#698: Dr. Mark Plotkin on Coffee, The World’s Favorite Stimulant — Chemistry, History, and More

At this altitude, I can run flat.

Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I ask you a personal question?

Now it is the time. What if I did the opposite?

I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton show hello.

Boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to the Tim Ferriss show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out their routines, habits, etc. That you can apply to your own life. This is going to be a slightly different episode this time around. We have a special edition featuring my friend Dr. Mark Plotkin, famed ethnobotanist. Mark takes over my duties as host for this episode and shares an episode of his Plants of the Gods podcast. But you are hearing it before anyone else. You are hearing it before even his own podcast subscribers. So this is a Tim Ferriss show exclusive. But let's back up. Who is Dr. Mark Plotkin? Mark? You can find him online on Twitter at docdoc. Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon conservation team, which has partnered with roughly 80 tribes to map and improve management and protection of roughly 100 million acres of ancestral rainforests. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books ever written about the rainforest. His most recent book is the Amazon what everyone needs to know. And you can find my interview with Mark, where we dig into his history, his mentors, including Richard Evan Schultes, the legendary Richard Evans Schultes, and so on at Plotkin this episode. However, this tightly packed episode explores all things coffee, which is the most widely consumed, mind altering plant product in the world. And it gets into all different aspects of coffee, many of which I think will surprise you. So without further ado, please enjoy.

Hello everyone, I'm Mark Plotkin. Dr. Mark Plotkin of the Amazon conservation team and host of the podcast Plants of the gods, hallucinogens, healing, culture and conservation. Kicking off this new season, we're going to talk about the ethnobotany of coffee. Over the course of our four seasons, we've talked a lot about how plants and fungi are woven through our history and our prehistory in surprising and often unexpected ways. We discussed how the battle over tall timbers to build tall ships led directly to the American Revolution. We looked into how ethnobotanist Richard Schulte's quest for the magic mushrooms of Mexico led to the development of blockbuster beta blocker heart drugs. We examined how absinthe inspired both the greatest writer and the greatest painter of the 20th century. Today, however, we're going to talk about coffee. Truly a plant of the gods, coffee is the most widely consumed, mind altering plant in the world, and it has a rich and intriguing history. But first, let me pose a question. The history of coffee features adultery, larceny, spies, smugglers and slave revolts. If Hollywood can make hit movies based on an amusement park ride like Pirates of the Caribbean, and based on a plastic doll like Barbie, why have they never made a film about the history of coffee? On a personal note, I've had the opportunity to drink a lot of great coffee in a wide variety of different settings. I've enjoyed superb cafe in such non tropical places as Holland and Japan. I've attended coffee ceremonies in East Africa, the original home of the coffee plant. I've drunk the famous blue mountain coffee in eastern Jamaica, and I've downed many a cup in Latin America from Mexico to Argentina. But the best coffee I've ever had, and continue to have on an almost daily basis, is the coffee we drink in my hometown of New Orleans. And this is coffee with chickery. Why do we drink coffee with chickery? During the napoleonic wars, after the defeated Trafalgar of the french fleet by Admiral Horatio Nelson and his navy in 18 five, the British imposed a naval blockade to prevent foreign products from entering France. The French, therefore, lacked two tropical plant products that they craved, sugar from sugarcane and coffee. Napoleon, however, launched an innovative approach to attempt to solve this problem. He challenged his countrymen to produce sugar and coffee, or coffee like drink, from local plants. Since neither sugar cane nor coffee could be grown outside of the tropics and in France, and France was cut off from her tropical colonies, the success was that of the sugar beet, which grows well in temperate regions. The French developed a strain of beet which yielded sufficient sugar to meet local demand. However, they were never able to find a coffee substitute which had all the benefits and taste of coffee. One of the most popular species with which they experimented was the chicory plant, which thrives in temperate regions. Despite Napoleon claiming that chicory was an excellent substitute for coffee and subsidizing its cultivation, it is not, but it is an excellent adulterant. In other words, it can be mixed with coffee, so a little coffee would go a long way. Furthermore, coffee mixed with chickery is exceptionally flavorful. So even after the napoleonic wars had long ended, people had developed a preference for the taste of coffee mixed with chicory. Which is why today, in parts of the world that were influenced by french colonialism, like New Orleans or Vietnam, many people still prefer to drink their coffee with chicory. Perhaps the greatest irony of the coffee story is that it is unquestionably an acquired taste. Brian Cowan, in the socialite of coffee, quotes behavioral psychologist Robert Bowles, an authority on motivation, who said, quote, coffee is one of the great marvelous flavors. Who could deny that? Well, actually, anyone drinking coffee for the first time would deny it. Coffee is bitter and characterless. It simply tastes bad the first time you encounter it. By the time you've drunk a few thousand cups, though, you cannot live without it. End of quote. From a broader perspective, note that over the course of the four seasons of the plants of the Gods podcast, we have heard different theories as to the ethnobiological origins of human consciousness. Several thousand years ago, the size of our ancestors brains increased by about 30%. According to the late ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, this was due to these creatures discovery and ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the so called stoned ape hypothesis. A competing and possibly complementary explanation for the birth of consciousness is that these primates were feeding on ripe fruits