YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Pollan

lines on the record: 120
first: 2021-06-30
most recent: 2021-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's all you need to know about the drug war. There it is in a kernel. The real reason for it, the fact that it had nothing to do with public health. Did he mention public health? Did he mention people suffering with addiction? No, or overdosing? No. It was simply political. And we've known long before Nixon that the drugs that get criminalized are the ones that are used by troublesome populations. I mean, the reason they went after cannabis was because of Mexicans and blacks who were using it. And the drug war has always been about politics. And they're about as blunt a revelation of that fact as you can imagine. Yeah, I remember reading that. And that quote got quite a bit of publicity when it came out. Unfortunately, Baum died. And I wanted to interview him about that interview. And he died last spring or last fall, and I wasn't able to. But it's, I think there are two things where whatever you think of the drug war, it collapses when you look at them. One is that looking at Nixon really starts it.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and they don't all have quite enough layers. Right. I think that's exactly right. And that is key to my method, which is not to privilege any one way of analyzing something. I don't think the scientists have all the answers. I don't think the poets have all the answers. But if you multiply lenses, you suddenly get the full picture. And that's what I love doing as a writer.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first time I interviewed him, I saw all these books about coffee in his study. And I was very curious about his interest. He gave me the idea for the experiment at the heart of that piece, which is he said, you can never understand your relationship to a drug, to a psychoactive substance unless you get off it and stand back and look at it. Because if you're an addict, he doesn't use the word addict, but if you're dependent, you will never see it accurately. And so that was the challenge to me, which is at the heart of that piece is like, could I abstain from coffee for three months without going crazy and losing my livelihood as a writer?”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I did well for psychedelics, you know, I thought about writing about 5MEO DMT. I thought about it, of course, it's not a plant, it's a toad. I could have done salvium divinorum. You know, there were a whole lot, but I wanted something that had a really rich history that has changed the course of history. And Meskelin has, and not just for our culture, but for Native American culture. We can talk more about that. So actually, it wasn't like when I was writing botany and desire, which is a portrait of four plants that I had like 10 I could have done and I had acetylon corn and apples and tulips and cannabis. There was something that loomed large about these three to me. Caffeine, because that is really the drug I have the deepest involvement with. And it was actually Roland Griffith, who we both know, who the psychedelic researcher at Hopkins, who, you know, before he started working on psilocybin, he was the world's leading researcher on caffeine.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really weird. I think it's one of the great mysteries of nature. So, anyway, I thought it'd be fun to write about this book is more of a romp than the last one. Yes, there's science in history, but these are really personal stories of my engagement with these plants and what these plants have to teach us. So I wanted to do something that was very close to my heart and that would be enjoyable and take me back to the garden.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so anyway, so I chose those three as representing different dimensions of our relationship to psychoactive plants. And to remind people that this is part of our engagement with the natural world as much as eating is, as much as clothing ourselves and fibers produced by nature, we use plants to alter our minds. How incredible is it that plants have evolved the precise molecular key to unlock your consciousness?”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my interest in that one grew out of all the reporting I did in the psychedelic community and asking people, what's your favorite psychedelic? And to my surprise, the answer I heard more than any other was mescaline. And nobody seems to have it. Nobody seems to use it anymore. And yet it was everybody's favorite. It was the master material somebody told me. And I remember, I don't think I should use his name, but somebody we both know who's younger than I am saying, why have you been hiding this from us for all these years? The hippies were hiding the best drug, keeping it all for themselves.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the other two I chose were opium, which has a particular relevance now because of the opiate crisis. But that is actually a piece that I wrote many, many years ago at the height of the drug war. And that piece is kind of a parable of the absurdity of the drug war that we can talk about in more detail. And then the third one I wanted to do is psychedelic. And a psychedelic I hadn't written about and that nobody's written much of.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In changing consciousness in a radical way, anyway, yet we do it, and people have always done it. The only culture that's been documented that doesn't have a plant to change consciousness are the Inuit in Greenland because nothing good grows where they live. That's the only reason that human desire has been fascinating me since I first grew cannabis when I was quite young. So I wanted to do a deep dive into it and I wanted to look at three plants that produce important psychoactives, an upper, a downer, and an outer, as I call it. So I chose caffeine. Which is we don't even think of that as a drug, as a psychoactive, as an addictive substance. But of course, it is. And I have it right here. I'm consuming it as we speak.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's my first love, you know, writing about plants and my interest in psychoactives and my interest in plants kind of come together in this book. In botany of desire, there was a chapter, which is a book that looks at the symbiotic relationship of people and plants, how they change us, and we change them. And I have always been fascinated by this one weird particular use to which we put plants. And this is true for most cultures, probably 95% of cultures around the world have some plant or fungus they use to change consciousness, to achieve transcendent experience. That's a very peculiar thing because if you think about it, why would that be adaptive? It could be the opposite. You know, when we take drugs, when we change consciousness, we're more vulnerable to accident, to predation. We lose our, a lot of our defenses. So there's a danger.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I was doing was very much in sync with what our species does when we feel thwarted by nature, which is we feel we have the right and we're the smarter creature. And I realized at that moment, and I wrote an essay about this originally appeared in the New York Times magazine, that what's happening in the garden is a microcosm of our engagement with the natural world for better and worse. And in this case, worse, and that I could use the garden and gardening as a place to explore our relationship to nature. In general, American nature writers go to the wilderness, right? They go to the desert, they go to the forest, they go to places where you just stand back and look. But in the garden, like the farm, we have no choice but to engage. We have to act if we're going to get what we want. So how do we act? What are the ethics? What's the morality? And that began this path of exam.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I wanted it to go, so the flames shot the other way, and there was this fountain of flames that comes out of this hole in my garden. And I was, you know, almost incinerated myself, thrown back and shocked into a recognition that this is not the way to deal with the natural world.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just gave some time for the gasoline to go through all the different rooms. And I had an image in my head because they have all these different rooms. They have a latrine. They have a food room. They have these elaborate boroughs. Then I threw a match. And I never took physics in college. I was an English major. And I didn't realize that fire would not go away from oxygen.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a lot like Caddy Shack when that movie came out. I identified completely with Bill Murray. But I got into this escalating series of steps. I got angrier and angrier. That you know, here I was the more evolved creature with the bigger brain being thwarted by this idiotic rodent. I don't know if they're rodents, but I thought it was a rodent. So it was my horticultural Vietnam, basically. And I kept getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. At one point, I was driving along the road nearby and I found a flattened woodchuck on the side of the street. And I had an idea. And I got a piece of cardboard and I scooped the roadkill onto the cardboard, brought it home, shoved it into the hole thinking this would send a message. You know, it was kind of like Don Corleone, you know, with the horse's head in the godfather. Didn't work. I was finally reduced to pouring, you know, half a gallon of gasoline down the burrow and lighting a match and throwing that in there. And I poured the gasoline down. I know people think of me as an environmentalist writer.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And every time I planted this woodchuck would emerge from his burrow and wipe out everything I planted. So I went to war. I mean, I found his burrow. I did a lot of research. I understood that I found that they're actually, even though they look like slobs, if you've ever seen a woodchuck or a groundhog, same thing. They're fat and they can barely see. And they kind of tootle around with their belly, you know, scraping the ground. But they're clean, you know, they're obsessed about cleanliness. And so I poured molasses and creosote down their hole because I found the hole and thinking that they would be disgusted and move away. But they just dug a new hole right next to it. And I escalated this war.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't get along that well through the teenage years. He thought I was too much of a hippie and my hair was too long and he really was, you know, kind of a right-wing guy. But in the garden, we really connected. And that experience of growing something and then actually creating something of value that you could eat or sell in my case to my mother was just so gratifying. And there began my love of plants. And so this first book was an attempt to look at what I was learning in the garden. And I was making a lot of mistakes. I got into a war with a woodchuck. And in fact, that was the first essay I wrote about. This woodchuck I planted my seedlings one spring. We bought a house. in Cornwall, Connecticut when I was 30, I guess. And I started gardening on the weekends there.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would do the planting. And if I could grow two or three strawberries, I'd put them in a Dixie cup and sell them to my mother. So it was a business too. But my love of gardening came from my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, who was a Russian immigrant who had come here to escape conscription basically in Tsarist Russia. He came in 1917. He started out selling potatoes from a horse-drawn cart on Long Island and gradually got into the produce business and became a wholesaler and then started buying farms, the farms of the farmers he knew who wanted to get out of the business on Long Island, turn those into shopping centers. It was a classic story, but he never lost his love of produce. You know, he grew in his garden. It was huge. I mean, there were just two of them. And they grew enough to have a farm stand. And I loved working in his garden. And I love.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was right along the edge of my parents' suburban tract house on Long Island. And anytime I could, and I had a kid across the street who would do the heavy labor for me, he was, you know, always happy to do what I told him to do.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my engagement with the natural world. I gardened as a little kid. I had a garden when I was eight years old. I called it a farm.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His newest book is This Is Your Mind on Plants. You can find him at Michaelpollen.com on Twitter and Instagram. At Michael Pollen at Michael.pollen, respectively. Michael, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Tim. Good to be back. I thought we would begin in the beginning, go back to the archives, and I came across something titled My Two Gardens. And I would like to ask you about your first garden or childhood garden, since that will be, I think, a great launching point for many, many topics in our conversation. Yeah, well, gardening is really the germ of all my work. It's funny, the piece you're alluding to appeared in Forbes, but it was an adaptation from my first book, A Second Nature, a Gardener's Education. And this came out in 91. And it was really the story of my learning how to garden, which was also the story of my learning how to think about nature.”
2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT