 We didn't just land on the earth from somewhere. We came out of the earth. So, you know, we're all coming from this kind of same place plants and people and if you look at indigenous cultures, so people who kind of are endemic to their place who still live where their ancestors lived and they have that knowledge, you see that plants are integral to their lives and you might be thinking like food or medicine, but also like musical instruments and housing and anything, you know, the baskets that they carry everything and all that their clothing, it all comes from plants and that ethnobotany covers all of that and sometimes the term economic botany is used to just talk about how people use plants economically in any classification. What I think for what I'm doing now at Harvard and MIT, the most interesting things are looking at that indigenous knowledge and thinking about how it might be applicable to the things that we're doing now. What can we learn from indigenous people? Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Ansaakian. We are at the Harvard Science Center at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about ethnobotany. We have Dr. John De La Para joining us on the show. Hello. Hey, nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on. I'm really excited to talk to you. Really appreciate Alex K. Chen making the bump for us to connect and make this happen. Dr. John De La Para is an associate at Harvard University. He's a research lead at the Open Agriculture Initiative at MIT Media Lab. He's a lecturer of environmental studies at Tufts University and a lecturer of biotechnology at Northeastern University. All right, John, let's start things off with our favorite question here. We love to start it off with, we find ourselves as stewards of Earth. What is your current take on the state of humanity? State of humanity. So as you mentioned, my expertise is ethnobotany. So I'm looking always at how humans and plants are interacting. Plants, in a lot of ways, are kind of a true crystallization of life on Earth because they can't run away from things. They have to live where they are. You know, they have to, that actually advantage of not having to run away means that they do very interesting things. Humans, I think, what happens in the questions about the state of humanity, humans have the ability to in some ways overpopulate their spaces. Yeah. So I think that one of the most pressing issues for the state of humanity is overpopulation. I think that that's something that in certain areas is causing fights over resources and things like that. So I think that we're at a beautiful place now where we have an opportunity to start thinking about how we use those resources. That could be the plants or other things. Plants are always integral to that. But as we educate each other and as we are able to speak about all these different interconnections between plants and people, that's when we can make that next leap forward. I think. So even though I believe that there is this crisis of population that's happening, I think that we have the solutions before us. I think that it's through education, that deep education to young people all the way through to older people can lead to, like I said, a great leap forward that really changes things. So hopeful, I guess. Yeah, yeah, very hopeful. It was very interesting. You're making the case for the crystallization of the plants in the location that they're set in versus the human and animal, the marine animals as well, just being able to move around. The other really interesting thing that you said was that you're so right that we have in many places these centers that are filled with clusters of people. And I think what we ended up doing was in many ways we want to surround ourselves with other really smart, diverse people in close proximity so we don't have to transit too far, but at the same time it has made for so much issues with, like you said, fighting over resources, rent in many places is very expensive, slums exist, versus these open swaths of land around the world that are just free for people to live on, basically. Right. So there's that interesting dichotomy that you brought up as well. Yeah, I mean, and swaths of land are usually not free for people to live on in general. I mean, there's more space, right? I just, you know, we as humans have evolved to, in some ways, small groups with family members, extended family, and also relying on the sources that are around us. We did always have the ability to move around, but in some ways, I think cities recall that wanting to have community and people try to reconstitute that desire for community everywhere we go. But often, you know, I live in a city even though I grew up on a farm, I grew up in a rural area, and I find community in a city. It's a different type of thing, but often it can be more profound because you are up against each other, and you do have to figure out how to share the space that you have around you, and plants mediate that interaction, I think, in many ways. Yeah, we're going to get to that. I'm super pumped to unpack that. Let's do your journey. So born in Alabama, and then you had a very, you have some roots from Mexico, and then you had a grandmother that really inspired you and had no botany, so teach us about this. Yeah, so yeah, I grew up on a small farm in Alabama. Mostly, we had goats when I was a kid, and we also grew a lot of the food that we ate, so we did rely on the farm a lot. My parents still are on that farm, and they still grow a lot. They still grow food every year. They still have, I think, one goat left now. But those are my roots for sure. My grandmother used plants when I was a kid, and that always fascinated me. So there was always this kind of folk knowledge. There was this almost spiritual connection that I maybe didn't realize, because when you're a child, the fish doesn't notice the water around it, and I didn't know what that was. It just was what life was. That always intrigued me to look more into it, and it definitely reverberated later in life. Yeah, my father's family has roots in Mexico, so in my last name is Spanish. Being a little bit separate from the other Alabama society, other people in society, I think sometimes you find people come up with interesting lives because they've been isolated, I think, a little bit. So being in Alabama, being a little different, I think, made me more introspective, want to do something a little bit different, which eventually led me. So my last two years of high school, I was in a rural place in the Appalachian mountains, but my last two years, I went to a boarding school in Alabama State-funded boarding school, the Alabama School of Math and Science, and if it weren't for that, I don't know what I would have done. Luckily, the state had this vision to fund this project, and about a hundred students from around the state were allowed to come, and my parents had no money, but it was paid for by the state. So it was an amazing resource for me, and there I met my fellow wayward travelers, kids from all around Alabama who didn't quite fit into the schools that they were in, but now they could be here and really kind of nerd out. And also it was a very college-like atmosphere that was somewhat unstructured in that there were labs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you kind of had to figure out how to manage your time. Then from there, I went to the Cooper Union, which is in New York City, an engineering, art, and architecture school. I had never been to New York City before, so I was totally Alabama when I showed up in New York. I know the first time I went to New York was for the orientation for Cooper Union. On top of it being New York City, which can be overwhelming for anyone, and it's kind of the prototypical city, if we're talking about rural versus city, it was also a very intense educational system. So I was studying engineering, and it was kind of like a boot camp mentality. I mean, your first year, everyone takes very difficult standardized classes that there might be giant lecture halls, and there has to be a bell curve re-instituted over top of even the brightest people that show up. So that was really intense for me, and I was always looking for nature. I remember going to Central Park and taking my socks and shoes off just so I could feel the grass and be connected to Earth, which seems like a somewhat trivial thing for me. It actually was really meaningful to have some connection, or to take even a day or two trip out to visit someone at Vassar, which is in Poughkeepsie a little bit farther off, that I could see trees and be out in the woods a little bit. That is what I think where I discovered some dichotomy of existence, that there is this thing I knew as a kid in Alabama, and then there's a city and you have to kind of balance those things in some ways. Yeah, you totally nailed it there with farm versus Manhattan, right? Those are vast different extremes, and if we can get a deeper sense of connection to Earth by doing things like just laying on the grass, taking your shoes off, just relaxing feeling Earth, the trees, the plants, we can really tie better into that unity feeling that drives us, that will drive us into a more sustainable future. Okay, so as you're getting New York, you feel that dichotomy, you also end up doing your PhD at Northeastern here in Boston. Yeah, and that journey was rather long and circuitous, so it wasn't a direct route for me at all. I mentioned this kind of pressure cooker situation of all my family being in Alabama, me being in New York City, a very foreign, bizarre place for me. The first year I was there, I don't think I got on the subway once because I was just afraid of everything. I was 18, I didn't know what was safe and what wasn't, it was just overwhelming. Eventually after a few years, I was totally relaxed there, but now it feels like a second home to me because I had to in some ways become a man in this environment. So, you know, there was that pool, that tension in my life, and then I was studying engineering, which was never exactly something I wanted, but Cooper Union, if you get in, it's free to go. And my parents, like I said, they couldn't afford to send me to school, so it was the obvious choice for me. It was a good school and it was free. But by the time I had reached the fourth year, it was actually 2001, 2002 in New York City. So September 11th happened, freaking me out a lot. Cooper Union is in Lower Manhattan. Oh, it's in Lower Manhattan too. Yeah, and I at one point lived on Gold Street, which is in the financial district, so it was disturbing to me because I had just become kind of comfortable in this place, and now it seemed scary to me again. I mean, it was very disruptive and being in Lower Manhattan, like that part of the city was shut down for part of a couple of weeks just in terms of transportation, and so it was very difficult. So, I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't want to be in New York. I just didn't want to be in New York anymore. I wound up getting a job in the New York State Assembly as a legislative aid, and I worked there for a bit, which seems totally weird, but that's what I wanted. I wanted something that was completely different than what I'd been doing before. I always had an interest in politics of all things, and I've always had this thing in my life that I want to taste everything. I want to try a lot of different things, and I even tell my students now that sometimes it's about finding out what you don't like, not what you do like, and I've done a lot of that, and that's when that started. I did that. I still hadn't finished Cooper, so I had just a handful of credits left to finish, but I didn't care about it at that point. I just wanted to do things. I didn't want to be in school anymore, so in my last year I left and I did this. I found out I didn't really like that. I eventually moved to New Jersey, where I did other types of things. I did some consulting work. I eventually started taking classes in horticulture, and I got certified in horticulture, because I wanted to get back to, I guess in some ways in response to September 11th and the city, I now wanted to be really into plants and really have that connection again, which symbolizes in some way where I came from and where I could go. Then I did that. I started studying that, and at the same time I started teaching. I was able to finish my undergrad in that time, and that took me several years. I did that, and then I started teaching at a community college in New Jersey. I started teaching chemistry, and I loved it. I never thought I'd have the chance to teach, so for me it was really magical to be in front of students. They're mostly nursing students, which they have a real mission that's actually like a tactile thing they're going to do, and chemistry is usually the class they want to take the least. But I saw it as an opportunity to show them practical things, because I also feel like I don't have a lot of patience for things that I can't understand why you're doing them. So when I would teach them chemistry, we would always do things. I would bring an IV bag in and we talk about ions, and why would they ever need to know what an ion is if they're not going to understand when they see it in a hospital what it actually means. So I always tied things in the experiments with my favorite part. And I was also of course interested in plants. I had this horticulture background, and I was starting to get interested more in teaching people about medicinal plants. I eventually started a class that was called medicinal plants that a lot of people really liked, and I was really getting my footing just in having in some ways taught myself about the stuff, but inspired by my grandmother and other people in my life. And that gave me an outlet, and I felt like, well this is my special thing that I feel like I can get up every morning to do. And then once I found that, I was like, okay, I need to just keep building on this. And that pressure of having to teach, especially something that you really care about, it's a weird feeling. You may be sweating, like this nervous anxiety sweat, but also you're loving what you're doing, and you get addicted to it. So for me, like I'm teaching four classes this semester, I love it, and also it's like tense. But you feel alive, I guess that's what it is. You're pushing yourself to the brink of your cognitive challenge. Yeah, every single day, and it's a performance. It's a high wire act every time. I know there are people who prepare way ahead of time and they have their slides, but still, I don't always have the time to do that. But even when I do, it's still a performance. You know, you still, what's going to happen in the classroom. I think if you're doing it right, it should be malleable, because people are going to ask questions and the conversation is going to go a different way. And that's how the learning experience really happens. And you have to be prepared for all that. Yeah, so from there, I said, well, if I want to keep doing this on any other level, beyond the community college level or whatever, I need to go to graduate school. So eventually, I found a professor that I thought was doing something that pushed the boundary of chemistry, medicinal plants, biotech, the future of what could happen with medicinal plants. Because actually, the truth is a lot of kids come to me and say, how do I study medicinal plants? How do I become an ethnobotanist? And the answer isn't easy. You have to be very determined because there aren't a lot of, there are some really great ethnobotanist mentors in the world and in the US, but not as many as there used to be. And it's not easy to find that track to do that. So the person I found was not an ethnobotanist at all. But they were doing something that was interesting to me. So I targeted them, I got into the program, and I learned all about plant tissue culture and different plant chemicals and things like that. And I loved it. But after two years, our paths kind of were divergent. I was going more in a different direction with analytical chemistry and looking at what's in these plants and how can we vary the chemical constituency of these plants. So eventually I finished my PhD under a different professor, but it all, it shows you how like, even though you might have a singular mindset, like this is the person that's kind of driving me to do this, you have to be flexible enough to know when it's time to change course a little bit. And that really opened up everything for me. Once I left that laboratory and I was able to be free from that and do other things that are more inventive, things got even more exciting for me, even though it was incredibly scary. And after that second year, when I thought I was going to be all over when I was going to leave that lab, I thought, well, I'll get a master's degree or who knows what I'll do. Maybe I just have to leave and not finish this at all. But that leap led to greater things, which is the thing that people are always afraid of. And people tell you that, right? But you never believe it. On the other side of the adversities is our greatest treasure. I fully believe that. I mean, the things I went through from Alabama, jumping to New York of all places and then jumping out of New York without a degree finished and then jumping back into graduate school and then out of one lab into another. Those have been the things that really propelled my life in a way that might have been more boring, I guess. Yeah, you went to the greatest challenges and you found your greatest treasures. I think that's a good way of putting it. The journey is so beautiful and that's what really stretches you to the brink of your abilities and it challenges you the most and it puts you in a place where you're learning a lot. It's also interesting that you have this way of viewing teaching as something that is very, very valuable. You come in there, like you said, with a malleability so that the conversation can move whichever direction it needs with the students when they're asking questions. I love how you found that interest in teaching and ethnobotany. Ethnobotany in general is very interesting. The plant and human interaction is interesting. The co-evolution is very interesting. It's been billions of years of evolution on the planet, millions of years of human evolution with plants. We find ourselves now in many ways finally becoming more and more literate with understanding some of the psychoactive properties of plant medicines. We find a lot of the nature therapy that's going on around the world where we just walk into forests and it decreases our cortisol levels, all these types of interesting things. What gardening does for the soul, these types of things. So what have you been learning about this co-evolution? Actually, something interesting, it's, I guess, what 30,000 years of human plant cultivation and humans themselves in 100 or more thousand years that go back with humans and kind of being in this plant place because that's what we're in. It's a plant place. It is. We evolved with them and we all came. We didn't just land on the earth from somewhere. We came out of the earth. We're all coming from this kind of same place, plants and people. If you look at indigenous cultures, people who kind of are endemic to their place who still live where their ancestors lived and they have that knowledge, you see that plants are integral to their lives. You might be thinking like food or medicine, but also like musical instruments and housing and anything, the baskets that they carry everything in, all their clothing, it all comes from plants and that ethnobotany covers all of that and sometimes the term economic botany is used to just talk about how people use plants economically in any classification. What I think for what I'm doing now at Harvard and MIT, the most interesting things are looking at that indigenous knowledge and thinking about how it might be applicable to the things that we're doing now. What can we learn from indigenous people? And for me, the greatest reward has come from thinking about not just the species that people choose for a particular purpose, let's say for a medicine, because people have known that they've collected plants of particular species to do particular things, helpful things, but indigenous people don't just choose a species. They choose what we might call in science world a phenotype, so actual expression of the plant and that phenotype is influenced by the environment. So indigenous people understand that, well, I don't just pick this plant because it's this plant, I pick because it's this side of the mountain at this time of day and this time of year and this growth stage and all those other things that go into making an actual physical plant, a physical plant. And what we've found is that those things have a lot of effect on the chemistry of the plant, which is kind of the fundamental makeup of the plant. And if we're talking about drug discovery or drug usage of a plant or any type of medicinal usage or food usage, we have to be aware of what those phenotypes that we might even call them, chemotypes, so the chemical type of that plant is because that is what will give us the true benefit. So I'm working on some projects now where we're looking at produce. So all the product, when you go to the store, you look at the point of sale where you actually buy the produce and you may have heard that, let's say apples are good for you, but what does that mean? An apple is not an apple. It's not an apple. An apple that was grown at a certain time of year is going to have a different chemical makeup than an apple that was grown at, you know, another time of year or a different place or any of these things will change drastically sometimes the chemistry. The variables of the environment that the fruit is grown in. Right. Right. And the soil compositions, the atmospheric compositions, the amount of nutrients, the water that it gets, how early you pick it or late you pick it. How long you take until you eat it off, right off of, if you write off this probably has more of the nutrient value than if you wait a month. Sure. Yes. Yeah. That's a good example. Also, when insects or plants or some environmental stresses are on a plant, let's say medicinal plant in particular, you can sometimes get more and different phytochemicals, plant chemicals that are good for treating a disease, I'd say, because often those chemicals that the plant makes that humans have found is useful are made not to give humans a gift necessarily. They're made to defend something, defend the plant because again, like I said, they can't run away. Right. So the plant is stuck in place. It has both an active and an inducible defense system. So an active defense system might be thorns, but an inducible defense system will be some kind of metabolic regulation of the chemistry of the plant so that when a caterpillar is chewing on it, the plant changes its chemistry and up regulates the production of something that's going to prevent the caterpillar from eating anymore. Yes. And those same compounds might be good for stopping cancer cells from dividing. That's very interesting. So that we find in this crossover a lot and humans have relied on this medicine in an anecdotal way for a long time. And the reason why this can be particularly important is because there's been some disdain in modern Western medicine for herbal medicine or plant-based medicine because it's so complex. And modern medicine is very reductionist. So we like to have one compound that has one mechanism of action that treats one disease or condition. But the truth is that plants make thousands of compounds and they do many different things in the body at once. And those are admittedly very hard to track. In fact, we don't even have a good way to measure all those compounds in the plant. There are many different tests that it takes to piece together what you might call the metabolome or the entire chemistry of a plant. And it's expensive and labor intensive. So let's say we figure out all the chemistry and now we have to figure out, well, what do they do when they go in your body? And they might do 100 different things on several different organ systems, just working at a concert. And you might look in an herbal book and say, well, what does the plant do? And it might say 10 things. That's very common because there are many different compounds that do different things. It may be that in the indigenous knowledge that you had to pick that plant at a certain time of year, certain type of the plant, that it would be better for this condition or something that may have been lost to the historical record. But that's how humans practice medicine for most of the existence of humans and plants. We were potentially, our edge of knowledge has actually receded a little bit over the last several thousand years of industrial revolution and internet age, especially our spiritual knowledge, our plant medicine knowledge in some ways. In some ways, of course, we've got the scientific tools to be able to poke deeper at the chemistries and whatnot. But the average person that lives in a metropolis not only doesn't even get to see the stars that much, but they don't get to really touch the soil or understand the season of a plant medicine and how that can affect their biology. Yeah, it's very foreign to most modern people, I think, in the West, at least, or what we might consider the West. I mean, 80% of the world uses plant-based medicine in some way, so they use accrued plant-based medicine in some way. And we're just manufacturing molecules here. Yeah, I mean, we do derive some of our, we do derive, I think, something like 60% of the drugs are in some way natural derived. So that might mean from an other, like a bacteria as well, but they're coming from some natural source and then maybe they're modified or something that changes the plant chemistry in some way to be more suitable as a drug or something like that. So we use those chemical scaffolds to create a lot of the drugs that we use now, but most people don't have the ability to do that. I mean, they still have to use the plant in its crude form or make a simple extract in water or ethanol or something like that. Yeah. And we don't understand that it's kind of a dark space where we don't fully understand how it's working. So another way that we've talked about this on the show so many times is that it's been billions of years of evolution and we don't actually have a ledger of all of what has happened in those biological processes. Like you said, when a caterpillar eats at the leaf, the plant figures out a way to survive. And if we could figure out some of the processes of the biochemical pathways and all the different things that are actually occurring in there, could we use some of those things to restore our homeostatic capacity back to an 18-year-old for a couple more years? There's so much that we don't actually know because it's just been such a long period of time with so many different evolutions that have occurred. And so we love thinking about what from the palette of evolution could we apply to longevity or could we apply to just living healthier and more fulfilling lives? I think sleep more, don't drink alcohol. Yeah, these basics, yeah. Sometimes it doesn't have to come down to a plant. I think that this is something that it falls into the same fallacies of Western thinking that sometimes there's a treatment you can take that'll fix everything. But I think sometimes what's missing is some kind of holistic understanding of your own human body and the people around you. So getting the simple things, drinking enough water, sleeping enough and eating a proper diet that is giving you the nutrients you need and avoiding the things that you know provide oxidative stress that make you feel and look older, I think are probably the big things. And then you can use plants to, plants I often think of as they can support health. So a lot of the plant-based drugs are actually things that are somewhat mild in their effect, but they support well-being for some particular organ or some condition. And then there are, and those might be for, or even for chronic conditions or something. But then there are acute medicines and for maybe acute illnesses or something very serious. And that may be a really strong or potent poison that is given at the right dosage that treats something. So I worked with the Madagascar Prairie Winkle for many years, which produces vincristine and vincblastine. They're used for cancer. They stop cell division just like I was talking about the caterpillar. It's what you might call an anti-feed-in. So it stops the caterpillar from eating, but it also stops rapid cell division in human. So that's an acute molecule that comes from a poisonous plant that we use. And there are several examples of that. Digitalis, from FoxGlove, is something that if you just ate the plant, you might have a heart attack. It's not good for your heart, but it's used as a drug for people that need their heart kind of kick-started in some ways. We're not in the right dosage. Yeah. We're not different from our environment. We are our environment. And when you view it from a holistic perspective, the nutrition, the sleep, the exercise, the social environment, when we're addicted to the devices versus the love and compassion and empathy and yeah, and emotion and social there. So all these things kind of tie into that holistic understanding of health. And then yeah, so that's a lot of ethnobotany on a kind of like a human, in many ways, a human level. I like how you said economic botany is that's an interesting way of seeing how we actually move goods. Also, it was cool how we move plants around the world. It was cool how you said that certain populations of people still use the baskets and use the plants for their houses. This type of thinking is like plants are for like every part of their lives. I mean, this table, this is ethnobotany. I mean, we forget these things, I think sometimes. The caution is sure. So those are all things that took a human growing it. But also, you know, maybe thousands of years of influence, human plant influence to get that type of cotton that is good for sure. Or this would in a place where it would be growing and then harvest it. So we just forget these things because it's not in front of us, especially if we're in a city, we don't realize how we integrate. So in the class, I teach a class on environmental fieldwork at Tufts. And so the project really could be whatever I wanted it to be. But the project we focus on is urban forage. So that's like what plants around us are actually edible or medicinal. So we talk about that as well. And for the students, I think like they'd never thought about that. And they have some sort of like plant blindness that might be called where everything just looks green. And they don't know what is what. It's all grass or whatever to them. But when I take them out and we look at things and we start as you look closer and closer as you zoom in, you start to see there's many different species of things. And then there's stories behind every single one of those plants, and they each kind of present on different plants throughout the semester. And then they catalog where all those are. They find out, well, this plant was brought from Europe because people valued it for this or this plant was brought from a part of Asia because people used it for this. And that we can actually reclaim that power of knowing what the plants are around us. And then even maybe even using them. And then maybe that changes how we do landscaping or maybe it changes how we live all together. Not worrying about the weeds that go around us because they actually had some kind of function in our lives and they still can. When you walk around and if you want to care more, you can like double click into the greenery. That is we zoom in. We pinch and zoom. Pinch and zoom into the greenery. And then when you actually go there like face to a plant and then you look next to it and you see something different. And you wonder where is that plant from? How long has it been in this area? How did it get here? What is its purpose here? Does it have insects living in it? What nutrients does it need? How much sunlight does it need? All those questions start to come for the student too because it's a human thing. They start to be curious about all that. And as part of that, we also do soil testing because there's at least 100 maybe more years of lead paint and gas stations and dry cleaners that have put stuff into the soil that can be taken up into the plant. That's part of the environmental aspect of it as well. But that is the current state of ethnobotany. We don't live in this pristine untouched glade where we can just pick anything and know that it's good for us. We have to be retaught and we have to look at things a little bit differently as well. That's right. What a cool class, the urban foraging class. That's just one of the classes that people line up to take. Yeah, that's a good one. We want students to be excited about this stuff, right? Yeah. That's one... That's a Tufts. That's a Tufts. And then you also teach another class at Tufts called Cannabis Debate. Yes, so of course students line up to take that course. I think I had 100 emails from students who were pleading to get into this course and I felt bad. We just didn't have the space. Monday was the last class. I co-tease that class with my partner who's an attorney. It's called Cannabis Debate, Science, Culture, and the Law. So I focus on the science and some of the culture and he takes some of the culture and the law. But it really is... Part of the reason we call it Cannabis Debate is because we wanted parents to be okay with it being on the transcript. If we just call it weed 101, I don't know if it'll be as cool. And they've heard the administration that appreciated that and they fully have supported the class. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. And there is some debate like at times it doesn't necessarily seem like for recreational use of cannabis on an hourly basis is conducive sometimes. Yeah, but that's right. But the debate is not like yes or no should we have cannabis and it's like the debate's over. In legalized cannabis is here to stay. So prohibition has ended. We might think of it in many ways. Ending. And we will look back at this period of prohibition as probably folly. Silly. Especially the ramifications of the war on drugs and things like that. This natural plant co-evolves with humans on earth and we're just going to ban it. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's so much more nuance. It's great that the students are getting to engage in the cultural problem. Yeah, and it's been really informative. And I mean people ask me why did you teach this class? I mean it's not my area of research or anything but it actually is. I mean it's a great example of ethnobotany. It's a great example of human-plant interaction and how we have influenced a plant and the plant has influenced us. And also I think of cannabis as a kind of arrowhead, the spearhead that will get us to be able to speak fluently about many other medicinal plants. Cannabis isn't just THC and CBD. It's maybe thousand. Right, I mean there's hemp but there's lots of molecules doing lots of things in your body and there's lots of different cultivative varieties that are doing lots of different things. So that's the same thing with any medicinal plant. If you were to look at Ginkgo Biloba or Ginseng and you were to buy 10 bottles of it from some drugstore, you would have 10 different chemical profiles likely because the environmental conditions under which it was grown, the age of the plant, it would all change and that's the same questions we're answering now with cannabis and we're grappling with the variability and how do we test for these things and what do we care about. So if we can answer those questions with cannabis first, I think people may become more comfortable and regulators may find better ways to understand how we can use these plant-based medicines better. Yeah, that's such a good class. I'm so happy that you're teaching that one. And then there's also you were telling me you were coming back, I want to give this example because it's kind of like a geopolitical example like another part of the world you're coming back from a conference in Barbados and Barbados has a high amount of sugarcane fields. And so teach us about what an ethno botanist, what their lens is when they look at. Yeah, sure. So I mean there's so much because sugarcane came with slavery or slavery came with sugarcane however you want to look at it and also many other plants. So Barbados is it's an island unto itself it had an endemic botany so it had lots of its own plants. The last assessment of the botany of Barbados showed there were just two endemic species left and the rest were all foreign plants that were brought into the island. Well actually that's not true some of them were indigenous plants but not endemic meaning they're not unique to that place. And then I think most recently said that they can't find the other ones so there's only one endemic species left in Barbados of like 600 plant species or something like that on the island. And that is because and I'm getting pretty specific to Barbados but there are lessons here so Barbados was not is not a volcanic island it's a it's made of coral so it's fairly flat so it's easy for for it was used very flattened and cleared and then put a whole bunch of sugarcane to fuel rum trade or in sugar and bring slaves into care for the sugarcane. It also brought other other species like breadfruit which was some people say was brought as food for the slaves and other kind of tropical plants as well but basically it's a monoculture of sugarcane that's what the agriculture in Barbados has been sugarcane and now the sugarcane is being supplemented by government just to keep things going in some way there are a few rum distilleries still in Barbados that that do that we so it was me and several other ethnobotanists there we spoke about many things but we wanted to you know give some perspective about what other types of agricultural endeavors could be pursued in Barbados one idea might even be cannabis right I mean if there's going to be a global cannabis trade of some sort there's no reason why those sugarcane fields can't be cannabis fields grown for medicinal purposes or for CBD or whatever yeah so I mean from an ethnobotanist point of view it's about interfacing with anthropology botany chemistry pharmacology those are when I teach about medicinal plants those are the four pillars of understanding that I try to build that knowledge on yeah yeah give us the four pillars again so and this is for medicinal plants anthropology botany chemistry and pharmacology yeah and I so for instance a class I'm teaching at Harvard on medicinal plants you know that we present it in that order and then we kind of culminate things by going for a plant walk and planting all those things yeah that's great and this is at Harvard and at Tufts yes yes it's the medicinal plants from the sacred to the scientific and that's also the title of the book that'll hopefully be out by the end of this year yes yeah yeah interesting what else about them from the sacred to the scientific with medicinal plants should we know well the and the reason I call it that is because you know some of the earliest understandings that it may be well first off it covers a lot of interest for people because some people are very interested in the anthropological and spiritual social aspects of how people use plants and I feel like you can't separate that from what we might think of as science those things have a lot to tell each other so I think it's really about I mean part of this is about someone like me who's a scientist who studies these things seriously and academically I you mentioned I mean I'm a researcher at Harvard I'm a researcher at MIT I do things on this one level but then saying I'm willing to talk about herbal medicine and I'm willing to talk about the spiritual side of how people have chosen plants because I know that those things should shouldn't be separated and that there's value to them like I said the majority of things that we use as medicine come from nature in some way are inspired by nature so yeah for me it's about it's integrated medicine right it's integrating human health spirituality social aspect as you mentioned that's part of health and making people feel more whole in some ways I think and allowing people to reclaim that so I did I mentioned that I just visited an herbal practitioner in upstate New York her name is Susan Weed who I honor every time I teach I always mention her she's sometimes calls herself a green witch she practices herbal medicine and she's a great teacher and what part of what she teaches that herbal medicine is people's medicine and I repeat that to my students and let them think about what that actually means I mean in some ways it means it should be in and can be accessible to most people people don't need to rely on a man in a white coat giving an isolated compound in a white pill there are ways to use the plants around us as medicine humans have figured it out for a long time and although some scientists might argue well and that's the ideal way to do it the truth is right now we're just not the state where everyone can have access to those things as and we we work towards that towards having the best medicine for everyone but there are also ways to learn from those complex plant medicines that could still be good for people yeah yeah yeah there's it's all under the umbrella of sacred scientific it's all under an umbrella of co-evolution of humans with plants right yeah yeah is is the the biotech that you're teaching at northeastern yeah what's a good example of some of the core material from that yeah so this class it's an introduction to biotechnology and biotechnology for most people nowadays especially in the cambridge boston area means working with protein drugs or large molecule pharmaceuticals and a lot of these are actually for treating what i sometimes call diseases of the affluent so things like cancer and other things that people live old enough to get and at high numbers whereas you know they're in other parts of the world people may be dying of infections and things that much younger ages so and it all and other reason it's affluence is tied to this because these drugs are incredibly expensive and incredibly incredibly again labor intends to produce these drugs so in that class traces the pathway of the biotechnological pipeline from drug manufacturing side of things it doesn't really get into plant-based medicine because this is mostly has to do with genetically engineering um let's say animal cells to produce a specific antibody drug or protein that will then treat some particular disease but as part of that now i've just put together a syllabus for an agricultural biotechnology course which will cover all the ways that biotechnology has been used and can be used to change agriculture i mean everything people may have heard of golden rice which was one of the first genetically modified plant organisms that allowed humans to have access to nutrients that they wouldn't have had otherwise children were going blind from lack of nutrition and you know something like this is a way to so i mean there are a lot of people anti-gmo right broadly and even in entire countries for anti-gmo but what they probably are actually anti or anti the business practices that are behind some of the work that's been done with genetically modified organisms because um in plant biotech humans have been doing some sort of biotechnology in that they're manipulating the plant genome in some way for thousands of years people have been crossing plants and creating things so human hands have had absolutely an influence the cannabis plant did not get to the way it is without human influence um the apples you eat are not they may not be gmo in the biotech sense but they were human or engineered things just like corn or wheat or any of these things were completely modified by human intervention we kept wanting to pair for the genetics that we wanted right yeah yes and then crossing things and making mutants of things and until we got what we wanted and um you know the future of that is it has to be done properly of course but um there's great potential for feeding a as i started this whole thing with the idea of overpopulating the world if the world is going to continue to grow in population we have to find new ways that we can be innovative to feed the world unfortunately that's just the way it is it may include genetically modifying crops so that they're less disease they're more disease resistant um so that their yields are higher i mean that's kind of where we've gotten ourselves drop resistance for better or worse um genetically modified organisms in somewhere are here to stay and um we and if we're going to use them we need to use them to solve these big problems like i kind of started talking about yeah i think it was really fascinating when you said that the diseases of the affluent are the ones when you live long enough to be able to get the cancer stuff like viagra right i mean that's not an essential drug for the world necessarily but a lot of money time scientific expertise has been spent on that um yeah yeah i mean it's not to discount the research in the cancer drugs but it's just that they're if we were to actually kind of have a level playing for we looked at things like neglected tropical diseases that's right um you know we would have a more fair way of looking at some of these things but we want to we want to target the basic physiological needs that are not being met in the world and then go and um alleviate that those um uh elements that come from that and then enable the full creative development of people and then also tackle cancer and dementia and all these other big things at the same time and another one of the things that you said was just that within biotechnology and it's so good that you're teaching about it that there is you know we work so much within the bio and i mentor there too the largest seed stage biotech accelerator and what they're working on are everything especially uh food-wise like uh like growing meat without the animals right it's such a fascinating space um and i think we're going to be able to sustainably feed the world um by uh leveraging the tools that biotechnology can inspire young people to get involved with it you also do this a bit at MIT's media lab um the open agriculture initiative is fascinating um the food computer i saw the video of the food computer i'm going to embed that video here for everyone to see but you do so much so many sensors there co2 sensor temperature sensor humidity sensor light panels there's a new brain and a new interface and a cloud back end and you can add sensors for ph and water temperature electro conductivity extra cameras i thought this was so cool seeing it looks like a little maker bot on a table and you can grow plants within it and see all the science that's happening yeah so now we now we can go really strange because all the things i've talked about have been about what you might think of like indigenous medicine indigenous people and but i think that the uniqueness that i try to bring is um you know of course ethnobotanists have studied indigenous people in fact here at harvard um the person who kind of popularized ethnobotanism most is richard schultes and i have i'm lucky enough to be working exactly where he were as a young person i never thought i'd have that chance but now at the harvard or barium uh is exactly where he was working studying these indigenous people and in some ways their technologies right we may not call it technology the way we think of the technology but humans develop technology to interface with the world particularly when it comes to plants so that's what ethnobotany meant and for me part of my mission has been to redefine what ethnobotany means and that's why i've been so lucky to work at the media lab which is really like the harry potter's magic studio of making magic things that's the subtitle of the media yeah uh with so many amazing programs there i i gave a talk uh about a year ago the director of open agriculture at the media lab kaleb harper was at the same conference and he invited me to come visit the laboratory which is out at the baits laboratory at mit which is actually like 40 minutes north of boston at the old it's a retired linear particle accelerator uh pre-surn uh daves and uh fascinating place uh spooky tunnels everywhere filled with kind of old technologies but they gave us a warehouse where we put large shipping containers that we've converted into controlled growing environments so that's what we do out there so to me this is the new idea of what ethnobotany can be so looking at where people are now and how they interface with plants um and what the future of that can be so at open agriculture one of our specialties is looking at controlled environment growing systems and we have what's called the food computer which is a 30 centimeter by 30 centimeter unit that's completely scalable so actually food computer is a general term for all the types of computers that we build that interface with our food or plants in any way so i love i love that pairing of the words yeah computer right right yeah um so yeah and this tool so this 30 centimeter centimeter box which is art is those dimensions um because of a nasa challenge they wanted something that was the size that could go up to the space station yeah so that's why we made it that size this is the third iteration and there'll be a fourth and a fifth already in the works for this um the mission for us was to make a small unit that could actually be used for stem and steam education yeah so this is something that we put into middle schools and high schools it's in 65 countries around the world excellent and it's cheap to make um everything can be fabricated pretty easily um all from the same material um and for cheap parts you can buy pretty easily and then it's a this mini controlled environment that allows you to grow something we our specialty has been basil it's kind of like our lab rat for what we've been doing so we grow basil in these small uh containers and and we teach kids about plants so some of these kids don't know that a tomato comes from the ground in a plant they think it just comes from a grocery store right they don't understand that connection right but i mean that really happens they don't know that we get food from my god we're so deep in metropolises that sometimes yeah the kids not only don't see stars they don't know the food comes from the farm right exactly yeah that's crazy so if kids don't know that then what kind of like environmental stewards are they gonna be like are they gonna care about who they vote for or anything if they don't even understand the simple process or even if they have a vague understanding they don't have a tactile understanding they're not you know for years my partner and I had put together a school uh gardens and community gardens he was on the school board in the town that we lived in and we would work to encourage that to happen and what we saw our kids for the first time interfacing the plants they learn a new uh speed of time time passes differently they have a new understanding for patients yes so all those things happen and when you have these little units they same idea you know they they have to watch this thing grow they see things go wrong or right and also while they're doing this all the variables that they're changing and all the sensors that you mentioned are uploading that data to the cloud yes and informing what's called a climate recipe and then we can learn we use machine learning to learn from all these different iterations of how the plant grew it's always takes images as well of the plant it's awesome um so we use that to build a system machine learning system yeah so that same tool the food computer which is actually it's called a pfc edu personal food computer yeah education for educational purposes so that's the personal food computer using that same technology scaled up we built the food server so this is a shipping container size version um we published a paper earlier this month in in april it can grow food for communities yeah exactly so what we at the media lab it's a unique funding system where companies become members and they give us some sort of challenge and they can fund particular projects so actually target wanted to grow plants things like basil or herbs or high value products close to the store so they didn't have to ship them but this same idea we've actually implemented in other places so we've partnered with um a well spun the company a cotton company in india and we've actually put these containers we've gone to india and installed these help them install these units where they can grow specialty cotton inside these units and learn about the environment and these tools are used not just for production so you might be thinking okay how much can i grow in this thing and how like i can't grow an apple and them right because it's kind of not built for that but you can use this tool to not just for production but you can also use it as an experimental platform so it allows you to isolate specific variables so if you wanted to know what happens when an insect is on this plant or what happens when i change the pH or if i change the temperature um then it will give you some information about the plants that you're growing themselves in fact it could help you choose which cultivated variety of the plant you're going to put out in the field we recently built what we call the tree computer so we work with Ferrero who's the maker of Nutella and Ferrero Rocher so it's a confectioner but think about how many other practical implications this might have they said you know we grow most of the hazelnuts in the world which is what they use for Nutella are grown in turkey which doesn't have a perfectly stable uh governmental situation it doesn't have uh there's problems with pests coming in and they wanted to diversify in other parts of the world so they said can you build us one of these computers that we could put a tree inside and then figure out which climate might be best to grow a variety so we did that we built this tree computer um we put them in there and then we test extremes like extreme cold extreme heat of targeted environments around the world and then we can tell them okay you want to grow in Adelaide Australia we punch in the environmental extremes then we see okay eight of these cultivars will never live there and two of them would do okay so then that saves them a lot of time and money and says okay we'll promote these two cultivated varieties and we'll grow them there and the same thing could happen that helps us make more food right it helps us have a better world in general because we're not wasting time and money and effort you're running all of the permutations of the possibilities of where plants can most effectively grow around the world way faster than an organization could you gave the example of an unstable potentially country where majority of the plant is grown or another one is when you drop an insect into the personal food computer and then you can literally watch the variables change on how that insect is affecting it that that is so cool and i 65 countries around the world now with these um scalability you can take it from 30 30 centimeters all the way up to and people are riffing on them because we everything's open agriculture so we don't keep anything secret it's an open source initiative yeah so that's the real key here because even though we have to partner with Target and Ferrero and these other companies because that's the model of the media lab um they have to agree to make everything open to the public so typically these controlled environments are incredibly privately held the technology is sequestered and you never hear about these and Target or Ferrero would want to keep it for themselves and then maybe distribute their patent to other companies and make money but in this case you're doing it as an open learning initiative yeah and that's so cool because then other people around the world can pick up the should the big shipping containers and like you said be growing for their and there may be a question like well this seems very expensive and you know how would people in developing parts of the world participate in this um what the vision is that well the technologies are being developed we want as many people who can be a part of it be a part of it and what we want people is to be a part of the destiny not subject to it or a part of the development of technology not subject to the technology that's delivered to them so that's why we have that we have um an online community that you know we hear from them they ask questions and it's very participatory so the idea is you know open source and open knowledge and having people share and improve on that knowledge yeah you get to the edge you make a massive new open source advancement and then that does not keep it you know closed off it pushes the edge further faster and then teach us about the flavor cyber agriculture as well reducing waste meeting demand maintaining flavor providing nutrition yeah yeah so uh uh flavor cyber so cyber ag is kind of the term for these types of devices and what we're doing here cyber just being like computerized agriculture in some way um this flavor cyber agriculture was the name of the paper that we just published about a month ago that showed that we could modulate we could tune the flavor of basil in some ways just by modulating this case we're doing light uv light in different times of exposure to that light um but the bigger picture of this is is the tunability of a plant in some ways so this idea that indigenous people have understood this for thousands of years that you pick a plant on this side of the mountain at this time of day with this weather because it gives you this product we can now iterate and experiment on in a cyber agriculture uh unit and we could say okay what do we need to do to tune this let's say we wanted to make a medicinal plant let's say we wanted to make an anti diabetes basil because we grow a lot of basil um what do we need to do to change that plant so that it produces most of that chemical that will be anti diabetic for people around the world who can't get insulin or metformin or some other anti diabetes medication that's some of the work I did uh in my previous research before I came here and it's some of the work we're continuing to do now at MIT it's so fascinating being able to tweak this in the age of cyber agriculture the different variables and be able to produce different medicines um and flavors and all this cool that's so interesting um what is the future of ethnobotany I think we're defining it I think that um so ethnobotany you know in the 40s 50s 60s people were very interested in uh how can we discover drugs from plants that are in parts of the world we haven't discovered so ethnobotanists had a real value to big companies for going out and discovering and identifying all these plants again like I said a lot of that work was done by Richard Schultes and his students at Harvard um now then it kind of dissipated a bit I would say because drug companies became not as interested they weren't finding as many leads from nature that they used to it was very labor intensive and then now we've we've been a bit I would say for the past maybe 15 20 years we've been trying to define what the future is I mean I'm trying to do that with my fellow ethnobotanists published a paper two years go called ethno phyto technology so that's taking ethnobotany and biotechnology and smashing them together because really that is ethnobotany is a science of studying plants and people biotechnology is a people driven uh technology people driven science that relies on nature in some way so it's just natural that we we do plant biotechnology right but what have we incorporated the human aspect even more what have we incorporated the ethnobotanical understanding of how people have used these plants or even just the notion that humans have understood that environment changes plant chemistry and then start to utilize that knowledge and pipelines to discover new things or make things better from the plant perspective that I think the future is integrating these things all the way from biotech to artificial intelligence I mentioned machine learning all these all these iterations of experience we do all the data because there's so much data all those sensors it's like an internet of things idea right so we I gave a talk on the internet of food not too long ago um because now we have all these sensors uploading all this data how do we utilize that IOF yeah right IOF yeah so we uh the way that we use it is we put it into machine learning models and we that's the entire paper that was published was based on we worked with a company called cognizant which has I think 280,000 employees around the world um who has an interest in modeling things um and they use you know the most modern techniques and artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to give us these outcomes um so I think the future is just recognizing where humans are now using that honoring and utilizing some that indigenous knowledge and then making sure we're sharing that around the world so that's one aspect I didn't agree it has to be shared back to the whole world so we're going all the way from sacred and indigenous plant medicines to the internet of food the uh the food computers the machine learning algorithms that we have now and we're open sourcing right that wisdom so we're providing an open sourcing I love that because the history of the world has been stealing from people who are weaker and then using it for the people who the victors right but we're trying to reverse that in some way if we can take some of this knowledge improve upon it and have it be open source for everyone to use I think that's a better model for living even in the world that keeps growing in population where food and plants are going to be vital to our survival I think it's the the best way for it and what a beautiful thing to have the companies like uh target uh or a walmart or an uh amazon or an apple the largest companies in the world across the world even in china and whatnot to be uh open sourcing the technology that they're working with cool uh institutions like media lab so that they get access to it immediately because they funded it as well but then it's democratized as well right away I love that process so much I think that's kind of like open notebook science at the edge of knowledge and that's I think that's a lot of our future two quick questions on the way out that we like asking our guests the first question is john do you think we're in a simulation yes absolutely tell us more that's my that's my maybe people won't have watched all the way to the end of the interview uh what is a simulation right um artificial intelligence someone asked me what is artificial intelligence I said it's it's intelligence right because we're recreating that now I I I absolutely open to the possibility that we're in a simulation um yeah I think in fact like to my mind sometimes it makes the most sense especially for the you know even listen listening to my story there have been so many times where things have been too bizarre to explain um yeah so uh that that's gonna go from a farm to Manhattan right right but also all the little things you don't mention that the repetitions that happen the the cues that you see yes um those are things that people have attributed to spirituality and god and other things um so just as bizarre is a simulation so I think put that up there with explaining the unexplained um I think that we should not be so arrogant I think that we have it all figured out on this little tiny speck of dust floating in space um I mean that that's really how I guess that's essentially how I feel I'm open if I weren't open to bizarre crazy ideas I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing so I think of course we could be in a simulation yeah I love it I love it um there's there's also the um what we'll learn as we uh in the next couple of decades hopefully um run our own simulations and be able to analyze the way that the humans evolved um and uh you're right the attribution of to uh what happened pre big bang why are we here right all that all these interesting questions um all right and the last question is what is the most beautiful thing in the world the most beautiful thing in the world I should have watched your other um you know I was I can't remember the name for it but hey have you heard of this term the like Norwegian term or something for um this kind of centered peacefulness that comes from being around people that you love and they love you and they understand you I think that even if you're in like a cabin and it's dark outside and cold you can have some comfort because you're around people who understand you in some way so I think that people are always trying to get there people I think a lot of humans are always trying to get to a comfortable place where they feel useful but also know that people understand what they are I think that feeling is probably the most beautiful thing in the world because it's so unique because a lot of the things around us are relatively inert but it's almost like the highest form of evolution or something right like the ability to that incorporates love and peace and all those other things but then feeling useful and feeling loved and feeling like you can communicate with someone I think that that that can be the most most beautiful thing in the world oh yeah that's well well said yeah yeah it's one of the deepest human feelings right sure yeah yeah and every human deserves to have that absolutely that's what yeah when the simulation is doing a really good job that's right we have that feeling when we push the new code deployments the updates right and humans can have that feeling um all the base physiological needs covered that's so right if we could encapsulate that feeling and say okay like I haven't I've felt this and now I know that everyone in the world should have the ability to feel this then then that just expands all the beauty yeah that's right yeah yeah John De La Parra what an absolute pleasure thank you so much for coming on to their show yeah this is such a pleasure uh so enlightening thank you for teaching us about ethnobotany and about the craziness of food computers and the cannabis debate course all this kind of stuff so fascinating we're excited to continue on building relationship and making connections for each other you're welcome of course anytime back in the bay area join us on the show again we'd love to do that thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode go and share more conversations about ethnobotany everything from the sacred and the indigenous all the way to the new internet of food era show that your friends your families your coworkers online go and start talking about it more and inspiring more people to build the future in this regard check out John's links below as well go and support him also support the artists entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in support simulation our links are below so you can continue doing cool things like coming to the boston area and interviewing people like john and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon