#537: The Hidden Knowledge of Animals — Mark Plotkin on Nature’s Medicine Cabinet

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. This special episode features Dr. Mark Plotkin. He is a very popular guest, and he is back by popular demand on many levels. Mark, you can find him at docmarkplotkin, P-L-O-T-K-I-N on Twitter, is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team, or ACT, A-C-T. Done a lot of work with ACT. They have partnered with roughly 80 tribes in South America, predominantly, to map and improve management and protection of roughly 100 million acres of ancestral rainforests. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, which is one of the most popular books ever written about the rainforest. His most recent book is The Amazon, subtitled What Everyone Needs to Know. And you can find my first interview with Mark where we cover his bio, his amazing, amazing resume, his adventures with Richard Evans Schultes, with indigenous tribes, everything he's learned from Western science and the various compounds he has firsthand experience using at tim.blog slash markplotkin. He's also host of the Plants of the Gods podcast, through which you can learn about everything from hallucinogenic snuffs to the diverse formulations of curare. Each episode basically covers a given plant. Curare, by the way, doesn't just relax the muscles of the body and lead to asphyxiation, if used for hunting, for instance.

It also led to modern anesthesia in many senses. So there's a lot to it. So check out Plants of the Gods. Today's episode focuses on how animals use medicinal plants, and it has some wild stories related to what we can learn and what we can use from the behaviors of cows, penguins, pigs, frogs and everything in between.

There's a lot of hidden wisdom in nature. And this particular audio is pulled from a chapter in Mark's book titled Medicine Quest, subtitle In Search of Nature's Healing Secrets. I read the book, I loved it, and I asked Mark if he'd be willing to record this chapter in audio to share with you all. So he made some updates, made some tweaks, he agreed, and here we are.

So with all of that said, please enjoy.

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Mark Plotkin (4:23)

In this week's episode of Plants of the Gods, we want to look at plants of the apes, how animals use medicinal plants, and how poison dart frogs get their poison. Biologists studying animals in the wild are typically discouraged from giving their study animals names, so as not to anthropomorphize them. In other words, not to think of them as friends or pets or anything like that. Jane Goodall, one of the greatest field biologists of all time, however, has always disagreed. I overheard a most interesting discussion between her and another biologist in the early 1980s. The zoologist asked, why do you give your chimps names? Is that really scientific? Without missing a beat, Jane asked him, do you have a dog? Yes, he replied. Does your dog have a personality? She asked. Of course, he said. Well, said Jane, I bet my chimps have at least as much personality as your dog. Many years later, when I was studying the history of wine as medicine in the ancient world, covered in an earlier podcast episode, I mentioned the project to Jane. You know that drinking alcohol wasn't invented by humans, don't you? She asked. Chimps periodically get drunk on fermented marula fruit, as do elephants and baboons and other species as well.