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Andrew Huberman interviews science writer Michael Pollan about his book A World Appears and the science and philosophy of consciousness. They explore how even plants and bacteria show sensience, how the ego and self can dissolve through psychedelics, meditation, and awe, and how consciousness may remain unexplained by brain matter alone. The conversation also covers psychedelic medicine's movement toward FDA approval and the food system's health problems.
- Pollan says we have no real understanding of how brain matter generates consciousness, and he keeps open the idea that the brain may channel rather than produce it, using the TV-receiver analogy.
- He distinguishes basic 'sensience' (responding to environmental change, which plants, bacteria, and barnacles show) from the fuller human consciousness with self-reflection and metacognition, citing Thomas Nagel's 'what is it like to be a bat?'.
- Plants can navigate mazes, respond to caterpillar sounds with defensive chemicals, and respond to the same anesthetics as animals, which Pollan treats as a loss of sensience.
- Pollan argues that feelings registered in the brain stem, per Damasio and Mark Solms, may be a more basic root of consciousness than cortical thought, and that this would extend consciousness to many more animals.
- Psychedelic and awe experiences can produce ego dissolution, which Pollan describes as a useful loosening of the defensive self, though he notes the ego still has a practical role.
- Pollan discusses caffeine: he quit it for months to study his dependence, then found his first coffee back to be a powerful experience.
- Pollan says he expects FDA approvals for psychedelics such as MDMA and psilocybin soon, with Ibogaine likely first, and he emphasizes that these should be administered with care.
- On food, he says American diets remain poor and calls for policy changes that make healthy food cheaper, noting current agricultural subsidies favor corn and soy.
Open question of consciousness
0:00I came out of this experience of studying consciousness and looking at all the theories of consciousness. I don't want to give it away but we have no 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
0:28receivers 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 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 you have to keep an open mind because our presumption that you know consciousness is an emergent property of brain complexity that idea doesn't have much traction.
0:53Welcome to the Hubberman Lab podcast where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. >> [music] >> I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Michael Pollen, author of landmark books including How to Change Your Mind, which is about psychedelics, The Botney of Desire, which is about how humans and plants co-evolved and collaborated to thrive.
1:21And 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. Michael Pollen 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.
1:40Today, 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.
2:02I should emphasize that the conversation is not as abstract as I'm making it sound. What I love about Michael Pollen 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 will be placed at the front edge of the conversation and the data on this thing that we call consciousness.
2:18You'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. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
2:35It 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 Pollen. Michael Pollen, welcome. [clears throat] >> Thank you.
2:52Good to be here. >> Longtime fan of your books, of you. I've had the privilege of 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.
3:11I feel like there's also some Wendel Berry woven in there. Big Wendleberry. >> Good. I didn't insult you. I didn't shout about that. >> We just lost him, too. >> Oh, is that right? >> He died like two weeks ago. >> Oh my goodness. I know. >> I'm a I'm like a huge Wendleberry fan. >> Really? Me, too. Oh my goodness.
3:28>> He taught me how to write and he taught me how to think about certain things. But I, you know, he had a huge influence on I was very fond of him. Did >> you ever meet him? >> Oh, yeah. We had I interviewed him on stage a few times. He interviewed me uh in Lexington, Kentucky, and um about one of my books.
3:45And 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 kind of 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 that you know the the the tobacco barns with the slots for drying.
4:15[snorts] So he he wanted me to see those uh when I when I came there. >> Amazing. Yeah, 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 Wendel Barry is this uh just magnificent poet who >> and farmer and essaist.
4:34Yeah. And he um you know 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 Thorough and John Mure and Emerson, is all about celebrating the the wilderness and being a spectator in nature.
5:06And of course, the gardener can't afford to do that. You have to act or you're not going to have anything to eat. I had a headful of thorough and Emerson from college and graduate school and I was kind of stymied about like what do I do about weeds? You know there you telling me weeds have just as much right to be in your garden as the bean plant which is crazy.
5:28But it was Wendell who who 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 for us to survive. And that's kind of who we are is um the species who remakes nature in various ways, but it has to be done u sort of more like a marriage than a domination.
5:53And 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. >> Amazing. I'm saddened to hear that he passed, but he certainly left behind. >> Well, it's a pretty good run. >> He had a very good run.
6:14>> We will put some links to his work for those that aren't familiar, and I encourage anyone listening 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 uh >> full stop. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, >> I'm with you. >> Let's talk about consciousness.
6:32>> As a neuroscientist, I was taught to avoid this >> issue. I hear it was the kiss of death at a certain point, right? >> Neuroscientists who had 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.
6:50But some people have died on the bed of nails that is the consciousness discussion. >> I almost did. [laughter] >> Clearly not. But uh yeah, but maybe you can tell us why 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.
7:10So 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 >> it's such a strange phenomenon because 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.
7:30Everything 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.
7:47And I would argue AIS don't have subjective experience, but we can talk about that later. Another popular, I don't know if it's a definition exactly, is Thomas Nagel, the uh the the philosopher in the 1970s wrote 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.
8:11So, 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. 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 going to have to face.
8:33That'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. So, I think humans have a very elaborated kind of consciousness compared to some other creatures.
8:57I make a distinction in the book between sensience and consciousness that some scientists make and I find really useful. Sensience being a more basic kind of ground floor of consciousness that uh includes awareness of your environment and a recognition of changes whether they're good or bad and that may be universal and that may be a property of life.
9:21Um, you can make a case that uh plants have sensience, that single-sellled creatures have sensience, 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 sensience.
9:42You know, we've added on all these things. And every creature has its own version of sensience based on their body type, their sensorium, their the scale of uh at which they live in in time and space cuz it's kind of to to to take our our our version of consciousness and make that the standard for everybody seems kind of crazy.
10:02This thing about being able to respond to the environment being some key component of consciousness. Um, a plant can respond to the environment. A barnacle >> can respond to the environment. >> Bacteria can. >> Bacteria can. They can light sense. It's they actually know the difference between morning and evening.
10:21>> And they have chemotaxis. They know between the difference between something that's good to eat and something that's toxic. >> Do you think they know they know? This is the piece that I feel like the the responding and the awareness that one is responding is maybe where in my mind I want to draw the line for some reason.
10:36like a plant will you know you know furlur 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 I feel like the the other stuff is just reflexive.
10:58Yeah, 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 this field of plant intelligence, which is fascinating.
11:22I mean, the things we're learning that plants can do that you would not have guessed. I mean, you can take a corn plant and [snorts] uh it can navigate a maze. 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.
11:43That's not 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.
12:05They can respond to the sound of water and they will and they're if they if they feel if they hear water running through a pipe, they will go down. They have like 20 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 nutrient levels are on a positive gradient or negative gradient.
12:30I mean, it's remarkable. One of the to me most curious things about plants is that they respond to the same anesthetics we do. 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 fly trap 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
13:03put in gas form and they will not respond to uh an insect crossing their threshold where normally they would clamp down. 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 sensience that that that that there's a loss of sensience that's happening when when they uh are
13:34anesthetized. But as you know, anesthetics are really weird. We don't even know how they work on us, right? I mean, xenon gas is inert gas and it puts you out. How does that work? >> This scare anyone going in for surgery. The anesthesia anesthesiologists have gotten much better. Yes, they know what they're doing.
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16:32Again, that's r o r a.com/huberman. Can we go at self versus other as maybe one potential window into this? I I don't want to make any assumptions, but when I think about the consciousness problem, I I think most people know that 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.
17:03So at the cellular level, you know, this is already set up. And in fact, I love your example of the the root growing towards the fertilizer 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.
17:25And if you do that >> even within the same species. >> Yeah. So, you know, and there are some exceptions to this, but it turns out to be 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.
17:40>> What we call cheotractants and chem repellants. And then if you think about that the the dendrites and axons that the branches of the neurons they often have these beautiful architectures. Those are set up by a simple rule of self- avoidance. Mhm. >> 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
18:02architectures depending on what other cells are doing that around you. That's how you get the all these different cell types and there's other features to it too. >> And I was shocked and excited to learn that that's kind of how tree roots do it too. >> Yes, I was going to say. >> So simple rules can build immense complexity.
18:18That 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. >> No tree, no neuron gets too much space, >> right?
18:38>> 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.
18:55>> So, this 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. It's just perhaps >> 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 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.
19:24ditto, you know, the plant that um 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 they know like, well, that's we're getting 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.
19:53how that gets you to consciousness. I mean self and others an important part of consciousness although and I talk about the self as kind of the most elaborate or advanced manifestation of consciousness. 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 it can give you an experience of consciousness without a self.
20:18I 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 as I realized this morning. >> Yes, >> 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.
20:44And um uh you know, Buddhists have known this for a long time, but it's it's it's a strange idea. 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 like a heavy psychonaut or anything, but >> there does seem to be this understanding there.
21:01And 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 bioprocted from the jungle. big pharma are isolated compounds synthesized, you know, um, as you know, uh, from jungle plants and other plants.
21:22So, 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.
21:41They're nourishing. What do you think about this sort of cross species communication? Do you think it's a a real thing having spent some time you spent a lot of time on about >> writing about plants in a garden? 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.
22:07I 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.
22:22So, >> I don't think it's entirely crazy. >> 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 described 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.
22:50That's good. Otherwise, it could get scary. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And I didn't know what to do with that. 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.
23:20Is it a useful thing? 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 sensience.
23:40We 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. and it's at the level of the this the evolution of the species. So um you know corn came to dominate the landscape in much of the world because it figured out what we wanted from it.
24:03And 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 if it produced this chemical called THC, it was going to get carried around the world and reproduced.
24:26And so I I I think we're in this symbiotic relationship with plants and that they they do manipulate us. 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 cesile 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.
24:58And they hit on some chemicals that happen to change our consciousness. 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.
25:21I mean, caffeine might kill insects, some insects. But somewhere along the line, they learned that it was better to just kind of with your mind than kill you outright. Because if they killed you outright, you would very quickly develop resistance, right? You'd select for resistant members of the species.
25:41>> [snorts] >> 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. And this is in a fenced garden. And Frank would follow me and look at me.
26:01And he needed to be reminded where the catnip was. 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 like that's a brilliant strategy on the part on the part of the um the plant to get your predator to forget where you are.
26:22>> 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. I wrote a book called Botney of Desire which really looked at how plants have mastered our desires as their as their evolutionary strategy.
26:44Desires for beauty in the case of flowers um desires for to change consciousness. Uh desires for food. So I have ultimate respect for their ingenuity. 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 want to make as much of you yourself as you possibly can?
27:09>> Yeah. >> 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 at least live long enough to proliferate and make sure that the young make it to >> and in retrospect it looks like you figured something out.
27:26But 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. Mhm. I mean, I think about dogs a lot cuz 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 [clears throat] eventually that led to the domestication and the expansion of all these different breeds
27:56of dogs. I mean, I think that's essentially the story. So, and they're not getting together and having a little, you know, backroom conversation like we've almost got them. 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.
28:12>> Yeah. And there are only 50,000 wolves left in this country. And how many dogs are there? It was a good strategy, >> right? Yeah. And and I feel like more people have dogs now than when I was growing up. >> Well, co led to a lot of people getting dogs. >> Yeah. So it's it's most people don't get dogs to to do work.
28:27They get dogs to be family members. And so they're really they're really figuring stuff out. They [clears throat] got us. >> They 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?
28:46Plants 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. Yeah. 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 or do they have any say in this?
29:08Like 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. >> Yeah. >> Humans are unique in this way. >> Oh, I think we are.
29:28I mean, I think we have a 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.
29:48Um, that's one of the things that's special about our consciousness. I mean, you know, well that our brains are doing a lot more than we're aware of, right? I mean, 24/7 they're monitoring our body, you know, reading these interosceptive signals and making adjustments and taking in things from the environment without our awareness.
30:07Um, 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 environment in which you can't program every move you have to make.
30:40There is a great evolutionary utility in being able to read the mind of another person and anticipate what they're going to do or say to predict. And um this is something that um you need theory of mind for or or imagination 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 and I don't think plants have that.
31:12But I do think that evolution um I really agree. Michael Leaven is a biologist at TUS uh who who works with you know creates little creatures you know organoids and um what he calls 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.
31:41I mean a lot of his project is actually deemphasizing genes and showing that that uh and deemphasizing neurons too. You know he he also shows that that [laughter] >> I accept all of biology. It just so happens I'm only trained to understand the the brain stuff. >> Well he's you know he's shown that um memory resides in not necessarily in in neurons there other other way.
32:03Yeah. >> Yeah. 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 uh skin cells from tadpoles and he puts it in a solution and they clump together and they form a new organism.
32:25It only lasts about a week or two. And that organism repurposes their psyia so they can have a means of locomotion and they can be conditioned and 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.
32:47It's funny, you don't hear about it nearly as much anymore. >> Yeah, you're right. And I think that there are things going on that are are um products of just an intelligent a being with enough tools and and cognitive ability to navigate an unfamiliar world. That's what it takes to survive in in evolution.
33:04When Caesar Milan, the dog whisperer, came on this podcast, he uh he said because he came from a very uh poor uh rural background, but he said, you know, people who grow 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.
33:24>> 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. I mean that's the bad stuff that drives the emergence. Also some really beautiful stuff like you said you kids grow up learning where safe harbor is in in people and they they can really sense people and animals very well in a way that in um more affluent societies we we have all these buffers you know um
33:54and and it struck me as like okay that's 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 there's stuff that switches like if we activate it people go into a age. No one likes to think about this, but yes, for them to this would happen.
34:08But then there's all the other stuff that's make, you know, where we can control our impulses and um think about past, present, and future and build technologies and it's a quotequote evolved stuff. It's just, you know, higher order what whatever the language never quite works, you know, um always makes it sound hierarchical cuz I would die in the environment that uh Cesar was describing, right?
34:28Um 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 [clears throat] 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 that lets us strategy set, understand context, integrate, imagine.
34:56Great. But I worry that it's that we have enough of it that we perhaps have tricked ourselves into over 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 Sonnenberg, my colleague who you know at Stanford working on the microbiome scared >> I want to say the out of me but then pun no pun intended >> when he said you know these microbiota that live in all of us and create these
35:31critical chemicals for brain health and it 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 romantic partner or if we um you know exchange a bill or a credit card swipe or something at with microbiome is proliferating and moving and I get really worked up lately in my own head
36:01about 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 and 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 we are losing out uh and suffering or feeling great while we do this but I just worry that perhaps
36:36Sonnenberg's theory is right which is we're literally just 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.
36:58So, 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. We think it's so important and it is, >> but whatever we're diluting ourselves, it's all just about >> getting the these microbiota getting us to get them where they want to go.
37:25>> 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 want to go there.
37:50I 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. But it but we should realize I mean that's the subtitle of botney 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 [laughter] of these bacteria and that yes they want us to shake hands.
38:17They want us to do all sorts of things because that 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. So, it is kind of creepy in a way, but it's also kind of 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.
38:44I mean we are we are a super organism 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 Justin's done really good work on this u we have outsourced the making of all sorts of metabolites bacterial metabolites, chemicals we need.
39:16Um, glutamate, GABA, 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.
39:41So, we're manipulating them at the same time they're manipulating us. I think it's a two-way street. >> Okay, that's a fair touch. >> Hope that helps you sleep. >> Yeah. Well, yes. I maybe if we don't make it to Mars, it will be because it will be because >> they don't want to go. >> They get they get up there and they make people very sick and they die and they and it So, in that sense, um maybe it better or worse for everyone.
40:02Who knows? I I don't have any theories about how this should all go. >> See, space food is very bad for bacteria, right? It's it's incredibly sanitary. It's it talk about ultrarocessed food. This, you know, the kind of stuff they bring on on intergalactic travel is going to be really bad for the bacteria.
40:19>> Yeah. So, if we don't make it, it's bacteria know that they don't want to make it there. Not good for them. >> They know it's they know Mars is a shitty habitat. >> Exactly. I'm only half kidding about this one and I'm going to try and steer off it so that I don't, you know, spiral into the the concern about it because it's not really a concern.
40:36I 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 Wendelberry, >> you know him better than I do, but we both have feelings associated with memories.
40:55I I can go as deep into this as as I'll allow myself to. Like I like the feeling of the paper like is different for a Wendel 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 and so on. And >> we don't know that other species do that, right?
41:14Um I like to think dogs and cats and apes do that. >> Elephants perhaps. >> Yeah. Um we know self versus other. Yeah, I mean I I try and break it down to that because I saw this um one of these beautiful 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 if you know mice have them, we have them, they have them and
41:42these two male lions are basically trying to kill each other. 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.
42:06It'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 when one is under threat, all of a sudden the contingency changes. Yeah. >> So they have enough prefrontal cortex to take the same circuitry.
42:21It's still aggression and now directed in a new >> but they redefine the us, right? The the eye is now plural. >> Yeah. So it's dynamic. And the reason I'm asking this, I'd love your thoughts on this, >> but I'm seing a question about collective consciousness. And and so this us 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.
42:48Maybe I'm too simplistic about it. 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 because remember we didn't think anybody else was conscious for hundreds of years, right?
43:13Since Decart, we had a monopoly on consciousness. 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 that's a fairly recent that's 50 years ago 55 years ago. >> It was assumed that consciousness was a cortical phenomenon.
43:37There is another line of research though that I've been that I was persuaded by um starting with Antonio Damasio in the '9s and going through Mark SS more recently uh he's a South African psychiatrist and neuroscientist who's a kind of protege of Damasios 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
44:10there 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 we often think the body you because we love the brain. You know, 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.
44:41So 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 that changes things in in many ways. If indeed this is true and feelings have to be felt, right? I mean, a feeling implies consciousness.
45:04It doesn't solve the hard problem or anything. I think feelings have a different status than thoughts do. I think they're sematic. 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.
45:24Not everybody, but a whole lot of species have brain stems, whereas cortex is kind of more exclusive club >> 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 inco.
45:44They'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. But pain, for example, is a conscious phenomenon that doesn't require a cortex.
46:05Their evidence for this is people who have no cortex, right? U 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.
46:26So 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 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.
46:43He he'll he 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. >> It's hard to wrap my head around that answer. >> Spontaneous is doing a lot of work there. >> Yeah. Yeah. No discredit to him. He's done amazing work.
47:03Yeah. No, no, I'm not saying you are, but just I think >> he's directed the whole field to the importance of feelings and and that's produced really important work and and emotion science and and things like that. Yeah. You know, he's a real pioneer. >> I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.
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47:56So, it's great to see all three of them now in the new AG1 Pro. As you may know, I've been taking AG1 every single day for about 14 years now. That means I discovered it and started taking it daily long before I even knew what a podcast was. I continued to take it and back it here on the podcast because it is an excellent formula and it's now even better with the AG1 Pro formula.
48:16For a limited time, you can get an extra 20% off your first subscription to AG1 Pro by going to drinkag1.com/huberman and using the code backtoine. So that's with the numeral 2 back numeral 2 routine. Just go to drinkag1.com/huberman. I feel like the one of the challenges of being human is that people experience the world differently enough.
48:40It seems uh right at the level of emotions. Let's just use that as an example. Some people I've actually seen this in comments on Instagram, so it has to be true, right? Um, no, but somebody once said [snorts] in in a comments and it really stuck with me, you know, that they think in feels. And I thought, this sounds like a bunch of woo stuff.
48:58But I thought maybe some people really do experience things more sematically. 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.
49:18I think that she told me that the that in Japan there's a specific word for the type of sadness that you experience when you got a bad haircut. [laughter] >> I love it. >> 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.
49:40So nuance is is very important but that's coming top down through language >> and that's how culture interacts with biology right I mean you know there 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 and the parent has to teach them you know you you need to eat.
50:04Yeah. And we see 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. >> 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.
50:19But we can't really look to the nerve networks and say, okay, the brain is sophisticated and the and the neural intervation to and from the body is um not sophisticated. I mean, it's as precise and as the other. So the problem seems to be that we don't have language for it. So like if I'm feeling wholeheartedly full of joy, that's an easy one.
50:43If I'm feeling happy, I mean I can I can change my language, my expression, etc. 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 how is it that the body is communicating with the brain in ways that get us away from language labels because language labels are we created those.
51:08>> Yeah. >> Right. This is very important. I think like we made that up. Grunts um you know uh exhales around putrid smells and inhales around pleasant smells. That's that's the those are the core components of of 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.
51:26Uh Eddie Chang, chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, >> who studies speech and language is my childhood friend. He said, you know, he said it like like Eddie, you know, he's very calm, you know, he's a neurosurgeon. He said, you know, all speech is just shaped exhales. And I was like, oh my goodness, amazing.
51:42When you just think it's so wild, but then we come up with many shaped >> what we what we've done with it. >> 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.
52:01>> Yeah, I think you're right. >> Like and pain is one example. Pleasure is another. But at the extremes it's easy. But in 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 body isn't in pain, but it's I'm not in rapture either.
52:20>> But your you know, your vag nerve, which connects the visceral organs to your to your brain, is um sending this stream of information. I think 80% of the traffic is going from body to brain, not the other way around. >> Point the neuroscientist. I teach neuro anatomy. You're you're right. It's 80.
52:36So incredible. Yeah, the descending projection is about 15 20. Nobody knows for sure. So you're bang on. So and most people when they talk about the neuroscience, they get some things right. You're bang on. So I just want to be clear to you like you're exact on every neuroscience point you've made. You're exactly right.
52:50>> Thank you. That means a lot coming from you. Um 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
53:26>> c can we talk about the time scale 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 time scale 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 10 hours for you and So how how your brain is operating right now reflects that.
53:59Like when we when I think of brain um body communication, I immediately want to default to like the now. What's my body feeling now? How does it impact my brain? But maybe the signals >> are of long time scales. 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.
54:22Like we don't know any of this. >> No, I know. And I it excites me as you you can probably tell because I feel like there in lie the answers to like being able to parse this experience of life consciousness thing. >> I'm really struck by the fact that you know we we we locate our seed of feeling and emotion in our heads most of us most of the time.
54:42But if you go back in history, they talked as much about the spleen and they 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. They had two groups of people.
55:03One they gave they each were given a pill, one got a placebo, one got ginger, powdered ginger. They then uh exposed people to um really morally repellent scenarios in writing about incest and and um uh just really disgusting um uh scenarios, eating one's dog, things like that. >> And um the people who had taken the ginger were less judgmental because their stomachs were calmed.
55:39Ginger 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. 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.
56:06And that the more I learn about this, the the whole idea of separating mind and body, you know, brain and body is is taking us down the wrong way. That that these things are inextricably bound up in ways that are just too complex for us to get. I mean, that's an obvious, you know, that's a pretty obvious case because disgust is both a moral and a physical um sensation or feeling, but I bet it applies to other things as well.
56:35It's a disgusting but uh yeah, pun intended but um elegant example of how this can work. >> Well, it's kind of brilliant as you know someone thinking up an experiment. I was like, "Oh, what a good idea." >> Yeah, good experiment. I like experiments that bridge this kind of higher order like like moral disgust, you know, is a cortical thing we assume.
56:54Although >> it clearly involves um you know, other circuitries. It makes sense. Ginger calms calms the gut. too. Um, and I know if I have some minor pain like a like a back strain or something, I'm much less patient. >> Yeah. >> 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.
57:17It's easier to allocate resources to what's out there. Maybe that takes us a little bit to psychedelics um, and collective consciousness. You know, one of the things that I'm um excited by uh is that I'm old enough now to have 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 read read some books and getting to know
57:49folks across these generations and a lot of themes repeat themselves. 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 conduit for for understanding. So for instance, the words collective consciousness years ago were about like one love.
58:11>> Yeah. >> 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, breath work is too broad a term and um any I don't like anything that's so that lumps so much that you lose critical um critical information.
58:37So if I say collective consciousness, I want to be clear. I'm not talking about one love. Although that's a great goal. Wicked peace on earth would be nice. I don't I don't know that I'm going to see it in my lifetime. I'm >> getting frustrated. Probably not, but I'll hold out hope. >> We're going the wrong way.
58:53>> 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 >> so, how do you define collective consciousness? >> 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 miism.
59:16>> Yeah. in day-to-day interactions so that everybody wins. It's this notion of everybody wins, >> right? >> And then I kind of 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
59:47then they can take care of others. 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-interest and I have self-interest. And that's where I feel like if there's if there's hope, it's about acknowledge.
1:00:05Like we can't 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? But it's not going to solve the problem. So, I'm throwing out a huge can of worms here, but how do you think about this collective consciousness thing?
1:00:20How 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. >> Yeah. So that's been the dream of psychedelics for a long time.
1:00:42Um that they would diminish the ego um and uh contribute to sort of pro-social feeling, a a sense of connection. um we're more alike than we're different. [snorts] You know, it doesn't always work. Um we have cases of ego dissolution and we have cases of ego inflation >> with with psychedelics. >> With psychedelics, some people >> Can you talk more about that?
1:01:10Yeah. >> Yeah. So, a very common uh phenomenon on on highdose psychedelics is the sense of 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 in two of my books um of highdose psilocybin. I suddenly saw myself um explode into this cloud of blue post-it notes that then fluttered to the ground and coalesed in this pool of blue paint.
1:01:42Beautiful. 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 equinimity. And when that happens and the ego is laid aside, there's no walls.
1:02:05The ego is a defensive structure. Um the self is a defense, right? It's it's as we were talking about us and them or me and me and them. 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.
1:02:33And 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. 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.
1:02:54Obviously 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 one voice, and there are other voices I can listen to.
1:03:17And 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.
1:03:40Um Derk Kelner who's a colleague of mine at at Berkeley does did this really he studies all 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 a third of the size um because their sense of self
1:04:08had been diminished in a very positive way. 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 asssurance and um and we worship self. But we also find that some of our happiest experiences are when we escape self, right?
1:04:32I mean it happens in sex. It happens experiences of awe, religious experience. It happens to people in church and synagogue all the time. 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.
1:04:54You wouldn't spend six years writing a book if you didn't know you were going to be the same person at the end of the six years and it would benefit you to have finished it. 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.
1:05:12There'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 want to give it away but we have no idea about consciousness really how it's how how brain matter generates consciousness if indeed that's how it happens.
1:05:36And 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. You wouldn't you wouldn't look in the TV set for the woman who gave you the weather report.
1:05:56You 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 pansychism too. The idea that the particles in this table have some ity little bit of consciousness that somehow gets combined in conscious beings like us.
1:06:18You have to keep an open mind because our presumption that you know consciousness is an emergent property of 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 Kristoff Ko, 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 and uh and he was head
1:06:53of Allen Brain Institute for many years. He had a experience on Iawaska 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. That's extraordinary for somebody of his experience to have come to that conclusion.
1:07:14And 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 much more than I once did. I'm going to summarize something you said to make sure I I got it right, which is that you had a psychedelic experience.
1:07:32Many 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. No, >> 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.
1:07:59They can't go back to their prior self. So it allows it's a portal that you can go back into consciously. It's an awareness. Do I have that right? Okay. >> Yeah, that'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 [clears throat] there when I need it.
1:08:14>> And then 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 it's simply just for clarity uh sake
1:08:44certain wavelengths of light certain sound waves that we can detect mechanical touch chemical sensing combin bind to our experience. We're abstracting our visual image of each other sitting across this table. There's no >> and it's limited by our senses. >> That's right. I can only bring in what I can bring in.
1:08:59A 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 Pollen 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 whatever gut whatever and we create this consciousness experience.
1:09:28But 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 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.
1:09:57I don't experience you as a bunch of photons. I experience you as a human. Right? >> So I'm either putting it together inside or it's put together outside and gets um and gets recapitulated. >> These are called filter theories of consciousness and the implication of them. uh Henri Bericson the French philosopher was a exponent of this and Aldis Huxley um uh believed this and talked about it in doors of perception that he had h had some access to this field and and and for him it was
1:10:30psychedelics. It was a masculine experience that convinced him of this and the idea was that there's more consciousness out there than we can handle >> and that [clears throat] um there is a filter 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.
1:10:51God, that's brilliant because if we took in all the >> we would be overwhelmed >> 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. >> No, our senses are limiting. Uh they're not they're not as expansive as they might be.
1:11:09And and your example, the bees are right. There's all these spectrums of light we can't see. It's also worth remembering that it's 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.
1:11:26I mean that's pretty heady stuff right there. 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? >> There's like the sensitium thing. Yes, >> it's like a thin sheet that runs through the body that acupuncturists seem to have known about for a very long time.
1:11:47Um, acupuncture is getting tremendous validation from the rigorous science now. >> Yeah, the acupuncturists are all like, "Yeah, we were telling you about this." >> Yeah, certain sites can increase or decrease inflammation. Uh, Chufuma's lab at Harvard Med is doing beautiful work on this. >> It's fascinating.
1:12:02So, so we shouldn't limit ourselves. I mean it 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 Allison Gobnik who's another colleague in psychology at Berkeley and you know she was saying well you know [snorts] the hard problem we may decide that consciousness is not one thing and maybe that's our mistake and we did that with the vital exp that was going to the one thing that was going to explain life and
1:12:32flowist I forget what that was going to explain but energy or fire or something like that. 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.
1:12:59I mean, I've thought about this with regard to AI. As we get these AIs, these chat bots that seem more and more uh to have a sense of self, say, you know, we call them agents because they act on their own interest. And so maybe it's possible to have an ego without being conscious because I don't think they're conscious.
1:13:20I don't know. We may be taking apart this idea at some point and maybe that'll help us to understand it. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives you insights into your heart health, your hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more.
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1:14:53To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code hubberman 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 aren't able to solve. And some people might say, well, that's just very, you know, pro AI.
1:15:17But I mean, humans have been putting their heads together around these sets of problems for a long while. I do think we're at a new vista now. >> No, 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 and some companies who are trying to make it conscious not just intelligent and those are not the same things.
1:15:37If they fail or succeed they're going to 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. Are computers going to have feelings? I don't think so.
1:15:58And 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 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.
1:16:28And I mean, you know, enough neuroscience to 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.
1:16:51There's a wonderful quote from Norbert Weiner who said that the um the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance. And I think this metaphor of the brain is computer is is we're not being vigilant about that metaphor at all. I don't think I think it falls apart if you push on it. I also think computers are clearly not brains even in the most modern iterations of AI for the simple reason at least one simple reason which is our brains create memories in one or two structures but then they export them
1:17:21to a bunch of other areas and computers have a memory center distributed memory is you know doesn't exist in most computers now >> but also that memory makes a physical change in the brain right I mean you're And your brain's different than mine cuz it was pruned very differently because of life experiences.
1:17:40So if you had a computer where the hardware was being constantly changed, it would be useless. >> Yeah. There are these um issues in neuroscience that never really get resolved. One of the things that perplexing to me, maybe you have some insight on this, is there were two labs, Suma Tonagawa's lab at MIT, he's got a Nobel and Mark Mayfford's lab at Scripps.
1:17:58essentially 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 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 you found that if you played them in the exact same sequence you got the same
1:18:22behavior. >> 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.
1:18:37I 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. 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 or then I bang on all of them and you still get the song."
1:18:54>> 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 resources and redundancy but we can't we we just I don't want to say we don't understand the brain there so much beautiful work has been done over the last you know 50 hundred years
1:19:19incredible 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 >> 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. >> Tell me more about that.
1:19:40>> This is not my area of expertise. So anything you say will be new. >> Me neither. Okay. This is total amateur. I heard a talk by Mo 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.
1:19:57Sim it's simultaneity. will be 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. Um you know that two particles separated by light years can nevertheless affect one another.
1:20:23And so non-locality is and realism, they're gone. And in biology, we just go along as if they're still here because we can't deal with it. Quantum effects 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 in a warm wet environment like a brain.
1:20:53You know, quantum computers have to be chilled to like nearly abs absolute zero. 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. >> That's as far as I can go. You know everything I know about it now.
1:21:17>> 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
1:21:45more >> benevolent way. 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. Maybe that's intentional, but I just want to know when you were younger, were you were you sort of intrigued by or drawn to flora and fauna?
1:22:03Were 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 going to sound uh like a scientist said it, but a very interdigitated way of thinking about us them. like you understand the difference between a human and a plant and a and an animal, which is great, but you also find these incredible points of connectivity that are really geared towards self-standing and therefore helping the relationship.
1:22:34So, can you trace that back to like something in particular or is that just your or is this just downloaded into you? No, I so I started gardening at a very young age uh accidentally. I had an experience when I was four or five. 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.
1:23:02And 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. 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.
1:23:19It 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 had to show my mom this this uh thing that I'd grown.
1:23:43I 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 eight next to the house. I called it a farm. Whenever I could grow three or four strawberries, I'd put them in a Dixie cup and sell them to my mom.
1:24:01So, it was a going concern. So, gardening was a really big part of it. And and you know, that puts you in relation to nature, an active relationship to nature. 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.
1:24:26Uh, 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 interest, they're going to 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.
1:24:46And um I realized what was going on in the garden is no different than what goes on on the farm. 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. Americans generally go to the wilderness to think about nature or the desert or the forest.
1:25:03And I actually think the garden at this point is a a more valuable laboratory because we've saved all the land we're going to 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. Although actually Trump's trying to open the lock again, >> trying to sell some of it.
1:25:23>> Yeah. in Utah. >> I will say just as a quick note if that 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.
1:25:45Um because they were promised something and it was taken away. And I the they're now truly outside the box of any political party. They will die before they let go of this land. >> Yeah. >> And but it is really scary. It is truly scary. Um some of our fishermen also and you know >> and so on and um we still need to to extol the virtues of wilderness.
1:26:05It'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 because he was a hunter. But we need to know how to behave in nature at this point right? I mean in the 94 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 I mean we have this this very strong binary and um and once we've decided
1:26:39that 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>> You also strike me as somebody who you think about these very high level problems. 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.
1:27:25They're not like feet on the ground like so did do you have like practical people in your lineage? Were you were you taught like cuz gardening also is has a practical aspect. You can't just wish the plants to grow. You can't just dance around them and play them sound bowls. I'm not I think listen I think sound bowl therapy we'll probably discover has some very important effects on the nervous system.
1:27:45So, 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.
1:28:02So, where does that come from? >> 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 >> about dilemma 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 >> 2006 >> okay so yeah short it was after college but that book was everywhere >> and the mantra from that book right you know food not too much mostly plants right
1:28:36>> 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 Schlloer's Fast Food Nation and Marian Nestle wrote a book called Food Politics that was very influential. >> 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.
1:28:56>> Yeah. >> 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 Robins family. What was that book? I forget the title. something about sugar, >> but it was about I mean you read it and you're just like the atrocities of the of the meat industry.
1:29:09So So they're hard books to form a relationship to because it's like a they're it's a bad rel it's a great they're great books but about bad relationships. >> Good point. >> Whereas your book it was about the the love of these things and so it was like this benevolence. >> Well, I've always felt if there's any way to put hope in a story, you need to put hope in a story because we need hope.
1:29:32we it's our it's our air, you know. And I remember I wrote a a a piece for the New York Times that 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 insemination to slaughter. And it's a pretty dark story about how we produce beef in this country.
1:29:52And 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.
1:30:21And then you need the pharmaceuticals because the corn makes the animal sick. And it's just 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 two food chains, an oil-based food chain and a sunlight based food chain.
1:30:43And you know, my editors were like, "Hey, this piece is already 8,000 words. You've got four paragraphs about grass-fed beef, which no one knows anything about and doesn't know where to get. You know, we got to cut that." And I said, "No, we have to leave that. That just shows the hope that we can grow our food using sunlight, not oil."
1:30:58And 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 kind of curious. I I wonder if they have grass-fed beef. And so I asked the butcher, "Do you have grass-fed beef?"
1:31:19And he goes, "What is going on? you're the sixth person this week who asked me for grass-fed 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.
1:31:39>> And I'm an optimistic person finally. >> You said finally [laughter] not not your entire life. >> No, no, I I think I have been. I I think I'm optimistic. I also think that I'm the oldest of four 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.
1:32:01Uh helping my mother with, you know, the household and things cuz my dad was kind of 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. 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 important what I would call the important movements of the last 50 60
1:32:34years of and I think psychedelics is one of them and but when I say that I want to be clear I'm talking about neuroplasticity to make people feel and be better versions of themselves may not come from psychedelics or even therapy or or the sematics or breath work 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.
1:33:06They 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 Su, you know, that kind of thing, but that people couldn't be so practical and and removed from thinking about new possibilities, new ways of humans being that they like dismissed it.
1:33:28And I feel like we're we are at an important repetition point where if we're going to break through, I feel like those two 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 like in your relationship to these things. So the practical side and the it you know the the clearly deep relationship to to plants in the world.
1:33:52>> I mean I do finally want to push the world in one direction and not in another. I mean and I you know I I mean you know that's considered advocacy in journalism and I I 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, but 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
1:34:23way. Not that you know we had such success. I mean I'm 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.
1:34:41They'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, but we're still eating a terrible diet for the most part in this country. And um we still have a agriculture that is all about growing corn and soy which are the building blocks of ultrarocessed food which is making us sick and killing us.
1:35:03Um 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 that you know holdovers from the 60s. Yeah. The drug war and things like that. >> He didn't like drugs. Now, now the the the red side is all about Ibeain for veterans.
1:35:24>> It's the most amazing transformation. >> Rick 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 used those those words publicly, so I'm happy to repeat it.
1:35:42He 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. >> And this is the only way in in our current political moment anything gets done is is you need you need support on the right as well as the left.
1:36:04And 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 ultrarocessed food getting it out of the schools. You know used to hear the food movement was elitist.
1:36:22You don't hear that anymore and that's because you have people on the right who are supporting want to push the world in the same direction. >> That's a really good we have some hope. There's some hope there. >> Yeah. No, that's a gosh we've got to really break down the divisions to move healthy eating forward.
1:36:36I was just going to um end psychedelics in the in the safest way. I I was struck when I would started to look at the like the new food pyramid stuff. I realized that um the American foods have never been healthy. Like if people talk about how they eat in Europe and my dad's from Argentina and how they eat the grass-fed beef was that was all they had, right?
1:36:56You know, 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, mac and cheese, French fries, like cotton candy.
1:37:13These are the most American apple as American as apple pie, right? We don't we don't right. So the so the 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.
1:37:46>> No, they don't. And you know America's not never had a s a real food tradition till the till fast food is our 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 kind of stomped out of them. I think part of the problem is since we didn't have this deep these deep roots and this food tradition we were much more vulnerable to marketing and then say the you know the French are
1:38:14the Italians are um and they had they had something to resist um what the marketplace wanted to do with food which is of course to process it you know 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 borrow I mean look, we talk about the Mediterranean diet, right?
1:38:35It's 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. >> So it doesn't have to be ours. I suppose you know we could borrow it from somewhere else. Um but it's very hard to change people's eating habits. um and one of the hardest things and habit in general, right?
1:38:57So I, you know, I don't I don't see it as easy and in general the fact that you now 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. 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.
1:39:22I mean, we subsidize corn, which gives us high fructose corn syrup, which gives us diabetes. >> So, we're we're we're s 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. >> It is insane. and it's costing us a fortune.
1:39:42So, we have to change the policy and make healthy food cheaper relative to unhealthy food. >> I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Matina. Matina makes my absolute favorite zero sugar cold brew yerba mate. In fact, I helped create the newest flavors. Listeners of this podcast know that yerba mate is my preferred caffeine source and has been for a long time.
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1:41:15Is the current administration with the emphasis uh on healthy eating that they that they're out there with is are they >> they're not doing anything? >> They're not doing it. >> 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.
1:41:42They'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 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.
1:42:04So this administration is not going to regulate anything. Um and the changes we need in the food system, getting ultrarocessed food out of the school lunch program is going to require regulations. uh and they're deregulating pesticides like crazy. >> Yeah, that's concerning. >> Very concerning. So, no, I I don't think it's uh an honest effort.
1:42:23I but I do think what RFK Jr. has done that is valuable is he's 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. [snorts] And I met them without knowing it when I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma.
1:42:46I was hanging out on Joel Salatin's farm. 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.
1:43:09And these people would show up on Saturdays to pick up their pastured chickens and and and I was wondering who are these people and how do they know about him? 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 Western Price Society um which is uh long story but um promotes grass-based uh animal protein and um has been around since the 30s or so.
1:43:40Um and has a very big network that no one on the coast notices, but it's out there. And uh 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 they were not aligned with science always but they were passionate about clean food and um uh and were willing to drive a 100 miles to get it then.
1:44:04>> Wow. 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.
1:44:28And um and it was in an appropriations bill. And um Shelley Pingri, 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. >> Right. >> So that's what we need. That's the kind of politics just like psychedelics right and left together.
1:44:46You can get things done. >> Yeah. Amen to that. I am forever stamped in my brain is, you know, Rick Perry and I forget who it was on the Democratic side like literally holding the hands of 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 with 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.
1:45:20in the psychedelics thing used to be like big sir hippies very left-leaning and what seems to have moved the most intense of all the psychedelics I gain looks like it's going to 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 >> yeah it is it is and something I would not have foreseen No, no.
1:45:47And and it's really to the credit, I think, of of the veterans like um Marcus Latrrell and and um Marcus Capone and but also Rick, you know. I'll say like I you know um >> Rick Perry also I would add Rick Din >> and Rick Dolin. The Ricks. >> The Ricks Ricks. >> The Ricks. Two very different characters.
1:46:08>> I'll say >> actually here's a funny one about Rick Davlin. Uh that at this event he got up there and he he said it was room full of veterans. um a lot of SEALs, a lot of spee spec ops folks and um and the first thing he said was that he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. [laughter] And the room just went silent and then I looked around and there were a lot of smiles.
1:46:30They appreciated his honesty. Honesty >> and you know I I adore him too. I adore him too. >> 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 one supporter and and people gave him a lot of grief in in his organization and 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 going to get change so I he's a visionary >> and uh and he reached out to the
1:47:02veterans groups and um so he deserves some of the credit too >> definitely the Ricks excuse me I for not crediting you dolin 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 being alive. Awake and cheerful and and clear of mind >> for 20 hours.
1:47:24>> And a journalist dream. He never goes off the record and he'll tell you exactly what he thinks. >> I love it. >> Um, couple more questions about psychedelics and then I want to talk about the most important drug on the planet um, which is caffeine. But when do you think MDMA andor psilocybin will get FDA approval given what you understand?
1:47:42Cuz it's kind of wild that Ibagane, the one psychedelic that no one's would even want to use recreationally, is going to get there first. It's >> and hasn't been, by the way, subjected to university drug trials, >> right? >> That's kind of incredible. >> It's incredible. >> Yeah. >> So, what about MDMA and psilocybin?
1:47:59>> They're closer. Um, so the resilient is the name of the company. It used to be LIOS. 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 data. It looks like they're fast-tracked. The same um executive order that um is fasttracking Ibeane is fasttracking other psychedelics.
1:48:25It was apparently originally written for Ibagane and somebody in the White House said it's kind of crazy to just do this one. Um there are these others that are closer to having the data we need. And then psilocybin coming from 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.
1:48:50You know, I've been hearing it's close for a long time. I think it really is close this time. Mhm. >> The reason it's happening, we should be clear, is because uh Joe Rogan texted the president and said, "This is really important." He had done a show on Ibagain uh and um President Trump having lost the the the manosphere vote or afraid of losing the manosphere vote um wanted to give Rogan something he cared about.
1:49:17And 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. It's going to 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.
1:49:43But 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 10 years. Everyone's going to be saying, "Is this for me?
1:50:01Is this for my kid? Is this for my parents?" >> Yikes. Well, except for the parents part. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. [laughter] >> 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.
1:50:18>> And look what's happened with cannabis. I mean, you know, 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 psychosis. And so, you know, it's going to be a I think there's a lot of public education to be done uh to help people navigate this.
1:50:35And, you know, they're not for everybody and there are people who definitely should stay away from psychedelics. And, uh, so it's going to be a very interesting couple years after it's approved. Um, and I hope it's done with some care. Um, but but we'll see. I mean, there is enormous hope here and and many people we can talk about the risk.
1:50:58They're 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 OCD um obsessivecompulsive disorder. I mean there is a lot of potential here and the field of mental health needs new tools.
1:51:25The ones they have just don't work very well. If we do this right, we're gonna we're gonna um benefit an [clears throat] enormous number of people. But doing it right is not gonna be easy. >> No. No. You made all the critical points. And I also want to extend my gratitude to you and Tim Ferrris um who've worked really really hard.
1:51:45>> Tim's done amazing work. >> Amazing 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 necks out there early when it was when it was risky and have really continued to to >> I remember how nervous I was when I published how to change your mind.
1:52:02I was talking about my own psychedelic experience. I didn't know what would happen. I thought the police would be knocking at the door. >> I mean, landed right. The timing was right. >> Yeah, the timing was right. >> You were like really early but not so early that >> the police would be at your door and Yeah.
1:52:19>> Wild. I listened to because as I recall it's only in audio book your book about um doing this absolutely stupid experiment. No, I'm kidding. of uh it was so awesome. 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 the same way some people who drink alcohol feel.
1:52:44And I'm grateful it's caffeine and not alcohol. >> Much better drug. >> 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 unless I've been sick, I I don't really know life without caffeine. What >> You should try it, though. >> Yeah.
1:53:03So, I was going to 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?
1:53:19What did you seriously what did you discover about um your relationship to substances or work or focus or anything? What what was revealed there? I read the book. I listened to the book and I highly recommend it as I do all your books >> and it is in a print book too. There's 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.
1:53:42So 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 herb mate or a couple other substances. I interviewed Roland Griffith u when I started writing about caffeine because before he got involved he's he's the was the psychopharmarmacologist at Johns Hopkins who did the initial work on psilocybin
1:54:12and 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 you can't understand it until you it's out of your system completely.
1:54:32So, 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.
1:54:47I'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-l 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.
1:55:09I mean, it was so wired into my writing process. It was just forget it. You know, that idea of sitting at a desk. And it was just really hard to do 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.
1:55:30And but even then I didn't feel like myself. And I thought, well, 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. 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.
1:55:53You can overuse it. It has a lot of very positive health effects up to seven or eight 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 then the negative effects are are are outweighed by positive effects.
1:56:16Helps people with Parkinson's reduces blood pressure. I forget I had a whole list of all the health benefits. There are a lot of and some of them are not tied to the caffeine. Of course, they're 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.
1:56:40Better than any psychedelic experience I've had. 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 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 as special.
1:57:02And uh but I thought to myself, is there a way to preserve that power? because 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. So I thought, okay, I'm only going to do caffeine one day a week.
1:57:21Saturdays, I'll have coffee, nothing 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 would really get me over the hump if I have a cup and slippery slope back to, you know, every day. But I appreciate it.
1:57:42I have no no bad faith about drinking coffee. I think it's God's gift to mankind in so many ways. Tea, too. I also 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 an exam.
1:58:00If they have a cup of coffee or tea, >> or maybe it's done with pills cuz they had a placebo control, probably with pills. The the ones who had caffeine perform better on the tests. It's uh a really great focus drug. It's cocaine without all the problems. >> Love it. Well, and you live in a great city for great coffee.
1:58:26>> We have such good coffee. the original pizza is just down the street and the cheese board and yeah. >> Well, I'm so grateful you wrote the book and that you did the experiment. I I will seriously consider doing the experiment. >> Give it a try. You learn a lot and it's it's just about thinking about your relationship to drugs in general.
1:58:40I mean, they are part of our lives. It's a normal part of human life. >> Our thinking about drugs has been really contaminated by the drug war. Drugs are not good or bad. I mean there it's all about context and caffeine is a really great case study and and it'll you learn something about yourself getting off it and and then getting back on it.
1:59:02>> Well, I'm excited. The way you describe it and that the fact that you share the belief that it is God's gift to mankind is uh is a reason enough. >> Michael, thank you so much for coming here today, sharing your knowledge and 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.
1:59:24Your care for humanity is is self-evident and for animals and and plants, too. The whole You strike me as somebody who really has like the whole picture. And yet, >> I'm trying. >> You're not just running around saying one love and everyone should drop acid. [laughter] Thank goodness. I mean, you're obviously a super serious scholar of everything.
1:59:42you uh put your uh your pen to and and when you speak 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. >> Happy to when it comes out. Yeah, it's an audio book. It's another short audio book and it'll be out sometime next year.
2:00:04>> Great. Well, I would love to have you back around that time. Sounds good. >> And I know I speak on behalf of like millions and millions of people. Thank you for doing what you do. And >> you're so generous. >> I'm so glad you dropped those watermelon seeds into the ground. [laughter] Here we are. >> Me, too.
2:00:18Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Michael Pollen. 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.
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