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

Andrew Huberman interviews author Michael Pollan on consciousness, plants, psychedelics, and food

Andrew Huberman speaks with Michael Pollan about the nature of consciousness, plant intelligence, psychedelics, and the American food system.

Summary

Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and a new book on consciousness, joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation. The conversation opens with a tribute to the recently deceased poet and farmer Wendell Berry, who influenced both men deeply.

The bulk of the discussion centers on consciousness — what it is, how it might arise, whether plants and animals possess it, and why neuroscience remains fundamentally stuck on the question. Pollan argues that consciousness may originate not in the cortex but in feelings registered in the brain stem, and that the brain-as-computer metaphor is dangerously misleading. He describes his own psilocybin experience of feeling plants were conscious and aware, and uses it to frame his investigation into plant intelligence and sentience.

A significant portion of the conversation is devoted to the microbiome: drawing on Stanford researcher Justin Sonnenberg's work, Huberman raises the provocative possibility that humans are merely vehicles for bacteria seeking to proliferate, while he offers the counter-view that the relationship is genuinely bidirectional — humans have effectively outsourced metabolite production to their microbial inhabitants.

The conversation also explores the inadequacy of separating mind from body, including brain-body communication via the vagus nerve, the time scales over which bodily signals integrate to shape cognition and mood, and a striking experiment showing that ginger — by calming the stomach — measurably reduces moral judgment of repellent scenarios, illustrating how deeply digestive organs are implicated in emotion.

He also discusses ego dissolution through psychedelics, psychedelic policy and political dynamics, the failures of the current administration on food policy despite its rhetoric, and what his experiment of quitting caffeine for three months revealed about addiction and awareness.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Opening: Wendell Berry and the natural world

Andrew Huberman: Michael Pollan, welcome.

Michael Pollan: Thank you. Good to be here.

Andrew Huberman: Longtime fan of your books, of you. I've had the privilege of speaking on stage next to you, although mostly I was just listening to you because you are this amazing intersection of science writer. You've written about food, psychedelics, now consciousness. You'll tell us about your new work on the microbiome. I feel like there's also some Wendell Berry woven in there.

Michael Pollan: Big Wendell Berry fan. I didn't insult you. I didn't shout about that.

Andrew Huberman: We just lost him, too.

Michael Pollan: Oh, is that right?

Andrew Huberman: He died like two weeks ago.

Michael Pollan: Oh my goodness.

Andrew Huberman: I'm like a huge Wendell Berry fan.

Michael Pollan: Really? Me, too. Oh my goodness. He taught me how to write and he taught me how to think about certain things. He had a huge influence on me. I was very fond of him.

Andrew Huberman: Did you ever meet him?

Michael Pollan: Oh, yeah. We had — 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. It was the one time where the whole community got together and racial lines were crossed, and the tobacco barns are gorgeous — the barns with the slots for drying. So he wanted me to see those when I came there.

Andrew Huberman: Amazing. Yeah, I was feeling a little anxious about bringing in that reference in case you weren't a fan or didn't like his work, but clearly he was a magnificent poet —

Michael Pollan: — and farmer and essayist. Yeah. 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. 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 headful of Thoreau and Emerson from college and graduate school and I was kind of stymied — like, what do I do about weeds? You're 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 wrote these essays and convinced me. He said we have a legitimate quarrel with nature, and that our relationship — we do have to make changes in nature for us to survive. That's kind of who we are as the species who remakes nature in various ways, but it has to be done more like a marriage than a domination. 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.

Andrew Huberman: Amazing. I'm saddened to hear that he passed, but he certainly left behind —

Michael Pollan: Well, it's a pretty good run.

Andrew Huberman: 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 go read some of his poems. They're an incredible journey.

Michael Pollan: Full stop.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I'm with you.

Defining consciousness — and why neuroscience avoids it

Andrew Huberman: Let's talk about consciousness. As a neuroscientist, I was taught to avoid this issue.

Michael Pollan: I hear it was the kiss of death at a certain point, right?

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Michael Pollan: I almost did.

Andrew Huberman: Clearly not. But yeah, maybe you can tell us why it's so precarious. 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?

Michael Pollan: 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 — 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 one — I don't know if it's a definition exactly — is Thomas Nagel, the philosopher who in the 1970s wrote a brilliant essay called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" 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. So yes, bats are conscious by that definition. Is it like something to be a computer? That's a real question that I think we're going to have to face.

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 — 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, ground-floor kind of consciousness that includes awareness of your environment and a recognition of changes — whether they're good or bad — and that may be universal. 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, where you can't program instinctually everything you need to know. And consciousness is how we do sentience. We've added on all these things. 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. To take our version of consciousness and make that the standard for everybody seems kind of crazy.

Plant intelligence and sentience

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Michael Pollan: Bacteria can.

Andrew Huberman: Bacteria can. They can sense light. They actually know the difference between morning and evening.

Michael Pollan: And they have chemotaxis. They know the difference between something that's good to eat and something that's toxic.

Andrew Huberman: 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 I want to draw the line for some reason. A plant will 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. I feel like the other stuff is just reflexive.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, it's reflexive, but I don't think it's always programmed. I think 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 took a deep dive into this field of plant intelligence, which is fascinating. The things we're learning that plants can do that you would not have guessed. You can take a corn plant and it can navigate a maze — you can give it a maze and put some fertilizer, some ammonium nitrate, in one corner of it, and the roots will find the fastest path to that ammonium nitrate. That's not a situation it really experiences in nature. That takes a certain kind of intelligence, problem-solving ability.

If you play the sound of caterpillars chomping on leaves for a plant, they will react to the sound and send either toxins or bad-tasting chemicals to that leaf to defend themselves. They can respond to the sound of water, and if they hear water running through a pipe, they will grow toward it. They have like twenty 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. It's remarkable.

One of the most curious things about plants to me is that they respond to the same anesthetics we do. Now, you might think — what does it mean to put a plant out? Aren't they already out? But actually they're just slow. They have behaviors, they're just very slow. So you take a plant with a really fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and you put it in a bell jar and you put some anesthetic gas in — xenon gas, or any number of things you can put in gas form — and they will not respond to an insect crossing their threshold, where normally they would clamp down. 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 would say that's sentience — that there's a loss of sentience happening when they are anesthetized. But as you know, anesthetics are really weird. We don't even know how they work on us. Xenon gas is an inert gas and it puts you out. How does that work?

Andrew Huberman: This will scare anyone going in for surgery. The anesthesiologists have gotten much better. They know what they're doing.

Michael Pollan: They know what they're doing.

Self versus other as a foundation for consciousness

Andrew Huberman: Can we go at self versus other as maybe one potential window into this? When I think about the consciousness problem, I think most people know that they are them and they know what's not them. And maybe a decent analogy is when nerve cells grow, they know the difference between them and other cells. So at the cellular level, this is already set up. And in fact, I love your example of the root growing towards the fertilizer, because you can give a nerve cell a simple rule — 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 —

Michael Pollan: — even within the same species.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So the dendrites and axons — the branches of the neurons — often have these beautiful architectures. Those are set up by a simple rule of self-avoidance. The branches know that they are of the same neuron and they just keep growing and 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 around you. That's how you get all these different cell types. And I was shocked and excited to learn that that's kind of how tree roots do it too.

Michael Pollan: Yes, I was going to say.

Andrew Huberman: So simple rules can build immense complexity. That's the point. And the self-recognizing self versus other, and then a simple rule of get as much stuff as you can — it sounds very selfish, right? — sets up a great system, because then everyone's doing that and you end up with essentially a tiled system. No tree, no neuron gets too much space.

Michael Pollan: And while this is all very cellular and we're literally talking about the branches of cells, it's not thinking. I feel like when you get up to the whole organism, I know the difference between me and you, me and the microphone. These plants seem to know the difference between them and the fertilizer. So this lack of confusion about what's me and what's not me seems to be like the most important rule that perhaps builds up to the consciousness thing.

Andrew Huberman: 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 connection but are separate plants — they will share soil and grow together. But if they're not related, even if they're the same species, they will compete. Ditto — the plant that when plants are shaded by another plant, they grow fast to get above it. But if they're shaded by themselves, they know, well, we're getting the light over there, so I don't have to go there.

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 — self and other is an important part of consciousness, although you can have consciousness without a self. Meditators know this. Psychedelics can give you an experience of consciousness without a self. I think we have it every morning when we wake up. There's that 500 milliseconds when you're reconstituting — who am I? Where am I? Oh, here I am.

Michael Pollan: And it's 750 milliseconds if you're in a hotel room, as I realized this morning.

Andrew Huberman: Yes, that's kind of weird. There is a consciousness that is not organized around a self. Buddhists have known this for a long time, but it's a strange idea.

Plants, psychedelics, and cross-species communication

Andrew Huberman: Going back to the plants and their intelligence — I've spent a little bit of time with people in the plant medicine community. Not a lot. There does seem to be this understanding, 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 isolated compounds synthesized 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 odor effects on us, some are poisonous, some are delicious and wonderful and nourishing. What do you think about this sort of cross-species communication? Do you think it's a real thing?

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

Michael Pollan: I don't think it's crazy. I haven't had that experience myself. I did have an experience — and this was on psilocybin, which 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, so that's good. Otherwise it could get scary.

And I didn't know what to do with that. There's a whole question with insights you have on psychedelics — do they have any value and how do you judge their value? In my case, I thought back to William James, who had written in Varieties of Religious Experience that you can't really judge the veracity of a big insight from 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 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. 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 — this plant located in western China, and now it's everywhere. The reason it did is it learned that if it produced this chemical called THC, it was going to get carried around the world and reproduced.

I think we're in this symbiotic relationship with plants and they do manipulate us. They're geniuses at biochemistry, and that's a function of the fact that they can't get up and run away. They're rooted — sessile, as it's called. So instead of consciousness like we have and the ability to move around, they developed chemicals, this incredible suite of chemicals. And they hit on some chemicals that happen to change our consciousness. This has been one of the most successful evolutionary 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. Caffeine might kill some insects. But somewhere along the line, they learned that it was better to just mess with your mind than kill you outright, because if they killed you outright, you would very quickly develop resistance. You'd select for resistant members of the species.

The way I learned this was courtesy of my cat, Frank. Frank had a real catnip problem. Every night I would go down to my garden to harvest some lettuce or something, and I had a catnip plant. Frank would follow me and look at me, and he needed to be reminded where the catnip was — like, why don't you know where it is? — because he would get so wrecked on catnip that he would forget. And that's a brilliant strategy on the part of the plant to get your predator to forget where you are. And the other thing they do, of course — many plant chemicals, psychoactive chemicals, diminish your appetite. Another brilliant strategy.

So I have enormous respect for what they do and what they do to us, and I really see them as active players in this drama. I wrote a book called The 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. I have ultimate respect for their ingenuity.

Andrew Huberman: When you say they've "figured out" — do you mean that, sticking with the rule of evolution, you just want to make as much of yourself as you possibly can? Try not to die, try to at least live long enough to proliferate and make sure that the young make it?

Michael Pollan: And in retrospect it looks like you figured something out, but in fact you're just trying things and certain things work. The plants that had the most caffeine proliferated in a way the ones that had the least caffeine did not. I think about dogs a lot because I love them. I'm told that dogs descended from wolves that figured out that if they were kind enough and 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. They're not getting together and having a little backroom conversation like, "We've almost got them." But it's been very advantageous for the domestic dog. They're very well treated — better than some humans, in fact.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And there are only 50,000 wolves left in this country. How many dogs are there? It was a good strategy.

Michael Pollan: And more people have dogs now than when I was growing up. COVID led to a lot of people getting dogs. Most people don't get dogs to do work. They get dogs to be family members. So they're really figuring stuff out. They got us.

Andrew Huberman: They got us. But this "figuring stuff out" thing, as it relates to consciousness — maybe it brings us back to the definitions. 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. So do you think that this consciousness — of plants, of dogs, of humans — can emerge through the simple flipping of switches that are hardwired into us? Or do they have any say in this? Do they realize they're doing better for the next generation? Because plants don't get to see what happens to their seeds, and in most cases dogs don't really know what happens to their puppies once they're adopted out.

Michael Pollan: Humans are unique in this way. I think we have a self-awareness and a sense of — we can time travel. Your dog probably can time travel a few minutes, or maybe a half hour if it's really hungry. 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.

Our brains are doing a lot more than we're aware of — 24/7 they're monitoring our body, 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 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. 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.

I really agree with Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts who works with organoids and what he calls xenobots. 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. A lot of his project is actually deemphasizing genes and deemphasizing neurons too. He's shown that memory resides not necessarily in neurons. There are other ways. He looks at bioelectric fields and that these can hold memories in groups of cells. These xenobots that he creates — he does this with skin cells from tadpoles, puts them in a solution, they clump together and form a new organism that only lasts about a week or two. 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 encoding those instructions. Anyway, it's taken him to a very odd place in biology.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, you're right. And I think there are things going on that are products of just an intelligent being with enough tools and cognitive ability to navigate an unfamiliar world. That's what it takes to survive in evolution.

The prefrontal cortex, the microbiome, and the question of who's in charge

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

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, if we activate it, people go into a rage. But then there's all the other stuff — where we can control our impulses and think about past, present, and future and build technologies and creativity. Symphonies, spaceships, poetry, and on and on. We think it's so important, and it is. But I have this big problem lately, which is I think that this prefrontal cortex expansion that happened in humans — I lose a lot of sleep over this. I worry that we have enough of it that we've perhaps tricked ourselves into over-investing in our own importance and the meaning of being here.

And here's where it gets to the microbiome. Justin Sonnenberg, my colleague at Stanford working on the microbiome, scared the — well, no pun intended — out of me when he said these microbiota that live in all of us create these critical chemicals for brain health and can impact our behavior, whether or not we feel sick or more energetic, more outgoing. There's this incredible array of ways they influence us. He said when we shake hands, when we kiss our romantic partner, when we exchange a bill or a credit card, our microbiome is proliferating and moving. And I get really worked up about the possibility that all of this — 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 microbiota trying to get us to interact with as many other people as possible. They aren't sitting there cackling, thinking about how we are losing out and suffering, but I just worry that perhaps Sonnenberg's theory is right — which is we're literally just vehicles. And that keeps me up at night.

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 and proliferate. So it sort of bookends the two levels of sophistication — 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 maybe we're deluding ourselves. It's all just about getting these microbiota where they want to go.

Michael Pollan: You know, they've been around a lot longer than we have. We evolved in a world dominated by bacteria and other microbes. And from their perspective, this animal comes along that offers certain advantages — like it 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. But there's a sense in which it's true. It's also true that we're calling the shots in some ways from our perspective.

But we should realize — the subtitle of The Botany of Desire was "A Plant's-Eye View of the World," and there is a perspective, just as legitimate, in which we are dupes of these bacteria. Yes, they want us to shake hands. They want us to do all sorts of things because this extends their range, and they want us to be sociable too. If we were all kind of shy and introverted, it would not serve their purposes. And they are influencing our moods. So it is kind of creepy in a way, but it's also kind of beautiful — that life is using us, and that we are a collective being. We are a super-organism. We have more bacterial genes in our body than we have human genes, and we need those genes.

The other story about it is you could also argue that we are manipulating them. Justin's done really good work on this — we have outsourced the making of all sorts of metabolites, chemicals we need: glutamate, GABA, serotonin. They're making all these short-chain fatty acids that are a fuel for our brain but also are calming our moods, 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. We're manipulating them at the same time they're manipulating us. I think it's a two-way street.

Andrew Huberman: Okay, that's a fair touch. Hope that helps you sleep.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. Well, 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. Space food is very bad for bacteria. It's incredibly sanitary. The kind of stuff they bring on intergalactic travel is going to be really bad for the bacteria.

Andrew Huberman: So if we don't make it, it's because the bacteria know Mars is a bad habitat.

Michael Pollan: They know Mars is a shitty habitat.

Meaning, memory, and the limits of language

Andrew Huberman: I'm only half kidding about this one. I think it gets to another layer of the consciousness question, which is about meaning. Part of the function of the prefrontal cortex is that we can assign meaning to things. We both like Wendell Berry. We both have feelings associated with memories. I can go as deep into this as I'll allow myself to. I like the feeling of the paper — it's different for a Wendell Berry poem only because that was my experience. So I can place all this meaning on top of things, and that's related to memory. We don't know that other species do that. Elephants perhaps.

Michael Pollan: I try and break it down to that because I saw one of these beautiful nature documentaries talking about male lions fighting. Their hypothalamus looks a lot like ours — the ventromedial hypothalamus, a subset of neurons. Mice have them, we have them, they have them. 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. The lion who was just fighting the other one — who arguably should let the other one die — understands this us-them thing and goes and fights the hyenas off. 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. They redefine the "us." The "I" is now plural.

Andrew Huberman: So it's dynamic. And the reason I'm asking this — I'd love your thoughts on collective consciousness. This "us" thing within and across species feels like a critical gate for getting closer to understanding what consciousness is, at least for me.

Michael Pollan: I'd attack it from another direction. 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. For a long time it was believed that consciousness was surely this advanced human achievement — remember, we didn't think anybody else was conscious for hundreds of years. Since Descartes, we had a monopoly on consciousness. It's only in 1970 that the first mirror test on a chimp was done and we started thinking, oh, these primates are conscious also. That's fairly recent — 55 years ago.

It was assumed that consciousness was a cortical phenomenon. There is another line of research, though, 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 protégé of Damasio's — suggesting that actually consciousness doesn't begin with thought in the cortex but with feeling in the brain stem. Feelings registered in the brain stem. The reason we have consciousness, according to this theory, is because there are these homeostatic set points, and the brain exists to keep the body alive. We forget that. We're cerebrocentric in so many ways. The body has to communicate with the brain, and it does it through feelings — like hunger and warmth or cold and itch — all these homeostatic feelings that register in the upper brain stem. 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 to book a table in a restaurant.

If indeed this is true, and feelings have to be felt — a feeling implies consciousness — then first of all, lots more animals are conscious. Everybody's got a brain stem. Not everybody, but a whole lot of species have brain stems, whereas the cortex is a more exclusive club.

I found that a very persuasive way to think about consciousness — that it starts with feelings in the body, and a lot of what the brain is doing is interpreting those feelings. They're just signals. William James wrote about this. He said, first there's the spike in heart rate, and then the brain says "fear." So there's this communication going on, and the cortex might get involved in that process. But pain, for example, is a conscious phenomenon that doesn't require a cortex. The evidence for this is people who have no cortex — some children are born without one. They've decorticated animals and found they still have, based on expressions and behaviors, evidence that they're having conscious experience. So for me that changed the whole way of thinking about it.

This remains to be proven in various ways, and it doesn't solve the issue of — okay, well, how does a feeling come to be felt? And who's feeling it? Is there a self that's feeling it? I find Damasio not satisfying on that question. In his new book he says that feelings are spontaneously conscious, and that's not really a satisfactory answer.

Andrew Huberman: It's hard to wrap my head around that answer. "Spontaneous" is doing a lot of work there.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. No discredit to him — he's done amazing work. He's directed the whole field to the importance of feelings, and that's produced really important work in emotion science. He's a real pioneer.

Emotion, the body, and the limits of language

Andrew Huberman: I feel like one of the challenges of being human is that people experience the world differently enough at the level of emotions. Some people think in feels — they experience things more somatically. 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 different words for types of sadness. I think she told me that in Japan there's a specific word for the type of sadness you experience when you got a bad haircut.

Michael Pollan: 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. That's how culture interacts with biology — there are different ways to interpret the same sensations. I think we learn this with kids when they melt down — they don't know if they're hungry or tired, and the parent has to teach them, you need to eat. They're getting the signals, but they don't have the mental equipment, the cortical equipment, to interpret what's going on.

Andrew Huberman: 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 at the nerve networks and say the brain is sophisticated and the neural innervation to and from the body is not sophisticated. It's as precise as the other. So the problem seems to be that we don't have language for it. If I'm feeling wholeheartedly full of joy, that's an easy one. But where I think neuroscience really needs some help is: how is it that the body is communicating with the brain in ways that get us away from language labels? Because language labels — we created those. Words are just shaped exhales after all, right? Which is amazing. Eddie Chang, chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, who studies speech and language and is my childhood friend — he said, very calmly, "You know, all speech is just shaped exhales." And I was like, oh my goodness. And yet we don't know the language of the body.

Michael Pollan: And 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.

Andrew Huberman: You're bang on. It's 80%. The descending projection is about 15 to 20%. Nobody knows for sure. So most people when they talk about the neuroscience get some things right — you're exactly right on every neuroscience point you've made.

Michael Pollan: Thank you. That means a lot coming from you. So what do those signals look like? How raw are they? Stress hormones released through inflammation change mood and get to the brain, and then suddenly make us feel threatened. I think it's really complicated. I think there's some very precise information reaching the brain, but I also think it needs a brain to interpret it.

Andrew Huberman: Can we talk about the time scale of all this? It's pretty straightforward to think about body versus mind, and I'm wondering whether the body is communicating with the brain at a time scale that doesn't match to language. Maybe how I feel right now actually reflects the integration of everything that happened over the last ten hours. So how my brain is operating right now reflects that. When I think of brain-body communication, I immediately want to default to the now — what's my body feeling now, how does it impact my brain? But maybe the signals are of long time scales. Maybe they integrate across my spleen, my stomach, and my heart, and then my liver and my pancreas are sending another message. We don't know any of this.

Michael Pollan: No, and it excites me because I feel like there lie the answers to being able to parse this experience of life and consciousness. I'm really struck by the fact that we locate our seat of feeling and emotion in our heads most of the time. But if you go back in history, they talked as much about the spleen and the liver and the heart — they understood something about emotions was coming from the body.

My favorite example is an experiment done on moral judgment and disgust — moral disgust. They had two groups of people. One got a placebo, one got powdered ginger. They then exposed people to really morally repellent scenarios in writing — about incest, 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 passing through our digestive organs. And you can manipulate with something as simple as ginger people's moral judgment. That says to me this whole system is a lot more integrated than we even realize, and the whole idea of separating mind and body, brain and body, is taking us down the wrong path. These things are inextricably bound up in ways that are just too complex for us to get.

Andrew Huberman: It's a disgusting but elegant example of how this can work. And I know if I have some minor pain like a back strain, I'm much less patient. I look at the world differently. 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.

Collective consciousness, ego dissolution, and psychedelics

Andrew Huberman: Maybe that takes us a little bit to psychedelics and collective consciousness. 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. The words "collective consciousness" years ago were about "one love," right? And that didn't work in terms of convincing people to live in peace with all other humans and animals. Clearly. Sadly. So that doesn't mean collective consciousness isn't worth thinking about. But just like we say breath work is too broad a term — anything that lumps so much that you lose critical information — if I say collective consciousness, I want to be clear I'm not talking about one love. Although that's a great goal. Peace on earth would be nice. I don't know that I'm going to see it in my lifetime.

Michael Pollan: We're going the wrong way.

Andrew Huberman: It's tough. Too many repeating themes of the sort that I wouldn't like to see are visible. So how do you define collective consciousness? 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. And then I kind of try and pressure-test that and say, is there a version of collective consciousness, everybody wins, that's based on truth — not based on lies? I think that's where it failed, because people are people, and there are bad humans and 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. How can we get to a collective consciousness that embraces 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? So I'm throwing out a huge can of worms here, but how do you think about this collective consciousness thing? Is it about living in peace and harmony as a species with other species?

Michael Pollan: That's been the dream of psychedelics for a long time — that they would diminish the ego and contribute to pro-social feeling, a sense of connection, a sense that we're more alike than we're different. It doesn't always work. We have cases of ego dissolution and we have cases of ego inflation with psychedelics.

Andrew Huberman: Can you talk more about that?

Michael Pollan: Yeah. A very common phenomenon on high-dose psychedelics is the sense of losing a sense of self. I mentioned earlier that you can be conscious without a sense of self. I've had that experience. I describe it in two of my books — on 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. 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 from a 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 defense — it's the us-and-them thing we were talking about. You merge with something larger because there's nothing to stand in the way. 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 — a Bach unaccompanied cello suite. And I became this piece of music. It was the most beautiful experience of music I'd ever had. There was no subject-object distinction. I was it. I wasn't listening to it. I was it.

This is something that pushes you toward getting over ego-consciousness, which is at the root of a lot of the discord that we feel in the world. Obviously it's not a permanent state anyone can be in. But the legacy of that experience is that I have more perspective on my ego. I know when he's up to his old tricks — when he's being too critical or aggressive or too self-interested — and I say, "Oh, that's my ego." And that's just one voice, and there are other voices I can listen to. So I think there's a value in having an experience of ego dissolution.

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, 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 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 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 — it happens in sex, it happens in experiences of awe, in religious experience. It happens to people in church and synagogue all the time. So where are we on this? I don't think it's so simple to say that there's a collective consciousness. I think we toggle back and forth between getting trapped in self and escaping it. And of course self is really important — 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. It distances us from people and makes us selfish.

Consciousness as a field — and the hard problem

Andrew Huberman: There's another idea of collective consciousness, of course — that consciousness is a field that exists outside us and we all take part in it.

Michael Pollan: 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. If you conceive of consciousness as like electromagnetic waves, brains are like radio receivers or TV receivers. You wouldn't look in the TV set for the woman who gave you the weather report. She's not there. She's somewhere else.

So I don't know that that's true. But coming out of this experience of studying this, I don't dismiss an idea like that. I don't dismiss panpsychism either — the idea that the particles in this table have some itty-bitty bit of consciousness that somehow gets combined in conscious beings like us. You have to keep an open mind, because our presumption that consciousness is an emergent property of brain complexity — that idea doesn't have much traction.

So maybe there is a field of consciousness that we tune into. How do we prove it? We were talking earlier about Christof Koch, who's a scientist we both greatly admire. He was a real physicalist, a materialist scientist who believed it was all about the brains, and he was head of the 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. 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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. 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 — that 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?

Michael Pollan: Yeah, that'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.

Andrew Huberman: And then the other piece about consciousness inside versus outside — I think maybe it will be helpful for people 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 "electromagnetic energies in the world" it sounds woo to some, but it's anything but. It's simply that certain wavelengths of light, certain sound waves that we can detect, mechanical touch, chemical sensing — combine to bind our experience. We're abstracting our visual image of each other sitting across this table. 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 in one model, consciousness is an abstraction that's created within our brains. We combine electromagnetic energies, whatever other faculties our neurons can contribute, combined with whatever gut signals, 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. So we're not abstracting it in our minds — it's literally entering through presumably our senses, maybe an additional sense we're not even aware of, and we're experiencing it, but it's literally out there. I don't experience you as a bunch of photons. I experience you as a human. So I'm either putting it together inside, or it's put together outside and gets recapitulated.

Michael Pollan: These are called filter theories of consciousness. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was an exponent of this, and Aldous Huxley believed this and talked about it in The Doors of Perception — that he had some access to this field, and for him it was psychedelics. It was a mescaline experience that convinced him of this. The idea was that there's more consciousness out there than we can handle, and that there is a filter — what Huxley called a reducing valve — and it basically admits what he called the measly trickle of consciousness we need to survive.

Andrew Huberman: God, that's brilliant. Because if we took in all the wavelengths of light, for instance, we wouldn't be able to see — I'd be overwhelmed with whatever that would look like or feel like.

Michael Pollan: Our senses are limiting. They're not as expansive as they might be. And your example of the bees is right — there are all these spectrums of light we can't see. It's also worth remembering that it was only like 120 or 150 years ago that we learned there was an electromagnetic field that you could actually use to convey information, and it's invisible. That's pretty heady stuff. So the thinking is, well, there might be another field. And didn't we just learn about this other body system? There's lymph and blood and there's a third one.

Andrew Huberman: There's like the interstitium thing. Yes.

Michael Pollan: 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 rigorous science now.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, the acupuncturists are all like, "Yeah, we were telling you about this." Certain sites can increase or decrease inflammation. Chiu-fang's lab at Harvard Med is doing beautiful work on this.

Michael Pollan: So we shouldn't limit ourselves. The idea that we've discovered all there is to discover in terms of fields and consciousness — it may look very different. I was talking to Alison Gopnik, who's another colleague in psychology at Berkeley, and she was saying, well, the hard problem — we may decide that consciousness is not one thing, and maybe that's our mistake. We did that with the vital force that was going to explain life. We tend, when we have a mystery, to make it singular, and sometimes the answer is breaking it up into parts. 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'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 — we call them agents because they act on their own interest. So maybe it's possible to have an ego without being conscious, because I don't think they're conscious. We may be taking apart this idea at some point, and maybe that'll help us to understand it.

The brain-as-computer metaphor and memory

Andrew Huberman: It's a super intriguing idea. I sometimes wonder if AI will tell us what consciousness is in a way that we aren't able to solve ourselves. 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.

Michael Pollan: We're stuck. We're absolutely stuck. And the effort to make a conscious AI, which is underway — there are individuals and some companies who are trying to make it conscious, not just intelligent, and those are not the same things. If they fail or succeed, they're 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. It can play chess or Go or whatever.

So if they succeed in making conscious AI, it'll discount the feeling idea. I don't think they can. 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. You know enough neuroscience to see that yes, it does some computations, but take the distinction between hardware and software — that doesn't really exist in brains. 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 computer — we're not being vigilant about that metaphor at all. I don't 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 that our brains create memories in one or two structures but then export them to a bunch of other areas. Distributed memory doesn't exist in most computers. And memory makes a physical change in the brain. 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.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. There are these issues in neuroscience that never really get resolved. One of the things perplexing to me is that there were two labs — Susumu Tonegawa's lab at MIT and Mark Mayford's lab at Scripps — that essentially ran the same experiment where they used an animal model where 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. You'd say neurons A, B, C, D fired in a certain order, and then you could go back and actually replay those neurons and found that if you played them in the exact same sequence you got the same behavior. Here's the problem: you could play those neurons backwards or all at once and get the exact same behavior. So this throws a serious wrench into our understanding of the brain. The notion that you need things firing in a particular sequence was completely undermined by those experiments. It would be like if I said, "These are the keys that you play in a song and it sounds like the song" — and then I 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 memories is — it's complete horseshit. It also turns out that every one of those neurons is participating in a bunch of other memories. That's great because that's great allocation of resources and redundancy. But we just don't understand how the brain is encoding experiences even at that level, and that's a problem.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, it's a huge problem. I don't know a lot about this, but it sounds to me like a quantum effect — that it's happening simultaneously.

Andrew Huberman: Tell me more about that.

Michael Pollan: This is not my area of expertise, so anything you say will be new. I heard a talk by Michio Kaku the other day and he was talking about quantum computers — that they will not work in a linear way, one after another. When they're solving a problem, they'll do it all at once. Simultaneity 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 — two particles separated by light years can nevertheless affect one another. 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 only work at these tiny scales, but in fact they work at all scales. We also have questions about whether they work in a warm, wet environment like a brain — quantum computers have to be chilled to nearly absolute zero. But I think in the next 50 years, we'll be trying to figure out if what we know about quantum reality may have something to do with creating consciousness. That's as far as I can go. You know everything I know about it now.

Andrew Huberman: Amazing. I mean, I think the brain is a receiver. I've heard that before, but today it really makes sense to me.

Michael Pollan's background — gardening, writing, and the natural world

Andrew Huberman: Can I ask about you? And can our listeners perhaps get some advice from you? You've written ten books and I'm sensing a thread through all of them about the natural world, about us, how those relate, and coming to some better understanding of self and relating to the world in a more benevolent way. It dawned on me as we were sitting down — I think the world knows very little about you. Maybe that's intentional. But I just want to know: when you were younger, were you intrigued by or drawn to flora and fauna? Were you thinking about humans in a certain way? You have this very interdigitated way of thinking about us and them — you understand the difference between a human and a plant and an animal, but you also find these incredible points of connectivity. Can you trace that back to something in particular?

Michael Pollan: 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 thinking about the pits, the seeds — my mother would always encourage me to spit them out. And I did that. I took some watermelon seeds and just covered them with dirt. I was really young and then forgot about it. That must have been May or June. And I came back in September and lo and behold there was a watermelon. It was the size of a football, but to me it was huge. I was just so blown away by this. It was a formative moment. 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. Gardening was a really big part of it. And you know, that puts you in an active relationship to nature. Most of us have a very observer-type relationship — we admire it from a distance on vacation. But gardening thrusts you right in the middle of it and you have to make decisions. Your plants have interests. You're not the only interested creature here. Your plants have interests, and to the extent you can satisfy their interest, they're going to give you what you want. So that, years later, I wrote my first book about that. And I realized what was going on in the garden is no different than what goes on on the farm. So it was very easy to go from there.

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. About 8% of the American landscape has been locked up, which is great. Although actually Trump's trying to open the lock again, trying to sell some of it.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, in Utah. I will say, as a quick note — this angers me so much. My friends who are hunters and real outdoors people were very excited about the protection of these lands and now they're essentially pissed at all forms of government. They were promised something and it was taken away. They're now truly outside the box of any political party. They will die before they let go of this land.

Michael Pollan: And hunters have been some of the great conservationists in American history. Teddy Roosevelt really started the modern conservation movement because he was a hunter. But we need to know how to behave in nature at this point — in the 92% of the landscape that isn't protected. Because in America we've tended to either have virgin nature or raped nature. We have this very strong binary, and once we've decided that this side goes to capitalism and the marketplace, we abuse it. And we have abused it. So learning how to behave in nature is really important, and that's guided a lot of my work. Consciousness is part of that — where do our minds engage with matter and nature and biology? And it's amazing we don't know yet.

Andrew Huberman: You also strike me as somebody who thinks about these very high-level problems, but many people who talk about psychedelics and write about psychedelics and think about collective consciousness and are friendly with plants — they're not feet on the ground. Gardening also has a practical aspect. You can't just wish the plants to grow. But you've made great efforts to get 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?

Michael Pollan: I've been kind of surprised that a couple of my books have actually changed a public conversation — around food, and then around psychedelics. I never set out to start something. 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 — and I have great admiration for them — is that those were about what not to do. Like, this is bad. Whereas my book was about the love of these things, so it was this benevolence.

Andrew Huberman: Good point. Whereas your book was about the love of these things, so it was this benevolence.

Michael Pollan: 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. I remember I wrote a piece for the New York Times that became a chapter in The Omnivore's Dilemma about the meat industry. I followed this one cow through the whole process, from insemination to slaughter. It's a pretty dark story about how we produce beef in this country. It's like 8,000 words. But I made a point to say, well, what are the alternatives? And I learned about grass-fed, grass-finished beef, which at the time was a tiny little market. I had a couple paragraphs on this — there's another way to do it.

I was making the point that the food chain from which most of us are eating beef is floating on a sea of oil — 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. It's just such a pathological system. But there's another food chain that takes sunlight captured by grass that feeds this animal. I juxtaposed these two food chains — an oil-based food chain and a sunlight-based food chain. And my editors were like, "Hey, this piece is already 8,000 words. You've got four paragraphs about grass-fed beef, which no one knows anything about and doesn't know where to get. We've got to cut that." And I said, "No, we have to leave that. That just shows the hope that we can grow our food using sunlight, not oil." And I won the fight, luckily.

A couple weeks after this piece came out — it made quite a bit of noise at the time — I walked into a butcher shop on College Avenue in Oakland, and 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 might be useful, and that individuals can have some agency and not be just victims of these big systems.

Andrew Huberman: And I'm sensing you're an optimistic person.

Michael Pollan: Finally. I think I am. I also think that — I'm the oldest of four kids. My father, who's no longer with us, was alcoholic. I had a lot of responsibility for being a sane person in the family dynamic, helping my mother with the household 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 to start with materialism, and if materialism fails, then we'll look at other, weirder ideas.

Andrew Huberman: I'm sorry to hear about your father and why you had to step into that role, but the world is fortunate that you did. Because when I look at the important movements of the last 50 or 60 years — and I think psychedelics is one of them — where each of those movements reached its cliff was when the individual or individuals leading that movement were either too emotive and not practical enough, or so practical and removed from thinking about new possibilities that they dismissed it. And I feel like we're at an important repetition point where if we're going to break through, those two things have to really be married. And I see it in you — the practical side and the clearly deep relationship to plants and the world.

Michael Pollan: I do finally want to push the world in one direction and not in another. Once I've mastered a subject, it would be disingenuous not to say I think we need to move this way. Not that we've had such success. I just wrote a new introduction to The Omnivore's Dilemma and I wish the book were more dated than it is. 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 and 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 an 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. 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, holdovers from the '60s, the drug war and things like that.

Psychedelics, politics, and FDA approval

Andrew Huberman: Now the red side is all about ibogaine for veterans.

Michael Pollan: It's the most amazing transformation. Rick Perry — self-described, he said it, I'm happy to repeat it — he calls himself a knuckle-dragging Republican who's into heart medicine. He really wants these medicines to be available to all veterans who are experiencing PTSD and substance abuse issues. And he's worked very hard across the aisle to try and bring these things to legal, safe use.

And this is the only way in our current political moment anything gets done — 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 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 want to push the world in the same direction.

Andrew Huberman: That's a really good — we have some hope. There's some hope there.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. We've got to really break down the divisions to move healthy eating forward.

Andrew Huberman: I was just going to end on psychedelics in the safest way. I was struck when I started to look at the new food pyramid stuff — I realized that American foods have never been healthy. We think fried chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, mac and cheese, French fries, cotton candy — as American as apple pie, right? So the classic American foods were all very unhealthy. I wonder if there's a way to redefine what American food is. 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. Those generally don't come from the foods I described.

Michael Pollan: No, they don't. America never had a real food tradition until fast food — that's really our food. 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 that since we didn't have these deep roots and this food tradition, we were much more vulnerable to marketing than, say, the French or the Italians, who had something to resist — what the marketplace wanted to do with food, which is of course to process it with the cheapest possible raw ingredients.

So yeah, we need to build an American cuisine that is healthy. But it's easier said than done. Or we borrow — look, we talk about the Mediterranean diet, which is 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. We could borrow it from somewhere else. But it's very hard to change people's eating habits.

There is 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 — we subsidize corn, which gives us high fructose corn syrup, which gives us diabetes — we're supporting both sides in the war on type 2 diabetes. We're supporting the sugar and we're supporting the treatment. It's insane. And it's costing us a fortune. So we have to change the policy and make healthy food cheaper relative to unhealthy food.

Andrew Huberman: Is the current administration, with the emphasis on healthy eating that they're out there with — are they doing anything?

Michael Pollan: They're not doing it. 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-institution programs 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. 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 — are going to require regulations. And they're deregulating pesticides like crazy.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, that's concerning.

Michael Pollan: Very concerning. So no, I don't think it's an honest effort. But I do think what RFK Jr. has done that is valuable is he's surfaced this other constituency that we were not aware of. 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 The 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. He's in the middle of nowhere, like 45 minutes from the interstate. And these people would show up on Saturdays to pick up their pastured chickens. I was wondering who are these people and how do they know about him? They were part of a whole network. They were MAHA moms before they were called that. They were members of something called the Weston A. Price Society, which promotes grass-based animal protein and has been around since the '30s or so. It has a very big network that no one on the coast notices, but it's out there. And I would talk to these mothers — they had their thing with seed oils and food is medicine — and they were not always aligned with science, but they were passionate about clean food and were willing to drive 100 miles to get it then.

So Kennedy surfaced these people and now they're engaged politically. And if the food movement can make common cause with them — we've seen some early signs. There was a bill in Congress that the administration was supporting that would have exempted pesticide makers from all lawsuits. 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.

Andrew Huberman: So that's what we need. That's the kind of politics — just like psychedelics, right and left together. You can get things done.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. Amen to that. And it's really to the credit of the veterans — like Marcus Luttrell and Marcus Capone — but also Rick Perry, and Rick Doblin.

Andrew Huberman: The Ricks.

Michael Pollan: The Ricks. Two very different characters. Actually, here's a funny one about Rick Doblin. At this event he got up there and the room was 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.

Andrew Huberman: And you know, 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 supporter, and people gave him a lot of grief — 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. And he reached out to the veterans groups. He deserves some of the credit too.

Michael Pollan: Definitely. The Ricks. And 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 — awake and cheerful and clear of mind for 20 hours.

Andrew Huberman: And a journalist's dream. He never goes off the record and he'll tell you exactly what he thinks.

Michael Pollan: I love it.

Andrew Huberman: Couple more questions about psychedelics and then I want to talk about the most important drug on the planet — caffeine. But when do you think MDMA and/or psilocybin will get FDA approval? 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 it hasn't been subjected to university drug trials.

Michael Pollan: That's kind of incredible. Yeah. So Lykos — the name of the company, it used to be 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. I hear before the end of the year, but I've been hearing it's close for a long time. I think it really is close this time.

The reason it's happening, we should be clear, is because Joe Rogan texted the president and said, "This is really important." He had done a show on ibogaine, and President Trump — having lost or afraid of losing the manosphere vote — wanted to give Rogan something he cared about. 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 to be administered in a certain way with some regulations. But the message that the public will take is that these things that we thought were dangerous drugs are medicines. People who haven't thought about psychedelics — everyone's going to be saying, "Is this for me? Is this for my kid? Is this for my parents?"

Andrew Huberman: Yikes. Well, except for the parents part. I'm just kidding.

Michael Pollan: I wouldn't mind doing psychedelics with my parents, but I hear you loud and clear. There are people who have a predisposition to psychosis or heart issues. And look what's happened with cannabis — we thought cannabis was a very safe drug, but now that it is being used so widely, we're learning about addiction and psychosis. So it's going to be a very interesting couple of years after it's approved. I hope it's done with some care. But there is enormous hope here. Many people — I can talk about the risks, they're real risks — but there are people whose lives will be saved by this. I have interviewed so many people who've had transformative experiences that have cured their addictions, their depression, their OCD. 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.

Andrew Huberman: No. You made all the critical points. And I also want to extend my gratitude to you and Tim Ferriss, who've worked really hard to get this to where it is and hopefully across the line and done right.

Michael Pollan: Tim's done amazing work.

Andrew Huberman: Amazing work. You guys really stuck your necks out there early when it was risky and have really continued to push.

Michael Pollan: 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.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, it landed right. The timing was right.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, the timing was right. I was really early but not so early that the police would be at my door.

Caffeine — the world's most popular drug

Andrew Huberman: I listened to — because as I recall it's only in audio book form — your book about quitting caffeine. I love this book. I drink a lot of caffeine. From the first time I took a sip of mate, I was like, this completes me in some way. And I'm grateful it's caffeine and not alcohol.

Michael Pollan: Much better drug.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I think so. And 90% of the world's adults consume it every day. I love it, and unless I've been sick, I don't really know life without caffeine. 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? Is that what it's about? What did you discover about consciousness, about your relationship to substances or work or focus? What was revealed there?

Michael Pollan: It is in a print book too — I subsequently put it in a book called This Is Your Mind on Plants, which came out a couple of years ago. It's one of three chapters in that book. 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. Something like 90% use it on a daily basis, whether it's in the form of coffee, tea, yerba mate, or a couple of other substances.

I interviewed Roland Griffiths when I started writing about caffeine, because before he got involved with psychedelics — he was the psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins who did the initial work on psilocybin and really launched the psychedelic renaissance — 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 8 or 10. It was a way to be with my dad. He would get up really early in the morning and he got home very late at night, and as I said, he was 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. 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 — it was so wired into my writing process. After a couple of days, the symptoms started to subside. And I finally got to this point where I had no caffeine in my system and I wasn't having tea either. But even then I didn't feel like myself. And I thought, well, isn't that weird? You feel more yourself on a drug than not on the drug. I just felt like I was somebody else. It was hard. I did it for about three months.

All the while I'm researching caffeine and learning about it — 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, and aside from jitteriness if you get it, the negative effects are outweighed by positive effects. It helps people with Parkinson's, reduces blood pressure. I had a whole list of all the health benefits. There are a lot. And some of them are not tied to the caffeine — there are also very valuable polyphenols in coffee and tea, which are a great boon to the microbiome.

But the day I got back on caffeine, my first cup — it was 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 was a superman. It was just wonderful. And then I had another cup and it was like, not as special.

And 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 else. And it worked for a few weeks and my Saturday coffee was wonderful. But then I had a big deadline on a Thursday and I thought, you know, this would really get me over the hump if I have a cup — and slippery slope back to every day. But I appreciate it. I have no bad faith about drinking coffee. I think it's God's gift to mankind in so many ways. Tea, too. I also drink green tea.

Andrew Huberman: I think we're very lucky to have it. It does have very positive cognitive benefits in terms of focus. People have done tests on students preparing for an exam — if they have a cup of coffee or tea, the ones who had caffeine perform better on the tests. It's a really great focus drug. It's cocaine without all the problems.

Michael Pollan: Love it.

Andrew Huberman: Well, and you live in a great city for great coffee.

Michael Pollan: We have such good coffee. Peet's original is just down the street, and the Cheeseboard, and yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Well, I'm so grateful you wrote the book and that you did the experiment. I will seriously consider doing the experiment.

Michael Pollan: Give it a try. You learn a lot. It's just about thinking about your relationship to drugs in general. 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 — it's all about context. And caffeine is a really great case study. You learn something about yourself getting off it and then getting back on it.

Andrew Huberman: 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 reason enough.

Michael, thank you so much for coming here today, sharing your knowledge, and for writing all these books. 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 —

Michael Pollan: I'm trying.

Andrew Huberman: You're not just running around saying "one love" and everyone should drop acid. Thank goodness. 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.

Michael Pollan: Happy to, when it comes out. Yeah, it's an audio book — another short audio book — and it'll be out sometime next year.

Andrew Huberman: Great. Well, I would love to have you back around that time. And I know I speak on behalf of millions and millions of people — thank you for doing what you do.

Michael Pollan: You're so generous.

Andrew Huberman: I'm so glad you dropped those watermelon seeds into the ground. Here we are.

Michael Pollan: Me, too. Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate it.