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

“You're absolutely right on, Tim. The word datura, the name of the genus, comes from ancient India, bands of criminals known as the Daturas, who used it as a knockout drug.”
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
“So I asked 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 Narciss 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.”
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
“That we both share, that all sentient beings share, but the soul that creates your personality. That's why a zombie appears comatose. Sephir in Haiti is not of zombies, it's of becoming a zombie. So I once asked a voodoo priest, for example, if it was just a matter of returning the soul to the victim, could that be done and the person made whole? And the man who I asked that question was a great emperor, the secret societies, he had been head of the Tontomakut 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.”
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 was at least told by many informants that at that point of disorientation the victim is given Dantura which must be an extraordinary horrific experience and one that would sort of seal the psychological conviction that he or she had in fact been punished in this way. Now when you mentioned 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 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 weigh Davis.”
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 so we don't know exactly what might or might not occur. We know that to trotoxin reaches a crisis in about six hours. And if you survive that crisis, you have no physiological damage whatsoever. But of course, in the case of the Haitian zombie, whether the individual is symbolically put into the ground, placed behind a shade or hidden from view, whatever, when they come out of the Tetrad intoxication, they know what's happened to them, and they're in a state of incredible suggestibility and fear. And what the Dactura may”
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
“Of flight. These are incredibly dangerous and horrific plants that the shaman in the Andes take only if everything else fails, almost with the idea that just in touching the realm of madness they might achieve illumination. And what's interesting in going back to the victims of Titrat toxification in Japan, if you eat fugu fish and you get poisoned and you're put into your coffin and you're lucky enough to be rescued, you come out of the coffin and you say, oh, that's terrible. What a mistake. I'll never eat fugu again. But that's the end of it, right? But remember, the Haitian doesn't sit around questioning whether zombies exist. He or she knows in the fiber of their being that they do, and he or she knows why a zombie is made, a form of punishment within the traditional culture.”
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
“One of the things you always have to do in this kind of research is separate what we might call the emic from the edict, which are unnecessarily technical terms in anthropology, the view from within, the view from without. 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. First, let me answer your question about Datura. Datura is in the Solanacea, the potato family, the family of choice of black magicians around the world. The tree daturas, the Bragmansias 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, etc.”
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 whole purpose of this was less to find the drugs used to make zombies because no drug can make a social phenomena, but rather to take a phenomena that had been used in an explicitly racist way to denigrate an entire culture in its religion and to try to make sense out of sensation. And so if the scientist sent me to Haiti to find the chemicals used to make zombies, I found myself instead studying the psychological, social, historical, political dimensions of a chemical possibility. And that's what made the research so exciting. The pursuit of that little preparation opened up these historic and ethnographic vistas that no one had seen 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
“had found in their environment a natural product that not only could make someone appear to be dead, but had done so many times in the past. So then you had to ask what really is a zombie, who's controlling the process. And the end, I was able to become the first person from outside of Haiti ever to be initiated into the Bizanco Champuel, the secret societies that produced the at least suggest that zombification was a form of ultimate social sanction in which the individual lost their personal autonomy and their physical freedom and became kind of cast into a state of purgatory that was in a sense worse than death. So just before we leave zombies.”
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
“Because titratoxin is a big molecule that selectively blocks sodium channels and brings on peripheral paralysis dramatically low metabolic rates and consciousnesses retain until death. And when you looked at the symptoms of narcissis, they match perfectly the symptoms of victims of fugu fish poisoning in Japan. The fuguish is a culinary delicacy. The chef must eliminate most of the TTX, but not all, because he wants a 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 suggested, without doubt, that the sorcerers in Haiti”
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
“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 end of one of those two books, 007 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 that Trototoxin. And that is what blew open the zombie study”
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 then here's where we get to your TTX. I analyzed the plants, took the reptiles, the herpetologists and all the various creatures to the various specialists, and I finally got around to the fish. And I went to see the ichthyologist in the basement of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. And this was like out of a movie. And I say to this wonderful character, did you find anything in those fish? And he had his head inside a white shark. And as he heard me, he bounced his head against the teeth, pulled his head out, and said, I thought you were the poison people. Because our museum was the world's center for the study of medicinal and toxic plants and hallucinogens. And then he goes to the shelf and he doesn't pull out the journal of ichthyology. He pulls out a pocketbook dime.”
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
“He literally said 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.”
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
“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. I had a live bufomarinous toad in my backpack, the biggest toad in the world 10 inches across and I had no permits. Yeah, yeah. So you couldn't do this post 9 11, but I went up to this customs agent and I just said, well, let's just see what he says. So I opened up this thing so only he could see it. And he slammed it shut him. And I'm not going to give you exactly what he said because...”
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 was the Well, it was just a ritual vessel of magical things. He's a sorcerer, a negative priest. And, you know, it's all been pickled in sugarcane alcohol. Part of it is, it's not like macho. It's sort of saying it's actually a more subtle, more poetic, more beautiful thing. You know, Tim, how do you break down the barrier between yourself and a people with whom you find yourself living as a guest? And it's never bravado or macho. It's actually always love and empathy and letting people know that you believe they're somebody. And it seems so simple, but you'd be astonished how many people I encountered, particularly in Haiti, including doctor Klein, who had no way 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.”
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 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, Blancot, what kind of white are you anyway? And so that was the beginning of my relationship.”
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 screamed and yelled at him that we had nearly gotten killed, that his powder was worthless, so you couldn't do a thing. And of course, he then got furious and he went into the inner sanctum, the temple and came out with a bottle, a little vial. And he said, 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, 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 in the proper ingredients for 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 bit.”
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 Voodoo took a particularly strong form in Haiti because as opposed to the other countries I mentioned, Haiti was an independent black country, the only one in the world for a century, gained its independence in 1804. And at that time, much of its population, the slaves, had literally been born in Africa. So in many ways, you can almost argue that Haiti is more Africa than Africa itself at this point. But at any rate, I saw Marcel and he made me the powder, 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 Humphor, the temple, I mentioned I was going to 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 Beauvar and I stormed back a week later.”
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 went to him, you know, and with a good friend of mine, Max Beauvoir, who's when he died, was sort of heralded as a pope of voodoo, an amazing kind of conduit for the outside world to understand voodoo. And again, as you say right off the top, Tim, that we have this idea of voodoo from the movies that couldn't be more wrong. And we should just think for a moment if we were asked to name the great religions of the world, what continent would we leave out sub-Saharan Africa? And of course, voodoo is not a black magic cult. It's a font word from Dachome or Benin that means spirit or God. It's just the distillation, a very profound religious ideas that came over during the era of slavery and then became transformed within the soil of a new world. That's why you have Hoodoo in the American South, Kumina Micandombl in Brazil, Ovia in Jamaica, and so on, Santaria in the DR. And of course, voodoo in Haiti.”
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 Tontomac The Tontomac Tonton in Creole means uncle, Makut means shoulder bag. This was the nickname for the volunteers 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 100 years to say that Voodoo was legitimate religion. He had voodoo temples in the presidential palace. He wore the costume of Baron Samadis, the guardian of the dead of the graveyard. He played voodoo like its 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 Tanton Makut. And it means that if you misbehave, they will come and take you away in their shoulder bag. And so I went out.”
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
“He'd been described by the BBC as the incarnation of evil. He was nothing of the sort. He had a whorehouse and a bunch of Dominican women, and he had been a junior member of the Tonton Macout. But I was able to establish through a little bit of kind of theatrics a good relationship with him.”
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
“Members had no doubt, but they immediately told him to get lost and he had to escape to the police station for his own safety, and when Duon 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 suggested that this man clearly had been misdiagnosed dead and somehow turned up in the realm of living. In fact, Duon 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 Duillon and Lehman and Dr. Klein went public saying they felt they had found the first zombie. Now that drew their attention to reports of a folk”
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
“Belief the zombie is the 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 taste that came his way. And finally, he discovered this remarkable story of a man called Clervius Narciss, who in the early nineteen sixties had been misdiagnosed dead or he'd been diagnosed dead by two physicians, both American trained and one American in the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in central Haiti, an American-directed institution that keeps impeccable records. And this man claiming to Narsi, Slater walked into his village in about 1980-81, claiming to be the long-lost brother.”
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, this was 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 had studied anthropology, but I never really understood the real message of anthropology until I went to Haiti. And I'll explain that in a moment. But what happened is that a very well-known psychopharmacologist by the name of Nathan Klein, psychopharmacology being the study of the action of drugs on the brain, had been going to Haiti for many years. The psychiatric institute bore's name he had set it up, and a close colleague of his at McGill University, Heinz Lehmann, had a former student Lamarck Duon, who was now the director of that psychiatric institute. And Duon was fascinated by the Haitian zombie phenomena, and of course by folkloric.”
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
“necessary to pay the cost of peace having drained its treasury for fifty years to pay the cost of a war only made possible by the sordid profits of prohibition.”
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 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 had been used with no evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for at least 5,000 years. And so one of our big efforts today is to decouple coca from cocaine and create a nutraceutical market for the plant that will give a legal market for the 150,000 families in Colombia alone that depend on cultivating coca for their survival, and also through taxes may just give Colombia the revenue.”
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
“Came too close to challenging the bourgeois foundations of their lives in Lima, they had to find the evil source, and the source was coca, and they blamed coca for every ill in the Andes and through all those years these doctors and physicians and nutritionists never did the obvious. A nutritional study to show just what this plant actually had in it. And when we finally did that in the mid-1970s, Andrew Wild, Tim Ploughman, Jim Duke at the USGA, what we discovered horrified our backers at the DEA and the US government. Because it turns out that COCA has a tiny amount of cocaine in it, absorb benignly as a mild stimulant by the mucous membrane of the mouth, absolutely without harm, the plant also has more calcium than any plant ever studied, perfect for a traditional diet without a dairy product.”
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
“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 richness of”
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
“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 Ploughman, a protege of my professor Schulte's Marx professor, in the 70s. And we were charged to work out the botany, the ethnobotany, the ethnography of coca. And at that time, we thought that the coca of Columbia for classic botanical reasons was derived from the coke of Peru. But now that we have DNA, we see a greater story. It turns out that these two sacred plants used for 8,000 years revered as the divine leaf of immortality by every culture in the Andes all come from the same wild ancestor, a species known as Erythrosumes, which grows along the eastern flanks of 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
“Like this, this is a Mombe bone right here, and you put the wad onto your mouth and you let the saliva kind of soften it and you don't really talk or breathe or the whole works will just explode as a green cloud. And as it's moist, you then lift it up as a quid. And the advantage, of course, is that by taking coca in this way, you absorb the entire plant and thus all the nutrients. I mean, one of the before I just finish that, then the other coca, the coca of the kogi that we talked about, that is erythroxam, novogranitensi, variety novranotensi, that's a coke of Columbia. And that cocoa was taken down the coast to Trajillo in the northern desert of Peru, and that became the preferred coca of the Inca. It's got a little wintergreen oil in it. It's erythroxylan Novogranetensi variety, Trujiensi, and that, of course, was a preferred coca.”
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 alkaloid concentration, and so in a very interesting way the peoples of the anaconda, in all these extraordinary societies, Barisana Makuna, Tucano, Cube, Ticuna, I mean, there's scores of these extraordinary cultures. They've learned to take the leaves, roast them over a clay griddle, and then rather than taking the leaf orally and mixing some kind of alkline with it, baking soda or limestone or ashes of certain plants, as you'll see in the mountains of southern Peru, they add the ash of the leaves of a tree known as Yarumo. And then they pound the two together until you get a very fine powder, which becomes even more fine when sifted through palm fiber. It's a consistency of talc. And with Mombe then, you take the actual coca with a bone.”
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
“Coca is a generic term for two different cultivated species and four different varieties that have been exploited by people in South America perhaps as long as 8,000 years, certainly 5,000 years. And I should say that coke is a cocaine what potatoes are to vodka. The two main types of coca one is called Colombian that's erthroxyl novogranitensi and the other is a classic coca of the southern Andes of Cusco and La Paz that is arithroxlan coca now in pre-Columbian times a variety of that was taken down the Amazon into the jungles of the northwest Amazon and this variety which is known as arithrox and coca variety Ipadu is cultivated vegetatively not from seed it also has half”
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 said to Danilo, your 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 this idea and the pilgrimage. And the idea is very simple. As you come out of the sacred temple, And what we discovered is they don't stay 18 years in the darkness, but 18 years in seclusion around the temple and 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.”
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
“So I have a very wonderful relationship to them, but here's what was extraordinary. One wintry day in Washington, the Columbian ambassador, then Carolina Barco, a good friend of mine, turned up at my office at the geographic with a political leader Daniloviafania and three mammos, one from each of the three cultures Wewa, Kogi, and Arawako. And they were there because the BBC had made a film and the Arawakos felt they hadn't had their say and they wanted to make their own film. So they'd come to me. And as I'm looking at this guy, Danilo, he looks so much like an old friend of mine. So I pulled out a book of mine, One River, which happened to have a photograph in the frontispiece of one of the chapters. I showed him the foot. And that was Danilo's father, Adelberto, who was murdered by the paramilitaries.”
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
“Close with them for almost fifty years. They in fact the Otawakos call me their mamoccidental I was once with President Santos, the Nobel laureate, the first time he ever visited Namasimake, and the Mamos had asked me to be there to welcome him. And I hitched a ride in the presidential plane. And when we got to the community, there was a kind of formal ceremony in which the president introduced his invitados, you know, his ministers and so on. And he got around to me and he couldn't have been more generous with 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.”
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
“prayers literally maintain the cosmic or we might say the ecological balance of the world and according to Reichel after 18 years in which the world only existed as an abstraction the young acolyte was taken out and taken on a journey and for the first time in his life 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 never saw the ritual he never went on one of those pilgrimages to the heart of the world then an amazing thing happened I first lived with the Arawakos when I was a lad of nineteen and twenty. In fact when you mention it's amazing I've now been”
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 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 suffered so much that they made a kind of collective vow never to screw up again. And I think that accounts for their intense religiosity. Many people call them the Tibetans of South America, but they live to this day inspired by a ritual priesthood, the Mamos, the sun priest. And the training for the priesthood is extraordinary. It was first reported in the 1940s by Reichel Domatov that the acolytes were taken away from their families at the age of two and three, and then sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness for eighteen years, during which time they absorbed the religious beliefs of their society. And it's their sincere conviction that those beliefs, those rituals”
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, it's truly remarkable. They live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on Earth that soars out of the Caribbean coastal plain to about 20,000 feet. There are four indigenous groups, the Kogi you mentioned, the Wiwa, the Arawakos, and the Kanquano. The Kanquano in the 19th century kind of kind of deal with the greater Colombian society and endured a great deal of assimilation, and they're kind of struggling to get back to their tradition ways. But the other three societies remain absolutely extraordinary. And in the bloodstained continent, you can almost say they were never conquered by the Spanish fully. They are descendants of an ancient civilization called Tyrona, which suffered immensely in the first decades of the Spanish conquest. And the survivors fled into this mountain massif where they”
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 great question because they kind of catnap in a way, but they can't really do much more than just catnap. 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 filthier nasty if we sleep four hours. But many societies around the world, you know, I spend 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 kind of, you know. Catnap with your dogs, but there's just too much to be done.”
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, 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 that 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 in back to your navigator why he's not running the ship because he or she must sit monk-like on the back of the vessel, remembering every shift.”
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 kind of tried to find 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 as Polynesia”
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 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 in Society can name 250 stars in the night sky. They can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon just by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of their sacred canoe, the 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 caused by local weather disturbances from those at pulsate across the ocean and can be followed with ease with which terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea. And each of these chapters in that book, Tim, the subjects also became films, of course, that we did for the geographic.”
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 world. You know, you have to show you can't tell polemics are never persuasive. So that book, The Wayfinders, it tells the story of the expeditions that we did to share this message across the world. And so we deliberately, and it wasn't easy, we didn't want to simply go out as so many ethnographic filmmakers tend to do celebrating the exoticism of the other. We really wanted to go to places where the beliefs, practices revealed this extraordinary universal truth. And I think you asked which was the most extraordinary of all. It would have to be the Polynesian wayfinders.”
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
“So there is no hierarchy in culture. That old Victorian idea, you know, we went from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized to the strand of London, that Victorian societies sat at the apex of a pyramid that went down to the so-called primitives of the world, absolutely ridiculed by modern science, shown to be an artifact of the 19th century irrelevant to our lives today and as distant from those lives of the idea of clergymen in that era who believe the earth was only 6,000 years old. So then the question is, how do you share this? How do you reveal this kind of wondrous thing about culture?”
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
“Of these intellectual social, spiritual, even ecological knowledge is at risk, and at the same time, and this is the amazing thing, we're living through an era where geneticists have finally proven it to be true what philosophers and poets have always dreamt to be true, that we really are all brothers and sisters. And I don't mean that in the spirit of hippie ethnography. I mean that studies of the human genome have shown without doubt that the genetic endowment of humanity is a continuum. Race is a total fiction. We're all cut from the same genetic cloth, we're all descendants of Africa, including those of us who walked out of the ancient continent 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.”
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
“to share with the public was kind of the fundamental revelation of anthropology, the idea of that the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being you know they're not failed attempts at being modern every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question what does it mean to be human and alive and when the peoples of the world answer that they do so in the 7,000 different voices of humanity and all those answers kind of collectively become our human repertoire. And so we also wanted to draw people's attention to the kind of haunting fact that of those 7,000 languages spoken the day you, Tim, and I were born by absolute academic consensus, half are not being taught to children, which means they're moribund on the brink of extinction, if not exhaustion. And that means, in effect, that we're living through an era where half a few”
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
“They wanted to demonstrate personify that they didn't just report science they generated science. And so that they recruited seven individuals, Jane Goodall, Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic, Sylvie, the Earl, the great oceanographer, a host of incredible characters, Johan, Reinhardt, who the high-altitude archaeologist who found the Ice Maiden, the perfectly preserved Ink and Mummy on Juliaco, they recruited me as a cultural anthropologist, and it was very much part of a conservation mission in the second hundred years having told you about the world, now the geographic was going to help you save the world. And my mission, as defined in my contract, 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 storytellers, as you well know, Tim changed the world. And what we were trying to do.”
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, well, that's a wonderful beginning, Tim. The Wayfinders was a book put together in a really wonderful tradition in Canada called The CBC Massey Lectures. And it's a fantastic event where once each year they pick what they call a public intellectual and you're asked to give five different talks in five different cities before live audiences, those talks are recorded for broadcast on radio three times during this coming year and then the lectures themselves are wrapped up into”
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