Michael Pollan

And I've met people creating schools on this.

And there is, in an interesting way, burbling around a kind of sense that attentional freedom exists.

is an increasingly political and structural question.

I think we see it fairly clearly with our kids, but I think we know it with ourselves too.

And it's very hard to think about how to create a coherent politics around it and activism around it.

And also nothing is more fundamental, including to how politics works, than what kind of attention you're cultivating in a society.

Attention as a collective resources, I think is a underplayed frame for this.

Attention is a collective capacity that is being exhausted by people like Trump, by certain ways the media and algorithmic media works.

A society with a more irritable, distracted, and diminished capacity for attention is going to be politically affected.

different than a society with a healthier form of it.

Yeah, this is Reed Hastings years ago who said our primary competitor is sleep.

Yeah.

I particularly loved the coda, the final chapter.

You go spend time with Joan Halifax, a great Zen teacher.

And she has a line in there that, coming as it does at the end of this very heady book, she says that she has divested herself from all meaning.

And you go to talk to her,

And she basically sends you to a cave and puts off talking to you.

Tell me a bit about that experience and also what you took from that extremely Zen form of teaching that you were gifted.

the way this book has a quality of you read it and maybe you know less but it adds wonder yeah and it made me think as i was going through different theories you know integrated information processing or whatever it's called how sad i'd be if any of them were true if you could prove to me the global workspace theory was the truth of consciousness

If you could prove to me consciousness evolved and all the things I think are a byproduct of an evolutionary process for reducing uncertainty, I would hate it.