where are we right now paul lex we are in the middle of nowhere it's the amazon jungle there's
vegetation there's insects there's all kinds of creatures a million heartbeats a million eyes
so uh really where are we right now we are in peru in a very remote part of the western amazon basin
and because of the proximity of the andean cloud forest to the lowland tropical rainforest we are
in the most biodiverse part of planet earth there's more life per square acre per square mile out here
than there is anywhere else on earth not just now but in the entire fossil record
the following is a conversation with paul rosalie his second time on the podcast but this time
we did the conversation deep in the amazon jungle i traveled there to hang out with paul
and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime i will post a video capturing some aspects of that
adventure in a week or so it included everything from getting lost in dense unexplored wilderness
with no contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more paul by the
way aside from being my good friend is a naturalist explorer author and is someone who has dedicated his
life to protecting the rainforest for this mission he founded jungle keepers you can help him if you go
to junglekeepers.org this trip for me was life-changing it expanded my understanding of myself
and of the beautiful world i'm fortunate to exist in with all of you so i'm glad i went and i'm glad i
made it out alive this is a lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the
description and now dear friends here's paul rosalie i can't believe we're actually here i can't believe
you actually came and i can't believe you forced me to wear a suit that was the people's choice trust
me all right we've been through quite a lot over the last few days we've been through a bit let me
ask you a ridiculous question what are all the creatures right now if they wanted to could uh cause
us harm the thing is the amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battlefield on earth
because there's more life here than anywhere else which means that everything here is fighting for
survival the trees are fighting for sunlight the animals are fighting for prey everybody's fighting
for survival and so everything that you see here everything around us will be killed eaten digested
recycled at some point the jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death and life is kind of
this moment of stasis where you you maintain this collection of cells in a particular dna sequence and then
and then it gets digested again and recycled back and renamed into everything and uh so so the things
the things in this forest while they don't want to hurt us there are things that are heavily defended
because for instance a giant anteater needs claws to fight off a jaguar a stingray needs a stinger on its
tail which is basically a serrated knife with venom on it to deter anything that would hunt that stingray
even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor long steak knife sized defense systems then you of
course the jaguars the harpy eagles the piranha the candiru fish that can swim up a penis lodge
themselves inside it's the amazon rainforest the thing is as you've learned this week nothing here
wants to get us with except for the exception of maybe mosquitoes every other animal just just wants
to eat and exist in peace that's it but there is each of those animals like you describe have a kind
of radius of defense so if you accidentally step into its home yeah into that radius it can cause harm
or make them feel threatened make them feel threatened there is a defense mechanism that
is activated some incredible defense mechanisms i mean you're talking about 17 foot black caiman
crocodiles that with significant size that could rip you in half anacondas the largest snake on earth
bushmasters that can grow up to be nine to i think even 11 feet long and i've caught bushmasters that
are thicker than my arms so for people who don't know bushmasters snakes what are these things these
are vipers it's a law i believe it's the largest viper on earth venomous extremely venomous with hinged
teeth tissue destroying venom like if you get bitten by a bushmaster they say you don't you don't rush and
try and save your own life you try to savor what's around you look at look around at the world smoke
your last cigarette call your mom that's it so that moment of stasis that is life is going to end
abruptly when you interact with one of those yeah i even have even this this seemingly can i just pause
at how incredibly beautiful it is that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the
chuckle it's like it's like even this seemingly beautiful little fern if you if you go this way on
the fern you're fine as soon as out as soon as you go this way there's invisible little spikes on
there if you want to oh yeah i feel that it's like everything is defended if you're driving on the
road and you have your arm out the side or if you're on a motorcycle going through the jungle
and you get one of these it'll just tear all the skin right off your body it's kind of doing that
to me now so what would you do like we're going through the dense jungle yesterday and you slide
down the hill your foot slips you slide down and then you find yourself staring a couple feet away
from a bush master snake what are you doing you're for people who somehow don't know are somebody who
loves admires snakes who has met thousands of snakes has worked with them respects them
celebrates them what would you do with a bush master snake face to face face to face this has happened
um that i've been there it's nice um i've come face to face with the bush master and there's two
things there's two reactions that you might get one is if the bush master decides that it's vacation
time if it's sleeping if he just had a meal they'll come to the edges of trails or beneath a tree and
they'll just circle up little spiral big spiral big pile of snake on the trail and they'll just sit
there and one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath a tree for two weeks
this snake was just sitting there resting digesting his food out in the open in the rain in the sun in
the night didn't matter you go near it barely even crack a tongue
now the other option is that you get a bush master that's alert and hunting and out looking for something
to eat and they're ready to defend themselves and so i once came across a bush master in the jungle at
night and this bush master turned its head towards me looked at me and made it very clear i'm going to
go this way and so i did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do and i grabbed its tail
now 11 feet later by the head the snake turned around and just said if you want to meet god
i can arrange the meeting i will oblige and i decided to let the bush master go and so it's like
that with most animals you know a jaguar will turn and look at you and just remind you of how small you
are like what did you see in a snake's eyes what how did you sense that this is not the right this is
not this is going to be your end if you proceed his readiness i i i wanted to get him by the tail
and show him to the people that were there and maybe work with the snake a little bit
as an 11 foot snake he the snake turned around and made it very clear like not today pal
it's not gonna happen is in the eyes and the movement and the tension it was the body it was
the movement and the s of the neck it was it was it was as if you pushed me and i went let's go
make my day yeah like he just looked a little bit too yeah too ready he's like i love this okay
all right so you know you just know you just know whereas like the snake you met last night yeah
beautiful snake such a calm little thing he just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails
and things and that snake has no concept of defending itself it has no way to defend itself so even a
even something the size of a blue jay could just come and just peck that thing in the head and
swallow it and it's a helpless little snake so it's it's really it kind of depends on the animal
depends on the mood you catch him in each one has a different temperament the grace of its movement
was mesmerizing curious almost maybe i'm anthropomorphizing projecting onto it but it was
the tongue flicking was a sign of curiosity he's trying to figure out what was going on i was like
why am i on this treadmill of human skin you know they're just trying to get to the next thing trying
to get hidden trying to get away from the light also the texture of the scales is really fascinating
i mean it's my first first snake i've ever touched is so interesting it was just such an incredible
system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work
and all the texture of its skin of its scales what do you love about snakes from my first experience
of the snake to all the thousands of experiences you had with snakes what do you love about these
creatures i think it's when you just spoke about it it was that's the first snake you've met
and it was a tiny little snake in the jungle and you spoke about it with so much light in your eyes
and i think that because we've been programmed to be scared of snakes there's something there's
something wondrous that happens in our brain maybe maybe it's just this this this joy of discovery that
there's nothing to be scared of and whether it's a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to
give distance to but you look at it from a distance and you go whoa or it's a harmless little grass
snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child it's they're just these strange legless
animals that just exist you know they don't even have eyelids they're so different than us they have
a tongue that senses the air and they to me are so beautiful and i've i've my whole life been
defending snakes from humans and it's it's they seem misunderstood i think they're incredibly
beautiful there's every color and variety of snakes there's venomous snakes there's tree snakes
there's huge crushing anacondas it's just of the two thousand six hundred species of snakes that
exist on earth there's just such beauty such complexity and such simplicity they're just they're
just to me to me um i feel like i feel like i'm i'm friend with snake and and they rely on me to
protect them from my people friend with snake me friend snake me friend snake you said some of them
are sometimes aggressive some of them are peaceful is this a mood thing a personality thing a species
thing is it what is it so as far as i know there's only really two snakes on earth that could be
aggressive because aggression indicates uh offense and so a reticulated python has been documented as
eating humans anacondas although while it hasn't been publicized they have eaten humans
um every single other snake from boa constrictor to bush masters to spitting cobra to grass snake to
garter snake to everything else every single other snake does not want to interact with you
they have no interest so there's no such thing as an aggressive snake once you get outside of an
anaconda and reticulated python aggression could be trying to eat you that's predation but
for every other snake a rattlesnake if it was there would either go escape and hide itself or it would
rattle its tail and tell us don't come closer a cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say don't
approach me i'm asking you nicely not to mess with me and most other snakes are fast or they stay in
the trees or they're extremely camouflaged but their whole mo is just don't bother me i don't want to be
seen i don't want to be messed with in fact all i want to be do is be left alone and once in a while
i just want to eat and by the way when you see a snake drink your heart will break it's like seeing
it's the only thing that's cuter than a puppy like watching a snake touch its mouth to water
and just you just see that that little mouth going as they suck water in and it's like it's just so
adorable watching this scaled animal just be like i need water in a state of vulnerability yeah but
bro there's nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue like a baby ball python all right baby
king coberman baby elephant so what are they they're like at a puddle and they just take it in
they can be at a puddle and they just take it in or one time in india i was with a snake rescuer and
we found this nine foot king cobra this this god of a snake their ophiophagus hana is their latin name
and they're they're snake eaters they're the king of the snakes the largest venomous snake
and the people that call called the snake rescuer because that's a profession in india um you know it
had gotten into their kitchen or their backyard and so we showed up and we got the snake and the snake
rescuer he knew he looked at the snake and he went to me he said you know why do you think this snake
would go in a house and he was quizzing me and i actually went you know i don't know is it warm
is it cold you know like sometimes cats like to go into into the warm warm cars in the winter
and he was like he's thirsty he goes watch this he took a water bottle poured it over now the snake
is standing up snake stands up three feet tall this is a huge king cobra with a hood terrifying snake
to be around he leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him
and he takes a water bottle and pours it onto the snake's nose and the snake turns up its nose
and just starts drinking from the water bottle human giving water to snake big scary snake but this
human understood snake gets water snake gets released in jungle everybody's okay so sometimes the needs
are simple they just don't have the words to communicate them to us humans yeah and is it
disinterest or is it fear almost like they don't notice us or is it where source the unknown
aspect of it the uncertainty is a is a source of danger well animals live in a constant state of
danger like if you look at that deer that we saw last night it's stalking through the jungle wondering
what's going to eat it wondering if this is the last moment it's going to be alive it's like animals
are constantly terrified of that this is their last moment yeah just for the listener we're walking
through the jungle late at night so it's darkness except our headlamps on and then all of a sudden
ball stops it's like and he looks in the distance and sees two eyes he's i think you thought is that
a jaguar or is it a deer and it was moving its head like this like uh scared or maybe trying to
figure it trying to localize itself trying to figure out to see around you're doing the same to it
the two of you like moving your head yeah and like deep into the jungle like i don't know uh it's
pretty far away through the trees you can still see it 30 feet or so yeah that's the thing to
actually mention i mean the with headlamp you see the reflection in their eyes it's kind of incredible
just to see a creature to try to identify a creature by just the reflection from its eyes
yeah and so the cats sometimes you'll get like a greenish or a bluish glow from the cats the deer are
usually white to orange caiman orange night jars orange snakes can usually be like orange moths
spiders sparkle and so you have all these different as you walk through the jungle you can see all these
different eyes and when something large looks at you like that deer did your first thing is
what animal is this that i am staring back at because through the light you kind of get you see
the reflection off the the bright light off the leaves and i couldn't tell at first because
that actually that those big bright eyes it could have been an ocelot could have been a jaguar could
have been a deer and then when it did this movement that's what the cats do they try to see around
your light i thought maybe lex friedman's here we're gonna get lucky it's gonna be a jag right
off trail your definition of lucky is a complicated one yeah it's a fascinating process when you see
those two eyes try to figure out what it is and it is trying to figure out what you are that process
uh let's talk about caiman we've seen a lot of different kinds of sizes we've seen a baby one a
bigger one tell me about these uh 16 foot plus apex predators of the amazon rainforest the big bad
black caiman which is the largest reptilian predator in the amazon except for the anaconda
they kind of both share that that that notch of apex predator they were actually hunted to
endangered species level in the 70s because they're they're leather black scale leather
but they're coming back they're coming back and they're huge and they're beautiful and i was i was
walking near a lake and i never understood how big they could get except for i was walking near a lake
last year and i was following this stream you know what it's like when you're following a little stream
and it's just a little trickle of water and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the
other direction on the tree on the stream river otter comes up to me and i swear to god this animal
looked at me and went hey and i went hey he was like didn't expect to see me there and he turned
around he like did a little spin started running down the stream then he turned around and you could
tell he was like let's go and i you know i'm not anthropomorphizing here the animal was asking me to
come with him so i followed the river otter down the stream we started running down the stream the
river otter looks at me one more time is like yo jumps into the lake and i'm like what does he want
me to see now in the lake this river otter is doing dives and freaking out and going up and down
and up and down and they're very excited they're screaming they're screeching
all of a sudden and i've never seen anything like this except for in like game of thrones
this crockhead comes flying out of the water all of the river otters were attacking this huge black
caiman 16 feet head half the size of this table and she was thrashing her tail around creating these
huge waves in the water trying to catch an otter and they're so fast that they were zipping around
or biting her and then going around and this otter swear to god interspecies looked at me and went
watch this we're fucking with this caiman it was amazing and i for the first time i got to stand
there watching this incredible interspecies fight happening they weren't trying to kill the caiman
they were just trying to mess with it and the caiman was doing his best to try and kill these otters
and they were just having a good time in that sick sort of hyper intelligent animal like wolf sort of way
where they were just going you can't catch us yeah like intelligence and agility versus like raw power
uh-huh and dominance i mean i got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had
you know you scale that up to imagine what a 16 foot even a 10 foot any any kind of black caiman
the kind of power they deliver maybe can you talk to that like the power they can generate with their
tail with their neck with their jaw alligators and caiman and crocodiles have some of the strongest
bite forces on earth think a saltwater crocodile wins as the strongest bite force on earth and
you got to hold about a what was it a four foot spectacle caiman and you got to feel i mean you're a
black belt in jujitsu how do you how do you compare the the explosive force you felt from that animal
compared to what a human can generate it's uh it's difficult to describe in words there's a lot
of power and we're talking about the power of the neck like the what is it i mean there's a lot it
could generate power all up and down the body so probably the tail is a monster but just just the
neck and you know not to mention the the power of the bite that and the speed too because uh the thing
i saw and got to experience is how still and calm at least from my amateur perspective it seems calm
uh still and then from that sort of zero to 60 you could just just go wild just thrash
and then there's also a decision it makes in that split second whether uh as it thrashes is it going to
kind of bite you on the way or not and that's where that's where of the four species of caiman
that we have here you see differences in their personalities as a species yeah and so you can
like just like you know like generally golden retrievers are viewed as a as a friendly dog
generally not every single one of them but as a rule spectacle caiman puppies you released one in
the river and it did nothing didn't bite one of your fingers it just swam away we dropped one in
the river and what did it do it chose peace now i had a smooth fronted caiman a few weeks ago and this
is probably about a three and a half footer not big enough to kill you but very much big enough to grab
one of your fingers and just shake it off your body just death roll it right off and as i was being
careful totally different caiman than the one that you got to see this one has spikes coming off it
they're like like like leftover dinosaurs it's like they evolved during the dinosaur times and
never change they have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don't see on
the other smoother caiman and i tried to release this one without getting bitten and i threw it into
the stream gently into the water just went wow and tried to pull my hands back and as i pulled my hand
back this caiman in the air turned around and just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one
tooth whack right to the bone of my finger and uh uh bone injury feels different than a skin injury
so you instantly and it just reminds you of that's a caiman with a head this big and it hurt and i know
that it could have taken off my finger now if you scale that up to a black caiman it's it's rib crushing
it's it's zebra head removing size you know just just meat destroying it's it's incredible it's nature's
metal sort of you know just raw power so what's the the biggest crock you've been able to handle
we were doing caiman surveys for years and we would go out at night and you want to figure out
what are the populations of black caiman spectacle caiman smooth forensic caiman dwarf caiman and the
only way to see which caiman you're dealing with is to catch it because a lot of times you get up close
with the light and you can see the eyes at night but you can't quite see what species it is
for instance this past few months we found two baby black caiman on the river which is unprecedented
here we haven't seen that in decades so it's important that we monitor our crock population
so i started catching small ones um in mother god i write about the first one that me and jj caught
together which was probably a little bigger than this table and uh probably mid-20s bravado
and competition with other young males of my species led to me trying to go as big as i could
and i jumped on a spectacle caiman that was slightly longer than i am and i'm five nine so i jumped on
this probably six foot crock and quickly realized that my hands couldn't get around its neck and my legs
were wrapped around the base of its tail and the thrash was so intense that as it took me one side
i barely had enough time to realize what was happening before it beat me against the ground
my headlamp came off so now i'm blind in the dark laying in a river in the amazon rainforest hugging a
six-foot crocodile and i went jj as i always do but i in that moment before i even let go i knew i
couldn't let go of the crock because if i let go of the crock i thought she was going to destroy my face
so i said okay now i'm stuck here if i just stay here i can't release or i need help but i was like
i'm never ever ever ever gonna try and solo catch a crock this big again i was like this is this is i
knew in that moment i was like this is good enough so anything longer than you you don't control the
tail you don't have you have barely control of anything yeah and that's a spectacle caiman a black
caiman is a whole other order of magnitude there it's like saying like oh you know i play i was play
fighting with my golden retriever versus i was play fighting with like you know what what's the
biggest scariest dog you could think of this the dog from sandlot a giant gorilla dog thing like a
like a malamute something something huge what are they called mastiffs yeah mastiffs i mean you
mentioned dinosaurs what what do you admire about black caiman what they've been here for a very very
long time there's something prehistoric about their appearance about their way of being about their
presence in this jungle with crocodiles you're looking at this this mega survivor they're in a class
with sharks where it's like they've been here so long when you talk about multiple extinctions you
talk about the sixth extinction earth's going through all this stuff the crocodiles and the
cockroaches have seen it all before they're like man we remember what that comet looked like
and they're not impressed yeah they have this they carry this wisdom yeah and their power yeah in the
simplicity of their power they carry the wisdom yeah and they're just sitting there in the streams and
they don't care and even if there's a nuclear holocaust you know that there would just be some
crocs sitting there dead-eyed in that stagnant water waiting for the life to regenerate so they
could eat again it's going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches and the
cockroaches are just background noise yeah they'll always be there sons of bitches you know we're
talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different species of caiman but whenever they're
together and you see multiple eyes which i've gotten to experience it's quite a feeling there's just
multiple eyes looking back at you of course for you that's uh immediate excitement you immediately go
towards that you want to see it you want to explore it maybe catch them analyze what the species is all
that kind of stuff yeah what's can you just describe that feeling when they're together and they're looking
at you so head above water eyes reflecting the light yeah so the other night lex and i were
in the river with jj surviving a thunderstorm we're in the rain and we had covered our
covered our equipment with our boats and the only thing that we could do was get in the in the river
to keep ourselves dry and so we were in the river at night in the dark no stars just a little bit of
canopy silhouetted with all this rain coming down it was such a din you could hardly hear anything and
all the way down river i just see this caiman eye in my headlamp light
and i started walking towards it because i was like this is even better we can catch a caiman while
we're in this thunderstorm in the amazon river and uh when jj went paul it's too far
jj very rarely very rarely like he'll he'll make a suggestion like he'll usually go like maybe it's far
but in that situation deep in the wilderness unknown caiman size he went paul it's too far
don't leave the three of us right now yeah we're too far out to take risks we're too far out to be
walking along the riverbed at night because then you know right here at the research station if you
step on a stingray you get evac'd out where we went nothing so so for me seeing those eyes i think i've
become so comfortable with so many of these animals that i i may have crossed into the territory where i feel
i feel so comfortable with with many of these animals that they just don't worry me anymore
i mean you were i i looked at you in a raft while you had a sizable probably about 12 foot black caiman
right next to your raft i watched its head go under bubbles the bubbles it was all coming up right next
to your raft as he he was just moving along the bottom of the river because he looked at me
went under and then my raft passed and yours came over him so now i'm looking back and your raft is
going over this black caiman and i'm going i'm not worried at all i was not worried i was not
worried that the caiman would freak out i was not worried that he would try to attack you i knew a
hundred percent that caiman just wanted us to go so you could go back to eating fish yeah that's it
man it's humbling it's humbling these giant creatures and especially at night like you were talking about
and for me it's both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under because like underwater it's
their domain so anything can happen so what is it doing that its head is going under it could be bored
it could be hungry looking for some fish it could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate
maybe you have some food around you maybe it's an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi i don't
know i have a few on the river okay um no when we see their heads go under it's just they're just
getting out of the way we're shining a light at them and they're going why is there a light at night
i'm uncomfortable head under so these caiman again you think of it as this big aggressive animal but
i don't know anybody that's been eaten by a black caiman and the the smaller species smooth fronted
caiman dwarf caiman spectacle caiman they're not going to eat anybody again at the worst if you were
doing something inappropriate with a caiman like you jumped on it and were trying to to do research
and it bit your hand it could take your hand off but that's the only time i've been walking down the
river and stepped on a caiman and the caiman just swims away and so in my mind caiman are just these
they're peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river and so to me they are my friends
and i worry about them because two months ago we were coming up river and on one of the beaches was a
beautiful about five foot black caiman with a big machete cut right through the head
the whole caiman was wasted nothing was eaten but the caiman was dead what do you think that was
curious humans just committing violence yeah just loggers people who aren't from this part of the
amazon because a local person would either eat the animal or not mess with it like pico would never kill
the caiman for no reason because it doesn't make any sense so these are clearly people who aren't
from the region which usually means loggers because they've come from somewhere else they're doing a job
here and they they're just cleaning their pots in the river at night and they see eyes come near them
because the caiman probably smells fish and then they just whack because they want to see it and
they're just curious monkeys on a beach and again me friend of caiman i protect from my type that said
you know you uh protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends but sometimes
friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding and if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black
caiman i feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a uh bone crushing situation but not
for a little five foot caiman and i think that's incredibly speciesist w a ball humans or a ball caiman
no like all my friends do the same thing they go you swim in the amazon rainforest you know you swim
in that river and i go yes every day we you know backflips into the river we've been swimming in the
river how many times with the piranha and the stingray and the candiru and the caiman and the anacondas all
of it in the river with us and we just do it and what's that for you so what what allows you to doing
that to do that knowing and having researched all the different things that can kill you which i feel
like most of them are in the river what allows you to just get in there with us well i think it's
something about you where you become like this portal through which it's possible to see nature is
not threatening but beautiful and so in that you kind of naturally by hanging out with you i get to
see the beauty of it there is danger out there but the danger is part of it just like the there's a
lot of danger in the city there's danger in life there's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally
physically there's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways we went on a expedition to the
forest just twisting your ankle breaking your foot um getting a bite from a thing that gets infected
it's there's a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways in a non-dramatic
caiman eating you alive kind of way yeah it it strikes me as unfair because humans were still
in our minds so so programmed to worry about that predator that predator that predator what predator
we've killed everything black caimans are coming off the endangered species list we exterminated wolves
from north america i actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son watch out foxes will get
you foxes yeah they eat baby rabbits and mice well in the case of apex predators i think when people
say dangerous animals they really are talking about just the power of the animal and the black caiman
have a lot of power a lot of power and so it's almost just a way to celebrate the power of the
animal sure and if it's in celebration then i'm all for it because my god is that power like the waves of
of of fury that you saw like when that tail i mean you saw you saw the tail of the spectacle that
perfect amazing thing with all those interlocking scales that works so it's like a perfect creation
of engineering and then and then when you have one that's this thick and all of a sudden that thing
is moving with all the acceleration of that power wow the volume of water the sound that comes out of
their throat they're such they're dragons we talked about the scales of the snake with like they came in
just the way it felt yeah was uh incredible just the armor the texture was so cool yeah i don't know
like the the bottom one came and had a certain kind of texture and it just all feels like power but also
all feels like designed really well it's like it's like exploring through touch like a world war ii tank or
something like that just it's the engineering that went into this thing yeah that like the mechanism of
evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time it's just like incredible this
is a work of art the pot you know the defense mechanisms the power of it the damage it can do
uh how effective it is as a hunter all of that all you can feel that in just by touching it do you ever
see the the mashup where they put side by side the image of i think it's a falcon in flight next to a
stealth bomber and they're almost the exact same design it's incredible like that what's the
equivalent for for a croc like you said maybe a tank like maybe more like an armadillo turtle
like hippos and yeah there may not be a machine a war machine equivalent of a crocodile it would
have to have like a big jaw element to it in the water i mean we we talked also about hippos
those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world just monsters yeah hippos and
rhinos hippos are bigger usually our rhinos are bigger rhinos rhinos is after elephants is the
largest white rhinos they can be terrifying too again when you step into the defense absolutely but
i have to tell you after being around so many rhinos your friends your i have rhino friends yeah black
and white rhinos yep and uh they're all sweethearts and i mean i mean sweethearts and i
mean when you look at a rhino it's like a living dinosaur i know it's a mammal but somehow it screams
dinosaur because it seems like pleistocenic and and and from another age with the giant horn and
they're so much bigger than you think like they're minivan sized animals like you're you're we're not
taller than they are at their shoulder and they have this strange shaped head and the huge horn
and they sit there eating grass all day so if a rhino is dangerous to a human it's because the
rhino is going don't hurt me don't hurt me don't don't hurt my baby and then they're like you know
what i'll just kill you it'll be easier because you're scaring me right now you're too close to
that rhino yeah and so like there again i just think it's funny because humans were so quickly to go
which snakes are aggressive there are no aggressive snakes you know rhinos can be dangerous
if provoked otherwise they're peaceful fat grass unicorns you know like they're they're really
pretty calm that we have these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet
the black hamen the rhinos the elephants all the big beautiful stuff is becoming less and less yeah
and it almost reminds me like in game of thrones they're like yeah they're in the beginning they're
like yeah there used to be dragons and it was like this memory and it's like yeah we used to have
mammoths and we we used to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long manatees and it's
there are things we used to have the caspian tiger that only went extinct in the 90s our lifetimes
and it's that that's mind-blowing to me that's that that has haunted me since i'm a child i remember
learning about extinction and i went wait you're telling me that i remember being a kid and going
by the time i grew up you're saying that i gorillas could be gone elephants could be gone
and because we're doing it and then i just that i remember i remember looking at the
the nightlight being blurry because i was crying i was so upset and oh and it was lonesome george that
turtle the galapagos tortoise where there was one left and they said if we just if we just had a
female he could live and i as a six seven eight year old that destroyed me we're all just trying to
get laid including that turtle including that turtle for a few hundred years dude so for young people
out there you think you're having trouble think about that turtle think about that turtle yeah you
know there's a turtle that darwin and steve erwin both owned yeah yeah i heard about that turtle
man they live a long time yeah they've seen things they've seen things that there's a there's a great
like internet joke where they're like they're like accusing him of like being uh incongruous with
modern times they're like he did nothing to stop slavery he didn't fight in world war ii
like cancel the turtle yeah cancel the turtle oh shit what a world we live in so it's interesting
you mentioned black caiman and uh anacondas are both apex predators so it seems like the reason
they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things
how is it possible for them to coexist i read that anacondas can eat caiman but not black caiman
how often do they come in conflict so anacondas and caiman occupy the exact same niche and they're
born at almost the exact same size and unlike most species they don't have sort of a size range that
they're confined to they start at this big baby caiman are this big baby anacondas are a little
longer but they're still they're thinner and they don't have legs so it's the same thing in in terms of
mass and they're all in the streams or at the edges of lakes or swamps and so the baby anacondas
eat the baby caiman baby caiman can't really take down an anaconda they're they're going for little
insects and fish they they have a quite a small mouth so they again it's in their interest to hide
from everything a bird a heron can eat a baby caiman pop it back and so they have to survive but the
anaconda and the caiman kind of kind of joust as they grow can you actually explain how the anaconda
would take down a caiman like would it first uh use constriction and then eat it or what's the
methodology yeah so anacondas have a kind of a i don't know like a three-point constriction system
where their first thing is anchor so like jujitsu so the first thing is latch on to you i like how i'm
writing this down like all right this is jujitsu like a master class here this is for when you're
wrestling an anaconda just in case and you'll be like the coach in the sideline screaming you got
alex don't let him take the back yeah all right so so one time me and jj were following a herd of
collared peccary and jj's teaching me tracking so we're following you know the the hoof prints through
the mud and we're doing this and i'm talking about no backpacks just machetes bare feet running through
the jungle and we come to this stream and jj's like i think we missed him you know i think they
went and i'm like no no they went here look and not because i'm a great tracker because i can see
you know a few dozen footprints hundreds of individual footprints right there and i'm going
no no they just crossed here and jj was like you know what we're not going to get eyes on him today
he was like it's okay he's like we did good we followed him for a long time and i was like cool
and then i was trying to gauge like can i drink this stream and i see a culpa and a culpa is a salt
deposit where animals come to to feed because sodium is a deficiency that most herbivores have
here and all of a sudden i just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping just that bone crunch
and i look down and there's about a 16 foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed peccary wild boar
and what this anaconda had done was as the all the pigs were going across the stream
the anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw swiped the legs wrapped around it bent it in half
and then crushed its ribs and that's what the anaconda do whether it's to mammals to caiman
it's all the same thing it's grab on they have six rows of backwards facing teeth so once they hit
you they're never going to come off you actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can
come out all those backward facing teeth so they have an incredible anchor system and then they use
their weight to pull you down to hell to pull you down into that water wrap around you and then start
breaking you and every breath you take you and you you're up against a barrier and then when you when
you exhale they go a little tighter and you're never going to get that space back your lungs are never
going to expand again and i know this because i've been in that crush before jj pulled me out of it and
so this pig the anaconda had gotten it and as the pig was thrashing the anaconda was wrapping around
it had bent it in half and i just heard those vertebrae going yeah and so for a caiman it's the
same thing they just grab and they wrap around it and then they have to crush it until there's no
response they'll wait an hour they'll wait a long time until there's no response from the animal
they'll overpower it then they'll then they'll reposition probably yawn a little bit should open their
jaw and then start forcing that entire now here's the crazy thing is that an anaconda has stomach acid
capable of digesting an entire crocodile where nothing comes out the other side and when you see
how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out
the other side that's insane and so it always made me wonder on a chemistry level how you can have such
incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't harm the anaconda itself and someone said but it's able
to digest oh it's some kind of mucus oh like the mucus there's a lot oh interesting there's levels of
protection from the anaconda itself but it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an
organism like that simplicity taking a scale it could just do the can swallow a caiman digest it slowly
i know but my question was how how on earth is it physically possible to have this hellish bile
that can digest anything even something as as as horrendous as a as a caiman scales and bones and all
the hardest shit in nature and then not hurt the snake itself and i had a chemist explain to me that
it's probably some sort of mucus system that that lines the stomach and and neutralizes the acid and
keeps it floating in there but my god that must be powerful stuff so what does it feel like being
crushed choked by an anaconda uh you when an anaconda is wrapped around you and you you find yourself
in in the in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing
you are confronted with the vast disparity in power that there is so much power in these animals
so much crushing deliberate reptilian ancient power that doesn't care they're just trying to get you to
stop they just want you to stop ticking and there's nothing you can do and there's i find it very
awe-inspiring when i encounter that kind of power when you even if it's that you see you know you see a dog
run you know you ever try to outrun a dog and they just zip by you and you go wow you know or you
see a horse kick and you go oh my god if that if that hoof hit anyone's head it'd knock them three
states over and it's like it's like there there is muscular power that is so far that like you said
that explosive that we we dream of doing it like imagine if like a muay thai kickboxer could could
harness that sort of caiman power that smash um and so it's just awe-inspiring i think it's really
really impressive what animals can do and we're we're all you know we're all the same sort of
makeup for the most part all the mammals you know we all have our skeletons look so similar we all
have like you know if you look like a kangaroo's biceps and chest it looks so much like a like a like
a man's and if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked chimp there's like chimps with
alopecia oh shit and so it's oh they're shredded it looks like a bodybuilder like it's got cuts and
huge huge everything like it's got pecs and they got that face it's just like just let me in what
now where's your wallet do something but yeah but there's a the specialization of a life time of
doing damage to the world and using those muscles it just makes you makes you just that much more
powerful than most humans because humans i guess have more brain so they get lazy they start
puzzle solving versus you know using the biceps directly well yes and no and i have this question
okay so i you know that whole you are what you eat thing now we one time here had two chickens now one
of them was a wild chicken like from the farm had walked around its whole life finding insects and the
other chicken was like factory raised and so we cut the heads off of both of them started getting ready
to cook them now the factory raised chicken was like a much higher percentage of fat had less muscle
on its body was softer tissue a lighter color the farm raised chicken had darker more sinewy muscles
less fat was clearly a better made machine and so my question is is that what's happening with us
you know like if you go see a sherpa who's been walking his whole life and pulling you know and walking
behind musk oxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city
versus someone that's just been chowing down at ihop for 40 years and never getting off the couch like
i imagine it's the same thing that you you become what you eat yeah i mean like you and i were like
have dead running up a mountain meanwhile there's a grandma just like walking and she's been walking
that road and she's just built different with her alpaca on her shoulders or the baby and she just
they're just built different when you when you apply your body in the physical way your whole life
yeah like you can't replicate that like like just like that chimp has those from constantly moving
through the canopy constantly using those arms just like if you're you know if you see an olympic
athlete or you hug rogan exactly you just go what why is there so much muscle here that's exactly what
i uh what i feel like when you give him a hug this this is definitely a chimp of some sort how how does
that uh just just that the constriction of the anaconda just the the feeling of that as
are they doing that based on instant instinct or is there some brain stuff going on like is this just
like a basic procedure that they're doing and they just really don't give a damn they're not like
thinking oh paul this is this kind of species who tastes good or is it just a mechanism just start
activating and you can't stop it with an anaconda i really think it's the second one i do think that
they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane i think they're a very simple system a very
ancient system and i think that once you once you hit predation mode it's going down no matter what
this stupid mosquito i'm going like this and every time he just flies around my hand like i'm a big slow
giant and he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot like and i'm like no and
then he comes right back to the same spot it's like it's like he's just going fuck you now here's the
question if the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it what does that make you fucking stupid
dude i flicked a wasp off me the other day it flew back like 12 feet and in the air corrected and then
flew back at my face it made so many correct like calculations and corrections and decided to come
back and let me know about it and it was like that wasp probably went back to the nest said guess
what happened today this bitch-ass kid from brooklyn tried to flick me and i showed him what's up i had
i'm running they had a good chuckle on that one uh yeah you actually mentioned to me uh just on the
topic of anacondas that you've been uh participating in a lot of scientific work on on the topic it's
like really in everything you've been doing here you are celebrating the animals you're respecting the
animals you're protecting the animals but you're also excited about studying the animals in their
environment so you're actually a co-author on a paper uh on a couple of papers but one of them is
on anacondas and uh studying green anaconda hunting patterns what's that about so um the lead authors of
that paper pat champaign and carter pain uh friends of mine and what we started noticing for me began at
that story i told you where we were coming across the stream and we saw the anaconda had had
had been positioned just below a culpa and then other people began noticing that anaconda seemed
to always be beneath these culpas where mammals were going to be coming and that that contrasted
with what we knew about anacondas because what we understood about anaconda is that they're purely
ambush predators and they don't pursue their prey but what we began finding out here and pat led the
process of amazing scientists he worked with the katia university for a long time worked with us
for a long time and and he he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an anaconda right around here
and we were able to see their movements and that's what these papers are showing is that they actually
do pursue their prey they do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest
they actually do pursue their prey they actually do seek out food so i mean think about it it's a it's a
giant anaconda obviously it's not it can't just sit in one spot it has to put some work into it and
so they're using scent and they're using communication to use the streams so you could be walking in the
forest in a very shallow stream and see a sizable anaconda looking for a meal so in the shallow stream
it moves not just in the water but in the sand yeah so it also likes to borrow a little bit
they borrow quite a bit and so these large snakes operate
subterranean more than we think interesting like there's times that you'll go with a tracker
you go with the telemetry set and it'll say like we'll be over the snake the snake's underground
snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream you saw it last night
where all the fish have have their holes under the side of the stream there is a there is a six foot
dwarf came in right in the stream right where we were standing he had his cave he goes under there
they know they have their system yeah we walked by it we walked by it and he stuck his head out
because he thought we'd gone and then we turned around and i just got a glimpse of him because i was
in the front of the line and he just went right back into his cave you you guys are not going to
touch me and so yeah with the anacondas it's been really exciting and uh in 2014 jj and me and
mosen and pat and lee we all we ended up catching what at the time was the record for eunectes
marinus scientifically measured it was 18 feet 6 inches 220 pounds one of the largest female
anacondas on record and since that time these guys have been continuing to study the species
continuing to just again just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species
and studying green anacondas in lowland tropical rainforest you've seen how hard it is
to to move to operate to navigate in this environment and so when you think of the fact
that in order to learn anything about this species you have to spend vast amounts of time first
locating them and then finding out a way to keep tabs on them because even if you get lucky enough
to see an anaconda by the edge of a stream to to be able to observe it over time to learn its habits
or to put a radio transmitter on it or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience
is almost impossible and so a lot of the stuff that i wrote about mother of god us jumping on
anacondas and trying to catch them and at first it just seemed like something we were doing to learn
to just try and see them but it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology
that would have scientific implications later on because now it's allowing us to try and find the
largest anacondas and people used to say there's no way there's 25 foot 27 foot well there's just
that video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot anaconda and so now as we keep going i'm going well
maybe through drone identification we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of
floating vegetation and even then how do we restrain them so that we could measure them and prove this
to the world it's sort of a side quest but so by doing these kinds of studies you figure out
how they move about the world what motivates them in terms of when they hunt where they hide in the
world as the size of the anaconda change so all of that that's that's those are scientific studies
yeah i mean look there's so much that we don't know about this forest we don't know what medicines
are in this forest we don't know with a lot of the 1500 there's something like 4 000 species of
butterflies in the amazon rainforest and of the 1500 species that are here in this region
all of them have a larval stage caterpillars right and each of the caterpillars has a specific host
plant that they need to need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly to enter the next
life cycle and for most of the species that fill the butterfly book we don't know what those
interactions are i recently got to see uh the white witch which is a huge moth it's it's one of the it's
one of the two largest moths in the world it's the largest moth by wingspan wow huge it looks
like a bird big white moth we still i believe i believe that we still don't know what the
caterpillar looks like it's 2024 we have iphones and penis shaped rocket ships like we don't know
where that moth starts its life yeah we still haven't figured that out by the way the rocket
ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes not because they wanted to look make it look like
a penis speaking of which i've ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring have you and make me
very i this i know it's not just a figment of my imagination i'm pretty sure they're real
in fact you explained it to me and they they make me very uncomfortable because there's just a lot of
penises hanging off of a tree yes i don't know what the purpose is i don't know who they're supposed
to attract but it certainly makes but certainly paul like really enjoys them yeah yeah well clearly you
you've done some some research and you've noticed a lot of them i haven't even seen them there was there
was there was a time where i almost fell and to catch my balance i had to grab one of the penises
of the penis tree and unforgettable uh anaconda the biggest baddest anaconda in the amazon versus
the biggest baddest black caiman because you mentioned they're like there's a race if there's
a fight this is the ufc and cage who wins this is the water biggest and the baddest the biggest and
the baddest that you have can imagine given all the studies you've done of the two animals
species in the baddest you're talking about an 18 foot several hundred pound black caiman versus a
26 foot 350 pound anaconda yeah i think it's a it's a it's a death stalemate i think the caiman
slams the anaconda bites onto it the anaconda wraps the caiman and then they both thrash around until
they both kill each other because i think the the caiman will tear him up so bad and the caiman's not
gonna let go he's gonna never gonna let go but then he's gonna he's gonna realize that he's he's
also being constricted so then he's gonna stop and he's gonna he's gonna keep slamming down on
that anaconda and the anaconda is just gonna keep constricting but if the caiman can do enough
damage before the end it's again it's almost like a striker versus a jujitsu yeah you know if you can
get enough elbows in before they lock you how fast is the constriction so it's pretty slow it's it's no
it's it's incredibly it's it's incredibly quick so it's it's it's you to you so you take the back and
get me in choke hold it's that it's i have maybe 30 seconds maybe on the upward side if you haven't
cinched it under my under my throat but if you've gotten good position it's over is there any way to
unwrap the choke undo the choke defending not unless you have outside help unless you have you know
another human or another 10 humans coming to unwrap the tail help you but for an animal like if a deer
gets hit by an anaconda no way they don't stand a chance so the the the black caiman would bite
somewhere somewhere close to the head and then and just try to hold on a thrash yeah i don't i
don't think a large black caiman here's the thing every fisherman knows this like the biggest fish
they're smart yeah and more importantly they're shrewd they're careful a huge black caiman that's 16
feet long isn't going to be messing with a big anaconda like they they they'll they won't they won't
cross paths because while they technically occupy the same type of environment that black caiman is
going to have this deep spot in a lake and that anaconda is going to have found this floating
forest like sort of black stream backwater where it's going to be and they'll have made that their
home for decades and they'll already have cleaned out the competition so maybe if there was a flood
and they got pushed together that they they could have some sort of a showdown but
almost more certainly is that when they get to that size that caiman at any sign of danger
right under the water just being it's almost like it's like even if you what do you learn when you're
a black belt you know what what do you do with a street fight you still run away there's no reason
for a street fight and i think the animals really understand that there's no there's no reason for this
so like a giant anaconda and a giant black caiman they could probably even coexist in the same
environment just knowing using the wisdom to avoid the fight like why or they would have a big showdown
and one of them would either die or have to leave they would have a territorial dispute yeah yeah
without killing either of them yeah on it dude nature anything could happen one of the things that
me and pat wrote up was that i saw a yellow-tailed creepo which is like a six-foot rat snake eating an
oxyropus melanogenes which is the the red snake that we found last night and just no one had ever
in scientific literature we'd never seen a creepo eating an oxyropus before and so i had the
observation in the field i sent it to pat champagne pat writes it up paper and so it's like it's this
really cool that's a really cool system because we're just out here all the time you end up seeing
things jj's dad saw an anaconda eating a taper tapers the size of a cow damn and it's that guy didn't
lie you know some people you trust your sources on that he he saw enough stuff he didn't need to
make up stories and you know how you you know what i love now is when you go to so when you ask people
when we were going up the mountain with jimmy yeah jj said to him he goes have you ever seen a puma
up here in the mountains and jimmy goes they're up here and jj jj went no no have you seen it and
jimmy went no never seen one and you know how most people will go yeah i've seen that makes me trust
a person when they admit nah i haven't seen it they're up here i haven't seen it and jimmy's
been living there his whole life his whole life there's pumas in the mountains you know mountain
lions pumas whatever that you know there's all different names for them they're distributed from
i think from alaska down through argentina that's they're everywhere it's extremely successful species
from deserts to high mountains everything i think you're saying pumas have a have a curiosity
have a way about them where they like explore like follow people like just to kind of figure out
like uh just that curiosity versus like as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff
like what is this about i think it's based in predatory instincts but i also think there is a
playfulness to higher intelligence animals that you don't see in lower intelligence animals and so
something like a rabbit for instance you're never going to see a rabbit come in to check you out
you just you just you can't even think of it like that like a rabbit's just going to either eat or run
away there's really two settings when you think of something like a river giant river otter
or a tyra which is a they call it manco here it's a it's a huge arboreal weasel
and they'll come check you out i woke up at my house the other day and there was a tyra climbing
up the side of the house and he was looking down at me sleeping and it's like he came to check me out
like it's like they're smart enough and they're brave enough here's the important thing they know
that they can fend for themselves they can fight they can climb they can run and so they're like let
me i'm curious i got time let me check this out yeah they're gathering information i wonder how
complex and sophisticated their world model is like how they're integrating all the information
about the environment like where all the different trees are where all the different nests of the
different insects are what the different creatures are by size all that kind of stuff i'm sure they
don't have enough you know storage up there to like keep all that but they probably keep the
important stuff basically you know so sort of integrate the experiences they have into like
what is dangerous what is tasty all that kind of stuff i think it's more complex than we
realize you go back to that friends to wall book are we smart enough to know how smart animals are
there's so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren't understanding
how to shed being so insurmountably human and understand that there are other types of intelligence
and whether that's elephants or cats so big cats for instance we just saw a camera trap video from
last night yeah where you see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five minutes later a cat
behind him by the way we're walking just exactly the same area also exact same time yeah yeah so we're
out there and there's deer and there's cats and there's a jaguar and there's a puma and there's all
these animals out there and we're out in the night in the inky black night in this ocean of
darkness beneath the trees and we're just exploring and getting to see everything and there's all these
little eyes and heartbeats i love the jungle at night man it's the most exciting thing you're one
of the things you do when you turn off the headlamp yeah complete darkness all around you
it's just the sounds everything you hear the cicadas the birds they're all screaming about sex
yeah all the time so they're just trying to get laid yeah so all of them are making mating calls now
the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator yeah but at night what what
amazes me is that for us it's so from the from the caveman logic of it's hard to make fire here
it's hard to even light a fire here to having this this this incredible beam of of of it you know all of a
we can look at the jungle and walk through that darkness then we're seeing the frogs on those
leaves and the snakes moving through the undergrowth and the deer sneaking through the shadows it's like
it's almost as supernatural as skydiving it's a strange thing to be able to do that technology
allows us to do we're doing something really complex and we're walking on trails that have
been cleared for us that we've planned out and so walking through the jungle at night you just get
this freak show of of of biodiversity and i'm addicted to it i truly love it except for the
times over the last few days when we walked on through jungle without a trail and that's just a
different experience well how would you categorize if somebody said lex i think i'm gonna go for a hike
through the jungle not on the trail yeah what would you tell them every step is really hard work
every step is a puzzle every step is a full of possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of
ways you just a wasp nest under a leaf a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step in it you're
gonna break a knee ankle leg and going to not be able to move for a long time uh there's
all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot uh bullet ants there's snakes and
spiders and uh oh my favorite that i've gotten to know intimately uh is different plants with
different defensive mechanisms one of which is just spikes so sharp you have i don't know if you
brought it but there's i didn't bring it i didn't bring it where's my club there's an epic club with
the spikes but there's so many trees that have spikes on them sometimes they're obvious spikes
sometimes less than obvious spikes and you know it could be just an innocent as you take a step
through a dense jungle it could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just
completely transform your experience your life by penetrating your hand with like 20 30 40 50 spikes
yeah and just changing everything that's just a completely different experience than going on a
trail where you were your observer of the jungle versus the participant of it and yeah and it truly is
extreme hard work to take every single step now just think about this i think scientifically because
people like to summarize people like to get really really uh sort of cavalier with our scientific
progress and they go you know we've already explored the amazon it's like well have we because
in between each tributary is you know let's say just between some of them let's just say 100 miles of
unbroken forest who's explored that yeah maybe some of the tribes have been there maybe some areas they
haven't been now when you're talking about scientists whether they're indigenous scientists western
science whatever so many of the areas in this jungle that is the size of the continental u.s
still have not been accessed and the places where people are doing research see i've been down here
long enough i see all the phds come down here and they all go to the same few research stations they're
safe they have a bed if you get hella dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest most remote
parts you're going to find micro ecosystems you're going to see little species variations
you're going to see a type of flower that jj's never seen before like what happened the other day
as you start walking through new patches of forest you start finding new species and everything here
changes you just go a little bit up river and the animals you see differ you go on this side of the
river versus on the north side of the river there's two other species of primates there that don't exist
here and that's in the mammal paper that we did with the the emperor tamarins and the pygmy
marmosets that the rangers found yeah the the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life
in this one region of the amazon what kind of can you talk more about that paper mammal diversity
along the les piedras river once again the mammal paper pat champaign the prodigy um he was sort of
leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region including holly o'donnell
out of oxford uh myself i really just made a few observations the jungle keepers rangers got
featured because they're the ones that spotted a pygmy marmoset that had previously been unrecorded
on the river i got to i got to contribute because i had i had the only photograph that i believe anyone
has of an emperor tamarin on this river it's the first proof of emperor tamarin on this river and
that's exciting it's exciting because um you know you'll you can post post a picture or share a
scientific observation or write about something and then what happens is you get these these like
couch experts these armchair experts who who will come and say you know no no you don't get blue and
yellow macaws there i can tell from my bird book it says they're not there and they'll tell you you're
wrong you know no you don't get woolly monkeys there or emperor tamarins it's like but but we but we
have proof and so we're coming together to try and add to that knowledge my general sort of amateur
experience of the species i've encountered here is like this should not exist whatever this is this
is not real this is cgi like what just the colors the weirdness i mean there's uh i think i called it
the the paris hilton uh caterpillar because it's like fur it looks like a one of those little dog
like yeah yeah it's like really furry and it's transparent and and and sort of it's transparent
all you see is this white beautiful fur and it's just like this caterpillar it doesn't doesn't look
real yeah do you think there are species like how many species have we not discovered and is there
species that are like extremely badass that we haven't discovered yet if you look up how many
trees are in the amazon rainforest it's something in the order of 400 billion trees there's something
like 70 to 80 000 species of plants individual types of plants here 1500 species of trees it's it's so vast
that it it it's comparable like the the the scale is like only comparable to the universe in terms of
stars and galaxies and and and and for the sheer immensity of it and so we're we're describing new
species every year and just walking on the trail at night you and i have seen you know you see a tiny
little spider hidden in a crevice and has the scientific eye ever seen that spider before has it
been documented do we know anything about its life cycle there's still so much that's here that is
completely unknown you know we have pictures of all these butterflies somebody went out with a
butterfly net and caught these butterflies took a picture of it gave it a name put it in a butterfly
book but what do we know what host plant do they use for their caterpillars what's their geographical
range what what do we actually know not that much so are there creatures out here that haven't been
described absolutely and some of them could be extremely effective uh predators in a niche
environment yeah absolutely i mean certainly certainly in the canopy 50 of the life in a rainforest is in
the canopy and we've had very limited access to the canopy for all of history you know if you wanted
to get up into the rainforest canopy you basically have to climb a vine or what scientists when i was
a kid i always used to see them with like the slingshots or the bow and arrows they would they
would shoot a piece of paracord over a branch pull the rope up and then you know do the ascension
thing and then you're up in this tree getting swarmed by sweat bees getting stung by wasps you're trying
to do science up there in that environment it's incredibly hostile and so having canopy platforms
i actually met a guy at a french film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the canopy
of the amazon and then lay these big nets over the over the broccoli of the of the trees and the nets
were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards
and snakes whatever just take specimens from the canopy that's how difficult it is that that scientists
have resorted to using hot air balloons and so having a tree house having canopy platforms having
it's it's starting to get there's starting to be more and more access to the rainforest canopy and so
we're beginning to log more data you know we've even observed in our tree house which is supposed to be
the tallest in the world we're seeing lizards that we don't see on the ground lizards that have never
been documented on this on this river like we're seeing snakes where they're saying we saw the snake
inside a crevice on that tree in the strangler fig and we don't know what it is it's just people
haven't been up there and that's where a lot of the monkeys are that's where there's just a lot of
dynamic life up there yeah i mean you when you wake up in the canopy in the morning in the amazon
rainforest as soon as that the darkness lifts as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning
the howler monkeys start up yeah and then the parrots start up and then the tinnamoos start
going and the macaws start going and pretty soon everybody's going and the spider monkey groups are
all calling to each other and it's just the whole dawn chorus starts and it's so exciting so you're
saying when they're screaming it's usually about sex sex or territory usually sex and violence or
implied violence or the threat of violence yeah i mean howler monkeys in the morning they're letting
other groups know this is where we're at we're going to be foraging over here you better stay away
and so it's a little bit respectful as well there is order in the chaos so just speaking of screaming
macaws are like these beautiful creatures they're uh lifelong partners they stick together so there's
you often see just they're monogamous so you see two of them together but when they communicate
their love language it seems to be very loud screaming yeah what what do you learn about relationships
from a cause that that it can be loud and rough and still be loving and still be loving but
is that interesting to you that there's like monogamy in some species that they they're
lifelong partners and then there's like total lack of monogamy in other species it's all interesting i
mean there's the anti-monogamy crew who's like you know we were never meant to be monogamous we're
supposed to just be animals and then there's the other side of the crew that's like we were meant to
be monogamous we are monogamous creatures that's what god wanted between a man and a woman and then
other people like yeah but i know about these two gay penguins and so that's natural too and so then
everyone tries to draw their their identity they're trying to justify their identity off of the not
the laws of nature so the fact that macaws are monogamous really doesn't have anything to do
with anybody except for that it's beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks it's difficult
they rely on ironwood trees or aguaje palms and it's difficult to find the right hole in a tree
there's only so much macaw real estate and so they need to use those holes
and each one of those ancient trees it's usually 500 years or more is is a is a valuable macaw
generating site in the forest and so if those trees go down you lose exponential amounts of
macaws and that's how you get endangered species and so that's why we're trying to protect the ironwood
trees another ridiculous question tell me if every jungle creature was the same size oh boy who would
be the new apex predator the new alpha at the top of the food chain dude that's like super smash
brothers of the jungle that's incredible yeah like bullet ants if you had a bullet ant that was the
size yeah can it be like uh like a tournament so everyone is pound for pound ratioed yeah for
efficiency so you have basically like a six foot bullet ant versus a huge black caiman versus an
anaconda versus ocelots or the size of jaguars versus yeah well let's let's go bullet ant versus
black caiman but they're comparable size size i don't know man i never thought about it i mean
bullet ant has these giant yeah giant giant mandibles it could probably grab the black caiman
and then at that amount of venom you're talking about a bucket of venom going into that black caiman
black caiman's going to get paralyzed immediately well insects have just a just a tremendous amount of
like strength i don't know how they generate what the geometry that is the natural world can't create
that same kind of power in the bigger thing it seems like it seems like it seems like ants and
like just these tiny creatures are the ones they're able to have that much strength i don't know how
that works what the physics of that is like an ant leaf cutter ant lifting that leaf that doesn't
make any sense yeah it doesn't make any sense i don't know i don't know if that's a limit of physics i think
it's just a limit of evolution of how that that works one of the most interesting limits that i heard
uh somebody talking about recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn't get bigger even bigger because
that's the the the the conditions on earth were favorable towards it was that at some point their
eggs reached there's physical limits that their eggs reached a size that the eggs were so big that
that eggs need to breathe for the embryo to survive and their eggs reached a limit where
in order to have a shell that could hold the mass of the liquid and the young dinosaur
if they got bigger it wouldn't be permeable anymore and i thought that was so interesting
because the entire size of physical creatures was determined by how thick shell can be before it
breaks or before it can't pass air through it yeah there might be a lot a lot of the like
biophysics limits that's to you know fascinating stuff just like the the interplay between biology
chemistry and physics of like a life form it's like this thing there's a lot involved in creating a
single living organism that could survive in this world and bigger you know being big is not always
good but being a big creature it's for many reasons like you were saying the big creatures
seem to be going extinct yeah for many reasons but in in the human world is because there seem to be
of higher value given the current size of the jungle i think that the the mvp the pound for pound
goat is ocelots you're talking about like a mid-size 40 40 50 pound cat that can climb that does
unlike a jaguar jaguar every time it hunts it's going after a deer it catches a deer the deer could
hit it with its with its antlers it could tear it with its hooves it's risking its life for that meal
an ocelot ocelots walk around at night and they climb a tree eat a whole bunch of eggs eat the
other bird too kill a snake maybe mess around and eat a baby came and they can have whatever they
like and they're they're sleek enough and and smart enough to get away from predators they don't really
have predators and so they're sort of they sort of occupy this perfect niche where they they can hunt
small prey in high quantity without taking on big risks and so if you had to choose an animal to be
it'd probably be like an ocelot or i would say giant river otters which are so damn cool because
they're the locals call them lobos de rio river wolves because they're so tough and they're so
social and they're so like us because they're intensely familial groups they live in holes by the
sides of lakes and they swim through the water and they catch fish all day long piranhas they eat them
just like the scales go flying as they eat these piranhas and they're so joyous in the way they swim
and they have friends and they have family and they i think it would be i think we could relate to being
a river otter really because i can't picture being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along
a 15 mile route and making sure there's no other cats and coming in on your territory and marking that
territory it seems it seems very solo and very cat-like it's a lonely existence lonely and we
humans are social we're so social and so to me river otters it's like having a big italian family
you're like constantly eating you're freaking out you know just like causing problems with the black
caiman take down a black caiman start a street fight yeah it's a family thing you mentioned
piranhas yeah what do you think you know they're they're a source of a lot of fear for people what
do you find beautiful and fascinating about these creatures they're also kind of social or at least
they hunt and operate in groups yeah not in the mammalian way though piranhas are in large schools
but i fish are so different like if you i can talk to you all day about how how much i'd love to be
an otter also going back to the fighting thing otters and weasels muscle a day tend to be very
loose in their skin so if you grab an otter it can still rotate around to bite you so it's like if i
grab you by the back you're stuck you know like we can't you grab them by the skin yeah they can
rotate around and just shred you apart so they're they're really cool fighters um piranha fish fish i
don't i don't you know i don't identify with fish in in terms like that i think living out here has
made me think of fish as a kind of rapid food that can or can't be gotten like you know so to me a
piranha is just is when i see a piranha i think about how i want to how i want it to taste yeah so
like a fish is a is a food source for so many creatures in the jungle so they're primarily food
source but piranhas are i mean they're predators they're serious predators they are serious predators
i found a baby black caiman not that long ago and he was missing all of his toes because the
piranhas had eaten them off it was really sad he just had these stumps and he was swimming around
the water and i was like you are not gonna make it he was like eight inches and he was such a cute
little puppy he had those big eyes and i was just like man you already are missing all your toes i was
like it's just a matter of time okay now he can't get away so some big agami heron's gonna come and
just nail him pop him down his throat that's the end of that for the caiman i mean nature is metal
nature sure as shit is metal bite off a little bit and then makes you vulnerable and then that
vulnerability is exploited by some other species and then that's it that's the end yeah but humans
are brutal too like like like that story we heard about that guy the other day who caught a stingray on
a fishing hook chopped its tail off to make it safe for humans cut a piece of the stingray off so he could
use it for bait and then threw the live fish back in the river like to me that is incomprehensible
amounts of cruelty with with with flawed logic in every direction like if you're gonna use the
thing as bait use it as bait if you're gonna remove its tail well then just kill it all together
yeah or if you want to save the animal and not kill it then don't maim it before you return it to its
it was such a weird so if you kill an animal you want to use it to its fullest by using it as a food
source by cooking it by you know eating every part of it all that kind of stuff yeah so we have we've
been eating paco yeah in your time here fried paco is great fried amazing it's delicious full of newt
you could tell it makes you healthy i feel like we better work out so that we can go harder in the
jungle and so a few months ago in august when the river was down it was there was a day that the river
was clear and a friend of mine victor who's who's married to a native girl he said it's time to go paco
fishing and at the time we were stuck out here and we had no resupply everybody was busy and so
everyone was demoralized the staff was hungry we were hungry and it really became this thing of like
hey go catch us some paco they were working on the trails they were installing the solar we were
working hard and we didn't have food and so we went out to the river and what we did was we went up river
we camped on the beach and in the morning victor's wife was was canoeing with the with the paddle dead
quiet don't let the paddle touch the wooden boat nikita was balanced in the middle of the thing
victor's on the front with this huge fishing rod and i'm sitting there and he goes i'll catch the
first one you catch the second one and he's got this huge fishing rod and a piece of half rotten meat
from the day before and he's smacking it against the wall six a.m he's just letting it smack against
the water and i'm going and we're floating down the river and i'm going this is not going to work
and we're floating and we're floating and a half hour passes and i'm going it's dawn i want to go
back to sleep i'm such and i'm just not a morning person and all of a sudden a fish hits that line
almost pulls this man off of his feet and he swings the thing in the fish comes on the boat and then i
realized he's got a big metal mallet on the boat so that you could try to shut that fish off
and it's this huge ore-shaped thick muscular paco and as soon as i saw that fish
i just thought wow the strongest of this species for millions of years have been swimming in this river
and suddenly we've through this incredible combination of the boat and the and the and
the cord and the hook none of which we made and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish a paco
because otherwise there's no chance that you're getting that fish they hide they're very very
suspicious of what you're doing we had gotten this fish onto the boat and ploom you hammer it
like a caveman boom it doesn't die boom you have to crush its skull and now you have this fish and
you're you're holding this genetic material the sustenance for your life that has been developing
since the dinosaur times it's so beautiful the act the sacred act of eating that of of the fish
of the competition with the fish and we spent the morning fishing we got three paco's three huge giant
vegetarian piranha and i i just remember touching them with so much reverence thinking about the
incredible history and how that before these rivers existed those paco's were were swimming through the
water and and and and trying to survive through through through history through history through
history until this until we we took just a few and we did it respectfully and we did it when we needed
it most not at a time when it was just for fun and it was it was really really special well humans using
them for sustenance there's a collaboration there that's that's something also that i've seen in the
jungle that there's creatures using each other and it's like a dance of either uh mutually using each
other it's or parasitic or symbiotic it's interesting like there's a a medicinal plant you grabbed
that was full of ants yeah they were like trying to uh murder you by biting but they were defending
the plant that they were using for whatever purpose there's a clear dance there of the ants using the
plant and the plant existing there for other applications and other use for humans and there's
that kind of circle of life happening but the ants were defense so that the plant didn't have its
own defense mechanism the ants the army of ants was there to protect the plant and did you actually
when you remember we put our backpacks down at that one spot and it was like the ants got on your
backpack and i said oh shit this is that tree did you actually get bitten by one of those because they're
incredibly painful yeah tangarana one they like yeah yeah surprisingly painful because they're small
there and it's nothing like i'm luckily have not been bitten by a bullet ant yet but it's just it's
amazing because they live inside the tree the tree comes standard with holes in it that allow the ants to
move and to exist safe and it protects their eggs and they protect the tree and they so we saw that
spot where there's a perfect circle around the trees because the ants had excavated the other
vegetation so that those trees could have no competition to grow the incredible calculation
of how ants know to guard come programs to garden that tree and the tree somehow has been genetically
informed to have ant habitat within itself it's it's it's mind-blowing and it actually is the foundation
of a lot of existential confusion for me because how the hell is this possible yeah well one of the
things you mentioned that's also a source of a lot of existential confusion for me is ants yeah and
the intelligence of different creatures in the forest there's these giant colonies there's just giant
systems but even just looking at a single colony of ants them collaborating leafcutter ants
is an incredible system so individually the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic but taken together
there is a vast intelligence operating that's able to be robust and resilient any kind of conditions is
able to figure out a new environment it's able to resist be resilient to any kinds of attacks and all
that kind of stuff what do you find beautiful about them like as you said just leafcutter ants in this
jungle that's forgetting all the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle but just
the leafcutters apparently digest roughly 17 of the total biomass of the forest everything all these
giant trees all that leaf litter 17 of that almost a fifth of this forest cycles through leafcutter ant
colonies so they're constantly regenerating the forest they're a huge source of the of the driver of
this ecosystem and so to me when you see them working it's again like i said you see your
friends as you go through the jungle you see all the kapok trees you see kanea tree you see there's
leafcutter ants doing what they're supposed to do and it's it's just so beautiful i find them
very beautiful army ants they're so tough they're so ready to fight they have the huge mandibles they're
just ready to they're just they're transporting their eggs they're moving from here to there anything
that's in the way is getting eaten they're just savage and they're kind of cute for that unless you're
tied to a tree the savagery is cute i find that yeah it's kind of reassuring you know you want
certain things to be tough that's their part oh that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the
and the nature mechanism yeah powerful play um but but but yeah but the army ants are so savage you know
like if you if you step on army ants they will all kamikaze just attack onto your feet and they'll just
they'll just sacrifice their own life for the good of the thing and they'll be trying to kill your
your shoes and there's something funny about that to me there's something like kind of reassuring again
unless unless imagine if you're going through the jungle and you slip and you fall and you twist your
knee yeah and you fall in just the right way but you you can't get up yeah you can't you're stuck there
and then army ants find you yeah they will take you apart there are records of horses that have been
tied up and army ants come and they'll take out the whole horse imagine the pain of that
it might be raining on us very hard very soon you want to pause nope i think we'll stay here until
the ship goes down we should mention that there's this one source of light and we're shrouded in
darkness and and now the night shift is going to take over soon and we are in the amazon rainforest
what does the rainforest represent to you when you zoom out look at the entirety of it carl sagan's
pale blue dot resonated with a lot of people that everything you've ever heard of all the heroes all
the villains all of your ancestors every achievement tragedy triumph everything has happened on that one
spot this one tiny tiny little rock that has life on it and to me the rainforests represent the crown
jewel of that as far as we know and to the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific brains
at their fullest capacity this is still the only place that we know that has life and given that the fact
that there are still these tropical towering complex ecosystems that we are barely understand
crawling and full of the most incredible life it's just to me it's it's it's so wonderful
it's so incredible those the waterfalls and the birds and the macaws and the jaguars it's barely
believable like if you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical hypothetical alien i live on this planet
and there's just these places where everything is interconnected everything means something to
something else and the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive and each tree is pumping air
into the river and there's an invisible river above the actual river and the whole thing goes into
stabilizing our global climate and each little tiny leafcutter ant somehow contributes to this giant
biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible that is beautiful i love that
and so the the rainforest to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest
challenge for us as a global society because if we can't protect the crown jewel the best thing
you know the most beautiful part then then we're really really missing the point yeah the diversity
of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life that is at the core of what makes earth a really
special thing that said you and i have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day i showed up
all right you brought a machete to this fight um luckily the table is long enough
you can't reach me see to you earth is truly special yeah you don't think there's other earths out there
millions of other earths in our galaxy when you look up you know we were sitting in the amazon river
okay at dark the storm rolled over yeah and you started counting the stars yeah one two and that
was once you can count the stars that was a sign that the storm will actually pass eventually will
pass and that's what you're doing three four five and it's going to pass you're not gonna have to sit
in that river for like all night so just a couple hours to keep yourself warm okay each of those stars
there's earth-like planets around them okay why do you think there's not alien civilizations there
you can write down a calculation on a napkin you can cite different hollywood movies you can point
up to the pieces of light in the stars but if you if i talk about show me a single cell that's not from
this planet it's still not possible and so i agree with you that the likelihood is there all indications
point to it it would be fascinating especially if it was done in especially you know imagine finding a
planet of alternative life forms not necessarily even intelligent imagine just a part of a planet
of butterflies whatever you know something else that would be amazing but but i'm concerned with
the reality that we have in front of us is that this is the spaceship this is life yeah and so right
now given that reality maybe that's maybe that's the case maybe maybe there are other planets
planets or or or maybe we are the first maybe life originated here maybe god the universe whatever
maybe maybe this is it this is the this is the this is the the testing ground for something bigger and
and and and and this complexity and this diversity of life and this life that we have
is that important and i think that part of what we do when we go oh yeah but there's other planets
where first of all we're we're taking an assumption into reality without i mean you know aliens right
now are about as real as santa claus we think they're out there but we're not sure maybe a little
more real because you know it could make sense we no one has an alien no one's seen an alien no one's
even seen cellular life and so i'm not again if they showed up tomorrow great let's study them but
right now we have this very simple threat going on where we can't stop killing each other and our
living environment and so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other
planets and talk about being an interplanetary species i'm very much concerned with the fact
that here in our home turf our living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean and
the trees are big and there's macaws flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers not
only do we have a responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this incredible
gift that is our entire reality seems kind of weird too at some point it conservation seems kind of
ridiculous like you're begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive it's it's it's almost
kind of silly at a point but but we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the
ocean and in the rivers they come standard with life on earth and and we're we're we're harming
the ability of earth's ecosystems to provide for that life and we are the generation that's going to
decide if those systems continue to provide life to all the people on earth and all the generations
and by the way all the other animals that exist for their own reasons other consciousnesses that
we're just beginning to understand elephants humpback whales whatever families of giant river otters
you not everything can be seen from a human perspective these are other species that have
their own stories and so i'm i'm more biocentric than anthropocentric and that i i think that that
nature is important but i also believe that we are
we are we are special we are the most intelligent animal so one i i agree with you there's some degree
to which when you imagine aliens you forget if by for a moment how special important life is here on earth
yes but it's also a way to
reach out through curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence what is consciousness what is
exactly the thing that makes life on earth special another way of doing that and i see the jungle in
that same way is basically treating the animals all around us the life forms all around us as kinds of aliens
as that's a humbling way that's an intellectual humility with which to approach the study
of like what the hell is going on here this is truly incredible like are are the animals we've met over
the last few days conscious what is the nature of their intelligence what is the nature of their
consciousness what motivates them are they individual creatures are they actually part of the
large system and how large is the system is earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips
of that system or uh are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the
emerging complexity of the system so i think thinking about aliens is a necessary uh
i like my tom with a little drop of poison from tom waits is a necessary perturbation of the system of
our thinking to sort of say hey we don't know what the fuck's going on around here sure
and aliens is a nice way to say okay uh the mystery all around us is immense because to me likely aliens
are living among us not in a trivial sense little green men but the force that created life
i think permeates the entirety of the universe that there is a force that's creative now the force
that created life is a big one and then the other thing is what do you mean by that there's aliens
living among us you mean extraterrestrials yes living among us yes you believe that
not like a hundred percent but there's a as a good percentage i don't understand how it's possible
for there not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout the just our galaxy but
that's different than saying that they're living among us if you tell me that there's aliens living
five galaxies over and that they're just out there somewhere i'm kind of i'm kind of more on your side
than that they're here because just like bigfoot like we have camera traps we have dna sequencing
through through water now like we can you're telling me no one found one wing nut of a of a of a
ship in all like the egyptians up until right now no one in russia saw like a crashed ship took a
picture tweeted that shit real quick and you know i i think there's no bigfoot there's no trivial
manifestations of aliens i think if they're here they're here in ways that are not
comprehensible by humans because they're far more advanced than humans they're far more advanced than
any life forms on earth so they're even if it's just their probes we cannot just even comprehend it
i think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas for example that ideas could be aliens
feelings could be aliens consciousness itself could be aliens so we can't restrict our understanding
what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that operates via natural selection on this
particular planet it could be much much much more sophisticated it could be in the space of
computation for example as we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational
systems with artificial intelligence it could be operating on some other level that we can't even
imagine it could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand
uh we we barely understand quantum mechanics we use it quantum mechanics is a way we use to make
very accurate predictions but to understand why it's operating that way we don't and there's so many
gigantic powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect sometimes can't detect dark matter dark energy
but it's out there we know it exists but we can't explain why and what the fuck it is we give it names
black holes and dark energy and dark matter but those are all names for things that mathematical
equations predict but we don't understand and so all of that is just to say that aliens could be here in
ways that are for now and maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand so aliens in the
in the strict biological sense like like like like horseshoe crabs we agree that they're they're not we
we haven't found physical aliens the only way i can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species
are trying to communicate with us humans uh or with other life forms and are trying to figure out a way
to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand like let's create a thing
yo there's a moth the size of a small eagle let's try to get us 15 minutes of attention it just might
it just might um fan of the podcast okay lex i love you um all right so so what's yours wouldn't it be
interesting it'd be really fascinating to me if we found out that there were aliens living among us and we
couldn't see them and what some of the people were calling aliens the scientists the the religious
people were calling angels and then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens
or angels there are these other there is more way more to the universe than we're realizing i just for me
the fact that there's there's a skull on the table yeah there's a skull there's not a skull in your
hand there's now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bullet in its head that i found on the floor
of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys i didn't kill the monkey so save your comments but
you know in terms of of the animals i think i think that when i see space it my feeling and i'm not
requiring anybody else to have this feeling but because we know because it's the only place that we
know that there's life and we have no idea how it started
i just think it's so important to protect it and and and for me it's just as much about our
children as it is about the little spider monkeys and the little baby came and that are in the river
right now because life is so beautiful yeah and i think that there's a huge amount of intellectual
responsibility that we can
transfer off of ourselves if we go yeah the rivers are filled with trash and yeah extinction is
happening but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway because at any moment this could
all end from an asteroid and like everything's going to shit anyway and so it's like we're
fucking up this planet it's like that's that's we're just being angry teenagers who are you know going
goth for a while and it's like what if you just rolled up your sleeves and said holy shit wait a
second you know we can pretty much do whatever we want we can fly all over the world we have we can
do heart transplants we can watch netflix and the amazon if we wanted to like we could do all
this amazing stuff we can capture on video or adventures and go back and watch them again and
again and again there's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to
do and we're the we're the richest in history i mean we could do everything we could cross the
whole planet in a second and it's like that's an amazing time to be alive and if we just don't
fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals we got it made yeah so it is true that we
can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons but it also is true that that snake that i got to handle
yesterday is like one of the most beautiful things earth has ever created in the in that little
organism is encapsulated the entire history of earth and it's it's beautiful so we both things are
true yeah we should we should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through
the weapons we create and we should become multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose but also
remember that this place is is really really special and probably if not difficult probably
impossible to recreate elsewhere and by the way there's something incredibly powerful about a skull
yeah if you ever hold a human skull it'll give you uh it'll it'll it'll it'll weigh on you for a
sec because you look into this the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you go you feel your own
teeth you go you feel your own skull and you go holy shit you go what is going on it's like taking
acid you just go oh boy i forgot that i'm a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock but even
even a monkey yeah it's like looking at a
ancestor you know not a direct ancestor but there's a it's like a you know like you you look in a puddle at
a reflection mm-hmm a little blurry but it's a little blurry but it's still there yeah it's still
there and like the roots of who we are is still there and it's all kind of incredible do you ever
think of the the tree of life just kind of like where we came from yeah the jungle is ephemeral it
just keeps it's a system that just keeps forgetting because it's just churning and churning and churning
and churning has in some ways no history but to create the jungle to create life on earth there's a
deep history of lots of death sex and death a festival of sex and death life on earth
that's what i see in the skull yeah there's something it's there's something kind of terrifying about
that image to me like when i hold that every now and then at night you hold that skull and you
it just reminds you that you're temporary yeah both you and i will one day have one of those yeah
hmm
mine will be bigger
the male competition continues the silverback slaps the lesser male once again uh do you have a lighter
yeah bro you want to light this blunt yeah
what are your favorite animals to interact with
i mean my favorite absolute favorite animal to interact with is 100 elephants which there's
no elephants here but i've been incredibly privileged to spend some time with elephants both in india and
in africa and i think that they're so smart and so complex that we do a really bad job of understanding
what an elephant really is i think that most children probably think of elephants as like
something kind of cuddly most adults probably think of have a similar misconception of them when you see an
elephant when you see a 12 foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out of its face with huge tusks
and those giant it's a it's an octopus-faced butterfly-eared behemoth that's a survival machine
and it'll look at you and just go do i have to kill you to keep safe and it's just they're so tough and they
have they have dirt on their back and they have flower petals and their little hair you realize
they have hair all over their body and the power to throw a car over to flip it just one of the most
impressive animals on earth and i think that i've gotten really good at interacting with wild elephants
in a way that's respectful to them and i think that that when an elephant allows you to be in its space
it's because you're you're showing submissiveness and and respect for the elephant space and they're so
intelligent that they're communicating with seismic vibrations through the earth that they have hot
you know a matriarchal society that they can remember the maps of their ancestors and they
know how to found find water that they can solve problems they're they're such beautiful animals and
they're so talk about aliens they're so alien looking these big weird heads and the trunks with
all those muscles and they're so different than us but but yet i actually think that we we grew up
together you know they they kind of raised us sibling species that we we've been we've inhabited the
same epoch in history and and we've relied on the ecosystems that they've created and i think that
they have a deep understanding of humans elephants and i think i see them more like aliens more like
non-human beings that we share the earth with so i don't see it as we're humans and they're animals i
actually see human elephants as as sort of a separate society along with humans as one of the
dominant species on the planet so almost every species especially the intelligent ones especially
the big ones are their own societies that overlap and sometimes co-develop yeah i think whales
i think elephants i think that there's there's those higher you know no one's suggesting that sardines
are you know somehow need human rights or something but i think the elephants need representation
in governments because they're they occupy they they influence their landscape they engineer their
environment they have emotions they have families they have burial rituals they're so like us and yet
we treat them like they're just just oversized cows that we have to be scared of it's they're not
they're not the same as as domesticated livestock they're one of the treasures of earth i mean look
let's just say little green men showed up and you said they said what's earth it's like well there's
mountains there's rivers it's like well how do i do this you know there's mountains rivers there's
there's elephants like it's like one of the first things a baby learns is elephant even if he's never
seen one it's just so iconic on earth like you said um um darren aronofsky darren aronofsky
um the the elephant walking over the camera i haven't seen it you said it's incredible yeah so at the
sphere the postcard from earth i mean it's a celebration of earth yeah in all forms and one
of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant and it steps over the audience and the
whole like the whole sphere reverberates that power i mean some of it is size yeah some of it is like how
did earth create this it is a weird looking creature but we take it for granted because
we've accepted that this earth can create this kind of thing but it is weird beautifully weird
oh it's beautifully weird i mean i mean elephants there's something really impressive and and wise
about them there's also beautiful weird that isn't so that doesn't come with so much grandeur like
to me a giraffe is beautifully weird yeah but they're just you know they're 18 foot tall camel
deer things with you know giant necks and they're strange and they're they're absolutely serenely
beautiful but they don't they don't have that deep intelligence that that elephants have there's
something that elephants have you see in their eyes where's how does the intelligence manifest itself
well this is the thing uh a lot of people a lot of the when i was reading friends de wall's book
a lot of what he was saying was that you know people give elephants human problems to solve
in controlled environments and call it you know a study on elephant intelligence whereas if you're
watching wild elephants and you're in the wild you're going to be watching them in a way that
they're they're looking you've pulled up in a safari vehicle or you've pulled over to the side of the
road and the elephants are wary of you so they're not acting natural but as soon as you start watching
wild elephants truly in the wild and comfort comfortable with your presence you see how they start caring for
their babies or or how they can get annoyed i once watched elephants around a water hole and there's
this warthog and i don't know why but this warthog decided he needed to get in and and there's this
young male elephant and he kept turning around to this warthog and just being like don't make me do it
now this elephant did not need to hurt the warthog and the warthog was just like i need a drink i need
a drink i need a drink much simpler bring the elephant was like you could just tell he was like watch this
and he just went and crushed the warthog like it was a big beetle yeah and crushed his pelvis and
the warthog dragged itself away on its front legs and probably went off to die but this young elephant
put out his ears and he like paraded around with his tail off and he was like look what i did
destruction and it's like that's a very relatable type of he was annoyed with the warthog yeah
and and and and so you see them do these things i mean the most magical thing and i've spoken about
this many times was that i was walking with a herd of semi-wild elephants that were crossing through
a village in india because elephants have lost a lot of their territory because there's so much
so so much population in india and so we're crossing through a village which is very delicate
because the matriarchs are leading the babies and there's villagers who have no idea what an elephant
is and they're watching the elephants cross and the matriarchs backed this girl up against the wall
and she was terrified standing there with her back against the wall and the elephant just put her trunk
out and touched the girl's stomach and then the other elephants came and they all started touching her
stomach and the the the the ranger there explained to me just went she's pregnant they know she's
pregnant they can smell they can tell and they're curious and they all the all the female elephants came
to investigate the pregnant girl and she had no idea what was going on and so it's like that stuff
that stuff and it's cool to hear that you know with the crushing and the pride of the young elephant
that there's a complexity of behavior it's just like with humans i mean you know yeah it's not always
pretty that's the thing man humans are capable of good and evil and sometimes we attach these words
i love that there's just it's an orchestra of different sounds yeah and that's that one is
sexy which that's a bamboo rat calling out for a mate i mean all right good luck to you buddy yeah good
hunting uh you know humans are capable of evil things and beautiful things and i wonder if animals are the
same you think there's just different personalities and different life trajectories for animals like as
they develop in their understanding of social interaction of survival of maybe even primitive
concepts of right and wrong within the social system do you think there is a lot of diversity in
personalities and and behavior just like different people is there different elephants of course and
what i really like is that you said is there a perception of what's right and wrong because
elephants have a code of ethics and so as the for the simplest example is that as young males begin to
grow they start developing these tusks and those tusks are a tool and they use them so for indian elephants
the females don't have tusks and the males do the females kick the males out of the herd the females
keep all the sisters and the ants and the and the and the cousins together but the males are their own
thing and so here's the thing if you have so what you get is these these crews of male elephants
and the older males will you know there's play fighting that goes on around you know two young males can
play fight but the older males they'll kick some ass they'll show them how to behave they'll explain who
gets to talk to the females who gets to interact who gets to mate who gets the best vegetation to eat
and so there's an order established and so young male elephants have to be taught how to act just
like a teenage human has to be taught you know you can't just haul off and and break another kid's nose
you gotta there's going to be consequence maybe you'll get suspended or maybe that kid will get his
friends and beat the living out of you whatever it is society regulates your behavior and elephants
have a very strict very predictable sort of like the males teach the males how to run things and the
females which which really have the final say they're matriarchal they're the ones leading the
herd where to go the males follow where the where the wise females tell them where to go
so that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they operate
what's right and wrong for an elephant yeah for an elephant right and wrong for an elephant is
not the same as what's right and wrong for grizzly bear grizzly bear if you're a male grizzly bear and
you see a female with cubs you just kill those cubs and then you can mate with that you can mate with
her and put your own cubs in there and it's like that's a whole different type of ethics yeah the value
of uh child life is different from species to species some of them hold the sacred some of them
not at all and that's why i think i resonate so much with elephants because they're i think they're
major i think that we're we're we are kind of matriarchal at least i grew up matriarchal like
women were the force in my life um my family and most of my friends as families and women kind of have the
final say and uh i feel like that's the way it is with with with with elephants like you might be bigger
and stronger but it doesn't really account for much if you're not smarter and and more emotionally
intelligent and you know how to take care of the group just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions
as we're talking about aliens there's a a lot of people trying to understand trying to study the
origin of life oh i love this first of all what do you think is life versus non-life like when you look
kids like ants or even like the simplest simplest of organisms we saw a frog in a stream yesterday
that was like a leaf frog it was like as flat as a sheet of paper and it does a lot of weird things
and it found a way to exist in this world but that's a single living organisms with a bunch of
components to it but like there's a life form that exists in this world what is the difference
between that in a rock what what is like what is the essence of that life this might be an
unanswerable question there's probably a chemistry physics biology way of answering that like what to
you is that i i think to me life is something that grows in response to stimuli like in basic biology 101
i think and i'm fine with that i don't need it to be more romantic than that but i think it's actually
comical how how do you get from a rock to an orangutan you know and our answer for that is
primordial soup maybe there was just stuff on earth and then the the stuff just got up and started
walking maybe they're just there was nothing happening and then there was all of a sudden there
was a cell and the cell had function and then it complexified and then it started reproducing and found
male and female parts and and what like it we are so un under equipped to understand how the hell we
got here let alone answer or or even bacteria i see this so many uh in very simple mathematical
models like something called game of life they're cellular automata you could see from simple rules
and simple objects when they're interacting together as you grow that system
complex objects arise like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science by
mathematics at all and it seems like from primordial soups you can get a lot of cool
shit and the force of getting from soup to like two humans on microphones yeah uh not understood and it
seems to be a thing that happens on earth i tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in
the universe and there's some deep force that's pushing this along in some way that there's something
we i don't want to sort of uh simplify it but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity
that we don't quite understand uh and that's the thing that created the first organism living organism
on earth that like leap from no life to life on earth that's a weird one that's a weird one because
you can imagine i think that what the earth is for 4.5 billion years old and you can imagine just this
this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and elements and iron and granite and like just random
stuff it's pretty easy to imagine that but then i remember that book there i think we all have the
same book when we were kids and then like they show this like fish-like animal crawling out of a
out of the primordial soup and it's like bro you just missed the most important part author of that
book bro and and i think the first bacteria came in around three three three point seven billion
years ago so there's like at least like you know a bunch of billion years where there's just nothing
there's just a planet and then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria and the bacteria stuck
around for long for a long time a billion two billion years it's just very very long just bacteria
just bacteria but a lot of them a lot of them there's probably a lot of innovation a lot of
murder a lot of interaction yeah yeah and then i mean there's there's a bit a few big leaps along
the history of life on earth yeah you know the predator prey dynamic that was a really cool innovation
it's almost like innovations like features on an iphone it's like it's nice like uh predator prey
uh eukaryotes so complex multicellular organisms uh emerging from the water to land that was weird
that was a that was an interesting innovation there's how whatever led to humans
that there's a lot of interesting stuff there i see i can't even get that far i can't get from
rock and sand to cells yeah that's that's a huge i mean i mean to everything around us that has
cells it's just it's it's wild even again and i i could imagine being on another planet and how
incredibly valuable this thing would be this this it's impossible to replicate it i'm looking at it
through the candlelight right now and i can see all of the structures in this leaf the incredible
structures in this leaf that look exactly like the veins in my arm which look exactly like the
rivers that are flowing across this landscape and it's like life has this this overwhelming pattern
that it uses and it's so beautiful i just i just think it's yeah when you imagine the the the the
days of the lightning and the volcanoes and the primordial soup it's it's there's a there's a big gap
there and it's it's fascinating to think about and it's fascinating to see how different people's
belief systems uh lead them to different answers there not to give any spoilers but postcard from
earth so darren aronofsky's film the idea there is there's probes that are sent out from earth oh
that's to all these other planets and each probe contains two humans a man and a woman
uh-huh and those two humans are in love so think of a couple in love they're sent there with all the
information basically a leaf that holds the information of what it takes to create life
on other planets to recreate on earth and other planets and the two humans hold all the information
for the things that make life on earth special especially in human civilization is love consciousness
the the social connection so all that information is sent in the probe and the postcard from earth
is uh those humans waking up remembering all the information that is earth that well like a celebration of
all the things that make earth magical throughout its history all the diversity of organisms all of
that you're loading all that in to create life on that new planet which is something i think alien
civilizations are doing they're sending probes all throughout the galaxy and they just haven't
arrived yet but anyway that's another uh that's so beautiful and one of the things that i i think i
i want to see that so much and one of the things that i love about aronofsky's work is is the fountain
and what i find so beautiful about that is that now here he's saying okay we're sending probes out
to other worlds alien civilizations and in the fountain it was sort of what i thought he did
so beautifully was braid together those three stories where in one i don't remember if he's
in a spaceship or if that's supposed to be like his soul the other one he's a scientist in sort
of like comparable times to ours and then he's the the spanish explorer but either way there's the tree
of life and it sort of braids together all of the major religions and it made me think of that quote
that you hear where it says you know oh god what was it um christ wasn't a christian and buddha wasn't
a buddhist and muhammad wasn't a muslim they were all just teachers who were teaching love and it's
like the fountain the fountain sort of says nature is that that driving force and it's our job to
understand that the game is love and that's what that's what the main character in the fountain needs
to learn is that it's that it's nature that's going to just that's going to carry your soul through
this this this thing and that there's so much you don't understand and the epiphany at the end
god i love that movie god i love it among many things you're also an artist is trying to convert
the thing that is nature into the thing that we humans can understand the complexity the beauty of
it that's what darren arnowski tried to do with those couple of films that's something that i hope
you do actually in the medium of film too that would be very interesting and you do that in the medium of
books currently um how much do you think we understand about the history of life on earth
i think we got it all wrong no i don't know it seems like they change it all the time you know they say
they say that easter island you know when i was in college they were big on telling you that easter
island they ruined their environment and uh they had environmental collapse and that's why there was
nobody on easter island it was a cautionary tale we could ruin our environment and now it seems like
they've changed their mind on that and then when humans entered north america seems to be hugely
up to speculation and you know the the africa spreading that we all spread out of africa and
then the pleistocene overkill extinction theory and it's like it seems like every few years they update
it and they change it and they say oh the guys no no no the guys from 10 years ago actually my new
theory is the best theory let's write some books and get me on letterman and it seems like there's a new
prevailing theory that's really always exciting and edgy about how how we got here and where we
came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political implications like how we should use
the amazon moving forward like the amazon was engineered by people so fuck it let's just cut it
down yeah it's i tend to believe that we mostly don't understand anything but there is an optimism in
continuously figuring out the puzzle of that and we we offline talked about the the graham hancock
flint dibble debate uh on on rogan i like debates personally so flint dibble represents mainstream
archaeology and i actually like the whole science the whole field of archaeology you're trying to figure
out history with so little information you're trying to put together this this this puzzle when you have
so little and you're desperately clinging on to little clues and from those clues using the simple
possible explanation to understand and now with modern uh technology as as flint was trying to express
that you can use large amounts of data that's like imperfect but just the scale and using that to
reconstruct civilizations there are different practices from the little details of uh what kind of
things they eat how they interact with each other what kind of art they create to when they exist
what are the time frames all that kind of stuff and that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding
but still the error bars are large in terms of what really happened and that leaves room for
things like graham hancock talks about like lost civilizations which i like also because it gives you have a
a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we got completely wrong and
that's always good to like remember it's confusing to me to imagine like what i don't even know what
like what ended the why where'd the egyptians go like what happened it seems like they were doing so
good they had so much cool um but i mean i was reading anthropological stuff in the amazon about about
tribes that you know just through through their societal structures and through their hunting practices
that that that didn't really develop practices that worked and kind of bands of people that went extinct
before they could turn into larger societies and and there's there's a lot of people that got it wrong
you know for every explorer that that that that leaves borneo and arrives in south america there's
probably hundreds hundreds more that just die at sea get eaten by sharks you know avalanche and it's just
it's so fascinating to me that we all of us really past our grandparents don't really even know where
we came from like do you know who your great great great grandparents are like no i mean there's methods
to try to figure that out but really again the air bars are so large it's almost like we trying to
create a narrative that makes sense for us you know that i'm i'm 10 neanderthal therefore i can bench press
this much and uh therefore my aggressive tendencies have a explanation when in reality there's so much
diversity of personalities that they they uh far overshadow any possible histories we might have
your aggressive tendencies don't have any explanation you're no you need to you listen to me right now
i'm sorry don't hit me again don't choke me out again yeah man uh one of the things you and i talk
a lot about is different explorers yeah um who do you think is i'm just throwing ridiculous question
one after the other who do you think is the greatest explorer of all time oh god i love shackleton but i
hate the cold so i can't i don't really i can't even read about it i hate the cold so much um i can't
i can't even go there for fun um i think percy faucet and the amazon was was was was the goat
in terms of just sheer the last of the victorian era you know march forward go deeper just stop at
nothing and then eventually take such big risks that you never come back it's it's hard for me to
relate to that kind of exploration because to me i'm such a softy i wouldn't want to like
leave my family behind i wouldn't want to like even if you told me that i could leave earth and
go exploring and i could go touch the moon i'd be like nope absolutely not like the highway is
dangerous enough like i would never risk dying in space this guy left his home went out into the
jungle out there with horrendous gear compared to the camping gear we have today no headlamp
and just explored for years on end well let me actually push back you have that
explore there is definitely a thing in you just me having observed you behave in the jungle and in
the world you're pulled towards exploration towards adventure towards the possibility of discovering
something beautiful including like a small little creature or like a whole new part of the rainforest
a part of the world that like is like holy this is beautiful i think that's the same kind of
imperative so maybe not going out to the stars but yeah like i could see you doing exactly the same thing so he
disappeared in 1925 during during an expedition to find an ancient lost city which uh he and other
people believed existed in the amazon rainforest so there's that pull like yeah i'm going to go into
there with shitty equipment with the possibility of finding something and they said he ran into
uncontacted tribes and started goofing off i think he started i think he started dancing and singing like
the tribes were ready to kill him and he started goofing and like doing a song and a dance and just
being ridiculous and the tribes are like what now and they're like wait wait wait wait wait don't shoot
him yet that's a funny one yeah and they they actually he kind of like on a human level used used humor
to save his own life on multiple occasions to the point where he de-escalated the situation was like
look we're not here to fight we're here to we have a pile of maps you know all my guys have beriberi
dengue malaria like we're dying out here if you guys just go on your merry way we'll go on our
merry way and like incredible he was so tough and then that guy from shackleton's expedition ended up
on one of faucet's expeditions and you go oh yeah he's a he's a proven explorer he's been through the
antarctic and the guy was like fuck the jungle absolutely fuck the jungle he was like and and
there's a great quote where he says without a machete and something you know i don't remember
exactly the words he used but he said without a machete in this environment you don't last
yeah and you know that now like you you in that tangle to just take three steps that way would
i would immediately be taking on i mean i'm not wearing shoes right now yeah bullet ants venomous
snakes spikes through my feet tripping over myself i don't have a headlamp
unbelievable risk right there we're sitting on the edge of tragedy can you explain what the the
purpose of the machete in this situation is like what what is a machete how does it work how does it
allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment so this is the tool that i spend most
of my life carrying this is in my hand for 90 of my time and in the jungle you really need a machete
there's so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through and like a jaguar an ocelot
a lot of these other animals that are more horizontally based and low to the ground they
can make it like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them and
it's dangerous and there's as you hit the bamboo it ricochets and there's spikes and then one piece
falls and it pulls a a train a vine that has spikes on it and that hits you in the neck and it just
the jungle is savage to humans but if you are an agouti a little rodent or a jaguar or a deer you can
kind of slip through this stuff and the deer have developed really small antlers they can just kind
of weave through low to the ground and so and so for us being these vertical beings walking through
the jungle it it really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement
at all times so machete is just a very very useful tool um it could help you pull thorns out of your
body as you saw last night we can use it to find food you want machete fishing you cut a fish head off
with a machete by like it was swimming and then you basically you know uh machete the water
and the other fascinating thing about that fish without his head it kept moving so it was amazing
it was just using i guess this nervous system to uh to swim beautifully i mean i that there's so many
questions there about how nature works you could well let's explain it because he the way the machete
hit this fish it kind of kind of took his justice his eyes off of and his lower jaw was still there
so it's really just like the brain and the top draw that came off and this fish as the the dust
cleared in this stream this fish was i found it very haunting in a very like interstellar way like
it was just the programming was still there but the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving
and it was gonna die but it was still swimming and it looks like an like an like a live fish it was it
was and you're still trying to catch it which is and i still have to work to catch it because
every time i caught it it would it would freak out and then it would jump back in the water and
i'm programmed here from years and years of living in the amazon that everything can hurt you so you
actually become quite you know if a moth lands on you you flick it because it could be a bullet ant
and so even the fish here a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them and so even though i
know that fish i know its name i've eaten them many times as i was holding it when it would twitch
with that explosive power just like the came and i would i would i would get that fear response and
release it and so that happened three or four times before i finally said this is stupid even though
he's slippery he hasn't got ahead i can hold on to him i put him in my pocket yeah you put him in
pocket and then we fried him up and he was delicious so and i'm grateful for his existence of her
his role and for my existence on this planet this brief existence that i was able to enjoy that
delicious delicious fish so the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle there's
vines by the way there's rope like things yeah they're extremely strong and they go all kinds
of directions to go horizontal and all this i don't even how treat we have a tree right above us that
makes no sense there's like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it
that makes it just makes no sense it feels like sometimes trees come from the uh from the sky
sometimes they come from the ground i don't i don't really quite understand the how that works
because there's new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees right away and the new trees come
up yeah that whole mechanism strangler figs and so strangler figs as you go across the world's ecosystems
that whole belt of you know whether you're in rainforests in the amazon the congo indonesia
all across the tropics you have strangler figs and the amazing thing that this that this species does
it's become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper influence on its ecosystem wherever it
is because they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making it hard for animals
to find fruit to find food and so the bats the birds the monkeys they all go to the strangler fig
they eat the fruit and the fruit of course is just tricking the animals the the plants are
tricking the animals into carrying their seeds to another tree and so they're getting free
transportation monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating strangler figs and then that strangler
fig sends out its vines gets to the ground and then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients out
competes that tree for light grows hyper drive around the trunk of that tree and then eventually that
tree will die and the strangler fig will win because it got a it got a boost up to the top whereas
these little trees down here they're gonna have to wait their turn they have to wait until a tree
falls until there's a light gap and then they have enough food to grow quick and so this whole thing
is an energy economy everything is just trying to get sunlight and so strangler figs yeah top-down
trees growing or parasitic top-down octopus trees growing over other giant trees and you've seen
the size of some of the trees here so uh you know back to percy faucet and exploration what do you
think it was like for him back then a hundred years ago god damn going to the jungle well see the thing
is those guys didn't go with the locals they came down here with like mules and they tried to do it
their way yeah and so he's one of the people that wrote about the green hell
the jungle as the oppressive uh war zone where there's nothing to eat and everything is killing
you and it's i i think i think that that image is so wrong because as you saw last night we could go
if we went out with jj right now we would machete fish some fish we could start a little fire we do it
it all in shorts like to jj it's green paradise and it's intense but but if you know what you're
doing which the local people surely do well then just beneath the sand there's turtle eggs that you
can eat and inside the nuts on the ground there's grubs that you can eat and if you really needed to
you could just jump on a caiman and eat that because their tails are pretty full of meat and it's like
like there's actually unending amount amounts of food here and so it's it's they were pretty you
know they were strange if you're able to tune into the that frequency i feel like your you and jj yeah
are able to tune to the to the frequency of the jungle that is a a provider not a destroyer of human
life right yeah like uh i think to be uh collaborated with not fought against
yes but we're coming at that with a with our modern lens because we're coming down here with
i've survived how many infections in the jungle where those probably would have killed me before
yeah so my dead ass opinion of the jungle would have been overwhelming and collective murder as
herzog says um and so percy faucet was coming down here with this view of it's trying to kill us at all
times where we are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability to
survive infections and and so it's it is different for us it is different we're we're we're coming at
this very very different but faucet to me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers like the
really batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the into the dark spaces on the map
and it's very hard for me to identify with him but with for instance richard evans schultes from harvard
that's someone where you go okay now we're getting to the point where i can start to understand
i mean just like the conquistadors and they tell you the conquistadors showed up and you know they
killed the the spanish killed 2000 inca on the first day and then they they marched to this city
they're like when i hear about that can you imagine yourself just like slaughtering a bunch of women
and children and soldiers and then just like drinking some wine and doing it again tomorrow i can't actually
wrap my head around that yeah it just seems like an entire different world no like different world
different value system different value system a different relationship with violence and life
and death i think we value life more we value we resist violence more yeah like i i just i can't
like if we saw a car accident i feel like if i saw a car accident like you know or if you see a
little bit of war some violence like it affects you these people were so comfortable with those
things it was such a normal part of their the spartans the the comanches like they became so
comfortable with war to the point that it became what they did and they celebrated it celebrated it and
direct violence too like taking that machete and murdering me only or if i got to the machete first me
murdering you not a chance bitch all right and then i would put it on instagram and show off
and the number of dms i would get from murdering you with a machete meanwhile half the world right
now is messaging me saying my dms are filled with take care of lex don't lose lex make sure lex comes
back safe lex is a national treasure we love lex make sure he holds a snake the amount of love that
is out there meanwhile i emerged from the jungle of blood around me with a machete and i take over
your instagram account he's very humble he doesn't want to hear about the love
all right so what do you think makes a great explorer whether it's uh percy fawcett richard
evans shulte by the way say who richard evans shulte is he's a biologist so that's another lens to
wish to be an explorer yes to study the the biology the the the immense diversity of biological
life all around us richard evans shulte's um i know about him from reading wade davis's book one
river which is this big hefty you know five or six hundred page tome about the amazon and it covers
two stories it's richard evans shulte's and i think it's in the 40s i think it's like pre-world war ii era
where he's in the amazon looking for the blue orchid and the cure for this and that and he's pressing
plants and he's going to these indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest and
they and they drink ayahuasca and they they talk to the gods and they he learns about how they
believe that the anaconda came down from the milky way and swam across the land and created the rivers
and sort of he came down and and and even though he was a western scientist from harvard he embraced
the indigenous perspective on the world on creation on spirituality and and he he sort of resigned
himself and gave himself fully to that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the amazon
that had hardly been explored and certainly never been explored in the way he was doing it in the
ethno-botanical spiritual way of of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants and how do the
local indigenous people use and understand them for example you know of 80 000 species of plants in the
amazon rainforest and 400 billion trees in the amazon rainforest the statistics of likelihood that
through trial and error that humans could discover ayahuasca it's i it's astronomical that one of these trees
and a root when put together allow you to go access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and
uh and talk to the gods that's that's that's almost almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself
the fact that trial and error it would take like millions of years or something it's it's it's i
forget what the figure is it's incredible but richard evans schultes was one of the first people that
came down and saw that and then one river is where wade davis comes back i believe in the 70s and the
the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places with with naked native
tribes and these these intact belief systems wade davis comes back and a lot of the same places
that schultes went now there's missionary schools and they're wearing discarded nikes and you know
whatever i don't know if there's nikes in the 70s but like western stuff has made it in
they've been contacted domesticated forced into western society and you know a lot of them then
forget the thousands and thousands of years the that have gone into creating the medicinal botanical
knowledge that the indigenous possess about how to cure ear infections and how to treat illnesses from
the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single generation with with the
modernization yeah he uh he wrote the plants of the gods their sacred healing and the hallucinogenic
powers that is interesting you mentioned like how to discover that like how do you find those
incredible plants those incredible things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways
of course physically heal but also like take you on a mental journey that's interesting so you don't
think trial and error is possible i was reading about ayahuasca and they're saying they're saying
statistically if if you know if a bunch if you put a thousand humans in the amazon and gave them
villages to live in because humans are communal species it would take tens and tens of thousands of
years or perhaps even centuries before even the possibility it's like that thing you know a bunch of
chips on a keyboard how could they write hamlet it's like astronomical odds to get to oh wait this and
this dose together and so what the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret
through the jungle to us as a link to the spirit world and that that's how we know this because if
they didn't remember it from their ancestors we would have no idea how to get this information from the wild
so i will likely do ayahuasca what do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking
that journey i think that ayahuasca is i can only speak from personal experience and for me it was
as if your brain is a house you've lived in your entire life and it's a big house it's a mansion
and there's many many rooms that you didn't even know exist hidden rooms behind the bookshelves
under the floorboards rooms that you had no idea were there and some of them are fantastic and some of
them are terrifying basements and ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that at its at its at its most
effective you sit in front of the shaman with the candlelight with the sounds of the jungle and you
drink this substance and after that what happens is the journey is all inside and and the shaman's
supposed to be able to guide you through that but in my experience you're you're so deep inside like
falling through nebulas out in space no physical form or crawling through the jungle like it's like
it's really really powerful like it's not like a it's not like the recreational drugs that that
that everyone does like where you go i did mushrooms and i could see so i could see music like and i was
talking to my friends but no no like your face down on the floor usually vomiting sometimes shitting
um you know having dialogues with with the creator and that that that can be that can be traumatizing as
well as amazing it's a really good way of looking at it it's a big house and you get to open doors
so you've never have before and discover what rumors are there inside you you ever think about that like
that there's parts of yourself you haven't discovered yet or maybe you've been suppressing
how much uh are you exploring the shadow oh boy so say you me carl young and jordan peterson
are in a deserted island together fuck i didn't even make my bed today there's no bed on an island
great i want to see you and jordan peterson do ayahuasca together um
i i think i think i that's that's the thing ayahuasca to me you know i've kind of told you about like
i've i've experienced some things that really made me believe that that there's that there's a benevolent
force around us but to me ayahuasca was like a was a ride through the scariest parts of the universe
to sort of be like here's here's what it could be like you know the that's where i came up with my
idea that you know like deep space or just space outer space is just the outside of the video game
and this is it because when i was on ayahuasca i was i was one of the jungle creatures and i wasn't paul
and i didn't have a name and for a long time i saw many things and i was i arrived at this spot in the
jungle where there was a big tree and all the animals were there and they were all not in words
not and not in any language that we can understand but they were all discussing what to do about the
threat and and it was all it was all leaving it was all flying up and it was fire and the jungle was
being destroyed and it was like i went and then after that it was just space and stars and silence like
crushing vacuum silence for years and that was terrifying that was fucking terrifying when i came
back and i had hands man i can remember my own name you're grounded things are simpler you're back
inside the video game what are the chances you think we're actually living in a video game when you say a
video game it implies that there's a player who's the player is god no there's a main player usually
that's not going to be god god is the thing that creates the video game oh so then we're just
and there's somebody's our npcs like i'm an npc you're an npc jesus christ so yeah you yeah yeah you created
me see is this like halo where you can kind of kill the npcs because i see how you put the machete behind
you okay i i think i'm just gonna take a stand here i think that because people i'm just sick of
fucking playing it halfway i think that because people live indoors in climate controlled boxes in
cities far away from nature they've completely lost track of everything that's real and they've
started to think that we're living inside of simulation notice that nobody carrying an alpaca
up a mountain thinks that we're living inside of a video game no they all know that it's real because
they've had babies on the floor of a cold hut yeah they understand the consequences of life they
understand the fish and how hard it is to get them and the basic rules of the wind and the rain and the
river and that we all have to play by those and that it's and and you talk to a talk to a grieving
mother and ask her if she's living inside a video game and it's like the people to me this this whole
thing of are we living in a simulation to me that's a that's that's the that's the infirmary of of
society starting to that to starting to to to to to to parody itself it's people going i have no meaning
in my life anymore so is this even real and again go ask the sherpa go ask the eskimo they're not
they're not you forget what fundamentally matters in life what is the source of meaning in the human
life uh if you talk about such subjects nevertheless you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical
questions and uh if you do it for short enough a time you won't forget about the things that matter
that there is human suffering that there is real human joy that is real that the the the our time
in the jungle was very hard did you suffer enough to know that it's real yeah i man i was hoping we're
in a video game that whole time so that's actually that's actually a really good way to there was this
moment that i watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle because we had no
water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our hands and our feet
and our legs and we were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime and we didn't know if a big tree was
going to just fall on us and mousetrap kill us and there's a lot of uncertainty but i watched something
very special happen to you and that was i saw you crouching by the side of this puddle it wasn't even
a flowing stream so we couldn't drink it and you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your
shirt and you you looked at me and you just said the only thing that i care about right now is water
and i feel like in that moment we were united in the in the simple reality of the fact that
we were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary
yeah uh it was scary but also there's like a
a joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body temperature down
and there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually we'll find clean water
because uh water is plentiful on earth it's kind of like a delusional faith that eventually we'll find
it was just like a little celebration
i think the cooling aspect of the water because uh you know the body temperature is really high from
traversing the really dense jungle and just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing
else really is yeah it was a little celebration of life of life on earth of earth of the jungle of
the jungle of everything it was nice it was a nice moment i think about that had a couple of those
there's one in the puddle and one in the river
one was uh full of delusion and fear and the other one was full of uh relief and celebration
yeah i've i've you know there's this thing that they they say where the the the all the pleasure in
life is derived from the transitions when you're cold warm feels good when you're hot cold feels
good when you're hungry food feels good and when you're that thirsty water becomes god and it's all
you want and also and also the other thing is that when you're when we're out there it felt so good to
be so lost and so tired and so like we're doing level to like like how would you how would you describe
um the physicality of what we were doing the level of physical like exertion well it's something
that i've haven't trained i don't even know how you would train for that kind of thing but it's
extremely dense jungle so every single step is like completely unpredictable in terms of the terrain
your foot interacts with so the different variety of slippery that is on the jungle floor is fascinating
because some things i mean the slope matters but some roots of trees are slippery some are not
uh some trees in the ground already rotted through so if you step through you're going to uh potentially
fall through so it could be a shallow hole or it could be a very deep hole with some leaves and
vegetation covering up a hole where if you fall through you could break a leg and completely lose
your footing or fall rolling down hill and if you roll downhill i'm i'm pretty sure there's a 99
probability that you'll hit a thing with spikes on it so there's so many layers of avoiding dangers
of small dangers and big dangers all around you with every single step so there's like a mental
exhaustion that sets in like the just the perception and you're just observing you you're
extremely good at perceiving having situational awareness of taking the information in that's
really important and filtering out the stuff that's not important but even for you that's
exhausting and for me it was completely exhausting just paying attention paying attention to everything
around you so that exhaustion was surprising because it's like there's moments when you're like i don't
give a damn anymore i'm just gonna step i'm just going to like and so that's it you go i don't care
anymore and you reach out and you i'm just going to lean against this tree and then what happened
every time spikes in it yeah yeah and then you have to care yeah and then there's just bad luck
because there is wasp nests there there's there's just like a million things and that is physically
is mentally psychologically exhausting because there's the uncertainty when is this going to end
it's up uh in our particular situation up and down hills up and down hills very steep downward
very steep upward no water all this kind of stuff and it it's uh the most difficult thing i've ever
done but it's very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it difficult because i i run
long distances very regular i do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level
could seem much more challenging than what we did but no this was another beast this is something else
but it was also raw and real and beautiful because it's like it's what the explorers did yeah it's what
earth is without humans and it and also just like the massive scale of the trees around us
was uh the humbling size difference between human and tree it's both humbling in that like that tree is
really old it's it's a time difference uh lifetime difference and just the scale it's like holy
shit we live on an earth that can create those things it makes me feel small in every way that life is short
that my physical presence on this earth is tiny how vulnerable i am all those feelings are there
and in that the physical uh endurance of traversing the jungle yeah was the
the hardest journey that i remember ever taking
every step
and then that made making it out of the jungle and then made it
the swim in the water that we could drink that was just pure joy
it was probably one of the happiest moments in my life just sitting there with you
paul and with jj in the water
full darkness the rain coming down and all just us all just laughing having made it through that
haven't eaten a bit of food before and the absurdity of the timing of all of it that it
somehow worked out
and
how we're just three little humans
sitting in a river
just our heads emerged barely above water with jungle all around us what a life
that was a real adventure
that was a real one yeah i'll never forget that so um it's a real honor to have shared that
of course we had very different experiences when you saw a caiman in that situation you're like
i have to go meet that guy it's a friend
well i mean we were in the in the river in a thunderstorm
just our next above we're all laughing our asses off and i mean we're in the river with the stingrays and
the black caiman and the piranha and all the electric yields and everything and it's pitch black out
and then what were we doing we're holding our headlamps up and there's those swirling moths
the infinity moths all making those geometric patterns and it's like we're just
three ridiculous primates
three friends in a river just laughing yeah
because we were safer in that river than we had been in there and we were rejoicing
yeah that that that the thunderstorm was was compared to the war zone that we'd been living
in the thunderstorm was safe and it was it really was a beautiful moment and also that like very
different life trajectories have taken these three humans into this one place yeah it's like what yeah
wow is this universe that would like uh because we're kind of like those moths you know what i mean
like we're where we would come from some weird place on this earth and we'd have all kinds of
shit happen to us and we're all pursuing some shit and some light and we ended up here together
enjoying this moment yeah that's something else it just felt absurd and in that absurdity was this
like real human joy and damn water tasted good oh water's good man water and those those little
oranges yeah those things and then i would just say like do you feel like i feel like running like no
matter how much i run i feel like the like you run you do a workout and then you stop maybe people
who do ultras feel this but like i felt like the we would we woke up it was like you know wake up at
dawn 6 a.m let's start walking you know break camp go and it's like pretty much you just don't stop
all day and it's level 10 cardio all day long and you're sweating buckets and there's no water it's
like you would never put yourself through that voluntarily you couldn't you'd never you would never
have the resolve to to continue torturing yourself except for that we were trying to make it to the
to freedom to get out and it's like the obsession of that with the compass and the machete and the
navigating fuck i think there's something to be said about like the fact that we didn't
think through much of that no and we just dived into it i think there was like there were like
laughing enjoying ourselves moments before and once you go in you're like oh shit oh shit and you just
come face to face with it yeah i think that's what you know whatever that is in humans that
goes to that that's what the explorers do the you know and the the best of them do it to the extreme
levels well i think that what we did was to to a pretty extreme level because we we left the safety
of a river of knowing where we were and voluntarily got lost in the amazon with very little provisions
on an on a very now that we're back i'm now that we experienced what we experienced i really can't
stop thinking about how stupid it was that we did that yeah because if we had gotten lost pico was
saying to me even if you guys had if one of you had broken your leg it's you know days in either
direction even if they had sent help for us help would take how long to scour all that jungle sound
doesn't travel even even a helicopter even if they looked for us they wouldn't be able to see us how
would we signal for help can't really build a fire and so it's like if anything had gone wrong if we'd
gone a few degrees different different to the west would have taken us two more days if we'd if we'd
gotten injured it'd be it'd be carry through that yeah and so it somehow only afterwards am i really
going wow thank god we got out of this thank god after i see so many people going make sure
nothing happens to lex friedman yeah i'd be the deadest motherfucker on earth
it somehow works out it does seem to somehow work out let me ask you about jane goodall another explorer
of a different kind uh what do you think about her about her role in understanding this
natural world of ours i think that jane is like a living historical treasure like i think somehow
she's alive but she's she's already reached that level where it's like einstein jane goodall like
there's these these these incredible minds and you know growing up as a child my parents would read to
me because i was so dyslexic i didn't learn to read until i was quite old and my mom was a big
jane goodall fan and and all i wanted to hear about was animals and so i would i would get read to about
this lady named jane goodall this girl who went to africa and studied chimps and who broke all the rules
and named her study subjects even though that wasn't what she was supposed to do and she became this
incredible advocate for earth and for ecosystems and for and she seemed to realize as her career
went on that that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key because they're going you know
that thing where she says we don't so much uh inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our
children we're just here we're just passing through and so if we destroy it we're we're we're dimming the
lights on the lives of future generations and so she's been really really cognizant of that and
she's been a light in the darkness she's sort of in terms of saying that animals have personalities
and culture and and their own inalienable rights and reasons for existing and and that human life
is valuable she's very big on that every day we influence the people around us and and the events
of the earth even if you feel like your life is small and insignificant that that that you do have an
impact and i think that's a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness that jane carries
what do you think about her field work with the chimps badass the fact that she did what
she did at the age that she did at the time that she did is is incredible it's actually incredible
she has that explorer gene and she also has that relentless relentlessness is like this incredible
quality she just you know she travels 300 days a year educating people talking around the world
trying to help bolster conservation now before it's too late and traveling 300 days a year is not fun
traveling at all can be not fun so i i started reading the river of doubt book you recommended to
me until he was about yeah uh so that guy's badass on many levels but i didn't realize how much of a
naturalist he was how much of a scholar of the natural world he was so that book details his
journey into the amazon jungle um what do you find inspiring about teddy roosevelt and that whole
journey of just saying fuck it of going to the amazon jungle of taking on that expedition well i mean
teddy roosevelt you could write volumes on what's inspiring about him i think that you know he was he was a
weak asthmatic little rich kid that that wasn't physically able that had no self-confidence and
he was very and he and and he had pretty severe depression he had tragedy in his life and he was
very um at least for me he's been one of the people like in the one of the first historical figures who
where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things and and to make himself from being a
weak asthmatic little teenager to to to sort of strengthening himself and building muscle and
becoming this barrel-chested lion of a guy who could be the president who could be an explorer and
uh one of the rough riders and he's just everything he does is so is so hyperbolically you know incredible
to come out of war and have the other people you fought with go he this guy has no fear i mean he
must have just been a psychopath and had no fear and then proving it further was that thing where
he was going to give a speech to a bunch of people and he got shot in the chest yeah and it went through
his spectacle case and through his speech and even though the bullet was lodged in his chest
this man said don't hurt the guy that shot me i believe he asked him why'd you do it and then as he's
bleeding and in the rain said no no no i'm not going to the hospital i'm going to keep going with
the speech what a badass that's incredible but going to the jungle on many levels is really is
really difficult for him at that time there's so many things like so many more things even than now
that can kill you all the different infections everything and the lack of knowledge just the sheer
lack of knowledge so that truly is an expedition a really really challenging expedition so there's
lessons about what it takes to be a great explorer from that the perseverance how important you think
is perseverance and exploration especially to the jungle i think it's all there is if you hear about
the people and and i think that that is a tremendous metaphor for life because whether you hear about that
plane that crashed in the andes and the people were alone and freezing and they had to eat
each other and some of them made it out some of them kept the fire burning and teddy roosevelt
voluntarily after being president threw himself into the amazon rainforest and survived came so close
to dying but survived and so perseverance is all of it i mean that's that's i think that's our quality
as a human so they also mapped so on the biology side is interesting but they mapped and documented
a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity what does it take to do that so when i when i see
move about the jungle you're always like you're capturing a creature take a picture right down like so
you can find new creatures find new things about the jungle document them sort of a scientific perspective
on the jungle but the back then there's even less known much less known about the jungle so what
what do you think it takes to document to map that world and you unexplored wilderness i i mean they're
they're clearly pressing botanical specimens they're probably shooting birds and and and roosevelt
knew how to knew how to preserve those specimens i mean he really was a naturalist so he knew exactly
so if he's seeing these animals to them whereas we'll take a picture and identify it they were harvesting
specimens taking them with them drying them out um for them it was totally different and and it could
be the first you know there's i don't know i forget what jj said there's something like 70 species of
ant birds here and it's like so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species
of bird and so for them as you have this bird and so perfectly preserving that specimen i think a lot of
non-scientific people don't realize that every species from blue whale to elephant to blue jay to
sparrow whatever whatever it is whatever species we have on record there are scientific specimens and
the first people to see them shot them and that's the museums are filled with these catalogs preserved
birds that these explorers brought back from new guinea and south america and africa and then put into
these drawers and and and now we we labeled them and we said this is you know this is red and green
macaw this is scarlet macaw this is brown crested ant bird and this is and it's just they're just
categorized that book of birds you have like encyclopedia of birds yo what the human achievement
in these pages for people listening paul just flipping through a huge number of pages these are just is
this in the amazon or is this in peru this is just here this is birds of peru dude pages on pages of
toucans and arasaris and and hummingbirds and ant birds and and smoky brown woodpecker and and
tropical screech owl which we just heard by the way it's just it's endless who knew there were so
many birds i had no idea there was so many documenting all of that uh analyze i mean there's also which we
got to experience and you're you're pretty good at also is is actually making understanding and
making the sounds of the different birds yeah what's your favorite bird sound to make uh undulated
tinamoo because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk uh they're usually the ones that make up
what is considered by many to be the anthem of the amazon can you do a little bird for us
that's what a undulated tinamoo sounds like and it's usually like oh it is getting to be afternoon
it's kind of it's almost like hearing church bells on a sunday it's like you just there's something
about it you go ah there he is and like you were saying it's a reminder oh that's a friend of mine
yeah surrounded by friends i have so many friends here what does it take to survive out here
what are some basic principles of survival in the jungle cleanliness i mean really but we talked
about this but like you know keeping i have so many holes in my skin right now look i have a mosquito
there we go um i have so many spots that i've scratched off of my skin because a mosquito bites
me and then i scratch it or the other big one is that i i worry that i have a tick
not uh deliberately not with my thinking brain but my my simian brain just wants to find and remove
ticks and so i scratch and then if my fingernails get too long i remove my skin and then
those beget those get infected in the jungle and so staying hyper clean using soap like basic stuff
keeping order to your bags um order to your gear things in dry bags make sure you know we did we
we explained that we got in the river during a thunderstorm we didn't explain why we did that
because the thunderstorm came when we had eaten dinner but we hadn't set up our tents and so we
decided to cover our bags with our boats that we had been carrying our pack rafts that we've been
carrying in our backpacks so all of our gear would stay dry so the only thing we could do is either
sit in the rain and be cold or sit in the river and be warm and so keeping our gear dry momentary
discomfort for future you know that was that to me was an incredibly smart calculation to make
is you really just you got to be smart out here you can't you know not running out of a headlamp
while you're out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness yeah it really takes just being a
little bit on your toes and i find that that that necessity of being on your toes is a place that i
like to live in it's just the right amount of challenge here so keeping the gear organized
and all that but also being willing to sort of improvise i've seen you improvise very well because
there's so much unknowns there's so many so much chaos and dynamic aspects that like planning is not
going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day no it's been really funny watching
watching you sort of shed your planning brain like day like day one it was very much like so are we
gonna and then i i could tell i could see your i could see your brow sort of furrow when you i would
go i don't know what time we're gonna get there and you'd go well just tell me and i'd be like i don't
know what the jungle's gonna let us do you know let's do let's record the podcast tomorrow okay but we
if it if it you know if it rains if it gets windy if a free comes if there's a a jaguar with rabies like
anything could happen landslide like anything literally i mean the thing you mentioned trees
falling that's a thing in the jungle that's a major thing in the holy shit first of all a lot of trees
fall yeah and they fall quickly and they could just kill you they fall quickly they're huge we're
talking about trees that are like the size of school buses stacked yeah and connected to other trees with
vines so that when they fall this millennium tree this thousand year old tree boom it shakes the
ground pulls down other trees with it so if you're anywhere near that for a few acres you're getting
smashed that's the end of you and so the jungle at any moment that you're out there could just decide
to delete you and then the leafcutter ants and the army ants and the flies and everything you'll be
digested in three days you'll be gone gone no bones nothing who do you think would eat most of you
uh i would hope that that like a king vulture with a colorful face would just dramatically just
get in there like right in the ass just like nature is metal just like when they like walk
in through the elephant's ass i'd want that on camera trap i think that would be a great way to go
and we slowly look up and just kind of smile yeah just rip out your intestines and just shake it
victorious over your dead body well but also honor a friend that's another yeah sure but you know you
just you'd look so you know you're white naked ass laying there in the jungle you'd be like face
down the shit that's why you always have to look good any moment a tree can fall on you and a
vulture just swoops in and eats your heart that's right uh we talked about alone this show a bit
yo rock house yeah who is well what do you think about that guy rock house roland welker from season
seven he built the rock house he killed the muskox uh with bow and arrow and then finished it with a
knife yeah and had the gopro to mount to you know yeah to document it that's really mind-blowing i mean
so for people don't know that shows you're supposed to survive as long as possible on season seven of the
show they literally said you can only win it if uh you survive a hundred days and and that's there's
a lot of aspects of that show that's difficult one of which is it's in the cold the others they get
just a handful of supplies no food nothing none of that so they have to figure all of that out and
uh this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show roland welker he built
a rock house shelter so what i mean what does survival entail it's building a shelter
fire catching food so staying warm getting enough energy to sort of keep doing the work it takes a lot
of work like building the rock house i read that it took 500 calories an hour from him so he had to feed
himself right quite a lot you're lifting uh 200 pound boulders and still the guy lost uh i read 44 pounds
which is 20 of his body weight so that's survival what uh lessons what inspiration do you draw from him
i think he was fun to watch because he had this indomitable spirit he was just he wasn't there
to commune with nature he was there to win and he was like to me that's the pioneer mentality he just
he was just he goes i'm a hunting guide i'm out here i'm gonna win that money i'm gonna survive
through the winter he wasn't worried i feel like so many people are like they worry second guessing
themselves am i in a video game i don't know what's my you know just questioning their entire
existential identity and this guy was like you know what there's a muskox over there i'm gonna shoot
it i'm gonna stab it and then i'm gonna make a pouch out of its ball sack and i'm gonna live off
that for the next few months and win a half a million dollars and that's an amazing amount of
pragmatic optimism that i just enjoyed and every time he would go we got to get back to rock house
and it became even though he's all alone it was he had a big smile on his face and what made that
season so great was that it was him and then it was callie and and roland had you know the muscle
and could make rock house and then callie was was the opposite she was this girl who yeah she could
hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and and she wasn't using raw power but what was so endearing
about her was that how much she loved being out there as hard as it was and as isolation isolationist
as it was she was smiling every time every time the show cut to her she was like hey everybody
it's morning can you believe the frost like you've been out there for 100 days
amazing opt i think it was really an amazing show of that that the game is all here the game of life
the game of alone and the game of life because it's the same thing yeah she maintained that sort of
silliness the the goofiness all through it when the condition got really tough and she had a very
different perspective as you know roland didn't want any of the spirituality it's very pragmatic yeah and
for callie is very spiritual collection connection to the land she said something like she wanted
not only to take from the land but to give back i mean there's this kind of poetic spiritual connection
to the land it's such a dire contrast to roland and but she's still a badass i mean to survive no matter
what no matter the kind of personality you have you have to be a badass i think she uh took a
uh porcupine quill from her shoulder that was crazy because i think it went in yeah somewhere
completely different and it migrated to her shoulder yeah and the way they understood that
is because they have i said that's impossible yeah because i remember that she's like pulling
off her shirt and she she's like there's something and then she like pushes it out yeah and i remember
like i was like hold up hold up hold up hold up how yeah and it was because the barbs once it goes in
as you move and flex your body it moves a little bit each time and it gets migrate like i didn't even
think of that shit plus if i remember correctly uh i think she caught two porcupines the second one was
like rotting or something or infected it had an affected body whatever had the spots on it yeah she
chose not to eat it no and then she chose not to eat it at first and then she decided to eat it
eventually yeah i forgot that yeah and she that was that was an insane sort of really thoughtful uh
focused collective decision waiting a day and then saying fuck it i need i need this fat and that was
the other thing is like fat is important oh yeah it's like meat is not enough you learn about like
what are the different food sources there apparently there's like uh rabbit starvation is a thing because
when you have too much lean meat and it doesn't nourish the body fat is the thing that nourishes the body
especially in uh in cold conditions so that's the thing she yeah she she was she was incredible and i thought
as as as as brash and sort of fun as roland was she represented um
a much more beautiful take on on it and it was really heartbreaking when she lost because i mean
and like you said still a badass yeah it's kind of like forest griffin versus stefan stefan bonner
like it was like it doesn't matter who won yeah you guys beat the shit out of each other like
and she didn't really lose right so she got she got evacked because her toe was uh
going frostbite frostbite a hundred days you think you can do a hundred days
honestly i've done i've i'm 18 years in the amazon man i just at this point it's uh
i could i wouldn't sign up for another hundred days yeah you know at this point i don't i don't have
that to prove i've survived in the wild and uh i wouldn't want to voluntarily take a hundred days
away from everyone i know yeah the loneliness aspect is is tough we're not meant for that i
really love the people i have in my life and i i wouldn't i wouldn't and you see it on the show
a lot of the people yeah big tough ex-navy seals who are survival experts who know what they're doing
they get out there and they go you know what i miss my family yeah and they go it's not worth it
they have this existential realization they go we only got i only got so many years here like let's
let's this is crazy it's just some money fuck it and they go home you know it's funny because you
sometimes film yourself in the jungle when you're alone and there's a another guy uh jordan uh jonas
hobo joro uh he's the season six winner and he said that the camera made him feel less lonely
i i've heard of him from multiple channels uh one of the things is he spent all of his 20s
in um living in siberia with the with the tribes out there uh herzog happy people
and so he actually talked about that it's one of the loneliest time of his life because
when he went up there he didn't speak russian and he needed to learn the language and even though you
have people around you when you don't speak their language it feels really really lonely
and he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could talk to the
camera there there is an element when you have in these harsh conditions if you like record something
you feel like you're talking to another human through it even if it's just a recording i sometimes
feel that like maybe because i imagine a specific person that will watch it and i feel like i'm talking
to that person well i noticed that when things got especially hard and they did get especially hard
when we were out in the wilderness
that you would begin filming to share that struggle but i also think that i've used that at times
where yeah you go well maybe if i because if you can tell someone else about it then
you're on the hero's journey and and then it sort of has to make you braver and it changes how you
because you i'm cold and i'm tired and i'm i'm hungry and this hurts and that hurts and i don't know
when we're gonna make it and how is this gonna go and and all of a sudden you go well guys we're
we're here we're going that way and and uh and then you're like well i gotta keep going because
because you're like they're still out there if you forget you have to step up that's one of the
reasons i i want a family i think when you have kids yeah you have to be like you have to be the
best version of yourself like for them all my friends with kids that i've seen them go through where
until you have a family you're just you're just playing around man i mean you could do important
work you can you can have skin in the in other games but it's once you have a little tribe of
humans that depends on you yeah if you take that seriously if you want to do that right it's one of
the hardest things you could do and it it just it just changes everything
how has your life changed since we last met speak about changing everything so you've been for people
don't know pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territories saving more and more and more
and more rainforests there's a lot i could ask you about that there's a lot of stories to be told there
it's a fight it's a battle it's a battle to protect this this uh beautiful area of rainforest
of nature um but since we last met you've made you've continued to make a lot of progress
so what what's what's the story of jungle keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and
everything you're going doing right now 18 years ago when i first came to the jungle
i was a kid from new york who always dreamed since i was six years old maybe even younger
of going to a place where animals were everywhere and there's big trees and skyscrapers of life and so
being dyslexic and and not fitting in in school and and reading about jane goodall and having lord of
the rings be one of the things i grew up on i just chose to come to the amazon and the first person i met
was this local indigenous conservationist named juan julio duran who was trying to protect this
remote river the las piedras river which in history apparently faucet referenced either the las piedras
but he called it tawamanu and said don't go there you'll surely die from tribes and so there's very few
references to this this river in history it stayed very wild because it's been a place that
the law hasn't made it the government hasn't really extended to like you know we're sort of
past the police limit and so jj was out here ages ago trying to protect this river before it was too
late and when i met him i was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of just seeing the
rainforest let alone seeing a giant anaconda or having any sort of meaningful experience or contribution to
the narrative and somehow over all the years that we began working together and sparked a friendship
and began exploring and going on expeditions and bringing people to the rainforest and and asking
them for help and manifesting the hell out of this insane dream that we had i mean we didn't even have a
boat we would take logs down the river we would have to cut a tree down every time we wanted to return
to civilization we'd have to cut down a balsa tree and float down the road down the river on it yeah
it was it was it's madness like it's madness it's pure madness and i don't know what made us keep
going but along the way people showed up who cared and who wanted to help and if it was a movie it
wouldn't even necessarily be a good movie because you'd go oh please you're just telling me that you
just kept doing the thing and just magically people showed up but yeah that's what happened that's
exactly the way we kept doing the thing that we loved we said it doesn't matter if we don't have
funding or a boat or gasoline or friends or anything we just kept going and along the way we found
someone who could help us start a ranger program and then we found dax da silva who helped us fund
the beginning of jungle keepers and then people like mosen and stefan who were there making sure that
this thing actually took flight off the ground and then right around the time that we were wondering
what was going to happen and if we're all going to have to quit and get real jobs and if we could
actually save the rainforest from the destruction that was coming lex friedman sends me a dm
and honestly changed the entire narrative because up until then we had been
we've been playing in the minor leagues pretending trying real real hard and the listeners of your
show in the moments after you published your episode with with our conversation began showing
up in droves and supporting jungle keepers putting in five ten a hundred a thousand we started getting
these donations and the incredible team that i work with we all went into hyperdrive everybody everybody
started going nuts we all started spending 16 hour days working to try and deal with the tidal wave
that lex sent towards us just because so many people knew that we were doing this that was an
indigenous led fight to protect this incredibly ancient virgin rainforest before it was cut and people
resonated with that and so we we got this this this huge swell of support and this year we've we've
protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rainforest because of that swell of support so
current 50 000 acres what's the goal what's the approach to saving this rainforest since we printed this
it's gone up to 66 000 acres it's and and as you know in each of those little acres are millions and
millions of animal heartbeats and societies of animals and the goal here is that we're between
manu national park altopudos national park the tambopada reserve we're in a region that's known as
the biodiversity capital of peru one of the most biodiverse parts of the western amazon and we're
fighting along the edge of the trans amazon highway and so it's it's just a small group of local people
and some international experts who have come together and use these incredibly out of side of the box
strategies to sort of crowdfund conservation to go look we know that this incredible life is here
we have the scientific evidence we have the national park system if we can protect this before they cut
it down we could do something of global significance all these jaguars all these monkeys all these
undescribed medicines the uncontacted tribes that we share this forest with could all be protected and
people have stepped up and begun to make that happen and there's people from all over the world and it's incredible
but what's the approach so trying to with donations to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it
so the approach is that currently the government favors extractors so if you're a gold miner
or a log an illegal logger or you just want to cut down and burn a bunch of rainforests and set up a
cacao farm the government's fine with that doesn't matter you're not really breaking the law if you
destroy nature so as long as you're producing something from the land they don't see it as a
loss that the nature was destroyed permanently yeah it's just wilderness it's sort of just beyond the
scope of it's not doesn't or the local people that technically own the land out here the local
indigenous people for instance we fought this year to help the community of puerto nuevo who's been
fighting for 20 years to have government-recognized land these are indigenous people in the amazon
fighting to protect their own land and you know what it was that was holding back they didn't
understand how the the system of of legal documents worked to certify that titled land they didn't
really have the funding to go from their very very remote community into the offices and so jungle keepers
helped them with that and so really all we're doing is helping local people protect the forest that is
their world that's it if people donate how will that help if people donate to jungle keepers what what
you're doing is you're helping someone like jj who's an indigenous naturalist who has the vision who has
seen forest be destroyed he's trying to protect it before it's too late you're saving mahogany trees
ironwood trees kapok trees skyscrapers of life just monkeys birds reptiles amphibians birds mammals this
entire avatar on earth world of rainforest that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe in the
water we drink this incredible thing as far as i know it's the most direct way to protect that and so
the fact that the fact that we've you know we have large funders who give us you know a hundred
thousand dollars to protect this huge swath of land and that goes through through things like this and
through instagram it you know it goes directly to the local conservationists who who work with the
loggers to protect that land before it's cut but one of the most impactful things that has happened this
year in the wake of our last conversation was that i got an email from a mother and she said you know
i'm a single mom and i work a few jobs and i can't afford to give you a ton of money but
um me and my kids look at your instagram often after dinner and they really want to protect the
heartbeats they really want to protect the animals and the rainforest and so we do we give five dollars
a month to jungle keepers and it was to me that was so impactful because i used to be that little kid
worried about the animals and i saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood yeah i ask
that people donate uh to jungle keepers you guys are legit um that money is going to go a long way
junglekeepers.org if you somehow were able to raise very large so the uh the raindrops would make
a waterfall a very large amount of money i don't know what that number is uh maybe 10 million dollars
20 million 30 million what are the different milestones along the way that could really help
help you on the journey of uh saving the rainforest if we did if let's just say some company organization
or or if enough people donated it let's just say we got that 30 million that money would go directly
into stopping logging roads into creating a corridor a biological corridor that connects
the uncontacted indigenous reserves with other tribal lands with manu national park with the
tambopata which establishes essentially the largest protected area in the amazon rainforest and what makes
this groundbreaking is that we're not doing this in the traditional way we're doing this take it to the
people and that's what's been so exciting is that you know when he started this when jj started this
30 years ago he had no idea his father wanted him to be a logger he didn't have shoes until he was 13
years old he grew up bathing in the river he had no idea that a bunch of crazy foreigner scientists
were going to show up and some guy in a james bond suit was going to come down here with microphones and
and that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this this incredible ecosystem
and all those little aliens well that's all the important thing to remember that the the people that
are cutting down the forest the loggers are also human beings their families they're they're they're basically
trying to survive and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring them money
and so they're just human beings at the core of it if they have other option if they have other options
they will probably choose to uh give their life to saving the community to
first and foremost providing for their family and after that saving the community helping the
community flourish and i think probably a lot of them love the rainforest they grew up in the rainforest
yeah i mean look at pico yeah pico used to be a logger full-time logger long-time logger
now he loves conservation he goes yo soy muy conservacionista it's like yeah you know it's all
about just providing people people options there's some dark stuff on the on the gold mine stuff you've
talked about you showed me parts of the rainforest where the gold mines are and and they're just kind
of erasing the rainforest yeah sort of at the edges that's when the mining happens and it's this ugly
it's this ugly process of they're just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer
of the sand or whatever that they process this to collect just little bits of gold
and there's also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are
created so the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that that has things like prostitution
where one-third of the of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are
minors under you know under 17 years old 13 to 17 year old there's just a lot of really really dark stuff
i think that we have
a rare chance to do something against that darkness i think that this is an example of local people who
have taken action done good work been good to the people that have visited
harnessed a certain amount of international momentum and now we're on the cusp of doing something
historic and so for the children in the communities along this river it won't be being a prostitute in a
gold mine it'll be becoming a trained ranger like last month um our ranger coordinator and one of our
one of our female rangers went to africa for a ranger conference and it's like we're beginning to this
is someone from a little tiny village with thatched huts up river she went to africa to talk about being
a professional conservation ranger and it's like that's that's changing lives and her her daughters
then she's married to ignacio the guy she like her their kids are gonna grow up seeing their parents
walking around with the emblem on and go oh i wanna and then and then people like pico and pedro
and all these guys that work here are gonna go well we have to we have to protect this forest and
then they start getting fascinated about the snakes and then they start caring about the turtle eggs
and then all of a sudden they have a way of life and and nobody needs to go be nobody can nobody
needs to go steal anybody's kids to be a prostitute in a gold mine that's horrible and so it's really a
it's a win-win for the for the animals for the river for the rainforest for people we're improve
it's biocentric conservation it's it's just making everything better yeah i've read an article
it said an estimated 1200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly drafted into child
prostitution around the communities in the gold mines at least one-third of the prostitutes in
the camp are underage the girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were
restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top dollar they jumped on and bust together and
came down to the rainforest what they found was not what they were expecting the mining camp
restaurants served food for only a few hours a day the rest of the time it was the girls themselves
who were on the menu literally at the end of the road and without the money to return home the girls
would soon become trapped in prostitution it's interesting to me that the most devastating
destruction of nature the complete erasure of the rainforest burned to the ground sucked through a
hose spit out into a disgusting mercury puddle like the complete annihilation of life on earth
goes hand in hand with the complete annihilation of a young life it's like it's all based around the same
thing it's it's the light versus the dark that's that's it's it's the destruction and the chaos
versus a move towards order and hope and and and it is incredibly dark and this region
is heavy with it well i'm glad you're fighting for the light
is there like a milestone in your future that you're working towards like financially in terms of donations
there is in in the next year and a half as you saw in your time here there's there's roads working
around the jungle keepers concessions all the work that the local people are doing to protect this land
is trying to be dismantled by international corporations that are subcontracting logging companies
here and really what we need is 30 million dollars in the next two years to protect the whole thing
you've seen the ancient mahogany trees you've seen the families of monkeys you've seen the caiman in the
river all of this is standing in the pathway of destruction that road they're going to come down
that road and men with chainsaws are going to dismantle a forest that has been growing since the
beginning this is so magical do you see the snake over there yeah do you there's a snake okay i'm
just gonna don't move i don't want you to move i'm gonna just this is one of the most beautiful snakes
in the amazon rainforest this is the blunt-headed tree snakes i've been hoping that you would get
to see this snake i have been praying oh boy okay okay let's just let's just let's just go right back
into this okay look at this little beauty creation let's keep you away from the fire look at this little
blunt-headed tree snake wow such an incredible so tell me about the snake harmless little snake
um if you put your hand out he'll probably just crawl onto your hand just be real careful with
the fire so look i'm just gonna put him like this we're gonna
yeah let's just snake safety so he's a tree snake yep nice and slow nice and slow nice and slow so you
nice and slow just really so just be the tree be the tree that he climbs on and this is like again this
is a snake that's so thin and so small there you go there you go nice and slow just just be the tree
let him crawl around so he's going to try and do all this stuff
let me see if i can just calm him down for a sec let me just see he's very active little snake so
see like the snake the other night okay just come look at this i can see the light through his body
to me this is an alien this is this strange little life form his eyes are two-thirds of his head
i'm not joking you look at their skull he's so tiny he's so people listening there's a snake in
paul's hands right now it's very uh it's long of course but very skinny very very light and and
also for everyone listening the odds of that as we're sitting here doing this podcast that
a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle might sound like something that would happen but
uh the density of snakes in the amazon rainforest makes this a very unique experience can you tell
me a little bit about the coloration scheme yeah so a little bit brown yeah just to describe this as
we're as we were talking here it's just a sort of banded white and brown snake with this tiny little
head about the size of my pinky nail um two thirds of this snake's head is made up of its gigantic eyes
it's got a small mouth and it's it's about about a third as thick as a pencil it's basically a
moving shoestring it's incredibly incredibly thin
the only thing i am thinking lexo is if we have dan come and just do some shots of yeah that's true dan
so what what are we looking at uh the snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle that i we were
talking about jungle keepers and what we could do and the snake just showed up at that moment and
this is a very active little snake who's out for a hunt tonight and wants to find something to eat so
this is a blunt-headed tree snake totally harmless little literally a moving shoestring
super beautiful little animal when you talk about aliens to me this is
this is an alien like what are you thinking what are you doing right now what do you think about
the fact that we were handled being handled by these giant humans and as you were saying it reaches
up to the leaves yeah this snake just naturally knows to go look you just put him anywhere near
leaves and he's like i got this he just wants to go right up into that tree i just want you to try
holding him and uh real gentle just be the tree yeah and just just kind of do the same thing you
learned last night just nice and gentle yep and see he's holding on to my finger right now he's just
going up there you go perfect nice and easy he's a little erratic he's a little goofy
maybe he's camera shy
maybe a fan of the podcast
and gigantic eyes relative to his body size huge oh geez hello moth
traffic traffic in the jungle and then for everyone listening as we're as we're as we're handling the
snake that we found that was crawling by us like literally by our shoulders as we're talking
a bat flies through no joke eight inches from lex's ear like just zips past his head as he's
holding a snake while we're sitting here in the jungle it's just we're just in it now now he's
going to try and back up and how do you yeah why don't you why don't you let's encourage him to come
back this he's he's weaved this way he's okay he's just he's just trying to back out yeah right there
release release okay i'm gonna this is what i'm gonna do we're gonna say thank you mr snake thank
you mr snake thank you mr snake go back up into the tree here we go there you go there you go
there you go and then uh we can resume normal podcasting now because we really are in the
jungle we really are in the jungle that's one of my favorite snakes that's one of my favorite
little aliens on this planet look at that
and it's going on some long journey it's gonna the canopy carry the rest of the night
so that little snake is one of the millions of life forms heartbeats that you're trying to protect
exactly um to me i
after almost 20 years down here the people here have become my friends the the caiman on the river
the the monkeys i when i fall asleep at night i think about all the different heartbeats all the
different little creatures here that that when they
bulldoze this forest when they when they chop down these trees that they that they vanish that we we
do we take away their world and in that very evolutionary historical sense of remembering the
the primordial soup it's like this these this little creature is surviving out here somehow
and we have the chance to save it and even if you don't care about the little creature on the pale blue dot
each of these little creatures contributes to this massive orchestral hole that creates
climactic stability on this planet and the amazon is one of the most important parts of that and each
of these little guys is playing a role in there so one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans
but living a very different kind of life so uncontacted tribes what do you find most fascinating about them
what i find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes is that while me and you are sitting
here with microphones in a light somewhere out there in that darkness in that direction not so far away
as the crow flies there are people sitting around a fire in the dark probably with little more than a few
leaves over their heads who don't even have the use of stone tools who only have metal objects that they've
stolen from nearby communities they're they're living such primitive isolated nomadic lives in the modern
world and they're still living naked out in the jungle um it's truly incredible it's truly remarkable and
i think that it's because they can't advocate for themselves they can't protect themselves it's sort of
like well we can let them get shot up by loggers and get their get let their land get bulldozed while
they hide they have no idea that their world is being destroyed um but they're they're they're sort
of the scariest and most fascinating thing out there right now in the jungle what do you think they're
because you've spoken about them being dangerous what do you think their relationship with violence is
why is violence part of their approach to the external world so from the best i understand it
that at the turn of the century industrial revolution we had sudden immense need for
rubber for hoses and gaskets and wires and tires and and the war machine and the only way to get
rubber was to come down to the amazon rainforest and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out
into the jungle and and cut rubber trees and collect the latex and henry ford tried doing fordlandia
tried having rubber plantations but leaf blight killed it and so you had this period of horrendous
extraction in the amazon where the rubber barons were coming down and just raping and pillaging
the tribes and making them go out to tap these trees and the uncontacted tribe said no they had
their six foot long longbows seven foot long arrows with giant bamboo tips and they moved further back
into the forest and they said we will not be conquered and since that time they've been out
there and it's it's confusing because in a way they're still running scared a century later and
their grandparents would have told them you know the outside world everyone you see in the outside world
is trying to kill you so kill them first so can you blame them for being violent no is this river still
wild because loggers were scared to go here for a long time for almost a century late that's why this
forest is still here yes and so is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on earth that
have no government no no affiliation no language that we can explain we don't know what their medicinal
plant knowledge is we don't know their creation myths we know nothing about them and they're just out
there right now with bows and arrows living in the dark surviving in the jungle naked without even
spoons forget about the wheel forget about iphones they got nothing and they're making it work we don't
know their creation myths so they have a very primitive existence but do you think their values
first of all do you think their nature is similar to ours and how do their values differ from ours
this is complicated because the the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical
reason for the violent life that they have you know they experienced incredible generational trauma
some time ago and that and because they've been living isolated in the jungle that has permeated to
become their culture they've become a culture of violence but yet the the the contacted modern
indigenous communities that we work with that are my friends that work here just the other day we were
speaking to one of them who is pulling spikes out of your hand while he was explaining that
he tried to help them the brothers los hermanos he tried to help them he tried to give them a gift
and what did they do they shot him in the head yeah he said there are brothers and he tried to give them
a bananas plantains plantains boat full of plantains and they shot at him they shot three arrows at
him and one of them actually hit him in the skull and put him in the hospital and he got
helic helicopter evacuated from his community and so he's brave for surviving but he's uh he's a lucky
survivor they they are incredibly accurate with those bamboo tipped arrows and those arrows are seven
feet long so when you get hit by one they come at a velocity that can rip through you and the range
range on a shotgun is way shorter than the range on a longbow you're talking about a couple hundred meters
on a longbow and they're deadly accurate they can take spider monkeys out of a tree and so there's
stories of loggers and i've seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who attract who attacked one of the
tribes and the tribes hadn't done anything but these loggers came around a bend they started shooting shotguns
at the tribe and the tribe scattered into the forest and as the loggers boat went around a bend they
just started flying arrows took out the boat driver boat skidded to the side and then everybody was
standing in the river and you can't run and the tribe just descended on them and just porcupine them
full of arrows shotgun versus bow there's a shotgun shell here by the way yeah from the from the loggers
mm-hmm yeah we picked that up yesterday was that yesterday that was i don't know i don't know one of
the things that happens here is time loses meaning in in some kind of deep way that
it does when you're in a big city in the united states for example and their schedules and meetings
and all this kind of stuff it transforms the meaning your experience of time your interaction with time
the role of time all of this
i've forgotten time and i've forgotten the existence of the outside world and how does that feel
it feels more honest it also puts in perspective like all the busyness all the
uh it kind of takes the ant out of the ant colony and says hey this you're just an ant and this is
just an ant colony and there's a big world out there yeah it's a it's a chance to be grateful to
celebrate this earth of ours and the things that make it worth living on including the simple things that
make the individual life worth living which is water and then food and the rest is the rest is just
details of course the friendships and social interaction that's a really big one actually
that one i'm taking for granted because i didn't get a chance yet to really spend time alone
hmm and when i came here i've gotten a chance to hang out with you and there's a kind of camaraderie
there's a friendship there that if that's broken that's a that's a that's a tough one too
you spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle you ever get alone out here yeah yeah i mean the
first 15 years we were doing this we there would be times that jj would be busy in town with his family
and i would for sheer love of the rainforest i would have to come alone out here and we didn't have
running water i didn't have running water i didn't have lights all i had was a couple of candles in
the darkness and a tent and i was 20 something years old living in the amazon by myself your boat sunk
and yeah it's incredibly lonely i i had to learn through experience because i thought
there's a period i think when you're you know you're young as a young man i i had this thing like i
wanted to prove that i could be like the explorers i wanted to prove that i could handle the elements
that i could go out alone that i could have these these deep connective moments with the with the
jungle and it's like i did that and that's great and you know what the kid from into the wild learned
right before he died in that bus that if you don't have somebody to share it with it doesn't matter
but uh some kind of like even just
deep human level like even if you have somebody to share it with
you ever just get alone out here just like this sense of like existential dread of like what you
know the jungle has a way of uh not caring about any individual organism it just kind of churns
it's like it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely
yeah for for me it's comforting being out here because i find the the rat race the national
narrative the the the the need to make money that's a worry about war to to be outraged about the newest
thing that that politician said and what that actor did and and it just there's always just this just
unending sort of media storm and and and and everyone's worried and everyone's trying to
optimize their sunlight exposure and find the solution and buy the right new thing and
to me coming out here first of all i mean something out here because i can help someone
i can help people i can help these animals and so i find my meaning out here
but also you know there's the losing the madness over the mountains it's it's nature has always and
for many people been where things make sense and to me i think i'm a simple analog type of person that
it makes sense that when it rains you get in the river to stay warm and and you you know you wait for
the dawn and you see a little tree snake and and you say it just it just it makes it makes more sense
and i think that the the the overwhelming teeming complexity that is inside the the ant mound of
society can be dizzying for some people and i think that maybe it's the dyslexia maybe it's just that i love nature
but um now if i when i land in jfk i i feel like a frightened animal on like like it's as if you
as if you release like a like a some animal that had never seen it onto like into times square and
you can just imagine this dog with its ears back running away from taxis and just just cowering from
the noise and it's just hustle and bustle and people are brutal and how much you want it for
get in the car yes screaming over the intercom and just everything everything sensory changes and
let's get home okay let's go you got a meeting you got to get to the next place you got to give a talk
you got to sign out out here when we finish up here what are we gonna do we're gonna eat some food maybe
go catch a crocodile go walk around the jungle and i like it's slower it makes sense and and there's that
again there's that deep meaning of of of that here where we can be the guardians for good we can we
can be we can hold that candle up and and know for sure that we're protecting the trees from being
destroyed and it's that simple thing of just this is good there you go it's simple in society i feel
like everyone's always losing their minds and forgetting the most basic of fundamental truths
and out here you can't really argue with them you know when we needed water it was like
shit if we don't get water we're fucked and that and that's to me that's where the camaraderie comes
from because no matter what we'll be we could go to the most fancy ass restaurant through the biggest
most famous people in the world it doesn't matter we still remember what it was like standing around
in the jungle going fuck we're scared we don't have water we got reduced to the simplest form of
humans and that's and that's something and we survived and that's and that's cool and you take
all the all those people in their nice dresses in those fancy restaurants you put in those conditions
they're all going to want the same thing as water and yes it's all the same thing all the beautiful
people how is your view of your own mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle how often do you
think about your death well i don't need more because the i've come to believe that there is a
benevolent god spirit creator taking care of us and i don't i don't think about my own death we have a
little bit of time here and we clearly know nothing about what we're doing here and it seems like
we just have to do the best we can and so i just it doesn't it doesn't scare me i've come close to
dying a lot of times and uh i just don't think you don't want to have a bad death first of all
you don't want to you don't want to you don't want to be a statistic you don't want to find out you
don't want to like try out a be the first to try out a new product and oops it crushed you
you know that that's that's a terrible way to go or the people that used to you know in the
gold rush they were using mercury and they're all getting uh or lead it was lead poisoning and it's
like oh you know a few million people died that way and it's like you want to you want a good death
you know you want to staring down the eyes of a tiger or hanging off the edge of a cliff saving
somebody's something something something worthy warrior's death but riding a 16 foot black caiman
just boots on screaming yeah um that'd be fun that'd be a good one a lot of people say that
you carry the spirit of steve erwin in in your heart in the way you carry yourself in this world
i mean he that guy was full of joy if i have a percentage of steve erwin i would be honored but
that guy that i think i think there's only one steve i think that he was he occupied his own
strata of just shining light every everything was positive enthusiasm love and happiness and
save the animals and do better and let's make it fun and and and that was so infectious that that it
sort of transcended his tv show it transcended his conservation work it transcended business and
entrepreneurship it just through sheer magnetism and enthusiasm he just i mean everyone knew who steve
was everyone loved steve we still all love steve and so it's uh it's just it's just amazing what one
spirit can do so if anybody you know makes that comparison i i get i get really uncomfortable because
to me steve erwin is like just just the goat and so i'm okay with that well i at least agree with
that comparison uh having spent time with you there's just an eternal flame of joy
and adventure too just pulling you uh a dark question but do you think you might meet the same end
giving your life in some way to something you love that is a dark question but i i think most likely
i'll get whacked by loggers i think that loggers or gold miners will take me out i don't i don't picture
myself going from animals but um that would be heartbreaking too yeah it would but yeah at the same
time though like the kurt cobain value of that if i died doing what i love to protect the river i'd be
so worth so much more a lot like we'd get the 30 million if i died tomorrow for sure so we've already
already talked about this my friends i'm like if i get whacked yeah do the foundation make the documentary
protect the river protect the heartbeats call it the heartbeats jungle keepers the heartbeats
you know be ready for it because these these things do happen people get pissed if you get in their way
and as many happy people as and who whose lives were changing there's also going to be some jealous
shitty upset people who are mad that they can't make prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying
the planet and so they might just uh erase you me well i hope you um like a clint eastwood character
just just impossible to kill i like how you squinted your eyes
on cue uh who do you think will play you in a movie god somebody with the right nose
somebody who can live up to this schnozzle yeah all right italian yeah it's funny do you think of
yourself as italian or human american that's the thing i don't you know ape my my life has been the
united nations of of whatever like i just every to me i just i don't that's the other thing you go
back to society and everyone's obsessed with with race to me i'm like look leopards have black babies
and yellow babies one mother like they're all leopards and and i'm i'm so colorblind and race
blind and everything else i've lived in india my friends are peruvian my family we got italian
filipino just everything and so i've i'm so immersed in it that that when i i find it very
jarring and um disconcerting how much time we spend talking about uh different religions and
just the differences in humans i'm like dude we're we're talking about whether or not our ecosystems are
going to be able to provide for us we're talking about nuclear what we're talking about there's some
pretty serious shit on the table and we're over here arguing over like shades of gray of of it's
it's so trivial and that shit drives me crazy and and as does the outrage where it's like no you you
you have to care i've been i've been criticized for not caring enough about that and i'm like
i'm gonna i'm gonna who cares what the hell i am who gives a shit what the hell i'm a human we're
all human yeah it's not that easy but it's kind of fun sometimes and and we're at a better time in
hit like when you think about like the middle ages like even if you were a king you still
didn't have that good you didn't have pineapples in the winter you didn't even know what the
fuck a pineapple was we have pineapples whenever we want them we can fly on planes to other countries
by the way let's clarify we you mean a large fraction of the world you know what i mentioned
to you one of the biggest uh things i've noticed when i immigrated from the soviet union to the united
states is the how plentiful bananas and pineapples were the fruit section the produce section of the
didn't have to wait in line at the grocery store could just eat as many bananas and pineapples and
cherries and watermelon as you want that's not everybody has that uh no that's true not everybody
has that but but but everybody could be that king no but but but a growing number of people today
can feast on pineapple can feast on pineapple and have toasters and new distracting apps all
the way until the grave that's the thing that uh i also noticed is i don't think so much about
politics when i'm here or we haven't even talked about it don't talk about the stupid uh differences
between humans except to just kind of laugh at the absurdity of it on occasion busy trying to survive
glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds of shit do you think nature is brutal as warner herzog
showed it or is it beautiful i think the brutality of nature is the chaos and i think that
we are the only ones in it that are capable of organizing in the direction of order and light
so yes there are going to be hyenas tearing each other apart yes there's going to be war-torn nations
and poor starving children but we as humans have the power to work towards something more organized than
that so there is a there is a force within nature that's always searching for order for good it's kind
of a unifying theory if you think about it i mean all of the chaos of history and the wars and and
the chaos of nature we we through technology and and organization there's so many people more people
today than ever before i think who are so concerned who realize that the incredible power like what
jane goodall says about you know how you can affect the people around you how you can do good in the
world how you can change the narrative of conservation from one of loss and darkness to one of innovation and
light like we can we can do incredible things we are the masters as humans and i think that i think
that we're on the cusp of sort of understanding the true potential of that like i just think i just think
that more than ever people people have harnessed this ability to do good in the world and be proud of it
and and and and and just change the the the darkness into something else when you uh have lived here and
taken in the ways of the amazon jungle how have your views of god you mentioned
how your views of god change who is god i've come to believe that again back to that that christ
wasn't a christian muhammad wasn't a muslim and buddha wasn't a buddhist that like the game the game is
love and compassion and the universe is chaotic and dangerous and nature is chaotic and dangerous but
we if if this is some sort of a biological video game our reality that the test is can we be good
good and we go through it every day can you can you be good to your parent can you be good to your
partner can you be good to your co-workers can it's so difficult and we see how people can cheat and steal
and hurt and destroy and and the incredible impact that it has on the world the the returning exponential
impact that one act of kindness one act of good can do and so
i see nature as god i see the religions as different cultural manifestations of the same truth
the same creative force
maybe me and you have the same beliefs and your aliens are my angels
well thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world
and thank you for bringing me along for some adventure and i believe more adventure awaits
thank you for being enough of a psychopath to actually just sign on to come into the amazon rainforest
in a suit and a year ago when you told me that you were going to do this i truly didn't believe you
so for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do to connect humans and to
create dialogue and to do good in the world and for all the adventures that we've had thank you so much
thank you brother lex thanks man thanks for listening to this conversation with paul rosalie
to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave
you with some words from joseph campbell the big question is whether you are going to be able to
say a hearty yes to your adventure thank you for listening and hope to see you next time