Michael Pollan

And of all the things, you know, whenever you finish a book, there's always a few threads that are left, you know, untied and, you know, curious paths.

It's too late to go down.

You're on the last chapter.

And consciousness was definitely one of them.

So I thought,

And I had a wonderful editor who was willing to support me on an expedition with a very uncertain destination.

And because I set off on this really not knowing where I was going, what I was doing, and with no sense of what to expect.

And, you know, God bless her.

She's since passed and God offers her name.

She's a wonderful editor.

She said, yeah, you'll do something interesting with that.

So I was off.

Well, you have certainly done that.

And we'll spend the next, I don't know, 90 minutes or so thinking about consciousness.

But I think you arrive at a place that I've arrived.

I don't know if it's stable in the end, but I seem to have occupied this spot for quite some time.

Thinking about consciousness and specifically the hard problem of consciousness, which we'll talk about in a moment, is something that just utterly kind of subsumed my intellectual interests somewhere around the mid-90s and held them for quite some time.

And you wrote a really interesting book on it.

I mean, it was about the self, but it was really about consciousness.

Waking up had a big influence on me.