The Tim Ferriss Show - #652: Famed Explorer Wade Davis

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Starting point is 00:03:56 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 world-class performers. In other words, people who are extremely good at what they do, perhaps the best at what they do in many different disciplines, to tease out the mental models, lessons learned, and so on that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today, I've wanted to have on for a very long time, Wade Davis. Wade is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership chair in cultures and ecosystems at risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 2000 and 2013,

Starting point is 00:04:32 he served as explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society, named by the NGS as one of the explorers for the millennium. He has been described as a, quote, rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity. An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and a PhD in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University, mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum. He spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups while making some 6,000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations

Starting point is 00:05:10 implicated in the creation of zombies. I'm not making that up. It is a fascinating story. And that was an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow, published 1986, an international bestseller, later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years, his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland. I hope I am pronouncing those correctly. Davis is the author of 375 or so scientific and popular articles and 23 books, including One River, The Wayfinders, Into the Silence, and Magdalena. His photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in 37 books and 130 magazines, including National

Starting point is 00:05:57 Geographic, Time, Geo, People, Men's Journal, and Outside. I could go on and on. His bio is incredible. I encourage you to check out his full bio at daviswade.com. You can find him on Instagram at wadedavisofficial. He has more than 40 film credits. He has honorary membership status in the Explorers Club, and it goes on and on. The man is truly incredible, and I really enjoyed this conversation. So without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with none other than Wade Davis. Wade, welcome to the show. It is an honor to have you. I've been meaning to reach out for a very long time, and I appreciate you carving out the time in your schedule. Well, thanks very much, Tim. It's great to be with you.

Starting point is 00:06:47 And I suppose I should just say, as a bit of context, the catalyst for reaching out was not one of your many TED Talks, although I've listened to many. It was not One River, although I'm familiar with that as well. It was actually being gifted the Wayfinders by a friend of mine. And I suppose just as a way of setting the stage, if you wouldn't mind, could you explain the basic intent of that book and the lectures that preceded it? And I'm curious, since it was published some time ago, if there's one story that you wish people would become familiar with or a chapter that you wish you could compel many, many people to read at this point in time? Yeah, well, that's a wonderful beginning, Tim.

Starting point is 00:07:32 The Wayfinders was a book put together in a really wonderful tradition in Canada called the CBC Massey Lectures. And it's a fantastic event where once each year they pick what they call a public intellectual, and you're asked to give five different talks in five different cities before live audiences. Those talks are recorded for broadcast on radio three times during this coming year, and then the lectures themselves are wrapped up into a book. And it's kind of an interesting thing because as opposed to most public speaking, you've got a lot of things going on. You're recording for live radio, you've got a live

Starting point is 00:08:09 audience, and you're also essentially delivering the lecture that's already been published and often is in the lap of the audience if they've bought the book. But it's a great tradition. You know, Martin Luther King gave them. I was the first anthropologist since Claude Levi-Strauss. And the Wayfinders has a very conversational style, and I think that's one reason it's been quite successful, and particularly for college students. And the basis of the book was really the mission that I had at the National Geographic. You know, I was very fortunate to be recruited as the first class of what the Geographic was calling their

Starting point is 00:08:45 explorers and residents, which is kind of an odd term because none of us were ever in residence. They wanted to demonstrate, personify, that they didn't just report science, they generated science. And so they recruited seven individuals, Jane Goodall, Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic, Sylvie the Earl, the great oceanographer, a host of incredible characters, Johann Reinhardt, who the high-altitude archaeologist who found the ice maiden that perfectly preserved Incan mummy on Juliaco. They recruited me as a cultural anthropologist, and it was very much part of a conservation mission. In the second hundred years, having told you about the world, now the geographic was going to help you save the world. And my mission, as defined in my contract,

Starting point is 00:09:31 was to change the way the world viewed and valued culture in a decade. And the way to do that was not through politics or polemics, but through storytelling. Because, you know, storytellers, as you well know, Tim, change the world. And what we were trying to share with the public was kind of the fundamental revelation of anthropology, the idea that the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being you. You know, they're not failed attempts at being modern. Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human and alive? And when the peoples of the world answer that, they do so in the 7,000 different voices of humanity. And all those answers kind of collectively become our human repertoire. And so we also wanted to draw

Starting point is 00:10:18 people's attention to the kind of haunting fact that of those 7,000 languages spoken the day you, Tim, and I were born, by absolute academic consensus, half are not being taught to children, which means they're moribund on the brink of extinction, if not exhaustion. And that means, in effect, that we're living through an era where half of humanity's intellectual, social, spiritual, even ecological knowledge is at risk. And at the same time, and this is the amazing thing, we're living through an era where geneticists have finally proven it to be true, what philosophers and poets have always dreamt to be true, that we really are all brothers and sisters. And I don't mean that in the spirit

Starting point is 00:11:02 of hippie ethnography. I mean that studies of the human genome have shown without doubt that the genetic endowment of humanity is a continuum. Race is a total fiction. We're all cut from the same genetic cloth. We're all descendants of Africa, including those of us who walked out of the ancient continent 65,000 years ago. But here's the astonishing thing. If we're cut from the same genetic cloth,000 years ago. But here's the astonishing thing. If we're cut from the same genetic cloth, by definition, we share the same genius. And how that genius is expressed

Starting point is 00:11:32 is simply a matter of choice and cultural adaptation. So there is no hierarchy in culture. That old Victorian idea, you know, we went from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized to the strand of London, that Victorian societies, you know, sat at the apex of a pyramid that went down to the so-called primitives of the world. Absolutely ridiculed by modern science, shown to be an artifact of the 19th century, irrelevant to our lives today, and as distant from those lives as the idea of

Starting point is 00:12:02 clergymen in that era who believed the earth was only 6,000 years old. So then the question is, how do you share this? How do you reveal this kind of wondrous thing about culture to the world? You know, you have to show you can't tell. Polemics are never persuasive. So the reason that book, The Wayfinders, it tells the story of the expeditions that we did to share this message across the world. And so we deliberately, and it wasn't easy, we didn't want to simply go out as so many ethnographic filmmakers tend to do, celebrating the exoticism of the other. We really wanted to go to places where the beliefs, practices

Starting point is 00:12:46 reveal this extraordinary universal truth. And I think you asked which was the most extraordinary of all, and it would have to be the Polynesian Wayfinders. Yeah, that blew my mind. The type story of the book. I mean, this is just an amazing thing if you think about it. Even today, members of the Polynesian Voyage and Society can name 250 stars in the night sky. They can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon just by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of their sacred canoe, the Hokulea, this great vessel that is a symbol of this Polynesian Renaissance.

Starting point is 00:13:27 In the darkness in the hull, they can distinguish as many as five different sea swells, again, moving through the water, distinguishing those caused by local weather disturbances from those that pulsate across the ocean and can be followed with the ease with which a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea. And each of these chapters in that book, Tim, the subjects also became films, of course, that we did for the Geographic. I kind of tried to find it, not a punchline, but a kind of line that would sum it all up. And so with Polynesia, it was very simple. If you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied

Starting point is 00:14:05 it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia. I found it so striking, and I may be using the wrong terms, but that the captain and the navigator were two entirely distinct functions. And that's a great example to me of perhaps just a fundamentally different way of viewing seafaring when you come from a Western lens. And I really enjoyed that book. I encourage everybody to pick it up. And if it's okay with you, I would love to actually segue to another culture, another group. Yeah, but Tim, before we leave Polynesia, let me just add one thing that just to clarify things for your listeners. The amazing thing about this tradition was that it was based on dead reckoning, which means that you only know where you are by remembering how you got there. of continents until the British solved the problem of longitude with the invention of the chronometer. But we know that 10 centuries before Christ, from an ancient civilization called La Pita, the ancient ancestors of the Polynesians set sail into the rising sun. And this idea of

Starting point is 00:15:18 dead reckoning means, and back to your navigator, why he's not running the ship, because he or she must sit monk-like on the back of the vessel, remembering every shift of the wind, every tack, every sign of the sun, the moon, the stars, the birds, the salinity in the water, every one of these empirical observations, and the order of their acquisition. And if that memory chain is broken, the voyage can end in disaster. And all of this has to be done by an individual who lives in a civilization that lacks the written word. So all of this has to be placed in memory over a three- and four-week voyage. Think about that. Tell me that is not a form of genius.

Starting point is 00:16:07 Not just a form of genius, but a form of endurance almost beyond belief. How many hours of sleep on average over that voyage per day or per night would that navigator get? It's a great question because they kind of catnap in a way, but they can't really do much more than just catnap. And, you know, it's funny, this idea of sleep, you know, we have this, we're so wired to the clock that we feel that we've somehow done something filthy or nasty if we only sleep four hours or, you know. But many societies around the world, you know, I spent a lot of time in the Arctic, and one of the things that's fascinating is that winter is a time for sleep, you know, the era of perpetual darkness. And summer, the light is luminous all day long, and kind of it's not even appropriate to sleep. You kind of, you know, catnap with your dogs,

Starting point is 00:16:57 but there's just too much to be done. Let's shift just a bit, or maybe entirely, to the Kogi peoples of northern Colombia. You are deeply, deeply familiar and intimate with Colombia and its people. I had the opportunity through a mutual acquaintance, Dr. Mark Plotkin, to meet a mammo and a small group of Kogi, but it was a very cursory experience and they were very select with their words and communication. Could you describe the Kogi people of Northern Columbia and perhaps just paint a picture for people of what that culture and what those peoples look like? Because I find them to stand out, at least for me, amongst the cultures I've been

Starting point is 00:17:47 exposed to in a number of ways. Yeah, it's truly remarkable. They live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on earth that soars out of the Caribbean coastal plain to about 20,000 feet. There are four indigenous groups, the Koguyu you mentioned, the Wiwa, the Arawakos, and the Kanquamo. The Kanquamo in the 19th century kind of had a fostean deal with the greater Colombian society and endured a great deal of assimilation, and they're kind of struggling to get back to their traditional ways. But the other three societies remain absolutely extraordinary. And in a bloodstained continent, you can almost say they were never conquered by the Spanish fully.

Starting point is 00:18:32 They are descendants of an ancient civilization called Tirona, which suffered immensely in the first decades of the Spanish conquest. And the survivors fled into this mountain massif where they lived almost in total isolation, very little reference to them in the colonial documents, for 200, if not 300 years. And it's almost as if they had suffered so much that they made a kind of collective vow never to screw up again. And I think that accounts for their intense religiosity. Many people call them the Tibetans of South America. But they live to this day inspired by a ritual priesthood, the Mamos, the sun priests. And the training for the priesthood is extraordinary.

Starting point is 00:19:16 It was first reported in the 1940s by Raikul Dormatov that the Acolytes were taken away from their families at the age of two and three, and then sequestered in the shadowy world of darkness for 18 years, during which time they absorbed the religious beliefs of their society. And it's their sincere conviction that those beliefs, those rituals, those prayers, literally maintain the cosmic, or we might say the ecological, balance of the world. And according to Reichel, after 18 years in which the world only existed as an abstraction, the young acolyte was taken out and taken on a journey. And for the first time in his life,

Starting point is 00:19:57 at the age of 18 or 19, he saw the horizon. He saw the mountains. He saw the sun. And suddenly the priest who has trained them all these years says, you know, it's that beautiful as I've promised you. It's yours to protect. Now, this was almost a fable within anthropology because Reichel never saw the ritual. He never went on one of those pilgrimages to the heart of the world. Then an amazing thing happened. I first lived with the Arawakos when I was a lad of 19 and 20.

Starting point is 00:20:30 In fact, when you mention, you know, it's amazing. I've now been close with them for almost 50 years. In fact, the Arawakos call me their mamo occidental. I was once with President Santos, the Nobel laureate, the first time he ever visited Namasimake, and the Mamos had asked me to be there to welcome him. And I hitched a ride in the presidential plane, and when we got to the community, there was a kind of formal ceremony in which the president introduced his invitados, you know, his ministers and so on. And he got around to me, and he couldn't have been more generous with, a good friend of mine, turned up at my office at the Geographic with a political leader, Danilo Villafana, and three mamos, one from each of the three cultures, Wiwa, Kogi, and Arawako. And they were there because the BBC had made a film and the Arawakos felt they hadn't had their say, and they wanted to make their own film.

Starting point is 00:21:47 So they'd come to me. And as I'm looking at this guy, Danilo, he looks so much like an old friend of mine. So I pulled out a book of mine, One River, which happened to have a photograph in the frontispiece of one of the chapters. I showed him the photo, and that was Danilo's father, Adalberto, who was murdered by the paramilitaries. And I said to Danilo, you know, son, you don't remember, but when you were a little infant, I carried you on my back for weeks up and down the mountains with your father. And he was so touched by that. And the connection was so strong that he invited us to do what I would have thought was the impossible, to actually go

Starting point is 00:22:25 along on a journey to the heart of the world and make a film about this idea and the pilgrimage. And the idea is very simple. As you come out of the sacred temple, and what we discovered is they don't stay 18 years in the darkness, but 18 years in seclusion around the temple in a ritual diet, not seeing women. And then they do go from the temple to the ice, and from the ice back to the sea, and from the sea back to the temple, completing this sort of sacred devotional pilgrimage of the divine. And we made that film. Unfortunately, at the very penultimate stage of the pilgrimage, we were kind of ambushed by the FARC. And we had to escape and turn our cameras over to one of the Wiwa lads that we had trained in cinematography. And with incredible skill, he finished those segments of the film.

Starting point is 00:23:19 So we actually had the entire pilgrimage documented. But I think there's a bigger point about the elder brothers, as they call themselves. They dismiss all of us who have ruined the world as the younger brothers. And these are societies that do not view the world through an extractive paradigm. You know, they do not think that the world is just a kind of a stage set upon which only the human drama unfolds. You know, they don't buy into the old Descartesian idea that all that exists is mind and matter and that only things that can be measured can exist. That whole kind of idea that we developed in the European tradition that has now become so dominant, so powerful, so ubiquitous,

Starting point is 00:24:02 but it is not the norm. It is highly anomalous. Most societies interact with the natural world through the kind of metaphor of reciprocity, some idea that the earth gives its bounty to us, we owe our fidelity to the earth. And that's very much how the Mamos see their role as representatives of the natural order of things. It's funny, when I was first asked by them to go and be there when President Santos arrived, one of my close friends, a man called Mamo Camilo, said to me something very profound. He said, you know, peace won't matter, and this is after 50 years of Colombia's horrific war, peace won't matter if it's only an excuse for the three sides to come together to maintain a war against nature. It's time for us

Starting point is 00:24:51 to make peace with the entire natural world. And as we flew up to Valle del Par on the presidential jet from Bogota, all of the president's aides were peppering him with statistics for his speech in the community that was going to be broadcast internationally. And I kind of sheepishly put up my hand and I said in Spanish, you know, President Santos, for the mammos, you know, statistics don't matter a rat's ass, you know, what they care about is what's in your heart. And then I told him what Mammo Camillo had said. And President Santos is an incredibly wonderful man, incorporated that and made that the theme of his speech that went out that day to the world. I was very struck by, and I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I'll just say,

Starting point is 00:25:36 struck by how central pagamientos, offerings, and payments seem to be to certainly the mammals, but broadly speaking, the coge. And I appreciate all the context that you just provided. I would also love you, and we could spend five hours just discussing what I'm about to bring up, but I also would love to ask you about coca. So many people are familiar with coca as a leaf that is chewed or something that is turned into cocaine. But could you talk a bit about mambe? So this is a word and something that has come up in my radius a number of times. But what is mambe? Where is it used? How is it prepared? Coca is a generic term for two different cultivated species and four different varieties that have been exploited by people in South America perhaps as long as 8,000 years, certainly 5,000 years. And I should say that coca is one is called Colombian, that's Erythroxyl Novogranitense,

Starting point is 00:26:48 and the other is a classic coca of the southern Andes of Cusco and La Paz, that is Erythroxyl coca. Now, in pre-Columbian times, a variety of that was taken down the Amazon into the jungles of the Northwest Amazon. And this variety, which is known as Erythroxyl and coca variety Ipadu, is cultivated vegetatively, not from seed. It also has half the alkaloid concentration. And so in a very interesting way, the peoples of the Anaconda, you know, all these extraordinary societies,

Starting point is 00:27:23 the Barasana, the Makuna, Tucano, Cubeo, Ticana. I mean, there's scores of these extraordinary cultures. They've learned to take the leaves, roast them over a clay griddle, and then rather than taking the leaf orally and mixing some kind of outline with it, baking soda or limestone or ashes of certain plants, as you'll see in the mountains of southern Peru, they add the ash of the leaves of a tree known as yarumo. And then they pound the two together until you get a very fine powder,

Starting point is 00:27:58 which becomes even more fine when sifted through palm fiber. It's a consistency of talc. And with mambé, then, you take the actual coca with a bone like this. This is a mambé bone right here. And you put the wad onto your mouth, and you let the saliva kind of soften it, and you don't really talk or breathe, or the whole works will just explode as a green cloud. And as it's moist, you then lift it up as a quid. And the advantage, of course, is that by taking coca in this way, you absorb the entire plant, and thus all the nutrients. I mean, one of the, before I just finish that, then the other coca, the coca of the cogi that we talked about, that is Erythroxyl

Starting point is 00:28:44 Novogranitensis, Variety Novogranitensis, that's a coca of Columbia. And that coca of the cogi that we talked about, that is Erythroxyl Novogranitensis, variety Novogranitensis. It's a coca of Columbia. And that coca was taken down the coast to Trujillo in the northern desert of Peru. And that became the preferred coca of the Inca. It's got a little wintergreen oil in it. It's Erythroxyl Novogranitensi, Variety, Trujillense. And that, of course, was a preferred coca that to this day Coca-Cola imports each year by the ton, allowing their beverage to really be the real thing. The fascinating story, Tim, is that I worked with Tim Plowman, a protege of my professor

Starting point is 00:29:18 Schultes, Marx professor, in the 70s. And we were charged to work out the botany, the ethnobotany, the ethnography of coca. And at that time, we thought that the coca of Columbia, for classic botanical reasons, was derived from the coca of Peru. But now that we have DNA, we see a greater story. It turns out that these two sacred plants, used for 8,000 years, revered as the divine leaf of immortality by every culture in the Andes, all come from the same wild ancestor, a species known as Erythroxon gracilipes, which grows along the eastern flanks of the Andes. Now, that may seem like arcane botany talk to many of our listeners, but it's actually a miracle, because to have two revered plants independently domesticated through a process of artificial selection, thousands of miles apart, and yet each deemed to be sacred essence of the divine, is unheard of, no precedent in all of the history of botany and of human

Starting point is 00:30:26 cultures. And so this is the richness of coca. Now, the extraordinary thing is that the efforts to eradicate coca fields began 50 years before there was a cocaine problem. In the 1920s, physicians in Lima in particular looked up into the Andes, and their concern for the well-being of Andean people was matched in its intensity only by their ignorance of Andean life. had to find a cause. And because issues of economics, land distribution, inequity came too close to challenging the bourgeois foundations of their lives in Lima, they had to find the evil source. And the source was coca. And they blamed coca for every ill in the Andes. And through all those years, these doctors and physicians and nutritionists never did the obvious, a nutritional study to show just what this plant actually had in it. And when we finally did that in the mid-1970s, Andrew Weil, Tim Plowman, Jim Duke at the USDA, what we discovered horrified our backers of the DEA and the U.S. government. Because it turns out that coca has a tiny amount of cocaine in it,

Starting point is 00:31:45 absorbed benignly as a mild stimulant by the mucous membrane of the mouth, absolutely without harm. The plant also has more calcium than any plant ever studied, perfect for a traditional diet without a dairy product. It also is chock full of vitamins. It even has enzymes that enhance the body's ability to digest carbohydrate at high elevation, making it perfect for the potato-based diet. So in one simple nutritional study that could have been done at any time, we put into stark profile these hideous efforts that are underway to this day to destroy the traditional fields.

Starting point is 00:32:25 And we showed that this was a plant that had been used with no evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for at least 5,000 years. And so one of our big efforts today is to decouple coca from cocaine and create a nutraceutical market for the plant that will give a legal market for the 150,000 families in Colombia alone that depend on cultivating coca for their survival, and also through taxes may just give Colombia the revenue necessary to pay the cost of peace, having drained its treasury for 50 years to pay the cost of a war only made possible by the sordid profits of prohibition.

Starting point is 00:33:12 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, every new potential hire can feel like a high-stakes gamble for your small business. So you want to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates. That's why you should check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the right people for your team faster and for free. Add your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring. Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview Thank you so much talk to faster. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Tim. That's linkedin.com slash Tim to post

Starting point is 00:34:12 your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. So we may come back to coca. And as you're discussing the nutritional profile, it makes me also think of the role that coffee serves in some populations in the world. But I would love to go to some well-trodden ground, and this is out of personal curiosity and also because I think that many people will want to hear more of the background here. And then we're going to probably come to discuss a number of mentors of yours. But I would love to hear you expand on TTX and Datura Stramonium, if I'm not getting that incorrect, grows right in my driveway in Texas. It's found in all sorts of places. TTX a little less so. But could you just provide the background on where you came across these two? Yeah, this is an incredible story, a kind of assignment of a lifetime that would completely change my trajectory. You know, I had done a lot of work in the Amazon, three years, in fact, through the

Starting point is 00:35:29 Andes and the Amazon. And I had studied anthropology, but I never really understood the real message of anthropology until I went to Haiti, and I'll explain that in a moment. But what happened is that a very well-known psychopharmacologist by the name of Nathan Klein, psychopharmacology being the study of the action of drugs on the brain, had been going to Haiti for many years. The Psychiatric Institute bore his name. He had set it up.

Starting point is 00:35:55 And a close colleague of his at McGill University, Heinz Lehman, had a former student, Lamarck Duyon, who is now the director of that psychiatric institute. And Duyon was fascinated by the Haitian zombie phenomena. And of course, by folkloric belief, the zombie is a living dead. It's an individual who has had their soul stolen by sorcery, kind of propelled into perpetual state of purgatory, said to be associated with enslavement. And this was sort of something very much from the realm of the phantasmagoric. But Duyon had been paying attention and investigating every case that came his way.

Starting point is 00:36:33 And finally, he discovered this remarkable story of a man called Clairvius Narcisse, who in the early 1960s had been misdiagnosed dead, or even diagnosed dead, by two physicians, both American-trained and one an American, in the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in central Haiti, an American-directed institution that keeps impeccable records. And this man claiming to be Narcisse later walked into his village in about 1980-81, claiming to be the long-lost brother. The family members had no doubt, but they immediately told him to get lost, and he had to escape to the police station for his own safety. And when Duyon looked into this, he was able to secure death certificates, Scotland Yard verified with their forensic expertise, the fingerprints belonging to the sister of the deceased, there were a score of lines of evidence that suggested that this man clearly had been misdiagnosed dead

Starting point is 00:37:33 and somehow turned up in the realm of the living. In fact, Duyon went to the family members and put together a questionnaire of intimate information of the family background, all of which this man answered correctly. So the bottom line is that Duyon and Lehman and Dr. Klein went public saying they felt they had found the first zombie. Now, that drew their attention to reports of a full poison that was said to bring on a state of apparent death so profound it could fool a physician. Now, this poison wasn't just mentioned in travelers' accounts and missionary memoirs and in ethnographic reports. It was specifically mentioned in the penal code of

Starting point is 00:38:14 the country. But Duyon had not been able to find the poison. He hadn't secured a formula of it. And this was key to the whole question of the Haitian zombie. It was either something from the realm of fantasy, or if it was real, there had to be a natural product. And if that product existed, that could make someone appear to be dead, such that they could come back into the realm of living undamaged. That had huge potential medical applications, as Klein saw it. So they came to Harvard. Schultes said he was too old to go, but he said he knew someone who could do the job. And that's how I was hired to go down to Haiti to secure this poison. Now, remember, I wasn't looking for a poison that could kill people. Lots of things can do that. I was looking for something much more rare, which was a poison that could bring someone to the state of apparent death, so profound it could fool a physician, and yet the victim could survive. And so I did what one does. I contacted a sorcerer who was, he'd been described by the BBC as the incarnation of evil. He was nothing of the sort. He had a whorehouse and a

Starting point is 00:39:26 bunch of Dominican women, and he had been a junior member of the Tonton Macoute. But I was able to establish, through a little bit of kind of theatrics, a good relationship with him. What was the group that you mentioned? I'm not familiar with it. A junior member of what group? The Tonton Macoute. The Tonton Macoute, Tonton in Creole means uncle, Makout means shoulder bag. This was the nickname for the volunteers for the national security, the militia that was set up by François Duvalier in the wake of his presidential election in 1957. And this is a pivotal part of the story because Duvalier was the first president in 100 years to say that voodoo was a hundred years to say that voodoo

Starting point is 00:40:05 was a legitimate religion. He had voodoo temples in the presidential palace. He wore the costume of Baron Samadhi, the guardian of the dead, of the graveyard. He played voodoo like a charm, and he used the secret societies as his base of power. And from them, as my research would discover, he created this notorious force, the Tonton Makut. And it means that if you misbehave, they will come and take you away in their shoulder bag. And so I went out with Marcel after this kind of bit of theater that we did to kind of, it was kind of funny, I'll tell you about it. I want to hear about the theater. Yeah. How do you develop a rapport? I went to him, you know, and with it was kind of funny, I'll tell you about it. I want to hear about the theater. Yeah, how do you develop a rapport? I went to him, you know, and with a good friend of mine, Max Beauvoir, who's, when he died,

Starting point is 00:40:50 was sort of heralded as the Pope of voodoo, an amazing kind of conduit for the outside world to understand voodoo. And again, I should say right off the top, Tim, that we have this idea of voodoo from the movies that couldn't be more wrong. And we should just think for a moment, if we were asked to name the great religions of the world, what continent would we leave out? Sub-Saharan Africa. And of course, voodoo is not a black magic cult. It's a fond word from Dahomey or Benin that means spirit or God. It's just the distillation of very profound religious ideas that came over during the era of slavery and

Starting point is 00:41:25 then became transformed within the soil of a new world. That's why you have Hoodoo in the American South, Kuminamikandomblé in Brazil, Ovia in Jamaica, and so on, Santaria in the DR, and of course, Voodoo in Haiti. And Voodoo took a particularly strong form in Haiti because, as opposed to the other countries I mentioned, Haiti was an independent black country, the only one in the world for a century, gained its independence in 1804. And at that time, much of its population, the slaves, had literally been born in Africa. So in many ways, you can almost argue that Haiti is more Africa than Africa itself at this point. But at any rate, I saw Marcel, and he made me the powder,

Starting point is 00:42:12 but I knew the way he made it, the ingredients, that it was kind of bogus. And so I, instead of telling him that, I doubled what I had promised to pay him. And as I left the Humphur, the temple, I mentioned I was going to try it on an enemy I had in the capital. I'd let him know how it worked. And then with a deliberate piece of theater, Max Beauvoir and I stormed back a week later and screamed and yelled at him that we had nearly gotten killed, that his powder was worthless, that he couldn't do a thing. And of course, he then got furious and he went into the inner sanctum, the temple, and came out with a bottle, a little vial. And he said, in Creole, he said, if you don't think I know how to make poison, drink this, you won't walk out of here alive.

Starting point is 00:42:53 And then all the Dominican girls started going, drink, drink, drink. And it was kind of a bit tense. And so I said to Marcel, look, man, it's not that you don't know how to make good poison. I came all this way because I know you can. I'm just saying what you made me is garbage. And if you give me garbage, you'll never see me again. But if you give me the real thing, you might make a lot of money from us. And then I walked out. And I went back the next day, and the proper ingredients were drying on the clothesline.

Starting point is 00:43:18 And then we went into the inner sanctum, the temple, and he took a bottle of raw alcohol with human remains in it and all kinds of animals and gore of one sort or the other and he handed it to me and i took a big drink and handed it right back to him and he laughed and i think it was the first time of many times that a haitian would say to me what kind of white are you anyway and so that was the beginning of my relationship were you not worried about drinking that? What was the expectation of the ingredients? Well, it was just a ritual vessel of magical things. He's a sorcerer, a negative priest. And, you know, it's all been pickled in sugarcane alcohol. Part of it is, it's not like macho,

Starting point is 00:44:00 it's sort of saying, it's actually a more subtle, more poetic, more beautiful thing. You know, Tim, how do you break down the barrier between yourself and the people with whom you find yourself living as a guest? And it's never bravado or macho. It's actually always love and empathy and letting people know that you believe they're somebody. And it seems so simple, but you'd be astonished how many people I encountered, particularly in Haiti, including Dr. Klein, who had no way whatsoever of hanging out with those folks. Just couldn't do it.

Starting point is 00:44:33 And that's what I've been doing all my life. But the important thing is from the Haitian point of view, the poison is not what makes a zombie. And that's really important. And that explains how I got the formula so quickly. But the funny part of this story is that it was Easter Sunday when I returned to the United States through JFK Airport. And I had this suitcase made of surplus 7-up tin cans that was filled to the gunnels with human bones, all the ingredients in various forms. I had a live bufo marinus toad in my backpack, the biggest toad in the world, 10 inches across. And I had no permits.

Starting point is 00:45:13 Customs dream. Yeah, yeah. So you couldn't do this post 9-11. But I went up to this customs agent. And I just said, well, let's just see what he says. So I opened up this thing so only he could see it. And he slammed it shut, Tim. And I'm not going to give you exactly what he said,

Starting point is 00:45:29 because there are children listening to your podcast. Oh, no, no. This doesn't need to be family friendly. What did he say? You can tell us. He literally said in a New York accent, look, it's Easter fucking Sunday. I didn't even want to fucking work today. I don't know who to fucking work today.

Starting point is 00:45:46 I don't know who the fuck you are. Just get the fuck out of here. And that's how the zombie poison came into America. Wow. Thank God for Easter Sunday and that guy. But then here's where we get to your TTX. I analyzed the plants, took the reptiles to the herpetologist and all the various creatures to the various specialists, and I finally got around to the herpetologists and all the various creatures to the various specialists. And I finally got around to the fish. And I went to see the ichthyologist in the basement of the

Starting point is 00:46:10 Museum of Comparative Zoology. And this was like out of a movie. And I say to this wonderful character, did you find anything in those fish? And he had his head inside a white shark. And as he heard me, he bounced his head against the teeth, pulled his head out, and said, I thought you were the poison people. Because our museum was the world's center for the study of medicinal and toxic plants and hallucinogens. And then he goes to the shelf, and he doesn't pull out the journal of ichthyology. He pulls out a pocketbook dime store novel, and it turns out to be written by Ian Fleming. And it was either from Russia with Love or from Dr. No. And at the end of one of those two books, 007 gets kicked in the

Starting point is 00:46:52 shin by the bad guy and dies. And he comes back to life in the next book because he's been kicked with the poison tetrodotoxin. And that is what blew open the zombie study. TTX, tetrodotoxin. Right. Because tetrodotoxin is a big molecule that selectively blocks sodium channels and brings on peripheral paralysis, dramatically low metabolic rates, and consciousness is retained until death. And when you looked at the symptoms of Narcisse, they match perfectly the symptoms of victims of fugu fish poisoning in Japan. The fugu fish is a culinary delicacy. The chef must eliminate most of the TTX, but not all, because he wants the connoisseur to enjoy the pleasant after effects of a mild intoxication. But because some people screw up, lots of people have died. And there was a whole literature in Japan and in the public, in newspapers, case natural product that not only could make someone appear

Starting point is 00:48:06 to be dead, but had done so many times in the past. So then you had to ask, what really is a zombie? Who's controlling the process? And in the end, I was able to become the first person from outside of Haiti ever to be initiated into the Bizanko Shampuel, the secret societies that produced the Tonton Makkut. And I was able to at least suggest that zombification was a form of ultimate social sanction in which the individual lost their personal autonomy and their physical freedom and became kind of cast into a state of purgatory that was, in a sense, worse than death. So just before we leave zombies, the whole purpose of this was less to find the drugs used to make zombies, because no drug can make a social phenomena, but rather to take a phenomena that had been used in an explicitly

Starting point is 00:48:59 racist way to denigrate an entire culture and its religion and to try to make sense out of sensation. And so if the scientists sent me to Haiti to find the chemicals used to make zombies, I found myself instead studying the psychological, social, historical, political dimensions of a chemical possibility. And that's what made the research so exciting. You know, the pursuit of that little preparation opened up these historic and ethnographic vistas that no one had seen before. I have two questions related to this,

Starting point is 00:49:37 and I'm sure we could have dozens more, but there are so many other things I'd love to chat about. But two follow-up questions. The first is, what role, if any, does the datura play in this entire process? And there are documented deaths every year in the United States, at least, related to people who attempt to DIY some type of trip from daturas. So the role of datura, if any, and then secondly, and this is based on a somewhat fragmented recollection of watching some type of news program that was reportedly covering this social phenomenon of zombification. And my impression from that was that some people remain in servitude for other people as zombies for an extended period of time.

Starting point is 00:50:22 And I'm wondering if there is, what are the primary contributing factors to a situation like that? You know, one of the things you always have to do in this kind of research is separate what we might call the emic from the edic, which are unnecessarily technical terms in anthropology, the view from within, the view from without. You know, like, why don't the people in India eat cows? Well, it's prohibited by the scriptures, but also they need the oxen to work the fields. You know, those would be the two points of view. And first, let me answer your question about datura. Datura is in the Solanaceae, the potato family, the family of choice of black magicians around the world. The tree daturas, the Bergmanzias in in South America are known as the jaguars intoxicant, the tree of the evil eagle.

Starting point is 00:51:07 And these plants have in them powerful tropane alkaloids, scopolamine and atropine in particular, that induce a state of psychotic delirium with visions of hellfire, a burning thirst, amnesia, a sensation of flight. These are incredibly dangerous and horrific plants that the shaman in the Andes take only if everything else fails, almost with the idea that just in touching the realm of madness, they might achieve illumination. And what's interesting, in going back to the victims of tetradotoxication in Japan, if you eat fugu fish and you get poisoned, and you're put into your coffin, and you're lucky enough to be rescued, you come out of the coffin and you say, oh, that's terrible, what a mistake, I'll never eat fugu again. But that's the end of it, right? But remember, the Haitian doesn't sit around questioning whether zombies exist. He or she knows in the fiber of their being that they do. And he or she knows why a zombie is made, a form of punishment within the traditional culture.

Starting point is 00:52:19 And so we don't know exactly what might or might not occur. We know that tetrodotoxin reaches a crisis in about six hours. And if you survive that crisis, you have no physiological damage whatsoever. But of course, in the case of the Haitian zombie, whether the individual is symbolically put into the ground, placed behind a shade or hidden from view, whatever, when they come out of the tetradotoxication, they know what's happened to them, and they're in a state of incredible suggestibility and fear. And what the datura may serve, it's known as the zombie, the zombie's cucumber. And I was at least told by many

Starting point is 00:53:07 informants that at that point of disorientation, the victim is given datura, which must be an extraordinary, horrific experience, and one that would sort of seal the psychological conviction that he or she had in fact been punished in this way. Now, when you mention the idea of slavery, well, there's no incentive to create in Haiti a force of indentured labor. But again, critically, given the colonial history, slavery implies a destiny almost worse than life itself. And by the same token, I mentioned earlier that they don't believe the poison creates a zombie. What a zombie is, is to make a zombie, I have to capture, Tim, your little good angel, your soul, the soul that makes you Tim Ferriss, as opposed to the soul that makes me Wade Davis.

Starting point is 00:54:00 Not the soul that we both share, that all sentient beings share, but the soul that creates your personality. That's why a zombie appears comatose. The fear in Haiti is not of zombies, it's of becoming a zombie. So I once asked a voodoo priest, for example, if it was just a matter of returning the soul to the victim, could that be done and the person made whole? And the man who I asked that question was a great emperor of the secret societies. He had been head of the Tantamacoute for a fifth of the country. I once asked our artist during the revolution, he had ever killed anybody.

Starting point is 00:54:35 He said, I never killed any people, just enemies. So I asked him, my art, you know, couldn't you just give the soul back to the person? And he said, yeah, you could do that. But on the other hand, Blanc, if you were a woman, would you want an ex-zombie to ask you to dance? And of course, what he was getting at is that a zombie becomes a total pariah. Now, remember what I said about Narcisse when he first went back to his village. Nobody doubted that it was the long-lost, presumed-to-be-dead brother, but did they welcome him with open arms? No, they told him, get the hell out of here.

Starting point is 00:55:08 He had died socially. He had died spiritually. They wanted nothing to do with him. And that really is what a zombie is all about. Yeah, thank you for that. And part of the reason I was asking about the datura is I do have some familiarity with Burugmansia and had some exposure to the Awahun or the Aguarunas

Starting point is 00:55:27 who use it pretty extensively for not just dark purposes or power purposes, but for many different conditions. But my understanding is that also organized crime, I want to say in Colombia for a period of time, was using Burugmansia seeds, which I think they called Burundanga. They would pulverize and say someone with a map would walk up to a mark and say, could you tell me where this place is? Blow the powder into their face, at which point that person would become highly suggestible and also have developed amnesia. So you could say, take someone back to their own apartment, ask them to help load their things into a truck. They would have no recollection of this, even though they would be coherent interacting with security guards. And for that reason, I was wondering if perhaps the datura

Starting point is 00:56:14 was used in a similar fashion to increase suggestibility. You're absolutely right on, Tim. The word datura, name of the genus, comes from ancient India. Bands of criminals known as the daturas who used it as a knockout drug. Wow. I did not know that. Wow. 70s. He spoke about how he ate a bunch of Tridatura in his hotel on the coast and ended up walking around the naked, the Barranquilla, a public market for five days before he was finally arrested. And at our table, Tim, there was a wonderful Colombian hippie girl who looked up at me and said, I know that market. I wouldn't even buy a mango there. But I'll tell you, in my book, Magdalena, about the great river of Colombia, there's a story of my good friend William Vargas, who was on his way to university. And these stories, like you recounted, are part of travelers' lore in Colombia. But I had never

Starting point is 00:57:19 met anyone who had actually endured this. And someone on a bus offered him a cake or a cookie, which he ate, and that was the last thing he remembered. And he came to four days later in a kind of a psychic horror, having lost everything that he owned and had his entire kind of psychological state shattered. So these are very powerful drugs indeed. So I guess there are a few lessons. Number one, don't take or accept candy from strangers, everybody listening, and do not play around with these plants and molecules. They are no joke and can do a tremendous amount of damage. So I would like to rewind the clock a bit. And you mentioned Richard Evans Schultes. I've had

Starting point is 00:58:02 a number of discussions about him on the podcast before, so he may come up, but I would actually like to invoke a different name, which is David Mabry Lewis, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Could you please describe who he was and what you learned from him or what lessons he imparted to you? I was so incredibly fortunate looking back. You know, I was an undergraduate at Harvard. I got my PhD at Harvard, but I began as an anthropologist. And David Mabry-Lewis was my undergraduate tutor. He was one of the great Americanists. He had traveled into the heart of Brazil in the 1950s to live amongst the Chavante, and before that, the Charente, who at the time were said to be the most feared indigenous groups in Brazil.

Starting point is 00:58:55 And he was a great humanist. And while I was with him, he created cultural survival with his wife, Pia. And he absolutely lived in a way, although he wasn't really a Boasian because he was from the British tradition of social anthropology, but he absolutely believed that activism was an integral part of the anthropological endeavor. You know, when you have languages disappearing, when you have Indigenous people suffering the predations of the rubber era, there's a moral obligation to both tell their stories and to work with them, I think, as a liaison, conduit to the world, facilitating or amplifying their voices, bringing their concerns to the world. And that was something that I had in the fiber of my DNA because of my association with David. I was also very fortunate, as you mentioned, to fall into the orbit of Professor Schultes. But Professor Schultes was a man of action and deed. In 18 years of studying with him, I don't think

Starting point is 01:00:03 I ever had an intellectual conversation. He would say things to you like, there's one river I'd like you to know, knowing full well the process of getting to that river would involve experiences guaranteed to assure you that if you emerged out of the forest of that confluence alive, you'd be a wiser and a more complete human being. But Schultes was not a man of ideas. He was a botanist. That's what he was, a plant explorer. And I loved botanical exploration largely because it provided the

Starting point is 01:00:33 conduit to culture. You know, if you want to live with the Inuit in the high Arctic, you better become a hunter because that is a measure of a man. If you want to engage the priests in Haiti, you have to serve the loi. You've got to become part of the circle of voodoo. Otherwise, what are you doing? And of course, in the Amazon, the plants become the perfect conduit to culture. You're not turning up at some malochan saying, I'm here to study your sex life. If someone turned up at our doorstep like that, we'd call the police. But studying the plants makes so much sense to those for whom the plants are so important. At the same time, most ethnobotanists of my generation were notoriously uneducated when it came to the nuances of anthropology and ethnography. And I was very, very fortunate in having in David a mentor who carried all the way through graduate school. I

Starting point is 01:01:32 taught more courses for David than I did for Schultes. And in fact, my ideas that in the wake of all my botanical research, I actually kind of discovered in the wake of the Haiti work that what I was really interested in was culture as opposed to plants. I always still use plants to inform much of my writing, but it was the through the 13 years at the Geographic, the decade as a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, everything traces back to David. And on the subject of mentors, I think this is so important for young people listening to this broadcast. You know, I grew up in the simplest of middle-class homes. My father's spirit in many ways had been broken in the war, as had my mother in a different set of circumstances. There was a lot of love, but not a lot of activity, creativity, and it was very clear to me

Starting point is 01:02:40 that I had to get out. And I began at a very young age jumping off cliffs. And as Terence McKenna always said, the great lesson of life is that when you do that, you don't land on rock, you land on a feather bed. The world exists to lift you up, not beat you down. You know, Jim Whitaker, the great climber, a good friend of mine, said that if you're not living on the edge when young, you're taking up too much space. But what I found myself having to do, Tim, was fling myself into the arms of mentors. And those mentors could be an old Gitxsan elder who I recorded mythology with and hunted with for 40 years. It could be an engineer who taught me how to understand the complexities of industrial logging when I spent a year in the bush. I've always believed that nothing is beneath you, nothing is a waste of time unless you make it so.

Starting point is 01:03:35 You know, a cab driver can have as much to teach you as a professor at university if you're open to the possibility. And I always found that if I just gave myself fully to these mentors, like Schultes, like David Mayberry Lewis, like Dr. Klein, and many that I've had the privilege to engage since then, you know, I was able to become the most important thing, which is the architect of my own life. And this is what I say to young people, you know, be patient, never compromise, give your destiny time to find you. Bitterness always comes to those who look back on a life of choices imposed upon them from the outside. And you may not make all the right decisions, but if you own those decisions, they all become the right ones, because together they become the path of your own creation, and you become the architect of your own life. And that is something so very important. And in

Starting point is 01:04:31 that spirit, Tim, I try to do everything I can to help young people. I answer every email, and I get, as you do, thousands of emails from young people. And very often what they're saying, they may have a specific question, but what they're really saying is not just how can I be you? They know they can't be me, but what they really want to know is how can I live a life of authenticity? How can I live a life where I'm not strapped to a laptop at a desk in a cubicle. How can I find a way to monetize the creativity of my own life? How can I make myself and the act of being alive my vocation, recognizing that any job one has is just a passing thing, a kind of a filter through which to see the world and only for a time.

Starting point is 01:05:24 And the real challenge is to make the world, and only for a time. And the real challenge is to make the art of life itself your vocation. And I always answer those because, you know, if you don't answer, it's not a neutral gesture. It's a slap in the wrist. They're reaching out to you, and all you have to say is, wonderful idea, Charlie. Go for it, your friend. And that takes about as much time as deleting the message. And I learned that from Schultes. You know, he was free to collect medicinal plants. He described the use of 2,000 medicinal plants previously unknown to science. And with him on all those collections was a man called Isidoro Cabrera. Now, when you do botany and you collect plants, the senior botanist's name goes first. So Tim Plowman and Wade Davis, Plowman and Davis.

Starting point is 01:06:23 And that's how you do it on the specimens. It's kind of a formal thing. But you never are said to put an indigenous helper on the label as if he's an equal to you, but Schultes did. And he met Isidoro when Isidoro's farm had been burned in the war. His parents had been murdered. He had no food. He was absolutely nothing. And he ended his life full professor of botany with multiple honorary degrees. And before he died, when I was writing the book One River, I went to see Isidoro in Cali. And I said, Professor, I want you to think really carefully. I want you to remember the first moment you met Professor Schultes in the forest, in the Macarena. What was it like?

Starting point is 01:07:14 What did he say? And he looked at me very pensively. And then he suddenly, there was a twinkle in his eye. And he said, he looked at me like I was somebody. Isn't that beautiful, Tim? That is beautiful. And in class riddled Columbia at that time for a Harvard professor to do that, and it made that young man's life, pulled him out of misery, gave him a career and a great gift to Columbia. What a story. And I want to come back to, I suppose, frames and lenses for a moment, and also Jim Whitaker. So for those who don't know,

Starting point is 01:07:54 the first American to summit Everest, if my research is not lying to me. And I'm looking at an excerpt from alumni stories on the brentwood.bc.ca website, and he comes up. And there's a line that I would like to explore because I think it's Maya Angelou, if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, said that courage is the mother virtue that unlocks all other virtues because effectively, I'm paraphrasing here, but at the breaking point, you need courage to enact or to enable those other virtues. And there's a line here, and I don't know if it is Jim's or yours, but either way, I would love for you to expand on it. Pessimism is an indulgence. Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention. Despair and insult to the imagination. And I want to bring this up because it strikes me that a lot of people, not just very young people, but many people overall, feel a certain psycho-emotional malaise right now, a sense of overwhelm that has led to pessimism or nihilism.

Starting point is 01:08:57 And so it seems to me that optimism is the unlock here. So could you elaborate on the pessimism as an indulgence and so on in that line? Yeah, that was actually my line, not Jim's. You know, people are always asking, we're always asking each other, are you optimistic? And I kind of feel like, how can you not be optimistic? I mean, that's the purpose of life itself. And if you're a father, you absolutely have an obligation to remain hopeful. And given how many gifts we have, surely pessimism does become something of an indulgence. You know, we're all so caught in the present these days,

Starting point is 01:09:34 you know, so little sense of history, and we forget how much we've achieved. But when you think about it, Tim, in my lifetime, women have gone from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay people, men and women, from the closet to the altar. When we think of the environment, when I was a young kid, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was a great environmental victory. Nobody spoke about the biosphere, biodiversity. Now these are terms familiar to schoolchildren. So what's not to love about a world capable of such social transformations, such scientific genius? You know, just think about that moment on Christmas Eve 1968 when Apollo

Starting point is 01:10:23 went around the dark side of the moon and emerged to see for the first time in human history, not a sunrise or a moonrise, but an earthrise. And in that incredible moment, we suddenly saw the earth as it is, not this infinite horizon, but a fragile blue planet, as the astronauts famously reported, floating in the velvet void of space. And I think everything has changed with that. You know, like a flash of illumination, it swept over the world. You know, we never will think again about the natural world in the same way we did before that vision. And even today, as I mentioned earlier, I think, you know, the revelations of genetics showing us indisputably that race is a total fiction. Well, that hasn't really gotten into the zeitgeist yet, as the moonshot has, but it will. extraordinarily exciting times and extraordinarily challenging times. But as I say to all young people, what generation has ever come of age in a world at peace, a world without troubles?

Starting point is 01:11:34 You know, it's very interesting. One of the ways I, Tim, keep my optimism, you know, my dad wasn't a religious man. His spirit was broken in the war. I never saw the inside of a church in his presence. But he did believe in good and evil. He used to say to me, there's good and evil in the world. Take your pick and get on with it. And it was incredibly wise, because we have this sort of thing in the Christian tradition, particularly, that if we just wait long enough, good's going to triumph over evil, and we'll all somehow be dissolved in the rapture. Well, ain't going to happen. And famously, in the medieval times, if you asked the obvious question, if God's all-powerful, why does he allow evil to exist? You were burned at the stake for heresy, right? But in the Indian tradition, the Vedic tradition, by contrast, when Lord Krishna was

Starting point is 01:12:21 asked that very question, if God's all-powerful, why does he allow evil to exist in the universe, Lord Krishna said to the disciple, to thicken the plot. In other words, good and evil walk hand in hand. You're never going to lose one. You've got to take your side, and the purpose of life is not to triumph over evil, but keep pushing the wheel of justice forward. And when you realize that that is the end point, you then never expect to win.

Starting point is 01:12:52 And if you never expect to win, you're not disappointed when you lose. And because of that, you can keep fighting with the same idealism, the same energy, when you're 69 years old, as I am today, that I energy when you're 69 years old as I am today that I had when I was 20 years old and marching against the war in Vietnam. I'd like to discuss rites of passage, and specifically, we don't have to necessarily focus on this, but this is something that often ends up on my radar of consciousness because I have many males in my audience, and there seems to be a distinct lack of rites of passage for men in most westernized societies or many westernized societies. And I would love for you to describe a chapter in your life, and I'm most certainly

Starting point is 01:13:40 going to butcher this pronunciation, but Spatzizi, did I get that right? Yeah, Spatzisi, red goat. So could you explain what that is? Before I jump into my, perhaps, story, rites of passage exist all around the world for a very specific reason. It's not a coincidence or an accident that they involve pain you know whether it's scarification whether it's the severing of the foreskin whether it's the pain of ordeal the ingestion i mean for example the algonquin speaking of datura their initiation right was to put the young lads in the longhouse seal it shut and make them eat datura for two weeks so that they would forget what it was to become boys,

Starting point is 01:14:26 to learn what it was to be a man. But the reason all these ordeals that you know so much about, vision quests, etc., have pain is because the message has to be clear. This is the end. It's not about the twiddling of thumbs. We are passing on to you the obligation of adulthood. You now hold the destiny of our people in your hands. This is not trivial. You best be prepared. And I think whether it's with women who go through their own rituals, which are always sort of timed to the first menses or the first period, fertility, transforming a girl into a woman, a potential mother, or it's a boy proving his manhood. Now, this has become rather frowned

Starting point is 01:15:17 upon in our kind of politically correct woke world. But the truth is, young men, I've never known a young lad who didn't want that challenge. It's that idea of proving oneself not in a gratuitously macho way, but literally in a kind of organic way of grit and courage and strength. And I think that's why, I mean, for example, I've got very close friends in the Navy SEALs, and they all have a kind of a calm confidence because they've been on what Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey. And I think those of us like myself, you know, brought up in a society that we did not have obvious outlets, we created our own hero's journeys. And for me, it was always either through work or travel. You mentioned Spazizi. Well, you know, I was living high to guai in northwest British Columbia in the mid-70s, and I was very much critical of industrial clear-cut logging,

Starting point is 01:16:21 but I felt that I best learned something about it. So I lied about my credentials and managed to hire on as a logging forestry engineer in one of the toughest logging camps in the west coast of British Columbia, where I stayed a year. And I learned everything about the business, including the corruption. And it was a fantastic experience because I also learned that the men and women fighting off hunger with a chainsaw were not my enemy. I learned that in all of these conflicts, particularly around resources, there are never any enemies, only solutions. But I kind of escaped that camp, taking a job as the first park ranger in what had just been created, Canada's biggest roadless wilderness park. And my job description was deliciously vague,

Starting point is 01:17:06 wilderness assessment and public relations. And in two four-month seasons, I saw 12 people. There was no one to relate publicly to. And these travels to South America, or, you know, even in Haiti, you know, you have to understand that during the course of that research, it turns out I never knew who was paying for it all. And I'll tell you, if you'd like, a story of the night I had to light myself on fire. Well, I can't say no to that. So, yes, please. Well, remember I said I became very close friends with Marcel Pierre.

Starting point is 01:17:38 And we were like brothers by the end of the many years I was there. And his wife was dying of uterine cancer. And he was so sad. He came to me and I bought all his blood for her. And his wife was dying of uterine cancer. And he was so sad. He came to me and I bought all this blood for her and she still was dying. And I took him back to get a tap-tap. And for once I was dressed like an American tourist. What is a tap-tap? Oh, a tap-tap is a local bus in Haiti. And I didn't have, I went in my little Jeep and I didn't have my wallet or any money. And I got a flat tire after I dropped him off.

Starting point is 01:18:05 And I said to this guy at the side of the road who fixed tires manually, I said, can you fix my tire? He starts fixing my tire. Then I say, creole, mise-en-mise, pas guin-cobre. I've got no money. And then he said, qui calite blanc ça? And he started hassling me. And I just wasn't in the mood.

Starting point is 01:18:20 I should have not done this. But I took his hand, and I gave him the Secret Society handshake. And then he blanched back, and then he said again, what kind of white are you? And then we had a big laugh, and he said, oh, I got a big thing happening. And I'd broken down by chance right by a Bizanco Champloo Secret Society temple. So I went back that night, for the first time, unescorted by a powerful voodoo priest. And the ceremony begins like any ceremony, with the invocation of leg by the spirit of communication, and then the order goes out, soldiers of the night, same skin, soldiers of the night, change of skin, and everybody goes, the hundreds of people go into this temple and emerge in these anonymous black and red robes. And at that moment, six men came and grabbed me and flung me into a chamber, and I rolled around in the dust, and I looked up, and I was looking at a table of emperors of the secret societies who wanted to know how I knew what I knew. And I shared with

Starting point is 01:19:33 them the iconography, passwords, handshakes, but it was all too much and too little at the same time. And it was a very awkward moment, and I had to do something. I was there by myself. And there's always a human skull with a candle burning with a bottle of raw sugarcane alcohol, the base of the potomitin, which is used as a libation not to drink. So I just thought I better do something. So I very deliberately went over, took the bottle and poured the alcohol over all over my body, my back, my hair, everything, and then very deliberately went to the candle and lit myself on fire. And as I flamed like a torch, remember, this isn't kerosene or diesel.

Starting point is 01:20:15 It's just like doing the same thing with lighter fluid. There wasn't any danger except I'd lose my eyebrows. But while I was still a living torch, I went over and offered the Secret Society handshake again to each of the men. They loved it, crapped up laughing. And after that, I couldn't go by that crossroads without getting flagged down. And I became very friendly with that temple, actually. Well, okay, so hold on. I mean, that's a hell of a party trick. So how did this occur to you? And I guess you just had knowledge that that wouldn't pose any grave danger. I certainly wouldn't. I mean, having your body on fire seems dangerous. You must have lit your fingers on fire with lighter fluid when you were a boy.

Starting point is 01:20:54 I haven't. I mean, maybe I should. I never say never. Tim, maybe it's a Canadian thing. You know, it's like, you know, there are these moments, and I don't mean in any way, because I keep saying it's empathy and love. It's not bravado. I remember when I was 14, you know, my mother was a modest but determined Canadian woman, and she worked all year as a secretary to raise enough money to let me join a group of kids a language teacher was taking to Colombia. And I was really lucky because I was billeted in the mountains and I never saw the other Canadian lads. And many of them got what the Colombians call mamitis or homesickness. And I felt like I just finally found home. I got drunk for the first time and kissed a girl. I was in heaven. But there was this real bully in the valley. I was 14 and he was 17

Starting point is 01:21:41 or 18. And he kind of terrorized, even the bad guy, he terrorized all the kids. And one day he challenged me to what they would do is they'd put a cigarette, you put your arm, forearms together, put a lit cigarette in the middle. And the first one to drop their arm is the loser. He put the cigarette on and I said, you know, this is stupid. It hurts. He didn't understand that that cigarette could have burned through my arm before I would drop my arm. And of course I didn't drop my arm, and eventually he had to drop his arm. And that was kind of a gift from me to him because he was never the same again. After that, he was a different character.

Starting point is 01:22:18 He didn't have to do that anymore. And to this day, I still have that huge scar on my forearm. But, you know, I don't ever regret having done that, you know. And what is wonderful about doing this kind of field work is a dance of culture. How do you find the rhythm? It's like dancing with a woman for the first time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You know, I always say to young students setting off to the field, you know, what you need to do is just act like you would if invited to someone's home at Thanksgiving.

Starting point is 01:22:49 Be polite, have good manners, self-deprecating humor, a willingness to eat what's put in front of you, and sleep where you're asked to sleep. I mean, Tim, food is power. It's amazing how many people will so crudely refuse a gift of food. You know, if you're being given food almost anywhere in the world, it means some child is probably not eating that day. And even if you know, and there's been many times when I've known because of the circumstances, that if I eat a plate offered to me, without doubt I'll contract giardia or amoebic dysentery. I always eat the food because you can always treat the illness. You can never rekindle the trust that you've shattered, not just between you and the person,

Starting point is 01:23:36 but between that person and the next outsider who will come along. I'd like to jump back to rites of passage for a second, because I do feel like young males pay the price for the void of no rites of passage, and women too, but they do have that inbuilt, as you pointed out, rite of passage, whether it's formalized in some type of societal context or not. I'm curious how you have, if at all, thought about rites of passage for your own kids or how you might suggest parents think about rites of passage, primarily for males, but it could also apply to females. Well, I had two girls, and when they each got their periods,

Starting point is 01:24:20 they came to me, not to their mother. Why is that, do you think? You'd have to ask them, but I mean, I had that kind of relationship with them. I mean, what we've done, obviously, with our daughters, we've been able to take them all around the world. And also, while they grew up, we own a fishing lodge, a very modest fishing lodge, but very remote, seven hours from the nearest town, three days drive north of Vancouver in tall town country. And so while they grew up and I was traveling a great deal for the National Geographic, the two or three months we would spend there every summer

Starting point is 01:24:55 became kind of the well the family drank from for the rest of the year. And for those months, they hung out with tall town kids all the time. And so they have this unbelievable kind of sense of the world. My daughter speaks Arabic, one of them. I remember our house in Washington in particular was kind of a grand central station. Everybody was free to crash there, and you never knew who was going to turn up. I just had a friend call me who reminded me of the day he woke up there and found four Mongolians drinking vodka at 6 a.m. in the kitchen. And one time we had Nilda Kalanapa, this great friend of mine, a weaver from, really a national treasure from Cusco, staying in one guest room. And I'd forgotten to tell my daughters that a friend of mine from Mali, Issa Mohammed, a Torgue, massive guy,

Starting point is 01:25:46 was there for the Folklife Festival. So they didn't know he was staying there. And he comes up from the basement guest room in full ritual regalia, looking like Lawrence of Arabia. This guy, this massive guy, much bigger than me, he comes into the kitchen, spreads his arms across the kitchen. My girls were eating Rice Krispies at the table. And he just says, mes enfants, je suis là. And they just look up at this incredible African guy. Could you translate that, please? Yeah, my children, I'm here.

Starting point is 01:26:17 They just looked up at him and they said, hello, sir. How are you? You must be a friend of my father's. Can we get you some breakfast, please? I mean, utterly nonplussed, you know. So it's, you know, those are the kind of initiation rites. I think for boys in the American context and culture, it really is great to find ways for them to go away and do physical labor. You know, this is why I think there should be Youth Conservation Corps in every state and national park. You know, there's nothing better than for a 15-year-old boy with all those hormonal

Starting point is 01:26:51 spasms and all that pimply face to just be forced to cut firewood all day. And these kind of opportunities aren't trivial. They create the character of our young. There's no reason whatsoever that our government in the United States shouldn't be able to mobilize resources that would make available to every young American boy and girl the opportunity to travel within America, to know another face of America, another section of the country, Californians to Iowa, Kansans to Miami, and so on, and give them work to help make us a better country, you know, whether it's picking up plastic or caring for the elderly, whatever it is, again, giving young people a sense that they're not the center of the universe, that they live to help others,

Starting point is 01:27:45 that we do exist as a community, that you have to be humble. And just because you believe it doesn't mean it's true, and that the democratization of opinion doesn't mean that your opinion counts as much as an elder who has lived through life that you can't even imagine. You know, there are ways to make this possible, but physical activity is the key, I think, particularly for men, which is why, say what you will about the military, you know, it has done more good for more young men in its history. Not that, obviously, we would not criticize some of the engagements, but you know what I'm saying. As an institution of the nation that stands for the nation, you know, young people

Starting point is 01:28:34 have to learn that there's something bigger than themselves that they need to be loyal to. And that's not necessarily a country. It's a concept. It's the idea of community. It's something we really noticed, Tim, in Canada, which is no perfect place. But one of the things that is so different in Canada is that there is really a sense of community. We really are a social democracy. And it creates for a different way of life. I mean, one thing, I don't want to belabor this, but you know, in America, universal healthcare is seen as socialist medicine. And healthcare in general is seen as a uniquely medical issue, right? And that is to miss the point completely. Universal health care, which we have in Canada, has nothing to do with medicine. It has everything to do with social solidarity. It has everything to do with every Canadian knowing that they belong and knowing that if their kid gets sick, they will get exactly, and I tell you, it is exactly the same care as any other Canadian,

Starting point is 01:29:48 including the prime minister. Yes, I sometimes have to wait for medical service in Canada, but everyone does, but no one is left behind. And that is one of the reasons that we have a less highly charged society. You know, why we seem to get along better. I certainly agree with that. And I also agree with the physical labor component and the importance of it for boys and young men and men overall.

Starting point is 01:30:22 But I think especially in that hormonal tidal wave period, let's just call it from whatever it might be, you know, 13 to 18. And in addition to the transcendence of the self to a larger cause, say in a military context, it strikes me that both the military and the physical exertion of, say, having to chop wood all day, serve a similar purpose in that of shared privation, which is a term you hear in a military context. And that is a group of boys going through some form of suffering together. And it does seem to activate something in the male psyche that is hard to access otherwise. One of my most memorable experiences when I was 20, I was just come back from the Sierra Nevada with the Mamos. And Tim was going back to Harvard to get his degree, and I had a month off until he was going to return. And I ran into this crazy Englishman who had walked from the tip of South America, and he was walking to Alaska. And he was sending

Starting point is 01:31:22 these dispatches to his newspaper, the London Sunday Observer. And I'm not sure what he wrote, because in 18 months of walking, he hadn't learned a word of Spanish. But anyway, he hired me to guide him through the Darien Gap, the only stretch of this trip that had no road. And he didn't care that I knew nothing about the area. That was great, because he kind of cultivated misadventures as fodder for his books. And in the course of that journey, it was incredible. During the rainy season, walking in swamps up to the neck for days at a time. At one point, we got lost in the jungle with three Kuna Indians for 12 days with no food. I was down to 146 pounds.

Starting point is 01:32:08 At one point, Sebastian was down to 120. We had to carry the other Indian lad. And at one point, when we were at the wit's end, I just said, we got to go. And I took the gun, and I walked up this trail, and I ran right into a black jaguar. And, you know, if you ever run into a jaguar, they've got these yellow eyes. They don't look at you. They look through you. You feel like you've been x-rayed.

Starting point is 01:32:31 I just looked at that incredibly beautiful creature, and then it leapt off the road. And I thought we had two weeks to walk to get to rescue, but we found our way to the end of the road that day. And it was just like a miracle. And at the end of this extraordinary misadventure, I got off the plane in Panama City. I had flown out in this cramped Cessna. The girl beside me had puked on me. Her mother turned around to console the daughter. She puked on me. I only had the rotten clothes on my back, $3 to my name, and one bottle of beer this engineer had given me. I arrived in Panama City with nothing more than that and no plans whatsoever, but I had never felt more alive.

Starting point is 01:33:13 I had been on my own hero's journey and I had survived and that would be etched into my character. You know, if I could do that, I could do anything. This may seem, well, it's not random because you prompted it in a way. So black jaguars are not common as far as I know. What did the Kuna Indians make of that black jaguar? They didn't see it. I was way ahead of them. I'm just wondering, even if you told them, if that carried any special significance? Oh, they would see that as, oh, for sure. I mean, nothing is accidental when it comes to that. You know, when you're with peoples like the Barasana and the Makuna, you know,

Starting point is 01:33:50 their most profound cultural insight, one might say, is their conviction that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality. So if you even, you know, their hunting myths become kind of a land management plan dictating how people can live in the forest. So the shaman, he's not just a priest or a physician, he's kind of like a nuclear engineer who goes to the heart of the reactor to reprogram the world. So there's a constant dialogue between human beings and the natural world. So no event has a life of its own. I do want to at some point, and I'm saying this to remind myself and maybe remind you to remind me about getting better at writing and teaching yourself to write on multiple levels. We'll get to that. But since you brought up the people in other dimensions effectively manifesting as plants and animals, I'd like to discuss, it doesn't have to be brief. We have as much time as we want. But the different origin

Starting point is 01:34:45 stories of this brew called ayahuasca, which exists in many different iterations used by many, many different tribal groups and cultures at this point, and churches, also syncretic religions at this point. But I'm wondering how you would explain the development of this particular combination of plants. And the reason I ask is that I've heard many different explanations for this. So one is just trial and error over a very long period of time. Another, on the opposite end of the spectrum, would be the plants told us. And I'm wondering how you would explain the arrival at this combination of, say, vine and chakru, a DMT-containing plant.

Starting point is 01:35:36 Well, first of all, you know, one thing I mentioned about ayahuasca or yagé is that the idea we often have of it as we, you know, go down to Iquito, Supu Calpa, the healers of the Shipibo, you know, as if it's sort of a quest for personal liberation, personal well-being, that's always been there in the traditional use of hallucinogens in South America, you know, the traditional syncretic cult of the Cactus of the Four Winds and the curanderos who use San Pedro cactus on the coast. And certainly the popularization of ayahuasca began with the Yahé letters between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

Starting point is 01:36:17 And it was Burroughs who turned up in Bogota, goes to the herbarium, meets who he calls Doc Schindler, who is Schultes, and Schultes sends him off and eventually gets him ayahuasca in Mocoa. And on that road between Sibandoy and Mocoa in the Upper Putamayo, when I was there in the 1970s, there were already individual healers sort of working with the gringo trade, but also working with individual campesinos. And of course, in all of these healing practices, the idea is that the imbalance of the individual is treated through the medicine, and whether the imbalance is caused by bad health, poor finances, personal problems, whatever, it's a balance, a source that one gets to. But I

Starting point is 01:37:06 mentioned that only to stress that it is completely a different situation when you get into the heart of the Northwest Amazon, where presumably these plants were originated, these preparations. So, for example, one of the powerful themes that is somewhat like what the Kogi do, this idea that human beings aren't the problem, we're the solution, because only through the human imagination can the wonder of the natural world become manifest, that we are the ones who have to maintain the energetic flows of the universe. We have this proactive role to play. Well, in the Northwest Amazon, it's very much that way. I mean, the main origin myth that in one way or another is shared by multiple cultures speaks of a great journey from the East up the Milk River in sacred canoes

Starting point is 01:37:59 dragged by anaconda. And in the canoes are all the hierarchy, the chiefs, the wisdom keeper, the dancers, the warriors, the slaves, and also the three vital plants, coca, yaje, and tobacco. And these are brought up the Milk River, and originally they were brought up by the Iowa, the Four Thunders, these mythological culture heroes, and they encountered a world of total devastation. And they turned that world upside down and brought order to it by destroying the negative forces. So this idea that humans are responsible for the equilibrium. And then the Iowas went up and became the stars, and then the great mother Romikumu brought the people up, and the people settled each river. Because each river was settled by a unique canoe, each language group are related to each other.

Starting point is 01:38:54 You can't marry within your language, so one of the extraordinary things in Northwest Amazon is linguistic exogamy. When you marry, you must marry someone who speaks a different language. But the use of ayahuasca is not individualistic, it's collective. linguistic exogamy. When you marry, you must marry someone who speaks a different language. But the use of ayahuasca is not individualistic. It's collective. At these great ceremonies that go on for two and three days, where the individuals, the men, all the people are there, but only men take yagé, they go through two different kinds of ritual paraphernalia, featherwork, by day, by night, and they literally, by taking ayahuasca, don't become symbols of the ancestors. They become the ancestors, and they fly away to all the sacred sites to pay homage to the natural world, to maintain the harmonic balance.

Starting point is 01:39:48 So the critical thing here is that the use of the plant preparation has nothing to do with any individual's well-being, but rather becomes a prayer ceremony for the collective well-being and survival of the culture. And it becomes a mediator to the divine. And so the kinds of things you see in the kind of gringo ayahuasca business around Akitos is not traditional in that sense. Now, as to how this knowledge was discovered, I mean, there are a couple possibilities. First of all, there is a species of Malpighiaceus vine, Diploteris cabreta, which looks very much like Yahé and does have DMT in it. So maybe they saw that, then they saw the opposite leaves, they saw the psychotria, coffee plant, opposite leaves.

Starting point is 01:40:45 Clearly, there's experimentation going on. But it's not just with ayahuasca. Take something like karari. The remarkable thing about karari, it's a muscle relaxant. But to affect the muscles, it has to get into the blood. You can drink as much karari as you want, and if you don't have some kind of wound in your stomach, you'll be fine. How do you rationally explain that process of elaboration, you know? And you mentioned trial and error. Well, I think statistically that is just click exposed as a meaningless euphemism. Now, I mentioned that story about Schultes saying the Siona Sequoia and the 17 varieties sing to you in a different key. Well, whatever that really means, when the people say the plants teach us, I'm quite prepared at this point in my

Starting point is 01:41:33 life to take them at their word. And the reason I say that is that these men, largely men, also women, but in terms of ayahuasca, these aren't sort of random characters. These are true natural philosophers who understand that flora in ways that few scientists could ever aspire to do. They have spent their lives in wisdom traditions, lineages that have been taking all of this common genius that I keep talking about, we all share as human beings, and applying it to that challenge. I mean, just jumping away for a second, you know, when you go to Australia, you realize that the entire purpose of life is not to change the world, but to do the rituals to keep the world just as it was. Well, imagine how much would be learned if the people of New York City had spent all of their existence putting all of their energy and capacity into

Starting point is 01:42:31 understanding the biological relationships of Central Park. I mean, it'd be incredible, right? So when we say the plants teach us, I'm not sure what that means. I don't quite know how it would become operative, but I do know, and I've had this experience myself taking any number of psychoactive substances, that you have insights that become almost challenging to believe in the wake of your experience. I never understood the glory of photosynthesis. I never appreciated the miracle of this verse of life, this idea that water can come together with carbon dioxide and create the air that we breathe and the food that we eat. I mean, that's a poetic verse every child should have to memorize, and no politician should ever be able to run for office if they can't recite

Starting point is 01:43:23 the formula of photosynthesis. But the point is, I remember I took, Tim and I discovered a new species of San Pedro cactus in 1974 in Bolivia, and we took a big walk of it on the eastern side of the Andes, and knowing that it was safe, and, you know, Tim, I mean, Schultes used to say Tim and I ate our way through South America. If anything back then had a chance to get us high, we would take it. I mean, we were crazy. We were kids. As Tim and I made ready to say goodbye to each other after over a year and a half traveling together, we took this extraordinary, Terrence would call heroic dose, of this new species we had found. And we were up for 48 hours. And at one point,

Starting point is 01:44:07 we just left the ground and we were like flying over the surface of the earth. And I looked down and I saw the Nazca lines, you know, and I became convinced that that explained how these guys conceive those monumental structures. But at that same experience, I saw Tim fly up like ichors to the sun and disappear, and I knew right then he was going to die, and he would be dead in short order, in fact, from AIDS. That's incredible. And for people who don't have the context, the Nazca lines, which I've seen from the air, are something to behold. So you see these huge depictions on the ground. Anthropomorphic figures that from the ground you can never make out. But from 10,000 feet, you see these perfectly etched forms of spiders and monkeys.

Starting point is 01:44:56 And also someone they refer to as E.T. because it looks bizarrely like our modern-day depictions of aliens. So go figure that one out. Question for you about the historic use of ayahuasca. Is it accurate to say, or let me rephrase the question, to what extent was ayahuasca or yagé predominantly used for, say, hunting or divination purposes versus healing purposes? Obviously, it depends on the setting, the culture, the moment in time. Certainly, all of these entheogens are used in the course of healing. I mean, the essence of the shamanic art of healing is the idea that disease is not caused by pathogens, but by an imbalance that has to be addressed. And to do so, the shaman must invoke some technique of ecstasy

Starting point is 01:45:45 to soar away on the wings of trance to get into these distant metaphysical realms where he or she can do their work of medical, magical, mystical rescue. So ayahuasca in that sense has always, I think, been associated with the healing arts. But again, in the context of periodic rituals and ceremonies, as I mentioned, like with the Barasana that we filmed, actually, the celebration of Kasaba woman, a kind of fertility ritual. There, it's a journey of the community. You know, the journey, the community comes together in ritual. I mean, this idea of communities coming together in ritual

Starting point is 01:46:21 doesn't have to involve these sacred plants. I mean, in the Andes, for example, in the community of Chinchera, once each year, Saracusco, the fastest young boy, is given the honor of becoming a woman. And he puts on the clothing of a sister, and he leads all able-bodied men on a run. But it's not your ordinary run. You start off at 11,500 feet, run 2,000 feet down to the base of the sacred mountain, and then you run to 16,000 feet, and then you drop down to the sacred valley and cross two more soaring Andean ridges. And you're running the boundaries of the community land, but the wonderful metaphor is that you

Starting point is 01:46:58 go into the mountain as an individual, but through sacrifice, which means in Latin to make sacred. From pure exhaustion, you merge into a single community that once again has expressed both its ownership, but also its obligations to the land. I did that race when I was 48 years old, the only outsider ever to do it. I trained six months with an African-American boxer in D.C. in a gym, and I only got through the day by chewing more coca leaves than anyone in the 5,000 year history of the plant. But it does help. I will say that of every remedy that was offered to me that I certainly tested when I was suffering from altitude sickness in South America, the only thing that fixed it and fixed it very quickly was coca leaf tea.

Starting point is 01:47:48 It was remarkable. It's a miracle. Well, I mean, coca, without diverting ourselves from ayahuasca, but I mean, the thing about coca, Tim, it's not just that coca is not cocaine. It's not just that, you know, it's been misunderstood or whatever. The real tragedy is that humanity as a whole has been robbed of the benefits of this incredible plant. You know, if you go back to the 19th century, when physicians were studying coca, heralding its virtues in a nonjudgmental context with open access to the leaves, time and again again they would be befuddled by its activity. They called it the stimulant that wasn't a stimulant. In other words, you would chew the

Starting point is 01:48:32 leaves and you felt nothing except the consequences of having done so. You suddenly felt a slight elevation of mood and the ability to concentrate and focus, perhaps a drop in appetite. But you had no sense of the kind of, you know, charge you get when even you drink a strong cup of coffee. And this, of course, is what makes the plant so perfect for our modern age. I mean, who wouldn't like to have access to a substance that gently elevated their mood, that was utterly benign, that had 5,000 years of safe use, that was a sacred plant, that allowed you to focus on your damn laptop without getting distracted to email, that allowed you to overcome that slight inertia that keeps you from writing that first sentence of your report. And then you suddenly discover at the end of the day,

Starting point is 01:49:25 you've been doing this so productively for eight hours, and you just go home, and you go to sleep, or you have your meal or whatever, with no side effects whatsoever. And you can do it again the next day and the next day and the next day. And before you know it, you see that your productivity, your well-being, your health has soared. People always say to me, you know, how on earth have you written 23 books? And I just wink. Ha ha ha. Oh, well, I'd love to open a bottle of wine and talk about that wink sometime.

Starting point is 01:49:59 Certainly, I would like to do some more writing myself. Let me come back to ayahuasca just for a moment, because you mentioned the trinity in many of these cultures of coca, yache, and tobacco. And I'm fascinated by tobacco. That's a longer story for maybe another time. But I have read, I think his name is, I'm probably mispronouncing this, but Johannes Wilbert in his book on tobacco. Oh, he was wonderful. Oh, good for you. He's a beautiful man. He just died. Yeah. He was another one of my great mentors. Oh, no kidding. All right. So tobacco is a whole separate chapter that I'd love to talk about for hours. But another trinity I've seen mentioned is cassava,

Starting point is 01:50:38 ayahuasca, and then palm for different reasons. I have read a number of papers, or at least one paper, I should say, that in the hunting context also mentioned use of ayahuasca or dosing of hunting dogs with ayahuasca. And I'm wondering if that can be explained simply by hyperdilation of the pupils, maybe better hunting at night, something along those lines, or if there's another explanation that the people doing it would offer. These things don't necessarily have a practical utility. Because someone feeds their dog either datura or ayahuasca doesn't imply the dog therefore must get some attribute from that dose. I mean, it could easily be a kind of a magical idea, you know, or, you know, a metaphysical idea, a transcendent idea. But, you know, there isn't

Starting point is 01:51:30 that separation between human beings and animals in that sense. A lot of that goes on in the Amazon. I mean, you mentioned Yucca. I mean, one of the fascinating things is that there are many female anthropologists today, but in the early years, it was obviously dominated by men. And in the Northwest Amazon in particular, there's a very clear division of labor. I would never say that women are subordinate. On the contrary, but there's a very clear division of labor. And for example, the gardens, the chakras, are very much the domain of the women. I once made a mistake in a longhouse saying in front of all the men to all the women, boy, I'd love you to take me to the garden and show me your cultivated plants. And everybody laughed their heads off,

Starting point is 01:52:13 because the gardens are also where you go to make love. So I'd essentially proposition every woman in the maloka, you know. But it does suggest that the realm of the woman is not readily accessible to men. I mean, I've often had people say to me, you know, all your books, it seems to be a man's world. Well, it's a man's world in the sense that I'm a man, but that doesn't mean I'm not respectful of the woman's sphere. with a barasana by two great ethnographers, Stephen Hugh Jones and his wife, Christine Hugh Jones. While Stephen was looking at the Yuripari cult and ayahuasca, and his book was published as The Palm and the Pleiades, Christine was hanging for all those years with the women.

Starting point is 01:52:55 And her book, From the Milk River, shows that the preparation of bitter manioc is wrapped in as much cosmology, as much significance as ayahuasca. I mean, if you think about it, in the Northwest Amazon, the main food is cassava, and cassava is made from bitter manioc or tapioca. And it's an incredibly elaborate process that the women have to do every day, transforming a poisonous root crop into the daily food of their children. And it's not surprising that the equipment and the process is absolutely celebrated in mythological terms. And that was Christine's great contribution of that book. So I will segue to the question on writing, because I selfishly also want to

Starting point is 01:53:46 know the answer, but I would like to spend a little bit more time on the sphere of psychedelics. With your experience of traveling over experientially after taking this new species of the San Pedro cactus, and then seeing your friend flying into the sun and having this realization. How do you explain these phenomena, those types of experiences, which seem to happen with some degree of regularity and shared visions, at least purportedly shared visions with ayahuasca and things of this time? Well, you know, I mean, I think this is why, you know, human beings in all places for all time have been fascinated by these entheogens because they really do reveal realms of ethereal wonder. And as you well know, in such a way that you almost are left

Starting point is 01:54:34 feeling that the world, lovely as it is, that we dwell in, in our ordinary consciousness, is almost like a crude facsimile of a realm that is beyond our imaginings at the other side of consciousness, if you want. And I think that, as I've always said, you know, I mentioned earlier these sort of great social transformations that can leave us, I think, hopeful. But when we look at the ingredients in the recipe that allowed for those social changes, there's one ingredient that we tend to expunge from the record, which is the fact that millions of us in that era, the 60s and 70s, took psychedelics. And, you know, I don't think I would think the way I think. I don't think I would write the way I write. I don't think I would understand cultural relativism as

Starting point is 01:55:25 I do. I don't think I would be drawn to nature as I am. I don't think I'd treat women the way I do, understand gay men and women, be as tolerant and open as I obviously am and have always been if I hadn't taken psychedelics. I mean, I always make this joke that our parents said, don't take these things, you'll never come back the same. And the poor parents didn't understand that was the entire point of the exercise. We didn't want to come back the same. We wanted to come back transformed. I mean, I think this was the key to my generation. You know, we all suffered from Baudelaire's malady, a horror of home. You know, we grew up in a world that we found to be problematic, or at least I did, in terms of our treatment of the environment, the

Starting point is 01:56:12 way we treated women, or the way we treated people of color, the way that gay men and women were treated, you know. And I went out looking for a more authentic life in a different world. And so there was almost no separation between my desire to know other cultures and other places, and knowing other realms of consciousness just went hand in hand with that, right? And I think, in a way, looking back, this sort of became the multiple elements of what was, in effect, my hero's journey. I set off with no plans except to be away for at least a year. I had enough money to stay with a budget of $3 a day. My only promise was that I was not going to come back to the United States until Richard Nixon was no longer president. And I waited them out.

Starting point is 01:57:05 I was gone 15 months. But looking back on those months, it was an absolute initiation. I came back a different person, which is, of course, what one wants to do when one travels. You have said that psychedelics were useful to you when you were young, but later on, more perhaps disorienting and less helpful. Do you still feel that way, if that's an accurate statement? Yeah, I think everybody, ever since Leary and Albert and Andy Weil began sharing this concept of set and setting, we've known that these substances kind of invoke, they're completely neutral. They create a kind of a

Starting point is 01:57:45 template upon which beliefs, expectations, one's set, and the setting of the experience can play roles. And I personally found, and I really believe in the kind of the Vedic notion of the stages of life. You know, you're a child, you're a young man, you become a householder, and then you are free to wander as a sadhu as you approach the end of your life. And I think one wants to try to be in sync with those stages, if you will. And when I was a young kid trying in high school to deconstruct the world around me, I love to smoke pot because we would just, you know, how it was, you're 15, 16, just laughing at the world and all the idiocies around you, you know. And similarly, you know, psychedelics opened my mind. I mean, these are powerful forces. Let's just remember that because of psychedelics,

Starting point is 01:58:40 the Beatles went from She Loves You to Tomorrow Never Knows in two years. Think about that, you know? And then what I found, Tim, is, to be honest with you, I lived such a crazy life. I mean, I didn't have a home. I owned nothing but artifacts and books. I was on the go constantly, you know? What I owned was in storage. The amount of travel, it was all exciting. But, you know, at the time, it was also very kind of confusing. You know, I was very ambitious to know what my destiny would be. I knew I didn't really want to be an academic. I love botany, but I wasn't going to be a botanist and so on. And jumping ahead, it was when I wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow that things clicked. I said, oh, that's what I am.

Starting point is 01:59:26 I can write. But, you know, there was a very powerful year for me where I was living in France after I'd finished The Serpent and the Rainbow, but before it had come out. And I was writing my PhD and living with a French girlfriend in a small village of 26 people in Provence in the Alps, the Low Alps. And I got a phone call in the night that my father had died. And I immediately came home to Canada. And that year, I can't remember the order that this happened, but I had a letter waiting for me from Gail. And in coming home from France, I walked out of a relationship of five years with this older French woman. Got home, there was a letter waiting from Gail, who is now my wife of 35 years.

Starting point is 02:00:19 Within a year, my father had died. I graduated from Harvard after 18 years of it being my home. I had met Gail. She was pregnant with the first child. My book had come out, and I had made a fortune. I bought a house with cash, and I was suddenly a father and a husband and living in British Columbia in a home and writing a book about Schultes having lost my father earlier in the year. All of that, also that year the Hollywood

Starting point is 02:00:45 movie came out based on the book. It was like the I Ching, my world turned over. And I found myself, once I became a father, you know, a whole different set of priorities. Now I had successfully built a world. I revered that world. I lived by that world. And I didn't really, at that critical time when I was a new husband, a new father, getting my career underway, establishing a reputation as a speaker, you know, living in this little house on a hill, writing this biography of Schultes that I had no idea whether it would be successful and become almost the cult book that it is. The point is that at that time, it was not the time to be blowing open my mind, right? On the contrary, right? It was a time to consolidate, to take all I had learned, all my vagabond dreams, dreams and pull them together as I kind of wove the fabric of my own individual life. And since then, you know, I've taken ayahuasca largely to sort of remember what it was like when I was riding one river, and I've taken a few other things. I could easily find myself experimenting once again, particularly as I get older and perhaps are approaching death.

Starting point is 02:02:07 It's one of the things that I think that the psychedelics are incredibly useful not to eliminate fear of death, but to help make it seem natural and normal, which it is. And I'm not here judging. I mean, I think, you know, if you look back, Leary, for example, or John Lennon, for that matter, I would argue took way too much LSD, whereas George Harrison and Ram Dass, famously, as they wrote, got the message and hung up. You know, in other words, I'm not sure how many times you need to take these substances to sort of learn what you're going to learn from them. Now, that's me. I mean, other people find these to be part of an ongoing journey and engagement. One of the things I do find interesting is how the gestalt on ayahuasca has changed. If you

Starting point is 02:03:02 would ask me, Tim, I first took ayahuasca in 1974. And if you had asked me then, which of all the plants that I was becoming familiar with would be the one that, you know, 45 years later would be in every hallway of America, I would never have said ayahuasca. I mean, you know, as Tim used to say, ayahuasca is about many things. Pleasant isn't one of them. And, you know, when you talk to the indigenous people, it's fascinating. You know, they use language like, you're the warrior confronting the horror. You know, you're nursing at the breast of Jaguar mother when she rips you from her tit and flings you into a pit of poisonous vipers. I mean, I once was with Randy Borman, and we took ayahuasca

Starting point is 02:03:46 with the kofan, and we had a very interesting kind of spontaneous session after the experience. And I was asking, you know, I said to these men I'd been through the journey with, I said, you know, I got to tell you, this stuff scares the hell out of me. And they all looked at me and said, of course it does. That's what it's supposed to do, you know? And so what I find interesting is that, you know, people of your generation and younger are all sort of reporting how kind of transcendent and blissful and wonderful ayahuasca was. I mean, the last time I took it, just to try to remember what it was like to write about it, I remember sort of clinging to my wife for about 24 hours. But anyway, I mean, this is all in the realm of set and setting. I do find that I prefer something like San Pedro cactus for the kind of visceral connection to the natural world. Yeah, I feel like not that dissimilar from your

Starting point is 02:04:45 description or the impetus behind the Wayfinders that not polemics, not politics, but storytelling is what you could use to drive a change in culture. I think that ayahuasca, maybe counterintuitively because of the just awful experiences that some people, many people will have, or challenging, let's just say, has all the ingredients for great storytelling. You have a group setting. You have, in most cases, at least in the United States, an imported exotic shaman who is running the show. You have shared privation in the form of vomiting and God knows what else. And you have just the perfect cocktail for word of mouth in so many ways. And I think for that reason, it has traveled and become so sexy in a sense, unlike say mushrooms that in the United States, these salaspe mushrooms are

Starting point is 02:05:40 taken in a very recreational setting, which would be very dissimilar from, say, the Mazatec traditional use. But that never made the hop. It never crossed the border. I always wonder if, you know, in the morning after taking ayahuasca, I always just feel happy to be alive. And I'm sometimes with these young people, whether it's just that, you know, they're so happy to just have gotten through it, you know. But anyway, it's a phenomenon. Yeah. I think there's also a selection bias for the highlight reels. It's much like if you're part of a religion, meaning I'm using religion in quotation marks, that is dietary focused, right? And if your hair starts falling out because you're following some weird diet, you don't want to confess that to the group because you'll be ostracized. So you just don't talk about how, oh, I felt destabilized for two

Starting point is 02:06:28 weeks, but you do tell them like, oh, I had this insight about my dad and things are so much better now. Anyway, I'll put that aside. Let's talk about writing. I really enjoy your writing. It is poetic. It has a very nuanced play of words and wordsmithing. And I've, in the course of doing research for this conversation, came across you mentioning on several occasions that you were forced to teach yourself to write well. And I'm most curious, and not necessarily why that was the case, but what the process looked like. How did you teach yourself to write well? It's good. I mean, a lot of aspiring writers out there. You know, I mean, I wasn't aware of myself having been anything like a writer in, say, high school.

Starting point is 02:07:12 I mean, I later looked back and was surprised to learn that I won the English prize, you know, and the history prize. And I did have a tremendous foundation in English grammar. You know, I went to a private school in Montreal in grade seven where we had to memorize like 120 sentence errors in English grammar, and literally we got whacked if we didn't know them. So that may sound silly, but grammar is the architecture of writing. I mean, if you don't understand basic grammar, you can never be a writer. And I have just an incredible intuitive understanding of the grammar of the English language because of that experience when I was young.

Starting point is 02:08:00 And what happened, you know, and I always kept journals when I was on the road. And I certainly was deeply impressed. And I had mentors like the poet Gary Snyder. I never went anywhere without one of Gary's volumes of poems in my backpack. Peter Mathewson, a number of writers that I really admired. And I was always drawn to the genre of travel books because that's sort of what I was doing, who I was. But what actually happened with the case of The Serpent and the Rainbow is, as I said earlier in the podcast, the zombie research was funded by Dr. Klein. They set up a dummy foundation called the International Psychiatric Research Foundation. And literally, at the beginning, if I needed $5,000, $10,000 by Wednesday, I just had to call New York by Monday night. And I never knew who was the benefactor, but it turned out to be a wonderful man, David Merrick, the Broadway producer, who at that time had just had a huge success on Broadway with 42nd Street.

Starting point is 02:09:07 And David had also done, obviously, a number of feature films. And he must have been hearing from Dr. Klein about My Misadventures. And he saw a film from the very start in this. Again, as I mentioned earlier, in an unbelievable 24 hours, Dr. Klein died during routine heart surgery, and Mr. Merrick had a debilitating stroke. So I literally went overnight from being flushed with support to having none. And I did apply to all the standard research sources, you know, various grant foundations, but they all take months and months to let you know whether you're going to get the money or not. And I had guided that British journalist through the Darien Gap. His name was Sebastian Snow, and he had written a really kind of dreadful book about his journey called

Starting point is 02:09:58 The Rucksack Man, and he actually lifted whole passages out of my diaries into his book, which actually was a fair exchange because it was the first time I saw my writing in print, albeit lifted from my journals. I was able to give him something worth saying because I spoke Spanish and was hanging with the Indians all the time. He knew nothing about where he was. He said if he spoke the Queen's English loud enough, they'd understand. He was just this complete eccentric guy. He went mad in Costa Rica, but that's a whole other story. But I thought, well, my God, if he could write a book, I can write a book. So that was an idea. He generously gave me the address of his literary agent in London. I walked off the street and said, I've got a couple of ideas. And this sort of Englishman looked down his nose,

Starting point is 02:10:45 as they often do to Canadians, you know, well, there might be something in that zombie thing. And before I knew it, you know, I dictated the story into a typewriter. What happened to me had it transcribed, typed by Ed Wilson's, Professor Wilson's wonderful, the late E.O. Wilson's secretary. And I had this big sort of 150-page thing, and I gave it in as a book proposal, got a contract for what then was an enormous amount of money for me, $35,000, spent it on some fun in Paris with a girlfriend, and then used the rest of it to finish the research. And then I had to actually write a book. And I wrote two chapters in Haiti. I had malaria and hepatitis at the same time, and I was really sick. And I wrote two chapters that I thought was the best thing since the Bible,

Starting point is 02:11:34 and I sent it to the editor, and he sort of sent it back to me and said, try again. Then I left the university, and a very dear friend of mine sort of plucked me out of Haiti and brought me to her beautiful farm in Virginia, and to both get well, but also to write the book. And I stayed there working in a slave cabin for seven months. And I, you know, I had a great story to tell. I had lived this story. I just had to find the way to tell it. So what I did, and no one gave me this idea, and I certainly had never taken a creative writing course. I mean, most creative writing courses are taught by people who are teaching creative writing courses because they can't write creatively. Otherwise, they'd be not doing that. They'd be writing books. But that may be a little harsh, but all of us lots of times have to get academic jobs. Don't get me wrong. But what I did is I just took all my favorite books. Hemingway, for example, for dialogue, No One's Better. Isaac Dinesen for

Starting point is 02:12:34 landscape. Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet. How do you evoke the exoticism of places as surreal as Haiti? Well, how about Alexandria in the 1940s? You know, Carpentier for mystical things. And this pile by my typewriter kept changing and so on, but it was always there. And I never obviously copied or plagiarized, but as I was trying to tell my story and I was stuck on how to do it, what language to use, I would just pick up any book randomly and read for a while.

Starting point is 02:13:12 And it was just weird, almost like by osmosis I would. And I was often writing at night. I had lots of coca and I was kind of in this kind of creative space. And again, you know, one thing that I think a lesson of all that is in the end, I wrote that book in seven months and it was edited in a single day and it came out and it sold 500,000 copies. Hold on, hold on, hold on. You say edited in a single day? Oh yeah. Almost no editing whatsoever. Oh, okay. I see. All right. I got it. Got it. Got it. What I mean by that is, I mean, I look, there's lots of different ways of writing,

Starting point is 02:13:44 you know, some people like to spit out a first draft, as they say, or, you know, just puke it onto the page. Well, I've just never understood how you could make something beautiful of puke. So I, to my detriment, perhaps, I'm a much more laborious writer. And I've never done a second draft of a book. I do that in a way as I'm going through. As I write a paragraph, I'm paying attention. I think writing is analogous to sculpture. You've got to pay attention. Like Barbara Tuchman, the great historian, had a little note above her typewriter, will they turn the page? And you have to create rhythms in every line. You have to

Starting point is 02:14:20 end every paragraph with something that's going to make the reader want, and it becomes unconscious, right? But at the same time, you're paying attention to the cadence of every word, at least I am. And that's when you talk about lyricism. And that was a skill I had to learn. In the early days, you know, it was very funny. My wife wouldn't bother to edit or look at anything I write anymore. We've been married too long. But in the early days, she was wonderful at not editing per se. She never added any words or deleted anything, but she had a little stamp that we called the puke meter. And if I had a passage where I, you know, went beyond lyricism to purple prose, she'd just stamp it, you know, a little face of someone throwing up. And that was really kind of wonderful because she was a great reader. And, you know, you can always go out on the lyrical edge, if you will, because you can always pull it back, but you can't bring spirit to dry prose,

Starting point is 02:15:16 you know? And it's interesting. I mean, like everything else, you get better and better the more you do it. Now I write bizarrely effortlessly. I mean, no one writes effortlessly. How many of you said anyone who says they write easily is either a bad writer or a liar? But I certainly don't. Also, I've never mistook activity for results because I've been self-employed most of my life, and I've never indulged writer's block. Can you imagine if a plumber came to your home, looked at you, and suddenly patted their brow and said, just can't do it today, I've got plumber's block? You call the bloody police, right? No, writing's a craft. You get up in the morning and you do it.

Starting point is 02:15:55 But one of the things that really was amazing to me, a real turning point in my life, having been raised in that kind of simple middle-class world where creativity happens to someone else. The Beatles are creative. Leonard Bernstein is creative, whatever. When I finally understood that creativity is not the motivation of action, it's a consequence of action. If you don't do, you can't create. So, you know, that insight and acting on that insight changed my life. I never sat around to wait for permission to write about any subject. People will say, oh, I can't write about World War I because I'm a botanist. No, you apply the same research skills that you use to write about the Haitian zombie

Starting point is 02:16:45 to understanding the essence of British culture in Edwardian England. In the same token, you can't be a photographer if you don't take pictures. You know, the way you become a better photographer is to take more and more images and to study the work of the masters. That's what I always would say to a young person. You know, if you want to write nonfiction, find the nonfiction that you think is the best going and pay attention. Don't just read it, study it. It's the same thing with music. When you listen to any of these great characters from Jimmy Page to the beloved and late Jeff Beck, just terrible

Starting point is 02:17:26 he passed away, they always talk about how they mind the work of every other blues player before them, you know, practice, practice, practice. I mean, Jerry Garcia never had a guitar out of his hands, nor did Hendrix. So you just have to do it and then ask. It's that classic idea, you know, do what needs to be done and only then ask whether it was permissible or possible. One of the things that I've found, Tim, about life is that at every single stage of life, there's someone telling you you shouldn't do something, and nobody wants you to change. In my case, it was, you're from Canada. What's wrong with the university? Why do you have to go to Harvard?

Starting point is 02:18:06 Wait a minute. You're supposed to be a lawyer. What's this anthropology thing? Wait a minute. What's this botany thing? We just came back from the Amazon. What's this voodoo thing? Wait a minute.

Starting point is 02:18:15 How can you go work in a logging camp? Your father just spent half his money sending you to this fancy school. Wait a minute. You've been in a logging camp. Why should you be a park ranger? Wait a minute. It's always like that. You cannot look behind you. I remember our mutual friend Mark Plotkin once told me, you know, in the early days, the problem with climbing up

Starting point is 02:18:36 the flagpole is that there's always somebody looking up your butt. By the way, that's a classic Mark kind of line. That is a classic Mark line. That is a very classic Mark line. I must say, Wade, this is an extremely enjoyable conversation for me. I'm taking a lot of notes. There are many other questions that I would love to ask, but I think I'll make it not so much dealer's choice, but guest's choice. So let me offer three options for sort of wrapping up, and then I would love to have you pick. So the first option, which is actually a question that Mark suggested, although I would

Starting point is 02:19:10 also love to know the answer, and that is why has Harvard not maintained their role as a leader in ethnobotany? So that's option one. Option two is you attended and spoke at Dennis McKenna's SPD 55 conference, and I've had Dennis on the podcast as well. What can you tell us about the current and future use of entheogens by Western societies? And then the last option, which just came to mind, because Kurt Vonnegut, I think, separates sort of the brain vomit first draft and then refine folks as swoopers. And then I think folks who operate more like yourself as plotters, I want to say, and I tend to write more similar to how you write, not to compare my writing to

Starting point is 02:19:51 yours, but I tend to rework and rework and rework, but that only works for me if I have a very reliable outline. So I was going to ask you about your outlining process when writing. I'd much rather talk about writing actually. Yeah, let's do it. If we do the third one. Yeah. Let's do it. If we do the third one. Yeah. Let's do it. I think all writers discover their own kind of methods, I mean, by definition. And what I do, and the strength of my books, and the way that some people might even call them too dense, is that they're incredibly deeply researched. You know, the book we haven't really talked about, Into the Silence, which actually won the prize for the top book in the English language, which was then called the Samuel

Starting point is 02:20:29 Johnson Prize, that took 12 years. And in that process, I bought 600 books with either myself or my research assistant. We visited 57 archives, multiple journeys to Tibet. I had the spiritual autobiography, the Namtar of Zathrumpusheh, translated from Rongbuk, translated by monks in Kathmandu. I spent weeks myself in the monastery established by his spiritual heir just to know what Rongbuk would have looked in 1921, and so on. So, just insane amounts of research. And then what I do is I go through all that material, and in the case, obviously, of the Everest book, you know, just files of original letters and reports, I mean, and then I create what I call work points. You know, I don't read the books.

Starting point is 02:21:26 I don't scan the books, skim the books. I think I'd say I mine the books. You know, I know, for example, that I want to deal at some point with how Edwardian women or women during the Great War dealt with the experience of death, right, as one example. Well, I know that in my head that's there. So as I go through all the material, I start constructing these work points. And that work point could be anything on a theme, you know, homosexuality in the 1920s, or the Buddhist science of minding. And the work points can become a huge number, right? But then everything I then subsequently source,

Starting point is 02:22:12 I know there's a work point sheet, a document to put it in. And so then that's how I distill all this research into a manageable set of sources. And when I write the book, I never go back, unless I specifically need to for one point or something, to the original sources. And at the same time, I find, Tim, and you might try this, that the act of doing that kind of unveils the outline of the book, you know, in ways. I don't think you can simply, I want to write a book on coca. Oh, here's going to be chapter one, chapter two. I mean, these book

Starting point is 02:22:52 proposals from publishers are so idiotic, because you can't really do that. You know, the book unveils itself. I mean, I'm sure you've had this experience. You think, oh my God, I've got to talk about this element of his life. It's going to be boring. I'll have to cover it in 10 pages. And you discover you can actually say all that you need to say in a paragraph. Or inversely, you discover, oh my God, Schultes, a perfect example of Schultes in One River, oh, I knew he was involved in this rubber crisis in World War II. Oh, it's going to be so boring, but I got to cover it. Turns out to be the most exciting part of his career and of the book, right? So the books have a way of unfolding like that. And I find, and I know some other writers don't, David McCulloch, the great writer. Incredible writer. Starts to write his books before he's even finished the

Starting point is 02:23:41 research, which I can't do. Yeah, I can't do that either. I feel it's like, you know, I have to have all the stuff before me before I begin to assemble it into the writing. And I don't think it's a slow process. I actually write very quickly. When you have your work points, do you organize them thematically into some type of order that you intend to follow as you piece those points into prose? Yes and no. I mean, you know, with the case of Into the Silence,

Starting point is 02:24:11 for example, I had to have one whole work point, as I call it, on just the pure chronology of the battles because I was dealing with all these men who fought all over the place. I had to just really know what happened at each battle. To give you an idea of this research, there were 26 men who went to Everest on those first expeditions, 21, 1922, 1924. Six of them missed the war. Sandy Irvin, too young. Longstaff, too old.

Starting point is 02:24:42 One a schoolteacher, another a diplomat. But 20 saw the worst of the fighting. And there were many other men. And I set out to find out where each one of those 21 men, it turned out to be, had been every single day of the four years and four months of the First World War. And I did it. That's an amazing task. You know, it might be fun, Tim, sometime when we're not just doing this podcast, if you're interested, we could get on call together for 10 minutes. I could literally show you some of

Starting point is 02:25:14 these work points. Oh, please. I would love that. I do with my graduate students. It's a really helpful way. And then you have things pop up, like, for example, that question of women relationship to the war. Well, you could write 10 pages about that and never achieve anything like a single line from Diana Manners, who said that by the end of 1916, every boy I'd ever danced with was dead. Right? And you're looking for those, you know. The other thing I call, Tim, is wow points. This is really important. If you're reading along, like I was reading Max Hastings, a great historian, I really love his books, and he wrote a book about the last year of the Pacific War and the overwhelming dominance of the Americans. And one of the statistics that

Starting point is 02:26:05 just blew my mind, and I'll give you this as a quiz. Okay. For every four pounds of equipment, food, gas, bullets, grenades, everything, per capita, the Japanese Empire of the Sun got to a frontline soldier per capita. How many pounds did we get? And across 13,000 kilometers of ocean. As an American, you're going to love this. I have no idea. I won't even hazard a guess. No, you got to guess. So give me the question one more time. For every four pounds of equipment, again capita you know not not and that means in for all the stuff they sent to the soldiers for everything from tokyo or wherever it came from for every four pounds the japanese got to a soldier how many pounds did america get to a

Starting point is 02:26:59 soldier okay i'm just gonna throw a number out there I might be overestimating. I'll say 40 pounds. Two tons. Okay. You see, so when I'm reading along like that, I go, wow, as you'd go, wow, and you file it away. And before you know it, you're writing a piece on Rolling Stone about the unreliving of America, and you want to speak about how extraordinarily powerful America was industrially in World War II, they come back to you. They come back to you. But the key thing I find, Tim, is if you're reading and something blows your mind, that's why I call it wow points, it's going to blow the mind of the reader. And you want to make sure that you find a way to get

Starting point is 02:27:42 all those wow points into your manuscript how do you file your wow points or just make these available in word document we're documents like yeah and like like the you know nancy manners i get that thing about everybody i danced with was dead well that would be filed away in women in the war got it you know be happy, you know, out of office hours kind of thing, you know, just when you got a moment and we might be able to pull them up and it's good exercise. Oh, I would love to do it. That's a very generous offer. My answer is yes. Well, the only way, it's the only way to kind of deal with the body of material. I mean, I mean, this whole wall of my office here is books that I bought for that one book.

Starting point is 02:28:25 Wow. Yes. So I would love to do that. That's a very generous offer. And you've been very generous with your time. I appreciate you being so game to go two and a half hours. I could go another two and a half hours, but maybe we'll save that for a round two if this torture wasn't too bad. It's been a lot of fun. And you asked at the very beginning, what you did is exactly what I was hoping you'd do. It was fun. It wasn't work. It was a conversation, my friend. Very kind of you.

Starting point is 02:28:51 Oh, I loved it. And I hope we get to meet in person. But before then, we can certainly have a phone call. I would love to see your work points and your flow. Is there anything you would like to mention, call attention to, any request of the audience you'd like to make before we attention to, any request of the audience you'd like to make before we come to a close? Not really. I mean, you know, it's nice that you can plug the Magdalena

Starting point is 02:29:11 book, you know, at the introduction, but other than that, that's fine. Unless there's something you want me to say. No, no, you've done more than enough. And I will just say thank you very much. And to everybody listening, we will link to all of the books, all of the references, many, many, if not, we will attempt to get all of the things that were mentioned in this conversation in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog.com. And wow, Wade Davis, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks to everybody for tuning in. my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends,

Starting point is 02:30:25 including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. ButcherBox makes it easy for you to get high quality, humanely raised meat that you can trust. They deliver delicious 100% grass fedfed, grass-finished beef, free-range organic chicken, heritage breed pork, and wild-caught seafood directly to your door.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #652: Famed Explorer Wade Davis

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