Michael Pollan

Three books for you.

Well, a book that was really influential in the writing of this book is a book called The Blind Spot.

It's by a philosopher, Evan Thompson, and two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser.

It's a critique of Western science.

And it makes a very powerful case that the blind spot of the physical sciences is inability to deal with lived experience.

For science, red is a certain frequency and red to them is an illusion because it's constructed in the brain.

But they're pointing out that humans who experience red is a fact of nature like any other fact of nature and you got to deal with it.

How does science deal with lived experience?

It's a fantastic book.

Another book that was really influential as I was working on the stream of consciousness is a stream of consciousness novel by Lucy Ellman called Duck's Newburyport.

It's a thousand pages, one sentence.

And that sounds really daunting and like I'm not going to pick that up.

You can open it anywhere you want, read 10 pages.

You can listen to the audio book.

You can fall asleep, pick it up again.

It's still there.

It's like this pool you can enter.

And it's all the thoughts of this middle-class, middle-aged woman who lives in Ohio, has a home baking business, and it's everything going on in her head, including scrolling on her phone.

But you have to infer that because there's nothing to orient you.

But anyway, it's great fun and really funny and a brilliant book.