What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael Pollan

“And this has been one of the most successful strategies. Coffee and tea are great examples. They didn't originally make these chemicals for us. They're probably defense chemicals. But what's interesting about the defense chemicals that they produce is that they're not, they don't kill anything.”

“First of all, most of us don't think of it as a drug, but it is a drug to which most of us are addicted. And something like 90%, yeah, use it on a daily basis, whether it's in the form of coffee, tea, or Yerba Mate, or a couple of other substances. I interviewed Roland Griffith when I started writing about caffeine because before he got involved,”

“There are a lot of, and some of them are not tied to the caffeine, of course. There are also very valuable polyphenols in coffee and tea, which are a great boon to the microbiome. But the day I got back on caffeine, my first cup, it was just the best drug experience, better than any psychedelic experience I've had.”

“So I thought, okay, I'm only going to do caffeine one day a week, Saturdays. I'll have coffee. Nothing, none else. And it worked for a few weeks. And my Saturday coffee was wonderful. But then I had a big deadline on a Thursday and I thought, you know, this would really get me over the hump if I have a cup and slippery slope back to, you know, every day.”

“But I appreciate it. I have no, no bad faith about drinking coffee. I think it's God's gift to mankind in so many ways. Tea too. I also drink green tea. I think we're very lucky to have it.”

“I think we're very lucky to have it. It does have very positive cognitive benefits in terms of focus. I mean, people, you know, they've done tests on students who preparing for an exam, if they have a cup of coffee or tea, or maybe it's done with pills because they had a placebo control, probably with pills.”

“It's cocaine without all the problems. Love it. Well, and you live in a great city for great coffee. We have such good coffee. The original Pete's is just down the street and the cheese board. And yeah. Well, I'm so grateful you wrote the book and that you did the experiment.”

“They had two groups of people. One, they gave, they each were given a pill. One got a placebo, one got ginger, powdered ginger. They then exposed people to really morally repellent scenarios in writing about incest and just really disgusting scenarios, eating one's dog, things like that.”

“And the people who had taken the ginger were less judgmental because their stomachs were calmed. Ginger calms the stomach. And so the emotion of moral disgust is somehow we are passing it through. We're doing a gut check on it. We're passing it through our digestive organs somehow.”⚑ Under review

“We're passing it through our digestive organs somehow. And that you can manipulate with something as simple as ginger, people's moral judgment. So that says to me this whole system is a lot more integrated than I think we even realize.”

“Yeah. It makes sense. Ginger calms the gut. So, and I know if I have some minor pain, like a backstrain or something, I'm much less patient. Yeah. I look at the world differently. And I think we all become more self-centric when we're in pain.”

“It's like 8,000 words. But I made a point to like, well, what are the alternatives? And I learned about grass-fed, grass-finished beef, which at the time was a tiny little market. And I had a couple paragraphs on this. There's another way to do it. There's another. So I was making the point that the food chain from which most of us are eating beef is floating”

“And, you know, my editors were like, hey, this piece is already at 8,000 words. You've got four paragraphs about grass fed beef. Which no one knows anything about it and doesn't know where to get, you know, we got to cut that. And I said, no, we have to leave that. That just shows the hope that we can grow our food using sunlight, not oil.”

“I walked into a butcher shop on College Avenue in Oakland. And I just, I was kind of curious, I wonder if they have grass fed beef. And so I asked the butcher, do you have grass fed beef? And he goes, what is grass fed beef? What's going on? You're the sixth person this week who asked me for grass fed beef.”

“I realized that the American foods have never been healthy. Like people talk about how they eat in Europe and my dad's from Argentina and how they eat the grass-fed beef. That was all they had, right? You know, there's some unhealthy elements about the diet there too, when they eat heavy meals late.”

“And this has been one of the most successful strategies. Coffee and tea are great examples. They didn't originally make these chemicals for us. They're probably defense chemicals. But what's interesting about the defense chemicals that they produce is that they're not, they don't kill anything.”

“First of all, most of us don't think of it as a drug, but it is a drug to which most of us are addicted. And something like 90%, yeah, use it on a daily basis, whether it's in the form of coffee, tea, or Yerba Mate, or a couple of other substances. I interviewed Roland Griffith when I started writing about caffeine because before he got involved,”

“There are a lot of, and some of them are not tied to the caffeine, of course. There are also very valuable polyphenols in coffee and tea, which are a great boon to the microbiome. But the day I got back on caffeine, my first cup, it was just the best drug experience, better than any psychedelic experience I've had.”

“of Desire, which is about how humans and plants co-evolved and collaborated to thrive, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is an incredible book about food and nutrition. And most recently, the book A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness.”

“The Omnivore's Dilemma was very present when I was going through college and around that time. I think it was a graduate. 2006. Okay, so shortly, it was after college, but that book was everywhere.”

“And I met them without knowing it. When I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma, I was hanging out on Joel Salatin's farm. He's a very progressive farmer in Virginia who has pioneered a kind of grass-based agriculture where.”

“My guest today is Michael Pollan, author of landmark books, including How to Change Your Mind, which is about psychedelics, The Botany of Desire, which is about how humans and plants co-evolved and collaborated to thrive, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is an incredible book about food and nutrition.”

“continued to be able to do that. I remember how nervous I was when I published How to Change Your Mind. I was talking about my own psychedelic experience. I didn't know what would happen. I thought the police would be knocking at the door. Landed right. The timing was right.”

“I had an experience when I was four or five. I grew up on Long Island, suburban Long Island, and I loved watermelon. And like everybody thinking about the pits, you know, the seeds when you swallow them or don't swallow them.”

“And that must have been May or June. And I came back in September and lo and behold, there was a watermelon. It was like the size of a football, but to me, it was huge. I was just so blown away by this. And it was just a formative moment.”

“He wrote a wonderful book on awe. He did this cool experiment where he asked people to draw a picture of themselves, just a stick figure on a piece of graph paper, and then he gave them an experience of awe.”

Our IdentificationDescribed, not named. We believe this refers to Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder.

“And certainly there were other important books that came out around the same period. Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Marion Nessel wrote a book called Food Politics that was very influential. The difference, I would say, they're great, and I have great admiration for them. But I would say that those were about what not to do.”

“And certainly there were other important books that came out around the same period. Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Marion Nessel wrote a book called Food Politics that was very influential. The difference, I would say, they're great, and I have great admiration for them. But I would say that those were about what not to do.”

“I think it's God's gift to mankind in so many ways. Tea too. I also drink green tea. I think we're very lucky to have it. It does have very positive cognitive benefits in terms of focus. I mean, people, you know, they've done tests on students who preparing for an exam, if they have a cup of coffee or tea, or maybe it's done with pills because they had a placebo control, probably with pills.”

“Yeah. And he, you know, actually, when I was writing my first book, Second Nature, I was trying to figure out how to behave in the garden, which is a microcosm of how do we behave in nature, right?”

“My guest today is Michael Pollan, author of landmark books, including How to Change Your Mind, which is about psychedelics, The Botany of Desire, which is about how humans and plants co-evolved and collaborated to thrive, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is an incredible book about food and nutrition.”

“And the implication of them, Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was an exponent of this. And Aldous Huxley believed this and talked about it in Doors of Perception, that he had had some access to this field. And for him, it was psychedelics.”

“I listened to the book and I highly recommend it as I do all your books. And it is in a print book too. Okay. I subsequently put it in a book called This Is Your Mind on Plants, which came out a couple of years ago. And it's one of three chapters in that book. So caffeine is a really interesting drug.”