Ezra Klein

And I got there and I spent a couple of days with the adepts and the monks.

But then she said, you know, I think we should go up to the retreat.

And she said, we'll go up there and you'll stay in the cave.

And I'm like, the cave?

That's like not my kind of thing.

I'm not a camper.

And she said, don't worry, it's a five-star cave.

So we get there.

And then after this 25-mile dirt road, and then there's another half-mile hike out to the cave.

And there's no electricity and there's no running water.

And somebody's dug into this hillside, these caves, and with a glass door on one side overlooking this meadow.

And there I was for the next three or four days.

And she kept ducking my interviews.

And at one point she said, I've divested of meaning.

I was like, oh, shit, this is not good for the journalist conducting interviews.

But like a meditation retreat that you were describing, it is almost a psychedelic experience when you're alone with yourself and the borders of self attenuate.

They become kind of more porous.

You realize the extent to which our identity as selves is a social identity, and it's reinforced by everybody we talk to because they're treating us like a self, so we must be a self.

But if you're absolutely alone in the middle of nowhere,

and you have no access to media, it softens.