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Huberman says Michael Pollan wrote about his months of caffeine abstinence in a book about caffeine.
“This was something that was actually covered in beautiful detail in a book by Michael Pollan, all about caffeine.”
Topic
Michael Pollan
9 facts from 3 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
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Michael Pollan and Tim Ferriss partnered on a psychedelic journalism fellowship at UC Berkeley, funded by Ferriss's foundation.
“Michael Pollan and I partnered on this, and my foundation funded it.”
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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”
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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.”
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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”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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”
Episodes