Michael Pollan

Consciousness is under siege.

I think that it's the last frontier for some of these companies that want to sell our time.

And of course, our time is our mind time.

Thank you, Terry.

It's very good to be back.

Yeah.

So anybody who uses psychedelics, I think, sooner or later starts thinking about consciousness.

I mean, I had thought about it at another point in my life, but for most of my life, I kind of went through it regarding consciousness as just kind of the water we swim in, you know, totally transparent.

But when I did these experiments with psychedelics for how to change your mind, something interesting shifted.

Psychedelics have a way of kind of smudging the windshield through which we normally see reality.

And suddenly we notice change.

wow, there is a windshield.

There's something between us and the world, and it could be different than it is.

And that's a very common, I think, perception of people on psychedelics.

But that really got me thinking and made me realize that for my next project, I really wanted to dig in because I realized I didn't know much about consciousness.

Yeah, it's slippery in one way and it's obvious in another.

I mean, there's nothing any of us know with more certainty than the fact that we are conscious.

It's immediately available to us.

It's the voice in our head.

But the definitions that I like are, one is simply subjective experience, or you could even just say experience.