AudioMano, Papa Zango

Hello out there in podcast land.

This is Chris coming to you on a rainy overcast stormy day in Los Angeles, California,

to Pangak Canyon to be exact, which I guess is appropriate because I recorded this conversation

with the legendary author, ethno-botinist anthropologist all around fascinating man, Wade Davis

in his office in Vancouver on an equally dismal dreary overcast afternoon a couple of weeks ago now.

I hope you enjoy this. I know you'll enjoy this. If you have any fucking sense at all,

you are going to enjoy this. There's it would be very hard not to. Wade Davis is someone I've

wanted to meet for decades literally of all living authors that I'm aware of and there are hundreds of

them. He's the only one I ever kind of felt like I might trade my life for his if I had the chance.

The guy, you know, he's kind of like, I remember there's a line Robert Sapolsky uses in his fantastic

book of primates memoir, which is on my list of recommended books along with one river by Wade Davis.

If you check my website, you'll see there's a place with recommended reading. And anyway,

there's a line he uses in that where he says he's talking about baboons. I think he and a friend

who studies champs are watching baboons and his friend says something like baboons would be champs

if they had any ambition, something like that. You know, they're like almost as smart as champs,

but they're just they're just missing some sort of essential element that would move them up to

the next level. Well, you know, in the world of sort of traveler personality writer type people,

Ted talkers, authors, I'm the baboon in Wade Davis is the chimpanzee. Wade Davis is what I would be if

I were if I had that fucking missing element, whether it's, you know, an extra 10 IQ points or ambition

or having been born just a little earlier or whatever it is, Wade Davis is on another level. He's

a fascinating guy. I read his first book about voodoo back in the 80s. I think I was an undergraduate

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