Name: What Michael Pollan Learned from Quitting Caffeine for 3 Months
Uploaded: 2021-07-05T19:03:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Michael Pollan Learned from Quitting Caffeine for 3 Months' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Michael Pollan Learned from Quitting Caffeine for 3 Months' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-05. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience and one of the things I'm trying to do with this is
your
mind on plants is start that post drug war conversation about drugs which is
one of the reasons I included caffeine you know a totally legal drug that
everybody uses what does that have to teach us in a way one of the most
powerful drug experiences I've had in my life was the first cup of coffee after
three months off really it was psychedelic it was incredible come on
try it try getting off caffeine three months three months without caffeine
how am I going to do a podcast you may have to take a hiatus run out of things
to talk about I'll fall asleep it was really hard I did it actually it's a
suggestion of Roland Griffith who you know the psychedelic researcher who
before
that was the world's leading expert on caffeine and and I was interviewing him
about caffeine for this chapter and he said well you're never gonna understand
your relationship to caffeine until you get off it so it was kind of a dare and
it
was really hard it was one of the hardest things I've done really I was a mess
for
how long three months
you're a mess until I was functional after a month
the first week I was not functional at all I felt like I had contracted ADD
I could not stay on track everything the periphery just kept intruding on my
thinking I couldn't
write I mean writing is the most linear thing you can do right right and you
and it's all about
concentration obviously and and I couldn't concentrate and I felt like there
was this veil between me and
reality that you know I was not quite seeing getting feeling and it was weird I
didn't feel myself for the whole time and and I thought what does that mean it
means yourself is caffeinated
and and that is baseline consciousness for me and for many people and that's
not a bad thing but I think we have a debt to these plants that we owe them
um and so I spent a lot of time in that researching that chapter looking back
in history for when
caffeine enters the west and it doesn't happen till the 1650s in Europe so we
actually have a before and
after which we don't with a lot of drugs because they just go back you know
millennia um and before
caffeine it was a very different world and a very different consciousness
people were drunk a lot of the time
caffeine buzzed almost all of the time people drank morning noon and night
because it was safer than water
right water was really how you got diseases if you fermented things even low
you know low alcohol it killed a lot of the microbes
um so people even kids you gave your kids hard cider for breakfast um wow and
uh and this was true in America
up until the 1800s, up until Prohibition.
But anyway, caffeine comes along in the 1650s,
and tea and chocolate and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England,
which is kind of like a great decade, right?
And things start to change.
In the form of coffee?
Coffee and tea and chocolate, which also has caffeine in it.
And so they had never experienced coffee before the 1600s?
That's right.
They had in the Arab world.
They had it from like 1200 or something like that.
Supposedly it was discovered in 800s by a herder in like Ethiopia
who noticed that his goats were getting very frisky
when they ate this particular berry and would stay up all night.
And so he kind of like started experimenting,
or he brought it to these monks and they made a drink.
And it's like, ooh.
It makes sense that it was in the Arab world,
because if you think about all the science that was being done in the Arab
world,
all the literature back then.
All the writing.
So one theory is that the Arab world had coffee first and had this incredible
golden age.
Yes.
And there is a historian of psychoactives named Wolfgang Schivelbush.
And he correlates.
What a name.
Isn't that wonderful?
German, of course.
Wolfgang Schivelbush.
It's a great book.
It's called Tastes of Paradise.
Highly recommend it.
And he said this was the perfect drug for the culture that invented mathematics
and had this incredible...
And it helped the culture in two ways.
One was as safe as alcohol made water, boiling it made it much safer.
And coffee and tea, of course, both require boiling water.
No one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before.
So this gave this incredible public health boost to these places.
And then you have the drug that basically fosters a kind of more linear,
rational, focused way of thinking.
And so there is a lot of evidence linking coffee and tea consumption with the
Enlightenment in France and with the Age of Reason in England.
And people in the 1600s started writing about it.
So they're like, wow, people, you know, we have this new civil and sober drink
that we...
And it was so popular because it was new that people drank less and they used
more caffeine.
And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution.
Because, you know, when you're doing physical labor outdoors, which was most of
history, right, you could be buzzed.
You didn't have to know what time it was.
You worked from sunup to sundown.
There were beer breaks, actually, on farms in England.
They would give you beer because it gave you calories and made you happy.
But when you start moving into, like, running machines and doing double-entry
bookkeeping, you need a clearer head.
And when you start moving toward night shifts and overnight shifts, you couldn't
do that without caffeine.
And that's when it begins.
There's a whole new, like, it freed us from the rhythms of the sun, which dictated
everything in Western culture.
You could only work till the sun went down.
So, it had a profound effect on capitalism, the rise of capitalism.
And the clearest illustration of that that I came across is the coffee break.
Where did that come from?
The coffee break actually has a history.
We know the company that came up with it.
And it was a necktie manufacturer in Denver called Wigwam Weavers.
Really?
And Wigwam Weavers made these very intricate silk neckties.
And during World War II, they lost all their best loom operators to the war
effort.
So, they hired these old guys to do it, you know, who weren't getting drafted.
And they couldn't do it very well.
Then they hired these women to do it.
And they could do it beautifully.
And there were very intricate patterns, very complicated looms.
I mean, you've seen how they, you know, the patterns on neckties.
And the women could do it really well, but only for about four or five hours.
So, they called a meeting.
And the owners said to the workers, what can we do?
We have to improve your efficiency.
And, you know, we need more output.
And the women said, well, give us a coffee break.
They didn't call it that initially.
And give us some time at, like, 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon and
give us some coffee and tea.
So, we started doing it.
And overnight, like, their productivity and efficiency goes up.
Quality control goes up.
And so, he institutes the coffee break.
And think about it.
Your employer gives you a drug and then gives you time off in which to ingest
it during the workday.
Yeah.
Why would they do that?
Because it contributes mightily.
So, the coffee break might seem like it's something your boss is giving you,
but it's a way to extract more value from you.
And I'm sure employees that have little breaks and get to enjoy just a little
bit of free time, they'll be more, they'll be happier employees.
Oh, yeah.
They'll probably be more productive.
Like, the counterintuitive.
Calling Mr. Bezos.
Yeah.
I mean, he should institute.
I don't know if he has coffee breaks.
He wants to be on Adderall 24-7, running to the next package.
Yeah.
Patches.
Tell me about your experience.
Adderall patches.
What your experience was like with the three months off and then having the
caffeine.
So, I had this three months that was really unpleasant.
The only things that were positive about it was I slept like a teenager.
It really did improve my sleep.
I had some great sleeps like I remember from when I was a teenager.
You know, when you can sleep 14 hours.
That was really good.
I also felt, and I'm not proud of this, self-righteous.
So, you know, and I remember one morning having to get a 6 a.m. flight and I
had to get up and get myself moving on mint tea.
Okay.
And I get to the airport and it's just when they're opening the Pete's and the
Starbucks and the line is like snaking, you know, for those people getting on 6
a.m. flights.
And I'm looking at these people and they look like junkies you see in Amsterdam.
They look so pathetic.
And, you know, that they were hooked and they needed their fix.
And they look kind of miserable and withdrawal was starting.
Because that first cup of coffee is not about the pleasure it gives us.
It's really about stopping withdrawal symptoms, which are beginning overnight
because you haven't had it for 24 hours.
And I felt self-righteous.
I'm not proud of that because I and I knew that I was going to rejoin them as
soon as I could.
Right.
So when I hit the three month mark, I decided and I needed for the ending of
the piece to have a cup and see this was going to tell me, you know, because
drugs are very different.
The first time you take them right before your body is accustomed to them.
So I had this first cup and I gave a lot of thought to where I would have it.
I thought about the original Pete's is in my neighborhood, the very first Pete's,
but I don't love their coffee.
It's kind of, it can be kind of burnt tasting.
And so I went to a place called the Cheese Board, which is a cafe bakery in my
neighborhood.
And they have a little pocket park out on the street.
And I got a cup, got a special, which is, it's sort of like a cappuccino, but
more coffee and less milk, like a flat white in Australia.
And we sat, my wife and I, Judith, sat there and I drank this drink and it was
so good.
I mean, I just felt these waves of well-being and then it turned into euphoria.
And I was like, wow, this is such a strong drug.
I had no idea.
It was like cocaine or something.
And that lasted for maybe 20 minutes.
But then something turned that was kind of interesting.
Across the street, there was a garbage truck that was grabbing hold of two
garbage, plastic garbage cans and shaking them like this and making this
horrible racket.
And it really got under my skin.
I was getting kind of irritable.
And I said to Judith, can we go home, you know, and I felt like I got to get
something done.
I felt kind of compulsive.
Wow.
And so we walked home and I went to my office and I just had this desire to get
shit done.
And so what I did was, this is really weird.
I unsubscribed from like a hundred listservs that I was getting on my email
that were really annoying.
I just killed them one after another and after another.
And then after I finished that, I went through the sweater in my closet, all
the sweaters in my closet.
And I threw out some.
I gave some away.
This sounds like meth behavior.
This is what I hear.
I had a friend of mine who used to date a girl who was on meth and she always
would clean.
Really?
She would come home and organize and clean things.
He's like, so if your girl starts cleaning incessantly, she might be on amphetamines.
You have a problem.
Yeah, I was really compulsive.
And very productive.
And I said to myself-
Did you keep drinking it throughout the day?
Well, this is- no, but I was tempted to.
So I said to myself, how can I hold on to this power that this drug has?
Because if I start using it every day, I'm going to lose it.
I'm just going to be another caffeine addict.
And I came up with this idea.
Only do it on Saturdays.
Once a week.
And I did that for a while.
So that very day, after cleaning out my closet, I worked in the garden and
there were some plants that needed replacement.
And so I started driving down to this garden center called Flowerland.
And I realized, why did I pick that nursery and say, oh, they have this Airstream
where they sell espresso drinks right out in front.
And it was like, it was the voice of the addict putting me in position to get
another cup the same day.
And so I resisted that.
And I did this Saturday thing for a while.
And it worked pretty well.
I really look forward to Saturdays.
And I got a lot done-
On Saturday.
On Saturday.
But I wasn't addicted anymore.
So I could get through the week.
It wasn't hard.
But then gradually it was like, hmm.
You know, it's Thursday and I got a deadline.
And this would really help me get over the deadline.
So I started making exceptions.
It was complete addict thinking, right?
Did you try any other forms of caffeine?
I would, yeah, I would, I would do green tea as I'm drinking now as a kind of,
green tea is a very good source of caffeine because it's really even.
There's another alkaloid in it that stretches out the effect.
So you don't get a jolt, but it kind of keeps you nicely titrated.
What is the caffeine content of green tea, the average cup?
It's probably a third of what you get in a cup of coffee.
It varies amazingly.
Like if the tips were plucked, you know, when they're brand new, you know,
first flush green tea, that has a lot more caffeine in it and is a lot more
valuable.
So there's a lot of variables that go into it.
The plant is producing caffeine, of course, as a pesticide.
Right.
And that was a whole question I looked at.
It's like, why do plants produce these things that have these effects on our
minds?
How did that, isn't that amazing that a plant could devise a chemical that can
unlock a receptor in your brain?
That's astonishing.
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What Michael Pollan Learned from Quitting Caffeine for 3 Months

the Joe Rogan experience and one of the things I'm trying to do with this is
your
mind on plants is start that post drug war conversation about drugs which is
one of the reasons I included caffeine you know a totally legal drug that
everybody uses what does that have to teach us in a way one of the most
powerful drug experiences I've had in my life was the first cup of coffee after
three months off really it was psychedelic it was incredible come on
try it try getting off caffeine three months three months without caffeine
how am I going to do a podcast you may have to take a hiatus run out of things
to talk about I'll fall asleep it was really hard I did it actually it's a
suggestion of Roland Griffith who you know the psychedelic researcher who
before
that was the world's leading expert on caffeine and and I was interviewing him
about caffeine for this chapter and he said well you're never gonna understand
your relationship to caffeine until you get off it so it was kind of a dare and
it
was really hard it was one of the hardest things I've done really I was a mess
for
how long three months
you're a mess until I was functional after a month
the first week I was not functional at all I felt like I had contracted ADD
I could not stay on track everything the periphery just kept intruding on my
thinking I couldn't
write I mean writing is the most linear thing you can do right right and you
and it's all about
concentration obviously and and I couldn't concentrate and I felt like there
was this veil between me and
reality that you know I was not quite seeing getting feeling and it was weird I
didn't feel myself for the whole time and and I thought what does that mean it
means yourself is caffeinated
and and that is baseline consciousness for me and for many people and that's
not a bad thing but I think we have a debt to these plants that we owe them
um and so I spent a lot of time in that researching that chapter looking back
in history for when
caffeine enters the west and it doesn't happen till the 1650s in Europe so we
actually have a before and
after which we don't with a lot of drugs because they just go back you know
millennia um and before
caffeine it was a very different world and a very different consciousness
people were drunk a lot of the time
caffeine buzzed almost all of the time people drank morning noon and night
because it was safer than water
right water was really how you got diseases if you fermented things even low
you know low alcohol it killed a lot of the microbes
um so people even kids you gave your kids hard cider for breakfast um wow and
uh and this was true in America
up until the 1800s, up until Prohibition.
But anyway, caffeine comes along in the 1650s,
and tea and chocolate and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England,
which is kind of like a great decade, right?
And things start to change.
In the form of coffee?
Coffee and tea and chocolate, which also has caffeine in it.
And so they had never experienced coffee before the 1600s?
That's right.
They had in the Arab world.
They had it from like 1200 or something like that.
Supposedly it was discovered in 800s by a herder in like Ethiopia
who noticed that his goats were getting very frisky
when they ate this particular berry and would stay up all night.
And so he kind of like started experimenting,
or he brought it to these monks and they made a drink.
And it's like, ooh.
It makes sense that it was in the Arab world,
because if you think about all the science that was being done in the Arab
world,
all the literature back then.
All the writing.
So one theory is that the Arab world had coffee first and had this incredible
golden age.
Yes.
And there is a historian of psychoactives named Wolfgang Schivelbush.
And he correlates.
What a name.
Isn't that wonderful?
German, of course.
Wolfgang Schivelbush.
It's a great book.
It's called Tastes of Paradise.
Highly recommend it.
And he said this was the perfect drug for the culture that invented mathematics
and had this incredible...
And it helped the culture in two ways.
One was as safe as alcohol made water, boiling it made it much safer.
And coffee and tea, of course, both require boiling water.
No one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before.
So this gave this incredible public health boost to these places.
And then you have the drug that basically fosters a kind of more linear,
rational, focused way of thinking.
And so there is a lot of evidence linking coffee and tea consumption with the
Enlightenment in France and with the Age of Reason in England.
And people in the 1600s started writing about it.
So they're like, wow, people, you know, we have this new civil and sober drink
that we...
And it was so popular because it was new that people drank less and they used
more caffeine.
And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution.
Because, you know, when you're doing physical labor outdoors, which was most of
history, right, you could be buzzed.
You didn't have to know what time it was.
You worked from sunup to sundown.
There were beer breaks, actually, on farms in England.
They would give you beer because it gave you calories and made you happy.
But when you start moving into, like, running machines and doing double-entry
bookkeeping, you need a clearer head.
And when you start moving toward night shifts and overnight shifts, you couldn't
do that without caffeine.
And that's when it begins.
There's a whole new, like, it freed us from the rhythms of the sun, which dictated
everything in Western culture.
You could only work till the sun went down.
So, it had a profound effect on capitalism, the rise of capitalism.
And the clearest illustration of that that I came across is the coffee break.
Where did that come from?
The coffee break actually has a history.
We know the company that came up with it.
And it was a necktie manufacturer in Denver called Wigwam Weavers.
Really?
And Wigwam Weavers made these very intricate silk neckties.
And during World War II, they lost all their best loom operators to the war
effort.
So, they hired these old guys to do it, you know, who weren't getting drafted.
And they couldn't do it very well.
Then they hired these women to do it.
And they could do it beautifully.
And there were very intricate patterns, very complicated looms.
I mean, you've seen how they, you know, the patterns on neckties.
And the women could do it really well, but only for about four or five hours.
So, they called a meeting.
And the owners said to the workers, what can we do?
We have to improve your efficiency.
And, you know, we need more output.
And the women said, well, give us a coffee break.
They didn't call it that initially.
And give us some time at, like, 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon and
give us some coffee and tea.
So, we started doing it.
And overnight, like, their productivity and efficiency goes up.
Quality control goes up.
And so, he institutes the coffee break.
And think about it.
Your employer gives you a drug and then gives you time off in which to ingest
it during the workday.
Yeah.
Why would they do that?
Because it contributes mightily.
So, the coffee break might seem like it's something your boss is giving you,
but it's a way to extract more value from you.
And I'm sure employees that have little breaks and get to enjoy just a little
bit of free time, they'll be more, they'll be happier employees.
Oh, yeah.
They'll probably be more productive.
Like, the counterintuitive.
Calling Mr. Bezos.
Yeah.
I mean, he should institute.
I don't know if he has coffee breaks.
He wants to be on Adderall 24-7, running to the next package.
Yeah.
Patches.
Tell me about your experience.
Adderall patches.
What your experience was like with the three months off and then having the
caffeine.
So, I had this three months that was really unpleasant.
The only things that were positive about it was I slept like a teenager.
It really did improve my sleep.
I had some great sleeps like I remember from when I was a teenager.
You know, when you can sleep 14 hours.
That was really good.
I also felt, and I'm not proud of this, self-righteous.
So, you know, and I remember one morning having to get a 6 a.m. flight and I
had to get up and get myself moving on mint tea.
Okay.
And I get to the airport and it's just when they're opening the Pete's and the
Starbucks and the line is like snaking, you know, for those people getting on 6
a.m. flights.
And I'm looking at these people and they look like junkies you see in Amsterdam.
They look so pathetic.
And, you know, that they were hooked and they needed their fix.
And they look kind of miserable and withdrawal was starting.
Because that first cup of coffee is not about the pleasure it gives us.
It's really about stopping withdrawal symptoms, which are beginning overnight
because you haven't had it for 24 hours.
And I felt self-righteous.
I'm not proud of that because I and I knew that I was going to rejoin them as
soon as I could.
Right.
So when I hit the three month mark, I decided and I needed for the ending of
the piece to have a cup and see this was going to tell me, you know, because
drugs are very different.
The first time you take them right before your body is accustomed to them.
So I had this first cup and I gave a lot of thought to where I would have it.
I thought about the original Pete's is in my neighborhood, the very first Pete's,
but I don't love their coffee.
It's kind of, it can be kind of burnt tasting.
And so I went to a place called the Cheese Board, which is a cafe bakery in my
neighborhood.
And they have a little pocket park out on the street.
And I got a cup, got a special, which is, it's sort of like a cappuccino, but
more coffee and less milk, like a flat white in Australia.
And we sat, my wife and I, Judith, sat there and I drank this drink and it was
so good.
I mean, I just felt these waves of well-being and then it turned into euphoria.
And I was like, wow, this is such a strong drug.
I had no idea.
It was like cocaine or something.
And that lasted for maybe 20 minutes.
But then something turned that was kind of interesting.
Across the street, there was a garbage truck that was grabbing hold of two
garbage, plastic garbage cans and shaking them like this and making this
horrible racket.
And it really got under my skin.
I was getting kind of irritable.
And I said to Judith, can we go home, you know, and I felt like I got to get
something done.
I felt kind of compulsive.
Wow.
And so we walked home and I went to my office and I just had this desire to get
shit done.
And so what I did was, this is really weird.
I unsubscribed from like a hundred listservs that I was getting on my email
that were really annoying.
I just killed them one after another and after another.
And then after I finished that, I went through the sweater in my closet, all
the sweaters in my closet.
And I threw out some.
I gave some away.
This sounds like meth behavior.
This is what I hear.
I had a friend of mine who used to date a girl who was on meth and she always
would clean.
Really?
She would come home and organize and clean things.
He's like, so if your girl starts cleaning incessantly, she might be on amphetamines.
You have a problem.
Yeah, I was really compulsive.
And very productive.
And I said to myself-
Did you keep drinking it throughout the day?
Well, this is- no, but I was tempted to.
So I said to myself, how can I hold on to this power that this drug has?
Because if I start using it every day, I'm going to lose it.
I'm just going to be another caffeine addict.
And I came up with this idea.
Only do it on Saturdays.
Once a week.
And I did that for a while.
So that very day, after cleaning out my closet, I worked in the garden and
there were some plants that needed replacement.
And so I started driving down to this garden center called Flowerland.
And I realized, why did I pick that nursery and say, oh, they have this Airstream
where they sell espresso drinks right out in 