Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2467 - Michael Pollan
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T17:00:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2467 - Michael Pollan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2467 - Michael Pollan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2467 - Michael Pollan

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Mr. Colin, so good to see you again.
Hey, good to be back.
Consciousness.
So, this new book, what inspired it?
What got you to, I mean, you've kind of explored consciousness a little bit
with your...
Psychedelic book, yeah.
How to Change Your Mind.
Well, actually, this book was inspired by the research I did for that book.
As you know, I had several research trips.
Do you do air quotes when you say research?
Yes.
And two things happened that were really interesting.
One is, there's something about psychedelics that makes you think about
consciousness.
You know, it's like smudging the windscreen, the windshield that you normally
use perfectly transparent and you see the world through.
Suddenly, it's like different.
And you realize there's something between me and the world.
And what is it?
And that's consciousness.
And so, like a lot of people who've done psychedelics, you start wondering
about this mystery.
Why is it this way, not that way?
So, that was one experience.
The other was, I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut where we have a
house of walking through my garden and getting the powerful impression that the
plants were conscious.
And that these, I remember this particular, it was a plume poppy or several plume
poppies.
And they were like returning my gaze.
They were very benevolent.
They were, you know, putting out positive vibes.
But, like, they were conscious, much more alive than they'd ever been.
And, like a lot of insights on psychedelics, I didn't know what to do with it.
Like, is it true?
Is it just a drug thing?
You know, what is it?
But I decided it would be interesting to find out.
And I consulted a couple people, scientists, and said, what do you do with an
insight like that?
And they said, well, you test it against other ways of knowing, including
scientific ways of knowing.
And that led me down this really interesting path, exploring plant intelligence
and plant consciousness.
So, basically, yeah, the book grew out of the psychedelic experiences and some
meditation experience.
Meditation also has a way of making you, like, hyper aware of how strange your
thoughts are.
Where are they coming from?
Who's thinking them?
So, there's a bunch of different schools of thought when it comes to
consciousness, right?
There's one, like the Rupert Sheldrake thing, sort of everything has
consciousness.
And there's the sort of rational scientists that believe it exists somewhere in
the mind.
In the brain.
Yeah, in the brain, excuse me.
And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an
antenna.
Right.
That's tuning in.
Receiving, yeah.
To the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.
Yeah.
Do you have any one of them that you hold?
I don't.
They're all equally plausible.
You know, I went into the experience assuming, because this is what most
scientists assume,
that somehow a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain generates
consciousness, you know, subjective experience.
But no one's been able to show that.
We've gotten nowhere in that effort to, you know, we can, we might correlate
certain parts of the brain with consciousness,
but we don't understand how three pounds of matter could generate the feeling
of being you.
You talk about it in your book where the two gentlemen who had the bet.
Yeah, yeah.
That was Christophe Koch, who's a great brain scientist, and David Chalmers,
who's a philosopher.
And this goes back to, like, in the early 90s.
They were getting drunk in a bar in Bremen, Germany.
And Christophe Koch had really, was at the beginning of the modern scientific
exploration of consciousness.
And he was working with Francis Crick, who had just come off of a Nobel Prize
for the discovery of DNA.
And Crick, who is, like, the most famous scientist in the world at the time,
thought, well, the same kind of reductive science
that discovered the double helix DNA and explained heredity.
I'm going to do that for consciousness.
He was a very arrogant man, and he thought of just, you know, no problem.
And Crick was kind of his sidekick.
I'm sorry, Koch was his sidekick.
And so Koch, who shared that kind of confidence, made this bet with Chalmers
that they would find the neural correlates, the parts of the brain that are
responsible for consciousness, within 25 years.
That was 25 years, 27 years ago now.
And Chalmers won the bet.
Chalmers is famous for coining the term the hard problem to, you know, to
describe the whole effort to figure out consciousness.
And it's a hard problem for a lot of reasons.
I mean, it is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.
I mean, how consciousness came to be.
Did it evolve?
Was it always here?
But his point was that our science is based on third-person, objective, quantifiable
measurements, and consciousness is fundamentally a subjective first-person
experience.
So how does those tools reach in and say anything of value about consciousness?
So he said, you know, there are easy problems in consciousness we can figure
out, like perception, emotion, things like that.
But there is this hard problem.
How do you get from matter to mind?
And he won the bet.
There was a ceremony I went to a couple years ago at NYU, and Coke presented Chalmers
with a case of very fine Madeira wine and renewed the bet.
He said, all right, in another 25 years.
That's optimistic.
How old are these gentlemen?
Coke is in his late 60s, so we'll see if he's around for this.
But Chalmers is a little bit younger.
It's such an interesting thought because we know that the mind contains, if
damaged, right?
We know that there's certain aspects, there's certain parts of the mind where,
like lobotomies, for instance.
We know that if we disturb it, it radically affects behavior.
We know that there's parts of the mind that you can stimulate that could
actually recall memories.
There's some weird stuff going on there.
So we know it's somehow or another at least functionally connected to
consciousness.
Oh, yeah.
It's definitely a relationship.
But if it's generating consciousness, that's one thing.
But it could be, as you said earlier, it could be receiving consciousness.
And the same things would hold true, that if you damage parts of the brain, if
you damage the television.
There's a signal still out there.
Right.
Yeah.
So that doesn't determine the truth of either theory.
And then the other one is panpsychism, which you were alluding to.
I don't know if that's Rupert Sheldrake.
I think he would believe more in the field of consciousness.
Yeah, right.
He was a morphic residence guy.
But I think he also subscribed to this idea that things contain consciousness.
It's not his, but you know what I mean.
Well, it's pretty universal, right?
There's a lot of people that have subscribed to this idea that everything has
consciousness.
Yeah.
That even the particles that this table is made of have some eensy little bit
of psyche.
And the challenge there is, so that solves the problem of how did it evolve?
It didn't evolve.
It's always here.
But then you have this other problem, like, well, how do you take these, if
every one of
our cells is made of particles that are conscious, how do you combine them in
such a way that
you get the sort of consciousness we have?
It's called the combination problem.
And nobody solved that.
It's a, you know, it's a really deep mystery.
And this is an odd book in some ways in that, I don't know if this is very
selling,
but you'll know less at the end than you do at the beginning.
But it's a fun ride.
Oh, I think it's a great ride.
It was a great ride for me.
I learned so much.
Well, it's a fun ride to consider these things that no one can really figure
out or not yet.
Yeah.
And also just to be put in touch with the fact you have this marvel going on in
your head
all the time.
You have a voice in your head.
You know, we're talking to each other, but you've got another voice going on
thinking
what you're going to ask, you know, what the next question is, maybe what you're
going
to have for dinner, you know, it's this amazing interior space we have.
Yeah.
And nobody understands how it came to be.
And you can manage it, which is also interesting.
Yeah, you can.
Because, like, I don't think about what I'm going to have for dinner.
That's the thing.
You put that out of your head?
No, about any of those things.
It's the way to stay locked in in a podcast.
Yeah, that's true.
Only think.
Because you can let your mind wander.
Oh, yeah.
Especially if someone on the other side is boring.
Yeah.
And then I'm like, oh, no, this conversation is going to be pulling teeth.
And then I start thinking about a new joke I'm working on or, oh, I got to get
my car
fixed.
Well, that's called spotlight consciousness, when you can, like, really, like,
put the blinders
on.
Yes.
And rule everything out.
And that's opposed to lantern consciousness, where you're taking in all sorts
of information,
you're letting your mind wander.
And, you know, they both have their value.
For our careers, spotlight consciousness is essential for our work.
We have to be able to focus.
To get through school, we have to be able to focus.
But, you know, children have this other kind of consciousness that's really
wild, because
they're very undisciplined.
They can't stay on task.
But they're taking in so much information.
And the world is just full of wonder and awe.
And psychedelics, you know, is a way to recover that kind of consciousness,
because you're getting
lots of sensory information from all over the place.
It's very hard to focus.
And so it's a taste of that other, you know, childhood consciousness.
I always say that about marijuana as well.
There's a thing about marijuana that people always say that it makes them
paranoid.
And I say it makes you aware of all the things you should be paranoid about.
Like, you're very, we're very vulnerable creatures, you know, but we like to
pretend that we are
not, you know, which is, I've found that out of all of my friends, the ones
that have tried
marijuana and hated it are all the ones that are control freaks.
Yeah, because you have to give up control.
Yeah, they're all really buttoned down, very serious, like really worried about
outcomes,
really concentrating on their career, really worried about, you know, just
certain things
that are just a part of their daily life.
And then they get a couple of hits of good weed.
And then they're like, oh, my God, we're on a planet.
You start freaking out like, oh, my God, none of this makes sense.
All this is crazy.
You know, um, the best piece of advice that I had when I was, you know,
starting my exploration
of psychedelics is you have to surrender.
Yes.
If you resist, you're going to be miserable.
You're going to get so anxious and so paranoid.
And if you let go, it's going to work out.
Yeah.
You just got to be able to accept whatever it's showing you.
And, um, you know, we live in a very strange culture where that's illegal.
Well, not everywhere, right?
I mean, it's changing.
Well, it is changing, fortunately.
And there's some talk about it changing federally.
You know, I actually talked to RFK Jr. about that.
There's some amazing therapies that are hugely beneficial to veterans, police
officers, people
with severe PTSD that experienced, you know, horrors that the average person
never has to experience.
And then they're forced to just, like, go back there, released.
Go back to regular life.
Yeah.
I know you've served us overseas and you've seen people blow up, but now go to
the supermarket.
Take this SSRI and it'll be okay.
And then, you know, I know a bunch of them.
And so many of them have benefited, particularly from Ibogaine.
Yep.
Ibogaine, um, the work that Rick Doblin and MAPS has done.
Yes, MDMA.
And psilocybin.
Those three are the big ones that I think.
Well, you know, I heard a lot of positive noise out of the administration at
the beginning
tha