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Michael Pollan, one of my all-time favorite non-fiction writers.
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A guy who's been writing about food and nature and consciousness for decades now.
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And for him, the writing process begins with a question.
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He finds something that he's interested in and he says, "All right, I'm going to go on an adventure.
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I'm going to experience things.
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I'm going to talk to people.
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I'm going to learn stuff.
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I'm going to come back and put it all into a book."
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And his writing style is almost like somebody putting their arm around you and he's just reporting back what he's learned. What did he do? In a very friendly way.
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Now, the adventure we talked about the most in this conversation was the time that he bought a cow and he followed it from birth to slaughter so that he could talk about meat in the industrial food system.
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Now, Michael's taught non-fiction writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley.
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And at the end of the interview, he goes, "Man, I just gave you an entire semester's worth of content in 1 hour."
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>> Well, the uh the place I want to begin, I told you this, I tried not to have coffee this morning. >> Mhm.
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>> And I just had the worst brain fog so I just chugged a cappuccino. I feel much better. >> Much better. >> Good. I'm glad. Yeah.
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Um you know, a lot of people took from that piece I did on caffeine and the fact that I had this fast that I had some problem with it and that, you know, you shouldn't drink coffee and it's some kind of heroic thing to abstain, but that really wasn't my point.
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I was abstaining to see what would happen and looking forward the whole time to getting back on caffeine.
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And um if you actually can succeed in stopping using it for a period of time, even just a week or two, that first cup will make it worth it.
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It's just you realize what a powerful drug it is.
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>> Yeah, I think you said that it was almost psychedelic. >> Yeah, it was amazing.
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And um but of course, you can't maintain that.
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Um cuz you slip very quickly back into your, you know, maintaining baseline.
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But there's no reason to not drink caffeine unless you're one of the few people who gets incredibly jittery.
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Um there's a lot of evidence that coffee and tea have um important health-giving properties.
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Um and I say coffee and tea not caffeine cuz it may be the the various plant chemicals in the two uh plants, the coffee and the and the tea plant that are responsible for the benefits, polyphenols so called.
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So, it may not be the caffeine, but it's correlated with um lower rates of Parkinson's, uh good cardiovascular health.
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Um there's a lot of a lot of positives to it.
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So, I don't urge anyone to give it up except to see except to get in touch with their addiction.
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And it's, you know, indispensable to writing for me. >> Mhm. I mean, about that?
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>> Well, I I just don't think I could sit down to write in the morning without being caffeinated.
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I mean, maybe tea would do the trick, but it really it has to be I sip a cup of coffee all morning.
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I mean, I stretch it out and um from like 9:30 or so when I sit down till 1:00 when I have lunch, um I manage to stretch out one cup.
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>> And how does your brain function differently?
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>> It just it's just sharper. You feel more present.
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You you don't have you describe brain fog.
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I mean, that's definitely uh what you feel. Um it it's funny.
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I mean, what's what's really weird about this is that I felt more myself on this chemical than I did in the absence of this chemical.
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It's now like woven into my the phenomenology of just being me, you know, and that you take it away and it's like something's something's wrong with that guy.
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>> Yeah, what I want to do is I want to talk about different drugs.
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Um and basically hear your take on what they do for the creative process.
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So, I want to go through We'll start with nicotine.
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>> Well, I haven't been exposed to nicotine in a very long time.
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I did smoke for a few years in my teens and 20s.
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But to me, nicotine and caffeine are very similar in that there is a kind of they're great focus drugs.
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Um there's a distinction that I draw in the consciousness book between uh it's not mine, it's Alison Gopnik's uh psychologist and philosopher between spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness.
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And um she says uh spotlight consciousness is is an adult uh skill of putting on blinders and focusing on something which we learn in school and we need to do to have success doing anything.
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Lantern consciousness is something young children have, which is to say they take in information from all 360°. They're not focused.
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They can't They can't stay on task.
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They can't get a lot done, but they're mastering the world and they're and they're actually getting more sensory information than we are.
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To write, you need you need um you know, that focused concentration for sure. That's spotlight. That's spotlight.
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So, um both caffeine and nicotine, I think, help you narrow your aperture in a in a way that's necessary for getting things done, but is closing out lots of stuff.
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So, I would put them in the same uh and and other stimulants do that, too, I think.
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Uh so, there's a sharpening of focus that happens with both.
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There's also an energetic component with caffeine. >> Mhm.
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>> That you just kind of feel like I've got the power that I can do what I need to do.
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You know, there's a there's a time where you feel too weak to get something done mentally.
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And uh there's a sense in which caffeine is empowering, I think. >> Yeah.
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>> Or gives you the illusion of power.
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>> People say, "Write drunk, edit sober."
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Let's talk about alcohol.
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>> Alcohol, I have never really connected to work.
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I think most writers who drink drink to unwind from their work.
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Not I don't know how many writers really write drunk.
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I mean, there must be must be some.
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I mean, even someone like, you know, Hemingway who was a heroic drunk.
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Was it while he was writing or was it You know, there's a way in which you can get so fraught and tangled up, especially after a difficult day's work, but just a hard day's work that you need a drug to kind of chill out.
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And in my experience, that's kind of how writers use alcohol.
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But I think that approach was discredited over the course of the 20th century.
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I you know, you don't hear about drunk writers now the way you did all the time then.
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Let's talk about psychedelics.
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So, psychedelics um can feed the creative process.
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I think we make a mistake in assuming it's automatically the case that you have epiphanies on psychedelics.
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99% of them are stupid or banal or like not really going to help you.
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I mean, yes, it's true, love is the most important thing in the world, but what are you going to do with that?
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Um it's useful to be reminded, but it's not a creative insight.
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But people have powerful experiences.
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Um there is a whole history of scientists who had breakthroughs on psychedelics.
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Um Kary Mullis is a famous example.
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He was the biologist of some kind who came up with the idea for PCR, this technique of multiplying DNA uh while tripping on acid driving in Mendocino County or somewhere like that.
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Um and he's told us and there are lots of stories like that about about scientists who had some sort of uh breakthrough, often involving a kind of visualization of a problem they were dealing with.
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But, you know, it's it's led a lot of people wrong, too.
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I mean, it's it's not automatic.
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Um I had an experience that I describe in um A World Appears that did lead to some an important element of the book.
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And that was that the plants in I was in my garden and the and that the plants around me were cautious.
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And that they were returning my gaze.
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They were benevolent, but just very present and wanting to engage.
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Um And I didn't know what to do with that, cuz I'm I'm pretty quick to dismiss things as drug-addled fantasy.
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>> Even when you're tripping? >> No, after.
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After is like I'm In the moment, it was completely persuasive and consuming, and it was like and it was wonderful, too. I mean, it was like wow.
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It was It was literally awesome.
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Um but afterwards, I was like, well, what do I do with that? Plants conscious?
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And I read Henry William James, and he talks about mystical experiences in Varieties of Religious Experience.
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And he said we can't judge the truth value of these things, cuz we don't know enough.
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Um but the the way to go is to treat them as hypotheses and see if you can find other ways of knowing that will support that idea. And that's what I did.
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I I I went down this long deep rabbit hole looking at plant intelligence and plant consciousness and found scientists who were actually working on this and actually believe plants have some kind of sentience.
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And so it became an important part of the book, um you know, about how how how deep into nature does consciousness extend.
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Um so I don't know that I would have done that if I hadn't had that experience on psychedelics.
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So, in that sense, um it was an inspiration.
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>> I taught writing for 6 years, and the biggest trouble that my students faced was writer's block.
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They had so much trouble getting ideas from out of their head and onto the page.
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But, you know what's weird?
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People don't get talker's block.
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Like, if you just talk out your ideas, it works.
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That's why I love WhisperFlow and use it for my writing all the time. It's super easy.
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Press a hotkey, and you just talk, and all of the sudden the ideas show up on the page.
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There's no um's, there's no sloppy punctuation, just a draft that you can work with and shape into something amazing.
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And since I'm no longer tethered to the keyboard, I can write on the move.
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And the biggest thing is that I trust it. Look, I love Siri. She and I go way back.
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We've known each other for years.
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But, sometimes I wonder if she even passed fourth grade English class, because she can't even get punctuation right.
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But, WhisperFlow automatically cleans up all your mistakes, digressions, and weird little vocal fillers without losing any of the substance.
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That's why I love WhisperFlow.
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I use it every single day, and I recommend it to every writer I know.
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And you can try for free at ref. whisperflow. ai/howiwrite.
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It seems like psychedelics have had quite a bit of a rise since say the 1960s.
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So, I would assume there's not a long history of writers using psychedelics to to write. Yeah.
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So, you know, there were some studies done in the '60s about creativity and and psychedelics, um LSD, and um they were not very strong methodologically, but they did So, they they what they did was this happened at Stanford.
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Jim Fadiman is the psychologist who who set these up, and he wanted to test the impact of LSD on creativity.
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And he got people in a variety of professions, you know, couple writers, scientists, architects, and everybody had to be stuck on a problem, you know, have some block.
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And he gave them all not a huge dose, like 100 micrograms of LSD, and he let them kind of sprawl on the floor for a while and trip, and then he said, "Okay, now we're going to our desks."
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And they all went to their desks and worked on their problems.
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And there's no control here, and it's all based on self-report, but many of them said that yeah, I figured out this out this design.
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I figured out the solution to this knot I was in.
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Many of them reported that it was very helpful.
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Um It's something we need to study again, I think.
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Studying creativity is a little tricky, like how do you measure it?
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We have non-divergent thinking or divergent thinking.
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But it would be really interesting to do that kind of work again and see um there's a scientist I interviewed for how for um a world of peers uh who studies spontaneous thought.
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This is daydreaming and mind-wandering, and this is where your your thoughts are not being um shaped by your environment so much as something inside you.
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Could be unconscious, could be who knows what.
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And that it's very important to creativity.
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And and she says it's psilocybin um uh nurtures spontaneous thought, and that's what's going on.
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You're having a lot of spontaneous thought, and out of that um some creative insights may come.
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So, but I think the whole idea needs to be tested experimentally.
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>> Yeah, tell me about as you're going through an experiment like that, the kind of journaling you do.
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I was kind of struck like looking through the journal entries of flipping through various books, how vivid some of the sentences are.
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>> So, when I'm doing an experiment to write about it, which I often do, I mean, I like to experiment on myself.
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Um I keep pretty careful notes.
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I I do a diary, and and that um and and there are phrases that will end up in the finished piece, but it's mostly just to remind me what it was really like day by day because you you know, as as the effects fade, you lose the vividness.
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So, uh I'll always do a um uh a detailed journal whether I'm, you know, following a cow through the meat system or uh using a psychedelic.
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I mean, psychedelics, you can't really take notes in live time.
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I mean, as it's happening. Yeah.
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But, um that night, I'll always write a very extensive uh everything I can remember about the experience.
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And you use a fraction of it, but you know, that's the nature of doing nonfiction.
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You're overshooting all the time.
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You do I mean, you you know, you have dozens of interviews that never make it into the into the piece.
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You have all these experiences and it turns out they're not really relevant.
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So, there's a lot of what you could call waste, but it all goes in it's composted in some ways.
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>> And you collected it all in that one sheet, right?
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It's like a single space.
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>> Yeah, I have a I have a journal for each piece.
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So, for the length of my research period, I am writing in it every day.
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And it consists of um things I've read, quotes that are really interesting, highlights of interviews.
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It doesn't contain the interviews, but it refers to them.
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Those are in separate files organized by individual and then subject.
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Um but as I go through the transcripts, I'll copy really salient quotes and put it in the journal.
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And that's that's what I write from.
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And it's a searchable thing and um you know, it's a mess.
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It wouldn't mean anything to anybody else, but that's kind of I I don't have a great memory, so that has to you know, it's all there.
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>> I was so happy when you said that. I have the worst memory.
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My sister can remember absolutely everything and I just cannot remember stuff.
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I got to write it all down.
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>> You know, as a writer, forgetting is very important or at least I've convinced myself because you have such a massive material and um forgetting is how you edit essentially.
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Forgetting's really important mental process.
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I wrote about it in uh Botany of Desire when I was writing about cannabis.
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Cuz one of the things cannabis does is uh cause us to forget. Everybody knows.
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Moment by moment you forget.
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You don't You don't know what happened like 5 seconds ago.
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I remember interviewing uh a scientist in Israel named Raphael Mechoulam. See, I remember that.
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Who studied cannabis and uh and I said, "So."
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And he had established that they it does cause people to forget things.
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And I said, "Why would that be adaptive?
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Why is Why is forgetting useful?"
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And he said, "Well, do you really want to remember all the faces you saw on the subway this morning?"
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That there we are we receive so much information every day that uh forgetting is as important as remembering.
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And that was like, "Oh, good.
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I'm cuz I'm really good at that."
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>> I'm going to be all right. >> [laughter] >> Yeah.
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Um as you're working, it seems like the writing happens in the morning and then the afternoon is basically these researching, reading. How does that work?
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>> Yeah, I I usually have one session in the morning when I'm drafting.
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I mean, you know, as a as a journalist, you have many days where you're not writing.
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You're taking notes or you're doing interviews or you're reading or um and um but when I'm in the drafting phase, which is the phase I enjoy the most actually, I enjoy it more than reporting, which is I think there are a lot of writers who would tell you they enjoy reporting more.
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I I just I never feel I'm I've done an honest day's work if I haven't produced some pages. >> I feel you.
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It's very very old-fashioned idea.
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>> Um so I will start in the morning.
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Uh so, if I'm in the middle if I'm drafting a chapter or an article, uh the first thing I do is read it through from the beginning um and edit it.
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Um and I find editing a good way to kind of prime the pump and then and bring the piece back into my into my, you know, short-term memory.
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And um and I, you know, I was trained as an editor.
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I was an editor before I was a writer.
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>> Oh, I didn't know that.
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>> Yeah, I was an editor for many years at uh Harper's Magazine for uh 10 years, I guess.
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And before that, I worked for a couple other magazines.
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So, I'm very comfortable in in that mode.
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And so, I'll spend uh I'll I'll edit from the the beginning of the piece.
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And so, that it gets combed over and over again.
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Every morning, I'm starting at the beginning.
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So, the beginnings get very refined.
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Um and then that could take 2 hours or an hour or something like that. A long time.
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And then I'll And I do that by hand.
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Um uh I print out at the end of the previous day.
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And then I have a clean clean copy and I mark it up and then put the changes on and then go forward a few more pages.
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So, that's that's the method that works for me.
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I tell my students though that you know, that's not necessarily the best way to do it.
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I have friends who who really just kind of spit out very rough drafts. Um they don't look back.
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They just write it till they're done.
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They'll even do it with a book.
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They'll do a short version of a book before they fully reported it.
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And then they then they work on that.
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Um I I have to I don't know.
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I sort of like to keep everything neat. >> Yeah.
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When I So, I taught writing for many years and I would basically put people to two camps.
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What I called the printer method and the pixel method.
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So, the printer method is, you know, how when you print out a photo and it comes out goes >> Yeah. >> And it's perfect.
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And then you get the next line, and it's perfect, then you get the next line.
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And then the pixel method is remember this would have been earlier in the internet, but a photo would pop up and it would be kind of blurry.
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>> And then it would >> And then it would kind of sharpen resolution.
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And so that's what other people do.
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They kind of get the whole thing. >> Right.
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>> And then they sharpen.
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And people are like, "Oh my goodness, I'm either this one or this one.
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I didn't even know you could write the other side." >> I know. I know.
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I see it with my students cuz some of them are much better spitting out that draft.
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You know, people talk about vomiting the first draft.
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Um but that's never been my style.
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>> Well, your point about research, another thing that I discovered when I was helping people work through writer's block and stuff like that is if you can just get a big enough base of information, sometimes and ideas, sometimes you then look at that mountain can be so high that you can build a little molehill over here because you have so much to pull from. >> Yeah. Yeah.
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Uh that's definitely true.
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I mean Yeah, I mean you can get overwhelmed by material.
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I'm working on a piece now that there's just too much information about.
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And uh so again, you have to I I step away from it for a couple days or weeks, forget a bunch of things, and then so what sticks, and then I focus on that.
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So I I rely on forgetting to help me deal with those overwhelming situations.
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>> Tell me about your why you write in the first person.
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>> You know, uh there are there are several reasons.
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Oh, my my writing, my professional magazine writing really began with uh some pieces I wrote for my first book, Second Nature, that uh are about the garden.
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And I read a lot of garden literature at the time, English and American.
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And it's very much in this uh letter writing mode.
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Very familiar, first person, uh, informal.
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And my first essays were my effort to write in that genre.
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Uh, even though I was doing different things, it wasn't just about, you know, the beauty of the rose, it was about, why do we think roses are beautiful?
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And how have they been evolved to manipulate us?
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And you know, all these other issues that came into it.
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But I was still writing in that mode.
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And so I think I got very comfortable writing in that first it's an epistolary mode, if I'm pronouncing that right.
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Kind of over the back fence conversation. >> Huh.
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>> And, um, very familiar with the reader, talking directly to the reader.
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And so it I think it kind of stuck and I found it was actually useful, more useful doing other kinds of journalism that was like, you know, a little more, um, hard-edged than garden writing.
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Um, so I think it comes from that.
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I also, um, I kind of like breaking the fourth wall and talking to the reader.
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I mean, I'll I'll go in and out of doing that.
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Um, I think over time I've developed a kind of voice on the page, although it's different from pace piece to piece, but there's some common denominator that people sense that the reader thinks is is very helpful, I mean, taking them through something.
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Um, I've And here's another another source of it.
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When I was at Harper's, I was working for Lewis Lapham.
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I was the executive editor, he was the editor-in-chief of the magazine.
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And I would assign pieces and bring them to him to get approved, to get them in the magazine.
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And invariably, he would say, "So, who is this person and why do they care?
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You got to tell me in the first page."
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And he was very, um, suspicious and skeptical of the omniscient voice, third-person omniscient voice, that this is the voice of the New York Times or the voice of the New Yorker, and it implies an authority that isn't real.
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Um, and it's not telling you something really important, which is who is this person, why does he care, or she?
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And so I was always editing to bring the first person into those pieces.
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Not in a big way, it didn't turn into confessional journalism, but it just kind of situated the writer, and he felt it was a very honest way to write.
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So, I think that was another source of it.
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Um, and then, you know, I do like doing these immersion pieces where I put myself in the story as a way to understand the story.
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And that goes back to, um, my parents, when I was like 13, gave me a copy of a book by George Plimpton called Paper Lion.
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George Plimpton founded the Paris Review, but he was also a really fine kind of literary sports writer for Sports Illustrated, mostly.
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And he had this idea that he could kind of revivify sports writing by getting on the field himself.
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And he wasn't a big athlete or anything, but he persuaded the Detroit Lions, this is back in the late '60s, early '70s, to let him go through summer training camp, and actually start as a quarterback in an exhibition game at the beginning of the season. How about that?
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Yeah, that's an assignment I'd say yes to.
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Yeah, and he was this kind of rangy, he was like 6'4", but skinny as a rail.
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And, um, he And Paper Lion is this wonderful book that kind of reinvents sports writing, because instead of the cigar-chomping guy on the sidelines who's been there, done everything, seen it all, the cynical voice of the usual sports writer in the in the press box.
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You were on the field and you had this kind of uh experience of awe that you only get when you do something for the first time.
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So, that no no no number of interviews with experienced and thoughtful football players who had been doing it since they were kids would give you the same vividness.
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He did cymbals at the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein.
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He pitched a baseball game.
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He uh He I don't know if he did hockey, but he he went He used this technique several times.
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And I just loved what it produced.
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Um these very And you get humor from that.
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Um cuz cuz invariably you're a fish out of wa- water.
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You're not very good at what you're doing. >> Right. >> You might get killed. >> Right.
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>> Um So, I didn't realize it at the time, but this had settled in me having I mean, I read this book when I was 13.
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And it uh when I saw opportunities to do that, and I guess the first time might have been when I was planting a genetically modified potato in my garden, and uh I mean, that was one of the first times.
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>> Talk about the watching a pig from birth to slaughter.
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>> Pig or It was a It was a >> A cow. Yeah, yeah. >> A steer. >> A steer.
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>> So, that was an interesting one.
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I was commissioned by uh the New York Times magazine.
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There was a few years where they encouraged me to write about the food system.
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And there was a sense This is before I wrote Omnivore's Dilemma, but there was a sense beginning in 2002, and I can date this to uh when Eric Schlosser uh published Fast Food Nation, which uh was a a surprise bestseller.
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>> So, that was what year? >> 2002.
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>> And what year was Super Size Me?
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>> Uh a little later than that, later in the decade. >> Okay.
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>> Toward the end of the decade. I think.
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Um it was certainly after Un Vogue's Dilemma, which is 2006. It's now 20 years.
26:58
You know, a good editor, and I had wonderful editors, uh Adam Moss and Jerry Maserati at the Times Magazine.
27:05
They have a sense of kind of where the zeitgeist is and where it's going, and they had a a a sense that people had had gotten very interested in how their food was produced and were anxious about it.
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And they were like, "We want you to write a big cover story about the meat industry." That's all they said.
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And uh I said, "Well, which animal?
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You know, I mean, let's Can we get more precise?"
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And they actually gave me They paid me to spend a month finding the story, which was nice and should happen more often cuz normally you have to write your pitches on spec. >> How did you do that?
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>> I just got on the phone and started calling people I know.
27:42
I began with a Bill Niman at Niman Ranch, who happened to be friends with the dean of the journalism school where I was teaching, Orville Schell.
27:50
I mean, that you know, you follow this daisy chain of people you know.
27:53
And he explained how cattle are being produced now and and and and acquainted me with the absurdity of the process.
28:00
I mean, the fact that, you know, they feed them corn even though they're evolved to eat grass, and when you feed them corn, they do grow quickly, but they get sick, so you have to give them antibiotics.
28:12
I mean, it's just like the He was very good at showing me how the system worked.
28:17
And then I would call other people on ranches.
28:19
And by the end, I said, um I went to my editor, Jerry Maserati, and so I did this big data dump. I'd learned everything.
28:29
I said, "Well, you know, there's I can think of six different focuses for this."
28:33
I said, "First, it should be about beef.
28:34
It should be about um not chicken or pork.
28:36
I think beef is the more interesting story.
28:40
And I can do the environmental story.
28:40
I can do the animal welfare story. I can do the feed story.
28:44
And um you know, uh, and or the pharmaceutical story, and you know, I had all I had like six different buckets of theme.
28:53
And he And he want And he, you know, and I just kind of did this data dump.
28:58
I didn't have a really clear idea what the line would be.
28:59
And he came up with this idea.
29:02
He said, "Well, why don't you find one cow." He called it a cow.
29:06
These are steers usually in the meat system. Cows are for dairy.
29:12
And and tell the life story of one.
29:12
And And then you can hang all those different issues on the on the life story."
29:18
And I thought that was a brilliant idea.
29:22
And so, that's what I started doing.
29:22
And then then I had to start a second phase of research, which is I had to find the the steer I was going to write the biography of.
29:29
I didn't know any steers. Yeah.
29:31
So, anyway, so so So, there's a cat So, there are two to to me when I do nonfiction, there are two big phases.
29:39
And this is true in like people who do documentaries.
29:41
It's a very similar way of thinking.
29:42
The first phase is the global research. Understand the system.
29:46
Understand what's typical.
29:46
Um, how does the whole thing work?
29:49
Um, how does it affect the environment, which I'm often those are the kind of questions I'm most engaged by.
29:56
Um, and and then once you once you know the general case, you have to find your case study.
30:05
And that's a very different kind of research.
30:06
And then you're looking for who's going to be good on camera.
30:08
Uh, who's the rancher who gives good quotes?
30:12
Who's the animal I have access to?
30:12
Uh, can I get into the feed lot and the slaughterhouse?
30:17
And And so, and that's, uh, can be harder research, especially in the food system, which is very secretive and So, then I found my animal, and I wasn't planning to buy it.
30:29
That idea didn't occur to me.
30:32
See, the both ideas in this were not mine.
30:34
Um, but I was on the ranch where I had I was going to go to pick out my animal.
30:39
While I was there, one of the ranchers said, "If you really want to understand our business, you should buy this."
30:46
And I'm like, "Mhm, that's a really good idea."
30:48
Cuz that changes everything.
30:48
If I own this animal, first of all, I can talk to the feedlot and slaughterhouse in a different way.
30:57
Like, what are you going to feed my animal?
30:59
Are you going to give it a hormone implant? Oh, that's my decision.
31:00
How do I weigh that decision?
31:05
Suddenly, I've again departed the skeptical press box >> perspective of the journalist. >> You're on the field. >> I'm on the field.
31:12
And uh and I have to look at those decisions differently.
31:16
So, okay, hormone implant. Totally unnecessary. Raises questions.
31:22
Maybe why we have, you know, early puberty for girls and things like that.
31:27
The fact that we're putting hormones in our meat. Europeans don't do it.
31:31
Um costs $15 to put that implant in the neck of the of my steer, his whose name was 534. His number was 534.
31:42
But it gives me $50 more in weight uh at the end.
31:47
And that could be the difference between profit and and loss on the animal.
31:48
So, there's no question you have to do it cuz in this competitive environment.
31:52
So, I it allows me to present some of the ranchers' decisions in a more sympathetic or empathetic way.
32:01
So, yeah, so that idea came from the rancher.
32:03
And uh then the question became, well, how much does it cost?
32:08
Uh it was like 600 bucks at that stage.
32:10
>> It was a young >> For baby.
32:11
>> For a baby, a calf, yeah.
32:13
And um and I thought, well, I could expense it to the Times, but then I wouldn't really have any skin in the game.
32:17
So, I I put up the 600 bucks myself, bought the animal, and um you know, it was funny, psychologically, it changed my relationship to the feedlot operator.
32:27
You know, I would I would you know, he they knew I wasn't a real rancher.
32:32
They knew I was a journalist, but I was talking about wolf you know, what would you do if 534 got this illness?
32:37
Or like what you know, uh and they were treating me a little more like a client and a little less like a journalist, which I think um soften their skepticism or their or their made them a little less guarded.
32:53
And that's a big part of journalism is making people less guarded.
32:57
>> When you're talking to them as you're going >> Yeah, I mean getting people to cooperate.
33:00
Some you know, I mean access was a real issue with that story and the the strategy so I had a so I had to get a ranch, I had to get a feedlot and I had to get a slaughterhouse.
33:12
Those were the three stops on the way.
33:17
Um had I gone to the slaughterhouse, which is one of the four big companies that slaughter most of the beef, 85% of the beef in America.
33:26
Um I would have been they're huge companies.
33:28
I would have been referred to the PR department and they would have said no way.
33:33
But I started at the other end with the ranch with the ranchers and the ranchers are the customers of the feedlots.
33:38
So when the ranch was called and said this guy's coming essentially I was okayed by them and they did it as a favor to their client. Ditto up the chain.
33:48
So I I had I had good access and um I mean they were all very upset when the piece came out, but um but I I was able to get very good access and talk to the veterinarians on the feedlot and and go there and meet and have a reunion with 534.
34:08
>> Can you tell me about the relationship?
34:10
The word that hasn't come up is narrative and we're talking about writing from the first person.
34:15
How does that then enable narrative to show up in a piece?
34:17
And also you talked about the through line.
34:20
>> Right, I call it the laundry line. >> The laundry line.
34:23
>> Which is a metaphor my students no longer quite get because they haven't seen a laundry line, you know, in a very long time. >> ages?
34:29
>> Now everybody has dryers. >> Yeah.
34:31
>> But you know, every now and then you're on a train and you go through Baltimore and you see all these laundry lines.
34:34
So, >> Well, I see there's a kind of X and Y axis on a on a non-fiction story, a narrative non-fiction story.
34:43
>> So, you have I forget which is which.
34:45
The X is the horizontal axis, I think.
34:48
So, that's your narrative.
34:50
Um, the the life story of this animal from insemination, birth, um, weaning, feedlot, slaughter. Those are the points.
35:01
And that's going this way.
35:01
And then you have all the information you want to impart about grass versus corn, about pharmaceuticals, about pollution, feedlot pollution, about, uh, you know, cruelty to animals. And that's the laundry.
35:16
And um, you need to space it out because if you clump it all together, it sags.
35:25
So, exposition is less, um, appealing to the to the reader than narrative.
35:31
We are just We just want to know what happened next. What happened next?
35:35
And in this case, you know that this animal's going to get killed in a slaughterhouse and and they're curious about what that's going to be like.
35:40
And that's kind of your suspense principle.
35:45
So, you can depart from your laundry line for a period of time and do your exposition and do the whole thing about feed and why they feed corn and what that means.
35:56
Uh, and the fact that that, um, is grown with fossil fuel, whereas corn whereas grass is grown with sunlight.
36:04
And, um, that and we should talk about that, too.
36:09
Metaphor is a very important part of this.
36:10
Um, but you can't be away from your narrative that long.
36:15
And you cultivate some sense of when is your reader going to get impatient?
36:18
Cuz you could go on forever with the exposition, but you got to get back to your narrative.
36:23
So, so that's kind of how I how I conceive it.
36:27
Some pieces I don't have that laundry line.
36:31
But, laundry line and the narrative are the same thing.
36:34
It's It's what's happening in the foreground.
36:38
And in the caffeine piece, I made my narrative giving up caffeine to see what would happen. God forbid. Yeah, God forbid.
36:45
Yeah, that was my sacrifice. It doesn't always work.
36:48
I mean, in some pieces just there's no such, you know, it's very hard to find a laundry line that's that's worked.
36:56
>> I heard it described recently as you're going on a walk in the woods.
36:58
You have a place where you're going.
37:00
You're on the path and you got to stay on the path, but you're allowed to look around.
37:03
But, you can't get off the path.
37:05
And I like that analogy cuz it gives you a chance to look and you can look at the different places, but you're fundamentally going somewhere.
37:12
>> I think you can get off the path for short amounts of short amounts of time. Okay.
37:18
You know, that you Oh, there's something down there. I want to explore that.
37:19
You know, do I see a mushroom down there and see, you know, 10 steps off the path or 20 steps off the path, but never lose the path. >> Right.
37:29
>> If you go too far, you you you won't see it anymore and you won't be able to find it.
37:33
So, but that's a kind of cultivated instinct, you know, of impatience.
37:42
There's impatience is very important in writing.
37:44
You You know, hitting that moment where I don't know if I can go this, you know, I'm going to lose people right here.
37:49
And and some of that's internalizing your editor.
37:57
Yeah, so you can leave it.
37:57
So, the whole point of doing these immersion things, there's a couple.
38:02
One is the perspective it gives you, which is fresh.
38:05
And um it's not the perspective of a journalist.
38:10
I People don't basically like journalists that much.
38:14
It's not the It's It's not who you want to hear from.
38:16
You want to hear from a nor- normal person.
38:17
And so, as soon as I start one of these uh participatory adventures, I'm not exactly a journalist.
38:30
I'm I'm someone having an adventure.
38:30
And um and I think readers connect to that more easily.
38:35
But the other thing is it gives you the narrative.
38:37
I'm I'm confecting the narrative.
38:41
Um and the reason I have to do that is I'm just not one of these people who sees the world in narrative terms naturally.
38:48
I have to I have to really work at it.
38:51
Finding the way to put myself in the story is finding the story.
38:56
And it's And when I can do that, it's just great.
39:00
It doesn't always work though, and you don't want to force it.
39:01
You asked me to bring up metaphor.
39:05
Yeah, so that's the other thing that I find really powerful in writing.
39:12
So I think when you're doing journalism, this may not be true for everybody, but at some level you want to change what readers think.
39:20
You're You're You are trying to move the world a little bit.
39:22
Um there is a kind of deep politics to it.
39:28
And you can argue a point, but if you can find the right metaphor, you can persuade people without even arguing.
39:35
You can persuade them at almost a subliminal level.
39:39
So I'll give you an example.
39:39
In this cattle story we've been talking about, I set up an opposition between a food chain grounded in sunlight and a food chain grounded in oil.
39:51
So corn is grown using um fossil fuel fertilizers.
39:56
That massive amount of 90 million acres of corn that we grow in this country is floating on a sea of oil.
40:03
When you feed animals on grass, which they evolved to do, they you know, they have a rumen, they can digest grass, something we can't do, you are eating from a food chain founded on sunlight. >> Okay.
40:18
>> Which do you like better? What sounds better? What's more appealing?
40:21
>> Obviously the sunlight, yeah. >> Yeah, obviously.
40:22
>> So, I don't even have to say that's really wrong and stupid and unsustainable.
40:25
People get there on their own.
40:28
So, setting up that metaphorical um framework did so much work for me.
40:34
And it's just this very simple metaphor.
40:37
Sun-based food chain, oil-based food chain.
40:41
>> What do you think's the key to a good metaphor?
40:43
Like one of the things that draws up there is just the vividness of it. >> Yeah.
40:47
>> You know, I can see the food chain on oil.
40:50
I can see the food chain on sunlight. >> And we love grass. I mean, right?
40:52
We're we're we're savannas creatures.
40:56
I mean, we I just have a I mean, look at the you know, obsession with the American lawn.
41:01
It just it's very pleasing to us.
41:01
It it suggests a kind of like well, subjugation of nature among other things.
41:08
But uh you know, we we we kids love to play on the grass.
41:10
The grass is like the lawn is very wholesome until, you know, Miracle-Gro products end up on it. >> WD-40. >> Yeah.
41:19
>> Um but um yeah, a good metaphor is easy to grasp.
41:25
They but they're insidious, too.
41:25
I mean, it's it's sort of cheating uh in some ways.
41:30
I mean, it >> They're They're where there's code of eyes.
41:33
This is a little dangerous.
41:34
>> This sort of the dark arts of communication right here.
41:37
>> Yeah, in some ways it is.
41:37
Um I mean, I've been thinking about it in this consciousness book.
41:43
There's a metaphor that I I attack, which is that the brain is a computer.
41:48
And that metaphor has been very effective in people trying to create conscious AIs.
41:53
You know, well, if the brain is a computer, consciousness is software, and you go down this path like, yeah, of course you can make a conscious AI.
42:01
But you have to go back and say, well, is that a fair metaphor?
42:05
Is it an accurate metaphor?
42:05
So, any metaphor is, you know, likening something to something else, and you're it implies an equation and sometimes it isn't really an equation or it's a partial equation.
42:17
So, I think you have to be honest about your metaphors though.
42:18
I mean I I you know, when I I'm kind of joking when I say it's cheating.
42:22
It's it's a shortcut to to persuading people.
42:27
And if you find the right metaphor, which is to say vivid but also accurate or fair, um that has done 90% of your work in terms of like if you want to if you want to encourage people to go to the to this food chain and away from this one.
42:43
That's you know, that's half the battle or 90% of the battle.
42:48
>> Let's talk about questions.
42:48
Questions how they've shown up throughout your work and how questions evolve in the career of a writer.
42:57
>> Questions are really important piece by piece.
43:01
I think you um a framing questions at the beginning of a piece is going to solve a lot of problems for you.
43:10
Because it's going to limit what you're doing.
43:12
It's it's a principle of exclusion.
43:14
Does this contribute to answering this question? No, it doesn't.
43:19
Okay, I'm not going to deal with that.
43:20
Um but it also introduces a principle of suspense. Um it's the most basic.
43:25
Um is is the writer going to be able to answer this question?
43:30
What is the you know, it has to be a question you know the reader is going to be interested in whether they thought about it or not.
43:37
And uh so it drives you forward.
43:37
It It's It's all you Suspense is very simple.
43:42
It's like what's going to make someone wonder what happens next?
43:47
And almost everything I write is a quest to answer some question or several questions.
43:55
And they're very they're not tricky, you know, they're sometimes very straightforward.
44:01
Um but it has to be something that the reader cares about.
44:03
Um I mean maybe you can make them care about it, but how would you think through the questions of your various books?
44:11
>> Cuz I was just looking through what I did is I looked through the titles of books, thought about the question, and then I read the blurb on the back.
44:16
And I was struck by how fast you can capture interest and how clear a question can be.
44:25
So, on A Place of My Own, what I wrote for the question was how do we get so confused about eating? >> Yeah.
44:30
>> And then on the back, right at the top of the blurb, it says, "America's suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder." >> Right.
44:40
>> And I'm like, "All right, >> [laughter] >> I'm in. Strap in.
44:41
Start the roller coaster." You know what I mean?
44:45
>> So, that goes to the importance of introductions.
44:49
Um, let me just say a few words about that.
44:51
Introductions are are often where you introduce the question.
44:55
Um, you don't an introduction So, so, nonfiction writers get to include an introduction. Novelists do not.
45:03
It's a It's a great privilege, and it's a great tool.
45:05
Um, the introduction sets the readers' expectations.
45:12
And if you're concerned that you haven't done something, you can simply say in the introduction, "This is not a book that does X." >> Mhm.
45:22
>> Um, and then suddenly no one can criticize you for not doing X. Yeah.
45:24
And I And I learned this because um A Place of My Own, in the original edition, did not have an introduction.
45:32
I thought it was so much more elegant to just launch into the narrative.
45:38
But I found that the book was misread very often, especially by reviewers.
45:44
And since I hadn't set up the expectations or the ground rules of the book, it was freedom for the reviewers to to review it any which way they wanted.
45:55
So, for an example, it's it's a book very much about building, but it doesn't actually give you the blueprint or tell you how to build. It's not a how-to book.
46:05
Uh it's a how to think about it book.
46:08
But there was a review, I remember cuz I got so annoyed about it, um by Witold Rybczynski, who is a uh Canadian architect who was writing a lot of popular stuff about architecture at the time.
46:21
He criticized the book for not giving you enough information to build the same building.
46:24
It's like, that is so not what I was doing.
46:27
And um so I I subsequently did write an introduction.
46:32
I asked my editor, I said, "It's 10 years.
46:34
Can we Can we add an introduction?" which I which I did.
46:38
Um but anyway, so the introduction is a great tool.
46:41
Very important decisions about your book will be made based on the introduction and nothing else.
46:48
You know, the people booking an NPR talk show like Fresh Air, they're going to read the introduction and decide whether to put you on or not.
46:54
Uh reviewers, book review assignment editors, they're going to read the introduction, decide who to give it to.
47:01
So, wow, it's worth getting right.
47:04
And what does getting right mean?
47:06
Well, getting right means framing some compelling questions, um teasing what you're going to do but not giving it away. Um you have to withhold.
47:14
I mean, you know, academics often make this mistake and it goes back to the abstract at the at the head of an article.
47:23
All right, well, like, "Oh, you're giving away the punchline here before we even start the article." That's so stupid. Why would you do that?
47:32
Well, that's the convention.
47:32
Um so you have to you there has to be something that you're withholding that you're going to get later.
47:38
It's like you don't tell a joke starting with the punchline.
47:41
And um so I learned this.
47:44
So, the book after uh A Place of My Own, Botany of Desire, the Botany of Desire introduction, I must have rewritten 25, 30 times.
47:52
I mean, I really worked at it with with the help of my editor, Ann Godoff, and the help of a good friend who I'd worked with at Harper's named Paul Tough.
48:05
And um it got more and more refined and um I think it's the best introduction I've written in terms of setting up a a kind of weird book.
48:15
>> And how do you think about the components of a good introduction?
48:16
What are you looking for?
48:18
If I'm giving you an introduction, say, "All right, David, this what I'm looking for in a good introduction. Send me that."
48:24
>> Okay, there's an origin story.
48:24
Like, why did you get interested? Is there an epiphany?
48:28
Is there a moment where suddenly you realize, "Oh, yeah, this is an interesting story."
48:33
Those are often confected, I find, in in nonfiction books.
48:36
Um and there's in Botany of Desire, there's a moment I describe of being in my garden and watching the bees pollinate this apple tree.
48:48
And and I was planting potatoes and I and this question occurred to me, "How am I like those bees?"
48:54
You know, they think they're getting the best of the apple tree and they're they're stealing the nectar or the pollen or whatever it is.
49:03
Um but in fact, they've been manipulated by that apple tree to do exactly that and carry their DNA to other apple trees.
49:10
And has the potato done the same thing to me?
49:12
So, in that little scene was the kernel of the book.
49:17
And and that raised these questions, who's in charge here?
49:22
Are the you know, are the domesticated plants manipulating us?
49:23
We think we're manipulating them.
49:26
How do we fit into nature?
49:28
So, so there's the origin story and then there's teasing the questions out that.
49:32
I'm making it sound more formulaic than it is cuz every book it's it's it's a little different.
49:38
Um and then a kind of preview of what you're going to get.
49:42
Here are the four plants we're going to look at.
49:46
And then, you know, some suspense, some principle of suspense.
49:49
I mean, beyond perhaps the question you're going to answer.
49:54
Um, but somewhere we're going to go or something you're going to know by the end that you don't know now.
50:00
Um, but something that pitches you forward.
50:02
But the idea there which is that we're in the symbiotic or co-evolutionary relationship with domesticated species um, and that we're less in charge in in nature than we think.
50:15
Um, that's the kind of thesis of the book and that's teased without being spelled out in great detail in the introduction.
50:23
So, yeah, I spent a lot of time on the introductions.
50:25
Um, it's the most worked part of the book.
50:27
They're also interesting cuz they're sort of in the book, but they're not quite in the book cuz you can talk about the book in the introduction. >> Yeah.
50:35
>> So, it is very much of a place to break the fourth wall and talk to the reader about what they're going to get.
50:41
>> And do you write those introductions at the beginning?
50:43
Do you write them at the end?
50:44
>> I usually write them at the end. >> Okay.
50:46
>> Um, in the case of A World Appears, I drafted it at the beginning and uh, and then rewrote it at the end.
50:54
>> And what do you make of that?
50:54
Is it that it gives you a sense of where you're going to go?
50:56
Gives you a frame for the a sandbox to play in and then at the end, now you're doing it for the reader instead of for yourself or something.
51:03
>> Well, now you can, you know, anything you promise you didn't deliver on.
51:07
>> [laughter] >> Again, it's your it's this wonderful opportunity to set expectations and say, "This isn't that kind of book."
51:13
or "I'm not going to write about free will here. Don't worry."
51:17
Um, so, anyway, yeah, it's I mean, we all should take advantage of it.
51:25
>> How do you think through voice as you're writing?
51:28
Cuz I know that at least at times you've done the research and then you once you start writing that chapter or whatever it is, you put away the research and now you're reading fiction and absorbing the >> Yeah.
51:41
>> the cadence of fiction, the rhythms of fiction, yeah. >> Yes.
51:44
So, in general fiction is better written than non-fiction.
51:48
You know, I think that's generally the case, although there's some badly written fiction and there's some beautifully written non-fiction.
51:57
So, once I've finished my research and I am in the drafting mode, I don't want to take in more information on the subject.
52:05
It's just going to throw me off.
52:05
I want to I want to work with what I have, what I remember of what I have.
52:12
And um and so I treat myself and that's when I start reading novels while I'm writing.
52:17
And I think what you read before you go to bed influences what comes out the next day.
52:24
And um so you're internalizing cadences and you're thinking more about metaphor than information.
52:33
And I just find it gives me a lot of um just sets me up right.
52:37
>> Are there certain writers whose voice you really admire and almost want to mimic as you're writing?
52:44
>> I used to I I was a big fan of Ted Hoagland uh who's a nature writer and I loved his prose and um I remember at times when I was working on kind of more of the most nature-y stuff I was doing uh such as the place in my own or or um botany and desire, I would pick up a collection of his essays and that would that would give me a good something.
53:07
Wendell Berry I've always liked his prose.
53:09
There's something sturdy about his sentences and um you know, he's more formal than I am and he's a little more of a scold than I am. >> How about formality?
53:20
Like dialing up, dialing down formality, what does that do?
53:25
>> Well, you know, I think I have a pretty friendly voice on the page. >> For sure.
53:30
>> And there's I try that there's always humor close by, you know?
53:36
And it's self-deprecating.
53:38
You know, I'm often an the on page one of my stuff, um because I I really I don't think we should be lecturing readers.
53:47
I don't think they like that.
53:50
I think if we if we if we write from the the summit of our conclusions to, you know, here's what we know, reader.
53:58
Here's what you should think. >> Right. To preach on the pulpit.
54:01
>> Yeah, nobody likes that.
54:01
What I say when I say I'm an idiot on page one, I have more questions than answers.
54:08
It's really not clear I'm going to be answering the questions.
54:09
That's kind of the suspense.
54:11
Am I going to figure this out?
54:13
Are we going to really know what consciousness is or how it comes about at the end of this book?
54:19
Um So, the voice is is is is naive at the beginning.
54:23
And it gets more sophisticated as it goes on.
54:27
And that's just, you know, I mean, I have this conversation with my students very often.
54:33
Is that is there something disingenuous about not telling, you know, cuz when I go back and write the beginning, I do know the ending.
54:41
I've done all the research.
54:43
Am I being disingenuous to pretend ignorance at the beginning?
54:50
And I would say, whenever we tell a story, we know the ending, but we don't announce it at the beginning.
54:55
Or go back to the example of the joke.
55:00
We know the punchline, but we're going to pretend we don't for a certain amount of time.
55:04
So, it might seem disingenuous, but I think it's very important.
55:06
You So, you recreate the conditions of your ignorance and your curiosity at the beginning, even though you know how it's going to come out.
55:15
So, that's part of the voice.
55:17
Although, I find the voice changes depending on the subject.
55:21
Um kind of automatically.
55:24
I mean, some subjects demand more seriousness. There's more at stake. Stakes are higher. >> Right.
55:30
>> If you're automatically going to the same place every book, you know, the exact same voice, you need continuity, but you need change, too. I think.
55:40
>> How has just the information environment, the changes in it, how is that changed how you approach your craft from before the internet to now, the internet and then the rise of Google and now AI, like how is all that changed how you approach your work?
55:55
>> Well, you have access to a lot more information and you can access it more easily.
55:58
I mean, there used to be used to have to go to library. >> Mhm.
56:03
>> I haven't been to the library in >> ages.
56:06
>> And I get on to the Harvard or Berkeley library site and and download things.
56:11
Occasionally, I'll take out a book.
56:13
Um but basically, you know, with a few keystrokes, you can find your way to, you know, and almost any academic paper and I rely on a lot of scientific papers.
56:23
It's overwhelming, actually.
56:23
I mean, there's just too much and uh you know, I always set up a Google alert on whatever I'm writing about and I'm writing this piece about the microbiome and it's like every day it's like 20 20 things to read.
56:40
It's just astonishing how much work is being done and how much coverage there is.
56:44
So, I think the job has become sorting through all this information, this blizzard of information and it's not all good.
56:52
And I'll use um Gemini or chat GPT for research occasionally and and, you know, the results are very uneven.
57:00
Um sometimes it's helpful, but you have to have to be pretty distrustful.
57:02
I've seen them make huge mistakes, but it's also very helpful um defining a term um finding the origin of things, really helpful.
57:13
>> Finding the origin of things.
57:13
Like where do you things come from?
57:15
Like the etymology of an Yeah, who was the first person to say X or or um yeah, who invented Y?
57:21
I was writing something and I was curious like how long have we known about electromagnetism?
57:29
>> Um because I was writing about panpsychism, which basically is the idea that everything is conscious.
57:34
It's like adding a new quality to matter. Consciousness.
57:40
Um and I thought, well, actually the metaphor for that or or an analogy to that is once about I'm trying to get people to take panpsychism seriously.
57:50
On its face, it seems kind of crazy to people.
57:54
>> Yeah, I'm looking at this wooden chair and I'm like, I don't know if there's consciousness in this. Just a dissolved rest.
57:59
Wincy antsy wincy tiny bit of conscious.
58:02
Trying to interact with this chair and ask, "Are you conscious over there?"
58:06
>> So, um I thought, okay, well, if you wanted to get people to take that idea seriously, what else have we added to matter in recent history?
58:13
In other words, something we had no idea of that turned out to be part of how the world the material nature of the world.
58:20
And then I thought, oh, electromagnetism.
58:24
Turns out it's only 200 years old.
58:24
Uh Nicholas Faraday figured it out.
58:29
Um so, you know, we we then added this new thing, uh these waves that are going through us right now all the time that you know, that can carry information, carry telephone messages. So, that's an example.
58:42
And I, you know, I didn't know about Faraday and electromagnetism.
58:45
Uh I should have, but I never took physics in high school.
58:50
Um and there it was on uh Gemini or ChatGPT.
58:54
>> As you're getting started exploring new idea, are there little heuristics that you look for?
58:58
Like one of the ones that I found to be really useful is to look at the civil wars inside of a field.
59:05
So, for example, one time uh you'll like this analogy I was or the story.
59:10
I was talking to a beekeeper.
59:12
We're in Austin, Texas and I was like, "Hey Ed, what what are the big arguments in a figure to a beekeeping conference?
59:20
What do people fight about?"
59:20
He's like, "Well, there's the localists and there's the globalists."
59:24
I'm like, "Okay, tell me about this. All right."
59:28
>> He goes, "Well, the localists, they believe that bees should stay in their local environment.
59:31
And then, what's cool about that is you get all these different colors of honey, and these different textures.
59:36
And then, also, if there's a disease, it stays locally concentrated.
59:39
And then, there's the globalists.
59:41
And the globalists, they basically have these bee farms, these honey farms that go on trucks, they go all over the place, and they can manipulate the location and the temperature and all these sorts of things so that the sunlight tricks the bees into getting more honey."
59:54
And they're like, "Of course we should do this.
59:57
We get way more honey production from this."
59:59
And these people hate each other.
1:00:01
And I'm like, "That's probably a good question to ask."
1:00:05
Whenever I'm looking at a field, what is the core divide amongst the experts?
1:00:10
>> Yeah, I think that's a great I think that's a great question.
1:00:14
Um and with scientists, there's always uh they try to be polite about it.
1:00:18
They're not as bald as the global locals, but you can you can get to that conflict.
1:00:27
And of course, you are looking for conflict, right?
1:00:28
I mean, narrative depends on conflict.
1:00:30
So, that was a great way to organize your piece.
1:00:34
>> Narrative depends >> on conflict, yeah. >> Explain that.
1:00:40
>> Well, if there's no conflict, there's no tension, and you do want a certain amount of tension.
1:00:46
Um in uh a world of peers, there is a a bet.
1:00:49
I start off with a bet between two people.
1:00:55
Kristof Koch is a neuroscientist who claims within 25 years we're going to find This is back in the '90s that we're going to find the neural correlates of consciousness, the the particular neurons in the brain that produce subjective experience.
1:01:09
And he is in a bar sitting with David Chalmers, philosopher at the time, quite young, from Australia, who framed the hard problem.
1:01:19
That uh you know, how do you get from matter to mind?
1:01:20
And he said, "No, you're not going to find the neural correlates in 25 years."
1:01:24
And they bet a case of fine wine.
1:01:26
So, suddenly you're like, "Oh, there's conflict, right?"
1:01:28
Two theories, who's going to be right? It's so simple.
1:01:34
It's so simple, but you know, if you set up that tension, then you you're like, "God, I wonder who won the bet?"
1:01:41
And that'll that'll get you to read 20 pages.
1:01:44
>> As you're telling a story, we're talking about looking for specific people and in the case studies you were mentioning earlier, what kinds of people are you looking for?
1:01:53
Is it people with strong opinion, bold voice?
1:01:55
What is Ah, I found >> Yeah. >> I found the person.
1:01:58
What is that person have exactly?
1:02:00
What is What makes a good character?
1:02:04
>> Um they have a pretty vivid way of expressing themselves. >> Mhm.
1:02:08
>> Um so, you can like look at the quotes and you know, some people just sing in quotes and some of them are just halting and boring and so, that's that's something.
1:02:20
So, you're looking for somebody who's well situated and has authority to say what they're saying and then says it in a vivid way.
1:02:29
Um you know, that's I mean, that's that's a good character to me.
1:02:35
Uh and often someone who's playing against type uh is is interesting.
1:02:40
>> Um playing against type.
1:02:41
>> Well, you expect a cowboy to be a you know, a a rancher to be a cowboy, but sometimes they're like guys with visors, you know. >> Yeah. >> Bookkeeping types. >> And and quirky.
1:02:53
>> You know, Michael Lewis is very good at finding these people who are just uh nonconformists, you know, who are playing against the system and beating the system in some ways.
1:03:02
He he goes back to that character all the time. >> Moneyball.
1:03:07
>> Moneyball, Big Short, and they're often kind of like on the spectrum.
1:03:10
He He really likes these um very quirky types.
1:03:17
And they're appealing cuz they're, you know, little guy beats the big system. >> Mhm.
1:03:20
At the risk of stepping too far off the path and spending too much time with the mushrooms and the tree, you know, down there, what is it that we love about gardens so much?
1:03:28
I mean, the Bible begins in a garden.
1:03:31
Gardens Uh you ever been to the Huntington Library? >> Oh, yeah. I love that. >> Oh my goodness.
1:03:36
The the Japanese garden, the Chinese garden, all these different kinds of gardens.
1:03:42
They really reveal so much about culture.
1:03:45
Like the the linearity of a French garden, the sort of windingness of a British garden.
1:03:51
>> They're idealizations of nature, right?
1:03:53
I mean, we live in nature.
1:03:53
This is nature that answers to our wishes and desires.
1:04:00
Um and uh so, if we're authoritarian and we and we crave order, we go to, you know, Versailles, the formal French uh garden.
1:04:10
And then, sometimes we have a more romantic notion of nature, and the English landscape garden is that which pretends to be untended.
1:04:17
But, it's very carefully tended. >> Right.
1:04:21
>> Um but, so yeah, I know.
1:04:22
It's a it's a language in which we can express our our um our desires for how we wish nature to be.
1:04:33
You know, I think some friction with the natural world is like very important to who we are.
1:04:36
It's one of the things that that AIs will ever have. Maybe robots will have.
1:04:42
Um but, actually dealing with the natural world and not just representations.
1:04:48
And gardens are interesting cuz they are representations, but they're real, also.
1:04:54
Um And that I think that's very powerful.
1:04:57
And I think gardens are expressions of our our power as humans, that we can make nature do what we want. >> Yes.
1:05:02
>> There's a lot of that.
1:05:02
Um and the formal garden is the most uh blatant, obvious expression of that wish.
1:05:12
And you know, it's it's no accident that it comes about a time when you have, you know, kings and queens in charge.
1:05:19
>> As you were saying that, I was thinking about and I was telling this to you when we first met.
1:05:23
So, I have a garden in my front yard, and I have never lived next to a garden.
1:05:29
So, it's my 31st year of life, it's my first time living next to a garden.
1:05:34
And as we're talking there, I was like, I need to write about this.
1:05:35
I I I feel it very strongly in my heart that something profound has happened over the last 2 months, and I do not have the words to describe it, and it's really bothering me.
1:05:50
And it leads me to asking you about writing as a way of thinking.
1:05:51
And writing as a way to putting words to experience that you just don't have.
1:05:58
There's something frustrating about that, and oh my goodness, through writing maybe it becomes clear.
1:06:03
>> Writing is a form of thinking.
1:06:03
It's not a form It's not just a form of expression.
1:06:07
I often don't know I have the general outlines of where I want to go, but there's so many times where I discover an idea in the in the course of writing.
1:06:17
So many times where a metaphor occurs to me.
1:06:22
Um it it does something to your brain, and it and it gives you access to things you can't know just walking around or thinking or planning or outlining.
1:06:34
Um If you could separate out what you thought you were going to write from what you ended up writing, I think you'd be surprised at how different it is.
1:06:40
Um This is what is really worrisome of this, you know, we're moving into this time where oh, we're going to sub sub out writing to AI.
1:06:51
And AI can write our papers, and and professors are dealing with this everywhere now.
1:06:55
Um But what is lost is is what comes out of the process.
1:06:59
What is lost is a way of thinking.
1:07:02
And um I don't know how it works, but I'm always surprised.
1:07:09
And it's it's the fun part, too.
1:07:11
It's like if you were just transcribing what was in your head, it would be kind of onerous, and you might get some pleasure from the craft of it, but it really is what you learn in the course of a day spent writing.
1:07:23
Um things you didn't know, ideas that you didn't expect.
1:07:26
Um and that's the kind of thrill of it.
1:07:29
And to and to try to, you know, sub that out to a machine seems like to deprive yourself of something really important.
1:07:39
Um it's a dimension of creativity.
1:07:41
And and you know, it's not just writers who get this.
1:07:46
I mean, my wife's a painter, and her process, she she does very little planning, and one mark leads to another mark.
1:07:53
And one color summons another one into existence because it just works with that.
1:08:01
And there's so much she doesn't know when she starts out that she learns along the way.
1:08:07
So, it's a process of discovery, um not not simply expressing, you know, a vision that you have.
1:08:16
And I'm sure this is true for architects, and I'm sure it's true for composers.
1:08:20
Um the process itself is generative, and um uh and I think we make a mistake when we when we when we hand that over.
1:08:29
It's such a precious thing to hand over to machines.
1:08:35
>> When you think of art as a way of basically expanding consciousness?
1:08:40
There was an interview that you did.
1:08:40
I don't know if it was the Charlie Rose interview they did years ago or something, but it was talking about art as a way to expand consciousness.
1:08:48
And I was thinking about the way that that's worked in my life of that is a lot of what the visual arts do is you look at them and you say, "I didn't know that that was possible."
1:08:58
>> Yeah, I mean, in this new book, I talk about art as a way to access the consciousness of others, which is a way to expand our consciousness.
1:09:06
There is a quality of kind of encryptedness to individual consciousness that there's a breach, there's a a space between your consciousness and mine, even though we're works taking all these words.
1:09:20
Um it's very hard to know what goes on in the mind of another person.
1:09:27
And one of the things novelists do is give us access.
1:09:32
It's a fictionalized person, but, you know, we know more about Madame Bovary's consciousness than we do about people very close to us.
1:09:43
So, Proust writes beautifully about this, about this um that we're all on these islands uh of consciousness, and we know the other person has it, but it's art is the is the way we have to access uh another's consciousness.
1:09:56
And and that happens in painting, too.
1:09:59
It's not just It's not just writing.
1:10:01
So, I think that's a really important function of art.
1:10:05
Yes, it does these other things, too, of changing our perspective or allowing us to see in another way, but what does that mean?
1:10:11
That's seeing as another consciousness sees.
1:10:15
Um and the more different consciousnesses we can um access, the broader our own consciousness becomes.
1:10:24
Um So, it's one of the reasons this book, even though it starts out with the science of consciousness, ends up spending a lot of time in the humanities.
1:10:34
Um because I came to see that um novelists were experts about consciousness, poets, too.
1:10:42
Poets are exposing consciousness to us all the time.
1:10:46
Um and it's not to say that consciousness consists of words, cuz it it doesn't necessarily.
1:10:52
There's a lot that in consciousness that can't be put into words, But it's as close as we can get.
1:10:57
Um, you know, using the tools we have.
1:11:00
And it's amazing how close we can get. >> Let's end here.
1:11:05
So, you're teaching writing.
1:11:07
What is it that you want to tell budding writers about these are the most important things to know if you want to do the kind of work that I do.
1:11:19
>> Well, a lot I mean, a lot of what we've been talking about, you know, finding the laundry line, framing the questions, working with suspense, you know, those are the things I teach.
1:11:30
The one thing that um I also teach is that nobody thinks they're very good at it while they're doing it.
1:11:41
And that unlike, you know, I look at people who do woodworking or play an instrument and it gets to a point of being sort of second nature.
1:11:50
And writing even after having been doing it professionally for like, I don't know, 40 years, um it's still really hard.
1:11:59
And every time you start, every time you face that white screen, um is, you know, why doesn't this come more easily?
1:12:11
There's a tendency to think if it's hard it's not for me or I'm not good at it or I'm not the right person.
1:12:16
But it's hard for everybody um to one degree or another.
1:12:20
And I still struggle, you know, every time I sit down to write.
1:12:24
Um play games with myself, how much do I have to produce before I can go have a snack.
1:12:31
Uh and so so just because you find it difficult doesn't mean you're not born to do it.
1:12:39
Um I I guess that's how I'd put it.
1:12:41
>> That was a wonderful conversation. It's good to meet you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> very much. >> Great pleasure.