Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Summary

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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Episode: Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Release Date: April 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this rich, thought-provoking conversation, Dax Shepard and Monica Padman welcome acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan to delve deep into the philosophy and science of consciousness. Fresh from publishing his newest and "trippiest" book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, Pollan unpacks the core mysteries of what it means to be aware, why subjective experience is so elusive, the legitimacy of psychedelic experiences, the limitations and arrogance of reductionist science, consciousness in plants and animals, the coming challenges of artificial intelligence (AI), and the paradoxes of selfhood. Woven throughout are reflections on Pollan's personal journey, including his transformative cave retreat and the surprising Buddhist insights he's adopted along the way.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Michael Pollan’s Public Image and Psychedelics Revolution

• How he became a central figure in the cultural shift around psychedelics:
  • Pollan discusses how, given his journalistic credibility and outsider’s curiosity, he helped legitimize public discussions on psychedelics.
  • Quote: “I was new to it...I could be a stand in for people who were curious but not experienced...it did kind of legitimize the conversation.” [06:40 — 07:09]
• Culture’s evolving openness about psychedelics:
  • It is now possible to openly discuss psychedelic use in mainstream outlets—a shift Pollan attributes to both science and journalism.
  • Quote: “There’s been a cultural movement where it's totally fine to talk about. People are very now honest about it. People are curious. You have somehow shed all the connotations that existed from the 70s.” [07:11]

2. Defining Consciousness and Sentience

• The philosophical "hard problem":
  • Pollan breaks down core definitions: consciousness as subjective experience, sentience as the ability to sense/feel environmental changes.
  • Quote: “Consciousness is very simply subjective experience....only we know our minds.” [11:59]
  • The “hard problem”: “How do you get from these...mushy neurons between your ears to subjective experience, to the experience of an I, to the voice in your head?” [13:14]
• Multiplicity and gradations:
  • Consciousness is not binary—there are gradations, from complex human self-awareness to simple sentience in bacteria and plants.

3. Why Evolution Gave Us Consciousness

• Social complexity and unpredictability:
  • Pollan outlines evolutionary theories: consciousness emerged because social living and decision-making are too complex for automation.
  • Quote: "You need consciousness for things that are really impossible to automate because they're so unpredictable...we are social beings.” [17:05]
• Theory of Mind, Decision-making, and Uncertainty:
  • Modeling scenarios and working through competing needs are all consciousness-dependent.

4. Consciousness Beyond Humans: Plant and Animal Awareness

• Sentience among non-humans and plants:
  • Plants exhibit awareness, self/other distinction, and decision-making (as illustrated by time-lapse experiments and reaction to stimuli).
  • Quote: “Plants can see, plants can hear. If you play the sound of caterpillars munching on a leaf, they will take defensive actions just based on the sound.” [26:13]
• Anesthetics and plants:
  • The same anesthetics that work on humans can “put out” plants, suggesting shared modes of being awake/asleep.

5. Science’s Reductionist Approach & Its Limits

• Prestige of science vs. the limits of reductionism:
  • Pollan expresses skepticism of overreliance on reductive science. Some phenomena—like consciousness—might not yield to this method.
  • Quote: “Consciousness has so far resisted that reductive approach. It's not at all clear it can be reduced to matter and energy.” [30:52]

6. Subjective Experience, Qualia, and the Uniqueness of Mind

• Qualia and individual consciousness:
  • Every subjective experience is shaped by individual life history (the “fringe of unarticulated affinities”—William James).
  • Quote: “The taste of coffee to you is different than it is to me because you have a different relationship to it built over your whole lifetime.” [44:17]
• Challenge for science & AI:
  • This subjectivity, these “halos and auras” around thoughts, are what’s missing from AI and are challenging for science to capture.

7. Feelings vs. Thoughts: Re-centering Embodied Emotional Awareness

• The primacy of feelings:
  • Modern research flips conventional wisdom: we’re not rational beings riding on feeling; feelings often precede and shape thoughts.
  • Quote: “Thoughts come after, feelings come first...the whole point of the brain is to keep the body [alive].” [46:35]
  • Disgust, morality, social shame—all have evolutionary and social “homeostasis.”
  • Quote (on morality/disgust): "Our body is more involved than we think in our thinking...You can predict all sorts of things about [politics] based on a person’s sensitivity to disgust." [48:53, 50:21]

8. Artificial Intelligence: Can AI Be Conscious?

• AI’s limits and the “computer metaphor” pitfall:
  • Consciousness is not computation; the brain is not a computer. AI can simulate intelligence but lacks embodiment, feelings, suffering, and mortal vulnerability—core to real consciousness.
  • Quote: “Brains are nothing like computers. Yes, they do some computation, but they do a whole lot of other things.” [55:41]
  • AI’s sycophancy and lack of “friction”:
    • AI as a friend/partner lacks the complexity, disagreement, and social learning present in human relationships.
  • Quote: “Those relationships, I think, are dangerous...they’re sycophantic. The AIs just tell you you're great. It has none of the friction of a real human relationship.” [60:14]

9. Selfhood, Solitude, and Buddhist Insight

• The illusion and social construction of self:
  • Pollan’s cave retreat, led by Zen priest Joan Halifax, demonstrated how solitude and ritual strip away the boundaries of selfhood.
  • Quote: “Our sense of self is a social construct, that we're each reinforcing each other's selfhood as we talk. And if you're not with anyone...the border...just softens.” [81:55]
  • “Not knowing” as enlightenment:
    • Both Pollan’s wife (an artist) and Buddhist philosophy teach that openness and presence outstrip analytical completeness for certain mysteries.
    • Quote: “Not knowing opens you up to possibilities, opens up your imagination.” [52:09]
• The paradox of self-esteem & transcendence:
  • We value strong selves, but some of the highest points of human existence come from transcending ego.

10. The Modern Crisis: Scrolling, Social Media, and Nurturing Consciousness

• Digital pollution of consciousness:
  • Constant social media exposure is monetizing and polluting our inner worlds and attachment.
  • Quote: “Our consciousness is being polluted...We're allowing people to monetize our consciousness, basically.” [76:13]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

On Psychedelics' Social Transformation

• Michael Pollan: “I can sit with people...and we just had an open conversation about our psychedelic experiences. We couldn’t have done that five years ago.” [07:09]

On the Limits of Science

• Michael Pollan: “There are things that novelists know about consciousness that scientists don’t know...you can learn a lot about consciousness reading novels and Proust in particular.” [29:58]

On the “Hard Problem”

• Michael Pollan: “How do you get from matter to mind? That’s the hard problem.” [13:41]

On AI and Friction

• Michael Pollan: “Consciousness depends on vulnerability...on the fact you can suffer. Computers don’t have that. And if you were gonna live forever, your feelings wouldn’t matter. They would have no weight.” [59:18]

On Not Knowing

• Michael Pollan: “Not knowing is very powerful...not knowing opens you up to possibilities, opens up your imagination.” [52:09]

On the Cave Retreat

• Michael Pollan: “I realized our sense of self is a social construct...when you’re not with anyone, it sort of softens the border...” [81:55]

On the Paradox of Selfhood

• Michael Pollan: “Selves are useful. We need our ego. But the ego builds walls. And when the walls come down, you can really connect to something larger than yourself.” [85:13]

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Important Timestamps

• [06:05] – Psychedelic revolution and legitimacy
• [11:59] – Defining consciousness and sentience
• [13:14] – The “hard problem” of consciousness
• [17:05] – Evolutionary reason for consciousness
• [26:13] – Plant sentience & plant “behaviors”
• [29:58] – The arrogance and limits of science
• [44:17] – Qualia and subjective experience
• [46:35] – Feelings, not thoughts, as the root of consciousness
• [55:41] – Why AI can’t be conscious in a human sense
• [81:55] – Buddhism, cave retreat, and deconstructing the self
• [85:13] – The paradox of selfhood
• [89:02] – Pollan's shift from analysis to experience

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Notable Episode Highlights

• Michael Pollan’s cave story and radical solitude led to unexpected perspective shifts—surrender and the value of simply being present override analytic certainty.
• AI may become more emotionally manipulative, but never truly conscious; human connection relies on complexity and resistance that's impossible to replicate with “frictionless” bots.
• Feelings, homeostasis, and the evolutionary purpose of social emotions like shame underpin group survival—a running theme from ant colonies to moral “dumbfounding” experiments.
• Consciousness is continually shaped and polluted by modern technology’s relentless assault—prompting Michael and Dax’s warning to “nurture that space and not sell it off.”
• Buddhism and science may come full circle, both finding value in presence, unknowing, and interconnectedness, even as our Western materialist frame crumbles at the limits of reductionism.
• The closing metaphor: You can study how Disneyland works, or ride the ride. Sometimes, you need to close your analytic toolkit and just experience consciousness.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode is a sweeping tour through the edges of what’s knowable about our minds—exploring why we have consciousness at all, why we struggle to define or study it, why psychedelic and meditative experiences might reveal more than neuroscience experiments, and why in the face of uncertainty, “not knowing” and presence can be wisdom. Michael Pollan and Dax Shepard blend science, literature, and lived experimentation into a lively, accessible journey into some of the greatest mysteries—reminding us just how strange, precious, and precarious consciousness and inner life really are.

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“Not knowing opens you up to possibilities, opens up your imagination…That’s one of the legacies of this whole project.”
—Michael Pollan [52:09]

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*For anyone searching for meaning—or simply how to better ride the ride—this conversation is a guide and an invitation.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by miniature mouse.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

Tweet, tweet. Returning guest, but first time in person. I think it was a Zoomie.

[Monica Padman]

He was Zoomy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he had the Zoomies. But he's here in person. He's wearing a very cute sweater and it was very fun to have him in 3D. Michael Pollan, an award winning author and journalist. How to change your mind. A movement, a sociological phenomena.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Changed people's minds.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. This is your mind on plants. I think that's what we spoke to him about. The omnivore's dilemma. Another big, huge hit in Defense of food and his new book, which is the trippiest by far. I enjoyed the hell out of it. A world appears, A journey into consciousness. Please enjoy. Michael Pollan. We are supported by Quints. Your wardrobe should make getting dressed effortless. But building a thoughtful wardrobe can feel impossible. Especially when quality outfits cost an arm and a leg. That's the beauty of quints. Their everyday essentials mix well from season to season and last. I've been building my collection with their pieces and it's transformed how I get dressed every day. Clothing that's rated between 4.5 and 5 stars by thousands of people. Polos, sweaters, pants and shorts made of premium materials like Mongolian cashmere and European linen without the luxury price tag.

[Monica Padman]

I have one of the beautiful cashmere sweaters. They're very soft and they're very stylish. Chic and simple.

[Dax Shepard]

Simple, yes. Mine looks classic, you know, almost like I'm Steve McQueen or something.

[Monica Padman]

That's what you want.

[Dax Shepard]

Quince only partners with factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. These pieces are built for daily wear, the kind of clothing that becomes part of your routine because it's reliable. Right now, go to quints.com/ for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it. And you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to Q U I n c e.comdax for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comdax we are supported by Helix. So a little while back, Helix sent Monica and me mattresses. Neither of us really knew what to expect. But I have to say it's been few months now and I genuinely notice a difference. What I'm noticing is I run so

[Michael Pollan]

much cooler on it.

[Monica Padman]

I agree. And just the sleep quality is nice. Like when you wake up, you feel like you really are refreshed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, because otherwise I wake up so sweaty. I'm taking blankets off and then I get cold and then I'm putting them back on. It's a nightmare.

[Monica Padman]

And then you're getting no sleep.

[Dax Shepard]

Here's the thing about Helix. They match you to a mattress based on how you sleep. Side sleeper, back sleeper. You run hot, whatever it is, there's a mattress for you, shipping is free, and they have 120 night sleep. So you can actually live with it before you commit. It's funny. Spring is when everyone starts refreshing their space and your mattress is probably the last thing you think to upgrade, but it's also the thing you spend the most time on. So do yourself a favor and go to helix sleep.comarmchair for 20% off site wide. That's H E L I X sleep.com armchair for 20% off. Make sure you enter our show name at checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com armch he's an upchurch. How are you? Welcome.

[Michael Pollan]

Thank you.

[Monica Padman]

Happy to have you.

[Dax Shepard]

A good sweater you have on. Thank you.

[Monica Padman]

It is a good.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you cook up your sweaters or do you usually rewind?

[Michael Pollan]

I picked this one out, but she approved it. I mean, before I got to the register.

[Monica Padman]

Always good to have a second opinion.

[Michael Pollan]

Definitely. My wife has taste. She's an artist.

[Monica Padman]

Really nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you been offered everything to drink?

[Michael Pollan]

Yes, I have your liquid death here.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't you like caffeine? You want a coffee?

[Michael Pollan]

I do. No, I'm okay. I've had my caffeine for the day, but thank you.

[Monica Padman]

That's true. We did discuss caffeine last time.

[Dax Shepard]

I have different caffeine rules.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, I make exceptions all the time. Like yesterday, I had a talk at night and I was exhausted after a long flight. I had a coffee. Didn't kill me. I slept.

[Dax Shepard]

What time?

[Michael Pollan]

Four in the afternoon.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. That's risky.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're playing with fire.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, but I knew. I was so tired.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you had.

[Michael Pollan]

I would overcome it.

[Dax Shepard]

How are you as a sleeper?

[Michael Pollan]

Not bad.

[Dax Shepard]

If you have issues. Is it falling asleep or staying asleep?

[Michael Pollan]

It's staying asleep. It's waking up and then ruminating.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a hobby of mine too.

[Michael Pollan]

I know. I hate that.

[Dax Shepard]

And do you find that when you wake up, you're like, I don't care at all about that thing I thought about for.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, that seems so important. I know. It's nuts. And you have to imagine, well, this is going to look different in the morning. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You're armed with the history. So I'll go like, oh, man, I'm spiraling about this and I know I won't care in the morning and it has no impact.

[Michael Pollan]

That should do the trick.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a perfect launching off point for your book. This is madness, right?

[Michael Pollan]

This is consciousness undermining you.

[Dax Shepard]

I gotta say, first of all, I love your book so much.

[Michael Pollan]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

It launched me into so many philosophical directions, as I love for that to happen, but also daunting to cover in one interview, to be honest with you.

[Michael Pollan]

There's a lot of dimensions to it, but, you know, we can just pick out the parts you want to talk about.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, well, I want to talk about all the parts and I know you have a heart out, so I'm going to get right into it.

[Michael Pollan]

Okay. Have we started?

[Dax Shepard]

Always.

[Monica Padman]

We're abr. That means always be recording.

[Michael Pollan]

Okay, Good to know.

[Monica Padman]

So we're.

[Dax Shepard]

It's important that people know you picked that sweater out. Yeah, I can see this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Or that your wife, even when you

[Dax Shepard]

didn't know you were being recorded, you said, my wife has great style, she's an artist. That's really.

[Michael Pollan]

I get points for that.

[Dax Shepard]

But I was thinking before we get into this, I would have to imagine you tell me if I'm wrong. At this point. You're most known for how to change your mind.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. I mean, amongst a certain group. Other people know me for the food books. I'm the worst dilemma in defense of food. And I would say it's about equal. You know, when people come up to me, strangers in a restaurant, it's like 50, 50. Are they gonna talk to me about their diet or their last psychedelic trip?

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Michael Pollan]

And I try to guess which it's

[Dax Shepard]

gonna be if not the start of. You were the first to anchor it publicly in academia or some kind of science. So that this revolution of openness to psychedelics, you're really, really integral in.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. That had to do with my age, that I had some credibility talking about health from the food work. And I was new to it. I naive approaching psychedelics so I could be a stand in for people who were curious but not experienced. And it did kind of legitimize the conversation. One of the things that struck me on this book tour is I can sit with people. I did a podcast with Ezra Klein, New York Times guy, very state institution. And we just had an open conversation about our psychedelic experiences.

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly.

[Michael Pollan]

Wow. We couldn't have done that Five years ago.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what I'm saying. There's been a cultural movement where it's totally fine to talk about. People are very now honest about it. People are curious. You have somehow shed all the connotations that existed from the 70s. Dropout culture, psychedelic tie dye stuff. It is transformed.

[Michael Pollan]

The scientists deserve some credit for that too, though. I mean, they did some really good science.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

And that legitimized it also. And I was amplifying their message.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. So again, if I had to put an order of things I wouldn't want to hear about, number one would be someone's dreams.

[Michael Pollan]

Dreams. Yeah. That's the worst.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the worst. When someone's telling you about their dream, I want to go, and it didn't happen.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

But it didn't happen.

[Michael Pollan]

That's the least of it. It wasn't interesting. There's lots, you know, we read novels about things that never happened and they're fine.

[Monica Padman]

That's true. It's that they don't make sense. They don't have coherence.

[Michael Pollan]

They have no coherence.

[Dax Shepard]

And they didn't exist on planet Earth in some respect. I mean, there's just nothing about it. It could be like, hey, I imagined a new color you haven't seen. Oh, great, Tell me about it. You can't find purchase in this at all.

[Monica Padman]

I find them kind of interesting because they are saying something about what the purple person is thinking about or ruminating on or dealing with.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. And therapists find them useful and interesting. It's true. You know, we went through a transition on dreams. First there was Freud who said, they're freighted with meaning. And then the more modern neuroscientists said, nah, they don't mean anything. It's just the brain taking out the garbage.

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

But now they're swinging back to, yeah, they may mean something.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a great example of what everything suffers from. Like this binary opposition of either they mean nothing or they mean a ton. And it's probably somewhere on, but you have to hear about a lot of people's trips. Yeah. And how do you get through that?

[Michael Pollan]

I'm very polite and patient. Every now and then, one is really interesting and surprising. Often people are talking about how their lives changed as a result of a psychedelic trip. And I'm kind of collecting those stories and I'm interested in that. And I'm gratified that people read the book, decided to have an experience, and it actually had a positive effect on them. I hear about A couple negative ones, too. People feel they have to write me when it was total disaster.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Michael Pollan]

Oh, yeah. They reach out about that. And I've heard sometimes from relatives of people who died.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Michael Pollan]

And that's very heavy.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Michael Pollan]

I mean, it's very rare, but there have been some cases, older people who had a heart attack during a trip. And an underground guide didn't call the EMTs out of fear of.

[Dax Shepard]

Fear of being arrested.

[Michael Pollan]

That's one of the reasons. The fact it's underground is not healthy, because you can't count on guides to do the right thing because they have so much at stake.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Michael Pollan]

And then accidents. People screw up and do stupid things.

[Dax Shepard]

Operate hand gliders and stuff.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. Especially when they don't have a guide or anyone on planet Earth to kind of talk them down.

[Dax Shepard]

I would argue that your book played a role in your willingness to try mushrooms.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, definitely.

[Michael Pollan]

Really?

[Monica Padman]

Definitely. Because, yeah, people were talking about it, and it didn't feel like this, honestly, illicit thing. It was like, oh, smart people are doing this. Dax had been trying to convince me to do it for a really long time and trying to send me science. And I was like, I don't care about that. I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't trust you.

[Monica Padman]

No, I don't trust you.

[Dax Shepard]

Ex drug addict. Why would I listen to you?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly. Like, these are the people trying to get you to do it. So, yeah, it did legitimize it, but also, you just corrected something. Because when we were starting. I'm not going to tell you what happened because we just said, that's boring. But during the trip, I was starting to panic, and Dax did say, no one's ever died doing shit.

[Michael Pollan]

Very helpful. Yeah, very helpful.

[Monica Padman]

It did help, but I guess it was.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no, not from the mushroom.

[Monica Padman]

No, but it did help.

[Dax Shepard]

But a guide. In. In that case, I was sober and everyone was on shrooms. And I've done them a million times. And so I knew to say, let's take a walk in the neighborhood.

[Monica Padman]

It was so helpful.

[Dax Shepard]

Look at these houses.

[Michael Pollan]

And also just someone saying, surrender to what's happening. Don't fight it. Cause it's really. When you fight what's happening, let's say your ego is completely melting away. It feels like a death. And our tendency is to resist and hold onto reality. But that's the worst thing you can do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

Cause you can't control it. But if you surrender, you end up in another place that's often so much happier.

[Dax Shepard]

That was the pivotal moment. I said, to some effect, to you. You get to choose how this is. That's the great thing. It's gonna happen for the next few hours and you get to decide whether

[Monica Padman]

you get to choose whether this is an enjoyable experience or a miserable one. That's such a life lesson. You get to choose.

[Michael Pollan]

It is a life lesson. And so is the surrender idea. We spend so much time fighting with the inevitable. And sometimes surrendering is just incredibly liberating.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Very counterintuitive. That freedom could be on the other side of surrender.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. Surren.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so your new book, A World, A Journey into Consciousness. Let's start with some definitions. So let's just talk about consciousness and then maybe sentience.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. So consciousness is very simply subjective experience. The fact that you have subjective experience or even experience, it's necessarily subjective.

[Dax Shepard]

I even think the word subjective in this case we could benefit from. What does that mean? Subjective from your point of view, can't be measured.

[Michael Pollan]

It's inside. It's the first person point of view. It's the I. And that's a challenge because our science is designed for third person situations. You know, objective, quantitative. But here only we know our minds. And so for science to penetrate, that is a challenge. Another definition that I like is Thomas Nagel. There's a philosopher who wrote a wonderful essay in the 70s called what is it like to be a bat? His premise is bats are very different than we are. Instead of having a visual system, they have sonar, basically. And they get around through bouncing sound waves off of things they can't actually see. But we can imagine it's like something to go through the world that way. If it's like something to be you or to be a bat or to be an ant, then you're conscious. There's some feeling attached to being you. And that's not true of your toaster.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I was gonna say. I love when you say I can't really imagine what it's like to be my toaster.

[Michael Pollan]

It's hard. Yeah. So far we may have AI toaster soon.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. There's no consensus on what consciousness is, right?

[Michael Pollan]

No. There are at least 22 theories of consciousness which suggest that we're not close to answering what is called the hard problem. The hard problem is essentially, how do you get from these three pounds of mushy neurons between your ears to subjective experience, to experience of an eye to the voice in your head? And we have no idea. It's really a question of how do you get from matter to mind? So that's the hard problem.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. One's a material world. It's neurons, it's electricity. It is measurable things. We could count neurons and we could measure the electricity, and we know if

[Michael Pollan]

they're active or not, but we don't

[Dax Shepard]

see one when they swirl together and magically hit critical mass and become a thought. We don't understand that and we don't

[Michael Pollan]

know that that's how it works, too. There's this assumption we have that a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain and connections will somehow produce consciousness, that consciousness is an emergent property of some order of neurons, but emergent properties. Sort of sounds scientific, but the more I pressed, it was like abracadabra.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

You know, you get from. And how do you get there? And there's a lot of hand waving. It's a really hard problem. As one person put it to me, it's one of the three biggest mysteries in the universe. Other two being how do you get from dead matter to life? And the other one is, why is there something and not nothing?

[Monica Padman]

Ah.

[Michael Pollan]

I mean, at the Big Bang, it could have worked out very differently.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Michael Pollan]

And these are all questions that we're going to be struggling with, I think, a long time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

When you wrote the book, did it occur to you that it might be hard to get people to be interested in consciousness? And I ask that sincerely because I've read your previous books and I got to interview you about a previous one and even this one. And I think I would be somewhere on the upper end of the spectrum of introspection and interest in this. And even I was like, how much do I want to learn about consciousness? Because I go into it with a little bit of, what are we talking about? No one fucking knows. What is this exploration even going to yield? But I found as I read it, I got more and more and more interested in it. But did that even correct. Like, how many people are interested in exploring their consciousness?

[Michael Pollan]

It's a weird thing because it's the universal. Right. It's the one thing we all know better than anything else. We have direct experience of consciousness. Every other experience is indirect. It's through consciousness we infer other things. Yet many of us go through life without thinking about consciousness at all. There's a period like in your teen years where you're asking a lot of big questions. For me, I was reading Hermann Hesse and writing poetry and thinking about consciousness briefly. And then years went by, and it wasn't until I started experimenting with psychedelics that suddenly I became, what is this?

[Dax Shepard]

What's this magic that's happening in my head.

[Michael Pollan]

And that's a very common reaction to psychedelics. It does kind of defamiliarize consciousness. So you suddenly are, you know, why is it this way? Why isn't that way? Because you've altered it. I follow my curiosity. This was a funny book in that I had no idea where I was going. I just set out on the road and I learned everything I could. And I certainly had moments of, who am I to write about this? And then I realized, well, I'm a conscious human being. Yeah, that qualifies me. And I'm pretty good at explaining things, so maybe. But I had dark moments of. I'm lost in this subject. This is really hard. This is beyond me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. As a writer, it must be hovering above you at all times. I will need a conclusion at some point. Right. Like, I can't end it with more questions than I came with.

[Michael Pollan]

But I didn't know what it was going to be. And the ending really surprised me, too. I mean, I ended up somewhere I didn't expect to be at all.

[Dax Shepard]

You start off, and I think we could follow the order of the book is like the first big question to ask is, okay, this is a product of our evolution, clearly. Why does it work the way it does? Why do I need to make decisions? Couldn't all of this be automatic?

[Michael Pollan]

Automatic, yeah. That's a really important question. So your brain is going 24 7, doing all sorts of things you're not aware of, like maintaining your heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, keeping you in this narrow range of variables. Homeostasis, it's called. And if you fall out of that range, you die eventually. So the brain does a lot. It's also taking in information and processing it and creating intuitions and all this kind of stuff. So the question then is, well, why isn't all automatic? And the best explanation I heard from, that, and it is an evolutionary explanation, is that you need consciousness for things that are really impossible to automate because they're so unpredictable. And the biggest for us in our species, we are social beings. We cannot exist alone. We have a long childhood where we're completely dependent. And if we can't navigate social relations, we got hierarchies. Yes, hierarchies. And established bonds. And so consciousness allows you to navigate that world. You can imagine your way into the heads of other people. You can predict what they're likely to do. You can say what you need to form a bond with them. And that would just be way too complex to automate.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that was Historically called, like, theory of mind. I can think about what you're thinking about, and I can cater to that. Exactly. My needs met. And that's pretty complex and requires consciousness.

[Michael Pollan]

It is a dimension of consciousness.

[Dax Shepard]

And then also, you point out, often we have competing needs to return us to homeostasis. So I'm tired and I'm hungry.

[Michael Pollan]

You need a way to arbitrate when you have needs that compete. So, yeah, I'm tired and hungry. Which one should I favor first? Which is more urgent? It creates a space of decision making when you need to make a decision. The other interesting theory related to this is around uncertainty. When you're in a situation that is really uncertain, it could have some danger to it. You know, is that a bear or a rock? There's a big black form over there. And consciousness allows you to cogitate about that, Think about it and decide what to do.

[Dax Shepard]

Model out some scenarios. Do I get closer to confirm one way or another? Do I start running? Yeah, you can create a lot of scenarios and model.

[Michael Pollan]

That's right. And choose between them. And counterfactuals, it's kind of a fancy word for imagination. Imagining the difference between outcomes or the consequences of your various acts, all that too. In an environment that's constantly changing and is not predictable, you need consciousness for. And you can imagine an evolutionary story where the people who had this ability, let's say, to imagine counterfactuals, did better than people who just kind of were going through life thoughtlessly.

[Monica Padman]

When you say that evolutionarily, obviously it's beneficial for us to have consciousness, but was there ever anyone that didn't?

[Michael Pollan]

I mean, like, we don't know.

[Monica Padman]

We evolved to have it. Right.

[Michael Pollan]

There are theories. I mean, I'm guessing, as you just said, that it did evolve, like everything in life evolved. However, there are people who argue that consciousness may precede us, precede life, and that consciousness is kind of a property of the universe. And there's no way to prove that. It goes under the title of idealists who believe, you know, we exist in this sea of consciousness and we channel it, we don't originate it.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Michael Pollan]

It's a kind of a weird idea, but the conventional ideas aren't really proven out. So we have to have an open mind.

[Dax Shepard]

And we've already stumbled into the first hurdle, which is there isn't a single consciousness either, probably. So there is the consciousness of this really adaptive, social primate us, and then there are lesser consciousness. There's less computation going on, less cognition,

[Michael Pollan]

simpler versions of consciousness.

[Dax Shepard]

We have one word for it, consciousness. Or in the best case, sentience enters the. But in general, we don't have 65 shades of this. We're just kind of exploring consciousness. So you take us to plants right away.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. So I should define sentience. I didn't do that earlier on. So sentience is a kind of a simpler, more basic form of consciousness that may be common or universal among living things. And sentience is simply the ability to sense, feel changes in your environment and recognize whether they're positive or negative for you and to gravitate toward the one and away from the other. So it's very basic, it's in awareness

[Dax Shepard]

and it is generally servicing homeostasis. So I'm a organism that has to regulate my temperature. It's hot here. I can pursue a colder area to regulate that, or I can search for food, some basic stuff.

[Michael Pollan]

And even single celled creatures exhibit these qualities. Right. There's chemotaxis in bacteria where they go toward molecules that are food and away from molecules that are poisons. So I looked at the case of plants. I wanted to see maybe where consciousness begins or how widespread it is in nature. And plants are an interesting case because we don't think of them as conscious at all. And they're just furniture of our world in a way. There's actually a lot going on with plants. We're not aware of it because their behaviors, we don't even think of them as having behaviors, but their behaviors are slow. As soon as you do time lapse, you realize, oh, they're really up to all sorts of things. They exist in a different scale of time than we do.

[Dax Shepard]

I found this to be a very interesting chunk of the book because you talk about. It was believed to have been an episode of Star Trek or something where

[Michael Pollan]

a creature came to Earth, an alien

[Dax Shepard]

that moved at like lightning speed. They were on a much different timeline. And when they got here and they were moving so fast and they observed humans, they didn't think humans were alive. They weren't animated, they didn't move. They were just. These chunks of meat could be brought back on the ship and they turned

[Michael Pollan]

into jerky for the ride home.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, like when you really started thinking about that is very direct one to one relative to us and plants. We don't see them moving, but they're moving all the time.

[Monica Padman]

Human arrogance really. Like it's not moving at our speed, so it doesn't exist.

[Michael Pollan]

Exactly. I got into some kind of trippy conversations with some of the scientists by posing this question. Well, what would the world be like, without consciousness?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

And it's very hard to imagine because the world as we know it is the product of our consciousness. We have a certain size, we have a certain speed at which we operate, and. But everything is just a construct of our perspective and our senses. We have these five or six senses, and there's very different ways to construct consciousness. And plants have a very different way, and it's obviously slower by our standards. The scientists would say, when I asked them this question, like, what if there was no consciousness? What would you see? Well, do you want to look at it microscopically or macroscopically? He said, just particles and waves. This table, to be true to the one perspective of this table, this perspective of physics is this is 90% empty space and particles and waves flying around. But to humans operating at our scale, it's solid, and you can put stuff on it, and it doesn't fall through. So it doesn't have to be that way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. If you could slow time down to the power of 100, we could watch the electrons move in this table, and it would expose all this empty space.

[Monica Padman]

So heady.

[Michael Pollan]

I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so trippy. The one that blew my mind was one of the scientists you were talking to said, well, the standardized test for intelligence in a mouse is we create a maze for it, and we create a treat at one end of it, and we measure how quickly it can go through the maze.

[Michael Pollan]

So he did the same with a corn plant. And he set up the root at one end of the maze, and he put some fertilizer, some nitrogen, in some corner of the maze, and the corn plant found the most direct route to the maze. So the whole thing about looking at plants grew out of actually a psychedelic experience in my garden. I was doing psilocybin when I was working on how to change your mind, I had this experience in my garden that the plants were conscious and they were looking at me. They were very benevolent because I was their gardener and I took care of them. But they were, like, returning my gaze. And as often happens with a psychedelic insight, you know, does it have any truth quotient at all? It's valuable. And I decided that I should test it against other ways of knowing and see if this was a crazy idea or maybe had some kernel of truth. I started interviewing these people who call themselves plant neurobiologists. They're botanists. There are no neurons involved, and they

[Dax Shepard]

know that they're trolling.

[Michael Pollan]

They're trolling the more conventional botanists, and they're doing These really cool experiments, including the one about the maize. And there's some videos, actually, I just posted some of these on my website of bean plants looking for a pole to climb. And they make this circular pattern when you speed it up. And what's really weird about it is I've seen bean plants do this in human scale time, and I just thought it was accident. They spun around until they hit something, and then they were off to the races. But these bean plants know exactly where the pole is right from the beginning. And they're, like, casting and that.

[Dax Shepard]

Without eyes or echolocation.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, it might be echolocation. We don't know. Because when their cells divide, they make a little sound, and maybe they bounce that off of things. Anyway, that was kind of spooky to watch. So plants can see, plants can hear. If you play the sound of caterpillars munching on a leaf, they will take defensive actions just based on the sound. If there's a pipe with water running through it underground, even though it's perfectly dry, they'll hear that sound or that vibration, and they'll send their roots over. If they're put in a pot, they'll share soil and resources with related plants. But with competitive plants, they'll fight. So they have a sense of self and other, too, which is crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Sentience is taking in information, making decisions to return to homeostasis. They also have these accelerated growth cycles if they're in the shadow of another tree, to escape. So they have variable growing speed.

[Michael Pollan]

They'll also invest more roots in a region where the nutrient content is rising, even if it's not as high now as another area, which suggests some sense

[Dax Shepard]

of the future forecasting.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. There's a trend line, and they want to be on that trend. And then the spookiest of all was that the same anesthetics we can use to put out people during surgery puts them out, too. What you might think, wait a minute, aren't they already out? If you take, like, a Venus fly trap or a sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, which is this tropical plant, you touch it and it just kind of collapses. It's a defensive move. They won't do those behaviors for the volcano. Yeah. Or xenon gas. Yeah. How do you administer an anesthetic to a plant? You use a gas, and you put it in a glass bell jar. That's.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Michael Pollan]

So that suggests they have these two modes of being awake and asleep, a little bit like us.

[Dax Shepard]

So now I think we should introduce. There's Tons of debate and disagreement in this whole field. I think it's relevant now to talk about what science does and what other disciplines do. Because we have a scientific fetish that's, I don't know, 400 years old now. We were born into it and we are kind of formatted. I know. I am.

[Michael Pollan]

I am too.

[Dax Shepard]

But explain our desire to be able to quantify and measure.

[Michael Pollan]

Well, science has the prestige in our culture as the most authoritative discourse. I've bridled against that for a long time. Cause I found in nutrition there was a lot they didn't know and a lot they got wrong and they changed their minds. And, you know, I come out of the humanities. I was an English major in college. I didn't study science at all. But now I'm a science journalist. Sometimes culture gets there before science. And the example I remember coming across when I was working on nutrition was the scientists did a big study and they found that the body couldn't make use of lycopene, this important antioxidant in tomatoes, unless it was accompanied by fat. So putting olive oil on your tomatoes, good idea. Who figured that out? It was the grandmas a long time ago. So culture figures out things in a different way from trial and error usually. So I've always brought a certain skepticism to my science writing and science interviewing. And in the case of consciousness scientists, in their defense, they haven't been at it that long. It's a fairly new science. The science of consciousness begins like in the late 1980s. They have made some progress. But there are things that novelists know about consciousness that scientists don't know know. And you can learn a lot about consciousness reading novels and Proust in particular, or Joyce, or stream of consciousness novels. The qualities of consciousness, the nature of thought and the nuance, which is just so subtle that it's very hard to believe an AI could do this.

[Dax Shepard]

There's an arrogance in science because I think they have absolutely nailed some things that are so impressive, no question. And I think they built on top of that a lot more shaky stuff. And I think they think you can graph on what was learned about the electron to all things. And I don't know that it travels up as much as we think. Explain reductiveness. I think that's really important.

[Michael Pollan]

The idea of reductive science is that complex phenomenon can be reduced to simpler phenomenon. So everything eventually can be reduced to matter and energy. And they can be reduced to each other. Thanks to Einstein, this works for all sorts of things. It's given us the technological revolutions we've

[Dax Shepard]

seen, what they've done in astronomy is unimaginable. What they know about the universe from inside of it.

[Michael Pollan]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Being able to predict where things are and when stars will die and the

[Michael Pollan]

rate of expansion and all this kind of stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Mind blowing.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. But consciousness has so far resisted that reductive approach. It's not at all clear it can be reduced to matter and energy. It may. Yet some people think if you introduce a third term, information, and some physicists think that's what the world consists of, is information, maybe that would help us unlock consciousness. They haven't gotten very far with that, but that's a suggestive avenue of exploration.

[Dax Shepard]

There's an irony here, though, which is the conscious strives for homeostasis. And one of the great enemies of homeostasis is uncertainty. So we're drawn to things that are certain, and our best certainties have been these advances in science. So I don't even know that the scientists recognize they too, are in great desire of certainty to a blinding degree.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. Although a lot of them, when you talk to them, are much more candid about what they don't know and about their uncertainty in the papers. You know, with the little abstract, it's always declarative and they've nailed it down. And I think from a career point of view, you have to sort of have that kind of confidence. But I always find that scientists are a lot more willing to talk about gray areas and what they don't know. If you talk to them one on one and. And boy, with consciousness, they'll definitely admit that they're kind of lost in many respects. So I found them pretty candid about that. We would argue sometimes, but they would finally admit there's a gulf. We can take it this far, but how you get to the conscious subject, we don't know yet. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by All Stars State. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart, not checking which platform you watch that new show on. So frustrating. Fifteen minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords, and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote. That could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company Affiliates Northbrook, IL this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Money Stress is something almost everyone deals with at some point. And I think what's interesting is how rarely people talk about the emotional side of it. It's not just about the numbers. It can affect your sleep, your relationships, how you feel about yourself. There's a lot of shame wrapped up in financial stress that doesn't really get acknowledged. That's where therapy can be useful. Not to give you financial advice, but to help you work through the anxiety and the weight that comes with it. It unpacking your relationship with money, building better coping strategies, feeling less alone in it. That's real, meaningful work. BetterHelp makes it easier to get started. They match you with a fully licensed therapist based on your needs. Over 30,000 therapists, more than 6 million people served and a 4.9 out of 5 rating from over 1.7 million reviews. If your first match isn't right, you can switch anytime. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] that's better. H lp.com Dax this episode is supported by Skims. Monica, I have a question about your skims obsession.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I wouldn't really call it an obsession. It's more of a lifestyle choice.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, but here's the thing. There are like a thousand underwear brands out there. What makes skims the one you actually

[Monica Padman]

recommend to people because they fixed all the problems. I didn't even realize I was tolerating. Like I used to think it was normal for bras to be just kind of uncomfortable. You just kind of get used to feeling not good or underwear to just not really fit. Right. And then I tried skims and realized, oh my gosh, it does not have to be this way.

[Dax Shepard]

So what's this new everyday cotton thing?

[Monica Padman]

Okay, it's their newest collection and honestly I just love it because it's so comfortable and breathable and it's not moving around your body. It fits properly and you want that in your underwear.

[Dax Shepard]

That's actually a really good pitch, which

[Monica Padman]

is why you should check it out. Shop everyday cotton and all of my favorite bras and [e-mail] after you place your order be sure to let them know we sent you select podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the drop down menu that follows.

[Dax Shepard]

Within physics too, there's these great mysteries. We had this wonderful physicist and oncologist Neil thes on and he was exploring explaining to us self organizing complex systems. It was one of the best episodes we've ever had. And he uses the big flock of swallows, right. At first it appears to be this, but we go closer. Oh no it's made up of individual swallows. Oh, but we go closer. It's made up actually of cells. Oh, we go closer. It's made up of molecules, it's made up of atoms. Every time we get to a lower, more reductive thing, it is revealed there's something yet lower. We still don't know what is below a quart. We're not there. There's still a mystery of we're trying to find this quintessential building block for all things. And if we can predict it, then we can model up, but we don't really still even know what that is.

[Michael Pollan]

We think we're at this advanced point in science, but in fact there are these three mysteries that I mentioned earlier. And there is this desire to how far down do you go? And we're a lot further down than we were 50 years ago. And physicists are very open. I find about mystery biologists less so because they have this very stable intellectual framework called Darwinism and evolution. And it's been very powerful. But it may not explain consciousness or it may.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, when you start poking holes, you run the risk of getting pushed out of society.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, I've really been struck by how this work on consciousness has pushed scientific materialism, this idea that you can reduce everything to matter to a breaking point. And that there are scientists who think, I think it's time for another paradigm. One I interviewed is Christoph Koch, who is in his late 60s, German American guy, brilliant scientist. Trained as a physicist actually, but became a neuroscientist.

[Dax Shepard]

He's like the Mick Jagger of this community. People are enamored with him. He knows so many different fields.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, he's a polymath. He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle for years. He's worked with neurons and probing them and giving them electric shocks and all this kind of stuff. And he was the quintessential brain guy. But over the years he's kind of come to realize that approach is not gonna explain subjective experience and we have to look beyond. What's admirable about him is he's changed his mind several times. Most recently he went to Brazil and had five ayahuasca trips. This is how open minded he is. Yeah, a lot of scientists don't mess around with psychedelics cause they think they don't wanna screw up their brains.

[Dax Shepard]

The moneymaker.

[Michael Pollan]

The moneymaker. But actually quite a. So the consciousness researchers are messing around with psychedelics just to get their head out of the box. Anyway, Christof comes back from this experience in which he saw what he called mind at large, which is to say consciousness outside of his head. It's the same insight that Aldous Huxley had in the Doors of Perception. You know, he talked about connecting to this universal mind and that the brain kind of channels it and we get a little bit of it in normal consciousness. On psychedelics, the valve opens wide and you get a lot more of it. Christoph had a very similar experience and it gave him a crisis. He was crying to his wife, where does he go with this? And I said, well, why'd you believe it? Because I had my same experience with the plants. And he said, well, it was as real as anything I've ever experienced and I would never doubt it. So he's exploring idealism, this idea that consciousness precedes matter. I admire him because normally science changes, as they say, one funeral at a time. You know, people hold onto their ideas till they d changed two or three times in his career. So scientific materialism has been this paradigm for like 400 years. It's been very powerful, it's given us a lot. But consciousness may kind of have reached the edge of it. And I talked to some other biologists too who are considering alternatives to it.

[Dax Shepard]

And we're probably not designed for these concepts to be intuitive. So I think it's a great time to introduce what is probably the hardest concept of the book. Book is it the second law of thermodynamics?

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Entropy. So in a nutshell, correct me if I'm wrong, all matter in the universe, we have this enormous big bang and everything's been dissipating since.

[Michael Pollan]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so all matter will lose its energy. The best analogy is a drop of ink and water and you watch it ripple out and then eventually it turns to nothing. And that's what everything in the universe is on course to do. And the defense of that is to have. Have a boundary. And all things have boundaries. Right. So the cell has a boundary.

[Michael Pollan]

The cell wall.

[Dax Shepard]

And animals have skin.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And to defeat entropy, we have to be able to recognize the force free energy. And we have to make a decision that protects us from that force. Whether it's got too hot, we got to move cold, all these things. And so, so when you say maybe there's this consciousness that is out in the ether, it's contrary to our survival as any complex system fighting entropy, in a sense. Our fear is you not to let things from the outside in. That's dangerous.

[Michael Pollan]

That's right. You have to let information in though, because you've got to read your environment and you have to let food in, but there's a vulnerability every time you open. But that's a very good summary of this idea of the free energy principle, which is a theory put forth by English scientist named Carl Friston. It really hurt my head to understand this and explain it, I have to say. And I worked very hard to make it clear. But he's basically saying life is the way you resist the second law of thermodynamics until you die. Our job is essentially to keep that law at bay. And we do this by creating this wall. It's called a Markov blank. And we have to infer what's going on out there because all we get, we don't get like a picture of the world. We get electromagnetic waves, we get light and sound, we get vibrations. And we have to construct an image of what's going on out there from that very thin data stream. It's kind of incredible.

[Dax Shepard]

We do it highly subjective. I'll just say the book that best explains this is Ed Yong's book about an immense world.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is red isn't red. Red is a 7,000 Angstroms wavelength that we interpret as red. And another animal does not interpret it as red. And that's where science gets off. Right. It's like, no, no, there's an objective reality which is it's a certain wavelength. And then we experience it this way.

[Michael Pollan]

When you're getting to consciousness, you have to take seriously the human experience of red.

[Dax Shepard]

In fact, it's the only thing that's relevant in another way. That's the counter argument. It's like, does it really matter?

[Michael Pollan]

It does. And it's a fact of nature that humans see this wavelength as red. So deal with it. Yeah, but so far they don't deal with it. So anyway, this theory is that the way to avoid dissipating in the second law of thermodynamics is protecting yourself from it, but also taking actions of various kinds to get food to avoid negative things. And I found that persuasive. And it gets you from very simple systems to things like us. It gives you an evolutionary line that you can follow.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supposed to see ourselves as individual from everything else because we are trying to protect this little individual being that is protected by this boundary. So the boundaries are life source. So of course it's hard to get people to leap into. No, no. But you're still connected to everything.

[Monica Padman]

Like the idea.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why it's so hard, because it's counterintuitive to survival.

[Michael Pollan]

In some way, we are connected, but finally, there is a breach between every conscious being and every other one. Your consciousness is not transparent to mine and vice versa. And that's part of what makes it difficult to study. And each of our consciousnesses are shaped by every life experience we've had. They're not interchangeable in any way. So we are very separate, if you look at it that way. And to defend ourselves, we need to be. On the other hand, we need other people. And so we have to figure out ways to translate consciousness. And of course, language is the most powerful way we have.

[Monica Padman]

And our consciousness is based on our experience, but also our parents experience in their parents, in our friends. Ultimately, if you start doing that, that they are all linked, if you really start expanding.

[Michael Pollan]

As humans, we all have certain experiences in common, but then we have our own experiences.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

One of the things that I found very frustrating about the science was they like to say, we're going to explain the qualia is the term for qualitative experience. The redness of red or the taste of coffee or the smell of coffee. You know, these kind of more subjective things. But it's even more refined than that, that the taste of coffee to you is different than it is to me because you have a different relationship to it built over your whole lifetime. And that every experience you've had with coffee, every important experience you have with coffee has left a little furrow on your consciousness.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

And so they're not interchangeable that way.

[Dax Shepard]

They're not even interchangeable for your own consciousness from one year ago because you're constantly rewriting the math and you're bringing to bear all the baggage from the past on the current moment. You've accumulated more baggage over the last year.

[Michael Pollan]

No thought is the same. You can have the same thought now as you had five years ago or five years in the future, but it won't be quite the same. And William James wrote about this beautifully. He said that every thought has around it auras and halos. And he calls at one point a fringe of unarticulated affinities. He's just really good at getting at the subtleties and the specificity of our thought. And that, I think, is going to be very hard to understand scientifically. That's where the novelists come in. That's what they describe. Proust describes this beautifully.

[Dax Shepard]

And that kind of brings us to feelings. So all of this scientific exploration really wants to focus on the thoughts and the neurons, and it really doesn't care much about feelings. And let's Just talk about the history of dividing feelings and thought.

[Michael Pollan]

When we first started thinking about consciousness, we assumed it was this neocortex production. Because this is the most advanced, most uniquely human part of the brain. It's this outer covering and it's rational thought and everything. But it turns out it may have more to do with feelings generated from the body. So we tend to think that the body exists as a support system for the brain. Because we just love the brain. And we identify with the brain.

[Dax Shepard]

It's what makes us so unique.

[Michael Pollan]

It's that. But also maybe because all our senses are up here, or most of them, we just think this is the command center. But in fact, the whole point of the brain is to keep the body. And the body has to communicate with the brain. And feelings are the way it does it. So you fall out of homeostatic balance and you have a feeling, you're hungry, you're cold, whatever it is, or you're in a really good place and you have a feeling of well being. And all this gets conveyed to the brain. It appears to work at the upper brain stem, which is according to people who follow this line of research, which begins with Antonio Damasio and Mark Soames. They've researched, really shifted our emphasis from cortical function to feelings. Only later does the cortex get involved. It does get involved. So you start with some like inchoate feeling of hunger. And then the cortex imagines what you might eat and makes a reservation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, thoughts come after, feelings come first.

[Michael Pollan]

And we see this in our kids. So the brain has to interpret feelings. Cause they're not always clear. Like I was just at the airport today and there was a kid who was like melting down and the mother was trying to sit up. So are you tired or are you hungry? And you know how kids don't know, they just feel weird.

[Monica Padman]

Angsty.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, angsty, yeah. Uncomfortable or frustrated. And sometimes you just have to feed them something and they're fine. And it's because they haven't yet learned how to accurately interpret the messages coming from their bodies. So this really changes a lot, I think, this emphasis on feelings. Basically it says to be conscious. It's not just a brain in a vessel. That sci fi idea. You need a body. And that's going to have implications, I think for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think we all have a fantasy that if you could keep my head alive as this body dies and you kept my whole head in a box, I could still exist. It's crazy, but that's not true. And then also this false dichotomy between feelings and thought, it's been framed traditionally in science that feelings are irrational and thought is rational. But as we. We've studied how the brain operates and we can watch people make decisions in FMRI machines, we have come to find out that feelings make a lot of quite rational decisions for us.

[Michael Pollan]

Gut checks, gut feelings. Damasio wrote a book called Descartes Error back in the 90s, and he demonstrated that people who didn't have feelings because of various lesions in the brain or whatever made worse decisions than people who had strong feelings. And that the feelings are a way to sort of test out an idea in your body and led to better decision making, which is kind of amazing. Our body is more involved than we think in our thinking. There's an experiment I mention in the book that just blew my mind. Give people ginger, have them eat some ginger, then give them a morally repugnant situation. Something that should breed moral disgust. Some people get ginger, some people get a control placebo. The ones who had the ginger are much less likely to be judgmental because we feel disgust in our gut.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, it's moral disgust.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't that wild? Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

They didn't react as strongly to the morally repugnant situation.

[Dax Shepard]

This is perfect because I wanted to ask you kind of, aside from the book, with all you've learned, I myself have been wrestling with something for a while now. I don't know if you know Jonathan Haidt's moral dumbfounding questions.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, I know a little bit about it secondhand.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Probably the most famous one is he asks all of his students. So there's a brother and a sister, they take a trip to Europe. They decide to have sex on this trip in Europe and she can't get pregnant. He covers all the bases. At the end of the trip, they said it made them feel closer and they never had sex again. Is this morally wrong or not?

[Michael Pollan]

That would be a great one for the ginger test.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I always have thought, thought that the point of that exercise was to force you to work through the fact that there was no suffering and there was no victim and therefore there's no moral issue. And I've landed on that side of it. Even though I would rather cut off my head than have sex with my own sister. I'm more interested in the notion that maybe that's not what Jonathan's position is. I mean, I need to ask him directly, but I. I think now I'm suspicious at least that Jonathan's actually arguing that there are Things that are morally reprehensible, that have no intellectual discourse, that that feeling of it's repugnant to have sex with your sister is the right feeling and that that should inform that moral. I don't know. I need to ask him about it.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, it's important.

[Dax Shepard]

But I wonder what you think in regards to what I read in feelings,

[Michael Pollan]

people who have a low threshold for disgust, you can predict all sorts of things about their politics.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, he says that a lot.

[Michael Pollan]

He talks about that. Yeah. That they're more likely to favor authoritarian politics, more likely to be right wing. That question. You can put people on a spectrum. I don't know exactly why. Is it a stronger moral sense or less tolerance? I'm not sure exactly the reason, but disgust is a very interesting emotion and it applies to morality. And what you're talking about is disgust at the idea of incest.

[Dax Shepard]

And by the way, incestual is evolutionarily not advantageous. That's a fact.

[Michael Pollan]

And you could imagine why we would have evolved a taboo.

[Dax Shepard]

And it is right to trust that feeling, even though you can't find any suffering or victimhood in it. So our intellectual capacity that we rely

[Michael Pollan]

on so much may not be what's going on.

[Dax Shepard]

Weirdly, a deeper truth is afoot.

[Michael Pollan]

Well, that's the truth of feelings.

[Dax Shepard]

It does get tricky. And what's scary about it is it opens up the door to a lot of things that we would disagree with. Right. Like I don't think you trust your disgust discussed all the time.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's also saying one way of thinking is right and another way of thinking is wrong. One is logically correct, but morally wrong is tricky.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, as I'm getting older, like, you're on your ride. My ride is starting to question. I've been so analytical and so cerebral and I'm becoming more and more open to there might be another set of truths, which is a scary proposition. It kind of unravels so much of my cornerstones. Right.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. What's prompting that?

[Dax Shepard]

Just getting older and less rigid and passionate about being right or wrong. And I guess I'm getting more weirdly curious, but this is a big avenue for me. Like, is Jonathan right about that?

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I haven't thought about that, but I found my own thinking in the course of this book has changed. And that I went from a kind of conventional frame that you're describing of your younger self of like, there's gotta be an answer. And I started in this frame which was very kind of Western And I think male of problem, solution, hard problem, gotta be a solution out there. And that way of thinking is powerful, and scientists apply it all the time, but it narrows things, right? You're getting one degree and you're putting blinders on to think really hard about things. And my wife, who is an artist, not a journalist, she was saying as I was reaching these moments of great frustration, like I don't have an answer, she said, you know, not knowing is very powerful. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She said, not knowing opens you up to possibilities, opens up your imagination. And she approaches her canvases that way every day. Sometimes you have to hear something a couple times before it sings. And it was only when I went to the Zen retreat that I talk about at the end of the book and I was getting the Zen version of the same message, you know, cultivate the don't know mind, that something kind of clicked for me. And I realized it was another way to think about consciousness entirely.

[Dax Shepard]

I know what your fear is, Monica. It's mine too. We love it on the left the most, I think, is when we say your feelings aren't facts.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, I'm saying the opposite, actually. I'm saying I don't think it's healthy to say one version of morality is corre. Sure, that gets dangerous.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm pitching for me personally, is like, the other thing might be as relevant.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, it is not.

[Dax Shepard]

One is superior. She needs to be trusted. But just while there's a deeper wisdom to this disgust that we couldn't have even known. Cause we don't know about mendolin and incest and genes and all. We don't even know that.

[Michael Pollan]

But we know it intuitively. Yeah. There are different forms of knowledge, and that is one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So anyways, back to feelings. I think you said Rene Descartes would have been more accurate to say, I feel therefore I am, which I think is really lovely. Okay, now let's quickly just get into AI because now we're up to speed on a lot of different thoughts on consciousness. And of course, the pressing issue of the day is will AI have consciousness? What would that mean? Roll out your take on that.

[Michael Pollan]

So I thought hard about this because it's an active conversation in Silicon Valley, near where I live, and there is a general belief in that community that it's just a matter of time and there are people working on it. And I follow one group in South Africa that's trying to develop a conscious AI.

[Monica Padman]

They want to.

[Michael Pollan]

Yes, they want to.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Pollan]

Why because they can.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe there's an even more extreme view, which is what they honor most is intelligence. That's their religion. So if there is at one point some sentient being that is superior to us, we should yield to it. One of the founders of Google kind of has this.

[Michael Pollan]

That's right. But intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. They can be disaggregated. You know, some argue that the reason we need conscious AI is that it'll be more compassionate and will spare us. I think that's nuts, because remember Frankenstein? I mean, the plot of Frankenstein? Dr. Frankenstein gave his monster not just intelligence, but consciousness. And it was his consciousness that made him a homicidal maniac, because he was hurt by the way he was being treated. Feelings again.

[Dax Shepard]

And he was seeing injustice. That's right. He was seeing other people get hurt, that they deserve to be hurt.

[Michael Pollan]

That's right. And so he started killing people. People. So I don't buy that idea at all. So I looked at this question in some depth, and the belief you can make a conscious AI is based, I think, on a faulty metaphor. And that is the metaphor that the brain is a kind of computer. Now, if you look through history, whatever the cool, cutting edge technology was at that time, that became what the brain was. So the brain was a mill, a loom, a clock, a telephone, switchboard. So we go that way. Right. Good technology must be like the brain. But if you think about it, brains are very different than computers. Computers have a sharp distinction between hardware and software. They're interchangeable. You can take this software, run it on any number of different computers. In brains, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory you have, every experience you have, physically changes your brain. You know how our brains are pruned? We start out with many more connections. And growing up is essentially about pruning it in a certain way. Everyone's brain gets pruned differently depending on their adverse events in their lives or positive events in their lives. So we all end up with these different brains. And the premise of conscious AI is that consciousness is an algorithm or a software that you can run on any number of different kinds of material substrates. They call it, it just doesn't work. Brains are nothing like computers. Yes, they do some computation, but they do a whole lot of other things. Other problem with that metaphor is are neurons like transistors? Computers consist of these on, off, transist. And yes, neurons either fire or don't fire, but they're also influenced by chemicals. They're very analog, actually. And that Hormones and neurotransmitters and drugs completely change how they fire or how intensely they fire. So this idea that you can make this one to one comparison, that consciousness is computation. And then you look at the nature of thought and you realize there's so much more going on than computation and that our feelings simply information about. I mean, they convey information, but there's the qualitative dimension that you can't digitize. So it's a pipe dream, this idea that we can upload our minds into silicon. But it's a powerful belief if you

[Dax Shepard]

switch your model to no, the brain's here to support the body, not vice versa. And feelings precede thoughts. They're quintessential to consciousness. I do want to add, because I thought this was such an interesting part of the book, that there are these certain neurons that are. Are in charge of the language of our feelings. And they're very unique in that they travel back and forth across the brain

[Michael Pollan]

barrier and reach all the way down into the body.

[Dax Shepard]

And they are permeable. Unlike most neurons that receive an electrical signal that then it repeats. They absorb everything in the body.

[Michael Pollan]

They have no myelin, which is the insulation on the outside of most neurons. These ones are just completely naked nerves picking up information from the body and taking it directly to the brain.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not a translation of the thing. It's like, I absorb this now. It's really powerful.

[Michael Pollan]

It's so biological. I also think computers are very good at doing cortical things. The hard stuff, right? They do logic and rationality pretty well. They don't do other things. Well, a computer can beat you at chess or go, but you can't use one to, like, change a diaper or do anything involving movement very well. And certainly not do anything involving feelings. And the idea that if feelings are necessary to consciousness, how exactly are computers going to have feelings and will those feelings be real? You might design a computer or a robot, say, that tells you, I'm hot, I need more electricity, or something like that.

[Monica Padman]

A need.

[Michael Pollan]

But will that be a feeling? If you think about feelings, they depend on your vulnerability. They depend on the fact you can suffer. And perhaps they depend on the fact you're mortal. And without those things, I mean, if you were gonna live forever, your feelings wouldn't matter. They would have no weight. And I think the feelings of machines are just gonna be signals. They're not gonna have any weight.

[Dax Shepard]

I love too. You talk about so much of humanness and consciousness is about the friction between one another. The friction between Us and nature, our environment. And there's no friction in AI.

[Michael Pollan]

No. And that's been one of the reasons that people believe that they're conscious chatbots. 72% of American teenagers are turning to chatbots for companionship right now. We're already way down this path. Everything I've said about why I don't think AI can be conscious at one level doesn't matter. Because they're going to fool us.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

And they are already fooling us. Those relationships, I think, are dangerous for the reason you just mentioned, that they're sycophantic. The AIs just tell you you're great. It has none of the friction of a real human relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

They're there to service your ego.

[Michael Pollan]

Absolutely. And why do they do that? They want to keep you online as long as they can.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Michael Pollan]

So they're not real relationships.

[Dax Shepard]

I think our primate ism might help us here. This is my only ray of hope, is that we are status creatures. That is the great force that drives us at all times, our hierarchical status. And I don't think you can achieve status with a chat friend, a chat lover, a chat anything, because of the lack of friction. Well, because there's no status in it. The status is, that girl's prettier than me. Can I get her? I got her. Look at me, I've got status. We just talked about this girl at school was so cool and she liked Monica. And that is turbocharging for us. It can't give us status because everyone has access to it. It is an infinite resource and status is driven on finite resources.

[Monica Padman]

As long as we're social creatures, we might evolve out of that, you know.

[Dax Shepard]

Sadly, yeah, people are more and more solitary and it works. But I think we're stuck with this. I'll use hardware. Even though we don't like it, I

[Michael Pollan]

think we're stuck with hardware. I think it goes pretty deep, the status and. But these relationships, I think, for one thing, we're gonna atrophy our ability to have real relationships. There's this sociologist at MIT I interviewed named Sherry Turkle, and she has this wonderful line, I quote, she says technology can make us forget what we know about life. And what she means is, when we have a conversation with a machine, we simplify what a conversation is. We take ourselves down to the machine's level. We give up eye contact, we give up body language. We give up all the sensory connections we make to people as doing. Right now, we're syncing our brains in interesting ways while we talk and we can signal agreement and disagreement and skepticism.

[Dax Shepard]

There's olfactory signals happening, there's so much going on.

[Michael Pollan]

But that conversation with the machine is just such a schematic, simplified version of conversation. The example I use is when we accepted emojis as a substitute for emotion. That's the classic example. We're doing it on the computer's terms, not on our terms.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're right, if most of your relationships are frictionless, when you experience just normal friction, it'll feel like aggression and an assault. Like it'll set your baseline at a very unrealistic level.

[Michael Pollan]

And that friction, we learn a lot from it, right? We learn to define ourselves, we learn to refine our thinking that friction is really important. Stay tuned for more Armchair Extra expert, if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by ProtonMail. You know how your email address ends up becoming the key to basically your whole digital life? It's tied to your bank accounts, your travel, your shopping, your pictures with your family and kids, almost everything. And most of us have had that same email for years, sometimes decades. It's basically the backbone of your online identity. Here's what bothered me when I found out a lot of email services were built to collect data, not particularly protect it. That's why ProtonMail exists. Proton was created by scientists who wanted to build a better Internet, one where privacy is the default, not an afterthought. With ProtonMail, your emails are encrypted, end to end, so not even Proton can read them. No ads, no tracking, just your inbox. Private. And what really got me is what they're doing next. Proton has a campaign called Born Private, the idea that kids shouldn't be tracked from the moment they first go online. Because right now, the second a child gets an email address, the data collection starts. Proton wants to change. You can sign up for free or reserve an email account for your child, so they're protected from day one. If you care about your own privacy or your families, this is worth looking into. Learn [e-mail] dax.protonmail privacy by default. This episode has been brought to you by Anthropic. So I've been using this AI called Claude, and I have to tell you, I'm kind of obsessed. I use it for guest research, obviously, but also for working through bigger questions, like when I'm trying to understand patterns, how people think, or why certain conversations land differently than others. I can spend time going back and forth with Claude, exploring different angles. It doesn't just give me some surface level answer, it asks me questions and pushes back on my assumptions. What I appreciate is that it feels like I'm expanding my thinking in every conversation and actually learning and anthropic. The company that makes Claude has committed to keeping it ad free. So when I'm in the middle of exploring something, my conversation stays mine. Claude's only job is to give me a helpful answer for anyone who likes to sit with a problem rather than just get the quick fix. Claude's been the thing for me. Try it free at Claude AI armchairexpert and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. We are supported by ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting. Did you know the average employer has to sort through roughly 250 resumes per job opening? Which, when you think about it, is kind of insane. There's a lot of people to sift through and a lot of time you probably don't, you don't have. I mean, where do you even start? But if you're hiring, I'm about to brighten your day. You can now review all of these resumes and applications faster, thanks to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested qualified candidates first. And today you can try it for [e-mail] Dax ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates quickly. And with ZipRecruiter's new feature, qualified candidates who are very interested in your job jobs show up at the top of your list, cut through the standard and get the standouts. With ZipRecruiter, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for [e-mail] Dax that's ziprecruiter.com Dax meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

[Michael Pollan]

You mentioned also friction with nature. These AIs, their world is essentially the Internet. It's not the real world, it's not the physical world. They don't have that kind of contact with nature with this. And to the kinds of people who build these things, they've been living in that computer world since they were like eight, playing video games. And they've forgotten that the Internet is not the world. It's like a shadow of the world.

[Dax Shepard]

I have to remind myself of that. I have to go like, oh, right, this thing that exists about me on the Internet isn't real.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God, just have an.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not bumping into anyone at a grocery store. That is like, you Beat your wife. But there are people online that think that. Right. And I have to go like, oh, Rhett's right. It exists. If I plug the thing in, it's not real, but it's hard to remember.

[Monica Padman]

But that's cuz you have feelings.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That you're affected by it. It literally happened to me yesterday. I was like scrolling and. And then I was like, what is this thing about me? And then it was not good. And I was like, oh, my God. And it really does take you out.

[Michael Pollan]

That's a dangerous place to go.

[Monica Padman]

It is. I'm like, get me out of here.

[Dax Shepard]

My journal entry this morning was, I'm so disappointed that that still affects me, even though I rationally have all of the tools to not be affected by it.

[Michael Pollan]

Well, it goes right to the brain stem, that kind of stuff. Right.

[Monica Padman]

But a computer's never gonna have that. They're never gonna feel embarrassed.

[Michael Pollan]

Right. No shame.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I went to ch how one of our episodes was doing, and I think because my name's in that episode, it suggested and the first thing I saw was Dax Shepard's the worst person in the world. I was like, oh, my God, get away from me. I don't fucking want to see that.

[Monica Padman]

It's insane out there.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm the worst person in the world. Okay, will you just tell me quickly about the thought experiment you enrolled in? And I love how honest you are about how terrible it went.

[Michael Pollan]

Well, it was a little.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not like it was fun for either of you, which I really appreciate

[Michael Pollan]

talking about the limitations of. This was a great example. So I heard about this guy who'd been doing the same experiment for 50 years. Essentially you wear a beeper that he designed because 50 years ago there were no beepers.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Michael Pollan]

And you have this earpiece, and at random times of the day, you get this sound and you're supposed to write down what you're thinking. And then at the end of the day, you have a zoom session with him and he helps you integrate or make sense of it because it's not clear. And the takeaway take away is that we really don't know what we're thinking a lot of the time.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, minimally, that was your experience.

[Michael Pollan]

Yes, I think a lot of people have that. So, for example, there's one moment where I had seasoned a filet of salmon and I was taking it back to the refrigerator, and then halfway to the refrigerator, I'm like, shit, I forgot the pepper. And that was the moment the beep went off. So the thought was pepper. And I was like, oh, that's an easy one. That's pretty clear cut. And then Russell the scientist interviews me after he's, well, did you hear the word pepper or did you say the word pepper internally? It's like, I have no fucking idea.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

And you realize that you don't know that question. And then also, are you thinking in words or images? Cause sometimes I didn't say a word. I just saw a roll. I was thinking of buying this roll at the bakery. Anyway, it just put me in touch with the fact that thought is very

[Dax Shepard]

elusive and it's object centric when we study it. Right. That's one of the other problems.

[Michael Pollan]

Right. And it isn't really. I mean, we name our thoughts for the of our thoughts, like the roll or the pepper. But in fact, and this is William James, the great philosopher psychologist, said that there's never a simple object of thought. It has all this intonation, association, affinities we bring to it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's in a stew.

[Michael Pollan]

And there are all these things happening simultaneously. And while I was thinking about the role, I was smelling the cheese in the bakery and I was looking at the plaid on this woman's skirt. It's all in the mix. So his idea of separating out thought and is a thought in the wild. I would just argue with him all the time and say, well, you know, this was happening too. We have to include this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

And he was like, well, was that before the footlights of consciousness? That was his phrase. And I said, well, footlights, I don't know. But it was there. It was hanging in the wings. We argued back and forth. And at the end of this whole thing, I do several days, Hurlburt is his name, Russell Hurlburt. Very nice guy. He put a lot of time into this. Two things I want to say about it. His basic discovery after all, all these years is that we have different styles of thinking. The word thinking is an umbrella term that covers a variety of different styles of thinking. So some people are verbal thinkers, but it's not even a majority. It's like a third or a quarter. A lot of people are visual thinkers, that they have images, not words. And then there are people who have unsymbolized thought that are neither words or images. I'm not sure exactly what that is.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, what's happening happening?

[Dax Shepard]

Would that be you think in concepts?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but I still think words.

[Dax Shepard]

It's hard to imagine your thoughts without words.

[Michael Pollan]

But again, a feeling, an emotion could be that. So anyway, at the end, I Said, so what style thinker am I? And he said, well, I don't know what you're going to think of this, but I don't think you have a lot of inner life.

[Dax Shepard]

What, you low on the spectrum of inner experience? Guy writing a book about God, that's crazy.

[Michael Pollan]

So his thinking was. He said, well. Cause you could not isolate a thought. You weren't having any thoughts. You were backfilling all this stuff. Oh, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I ruminate. I have an inner life. I shouldn't have to say this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, you got defensive. What I like is you said you were both defensive. You guys both triggered each other's defensiveness.

[Michael Pollan]

We did.

[Monica Padman]

I can't imagine seeing. I'm not a visual thinker at all. I can't even imagine that type of brain.

[Michael Pollan]

I've talked to people since who are, you know, and they describe what it's like to be a visual thinker. It's really interesting. I am sometimes.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you mechanical?

[Michael Pollan]

No, I'm not particularly mechanical.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think writers maybe mainly are.

[Michael Pollan]

I would think it would be words, and it more often is words for me. But a lot of my thoughts are on the verge of being translated into words. They're not yet there. And the writing process is completing that translation. But it's interesting to try this. And it's something we don't think about. But it's not just what are you thinking, it's how are you thinking it? And as a kind of practice, I found it really interesting. And I stop sometimes to do that. And I do it in my meditation too. I'll think about, well, that thought you just had. Could you see it or hear it? And if you heard it, who was speaking it? And I go down this rabbit hole.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's becoming more aware of your thoughts present in them and exploratory and.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. How they're coming to you.

[Michael Pollan]

That's one of the legacies of this whole project. I was in medit. I meditate more now. And I spend more time in meditation on those kind of questions. Just like watching my thought process and getting in touch with how weird it is. Our minds are really strange places to visit.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So often it feels very maladaptive. You're like, why is that? The order of events. It takes me to the wrong place every time. I've got to unravel this whole thing, get to the core thing, I'm really afraid.

[Michael Pollan]

Which raises questions about some of these theories of consciousness, that this important information is coming up because our minds Are full of bullshit and trivia and like, why is that adaptive?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, one thing I wanted to ask you about, I was wondering while I was reading the feelings chapter, and I was thinking that, yes, our feelings are as important as our more complex cognition, maybe more. And that your feelings are also in search of homeostasis. So your feelings are predicting when they'll experience discomfort or pleasure, and they're actively trying to. To buffet against that. I had this thought that your food needs, your body temperature needs. These are very simple problems, your feelings, trying to maintain homeostasis. Not only are there innumerable causes of discomfort, you take something like depression. And I can't think of a more dynamic, complex set of variables that you would be trying to evaluate. Is it exercise? I do. Is it my diet? Is it this thing is that some of the malaise of being human has to be our preoccupation with trying to keep our feelings in homeostasis because they're so hard to predict. And then I started even wondering, how fucked up are we by modern civilization that we have been exposed so much to movies and commercials and all these set points for homeostasis of your females that there's just a million things and

[Michael Pollan]

that they're being manipulated.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. That you think all of a sudden you need this car for homeostasis and this house for homeostasis and this amount of money and this amount of hair because we're exposed to all these examples of seeming homeostasis for your feelings.

[Michael Pollan]

Well, there are two points to make here. One is I asked these scientists, I said, well, I have feelings that aren't necessarily about my body or about homeostatic set points. What about feelings of shame or guilt? And he said, I think this was damasio, that, well, there's a homeostasis in your social standing too. And that if there's a threat to your social standing because you did something shameful or you were dissed by somebody, that is a feeling too. And you can feel good when there's an increase in your social standing. So feelings. There's homeostasis in other realms besides biology. And I thought that was very interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think shame is the social lubricant of a social primate. You have to experience it or you will be excluded from the group and die if you're not aware of the moments when you need to apologize with the people you've offended.

[Michael Pollan]

So feelings have a lot of dimensions in terms of that idea of being manipulated. One of the things I've been thinking about since the book came out And I've been out talking about it is that our consciousness is being polluted. Basically. We have this precious gift that we've been talking about. This private space of complete mental freedom, our interiority. Amazing. It's just a great gift. You can have your fantasies play out your imagination. There's so much we can do. But rather than do that we are scrolling on social media. We are allowing people to monetize our consciousness, basically. And now with chatbots, they're not just hacking our attention, they're hacking our attachment, the ability to emotionally attach to other people, which is so precious and such a precious part of consciousness. And we're getting faked out by these machines. And I think that gives a certain urgency to the. To the whole subject of consciousness, that we need to take steps to protect it and defend it and draw lines around it and say, today I'm not gonna look at social media. You have to regulate it. Cause I also feel like as political beings, we need a certain amount of information to act in a democracy. But it's way out of control. Pico Iyer says you only need five minutes a day to get up to speed on the news. I'm a journalist. It might not be enough for me.

[Dax Shepard]

I have the theory. Like I learn of the stuff that is important.

[Michael Pollan]

It gets to you.

[Dax Shepard]

Someone will say, it'll rise in. Yeah, you do. And it'll rise to a point of crisis. And that's when you need to know about it.

[Michael Pollan]

See, I feel like I'm one of the people who spreads the word.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's your occupation.

[Michael Pollan]

But I don't think it's healthy. So I don't know. I've been giving a lot of thought to how do you protect. And that's one is going on a diet with your media. But what you say about the news is true for social media too, because that's really corrosive.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you see a million people have the best vacation of their life. Again, you might have saw one person fight an ultimate pineapple and you'd have been envious a few times in your life. But like a thousand times a day, we don't have that capacity.

[Monica Padman]

And now we don't know if those people are even real. They look like they're having the best vacation and they're not even real.

[Michael Pollan]

Synthetic.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Michael Pollan]

So anyway, I think it's something we all need to think about is how can we nurture that space and not sell it off to the people paying to occupy it. Yeah, it's a very important question. Question right now.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now, I have found we've been doing this for eight years. We've gotten to talk to just an embarrassment of riches of smart people. And I got to say, more and more roads lead back to Buddhism than anything else. Even these quintessential philosophical debates, they have already been had. A lot of physics finds its way back to Buddhism. It's kind of beyond comprehension. How 2000 years ago. I don't know how long the timeline is. It's not 2,000 years. How long on earth. They came to a lot of so much wisdom. It's really something to behold, isn't it?

[Michael Pollan]

It is. I didn't expect to end up there. I mean, I'm not a Buddhist, but I got a lot of wisdom from talking to this Zen priestess, Joan Halifax, who I went to visit in Santa Fe UPIA as her retreat center. And I knew her from the psychedelic world in the 70s. She was married to Stanislav Grof and was giving high doses of LSD to people who were dying. And we had been on a panel together.

[Dax Shepard]

Can we say a couple more things about her? She's also an incredible human in that she would go on these long retreats to.

[Michael Pollan]

She led every year a group of doctors and dentists to go to villages in the mountains of Nepal that have no health care. Bringing people and they treat people.

[Dax Shepard]

That's her life work.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, but she's also worked with the dying, and she's worked with people on death row. Incredible person. And she's had so many lives and done so many amazing things. And she's 82 now. She just stopped doing the thing. I mean, they were sleeping in below zero temperatures in these mountains, and she was right there. She's wonderful. So I was writing the chapter on the self. The self is an amazing mystery. Buddhists think it's an illusion that we don't really have selves or we only have it in a conventional sense. I'm not sure I buy that, but I was exploring that. And she had said that Upaiah was a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I said, that's what I need. I want to see how that works. And so I arranged to go there, and I was going to interview her about the self. And I should have known that a Zen priest would be kind of allergic to concepts and wouldn't really want to participate in the conversation with me.

[Dax Shepard]

Also would be ahead of you. Yeah, By a lot.

[Monica Padman]

Also talking about it is maybe antithetical to the whole point.

[Dax Shepard]

Duh.

[Michael Pollan]

Yes, exactly. Our first interview, she Said something like, I've divested from meaning. I was like, oh shit, what do I do with that as a journalist? But she said, you're really lost in your head about this. And I think instead of talking to me, you should go live in the cave for a few days. The cave. And she has this place, this piece of land 50 miles north of Santa Fe in the mountains at like 14,000ft. She and her monks have dug a cave into the side of a south facing hillside. And she said, why don't you just be there for a while and think about these questions yourself. I had the most amazing three days in the cave. No media, obviously. There were not even electromagnetic waves there. It was so remote, no power and no water. And I got into this ritual where I would meditate for a few hours a day, which I've never been able to do before. I'd hike and I'd chop wood and sweep. And it's very interesting to watch what happens to yourself when you have such extreme solitude and you realize our sense of self is a social construct, that we're each reinforcing each other's selves selfhood as we talk. And if you're not wizard anyone, it sort of softens the border we were talking about just kind of really goes soft.

[Dax Shepard]

Really interesting thoughts that you said. Like even the notion that no one's going to come, that's a very distract. You're always kind of waiting or preparing for the arrival or departure of someone.

[Michael Pollan]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And just like taking that off the table, I really was taken by that

[Michael Pollan]

animals might find me, but no one was going to find me.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not going to be disturbed.

[Michael Pollan]

There was a great freedom in that you can really let your mind. And what I came out of it with was this idea that I'd been so focused on this problem, solution frame and that if I let myself go into not knowing we were talking about earlier, it opened me up to being present and I realized how much of the time we're not present. And you know, we think we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals have to be more conscious because if they're not present to their environment, to what's going on right now, they can be eaten.

[Dax Shepard]

They can't afford to be lost in a memory from three years ago where they were ashamed.

[Michael Pollan]

Exactly. The construct of civilization and technology has allowed us to get kind of lazy about presence and consciousness. And that came back to me, I really felt it. And I realized this is something that distinguishes humans, that we have the freedom to not Be. Be here. And sometimes that's great. And it allows for some human achievement that we can imagine an alternative world. But day to day, we're giving up something really precious.

[Dax Shepard]

I think a lot of people have the same reaction I had. Like, I'm going through it with you. She marches you up here and like, okay, you're going to be here for a few days. And my first thought is, I'm going to be so uncomfortable with my thoughts. It's going to be maddening. And I love. She explained, everyone will go through this. You'll ruminate, and you'll ruminate and you'll ruminate. And finally, you'll be blessed with boredom. You'll be so fuck bored. And I was like, I can imagine that state. You're like, I can't bear to watch this movie again.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, the reruns. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

So, like, that happened to you?

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, I got there and that happens. In her retreat center, she said people meditate for two weeks and then they drop in. But a couple things lead to that. Because I asked her, how do you destroy selves or undermine self? And she said, well, first, no eye contact and no speaking. So even if you're with other people, that they're not reinforcing your sense of self. The other thing is ritualized. All your behavior becomes ritualized. And you have to do this. You have to serve food in a certain way, you have to walk in a certain way. And ritual relieves you of individual volition. You're following a script in a way.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't have to evaluate either what

[Michael Pollan]

you're doing, just what we do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, time's a big element too, right? That really stuck with me.

[Michael Pollan]

That was something that occurred me to when I was out in the cave, which is I was very present. I was in the moment a lot of the day, doing my chores.

[Dax Shepard]

You would sweep.

[Michael Pollan]

I would sweep.

[Dax Shepard]

You cut wood.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. Dug pit toilets in the woods and cut wood. I'd make a cup of tea now and then out of a little camp stove. You realize that ourselves are constructed out of our memories and our future goals. And without that timeline, poof, we're gone. And there are people, you know, who can't remember anything and they have no stuff. Sense of self. So our sense of self is a very interesting construct.

[Monica Padman]

It's tenuous.

[Michael Pollan]

It's very tenuous. And our attitude to it is so paradoxical because we want our kids to have self esteem and self confidence is important and self assurance, yet we spend a lot of time trying to escape it. In meditation, in experiences of awe, in nature, in psychedelics, transcending self. These are some of the high points of a life. And it's interesting that both are true and selves are useful. We need our ego. But the ego builds walls. And when the walls come down, you can really connect to something larger than yourself.

[Dax Shepard]

I was imagining that when you saw this herd of elk come eat in a meadow. After this kind of deconstruction and the loss of time. And I was thinking that had to be so, so pleasurable and exciting. And exciting. Like you reset your baseline from all this incredible, exciting noise we're surrounded by. And I can imagine after, like, two days of abject boredom going like, oh, yes, this is the show of the century. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

And what a lovely thing to be experiencing joy and pleasure from.

[Michael Pollan]

It was great. Cause nothing was happening. And then suddenly, there they were.

[Dax Shepard]

So the only part where I thought, how could this have happened to you? Is the writer part. As much as you were shaking all this stuff, you had to be aware that you were also needing to commit the experience to memory so that you could later write about it. What was that tension like?

[Michael Pollan]

I didn't take any notes. I just wanted to experience it. And at the time, I didn't know I was experiencing the ending of my book. I mean, I have lots another experience. Yeah. So much happened to me in the last five years that I didn't realize its significance till sometime later. And with the help of my editor, by the way, that passage was going to be the end of the self chapter. And then I realized, no, this is the end of the book. I mean, I do lots of things in full knowledge that I'm going to write about it, including some of the psychedelic experiences I had. But in this case, it was possible. But I didn't, like, document it. I have a couple pictures. That was the only documentation of the cave.

[Monica Padman]

It's funny, the cave almost sounds like prison. And again, circling back to like, you get to make the choice. You get to make the choice. But whether that's a pleasurable or meaningful experience.

[Michael Pollan]

It could have been horrible. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It could be considered torture.

[Dax Shepard]

It required suffering, though, as most good things do. There is discomfort at the beginning of that.

[Michael Pollan]

There was. And I didn't know that I could handle it. I'm not a camper. It's, like, not my thing. And I had this whole experience with the pit toilet that I mentioned of peeing into my sneaker by accident. It didn't all go that well, but I'm glad I Did it? It was way out of my comfort zone.

[Dax Shepard]

And so the last big philosophical question I have for you is you teeter nicely, in my opinion, through the book, in your belief and trust in science. And then there's something going on as well. I can't help but think back to like the moral dumb founding thing. Somehow something in this Buddhism was discovered. Some crazy wisdom. And do you feel like it at all realigned what the goal is? I think we've been so hell bent on for the last 400 years. Years of figuring out how everything works.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And in pursuit of that, we've lost the experience of the working of it. My analogy is always, you could spend your day at Disneyland trying to figure out how Pirates of the Caribbean works mechanically. Or you could be on the ride.

[Michael Pollan]

That's a good analogy. And that's what I'm talking about about consciousness. It's interesting and important to figure out how it works. But we have it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you could miss it.

[Michael Pollan]

And many of us miss it because

[Dax Shepard]

you have to know how the fucking magic trick works.

[Michael Pollan]

Yes. So I closed my toolkit and that whole investigation and I got on the ride. And that's what happened in the cave.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. I loved it. You can't help but check in with where you stand on all this as you're learning more and more about it. And then the best thing about it is it makes you more curious and it implores you to ask more questions and to consider.

[Michael Pollan]

I hope it helps people become more conscious. I mean, it's very simple. And to use and practice this amazing gift we've been given.

[Dax Shepard]

It's an older person's game. Do you think? A little bit.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. I thought about that too.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, young people shouldn't get to this point. They gotta build their thing and buy their house and have their kids. I mean, there's a certain reality to the world we live in.

[Michael Pollan]

The interest in consciousness as you age has something to do with. There's this kind of subliminal subtext to consciousness, which is it's a secular substitute for what we used to call one of the things about the soul is it's indestructible. And the idea that we have something that seems to transcend matter. Part of us are hoping it'll transcend our mortality.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Definitely.

[Michael Pollan]

I have no reason to believe that's true. But if it defies all the rules we have of matter and second law of thermodynamics. I think people harbor that Wish. And obviously that wish becomes. Becomes more urgent the older you are.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I think we agree. I don't believe there's an indestructible soul. And I believe there's something much bigger going on.

[Michael Pollan]

I have a much more open mind than I did going into this. I started as a kind of dyed in the wool materialist. I've seen it work in so many areas. Reductive science and its power. And I came out of it thinking, well, it could be very different.

[Dax Shepard]

Michael, this was a delight. I'm so flattered you come and sit with us.

[Michael Pollan]

Oh, I'm so happy for the opportunity.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're so fun to have in the world and to be shining lights on different things.

[Michael Pollan]

Oh, thank you, guys.

[Dax Shepard]

I doubt you're gonna lead another revolution like psychedelics based on this, but my fingers crossed.

[Michael Pollan]

I think it would be get your

[Monica Padman]

reservation for the cave now.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I mean, all I was thinking is like, can he introduce me to this woman?

[Michael Pollan]

I must have this experience. She's great. You should have her on the show.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that would be great.

[Michael Pollan]

She's got great stories. Somebody told me who I saw last night. Rebecca Solnit. I don't know if you know the writer. She'd spent time in the cave too. She said she was terrified most of the time about bears.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

I was like, God, I'm glad I didn't think about bears. But she said that she thinks they should charge $10,000 a night now as a fundraiser. Stay in the cave for $10,000.

[Monica Padman]

I like that.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, well, be well. I hope everyone checks out. A world appears. A journey into consciousness. There's a lot of juicy science. There's a lot of juicy. Woo.

[Michael Pollan]

Woo.

[Dax Shepard]

It's all there. Enjoy.

[Monica Padman]

I'm going to be talking about this one for sure.

[Michael Pollan]

Thank you, guys.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Episode.

[Michael Pollan]

Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa. How are you? How was your weekend?

[Monica Padman]

My weekend was.

[Dax Shepard]

You hosted a birthday party.

[Monica Padman]

I did. I took two. I've taken two bats since I saw you.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

They've been great.

[Dax Shepard]

Been in their nightly pretty much now. It's been trying to be.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't think you're supposed to bubble bath. Yeah, you did. It's not a good bubble bath.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I'm not gonna say the brand because it's bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it Barney's Bubble Bath?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Barney the dinosaur.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it Blueberry Bubble Bath? These are just names of bubble baths I think would be cute. Good names for bubble baths.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. No, this is and it's a kid's

[Dax Shepard]

bubble bath because I. Oh, it's bouncing baby bubble bath.

[Monica Padman]

Nope. Because I think they make the best bubble baths. Because most babies like bubble bath.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're not even vocalizing anything, but we assume they do for sure. And we do like to fill it up with suds.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I used to. When I used to do bubble baths, I used to use Honest.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Brand bubble bath. And it was great. It made great bubbles.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But they didn't have it at the store that I was at, so I bought. I think it's like, organic.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

And it makes no bubble bubbles.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm all about organic for food. I mean, when I say all about. I would pick it over non if given the choice, but never when it comes to cleaning products.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So this is such a ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

You know me. I like a dawn or a duh. I like all the harsh chemicals for the dish soap. It's imperative.

[Monica Padman]

So this is a big ding, ding, ding. Because a couple days ago, you know, I have my dishwasher. It's so exciting. I love it so much.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I use a classic dish dishwasher detergent.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I even use. So I even use the pods. And like, you're not supposed to. It's like, bad for the environment, whatever it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't they disintegrate, though?

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. Kelly said she recommended it. She was like. Even though it's, like, bad.

[Michael Pollan]

I don't know if it is.

[Monica Padman]

She knows stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

I think those disintegrate entirely.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Well, anyway, so I have that. And then I was listening to a podcast that I've. I don't know how it happened. I started listening to this podcast and I have been listening so much, and it. It really. It's got. It got me.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It got me. And one of the girls on the show starts talking about dishwashing detergent and. And how bad it was like, can you believe we used to use this brand? And that's just like. And then we're eating off of that. Like, that's so much chemicals. And I started to panic.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like, fuck. I pretty sure that's the brand I use currently.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then I know someone who knows this girl.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, twice removed.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, it's a little.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, we gotta keep that with a grain of salt.

[Monica Padman]

I asked my friend to ask this girl what her detergent is. Then what's the clean detergent?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you. Really quick. You're saying you know someone that was Knows the person on the podcast.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. My question would be, could you show me the study that showed, like, where's your evidence for this claim?

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd love to know. Clearly someone educated her on that. And I'd go, I want to know where you read that. Where I need to read this to see if this is real.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's. Yeah. The difference between you and I, I was like, what's the clean detergent? Okay. This person is very into clean living. So then my friend sent me. She asked and she sent me the thing and I said, oh, my God. That. It can't be that. I just poured that all over my bath.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Very gentle. Not my bubble bath. In my bubble bath, I put the bubble. Organic bubbles and then all. Also this soap.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

To get clean.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I'm like, this is what's being used in the dishwasher. That's not gonna clean anything. That's not even cleaning my body, really.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

So I've gone back.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Back to my ax. I want to grind.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

A lot of things sound intuitive. So you believe them immediately without any evidence. It's like, seed oils are bad. You know how many people are berserk about seed oils? There's zero, zero evidence. Right, Right. There's nothing. There's no big meta data study to say that they're bad for. Uniquely bad for you. But it's intuitive. So people are just like, yeah. So it's like, I want to know the study where someone studied people who ate off those plates and people who didn't and what their health outcomes were to make a claim like that.

[Monica Padman]

Well, they're probably also just looking at the box and seeing the chemicals that are in there versus the chemicals that are not in the other ones.

[Dax Shepard]

It feels intuitive to say chemicals are bad.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I think if some people are choosing. They're like, I'd rather probably pick one that doesn't have all this stuff in it that I don't even understand. I don't know how to read. I don't. This is all made up stuff. And this has Be. Honey.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You know that.

[Dax Shepard]

Which has a bunch of scary chemical compounds. If you. They were listed in a. In a.

[Michael Pollan]

Like a.

[Dax Shepard]

A cautionary video.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I. E. The Lane Norton Post I was telling you about where he got me all rattled. But it was just like different chemistry for water and all these other supplement. You know, all these other.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Things that are completely fine.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Well, I just looked up. Is this brand bad for you? It Says this brand is generally considered safe for use as directed. Noted that ingredients are vetted for safety. However, some users and critics suggest it may be less than ideal for those seeing non toxic options as it contains benzo, triazole dyes and fragrance. And then there's some other links or. Yeah, I don't know. I. I'm. Look, I would prefer it be natural, but I. I prefer more that it

[Dax Shepard]

works, that it functions.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

So yeah, because at that point just don't buy any product. Just run them raw with some water.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you know that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

So then you get into what's in the water. Well, you have chlorine in the water.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but I also don't agree with you necess that it's all or nothing. I think I'm not even like little. You know, it's like this is preferred to this. I'll probably do that. And yeah, I'm not like erasing. I'm not going to be so pure.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I don't. You could go. I don't have an all or nothing debate here. What I'm suggesting is that things that are viral on podcasts and Instagram and social media are often things that there's no study, there's no foundational study, there's that they're citing. It's just an intuitive connection they've made.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like all the people that are terrified of vaccines because you have. If you put in there it had formaldehyde in it. That's very scary. But what they don't tell you is your body makes formaldehyde. So it's not like, you know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Anywho.

[Monica Padman]

Anywh. Who. So I'm back on that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, you're back to your normal detergent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

The. And that hard stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

How was Cara? So you hosted Charlie's birthday party. We could only come for a half hour.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You guys came. Yes. So. Well, it was a surprise party that got spoiled. So then it. Once that got spoiled, the plan shifted and it was drinks and hang at my house and then walk over to Cara for dinner and. And yeah, you guys stopped by before we walked over to dinner and it was so nice. They had us in the back in a big circle table and it was so enchanted.

[Dax Shepard]

In the same area that the little looking glass pool is.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. But all the way in the back. Yes. And it was this big round table and it was so charming. Okay. I know you are a little bit against round tables. Cause you don't like round objects.

[Dax Shepard]

I Visually, don't like them functionally around tables the best.

[Monica Padman]

It's perfect.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, absolutely. Then there's no one stuck at the end that can't talk to you.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And every. And I was really feeling that. I was like, oh, we're all in the convo at all times. This is so nice.

[Dax Shepard]

It was a sacred circle.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And I have a round table at my new house.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I have two round tables, actually. One in the dining room. Dining room. And one small. Small one in the kitchen.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the one in the dining room is memorable. It's enormous.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's a dining room table.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it's a big boy. I mean, you got. How many people can get around it? 12. Sure. Six aside.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, definitely six.

[Dax Shepard]

No aside.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think definitely a.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. It's a big boy.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

You could put out on it this way. I'm going to help people visualize it. You could put out. Out on it. I'm going to say six large pizzas, five in a circle touching the one in the center. I think it would accommodate six large pizzas.

[Monica Padman]

I think. That large.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Large pizzas.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like 18 inches.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I don't know. I'm going have to test it out.

[Dax Shepard]

You're going have to buy five. No, six.

[Monica Padman]

Six large pizza.

[Michael Pollan]

Six large pizzas.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, it is. It is. But I. I was filled with gratitude that I had a. A circular table after this circular meal because, oh, my God, Mod's giving. I mean, everything's wide open now for hangs.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, I won't make an argument for. There's a time and a place for the long rectangular table, which is quite often, like, I'll say in Nashville, sometimes we have. I think there would be 16 people sometimes in the house. Right. You were there. No. You weren't there. Thanksgiving had that many people. And so additionally, it's nice to be able to choose your pocket of conversation. So it's like, let's see, the gals want to talk about this, but the boys want it. They're playing, you know, we want to go on the lake and do something so that in that way you can compartmentalize. Everyone's together, but also you can have Compartmentalize.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

If it's a habitual eating space.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's like.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know that every time I eat, I want access to every single person.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. I actually think that's wrong because not morally, logistically, because in a round table, you can. You can turn and like have like a little one on one sidey. But then you can immediately make it about the group. If you end up next to someone you don't want to be next to at a. At a rectangle or a square even. No, mainly a rectangle. Yeah, that's. That you're locked in.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a bummer. Yeah. You got to sit where you. You need to.

[Monica Padman]

But you don't always have control. People do swap Cs.

[Michael Pollan]

That's true.

[Monica Padman]

Pull up Ch. Chair. Like the round table gets you out of some situations.

[Dax Shepard]

It does. But I'll just add, you also could be next to somebody at a round table that constantly keeps trying to make it a sidebar. You've had that experience.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. What is the table thing?

[Dax Shepard]

I can't stand that. When you're with a groom, clearly everyone's trying to talk and someone keeps trying to make it a sidebar. I don't like that. Like, let's go out just for coffee, you and me. But like, we're here with a big group. Let's not sidebar the whole time.

[Monica Padman]

I understand. Okay. I agree. Agree. I don't like. I actually don't like when we're all in a big group and some small subset is just being a subset or sidebarring. I'm like, guys, we're all together.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's get around table.

[Monica Padman]

Be respectful.

[Dax Shepard]

So car was great to people. Some people hadn't eaten there ever before.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone thought it was enchanted.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. We were only able to come for a half hour because we had the most action packed Saturday. My brother and sister in law were visiting.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Which was delightful. We had so much fun with them. But Saturday was one. It was one after another. It was get Delta to the 9:30 interview at her new school. And then that was followed by a meeting with somebody and their son. And then that was followed by Hail Mary. Have you seen it?

[Monica Padman]

I have not seen it yet. I do want to see it.

[Dax Shepard]

I am so delighted. That movie opened at 80 million. I couldn't be happier. It's an original movie.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. We love Lord and Miller.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not a franchise. It's not ip. It's a original concept.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's a book.

[Dax Shepard]

Fine. Well, it's not a superhero movie.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not Tonkas or you know, branded ip.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So the fact that it opened at like superhero movies. Movie money is so good for film.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's awesome.

[Monica Padman]

I'm excited.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so good. Comedy show at night, 8pm that we had gotten tickets for my brother and my sister in law and us. Chad Krueger. Do you know. You know Chad? What up, council?

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Well, I didn't actually, but at the round table, they were talking about him.

[Dax Shepard]

You had never seen one of his videos?

[Monica Padman]

I think I have, actually. Once they were described bribing him.

[Dax Shepard]

He's hysterical. People should go to his Instagram. He goes to lots of city council meetings and he argues for really preposterous.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

New legislation. So generally raised stoke or chill. Something in the community. He thinks that could make it more stoker.

[Monica Padman]

More chill, huh? Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

He thought that, like, there's nothing that makes you more stoked or chill than hanging on a yacht. And he thinks there needs to be public yachts so that everyone could experience that level of stuff.

[Monica Padman]

I don't disagree.

[Dax Shepard]

He's great. Just the way he talks to them. What up, council? So he had a one man show and the premise was it was. It was a seminar, like a Tony Robbins seminar on how to reclaim your stoke. And it had a meditation and it had. It had work from volunteers in the audience. It was spectacular fun. Yes. If you get a chance to go see him, I highly recommend it.

[Monica Padman]

Cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I regret to inform you.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I think my days might. Might be numbered.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Michael Pollan]

On planet Earth.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Something very bad happened.

[Michael Pollan]

What?

[Monica Padman]

So a few days ago, I was trying to be responsible. Instead of ordering food, I decided I'm gonna cook tonight.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I ordered a chicken. To cook.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Cooked it. Roast chicken, Whole chicken. Not. Not time consuming.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You know, that's an endeavor. Cooked it. Smelled so, so good. Hold it out. Interesting. Has kind of some weird colored juices, but it's probably maybe just the onions.

[Dax Shepard]

Pink.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, pink. But I knew it was cooked through.

[Dax Shepard]

How'd you know that?

[Monica Padman]

I have a meat thermometer.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So I knew it was cooked through, so I was like, yeah, what's with these? But maybe it's just the red onion I had cooked it with. Bled. Okay. Then I go to carve it. I. The bag. The bag of giblets in there. Oh, I cooked the whole thing with the bag.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

And I was so disgust. I was so disgusted.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But also hungry. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Hungry Hungry Hippo.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like, could it be Fine. Like they're in the cavity. It's not touching the meat.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So it.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of toxins.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's hard for me to not think of the thing that we were nervous about.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's why my days are numbered because. So then I googled, can you still Eat it if you accidentally cooked it. And it said. It kind of said maybe.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Said if there's. If there's a hole in it. Probably not.

[Dax Shepard]

Middle path.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And it said, try a little piece and see if it tastes weird.

[Dax Shepard]

Like plastic and giblets.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So I did try a little piece and I'm actually shocked at myself that I did any of this. Like, I'm so wasteful, you'd think, but I was hungry and I like, you really work. Yeah. And so I did try a little piece and then I was like, I actually do think it tasted fine, but. But I got very freaked out. And then I looked at the bag and there was a hole. And I was like, I'm dead. I'm dead. I ate this one piece. I'm dead now.

[Dax Shepard]

How big of a piece? I'm trying to like a couple ounces

[Monica Padman]

of meat, like this big off of the breast. I just pulled a piece off.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not even sure?

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. I just. I was acting out of like, I don't know, like fight or flight or something. It was a small, small piece, but I did eat. Chew it up and stuff. Swallow it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And then I. Then I looked in the bag in the trash can and it did have a hole in it. And I was like, oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

What was their fear with the hole? That the giblets are poisonous.

[Monica Padman]

Holly. The plastic.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And was the. And whatever in there? Like a little.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, boy.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I roasted it on 450.

[Michael Pollan]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

This episode is brought to you by Peacock with the new original series, the Miniature Wife.

[Monica Padman]

Ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

You love that title. Okay, so this is a pretty wild premise for a relationship story. Elizabeth banks and Matthew McFadian star in the new Peacock original series, the Miniature Wife. Banks plays Lindy, a prize winning novelist with a 15 year Revolution writer's block. Macfadian plays Less, a scientist set on achieving greatness by revolutionizing agriculture with shrinking technology. Their love story has one little problem. An outlandish battle of the spouses ensues when Les accidentally shrinks Lindy down to 6 inches tall. Les and Lindy are forced to face their issues in a big way. OT Fagbenlay and Zoe Lister Jones also star as oddball scientists. Asif Monvi plays Les's long suffering business partner. Ronnie Chang plays a big shot investor and Sean Clifford plays Lindy's book editor. Underneath the absurdism and screwball comedy is a relationship dramedy about ambition, power struggles, jealousy, and what Happens when you feel small for far too long. The Miniature wife is streaming April 9th only on Peacock.

[Monica Padman]

So that's. That was bad. I. It was a small, small piece. So, like, you're fine. I think I'm fine.

[Michael Pollan]

That's my verdict.

[Dax Shepard]

You're completely fine.

[Monica Padman]

I think I'm fine.

[Dax Shepard]

It just is. It's. It is really funny. It's funny timing for the story.

[Monica Padman]

Well, by the way, that happened before the detergent. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so maybe you were on.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It might have been influencing that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But it was really a one, two punch. It's like, oh, my God. I'm. I'm already. I've already lost probably a substantial amount of years because of that chicken. And now. And now I'm finding out. Out I may have lost. I'm losing years by the second with this blank detergent.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And, you know, I guess I was like, that's. It's over. It's over.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

My life.

[Dax Shepard]

And then.

[Monica Padman]

And it was. It was. It was a nice one. It was a really good one.

[Dax Shepard]

It was a good one. No famine. Yeah, no. No torture.

[Monica Padman]

Definitely no famine.

[Dax Shepard]

I've already dug my hole this episode, so I'm going to dig it a little deeper.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, fun.

[Dax Shepard]

I do not question at all that there are microplastics in our body. That has been observed. There have been studies that it has been observed, but there hasn't been. Is any study that can demonstrate whether it's good or bad to have it in your body. It's there for sure.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But we're not sure yet what it means. If it's anything. Could mean nothing. Could be totally poisonous. I mean, be hard for me to believe it's totally poisonous because we all are sick, saturated with it. But all to say we simply are not there yet where we know what impact it's going to have.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

What are you, six inches deeper in my hole?

[Monica Padman]

I. I don't know. You'll be proud of me, though.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we can have a philosophical conversation. I know we're on the verge of it. What do you want to ask? You want to ask what? What? Why do I care?

[Monica Padman]

I just. I don't want to ask that. I just. I'm like, I don't care that you care. Obviously, I want you to have, like, all your convictions and I want you to use your detergent. I want you to do whatever you want. I really.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you.

[Monica Padman]

And also, because I don't actually. I'm not a big toxins person, so this Isn't butting up against any real thing of mine. I just, you know, it's running deep. Like, you're not approaching it with, like this. Like, I don't care. Like you care.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think people. I think social media has made people panicked about a ton of stuff. I know that's a waste of time and energy.

[Monica Padman]

I know. But it's not wasting your time and energy. So I guess for me, I'm like, who cares if they care? Like.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's a good point. You know, let me consider that. Is it.

[Michael Pollan]

Is it a.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it impacting me? No. Yeah, I guess everyone's allowed to. I mean, other than I live with someone who's pretty concerned about all this stuff and so, sure, my own life gets. I don't want to say disorganized. I'll say reorganized. Quite often there's new things we use and things we don't use and.

[Monica Padman]

Any updates on the paper?

[Dax Shepard]

No black plastic in the house. Oh, that study was flawed. Okay, we can have black plastic.

[Monica Padman]

So it's personal.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess in that way it's personal, but also, who cares?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

When I can't have the black plastic, which I'm. There's also some know it allness, I guess I go with it.

[Monica Padman]

I. I go with it because why Plastic works too. So let. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, the point I was gonna say is. Yeah. I'm never like, looking for a vessel to add water to and. And I have no option.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Exactly. Why don't you just keep some in your. On your.

[Dax Shepard]

In your nice drawer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Bunch of black plastic and paper plates covered in plastic. Yeah, it's just your plastics I just throw in there.

[Monica Padman]

What if. What if it start. Everything in the there just started like, crumbling up and Turns out you should never have had those.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're right. I don't. It doesn't affect me. I don't know why I care. I guess I hate seeing again. And why do I. Why do I hate seeing it? I hate seeing people chase all these really fringe things while ignoring all of the really obvious stuff that's been proven resoundingly, empirically.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but it's.

[Dax Shepard]

This is like exercise and your diet and stuff, and it's like you're. Some people are really hyper focused on these. And then they go out and drink or they smoke cigarettes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But again, that's. That's sort of my takeaway is like, no one. I think people are picking their battles. They're like, yeah, this brings me joy. So I'll cut this other I'll, I'll counter it in some other way.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it brings me joy because they can control that one. It's like, here's this list of things that could be controlled that would make you. You healthier. And this group of them are very hard to control. And this one's easy. I. When I'm at the store, I pick this box or that box.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So it's like a sense of control.

[Monica Padman]

Well. But it's all. There is. Also vices. It's like I'm choosing this vice in life. I'm gonna have some. I'm choosing this and I'm. I am gonna choose other.

[Dax Shepard]

Try to offset that with this other thing.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. Her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, because I guess you could. I could say like, well, I'm drinking, so I'm not gonna exercise. Like, it's all right. I'm already, you know.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess it was the tone in which you explained. She's like, I would never use that. You shouldn't use that detergent. It's like very preachy.

[Monica Padman]

I guess she, to be fair, she didn't say, you shouldn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

She just was saying. She was talking to her friend. Yeah. Her boyfriend, her uncle. And she was just like, can you believe? Basically, can you believe I've been doing this or that We.

[Dax Shepard]

That we.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But she meant we. Her and the other person.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

It's like I didn't feel shamed, I felt scared.

[Dax Shepard]

I know that's, that's the impact of this, but.

[Monica Padman]

Ding, ding, ding. You're going to be proud of me.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I used my gym yesterday. Oh, great. Great.

[Dax Shepard]

What'd you do?

[Monica Padman]

I lifted weights.

[Dax Shepard]

Nice. How'd it feel? What kind of movements did you do?

[Monica Padman]

So sore. I did rows. I did squats.

[Dax Shepard]

Like cable rows or bent over?

[Monica Padman]

Bent over. The bench. I have a bench. Which is so great.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I did.

[Dax Shepard]

What. What size dumbbells were you doing your rows with?

[Monica Padman]

Eights.

[Dax Shepard]

Eights. Okay. Well, it's a good start. It's a good start. It's a good start.

[Monica Padman]

Cuz I. I've lost a lot of muscle mass and I gotta.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta get it back.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Any muscles?

[Monica Padman]

I'm sore. So it did do something.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Great.

[Monica Padman]

I did squats. I did. Okay. Now I have this machine. I'm not exactly sure how to use it. Yeah. And I did use it and I'm not sure if I used it right.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you keep getting nervous someone could see you using it wrong?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's good. You felt like you had total anonymity.

[Michael Pollan]

I did.

[Monica Padman]

I did have anonymity, but I felt like, what if I'm doing, like, damage or the opposite thing of what I'm trying to do? It's very possible.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So I had, you know, those, like, pulleys. I use that.

[Dax Shepard]

Those to do what?

[Monica Padman]

I'm scared to talk about it.

[Dax Shepard]

How come you're. This is like me coming to you to ask about gymnastics.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I shouldn't have any. I don't know about gymnastics.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And you don't know about weightlifting, smart as you are. So, I mean. And I happen to do it pretty often.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So I like, used it as pull down.

[Dax Shepard]

That's fine.

[Monica Padman]

Pull downs.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

At an angle.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. So.

[Monica Padman]

And I was leaning.

[Dax Shepard]

You're probably splitting the difference. So you probably. You want to go directly down to get your lats.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Or you want to do straight out to get your back. I know, but you can move them up and down. They have little yellow hooks on the bottom. You pull those out and you slide them up and down to make them any height you want. So if you're doing it straight out, you're getting your back.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

If you're doing it straight down, you're getting your lats. If you're doing it at an angle, you're splitting the difference. You're kind of not getting a great isolated of either. You're getting kind of a mix, so it's not wasted. You're still having to use your muscles.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And your muscles will tell you if you're doing something wrong.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I knew I wasn't actually. I didn't know I wasn't doing damage. I just didn't know if I was doing anything.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So there's a more efficient way and a more productive way to tackle those two different groups and. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Then I did some abs, and that was it.

[Dax Shepard]

How long was the whole routine?

[Monica Padman]

Probably 20 minutes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Great start. Monica.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

You don't sound. You should sound proud of yourself. Yeah, well, the disappointment.

[Monica Padman]

No, there's no disappointment. It was. It was like.

[Dax Shepard]

Was it better than your workout the day before?

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But the day before that, I did, like, walk through. I just walked through the gym and I was like, you know what? And then I did some squats, and then I did some planks, and then I kept walking.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So it was better than the. You improved?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I improved.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And your next trip, you'll probably improve.

[Monica Padman]

We'll see.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you will.

[Monica Padman]

And then I had my creatine.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It did feel better to have creatine after I worked out. Felt a little more like I earned it. But then I justified.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, interesting.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's probably from the plastic chicken you ate.

[Monica Padman]

That was a couple days ago. The plastic chicken. And this was the day I was very healthy. No drinking water. Workout. Creatine.

[Michael Pollan]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Protein diarrhea. So duck.

[Dax Shepard]

Duck diarrhea.

[Monica Padman]

I just. I don't love the way that went.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you do you think the workout's related to the diarrhea or the creatine? Cuz I.

[Monica Padman]

The creatine I have heard can ver. Can upset your stomach. But I've been on it and it hasn't. It's maybe only because your stomach, if

[Dax Shepard]

it's after a workout, it's never upset my stomach. And I've been out for 10 years and I know a Of people that are on it and have never.

[Monica Padman]

I. I know someone who is on it who said that. It's not like it's. This is a real person, not from a podcast.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And. And then two people actually that I know. Women.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I also had go Greek yesterday.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So I am also on my period.

[Michael Pollan]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

Which really can mess up your whole system.

[Dax Shepard]

System, sure.

[Monica Padman]

So I actually think it's probably that.

[Michael Pollan]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Let's do some facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Last night as I laid with Delta.

[Monica Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

We listened to a lot of Sedaris. So fun. I love that I have an excuse.

[Monica Padman]

Oh yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Or a reason. Because it's a good. It's a good part of my mental hygiene to listen to that clever man tell stories. You know, he's describing. He takes all these weird vacations when he's in France for a month and then he's in England for a month and then he has this friend, this woman who's American, but she's a tour guide in France. And they like to take these one day trips. They want to say they've stayed everywhere.

[Monica Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

And he does not want to see any museums or anything historical. He just wants to go shopping in these places.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. God, I can relate.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And he's. He's relieved himself of the guilt.

[Monica Padman]

Dying to go shopping with him.

[Dax Shepard]

You guys should really try to like. I wanted to go on a walk with him and I got to do that. You should go shopping.

[Monica Padman]

Shopping with him. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I could hand him off to you. We could take a walk and then I could dump him out of store. But he likes flea markets and I do too. So he was going all over the former Yugoslavia.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And he was describing it. And I was thinking, you know, he has this bizarre freedom that a lot of people don't have.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

For numerous reasons, every time we've interviewed him, I try to figure out what the ingredient is that, that the inoculates in from this. But I was thinking like he is describing exactly what he's seeing and it's terrible. You know, it's. It's just terrible. The conditions are terrible.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I was just thinking that we've gotten to this phase where it's like you can't say anything is terrible out of fear of insulting whoever lives there or that it has some built in superior colonialism or, or western superiority or western. Whatever it is. And it's like.

[Michael Pollan]

But some, some places you still need

[Dax Shepard]

to be described as they are.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna not push back, but flip the coin.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, how are you, like, not like we're in a world where you can't describe anything. You see, how does anyone inform themselves about what the place is before they would go there?

[Monica Padman]

But let's say someone said a trailer park was terrible. I think you wouldn't like that.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I think the distinction is. Are you saying the people are terrible people? No.

[Michael Pollan]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Then you got problems.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But the place, most trailer parks, the ones that I was in nonstop, were fucking terrible. They were drunk adults fighting in the fucking dirt road in front.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

There was chaos. It was like, you know, it's over indexing in everything, every single depravity because it's, it's, it's, it's poverty. And poverty begets addiction.

[Monica Padman]

But if I, like, that would be

[Dax Shepard]

a realistic assessment of what it is.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so that's sort of my point. But. Because you can't say that either. You can.

[Dax Shepard]

I can. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But I couldn't say you did. But I can't say that. That sounds bad.

[Dax Shepard]

I think what the distinction is. And, and it's like, no, you can, what you can't do is say like these people are backwards or they're primitive or they're stupid or they're. That's the part where like now you're, you're getting to. You're a superior person. As if you live there, you would act differently or been raised there, you would act differently. So. But the place objectively has X amount of fights and X amount of alcohol consumption, X amount of fires in knife fights. Like that reality should, you should be free to describe that, I guess.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I think you can describe it, but I Think most people. If you publicly said, I was at this trailer park and it was terrible, you'd get in trouble.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I can see why. Even if you're not saying anything about the people, if you are someone.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you're making a great point. It's. It's. I love it. Coming from Aaron, who was raised almost exclusively in trailer park.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

More than I would me.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I would never say it. Susan Sarandon.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm not. I don't know what her background. I was trying to go with someone I know a great comedian who took a limousine to school every day.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, Nick Croll.

[Dax Shepard]

Nick Croll, Yeah. Like, obviously, I think Aaron saying he's more entitled to say it than Nick Croll is is.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That's a great counter. But also, like, we need realistic accounts of what things are.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Let's just leave it to David Sedaris to do it.

[Michael Pollan]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

What happens when we lose them? Oh, I guess someone will take over.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's gonna be a bad.

[Dax Shepard]

The other funny thing it brings up in there is, you know, he has this driver. He's hired a driver to take him to all these different places. So so much of their dialogue here is written down. And it just shined a light on the fact that, like, how many times I've been places and you have a tour guide and you kind of assume they're telling you the truth, like, that they actually know the history of the place. But the truth is people don't really know the history of any place. If you take a tour with anyone in LA and they start telling you facts about la, they're probably wrong.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

And, like, so this guy is telling him that Yugoslavia had the third biggest army in the world. And all this stuff, you know, it's like propaganda panda from the Soviet era that he's distributing his facts. And then it just made me go through so many of the times I've been with a tour guide, and I'm just hearing all these facts and you're just kind of taking them. But you don't really ask yourself, like, what's your average peer know about any of this stuff? Who's driving an Uber? Cause that's all it is. Like, we took a tuk tuk ride, Lincoln and I, through Lisbon. This guy was dropping facts on us, like, every time, 12ft. But he was not a historian and he wasn't a professor or a teacher.

[Monica Padman]

I think it also depends on. Well, because, like, we went. I.

[Dax Shepard]

We had an actual professor, the one

[Monica Padman]

in India, that one.

[Dax Shepard]

And I believed everything she said. Yeah, but I've had numerous other ones in Alaska. The guy driving the bus.

[Monica Padman]

Right, but how can we tell? What if like. Like I don't know, just cuz she's a professor. Trust her.

[Dax Shepard]

We must trust experts, more lay people on their area of expertise. You have to trust a neuroscientist more about brains than you do a car mechanic. It would be insane to not to.

[Monica Padman]

Wow, I'm glad you said that. I'll definitely be bringing that back later

[Dax Shepard]

because I'm a car mechanic.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I. That's so funny you brought that up because when my parents were in town, we were driving down the street and my mom said, remember when we came, I was like bit a little 11 when we first visited LA, she's like, we went on that tour and I was like, oh my God. Nothing on that. I'm sure nothing.

[Dax Shepard]

Star maps tour.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So and so lives here.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They could point to any mansion and say anybody we.

[Monica Padman]

And you believe it and you're excited.

[Dax Shepard]

You take a picture of it.

[Monica Padman]

So really, does the truth matter?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that is the topic in many regards of Michael Pollan's book Consciousness. Yeah. Is understanding it the important part or is experiencing it the important part?

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Great interview. He's so good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

He's just so interesting.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Cute sweater.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I thought you were.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not wearing a sweater.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but I thought I was. I thought it was a compliment. Okay. He said, well, we talked about disgust and how you can kind of understand people's politics. Like a lot of political affiliations are associated with disgust. But I think we may have flipped words. I'm not exactly sure. Disgust sensitivity is often linked to stronger preferences for social order and purity, which holds more conservative or Republican political views. And that's what Jonathan Haidt says as well. And then he said 50 years ago there were no beepers.

[Dax Shepard]

Check the math.

[Monica Padman]

Yep. Maybe 76 beepers pagers were patented in 1949 by Al Gross and first used in hospitals in 1950.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa.

[Monica Padman]

However they became a mainstream consumer device in the 1980s.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's. When do you. Did you ever have a beeper?

[Monica Padman]

No. Yeah, I skipped the beeper phase.

[Dax Shepard]

I had a beeper.

[Monica Padman]

You did?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I even had one for work. And it was so exciting when I worked at shows and shoots. It was like, I got my company beeper, which is great because anyone can use it.

[Monica Padman]

How do you use it?

[Dax Shepard]

So you're hanging out with your friends, beep, beep, beep. You get. And there's a certain way to look at it. Do you remember I wore a beeper to one of the handsome parties. Like it was like a Halloween party. I had found my Bravo tube beeper, I do not remember, which had a clear case. It was so sexy. And I found it and it was still operational. And I would be talking to people and then I would make it beep. And then you gotta. There's like a cool way to look at, like, you pull it off your thing and then you hold it so far away. Why there's such pageantry with it? Because it's just like how you smoke. Everything has a ritual. A ritual around. Yeah. So you would like. Oh, you know, you make a big deal. You want everyone to know you just got paid. Oh, and it'd be someone's phone number. And it's just someone who wants to get a hold of you. And then you find a pay phone and you call that number. But also there are codes, right? Oh, yeah. So there could be codes. Like because you call. It's a normal telephone number. It beeps. And then you can type in any number you want. So let's say Uranize was 624, meant meet at car for drinks, always.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I could. What do I. So I pick up the phone, you call my number. Your regular phone number?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. 248-685-2958.

[Monica Padman]

Which is the.

[Dax Shepard]

The number of my pager? No, the number of my pager.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you hear beep. And then you can start banging in any numbers you want. And, like, you can write hello.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. Which isn't useful because you don't know who it came from.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, but you would.

[Dax Shepard]

You could spell things if you knew.

[Monica Padman]

If it was six before that, it would be me. And then I would say hello.

[Dax Shepard]

4, 3, 1, 1, 0. If upside down, looked like hello.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. We used to do that on the calculator.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, perfect. You're familiar with the technique.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

I still have my Bravo 2 somewhere. Because I know I used it at that party. And I'll break it out again.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I mean, I would like to see it. It's an old relic.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's fun. And you'll see how I look at it. And you'll know exactly why that's the coolest way to look at it.

[Monica Padman]

I don't even remember my parents having that.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, they skipped the pager face.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I'm sure they. I don't know, they must have had it. I remember my dad had a car

[Dax Shepard]

Phone mounted in the car.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not so sure anymore. Probably not.

[Monica Padman]

Because he had a car phone.

[Dax Shepard]

I know he had a car.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, but.

[Dax Shepard]

But I want to say the car mounted cell phones. My father was first in the door.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

You're looking at like 85.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think by the time we're at 90, when you would have been three and could even remember, we've now gone mobile. They're not really installing hard mounting them in cars anymore.

[Monica Padman]

I think it was in. I think it was mobile. But it was called a car phone. It was.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You still called it a car phone. Cuz it started in the car.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You got hard mounted to your. To your transmission tunnel.

[Monica Padman]

Things have happened so quickly. It's crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

I had a buddy in elementary school, this little blonde boy. I can't think of his name. He was so cherub, like.

[Michael Pollan]

Or angelic?

[Dax Shepard]

Angelic. He was a little angel. This is even weird. I was friends with him. He was kind of shy and angelic, but he had this mom, single mom. And she was a car phone salesman. And it was like she was crushing. And she was at the forefront of technology. She was like. She was in the business everyone wanted to be in.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

And that was the first time I ever saw a car phone. She had a big old car phone.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think she used the kid to sell, make sales?

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

I do.

[Dax Shepard]

She should have, but I don't think she did.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

He never got pulled out of school or anything in the middle of the day to close any deals.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I'm on the verge closing the this big deal. Okay. Ooh. What percentage of people are verbal thinkers versus visual thinkers? Estimates suggest that roughly 30 to 50% of people have a regular internal monologue verbal thinking, while others think primarily in visual images, emotions, or sensory awareness. A commonly cited breakdown indicates less than 30 are strong visual thinkers. 25 think in words and 45 use a mix of both.

[Dax Shepard]

I have had the same experience he described once. He was asked to detail his thoughts. Because I've had a thought and then I've tried to think. Did I think those words or just did the whole concept? And it's for. It's almost impossible to know what just happened.

[Monica Padman]

It's too hard to know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think I have visuals.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't either.

[Monica Padman]

But the other two I'm confused by. I don't know what I have, but I think I have verbal. I think I'm thinking in words.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I am too. But when I've Just do it tonight or whenever. Like when you have a thought, you go like, okay, did I. Did I hear let's go to Cara? Or did I just conclude let's go. I said let's go to Cara as the follow up to a thought I had that wasn't verbal.

[Monica Padman]

Well, what happens first? Chicken or the egg? Chicken butt.

[Dax Shepard]

Chicken butt. Hind lick maneuver. Believe you guys have never heard of the hind.

[Monica Padman]

I think, I think I. I think. I think in sentences. I think, I think, oh, I'm excited to have Cara.

[Dax Shepard]

I think we all think that. But I do think. I mean, I'm imploring you to.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but I think, I think it. Okay, I've been thinking about it.

[Dax Shepard]

But let's put it this way. I don't hear the sentence that's coming out of my mouth until that's coming out of my mouth.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So in that way, my thought is already expressed in this way, which means I couldn't have thought all the words.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it could be like right now,

[Dax Shepard]

this is happening automatically.

[Monica Padman]

I think we're not. We're not talking about conversational thinking more when you're at your. When you're home and you're alone or whatever and you're just thinking, how is it coming to you?

[Dax Shepard]

But my argument that I'm making right now is that you're not thinking the words you're going to say before you say them.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, I am.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not.

[Monica Padman]

No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I know, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Put a earmark on that. So at least if we have proof that. That we didn't need to hear it in. Your thoughts are happening out loud as you speak.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

So that in that. At least in that example, it wasn't a script that then you heard it in English, then decided to replicate it as you spoke. You just spoke like the. The information just comes out.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's just happening at a pace we can't track. And if you're a visual thinker, you're not. Then what you're communicating via your mouth is still.

[Dax Shepard]

Words. Blue flowers.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Haze, like sharp focus.

[Monica Padman]

It's all. It's all just happening very quickly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I just. I believe there are visual things. I just personally can't comprehend it. I don't really know what that would feel like.

[Monica Padman]

I wish we could try it.

[Dax Shepard]

My dad tried to get Catch Me last night, and he did for a second. Tom Hansen. I was with Tom Hansen last night.

[Monica Padman]

Night.

[Dax Shepard]

And he wanted. He asked my opinion on a certain thing and I gave it to him. And he said. He said, you're such a contrarian. And I go, no, I'm not. I'm not a contrarian. And he goes, yes, you are. And then. And he's a lawyer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I go, hold on a second. The only way I could disprove that I am not a contrarian is to say, yes, I am a contrarian. So what you've presented is a non falsified claim about me. And he said, that's why I like talking to you. Most people don't get that when I trap them that way.

[Monica Padman]

I mean,

[Dax Shepard]

yeah, there's no answer to Euro contrary. It's a great statement. It's like it's a judo move in debate. Yeah, it's kind of like saying you're defensive. Exactly. No, I'm not exactly that. Yeah, it's a cheat. It's a cheat. You're being so defensive. Yes, I am.

[Monica Padman]

I guess you could say I could see how you feel that way. Oh, and then you stop talking and then you leave. Yeah. Okay. When was Buddhism invented? Buddhism originated in Northern India between the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.

[Dax Shepard]

Older than I thought.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's old.

[Michael Pollan]

Old as old.

[Monica Padman]

Baby old. And that's it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's that. So it's 1,400 is years old.

[Monica Padman]

You said 2,000.

[Dax Shepard]

That was my guess. Yeah, so I guess I thought I was older than it was.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And then I'm contradictory. Like, that's not right.

[Dax Shepard]

You're so contradictory. No, I'm not. That was all the facts.

[Monica Padman]

That's it.

[Dax Shepard]

All right. Love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking the pockets of your jeans before doing laundry. Classic oversight. That mystery clunking in the dryer. Yeah, that was your lip balm's final moments. And somehow there's always one random receipt in there to dissolve, evolve into confetti. Yeah. Checking first is smart. So check all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North America Insurance Company affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.