YouSaid · the spoken record

Wade Davis

lines on the record: 148
first: 2023-01-27
most recent: 2023-01-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Not really. I mean, you know, it's nice that you can plug the Magdalena book at the introduction. But other than that, that's fine. Unless there's something you want me to say.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a lot of fun, and you asked at the very beginning what you did is exactly what I was hoping you'd do. It was fun. It wasn't work. It was a conversation, my friend. Very kind of you.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the only way, it's the only way to kind of deal with the body of material. I mean, this whole wall of my office here is books that I bought for that one book, you know?”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, 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 them up. And it's good exercise. I would love to.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Word document, Word documents. Like, yeah. And Nancy Manners, I get that thing about everybody I danced with was dead. Well, that would be filed away in women in the war.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is if you're reading and something blows your mind, that's why I call it wild points, it's going to blow the mind of the reader. And you want to make sure that you find a way to get all those wild points into your manuscript.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 II, they come back to you, they come back to you. But the key thing I find, Tim.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For every four pounds of equipment, food, gas, bullets, grenades, everything, per capita, the Japanese Empire of the Sun got to a frontline soldier per capita. How many pounds did we get? And across 13,000 kilometers of ocean. As an American, you're going to love this.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do if my graduate students, it's a really helpful way. And then you have things pop up. Like, for example, that question of women relationship to the war, well, you could write at 10 pages about that and never achieve anything like a single line from Diana Manners, who said that by the end of 1916, every boy I had ever danced with was dead. Right. And you're looking for those, you know. The other thing I call Tim is wow points. This is really important. If you're reading along, Like I was reading Max Hastings A Great Historian, I really love his books and 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.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it might be fun to him sometime when we're not just doing this kind of this podcast, if you're interested, we could get on call together for 10 minutes. I could show you some of these work points.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and no. I mean, you know, with the case of Into the Silence, for example, I had to have one whole work point, as I call it, on just the pure chronology of the battles, because I was dealing with all these men who fought all over the place. I had to just really know what happened at each battle. They gave you an idea of this research. There were 26 men who went to Everest on those first expeditions, 21, 1922, 1924. Six of them missed the war. Sandy Irvin too young, Longstaff too old, won a schoolteacher, another a diplomat, but 20 saw the worst of the fighting. And there were many other men. And I set out to find out where each one of those 21 men, it turned out to be, had been every single day of the four years and four months of the First World War. And I did it.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel it's like, you know, I have to have all the stuff before me before I begin to assemble it into the writing. And I don't think it's a slow process. I actually write very quickly.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chapter one chapter two. I mean, that'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...”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything on a theme, you know, homosexuality in the 1920s or the Buddhist science mind and the workplace can become a huge number, right? But then everything I then subsequently source, I know there's a workpoint sheet, a document to put it in. And so then that's how I distill all this research into a manageable set of sources. And when I write the book, I never go back unless I specifically need to for one point or something to the original sources. And at the same time, I find Tim, and you might try this, that the act of doing that kind of unveils the outline of the book, you know, in ways I don't think you can simply, I want to write a book on coca. Oh, here's going to be.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spiritual error just to know what wrong book would have looked like in 1921 and so on. So just insane amounts of research. And then what I do is I go through all that material and in the case obviously of the Everest book, you know, just files of original letters and reports. I mean, and then I create what I call workpoints. You know, I don't read the books. I don't scan the book, 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 Edwardian women or women during the Great War dealt with the experience of death, right? As one example. Well, I know that in my head, that's there. So as I go through all the material, I start constructing these work points. And that workpoint could be any...”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think all writers discover their own kind of methods. I mean, by definition. And what I do and the strength of my books and the way that some people might even call them too dense is that they're incredibly deeply researched. You know, the book we haven't really talked about into the silence, which actually won the prize for the top book in the English language, which was then called The Samuel Johnson Prize. That took 12 years. And in that process, I bought 600 books with either myself or my research assistant. We visited 57 archives, multiple journeys to Tibet. I had the spiritual autobiography of the Namtar of Zatsurin Poche translated from Rungbook, translated by monks in Kathmandu. I spent weeks myself in the monastery established by his”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's that classic idea, you know, do what needs to be done and only then ask whether it was permissible or possible. One of the things that I've found him about life is that at every single stage of life, there's someone telling you he 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. What's this botany thing? We 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 half his money sending you to this fancy school. Wait a minute. You've been in a logging camp. Why should you be a park ranger? Wait a minute. It's always like that. You cannot look behind you. I remember our mutual friend Mark Plotkin once told me, you know, in the early days the problem with climbing up the flagpole is that there's always”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 non-fiction that you think is the best going and pay attention don't just read it study it. It's the same thing with music. When you listen to any of these great characters from Jimmy Page to the beloved and late Jeff Beck, just terrible he passed away. They always talk about how they mind the work of every other blues player before them, you know, practice, practice, practice. I mean, Jerry Garcia never had a guitar out of his hands, nor did Hendrix. So you just have to do it.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I finally understood that creativity is not the motivation of action, it's a consequence of action. If you don't do, you can't create. So, you know, that insight and acting on that insight changed my life. I never sat around to wait for permission to write about any subject. People will say, oh, I can't write about World War I because I'm a botanist. No, you apply the same research skills that you use to write about the Haitian zombie to understanding the”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learn in the early days, you know, it was very funny. My wife wouldn't bother to edit or look at anything I write anymore. We've been married too long. But in the early days, she was wonderful at not editing per se. She never added any words or deleted anything, but she had a little stamp that we called the puke meter. And if I had a passage where I went beyond lyricism to purple prose, she'd just stamp it, you know, a little face of someone throwing up. And that was really kind of wonderful because she was a great reader. And, you know, you can always go out on the lyrical edge, if you will, because you can always pull it back, but you can't bring spirit to dry prose, you know? And it's interesting. I mean, like everything else, you get better and better the more you do it. Now I write bizarrely effortlessly. I mean, no one writes effortlessly. I mean, we said anyway says they write easily is either a bad writer.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I mean by that is, I mean, look, there's lots of different ways of writing. Some people like to spit out a first draft, as they say, or, you know, oh, just puke it onto the page. Well, I've just never understood how you can make something beautiful of puke. So to my detriment, perhaps, I'm a much more laborious writer. And I've never done a second draft of a book. I do that in a way as I'm going through, you know, as I write a paragraph, I'm paying attention. I think writing is analogous to sculpture. You got to pay attention like Barbara Tuckman, the great historian, had a little note above her typewriter. Will they turn the page? And you have to create rhythms in every line. You have to end every paragraph with something that's going to make the reader want. And it becomes unconscious, right? But at the same time, you're paying attention to the cadence of every word, at least I am. And that's when you talk about lyricism. And that was a skill I had.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lesson of all that is in the end I wrote that book in seven months and it was edited in the single day and it came out and it sold 500,000.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hemingway, for example, for dialogue no one's better Isaac Dinnison for landscape Lawrence Dorell in the Alexandria Quartet How do you evoke the exoticism of places surreal as Haiti? Well, how about Alexandria in the nineteen forties? You know, Carpentier for mystical thing and this pile by my typewriter kept changing and so on, but it was always there. And I never obviously copied or plagiarized. But as I was trying to tell my story and I was stuck on how to do it, what language to use, I would just pick up any book randomly and read for a while. And it was just weird, almost like by osmosis I would, and I was often writing at night. I had lots of coca and I was kind of in this kind of creative space. And again, you know, one thing that I think”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 as a slave cabin for seven months. And I, you know, I had a great story to tell. I had lived this story. I just had to find the way to tell it. So what I did, and no one gave me this idea. And I certainly had never taken a creative writing course. I mean, most creative writing courses are taught by people who are teaching creative writing courses because they can't write creatively. Otherwise, they'd be not doing that. They'd be writing books. But that may be a little harsh. But all of us lots of times have to get academic jobs, don't get me wrong. But what I did is I just took all my favorite books.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The story. But I thought, well, my God, if he could write a book, I can write a book. So that was an idea. He generously gave me the address of his literary agent in London. I walked off the street and said, I've got a couple of ideas and this sort of Englishman looked down his nose as they often do to Canadians. Well, there might be something in that zombie thing. And before I knew it, I dictated the story into a typewriter, what happened to me had it transcribed type by Ed Wilson's professor Wilson's wonderful, the late Yo Wilson secretary. And I had this big sort of 150 page thing and I gave it in as a book proposal, got a contract for what then was an enormous amount of money for me, $35,000. Spend it 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 chats.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I did apply to all the standard research sources, various grants foundations, but they all take months and months to let you know whether you're going to get the money or not. And I had guided that British journalist through the Darian Gap. His name was Sebastian Snow, and he had written a really kind of dreadful book about his journey called The Rucksuck Man. 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 them something worse saying because I spoke Spanish and was hanging with the Indians all the time. He didn't know nothing about where he was. He said, if he spoke the Queen's English loud enough, they'd understand. He was just this complete eccentric guy. He went mad in Costa Rica, but that's a whole nother.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's good. I mean, a lot of aspiring writers out there, you know, I mean, I wasn't aware of myself having been anything like a writer in, say, high school. I mean, I later looked back and was surprised to learn that I won the English prize, you know, and the history prize. And I did have a tremendous foundation in English grammar. You know, I went to a private school in Montreal in grade seven where we had to memorize like 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 if you don't understand basic grammar you can never be a writer and i have a just an incredible intuitive understanding of the grammar of the english Language because of that experience when I was young.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always wonder if, you know, in the morning after taking ayahuasca, I always just feel happy to be alive. And I'm sometimes with these young people, whether it's just, you know, they're so happy to have gotten through it, you know. But anyway, it's a phenomenon.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But anyway, I mean, this is all in the realm of set and setting. I do find that I prefer something like San Pedro Cactus for the kind of visceral connection to the natural world.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“confronting the horror, you know, those, you know, you're nursing at the breast of Jaguar mother when she rips you from her tit and flings you into a pit of poisonous vipers. I mean, I once was with Randy Borman and we took ayahuasca with the Kofan and we had a very interesting kind of spontaneous session after the experience and I was asking I said to these men I'd been through the journey with I said, you know, I got to tell you this stuff scares the hell out of me. And they all looked at me and said, of course it does. That's what it's supposed to do, you know? And so what I find interesting is that, you know, people of your generation and younger are all sort of reporting how kind of transcendent and blissful and wonderful ayahuasca was. I mean, the last time I took it, just to try to remember what it was like to write about it, I remember sort of clinging to my wife.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure how many times you need to take these substances to sort of learn what you're going to learn from them. Now that's me. I mean, other people find these to be part of an ongoing journey and engagement. One of the things I do find interesting is how the gestalt on ayahuasca has changed. If you had asked me, Tim, I first took ayahuasca in 1974. And if you had asked me then which of all the plants that I was becoming familiar with would be the one that, you know, 45 years later would be in every hallway of America, I would never have said ayahuasca. I mean, you know, as Tim used to say, ayahuasca is about many things. Pleasant isn't one of them. And, you know, when you talk to the indigenous people, it's fascinating. You know, they use language. Like, you're the warrior.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I kind of wove the fabric of my own individual life. And since then, you know, I've taken ayahuasca largely to sort of remember what it was like when I was riding one river and I've taken a few other things. I could easily find myself experimenting once again as particularly as I get older and perhaps are approaching death. That's one of the things that I think that these psychedelics are incredibly useful not to eliminate fear of death, but to help make it seem natural, normal, which it is. And I'm not here judging. I mean, I think, you know, if you look back, Leary, for example, or John Lennon for that matter, I would argue took way too much LSD, whereas George Harrison and Ramdas famously as they wrote, got the message and hung up, you know, in other words.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also that year, the Hollywood movie came out based on the book. It was like the Y Ching, my world turned over. And I found myself, once I became a father, you know, a whole different set of priorities. Now I had successfully built a world, I revered that world. I lived by that world. And I didn't really at that critical time when I was a new husband, a new father getting my career underway, establishing a reputation as a speaker, you know, living in this little house on a hill, writing this biography of Shulte's that I had no idea whether it would be successful and become almost a cult book that it is. The point is that at that time, it was not the time to be blowing open my mind. On the contrary, right? It was a time to consolidate, to take all I had learned, all my Vagabond dreams and pull them together”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After I had finished the serpent the rainbow, but before it had come out, and I was writing my PhD and living of the 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 had died. And I immediately came home to Canada. And that year, I can't remember the order that this happened, but I had a letter waiting for me from Gail. And in coming home from France, I walked out of a relationship of five years with this older French woman, got home there was a letter waiting from Gail, who is now my wife of thirty five years. Within a year my father had died from Harvard after eighteen years of it being my home. I had met Gail, she was pregnant with the first child. My book had come out and I”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“1516 just laughing at the world and all the idiocies around you, you know. And similarly, you know, psychedelics opened my mind. I mean, these are powerful forces. Let's just remember that because of psychedelics, the Beatles went from she loves you to tomorrow never knows in two years. Think about that, you know. And then what I found him 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 going to be a botanist and so on.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think everybody, ever since Leary and Albert and Andy Weil began sharing this concept of set and setting, we've known that these substances kind of invoke, they're completely neutral. They create kind of a template upon which beliefs, expectations ones 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're a child, you're a young man, you become a householder, and then you are free to wander as a sadhu as you approach the end of your life. And I think one wants to try to be in sync with those stages, if you will. And when I was a young kid trying in high school to deconstruct the world around me, I love to smoke pot because we would just say, you know how it was your”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 $3 a day. My only promise was that I was not going to come back to the United States until Richard Nixon was no longer president. And I waited them out. I was gone 15 months, but looking back on those months, it was an absolute initiation. I came back a different person, which is, of course, what one wants to do when one travels.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took psychedelics. And, you know, I don't think I would think the way I think. I don't think I would write the way I write. I don't think I would understand cultural relativism as 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 am and have always been if I hadn't taken psychedelics. I mean, I always make this joke that our parents said, don't take these things. You'll never come back the same. And they poor parents didn't understand that was the entire point of the exercise. We didn't want to come back the same. We wanted to come back transformed. I mean, I think this was the key to my generation. You know, we all suffered from Baudelaire's malady, a horror of home. You know, we grew up in a world that we found to be problematic.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I mean, I think this is why human beings in all places for all time have been fascinated by these entheogens because they really do reveal realms of ethereal wonder. And as you well know, in such a way that you almost are left feeling that the world, lovely as it is that we dwell in, in our ordinary consciousness, is almost like a crude facsimile of a realm that is beyond our imaginings the other side of consciousness, if you want. And I think that, as I've always said, I mentioned earlier, these sort of great social transformations that can leave us, I think hopeful. But when we look at the ingredients and the recipe that allowed for those social changes, there's one ingredient that we tend to expunge from the record, which is the fact that millions of us in that era, the 60s and 70s,”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The equipment and the process is absolutely celebrated in mythological terms. And that's what Christine's great contribution of that book.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it does suggest that the realm of the woman is not readily accessible to men. I mean, I've often had people say to me, you know, all your books, it seems to be a man's world. Well, it's a man's world in the sense that I'm 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 bodhisana 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 poem in the Plades, Christine was hanging for all those years with the women, and her book from the Milk River shows that the preparation”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mistake in a long house 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 laugh their heads off because the gardens are also where you go to make love. So I'd essentially proposition every woman in the Maloka, you know.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These things don't necessarily have a practical utility. Because someone feeds their dog, either Datura or ayahuasca, doesn't imply the dog therefore must get some attribute from that dose. I mean, it could easily be a kind of a magical idea, you know, or, you know, a metaphysical idea, a transcendent idea. But, you know, there isn't that separation from human beings and animals in that sense. A lot of that goes on in the Amazon. I mean, you mentioned yuca. I mean, one of the fascinating things is that there are many female anthropologists today, but in the early years, it was obviously dominated by men. And in the northwest Amazon in particular, there's a very clear division of labor. I would never say that women are subordinate, on the contrary, but there's a very clear division of labor. And for example, the gardens, the chakras, are very much the domain of the women. I once made a...”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before you know it, you see that your productivity, your wellbeing, your health has soared. People always say to me, you know, how on earth have you written 23 books? And I just wink.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 you suddenly 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 before”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a miracle. Well, I mean, Coca, without diverting ourselves to myah, but I mean, the thing about Coca, Tim, it's not just that coca is not cocaine. It's not just that, you know, it's been misunderstood or whatever. The real tragedy is that humanity as a whole has been robbed of the benefits of this incredible plant. You know, if you go back to the 19th century, when physicians were studying coca, heralding its virtues in a non-judgmental 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.”
2023-01-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT