligence, problem-solving ability. If you play the sound of caterpillars chomping on leaves for a plant, they will react to the sound, uh, and send, uh, either toxins or bad tasting chemicals to that leaf to defend themselves.

**[0:12:08] Michael Pollan:** They can respond to the sound of water, and they will, and they're if they f- if they feel if they hear water running through a pipe, they will go down. They have, like, twenty senses. We have five or six. They can sense gravity, which we can't do. They they can sense pH, they can sense, um, uh, whether n- nutrient levels are on a a positive gradient or negative gradient. I mean, it's remarkable. One of the I f- to me, most curious things about plants is that they respond to the same anesthetics we do.

**[0:12:41] Michael Pollan:** Now, you might think, what does it mean to put a plant out? Um, aren't they already out? But actually, they're just slow. They have behaviors, they're just very slow. So you take a you take a plant with a really fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and you put it in a bell jar, and you put some anesthetic gas in, xenon gas or or any number of, uh, you know, anything you can put in gas form. And they will not respond to, uh, an insect crossing their threshold where normally they would clamp down.

**[0:13:12] Michael Pollan:** So that raises a really interesting question. What exactly are they losing when they are under? We would say consciousness, but that's a long way to go. I mean, I don't use the word consciousness for plants, although I met scientists who do, but I would say that's sentience, that that that it that that there's a loss of sentience that's happening when when they, uh, are anesthetized. But as you know, anesthetics are really weird. We don't even know how they work on us, right?

**[0:13:39] Michael Pollan:** I mean, xenon gas is inert gas, and it puts you out. How does that work?

**[0:13:44] Andrew Huberman:** Does it scare anyone going in for surgery? The anes- an anesthesiologists have gotten much better at it, they know what they're so they doing. know what they're doing. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Eight Sleep just launched the Pod Six, which is their most advanced sleep system. The Pod Six is half the size of their previous models, it's 20% faster with its cooling and heating, and it has nine times as many sensors for tracking your sleep.

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**[0:16:45] Andrew Huberman:** I I don't wanna make any assumptions, but when I think about the consciousness problem, I I think most people know that Yeah. they are them and they know what's not them. And, uh, maybe a decent analogy is when nerve cells grow, they know the difference between them and other cells. So, at the cellular level, Yeah. you know, this is already set up. And in fact, y- I love your example of the the root growing towards the fertilizer.

**[0:17:11] Andrew Huberman:** Because you can give a nerve cell a simple rule. All nerve cells, a simple rule, which is essentially grow out as far as you can and connect with as many other nerve cells as you possibly can. And know the difference between you and other. And if you do Even that,

**[0:17:26] Michael Pollan:** within the same species.

**[0:17:27] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, so, uh, you know, and, uh, there are some exceptions to this, but it turns out to be, uh, it's not straightforward to build a brain, but you don't need a ton of signals. You need signals that say grow here, and you need signals that say you may not grow here. What we call chemotractants and chemorepellents. And then if you think about the the n- the dendrites and axons, that the branches of the neurons, they often have these beautiful architectures.

**[0:17:49] Andrew Huberman:** Those are set up by a simple rule of self-avoidance. You they the branches know that they are that they're in the same of the same neuron, and they just keep growing and they keep branching every time they get too close to one of their own. And then you end up with these beautiful architectures depending on what other cells are doing that around you. That's how you get the the all these different cell types, and there's other features to it too.

**[0:18:11] Andrew Huberman:** And I was shocked and excited to learn that that's kinda how tree roots do it Yes, I too. was gonna say Right, so simple rules can build immense very complex. Yeah, complexity. That that's that's the the point, and the self recognizing self versus other, and then a simple rule of get as much stuff as you can. It sounds very selfish, right? Sets up a great system, actually, because then everyone's doing that, and you end up with essentially a tiled system.

**[0:18:35] Andrew Huberman:** No tree, no neuron gets too much space. and while this is all very cellular, and we're literally talking about the branches of cells, it's not, you know, thinking. I feel like when you get up to the whole organism, I know the difference between me and you, me and the microphone. These plants seem to know the difference between them and the fertilizer. So, this Well, they lack of confusion about what's me and what's not me seems to be, like, the most important rule that perhaps builds up to the consciousness thing.

**[0:19:04] Andrew Huberman:** It's just perhaps

**[0:19:04] Michael Pollan:** It's really an important rule, and you see it in plant roots too. Because if you put, uh, two plants that are related to one another, that have some genetic connection, but are separate plants, they will share soil and grow together. And but if they're not related, even if they're the same species, they will compete. Ditto, you know, the plant that, um, the when plants are shaded by another plant, they grow fast to get above it. But if they're shaded by themselves, closer to your example, they don't.

**[0:19:38] Michael Pollan:** They know, like, Well, that's we're get we're getting the light over there, so I don't have to go there. But, yeah, I think the self and other is is is a key rule, and and I I completely agree that you can take a set of very simple rules and build a very complex creature from it. How that gets you to consciousness, I mean, self and other is an important part of consciousness, although, and I talk about the self as kinda the most elaborate or advanced manifestation of consciousness.

**[0:20:06] Michael Pollan:** It turns out you can have consciousness without a self, and that's, um, uh, you know, I mean, meditators know this, um, psychedelics give you and can give you an experience of consciousness without a self. I think we have it every morning when we wake up. There's that 500 milliseconds, you know, when you're reconstituting, like, Who am I? Where am I? Oh, you know, here I am. And it's 750 milliseconds if you're in a hotel room.

**[0:20:34] Michael Pollan:** As I realized this morning. That's kind of weird that you can have that. There is a there is a consciousness that is, uh, not organized around a self. And, um, uh, you know, Buddhists have known this for a long time, but it's it's it's a strange idea.

**[0:20:49] Andrew Huberman:** Going back to the the plants and their intelligence, you know, I've spent a little bit of time with people in the plant medicine community, not a lot. I'm not a, you know, like, a heavy psychonaut or anything, but there does seem to be this understanding there. And I I don't think it's just conjecture. I think it's a real understanding of people who spend time in the jungle, who spend time with plant medicines. Even pharmacists in this country will tell you that most drugs were bioprospected from the jungle.

**[0:21:14] Andrew Huberman:** Big Pharma are isolated compounds synthesized, you know, um, as you know, uh from jungle plants and other plants. So there's this notion that the plants actually can sense us and that they're communicating with us. I know this sounds really wacky, but we can certainly see them, we can smell them. They can have, you know, odor effects on us. Uh, some are poisonous, some are delicious and and wonderful for for us. They're nourishing. What do you think about this sort of cross-species communication?

**[0:21:46] Andrew Huberman:** Do you think it's a a real thing? Having spent some time you spent a lot of time on about y- Yeah, I think digging about and about plants thinking about plants. in a garden, as Yeah, like

**[0:21:54] Michael Pollan:** well as things.

**[0:21:54] Andrew Huberman:** like my mom gardens, and she is convinced, and she's a very rational person. She is convinced that talking to the plants while she plants them has a real effect on the relationship between her and these plants. I mean, she's not thinking that they can hear and understand the language, but that there's some sort of energetic transfer there. And I don't think she's alone. People who garden have a relationship to the plants, and I certainly feel this way about my dog, to some extent my fish, although to a lesser extent.

**[0:22:23] Andrew Huberman:** So, I don't think it's entirely crazy.

**[0:22:25] Michael Pollan:** I don't think it's crazy. I think that, um, I haven't had that experience myself. I I did have an experience, and this was talk about plant medicine on on psilocybin that I describe in my book of, um, feeling that the plants in my garden were conscious and, um, aware and returning my gaze, and they were very benevolent, and I took good care of them. That's good. Otherwise, And you get scary. Yeah, and I didn't know what to do with that.

**[0:22:56] Michael Pollan:** I mean, there's a whole question with insights you have on psychedelics, like, do they have any value? And how do you judge their value? And in my case, I thought back to William James, who had written in in Varieties of Mystical Experience, uh, that you can't really judge the veracity of a of a big insight on a mystical experience because we don't know enough. But there are two ways to think about it. Is it a useful thing?

**[0:23:22] Michael Pollan:** Is it pragmatic to believe that? And that's one argument in favor. And the other is treat it as a hypothesis and see if you can find other ways of knowing, scientific or or otherwise, that could, uh, support that idea. And that's what got me into plant, um, you know, learning about plant intelligence and plant sentience. We are in relationship with plants, domesticated plants in particular. I think they manipulate us in various ways, but it's it's not at the level of the individual plant, it's at the level of the the s the evolution of the species.

**[0:23:55] Michael Pollan:** So, um, you know, corn came to dominate the landscape in much of the world because it figured out what we wanted from it. And when I say figured out, I mean purely by trial and error. Cannabis, too, cannabis was, you know, this plant, you know, located in western China, I guess, and now it's everywhere. And the reason it did is it learned that we respond i i if it produced this chemical called THC, it was gonna get carried around the world and reproduced.

**[0:24:28] Michael Pollan:** And so I I I think we're in this symbiotic relationship with plants in that they they do manipulate us. Th- they're, um, geniuses at biochemistry, as you suggest, you know, and that's a function of the fact that they can't get up and run away, right? They're rooted, they're sessile, as it's called. And so, instead of consciousness like we have, and mo and, uh, the ability to move around, they they develop chemicals, this incredible suite of chemicals, and they hit on some chemicals that happen to change our consciousness.

**[0:25:04] Michael Pollan:** And this has been one of the most successful, um, strategies. Uh, coffee and tea are are great examples. They didn't originally make these chemicals for us. They're probably defense chemicals. But what's interesting about the defense chemicals that they produce is that they're not they don't kill anything. I mean, caffeine might kill insects, some insects, but somewhere along the line, they learned that it was better to just kind of fuck with your mind than kill you outright.

**[0:25:34] Michael Pollan:** Because if they killed you outright, you would very quickly develop resistance, right? You'd select for resistant members of the species. The way I learned this, it was courtesy of my cat, Frank. Frank had a real catnip problem, and, uh, every night, Frank, uh, I would go down to my garden to, you know, harvest some lettuce or something like that. And I had a catnip plant in this is in a fenced garden, and Frank would follow me and look at me, and he needed to be reminded where the catnip was.

**[0:26:05] Michael Pollan:** It's like, you know, why don't you know where it is? Because he would get so wrecked on catnip that he would he would forget. And, I'm like, that's a brilliant strategy on the part of the, uh, on the part of the, um, the plant to get your predator to forget where you are. amazing. And the other thing they do, of course, many plant chemicals, psychoactive chemicals, diminish your appetite. Another brilliant strategy. So I have enormous respect for what they do and what they do to us, and I really see them as active players in this drama.

**[0:26:37] Michael Pollan:** I wrote a book called Botany of Desire, which really looked at how plants have mastered our desires as their, uh, as their evolutionary strategy. Desires for beauty, in the case of flowers, um, desires for to change consciousness, uh, desires, uh, for food. So I have ultimate respect for their ingenuity.

**[0:26:58] Andrew Huberman:** When you say they've, um, that plants have figured out, do you mean that that sticking with the, you know, the rule of evolution, you just wanna make as m much of you yourself as you possibly can in species that nurture young, nurture young, protect young, proliferate, die, repeat, right? I mean, that's it's like a harsh way of thinking about it, but that's those are essentially the simple rules of evolution. Try not to die, try to prol- or at least live long enough to proliferate and make sure that the young make it and in to.

**[0:27:25] Michael Pollan:** retrospect, it looks like you figured something out, but in fact, you're just trying things, and certain things work. And the plants that, you know, had the most caffeine, say, um, proliferated in a way, the ones that had the least caffeine did not.

**[0:27:38] Andrew Huberman:** I mean, I think about dogs a lot, cause I love them, and I'm told that dogs descended from wolves that figured out that if they were kind enough and they were patient enough, they might get scraps of food. And eventually, that led to the domestication and the expansion of all these different breeds of dogs. I mean, I think that's essentially the the story. So, in They're not getting together and having a little, you know, backroom conversation like we've almost got 'em.

**[0:28:05] Andrew Huberman:** But but they so and that's certainly been advantageous for the domestic dog. Um, they're very well treated better than some humans, in fact.

**[0:28:12] Michael Pollan:** and there are only 50,000 wolves left in this country, and how many dogs are there? It was a good strategy.

**[0:28:17] Andrew Huberman:** Right, yeah, and and I feel like more people have dogs now than when I was growing up.

**[0:28:22] Michael Pollan:** Well, COVID led to, uh, a lot of, uh, people getting dogs,

**[0:28:25] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, so it's it's, uh, most people don't get dogs to s to do work. They get dogs to be family members, and so they're really they're really figuring stuff Yeah, they out. But they

**[0:28:34] Michael Pollan:** got us.

**[0:28:34] Andrew Huberman:** got us. Um, but this figuring stuff out thing is is as it relates to consciousness is, um, maybe it brings us back to the definitions. So does that mean that you don't have to have self-awareness that you're doing it? Plants probably don't realize they're doing this. They're just following a rule that's scripted into their genome. Um, try and get resources, feel good, not pain in the moment, and proliferate, take care of young, and so forth. So do you think that this consciousness, like, of plants or of dogs or of humans, can emerge through the simple flipping of switches that are hardwired into us?

**[0:29:08] Andrew Huberman:** Or do they have any say in this? Like, do they realize, um, that they're doing better for the next generation? Because plants don't get to see what happens to their seeds. And in most cases, dogs don't really know what happens to their puppies once they're, you know, um, adopted out. Humans are unique in this way.

**[0:29:28] Michael Pollan:** Oh, I think we are. I mean, I think we have a, uh, uh, an awareness, a self-awareness, um, and a sense of, uh, you know, we can time travel. You know, your dog probably can time travel a few minutes or maybe a half hour if it's really hungry, you know? Um, but we have the ability to to imagine the future, uh, even a future we're not in. Um, that's one of the things that's special about our consciousness.

**[0:29:54] Michael Pollan:** I mean, you know well, that our brains are doing a lot more than we're aware of, right? I mean, twenty four seven, they're monitoring our body, you know, reading these interoceptive signals and making adjustments and taking in s things from the environment without our awareness. Um, so the question is, why does anything have to rise to the level of awareness? Why why wasn't it all automated? I think that's one of the mysteries. The best explanation I heard of why that should be, and this is sort of an evolutionary just-so story, but it's a pretty persuasive one, is because we are, uh, fundamentally social beings that live in a very and and and being in a human society is incredibly complex

**[0:30:37] Michael Pollan:** environment in which you can't program every move you have to make. There is a great evolutionary utility in being able to read the mind of another person and anticipate what they're gonna do or say to predict. And, um, this is something that, um, you need theory of mind for, or or imagination at at the very least. And that strikes me as a pretty good explanation of why you would have gone beyond automatic response to something much more, uh, deliberate and aware.

**[0:31:12] Michael Pollan:** And I don't think plants have that. But I do think that evolution, um, I really agree. Uh, Michael Levin is a biologist at Tufts, uh, who who works with, you know, creates little creatures, you know, organoids, and, um, what he calls xenobots. And he's shown that there are behaviors that are not dictated by the genes, that, um, that what evolution creates is cognitive beings that are very good at solving novel problems. I mean, a lot of his project is actually de-emphasizing genes and showing that that, uh, and de-emphasizing neurons too, you know, he he also shows that that

**[0:31:53] Andrew Huberman:** I accept all of biology. It just so happens I'm I'm only trained to understand the the other brain stuff.

**[0:31:58] Michael Pollan:** Well, he's, you know, he's shown that, um, memory resides in not necessarily in in neurons, there are other other The immune way. Bioelectric system, yeah, yeah, Yeah, and the immune system is a good example. He looks at bioelectric fields and that these can hold memories, uh, in in groups of cells. And that these xenobots that he creates uh, from, and he he he does this with, um, taking s uh, skin cells from tadpoles, and he puts it in a solution, and they clump together, and they form a new organism.

**[0:32:25] Michael Pollan:** And only lasts about a week or two. And that organism repurposes their cilia so they can have a means of locomotion, and they can be conditioned to navigate mazes. There's nothing in their genes that's in encoding those instructions. Anyway, it's it's taken them to a very odd place in biology. You know, we used to hear a lot about the word instinct. It's funny, you don't hear about it nearly as much anymore. And I think that there are things going on that are are, um, products of just an intelligent a a a being with enough tools and and cognitive ability to navigate an unfamiliar world.

**[0:33:03] Michael Pollan:** That's what it takes to survive in in evolution.

**[0:33:06] Andrew Huberman:** When Caesar Milan, the dog whisperer, came on this podcast, he, uh, he said because he, coming from a very, uh, poor, uh, rural background, but he said, you know, uh, people who grew up in that environment, um, have incredible instincts about what is safe, what's not safe. You know, he saw a lot of death from a young age. Uh, people died every day. Um, and, you know, stakes were very high, um, and resources were low. And he said, you know, that you see a completely different side of humans, and it's not all bad.

**[0:33:33] Andrew Huberman:** I mean, that's the bad stuff that drives the emergence also of some really beautiful stuff. Like you said, you kids grow up learning where safe harbor is i in people, and they they can really sense people and animals v- very well, in a way that in, um, more affluent societies, we we have all these buffers, you know? Um, and and it struck me as, like, Okay, that's r- super interesting because I feel like as a neuroscientist, I think of, okay, there are parts of the brain that are purely autonomic, taking care of heart rate.

**[0:34:03] Andrew Huberman:** There's stuff that switches, like, if we activate it, people go into a rage. No one likes to think about this, but, yes, for them too, this would happen. But then there's all the other stuff that's made you know, where we can control our impulses and, um, think about past, present, and future, and build technologies, and it's a quote unquote evolved stuff. It's just, you know, higher order, whatever whatever. The language never quite works. You know, um, always makes it sound hierarchical, cause I would die in the environment that, uh, Cesar was describing, right?

**[0:34:29] Andrew Huberman:** Um, so, higher order isn't fair, but in any case, I feel like this damn prefrontal cortex expansion that happened in humans. Here's here's where I get really I lose a lot of sleep over this. And you're the perfect person to ask this. I've asked a few guests, but, um, I have this big problem lately, which is I think that I know that humans Got a lot more prefrontal cortex real estate, the area got a that lets us strategy.

**[0:34:55] Andrew Huberman:** Said, understand context, integrate, imagine. great. Great. But I worry that it's that we have enough of it that we perhaps have tricked ourselves into over, Hm. um, investing in our own importance and our And actually, the whole meaning and of being here. And and here's where it gets to the microbiome. I'll try and make this very quick. Justin Sonnenburg, my colleague who, you know, at Stanford, working on the microbiome, scared I wanna say the shit out of me, but then pun it no pun intended.

**[0:35:28] Andrew Huberman:** When he said, you know, these microbiota that live in all of us and create these critical chemicals for brain health and all and can impact our behavior, whether or not we feel sick or more energetic, more outgoing. I mean, there's this incredible array of ways they influence us. He said, When we shake hands, like we did today, the second time in our lives, or when we, um, you know, if we kiss our ro- romantic partner, or if we, um, you know, exchange a a bill or a credit card swipe or something at the with.

**[0:35:56] Andrew Huberman:** Microbiome is proliferating and moving. And I get really worked up lately in my own head about the possibility that all this stuff, like trying to go to Mars, um, trying to, uh, navigate the political barbed wire that is the United States and the world right now, wars, all of it. I worry that all of it is just the damn microbiota trying us to trying to get us to interact with as many other people as possible. And they aren't sitting there chuckling, um, cackling, thinking about how w- we are losing out, uh, and suffering or feeling great while we do this.

**[0:36:34] Andrew Huberman:** But I just worry that perhaps Sonnenberg's theory is right, which is we're literally just vessels. vehicles and that keeps me up at night. I confess, it does. really. But it also keeps me up at night because I can only have that thought, that concern, because of this excessive prefrontal cortex real estate. Otherwise, I would just be busy trying to get my food and nourishment, proliferate, and so on. So that's two. So it sort of bookends the two sort of levels of quote unquote sophistication, like higher order brain function in humans, building technologies, creativity, symphonies, spaceships, poetry, and on and on.

**[0:37:14] Andrew Huberman:** We think it's so important, and it is, but whenever we're deluding ourselves, it's all just about getting the m these microbiota, getting us to get them where they wanna go.

**[0:37:25] Michael Pollan:** you know, they've been around a lot longer than we have, right? I mean, we evolved in a world dominated by bacteria and other microbes. And, um, so from their perspective, I think it's a perspectival question, but from their perspective, this animal comes along that offers certain advantages, like, can go all over the world, um, and maybe to outer space if they wanna go there. I don't think they'll do very well there, but so there's a sense in which it's true, but it's also true that we're calling the shots in some ways from our perspective.

**[0:38:00] Michael Pollan:** But it but we should realize, I mean, that's the subtitle of Botany of Desire was A Plant's-Eye View of the World. And there is a perspective, and it's just as legitimate, um, in which we are dupes of these bacteria, and that, yes, they want us to shake hands. They want us to do all sorts of things because the this extends their their range, and they want us to be sociable too. You know, if we were all, you know, kind of shy and introverted, it would not serve their purposes, and they are influencing our moods.

**[0:38:33] Michael Pollan:** So it is kinda creepy in a way, but it's also kinda beautiful that, you know, we don't, you know, that that life is using us, and and, um, uh, that we are a collective being too. I mean, we are we are a superorganism, you know? And we have we have, you know, more genes, more bacterial genes in our body than we have human genes, and we need those genes. That's the other thing. I mean, the other story about it is you could also argue that we are manipulating them in that we have outsourced the and and Justin's done really good work on this.

**[0:39:10] Michael Pollan:** Um, we have outsourced the making of all sorts of metabolites, bacterial metabolites, chemicals we need, um, glutamate, Gaba, uh, serotonin, um, I mean, they're making, and and then all these short-chain fatty acids that are a fuel for our brain, but also are, um, calming our moods, you know, reducing our anxiety. So instead of learning how to make those chemicals ourselves, we kind of ingeniously figured out that we could host these bacteria, and they would make them for us.

**[0:39:42] Michael Pollan:** So we're manipulating them at the same time, they're manipulating us. I think it's a two-way street.

**[0:39:45] Andrew Huberman:** Okay, that's a fair two-step.

**[0:39:47] Michael Pollan:** I hope it helps you sleep.

**[0:39:48] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah. Well, yes, I uh, maybe if we don't make it to Mars, it will be because it will be because

**[0:39:54] Michael Pollan:** They don't wanna go.

**[0:39:55] Andrew Huberman:** they get up they get up there and they make people very sick and they die. And they re and it so, in that sense, um, maybe it's b- better or worse for everyone, who knows? I I don't have any theories about how this should all go. See, space But

**[0:40:07] Michael Pollan:** food is very bad for bacteria, right? It's it's incredibly sanitary. It's, uh, it talk about ultra-processed food. This, you know, the kind of stuff they bring on on intergalactic travel is gonna be really bad for the bacteria.

**[0:40:19] Andrew Huberman:** yeah, so if we don't make it, which, uh, bacteria know that they don't wanna make it there,

**[0:40:24] Michael Pollan:** That's right.

**[0:40:24] Andrew Huberman:** it's not good for them. They know it's Yeah,

**[0:40:26] Michael Pollan:** e- they know Mars is a shitty habitat.

**[0:40:28] Andrew Huberman:** exactly. I'm only half kidding about this one, and I'm gonna try and steer off it so that I don't, you know, spiral into the the concern about it, it's because it's not really a concern. I think that it gets to another layer, perhaps, of this consciousness question, which is about meaning. You know, part of the function of the prefrontal cortex is that we can assign meaning to things. Right? Like, we both like Wendell Berry. Uh, you know him better than I do, but we both have feelings that associate with memories.

**[0:40:56] Andrew Huberman:** I, uh, I can go as deep into this as as I'll al- allow myself to, like, I like the feeling of the paper, like, is different for a Wendell Berry poem only because that was my experience. So I can place all this meaning on top of things, and that's related to memory, it's and so on. And we don't know that other species do that, right? Um, I like to think dogs and cats and apes do that, elephants, perhaps, Yeah, um, they definitely

**[0:41:22] Michael Pollan:** which more than their dead.

**[0:41:23] Andrew Huberman:** know self versus other. I mean, I I try and break it down to that because I saw this, um, one of these beautiful na- nature documentaries where they were essentially talking about these male lions fighting, and, you know, their hypothalamus looks a lot like ours, and we know the structure, ventromedial hypothalamus, a subset of neurons there. And if y- you know, mice have em, we have em, they have em. And these two male lions are basically trying to kill each other.

**[0:41:46] Andrew Huberman:** But then there's another scene where one is getting attacked by hyenas, and all of a sudden, a different switch gets flipped where the lion, who was just, arguably, should let the other one die, understands this us-them thing and goes and essentially fights them off. And and it's very dramatic, and the hyenas are the hyenas are trying to castrate the lions. It's it's like a it's as brutal as nature gets in that moment, but also as beautiful as it gets because it illustrates that two members of the same species that are trying to kill each other.

**[0:42:16] Andrew Huberman:** When one is under threat, all of a sudden, the contingency changes. So they have enough prefrontal cortex to take the same circuitry, it's still aggression, and now directed in a new But they redefined way.

**[0:42:26] Michael Pollan:** the us, right?

**[0:42:27] Andrew Huberman:** that's right.

**[0:42:28] Michael Pollan:** The the I is now plural.

**[0:42:30] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, so it's dynamic, and the reason I'm asking this, I'd love your thoughts on this, but I'm s seeding a question about collective consciousness. And and so this us-them thing within and across species, to me, feels like a a critical gate for for getting closer to understanding what is consciousness, at least for me. Maybe I'm too simplistic about it.

**[0:42:51] Michael Pollan:** I mean, I guess I'd attack it from another direction, which is, you know, you've been talking about the cortex, and, yeah, the cortex is very cool, and we have a lot of that real estate, and that's sort of what sets us apart. And for a long time, it was believed that consciousness, surely, as this advanced human achievement, cause, remember, we didn't think anybody else was conscious for hundreds of years, right? Since Descartes, we had a monopoly on consciousness.

**[0:43:17] Michael Pollan:** It's only, I think, in 1970, the first experiment mirror test, uh, on a on a chimp, and we started thinking, Oh, these primates are conscious also. I mean, we d that's a fairly recent, that's fifty years ago, fifty five years ago. It was assumed that consciousness was a cortical phenomenon. There is a another line of research, though, that I've been that I was persuaded by, um, starting with, uh, Antonio Damasio, in the nineties, and going through Mark Solms more recently.

**[0:43:49] Michael Pollan:** Uh, he's a South African psychiatrist and neuroscientist who's a kind of protege of Damasio's, uh, suggesting that actually consciousness doesn't begin with thought in the cortex, but with feeling in the brain stem or feelings registered in the brain stem. And the reason we have consciousness, according to this theory, is, um, because there are these homeostatic set points, and and that the well, back up a little. The brain exists to keep the body alive. We forget that.

**[0:44:18] Michael Pollan:** We often think the body, you know, cause we we love the brain, you know, it we're cerebrocentric in so many ways. And the body has to communicate with the the brain, and it does it through feelings like hunger and warmth or cold and itch and and all these kind of what they call homeostatic feelings that register in the upper brain stem. And the cortex only gets involved afterward. So you register this sensation of hunger, and then the cortex helps you visualize a meal or where you might get food, or how you might get or how to book a table in a restaurant, whatever it is.

**[0:44:53] Michael Pollan:** That changes things in in many ways. I if indeed this is true, and feelings have to be felt, right? I mean, a feeling implies consciousness. It doesn't solve the hard problem or anything. I think feelings have a different status than thoughts do. I think they're somatic. I think that they're reinforced by just having a body. And if that's true, then, first of all, lots more animals are conscious, right? I mean, everybody's got a brain stem. Not everybody, but a whole lot of species have brain stems, whereas cortex is kinda more exclusive club.

**[0:45:31] Michael Pollan:** And, um, uh, I found that a very, uh, persuasive way to think about consciousness, and that it starts with, uh, feelings in the body. And a lot of what the brain is doing is interpreting those feelings because they're inchoate. They're just signals, right? William James wrote about this. He said, you know, first, there's the the spike in heart rate, and then there's and then the brain says, fear. And so there's this communication going and and the cortex might get involved in that process.

**[0:46:01] Michael Pollan:** But pain, for example, is a conscious phenomenon that doesn't require a cortex. Their evidence for this is people who have no cortex, right? Uh, some children are born without one. They've decorticated animals, and they find they still have, even though they can't report emotion, they have evidence of, you know, based on expressions and behaviors that they're that they're having conscious experience. So for me, that changed the whole way of thinking about it. You know, this remains to be proven in various ways, and it doesn't solve this issue of okay, well, how does a feeling come to be felt?

**[0:46:37] Michael Pollan:** And who's feeling it? What's the is there a self that's feeling it? And I find Damasio not satisfying on that question. He he'll he'll say, well, um, and in his new book, he says this, that feelings are spontaneously conscious. And that's that's an an it's not really a satisfactory answer.

**[0:46:56] Andrew Huberman:** It's hard to wrap my head around that Spontaneous is answer.

**[0:46:58] Michael Pollan:** doing a lot of work there.

**[0:47:00] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, yeah, no discredit to him. He's done amazing Oh, he work. But yeah, has. no, no, I'm not saying you are, but just to I think, but

**[0:47:06] Michael Pollan:** He's directed the whole field to the importance of feelings, and and that's produced really important work in in emotion science and and things like that. Yeah, no, he's a real pioneer.

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**[0:48:34] Andrew Huberman:** I feel like the one of the challenges of being human is that people experience the world differently enough, it seems, uh, right, at the level of emotions. Let's just use that as an example. Some people I I've actually seen this in, uh, comments on Instagram, so it has to be true, right? Um, no, but somebody once said in in a comment, and it really stuck with me, you know, that they think in feels. And I thought, Oh, this sounds like a bunch of woo-woo stuff, but I thought maybe some people really do experience things more somatically.

**[0:49:05] Andrew Huberman:** Okay, check that box. I totally accept that, and maybe the language labels of emotion for one person are more crude than for another. Lisa Feldman Barrett verified that in cultures where there are many, many different words for types of sadness. I think that she told me that the the in Japan, there's a specific word for the type of sadness that you experience when you got a bad haircut.

**[0:49:28] Michael Pollan:** I love it.

**[0:49:28] Andrew Huberman:** Amazing, which also helps people avoid global statements like I'm feeling depressed when, in fact, they're feeling low. And when they say they're depressed in certain cultures, it really means they are depressed. Right, So nuance is is very important, but that's coming top down through language.

**[0:49:44] Michael Pollan:** And that's how culture interacts with biology, right? I mean, you know, there are different ways to interpret the same sensations. I think we learn this with, uh, you know, when you have kids, when they're when they melt down, they don't know if they're hungry or tired. It and the parent has to teach them, you know, you you need to eat. Um,

**[0:50:02] Andrew Huberman:** And you say, you need a nap, and yeah, we you need and we see a yep.

**[0:50:05] Michael Pollan:** this with kids. They're getting the signals, but they don't have the mental equipment, the cortical equipment, to interpret what's going on.

**[0:50:13] Andrew Huberman:** And so then the question is, are the signals from the body crude or refined? I'm I'm not denying their importance. They're critically important, but we can't really look to the nerve networks and say, okay, the brain is sophisticated, and the and the neural innervation to and from the body is, um, not sophisticated. I mean, it's as precise and, uh, as the other. So the problem seems to be that we don't have language for it. So, like, if I'm feeling hm.

**[0:50:39] Andrew Huberman:** Wholeheartedly full of joy, that's an easy one. If I'm feeling happy, I mean, I can I can change my language, my expression, etcetera. But where I would I think neuroscience really needs some help, and I think you're helping the the conversation, which will inform experiments, is h- how is it that the body is communicating with the brain, i in ways that get us away from language labels? Because language labels are a cr- we created those, right?

**[0:51:09] Andrew Huberman:** This is, uh, very important, I think, like, we made that up. Grunts, um, you know, uh, exhales around putrid smells and inhales around pleasant smells. That that's the those are the core components of of hm, language. I mean, words are just shaped exhales after all, right? which is amazing, uh, by the way, I didn't come up with that statement. Uh, Eddie Chang, chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, who studies speech and

**[0:51:31] Michael Pollan:** I love it.

**[0:51:31] Andrew Huberman:** language, is my childhood friend. He said, you know, he said it like like Eddie, you know, he's very calm, you know, it's a neurosurgeon. He said, you know, all speech is just shaped exhales. And I was like, Oh, my goodness, Wow. amazing. When you just think that's so wild, but then we come up with many Wow.

**[0:51:46] Michael Pollan:** Well, look, what we what we've done with it.

**[0:51:49] Andrew Huberman:** I know it's incredible, it's incredible, and yet we don't know the language of the body movement. Yes, but so this is where I feel like the consciousness problem is perhaps a little stuck.

**[0:52:01] Michael Pollan:** Yeah, I think you're right.

**[0:52:02] Andrew Huberman:** Like, and pain is one example. Pleasure is another, but at the extremes, it's easy. But in day to, uh, day-to-day experience outside of those extremes, it's it's very hard to like, what's going on right now? I don't know. I mean, my my body isn't in pain, but it's I'm not in rapture either. But your Where

**[0:52:20] Michael Pollan:** you know, your vagus nerve, which connects the visceral organs to your to your brain is, um, sending the stream of information. I think 80% of the traffic is going from body to brain, not the other way around.

**[0:52:33] Andrew Huberman:** quite the neuroscientist. I teach neuroanatomy. You're you're right. It's eighty. So,

**[0:52:36] Michael Pollan:** It's incredible.

**[0:52:36] Andrew Huberman:** yeah, yeah, the descending projection is about fifteen, twenty. Nobody knows for sure, so you're bang on. So, yeah. And I think and most people, when they talk about the neuroscience, they get some things right. You're bang on, so I just wanna be clear

**[0:52:46] Michael Pollan:** thank you.

**[0:52:47] Andrew Huberman:** to you. Like, you're exact on every neuroscience point you've made, you're exactly right.

**[0:52:50] Michael Pollan:** Thank you. So, yes, I that means

**[0:52:51] Andrew Huberman:** that's true.

**[0:52:51] Michael Pollan:** a lot coming from you. So what do those signals look like? I mean, how raw are they? I mean, um, and, uh, you know, stress hormones released, you know, through inflammation, you know, change mood, get get to the brain, right? Um, I forget which ones they are, and then suddenly make us feel threatened. The path, I think it's really complicated. I, you know, I think there's some very precise information reaching the brain, but I also think it needs a brain to interpret it.

**[0:53:26] Andrew Huberman:** Can we talk about the timescale of all this? Because so it's pretty straightforward to think about us them, um, body versus mind. And I'm wondering whether the body is communicating with the brain at a timescale that we that doesn't match to language. For instance, maybe how I feel right now and how you feel right now actually reflects the integration of everything that happened over the last ten hours for you. And so how how your brain is operating right now reflects that.

**[0:54:00] Andrew Huberman:** Like, when we when I think of brain, um, body communication, I immediately want to default to, like, the now. Hm, yeah, What's my body feeling right, now? How is it impacting my brain? But maybe the signals are of long timescales, maybe they integrate across my spleen, my stomach, and my heart, and then my, you know, my liver and my pancreas are sending another message. Like, we don't know any of this,

**[0:54:23] Michael Pollan:** no, I know.

**[0:54:24] Andrew Huberman:** and I it excites me, as you can, you can probably tell, because I feel like therein lie the answers to, like, being able to parse this experience of life, consciousness thing.

**[0:54:35] Michael Pollan:** I'm really struck by the fact that, you know, we we we locate our seat of feeling and emotion in our heads, most of us, most of the time. But if you go back in history, they talked as much about the spleen and the the liver and the heart, and that emotions they they understood something about emotions was coming from the body. My favorite example is, uh, an experiment was was done on moral judgment and disgust, moral disgust.

**[0:55:03] Michael Pollan:** They had 2 groups of people, 1 they gave uh, they each were given a pill, 1 got a placebo, 1 got ginger, powdered ginger. They then, uh, exposed people to, um, really morally repellent scenarios, wr- in writing about incest and and, um, uh, just really disgusting, um, uh, scenarios, eating one's dog, uh, things like that. And, um, the people who had taken the ginger were less judgmental. Because their stomachs were calmed, ginger calms the stomach, and so the emotion of moral disgust is somehow we are passing it through, we're doing a gut check on it.

**[0:55:48] Michael Pollan:** We're passing it through our digestive organs somehow, and that you can manipulate with something as simple as ginger, people's moral judgment. So that that says to me, this whole system is a lot more integrated than I think we even realize, and that the more I learn about this, the the whole idea of separating mind and body, you know, or brain and body, is is taking us down the wrong way, that that that these things are inextricably bound up in ways that are just too complex for us to get.

**[0:56:23] Michael Pollan:** I mean, that's an obvious, you know, that's a pretty obvious case, cause disgust is both a moral and a physical, um, sensation or feeling. But I bet it applies to other things as well.

**[0:56:35] Andrew Huberman:** It's a disgusting, but, uh, uh, pun intended, but, um, elegant example of how this can work.

**[0:56:41] Michael Pollan:** Well, it's kind of brilliant as, uh, you know, someone thinking up an experiment. And I was like, Oh, what a good idea. Yeah, good experiment. But Yeah.

**[0:56:48] Andrew Huberman:** I like experiments that bridge this kind of higher order, like like moral disgust, you know, is a cortical thing we assume, although it clearly involves, l- um, you know,

**[0:56:57] Michael Pollan:** Not. Just.

**[0:56:58] Andrew Huberman:** other circuitries. It makes sense. Ginger calms calms the gut, so, um, and I know if I have some minor pain, like a like, a back strain or something, I'm much less patient. I, um, I look at the world differently. Um, and I think we all become more, um, self-centric when we're in pain, when we feel good, it's easier to allocate resources to what's out there. Maybe that takes us a little bit to psychedelics, um, and collective consciousness.

**[0:57:25] Andrew Huberman:** You know, one of the things that I'm, um, excited by, uh, is that I'm old enough now to have w- heard about the counterculture of the 60s, grown up in its wake, um, experienced this health wellness, public education thing that I do, touched into science and and living in California, you know, I've spent some a little bit of time at Esalen, read read some books and getting to know folks across these generations, and a lot of themes repeat themselves.

**[0:57:54] Andrew Huberman:** And one of the themes that I think we need to overcome is the lack of adequate language or dismissing language that can act as a barrier rather than a a conduit for for understanding. So, for instance, the words collective consciousness years ago were about, like, one love, right? And that didn't work, um, in terms of convincing people to live in peace with all other humans and animals, clearly, sadly. So, that doesn't mean collective consciousness isn't worth thinking about, but just like we say, you know, breathwork is too broad a term, and, um, any I don't like anything that s that lumps so much that you lose critical, um, critical information.

**[0:58:37] Andrew Huberman:** So if I say collective consciousness, I want to be clear, I'm not talking about one love, although that's a great goal. I think peace on earth would be nice. I don I don't know that I'm gonna see it in my lifetime. I'm getting frustrated. Probably not, but I'll hold out hope.

**[0:58:51] Michael Pollan:** We're going the wrong way.

**[0:58:52] Andrew Huberman:** It's it's it's tough. It's it's it's tough. I I have to say. It's, um, uh, too many repeating themes of the sort that I wouldn't like to see, um, are are visible. But

**[0:59:04] Michael Pollan:** So how do you define collective consciousness?

**[0:59:06] Andrew Huberman:** well, I've heard the term, right? And when I think about it, I've not been to Burning Man, but I think about people who are trying to set aside me-ism in day-to-day interactions so that everybody wins. It's this notion of everybody wins. And then I kinda try and pressure test that a little bit and say, is there a version of collective consciousness, everybody wins, that's based on truth, that's not based on lies? I think that's where it failed because people are people, and there are bad humans, there are good humans, but it's a continuum, and people are fundamentally self-interested until they're okay, and then they can take care of others.

**[0:59:49] Andrew Huberman:** I think that's true of essentially all humans. How can we get to a collective consciousness, embracing the idea that I'm me, you're you, we could work together, but we have to also acknowledge the truth that you have self-interests and I have self-interests. And that's where I feel like if there's ho- if there's hope, it's about acknowledge like, we can't bullshit ourselves into thinking one love. We can't all take LSD and expect to get there. In fact, I think that would make things worse, maybe maybe better, who knows?

**[1:00:14] Andrew Huberman:** But it's not gonna solve the problem. So I'm throwing out a huge can of worms here, but how do you think about this collective consciousness thing? How perhaps should it be redefined? Is it about living in peace and harmony as a species with other species? Is that what it's really about? Um, because I think anyone that takes psychedelics or who has a positive hope for humanity or both wants that

**[1:00:38] Michael Pollan:** Yeah. So that's been the dream of psychedelics for a long time, um, that they would diminish the ego, um, and, uh, contribute to sort of pro-social feeling, a s a sense of connection. Um, we're more alike than we're different. You know, it doesn't always work. Um, we have cases of ego dissolution, and we have cases of ego inflation.

**[1:01:07] Andrew Huberman:** with with psychedelics. With psychedelics. Some Can you can you talk people more about that? Yeah.

**[1:01:11] Michael Pollan:** yeah, so a very common, uh, phenomenon on on high-dose psychedelics is a sense of, uh, losing a sense of self. Um, I mentioned earlier that you can be conscious without a sense of self. And I've had that experience. I describe it in, uh, in 2 of my books, um, of, uh, high-dose psilocybin. I suddenly saw myself, um, explode into this cloud of blue Post-it notes, then flutter to the ground and coalesced in this pool of blue paint.

**[1:01:43] Michael Pollan:** Beautiful. It was. And it was like, that sounds scary, but in fact, it was like, Yes, I'm blue paint. That's what I am. And I was observing this, though, from this new perspective that wasn't me. It was completely objective, total equanimity. And when that happens and the ego is laid aside, there's no wall. The ego is a defensive structure. Um, the self is a defe- right? It's it's as we're talking about us and them or me and me and them.

**[1:02:15] Michael Pollan:** You merge with something larger, um, because there's nothing to stand in the way. And some people merge with the divinity, or the universe, or or love, or other people. In my case, it was a piece of music that the guide was playing, this Bach, uh, cello, unaccompanied cello suite, and I became this piece of music, and it was the most beautiful experience of music I'd ever had. There was no subject object distinction. I was it. I wasn't listening to it.

**[1:02:43] Michael Pollan:** I was it. This is something that pushes you toward getting over ego consciousness, which is at the root of a lot of the, you know, discord that we feel in the world. Eh, obviously, it's not a permanent state anyone can be in, but the the legacy of that experience is I am less I feel I have more perspective on my ego. I know when he's up to his old tricks, you know, when he's being too critical or aggressive, or too self-interested, and I say, Oh, that's my ego, and that's just 1 voice, and there are other voices I can listen to.

**[1:03:18] Michael Pollan:** And, so, I think there's a value in having an experience of ego dissolution. Now I hasten to say there are other ways to get there. Um, uh, meditators get there too. Um, it's more work, but you can get there through meditation and transcend your sense of ego. Uh, experiences of awe, which you can get from many different ways, diminish your sense of ego in a way that I think is very pro-social. Um, Dacher Keltner, who's a colleague of mine at at Berkeley, does did this really he studies awe.

**[1:03:47] Michael Pollan:** He wrote a wonderful book on awe. He did this cool experiment where he asked people to draw a picture of themselves, just a stick figure on a piece of graph paper. And then he gave them an experience of awe. He took them river rafting or something like that, and then he had them do it again, and they would they would draw a picture of themselves at, like, 1/3 of the size, um, because their sense of self had been diminished in a very positive way.

**[1:04:10] Michael Pollan:** It felt very, very good. We have such complicated, paradoxical feelings about the ego and the self. We celebrate it in our society. We want our kids to have self, um, confidence and self-assurance and, um, and we worship self. But we also find that some of our happiest experiences are when we escape self, right? I mean, it happens in sex, it happens, sp- experiences of awe, religious experience, it happens to people in church, in synagogue all the time.

**[1:04:42] Michael Pollan:** So, where are we on this? And that's why I don't think it's so simple to say that there's a collective consciousness. I think we toggle back and forth of getting trapped in self, and and and, of course, self is really important. Having a sense of self, you wouldn't spend 6 years writing a book if you didn't know you were gonna be the same person at the end of the 6 years, and it would benefit you to have finished it.

**[1:05:04] Michael Pollan:** So, we need that sense of self to get things done, but it's also a trap, and it distances us from people and makes us selfish and and, uh, so I I just don't think it's simple. There's another idea of collective consciousness, of course, that consciousness is a field exists outside us, and we're we all take part in it. I came out of this experience of studying consciousness and looking at all the theories of consciousness. I don't wanna give it away, but we have no fucking idea about consciousness, really, how it's how how brain matter generates consciousness, if indeed that's how it happens, and there are people who doubt that's how it happens.

**[1:05:41] Michael Pollan:** It could be that the brain channels consciousness, right? I mean, that if you conceive of consciousness as, like, electromagnetic waves, um, brains are like radio receivers or TV receivers. You wouldn't you wouldn't look in the TV set for the woman who gave you the weather report. You know, she's not there. She's somewhere else. So I don't know that that's true, but coming out of this experience of studying this, I don't dismiss an idea like that. I don't dismiss panpsychism, too, the idea that the particles in this table have some itty-wincy little bit of consciousness that somehow gets combined in conscious beings like us.

**[1:06:21] Michael Pollan:** You have to keep an open mind because our presumption that, you know, consciousness is an emergent property of bl- brain complexity, that idea is not it doesn't have much traction. So so, anyway, so maybe there is a field of consciousness that we we tune into. How do we prove it? You know? I mean, we were talking earlier about Christoph Koch, who's a scientist we both greatly admire, and he was a a real physicalist, a materialist scientist who believed that it was all about the brains.

**[1:06:52] Michael Pollan:** And, uh, and he was head of Allen Brain Institute for many years. He had a experience on ayahuasca that he shared publicly. I'm not speaking out of school, where he was absolutely convinced and remains convinced that, um, consciousness exists outside of brains. Now, that's extraordinary for somebody of his experience to have come to that conclusion, and he and it's unshakable. I haven't had that experience. I'm not convinced of that the way he is, but, um, but I respect people who hold that idea now, and much more than I once did.

**[1:07:27] Andrew Huberman:** I'm gonna summarize something you said to make sure I I got it right, which is that you had a psychedelic experience. Many people who take psych psychedelics - not all, but many - have an ego dissolution experience. It's, um, very tangible and rich inside of the psychedelic journey. There's an export to after the journey, but it doesn't fundamentally change your relationship to self at every moment in your waking life. I think that's important for people to hear because I think a lot of people think about people who take a lot of psychedelics and sort of fundamentally change, they can't go back to their prior self.

**[1:08:01] Andrew Huberman:** So it it allows it's a portal that you can go back into, consciously, it it's an awareness. Do I have that right? Okay.

**[1:08:07] Michael Pollan:** Yeah. It's exactly right. I, um, uh, I just have a slightly different understanding of my ego. It's not like it's gone away. It's there when I need it.

**[1:08:14] Andrew Huberman:** And then the the other piece about consciousness inside versus outside, I think maybe it will be helpful for people. Certainly, it is for me to think about, um, brains and inside-outside stuff this way. Pit vipers can sense heat emissions we can't, honeybees can see UV light we can't. We experience all of life through a pretty narrow set of filters. I think when people hear the electromagnetic energies in the world, it sounds woo to some, but it's anything but.

**[1:08:40] Andrew Huberman:** It's simply just for clarity, uh's sake, certain wavelengths of light, certain sound waves that we can detect, mechanical touch, chemical sensing combined to our experience. We're abstracting our visual image of each other sitting across this table. There's And it's no

**[1:08:56] Michael Pollan:** limited by our senses.

**[1:08:57] Andrew Huberman:** that's right. I can only bring in what I can bring in. A different animal or even person would detect you differently. But the the whole idea is that I'm I'm putting all that together into an abstraction of Michael Pollan sitting here doing a podcast with me. So if in one model, consciousness is an abstraction that's created within our brains, we combine electromagnetic energies, whatever other faculties our neurons can, um, contribute to those meaning, understanding, combining with with s whatever, gut, whatever, and we create this consciousness experience.

**[1:09:30] Andrew Huberman:** But you're saying there's another model where there's an energy out in outside of us that somehow we're detecting that is already a consciousness. And so it's we're not crus- we're not abstracting it in our minds. It's literally entering through, presumably, our senses. Maybe there's an additional sense we're not even aware of, and we're experiencing it, but it's literally out there. I don't experience you as a bunch of photons. I experience you as a human. So I'm either putting it together inside or it's put together outside and gets, um, and gets recapitulated Yeah.

**[1:10:11] Andrew Huberman:** These are internally.

**[1:10:11] Michael Pollan:** called, uh, filter theories of consciousness, and the implication of them, uh, Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was an exponent of this, and Aldous Huxley, um, uh, believed this and talked about it in Doors of Perception, that he had ha- had some access to this field, and and and for him, it was psychedelics. It was a a mescaline experience that convinced him of this. And the the idea was that there's more consciousness out there than we can handle, and that, um, there is a filter or or what what Huxley called a reducing valve, and it basically admits the what he called the measly trickle of consciousness we need to survive.

**[1:10:53] Andrew Huberman:** God, that's brilliant because if we took in all the

**[1:10:55] Michael Pollan:** We would be overwhelmed.

**[1:10:56] Andrew Huberman:** all the wavelengths of light, for instance, we wouldn't be able to see. I'd be overwhelmed with whatever that would look like or feel like. I I can't use that.

**[1:11:05] Michael Pollan:** No, our senses are limiting. Uh, they're not they're not as expansive as they might be. And and your example of the bees are right. There's, uh, all these spectrums of light we can't see. It's also worth remembering that it it was only, like, what, 120 or 150 years ago that we learned there was an electromagnetic field that, you know, that you could actually use to convey information, and it's invisible. I mean, that's pretty heady stuff right there.

**[1:11:30] Michael Pollan:** So, their thinking is, well, there might be another field. And didn't we just learn about this other, um, body system? There's lymph and blood, and there's a third one. What is it called?

**[1:11:40] Andrew Huberman:** There's, like, this sensate thing. It's like a thin sheet that runs through the body that acupuncturists seem to have known about for a very long time. Um, acupuncture's getting tremendous validation from the rigorous science now.

**[1:11:52] Michael Pollan:** Yeah, the acupuncturists are all like, Yeah, we were telling you about this.

**[1:11:55] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, certain sites can increase

**[1:11:56] Michael Pollan:** See?

**[1:11:57] Andrew Huberman:** or decrease inflammation. Uh, Chufu Ma's lab at Harvard Med is doing beautiful work on

**[1:12:02] Michael Pollan:** It's it's fascinating.

**[1:12:02] Andrew Huberman:** this. Yeah. Yeah.

**[1:12:03] Michael Pollan:** So so we shouldn't limit ourselves. I mean, i the idea we've discovered all there is to discover in terms of fields and consciousness, it may look very different. So, I was talking to, uh, Alison Gopnik, who's another colleague in psychology at at Berkeley, and, you know, she was saying, Well, you know, the hard problem. We may decide that consciousness is not 1 thing, and maybe that's our mistake. And we did that with the elan vital. Explan- that was gonna the the one thing that was gonna explain life and phlogiston, I forget what that was gonna explain, but energy or fire or something like that.

**[1:12:38] Michael Pollan:** So we tend, when we have a mystery, we tend to make it singular, and sometimes the answer is breaking it up into parts. And so maybe there's ego, self, and that's something, and then maybe there's emotion, and maybe self-reflection is something else entirely. I mean, I've thought about this with regard to AI as we get these AIs, these chatbots that seem more and more, um, to have a sense of self. Say, you know, we call them agents because they act on their own interest.

**[1:13:15] Michael Pollan:** And so maybe it's possible to have an ego without being conscious, cause I don't think they're conscious. I don't know. We may be taking apart this idea at some point, and maybe that'll help us to understand it.

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**[1:14:54] Andrew Huberman:** To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code Huberman for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. It's a super intriguing idea. I I sometimes wonder if AI will tell us what consciousness is in a way that we're Well, in a not able to way, solve. And some people might say, Well, that's just very, you know, pro-AI. But, I mean, humans have been putting their heads together around these sets of problems for a long while.

**[1:15:24] Andrew Huberman:** I do think we're at a new vista Oh, we're now.

**[1:15:25] Michael Pollan:** we're stuck. We're absolutely stuck. And the effort to make a conscious AI, which is underway, I mean, there are there are individuals in some companies who are trying to make it conscious, not just intelligent, and those are not the same things. If they fail or succeed, they're gonna teach us important things about consciousness. For example, if it truly is about feelings, and that's where consciousness originates, feelings depend on having a body, a vulnerable body, and possibly on our mortality.

**[1:15:55] Michael Pollan:** Are computers gonna have feelings? I don't think so. I, uh, and I think a computer simulation of a feeling is very different than a simulation of a thought, which is as good as a real thought. You know, it can play chess or go or whatever. So if they succeed in making a a conscious AI, it'll it'll discount the feeling idea. I don't think they can. I, you know, as long as we're dealing with silicon computers, the idea that you could have a conscious, uh, computer is based on a faulty metaphor of the brain as a computer.

**[1:16:29] Michael Pollan:** And, I mean, you know enough neuroscience to to see the yes, it does some computations, but take the distinction between hardware and software. That doesn't really exist in brains. Well, that's a key thing about computers. And neurons are not just on or off. They're not simply transistors. They're affected by chemicals and oscillations. There's a wonderful quote from, uh, Norbert Wiener, who said that the, um, the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance. And I think this metaphor of the brain as computers, uh, is we're not being vigilant about that metaphor at all.

**[1:17:03] Michael Pollan:** I don't think I think it falls apart if you push on it.

**[1:17:06] Andrew Huberman:** I also think computers are clearly not brains, even in the most modern iterations of AI, for the simple reason, uh, at least one simple reason, which is our brains create memories in 1 or 2 structures, but then they export them to a bunch of other areas, and computers have a memory center. Distributed memory is, you know, is doesn't exist in most computers now.

**[1:17:31] Michael Pollan:** But also that memory ha- makes a physical change in the brain, right? I mean, your and your brain's different than mine cause it was pruned very differently because of life experiences. So, if you had a computer where the hardware was being constantly changed, it would be useless.

**[1:17:45] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, there are these, um, issues in neuroscience that never really get resolved. One of the things that's perplexing to me, maybe you have some insight on this, is there were 2 labs, the Sumitomo Nagawa's lab at MIT, he's got a Nobel, and Mark Mayford's lab at Scripps, both essentially ran the same experiment where they used an animal model where you could, um, the animals would learn something, and then you could capture which neurons were activated during the learning and were critical for the expression of that behavior.

**[1:18:12] Andrew Huberman:** And you'd say neuron A, B, C, D, they fired in a certain order, and it was those neurons. You could and then you could go back and actually replay those neurons, and if you found that if you played them in the exact Yeah, the same sequence,

**[1:18:21] Michael Pollan:** same behavior.

**[1:18:21] Andrew Huberman:** you got the same behavior. Here's the problem. You could play those neurons backwards or all at once and get the exact same behavior. So, this throws a serious wrench into our understanding of the brain. The notion that you need things firing in a particular sequence was completely crapped on by those set of experiments. I mentioned the Nobel, even though Susumu got it for immunology, he's a very smart guy. Mark's a very smart guy. So these papers have stood the test of time.

**[1:18:46] Andrew Huberman:** But it would be like if I said, Oh, you know, this is the the the keys that you play in a song, and it sounds like the song, You're playing or they're banging

**[1:18:52] Michael Pollan:** all of them. Yeah.

**[1:18:52] Andrew Huberman:** on all of them, and it's you still get the song. So, our whole notion of the temporal ordering of firing of neurons being important for for memories is, like, it's complete horseshit. It also turns out that every one of those neurons is participating in a bunch of other memories, and so some of them are that's great because that's great allocation of of

**[1:19:12] Michael Pollan:** And redundancy.

**[1:19:12] Andrew Huberman:** resources. But but we can't we we just I don't wanna say we don't understand the brain. There's so much beautiful work has been done over the last, you know, 500 years, incredible work. But there is this problem, like, we don't really understand how the brain is encoding experiences, even at that level, and that's a problem.

**[1:19:29] Michael Pollan:** Yeah, it's a huge problem. Well, I don't know a lot about this, but it sounds to me like a quantum effect, that it's happening simultaneously.

**[1:19:37] Andrew Huberman:** Tell me more about that. Like, this is not my area of expertise, so anything you say will be

**[1:19:42] Michael Pollan:** Me neither.

**[1:19:42] Andrew Huberman:** new to me.

**[1:19:43] Michael Pollan:** Okay. This is total amateur. I heard a talk by Michio Kaku the other day, and, uh, he was talking about quantum computers and that they will, um, not work in a linear way, one way after another, after another. When they're solving a problem, they'll do it all at once. Simul- it's simultaneity will be a a hallmark of that. There's a whole school of thought that quantum physics may help explain consciousness. I, I honestly don't understand it, but quantum mechanics have given us some very, uh, bizarre explanations of things, such as entanglement.

**[1:20:19] Michael Pollan:** Um, you know, that 2 particles separated by light years can nevertheless affect one another, and so non-locality is and realism, they're gone. And in biology, we just go along as if they're still here cause we can't deal with it. Quantum effects, uh, have been discounted in brains because they seem to we we think they only work at these tiny scales, but, in fact, they work at all scales. We also have questions about whether they work with a warm, wet, uh, in a warm, wet environment, like a brain, you know, quantum computers have to be chilled to, like, n- nearly abs- absolute zero.

**[1:20:59] Michael Pollan:** But I think that that is the next in the next 50 years, I think we'll be trying to figure out if what we know about quantum reality may have something to do with creating consciousness. It's as far as I can go. You know, Amazing. everything I know about it No, ama- now. Yeah.

**[1:21:17] Andrew Huberman:** amazing. I I mean, I think, um, the brain is a receiver. I've heard that before today. It really makes sense to me now that, um, based on how you described it. Can I ask about you, uh, and can I get some advice from you, and can our listeners perhaps get some advice from you? Uh, you've written 10 books, and I'm sensing a thread through all of them about the natural world, about us, how we how those relate, and coming to some better understanding of self and relating to the world in a more benevolent way.

**[1:21:47] Andrew Huberman:** That's that's my export, but I'm I know there's much more to you. But it dawned on me as we were sitting down, I I think the world knows very little about you, and maybe that's intentional. But I just wanna know when you were younger, were you were you sort of intrigued by or drawn to flora and fauna? Were you sort of, like, thinking about the humans in a certain way? It it it just strikes me that you have a very, um, it's gonna sound, uh, like a scientist said it, but a very interdisciplated way of thinking about us, them.

**[1:22:17] Andrew Huberman:** Like, you understand the difference between a human and a plant and a and an animal, which is great, but you also s find these incredible points of connectivity that are really geared towards self-understanding and therefore helping the relationship. So can you trace that back to, like, something in particular, or is that just your de- or is this just downloaded into you?

**[1:22:43] Michael Pollan:** I, uh, so I started gardening at a very young age, uh, accidentally. I had an experience when I was 4 or 5. I grew up on Long Island, suburban Long Island, and I loved watermelon. And, like everybody, thinking about the pits, you know, the seeds when you swallow them or don't swallow them, and and my mother would always encourage me to spit them out. And I did that, and I I took some watermelon seeds, and I just covered it with dirt.

**[1:23:10] Michael Pollan:** I was, like, really young, and then forgot about it. And that must have been May or June, and I came back in September, and lo and behold, there was a watermelon. It was, like, the size of a football, but to me, it was huge. I was just so blown away by this, and it was it was just a, you know, formative moment. And I was so excited. I picked I picked it, and I was running, and we had a concrete patio behind our house, and I I had to show my mom this this, uh, thing that I'd grown.

**[1:23:44] Michael Pollan:** I hadn't really done anything, and I tripped and fell, and the watermelon just completely splattered, um, all over the patio. But I went on. I planted a garden when I was, like, 8 next to the house. I called it a farm. Whenever I could grow 3 or 4 strawberries, I'd put them in a Dixie cup and sell them to my mom. So it was a going concern. So gardening was a really big part of it, and and, you know, that puts you in a relation to nature, an active relationship to nature.

**[1:24:12] Michael Pollan:** Most of us have a very kind of observer, um, type relationship. We admire it from a distance on vacation, you know, um, but gardening thrusts you right in the middle of it, and you have to make decisions, uh, and that your plants have interests. You know, you're not the only interested creature here. Your plants have interests, and to the extent you can satisfy their interests, they're gonna give you what you're what you what you want. So that, you know, eventually, years later, I wrote my first book was about that, and, um, I realized what was going on in the garden is no different than what goes on on the farm.

**[1:24:53] Michael Pollan:** So it was very easy to go from, uh, I started writing these essays about what was going on in my garden and using that as a laboratory. I mean, ge- Americans generally go to the wilderness to think about nature, the desert or the forest. And I actually think the garden, at this point, is a a more valuable laboratory cause we've saved all the land we're gonna save, you know? I think 8% of the American, uh, landscape has been we've locked it up, thrown away the key, which is great.

**[1:25:20] Michael Pollan:** Although, actually, Trump's trying to open the lock again, Sure, sell some but

**[1:25:23] Andrew Huberman:** of it.

**[1:25:23] Michael Pollan:** yeah. In Utah.

**[1:25:24] Andrew Huberman:** I will say, just as a quick note, if the like, this angers me so much. My friends who are hunters and, like, real outdoors people, um, were very excited about the protection of these lands and now have they're essentially pissed at all forms of government. Let's just put it that way, um, because they were promised something, and it was taken away. And I they they're now truly outside the box of any political party. They will die before they let go of this land.

**[1:25:55] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah. Well, And it but it is hunters really scary. It is truly scary. Um, and some of our fishermen also, and, you know, and so on. And, um,

**[1:26:03] Michael Pollan:** We still need to to extol the virtues of wilderness. It's without question, and hunters have been some of the great conservationists in American history. I mean, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, you know, really started the modern conservation movement cause he was a hunter. But we need to know how to behave in nature at this point, right? I mean, in the 94 and 98% of the or 92% of the landscape that, um because America, we've tended to either, you know, there's either virgin nature or raped nature, right?

**[1:26:33] Michael Pollan:** I mean, we have this this very strong binary, and, um, and once we've decided that this is this side goes to capitalism and the marketplace, you know, we abuse it, and we have abused it. So so learning how to how to behave in nature, I think, is really important, and that's that's guided a lot of my work. You're right in your take. Consciousness, you know, is part of that. It's like, where do where do our minds engage with matter and and nature and and biology, and and and it's amazing, we don't know yet.

**[1:27:08] Andrew Huberman:** you also strike me as somebody who you think about these very high level problems. Eh, I don't know when that came about, um, but clearly you're observant and you and you think a lot. But many people who talk about psychedelics write about psychedelics and think about collective consciousness and, um, and are friendly with plants and plants like them, they're not, like, feet on the ground. Like, so, do do you have, like, practical people in your lineage where you where you taught, like cause gardening also is it has a practical aspect.

**[1:27:35] Andrew Huberman:** You can't just wish the plants to grow. You can't just dance around them and play them sound bowls. I'm not to I th- listen, I think sound bowl therapy will probably discover has some very important effects on the nervous system, so I'm not being disparaging of it at all. But it's one thing to like these things and and feel you have a relationship to them. Um, but you've made great efforts to try and get many people, millions of people, to to appreciate and lean into these relationships in ways that can serve them and and the world.

**[1:28:03] Andrew Huberman:** So where does that come from?

**[1:28:05] Michael Pollan:** Well, I don't know exactly. I've been kind of surprised that a couple of my books have actually changed a public conversation around food and then psychedelic.

**[1:28:16] Andrew Huberman:** I think about Aldibor's dilemma. It was very present in, you know, when I was going through, you know, college and and around that time. I think it was a graduate okay, so it was, yeah, shortly it was after, uh, college, but that book was everywhere, and the mantra from that book, right, you know, um,

**[1:28:33] Michael Pollan:** Eat food, not too much, mostly plants, mostly plants. So I never, you know, I didn't set out to, um, start something, and and certainly there were other important books that came out around the same period, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Marion Nestle wrote a book called Food Politics that was very influential.

**[1:28:49] Andrew Huberman:** The difference, I would say, they're great, and I great admiration for them, but I would say that those were about what not to do. Like, this is bad, you know? And, um, and, like, growing up, I read the one, was it, was Tom Robbins wrote a book from the Baskin Robbins family. What was that book? I forget the title.

**[1:29:05] Michael Pollan:** Something about sugar.

**[1:29:06] Andrew Huberman:** But it was about I mean, you read it, and you're just like, the atrocities

**[1:29:07] Michael Pollan:** Sugar is poison.

**[1:29:08] Andrew Huberman:** of of of the of the meat industry. So it's

**[1:29:10] Michael Pollan:** Oh, that one.

**[1:29:10] Andrew Huberman:** a it's so they're hard books to form a relationship to cause it's like a they're tell it's a bad relate it's a great they're great books, but about bad relationships.

**[1:29:18] Michael Pollan:** Good point.

**[1:29:18] Andrew Huberman:** Whereas your book, it was about the the love of these things, and so it was I have like this benevolence.

**[1:29:23] Michael Pollan:** yes. Well, I've always felt if there's any way to put hope in a story, you need to put hope in a story cause we need hope. We it's our it's our air, you know? And I remember wr- I wrote a a piece for The New York Times. It became a chapter in Omnivore's Dilemma about, um, about the meat industry, and I followed this one cow through the whole process, you know, from s insemination to slaughter.

**[1:29:48] Michael Pollan:** And it's a pretty dark story about how we produce beef in this country, and it's a long story. It's like 8,000 words, but I made a point to, like, well, what are the alternatives? And I learned about grass-fed, grass-finished beef, which at the time was a tiny little market. And, um, I had a couple paragraphs on this. There's another way to do it. There's another so I was making the point that the the food chain from which most of us are eating beef is floating on a sea of oil, and that, um, it's fossil fuel to grow the corn, um, that feeds the animal, and then you need the pharmaceuticals because the corn makes the animal sick, and it's just

**[1:30:26] Michael Pollan:** it's just such a pathological system, and it's so dark. Um, but there's another food chain that takes sunlight captured by grass that feeds this animal. I juxtapose these 2 food chains, an oil-based food chain and a sunlight-based food chain. And you know, my editors were like, Hey, this piece is already at 8,000 words. You've got 4 paragraphs about grass-fed beef, which no one knows anything about and doesn't know where to get. You know, we gotta cut that.

**[1:30:54] Michael Pollan:** And I said, No, we have to leave that. That just shows the hope that we can grow our food using sunlight, not oil. And I won the fight, luckily, and was so gratified. A couple weeks after this piece came out, this piece made quite a bit of noise at the time. I walked into a butcher shop on College Avenue in Oakland, and I just I was kinda curious. I I wonder if they have grass-fed beef. And so I asked the butcher, Do you have grass-fed beef?

**[1:31:19] Michael Pollan:** And he goes, What is going on? You're the 6th person this week who asked me for grass-fed Awesome. beef. And he got it. Um, so that satisfies me a lot. I I like writing where we can point a direction that it might be useful for and that that individuals can have some agency and not be just victims of these big systems. And I'm an optimistic person, finally.

**[1:31:42] Andrew Huberman:** You said, finally? Not not your entire life?

**[1:31:45] Michael Pollan:** No, no, I ha- I think I have been. I I think I am optimistic. I also think that I I'm the oldest of 4 kids. My father, who's no longer with us, was alcoholic. I had a lot of responsibility for being a sane person in the family dynamic, uh, helping my mother with, you know, the household and things, cause my dad was kinda checked out. And, um, uh, so I think I do I do value practical things, and and and that's why my instinct is always, like, start with materialism, and if materialism fails, then we'll look at other weirder ideas.

**[1:32:21] Andrew Huberman:** Sorry to hear about your father and why why you had to step into that role, but the world's, um, fortunate that you did. Because when I look at the the the import what I would call the important movements of the last 50, 60 years of and I think psychedelics is one of them, and it but when I say that, I wanna be clear, I'm talking about neuroplasticity to make people feel and be better versions of themselves.

**[1:32:45] Andrew Huberman:** It may not come from psychedelics or even therapy or or the somatics or breathwork or health and fitness, all of it, you know, I feel like where each of those quote unquote movements reached its cliff was when the individual or individuals that were leading that movement were either too emotive and not practical enough. They weren't thinking about how they could export the knowledge in a way that people could really make use of it, um, that acknowledged the variety of truths that were out there, that people weren't all gonna just, like, move to San Francisco or Big Sur, you know, that kind of thing, but that people couldn't be so practical and and removed from thinking about new possibilities, new ways

**[1:33:26] Andrew Huberman:** of humans being that then, like, dismissed it. And I feel like we're we are at an important repetition point where if we're gonna break through, I feel like those 2 things have to really, um, be married in the in the movements. And and I and I see it in you and I'm I'm I w- w- you're like, uh, in your relationship to these things, uh, so the practical side and the, eh, you know, the the clearly deep relationship to to plants in the world.

**[1:33:52] Michael Pollan:** I mean, I do finally wanna push the world in one direction and not in another. I mean, and I, th- you know, I I mean, you know, that's considered advocacy in journalism, and I I own up to it. Um, once I I mean, there's a point when I'm starting on a subject where I don't know a lot that I wouldn't pretend to know where the world should go or where the food industry should go.

**[1:34:13] Michael Pollan:** But at a certain point, you've you've mastered the subject, and you it would be disingenuous not to think that I think we need to move this way. Not that, you know, we had such success. I mean, I'm I I just wrote a new introduction to Omnivore's Dilemma, and I wish the book were more dated than it is. Um, it's, you know, the food system is still screwed up. I I think we have more awareness of it, people have a better idea where their food comes from, they're they're they're making the link between, um, what they're eating and their health, in a way, thanks to people like you, but a whole lot of other people.

**[1:34:49] Michael Pollan:** But we're still eating a terrible diet for the most part in this country, and, um, we still have a a agriculture that is all about growing corn and soy, which are the building blocks of ultra-processed food, which is making us sick and killing us. Um, so we have a long way to go. In a way, we've made more progress with psychedelics, but in the case of psychedelics, there was no opposition. I mean, there was some cultural opposition, you know, the, eh, you know, holdovers from the '60s, yeah, the drug war and he didn't things like that.

**[1:35:19] Andrew Huberman:** he didn't like drugs. Now now the the the red side is all about Ibogaine for veterans It's the most with PTSD. Rick

**[1:35:26] Michael Pollan:** amazing transformation.

**[1:35:26] Andrew Huberman:** Perry, self-described, I like Rick, I get along with him. He's very bipartisan about this psychedelic thing, and he just self-described. You said it, Rick. He calls himself a knuckle-dragging Republican who's into heart medicine. He uses those l- those words

**[1:35:40] Michael Pollan:** Love it.

**[1:35:41] Andrew Huberman:** publicly, so I'm happy to repeat

**[1:35:42] Michael Pollan:** I love it.

**[1:35:42] Andrew Huberman:** them. He he really wants these medicines to be available to all veterans who are experiencing PTSD and substance abuse issues, and he's worked very, very hard across the aisle to try and bring these things to legal, safe

**[1:35:58] Michael Pollan:** And this is the only way standards. in in our current political moment anything gets done is is you need you need support on the right as well as the left, and and that's been a lesson of the food movement, which was coded kind of left liberal. Now you have Maha, and there are a lot of problems with Maha, um, but there are areas of agreement on pesticides and on ultra-processed food, getting it out of schools. You know, you used to hear the food movement was elitist.

**[1:36:23] Michael Pollan:** You don't hear that anymore, and that's because you have people on the right who are supporting wanna push the world in the same direction.

**[1:36:29] Andrew Huberman:** That's a really good point.

**[1:36:30] Michael Pollan:** So we have some hope, there's some hope there.

**[1:36:32] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, no, that's a gosh, we've gotta really break down the divisions to move healthy eating forward. I was just gonna, um, end psychedelics in the in the safest way. I I was struck when I was started to look at the, like, the new food pyramids of I realized that, um, the American foods have never been healthy. Like, if you people talk about how they eat in Europe, and my dad's from Argentina, and how they eat, the grass-fed beef was there, that was all they had, right, you know?

**[1:36:57] Andrew Huberman:** Um, there's some unhealthy elements about the diet there too, when they eat heavy meals late, and, you know, but now it's people have improved their diet. Information travels, but, you know, we think fried chicken, we think, um, hot dogs, hamburgers,

**[1:37:11] Michael Pollan:** Mac and cheese.

**[1:37:12] Andrew Huberman:** mac and cheese, french fries, like cotton candy. These are the most Ameri- apple as American as apple pie, right? We don't And a we don't talk right, so

**[1:37:20] Michael Pollan:** New Lord.

**[1:37:20] Andrew Huberman:** the so the the Amer- the classic American foods were all very unhealthy. So I wonder if there's a way to redefine what American food is. That and that to me would be cool because Americans also pride themselves on being pioneers of all sorts of things, including physical endeavors that require a lot of vitality and strength, endurance, and coordination, like, you know, so those generally don't come from the foods I described.

**[1:37:45] Michael Pollan:** No, they don't. And, you know, America's not never had a sing- a a real food tradition till the till f- fast food is our re is really our our food. Bummer. I'm sorry to say. Bummer. But people came from all these other countries, and they had a food tradition, and it got kinda s stomped out of them. I think part of the problem is since we didn't have this deep these deep roots in this food tradition, we were much more vulnerable to marketing.

**[1:38:12] Michael Pollan:** And then say the, you know, the French are, the Italians are, um, and they had s they had something to resist, um, what the marketplace wanted to do with food, which is, of course, to process it, you know, with the cheapest possible raw ingredients. So, yeah, we need to build an American cuisine that, um, is healthy, um, but it's easier said than done. Or we bar I mean, look, we talk about the Mediterranean diet, right? It's one you know, one of the diets we we have good reason to believe is healthier than others, and, uh, and is attractive to a lot of people.

**[1:38:44] Michael Pollan:** So it doesn't have to be ours, I suppose. I, you know, we could borrow it from somewhere else. Um, but it's very hard to change people's eating habits, um, and, uh, one of the hardest things. And habit in general, right? So I you know, I don't I don't see it as easy, and in general, the fact that you ne- there's a there's a growing recognition, though, that that most of the chronic diseases we're dealing with, the ones that are killing us, are food-related, diet-related.

**[1:39:12] Michael Pollan:** And I think you can attack that from the cultural stance and get people to eat different food, but as long as the the policies are making the the bad food cheap, which they are. I mean, we subsidize corn, which gives us high fructose corn syrup, which gives us diabetes. So, we're we're we're so we're supporting both sides in the war on type 2 diabetes, right? We're supporting the sugar, and we're supporting the treatment. It's insane

**[1:39:40] Andrew Huberman:** It is insane.

**[1:39:41] Michael Pollan:** and it's costing us a fortune. So, we have to change the policy and make healthy food cheaper relative to unhealthy food.

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**[1:41:25] Michael Pollan:** No, I mean, RFK Jr. has been talking a good game on this, but, um, meanwhile, the the big beautiful bill, um, eliminated all sorts of farm-to-school and farm-to-um, other institution, uh, supporting small agriculture, regenerative agriculture. They're cutting all that stuff while they talk about it. And, uh, the only change they've made on food after over 2 years has been, uh, getting food companies to voluntarily remove some dyes from cereal. I don't think that's that big a deal, I don't think dyes are a a crucial health problem, and it's voluntary.

**[1:42:05] Michael Pollan:** So, this administration is not gonna regulate anything. Um, and the changes we need in the food system, getting ultra-processed food out of the school lunch program is gonna require regulations, uh, and they're deregulating pesticides like crazy.

**[1:42:19] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, that's concerning.

**[1:42:21] Michael Pollan:** Very concerning. So, no, I I don't think it's, uh, an honest effort. I but I do think what RFK Jr. has done that is valuable is he surfaced this other constituency that we we were not aware of, and these are mothers, many of whom have kids with serious illnesses that they're trying to treat with a better diet. And I met them without knowing it. When I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma, I was hanging out on Joel Salatin's farm.

**[1:42:49] Michael Pollan:** He's a very progressive farmer in, um, in Virginia who has pioneered a kind of grass-based agriculture where he rotates different species over the same grasslands and and grows amazing food, um, eggs and meat, uh, especially. And he's in the middle of nowhere. He's like 45 minutes from the interstate, and these people would show up on Saturdays to pick up their pasture chickens and and and I was wondering, Who are these people and how do they know about him?

**[1:43:18] Michael Pollan:** And they were part of a whole network. And they were they were these Maha moms before they were called that, and, uh, they were members of something called the Weston Price Society, um, which is, uh, a a long story, but, uh, promotes grass-based, uh, animal protein, and, um, has been around since the '30s or so, um, and has a very big network that no one on the coast notices, but it's out there. And, uh, so and I would talk to these mothers, and they they, you know, they had their thing with seed oils and food is medicine, and, you know, th- they were not aligned with science always, but they were passionate about clean food and, um, uh, and were

**[1:44:02] Michael Pollan:** willing to drive 100 miles to get it there. So, Kennedy surfaced these people, and now they're engaged politically. And if the food movement can make common cause with them, and we've seen some some early signs. There was a a bill in Congress that the administration was supporting that would have exempted, uh, pesticide makers from from lawsuits, all lawsuits. And, um, and it was in an appropriations bill, and, um, Shelley Pingree, who's a food movement leader and an organic farmer from Maine in Congress, she got together with Maha activists, and they got it stripped out of the bill, and they did it twice.

**[1:44:42] Michael Pollan:** Great. So that's what we need. That's the kind of politics, just like psychedelics, right and left together, you can get things done.

**[1:44:49] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, amen to that. I w- am forever stamped in my brain is, you know, Rick Perry, and I forget who it was on the Democratic side, like, literally holding hands. They're like, We're for heart medicine, and this was at a veterans, um, benefit, um, and it's interesting. Similarly to well, in in sort of parallel construction, as you said, with the whereas the food, uh, slow food and and, you know, movement, um, healthy food movement used to be considered elitist, and now it's not.

**[1:45:20] Andrew Huberman:** In the psychedelics thing, used to be, like, big Left. Sur hippies, very left-leaning, and what seems to have moved the most intense of all the psychedelics, ibogaine, looks like it's gonna cross the line as into a true, um, supported therapeutic by the FDA. It's not there yet, was the veterans community, which, of course, is right and left, but tends to lean right, if we're honest, and that's pretty remarkable.

**[1:45:44] Michael Pollan:** Yeah, it is. So, you know, It is, a and, eh, something I would not have foreseen.

**[1:45:48] Andrew Huberman:** no, no. And and it's really to the credit, I think, of of the veterans like, um, Marcus Luttrell and and, um, Marcus Capone, and but also Rick, you know, I'll say, like, I, you know, um, Rick Perry, but also Rick Perry

**[1:46:02] Michael Pollan:** I would add Rick Dobbin.

**[1:46:03] Andrew Huberman:** and Rick Doblin, the Ricks The Ricks. The we'll refer

**[1:46:06] Michael Pollan:** Two Ricks.

**[1:46:06] Andrew Huberman:** to the Ricks, 2 very different characters.

**[1:46:08] Michael Pollan:** I'll say.

**[1:46:08] Andrew Huberman:** Actually, here's a funny one about Rick Doblin, uh, that at this event, he got up there and he he said, uh, it was room full of veterans, um, a lot of SEALs, a lot of special spec ops folks, and, um, and the first thing he said was that he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and the room just went silent, and then I looked around, and there were a lot of smiles. They appreciated his honesty,

**[1:46:31] Michael Pollan:** Honesty. Yeah.

**[1:46:32] Andrew Huberman:** and, uh, you know, and I I The guy is nothing adore I adore if not, uh, him, I adore him too, I adore him too.

**[1:46:37] Michael Pollan:** but he but he very deliberately reached out to the right years ago. I remember he took a a contribution from Rebecca Mercer, who was a big Trump 1 supporter, and and people gave him a lot of grief in in his organization, and, uh, you know, Why are you in bed with someone from the right? And he said, No, this is really important. This is how we're gonna get change. So I he's a visionary. And, uh, and he he reached out to the veterans groups, and, um, so he deserves some of the credit too.

**[1:47:06] Andrew Huberman:** Definitely. The Ricks. Excuse me, I for not crediting you, Doblin. Doblin has the worst diet ever. We're working on him. He has, like, croissants and orange juice for breakfast, and he has more energy than any human

**[1:47:17] Michael Pollan:** It's crazy.

**[1:47:17] Andrew Huberman:** being alive. Awake and cheerful and and clear of mind for 20 hours In a journalist's on

**[1:47:25] Michael Pollan:** dream, cause he never goes off the record, and he'll tell you exactly what he thinks.

**[1:47:29] Andrew Huberman:** I love it. Um, couple more questions about psychedelics, and then I wanna talk about the most important drug on the planet, um, which is caffeine, but when do you think MDMA and or psilocybin will get FDA approval, given what you understand? Cause it's kinda wild that ibogaine, the one psychedelic that no one's would even want to use recreationally, is gonna get there first. It's

**[1:47:50] Michael Pollan:** And hasn't been, by the way, subjected to university drug trials. That's kind of incredible.

**[1:47:56] Andrew Huberman:** It's incredible. So, what about MDMA and and psilocybin?

**[1:47:59] Michael Pollan:** They're closer. Um, so, the Resilient is the name of the company. It used to be Leycos. It was part of MAPS. They've put forward MDMA, uh, in the treatment of, uh, trauma, and they were turned down once, but they've resubmitted with some additional d data. It looks like they're fast-tracked. The same, um, executive order that, um, f- is fast-tracking ibogaine, is fast-tracking other psychedelics. It was apparently originally written for ibogaine, and somebody in the White House said, It's kinda crazy to just do this one.

**[1:48:32] Michael Pollan:** Um, there are these others that are closer to having the d data we need. And then psilocybin coming from, uh, Compass, uh, a company called Compass Pathways is also close. You know, I hear before the end of the year, but I I I it's hard to believe. You know, I've been hearing it's close for a long time. I think it really is close this time. The reason it's happening, we should be clear, is because, uh, Joe Rogan texted the president and said, This is really important.

**[1:49:04] Michael Pollan:** He had done a show on ibogaine. Uh, and, um, President Trump having lost the the the manosphere vote, or f- afraid of losing the manosphere vote, um, wanted to give Rogan something he cared about. And, um, you know, is this the way to do drug approvals in America? I have some questions about that. Um, I think I think Trump's doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but there we are. So, I think it will happen soon.

**[1:49:33] Michael Pollan:** It's gonna be, uh, an earthquake when it happens because they'll be approved as medicines and to be administered in a certain way with some regulations, but the message that the public will take, that the society will take, is that these things that we thought were dangerous drugs are medicines. People who haven't thought about psychedelics, we are in a small community of people thinking who've been thinking about psychedelics for the last ten years. Everyone's gonna be saying, Is this for me?

**[1:50:02] Michael Pollan:** Is this for my kid? Is this for my parents?

**[1:50:05] Andrew Huberman:** Yikes. Well, except for the Parents part. No, I'm Just k- I'm just kidding. I wouldn't mind doing psychedelics with my parents, but, uh, but I I hear you loud and clear. I mean, there are people who have pre- predisposition to psychosis or heart issues that, Yeah. And look Um, kids, What's happened I mean

**[1:50:19] Michael Pollan:** With cannabis. I mean, you know, we we thought cannabis was a very safe drug, but now that it is being used so widely, we're we're learning about addiction Psychosis. And and psychosis. And so you know, it's gonna be a I I think there's a lot of public education to be done, uh, to help people navigate this, and, you know, they're not for everybody, and there are people who definitely should stay away from psychedelics, and, uh, so it's gonna be a very interesting, uh, couple years after it's approved, um, and I hope it's done with some care, um, but but we'll see.

**[1:50:53] Michael Pollan:** I mean, there is enormous hope here, and and many people we can talk about the risks. There are real risks, but there are people whose lives will be saved by this. I mean, I have interviewed so many people who've had transformative experiences, um, that have, uh, you know, uh, cured their addictions, um, their depression, uh, their, uh, OCD, uh, um, obsessive-compulsive disorder. I mean, there is a lot of potential here, and the field of mental health needs new tools.

**[1:51:26] Michael Pollan:** The ones they have just don't work very well. If we do this right, we're gonna we're gonna, um, benefit an enormous number of people, but doing it right's not gonna be easy.

**[1:51:36] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah. No, you made all the critical points, and I also wanna extend my gratitude to you and Tim Ferriss, um, who've worked really, really Yeah, Tim's done Hard. Amazing

**[1:51:46] Michael Pollan:** Amazing work.

**[1:51:46] Andrew Huberman:** Work to get this to where it is, and hopefully across the line and done right. I I think I know you both care a lot about that, and there are others, but you guys have really stuck your neck out next out there early when it was when it was risky and have really continued to to put Remember how Their foot forward.

**[1:52:01] Michael Pollan:** Nervous I was when I published How to Change Your Mind. I was talking about my own psychedelic experience. I didn't know what would happen. I thought the police would be knocking at the door.

**[1:52:09] Andrew Huberman:** And they landed right, uh, the timing was right. Yeah, the timing It was at

**[1:52:13] Michael Pollan:** Was right.

**[1:52:13] Andrew Huberman:** A key where, like, really early, but not so early that the police would be at your Door, and, yeah, wild. I listen to cause as I recall, it's only an audio book, your book about, um, doing this absolutely stupid experiment. No, I'm kidding you. Uh, but it was so awesome. I I I love this book where you quit caffeine. And, um, I drink a lot of caffeine. From the first time I took a sip of mate, I was like, This completes me, you know, in some way, you know, the so the same way some people who drink alcohol feel, and I'm grateful it's caffeine and not alcohol.

**[1:52:48] Michael Pollan:** Much better drug.

**[1:52:48] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, I I think so. So, and 90% of the world's adults consume it every day, and and on and on, and, um, and I love it, and, uh, unless I've been sick, I I don't really know life without caffeine. What do You should You

**[1:53:02] Michael Pollan:** Try it, though.

**[1:53:03] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, so I was gonna say, what do you think an experiment like quitting caffeine for an extended period of time could do for somebody like me, or for somebody listening that would perhaps allow the caffeine to be even a better experience after? Is that what it's about, Or what did you discover about consciousness? What did you seriously, what did you discover about, um, your relationship to substances, or work, or focus, or anything? What what was revealed there?

**[1:53:28] Andrew Huberman:** I read the book, I listened to the book, and I highly recommend it. As I do all your And it is Books, but

**[1:53:32] Michael Pollan:** In a print book, too.

**[1:53:33] Andrew Huberman:** Oh, great.

**[1:53:33] Michael Pollan:** There's a great I I subsequently put it in a book called This Is Your Mind on Plants, and, um, uh, which came out a couple years ago, and it's one of three chapters in that book. So, caffeine is a really interesting drug. First of all, most of us don't think of it as a drug, um, but it is a drug to which most of us are addicted. And something like 90% yeah, use it on a daily basis, whether it's in the form of coffee, tea or or yerba mate or a couple other substances.

**[1:53:59] Michael Pollan:** I interviewed Roland Griffiths, um, when I started writing about caffeine because before he got involved, he's he's the was the, uh, psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins who did the initial work on psilocybin and really launched the psychedelic renaissance. And, um, but before he worked on psychedelics, he worked on caffeine. So I I wanted to talk to him about it. And during this interview, he said, you know, the only way you can really understand a drug that you're taking habitually is to get off it.

**[1:54:27] Michael Pollan:** You can't understand it until you you it's out of your system completely. So, he proposed that I go on this caffeine fast. I started really young, like 8 or 10. It was a way to be with my dad. He would get up really early in the morning, and he got home very late at night. And as I said, he's sort of absent a lot of the time, but the time I could really connect with him was at breakfast.

**[1:54:49] Michael Pollan:** I'd get my drag myself out of bed and have coffee with him. And, um, so my addiction started very early. It was very hard to get off. If you go cold turkey, people describe flu-like symptoms. I just felt off. I could not focus. I felt like I had ADHD. I didn't feel myself, which is odd. And I couldn't write at all. I mean, it was so wired into my writing process. It was just, Forget it, you know, that that idea of sitting at a desk.

**[1:55:17] Michael Pollan:** And it was just really hard to do, to to shake it. After a couple days, the symptoms started to subside, and I finally got to this point where I had no caffeine in my system, and I wasn't having tea either, and but even then, I didn't feel like myself. And I thought, why isn't that weird? You feel more yourself on a drug than not on the drug. I just felt like I was somebody else. It was hard.

**[1:55:45] Michael Pollan:** I did it for about three months. And all the while, I'm researching caffeine and learning about it, and learning, you know, it's it's not bad for you. You can overuse it. It has a lot of very positive health effects, up to 7 or 8 cups a day, and at that point, problems begin, and some people get jittery on a lot less than that. Um, but for most people, it is addictive, but aside from, you know, jitteriness, if you get it, the the negative effects are are are outweighed by positive effects.

**[1:56:18] Michael Pollan:** Helps people with Parkinson's, reduces blood pressure. I forget. I had a whole list of all the health benefits. Uh, there are a lot of and some of them are not tied to the caffeine, of course. There are also very valuable polyphenols in coffee and tea, which are a great boon to the microbiome. But the day I got back on caffeine, my first cup, it was it was just the best drug experience, better than any psychedelic experience I've had.

**[1:56:44] Michael Pollan:** It was so powerful. I was just flying. I had all this energy, and I came home and I cleaned my closet, which I I I never do. Uh, I I cleaned up the garden. I just was just I was a superman. It was just wonderful. And then I had another cup, and it was like, not a special and, uh, but I thought to myself, Is there a way to preserve that power? Because th- getting back on caffeine is very different than the daily experience of getting to baseline, which is essentially what you're doing with a addiction like that.

**[1:57:18] Michael Pollan:** So, I thought, Okay, I'm only gonna do caffeine 1 day a week, Saturdays. I'll have coffee. Nothing. N- none else. And it worked for a few weeks, and my Saturday coffee was wonderful. But then I had a big deadline on a Thursday, and I thought, you know, this will really get me over the hump if I have a cup, and slippery slope back to, you know, every day. But I appreciate it. I have no no bad faith about drinking coffee.

**[1:57:47] Michael Pollan:** I think it's God's gift to mankind in so many ways. Tea, too. I also I Drink green tea. I think we're very lucky to have it. It does have very positive cognitive benefits in terms of focus. I mean, people you know, they've done tests on students who preparing for a an exam, if they have a cup of coffee or tea or maybe it's done with pills cause they had a placebo control, probably with pills. The the ones who had caffeine perform better on the tests.

**[1:58:16] Michael Pollan:** It's, uh, a really great focus drug. It's cocaine without all the problems.

**[1:58:22] Andrew Huberman:** Love it. Well, and you live in a great city for great coffee.

**[1:58:25] Michael Pollan:** We have such good coffee. The original Pete's is just down the street And the cheeseboard, and yeah.

**[1:58:31] Andrew Huberman:** Well, I'm so grateful that you wrote the book and that you did the experiment. I I will seriously consider doing the

**[1:58:36] Michael Pollan:** Give it a try.

**[1:58:36] Andrew Huberman:** Experiment. Yeah.

**[1:58:36] Michael Pollan:** You learn a lot. And It's it's just about thinking about your relationship to drugs in general. I mean, they are part of our lives. It's a normal part of human life. W- our thinking about drugs has been really, uh, contaminated by the drug war. Drugs are not good or bad. I mean, they're it's all about context, and caffeine is a really great case study, and and i it'll you learn something about yourself getting off it and and then getting back on it.

**[1:59:02] Andrew Huberman:** Well, I'm excited the way you describe it and the the fact that you share the belief that it is God's gift to mankind is a is a reason enough. Michael, thank you so much for coming here today, sharing Oh, my Your knowledge and Pleasure. For writing all these books. I mean, you have humanized plants in a way that makes people healthier when they pay attention to and act on the information. Your care for humanity is is, uh, self-evident, and for animals and and plants, too.

**[1:59:30] Andrew Huberman:** The whole you strike me as somebody that really has, like, the whole picture, and

**[1:59:35] Michael Pollan:** I'm trying.

**[1:59:35] Andrew Huberman:** Yet, you're not just running around saying, One love and everyone should drop acid, thank goodness. I mean, you're obviously a super serious scholar of everything you, uh, put your, uh, your pen to, and and when you speak, uh, I learn, and people really learn. Um, I know you have a book that you're working on now about the microbiome. Maybe we have you back to talk about that if you're willing.

**[1:59:58] Michael Pollan:** Happy to when it comes out. Yeah. I Yeah. It's an audiobook. I It's another short, uh, audiobook, and it'll be out sometime next year.

**[2:00:03] Andrew Huberman:** Great. Well, I would love to have you back around that time

**[2:00:06] Michael Pollan:** Sounds good.

**[2:00:06] Andrew Huberman:** Because and I know I speak on behalf of, like, millions and millions of people. Thank you for doing what you do, Oh, you're And and, um,

**[2:00:13] Michael Pollan:** So generous.

**[2:00:13] Andrew Huberman:** I'm I'm so glad you dropped those watermelon seeds into the ground. Here we are.

**[2:00:17] Michael Pollan:** Me too. Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate

**[2:00:19] Andrew Huberman:** Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Michael Pollan to learn more about his work and to find links to his many excellent books, including his most recent book on consciousness, please see the show note caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific, zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple.

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