it was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time.
And we're standing by the tail and the snake
was so big that, I mean, this must have been a 25-foot
anaconda dead asleep with a probably a 16-foot anaconda like
sprawled across her. And they're laying in the starlight and we're floating on
top of a lake standing there in the middle of the Amazon and
JJ just, I just, I could feel the blood drain out of his face
and as like a, however old I was, you know, maybe 20 years old, I just said if I,
if we could somehow show people this, we'll be on the front cover of National
Geographic and we can protect all the jungle that
we want. And so I tried to catch it.
Yeah. So I jumped on the snake and the only measurement I have of this animal
is that when I wrapped my arms around it, I couldn't touch my fingers.
Yeah. And so I was, you know, my, my feet were dragging and to her credit this
anaconda did not turn around and eat me because her head was, you know, this big.
And, and she went and she reached the edge of the,
the grass island and she starts plunging into the dark.
And so I'm watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda is going and I had to make
the choice of either going headfirst down into the
black, which no thank you, or stopping and just
keeping my hand on this thing as it raced by me and I just felt the scales
and the muscle and the power go by and then eventually taper down to
the tail until it slipped away into the darkness and I was laying there
just panting.
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosli,
a conservationist, explorer, author, filmmaker,
and real-life Tarzan since for much of the past 17 years
Paul has lived deep in the Amazon rainforest protecting endangered species
and trees from poachers, loggers, and foreign nations funding them.
He is the founder of Jungle Keepers which today protects over 50,000 acres
of threatened habitat and Paul is one of the most incredible
human beings I've ever met. I hope to travel with him in the Amazon
jungle one day because in his eyes I saw a truth that
can only be discovered directly by spending time among the immensity and
power of nature at its purest. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To
support it please check out our sponsors in the description
and now dear friends here's Paul Rosli. In 2006 at 18 years old you fled New
York and traveled to the Amazon. This started a journey that I think
lasts to this day. Tell me about this first leap. What in
your heart pulled you towards the Amazon jungle?
From the time I was you know three years old I'd say
you know it was dinosaurs, wildlife, documentaries, Steve Irwin, you name it
and like when my parents said you know nature versus nurture they they nurtured
my nature. I was always just drawn to streams, forests. I wanted to go explore
where the little little creek led. I wanted to see the turtles and the snakes
and so I was a kid that hated school, did not get
along with school. I was dyslexic and didn't know it. Undiagnosed
I didn't read until I was like 10 years old like way behind
and so for me the forest was safety. Like I remember one time in first
grade they had you doing those you know those multiplication sheets
that was pure hell for me and so I actually got so upset that I couldn't do
it that I ran out the classroom ran out the door
and went to the nearest woods and I stayed there because that was safe
and so for me like once I got to the point where I was like high school isn't
working out I had incredibly supportive parents
that were like look just get out take your GED get out of high
school after 10th grade you got to go to college but like start
doing something you love and so I saved up and bought a ticket to the
Amazon and met some indigenous guys and the second I walked in that forest it
was like it's like the first scene in Jurassic Park when they see the
dinosaurs and they go oh this is it yeah I walked in there and just I looked at
those giant trees I saw leaf cutter ants in real life and I just went
oh it was like the movie just started you know that was when that was when
like I came online can you put into words what is it about
that place that felt like home what was it that drew you what
aspect of nature the streams the water the the forest the jungle the animals
what what drew you it's just it's always been in my blood
I mean for any forest I mean whether it's you know upstate New York or
India or Borneo but the Amazon it's it's it's all of that turned up to
this level where everything is superlatively diverse
you know you have more plants and animals than anywhere else on earth not
just now but in the entire fossil record it's
the Andes Amazon interface there's just that's
terrestrially that's that's where it is that's the greatest library of life that
has ever existed and so you're just you're so stimulated
you're so overwhelmed with color and diversity and beauty and
this overwhelming sense of natural majesty of these
you know thousand year old trees and half the life is up in the canopy of
those trees we don't even have access to it there's
stuff without names walking around on those branches and it's like it just
takes you somewhere and so going there it was like
you know the guys I met just opened the door and they were like you know how far
do you want to go down the rabbit hole how how
how much of this do you want to see you mentioned Steve Irwin
uh you list a bunch of heroes you have he's one of them
and you said that when you're unsure about a decision you ask yourself
uh WWSD what would Steve do why is that such a good heuristic for
life what would Steve do he's a human being that like everything
we saw from Steve Irwin was positive everything was with a smile on his face
if he was getting bitten by a reticulated python he was smiling
if he was you know getting destroyed in the news for feeding a crocodile with
his son too close he was trying to explain to people why it's okay
and why we have to love these animals and everything was about love everything
was about you know wildlife and protecting and to me a
person like that that where you only see positive things
that's that's a role model and it's just like an endless curiosity and hunger to
explore this this world of nature yeah and an
insatiable madness for for for wildlife I mean the guy was just so
much fun I gotta if it's okay uh read to you a few of
your own words you open the book mother of god with
the passage that I think beautifully paints a scene
before he died Santiago Duran told me a secret
it was late at night in a palm thatched hut on the bank
of the Tambopata river deep in the southwestern corner of the amazon basin
besides the mud oven two wild boar heads sizzling
sizzled in a cradle of embers their protruding tusks
curling in static agony as they cooked the smell of burning sicropia wood
and cinched flesh filled the air woven basket
containing monkey skulls hung from the rafters
where stars speak through the gaps in the thatching a pair of chickens huddled
in the corner conversing softly we sat facing each other on sturdy benches
across a table hewn from a single cross section
of some massive tree now nearly consumed by termites
the song of a million insects and frogs filled the night
Santiago's cigarette trembled in the aged fingers as he leaned close over the
candlelight to describe a place hidden in the
jungle that line the songs of a million insects
and frogs filled the night for some reason hit me
um what's it like sitting there conversing among so many living
creatures all around you every night in the
jungle you live in constant awareness of that out there in
the darkness are literally millions of heartbeats
around you and so like we exist
in this in this you know domesticated paved world most of the time but when
you go out there past the roads and the and the telephone
poles and the hospitals and you make it out into earth just wild earth
and there's no there's no there's not it's not like this is a national park
there's no rescue helicopter waiting to come get you you are out there
and you're surrounded at night by i mean there are snakes and jaguars and frogs
and insects and all this stuff just crawling through the swamps and through
the trees and through the branches and we put on headlamps and go out into the
night and just absolutely fall to our knees with wonder
of the things that we see it's it's absolutely incredible and most of it
doesn't make sounds like the insects do the insects do the
frogs do you have some of the night birds making sounds but a lot of it
everything has evolved to be silent invisible i mean everything there
is in the on on the list like like i
there's another line in mother of god where i said like you know like life is
just like a temporary moment of stasis and like the churning
recycling death march that is the amazon like it's um
it's been called the greatest natural battlefield on earth i mean if any in
any square acre there's more stuff eating other things
than anywhere else and and you go through a swamp in the amazon
and there's like there's tarantulas floating on the water there's frogs in
the trees there's there's there's tadpoles hanging from
leaves waiting to drop into the water there's fish waiting to eat them there's
birds in the trees you're sitting you literally are surrounded by so many
things that your brain can't process it it's it's just overwhelming life
churning death march some of the creatures are waiting
and some of them are being a bit more proactive about it
what do you make of that churning death march
that the amount of murder that's happening all around you at all scales
what is that you know we uh we dramatize wars
and the millions of people that were lost in world war ii
uh some of them tortured some of them dying
with a gun in hand some of them civilians
but it's just millions of people what about the billions and billions
and billions of organisms that are just being murdered all around you
does that um do you does that change your view of nature
of life here it i've always kind of wondered like that like when you see
like a you know wildebeest taken down by lions
and and eaten from behind while it's alive and it makes you question
god you know you go how could how could how could they let this happen
um in the amazon i find personally that these natural
processes make up almost a religion that it reminds you
how temporary we are that you know the the the bot flies that
are trying to get into your skin and the mosquitoes that are trying to
suck your blood and the you know when that when you sweat you see
you see the you literally can like hold out your arm and watch the condensation
come off of your skin and rise up into the canopy and join the clouds and rain
back down in the afternoon and and then you drink the river and start
it all over again and it's like it's flowing through you so the amazon
reminds me that that there's a lot that we don't
understand and so when it comes to that overwhelming
and collective murder as burner herzog put it um it's just part of
the show it's part of the freak show of the amazonian knight
i see you i you in certain moments able to feel one with a mosquito that's
trying to kill you slowly one with the mosquito is a stretch
is it always the enemy what i mean is like you're part of the machine there
right yeah and it's like fair play it's like fair play so like we have
bullet ants and like you know you get you get nailed by a bullet ant you just
go yeah well well done today's today's over i'm going back to
bed and i'm taking a pile of tylenol you know
do you think in that sense when you're out there are you a part of
nature or are you separate from nature is man a part of nature or separate
i think that's what's so refreshing about it is that out there you truly are
and so whether we're bringing researchers or film crews or
or whether we're just out there ourselves on an expedition
um you truly are part of nature and so one of the things that the my team and i
started doing when i became friends with these guys you know this is a
family of indigenous people from the community of enfierno and they
took me in and as we got close they started saying you know
you can come with us on our like annual hunting trip and i went okay
and it's four guys in a boat and you don't want to get your clothes wet so
we're all in like our boxers in a canoe with a motor
going out past the places that have names and you're out in the middle of
the jungle and the thing is like when you're when
your motor breaks you are so quickly reminded of
the inerrant truths like the things that nobody can
argue with and we live in such a human world where everything is debatable
religion and politics and perspectives on everything and then you get down to
this point where it's like if we don't figure something out the
river is going to rise and take the boat that's the truth and ain't nobody gonna
like argue with that and it's like to me there's a beauty in that truth because
then all of us are united there in that in that truth against like the natural
facts around us and so to me i that's that's that's a
state where i i feel very very at home and the amazon is more efficient than
most places on earth that swallowing you up oh god yeah okay
so just to linger on that because you you've spoken about francisco de
arellana uh who's this explorer in the in uh 1541 and 42 that sailed the length
of the amazon yeah probably one of the first and there's
just a few things i should probably read i should probably
find a good book on him because the guy seems like a gangster
yes there's some great books on him so he sailed
uh he led the expedition that sailed all the way from one end to the other
there's like a rebuilding of a ship which is insanity
yeah yeah so because it speaks to the thing it's like nobody's going to come
and rescue you no you have to if your boat dies you
gotta have to rebuild it yeah so they came down the andes entered
in the headwaters of the amazon constructed some sort of
raft boat craft something and made it down the entire amazon basin of course
his stories are the ones that led to the
amazon being called the amazon because he reported tribes of women he reported
these large cities places where the tribes lived on farms
of river turtles that they corralled and they lived off of that protein and
then when they came out to the mouth of the amazon if i remember it correctly
that just through navigation and the stars they were
able to calculate where the way was back to spain
and make a boat sea worthy enough to bring them home
incredible absolutely do people like that inspire you your own journey
like what gives you kind of strength that
in these harshes of times and harshes of conditions you can persevere
yeah i mean you look at the stories of people that are so you know these
stories of people that have overcome incredible suffering like that or like
you know what shackleton did or something like that and so like when
you're you know i've been you know your tent gets washed away you
go to sleep and the river rises 20 feet and washes away your tent and you crawl
out and all you have is a machete and a headlamp
literally no bag no food no nothing and you go wow the next six days before i
reach back to a town is going to be just pure hell i'm going
to be sleeping on the ground covered in ants destroyed by mosquitoes
and then it becomes you know am i in any capacity any percentage
as tough and resilient as the people that i've read about that have made it
through things far worse than this and and then that's the game you play
what goes through your head when all you got is the headlamp and the machete
so are you uh thinking at all like i i've gotten a chance to interact
quite a lot with elon musk and he constantly puts out fires
having to run several companies there's never a kind of
uh whiny deliberation about issues you just always
one one step forward how to solve right this is the situation how do you solve
it or do you also have a kind of
self-motivating almost egotistical like i'm a bad
motherfucker i can handle anything almost like
trying to fake it till you make it kind of thing
there's there was a little bit of your machete and you know i got a sword
um there there maybe may have been a little bit of that when i was like
you know like 14 15 years old i'd like you know have like a hunting knife and
my dog and i'd go out into the woods of like the cat skills and survive for a
weekend which my rule was one match you know you
get one match and you got to make shelter
and then you know i'd bring like a steak and like make a fire and stuff and like
at that point there maybe with some ego but in the amazon
you get stripped down so completely that you
it's like that thing like you know watch the atheism leave everyone's body when
they think they're about to die it's like when you
find yourself staring up at the amazon at night and you go there is no hope of
getting out of here i mean i was once lost in a swamp where
it took me days to get out of there and there was there was moments where
i just said this is you know this is clearly it there's no there's no ego
there there's just hope you you start you start realizing what
you believe in and praying that you'll be okay and and
then trying to trying to summon whatever you know about how to survive and
and that's it and so it's it's actually again it's kind of it's kind of a
blissful state if you can walk that line between like
adventure and tragedy and sort of keep yourself right at that very very fine
line without going over ever fear of death fear ever fear um
terror no i don't want to die i wanna i wanna
you know i love the people in my life and there's a lot of things i want to do
but every time i've been every time i've been certain that i'm
gonna die it's been i've been very very calm
very calm and just sort of like okay well if this is
how the movie goes and this is how it goes almost accepting yeah
which is which is reassuring you mentioned herzog
just to uh venture down this road of death and fear
and so on there's been a few madmen like you
in this world uh he's documented a couple of them
uh what lessons do you draw from grizzly man
or into the wild those kinds of stories i were you ever afraid that you'll be
one of those stories oh yeah i actually think that that's in
mother of god where i said i almost until into the wild did myself like
i i went out there and really i got so lost and so destroyed that
i said this this is this is going to be the next one you know this is going to
be the next story of some idiot kid from new york who went to the amazon thinking
he was percy faucet and then vanished because if you if you
do vanish out there your body's going to be consumed in a
matter of days like like two you know if we see if we see an
animal dead on the trail it's you got dung beetles and and fly larva
and vultures and there's a whole pecking order you know you get the black
vultures the yellow vultures the king vulture they all come in
that thing is picked clean in a couple of days what would be the creature that
eats most of you in that situation probably the vultures probably the
vultures and the and the maggots it's it's really quick it's really
really quick like like like you even as far as like you can't
leave food out you know like if you have like a
piece of chicken you say oh i'll eat it in the morning you leave it out you
can't do that it's not it's not good by morning
grizzly mad for example like what because that's a beautiful story
it's both comical and genius and especially the way herzog tells it
first do you like the way you told the story do you like herzog
i do i love herzog and i love his his documentary the burden of dreams which
is which is in the amazon not very far from
where i work and the the sheer madness that you see
this man undergoing of just trying to recreate
hauling a boat over a mountain um is is is wild and and the you know the
the extras that he hired to be to play the natives are are the i think
they're matcha ganga tribesmen and they're just they just
look like all the guys that i hang out with and it's like you know they're
they're doing all this stuff in the jungle that
months and months and months and you can just see him deteriorating with madness
because the jungle you know your boat you know how many
times i've tied up a boat to the side of the river this just happened like
a year and a half ago i tied up through a lot through covet i pretty much just
lived in the jungle for a while and there was nobody there and there
was no support and i tied up my boat and the rain is just hammering
like like like the universe is trying to rip the earth in half the rain is just
going and the river is rising and i tied up the boat
but then you go to sleep and you got to wake up every two hours to go check the
boat and the boat is thrashing back and
forth and so all night every two hours i'd wake up
barefoot in driving rain like you know golf ball raindrops and just go down
check the boat and then by morning i was like i fell
asleep woke up check the boat and then i was like i'm just gonna go make coffee
i was so done i was so like at the end of my rope every time bailing the boat
out and stuff and then we got 15 minutes of heavy
rain that filled the boat sank it and so now i'm stuck up river with no
boat and it's like that type of thing where
it's like no matter how hard you try the jungle is just like listen
you ain't you're nothing you are nothing and so it's that constant reminder and
so Herzog really threw himself into that in that film and uh it's it's brilliant
to watch what do you think he meant by the line
that you include in your book it's a land that god if he exists has
created in anger
said in german accent yeah overwhelming and collective murder
so that's that's so you didn't really appreciate the beauty of the of the
murder i think he appreciated it but to him it
was very dark you know i think he saw the darkness
in it and that's there it sure is as soon as you do ayahuasca
you that door opens and you see the darkness
because it brings you right into the jungle like the the heart of it
but i think that for him it it is i think that darkness is something that
he embraces and that he loves there's another film of his and i don't
know if this is accurate but my memory has it
that there's a penguin and i think it's in antarctica and the penguin's going in
the wrong direction away from the ocean yeah and i feel like
he goes on this monologue about how like he's just had enough
yeah he's you know this one penguin is just marching towards you know
yeah well he his because i remember that clip from that
uh documentary and what warner says is that the penguin
is deranged yes he's lost his mind and i took offense to that yeah because
maybe that's a brave explorer like how do you know there's not some a lot more
going on like it could be a love story
those penguins get super attached maybe his mate was over there and he had to go
find her like or it's a lost mate and he last time he
saw her was going in that direction exactly so this is like the great
explorer they we we assume animals are like the
average of the bell curve like every animal we interact with is just the
average but they're special ones just like they're special humans
yeah that could be a special penguin it could have been and i i had the same
thought where i was like i was like he's i i found it beautiful how he
interpreted it what i took away from that was i found that
borna herzog's monologue there was was brilliantly dark and also comedic
but but maybe irrelevant biologically speaking towards penguins like you know
um which which happens a lot with animals i find like there's so many
times where i'll find people be like do you think that animals can show
compassion and you hear like a bunch of people that have never left the pavement
talking about like wow this this one animal helped another and it's like
it's like go ask jane goodall if animals can show compassion
go go talk to anybody that works on a daily basis with animals and they'll
and so like to me there's a there's always a little bit of frustration and
hearing people sort of like pleasantly surprised that
animals aren't just you know these you know these
automatons of you know just just what's the word like um like
programmed you know nothingness first of all what
have you learned about life from jane goodall because
she spoke highly of your book and eulistris
as one of the mentors but what what kind of wisdom about animals do you draw from
her the wisdom from jane is so diverse it's
i mean she first of all she's someone that
you know the work that she did at the time she did it was
so incredible because i mean she she was out there at a very young age
doing that field work she was naming her subjects which everyone said you
shouldn't do she broke every rule she broke every
rule she was assigning and everyone said you know you're anthropomorphizing these
animals by saying that they're doing this and that and
she she was like no they're they're they're interacting they're showing
love they're showing compassion they're showing hate they're showing fear
and and she broke straight through all of those things
um and and it paid off in dividends for her do you see the animals as having
all those human-like emotions of anger of compassion
of longing of loneliness from what you've seen
with especially with mammals but with different species out there do they have
all that it depends on the animal you know if
you're talking you know on the scale of a cockroach to an elephant you know it's
like a lot of these things and i wonder
about this stuff all the time you know i'll have a praying mantis on my hand
and just go what is going through your mind you know
or you'll see it you'll see a spider make a complex decision and go i'm going
to make my web there you know and you go how how are you
how are you doing this how are you because he made a calculation there you
know it's smart i was in the jungle not that long ago and i'm i was walking and
all of a sudden this dove comes flying through the jungle
right up to my face lands on a branch like right here right next to me i look
at the dove dove looks at me and she's like hey and she's clearly
like panting and i'm like i'm like why why are you why are you so close to this
is weird and she's like i know and then and then an
ornate hawk eagle flies up 10 feet away looks at both of us
and just like scowls and like sticks up its head feathers and then just like
flies off and the dove is like sweet thanks and
then flew in the other direction it was like dude you just used me to save your
life yeah the dove knew see well this is what
because there's different you know there's mike tyson and there's albert
einstein yeah and i sometimes i wonder when i look
at different creatures even insects like is this mike tyson or is this einstein
yeah like because one or other kinds of
personnel like there is this a new yorker
or is this a midwesterner or is this like a
san francisco barista of the insects like
there's all kinds of personalities you never know so you can't like project
like you could if you run into a bear and it's very angry it could be just the
asshole new yorker yeah sure sure that's supposed to what
are you saying about new yorkers man exactly point well made uh so speaking
about communicating with a dove um you uh first met the crew in the amazon
you talk about jj as somebody who can communicate with animals
what do you think uh jj is able to see and hear and feel that others don't that
he's able to communicate with animals when i say this is the most
skilled jungle man i've ever seen and i know so many guys in the region
um he has libraries of information in his cranium that we cannot fathom it's
just it's just stunning like you know i have seen him use medicinal plants to
things that western doctors couldn't cure i've seen
him navigate in such a way that he's not using the stars he's not using
any any discernible you know it's like when elephants
sometimes like you'll watch a herd of elephants and they'll be like yo let's
go we're going this way and you'll see them sort of communicate but there's no
audible sound they'll just decide that they're going
that when they all do it jj has this way in the jungle of you know
he'll stop and he'll go wait and you go what is it
and he goes there's a herd of peccary coming and i'm like
where based on what yeah you know and he's like just wait you'll see
and he'll sit there um you know it's just experience
it's incredible experience it's it's it's growing up barefoot in the amazon
and the gift is that he can speak fluent english
and so when i bring tourists and scientists
or news reporters down there he can communicate with them he's actually good
on camera because he doesn't care about cameras
um and like you know for instance we were we were we were walking up a stream
a few months ago and i went hey look jaguar tracks and
he went oh and i was like what jaguar tracks and he's like no look look
harder and i was like the the toes are deeper than the back and
he was like uh-huh and where are they and i was like by the water and i was
like the jaguar was drinking it was leaning to drink and he was like that's
right he's like now look behind you i look behind me
and there's scat there's a big log of jaguar shit sitting there
it's got butterflies all over it fresh pretty fresh
and then there's another one that's less fresh and so he's he's teaching me as he
does he's going look at this look at this is that one as fresh as this one
no and then he goes now look up look up there's three vultures above us the kill
is near us the jaguar has been coming multiple
times to the river to drink as it's feasting on whatever it killed
and he's going it's within 30 feet of us right now and it's like
i'm like oh look impressions in the sand he's like i just drew 19 conclusions
from that it's like watching sherlock holmes at work it's just
constructing the crime scene incredible does that apply also to be
able to communicate with the actual animals like
read into their body movements directly uh into their whatever that dove was
saying to you you'd be able to understand or is that
all just kind of taking in the complex structure of the crime scene of the
interactions of the different animals of the environment and so on
like what is that that you're able to communicate with another creature
that he was able to communicate with another creature he knows the intention
of pose he knows the habits he knows the
perspective when when when he talks about animals he'll
talk about each species as if it's a person so he'll say oh oh the the
jaguar she never likes to let you see her and
so he'll come back from the jungle and go i was watching monkeys and this
this jaguar was also watching the monkeys but i was being so quiet she
didn't see me and then when she see me she feels so embarrassed and she go and
he'll tell you this story like as if he had this interaction with like his
neighbor and you know and he'll be like oh the
puka kunga it never does that you won't see it do that and so one time
one time he caught a fish and i i was such a big fish it was this big
beautiful pseudo platy stoma this tiger catfish this amazing
old fish and they're all excited to eat it and i felt so bad watching this thing
gasp on the sand and i went you know what
we don't need this this is for fun i threw it back
oh no and then i took my hand and i went and i made like drag marks like so i
could say oh it it snuck back in the water
and so he walks up he looks at it and he was like i hate you
and i went what no i said i must have it must have just
he went that's not what happens he goes it goes like this when it go he knew the
track of a fish and i was like oh yeah i was like all right jj i'm sorry i'll
catch you another fish uh so stepping back to that way you
open mother of god yeah uh who was santiago duran and what
secret did he tell you jj's father was uh at some point he was a policeman
at some point when he was a teenager he was working on the boats that before
this little gold mining city of puerto maldonado
uh grew the only way to get supplies in was to take canoes up the
tembopata river up to the next state which is puno and
and where mules would come down from the mountains with supplies and then he'd
pilot the boats down but they didn't have motors at that time so he would be
pulling the boat so he was he became this physically terrifying
man and i met him in it when he was in his
80s and he was still living out in the jungle by himself and
i mean he's seen an anaconda eat a taper which is the you know a cow sized mammal
in the amazon he'd seen uncontacted tribes face to
he once killed an 11-foot electric eel opened the back of the thing's neck
removed the nerve that he says was the source of the electric
then he cut his forearm placed that nerve into his forearm
wrapped it with a dead toad and claimed that it would give him strength through
the rest of his life and continued to be a jungle badass
until the day he quietly leaned back at a
barbecue and ceased to be alive the man was incredible
but the secret that he told us was that if you want to find big anacondas
you know if you want to see the yakumama he was like you have to go to the
bowayo the place of boas the the place that we came to call the
floating forest and so he sent us there and it became like this
this pilgrimage and you know in the amazon the a lot of the creation myths
are based around the anaconda coming down from the heavens and carving the
rivers across the jungle and if you look at the rivers it looks
like that it looks like the path of an anaconda crawling
through the jungle it's even the right color
and so from the reference to the tribes of women the amazons to
the anaconda mother everything in the amazon is very feminine based even the
even the trees the largest trees in the jungle the mother of the forest the
madre de la selva is the kapok tree and it's just this
monster tree these beautiful ancient trees
and that was the beginning of the transition that we made from me
being like i hate school i want to go on adventures
you know jane goodall got to do all this amazing stuff i'm just a kid
stuck here to to eventually becoming something that had to do with
where my identity became the jungle where my life became the jungle
the the secret that he told us opened that door
because when we started working with these giant snakes it started getting
attention it started getting people to go what
are you doing um and it started started allowing me
to have experiences that that solidified and nailed down the fact
that this wasn't just like a weekend retreat this was
this was something that that i was born to do and gave you more and more
motivation to go into these uncharted territory
of the yuck yakumama yeah which uh just to step back what nations
are we talking about here is just some geography
what are we talking about where is this so i'm in peru
yeah we're in peru and so which is a south american nation peru is a south
american nation brazil has 60 of the amazon which is
unfortunate because anything that happens politically in brazil has a
massive impact impact on the amazon peru has the western amazon and ecuador
has a little bit of the western amazon and
the western amazon is where the andes mountains
the cloud forests which is a mega biodiverse biome
falls into the western amazon lowlands and so you have these the meeting of
these two incredible biomes and that's what makes this like
superlative incredible you know glowing moment of life on earth
so yeah we're in peru in the madre de dios which is
the mother of god which i always thought was such a beautiful
you know the jungle is the source of all life
and uh so we were with the esa people and they
belong to a community that's called enfierno which was given
by the missionaries who when they tried to go bring these people jesus got so
many arrows shot at them they just called it hell
um and so so santiago duran helped unite these tribes that were that were
sort of scattered through the jungle and get them status
government recognized status as indigenous people so he was sort of a
hero he was sort of a legend for a lot of the
stuff he'd done out barefoot with just like a rifle and a machete in the jungle
he he adopted the he had 19 children and the last one the the i think the
20th child that he adopted was a refugee from the
shining path that floated down the river and he just took him in and you know
this is this is just a guy that was a you know everything he did like when he
died the whole the whole the whole region showed up it was
it was he was somebody so just the fact that i know him gives me street credit
like the fact that i knew him i can go like oh i knew santiago and people like
no i'm like yeah yeah so you have to get
integrated to the culture to the place that me
in every single way which is which is tough for you for the
being from from new york yeah yeah it may it could have been tough but it was
i took to it you know the jungle they they were very uh you know jj is
teaching me about medicines and we were doing bird surveys and you know
taking data on macaw populations and jj was just like you
really want to like he goes you got to sleep and i was like i only have a few
weeks here i don't know if i'm ever going to come back i'm never going to
sleep so we'd be out every night looking for
all the wildlife we could i wanted to take photos i wanted to see things and
and then you know the the exchange came with that he was like you know i'm
terrified of snakes and i said well i've always worked with snakes i said i'll
teach you how to handle snakes and then we just had this like little
exchange and when i left after my first time back in 2006
you know i said i said how can i help and and they were like look you know
we're out here trying to protect this this little island of forest
that is going to be bulldozed and and the more people that you can bring the
more knowledge and the more awareness that you can bring to this
it'll help and so really at that age at 18 years old i sort of
started dabbling with the idea of that i could be part of
helping these people to protect this place that i loved
and of course at that time that idea seemed
like too large of a dream or too large of a of a challenge to that i could
actually impact it so what was the journey
of looking for these giant snakes of uh looking for anacondas
what are anacondas anaconda is the largest snake on earth so you have
reticulated pythons in southeast asia they're actually longer
but anacondas are these massive boas they give live birth and unlike a lot of
other species so an anaconda starts off you know a little
two-foot anaconda just a little thicker than your finger a little baby
and they're food for cane toads herons crocodiles
you name it they're they're pretty harmless defenseless
but as they grow they're eating the fish they're eating the crocs and then they
grow a little more and they're eating things like capybara and they're eating
larger prey and then at the end of their life a female anaconda you're talking
about a 25 30 foot 300 400 pound snake with a head
bigger than a football and these things that means that they
impact the entire ecosystem which is very unique
moves up the food chain to become basically an apex predator
apex predator yeah the the apex predator of the rivers and so
that's how interesting is just eating your way up the food chain your way up
the food chain if you can survive and like that you know they're constantly
at war with everything else but you know so i showed up in the amazon i was like
so where the anacondas at and they were like oh no no it's not
like that they're like it's you you have to find
these things they're they're subterranean they're living in the
special swamps they're people kill them and so we went to the
floating forest after we'd come back from
an expedition we'd call it like a 12-foot anaconda and it's now it's
become like this like classic photo of me and jj with this anaconda over our
shoulders and we were like we you know we
12 days out in the jungle on a hunting trip and we came back and we showed his
dad and uh santiago looked at us and he was
like that's the smallest anaconda i've ever seen he's like you guys are
pathetic oh man 12 foot and he was like look you
go to the go he's like go he's like i'm giving you
permission go to the boy or go to the floating forest and so we went to this
place and we reached there at night and it was me
jj and one of his brothers and his brother took one look at it and
was like i'm out and he started walking back and me and
jj get to the edge of this thing and this is our friendship it's both this
two idiots pushing each other farther and farther
and like i like put a foot on the on the ground
and it all shook and the stars are reflecting
on the ground and what we realize is that it's a lake
with floating grass on top of it and there's
islands of grass floating on this lake very life of pie
and the tops of trees are coming out of the surface of the water and so we
start walking across this and jj's going these are big anacondas and
i'm going jj that's a two foot wide smooth path
snaking through the grass there's no anaconda that big yeah
he was going they're listening i said they don't have ears
he goes they're listening and it's like we're walking and we're walking and then
it's like maybe it's like 1 a.m or something
and it was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time
and we're standing by the tail and the snake
was so big that i mean this must have been a 25 foot
anaconda dead asleep with a with a probably a 16 foot anaconda like
sprawled across her and they're laying in the starlight and we're floating on
top of a lake standing there in the middle of the amazon and
jj just i just i could feel the blood drain out of his face
and as like a however old i was you know maybe 20 years old i just said if i
if we could somehow show people this we'll be on the front cover in national
geographic and we can protect all the jungle that
we want and so i tried to catch it
yeah so i jumped on the snake and the only measurement i have of this animal
is that when i wrapped my arms around it i couldn't touch my fingers
yeah and so i was you know my my feet were dragging and to her credit this
anaconda did not turn around and eat me because her head was you know this yeah
and and she went and she reached the edge of the
the grass island and she starts plunging into the dark
and so i'm watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda is going and i have to
make the choice of either going head first down into
the black which no thank you or stopping and just
keeping my hand on this thing as it raced by me and i just felt the scales
and the muscle and the power go by and then eventually taper down to
the tail until it slipped away into the darkness and i was laying there
just panting and i turned around and went jj what the fuck
like where were you man he was just like completely white circuits blown and i
had to go then like kind of like take care of him i was like are you okay
and he was like no he you know he just couldn't
and so we came back with that and then after that we were like okay
clearly clearly the parameters of reality that we thought were possible
are are just a tiny fraction of what's out there like we we now that that sort
of recalibrated us we were like okay we're we're rubbing up against things
that are bigger than we thought wherever possible and so we were like okay now we
need to we need to concentrate on this so how
dangerous is that creature tell to you to to humans to humans not at
all i mean my um one our our cook's uh father-in-law
was was eaten by an anaconda but like you know
then again like the way you see that tell that story sometimes it happens it
happens i mean come on every now and then somebody gets stung by a bee and
dies like you know it's it once in a while it happens but
you gotta have a really big anaconda really hungry
and like anybody that works in the wild i mean just
you know if you you walk up to a crocodile even a giant nile crocodile
you walk up to them most of the time they're gonna
run into the water they don't want confrontation they hunt in their way on
their terms sneaky you're not gonna see him and so
with an anaconda it's like yeah if you're
i mean the guy who got eaten like if you're drunk and you go to the edge of
the water and you go for a midnight swim by yourself in an amazonian lake i mean
whose fault is that but if you jump on anaconda try to uh
yeah hold on then you're safe um apparently i mean i
think i've i think at this point we've you know the research we've done i think
i've handled or caught you know over 80 anacondas in the field and
um not one of them has bitten me they always choose
flight over fight they're like just like leave me alone let me go i'm just
going to crawl under this thing um they're not an aggressive animal i
mean no snake no i actually like i kind of like the
only time i get particular with like you know the words is like people go
that's an aggressive black mambas are aggressive no snake is
aggressive a rattlesnake is going to rattle to say hey back up
cobra's going to stand up and show you its hood and people go oh look he's
being aggressive no he's not being aggressive he's going
don't step on me don't make me do this they're actually being very peaceful
that's the way i look at it because if there's a cobra in the corner of this
room right now he would crawl under the curtain and we'd never see him again
yeah it's like uh jenga's khan before conquering the villages he always
offered for them to join the army doesn't need to be like this
yeah join us nobody gets destroyed if you want to
be proud and fight for your country then uh then we're gonna oblige him
exactly okay so how do you how do you catch uh
actually let's step back because there is
in part you are a bit of a snake whisperer so what
what is it that that others don't understand that you do about snakes
what's maybe a misconception or what what is uh what have you learned from
the language you speak that snakes understand i don't
know it's just it's an animal that has has many times in my life i've been
responsible for helping um the you know i started
catching snakes when i was very young i'd watch Steve Irwin and go out and
catch a garter snake or a black rat snake in new york and
um and then i had a rule i said i have to catch a hundred non-venomous snakes
before i'm allowed to handle a venomous snake if i ever need to handle a venomous
snake and then you know i was on a trail one time i
think in harriman state park and some guy you know
like some big hero he tells us you know he's like back up
i'm gonna get this and he like picks up a stick and he like goes to like assault
this poor copperhead that's sitting on the trail
and so like at like 16 years old i had to go and like shoulder this guy out of
the way and i like got the thing by the tail and used a stick to very gently
just put it off the trail copperhead was not going to
do anything to him but he wanted to you know beat his chest and show his wife
that he was tough but then in india you know i've lived
in india for five years at this point in and out you
know periodically and and snakes are always getting into
people's kitchens um one time we had a king cobra get
into someone's kitchen an 11-foot snake like a monster like a god of a snake
this thing stood up you know would stand up and be able to look at you over the
table and this terrifying monster thing
um giant gorilla dog thing like we caught it with one of the local
snake catchers and we brought it out and he goes
you know i wonder why it was in the kitchen yeah
looking for food and they go no they eat snakes king cobra ophio fagus hannah
they eat snakes and he goes she's thirsty
and so we got a bottle of water and we got footage of this and we she's
standing up she's going don't make me kill you don't make me kill you
you're scaring me right now i don't want to kill you we took the bottle of water
we poured it on her nose and she started she started drinking you
could see you could see her just drinking and the snake just took
this long drink she drank a whole water bottle
and then said thank you so much and crawled off
and it's like to me the fact that people are scared of snakes they have symbolic
hatred of snakes you know you you know someone's evil and sneaky we call them a
snake and like to me it's like when i take volunteers or researchers or
students out into the jungle and we find
an an emerald tree boa or an amazon tree boa or
or a vine snake and it's like there's just it's one of the few animals like
you can't really catch a bird and show it to people
we're going to scare the bird its feathers are going to come out you might
give it a heart attack snakes you can lift up a snake you know
if there's a snake in the room right now i could lift it up and say lex here
this is how you hold it and we can interact calmly with this thing and then
put it back on its branch and then it'll go
and i've seen what that does to people i've seen how the wonder in their eyes
and so to me snakes have always been this incredible link to teach people
about wildlife about nature because they have naturally a lot of
fear towards this creature and to realize that the fear is not
justified it's not grounded or is not as deeply
grounded in reality of course there's always new yorker
snakes right there's always going to be an asshole snake here and there
coming for me man
well okay so back to the anaconda how do you catch an anaconda like what
uh how do you handle because it's such a 25 foot or even 12 foot
yeah these giant snakes how do you how do you deal with this creature how do
you interact with it we had to learn how to do that because
one of the first ones we caught that i would say maybe like a 16-footer which
is no joke of a snake you know girth of a basketball let's say um
you know we're on the canoe and this is this is the early days like you know
now we're at a whole different level but this is
back when we were barefoot and shirtless and
just guys in the amazon and jj is like you know i just listen to him
he'd be like get off the boat you come from the top we're going to come from
the bottom so okay i just did as i was told i came in
the snake is all curled up dead asleep she's got some butterflies on her eyes
trying to get salt and stuff and all of a sudden i see the tongue so
so i'm like she's awake and i'm like guys guys guys and that
like they're they're paying attention to not crash in the boat to getting over
there and we're all trying to run snake starts
going into the water so i run ahead grab this snake get her by the head so
you got her by the head you think okay can't she can't get me i got her right
behind the head and it's about this thick the neck
what's that feel like sorry to interrupt like
grabbing this thing with this giant head it's exciting it's amazing it's it's
scary how hard is it to hold it's not that hard
to hold the scary part is the moment of it's like if you've ever done like a
cliff dive or something it's that moment where you go
do it do it the time like do it and if your body's going do not do that yeah
and then you're like i gotta just do it and you do it because you can't just
gently like flirt with it you have to grab no
and it's like it's like crossing the street when there's a bus coming it's
like you hesitate it's more dangerous you know so like you just you go for it
and i got her and i was like i got her and then a coil goes over my wrists and
all of a sudden my wrists slap together and you feel this squeeze
that can crush the bones out of an animal bigger than me
and the next coil comes very quickly over my neck
and now i'm on my knees with my arms tied if i wanted to let go of the snake
i couldn't and my shoulders are coming together and
my collarbone is about to break and i tried to yell for jj and all that
came out was there's nothing and so that's what they do to their prey you
know so i attacked as far as the snake knows i attacked
she doesn't know that i just want to measure her
you you started out as the big spoon but then the snake became the big spoon
very much became the big spoon and uh i was i would say i was 15 seconds away
from having my entire rib cage collapsed and then jj showed up and
grabbed the tail and just started unwrapping this thing and then we got
but now we have a system now we know like you know
i'm always i've done i've gotten more head catches than anybody so i'm usually
point guy and you know you're the you're the the
first the the point guy on the okay the the
taking the big risky yes first step yes although the
it could be argued that there's a similarly large risk for the tail guy
because anaconda's defense is to take a giant projectile shit and so the
person that gets the tail is going to smell like anaconda for
like at least a week yes it's the least pleasant you're taking
you're taking the the most dangerous one there
um they have the least pleasant job this is fascinating but what's really
fascinating though is that because they're the apex predator
they're they're eating the fish they're eating the birds they're eating
everything and everything in this riparian ecosystem
is absorbing the mercury that's coming off the gold mining in the region and so
anacondas can be indicative for us of how is mercury
moving through this ecosystem and this is a region
where we've lost hundreds of thousands of acres to artisanal gold mining where
they use mercury to bind the gold they cut the forest
burn the forest and then they run water through the sand
and the sand particles have bits of gold in it
not chunks but just little almost microscopic flecks of gold
and then they use the mercury to bind that
and then they burn off the mercury and that vapor goes up into the clouds just
like everything else it's all connected down there
and then rains down into the rivers and so the people in the region
are having birth defects from the amount of mercury
that's in the water and so we were starting at at one point when we were
doing most of our anaconda research we were learning things like these
animals actually aren't just ambush predators which is what most of the
literature would tell you is that anacondas are ambush predators no they
actually go hunting they'll go find clay licks and salt
deposits and they'll wait there they'll actually pursue animals
and we were trying to take tissue samples to find out if
anacondas could be used to study how mercury is moving through the ecosystem
and so that was really it became can we use these animals not only as
ambassadors for wildlife because everybody wants to see the anacondas
but also you know what can we learn from studying
this very very little understood apex predator and one of the things you can
learn is how mercury moves through through the ecosystem which can damage
the ecosystem in all kinds of different ways yeah it's brutal man
the the gold mining what that's happening down there is
is it's funny because we've been hearing a lot recently about like the cobalt
mines in africa and it's like where we are in
the amazon um we were down there with abc news i want to say like a year
and a half ago um with my friend matt gutman who's the
chief correspondent for abc and we he wanted to see the amazon fires he
wanted to see some wildlife he wanted to see the areas that we're protecting and
then he goes i want to see the gold mining areas and and i'd never
gotten in so deep but we we met these russian guys you can't go with the
proving they will kill you like our lawyer's father was was assassinated for
standing up to the gold miners there was two russian guys though who
had a legal mining concession somehow way out past the machine gun guarded
limit of the pampas which is where they do all this gold mining we got in there
and took footage of the desert that is
forming in what used to be the headwaters of the
amazon rainforest and it's like there is a massive global scale ecological
crime happening down there that you can see from space
from this unregulated gold mining and the cops can't go there because they
will be murdered it's completely lawless what's the
machine gun limit exactly it's the border of this area that
they call the pampas which is where the rainforest has been cut and completely
destroyed and it looks like mars it's just sand
and inside of this area are gold miners and we you know we tried to get in there
to film years ago and there's just a lot of guys with
machine guns who don't let that happen and what the russian guys the russian
guys had access somehow they've come down with a bit of money and they had a
new system yeah and actually what was interesting is
while i was in there they're very friendly
and really really too friendly uh gold miners
and they uh one of them while i was there he uh
you know he kind of tapped me on the shoulder he was like you know look at
those guys he was like those guys over there he
goes i just heard them say your name and he goes that's not a good thing he
goes they know exactly who you are he goes i wouldn't keep posting to
instagram about gold mining in the amazon and i was like
thanks for the warning and then you know uh
in june somebody pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and i got a more stern
warning but they pay attention to the flow of information because they don't
want the world to uh to find out oh the last thing they
want is to be shut down but the gold miners are notorious for
you know just uh whacking people and throwing them in a
in a pile of you know gold mining leftovers
it's really like like the peruvian government has to get the military to go
after them like the work we've done with gold miners
converting them into conservationists has all been like i mean i've seen the
peruvian navy come down and literally blow up gold mining barges and
you know it's it's it's a war it's a war being fought in the amazon
so it's a it's possible to convert them into conservationists
what's that process like we or is that like uh
you say that in jest no i say that in an absolute sincerity we we went up river
uh up the malinowski river several years ago and i think it was 2018
and everyone everyone was like you are going to die like you will be shot and
killed and uh the reason we were able to do it
with relative safety was that the gold miner
that we were going with was the brother-in-law of one of my
closest friends down there our expedition chef and one of the
directors of jungle keepers and they said look you can go just keep
a low profile and so i went up with a photographer and we spent a week there
and dead animals everywhere deforestation
everywhere i mean the things we saw were so horrible and we're living with these
gold miners that are you know they're they're getting their
gold they're burning off the mercury i watched a guy smoking a cigarette
burning the mercury off of his gold with the with the vapor going straight
into his face with his child right there i mean
unbelievable negligence of just sanity just
and then and then towards the end of the week the peruvian navy comes down the
river and everyone starts scrambling and i was like i'm just going to sit here
with my hands up because you know and they didn't even stop they they
found the gold mining barge you know they have a floating
thing in the river that just plums the bottom of the river just sucks all the
all the sediment up and they stopped and they strapped a bunch of
explosives to this motor and good lord the the the sound of this explosion and
there was just hot metal raining down all over the
place and then they just went a bunch of guys in fatigues and they just kind of
like looked at us like peace and i sat there with this gold miner and
i went now what and he went well now i gotta go get a new motor and i went
why don't you just do something else and he goes what else is there
and i went look what we do and i sat there with my phone and i was like
see this these are pretty tourists and we feed them food and we show them
tarantulas and macaws and they and he looked at this and he went wow
he goes you because that looks like so much fun and i went it is so much fun i
said we show people we bring students to the jungle
he goes so you're saying if i build you a lodge you'll bring people i said yeah
and i came back a year later and he sat there with a with a chainsaw a hand
saw and some nails and he cut down like 17
palm trees and he built an ecotourism lodge
so you give them another channel of survival without making money
and that's what we've been doing through jungle keepers for loggers
and for all kinds of extractors is just saying look what do you make you make
15 a day destroying the ancient trees of the
jungle what if we paid you 35 a day to have a
uniform and a job and health insurance and
security and you just protect it and use all of
the jungle knowledge you've gained as a logger to protect this place
who are the loggers trying to to destroy the amazon
can you say a little bit more about it is that as a threat
to the the am the amazon rainforest a lot of them are really close friends of
mine they're they're they're people that need to make a
living and they're jungle people who you know the rainforest is a very
challenging especially the amazon is a very challenging environment so you have
these people who they have a chainsaw they have a job
opportunity they go out and they cut the trees and a lot of these guys grew up
fishing they grew up in the jungle they know how to do it
and so for them it's a way to like they also love it so this is the thing these
are outdoorsmen these are guys that love the jungle
and so they you know in the 90s we had the mahogany boom where they went out
after the mahogany and you almost can't find a mahogany tree in the jungle
anymore and and if you want to talk about like
carbon sequestration in the rainforest the the ancient hardwoods hold like 60
percent of the carbon of the whole rainforest
they have an outsized disproportionate mass from from that
ancient density of the wood and so these these
these loggers go out and they cut the wood that's most valuable and then they
bring it back to town and they sell it and then people like us buy it and put
it on our kitchen floors and you know and so
the thing is is i you know when i got to the amazon it was you know loggers are
the bad guys and if you talk to you know a lot of
like the phds that i worked with down there were you know always very at odds
with the miners at odds with the with the loggers
and then i'd be with jj and jj would sit down and he'd be like hey let's pour a
drink oh they have masato let's all sit down and like we'd all be chilling and
throwing them back with a bunch of loggers and and then
those the opportunity through through not
vilifying these people came to be like oh these are
these are these guys are great you know and then of course out in the wild every
now and then something will happen you'll see somebody's boat
flipped over and you go you go help them out and then that that creates a certain
type of kinship so they're ultimately people who love
who love the same thing you love often yeah even if they don't love it they're
people that aren't necessarily looking to destroy it
i've met loggers who have looked at at trees they're about to cut and gone ah
this is a shame started up you know they're just like
this is where the paycheck comes from let's come back briefly to anacondas
can you tell me uh this whole situation with discoveries eaten alive there's
some drama and controversy around that can you explain that whole saga with
discovery with um with your whole effort maybe
outside of even the drama the the initial thing
which i now feel you're sufficiently insane to actually do
of being eaten by anaconda is that actually possible to survive something
like that i mean if anaconda swallows you while
you're wearing the suit that they made maybe but
that was in hindsight whether that was the result of
look i go to the jungle and you start seeing these beautiful
places these incredible species you start
developing a relationship with these animals
and then you watch it get destroyed every year we watch it burn every year
places that are are crucial to my soul i have seen
leveled and turned to ash and at some point
we started going someone has to do something about this
and you look to your right and you look to your left and there is no one because
it's the middle of the amazon and the rainforests have been being
destroyed since the 70s it's a cliche and so we started trying to do
something about it and so i started putting a little bit more
emphasis on on publicity a little bit more emphasis on getting the message out
there and so i started trying to see how what was going to work you know you
start firing shots in the dark and seeing and you know jj is going you have
to help us do something and i'm going okay you know and so from 18 years old
now now i'm 23 years old and all of a sudden
this place isn't isn't foreign to me anymore it's it's home
and and so when you're trying to think of all the different ways you can bring
attention to this place that you care about that's being destroyed
yeah you're standing next to a boulder of progress
of of destruction and it's about to roll onto the forest and just destroy it and
snuff out all that life and no one's there to do anything about it
and so you go is there any way that i could put myself
in front of this boulder and hold it back
and you're talking about you know the globe
the global economic reality it's just it's just such a massive it's systemic
so what's the most dramatic possible thing i could do
exactly so when you find yourself flown to la
as a 23 year old dude and uh you're sitting there with some guy you know
who's like spinning a pen and got his feet up on the desk and
going you know what can you show us down there and you go i could show you
the biggest anacondas in the world and we could talk about mercury and bio
accumulation and we could show people how these animals are misunderstood and
we go on a big expedition and we could be the coolest show ever and he goes
yeah not good enough you know okay and so
those that that that that cycled through a
bunch of times and someone at some point in one of those
meetings said you know what if we show people that anacondas
really can't eat humans and i went how is that a good show you want me to feed
someone to an anaconda and i said i said i mean i kind of
joked like what if you know i said the only way that's feasible is if you like
make a suit with a breathing apparatus and
let the snake eat you and then come back out safely and make sure you don't hurt
the snake and they're like kid you're on and i was
like oh shit so i should mention a small
tangent i think i mentioned to you offline
uh due to travel troubles where i traveled to the totally wrong part of
the united states um on my way to boston uh
and on my way to boston i did a conversation with uh
mr beast jimmy and i've gotten a chance to hang out with him for the day
and one of the things we did is have a lengthy brainstorm session with his team
or i was i was observing it sure sure um
but it was interesting because he's probably way
better at that conversation that you had with the with the guy in la
yeah than the guy in la obviously because he's
made he's revolutionizing entertainment and he's also doing philanthropy yeah
yeah which he's trying to figure out how to help the world with that kind of
stuff so i would love to actually i'll send him a message to see what what
his thoughts just brainstorm he's so strong at this yeah literally
taking the situation you're facing yeah here's the place that i really care
about is being burned down it's being destroyed uh what's the sexy
video yeah well how do you get how do you get
people to watch something that's you know we all change the channel when
they show us the kids in africa with the swollen stomachs nobody wants to see it
and it's like with the rain forest like we know we
know we know and i'm going i could give data all day long i could
show photos of burning forest and so i was looking for what would do
it and so the eating alive thing without spending too much time on a on a
massive misstep was i agreed to do it they paid me at the time more money than
i had made before which i very much needed because nobody pays you to be a
conservationist um so i was a very poor 23 year old it
was like yes i would love that please and i thought
you know what this is the start of a tv career
yeah um we got we got shafted so bad i mean they used
somehow they changed our voices they changed the things we said they changed
the message of the film there was one point where we had caught
a 19-foot snake and i was holding her head and i said this is such a beautiful
animal the queen of the amazon this is such a
great moment for me i kissed her on the head i said she's made so many babies
look at the scars i was talking about just the poetry of this incredible
dragon and then the producer goes yeah yeah
that's great listen if that was to bite you
what would happen and i was like oh well if it bit you you know you'd bleed out
because it would lacerate down to the that's what they put in the film and so
day of they they didn't show me the film until
the night before i went on matt lauer's show
and i said i am not endorsing this film and they had called it expedition on the
call sheet they called it expedition ea expedition amazon all of a sudden they
changed it to eaten alive and i went wait guys wait wait wait i said you're
going to make people think that it actually happened not that we're
attempting it and they and i say i'm not and then they called me and they said
you better you're going on live tv tomorrow they said you let us know what
level of control we need to show for you right it was a very threatening phone
call and so i had to go out and smile for the
cameras and endorse something that was a train
wreck and the the scientific community was
like you're an idiot we don't want to ever see you again i
lost a lot of opportunities pita came which you know pita whatever
but pita came out people were like you you were trying to hurt a snake which i
would never do and then the american public was like
you know you said you were going to get eaten by a snake and you didn't and so
everyone was pissed i basically had to exile myself to india for like six
months and just i mean i had death threats coming through
all my messages people were furious with me what gave you strength
to that how difficult was that psychologically
just everything you care about being completely kind of
flipped upside down i've spent so much time
on the ground with the local people learning from the wildlife it's such a
devout and important thing to me and it got turned into a a sideshow it
got turned into a joke and then not just a joke it got turned into that
i'm somehow bad to animals you know i'm i'm um i'm irresponsible
scientifically jimmy kimmel told me to have sex with
the hippo as my next stunt like it was like it got really ugly and
it misfired so bad and when you hear these like
motivational speakers talk about you know you just got to keep trying
and sometimes you're going to fail hard it was like
that one i got hit in the head with a baseball bat that one was tough
and uh at the time i was like i'm fine and i was like i'm gonna go away for a
while you know and and i learned a lot though
like at this point i'm still glad i did it
because man did i learn a lot about what what a room full of people that you
don't know who could look you in the eye and shake your hand and say
trust us oh boy do you have a human level of
resentment towards discovery towards the people
involved were you able to forgive them i don't
care it literally that that's what they do
you know they literally put out a documentary saying that mermaids were
real you know it's wait a minute wait a
minute they're not listen no uh i said did i'm not even
touching that one it is true the document there is a
there is a documentary where they duped a bunch of scientists who are like
oceanographers and they like showed them ancient footage of
you know mariners saying that seals were mermaids who cares
it's it's it's it's i was young i got brought to hollywood and i got
spit out the other side and that's on me that's not their fault
you know you there's that you know you don't the
there's that parable about the frog who gives the scorpion a ride across the
water and then at the end he says i'll give
you a ride just don't sting me and i get to the other side and scorpion stings
him and the frog goes why did you do that and the scorpion goes i'm a
scorpion yeah that's it's not their fault that's
my nature but uh now that you've become much more well known and much
more successful what you do you have a platform
can you return to those people and use it the machine to
get more and more attention is that something you work on
or do you prefer to work completely outside
i think that most of the success that we've had
now in protecting the rainforest and and and it's the levels that we've reached
just so far i think back to those barefoot days of
catching snakes with jj in the boat and now
the massive ecological reserve we have and the team of rangers and the
converted loggers and all of that is because of the ability
to communicate and to show people but that's all been through social media
and so i'm open to the fact you know if if if somebody came and gave
a sort of like bordanian pass where they said look you can be yourself you can
swear you can fart you can smoke you can do whatever you want to do
go out there and show us the real thing i would love to
but now i know how those contracts need to be i need to have right to refusal
and they can't change them and so i'd almost rather just do it like
the way i think like mr beast does stuff where it's like you just you get a crew
guys and some seed money and go film the episodes and put it out
exact i mean a committee never helped real art be better
it has to come from the the the source of inspiration so you get you i think
you know you get jj and a crew of people or the guys in africa that i'm
working with right now doing elephant conservation and like
but you got to show real i mean look that's why
that's why i mean look that's why joe rogan isn't is is important right now
that's why you're important right now is because it's not being filtered through
this ridiculous system of of polishing it and dumbing it down
yeah that's why joe has been an inspiration you don't need a
a crew of a bunch of people you don't need a crew period all you need is
one or two other people and that's it and in my case you don't need anybody
i've been doing this uh i by requirement i just need to be by
myself there's a few other folks now that help
with the editing and so on but it's just they make life more
awesome as opposed to a boss that's that's like a creative director yeah
somebody told me actually i was visiting la i think it was in la that they were
saying that uh now for all intimate scenes in
hollywood movies there's an intimacy director so when there's a
uh two people having sex there's a third person
that ensures that uh on film so it's not real but there's still intimacy uh that
there's a third person that ensures that like
everyone is comfortable and the actors say that this
like always ruins the the chemistry of the scene
yeah and so it's just it's a very hollywood thing i understand there's
creepy uh yeah i understand uh thanks harvey
wines uh and it's usually i think comes from
the director pushing things too hard if you just leave it to the actors they
know their boundaries they can control their own boundaries
uh so the intimacy director is more for the like the director pushing things you
know there's i understand i understand the
logic like let's make sure that we don't have anything happen here that
shouldn't be happening i get it but i yeah
but but no i think that authenticity is is
is the greatest currency and i think that in order for me to tell the stories
that i can tell like you know what changed the game for
me was i want to tell you this story sure so
in 2019 um
the amazon fires started popping off and we had just gone to
to film uh like a month earlier we'd filmed like a small documentary
and uh they'd been following me as if i was on a as if i was on a solo which you
know we did the best we could i lived on my own
but we as we were driving we passed a spot where the flames were 70 feet tall
the forest was being destroyed and i went out there with my phone
which overheated in like two minutes and said you can't use it but i for a second
i was out there in the flames picking up animals and throwing them
off to try and just get them cooled off i was trying to get snakes out of there
everything was the birds are flying and i fucking lost it i i was red-eyed i
was crying and i was going this is happening every fucking day i
was screaming and it's the first time that i'd done that because i've seen the
burning so many times and i just lost it that day and i don't know what made me
pull out my phone because usually in those intense moments i i say forget the
documentation this is real life we got stuff to do and i'm doing i'm not
documenting and then a month later i'm home and i'm
in new york and all of a sudden i see these articles
like you know the amazon's burning worse this year than it was last year and blah
blah blah and i was like this you know fucking
and i threw it up on instagram like eight o'clock at night
and i'd never like i'd never cursed on instagram i don't know you know why i
just never did and i my phone was on a hundred percent
and i put on top of the refrigerator and i went to bed
and i woke up in the morning and my phone was on the floor on two percent
and it was ringing off the hook and it was like the news
and they're like are you the guy that posted that viral video about the amazon
and i was like what yeah and that was the start that's where
it broke and that's where we went from barefoot
in the amazon to you know all of a sudden you know i was a
talking head for three weeks and going around on all these news stations and
all of a sudden i was like the spokesperson for the amazon and jj's
calling me and he was like go go go go go like get us
get us that support and it was just um you know so so communicating with
people and bringing them into that reality and whether it's you know
rhino poaching and elephant poaching or the amazon being destroyed it's like to
me it's like being able to to to take people into that is is
something that i would love to do yeah and you do it directly with
authenticity on your instagram people should definitely follow your instagram
i think i think rogan follows your instagram too well
the end of that story actually kind of involves him because yeah because
because i went to all these news outlets and i was living in green rooms and
traveling around and i was all strung out and i hadn't seen anybody i actually
know in a few weeks which was starting to get to me
and i finally got home and i went to like a family party and everyone's like
dude you've been it's been crazy and i was like yup and then i left and my
cousin michael calls me and he's screaming and i'm going what what what
what what and he goes joe rogan just shared it joe rogan you
shared it oh nice and everyone was losing their shit and it was so amazing
and it was like yeah that's when it really took off and
what happened as a result of all of this is that uh a canadian entrepreneur
who started lightspeed reached out and uh several months later after
covid after that boom you know i'd been in the game for maybe
13 years or something had no money no savings no job no
nothing and after that great publicity thing
nothing happened the waves came and everything got real exciting everybody
reached out and they said we care so much
nothing happened though you know we can run into battle but if we don't have our
arrows in the quiver what can we do and i actually i made a
phone call to my friend mosin right at the start of covid and i was
going through divorce and i was broke and i said i'm gonna get a job
i said i give up so this is stupid i said the ecotourism business is done
jungle keepers has dried up we're done and then this guy dax da
silva called me on the phone and said listen i'm in what what do we got to do
and so if if the analogy was me and jj and a few other people trying to hold
this boulder back from just destroying the rainforest all of a sudden dax comes
in like a titan and just puts his arm out and just goes
i'm gonna help and he gave us the funding to start
actually developing a ranger program to start actually bringing loggers to be
protectors of the forest to be supporting smaller conservation
things and now we're protecting 50 000 acres of rainforest we're protecting
entire streams and ecosystems that i love
and we're soon going to double that and it's like this this whole thing so
um yeah the the the the communication of these things is crucial and i actually
think it's incredible that that social media has played such a big
role in it well i mean uh just because i i know joe
well and i love him so much i definitely think
uh you should do his podcast but also just be friends with him i think you
guys um he's one you know not the meme
but he's one with nature and not much more with the
i'm one while i do appreciate and love nature i also love
um technology and robots and so on so we're
in that meme type of way we're very very different but well
either way at some point make sure you tell the guy thank you because it
definitely really helped push us over that that
limit where you know if enough people see it you get
someone like dax who who who says i can help and i have the
resources to help and that that changed our whole lives
everything
back to the jungle uh you had a bunch of interactions with jaguars
how are you still alive like what man dude
jags jags aren't the jags i'll tell you this jags are not
the danger the falling trees are the danger uh
i'll tell you some elephant stories and then you'll then you'll then you'll
wonder why i'm still alive but um jags i've i've just one you know so
jj started in santiago his dad started challenging me to do solos go out
alone into the wild style you know i'd have a
hammock a headlamp three days worth of food some fish
hooks a machete that's it and so like one of the stories
that that happened early on was i was out there and it was raining and i was
lost and this is how we test your jungle
knowledge can you survive out there do you know how to find food have you
listened to the things that we taught you
and there was one night that i was in a hammock
and a jaguar came up and i was asleep when it happened and she came up right
next to my head and she was and i could hear her smelling me
and then my first instinct was to to to turn on my headlamp and just the sound
of my arm moving against the the the material
and she just like she just right here i could feel her breath
and i just laid there in the dark and that's one of those moments where you go
you really learn a lot about yourself because i wasn't scared i i felt like i
understood the intentions of the cat if she was
hunting i'd already be dead she was curious and i was lost and i
didn't know if i was ever going to get out of that jungle but
what she did was energize me because it was an experience like
the giant anaconda where i said this is so wild
that it's that it's so almost cinematically outside the
realm of what i thought my life could be like
that it made me like wait because the previous day i was lost
tired confused kind of devastated tail between my legs
after that i was like man you've been waiting for this your whole life
go get it and i like woke up and i was like i am gonna navigate even though
i've been in this swamp for three days i'm gonna find my way out of this swamp
and like she just like breathed fire into me
where it was like it was like if that's possible
if i could be six inches away from a jaguar's face
then i got i got that energy from her so that you're able to
start to really hear and feel the the jungle around you yeah that was a
that was a sign do you know what you're doing it really felt like a sign i
how do you survive in a solo solo hike to the jungle
what what are the different components what are the different dangers
so you said you had a hammock you had some food what kind of food by the way
we're talking about uh nuts stuff that won't go bad because
you can't so you can't really start a fire in the
amazon like i'm a good for i mean i camp all over the place i'm a wilderness
guide starting a fire in the amazon is futile
in fact a lot of survival manuals will tell you don't do it because if you're
really lost it'll break your spirit you're not going to be able to do it
that's dark yeah they're like don't even try it
um but you can still get like hypothermia from if you get wet and you
lay out in the jungle you could you know you could still
exposure can still get you so you want fire um
i even in the beginning i used to bring like ramen noodles which is which is
the nutritionally is irrelevant and so i started bringing like nuts
and then supplementing that with fish which forced me to become a very good
fisherman and um now of course jj knows that he can
like they can cut certain roots and they bash it up and they put it in the stream
and the fish just float to the top and they take with them so like he's got
like he's got all the cheat codes yeah whereas like i'm sitting there with a
hook and then he's like he'll go now find bait and i go bait
in the most competitive ecosystem on earth good luck finding a worm
you can't do it what does jj do he takes the machete
looks at his foot cuts a slug of callus off of his heel because he's got this
thick rhino skin nice puts that on the hook catches a
six-inch fish chops it in half puts it on a bigger
hooking and in 15 minutes he's got a four-foot
giant catfish that could feed a family of 16 and he's happy i'm sitting there
and i'm like i'm gonna try to like stick a beetle on a
on a fishing hook and like you know do you have just a line and a hook or is
there a rod too just a line and a hook and then you you
just chop a you just chop a rod and tie it to the
you know you just chop a little sapling so are you still able to start a fire
or no i like for the food that i bring to not be fire dependent
sure and so if i have some nuts i can i can shove in a few enough calories to
get me through the night or like and leave a fishing line out
and there'll be something there in the morning
um but yes i can start a fire but a lot of times what i'll do is i'll bring a
flask and not with like alcohol but with
diesel and so you have a tuna can and you put
the diesel in this is what the local guys do
everything i do you know i'm sure this is going to be someone listening to
this and they're like how could you do that and it's like
yeah this is what we do down there sorry uh it's a it's a tuna can you pour a
little bit of diesel in it it burns slow you light it and you put your sticks you
make your pyramid over that and eventually that will burn through the
moisture and finally you'll get a very reluctant little fire enough to
burn you know to make yourself like a cup of tea or to pour that into the
noodles something something or you just eat a fish raw how
important is it to stay dry is it basically impossible it's impossible to
stay dry you're wet all the time you're wet all the time what does that
mean that means infections are more efficient yeah um
so yeah i don't know if you saw the picture in my book where i have the
yellow spots yeah so yeah there's a picture
with your like entire face consumed with yellow spots is basically i guess that's
mercer yep oh boy uh so how did that happen what
uh what was the infection like and um
yeah and how crazy are you for letting that infection
stay in you for a prolonged period of time without treating it or you had no
choice no i i did have a choice i was 19 years
old and i was taking care of a giant anteater
that was orphaned and this is like my dream animal yeah and she was mine
and my job was to teach her the jungle and so when i started like noticing that
i had an infection and that i was i had i think i had dengue at the time
too i went back to town probably picked up
mercer in the hospital where i got tested
came back into the jungle and then got progressively sicker and sicker and
weaker and weaker as i was two weeks three weeks in the jungle
and it got to the point where my vision went black and white and i passed out
one day and and i don't know why but at the time
i had shaved that day and when i woke up the next
morning i couldn't open my eyes because the
the pus had come out of my eyes yeah and out of my the pores in my face all
those little micro cuts and the pillow was stuck to my face and
i was stuck up river with no help at 19 years old and also when you when you see
that picture you can imagine that i assumed that my
life was over because i didn't know what it was
and i also didn't assume that or at the very least i figured i'd be disfigured
the rest of my life i didn't think there was any getting better from that
and so i remember sitting by the side of the river praying that a boat would
come by but it was the rainy season and there aren't going to be any boats
because the river is psychotic um and so
it was a long time before i got back to town and i didn't want to leave the
anteater but it became like i was like i realized i was dying
and then i finally got a boat with some loggers
a death boat just loaded with these guys were
had had gone into the jungle and shot everything they could and taken all the
babies and they were going to go sell them and so it was like
baby monkeys and toucans and birds in cages and pieces of crocodiles and
anaconda skins and jaguar skins rolled up and it was just
like i was just laying there with all these
dead animals in the boat with all the flies on my face and
got back to the hotel called my mother said please book me a flight out like
today like today and then i sat on the plane
and somebody somebody sat next to me on the plane and i had a hood on
and i do i do remember that in my in the haze at this point i was having trouble
staying conscious but i do remember that she like looked
over like trying to see what was sitting next to her and then
she got up and never came back and when i got to
to to immigration in new york you know the cop
what he like takes my passport and he goes yeah he goes so what were you doing
in peru he's looking down he goes yeah and he like holds up the passport looks
at the passport looks at my face he goes whoa
buddy what the fuck and i said no that's what he was like i'm trying to get home
to go to the hospital he goes he stamps it he goes go go go god
bless god bless he's like oh shit yeah and then they put me in the room in
the hospital with like the hazmat suits and they didn't know what it was and i
spent like five days on ivy antibiotics with like four different things running
through my veins and the the doctors were like don't let it go
that close they're like you went real close on that one
yeah that's what that picture i mean people should uh check out the book just
to see the picture because i imagine you just laying there
unable to see have a fever probably so you're like
half hallucinating yep and uh there's no there's no boat
there's no no way out there's no help coming um
plus there's this creature who you've become a parent of
yeah that you love yeah boy that's a dark place to be as a 19 year old i mean
most people have never will never be in a place like that
like where did you find strength in that in those in that place
i don't know i just remember writing like a goodbye letter to my parents
because i said if i die out here it was really dark like it was it was
it was terrifying it really felt like it was the end
and i was writing you know if you find me out here
i'm sorry and all that all that type of stuff and it was
you know um i don't know about strength there's no strength it was just like
move forward and at some point it was like if you'll
take me down river take me down river you know and
you just got lucky with the loggers with the death boat yeah that they found you
well how did the infection start by the way i don't know
i really don't know i mean we always have some sort of little shit but the
thing is now jj taught me that there's like three different trees
that can cure infections i didn't know this at the time i didn't know the cheat
codes now there's there's if you have a small
infection you can use sangre de drago and it'll cure it right away
like let's say you have a bot fly and it gets a little pussy there's a fly
living in your skin you put that on there not only will it
kill the fly but it'll heal the infection
now if you have a worse infection you can go to ohay which is ficus incipita
and you can use that and that will completely heal that will
murder it's like crocodile blood it will murder infections so like
forget neosporin that's a joke these are heavy chemical compounds running through
these trees and they know all about them and so
whatever it is so now at this point that's no longer an issue like
because we know how to handle it which at that time if jj had been there
i would have been fine well learn the hard way so these are open wounds
and then there's creatures that start living in them because basically what is
it well that's separate that's bot flies yeah there's there's a
there's a creature that unfortunately very very very unfortunately
um likes to make its home inside the flesh
of mammals yeah and so the flies attach their
eggs to mosquitoes the mosquitoes go and seek out
warm-blooded animals the eggs microscopic eggs fall into your skin
and then begin to grow and sooner or later you feel a twitch
and it's a worm living inside of you that's like vertical down in you and
it's it's eating you yeah and at first it's not a problem but
when they get to about as thick as that pen
it starts to hurt because you got a hole in you and they have a little breathing
tube that comes up and they breathe and they go back in
and then they eat and they come back up to breathe and you have a
you have a friend living in you yeah um and it's had one of those i've had lots
of those it's tough to take them out they have
hooks
how do you do you have to
you gotta love the junk so how do you take it out to come
100 uh you gotta you gotta put an irritant so like a lot of times
what we'll do down there is some someone will take a massive drag of a cigarette
and then they'll spit the they'll they'll power
like exhale and get some of the some of the tar which also shows you how much
tar you get out of a cigarette and then with a knife and you put that
right over the hole and then uh you slap some vaseline or
something on top of that so they can't breathe
and eventually over the course of a few hours they'll come up enough
looking for air and then you gotta grab them with a tweezer and try not to rip
them because then you're gonna get an infection
and you gotta squeeze from the it's a whole ceremony when people have botflies
we're all like oh it's botfly time let's go and then like jj will squeeze he's
got like pliers for thumbs yeah he can like take a piece of your neck
and you think he's going to break your skin he'll just squeeze until this thing
comes out and you don't wanna you know there's an open wound right there and
yeah you don't want to bathe for a day or two after until that closes because
otherwise you're gonna have like water sloshing around in like a little
pocket of yours it's kind of gross and that water might have other
organisms yeah water in your skin tends to yeah i
mean the jungle water is clean we drink it like i drink the water
fresh out of the stream oh that's interesting
well it's just a giant filtration system all those roots
the whole jungle is constantly purifying everything people might be
thinking about that with the jungle there's insects probably all over you
all the time it's not as bad as you think like i've
been to to to finland lapland in the summer and
the mosquitoes are horrendous like devastating the amazon in in our
area if you're sitting in a hammock reading a book
out you know our research stations don't have walls or anything
um you're good for about one one mosquito every half hour which really is
not a lot i mean it's worse in new jersey like
it's really not that bad tell me a little more about the the
little baby anteater lulu lulu they they you've uh who you've rescued
and had to sadly leave behind yeah i just was always fascinated with giant
anteaters or this you know german shepherd-sized
thing with wolverine claws and these giant popeye forearms and they they
excavate and and termite mounds and they have
this long tongue and their babies right on their back
for the first six months of their lives and so they actually have this
incredibly intimate relationship with their young
and it just so happened that this animal that i was
wildly fascinated with there was an orphan on the river
and jj was like you love these things and i was like yeah and so he went he
was like hey my friend you should he got he got me the the baby and we
were like we're going to rewild her and so i spent like
weeks and weeks and weeks just like with this thing on my back
crawling through the jungle teaching her to find ants giving her milk
falling asleep with her on my chest and their their tongue is like 11 inches
long at that age and so she when she wanted me to wake up she'd
fire it up my nose it would come out my mouth and she'd
and then if i tried to get her off me quick she'd stick the claws in and
you know all my clothes i have like i've old like you know now they're like
you know like museum pieces with rips in them from from lulu's claws
just able to also communicate emotion and feeling and all that she needed it
she needed it so if this animal didn't have the physical touch
if we didn't if i didn't hold her all day long she'd throw tantrums
she'd go shred something she'd go pull down the curtain she'd go
ruin the woods just just just start literally having
a traumatic response to not having intimacy which was shocking because
again on the scale of a cockroach to an
elephant you go i didn't know that giant anteaters had such intense emotions
like but she did and we we you know and also taking care of her forced me
to to explore the jungle from the perspective of an animal
so i got to like be an animal and so there's only a few times in your life in
my life where i've gotten to do that you know one was with her another time
was living with a herd of elephants where i had to walk with them through
the forest and like see how they interacted
completely natural and it's it's it's different it's very different and you
realize like just like a person's public persona
when they're out on the street in manhattan
is going to be very different than when you're on the couch with them on a
tuesday night and and and with wild animals it's very
much like that you know like if we see you see a bobcat on a trail and it's
going to look at you and glare at you and then
go off and it's like yeah but what's it like when it's in the den
and it's playing with its cubs yeah so that when it's looking at you that's
like the instagram post it's making and the actual doing duck face yeah yeah so
you've um besides amazon you spent a lot of
time in india uh can you uh tell me what you learned
hanging out with a herd of elephants well yeah well what should uh what do
people not understand about elephants that's
that's beautiful to you that's interesting to you first of all i think
that elephants should have government representation
as like a subset of society like actually
they they have intelligence they are so intelligent
and when you look at an elephant so there's this question that keeps coming
up of you know are we are we smart enough to know how smart
animals are can can we can we interpret the intelligence that we're seeing
and i've i've i've i lived with a semi-wild herd of elephants in india for
a while and some of the things that i saw like
changed how i view reality to be honest with you
because you know you watch a matriarch of an
elephant herd walk up to someone that none of us knew was pregnant
and her trunk goes to her stomach and then she calls all the other ones over
and they're interested in this little human
that they know that there's something in there and they're and they're all
conversing about it and you go whoa or that every morning we'd wake up and
the elephants didn't want the stream water they didn't want the lake water
they want puddles they wanted the water from our well
we had like a stone well you know like a traditional
and every morning it's like run out of bed because all the elephants were going
to come and they were going to rip the bucket off and destroy everything but
they wanted that nice cold clean water and so it was like caring for elephants
that were wild that were sometimes getting shot at by
farmers because if they went to try and rob some bananas
so these are sort of like delinquent elephants that were half wild and the
forest department was thinking about you know getting rid of them which
whatever that meant and uh i made really good friends with
this one elephant and his name was dharma
and uh dharma had the had the this stuff doesn't this is it's hard to write the
book i'm writing right now because none of it sounds real
he grew up around people because he was a tuskless male
so he couldn't hang out with the females because he was a grown-up male
and he couldn't hang out with the males the bulls because he couldn't defend
himself when they rough housed and everything so
dharma would be like wandering around the forest not knowing who to hang out
with and so like there was one night there
was a tiger calling and we just heard you could hear it
echoing over the hills and what does dharma do 2 a.m we hear
dharma show up and he's the same thing he starts
throwing a tantrum he starts pulling shit over he says
takes a chair throws it we had bananas in the truck
dharma walks up to the truck it's like a jeep and he walks up to the jeep
smells it he looks at me and he's like you're gonna get out of bed i'm like no
i'm not gonna get out of bed i was like dharma you're a grown-ass elephant
the tiger does his thing again and he's like i need bananas to feel better
yeah pushes the truck up on two two wheels
oh wow looks at me is this how you want it to be
so i'm up i'm up and i go and i'm like please please please please please don't
look at me i'm rubbing his face and he's like he puts it down it's all
right well then then hit me i didn't do it so he lifts it up
again and so in the end there was no way for me to outsmart the
elephant he wins yeah there's nothing i could do and so a
lot of my job was taking him out into the forest
and and you know spending a little bit of time with him i have this beautiful
one time i set up the tripod and i went and i was just i was just journaling
and he would come and he would just like play with my hair and he'd be like hey
what's up you know he just he wanted someone to
to interact with on an emotional level and you know when you think about
elephants in terms of the fact that you know people go oh you know they
they use medication to induce labor it's like yeah that's not that surprising
they they they hold the bones of the dead it's like yeah they have the best
smell of pretty much any animal that's also not surprising they probably know
exactly who that was that bone but they can navigate to
water holes and communicate in ways that we
cannot really figure out and so when you hear about people measuring at elephant
intelligence you'll hear about scientists being
like oh well we gave it a you know a bucket with a hole in it and then it had
like a key and there was a rope and you're like
bro this is all human stuff yeah can you go walking with them for
three weeks in the wild and watch how they deal with the problems that they
encounter in the forest and so elephants have become especially
recently with the work that's been going that i've been doing in africa with vet
paw um i've just become so fascinated with
elephants and uh you know
elephants the elephant the african elephant population right now is down at
two percent of what it was a few hundred years ago we're really
we're really putting them on the brink of you know there's there's some
elephants that are being born tuskless because we've poaching has taken down
the great tuskers to the point where now it's it's actually beneficial for some
elephants and not have tusks because they won't have humans but that's
that's like we've created deformed elephants and so like now i'm
gotten very concerned with issues of elephants and tusks are fundamental to
the interaction between elephants absolutely i mean with males compete
with each other but also elephants use their tusks you know like they'll
they'll break a branch and they'll be like this is a good branch i'm going to
eat the hell out of this and they'll like hang it on their tusk
and they'll like grab a bunch of other stuff they'll like hold it
um you know ripping a tree up out of the ground i just watched it two weeks ago
as as i was watching an elephant he got down
on his knees and stuck his his tusk into the ground and like
leveraged up he like archimedes to this root out of the ground and then was like
that's a sweet root and then when he left i went
and i tasted the root and it was like sweet ginger and i was like i have no
idea what this is but he knew it was good
do they use tusks for sexual selection like to impress the ladies or no
it's certainly involved in how who who has
mating rights oh who wins in the who wins i mean if you got the big tusks and
there are elephants out there like the mammoth
big tuskers that have tusks down to the ground like huge and when
you see them it's like seeing something unique on earth unique in history
because we're at a point where we might lose those
there are only a few of them left and then they're so prized by hunters
yeah it's interesting because i i forget what the actual conclusion on that is
because there's some studies of the use of the value of beauty in evolution
like birds yeah and peacocks and so on that there's no
actual value to it but it plays a role in
in sexual selection meaning value like it's much easier to understand
competition like a tusk helps you defeat
sure it's a tool but i bet you there's a component to the tusk
where the ladies go god damn that's nice like there's a visual beautiful
component maybe not i don't know but what if
what if beauty though as we're defining it though is is is
symmetry and the the absence of yellow spots on your face
and and healthy looking hair and so like i think to us beauty is
sexually appealing traits that look good to mate with and so
so that that 19 year old with uh marissa well everybody in the world
would swipe left on that yeah at least
sexually desirable objects in the universe okay
uh what you mean speaking of elephant intelligence and something i i think and
work quite a bit on as with artificial intelligence is what
the philosophical question that comes up is
what is intelligence what is intelligent
um humans homo sapiens are often thought to be highly intelligent that's
the reason they stand out uh in your understanding
of different species like the elephant what stands out to about humans or are
they just another animal with different kinds of intelligence
well we're certainly unique because we have
altered the entire planet yeah you know the term the anthropocene i mean it's
like we've literally created a geological layer of us
whereas other animals don't and going back to elephants it's like
they also engineer their environment if you're in a forest
like if you drop me in a forest on earth i could tell you in two seconds if
there's elephants there because there's twisted branches and an excavated earth
and they they're constantly gardening um
but i mean look look at us i mean there's we're we're
clearly unique in nature which which makes me not understand the the the
anti-human sentiment that that so much of environmentalism has about like you
know like we're we're bad we're damned we ruin everything and it's like
i've seen the worst i've seen the burning amazon and i'm still like
i love being able to share ideas with you and travel to places
and facetime my family when i'm not around them and it's like i
i celebrate a lot of what makes us human and i i it's almost like reality is this
crazy video game and it's like if we could just figure out the right
keys we can pretty much do anything we can think of and it's like
i mean poetry art i mean you know i'm the biggest
animal lover in the world but we are we are we are different
we really are yeah the ability to um puzzle solve create tools
we think it's the coolest invention humans have come up with
is it fire what's the most impactful uh i feel like fire is fire i feel like
fire is kind of a gimme i feel like they didn't really invent it they they
probably like the wheel flying i mean flying i mean think of
think if you could go back in time to someone that never flew
yeah you know a sultan a an egyptian king
george washington you know and be like you can
fly i mean this just just on my way here yeah
and i fly way too much but i was looking out the window at the clouds and going
this is unbelievably spectacular it's just stunning
you know as a kid you you look at a cloudy day
and you go this is the world is like this today and then you get in a plane
and you fly above the clouds and it's sunny up there and you go
oh it just it changes your perspective it's like when people go to the moon and
they come back and they tell you the pale blue dot you know just i say
i say flying i think the ability to fly i mean the fact that
i could i could get on a plane and be in india and
you know 20 22 hours is it's shocking in terms of its usefulness i would argue
that's not in the top five but in terms of its
ability to inspire yeah there's uh somebody i forgot who
uh told me this idea that there's something about the atmosphere earth's
atmosphere that allows you to look up and see the stars
like if we didn't have that human civilization would not have happened
meaning like being able to look up and see something out there
uh would fill our like this something that allows you to look
up versus just look down to like first looking at your local environment be
able to like wander and see holy shit
there's a big world out there and i don't know
anything if if you're able to look up and see that
that that kind of humility combined with the ability to dream
about exploring maybe it just inspires the exploration it's kind of an
interesting thought given how inspiring for example the uh
the extra upgraded super cool version of flying which is flying to other planets
i mean there's going to be hopefully
it's possible this century a child born no not this century maybe
the century a child born on another planet that looks
up and looks back at earth and it has to be educated by his her
parents that like there's another place
there's another place where life is way easier
oh god it's so easy there's water everywhere
exactly people complain about earth man earth is really
really good it's really really good here
water everywhere oh man i wouldn't even leave
given like right now like if somebody said like oh you could like you could go
to the moon i'd be like no i'm good if i died in space i'd be so pissed i
love it here yeah but you're still there's a longing to explore for you
there's a longing to explore but i i really think i'm i'm such a
like my longing to explore is like rivers streams oceans jungles like
to me like yeah i would i would watch the hell out of the
the live stream of of elon touching down on mars like i'd be like this is
incredible it's an amazing that i get to be around to see this
i'm staying where i'll be right here yeah but it's good that the human spirit
pushes us oh it's amazing that was possible and it does that for
you what um just uh out there questions what's
what's the most dangerous animal in the amazon would you say
mammal let's go with mammal dangerous mammal
like dangerous in terms of you walking around doing the solo hike
i'm gonna disappoint everybody with this but it's it's it's humans
it's nothing there's no if i'm out in the amazon there's nothing that's going
to attack me you know and in india you might have you
might have an old leopard or a tiger that's missing
a tooth that decides your prey or you might have an angry elephant that's in
must that just decides to just decides to
flatten you in the amazon you're not there's real jaguars won't even let you
see them yeah and there's really nothing else one
of my friends a brilliant scientist friend of mine
pat got attacked by a rabid ocelot once but that's like a
diesel house cat just having a fit you know that's it wasn't the worst thing
in the world it's just the assholes kingdom okay
what uh in terms of humans you said
that the tribes some of them uncontacted
yeah can be exceptionally dangerous what's your experience with them what
should people learn is it it's such a fascinating part of
life here on earth that there's tribes that don't have much or any contact with
the quote-unquote civilized world
i most of the people that i meet don't actually
really understand how how isolated these people are or how weird it is that we're
sitting here and that we have iphones and airplanes
and all this stuff and these people are living
naked in the forest at this moment and so the the
the thing though you know i also was recently somebody somebody said oh
there's like paleolithic tribes and it's like no no
just by default they're modern tribes living now
they just happen to be living out in the jungle and there's a huge debate about
you know do we try and contact them and bring them in
and there's two camps of people on this who they said it was it was
it was the trauma of the rubber boom that sent them out that far into the
forest and made them terrified of the outside world and
so that's also what made them so hyper violent
i mean they're there i there's one of the guys we work with on our team victor
was and i think it was 2004 he's coming down
river and he had a load of mahogany wood and he's piloting this boat and
he sent two people husband and wife ahead to go start cooking breakfast on
the beach so they could put the little kitchenette thing down and
pick put the propane he sent them ahead as the
he's going nice and slow with the barge coming down the river
they go ahead reach the beach they get out he starts cutting some cane to start
put making a fire tribe comes out no warning they just
start screaming they start shooting arrows
the man instantly gets an arrow through the leg and it pins his leg so he can't
run he tells his wife go save yourself and she does she jumps
in the water there's arrows falling around her too
and as she's floating down the river she looks back and the last thing she sees
is these guys getting to her husband and beginning to rip him apart as victor
comes down the river this is a guy we work with every day he
comes down the river and sees his friend
disemboweled opened up dissected his parts are all over the beach the beach
is red and they only found out what happened
because they found her later on holding onto a stick in the river and they're
like what happened and she was like they just attacked
they don't want people on their land on the on the on the the sort of the
underground whatsapp chain of the amazon they a few in
august like this was not internationally known um some loggers
went up and tried to steal a few trees from
where the tribes were and then everybody sent the pictures of what the loggers
looked like after a few days because the tribes porcupined them with arrows
they were laying there on the ground just arrows sticking out of their bodies
and then eventually the authorities came out and looked and there was just these
white but i'll show you the pictures later there's just these white
puffy bodies with like the skulls sticking out and it was like
you don't mess with these tribes i wonder what
are the what's the mythology around that they construct around who these
outsiders are are they gods are they demons are they
humans what who are they who are we to them well you you got to go back to
the rubber boom the the rubber barons went down there and at the start of the
industrial revolution the only way to get rubber
was to mine it from the trees that are out in the forest and so the only way to
do that because you can't make a rubber plantation in the jungle
the the rubber when it's in plantation form when it's a monoculture it gets
this leaf blight and it all dies henry ford tried it didn't work and so
what they did was they sent these people down who just whipped
burned enslaved raped and pillaged the people it's one of the worst periods
in human suffering that i've ever read about
one missionary said they were killing the locals the way you or i would kill a
mosquito they just went nuts and so they sent
them out and they would come back with rubber and this
would go to fuel the industrial revolution for hoses and gaskets and
tires and all this stuff that suddenly we needed
and it was during that time that these these these you know
gangs of foreigners would go into the jungle to enslave the natives
that these uncontacted tribes went back into the jungle and said not us
and they have six foot bows and seven foot arrows with bamboo tips they
make the bamboo tips into razor blades
and so when those things fly actually one of my rangers one of the jungle
keepers team um was present when the tribes had
come out onto the river and he tried to help
them because they're nomadic and they live out there and so there's an element
of like brother like you know they're trying to
be like you don't need to be like this like we're friendly
so they sent a canoe across the river with bananas and so he's
up to his waist in the river and the tribes are right across the river
and and they shot and he sees the arrow coming right at his head and as he moved
to the side it hit him at the temple and sliced him
back towards the ear opening him to the skull
he's fine but let me tell you something when he goes and gets a crew cut it's
the most badass skull you the scar you've ever seen man and so he
he always keeps it real short on that side but
but even if you try to help them that they're not necessarily friendly tough
that's a tough lesson yeah i suppose they have a point
they have a point and and protecting them is
is a default of you know now that we're protecting all this ecosystems and all
these other indigenous communities it's like we all sort of live with this
knowledge that they're the hermanos the brothers are out there
and that's the way they want to keep it and so we just have to be respectful of
like you don't camp on certain beaches at
certain times of the year because we know that they might be there
you really have to be careful about that have you yourself interacted with any
my interaction with them came on a solo where i pushed it a little bit too far
and i i was planning to do a three week this was like the big one
and i i got dropped off by poachers up a river
and i went past the point where they were like names there i said what what
what tributary are we on and they were like tributary
and i was like okay and i said leave me here and i remember the guy being like
are you committing suicide and he didn't understand that i was like no i
have a backpack and i have like food and like
i'm gonna like take videos and have a tripod and i was like we're cool here
and they looked at me like they were like
goodbye and i was like all right and i went up this river and and again
like you just you learn these things like you know
it was only when i'd been alone for a week that you realize you're
you know that saying they're like oh you're you're born alone and you die
alone it's like no you're not you're born into a room full of people usually
at the very least your mother's there for everybody and uh and so you've been
around people probably if you're a normal person
every single day of your life yeah you've seen dozens if not hundreds of
people and all of a sudden you realize what a
social creature we are because on day six it gets weird for me
it got weird i know there's people that can do it longer
so what is it what does that mean like longing for contact like
are you lonely longing for contact the distortion of reality in the sense that
like you know you wake up and there's no one
there and you start to you know you're going up a river so i
would i would keep like i kept looking back down river and
almost thinking of my life as something it was almost like i had already died
and i had gone to somewhere else and i was looking back on that life as like
something that i had experienced and then there came this panic of
what if it's gone or like what if world war three broke out and i just don't
know about it my family in new york is vaporized and
something just you just your your your actually
your ability to comprehend and interpret reality
kind of requires other people it's not just that you're lonely
you need that contact to actually just perceive the world
make sense of it all of that so you start basically hallucinating
i certain kind of way i started feeling very uncomfortable
um it doesn't help also that like santiago told me these stories where he's
like if you hear capuchins sounding not quite
monkeys if you hear capuchin monkey sounding not quite like capuchins he
goes it's the tribe and they're coming to get you
and then so um the guy who was shot ignacio they showed me videos where we
saw them on the beach and they're communicating in monkey calls they're
using it as code so that we don't understand them
even though we don't speak their language but they're they're using
animal calls and so every night you go to sleep and then
you go did that tend to move sound off and you're like shit you know and it's
really hard to fall asleep and then like one night i i messed up and i left a
fish i like cleaned this fish i ate like
this huge fish i just ate it to my face you're you're putting out like
marathon levels of of energy every day like you know
goggins would love solos he'd be like this is awesome yeah
you eat the fish raw uh this one i actually cooked it but you know the
skeleton was laying there right right outside my tent
stupid yeah and in the middle of the night i wake up
and i just could tell there's something there you know and then like you almost
don't want to look it's like when you're a kid at the
basement door and you're like is there a ghost it's like yeah
i like unzip the tent and i like open it up
and there's like 27 black caiman outside of my tent all looking at me like this
and like some of their heads are this big and they're like
there's fish there can we have it and i'm like holy shit
and like you know i was like do i i kind of like had to like scooch the tent back
and like move back and let them have their fish and
there's a host of crocodiles outside of my tent yeah
um but no so then there's wait how many like 27
maybe there's a lot big ones small ones medium-sized one every type they were
all there and their eyes glow in the night
you know you shine a light at animals and they have a tape of them lucid them
and so their their eye shine comes back at you if you
shine a headlamp at a at a jaguar or a frog or almost
every animal has a tape of them these are croc there's a whole lot of them
yeah i thought can we go back to the part of the conversation where you said
the jungle is not dangerous the humans are the most dangerous
did they eat me no why didn't they eat you they wanted the fish
is there some way of you interacting with them that
shows that you're not a source of harm i don't believe so
i'm sure there's someone out there that thinks they can talk to crocs but
because there's a there's a story of you grabbing a croc by the tail
yeah what did you learn from that learn to not always listen to jj
so jj was testing you to uh yeah to see how stupid it was
how do you hold the crocodile exactly you have to get him by the head
like an anaconda like this and so so you're one of the world experts at
grabbing creatures by the head i wouldn't say
world expert but i've done a lot of it um i also have you see how there's like
kind of a ball there that's where a crocodile tooth went in
that side and like came out that side of my
that was a really good chomp and the watch i was wearing at the time
saved me because that like that um real fast just chomp just whack like
somebody took a sledgehammer you put your hand on the table and i just went
it really hurt um shouldn't have been doing that
how did that how did that come up because i caught a croc that was too big
so usually when we catch little caiman in the streams and we measure them to
monitor the populations um you get it by the neck and then i
tuck the tail under my arm and i hold it and you're talking about a
little you know four foot croc nothing and i i this one i dove into a into a
swamp and i caught like a six foot spectacle caiman
and her head was big and i had her by the neck and i realized i couldn't get
her tail under my arm because her tail was all the way back there and she
started thrashing and it was like probably croc number 375
that i'd caught and i just got a little cocky and i said oh
she's you know i just i just like grabbed her by a leg i was like i got
this and she just came back and tagged me and
i went okay gonna go back to being safe just to
linger on it what uh is it one of the one of the bigger
predators in the amazon what and it's is it going to uh are they
going extinct black caimans black caiman were i believe they were
critically endangered for a while because for a while the fashion industry
loved their skin it's soft and it's black um they're bouncing back
a little bit now you know like most animals if you leave
them alone they'll be fine i mean crocs have been
through you know how many millions and millions of years on earth before us
i mean that's even the joke with with the joke but that's the grim reality of
tiger conservation it's there was a hundred thousand tigers in
1900 now there's four thousand tigers left on earth
it's not rocket science all you have to do
is not bulldoze their forest and allow there to be some deer and tigers will be
fine that's it it's so simple and that's like sometimes
where i feel like i have the dumbest job in the world i'm like guys please
stop killing the things that keep us alive
the amazon regulates our global climate produces
medicine is home to indigenous people it's beautiful
rainforests only cover three percent of the planet's landmass like it's not that
much to ask if you uh leave their home untouched
they'll figure out how to have sex and multiply
except for pandas apparently because you have to convince
yeah humpbacks humpbacks they went down to
they went from a hundred and thirty thousand down to i think about eight
thousand at whaling times and then when we banned
whaling since that time where i think we're
back up to over a hundred thousand humpback whales
they've bounced back it's a success story we're not going to lose them
okay so you're in on the solo with uh crocs looking at you see this is
why you're good at this you know i i would have lost we would have been
no that's forever with the fish that was your mistake
that was my mistake i don't understand how you're still alive i mean i
it's really inspiring when you come we're gonna i'm gonna show you
you told me you're coming around 100 coming yeah but you know
if there's any place i mean um sort of a grim joke but if there's any
way to die uh that's a good one if i'm being honest
it's a cool one it's a pretty cool one it'll become part of the part yeah i
mean there's it's i'm not even like joking there's a
there's a oneness to the whole thing all the stories just reading your work
looking at your work i it seems like you're part of this
machine that is nature the this this incredible machine like we all die
and we're all part of this big thing that humans do have the capability to
also construct narratives and stories and myths and tell them to each other
and share them with each other and have more sophisticated ways therefore to
communicate love to each other but animals do as well they communicate
love maybe more simply maybe more honestly
anyway so you're you were the crocs and the fish
yeah so i messed up i left the fish out crocs showed up outside my tent
but in the end it was fine i i backed off they had their way with the fish and
then they all started biting each other it was fun to watch
is that a general sorry to interrupt is that a general rule you want to not
leave yeah just like if you're camping in the
northeast you don't leave like you do a bear bag or a bear canister you
don't you don't want to invite the wild animals i really did mess up i kind of
was just like you know whatever i do this every now and then i get a
little too cavalier um and the the ocean has almost almost
taken me down for that a few times um but yeah so the crocs and then you
keep going for a few days and my plan was to get
to a point where i reached the end of the tributary and this had a very
um you know again for me this is like a pilgrimage
this is like this is like me going into the heart
of the the very center and soul and essence
of everything that i am fascinated with like as close to god as you can get
because you're leaving every type of security every human
relationship you're also pushing all your chips in
and so it's it's i you know every step i took further up river it
got weirder and weirder and more intense and every day and every moment it
changed and i would i brought pictures at the time there's no way to keep a
phone charged i didn't have like a power bank or anything
um you know i brought pictures from home i brought a
i brought a national geographic magazine um
something just to you know and um there came a day right when i was
getting to the end like to the point where the river was so shallow that
it was just a trickle and i was walking on the rocks and the andes mountains
were in front of me and i was like reaching the the place and the
music was swelling and then all of a sudden i saw smoke around the
next bend and i i i like my spine is reacting
right now as i talk about it because i i knew i knew what i was going to see
because i knew that it was impossible for loggers to be out there there's no
motor that could take you the boat would have run aground
miles ago and so i i went and this is the other this is the other
idiot thing it's like just turn around yeah just do it
i'm that kid though when you see like a wet paint sign like i walk by and i
touch the wall yep and uh so i i i went around the bend
and and i see i see a few naked people on the beach
and they see me and we're like a good distance apart it's there on the other
side of the river but you know arrow in hand bow in hand
the the intention of pose they're looking at me they're
clearly conversing and that moment lasted for a long moment where i said
this is the part of the story where they are going to
rip me apart dissect me to see what i eat i mean every other story in the
region that we've heard that's the ending of it if you're alone
with these people it's not going to go well
and i have nothing to defend myself with um and i just i turned and i ran
for like three hours and i got in the river and i swam for a while and all my
food got wet um i mean everything i just you know all
systems just ran for dear life and and my my get
out plan the thing after i crossed the mountains
and came down into the next tributary was i had a pack raft
it's a tiny little inflatable raft good enough to handle rapids
and i inflated the pack raft once the once the river was like six inches deep
i inflated the pack raft and i went and i went for the rest of that day
into the night i went into the point that my headlamp died and i was just
floating floating in a raft down the amazon and
hitting into things and i was like okay i'm gonna i'm gonna pop this raft
so i got out of the raft set up my tent and i was like i need some sleep i was
freaking out i hadn't had food and now you know
hours and hours and hours as soon as i fell asleep
my asshole brain comes up with the dream of that i hear voices
they're right outside the tent i just you know
sleeping was worse than being awake so i woke up
got back in the tent and then at one point it was really cool because one of
those one of the same black caiman that had
come for the the fish as i'm going down river he came right up next to me and
the two of us were going and he was just like motoring down river this giant
like 16 foot crocodile he just like came up to me and like
looked at me as i was going and it was funny because i wasn't scared of him
i was scared of them and yeah it took me like a week to get back to town
and and again the things you learn in these moments
the the you know the appreciation for your parents
the the the the what a hug feels like you know when you when you are are faced
with pretty much certainty that you're not
going to get those things again whether it's from merse or uncontacted
tribes or you know um i find that that it brings it brings
it brings you this new joy for life where you just being that
close to death yeah you go yeah i you go my god this is
all a miracle it's sad because they're human just like
you actually how different are they like if
you were forced to interact for a week together
where they can't they're not allowed to kill you
like not allowed to kill me would they are they
how fundamentally different are they do you think i don't think they're
different i think they're like any other amazonian natives um they're they're
they're tall they seem to have tall genetics um
and there's places you know again there's what is known
and then there's what we know down there like there's there's one community where
i don't know whether it was like a bad rainstorm or something but some kid from
the uncontacted tribes did end up in a village and so
he learned spanish or he learned whatever dialect they speak in that
village and so he's told us a little bit about what life was like with them but
like they're just people they're just people
they have their own culture they know about medicines that we don't know about
they definitely have hunting practices that that we don't understand they can
hit a spider monkey out of a 160 foot tree with a bamboo arrow
we can't do that i mean they are incredible hunters and also like living
naked in the jungle with the bot flies and the mosquitoes
i don't know how they do it like sometimes at night and again we don't
have night vision whereas almost every other animal does
and sometimes we'll be sitting you know on our
you know at the research station at night and we'll be just drinking and
like looking out and at the you know we'll scare each other we'll
go you know you realize if they were out there right now they could be
looking at us and it's like the truth is is that when it's dark out
there they can't see it's not easy to start a fire
with matches and a lighter and gasoline they do it with friction
they have some some beads on survival that we
could really learn from um not to mention that then you have
people that believe that they are actually the guardians of the extinct
giant ground sloth and what they're doing is you know living out there
because they're protecting a secret population of previously extinct
megafauna but there's all kinds i mean this it's like
you you go into the crypto world so quick i've heard so many people be like
but then again you have to be humble at how little we know
about about that world about the world of life like you said there's
so much of life in the amazon that we don't uh creatures with no names
tons of them we could go out on a night walk right now and i could show you
something that you know you i've done it you you you you pick up a
bug and you go that doesn't look right
that's not right he's got three heads yeah you know and then you send it to
to the the greatest expert on that genus of insects and
and they go look i got no idea and you're talking to a world expert and
it's like that's it and then 50 of the life is up
in the canopy and so like we started climbing the trees like rock
climbing like what alex honnold does like well
like i'll climb up 50 feet and then i'll put a safety like i'm basically trad
climbing and then i'll climb up another 50 feet
and i'll have jj belaying me from below and then i'll be like oh look a snake
i'm like jj pay attention like did you get up there and the the
branches are as thick as this table so you can
like walk around freely oh it's like total like avatar when
they're in the floating islands like you can
you can go run around if that's what you want to do
bromeliads orchids cactuses because up there it's against the sun so it's a
different environment oh wow yeah interesting um and then you start
seeing lizards and snakes and birds and things that
aren't down on the ground and so how many
scientists have actually gotten to really spend time up there and really
inventory the life that's why when you hear about
you like it it's like a taxonomical discussion of how many species that are
on earth they're like between you know 10 and 30 million and it's
like wow that's a big it's a big swing what about stuff on the
ground so you mentioned some insects what about bullet ants
so it's supposed to be the most painful bite in the world you've been bitten by
one seven or eight times yeah what does it
feel like okay so the first time that we ever did
bullet ants um jj said you know okay this is what we're
gonna do he goes you know it's bullet ant roulette
we're gonna get a bullet ant and you get like chopsticks you like pick up this
bullet ant and they're big they're big and they're tough like
he goes we're gonna put our forearms together and we're
gonna drop the bullet ant and clamp our forearms together and just
rub and whoever whoever it takes it takes yeah of
course jj did not get stung and i did and it
hurts every bit as much as they say it hurts it
really let me have it and then and then i was like hitting my arm against the
table to try and like kill it or get it off but it was holding on and just like
really injecting the venom and uh yeah really letting you have it and
then it it travels up and it goes into your like
lymph nodes and and into your here and you get a headache and
and i think the the the brilliant thing about the
the the venom of a bullet ant is that it makes you feel
likes like this this feeling of alarm it makes you feel like
something's wrong you don't just go oh this hurts like it's like a bee sting
or you oh this really hurts on my hand it's like no no no
your whole nervous system is freaking out and you start sweating and then you
get cold and then you're tired then you get a little blurry vision and it's like
and that's actually that bad i mean now after six or seven i get bitten and i'm
like kind of okay so it's a full body full mind
experience it's a full body full mind experience but then there's
places in the amazon where they you know stick their hand in a glove with like
70 of them right and i think steve-o did that which i i would
i just don't understand how you could do that without going into complete
anaphylactic shock and dying because one really sucks
uh well just like just like we said with animals and with humans there's
different kinds different kinds certainly uh especially unique the first
of his species um
on the point of uncontacted tribes
so it's interesting to think about what kind of civilizations have there
been yeah this is something that you've talked
about a little bit uh graham hancock has uh written about
ancient civilizations as sort of challenging the
conventionals or the mainstream thinking about the the civilizations that have
been there in the amazon can you steel man and criticize the idea
so the pro and the con of the idea that there have been ancient advanced ancient
civilizations in the amazon like how much do we know what are all the
possibilities of what's in the amazon in this past so
like when oreana went down the amazon the
reports were that there was great civilizations in the amazon
and then you know a few hundred years later when people got to actually check
up on this stuff it was all gone and so was that because of disease that
we wiped out all these civilizations and these communities of people
potentially probably was he just wrong probably not this is a guy that
navigated by the stars back to spain after building his own boat like
yeah or did he you know or was he trying to just i don't know i don't know but
there clearly is a long history of complex civilizations in the amazon
100 there's no one that can deny that the thing that i reacted to
was that i've heard videos i've seen moments in podcasts where the narrative
becomes not there's more ancient civilization
information in the amazon than we previously thought
true statement we're discovering with lidar
and this is what graham hancock is talking about that we're discovering
constantly that there's there was more civilizations than we
thought in various places the place where i take
offense is where they start to say that the amazon there's
actually articles that that are titled this that the
amazon is a man-made garden
which is not true so the actual which i think is a really different idea
that the uh the entire ecosystem everything we've been talking about all
the species all the forestry and the different
just life life one of the most diverse ecosystems on earth is initially created
by humans it's ridiculous well it's not first of
all it's unlikely but it's not ridiculous so
we can't well there's no ridiculous in um in science
but the complexity of life is very difficult to engineer as
as you the more you study about biological systems and so on
it's very difficult to create the kind of things that nature is able to do
that said i don't know if you've heard but the entire earth the world has gone
through a pandemic recently and if and everybody said of course it's
natural origins viruses mutate all the time and nevertheless
it seems more and more likely than this particular case
it was of an artificial origin leaked from a lab
so humans are able to create stuff at least modern
technological uh genetic engineering made golden retrievers
come on you can't be that nice and that good looking
uh used to be a wolf yeah but so that bothers you because it
it allows you to think that um we don't need to preserve the amazon we can
always engineer it yeah exactly then just this is just to
me that's a slippery slope like i totally
um it's just it's so quick from i'm a fan of
expeditions to find ecological ruins and and to learn more about the ancient
civilizations to which i don't think is what he's
putting out is that then sort of like news articles which i think they're
trying to bait you where they're going was the amazon man
made and it's like yeah you know because then you get a you're
going to get a brazilian president to go see
see what they said it's man-made so we might as well continue to engineer it
and manage it and it's like there's such complex systems and
interactions and such a such a giant web of life there that
at least in my opinion is clearly one of the most authentically
natural things and again are there things that we've
engineered to the uncontacted tribes sometimes they they have banana plants
that they've stolen and we could see it from the air
that they've they have banana plants we made banana plants that's engineered by
us we know for a fact um so agricultural
engineering agricultural engineering and stuff like
that but suggesting that the amazon basin you know it's just it's just a
weird way to think about it i've just heard people
dismiss the concert the the protection of the amazon based on the fact they're
like oh well if people made it and it's such a
giant leap from from from the from zero to a hundred um
you know is there slash and burn that the ancient civilizations did
of course are there areas that were affected by people of course
i just get worried when we start talking about it was a
man-made thing yeah hear you loud and clear on that
and i personally think that's completely separate
from wondering about what the ancient civilization have been able to
accomplish oh sure it's almost really sad because if all the humans on
earth die now how long does it take before
all signs of humans ever existing disappear
for the most part
from an alien perspective how what timeline are we talking about i mean
like i mean there's there's a hundred
thousand years like it could be less it could be less it could be like a few
thousand because a hundred thousand is complete destruction
a hundred thousand is like nothing but but then
it could be in in just a few hundred years it starts becoming
you know the government of the alien civilization is gonna have to pay quite
a bit of money to do the research because they're gonna find other life
first they're gonna find the dolphins and the fish and so on
they're gonna find the trees maybe the trees are the interesting thing
sure the buildings are not that interesting crumbles but there must be
examples of cities that have been left on unattended for a few decades and like
how quickly the the the plants push up through the street
and everything starts to get broken down if you really look you'll be like oh
there's some interesting geometry here for the buildings and so on but most
most of the computer stuff yeah all the all the stuff of the past
100 years the airplanes all that all the technologies
all the paperwork that all the hard drives they store all the information
i want to i want to actually know how long it takes like a 747 to like
biodegrade like how like if you just leave it there
sitting on the runway society stops yeah how long does it take for that thing to
disappear like that's completely versus uh to a
point where it's unidentifiable might be different but
sure i mean the the point i'm trying to say here is as you've brilliantly put
the the amazon churns yeah oh yeah and the fact that
i wonder throughout its history what are the peaks of the awesomeness
well how many banana how many agricultural einsteins of bananas
yeah were there the creating different kinds of ideas different kinds of
geometries different kinds of tools well yeah look what the incas did i mean
the incas you know machu pichu i mean when they found when hyrum bigum found
machu pichu was covered in jungle you could hardly see it
and i mean the the stone work they did much like what the egyptians did with
the pyramids a lot of it we don't really understand how they did it
if you come to the jungle you got to go to machu pichu because it's not far from
there and i usually like i'm i'm the person
like i i won't i don't usually go see like the you know
like i've never been to see the taj mahal after living in india for five
years like i'm just not but when you look up and you see machu
pichu you go either they were communicating with the gods there
or these people were so smart that they knew that anybody they brought
they were going to impress they they've built something there that
when you look up at that mountain you go whoa with those giant stones the beauty
of it you know it's just it's just stunning to imagine that there
was this culture of people that that could achieve this
and so through the amazon i mean that's sort of up in the andes but
there's all kinds of stuff in the amazon there are places where they say there's
can um pyramids beneath the canopy that we just don't know about um i mean
there's it's endless if you had uh billions of
dollars trillions of dollars what what would be
the efforts in the amazon for the for both conservation and for
exploration all right well first things are tied together
yeah exactly first arrest the the deforestation so we don't have an
ecological crisis on our hands we don't want to keep
losing species losing indigenous cultures losing the climate stabilizing
services that the amazon provides as a whole
stop that that's my first mission next then we can play and then it's like
let's go find i mean i've flown over the amazon and a cessna and it's like
you see things where you go we have to go see what
that is you know weird lakes or or shapes in the jungle that don't
make sense that are that are that are strange and like so
even at that level you can see weirdness you can see different oh yeah like signs
of possible awesomeness oh the jungle is so weird and here's the
other thing is that most until like the region i've been working
and you see where the researchers go there's certain biological stations
there's certain places where like oh like this university has a relationship
with this this university is this so everybody
goes to the same few study sites and then they walk on the
same trails and they have the same guides
when you fly in a cessna and you fly a few hours away from all that and you
see a tiny little tributary and then you fly for 40 minutes over
unbroken green just wild before you reach another tributary
even if somebody could survive going up that tributary had the expeditionary
expertise and the ability to survive getting shot
at by arrows if they could get up that tributary
now cut perpendicular into the jungle which i don't do
on the solos you can't you can never don't ever leave the river
but you tell me that in that span of 70 miles between
tiny tributaries at the edge of the world no one's been there
none of us have been there you know maybe somebody ten thousand years ago
was there but we don't know what populations of
things are there we don't know what ruins are there
and so there's so much undiscovered stuff in the amazon that is
just waiting just waiting what what is the process of exploring that so
how does money get converted towards exploration
is there is there safe ways of doing that
there's places where you know we found out about things that have to be
explored but where you you come up with well how
do we do this without getting shot and and all and not
only without getting shot but also without endangering them too because how
stupid are we if we if we go in there to people that are
living in the jungle not bothering us and we go insert
ourselves into there because we're curious about some rocks
that doesn't seem fair for the loss of life and so like
um but yeah that's that's something that we're working on and like one thing of
course is like lidar and stuff but eventually
eventually at the end of everything it comes down to boots on the ground
yeah as somebody who has to ask that very question about
how to deal with uncontacted tribes they're going to kill you
but you also don't want to disturb their environment
if you were an intelligent alien civilization
oh boy and you came about earth how how would you interact with it can
you put yourself in the mind of an alien civilization because there
seems to be some parallels here it is actually right it's like a microcosm
of we're very aggressive human civilization
is very aggressive so if we were easily we get threatened
easily yeah for stupid reasons because we start
like american military probably thinks it's like the chinese or the russians
if we see any kind of flying objects it gets very
on edge i don't know i mean because you know part of it is like
you just want to ask like that's the thing i just want to ask questions yeah
but you know but you don't know the same language you're gonna get you're gonna
get first of all you send a boat of bananas you send a boat of bananas you
get shot um i mean picture if aliens landed in
new york how long would it take for one of them to get shot
it'd be minutes it'd be a matter of minutes
yeah that's because it's new york everywhere else look where we are right
now that's true maybe even worse here yeah
uh but it makes me really makes me wonder what is the right way to
interact with uh intelligent life that's not like
our own i hope i i dream of in our lifetime we
would interact with possibly life on mars or on one of the
moons of uh jupiter or saturn and like how do you interact with that
thing well there's very technical biological
chemical processes but also if there's any kind of intelligence how
do you try to communicate with that intelligence
yeah so we're not talking about like a cockroach we're talking about like
something that's clearly like doing things making things well cockroach
possibly how do you know the difference between
a cockroach like how do you know we were just talking about this yeah we don't
know we don't know we have just like a race of like
philosopher cockroaches right chilling on the rocks well here on earth
we kind of there seems to be a strong correlation between
size and intelligence like yes it seems like the bigger things have
bigger uh nervous systems and brains and so
they're usually smarter but that doesn't i think it's brain it's
the ratio brain to body sure because you have like
crows yeah that are up among the most intelligent and it's like the size of
the brain to the size of the body but there also could
be kinds of intelligence we were completely no
idea we're not appreciating maybe cockroaches it survived the longest
they're talking shit about us right now it's dumb humans like dude
they got these rocks are so great a couple of hundred years
exactly uh did you ever you ever hear that kurt vonnegut where the the two
space travelers get lost this this this really impacted me as a kid because my
dad was an english teacher so he's always quoting
dostoevsky and uh and kurt vonnegut and there's this two space travelers get
like crash landed in a cave and on the walls of the cave are the
harmoniums and these kite-shaped animals and they
feed off the vibrations of the cave and that's all they do they don't hurt each
other they just do that and so for like two years these
travelers are stuck and they're trying to fix their ship and
one of them starts playing music for the harmonians and the harmonians
love him for the music and they all come around him and
and he plays this music for him and finally they they fix the ship
and and the one guy is like all right let's get out of here and the other guy
is like you know what i'm staying he goes i i found a place where i can do
good i'm not hurting anybody and they love
me yeah i'm staying right here yeah this
whole ambition thing we got going on always trying to build a bigger boat
bigger thing that might not be the the ultimate
conclusion of a of a happy existence as a civilization
that's probably that's one of the possibilities why we haven't met the
aliens yet at scale it's because they're once you
get good enough at technology you realize that happiness
lies in a peaceful coexistence it's possible
so where do you stand on like aliens now like there's a lot coming out about the
the pilots and the the things people have been seeing and again like i kind
of come in and out of this stuff like i'll be in the jungle for three months i
miss i miss a lot so like update me like or are we are we being
contacted right now like of course nobody knows but i tend to
believe my intuition says there's aliens everywhere
that um the our even our galaxy sure that's a bigger leap but i believe
our galaxy has probably billions
hundreds of millions of planets with life on it
like bacteria type of life sure and i believe there is
i don't know thousands of alien civils intelligent alien civilizations that
exist or have existed the problem is there's a lot of time
and it's very difficult to contact each other so to achieve
a kind of civilization that's able to actually
send out enough signal or um radiate enough energy where we would
notice i think that's really tough that said statistically speaking it
seems like that should have been possible inside our galaxy or maybe
nearby and so
i suspect that um once an alien civilization is
just many orders of magnitude smarter than us humans
the way you would contact us is going to be very difficult for us humans to
understand we're very egocentric we want the message to be sent as like a
in english versus you know i think consciousness itself yeah emotion
um thoughts could be like fingertips
could be words in the story that the aliens are telling us
or things that are just like a low dimensional projection of a much
higher dimensional message that's being sent by aliens
and it may be our striving to create technology
is to create the kind of sensor that's actually able to hear some of the
message maybe that's what ai is trying to do so
i i think that bridging that barrier of
communication between us and cockroaches i think
that's the biggest challenge interesting like the messages are all
around us they're here i i suspect the the the alien messages
are here the aliens are here we're just too dumb
to see it so first of all the the imagining
planets where there are like just picturing like a like a not a
silent planet but just like a planet of alternate life forms you know maybe it's
not something that's that we can communicate and have a
conversation with but just like a planet of like butterflies and centipedes and
and weird you know unfortunately bacteria for billions of years it was
uh bacteria as a single cell prokaryotes and eukaryotes but they're not they're
boring but yeah but animal animals of some sort
in an environment of some sort imagine that would just be such an
interesting beautiful amazing thing and i'm sure they're out
that i'm yeah the kind of viruses they got going on
it's uh but they could also not be biologically based
there could be different chemistry so you have to be humble to that too
sure but then you know it depends on the day like
i think you caught me on that day today an optimistic one
sometimes i i think we're all we this is all there is because you start you
ask that question that the fermi paradox like why aren't they here
you can't imagine an advancing civilization that would not be
explorers because we're explorers why is that
depressing to you that the idea that that
let's just say you found out right now that there isn't anything else
let's just say that for for example sake that
the earth is the earth and the universe is the universe and it's sort of like
the backdrop of a video game and it's just what's out there would
that be tremendously depressing to you i think it's exciting for an engineer
it's probably exciting for an explorer but i would equate that to your going
out hiking for three days with one match
it kind of terrifies me that we only got one match really
yeah really yeah one all you got is one match
this no no no hold on a second hold on a second wait paul wait wait a minute
you're going out there's no more matches but this is the
only man you got to extinguish the planet like there's not
as far as we know there's no there's no meteor coming i'm saying like do you
live in a so i'm saying is that is is your worry
then that we need to have a backup plan yeah really well there has so like what
if we do what if we do mess it up so bad that uh yeah live here
anymore well there's different ways to mess it
up there's there's ways to mess it up to make life
really difficult uh some of the mad max type of thing
but there's nuclear war yes with the further and further advancement of
technology that can destroy destroy all of earth it just feels like
that's going to be exponentially growing yes it's going to get worse
and that i it's uh listen i'm i'm very optimistic
but it's a it's a heck of a russian roulette we're playing okay so
i'm still curious about your your intention though or like where your
where your your passion for this comes from are you
is your or maybe it's both but is it is it is it the need to have a
backup plan for humans which which is which is
admirable for your intense love of humanity and our consciousness and love
and art and everything or is it also just that the the raw
fascination of imagining what's out there
um because i just the way you said that about like oh you caught me on a
positive day where i think it's there was some there's something in
there that made me think that that you need there to be
uh yeah yeah there's
i think i'm the kind of person that sees beauty in everything
but to me a universe full of diverse life is more beautiful than one where
it's just humans it's just the earth life interesting
there's more beauty i mean uh i'm not egotistical about the awesomeness of
humans i like if humans are not the smartest
in uh in our galaxy uh are not even close to being the smartest
and that to me is i don't know that that to me is exciting about the
possibility of what or what the universe can create yes
i'm with you on that that it that it's wildly exciting to to to
like if we found even if it was just a distant
inkling that we found out that there is there is a planet that has life there's
no there's no communication coming from but we know for a fact there's stuff
going on there it would just change how we think about our entire reality
we know now and it could be to me i guess the little
inkling of a thing that is depressing if all
there is is earth
and humans destroy it then we're the coolest thing that the
universe has ever created
it's over i'm interested to have this conversation i'm really i'm really i'm
saying like i would be interested to bring you to the jungle
yeah um and and this i like now i'm also wondering i'm wondering like
what what your wilderness experience is because i feel like for me
i'm so earth-centric to the to the point where i'm like
we differ in that for me this is like it's a curiosity i feel wonder and i
feel it's fun to talk about like what's at
the edge of space like you know there's the conundrums of of space time and
but but i'm so to me i'm like what if what if the aliens are watching us or
what if the aliens aren't watching us but what if the challenge here is
we've been put on on earth as as the most
intellectually complex of these creatures
and and and we're being observed to see how we manage it and it's like
yeah we haven't made a good job of managing each other
you know before um orianna went down the the amazon i mean they showed up and
just sacked the incas i mean we are history i
don't have to tell you you just got back but it's um
i just sometimes i wonder you know what what the
is is there a grand narrative with with what we're doing to wildlife because
it's like we have all these other species and we're
we're struggling even here in this conversation to sort of quantify like
you know i i think that most people don't think outside of the human
framework you know what i mean like just driving
around for me living outside of the jungle
even just for a few weeks i get you don't you don't you don't even
think about the fact that there's other species
around us we really don't day to day you look at tv and you look at
you listen to the radio and it doesn't it's not very consequential to the
average person living in a city that there are these
you know islands covered in walruses and that there's rain forests
filled with birds and frogs and all these things happening and that
you know the salmon are contributing to our fresh water and
and that that life is literally given to us and made possible by these ecological
systems to me that's where like the whole you know
essence of my existence comes from and so like
yeah thank you for that reminder because you're basically saying like
the alien civilizations you dream about are here on earth
those those those worlds are here for me yeah yeah no i agree with you i
think i i agree with you and i think that's
actually the way i uh think most of the time the
you know i i think i'm on mushrooms all the time
genetically somehow because when i go out in nature is just the
the beauty even of nothing you talk about the amazon
man just basics of nature yeah fill you fill me with awe and the other
thing that fills me with awe is our own mind like the the biology
of these things firing basically not our own mind but
biology of any living organisms because it's like an ecosystem they've
came these cells came together they somehow function they'll
they delegate they mostly operate in a local way but they
uh first of all it's just like you said with the anacondas you start out as a
tiny snake and you become giant when you're a tiny snake
you're prey for everything when you're a giant snake you're a predator or
you're prey to no one yeah and like just that whole process
same starting with a single embryo single cell as a human and through the
embryogenic process constructing this giant
human that's able to have limbs move about the world think about
things write books and so on just that that is incredibly beautiful
and all of that is here on earth yes um and so actually i was being sort of
poetic about aliens and so on i think i can spend 99.99 percent
in terms of filling my mind with awe and beauty just
looking down here on earth for sure i agree with you
yeah and i'm and they shouldn't cancel out like i think it's beautiful that
there's that there's people that are fascinated
and obsessed with looking out into space and that will travel there um i mean
just to me the idea of i mean i have a little piece of meteorite at home that i
hold and it does amazing things to my mind
because i'm like everything i've ever touched is from this earth
and i'm holding this thing that's been places that we can't even think about
and it blows my mind and i love it but but when it comes to like
intelligence i think it's like i'm so concerned with the fact that
we're at this moment in history and it's interesting to me that you
know we had the internet and now that with the emergence of ai
and more and more i feel like we are starting to resemble
like an ant colony where there's more and more connection
and there's more and more interaction globally between everybody
in the next 10 years we're gonna have to decide are we gonna let our ocean
ecosystems just collapse are we gonna just take that three
percent of rainforest and just let them log the shit out of it until it's gone
and it's like we're gonna be in a very different
reality then then it's gonna be very dystopian future or can we keep the good
things about earth transcend that realize that we have
these incredible alien species around us that are animals that we grew up with
that we wouldn't be here without that we owe something to
and i feel like at that stage then the the the outward look becomes
something else it's almost like we've we've proven then if aliens came up to
us that's when i'd feel good aliens would come up to us and they said
you know this louie has the thing where he goes god comes back and he goes what
did you do because the polar bears are brown he's
like i left food for you it's like if the aliens came and were
like you know and they interviewed the elephants and they said how are you
feeling and the elephants would be like listen
fuck these little primates you know what they've done to us
and it's like i mean you know i've seen people break an elephant i've seen
i've seen i've seen it all with that stuff and it's like if
if if anybody was to ask them they'd be screaming
and and so like to me it's just you know i i have trouble
trouble looking out into space i have trouble looking out into normal life as
a human because i'm so concerned with trying to
make sure that they're okay because not enough people are doing that
well the interesting thing about all the development with ai
and just that we're living more and more of our life online
i think we're actually learning
what's missing when it's online like i think people
realize that online interaction is shallow but we're just learning that
that that's a reality yeah that we need that human connection
and i think there's going to be the swing back to like
sadly ai systems of the future might be able to
live fulfilling lives online but us humans
have have to have a deep connection with earth and like with
with each other physical connection i think there's going to be a phase
somewhere in the century where we go back to deep physical connection
and there will be a digital world sure that we visit
that it would be separate and that's the you have
a discussion with that with twitter with instagram with all these
social networks that they don't they seem to be dividing us they
seem to not be bringing happiness and you have to try to figure out like
okay so how do we use them in a way that does connect us does
educate us grow our knowledge base but also keeps
us uh keeps our lives fulfilling in a deep
human way that we're for good and for bad
genetically designed we could they we can't overcome but we
can't escape these meat vehicles yeah but that's
to me that's so reassuring yeah it's like when like i have you know
we all have those friends that are like you know we got to live forever and it's
like i don't know man do you yeah i don't know is it that bad
that this is how it works like that we don't understand it
um yeah the it's often from the tech sector the
discussions about immortality and so on yeah
i think that's somehow trying to escape the the beauty of this earth
for sure that that there's something too bright to look at like
yeah and i i i perhaps like you i'm worried about
the uh unintended negative consequences of trying to escape the way things
are on this earth because this is an incredible mechanism
how many times in the past has new technology come out that people have
hailed as you know blasphemy or it's not going to work or it's it goes against
nature and and now well heart transplants are
pretty cool yeah you know and and you could say what
you want about like television and like oh it's you know it rots your brain it's
like yeah but also how many times have you sat in a room full of people
being entertained and all laughing and interacting and eating popcorn because
of the televisions there it's not it's not one or the other and so i feel
like with ai we'll we'll we'll learn we'll learn our way through it you know
there's a like with the with the legged uh robots especially
and humanoid also so anything on legs four legs or two legs
i remember like the first time i interact interacted with a legged robot
i saw magic there like
that this too can have consciousness this too
can have this life-like quality that a human being loves
about other human beings about other living creatures
now while i'm still i grew up in the place with no internet
in a time with no internet so i still like
biological dogs better i i noticed the magic in robotic dogs
yeah and it makes me wonder the way same way we're just talking about aliens
looking up it makes you wonder about other alien civilizations now the deep
love is for dogs for other humans yeah but
there's still this wander i struggle with that
like you said the the whatever's going on in here
the idea and there's so much talk about the fact like at what point does
an artificially intelligent robot become something that has and it's like i get i
get very uncomfortable with that it makes me
i don't know how to how to handle the things because i don't know enough about
it probably but it's like i don't know how to handle like
i don't know how to handle it either nobody knows anything about it
because the it's really everything is terrifying here because it
could be as simple as consciousness is easy to fake
so what if you live in a world 10 to 20 years from now where
your toaster there's a bunch of robots in your room
that are faking consciousness and then you fall in love with them
and you have a deep connection with them and then you actually have a deeper
connection with your toaster than you do with any
uh romantic human partner you've ever had
and you start to i was i was upset about the dogs
robot doesn't take a shit on the floor i was like you just you just took it way
worse yeah yeah and then you know and then they
they start to uh i don't know if you've seen ai porn
but it gets pretty intense like fully ai porn like they're they're
fake people
take people that can uh things i've missed in the jungle
things boy do i have a lot to show you or not
show you not show you let me uh ask you about a touchy topic
uh climate change what's the effect of climate change
on the uh on the amazon maybe species diversity
what what what is something that people should
should think about because there's different views on
i think most people believe that climate change is human caused and
that it's happening but there is different perspectives
on the degree of damage that it's going to do over the next several decades
and what our response should be as a society
and so it would be amazing to hear your perspective on it
in in in small slices of your experience or in large
to me there's no denying the fact that we are experiencing changes
i think anybody that that doesn't agree with that hasn't been outside in the
last 20 years or hasn't interviewed old farmers will
tell you that it changed or you know it's that i think a lot of us can agree
with that where i deviate is that i am not a
climate scientist i am i am not qualified and so i
just like everybody else am listening and what happens to me is i
see that the someone like santiago duran jj's father
will will tell me it's totally different than it was when i was a kid
the seasons have changed and moved and like
in new york when i was a kid like we used to get like white christmas like we
used to get snow we don't i was in shorts like i came
off the plane right before coming here and i was in like shorts for a second
like i was like this is a different reality but my
ability could my or my my interpretation of
climate change you know i feel like it's just as dumb
as those people that go like you know it's really cold i thought they said it
was getting warmer it's like it's a very rudimentary thing and so as a
as a someone that's fighting for the preservation of biodiversity
i i i don't feel like i'm any more qualified
than the average person too i can only provide anecdotal
anecdotal evidence of the stuff i've seen what i what i do
do though and i always i always make a strong delineation here is that
i can speak to the fact that i've been places where the ocean fisheries have
been depleted and the local fishermen can tell you and
the scientists can tell you there's no more fish here i've been to
the places where the rainforest line is being pushed back
in borneo and it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller
and i've been in the amazon and i've walked through the killing fields and
through the fires and i've burnt my lungs on it
and and i'm a big believer personally and instead of trying to take on
all of it i've tried very hard in my life to pick
one thing and to me that one thing is protecting as many wild heartbeats as i
can because they're under constant fire and
so climate change you know there's so much
arguing over it and and like you said the the
degree to which we we affect it and and and and how do you you know what i mean
like i like to have provable data points like you know i
can show you tropical deforestation i can show you
the decline in tigers over the last hundred years
i can't prove i you know what i mean like i can't answer that question i
don't think if probably you can better than i can no
i i think one of the criticism i'd love to get
your opinion on is uh one of the criticisms that
somebody like jordan peterson provides yeah is that the climate
is such a complex system there's so many variables
that making conclusive statements about what's going to happen with the quote
unquote climate in the next 10 20 50 years yeah is
a nearly impossible uh task therefore as he would say
as as people like beyond lomburg would say the kind of
fear-mongering that is done saying we should spend
humongous amounts of money to change the trajectory of everything we're doing in
terms of energy um in terms of infrastructure and so on
in terms of how we allocate money is not justified because
predicting is very difficult and instead it's better
exactly what you're saying which is uh focusing on local problem
saying uh we need to protect the amazon what are the what are the things
attacking the amazon this year in the next five years how can
we stop the deforestation how can we stop different things and
then and then and humans are exceptionally good
and um at coming up with solutions for that especially when you put money
behind it you put attention to it and that's the
way we solve all the different problems that are
going to um that are projected for the climate change in its worst case
scenarios uh to be realized on this earth so that
that's kind of the the case he would make and i should also mention that one
of the reasons i was fortunate enough to discover your
work is um first a friend mentioned that i
should definitely talk to you and i googled you and i saw that
somebody recommended that jordan peterson absolutely must talk to you on
his podcast wow um i think there's like a reddit post
thank you reddit poster that's that's great i was like oh
interesting and then i looked and jordan hasn't yet
i thought my goal is for you to talk to to rogan and to jordan peterson for for
different reasons but for the same reason they get connected to uh the human
being that deeply cares about this earth and i
think that's probably the right lens through which
to look at the effects of climate change um in terms of focusing on the
different things that are threatening threatening the diversity of species
in this most magical place on earth which is the amazon
but also as you talk about with elephants and tigers in india
and focusing on how to solve those problems i don't know if there's any
comment you want to make on uh folks like jordan peterson
who are sort of raising questions about how much do we really understand about
the climate uh first of all i'm such a jordan
peterson fan and i think the guy is heroic for a number of reasons
and i find his his use of language and his use of
theology and and the message that he puts out wonderful
um i cringe a little bit when he says i feel like and i i might not even be
accurate on this but i cringe a little bit when i feel like he just
he dismisses that there is an ecological emergency happening right now now i'm
not saying i'm not talking about climate change specifically but i've heard him
say you know environmentalists upset me and
he goes well what do you mean by the environment
everything and it sort of seems to outrage him and it's
and i i kind of agree with him there because
so are you telling me that we need to halt our global process and and and
progress and economies and everything i don't know
i don't know and so so to me um i i don't that doesn't bother me
because he's exploring what the hell are these people talking
about when you say you have i have i personally have
friends and students and people filling my inboxes i have young kids telling me
that they're they've become vegan and they ride a
bicycle and sometimes they don't watch tv because it uses electricity and they're
i mean they're just becoming so so terrified of that they're killing the
earth and so it's this doomsday anti-human sentimentist thing
that we're that we're evil it's like it's almost
like a new religion about you're evil and so to me
it almost makes me in a totally different camp where like climate change
and the right left politics and you know i i considered a family i consider
thanksgiving dinner and listen to listen to the the climate
thing go back and forth yeah and i'm like i'm not even i'm not
even here and that might actually annoy some people
in the environmental field that might feel betrayed by me saying that but
i don't care my job and it's not just the amazon and and that's one note i
wanted to make is that my career has has taken place largely
in the amazon and also in india and now a lot in
africa but it's it's not even just these exotic places either it's it's it's
people realizing that you know the salmon runs in canada and
the the butterfly gardens in our backyards that
there's biodiversity everywhere and it's and i i
strongly feel like you know the idea of jungle keepers the idea of of of
stewards of nature and so for me my my job my one thing
and i i try to tell this to these kids that message me and that my
my inboxes are full of this where they go you know the climate is burning and
elephants are in decline and tigers and and this and that like guys look first
of all calm down first of all like go outside
go get laid do something have fun next pick something that you can
affect and it doesn't have to be with the
environment do something good on earth go help
somebody that needs food go help your elderly neighbor whatever it is
practice practice with being effective at one thing
at a time and so for me like i said from those early days of sitting there with
jj on the side of a river and going someone has to protect this
my concern is that we've lost 70 percent of the wildlife on this planet in the
last 50 years that's a huge problem wildlife
maintain the ecosystems and so i have a very clear cut
very definable very measurable and provable thing that i'm fighting against
and it's a very to me it's a very like small ask don't
cut down the three percent of the world that has
50 of the biodiversity in it maybe let's keep some wild tigers
for future generations and because tigers have their own inherent right to
exist here that's my thing in terms of when we get
to you know i get attacked for you know you
should be a vegan okay you show you you have me roll into
a village in the amazon when they offer me spider monkey and you tell me that i
should be a vegan and you you see how much they respect you and
you tell them that you're a vegan like um but no so for someone like
peterson i think it's actually good that he's
first of all telling everyone to make their damn beds and uh
and and exploring it through a different lens you know he's he's coming at it
from a totally different thing and saying you know it are are we
just being alarmist here are we what i mean again imagine if you
know that imagine if there isn't a problem and
they're then they're making one out of it and all the implications that that
could have for progress it's like so i think what he's doing is is
perfectly reasonable um there is a podcast though where he's
he's it was a great one though where he's he's
discussing animal intelligence and and i could really see that that
you know the human psyche and theology and and religion is
so much his world that that the the really the the idea of
animals being intelligent was novel and it was and it was
fascinating yeah that's that's why i would love for the two years to talk
just i don't know and hopefully i'm not on a line here but
he is so focused on the human mind
that i think he forgets that there's other life out there
there's this whole machine of intelligence of a kind of intelligence
out there this entire trillions of species
tiny and big just crawling just moving everywhere every we're
actually part of it so like to look at a human psychology is distinct from that
is missing at least some of the picture some of the picture i do believe though
i would agree with him on that humans are unique yeah human psychology
is unique we just are but but i also you know it's it's he's in
such an interesting place because usually you have you know
environmentalists who are like you know nature nature nature and then you and
it's very anti-human and then you have the other side and
it's like he's he's he's on this path where he's he's starting
to explore what those like diverse intelligences
mean and that that to me is really amazing
because i love hearing what he'll do with that
and i think also on top of that i think if you're aware of nature
deeply aware of nature it gives you another perspective on
the evolutionary history of humans it's one thing to be an evolutionary
biologist and kind of study it from a like philosophical perspective and
it's the other to really i think experience it and deeply knowing to see
i don't know the fact that we came from fish
really be cognizant of that that's something else
that's like i don't know uh to realize that we're part
of a computing machine that created intelligence
we're part we're part of the thing that started bacteria and is now
creating ai and yeah and uh i don't know duncan donuts i don't
know what else is impressive the other great human achievements the other great
i was thinking well what's interesting about boston but i feel like we keep we
keep scratching up against this thing in this
conversation that that that it's so easy 50 i think something like 50 or more
percent of the the humans on this planet live in cities
and i think it's so easy for people to forget
that we share this planet with so many other things and
and and i think that that sort of that we're in a little in a way we're
almost like ecological orphans and that we've left
the the things that actually make us feel
at home and that's a bit of a stretch because i don't know if everybody feels
that way but for me i mean professionally as an
expedition guide when i take people into nature i see what happens to them
and they leave going i mean it doesn't have to be the amazon it could be you
know upstate new york but it's like if you
do it the right way if you if you remove the fear
of you know breaking an ankle seeing a snake being bitten by a mosquito all
that stuff if you can get people to a peaceful moment and you're fly fishing
a lot of times they'll take that moment they'll talk about it the rest of their
life if they don't if they don't live in that you know then there's those of us
who spend our lives doing that but for a reason because it's the only place
we feel sane and you were uh kind enough to suggest
that we might travel together for a time at some point
if uh if we do that if we journey together what
where would you recommend we should go so what i would want to show you is
is sort of i'd want to take you to church i'd want to take you to
take you to take you to see the giant trees take you to meet the old
the old gods really um there's places when you walk in
off the river that are so deep in the farther you know and again this is
now we we we do this we have the boats we have the rangers we we
protect this ecological corridor now um and so it would be taking you to meet
some of those loggers that that we converted it'd be taking you
we'd have to go to the floating forest um
meet some of the trees that i love the most go piranha fishing
and like really just spend my ideal trip for you would be would be to spend
five days of you know airplane mode phone
completely living out comfortable i'm not saying i don't want to you know
i don't want to torture you i'm saying go and live comfortably on an expedition
in the amazon and that means a few days at this research station
maybe go up river three days and camp up here just on the edge of where the
uncontacted are and then come back and then see the jungle keeper station but
along the way seeing all the special sacred places it would be almost like
saying like let's go see you know all the treasures of italy it's
like this is one of the most beautiful things on earth
and and i've had the incredible almost unbelievable fortune to be
responsible for protecting it and and uh i don't you know i think it's i
think it's a privilege to be able to share that with people
to be able to witness what this earth is has created
just it's it's you know it's been just a gift just even to follow your instagram
the the window you the window you create on the
on this part of the world uh it's just really beautiful
i do want to ask on that
maybe it's like uh behind the scenes a little bit but that's like how do you
keep the equipment dry like how do you like how hard
is bringing the equipment to the cameras you're an incredible filmmaker and
photographer so how do you make it work i don't know it's not that hard we we
really it's not that bad wet it is wet the new iphones are waterproof
and if they don't get i'm telling you dude it's been such a weapon it's been
awesome um if you drop it in the river my one
thing is you got to have a tether because i drop it all the time and so
i'll be hanging off a boat and i'll be trying to take a video and
i'll be like here we are in the amazon you can see the lung and funk
yeah that's the biggest thing but the the we shoot on cannons
and uh i don't know it's worked out it's not that bad
oh really so you can keep the equipment dry i keep the equipment dry and i
actually don't a lot of people put their shit in silica at night and like
keep it dry and then they take it out and i find that when you do that
the temperature chain change creates moisture inside the camera so what i do
is i never do that i just keep my cameras in my backpack
with a zipper so they're more or less exposed to the
elements yeah and so it sort of always has a little
bit of equilibrium and that's it i mean i shoot on some
pretty fancy equipment sometimes and and it's great but i mean the awesome
thing though now is that like with with with a cell phone i mean like
i like i like put my phone down on the ground a few weeks ago and like let this
rhino like walk up to it and stuff and it's like
you can get video footage that you can literally put on netflix like it's just
like it's it's getting really exciting and that's where like
um right where i deviate from the the nature people that are like we need to
go back and live in cabins i'm like dude this is awesome and i love taking
slow-mos like like no way it makes you
re-appreciate but just by yourself just re-appreciate over and over and over and
then you can also share it with the world well
that's the thing is sharing it with people
there's nothing better than like teaching a kid to catch a fish
you know and like and like and in in a way instagram has allowed us to do that
where it's like i can have this crazy ass moment that
that is so unique and then and then put it up for people to see
you know and or i mean i remember one of the most recent things that got people
you never know what's going to get people excited um i literally just like
there was like you know three thousand butterflies on the
beach and they were like black red and blue
beautiful butterflies and i just like panned the phone across it and then like
jumped in the river and swam away and like threw that up on instagram and
people went berserk they're like this is the most amazing thing like four
different accounts reached out to try and share it and i was like
butterflies they're everywhere there's four thousand species of butterfly in the
amazon like but but sharing that with people is
beautiful how do you find the thing to shoot how
how do you come up with the butterflies how do you notice
the thing that's beautiful and say i'm gonna wait a minute
like pause this is beautiful let me take a let me let me take a picture of this
because like sometimes you might get used to yeah the beauty right yeah
yeah or like sometimes simple crazy things like like leaf cutter ants
yeah they're just walking by they become it becomes pedestrian it's like well
i mean just like when you're you know you're living at the elephant camp and
it's like the elephant comes out and he starts
like trashing the water bucket we're all like we just
stop yeah we're trying to watch picky blinders here
just leave us alone it becomes normal after watching
yeah um uh but no in the jungle i don't i don't that's never a struggle
for me because as a photographer it's like
whenever my eye hits on something i went i've never seen
that many of those butterflies all the same species together and like
this oh yeah i'm trying to get this one thing that the butterflies do is in the
dry season the salt deposits you'll get like
three or four maybe five thousand butterflies
all coming onto this one area of sand because there'll be like some leaching
there'll be some some salt deposit there or something
and they'll all be wings flat against the ground with their with their
proboscis on the sand and if you go walk near them they will
vortex up and you have a rainbow vortex of butterflies
and you can like go run through that and it's surreal and i want to what i
want to do is get the shot where i i guess leave the phone recording in
slow-mo facing up
and leave it there for an hour let the butterflies come in and settle and then
disturb them so i get the bottom of the vortex of the bug i'm like
these are the ways i think where i'm like how can i show people the absolute
mind-blowing you know with an iphone perfection it's
amazing i mean that's what i have you know i'm sure that somebody else could
do it with you know a red and and and nail it but it's like
that's what i have in the jungle because i have to travel light and i
you know yeah i think that that that really that works i have the same thing
when i was traveling ukraine the the equivalent was just the suit is
that suitcase over there with the foam yeah and you just shove it full of
equipment and who cares you can you can go to war zone if it
doesn't matter it doesn't like uh i it has to do with
the you're talking about like with the like
protecting your camera or not it feels like the more you protect
stuff the more it's gonna get damaged yeah like so like see like my
cameras they're all missing this is like this is amazing to me so
all my cameras are missing the they're all how you can see the metal
through the paint nice so all this and so like they're all
because i'm constantly like i like slide in and like take a picture and like
they're banged up but these they're good they're good machines i think they get
tougher over time if you put them through it's like the immune system
it's like muscles it's like david goggins cameras if you gotta you gotta
make them suffer every day yeah all right what's your view on
hunting um so you really hate poachers i really
hate poachers how do they operate who are they what
are they up to what do they do poachers to me are the people that are
going in and annihilating wildlife for profit
without any you know the people that are going in and and machine gunning an
elephant to take its tusks yeah the people that are sneaking into
protected areas in africa and shooting rhinos so that they can
cut off their horns before the animal's even dead while its baby is beside it
so and and and there's a difference between
a poacher and a hunter i'm a hunter jj is a hunter i i work with
an organization called vet paw in africa and they use
united states veterans who have come back post 9 11 veterans who have come
back from the war and have these skills and they've been
using these guys to protect the last black rhinos white rhinos
elephants and so we've i've gotten to see this play
out on a private reserve in africa where these incredible people have decided to
protect zebras wildebeests all types of impala
giraffes several herds of elephants white rhinos black rhinos
all of this stuff is protected and what's interesting is
it's a hunting preserve and so it's been very interesting and
challenging sharing my work there with the public
because for instance i went to a very high
profile photographer recently and i said you have to get over here and see this
it's it's amazing what these people have done it's this reserve called buffalo
and they've you know there's rescued families of
elephants and they have you can see a black rhino every day if you want to
this is they're critically endangered and it's
because of the work that vet paw does protecting these animals from poachers
but what people don't understand is that hunting
happens all the time on the reserve not for the elephants and the rhinos those
are those are special and they will never be
hunted there but things like an impala things like an
a wildebeest a zebra there aren't as many predators as there used to be
so if you leave those animals
un-hunted you know without the wolf to chase the herd
to thin off the ones that are old and dying or sick
well then you just have animals that are old and dying and sick walking around
suffering and so on and reserves like this they
hunt and they take the old ones and they use the funding from hunting no
one's going to pay you thirty thousand dollars to take a picture of a buffalo
but they'll pay you thirty thousand dollars to hunt a buffalo
and so these reserves responsibly and ethically on
foot can go hunting and manage and again if they if they were hunting
rhinos or if they're hunting elephants i'd be out in a second
they're hunting non-endangered species they're hunting non-endangered species
they're hunting game species and the the difference is that a poacher is
going to instead of those are responsible hunters that are ecologists
and conservationists whereas a poacher is someone that will
come in and kill recklessly and murder an animal for no reason for a
part to sell i would love to travel together
actually um so um let's let's we'll talk offline i
would love to make that happen if you allow me i'm
i'm 100 serious man i have tremendous respect for your work and i've been
watching you since the beginning i would love to do that together
i've been i've talked to joe quite a bit about it and i
really love the idea of eating the meat that i've hunted
it's mostly what i eat is meat not for dietary i don't have any weird
constraints on my diet and so on i just really enjoy eating meat
it's really good and uh there is a part of me that's bothered by factory farming
yes sure that uh it's very easily accessible meat but there's something
deeply wrong with it um part of the reason i love fishing and eating the
the fish that i catch it just seems to be
more ethical but also a more intimate deep connection honest connection with
with nature you get to see the killing of the food that you're consuming
versus removing that from the picture not even thinking about it
not thinking about that this came from the meat and
um yeah i love the idea that you kill i kill one animal and i eat that
basically for the whole year yeah an ethically
slaughtered animal whether it's a fish or a deer or whatever else
to me that's oh god how i'm gonna i'm gonna use the wrong
religious term here but there's a there's a i feel like i want to use the
word like sacrament but it's like there's a there's a there's a deeply
profound ritual and honestly honestly if you if you teach a kid to grow a
vegetable you show a kid how to grow a carrot and the the miracle of like wait
i put a this thing just grew in there it just
appeared because there was sunlight and it's like yeah
the the to me yes you that when you feel that fish tug on the line
to me it it does something that that awakens a deep primal something this
satisfaction and and then when you eat that you feel
you feel good and and so i think the other thing like sort
of functionally speaking is that aside from the fact that i think it's
one of the original we were so disconnected like we should
be hunting we should be gathering walking more i mean look at
like what what we discussed now like people are like oh you got to get your
steps in for the day and it's like that never used to be a problem
um you know people like well should should we be eating animals and it's
like what do you think we do here on earth like i'm not sure
how you got so confused but walmart did it to you like i don't
know like what i living where i've lived and i mean from 18
to 35 i feel like i've grown up i've lived more outside than i have inside
and i've it just to me like showing people
these things i can see this miraculous wonder in their eyes when they when they
realize that they can reach out into the world and interact with something and
and so when i hear these like frantic people talking about
you know whether or not it's right it's like no of course it is
then again factory farming is is awful but
but i try to stay i try and walk the line i'm worried about wild animals i'm
worried about wild ecosystems the other thing that's sort of important
about hunting is that if if people's livelihoods
depend on salmon and elk and and ocean fisheries
well then they'll fight to protect it naturally because it's part of their
life and it's if everybody's going to burger
king and everybody's getting chicken wrapped in plastic they forget
that the fish are there because they're too busy watching sitcoms
and so then when the when the conglomerate comes in and builds a dam
nobody really cares and then you just end up with a few hippies and signs
standing next to the river and it becomes silly
we forget the meaning you mentioned that
ayahuasca reveals oh boy oh boy oh no the the darkness
that's there in the in the jungle there's beauty but there's darkness so
what is what is it that i ask reveals what is the heart of darkness fuck it
opens the heart of darkness right up um um i'm going to show you a picture of
them of our shaman and then i'm going to ask if you want to do ayahuasca here
not here in that sense it can only be done in the jungle anybody that tells
you i've heard people be like oh i did ayahuasca in brooklyn last week and i'm
like no you didn't actually i actually told that to my
native friends i went hey guess what i said a bunch of gringos keep thinking
they're doing ayahuasca brooklyn and they were like
howling laughing they're like you can't do it outside the jungle and i was like
exactly i've never done ayahuasca i would love to
i've uh i've done or eaten whatever mushrooms
it's it's a wonderful experience i think it's wonderful um
but ayahuasca oh man yeah see i'd done mushrooms i
thought i was like okay and i i i yeah i was like i got this i
had my notebook i was like i'm gonna journal a little bit
you know and then but but you quickly i quickly
quickly realized how out of my depth i was and how unprepared i was
for what was happening because you sit in a circle with these native guys and
there's one you know he's got the feathers and he's
old and he's got a face like the map of the world and he's
he's smoking this fat old tobacco thing and
he calls you forward and you kneel before him and you're going
is it too late to back up and everyone's you know there's one candle
and he blows smoke over the over the cup and he hands it to you and you're like
again it's these it's these it's these like these things that you can't argue
with it's these facts you're like as soon as this
goes down i'm gone i know it and this is a moment in my life that i
i have to either embarrass myself in front of everybody or i'm going forward
with this and dish and then i went and sat
and you're sitting in the dark and it's again so we're on a platform
with a with palm thatched roof and the jungle is all around you so all those
million tens of millions of frogs and insects are
and i'm like all right cool and i remember i like
you know like i tried to like light a cigarette or something and i went
oh that's not gonna happen you know and then i and i i put my hands on the floor
and like my experience i mean like we've done
mushrooms you know it's like it's interesting it's introspective
no this this was like somebody unzipped the universe i
i you know i spent a lot of without boring people with it i spent a lot of
time in in in like unconstructed dream space
like floating between nebulas like there was a long period where
there was no physical shape where i lived without a name and like so it's
like it's like you get brought so deep down so elementally lost
in the universe where like i truly felt like i was experiencing
moving through places like like that like that uh
like that um asteroid that i have like it's
it's like a piece of your piece of something detached from the earth and so
i i got back from it and uh
had had an interesting new appreciation for life
uh i strongly suggest that people just do mushrooms like a normal person
unless unless you're ready it was really intense it was really intense but to be
fair the shaman who did it was like the old
school guy yeah and he was he was getting up there in
years and he had forgotten and overboiled the brew
yeah and so we came back and i was like four in the morning and i had
you know all this crazy shit i'd been on journeys and years down there and so
when i came back and i had like hands i started crying i started absolutely
weeping gratitude or gratitude that i was alive
i was gonna get to see my people again i was like i'm gonna have to see my
parents again yeah i'm gonna get to talk kind of
thought you might be gone i was gone i was gone i was i was a i was a dimly
conscious something floating in dark space and
spent what felt like years down there and so
when i i really did feel like being reborn which i was like cheap trick like
yeah you um but no the the the the way it moves
you through the jungle the way the jungle moves through your skin
there are moments of absolute majesty and incredible
discovery that happen along the way um and on the way up the jungle brings
you up and the shaman brings you up and and the and you get to move through the
forest in a way that it's almost like you're inhabiting the
consciousness of animals very very very like i didn't think that
hallucinogenics could do this to a to a brain
you know mushrooms you're like oh i can i feel like i can feel music like
cool you know you guys want to watch mars the penguins
this is transformative like what yeah did that did that change you
i don't know i think it definitely it definitely
i i almost feel like it showed me the thing that i was scared the most of and
it's that it was like that it's all just cold
dark nothing it like brought me to like the basement of the universe
and i felt like the point of that was to to come back
to this place where there's all this life and light and
love and and all this amazing stuff that we experience on a day-to-day basis and
don't take for granted and so just like almost dying
this was like fully dying like they're you know
but the great part is is that usually it's not that intense
this guy had overboiled the brew he'd also i saw the vine afterwards
most ayahuasca vines are like as thick as your arm this one was like as thick
as a garbage can it was like the oldest ayahuasca vine you can imagine
and at like four in the morning i like crawled over to my friend chris who's a
tough new york city firefighter we were like
holding each other just like weeping just like thank god we're back
and uh then we had to go looking for the shaman
where the hell is this guy he's gone yeah we found him in the morning and he
was laying in the stream naked like et at the you know at the end when he's
like laying like in the yeah he he kicked his own ass with that
and he retired after that oh so we really got like we somebody
turned the dial all the way up on us and so we got we
got blasted so it's not supposed to be that bad but
i think you're somebody who's fearless in sort of diving into those kinds of
places i think i also retire from ayahuasca i could be fearless with other
things but i think i'm good it sounds kind of uh
to me personally kind of exciting
well i think i think that you have a severely fearless aspect to you
i mean you're when you come up with something that intrigues you like if
somebody told you right now that you could go
physically into deep space i feel like you would do it
yeah i did yeah if go to mars yeah right and some of it is
i don't even know if you have that some of that is more
goggins like i want to see where my mind breaks
by pushing it to tough places there's a curiosity of
exploring the mind the limits of the mind
i feel like you're not a cold plunge that's like you're not coming back
right right and that's that's okay uh so you know i have i i do i have
i i'm with you on that i love seeing my limits i absolutely love seeing my
limits i love getting my ass kicked i love being shown how insignificant i
am but when it comes to something like that where you got to push your chips
and it's got to be something for me it's got to be a hill that i believe in
before i die on it and it's like like to me the the promise of exploring
space isn't enough but like even just the way i mean you
said you're like i'm going to ukraine here i go you know there there's a
certain um
dedication to to curiosity at any expense and i think that that
is something that maybe we share in very in different directions
something tells me with those with those with those crocodiles outside
i would have gotten eaten something tells me there's some something trying
to preserve you in this world i'm not sure exactly what that is
somehow you keep surviving what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing
why are we here like do you ever ask yourself for that question i feel like
that's every day i feel like i'm someone that lives with
that a lot and i think that i think that it actually takes me away from the human
world a little bit i feel like i've always been a little bit apart
because i think that other people do you know mushrooms and they go wow it
really made me think about how amazing it is here and i feel like on a daily
basis i find myself where i'm like i can't
believe that any of this is possible you know i i and that and that goes
that goes from how delicious something tastes
to being able to talk to to to to someone in your family or or have a
phone there's times where i'm in the amazon and i
i miss home and i even just face timing with someone i go this is possible
like people were rubbing sticks together to try and survive saber-toothed tigers
not that long ago and i'm over there like yo mom look at this
it's wild like i'm in a constant state of awe
and so um i actually hope that this is
that this is a testing ground and whether it's aliens or god or whatever
it is that that this is all that this is that this is that this is
something crucially important that would be nice
because it feels like it is yeah i hope that too that the universe almost
created us to see what's possible
and that i'd like to believe that beauty and good is possible
and and those are the things that make me say that it's not
it's impossible for it to just mean nothing
and i'm very and just like you said there could be life forms that
that we can't even understand there could there are there
i'm very open to the idea that there's meanings that we have no idea about
the the few things i know are the things that i love and some of the things that
i love you know are being pushed to extinction
so i try to protect them but that's that's
that's that's that's my mission but i'm saying like in terms of what are we
doing here i'm i'm just um always always amazed at at the at
the simplest things i mean the you know that we can sit here doing
this exchanging yeah using our imagination to fill in the
gaps exchanging feelings experiences images
yeah it fills you with awe and every once in a while you get a little glimpse
of something like a deeper meaning that might be
there you know you don't you don't really know what it is but you get a
glimpse every now and then you keep searching
and then it's over before you know it paul uh hopefully for you
you got many more years it was dark man you're an important important and a
beautiful man paul thank you so much for talking today
thank you for being who you are for everything you're doing
um i hope to see you again soon many times and maybe one day soon in the
jungle i hope that happens thank you lex
thanks for listening to this conversation with paul rossley to
support this podcast please check out our sponsors
in the description and now let me leave you with some words from jane
goodall if we kill off the wild then we're killing off a part of our
souls thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time