Michael Pollan: The Hidden Cost Of Constant Distraction (Use THIS Practice To Reclaim Your Attention, Clarity, And Inner Freedom)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The mind is bigger than consciousness. Probably ninety percent of
what your brain does you're not aware of. It's like
managing your body. It's perceiving things in your environment you're
not attending to. We should remember that brains exist to
keep bodies alive, not the other way.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Like, Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. Today's guest
is someone that I've wanted in the seat for such
a long time. I just found out that I missed
out on him last time by a year because On
Purpose launched in twenty nineteen and his book That I
Loved came out in twenty eighteen. I'm speaking about the one,
the Only. Michael Pollen an award winning journalist, best selling

(00:33):
author known for reshaping how we think about food, nature,
and how we experience the world around us. In his
new book, A World Appears, he explores consciousness, how perception, awareness,
and attention shape the reality we live in. If you
feel like you're living on autopilot and want to live
with greater intention, this conversation will help you slow down,

(00:56):
see more clearly, and reconnect with what truly matters. Please
welcome to On Purpose. Michael polland Michael It's great to
have you here.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Thank you Jay, great to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I really meant it. I mean, your work to me
feels like what science, exploration and journalism needs to be about.
And I don't know where we lost that along the
way in our curiosity, our fascination with the metaphysical as
much as the material. And I just find it so

(01:27):
refreshing every time I read your work that you're constantly
pushing the boundaries and almost your self confession of being
caught in two minds or yourself debating these topics feel
so inviting, and it feels so different to how I
think science is now going about presenting topics as certain
and clear and discovered and solved, with a full stop

(01:50):
after them. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Well, you know, my work is always structured as a
quest or an education. I start out with questions, not answers,
and follow the path of my curiosity. I mean, if
you read my work, you'll see I'm always kind of
an idiot on page one, like I was like, yeah,
what is this consciousness thing? Or where does my food

(02:14):
come from? I mean, these really basic questions. And then
the books are really the story of discovery of learning,
and I learn, I learn alongside the reader. I really
hate books that lecture at me. And most science writing,
most science starts with the abstract, the conclusion. You know,
I think that's backwards. It's like telling the punchline to

(02:36):
a joke before you tell the joke. Yeah, so anyway,
So that's I mean, I love that. And what I
love about being a journalist is that, you know, we
get paid to learn whole new subjects as adults, you know,
have a whole new education. And I think that's an
incredible privilege.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Is there such a thing as a bad question?

Speaker 1 (02:56):
No, but some questions are more interesting than others.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
How do you decide?

Speaker 1 (03:01):
It's just something that if I really care about learning
the answer, and I know other people do as well.
Like there was when I started writing about food, it
began with that very simple question. I realized, I don't
know where my food comes from. It's not the supermarket.
How did they produce this thing? I remember starting out
with a I wrote a story about the cattle industry,

(03:23):
and I wanted to learn how a steak, a prime steak,
gets to a steakhouse in Manhattan, and I followed it
all the way back to a ranch in Idaho, and
then to a feed lot, and then to a slaughterhouse,
and I had no idea how many pharmaceuticals were giving
to these animals, how miserably their lives were when they

(03:43):
left the ranch. It was just a revelation. And you know,
if you think about it, it's such an obvious question,
where does my food come from? And everyone used to
know the answer. If you go back one hundred years
or one hundred and fifty years, that would have been
a stupid question, because everybody either was a farmer, or
knew a arm or went to farms. But our food
chain got so long and intricate that we lost track

(04:05):
and we don't know what happens behind the supermarket. So
you know, these are not complicated questions, but the answers
end up being very complicated sometimes, and that's certainly true
with consciousness. I got interested in that two ways, one
through meditation and the other through the psychedelic experiences I
had for my book, How to Change Your Mind, And

(04:27):
psychedelics and meditation both have a way of kind of
smudging the windshield of our consciousness. You know, suddenly we
normally we don't have to think about consciousness. It's just
the water we swim in, you know. But when you
smudge that pain, you realize, hey, there is something between
me and the world. It's this way, but it could
be that way. It's subject to change. What is that

(04:51):
and that you know? That became the question that drove
this new book.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Why do you think science has brushed aside research and
exploration of consciousness in the way that you've chosen to
approach you what's been the reason?

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well, science is now all over it, but it didn't
start until around nineteen eighty nine or ninety, which is incredible.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
That feels so late.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
This is such a huge phenomenon of our lives. And
there are reasons for that. One is it's really hard.
It's not called the hard problem for nothing. It was
considered disreputable if you were a scientist to work on consciousness.
It was a little too vague and woo woo. You
can go all the way back to Galileo, and he

(05:31):
made a decision that was really faithful for the future
of science, which was we are going to focus and
remember the Church was very suspicious of science back then.
We are going to focus on objective, measurable, third person reality,
and we are going to leave to the church the
soul by which he meant subjectivity and personal interior experience qualities. Also,

(05:57):
we're going to do quantities. We'll leave quality alone. He
knew those other things existed and were important, but he
also knew he'd be on the churches. He'd be stepping
on the church's toes by getting into it. So he
put science on this course, which it has followed it
ever since. It's been incredibly productive. We've figured out all
sorts of stuff by using you know, math is very

(06:20):
good for a lot of things. But along the way
we dropped this whole area, and it was only picked
up in a serious way. I mean, Freud did some
work on it, William James did some work on it.
But in terms of the physical sciences, it doesn't really
happen until Francis Crick, who was the discoverer of DNA
the double helix with Watson and another colleague. He decided,

(06:46):
having cracked the code of heritability in life, that now
he was going to nail down consciousness, damn it. And
he was a very brilliant but also arrogant scientist, and
he thought the same reductive science that had discovered the
alphabet of DNA could discover the source of consciousness, and
he predicted it would be a group of neurons in

(07:09):
the brain that were responsible, and he called these the
neural correlates of consciousness, and he worked on that. He
wrote some papers, and he found correlations between consciousness and
certain frequencies of brain waves. But at a certain point,
I think he realized that it doesn't really tell you anything.
You're still facing this huge question like how does three

(07:32):
pounds of brain tissue, this gray matter between our ears
generate subjective experience, internal perspective, self awareness, and even basic perception.
And we still don't know, and it may not be
possible to know. But there's a flurry of activity, and
there's a lot of people working on consciousness now they're

(07:55):
twenty two leading theories, which sort of tells you the
field is lost. And so that's what I delved into.
You're like, well, what can we say? And I learned
a lot of very interesting things along the way, but
I mean, i'll give away the fact that I did
not solve the hard problem and we're a long way
from solving it.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, why do you think? Why do you think it's
important to understand consciousness when today people may even feel
like we don't have time for it. We're just busy
at work. We're got an unlimited amount of entertainment to
catch up on. We're all late on a TV show
that everyone else loves. We have families, friends, traveled, There's
so much What would learning about consciousness do for us?

Speaker 1 (08:38):
I think learning about consciousness allows us to be more conscious.
I don't think we're as conscious as we could be
if you compare us to any animal, and many animals
are conscious. That's one of the things we've learned through
this research is that consciousness goes way down. You know,
Descartes thought we had a monopoly on consciousness, and it's
clearly not the case. Explore plant consciousness in the book,

(09:02):
which is you know, there's a group of scientists who
are convinced that plants are conscious. The value of being
conscious is this is the space of our freedom, this interiority.
Without this, we are zombies, and we should be cultivating
this space. It has enormous power to basically allow us

(09:24):
freedom from you know, there are a lot of companies,
there are a lot of technologies that want to think
our thoughts and occupy our consciousness. When you're on social media,
sure you're conscious, but minimally. So you're basically scrolling through
and allowing some corporation or some individual or some political
ideology to occupy your consciousness. And I think we give

(09:48):
up a lot when we do that. You know, the
machines have design designs on our time. We have a
phenomenon now where people are forming strong emotional attachments with machines,
with chatbots. I think this is essentially giving away their consciousness.
Is not worrying, very worrying. I mean, we are starting
to see I just read a report on AI psychosis.

(10:10):
These are people who have formed stronger emotional attachments with
machines than with people.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
Why is that? Why is it that we can easily form.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
I think we're desperate for attachment and have trouble finding
it in real life, and machines are kind of a
frictionless AI is a very frictionless way to form an attachment.
You know, they suck up to you, right, I mean
it's agreeable, it's totally agreeable, and it's telling you how
brilliant you are, and it never criticizes you. I mean attachment.

(10:41):
You know, relations with real human beings has friction, has complexity,
has surprise, whereas if you're doing this with the chatbot.
It's basically gratifying every wish you have and telling you
you're brilliant. But these chatbots have been designed to maximize
the time you'll spend with them, just like social media.
And this was especially true of chat GPT four, which

(11:03):
was very sycophantic. It just sucked up to people in
just embarrassing ways, but effective ways. It convinced a couple
of people to commit suicide, but it also convinced others
they had solved problems in mathematics and physics, even though
they weren't physicists or mathematicians. It was kind of nuts.
But I think we're suckers for praise, and I think

(11:27):
we have a built in tendency to answer pomorphize everything.
You know. See you think about children with their stuffed animals.
You know, they're alive to them, they speak, they have conversations.
I think we're all animists until it gets drummed out
of us in school, and then we become these rational materialists.

(11:48):
But part of us always wants to go back, and
these chatbots give us an opportunity to so I think
we have you know, we've learned about the mental health
problems of social media, which are really serious, especially for adolescents.
Social media has essentially hacked our attention very effectively. Attention
is part of consciousness, but in a way it's the

(12:10):
most passive and easiest part of consciousness to reach. It's
it's somewhat superficial compared to emotions and attachment. And so
now we're moving on from hacking attention to hacking attachment,
hacking consciousness at a very deep level. And I think
that's very worrying, and I think we need to we

(12:32):
need to claim our consciousness for ourselves. And you know,
think twice before you know, you're you're online at the
bank or the supermarket, and you how do we fill
that time? We immediately open our phones and we start
scrolling because we have trouble being alone with ourselves. You know,
our minds can be a scary place in some ways.
You know, they're the source of self criticism and rumination

(12:55):
and things like that. But how much better I think,
was it when we did have that distraction and we're
standing online at the supermarket and instead we're daydreaming, we're
thinking about what we're going to make for dinner. Where
we're looking at the clothes on the person in front
of us. We're looking, we're overhearing conversation. We're just present

(13:16):
to the world. And if you think about it, we're
the only species that can afford not to be present
to the world. I mean, every animal right has to
be like fully conscious all the time they're awake, because
they may be turned into food, they may be prey
for something, and so they have a level of presence

(13:37):
that we're giving up. Now, there are ways to reclaim it. Meditation,
of course, is a great way to reclaim it. And
you know, you're kind of drawing a line around your
consciousness when you meditate, right, You're turning off all other
stimuli and being in that space and realizing how interesting
and weird it is. You have thoughts that you haven't
really thought. I mean, they just popping up. What is

(13:59):
that about? And on psychedelics too, I mean, you just
there is this flood of mental material and it seems
a shame to not be attending to that and to
be attending to Twitter instead. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
I spend thirty days a year off my phone and
so I just got back from that and it's phenomenal.
What's possible. I meditate every day. I have a daily
meditation practice, but I find that the thirty days away
is different to having a full work day, and everything
else that comes with comes after my morning meditation and

(14:37):
the thirty days I just spent off my phone. It's
like you just feel completely clearer. I feel thoughts connect better,
I feel more effective and productive and present.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
I'm more aware of nature. Nature has, you know, a
subtle quiet voice, and it gets drowned out very easily
by our lives and by our technologies. And so I
find when I'm off my phone and I do you know,
we do a lot of hiking and won't take our
phone with us, and you can really attend to the

(15:09):
kind of subtleties of nature, and suddenly nature speaks more
loudly to you.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
What does your daily meditation practice look like?

Speaker 1 (15:17):
My wife and I meditate together, not very long, twenty
minutes in the morning. After we do exercises. We have
a long morning ritual, and I find that's very useful
for kind of setting the day. You know, it's not
always great. I mean, I have meditation. You know, there's

(15:38):
a tent when you do at the beginning. Your to
do list is a threat always, so some days I
can really quiet it, and some days I can't, and
then sometimes I'll do a meditation at the end of
the day. I recently did a meditation retreat for the
first time, and it wasn't very long, but I was
in a It was a silent retreat for four days.

(16:00):
It was only about thirty people, four teachers. Was very
privileged in many ways, and I was amazed how far
and deep you can go. And that was four days
without phones, four days without eye contact. You know, we
were just in this space of our of our own minds,
and we alternated walking meditation with sitting meditation, and we

(16:20):
had dermatos at night and two moments where we could
address our teachers and ask questions.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
What was the power of the no eye contact.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
One of the things you try to do in a
meditation retreat is not have any need to socially present
the performance. We go through socially all the time when
we see people meet people, and you're and these are
strangers by and large, and so it just frees you.

(16:50):
I don't have to I don't have to be any
way for you. I can just be the way I feel.
So it goes along with the silence and I and
you know, I was also at a zeer reporting on
the book in Santa fe John Halifax's Upayah Zence Center,
and there too, there is silence and no eye contact,

(17:11):
and she articulates it is about this the pressure we
have to be a certain way in social situations, and
getting away from that is I found very powerful. We
have so many claims on our attention and to put
them aside for a period of time is incredibly powerful.

(17:32):
I mean I had some real breakthroughs during that meditation retry.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah. I was just visiting the monastery that I used
to live at in India, so it was just there
and I was reminded of the fact that there's no
mirrors there. Yeah. And it's just this unbelievable experience of
dissolving into that feeling as you were just mentioning of
not performing well, not having to be And I was
thinking about the overexposure we have to our own image,

(17:59):
whether it's face time, whether it's zoom. You're always looking
at your box in the corner. Yeah, the selfie, the selfie,
the even facetiming you have yourself back at yourself.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
Right and zoom. We're spending so much time on zoom,
and we are always in that.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Box, and it's probably the first time in history that
we've been this over exposed to our own image.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
That's a good point.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
So no wonder we think we're too fat, too ugly
to whatever else is.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
It will lead to self criticism, yeah, question, Yeah, So,
I mean, you know, the beauty of meditation, and this
is true of psychedelics, is kind of a shrinking of
the self and a kind of partial dissolution, sometimes total
dissolution of the sense of self and realizing that our
consciousness transcends ourself, and that you can put down yourself

(18:46):
or transcend it in some way and still be very conscious,
sometimes even more conscious, because the self or the ego
and I think I use those words interchangeably builds walls.
It's a defense of structure. Finally, it's very useful, without question.
I mean, it's what allows me to write books and

(19:06):
for you to write books and do podcasts, get we
get a lot done. And as a unit of social interaction,
it's necessary, but it disconnects us. It makes us selfish.
And so the times I've experienced self essentially dissolving or

(19:27):
going away, it's followed by this powerful connection with something
larger than yourself. And for me, I mean, I'll never
forget this one experience I had on psilocybin for my book,
I had a complete dissolution of self. I just exploded
in a little cloud of blue post it notes. I

(19:47):
wear blue a lot. And then the post it notes
fell to the ground and coalesced in this pool of
blue paint, and I was no more. I was that
pool of blue paint. But that seemed fine. And then
I had this experience of merging with something larger, which
in this case was a piece of music that my
guide was playing a bach on a company Chellis suite,

(20:09):
and there was no longer a subject object distinction. I
just was that music, and it was the most profound
experience of music I had ever had. Self is so interesting.
We spend so much time, you know, self confidence is important,
self assurance, and we're taught to value ourselves all great,
But think about how much time and how many things

(20:29):
we do to escape ourselves too. It's a paradox, I think,
because self ego can be very oppressive too. It's that
critical voice. It's what does the ruminating that you know,
those spirals have thought you can't get out of so
finding you know, healthy productive ways to transcend the cell
or shrinket is I think really valuable. I have a

(20:52):
good friend who's a colleague at Berkeley, who teaches, who
studies Awe Daker Keltner, and he does a really cool
experiment with people where he he asked he asked people
to draw kind of a stick figure of themselves on
a piece of graph paper. Then he gives them an
our experience and it might be video of Yosemite or
something like that on a big screen. And then he

(21:14):
asked them to draw themselves again, and they draw themselves
at half the size.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
So experiences of are one way to kind of diminish
the claims of the self.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
It's fascinating what you talked about the paradox of how
we're infatuated with ourselves and there needs to be this
focus on the self because that's all we have. And
then we want to achieve, and we want to achieve
and we need to grow and we need to work
towards something in order to pursue meaning. But then you're saying, actually,
there's a part of us, you're so right, that just

(22:02):
wants to relieve an escape, And I was thinking about
the word mantra as you said that, and how mon
means mind and truck comes from the Sanskrit triity, which
means to transcend, and so it's to transcend the mind
is what mantra actually means. Even though now we use
it as affirmation or mantra we use is something repetitive,
but mantra in its actual definition means to transcend the mind.

(22:25):
Where did you find that consciousness lives because we've believed
it lives in the brain.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
I believe, we believe that, but we have not been
able to prove it. The assumption has always been that
there is some way that a certain arrangement of neurons
you know, produces or consciousness you know, emerges from that complexity,
but we haven't gotten too far figuring out how that
might be. What we've observed, we know there are correlations

(22:53):
between the brain and consciousness, and that you know, if
you if you anesthetize someone, they become unconscious, and if
you remove certain parts of the brain, you become unconscious.
But we haven't gotten very far in proving that relationship.
There are other theories that are being more seriously entertained.
One is panpsychism. This is the idea that everything is

(23:16):
conscious that in the same way a couple hundred years
ago we realized that there was this other force in
the world called electromagnetism, and that there are these waves
all around us that are passing through us and can
carry information TV and radio waves. Is there another thing
we need to add to the stock of reality, and
is that psychism or psyche, and that every particle has

(23:41):
some ency bit of psyche, and that somehow these little
bits combine to form the kind of consciousness we have.
It seems really far fetched. It solves the problem of
consciousness in a way, but it creates this new problem
of like, well how do they combine. Then there are
theories that usually go under the word idealism, that consciousness

(24:05):
precedes matter and that we are at sort of pools
of individual consciousness in a larger field. There's also transmission theories,
which is that again, consciousness is a field that's outside
of our minds, and what our minds do is channel it,
and we are like radio or TV in the same
way that radio or TV receivers are picking up something.

(24:28):
If you look at a TV set, you know the
woman doing the weathercast is not in the set in
the same way consciousness is not in here. It's channeled
and we let in a certain amount. And this was
There was a French philosopher, Henri Berkson, who developed this theory,
and it was Alvius Huxley actually talks about it a lot.

(24:49):
He thought what psychedelics did was open wider the valve
so more consciousness gets in. Because in normal times we
have this thin dribble of consciousness and that's all we
need to survive. But there's a lot more out there,
and that's what psychedelics acquaints you with. You know, it's
a theory, I mean hard to prove. So there's a

(25:11):
lot of a lot of different ideas out there. And
one basic idea is like, you know, can you have
consciousness without brains? And there are people who believe that
that just you should be able to do it on
Some people think you can do it on silicon and
in computers, and that consciousness is like an algorithm. The
brain is like a computer, and you can run that

(25:34):
algorithm on different substrates they're called including computer memory. I
don't think that's true, but that's a very common belief
in silicon valley.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
So this is different from the more religious, spiritual understanding
of consciousness being this spark that animates the body, and
yes and no.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
I mean the religious ideas is close to idealism that
consciousness is something larger than us, there's a field or
pool of it that we pass in and out of,
and that if that were true, it would explain things
like telepathy or past lives because time is just a
human construct in that idea, and you can go in

(26:16):
both directions in the pool of consciousness. Now that I
have trouble believing the theory that brains produce consciousness, I
have a very open mind, and I think we have to.
I don't think we can say with confidence that any
of these supposedly woo woo ideas are necessarily false. I mean,
think about what we're learning in physics. I mean, what

(26:37):
could be more woo woo than the idea that two
particles separated by light years can instantaneously affect one another,
as has been proven now entanglement, quantum entanglement. So you know,
I think the universe is a lot stranger than we know.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
What's the difference between the consciousness and the mind.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
The mind is bigger than consciousness in the sense that
it would include everything the brain is doing unconsciously, so
you're subconscious. You know, probably ninety percent of what your
brain does you're not aware of. It's like managing your body,
which is a big project. It's perceiving things in your
environment you're not attending to. It's picking up on homeostasis.

(27:20):
You know, is my body at the proper temperature? Do
I need food? How's my blood pressure or heart rate?
I mean, it's just incredible what it's doing. It's managing.
It's very complex organism. We should remember that brains exist
to keep bodies alive, not the other way around, and
they do that by monitoring things and making adjustments. So
that's the mind. It's doing all that stuff. Consciousness is

(27:43):
this little tip of the iceberg of the stuff we're
aware of. And the interesting question is, if we can
automate all that, why don't we automate the whole thing?
Why aren't we zombies? Why do we need the space
of awareness and decision making. The best guess is because
there are for a creature that exists in a very

(28:05):
complex social reality. I mean, we are inherently social beings.
We need connection and we die Without it, you can't
automate something as complex as social engagement. You can't automate
like you need things like theory of mind so I
can guess what you're thinking, anticipate what you're going to do,
and all the little signals that go on in a conversation.

(28:28):
You can't automate that. It's just too complex. And also
there are certain needs you have that may contradict. Let's
say you're tired and you're hungry, which should you deal
with first? You need to make a decision, and those
kind of conflicting needs may be what drive us to
become conscious because we need that space of decision making.

(28:52):
So that's the best guess. Nobody knows for sure.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, it's But I appreciate the openness and the fascinating
questions that you ask in the book because to me,
I mean, I found that so extremely endearing that you,
you know, start the book going you may not know
more than you know now, And I was like, what
an interesting way, And I was like, but I love
that because it is the only way we can approach
these really big questions that are so far beyond us.

(29:19):
And you know, you're extremely humble in the introduction as well,
but just your self confession of just how like, you know,
who are we to even ask these questions and qualified
to look into it? But I think that is your qualification,
and that's why I think you're such a Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
I wondered about that, like, why me? You know, I'm
not an expert. I didn't know a lot about neuroscience
or philosophy when I started. I had to learn whole
new fields. But then I thought, well, I'm a conscious
human being who's pretty good at explaining things, so why
not me. I mean, one of the conclusions of science

(29:53):
so far, which is really interesting, is that, you know,
we first approach consciousness with this idea, we're going to
find those neurons, you know, the neural correlates. As time
has gone on, there's been this general recognition that subjective
experience is central to this. So what the philosophers call phenomenology,
which is a fancy word for human experience, has to

(30:17):
be explored, and that what any individual is experiencing, what's
going on in their minds, is relevant to the science.
So I thought, okay, I'll offer myself and I'll bring
whatever I can from by looking closely at my own experience.
That's why meditation, I think, is going to be very
useful to the scientists. Also because you have a group

(30:40):
of people and I'm talking not of people like myself,
but really experienced meditators that people who have done the
ten thousand hours, like presumably you got to that number
in three years, would have some insight about consciousness. And
that's true. There are some interesting experiments going on where
there was one. There's a woman named Colleina Christo who
studies what's called spontaneous thought that I looked at that

(31:03):
includes daydreams and mind wandering, which are very interesting phenomenon
where the mind just finds its own path. And she
put experienced meditators in an MRI and told them to
press a button when a thought arose. They were trying
not to have any thoughts, and she concluded that you
can only go about ten seconds without a thought. But anyway,

(31:27):
when people press the button, she saw what was going
on in the brain at the same time, and the
thought arises in the brain, she saw that activity in
the memory center which she was looking hippocampus, four seconds
before the person was aware of it. So there is
a very elaborate and long process before thoughts become conscious,

(31:52):
they exist somewhere else and then pop into what we
call the stream of consciousness. But that it takes four
seconds gests that something's going on. Perhaps the thoughts are
competing with one another to get into that workspace. That's
one theory, but we don't understand exactly what's going on.
So that tip of the iceberg metaphor I think is

(32:14):
really important for consciousness. There's a lot going on that
precedes it, and meditators have, I think, can develop a
keener sense of what that is.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, I want I want to spend the rest of
our conversation talking about both meditation and psychedelics because I
think these are both, what you've shown through your work
pathways to access to consciousness.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Without without doubt. Yeah, and different, very similar, And they're
different and similar.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
That's I was going to ask you that, Let's start
with the similarities. What are the similarities in what meditation
and psychedelics allow us as access into consciousness.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
Well, they both take us out of the they can
take us out of the world we're in and all
the kind of distractions. And I mean there are two
ways to use psychedelics. One is, you know, people take
mushrooms and they walk out in the woods and they
have a profound experience of nature. But in a guided
psychedelic experience, you're you're usually wearing eye shades, you have
headphones on, so you are closing off the sensory, the

(33:12):
outside senses, so you can go inside more like meditation.
That building of that fence around your consciousness allows certain
things to happen. You can really travel. People don't talk
about it nearly enough, but the psychedelic experience you know,
has a has a has a path, has a trajectory. Right,
there's the onset, you know, the coming on. There's this

(33:33):
period of intense, uncontrollable visual and sensory experience, and then
there's this long tail. The long tail is a meditation
and a really profound one I find because you I
can meditate better in that space than just about anywhere.
You've regained some control of your mind. You can decide

(33:54):
I want to think about this, but you can do
it in a completely understructed way. You still can close
out everything. So that's one aspect that I think is similar.
There is spontaneous thought. In both cases. Things are just
arising from who knows where. Maybe you're subconscious memories are

(34:16):
coming up, fantasies are coming up, So there is that
just kind of loosening of constraints on consciousness just to
see what arises. And you know, sometimes in meditation we
fight that, but there's a kind of you know, of
a possible meditation. We just openly observed that you can
learn to do that. In meditation, it's forcible, and psychedelics

(34:39):
you have no choice. It's going to happen whether you
want it to or not.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
What do you wish people who take psychedelics would do
differently in their approach to taking them.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Do it more intentionally? I think I think it's potentially
very powerful. I think that you know, at different points
in our lives we use them in different ways, and
sometimes they're used to just kind of for thrills and
to go to concerts and just you know, groove on
nature and things like that, and there's nothing wrong with that,
and I know many people who have had really powerful experiences.

(35:10):
But I think if you use them more intentionally, they
can be incredibly therapeutic. They can teach you things about yourself.
It's not that the intention always bears fruit. I've said
intentions and then something completely different dominated the experience, which
has turned out to be very positive. I remember I
went into one guided experience about I don't know, a

(35:33):
year after my father died, and I had the sense
that I hadn't fully grieved his passing and that I
wanted to sort of be with him and hear his
voice and take his advice and connect with him again,
which happens sometimes on psychedelics. I took my psilocybin and
the whole trip was about my mother, who's still alive.

(35:54):
And the message was your dad's dead, here's your mom.
Well open yourself to that relationship, go see her. And
the next day was a Jewish holiday, I think it
was Russia Shana, and they were having a dinner in
New York. I was in Cambridge and I couldn't get
down because it was a teaching day or something like that.
And as soon as the trip was over, I said

(36:15):
to Judith, my wife, we're going in New York and
we completely changed direction. So there was a case where
the intention didn't work out, but I learned something and
it was a really important lesson that take you know,
don't take your mom for granted. She's still here.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Thank you, Thank you for sharing that that's such as,
that's such a beautiful experience of something being completely the
opposite to what you expected. How does science currently explain
that experience? Because that you know, at least I don't
know the scientific explanation, and some asking but I hear
a scientist here that and go, well, you just made

(36:50):
that up in your head, that experience.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
But like you take everything up in your head.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yes, else, So how does science go ahead and explain that?

Speaker 1 (36:58):
Well, there's some interesting work. So I'm very interested in
the science of psychedelics and I wrote about it and
How to Change Your Mind. I also, with Daker Keltner,
who I mentioned earlier, helped start a psychedelic research center
at Berkeley where I do work. It's called the Berkeley
Center for the Science of Psychedelics. There's a couple theories.
I mean, one is that there are top down controls

(37:21):
on our consciousness and perception. Most of what we experience
is a prediction based on past experience and beliefs. Our
senses exist only to correct that it's a weird idea,
but that the brain is essentially hallucinating reality with this
error correction, constant stream of error correction and psychedelics relaxes

(37:47):
those beliefs. I'll give you an example. There's a famous
psychological experiment called the rotating mask. You've seen it. It's
that mask used when the Happy and Sad theater, you
know image and it's conker right. It's just the skin
and one of those masses on a carousel and it turns,

(38:07):
and first it's convex, and you see it as we
normally see faces, and then it turns. You go online
and find one of these, and then you turn it
and you start seeing the back of the face, which
we've never seen in reality, and you will see what happens.
Your mind will refuse to see the back of the
face and this will pop out and become convex. And

(38:28):
that's because the brain doesn't believe faces can ever be concave.
And since you were a baby on your mother's breast,
you've studied faces and you know they're always convex. On psychedelics,
you can see the back, it doesn't pop out. There's
research showing this. So what that suggests is that that
prediction that this is the way a face has to

(38:51):
be is relaxed, and you're actually seeing more of reality
in a sense, because you're the prediction is not accurate
in that case.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
So that's so cool, isn't that cool? Yeah, that's fascinating.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
So your beliefs about how the world is are relaxed,
which allows new beliefs to form, and it allows more
information to come up from the bottom. So that's one theory.
Another is that there's a structure, a network in the
brain called the default mode network, which is really interesting
and it's in the midline and it connects several different structures,
but it's involved with It was called that because if

(39:28):
you put someone in an fMRI and say, okay, we
need a baseline, no task, just mind want or think
that lights up. It's where we go and we're not
dealing with incoming a lot of incoming or outgoing tasks
and things like that. And the default connects memory and
emotion and a structure called the posterior cingulate cortex. It

(39:52):
seems to be where the ego is. If the ego
has an address in the brain, it's in this network.
Time travel is it takes place there and if you
think about it self, depends on time travel. Right. You
need a sense of the future and the past to
construct this is who I am. If you let the
future in the past go, you sort of dissolve. It

(40:14):
also is where we construct the story of who we are.
In other words, we have this narrative of who we are,
and everything that happens we kind of fit into that story.
And all this is deactivated during psychedelics, and that probably
explains the ego dissolution that happens on a high dose,
or often happens on a high dose. So that would

(40:35):
be another way that the usual structures things like rumination
break down and temporarily and the brain is rewired for
a time.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
And so I assume that's extremely helpful for people who
struggle even with overthinking.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
And rumination in particular and rumination and that's getting stuck
in a groove of thought, and it's often negative. You know,
I'm unworthy, I'm ugly, I'm too fat, nobody loves me.
People get stuck in these spirals. And by relaxing the
default mode network or taking it offline for a period,

(41:13):
you get a relief from that, and that feels really good,
and when you come back online it can change. Same
with addiction, which, if you think about it, is a
form of rumination, right' it's you're stuck.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
I need this, I have to have this.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
I can't live without a drink. I can't I can't
get through life without a cigarette. These are narratives that
our ego is telling us, and they're deep grooves, and
they get deeper the longer we live with them. Psychedelics
gives you a path, a temporary path out that can
become a permanent path. A beautiful metaphor that one of

(41:48):
the neuroscientists I interviewed said is think of He said,
think of the mind as a hill covered in snow,
and they are all these and every thought is a
sled going down the hill. And over time the sleds
formed these grooves, and after a while you can't go
down the hill without falling into one of those grooves.
The psychedelic is like a fresh snowfall. It fills all

(42:10):
the grooves and allows you to take another path down
the hill. A beautiful man.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, that's nice, beautiful, I love. What's the research that
talks about that connection with things like OCD and ADHD.

(42:38):
Has there been a lot of research that OCD.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
Definitely, I don't know about ADHD, but OCD is of
course getting stuck in deep grooves and patterns that you
and habits you absolutely cannot escape. There was a study
done at Yale by a psychiatrist named Ben Calmendy with
see patients and got on psilocybin, and he got terrific results.

(43:04):
Psilocybin seems to be really good at breaking patterns, all
different kinds of patterns, patterns of depression and anxiety, patterns
of addiction, so patterns of thought and behavior. It's been JOHNS.
Hopkins did some really remarkable work on with cigarette smokers
getting them to quit smoking. It seems almost too easy.
I interviewed some of these people for how to Change

(43:27):
your Mind, and I would ask them to describe their trip.
And this woman who smoked for fifty years, had had
this incredible trip. I went all over the world and
all through history, and I went back to Shakespearean England,
and I went to India, and I went here and there,
and I realized there's so much beauty and so much

(43:47):
experience in the world that shortening your life with cigarettes
was really stupid. Now, I'm sure she's had that thought
at other times. But the thoughts you have on psychedelics
have a particular or weight or authority that no other
thoughts have. William James called it the noetic quality, the
idea that this is not just an insider an opinion.

(44:08):
This is a revealed truth that allows you when you say,
when you have that feeling I'm done smoking, this is
I'm I want more of my life. It sticks. It's
sticky in a way resolutions never are, so that seems
to be one of the ways. We don't understand why
that is. But the brain is particularly plastic during a

(44:30):
psychedelic experience and for a period of time after. There's
some very interesting research about what are called these critical
windows that open. You know, how kids can learn language
very quickly at age three, four and five. They have
a window for a developmental window for a learning language,
and then adolescents have a developmental window for forming social attachments,

(44:53):
and that's a time when their friends matter more than
anything else in their lives. These windows close psychedelics. This
is the work of one of the members of the
Psychedelic Research Center at Berkeley, Google Dolan. She has shown
that psychedelics can reopen these critical windows and allow people
to learn in a powerful way. It's fascinating research. It's

(45:14):
been an animal so far She's done it with octopuses
and rats and mice, but now she's starting to work
on humans. And if you think about it, it has
huge implications for possibly things like autism, where the window
for forming social connection has closed prematurely. It's one theory

(45:34):
for stroke recovery from stroke. There's a window after a
stroke for I think six weeks where if you do
intensive work you can make a lot of progress and
then it closes. Could you reopen that with psychedelics. She's
actually testing that right now. Wow.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Are there any known negative impacts of psychedelics on the brain.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
Some people have really bad experiences and there have been
cases of psychotic breaks, So people have their first psychotic
break and they become schizophrenic. Is this a side effect
of the psychedelics or is it something that was going
to happen anyway? I mean it big, big experiences lead
people to have psychotic breaks at certain windows, lay like

(46:14):
in their twenties. So it isn't really clear whether the
psychedelics are I mean, they might have precipitated it, but
it probably was going to happen anyway. Then the people
just have bad trips. They can be absolutely terrifying, and
there are people who shouldn't mess around with them. I mean,
if there's if you have any risk of schizophrenia, they
don't allow you in these studies, dittomania, manic depression, they

(46:39):
don't want you in these studies. I mean, this sounds
really weird, but they're remarkably safe drugs by the usual standards.
The classic psychedelics psilocybin DMT, which is in nyahuasca LSD.
They have no known lethal dose, which is extraordinary. I
mean tilan all has a lethal dose around seventeen pills
or something. They're not they're not habit for me, they're

(47:03):
not addictive. There is this psychological risk that people will
who are unstable will get, you know, still less stable.
So they're serious. You know, you have to take you
don't take them lightly. But they have especially in the
in the context of a guided situation where somebody is
with you the whole time. Somebody's prepared you for what

(47:26):
to expect and then helps you integrate, which is to say,
help you make sense of what can be a very
confusing experience. They're very productive and they may revolutionize mental health.
You know, we're close to approval on two of them
right now, and and whatever you think of RFK Junior
and what he's doing to public health in America. He's

(47:48):
very supportive of psychedelic medicine, and there's a good chance
that both psilocybin and MDMA will be approved in the
next year or so.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Yeah, I was about to ask, how how is the
world reacting, the healthcare world reacting to the inclusion of
psychedelics in the way they.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
Well, that's a great question, you know. I wondered about
that too, And I remember interviewing Tom Insull, who was
a very prominent psychiatrist. He was head of the National
Institute of Mental Health. I called him it and I
was kind of surprised that when I was writing about it,
I wasn't hearing more resistance from psychiatrists, many of whom

(48:27):
have treated people who took psychedelics. At one point and
he said something that surprised me. He said, you know,
the field is desperate for new tools that if you
compare mental health treatment with infectious disease, cardiology, oncology, they
have made huge strides in the last twenty years actually

(48:50):
curing people, extending lives. You can't say that about mental
health treatment. We are really stuck the last big innovation
where SSRI antidepressants, and they don't work very well. Actually
they help some people, but they perform a little better
than placebo in head to head studies. And he said,
so really yeah, oh it's it's two points better than

(49:13):
a placebo. Now, placebos are powerful and when you're treating
mental health, but and they have lots of side effects.
People don't like to take them. They put on weight,
they lose their libido, things like that. He said the
field is desperate and open for that reason and that
this could be a breakthrough. And the other question I

(49:33):
asked him that was he had a really interesting answer.
I was that, you know, I was a little suspicious.
You're talking about one drugs, let's say, psilocybin to treat
anxiety and depression and OCD and an addiction. Isn't that
a little too good to be true? It sounds like
a miracle drug, a miracle drug. And he said he
answered my question with a question. He said, what makes

(49:55):
you think those things are all different? What? They may
be products of the same brain, different manifestations of a
brain that's stuck, stuck in grooves, you know, repetitive rumination.
And there may be a common denominator and those just
maybe symptoms. I was like, well, that's kind of mind blowing,
and in fact is yeah. Yeah, there is a study

(50:17):
going on at Harvard now Harvard Medical School looking at
this question of rumination and psychedelics and see whether maybe
that's the common denominator that psychedelics addresses.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
Well, I mean, yeah, I feel like with what you're
speaking about, I'm thinking about so many of my friends
who and my wife's friends who are currently struggling with
OCD and extreme forms of it, and I'm thinking, you know,
this is one thing they haven't tried. It's or maybe
it's not possible in the country that they live in.
And if there's so many great studies that are actually

(50:48):
showing the benefits, it's almost like it may be worth trying,
because the other paths are definitely not working. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
I mean, the first thing I would do is look
for studies going on around the country. You know, trials
dot Gov maintains every drug trial going on around the country,
and you can search OCD, and you can search psilocybin
and see if their follow ups to that Yale study
that might be going on. And the other alternative is

(51:16):
to work with a really good guide and see if
that might help, because it had, I mean, it has
helped many people. The Netflix series based on How to
Change Your Mind has an episode. The second episode is
about psilocybin, and there are stories of people whose lives
were just changed. There's a thirty year old there who

(51:37):
we interviewed who had been just paralyzed by It really
emerged after the birth of his first child, and he
was just so terrified about doing something wrong and his
just life was completely paralyzed by OCD and he participated
in this trial and in the course of one afternoon,

(51:59):
it really its hold on him. Well, it's kind of extraordinary.
It does seem too good to be true, but I've
interviewed these people and these these stories of transformation are
just so powerful.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Yeah. Well, the fact that you said that it's not addictive,
it's not toxic, and it's not toxic. I mean those
two things make it feel so much better than everything. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
No, I think the risk is low, and it's lower
still when you use a guide, you know someone who's
because people do stupid things on psychedelics. People do jump
up off off of buildings every now and then and
think that they can fly, and if you're with someone
who's staying closer to the ground, who's been around the block,

(52:43):
you're very safe and the risk you've mitigated the risk
to a large extent.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
What have you learned about consciousness that most changed your
view about death.

Speaker 1 (52:52):
One of the more interesting studies of psychedelics that was
done early on was giving them to terminal cancer patients.
People who were had what is called existential distress. They
were just terrified of either death or recurrence of their cancer.
And over the course of one session, I interviewed people
who lost their fear entirely. And the way this happened

(53:16):
it was different in different people. Some people had a
vision of an afterlife and they saw where they were
going to go when they died. But I remember this.
One woman had this experience of again flying through space
and seeing all these things, and then going underground, and
she said, and then I dissolved in the soil, and

(53:39):
my spirit was taken up by the plants. And that
was fine. If that's what happened, that was fine. She
had acquired a sense of herself not as this narrow
little thing that was vulnerable to death, but as this energy,
as this set of carbon molecules that wasn't going to
die and would go into to nature. It's actually a

(54:02):
very realistic take on things. You know, in a way,
but if to the extent you expand your sense of self,
your fear of death shrinks. That was the message that
a lot of these people had. I'm not convinced that
consciousness survives death. I think a lot of people subconsciously
believe that. I think consciousness in a way is the

(54:24):
word we use for the soul in our time and
the whole It has a lot in common with the soul.
That's certainly what Galileo thought. And the soul is indestructible, right,
So there's a solace in that, especially as we get
older and we sort of feel our bodies falling apart.
Our consciousness is intact. It seems like it could transcend

(54:45):
the body, does it really? You know? I've learned to
be humble enough to say I don't really know. Near
death experience is a very curious phenomenon. As I said
said earlier, you know, the universe is stranger and more wonderful,
literally full of wonder than we know. My psychedelic experiences

(55:09):
have have tempered my fear of death, I would say, yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
I've always been fascinated by the work of doctor Ian
Stevenson and old souls and the near death experiences and
past life experiences, and always been fascinated by seeing more
research in that space because I feel like it's not
really been evolved since then.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
He started this little group at UVA. I've been there,
and Stevenson had died when I went, but I met
some of the other people there, and they have these
incredible files on these past live experiences, near death experience.
We have a lot of empirical evidence that contradicts our
usual materialist understanding of how the world works. The way

(55:59):
science is supposed to work is when you have empirical
evidence that contradicts your paradigm, you have to rethink your paradigm.
We're not doing it. We're really like addicted to this paradigm.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
You don't take psychedelics that might help.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
And I wish more research was done on this too,
And it's not taken seriously by most scientists, which I
think is a shame because I think they I mean,
they should be open and skeptical. That's the whole idea
of the scientific enterprise. I do see some shakiness in
the materialist paradigm. I have talked to scientists and including

(56:38):
people you know, brain scientists, real you know, biologists, who
have come to the conclusion that materialism can't explain consciousness
and that there's something else going on. I have talked
to biologists and I interview some of them in a
world appears who believe that biology is shaped not just

(57:02):
by environment and genes, but that there are platonic forms
that endow living things with a sense of purpose agency
that in the same way math has certain concepts that
are seem to be eternal and you know, platonic in
that sense, if you have three angles, it's going to

(57:25):
add up to one hundred and eighty degrees or whatever
it is triangle. That there's something similar governing more of life.
This is a very prominent biologist who believes this. So
we may be getting close to a time where reconsidering
materialism will happen. Certainly, physicists are there. They're open to

(57:53):
some very seemingly exotic ideas that siousness may have some
effect on the world. You know, the double slit experiment
suggests that an observer seems to change what happens. I mean,
that's kind of mind blowing. So biology has been more

(58:14):
conservative because they had Darwinism and that kind of explained everything.
But I'm starting to see a little crack in the edifice,
and it's the study of consciousness. I think that is
causing it. So we may look back in fifty one
hundred years and realize that, you know, when we have
another paradigm revolution, that oh yeah, there's something, there's something

(58:39):
more that this that the maybe we'll be adding something
to matter to what matter is, or maybe it'll be
a whole different idea.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
What's what's it going to take for that to happen,
because I feel like you said, it's happened in places
like oncology, or there's at least evolution. We talked about AI.
You know, we're talking about the fact that you have
machines that can think and formulated.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
Well, yeah, we didn't talk about AI. We haven't talked
about AI. I think, you know, our definition of what
is human is going to be is under pressure now
in a way that could be very productive and could
be destructive. On the one hand, we're learning we don't
have a monopoly unconsciousness. All these animals and possibly plants

(59:24):
and bacteria have some very elemental sense of I would
call it sentience, consciousness being a more complex version of sentience.
Consciousness is how humans do sentience, and maybe all living
things have sentience. That is that reanimates the world to
a large extent, and that materialist idea that you know,

(59:45):
aside from a handful of species, the world is dead
matter that we can do with what we want, that
idea I think will be gone. On the other side,
we have this threat to our sense of specialness from
AI and I. I talk in the world of peers
of people trying to develop conscious AIS. I, you know,

(01:00:07):
for various reasons, I think it's very unlikely they'll be
able to. The problem is, though, even if they can't,
AIS will fool us into believing they're conscious. And of
course we're seeing that with AI psychosis and people forming
these bonds with machines. That is the literal definition of
the word dehumanizing, right, But we're going down that path.

(01:00:28):
So who are we? What's special about us? I mean,
I would argue that we have more in common with
the animals, who like us, are mortal and can suffer
and are vulnerable than we have with the machines, and
the machines are really smart, you know, at the level

(01:00:49):
of intelligence, they will outstrip us, I'm sure. I mean
they may have already, but they can't feel, and I
don't think they'll ever feel, because feelings have no meaning
without vulnerability, without our mortality. Story yeah right, like yeah, story,
yeah exactly. And so so I think we're coming to

(01:01:10):
this interesting moment where we will be rethinking what is
what it means to be human. We went through this
during the Romantic Revolution. During the Industrial Revolution, there was,
you know, the rise of Romanticism, and that was really
an effort to like, here's what we are, here's how
we're different than machines. And it was the celebration of
the human and things like love that machines will never

(01:01:33):
have as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
So we believe that you believe that the machines will
never love.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
I don't. I don't see how they can unless they
become mortal in some ways like us. I just think
so much of who we are is tied to the
fact that we are flesh and blood that will not
live forever, and that shapes our lives and machines don't
don't do that. And intelligence and consciousness are not same thing.

(01:02:01):
We all know people who are highly intelligent and marginally
conscious and people who are who are conscious and not
very intelligent. They're just separate, and I think that I
think we make a mistake. We also make a mistake
in thinking that brains are like computers, and they're so
different in so many ways. There's no distinction between hardware

(01:02:22):
and software. In a brain, every experience can be found someday,
you know, as a set of neurons connecting in a
certain way. I mean, your brain is different than mine
because you've had a different life than mine. They're not
interchangeable the way computer hardware is. I mean, there's so
many reasons for this, but I don't think that's in

(01:02:43):
our future. I could be wrong, but the fact that
we will be fooled is problem enough. And I think
we're going to have to deal with all those mental
health difficulties that you know, kids come home from school.
I've heard stories of this, and they want to tell
their chin what happened that day before. They want to
tell their parents, and they formed a stronger relationship with

(01:03:05):
that chatbot. I think that there's a great line. The
sociologist Sherry Turkle says technology can cause us to forget
what life is about. And it's really true if you
think about it. We have a you know, when we
have a conversation with a machine, which now we do routinely,

(01:03:26):
whether you're making an airline reservation or dealing with the chatbot,
we call it a conversation, but in fact we grossly
simplify what a conversation is. There's no eye contact, there's
no body language, there's no there's none of those ineffable
you know, qualities that facilitate human interaction. The emoji is

(01:03:49):
the classic case, right, I mean that that's substitutes for emotion.
So we're meeting the machines on their ground and they're
not meeting us on our ground. So anyway, I think,
you know, the defense of human consciousness is like a
really high priority for me.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
I wonder what that says about our egos need for
constant validation and reassurance and where that comes from.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
Well, a hunger, a basic hunger of probably not having
enough love in our lives from our parents or enough. Yeah,
there's a neediness and we'll satisfy. You know. Look, we
use our pets to satisfy it, right, the unconditional love
of our dogs, and now we have these machines who
are you know, doing it in an even more sophisticated way.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
And it almost feels like that's the crux of it.
It's how to love again. Because the reason why we
choose the chat ball with the person is the person says, well,
just go up to your bedroom do your homework, or
you know, the parent in that case, or the parent
says something like oh, just you know, these things happen
or whatever it may be. And it's like, but the
chat pot's going to say, well, tell me how you feel.

(01:05:13):
How was your day?

Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
And then you're gonna say how your day was and
it was bad, and we're like, oh, that's unfair that
that bully did that to you, And like, you know,
it has it has the time to be empathetic and.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
It doesn't have its own interest.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't like.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
You know, when you're having an exchange that other person
might want a little attention and TLC also not the
chat pots.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Yeah, and what does that say about our need to
be self centered main characters.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
It's not a happy thought. Yeah, But I mean I
think it just speaks to our need and our loneliness.
You know, we need more attachment than we have, and
we have a basic hunger around that and you know,
hopefully we found it from our parents and our partners,
but not everybody does. And there are lots of people

(01:06:01):
who live alone, who eat their meals alone, and this
to them is a solace. And you know, there's talk
about using you know, robots with chatbots in them to
take care of the elderly, and that idea just fills
me with creepiness. Yeah, I mean, I get it, we

(01:06:22):
don't spend enough time taking care of the elderly. But
human connection is so important, I mean, more important, I
think than we realize. And there are things going on
when humans take care of humans that you can't quantify,
that you can't digitize. You know, we look into each
other's souls and can you fake that? I don't think so. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Yeah, you see, even with the experience of animals, as
you were saying, and almost because we've got so overexposed
to humans in maybe uncomfortable ways in that you see
humans every day and you take them granted, and sometimes
humans are rude and sometimes they don't smile, and all
the things. I remember when I was fortunate enough to
go to a trip to Rwanda a few years ago

(01:07:07):
and trek with the mountain gorillas and so obviously in
their mountains, they're not in a cage or a they're
not in a space that's controlled. It's their home and
you get to visit their home. I have never felt
like that emotional around anything, Like it was so powerful
and special to be that close. And I was just, look,
my friends in h.

Speaker 1 (01:07:28):
Do they make eye contact?

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
They they so you're told not to make eye contact
with them because it could intimidate them. But it is
beautiful because we were asked to make this sound when
we got closer to them, and the sound is and
it's meant to me and we come in peace. And
what's fascinating is when they first told me this, I
was like, okay, whatever, Like I was a bit skeptical,
but I did it anyway, and they do it back,

(01:07:50):
and that was really special to have that exchange totally,
and they were so happy for us to be around them,
and they didn't want to push us away, they didn't
try to scare us. Like I was this far away
from a silver bag and we were just watching one
of them like man spreading like the other ones. The
kids were playing around, like mothers were carrying their babies

(01:08:10):
on their back, and you don't see one or two.
There's families of like sixteen garrillas walking together. And it's
truly one of the most beautiful things. And I was
just watching now my friends on safari in Africa with
her family, and she was just posting these stories of
like little lion cubs like playing together, and I was
just messaging like, gosh, this is so beautiful. Like the
ability what you're saying is so evident to us that

(01:08:33):
I never feel that way about a machine. I might
be blown away by the size of a building or
what it can do, but it doesn't appeal to this
heart centered, love centered version of me. That is, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:08:46):
I think in the future, I mean, I think we're
going to go through this period of redefining the human
which I think is going to be really interesting. I
call it in the book like a Copernican moment, like
when we learned we weren't the center of everything and
it was mind blowing and we had to change everything.
And I think we're coming up on one. I think
the net effect is we will draw closer to the

(01:09:06):
animals who share the ability to feel, who share our mortality,
our vulnerability, and in opposition to the machines. In defending
ourselves against the machines who are trying to form that
bond with us, hopefully that will lead to more moral
consideration for the animals who we have not treated as

(01:09:28):
we should. I mean, you know, we think of factory farms.
You know, I've done a lot of research on the
food system, and supposedly, if you're conscious, we were supposed
to give moral consideration. But their feed lots are full
of conscious beings that we give no moral consideration, in fact,
treat with incredible cruelty. So I can see a future

(01:09:50):
where our alliance. You know, we spent hundreds of years
defining ourselves as against the animals. You know, we're the animal.
We're the only animal that can do X, Y and Z.
You know, every one of those things has fallen, you know, language, culture,
tool making. You know, it turns out animals can do
it all. So I think we will form more of

(01:10:10):
a bond with animals as we have to deal on
the other side with these machines that want our attention
and our attachment.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
Yeah, Michael, Thank you so much. I hope this is
the first of many conversations we have, because.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
I do too. First stimulation.

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
Yeah, me too. I could go for hours with you.
It's like I'm fascinated, I'm riveted, curious. The way you
write is I don't know. It also appeals to my heart,
and I feel like that's something I hope we don't
lose in the world as we go into AI, like
the reading of actual thought and the world and yeah,

(01:10:46):
it's it's because it's it's so different, and we know,
I mean, we can already tell when AI is writing
versus a humans writing, and you can tell the sharing
of a story and discovery when it's AI or not.
But you know, the way you write, especially, I feel
it almost feels like you're writing from a meditation or
psychedelic and that's like a really special experience as a

(01:11:06):
reader to feel like this isn't just research or thought,
it's it's a revelation and expansion and questioning.

Speaker 1 (01:11:16):
You know. I think ais have been taught to do answers,
and humans form questions, and I don't think AIS are
very good at forming questions.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
So and that's the only saving grace. I think AI
has offered is that we'll get better at asking questions.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Yes, because I think so important to using it well.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
Totally. I feel humans have become bad at asking questions
over the last ever since I was born, in at school,
because it was always about having the answers, and now
that we have all the.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
Answers, questions are so much more interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
Questions are so much more interesting and important today because
AI will just give you what you ask it for,
and so we have to get become better off.

Speaker 1 (01:11:53):
I think it's a great point. Yeah, I think it's
a great point. But yeah, I tell my students. I
teach students writing, and if you can form a good question,
you've got everything you need to write a great piece
because you've created a detective story essentially. You know, how
do you answer this question and that will be the
path that leads you through the piece and all the
material that you've accumulated. So getting good at asking questions

(01:12:16):
is like very important.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
How do you relieve yourself of your and maybe it's
not yours, but how do you relieve yourself of society's
addiction to solving and conclusions in a world where you're
offering more questions and opener.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
Yeah, that's it. That's interesting. I don't know. So far
it hasn't been a problem. I mean, this is the
first time I've said at the beginning of a book,
you may know less at the end than the beginning.
As a value proposition, I don't know that's going to
work out.

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
I don't think it's true. As a reader, I would
say that you are being humble and kind and generous,
but the topic affords that humility isn't. Yeah, you know,
I understand why you said it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:57):
But also, on the way to answering one question, you
learn things you weren't you didn't expect to learn. There's
a ton I learned here. And I did go from
wanting to answer the hard question which I was bringing
this very kind of western male point of view problem solution.
This is how you frame things, right, this is how
we've learned to frame things. And by the end, and

(01:13:20):
I don't want to give away the end, but I
end up meditating in a cave and realizing that, you know, yes,
there's the problem of consciousness. That's interesting, But much more
interesting and important is the fact of it, this amazing
gift we have. I got in touch with that and
I hadn't thought when I went into this project that

(01:13:42):
attending to being present to was really going to be
the answer and that so so it took a turn.
So the question gives you the path, but there's there's
a lot of detours along the way, and you learn
things you weren't expecting to learn.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Michael, we and every on Purpose interview the final five.
These questions have to be answered in one sentence maximum.
We'll probably break our rule at some point, but let's see. So,
Michael Polland, is your final five. The first question is
what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:14:14):
Here, I'm gonna draw on my father, who was a
very wise person and kind of a He was a
lawyer but really a life coach, and more often than not,
people would come to him with a dream. This is
not one question.

Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
That's fine, it's beautiful, so I won't put.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
A full stop anyway. And they had a dream of
some kind. They wanted to start a business, they wanted
to have kids, they wanted to get married by a house.
And his advice was always the same, do it. And
people are held back by fear. And he could see
that these people had a dream, but they had a

(01:14:51):
voice in their head that often came from their parents
urging caution, and he would just say do it. And
as my mother reminds me, it worked. Ninety percent of
the time. People were happier that they did it. The
ten percent that didn't work were people who wanted to
start restaurants. That's very good, which is really tough business,

(01:15:12):
and maybe you shouldn't do it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
Choice, So it's very simple. It's two word advice, but
so many of us are held back and we spend
our lives waiting for the right moment and we don't
make You just have to force the issue sometimes, So jump. Absolutely,
So that would be my advice.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
Yeah. Second question, what is the worst advice you've ever
had overceived?

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
Oh? God, go to law school. That was very common
advice for people who weren't sure what they wanted to do.
And there's not going to be a lot of jobs
for lawyers.

Speaker 2 (01:15:50):
Yeah. Question number three, I was wondering, did your cover
of your book come to you in a experience of psychedelics?

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
No, but it was very hard. I love this cover
because it suggests that there's something behind the world that
we that we see. We went through many iterations and
then the designer came up with this and I thought
that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:13):
No, I loved it too. It was so unique. I
was like, this come from that psycholic yeah, all meditation
question before. If you could erase one false belief humans
have about consciousness, what would it be.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
Well now, I mean the false belief used to be
that we had we were the only conscious species, and
we believe that for a very long time, and that
this was our privilege. I think it's getting erased. I
think very few people believe that anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):
Other false that's a good one though, still I feel
like it is.

Speaker 1 (01:16:45):
Yeah, it needs to be.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
Because it's not changing how we behave with We.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
Still act as though we're the only conscious being and
everything else in the world is a resource, doesn't have
any point of view of its own. And I think
we are learning or about to learn that everything has
a point of view of its own, everything has interest
in agency, and we have to be more respectful. I
mean that one of the things that came out of

(01:17:09):
writing this book for me was really a re enchantment
of the world. I mean, when I realized that that
plants were sentient, I mean, you look at a forest
differently you look at a lawn differently, and so we
have a long way to go. I think intellectually we
know that there are lots of conscious creatures, but we're

(01:17:29):
not acting that way.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
And fifth and final question. We asked this every guest
on the show. I'm excited to hear you answer. If
you could create one law that everyone in the world
had to follow, what would it be?

Speaker 1 (01:17:43):
Too much responsibility? I hate telling people what to think.
I'm not getting I'm not getting one. I'm going to
say that I'm not going to do one. I think that. Yeah,
it's not for me to say.

Speaker 2 (01:18:01):
I love that because that's the first time in the
history of the show that we've had, is that right, Yeah,
So I love that answer.

Speaker 1 (01:18:06):
I'm gonna have to go back and see what some
of the other answers you got.

Speaker 2 (01:18:09):
We've had a mix. You get like the you know,
you get the love and beloved, the kindness you get, yeah,
you know, you get about and then you get fun
ones like Trevor Noa said. He said, imagine one day
you'd wake up and every day a different person in
your community would end up bankrupt. So it could and

(01:18:29):
it could be you. So how would you treat each other,
knowing that one of you could lose everything, and then complicated, complicated. Look,
James Corden said, I you would be blocked out of
your phone for every minute that you use it. So
there's there's a song of the other.

Speaker 1 (01:18:47):
Well here's here's one. I think we should have a
law against machines talking in the first person.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
So how would it talk to us?

Speaker 1 (01:18:55):
I don't know, third person, right, I just wouldn't say I. Yes,
it could say you. But as soon as machines start
using the eye, I think we go down a slippery
Slope's great mental illness, widespread mental illness.

Speaker 2 (01:19:10):
That's a great one.

Speaker 1 (01:19:11):
AI regulation. It's not going to happen during this administration,
but it's going to have to happen eventually.

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
At some point.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
Using Oh absolutely, I mean, look, what are.

Speaker 2 (01:19:20):
They going to be too late? Again?

Speaker 1 (01:19:22):
Yeah? No, I mean I think it will turn out
to be a historical tragedy that AI came of age
during this particular administration where there is no interest in
regulating it at all. I mean, we made that mistake
with social media once. You know, we could have said
that companies are responsible for the ages and yeah, I
mean there's so much we could have done, and now

(01:19:42):
we didn't know, but now we know we had that experience.
Why are we repeating it anyway?

Speaker 2 (01:19:49):
That Michael paulin the book is called a world appears. Honestly,
it's I would encourage and recommend for every single one
of you who have fascinated by this conversation fascinate by
Michael's other work, to read it because it's it's the
most riveting reading I've done in a long time, open questions,
fascinating subject matter, explorations between psychedelics, meditation, consciousness, and everything beyond. So, Michael,

(01:20:13):
thank you for this gift, and I hope we get
to do this a lots more.

Speaker 1 (01:20:18):
Yes, thanks for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
Thank you. If you love this episode, you love my
conversation with doctor Joe Dispenser on why stress and overthinking
negatively impacts your brain and heart and how to change
your habits that are on autopilot. Forgiveness is when you
overcome the emotion of your past and so you feel
so good that you no longer want to feel bad.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Jay Shetty

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Betrayal Season 5

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Michael Pollan: The Hidden Cost Of Constant Distraction (Use THIS Practice To Reclaim Your Attention, Clarity, And Inner Freedom)