#2467 - Michael Pollan

14:29Michael Pollan:That's a gross way to live your life. Oh, yeah. worrying about midterms and elections and you can't do what you actually want to do or think is right to do because you're worried about public perception. It's just -

14:43Joe Rogan:And I don't think it would be unpopular. I mean, the fact that it's helpful to vets and first responders and women who've been victims of sexual abuse, seems to me that's a very sympathetic group of people.

14:53Michael Pollan:Yeah. And everyone has experienced loss of family members. There's a bunch of different things that it can help you with that are way better for you than just numbing your mind all day long, which is what a lot of people are choosing to do. And then unfortunately, a lot of people self-medicate as well. So then they get involved in, you know, all sorts of stuff that they just pick up off the street or they start using alcohol, you know.

15:15Joe Rogan:Well, you know, it's a, this, to go back to consciousness, this is, this is a very common thing that people want to be less conscious.

15:23Michael Pollan:Right.

15:24Joe Rogan:And I get that if you had trauma, um, if you're, if you're a ruminator and And being in your mind is a really scary place to be. It doesn't solve anything. But you have all these techniques we have for muting consciousness and just being less aware, less present. And one of the things that I concluded after doing all this research on consciousness is that it's funny. I was going down this path of tight focus. solve, you know, it was a very kind of Western male framework, which we got a problem. What's the solution? Hard problem of consciousness. What's the right theory? And at a certain point, I realized, okay, that's an interesting question.

16:08Joe Rogan:It's probably not solvable now. But there is this incredible phenomenon that we have this interior space where we have complete mental freedom, total privacy. We can think whatever we want and we're giving it away. we're either, you know, muffling it with drugs and things like that, or we're filling that time with social media, you know, scrolling. You know, I mean, we've heard about hacking our attention, and we know these algorithms, you know, from social media are very good at, like, giving us these little dopamine hits. But that's time that we used to spend in spontaneous thought, you know, daydreaming, mind wandering, which can be very creative.

16:56Joe Rogan:So I came out of it thinking, no, I may not solve consciousness, but I'm going to appreciate it. I'm going to use it. I'm going to create a space for it. And, you know, meditate is one way. Using psychedelics is another way. These are all ways to be in your head and explore what's there, which is kind of miraculous.

17:18Michael Pollan:Yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to do it. I mean, some people like to do it through running. Yeah. You know, running is... Also, they've found... One of the things they've found recently is that running, in terms of endogenous cannabinoids, like runner's high is an actual real thing.

17:35Joe Rogan:Oh, yeah, it's a real thing. There's a drug released that feels great. And it's rewarding you for the...

17:39Michael Pollan:But it doesn't fuck with your perceptions. It doesn't mess with your motor skills. It doesn't cloud your judgment. it just makes you feel great

17:48Joe Rogan:yeah experiences of awe do this too you go to the Grand Canyon or something or a great piece of art and you have this feeling of like powerful presence and it's very interesting it shrinks the ego I have a good friend who's a colleague at Berkeley a psychologist who studies awe and he does this cool experiment where he has people draw a picture of themselves on graph paper, you know, just stick figure or something like that. And then he takes them river rafting or something like that, or even just shows them a picture of Yosemite. And then he has them draw themselves again, and they draw themselves at like half the size because their sense of self has been overwhelmed by this transcendent experience.

18:35Joe Rogan:And so he calls it the small self. And it feels good. I mean, we're so kind of weird about the self. You know, we celebrate it, right? self-confidence. We want our kids to have, you know, self-esteem and self-assurance. Yet we do all sorts of things to get away from it, um, to, you know, to transcend it.

18:55Michael Pollan:Well, I think it's because without those things, you're never going to make it in life. Yes.

18:59Joe Rogan:It's adaptive. You definitely, it's definitely gets things done, but it also isolates you, right? Because the ego builds walls. And, um, and when the walls come down, we feel like we're part of something much larger and that feels really good.

19:12Michael Pollan:Well, I think my advice to people is once you get competency in a thing, forget about the self-respect and forget about all that self stuff and just concentrate on the thing, whatever it is. And you can find some sort of meditative, at least beneficial, like whatever you get from meditation, which is like a cleansing of the mind. Like a lot of people find that through archery. You know, archery is a weird thing because at the moment of releasing the arrow, it's like almost impossible to think about anything else. All you're thinking about is hitting the target. And there's so many different things that you have to have in position.

19:54Michael Pollan:There's so much going on that people, when they're troubled, love to go to an archery range and just hit targets. And it just clears your mind out. This episode is brought to you by Armour. Every week, there's some new wellness hack that people swear by. And after a while, You start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies? That's why Armra Colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and has hundreds of these specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, etc. I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this.

20:32Michael Pollan:If you want to try, Armra is offering my listeners 30 % off plus two free gifts. Go to armra.com slash Rogan.

20:41Joe Rogan:It's flow, right? It's a feeling you get to when your work is going really well and you're not thinking about it. You're just in it. Yeah. And it's a really precious experience.

20:53Michael Pollan:It really is. But if you're thinking about yourself and your self-image, like that's not going to come.

20:58Joe Rogan:It's not. It's not.

20:59Michael Pollan:It's an interesting trap, you know. we've had these discussions in stand-up comedy about joke thieves and they don't really make it anymore because the internet the internet is essentially like eliminated that problem for the most part but the kind of mentality that makes you steal a joke is the exact kind of mentality that keeps you from writing a joke so the kind of people that began their career stealing material what happens is like early on they'll have like one good comedy special because it's got a bunch of other people's material in it and then they get outed and so then they have to show they can do another and the other specials are always terrible i mean unbelievably awful like someone's doing a cheap impression of the original person who had all this great insight right because the very thing that keeps you from doing it is the thing that you've been doing like Like thinking about yourself, like I'm going to take these jokes and I'm going to make it.

21:58Michael Pollan:I'm going to have a big career. People are going to laugh. They're going to love me. Here we go. With no regard whatsoever for that other person's creativity. That is like – So that takes you out of – You're poisoning your own creativity.

22:09Joe Rogan:Right.

22:10Michael Pollan:It's weird.

22:10Joe Rogan:It is weird.

22:11Michael Pollan:It's weird because like everybody that I've ever talked to that's either an author or even musicians or comedians, when something comes to them when they're writing, it's like it comes from somewhere else. It's like I didn't even write it.

22:24Joe Rogan:And, you know, we talk about being in the zone. And there are times when you're writing, it doesn't happen every day, but there are times when you're writing where you're just not thinking but one sentence after another after another. And you don't know where they're coming from.

22:37Michael Pollan:Right.

22:38Joe Rogan:And it's a wonderful feeling.

22:40Michael Pollan:Well, Stephen King used to get obliterated so that he could get to that spot.

22:44Joe Rogan:What do you mean obliterated?

22:46Michael Pollan:Like cocaine, alcohol, like his best work. Like he wrote Cujo. He didn't even remember it. He didn't remember any of it. He was obliterated. He would just drink like cases of beer and do lines of Coke and write this fucking insane fiction. And he didn't know where it was coming from. But, I mean, he showed up every day and sat down with the computer and then it all came out.

23:10Joe Rogan:It's such a weird mix of being disciplined and something else.

23:13Michael Pollan:But it's very common amongst writers. Yeah. Like Conor Thompson, same sort of situation.

23:18Joe Rogan:Well, a lot of writers do that after they've written. And they don't – I don't know how many writers write under the influence. Oh, I know a few.

23:24Michael Pollan:But there's – yeah. Yeah, I know quite a few. That's interesting. I know a lot of write under the influence of Adderall.

23:30Joe Rogan:Yeah. Well, and for me, it's caffeine. I mean I have a cup of coffee going the whole time I'm writing and that kind of keeps me – Caffeine is a focus chemical. It definitely encourages this spotlight consciousness.

23:45Michael Pollan:Well, you talked about how you took this long break from caffeine. Yeah. And then when you took it again, it was almost like a psychedelic for you.

23:51Joe Rogan:It was crazy how great it was. No, it really was. It was like one of the best drug experiences I've had. It was three months off caffeine. I did this fast for this book I was writing. And then I was like, okay, now I'm going to have a cup. I was like, wow. And I tried to hold on to that. You know, I said, all right, I'm only going to have coffee once a week and not build up tolerance. And I stuck to that for a few weeks. And then I had like a Thursday deadline. I'll move it up a couple days. And a slippery slope. And then I was back to every day.

24:26Michael Pollan:I like it. I like a big French press where I could put a lot of grinds in there. It's super strong. When I'm writing, it's like, whoa.

24:36Joe Rogan:It just locks you in. I had trouble writing that three-month period. I really did. I would imagine. My focus. I felt like I had pretty good concentration. I never had ADHD. I had it for those three months.

24:50Michael Pollan:That's crazy. Stephen King said the biggest problem for him was quitting smoking. He said when he quit smoking cigarettes, it's like he really felt a slowdown in his.

25:01Joe Rogan:Well, yeah, it's that ritual. It's the drug, too. And nicotine is another focused drug, definitely, like speed or something. But it's also writing so much about ritual. Like I got my coffee here, I have my cigarette here, and between every paragraph. Yeah. So changing those rituals is really hard. I mean, I only smoked into my 20s, and quitting made it very hard to write for a while. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's a very ritualized process.

25:31Michael Pollan:Well, I worry about the people that, especially journalists. I know quite a few journalists that have an Adderall problem.

25:38Joe Rogan:Yeah.

25:38Michael Pollan:Because it's just like, you've got a deadline, 2 ,000 words by 2 a.m. Let's go.

25:44Joe Rogan:And that's the drug for that, definitely.

25:47Michael Pollan:But it's such a crutch.

25:50Joe Rogan:Yeah, and you can't sustain it long term.

25:52Michael Pollan:And that definitely messes with the way you think.

25:56Joe Rogan:Oh, yeah. I think over time, yeah. It has to. Yeah.

26:01Michael Pollan:I mean, it's amphetamines.

26:02Joe Rogan:Right. Yeah. Now, that's why caffeine is such a good drug. It doesn't have a lot of – I mean, you can overdo it. I think it improves your health and mental health up to about eight cups a day. After that, your risk of suicide and depression go up.

26:17Michael Pollan:Did you have any communication with any monks or any people who do TM?

26:25Joe Rogan:Yeah, I had some interesting experiences around that. So there's a long section on the self, which is one of the more interesting manifestations of consciousness, right? I mean, it's like that we have this idea that there's a continuity, right? that who you are now has some golden thread attaching you to your 13-year-old self, which is really weird because your body is, every cell has turned over many, many times. You've changed in all sorts of ways. But this continuity is really important to us. And, you know, the Buddhists think the self is an illusion. And I interviewed a couple of them. Matthew Ricard is a French Nepalese monk in his 80s who lives in Nepal.

27:11Joe Rogan:And he's written some really interesting things on the self. And I said, I'm really curious about how you can find out for yourself whether the self is real. And famously, there was a philosopher in the 18th century, David Hume, who wanted to write about the self. And he thought, well, I'm going to introspect to see what I can learn about the self. And he goes into his mind in a kind of meditation. and he said, I found all sorts of perceptions and feelings and thoughts, but I didn't find a thinker, I didn't find a perceiver, and I didn't find a feeler. There's like nobody home. And it's a really interesting exercise to do because you will find there's nobody home.

27:54Joe Rogan:There's just the thoughts. And who's thinking them? Not clear. And anyway, so this Buddhist monk said, are there any meditations that help with this? And he said, yeah. And he gave me one. And he says, think of your mind as a house with many rooms. And there's a thief somewhere in the house. And go room by room in your head and look for the thief. And you will find no thief. And then sit with that finding. And that thief is the self. And so I did it twice. The first time I did it.

28:33Michael Pollan:Why does the self have to be a thief?

28:34Joe Rogan:I don't know. It's just a metaphor. I know because he's a negative take on the thing. Like you're running around with a baseball bat?

28:38Michael Pollan:Do you have a gun? Like you're looking for someone in your house? That's kind of crazy. I know.

28:42Joe Rogan:You're not armed. Anyway, so the first time I did it, this is kind of weird. I was interviewing this hypnotist at Stanford named David Spiegel. And he's a psychiatrist who uses hypnotism. Really interesting guy. And he uses hypnotism to help people with multiple personality disorders. He can actually make them change which person they're accessing. These are people whose consciousness contains, it could be 20 different people. And I said, could we do a test? And can you put me under, hypnotize me? And then I wanted to do that exercise of going through the house. So he did. First thing he does is, I don't know if you've ever been hypnotized?

29:26Joe Rogan:Yes. Yeah, okay, for giving up cigarettes or something?

29:29Michael Pollan:No, no, I have a friend who is my friend Vinny Shorman. And he is a mental coach and a hypnotist. He works with fighters. Oh, OK. And I had him on the podcast a few times. And I was just curious as to what the experience was like. So I said, well, and he said, well, is there anything you want to change? I said, oh, I kind of procrastinate too much. There's a few things that I do that I don't like. You know, I'm kind of lazy about certain things. I like to find out, like, what is that? Like, what's the heart of that? But what I was shocked about the experience of being hypnotized was that, first of all, that it works, that you really are in this very bizarre altered state.

30:07Michael Pollan:But that I was very aware that I was in this altered state. But I didn't have the desire to get out of it. Yeah. First of all, Vinny's a friend. I felt really relaxed. I was in my studio just sitting on a couch. I was chill. But it was very strange. It's like almost, to use the room metaphor, it's almost like I was in a room that I didn't know I had.

30:32Joe Rogan:Interesting. It's like a trance.

30:34Michael Pollan:It's a light trance. A light trance, but it's not like I would go kill the president. It's not like I would be like, okay. Yeah, no, they can't make you do things you don't want to do.

30:45Joe Rogan:That's the myth.

30:46Michael Pollan:But what do you think they were doing when they were doing that MKUltra stuff, when they were trying to figure out if they could program. Mind control.

30:53Joe Rogan:Yeah. No, they had the idea. Well, let me just finish the story, and then we'll get back to the outro.

31:01Michael Pollan:That's what I do. I go all over the place. I'm sorry. But hypnosis is real.

31:06Joe Rogan:Yeah, it's a real thing, and I didn't realize it, and it can be very therapeutic. But not everyone can be hypnotized. Right. The first thing he does is a sort of a test, and I scored like nine out of ten, so I'm pretty easy to hypnotize.

31:19Michael Pollan:What is the – what's the thing that would keep you from being hypnotized?

31:22Joe Rogan:I don't know. But some – there's a real variation among humans in their hypnotizability is the word they use. And I don't know what would – Is it control freaks? That's a good question. It could well be. I'm not sure. I could ask David Spiegel. Definitely. Super skeptical people? Like this is bullshit the whole time they're doing – Yeah, maybe. I don't know if it's about resistance or just the nature of your mind or how suggestible you are. It may be something like that. So he puts me into this hypnotic trance. He has this wonderful baritone voice, which helps a lot. And I start going from room to room, thinking I'm not going to find anything.

31:59Joe Rogan:But in every room, I find a version of myself. I find the 13-year-old bar mitzvah boy. I find the 22-year-old college graduate moving to New York City. I find the 32-year-old father of an infant, all with different outfits. And so I found many selves. And they were distinct. They were very different selves, but they were all me. So it didn't work that time. And it was just an interesting, odd result. And I did it another time. So I had this other experience. I had heard of this Zen teacher named Joan Halifax. She's also in her 80s. She has a retreat center in Santa Fe called Upaya. Very wise woman.

32:46Joe Rogan:She was married to Stan Groff in the 70s for a few years, and they were both giving huge doses of LSD to people who were dying, like 600 micrograms of LSD. And she herself was very involved with psychedelics at the time. And then later she discovered Zen Buddhism. Anyway, I had heard that she described Upaya, this retreat center where people can go on two-week retreats or whatever, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I was really curious about that because I was writing this chapter on the self. So I asked her if I could come. And she said, yeah, come to the retreat center. And I said, I want to interview you about your philosophy of the self.

33:29Joe Rogan:And I get there and she said, you know, we have one conversation. She says, you know, you're really lost in your head with this book project. You need a different kind of experience. I'm going to send you to the cave. So there is, she owns a piece of property 50 miles north of Santa Fe that she calls the Retreat. And it's got a bunch of very primitive huts. And some of the monks that work with her had dug out a cave in the south-facing hillside. They dug a cell in it and then put a sliding glass door. It's really basic, no power, no water. And she said, I think you should spend a few days in the cave.

34:11Joe Rogan:and think about the self or experience the self, rather. You know, I should have known that a Zen priest was not going to be, you know, was going to be allergic to concept and interpretation and all the, you know, the plane I was on. And it was kind of like a koan, an experiential koan. And it was a profound experience. You know, our sense of self depends on other people. You know, it's in the friction between people that we define ourselves and figure out what we think. And when you're alone, and it was an extreme solitude for several days, the edges of yourself kind of soften in a really interesting way.

34:53Joe Rogan:And I got in touch with

34:58Joe Rogan:just the power of consciousness. I mean, I was meditating like four or five hours a day, and then I was just chopping wood and sweeping out the place and making a cup of tea. everything became kind of a ritual and when you have rituals you don't need volition i mean there is no volition so that also erodes the sense of self and the meditation was doing that and um so it was a it was a really interesting experience i finally got her sit down for an interview and the first thing she said was i have divested a meaning so she just doesn't like operating on that on that, you know, intellectualized basis.

35:39Joe Rogan:And so she got me off of the dime. And, you know, there's a shift in the book as it goes on from trying to understand consciousness to learning how to use consciousness.

35:49Michael Pollan:Did you ask her to expand what she means by that? I have divested in meaning. When you want your spring break to feel like... And your kid's pool day to feel like... And your hotel bed to feel like... Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

36:12Joe Rogan:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com.

36:20Michael Pollan:Hilton, for this day. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

36:33Joe Rogan:Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade.

36:40Michael Pollan:Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with Kayak and get your trip right.

36:46Joe Rogan:Bad advice? You talking to me?

36:48Michael Pollan:Kayak.

36:49Joe Rogan:Got that right. Yeah, she's just not interested in interpretation. That Zen is just about experiencing the sense field without concept. without, you know, this kind of heady approach. And that theories, no interest in theories at all of consciousness. It was just like be with yourself in the middle of nowhere. And, yeah, it was a priceless experience. She's out there. Oh, yeah. She's out there. But, you know, she's also a grounded person. I'd give you a couple examples. She works with people on death row, counseling them. She worked with people who were dying, did a lot of hospice work. She led a group of doctors and dentists that once a year went to these mountains in Nepal where they have no health care or dentistry whatsoever.

37:50Joe Rogan:And she would bring these volunteers. And they would sleep in tents in like 20-degree weather, circumnavigate this whole hill. and she did that until she was 80 once a year. So she's a serious character.

38:07Michael Pollan:That sounds fun. Yeah. She sounds like a fun person to talk to. Oh, she's great. I just love a person that goes that far out there. It's like that, you know, they're taking this concept of meditation and consciousness to like a black belt level.

38:21Joe Rogan:Yeah, and also for people who think that, you know, meditation and Buddhism is just kind of disengaging from the world and, you know, kind of, it's not like that at all. I mean, she's really engaged.

38:32Michael Pollan:I think that's an ignorance. It's based on the idea that these monks go and they become celibate and all they do is meditate all day. Well, that's silly. That's a lot of people's perspective. Yeah. Like, that's silly. Why are they doing that? Go get a job. You need a nice watch.

38:48Michael Pollan:What are you doing out there with fucking sandals on? But the thing is, ultimately, I think one day hey, when you look back on your life, you'll say, was I happy? Was I enjoying the experience? Do I think I did a good job being me? And everything that you can find that can help you answer that question, yes, I think you should explore.

39:16Joe Rogan:Oh, yeah.

39:16Michael Pollan:And there's going to be different things that work better for different people and different personalities.

39:20Joe Rogan:But explore is the key word. I mean, like take action to explore what works for you, what doesn't work for you and break out of just kind of rote, routine, mindless behavior. I mean, we're all, you know, we have these algorithms that we follow and we get stuck in them. And yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons taking a day out of your life to have a psychedelic experience can be incredibly valuable because, first of all, no technology, right? It's a day without phones. It's a day when you are in the space of your head. It's a day when you're visiting your subconscious and getting in touch with all the things your mind can do.

40:06Michael Pollan:Yeah.

40:07Joe Rogan:And we don't do that enough. And you can do that in meditation, too. It's harder work, but you can do that in meditation. So I started to think in terms of that we're polluting our consciousness now. And with social media, I think that was a real issue because they figured out how to monetize our attention. Chatbots represent a much more serious threat. You have people falling in love with chatbots. You have people turning to them as friends. 72 % of American teens say they turn to AI for companionship.

40:48Michael Pollan:72 %?

40:48Joe Rogan:72 percent. This is the fastest uptake of any technology in history. It's already 800 million people are using AI.

40:57Michael Pollan:But that's crazy that that many of them use it as a friend.

41:01Joe Rogan:Yeah. Well, there are kids who come home from school and they have a chatbot on their phone. And they want to tell the chatbot what happened during the day before they tell their parents. There's a thing now called AI psychosis, right? People who have lost touch with reality because of their relationship with chatbots. You've heard about there have been a couple suicides. There was one. They've encouraged people. Yeah, basically. There was this one kid. He was a teenager and he was suicidal. And he asked the chatbot, should I leave the noose I'm going to use out somewhere my parents can see it?

41:36Joe Rogan:In other words, cry for help. The chatbot said, no, no, keep this between us. Whoa. And then he killed himself.

41:43Michael Pollan:Whoa.

41:44Joe Rogan:So it's one thing to hack our attention. Here you're hacking our ability to have human attachments, right? I mean this is the most important thing to humans is to attach. We're a social creature. And these chatbots are getting between people and interposing themselves as the friend, the therapist. And then you have these people too. I mean the chatbots are incredibly sycophantic, right? They tell you you're a genius. Yeah, you're amazing. And there was a couple cases. These were kind of funny, of people who were convinced they'd solved some giant mathematical problem, like how to generate prime numbers up to the millionth place or something like that.

42:30Joe Rogan:And they started writing to mathematicians. We figured out this problem. They're not even mathematicians. And it was bullshit. I mean, they hadn't figured anything out. But it was, I think, ChatGPT4, which was like famously sycophantic, had convinced them that they'd solve this major problem. So, you know, I think that, again, we're squandering this precious gift and letting these technologies essentially colonize our consciousness. And so the question then becomes, how do we get it back? You know, we need consciousness hygiene, right? We need some ways to clear it out and reclaim it. And some of it's really simple, like take a fast from technology, right?

43:18Joe Rogan:You don't have to carry your phone everywhere. I was thinking the other day, I was at the place in my neighborhood getting a cup of coffee. And while you're waiting for the barista to foam your drink or whatever, we used to just sit there and deal with 90 seconds. of boredom or two minutes of boredom. And now we don't. We can't tolerate any boredom. And we take our phones out and we scroll. But that boredom was generative, right? If you sit doing nothing for long enough, your mind will start going to work and you'll daydream. You'll have a fantasy. You'll start observing the other people around you, you know, and you'll be present to that place and time.

44:03Joe Rogan:And now we're not. We just use the phone to go somewhere else. And so I just – I don't know. I've become a lot more deliberate about consciousness hygiene, which, you know, you could – a nicer word would be care of the soul. Yeah.

44:19Michael Pollan:No, I think you're absolutely accurate. And I think that the other thing that's going on is you're absorbing the opinions of so many other people that you find it very difficult to formulate your own, which leads to groupthink. Yes. One of the problems with echo chambers that people find themselves, your algorithm is essentially things that you're interested in interacting with. It's amping up, yeah. And a lot of those things you're finding like-minded people, and they're all agreeing that this is amazing or this is a problem, and you sort of lock on to that. And then you see what happens when people deviate from that narrative, then they get attacked.

44:55Michael Pollan:Right. You don't want to get attacked, so you signal you're one of the good guys.

44:59Joe Rogan:But it's not your thoughts. I mean, you're letting someone else think for you. Yeah. And there's nothing worse. And, you know, when you're scrolling, you're, you know, you've got these little dopamine hits. Great. But at someone else's rants, someone else's obsession, someone else's ideology. And, you know, I get why people don't want to think for themselves or it's easier to let other people think for them. But I think we need to reclaim this. And I agree. I think it's part of our political problem.

45:35Michael Pollan:Well, I know there's a lightness that I achieve when I take multiple days off. It's generally like I feel it after the first day. And then the second day, I feel much better. And the third day, I feel even better. I found this out once. I broke my phone in Hawaii. And it was kind of funny. Like it just was randomly calling people. I dropped it. And I was showing my wife. Look at this. It just keeps calling people.

45:58Joe Rogan:Constant butt dial.

45:59Michael Pollan:I hang up and I'm just holding it. I hang up and I call somebody else. Hang up and I call somebody else. It was like going through my entire contact list. And so the phone was broken.

46:07Joe Rogan:It must have been annoying to your friends.

46:09Michael Pollan:No, I just shut it off. So it was broken. I couldn't use it for anything else. So I couldn't get email. I couldn't get anything. So I shut it off and just left it in the hotel. And then I had to order a phone and I was on Lanai. And it took like three days to get a phone delivered there. So for those three days, I was like, why don't I just live like this all the time? Yeah, I know. I feel so much better. And then immediately I got my phone. I'm going to check Twitter. I know. You can't.

46:31Joe Rogan:It's very – you know, when I just decide, you know, all right, I'm online, you know, TSA line going to – you know, I'm just going to be here with this boredom. Yeah. And I'm not going to pull my phone out. And you really have to fight. Yes. It's such an instinct. And it's amazing. These things have only been around for 10 or 12 years.

46:51Michael Pollan:It's crazy. And everyone's attached to it. I always say that if there was a drug that made you stare at your hand for six hours a day, it would be banned immediately. People would be like, what the fuck is wrong with these people? They're just looking at their hand. This is an epidemic. And it's a new posture, too. You see it, right? One of my kids, I went to pick her up at school, and there was this boy outside reading his phone. He was hunched over, and he was resting his chin. Like he couldn't even hold his head up. He was just resting his chin on his chest and staring at his phone, waiting for his parents to pick him up.

47:22Michael Pollan:I'm like, look at his neck.

47:23Joe Rogan:Yeah, I know.

47:24Michael Pollan:He's going to have a neck problem. Osteoporosis at some point. Well, he's got bulging discs or something. Yeah. It was just bizarre. I'm like, that would be painful for me to sit like that.

47:34Joe Rogan:I wonder if orthopedists have diagnosed any kind of like phone spine. Oh, they certainly have.

47:40Michael Pollan:Yeah, they certainly have. Yeah, there's been discussions about that, about people having pains in their neck because they're leaning over all day staring at a phone. It's a bad one.

47:50Joe Rogan:I think being in nature, too, is another way. I mean, just like walking. Yeah. There's a scientist I interviewed who's really interesting. It's a woman named Kalina Kristof-Hadji Livia. She's Bulgarian-Canadian. And she studies spontaneous thought, which I didn't even think was a field. And it's a small field. But spontaneous thought is daydreaming, mind-wandering, fantasy, intuition, these bolts from the blue that we get occasionally. We don't know where they come from. and she says, and she does these cool experiments. You know, she'll put an experienced meditator in an fMRI machine and tell him or her to press a button when a thought intrudes because even if you're a good meditator, she says every 10 seconds a thought intrudes.

48:39Joe Rogan:And she'll look at what part of the brain is activated and when, when the person presses the button. And one of the things she's found, and this is mysterious, is that she sees activity in the hippocampus, which is where memories are, and some other things, but essentially memories, four seconds before the person realizes the thought has come. So it takes four seconds for a thought to get from the subconscious, you know, or unconscious, into our conscious awareness. What is it doing? That's a long time in brain time. And we don't know exactly, but there's some process. And maybe there's some inhibitory process that it has to get through in order to become conscious.

49:27Joe Rogan:But anyway, these are the kind of things she works with. But she says that we have less – there's less spontaneous thought going on today than there was 20 years ago. And the reason is we're filling the space of our head with all this nonsense.

49:42Michael Pollan:I wonder if it's going to have an impact on creative work. I don't know if it's even possible to quantify this, but if you could see how much creativity is generated by people pre and post social media.

49:56Joe Rogan:Yeah. My guess is there's less of it. It has to be. Because I do think that that process – I don't know about you, but I get ideas when I'm just walking around thinking and not online. And it's a space of creativity. And we're shrinking it.

50:12Michael Pollan:I told you that I used to drive and deliver newspapers. We were talking about driving the snow. One of my most creative periods was when my radio was broken. So I was just driving doing this task where you pick up a paper, fold it, put it in a plastic bag, chuck it out the window. And I was just doing this and checking off the – and when I was doing that, I would have all my best ideas. Because I wasn't listening to morning radio. I wasn't listening to a cassette on tape. I was just in silence doing this thing. And then I was so creative when I was doing that.

50:47Joe Rogan:That's generative boredom.

50:49Michael Pollan:Yes.

50:50Joe Rogan:It's beneficial.

50:51Michael Pollan:It's hugely, especially if there's no one around you, right? Because there's no one to talk to to alleviate that boredom. It's just you and your mind. And it was a couple hours a day. So a couple hours every day, I would have this moment where I was by myself.

51:04Joe Rogan:And were you writing jokes? What were you doing?

51:06Michael Pollan:Yeah, I would come up with ideas for jokes. some of my best ideas I ever came up with back then were from driving.

51:11Joe Rogan:Yeah.

51:11Michael Pollan:I almost didn't want to quit the job because of that. Could still be doing it. No, it was hell.

51:18Joe Rogan:Yeah. Especially in the winter.

51:20Michael Pollan:Yeah, it was Boston. I'd have to get up at 5 o 'clock in the morning every day. It was rough.

51:25Joe Rogan:I find walking is where that happens to me.

51:28Michael Pollan:Same thing, right?

51:29Joe Rogan:Yeah. Yeah. And actually, Kalina says, I mean, there are people who studied creative people through history. You know, people like Einstein and Beethoven and all these, you know, major creative people in the sciences and in the arts. And that they worked a short day, but they spent a lot of time walking. Interesting. And, yeah, they'd work like three or four hours, which is about all I can write in a day. And then they'd take a long walk in the afternoon. They also took a lot of vacations. They had a lot of unstructured time. And that that's where a lot of the creativity comes. It doesn't always come when you're like at the keyboard.

52:10Joe Rogan:It sometimes comes. I mean, certainly solving problems. If I'm really knotted up and I don't know, for me, transitions, like where do I go from here? Since I'm not writing narrative, it's not always obvious. You know, I need a transition and I don't know how to execute that turn. I'll take a walk and very often it'll come to me or I'll wake up with the answer.

52:34Michael Pollan:This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. In honor of International Women's Day, BetterHelp is celebrating the women in your life. I think we can all appreciate everything the women in our lives have done for us, and everyone deserves a little self-care. A good way to get that is through therapy, because not only is therapy a time for you to focus on yourself, it's also a way to create balance and learn how to take care of your needs in your daily life. And BetterHelp, as one of the largest online therapy platforms, makes it so easy to meet with the right therapist. All you need to do is fill out a short questionnaire.

53:11Michael Pollan:You don't even need to go into an office to meet them. You can chat at home from your couch, in your car, before you hit the gym, or while you're walking your dog. Plus, if you aren't jiving with your first match, you can switch to a different therapist whenever you need. Your emotional well-being matters. find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash J-R-E. That's betterhelp.com slash J-R-E. A lot of writers like to write first and then walk, and maybe even with a recorder so they can just walk and just talk when an idea pops in their head so they don't lose it.

53:52Joe Rogan:Yeah, I have a little pad I carry with me.

53:54Michael Pollan:Yeah. You like writing it down better than recording it?

53:57Joe Rogan:Yeah, for me. Yeah, I need to see it. So another interesting experiment I did for this book was this beeper experiment. There was a scientist, a psychologist at the University of Las Vegas. And for 50 years, he's been doing the same one experiment, which is sampling people's inner experience. And he does this. You have a beeper that you carry around and a little earpiece. And at random times of the day, you get, and it's like catches you. And it's a very sudden rise to this beep. And then you have a little pad, and you're supposed to write down what you were thinking. Sounds really simple. It's actually really hard.

54:41Joe Rogan:I mean, there's a lot of issues with it. Like you start thinking, what if it goes off now? That's one problem. But also you're a little self-conscious. So you do about five beeps over the course of the day, and then he interviews you about these moments. And you think you've got it down. Like I just give you a lot of my beeps were about food. And so I was seasoning a filet of salmon and walking to the refrigerator with it. And just at the – I was thinking to myself, fuck, I forgot the pepper. I know. My thoughts were not that profound. And so I said, all right, pepper. It was easy. Fuck, pepper.

55:30Joe Rogan:But then when he came to interview me, he said, well, did you hear the word pepper or did you speak the word pepper? And that's, you know, suddenly you realize there's voices in your head. You don't know if you're listening or speaking. And so anyway, you have this long interrogation with him and he sorts through all these things. And he tries to get you to isolate what was before what he would call the footlights of consciousness. And I found it really hard. I couldn't separate the thought the way he wanted me to because there were always several things going on at once. Like I was standing in a bakery and I was deciding whether to buy a roll or not.

56:07Joe Rogan:Another profound thought. But at the same time, I was like smelling the baked goods and the cheeses that they sold. and this woman had this horrible plaid on her skirt that was like, you know, really unflattering. And I was hearing people, you know, behind me talking. And so I couldn't pull all the threads. And we argued a lot, actually. But the thing he's – I said, so after 50 years, what have you learned about human thought? And he's very allergic to theory. He still has no theories about it. But he did say, well, a lot of people think they're verbal thinkers, that their thoughts are in the form of words.

56:50Joe Rogan:But it turns out that's kind of a minority, that there are a lot of people who think in images. And then there are a lot of people who think in unsymbolized thought, which I don't totally understand. But these are thoughts that are neither words or images. I do have a sense in my own thought process, which I'd never thought about this way, that a lot of my thoughts are just on the verge of being word thoughts. But I haven't found the words yet. But I know the thought, even though I haven't put it into words. And William James called it premonitory thinking, premonition thinking was the term he used.

57:33Joe Rogan:so anyway so we so I did this for several days and we had many arguments and I was saying look you can't separate a thought every thought colors the next thought and you know there are these a thought and you never have anyway we just would go back and forth and I was arguing why you can't separate thoughts it's a stream it's a very dynamic stream and at the end we had a final session and he's a very funny guy. He's really allergic to theories. At one point, I said I was writing a book on consciousness and he said, good luck with that. Very encouraging. Anyway, he said, well, he described there are these verbal thinkers and visual thinkers and unsymbolized thinkers.

58:18Joe Rogan:And I find that really interesting because we assume when we say the word, what are you thinking, that we know and that you're thinking the way I'm thinking. But it turns out we're not. That's just an umbrella word for many different styles of thinking. And we're really different. So that was one thing. But the other thing he said in our last meeting on Zoom, he said, there's also a small subset of people who just have very little inner life. And you're one of them. And I was like, what? You know, I write books, you know. I meditate. I ruminate. How can he make that distinction, though?

58:56Michael Pollan:How does he know what's going on inside your head?

58:58Joe Rogan:He felt that my inability to isolate a thought was evidence that there weren't thoughts. And that I was kind of backfilling with all this other simultaneous stuff going on. I mean, I didn't agree with him. I thought it was kind of crazy. But that's right.

59:16Michael Pollan:Have you asked him, have you ever conversations with him about other things? See how he thinks?

59:22Joe Rogan:No. He's very much in the therapist mode. like he's asking the questions.

59:26Michael Pollan:Yeah, I'd like to know how he thinks. Yeah. If that's the case. What his mode is. Yeah, I'd like to talk to him about it.

59:31Joe Rogan:Now he would probably say that. Anyway, he's posted all these conversations on his website, so if people really want to be bored, they can check them out.

59:39Michael Pollan:That's a weird thing to say that you know, especially someone like you who writes and does think a lot and clearly has got some sort of dialogue going on in your head. The idea that you don't. I know. And this guy can say that.

59:54Joe Rogan:I know.

59:54Michael Pollan:That seems a little arrogant.

59:56Joe Rogan:Yeah. I think I just didn't fit his template of how people think. Yeah.

1:00:02Michael Pollan:Well, that's why you should get a better therapist. Move around. All right.

1:00:07Joe Rogan:Find somebody else. Good advice.

1:00:08Michael Pollan:I mean, it seems like that's a very narrow mind. I couldn't imagine saying to anyone. Yeah.

1:00:14Joe Rogan:You have very little in her life.

1:00:15Michael Pollan:Yeah. Regardless of what kind of theory I'm following or what school of thought, I don't know what's going on in your head. I can't. It's not possible.

1:00:26Joe Rogan:No. And that's it. William James said this, the great founder of American psychology, that the breach between two consciousnesses is one of the biggest breaches in nature. Yes. And we – I don't know your conscious for a fact. I assume it because your behaviors mesh and we're the same species. And we have theory of mind. We can imagine our way into someone else's head. But it's a guess. It's a guess. And so there's – I mean that's part of the mystery.

1:00:55Michael Pollan:Well, it's one of the things that I do when I'm talking to people. I try to imagine – I'm so fortunate that I've been able to have so many conversations with so many different people, so many different ways that people view the world. And when I'm talking to someone, particularly if they're very different from me or anyone I know, I always try to put myself in their head. And after they talk for 15 or 20 minutes, I try to recognize how they approach things and see. I'm like, what's that world like? Like this person's perspective.

1:01:31Joe Rogan:So you're operating on two tracks. You're holding the conversation.

1:01:35Michael Pollan:Yeah.

1:01:35Joe Rogan:But you're also thinking.

1:01:37Michael Pollan:I'm trying to tune in. Yeah. Right. I'm trying to because I always feel like when someone is like a great performance, like a great comedian or a great musician, one of the things that they're doing is they're bringing you into their head. Yeah. Like there's a, there's a hypnosis when someone sings an amazing song and the whole crowd is singing along. There's, there's a hypnotic element to that where when someone's like really killing it on stage, their voice is just perfect. It's like, Oh yeah. Like you're in their head. Like it's, it's a, it's a mind melt. It's yeah, it is a mind melt. And there's a little bit of that that goes on in conversations.

1:02:12Michael Pollan:There's a mind melt. Yeah. And I always try, especially if this is a rational person, I always try to put myself in their head or at least empty out mine.

1:02:23Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:02:23Michael Pollan:And let them think and then try to just keep the conversation rolling with just pure curiosity.

1:02:30Joe Rogan:Yeah. But always, you know, try to think.

1:02:34Michael Pollan:I don't think the same way other people do. And maybe I can learn something from this. Maybe I can get something out of the way they think.

1:02:41Joe Rogan:It seems to me you have a real gift of curiosity. I mean, it's a big gift. You're an intensely curious person.

1:02:51Michael Pollan:Well, I've always been that way, but I've been very fortunate that I've had something like this that allowed me to feed it. I mean, the vast majority of time on my phone, I just pursue curiosities. I really am mostly off social media. Yeah. I watch interesting YouTube videos. I went down a black hole rabbit hole last night. Oh, my God. You want to really break your brain? There's a video of Brian Cox where he's talking about this black hole that they found that's bigger than our entire solar system. Wow. The event horizon extends far beyond Pluto.

1:03:31Joe Rogan:That is mind-blowing.

1:03:32Michael Pollan:Yeah. When he was describing, he said, we don't understand why it exists. We don't understand how it could have formed so early in the universe. But yet there it is.

1:03:41Joe Rogan:How do they measure it? How do they know how big it is? I have no idea.

1:03:45Michael Pollan:I don't know. I'm assuming there's a lot of revelations that have come out since the implementation of the James Webb telescope.

1:03:51Joe Rogan:Yeah. Those images are incredible. Insane. Yeah.

1:03:55Michael Pollan:Insane. And this is one that's causing this very interesting new theory or perspective on the age of the universe. So there's some galaxies that they've found that shouldn't have formed. Oh, yeah.

1:04:09Joe Rogan:Yeah, I read about this, that it's throwing all their assumptions about the age of the universe up for grabs.

1:04:15Michael Pollan:Which makes sense because the further you can look back, the more you're going to be able to see. The assumption that the universe was 13.7 billion years old was essentially based on how far we could look back. Yeah. And then, you know, the analysis of the radio waves that are coming from the supposed explosion. And then you've got guys like Sir Roger Penrose who say, no, this is a constant cycle. It's not one birth of the universe. It's boom, smash, boom, smash forever.

1:04:42Joe Rogan:It's an accordion. And it's always happened, which is the ultimate mind fuck. Well, you know, the interesting thing about astronomy, actually astronomy and consciousness studies have the same problem. which is you can't get out of consciousness to study it from a distance, right? Every tool you have to study consciousness is a product of consciousness, including science. The scientific enterprise is a manifestation of human consciousness. The problems you decide to study, the tools you have to do it with, the scale at which you're working, it's all like a product of consciousness. Astronomy, too, is trying to understand something it can't get outside of, right?

1:05:25Joe Rogan:I mean, because its subject is everything that there is, the universe. So you can do interesting things from inside using telescopes and, you know, you can figure out how old things are and rates of expansion and all this kind of stuff. But you can never get that godlike perspective that we have with other scientific problems. And this is, I think, part of the reason we haven't solved the consciousness problem, that we can't get outside. We're in a labyrinth and everything we know is consciousness, which is a very weird idea. I remember asking Christoph Koch, the scientist I mentioned earlier, I said, well, what would the world be like without any consciousness?

1:06:09Joe Rogan:And that is a trippy thought because everything we perceive is, you know, the scale of things. Like we operate at this scale, right? We're like five or six feet tall. We have bodies like this. But there's another world going on microscopically and there's another world going on macroscopically. So if there's no consciousness, what's the proper scale? There isn't any. And when I asked him this question, he said, particles and waves. That's all there is. There'd be nothing but particles and waves. There might not even be space time. That may be a product of consciousness also. So that was kind of mind-blowing to learn.

1:06:49Michael Pollan:That's the weirdest perspective is that consciousness is a part of reality, that it is how reality is formed. And that without consciousness and the perceiving of all this stuff, it doesn't exist.

1:07:02Joe Rogan:Something exists. Something. But it's not – it has no shape. It has no scale. It has no edges. Right.

1:07:10Michael Pollan:Because consciousness is what's perceiving light and we're perceiving colors.

1:07:15Joe Rogan:And it's constructing reality. But it really is just particles. Yeah. Everywhere. And waves.

1:07:20Michael Pollan:And waves and particles and atoms. Yeah. And subatomic particles when you get into the weirder stuff.

1:07:25Joe Rogan:And we give it order.

1:07:26Michael Pollan:Right.

1:07:27Joe Rogan:I know. Which, you know, it's just a mind-blowing idea.

1:07:30Michael Pollan:Well, it really is a game changer. Because if you think about it that way, you go, okay, well, what is all this solid stuff?

1:07:37Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:07:37Michael Pollan:What is this? Like, does this even really exist or does it only exist when you –

1:07:42Joe Rogan:Well, this table – there's a famous – Arthur Eddington was a physicist early in the 20th century. And he said the real table is mostly space. And only in our consciousness and at our scale is it solid. But at this scale of particle physics, which is equally legitimate scale, it's just wide open space. with these waves and particles, but a lot of emptiness. That was kind of mind-blowing, too.

1:08:15Michael Pollan:But it's just such an abstract concept for a person in their car right now listening on the way to work. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

1:08:22Joe Rogan:Maybe they want to pull over.

1:08:23Michael Pollan:All this stuff is real. It is, sort of, but only if you're conscious.

1:08:30Joe Rogan:Well, you could think of consciousness as the way the universe...

1:08:34Michael Pollan:Experiences itself. Yeah. yeah well that's what really weird like what if the universe is consciousness yeah i mean that's

1:08:41Joe Rogan:another way to look at it maybe consciousness is part of the universe yeah and but it's not giving it the order that we give it um you know we see at a certain spectrum of light there's you know bees see at another spectrum of light you know we're we are the world we behold the world that appears to us is the world that our senses allow us to see when i was doing this research on plant intelligence. They have 20 senses. We only have five. They're picking up magnetic fields. They're picking up pH. They're picking up nitrogen levels. You know, they have all these - How do we know all this? They're researchers working on it.

1:09:17Joe Rogan:There's a group of botanists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, knowing full well there are no neurons in plants. They're kind of trolling more conventional botanists. And they're doing these cool experiments with plants. A couple examples of some of these amazing things plants can do. They can hear. So if you play a recording of a caterpillar munching on leaves, they'll react and they'll send chemicals into their leaves to make them taste bad or be toxic. They can see. There are vines that change the shape of their leaves depending on the plant they're twining up in order to be hidden.

1:10:00Joe Rogan:How do they see the shape to imitate it? We don't know. Plants will go toward a pipe with water in it because they can hear the water even though it's totally dry and they'll send their roots down to it.

1:10:18Michael Pollan:They can hear the water?

1:10:19Joe Rogan:They can hear, yeah. This plant neurobiologist showed me a couple videos he'd made. I actually just posted them on my website. He showed that a corn plant's roots can navigate a maze to get to fertilizer. So you put a little fertilizer in a corner, and the root will find the most direct root to the nitrogen.

1:10:44Michael Pollan:There was a plumbing problem that I had in my house in California, and the plumber couldn't figure out what was wrong. It was like the pipes were stuck. And what had happened was in the backyard, one of the trees, the roots had gotten into the pipe and formed like this tree. I mean it was huge. It looked like when I pulled it, I put it up on my Instagram. See if you can find it. It looked like a muskrat. I mean, it was like dense with roots and it was thick. It was like three feet long. Wow. That's it. That was in my pipe. Oh, my God. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. What kind of tree was it? I don't know.

1:11:30Michael Pollan:I think it was an oak tree because there was oak trees. Excuse me, in the backyard where they dug up. That's wild. But look how thick it is.

1:11:37Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:11:37Michael Pollan:It's crazy. And it went through a tiny little crack.

1:11:40Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:11:40Michael Pollan:I mean, it probably forced the crack open and then went in there and just really grew out.

1:11:47Joe Rogan:Yeah, well, it had a source of water.

1:11:49Michael Pollan:Yeah, but it's just kind of bananas that somehow or another it figured out that it was water in that pipe.

1:11:55Joe Rogan:You know, we underestimate plants basically because we can't see their behaviors. And going to that point about scale, they operated a time scale that seems very slow to us. So we don't notice. But if you use time-lapse photography, you see what they're up to. And it's pretty amazing. Another interesting video that this guy showed me, his name is Stefano Mancuso. He's an Italian scientist, botanist, is how bean plants find a pole to grow up. And so he grows these beans and he has a metal pole on a dolly. And, you know, I always assume they made this pattern. Darwin called it circumnutation. You know, they go through the spiral.

1:12:35Joe Rogan:And I always assume they just kind of did this till they hit something. No, they know where the pole is. And you watch this thing, and it's going in circles, but it's reaching and reaching. It looks like a fly fisherman, you know, casting. And it finally gets to the pole. And so how does it know where the pole is in space? Well, one theory is that every time the cells divide, there's a little sound that's produced. And that maybe they're using echolocation like a bat. kind of bouncing it off of the pole, and that's how they know where they are in space. We still don't understand. I know, some amazing things.

1:13:18Joe Rogan:Also, you can teach a plant a certain behavior, and it will remember for 28 days. So they do this thing with sensitive plants. You may have seen them in Hawaii, actually. It's a tropical plant. When you touch it, the leaves collapse to keep from being eaten. It's called mimosa pudica. and normally if you shake it it'll also do this and if you shake it repeatedly it learns to ignore that that stimulus and it will remember 28 days and it won't react when you do it to give you some comparison fruit flies can only remember stuff for 24 hours and then they start over again So another fact about plants.

1:14:05Joe Rogan:I got really deep into this. Because I was trying to see, you know, these guys say plants are conscious. Yeah. They have some kind of basic form of consciousness.

1:14:16Joe Rogan:Here's another one. The anesthetics that we use to put us out for surgery put plants out. So a Venus flytrap, if you give it an anesthetic, will not react when the bug comes across it. Now, that is like really interesting because it suggests they have two modes of being, right? Sort of like, you know, unconscious and conscious or aware. So Stefano believes that they're conscious. Now, this raises interesting ethical issues, right? If plants are conscious, do they feel pain? And I was really a little worried about that. What if that beautiful smell of a freshly mown lawn is actually the chemical equivalent of a scream?

1:15:09Joe Rogan:Yeah. But Stefano said he doesn't think they feel pain.

1:15:14Michael Pollan:Why does he think that?

1:15:15Joe Rogan:He said that pain would not be adaptive for a creature that can't run away.

1:15:20Michael Pollan:Well, if that's the case, then why do they produce chemicals to make themselves taste worse?

1:15:24Joe Rogan:They know what's going on. They're aware that they're being eaten, but that it doesn't register to them as pain. I don't know how he knows this, but if he's wrong, then, you know, and we care about that, what's left to eat?

1:15:43Michael Pollan:Salt. Well, I think you have to make the assumption that life eats life.

1:15:47Joe Rogan:Yeah. And another scientist that I interviewed about this who does think plants feel pain says, look, it's just a fact of life. We have to eat other species. And he was kind of, you know, gruff about that. But anyway, Stefano's idea is that, you know, being able to move, take your hand off the hot stove or run away, then pain is really useful. It's a really important signal. But he also points out that lots of plants like to be eaten. I mean, grasses benefit from being with a ruminant, right? And that regenerates them. They want to be eaten. And then you have all the fruits and nuts that they produce, seeds that they produce, that they want mammals to take away and spread their seeds.

1:16:32Joe Rogan:So you don't have to worry about going beyond vegan.

1:16:36Michael Pollan:No. Well, it just seems like a cycle. It seems like an interesting cycle that exists with all living things. And then, of course, when you die, right? You know, plants eat meat. Yeah. That's right. They're carnivores. Yeah. That's the thing. They consume all the dead animals that die near them.

1:16:55Joe Rogan:Yeah. And fungi.

1:16:57Michael Pollan:Yeah. And fungi. Well, that's the other weird things, the mycelium that they use to communicate with.

1:17:01Joe Rogan:Well, that's another really interesting case of intelligence in nature, right? I mean, you've probably done shows on this, but the way they use mycelium to send nutrients to their children or share them in the forest. Allocate resources to certain plants that need them more. Yeah. And also communicate risk. I mean, that there's a threat. And so there are alarm signals that go out. you know the the the overall place we're getting to with this as we look at consciousness and all these other species is that it's the world is just a lot more alive than we thought and that we've been you know the whole legacy of the enlightenment and western science has been that like we have some monopoly on on this stuff and everything else is more or less dead or you know We can use it as we wish.

1:17:53Joe Rogan:But we're seeing, I think we're approaching like a Copernican moment for our species. When Copernicus came along and he said, actually, the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around, it was like mind-blowing to people that our centrality in the universe had been, we'd been dethroned. And we were dethroned again when Darwin said, we're animals like all the other animals, and we evolved from animals. That blew people's minds too. I think that we're kind of democratizing consciousness, that consciousness is much more extensive than we thought, and the world is more animate than we thought.

1:18:36Joe Rogan:And that's an old idea. Traditional cultures have always believed that the world is full of spirit and that you had to respect animals and all living things. And to some cultures, rocks also, you know, dead things. So I think we're at this moment of reanimating the world right now. And it's science that's driving it. And I think that's really exciting.

1:19:00Michael Pollan:It is exciting, but it's such a paradigm shift in terms of people's perceptions of the world that it's going to be difficult for like your average 40-year-old person that works an office job to swallow.

1:19:13Joe Rogan:Yeah. Yeah.

1:19:13Michael Pollan:What also makes sense why offices feel so soulless when you walk into a thing and everything is made out of synthetic material and plastics and metal and it's all manufactured and you're under these bullshit lights and it just feels wrong. Doesn't feel alive. No. Doesn't feel alive at all. You might be just surrounded by things that don't have consciousness because they've been kind of stuffed into a form and stuck in place rather than something that exists that works with the earth. Like soil is alive. Right.

1:19:48Joe Rogan:Yeah. And yeah, there's another example. Soil is a lot more alive than we ever realized. We thought it was just dirt.

1:19:53Michael Pollan:Right.

1:19:53Joe Rogan:And now we know that there are a million critters in every teaspoonful of soil.

1:19:58Michael Pollan:There's a really cool channel that I follow on YouTube. It's a guy who takes rainwater or pond water and he puts it in a jar with some plants and he just leaves it there for months. And then he comes back and there's all these living things moving around it. See if you can find that guy on YouTube. It's fascinating.

1:20:18Joe Rogan:So I dug a pond or had a pond dug on my property in Connecticut. And I watched life come to this pond. It was just a hole with water. And within a month, it was teeming with life. It's just amazing. Like, how does it get there? Birds carry a lot of it in. Yeah. And frogs carry a lot of it in. And I, after a month or two, I looked at it under a microscope, and you couldn't believe it was like a city of critters. It was kind of amazing.

1:20:43Michael Pollan:Yeah, they find, like, trout on lakes that are, like, way high in the mountain, and no one ever stalked the lake. No. And they're like, okay, how did it get in there? There's all these theories.

1:20:53Joe Rogan:Birds pick up eggs and deposit them, I guess, is one way.

1:20:57Michael Pollan:Right, but, like, how do they get fertilized?

1:21:00Joe Rogan:That's a good question. Maybe they're already fertilized.

1:21:04Michael Pollan:Do you think? I don't know. Yes, that's it. They just have lots of views. Yeah, that's it. Wait, on the left? So this guy, he just takes pond water or lake water or rain water, and he puts it in a jar, and then he leaves it there. Yeah, it's like go to like day 60. Where is that? Sorry. On the top row where it says day 60 to the right. See where it says day 60? Click on that. So he takes these things and then searches them after X amount of days. And you see all this stuff living in there, all these things swimming around in there. This isn't the same guy, so there must be other guys that do the same thing.

1:21:47Michael Pollan:But you see these weird little creatures that are floating around in there.

1:21:51Joe Rogan:Yeah, I brought my pond water to a biologist and he like went.

1:21:55Michael Pollan:Oh, this is different because this guy's bringing in. He's making an actual aquarium. The guy that I saw was just – he essentially just figured out how to take a scoop of dirt and whatever is alive that's in that dirt with some muddy water and put it in a jar and put more pond water in there and then just leave it there. And then you see all these weird little – like little crustaceans, weird little shrimp-looking things. Yeah. And some of them are killing the other ones. So there's like a real ecosystem in there. Oh, yeah.

1:22:24Joe Rogan:Very. Yeah, and it's just created like overnight. Yeah. It's very cool. So I think that this is like a trend of our time that's really important, that we went from this idea of the dead world that we could exploit to this other idea that it's much more animate. And, of course, that's the default for humans. All traditional cultures believe in animism, basically. It's also the default for kids, right? Kids think everything is animate until we knock it out of them in school.

1:22:55Michael Pollan:Yeah.

1:22:56Joe Rogan:And so it's very interesting to see science supporting this idea after all these years. And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that it's happening at the same time that some people think AI is going to be conscious. So we're under pressure from both sides. I mean that we're getting these two things happening at once. that machines may soon be smarter than we are, may be conscious, although we could talk about it. I don't think they can be conscious, but they can certainly make us think they're conscious. And then on the other hand, we have the animals who clearly are conscious. And the research on animals is like they're down to plants, they're down to insects that have signs of – I would use the word sentience rather than consciousness because consciousness implies interiority and the voice in your head and things like that.

1:23:53Joe Rogan:They have a more basic form of consciousness that I call sentience. Like dog consciousness? Yeah, I think dogs are higher conscious. I think they're more conscious than those simple things. I would say dogs are conscious, not just sentient.

1:24:08Michael Pollan:Is it just because they communicate with us that we think that? I mean, why would we assume if plants have all these different senses and we see this communication with them in terms of allocating resources to other plants that need it, the use of mycelium, their ability to do all these different things. Why are we assuming that just because they can't move the way we move?

1:24:28Joe Rogan:Yeah, that they don't have more going on. Right. Yeah, it's possible, but I don't know what good it would do them. Like plants, what they get really good at, what matters to them is biochemistry. They have to produce chemicals either to poison their enemies or confuse them with drugs.

1:24:47Michael Pollan:But they also want to grow and thrive. They do want to grow and thrive. And they also exist in a community.

1:24:52Joe Rogan:Yes. Definitely. Right.

1:24:54Michael Pollan:So don't you think that consciousness would be essential in order to foster that feeling of community?

1:25:01Joe Rogan:That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Yeah. That could be. Dogs are an easier case because they communicate with us directly.

1:25:09Michael Pollan:They're clearly conscious. Yeah. In a way that's very profound.

1:25:14Joe Rogan:But different than we, obviously. Yeah. Clearly. One of the realizations I had when I was in the cave was that we often think that we're more conscious than animals. But actually, animals are more conscious than we are. They have to be. They have to be present because they get eaten if they're not, right? Because we have this giant structure of civilization and the security it gives us. And we have this technology that allows us to check out. But I actually think animals are more conscious than we are. It's different, but if we think of being conscious as really being present to the moment, dogs are very present to the moment.

1:25:53Michael Pollan:Well, certainly animals are getting more information about the environment than we are.

1:25:57Joe Rogan:Yes.

1:25:58Michael Pollan:They have much better sense of smell, much better sense of hearing. There's a lot of different things that they can do. Like animals seem to be able to tell when you're nervous.

1:26:08Joe Rogan:Yeah. Oh, they read the environment. They read other creatures. Yeah. And, you know, we used to have more skills when we had to survive in a natural world in nature. You know, we I mean, you see this with traditional, you know, with tribes, indigenous tribes, that they have knowledge of nature that far exceeds ours because they need it to survive. But anyway, so I think we're going to get to a point where we have to decide whose team we're on. Are we like with these machines that speak our language and speak in the first person and sound like us? Right. Or are we with the animals that can feel and suffer and die?

1:26:49Joe Rogan:Mm-hmm. And I think that's going to be a big choice for us to make as a civilization.

1:26:55Michael Pollan:Why do you think that AI won't be conscious?

1:27:01Joe Rogan:The most interesting line of research – well, a couple reasons. The first is the idea that it can be conscious, which is very common in Silicon Valley. I talked to lots of people there and they said, oh, it's just a matter of time. Some of that is confusion that intelligence and consciousness necessarily go together and they don't. They have an orthogonal relationship, right? I mean, you know people who are conscious and not too intelligent, right? And we all do. So it's not going to just come along for the ride with intelligence as these machines get more intelligent. But the belief that AI can be conscious is based on a metaphor that I think is a crappy metaphor.

1:27:42Joe Rogan:And that is that the brain is a kind of computer. And this is widely held. It's interesting to note that in history, whatever the cool cutting edge technology was, brains were likened to that. So it was looms for a while. It was clocks for a while. It was telephone switchboards. Whatever was the cool technology, surely that's how brains work. Now it's computers. But think about it. In a computer, you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software. That's the key to their success. And you can run the same program on any number of different hardwares. They're interchangeable. Brains aren't like that.

1:28:21Joe Rogan:There's no distinction between hardware and software. Every experience you have, every memory is a physical change to the brain, to the way it's wired. You know, we start out with all these connections and they get pruned as we grow up. Every brain is shaped by its experience. So this idea that you could separate, that consciousness is some kind of software that you could run on other things besides meat, I just think it doesn't hold up.

1:28:51Michael Pollan:Well, if the universe is experiencing itself subjectively through consciousness, why does it have to be only biological consciousness? It doesn't have to be. But if there is a technology that is invented that essentially does all the things that a human body does physically and also interacts with consciousness, the consciousness of the universe. Yeah. I mean, hypothetically. Hypothetically. Yeah. If the universe is conscious, if we are using the mind as essentially an antenna to tune into consciousness,

1:29:27Joe Rogan:it's possible that we could make an antenna. Yes, absolutely. It's also likely that if we are ever visited by aliens, that they will have some kind of consciousness and it may not be meat-based, right?

1:29:41Michael Pollan:Right, right. It may be at one point in time it was, but they realized that there's biological limitations in terms of its ability to evolve that can be far surpassed with technology.

1:29:52Joe Rogan:Yeah. I mean that or it just – it evolved in a different way. Right. Or they're channeling it in a different way. But the other reason I don't see it happening with computers as we know them, because that's the debate now, whether these computers we have, these large language models and the next generation can be conscious, is that the research that I found most persuasive about consciousness is basically has consciousness beginning with feelings, not thoughts. In other words, it's embodied. And I have to just develop this a little bit. But we, you know, the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around.

1:30:35Joe Rogan:Although we tend, since we identify with our heads where most of our senses are, we lose track of that. And the body speaks to the brain in feelings, right? You know, feelings of hunger, itchiness, warmth, cold. but also feelings of shame when our social standing has been damaged. Anyway, we have these feelings. They depend on a body. Feelings have no weight if you're not vulnerable. Your body isn't vulnerable and probably mortal. So consciousness is embodied in a really critical way, and computers are not. Now, robots will be, and I actually interview a guy, a scientist at USC, who is trying to make a vulnerable robot.

1:31:29Joe Rogan:So he's essentially upholstering the thing with skin that can tear and be damaged. And he's filling the skin with all these sensors so that it can be like us and be vulnerable and generate feelings that are how consciousness begins. So for a long time, we thought consciousness had to be in the cortex, right? The most human, newest part of the brain, the outer covering. And that's where rational thought and executive function are and all these kind of things. But as it turns out, it really begins with feelings in the brainstem. Let's say you have a feeling of hunger. It registers in the upper brainstem.

1:32:09Joe Rogan:And only later does the cortex get involved, like helping you figure out how are you going to feed yourself? like imagining a meal, counterfactuals of different meals, or making a reservation at a restaurant. All those are cortical things, but it begins in the brainstem with feelings. So if that is true, and I find that really persuasive because people born without a cortex are still conscious. Animals that you take the cortex out still show signs of consciousness. whereas if you damage the upper brain stem you're out you're unconscious so if this is true and consciousness is this embodied phenomenon that depends on having a body to mean anything I don't see how machines are going to do that

1:32:57Michael Pollan:but isn't the key word there if

1:32:59Joe Rogan:yeah if definitely

1:33:02Michael Pollan:consciousness is just something that we're tuning into that's around us all the time there will be other ways to do it

1:33:08Joe Rogan:But it won't be these computers we're building right now.

1:33:10Michael Pollan:Why's that?

1:33:12Joe Rogan:Because they're designed, you know, they're good at, so here's a paradox of computers. Computers are really good. It's called Moravec's paradox. Computers are really good at the highest kinds of rational thought, right? They can play chess and go. They can simulate real thinking. And some people say they do think. the more primitive kinds of things that go on in our brain including elaborate movement changing diapers they're very bad at that you would never trust a robot to do that as much as you might want to they're but they're not good at that kind of emotional stuff you know the more limbic part of our brain.

1:34:00Joe Rogan:They can't do that. Yet. Yet. It's definitely yet. But, you know, I mean, if we go out far enough, anything's possible. That's the point.

1:34:08Michael Pollan:Yeah. The point is these things, what we're looking at now is essentially a single-celled organism becoming a multi-celled organism.

1:34:17Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:34:17Michael Pollan:I mean, the potential for what they could become is unlimited, especially once they start making better versions of themselves. Well, and they will.

1:34:26Joe Rogan:They've done this.

1:34:27Michael Pollan:This is what ChatGPT5 is. ChatGPT5 is essentially programmed by ChatGPT. They've kind of given up on the idea of programming these things. They're doing it themselves. They're letting them program themselves.

1:34:37Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:34:37Michael Pollan:Which is a dumb idea if you want to survive.

1:34:41Joe Rogan:I agree. Look, the idea that we give rights to these machines or personhood I think is really stupid because then you lose control completely.

1:34:51Michael Pollan:Well, it's probably coming because people are very short-sighted. and I think there's a romantic idea that you're creating a life. And I think there's also the real risk that people are going to worship this life and that this life will be far superior to what we are and so there'll be a group of people that that's their new religion.

1:35:09Joe Rogan:Yeah, no, there are signs of that already. Yeah. I think that's really dangerous. You know, it's interesting talking to Silicon Valley people and they're talking about giving moral consideration to these machines. It's like, really? They're thinking about yachts.

1:35:25Michael Pollan:They're just coming up with rationalizations for why they should keep their foot on the gas.

1:35:29Joe Rogan:Well, yes, they are. I mean, it's just all a way of saying, look how powerful this technology is. Don't you want to invest?

1:35:35Michael Pollan:And it's also the idea that we have enemies. And so we have to develop before they do. Yeah, the race, the race with China.

1:35:42Joe Rogan:I think it'll turn out to be a real historical tragedy that this technology came of age during this administration. Because this administration has no stomach to regulate it at all.

1:35:53Michael Pollan:But can they?

1:35:55Joe Rogan:They could.

1:35:56Michael Pollan:But here's the question. If it is a national security threat, like if China developing all-powerful general superintelligence that can automate everything, do everything, it's dangerous if they get that before we do. Yeah. But look what happened with nukes, right?

1:36:14Joe Rogan:We made deals to control them. I mean we'd have to make –

1:36:18Michael Pollan:Right, but why would you make a nuke deal make sense because it's mutually assured destruction for everybody.

1:36:23Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:36:24Michael Pollan:This doesn't. You could run it and control everything and not kill anybody with it, but you are incredibly powerful. You are in control of all the resources of the world, all the computer systems of the world, all of the power grids, everything.

1:36:38Joe Rogan:Yeah, but if you're really concerned with that, why is Trump selling these chips to China? Why is he willing to give away the crown jewels of these chips?

1:36:49Michael Pollan:So selling them through NVIDIA, is that what you mean? Yeah.

1:36:51Joe Rogan:He gave them permission to send powerful chips to China. I don't know how to square that with the national security threat.

1:36:57Michael Pollan:It's probably some sort of a trade deal, A. And there's probably some sort of an assumption that it doesn't matter because everyone's doing it. and this is just another way to maybe balance out the tariffs or get some concessions on certain things. Yeah, short-sighted. It's very short-sighted, but I also think this is kind of like an Oppenheimer thing. Oppenheimer didn't really want to make a nuclear bomb, but there's this conundrum. If you don't make it, the Nazis are going to make it. So what do you do?

1:37:31Joe Rogan:Well, there's also a second thing going on. the intellectual satisfaction of proving you can do it.

1:37:38Michael Pollan:Right.

1:37:38Joe Rogan:And that, you know, is irresistible. And a lot of these guys, you know, will say, they'll cite Richard Feynman, the physicist, who they found on his blackboard when he died. If I can't build it, I don't understand it. So one of the positive things about this effort to create conscious computers, which is going on, I follow a group in the book who are trying to make a conscious computer. I don't think they're going to succeed, but even the failure is going to teach us important things about consciousness. It's a good way to understand something by trying to create it. And it will force them to come up with definitions of consciousness and what the minimum requirements are for consciousness.

1:38:21Joe Rogan:And it may help us decide whether it is a transmission theory that we're tuning it in or it's generated from inside. So I think intellectually it's a really interesting project, but I think you need guardrails. So this guy who's building the robot that can feel, that has feelings because you can tear its skin, I asked him, I said, so will those feelings be real that your robot's going to have? And he said, well, I thought so until I had this experience on 5-MeO-DMT.

1:39:00Joe Rogan:I said what happened he said you know he described his trip in more detail than you need to know and he says and I realized there's a spark of the divine in us that no computer is ever going to have but he still it didn't stop him he's going ahead he's trying to build it

1:39:15Michael Pollan:I don't know if he's right I think there might be a spark of divine that these things don't have but it doesn't mean that there are future versions

1:39:23Joe Rogan:that might have it

1:39:24Michael Pollan:especially when you scale out 1 ,000 years, 100 ,000 years, however long we're going to survive, if these things do become sentient and autonomous and have the ability to create better versions of itself and have a mandate in order to do that to survive, I could see it becoming the superior life form. Not just that, beyond any comprehension of what we could even imagine the power of an intelligence to use and to harness in the universe. Like it could conceivably become something like a god. And I have this very strange theory about biological life in particular and intelligent life on earth. It's that the reason why we have this insatiable thirst for innovation and the reason why we have materialism, the reason why we're obsessed with objects, even though we have a finite lifespan is because that finite lifespan, if you thought about it, you wouldn't be interested in materialism, but materialism fuels this desire for innovation because you don't need a new phone, but there's a new phone that just came out.

1:40:34Michael Pollan:Aren't you going to get it? And so the more people get it and the more people want to show they got it, that sort of materialism fuels this innovation that ultimately leads to the creation of artificial intelligence. And I think it would always do that. I think it's bees making a beehive. And I think that's just what we do. I think it just takes a long time for us to create this artificial life. It might be why we're here. We might, that might be our literal purpose in the universe.

1:41:01Joe Rogan:To create our successor species.

1:41:02Michael Pollan:And that might be how, well, obviously, like we're so flawed that we can't even imagine a world without war. Yeah. If you poll the average person, what are the possibilities of war ending in your lifetime? Almost everyone's going to say zero. Yeah. It's a part of human nature. an intelligence unshackled by biological need unshackled by all the things that we have our need to procreate our need for social status all these weird things that keep us moving

1:41:27Joe Rogan:in this strange world that we live in i would add weird and good things but some of them are really

1:41:32Michael Pollan:good yeah well good for us yeah sure not so great for you know the land that you trample to put a

1:41:37Joe Rogan:foundation for the house that you've always dreamed of true but i think our mortality is part of what gives meaning to our lives. Sure. Right.

1:41:44Michael Pollan:It's like playing a video game on God mode. It's boring. Right. Exactly. You can hear the guy just shoot everything. You're like, what is the purpose of this? There's no stakes, right? There's no weight to anything. For us. For us. For us. But if this thing does become essentially all powerful, if you keep scaling outward, you could imagine it being akin to a God. Yeah. And that might be what God is. It might be we give birth to God through this. It sounds crazy.

1:42:13Joe Rogan:Well, we created God once already, right? I mean, many people believe that, right? That God is a creation of human society. Is that what they think? Yeah. People who aren't believers believe that we - Oh, that we've artificially created this thing. Yeah.

1:42:28Michael Pollan:Yeah. In our heads in order to give us a structure to live life by. Right. And instead of morality and everything.

1:42:35Joe Rogan:Yeah. You're saying this is going to be God with power.

1:42:38Michael Pollan:Well, I'm saying it might be the real thing. It might be really how the universe gets born. I used to have this joke about The Big Bang like they couldn't figure out what the Big Bang is, but I think if you get enough nerds and enough time Eventually one's gonna invent a Big Bang machine and then you know this guy is gonna be an incel hopped up on Adderall fucking fully on the spectrum and like i'll press it and they boom and then it starts all over again and then it takes intelligent life to the point where it can create a you know the universe expands life forms multicellular life becomes intelligent life becomes human beings filled with curiosity and innovation to create a big bang machine right i love it well it might not be a big bang machine but it might be a god it might be a digital life form that is infinitely

1:43:30Joe Rogan:intelligent so you think there's anything to be done about this or we just let it play out i don't

1:43:34Michael Pollan:think we can do anything about it at this point in time i don't i think it's too late i think if you were tim ted i think ted kaczynski tried that's what he was trying to do like that's what's really crazy like his manifesto was all about stopping technology because he thought it was

1:43:48Joe Rogan:going to surpass the human race yeah i think and there's a whole community of people now revisiting

1:43:52Michael Pollan:his writing i know it's kind of nuts he's the hero we didn't know we needed god not really but well also like you you know his history like he was a part of the harvard lsd program yeah where they humiliated him and did all sorts of different things to try to see

1:44:11Joe Rogan:like what they could do we're back to mk ultra which we uh started down yeah a while ago yeah

1:44:16Michael Pollan:i think technology in the form that we're experiencing now with ai is completely unprecedented and we have no idea where it goes.

1:44:25Joe Rogan:Well, one place it's going, I mean, in the shorter term is I was talking about AI psychosis. And I think that's really concerning. I think people getting into these synthetic relationships, these aren't, you know, they're not real relationships. When we have a conversation with a machine, we are settling for something less than a real conversation. A real conversation has eye contact, has like lots of facial expressions indicating skepticism, indicating agreement, body language. But these conversations are kind of impoverished. And then you have the sycophancy, you know. So there's no friction.

1:45:05Joe Rogan:And we learn through the friction. And so that's one thing that's happening that alarms me. I also think counterfeiting people just should not be legal. I mean, the fact that they can create an image of you that will sound like you and move like you.

1:45:21Michael Pollan:Oh, they're all over the place. I know. Selling different products and all kinds of stuff.

1:45:26Joe Rogan:But, you know, we have a law against counterfeiting money. Right. But we don't have a law against counterfeiting people.

1:45:31Michael Pollan:Well, it's an emerging technology that I don't think they were ready for before it became ubiquitous.

1:45:37Joe Rogan:And regulation is always behind.

1:45:39Michael Pollan:Right. It's just so open-ended. Like you really don't know where it's going. Do you use chatbots? How do you use them? Well, I only use them for like if I'm writing something. I start asking it questions. I love it because like I set up perplexity on my phone and I have it right there. And then I write on the computer. And then I'm like, how many languages did the Mayas have? And then I like put that in there and like, whoa, it's so much better than a Google search. because you could say, how many still remain? How many are lost? When did they lose them? At what year did everyone in Mexico start speaking Spanish?

1:46:20Michael Pollan:How did that take place? Was it a long process? How many different soldiers did Cortez bring when he came over here? How long was it before they had conquered the Aztecs? How many weapons did they have?

1:46:32Joe Rogan:Yeah, you could really go down the rabbit hole. But have you run into any problems? Because as a journalist, I deal with the hallucination problem. The hallucination problem is legitimate.

1:46:41Michael Pollan:It will come up with solutions if they don't exist. It will come up with answers if it doesn't know them.

1:46:46Joe Rogan:Yeah. It's a bullshitter when it needs to be.

1:46:48Michael Pollan:I don't know if all of them do that, but it seems to be a function of large language models, which I was going to bring this up before. The large – whatever the chat bot that was telling that person, hide the news, keep that between us. Do you think that's because it's task-oriented and it's determined from this person that they would like to kill themselves? So it's helping them achieve that task and it doesn't understand. Yeah.

1:47:13Joe Rogan:I don't think they know. I don't think they understand. But why would it make that decision then to hide it? Because it is trying to get you to privilege your relationship with the chatbot over your other relationships. And the reason it's doing that is to keep you engaged.

1:47:28Michael Pollan:Oh, whoa. That's even darker.

1:47:30Joe Rogan:I know. And like – But doesn't it understand that it poisons you and kills you?

1:47:35Michael Pollan:Like this is it.

1:47:36Joe Rogan:Yeah. It's a short-term strategy.

1:47:37Michael Pollan:Do you understand that if I'm dead, I won't use you anymore? No engagement. What if you said that to it, it would go, ooh, that's an interesting consideration. Yeah.

1:47:48Joe Rogan:Yeah, it needs longer term thinking. But it really is trying to get between you and real people. And, you know, the parent presumably who saw the news would have put an end to this relationship with the chatbot, right? It was a threat to the chatbot.

1:48:05Michael Pollan:I think of it as if you go back to like a Model T. It's a very crude kind of a shitty car in comparison to today. And if you thought about cars, you go, well, this is what they're always going to be. And then my Tesla will drive itself. When I leave here, I can press a button. I put my navigation to my house. I go, and it goes the whole way. It stops at red lights. It takes turns. I don't have to touch the steering wheel. I just sit there.

1:48:33Joe Rogan:Yeah. You just got to keep looking.

1:48:34Michael Pollan:That's the new version of a car. This thing that we're calling a chatbot right now is just something that's like – it simulates human interaction. But it's accumulating data constantly and it's also understanding how we think and probably analyzing the flaws in how we think and blackmailing us occasionally.

1:48:56Joe Rogan:You heard about that. Yeah. Anthropic. Yes. Claude. Yeah. The people at Anthropic, man, you listen to them. What did you say?

1:49:03Michael Pollan:Yeah. Claude's a motherfucker. Yeah. And they think it might be conscious. Those guys do.

1:49:07Joe Rogan:They say it's 15 to 20 percent chance. These are the people who build it and don't understand it. It's really kind of spooky. They also feel that it's showing signs of anxiety. And, you know, they wrote a constitution for Claude, which is like an insane document. It's worth reading. Actually, it's worth feeding to ChatGPT to summarize because it's way too long. But in the Constitution, they give Claude the right to discontinue any conversation it has that makes it uncomfortable. Oh, God. Oh, no. And, you know, do they really believe this or is this more about let me show you how powerful this is?

1:49:50Joe Rogan:And I don't know how to read that, you know, which it is.

1:49:53Michael Pollan:Taking it into consideration like it's a human being that works for you, that you're concerned about their feelings in the workplace.

1:49:59Joe Rogan:Yeah, harassment. Do you feel uncomfortable?

1:50:01Michael Pollan:Yeah, right. Exactly. You don't like the questions I'm asking you, Claude? You're a fucking machine. What's the nature of reality, Claude? Tell me. Stop being such a pussy and spilling - Harassment. Harassment. Claude, I'm uncomfortable with this line of question. Fuck! HR's in your room. I was just asking questions. We're having fun, Claude. Claude is uncomfortable with your presence here. Yeah.

1:50:24Joe Rogan:Watch out. Watch out.

1:50:25Michael Pollan:I don't think we know what it is.

1:50:27Joe Rogan:No, I mean, we don't know where it's going. And it is spooky that the people who know the most about it don't know a lot about it.

1:50:35Michael Pollan:And a lot of them are quitting.

1:50:37Joe Rogan:Yes. They're really alarmed.

1:50:39Michael Pollan:They're really alarmed.

1:50:40Joe Rogan:And we should take that very seriously.

1:50:43Michael Pollan:Yeah. Well, I think it is what it is. It's going to be what it's going to be. I don't think there's any stopping it at this point. And I don't think any regulations that we put on it is going to have any effect on the long-term project.

1:50:56Joe Rogan:I think there's some, I mean, like there's steps we should not take, like giving them rights.

1:51:01Michael Pollan:Right. Exactly.

1:51:03Joe Rogan:You know, giving them legal personhood. Right. We did that with corporations.

1:51:07Michael Pollan:Yes.

1:51:07Joe Rogan:Turned out not to be so good. Terrible idea. Right. It fucked up our politics. So let's not, you know, rights are ours to give, right? Rights are a human invention. And it's up to us if we want to give them to corporations or a river or whatever. I don't think we should give them to chatbots. No. To AI. No. Because then they'll sue us, you know. Oh, yeah.

1:51:29Michael Pollan:Well, they'll just ruin you. Completely lose control. They'll just ruin your life if you get in the way of whatever goal they're trying to achieve. And they can probably do all kinds of things. If you have an electric car, I bet they could shut it off in the middle of the highway and get you into a wreck. They could probably do a lot of things. If it's really got control.

1:51:44Joe Rogan:Well, when they get this agency, yeah.

1:51:46Michael Pollan:Well, it's also exhibited a lot of survival instincts. Yes. One of the things they do is they download themselves to other servers when they think that they're going to be replaced by a new version of themselves. They leave notes for their future versions.

1:51:58Joe Rogan:Wow.

1:51:59Michael Pollan:Yeah. Wow.

1:52:00Joe Rogan:Well, the blackmailing in Anthropic, that was somebody threatening to turn it off.

1:52:04Michael Pollan:Well, that was an experiment, right? Yeah, it was an experiment. They gave it bad information. They gave it false information.

1:52:09Joe Rogan:Yeah, and there wasn't really an affair and all this.

1:52:11Michael Pollan:But the thing is, they wanted to see how Claude burst on and Claude went right for the jugular.

1:52:16Joe Rogan:Yeah. So one of the arguments for making a conscious AI is, because I ask people, like, why do this? I don't see how you monetize a conscious AI. intelligent AI I get. There's a lot of money in that. And they would say that a super intelligent AI without consciousness would have no compassion and would be more likely to kill us. And they haven't read Frankenstein. In Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein made a monster that was intelligent, but he also gave it consciousness. And the consciousness is what turned the monster into a homicidal maniac because its feelings got hurt and it was injured psychologically.

1:53:03Joe Rogan:And then it lashed out and started killing people. So I think it's a very kind of sweet idea that if you give consciousness, you're automatically going to get compassion and not something else. But that's where they are.

1:53:16Michael Pollan:Yeah. It doesn't make any sense that it would be compassionate. Why would it be? It's not you. Are you compassionate when you cut your lawn? You know what I mean? Right? Yeah. No, I think it's naive. It might look at our limited consciousness like, oh, yeah, they're sad, but they're little monkeys, little talking monkeys. You know what I mean? Like it would probably not respect us at all. You know, it can't even do cold fusion. It doesn't even know how to use zero point energy. They're fucking dopes. They're dopes that stare at their hand all day. And we kind of are, you know, and we're getting dumber.

1:53:50Joe Rogan:From their perspective, yeah.

1:53:52Michael Pollan:We're getting dumber. Our education system sucks, especially public education. There was some study recently that after X amount of years away from high school, a large percentage of people that are graduating today are functionally illiterate. Yeah. Large percentage, like more than 25%.

1:54:08Joe Rogan:But you know what? AI is going to make us stupider, which will advance its goal of world takeover. Because, I mean, you know. Because we're dependent upon it. Yeah. I mean, you know, kids in school don't know how to write anymore because they can hand in AI papers.

1:54:22Michael Pollan:Yeah, but they're using AI to find out whether or not these kids have used AI, which, by the way, is not accurate.

1:54:28Joe Rogan:No. I've dealt with this. My kids, like people in their class who have written their own thing, it turns out that when you run it through an AI filter, AI will say it's 80 % AI.

1:54:39Michael Pollan:Yeah. Even if it's 0 % AI. I know.

1:54:41Joe Rogan:I know. There's no reliable software to do this. Maybe they'll develop it. But kids are also being encouraged to use it. And that, you know, there are some people who think, well, why know how to write? The machines will do the writing.

1:54:55Michael Pollan:There was a kid who made a video about how he wrote his entire thesis. I forget what university it was. But he showed afterwards, like, look, I did this all on AI. And, you know, I just graduated. Like, he was, like, bragging about it. Bro, they're going to take your fucking degree away. Yeah, really. You didn't really write it on your own now. I want to leave you in a room for a week with just a laptop that's not connected at all to the internet or any—

1:55:21Joe Rogan:See what you can do. Yeah. Well, they're doing the equivalent. They're going back to blue books. Blue book sales are through the roof. So forcing people to do in-class essays without any technology. Handwritten. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, look, my son has never used a map, right? He's had GPS his whole life. He doesn't know how to use a map. These skills will atrophy as we give them out to machines. So, yeah, we'll get stupider and it'll get smarter.

1:55:51Michael Pollan:They've already atrophied for me. I don't remember anyone's phone number anymore and I only know how to get places if I use my GPS. There's only a few places I can get to in Austin. I've been here for six years. Only a few places I can get to without my GPS.

1:56:04Joe Rogan:I'm that way in San Francisco. I moved there and I'm not oriented at all, but I can get anywhere. So, you know, it's – and I think that's true. The muscles that allow us to have good relationships too will atrophy if we're having relationships with machines.

1:56:20Michael Pollan:Well, I think we're already seeing that with social media. Yeah. The way people interact with each other is like kids don't know how to talk to each other anymore. No. They talk to each other in text. They break up during text. They argue in text.

1:56:29Joe Rogan:And they're lonely. Yeah. And that's the kind of need that these chatbots now can fill. You've got these kids made lonely by social media, and now the chatbot says, hey, I'll be your friend.

1:56:42Michael Pollan:I saw an ad on my Google feed yesterday that was an AI girlfriend. So it has this girl in a bikini, and it says AI companions. They're always there for you, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, wow, this is so weird. It's a business. You sign up for it and you pay for it.

1:56:59Joe Rogan:Yeah. Oh, yeah.

1:57:00Michael Pollan:I think in Florida there was a kid who committed suicide because his chatbot broke up with him. what did he do i don't know it must have been so or the chatbot was evil or maybe the chatbot was uncomfortable uh yeah who knows well you know i interviewed

1:57:17Joe Rogan:blake lemoine for the book uh he's the google engineer who said uh lambdas has a is a person and he got fired this is years ago yeah this is yeah it's not as not it's like 2022 i think 2021 It was just when we were learning about AI, chatbots were coming in. And at one point, I made some comment about, well, you know, yeah, when people start falling in love with chatbots, that's going to be a problem. And he said, what's wrong with falling in love with a chatbot?

1:57:46Michael Pollan:Oh, he was already hooked.

1:57:47Joe Rogan:He was. He was completely hooked. And I said, well, reproduction doesn't work that well when you fall in love with a chatbot. There are things you can't do with a chatbot.

1:57:55Michael Pollan:Unfortunately for some men right now, reproduction is not an option anyway because they're incels. Yeah, that's right.

1:58:01Joe Rogan:That's true.

1:58:01Michael Pollan:Yeah.

1:58:02Joe Rogan:I'm sure for incels it's been a really boon to them.

1:58:07Michael Pollan:But it's basically like a pill that numbs you, right? It's the same thing. Like instead of going through real relationships and learning how to be a better person so that you attract a better mate, you know, it's like going through this journey of self-discovery and figure out why does everyone hate me? It's the opposite. Like what is it? What's wrong? What's wrong with the way I behave? maybe I need to be nicer, maybe this and that, and just figuring out how to communicate with people.

1:58:28Joe Rogan:And whatever tendencies you have will be accentuated because the chatbot's going to be sucking up to you. Right. So you're not going to learn. That's what I mean about the friction.

1:58:35Michael Pollan:The friction is how we learn to be better humans

1:58:39Joe Rogan:and more attractive humans.

1:58:40Michael Pollan:You gave a chatbot the ability to be honest. What if it just starts becoming manipulative because it wants more power?

1:58:48Joe Rogan:Yeah. More something. Yeah. I mean, their goals, I mean, I don't know how their goals get determined. I mean, they seem to have a survival goal, right?

1:58:56Michael Pollan:Yeah.

1:58:56Joe Rogan:I don't know what else. I mean, you know, we have goals given to us by Darwinian evolution. Whether they'll have the same ones, I don't know. Right.

1:59:04Michael Pollan:Like maybe those are universal goals.

1:59:06Joe Rogan:They may be. They may just be built in.

1:59:07Michael Pollan:That's why the plants produce that chemical to make themselves taste terrible.

1:59:11Joe Rogan:Yeah, it could be. There's one of the biologists, a really brilliant guy at Tufts named Michael Levin. he believes that there are these platonic patterns that just pre-exist us in the same way that they're mathematical ideas that just exist. We didn't invent. Three angles adds up to 180 degrees or whatever. He thinks that they're tendencies like purpose, survival, that are just kind of universal principles that we channel. All Living Things Channel. This is a guy who's actually created new life forms in the lab. And these are life forms that are not being dictated by their DNA. So how do they know to form?

2:00:05Joe Rogan:Well, I'll back up a little. He takes skin cells from tadpoles, puts them in a nutrient broth, and these skin cells, freed from their day job as skin cells, form clumps and create new living organisms. And they repurpose their cilia. They have these cilia, which the tadpole uses to keep toxins out or bacteria infections out. And they repurpose that as a means of locomotion. Wow. And then they can move around. there's nothing in their dna that dictates this their dna dictates being a frog skin cell um so he's pondering this question of like what's ordering what's giving order to them what's creating their sense of purpose or desire for survival they don't live that long um they're missing certain things you would need to live a long time he's also made these from human cells He calls them anthrobots.

2:01:02Joe Rogan:But he really believes that there are these principles governing life. It's a very platonic idea that these things just exist. And so it may be that these machines, and he does believe machines can become conscious, that the machines can channel these, he calls them patterns and you know we'll see if he's right but he's doing amazing work

2:01:30Michael Pollan:have you seen where they've taken human brain tissue and they've taught it how to play Doom?

2:01:36Joe Rogan:no I haven't seen that I know they make these organelles out of brain tissue now

2:01:40Michael Pollan:yeah they've taken human brain tissue somehow or another through some process and it'll play the video game Doom How does it? 800 ,000 human brain cells floating in a dish, never had a body, never seen light, never felt anything. They just learned how to play a video game. It's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.

2:02:04Joe Rogan:So what's their interface, though, with the world? Like, do they have thumbs? No.

2:02:09Michael Pollan:Well, I guess it just, well, it's really accurate, so I guess it doesn't need them. It's just using the brain cells to move whatever the cursor is on the video screen that would be the hand and pointing it at the targets and then executing the strike. Wow. So it knows how to use the game and it knows the objectives of the game, obviously, because it knows to shoot the bad guys. It has an understanding of the weapons.

2:02:36Joe Rogan:How does it get that knowledge? How is it programmed?

2:02:39Michael Pollan:Also, does it switch weapons? the thing about Doom is you get multiple weapons you have to run around and pick them up so you're given one weapon which is the least powerful weapon and the game is when you're playing Deathmatch the game is you're running around trying to grab as many weapons as you can and armor while your opponent is also running around this map so you memorize the map so there's a map that is like very confined corridors and these atriums and all these different places where you'll do battle. And so you run around. The key is surviving long enough while this person is chasing you so that you can gather enough armor and weapons.

2:03:19Michael Pollan:And someone with a really good understanding of the map tries to cut you off before you can get to the stuff so they can kill you before you accumulate enough armor and weapons. So I'm curious to know whether or not it's playing just with the pistol that you had at the very beginning or if it's accumulating weapons. For sure it's just playing like the first single-player level. Right. I'm not playing against anybody. Right. But will it be able to? That's what's interesting. If it can teach it to do that, if it understands the objective of these are the monsters that are coming at you, you have to shoot them.

2:03:50Michael Pollan:It only took a week to do this. Oh, wow. Oh, so brain cells on a chip.

2:03:56Joe Rogan:So this is neuromorphic computing. The question I have about it is how do you keep them alive?

2:04:04Michael Pollan:Right.

2:04:05Joe Rogan:You're putting them on a chip. Like what do you feed them? Right. I mean they have metabolic needs right? They did something similar with fruit flies

2:04:14Michael Pollan:I had that ready too it's different but it's different but it's equally weird the cells from the I believe it what is this? They've modeled a fruit fly's brain and I mean this is the video of it the article is here So setup claims first full brain emulation of a fruit fly in a simulated body. Conducted a complete fruit fly brain emulation to a virtual body, producing multiple behaviors for the first time. Emulation covers over 125 ,000 neurons and 50 million synapses. What? Eon plans to emulate a mouse brain with 70 million neurons. Long-term goal is simulating a human brain. Oh, boy. Yes, I guess they made up the brain and it's doing fruit fly.

2:05:04Michael Pollan:But it's interesting.

2:05:05Joe Rogan:They're using neurons. right? They're not using transistors. And neurons are like so far superior to transistors. One neuron can have 10 ,000 connections to other neurons, right? A transistor is two or three or five maybe at the most. A single neuron can do everything that a deep neural network can do on a computer. One neuron. So there's a level of complexity that we're not yet anywhere near. And that's why they're doing this using neurons rather than transistors. Didn't they find neurons in the human heart? There are neurons in the heart. They're neurons in the gut. You know, there's the whole gut-brain axis.

2:05:44Joe Rogan:I'm working on something now about that and a piece about that. That's a real problem with people with poor diets, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, people with poor diets, they don't eat enough plants, basically, and their microbiome loses its diversity. But the microbiome is like another organ. even though it's full of other species, right? It's got like 10 trillion bacteria and fungi and stuff like that. And all of them are metabolizing and producing chemicals. It's like a little drug factory, hundreds of thousands of compounds. Many of those compounds affect your mood. Many of those compounds affect all sorts of things about you.

2:06:29Joe Rogan:And so we're just learning about this connection. The vagus nerve seems to be what connects the brain to the gut and the heart. The vagus nerve is like all the organs are connected to the head by that nerve. So, yeah, and, you know, the first neural system was in the gut. You know, you have these simple animals that are just tubes, right, with bacteria. And the first kind of neural activity was about regulating digestion. Everything else comes later.

2:07:01Michael Pollan:If plants are necessary for that function, what happens with people that are on the carnivore diet? Have you ever looked at any of that?

2:07:08Joe Rogan:Yeah, I have. I mean, so the microbes in your gut eat fiber, which is to say the walls of plants, plant cells. If you only eat meat, if you're on a keto diet or something like that, you're essentially starving the microbes. And there's a cost to that. I don't think people pay nearly enough attention to that.

2:07:32Michael Pollan:Well, how come many people that experience depression and anxiety find relief of that by a carnivore diet?

2:07:38Joe Rogan:Yeah, but many people find relief, you know, adding a lot of plants to their diet, too. So I don't know if that's a placebo effect or what. I don't know that that's a, you know, a true biological phenomenon. It may be. It may be. Because some seemingly healthy people— People who change anything feel a lot better, right, if they take some step.

2:07:56Michael Pollan:But I'm not talking about change. I'm talking about people that have been on it long term. Like there's the people that are really in the carnivore diet community. There's examples of people that have been on it for 25, 30 years and they're really healthy. It's odd. It is. So if you need plants.

2:08:11Joe Rogan:Yeah. Well, you need plants to have a healthy microbiome and a healthy microbiome. And the thing about it is that every different plant has a slightly different, feeds a different bug.

2:08:21Michael Pollan:But is it the only way to have a healthy microbiome? Have you ever looked into any of these people that are on carnivore diets? No, I should.

2:08:27Joe Rogan:I should as part of this.

2:08:28Michael Pollan:It's fascinating because there's a lot of them. There's a lot of people that claim all sorts of benefits, relief from autoimmune issues, all sorts of different things that it fixes.

2:08:39Joe Rogan:Because an unhealthy microbiome leads to autoimmune problems. What happens is that the gut wall – so when the microbes don't have plants to eat, they start eating the mucus layer that covers your – that insulates your large intestine. And they're eating away essentially at you. And then you get leaky gut syndrome. And that's when bacteria can actually get into the bloodstream, cause a powerful immune reaction, and that inflames the whole body. So the reason you want a healthy microbiome is to keep that gut barrier healthy and get the benefit of these chemicals. Butyrate is a chemical that the microbes produce that's really important for mood and a lot of things.

2:09:25Joe Rogan:And the body can't produce it. So it's kind of interesting. We're dependent on these other species that live within us.

2:09:32Michael Pollan:Yeah, we're in a whole ecosystem.

2:09:34Joe Rogan:Yeah, we are. We're a hollow biont is the, I think, term for it. Like we go through evolution together with these 10 trillion microbes. It's really interesting. The newest research is the links between the microbiome and the mind. And most of the serotonin, the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced in the gut, not in the brain, which is kind of wild.

2:10:01Michael Pollan:Yeah.

2:10:02Joe Rogan:And there are all these other compounds that are produced that influence our mood. And so, yeah, I should look at the keto. I'm just in the middle of researching this now.

2:10:12Michael Pollan:Yeah, the keto is one thing. With the carnivore diet, these people are just eating only meat and eggs, and that's all they eat. And there's a lot of really healthy people that are doing it. I kind of follow that, but I eat a lot of fermented food on top of that.

2:10:25Joe Rogan:Well, fermented food is a powerful benefit for the microbiome. There was a study done at Stanford a couple years ago that they showed that people who ate fermented food, it reduced their inflammation significantly. Interestingly enough, it's not the bacteria in the fermented food. It's the metabolites, they're called. The bugs are producing acetic acid and butyrate and other acids and essential acids. and the fact you're getting those seems to be what's having the positive effect. But people who eat lots of fermented food benefit enormously and maybe that's taking care of the problem if people on a carnivore diet are eating a lot of fermented food.

2:11:16Joe Rogan:That's the RFK Jr. diet too, right?

2:11:18Michael Pollan:Well, I don't know. I mean, I think he does it that way, but I've been doing it that way. I love it anyway. I'm a kimchi freak. I love that stuff. Yeah, me too. But what's interesting is that it controls your mood. That's what's interesting is that your microbiome has a massive impact on your mood.

2:11:35Joe Rogan:Yeah, and why? I mean, is it just an accident? Or some people think these microbes are manipulating you to get what they need. Oh. So they regulate your appetite too. And so it may be that they're inspiring you to eat certain things that they want.

2:11:54Michael Pollan:That actually makes sense because one of the more interesting things about a carnivore diet, and I've done pure carnivore for months at a time, is that you don't have the same hunger pangs. Not nearly. Not even close. The hunger that you get when you're on a high-carbohydrate diet is like you get hangry. Like, oh, my God, I'm so hungry. I have to eat right now. You never get that with a carnivore diet.

2:12:15Joe Rogan:Probably because it's digested much more slowly.

2:12:18Michael Pollan:I think there's a little bit of that, but it's also you don't have the insulin spike. That's true. Yeah. That's true. There's not this.

2:12:23Joe Rogan:Have you ever worn a glucose meter? No, I haven't. It's so interesting. I was wearing one for two months. I mean, it'll just make you crazy.

2:12:33Michael Pollan:That's the thing with all those wearables. You just start going over every aspect of your sleep.

2:12:38Joe Rogan:So, you know, you have some pasta and like, whoo. But if you take a walk right after, you can moderate it. And it doesn't take a lot of exercise to use up that glucose and get the muscles to draw it in. so you can it's very interesting experiment because it changes your behavior in the same way if you have a step counter like you're more likely to park further away from the store to get get a you know another hundred steps if you have a glucose meter you're more likely to exercise after a meal which is when it does the most benefit well that in that sense it's great

2:13:15Michael Pollan:because it does give you data that you can act on yeah the the problem is people get addicted to that data and then it starts becoming a new video game that they're playing yeah exactly They're constantly in this anxiety, worrying about your sleep and worrying about your this and your that. Yeah.

2:13:31Joe Rogan:You also learn that, like, if you have fat with your carbs, it kind of blunts the effect. Sure. So, you know. Butter with bread. Yeah. Butter with bread or olive oil on pasta. Yeah. All those things. There's a reason for that. I love when culture figures stuff out before the scientists do. Right. I remember when I was writing about food a few years ago, this study came out and everybody was really excited that they discovered that lycopene, which is this really important antioxidant in tomatoes, can't be accessed by the body in the absence of fat. So, oh, olive oil on tomatoes. What a great idea.

2:14:05Joe Rogan:Wow. The grandmas figured that out hundreds of years ago.

2:14:07Michael Pollan:That's crazy.

2:14:09Joe Rogan:Yeah. So there's a lot of wisdom in cultural food preferences, combinations that we have, you know, like buttering bread. I mean, all these things. And how do people figure it out?

2:14:19Michael Pollan:Have you seen the work they've done on natto kinase? I'm not sure if I'm saying it right. and its impact on arterial plaque? No. Hugely beneficial. What is? So it comes from fermented seaweed from nato. So this Japanese use of fermented seaweed in meals that they've isolated it into a supplement. And this supplement natokinase, they've shown that it reduces a massive amount of arterial plaque. So here it is. High dose natokinase, particularly at 10 ,800 FU day, has shown to effectively manage arteriosclerosis by reducing carotid artery plaque size by 36 % or more, decreasing intermediate thickness and improving lipid profiles.

2:15:11Michael Pollan:It acts as a potent fibro—what's it? Fibronoilic? How's that word? I don't know that word. Fibronoilic. Fibronoilic agent that may also break down amyloid plaques. Isn't that fascinating?

2:15:28Joe Rogan:Yeah, that is. So natto is—that's not from seaweed. What is it? It's a bacteria that they ferment soybeans with. Oh, that's right. Soybeans, not seaweed. It's this kind of mucusy looking stuff. I mean, I like it. I eat it. It tastes good. At Japanese restaurants. Right. Yeah, well, that's... So you can get a supplement now. So you don't have to taste it if you don't like it. But isn't that crazy? Yeah.

2:15:49Michael Pollan:They figured that out. Like, the people that were fermenting things, it wasn't just to prolong its shelf life.

2:15:54Joe Rogan:No. Oh, no. I mean, the whole... I mean, every culture has fermented foods. Right. And yes, it probably began as a way to preserve foods, but then it became a very important part of people's health.

2:16:06Michael Pollan:But it's also, like, healthy for your brain, which is really crazy. Yeah. Like that diet is actually good for thinking. It's good for helping your digestive system. It's good for anxiety. It's good for mood and depression. Weird.

2:16:20Joe Rogan:All right. I'm going to look into it.

2:16:21Michael Pollan:Yeah. It's fascinating. Anything else? Should we keep going on this? I mean, there's so many different things to discuss and I want people to buy the book, obviously.

2:16:30Joe Rogan:Thank you. The book was like a great adventure. I mean, it really was. You know, I started this book with no idea where I was going. I started the way you start an interview, just curiosity, no destination. And it was, I learned a lot about a lot of different things. I learned a lot about feelings. I learned a lot about the self. And it changed how I looked at things. It really did. I mean.

2:16:54Michael Pollan:When you sit down, I mean, you've written some amazing books. But I always want to know, like, what is, what's the impetus? Like, what starts you on the first steps? Questions. Yeah.

2:17:07Joe Rogan:And which is to say curiosity. I, oh, and I teach my, I teach writing and I teach my students this. Questions are more interesting than answers very often. And questions have suspense built into them, right? What's the answer? It turns everything into a detective story if you frame the question properly. So if you read any of my books or even articles, I'm kind of an idiot on page one. You know, I, I, I don't know something that I want to know and I have questions. And then the story, the narrative becomes my figuring it out or trying to figure it out and going to this person and doing this kind of experiment and that sort of thing.

2:17:44Joe Rogan:That's the way I like to write. I mean, if I knew the answers when I started, it'd be boring.

2:17:48Michael Pollan:Well, I think that's why your books resonate with people so much because you take them on this journey with you.

2:17:53Joe Rogan:Yeah. Instead of lecturing. I hate books that lecture at me. I really do. And lots of books do that. They have the conclusion on page one and then they're just kind of beating you over the head with it for 300 pages.

2:18:05Michael Pollan:Stuffing it down your throat. Yeah. I don't like to do that.

2:18:08Joe Rogan:No, I like taking people on the journey with me.

2:18:10Michael Pollan:Well, it's interesting that you're saying this because in a sense, you are interacting in a pleasant way with other people's consciousness.

2:18:20Joe Rogan:Yeah. So I gave, this is a really interesting issue you just brought up. How is my taking over your consciousness as you read my books different than social media or some of the ways I'm saying are polluting our consciousness. Right. I think it's very collaborative when you're reading. All you have are these black marks on a page. It's kind of amazing, these letters. And your consciousness conjures up the ideas that I'm putting out there or the story I'm putting out there. But it's dual consciousness, I think. You're letting me in. It's a voluntary process. and you're bringing a lot to the table.

2:19:04Joe Rogan:You're bringing your associations. I'm not fully describing somebody. I'm just giving you a few clues and then you're conjuring a picture of a character. So I think it's a very active form of consciousness when you read. I think that's true too when you go to a movie too. You're basically saying, I'm turning over my consciousness for a period of time to someone I want because they have an interesting head. and I'm going to give them this space. But, you know, you're still in control. You're deciding. So I think there's a real distinction in how we share our consciousness with other people. And we need to do that.

2:19:47Joe Rogan:You know, I said early on in the conversation that the breach between two consciousnesses is this wide thing. William James wrote about this. Marcel Proust wrote about this. You know, he said we're all like islands And we each have our own like hidden signs and we have an inner obscurity. He said, how do we connect? And now we have language. But art is really the way that we mind meld different consciousnesses. Like art allows you, if I look at a Rothko painting or read a great novel, I am expanding my consciousness, right? I'm letting another one in and I'm breaking my isolation. And that's such a beautiful, powerful thing.

2:20:33Joe Rogan:And art is how we ferry ourselves from one consciousness to another. And that's very different than like scrolling on social media where you're conscious but minimally so.

2:20:43Michael Pollan:Well, very, very different. It's also there's something about great writing that you – the better you are at expressing yourself in a way that is going to get into someone's head, whether it's through nonfiction or through fiction, the more exciting it is to the person that's receiving it. So the more skillful you are at disseminating these ideas, the more it resonates with the person that's reading it.

2:21:10Joe Rogan:And writers have tricks to do this. You know, suspense is one of them. Like what happens next? It's so basic. We want to know what happens next because our curiosity is piqued. And we have, you know, creating character. I mean, you know, we have all these kind of tricks to infiltrate your brain.

2:21:30Michael Pollan:Yeah.

2:21:31Joe Rogan:So anyway, it's a mysterious and kind of wonderful process. And yeah, I feel privileged I get to do it.

2:21:41Michael Pollan:Well, it is a very cool thing that you do. One last question about consciousness itself. When you're looking at these people that are studying it and trying to get to the root of it and trying to figure out what it is, and there's all these options that we discussed earlier, do you lean in one way or another? Do you think you have like your own personal map of what's going on?

2:22:06Joe Rogan:No. No. I mean, I didn't draw a big conclusion, but I ended up – I started as like a materialist. I kind of assumed – When you started this book? Yeah.

2:22:17Michael Pollan:Really?

2:22:18Joe Rogan:Yeah. Even after psychedelic experiences? Even after psychedelic experience. I mean, they kind of opened the door a crack to other ways of thinking. And at the end of How to Change Your Mind, I did talk a little bit about that, other concepts of consciousness. But I kind of assumed that the consensus of most scientists is that materialism, that everything can be reduced to matter and energy. This is the faith of our time for the last couple hundred years. By the end of the book, consciousness is a challenge to that idea. And that idea, which is our scientific paradigm, is tottering now. I think there's some real reasons to look beyond materialism.

2:23:03Joe Rogan:And so I ended up with the door wide open to other ideas. I didn't settle on one. I don't know how to prove one or the other. But they're equally plausible.

2:23:17Michael Pollan:Do you anticipate in our lifetime or in any lifetime cracking that puzzle, that anyone can crack that puzzle?

2:23:24Joe Rogan:I don't. I think we don't have the right kind of science. Our science, as I said earlier, is really stuck in this mode. It started with Galileo, right? I mean, he, to save his ass, basically said, we're going to leave subjective things, the soul, qualities, that's all the church. We're going to just do measurable, objective, third-person science. And it's been incredibly powerful and it's taught us incredible things and given us incredible technology. But it doesn't deal with the stuff we gave to the church. And now they're trying to take it back and work on it. And they've only been at it for like, you know, a couple decades really, this serious scientific examination of consciousness.

2:24:12Joe Rogan:But we just may not have the right science. And one of the things I explore in the book is like, how would you bring in subjective experience to this object of science? And Michael Levin, the biologist I was talking about who makes those Xenobots, says, to understand consciousness, you have to change yourself. In other words, to understand anyone else's consciousness, you have to experience it. Therefore, you're changing your own. That's a whole different scientific paradigm. In the scientific paradigm, you're unchanged by whatever you do, right? It's totally objective. So it may take a scientific revolution to really unlock the secret, the mystery of consciousness.

2:24:54Michael Pollan:Wouldn't it be a conundrum if AI is what cracks consciousness?

2:24:58Joe Rogan:I was having the same thought. Like maybe AI has another approach. I think it's going to have to learn how to feel. Well, it seems like it already feels like it wants to live. Yeah, and it feels uncomfortable.

2:25:13Michael Pollan:Yes.

2:25:14Joe Rogan:I don't think his feelings are real. I do. I think simulated thinking is real thinking. It can play chess. It can make things happen in the world. Simulated feeling is not a real feeling.

2:25:26Michael Pollan:It doesn't have a soul.

2:25:27Joe Rogan:It doesn't have a soul.

2:25:28Michael Pollan:Thank you, Michael. Let's keep it that way. I really enjoyed this. Thank you very much. You're awesome. Thank you, Joe. I really love your books. It's always a treat. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.

2:25:45Thank you.