A.J. Jacobs Thanked One Thousand People For His Morning Coffee

Found this after I heard his TED talk about the subject on WABE radio on Jan. 19, 2019

https://www.newsweek.com/thanks-thousand-j-jacobs-coffee-radical-gratitude-1222245

By Mary Kaye Schilling On 11/21/18

A.J. Jacobs isn’t religious, but he likes to begin dinner with a prayer of thanks for all the people who contributed to the family meal: the farmer who grew the vegetables, the trucker who brought them to the store, the cashier who rang him up at the supermarket. You can imagine the eye-rolling from his three sons. One night, the youngest said, “You know they can’t hear you, right?”

Jacobs pondered this and realized that his premeal thank-you sessions were a little perfunctory. He decided to commit more fully. It occurred to him that every object he encountered in a day required the effort of thousands of people, many of them below the radar. Jacobs decided he would thank everyone involved in something he can’t live without.

Thus was born the “Great Coffee Gratitude Trail,” a project that has become his sixth book, "Thanks a Thousand", and his second Ted Talk.

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“If there’s a bigger theme to Thanks a Thousand,” he says, “it’s that, in the creation of any one thing, there are hundreds of people involved from around the globe. With the increasing calls for tribalism and isolationism, it reminds us of how interconnected we are.”

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as Jacobs discovered, each thank-you on the trail yielded dozens more. “The book could have easily been 800 times longer,” he says.

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Jacobs’s gratitude commences with the barista at Joe’s; by the end of the book, he’s picking coffee beans with a family of growers in the mountains of Colombia. But there are less-expected stops: truckers and health inspectors and steel plant workers and a company that makes the invaluable pallets that move the heavy bags of beans throughout the process. “I came to appreciate pallets like I never had,” says Jacobs. (Me too.) “Forty-six percent of wood in America is used for pallets!”

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https://www.npr.org/2019/01/18/686269793/aj-jacobs-how-can-we-thank-those-we-take-for-granted

Which is part of the whole show "Approaching With Kindness" on WABE


https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/

His own web site is

https://ajjacobs.com/