Albert Lin is a renowned explorer, scientist, and storyteller. He is best known for his role as the host of multiple National Geographic programs. Together with his team, he uses advanced technologies such as satellites, drones, ground penetrating radar, and cutting edge LiDAR to uncover ancient civilizations around the world.
Albert Lin is a renowned explorer, scientist, and storyteller. He is best known for his role as the host of multiple National Geographic programs. Together with his team, he uses advanced technologies such as satellites, drones, ground penetrating radar, and cutting edge LiDAR to uncover ancient civilizations around the world.
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Albert Lin:
You see the bricks there, and then you see little bits of pottery lying on the ground, and you pick up a piece of pottery and you look at it. It's just a shard. It's just this piece of pottery that's been sitting in the jungle for 800 years or something like this, and it still has the fingerprint of the person who made it on the inside. And you put your thumb against that fingerprint, and you are there. You are holding the thumb of the person who made this 800 years ago.
Shelby Stanger:
Albert Lin is a renowned explorer, scientist, and storyteller. He has accomplished a lot, but he's probably most known for his TV presence as the host of multiple National Geographic series, including Lost Cities. In these expeditions, Albert and his team use satellites, drones, ground penetrating radar, and cutting edge LiDAR technology to uncover ancient civilizations from Guatemala to Sudan and Scotland. On the show, you may have seen him hacking through the jungle with a machete, a prosthetic leg, and lasers in the sky to find secrets of our past that can shape our future. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. This episode contains a discussion about Albert's experience using psilocybin for medicinal treatment. It does not constitute medical advice. Listen responsibly and consult your doctor about your medical care.
Albert largely grew up in northern California, where his dad was an astrophysicist and his mom was an actress and musician. In a household where big questions were always on the table, Albert developed a deep sense of curiosity. He eventually earned a PhD in science and engineering from UC San Diego. After he graduated, Albert's life took a turn when he traveled to Mongolia in search of answers about his family's heritage. While he was there, he connected with the culture and became fascinated with the story of Genghis Khan, the legendary and controversial leader who once ruled the largest empire in history.
Albert Lin:
I learned from the Mongolians that Genghis Khan was a hero to them. Not a villain like you hear about in the West, but like a hero. And their story about him was never really told. No paintings were ever made of him while he was alive. Nobody really ever had any documentation of him from his own people while he was alive. No tombs of he or his ancestors have ever been found. So there's just never been any hard evidence, it's all just conjecture. And yet for the Mongolian people, he created the largest empire in human history in land mass and population in a single lifetime. More than the Romans, more than anything. And so growing up I was like, "Well, where are my heroes?" And all of a sudden I find this hero, and at the same time, I have to fly home and finish my PhD in engineering. And I'm like, "Well, what the hell? I need to merge these two worlds together." And so essentially the next step was figuring out how to use engineering and technology to go find this tomb. And that's when I graduated.
Shelby Stanger:
So you applied for this grant to go find, and I'm saying his name wrong, Genghis Khan's tomb.
Albert Lin:
Yeah, Genghis, Genghis Khan.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you say it?
Albert Lin:
Genghis, Genghis Khan.
Shelby Stanger:
Genghis Khan.
Albert Lin:
That's what the Mongols call him.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that. Okay. Did you find it?
Albert Lin:
Here's what we found. We found a series of temples buried in the roots of trees that were surrounding this plateau on the exact mountain that we had identified as where the tomb should be.
Shelby Stanger:
And no one else had found that?
Albert Lin:
Nobody. And it's because it is in the center of a precinct that's known as the Forbidden Precinct, the Ikh Khorig, that's been protected and hidden away by the decree of Genghis Khan himself for 800 years, and it's right on the border of outer Mongolia and Russia.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you find it when no one else had?
Albert Lin:
So to get access to this sacred site, we had to find a way to look non-invasively without digging. So all of a sudden I start turning to all my friends and we're like, "Okay, let's use satellites, let's get drones, let's get radar." And we built out this whole virtual expedition that could sense through the ground without digging the ground. But what ended up happening was, while we got permission to this sacred place that had been forbidden to go to for 800 years, we get there and all these storms are whipping all around us. And all of a sudden this storms rip up all this earth in the roots of trees. So the trees tip over and they rip up like these windows into the earth.
And as we're hiking up to try to scan this mountain with all our radars, all of a sudden we're looking and it's like the mountain had shown us what was there, and it was this just cluster of temples right underneath our feet. And as we walk across, you're standing on a roof, and then you reach into the roots of a tree and you pull out an arrowhead and a horse tooth and a gold bit of lacquer and some other piece of pottery, and you're like, "Wow."
Shelby Stanger:
Wait, that is like most people's dream, to discover something like that. How did you feel when that happened?
Albert Lin:
It's like every cliche about life, that moment of discovery, that moment where you actually find something that's been hidden away for hundreds of years. I think it's the same thrill that drives us to stay curious. But when it actually gets realized, that feeling, that aha, it's so remarkable. It sends all these chills up your back and you're just like, "What?" And it takes a while to sink in. We ended up finding all this stuff in the base of the temples, even though we didn't excavate, we could see these voids, and we think those are burial chambers. I think they are. And all the horse bones and all the little bits of fragment, burnt wood, everything that we found there dates to exactly the time of Genghis Khan's death. So that's what I'll leave it at. We were about to get the cover story of Newsweek, and then they all of a sudden, the Mongolian government embargoed the findings and they were going to create this big protection zone around it and heritage thing around it.
And now I've been invited to maybe go back and publish the remainder of the work, but there's literally hundreds of pounds of artifacts from that place in the lab showing that, what else could it be? And not only did I find this deep story of Genghis Khan and of the Mongolian culture, but I think I found my roots in something about being human, believing that there is this deep curiosity in me that is real and that doesn't need to be denied because it sounds childish or a thing of the past or whatever, but that it's real. That journey taught me that asking big ideas and searching for mysteries, that's life for me.
Shelby Stanger:
In the process of searching for this tomb, Albert realized that he had a deep passion for exploring ancient civilizations. He began learning more about technology used by experts in the field. But in 2016, after becoming a prominent archeological engineer, Albert's life was upended by a major traumatic event. He was riding in an ATV outside of San Diego when he was in an accident.
Albert Lin:
When the roll cage came down on my leg, it was just, everything was shattered to bits. And then all of a sudden I'm sitting in a hospital and I'm wondering, "Am I ever going to walk again or anything?" And that was a little bit scary at first. Then they went through months, about a month of surgeries to do what they called limb salvage, getting your leg opened and closed and opened and closed through all these surgeries and all this. It was mostly metal at that point anyway.
Shelby Stanger:
After many unsuccessful surgeries, Albert chose to have his leg amputated. It was a hard decision, but he preferred the certainty of amputation to the unpredictability of continued pain and mobility issues. As he was navigating this massive life change, there were big things happening in the world of archeology. Scientists were using new LiDAR technology to search for ancient Mayan ruins in the Peten jungle of Guatemala. This technology uses laser pulses to cut through layers like dense forest canopies to create highly detailed three-dimensional maps of the terrain. It was the kind of project that Albert had always dreamed of. Despite the fact that he was still recovering, he was invited to participate in the expedition.
Albert Lin:
In the recovery period, I get this message from my friend Tom, who had just collected this landmark data set of the jungles of the Peten. There were 60,000 new Mayan structures discovered. He was like, "Well, the data's looking pretty crazy right now, and there's just so much out there that has yet to be discovered." And then I get this other call from Nat Geo saying, "Hey, well, you're very good at telling these stories. We want you to go all through the Peten right now and meet all the different archeologists as they're making the discoveries. We've got a helicopter on standby. You ready to go?" And I was still in a wheelchair, but that's what I love about Nat Geo, in that they didn't make that the decision maker. They let me decide where my limits were. And so the funny thing is, I never did PT. Really the first few major steps, like long journeys, were in the jungles with my new body, and it was all happening at the same time.
Shelby Stanger:
So you got a prosthetic leg as you went to Guatemala.
Albert Lin:
Basically, to go to Guatemala, I had to get my first prosthetic leg built. And I was still using walking sticks, and it was still really raw, but all this data had come in and it was about to go down. And I remember my friend calls me, he's like, "Okay, well, they're about to let us in, but the permits are getting held up and everything's getting weird." And everybody was stuck in the town outside of the jungle in Guatemala. And I flew in, he's like, "Come on, come on, let's go." And I was still getting around everywhere with walking sticks. And all the archeology digs were held up. But there was this one guru archeologist, this guy, Steve Houston, who basically decoded the Maya glyphs, but he doesn't stop, and he doesn't have any sympathy. He doesn't ...
Shelby Stanger:
He sounds gnarly.
Albert Lin:
He doesn't care if you're hurting. He just has no sympathy whatsoever. He's just no bullshit. And it's kind of exactly what I needed. And he's like, "Well, let's just go. Let's just go on and we'll just hike. We won't do any excavations. We'll just go for a hike." And the minute we get into the jungle, all of a sudden we're going off trail and we realize that the GPS that we are using to try to find these coordinates doesn't work because you have no line of sight to the sky. You can't see through the trees. So now we're just dead reckoning with a compass, old school style, with this map that had just been created with lasers in the sky. And we're hiking around and we're crawling up this escarpment.
And I distinctly remember the moment where I had to put my walking sticks into my backpack and pull out my machete, and it was like, "Oh, all the inabilities are sort of falling away." It kind of felt like that moment in Forrest Gump where he's running and all of a sudden all the braces fall off and everything. And it was like, "I've got to go. I've got to get the machete. We're going, I'm following this guy with this map, and we're going to go find this thing." And eventually up this giant escarpment, there we are standing in front of a pyramid that had been sitting there for 1,000 years that had never been seen since the time of its use.
Shelby Stanger:
How crazy. What was the pyramid like?
Albert Lin:
Well, pyramids in the jungle look like big mountains covered in trees, because the jungle takes over very quickly. But then you look around and you see the bricks there, and then you see little bits of pottery lying on the ground. And you pick up a piece of pottery and you look at it, and it still has the fingerprint of the person who made it on the inside. And you put your thumb against that fingerprint, and you are there. And it's like ... And I can't describe the feeling of being superimposed into the presence of somebody from 800 years ago in this sacred landscape that they had basically left to nature. But it's profound. It's profound. And all my physical stuff, my prosthetic, everything else like that, it all just sort of melted away.
Shelby Stanger:
In the jungles of Guatemala, Albert and his team found a sacred altar, undiscovered cave systems, and even a seven-story pyramid that dated back all the way to 562 CE. While Albert was on this expedition, he was so immersed in his work that he barely thought about his injury. The discomfort from his amputation seemed to fade into the background. Once the adrenaline wore off and Albert was back in the States, though, he began experiencing intense pain in part of his leg that was no longer there. Eventually doctors diagnosed him with a condition known as phantom limb pain.
Albert Lin:
For a lot of folks that have a limb amputated. The brain still is saying there's something wrong, and it's wrong in a part of your body that no longer exists. So imagine feeling something really intense and then trying to go grab for it, and all you get is air. And at first it was all-consuming, to the point in which it felt like you're gasping for air below the surface of the water but you can't get up to the top of it. It feels like your foot's being lit on fire or there's electrodes being shot through it, and there's no pain meds that can approach it. You can't take a pain med to cure something in your brain.
And so there was at UCSD this neuroscientist, and he discovered this process called mirror box therapy, where you could use a mirror to trick your mind into seeing two limbs again when you lose one limb. It's like when, have you ever done that thing when you were a kid where you'd sit next to maybe a large sliding door mirror in the closet or something, and you'd stick one leg and arm out the side, and you can fly in the reflection of the mirror? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Shelby Stanger:
Totally know what you're doing, yes.
Albert Lin:
Yeah. So it's like that, but now you're trying to create two arms again or two legs again, and then your brain is like, "Oh, it's no longer in pain." It'll release the pain. And I remember walking into his room, his office. It looks like you're walking into Darwin's office. There's brains in jars, there's dinosaurs everywhere. There's weird mandalas on the walls. There's everything. And he's lighting my foot on fire with a fake Halloween blowtorch, but it's not my foot any more. And I'm feeling it. I'm like, "Oh my God." And then I remember it was around Halloween, and he went to the Halloween store and got a severed leg from the Halloween store and attached it to my body so I'd see two legs again, and then remove it over and over again so I could see it being removed. And it was really gruesome because it was a Halloween leg, so it was covered in blood and gore and everything like that. But he was stuck with what he had. It was pretty funny.
But every time those images would be removed, the pain would come rushing back in. It's almost like I was seeing a story, but I wasn't truly believing the story. And this was a very, very awe-inspiring realization to me, that reality is a matter of deep neuroplastic belief making and manifesting what's all around us. So what ended up happening was, with him, I looked towards all the research and they're showing that people in deep states of depression were using psychedelics to let go of their traumas in a heightened moment of neuroplasticity. So that's what we did. We combined the mirror with a heavy dose of psilocybin, and boom, the pain went away and it was gone. And it was really gone. And I'm happy to say that now we are past the first clinical trial at UCSD in the new Center for Psychedelic Research that was born out of this, and it's super, super, super successful.
So it is really, really remarkable to think that these tools can help us change our reality. But what really got me going was realizing that these are not modern tools. This isn't some discovery of the 1960s. This goes back to the Mexica, back to the time of before Maria Sabina in the states of Mexico, Oaxaca, before then, either all the way back to the ancient Mayans and before that. These uses of entheogens, these uses of tools to get to neuroplasticity, they have been a part of our culture since the dawn of our humanity. And not just drugs from plants, but other tools, chanting, dance, architecture, climbing a mountain, being in awe. And the other part of this, what is the source of imagination? Where does new knowledge come from? When we began our humanity, we had a very basic amount of information, and now we have this wild world of knowledge around us.
We've lost a lot of knowledge too, but everything was imagined first and then became reality, right? Where did all that stuff come from? Where's the birth of imagination? And when I saw my leg and my reality in my leg coming through in this moment where it was like, "I can literally imagine a new reality, but I have to get to this neuroplastic state first," I started thinking that actually all culture has these tools, almost like these portals towards neuroplasticity, and they are our vehicles to imagine the cultures that then emerge from them. In order to get to a place where you can create a new reality, you have to be in a neuroplastic state. You have to get to that origin source of imagination itself.
Shelby Stanger:
Albert launched the first case study using psilocybin to treat phantom limb pain. His experience with neuroplasticity not only changed the way he relates to his own body, but it led to the creation of the Center for Psychedelic Research at UCSD and a multi-million dollar clinical trial based on that case study. It also shifted his understanding of how we adapt, survive, and make meaning across time. Albert describes it as a search for what it means to be human, both individually and collectively.
Albert Lin is an explorer, scientist, and storyteller. With a background in science and engineering, he's helped make incredible discoveries while searching for ancient civilizations around the world. He's also learned a lot about culture and psychology through deeply transformative experiences in his own life. These moments have changed the way he thinks about humanity. What have you discovered about what it means to be human?
Albert Lin:
Well, one is, we are both incredibly unique from culture to culture, but also really, really, really similar. I'm trying to make a film now about this kid. My friend discovered a couple of years ago this kid in a cave in Borneo who had his leg amputated 31,000 years ago. And this kid survived for up to a decade afterwards and had this very beautiful, intentional burial that survived time for 31,000 years. And we're talking about just, I know that number throws, it's like, what? 31,000 years ago is a very long time ago. We're talking about before all the civilizations, Egypt, everything, before everything, into our pre pre-human civilization dawn. We're talking about stone age. In the earliest days of our existence, this kid had a major accident. And instead of being left, which at a time of hunter gatherers, you'd think it'd be more convenient to leave somebody who can't move behind, a community got around this person, figured out how to amputate their leg, figured out how to keep them from infection, figured out how to get them to survive. There's even wear on the bones that suggest a prosthetic.
But then when you look at that cave and where the burial is, there's all these handprints on the walls, and those handprints are from the people who cared for that kid. So what that tells me, and what I've experienced in my own life, is that we have an instinct to care about each other. Despite what you see in the news all day long and all the negativity that's out in the world and all that, I've noticed time and time again that when it really comes down to what I experience in humanity, it's that we have an innate desire to care for each other. So that's one.
The second thing is that something happens when you feel the power of collective thought. When we put our minds towards something collectively, it actually, I think, shifts things. And I've had moments in my life where I was at the center of a room where a community around the world was focusing their prayers and thoughts. When I lost my leg, when my friend Jamie died, and more recently when my son had a traumatic brain injury. And I know this is not a very science-y way to describe it, but I've seen that moment three different times, and I've literally felt the light in the room change. It becomes shinier almost. This is anecdotal, but these are the most intimate moments of my life. And these intimate moments, I have felt the power of collective thought. And I think that that tells me that we are a collaborative set of beings and that we have a lot more power in our collective thought than we give credence to.
Shelby Stanger:
I want to talk a little bit about Charlie. So you have this great son who was just in a ski accident about 60 days ago. And I don't exactly know what happened. Did he go off a jump?
Albert Lin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's on the Mammoth ski team, and he just was training and hit a jump way too big. He had all the protective gear on, back protection.
Shelby Stanger:
Helmet and everything?
Albert Lin:
Helmet, everything. And just came down so hard. I had just left him there because I had to give a talk in Chicago. So he was staying with a friend from the team and her family. And I was sitting in the Chicago Field Museum thinking about this story that I just told you about with the kid in Borneo and seeing all the support and love and everything. And then all of a sudden I get this phone call. And nothing could prepare you for that phone call, right? At first it sort of trickles in, "Does he have any allergies?" And then the next thing, I just remember the ski patrol saying, "Well, he's got a pulse and he's breathing, but that's all I can tell you."
And then my whole body starts going into flight or flight mode. Now I'm standing in the cold in Chicago trying to wave down a taxi, and I get another call, and it's from the life flight and the helicopter, and you could hear the ventilator going and him breathing through the machine. And it was like, "Oh my God, oh no." And my kids and I, we've built this super deep bond over the years, and they carried me through. He taught me how to walk again. My daughter taught me how, they just took care of me through my own journey. So we're really there together, and we'd been spending so much time even driving together on the way to Mammoth every weekend that we talked about all this philosophy and all these things along the way. And he would tell me about his thoughts on life and death and all this other stuff. And then boom, there he is on the edge of death. And the craziest experience of the last two months has been just watching him come back. He was in a coma for three days.
Shelby Stanger:
An induced coma?
Albert Lin:
Yeah, induced coma. And then-
Shelby Stanger:
Just because his head was swollen?
Albert Lin:
So swollen and he needed to calm everything down, and he couldn't really functionally breathe on his own yet, so he was intubated and all that. And I remember landing in that hospital room and seeing my little baby boy. He's not really a baby any more, he's 14. It was terrifying. And then my friend, who he was staying with, who happens to be a very unique person, her name is Dina Castor. Do you know the name Dina?
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, she's one of the best runners of all time and owns the track at Mammoth that we run at. She's a stud.
Albert Lin:
Yeah, she's a legend.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah.
Albert Lin:
Three-time Olympian, longest holder of the American record for the marathon. Like, what? She's an incredible human and her family's incredible. And we were there all of a sudden now in this portal right at the edge. And Dina is just holding this incredible space. She would sit next to him in the quiet moments and do these visualizations. Like, "Imagine you're sitting here and about to walk into the snow," and get him to see the mountain again and touch the snow and feel all these things. And I remember the first time we saw him respond to something was when he had just gotten the tubes out and everything. He licked his lips when she said, "Now taste the snow in your mouth." And we all just started crying in the room. It's like, "He licked his lips, oh my God, he's moved. He's there. He can think." It was incredible.
And then he wakes up. And the energy in the room, when I talk about the light shifting, because I had put it out there, "Everybody send a message," their thoughts, their feelings, and their love from all over the world. And you could feel it as if you could wipe your hands through the air and move light itself. And then the next two months became this whole thing where the doctors, once he got out of it, like, "Okay, well, you've got to mesh neuroplasticity with the person he wants to be."
Shelby Stanger:
To assist in his son's recovery, Albert put all of his knowledge and experience to good use and is helping to create a healing routine that focuses on neuroplasticity and joy. It involves a lot of mindfulness, gratitude, whole foods, functional movement, and of course time spent in nature. Charlie is now a few months out from his injury, and his recovery has truly been remarkable. If you want to watch Albert's various TV series, including Lost Cities, you can find them on Disney Plus. You can also find Albert on Instagram and YouTube at @ExplorerAlbert. That's E-X-P-L-O-R-E-R, A-L-B-E-R-T. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.