Michael Pollan

Because, and not to do violence to it, both were actually about their subject, but

It is striking to me how often in this book, it's not just Koch, there is the scientist who is building, I think, a robot trying to make consciousness and then does, I think, 5-MeO-DMT and realizes everything is love.

There's your mushrooms, there's a lot of people who note offhandedly that they are...

There seems to be something here that it has caused a larger ontological shock than I think a stylized description of, well, you ingested a chemical, of course you had a chemical experience, would naturally suggest.

It's a totally unsatisfying explanation, yeah.

You talk about consciousness as a reducing valve, as a filtering mechanism of sensory experience.

And we've talked a little bit about the wider, more lantern-like consciousness of children.

I wonder how different the experience of being conscious in advanced modernity with a smartphone and a task list and...

We are really training ourselves to narrow down, to be successful in the economy we have structured in much of the Western, though not only Western world at this point.

We have altered what it means to be human.

And I wonder how much we've made the experience of consciousness increasingly unsatisfying by, like you can overtrain any muscle.

And what we are doing is,

staring in a narrowed way at a computer.

I mean, there's all this great neuroscience on the difference between wide gaze and narrow gaze, which I really feel when I look out over a mountain range and when I look at my phone, you can feel... The shrinking.

The shrinking and the tightening of the chest and the... The posture.

We have...

we have narrowed how it feels to be a human being.

We have, but it's not too late.

Tell me about your consciousness sovereignty ideas as you're moving in here into... Consciousness hygiene.

We believe you for sure.