The Tim Ferriss Show - #469: Dr. Mark Plotkin on Ethnobotany, Real vs. Fake Shamans, Hallucinogens, and the Dalai Lamas of South America

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Dr. Mark Plotkin (@DocMarkPlotkin) is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team, which has partnered with 55 tribes to map and improve management and protection of 80 million acres of ancestral rainforests. Educated at Harvard, Yale, and Tufts, Plotkin has since spent much of the past four decades studying the shamans and healing plants of tropical America from Mexico to Argentina, although much of his work focuses on the rainforests of the northeast Amazon. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books about the rainforest. His new book from Oxford Press is The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know.His upcoming podcast series is titled Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens: Culture, Conservation, History and Healing, and it will be coming out in late October. More information will be available on Mark’s website.Please enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different fields. My guest today, super exciting, long time in the making, Dr. Mark Plotkin. You can find him on Twitter at DocMarkPlotkin, P-L-O-T-K-I-N, is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team. You can find that at amazonteam.org, which has partnered with 55 tribes to map and improve management and protection of 80 million acres of ancestral rainforests. Educated at Harvard, Yale, and Tufts, Plotnikin has spent much of the past four decades studying the shamans and healing plants of tropical America from Mexico to Argentina, although much of his work focuses on the rainforests of the Northeast Amazon. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books about the rainforest ever

published. His new book, published by Oxford Press, is the Amazon subtitle What Everyone Needs to Know. This episode is brought to you by Pornhub. Just kidding. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, which is part of my morning routine, also part of my afternoon routine. Routine saves me. So there are a number of ways that I use Four Sigmatic. In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee, and it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing, and all you have to do is add hot water.

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Tim, good to be here. And we were chatting before we hit record. I said, my audience likes stories and specifics. And you said, I might have a few of those. And certainly, based on what I know of you, based on our conversations, based on suggestions from friends who know you, I think we will have no shortage of ground to cover. And I thought we could start with a name and a person who fascinates me endlessly, and that is Richard Evan Schultes. And I would love if you could explain who this is and how you crossed paths with this person.

Well, Schultes is often called the father of ethnobotany. And Schultes, who passed away about 20 years ago when he was told this, would often say, well, you know, ethnobotany started with the pharaohs, and I'm not quite that old. So he had a marvelous sense of humor and seeing him in the field, I think this is really one of the ways he won his indigenous colleagues over. He might've been a world famous Harvard professor, but ultimately a very down to earth, very early, wonderful, smart, kind, conscientious fellow. Schulte's taught for many years at the Harvard Botanical Museum, and he influenced

people far and wide, not just his students like me or Tim Plowman or Wade Davis, but people even that knew of his work and didn't take his course. People like Allen Ginsberg, great Schultes fans. People like the great biologist E.O. Wilson were Schultes fans. So his effect on popular culture and on science were, as I said, far and wide. And this great new institute, Tim, that you helped start at the Johns Hopkins University, bringing some of these entheogens, some of these hallucinogenic principles to bear on so-called incurable diseases like PTSD or schizophrenia, in a sense traces back to a lot of Schultes' work, because Schultes is the one who went into the subtropical forests of southern Mexico and Oaxaca in the 30s and came up with the magic mushrooms. And Schultes is the one who went

into the rainforests of the Northwest Amazon in the 40s and came out with ayahuasca. So his positive impact on the world is still being felt. the work of Schultes. And I have one book, for example, that I've traveled with for many, many, many years, which is Plants of the Gods, which I'm sure you've seen, which was not only co-authored by Richard Evans Schultes, but also Albert Hoffman, the first person to synthesize LSD-25. And then Christian Raich, although I'm not sure if that's how he pronounces his name in German, that is how it is spelled. And what is ethnobotany, since we'll be digging under the hood with this quite a bit? You know, in the broad sense, ethnobotany is simply the relationship between plants and peoples.

But in popular culture, ethnobotany is the search for medicinal plants in the rainforest from tribal shamans. So you can go broad or you can go narrow, but it has to do with plants and peoples. The bottom line is that Schultes taught and Schultes believed and taught the rest of us to believe that much of human culture is based on our relationship with plants. There's evidence to indicate that many of the world's religions had their beginning in the effect of these magical plants on the minds of our ancestors. And as we know, the effect of these plants and these fungi and these frogs we now know on our minds is having a very positive effect when used correctly, either in traditional settings under

the care of traditional healers who really know their stuff, or in the hands of Western physicians who are beginning to discover the incredible power and potential of these compounds. The bottom line is that these entheogenic hallucinogenic compounds in the hands of shamans, who I work with, are essentially vegetal scalpels that allow these men, and in some cases these women, to understand, analyze, treat, and sometimes cure emotional ailments, brain ailments that our own physicians yet cannot. One of the things that impresses me most about you and Schultes by extension, but that impresses me about you is your field work. You have traveled extensively in the field and have interacted with so many different tribes, so many different nations of people. And I'm curious to know

when you were bitten by the bug, so to speak. When did this journey start for you? Oh, it started on a cool September night in 1974. I had dropped out of college and was working at Harvard. And a colleague of mine says, you know, Harvard has a night school. And there's this extraordinary Harvard professor who went down to the Amazon in 1941 and essentially disappeared, essentially went native for about 14 years. I just want to pause to say for people, 14 years, just let that sink into your mind for a second. And this was just a place at time. This is in the, what, the 30s? 1941 to 1954. Okay, please continue. Sorry to interrupt. And so Schultes, to entice the students, gave a version of his very famous lecture on the

plant hallucinogens of the Northwest Amazon. And there was this one slide, this one image that changed my life forever. And it was a picture, a black and white picture that had three indigenous peoples in barcloth masks and grass skirts. Schulte said, here you see three Yukuna Indians doing the Kayari dance to keep away the forces of darkness. The one on the left has a Harvard degree. Next slide, please. And that image got me hooked, got me hooked on plants, got me hooked on indigenous peoples, got me hooked on the Amazon. What was your next step or the step that led it to becoming a career for you? How did you take that interest and translate it into a trajectory? Well, you know that famous saying of Pasteur, which is that chance favors the prepared mind.

So it wasn't dumb luck, but there was certainly a lot of luck involved. I had dropped out of college and I was working in a museum and was, you know, looking for adventures, they say. And there was this one incredible graduate student who himself was sort of legendary. And he said, there are rumors of an endangered man-eating crocodilian called the Black Caiman in the northeast Amazon in a country called French Guiana, this forgotten little ex-colony in the northeast shoulder of South America. You want to go? And I signed up then and there. So what was it, just to backtrack for a second, about, and I'm not going to spend too much time on Schultes, but I think the parallels are interesting. What was it that caught the

interest and piqued the curiosity of, say, a Ginsberg or an E.O. Wilson? What was it about him? How was he portrayed? Well, Schultes was essentially a trickster, and I mean that in the very positive shamanic sense of the word. You see this man, this elderly man in a white lab coat with a crew cut and a Harvard tie. He looked like the straightest lace fellow in Harvard Square, and this is culturally the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s. Yet when he talked and told his stories and showed his pictures, he was this wild man who went down to the jungle and did all these tribal dances and did all of these tribal drugs. And I thought, wow, you know that great quote of Walt Whitman's that everybody cites about I hold multitudes. Well, there were Schultes' multitudes, the ultimate pillar of the establishment and the ultimate swashbuckling explorer,

all in the same person. I have no idea if there is any connection here, but when I first discovered Schultes, it made me think there had to be some type of historical basis for Indiana Jones, minus the theft of artifacts. But the similarities are pretty striking. So aside from the physical appearance, I suppose. Well, this is always a big debate in the academic community where people say, you're Indiana Jones. No, you're not. No, I'm not Indiana Jones, back and forth, who is, who isn't. Indiana Jones is a fictional character. Indiana Jones was a tomb robber, but Indiana Jones fired the imagination of many of us who've made a living out of tropical research. So the net effect was tremendously positive. But remember that elements of Schultes, which you're correct, were baked into the Indiana Jones archetype.

Elements of Schultes were also baked into Sean Connery in the movie Medicine Man. So he wasn't just portrayed by Harrison Ford, he was also portrayed by Sean Connery. Pretty amazing for a straight-laced Harvard professor. So lest people think that shaman, shaman, curandero, ayahuasquero, whatever we want to use as a term, I suppose curandero, in this case, if we're talking about Spanish, would be limited to hallucinogens. Could you speak to, this is a story I've heard you tell, but your foot injury, and as a way to just provide a little more surrounding context for the conversation we're going to have? Well, people need to understand that the Amazon is full of different cultures. When you're looking at indigenous cultures, it's between 300

and 400. A minority of those are ayahuasca drinkers, okay? A minority of those are coca chewers. So when people say to me, what do Indians in the Amazon want or what are shamans like, you're dealing with a lot of diversity here, and that's something that the general public doesn't really seem to get. Now, I've done a lot of my work in the Northeast Amazon on the Suriname-Brazil border, and there is no ayahuasca there. There are no hallucinogenic fungi there, or if there is, they don't take them. And these people are still masters of the rainforest. These people still are master diagnosticians and healers. No shaman, just like no physician, can cure everything. And there are different forms of expertise and different forms of healing, even within Amazonian cultures.

And here's an example. I was in the Northeast Amazon, where I've worked for decades. And I came into the village and the shaman, who was an old friend of mine, said, you're limping. And I said, yeah, you know, I hurt my foot and it doesn't seem to be healing very well. And he says, and I'll never forget this. He says, take off your shoe and give me a machete. And it did as I was told. He walked over to a palm tree, which was about three meters away, scraped off a fern growing on the palm tree, threw it in the fire, applied it to my foot, burned the hell out of me, threw it in the pot, and had me drink it.

Now, the pain stopped almost instantaneously. Now, understand that when I injured my foot, I put on heat, I put on cold, I took aspirin, didn't work. I went to the doctor. She gave me a cortisone shot, didn't really work. I went to a masseuse, went to an orthopedic, didn't work. And this guy cured me on the spot. So I don't understand how it worked chemically or spiritually or shamanically, but my foot got better. Now, seven months later, it came back, and I was back in the rainforest, and he fixed it. Now, that's 10 years ago, and it doesn't hurt. So, who would you rather be treated by? Again, the point being that these guys can't cure everything, but sometimes, sometimes they can cure things

that our own physicians, our own masseuses, our own Ayurvedic physicians cannot. And that's why I am so anxious to make sure that these healing traditions are preserved, these healing plants and fungi are preserved, and that these cultures have room and breathing room to exist in a world which is pressing in on all sides. And as we know from the headlines, COVID-19 is pressing in particularly heavily. One of my favorite quotes of yours that I've found is, and please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, it might be a paraphrase, but Western medicine is the most successful system of healing ever devised, but it has holes, right? And then I think they put some ellipses in there, so I probably omitted a bunch in the middle. But what types of, first you can correct that,

and then could you elaborate on what you see as holes? Well, I think it's quite clear to all of us that Western medicine can't cure everything. Anybody who's lost a relative to cancer, anybody who has lost a relative to a suicide, anybody who has trouble sleeping, anybody who's stressed out. Western medicine doesn't seem to be able to cure many cases of these ailments. And again, no shamanic system, Chinese medicine doesn't have all the answers. All of these systems do something well. And all of these systems need to be protected for their own sake and for the betterment of all of us. The medical office of the future, if we get it right, I believe,

is going to have a physician, is going to have a shaman, is going to have a masseuse therapist, is going to have a nutritionist, all of these things that should be working together. So it shouldn't be the physician versus the medicine man or woman. It should be ways of combining that. Now, I don't think that we're ever going to see a healer where it's going to be a woman using ayahuasca and antibiotics and ayurvedic therapy and massage therapy. One person just can't contain all that stuff, which is why you need different people maintaining and practicing these different systems. There's such a breadth of subject matter. And unless you want to go an inch deep and a mile

wide, it seems like you really need to specialize. And there are a couple of notes here I have that I'd love to explore just to kind of show how much territory there is to explore. Could you please speak to electric eels and dolphins? I can't wait to hear this because I don't know what comes after the question. But new discoveries in the Amazon regarding electric eels and dolphins. Well, electric eels are hard to miss. They're eight-foot slabs of meat that send out Jedi-like impulses that paralyze, stun, and sometimes kill their prey. So this isn't something that's a recent discovery. Electric eels have been studied for 250 years.

Linnaeus himself described the first electric eel. Volta built the first battery, inspired in part by his studies of electric eels. And just last year, 2019, we found two new species of electric eels, and one of them shot out 20% more electricity than electric eels were known to produce. The point here being, if we still don't know how many species of electric eels there are, and now we're studying this to find ways of building new micro batteries, which we can implant within the human body to power electrical devices. Think what else is out there that isn't eight feet long and hard to miss. And so the excitement is to find stuff like this. The flip side of it is watching it be destroyed, as we all see last year with the Amazon fires, the pace of destruction picking

up in Brazil. So it's both exciting and disheartening at the same time. Is the dolphin example also one of new species being discovered? Same thing. And again, I want to emphasize that it shouldn't be about protecting species, whether it's here at home in Austin, Texas, or Peru, or California, or wherever. It shouldn't be about protecting species because they can cure cancer or because they can teach us how to make new batteries. I think species in general and conservation in general is an ethical exercise. We shouldn't be destroying species through our own stupidity and our greed because sometimes, sometimes, sometimes these things turn out to be life-changing. Now, in terms of the pink dolphin or the Amazon, they just found a new species of a pink dolphin.

How do you miss pink dolphins? Okay, but the Uruguayan river dolphin is a different species. So, again, we're seeing that big, large, conspicuous, well-studied creatures still have secrets that it can share with us. And they might help revolutionize certain aspects of medicine, like it seems possible with these new electric eels, or it might just be a cool species that we can go down there and see and enjoy. Because one thing you have to remember when people talk about, well, we can't afford conservation because we need to develop. The fact is that tourism, ecotourism is the second biggest industry in the world. And as we live in an ever urbanizing planet, people have more and more desire and need to commune with nature.

So the value of these wild dolphins and electric eels and all the other cool things around the world only increases if we protect them and their oceans and coral reefs and rainforests and deserts in which they live. So let's hop from some of these, what you would think would be very conspicuous animals that have been missed. And by missed, I suppose we should say by Western science, not necessarily by the people who live there on the ground. Could you explain what Yopo is, please? Yopo is the great undiscovered hallucinogen of the Amazon. Everybody focuses on ayahuasca, all for good reason. However, there is a very powerful hallucinogen, my personal favorite, in the north-central Amazon, centered on the Venezuela-Brazil border, and it's called Yopo. It's a hallucinogenic snuff. Many people saw this in these famous films by Napoleon Chagnon, Anthropology 101.

And this is a tree sap, or less recognized, a leguminous crushed seed, because these are very different hallucinogens, that the Anamami blow up their nose for the purpose of divination and healing. And it is quite an extraordinary experience because it hurts like hell for a few minutes. And then it is an extremely visual, spiritual trip that lasts for 20 minutes. And then you feel absolutely wonderful afterwards. So for all of us who've taken LSD and went through that black period, remember that's why the stones wrote painted black, you feel better afterwards, immediately afterwards, which in my experience is unique. And it just goes to point that there

are other mind-altering substances that are still out there. It's not just all about ayahuasca. And I'll give you a concrete example. My late friend, Lauren McIntyre, was lost on the Brazil- Peru border in 1969, was taken in by a group of uncontacted peoples called the Matzes, who had a very ferocious reputation. And they were the ones that introduced him to hallucinogenic frogs, now known as Campo quite widely. I learned about this from McIntyre. I put this in a TED Talk I gave a few years ago. And when I went to one of the villages in which I work in South Suriname, I gave my TED Talk in the tribal language. And when I showed the magic frog from Peru, one of the shamans stopped me and said, oh, we have that frog here. And I said, no, you don't. That's from Peru. And he goes no no we have it here and i said no no it's it's from peru it's like you've never heard of this place it's thousands of miles away that frog does not occur here and i said

no way and he says yeah it's here but it's in the canopy and i said what do you use it for and he says oh we use it for hunting magic just like those indians you're talking about and i said i've been working here over 30 years and you never told me this. And he said, well, you've been working here over 30 years and you never asked me. And by the way, there's another frog that we use for the same purpose. So I was able to collect and identify this frog, completely different family. It's not like sometimes, you know, the next species over will have the same compounds in it, completely different family. And actually some analysis had been done with this and it contains bufotenin, which is a hallucinogenic principle. So once again, the Indians were right and the Western scientists was wrong.

And by hunting magic, that means they consume this to divine beforehand or they use it for the hunt itself? They use it the night before the hunt to see where the animals will be. And as a Western scientist, this makes no sense to me. But as an ethnobotanist, when people tell me stuff, indigenous people tell me stuff that I found hard to believe, it's important to put aside my disbelief and be willing to listen and learn. And the classic account of this was published by my buddy Peter Gorman, who heard about Lorne McIntyre's first encounter with this drug and went down to the Northwest Amazon where he had a fair amount of experience and he tried it. And he said, I took the stuff. In my mind, I saw this taper crossing the river at a place I knew.

The next day we went hunting, we got to that crossing and there was the taper. It raises a lot of questions, doesn't it? It raises many questions, more questions than answers, but that's what makes this field of study endlessly fascinating. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. People always ask me what podcasts I listen to, and the truth is, I don't actually listen to that many, given all the projects that I'm working on, given producing this podcast. One exception is Business Wars from the podcast network Wondery. You know a lot of their shows already, as at least 20 of Wondery's shows have reached number one on Apple Podcasts. Now, Business Wars is a great show that profiles

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very short, very dramatic, easy to listen to. I enjoy them a lot. So check out Wondery Plus today with this exclusive offer for listeners of this podcast. You can get 25% off a one-year membership at Wondery, that's W-O-N-D-E-R-Y, WonderyPlus.com slash Tim to start enjoying business wars and much more. That's WonderyPlus, W-O-N-D-E-R-Y-P-L-U-S, WonderyPlus.com slash Tim to enjoy and join WonderyPlus. Let me ask you another question related to Yopo. So you said your personal favorite. For someone who does not have any personal experience, how would you describe the differences between Yopo and, say, ayahuasca, aside from the duration of the experience?

You know, somebody asked me recently, Tim, about ayahuasca, if I'd taken it. And I said, well, you know, I'm an ethnobotanist. It's my job. And they said, well, how many times have you taken it? And I said, 87, I think. And as you know, these experiences are often very different. It depends on where you are in life. It depends what's on your mind.

It depends on the shaman. It depends on the mix. Because most ayahuasca mixes are comprised of different ad mixes by the real masters. And it depends, as your shamans say, it depends on what you need. Sometimes you're going to the ninth dimension and making love to the goddess of the river under the water. And sometimes you don't see anything and sleep deeply. And when you ask the shaman about it, he or she will say, well, you got what you needed. So it's very difficult to say, oh,

ayahuasca is this and yopo is that and the magic mushrooms are that. But I will say this, the Yanomami with whom I had the great pleasure to live and study this stuff, make two kinds of yopo. Okay. One is made from the sap of a varroa tree, which is essentially an Amazonian nutmeg. Remember nutmeg is a tree from the Southeast Asian tropics. And if you read the autobiography of Malcolm X, he talks about sneaking into the prison commissary at night and stealing nutmeg so they could get a buzz, catch a buzz out of it. Now, I find the Yopo from the Varroa snuff to be very, very, very visual. It takes you a different place. The visions are extraordinary, much like I've seen in some ayahuasca experiences. And then with the

other yopo, which is made from the crushed seeds of a savannah tree, it's primarily auditory. You're hearing extraordinary things. You can hear everything in the jungle. It is unlike any other entheogenic substance which I have taken. And that, to me, are very striking differences. But again, the details are in primarily who's the shaman, what is he or she treating you for, what is the dosage. So I really can't be more specific than that. Well, thank you for making the attempt, nonetheless. Let's talk about this word, shaman. It gets used a lot. It seems like everyone on Facebook who plays the didgeridoo, does yoga, or has been to Burning Man is now shaman these days. For you, what does that

designation connotate? And understanding that that is not the word that these people would use to describe themselves necessarily in these indigenous communities. But what does that signify to you? What are the prerequisite skills or experiences that would lead someone in your mind to qualify for that? You know, the etymology of the word when I looked it up was he who knows. And I think, you know, there are many terms for you and I would think of as a shaman. It is somebody who is an expert healer, somebody who is a keeper of the traditions, a keeper of the laws, a psychopomp, the person who conveys souls to the underworld. And one way to contrast it with our own healers and why I think some of these shamans are so effective is in our system, if you're sick, you go to the general practitioner. And if that doesn't work, she sends you to a specialist. And if that doesn't work, he sends you to a psychiatrist. Whereas the shaman in a sense, it's kind of one-stop shopping. And there's two things that stick in my mind is how you know

you're dealing with the real thing. One is in the Northwest Amazon, if you ask somebody if they're a shaman, they will never say yes. They will say, well, some say that I am, or who knows. And then anybody who pounds their chest like some sort of tribal Tarzan and says, yes, I'm a shaman or I'm the great shaman or whatever, isn't a shaman. Secondly, I gave the commencement address at Tulane Medical School a couple of years ago, my hometown in New Orleans. And the night before, I had a few drinks with the dean and I said, I got to ask you something. I said, why did you ask an ethnobotanist to give the graduation speech in a medical school? And this is after a lot of wine. He said, well, we wanted Jimmy Carter, but we couldn't afford him. But the reason I bring up that example to answer your

question is one of the great shamans of the Northwest Amazon, a real ayahuasca master, Don Laureano, he's long gone now, of the Ingano peoples. I once asked him, how long does it take you to become a shaman? A taita, that's what, in their language, that's what they call a shaman. How long did it take you to become a taita? And he says, you know, my son, he says, in your system, you have to go to school for three years to become a doctor. He says, in your years, he says, I'm over 90. He says, I'm still learning. I thought that is a true shaman. Let me sub in for quite a few listeners out there to follow up on your mention of 87 or so times at the cup with ayahuasca. The question that one might ask is why so many times,

right? Why keep doing it? Is this not supposed to be the wham-bam, thank you, Van Damme, one-stop shopping where you come in and you have this transformative experience? Why keep going back to the well? How would you respond to that? It's an excellent question. And like I said, I'm an ethnobotanist. It's my job.

Seven of the tribes you work with are the original Ayahuasca tribes. These are the same tribes that taught it to Schultes. So when you want to work with an Ayahuasquero and he says, well, we have to do this in ceremony, we do. Okay. Very, very, very few occasions, Tim, have I gone down there and said, I'm having a problem. I have an issue I can't deal with. I really want to have a ceremony. In almost every single case, it was part of bonding with these people. It was part of communicating with these people. It was never like, hey, I hear he's a great shaman. Let me give this a whirl. I don't work that way. I mean, you know, as an ethno-botanist, you don't want to be a shaman snob. Like, oh, well, I know a real shaman and you don't sort of stuff. That's

nonsense. However, it does give you access to this shamanic world, and you're dealing with the real deal. And I want to bring up our mutual friend, Michael Pollan. You know, I hope everybody's read Michael's great book on hallucinogenic plants and practice. And one thing that comes through repeatedly time and time again is this is not a toy. People with mental ailments, who are often the ones who go down to the rainforest in search of these things, often come back worse. So that you really need to be dealing with the real deal. And stuff that you buy on the internet or workshops you hear about on the internet, you got to be real careful because it's not like smoking a joint.

You know, you can really have a bad trip. It can really do you harm. And so the point here is not to say, okay, well, I've done it 87 times and Tim, you've only done it 83 times. So, you know, I'm a bigger stud than you are. That's ridiculous. I mean, I remember when I was back in college and people would like, well, the people who smoke the most dope are supposed to be the wisest. How'd that work out, right? There are people that go and take ayahuasca once and they say, I got it. I'm done. I got what I needed.

I'm never going to do it again. Or the shaman will tell them, okay, you don't need to do this anymore. Or you need to take another cup or don't you dare take another cup. You know, this is how it has to be regarded. You wouldn't go to a doctor that you heard about on the internet who didn't have an MD and wasn't certified. Why would you undergo something so profound and frankly so risky with just some fly-by-net operation? Yeah. I want to mention a few things to underscore a few of the points that you made. So the first, Michael Pollan, for those interested,

his book, How to Change Your Mind, is exceptional. I also have two interviews with him on this podcast. Great 30,000-foot view as well as experiential account of someone who is psychedelically naive, researching not just the history, but the current day, and also having his own first-person experiences. To the point related to risk, just to give a few concrete examples so that people understand what can happen. In some areas of Peru, and certainly hallucinogens are not limited to Peru, these plants, and there are many different types of plants, are not limited to Peru, and certainly hallucinogens are not limited to Peru. These plants, and there are many different types of plants, are not limited to Peru. But that has become one of the top destinations for those

seeking some type of transcendent experience or who are desperate to address a problem they've not been able to address. And in some areas, Pucallpa and other parts of Peru, there are a lot of basically walking dead. I'm not going to say dead, but you have these Westerners who have had psychotic breaks or just wandering around homeless. I mean, it's a non-trivial problem. And it's really important to understand that these compounds can cause what Roland Griffiths at Hopkins would call ontological shock, where your perception of reality is so fundamentally shifted that you cannot get back to moor your boat. You cannot get back to the dock. And I know someone personally

who, actually I know multiple people who went down, he did a dieta, which involved fasting and consuming a plant, in this case, Chirixinango, which is very valuable in a number of contexts. But whether it was the administration or his genetic predisposition or any number of other factors, he was untethered from reality for a good, I want to say it was between one and two months. And his family had to fly down to South America. And the only way they could get him on a plane was by convincing him that he was God and that he would be doing them a great service. It would be a demonstration of his power to get on this plane with them to fly back to the United States. I mean, this is not to say a typical experience, but it's not altogether rare alternatively. So I don't have to take us too far into the sort of encyclopedic list of these types

of side effects, but you have to treat them very carefully. So you wouldn't go on Craigslist to find a neurosurgeon, and I don't think you should buy ayahuasca for your slow cooker on the dark web and invite your friend who's had one hallucinogenic experience to be your shaman for the weekend. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. Well, I completely agree. In my new book, The Amazon, What Everybody Needs to Know, I talk about ayahuasca. And I point out the subscure liana that was dug up, in a sense, by Schultes in the 40s and 50s is now being taken from Israel to Istanbul.

And you take it at your own risk. I get a lot of calls and emails from people saying, where should I go to take it? It's like, I'm a conservationist. I'm an ethnobotanist. I'm not running an ecotourism operation for psychonauts. So don't even ask me. But understand that there's risks. Like I said earlier, hallucinogens are vegetal scalpels and scalpels can heal you and scalpels can hurt you. They are the vegetal or fungal two-edged swords. So this idea, and I get this all the time, people say, oh, well, it's a plant, so it can't hurt me. Really?

Ever hear of strychnine? Yeah. Hemlock? Yeah. Belly amina. A lot of it. I'm all in favor of plant medicines or fungal medicines, but the idea that they have all the answers and there's no downside is as ridiculous as saying if a doctor doesn't know it, nobody else can.

Agreed. And I want to talk about more things that can hurt or heal. Let's start with vampire bats, or maybe not vampire bats specifically, but you were bitten by a vampire bat? This is something I did not know. Or is it maybe a story about someone else? Okay, please say more. This is recounted in my first book, Tales for Shaman's Apprentice, which talks about my 15-year search for medicinal plants in the Northeast Amazon. And I was on the Suriname-Brazil border, on the Suriname side, packing my gear to hike across the border and into Brazil. And remember, Americans don't typically arrive in Brazil on foot.

And I was in the camp and I had my lantern on. And I felt this terrible pain in my leg. And I looked down and there was a bat attached to my leg, biting me, slicing into my leg. And I mean, I was bleeding like a stuck pig. I yelled and my indigenous guide came running in, took a machete and sliced it in half. And I just stood there bleeding all over the floor. And I said to him, oh my God, I said, am I going to get rabies and die? And he said, no. And then he said, what's rabies? So he was right.

I didn't get rabies and die. But the reason that I was bleeding like a stuck pig is that vampire bats have anticoagulants in their saliva, much as leeches do. If you feed on blood for a living, you don't want it to clot, right? That means dinner's over. So this saliva, this compound is being looked at in the lab, and it's got a great trade name, Draculin. So the important thing here, Tim, is that... Are you serious? Is that what it's called? That's what it's called. You can look it up.

Oh my God, that's incredible. The important thing here is, you know, I started out working at the World Wildlife Fund, and we were all about save the elephants and save the pandas and save the whales, and that's great. But there's not much coming out of elephants, pandas, and whales in the medicinal realm. It's often the creepy crawlies, often the poisonous things like poisonous snakes, which led to the birth of ACE inhibitors, a billion-dollar drug industry on its own. And so it's sometimes a very good reason for saying we can't just protect the cute, cuddly things that are appealing to us emotionally. Sometimes it's the nasty, mean, hairy, aggressive insects, scorpions, or other things like that, that might have real potential. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, I mean, if you've undergone anesthetic, if you trace it back,

a lot of the, I want to say some of the early innovations related to anesthetics were from curare and poison darts used in South America, which I would imagine probably came from frog venom of some type or toad venom, but you could perhaps speak to that. It's incredible how much knowledge is held in the heads of these, let's just call them elder doctors in the rainforest, not by our credentials, but certainly in their traditions. And I think you've called them one of or the most endangered species, because in a sense, whether it's cute or cuddly, whether it's a creepy crawly, how they can be used medicinally, or plants certainly, how they can be used medicinally has been vetted through trial and error for hundreds and thousands of years by

some of these groups of people. And there's a real question of how you can preserve that when these people are being displaced. And certainly the older generations are dying. The younger folks have perhaps become seduced by modernity, understandably on some levels, and disillusioned with their traditional medicinal approaches. How do you preserve? And you have done such great work in this respect, but how do you even hope to try to preserve that? Well, that was the birth of the Shaman's Apprentice Program that we run out of here

at the Amazon Conservation Team, is that I quickly realized decades ago that I could never collect all the information. Schultes could never collect all the information. And a much better way to preserve it is within the cultures themselves. And the fact is that no matter how much a shaman will teach me after decades and decades and decades of partnership, collaboration, friendship, love, they still teach even more secrets to their kids or their grandkids. And so the answer we stumbled across, me and my indigenous colleagues, was let's pass it down within the tribe. Okay, these are traditional secrets. It's not going to be

published. It's not going to be marketed. It's up to them. But as long as the young people don't learn it, we're doomed. Well, through this program, we now have four shaman's apprentice clinics in the Northeast Amazon. We have one of the first books ever written by the Indians for the Indians in their language, documents all of their medicinal plant knowledge. We have them running clinics first and foremost for themselves and their own culture. Outsiders are coming to them for treatments. And it's a living, breathing, thriving tradition where when I went there, it was dying out. You had all these great shamans, they were like the last of the mastodons that weren't going to reproduce. Well, now they're reproducing. And the point we made, the point I made time and time again, was not like, okay, you can be a shaman or you can have an iPhone, right? You can do both.

But if we're going to introduce technology, let's do it in a way which supports the perpetuation of the culture rather than replaces it. Because when you have the equivalent of, I call it tech bombing, where you have outsiders just come in and give these guys all sorts of trinkets, iPads and iPhones, they're very seductive. But let's show them how they can use to document their traditions to record grandma and grandpa, not just the medicinal plants, the old songs, the legends and things like that. So it's never lost. How do you, from a brass tacks standpoint, tactically on the ground, because like you, I've seen the iPads, the big screen TVs and so on, but used not in a focused way, but how most of the world and certainly how sometimes I use

these things as a source of entertainment and distraction. How did you help to incentivize the participants, especially the younger generations, to help facilitate this? How did you actually, yeah, what did you do? Surprisingly easy. 20 years ago, the chief of the Trio tribe, which is the major tribe in the Northeast Amazon, who was a friend of mine at the time, still is, said to me, we want to get title to our lands and we need a map. That's what the government told us. You need a map. We didn't even know what a map was. They showed us. So we want the help of the Amazon conservation team. And I said, you got it. And he said, so you'll make us a map. And I said, no. And he said, but you said you're going to help us. And I said, we will. And he said, so you'll make us a map. And I said, we won't. He said, but you said you're going to help us. And I said, we will. And he said, so you'll make us a map.

And I said, we won't. He said, I'm confused. I said, we will not make a map. We will teach you to make your own map and we will provide the training and the technology to do so, which we did. So technology came in specifically to help them protect their land, to lay their claim to the traditional territory. And while you're at it, why don't you talk to Grandpa and find out all the names of the rivers and ask him why those rivers have those names. Was it a great battle?

Was it the home of a sacred spirit? Stuff like that. So it was introduced specifically to protect land and culture. Now, yeah, I mean, do they play games and stuff like that? They do. But it was introduced in a serious and purposeful way. And they have taken it onto themselves to find new ways to use it. I'll give you an example. If you're a botanist, you know that Brazil nuts only live in the Amazon Basis. That's what I was taught as a student at Harvard. But the trios in mapping

their lands, which crosses the border between Brazil and Suriname, found 13 stands of Brazil nuts outside the Amazon Basin because the Guianas are the other side of the watershed. So they decided to create maps of their Brazil nut trees because that is a sustainable resource. That was their idea. I didn't tell them to do it. One of the proudest moments in my career happened this week when I saw a picture of these same Indians in a clinic, which we helped them set up, all of them wearing masks. And the shamans were creating what they call an immunostimulant beverage from local plants and giving it to all the villagers as part of the ways to keep the coronavirus at bay. So this shows the perfect marriage of ancient shamanic wisdom, which is the plants,

and 21st century knowledge, which is the face masks. And the technology has been a very important part of the equation. So it's not this thing like, let's give them all our technology because it's cool and we want to show them that we're cool. Nor is it this equally ridiculous idea of saying, oh no, they're Indians, we'll spoil them if we give them technology. You know, they're part of the modern world. And with the exception of the 70 uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, everybody has a sense what's going on. How did you, or how did they, go from using GPS and other tools for mapping to recording the, and I'm going to mispronounce this, maybe you can tell me, pharmacopoeia, pharmacopoeia? Both are correct. Both. Okay, great. I'll go with both. The spectrum of plants and compounds and animals, I suppose, that could be used medicinally as well as the methods of preparation and administration.

How do you make the jump from mapping land to that? Or how is it done in any instance? Because it was a process. I went down there to collect ethnobotanical information, a la Schultes, making lists and writing it down. And when they said, why do you want to do this? I said, well, you know, that Bible you read in church, I'm not a Christian, I'm a Jew. And if my ancestors hadn't written down their information, we wouldn't have the Bible to learn from today. So I want to work with your shamans to write down their knowledge.

So 20 years from now, 200 years from now, your great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will have your original wisdom to learn from. Well, the chief was a fundamentalist Christian. This was perfect. And we did so. So we started writing down lists of plants and what they're used for. And then the shamans would prepare for me. So I realized, okay, well, you're actually, you need, you know, the dosage, you need the preparation. It's not just a, they use species A for headaches. That doesn't really tell you much. And then I did this all with guides my age. I started this when I was 27. And after eight years, I very proudly handed the chief a book of his ethnobotanical wisdom in his language. He had two books in his language at

that point, the Bible presented by the missionaries and the Terreno Epi Panpietro, the Trio Plant Medicine Handbook done by me in collaboration with Dee Seamans. It's the power of the written word. I mean, you've written enough books, Tim. It's the power of the written word that when you put it in front of somebody and it's written down, it carries much more weight than just, you know, a conversation or an interview or anything like that. That really revolutionized their thinking of the value of this stuff. So I said, look, I got you guys started, but ultimately it's not all about me. My first book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, it's kind of a trick title because I'm not the apprentice. They are. But in following me and me helping them kickstart this interest in their own traditions, they took it over, which is the way it should be. Was the book in their native language to prevent biopiracy?

Yes. It was. All right. Please continue. So I've been criticized for not publishing this information in the technical literature, but I have no interest in it. It's their secret. I'm not going to reveal the secret that sold to me in confidence so I can get tenure. I run a not-for-profit. I don't face that challenge, but I wouldn't do it anyhow. And so the knowledge is first and foremost for them. And if they want to commercialize it or sell it somehow, good for them.

I mean, I'll give them advice, but I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it for them. I'm not going to take what I know, and I know a lot, and make money commercially. I run a not-for-profit. Profit is not my prime motivating factor in life. So let's take an example, just to explore this a little bit further. Male aphrodisiacs. So I was going to say, what has your experience been with them? But what I mean by that is in your field studies, I mean, we can go any direction you want, but in your field experiences, whether it's with the trios in the Northeast Amazon or elsewhere, maybe you could just walk us through your sort of exposure to this and the reception from your Western friends and colleagues.

Yeah, I was working with the trio's first trip, I think was 1982. And they kept showing me this one plant and they say, that's a Malifordesiac, that's a Malifordesiac, that's a Malifordesiac. Now, you have to understand that shaman's knowledge is individualistic in that even within the same tribe, even within the same village, very seldom do you have a shaman who will say, I use this plant for this, and I use this dosage, and I prepare it this way, and so on and so forth. It's not a perfect match. Okay, it's like our own medicine. It's art and science.

If you go to three doctors with one ailment, very seldom do you get the exact same recommendation in my experience. So I came back, but they kept saying, this is a male aphrodisiac. So I got back to my office at Harvard. I was working in the museum for and with Schultes at the time. And he said, well, call the medical school, see what they say. So I got this guy on the phone at the medical school calling here from the Harvard Botanical Museum. And I said, look, I found this thing. And they say it's a male aphrodisiac. And he said, did you try it? And I said, look, I'm 27. I wouldn't be able to tell if it worked or not.

So he said, well, understand there's no such thing as a male aphrodisiac. And I said, what do you mean? He says, well, it's physiologically impossible. And I said, well, I mean, what about Spanish fly? He said, it's an urban legend. It doesn't work. There is no such thing as a male aphrodisiac. Okay, fine. A year later, I was working with the Wayana people to the east on the Suriname-French Guiana border. And they showed me this other plant. They said it's a male aphrodisiac. And three shamans said it's a male aphrodisiac.

It wasn't even the same family. Okay, once again, you know, if something's just one species over in the same genus, probably the same compounds. Completely different plant, completely different family. Okay. Once again, you know, if something's just one species over in the same genus, probably the same compounds, completely different plant, completely different family. And so I got back to Harvard and I called the medical school and the guy says, Oh, you're the guy who called last year. I told you there's no such thing, no such thing, no such thing. A year later, I was working with the Maroons. The Maroons are Afro-Amazonians. They are the descendants of escaped slaves. They were brought to the Northeast Amazon inAmazonians. They are the descendants of escaped slaves. They were brought to the Northeast Amazon in the 1700s.

They got off the slave ships, looked around, and said, this is equatorial rainforest. I'll see you white boys later, and took off for the interior. Okay? And you go in their villages, and it looks like the set of roots. It looks like, you know, 17th century West Africa. And they showed me a plant that they said was a male aphrodisiac, different species, different genus, different family, except these guys were selling it in town. So I didn't even call the medical school because I didn't want to have

the same conversation. A few years later, some physicians got, I think it was the dosage wrong on a blood pressure medicine. And all of a sudden, all these guys in the old folks' home are popping woodies. Right? Eureka. It's a male aphrodisiac. Okay? So if a shaman in a red breech cloth says it's a male aphrodisiac, the guy in the white coat says it's impossible. If a guy in a white coat stumbles across it, you know, it's billions of dollars and maybe a Nobel Prize.

Is there, you know, just as a side note, this could be a total urban legend. I heard that the way, this could be total fancy, but that the way that Viagra was identified for male enhancement, erectile dysfunction, whatever you want to call it, was that they had called it a fail for blood pressure or whatever the primary outcome measure was for the study. And they asked the subjects, these elderly folks, to return their supplies. And the men all refused. And they were like, what the hell is going on here? What is going on here? This is very, very odd. So in your experience, have you seen any tribes who have been able to, without sort of destroying, setting fire to their own homes, metaphorically speaking, take some of

this knowledge and monetize it for their benefit? Have you seen any success stories? And the reason I ask is one of the compelling reasons to, say, preserve rainforest and all sorts of different ecosystems is for the medicinal value that might be contained. So I'm wondering if there are any success stories. It's really a good question from my colleague, Paul Cox, who's a fellow ethnobotanist trained at Harvard around the same time I was. And he was making great progress with some compounds from American Samoa antivirals, where the deal he cut, which is the way it should be done, where they would make a keystone payment. In other words, let me take this plant, and if it cures AIDS, I'll be back in 17 years with a billion dollars. You know, it's a crapshoot. It's a long shot for any plant or animal product or fungal product to make it to the market for a variety

of reasons. But he said, okay, if you want to study this in the lab, you have to pay these people X. And then if it passes phase one, which it did, then you have to pay them Y. And then if it passes phase two, you have to pay them Z. And then if it gets to market, they get a piece of the action. Another colleague of mine, Stephen King at Jaguar Health has been developing a new anti-diarrheal from TreeSap in Peru and has made a lot of progress in putting money back into these communities. So I wish I had a great success story to tell you about some tribe that made a billion dollars and saved the rainforest and lived happily ever after. The answers aren't completely in, but these were two successful examples that really

bear looking into further. Thank you. No, that's very encouraging. I really just don't know if there are any precedents or sort of deal structures that have made sense long term. And it's the cure for cancer or an ecotourism lodge or non-timber forest products, and they can live happily ever after. And anybody who has a pension or has stocks knows that you don't put all your money on one horse, even at the racetrack, right? So what we need is a diverse portfolio, as we would call it, where they're making some money from ecotourism and they're making some money from handicrafts and they're making some money from running a shamanic clinic and so on and so forth. That's the way to really help these people. The other fallacy is that we just got to get them a lot of money as much as possible as soon as possible. They'll be better off. I've seen this time and time again where these guys make enough money to move to the city and actually they don't live in the nice part of the city. They live in the slums,

the barrio, the favela, and they're much worse off. So a little money on a very steady basis based on non-destructive aspects of the ecosystem to me is the way to go. And I'll give you an example of that. There's a tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Aquarios. They were essentially dragged out of the forest right before I started my work in the 70s and 80s in the Northeast Amazon. But the other Indians regard them as almost legendary in terms of their ability to hunt, in terms of their knowledge of the forest. And I was told they had 35 words for honey. And I have to report that was an exaggeration.

There's only 34. I wrote them all down. I got together with my colleagues and said, let's create a project on sustainable development of honey. We'll show you guys how to build hives. We'll have the aquarios as our technical experts to talk about what produces the best honey, what's the stingless bees we should be working with. And we're now producing honey. Not a single tree's cut down. Okay. And they're making money and they have more honey than ever. And it's one of those win-win situations. They're never going to get rich from this. But when they go to town, they've got honey in their pocket, which essentially means money in their pocket. It's something they can sell without having to

cut down a mahogany tree or sell off the lands to gold miners or anything like that. Well, that sounds certainly like tremendous progress, or at least providing a very viable alternative to cutting down the mahogany and so on. I would love to explore perhaps the other side of the coin. And what I mean by that is I mentioned just a few minutes ago, say finding the, or you did also, the cure for cancer or the cure for AIDS or the cure for fill in the blank. But it strikes me that there's also, and certainly this is not my original thought, there is the avoidance of the next AIDS or the next fill-in-the-blank pandemic. Could you speak to your thoughts on preventing pandemics? Any policies or lessons that you think are worth underscoring?

Well, I did an editorial recently for the Los Angeles Review of Books. It's on my personal website, markplotkin.com, in which I point out that the pandemic was caused by abuse of nature. And by that, the concrete example of that is it came out of a bat that was crammed together in some fetid cage in Wuhan, China. And we don't know exactly how it jumped to the human species, whether it went to a pangolin and then to a human. That part's a little unclear. But it's clear that this terrible virus originated in the bat. And our attitude towards abusing these animals, cruelty to animals, is causing real harm. I mean, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths, trillions of dollars already, and no end in sight. So when indigenous peoples, whether

they're pygmies in West Africa or indigenous peoples in the Amazon, tell us we're going to pay a price for abusing nature, we're paying that price. Some of the most extraordinary people I've ever met are the Kogis. The Kogis live in Northern Columbia in the Sierra Nevada. It's not in the Amazon, but they've been called the Dalai Lamas of South America. They're the most traditional people. They don't wear shoes. They don't have wristwatches. They don't have cell phones for the most part. And they have been saying, and they told me this in February, Tim, they told me this in February and March, if we don't stop abusing nature, we're going to pay a terrible price. Well, guess what? They were right. And I'm sure they take no joy in that. But this whole attitude towards monetizing everything,

towards short-term thinking, is destroying the planet on which we live, is fouling the nest in which we live. So this attitude, oh, well, foreign aid is a waste of money and third world people deserve what they get. Really? How much money have we spent in the U.S. now on coronavirus? And as I said, there's no end in sight. So I really don't like to hear this phrase, what's the silver lining in this pandemic? There's no silver lining. It's terrible. But there may be some lessons learned. And one of those lessons has got to be abusing wildlife is a real bad idea. Bad ethically, bad spiritually, but obviously, perhaps worst of all, bad epidemiologically. Are there any actions that you would like to see taken, any policies put in place?

It seems like regulating wet markets in China would be or is exceptionally challenging, but I haven't been tracking the news or developments, so perhaps steps have been made to try to mitigate some risk. Do you have any thoughts on what could be done to remedy some of these problems? Well, as I recall, you have extensive experience in East Asian studies and martial arts and things like that. So maybe you have a better understanding of the mindset than I do. But we're all paying a price here. The Chinese, the Americans, the Canadians, the Amazonian indigenous peoples. I would hope that we as a species can sit down and say, let's have some guidelines here. You know, there's a lot of people calling for an end of the wildlife

trade. In an ideal world, maybe that would be possible, but we don't live in an ideal world. Let's control it. Let's have less cruelty. Let's have less conditions that lead to diseases jumping out of these species, whether they're bats or pangolins or armadillos. And I know from other biologists, there are as many viruses in the bats of the Amazon as there are in Southeast Asia. So it's not just like, okay, if we shut down the wet market in Wuhan, we're cool. Okay. I'm always much more in favor of building bridges and creating alliances than pointing fingers and saying, you know, this person's at fault. These are the bad guys. I'm the good guy. That seldom

works. It just goes against human nature. By the same token, the idea that everybody will just get together and sing kumbaya is equally ridiculous. The wildlife trade is the biggest illegal market with the sole exception of narcotics and munitions. So we're not talking about a couple of guys doing bad things on the side and the back of a market somewhere in the tropics. We're talking about a lot of power and a lot of money. But if we don't tackle it, the next pandemic is going to be right behind it. This is not a one-off. There's nobody who understands epidemiology or the wildlife trade thinks, okay, once we get past skyrocketing unemployment around the world. You have many deaths, but it's nowhere near as bad as it could have been. It's very much a virus that's designed to trick smart people in a lot of ways, but it's not nearly, at least as far as we know right now, as lethal as it could have been, right? Compared to many other viruses that have even scarier combinations of R0, the sort of transmissibility and lethality.

So hopefully this will act as a sort of flare to catch the attention of people who can take steps to mitigate some of these risks. Well, as somebody who's been working the Amazon for a long time, I'm often asked, well, when I look at the Amazon rainforest, is the glass half full or half empty? And my response is always the same. Any glass that's half full is half empty. So as terrible as things are with COVID-19, as you said, it could be worse. I wouldn't say that's a silver lining, but I would say, like you said, Tim, that it is a wake-up call. And when you look at some of these terrible hemorrhagic fevers, they're even scarier. But that's not to belittle this virus, which is

killing our species right, left, and center. So the focus needs to be on dealing with this pandemic, but the focus at the same time needs to be on preventing the next pandemic. When I started working in the rainforest in the 70s, many people said to me, like, well, rainforest, who cares about that? We have to worry about zero population growth. Now people say to me, well, the rainforest, who cares about that? We need to worry about climate change. But overpopulation is driving deforestation of the rainforest rainforest and deforestation of the rainforest, destruction of the rainforest is pouring carbon into the atmosphere. And it's the number two cause of climate change, number two driver of climate change after fossil fuels. So the idea

that, oh, well, let's just solve COVID-19 and then we can worry about wildlife and then we can worry about poverty and then we can worry about permanent next pandemic. No, we need to do all those things now. Yeah, it's all interrelated. And one thing that strikes me about your bio and your stories and looking at your career is that much like Schultes, you are a boundary walker, right? Just like the coyote, just like the trickster, you're the raven, right? I mean, you're both boundary walkers and we won't go into a whole Joseph Campbell mythological expedition right now, but you're both boundary walkers. And as a boundary walker, you've been very good at finding common ground, common interests, and building long-term relationships with people who at face value

would seem to be very different from yourself. And I'd be interested to hear, since I do think that building bridges is going to be very important. If you want to tackle any of these issues that we just mentioned, there's going to need to be in the US bipartisan support. They're going to need to be, as you put it, large tents, as we were talking before we started recording. Could you speak to some of your longer-term relationships, what they look like? For instance, you mentioned in a note that you shot me a shaman that you hadn't seen in 32 years. I don't know the story behind that, but could you tell it? I was invited to a conference of indigenous leaders, mostly shamans. I was the only white guy there. It took me four days to get there. That in itself is a long story, which I'll spare

you this time. But when I got there, I met an old friend who was the one who invited me, who was a tribal leader. And while we're talking, his brother walked up and he said, remember me? And I said, yeah. He says, I haven't seen you in 32 years. You were my father's friend. I walked five days to be here. Can I give you a hug? I mean, I almost burst into tears. Wow. I almost burst into tears. I mean, how sincere is that? But the point here is that a long-term relationship allows you to work with people, whether it's a shaman in the Amazon or whether it's somebody in Capitol Hill or somebody you grew up with, based on a level of trust and

friendship and knowledge that you simply can't do in a hurry. And we're rushing everywhere, less so these days. You just cannot create the connections to get things done. And if we need system change, which the Skoll Foundation, which is one of the supporters of our work, founded by Jeff Skoll, who says we need system change, means that we can't just tinker around the edges. And what a lot of people don't realize, if you look at the history of environmentalism, particularly in this country, it was founded by Republicans. The first great environmentalist was Teddy Roosevelt. And the second greatest environmentalist in terms of presidents was Richard Nixon, also a Republican. So this whole idea that,

well, if you like trees or you like hunting or you like wildlife, you should be a Democrat or Republicans don't believe in this. Everybody gets sick. Everybody wants clean. Everybody wants clean water. So this is one thing where there shouldn't be any political discord. There should be broad agreement. And clearly we need to work together, Democrats, Republicans, independents, people elsewhere, even in dictatorships, you know, for the common good. I went to the Rio conference in 92. It was the greatest gathering of world leaders ever. George Bush Sr. was there. Fidel Castro was there. And this was probably the greatest occasion in the history of the world where everybody put aside their politics and said, we want a better world, not for ourselves so much as for our kids

and our grandkids. That's the attitude we need to have. Agreed. I'd like to, if you don't mind, take a bit of a left turn. We're going to come back to this, but I want to travel back to the Amazon or surrounding areas for a second because you mentioned the magic mushrooms of Mexico and Schultes. Among the Mazatecs, much of the fungal medicine work is matriarchal. A lot of women, very female forward. That's even an expression, but it tends to be matriarchal. And I've certainly seen that there are many ayahuasqueras among the Shipibo people, female. Have you run into other societies, other tribes, other nations within, say, South or Central America that have been predominantly matriarchal when it comes to the shamanic work or medicine work? Interesting question, difficult to answer.

You hit the two highlights. The famous female shamans of the Neotropics are the Mazatecs in southern Mexico and the Shipibo in the Amazon. Now, every tribe that I've worked with, and I've worked with a number of them, has female healers and sometimes female shamans. They sometimes make that distinction. They're the ones that tend to focus on female ailments, menstrual problems, for example, childbirth problems or kids things. There are on occasion female shamans that I've met, but they're few and far between. I've had many discussions with shamans around the fire at night about why that's the case. And they said, women work too hard to have the time to practice medicine. They do all the work around here, right? They raise the kids,

attend the gardens, they do all the cooking. It is a very demanding profession. And it's not something you can do in your spare time. And tribal societies, women tend to have very little spare time compared to the men. It's obviously a sweeping generalization. But sometimes a woman will feel a call to heal. And that is what she'll do. And she'll be the equivalent of any male shaman or sometimes even better. But they tend to be outliers rather than, oh yeah, there's a bunch of tribes that I know where the primary shamans are women. So I would have to say in my experience, no, but you know, the Amazon's a big place and there's lots of tribes. So you may find different answers from

other ethnobotanists. Within the tribes that you've spent time, this is going to sound like an odd question, but it's related to the male-female split among practitioners. And that is what percentage, this is, I know it's a lame question, but what percentage of the use of hallucinogens specifically is focused on hunting, aspects of hunting, or warfare? Maybe less so today, but tribal warfare. You know, in my experience, the tribes that I spend considerable time with that are very much into hallucinogens on a regular basis are in the Northwest Amazon. And most of the tribes I work with don't use hallucinogens in the Xingu, in the Southeast Amazon, in Brazil, the trios up on the Suriname-Brazil border, the Wayanas on the Suriname-French Guiana border, the Waiwais on the Suriname-Guiana border. So I can't give you a straight answer

there, Tim. It doesn't break down very easily. And most of the groups that I've worked with, warfare is definitely a thing of the past, except for some of the Anamami when I worked there 20 years ago, spent time there 20 years ago. There was still warfare amongst the different villages, but I think that's gone by the wayside since then. And hunting? And the reason I'm asking, I mean, is I'm curious if the disproportionate male representation in working with some of these plants is related to

a disproportionate traditional application to hunting, which I would assume in many of these cultures is predominantly male. But maybe that's an overreach. I don't know. I hadn't thought of that, but I think that makes very good sense. And the tribes that I've spent time with that do a lot of ayahuasca, for example, and yopal, It's primarily for hunting, hunting visions, hunting magic, good luck in the hunt, seeing where the animals are going to be. But as I said, the onomami were still doing some warfare, very limited amount. And that was primarily the men and the men were the one doing all the yopal, at least that I saw.

What do you think the, and this is a heavy term, so maybe it's not the right way to phrase it, but the responsibility, if any, for people in the United States and elsewhere who are using these compounds from the Amazon to, in some fashion, support or protect the communities, the people from which these medicines came? And that's a loaded question. So yeah, you can answer it however you want. I find it highly ironic that all these people are talking about the vine of life. Don't look where the stuff's coming from. I've had humans complaining to me. They see plane loads of this stuff flying out of the Northwest Amazon. They never got anything for it. There was no replanting. They didn't know where it went. It was a sacrilege to them. So I would like to think that everybody should be thinking about giving

back whenever they benefit from something. And I'm not just talking about hallucinogens. But there seems to be a lot or very little interest in supporting these forests, very little interest in supporting the shamans other than, okay, this guy gave me the brew to drink, so I got to slip him a few bucks. It's just kind of a disconnect that it's all about healing, but they're not thinking about who they need to heal as reciprocity for getting some of the healing. You know what I'm saying? I do. Is there anything they can do? And this could relate to Amazon conservation team or any number of other things. But I'm wondering if people who are listening, whether they have benefited from psychedelics, whether derived from or synthesized based on the molecular structure of natural compounds, if they wanted to try to support, and certainly this is a great time to support because not unlike the Native American communities in the United States, the indigenous tribes,

certainly speaking with some of my friends in South America, are having just an atrocious time with COVID-19 and having food supplies cut off and it being viewed in some ways as an opportunity for governments to withhold resources. And it's a very tragic situation. So I think that the timing couldn't be better, in a sense, for supporting the communities from which a lot of these medicines came. What can people do? Are there any steps you might recommend? Any things you might suggest they consider? Well, what you're saying, I hear two questions, Tim. One is, how should people give back that are benefiting from this healing and these plants and these fungi? That's one thing. And our organization is very active in

supporting the shamanic cultures of the Northwest Amazon, which is where ayahuasca and the use of ayahuasca originated. I'm sorry to my Brazilian friends who think it all came from Rio and Sao Paulo. No, originally it came from the Northwest Amazon. In terms of helping indigenous peoples in the Amazon, they're getting hammered by this virus. And it's particularly challenging in the sense that it's not like we've got the cure for this. And if we just had enough money, we'd give it to them. I wish it was that simple. It's not. We don't have the cure for it. We don't have the cure for them. We don't have the cure for us. But there are positive steps that can and should be taken. And if you look at our website, AmazonTeam.org, you can see some of the things that we've been doing,

which is indigenous park rangers who control the borders and keep the outsiders out because that's how the disease gets in. Number two, educational materials in the tribal language. Don't send in a poster in Spanish or Portuguese and think, okay, they got it. Also, the educational material has to be aimed at a culturally appropriate way. These are tribal people. They eat out of the same pot. In the age of coronavirus, you don't eat out of the same pot. Sometimes it's just sending in soap. They can make

soap from some local plants, but not to the degree that they need it now. I mean, I'm washing my hands 20 times a day, as we all should be. So we not only recognize the problem, but we have programs in place to deal with it. We have gotten over two tons of supplies, medical and sanitary supplies, into the hands of the indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. Now, on the one hand, that's a pretty impressive number. On the other hand, it's pretty pathetic compared to the size and scope of the problem and the challenge. So we need more help. We need more support to do more of this and partner with other organizations that can do more along the same lines. So we know there's a problem. We know it's getting worse. I've lost

two, we've lost two tribal leaders in the Amazon in the last month who were spectacular people that, you know, there's no replacement for. And remember that the way that these diseases strike is they first and foremost hit the elderly. Well, the elderly are the libraries. The elderly are the ones that have all the knowledge in their heads. And secondarily, they hit the little ones. Not necessarily coronavirus, but some of the other things that sweep through. So you're losing the elderly and you're losing the little ones, which means you're losing the library and you're losing the next generation. That's a lose-lose proposition.

And for those people interested, they can also follow Amazon Conservation Team on Twitter, at AmazonTeamOrg, and I'll link to that in the show notes. And you recently just published a response dashboard, which is quite impressive. I'm impressed by it, which was built with something called Esri. People can check out at Esri, E-S-R-I. Very, very cool. And you can see visually how ACT, that is Amazon Conservation Team, A-C-T, is working to mitigate the threat posed by COVID-19

to the Amazon rainforest's most vulnerable populations. It's very cool. It's very well done. And it's a timely tool and it's a timely problem if people have had this in some fashion weighing on their mind, or if it just occurred to them that if they are a proponent of healing modalities that include plants or things derived from those plants, inspired by those plants, that this is a good time to sort of toss your hat in the ring. And people can certainly find more about what you do at AmazonTeam.org. Well, Mark, we could go in a million different directions. Is there anything else that you would like to make sure we mention or take some time to chat about? Well, I do have a story and I have a concluding note, which you can feel free to edit in somewhere. I used to play a lot of racquetball and I injured my arm quite badly, my forearm. And for some reason, the muscles of your forearm

don't have a lot of venation. They don't heal well on their own if you injure them a certain way. And I went to the doctor, I went to the masseuse. Same story, as I mentioned earlier with my foot. It just didn't get better, and I went to the shaman, and he looked at it, and he said, this is going to take some time, so I spent a month there. I mean, I was doing other things, but the first thing he did was give me plants as a topical. He rubbed them on, a lot of massage, gave me a drink, so it was internal as well. And then he said, okay, here's the problem. You have a bad relationship buried in that muscle. That's why your doctors can't heal it and I can. So I am going to chant and I'm going to remove those bad emotions

because it'll just come back. So he did the chanting, he did the massage, I drank the potion. And he said, now here's the problem. What Western medicine doesn't understand is when you have a bad injury, things will come back and attack that space. So some people, you know, when they're nervous, they get stomach aches or they get pimples or they can't sleep. He says, what I need to do is put a shamanic patch over where the wound was. There's no more wound. I've healed it. But I'm going to put a patch so it never comes back. So when you have stress or when you're injured, it doesn't start hurting again. That was about 13 years ago. I'm still fine. That's an explanation and approach

to healing, which I've never heard from any physician. And frankly, I've never heard from any other shaman. But you know what? My arm doesn't hurt. So many interesting questions. I love interesting questions. You know, I just want to make a quick side note, because I realized I didn't answer it earlier. I didn't explain it.

You said liana earlier. That is a vine or a wooden climbing plant that hangs from trees. Liana is a woody vine. It's what Tarzan used to swing on. It's what ayahuasca is. Yeah, it's quite a cross-section too. Beautiful-looking vine. Not so delicious.

Looks better than it tastes. That's definitely true. And you said you had some closing comments. Yeah. Recently, I was talking to a fellow trying to get some support for fighting COVID-19 amongst the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. He said, ACT, what does it stand for? And I said, get shit done. He said, well, that doesn't match the acronym. I said, it's Amazon Conservation Team.

You want a mission statement? I got a mission statement. The point is, we're about accomplishing the goals, partnering with indigenous peoples to protect their culture and their forest. And the challenge has never been greater in the age of COVID-19. The point being that Western medicine doesn't have all the answers. We don't have a cure for COVID-19. We don't have a cure for coronavirus. Neither do they. But what we're able to do is bring to bear Western knowledge and abilities and sanitation and technology, like through the new dashboard, to keep track of this and try and devise the means to keep it at bay as much as possible. The future of conservation, the future of the rainforest, the future of indigenous peoples, in my opinion, isn't about the microchip versus the medicine man.

It's both of them working together. It's about building bridges and building alliances and coming up with a new way of doing things, a new way of living our lives, a new way of stewarding nature. And it takes boundary walkers, whether it's the shamans who come out of the rainforest to enlighten us with their wisdom, or guys like you or me who've been down to the rainforest to learn from them, or people that have feet in different worlds, or people that are just open to hearing other realities, other modalities, willing to try medicines or chanting or frog slime when Western medicine wasn't able to do the trick. So whether it is Black Lives Matter, whether is it about saving the rainforest, all of these cries should feed productively into a more positive place for all of us. Because conservation is not just about saving the rainforest.

Conservation is not just about saving the Indians. Conservation is about saving ourselves as well. Well, Mark, we could talk for many, many more hours, and I hope to do that in person. Me too. And this has been just a thoroughly enjoyable conversation, and I really appreciate you taking the time. I think this gives people a lot to chew on.

They can find Amazon Conservation Team at amazonteam.org. They can find your personal website at markplotkin.com. I'll link to all of those in the show notes. And people can find those at tim.blog forward slash podcast and just search Plotkin, P-L-O-k-i-n and it'll be it'll come right up or you just search amazon and i'm sure it'll also pop right up this has been a blast i really appreciate you taking the time i enjoyed it at least as much as you did tim well this will be this will be round one and hopefully we'll get around to set up in person might be at a socially appropriate distance, but TBD on that front. And so many more questions, but I'll let those sit for now. And thank you once again. And to

everyone listening, be safe, keep your mind open. And if you can support, if you have found benefit from the plants, the compounds that we're describing, I feel like it is, at least for me, a moral imperative. And quite frankly, it's also an existential imperative, if you are consuming these plants, for the compounds themselves to support these geographies, these people who have been the stewards of this technology, these means of preparation and administration for hundreds and thousands of years. And an easy way to do that is to go to AmazonTeam.org and see what opportunities exist. It doesn't need to be a lot of money. No, there are a lot of different causes. There are a lot of different pains and a lot of uncertainty at the moment. But as you said, conservation is sort of the fabric upon which many of these other concerns rest, and it's all-encompassing in some respects.

So I will say thank you, Mark, Dr. Mark Plotkin, markplotkin.com. I definitely encourage people to take a look at Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, as well as the Amazon subtitle, What Everyone Needs to Know. And until next time, thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun

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