Gilbert Cruz: I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the book review from the New York Times. Today we are delighted to share an episode from our colleagues over on the Ezra Klein show. It's an interview with Michael Pollen. You probably have heard of Michael Pollen. He has written several best-selling books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and How to Change Your Mind. His latest book came out earlier this year and it's called A World Appears, a journey into consciousness. It's an exploration of what consciousness is. And the book is, as our review says, highly pleasurable to read. The conversation Pollen has with Ezra is also highly pleasurable. I hope you enjoy.

Ezra Klein: Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness. us. It is the only thing we truly know. The only thing we have certain actual firsthand experience of yet we don't understand it at all. We don't know what it's made of. We don't know how it works. We don't know why it exists. And the closer we look at it, the weirder consciousness gets. The more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail. I find that so delightful that something so close can remain so mysterious that such a central question about the universe is happening inside of us all of the time. Now that's not to say we haven't tried to understand it or that we haven't learned a lot from those efforts. In his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, the science writer Michael Pollen takes a tour of those efforts, of those theories, of those experiments, of those psychedelic trips and meditation retreats, and he keeps finding himself in stranger and stranger territory deeper inside the mystery. So, I wanted to have him on to talk about it. Michael Pollen, welcome back to the show.

Michael Pollen: Thank you. Good to be back.

Ezra Klein: So, I wanted to begin with an experiment that you participated in during the reporting of this book where you wore a beeper and tried to record what was going on in your mind when that beeper went off. What did you learn from that?

Michael Pollen: When's the beeper going to go off? So the the experiment was uh there's a a psychologist at University of Nevada, Las Vegas named uh Russell Hurlbert and he's been sampling inner experience as he calls it for 50 years. And the way he does it is he equips you with a beeper. You wear this thing in your ear. It emits a very sharp beep. You know exactly what it was and when it was. There's no like reaching for your phone or or any doubt about what you're dealing with. And then you're supposed to write down what you were thinking at that very moment. And then you collect a day's worth of beeps, which could be five or six beeps. And um you know, it's got various kind of observer effect problems. Um you wonder, you know, god, if the beeper went off now, what would I have to say? Oh, that would really be embarrassing. So you're you're there is this self-consciousness, but you forget about it over the course of the day. Suddenly, you get a beep and you write it down. And you know, I was struck by how benal my beeps were. I mean, I would be like, uh, the one I I describe in the book is I'm waiting online at a bakery and I'm deciding, should I buy a roll or use the heel of bread I have at home to make a sandwich for lunch? This is not profound stuff. And then he interrogates you about them to try to make sense of it and help you become a better student of what's going on in your own mind. Because it turns out very often we don't know what we're thinking. At least I didn't know what I was thinking. And he would say, "Now, did you speak that or did you hear that spoken?" I was like, "I have no idea. Was it in language or was it an image?" And I said, "Well, there was sort of an image. It was kind of very unspecific, kind of an emoji of a role, not not a real role." And he'd take you through it and it was an incredibly challenging process.

Ezra Klein: I want to stay on that for a second. I would say that a lot of thoughts I have, if you push me, they're the feeling of a thought. I know it's there, but it's not spoken. I'm not looking at lettering on the projector screen of my brain.

Michael Pollen: It's something less than a fully formed thought. This word thought implies a kind of, you know, roundedness to the thing that just doesn't exist. And many of our thoughts are these wisps of mentation, you know, that

Ezra Klein: I love that. Gossamer wisps of mentation is how you put it in the book.

Michael Pollen: Yeah. And then also many people think uh in totally un symbolized thoughts which I don't really understand what those would be if they're not words and not images but his finding after 50 years of this is that we think in very different ways. He roasts you at the end of the experiment.

Ezra Klein: Oh man. You you finish this up and he says that you are low on very little interal experience.

Michael Pollen: Yeah. I I didn't know how to take this. Um I mean we all think we have a lively inner life but um absence of one it never occurred to me that that raises a question for me which is

Ezra Klein: To what degree was what you were recording in this experiment different than your perception of how your mental life feels to you in a day?

Michael Pollen: Very different. I just assumed I had a little more going on than he thought I had. Um, but part of the reason he came to that conclusion is I argued with him lot. I found the whole idea of separating thoughts into these discrete chunks absolutely impossible. When I was on that bakery waiting in line, there was the smell of baked goods and cheese. They sell cheese at this place. There was the the image of this woman in front of me who had this very loud plaid skirt on that was kind of hideous. there was um you know my awareness of the other people there. Did I recognize anybody there? I often bump into people I know here. My thoughts were so interfected, you know, by one another. Um one thought coloring the next and he just kept drilling down until I absolutely would separate all that. But I had read a lot of William James at this point. He's got this amazing essay on the stream of consciousness and he's an incredibly acute observer of the nuance and subtlety of our thoughts and he talks about things like the unarticulated affinity between two thoughts or how one thought colors the next and then the other and that it is a stream and you can't pull anything out of the stream without completely disturbing it.

Ezra Klein: Let's talk about William James because he always ends up the godfather, the leading source of metaphor in any book like this. Who is he?

Michael Pollen: So William James is the father of of psychology in America. He is now regarded more as a philosopher and that's because psychology is so empirical now. He he was really I don't know if he used this word but he acted like wrote like a phenomenologist which is to say about the lived experience of thought. I first got acquainted with him when I was working on how to change your mind because he'd written the varieties of of religious experience and there's a fantastic chapter there on mystical experience and he experimented with with drugs himself uh to look at these kind of outer reaches of consciousness. He's kind of unreadable yet he's also a great writer at the same time. There's something about his sentences that are so long and intricate that um he loses a modern reader about 80% of the way to the period, at least me. But the the observations are just so refined and they they kind of put to shame all the scientists working on consciousness. I mean, I hate to say that because I respect a lot of them, but that he's on to the the subtlety of mental experience, and they of course are reducing it to fairly simple things like visual perception or um qualia, which is their word for, you know, qualities of experience. He goes so far beyond qualia to delve into these details of thinking that it was so I I had a head full of James when I was doing this experiment and it seemed to keep doing violence to that. I was I recognized my thinking more in James than in Herbert's questions.

Ezra Klein: One thing I love about James is his precision in describing how imprecise the stuff of the mind is. and mind stuff is a a word or term. I want to quote you quoting him here because I love this. You're writing, "The objects of our thoughts can never be completely disentangled from what James variously calls their auras, halos, accentuations, associations, susions, feeling of tendency, premonitions, psychic overtones, and you say perhaps my favorite fringe of unarticulated affinities." But but talk to me a bit about that because I do think that I I do a meditation often where you note what is going on in your attention and you note your thoughts and and even within thoughts you note did I hear that? Did I see that? Did I feel that? And it always also seems to me to be doing a kind of violence. I'll sink into a dream a little bit and what was that exactly? It wasn't quite a word. It wasn't quite a visual. All this stuff that you just quoted, tell me a little bit about the borderlands of mental experience.

Michael Pollen: I think it's just a reminder that our mental life is just far more intricate, complex, and um shadowy than we give it credit for. And that, you know, it's in the nature of reductive science to simplify things in order to better understand them. It'd be very weird to start from a Jamesian view of the of the um stream of consciousness and try to understand that scientifically. I feel like one of the central questions of your book and one reason I like the topic of consciousness so much is that it is the only thing we have actual experience of. It is the most familiar thing to us and yet actually like quite unfamiliar. And I mean this is one of the great lessons of meditation or psychedelics more unfamiliar the more you attend to it. Yes. That is what really interesting. I mean the more I thought about consciousness the more elusive the the phenomenon becomes and meditators get acquainted with this pretty quickly. You realize pretty quickly that you have thoughts that you are not thinking. You have images that you haven't conjured. You know that you're on the verge of sleep or sleepiness and they just pop into your mind like where did they come from? And this idea of uh thoughts thinking themselves is is bizarre to most people. But I I just think the poets and novelists have are further along than the scientists as they you know as they often are. And uh and that's one of the reasons I kind of turn toward literature later in the book for a kind of more subtle understanding of of the thought process.

Ezra Klein: Well, let's stay with the scientists for a little while at least. One of the things you try to do in the book is track their efforts to reduce consciousness to something measurable and maybe protohuman non-human. You have a great chapter on plants. And I guess maybe a place to start with the plants is you taught me something I didn't know which is you can anesthetize a plant.

Michael Pollen: Isn't that mind-blowing? Yeah. So there's a group of scientists, botonists, and they call themselves plant neurobiologists, which is a very tendentious thing to say because there are no neurons involved in plants. Uh they're trolling more conventional botonists, I think.

Ezra Klein: I appreciate when people troll each other in ways that lay men don't even. I was like, that seems fine.

Michael Pollen: No, it it it's fighting words in the field. Absolute plant dorks. Um, and they uh do all these experiments to see how intelligent plants are, how much they can respond and solve some problems and and they've also done experiments to try to determine if they're conscious or I would use the word sensient is is more reasonable, although they will use the word conscious. Sensience is a kind of more basic form of consciousness. It's what perhaps all living things have. It's the ability to sense your environment and recognize what's the veilance is that a positive or negative thing happening and then respond appropriately. You know bacteria can do this. They have chemotaxis, right? They can recognize molecules that are food and molecules that are poison and act appropriately. So it's a very basic form. Consciousness is how humans do sensience. And we've added lots of bells and whistles like the stream of consciousness, like uh self-reflection, like the fact that we're aware that we're aware. Most other creatures are just aware, although we recently learned that uh chimps have imagination. Um which is kind of mind-blowing. Yeah. So one of the experiments these guys did was take anesthetics that work on humans including a really bizarre one called xenon gas. I say it's bizarre because xenon gas is inert yet somehow it puts us out if you expose us to the gas which is weird because there's no chemical reaction going on and if you take a carnivorous plant or a sensitive plant mimosa pudika which is the one that tropical plant if you touch it it kind of collapses its leaves and you give it the xenon gas or any number of other anesthetics that work on us they won't react there'll be a period where they appear to be asleep and then they'll regain their ability. So the fact that plants have two states of being is a very pregnant idea and you know there's this at least two states of being right two that we've identified lights on lights off that to some implies consciousness you know there's the famous definition of Thomas Nagel who wrote this great essay called what is it like to be a bat and he his test for consciousness is if it is like anything to be a creature that creature and is conscious. So it is like one thing when the plants are awake and it is like something else when they're not or it's no longer like anything. But the switch in state is very much like consciousness.

Ezra Klein: You're a gardener. Do you think you're causing plants pain by pruning them?

Michael Pollen: Yeah. So, you're bringing up the issue that immediately comes to mind when you start hearing about plant consciousness, which is, are we hurting them? When we mow the lawn is that beautiful scent of freshly mowed grass, the scream.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. The screams of and that'll make you crazy. Grim way to put it. Yeah. But if you because you say it'll make you crazy, but I actually people know we're causing pain to cows and pigs and chickens and just don't think about it.

Michael Pollen: Exactly. It doesn't. So it turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on a industrial scale. Yeah. Although there's all this worry about this in Silicon Valley, you know, that our our tender hearts should go out to these machines that might be conscious and we owe moral consideration to the machines. Anyway, I think here here's my suspicion about that because I do think it is possible we're going to make sensient machines, machines that have some experience of what it is like to be a machine and I think that you will find there's a lot of concern about that until the moment it turns out to be against anybody's interest to ask you have to do anything about it. Yeah. And also they love the conversation about the far future or near far future of you know whether it's boomer or doomer view because it's a great way not to deal with what's right in front of us. One of the things that has struck me and it's a a theme of of your book is our ability as human beings to wall off our experience from that of everything else in the world. I forget the the great philosopher you're you're quoting here, but but there is one of them who just doesn't believe animals can feel pain, sees them as functionally robotic. Well, Decart. Decart. It is Dayart. Yeah. And that is in part helping to justify vivisections of live animals in that era. Rabbits. Yeah. And it's just like I have a I have two dogs. I've been around some rabbits. The idea that you would believe those animals are not feeling pain, it actually raises a pretty profound for me question about human consciousness and our ability to interpret what we are seeing around what we would like it to be as opposed to what it is.

Michael Pollen: Yeah. That and the power of an idea. I mean he developed this idea that humans had this monopoly on consciousness. I think therefore I am. In other words, the thing I know is that I'm a conscious being and nobody else has it. No other creature has it. And he was so convinced of his own idea that when these animals screamed sounds that we would have no trouble interpreting as suffering, he didn't hear it as suffering. He just thought it was automatic noise. And it is hard to believe. And it's true. I mean, it tells you something about the power of an idea to overcome our feelings, uh, our instincts. Um but we do you know we do this all the time and um you know he was so wrong about this. It's not funny but um we see things through a ideological lens you know and uh it shapes what we actually see and hear and and it changed the sound of those screams to him into meaninglessness. Okay. But you do get into this question of yes are we causing mass suffering to plants. Yeah. And I talked to Stephano Manuzu about this and some other researchers. Some one in particular believes yes we are causing pain to plants and his take was but hey that's just life you know if we don't eat plants we're down to salt basically you know if you give up on animals and plants doesn't think so he he thinks pain would not be adaptive to a creature that can't run away and the big fact about plants of course is they're cesile they're stuck in place they're rooted um and that dictates everything about them and it's the reason why the language in which they work is biochemical, right? They produce chemicals to protect themselves, to intoxicate, to intract, all all different kinds of things. So, he says they're aware that they're being eaten. They often don't mind. The grasses actually benefit from being eaten. And then, of course, there are all the fruits and nuts that, you know, they're happy to give away to mammals. Um, so I don't know where I come out on that. I I I I I I don't think my plants when I prune them, I mean, they they like being pruned, you know, they respond with more growth and new leaves and so I'm not too worried about that.

Ezra Klein: There are a lot of things I go through that make me grow that I don't like. I would say it's been a been a consistent experience of my life. Well, it's a short-term long-term thing, right? Perhaps when you cut them with the secers that bothers them, but they respond in a really constructive way. There is also another more complex way plants are operating on this book which is that some of this book is motivated by experiences you've had with psychedelic mushrooms right which are not exactly plants but okay fine you'll get letters I'm just saving you the trouble um and you have had an you have an experience there that I have heard from many others which is a kind of openness to animism.

Michael Pollen: Yeah. That's a very common experience on psychedelics. The world seems much more alive than it does in normal times. You know, animism is very interesting because it's kind of our default as a species. You go around the world, you look at traditional cultures, they believe that there's a spirit in infusing especially living things, but also rocks and cliffs and sky and clouds and everything. And most kids are animist till they go to school and then we kind of knock it out of them. Um, so it's interesting that we exist in this unanimous bubble of western scientific materialism. But you you push in any direction or travel in any direction or have a psychedelic experience and suddenly questions are raised about it. And I think that's what's interesting about what these plant neurobiologists are doing. They're returning us to a uh if it's not full-scale animism, it's a reanimated world where there is just and and I did come out of this research experience of looking at plant consciousness or plant sentience with a a sense that the world is more alive than I thought. Especially on Iaska, which is a plant-based, right? It's two plants. It's a brew of two plant. And if you ask most uh Iowa scaros, how did anyone ever figure out the recipe? Cuz it's so obscure that these two plants cooked together would have this effect and neither by themselves has any effect or much of any effect. Uh and they'll tell you the plants taught me and they will mean it. And we don't know in the through the lens of western science how to listen to that. It sounds ridiculous to us. Um, you know, I mean, if I came out anywhere on this whole book, it's like my mind is much more open than it was to a lot of weird stuff just because the normal stuff hasn't really panned out that well.

Ezra Klein: So certainly the mainstream interpretation of what consciousness is is that as life becomes more complex as unlike plants we're moving around that you have a an escalating complexity in conscious experience in order to achieve goals. in the the world that consciousness is being created through evolutionary pressure. It's adaptive. It's adaptive. Yeah. One thing you do is go through a couple of the ideas of what it could be adaptive towards. So, I'm going to back up a little bit to make sense of this idea. One of the big questions is your brain, at least 90% of what it's doing, you're not aware of. It's doing all this work, monitoring your body, maintaining homeostasis, perceiving things in your environment without you being consciously aware of it. You know, peripheral vision, smell, sense, you know, touch, all these kind of things, temperature. So, the question then becomes, if this automatic machine is so good at what it does, why does any of it become conscious? That's part of the hard problem of consciousness. Why why aren't we just zombies? You know, wouldn't that have been simpler? And the reasons and to some extent these are evolutionary just those stories but they're persuasive that basically you can automate things until you get to a level of complexity. And for us it's our social lives. The fact that we are fundamentally social beings absolutely dependent on other people with a long period of complete dependence for babies and children compared to other species. Social life cannot be automated. It's just too complex. So, you need to be able to anticipate what I'm likely to say, how a remark is going to land. Theory, you know, we call it theory of mind. Uh this idea that we can imagine our way into other people, basis of compassion and things like that. Um so once we entered this realm of great complexity, automating our responses just wasn't going to work. And the creatures that had consciousness that could imagine what was going on in in in another human's head did better than people who didn't and and failed to imagine what was going on in someone else's head. I find that a pretty persuasive theory. I guess one question it raises is you look at a baby or one-year-old, they are very very socially dependent. And I think they are clearly having a very intense experience of consciousness, a more intense one than I have. My consciousness is much better at filtering out information than theirs is. You have spotlight consciousness. I have spotlight consciousness. So I'm I'm curious to hear you you you talk a bit about that because on the one hand it it feels like that idea would imply consciousness becomes richer as you become more goal- directed but I think it's quite clear that it becomes narrowed as you become more goal directed.

Michael Pollen: Yeah. I think you could make a case that young children are more conscious than we are. I I think it's almost inarguable. Yeah. And which is a kind of interesting thing that we prune consciousness down the way we're pruning so many things in the brain as we age. But this idea of lantern versus spotlight consciousness I found very powerful. I learned it from Allison Gobnik who's a child psychologist, developmental psychologist at Berkeley and she gave me a lot of good advice as I was embarking on this. Uh the first was never forget that the kinds of people working on these questions about consciousness are not typical in their consciousness. These are people who can sit in a chair for a really long time, read books for a really long time, think out problems. They have an extreme version of spotlight consciousness which she calls professor consciousness. So that was very helpful. Um she contrasts this with children's consciousness which she calls lantern consciousness. So instead of having that one degree of attention focused on some object, they're taking in information from all 360°. It seems very undisiplined, very unfocused. Uh you find it when kids get to school, some kids can sit there and do it and a lot of kids can't because they're still taking in information from all these sides. It's interesting. It allows them to solve problems that adults can't solve. They think outside the box. They have more divergent thinking. And then as time goes on, we narrow our focus. It allows us to get a lot done to put on our shoes in a semi-efficient manner. and uh and but it it involves putting these blinders on. So, there's a trade-off. And one of the things psychedelics do, and Allison made this point to me also, is return us to lantern consciousness. And you know, she said um in an interview with me and to other people, you know, when she first tried LSD, which wasn't until I think her 60s, she realized, "Oh, this is how the kids are thinking. They're tripping all the time." And she said, "Just have tea with a four-year-old and you'll see." And there's a lot of truth to that. I think

Ezra Klein: I want to get at another theory of what consciousness is for. I think the the language in the book is consciousness is felt uncertainty. That is very beautiful. Although in practice I find it very unpleasant. But what does that mean?

Michael Pollen: So the phrase comes from a scientist named Mark SS who is a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst in South Africa and he's written a really interesting book called the hidden spring. And his theory is that consciousness arises when you can't automate things. And in this case he's talking about the fact that you you might have two competing needs. Let's say you're hungry and you're tired and you have to decide which to privilege. Uh and that takes decision-making. And what consciousness does is open up this space to resolve uncertainty. So if everything was predictable in the world and you could be certain when this happens that happens, you know, and you had a kind of neat algorithm to deal with contingencies, you don't need it. But a lot of life presents us with uncertainty and that's when consciousness arises.

Ezra Klein: I think I've thought about this part of the book more than any other and I think that's in part because the way my mind works and I'm not sure how generalizable this is. My thoughts attract to uncertainty in my life. I just ruminate and ruminate and ruminate over whatever I am typically most emotionally uncertain about. So on the one hand this idea that there is something at the very least that is attracting the spotlight of my attention to uncertainty feels true but I also have a couple of questions and problems with it. One is that it doesn't seem like what we're talking here about is exactly consciousness. is I mean what you were just saying about the child or about the adult on psychedelics they are not attracted to uncertainty in the same way uh the the experience of like psychedelic consciousness expansion is in many ways I think less of the experience of felt uncertainty it becomes much more about experience whereas uncertainty at least in the way I experience it in my consciousness tends to be much less experiential yeah like it's a distraction from experience. Yeah, I think that's right. I haven't really thought about that that much. Um, one of my takeaways is that we have to be kind of pluralists of consciousness that there are many different kinds and that psychedelic consciousness should be counted as one of them or the mystical forms of consciousness that James talks about and then there's everyday consciousness and spotlight consciousness and that. So I think we all have a toolkit to some extent and we experience I mean the kind of consciousness you experience as a meditator is very different than the kind you do at work right or when writing I mean writing is a great example that's a very peculiar form of consciousness. So the other thing I was thinking about with this was consciousness is felt uncertainty felt where because I think we think of consciousness as a thing happening in our minds. Something I think actually that has come out of my meditation for me but then I loved seeing how much of it there was in your book is recognizing how much is happening in the body.

Michael Pollen: Yeah. I think that's my biggest discovery as someone who lives in his head most of the time. How important having a body is to being conscious. You know, we identify with our heads more than our bodies, right? Maybe because our eyes are there. I don't know. But uh consciousness probably arises with feelings first. It starts with things like hunger and itchiness and as it gets filtered into the cortex becomes the kind of complicated thinking that we pride ourselves on. Um I think that feelings are based in the body finally. It's how the body talks to the brain. And we have to remember this very simple fact which is the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. We're not just a support system for this amazing three lbs of tofu in our heads. And once you realize that, you realize that the messages coming from the body are really important to the brain. And these feelings are the beginning of conscious experience. And if you didn't have them, it's questionable whether you would have consciousness. There's no doubt, I think, that the experience of consciousness is some kind of interplay between both. I feel uncertainty in my solar plexus. Mhm. I think about things I'm uncertain around in my brain. Exactly. And where do you experience disgust? Like moral disgust. It's in your belly. Yeah, this is a very cool experiment. They gave people ginger before exposing them to some morally distasteful event or something or image. And um the people who had the ginger were less disgusted because their stomachs were settled. So our our feeling of moral disgust is kind of channeled through our gut which is such a weird idea. But that's probably true of a lot of feelings and that it has enormous implications for this discussion about AI whether it can be conscious because feelings are not just signals. They're not just bits of information. They contain information. You're getting a lot of information from a feeling but that's the residue of the feeling. There's something more somatic about it. And um it's very hard to imagine how computers could get to that. Um and feelings have no weight if you don't have a vulnerability, if you don't have the ability to suffer and and perhaps be mortal. Otherwise, a feeling is just more information. And and we know feelings are a lot more than that to us.

Ezra Klein: You talked about consciousness as a reducing valve as a filtering mechanism of sensory experience and we've talked a little bit about the wider more lantern like consciousness of children. Mhm. I wonder how different the experience of being conscious in advanced modernity with a smartphone and a task list. And we are really training ourselves to narrow down to be successful in the economy we have structured in much of the western not only western world at this point. We have altered what it means to be human. And I wonder how much we've made the experience of consciousness increasingly unsatisfying by like you can overtrain any muscle. Yeah. And what we are doing staring in a narrowed way at a computer. I mean, there's all this great neuroscience on the earth between wide gaze and and narrow gaze, which I really feel when I look out over a mountain range and when I look at my phone, you can feel the shrinking of the shrinking and the tightening of the chest and the the posture of screens. Yeah, we have we have narrowed how it feels to be human being.

Michael Pollen: We have. But it's not too late, you know. I mean, tell me about your consciousness sovereignty ideas as you're as you're moving in here into consciousness hygiene. Um, one of the things I've been talking a lot about protecting our consciousness and what a precious space of interiority we have and it's this place of mental freedom. But I realize for some people going there doesn't feel good. Um, that these are people who ruminate a lot and I'm I'm prone to that too to a lot of rumination which is you know very circular thinking often not productive. It keeps you focused on something but not in a way that's making progress. Usually it's a spiral maybe. Um but also realizing you can take some control over your consciousness and that we need to do more to defend it. And meditation is one great way. And as challenging as it can be, you feel like here's my mind. I'm with my mind. It might be painful. It might not be. But no one is telling me what to think. You know, we spend so much time thinking the thoughts of other people and enduring the rants of other people and the obsessions of other people. Meditation is, I think, a really interesting way to kind of put a fence around your consciousness. you know, you put down your phone, you still have a pad because you're just trying to get rid of those to-do things, but when it's working really well, there's great pleasure in watching the um you know, the show go by and and the the things I wasn't expecting to think about. Suddenly and and imagery and all this kind of stuff. I do have an internal life contrary to what that guy said. Um so, sure you do, Michael. We believe you for sure. You're not just a a zombie here. No. Yeah. This was Reed Hastings years ago who said our our primary competitor is sleep. Yeah. Was one of the more dystopic things I've heard a CEO say. I know. It really is. And you know they are competing with our the part of our consciousness that wants to think its own thoughts because there's more money to be made if we think their thoughts.

Ezra Klein: I particularly loved the kod the final chapter. You go spend time with Joan Halifax, a great Zen teacher, and she has a line in there that coming as it does at the end of this very heady book. She says that she has divevested herself from all meaning. Yeah. and you go to talk to her and she basically sends you to a cave and puts off talking to you. Tell me a bit about that experience and also what you took from that extremely zen form of teaching that you that you were gifted.

Michael Pollen: Yeah. I mean, it was kind of an experiential co-an, right? I mean, like I'm not going to I should have known she's zen teacher that she would be allergic to concepts and interpretation and everything I wanted to do. It was like duh, you know? So I had met her once or twice before. I had a lot of admiration for her. We'd been on a panel together because she had a lot of experience with psychedelics. She was married to Stan Grath and administered huge doses of of LSD to the dying back in the 70s. And um I thought I would go. It's such a wild project. I know it really is. Although many people have been helped by this. I mean it's one of the better applications of psychedelics I think is helping people with terminal cancer. But anyway, I was working on the self chapter at the time and you know, there's this Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion, which I've struggled with in various ways. I understand sort of how it's true, but yet self seems to be still working in my life. And and I wanted to talk to her about that. And she had described her retreat center, which is called Upupaya. It's in Santa Fe, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. I was like, "Oh, that sounds interesting. I should go get deconstructed." So that's why I went and I got there and I spent a couple days with the adeps and the monks. But then she said, "Now I think we should go up to the retreat." And she said, "We'll go up there and you'll stay in the cave." And I'm like, "The cave? That's like not my kind of thing. I'm not a camper." And uh she said, "Don't worry, it's a five-star cave." So, we get there and then after this 25 mile dirt road and then there's another halfmile hike out to the cave and there's no electricity and there's no running water and somebody's dug into this hillside um these caves and with a a glass door on one side overlooking this meadow and there I was for the next three or four days and she kept ducking my interviews and at one point she said, "I've I've divested a meaning." I was like, "Oh this is not good for the journalist conducting interviews." But like a meditation retreat that you were describing, it is almost a um a psychedelic experience when you're alone with yourself and the borders of self attenuate. They become kind of more porous. Um you realize the extent to which our identity as selves is a social identity and it's reinforced by everybody we talk to because they're treating us like a self. So we must be a self. But if you're absolutely alone in the middle of nowhere and you have no access to media, it softens. And then I was meditating for hours at a time. And it was very interesting because life became like a meditation. In fact, I had more profound meditations doing chores, you know, chopping wood and sweeping out my little cave than I did when I was sitting on the platform. And um and it shifted my thinking about consciousness in this way. I had gotten caught in this frame very western very male of problem solution hard problem of consciousness solution. And I had trained my attention. I had narrowed right. I had a focus on that question for five years of really you know struggling to understand this. And I suddenly realize, well, there is the problem of attention, but there's also the fact of it. And the fact of it is so marvelous and so astonishing and mysterious. And why aren't I paying more attention to that? Why aren't I being more present? One night I woke up in the middle of the night to go out to pee and there is um it's a new moon and there's no light pollution at all and the stars, this vault of stars is more numerous and more gorgeous than it's ever been. But it's not out there. It's reaching all the way down to me here that we occupy the same space, the same intergalactic blanket. And it was such a uh all my kind of learned ways of looking at the starry sky, you know, we all have these predictions, right? The brain is a prediction machine. All the concepts in the frames just went away and it was just kind of like me, stars, space. And you know, this is this is not such an unusual experience, but it shifted my thinking from solving a problem to being within it.

Ezra Klein: You you talked earlier about the way this book has a quality of you read it and maybe you know less but it adds wonder. Yeah. And it made me think as I was going through different theories, you know, integrated information processing or whatever it's called and how sad I'd be if any of them were true. If you could prove to me the global workspace theory was the truth of consciousness. If you could prove to me consciousness evolved and all the things I think are a byproduct of an evolutionary process for reducing uncertainty, I would hate it.

Michael Pollen: Well, you know, it's funny. This is a lesson I learned not just from Joan, but from my wife who's an artist, Judith. And uh you know she was lecturing me about you know not knowing has its own power and of course it is a Zen idea to cultivate the don't know mind and she's right it does have a power and that not knowing opens you in a way that knowing closes you down and that we're very frustrated with not knowing but it is the state it is our existential predicament about many many things and getting comfortable with it. I mean I it was a long way to go for me to get comfortable with it but getting comfortable with it. Yes. More awe, more wonder in the face of mystery. I think that's a place to end.