Episode #429 from 2:26:16
Ayahuasca
All right, so what do you think makes a great explorer, whether it's Percy Fawcett, Richard Evans Schultes? By the way, I'll say who Richard Evans Schultes is. He's a biologist. So that's another lens through which to be an explorer, is to study the biology, the immense diversity of biological life all around us. Richard Evans Schultes, I know about him from reading Wade Davis's book, One River, which is this big, hefty 500 or 600 page tome about the Amazon, and it covers two stories. It's Richard Evans Schultes, and I think it's in the '40s. I think it's pre-World War Two era era where he's in the Amazon looking for the blue orchid and the cure for this and that, and he's pressing plants and he's going to these Indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest and they drink ayahuasca and they talk to the gods and he learns about how they believe that the Anaconda came down from the Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers. He came down and even though he was a western scientist from Harvard, he embraced the Indigenous perspective on the world, on creation, on spirituality.
Why this moment matters
All right, so what do you think makes a great explorer, whether it's Percy Fawcett, Richard Evans Schultes? By the way, I'll say who Richard Evans Schultes is. He's a biologist. So that's another lens through which to be an explorer, is to study the biology, the immense diversity of biological life all around us. Richard Evans Schultes, I know about him from reading Wade Davis's book, One River, which is this big, hefty 500 or 600 page tome about the Amazon, and it covers two stories. It's Richard Evans Schultes, and I think it's in the '40s. I think it's pre-World War Two era era where he's in the Amazon looking for the blue orchid and the cure for this and that, and he's pressing plants and he's going to these Indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest and they drink ayahuasca and they talk to the gods and he learns about how they believe that the Anaconda came down from the Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers. He came down and even though he was a western scientist from Harvard, he embraced the Indigenous perspective on the world, on creation, on spirituality.