Transcript

#652: Famed Explorer Wade Davis — How to Become the Architect of Your Life, The Divine Leaf of Immortality, Rites of Passage, Voodoo Demystified, Optimism as the Purpose of Life, How to Be a Prolific Writer, Psychedelics, Monetizing the Creativity of Your Life, and More

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Encode Tim. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So then I also do those questions. Now it is seen. My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton.

No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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 of In cultures and ecosystems at risk. at the University of British Columbia. Between two thousand and twenty thirteen, 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 scientists, 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

six thousand botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies. I am 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 in 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 three hundred and seventy five or so scientific and popular articles and twenty three books, including One River, The Wayfinders, Into the Silence, and Magdalena. His photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in thirty-seven books and 130 magazines, including National 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 Wade DavisOfficial. He has more than forty 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. Yeah. 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.

If there is one story that you wish people would become familiar with or 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.

The Wayfinders was a book put together in a really wonderful tradition in Canada called the C B C 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 the

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 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 bought the book. But it's a great tradition, you know, Martin Luther King gave them I was the first anthropologist since Claude Louis Strauss. And the Wayfinders has a very conversational style, and I think that's one reason It's been quite successful and and particularly for college students. And the the basis of the book was really the mission that I had at the National Geographic. You know, I was um very fortunate to be recruited as the first class of what the Geographic was calling their explorers and residents, which It's 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 say generated science. And so the they recruited seven individuals. Jane Goodall Bob Ballard who found the Titanic, Sylvie the Earl, the great oceanographer, a host of incredible characters, Johan Reinhart, who the high altitude archaeologist who found the Ice Maiden, the perfectly preserved Inc and Mummy on Huliako. They recruited me as a cultural anthropologist and 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 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 seven thousand different voices of humanity. And all those answers kind of collectively become our human repertoire. And so we also wanted to

Draw people's attention to the kind of haunting fact that of those seven thousand languages spoken the day you Tim and I were born. By absolute academic consensus. Half are not being taught. 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, 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 I don't mean that in the spirit 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 continents sixty five thousand 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 is simply a matter of choice.

And cultural. Adaptation. So there is no hierarchy in culture. That old Victorian idea that you know we went from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized of 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 nineteenth century irrelevant to our lives today and as distant. From those lives of the idea of clergymen in that era.

Who believed the earth was only six thousand 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 you have to show you can't tell. Polemics are never persuasive. So the reason that book, The Way Funders, 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 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 revealed 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 uh name two hundred and fifty stars in the night sky. They they can sense the presence Of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon just by watching the reverberation of waves the hull of their sacred canoe, the Hokalea, this great vessel that is a symbol of this Polynesian Renaissance. In the darkness in the hull.

They can Distinguish. As many as five different sea swells again moving through the water, distinguishing those who across the ocean and can be followed with the ease with which uh

Terrestrial. Explorer would follow a river to the sea. And in 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 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 Function. And that's a great example to me. Of perhaps just a Fundamentally different.

way of viewing seafaring when you come from a western Blends. 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

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. And it was the impossibility of doing that. They kept most European transports hugging the shores of continents until the British solved the problem of longitude with the invention of the chronometer. But we know That ten centuries before Christ, from an ancient civilization called Lapita, The ancient

ancestors of the Polynesians set sail into the rising sun. And this idea of dead reckoning means and back to your navigator. Why he's not. running the ship. Because he 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 empirical observation and the order of their acquisition and if that memory chain is broken

the voyage can end in a 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.

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 catnapping, 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 sleep four hours. Or you know but many societies around the You know I 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 air of perpetual darkness. And summer the light is luminous. All day long.

And kind of it's not even appropriate to sleep. You kinda you know, cat nap with your dogs, but there's just too much to be done. Let's shift just a bit, or maybe entirely. To the Koge peoples of Northern Columbia, you are Deeply, deeply familiar and intimate with Columbia and its people. I had the opportunity through a mutual acquaintance, Doctor Mark Plotkin, to meet a Mammel 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 people's look like because I find them to stand out, at least for me, amongst the cultures I've been exposed to in a number of ways. Yeah, it's it's truly remarkable. They live in the Sierra Novara de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on earth that soars out of the Caribbean coastal plain

to about twenty thousand feet. There are four indigenous groups. The Kogi you mentioned the Wewa The Arawakos and the Canquamo. The Canquamo in the nineteenth century Kind of cut up. First deal with the greater Colombian society and in 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. 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 two hundred, if not three hundred years, and it's almost as if They had suffer 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. It was first reported in the nineteen forties by Reichel Domatov 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 eighteen years, during which time they

Absorb the religious beliefs of their society and it's their sincere conviction that those beliefs those rituals literally maintained the cosmic or we might say the ecological balance of the world. And according to Reichel After eighteen 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. At the age of eighteen or nineteen. 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 with an anthropology,'cause M 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 Otahuacos when I was a lad of nineteen and twenty. In fact when you mention you know, it's amazing I've now been close with them for almost fifty years. They in fact the Atahuacos call me their Mamo Occidental. the first time he ever visited Namasima Key and the Imamos had asked to be there to welcome him. And uh I hitched a ride in the presidential plane and and when we got to the community There's a kind of formal ceremony in which uh the president introduced his invitados, you know, his ministers and so on. He got around to me and he couldn't have been more generous with his praise and his kind words, but he was interrupted by one of the Mamos who said, You don't have to tell us about that guy. He's our ambassador in North America. So I have a very wonderful relationship.

But here's what was extraordinary. One wintry day in Washington. The Colombian ambassador, then Carolina Barco A good friend of mine turned up at my office at the Geographic With a political leader uh Danilo Viafania

And three mamos, one from each of the three Cultures. We were Koge and Are wakum. And

They w 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. 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 front of space of one of the chapters. I showed him the f And that was Danilo's father, Adalberto.

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 in 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 along on a journey to the heart of the world. And make a film about Yes. idea and the pilgrimage. And w the idea is very simple. You as you come out of the sacred temple

And what we discovered is They don't stay eighteen years in the darkness, but eighteen years In seclusion around the temple in a ritual diet, not seen 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 fark and we had to escape.

And turn our cameras over. to one of the Weewa uh lads that we had trained in cinematography and with incredible skill he finished those segments of the film so we actually had the entire pilgrimage document. 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. buy into the old Descartes 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 develop in the European tradition that has now become so dominant, so powerful, so ubiquitous, 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 or We owe our fidelity to the earth, and that's very much how the mammoth see.

The 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. Uh he said, you know, peace won't matter. And this is after fifty 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 to make peace with the entire natural world. And as we flew up to Value Du 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 kinda sheepishly put up my hand and I I said in Spanish, you know, President

Santos for the Mamos, 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 Mamma Camilo had said and and President Santos is an incredibly wonderful man, incorporated that and made that the kind of the the the theme of his speech that went out that day to the world. I was very struck by and and uh I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I'll just say struck by how Central. Pagamientos offerings and payments seem to be

to certainly the Mammals, but broadly speaking, the Koge 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

sort of in my radius a number of times. But what is Mambay? 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 eight thousand years, certainly five thousand years, and I should say that coke is to cocaine, but potatoes are to vodka.

And The two main Types of coca. One is Called Columbia.

Erythroxal novogranitensin. And the other is a classic coca of the southern Andes of Cusco and La Paz, that is Eerothroxman coca. Now In pre Columbian times, a variety of that was taken down the Amazon and Into the jungles of the Northwest Amazon.

And this variety which is known as erythrostlin coca variety epa do 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, the Barasan and Makuna, Tucano, Kubeo, Tikana, I mean there's scores of these extraordinary Cultures. Um 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 alkaline 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 Yarum. And then they pound the two together until you get a very fine powder, which becomes even more fine when sifted through palm fiber. It's a consistency of talk. And with Mambay then you take the Actual Coca with a bone like this. This is my Mambe bone right here.

And you put the wad onto your mouth and you L 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 erythroxum novogranitensi, variety novogranitensi, the coca of Columbia. And that coca was taken down the coast To Trujillo in the northern desert of Peru. And that became the preferred Coke of the Inca. It's got a little wintergreen in it. It's erythroxalin

Novergunitency variety. Trujancy. 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 Schulte's Mark's professor. In the seventies.

And we were charged to work out the botany, the ethnobotany The ethnography of Coca. And at that time we thought that the Coke of Columbia for classic botanical reasons was derived from The Coke of Pru, 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 Erethrostum Grasilipes, 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 cultures. And so this is the the richness of coca. Now The extraordinary thing. is that the efforts to eradicate coca fields began fifty years before there was a cocaine problem. In the nineteen twenties 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. And when they saw illiteracy, poor sanitation, One social pathology after the other, they had to find a cause. And because issues of economics, uh 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 blame Coca for every

Ill in the Andy's 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 nineteen seventies, Andrew Wilde, Tim Ploughman, Jim Duke at the US GA what we discovered horrified our backers of the DEA and the US government because it turns out that coca has a tiny amount of cocaine in it, absorbed benignly as a mild stimulant by the mucus membrane of the mouth, absolutely

Without harm The plant also has more Calcium than any 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. And we showed that this was a plant that have been used with no evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for at least five thousand

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 hundred and fifty thousand

Families in Columbia alone. That depend on Cultivating coca for their own. Survival. And also through taxes may just give Colombia

The revenue Несесері то пай кост піз. Having drained its treasury for fifty years. to pay the costs of a war only made possible by the sordid profits of prohibition. Yeah.

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 one hundred percent 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.

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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 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 Tourist Dramonium, if I'm pronouncing that right. And How you came across these two in combination because Datura, I think Datura Stromonium. Also known as Jimson Weed, if I'm not getting that. Correct. Group in my driveway.

In Texas. It's found in all sorts of places. T T X a little less so but could you just uh 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 Andes and the Amazon.

And I'd studied anthropology, but I never really understood The real message of anthropology until I went to Haiti and I'll explain that in a m 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.

And a close colleague of his at McGill University, Heinz Lehmann. had a former student Lamarque Duan. 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 Duon had been paying attention and investigating every case that came his way, and finally he discovered this remarkable Yeah.

Of a man called Clervius Narciss. 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 Narciss later walked into his village and in about nineteen eighty, eighty one, claiming to be the long lost brother. The family members had no doubt that

Uh, 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 that belonging to the sister of the deceased. There were a score of lines of evidence. That suggests that this man clearly had been misdiagnosed dead and somehow turned up in the realm of the living. In fact, Duillon 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 Laman and

Doctor Klein went public. Saying they felt they'd found the first zombie. Now that drew their attention to Reports of a faux 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 the country. But Duillon 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 un Damage.

Huge potential. Medical applications as Klein saw it. So they came to Harvard. Schultees 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 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 some to the state of apparent death so profound it could fool the physician, and yet the victim could survive.

And so I did what one does. I contacted a Sorcerer. Who was uh he had been described by the BBC. As the incarnation of evil. He was nothing of the sort. He he had a

Courthouse and a bunch of Dominican women. And he had been a junior member of the Tonton Ma Coup, 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 Tontama Co. The Tonton Makut, Tonton in Creole means uncle, Makut means shoulder bag. This was the nickname for the volunteers of for the national security The militia that was set up by Francois Duvalier In the wake of his presidential election in nineteen fifty seven and this is a pivotal part of the story.

Because Duvalier was the first president in a hundred years to say that voodoo was a legitimate religion. He had voodoo temples in the presidential palace. He wore the costume of Baron Samadi, 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 kinda It was kinda funny, I'll tell you about it. I wanna 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 was sort of heralded as the Pope of Voodoo, an amazing kind of conduit. for the outside world to understand voodoo and and again I should say right off the top

Tim, that we have this idea of voodoo from the movies. It 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 fine word from Dahomey or Benin that means spirit or God. It's just the distillation of very profound religious ideas. They came over during the era of slavery and then became Transform within the soil. of a new world. That's why you have Hudu in the Americ, cuminumble.

In Brazil OBIA and Jamaica and so on, Santaria in the DR and 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 eighteen. Oh four.

And at that time much of its population The slaves. had literally been born in Africa. So in many ways you can almost argue But Haiti is more Africa. Than Africa itself at this point. But at any rate

I saw Marcel and he made me the powder, 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 M4, the temple

I mentioned I was gonna try it on an enemy I had in the capital, I'd let it know. How it worked. And then with a deliberate piece of theater, Max Bevoir and I storm back a week later. and screamed and yelled at him that we had nearly gotten killed, that his powder was worthless, so he couldn't do a thing. And of course he then got furious and he went into the inner sanctum in the temple and came out with a bottle, a little vial, And he said, if you don't 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. And then all the Dominican girls started going, Bah, Bah, 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 in the clothesline. And then we went into the inner sanctum of 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, Pi calité blancillo.

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. It's part of it is it's not like macho, it's sort of saying it's actually a more subtle, more poetic, more beautiful thing. You know, Tim, how 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 there's somebody. And it seems so simple, but you'd be astonished how many people I encountered, particularly in Haiti, including Doctor Klein.

Wait. Whatsoever of hanging out with those folks. Just couldn't do it. 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 seven up tin cans. That was filled to the gunnels with human bones, all the ingredients in various forms. Bufo Marinus toad in my backpack, the biggest toad in the world, ten inches across, and I had no permits. Customs Dream.

Yeah, yeah. So You couldn't do this post nine eleven, but I went up to this customs agent And I guess well let's just see what he says. So I opened up this thing so only he could see it. And he slam it shut, Tim, and I'm not gonna give you exactly what he said 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 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 I analyzed the plants, took the reptiles to the herpetologists and all the various Creatures to the very specialist and I finally got around to the fish. And I went to City Ichthyologist in the basement of the 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. 'Cause 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 Doctor No. And at the one end of one of those two books, Double O seven gets kicked in the 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.

Tetratoxin. And that is what blew open the zombie study. T T X Tetratoxin. Right. Mm-hmm. Because tetratotoxin 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 narcissist They match perfectly the symptoms of victims of

Fugu fish poisoning. In Japan, the Fuga 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 after case after case of people nailed into their coffins by mistake. So this changed everything. This suggests

Without. That the sorcerers in Haiti Had found in their environment a natural product. That not only could make someone appear to be dead, but 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 Champuel, the secret societies that Fantom. 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 A state of purgatory that was in a sense worse than death. So

Just before we leave zombies. The whole purpose of this was Let's define 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 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 Define 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, and I'm sure we could have dozens more, but there's 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 States at least, related to people who attempt to DIY some type of trip from Datura. 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. 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 Solanace, the potato family, the family of choice of black magicians around the world. The tree daturas, the Bergmansias in South America are known as the Jaguars Intoxicant, the tree of the evil eagle. 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 and going back to the victims of tetrado toxication 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 fibre of their being that That they do. And Hier she knows why a zombie is made, a form of punishment. Within

The traditional. Culture. And so We don't know exactly. what might or might not occur. We know that tetralotoxin 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 Place behind uh

A shade or hidden from view, whatever. When they come out of the tetrato toxication, they know what's happened to them and they're in a state of incredible suggestibility and fear. And What the Doctura may serve. It's known as the con zombie, the zombie's cucumber.

And I was at least told by many informants. That at that point of disorientation The victim is given thatura Which must be an extraordinary horrific experience and one that would sort of seal the psychological conviction

That he or she had in fact 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 Ferris, as opposed to the soul that makes me Wade Davis. Not the soul that we both share. All sentient beans share, but the Soul that creates your personality. That's why a zombie appears comatose. So fear in Haiti is not of zombies, it's of becoming a zombie. So I once asked a voodoo priest, for example, if 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 the great emperor of the secret societies. He had been head of the Tontama Kut for a fifth of the country. I once asked her artist during the revolution. He had ever killed anybody. He said, I never killed any people, just enemies. Yeah.

Yeah. 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. 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 Buddh Mansia. and had some exposure to the Awa Jun or the Aguarunas who use it pretty extensively for not just uh dark purposes or power purposes, but for 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 Brugmancia seeds, which I think they called Burundanga. They would pulverise

And say someone with a map would walk up to a 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 was used in a in a similar fashion to increase suggestibility.

You're absolutely right. 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. I was once in San Agustin. With uh

Colombian. This a Australian kinda hippie guy, this is back in the early seventies. He spoke about how he ate a bunch of Tri Datura. In his hotel in on the coast. And ended up walking around the uh naked, the barrankia.

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 but I'll tell you in my book Magdalena about the the Great River of Colombia There's a story of my good friend William Vartigus who was on his way to university And these stories like you recounted are part of Travelers Lore in Columbia, but I had never met anyone who'd actually endure this, and someone on a bus Offered him.

A cake or cookie, which she 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 shaftered. 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 Shalte's I've had 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 Mabury 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 Maybur Lewis was my

Undergraduate tutor. He was one of the great Americanist. She Had Traveled into the heart.

of Brazil in the nineteen fifties. To live amongst the Shivante and before that the Shorente, who at the time were So the

Indigenous groups in Brazil. 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 liaison Conduit to the world. facilitating or amplifying their voices, bringing their concerns to the world. And that was something that I hadn't 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 Sultees. But Professor Schultz was a man of action and deed. And eighteen years of studying with him, I don't think 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 that 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 a wiser and a more complete human being. But Schultees was not a man of ideas. He was a botanist, that's what he was, a plant explorer. And I loved

Yeah. Largely because it provided the 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 the measure of a man. If you want to Engage the Priests in Haiti. You have to serve the law. 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 Malokan saying I'm here to study your sex life. If someone turned up at our door step like that, we'd call the police. But studying the plants makes so much sense to those for whom the plants А сон, а те сам там. 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 taught more Courses for David. than I did for Shultees.

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, you know. I always still use plants to inform much of my writing. But it was the

ethno part of ethnobotany that intrigued me. And in that sense All of my ideas that I have been exploring. through the thirteen years at the geographic, the decade as a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Everything traces back. To David. And I 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 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 that I had to get out. And I began A very young age. Jumping off cliffs. And as Terrenna always said, the great

lesson of life is that when you do that you don't land On rock you land on a featherbed. 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 Gitson elder who I recorded mythology with and hunted with for forty years. It could be an engineer who taught me How to understand the the 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. You know, a cab driver can have is 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 Schultees, like David Maybe Lewis, like Doctor 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 that 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 i in 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 It's not just how can I be you? It's 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. You know, how Can I make myself and the act of being alive my vocation, recognizing that any job one has is just a a passing thing, a kind of a filter through which to see 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 Schultees, you know, I'll tell you one wonderful story. The most famous botanical collections of Schulte's, and Mark would certainly confirm this, were between nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty three, when free of the rubber emergency he was Free to click medicinal plants.

Described The use of two thousand medicinal plants previously unknown to science. And with them on all those collections was a man called Isidoro Cabarera. Now when you do botany and you collect plants. The senior botanist name goes first. So Tim Ploughman and Wade Davis. Plowman and Davis. And that's how it you do it on the specimens. It's kind of a Formal thing.

But you never Or said. To put an indigenous helper. on the label as if he's an equal to you. But Schultz did.

And he met Isidoro when Isidoro's farm had been burned in the war. His parents had been m murdered. He had no food. He was absolutely nothing. And he'll 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 um Cali. And I said Professor I want you to think really carefully. I want you to remember the first moment you met Professor Schultees in the forest, in the Makarina. What was it like? 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. You know, and in class riddled Columbia at that time, for a Harvard professor To do that.

And it made that young man's life. Pull them out of misery. Gave him a career and a great gift to Colombia. What a story. And I I want to come back. Two

I suppose uh Frames and lenses for a moment. And also Jim. Whitakers. So for those who don't know, the first American to summon Ephrist, 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 think it's Maya Angelou, if I'm pronouncing her name correctly said that courage is the the mother virtue that unlocal virtues because at the 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 I wanna 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. 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 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 And

Given how many gifts we have. Surely pessimism does become something of an indulgence. You know, we're all we're all so caught in the present these days, 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.

So What's not to love about a world capable of such social Transformation. Genius, you know, just think about That moment on Christ Eve nineteen sixty eight.

When Apollo 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 earth rise. And in that incredible moment We suddenly saw the earth as it is, not this infinite horizon. But uh

Fragile Blue planet is 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 We'll 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 the revelations of genetics showing us Indisputably that race is a total fiction. Well that gotten into the zeitgeist yet, as the moonshot has, but it will. And I think that

We're living through Extroordinarily 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.

You know, it's 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. 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 gonna triumph over evil and we'll all somehow be dissolved in the rapture. Well ain't gonna happen. And

Famously in the Medieval times, if you ask the obvious question, if God's all powerful, why does he allow evil to exist? You are burned at the stake for heresy, right? But in the Indian tradition, the Vedic tradition, by contrast, when Lord Krishna was asked that very question, if God's all powerful, why does he allow evil to exist in universe? Lord Christian said to the disciple to thicken the plot. In other words, good and evil walk hand in hand. You're never gonna 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. 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 sixty nine years old as I am

Today That I had when I was twenty years old and marching against the war in Vietnam. 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

Westernized societies or many westernized societies and I would love for you to Describe a chapter in your life. Uh and I'm most certainly gonna butcher this pronunciation, but spotsy.

Did I get that right? Yes, but easy. Red goat. Mm-hmm. So could you explain what what that is? Before I jump into my perhaps uh uh story.

Rights 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, with it scarfication. 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 that Tura for two weeks. So that they would forget what it was to become boys to learn what it was to be a man. But the reason all these ordeals that you know so much about, vision quests, et cetera, 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 a It's with women who

Go through their own. Rituals which are always sort of timed to the first Minces or the first Period. Fertility.

Transforming a girl into A woman of potential Mother Or it's a Boy.

proving his manhood. Now this has become rather frowned 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. Idea of Proving ones not in a

Gratuitously much away 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 I've got very close friends in the Navy SEALs, and they all have a kind of a

calm confidence'cause they've been on what Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey the 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 Spatsy. Well you know, w I was living High Guai in Northwest British Columbia in the mid seventies and I was very much critical of industrial

Clear clear login. 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 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 willingness assessment on public relations in two four month seasons I saw twelve 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 w 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 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 m bought all his 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 that tap tap?

Oh Tap Taps is a local bus in Haiti. And uh 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 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 Create. I've got no money. And then he said Ki card Sayo and he started hassling me and I just wasn't in the mood. 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 he said then he said again, What kind of white are you? And then we had a big laugh and he said, Oh well I got a Nug. We got a big thing happening. I and I had broken down by chance right by a Bisangot Champouil

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 the dances are just voodoo dances, but then at midnight You hear the fit cash. The whip.

Crack and the conch trumpet, the symbol of the revolution, blow and then the order goes out Soldiers of the night change skins, so that the nuisance and everybody goes the hundreds of people. Go into the 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 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. 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 sugar cane.

alcohol, the base of the potomiton, 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, 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 love craft laughing.

And after that I couldn't go by that crossroads without getting flagged down. You know? And I became very friendly with that temple, actually. 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 you must have lit your fingers on fire with lighter fluid when you were a boy. I d I haven't. I mean maybe I should. I never never say never. You know, it's like you know, there're these moments and and I don't mean in any way,'cause I I keep saying it's empathy and love. It's not bravado.

I remember when I was fourteen, you know, my mother was a A modest, but determined Canadian woman, і she worked all year. as a secretary to raise enough money to let me join a group of kids, a language teacher was taken to Colombia. And I was really lucky because I I was uh billeted in the mountains and I never saw the other Canadian lads and many of them got what the Colombians call mamitas or homesickness and I felt like I just finally found home. I got drunk for the first time and kissed a girl I'm I was in heaven. But there was this real bully in the valley. I was fourteen and he was seventeen or eighteen. And he kinda terrorized even the bag, he terrorized all the kids. And one day he challenged me to what they would do is they 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. 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. You know, 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.

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 n 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, but between that person and the next outsider who will come along.

I'd like to Jump back to Rights of Passage for a second because I do feel like Young males. pay the price for the void of no rights of passage. And women too, but they do have that inbuilt, as you pointed out, right 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 you know, I had two girls and you know, when they

Each got their periods, 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 Talton country. And so Wally grew up and I was traveling a great deal for the National Geographic

The two or three months we would spend there every summer became kind of the well the family drank from for the rest of the year. And for those months they hung out with Tall Tan kids all the time. And so they they have this unbelievable kind of sense of the world. My daughter Speaks Arabic, one of them, you know, another.

I remember uh our house in Washington in particular was kind of the a grand central station. Everybody was free to crash there and you never knew who was gonna turn up. I I just had a friend call me who reminded me of the day he woke up there and found four Mongolians drinking vodka at six 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 Mohammad

A twerg. Massive guy was there for the Folklike Festival. So They didn't know he was staying there, and he comes up from the basement guest room in full ritual regalia, like 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 crispies 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? Uh yeah, my children. I'm here.

Ha ha. Ha ha ha. 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, th those the kind of initiation rights I I think for Boys in the American context and culture

It really Is great. Two 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 fifteen year old boy with all those hormonal 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 carrying 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, 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 is 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.

Uh people 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 see Idea of community it's something we really noticed him 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 I don't want to belabor this, but you know, in America

Universal health care is seen as socialist medicine, and health care 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 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, 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 That we have a list 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, but I think especially in that hormonal Tidal wave period. Let's just call it from whatever it might be, you know, thirteen to to eighteen and In addition to the transcendence of the self to a larger cause, say in a military context, it it strikes me that both the military and the physical exertion of say having to chop wood all day

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. most memorable experiences when I was twenty.

I was l just come back from the Sierra Nevada with the Mamos. And Tim was uh going back to Harvard to get his degree and I had a month off until he was gonna 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 these dispatches to his newspaper, the London Sunday Observer And I'm not sure what he wrote because in Eighteen walking he hadn't learned a word of Spanish. Ha.

But anyway he hired me. That had no road. And he didn't care that I knew nothing about the area. That was great,'cause he kinda cultivated misadventures as fodder for his

Books. And in the course of that journey we became it was incredible. Uh 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 Cuna Indians for twelve days with no food. I was down a hundred and forty six pounds at one point. Sebastian was down to one hundred and twenty. We had to carry the other Indian lad and at one point when we were at the wit's end, I just said, We gotta 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. They you feel like you've been x rayed. 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 y 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 cramp Sessna.

The girl beside me had puked on me. Her mother turned around to console the daughters she puked on me. I only had the rotten clothes on my back, three dollars 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 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 uh well. It's not random because you prompted it in a way. So black jaguars are not common, as far as I know. Uh what did the Kunna 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 they're they're nothing nothing is accidental when it comes to that. You know, when you're with people like the Badasan and Makuna, you know, they 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 that the shaman is he he's not just a priest or physician, he's kinda 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 r 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 uh in other dimensions effectively manifesting as plants and animals. I'd like to discuss

Doesn't have to be brief, we have as much time as we want, but The different origin stories. Uh 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. Uh and uh I'm wondering. How you would

explain the arrival at this combination of say vine and chuck DMT containing plant. Well, first of all, you know, one thing to mention about ayahuasca or Yah Is that the idea we often have of it as we, you know, go down to uh Equito, Supucalpa The healers of the Shipebo 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 the traditional syncretic cult of the cactus of the four winds and the curonderos who use San Pedro cactus. And certainly. The

popularization of ayahuasca began with the Yahe letters between William Burroughs and Alan Ginsburg, and it was Burroughs who turned up in Bogota Goes to the herbarium meets. who he calls Doc Schindler, who is Shultes, and Schultz sends him off and eventually gets him Ayahuasca in Makoa. And on that road between Sibandoi and Moko in the upper Putumile

When I was there in the nineteen seventies, there were already individual healers sort of Working with the gringo. Trade. But also

Working with individual composinos. And of course in all of these healing practices, the ideas that the imbalance of the individual is treated through the medicine and whether the imbalance is caused by bad health, poor finances, uh personal problems, whatever, it's a balance to source it. one gets to. But I mentioned it only to stress that it is completely a different situation.

When you get into the heart of the North West Amazon, where presumably These plants were originated, these preparations. So for example 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 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 North West Amazon it's very much that way. I mean the the 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. dragged by anaconda and in the canoes Or all the Hierarchy, the chiefs, the wisdom keeper, the dancers, the warriors, the slaves, and also the three vital plants Coca,

Ya hey. 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

But humans are responsible for the equilibrium. And then The Iowa's went up and became the stars and then The great mother Romikumu brought the people up and the people settled each river, and because each river was settled by a unique canoe, each language group are related to each other. 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. 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 Yay. They go through two different Kinds of ritual. Paraphernalia.

Feather work. 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 Two the natural world to maintain the harmonic balance. So the critical thing here is that the use of the Plant.

Preparation. has nothing to do with any individuals well being, but rather becomes a prayer ceremony for the collective well being and survival of the culture. And it becomes a mediator. Yeah.

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 couple possibilities. First of all, there is a species of Malpigacus Vine Diplotaris Cabrera. Which

It looks very much like Yah 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. Clearly there's experimentation going on. But it's not just with ayahuasca. Take something like

Karari. The remarkable thing about currari it's a muscle relaxant, but to affect the muscles, it has to get into the blood. You can drink as much currori as you want, and if you don't have a some kind of wound in your stomach You'll be fine. How do you rationally explain that process of elaboration, you know? And 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 Schulte saying the Siona Sequoia

And the seventeen 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 life to take them at their word. And the reason I say that is that These

Men. Largely men, also women, but But in terms of the 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, uh 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 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 no. How would become a 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. The formula of photosynthesis. But the point is I remember I took Tim and I discovered a new species of San Pedro cactus in nineteen seventy. Four Bolivia.

And we took a big walk of it on on a On the eastern side of the Andes and knowing that it was safe and Yeah, Tim I mean Schultz used to say Tim and I ate our way through South America. If anything back then had a chance to be h uh get us high we would take it. We're crazy. We're kids. As Tim and I

made ready to say goodbye to each other after over a year and a half travelling together We took this extraordinary parents would call heroic dose of uh this new species we had found and we were up for forty eight hours and at one point we just left the ground and we were like flying over the surface of the earth and I looked down and I saw the Naska 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 Ickers to the sun and disappear. And I knew right then he was gonna die.

And he would be dead in in short order, in fact, for me. That's incredible. And for people who don't have the context, the Nasda lines, which I've seen from the air Or something to behold. So you see these these huge Depictions on the ground. But from ten thousand feet you see these Perfectly it's

Forms of spiders and monkeys. And also someone they refer to as E. T because it looks Bizarrely like our modern day depictions of 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 Yahe predominantly used for, say, hunting or divination purposes versus healing purposes?

Obviously it depends on the setting, the culture, the moment the time. Certainly. All of these Entheogens are used in the course of healing. I mean the 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 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 the with the Badasana. that we filmed actually the celebration of Cassaba woman, a kind of fertility ritual. There it's a journey of the community. You know the journey the community comes together. I mean this idea of communities coming together in ritual doesn't have to involve these sacred plants. I mean, in the Andes, for example, in the community of Chincher, once each year,

outside of Cusco, the fastest young boy is given the honor of becoming a woman, and he puts on the clothing of a w a sister And he leads all able bodied men on a run, but it's not your ordinary run. You start off at Eleven thousand five hundred feet, run two thousand feet down to the base of the sacred mountain, and then you run to sixteen thousand feet. And then you drop down to the sacred valley and cross two more Sorry and ridges.

And you're running the boundaries of the community land. But the wonderful metaphor is that you go into the mountain as an individual But thro 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 land. Now I did that race when I was forty eight 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 five thousand year history of the planet. But Yeah, that's it. It does help. I I 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. It was remarkable. It's it's a miracle. Well I mean Coca With a

Diverting ourselves from ayahuasca parents, 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 nineteenth century When physicians were Studying coca Heralding its virtues in a nonjudgmental context.

With open access to the leaves. Time and 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 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 five thousand 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 I shouldn't discover at the end of the day 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 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 twenty three books? And I just wink. Ha ha. Oh well, I'd love to open a bottle of wine and talk about that wig sometime. Uh certainly'cause I would like to do some more writing myself. Let me come back to ayahuasca just for a moment, because you mentioned the 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 and his book on tobacco. Oh, he was wonderful. Oh good view. He's a beautiful man. He just died. Yeah. He was another one of my great mentors.

Oh no kidding. All right, so so tobacco yeah, so tobacco is a is a whole separate chapter that I'd love to talk about for hours. But another trinity I've seen mentioned is Cassava, 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. You know, because someone feeds their dog either Datura Or um ayahuasca. Doesn't imply that. The dog therefore must get some attribute from that. I mean it could easily be a kind of a magical idea, you know, or you know a a metaphysical idea, a transcendent idea. But you know, there isn't that separation between human beings and animals in that in that sense.

A lot of that goes on in the Amazon. I mean, you you mentioned UCA. 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 Chaka's. Or very much of 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 because the gardens are also where you go to make love. So it essentially proposition every woman in the Maloka, you know but it does suggest that the realm of the w woman is not readily accessible. 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 man, but that doesn't mean that I'm not respectful of the woman's sphere. And one of the exciting studies that was done with a Badasana By two great ethnographers, Stephen Hugh Jones and his wife Christine Hugh Jones. While Stephen was looking at the Uri Pari cult and ayahuasca, and his book was published as a palm in the Pleiades, Christine was hanging for all those years with the women. 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 North West 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 the children. And it's not Surprising that. The equipment and the process is absolutely Celebrated in mythical

Terms. And that's was Christine's great Contribution of that book. So we'll Segue to the question on writing because I selfishly also want to know the answer, but but I would like to spend a little bit more time on the the sphere of psychedelics with your experience of traveling over experientially

Yeah. 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 uh shared visions, at least purportedly shared visions with ayahuasca and things at this time? Well, you know, I mean I think this is why, you know, human beings in all places for all time I've been fascinated by these

Enthogens because they really Do reveal realms of ethereal wonder. And as you well know, in such a way that you almost are left feeling that the World Lovely as it is that we dwell in in our ordinary consciousness is almost like a crude facts simile of a realm that is beyond our imaginings a

the other side of consciousness, if you want. And I 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 hopefully. But w 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 sixties and seventies, Took psychedelics. And

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 I do. I don't think I would be drawn to nature as I am. I don't think I treat women the way I do. Understand gay. Men and women be as tolerant and open as I

Obviously a M and if Always been. If I hadn't taken psychedelics. I mean I always make this joke that her parents said, Don't take these things You'll never come back the same and they For

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 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, you know.

I set off. With no plans. Except to be away for at least a year. I had enough money to stay you know, with a budget of three dollars a day. My only

promise was that I was not gonna come back to the United States until Richard Nixon Was no longer president. And I waited them out. I was gone fifteen months. But looking back on those months It was an absolute Initiation.

I came back 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 Yeah, I think everybody ever since Leary and Albert and uh Andy Wil began. Sharing this concept of set and setting.

We've known that these substances kind of invoke uh they create a they're completely neutral. They create a kind of a a 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 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 were just how it was you're fifteen, sixteen, just laughing at the world and all the idiocies around you, you know. And and similarly, you know, psychedelics opened my mind. I mean it's these are powerful forces. Let's just remember that because of psychedelics, the Beatles went from she loves you Two tomorrow never knows in two years. Think about that, you know. Yeah. 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 own 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 gonna be a botanist and so on. And jumping ahead, it was when I wrote The Serpent of the Rainbow that things clicked. I said, Oh, that's what I am. 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 of the rainbow, but before it had come out. And I was writing my PhD in living uh with a French girlfriend In a small

Village of twenty six people in Provence and the Alps, the low Alps. And I got a phone call in the night. That my father died. And I immediately came home to

Canada. And that year I 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 thirty five years. Within a year

My father had died. I graduated from Harvard after eighteen years of it being my home I had met Gail, she was pregnant with her 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 Schulte's having lost my father earlier in the year. I mean all of that Also that year the Hollywood movie came out. Based on the book. It was like the I Ching, my world turned over and I

I found myself once I became a father. You know, a whole different set of Now I Had successfully built a world. I revered that world. I lived

Yeah. And I didn't really at that critical time when I was A nu 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 Schulte's 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. І вас за тайме консолидайте, так лен. All my vagabond dreams and pull them together As I kind of wove the fabric.

Um 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 writing one river.

And I've taken a few other things. I could easily find myself Experimenting once again as uh particularly as I get older and perhaps are Approaching death. It's one of the things that I think that these psychedelics are incredibly useful not to Eliminate fear of death, but uh.

Help make it seem Natural, normal, um 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

L S T. Whereas George Harrison and Ramdas uh famously as a Wrote Got the message and hung up. You know, in our in other words I'm not sure how many times you need

To take These substances to sort of learn. What you're gonna learn from them. 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 had asked me, Tim I first took ayahuasca in nineteen seventy four. 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, forty five 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 They use language like You're the warrior confronting the horror. You know, those you know, you're nursing at the breast of Jaguar. Mother when she rips you from her kit and flings you into a pit of poisonous vipers. I mean I know this was with Randy Borman, we took ayahuasca 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

Been through the Journey with I said, you know. I gotta tell ya, 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 of your generation and younger Are all sort of reporting how kind of Transcendent and blissful and Wonderful ayahuasca. 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 twenty four hours. Yeah. But anyway, I mean this is all in the realm of set and setting. I I do find that I prefer something like San Pedro cactus.

for the kind of visceral connection to the natural world. Yeah, I th I feel like not that dissimilar from your 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

Mm-hmm. just awful experiences that some people many people will have or challenging, let's just say. Has all the ingredients for sh 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.

It's 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 philosophy mushrooms are taken in a very recreational setting, which would be very dissimilar from, say, the Mazatec Traditional use. But that never made the hop. It me it never crossed the border. I always wonder if you know, w in the morning after taking ayahuasca I always just feel happy to be alive and I'm sometimes with these with these with these young people where they're just that you know, they're they're so happy just have gotten through it, you know. But uh anyway, it's 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 and 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 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 a writer in, say, high school. I mean I I later looked back and was surprised to learn that I won the English prize, you know, and the and the history prize. And I did have A tremendous foundation in English grammar. You know, I I went to a a private school in Montreal in grade seven where we had to

memorize like the 120 sentence errors in English grammar and literally we got whacked if we didn't know them. So That may sound silly but No grammar is the architecture of writing. I mean i if you don't Understand basic grammar.

You can never be a writer. And I have uh Just a incredible Intuitive. Understanding of the grammar of the English language because of that experience when I was young.

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 Matheson, a number of writers that I really admired. And

I was always drawn to the genre of travel. Fox. Because that's sort of what I was doing, who I was. But what actually happened with the case of the

The serpent of the rainbow. Is as I said earlier in the podcast, the zombie research was funded by Doctor Klein. They set up a dummy foundation called the International Psychiatric Research Foundation. And literally at the beginning If I needed five thousand, ten thousand dollars 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. And David had also done uh obviously a number of feature films and he Must have been hearing from

Doctor Klein about my misadventures and he saw a film from the very start in this. Again, as I mentioned earlier. Yeah. Unbelievable. twenty four hours doctor Klein died during routine heart surgery and Mr. Merrick had a debilitating stroke. So I literally went overnight

From being flush with support to having none. And I did apply to all the standard research sources, you know, various grants, foundations. But they all take months and months to let you know whether you're gonna Get the money or not. I had guided that British journalist through the Darien Gap. His name was Sebastian Snow, and And he had written a really kind of dreadful book about his

Journey called the Rucksuck 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 he was just this complete eccentric guy. He went mad. In Costa Rica, but that's a whole nother 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 of Got a couple of ideas and This sort of Englishman look down his nose as they often do to Canadians, you know, Well there might be something in that zombie thing. And before I I knew it, you know, I I I I dictated the the story into a typewriter what happened to me.

Had it transcribe type by Ed Wilson's uh Professor Wilson's look wonderful. The late. Eo Wilson's secretary. And I had this big sort of hundred and fifty page And I

Gave it in as a book proposal, got it. Contract for what then was a Enormous amount of money for me, thirty five thousand dollars. Spending on some fun in Paris with a girlfriend. And then

Use 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 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.

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 didn't uh 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 Looks. Hemingway, for example, for dialogue. No one's better.

Isaac Dinnison for landscape, Lawrence Durell in the Alexandria Quartet. How do you evoke the exoticism of a place as surreal as Haiti? Well, how about Alexandria in the nineteen forties? You know, Carpentier for v for mystical thing. And this pile by my typewriter You know kept changing and 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 struck and how did Do it.

I would just pick up Any book randomly. And read for a while. And it was just weird, almost like a biosmosis I would And I was

Often writing at night I had Lots of coca. And it 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 five hundred thousand dollars. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Do you say edit it 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. You know, some people like to spit out a first draft as they say, or you know, or 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. I do that in a way as I'm going through, you know, as I write a Paragraph. I'm paying attention. I think writing is analogous to sculpture. You know, you're you gotta pay attention Barbara Tuchman the great historian had a

Little note above her typewriter, will they turn the page, you know? And you have to create rhythms in every line. You have to end every paragraph with something that's gonna 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 i i 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 uh 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 just stamped it, you know, to the face of someone throwing up and that was really kinda wonderful'cause 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, you know. So 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 I mean no one writes effortlessly. I mean we 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 to call the bloody police, right? No, writing's a crack. You get up in the morning and you do it. 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. You know, the Beatles are creative, you know, the 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 One because I'm a botanist. No, you apply the same research skills that you Use to write about the Haitian zombie. to understand 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'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, I just Terrible he passed away, and

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 of you know, do what needs to be done. And only then ask whether it was permissible.

One of the things that I've found him 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 of Why do you have to go to Harvard? Wait a minute. You're supposed to be a lawyer. What's this anthropology thing? Wait a minute, you and Anthrop what's this botany thing? Well you just came back from the Amazon, what's this Voodoo thing? Wait a minute, how can you work in a logging camp? Your father just spent a 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? You know

Wait a minute, you it's always like that. You cannot look at Behind you, I I remember our mutual friend Mark Clark and Once told me, you know, in the early days

The problem with climbing up The flagpole is that it 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 you. I'm taking a lot of notes. There are many other questions that I would love to ask, but I I think I'll

I'll make it not so much dealers choice. But guest's choice. So let me offer three options first, 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 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 fifty five conference. And I've had Dennis on the 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 Kir Vonnegut, I think.

Separate sort of the brain vomit first draft and then refine folks as swoopers and then I think folks who operate more like yourself as as plotters, I wanna say. And I tend to write more similar to how you write, not to compare my writing to yours, but I tend to rework and rework and rework. But that only works for me if I have a very reliable outline. So m I was gonna ask you about your outlining process when writing. I'd much rather talk about writing, actually. Yeah, 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

Is that they're incredibly Deeply researched. Into the silence, which actually won the prize for the top book in the English language, the uh which was then called the Samuel Johnson Prize. That took twelve. And

In that process I Bought six hundred books. With Either myself or my research assistant. We visited fifty seven archives.

Multiple journeys to Tibet I had the Spiritual autobiography, the Namtar of Zatarimpushe translated from wrongbook translated by monks and Katmandu. I I spent weeks myself in the monastery established by his spiritual heir just to know what Rongbook would have looked like In nineteen.

twenty one 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 I don't scan the books. Skim the books. I think I'd say I mind the books.

You know, I know for example that I want to Deal at some point. With how Edward 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 I 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 nineteen twenties or The Buddha science minding and the work points can can become A huge number, right? But then

Everything I then subsequently source 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. 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 in in ways I don't think you can simply I want to write a book on coca.

Oh, here it's gonna be chapter one, chapter two. I mean it's these book 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 gonna be boring. I'll have to cover it in ten pages and you discover you can actually say all that you need to say in a paragraph. Or inversely you discover Oh my God, Schulties perfect example of Schulties in one river. Oh, I knew he was involved in this rubber crisis in World War Two. Oh, it's gonna be so boring, but I gotta 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. Mm-hmm. Starts to write his books before he's even finished the research, which I can't do. Yeah, I can't do that either. I have to have all the

All the stuff before me before I begin to assemble it into the 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, i with the case of Into the Silence, for example, I had to have one Hm.

Work. Point as I call it. On just the pure chronology of the battles'cause I was dealing with All these men who fought all over the place. I had to just really know what happened at each battle. There were twenty six men Who went to Everest.

On those first expeditions twenty one, nineteen twenty two, nineteen twenty four. Six of them miss the war. Sandy Irvin too young. Long staff too old. One a school teacher, another a diplomat, but twenty saw the worst of the fighting. And there were many other men.

And I set out to find out where each one of those twenty One minute 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 a that's an amazing test.

We could get on a call together for ten minutes. I could literally show you some of these work points. Oh please. I would love that. I do with my graduate students. I it's it's a really Helpful way. And then you

You know, you have things pop up, like for example, that the question of women relationship to the war. Well you could write a ten pages about that and never Achieve anything like A single line. from Diana Manners who said that by the end of nineteen sixteen every boy I had ever danced with was dead.

Mm-hmm. Right. And you're looking for those, you know. The other thing I call it, 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

About the 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 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 the Sun got to a frontline soldier per capita. How many pounds did we get? And across thirteen thousand kilometers of ocean.

As an American, you're gonna love this. I have no idea. I won't even hazard a guess. No, yeah, got mine, you gotta guess. So give me the question one more time. For every four pounds of equipment per capita. You know, not not uh and that means in for all the stuff they sent to the soil. All the stuff. 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 soldier? Okay, I'm just gonna throw a number out there. I might be overestimating. I'll say forty 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 unraveling of America and you want to speak about How extraordinarily powerful America was industrially In World War Two

You know, they come back to you, they come back to you. Yeah. But the key thing I find him. Is if you're reading And something blows your mind. That's why I call it wow points.

It's gonna blow the mind of the reader. And you wanna make sure that you find a way to get all those wow points. Into your manuscript. How do you file your wow points or just make these available in Word document. 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. Mm-hmm. Got it. You know, yeah, I'd 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'em up and it it it's good exercise. I'd love to do it. That's a very generous offer.

My answer is yes. Well the only way it's the only way to kinda 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, you know? 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 if if this torture wasn't too bad. What you did is exactly what I was hoping you'd do. It was fine. It wasn't work, it was a conversation, my friend. Very kind of you. Oh, I 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. Mention, call attention to any request of the audience you'd like to make before we come to a close. Not really. I mean it you know, it it's nice that you can plug the Magdalena book at you know, at the introduction. But other than that, that's fine. I I unless there's something you want me to say. No, no, you've 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 Dotblog slash podcast.

And Wow. Way Davis, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks to everybody for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, 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.

Kinda 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, 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 slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog 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-fed, grass finished beef, free range organic chicken, heritage breed pork, and wild caught seafood directly to your door. For me, in the past few weeks, I've cooked a ton of their salmon, as well as two delicious barbecue rib racks in the oven. Super simple. They were the most delicious pork ribs I've ever prepared. My freezer is full of

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