I guess what will what's that man? So I was looking at letters of note this week and there was this thank you note I found that I was stunned by. It's from Clyde Barrow. Clyde, Oh is that is that Clyde of Bonnie and Clyde. That's right? And he wrote a thank you note to Henry Ford. So here's what it reads. While I still have got breadth in my lungs, I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove forwards exclusively when I could get away
with one, for sustained speed and freedom from trouble. The Ford has got every other car skinned. And even if my business had been strictly legal, it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V eight yours truly Clyde Champion Barrow. No is this is this real? So there is some question about that. But it was sent from Tulsa when Clyde Barrow was tooling through the area, and according to Stokes, it was
very much his style of humor. But I was learning about gratitude, and it turns out that counting your blessings and writing thank you notes like this one actually help you sleep better at night, And according to the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, you should count blessings not cheap because you actually have more positive thoughts before you sleep, which soothes the nervous system and helps people sleep better and longer. So maybe an outlaw like Clyde actually had a really
good reason for thanking Henry Ford. But learning about this story made us wonder what are some of the other scientific benefits of gratitude. Do human brains start with a negative bias? And how much can being thankful and really help our lives. So that's what we're digging into. Let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius.
I'm Will Pearson and is always I'm joined by my friend man guess how Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass bell thing out the theme song to Golden Girls. I mean this guy, he's been playing this what do you Say? Mango for like three hours over Oh he loves that thank you for being a friend line. It just puts the biggest smile on his face and I love to see that. That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Yeah, who knew he was such a fan. Well, I know
he loves the eighties, but yeah, you're right. I didn't know he was such a big fan of this one. But anyway, turn it down, Tristan, it's time to get focused here. And I know we wanted to talk about gratitude, and I thought there'd be no better person to discuss
this than with our good friend and author A. J. Jacobs. Now, if for some reason you don't know A. J's work, he's done all sorts of amazing feeds, from reading the entire encyclopedia for his book That Know It All, to following every rule in the Bible for the year of living Biblically. And now he's got a new book all about living a more thoughtful life called Thanks a Thousand. A. J. Jacobs, welcome back to the program. Well, thank you, of course, thank you. I have to say that, but I also
mean it. Well, J. Tell us a little bit about this book. You chose to thank every person who helped bring a cup of coffee to your lips. But why don't you give you this idea? And why do you choose coffee over I don't know, cheese or white wine or something else. M hmm. That's good. I could do
sequels on those. I like both of those. Back when I was writing The Year of Living Biblically, the book you just referenced, and that one was about where I tried to follow the Bible as literally as possible, uh ten commandments. I grew a huge beard. I stoned people adulterers. I stoned adulterers, but using small pebbles so I didn't get arrested. The Bible says that you should say prayers of thanksgiving, so I would do that, and uh, I
actually found it quite meaningful. But when the project was over, UH, I wanted to continue in some way, but it felt a little odd because I'm agnostic, so thanking God seemed a little strange. So instead I tweaked it and decided, before a meal with my wife and kids, I would thank some of the people who helped, you know, the farmer who grew the tomatoes and the woman at the grocery who sold me the tomatoes. And my my kids tolerated it for a while and then my son said,
you know, Dad, uh, those people can't hear you. If you really believe this, you should thank them in person. And I was like, that is a good idea. That is actually a book idea. So thank you for helping my job. Um and uh, I decided to do it and it was it was a wild experience. I went all over the world and made me realize that it's all interconnected. Every little thing we do in life has hundreds thousands of people involved that we take for granted.
I decided costs or first of all, coffee. You know, I do love it. I have it every morning, and it's just such a huge part of modern life. You know, there's two billion cups of coffee consumed every day around the world. And uh, a'm floys a hundred twenty five million people. So I I thought, all right, let's do the coffee. Wow, that is unbelievable. Hundred and twenty five
he said. Five million people employed by this industry somehow, right, And that's not counting, as I say, sort of, the the people who are adjacent, the people who you know, make the steel for the coffee roasters so that they work. Uh. So, you know, if you include that, you can get up to I'm sure however you define it, you can get it up to you know, a billion or two billion. Well, with with that in mind, how do you even start when you embark on a project like this, it definitely
feels overwhelming. So how did you decide which thousand people to thank? I mean, and should you have thanked Beyonce in the process. Yeah, you could thank her because you could make the argument the chemist who designed the plastic lining for my coffee cup listen to Beyonce while studying for her example. But I just followed what fascinated me. I wanted to focus on for five or six stories
that I thought were really surprising and touching. I started with the barista at my local New York coffee shop, who was lovely and who told me, you're encountering people in a very dangerous situation pre caffeination. And she said the worst part is people just treat her like a vending machine. They don't look up from their phones. They just thrust their credit card in her direction. So I made, uh the pledge that I would, you know, actually make eye contact with people that I'm and I know I
deserve a Nobel prize for that. Uh but uh, but it's you know, it's a small gesture, but it's so it has such outsized impact to to actually look at someone in the eyes when you're dealing with them instead of at your phone. I really love that, you know what. One of the things, as he mentioned a little earlier, was about how important the coffee lids are for for the cups, and I was curious if you could expand on that a little bit more. Oh yes, so the lids I did not know. You know, I could have
written a book on lids. Probably would not have sold many, but it was fascinating to see every little thing has so much behind it. And I talked to the designer of the lid for my coffee cups and he was so passionate about it, and he was very innovative. He was sort of like an Elon Musk of coffee lids, hopefully a little more emotionally stable. And he thinks the problem is the lids will block the aroma, which is a huge part of the coffee experience. So he made
a bigger hole in the middle. Um he made this. Uh. The shape is like this inverted uh hexagon, like you know, like the buckminster Fuller type uh shape and uh so you can really get your nose in and get max of him a roma. And it is just hilarious how much thought goes into uh this, this little piece of plastic, and it made me realize there are there are hundreds of these these mini masterpieces. So I actually loved the
little sides of people who should have been thanked. And one of the people you bring up in your book is Jonas Salk, who we all know figured out the vaccine for polio, but for most of us who've heard of him, he's treated as kind of a loan genius. Like,
why do you think more people weren't recognized for that discovery? Right? Well, that is one of the big themes of my book is that it takes hundreds of people for every advance, and psychologists call it the responsibility bias, that we just like to focus on the one person and say, you know, here's the loan genius. And Jonas Salk is a perfect example of that. And he invented the polio vaccine or
a polio vaccine, and he was like the superhero. He was along on the cover of Time magazine and he gave a speech saying how great he was basically for conventing the vaccine, but he neglected to thank all the people in his lab, and there were tons of people in his lab. There are tons of people who made scientific advances, like on growing polio, so you could actually do the experiments on the polio uh and and they
were very upset with which I think is understandable. So we as humans have this bias to feature the one person, and I totally as an author, I play into that. You know, this book says it's by A. J. Jacobs, which is ridiculous because a truthful cover would say by you know, the words by A. J. Jacobs. Here's the design. You know, it would have like two hundred fifty people on the cover. And I actually proposed that to my publisher, and I thought that might be an interesting sort of
marketing angle. But I do have a list in the back of a thousand people who helped with the coffee and my book. Speaking of being grateful and especially in this sense, what are some of the scientific benefits of being grateful? And you know, like does it have an impact on our health or happiness? There are studies that show you you know, it'll lift depression, it will help you sleep, improve your diet. Uh. I like this one study that indicated that gratitude causes you to be more
generous to strangers. If you're feeling grateful, you're more likely to help others. There's studies on how it boosts athletic performance. I don't know if that's true. I love that you thanked a thousand people and now you're gonna, like be drafted for the NBA or okay, exactly, I should try out now that I'm so grateful. Many people we have the negative bias, which was very helpful when we were
cave people trying to uh get away from lions. But but going through the world with a negative bias and only focusing on those three or four things that go wrong, it's not great for our mood. So this really has helped me to focus on the hundreds of things that go right every day as opposed to the three or four that go wrong, and just making a conscious effort. Like when I was at the airport, uh the other day, I I'm always annoyed because my gate is always the
one that's a mile and a half walk. It drives me crazy. But I realized that's not true. That's just what I remember because I remember the annoying ones. And so every time the other day I was at a gate, like you go through security and it's right there, and I say, you know what, I'm gonna make a note of that. I'm gonna remember pay attention, and next time I try to complain to myself, I'm gonna say, that's wrong,
You're you're being irrational. I I know, I've read these studies before that if you've fake smiling, it'll actually eventually make you happier. And I was curious, is that possible with gratitude, to like, can you fake gratitude and and
end up being more grateful in the process? Right, Yes, the answer is yeah, and there are studies and from an anecdotal point of view, totally because I you know, I would wake up in my default mood of grumpiness and I would during this project, I would force myself every day to spend a couple of hours either writing thank you notes or uh calling people cold calling or visiting people uh to thank them for their role in my coffee. And it had an effect on me, and it had the the ideal as if it has a
good effect on that. You know, some people I would call and they'd be like, what's going on? Is this a pyramid scheme? What are you trying to do? But I would call the woman who does the pest control for the coffee, the warehouse where the coffee beans are word and I'd say, I know this sounds strange, but I want to thank you for helping keep the insects
out of my coffee. And she would say, well, that does sound a little strange, but that that's lovely and that helped make my day and you know, it made me feel better, you know, A j There's this little aside in the book that I really liked, and it's about how a friend of yours has this trick for counting her blessings and this is before she goes to sleep, and she uses the alphabet to do this. Can you
talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that was a love and that has worked for me, this idea of when you're going to sleep, instead of counting sheep, do this little trick, which is go through the alphabet and come up with one thing for every letter that you are thankful for. So you know, I could be anything related to your life. You know, A is for the apple pancakes and my my husband makes on Saturday mornings,
or what have you. It gets you enough outside of yourself for me that you fall asleep as opposed to stressing about all of the things you have to do the next day. That's really wonderful. Well, we're gonna be back with A. J. Jacobs right after this break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking to author A. J. Jacobs. Now, A J. I want you to talk to us a
little bit about nostalgia. I know you used to have a calm at mental flass that talked about how things used to be and falling into this trap of the good old days? But what was coffee like in the good old days? And should we be grateful for how it's evolved? Oh? Yeah, I mean I love talking about that. The good old days were not good at all. They were They were horrible day where disease ridden, smell a racist, homophobic, sexist,
the whole thing. And yeah, coffee, you are very lucky that you were not drinking coffee in the nineteenth century. You did not know what you were getting. There was no FBA. So you know, the list of things that adulterated coffee in the past is quite impressive. You know, sawdust, dog biscuits, lead arsenic, something called monkey nuts, which I don't actually think is the private parts of animals. It
was a sort of plant from South America. But I am very grateful for coffee for saving the United States, at least that's my theory. The because in the Civil War, the North had real coffee, caffeinated coffee, but the South had no real coffee. The naval blockade blocked it, so they had to make bake coffee out of chicory and like roasted corn and asparagus seeds and all sorts of ridiculous stuff. But you know, they were not caffeinated. So North was caffinated. And I think it could have been
the deciding factor. Will never know, but I like to think. So. Um. Now, you you did talk about a friend who happens to be a professor that reminded you that you do have to be honest, even in a book about gratitude about coffees good and bad qualities. And so with that in mind, along the way, you decided to thank a major petroleum company. And so I'm I'm curious one, you know, why did you do that and to how did it make you
feel when you decided to do that? Right, it made me realize the coffee could not have gotten to me without oil. And you know, it powers the ships and the trucks that bring it to me. So I figured I had to thank Exxon because they were that's what the trucks used. But I also think that Exxon is probably doing some horrible things to our planet. So I wrote what I think might be the most passive aggressive thank you note in the history of thank you notes to the CEO of Exxon, where I said, you know,
I appreciate your role in getting me my coffee. I love coffee. I hope it's around in fifty undred years and that are planet doesn't explode from overuse of fossil fuels. And I'm pretty sure that had a huge impact. We're just we're just waiting. I'm sure that some of those policy changes are coming pretty soon because of you exactly. So I wanted to hear about your experiences at the coffee warehouse because I saw a line in the book about gay moths and I was curious to hear a
little bit more about that. Oh yeah, so that was I did check up on this, and and it appears to be true. But they have, you know, they have a pest problem at the warehouse because they have the amount of coffee there. It was, if I believe it was five football fields, Big phil stacked with coffee fifteen feet high. You know, it could make a billion cups of coffee so that you know, of course insects enjoy
their coffee. So but they had found some novel strategy for getting rid of the moths and it had to do with releasing a far genome that made the male moths not attracted to females so that they wouldn't, uh, they wouldn't mate and have baby moths. And I looked into it and it seemed to have some scientific package, so uh, yeah, I don't know it was. You know, I'm all for uh, moths identifying in any way they want and their fluidity and moths is fine by me. Um,
and I guess it's better than killing them. So there you go. Now, we've we've got a bunch of stories on coffee over the years, both at Mental Floss and now Here a part time genius. And I've read about coffee cherries before, but I didn't realize that you can actually eat them. So I'm curious, what does a coffee cherry taste like? Yeah, coffees grow on trees and uh and the fruit looks like a cherry or a grape tomato. It's red and inside is the coffee bean. And what's weird.
It's a very paradoxical fruit because you've got If you taste the fruit, it's quite sweet, but the but the bean is bitter. And there's the legend of how coffee was discovered. I guess people didn't need it, but the legend is that called the the Ethiopian goatherd, and Millennia passed saw his goats eating the the cherries and like flipping out and just dancing and bouncing around, and he's like, huh, that looks fun, and so he uh started to eat him.
You know, I did think collect heard in the book, but ever existed. That's a great point. I didn't and that is an oversight. Thank you. In the follow up edition, I will so. One of the facts that struck me was that if you actually paid minimum wage to everyone involved in the process, you're write that a cup of coffee would cost Is that right? Well, there was one calculation from one team. I can't swear that that's true, but yeah it was. It's weird because you pay three
dollars for this little cup of brown liquid. You know, one part of me is like, this is ridiculous, This is yeah crazy. Uh, but once you look into the supply chain, there are so many hundreds of people, and it has to travel so far, and if you paid minimum wage to the people who were working in the developing countries, then the coffee should actually be twenty five dollars. Some people are afraid that beings super grateful makes you complacent,
And there was a Barbara Aaron Reich, the writer. She wrote a New York Times op ed that said, you know gratitude is She said it was basically a right wing conspiracy to keep people from making real reforms, like Walmart workers would be so grateful for their for minimum wage or whatever they can paid that they wouldn't object. But luckily, the research says the exact opposite. It actually says the more grateful you are, the more likely you
are to advocate for change. I'm curious, what was it like to thank the people who plucked and produced the coffee cherries in Colombia? Like, how did they respond when you thank them? I think they were a bit confused as to my project. But in the end, I think I got through and I tried to make it as vivid as possible, which is what they say the best
ways of thanking. You know, I said, you, you know, every morning I drink the coffee that you that you guys make possible, and and I couldn't do my job or take care of my kids without your coffee, so thank you. And and they did come around, and they actually said that they couldn't do their job without a
hundred other people. And they talked about, uh, you know, the pickup truck that they drive is made from parts all over the world, and the machine that takes the skin off of the coffee cherry that's made in Brazil. They didn't Jonas Salka and just take all the credit for all the coffee exactly that it's all us. Uh No, they were very nice. Stay right there, Listeners will be back with A. J. Jacobs after the break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're here with A. J. Jacobs
talking about his new book, Thanks a Thousand. I love seeing the list some of the funnier entries in there. I know it was a little surprised to see Joe's parents from Joe's Coffee thanked in here. And I'm curious, like, who were some of the funnier, maybe more surprising people that you didn't exactly expect to thank as you were on your way to a thousand thank yous. Uh yeah, there were some very you know, I used my credit card and I didn't know how much went into just
making the credit card. The people who have to make the magnetic strip and the people who assigned the numbers to the credit cards. There's a there's a whole institute that assigns numbers two various credit cards. Um, and you know that they don't do it themselves. Uh. I will say this one was crazy. If you go on the Apple website, you can find a list of their suppliers, and it's I could have done the whole thing just that list that I restrained myself. But a lot of
companies don't do that. They don't say where their stuff comes from. But but some do, and the Apple was one of them. M hm. Well, I'm not going to spoil it for people, but the way you end the book with the Italo Calvino quote and how the world could look if we were all a little bit more grateful made me just genuinely want a world where we could be more aware and more connected and not like
social media, connected but actually grateful and connected. And I just wanted to thank you so much, truly for writing this book, and thank you of course in mangas as I mentioned, I you know I'm a huge listener, and I that a few episodes ago you told the story of how you were in Portland and everyone thanks and the bus driver and how touched you were, and I thought that it's lovely. If we can turn the world into one giant Portland bus, the world would be a
better place. I agree. The book is thanks at thousand. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing.
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