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

Key Takeaway

Run a personal “awe and ego” experiment today: spend 20 uninterrupted minutes in a garden, park, or other natural setting without headphones or a phone. Notice the organism-level details—light, texture, sound, growth, decay—and ask what needs or signals your body is carrying right now. Pollan’s practical point is not to erase the self, but to gain perspective on it: awe, nature, and reflective attention can loosen self-focus and support more connected, prosocial choices.

Episode Overview

Andrew Huberman speaks with author Michael Pollan about consciousness, plant intelligence, the body-brain relationship, psychedelics, food systems, and caffeine. Pollan argues that consciousness remains fundamentally mysterious, that sentience may be more widespread than traditionally assumed, and that experiences of awe or ego-dissolution can offer useful perspective without eliminating the need for a stable self. The conversation repeatedly returns to practical engagement with nature, healthier food policy, and examining one’s relationship with everyday drugs.

Full Transcript

Transcript of What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael Pollan from Huberman Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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 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, brains are like radio receivers or TV receivers. You wouldn't look in the TV set for the woman who gave you the weather report.

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. You have to keep an open mind because our presumption that consciousness is an emergent property of brain complexity, that idea doesn't have much traction. Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Michael Pollan, author of landmark books, including How to Change Your Mind, which is about psychedelics, The Botany of Desire, which is about how humans and plants co-evolved and collaborated to thrive, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is an incredible book about food and nutrition.

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

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

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan, welcome. Thank you, good to be here. Long time 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. I feel like there's also some Wendell Berry woven in there. Oh, big Wendell Berry fan. Good, I didn't insult you. I didn't shout out that. Not at all. We just lost him too. Oh, is that right? He died like two weeks ago. Oh my goodness. I know. I'm like a huge Wendell Berry fan. Really, me too. He taught me how to write and he taught me how to think about certain things. But I know he had a huge influence on me.

I was very fond of him. Did you ever meet him? Oh yeah, I interviewed him on stage a few times. He interviewed me in Lexington, Kentucky about one of my books. And I went to his house 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 barns were gorgeous.

The tobacco barns with the slots for drying. So he wanted me to see those 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 he was calling in because- He was. And for those who don't know, Wendell Berry is this just magnificent poet who- And farmer and essayist, yeah. And he, you know, actually when I was writing my first book, Second Nature, I was trying to figure out how to behave in the garden, which is a microcosm of how do we behave in nature, right?

In other words, I had pests, I had problems, I had fertility issues. And the American tradition of thinking about nature, which goes back to Thoreau and John Muir and Emerson, is all about celebrating the wilderness and being a spectator in nature. And of course, the gardener can't afford to do that. You have to act or you're not gonna have anything to eat. I had a head full of Thoreau and Emerson from college and graduate school. And I was kind of stymied about, like, what do I do about weeds?

You know, Thoreau's telling me weeds have just as much right to be in your garden as the bean plant, which is crazy. But it was Wendell would write these essays 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 for us to survive. And that's kind of who we are, is the species who remakes nature in various ways. But it has to be done sort of more like a marriage than a domination.

And so he just had a new way of thinking about how to relate to nature that really helped me and clarified my whole view of environmentalism. So yeah, he's a great hero. Amazing. Saddened to hear that he passed, but he certainly left behind amazing. He was 92. That's a pretty good run. Yeah, he had a very good run. 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 an incredible journey. And full stop. Yeah, I'm with you. Let's talk about consciousness. 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 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 stature. But some people have died on the bed of nails. That is the consciousness discussion. I almost did.

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

Everything else we know through consciousness, right? Everything else is an inference, but we have this thing that we know we have, but defining it is difficult. So there are some very simple definitions like subjective experience. That's pretty good. Your toaster doesn't have subjective experience. And 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 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. So even though we don't know exactly what it's like to be a bat, we can kind of imagine a creature that navigates the world through sonar, through sound waves instead of light photons. And so, okay, we can imagine that. So yes, bats are conscious by that definition. So is it like something to be a computer is a real question that I think we're going to have to face. That's kind of what I use as a definition.

There's a lot of bells and whistles 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. I make a distinction in the book between sentience and consciousness that some scientists make, and I find really useful. Sentience being a more basic kind of ground floor of consciousness that includes awareness of your environment and a recognition of changes, whether they're good or bad.

And that may be universal. I mean, that may be a property of life. You can make a case that plants have sentience, that single-celled creatures have sentience. And it may be something you need to survive in an environment that's constantly changing, that you can't program instinctually everything you need to know so that this would be very useful. And consciousness is how we do sentience. You know, we've added on all these things, and every creature has its own version of sentience based on their body type, their sensorium, the scale at which they live in time and space, because it's kind of to take our version of consciousness and make that the standard for everybody seems kind of crazy.

This thing about being able to respond to the environment being some key component of consciousness. A plant can respond to the environment. A barnacle can respond to the environment. A bacteria can. Bacteria can. They can light sense. It's, they actually know the difference between morning and evening. 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 that the responding and the awareness that one is responding is maybe where in my mind, I want to draw the line for some reason, like a plant will, you know, furl and unfurl 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 if I take a sip of this tea and it's too hot, I have some sense of what I'm going to do next and why, whereas I feel like the other stuff is just reflexive. Yeah, it's reflexive, but I don't think it's 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 something programmed in their genes.

I mean, I took a deep dive into this field of plant intelligence, which is fascinating. I 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 it can navigate a maze. You can give it a maze and put some fertilizer, some ammonium nitrate in one corner of it and the roots will find the fastest path to that ammonium nitrate. That's not a situation it really experiences in nature. 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 and send either toxins or bad-tasting chemicals to that leaf to defend themselves. They can respond to the sound of water and 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 can sense pH. They can sense whether nutrient levels are on a positive gradient or negative gradient. I 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? Aren't they already out? But actually, they're just slow. They have behaviors. They're just very slow. So you take a plant with a really fast behavior like a Venus flytrap and you put it in a bell jar and you put some anesthetic gas in, xenon gas or any number of, you know, anything you can put in gas form and they will not respond to 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 sentience, that there's a loss of sentience that's happening when they are anesthetized. 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? Does it scare anyone going in for surgery? The anesthesiologists have gotten much better. Yes, they know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. Eight Sleep just launched the Pod 6, which is their most advanced sleep system. The Pod 6 is half the size of their previous models. It's 20% faster with its cooling and heating and it has nine times as many sensors for tracking your sleep.

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Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $200. Today's episode is also brought to us by Rora. Rora makes what I believe are the best water filters on the market. It's an unfortunate reality, but tap water often contains contaminants that negatively impact our health. In fact, a 2020 study by the Environmental Working Group estimated that more than 200 million Americans are exposed to PFAS chemicals, also known as forever chemicals, through drinking of tap water. These forever chemicals are linked to serious health issues, such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems.

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In fact, I consider it a welcome addition to my kitchen. It looks great, and the water is delicious. If you'd like to try Rora, you can go to rora.com slash Huberman and get an exclusive discount. Again, that's Rora, R-O-R-R-A.com slash Huberman. Can we go at self versus other as maybe one potential window into this? I don't wanna make any assumptions, but when I think about the consciousness problem, I think most people know that they are them, and they know what's not them. And maybe a decent analogy is when nerve cells grow, they know the difference between them and other cells.

So at the cellular level, this is already set up. And in fact, I love your example of 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. And if you do that- Even within the same species. Yeah, so, 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, what we call chemoattractants and chemorepellants. And then if you think about 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. The branches know that they're of the same neuron, and they just keep growing, and they keep branching every time they get too close to one of their own. And then you end up with these beautiful architectures, depending on what other cells are doing that around you.

That's how you get 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 gonna say. So simple rules can build immense complexity. That's 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. And while this is all very cellular, and we're literally talking about the branches of cells, it's not thinking. I feel like when you get up to the whole organism, I know the difference between me and you, me and the microphone. These plants seem to know the difference between them and the fertilizer. So this 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 two plants that are related to one another to have some genetic connections, but are separate plants, they will share soil and grow together. But if they're not related, even if they're the same species, they will compete. Ditto the plant that 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, we're getting the light over there, so I don't have to go there. But yeah, I think the self and others is a key rule. And I completely agree that you can take a set of very simple rules and build a very complex creature from it. How that gets you to consciousness. I mean, self and 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, you know, I mean, meditators know this. Psychedelics can give you an experience of consciousness without a self. I think we have it every morning when we wake up. There's that 500 milliseconds, you know, when you're reconstituting, like, who am I? Where am I? Oh, you know, here I am. And it's 750 milliseconds if you're in a hotel room. I realized this morning. That's kind of weird that you can have, that there is a consciousness that is not organized around a self. And, you know, Buddhists have known this for a long time, but it's a strange idea.

Going back to the plants and their intelligence, you know, I've spent a little bit of time with people in the plant medicine community. Not a lot. I'm not a, you know, like a heavy psychonaut or anything, but there does seem to be this understanding there. And I 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 bio-prospected from the jungle.

Big Pharma are isolated compounds synthesized, you know, as you know, from jungle plants and other plants. So there's this notion that the plants actually can sense us and that they're communicating with us. I know this sounds really wacky, but we can certainly see them. We can smell them. They can have, you know, odor effects on us. Some are poisonous, some are delicious and wonderful for us. They're nourishing. What do you think about this sort of cross-species communication? Do you think it's a real thing? Having spent some time, you spent a lot of time about writing about it and doing about plants.

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

So I don't think it's entirely crazy. I don't think it's crazy. I think that I haven't had that experience myself. I did have an experience, and this was, talk about plant medicine on psilocybin that I described in my book, of feeling that the plants in my garden were conscious and aware and returning my gaze. And they were very benevolent. I took good care of them. That's good. Otherwise it could get scary. 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 Varieties of Mystical Experience, that you can't really judge the veracity of a big insight on a mystical experience, because we don't know enough. But there are two ways to think about it. Is it a useful thing? 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 otherwise, that could support that idea.

And that's what got me into plant, learning about plant intelligence and plant sentience. We are in relationship with plants, domesticated plants in particular. I think they manipulate us in various ways. But it's not at the level of the individual plant. It's at the level of the evolution of the species. So, you know, corn came to dominate the landscape in much of the world, because it figured out what we wanted from it. And when I say figured out, I mean, purely by trial and error. Cannabis too.

Cannabis was, you know, this plant, you know, located in Western China, I guess. And now it's everywhere. And the reason it did is, it learned that we respond, if it produced this chemical called THC, it was gonna get carried around the world and reproduced. And so, I think we're in this symbiotic relationship with plants, in that they do manipulate us. They're geniuses at biochemistry, as you suggest, you know. And that's a function of the fact that they can't get up and run away, right? They're rooted, they're sessile, as it's called.

And so, instead of consciousness like we have, and the ability to move around, they develop chemicals. This incredible suite of chemicals. And they hit on some chemicals that happened to change our consciousness. And this has been one of the most successful strategies. Coffee and tea 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 don't kill anything. I mean, caffeine might kill insects, some insects. But somewhere along the line, they learned that it was better to just kind of fuck with your mind than kill you outright.

Because if they killed you outright, you would very quickly develop resistance, right? You'd select for resistant members of the species. The way I learned this, it was courtesy of my cat, Frank. Frank had a real catnip problem. And every night, Frank, I would go down to my garden to 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. And 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 forget. And I'm like, that's a brilliant strategy on the part of the plant, to get your predator to forget where you are. 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 Botany of Desire, which really looked at how plants have mastered our desires as their evolutionary strategy. Desires for beauty, in the case of flowers. Desires to change consciousness. Desires for food. So I have ultimate respect for their ingenuity. When you say that plants have figured out, do you mean that sticking with the rule of evolution, you just wanna make as much of yourself as you possibly can in species that nurture young, protect young, proliferate, die, repeat, right? I mean, it's like a harsh way of thinking about it, but 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. And in retrospect, it looks like you figured something out. But in fact, you're just trying things and certain things work. And the plants that had the most caffeine, say, proliferated in a way the ones that had the least caffeine did not. I mean, I think about dogs a lot, because I love them, and I'm told that dogs descended from wolves that figured out that if they were kind enough and they were patient enough, they might get scraps of food.

And eventually that led to the domestication and the expansion of all these different breeds of dogs. I mean, I think that's essentially the story. So they're not getting together and having a little backroom conversation, like we've almost got them. And that's certainly been advantageous for the domestic dog. They're very well treated, better than some humans, in fact. 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 I feel like more people have dogs now than when I was growing up.

Well, COVID led to a lot of people getting dogs. Yeah, so most people don't get dogs to do work. They get dogs to be family members. And so they're really figuring stuff out. They got us. But this figuring stuff out thing is, as it relates to consciousnesses, maybe it brings us back to the definitions. So does that mean that you don't have to have self-awareness that you're doing it? Plants probably don't realize they're doing this. They're just following a rule that's scripted into their genome. Try and get resources, feel good, not pain in the moment, and proliferate, take care of young and so forth.

So do you think that this consciousness 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? Like, do they realize that they're doing better for the next generation? Because plants don't get to see what happens to their seeds in most cases. Dogs don't really know what happens to their puppies once they're adopted out. Yeah. Humans are unique in this way. Oh, I think we are. I mean, I think we have an awareness, a self-awareness, and a sense of, 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? But we have the ability to imagine the future, even a future we're not in. 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. They're monitoring our body, you know, reading these interoceptive signals and making adjustments and taking in things from the environment without our awareness.

So the question is, why does anything have to rise to the level of awareness? 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 fundamentally social beings that live in a very, and being in a human society is incredibly complex environment in which you can't program every move you have to make. There is a great evolutionary utility in being able to read the mind of another person and anticipate what they're going to do or say, to predict.

And this is something that you need theory of mind for 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 deliberate and aware. And I don't think plants have that. But I do think that evolution, I really agree. Michael Levin is a biologist at Tufts who works with, creates little creatures, organoids and what he calls xenobots. And he's shown that there are behaviors that are not dictated by the genes, that what evolution creates is cognitive beings that are very good at solving novel problems.

I mean, a lot of his project is actually de-emphasizing genes and showing that, and de-emphasizing neurons too. He also shows that- I accept all of biology. It just so happens I'm only trained to understand the brain stuff. Well, he's shown that memory resides in, not necessarily in neurons, there are other ways. The immune system. Yeah. Yeah. The immune system is a good example. And that these can hold memories in groups of cells. And that these xenobots that he creates from, and he does this with taking skin cells from tadpoles and he puts it in a solution and they clump together and they form a new organism and only lasts about a week or two.

And that organism repurposes their cilia so they can have a means of locomotion and they can be conditioned and navigate mazes. There's nothing in their genes that's encoding those instructions. Anyway, it's taken them to a very odd place in biology. We used to hear a lot about the word instinct. It'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 products of just an intelligent, a being with enough tools and cognitive ability to navigate an unfamiliar world.

That's what it takes to survive in evolution. When Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, came on this podcast, he said because he came from a very poor rural background, but he said people who grew up in that environment have incredible instincts about what is safe, what's not safe. He saw a lot of death from a young age. People died every day and the stakes were very high and resources were low. And he said that you see a completely different side of humans and it's not all bad.

It's the bad stuff that drives the emergence also, some really beautiful stuff. Like you said, kids grow up learning where safe harbor is in people and they can really sense people and animals very well in a way that in more affluent societies, we have all these buffers. Yeah, that's true. 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 the heart rate. There's stuff that switches.

Like if we activate it, people go into a rage, no one likes to think about this, but yes, for them too, this would happen. But then there's all the other stuff that's where we can control our impulses and think about past, present, and future and build technologies and it's a quote unquote evolved stuff. It's just higher order, whatever, the language never quite works, always makes it sound hierarchical because I would die in the environment that Cesar was describing, right? So higher order isn't fair. But in any case, I feel like this damn prefrontal cortex expansion that happened in humans, here's where I get really, I lose a lot of sleep over this and you're the perfect person to ask this.

I've asked a few guests, but 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, great. But I worry that it's, that we have enough of it that we perhaps have tricked ourselves into over investing in our own importance and our, and actually the whole meaning of being here. 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 shit out of me, but then pun, no pun intended. And he said, you know, these microbiota that live in all of us and create these critical 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, you know, if we kiss our romantic partner, if we, you know, exchange a bill or a credit card swipe or something, microbiome is proliferating and moving.

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

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

We think it's so important and it is, but whenever we're deluding ourselves, it's all just about getting these microbiota, getting us to get them where they want to go. 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 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 and maybe to outer space if they want to go there.

I don't think they'll do very well there. 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 we should realize, I mean, that's the subtitle of Botany of Desire was a plant's eye view of the world. And there is a perspective and it's just as legitimate in which we are dupes of these bacteria and that, yes, they want us to shake hands. They want us to do all sorts of things because this extends their range.

And they want us to be sociable too. You know, if we were all 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 life is using us and that we are a collective being too. I mean, we are a super organism, you know, and 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, and Justin's done really good work on this, we have outsourced the making of all sorts of metabolites, bacterial metabolites, chemicals we need, glutamate, GABA, serotonin. I mean, they're making, and then all these short chain fatty acids that are a fuel for our brain, but also are 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.

So 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 touche. I hope that helped you sleep. Yeah, well, yes. Maybe if we don't make it to Mars, it will be because they get up there and they make people very sick and they die. So in that sense, maybe it's better or worse for everyone, who knows? I don't have any theories about how this should all go. See, space food is very bad for bacteria, right? It's incredibly sanitary.

Talk about ultra-processed food, the kind of stuff they bring on intergalactic travel is gonna be really bad for the bacteria. Yeah, so if we don't make it, bacteria know that they don't want to make it there. That's not good for them. That's right. They know it's, they know Mars is a shitty habitat. Exactly. I'm only half kidding about this one, and I'm gonna try and steer off it so that I don't spiral into the concern about it, because it's not really a concern. I think that it gets to another layer, perhaps, of this consciousness question, which is about meaning.

You know, part of the function of the prefrontal cortex is that we can assign meaning to things. We both like Wendell Berry. You know him better than I do, but we both have feelings associated, memories. I can go as deep into this as I'll allow myself to. Like the feeling of the paper is different for a Wendell Berry poem, only because that was my experience. So I can place all this meaning on top of things, and that's related to memory and so on. And we don't know that other species do that, right?

I like to think dogs and cats and apes do that. Elephants, perhaps. Yeah. Which, more in their way. They definitely know self versus other. I try and break it down to that, because I saw this, one of these beautiful nature documentaries where they were essentially talking about these male lions fighting, and their hypothalamus looks a lot like ours, and we know the structure. Ventromedial hypothalamus, a subset of neurons there. You know, mice have them, we have them, they have them. And these 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 it's very dramatic, and the hyenas are trying to castrate the lions. 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.

So they have enough prefrontal cortex to take the same circuitry, it's still aggression, and now direct it in a new way. But they redefined the us, right? That's right. The I is now plural. So it's dynamic. And the reason I'm asking this, I'd love your thoughts on this, but I'm seeding a question about collective consciousness. And so this us-them thing within and across species, to me, feels like a critical gate for getting closer to understanding what is consciousness, at least for me. Maybe 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? Since Descartes, we had a monopoly on consciousness. It's only, I think, in 1970, the first experiment mirror test on a chimp, and we started thinking, oh, these primates are conscious also.

I mean, that's a fairly recent, that's 50 years ago, 55 years ago. It was assumed that consciousness was a cortical phenomenon. There is another line of research, though, that I was persuaded by, starting with Antonio Damasio in the 90s, and going through Mark Soames more recently, he's a South African psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who's a kind of protege of Damasio's, suggesting that actually consciousness doesn't begin with thought in the cortex, but with feeling in the brainstem, or feelings registered in the brainstem. And the reason we have consciousness, according to this theory, is because there are these homeostatic set points, and that, we'll back up a little, the brain exists to keep the body alive.

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

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

And I found that a very persuasive way to think about consciousness, and that it starts with feelings in the body. And a lot of what the brain is doing is interpreting those feelings, because they're inchoate. They're just signals, right? William James wrote about this. He said, you know, first there's the spike in heart rate, and then the brain says fear. And so there's this communication going, and the cortex might get involved in that process. But pain, for example, is a conscious phenomenon that doesn't require a cortex.

Their evidence for this is people who have no cortex, right? 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 having conscious experience. So for me, that changed the whole way of thinking about it. You know, this remains to be proven in various ways, and it doesn't solve this issue of, okay, well, how does a feeling come to be felt, and who's feeling it?

Is there a self that's feeling it? And I find Dimasio not satisfying on that question. He'll say, well, and in his new book, he says this, that feelings are spontaneously conscious. And that's 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. Oh, he has? No, no, I'm not saying you are, but just, I think. He's directed the whole field to the importance of feelings, and that's produced really important work, and emotion science, 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. AG1 just launched their newest formulation, called AG1 Pro, and right now, you can get an extra 20% off your first subscription. AG1 takes the clinically-backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients, creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB, and zinc carnosine. It has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, along with brain health, calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown, and zinc carnosine to support and improve the lining of your gut.

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For a limited time, you can get an extra 20% off your first subscription to AG1 Pro by going to drinkag1.com slash Huberman, and using the code back to routine. So that's with a numeral two, back numeral two routine. Just go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman. I feel like one of the challenges of being human is that people experience the world differently enough, it seems, 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?

No, but somebody once said in a comment that really stuck with me, that they think in feels. And I thought, oh, this sounds like a bunch of woo stuff. But I thought, maybe some people really do experience things more somatically. Okay, check that box, I totally accept that. And maybe the language labels of emotion for one person are more crude than for another. Lisa Feldman Barrett verified that. In cultures where there are many, many different words for types of sadness. I think that she told me that in Japan, there's a specific word for the type of sadness that you experience when you got a bad haircut.

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. So nuances is very important, but that's coming top down through language. And that's how culture interacts with biology, right? I mean, there are different ways to interpret the same sensations. I think we learn this with, when you have kids, when they melt down, they don't know if they're hungry or tired. And the parent has to teach them, you need to eat.

You need to eat now, you need to eat. 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 not denying their importance. They're critically important, but we can't really look to the nerve networks and say, okay, the brain is sophisticated and the neural innervation to and from the body is not sophisticated. I mean, it's as precise 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. If I'm feeling happy, I mean, I can change my language, my expression, et cetera. But where I would, I think neuroscience really needs some help. And I think you're helping 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, right?

This is very important. I think like we made that up. Grunts, exhales around putrid smells and inhales around pleasant smells, those are the core components of language. I mean, words are just shaped exhales after all, which is amazing. By the way, I didn't come up with that statement. Eddie Chang, chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, who studies speech and language, is my childhood friend. He said, you know, he said it like Eddie, you know, he's very calm, he's a neurosurgeon. He said, you know, all speech is just shaped exhales.

And I was like, oh my goodness, amazing. When you just think, that's so wild. But then we come up with many shaped exhales. But look 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. Yeah, I think you're right. 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 very hard to like, what's going on right now?

I don't know, I mean, my body isn't in pain, but I'm not in rapture either. Well, you know, your vagus nerve, which connects the visceral organs to your brain, is sending this stream of information. I think 80% of the traffic is going from body to brain, not the other way around. You're quite the neuroscientist. I teach neuroanatomy. You're right, it's 80, so yeah. The descending projection is about 15, 20, nobody knows for sure, so you're bang on. And most people, when they talk about the neuroscience, they get some things right, but you're bang on, so I just want to be clear to you.

On every neuroscience point you've made, you're exactly right. Thank you, that means a lot coming from you. So, what do those signals look like? I mean, how raw are they? I mean, and you know, stress hormones released, you know, through inflammation, you know, change mood, get to the brain, right? I forget which ones they are, and then suddenly make us feel threatened. The path, I think it's really complicated. You know, I think there's some very precise information reaching the brain, but I also think it needs a brain to interpret it.

Can we talk about the timescale of all this? Because so, it's pretty straightforward to think about us, them, body versus mind, and I'm wondering whether the body is communicating with the brain at a timescale 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 your brain is operating right now reflects that. Like, when I think of brain-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 timescales. Maybe they integrate across my spleen, my stomach, and my heart, and then my, you know, my liver and my pancreas are sending another message. Like, we don't know any of this. No, I know. And it excites me, as you can probably tell, because I feel like therein 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 locate our seed of feeling and emotion in our heads, most of us, most of the time.

But if you go back in history, they talked as much about the spleen and the liver and the heart and that emotions, they understood something about emotions was coming from the body. My favorite example is an experiment was done on moral judgment and disgust, moral disgust. They had two groups of people. One, they gave, they each were given a pill. One got a placebo. One got ginger, powdered ginger. They then exposed people to really morally repellent scenarios in writing about incest and just really disgusting scenarios, eating one's dog, things like that.

And the people who had taken the ginger were less judgmental because their stomachs were calmed. Ginger calms the stomach. And so the emotion of moral disgust is somehow we are passing it through. We're doing a gut check on it. 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 says to me this whole system is a lot more integrated than I think we even realize. And that the more I learn about this, the whole idea of separating mind and body, brain and body, is taking us down the wrong way.

That these things are inextricably bound up in ways that are just too complex for us to get. I mean, that's an obvious, that's a pretty obvious case because disgust is both a moral and a physical sensation or feeling. But I bet it applies to other things as well. It's a disgusting but, pun intended, but elegant example of how this can work. Well, it's kind of brilliant as 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 moral disgust is a cortical thing, we assume.

Although it clearly involves other circuitries. It makes sense. Ginger calms the gut. So, and I know if I have some minor pain, like a back strain or something, I'm much less patient. I look at the world differently. And I think we all become more self-centric when we're in pain. When we feel good, it's easier to allocate resources to what's out there. Maybe that takes us a little bit to psychedelics and collective consciousness. One of the things that I'm excited by is that I'm old enough now to have heard about the counterculture of the 60s, grown up in its wake, experienced this health, wellness, public education thing that I do, touched into science and living in California.

You know, I've spent a little bit of time at Esalen, read some books and getting to know folks 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 understanding. So for instance, the words collective consciousness, years ago were about like one love, right? And that didn't work 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, breath work is too broad a term and anything that lumps so much that you lose critical information. So if I say collective consciousness, I want to be clear, I'm not talking about one love, although that's a great goal. Peace on earth would be nice. 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. It's tough, it's tough, I have to say.

It's too many repeating themes of the sort that I wouldn't like to see are visible. So how do you define collective consciousness? Well, I've heard the term, right? And when I think about it, I've not been a burning man, but I think about people who are trying to set aside me-ism in day-to-day interactions so that everybody wins. It's this notion of everybody wins. And then I 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 then 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 hope, it's about acknowledge, like we can't bullshit ourselves into thinking one love.

We can't all take LSD and expect to get there. In fact, I think that would make things worse, maybe, maybe better, who knows, but it's not gonna solve the problem. So I'm throwing out a huge can of worms here, but how do you think about this collective consciousness thing? How perhaps should it be redefined? Is it about living in peace and harmony as a species with other species? Is that what it's really about? 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, that they would diminish the ego and contribute to sort of pro-social feeling, a sense of connection. We're more alike than we're different. You know, it doesn't always work. We have cases of ego dissolution and we have cases of ego inflation. With psychedelics. With psychedelics. Can you talk more about that? Yeah, so a very common phenomenon on high dose psychedelics is a sense of losing a sense of self. I mentioned earlier that you can be conscious without a sense of self.

And I've had that experience, I describe it in two of my books, of high dose psilocybin. I suddenly saw myself explode into this cloud of blue post-it notes that then fluttered to the ground and coalesced in this pool of blue paint. Beautiful. It was. And it was like, that sounds scary, but in fact, it was like, yes, I'm blue paint. That's what I am. And I was observing this though, from this new perspective that wasn't me. It was completely objective, total equanimity. And when that happens and the ego is laid aside, there's no wall.

The ego is a defensive structure. The self is a, right? It's, as we were talking about, us and them, or me and them. You merge with something larger because there's nothing to stand in the way. And some people merge with the divinity or the universe or love or other people. In my case, it was a piece of music that the guide was playing, this Bach unaccompanied cello suite. And I became this piece of music. And it was the most beautiful experience of music I'd ever had.

There was no subject-object distinction. I was it. I wasn't listening to it. I was it. This is something that pushes you toward getting over ego consciousness, which is at the root of a lot of the discord that we feel in the world. Obviously, it's not a permanent state anyone can be in. But 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, 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. And so I think there's a value in having an experience of ego dissolution. Now, I hasten to say there are other ways to get there. Meditators get there, too. It's more work. But you can get there through meditation and transcend your sense of ego. 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.

Dacher Keltner, who's a colleague of mine at Berkeley, did this really, he studies awe. 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 draw a picture of themselves at like a third of the size because their sense of self had 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-confidence and self-assurance and we worship self. But we also find that some of our happiest experiences are when we escape self, right? I mean, it happens in sex. It happens, 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 of course, self is really important. Having a sense of self, you wouldn't spend six years writing a book if you didn't know you were gonna 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 so I just don't think it's simple.

There's another idea of collective consciousness, of course, that consciousness is a field, exists outside us, and we all take part in it. I came out of this experience of studying consciousness and looking at all the theories of consciousness, I don't wanna give it away, but we have no fucking idea about consciousness, really, how 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, brains are like radio receivers or TV receivers.

You wouldn't look in the TV set for the woman who gave you the weather report. She's not there, she's somewhere else. So I don't know that that's true, but coming out of this experience of studying this, I don't dismiss an idea like that. I don't dismiss panpsychism, too, the idea that the particles in this table have some itty-witty little bit of consciousness that somehow gets combined in conscious beings like us. You have to keep an open mind, because our presumption that consciousness is an emergent property of brain complexity, that idea doesn't have much traction.

So anyway, so maybe there is a field of consciousness that we tune into. How do we prove it? We were talking earlier about Christophe Koch, who's a scientist we both greatly admire, and he was a real physicalist, a materialist scientist who believed that it was all about the brains, and he was head of Allen Brain Institute for many years. He had a experience on ayahuasca that he shared publicly, I'm not speaking out of school, where he was absolutely convinced and remains convinced that consciousness exists outside of brains.

That's extraordinary for somebody of his experience to have come to that conclusion, and it's unshakable. I haven't had that experience. I'm not convinced of that, the way he is, but I respect people who hold that idea now much more than I once did. I'm gonna summarize something you said to make sure I got it right, which is that you had a psychedelic experience. Many people who take psychedelics, not all, but many have an ego dissolution experience. It's very tangible and rich inside of the psychedelic journey.

There's an export to after the journey, but it doesn't fundamentally change your relationship to self at every moment in your waking life. I think that's important for people to hear, because I think a lot of people think about, people who take a lot of psychedelics and sort of fundamentally change, they can't go back to their prior self, so it's a portal that you can go back into consciously. It's an awareness. Do I have that right? Okay. You're exactly right. I just have a slightly different understanding of my ego.

It's not like it's gone away. It's there when I need it. 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 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 sake, certain wavelengths of light, certain sound waves that we can detect, mechanical touch, chemical sensing combined to our experience. We're abstracting our visual image of each other sitting across this table. There's no- And it's limited by our senses. That's right. I can only bring in what I can bring in. A different animal or even person would detect you differently. But the whole idea is that I'm putting all that together into an abstraction of Michael Pollan sitting here doing a podcast with me.

So if in one model, consciousness is an abstraction that's created within our brains. We combine electromagnetic energies, whatever other faculties our neurons can contribute to those, meaning, understanding, combining with whatever, gut, whatever, and we create this consciousness experience. But you're saying there's another model where there's an energy outside of us that somehow we're detecting that is already a consciousness. And so we're not abstracting it in our minds. It's literally entering through presumably our senses. Maybe there's an additional sense we're not even aware of. And we're experiencing it, but it's literally out there.

I don't experience you as a bunch of photons. I experience you as a human. So I'm either putting it together inside or it's put together outside and gets recapitulated internally. Yeah, these are called filter theories of consciousness. And the implication of them, Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was an exponent of this. And Aldous Huxley believed this and talked about it in Doors of Perception that he had had some access to this field. And for him, it was psychedelics. It was a mescaline experience that convinced him of this.

And the idea was that there's more consciousness out there than we can handle and that there is a filter or what Huxley called a reducing valve. And it basically admits what he called the measly trickle of consciousness we need to survive. God, that's brilliant. Because if we took in all the- We would be overwhelmed. All the wavelengths of light, for instance. Exactly. We wouldn't be able to see. I'd be overwhelmed with whatever that would look like or feel like. I can't use that. No, our senses are limiting.

They're not as expansive as they might be. 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 was only like, what, 120 or 150 years ago that we learned there was an electromagnetic field that you could actually use to convey information and it's invisible. I 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 body system? There's lymph and blood and there's a third one.

What is it called? There's like the syncytium thing. It's like a thin sheet that runs through the body that acupuncturists seem to have known about for a very long time. 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. Shufu Ma's lab at Harvard Med is doing beautiful work on this. Yeah. It's fascinating. So we shouldn't limit ourselves. I mean, 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 Alison Gopnik, who's another colleague in psychology at Berkeley, and she was saying, well, you know, the hard problem, we may decide that consciousness is not one thing and maybe that's our mistake. And we did that with the élan vital, that was gonna, the one thing that was gonna explain life. And phlogiston, I forget what that was gonna explain, but energy or fire or something like that. So we tend, when we have a mystery, we tend to make it singular. And sometimes the answer is breaking it up into parts.

And so maybe there's ego, self, and that's something. And then maybe there's emotion, and maybe self-reflection is something else entirely. I mean, I've thought about this with regard to AI, as we get these AIs, these chatbots that seem more and more 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. I don't know. We may be taking apart this idea at some point, and maybe that'll help us to understand it.

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To learn more, visit FunctionHealth.com slash Huberman and use the code Huberman for- a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman. It's a super intriguing idea. 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, but 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.

We're stuck, we're absolutely stuck. And the effort to make a conscious AI, which is underway, I mean, there are individuals and some companies who are trying to make it conscious, not just intelligent, and those are not the same things. If they fail or succeed, they're gonna teach us important things about consciousness. For example, if it truly is about feelings, and that's where consciousness originates, feelings depend on having a body, a vulnerable body, and possibly on our mortality. Are computers gonna have feelings? I don't think so.

And I think a computer simulation of a feeling is very different than a simulation of a thought, which is as good as a real thought. You know, you can play chess or go or whatever. So if they succeed in making a conscious AI, it'll discount the feeling idea. I don't think they can. You know, as long as we're dealing with silicon computers, the idea that you could have a conscious computer is based on a faulty metaphor of the brain as a computer. And I mean, you know enough neuroscience to see the, yes, it does some computations, but take the distinction between hardware and software.

That doesn't really exist in brains. Well, that's a key thing about computers. And neurons are not just on or off. They're not simply transistors. They're affected by chemicals and oscillations. There's a wonderful quote from Norbert Wiener who said that the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance. And I think this metaphor of the brain as computers 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 to 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, your brain's different than mine because it was pruned very differently because of life experiences. So if you had a computer where the hardware was being constantly changed, it would be useless. Yeah, there are these issues in neuroscience that never really get resolved. One of the things that's perplexing to me, maybe you have some insight on this, is there were two labs, Susumu Tanegawa's lab at MIT, he's got a Nobel, Mark Mayford's lab at Scripps, both essentially ran the same experiment where they used an animal model where you could, 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. 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 behavior. Here's the problem. You could play those neurons backwards or all at once and get the exact same behavior. So this throws a serious wrench into our understanding of the brain.

The notion that you need things firing in a particular sequence was completely crapped on by those sets of experiments. I mentioned the Nobel, even though Susumu got it for immunology, he's a very smart guy, Mark's a very smart guy. So these papers have stood the test of time. But it would be like if I said, oh, you know, this is the keys that you play in a song and it sounds like the song, where then I bang all of them and you still get the song.

So our whole notion of the temporal ordering of firing of neurons being important 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 resources. But we can't, we just, I don't wanna say we don't understand the brain. There's so much beautiful work has been done over the last, you know, 50, 100 years, incredible work. But there is this problem, like we don't really understand how the brain is encoding experiences, even at that level.

And that's a problem. 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. This is not my area of expertise, so anything you say will be new to me. Me neither, okay, this is total amateur. I heard a talk by Michio Kaku the other day and he was talking about quantum computers and that they will 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. It's simultaneity, it will be a hallmark of that. There's a whole school of thought that quantum physics may help explain consciousness. I honestly don't understand it, but quantum mechanics have given us some very bizarre explanations of things, such as entanglement, that two particles separated by light years can nevertheless affect one another. And so non-locality 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 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. Quantum computers have to be chilled to like nearly 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.

It's as far as I can go. You know everything I know about it now. Amazing, I mean, I think the brain is a receiver. I've heard that before today. It really makes sense to me now that based on how you described it. Can I ask about you and can I get some advice from you? And can our listeners perhaps get some advice from you? You've written 10 books, and I'm sensing a thread through all of them about the natural world, about us, how those relate, and coming to some better understanding of self and relating to the world in a more benevolent way.

That's my export, but I know there's much more to you. But it dawned on me as we were sitting down, I think the world knows very little about you, and maybe that's intentional. But I just wanna know when you were younger, were you sort of intrigued by or drawn to flora and fauna? Were you sort of like thinking about the humans in a certain way? It just strikes me that you have a very, it's gonna sound 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 an animal, which is great, but you also find these incredible points of connectivity that are really geared towards self-understanding and therefore helping the relationship. So can you trace that back to like something in particular? Or is that just, or is this just downloaded into you? No, so I started gardening at a very young age, 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. And my mother would always encourage me to spit them out. And I did that, and 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. It was like the size of a football, but to me, it was huge.

I was just so blown away by this. And it was just a formative moment. And I was so excited, I picked it, and I was running, and we had a concrete patio behind our house, and I had to show my mom this thing that I'd grown. I hadn't really done anything. And I tripped and fell, and the watermelon just completely splattered 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. So it was a going concern. So gardening was a really big part of it. And that puts you in a relation to nature, an active relationship to nature. Most of us have a very kind of observer type relationship. We admire it from a distance on vacation. But gardening thrusts you right in the middle of it. And you have to make decisions. And your plants have interests.

You're not the only interested creature here. Your plants have interests. And to the extent you can satisfy their interests, they're gonna give you what you want. So eventually, years later, I wrote my first book was about that. And 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, 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.

I actually think the garden, at this point, is a more valuable laboratory. Because we've saved all the land we're gonna save. I think 8% of the American 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. He's trying to sell some of it. Yeah, in Utah. I will say, just as a quick note, if this angers me so much, my friends who are hunters, and real outdoors people, were very excited about the protection of these lands.

And now, they're essentially pissed at all forms of government. Let's just put it that way. Because they were promised something, and it was taken away. And they're now truly outside the box of any political party. They will die before they let go of this land. And it is really scary. It is truly scary. Some of our fishermen also, and so on. We still need to extol the virtues of wilderness, without question. And hunters have been some of the great conservationists in American history. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt 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%, or 92% of the landscape. Because America, we've tended to either, there's either virgin nature, or raped nature, right? I mean, we have this very strong binary. And once we've decided that this side goes to capitalism, and the marketplace, we abuse it. And we have abused it. So, learning how to behave in nature, I think, is really important. And 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 our minds engage with matter, and nature, and biology? And it's amazing, we don't know yet. You also strike me as somebody who, you think about these very high-level problems. I don't know when that came about. But clearly, you're observant, and you think a lot. But many people who talk about psychedelics, write about psychedelics, and think about collective consciousness, and are friendly with plants. And plants like them, they're not feet on the ground. Like, so, do you have practical people in your lineage, where you taught, because gardening also 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, listen, I think sound bowl therapy will probably discover has some very important effects on the nervous system. So, I'm not being disparaging of it at all. But it's one thing to like these things, and feel you have a relationship to them. But you've made great efforts to try and get many people, millions of people, to appreciate, and lean into these relationships, in ways that can serve them, and the world.

So, 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 psychedelics. I think about Omnivore's Dilemma. Well, it was very present in, when I was going through college, and around that time. I think it was a graduate. 2006. Okay, so it was shortly, it was after college. But that book was everywhere. And the mantra from that book, right, you know? Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants, right?

So, I never, you know, I didn't set out to start something. And certainly, there were other important books that came out around the same period. Eric Schlosser'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 great admiration for them. But I would say that those were about what not to do. Like, this is bad, you know? And like, growing up, I read the one, was it Tom Robbins wrote a book from the Baskin-Robbins 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 meat industry. So, they're hard books to form a relationship to, because it's like a, it's a bad, it's a great, they're great books, but about bad relationships. Good point. Whereas your book, it was about 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.

We, it's our air, you know? And I remember, I wrote a piece for the New York Times that became a chapter in Omnivore's Dilemma 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. And it's a long story, it's like 8,000 words. But I made a point to like, well, what are the alternatives? And I learned about grass-fed, grass-finished. which at the time was a tiny little market.

And 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 food chain from which most of us are eating beef is floating on a sea of oil. And that it's fossil fuel to grow the corn that feeds the animal and then you need the pharmaceuticals because the corn makes the animal sick and it's just such a pathological system and it's so dark. But there's another food chain that takes sunlight captured by grass that feeds this animal.

I juxtaposed these two food chains, an oil-based food chain and a sunlight-based food chain. And 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, we gotta cut that. I said, no, we have to leave that. That just shows the hope that we can grow our food using sunlight, not oil. And I won the fight, luckily, and was so gratified. A couple weeks after this piece came out, this piece made quite a bit of noise at the time, I walked into a butcher shop on College Avenue in Oakland and I just, I was kind of curious.

I wonder if they have grass-fed beef. And so I asked the butcher, do you have grass-fed beef? And he goes, what is going on? You're the sixth person this week who asked me for grass-fed beef. And he got it. So that satisfies me a lot. I like writing where we can point a direction that it might be useful for, and that individuals can have some agency and not be just victims of these big systems. And I'm an optimistic person, finally. You said finally? Not your entire life?

No, no, I think I have been. 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, helping my mother with the household and things, because my dad was kind of checked out. And so I think I do value practical things. 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 you had to step into that role, but the world's fortunate that you did, because when I look at what I would call the important movements of the last 50, 60 years, and I think psychedelics is one of them, but when I say that, I wanna be clear. I'm talking about neuroplasticity to make people feel and be better versions of themselves. It may not come from psychedelics or even therapy or the somatics or breath work or health and fitness, all of it.

I feel like where each of those quote unquote movements reached its cliff was when the individual or individuals that were leading that movement were either too emotive and not practical enough. They weren't thinking about how they could export the knowledge in a way that people could really make use of it, that acknowledged the variety of truths that were out there, that people weren't all gonna just like move to San Francisco or Big Sur, that kind of thing, but that people couldn't be so practical and removed from thinking about new possibilities, new ways of humans being that they dismissed it.

And I feel like we are at an important repetition point where if we're gonna break through, I feel like those two things have to really be married in the movements. And I see it in you and in your relationship to these things. So the practical side and the clearly deep relationship to plants in the world. I mean, I do finally wanna push the world in one direction and not in another. I mean, that's considered advocacy in journalism and I own up to it. 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 at a certain point, you've mastered the subject and it would be disingenuous not to think that I think we need to move this way. Not that, you know, we had such success. I mean, I just wrote a new introduction to Omnivore's Dilemma and I wish the book were more dated than it is. It's, you know, the food system is still screwed up. I think we have more awareness of it. People have a better idea where their food comes from. They're making the link between 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 we still have a agriculture that is all about growing corn and soy which are the building blocks of ultra-processed food which is making us sick and killing us. 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, holdovers from the 60s. Yeah, the drug war and things like that.

He didn't like drugs. Now the red side is all about Ibogaine for veterans. 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 words publicly. So I'm happy to repeat it. 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 standards.

And this is the only way in our current political moment anything gets done is you need support on the right as well as the left. 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, but there are areas of agreement on pesticides and on ultra-processed food, getting it out of schools. You know, you used to hear the food movement was elitist. You don't hear that anymore. And that's because you have people on the right who are supporting, wanna push the world in the same direction.

That's a really good point. So we have some hope, there's some hope there. Yeah, no, that's it. Gosh, we've got to really break down the divisions to move healthy eating forward. I was just gonna end psychedelics in the safest way. I was struck when I started to look at the new food pyramids of, I realized that the American foods have never been healthy. People talk about how they eat in Europe and my dad's from Argentina and how they eat the grass-fed beef. That was all they had, right?

There's some unhealthy elements about the diet there too, when they eat heavy meals late. But now it's, people have improved their diet, information travels. But, you know, we think fried chicken, we think hot dogs, hamburgers. Mac and cheese. Mac and cheese, french fries, like cotton candy. These are the most American, as American as apple pie, right? We don't, we don't talk. Right, so the classic American foods were all very unhealthy. So I wonder if there's a way to redefine what American food is. 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.

You know, so those generally don't come from the foods I described. No, they don't. And, you know, America's never had a real food tradition till the, till fast food is really 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 in this food tradition, we were much more vulnerable to marketing.

And then say that, you know, the French are, the Italians are, and they had, they had something to resist what the marketplace wanted to do with food, which is of course to process it, you know, with the cheapest possible raw ingredients. So yeah, we need to build an American cuisine that is healthy, but it's easier said than done. Or we borrow, I mean, look, we talk about the Mediterranean diet, right? It's, you know, one of the diets we have good reason to believe is healthier than others 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. But it's very hard to change people's eating habits. And one of the hardest things, and habit in general, right? So, you know, I don't see it as easy. And in general, the fact that you now, there's a growing recognition though 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 policies are making the bad food cheap, which they are, I mean, we subsidize corn, which gives us high fructose corn syrup, which gives us diabetes. So we're supporting both sides in the war on type two 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. So 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.

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Is the current administration with the emphasis on healthy eating that they're out there with, are they- They're not doing anything. No, I mean, RFK Jr. has been talking a good game on this. But meanwhile, the big, beautiful bill eliminated all sorts of farm to school and farm to other institution supporting small agriculture, regenerative agriculture. They're cutting all that stuff while they talk about it. And the only change they've made on food after over two 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 crucial health problem and it's voluntary. So this administration is not gonna regulate anything. And the changes we need in the food system, getting ultra-processed food out of the school lunch program, it's gonna require regulations. And they're deregulating pesticides like crazy. Yeah, that's concerning. Very concerning. So no, I don't think it's an honest effort. But I do think what RFK Jr. has done that is valuable is he's surfaced this other constituency that we were not aware of.

And these are mothers, many of whom have kids with serious illnesses that they're trying to treat with a better diet. And I met them without knowing it when I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma. I was hanging out on Joel Salatin's farm. He's a very progressive farmer in Virginia who has pioneered a kind of grass-based agriculture where he rotates different species over the same grasslands and grows amazing food, eggs and meat especially. And he's in the middle of nowhere. He's like 45 minutes from the interstate. And these people would show up on Saturdays to pick up their pastured chickens.

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 these maha moms before they were called that. And they were members of something called the Weston Price Society, which is a long story, but promotes grass-based animal protein and has been around since the 30s or so and has a very big network that no one on the coast notices, but it's out there. And I would talk to these mothers and they had their thing with seed oils and food is medicine.

And they were not aligned with science always, but they were passionate about clean food and were willing to drive 100 miles to get it then. 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 early signs. There was a bill in Congress that the administration was supporting that would have exempted pesticide makers from lawsuits, all lawsuits, and it was in an appropriations bill. And Shelley Pingree, who's a food movement leader and an organic farmer from Maine in Congress, she got together with Maha activists and they got it stripped out of the bill and they did it twice.

So that's what we need. That's the kind of politics, just like psychedelics, right and left together, you can get things done. Yeah, amen to that. I am forever stamped in my brain as Rick Perry and I forget who it was on the Democratic side, like literally holding the hands are like, we're for Harvard. art medicine, this was at a veteran's benefit. And it's interesting, similarly to, well, in sort of parallel construction, as you said, whereas the food, slow food and movement, healthy food movement, used to be considered elitist, and now it's not.

The psychedelics thing used to be like, big sur hippies, very left-leaning, and what seems to have moved the most intense of all the psychedelics Ibogaine, looks like it's gonna cross the line as into a true supported therapeutic by the FDA, it's not there yet, was the veteran's 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, and it's really to the credit, I think, of the veterans like Marcus Luttrell and Marcus Capone, but also Rick, I'll say, like I, you know.

Rick Perry, but also I would add Rick Doblin. And Rick Doblin, the Ricks. The Ricks, the two Ricks. The Ricks, two very different characters. I'll say. Actually, here's a funny one about Rick Doblin, that at this event, he got up there, and he said, it was a room full of veterans, a lot of SEALs, a lot of Spec Ops folks, and the first thing he said was that he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and the room just went silent. And then I looked around, and there were a lot of smiles.

They appreciated his honesty. Honesty, yeah. And you know, I adore him. The guy is nothing if not honest. I adore him, too. But he very deliberately reached out to the right years ago. I remember he took a contribution from Rebecca Mercer, who was a big Trump One supporter, and people gave him a lot of grief 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 gonna get change. So he's a visionary.

Yeah. And he reached out to the veterans groups, and so he deserves some of the credit, too. Definitely. The Ricks. Excuse me for not crediting you, Doblin. Doblin has the worst diet ever. We're working on him. He has croissants and orange juice for breakfast, and he has more energy than any human being alive. Awake and cheerful, and clear of mind for 20 hours in a journalist's dream, because he never goes off the record, and he'll tell you exactly what he thinks. I love it. Couple more questions about psychedelics, and then I wanna talk about the most important drug on the planet, which is caffeine.

But when do you think MDMA and or psilocybin will get FDA approval, given what you understand? Because it's kind of wild that Ibogaine, the one psychedelic that no one would even want to use recreationally, is gonna get there first. And hasn't been, by the way, subjected to university drug trials. That's kind of incredible. It's incredible. So what about MDMA and psilocybin? They're closer. So the Resilient is the name of the company. It used to be Lycos. It was part of MAPS. They've put forward MDMA in the treatment of trauma.

And they were turned down once, but they've resubmitted with some additional data. It looks like they're fast-tracked. The same executive order that is fast-tracking Ibogaine is fast-tracking other psychedelics. It was apparently originally written for Ibogaine, and somebody in the White House said, it's kind of crazy to just do this one. There are these others that are closer to having the data we need. And then psilocybin, coming from Compass, a company called Compass Pathways, is also close. You know, I hear before the end of the year, but it's hard to believe.

You know, I've been hearing it's close for a long time. I think it really is close this time. The reason it's happening, we should be clear, is because Joe Rogan texted the president and said this is really important. He had done a show on Ibogaine. And President Trump, having lost the Manosphere vote, or afraid of losing the Manosphere vote, wanted to give Rogan something he cared about. And, you know, is this the way to do drug approvals in America? I have some questions about that. 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 gonna be an earthquake when it happens, because they'll be approved as medicines and to be administered in a certain way with some regulations. But the message that the public will take, that the society will take, is that these things that we thought were dangerous drugs are medicines. People who haven't thought about psychedelics, we are in a small community of people who've been thinking about psychedelics for the last 10 years. Everyone's gonna be saying, is this for me?

Is this for my kid? Is this for my parents? Yikes. Well, except for the parents part. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't mind doing psychedelics with my parents, but I hear you loud and clear. There are people who have predisposition to psychosis or heart issues. And look what's happened with cannabis. We thought cannabis was a very safe drug, but now that it is being used so widely, we're learning about addiction. Psychosis. And psychosis. And so it's gonna be a, I think there's a lot of public education to be done to help people navigate this.

And they're not for everybody. And there are people who definitely should stay away from psychedelics. So it's gonna be a very interesting couple years after it's approved. And I hope it's done with some care. But we'll see. I mean, there is enormous hope here. And many people, we can talk about the risk. There are real risks. But there are people whose lives will be saved by this. I mean, I have interviewed so many people who've had transformative experiences that have cured their addictions, their depression, their OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.

I mean, there is a lot of potential here. And the field of mental health needs new tools. The ones they have just don't work very well. If we do this right, we're gonna benefit an enormous number of people. But doing it right, it's not gonna be easy. You made all the critical points. And I also want to extend my gratitude to you and Tim Ferriss, who've worked really, really hard. Tim's done amazing work. Amazing work to get this to where it is and hopefully across the line and done right.

I think I know you both care a lot about that. And there are others. But you guys have really stuck your necks out there early when it was risky. And have really continued to. I remember how nervous I was when I published How to Change Your Mind. I was talking about my own psychedelic experience. I didn't know what would happen. I thought the police would be knocking at the door. And they 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, wild. I listened to, because as I recall, it's only an audio book, your book about doing this absolutely stupid experiment. No, I'm kidding you. But it was so awesome. I love this book where you quit caffeine. And I drink a lot of caffeine. From the first time I took a sip of mate, I was like, this completes me in some way. The same way some people who drink alcohol feel. And I'm grateful it's caffeine and not alcohol. Much better drug. Yeah, I think so.

So 90% of the world's adults consume it every day and on and on. And I love it. And unless I'd been sick, I don't really know life without caffeine. You should try it though. Yeah, so I was gonna say, what do you think an experiment like quitting caffeine for an extended period of time could do for somebody like me or for somebody listening that would perhaps allow the caffeine to be even a better experience after? Is that what it's about? Or what did you discover about consciousness?

What did you, seriously, what did you discover about your relationship to substances or work or focus or anything? 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. Oh, great. I subsequently put it in a book called This Is Your Mind on Plants, which came out a couple years ago. And it's one of three chapters in that book. So caffeine is a really interesting drug.

First of all, most of us don't think of it as a drug. 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 herbamonte, or a couple other substances. I interviewed Roland Griffith when I started writing about caffeine, because before he got involved, he was the psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins who did the initial work on psilocybin and really launched the psychedelic renaissance. But before he worked on psychedelics, he worked on caffeine.

So I wanted to talk to him about it. And during this interview, he said, 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 it's out of your system completely. So he proposed that I go on this caffeine fast. I started really young, like eight 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. I'd drag myself out of bed and have coffee with him. And so my addiction started very early. It was very hard to get off. If you go cold turkey, people describe flu-like symptoms. I just felt off. I could not focus. I felt like I had ADHD. I didn't feel myself, which is odd. And I couldn't write at all. I mean, it was so wired into my writing process. It was just forget it, 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. 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 not bad for you. You 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. But for most people, it is addictive. But aside from jitteriness, if you get it, the negative effects are outweighed by positive effects. Helps people with Parkinson's, reduces blood pressure. I forget, I had a whole list of all the health benefits. 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 just the best drug experience, better 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 never do. I cleaned up the garden. I just was just, I was a superman. It was just wonderful. And then I had another cup, and it was like not a special.

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 an addiction like that. So I thought, okay, I'm only gonna do caffeine one day a week, Saturdays. 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 every day. But I appreciate it. I have 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, if they have a cup of coffee or tea, or maybe it's done with pills because they had a placebo control, probably with pills, the ones who had caffeine perform better on the tests.

It's 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. We have such good coffee. The original Pete's is just down the street. Yeah. And the cheese board, and yeah. Well, I'm so grateful you wrote the book and that you did the experiment. I will seriously consider doing the experiment. Give it a try. You learn a lot. And it's just about thinking about your relationship to drugs in general. I mean, they are part of our lives.

It's a normal part of human life. Our thinking about drugs has been really contaminated by the drug war. Drugs are not good or bad. I mean, it's all about context. And caffeine is a really great case study. And you learn something about yourself getting off it and then getting back on it. I'm excited, the way you describe it and the fact that you share the belief that it is God's gift to mankind is a reason enough. Michael, thank you so much for coming here today, sharing your knowledge.

Oh, my pleasure. 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. Your care for humanity is self-evident. And for animals and plants, too. 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. Thank goodness. I mean, you're obviously a super serious scholar of everything you put your pen to.

And when you speak, I learn and people really learn. 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. It's an audio book. It's another short audio book and it'll be out sometime next year. 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 I'm so glad you dropped those watermelon seeds into the ground. Here we are. Me too. Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate it. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Michael Pollan. To learn more about his work and to find links to his many excellent books, including his most recent book on consciousness, please see the show note caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple.

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