Ezra Klein

I'm just saving you the trouble.

Yeah, that's a very common experience on psychedelics.

The world seems much more alive than it does in normal times.

Animism is very interesting because it's kind of our default as a species.

You go around the world, you look at traditional cultures, they believe that there's a spirit infusing, especially living things, but also rocks and cliffs and sky and clouds and everything.

And most kids are animist till they go to school and then we kind of knock it out of them.

So it's interesting that we exist in this unanimous bubble of Western scientific materialism.

But you push in any direction or travel in any direction or have a psychedelic experience and suddenly questions are raised about it.

And I think that's what's interesting about what these plant neurobiologists are doing.

They're returning us to a... If it's not full-scale animism, it's a reanimated world where there is just... And I did come out of this research experience of looking at plant consciousness or plant sentience with a sense that the world is more alive than I thought.

Oh, yeah.

Especially on ayahuasca.

Which is a plant-based, right?

It's two plants.

It's a brew of two plants.

If you ask most ayahuasqueros, how did anyone ever figure out the recipe because it's so obscure that these two plants cooked together would have this effect and neither by themselves has any effect.

or much of any effect.

And they'll tell you the plants taught me, and they will mean it.

And we don't know through the lens of Western science how to listen to that.

It sounds ridiculous to us.