Hello and welcome to Under the Skin from Luminary. This week I spoke with Michael Pollan,

Michael's an American author and journalist and currently the night professor of science and

environmental journalism at UC Berkeley. You know him probably because of that. Clippy down about

caffeine on Joe Rogan's show. That was really good. He's written some fantastic books.

His latest is your mind on plants. On this chat, right? What did we talk about in that, the Michael

Pollan chat? I've had the bit where he talks about how we think we've domesticated plants,

but actually they fooled us. There you go. Check that out. You're going to love it. You're going to

love this bit. Trying to achieve a quality with the annihilation of category is not successful.

That's exactly right. We're in this era where it turns out we were never the past.

What's beneath the surface of people with my ideas that define our time, the history we're told?

Welcome to Russell Brand. Under the skin. So yeah, I've written a lot of very critical things about

the food system, about the meat industry. And you know, to me it's all about peace with this

relationship with plants, where it goes wrong, where it goes right. And the fact that

we think of domestication is something we do to plants like corn or even, you know, peyote,

or coffee. But of course, they're doing something to us too. Their evolutionary strategy is to

gratify our desires, right? I mean, plants are brilliant, but they are limited in that they

can't move around. So they have to use chemistry to get animals like us to do work for them,

to move their seeds around the world, to create habitat. Corn got us to eliminate the forests,

so it would have more habitat. And it did that by being very useful to us, to a fault. And now we

have way too much of it. So anyway, so I've been looking at that symbiosis. And I really, I mean,

I wrote a book whose subtitle was a plants eye view of the world. It's called the botanum desire.

And I really see plants as operating on us. When you mow your lawn, you are doing, it seems like

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