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📚 Hey, I’m here with more books!
You’ve still got until the end of January to enter the massive book giveaway I’m running with my friends Kody and Merott ($33k in prizes are going to 400 winners), but today’s book has me rethinking everything I ever thought I knew about coffee, opium, and mescaline.
Okay, so to be fair, I never really knew too much about any of those things in the first place.
Except for the fact that opium is basically ravaging America right now, Aldous Huxley took a bunch of mescaline and wrote some great books about it, and, well…I just f***ing love coffee.
Making coffee is pretty much the first thing I do every day (the second is to pick up a book), but I never really gave much thought to where it came from, how it became so popular, and the wild evolutionary process by which coffee beans basically used human beings to take over the world.
Seriously! Coffee took over the world, entirely because human beings couldn’t live without it, so we brought it from the few places in the world it was grown, and transported it to the ends of the earth.
Coffee took over the world using humans as their “hosts” and today’s book, This is Your Mind on Plants, tells that fascinating story, as well as the tragic story of opium, and the developing story of mescaline and other psychedelics.
A few housekeeping things before we jump in…
Next week, I’m bringing back Five Books Friday, and we’re gonna get back to a somewhat regular cadence with these emails.
2024 hit me like a ton of books, and I’ve been kinda scrambling a bit to keep up with everything.
The only thing that saved me from going completely off the rails was using some of the time management strategies and tactics I teach inside Time Mastery.
Shameless plug? Sure. But this stuff works.
Last week, I published my complete breakdown of The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand (one of my favorite books of all time), and this weekend I’m releasing my breakdown of Rise of the Reader, by Nick Hutchison.
Also, if you fight a daily fight against perfectionism (like I do), you may find this video helpful.
I’m starting to really dig the Sam Sulek-style videos I’ve been watching lately too, and so I’m going to be using YouTube to document my progress towards reading 200 books this year, growing my business, and sharing the lessons trapped inside all these fantastic books.
Subscribe here if that’s something you want to follow along with.
But now, let’s talk about coffee and drugs…
I ended up with about 4 full pages of notes from this book, highlights of which I’ll be sharing with you here in this email.
Below, I share a short summary of This is Your Mind on Plants, as well as my best book notes, along with some additional recommended reading.
If you’re interested in the sinister origins of the drug war in America, the world domination of the coffee bean, or entering altered states of consciousness, you might want to check out…
My summary of this book and all my notes are available on Patreon, as well as my personal notes from more than 1,200+ other books. Updated monthly.
The support I’ve received on Patreon over the years has been nothing less than incredible and I just want to quickly mention two of my biggest supporters by name:
Jeremy Steingraber and Will Ramadan (KnowleDJ)!
I’ve been working 12- to 16-hour days for long stretches to build my business and grow my impact, putting in long, tough hours at the gym (and the library), and my Patreon supporters are among those who make it all worth it.
They make my days brighter, and the weights lighter.
I didn’t try to make that rhyme, but here we are!
Anyway, there are plenty of other cool rewards available there too, but the main thing is that you get more than 1,250+ summaries and thousands of pages of book notes for just $1! Also organized by year and by book.
They’re updated monthly with all the new books I’ve been reading and taking notes on, although, to be completely honest (as usual), I’m still a bit behind on my notes and working hard to catch up.
You can always just preview my notes here on this page though before you make that $1 leap :)
Now, let’s get back to today’s book!
Is the plant that produces caffeine using us, or are we using it?
Can consciousness be expanded in a way that’s “safe” and doesn’t lead to addiction, or is mescaline the scourge that fearmongers have always claimed it is?
Do the opiates that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by overdose have benefits that outweigh their devastating costs?
Michael Pollan fearlessly (and sometimes fearfully) addresses these and other pressing questions of our times in his follow-up to the absolutely phenomenal book, How to Change Your Mind.
There’s a ton of nuance here, both in this book and the wider issues it addresses, as Pollan investigates the fascinating and, I’ll say it, surprising reach of psychoactive compounds like caffeine, opium, and mescaline, among others.
These compounds are not unmitigated “goods.”
They come with dangers, pitfalls, dead ends, and as long as people have been around there have been people who have fallen into them.
That being said, these psychoactive compounds (and whoever thought of caffeine as such?) are here to stay, and how we integrate them into our societies and into our lives will make all the difference for our future, our continued progress, and our reconciliation with everyone with whom we share this earth.
I have a personal history – though by no means as extensive as Pollan’s – with compounds such as ayahuasca and mescaline (and obviously coffee!), and so I’ve seen, witnessed, first-hand how powerful they are and how much they have to give us and to show us.
“The same opiates that killed some fifty thousand Americans by overdose in 2019 also make surgery endurable and ease the passage out of this life. Surely that qualifies as a blessing.”
“‘You want to know what this was really all about?’ Ehrlichman began, startling the journalist with both his candor and his cynicism.
Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House ‘had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people…
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’”
“The campaign produced an explosion in prescriptions for OxyContin that would earn the company’s owners, the Sackler family, more than $35 billion, while leading to more than 230,000 deaths by overdose.”
“Indeed, for most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness.
Something like 90 percent of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda).
Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. It’s so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible.”
“This is part of the insidiousness of caffeine. Its mode of action, or ‘pharmacodynamics,’ mesh so perfectly with the rhythms of the human body, so that the morning cup of coffee arrives just in time to head off the looming mental distress set in motion by yesterday’s cup of coffee. Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates. How brilliant!”
“If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.”
“It is one thing to live in a shared culture of caffeine, in which everyone’s mind is running at more or less the same accelerated pace. But it’s quite another to find yourself so sped up mentally that other people appear to you like motionless figures on a train platform, as you blur by them in caffeinated clouds of impatience.”
“What mental breakthrough has ever been credited to mint tea?”
“Perched somewhat crookedly on the steep slope of one of these caffeine mountains, my main thought was, You really have to give this plant a lot of credit.
In less than a thousand years it has managed to get itself from its evolutionary birthplace in Ethiopia all the way here to the mountains of South America and beyond, using our species as its vector.
Consider all we’ve done on this plant’s behalf: allotted it more than 27 million hectares of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth.
This astounding success is owing to one of the cleverest evolutionary strategies ever chanced upon by a plant: the trick of producing a psychoactive compound that happens to fire the minds of one especially clever primate, inspiring that animal to heroic feats of industriousness, many of which ultimately redound to the benefit of the plant itself.
For coffee and tea have not only benefited by gratifying human desire, as have so many other plants, but these two have also assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilization in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism, and dominated by a species that by now can barely get out of bed without their help.”
“But that’s how evolution works: nature’s most propitious accidents become evolutionary strategies for world domination. Who could have guessed that a secondary metabolite produced by plants to poison insects would also deliver an energizing bolt of pleasure to a human brain, and then turn out to alter that brain’s neurochemistry in a way that made those plants indispensable?”
“Reading Huxley’s account while quarantined in a pandemic intensified my desire to try mescaline. The idea that a molecule could somehow deepen or expand the scope of one’s reality suggested a mental strategy nicely tailored to the situation.
I was reminded of the lovely line Shakespeare gave Hamlet, enduring a different kind of claustrophobia: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.’
Mescaline might offer a way to do that, not as a means of escape from circumstance, but as an expansion of it. Instead of an alternate reality, it promised infinitely more of this one.”
Currently, I don’t have a complete breakdown of This is Your Mind on Plants published on the Stairway to Wisdom (my library of expert book breakdowns), but below I’ve listed some similar breakdowns that you may enjoy instead.
When you become a member of the Stairway to Wisdom, you’ll gain access to more than 120+ book breakdowns like these ones here, as well as a premium weekly newsletter that will help you build the kind of life for yourself that you’ll love living.
“Who controls your cortex? Who decides on the range and limits of your awareness? If you want to research your own nervous system, expand your consciousness, who is to decide that you can’t and why?”
14-Minute Read | 3,700 Words
The urge to BE somebody is causing tremendous conflict, as people the world over desperately try to assert their specialness. But what if there's a better way to live, one that brings us together instead of pulling us apart? Why can't we be happy being NOBODY? After all, nobody's perfect!
40-Minute Read | 10,400 Words
Colin Wilson believes that most people are like great big jet airplanes, yet they're living as though they're flying on just one engine. In this book, he takes aim at the pessimistic outlook of so many philosophers and shows us how we can shock ourselves into full aliveness and joy.
31-Minute Read | 7,900 Words
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That’s it! I hope you found these book recommendations helpful, and I’ll be back with even more books for you very soon!
Mere “information” is everywhere today, but what’s going to separate you (and give you the life you desire) is consistent, meaningful action, backed up with the most powerful ideas from the greatest books ever written.
That’s what I aim to provide you with.
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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