Mark Plotkin
speaker
534 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Mark Plotkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
One of them's tripping on magic mushrooms.
One is drunk on fermented fruit.
and one is over-caffeinated on these coffee berries.
I think your hypotheses are equally valid.
I think the emotional one might try and levitate over the line and the drunk one might take it on.
But the caffeinated one is most likely when they get away.
Well, I call myself an ethnobotanist, which is a person who studies the relationship between people and plants.
Everybody loves the idea of following shamans through the Amazon rainforest.
I've done plenty of that.
But the broad explanation of ethnobotany is people and plants.
That means almonds in a cornfield.
And of course, as somebody who knows and loves nature, like you obviously do, it's all connected.
So when you see a farmer in Iowa, he or she may or may not be aware that corn originated on the Mexico-Guatemala border.
And even though we have high-growing crops,
high-yielding corn in Iowa and everywhere else, that we still need those wild and semi-domesticated varieties of corn in Mexico and Guatemala to increase yields, increase pests and diseases, and increase resistance to climate stress.
One of the indigenous groups I work with and I did my thesis on many decades ago are called the Wayanas.
They live on the border between Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil in the northeast Amazon.
And they have a different theory of reality and shamanism.
Usually becoming a shaman or a medicine man or a medicine woman in most cultures, even in our own, to become an herbalist, involves learning and being in a classroom or being in the forest.
The Wayanas say, no, we're born with an invisible blindfold over our eyes.
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