Michael Pollan

And that's it.

You said 2,000.

Yeah.

Yeah, and then you were like, that's not right.

That's it.

All right, love you.

Love you.

Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness.

It is the only thing we truly know, the only thing we have certain actual first-hand experience of.

And yet we don't understand it at all.

We don't know what it's made of.

We don't know how it works.

We don't know why it exists.

And the closer we look at it, the weirder consciousness gets.

The more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail.

I find that so delightful that something so close could remain so mysterious that such a central question about the universe is happening inside of us all of the time.

Now, that's not to say we haven't tried to understand or that we haven't learned a lot from those efforts.

In his new book, A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness, the science writer Michael Pollan takes a tour of those efforts, of those theories, of those experiments, of those psychedelic trips and meditation retreats.

And he keeps finding himself in stranger and stranger territory, deeper inside the mystery.

So I wanted to have him on to talk about it.