The Ezra Klein Show · 2026-03-31 · 90 min · 15,638 words

Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

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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 can remain so mysterious. that such a central question about the universe is happening inside of us all of the time.

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