Ezra Klein

I mean, if I came out anywhere on this whole book, it's like my mind is much more open than it was to a lot of weird stuff, just because the normal stuff hasn't really panned out that well.

Now, why would the plant-based psychedelics be more likely to do this than the chemistry-based psychedelics?

I think there it's set and setting.

You know, Timothy Leary's great contribution was explaining that the psychedelic experience is shaped profoundly by the physical setting in which it takes place and the mindset, the mental setting that you bring to it.

When you're using a plant-based psychedelic, I mean, the imagery is all jungle imagery.

You know, people see leopards and they see vines.

Do you think that's because of set and setting or because of something in the... I think it's set and setting, yeah.

No, but there's like 5% of me that was like, okay, maybe.

I'm kind of, I've entered this never say never realm with this research.

Yeah.

Tell me some of them.

So I'm going to back up a little bit to make sense of this idea.

One of the big questions is your brain, at least 90% of what it's doing, you're not aware of.

It's doing all this work, monitoring your body, maintaining homeostasis, perceiving things in your environment without you being consciously aware of it.

Peripheral visions, smell, scent, touch, all these kind of things, temperature.

So the question then becomes, if this automatic machine is so good at what it does, why does any of it become conscious?

That's part of the hard problem of consciousness.

Why aren't we just zombies?

You know, wouldn't that have been simpler?

And the reasons, and to some extent these are evolutionary, just those stories, but they're persuasive, that basically you can automate things until you get to a level of complexity.