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The following is a conversation with Paul Rosley, a conservationist, explorer, author, filmmaker, and real-life Tarzan.
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Since for much of the past 17 years, Paul has lived deep in the Amazon rainforest, protecting endangered species and trees from poachers, loggers, and foreign nations funding them.
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He is the founder of Jungle Keepers, which today protects over 50,000 acres of threatened habitat.
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And Paul is one of the most incredible human beings I ve ever met.
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I hope to travel with him in the Amazon jungle one day, because in his eyes, I saw a truth that can only be discovered directly by spending time among the immensity and power of nature at its purest.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Also, if you want to work with our team, we re always hiring.
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Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
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And now onto the flatteries.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors.
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Maybe you will too.
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This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress.
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There s few things I enjoy in life more than a great power nap.
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I take a sip of coffee, I get some caffeine in my body, and then when the feeling of just kind of jadedness, of tiredness, if you think of motivation as an ocean, the thing that covers that motivation are the surface waves.
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I think of the desire to nap as surface waves, and the nap itself is a way to bring calm to the waters.
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It s a way to let the storm pass.
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I just took a nap before this, and you perhaps can tell in my voice the energy of a thousand butterflies.
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I don t know why I chose butterflies, but I did.
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I don t know why I chose a thousand, but it s a distributed system with emergent behavior, I m sure.
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Although the flocking behavior I m aware of is mostly for birds.
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I wonder if butterflies flock.
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They seem more independent.
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They seem too beautiful to flock.
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Does beauty prevent you from cooperating?
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Is there a threshold beyond which you re too beautiful to cooperate with others?
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And the definition of beauty, of course, is species dependent, unless we re talking about butterflies, in which case they re just beautiful, beautiful to other species as well, at least to humans.
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Anyway, check out Eight Sleep and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com slash Lex.
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This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, Help.
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I ve been going through some rough times mentally.
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I just took a nap, so I m feeling pretty good.
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But this last year, and I just tweeted about this, has been really rough.
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I ve had some really low points.
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It s probably not the right place to talk about such low points here as I sit alone in a dark hotel room.
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All the lights off because you know how hotel rooms are.
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There s no overhead lights.
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It s just a lamp.
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Nobody knows how to turn that lamp on so it s mostly darkness with little hints of light from a lamp That s just around the corner And here I sit alone with a microphone Talking about things What is this life exactly?
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Anyway, sometimes those little environments, those little moments can catch you off guard.
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And the darkness that s in our past comes to the surface and it can break you.
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It s good to bring it to the surface often so it doesn t break you.
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And that s where I think talking to others helps.
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I think talk therapy with a professional helps.
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If you want an accessible version of that, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month.
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That s betterhelp.com slash Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
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Actually, I m currently in Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and tragically, I ran out of Athletic Greens.
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Athletic greens is one of the things that makes me feel like I m home.
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It is part of the daily ritual.
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I drink it twice a day and it kind of grounds me.
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It helps me make sure I m getting all the nutrition I need.
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There s something about making sure your diet is not horrible and you re getting the nutrients in your body that you need.
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And you re getting the sleep and the rest and the exercise you need.
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When all of that is in place, there s so much more that you can do with life.
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All the hardship, all the dark things, everything, you can take it on.
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And the easiest version of that is the vitamins.
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And the super awesome multivitamin I rely on is the feta greens.
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It s also delicious, I should say.
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They ll give you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase when you go to athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Paul Rosley.
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In 2006, at 18 years old, you fled New York and traveled to the Amazon.
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This started a journey that I think lasts to this day.
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Tell me about this first leap.
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What in your heart pulled you towards the Amazon jungle?
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from the time I was, you know, three years old, I d say, you know, it was dinosaurs, wildlife documentaries, Steve Irwin, you name it.
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And like when my parents said, you know, nature versus nurture, they nurtured my nature.
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I was always just drawn to streams, forests.
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I wanted to go explore where the little creek led.
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I wanted to see the turtles and the snakes.
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And so I was a kid that hated school, did not get along with school.
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I was dyslexic and didn t know it, undiagnosed.
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I didn t read until I was like 10 years old, like way behind.
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And so for me, the forest was safety.
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Like I remember one time in first grade, they had you doing those, you know, those multiplication sheets.
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That was pure hell for me.
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And so I actually got so upset that I couldn t do it, that I ran out, the classroom ran out the door and went to the nearest woods and I stayed there because that was safe.
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And so for me, once I got to the point where I was like, high school isn t working out, I had incredibly supportive parents that were like, look, just get out.
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Take your GED.
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Get out of high school after 10th grade.
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you gotta go to college, but start doing something you love.
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And so I saved up and bought a ticket to the Amazon and met some indigenous guys.
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And the second I walked in that forest, it was like, it s like the first scene in Jurassic Park when they see the dinosaurs and they go, oh, this is it.
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I walked in there and just, I looked at those giant trees.
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I saw leafcutter ants in real life and I just went,
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Oh, it was like the movie just started.
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That was when I came online.
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Can you put into words what is it about that place that felt like home?
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What was it that drew you?
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What aspect of nature, the streams, the water, the forest, the jungle, the animals, what drew you?
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It s just, it s always been in my blood.
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I mean, for any forest, I mean, whether it s upstate New York or India or Borneo, but the Amazon, it s all of that turned up to this level where everything is superlatively diverse.
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You have more plants and animals than anywhere else on earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record.
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It s the Andes-Amazon interface.
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Terrestrially, that s where it is.
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It s the greatest library of life that has ever existed.
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And so you re just, you re so stimulated.
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You re so overwhelmed with color and diversity and beauty and this overwhelming sense of natural majesty of these, you know, thousand year old trees.
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And half the life is up in the canopy of those trees.
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We don t even have access to it.
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There s stuff without names walking around on those branches.
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And it s like, it just takes you somewhere.
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And so going there, it was like,
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The guys I met just opened the door and they were like, how far do you wanna go down the rabbit hole?
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How much of this do you wanna see?
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You mentioned Steve Irwin.
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You list a bunch of heroes that you have.
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He s one of them.
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And you said that when you re unsure about a decision, you ask yourself, WWSD, what would Steve do?
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Why is that such a good heuristic for life?
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What would Steve do?
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He s a human being that like everything we saw from Steve Irwin was positive.
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Everything was with a smile on his face.
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If he was getting bitten by a reticulated python, he was smiling.
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If he was, you know, getting destroyed in the news for feeding a crocodile with his son too close, he was trying to explain to people why it s okay and why we have to love these animals.
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And everything was about love.
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Everything was about, you know, wildlife and protecting and
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To me, a person like that, where you only see positive things, that s a role model.
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And it s just like an endless curiosity and hunger to explore this world of nature.
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Yeah, and an insatiable madness for wildlife.
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I mean, the guy was just so much fun.
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I gotta, if it s okay, read to you a few of your own words.
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You opened the book, Mother of God, with a passage that I think beautifully paints a scene
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Before he died, Santiago Duran told me a secret.
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It was late at night in a palm-thatched hut on the bank of the Tempapata River, deep in the southwestern corner of the Amazon basin.
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Besides a mud oven, two wild boar heads sizzled in a cradle of embers, their protruding tusks curling in static agony as they cooked.
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The smell of burning secropia wood and cinched flesh filled the air.
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Woven baskets containing monkey skulls hung from the rafters, where stars peeked through the gaps in the thatching.
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A pair of chickens huddled in the corner, conversing softly.
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We sat facing each other on sturdy benches, across a table hewn from a single cross section of some massive tree, now nearly consumed by termites.
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The song of a million insects and frogs filled the night.
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Santiago s cigarette trembled in the aged fingers as he leaned close over the candlelight to describe a place hidden in the jungle.
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That line.
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the songs of a million insects and frogs filled the night for some reason hit me.
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What s it like sitting there conversing among so many living creatures all around you?
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Every night in the jungle, you live in constant awareness of that out there in the darkness are literally millions of heartbeats around you.
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And so like,
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We exist in this domesticated, paved world most of the time, but when you go out there past the roads and the telephone poles and the hospitals and you make it out into earth, just wild earth, and it s not like this is a national park, there s no rescue helicopter waiting to come get you, you are out there.
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and you re surrounded at night by, I mean, there are snakes and jaguars and frogs and insects and all this stuff just crawling through the swamps and through the trees and through the branches.
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And we put on headlamps and go out into the night and just absolutely fall to our knees with wonder of the things that we see.
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It s absolutely incredible.
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And most of it doesn t make sounds like the insects do.
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The insects do, the frogs do, you have some of the night birds making sounds, but a lot of it, everything has evolved to be silent, invisible.
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I mean, everything there is on the list.
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There s another line in Mother of God where I said, you know, life is just like a temporary moment of stasis and like the churning, recycling death march that is the Amazon.
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It s been called the greatest natural battlefield on earth.
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I mean, in any square acre, there s more stuff eating other things than anywhere else.
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And you go through a swamp in the Amazon.
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and there s tarantulas floating on the water, there s frogs in the trees, there s tadpoles hanging from leaves waiting to drop into the water, there s fish waiting to eat them, there s birds in the trees.
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You literally are surrounded by so many things that your brain can t process it.
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It s just overwhelming life.
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Churning Death March.
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Some of the creatures are waiting and some of them are being a bit more proactive about it.
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What do you make of that churning death march, that the amount of murder that s happening all around you at all scales?
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What is that, you know, we dramatize wars and the millions of people that were lost in World War II, some of them tortured, some of them dying with a gun in hand, some of them civilians, but it s just,
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millions of people.
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What about the billions and billions and billions of organisms that are just being murdered all around you?
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Does that change your view of nature, of life here?
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I ve always kind of wondered like that.
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Like when you see like a, you know, a wildebeest taken down by lions and eaten from behind while it s alive, and it makes you question God.
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You know, you go, how could they let this happen?
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In the Amazon, I find, personally, that these natural processes make up
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almost a religion, that it reminds you how temporary we are.
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That, you know, the bot flies that are trying to get into your skin and the mosquitoes that are trying to suck your blood and the, you know, that when you sweat, you see the, you literally can like hold out your arm and watch the condensation come off of your skin and rise up into the canopy and join the clouds and rain back down in the afternoon.
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And then you drink the river and start it all over again.
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And it s like, it s flowing through you.
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So,
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The Amazon reminds me that there s a lot that we don t understand.
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And so when it comes to that overwhelming and collective murder, as Werner Herzog put it, it s just part of the show.
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It s part of the freak show of the Amazonian night.
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I see you at certain moments able to feel one with a mosquito that s trying to kill you slowly.
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One with the mosquito is a stretch.
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Is it always the enemy?
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What I mean is like, you re part of the machine there, right?
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Yeah, and it s like fair play.
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It s like fair play.
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So like we have bullet ants and like, you know, you get nailed by a bullet ant and you just go, yeah, well done.
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Today s over.
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I m going back to bed and I m taking a pile of Tylenol.
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Do you think in that sense, when you re out there, are you a part of nature or are you separate from nature?
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Is man a part of nature or separate?
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I think that s what s so refreshing about it, is that out there you truly are.
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And so whether we re bringing researchers or film crews or whether we re just out there ourselves on an expedition, you truly are part of nature.
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And so one of the things that my team and I started doing when I became friends with these guys, you know, this is a family of indigenous people from the community of Inferno and they took me in and
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As we got close, they started saying, you know, you can come with us on our like annual hunting trip.
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And I went, okay.
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And it s four guys in a boat and you don t want to get your clothes wet.
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So we re all in like our boxers in a canoe with a motor going out past the places that have names.
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And you re out in the middle of the jungle.
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And the thing is like, when your motor breaks, you are so quickly reminded of
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the inerrant truths, like the things that nobody can argue with.
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And we live in such a human world where everything is debatable, religion and politics and perspectives on everything.
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And then you get down to this point where it s like, if we don t figure something out, the river is going to rise and take the boat.
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That s the truth.
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And ain t nobody gonna like argue with that.
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And it s like, to me, there s a beauty in that truth because then all of us are united there in that truth against like the natural facts around us.
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And so to me, that s a state where I feel very, very at home.
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And the Amazon is more efficient than most places on earth at swallowing you up.
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Oh God, yeah.
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Okay.
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So just to linger on that, because you ve spoken about Francisco de Arellana, who s this explorer in 1541 and 42 that sailed the length of the Amazon.
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Probably one of the first.
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And there s just a few things I should probably read.
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I should probably find a good book on him, because the guy seems like a gangster.
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Yes, there s some great books on him.
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So he led the expedition that sailed all the way from one end to the other.
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There s like a rebuilding of a ship.
1
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Which is insanity.
1
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Yeah.
1
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Yeah.
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So because it speaks to the thing, it s like nobody s going to come and rescue you.
1
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No.
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If your boat dies, you re going to have to rebuild it.
1
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Yeah.
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So they came down the Andes, entered in the headwaters of the Amazon, constructed some sort of
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raft, boat, craft, something, and made it down the entire Amazon basin.
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Of course, his stories are the ones that led to the Amazon being called the Amazon because he reported tribes of women.
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He reported these large cities, places where the tribes lived on farms of river turtles that they corralled and they lived off of that protein.
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And then when they came out to the mouth of the Amazon, if I remember it correctly, that just through navigation and the stars, they were able to calculate where the way was back to Spain.
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and make a boat seaworthy enough to bring them home.
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Incredible, absolutely incredible.
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Do people like that inspire you, your own journey?
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What gives you kind of strength that in these harshest of times and harshest of conditions, you can persevere?
1
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Yeah, I mean, you look at the stories of people that are so, you know, these stories of people that have overcome incredible,
1
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suffering like that or like, you know, what Shackleton did or something like that.
1
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And so like when you re, you know, I ve been, you know, your tent gets washed away, you go to sleep and the river rises 20 feet and washes away your tent and you crawl out and all you have is a machete and a headlamp, literally no bag, no food, no nothing.
1
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And you go, wow, the next six days before I reach back to a town is going to be just pure hell.
1
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I m going to be sleeping on the ground, covered in ants, destroyed by mosquitoes.
1
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And then it becomes, am I in any capacity, any percentage as tough and resilient as the people that I ve read about that have made it through things far worse than this?
1
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And then that s the game you play.
1
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What goes through your head when all you got is the headlamp and the machete?
1
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So are you thinking at all?
1
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I ve gotten a chance to interact quite a lot with Elon Musk, and he constantly puts out fires, having to run several companies.
1
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There s never a kind of,
1
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whiny deliberation about issues.
1
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You just always, one step forward, how to solve, right?
1
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This is the situation, how do you solve it?
1
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Or do you also have a kind of self-motivating, almost egotistical, like, I m a bad motherfucker.
1
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I can handle anything.
1
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Almost like trying to fake it till you make it kind of thing.
1
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There was a little bit of that.
1
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With your machete and everything.
1
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I got a sword.
1
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There may have been a little bit of that when I was like, you know, like 14, 15 years old, I d like, you know, have like a hunting knife and my dog and I d go out into the woods or like the Catskills and survive for a weekend, which my rule was one match.
1
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You know, you get one match and you gotta make shelter.
1
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And then, you know, I d bring like a steak and like make a fire and stuff.
1
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And like at that point, there may be with some ego, but in the Amazon, you get stripped down so completely that you,
1
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It s like that thing, like, you know, watch the atheism leave everyone s body when they think they re about to die.
1
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It s like when you find yourself staring up at the Amazon at night and you go, there is no hope of getting out of here.
1
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I mean, I was once lost in a swamp where it took me days to get out of there.
1
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And there was, there was moments where I just said, this is, you know, this is clearly it.
1
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There s no, there s no ego there.
1
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There s just hope you, you start, you start realizing what you believe in and,
1
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praying that you ll be okay and then trying to summon whatever you know about how to survive.
1
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And that s it, and so it s actually, again, it s kind of a blissful state if you can walk that line between adventure and tragedy and sort of keep yourself right at that very, very fine line without going over.
1
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Ever fear of death?
1
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Fear, ever fear?
1
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Terror?
1
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No, I don t want to die.
1
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I love the people in my life and there s a lot of things I wanna do, but every time I ve been certain that I m gonna die, I ve been very, very calm.
1
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very calm and just sort of like, okay, well, if this is how the movie goes, then this is how it goes.
1
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Almost accepting.
1
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Yeah.
1
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Which is, which is reassuring.
1
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You mentioned Herzog just to, uh, venture down this road of death and fear and so on.
1
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There s been a few madmen like you in this world.
1
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He s documented a couple of them.
1
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What lessons do you draw from Grizzly Man or Into the Wild, those kinds of stories?
1
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Were you ever afraid that you would be one of those stories?
1
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Oh yeah, I actually think that it s in Mother of God where I said I almost into the wilded myself.
1
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I went out there and really I got so lost and so destroyed that I said this is gonna be the next one.
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This is gonna be the next story of some idiot kid from New York who went to the Amazon thinking he was Percy Fawcett and then vanished.
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Because if you do vanish out there, your body s gonna be consumed in a matter of days, like two.
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If we see an animal dead on a trail, you got dung beetles and fly larva and vultures and there s a whole pecking order.
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You get the black vultures, the yellow vultures, the king vulture, they all come in.
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That thing is picked clean in a couple of days.
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What would be the creature that eats most of you in that situation?
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Probably the vultures.
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Probably the vultures and the maggots.
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It s really quick, it s really, really quick.
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Even as far as you can t leave food out.
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If you have a piece of chicken, you say, oh, I ll eat it in the morning.
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You leave it out, you can t do that.
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It s not good by morning.
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- Grizzly Man,  for example, what, because that s a beautiful story.
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It s both comical and genius, and especially the way Herzog tells it.
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First, do you like the way he told the story?
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Do you like Herzog?
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I do.
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I love Herzog and I love his documentary, The Burden of Dreams, which is in the Amazon, not very far from where I work.
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And the sheer madness that you see this man undergoing of just trying to recreate hauling a boat over a mountain.
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um is is is wild and and the you know the the extras that he hired to be to play the natives are are the i think they re machiganga tribesmen and they re just they just look like all the guys that i hang out with and it s like you know they re doing all this stuff in the jungle that
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months and months and months, and you can just see him deteriorating with madness because the jungle, you know, your boat, you know how many times I ve tied up a boat to the side of the river?
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This just happened like a year and a half ago.
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I tied up, through COVID, I pretty much just lived in the jungle for a while, and there was nobody there, and there was no support, and I tied up my boat, and the rain is just hammering, like the universe is trying to rip the earth in half.
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The rain is just going, and the river s rising, and I tied up the boat.
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But then you go to sleep, and you gotta wake up every two hours to go check the boat.
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And the boat is thrashing back and forth.
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So all night, every two hours, I d wake up barefoot in driving rain, like golf ball raindrops, and just go down and check the boat.
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And then by morning, I was like, I fell asleep, woke up, checked the boat, and then I was like, I m just gonna go make coffee.
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I was so done.
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I was so like at the end of my rope every time, bailing the boat out and stuff.
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And then we got 15 minutes of heavy rain that filled the boat, sank it.
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And so now I m stuck up river with no boat.
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And it s like that type of thing where it s like, no matter how hard you try, the jungle s just like, listen, you re nothing.
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You are nothing.
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And so it s that constant reminder.
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And so Herzog really threw himself into that, in that film.
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And it s brilliant to watch.
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What do you think he meant by the line that you include in your book?
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It s a land that God, if he exists,
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has created in anger.
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Said in a German accent.
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Yeah.
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Overwhelming and collective murder.
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So you didn t really appreciate the beauty of the murder.
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I think he appreciated it, but to him, it was very dark.
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I think he saw the darkness in it, and that s there.
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It sure is.
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As soon as you do Ayahuasca, that door opens and you see the darkness, because that brings you right into the jungle, the heart of it.
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But I think that for him, it is... I think that darkness is something that he embraces and that he loves.
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There s another film of his, and I don t know if this is accurate, but my memory has it,
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that there s a penguin, and I think it s in Antarctica, and the penguin s going in the wrong direction, away from the ocean.
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And I feel like he goes on this monologue about how he s just had enough.
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This one penguin is just marching towards, you know.
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Yeah, well, his, because I remember that clip from that documentary, and what Werner says is that the penguin is deranged, that he s lost his mind.
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And I,
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took offense to that.
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Because maybe that s a brave explorer.
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How do you know there s not a lot more going on?
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It could be a love story.
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Those penguins get super attached.
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Maybe his mate was over there and he had to go find her.
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Or it s a lost mate and he last time he saw her was going in that direction.
1
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So this is like the great explorer.
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We assume animals are like the average of the bell curve.
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Like every animal we interact with is just the average, but there s special ones, just like there s special humans.
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That could be a special penguin.
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It could have been.
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And I had the same thought where I was like, I found it beautiful how he interpreted it.
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What I took away from that was I found that Werner Herzog s monologue there was brilliantly dark and also comedic.
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but maybe irrelevant biologically speaking towards penguins, which happens a lot with animals.
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I find there s so many times where I ll find people be like, do you think that animals can show compassion?
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And you hear a bunch of people that have never left the pavement talking about like, wow, this one animal helped another animal.
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It s like, go ask Jane Goodall if animals can show compassion.
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Go talk to anybody that works on a daily basis with animals and they ll,
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And so like to me, there s always a little bit of frustration in hearing people sort of like pleasantly surprised that animals aren t just, you know, these automatons of, you know, just, what s the word, like programmed, you know, nothingness.
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First of all, what have you learned about life from Jane Goodall?
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Because she spoke highly of your book and you list her as one of the mentors, but what kind of wisdom about animals do you draw from her?
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SPEAKER_01
The wisdom from Jane is so diverse.
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I mean, first of all, she s someone that, you know, the work that she did at the time she did it was so incredible because, I mean, she was out there at a very young age doing that fieldwork.
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She was naming her subjects, which everyone said you shouldn t do.
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She broke every rule.
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She broke every rule.
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She was assigning, and everyone said, you know, you re anthropomorphizing these animals by saying that they re doing this and that.
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She was like, no, they re interacting, they re showing love, they re showing compassion, they re showing hate, they re showing fear.
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And she broke straight through all of those things, and it paid off in dividends for her.
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Do you see the animals as having all those human-like emotions of anger, of compassion, of longing, of loneliness, from what you ve seen, especially with mammals, or with different species out there, do they have all that?
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It depends on the animal.
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If you re talking on the scale of a cockroach to an elephant, it s like a lot of these things.
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And I wonder about this stuff all the time.
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I ll have a praying mantis on my hand and just go, what is going through your mind?
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Or you ll see a spider make a complex decision and go, I m gonna make my web there.
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And you go, how?
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how are you doing this?
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Because he made a calculation there, it s smart.
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I was in the jungle not that long ago and I was walking and all of a sudden this dove comes flying through the jungle right up to my face, lands on a branch like right here, right next to me.
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I look at the dove, dove looks at me and she s like, hey, and she s clearly like panting.
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And I m like, why are you so close?
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This is weird.
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And she s like, I know,
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And then an ornate hawk eagle flies up 10 feet away, looks at both of us and just scowls and sticks up its head feathers and then just flies off.
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And the dove was like, sweet, thanks, and then flew in the other direction.
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And I was like, dude, you just used me to save your life.
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The dove knew.
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Because there s Mike Tyson and there s Albert Einstein.
1
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And sometimes I wonder when I look at different creatures, even insects, is this Mike Tyson or is this Einstein?
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Or other kinds of personalities.
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Is this a New Yorker or is this a Midwesterner?
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Or is this a San Francisco barista of the insects?
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There s all kinds of personalities and you never know.
1
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So you can t project.
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SPEAKER_00
If you run into a bear and it s very angry, it could be just the asshole New Yorker.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, sure, sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
What are you saying about New Yorkers, man?
1
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, point well made.
1
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So speaking about communicating with a dove, you first met the crew in the Amazon.
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You talk about JJ as somebody who can communicate with animals.
1
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What do you think JJ is able to see and hear and feel that others don t, that he s able to communicate with animals?
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When I say this is the most skilled jungle man I ve ever seen, and I know so many guys in the region,
1
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um he has libraries of information in his cranium that we cannot fathom it s just it s just stunning like you know i have seen him use medicinal plants to cure things that western doctors couldn t cure i ve seen him navigate in such a way that he s not using the stars he s not using any any discernible
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You know, it s like when elephants, sometimes like you ll watch a herd of elephants and they ll be like, yo, let s go, we re going this way.
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And you ll see them sort of communicate, but there s no audible sound.
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They ll just decide that they re going that when they all do it.
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JJ has this way in the jungle of, you know, he ll stop and he ll go, wait.
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And you go, what is it?
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And he goes,
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there s a herd of peccary coming.
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And I m like, where?
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Based on what?
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And he s like, just wait, you ll see.
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And he ll sit there.
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You think that s just experience?
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It s incredible experience.
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It s growing up barefoot in the Amazon.
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And the gift is that he can speak fluent English.
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And so when I bring tourists and scientists or news reporters down there, he can communicate with them.
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He s actually good on camera, because he doesn t care about cameras.
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And like, you know, for instance, we were, we were, we were walking up a stream a few months ago and I went, Hey, look, Jaguar tracks.
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And he went, and I was like, what Jaguar tracks?
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And he s like, no, look, look harder.
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And I was like,
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The toes are deeper than the back.
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And he was like, uh-huh.
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And where are they?
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And I was like, by the water.
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And I was like, the jaguar s drinking.
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It was leaning to drink.
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And he was like, that s right.
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He s like, now look behind you.
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I look behind me.
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And there s scat.
1
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There s a big log of jaguar shit sitting there.
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And it s got butterflies all over it.
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Fresh?
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Pretty fresh.
1
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And then there s another one that s less fresh.
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And so he s teaching me as he does.
1
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He s going, look at this.
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Look at this.
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Is that one as fresh as this one?
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No.
1
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And then he goes, now look up.
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Look up.
1
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There s three vultures above us.
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The kill is near us.
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The jaguar has been coming multiple times to the river to drink as it s feasting on whatever it killed.
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And he s going, it s within 30 feet of us right now.
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And it s like, I m like, oh look, impressions in the sand.
1
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He s like, I just drew 19 conclusions from that.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s like watching Sherlock Holmes at work.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s just- Constructing the crime scene.
1
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Incredible.
1
SPEAKER_00
Does that apply also to be able to communicate with the actual animals, like read into their body movements directly, into their, whatever that dove was saying to you, you d be able to understand?
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Or is that all just kind of taken in the complex structure of the crime scene, of the interactions of the different animals, of the environment and so on?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like what is that, that you re able to communicate with another creature, that he was able to communicate with another creature?
1
SPEAKER_01
He knows the intention of pose, he knows the habits, he knows the perspective.
1
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When he talks about animals, he ll talk about each species as if it s a person.
1
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So he ll say, oh, the jaguar, she never likes to let you see her.
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And so he ll come back from the jungle, and he ll go, oh, I was watching monkeys, and this jaguar was also watching the monkeys, but I was being so quiet, she didn t see me.
1
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And then when she sees me, she feels so embarrassed, and she d go.
1
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And he ll tell you this story as if he had this interaction with his neighbor.
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And he ll be like, oh, the puka kunga, it never does that.
1
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You won t see it do that.
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And so one time he caught a fish, and I was such a big fish.
1
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It was this big, beautiful pseudoplatystoma, this tiger catfish, this amazing old fish, and they re all excited to eat it.
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SPEAKER_00
And I felt so bad watching this thing gasp on the sand.
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And I went, you know what?
2
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We don t need this.
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SPEAKER_00
This is for fun.
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I threw it back.
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And then I took my hand and I went, and I made like drag marks.
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Like, so I could say, oh, it snuck back in the water.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so he walks up, he looks at it and he was like, I hate you.
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And I went, what?
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I said, I must ve, it must ve just, he went, that s not what happens.
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SPEAKER_00
He goes, it goes like this when it goes, he knew the track of a fish.
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And I was like, oh yeah.
2
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I was like, all right, JJ, I m sorry, I ll catch you another fish.
2
SPEAKER_01
So stepping back to that way you opened Mother of God, who was Santiago Duran and what secret did he tell you?
2
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JJ s father was, at some point he was a policeman.
2
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At some point when he was a teenager, he was working on the boats that before this little gold mining city of Puerto Maldonado,
2
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grew, the only way to get supplies in was to take canoes up the Tambopata River up to the next state, which is Puno, and where mules would come down from the mountains with supplies, and then he d pilot the boats down.
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But they didn t have motors at that time, so he would be pulling the boat.
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So he became this physically terrifying man.
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And I met him when he was in his 80s, and he was still living out in the jungle by himself.
2
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And I mean, he s seen an anaconda eat a tapir, which is a cow-sized mammal in the Amazon.
2
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He d seen uncontacted tribes face to face.
2
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He once killed an 11-foot electric eel
2
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opened the back of the thing s neck, removed the nerve that he says was the source of the electric, then he cut his forearm, placed that nerve into his forearm, wrapped it with a dead toad, and claimed that it would give him strength through the rest of his life, and continued to be a jungle badass until the day he quietly leaned back at a barbecue and ceased to be alive.
2
SPEAKER_00
The man was incredible.
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But the secret that he told us was,
2
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that if you want to find big anacondas, you know, if you want to see the Yakumama, he was like, you have to go to the Boayo, the place of boas, the place that we came to call the floating forest.
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And so he sent us there and it became like this
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this pilgrimage and, you know, in the Amazon, a lot of the creation myths are based around the anaconda coming down from the heavens and carving the rivers across the jungle.
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And if you look at the rivers, it looks like that.
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SPEAKER_00
It looks like the path of an anaconda crawling through the jungle.
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It s even the right color.
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And so from the reference to the tribes of women, the Amazons, to the Anaconda mother, everything in the Amazon is very feminine based.
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SPEAKER_00
Even the trees, the largest trees in the jungle, the mother of the forest, the Madre de la Selva, is the Kapok tree.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s just this monster tree, these beautiful ancient trees.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that was the beginning of the transition that we made from
2
SPEAKER_00
Me being like, I hate school.
2
SPEAKER_00
I want to go on adventures.
2
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Jane Goodall got to do all this amazing stuff.
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I m just a kid stuck here to eventually becoming something that had to do with where my identity became the jungle, where my life became the jungle.
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SPEAKER_00
the secret that he told us opened that door, because when we started working with these giant snakes, it started getting attention.
2
SPEAKER_00
It started getting people to go, what are you doing?
2
SPEAKER_00
And it started allowing me to have experiences that
2
SPEAKER_00
solidified and nailed down the fact that this wasn t just like a weekend retreat.
2
SPEAKER_00
This was something that I was born to do.
2
SPEAKER_01
And gave you more and more motivation to go into these uncharted territory of the Yakumama.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yakumama.
2
SPEAKER_01
Which, just to step back, what nations are we talking about here?
2
SPEAKER_01
Some geography.
2
SPEAKER_01
What are we talking about?
2
SPEAKER_01
Where is this?
2
SPEAKER_01
So I m in Peru.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re in Peru.
2
SPEAKER_00
Which is a South American nation.
2
SPEAKER_00
Peru is a South American nation.
2
SPEAKER_00
Brazil has 60% of the Amazon, which is unfortunate because anything that happens politically in Brazil has a massive impact on the Amazon.
2
SPEAKER_00
Peru has the Western Amazon, and Ecuador has a little bit of the Western Amazon.
2
SPEAKER_00
The Western Amazon is where the Andes Mountains, the cloud forests, which is a mega biodiverse biome, falls into the Western Amazon lowlands.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so you have the meeting of these two incredible biomes, and that s what makes this like superlative, incredible, you know, glowing moment of life on earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, we re in Peru in the Madre de Dios, which is the mother of God, which I always thought was such a beautiful, you know, the jungle is the source of all life.
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SPEAKER_00
And so we were with the S.A.H.
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people, and they belong to a community that s called Inferno, which is given by the missionaries who, when they tried to go bring these people to Jesus, got so many arrows shot at them that they just called it hell.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so Santiago Duran helped unite these tribes that were sort of scattered through the jungle and get them status, government-recognized status as indigenous people.
2
SPEAKER_00
So he was sort of a hero, he was sort of a legend for a lot of the stuff he d done out barefoot with just like a rifle and a machete in the jungle.
2
SPEAKER_00
He had 19 children?
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SPEAKER_00
And the last one, I think the 20th child that he adopted was a refugee from the Shining Path that floated down the river and he just took him in.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this is just a guy that was, everything he did, like when he died, the whole region showed up.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was, he was somebody.
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SPEAKER_00
So just the fact that I know him gives me street credit.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like the fact that I knew him, I can go like, oh, I knew Santiago, and people are like, no.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m like, yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you had to get integrated to the culture, to the place, in every single way, which is tough for you for the being from New York.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it could have been tough, but I took to it.
2
SPEAKER_00
JJ s teaching me about medicines, and we were doing bird surveys and taking data on macaw populations, and JJ was just like, he goes, you got to sleep.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, I only have a few weeks here.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know if I m ever going to come back.
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SPEAKER_00
I m never going to sleep.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we d be out every night looking for all the wildlife we could.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to take photos.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to see things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then the exchange came with that he was like, I m terrified of snakes.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I said, well, I ve always worked with snakes.
2
SPEAKER_00
I said, I ll teach you how to handle snakes.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then we just had this little exchange.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when I left after my first time back in 2006,
2
SPEAKER_00
I said, how can I help?
2
SPEAKER_00
And they were like, look, we re out here trying to protect this little island of forest that is going to be bulldozed.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the more people that you can bring, the more knowledge and the more awareness that you can bring to this, it ll help.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so really at that age, at 18 years old, I sort of,
2
SPEAKER_00
started dabbling with the idea of that I could be part of helping these people to protect this place that I loved.
2
SPEAKER_00
And of course at that time, that idea seemed like too large of a dream or too large of a challenge so that I could actually impact it.
2
SPEAKER_01
So what was the journey of looking for these giant snakes?
2
SPEAKER_01
Of looking for anacondas?
2
SPEAKER_00
What are anacondas?
2
SPEAKER_00
Anaconda is
2
SPEAKER_00
the largest snake on Earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you have reticulated pythons in Southeast Asia.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re actually longer, but anacondas are these massive boas.
2
SPEAKER_00
They give live birth, and unlike a lot of other species, so an anaconda starts off, you know, a little two-foot anaconda, just a little thicker than your finger, a little baby, and they re food for cane toads, herons, crocodiles, you name it.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re pretty harmless, defenseless.
2
SPEAKER_00
but as they grow, they re eating the fish, they re eating the crocs, and then they grow a little more, and they re eating things like capybara, and they re eating larger prey, and then at the end of their life, a female anaconda, you re talking about a 25, 30-foot, 300, 400-pound snake with a head bigger than a football, and these things, that means that they impact the entire ecosystem, which is very unique.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it moves up the food chain to become basically- An apex predator.
2
SPEAKER_01
An apex predator.
2
SPEAKER_00
the apex predator of the rivers.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so- That s so interesting.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just eating your way up the food chain.
2
SPEAKER_00
Eating your way up the food chain, if you can survive.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they re constantly at war with everything else.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I showed up in the Amazon.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was like, so where are the anacondas at?
2
SPEAKER_00
And they were like, oh no, no, no, it s not like that.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re like, you have to find these things.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re subterranean.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re living in the special swamps.
2
SPEAKER_00
People kill them.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we went to the floating forest after we d come back from
2
SPEAKER_00
an expedition, we d call it like a 12 foot anaconda.
2
SPEAKER_00
And now it s become like this like classic photo of me and JJ with this anaconda over our shoulders.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we were like, we 12 days out in the jungle on a hunting trip.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we came back and we showed his dad and Santiago looked at us and he was like, that s the smallest anacondita I ve ever seen.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s like, you guys are pathetic.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh man, 12 foot.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he was like, look, you go to the, go.
2
SPEAKER_00
He was like, go.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s like, I m giving you permission.
2
SPEAKER_00
Go to the buoy or go to the floating forest.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we went to this place and we reached there at night and it was me, JJ and one of his brothers.
2
SPEAKER_00
And his brother took one look at it and was like, I m out.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he started walking back and me and JJ get to the edge of this thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this is our friendship.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s both this two idiots pushing each other farther and farther.
2
SPEAKER_00
And like, I like put a foot on the,
2
SPEAKER_00
on the ground and it all shook.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the stars are reflecting on the ground and what we realize is that it s a lake.
2
SPEAKER_00
with floating grass on top of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there s islands of grass floating on this lake, very life of Pi, and the tops of trees are coming out of the surface of the water.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we start walking across this and JJ s going, these are big anacondas.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I m going, JJ, that s a two foot wide smooth path snaking through the grass.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s no anaconda that big.
2
SPEAKER_00
He was going, shh.
2
SPEAKER_00
I said, they don t have ears.
2
SPEAKER_00
He goes, they re listening.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, we re walking and we re walking.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then it s like, maybe it s like 1am or something.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time and we re standing by the tail.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the snake was so big that, I mean, this must ve been a 25-foot anaconda dead asleep with probably a 16-foot anaconda sprawled across her.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they re laying in the starlight and we re floating on top of a lake, standing there in the middle of the Amazon.
2
SPEAKER_00
And JJ just, I could feel the blood drain out of his face.
2
SPEAKER_00
And as I got, however old I was, maybe 20 years old, I just said, if we could somehow show people this, we ll be on the front cover of National Geographic and we can protect all the jungle that we want.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I tried to catch it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I jumped on the snake.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the only measurement I have of this animal is that when I wrapped my arms around it, I couldn t touch my fingers.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I was, you know, my feet were dragging, and to her credit, this anaconda did not turn around and eat me, because her head was, you know, this big.
2
SPEAKER_00
And she went, and she reached the edge of the grass island, and she starts plunging into the dark.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I m watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda s going, and I had to make the choice of,
2
SPEAKER_00
either going head first down into the black, which no thank you, or stopping and just keeping my hand on this thing as it raced by me and I just felt the scales and the muscle and the power go by and then eventually taper down to the tail until it slipped away into the darkness and I was laying there just panting.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I turned around and went, JJ, what the fuck?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, where were you, man?
2
SPEAKER_00
And he was just like completely white, circuits blown.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I had to go then like, kind of like take care of him.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was like, are you okay?
2
SPEAKER_00
And he was like, no.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, he just couldn t.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we came back with that and then.
2
SPEAKER_00
After that, we were like, okay, clearly the parameters of reality that we thought were possible are just a tiny fraction of what s out there.
2
SPEAKER_00
That sort of recalibrated us.
2
SPEAKER_00
We were like, okay, we re rubbing up against things that are bigger than we thought were ever possible.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we were like, okay, now we need to concentrate on this.
2
SPEAKER_01
So how dangerous is that creature to humans?
2
SPEAKER_00
To humans, not at all.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Mike, our cook s father-in-law was eaten by an anaconda, but like, you know, then again, like- Look at the way you say that story.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes it happens.
2
SPEAKER_00
It happens.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, come on.
2
SPEAKER_00
Every now and then somebody gets stung by a bee and dies.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, you know, once in a while it happens, but you got to have a really big anaconda, really hungry.
2
SPEAKER_00
And like,
2
SPEAKER_00
Anybody that works in the wild, I mean, just, you know, if you walk up to a crocodile, even a giant Nile crocodile, you walk up to them, most of the time they re gonna run into the water.
2
SPEAKER_00
They don t want confrontation.
2
SPEAKER_00
They hunt in their way, on their terms, sneaky.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re not gonna see them.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so with an anaconda, it s like, yeah, if you re, I mean, the guy who got eaten, like, if you re drunk,
2
SPEAKER_00
and you go to the edge of the water and you go for a midnight swim by yourself in an Amazonian lake, I mean, whose fault is that?
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you jump on an anaconda and try to hold on, then you re safe.
2
SPEAKER_00
Apparently.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think at this point, the research we ve done, I think I ve handled or caught over 80 anacondas in the field, and not one of them has bitten me.
2
SPEAKER_00
They always choose flight over fight.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re like, just leave me alone, let me go, I m just gonna crawl under this thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re not an aggressive animal.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, no snake, no, I actually like, I kind of like, the only time I get particular with like, you know, the words is like, people go, that s an aggressive, black mambas are aggressive.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I go, no, no snake is aggressive.
2
SPEAKER_00
A rattlesnake is gonna rattle to say, hey, back up.
2
SPEAKER_00
A cobra is gonna stand up and show you its hood.
2
SPEAKER_00
And people go, oh, look, he s being aggressive.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, he s not being aggressive.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s going, don t step on me.
2
SPEAKER_00
Don t make me do this.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re actually being very peaceful.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s the way I look at it, because if there was a cobra in the corner of this room right now, he would crawl under the curtain and we d never see him again.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s like Genghis Khan, before conquering the villages, he always offered for them to join the army.
2
SPEAKER_01
Doesn t need to be like this.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, join us, nobody gets destroyed.
2
SPEAKER_01
There you go.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you want to be proud and fight for your country, then we re gonna have to deal with it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oblige him.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
So how do you catch, actually, let s step back, because there is,
2
SPEAKER_01
In part, you are a bit of a snake whisperer, so what is it that others don t understand that you do about snakes?
2
SPEAKER_01
What s maybe a misconception?
2
SPEAKER_01
Or what have you learned from the language you speak that snakes understand?
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s an animal that has many times in my life I ve been responsible for helping.
2
SPEAKER_00
I started catching snakes when I was very young.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d watch Steve Irwin and go out and catch a garter snake or a black rat snake in New York.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I had a rule, I said, I have to catch 100 non-venomous snakes before I m allowed to handle a venomous snake, if I ever need to handle a venomous snake.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I was on a trail one time, I think in Harriman State Park, and some guy, like some big hero, he tells us, he s like, back up, I m gonna get this, and he picks up a stick, and he goes to assault this poor copperhead that s sitting on the trail.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so at 16 years old, I had to go and shoulder this guy out of the way, and I got the thing by the tail and used a stick to very gently just put it off the trail.
2
SPEAKER_00
Copperhead was not going to do anything to him, but he wanted to beat his chest and show his wife that he was tough.
2
SPEAKER_00
But then in India, I ve lived in India for five years at this point, in and out, periodically, and snakes are always getting into people s kitchens.
2
SPEAKER_00
One time we had a king cobra.
2
SPEAKER_00
get into someone s kitchen, an 11 foot snake, like a monster, like a god of a snake.
2
SPEAKER_00
This thing stood up, you know, would stand up, it d be able to look at you over the table.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this terrifying monster thing, this giant gorilla dog thing, like, we caught it with one of the local snake catchers and we brought it out and he goes, you know, I wonder why it was in the kitchen.
2
SPEAKER_00
I went, yeah, looking for food.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, no, they eat snakes.
2
SPEAKER_00
King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, they eat snakes.
2
SPEAKER_00
and he goes, she s thirsty.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we got a bottle of water and we got footage of this and she s standing up, she s going, don t make me kill you, don t make me kill you, you re scaring me right now, I don t wanna kill you.
2
SPEAKER_00
We took the bottle of water and we poured it on her nose and she started drinking.
2
SPEAKER_00
You could see her just drinking and the snake just took this long drink, she drank a whole water bottle and then said, thank you so much and crawled off.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, to me, the fact that people are scared of snakes, they have symbolic hatred of snakes, you know, someone s evil and sneaky, we call them a snake.
2
SPEAKER_00
And like, to me, it s like, when I take volunteers or researchers or students out into the jungle and we find an emerald tree boa or an Amazon tree boa or a vine snake, and it s like, it s one of the few animals that you can t really catch a bird and show it to people.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re gonna scare the bird, its feathers are gonna come out, you might give it a heart attack.
3
SPEAKER_00
Snakes, you can lift up a snake.
3
SPEAKER_00
If there s a snake in the room right now, I could lift it up and say, Lex, here, this is how you hold it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we could interact calmly with this thing and then put it back on its branch and then it ll go.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I ve seen what that does to people.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve seen how, the wonder in their eyes.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so to me, snakes have always been this incredible link to teach people about wildlife, about nature.
3
SPEAKER_01
because they have naturally a lot of fear towards this creature and to realize that the fear is not justified, is not grounded, or is not as deeply grounded in reality.
3
SPEAKER_01
Of course, there s always New Yorker snakes, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s always gonna be an asshole snake here and there.
3
SPEAKER_01
Coming for me, man.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, okay, so back to the anaconda.
3
SPEAKER_01
How do you catch an anaconda?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because it s such a 25 foot or even 12 foot, these giant snakes.
3
SPEAKER_01
How do you deal with this creature?
3
SPEAKER_01
How do you interact with them?
3
SPEAKER_00
We had to learn how to do that because one of the first ones we caught that I would say maybe like a 16 footer, which is no joke of a snake, girth of a basketball, let s say.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, we re on the canoe and this is the early days.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, you know, now we re at a whole different level, but this is back when we were barefoot and shirtless and just guys in the Amazon.
3
SPEAKER_00
And JJ s like, you know, I just listened to him.
3
SPEAKER_00
He d be like, get off the boat.
3
SPEAKER_00
You come from the top.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re going to come from the bottom.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
I just did as I was told.
3
SPEAKER_00
I came in, the snake is all curled up, dead asleep.
3
SPEAKER_00
She s got some butterflies on her eyes, trying to get salt and stuff.
3
SPEAKER_00
And all of a sudden I see the tongue, zoom, zoom.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, she s awake.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, guys, guys, guys.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they re paying attention to not crashing the boat, to getting over there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we re all trying to run.
3
SPEAKER_00
Snake starts going into the water.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I run ahead, grab this snake, get her by the head.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you got her by the head.
3
SPEAKER_00
You think, okay, she can t get me.
3
SPEAKER_00
I got it right behind the head and it s about this thick, the neck.
3
SPEAKER_01
What s that feel like, sorry to interrupt, like grabbing this thing with his giant head.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s exciting, it s amazing.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s scary.
3
SPEAKER_00
How hard is it to hold?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not that hard to hold.
3
SPEAKER_00
The scary part is the moment of, it s like if you ve ever done like a cliff dive or something, it s that moment where you go, do it, do it, the time, like do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if your body s going, do not do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then you re like, I gotta just do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because you can t just gently flirt with it.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to grab it.
3
SPEAKER_00
No.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s like crossing the street when there s a bus coming.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like if you hesitate, it s more dangerous.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you just go for it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I got her.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, I got her.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then a coil goes over my wrists.
3
SPEAKER_00
And all of a sudden my wrists slap together and you feel this squeeze that can crush the bones out of an animal bigger than me.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the next coil comes very quickly over my neck.
3
SPEAKER_00
And now I m on my knees with my arms tied.
3
SPEAKER_00
If I wanted to let go of the snake, I couldn t.
3
SPEAKER_00
And my shoulders are coming together and my collarbone is about to break.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I tried to yell for JJ and all that came out was,
3
SPEAKER_00
It was nothing.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so that s what they do to their prey, you know?
3
SPEAKER_00
So I attacked, as far as the snake knows, I attacked.
3
SPEAKER_00
She doesn t know that, I just wanna measure her.
3
SPEAKER_00
You started off as the big spoon, but then the snake became the big spoon.
3
SPEAKER_00
The snake very much became the big spoon.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I would say I was 15 seconds away from having my entire ribcage collapsed.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then JJ showed up and grabbed the tail and just started unwrapping this thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
But now we have a system.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now we know like, you know,
3
SPEAKER_00
I m always, I ve done, I ve gotten more head catches than anybody, so I m usually point guy, and you know.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re the first, the point guy.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m the point guy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, taking the big risky.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
First step.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, although it could be argued that there s a similarly large risk for the tail guy, because Anaconda s defense is to take a giant projectile shit
3
SPEAKER_00
And so the person that gets the tail is gonna smell like anaconda for at least a week.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it s the least pleasant.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re taking the most dangerous one there.
3
SPEAKER_01
They have the least pleasant job.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is fascinating.
3
SPEAKER_00
But what s really fascinating though is that because they re the apex predator, they re eating the fish, they re eating the birds, they re eating everything, and everything in this riparian ecosystem is absorbing the mercury that s coming off the gold mining in the region.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so anacondas can be,
3
SPEAKER_00
indicative for us of how is mercury moving through this ecosystem.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is a region where we ve lost hundreds of thousands of acres to artisanal gold mining, where they use mercury to bind the gold.
3
SPEAKER_00
They cut the forest, burn the forest, and then they run water through the sand, and the sand particles have bits of gold in it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Not chunks, but just little, almost microscopic flecks of gold.
3
SPEAKER_00
and then they use the mercury to bind that, and then they burn off the mercury, and that vapor goes up into the clouds, just like everything else, it s all connected down there, and then rains down into the rivers, and so the people in the region are having birth defects from the amount of mercury.
3
SPEAKER_00
that s in the water.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we were starting at one point when we were doing most of our anaconda research, we were learning things like these animals actually aren t just ambush predators, which is what most of the literature would tell you is that anacondas are ambush predators.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, they actually go hunting.
3
SPEAKER_00
They ll go find clay licks and salt deposits and they ll wait there.
3
SPEAKER_00
They ll actually pursue animals.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we were trying to take tissue samples to find out if anacondas could be used to study how
3
SPEAKER_00
Mercury s moving through the ecosystem, and so that was really, it became, can we use these animals not only as ambassadors for wildlife, because everybody wants to see the anacondas, but also, what can we learn from studying this very, very little understood apex predator?
3
SPEAKER_01
And one of the things you can learn is how Mercury moves through the ecosystem, which can damage the ecosystem in all kinds of ways.
3
SPEAKER_00
in different ways.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s brutal, man.
3
SPEAKER_00
The gold mining that s happening down there is, it s funny, because we ve been hearing a lot recently about the cobalt mines in Africa.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, where we are in the Amazon, we were down there with ABC News, I want to say like a year and a half ago, with my friend Matt Gutman, who s the chief correspondent for ABC.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he wanted to see the Amazon fires.
3
SPEAKER_00
He wanted to see some wildlife.
3
SPEAKER_00
He wanted to see the areas that we re protecting.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then he goes, I want to see
3
SPEAKER_00
the gold mining areas.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I d never gotten in so deep, but we met these Russian guys, you can t go with the Peruvian, they will kill you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like our lawyer s father was assassinated for standing up to the gold miners.
3
SPEAKER_00
There was two Russian guys though, who had a legal mining concession somehow, way out past the machine gun guarded limit of the Pampas, which is where they do all this gold mining.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we got in there and
3
SPEAKER_00
took footage of the desert that is forming in what used to be the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest and it s like there is a massive global scale ecological crime happening down there that you can see from space
3
SPEAKER_00
from this unregulated gold mining, and the cops can t go there because they will be murdered.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s completely lawless.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s the machine gun limit, exactly?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s the border of this area that they call the Pompous, which is where the rainforest has been cut and completely destroyed, and it looks like Mars.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just sand.
3
SPEAKER_00
And inside of this area are gold miners.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we tried to get in there to film years ago, and there s just a lot of guys with machine guns who don t let that happen.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what the Russian guys have access to?
3
SPEAKER_00
The Russian guys had access somehow.
3
SPEAKER_00
They d come down with a bit of money, and they had a new system.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And actually what was interesting is while I was in there, they re very friendly and really, really two friendly gold miners.
3
SPEAKER_00
And one of them while I was there, he kind of tapped me on the shoulder.
3
SPEAKER_00
He was like, you know, look at those guys.
3
SPEAKER_00
He was like, those guys over there?
3
SPEAKER_00
He goes, I just heard them say your name.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, that s not a good thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
He goes, they know exactly who you are.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, I wouldn t keep posting to Instagram about gold mining and the Amazon.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, thanks for the warning.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then, you know, in June, somebody pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and I got a more stern warning, but... They pay attention to the flow of information because they don t want the world to...
3
SPEAKER_00
to find out.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, the last thing they want is to be shut down.
3
SPEAKER_00
But the gold miners are notorious for, you know, just whacking people and throwing them in a pile of, you know, gold mining leftovers.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s really like the Peruvian government has to get the military to go after them.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like the work we ve done with gold miners, converting them into conservationists has all been like, I mean, I ve seen the Peruvian Navy come down and
3
SPEAKER_00
literally blow up gold mining barges, and it s a war.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a war being fought in the Amazon.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s possible to convert them into conservationists?
3
SPEAKER_01
What s that process like?
3
SPEAKER_00
Or is that like, you say that in jest?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, I say that in absolute sincerity.
3
SPEAKER_00
We went upriver, up the Malinowski River several years ago, I think it was 2018, and everyone was like, you are going to die.
3
SPEAKER_00
You will be shot and killed.
3
SPEAKER_00
The reason we were able to do it with relative safety was that the gold miner that we were going with was the brother-in-law of one of my closest friends down there, our expedition chef and one of the directors of Jungle Keepers.
3
SPEAKER_00
They said, look, you can go, just keep a low profile.
3
SPEAKER_00
I went up with a photographer and we spent a week there.
3
SPEAKER_00
dead animals everywhere, deforestation everywhere.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the things that we saw were so horrible.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we re living with these gold miners that are, you know, they re getting their gold, they re burning off the mercury.
3
SPEAKER_00
I watched a guy smoking a cigarette, burning the mercury off of his gold with the vapor going straight into his face with his child right there.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean,
3
SPEAKER_00
unbelievable negligence of just sanity.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then towards the end of the week, the Peruvian Navy comes down the river and everyone starts scrambling.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, I m just going to sit here with my hands up because, you know, and they didn t even stop.
3
SPEAKER_00
They found the gold mining barge, you know, they have a floating thing in the river that just plumbs the bottom of the river, just sucks all the sediment up.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they stopped and they strapped a bunch of explosives to this motor and
3
SPEAKER_00
Good lord that the the sound of this explosion and there was just hot metal raining down all over the place and then they just went a bunch of guys in fatigues and they just kind of like looked at us like peace and I sat there with this gold miner and I went now what?
3
SPEAKER_00
And he went, well, now I gotta go get a new motor.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I went, why don t you just do something else?
3
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, what else is there?
3
SPEAKER_00
And I went, look what we do.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I sat there with my phone and I was like, see this?
3
SPEAKER_00
These are pretty tourists and we feed them food and we show them tarantulas and macaws.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he looked at this and he went, wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
He goes, that looks like so much fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I went, it is so much fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
I said, we show people, we bring students to the jungle.
3
SPEAKER_00
He goes, so you re saying if I build you a lodge, you ll bring people?
3
SPEAKER_00
I said, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I came back a year later and he sat there with a chainsaw, a handsaw, and some nails, and he cut down like 17 palm trees and he built an ecotourism lodge.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you give him another channel of survival of making money.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s what we ve been doing through Jungle Keepers for loggers and for all kinds of extractors is just saying, look, what do you make?
3
SPEAKER_00
You make $15 a day destroying the ancient trees of the jungle.
3
SPEAKER_00
What if we paid you $35 a day to have a uniform and a job and health insurance and security and you just protect it and use all of the jungle knowledge you ve gained as a logger to protect this place?
3
SPEAKER_01
Who are the loggers trying to destroy the Amazon?
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you say a little bit more about it?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is that as a threat to the Amazon rainforest?
3
SPEAKER_00
A lot of them are really close friends of mine.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re people that need to make a living.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they re jungle people who, you know, the rainforest is a very challenging, especially the Amazon, is a very challenging environment.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you have these people who
3
SPEAKER_00
They have a chainsaw.
3
SPEAKER_00
They have a job opportunity.
3
SPEAKER_00
They go out and they cut the trees.
3
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of these guys grew up fishing.
3
SPEAKER_00
They grew up in the jungle.
3
SPEAKER_00
They know how to do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so for them, it s a way to like, they also love it.
3
SPEAKER_00
So this is the thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
These are outdoorsmen.
3
SPEAKER_00
These are guys that love the jungle.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so they, you know, in the nineties, we had the mahogany boom where they went out after the mahogany and you can almost can t find a mahogany tree in the jungle anymore.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if you wanna talk about like carbon sequestration in the rainforest, the ancient hardwoods hold like 60% of the carbon of the whole rainforest.
3
SPEAKER_00
They have an outsized disproportionate mass from that ancient density of the wood.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so these loggers go out and they cut the wood that s most valuable and then they bring it back to town and they sell it and then people like us buy it and put it on our kitchen floors.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you know, and so,
3
SPEAKER_00
The thing is, when I got to the Amazon, it was loggers are the bad guys.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if you talk to a lot of the PhDs that I worked with down there were always very at odds with the miners, at odds with the loggers.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I d be with JJ and JJ would sit down and he d be like, hey, let s pour a drink.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, they have masato, let s all sit down.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we d all be chilling and throwing them back with a bunch of loggers.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then the opportunity through not vilifying these people came to be like, oh, these guys are great.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then of course, out in the wild, every now and then something will happen.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ll see somebody s boat flipped over and you go help them out.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then that creates a certain type of kinship.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they re ultimately people who love.
3
SPEAKER_00
who love the same thing you love.
3
SPEAKER_00
Often, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Even if they don t love it, they re people that aren t necessarily looking to destroy it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve met loggers who have looked at trees they re about to cut and gone, ah, this is a shame, start it up.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re just like, this is where the paycheck comes from.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s come back briefly to anacondas.
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you tell me this whole situation with Discovery s eaten alive?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s some drama and controversy around that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you explain that whole saga with Discovery, with your whole effort?
3
SPEAKER_01
Maybe outside of even the drama, the initial thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
which I now feel you re sufficiently insane to actually do of being eaten by an anaconda.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is that actually possible to survive something like that?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, if an anaconda swallows you while you re wearing the suit that they made, maybe.
3
SPEAKER_00
But that was, in hindsight, that was the result of, look, I go to the jungle and you start seeing these beautiful places, these incredible species.
3
SPEAKER_00
You start developing a relationship with these animals.
3
SPEAKER_00
and then you watch it get destroyed.
3
SPEAKER_00
Every year, we watch it burn.
3
SPEAKER_00
Every year, places that are crucial to my soul, I have seen leveled and turned to ash.
3
SPEAKER_00
And at some point, we started going, someone has to do something about this.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you look to your right, and you look to your left, and there is no one, because it s the middle of the Amazon, and the rainforests have been being destroyed since the 70s.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a cliche.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we started trying to do something about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I started putting a little bit more emphasis on publicity, a little bit more emphasis on getting the message out there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I started trying to see what was gonna work.
3
SPEAKER_00
You start firing shots in the dark and seeing, and JJ s going, you have to help us do something.
3
SPEAKER_00
okay, and so from 18 years old, now I m 23 years old, and all of a sudden, this place isn t foreign to me anymore, it s home.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so- You re trying to think of all the different ways you can bring attention to this place that you care about that s being destroyed.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you re standing next to a boulder of progress, of destruction, and it s about to roll onto the forest and just destroy it and snuff out all that life, and no one s there to do anything about it, and so you go,
3
SPEAKER_00
Is there any way that I could put myself in front of this boulder and hold it back?
3
SPEAKER_00
And you re talking about the global economic reality.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just such a massive, it s systemic.
3
SPEAKER_00
So what s the most dramatic possible thing I could do?
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
So when you find yourself flown to LA as a 23-year-old dude,
3
SPEAKER_00
And you re sitting there with some guy who s like spinning a pen and got his feet up on the desk and going, what can you show us down there?
3
SPEAKER_00
And you go, I could show you the biggest anacondas in the world.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we could talk about mercury and bioaccumulation.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we could show people how these animals are misunderstood.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we go on a big expedition, and we could be the coolest show ever.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, yeah, not good enough.
3
SPEAKER_00
You go, OK.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so that cycled through a bunch of times.
3
SPEAKER_00
And someone at some point in one of those meetings said, you know, what if we show people that anacondas really can eat humans?
3
SPEAKER_00
And I went, how is that a good show?
3
SPEAKER_00
You want me to feed someone to an anaconda?
3
SPEAKER_00
And I said, I mean, I kind of joked, like, what if, you know, I said, the only way that s feasible is if you like make a suit with a breathing apparatus and let the snake eat you and then come back out safely and make sure you don t hurt the snake.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they were like,
3
SPEAKER_00
Kid, you re on.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, oh, shit.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I should mention a small tangent.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think I mentioned to you offline due to travel troubles where I traveled to the totally wrong part of the United States on my way to Boston.
3
SPEAKER_01
And on my way to Boston, I did a conversation with Mr. Beast.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Jimmy, and I got a chance to hang out with him for the day.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of the things we did is have a lengthy brainstorm session with his team, or I was observing it.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it was interesting because he s probably way better
4
SPEAKER_01
at that conversation that you had with the guy in LA than the guy in LA, obviously, because he s made, he s revolutionizing entertainment, and he s also doing philanthropy, which he s trying to figure out how to help the world with that kind of stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I would love to actually, I ll send him a message to see what his thoughts, just brainstorm.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s so strong at this.
4
SPEAKER_01
Literally take the situation you re facing.
4
SPEAKER_01
Here s the place that I really care about is being burned down.
4
SPEAKER_01
that s being destroyed, what s the sexy video?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, how do you get people to watch something that s, you know, we all change the channel when they show us the kids in Africa with the swollen stomachs.
4
SPEAKER_00
Nobody wants to see it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, with the rainforest, like, we know, we know, we know, and I m going.
4
SPEAKER_00
I could give data all day long.
4
SPEAKER_00
I could show photos of burning forest.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I was looking for what would do it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so the Eatin  Alive thing, without spending too much time on a massive misstep, was I agreed to do it.
4
SPEAKER_00
They paid me, at the time, more money than I had made before, which I very much needed, because nobody pays you to be a conservationist.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I was a very poor 23-year-old that was like, yes, I would love that, please.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I thought, you know what, this is the start of a TV career.
4
SPEAKER_00
we got shafted so bad.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they used, somehow they changed our voices, they changed the things we said, they changed the message of the film.
4
SPEAKER_00
There was one point where we had caught a 19-foot snake and I was holding her head and I said, this is such a beautiful animal, the queen of the Amazon.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is such a great moment for me.
4
SPEAKER_00
I kissed her on the head.
4
SPEAKER_00
I said, she s made so many babies.
4
SPEAKER_00
Look at the scars.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was talking about just the poetry of this incredible dragon.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then the producer goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that s great.
4
SPEAKER_00
Listen, if that was to bite you, what would happen?
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, oh, well, if it bit you, you d bleed out, because it would lacerate down to the, that s what they put in the film.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so day of, they didn t show me the film until the night before I went on Matt Lauer s show, and I said, I am not endorsing this film.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they had called it Expedition on the call sheet, they d called it Expedition EA, Expedition Amazon.
4
SPEAKER_00
all of a sudden they changed it to Eaten Alive.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I went, wait guys, wait, wait, wait.
4
SPEAKER_00
I said, you re gonna make people think that it actually happened, not that we re attempting it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I said, I m not.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then they called me and they said, you better, you re going on live TV tomorrow.
4
SPEAKER_00
They said, you let us know what level of control we need to show for you.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was a very threatening phone call.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I had to go out and smile for the cameras and endorse something that was a train wreck.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the scientific community was like, you re an idiot.
4
SPEAKER_00
We don t want to ever see you again.
4
SPEAKER_00
I lost a lot of opportunities.
4
SPEAKER_00
PETA came, which, you know, PETA, whatever, but PETA came out.
4
SPEAKER_00
People were like, you were trying to hurt a snake, which I would never do.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then the American public was like, you know, you said you were going to get eaten by a snake and you didn t.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so everyone was pissed.
4
SPEAKER_00
I basically had to exile myself to India for like six months and just, I mean, I had death threats coming through all my messages.
4
SPEAKER_00
People were furious with me.
4
SPEAKER_01
What gave you strength to that?
4
SPEAKER_01
How difficult was that psychologically?
4
SPEAKER_01
Just everything you care about being completely kind of flipped upside down.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve spent so much time on the ground with the local people learning from the wildlife.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s such a devout and important thing to me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it got turned into a sideshow.
4
SPEAKER_00
It got turned into a joke.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then not just a joke, it got turned into that I m somehow
4
SPEAKER_00
bad to animals.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m irresponsible scientifically.
4
SPEAKER_00
Jimmy Kimmel told me to have sex with a hippo as my next stunt.
4
SPEAKER_00
It got really ugly, and it misfired so bad.
4
SPEAKER_00
And when you hear these motivational speakers talk about, you just gotta keep trying, and sometimes you re gonna fail hard, it was like, that one I got hit in the head with a baseball bat.
4
SPEAKER_00
That one was tough.
4
SPEAKER_00
And at the time, I was like, I m fine.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, I m gonna go away for a while.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I learned a lot though.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like at this point, I m still glad I did it because man, did I learn a lot about what a room full of people that you don t know who could look you in the eye and shake your hand and say, trust us.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh boy.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you have on a human level of resentment towards discovery, towards the people involved, were you able to forgive them?
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t care.
4
SPEAKER_00
It literally, that s what they do.
4
SPEAKER_00
They literally put out a documentary saying that mermaids were real.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s funny.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re not?
4
SPEAKER_01
Listen.
4
SPEAKER_01
No.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said that, I m not even touching that one.
4
SPEAKER_01
It is true.
4
SPEAKER_01
It is true.
4
SPEAKER_01
There is a documentary.
4
SPEAKER_00
There is a documentary where they duped a bunch of scientists who are like oceanographers and they like showed them ancient footage of mariners saying that seals were mermaids.
4
SPEAKER_00
Who cares?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s,
4
SPEAKER_00
It s, I was young, I got brought to Hollywood and I got spit out the other side.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s on me.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s not their fault.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s that parable about the frog who gives the scorpion a ride across the water.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then at the end he says, I ll give you a ride, just don t sting me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they get to the other side and the scorpion stings him.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the frog goes, why did you do that?
4
SPEAKER_00
And the scorpion goes, I m a scorpion.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s, it s not their fault.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s in my nature.
4
SPEAKER_01
But now that you ve become much more well-known and much more successful at what you do, you have a platform, can you return to those people and use it, the machine, to get more and more attention?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is that something you work on?
4
SPEAKER_01
Or do you prefer to work completely outside?
4
SPEAKER_00
I think that most of the success that we ve had now in protecting the rainforest, and the levels that we ve reached are so far, I think back to those barefoot days of catching snakes with JJ and the boat, and now the massive ecological reserve we have, and the team of rangers and the converted loggers, and all of that is because of the ability to communicate and to show people, but that s all been through social media.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I m open to the fact, if somebody came and gave a sort of like Bourdainian pass where they said, look, you can be yourself, you can swear, you can fart, you can smoke, you can do whatever you wanna do, go out there and show us the real thing, I would love to.
4
SPEAKER_00
But now I know how those contracts need to be.
4
SPEAKER_00
I need to have right to refusal and they can t change them.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I d almost rather just do it like the way I think like Mr. Beast does stuff where it s like, you just, you get a crew of guys and some seed money and go film the episodes and put it out exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, a committee never helped real art be better.
4
SPEAKER_00
It has to come from the source of inspiration.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you get, I think, you know, you get JJ and a crew of people or the guys in Africa that I m working with right now doing elephant conservation and like,
4
SPEAKER_00
but you gotta show real.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, look, that s why Joe Rogan is important right now.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s why you re important right now is because it s not being filtered through this ridiculous system of polishing it and dumbing it down.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s why Joe has been an inspiration.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t need a crew of a bunch of people.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t need a crew, period.
4
SPEAKER_01
All you need is one or two other people, and that s it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in my case, you don t need anybody.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve been doing this by requirement.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just need to be by myself.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a few other folks now that help with the editing and so on, but it s just they make life more awesome, as opposed to a boss that s a creative director.
4
SPEAKER_01
Somebody told me, actually, I was visiting
4
SPEAKER_01
LA, I think it was in LA, they were saying that now for all intimate scenes in Hollywood movies, there s an intimacy director, so when there s two people having sex, there s a third person that ensures that, on film, so it s not real, but there s still intimacy, that there s a third person that ensures that, like,
4
SPEAKER_01
everyone is comfortable and the actors say that this always ruins the chemistry of the scene.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so it s a very Hollywood thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
I understand that it s creepy.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I understand.
4
SPEAKER_01
Thanks, Harvey Weinstein.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s usually, I think, comes from the director pushing things too hard.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you just leave it to the actors, they know their boundaries, they can control their own boundaries.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the intimacy director is more for the director pushing things.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s Werner Herzog.
4
SPEAKER_00
I understand the logic.
4
SPEAKER_00
Let s make sure that we don t have anything happen here that shouldn t be happening.
4
SPEAKER_00
I get it, but I, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
But no, I think that authenticity is the greatest currency.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that in order for me to tell the stories that I can tell, like, you know, what changed the game for me was, I wanna tell you this story.
4
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
4
SPEAKER_00
So in 2019,
4
SPEAKER_00
The Amazon fires started popping off and we had just gone to film like a month earlier.
4
SPEAKER_00
We d filmed like a small documentary and they d been following me as if I was on a solo, which we did the best we could.
4
SPEAKER_00
I lived on my own.
4
SPEAKER_00
But as we were driving, we passed a spot where the flames were 70 feet tall.
4
SPEAKER_00
The forest was being destroyed.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I went out there with my phone, which overheated in like two minutes and said, you can t use it.
4
SPEAKER_00
But for a second, I was out there in the flames, picking up animals and throwing them off to try and just get them cooled off.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was trying to get snakes out of there.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everything was, the birds are flying, and I fucking lost it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was red-eyed, I was crying, and I was going, this is happening every fucking day.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was screaming, and it was the first time
4
SPEAKER_00
that I d done that, because I ve seen the burning so many times, and I just lost it that day.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know what made me pull out my phone, because usually in those intense moments, I say, forget the documentation, this is real life, we got stuff to do, and I m doing, I m not documenting.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then a month later, I m home, and I m in New York, and all of a sudden I see these articles, like, you know, the Amazon s burning worse this year than it was last year, and blah, blah, blah, and I was like, this, you know, fucking, and I threw it up on Instagram, like eight o clock at night,
4
SPEAKER_00
And I d never cursed on Instagram, I don t know why, I just never did.
4
SPEAKER_00
And my phone was on 100% and I put it on top of the refrigerator and I went to bed.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I woke up in the morning and my phone was on the floor on 2% and it was ringing off the hook and it was like the news.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they were like, are you the guy that posted that viral video about the Amazon?
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, what?
4
SPEAKER_00
And that was the start, that s where it broke.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s where we went from barefoot in the Amazon to,
4
SPEAKER_00
you know, all of a sudden, you know, I was a talking head for three weeks and going around on all these news stations.
4
SPEAKER_00
And all of a sudden I was like the spokesperson for the Amazon and JJ s calling me and he was like, go, go, go, go, go, like get us, get us that support.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it was just, you know, so, so communicating with people and bringing them into that reality and whether it s, you know, rhino poaching and elephant poaching or the Amazon being destroyed, it s like, to me, it s like being able to, to, to take people into that is, is something that I would love to do.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and you do it directly with authenticity on your Instagram.
4
SPEAKER_01
People should definitely follow your Instagram.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think Rogan follows your Instagram, too.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, the end of that story actually kind of involves him, because I went to all these news outlets, and I was living in green rooms and traveling around, and I was all strung out, and I hadn t seen anybody I actually know in a few weeks, which was starting to get to me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I finally got home and I went to like a family party and everyone s like, dude, you ve been, it s been crazy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, yup.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I left and my cousin Michael calls me and he s screaming and I m going, what, what, what, what, what?
4
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, Joe Rogan just shared it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Joe Rogan, you shared it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And everyone was losing their shit.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it was so amazing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it was like, yeah, that s when it really took off.
4
SPEAKER_00
And what happened as a result of all of this is that
4
SPEAKER_00
a Canadian entrepreneur who started Lightspeed reached out.
4
SPEAKER_00
And several months later after COVID, after that boom, I d been in the game for maybe 13 years or something, had no money, no savings, no job, no nothing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And after that great publicity thing, nothing happened.
4
SPEAKER_00
The waves came and everything got real exciting.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everybody reached out and they said, we care so much.
4
SPEAKER_00
Nothing happened though.
4
SPEAKER_00
We can run into battle, but if we don t have our arrows in the quiver,
4
SPEAKER_00
What can we do?
4
SPEAKER_00
And I actually, I made a phone call to my friend Mohsen right at the start of COVID, and I was going through a divorce, and I was broke, and I said, I m gonna get a job.
4
SPEAKER_00
I said, I give up.
4
SPEAKER_00
I said, this is stupid.
4
SPEAKER_00
I said, the ecotourism business is done, Jungle Keepers has dried up, we re done.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then this guy Dax De Silva called me on the phone and said, listen, I m in, what do we gotta do?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so if the analogy was me and JJ and a few other people trying to hold this boulder back from just destroying the rainforest, all of a sudden Dax comes in like a Titan and just puts his arm out and just goes, I m going to help.
4
SPEAKER_00
And he gave us the funding to start actually developing a ranger program, to start actually bringing loggers, to be protectors of the forest, to be supporting smaller conservation things.
4
SPEAKER_00
And now we re protecting 50,000 acres of rainforest.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re protecting entire streams and ecosystems that I love, and we re soon gonna double that.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s like this whole thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the communication of these things is crucial.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I actually think it s incredible that social media has played such a big role in it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, just because I know Joe well, and I love him so much, I definitely think you should do his podcast, but also just be friends with him.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think you guys, he s one, not to meme, but he s one with nature.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I m much more with the, I m one,
4
SPEAKER_01
while I do appreciate and love nature, I also love technology and robots and so on.
4
SPEAKER_01
So in that meme type of way, we re very different.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, either way, at some point, make sure you tell the guy thank you, because it definitely really helped push us over that limit where
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, if enough people see it, you get someone like Dax who says, I can help, and I have the resources to help.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that changed our whole lives.
4
SPEAKER_01
Back to the jungle.
4
SPEAKER_01
You had a bunch of interactions with jaguars.
4
SPEAKER_01
How are you still alive?
4
SPEAKER_00
Man, dude, jags aren t the, jags, I ll tell you this, jags are not the danger.
4
SPEAKER_00
The falling trees are the danger.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ll tell you some elephant stories and then you ll wonder why I m still alive.
4
SPEAKER_00
So JJ started and Santiago, his dad, started challenging me to do solos.
4
SPEAKER_00
Go out alone into the wild style.
4
SPEAKER_00
I d have a hammock, a headlamp, three days worth of food, some fish hooks, a machete, that s it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so one of the stories that happened early on was I was out there and it was raining and I was lost.
4
SPEAKER_00
this is how we test your jungle knowledge.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you survive out there?
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you know how to find food?
4
SPEAKER_00
Have you listened to the things that we taught you?
4
SPEAKER_00
And there was one night that I was in a hammock, and a jaguar came up, and I was asleep when it happened, and she came up right next to my head, and she was, and I could hear her smelling me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then my first instinct was to turn on my headlamp, and just the sound of my arm moving against the material, and she just,
4
SPEAKER_00
Like she just right here, I could feel her breath.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I just laid there in the dark.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s one of those moments where you go, you really learn a lot about yourself because I wasn t scared.
4
SPEAKER_00
I felt like I understood the intentions of the cat.
4
SPEAKER_00
If she was hunting, I d already be dead.
4
SPEAKER_00
She was curious and I was lost and I didn t know if I was ever going to get out of that jungle.
4
SPEAKER_00
But what she did was
4
SPEAKER_00
energize me, because it was an experience like the giant anaconda, where I said, this is so wild, that it s so almost cinematically outside the realm of what I thought my life could be like, that it made me like, wait.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because the previous day, I was lost, tired, confused, devastated, tail between my legs.
4
SPEAKER_00
After that, I was like, man, you ve been waiting for this your whole life.
4
SPEAKER_00
Go get it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I like woke up and I was like, I am going to navigate, even though I ve been in this swamp for three days, I m going to find my way out of this swamp.
4
SPEAKER_00
And like, she just like breathed fire into me where it was like.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was like, if that s possible, if I could be six inches away from a jaguar s face, then I got that energy from her.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you were able to start to really hear and feel the jungle around you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was a sign that you know what you re doing.
4
SPEAKER_01
It really felt like a sign, it really did.
4
SPEAKER_01
How do you survive on a solo hike through the jungle?
4
SPEAKER_01
What are the different components, what are the different dangers?
4
SPEAKER_01
So you said you had a hammock, you had some food.
4
SPEAKER_01
What kind of food, by the way, are we talking about?
4
SPEAKER_00
Nuts, stuff that won t go bad.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you can t really start a fire in the Amazon.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I camp all over the place, I m a wilderness guide.
5
SPEAKER_02
Starting a fire in the Amazon is futile.
5
SPEAKER_02
In fact, a lot of survival manuals will tell you, don t do it, because if you re really lost, it ll break your spirit.
5
SPEAKER_02
You re not going to be able to do it.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s dark.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
They re like, don t even try it.
5
SPEAKER_02
But you can still get hyperthermia from if you get wet and you lay out in the jungle.
5
SPEAKER_02
Exposure can still get you.
5
SPEAKER_02
So you want fire.
5
SPEAKER_02
In the beginning, I used to bring ramen noodles, which is
5
SPEAKER_02
that nutritionally is irrelevant.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so I started bringing like nuts and then supplementing that with fish, which forced me to become a very good fisherman.
5
SPEAKER_02
And now of course, JJ knows that he can like, they can cut certain roots and they bash it up and they put it in the stream and the fish just float to the top and they take with them.
5
SPEAKER_02
So like, he s got like, he s got all the cheat codes.
5
SPEAKER_02
Whereas like, I m sitting there with a hook and then he s like, he ll go, now find bait.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I go bait.
5
SPEAKER_02
in the most competitive ecosystem on Earth, good luck finding a worm.
5
SPEAKER_02
You can t do it.
5
SPEAKER_02
What does JJ do?
5
SPEAKER_02
He takes the machete, looks at his foot, cuts a slug of callus off of his heel, because he s got this thick rhino skin, puts that on the hook, catches a six-inch fish, chops it in half, puts it on a bigger hook, and in 15 minutes, he s got a four-foot giant catfish that could feed a family of 16, and he s happy.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m sitting there, and I m like, I m gonna try to like stick a beetle on a fishing hook and like, you know,
5
SPEAKER_02
Do you have just a line and a hook or is there a rod too?
5
SPEAKER_02
Just a line and a hook and then you just chop a rod and tie it to the, you know, you just chop a little sapling.
5
SPEAKER_02
So are you still able to start a fire or no?
5
SPEAKER_02
I like for the food that I bring to not be fire dependent.
5
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so if I have some nuts, I can shove in enough calories to get me through the night and leave a fishing line out and there ll be something there in the morning.
5
SPEAKER_02
But yes, I can start a fire, but a lot of times what I ll do is I ll bring a flask and not with like alcohol, but with diesel.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so you have a tuna can and you put the diesel in it.
5
SPEAKER_02
This is what the local guys do.
5
SPEAKER_02
Everything I do, you know, I m sure there s gonna be someone listening to this and they re like, how could you do that?
5
SPEAKER_02
And it s like, eh, this is what we do down there, sorry.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s a tuna can, you pour a little bit of diesel in it, it burns slow, you light it and you put your sticks, you make your pyramid over that and eventually that will burn through the moisture and finally you ll get a very reluctant little fire, enough to burn, you know, to make yourself like a cup of tea or to pour that into the noodles, something.
5
SPEAKER_02
Or you just eat a fish raw.
5
SPEAKER_02
How important is it to stay dry?
5
SPEAKER_02
Is it basically impossible?
5
SPEAKER_02
It s impossible to stay dry.
5
SPEAKER_02
You re wet all the time.
5
SPEAKER_02
You re wet all the time.
5
SPEAKER_02
What does that mean?
5
SPEAKER_02
That means infections are more efficient?
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
So yeah, I don t know if you saw the picture in my book where I have the- The yellow spots?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, there s a picture with your entire face consumed with yellow spots is basically, I guess that s MRSA?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yep.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh boy.
5
SPEAKER_00
So how did that happen?
5
SPEAKER_00
What was the infection like?
5
SPEAKER_00
And how crazy are you for letting that infection stay in you for a prolonged period of time without treating it?
5
SPEAKER_00
Or you had no choice?
5
SPEAKER_02
No, I did have a choice.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was 19 years old and I was taking care of a giant anteater that was orphaned.
5
SPEAKER_02
And this is like my dream animal.
5
SPEAKER_02
And she was mine.
5
SPEAKER_02
And my job was to teach her the jungle.
5
SPEAKER_02
So when I started noticing that I had an infection and that I was, I think I had dengue at the time too, I went back to town, probably picked up MRSA in the hospital where I got tested, came back into the jungle and then got progressively sicker and sicker and weaker and weaker.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was two weeks, three weeks in the jungle.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then it got to the point where my vision went black and white and I passed out one day.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I don t know why, but at the time I had shaved that day.
5
SPEAKER_02
And when I woke up the next morning, I couldn t open my eyes because the pus had come out of my eyes and out of the pores in my face, all those little micro cuts, and the pillow was stuck to my face.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I was stuck upriver with no help at 19 years old.
5
SPEAKER_02
And also when you see that picture, you can imagine that I assumed that my life was over, because I didn t know what it was.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I also didn t assume that, or at the very least, I figured I d be disfigured the rest of my life.
5
SPEAKER_02
I didn t think there was any getting better from that.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so I remember sitting by the side of the river praying that a boat would come by, but it was the rainy season and there aren t going to be any boats because the river is psychotic.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so it was a long time before I got back to town and I didn t want to leave the anteater, but it became like I was like, I realized I was dying.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then I finally got a boat with some loggers, a death boat, just loaded with, these guys had gone into the jungle and shot everything they could and taken all the babies and they were gonna go sell them.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so it was like baby monkeys and toucans and birds in cages and pieces of crocodiles and anaconda skins and jaguar skins rolled up.
5
SPEAKER_02
And it was just like, I was just laying there with all these dead animals in the boat with all the flies on my face.
5
SPEAKER_02
got back to the hotel, called my mother, said, please book me a flight out like today, like today.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then I sat on the plane and somebody sat next to me on the plane and I had a hood on.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I do remember that in the haze, at this point I was having trouble staying conscious, but I do remember that she like looked over like trying to see what was sitting next to her and then she got up and never came back.
5
SPEAKER_02
And when I got to immigration in New York, the cop, he takes my passport and he goes, yeah, he goes, so what were you doing in Peru?
5
SPEAKER_02
He s looking down and he goes, yeah, and he holds up the passport, looks at the passport, looks at my face, he goes, Beau, buddy.
5
SPEAKER_02
I was like, what the fuck?
5
SPEAKER_01
And I said, no, that s what, I was like, I m trying to get home to go to the hospital.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he goes, he stamps it, he goes, go, go, go, go, God bless, God bless.
5
SPEAKER_01
He was like, oh shit.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then they put me in the room in the hospital with like the hazmat suits and they didn t know what it was.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I spent like five days on IV antibiotics with like four different things running through my veins.
5
SPEAKER_02
And the doctors were like, don t let it go that close.
5
SPEAKER_02
They re like, you went real close on that one.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s what that picture, I mean, people should check out the book just to see the picture.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because I imagine you just laying there, unable to see, have a fever probably, so you re like half hallucinating.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there s no boat, there s no way out.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s no help coming.
5
SPEAKER_00
Plus there s this creature who you ve become a parent of, that you love.
5
SPEAKER_00
Boy, that s a dark place to be as a 19 year old.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, most people will never be in a place like that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like where did you find strength in that place?
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
5
SPEAKER_02
I just remember writing like a goodbye letter to my parents.
5
SPEAKER_02
Cause I said, if I die out here, it was really dark.
5
SPEAKER_02
Like it was terrifying.
5
SPEAKER_02
It really felt like it was the end.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I was writing, you know, if you find me out here, I m sorry.
5
SPEAKER_02
And all that type of stuff.
5
SPEAKER_02
And it was, you know, I don t know about strength.
5
SPEAKER_02
There was no strength.
5
SPEAKER_02
It was just like, move forward.
5
SPEAKER_02
And at some point it was like, if you ll take me down river, take me down river, you know?
5
SPEAKER_00
And you just got lucky with the loggers, with the death boat, that they found you.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, how did the infection start, by the way?
5
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
5
SPEAKER_02
I really don t know.
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, we always have some sort of little shit, but the thing is now JJ taught me that there s like three different trees that can cure infections.
5
SPEAKER_02
I didn t know this at the time.
5
SPEAKER_02
I didn t know the cheat codes.
5
SPEAKER_02
Now, if you have a small infection, you can use Sangre de Drago and it ll cure it right away.
5
SPEAKER_02
Like let s say you have a bot fly and it gets a little pussy.
5
SPEAKER_02
There s a fly living in your skin.
5
SPEAKER_02
You put that on there, not only will it kill the fly, but it ll heal the infection.
5
SPEAKER_02
Now, if you have a worse infection, you can go to Ojai, which is ficus insipida, and you can use that, and that will completely heal, that will murder, it s like crocodile blood, it will murder infections.
5
SPEAKER_02
So like, forget Neosporin, that s a joke.
5
SPEAKER_02
These are heavy chemical compounds running through these trees, and they know all about them.
5
SPEAKER_02
whatever it is, so now at this point, that s no longer an issue, because we know how to handle it, which at that time, if JJ had been there, I would have been fine.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, learn the hard way.
5
SPEAKER_00
So these are open wounds, and then there s creatures that start living in them?
5
SPEAKER_00
It s basically, what is it?
5
SPEAKER_02
Well, that s separate, that s bot flies, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
There s a creature that unfortunately, very, very, very unfortunately, likes to make its home inside the flesh of mammals.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so the flies attach their eggs to mosquitoes.
5
SPEAKER_02
The mosquitoes go and seek out warm-blooded animals.
5
SPEAKER_02
The eggs, microscopic eggs, fall into your skin and then begin to grow, and sooner or later you feel a twitch.
5
SPEAKER_02
And it s a worm living inside of you that s like vertical down in you, and it s eating you.
5
SPEAKER_02
And at first it s not a problem, but when they get to about as thick as that pen,
5
SPEAKER_02
it starts to hurt because you got a hole in you and they have a little breathing tube that comes up and they breathe and they go back in and then they eat and they come back up to breathe and you have a friend living in you.
5
SPEAKER_02
And it s- You ve had one of those?
5
SPEAKER_02
I ve had lots of those.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s tough to take them out.
5
SPEAKER_02
They have hooks.
5
SPEAKER_00
How do you, do you have to?
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh man, you gotta love the jungle.
5
SPEAKER_00
So how do you take it out?
5
SPEAKER_02
You have to come.
5
100%.
5
SPEAKER_02
You gotta put an irritant.
5
SPEAKER_02
So like a lot of times what we ll do down there is someone will take a massive drag of a cigarette and then they ll spit the, they ll power like exhale and get some of the tar, which also shows you how much tar you get out of a cigarette.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then with a knife, you put that right over the hole.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then you slap some Vaseline or something on top of that so they can t breathe.
5
SPEAKER_02
And eventually over the course of a few hours, they ll come up enough looking for air.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then you got to grab them with a tweezer and try not to rip them because then you re going to get an infection.
5
SPEAKER_02
And you got to squeeze from the, it s a whole ceremony.
5
SPEAKER_02
When people have bot flies, we re all like, oh, it s bot fly time.
5
SPEAKER_02
Let s go.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then like JJ will squeeze.
5
SPEAKER_02
He s got like pliers for thumbs.
5
SPEAKER_02
He can like take a piece of your neck and you think he s going to break your skin.
5
SPEAKER_02
He ll just squeeze until this thing comes out.
5
SPEAKER_02
and you don t wanna, I guess there s an open wound right there.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you don t wanna bathe for a day or two after until that closes, because otherwise you re gonna have water sloshing around in a little pocket of yours, it s kind of gross.
5
SPEAKER_02
And that water might have other organisms in it.
5
SPEAKER_02
Water in your skin tends to, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, the jungle water s clean.
5
SPEAKER_02
We drink it, I drink the water fresh out of the stream.
5
SPEAKER_02
Oh, that s interesting.
5
SPEAKER_02
Well, it s just a giant filtration system.
5
SPEAKER_02
All those roots, the whole jungle s constantly purifying everything.
5
SPEAKER_00
People might be thinking about that with the jungle.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s insects probably all over you all the time.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s not as bad as you think.
5
SPEAKER_02
I ve been to Finland, Lapland, in the summer, and the mosquitoes are horrendous, devastating.
5
SPEAKER_02
The Amazon, in our area, if you re sitting in a hammock reading a book,
5
SPEAKER_02
Our research stations don t have walls or anything.
5
SPEAKER_02
You re good for about one mosquito every half hour, which really is not a lot.
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, it s worse in New Jersey.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s really not that bad.
5
SPEAKER_00
Tell me a little more about the little baby anteater, Lulu.
5
SPEAKER_00
Lulu.
5
SPEAKER_00
Who you ve rescued and had to sadly leave behind.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I just was always fascinated with giant anteaters.
5
SPEAKER_02
They re this German shepherd-sized,
5
SPEAKER_02
thing with Wolverine claws and these giant Popeye forearms and they excavate ant and termite mounds and they have this long tongue.
5
SPEAKER_02
and their baby s right on their back for the first six months of their lives, and so they actually have this incredibly intimate relationship with their young, and it just so happens that this animal that I was wildly fascinated with, there was an orphan on the river, and JJ was like, you love these things, and I was like, yeah, and so he went and he was like, hey, my friend, he got me the baby, and we were like, we re gonna rewild her, and so I spent weeks and weeks and weeks just with this thing on my back,
5
SPEAKER_02
crawling through the jungle, teaching her to find ants, giving her milk, falling asleep with her on my chest.
5
SPEAKER_02
And their tongue is like 11 inches long at that age.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so when she wanted me to wake up, she d fire it up my nose and it would come out my mouth.
5
SPEAKER_02
And then if I tried to get her off me quick, she d stick the claws in.
5
SPEAKER_02
And all my clothes, I have old, now they re like museum pieces with rips in them from Lulu s claws.
5
SPEAKER_02
Just able to also communicate emotion and feeling and all that.
5
SPEAKER_02
She needed it.
5
SPEAKER_02
She needed it.
5
SPEAKER_02
So if this animal didn t have the physical touch, if I didn t hold her all day long, she d throw tantrums.
5
SPEAKER_02
She d go shred something.
5
SPEAKER_02
She d go pull down the curtain.
5
SPEAKER_02
She d go ruin the wood.
5
SPEAKER_02
She d start literally having a traumatic response to not having intimacy.
5
SPEAKER_02
Which was shocking, because again, on the scale of a cockroach to an elephant, you go, I didn t know that giant anteaters had such intense emotions.
5
SPEAKER_02
But she did.
5
SPEAKER_02
And also taking care of her forced me to explore the jungle from the perspective of an animal.
5
SPEAKER_02
So I got to be an animal.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so there s only a few times in my life where I ve gotten to do that.
5
SPEAKER_02
One was with her, another time was living with a herd of elephants where I had to walk with them through the forest and see how they interacted.
5
SPEAKER_02
completely natural, and it s different.
5
SPEAKER_02
It s very different, and you realize just like a person s public persona when they re out on the street in Manhattan is gonna be very different than when you re on the couch with them on a Tuesday night.
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And with wild animals, it s very much like that.
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If you see a bobcat on a trail and it s gonna look at you and glare at you and then go off, and it s like, yeah, but what s it like when it s in the den?
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and it s playing with its cubs.
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So that when it s looking at you, that s like the Instagram post it s making.
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It s doing duck face.
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So you ve, besides Amazon, you ve spent a lot of time in India.
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Can you tell me what you learned hanging out with a herd of elephants?
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What do people not understand about elephants that s beautiful to you, that s interesting to you?
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First of all, I think that elephants should have government representation as like a subset of society.
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Like, actually, they- They have intelligence?
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They are so intelligent.
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And when you look at an elephant, so there s this question that keeps coming up of, you know, are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?
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Can we interpret the intelligence that we re seeing?
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And I lived with a semi-wild herd of elephants in India for a while, and some of the things that I saw changed how I view reality, to be honest with you.
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Because you watch a matriarch of an elephant herd walk up to someone that none of us knew was pregnant, and her trunk goes to her stomach.
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And then she calls all the other ones over, and they re interested in this little human that they know that there s something in there.
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And they re all conversing about it, and you go, whoa.
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or that every morning we d wake up and the elephants didn t want the stream water, they didn t want the lake water, they didn t want puddles, they wanted the water from our well.
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We had like a stone well, you know, like a traditional.
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And every morning we d like run out of bed because all the elephants were gonna come and they were gonna rip the bucket off and destroy everything, but they wanted that nice, cold, clean water.
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And so it was like caring for elephants that were wild, that were sometimes getting shot at by farmers, because if they went to try and rob some bananas.
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So these are sort of like delinquent elephants that were half wild, and the forest department was thinking about, you know, getting rid of them, which whatever that meant.
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And I made really good friends with this one elephant, and his name was Dharma.
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And Dharma had the, this stuff doesn t, it s hard to write the book I m writing right now, because none of it sounds real.
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He grew up around people because he was a tuskless male.
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So he couldn t hang out with the females because he was a grown up male.
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And he couldn t hang out with the males, the bulls, because he couldn t defend himself when they roughhoused and everything.
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So Dharma would be like wandering around the forest, not knowing who to hang out with.
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And so like there was one night there was a tiger calling and we just heard, you could hear it echoing over the hills.
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And what does Dharma do?
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2 a.m., we hear Dharma show up.
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And he s, same thing.
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He starts throwing a tantrum.
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He starts pulling shit over.
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He takes a chair, throws it.
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We had bananas in the truck.
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Dharma walks up to the truck.
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It s like a Jeep.
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He walks up to the Jeep, smells it.
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He looks at me, and he s like, are you gonna get out of bed?
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I m like, no, I m not gonna get out of bed.
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I was like, Dharma, you re a grown ass elephant.
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The tiger does his thing again, and he s like, I need bananas to feel better.
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pushes the truck up on two wheels.
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Oh, wow.
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Looks at me.
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Is this how you want it to be?
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And so I m up, I m up.
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And I go and I m like, please, please, please, please, please, don t make me rub in his face.
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And he s like, he puts it down.
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He s like, all right, well then, hit me.
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I didn t do it, so he lifts it up again.
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And so in the end, there was no way for me to outsmart DL if he wins.
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There was nothing I could do.
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And so a lot of my job was taking him out into the forest and spending a little bit of time with him.
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I have this beautiful,
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One time I set up the tripod and I went and I was just journaling.
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And he would come and he would just like play with my hair and he d be like, hey, what s up?
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And he just, he wanted someone to interact with on an emotional level.
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And when you think about elephants in terms of the fact that people go, oh, they use medication to induce labor.
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It s like, yeah, that s not that surprising.
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They hold the bones of the dead.
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It s like, yeah, they have the best smell of pretty much any animal.
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That s also not surprising.
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They probably know exactly who that was, that bone.
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But they can navigate to water holes and communicate in ways that we cannot really figure out.
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And so when you hear about people measuring elephant intelligence, you ll hear about scientists being like, oh, well, we gave it a bucket with a hole in it and then it had like a key and there was a rope.
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And you re like, bro, this is all,
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human stuff.
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Can you go walking with them for three weeks in the wild and watch how they deal with the problems that they encounter in the forest?
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And so elephants have become, especially recently with the work that I ve been doing in Africa with vet paw, I ve just become so fascinated with elephants.
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The African elephant population right now is down at 2% of what it was a few hundred years ago.
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we re really putting them on the brink of, you know, there s some elephants that are being born tuskless because we ve, poaching has taken down the great tuskers to the point where now it s actually beneficial for some elephants to not have tusks, because then they won t have humans, but that s like we ve created deformed elephants, and so like now I m,
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I ve gotten very concerned with issues of elephants.
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And tusks are fundamental to the interaction between elephants.
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Absolutely.
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I mean, when males compete with each other, but also elephants use their tusks.
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They ll break a branch and they ll be like, this is a good branch.
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I m gonna eat the hell out of this.
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And they ll hang it on their tusk.
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And they ll grab a bunch of other stuff.
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They ll hold it.
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you know, ripping a tree up out of the ground.
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I just watched it two weeks ago.
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I was watching an elephant.
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He got down on his knees and stuck his tusk into the ground and like leveraged up.
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He like Archimedes to this root out of the ground and then was like, that s a sweet root.
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And then when he left, I went and I tasted the root and it was like sweet ginger.
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And I was like, I have no idea.
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I have no idea what this is, but he knew it was good.
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Do they use tusks for sexual selection, like to impress the ladies or no?
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It s certainly involved in who has mating rights.
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Oh, who wins in the competition.
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Who wins.
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I mean, if you got the big tusks, and there are elephants out there, like the mammoth big tuskers that have tusks down to the ground, like huge.
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And when you see them, it s like seeing something unique on earth, unique in history, because we re at a point where we might lose those.
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There are only a few of them left.
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and then they re so prized by hunters.
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Yeah, it s interesting, because I forget what the actual conclusion on that is, because there s some studies of the use of the value of beauty in evolution, like birds and peacocks and so on, that there s no actual...
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value to it, but it plays a role in sexual selection, meaning value like, it s much easier to understand competition, like a tusk helps you defeat the competitor.
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But I bet you there s a component to the tusk where the ladies go, god damn, that s a nice question.
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Like there s a visual beautiful component.
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Maybe not, I don t know.
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But what if beauty though, as we re defining it though, is symmetry and the absence of yellow spots on your face and healthy looking hair.
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And so I think to us, beauty is sexually appealing traits that look good to mate with.
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So that 19 year old with Marisa, everybody in the world would swipe left on that.
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the least desirable object in the universe.
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Okay, speaking of elephant intelligence, it s something I think and work quite a bit on with artificial intelligence, is the philosophical question that comes up is what is intelligence?
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What is intelligent?
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Humans, homo sapiens, are often
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thought to be highly intelligent.
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That s the reason they stand out.
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In your understanding of different species like the elephant, what stands out to you about humans?
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Or are they just another animal with different kinds of intelligence?
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Well, we re certainly unique because we have altered the entire planet.
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You know, the term the Anthropocene, I mean, it s like we ve literally created a geological layer of us, whereas other animals don t.
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And going back to elephants, it s like they also engineer their environment.
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If you re in a forest, like if you drop me in a forest on Earth, I can tell you in two seconds if there s elephants there, because there s twisted branches and excavated earth, and they re constantly gardening.
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But I mean, look at us.
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I mean, we re clearly unique in nature, which makes me not understand the anti-human sentiment that so much of environmentalism has about like, we re bad, we re damned, we ruin everything.
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And it s like, I ve seen the worst.
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I ve seen the burning Amazon and I m still like,
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I love being able to share ideas with you and travel to places and FaceTime my family when I m not around them.
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And it s like, I celebrate a lot of what makes us human.
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And it s almost like reality is this crazy video game.
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And it s like, if we could just figure out the right keys, we can pretty much do anything we can think of.
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And it s like, I mean, poetry, art, I mean, you know, I m the biggest animal lover in the world, but we are different.
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We really are.
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Yeah, the ability to puzzle solve, create tools,
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What do you think is the coolest invention humans have come up with?
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Is it fire?
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What s the most impactful?
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I feel like fire is kind of a gimme.
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I feel like the- They didn t really invent it.
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They probably- Like the wheel.
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Flying.
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I mean, flying.
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I mean, think if you could go back in time to someone that never flew.
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You know, a sultan, an Egyptian king.
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George Washington, and be like, you can fly.
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I mean, just on my way here, and I fly way too much, but I was looking out the window at the clouds and going, this is unbelievably spectacular.
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It s just stunning.
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As a kid, you look at a cloudy day, and you go, the world is like this today.
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And then you get in a plane, and you fly above the clouds, and it s sunny up there, and you go, oh.
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It changes your perspective.
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It s like when people go to the moon and they come back and they tell you the pale blue dot.
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I say flying, I think the ability to fly.
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I mean, the fact that I could get on a plane and be in India in 22 hours is shocking.
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In terms of its usefulness, I would argue that s not in the top five, but in terms of its ability to inspire.
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There s somebody I forgot who told me this idea that
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there s something about the atmosphere, Earth s atmosphere, that allows you to look up and see the stars.
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If we didn t have that, human civilization would not have happened.
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Meaning being able to look up and see something out there would fill our, something that allows you to look up versus just look down.
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Looking at your local environment, be able to wander and see, holy shit,
6
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There s a big world out there, and I don t know.
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anything, if you re able to look up and see that, that kind of humility combined with the ability to dream about exploring, maybe it just inspires exploration.
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It s kind of an interesting thought, given how inspiring, for example, the extra upgraded, super cool version of flying, which is flying to other planets.
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I mean, there s going to be, hopefully it s possible,
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this century, a child born, no, not this century, maybe this century, a child born on another planet that looks up, that looks back at Earth, and has to be educated by his, her parents, that like, there s another place.
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There s another place where life is way easier.
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Oh God, it s so easy.
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There s water everywhere.
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Yeah, exactly.
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People complain about Earth.
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Man, Earth is really, really nice.
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It s really, really good.
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It s really, really good here.
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Water everywhere, anything.
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Oh man, I wouldn t even leave.
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Given like right now, like if somebody said like, oh, you could like, you could go to the moon.
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I d be like, no, I m good.
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If I died in space, I d be so pissed.
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I love it here.
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Yeah, but you re still, there s a longing to explore for you.
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There s a longing to explore, but I really think I m such a, like my longing to explore is like rivers, streams, oceans, jungles.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like to me, yeah, I would watch the hell out of the live stream of Elon touching down on Mars.
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Like I d be like, this is incredible.
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It s an amazing that I get to be around to see this.
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I m staying where?
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I ll be right here.
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Yeah, but it s good that the human spirit pushes us.
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Oh, it s amazing.
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To what s possible.
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And it does that for you.
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Just out there questions, what s the most dangerous animal in the Amazon, would you say?
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Mammal, let s go with mammal.
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Dangerous mammal.
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Dangerous in terms of you walking around doing the solo hike.
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I m gonna disappoint everybody with this, but it s humans.
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If I m out in the Amazon, there s nothing that s going to attack me.
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You know, and in India, you might have an old leopard or a tiger that s missing a tooth that decides your prey, or you might have an angry elephant that s in must that just decides to flatten you.
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In the Amazon, you re not, there s real, jaguars won t even let you see them.
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And there s really nothing else.
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One of my friends, a brilliant scientist friend of mine, Pat, got attacked by a rabbit ocelot once, but that s like a dieseled house cat just having a fit.
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It wasn t the worst thing in the world.
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It s just the assholes of the animal kingdom.
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Okay, in terms of humans, you ve said that the tribes, some of them uncontacted, can be exceptionally dangerous.
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What s your experience with them?
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What should people learn?
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It s such a fascinating part of life here on Earth that there s tribes that don t have much or any contact with the quote-unquote civilized world.
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Most of the people that I meet don t actually really understand how isolated these people are or how weird it is that we re sitting here and that we have iPhones and airplanes and all this stuff and these people are living naked in the forest at this moment.
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And so, the thing though, you know, I also was recently, somebody told me, oh, there s like Paleolithic tribes, and it s like, no, no, no, just by default, they re modern tribes living now.
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They just happen to be living out in the jungle, and there s a huge debate about, you know, do we try and contact them and bring them in?
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And there s two camps of people on this who they say that it was the trauma of the rubber boom that sent them out that far into the forest and made them terrified of the outside world.
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And so that s also what made them so hyper-violent.
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I mean, one of the guys we work with on our team, Victor, was in, I think it was 2004, he s coming down river and he had a load of mahogany wood, and he s piloting this boat.
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And he sent two people, a husband and wife, ahead to go start cooking breakfast on the beach so they could put the little kitchenette thing down and put the propane.
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He sent them ahead.
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He s going nice and slow with the barge coming down the river.
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They go ahead, reach the beach.
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They get out.
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He starts cutting some cane to start making a fire.
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Tribe comes out.
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No warning.
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They just start screaming.
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They start shooting arrows.
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The man instantly gets an arrow through the leg and it pins his leg so he can t run.
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He tells his wife, go save yourself.
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And she does.
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She jumps in the water.
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There s arrows falling around her too.
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And as she s floating down the river, she looks back and the last thing she sees is these guys getting to her husband and beginning to rip him apart.
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As Victor comes down the river, this is a guy we work with every day.
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He comes down the river and sees his friend
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disemboweled, opened up, dissected.
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His parts are all over the beach.
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The beach is red.
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And they only found out what happened because they found her later on holding onto a stick in the river.
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And they were like, what happened?
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And she was like, they just attacked.
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They don t want people on their land.
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on the sort of the underground WhatsApp chain of the Amazon, in August, like this was not internationally known, some loggers went up and tried to steal a few trees from where the tribes were.
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And then everybody sent the pictures of what the loggers looked like after a few days because the tribes porcupined them with arrows.
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They were laying there on the ground with just arrows sticking out of their bodies.
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And then eventually the authorities came out and looked and there was just these white, I ll show you the pictures later.
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There s just these white puffy bodies with like the skulls sticking out.
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And it was like, you don t mess with these tribes.
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I wonder what s the mythology around that they construct around who these outsiders are.
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Are they gods?
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Are they demons?
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Are they humans?
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Who are they?
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Who are we to them?
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We got to go back to the rubber boom the rubber barons went down there and at the start of the industrial revolution the only way to get rubber.
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was to mine it from the trees that are out in the forest.
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And so the only way to do that, because you can t make a rubber plantation in the jungle.
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The rubber, when it s in plantation form, when it s a monoculture, it gets this leaf blight and it all dies.
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Henry Ford tried it, it didn t work.
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And so what they did was they sent these people down who just whipped, burned, enslaved, raped, and pillaged the people.
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It s one of the worst periods in human suffering that I ve ever read about.
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One missionary said they were killing the locals the way you or I would kill a mosquito.
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They just went nuts.
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And so they sent them out and they would come back with rubber and this would go to fuel the industrial revolution for hoses and gaskets and tires and all this stuff that suddenly we needed.
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SPEAKER_01
And it was during that time that these, you know, gangs of foreigners would go into the jungle to enslave the natives, that these uncontacted tribes went back into the jungle and said, not us.
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And they have six foot bows and seven foot arrows with bamboo tips.
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They make the bamboo tips into razor blades.
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And so when those things fly, actually one of my rangers, one of the jungle keepers team was present when the tribes had come out onto the river and he tried to help them, cause they re nomadic and they live out there.
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And so there s an element of like brother, like, you know, they re trying to be like, you don t need to be like this.
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SPEAKER_01
Like we re friendly.
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SPEAKER_01
So they sent a canoe across the river with bananas.
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SPEAKER_01
And so he s up to his waist in the river and the tribes are right across the river.
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SPEAKER_01
They shot, and he sees the arrow coming right at his head.
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SPEAKER_01
And as he moved to the side, it hit him at the temple and sliced him back towards the ear, opening him to the skull.
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He s fine.
6
SPEAKER_01
But let me tell you something, when he goes and gets a crew cut, it s the most badass skull, the scar you ve ever seen, man.
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SPEAKER_01
And so he always keeps it real short on that side.
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SPEAKER_01
But even if you try to help them, they re not necessarily friendly.
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SPEAKER_01
That s a tough lesson.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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I suppose they have a point.
6
SPEAKER_01
They have a point and protecting them is a default of, you know, now that we re protecting all this ecosystems and all these other indigenous communities, it s like we all sort of live with this knowledge that they re the hermanos, the brothers are out there and that s the way they wanna keep it.
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SPEAKER_01
And so we just have to be respectful of like, you don t camp on certain beaches at certain times of the year because we know that they might be there.
6
SPEAKER_01
You really have to be careful about that.
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Have you yourself interacted with any?
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My interaction with them came on a solo where I pushed it a little bit too far.
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SPEAKER_01
And I was planning to do a three week, this was like the big one.
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SPEAKER_01
And I got dropped off by poachers up a river and I went past the point where they were like names there.
6
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I said, what tributary are we on?
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And they were like, tributary.
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And I was like, okay.
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SPEAKER_01
And I said, leave me here.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I remember the guy being like, are you committing suicide?
6
SPEAKER_01
And he, he didn t understand that.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was like, no, I have a backpack and I have like food and like, I m going to like take videos and I have a tripod.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, we re cool here.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they looked at me like they were like, goodbye.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, all right.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I like went up this river.
6
SPEAKER_01
And, and again, like you just, you learn these things like, you know, it was only when I d been alone for a week that you realize you re, what does that say?
7
SPEAKER_02
They re like, oh, you re born alone and you die alone.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s like, no, you re not.
7
SPEAKER_02
You re born into a room full of people, usually.
7
SPEAKER_02
At the very least, your mother s there for everybody.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so you ve been around people, probably, if you re a normal person, every single day of your life.
7
SPEAKER_02
You ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of people.
7
SPEAKER_02
And all of a sudden you realize what a social creature we are.
7
SPEAKER_02
Because on day six, it gets weird.
7
SPEAKER_02
For me, it got weird.
7
SPEAKER_02
I know there s people that can do it longer.
7
SPEAKER_02
So what does that mean?
7
SPEAKER_02
Like longing for contact, like lonely?
7
SPEAKER_02
Longing for contact, the distortion of reality in the sense that like, you know, you wake up and there s no one there and you start to, you know, you re going up a river.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I kept looking back down river and,
7
SPEAKER_02
almost thinking of my life as something, it was almost like I had already died and I had gone to somewhere else.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I was looking back on that life as like something that I had experienced.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then there came this panic of, what if it s gone?
7
SPEAKER_02
Or like, what if World War III broke out and I just don t know about it?
7
SPEAKER_02
My family in New York is vaporized.
7
SPEAKER_02
Something, you just, you re, you re, you re.
7
SPEAKER_01
So actually, your ability to comprehend and interpret reality kind of requires other people.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s not just that you re lonely.
7
SPEAKER_01
You need that contact to actually just perceive the world, make sense of it, all of that.
7
SPEAKER_01
So you start basically hallucinating in a certain kind of way.
7
SPEAKER_02
I started feeling very uncomfortable.
7
SPEAKER_02
It doesn t help also that Santiago told me these stories where he s like, if you hear Capuchins sounding not quite monkeys, if you hear Capuchin monkeys sounding not quite like Capuchins, he goes, it s the tribe and they re coming to get you.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then the guy who was shot, Ignacio, they showed me videos where we saw them on the beach and they re communicating in monkey calls.
7
SPEAKER_02
They re using it as code so that we don t understand them, even though we don t speak their language.
7
SPEAKER_02
But they re using animal calls.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so every night you go to sleep and then you go, did that tinamou sound off?
7
SPEAKER_02
And you re like, shit.
7
SPEAKER_02
You know, and it s really hard to fall asleep.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then, like, one night I messed up and I left a fish.
7
SPEAKER_02
I, like, cleaned this fish.
7
SPEAKER_02
I ate, like, this huge fish.
7
SPEAKER_02
I just ate it to my face.
7
SPEAKER_02
You re putting out, like, marathon levels of energy every day.
7
SPEAKER_02
Like, you know, Goggins would love solos.
7
SPEAKER_02
He d be like, this is awesome.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
Do you eat fish raw?
7
SPEAKER_02
This one, I actually cooked it, but the skeleton was laying there right outside my tent, stupid.
7
SPEAKER_02
And in the middle of the night, I wake up and I just could tell there was something there.
7
SPEAKER_02
You almost don t wanna look.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s like when you re a kid at the basement door and you re like, is there a ghost?
7
SPEAKER_02
I unzip the tent and I open it up and there s 27 black caiman outside of my tent all looking at me like this.
7
SPEAKER_02
And some of their heads are this big and they re like, there s fish there, can we have it?
7
SPEAKER_02
And I m like, holy shit.
7
SPEAKER_02
And like, you know, I was like, do I, I kind of like had to like scooch the tent back and like move back and let them have their fish.
7
SPEAKER_02
And there was a host of crocodiles outside of my tent.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
But no, so then there was- Wait, how many?
7
SPEAKER_02
Like 27, maybe.
7
SPEAKER_02
There s a lot, big ones, small ones, medium-sized ones, every type, they re all there.
7
SPEAKER_02
Their eyes glow in the night.
7
SPEAKER_02
You shine a light at animals and they have a tapetum lucidum, and so their eye shine comes back at you.
7
SPEAKER_02
If you shine a headlamp at a jaguar or a frog, almost every animal has a tapetum.
7
SPEAKER_01
These are croc, there s a whole lot of them.
7
SPEAKER_01
I thought, can we go back to the part of the conversation where you said the jungle is not dangerous, the humans are the most dangerous thing?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, did they eat me?
7
SPEAKER_01
No.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why didn t they eat you?
7
SPEAKER_01
They wanted the fish.
7
SPEAKER_01
Is there some way of you interacting with them that shows that you re not a source of harm?
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t believe so.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m sure there s someone out there that thinks they can talk to crocs, but... Because there s a story of you grabbing a croc by the tail.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_01
What did you learn from that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Learned to not always listen to JJ.
7
SPEAKER_01
So JJ was testing you to- Yeah, to see how stupid I was.
7
SPEAKER_02
How do you hold the crocodile exactly?
7
SPEAKER_02
You have to get him by the head, like an anaconda like this.
7
SPEAKER_02
So you re one of the world experts at grabbing creatures by the head?
7
SPEAKER_02
I wouldn t say world expert, but I ve done a lot of it.
7
SPEAKER_02
I also have, you see how there s kind of a ball there?
7
SPEAKER_02
That s where a crocodile tooth went in that side and came out that side of my mouth.
7
SPEAKER_02
That was a really good chomp.
7
SPEAKER_02
And the watch I was wearing at the time saved me, because that, ka, like that.
7
SPEAKER_02
Just real fast, just chop, just whack.
7
SPEAKER_02
Like somebody took a sledgehammer, you put your hand on the table and I just went.
7
SPEAKER_02
Really hurt, shouldn t have been doing that.
7
SPEAKER_02
How did that come up?
7
SPEAKER_02
Because I caught a croc that was too big.
7
SPEAKER_02
So usually when we catch little caiman in the streams and we measure them to monitor the populations, you get it by the neck and then I tuck the tail under my arm and I hold it.
7
SPEAKER_02
And you re talking about a little, you know, four foot croc, nothing.
7
SPEAKER_02
And this one, I dove into a swamp and I caught like a six foot.
7
SPEAKER_02
spectacle came in and her head was big and I had her by the neck and I realized I couldn t get her tail under my arm because her tail was all the way back there and she started thrashing and it was like probably croc number 375 that I d caught and I just got a little cocky and I said, ah, she s, you know, I just, I just like grabbed her by a leg.
7
SPEAKER_02
I was like, I got this.
7
SPEAKER_02
And she just came back and tagged me and I went, okay, gonna go back to being safe.
7
SPEAKER_01
Just to linger on it, what,
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it one of the bigger predators in the Amazon?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are they going extinct, black caimans?
7
SPEAKER_02
Black caiman were, I believe they were critically endangered for a while because for a while the fashion industry loved their skin.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s soft and it s black.
7
SPEAKER_02
They re bouncing back a little bit now.
7
SPEAKER_02
Like most animals, if you leave them alone, they ll be fine.
7
SPEAKER_02
Crocs have been through how many millions and millions of years on Earth before us.
7
SPEAKER_02
I mean, that s even the joke, but that s the grim reality of tiger conservation.
7
SPEAKER_02
There was 100,000 tigers in 1900.
7
SPEAKER_02
Now there s 4,000 tigers left on Earth.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s not rocket science.
7
SPEAKER_02
All you have to do is not bulldoze their forest and allow there to be some deer and tigers will be fine.
7
SPEAKER_02
That s it.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s so simple.
7
SPEAKER_02
And that s like sometimes where I feel like I have the dumbest job in the world.
7
SPEAKER_02
I m like, guys, please stop killing the things that keep us alive.
7
SPEAKER_02
The Amazon regulates our global climate, produces medicine, is home to indigenous people.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s beautiful.
7
SPEAKER_02
Rainforests only cover 3% of the planet s landmass.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s not that much to ask.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you leave their home untouched, they ll figure out how to have sex and multiply, except for pandas, apparently, because pandas you have to convince.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
Humpbacks, they went from 130,000 down to, I think, about 8,000.
7
SPEAKER_02
at whaling times, and then when we banned whaling, since that time, where I think we re back up to over 100,000 humpback whales, they ve bounced back.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s a success story, we re not gonna lose them.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so you re on a solo, hmm.
7
SPEAKER_00
with Crocs looking at you.
7
SPEAKER_00
See, this is why you re good at this.
7
SPEAKER_02
I would have lost, we would have been tangent forever.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, that s pretty epic with the fish.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was your mistake.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was my mistake, the fish.
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t understand how you re still alive.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s really inspiring.
7
SPEAKER_02
When you come, I m gonna show you.
7
SPEAKER_01
You told me you re coming already.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re already in.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, 100% coming.
7
SPEAKER_01
If there s any place, I mean,
7
SPEAKER_01
sort of a grim joke, but if there s any way to die, that s a good one, if I m being honest.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s a cool one.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s a pretty cool one.
7
SPEAKER_02
You ll become part of the.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, I m not even joking, there s a oneness to the whole thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
All the stories, just reading your work, looking at your work, it seems like you re a part of this machine that is nature, this incredible machine.
7
SPEAKER_01
We all die.
7
SPEAKER_01
and we re all part of this big thing, that humans do have the capability to also construct narratives and stories and myths and tell them to each other and share them with each other and have more sophisticated ways, therefore, to communicate love to each other, but animals do as well.
7
SPEAKER_01
They communicate love, maybe more simply, maybe more honestly.
7
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, so you with the crocs and the fish.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so I messed up.
7
SPEAKER_02
I left the fish out.
7
SPEAKER_02
Croc showed up outside my tent.
7
SPEAKER_02
But in the end, it was fine.
7
SPEAKER_02
I backed off.
7
SPEAKER_02
They had their way with the fish, and then they all started biting each other.
7
SPEAKER_02
It was fun to watch.
7
SPEAKER_01
Is there a general, sorry to interrupt, is there a general rule you wanna not leave?
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, just like if you re camping in the Northeast, you don t leave, like, you do a bear bag or a bear canister.
7
SPEAKER_02
You don t wanna invite the wild animals.
7
SPEAKER_02
I really did mess up.
7
SPEAKER_02
I kinda was just like, you know, whatever.
7
SPEAKER_02
I do this every now and then.
7
SPEAKER_02
I get a little too cavalier, and the ocean has almost taken me down for that a few times.
7
SPEAKER_02
But yeah, so the Crocs, and then you keep going for a few days, and my plan was to get to a point where I reached the end of the tributary, and this had a very,
7
SPEAKER_02
You know, again, for me, this is like a pilgrimage.
7
SPEAKER_02
This is like me going into the heart of the very center and soul and essence of everything that I am fascinated with, like as close to God as you can get, because you re leaving every type of security, every human relationship.
7
SPEAKER_02
You re also pushing all your chips in.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so it s,
7
SPEAKER_02
you know, every step I took further up river, it got weirder and weirder and more intense.
7
SPEAKER_02
And every day and every moment it changed.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I brought pictures at the time.
7
SPEAKER_02
There s no way to keep a phone charged.
7
SPEAKER_02
I didn t have like a power bank or anything.
7
SPEAKER_02
You know, I brought pictures from home.
7
SPEAKER_02
I brought a National Geographic magazine, something just to, you know, and there came a day right when I was getting to the end, like to the point where the river was so shallow that
7
SPEAKER_02
It was just a trickle and I was walking on the rocks and the Andes mountains were in front of me and I was like reaching the place and the music was swelling and then all of a sudden I saw smoke around the next bend.
7
SPEAKER_02
And my spine is reacting right now as I talk about it, because I knew what I was gonna see, because I knew that it was impossible for loggers to be out there.
7
SPEAKER_02
There s no motor that could take you.
7
SPEAKER_02
The boat would have run aground miles ago.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so I went, and this is the other idiot thing.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s like, just turn around.
7
SPEAKER_02
Just do it.
7
SPEAKER_02
I m that kid though, when you see like a wet paint sign, like I walk by and I touch the wall.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yep.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so I went around the bend.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I see a few naked people on the beach and they see me and we re like a good distance apart.
7
SPEAKER_02
They re on the other side of the river, but arrow in hand, bow in hand, the intention of pose, they re looking at me, they re clearly conversing.
7
SPEAKER_02
And that moment lasted for a long moment where I said,
7
SPEAKER_02
This is the part of the story where they are going to rip me apart, dissect me to see what I eat.
7
SPEAKER_02
I mean, every other story in the region that we ve heard, that s the ending of it.
7
SPEAKER_02
If you re alone with these people, it s not gonna go well.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I have nothing to defend myself with.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I just, I turned and I ran for like three hours and I got in the river and I swam for a while and all my food got wet.
7
SPEAKER_02
I mean, everything, I just, all systems go.
7
SPEAKER_01
Just ran for dear life.
7
SPEAKER_02
Just ran for dear life.
7
SPEAKER_02
And my get out plan, the thing after I crossed the mountains and came down into the next tributary was I had a pack raft.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s a tiny little inflatable raft.
7
SPEAKER_02
good enough to handle rapids.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I inflated the packraft.
7
SPEAKER_02
Once the river was like six inches deep, I inflated the packraft and I went for the rest of that day into the night.
7
SPEAKER_02
I went into the point that my headlamp died and I was just floating in a raft down the Amazon and hitting into things.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, okay, I m gonna pop this raft.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I got out of the raft, set up my tent, and I was like, I need some sleep.
7
SPEAKER_02
I was freaking out.
7
SPEAKER_02
I hadn t had food in hours and hours and hours.
7
SPEAKER_02
As soon as I fell asleep,
7
SPEAKER_02
my asshole brain comes up with the dream of, that I hear voices, they re right outside the tent.
7
SPEAKER_02
I just, you know, sleeping was worse than being awake.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I woke up, got back in the tent, and then at one point it was really cool, because one of those, one of the same black caiman that had come for the fish, as I m going downriver, he came right up next to me and the two of us were going, and he was just like motoring downriver, this giant, like 16-foot crocodile.
7
SPEAKER_02
He just like came up to me and like looked at me as I was going, and it was funny, because I wasn t scared of him.
7
SPEAKER_02
I was scared of them.
7
SPEAKER_02
And yeah, it took me like a week to get back to town.
7
SPEAKER_02
And again, the things you learn in these moments, the appreciation for your parents, what a hug feels like when you are faced with pretty much certainty that you re not gonna get those things again.
7
SPEAKER_02
whether it s from MRSA or uncontacted tribes.
7
SPEAKER_02
I find that it brings you this new joy for life where you... Just being that close to death.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you go, my God, this is all a miracle.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s sad because they re human just like you.
7
SPEAKER_01
Actually, how different are they?
7
SPEAKER_01
Like if you were forced to interact for a week together where they can t, they re not allowed to kill you.
7
SPEAKER_01
Not allowed to kill me.
7
SPEAKER_01
How fundamentally different are they, do you think?
7
SPEAKER_02
I don t think they re that different.
7
SPEAKER_02
I think they re like any other Amazonian natives.
7
SPEAKER_02
They re tall.
7
SPEAKER_02
They seem to have tall genetics.
7
SPEAKER_02
And there s places, again, there s what is known, and then there s what we know down there.
7
SPEAKER_02
There s one community where
7
SPEAKER_02
I don t know whether it was like a bad rainstorm or something, but some kid from the uncontacted tribes did end up in a village.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so he learned Spanish or he learned whatever dialect they speak in that village.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so he s told us a little bit about what life was like with them, but like, they re just people.
7
SPEAKER_02
They re just people.
7
SPEAKER_02
They have their own culture.
7
SPEAKER_02
They know about medicines that we don t know about.
7
SPEAKER_02
They definitely have hunting practices that we don t understand.
7
SPEAKER_02
They can hit a spider monkey out of a 160 foot tree with a bamboo arrow.
7
SPEAKER_02
We can t do that.
7
SPEAKER_02
I mean, they are incredible hunters.
7
SPEAKER_02
And also like living naked in the jungle with the bot flies and the mosquitoes, I don t know how they do it.
7
SPEAKER_02
Like sometimes at night, and again, we don t have night vision, whereas almost every other animal does.
7
SPEAKER_02
And sometimes we ll be sitting at the research station at night and we ll be just drinking and looking out and we ll scare each other.
7
SPEAKER_02
We ll go, you realize if they were out there right now they could be looking at us.
7
SPEAKER_02
And it s like, the truth is is that when it s dark out there, they can t see.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s not easy to start a fire with matches and a lighter and gasoline.
7
SPEAKER_02
They do it with friction.
7
SPEAKER_02
they have some beads on survival that we could really learn from.
7
SPEAKER_02
Not to mention that then you have people that believe that they are actually the guardians of the extinct giant ground sloth and what they re doing is living out there because they re protecting a secret population of previously extinct megafauna.
7
SPEAKER_02
But there s all kinds, I mean, it s like you go into the crypto world so quick.
7
SPEAKER_02
I ve heard so many people be like,
7
SPEAKER_01
But then again, you have to be humble at how little we know about.
7
SPEAKER_01
about that world, about the world of life.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like you said, there s so much of life in the Amazon that we don t, a creature with no names.
7
SPEAKER_02
Tons of them.
7
SPEAKER_02
We could go out on a night walk right now and I could show you something.
7
SPEAKER_02
I ve done it.
7
SPEAKER_02
You pick up a bug and you go, that doesn t look right.
7
SPEAKER_02
That s not right.
7
SPEAKER_02
He s got three heads.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then you send it to the greatest expert on that genus of insects and they go, look, I got no idea.
7
SPEAKER_02
And you re talking to a world expert.
7
SPEAKER_02
And it s like, that s it.
7
SPEAKER_02
And 50% of the life is up in the canopy.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so we started climbing the trees, rock climbing, like what Alex Honnold does.
7
SPEAKER_02
I ll climb up 50 feet, and then I ll put a safety.
7
SPEAKER_02
I m basically trad climbing.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then I ll climb up another 50 feet, and I ll have JJ belaying me from below.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then he ll be like, ooh, look, a snake.
7
SPEAKER_02
I m like, JJ!
7
SPEAKER_02
Pay attention.
7
SPEAKER_02
You get up there and the branches are as thick as this table.
7
SPEAKER_02
So you can like walk around freely.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s like total like Avatar when they re in the floating islands.
7
SPEAKER_02
Like you can go run around if that s what you want to do.
7
SPEAKER_02
Bromeliads, orchids, cactuses, because up there it s against the sun.
7
SPEAKER_02
So it s a different environment up there.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
Interesting.
7
SPEAKER_02
And then you start seeing lizards and snakes and birds and things that aren t down on the ground.
7
SPEAKER_02
And so how many scientists have actually gotten to really spend time up there and really inventory the life?
7
SPEAKER_02
And that s why when you hear about, you like it, it s like a taxonomical discussion.
8
SPEAKER_00
of how many species there are on Earth.
8
SPEAKER_00
They re like between 10 and 30 million, and it s like, well, that s a big swing.
8
SPEAKER_01
What about stuff on the ground?
8
SPEAKER_01
So you mentioned some insects.
8
SPEAKER_01
What about bullet ants?
8
SPEAKER_01
So it s supposed to be the most painful bite in the world.
8
SPEAKER_01
Have you been bitten by one?
8
SPEAKER_00
Seven or eight times, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
What does it feel like?
8
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so the first time that we ever did bullet ants, JJ said, you know, okay, this is what we re gonna do.
8
SPEAKER_00
He goes, you know, it s bullet ant roulette.
8
SPEAKER_00
We re gonna get a bullet ant, and you get like chopsticks, you like pick up this bullet ant, and they re big, they re big and they re tough.
8
SPEAKER_00
And he goes, we re gonna put our forearms together and we re gonna drop the bullet and clamp our forearms together and just rub.
8
SPEAKER_00
And whoever it takes, it takes.
8
SPEAKER_00
Of course, JJ did not get stung and I did.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it hurts every bit as much as they say it hurts.
8
SPEAKER_00
It really let me have it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then I was like hitting my arm against the table to try and like kill it or get it off, but it was holding on and just like really injecting the venom.
8
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, really letting you have it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then it travels up and it goes into your like lymph nodes and into your here and you get a headache.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I think the brilliant thing about the
8
SPEAKER_00
the venom of a bullet ant is that it makes you feel like this feeling of alarm.
8
SPEAKER_00
It makes you feel like something s wrong.
8
SPEAKER_00
You don t just go, ow, this hurts.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s like a bee sting where you go, oh, this really hurts on my hand.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s like, no, no, no, no, no.
8
SPEAKER_00
Your whole nervous system is freaking out, and you start sweating, and then you get cold, and then you re tired, and then you get a little blurry vision, and it s like, that s actually that bad.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, now after six or seven, I get bitten, and I m kind of okay.
8
SPEAKER_00
So it s a full body, full mind experience.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s a full body, full mind experience, but then there s places in the Amazon where they stick their hand in a glove with like 70 of them.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I think Steve-O did that, which I just don t understand how you could do that without going into complete anaphylactic shock and dying, because one really sucks.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, just like we said, with animals and with humans, there s different kinds.
8
SPEAKER_01
There s different kinds, certainly.
8
SPEAKER_01
Stephen s definitely a special, unique kind.
8
SPEAKER_01
The first of his species.
8
SPEAKER_01
On the point of uncontacted tribes, it s interesting to think about
8
SPEAKER_01
what kind of civilizations have there been?
8
SPEAKER_01
This is something that you ve talked about a little bit.
8
SPEAKER_01
Graham Hancock has written about ancient civilizations as sort of challenging the conventionals or the mainstream thinking about the civilizations that have been there in the Amazon.
8
SPEAKER_01
Can you steel man and criticize the idea, so the pro and the con of the idea that there have been advanced ancient civilizations in the Amazon?
8
SPEAKER_01
Like how much do we know?
8
SPEAKER_01
What are all the possibilities of what s in the Amazon in this past?
8
SPEAKER_00
So like when Oriana went down the Amazon, the reports were that there was great civilizations in the Amazon.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then a few hundred years later, when people got to actually check up on this stuff, it was all gone.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so was that because of disease that we wiped out all these civilizations and these communities of people?
8
SPEAKER_00
Potentially, probably.
8
SPEAKER_00
Was he just wrong?
8
SPEAKER_00
Probably not.
8
SPEAKER_00
This is a guy that navigated by the stars back to Spain after building his own boat.
8
SPEAKER_00
Or was he trying to just, I don t know, I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there clearly,
8
SPEAKER_00
is a long history of complex civilizations in the Amazon, 100%.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s no one that can deny that.
8
SPEAKER_00
The thing that I reacted to was that I ve heard videos, I ve seen moments in podcasts where the narrative becomes not, there s more ancient civilization information in the Amazon than we previously thought.
8
SPEAKER_00
True statement.
8
SPEAKER_00
We re discovering with LIDAR, and this is what Graham Hancock is talking about, that we re discovering constantly that there was more civilizations than we thought in various places.
8
SPEAKER_00
The place where I take
8
SPEAKER_00
offense is where
8
SPEAKER_00
they start to say that the Amazon, there s actually articles that are titled this, that the Amazon is a man-made garden, which is not true.
8
SPEAKER_01
So the actual, which I think is a really different idea, that the entire ecosystem, everything we ve been talking about, all the species, all the forestry and the different, just life, life, one of the most diverse,
8
SPEAKER_01
ecosystems on Earth is initially created by humans.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s ridiculous.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s not, first of all, it s unlikely, but it s not ridiculous.
8
SPEAKER_01
So we can t, well, there s no ridiculous in science.
8
SPEAKER_01
But the complexity of life is very difficult to engineer.
8
SPEAKER_01
The more you study about biological systems and so on, it s very difficult to create the kind of things that nature is able to do.
8
SPEAKER_01
That said, I don t know if you ve heard, but the entire Earth,
8
SPEAKER_01
the world has gone through a pandemic recently.
8
SPEAKER_01
And everybody said, of course, it s natural origins.
8
SPEAKER_01
Viruses mutate all the time.
8
SPEAKER_01
And nevertheless, it seems more and more likely that in this particular case, it was of an artificial origin, leaked from a lab.
8
SPEAKER_01
So humans are able to create stuff, at least modern technological, genetic engineering.
8
SPEAKER_01
Made golden retrievers.
8
SPEAKER_01
Come on.
8
SPEAKER_01
you can t be that nice and that good looking.
8
SPEAKER_01
Used to be a wolf, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that bothers you because it allows you to think that we don t need to preserve the Amazon, we can always engineer it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
8
SPEAKER_00
To me, that s a slippery slope.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s so quick from, I m a fan of expeditions to find ecological ruins and to learn more about the ancient civilizations, which I don t think is what he s putting out, is that then news articles, which I think they re trying to bait you, where they re going, was the Amazon man-made?
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s like,
8
SPEAKER_00
Because then you re going to get a Brazilian president to go, see, see what they said?
8
SPEAKER_00
It s man-made.
8
SPEAKER_00
So we might as well continue to engineer it and manage it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, there s such complex systems and interactions and such a giant web of life there that
8
SPEAKER_00
at least in my opinion, is clearly one of the most authentically natural things.
8
SPEAKER_00
And again, are there things that we ve engineered?
8
SPEAKER_00
The uncontacted tribes, sometimes they have banana plants that they ve stolen, and we can see it from the air that they have banana plants.
8
SPEAKER_00
We made banana plants.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s engineered by us.
8
SPEAKER_00
We know for a fact.
8
SPEAKER_00
So agricultural engineering.
8
SPEAKER_00
Agricultural engineering and stuff like that, but suggesting that the Amazon basin
8
SPEAKER_00
It s just a weird way to think about it.
8
SPEAKER_00
I ve just heard people dismiss the protection of the Amazon based on the fact they re like, oh, well, if people made it and it s such a giant leap from zero to 100,
8
SPEAKER_00
Is there slash and burn that the ancient civilizations did?
8
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
8
SPEAKER_00
Are there areas that were affected by people?
8
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
8
SPEAKER_00
I just get worried when we start talking about it was a man-made thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
I hear you loud and clear on that, and I personally think that s completely separate from wondering about what the ancient civilization have been able to accomplish.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, sure.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s almost really sad, because if all the humans on Earth die now,
8
SPEAKER_01
How long does it take before all signs of humans ever existing disappear?
8
SPEAKER_01
For the most part.
8
SPEAKER_01
From an alien perspective.
8
SPEAKER_00
What timeline are we talking about?
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean like.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean there s.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like 100,000 years?
8
SPEAKER_01
It could be less.
8
SPEAKER_01
It could be less.
8
SPEAKER_01
It could be like a few thousand.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because 100,000 is complete destruction.
8
SPEAKER_01
100,000 is like nothing.
8
SPEAKER_01
But then.
8
SPEAKER_01
it could be in just a few hundred years, it starts becoming, the government of the alien civilization s gonna have to pay quite a bit of money to do the research and to find, because they re gonna find other life first.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re gonna find the dolphins and the fish and so on.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re gonna find the trees.
8
SPEAKER_01
Maybe the trees are the interesting thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
The buildings are not that interesting.
8
SPEAKER_00
They crumble.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there must be examples of cities that have been left unattended for a few decades and like how quickly the,
8
SPEAKER_00
the plants push up through the street and everything starts to get broken down.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you really look, you ll be like, oh, there s some interesting geometry here for the buildings and so on, but most of the computer stuff, all the stuff of the past hundred years, the airplanes, all that, all the technologies,
8
SPEAKER_00
all of the paperwork, all the hard drives that store all the information.
8
SPEAKER_00
I wanna actually know how long it takes a 747 to biodegrade.
8
SPEAKER_00
If you just leave it there, sitting on the runway, society stops.
8
SPEAKER_00
How long does it take for that thing to disappear?
8
SPEAKER_01
That s a weird one.
8
SPEAKER_01
Completely versus to a point where it s unidentifiable might be different, but sure.
8
SPEAKER_01
The point I m trying to say here is, as you ve brilliantly put, the Amazon churns.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the fact that I wonder throughout its history, what are the peaks of the awesomeness?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, how many banana, how many agricultural, Einstein s of bananas were there?
8
SPEAKER_01
They re creating different kinds of ideas, different kinds of geometry, different kinds of tools.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, look what the Incas did.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the Incas, you know, Machu Picchu.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, when they found, when Hiram Bingham found Machu Picchu, it was covered in jungle.
8
SPEAKER_00
You could hardly see it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, the stonework they did, much like what the Egyptians did with the pyramids, a lot of it, we don t really understand how they did it.
8
SPEAKER_00
if you come to the jungle, you gotta go to Machu Picchu, because it s not far from there.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I usually, I m the person, I don t usually go see the, I ve never been to see the Taj Mahal after living in India for five years, I m just not.
8
SPEAKER_00
But when you look up and you see Machu Picchu, you go, either they were communicating with the gods there, or these people were so smart that they knew that anybody they brought, they were gonna impress.
8
SPEAKER_00
They,
8
SPEAKER_00
They ve built something there that when you look up at that mountain, you go, whoa, with those giant stones, the beauty of it.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s just stunning to imagine that there was this culture of people that could achieve this.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so through the Amazon, I mean, that s sort of up in the Andes, but there s all kinds of stuff in the Amazon.
8
SPEAKER_00
There are places where they say there s pyramids beneath the canopy.
8
SPEAKER_00
that we just don t know about.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s endless.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you had billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, what would be the efforts in the Amazon?
8
SPEAKER_01
for both conservation and for exploration.
8
SPEAKER_01
Which are tied together.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
8
SPEAKER_00
First arrest the deforestation so we don t have an ecological crisis on our hands.
8
SPEAKER_00
We don t want to keep losing species, losing indigenous cultures, losing the climate stabilizing services that the Amazon provides as a whole.
8
SPEAKER_00
Stop that.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s my first mission.
8
SPEAKER_00
Next, then we can play.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then it s like, let s go find, I mean, I ve flown over the Amazon in a Cessna and it s like, you see things where you go, we have to go see what that is.
8
SPEAKER_00
You know, weird lakes or shapes in the jungle that don t make sense, that are strange.
8
SPEAKER_00
And like- So even at that level, you can see weirdness.
8
SPEAKER_01
You can see different signs of possible awesomeness.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, the jungle is so weird.
8
SPEAKER_00
And here s the other thing is that most,
8
SPEAKER_00
to like the region I ve been working in, you see where the researchers go.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s certain biological stations, there s certain places where like, oh, like this university has a relationship with this, this university has this.
8
SPEAKER_00
So everybody goes to the same few study sites, and then they walk on the same trails, and they have the same guides.
8
SPEAKER_00
When you fly into Cessna and you fly
8
SPEAKER_00
a few hours away from all that, and you see a tiny little tributary, and then you fly for 40 minutes over unbroken green, just wild, before you reach another tributary.
8
SPEAKER_00
Even if somebody could survive going up that tributary, had the expeditionary expertise and the ability to survive getting shot at by arrows, if they could get up that tributary,
8
SPEAKER_00
now cut perpendicular into the jungle, which I don t do on the solos.
8
SPEAKER_00
You can t, you can never, don t ever leave the river.
8
SPEAKER_00
But you re telling me that in that span of 70 miles between tiny tributaries at the edge of the world, no one s been there.
8
SPEAKER_00
None of us have been there.
8
SPEAKER_00
Maybe somebody 10,000 years ago was there, but we don t know what populations of things are there.
8
SPEAKER_00
We don t know what ruins are there.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so there s so much undiscovered stuff in the Amazon that is just waiting, just waiting.
8
SPEAKER_01
What is the process of exploring that?
8
SPEAKER_01
So how does money get converted towards exploration?
8
SPEAKER_00
Is there safe ways of doing that?
8
SPEAKER_00
There s places where we found out about things that have to be explored, but where you come up with, well, how do we do this without getting shot?
8
SPEAKER_00
And not only without getting shot, but also without endangering them too.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because how stupid are we if we go in there to people that are living in the jungle, not bothering us, and we go insert ourselves into there because we re curious about some rocks?
8
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t seem fair for the loss of life.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so like, but yeah, that s something that we re working on.
8
SPEAKER_00
And like one thing of course is like LIDAR and stuff, but eventually, eventually at the end of everything, it comes down to boots on the ground.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
As somebody who has to ask that very question about how to deal with uncontacted tribes, they re going to kill you, but you also don t want to disturb their environment.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you were an intelligent alien civilization,
8
SPEAKER_01
and you came about Earth, how would you interact with it?
8
SPEAKER_01
Can you put yourself in the mind of an alien civilization?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because there seems to be some parallels here.
8
SPEAKER_00
It is actually, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like a microcosm of.
8
SPEAKER_01
We re very aggressive.
8
SPEAKER_01
Human civilization is very aggressive.
8
SPEAKER_01
So if we, we re easily, we get threatened easily.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
For stupid reasons, because we start, like American military probably thinks it s like the Chinese or the Russians.
8
SPEAKER_01
If we see any kind of flying objects, it gets very,
8
SPEAKER_00
on edge?
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, because, you know, part of it is like, you just want to ask, like, that s the thing.
8
SPEAKER_00
I just want to ask questions.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but you, you know, but you don t know the same language.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you re gonna get, first of all, you send a boat of bananas.
8
SPEAKER_00
You send a boat of bananas, you get shot.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, picture if aliens landed in New York, how long would it take for one of them to get shot?
8
SPEAKER_00
It d be minutes.
8
SPEAKER_00
It d be a matter of minutes.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s because it s New York.
8
SPEAKER_01
Everywhere else, look where we are right now.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
8
SPEAKER_01
It d be even worse here, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
It makes me wonder what is the right way to interact with intelligent life that s not like our own.
8
SPEAKER_01
I dream of, in our lifetime, we would interact with
8
SPEAKER_01
possibly life on Mars or on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, and how do you interact with that thing?
8
SPEAKER_01
There s very technical, biological, chemical processes, but also, if there s any kind of intelligence, how do you try to communicate with that intelligence?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so we re not talking about a cockroach, we re talking about something that s clearly doing things, making things.
8
SPEAKER_00
Or a cockroach, possibly.
8
SPEAKER_01
How do you know the difference between a cockroach, how do you know, we were just talking about elephants.
8
SPEAKER_01
We don t know, we don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
We have- Just like a race of philosopher cockroaches just chilling on the rocks.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, here on Earth, we kind of, there seems to be a strong correlation between size and intelligence.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_01
It seems like the bigger things have bigger nervous systems and brains, and so they re usually smarter, but that doesn t,
8
SPEAKER_00
I think it s brain, it s the ratio, brain to body.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because you have like crows that are up among the most intelligent.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s like the size of the brain to the size of the body.
8
SPEAKER_01
But there also could be kinds of intelligence that we re completely, we re not appreciating.
8
SPEAKER_01
Maybe cockroaches.
8
SPEAKER_01
They ve survived the longest.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re talking shit about us right now, dumb humans.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re like, dude.
8
SPEAKER_01
These rocks are so great.
8
SPEAKER_01
A couple of hundred years, exactly.
8
SPEAKER_00
Did you ever hear that Kurt Vonnegut where the two space travelers get lost?
8
SPEAKER_00
This really impacted me as a kid because my dad was an English teacher, so he s always quoting Dostoevsky and Kurt Vonnegut.
8
SPEAKER_00
And there s this two space travelers get like crash landed in a cave.
9
SPEAKER_00
And on the walls of the cave are the harmoniums, and there s these kite-shaped animals, and they feed off the vibrations of the cave, and that s all they do.
9
SPEAKER_00
They don t hurt each other, they just do that.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so for like two years, these travelers are stuck, and they re trying to fix their ship, and one of them starts playing music for the harmoniums.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the harmoniums love him for the music, and they all come around him, and he plays this music for them.
9
SPEAKER_00
And finally, they fix the ship, and the one guy is like, all right, let s get out of here.
9
SPEAKER_00
The other guy s like, you know what, I m staying.
9
SPEAKER_00
He goes, I found a place where I can do good.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m not hurting anybody, and they love me.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m staying right here.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this whole ambition thing we ve got going on, always trying to build a bigger boat, bigger thing, that might not be the ultimate.
9
SPEAKER_01
conclusion of a happy existence as a civilization.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s one of the possibilities why we haven t met the aliens yet at scale.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s because once you get good enough at technology, you realize that happiness lies in a peaceful coexistence.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s possible.
9
SPEAKER_00
So where do you stand on aliens now?
9
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot coming out about the pilots and the,
9
SPEAKER_00
the things people have been seeing.
9
SPEAKER_00
And again, I kind of come in and out of this stuff.
9
SPEAKER_00
I ll be in the jungle for three months.
9
SPEAKER_00
I miss a lot, so update me.
9
SPEAKER_00
Are we being contacted right now?
9
SPEAKER_01
Of course nobody knows, but I tend to believe, my intuition says this, there s aliens everywhere.
9
SPEAKER_01
Even our galaxy.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s a bigger leap, but I believe our galaxy has probably billions
9
SPEAKER_01
hundreds of millions of planets with life on it, like bacteria type of life.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I believe there is, I don t know, thousands of intelligent alien civilizations that exist or have existed.
9
SPEAKER_01
The problem is there s a lot of time.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s very difficult to contact each other.
9
SPEAKER_01
So to achieve
9
SPEAKER_01
a kind of civilization that s able to actually send out enough signal or radiate enough energy where we would notice, I think that s really tough.
9
SPEAKER_01
That said, statistically speaking, it seems like that should have been possible inside our galaxy or maybe nearby.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so,
9
SPEAKER_01
I suspect that once an alien civilization is just many orders of magnitude smarter than us humans, the way it would contact us is going to be very difficult for us humans to understand.
9
SPEAKER_01
We re very egocentric.
9
SPEAKER_01
We want the message to be sent as like a,
9
SPEAKER_01
in English versus, you know, I think consciousness itself, emotion, thoughts.
9
SPEAKER_01
could be like fingertips, could be words in the story that the aliens are telling us.
9
SPEAKER_01
Or things that are just like a low dimensional projection of a much higher dimensional message that s being sent by aliens.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that maybe are striving to create technology to create the kind of sensor that s actually able to hear some of the message.
9
SPEAKER_01
Maybe that s what AI is trying to do.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I think,
9
SPEAKER_01
that bridging that barrier of communication between us and cockroaches, I think that s the biggest challenge.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like the messages are all around us, they re here.
9
SPEAKER_01
I suspect the alien messages are here, the aliens are here, we re just too dumb to see it.
9
SPEAKER_00
So first of all, the imagining planets where there are, like just picturing like a, not a silent planet, but just like a planet of,
9
SPEAKER_00
alternate life forms.
9
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it s not something that we can communicate and have a conversation with, but just like a planet of butterflies and centipedes and weird things.
9
SPEAKER_00
Unfortunately, bacteria, for billions of years, it was...
9
SPEAKER_01
bacteria, single-celled prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but they re boring.
9
SPEAKER_01
But yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but animals of some sort in an environment of some sort, imagine that.
9
SPEAKER_00
It would just be such an interesting, beautiful, amazing thing, and I m sure they re out.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now that, I m, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
The kind of viruses they got going on.
9
SPEAKER_01
Ooh.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s, but they could also not be biologically based.
9
SPEAKER_01
They could be different chemistries.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
So you have to be humble to that, too.
9
SPEAKER_01
But then, you know, it depends on the day.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like, I think you caught me on that day today, an optimistic one.
9
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes I think that we re all, this is all there is, because you start, you ask that question, the Fermi Paradox, like, why aren t they here?
9
SPEAKER_01
You can t imagine an advanced alien civilization that would not be explorers, because we re explorers.
9
SPEAKER_01
Why is that?
9
SPEAKER_00
depressing to you, that the idea that, let s just say you found out right now that there isn t anything else.
9
SPEAKER_00
Let s just say that, for example s sake, that the earth is the earth and the universe is the universe and it s sort of like the backdrop of a video game.
9
SPEAKER_00
and it s just what s out there.
9
SPEAKER_00
Would that be tremendously depressing to you?
9
SPEAKER_01
I think it s exciting for an engineer, it s probably exciting for an explorer, but I would equate that to your going out hiking for three days with one match.
9
SPEAKER_01
It kind of terrifies me that we only got one match.
9
SPEAKER_01
Really?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Really?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, all you got is one match.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, hold on a second.
9
SPEAKER_01
Hold on a second.
9
SPEAKER_01
Wait.
9
SPEAKER_01
Paul, wait a minute.
9
SPEAKER_01
You re going out,
9
SPEAKER_01
There s no more matches.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is the only match you got.
9
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No one s going to extinguish the planet.
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As far as we know, there s no meteor coming.
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I m saying, do you live in a, so I m saying is your worry then that we need to have a backup plan?
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Yeah.
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Really?
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So what if we do mess it up so bad that we can t live here anymore?
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Well, there s different ways to mess it up.
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There s ways to mess it up to make life really difficult.
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Mad Max type of thing.
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But there s nuclear war with the further and further advancement of technology that can destroy all of Earth.
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It just feels like that s going to be exponentially growing.
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Yes, it s gonna get worse.
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Listen, I m very optimistic, but it s a heck of a Russian roulette we re playing.
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Okay, so I m still curious about your intention, though, or where your passion for this comes from.
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Is your, or maybe it s both, but is it the need to have a backup plan for humans, which is admirable for your intense love of humanity and our consciousness and love and art and everything, or is it also just the raw fascination of imagining what s out there?
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Because I just, the way you said that about like, oh, you caught me on a positive day where I think it s, there was something in there that made me think that you need there to be.
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Yeah, yeah, there s... I think I m the kind of person that sees beauty in everything, but to me, a universe full of diverse life
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is more beautiful than one where it s just humans.
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It s just the Earth life.
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There s more beauty.
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I mean, I m not egotistical about the awesomeness of humans.
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I like if humans are not the smartest in our galaxy, or not even close to being the smartest, and that to me is,
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I don t know, that to me is exciting about the possibility of what the universe can create.
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Yes, I m with you on that, that it s wildly exciting to, like if we found, even if it was just a distant inkling, that we found out that there is a planet that has life, there s no communication coming from it, but we know for a fact that there s stuff going on there.
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It would just change how we think about our entire reality.
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We know now.
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And it could be, to me, I guess, the little inkling of a thing that is depressing.
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If all there is is Earth and humans destroy it, then we re the coolest thing that the universe has ever created.
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It s over.
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I m interested to have this conversation.
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I m really, I m saying like, I would be interested to bring you to the jungle.
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And now I m also wondering, I m wondering what your wilderness experience is, because I feel like for me, I m so Earth-centric to the point where I m like,
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we differ in that, for me, this is like, it s a curiosity.
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I feel wonder, and I feel it s fun to talk about what s at the edge of space.
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There s the conundrums of space-time, but I m so, to me, I m like, what if the aliens are watching us, or what if the aliens aren t watching us, but what if the challenge here is we ve been put on Earth as the most,
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intellectually complex of these creatures, and we re being observed to see how we manage it.
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And it s like, we haven t made a good job of managing each other.
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Before Oriana went down the Amazon,
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I mean, they showed up and just sacked the Incas.
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I mean, we, our history, I mean, I don t have to tell you, you just got back, but it s, I just, sometimes I wonder, you know, what the, is there a grand narrative with what we re doing to wildlife?
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Because it s like, we have all these other species and we re struggling even here in this conversation to sort of quantify, like, you know, and I think that most people don t think outside of the human framework.
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You know what I mean?
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Like just driving around, for me, living outside of the jungle, even just for a few weeks, I get, you don t even think about the fact that there s other species around us.
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We really don t day to day.
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You look at TV and you listen to the radio and it doesn t, it s not very consequential to the average person living in a city that there are these islands covered in walruses and that there s rainforests.
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filled with birds and frogs and all these things happening, and that the salmon are contributing to our fresh water, and that life is literally given to us and made possible by these ecological systems.
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To me, that s where the whole essence of my existence comes from, and so like... Yeah, thank you for that reminder, because you re basically saying the alien civilizations you dream about are here on Earth.
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Those worlds are here.
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For me, yeah.
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Yeah, no, I agree with you.
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I think, I agree with you, and I think that s actually the way I think most of the time.
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I think I m on mushrooms all the time, genetically somehow, because when I go out in nature, it s just the beauty, even of, you talk about the Amazon, man, just basics of nature.
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Yeah.
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fill me with awe.
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The other thing that fills me with awe is our own mind.
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Like the biology of these things firing, basically, not our own mind, but biology of any living organisms.
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Because it s like an ecosystem.
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These cells came together, they somehow function, they delegate, they mostly operate in a local way, but they, you know,
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First of all, it s just like you said with the anacondas.
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You start out as a tiny snake and you become giant.
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When you re a tiny snake, you re prey for everything.
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When you re a giant snake, you re a predator or you re a prey to no one.
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And just that whole process, starting with a single embryo, a single cell as a human, and through the embryogenic process, constructing this giant human that s able to,
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have limbs, move about the world, think about things, write books and so on.
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That is incredibly beautiful.
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And all of that is here on Earth, yes.
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And so actually, I was being sort of poetic about aliens and so on.
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I think I can spend 99.99% in terms of filling my mind with awe and beauty just looking down here on Earth, for sure.
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I agree with you.
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Yeah, and they shouldn t cancel out.
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I think it s beautiful that there s people that are fascinated and obsessed with looking out into space, and that will travel there.
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I mean, just to me, the idea of, I mean, I have a little piece of meteorite at home that I hold, and it does amazing things to my mind, because I m like, everything I ve ever touched is from this earth, and I m holding this thing that s been places that we can t even think about.
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And it blows my mind and I love it.
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But when it comes to intelligence, I think it s like, I m so concerned with the fact that we re at this moment in history.
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And it s interesting to me that we had the internet, and now with the emergence of AI, and more and more, I feel like we are starting to resemble like an ant colony, where there s more and more connection, and there s more and more interaction globally between everybody.
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In the next 10 years, we re gonna have to decide, are we gonna let our ocean ecosystems just collapse?
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Are we gonna just take that 3% of rainforest and just let them log the shit out of it until it s gone?
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And it s like, we re gonna be in a very different reality then.
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Then it s gonna be very dystopian future.
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or can we keep the good things about Earth, transcend that, realize that we have these incredible alien species around us that are animals, that we grew up with, that we wouldn t be here without, that we owe something to.
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And I feel like at that stage, then the outward look becomes something else.
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It s almost like we ve proven that if aliens came up to us, that s when I d feel good.
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Aliens would come up to us and they said... Louis has the thing where he goes, God comes back and he goes, what did you do?
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He goes, the polar bears are brown.
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He s like, I left food for you.
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It s like if the aliens came and they interviewed the elephants and they said, how are you feeling?
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And the elephants would be like, listen, fuck these little primates.
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You know what they ve done to us?
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And it s like, I mean, you know, I ve seen people break an elephant.
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I ve seen it all with that stuff.
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And it s like, if anybody was to ask them, they d be screaming.
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And so like, to me, it s just, you know, I have trouble, correct, trouble looking out into space.
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I have trouble looking out into normal life as a human, because I m so concerned with trying to make sure that they re okay, because not enough people are doing that.
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The interesting thing about all the development with AI and just that we re living more and more of our life online, I think we re actually learning what s missing when it s online.
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I think people realize that online interaction is shallow, but we re just learning that that s a reality, that we need that human connection.
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And I think there s going to be the swing back to like, sadly, AI systems of the future might be able to live fulfilling lives online, but us humans have to have a deep connection with Earth, and like with each other, physical connection.
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I think there s going to be a phase
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somewhere in the century where we go back to deep physical connection.
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And there ll be a digital world that we visit, that it ll be separate.
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And you have a discussion with that, with Twitter, with Instagram, with all these social networks, that they don t, they seem to be dividing us, they seem to not be bringing happiness, and you have to try to figure out, like, okay, so,
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how do we use them in a way that does connect us, does educate us, grow our knowledge base, but also keeps our lives fulfilling in a deep human way, that we re, for good and for bad, genetically designed, that we can t overcome, that we can t escape these meat vehicles.
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Yeah, but to me that s so reassuring.
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We all have those friends that are like, we gotta live forever, and it s like, I don t know, man, do you?
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I don t know, is it that bad that this is how it works, that we don t understand it?
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Yeah, it s often from the tech sector, the discussions about immortality and so on.
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I think that s somehow trying to escape the beauty of this Earth, for sure.
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that there s something different.
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It s too bright to look at.
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Yeah, and perhaps like you, I m worried about the unintended negative consequences of trying to escape the way things are on this earth, because this is an incredible mechanism.
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How many times in the past has new technology
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come out that people have hailed as blasphemy, or it s not gonna work, or it goes against nature, and now, well, heart transplants are pretty cool.
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And you could say what you want about television, and like, oh, it rots your brain.
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It s like, yeah, but also, how many times have you sat in a room full of people being entertained and all laughing and interacting and eating popcorn because of the televisions there?
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It s not one or the other, and so I feel like with AI,
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we ll learn our way through it, you know?
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There s like with the legged robots especially, and humanoid also, so anything on legs, four legs or two legs.
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I remember like the first time I interacted with a legged robot, I saw magic there, like,
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that this too can have consciousness, this too can have this lifelike quality that a human being loves about other human beings, about other living creatures.
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Now while I m still, I grew up in a place with no internet, in a time with no internet, so I still like biological dogs better.
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I notice the magic in robotic dogs.
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And it makes me wonder, the same way we re just talking about aliens looking up, it makes you wonder about other alien civilizations.
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Now the deep love is for dogs, for other humans, but there s still this wonder.
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I struggle with that.
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Like you said, whatever s going on in here.
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the idea, and there s so much talk about the fact, like at what point does an artificially intelligent robot become something that has, and it s like, I get very uncomfortable with that.
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It makes me, I don t know how to handle the things, because I don t know enough about it, probably, but it s like, I don t know how to handle like.
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I don t know how to handle either.
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Nobody knows anything about it, because it s really,
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Everything is terrifying here, because it could be as simple as consciousness is easy to fake.
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So what if you live in a world 10 to 20 years from now where your toaster, there s a bunch of robots in your room that are faking consciousness, and then you fall in love with them, and you have a deep connection with them, and then you actually have a deeper connection with your toaster than you do with any romantic human partner you ve ever had.
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And you start to- I was upset about the dogs.
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I was like, at least the robot doesn t take a shit on the floor.
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I was like, you just took it way worse.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And then they start to, I don t know if you ve seen AI porn, but it gets pretty intense.
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Like fully AI porn.
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Like they re fake people.
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Take people that can- Things I ve missed in the jungle.
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Boy, do I have a lot to show you, or not show you.
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Let me ask you about a touchy topic.
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Uh-oh.
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Climate change.
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Oh boy.
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What s the effect of climate change on the Amazon?
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Maybe species diversity?
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What is something that people should think about?
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Because there s different views on, I think most people believe that climate change is human caused.
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and that it s happening, but there is different perspectives on the degree of damage that it s going to do over the next several decades and what our response should be as a society.
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And so it would be amazing to hear your perspective on it in small slices of your experience or in large.
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To me, there s no denying the fact that we are experiencing changes.
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I think anybody that doesn t agree with that hasn t been outside in the last 20 years, or hasn t interviewed old farmers who will tell you that it changed.
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I think a lot of us can agree with that.
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Where I deviate is that I am not a climate scientist.
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I am not qualified.
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And so I, just like everybody else, am listening.
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And what happens to me is I see that someone like Santiago Duran, JJ s father, will tell me it s totally different than it was when I was a kid.
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The seasons have changed and moved.
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In New York, when I was a kid, we used to get...
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white Christmas.
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We used to get snow.
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I was in shorts.
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I came off the plane right before coming here and I was in shorts for a second.
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I was like, this is a different reality.
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But my ability or my interpretation of climate change, I feel like is just as dumb as those people that go like,
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It s really cold.
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I thought they said it was getting warmer.
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It s a very rudimentary thing.
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And so as someone that s fighting for the preservation of biodiversity, I don t feel like I m any more qualified than the average person to, I can only provide anecdotal evidence of the stuff I ve seen.
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What I do do though, and I always make a strong delineation here is that,
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I can speak to the fact that I ve been places where the ocean fisheries have been depleted, and the local fishermen can tell you, and the scientists can tell you, there s no more fish here.
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I ve been to the places where the rainforest line is being pushed back in Borneo and it s getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
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And I ve been in the Amazon and I ve walked through the killing fields and through the fires and I ve burnt my lungs on it.
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And I m a big believer personally.
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And instead of trying to take on all of it,
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I ve tried very hard in my life to pick one thing.
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And to me, that one thing is protecting as many wild heartbeats as I can because they re under constant fire.
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And so climate change, you know, there s so much arguing over it.
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And like you said, the degree to which we affect it and, you know,
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And how do you, you know what I mean, like I like to have provable data points, like I can show you tropical deforestation, I can show you the decline in tigers over the last 100 years.
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I can t prove, you know what I mean, like I can t answer that question, I don t think, probably you can better than I can.
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No, I think one of the criticisms, I d love to get your opinion on, is one of the criticisms that somebody like Jordan Peterson provides is that the climate
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is such a complex system.
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There s so many variables that making conclusive statements about what s going to happen with the quote-unquote climate in the next 10, 20, 50 years is a nearly impossible task.
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Therefore, as he would say, as people like Bjorn Lomborg would say, the kind of fear mongering that is done, saying we should spend humongous amounts of money to change the trajectory of everything we re doing in terms of energy, in terms of infrastructure and so on, in terms of how we allocate money, is not justified because predicting is very difficult.
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And instead it s better exactly what you re saying, which is,
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focusing on local, saying we need to protect the Amazon.
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What are the things attacking the Amazon this year?
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In the next five years, how can we stop the deforestation?
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How can we stop different things?
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And then humans are exceptionally good at coming up with solutions for that, especially when you put money behind it, you put attention to it, and that s the way we solve all the different problems that are
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that are projected for the climate change in its worst case scenarios to be realized on this earth.
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So that s kind of the case he would make.
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And I should also mention that one of the reasons I was fortunate enough to discover your work is first a friend mentioned that I should definitely talk to you, and I Googled you, and I saw that somebody recommended that Jordan Peterson absolutely must talk to you on his podcast.
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I think it was like a Reddit post.
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Thank you, Reddit poster.
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That s great.
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I was like, oh, interesting.
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And then I looked, and Jordan hasn t yet.
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I thought, my goal is for you to talk to Rogan and to Jordan Peterson for different reasons, but for the same reason.
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They get connected to a human being that deeply cares about this Earth.
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And I think that s probably the right lens through which to look at the effects of climate change.
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in terms of focusing on the different things that are threatening the diversity of species in this most magical place on Earth, which is the Amazon, but also, as you would talk about with elephants and tigers in India, and focusing on how to solve those problems.
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I don t know if there s any comment you wanna make on folks like Jordan Peterson, who are sort of raising questions about how much do we really understand about the climate?
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First of all, I m such a Jordan Peterson fan and I think the guy is heroic for a number of reasons and I find his use of language and his use of theology and the message that he puts out wonderful.
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I cringe a little bit when he says, I feel like, and I might not even be accurate on this, but I cringe a little bit when I feel like he dismisses that there is an ecological
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emergency happening right now.
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Now, I m not talking about climate change specifically, but I ve heard him say, you know, environmentalists upset me.
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And he goes, well, what do you mean by the environment?
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Everything?
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And it sort of seems to outrage him.
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And I kind of agree with him there.
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So are you telling me that we need to halt our global process and progress and economies and everything?
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I don t know.
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I don t know, and so to me, that doesn t bother me because he s exploring what the hell are these people talking about.
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When you say, I personally have friends and students and people filling my inboxes, I have young kids telling me that they re...
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They ve become vegan and they ride a bicycle and sometimes they don t watch TV because it uses electricity.
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And I mean, they re just becoming so, so terrified of that they re killing the earth.
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And so it s this doomsday, anti-human, sentimentist thing that we re evil.
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It s almost like a new religion about you re evil.
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And so, to me, it almost makes me, in a totally different camp, where climate change and the right-left politics, and I considered a family, I considered Thanksgiving dinner, and listen to the climate thing go back and forth, and I m like, I m not even here.
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And that might actually annoy some people.
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in the environmental field that might feel betrayed by me saying that, but I don t care.
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My job, and it s not just the Amazon, and that s one note I wanted to make is that my career has taken place largely in the Amazon and also in India and now a lot in Africa, but it s not even just these exotic places either.
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It s people realizing that the salmon runs in Canada and the butterfly gardens in our backyards, that there s biodiversity everywhere.
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And I strongly feel like the idea of jungle keepers, the idea of stewards of nature.
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And so for me, my job, my one thing, and I try to tell this to these kids that message me and that my inboxes are full of this where they go, the climate is burning and elephants are in decline and tigers and this and that.
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I m like, guys, look, first of all, calm down, first of all.
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Go outside, go get laid, do something, have fun.
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Next, pick something that you can affect, and it doesn t have to be with the environment.
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Do something good on earth.
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Go help somebody that needs food.
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Go help your elderly neighbor.
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Whatever it is, practice with being effective at one thing at a time.
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And so for me, like I said, from those early days of sitting there with JJ on the side of a river and going, someone has to protect this,
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My concern is that we ve lost 70% of the wildlife on this planet in the last 50 years.
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That s a huge problem.
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Wildlife maintain the ecosystems and so I have a very clear cut, very definable, very measurable and provable thing that I m fighting against and it s a very, to me it s a very like small ask.
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don t cut down the 3% of the world that has 50% of the biodiversity in it.
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Maybe let s keep some wild tigers for future generations and because tigers have their own inherent right to exist here.
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That s my thing.
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In terms of when we get to, you know, I get attacked for, you know, you should be a vegan, okay?
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You have me roll into a village in the Amazon when they offer me spider monkey and you tell me that I should be a vegan and you see how much they respect you when you tell them that you re a vegan.
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But no, so for someone like Peterson, I think it s actually good that he s, first of all, telling everyone to make their damn beds and exploring it through a different lens.
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He s coming at it from a totally different thing and saying, are we just being alarmist here?
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I mean, again, imagine if they re
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isn t a problem and they re making one out of it and all the implications that that could have for progress.
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So I think what he s doing is perfectly reasonable.
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There is a podcast though where he s, it was a great one though, where he s discussing animal intelligence.
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And I could really see that the human psyche and theology and religion is so much his world, that really the idea of animals being intelligent was novel, and it was fascinating.
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Yeah, that s why I would love the two of you to talk, just, I don t know, and hopefully I m not out of line here, but he is so focused on the human mind that I think he forgets
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that there s other life out there.
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There s this whole machine of intelligence, of a kind of intelligence out there.
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This entire trillions of species, tiny and big, just crawling, just moving everywhere.
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And we re actually part of it.
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So to look at human psychology as distinct from that is missing at least some of the picture.
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some of the picture.
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I do believe, though, I would agree with him on that humans are unique.
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Human psychology is unique, we just are.
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But I also, you know, he s in such an interesting place because usually you have, you know, environmentalists who are like, you know, nature, nature, nature, and then it s very anti-human.
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and then you have the other side, and it s like he s on this path where he s starting to explore what those diverse intelligences mean.
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And that to me is really amazing, because I love hearing what he ll do with that.
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And I think also on top of that,
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I think if you re aware of nature, deeply aware of nature, it gives you another perspective on the evolutionary history of humans.
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It s one thing to be an evolutionary biologist and kind of study it from a philosophical perspective, and it s the other to really, I think, experience it and deeply know it, to see, I don t know, the fact that we came from fish and really be cognizant of that.
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That s something else, that s like,
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I don t know, to realize that we re part of a computing machine that created intelligence.
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We re part of the thing that started bacteria and is now...
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of creating AI and, I don t know, Dunkin  Donuts.
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I don t know what else is impressive.
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The other great human achievements.
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I was thinking, well, what s interesting about Boston?
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But I feel like we keep scratching up against this thing in this conversation, that it s so easy.
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I think something like 50 or more percent of the humans on this planet live in cities.
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And I think it s so easy for people to forget that we share this planet with so many other things.
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And I think that that sort of, that we re in a way, we re almost like ecological orphans and that we ve left the things that actually make us feel at home.
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And that s a bit of a stretch, because I don t know if everybody feels that way.
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But for me, I mean, professionally as an expedition guide, when I take people into nature, I see what happens to them.
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And they leave going, I mean, it doesn t have to be the Amazon.
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It could be upstate New York.
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But it s like if you do it the right way, if you remove the fear of
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of breaking an ankle, seeing a snake, being bitten by a mosquito, all that stuff.
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If you can get people to a peaceful moment and you re fly fishing, a lot of times they ll take that moment and they ll talk about it the rest of their life.
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If they don t live in that, then there s those of us who spend our lives doing that, but for a reason, because it s the only place we feel sane.
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And you were kind enough to suggest that we might travel together for a time at some point.
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If we do that, if we journey together, where would you recommend we should go?
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So what I would wanna show you is sort of, I d wanna take you to church, I d wanna take you to see the giant trees, take you to meet the old gods, really.
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There s places when you walk in off the river that are so deep in the forest, and again, now we do this, we have the boats, we have the rangers, we protect this ecological corridor now.
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And so it would be taking you to meet some of those loggers that we converted.
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It d be taking you, we d have to go to the floating forest, meet some of the trees that I love the most, go piranha fishing, and really just spend, my ideal trip for you would be to spend five days of airplane mode phone,
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completely living out comfortable.
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I m not saying, I don t wanna, you know, I don t wanna torture you.
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I m saying go and live comfortably on an expedition in the Amazon.
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And that means a few days at this research station, maybe go up river three days and camp up here just on the edge of where the uncontacteds are, and then come back.
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and then see the Jungle Keeper Station.
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But along the way, seeing all the special sacred places, it would be almost like saying, like, let s go see, you know, all the treasures of Italy.
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It s like, this is one of the most beautiful things on earth.
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And I ve had the incredible, almost unbelievable fortune to be responsible for protecting it.
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And I don t, you know, I think it s a privilege to be able to share that with people.
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To be able to witness
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what this Earth has created.
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It s been just a gift just even to follow your Instagram.
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The window you create on this part of the world is just really beautiful.
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I do wanna ask on that.
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Maybe it s like behind the scenes a little bit, but how do you keep the equipment dry?
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How hard is bringing equipment to the cameras?
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You re an incredible filmmaker and photographer, so how do you make it work?
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I don t know, it s not that hard.
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It s not that bad.
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It s wet.
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It is wet.
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The new iPhones are waterproof.
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And if they don t get, I m telling you, dude, it s been such a weapon, it s been awesome.
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If you drop it in the river, my one thing is you gotta have a tether, because I drop it all the time.
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And so I ll be hanging off a boat, and I ll be trying to take a video, and I ll be like, here we are in the Amazon, and you can see the line, and thunk.
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That s the biggest thing.
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But we shoot on cannons, and
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I don t know, it s worked out, it s not that bad.
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Oh really, so you can keep the equipment dry.
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I keep the equipment dry and I actually don t, a lot of people put their shit in silica at night and keep it dry and then they take it out.
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And I find that when you do that, the temperature change creates moisture inside the camera.
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So what I do is I never do that.
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I just keep my cameras in my backpack with a zipper so they re more or less exposed to the elements.
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And so it sort of always has a little bit of equilibrium.
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And that s it.
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I mean, I shoot on some pretty fancy equipment sometimes and it s great.
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But I mean, the awesome thing though now is that like, with a cell phone, I mean like, I like put my phone down on the ground a few weeks ago and like let this rhino like walk up to it and stuff.
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And it s like, you can get video footage that you can literally put on Netflix.
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Like, it s just like, it s getting really exciting.
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And that s where like,
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where I deviate from the nature people that are like, we need to go back and live in cabins.
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I m like, dude, this is awesome.
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And I love taking slow-mos, like, no way.
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It makes you reappreciate, but just by yourself, just reappreciate over and over and over.
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And then you can also share it with the world.
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Well, that s the thing is sharing it with people.
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There s nothing better than like teaching a kid to catch a fish, you know?
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And like, in a way, Instagram has allowed us to do that where it s like, I can have this crazy ass moment
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that is so unique and then put it up for people to see.
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I mean, I remember one of the most recent things that got people, you never know what s gonna get people excited.
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I literally just like, there was like 3,000 butterflies on the beach and they were all like black, red, and blue.
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Beautiful butterflies.
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And I just like panned the phone across it and then like jumped in the river and swam away.
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And like threw that up on Instagram and people went berserk.
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They re like, this is the most amazing thing.
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And like four different accounts reached out to try and share it.
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And I was like,
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Butterflies, they re everywhere.
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There s 4,000 species of butterfly in the Amazon.
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But sharing that with people is beautiful.
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How do you find the thing to shoot?
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How do you come up with the butterflies?
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How do you notice?
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the thing that s beautiful and say, I m gonna, wait a minute, pause, this is beautiful.
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Let me take a picture of this.
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Because sometimes you might get used to the beauty, right?
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Yeah, or sometimes simple crazy things like leafcutter ants, they re just walking by.
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It becomes pedestrian.
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It s like, well, I mean,
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Just like when you re, you know, you re living at the elephant camp and it s like the elephant comes out and he starts, like, trashing the water bucket.
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We re all like, we just stop.
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We re trying to watch Peaky Blinders here.
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Just leave us alone.
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It becomes normal after a while.
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Yeah.
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But no, in the jungle, I don t, that s never a struggle for me because as a photographer, it s like, whenever my eye hits on something, I went, I ve never seen that many of those butterflies, all the same species together.
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And like this, oh yeah, I m trying to get this one thing that the butterflies do is in the dry season, the salt deposits, you ll get like,
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three or four, maybe 5,000 butterflies, all coming onto this one area of sand, because there ll be some leeching, there ll be some salt deposit there or something.
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And they ll all be wings flat against the ground with their proboscises on the sand.
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And if you go walk near them, they will vortex up.
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And you have a rainbow vortex of butterflies, and you can go run through that.
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And it s surreal.
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And I want to, what I want to do is get the shot where I, I guess, leave the phone recording in slow-mo facing up.
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and leave it there for an hour, let the butterflies come in and settle, and then disturb them so I get the bottom of the vortex of the bug.
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I m like, these are the ways I think where I m like, how can I show people the absolute mind-blowing, you know, perfection?
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I mean, that s what I have.
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I m sure that somebody else could do it with a red and nail it, but it s like, that s what I have in the jungle because I have to travel light and I, you know.
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Yeah, I think that really, that works.
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I have the same thing when I was traveling in Ukraine.
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the equipment was just that suitcase over there with the foam, and you just shove it full of equipment, and who cares?
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You can go to war zone, it doesn t matter.
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It has to do with the, you were talking about protecting your camera or not.
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It feels like the more you protect stuff, the more it s gonna get damaged.
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Yeah, so see, my cameras, they re all missing.
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This is amazing to me.
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So all my cameras are missing the, you can see the metal through the paint.
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So all this.
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And so they re all, because I m constantly, I ll slide in and take a picture.
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They re banged up, but they re good machines.
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I think they get tougher over time if you put them through.
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It s like the immune system.
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It s like muscles.
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It s like David Goggin s cameras.
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You gotta make them suffer every day.
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Yeah, what s your view on hunting?
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So you really hate poachers.
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I really hate poachers.
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How do they operate?
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Who are they?
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What are they up to?
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What do they do?
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Poachers to me are the people that are going in and annihilating wildlife for profit without any
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You know, the people that are going in and machine gunning an elephant to take its tusks.
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The people that are sneaking into protected areas in Africa and shooting rhinos so that they can cut off their horns before the animal s even dead while its baby is beside it.
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So, and there s a difference between a poacher and a hunter.
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I m a hunter.
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JJ s a hunter.
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I work with an organization called Vet Paw in Africa and they use United States veterans who have come back, post 9-11 veterans who have come back from the war and have these skills.
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And they ve been using these guys to protect the last black rhinos, white rhinos, elephants.
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And so I ve gotten to see this play out on a private reserve in Africa where
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These incredible people have decided to protect zebras, wildebeests, all types of impala, giraffes, several herds of elephants, white rhinos, black rhinos.
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All of this stuff is protected.
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And what s interesting is it s a hunting preserve.
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And so,
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It s been very interesting and challenging sharing my work there with the public because, for instance, I went to a very high-profile photographer recently, and I said, you have to get over here and see this.
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It s amazing what these people have done.
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It s this reserve called Buffalo Cloof, and they ve rescued families of elephants, and you can see a black rhino every day if you want to.
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They re critically endangered.
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And it s because of the work that VetPaw does protecting these animals from poachers.
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But what people don t understand is that hunting happens all the time on the reserve, not for the elephants and the rhinos.
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Those are special, and they will never be hunted there.
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But things like an impala, things like an anyala, a wildebeest, a zebra, there aren t as many predators as there used to be.
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So if you leave those animals unhunted, you know, without the wolf to chase the herd to thin off the ones that are old and dying or sick,
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well then you just have animals that are old and dying and sick walking around suffering.
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And so on reserves like this, they hunt and they take the old ones and they use the funding from hunting.
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No one s gonna pay you $30,000 to take a picture of a buffalo, but they ll pay you $30,000 to hunt a buffalo.
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And so these reserves responsibly and ethically on foot
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can go hunting and manage, and again, if they were hunting rhinos or if they were hunting elephants, I d be out in a second.
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They re hunting non-endangered species.
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They re hunting non-endangered species, they re hunting game species, and the difference is that a poacher is gonna, so those are responsible hunters that are ecologists and conservationists, whereas a poacher is someone that will come in and kill recklessly and murder an animal for no reason for a part to sell.
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I would love to travel together, actually.
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We ll talk offline.
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I would love to make that happen if you allow me.
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I m 100% serious, man.
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I have tremendous respect for your work, and I ve been watching you since the beginning.
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I would love to do that together.
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I ve talked to Joe quite a bit about it, and I really,
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Love the idea of eating the meat that I ve hunted.
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It s mostly what I eat is meat.
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Not for dietary, I don t have any weird constraints on my diet and so on, I just really enjoy eating meat.
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It s really good.
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And there is a part of me that s bothered by factory farming.
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Yes.
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Sure.
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That it s very easily accessible meat, but there s something deeply wrong with it.
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Part of the reason I love fishing and eating the fish that I catch, it just seems to be more ethical, but also
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a more intimate, deep connection, honest connection with nature.
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You get to see the killing of the food that you re consuming versus removing that from the picture, not even thinking about it, not thinking about that this came from the meat.
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Yeah, I love the idea that you kill, I kill one animal and I eat that animal basically for the whole year.
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Yeah, an ethically slaughtered animal, whether it s a fish or a deer or whatever else.
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To me, that s, oh God, I m gonna use the wrong religious term here, but there s a, I feel like I wanna use the word like sacrament, but it s like, there s a deeply profound ritual.
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And honestly, if you teach a kid to grow a vegetable, you show a kid how to grow a carrot, and the miracle of like, wait, I put a, this thing just grew in there, it just appeared because there was sunlight, and it s like, yeah.
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to me, yes, when you feel that fish tug on the line, to me, it does something that awakens a deep primal something, this satisfaction.
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And then when you eat that, you feel good.
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And so I think the other thing, like sort of functionally speaking, is that aside from the fact that I think it s one of the original, we re so disconnected, like we should be hunting, we should be,
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gathering, walking more.
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I mean, look at what we discuss now.
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People are like, oh, you got to get your steps in for the day.
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And it s like, that never used to be a problem.
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People are like, well, should we be eating animals?
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And it s like, what do you think we do here on Earth?
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I m not sure how you got so confused.
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but Walmart did it to you.
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I don t know.
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Living where I ve lived, from 18 to 35, I feel like I ve grown up.
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I ve lived more outside than I have inside.
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It s just, to me, showing people these things, I can see this miraculous wonder in their eyes when they realize that they can reach out into the world and interact with something.
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And so when I hear these like frantic people talking about, you know, whether or not it s right, it s like, no, of course it is.
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Then again, factory farming is awful, but I try to stay, I try and walk the line.
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I m worried about wild animals.
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I m worried about wild ecosystems.
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The other thing that s sort of important about hunting is that if people s livelihoods depend on salmon and elk and ocean fisheries, well then they ll fight to protect it naturally because it s part of their life.
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And if everybody s going to Burger King and everybody s getting chicken wrapped in plastic, they forget that the fish are there because they re too busy watching sitcoms.
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And so then when the conglomerate comes in and builds a dam,
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Nobody really cares and then you just end up with a few hippies and signs standing next to the river and it becomes silly.
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We forget the meaning.
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You mentioned that ayahuasca reveals the darkness that s there in the jungle.
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There s beauty, but there s darkness.
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So what is it that ayahuasca reveals?
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What is the heart of darkness?
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Fuck, it opens the heart of darkness right up.
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I m gonna show you a picture of our shaman, and then I m gonna ask you if you wanna do ayahuasca here, not here in that sense.
11
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It can only be done in the jungle.
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Anybody that tells you, I ve heard people be like, oh, I did ayahuasca in Brooklyn last week, and I m like, no, you didn t.
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I actually told that to my native friends.
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I went, hey, guess what?
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I said, a bunch of gringos keep thinking they re doing ayahuasca in Brooklyn.
11
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And they were like howling, laughing.
11
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They re like, you can t do it outside the jungle.
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And I was like, exactly.
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I ve never done ayahuasca.
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I ve done or eaten whatever, mushrooms.
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It s a wonderful experience.
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I think it s wonderful, but ayahuasca,
11
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Oh man, yeah, see, I had done mushrooms.
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I thought I was like, okay.
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Yeah, I was like, I got this.
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I had my notebook.
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I was like, I m gonna journal a little bit, you know, and then, but you quickly, yeah, I quickly, quickly realized how out of my depth I was and how unprepared I was for what was happening.
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Cause you sit in a circle with these native guys and there s one, you know, he s got the feathers and he s old and he s got a face like the map of the world.
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And he s smoking his fat old tobacco thing.
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he calls you forward and you kneel before him and you re going, is it too late to back up?
11
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And everyone s, you know, there s one candle and he blows smoke over the cup and he hands it to you.
11
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And you re like, again, it s these things that you can t argue with.
11
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It s these facts.
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So you re like, as soon as this goes down,
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I m gone.
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I know it.
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And this is a moment in my life that I have to either embarrass myself in front of everybody or I m going forward with this and then I went and sat.
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and you re sitting in the dark, and it s, again, so we re on a platform with palm-thatched roof, and the jungle is all around you, so all those tens of millions of frogs and insects are, and I m like, all right, cool.
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And I remember I tried to light a cigarette or something, and I went, oh, that s not gonna happen.
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And then I put my hands on the floor, and my experience, I mean, we ve done mushrooms, so you know it s interesting, it s introspective,
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No, this was like somebody unzipped the universe.
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I spent a lot of, without boring people with it, I spent a lot of time in unconstructed dream space, floating between nebulas.
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There was a long period where there was no physical shape.
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where I lived without a name.
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So it s like you get brought so deep down, so elementally lost in the universe where I truly felt like I was experiencing moving through places like that asteroid that I have.
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It s like a piece of something detached from the earth.
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And so I got back from it and
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had an interesting new appreciation for life.
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I strongly suggest that people just do mushrooms like a normal person.
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Unless you re ready.
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It was really intense.
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It was really intense.
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But to be fair, the shaman who did it was like the old school guy.
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Yeah.
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And he was getting up there in years and he had forgotten and overboiled the brew.
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Yeah.
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And so we came back and it was like four in the morning and I had
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you know, all this crazy shit.
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I d been on journeys and years down there.
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And so when I came back and I had like hands, I started crying.
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I started absolutely weeping.
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Gratitude or what?
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Gratitude that I was alive.
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I was gonna get to see my people again.
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I was like, I m gonna have to see my parents again.
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I m gonna get to talk to humans.
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So you kind of thought you might be gone.
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I was gone, I was gone.
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I was a dimly conscious something floating in dark space and spent what felt like years down there.
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And so when I really did feel like being reborn, which I was like cheap trick, like, yeah.
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But no, the way it moves you through the jungle, the way the jungle moves through your skin, there are moments of absolute majesty and incredible discovery that happen along the way.
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And on the way up, the jungle brings you up, and the shaman brings you up, and you get to move through the forest in a way that it s almost like you re inhabiting the consciousness of animals.
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Very, very, very, like, I didn t think that hallucinogenics could do this to a brain, you know?
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Mushrooms, you re like, oh, I feel like I can feel music, like, cool.
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You guys wanna watch March of the Penguins?
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This is transformative.
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Did that change you?
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I don t know, I think it definitely.
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I almost feel like it showed me the thing that I was scared the most of, and it was like that it s all just cold, dark, nothing.
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It brought me to the basement of the universe.
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And I felt like the point of that was to come back to this place where there s all this life and light and love and all this amazing stuff that we experience on a day-to-day basis and don t take for granted.
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And so just like almost dying, this was like fully dying.
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Like there, you know.
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But the great part is is that usually it s not that intense.
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This guy had overboiled the brew.
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He d also, I saw the vine afterwards.
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Most ayahuasca vines are like as thick as your arm.
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This one was like as thick as a garbage can.
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It was like the oldest ayahuasca vine you can imagine.
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And at like four in the morning, I like crawled over to my friend Chris, who s a tough New York City firefighter, and we were like holding each other, just like weeping, just like, thank God we re back.
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Then we had to go looking for the shaman.
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Where the hell is this guy?
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He s gone.
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We found him in the morning and he was laying in the stream naked like ET at the end when he s like laying like in the... Yeah, he kicked his own ass with that brew and he retired after that.
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So we really got like, somebody turned the dial all the way up on us.
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And so we got blasted.
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So it s not supposed to be that bad.
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but I think you re somebody who s fearless in sort of diving into those kinds of places.
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I think I also retire from ayahuasca.
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I could be fearless with other things, but I think I m good.
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It sounds kind of, to me personally, kind of exciting.
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Well, I think that you have a severely fearless aspect to you.
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I mean, when you come up with something that intrigues you, like if somebody told you right now that you could go physically into deep space, I feel like you would do it.
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Yeah, if go to Mars, yeah.
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Right?
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And some of it is
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I don t even know if you have that.
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Some of that is more Goggins-like.
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I wanna see where my mind breaks by pushing it to tough places.
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There s a curiosity of exploring the mind, the limits of the mind.
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I feel like you re- If it s not a cold plunge, that s like you re not coming back.
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Right, right, and it s okay.
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See, no, I have, I do, I have, I m with you on that.
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I love seeing my limits.
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I absolutely love seeing my limits.
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I love getting my ass kicked.
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I love being shown how insignificant I am.
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But when it comes to something like that, where you gotta push your chips in, it s gotta be something for me.
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It s gotta be a hill that I believe in before I die on it.
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And it s like, to me, the promise of exploring space isn t enough.
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Like even just the way, I mean, you said, you re like, I m going to Ukraine, here I go.
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There s a certain dedication to curiosity at any expense.
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And I think that that is something that maybe we share in different directions.
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Something tells me with those crocodiles outside, I would have gotten eaten.
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Something tells me.
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There s something trying to preserve you in this world.
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I m not sure exactly what that is.
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Somehow you keep surviving.
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What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
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Why are we here?
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Like, do you ever ask yourself that question?
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I feel like that s every day.
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I feel like I m someone that lives with that a lot.
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And I think that it actually takes me away from the human world a little bit.
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I feel like I ve always been a little bit apart because I think that other people do mushrooms and they go, wow, it really made me think about how amazing it is here.
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And I feel like on a daily basis,
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I find myself where I m like, I can t believe that any of this is possible.
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And that goes from how delicious something tastes to being able to talk to someone in your family or have a phone.
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There s times where I m in the Amazon and I miss home and I even just FaceTiming with someone.
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I go, this is possible?
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Like people were rubbing sticks together to try and survive saber-toothed tigers not that long ago.
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And I m over there like, yo, mom, look at this.
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It s wild, like I m in a constant state of awe, and so I actually hope that this is a testing ground, and whether it s aliens or God or whatever it is, that this is something crucially important.
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That would be nice, because it feels like it is.
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Yeah, I hope that too, that the universe almost created us to see what s possible.
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And that I d like to believe that beauty and good is possible.
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And those are the things that make me say that it s not, it s impossible for it to just mean nothing.
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And just like you said, there could be life forms that we can t even understand.
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I m very open to the idea that there s meanings that we have no idea about.
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The few things I know are the things that I love, and some of the things that I love are being pushed to extinction, so I try to protect them, but that s my mission.
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But I m saying in terms of what are we doing here, I m just...
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Always amazed at the simplest things.
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That we can sit here doing this, exchanging.
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Using our imagination to fill in the gaps, exchanging feelings, experiences, images.
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Yeah, it fills you with awe.
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And every once in a while you get a little glimpse of something, like a deeper meaning that might be there.
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You don t really know what it is, but you get a glimpse.
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And you keep searching.
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And then it s over before you know it, Paul.
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Hopefully for you, you got many more years.
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You re an important, important, and a beautiful man.
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Paul, thank you so much for talking today.
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Thank you for being who you are, for everything you re doing.
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I hope to see you again soon, many times, and maybe one day soon in the jungle.
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I hope that happens.
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Thank you, Lex.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosli.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Jane Goodall.
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If we kill off the wild, then we re killing off a part of our souls.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.