Something You Should Know - How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist & How Coffee Became the World’s Beverage

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

You know you shouldn’t go food shopping when you are hungry because you will end up buying more junk food. It turns out that when you are hungry, you shouldn’t go shopping for ANYTHING – not just food. Listen as I explain why. http://www.womansday.com/life/work-money/default/a49921/dont-buy-anything-on-an-empty-stomach/ You know the phrase, “It’s not rocket science.”? The implication of that is that rocket science is really hard and rock scientists must be really smart. And they probably are. So how can you think like one? Former rocket scientist Ozan Varol joins me to explain. Ozan is now retired from rocket science. Today he is a law professor and podcaster (his podcast is called Famous Failures) and he is author of the book, Think Like A Rocket Scientist (https://amzn.to/2VxeHh1).  We all know that eating fruits and vegetables is good for your health and your looks. Listen as I discuss how eating produce can also make you more attractive. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3296758/ It’s weird to think that such a huge portion of the world’s population drinks coffee every day. Why is that – is it really because it tastes so good or is it just that we are hooked on the caffeine? And how did drinking coffee become so popular? Augustine Sedgewick spent a long time investigating the origins of our love affair with coffee and he joins me to share this remarkable story. Augustine is a teacher at City University in New York , got his PhD from Harvard – and he is author of the book Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug (https://amzn.to/3b642jW).  This Week's Sponsor -AirMedCare Network.Go to www.AirMedCareNetwork.com/something and get up to a $50 gift card when you use the promo code: something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, why you should never go shopping when you're hungry, and it's not the reason you think.

Then a rocket scientist helps you think more like a rocket scientist, and it all starts with questioning assumptions. There's a quote I love from Alan Alda. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won't come in. How do you do that? Well, ask yourself from time to time, what am I doing simply because I've done it before? Then how eating fruits and vegetables can actually make you more attractive.

And how and why did coffee become the world's favorite drink? Most of us use coffee to adapt our bodies to the demands of modern life. The way that we began thinking about coffee as especially useful for that purpose really dates to the 1920s. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes.

Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Like you, I suspect I'm waiting for life to get back to normal, or at least close to normal. And while we're waiting, in the meantime, we will continue to publish episodes of this podcast that are all about subjects I think you'll find interesting. And we start today with shopping. Of course you know, you've heard before, that you shouldn't go grocery shopping when you're hungry. People who do tend to buy more junk food and spend more money.

But what about other kinds of shopping that have nothing to do with food? Well, it turns out you're more likely to buy more of anything when you're hungry, according to a study from the University of Minnesota. Hunger seems to put us in an acquiring mode. So shopping for clothes or toys or anything will often result in you bringing home more than you ever planned to. In the study, hungry shoppers shopping for non-food items bought 64% more than people who were full. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you've heard the phrase, it's not rocket science, as if rocket science is so hard to understand to get your head around.

Well, it probably is. So how is it that rocket scientists think? What is it about their thinking that's different than the way you and I think? And how can we think more like a rocket scientist? Well, here with some interesting ideas on that is a rocket scientist. Ozan Virol was a rocket scientist, which he'll tell you about in a minute, and he is now a law professor and a podcaster. His podcast is called Famous Failures.

He's also the author of a book called How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist. Hi, Ozan. Welcome. Thank you for having me, Mike. So what does it mean to think like a rocket scientist and how is it different than the way I think? Because I don't think I think like a rocket scientist. Well, that's a good question. Well, you might be thinking like a rocket scientist, you just may not be aware of it. But basically, to think like a rocket scientist is to dream big, to challenge assumptions, to actively change a rapidly evolving world. Okay, well, that sounds fun. So I know you have some strategies of how rocket scientists think.

So you pick one and let's dive in. Sure. I think the best example, one of the best examples might be the importance of reframing problems to generate better answers. And I'll begin with a story here, which I also recount in the book. The year was 1999. At the time, I had just started working on the operations team for what would become the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. And at the time, our mission was to send a single rover to Mars in 2003. In 1999, as we were busy designing our rover, another lander called the Mars Polar Lander crashed on the Martian surface.

Now, this wasn't our baby, but the Polar Lander was using the same landing mechanism that we were planning to use. Our mission, understandably, got put on hold since our landing mechanism had just failed spectacularly on the Martian surface. And we were scrambling to figure out a way to fix the landing mechanism and come up with a new way of landing on Mars. And I remember distinctly when my boss, who is the principal investigator of the mission, he walked into my office one day

and he said, I just got off the phone with the administrator of NASA and he asked, can we send two rovers instead of one? Now, it was such a simple question, but one that none of us had thought about asking before. Because up until then, NASA had just been sending one rover to Mars every two years and crossing their fingers that nothing bad happens along the way. So the question from the NASA administrator reframed the problem. The problem wasn't just the landing system. Even if we fix the landing system, sending a delicate robot to Mars 40 million miles through outer space is really risky. Instead of putting all our eggs in one spacecraft's basket and crossing our fingers that nothing bad happens, we decided to send two rovers instead of one.

The rovers were named Spirit and Opportunity. We built them to last for 90 days. Spirit lasted for six years, but Opportunity, and I still get goosebumps every time I say this, but Opportunity kept roving the red planet until 2018, over 14 years into its 90-day expected lifetime. Now, audience members who might be listening to this might be thinking, well, that's great. It's amazing that this person was able to ask a question that reframed the problem, but how do you actually come up with the right question to ask? And one of the tactics I offer in the book is to differentiate between what we call strategy and tactics. Those terms are often used interchangeably, but they refer to different things.

So a strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics are the actions you take, the tools you use to actually implement the strategy to reframe the problem to zoom out and to find the strategy ask yourself what problem is this tactic here to solve so if you frame the problem more broadly as the risk involved in landing on mars not just as a defective landing mechanism, sending two rovers instead of one decreases risk and increases reward. So that's one way of zooming out and asking a question that other people are missing. But the moral of the story here is breakthroughs, contrary to popular wisdom, don't begin with a smart answer. They often begin with a smart question.

So then how do I take that thinking into a much more mundane situation and apply it there? Because that's a big, I'm not designing rovers to go to Mars. So how would this work in my life? Stanford professor Tina Selig runs this exercise in one of her classes on entrepreneurship. She walks into the class. She divides up the class into different teams and gives each team $5 in funding. And she tells them, your goal is to make as much money as possible in two hours and then give a three-minute presentation to the class. Most teams use the $5 to start a car wash or go back to their six-year-old days and set up a lemonade stand. One team had the idea of putting it all on red at the roulette table. But those teams tend to bring up the rear in the class. The more successful teams reframe the problem more broadly. They leave the tactic aside, the tactic being the $5 bill.

They realize that that tactic is essentially a worthless and distracting resource. Instead, they frame the problem more broadly as, how can we make the most amount of money if we start with absolutely nothing? So one team, one particularly successful team, ended up making reservations at popular Silicon Valley restaurants and then selling the reservation times to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who wanted to skip the wait. That team made an impressive few hundred dollars in just two hours. But the team that came in first, they reframed the problem even more broadly. They realized that both the $5

and the two-hour timeframe they had for making the most amount of money as possible were not the most valuable resources in their arsenal. Rather, the most valuable resource in their arsenal was this three-minute presentation time before a captivated Stanford class. They sold this three-minute presentation time before a captivated Stanford class. They sold that three-minute time to a company interested in recruiting Stanford students and walked away with like $650. So that's one example of how the same strategy of zooming out

from the tactic and asking yourself, well, what is this $5 here to solve, can help you see approaches and different perspectives that you might otherwise miss. What's interesting about that is my first reaction was that if the teacher gave me $5 and said, use this to make the most money you can, then I would have thought, well, I have to use the $5. But what you're saying is the successful teams completely discarded the $5. That didn't even play into their solution. What often happens is we have a tactic in front of us. And again, in this case, it's the $5 bill, but it might be something else in your life that you're used to doing. And as the saying goes, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So tactics, tools can be the subtlest of traps because we feel compelled to use them, number one, and use them in the same way that we've been using them before. But if you ask yourself, what is this tactic here to solve? Once you frame the problem more broadly in terms of what you're trying to accomplish instead of your favorite solution or favorite tactic, you'll be able to discover other possibilities lurking in plain sight. Okay, great. So give me another rocket science way of thinking. One other strategy is a principle from rocket science called test as you fly, fly as you test. And so it's a simple principle from the rocket world, which essentially says that experiments or tests on Earth must mimic to the

greatest extent possible the same conditions in flight. So for example, during simulations for space shuttle missions, scientists activated like close to 7,000 malfunction scenarios, and they threw every imaginable failure at the crew. The more catastrophic, the better. And the idea here is that repeated exposure to problems in an environment that's going to closely simulate space flight will inoculate the astronauts and boost their confidence in their ability to diffuse just about any issue. Now, if you apply that principle to our own lives, most of us do experiments or simulations in conditions that don't mimic reality. So we give, for example, a mock presentation in front of a friendly audience. We do mock job interviews

while wearing sweatpants with our spouse or partner who's going to ask us a predetermined list of questions. If you're training for a triathlon, chances are that you're probably running on a treadmill somewhere while watching Netflix. If you apply the test as a fly principle in your life, you would make sure that the training conditions closely mimic reality. So, for example, if you're going to be, if you're training to give an important presentation, you would practice that presentation in front of a group of strangers. You might also down a few espressos. I've done this before. Down a few espressos before you actually give the practice speech to simulate the types of jitters that you might get in real life. If you're training for a triathlon, do it outside and do it under very

similar conditions, facing the rain, the wind, whatever conditions you might be facing on race day so you can be desensitized to those questions before race day actually arrives. Well, that's interesting, because you say that's a rocket scientist way of thinking. And yet, it's really kind of common sense that if you want to do something well in real life, practice it as close to real life as possible. It seems pretty intuitive if you remember to do that. Exactly. It is intuitive, although most people don't do it and most businesses don't do it either. I mean, in the business world, a lot of surveys, experiments, and focus groups are run in conditions that don't resemble reality at all. And so those tests, those focus groups end up spitting incorrect answers.

So many sportswear companies, for example, when they're designing a shoe will ask potential customers, how much money would you pay for this pair of shoes? That is not a very good test because customers don't get that question in real life. No one walks up to them in an actual store and asks, how much would you pay for this pair of shoes? So if you really want to know how much your customers would pay for your service or product, you should apply the test as you fly, fly as you test principle, which is actually sell something to them. Actually ask them to walk into a store, pick up this pair of shoes or go to your

website and buy your product and see if they're willing to pull out their wallets and their credit card numbers and actually input that in. That's the best way to gauge popularity or consumer response is to decrease that gap between the experiments and the actual flights, which unfortunately many businesses don't do. And yet it makes all the sense in the world. Hey, we're learning how to think like a rocket scientist, and we're doing that with Ozan Virol, who was a rocket scientist, now a law professor and author of the book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives,

and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover.

We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. So Ozan, what's another strategy for thinking like a rocket scientist? Sure. Another one is called first principles thinking. And I'll also illustrate this with a story from SpaceX and Elon Musk. When Elon Musk was first thinking about sending a rocket to Mars, he went shopping for rockets on the American market.

They were way too expensive, even for his own budget. So he went to Russia to shop for, I kid you not, decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles without the nuclear warheads on top, of course. And even the Russian rockets were way too expensive. And he was about to give up until he realized that his approach was deeply flawed. He was on a flight back from Russia from one of his shopping sprees empty-handed. He had an epiphany and he arrived at that epiphany using a principle from physics called first principles thinking. First principles thinking requires you to hack through existing assumptions in your life as if you're hacking through a jungle until you're left with the fundamental components.

Everything else is negotiable. So instead of letting your original vision or the visions of other people around you, your competitors, your peers, shape the path forward, you abandon all allegiances to them. You switch from being a cover band that plays somebody else's songs to an artist that does the painstaking work of creating something new. So in trying to buy rockets that other people had built, Elon Musk realized that he was playing the role of a cover band. And for Musk, using first principles meant starting with the laws of physics and just asking himself, what's required to launch a rocket? He stripped a rocket down to a smaller subcomponent. It's fundamental raw materials. And it turns out that if you buy those raw materials

on the market and build the rockets from scratch, it was around like 2% of the typical price, which is a crazy ratio. So Musk decided to build his next generation rockets from scratch. If you walk through the halls of SpaceX's factories, you'll notice people doing everything from welding titanium to building in-flight computers. First principles thinking prompted SpaceX and also Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, to question another deeply held assumption in rocket science. For decades, most rockets that launched spacecraft into outer space could not be reused. They would plunge into the ocean or burn up in the atmosphere after carrying their cargo to orbit, requiring an entirely new rocket to be built. Now imagine for a moment doing the same thing for commercial flights. You know, you fly from Portland, Oregon, where I am,

to New York City. After the passengers deplane, somebody walks up to the plane and just torches it. That's basically what we did for rockets. The cost of a modern rocket is about the same as a Boeing 737, but flying on a 737 is far less expensive because jets, unlike rockets, can be flown over and over again. And so SpaceX and Blue Origin are both in the process of changing that. Both companies have refurbished and reused numerous recovered rocket stages, sending them back out to space like certified pre-owned vehicles. So those two stories illustrate the importance of questioning

assumptions in your life and applying first principles thinking. There's a quote I love from Alan Alda that's often misattributed to Isaac Asimov. But he says, your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won't come in. How do you do that? Well, ask yourself from time to time, what am I doing simply because I've done it before? Or what am I doing simply because others around me are doing it? Can I question that assumption and replace it with something new?

Sometimes though, you know, we do it this way because it really is the best way. And it's sometimes hard to know, is a new way better or is a new way just a new way that's different and maybe not better? That's a great question. I think the best way to find out the answer is to conduct tests. So just take one day and do something differently and see what results it produces. And if, and scientists certainly approach problems this way too, they have hypotheses and they try their hypothesis, they test it. If it works, great. If it doesn't, that's great too, because now you learned that this alternative way of doing something isn't better. And what you were doing before is the

best way to do it. I think though many of us get stuck in a rut because we don't ask ourselves these questions and we don't conduct these limited experiments to see what we're missing and to figure out if there is actually a better way of doing something. Well, who hasn't heard the advice to question your assumptions, but it's hard to question your assumptions

because assumptions are very automatic and hard to to dissect one really helpful way to question assumptions is to bring outsiders into the conversation expertise is really valuable but experts are often too ingrained in what's worked in the past so if you've been doing something the same way for years, it's really hard, even if you're asking yourself these questions, to see what you might be missing. So it's helpful to bring in someone. And this, by the way, doesn't have to be an expensive consultant or speaker. It can be as simple as bringing someone from a different division or different project. It can be your partner, your spouse, one of your colleagues who knows nothing about what you're working on. Because those individuals, amateurs, are great at asking those

quote-unquote dumb questions that actually aren't dumb at all, that jolt you out of your current perspective and expose the assumptions that you're operating under. This, by the way, is part of the reason why I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been able to disrupt the aerospace industry because they were outsiders to it. Elon Musk came from Silicon Valley. Jeff Bezos was in the finance world before he entered retail. But because they were outsiders, these gate crashes were able to see the assumptions that many of the insiders were operating under. Because conventional wisdom is easier to tune out when you don't know

what the conventional wisdom is. One of my favorite stories about the value of insiders, or outsiders, I should say, is from J.K. Rowling, who's the author of Harry Potter. When she submitted the first Harry Potter book to publishers, the publishers were unanimous in their opinion. They thought that the book was not worth printing. So about a dozen publishers rejected the book until it landed on the desk of Nigel Newton, who's the head of Bloomsbury Publishing in the United Kingdom. And Newton saw promise in the book when others had missed it. What was the secret? Well, he took the draft back home and gave it to his eight-year-old bookworm daughter,

Alice. Alice took the book to her room, read it, came back down and said, Dad, this is so much better than anything else I've read. And that input from eight-year-old Alice convinced her dad to write a meager 2,500-pound check to J.K. Rowling to acquire the rights to publish the first Harry Potter book. This is, by the way, the best bet made in publishing history since J.K. Rowling is now a billion-dollar author.

But what gave Newton his advantage was his willingness to get the opinion of an outsider who was part of the target audience for the book but an outsider to the publishing industry. And Alice was able to see what all of these experts in publishing had missed. Well, I love that Harry Potter example, because you can just imagine people saying, well, you know, she's eight years old. She doesn't really know how the publishing world works, or she doesn't know what really makes a book sell. And she was more right than all the other publishers that rejected the book and all the experts who said, oh, you just can't do that. Exactly, exactly. And the Harry Potter story, by the way, also harkens back to another strategy that we already talked about, which is test as you fly, fly as you test, right? So it's one thing to run a young adult book by experts in the publishing industry who are,

what, in their 40s, 50s, who are not the target audience for the book. But if you actually want to test as you fly, fly as you test, give the book, as Nigel Newton did, to a member of the target audience and see what they think about the book. Because they're the ones who are going to be buying it, who are going to be reading it. So it makes sense to ask them. Well, great. Well, this has been fun. I feel smarter. I'm not sure I'm going to be designing

and sending rockets into space, but maybe think a little more like a rocket scientist. Ozan Valor has been my guest. He is or was a rocket scientist. He is now a law professor, podcaster, and author of the book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist. There's a link to his book in the show notes. And if you use that link to buy the book, Ozan has some really great bonuses that he will give you that you won't get if you buy the book somewhere else. So click on the link in the show notes if you want to buy his book. Thanks, Ozan. My pleasure. Thank you so much.

Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong.

And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Bitches on Comics is a bi-monthly interview podcast where we talk to the coolest LGBTQ plus folks and women in comics and pop culture. Our unique perspectives and welcoming nature have earned us the honor of being named a best comic book podcast by Book Riot, Screen Rant, The Mary Sue, Comic Book Herald, and Comic Book Couples Counseling. Bitches on Comics is hosted by moi,

Monica Estrella-Negra, filmmaker, writer, and co-founder of Audrey's Revenge Film. And me, Essie Plinor, comic and pop culture nerd and culture critic with writing in The Independent, Vice, Electric Literature, Star Trek, and so much more. We're also both voting members of GALICA,

the Society of LGBTQ Plus Entertainment Critics. Join Bitches on Comics for in-depth, hilarious, and heartfelt conversations with the likes of Stephanie Williams, Leah Anderson, and the late, great Rachel Pollack. Listen to Bitches on Comics on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or tune in at bitchesoncomics.com. New episodes every other Wednesday. Have you ever stopped to think how amazing it is that all over this country, all over the world,

so many people start their day with a cup of coffee. And some go on to have two, three, four, or more cups of coffee. Coffee is the world's beverage, delivering a nice big punch of caffeine along with every cup. So how did this happen? How did so many millions and millions of people become slaves to coffee all over the world? Well, it turns out, as you might imagine,

it's a pretty interesting story, and one that Augustine Sedgwick has investigated and explored. Augustine is a teacher at City University in New York. He got his PhD from Harvard, and he's written a book called Coffee Land, One Man's Dark Empire, and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. Hey, Augustine. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So, obviously, it takes a whole book to explain this story, but in a nutshell, how did coffee become such a big part of so many people's lives that we don't even think about it, but imagine not having your cup of coffee in the morning and people freak out. I mean, how did it become so important? It is really, as you mentioned, so common and yet so extraordinary.

Coffee and its namesake ingredient, caffeine, are used by as much as 90% of the people on the planet just to meet the demands of everyday life. So where does the story begin? 90% of the people on the planet just to meet the demands of everyday life. So where does the story begin? Whose idea was it to take these beans and cook them up and make a beverage and drink it? First people who started using coffee as a beverage were Sufi monks in Yemen in the 15th century. And they used it because they wanted to stay awake and stay up all night praying. And for a long time, coffee had this association with religious rituals. And so when people wanted to do the thing that they judged most important in the world, which is pray, they used coffee to help them do it for extended periods of time.

And then what happened? When did the marketing campaign kick in, where it went from a couple of monks in the 15th century to everybody today? Yeah, it's a long way from there to here. Coffee spread widely through the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, which is where the first Europeans encountered it, around the turn of the 17th century. It became popular very quickly in England and in London especially. Coffee was tea before tea in British culture. But even so, even when coffee began to become popular in Europe,

there was disagreement about its effects on the body and how it changed people who drank it. I mean, women in London in the 17th century complained that it made men lazy and impotent. Employers at the same time celebrated coffee because it made their clerks and their apprentices more efficient and more alert. So these disagreements about coffee really continued for centuries, and the difficulty of understanding coffee's consequences for the human body continued for centuries. And coffee really didn't become a mass beverage until the middle of the 19th century, the end of the 19th century. And that was the consequence of, first of all, the transformation of vast areas of the

global landscape, especially in Latin America, into coffee monocultures, but also at the same time, the rise of truly exhausting ways of life in much of the industrialized global north. Really? So it was the fact that people were so tired that coffee caught on? They were so tired, and coffee was something that was increasingly available in large quantities for low prices, thanks to the transformation of the global landscape into a coffee plantation. Yes, absolutely. And so it wasn't so much that people loved it so much as they needed it? I think that's largely the case, and we have developed a way of appreciating coffee in the same way that we learn to appreciate all the things that we need.

You say that it really caught on in the mid-1800s? Yes, so roughly the second half of the 19th century in the United States is when coffee became a mass beverage for the first time in its global history, which at that point was between 300 and 400 years after the introduction of coffee drinking. Only then did it become truly a mass drink. And you said that coffee was tea before tea was tea. In other words, that coffee was a big beverage in England. So what happened? How did tea take its place? British Crown granted the East India Company a tea monopoly

and won access to Chinese ports in the early 18th century. And after that, tea, which had been scarcer and more expensive in England, actually flooded into the British market and supplanted coffee for centuries in England, which now today is again a very rich coffee-drinking society, but obviously for centuries was dominated by tea, both its culture and its imperial politics, which led, of course, to the Boston Tea Party. Is coffee, do you think, so popular because it is just so wonderfully delicious and we all just enjoy the ritual, or are we just hooked on it? Is it just an addicting drug and that's why it's so popular?

That's a tremendously interesting question to me and a tremendously complex question. Most of us use coffee because we use it to adapt our bodies to the demands of modern life. The way that we began thinking about coffee as especially useful and appropriate for that purpose really dates to about a century ago, the 1920s, when Brazilian coffee growers teamed up with American coffee roasters to fund scientific studies that would resolve this lingering ambiguity about whether coffee was good for you or bad for you. And the studies that the coffee growers and roasters conducted drew heavily on previous research funded by Coca-Cola Company, which found that caffeine was a boon to work. And the studies concluded that coffee and caffeine were not things to be wary of or suspicious of or fearful of,

but on the contrary, kind of a miracle drug or a wonder drug, and especially a source of instant energy precisely at those moments when you most needed the ability to do some extra work. Was there, has there been a big successful marketing campaign, and that's why pretty much the whole world drinks coffee? Or is it more that, you know, people start to drink it, and then they get hooked on it, and their friends see them drink it, so, hey, I'll try that, and then they get hooked on it, and it's just a drink that contains a very addictive drug, and that's why the whole world drinks it? Well, that's the fascinating thing, is our way of thinking about coffee

as a work drug, as a kind of miracle drug, that the thing that we all need when we don't have any more energy or can't go on or have to get up for another morning and do this thing, our way of using coffee that way, our way of using coffee for that purpose is very much the result of marketing campaigns. There's no reason why we couldn't consume caffeine in some other form, whether it's Coca-Cola or Red Bull or what have you, but we have developed all these associations around coffee that make it seem not only useful but also delicious.

And from the perspective of someone who both uses coffee and enjoys it, it is delicious. It's wonderful. Who are some of the big or more interesting players in the game that you talk about that either helped or hurt or whatever? The book is a history of coffee that takes in 500 years and more or less every corner of the globe, but it's told to the story of one man named James Hill. And James Hill was born in Manchester, England, in the slums of Manchester, England, in the late 19th century. The best thing that could happen to you if you were a young man from the slums of Manchester, England at that time was that you could get a job selling the things that Manchester made around the world.

Hill, when he was 18, got a job as a textile salesman that took him to Central America. And once in Central America, which was then undergoing a dramatic coffee boom, Hill married well into a family that had coffee plantations. And he imported into Central America ideas from industrial factories in Manchester that helped him build extremely efficient and productive plantations and helped him not only transform that country of El Salvador in a profound way, but also build a family coffee business that is still one of the world's leading coffee dynasties to this day. There are a lot of different brands of coffee, and those different brands have different reputations, and the coffee maybe tastes different. What about some of those?

I write a lot about Hills Brothers Coffee, which was the great San Francisco-based coffee roaster. They had a trademark red can that featured a picture on the front of the cans of an Arab, and they became a household brand in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, in part by celebrating the quality of the coffee that they were getting from James Hill and others in Central America against the coffee that was coming in from Brazil and which tended to be seen as a kind of low-quality, low-price coffee. So already, even then, within the supermarket era of coffee drinking, there were distinctions based on provenance and place, such as like those we see today.

But of course, today, they've been taken to an entirely new level where we're encouraged to understand the specific plantation where the beans came from and its elevation and what tasting notes to discover in those beans. And we're being encouraged by the coffee industry, actually, to appreciate coffee as people appreciate wine. And one reason for that, of course, is that if we think of coffee more like wine, well, then we'll be willing to pay more for it. And surely it's true that you couldn't get coffee from one single plantation in a

supermarket in the mid-20th century United States. And therefore, if you buy this direct trade, single origin coffee today, and it comes from one plantation, then you could have a different experience of drinking that coffee than you would and you could have had in another era. Well, every coffee drinker knows and has had the experience that different coffee from different places tastes different. You know, Starbucks coffee tastes different than McDonald's coffee tastes different than Dunkin' Donuts coffee. And it all tastes different than the coffee I get at the supermarket that I make in my kitchen.

So what is the difference? Is the difference the beans? Is the difference the process? What is it? It's a great question. What varies, what you could taste, is probably the differences in processing, including roasting and packing. Roasting and grinding and packing and even preparation. I think it would probably be easier to distinguish between coffee on that basis than on saying, well, this coffee is clearly from El Salvador and this one's from Indonesia and this one's from Ethiopia.

What you can taste are differences in processing. And that's so interesting to me specifically that we attribute variations in our experiences of coffee drinking to the beans themselves, when in fact what we're really experiencing are differences in the work that has gone into making those beans available to us. And there's a very great distinction between those things that is not fully appreciated when you're just trying to figure out if you can detect the notes of mango and peach in your cup. Can you? Can you detect the notes of mango and peaches in your cup? I have one criterion for my coffee. If it was made recently and it's hot,

then that's good enough for me. Well, you're not much of a coffee snob, and I think you and I could drink out of the same pot just fine. How did Seattle become such a big coffee place? Yeah, that's a great question. Regional coffee cultures did differ based on the parts of the world to which they were connected. For example, San Francisco did a lot of business, which was where Hills Brothers Coffee Roasters was based and Folgers was based. They did a lot of business with Central America because of the trade routes and the geographical connections that developed there. New York did a lot of business with Brazil for the same reason.

The coffee cultures in those places were notably different. The iconic New York cup is, you know, the diner cup. The iconic San Francisco cup was marketed to be, was advertised to be a kind of high-quality cup. The rise of Seattle as a coffee capital, especially as the capital of kind of an especially flavorful or high-quality or expensive coffee, comes from that much longer history of the coffee trade between San Francisco and Central America. Starbucks was based on a Berkeley area chain called Pete's, and Pete's Coffee Shop drew on Central America coffees to market coffees to Bay Area residents that were worth their money, worth extra money, were special and delicious and wonderful. And Starbucks based its business very much on that model and on the economic networks it drew on.

You had mentioned a moment ago that much of what you taste in coffee isn't about the bean as much as it's about what happens once the bean is picked. And I don't think people really get a sense of that because that's not the way it's pitched. It's really pitched as the best beans, Arabica beans. Our beans are only from this place, and that's the real selling point, that the beans are so special. But you're saying that that's really not the case. Right. It makes a lot of sense to me that, you know, the owners of particular plots of land in coffee-producing places around

the world would want to promote an idea that the value of coffee came from the plant, and the plant took it, in turn, from the land itself, rather than from the people who worked that land and tended the plant and picked the beans and processed the beans into an export-ready commodity and so on and so forth. That story about the labor that has taken to develop these places into plantations and produce the coffee that grows there and is exported from there is excluded from this story that encourages us to see the value in the bean itself. Where are we in the graph? Is coffee on the increase? Is it on the decrease? Is it pretty much a plateau? Where are we?

Well, you know, the coffee industry has been worried about this question for a very long time, probably ever since it became cool for James Dean to drink a bottle of Coca-Cola in a white T-shirt leaning on a hot rod or something like this. The coffee industry has been concerned that young people especially are going to get their caffeine from other places. And to some extent they do. Much of the caffeine that's consumed around the world now

surely comes in the form of, you know, brightly colored 24-ounce cans of energy drink and things like this, which, you know, just always for some reason, even though they contain the same thing as coffee, seem completely horrifying to me. They are really not fundamentally different from coffee. I would say that the graph of caffeine consumption keeps going up and up and up and up. The graph of coffee consumption is probably significantly flatter.

Well, it may be flatter, but it sure represents an awful lot of people. Me, you, and pretty much everybody I know. My guest has been Augustine Sedgwick. He is a teacher at City University in New York, and he's author of the book, Coffee Land, One Man's Dark Empire, and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Augustine. Thanks very much. Bye.

Sure, we all know that fruits and vegetables are good for us, but did you know they can actually make you more attractive? Researchers use something called a spectrophotometer to measure the absorption of light at different locations on the body, such as the cheeks, forehead, forearms, and shoulders. The meter revealed a significant enhanced pigmentation

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Four servings a day are enough to notice a difference. And that is something you should know. I just read an article the other day that said podcast binge listening is up because people have a lot of time to kill. And if you do, well, we have 300 episodes to binge on. So feel free to binge away. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.

In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

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