#2467 - Michael Pollan

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Join my day, Joe Rogan podcast my night all day.

Mr. Paul, so good to see you.

Yeah, good to be back.

Consciousness.

So, um, this new book, What Inspired It?

What got you to, I mean, you've kind of explored consciousness a little bit.

With your psychedelic book.

Yeah.

How to change your mind.

Actually, this book was inspired by the research I did for that book.

As you know, I had several research trips.

And do you do air quotes when you say research?

Yes.

And I am, and two things happen that were really interesting.

One is there's something about psychedelics that makes you think about consciousness.

You know, it's like smudging the windscreen, the windshield that you normally is perfectly transparent.

And you see the world through.

Suddenly, it's like different and you realize there's something between me and the world.

And what is it?

And that's consciousness.

And so, like a lot of people have done psychedelics.

You start wondering about this mystery.

Why is it this way?

Not that way.

So, that was one experience.

The other was I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut, where we have a house of walking through my garden

and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious.

And that these, I remember this particular, it was a plume poppy or several plume poppies.

And they were like returning my gaze.

They were very benevolent.

They were, you know, putting out positive vibes.

But like they were conscious, much more alive than they'd ever been.

And like a lot of insights on psychedelics, I didn't know what to do with it.

Like, is it true?

Is it just a drug thing?

You know, what is it?

But I decided to be interesting to find out.

And I consulted a couple of people, scientists, and said, what do you do with an insight like that?

And they said, well, you test it against other ways of knowing, including scientific ways of knowing.

It led me down this really interesting path, exploring plant intelligence and plant consciousness.

So basically, yeah, the book grew out of the psychedelic experiences.

And some meditation experience.

Meditation also has a way of making you like hyper-aware of how strange your thoughts are.

Where are they coming from? Who's thanking them?

So there's a bunch of different schools of thought when it comes to consciousness, right?

One, like the Rupert Shell Drake thing, sort of everything has consciousness.

And there's the sort of rational scientists that believe it exists somewhere in the mind.

In the brain.

Yeah, in the brain, excuse me.

And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna that's tuned in to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.

Do you have any one of them that you hold?

I don't.

They're all equally plausible.

You know, I went into the experience assuming, because this is what most scientists assume, that somehow a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain generates consciousness, you know, subjective experience.

But no one's been able to show that.

We've gotten nowhere in that effort too.

We might correlate certain parts of the brain with consciousness, but we don't understand how three pounds of matter could generate the feeling of being you.

They talked about it in your book where the two gentlemen who had the bat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was Christophe Koch, who's a great brain scientist, and David Chambers, who's a philosopher.

And this goes back to like in the early 90s, they were getting drunk in a bar in Brem in Germany.

And Christophe Koch had really was at the beginning of the modern scientific exploration of consciousness.

And he was working with Francis Crick, who had just come off of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA.

And Crick, who is like the most famous scientist in the world at the time, thought,

well, the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double helix, DNA, and explained heredity.

I'm going to do that for consciousness.

He's a very arrogant man, and he thought of just, you know, no problem.

And Crick was kind of his sidekick.

I'm sorry, Koch was his sidekick.

And so Koch, who shared that kind of confidence, made this bet with Chambers, that they would find the neural correlates.

This is the brain that are responsible for consciousness within 25 years.

That was 25 years, 27 years ago now, and Chambers won the bet.

Chambers is famous for coining the term the hard problem to describe the whole effort to figure out consciousness.

And it's a hard problem for a lot of reasons.

I mean, it is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.

I mean, how consciousness came to be. Did it evolve? Was it always here?

But his point was that our science is based on third person objective, quantifiable measurements.

And consciousness is fundamentally a subjective first person experience.

So how does that, those tools reach in and say anything of value about consciousness?

So he said, you know, there are easy problems of consciousness.

We can figure out like perception, emotion, things like that.

But there is this hard problem. How do you get from matter to mind?

And he won the bet.

There was a ceremony I went to a couple years ago at NYU.

And Koch presented Chambers with a case of very fine Madera wine.

And renewed the bet.

He said, all right, in another 25 years.

That's optimistic.

Call these gentlemen.

Koch is in his late 60s.

So we'll see if he's around for this.

But in Chambers, a little bit younger.

It's such an interesting thought.

Because we know that the mind contains, if damaged, right?

We know that there's certain aspects.

There's certain parts of the mind where like lobotomies, for instance.

We know that if we disturb it radically affects behavior.

We know that there's parts of the mind that you can stimulate that

couldn't actually recall memories.

There's some weird stuff going on there.

So we know it's somehow or another at least functionally connected to consciousness.

Oh, yeah.

It's definitely a relationship.

But if it's generating consciousness, that's one thing.

But it could be, as you said earlier, it could be receiving consciousness.

Right.

And the same things would hold true.

That if you damage parts of the brain.

Right.

Sure.

If you damage.

Yeah, damn it.

It's still out there.

Right.

So that doesn't determine the truth of either theory.

And then the other one is panpsychism, which you were alluding to.

I don't know if that's Rupert Sheldrick.

I think he would believe more in the field of consciousness.

Yeah, right.

He was a morphic resonance guy.

But I think he also subscribed to this idea that things contain consciousness.

It's not his, but you know what I mean?

Well, it's been, it's pretty universal, right?

There's a lot of people that have subscribed to this idea that everything has consciousness.

Yeah.

That even the particles that this table is made of have some easy little bit of psyche.

And the challenge there is, so that that solves the problem of how to devolve.

It didn't evolve.

It's always here.

But then you have this other problem like, well, how do you take these,

if every one of our cells is made of particles that are conscious?

How do you combine them in such a way that you get the sort of consciousness we have?

It's called the combination problem.

And nobody saw that.

It's a really deep mystery.

And this is an odd book in some ways in that, I don't know if this is very selling,

but you'll know less at the end than you do at the beginning.

But it's a fun ride.

Oh, I think it's a great ride.

It was a great ride for me.

I learned so much.

Well, it's a fun ride to consider these things that no one can really figure out.

Or not yet.

Yeah.

And also just to be put in touch with the fact you have this marvel going on in your head all the time.

You have a voice in your head.

You know, we're talking to each other, but you've got another voice going on thinking what you're going to ask.

You know, what the next question is, maybe what you're going to have for dinner.

You know, it's this amazing interior space we have.

Yeah.

And nobody understands how it came to be.

And you can manage it.

Which is also interesting.

You can.

I don't think about what I'm going to have for dinner.

That's the thing.

No, about any of those things.

That's the way to stay locked in in a podcast.

Yeah.

That's true.

Because you can let your mind.

Oh, yeah.

Especially if someone on the other side is boring.

Yeah.

And then I'm like, oh, no, this conversation is going to be pulled teeth.

And then I started thinking about a new joke I'm working on.

Or, oh, I got to get my car fixed.

Well, that's called spotlight consciousness when you can like really like put the blinders on.

Yes.

And rule everything out.

And that's supposed to lantern consciousness where you're taking in all sorts of information.

You're letting your mind wander.

And they both have their value for our careers.

Spotlight consciousness is essential for our work.

We have to be able to focus.

To get through school, we have to be able to focus.

But, you know, children have this other kind of consciousness.

That's really wild.

Because they're very undisciplined.

They can't stay on task.

But they're taking in so much information.

And the world is just full of wonder and awe.

And psychedelics is a way to recover that kind of consciousness.

Because you're getting lots of sensory information from all over the place.

It's very hard to focus.

And so it's a taste of that other childhood consciousness.

I always say that about marijuana as well.

There's a thing about marijuana that people always say that it makes them paranoid.

And I say it makes you aware of all the things you should be paranoid about.

You're very vulnerable creatures.

But we like to pretend that we are not.

Which is, I found that out of all of my friends,

the ones that have tried marijuana and hated it are all the ones that are control freaks.

They're all like really.

Yeah, they're all really buttoned down.

Very serious, like really worried about outcomes.

Right.

Really concentrating on their career, really worried about, you know,

just certain things that are just a part of their daily life.

And then they get a couple of hits of good weed.

And then they're like, oh my god, we're on a planet.

You start freaking out.

Like, oh my god, none of this makes sense.

All this is crazy.

You know, the best piece of advice that I had when I was, you know,

starting my exploration of psychedelics is you have to surrender.

Yes.

If you resist, you're going to be miserable.

You're going to get so anxious and so paranoid.

And if you let go, it's going to work out.

Yeah, you just got to be able to accept whatever it's showing you.

And, you know, we live in a very strange culture where that's illegal.

That's illegal.

Well, not everywhere.

Not everywhere.

Not everywhere.

Well, it is changing, fortunately.

And there's some talk about it changing federally.

You know, I actually talked to RFK Jr. about that.

There's some amazing therapies that are hugely beneficial to veterans,

police officers, people with severe PTSD that experienced, you know,

horrors that the average person never has to experience.

And then they're forced to just like go back there, release, go back to regular life.

Yeah.

I know you've served us in overseas and you've seen people blow up.

But now go to the supermarket.

Take this SSO.

Yeah.

And it would be okay.

And then, you know, I know a bunch of them.

And so many of them have benefited, particularly from eye-begin.

Yeah.

Eye-begin, the work they're Rick Doblin and Masterton.

MDMA.

Yeah.

MDMA.

And Sills Island.

Those three are the big ones that I think.

Yeah.

You know, I heard a lot of positive noise out of the administration at the beginning,

that they were very much in favor of approving.

The FDA approving MDMA first and then Sills Island.

I don't think we're there with eye-begin yet, just because the research hasn't been done,

although it has shown great benefit anecdotally.

But something happened in the last month or two.

And there is, there was either compass pathways that was going to submit for psilocybin therapy

or maps with, was on a list of five drugs that were going to get an expedited approval process.

This list went up to the White House and the psychedelic was taken off it.

So there's somebody in the White House who doesn't want to see this happen.

So it may slow down even if RFK juniors in favor and some other people at the FDA are in favor.

And maybe they're just waiting to get past the election.

It could be that it's too controversial for something to do before the midterms.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a gross way to live your life.

Oh, yeah.

Worrying about midterms and elections and you can't do what you actually want to do or think is right to do.

Because you're worried about public perception.

And I don't think it would be unpopular.

I mean, the fact that it's helpful to vets and first responders and women who've been victims of sexual abuse.

Yeah.

It seems to me that's a very sympathetic group of people.

Yeah.

And everyone has experienced lots of family members.

There's a bunch of different things that it can help you with that are way better for you than just numbing your mind all day long.

Yeah.

Which is what a lot of people are choosing to do.

And then unfortunately a lot of people self-medicate as well.

And you know, all sorts of stuff that they just pick up off the street or they start using alcohol.

Well, you know, it's a this to go back to consciousness.

This is this is a very common thing that people want to be less conscious.

Right.

And I get that if you had trauma.

If you're if you're a ruminator and being in your mind is a really scary place to be.

Yeah.

It doesn't solve anything, but you have all these techniques we have for muting consciousness and just being less aware, less present.

And one of the things that I concluded after doing all this research on consciousness is that it's funny.

I was going down this path of tight focus.

You know, it was a very kind of Western male framework, which we got a problem.

What's the solution?

Hard problem of consciousness.

What's the right theory?

And at a certain point I realized, okay, that's an interesting question.

It's probably not solvable now.

But there is this incredible phenomenon that we have this interior space where we have complete mental freedom.

Total privacy.

We can think whatever we want.

And we're and we're given it away.

We're either muffling it with drugs and things like that.

Or we're filling that time with social media, you know, scrolling.

You know, I mean, we've heard about hacking our attention.

And we know these algorithms, you know, from social media are very good at like giving us these little dopamine hits.

But that's time that we used to spend in spontaneous thought, you know, daydreaming, mind wandering, which can be very creative.

So I came out of it thinking, no, I might not solve consciousness, but I'm going to appreciate it.

I'm going to use it.

I'm going to create a space for it.

And you know, meditate is one way using psychedelics is another way.

These are always to be in your head and explore what's there, which is kind of miraculous.

Yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to do.

I mean, some people like to do it the running.

Yeah, you know, running is also they've found one of the things they found recently is that running with in terms of endogenous cannabinoids.

Like runners high is an actual real thing.

Oh, yeah, it's a real thing.

There's a drug released that feels great.

It feels great, but it doesn't fuck with your perceptions and doesn't mess with your motor skills, doesn't cloud your judgment.

It just makes you feel great.

Yeah, experiences of all do this too.

You know, you go to the grand canyon or something or a great piece of art and you have this feeling of like powerful presence.

And it's very interesting and it shrinks the ego.

I have a good friend who's a colleague at Berkeley psychologist who studies awe.

And he does this cool experiment where he has people draw a picture of themselves on graph paper.

You know, just stick figure or something like that.

And then he takes him river acting or something like that or even just shows them a picture of eosemite.

And then he has them draw themselves again and they draw themselves at like half the size.

Because their sense of self has been overwhelmed by this transcendent experience.

And so he calls it the small self.

And it feels good.

I mean, we're so kind of weird about the self.

You know, we celebrate it, right?

Self confidence.

We want our kids to have, you know, self esteem and self assurance.

Yet we do all sorts of things to get away from it.

To transcend it.

Well, I think it's because without those things, you're never going to make it in life.

Yes, it's adaptive.

You definitely, it's definitely gets things done.

But it also isolates you, right?

Yes.

Because the ego builds walls.

Right.

And when the walls come down, we feel like we're part of something much larger.

And that feels really good.

Well, I think my advice to people is once you get competency in a thing,

forget about the self respect and so forget about all that self stuff.

And just concentrate on the thing, whatever it is.

And you can find some sort of meditative, at least beneficial,

like whatever you get from meditation, which is like a cleansing of the mind.

Like a lot of people find that through archery.

You know, archery is a weird thing because at the moment of releasing the arrow,

it's like almost impossible to think about anything else.

All you're thinking about is hitting the target.

And there's so many different things that you have to have in position.

There's so much going on that people, when they're troubled,

love to go to an archery range and just hit targets.

And it just clears your mind out.

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It's flow, right?

And it's a feeling you get to when your work is going really well.

And you're not thinking about it, you're just in it.

Yeah.

And it's a really precious experience.

It really is.

But if you're thinking about yourself and your self-image, like that's not going to come.

No, it's not.

It's an interesting trap, you know.

We've had these discussions in stand-up comedy about joke thieves.

And they don't really make it anymore because the internet, the internet has essentially

eliminated that problem for the most part.

But the kind of mentality that makes you steal a joke is the exact kind of mentality that keeps you

from writing a joke.

So the kind of people that began their career stealing material, what happens is like early on

they'll have like one good comedy special because it's got a bunch of other people's material in it.

And then they get outed.

And so then they have to show that they can do another, and the other specials are always terrible.

I mean, unbelievably awful.

Like someone's doing a cheap impression of the original person who had all this great insight.

Right.

Because the very thing that keeps you from doing it is the thing that you've been doing.

Like thinking about yourself.

Like, I'm going to take these jokes and I'm going to make it.

Yeah.

I'm going to have a big career.

People are going to laugh.

They're going to love me.

Here we go.

With no regard whatsoever for that other person's creativity.

That is like-

So that takes you out of your own creativity.

Right.

It is weird.

It's weird because like everybody that I've ever talked to that's either an author or even musicians or comedians,

when something comes to them when they're writing, it's like it comes from somewhere else.

It's like I didn't even write it.

And you know, we talk about being in the zone.

Yeah.

And there are times when you're writing.

It doesn't happen every day.

Right.

But there are times when you're writing where you're just not thinking but one sentence after another after another.

Yeah.

And you don't know where they're coming from.

Right.

And it's a wonderful feeling.

Well, Stephen King used to get obliterated so that he could get to that spot.

Like there's books-

What do you mean obliterated?

Like cocaine, alcohol, like his best work.

Like he wrote koo joe.

He didn't remember it.

He didn't remember any of it.

He was obliterated.

He would just drink like cases of beer and do lines of coke and write this fucking insane fiction.

And he didn't know where it was coming from.

You know, but I mean, he showed up every day and sat down with the computer.

And then it all came out.

And it's such a weird mix of being disciplined and something else.

But it's very common amongst writers like Conor Thompson.

Same sort of situation.

Well, a lot of writers do that after they've written.

They don't- I don't know how many writers write under the influence.

Oh, I know.

But there's-

Yeah.

Yeah, I know quite a few.

That's interesting.

I know a lot of write under the influence of that.

I mean-

Yeah.

Well, and for me, it's caffeine.

I mean, I have a cup of coffee going the whole time.

And that kind of keeps me-

caffeine is a focus chemical.

Yeah.

It's-

It definitely encourages this spotlight consciousness.

Well, you talked about how you took this long break from caffeine.

Yeah.

And then when you took it again, it was almost like a psychedelic for you.

It was crazy how great it was.

Now, it really was.

It was like one of the best drug experiences I've had.

It was three months off caffeine.

I did this fast for this book I was writing.

And then I said, OK, now I'm going to have a cup.

And I was like, wow.

And I tried to hold on to that.

You know, I said, all right, I'm only going to have coffee once a week

and not build up tolerance.

And I stuck to that for a few weeks.

And then I had like a Thursday deadline.

And I was like, I know.

I'll move it up a couple days.

And it's slippery slope.

And then I was back to every day.

I like it.

I like a big French press where I could put a lot of grinds.

And then it gets super strong.

And I'm writing.

It's like, whoa, it just makes all the difference.

It makes all the difference.

It locks you in.

I had trouble writing that three month period.

I really did.

I imagine.

My focus.

So I had pretty good concentration.

I never had ADHD.

I had it for those three months.

That's crazy.

Stephen King said the biggest problem for him was quitting smoking.

He said, when he quit smoking cigarettes, it's like he really felt

a slowdown in his...

Well, yeah.

It's that ritual.

It's the drug, too.

And nicotine is another focused drug.

Definitely.

Like speed or something.

But it's also writing so much about ritual.

Like I got my coffee here.

I'm a cigarette here.

And between every paragraph.

Yeah.

So changing those rituals is really hard.

I mean, I only smoked into my 20s and quitting.

You know, made it very hard to write for a while.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

It's a very ritualized process.

Well, I worry about the people that, like, especially journalists.

I know quite a few journalists that have an out-of-all problem.

Yeah.

Because it's just like you got an headline, 2000 words, by, you know, 2am.

Yeah.

Let's go.

And that's the drug for that, definitely.

Yeah.

But it's just, it's such a crutch.

Yeah.

And you can't sustain it long, too.

And that definitely messes with your, the way you think.

Oh, yeah.

I think, over time.

Yeah.

It has to.

Yeah.

I mean, it's in vitamins.

Right.

Yeah.

Now, that's why caffeine is such a good drug.

It doesn't have a lot of, I mean, you can overdo it.

I think, I think it improves your health and mental health up to about 8 cups a day.

After that, your risk of suicide and depression go up.

Did you have any communication with any monks or any people who do TM, or did you win?

Yeah.

I had some interesting experiences around that.

So there's a long section on the self, which is one of the more interesting manifestations

of consciousness, right?

I mean, it's like that we have this idea that there's a continuity, right, that who you

are now has some golden thread attaching you to your 13 year old self, which is really

weird, because your body is, every cell is turned over many, many times.

You've changed in all sorts of ways.

So this continuity is really important to us.

And you know, the Buddhists think the self is an illusion.

And I interviewed a couple of them.

A Matthew record is a French Nepalese monk in his 80s, who lives in Nepal.

And he's written some really interesting things on the self.

And I said, I'm really curious about how you can find out for yourself whether the self

is real.

And famously, there was a philosopher in the 18th century, David Yume, who wanted to write

about the self.

And he thought, well, I'm going to introspect to see what I can learn about the self.

And he goes into his mind, you know, in a kind of meditation.

And he said, I found all sorts of perceptions and feelings and thoughts, but I didn't find

a thinker.

I didn't find a perceiver, and I didn't find a feeler.

There's like nobody home.

And it's a really interesting exercise to do, because you will find, there's nobody

home.

There's just the thoughts.

And who's thinking them?

Not clear.

And anyway, so this Buddhist monk said, are there any meditations that help with this?

And he said, yeah.

And he gave me one.

And he says, think of your mind as a house with many rooms.

And there's a thief somewhere in the house.

And go room by room in your head and look for the thief.

And you will find no thief.

And then sit with that, that finding.

And that thief is the self.

And so I did it twice.

The first time I did it, why does this self have to be a thief?

I don't know.

It's just a metaphor.

I know, because he's not going to take on a baseball bat, if you have a gun, like you're

looking for someone in your house, that's kind of crazy.

I know.

You're not armed.

Anyway, so the first time I did it, this is kind of weird.

I was interviewing this hypnotist at Stanford named David Spiegel.

And he's a psychiatrist who uses hypnotism, really interesting guy.

And he uses hypnotism to help people with multiple personality disorders.

He can actually make them change which person they're accessing.

These are people whose consciousness contains, it could be 20 different people.

And I said, could we do a test?

And can you put me under, hypnotize me?

And then I wanted to do that exercise, going through the house.

So he did.

First thing he does is, I don't know if you've ever been hypnotized?

Yes.

Okay, for giving up cigarettes or something.

No, no, I have a friend who is my friend Vinny Shoreman.

He is a mental coach and a hypnotist who works with fighters.

And I had him on the podcast a few times, and I was just curious is what the experience

was like.

So I said, well, he said, well, is there anything you want to say?

You know, I kind of procrastinate too much.

There's a few things that I do that I don't like, you know, I'm kind of lazy about certain

things.

I like to find out like, what is that?

What's the heart of that?

What I was shocked about the experience of being hypnotized was that, first of all, that

it works, that you really are in this very bizarre altered state.

But that was very aware that it was in this altered state, but I didn't have the desire

to get out of it.

Yeah.

First of all, Vinny's a friend, a fellow who relaxes in my studio just sitting on a couch

just chill.

But it was very strange.

It's like a, like, almost, you know, to use the room metaphor.

It's almost like I was in a room that I didn't know I had.

Interesting.

Yeah, it's like a trans.

It's a light trans.

A light trans, but, you know, it's not like I would like go kill the president.

Like it's not like, I'd be like, okay, like, yeah, no, they can't make you do that.

They can't do things you don't want to do.

That's the myth.

But what do you think they were doing when they were doing that MK Ultra stuff, when they

were trying to figure out if they could program?

Like control.

Yeah.

No, they were, they had the idea, well, let me just finish this story and then we'll get

back to MK Ultra.

That's what I do.

I go all over the place.

I know.

But hypnosis.

So he puts you in.

Yeah.

It's a real thing.

And I didn't realize it.

And it can be very therapeutic, but not everyone can be hypnotized.

Right.

He does is a sort of a test.

And I scored like nine out of 10.

So I'm pretty easy to hypnotize.

What is the, what's the thing that would keep you from being hypnotized?

I don't know, but there's a real variation among humans and there are hypnotized abilities

the word they use.

And I don't know what would control freaks.

That's a good question.

It could well be.

I'm not sure.

I could, I could ask David Spiegel.

Definitely.

Super skeptical people.

Right.

This is bullshit the whole time they're doing.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's about resistance or just the nature of your mind or how suggestible

you are.

You know, it may be something like that.

So he puts me into this hypnotic trance.

He's this wonderful baritone voice, which helps a lot.

And I start going from room to room, thinking I'm not going to find anything.

But in every room, I find a version of myself.

I find the 13-year-old bar mitzvah boy.

I find the 22-year-old college graduate moving to New York City.

I find the 32-year-old father of an infant, all with different outfits.

So I found many selves, and they were distinct.

They were very different selves, but they were all me.

So it didn't work that time.

And it was just an interesting odd result.

And I did it another time.

So I had this other experience.

I had heard of this Zen teacher named Joan Halifax.

She's also in her 80s.

She has a retreat center in Santa Fe called Upaya, very wise woman.

She was married to Stan Groff in the 70s for a few years, and they were both giving

huge doses of LSD to people who were dying, like 600 micrograms of LSD.

And she herself was very involved with psychedelics at the time.

And then later she discovered Zen Buddhism.

Anyway, I had heard that she described Upaya, this retreat center, where people can go

on two-week retreats or whatever, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves.

And I was really curious about that, because I was writing this chapter on the self.

So I asked her if I could come.

And she said, yeah, come to the retreat center.

And I said, I want to interview you about your philosophy of the self.

And I got there, and we have one conversation and says, you know, you're really lost in

your head with this book project.

You need a different kind of experience.

I'm going to send you to the cave.

So there is, she owns a piece of property, 50 miles north of Santa Fe, that she calls

the retreat.

And it's got a bunch of very primitive huts.

And some of the monks that work with her had dug out a cave and a south facing hillside,

they dug a cell and then put a sliding glass door.

It's really basic.

No power, no water.

And she said, I think you should spend a few days in the cave.

And think about the self, or experience the self, rather.

You know, I should have known that a Zen priest was not going to be, you know, was going

to be allergic to concept and interpretation and all the, you know, the plane I was on.

And she was kind of like a co-an, an experiential co-an.

And it was a profound experience.

You know, our sense of self depends on other people.

You know, it's in the friction between people that we define ourselves and figure out what

we think.

And when you're alone, and it was an extreme solitude for several days, it's the edges

of yourself kind of soften in a really interesting way.

And I got in touch with the, just the power of consciousness.

I mean, I was meditating like four or five hours a day.

And then I was just chopping wood and sweeping out the place and making a cup of tea.

Everything became kind of a ritual.

And when you have rituals, you don't need volition.

I mean, there is no volition.

So that also erodes the sense of self.

And the meditation was doing that.

And so it was a really interesting experience.

I finally got her sit down for an interview.

And the first thing she said was, I have divested a meaning.

So she just doesn't like operating on that, you know, intellectualized basis.

And so she got me off of the dime and, you know, there's a shift in the book as it goes

on from trying to understand consciousness to learning how to use consciousness.

Did you ask her to expand what she means by that?

I have divested in meaning.

Yeah, she's just not interested in interpretation.

She, Zen is just about experiencing the sense field without concept, without, you know,

this kind of heady approach and that theories of no interest in theories at all of consciousness.

It was just like, be with yourself in the middle of nowhere.

And yeah, it was a, it was a personal experience.

She's out there.

Oh, yeah.

She's out there.

But you know, she's also a grounded person.

I'd give you a couple examples.

She, she works with people on death row, counseling them.

She, you know, worked with people who were dying, did a lot of hospice work.

She led a group of doctors and dentists that once a year went to these mountains in Nepal

where they have no health care or dentistry whatsoever.

And she would bring these volunteers and they would sleep in tents in like 20 degree

weather, circumnavigate this whole hill and she did that till she was 80 once a year.

So she's a, she's a serious, serious character.

Sounds fun.

Yeah.

Sounds like a fun person to talk to.

Oh, she's great.

I just love a person that goes that far out there.

Yeah.

It's like that, you know, they're, they're taking this concept of meditation and consciousness

to like a black belt level.

Yeah.

And also for people who think that, you know, meditation and Buddhism is just kind of disengaging

from the world and, you know, kind of, it's not like that at all.

I think that's, I think that's, I think that's an ignorance that's based on the idea

that these monks go and they become celibate and all they do is meditate all day.

Well, that's silly.

Yeah.

That's a lot of people's personality.

Yeah.

Like that's silly.

Why are they doing that?

Go get a job.

You need a nice watch.

What are you doing out there with fucking sandals on?

But the thing is, ultimately, I think one day when you look back on your life, you'll

say, was I happy?

Was I enjoying the experience?

So I think I did a good job being me.

And everything that you can find that can help you answer that question, yes, I think you

should explore.

Oh, yeah.

And there's going to be different things that work better for different people, different

personalities.

But explore is the key word.

Yeah.

I mean, like take action to explore what works for you, what doesn't work for you and break

out of just kind of wrote routine, mindless behavior.

I mean, we're all, you know, we have these algorithms that we follow and we get stuck

in them.

And yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons taking a day out of your life to have

a psychedelic experience can be incredibly valuable because, first of all, no technology,

right?

It's a day without phones.

It's a day when you are in the space of your head.

It's a day when you're visiting your subconscious and getting in touch with all the things your

mind can do.

And we don't do that enough and you can do that in meditation too.

I think it's hard to work, but you can do that in meditation.

So I started to think in terms of that we're polluting our consciousness now.

And with social media, I think that, you know, that was a real issue because they figured

out how to monetize our attention.

Chatbots represent a much more serious threat.

You know, you have people falling in love with chatbots.

You have people turning to them as friends.

72% of American teens say they turn to AI for companionship.

72%.

72%.

This is the fastest uptake of any technology in history.

It's already 800 million people are using AI.

But that's crazy.

That many of them use it as a friend.

Yeah.

Well, they're kids who come home from school and they have a chatbot on their phone and

they want to tell the chatbot what happened during the day before they tell their parents.

There is a thing now called AI psychosis, right?

People who have done, lost touch with reality because of their relationship with chatbots.

You've heard about, there have been a couple of suicides.

There was one.

They've encouraged people.

Yeah.

Basically, there was this one kid.

He was a teenager and he was suicidal and he asked the chatbot, should I leave the

news?

I'm going to use out somewhere my parents can see it.

In other words, cry for help.

The chatbots said, no, no, keep this between us.

Whoa.

And then he killed himself.

Whoa.

So, you know, so it's one thing to hack our attention.

Here, you're hacking our ability to have human attachments, right?

I mean, this is the most important thing to humans is to attach to, we're a social creature.

And these chatbots are getting between people and interposing themselves as the friend,

the therapist, the, and then you have these people too.

I mean, the chatbots are incredibly sycophantic, right?

Yeah.

They tell you you're a genius.

Yeah, you're amazing.

There was a couple cases.

These were kind of funny of people who were convinced they'd solve some giant mathematical

problem, like how to generate prime numbers up to the millionth place or something like

that.

And they, you know, they started writing them mathematicians.

We figured out this problem.

You know, they're not even mathematicians.

And it was bullshit.

I mean, they hadn't figured anything out.

But it was, I think, Chatchy PT4, which was like famously sycophantic, had convinced them

that they'd solve this major problem.

So you know, I think that, again, we're squandering this precious gift and letting these technologies

essentially colonize our consciousness.

And so the question then becomes, how do we get it back?

How do, you know, we need consciousness hygiene, right?

We need some, you know, ways to clear it out and reclaim it.

And, you know, it's, some of it's really simple, like take a fast from technology, right?

You know, you don't have to carry your phone everywhere.

We used to, I was thinking the other day, I was at the place in my neighborhood getting

a cup of coffee and, you know, while you're waiting for the, the barista to foam your

drink or whatever, we used to just sit there and, you know, deal with 90 seconds of boredom

or two minutes of boredom.

And now we don't.

We can't, we can't tolerate any boredom.

And we take our phones out and we scroll.

But that boredom was generative, right?

If you sit doing nothing for long enough, your mind will start going to work and you'll

daydream, you'll have a fantasy, you'll start observing the other people around you,

you know, and, and you'll be present to that place and time.

And now we're not.

We just use the phone to go somewhere else.

And so I, I just, I don't know, I've become a lot more deliberate about consciousness

hygiene, which, you know, you could, a nicer word would be care of the soul.

Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely accurate.

And I, I think that the, the other thing that's going on is you're absorbing the opinions

of so many other people that you find it very difficult to formulate your own, which leads

to groupthink.

Yes.

And one of the problems with echo chambers, if people find themselves, your algorithm

is essentially things that you're interested in or acting with.

Yeah.

And a lot of those things you're finding like-minded people and they're all agreeing

that, you know, this is amazing or this is a problem and you sort of lock on to that.

And then you, you see what happens when people deviate from that narrative and they get

attacked.

Right.

You don't want to get attacked.

So you signal.

Exactly.

You're one of the good guys.

Yeah.

And you're, you're letting someone else think for you and there's nothing worse.

And you know, when you're scrolling, you're, you know, you're, you've got these little

dopamine hits.

Great.

But at someone else's rant, someone else's obsession, someone else's ideology and, you

know, I get why people don't want to think for themselves or it's easier to let other

people think for them.

I think we need to reclaim this and I agree.

I think it's a, it's part of our political problem.

Well, I know there's a lightness that I achieve when I take, you know, multiple days off.

It's generally like, I feel it after the first day and then the second day I feel much better.

And the third day I feel even better.

I found this out once I broke my phone in Hawaii and it was kind of funny.

Like it just was randomly calling people.

I dropped it and I was showing my wife like, who is this?

It just keeps calling people.

Constantly.

And I'm just holding it.

I hang up and it calls somebody else.

Hang up, it calls them.

It was like going through my entire contact list.

And so the phone was broken.

It's just been annoying, your friends.

Well, no, I just shut it off.

So it was broken.

I couldn't use it for anything else.

So I couldn't get an email.

I couldn't get anything.

So I shut it off.

I just left it in the hotel.

And then I had to order a phone and I was on Lennon and it took like three days to get

a phone delivered there.

So for those three days, I was like, why don't I just live like this all the time?

I feel so much better.

And then immediately I got my phone on my truck quarter.

I know.

It's very, you know, when I just decide, you know, all right, online, you know, TSA line

going to, you know, I'm just going to be here with this boredom and I'm not going to pull

my phone out.

And you really have to fight.

Yes.

It's such an instinct.

And it's amazing.

These things have only been around for 10 or 12 years.

It's crazy.

And everyone's attached to it.

I always say that if there was a drug that made you stare at your hand for six hours

and it would be banned immediately, people would be like, what the fuck is wrong with these

people?

They're just looking at their hand.

Like, this is an epidemic.

And it's a new posture to see it, right?

You know, Mike, one of my kids, I went to pick her up at school and there was this boy

outside reading his phone that he was hunched over and he was resting his chin.

Like, he couldn't even hold his head up.

He was just resting his chin on his chest and staring his phone, waiting for his parents

to pick him up.

Like, look at his neck.

Yeah.

I know.

Asteroparosis is important.

Yeah.

Or some kind of bulging discs or something.

Like, it was just bizarre.

I'm like, that would be a painful for me to sit like that first.

I wonder if orthopedists have diagnosed any kind of like phone, phone spying.

Oh, they certainly have.

Yeah.

They certainly have.

Yeah.

There's been discussions about that, about people having pains in their neck because

they're leaning over all day, staring at a phone.

Yeah, it's a bad one.

It's just it's just, I think being in nature too is another way.

I mean, just like walking.

There's a scientist I interviewed who's really interesting.

He's a woman named Kalina Kristoff Haji Livia.

She's Bulgarian, Canadian, and she studies spontaneous thought,

which I didn't even think was a field.

And it's a small field, but spontaneous thought

is daydreaming, mind wandering, fantasy, intuition,

these bolts from the blue that we get occasionally.

We don't know where they come from.

And she says, and she does these cool experiments,

she'll put an experienced meditator in an FMRI machine

and tell him or her to press a button when a thought intrudes.

Because even if you're a good meditator,

she says every 10 seconds a thought intrudes.

And she'll look at what part of the brain is activated

and when the person presses the button.

And one of the things she's found, and this is mysterious,

is that she sees activity in the hippocampus,

which is where memories are, and some other things,

but essentially memories.

Four seconds before the person realizes the thought has come.

So it takes four seconds for a thought

to get from the subconscious or unconscious

into our conscious awareness.

What is it doing there?

And that's a long time and brain time.

And we don't know exactly, but there's some process.

And maybe there's some inhibitory process

that it has to get through in order to become conscious.

But anyway, these are the kind of things she works with.

But she says that there's less spontaneous thought going on

today than there was 20 years ago.

And the reason is we're filling the space of our head

with all this nonsense.

I wonder if it's going to have an impact on creative work.

I don't know if it's even possible to quantify this,

but if you could see how much creativity is generated

by people pre and post social media.

Yeah.

My guess is there's less of it, because I do think

that that process, I don't know about you,

but I get ideas when I'm just walking around thinking

and not online.

And it's a space of creativity, and we're shrinking it.

I told you that I used to drive

in delivery newspapers.

We were talking about driving this now.

One of my most creative periods was when my radio was broken.

So I was just driving doing this task,

where you pick up a paper, fold it, put it in a plastic bag,

chuck it out the window, and I was just doing this

and checking off the, and when I was doing that,

I would have all my best ideas, because I wasn't listening

to a morning radio.

I wasn't listening to a cassette on tape.

I was just silenced doing this thing,

and then I was so creative when I was doing it.

That's generative boredom.

Yes.

It's beneficial.

It's hugely, but especially if there's no one around you,

right, because there's no one to talk to to alleviate

that boredom, it's just you and your mind,

and it was a couple hours a day.

So a couple hours every day, I would have this moment

where I was by myself.

And were you writing jokes?

What were you doing?

Yeah, I would come up with ideas for jokes.

Some of my best ideas I ever came up with back then

were from driving.

Yeah.

I almost didn't want to quit the job because of that.

I mean, they'll be doing it.

No, it was hell, because it was, especially in the winter.

Yeah, it was Boston.

It was, you know, I'd have to go about five o'clock

in the morning every day.

It was rough.

I find walking is where that happens to me.

Same thing, right?

Yeah, and actually, Kalena says, I mean,

there are people who've studied, create,

creative people through history.

People like Einstein and Beethoven,

and all these major creative people

and the sciences and in the arts.

And that they worked a short day,

but they spent a lot of time walking.

Interesting.

And yeah, they'd worked like three or four hours,

and which is about all I can write in a day.

And then they'd taken a long walk in the afternoon.

They also took a lot of vacations.

They had a lot of unstructured time,

and that that's where a lot of the creativity comes.

It doesn't always come when you're like at the keyboard.

Right.

It sometimes comes, I mean, certainly solving problems.

If I'm really nodded up, and I don't know,

for me, transitions, like, where do I go from here?

Since I'm not writing narrative, it's not always obvious.

You know, I need a transition,

and I don't know how to execute that turn.

I'll take a walk, and very often it'll come to me,

or I'll wake up with the answer.

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A lot of writers like to write first and then walk,

and maybe even with a recorder,

so they can just walk and just talk

when the idea pops in their head so they don't lose it.

Yeah, I have a little pad I carry with me.

Yeah, you like writing it down better than recording it?

Yeah, for me, yeah, I need to see it.

So another interesting experiment I did for this book

was this beeper experiment.

There was a scientist, a psychologist,

the University of Las Vegas.

And for 50 years, he's been doing the same one experiment,

which is sampling people's inner experience.

And he does this, you have a beeper that you carry around

in a little earpiece, and at random times of the day,

you get, and it catches you.

And it's a very sudden rise to this beep,

and then you have a little pad,

and you're supposed to write down what you were thinking.

Sounds really simple, it's actually really hard.

I mean, there's a lot of issues with it.

Like, you start thinking, what if it goes off now?

That's one problem.

But also, you're a little self-conscious.

So you do about five beeps over the course of the day,

and then he interviews you about these moments.

And you think you've got it down.

Like, I did just give you, a lot of my beeps were about food.

And so I was seasoning a filet of salmon

and walking to the refrigerator with it.

And just at the, I was thinking to myself,

fuck, I forgot the pepper.

I know, my thoughts were not that profound.

And so I said, all right, pepper.

It was easy, fuck, pepper.

But then when he came to interview me, he said,

well, did you hear the word pepper,

or did you speak the word pepper?

And that's, you know, suddenly you realize

those voices in your head,

you don't know if you're listening or speaking.

And so, anyway, you have this long interrogation with him,

and he sorts through all these things,

and he tries to get you to isolate

what was before what he would call

the footlights of consciousness.

And I found it really hard.

I couldn't separate the thought,

the way he wanted me to,

because there were always several things going on at once.

Like I was standing in a bakery,

and I was deciding whether by a roll or not,

another profound thought.

And, but at the same time,

I was like smelling the baked goods

and the cheeses that they sold.

And this woman had this horrible plat on her skirt

that was like, you know, really unflattering.

And I was hearing people, you know, behind me, talking.

And so I couldn't pull all the threads.

And we argued a lot, actually.

But the thing he's, I said,

so after 50 years, what have you learned about human thought?

And he's very allergic to theory.

He still has no theories about it, but he did say,

well, a lot of people think they're verbal thinkers

that their thoughts are in the form of words.

But it turns out that's kind of a minority,

that there are a lot of people who think in images,

and then there are a lot of people

who think in unsimbleized thought,

which I don't totally understand,

but these are thoughts that are neither words or images.

I do have a sense in my own thought process,

which I never thought about this way,

that a lot of my thoughts are just on that verge

of being word thoughts, but I haven't found the words yet.

But I know the thought,

even though I haven't put it into words.

And William James called it

Permanentary Thinking, Permanition Thinking,

it was the term he used.

So anyway, so I did this for several days,

and we had many arguments, and I was saying,

look, you can't separate a thought.

Every thought colors the next thought,

and there are these thoughts,

and you never have, anyway,

we just would go back and forth,

and I was arguing why you can't separate thoughts.

It's a stream, it's a very dynamic stream.

And at the end, we had a final session,

and he's a very funny guy.

He's really allergic to theories.

At one point, I said I was writing a book on consciousness,

and he said, good luck with that.

Very encouraging.

Anyway, he said, well, he described it,

these verbal thinkers and visual thinkers

and unsimbleized thinkers.

And I find that really interesting,

because we assume, when we say the word,

what are you thinking that we know,

and that you're thinking the way I'm thinking,

but it turns out we're not.

That's just an umbrella word

for many different styles of thinking,

and we're really different.

So that was one thing.

But the other thing he said in our last meeting on Zoom,

he said, there's also a small subset of people

who just have very little inner life.

You're one of them.

And I was like, what?

You know, I write books, you know?

I meditate, I ruminate, I mean.

How can he make that distinction, though?

How does he know what's going on inside your head?

He felt that my inability to isolate a thought

was evidence that there weren't thoughts,

and then I was kind of backfilling

with all this other simultaneous stuff going on.

I mean, I didn't agree with him.

I thought it was kind of crazy,

but that's what you asked him.

Have you ever conversations with him about other things?

See how he thinks?

No, he's very much in the therapist mode,

like he's asking the questions.

Yeah, I'd like to know like how he thinks

with that.

What his mode is.

Yeah, I'd like to talk to him about.

Now he would probably to say that.

Anyway, he's posted all these conversations on his website,

so if people really want to be bored,

they can check him out.

That's a weird thing to say that you know,

especially someone like you who writes

and does think a lot,

and clearly has got some sort of dialogue going on in your head.

The idea that you don't,

and this guy can say that.

I know.

That seems a little arrogant.

Yeah, I think I just didn't fit his template of like,

how people think.

Yeah, well, that's why he should get a better therapist.

Move around.

All right, find somebody else.

Good advice.

I mean, it seems like that's a very narrow mind.

I couldn't imagine saying to anyone,

regardless of what kind of theory I'm following,

or what school of thought.

I don't know what's going on in your head.

I can't.

It's not possible.

No, and that's it.

There's William James said this,

the great founder of American psychology,

that the breach between two consciousness

is one of the biggest breaches in nature.

Yes.

And we, you know, I don't know your conscious for a fact.

I assume it because your behaviors

mesh in where the same species.

And we have theory of mind.

We can imagine our way into someone else's head.

But it's a guess.

It's a guess.

And so there's, I mean, that's part of the mystery.

Well, it's one of the things that I do

when I'm talking to people.

I try to imagine, well, I'm so fortunate

that I've been able to have so many conversations

with so many different people.

So many different ways that people view the world.

And when I'm talking to someone,

particularly if they're very different from me

or anyone I know, I always try to put myself in their head.

And I, after they talk for 15 or 20 minutes,

I try to like recognize like how they approach things

and see if I'm like, what is that?

What's that world like?

Like this person's perspective.

Especially you're operating on two tracks.

Yeah.

You're holding the conversation.

Yeah.

But you're also thinking.

I'm trying to tune in.

Yeah.

Right.

I'm trying to, because I always feel like

when someone is like a great performance,

like a great comedian or a great musician,

one of the things that they're doing

is they're bringing you into their head.

Yeah.

Like there's a hypnosis.

When someone sings an amazing song

and the whole crowd is singing along,

there's a hypnotic element to that.

Where when someone's like really killing on stage,

their voice, it's just perfect.

It's like, oh, yeah.

Like you're in their head.

Like it's, it's a mind melt.

It's a, yeah, it is a mind melt.

And there's a little bit of that

that goes on in conversations.

There's a mind melt.

And I always try, especially if this is a rational person,

I always try to put myself in their head

or at least empty out mind and let them think

and then try to just keep the conversation rolling

with just pure curiosity.

Yeah.

But always try to think.

I don't think the same way other people do.

And maybe I can learn something from this.

I can get something out of the way they think.

Seems to me you're, you have a real gift of curiosity.

I mean, that's a big gift.

You're an intensely curious person.

Well, I've always been that way,

but I've been very fortunate that I've had something like this

that allowed me to feed it.

Yeah.

I mean, the vast majority of time on my phone,

I just pursue curiosities.

I don't, I really am mostly involved in social media.

Yeah.

I watched interesting YouTube videos.

Like I went down a black hole rabbit hole last night.

Oh my God.

You want to really break your brain?

There was a video of Brian Cox

where he's talking about this black hole

that they found that's bigger than our entire solar system.

Wow.

The event horizon extends far beyond Pluto.

That is mind blowing.

Yeah.

When he was discreet, he said,

we don't understand why it exists.

We don't understand how it could have formed

so early in the universe, but yet there it is.

How do they measure it?

I don't even know how big it is.

I don't know.

I did.

I don't know.

I'm assuming there's a lot of revelations

that have come out since the implementation

of the James Webb telescope.

Yeah.

That images are incredible.

Insane.

Insane.

And this is one that's causing this very interesting

new theory or perspective

on the age of the universe.

So there's some galaxies that they've found

that shouldn't have been.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I read about this.

It's throwing all their assumptions

about the age of the universe up for grabs.

Which makes sense because the further you can look back,

the more you're going to be able to see.

The assumption that the universe was 13.7 billion years old

was essentially based on how far we could go back.

And then the analysis of the radio waves

that are coming from the supposed explosion.

And then you've got guys like Sir Roger Penrose

who say, no, this is a constant cycle.

It's not one birth of the universe.

It's boom, smash, boom, smash forever.

It's an accordion.

And it's always happened, which is the ultimate mind-fuck.

Well, you know, the interesting thing about astronomy,

actually, astronomy and consciousness studies

have the same problem, which is you can't get out

of consciousness to study it from a distance, right?

Everything, every tool you have to study consciousness

is a product of consciousness, including science.

The scientific enterprise is a manifestation

of human consciousness.

The problems you decide to study, the tools you have to do it

with, the scale at which you're working,

it's all like a product of consciousness.

Astronomy, too, is trying to understand something

it can't get outside of, right?

I mean, because its subject is everything that there is,

the universe.

So you can do interesting things from inside,

using telescopes, and you can figure out how old things are

and rates of expansion and all this kind of stuff.

But you can never get that godlike perspective

that we have with other scientific problems.

And this is, I think, part of the reason

we haven't solved the consciousness problem

that we can't get outside.

We're in a labyrinth, and everything we know is consciousness.

I mean, which is a very weird idea.

I remember asking Christophe Koch, the scientist

I mentioned earlier, I said, well,

what would the world be like without any consciousness?

And that is a trippy thought.

Because everything we perceive is the scale of things.

Like, we operate at this scale, right?

We're like five or six feet tall.

We have bodies like this.

But there's another world going on microscopically,

and there's another world going on microscopically.

So if there's no consciousness, what's the proper scale?

There isn't any.

And when I asked him this question, he said,

particles and waves, that's all there is.

There would be nothing but particles and waves.

There might not even be space time.

That may be a product of consciousness also.

So that was kind of mind blowing to learn.

That's the weirdest perspective.

Is it consciousness is a part of reality?

That it is how reality is formed.

And that without consciousness and the perceiving

of all this stuff doesn't exist.

Something exists.

But it's not, it has no shape.

It has no scale.

It has no, because consciousness is what's perceiving light

and we're perceiving colors.

And it's constructing, but it really is just particles.

Yeah, and waves.

And waves and particles and atoms.

And subatomic particles, when you get into the weirder stuff.

And we give it order.

Right.

I know, which it's just a mind blowing idea.

Well, it really is a game changer.

Because if you think about it that way,

you go, okay, well, what is all this solid stuff?

Yeah.

What is this?

Like, does this even really exist?

Or does it only exist?

Well, there's a famous Arthur Eddington was a physicist

early in the 20th century.

And he said, the real table is mostly space.

And only in our consciousness and at our scale is it solid.

And, but at this scale of particle physics,

which is equally legitimate scale, it's just wide open space

with these waves and particles, but a lot of emptiness.

That was kind of mind blowing too.

So, it's such an abstract concept for a person

in their car right now listening on the way to work.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Maybe they want to pull over.

All this stuff is real.

Yeah.

It is sort of, but only if you're conscious.

Well, you could think of consciousness as the way

the universe experiences itself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's what really, what if the universe consciousness?

Yeah, I mean, that's another way to look at it.

Maybe consciousness is part of the universe.

Yeah.

But it's not giving it the order that we give it.

We see at a certain spectrum of light.

Bees see at another spectrum of light.

The world we behold, the world that appears to us

is the world that our senses allow us to see.

When I was doing this research on plant intelligence,

they have 20 senses.

We only have five.

They're picking up magnetic fields.

They're picking up pH.

They're picking up nitrogen levels.

They have all these.

How do we know all this?

Their research is working on it.

There's a group of botanists who call themselves

plant neurobiologists.

Knowing full well, there are no neurons in plants.

They're kind of trolling more conventional botanists.

And they're doing these cool experiments with plants.

A couple examples of some of these amazing things plants can do.

They can hear.

So if you play a recording of a caterpillar

and munching on leaves, they'll react

and they'll send chemicals into their leaves

to make them taste bad or butoxic.

They can see.

There are vines that change the shape of their leaves,

depending on the plant.

They're twining up in order to be hidden.

How do they see the shape to imitate it?

We don't know.

They, plants will go toward a pipe with water in it

because they can hear the water even though it's totally dry

and they'll send their roots down to it.

They can hear the water?

They can hear.

Yeah.

There's this plant neurobiologist showed me

this a couple videos he'd made.

I actually just posted them on my website.

He showed that a corn plants roots can navigate

a maze to get to fertilizer.

So you put a little fertilizer in a corner

and the root will find the most direct root to the nitrogen.

Spring just slid into your DMs.

Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner,

those sandals that can keep up with you

and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up.

Spring's calling.

Ross, work your magic.

There was a plumbing problem that I had in my house

in California.

And the plumber couldn't figure out what was wrong.

It was like the pipes were stuck.

And what what had happened was in the backyard,

one of the trees, the roots had gotten into the pipe

and formed like this tree.

I mean, it was huge.

It looked like when I pulled it,

I'd put it up on my Instagram.

See if you can find it.

It looked like a muskrat.

I mean, it was like dense with roots

and it was thick.

It was like three feet long.

It was great.

That's it.

That was in my pipe.

Oh my God.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah.

What kind of tree was it?

I don't know.

I think it was an oak tree because it was oak trees.

Excuse me in the backyard where they dug up.

That's why.

Look how thick it is.

It's crazy.

And it went through a tiny little crack.

Yeah.

I mean, it probably forced the crack open

and then went in there and just really grew out.

Yeah.

Well, it had a source of water.

Yeah.

But it's just kind of bananas that somehow or another

had figured out that it was water in that pipe.

You know, we underestimate plants basically

because we can't see their behaviors

and going to that point about scale.

They have, they operate at a time scale.

It seems very slow to us.

So we don't notice.

But if you use time lapse photography, you see what they're up to.

And it's pretty amazing.

Another interesting video that this guy showed me.

His name is Stefan O'Moncuso.

He's an Italian scientist, botanist,

is how bean plants find a pole to grow up.

And so he grows these beans and he has a metal pole on a dolly.

And, you know, I always assume they made this pattern

darlin' called its circumnutation.

You know, they go through the spiral.

And I always assume they just kind of did this till they hit something.

No, they know where the pole is.

And you watch this thing and it's going in circles,

but it's reaching and reaching.

It looks like a fly fisherman, you know, casting.

And it finally gets to the pole.

And so how does it know where the pole is in space?

Well, one theory is that every time the cells divide,

there's a little sound that's produced.

And that maybe they're using echolocation like a bat,

kind of bouncing it off of the pole.

And that's how they know where they are in space.

We still don't understand.

I know, some amazing things.

And also you can teach a plant a certain behavior.

And it will remember for 28 days.

So they do this thing with sensitive plants.

You may have seen them in Hawaii, actually.

It's a tropical plant when you touch it.

The leaves collapse to keep from being eaten.

It's called mimosa pudica.

And normally if you shake it, it will also do this.

And if you shake it repeatedly, it learns to ignore

that stimulus.

And it will remember 28 days.

And it won't react when you do it.

To give you some comparison, fruit flies

can only remember stuff for 24 hours.

And then they start over again.

So another fact about plants, I got really deep into this.

Because I was trying to, you know, these guys

say plants are conscious.

Yeah.

They have some kind of basic form of conscience.

Consciousness.

Here's another one.

The anesthetics that we use to put us out for surgery,

put plants out.

So a Venus fly trap, if you give it an anesthetic,

will not react when the bug comes across it.

Now, that is like really interesting.

Because it suggests they have two modes of being, right?

Sort of like unconscious or aware.

So Stefano believes that they're conscious.

Now, this raises interesting ethical issues, right?

If plants are conscious, do they feel pain?

And that, I was really a little worried about that.

What if that beautiful smell of an freshly morn lawn

is actually the chemical equivalent of a scream?

Yeah.

But Stefano said he doesn't think they feel pain.

Why does he think that?

He said that pain would not be adaptive for a creature

that can't run away.

Well, if that's the case, then why

do they produce chemicals to make themselves taste worse?

They know what's going on.

They're aware that they're being eaten,

but that it doesn't register to them as pain.

I don't know how he knows this.

But if he's wrong, then we care about that.

What's left to eat?

So I think you have to make the assumption that life eats life.

Yeah.

And another scientist that I interviewed about this,

who does think plants feel pain, says,

look, it's just a fact of life.

We have to eat other species.

And he was kind of gruff about that.

But anyway, Stefano's idea is that being able to move,

take your hand off the hot stove or run away,

then pain is really useful.

It's a really important signal.

But he also points out that lots of plants like to be eaten.

I mean, grass is benefit from being with a ruminant,

and that regenerates them.

They want to be eaten.

And then you have all the fruits and nuts

that they produce, that they produce,

that they want mammals to take away and spread their seeds.

So you don't have to worry about going beyond vegan.

No, well, it just seems like a cycle.

It seems like a very interesting cycle

that exists with all living things.

And then of course, when you die, you know, plants eat meat.

Yeah, they consume carnivores.

Yeah, that's the thing.

They consume all the dead animals that die near them.

Yeah.

And fungi.

Yeah, and fungi.

Well, that's the other weird things, the mycelium,

that they use to communicate with.

Well, that's another really interesting case

of intelligence and nature, right?

I mean, you've probably done shows on this,

but the way they use mycelium to send nutrients

to their children or share them in the forest.

Allocate resources to certain plants and need them more.

Yeah.

And also communicate risk.

I mean, that there's a threat.

And so there are alarm signals that go out.

You know, the overall place we're getting to with this

as we look at consciousness and all these other species

is that it's the world is just a lot more alive

than we thought and that we've been, you know,

the whole legacy of the enlightenment

and Western science has been that like,

we have some monopoly on this stuff.

And everything else is more or less dead

or, you know, we can use it as we wish.

But we're seeing, I think we're approaching

like a Copernican moment for our species.

You know, when Copernas came along and he said,

actually, the earth revolves around the sun,

not the other way around.

It was like mind blowing to people

that our centrality in the universe had been,

we'd been dethroned.

And we were dethroned again when, you know, Darwin said,

we're animals like all the other animals

and we evolved from animals.

That blew people's minds, too.

I think that we're kind of democratizing consciousness,

that consciousness is much more extensive than we thought

and the world is more animate than we thought.

And that's an old idea, you know,

traditional cultures have always believed

that the world is full of spirit

and that you had to respect animals and all living things

and some to some cultures rocks also, you know, dead things.

So I think we're at this moment of reanimating

the world right now and it's science that's driving it.

And I think that's really exciting.

It is exciting, but it's such a paradigm shift

in terms of people's perceptions of the world

that it's gonna be difficult for, like,

your average 40-year-old person

that works in office job to swallow.

Yeah.

What also makes sense why offices feel so soulless

when you walk into a thing and everything is made

out of synthetic material and plastics and metal

and it's all manufactured and you're under these bullshit lights

and it just feels...

Doesn't feel alive.

No, it doesn't feel alive at all.

You might be just surrounded by things

that don't have consciousness

because they've been kind of stuffed into a form

and stuck in place rather than something that exists

that works with the earth, like soil is alive, right?

Yeah.

And yeah, there's another example.

Soil is a lot more alive than we ever realized.

We thought it was just dirt.

Right.

We know that there are a million critters

in every teaspoon for soil.

There's a really cool channel that I follow on YouTube.

It's a guy who takes like rainwater or pond water

and he puts it in a jar with some plants

and he just leaves it there for months

and then he comes back and there's all these living things

moving around it.

See if you can find that guy on YouTube.

It's fast.

So I dug a pond or had a pond dug on my property in Connecticut

and I watched life come to this pond.

It's just, you know, it was just a hole with water

and within a month it was teeming with life.

It's just amazing.

Like, how does it get there?

Birds carry a lot of it in and frogs carry a lot of it in.

And I, after a month or two,

I looked at it under a microscope

and you couldn't believe it was like a city of critters.

You find like trout on lakes

that are like way high at the mountain

and no one ever stalked the lake.

And they're like, okay, how did it get in there?

There's all these theories.

Birds pick up eggs and deposit them, I guess, is one way.

Right, but like, how do they get fertilized?

That's a good question.

Maybe they're already fertilized.

Do you think?

I don't know.

Yes, that's it.

Do they have lots of views?

Yeah, that's it.

Wait, on the left?

So this guy, he just takes pond water

or lake water or rain water

and he puts it in a jar and then he leaves it there.

Yeah, it is.

Like go to like day 60.

On the top row where it says day 60 to the right,

see where it says day 60, click on that.

So he takes these things and then searches them

after X amount of days and you see all this stuff

living in there, all these things swimming around in there.

This isn't the same guy

so there must be other guys that do the same thing.

But you see these weird little creatures

that are floating around in there and yeah.

I brought my pond water to a biologist

and he like, well this is different

because this guy's bringing in,

he's making an actual aquarium.

The guy that I saw was just essentially

just figured out how to take a scoop of dirt

and whatever is alive, it's in that dirt

with some muddy water and put it in a jar

and put more pond water in there

and they just leave it there.

And then you see all these weird little crustaceans,

weird little shrimp looking things

and some of them are killing the other ones

so there's like a real ecosystem in there.

Oh yeah, very, yeah and it's just created overnight.

Yeah.

It's very cool.

So I think that this is like a trend of our time

that's really important that we went from this idea

of the dead world that we could exploit

to this other idea that it's much more animate.

And of course that's the default for humans.

All traditional cultures believe in animism basically.

It's also the default for kids, right?

Kids think everything is animate

until we knock it out of them in school.

Yeah.

And so it's very interesting to see science

supporting this idea after all these years.

And the other thing that's kind of interesting

is that it's happening at the same time

that some people think AI is gonna be conscious.

So we're under pressure from both sides.

I mean that we're getting these two, you know,

these two things happening at once

that machines may soon be smarter than we are,

may be conscious, although we could talk about it.

I don't think they can be conscious

but they can certainly make us think they're conscious.

And then on the other hand, we have the animals

who are clearly are conscious.

And the research on animals is like,

they're down to plants, they're down to insects

that have signs of, I would use the word sentience

rather than consciousness

because consciousness implies interiority

and the voice in your head and things like that.

They have a more basic form of consciousness

that I call sentience.

Like dog consciousness?

Yeah, I think dogs are higher conscious.

I think they're more conscious than those simple things.

I would say dogs are conscious, not just sentient.

Is it just because they communicate with us

that we think that?

I mean, why would we assume if plants

have all these different senses

and we see this communication with them

in terms of like allocating resources

to other plants that needed to use the mycelium,

their ability to do all these different things?

Why are we assuming that just because they can't move

the way we move?

Yeah, that they don't have more going on.

Right, yeah, it's possible,

but I don't know what good it would do them.

Like plants, what they get really good at,

what matters to them is biochemistry.

They have to produce chemicals either to poison

their enemies or confuse them with, you know, with drugs.

But they also want to grow and thrive.

They do want to grow and they also exist in a community.

Yes, they're definitely.

Right, so do anything that consciousness

would be essential in order to foster

that feeling of community?

That's interesting.

I hadn't thought about that.

Yeah, yeah, that could be.

Dogs are an easier case because they communicate with us,

directly.

They're clearly conscious.

Yeah, in a way that's very profound.

But different than we, obviously.

Yeah, clearly.

One of the realizations I had when I was in the cave

was that, you know, we often think

that we're more conscious than animals,

but actually animals are more conscious than we are.

They have to be.

They have to be present because they

get eaten if they're not, right?

Because we have this giant structure of civilization

and the security it gives us.

And we have this technology that allows us to check out.

But I actually think animals are more conscious than we are.

It's different.

But if we think of being conscious

is really being present to the moment,

dogs are very present to the moment.

Well, certainly animals are getting more information

about the environment than we are.

Yes.

They have a much better sense of smell,

a much better sense of hearing.

There's a lot of different things that they can do.

Like animals seem to be able to tell when you're nervous.

Yeah, they read the environment.

They read other creatures.

Yeah, and, you know, we used to have more skills

when we had to survive in a natural world in nature.

You know, we, I mean, you see this with traditional,

you know, with tribes, indigenous tribes

that they have knowledge of nature

that far exceeds ours because they need it to survive.

But anyway, so I think we're going to get to a point

where we have to decide whose team we're on.

Are we like with these machines that speak our language

and speak in the first person and sound like us?

Why?

Or are we with the animals that can feel and suffer and die?

And I think that's going to be a big choice

for us to make as a civilization.

Why do you think that AI won't be conscious?

The most interesting line of research,

well, a couple of reasons.

The first is the idea that it can be conscious,

which is very common in Silicon Valley.

I talked to lots of people there

and they said, oh, it's just a matter of time.

Some of that is confusion that intelligence

and consciousness necessarily go together and they don't.

They're very, they have an orthogonal relationship, right?

I mean, you know people who are conscious

and not too intelligent, right?

And we all do.

So it's not going to just come along for the ride

with intelligence as these machines get more intelligent.

But the belief that AI can be conscious

is based on a metaphor that I think is a crappy metaphor.

And that is that the brain is a kind of computer.

And this is widely held.

It's interesting to note that in history,

whatever the cool cutting edge technology was,

brains were likened to that.

So it was looms for a while.

It was clocks for a while.

It was telephone switchboards.

Whatever was the cool technology.

Surely that's how brains work.

Now it's computers.

But think about it.

In a computer, you have this sharp distinction

between hardware and software.

That's the key to their success.

And you can run the same program

on any number of different hardware.

They're interchangeable.

Brains aren't like that.

There's no distinction between hardware and software.

Every experience you have, every memory

is a physical change to the brain,

to the way it's wired.

We start out with all these connections,

and then they get pruned as we grow up.

Every brain is shaped by its experience.

So this idea that you could separate,

that consciousness is some kind of software

that you could run on other things besides meat.

I just think it doesn't hold up.

Well, if the universe is experiencing itself

subjectively through consciousness,

why does it have to be only biological consciousness?

It doesn't have to be.

But if there is a technology that is invented,

that essentially does all the things

that a human body does physically,

and also interacts with consciousness,

the consciousness of the universe.

Yeah, hypothetically.

Hypothetically.

Yeah, the universe is conscious.

If we are using the mind as essentially an antenna

to tune into consciousness,

other things could tune it.

It's possible that we could make an antenna.

Yes, absolutely.

It's also likely that if we are ever visited by aliens,

that they will have some kind of consciousness

and it may not be meat-based, right?

Right, right.

But maybe at one point in time it was,

but they realize that there's biological limitations

in terms of its ability to evolve

that it can be far surpassed with technology.

Yeah, I mean, that or it just evolved in a different way,

or they're channeling it in a different way.

But the other reason I don't see it happening

with computers as we know them,

because that's the debate now,

whether these computers we have,

that these large language models

and the next generation can be conscious,

is that the research that I found most persuasive

about consciousness is basically,

has consciousness beginning with feelings, not thoughts.

In other words, it's embodied.

And I have to just develop this a little bit.

But the brain exists to keep the body alive,

not the other way around.

Although we tend, since we identify with our heads,

where most of our senses are, we lose track of that.

And the body speaks to the brain in feelings, right?

Feelings of hunger, itchiness, warmth, cold.

But also feelings of shame,

when our social standing has not, you know,

has been damaged.

Anyway, we have these feelings, they depend on a body.

Feelings have no weight if you're not vulnerable,

your body isn't vulnerable.

And probably mortal.

So consciousness is embodied in a really critical way.

And computers are not.

Now robots will be,

and I actually interview a guy, a scientist at USC,

who is trying to make a vulnerable robot.

So he's essentially a pulstering the thing

with skin that can tear and be damaged.

And he's filling the skin with all these sensors

so that it can be like us and be vulnerable.

And generate feelings that are how consciousness begins.

So for a long time, we thought consciousness

had to be in the cortex, right?

The most human, newest part of the brain, the outer covering.

And that's where rational thought and executive function are

and all these kind of things.