What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael Pollan
Guests: Michael Pollan
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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.
Big Wendell Berry fan.
Good.
I didn't insult you.
I didn't check 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.
Oh, my goodness.
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 are 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 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 going to 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 who 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.
I think 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.
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?
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. And 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.
And they can light sense.
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 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, 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 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.
It has to, 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,
§02Transcript — part 2
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?
This is going to 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.
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Can we go at self versus other as maybe one potential window into this?
I don't want to 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, you know, 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, you know, and there are some exceptions to this, but it turns out to be, it's not straightforward to build a brain, but you don't need a ton of signals.
You need signals that say grow here and you need signals that say you may not grow here, what we call chemoattractants and chemorepellants.
And then if you think about the dendrites and axons, 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 the all these different cell types and there's other features to it too
and i was shocked and excited to learn that that's kind of how tree roots do it yes i was
gonna say so simple rules can build immense complexity that's 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.
Right. And while this is all very cellular and we're literally talking about the branches of
cells, it's not, you know, thinking. I feel like when you get up to the whole organism,
I know the difference between me and you, me and the microphone. These plants seem to know
the difference between them and the fertilizer. So this 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, 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, you know, 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 other 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 other is 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 give you and can give
you an experience of consciousness without a self. I think we have it every morning when we wake up.
There's that 500 milliseconds, you know, when you're reconstituting, like, who am I?
Where am I?
Oh, you know, here I am.
And it's 750 milliseconds if you're in a hotel room, as 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, I spent a little bit of time with people in the plant medicine community.
Not a lot.
I'm not 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 bioprospected 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 plants.
Yeah, I think about plants in my garden.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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 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.
And if it produced this chemical called THC, it was going to 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 happen 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.
Amazing.
And the other thing they do, of course, many plant chemicals,
psychoactive chemicals diminish your appetite.
Another brilliant strategy.
So I have enormous respect for what they do and what they do to us.
And I really see them as active players in this drama.
I wrote a book called 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,
§03Transcript — part 3
You just want to make as much of yourself as you possibly can in species that nurture young,
nurture young, protect young, proliferate, die, repeat, right?
I mean, that'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 to reproductive.
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, you know, 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, you know, backroom conversation like we've almost got them.
But they, so, 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 it's, it's, uh, most people don't get dogs to do work.
They get dogs to be family members.
Right.
And so they're really, they're really figuring stuff out.
Yeah.
They got us.
They got us.
Um, but this figuring stuff out thing is, is as it relates to consciousness is, um, maybe
it brings us back to the definitions.
So does that mean that you don't have to have self-awareness that you're doing it?
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 yeah 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 um 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.
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, 24-7, 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, you know, creates little creatures, you know, 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.
You know, 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 not necessarily in neurons.
There are other ways.
The immune system.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The immune system is a good example.
He looks at bioelectric fields and that these can hold memories in groups of cells.
And that these Xenobots that he creates, 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.
It 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.
You know, we used to hear a lot about the word instinct.
It's funny you don't hear about it nearly as much anymore.
Yeah, you're right.
And I think that there are things going on that are products of just an intelligent, of 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, you know, people who grew up in that environment have incredible instincts about what is safe, what's not safe.
You know, he saw a lot of death from a young age.
People died every day.
And, you know, stakes were very high and resources were low.
And he said, you know, that you see a completely different side of humans and it's not all bad.
I mean, that's the bad stuff that drives the emergence.
Also some really beautiful stuff.
Like you said, 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, you know?
Yeah, it'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 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 made,
you know, 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, you know, higher order, whatever.
the language never quite works. It 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
I 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 we have enough of it that we perhaps have tricked ourselves into over-investing in our own importance 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 Sonnenburg, my colleague who you know at Stanford working on the microbiome, scared, I want to say the shit out of me, but then no pun intended.
When he said, you know, these microbiota that live in all of us and create these critical chemicals for brain health and can impact our behavior, whether or not we feel sick or more energetic, more outgoing.
I mean, there's this incredible array of ways they influence us.
He said, when we shake hands like we did today, the second time in our lives, or when we, 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 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 Sonnenburg's theory is right, which is we're literally just vehicles.
And that keeps me up at night.
I confess it does.
Really?
But it also keeps me up at night because I can only have that thought, that concern because of this excessive prefrontal cortex real estate.
Otherwise, I would just be busy trying to get my food and nourishment, proliferate and so on.
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 when 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 is 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, the subtitle of Botany 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 their range and they want us to be sociable too you know if we were all
you know kind of shy and introverted it would not serve their purposes and they are influencing our
moods. So it is kind of creepy in a way, but it's also kind of beautiful that, you know, we don't,
you know, that 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 helps
you sleep. Yeah. Well, yes. I, maybe if we don't make it to Mars, it will be because-
They don't want to go.
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 going to 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.
They know Mars is a shitty habitat.
Exactly.
I'm only half kidding about this one, and I'm going to try and steer off it so that I don't, you know, spiral into the 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
like we both like wendell berry you know him better than i do but we both have feelings
associated memories i i can go as deep into this as as i'll allow myself to like i like the feeling
of the paper like is different for a wendell berry poem only because that was my experience
so i can place all this meaning on top of things and that's related 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. They definitely know self versus other. I mean, 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, you know, 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.
§04Transcript — part 4
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 redefine the us, right?
That's right.
The I is now plural.
Yeah, so it's dynamic.
And the reason I'm asking this, I'd love your thoughts on this, but I'm 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 Solms 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 what's the is there a self that's feeling it and i find Damasio not satisfying
on that question he'll he'll say well um and in his new book he says this that feelings are
spontaneously conscious and that's that's an it's not really a satisfactory answer it's hard to wrap
my head around that spontaneous is doing a lot of work there yeah yeah no discredit to him he's
done amazing oh yeah yeah 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
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I feel like the 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, you know, 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 nuance is very important, but that's coming top down through language.
And that's how culture interacts with biology, right?
I mean, you know, there are different ways to interpret the same sensations.
I think we learn this with, you know, 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 know, you need to eat.
You need to eat a nap.
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.
Yeah. Right. This is very important. I think like we made that up grunts, you know, exhales around putrid smells and inhales around pleasant smells.
That's that's the those are the core components of language.
I mean, words are just shaped exhales after all. Right. Which is amazing.
By the way, I didn't come up with that statement. Eddie Chang, chair of neurosurgery at UCSF.
I love it. Who studies speech and language is my childhood friend.
He said, you know, he said it like like Eddie, you know, he's very calm.
you know it's a neurosurgeon he said you know all speech is just shaped exhales and i was like oh my
goodness wow amazing when you just think it's so wild but then we come up with many shaped 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 like and pain is one example pleasure is another
But at the extremes, it's easy.
But in day-to-day experience, outside of those extremes, it's 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.
But, 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. It's incredible. 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. 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 on my brain?
But maybe the signals are of long time scales.
Maybe they integrate across my spleen, my stomach, and my heart.
And then my, you know, my liver and my pancreas are sending another message.
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,
you know, 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, you know,
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, 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.
It's 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.
Yeah.
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.
You know, 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.
Yeah.
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 I don't like 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.
§05Transcript — part 5
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 to Burning Man, but I think about people who are trying to set aside me-ism in day-to-day interactions so that everybody wins.
It's this notion of everybody wins.
Right.
And then I kind of try and pressure test that a little bit and say, is there a version of collective consciousness?
Everybody wins.
That's based on truth.
That's not based on lies.
I think that's where it failed because people are people and there are bad humans.
They're 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 going to solve the problem.
So I'm throwing out a huge can of worms here, but how do you think about this collective
consciousness thing? 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 walls.
The ego is a defensive structure.
The self is a defensive, right?
It's as we're talking about us and them or me and 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 cello, unaccompanied cello suite.
And I became this piece of music.
And it was the most beautiful experience of music I'd ever had.
There was no subject-object distinction.
I was it.
I wasn't listening to it.
I was it.
this is something that pushes you toward getting over ego consciousness, which is at the root of
a lot of the, you know, discord that we feel in the world. 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, you know, when he's being too critical or aggressive
or too self-interested.
And I say, oh, that's my ego.
And that's just one voice.
And there are other voices I can listen to.
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 going to be the
same person at the end of the six years, and it would benefit you to have finished it.
So we need that sense of self to get things done.
But it's also a trap and it distances us from people and makes us selfish.
And 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 want to 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.
You know, she's not there.
She's somewhere else.
So I don't know that that's true.
But coming out of this experience of studying this, I don't dismiss an idea like that.
I don't dismiss panpsychism too.
The idea that the particles in this table have some eaty-weeasy little bit of consciousness that somehow gets combined in conscious beings like us.
you have to keep an open mind because our presumption that you know consciousness is an
emergent property of brain complexity that idea is not it doesn't have much traction so so anyway
so maybe there is a field of consciousness that we we tune into how do we prove it you know i mean
we were talking earlier about Christof 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 an 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. And 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 going to 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.
No.
I think that's important for people to hear
because I think a lot of people think about
people who take a lot of psychedelics
and sort of fundamentally change.
They can't go back to their prior self.
So it allows, it's a portal
that you can go back into consciously.
It's an awareness.
Do I have that right?
Yeah, it's 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's sake, certain wavelengths of light, certain sound waves that we can detect, mechanical touch, chemical sensing, combined to our experience.
We're abstracting our visual image of each other sitting across this table.
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.
Right.
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.
That's brilliant.
Because if we took in all the wavelengths of light, for instance.
I 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 of 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 know, 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?
§06Transcript — part 6
There's lymph and blood and there's a third one.
What is it called?
There's like the syncytium thing.
Yes.
It's like a thin sheet that runs through the body that acupuncturists seem to have known about for a very long time.
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.
Qiufu Ma's lab at Harvard Med is doing beautiful work on this.
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 Elan Vital, the one thing that was going to explain life.
And phlogiston, I forget what that was going to explain, but energy or fire or something like that.
So we tend, when we have a mystery, we tend to make it singular.
And sometimes the answer is breaking it up into parts.
And so maybe there's ego, self, and that's something.
And then maybe there's emotion and maybe self-reflection is something else entirely.
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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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.
Oh, we're stuck.
We're absolutely stuck.
And the effort to make a conscious AI, which is underway.
I mean, there are individuals in some companies who are trying to make it conscious, not just intelligent.
And those are not the same things.
If they fail or succeed, they're going to teach us important things about consciousness.
For example, if it truly is about feelings, and that's where consciousness originates, feelings depend on having a body, a vulnerable body, and possibly on our mortality.
Are computers going to have feelings?
I don't think so.
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 doesn't exist in most computers now.
But also that memory makes a physical change in the brain, right?
That's 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 Tonegawa's lab at MIT, he's got a Nobel, and Mark Mayford's lab at Scripps,
both essentially ran the same experiment where they used an animal model where you could,
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 have 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 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 they're going to bang on all of them and you still get the song.
so our whole notion of the temporal ordering of firing of neurons being important for for memories
is like it's complete horseshit it also turns out that every one of those neurons is participating
in a bunch of other memories and so some of them are that's great because that's great allocation
of resources and redundancy but we can't we we just i don't want to say we don't understand the
brain there's so much beautiful work has been done over the last you know 50 hundred years
incredible work. But there is this problem. 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, you know, the 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, you know, 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 we, 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 want to 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 going to 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, I, 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've 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, you know,
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, you know.
But gardening thrusts you right in the middle of it. And you have to make decisions.
and that your plants have interests.
You know, you're not the only interested creature here.
Your plants have interests.
And to the extent you can satisfy their interests,
they're going to give you what you want.
So that, you know, eventually, years later,
I wrote my first book was about that.
§07Transcript — part 7
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.
And I actually think the garden at this point is a more valuable laboratory because we've saved all the land we're going to save.
You know, 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.
They're trying to sell some of it.
Yeah, in Utah.
I will say just as a quick note, if like this angers me so much, my friends who are hunters and like real outdoors people were very excited about the protection of these lands.
And now have they're essentially pissed at all forms of government.
Let's just put it that way, because they were promised something and it was taken away.
And I they're now truly outside the box of any political party.
they will die before they let go of this land.
Yeah.
But it is really scary.
It is truly scary.
Yeah.
Some of our fishermen also and, you know, and so on.
We still need to extol the virtues of wilderness.
It's without question.
And hunters have been some of the great conservationists in American history.
I mean, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, you know,
really started the modern conservation movement because he was a hunter.
But we need to know how to behave in nature at this point, right?
I mean, in the 94, 98% of the, or 92% of the landscape that, because America, we've tended to either, you know, 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, you know, 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 like feet on the ground.
Like, so do you have like practical people in your lineage where you talk?
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 psychedelic.
I think about The Omnivore's Dilemma was very present in, you know, when I was going through, you know, college and around that time, I think it was a graduate. 2006.
Okay. So, yeah, shortly, it was after college, but that book was everywhere. And the mantra from that book, right?
Yeah.
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 Marion 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.
Yeah.
Like this is bad, you know.
And like growing up, I read the one that was at 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, 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, 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 beef, which at the time was a tiny little market.
And I had a couple paragraphs on this.
There's another way to do it.
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 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 juxtapose these two food chains, an oil-based food chain and a sunlight-based food chain.
And, you know, my editors were like, hey, this piece is already 8,000 words.
You've got four paragraphs about grass-fed beef, which no one knows anything about and doesn't know where to get.
You know, we got to cut that.
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
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, you know, 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 want to 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 going to just like move to San Francisco or Big Sur,
you know, 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 like dismissed it.
And I feel like we are at an important repetition point where if we're going to break through,
I feel like those two things have to really be married in the movements.
And I see it in you and I'm like in your relationship to these things.
So the practical side and the, you know, the clearly deep relationship to plants in the world.
I mean, I do finally want to push the world in one direction and not in another.
I mean, you know, that's considered advocacy in journalism and I own up to it.
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.
I love 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 the 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, want to 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 going to end psychedelics in the safest way.
I was struck when I started to look at the new food pyramids.
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?
You know, there's some unhealthy elements about the diet there too,
when they eat heavy meals late and, you know,
but now it's people have improved their diet, information travels.
But, you know, we think fried chicken, we think hot dogs, hamburgers.
Mac and cheese.
Mac and cheese, french fries, like cotton candy.
§08Transcript — part 8
These are the most American, as American as apple pie, right?
Made with lard.
Right, so the classic American food,
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. So those generally don't come from the foods I described.
No, they don't. And America's never had a real food tradition 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 these deep roots
in this food tradition,
we were much more vulnerable to marketing
than say the French are, the Italians are.
And they had something to resist
what the marketplace wanted to do with food,
which is, of course, to process it, you know, the cheapest possible raw ingredients.
So, yeah, we need to build an American cuisine that 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,
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 2 diabetes, right?
We're supporting the sugar and we're supporting the treatment.
It's insane.
It is insane.
And it's costing us a fortune.
So we have to change the policy and make healthy food cheaper relative to unhealthy food.
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Is the current administration with the emphasis on healthy eating that they're out there with?
They're not doing anything.
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 going to regulate anything.
And the changes we need in the food system, getting ultra-processed food out of the school lunch program is going to 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 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, you know, they had their thing with seed oils and food as medicine.
And, you know, they were not aligned with science always, but they were passionate about clean food and were willing to drive 100 miles to get at them.
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 Chellie 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.
Right.
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 of like, we're for heart medicine.
that 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, you know, 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 going to cross the line as into a true supported therapeutic by the FDA. It's not
there yet. Was the veterans community, which of course is right and left, but tends to lean right,
if we're honest. And that's pretty remarkable. Yeah, it is. It is. And something I would not
have foreseen. No, no. And it's really to the credit, I think, of the veterans like
Marcus Luttrell and Marcus Capone, but also Rick.
You know, I'll say like I, you know.
Rick Perry.
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 has nothing if not honest.
I adore him too.
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 going to 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 like croissants and orange juice for breakfast.
And he has more energy than any human being alive.
It's crazy.
Awake and cheerful and clear of mind for 20 hours.
And a journalist's dream because he never goes off the record and he'll tell you exactly what he thinks.
I love it.
A couple more questions about psychedelics and then I want to 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 going to get there first.
And hasn't been, by the way, subjected to university drug trials.
Right.
That's kind of incredible.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
So what about MDMA and psilocybin?
They're closer.
So the Resilient is the name of the company.
It used to be Lykos.
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 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.
§09Transcript — part 9
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 going to 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 going to be saying, is this for me?
Is this for my kid?
Is this for my parents?
Yikes.
Well, except for the parents part.
Yeah.
I'm just kidding.
I wouldn't mind doing psychedelics with my parents, but I hear you loud and clear.
I mean, there are people who have predisposition to psychosis or heart issues that-
Yeah.
And look what's happened with cannabis.
I mean, you know, we thought cannabis was a very safe drug, but now that it is being
used so widely, we're learning about addiction.
Psychosis.
And psychosis.
And so, you know, it's going to be a – I think there's a lot of public education to be done to help people navigate this.
And, you know, they're not for everybody.
And there are people who definitely should stay away from psychedelics.
And so, it's going to 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 risks, they're real risks, but there are people whose lives will be saved by this.
I mean, I have interviewed so many people who've had transformative experiences that have, you know, 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 going to benefit an enormous number of people.
But doing it right is not going to 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.
Yeah, Tim's done amazing work.
It's 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 put pressure on.
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.
Maybe 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.
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, you know, 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.
And 90% of the world's adults consume it every day and on and on.
And I love it.
And unless I've been sick, I don't really know life without caffeine.
You should try it, though.
Yeah. So I was going to say, what do you think an experiment like quitting caffeine for an extended period of time could do for somebody like me or for somebody listening that would perhaps allow the caffeine to be even a better experience after? Is that what it's about? Or what did you discover about consciousness? 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.
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 yerba mate, or a couple of other substances.
I interviewed Roland Griffiths 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, you know, the only way you can really understand a drug that you're taking habitually is to get off it.
You can't understand it until 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, you know, that idea of sitting at a desk.
And it was just really hard to do, to shake it.
After a couple days, the symptoms started to subside.
And I finally got to this point where I had no caffeine in my system.
And I wasn't having tea either.
But even then, I didn't feel like myself.
And I thought, 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, you know, 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.
There are a lot of, and some of them are not tied to the caffeine, of course.
They're also very valuable polyphenols in coffee and tea, which are a great boon to the microbiome.
But the day I got back on caffeine, my first cup, it was 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 as 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 going to 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, you know, 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 Peet's is just down the street
and the cheese board and yeah.
Well, I'm so grateful you wrote the book
and that you did the experiment.
I 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.
Well, 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.
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 the whole picture.
And yet, you're not just running around saying one love and everyone should drop acid.
Thank goodness.
I mean, you're obviously a super serious scholar of everything you 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.
Yeah.
It's an audio book.
It's another short audio book.
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.
§10Transcript — part 10
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