Person
1 episodes · 26 quoted claims
Pollan says his first book, Second Nature, grew from his effort to work out how to behave in nature through gardening, where Wendell Berry's thinking helped him.
“when I was writing my first book, Second Nature, I was trying to figure out how to behave in the garden”
Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay titled 'What is it like to be a bat?', arguing that a creature is conscious if there is something it is like to be that creature.
“wrote a a brilliant essay called What is it like to be a bat? And his point was, if it is like anything, then you're conscious.”
Pollan says corn plant roots can navigate a maze to find the fastest path to ammonium nitrate fertilizer placed in one corner.
“You can give it a maze and and put some, uh, fertilizer, some ammonium nitrate, in one, like, corner of it, and the roots will find the fastest, uh, path to that ammonium nitrate.”
Pollan says that when a Venus flytrap is exposed to anesthetic gas in a bell jar, it stops responding to an insect that would normally trigger it to clamp down.
“you take a plant with a really fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and you put it in a bell jar, and you put some anesthetic gas in”
Pollan says cannabis, once located in western China, spread worldwide because humans carried and reproduced it for its THC.
“Cannabis, too, cannabis was, you know, this plant, you know, located in western China, I guess, and now it's everywhere.”
Pollan says caffeine in coffee and tea probably evolved as a plant defense chemical rather than for humans.
“They didn't originally make these chemicals for us. They're probably defense chemicals.”
Pollan says biologist Michael Levin makes xenobots by placing tadpole skin cells in solution, where they clump into a new organism.
“skin cells from tadpoles, and he puts it in a solution, and they clump together, and they form a new organism”
Pollan says the human body contains more bacterial genes than human genes, and that humans depend on microbes for metabolites such as GABA and short-chain fatty acids.
“more genes, more bacterial genes in our body than we have human genes, and we need those genes”
Pollan says the first mirror test on a chimpanzee, around 1970, led scientists to start regarding primates as conscious.
“It's only, I think, in 1970, the first experiment mirror test, uh, on a on a chimp, and we started thinking, Oh, these primates are conscious also.”
Pollan says the theory that consciousness begins with brain-stem feelings was developed by Antonio Damasio from the 1990s and later by Mark Solms.
“starting with, uh, Antonio Damasio, in the nineties, and going through Mark Solms more recently.”
Pollan says about 80 percent of the vagus nerve's traffic runs from the body to the brain.
“I think 80% of the traffic is going from body to brain, not the other way around.”
Pollan describes an experiment in which people given powdered ginger judged morally disgusting scenarios less harshly than people given a placebo.
“the people who had taken the ginger were less judgmental. Because their stomachs were calmed, ginger calms the stomach”
Pollan says that during a high-dose psilocybin session he lost the subject-object distinction and became a Bach unaccompanied cello suite.
“it was a piece of music that the guide was playing, this Bach, uh, cello, unaccompanied cello suite, and I became this piece of music”
Pollan says Dacher Keltner found that people drew themselves about one-third the size after an awe experience such as river rafting.
“He took them river rafting or something like that, and then he had them do it again, and they would they would draw a picture of themselves at, like, 1/3 of the size”
Pollan says neuroscientist Christof Koch, formerly head of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, became convinced after an ayahuasca experience that consciousness exists outside brains.
“he was head of Allen Brain Institute for many years. He had a experience on ayahuasca that he shared publicly.”
Pollan says Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley proposed that the brain filters a larger consciousness, which Huxley called a 'reducing valve'.
“the idea was that there's more consciousness out there than we can handle, and that, um, there is a filter or or what what Huxley called a reducing valve”
Pollan says his gardening began around age four or five, when seeds he buried in the yard grew into a watermelon.
“took some watermelon seeds, and I just covered it with dirt. I was, like, really young, and then forgot about it.”
Pollan followed a single cow from insemination to slaughter for a New York Times piece that became a chapter of The Omnivore's Dilemma.
“I followed this one cow through the whole process, you know, from s insemination to slaughter.”
Pollan says that weeks after his beef article ran, an Oakland butcher reported that he was the sixth person that week to ask for grass-fed beef.
“I walked into a butcher shop on College Avenue in Oakland, and I just I was kinda curious.”
Pollan argues that U.S. corn subsidies make high-fructose corn syrup cheap, which he links to type 2 diabetes.
“we subsidize corn, which gives us high fructose corn syrup, which gives us diabetes.”
Pollan says the mothers he met buying pasture-raised chickens at Joel Salatin's farm belonged to the Weston Price Society, a network promoting grass-based animal protein.
“they were members of something called the Weston Price Society”
Pollan says Representative Chellie Pingree and MAHA activists twice got a pesticide-maker lawsuit exemption removed from an appropriations bill.
“Shelley Pingree, who's a food movement leader and an organic farmer from Maine in Congress, she got together with Maha activists, and they got it stripped out of the bill, and they did it twice.”
Pollan says the company formerly called Lykos, now Resilient, was turned down once on MDMA for trauma treatment and has resubmitted with additional data.
“They've put forward MDMA, uh, in the treatment of, uh, trauma, and they were turned down once, but they've resubmitted with some additional d data.”
Pollan says Joe Rogan texted President Trump about ibogaine's importance, which Pollan credits as the reason psychedelics are being fast-tracked.
“Joe Rogan texted the president and said, This is really important. He had done a show on ibogaine.”
Pollan says Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist, did the initial modern psilocybin work and earlier studied caffeine.
“he's he's the was the, uh, psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins who did the initial work on psilocybin and really launched the psychedelic renaissance.”
Pollan went without caffeine for about three months as an experiment suggested by Roland Griffiths.
“I did it for about three months. And all the while, I'm researching caffeine and learning about it”