Paul Rosolie recounts his Amazon journey, detailing a 15-foot anaconda attack and harrowing escapes from armed miners who operate with impunity, often driven by poverty rather than malice. He critiques consumer-focused environmentalism, arguing systemic economic changes are vital against deforestation fueled by logging, mining, and drug trafficking. While debunking Graham Hancock's "man-made garden" theory, Rosolie highlights the sterile soil ecology and lethal dangers of uncontacted tribes. The segment culminates in his urgent call to raise $30 million for Jungle Keepers to protect 50,000 acres from Chinese logging, emphasizing that saving old-growth trees is critical for global carbon stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Obsessed With Venomous Snakes00:14:57
Thanks for coming, man.
Dude, thanks for having me.
Fascinating life story you have.
It's a weird, weird path I chose.
How old were you when you decided to officially move to the Amazon rainforest?
I was 17 years old when I made the decision.
I hated school, it was never good.
I was getting into fights with gym teachers.
I was getting suspended.
I was just failing all my classes.
And just my parents are awesome.
My parents said, look, just forget it.
They said, just forget the last two years of high school.
Go to college, save up your money, do whatever you want.
I said, Do whatever I want.
I said, I'll do whatever I want.
So I'm getting a plane ticket to the Amazon.
What sparked that idea?
You read books about people following their dreams and doing all this shit.
And it's like, you're just a kid.
Yeah.
And I was like, I want that.
I want to go out and, you know, find something amazing.
And to me, it was like the Amazon is the place that has more terrestrial biodiversity than anywhere else on earth, not just now, but at any point in the fossil record.
And so I was just like, get me on a one way ticket to there.
And then it took like six months of emailing people and calling professors and trying to find a research position there because I didn't want to go as a tourist.
I didn't want to go as like, there's other people go to like Costa Rica.
I didn't want to go on like a rainforest vacation.
I wanted to go and authentically be in the Amazon rainforest.
And so I found a research position with one of the local indigenous guys.
This guy's name is Juan Julio Duran, and he's, you know, everybody calls him JJ.
And he had a small plot of land that he was protecting.
And He was doing that in collaboration with a PhD candidate who was doing research on bird populations in the region.
And they said, Look, if you come and you do like four hours of bird research every day, you can stay for as long as you want.
No shit.
And so I went there, and it's like, you know, the first scene in Jurassic Park when they're like, they pull up to the park and they have no idea what they're about to see.
And then Dr. Grant sees the brachiosaurus for the first time and he grabs her head and he turns her head, and the music swells, and you get chills all over your body.
And they're like, Oh my God, dinosaurs.
That's what it was like going to the Amazon for the first time.
It's like you can't be serious that there are these millennium trees that are thicker than this room at the base that go up 150, 160 feet that have entire ecosystems living on them.
These are things that were like, these were trees that were alive.
These were saplings when Pizarro hit Peru.
When Columbus was still stumbling across the ocean, these things were growing in the Amazon.
It's like monster trees, leaf cutter ants, jaguars, anacondas, all this crazy stuff.
It was just like, This is a dream come true.
It felt like I literally, literally felt like I'd unplugged from the matrix and suddenly I'd gotten to the real world.
How, how did it, how long did you have to spend down there before it, did you, did it actually change you in any way?
Oh, it physically changes you because we are, well, let's take it like this.
You look at wildlife, wildlife, you know, yeah, sharp teeth and claws and feathers and camouflage and all this, all these different things that they have, all these different attributes they have that make them good at their lifestyle.
We are soft.
Like most of us have vitamin D deficiencies where our skin is soft.
We don't have sharp teeth.
We're not fast.
You go to the Amazon and the jungle starts working on you.
And, you know, the sun bakes your skin and then you're cold in the rain.
And if you're going with local guys the way I was, they were saying, like, you know, let's go out and track some animals.
And they're like, get the shoes off.
They're like, way too much noise with the shoes.
And so you take your pathetic little, you know, gringo feet.
And start walking around the Amazon rainforest where you have 12 inch spikes coming out of the ground, where you have venomous snakes, scorpions, all this stuff.
But you start to develop harder calluses on your feet.
Your skin tightens and becomes tan.
You become, you literally start getting stronger.
You start losing weight.
Your strength to weight ratio skyrockets.
You literally start changing.
The jungle molds you.
And then, of course, you're under constant assault from the mosquitoes, the ticks, all the other things that are after you.
You're part of that ecosystem.
So, yeah, it changes you physically.
And then it also changes you mentally in the fact that you.
All these things that are dormant in us while we're living in society turn on.
You know, we don't need a lot of the, you know, alarm receptors that we're born with that come standard in our bodies.
We don't even know about them.
And it's like, you know, the ability to know when rain is coming, the ability to sense the tempo of a forest.
You know, the birds, you don't realize it, but when you walk through a forest, the birds will tell you what the tempo of a forest is.
And so, you know, there's happy chatter when the birds are all just, you know, chilling and the sun is out and it's the afternoon.
And then there's, There's that weird quiet right before a thunderstorm.
And then there's other shades of it.
If there's a large predator or a snake going by, you'll have birds alarm calling in that direction.
And you start to wake up to these little things.
And sometimes it's not even a conscious thing.
Sometimes you start going, Why do I feel like this is about to happen?
And then it does.
And you go, What am I learning here?
It's sort of so vast that you can't quite put your finger on it.
So, mentally, physically, spiritually, the jungle became everything to me.
So, when you first moved down there and you were doing working on that research stuff with that guy, JJ, where were you living?
What was it?
Did you have a car?
Like, what was life like when you got down there?
Oh, it's I hope that my local team gets to hear this.
I'm going to play it for them because it's so funny.
Because I was just over in Africa and they were asking the same thing.
They were like, So, how do you guys get to the store?
And I was like, So, the only way to get to our so, JJ had a research station way out in the jungle.
And so, I mean, this is a guy that grew up without shoes.
You know, he was like out in the jungle.
They were like supplementing, I think, like 70% of their food came from like bushmeat that they hunted.
And so, to get to his research station that he chose to be far out in the jungle, we used to have to leave town with two weeks of supplies.
The first day, you'd be going on a boat upriver, upriver, upriver all day long, no matter what.
And then you camp on the side of these beaches on the edges of the river and the drier months of the year.
And so, you camp on a beach and then the next day, you keep going upriver.
And then finally, you arrive.
At the research station at the bank of the river.
And then you have to carry two weeks worth of eggs, two weeks worth of rice, two weeks worth of everything up into the jungle over the staircase up to the research station.
And so it's a totally different type of lifestyle.
So, no, we don't have a car.
You're out there.
And then when you run out of supplies, especially at that time, we had like a little radio.
We could radio for town and they could send a shipment of food, but that would come in like four or five days.
So, like, completely isolated.
So, and then how did you transition from moving to the rainforest and working down there in the Amazon to making TV shows?
That's an interesting story.
So, the thing is, as I started learning from JJ, he started basically what it is.
I mean, this guy knows the sap running through the trees of the Amazon that are medicinal.
Like, and these are not like you have to believe in it for it to work.
This is like heavy chemical compounds that are, you know, recognized by Western medicine.
This is real, real powerful stuff.
And he was teaching me about that.
He was teaching me about birds.
He was teaching me how to track jaguars, how to track game species, all this stuff that I'm just downloading constantly from him.
How did he learn this stuff, by the way?
He grew up in the forest.
So he was, he grew up going on hunting expeditions.
He grew up with his brothers who were loggers.
He was the only conservationist out of the crew.
He has like 17 brothers.
And when you say he grew up in the forest, like I'm trying to picture it like an indigenous community, he grew up like that, like a tribe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The indigenous community.
Yeah.
Wow.
So he came from that background.
So when you have an ear infection, he's like, Oh, we need to go get teros de los muertes.
He's like, We need to go get dead man's fingers.
And we go get the fungus and they mix it up and they mix a few other things and they pour it in your ear and your ear infection goes away.
If you have a bot fly, they know how to remove the bot fly.
It's all these different things.
If you have a broken bone, they have very unique ways of, Of healing a broken bone.
And so I was learning so much from this guy.
And then the only thing that he didn't know, because they hunt, they log, they use medicines, they have all these things that they interact with the forest.
The thing that he didn't know was snakes.
And I'd grown up watching what?
Steve Irwin.
And so I had always been catching snakes.
I've always loved snakes.
And in New York, we had black rat snakes, garter snakes, whatever.
And.
I had set a goal for myself where I had said I had to catch 100 non venomous snakes before I ever messed with a venomous snake.
You know, I had to successfully catch 100 non venomous snakes.
And that didn't work out because at some point in, I think it was Harriman State Park, I saw some old guy and he saw a copperhead and he told his wife, he goes, you know, he goes, back up, honey, I got this.
And he picks up a stick and he was going to go hit the thing.
And at like 16 years old, I ran up behind this guy and like grabbed the stick and I was like, no, you're not.
Pushed him back, and then I just like took a little twig and like got the snake by the tail and like moved it.
I was like, That was my first venomous snake.
Like, there we go.
But when I got to the Amazon, I'd caught hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of snakes.
And so I was like, Catching bush masters and vine snakes and all this amazing, beautiful snake life.
And JJ was like, How do you do?
He's like, How do you know this?
And I was like, I was like, Snakes is what I do.
And he's like, Have you ever thought about seeing an anaconda?
And I was like, I would love to see anaconda.
And he was like, Well, um, We go on this one hunting trip every year.
He's like, it's a bit of a ceremony.
He's like, me and my brothers and my dad, we get in a boat and we pack like two weeks of supplies and we go way up this river to a point where there's like, there's no past the point where the features of the land have names, like really wild.
And he was like, but every time we go there, he's like, as you're going up the river, he's like, we see anacondas on the side.
And so he's like, do you want to come?
And so I went to his parents' house to meet his brothers.
And at this time, he was introducing me to them.
And these are the people who have become my life friends.
But It was like we had a meeting and they said, Yeah, join us.
We went on this expedition.
And like the first thing we found was this 13 foot huge female anaconda.
And I just jumped out of the boat, grabbed it by the head, it wrapped around my arms.
And that was the start of something.
And we started, we were saying, Let's start measuring the anacondas on these rivers.
Let's see how many anacondas are on which rivers.
And like, let's start putting together something that could become a study at some point.
And pretty quickly, we got into trouble with that because.
Then there was like a 15 foot anaconda this one day, and she was sleeping on this log.
And so, what happened was they dropped me down upriver.
They took the boat downriver, and they said, Okay, we're going to come from either side and we're going to surprise her.
And so, this anaconda's asleep.
She's probably as thick as a basketball around, like pretty decent sized snake.
And she's dead asleep.
And as I'm crouching in and I'm coming in, and we're like wearing just boxers.
What is she laying on?
She's laying on this tree by the side of the river.
Okay.
And as I'm getting close to her, all of a sudden, she just wakes up, and I see the muscles flex, and I see she's getting ready.
And I'm going, oh no.
And boom, she goes into the water and she's going to just run away.
So I run forward, I grab her, I pull her back.
She strikes at me.
And as she strikes at me, I just grab her head right before it hits my face.
So I have this snake, I get another hand on.
Once you have control of the head, they shouldn't be able to bite you.
So I'm like, all right, good, got control of the head.
I start screaming for the guys.
I'm like, JJ, JJ.
I'm holding on to the snake.
Now, here's the thing that I didn't anticipate.
She wraps a coil around my hands.
Suddenly, my forearms are tied together.
I want, oh.
And then all of a sudden, the next coil comes around over my neck.
And so now my shoulders and my arms are out of my control.
The snake owns them.
And this is like a 150 pound, 200 pound snake.
And so I get pulled to my knees, and then she starts the constricting.
Because, as far as she knows, I'm a predator attacking her.
Snake starts constricting my collarbones, which were inches from touching.
Like my shoulders were just coming together until my shoulders were like, I felt everything about to break.
Right at that minute, the rest of the guys got there, they started unwrapping her.
You have to unwrap an anaconda from the tail.
And so they start unwrapping her, and I just got this breath.
And it was like the closest I ever came to getting crushed to death by an anaconda.
And that was one of the first experiences I had with them.
But we returned from that expedition with these photos that.
Made like even the local people were like, what did you guys do?
Like, are you insane?
And then that's where Gringo Loco comes from, where they started, they all started calling me Gringo Loco.
And, but yeah, that's the long winded way of answering your question.
That then when I went home back to New York, eventually I had to do like a college semester.
I'd like show up for a college semester with like bullet ant stings on me and like thorns sticking out of my skin.
And I'd be like, yeah, I know I'm 10 days late, but I was taking care of a giant anteater.
And they'd be like, what?
But eventually, you know, somebody interviewed me.
The guys at mangabay.com actually, I think, were the first ones to do an interview.
And it was Anacondas and Floating Forests, The Secrets of the Amazon.
And it was just like this thing.
And then ever since then, it's just been this people were just, you know, kind of just like, you're the anaconda guy.
And then that started that.
But it was like that, that was just, you know, at the time, we were just barefoot dipshits with, you know, a machete in the jungle.
We didn't have a plan.
We didn't know what we were doing.
I was just trying to, like, Make up for all the time I felt like school had stolen from me.
I just wanted to go live a life and have fun and have adventures.
It wasn't until later that the whole protecting the forest thing came around.
When you went down there, I find it fascinating that they thought you were a psycho for being so obsessed with the snakes.
Because I don't think those guys are.
How do they feel?
They're not going trying to touch or catch snakes.
They don't want anything to do with snakes, right?
Oh, God, no.
No, no, no.
I feel like it's something that's ingrained in human DNA that we are just.
Inherently terrified of fucking snakes?
That's a weird question.
I've always wondered about it because so many people are so scared of snakes.
But two things.
One, if you take a child and you show them a snake, and I'm talking, I've done this.
I've done this with like nieces, nephews, my friends' kids, where we'll be out on a hike and we'll find like a big black rat snake, a snake that cannot hurt you if it tried, but it's big and it looks scary.
Get the kid over and you can't pick up the snake.
And a lot of times you don't even need to hold him by the head.
You say you could touch the tail.
And the kid's like, really?
That's amazing.
Protecting The Snake Ecosystem00:14:05
And they touch the tail.
And it's.
There's no fear.
And the same thing with when you take, I've had, you know, a 65 year old woman come with me on the tours I lead to the Amazon and just say, if I even think about a snake, I'll start crying.
And I've done that thing where I catch a snake, I go sit on, you know, at the research station, I'll go sit on a couch and I'll say, look, what I want you to do is sit next to me.
I want you to sit next to me.
And sometimes they can't, but then eventually I'm like, look, this is your goal is you got to sit next to me.
Sit next to me.
And I'm just handling the snake nice and calm.
And I can calm them down.
And then, Eventually, it's okay.
Let one bit of the snake go over your finger.
And then it's okay.
Maybe let your hand on the back end of the snake.
And then eventually, they're holding the snake.
And then a few things happen.
First of all, they go, This is an amazingly beautiful animal, which it is.
And then next, they feel really accomplished.
They overcame their fear and they realize, oh my God, this is nothing to worry about because most snakes that aren't venomous, like you take a garter snake, a blue jay could kill it.
Like a bird could eat that.
They're helpless.
So, unless it's a spitting cobra or a bush master or a rattlesnake, snakes, for the most part, are just little animals that live near ponds and eat frogs and rats and help us to not have diseases because they control pests.
Is that how you explain it to the indigenous people down there?
Yeah.
Yeah, that.
And then, you know, they would get pissed because we've had a few things where, like, you know, a snake will come into someone's farm and, like, eat a goat, you know, and the farmer's pissed.
And so we have to go deal with that, hopefully rescue the snake before he kills it.
There was one really sad instance where some people had come from a different part of Peru, and this family settled in the jungle and they let their kid go out fishing in a swamp.
And this is, I think he was like a nine year old kid and he was sitting there fishing in the swamp, which, you know, Anaconda grabbed him by the leg, wrapped him up, and killed him, and then started to eat him.
And it was almost over his knees, it went from the head over the knees.
And then the family showed up and saw it, and they all started beating the snake and trying to, they thought they could rescue the kid.
But by the time a snake is swallowing you, you're dead.
They've crushed most of the bones in your body.
So that was very sad because they didn't understand that there's dangerous things out there in the jungle.
And so, like, anacondas are not man eaters, but.
You know, once in a while, you know, deer are vegetarians, but in the thick of winter, they have been known to eat a baby bird in the spring.
You know, it's like whatever calories you can find in nature.
What is an anaconda's preferred food?
Oh, capybara, caiman, birds, fish.
And so the crazy.
Really?
Crocodiles?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Fuck.
Yeah.
So in the Amazon, anacondas are unique because most species have like a level that they exist in.
So you take like a, A cat like a jaguar is going after like deer and wild boar and things like that.
An anaconda is born at like two feet and they're live birth, they're not in eggs.
So they're born at like two feet long, little thing, you know, just like a thick cigar.
This is a little snake though, that again, like a heron could walk up to this snake, peck it on the head, swallow it.
So they're food for other species.
The baby Cayman are born around the same time of the year.
And so the anaconda and the baby Cayman, these little crocs are facing off.
So who can eat who?
And it's sort of this like arms race who can grow?
And that's why anacondas grow quickly.
But what you get with anacondas is that a baby anaconda is starting off with like fish and bugs and frogs, and then it goes up to like shorebirds, like the herons and the crocs, and then it's going up to like paca and rabbits and all these other things.
And then at the top of when you get a full grown, you know, 20 foot anaconda, 26 foot anaconda, you're talking about they could eat tapirs.
They could eat something the size of a cow.
They could eat a human.
They could eat a jaguar.
They could eat whatever they want.
They're an apex predator.
So they go, they have this outsized.
Influence on the ecosystem they're in as an apex predator.
So they're really a unique species, like in that regard.
Yeah, it's fascinating when you see different types of animals and how vulnerable they are right from birth.
Like humans are the worst.
Well, humans are pathetic.
I mean, a baby deer stands up in the first two minutes, it's alive.
A human can't fend for itself in the first four or five years of his life.
You know, the parents are all doing adult stuff, you know, whether it's cutting trees or hunting monkeys or whatever they're doing to survive.
And like the kids are sort of like this self governing tribe.
Where you have like the 13 year olds and the 10 year olds caring for the younger kids.
And like in the evenings, we'd always be in the river.
And it's like you're playing with all these like little naked Amazonian kids and they're all splashing in the water.
And it's like, yeah, there's giant catfish in there and there's piranha and there's caiman and there's anaconda.
And like everyone, everyone knows what's going on.
You know, they know how to stay safe.
They know what the rules are.
And it's just funny coming back here and seeing, like, you know, helicopter parents, you know, like, little Timmy, come here.
Come here.
Don't go over there.
Don't, don't touch that.
Like, put some Purell in your hands.
And, like, you have kids over there and they're, like, skinning a monkey and just, like, making eye contact with you.
It's like, yeah, it's so much different here.
I mean, there's different, completely different things you got to worry about with your kids here.
Just like crossing the street.
I mean, it's way, way more dangerous.
Yeah.
Way more dangerous.
So, How did that whole video come about of you getting eaten by the anaconda?
Well, okay.
I'll say it like this.
The first step for that was a reaction to the things that I'd seen.
And when you live in the rainforest, you see these ancient trees getting cut.
And each time an ancient tree gets cut, you're talking about a skyscraper of life.
You're talking about something where there's.
Reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, lichens, mosses, orchids, all this stuff living on this tree.
It's taken hundreds of years, centuries to become this giant pillar of the forest.
And then somebody comes in with the chainsaw, thing goes down.
And so they do that, they board it up, send it out, and then they burn what's left.
And so you see that again and again and again.
You go, oh my God, they weren't lying to me when I was a kid.
The rainforests really are disappearing, they really are getting destroyed.
And so we started looking for ways to.
Protect the forest, which again, as a 20-something-year-old kid and I'm running, I'm having all these crazy adventures.
Great.
Um, and then you know, one night around a fire, JJ's father, uh, old badass guy that had been in the Amazon his whole life, um, you know, we were talking and they said, Look, if this place isn't gonna change into something very different from what it is, it has to be protected.
You know, we said, Well, what does that look like?
And so they just said, We need more support, we need, we need, you know, somehow, we need to, we didn't have a plan.
And so around that time, I got a call from Discovery Channel and they flew me out to LA and they said, Look, we want to do a show about anacondas with you.
And I said, Great.
So let's do it.
And I told them how important they are apex predators, all this stuff.
There's such big, beautiful snakes.
We had all this incredible footage to show them.
And they were like, That's cool, but it's not enough.
They're like, We need something more.
And so I'm sitting in this room and then I told them the story about the kid that got eaten.
And then they said, No, no, no, there's no confirmed.
Cases of a person being eaten by an anaconda.
And of course, we have confirmed cases of people being eaten by a reticulated python, but we don't have for anaconda.
And so I said, So what does that mean?
So it's not true.
Just, you know what I mean?
Like a villager out in the middle of the Amazon, if his mother is eaten by an anaconda, he's not going to go film it with his phone and upload it to YouTube and go on CNN and be like, Got it.
Wow, they're bored.
That's not how they, yeah.
So that's not like it doesn't happen.
And just jokingly, I was like, Dude, I should just get in some sort of a protective suit and get swallowed to prove that it's possible because these snakes are huge.
And the guy was just like, That's it.
He's like, you just hit it, kid.
And I was like, oh no.
Oh no.
And then I refused it.
And then I talked to everyone, my friends and my family.
I asked Jane Goodall about it.
I said, should I?
She was like, are you crazy?
She's out of your mind.
She didn't know anything about snakes?
Yeah, no, she doesn't.
She knows everything about everything.
She's Gandalf.
Wow.
She's Gandalf.
You think she's like an old lady or something.
She's a badass.
But everyone told me not to do it, but the producers knew.
I got an education in like getting screwed by Hollywood.
It's you and me both.
Yeah.
They basically were like, We'll give you a two hour special.
You can talk about ecology and conservation and do science, all that shit.
They're like, Just at the end, do this stunt.
And if you do that, we'll give you a $3 million budget.
We'll fund your research.
We'll do this and we'll do a huge fundraiser for the forest so you can protect the habitat.
It was a huge train wreck.
They changed everything.
They didn't record any of the science.
I mean, they did.
In the field, they recorded all the science.
We got to the studio.
They threw all that out.
They just put all the, all the, all the, You know, the blood and the craziness and the fear.
You know, like one time they called and they said, you know, we need you guys to look more scared.
And it's like the drama.
The drama.
And it ended up in a huge train wreck.
And like, you know, I got trounced and like, you know, like Opie and Anthony were ripping me apart.
Jimmy Kimmel told me to have sex with a hippo.
I mean, so where did you film it and where did you find the anaconda?
JJ and his brother Pico.
And we got some of our best and brightest of the young scientists that we work with.
And we, Did a six week expedition through the Amazon looking for the largest anacondas on earth.
And, you know, and I had producers calling me.
At one point, I had a producer call on a sat phone.
I'm like sitting by the side of a river in the middle of the Amazon sat phone.
And the guy calls me and he goes, Listen, we need a danger beat.
We need a lead out to the commercial.
And I was like, The day before, we just caught like a 15 foot anaconda.
And I was like, Bro, that wasn't exciting enough for you.
And he goes, No, no, we need something else.
And I went, Well, I don't know what you know.
We got work to do here, man.
And he was like, No, no, no.
Listen, kid.
He was like, You're going to give me a danger beat.
And I went, Okay, so what do you want?
Next day, he calls and he goes, Look, we sat around a board, and this is a bunch of people sitting in a fucking air conditioned room in LA.
And they go, You're going to be going up river.
And you, he goes, Don't worry, you're going to look like the hero.
Thanks, bro.
He goes, You're going to look like the hero.
He goes, Because you're going up river and you're going to notice that there's black piranha in the river.
And he goes, You're going to tell everyone to pull the boat over.
And then you're going to take a bucket of blood and pour it into the river.
And then you're going to safely bring your people around the threat.
And I went, How would a piranha hurt us in a boat?
Huh?
We swim in the river every day.
Next, where am I going to get a bucket of blood from?
And next, and then he just went, listen, kid.
He was like, unless you think so.
In the end, what they made us do is they made us get in a stream and pretend that we were having an encounter with an electric eel.
Electric eel?
I mean, we've had encounters with electric eels, but we had to fake it.
None of us are actors.
And so, like, I had my friends up to their chests in this stream, and I had to be like, whoa, guys, hold on.
You know, and like, let's get out.
And like, you can see that we're all.
Fucking acting, we're not right, it looks stupid, but that's what TV does.
They hold the gun to your head and they're like, Do what we do, what we ask, yeah.
Um, and so that was a huge thing, and it ended up costing me a lot, you know.
Like, when you hear people talk about, you know, like I just lost, like, you know, a lot of scientists didn't want to deal with me.
PETA came out after me because they said I was trying to hurt snakes, and then America didn't like it because I didn't actually get eaten.
Um, so like I got it from all ends, and then uh, but what I say now though is, like, look.
You know, to people who criticize me for it, like, and I just missed out on a big environmental award like six years later because somebody Googled it and they were like, Aren't you that guy that did that thing?
And I'm like, Yeah.
And they're like, All right, disqualified.
I was going to win this like big award for like $60,000 and disqualified.
And I was like, For a show that hurt no animals, that tried to protect the forest, no, you know, crimes were committed.
And it's just like, What happens when you, I took a swing.
You know what I mean?
I took a swing and it missed, but you got to try.
And, like, that's the thing.
And that's what I would say to anybody because it's, I'm still, every now and then, somebody will still be like, oh, you're the anaconda guy.
And it's like, yeah.
How much forest are you protecting?
What's the biggest thing you ever did?
What's the biggest thing you ever sacrificed to try and protect something you love?
That's the thing with TV, man.
It's so dramatized.
Like anything you watch on any of those, I don't care if it's History Channel or the Science Channel or whatever, every single one of those shows, like the here's the big problem.
Most of the times, for example, like on the History Channel, they will talk about something legit.
Like they'll go and study something legit.
Like my best example of it is that Skinwalker Ranch show.
There's this crazy ranch up in the middle of like the Midwest that supposedly has like, A lot of UFO sightings and shit, weird shit happening there.
And there's like actual documented science of that place.
Yeah.
But then they go make this TV show and they fucking script it to death.
And they have all these people, they bring them in, they turn it into this big fucking dog and pony show.
And it just ruins it and it discredits the whole entire, the whole entire area, the whole entire topic.
It's fucking pathetic.
Yeah.
No.
So that was a learning experience.
So that was like by 24, 25, 26 or something.
Um, Yeah, I'd been through that.
And then so I pretty much had to like chapel myself and go to another country.
So I went and stayed in India because, like, after that, it was just like the media was just killing me.
I was getting like death threats in my.
Because then I made the mistake of saying that I don't think that people should keep snakes in small cages.
Climate Change And Survival00:15:36
You know, they're wild animals and I appreciate them and stuff.
And then I got, which I never knew existed, the herp community.
It's like a bunch of dudes that keep snakes in boxes in their mom's basements.
And these people came out by the thousands and like were just like going crazy on social media.
Because they love keeping torturing snakes in small boxes in their mom's basements.
They have like filing cabinets filled with amazing snakes from all over the world that never see the light of day.
It's basically horrendous animal abuse.
And it's a herp community.
Because herpetology is reptiles, they call it.
And then they'll even go as far as to say, like, oh, we're conservationists because we're protecting these species out of the wild.
And it's like, no, you're just a society of tools.
What are they actually doing?
They just like keeping, like, they'll have like a Sumatran spitting cobra and a Tupperware over there.
And then they'll like take it out and like show some people.
And then, like, on the internet, like on a video or something, some of them on the internet.
Some of them I've been to these places, you know, I go and hang out with everybody.
Um, I've been to some of these basements, and uh, there's the most amazing stuff.
I mean, like, really rare animals that these guys will get at like reptile shows.
And then they have literally, I mean, you can look it up.
You can look it up.
There's there's um, there's a guy on YouTube who he's he always has like videos of like reticulated pythons striking at him.
He's like a kind of like older guy with a beard, he's kind of heavy and he's.
He makes these really wacky videos where there's snakes striking at him.
But if you look behind him, there's filing cabinets of snakes.
And I think they're like an exotic pet dealer.
Oh, okay.
And so there's a whole dude that's big in Florida.
Is it really?
Oh, my God.
Yes.
You can buy anything.
Yeah, that's why you guys have Burmese pythons here because they leaked out.
You don't spend any time in Florida, do you?
Not a lot.
Florida's the closest thing to the Amazon in the US.
Dude, it's pretty wild.
It's pretty close, right?
Yeah.
I mean, the close compared to.
A lot of the other places in the U.S.
I mean, you can go out in a swamp and catch a 16 foot Burmese python.
That's pretty cool.
It is pretty cool.
That's pretty cool.
You got the Florida Panthers, and you know, there's some really important wildlife here.
Like Florida is no joke.
How long has this issue with companies coming into the Amazon and getting these loggers and these miners and all of these various industries, how long have they been coming in and tearing out the rainforest?
This is long before you went down there, right?
Oh, yeah.
No, this is like centuries, man.
Like, Like, we, I mean, like Darwin was writing about, like, if they keep doing this, eventually it's going to be a huge problem.
You got to remember, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir were, you know, trying to protect the sequoias in the United States.
We cut 97% of the old growth forest that existed on the United States when Europeans showed up.
97%.
So all the forest just got cleared and thrown into fucking kilns for the Industrial Revolution.
Like we murdered the ecosystems of North America.
And then with chainsaws and boat motors, you know, everything in the Amazon is rivers.
You move, it's a, it's a, it's a, Region of rivers.
And so once you had boat motors and chainsaws, you could get people out there and they could start cutting down trees.
And then, of course, with the modern era in the last 30, 40 years, where you have roads going into the Amazon, where you actually have like excavators and go bulldoze the trees down and then get people in there.
And then they can really start doing some damage.
And so we've seen just Amazonian deforestation skyrocket in like the last 50 years.
And that's corresponded with that all over the world in the Congo, in Indonesia.
We're at this point suddenly in history where we're losing habitat really.
Quickly.
We're losing species really quickly.
And that's why they call it the sixth extinction.
We're losing species at a rate that's almost similar to when the dinosaurs went extinct.
And so that's totally human caused.
And since 1970, we've lost something like over 50% of the wildlife on this planet.
And that's not the species, but that's how numerous they are.
50% of the wildlife that was on this planet is gone because of the human activity, because we control 70% of the landmass that's not under the ice.
And we're clearing.
I mean, Indonesia, we're just leveling it for palm oil.
The Congo rainforest, all that tropical hardwood, they're taking it out.
The Amazon, they're cutting new roads.
The Trans Amazon Highway.
The Chinese want to come in and do rubber plantations in the Amazon.
It's like the threats are unbelievable.
And it's so ridiculous because rainforests only cover something like 6% of our planet and have like 50% of the terrestrial life contained in there.
And there's so much medicines and indigenous wisdom from the cultures that live there.
And all the biodiversity that we depend on, and those systems that keep us alive.
Whether you live in New York or Tokyo, you depend on the climate stability that rainforests provide.
And so it's like, it's one of those things.
I went on Fox News once, and the guy goes, he goes, you know, it was actually kind of fun.
As I get in the studio, he goes, oh, what the hell?
I can't remember his name.
I think it was Varney, but he was like a finance guy.
And I appreciated it because I was still new to doing interviews and stuff.
And he leans over and he goes, listen, kid, he goes, the second that green light goes on, he goes, I'm going to come at you like a tiger.
He goes, but it's all part of the thing.
He goes, I'm supposed to like, it's the type of show I do.
And I said, All right.
I said, I'm ready.
And like, they went, Three, two, one, action.
And he went, You better not be one of these greenies.
He's like, You're a pathetic tree hugger.
And he started like coming right at me.
And I was just like, Dude, I was like, If you have people in populations that can't breathe the air and drink the water, it's bad for business.
So don't tell me that the economy is going to be doing good when the ecosystems collapse.
And he was just like, He was like, Nice.
And then we fought over it for a while.
But like, you know, of course, his thing was, you know, screw the environment.
Let's keep growing, you know.
And I was trying to make the case that, You know, you can't have an economy without nature.
It all goes back to, you know, mining and water and trees at the end of the day.
Who is making the argument that don't fucking worry about it?
We've been chopping down the rainforest since the 50s.
It's nothing's changing.
It's not going to change our lives or our grandkids' lives.
Or who's making those arguments?
Well, plenty of people are making those arguments.
And what is that argument?
The argument is like, oh, well, I mean, look here.
I'll tell you this.
I stay away from climate change because I do talks all over the world for businesses or schools, doesn't matter.
And I stay away from climate change because when you say, guys, global climate change, a lot of people go, well, where?
How can you prove it?
And who are the scientists?
And it's a lot of like ethereal sort of facts and it's difficult.
And then some people, you'll get some people come on and go, you know, look, the thing is, it's not what you think.
We're coming out of an ice age.
And so then everybody can argue over it.
And so what I've done with my conservation career is I stick to numbers that you can't argue with, like how much we've depleted our oceans, how.
Sharks are becoming endangered due to shark finning.
How bycatch is ruining the life.
So, our fisheries are collapsing.
You can't argue with that.
That's a fact.
The fact that rainforests are disappearing.
That's a fact.
The fact that we're losing species like rhinos and elephants and things at an accelerated rate that could put them extinct within our lifetimes.
Those are facts.
And so, I try to stick to things that I've seen personally that I can prove with data.
And so, that's really what I tend to stick on.
But I've just.
Recently, I was listening to a podcast, and it's a shame because so much of what Jordan Peterson is so fantastic and he's so linguistically gifted, and his whole message is helping people and making the world a better place.
And then he goes, But I really don't think there's any problem with the environment.
And I'm like, Have you been outside?
I'm like, I get it.
You've studied the Greek philosophers and the Roman philosophers.
I was like, You have a major hole in your understanding, my friend.
Like, I love the guy, but man, I was like, I wanted to grab him.
He hasn't been outside.
I don't think he's been outside.
I don't, I just don't think he has.
Yeah, that's unfortunate.
That's unfortunate.
You know, and there's, you know, there's people like him.
There's a lot of people who make a lot of smart, you know, concise points or arguments about the economy and the history and the numbers of it and where climate's been, where the economy's been and the population of whatever it might be.
But the hard thing for you is your heart's in it because your feet are on the ground and you've lost your blood to the rainforest and you've had to survive in there.
So it's different for you.
Yeah.
And so when I hear like Elon Musk be like, oh, I'm worried about depopulation.
Bro, we have 8 billion people on Earth.
The Earth is choking under the mountain of human shit that is being created.
And you're worried about depopulation?
It's like, I want to run up and smack him in the mouth.
Yeah.
Well, he's talking about birth rate.
He's talking about our birth rate is going down at a tremendous rate.
And I guess if you do the math, our population will be like, I forget the numbers, but I think it'll be like one thousandth of what it is now in a couple decades.
Okay.
Imagine the wealth that everyone could have.
Imagine the poverty we could alleviate if.
Instead of 8 billion people, there was 3 billion people.
Right.
And then everyone could have access to doctors and airplanes and Netflix accounts and all this wonderful stuff.
And you wouldn't have to have people chopping down the rainforest because they're starving.
Oh my God.
Did you see that thing that came out in the New York Times the other day?
There was a guy that was interviewed.
I'm going to text this to you, Austin.
You can pull it up.
There is a guy they did this feature on in the New York Times that his life has been devoted to depopulating the earth.
What?
And he says he doesn't advocate for suicide.
But hold on.
Let me find it real quick.
Yeah.
Well, no, that's the other extreme, though.
Because then you get these anti human environmentalists that are like, humans are bad.
Right.
Well, I mean, we are kind of like maggots eating a corpse, aren't we?
See, I disagree with that.
I think there's a lot of anti human sentiment in environmentalism.
And it's like, I love humans.
I love art.
I love culture.
I love music.
I love my family.
I think that.
I think that we're awesome.
I mean, the shit that we do is incredible.
It's just we're so disorganized.
We're so like, we're like an obese, like a morbidly obese animal in the forest, just like eating all the food in reach and shitting all over itself.
It's like, if you could just stop that.
Yeah, like certain parts of us, certain parts of us are like that, but certain parts of us are not.
Like the people that just fucking consume and trash the earth and, and, and I don't even, I take that back.
It's the people that are the most desperate on earth are the ones, it's not the lazy people.
It's the people that are desperate that are doing that.
Like the people that are in the Amazon, I'm sure that are those people, I'm sure, just trying to feed their families, just like the people in Colombia who are making, who are manufacturing cocaine for the cartels.
So, yeah.
So go to this.
You just pulled the picture, pull up his actual Twitter.
And then find the New York Times article.
But yeah, it's people that are desperate that'll do anything they can to feed their families.
And the most, the most, Available thing are these things that fucking kill people or that destroy natural resources.
Yeah.
And I mean, who suffers first from a dirty environment?
I mean, usually it's the poorest people that still rely on fishing, that still rely on water from a stream.
You know, in India, international farming organizations came in and like bought up all this farmland and sold fertilizer and got them all in debt.
And then like 70,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2008.
Because they needed the land and American corporations came in and did the farmer suicides.
It's like this major thing.
And it's like those people were just trying to survive on the land.
And it's like the corporations came in and ruined that for them.
And so it's like we're literally like when I see deforestation, when I see dams on rivers, I see it as self inflicted wounds.
Like I'm not, you know, there's environmentalists like those, the losers who are going and throwing Campbell's soup on paintings in Europe right now.
Yeah.
They're just like, You know, narcissistic, psychotic teenagers who, again, who've never been outside, who don't understand that all of this stuff is fixable, that you can work with corporations to be more sustainable.
You could put pressure on them.
You know, if you say, like, okay, Nutella is using palm oil and it's deforesting Indonesia, it's like, well, if enough people just don't buy Nutella for a year, they will listen because it'll affect their bottom line.
So it's, it really is in our hands.
It's just, it's just, it's almost more complex and more simple at the same time than we think because all we're trying to do.
Is not cut down trees.
Yeah.
So, I mean, if you look at it the opposite way, basically, the reason for all of this is economics, right?
It's just economics and money.
So, there's a lot of mouths.
And it's hard to tell people, let's boycott Nutella or let's not use paper.
You would have to come up with some sort of competing, something economically that competes with it and that is more viable and that pays better.
Yeah, exactly.
You have to make everybody win.
So, for example, you can't make everybody a social justice warrior.
No.
And so, there's two things.
That's all right.
Forget it, Austin.
We don't need to look at it.
Two things that have jumped out to me is like one of the things they love to do is like they'll have these like conferences and they'll be like, you all need to like turn the water off when you brush your teeth and like remember not to use straws, you know?
And it's like, okay, so you're telling me that when I go to Dunkin' Donuts, I got to remember not to use a straw and that's going to save the world.
It's like, no, what about stop producing straws or styrofoam or find something so that we don't have to have millions and millions of plastic bottles?
You can't put this in the hands, even a wealthy American who has a family.
They don't have the time to, if you start, okay, well, I recycle, I compost, I ride my bike to work, I did it.
By the time you get done being the greatest green warrior you can be, your whole life revolves around that.
And so it's like, no, you need to stop putting the guilt on the consumer and start, you know, like when we went from VHS to DVDs, nobody asked us if we were doing that.
You just one day you went to Blockbuster and you went, huh, I got, we got to get a DVD player because that's what we use now.
And it's like, we just need to update the technology that we use.
So we stopped putting all this plastic in the medical field, crucial.
We need plastic.
It's a miracle.
Well, the perfect, that's a great example.
The DVDs versus the VHS.
Sony came out with DVDs and then the other company said, oh shit, they got DVDs.
We got to fucking do DVDs now.
And then that was it.
And right very quickly, I mean, I remember being a kid and everything was like VHS, and then all of a sudden there was like the DVD era, and then very quickly, then like I feel like Netflix pushed it into yeah, the digital, yeah, and then everybody else followed, and then everyone else followed.
I feel like as late as like three years ago, my mom went, I really like that movie, can we get that on DVD?
And I went, and play it where, where do you want to play it?
I was like, I could probably find it, that's hilarious, man.
So, what, so what.
Are the economics driving everything that's killing the rainforest?
That the rainforest is incredibly profitable.
When you cut down an old growth mahogany tree, it's worth sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Economics Of Deforestation00:07:49
These are incredible hardwoods.
I mean, look at like you go to like IKEA, that's all like particle board.
It's all like sawdust that they've glued together with resin.
It's all crap.
But if you're talking about real wood, like hard quality wood that takes hundreds of years to grow, that stuff is valuable, man.
That is valuable.
And so you have the logging guys going after that.
You have the land grabbers, right?
Like this shit from Home Depot that I got.
I got this from Home Depot.
This looks like some real wood here, man.
These are pieces.
This is a magical wood.
I got these pieces from Home Depot and I just stained them.
So, like when you go to Home Depot, you go to the lumber section.
Yeah.
Yeah, but this is, I don't know what this is, but it's nice.
Or maybe it's just the stain that's making it look like it's the stain.
No, I stained it.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, they're tearing it up because, you know, in Indonesia, they're literally clearing the forest as if it's a wasteland.
And then they're throwing up palm trees so they could form palm oil to put in Nutella and a bunch of other products and soaps and stuff.
And it's like, it's pointless.
You're ruining, literally, it's like burning down the Sistine Chapel.
You're ruining one of the greatest representations of beauty we have on this planet.
And it's like setting that on fire to heat up a hot pocket.
It makes no sense.
It's just like us burning down a house right now to cook a meal.
It's just like, it's not you.
You might, you understand a tenth of the process.
Like, And so that's what we're doing.
That's what we're allowing to be done.
And, you know, it's of course, if you go to a building and you break something, it's vandalism.
If you go to a river and you put a dam and kill all the fish, and then all the farmers downstream of there can't irrigate their crops and everybody dies, it's just progress.
That's the way the world works right now.
Hmm.
That's why we're in this problem.
Because think about it if people weren't allowed to stop rivers, if people weren't allowed to burn down forests, if there's actual consequences for this, if people weren't allowed to kill black rhinos, there'd still be black.
Rhinos.
They've been here for hundreds of millions of years.
And so, like, that's the thing that people don't understand with all this stuff.
You know, they go, Oh, we're losing elephants at a rate that they'll be extinct in our lifetimes.
It's like, no, we're not losing elephants.
They're being shot and massacred every single day to the point that there might not be any more elephants because we're allowing humans to do that.
If we weren't there, these things would be fine.
They've been doing this.
They engineered the world we live in.
And we are a whole livelihood to elephants.
I mean, my God, they're part of the.
They're like our siblings in evolution.
My God.
They had such a huge impact on the ecosystems of ancient landscapes.
Like during the last ice age, there were so many other elephant like creatures, and they're constantly breaking things and forging paths through bush.
And I mean, they are so influential in creating the ecosystems that we call home on Earth.
And again, of course, if you reduce it down further, without those ecosystems, we'd be a dead planet, just like everywhere else.
Without the plants and the animals, you know, without birds pollinating plants, without plants creating soil, we wouldn't have the physical things.
So it's like this problem that we're having with conservation is actually like.
Almost moronic when you break it down because it's like it's literally we're just cutting our own wrists.
We're just that's what we're doing.
It's it makes no sense.
How can you explain to me how the government, like the governments of Brazil or some of the other countries, how they structure the economics of the rainforest?
You were explaining how they take certain sections and they allocate them to certain industries, or you could buy.
How does can you explain that?
Yeah, I mean, there's a, this is again, this is a complicated thing and it differs from country to country.
So the Amazon is in like eight or nine countries.
And then, of course, you have the Congo and you have Indonesia, but there's all these different rainforest countries.
But like in Brazil, for example, I know that in the, I want to say there's a new president there, right?
There is a new president there, thank the Lord.
Cause the other guy pretty much hated the Amazon and wanted to burn it, Bolsonaro.
Right.
Like he actively said that.
Like he was actively like, we need to occupy.
And so that's a result of that a couple decades ago.
Whatever was going on politically in Brazil, they had.
They were literally learning in school that if we don't occupy the Amazon, someone's going to come take it.
And so, since it's just land, it could be invaded.
And so, their thing was occupy the Amazon.
And it's such a strange concept because who is going to do that?
You know what I mean?
But the thing with the jungle is that because you're out past.
Well, that's another topic, but it's very lawless once you get out past there because you can't get.
Law enforcement out there.
And so, like, sort of like medieval law resumes, but we can get to that later because there's a lot to unpack there.
But, like, in Peru, where I work, I'm in the Peruvian Amazon, which is the headwaters of the Amazon.
And so the government says, like, okay, this plot can be for mining.
This plot can be for logging.
This plot can be for conservation.
But that doesn't work.
That's not how a forest works.
You know what I mean?
There's populations of wildlife that move and migrate through an ecosystem.
So if you log this and you mine this and you do that in a bunch of other places, then there's a little block here where it's for, that's for.
Conservation, you've created an island.
It's not useful to anything.
This all has connectivity.
Jaguars migrate up and down through Central America, up and down through South America.
Tigers migrate up and down through India.
The elephants move across the land.
The birds migrate entire hemispheres.
Nature doesn't understand political boundaries or fence lines.
The problem is that our whole thing is political boundaries and fence lines.
The way these governments chop this up and they go, We want this land.
They look at it and they go, We want.
This land to be contributing to the economic productivity of the country.
And so, one of the greatest problems that we have to solve, and some countries are working on this, is that we don't look at a river and see it as a life giving force.
We don't see it as something that's contributing to the economy.
How much money are we gaining from the Hudson River by the fact that New York City has beautiful, free, clean drinking water?
What's that worth per year?
Or the fact that those forests are providing those ecosystem services.
It's like that doesn't get considered.
So, the default is always that, you know, when an industrialist comes in and goes, I want to build a dam and it's going to create this many kilowatts of power and it's going to, well, suddenly that's, we have to fight that.
So, environmentalists are always on the defensive because there's always this beautiful river with the salmon and the bears and the wolves and the eagles.
And then somebody comes and sticks a wall up there, and then all the salmon die, and then the local people can't fish.
And then all of a sudden, the predators are starving.
And then all of a sudden, oh, we're putting DDT on the ground.
Now the eagles are going extinct because their eggs, because of the DDT, are getting into the fish.
Their eggs are falling apart.
So DDT was a pesticide that we were using in the US.
And this is creepy as hell because people like my parents actually remember playing in the.
They used to.
There's a movie where they showed this too, but these trucks used to come around and they used to spray insecticide through suburbia.
And.
The idea was we'll help by killing mosquitoes.
And what happened was, as this got into the water system and got into the fish, bald eagles were eating DDT laced fish.
And the DDT was causing the bald eagles to have their eggs not as thick.
The shell wasn't as thick.
And so when the mother would sit on them to keep them warm, the eggs would break.
And we almost lost bald eagles.
We almost lost our national bird.
And so, in the 70s, right around the time the EPA was forming and stuff, it looked like we were going to lose bald eagles.
And so now the flip side of that is that once we stopped using DDT, And killing the bald eagles, their populations boomed back.
And now I have a bald eagle living right next to my house in New York.
And the same thing happened with humpback whales.
Lost Species In The Wild00:10:57
During the whaling times, you had people all over the world and ships just hauling in whales, all kinds of whales, right whales, humpback whales, everything.
Humpback whales went from 130,000 global population around that down to, I think, about 7,000.
Now, again, think about it that if it was your bank account, you know what I mean?
Like, could you bounce back?
And then, of course, they banned whaling.
And in the almost a century since they've banned whaling, humpback whales are almost back to pre whaling numbers.
And so, again, proving the point that if we stop murdering these species before they can even reproduce, they'll be fine.
They were here long before we got here.
And so, like, that's the core of what I'm trying to spread to everyone.
It's like, you know, I've spent time with these species, whether it's spider monkeys or elephants or anacondas or just the forest itself.
And it's like, I've.
At this point, you know, it started off as let's go on a fun adventure, and now it's become, you know, these creatures in these places can't put on a suit and go address the United Nations.
And it's like, well, you got to be a voice for them then.
Other than loggers and gold miners, what other industries are down there?
Are they all just like rogue groups of guys, like showing up with tons of equipment?
Yeah.
So you have loggers down there.
And then you have the gold miners, and the gold miners, they're a tough bunch.
They will burn your house down because they're, again, it's poor people that can't figure out another way of making a living.
So they'll go and they'll just get like an old motor and a hose, and somehow they're getting mercury.
And in the Amazonian soils, which is like so fine that it's almost sterile, there's like no oxygen in those soils.
And so, especially in the West Amazon, the gold is embedded in the sand.
So it's like particulate.
So you could just barely see it.
You almost need a microscope to see gold.
In the particles of the sand.
So you like to wash the water over the sand in your hand and you just start to see these little crystals, little bits of gold.
So what they do is they'll cut a forest, burn the forest, and then they'll dredge it basically and they'll suck the land up through these huge hoses, run it through a whole sluice machine.
And then at the bottom, they collect the heaviest sediment and the gold settles to the bottom.
And then they mix mercury in with that.
And the mercury binds to the gold.
And then what they do is they come out with this like thing, this ball, this ingot of mercury.
That has gold in it, and then they light that on fire.
And I've been next to them when they do this, and we all know how bad mercury is for you.
And it's like, I literally watched a guy smoking a cigarette, burning with a little blowtorch.
He was burning this ball of mercury, and the fumes are coming up, going straight into his face.
His little, like, two year old was sitting right next to him.
He's burning mercury as it's entering the atmosphere to get this little bit of gold that he got from destroying acres of the Amazon rainforest.
And now the people in that region of the Amazon rainforest have mercury levels in their own bodies that are about eight times what's safe for humans to have because they're getting it from the fish, because it's going up into the atmosphere, joining the rain, and coming back down into the rivers.
The fish have it, and it's going to the humans, and now kids are coming out with like six eyes.
Oh my God.
And so, this is like a perfect example where if you just now, so let's rewind that back.
How do you stop this problem?
Give that guy a better job.
And that's what we started doing.
I mean, we're, you know, we're small, we're, we're, we are literally a teardrop in the ocean.
But in our region, what we've started doing is going up to these gold miners and just going, Hey, how much do you make doing that?
They go, You realize you could just bring guests from all over the world, you could have fun, you don't get chased by the police.
And you could make your life doing ecotourism, showing people the rainforest and being a protector of it.
You become a jungle keeper with us.
And then, you know, so we try and work with them with that.
We try to bring them in.
We've done that with loggers, we've done that with gold miners.
And so it's really, and a lot of times these are super nice people.
These are people I spent Christmas with the gold miners last year.
Did you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
These are guys that, like, you know, now they're like, oh, you changed our lives.
You know, we're not getting arrested every other week.
You know, the, the, I was with them when the Peruvian armed forces came down the river, they blew up.
Their gold mining barge.
They were arresting them.
I mean, they were chasing them through the forest.
It was madness.
I said, Do you like this?
I said, Is this fun for you?
And he goes, No.
He goes, My dad was a gold miner.
I don't really know what else to do.
He's like, I got mouths to feed back there.
He goes, I got to do what I got to do.
And I was like, Okay, okay, okay.
I was like, Just try ecotourism.
It was like, there's an unlimited amount of people up north that want to see the rainforest.
Who are they selling this gold to?
They go to town and they sell the gold to brokers.
So these guys don't make a ton of money.
The guys that are doing it on the ground, of course.
And then those guys sell it to the next guy, sell it to the next guy, and then it makes it to, you know, deeper into the gold market until it gets mixed in with it.
And I don't, I believe it's what's coming out of the West Amazon is not even a particularly high quality gold either.
I don't know the details of it specifically.
I've just seen the devastation.
I've seen, dude, there was a lake.
One of the worst things I ever saw.
There was this lake.
Me and this guy, Borian, who was the gold miner, we went to this lake, and there was this one day we went and he goes, let's get some piranha.
Like the sun was setting, and we're like smoking cigarettes.
And we had sticks with, you know, just a stick with a fishing line on it and a hook.
And you have to put metal on the hook so the piranha can't bite off the line, you know.
And so you catch a first fish, and then you chop that one up, and you put the hook, and boom, all of a sudden they love to cannibalize each other.
So we're pulling piranhas up one after the other, one after the other.
And he's so good at it, he's got the technique.
As soon as it bites, you just pull it up out of the water.
And I had his backpack, and so I'm just catching piranhas, boom, boom, catching them in the backpack.
One after the other.
It was like 10 minutes.
We filled a whole backpack filled with piranha.
And then, you know, this beautiful lake.
We're watching black caimans swim across the lake.
We saw places where there was big anacondas.
We saw jaguar tracks.
It was paradise on earth.
It was like the wildest place.
It was literally Avatar.
And so I went back, called in a group.
I got, I was like, we got to show people this.
And I brought a group of tourists there.
This was about a year later.
And we're going up river.
And I was like in this great mood.
We were all having fun.
We're sort of like yelling and talking on the boat on the way up.
I'm like, we're going to go.
Piranha fishing.
You guys are going to love this so much.
It's the wildest place.
We go through the forest and we start walking, and we get to where the part where the path opens up onto this lake, and the lake was gone.
The water was gone, and it's just a sand pit, and there was a gold mining dredge there.
The gold miners had gotten to the lake and they wanted to see if there was gold in there.
And so, what they had done was they had pumped out the entire lake, they had burned the surrounding forest, all the wildlife was gone.
And this incredibly beautiful, pristine spot on earth was just like deleted.
And I had all these tourists behind me, like blinking, going, Wait, when's the fun part?
And I was like, I just had tears in my eyes.
And I looked at Borian, and he just went minus one lake and just turned around and walked back.
And it was like somewhere that he had been fishing for generations, like his father had shown him.
And it was like this beautiful spot that'll never come back.
And it was like, Jesus.
It was hard to see.
And so we have to deal with a lot of that with what I do because you just see these beautiful places.
I mean, it's literally like, you know, people can say what they want about the movie Avatar, but it's like literally the same storyline.
It's just, you know.
Are piranhas any good?
Yo, piranhas?
If I had piranhas for you right now, you would eat it until you fell over.
It's so.
Oh my God, fried piranhas, dude?
What could you compare it to?
I don't know.
It's a bit bony, so you got to like fry the shit out of it because you don't want to have to pick through the bones.
You want to just eat the bones.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So you get them on the hook, you get them, and then you.
Kind of like a sardine.
I guess, but they're bigger than that, though.
They're, you know, they're pretty big.
They're that big?
Yeah, they get pretty big.
You got to be careful when you're getting them off the hook, man.
You got to have a stick.
You got to have a whack stick because you get the piranha up on the boat.
You got to hit them, stun them.
Otherwise.
Oh, is that there's a little clip in that dark green documentary where you're stunning a fish?
Is that.
Yeah.
It's a piranha?
Yeah.
You really got to watch.
I know guys who are missing the tip of their finger because they just, you know.
What, how much, like, how big of a worry are the piranha like when you're swimming?
Like, because you're, there's a bunch of clips of you in that documentary just jumping out of the boat into the river.
Like, are they, are they everywhere?
Are they pretty much like basically like jumping in the ocean worrying about a shark?
Like, you can swim anywhere in here and you have to worry about a shark.
Yeah.
But also, piranha don't tend to, they're like eating other fish and doing other stuff.
The only time that you get that, that legendary thing where piranha will like destroy you and turn you into a skeleton is like if you have a lake where the vegetation is growing in.
And growing in.
And that's what happens.
So, some of these lakes, the jungle will actually start to eat the lake as the vegetation comes in, and eventually it'll absorb it.
And you can see it from Google, like from Earth, from satellite.
You can look down, you see these depressions in the forest where the vegetation is a little different because it used to be a lake and the jungle's eating it.
But right before that lake disappears, you have this piranha population in that lake that is psychotic and there's no food because they've eaten everything else.
They've eaten all the other fish.
Now they're eating each other and they've gone crazy.
So, if you take anything and throw it in there, They will turn it into a skeleton in moments.
But that's like being on top of a mountain in a lightning storm with a lacrosse stick in the air.
It's just like, oh, really?
It's like, it's not, that doesn't happen.
Oh, okay.
It doesn't happen.
That being said, we do swim everywhere, we swim in all the rivers.
But the thing is, it does help to know exactly where you are.
We were on an expedition about a year ago and we stopped by the side of this stream.
And JJ gets out and he's like, let's go fishing.
He takes some, could we go machete fishing?
We just like walk around until you see a fish and just whack it and stuff.
And he goes, all right, let's go fishing.
I go, cool, you start.
I'll be here.
I'm going to start getting this ready, whatever else.
I threw a few hooks in the river, and all of a sudden, something starts pulling on my hook, and I'm going, This is not a fish.
And this thing was really strong.
And all of a sudden, I just see this huge electric eel like breach out of the water.
It's like an eight foot electric eel.
And I'm like, JJ, I never had an electric eel on a hook before.
And so he comes back, and he's trying to get it off the hook, and he doesn't know what to do.
So finally, he just whacks it because I think he also just wanted to see it.
But it was like this giant, absolutely monstrous, eight foot long electric eel.
Hunting In Absolute Hell00:11:31
And so we're like, shit, okay.
Well, glad we didn't, like, you know, get too, too deep into this stream.
So we start walking again, and then two more electric eels come swimming over this rock.
Oh, shit.
And then a stingray goes by, and we were just like, this stream?
They're like, next stream, next one.
Like, this was the stream from absolute hell.
Like, it was just filled with piranha electric eels, stingrays, like everything in this stream.
The next hook that came out of the water was this giant stingray about this big, and it was just like stabbing upwards.
It was just like, oh my God.
So we were just, we all were like, ah, next.
Next.
I don't know what it was with that one stream, but it was like, not this stream from hell.
Yeah.
This is not the one.
So you could essentially, you could be, you could jump in the water and swim past a school of piranha and be fine.
We do it every day.
Every day.
Every single day in the Amazon, I jump in the water.
Like that's how I shower.
I don't want to smell like.
And you're not worried about piranha at all?
No.
Okay.
Not at all.
Not at all.
Maybe if you had like a cut or something, can they smell blood?
I don't know.
I always have cuts, man.
I'm always all banged up.
But I, um, I stepped on a crocodile once, barefoot.
He was on the bottom.
I stepped on his head and he like moved.
He was like, Stop it!
Move to the side.
What is the number one most terrifying thing you do not want to run into when you're down there?
The humans.
There's tribes out there.
And so to explain this, there's the, on the internet, if you search, if you, if you, if we can pull it up, if you search like uncontacted tribes, Amazon.
Yeah.
There are tribes living out in the Amazon that have been there for centuries.
And.
They are living like that because during the periods of extraction and during the conquistador era, they were the tribes that went back and said, We're not getting conquered.
You see, even I go to Peru, everybody speaks Spanish.
It's because of the Spanish.
Right.
These are the tribes that backed up.
Isn't that crazy that they came down here and like that people in South America got Spanish from the Spaniards?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So see that big patch in the lower left hand corner of South America right there?
That's we're like in one of the main areas.
Yeah.
Right above where the cursor just was.
Um, But we have uncontacted tribes in the region.
That's all you got.
You can't pull up anything better than that.
Come on, get us some photos.
There's one photo on Google where they're painted red and black.
There we go.
There we go.
Right on the top line.
Go to the top, right there.
Like, see, that one.
These people are living out there.
And what they're doing in that photo is they are trying to shoot the plane that's flying over them.
No fucking way.
And they don't speak a language that any of us speak.
You see that?
See the red one?
You see that red one?
Right by the hut.
Yes.
They use medicinal compounds as insecticide.
And a lot of times that dyes their skin.
So you get purple ones, you get black ones, you get red ones.
That's his skin that's red?
Yeah.
But I mean, it's been dyed.
It's been dyed.
It's like, so there's a purple plant down there.
You rub on your fingers.
It's a leaf, and you go like this.
And then the mosquitoes will stay away from your fingers.
So these people are living with no clothing on, with no permanent shelter in the Amazon rainforest.
And they've been doing this for a few thousand years.
And they're still out there.
Oh my God.
And so the scariest thing that you could possibly run into in the Amazon is that.
They what well, why would they be threatening to other humans?
Oh, well, because the story, as I understand it, is like the last contact that a lot of these tribes had with the outside world was during the rubber boom, and the rubber boom was at the turn of the century, like early 1900s.
Um, so the industrial revolution, we needed gaskets and hoses and factory stuff, and so all of a sudden, bike tires, car tires, we needed rubber for the first time in history, and the only place you could get rubber was the Amazon because that's where the rubber trees grew.
So, we sent everybody to the Amazon and we sent these rubber barons who went down and they just enslaved the local people.
And they said, You're going to go out into the forest all day long and you're going to harvest rubber for us.
And so, it was like one of the worst human holocausts on the planet because they went and just massacred the indigenous population.
Oh, my God.
Is that a rubber tree?
Horrendous.
That is a rubber tree.
See how they score the bark?
Yeah.
And then it'll go into the bucket.
That's literally where latex comes from.
That's how we got it.
Insane.
And so, again, like thinking about how does industry come back to nature?
It's like we got rubber from there, the Amazon.
And so during this horrendous period of oppression, some of the tribes were like, We are not going to be put in chains.
We are not going to be set on fire.
And they became hyper weaponized, super defensive.
And they moved back as far as they could into the forest.
And they became the uncontacted tribes.
And so now they speak a language that we don't really speak.
And my first experience with them was that I had heard that.
They would kill you.
So, one of the guys I work with, he was a logger.
And in 2004, he was working as a mahogany logger.
And he's coming down the river.
And he sent his friend and his friend's wife ahead to go to the side, get some firewood, start making breakfast.
Because they had this huge barge of mahogany.
So they're going very slowly down the river.
And he sent them ahead to go make breakfast.
And so this guy's name is Victor.
And as Victor's coming down the river, he's just chilling.
What he doesn't know is that this is what happened.
They go ahead.
They reach the beach and they're like, all right, let's get some fire with it.
Go up onto the beach, and all of a sudden, they hear the war cry from the uncontacted tribe.
Arrows start falling six foot long arrows, what we think of as spears.
They're shooting.
This guy gets hit through the thigh and through the front of his leg.
And so his leg is locked.
He goes down.
He tells his wife, he goes, just keep running, run for it.
She runs because they're coming.
They're like running now.
There's a bunch of red, purple, black, yellow people painted all different colors running out of the jungle screaming.
She jumps into the water.
Swims for her life.
The last thing she saw was them coming down on him and just cutting him to pieces.
When my friend came around the bend, he said there was blood all over the beach.
They had removed his testicles.
I think they took one of his arms.
They'd opened up his stomach because they wanted to know what he was eating.
Because to them, we're foreign.
They're like, what are these people surviving on?
They're so far.
They have these flying things and they come by in these loud boats and they don't understand.
So they got the story when they kept going downriver and they found the woman and she was just holding onto a stick.
And she was weeping.
And of course, she was super messed up after what happened to her husband.
But there was that massacre on the beach, and that was just in 2004.
This August, this August, this brutal pictures were going around, you know, the WhatsApp news network in the region.
Some loggers had gone to the wrong beach, man, and the tribes had showed up.
And what the tribes do is when they surround you and they don't want to speak in human terms, they start using animal calls.
They start using monkey calls and bird calls to communicate with each other so that the The people that they're tracking won't know.
And so they got, and then so they got to get around these people and they start using that type of thing.
So, these guys got scared and they started firing off their guns.
Well, as soon as they fired off their guns, the tribe took that as aggression.
And then somebody found them a few days later when the bodies were all bloated and disgusting and had been picked apart by vultures.
But it was just like, you will be massacred.
Absolutely massacred.
And so, the scariest thing I ever saw in the jungle was them.
Wow.
So, you actually had an encounter with them?
I had a horrible encounter with them.
It was right around the time JJ had.
JJ had kept telling me that there were these places in the jungle that, like, no one goes, that you could keep going past a certain point, and then, like, you know, there'd be like rocks where the boats can't go, and then, and then past that.
Well, what's past that?
And he's like, well, it keeps going.
It's like a stream, but it's shallow, but nobody goes there.
And I was like, this is what I was born to do.
So, um, there's a company based out of Colorado called Alpaca Pack Rafts, and they make these little rafts that roll down into like the size of a tent.
So I got a pack raft, put my paddles on the outside of my bag, put like, 10 days worth of like nuts and high calorie dry foods in my bag.
I had a journal.
I had like a little Canon power shot at the time.
And I went and I went up with poachers because those are the only people that were going deep into the forest.
And I get dropped on the side of a river.
And I said, So I said, just so you guys, so what spot is this?
And they're like, No tiene nombre.
They're like, Doesn't have a name.
And then I was like, All right, well, goodbye.
And they were like, No, you want us to leave you here.
And they kept, they kept, they were like, No, no, no, you're going to die.
They're like, You're going to die.
And I was like, you don't get it.
I'm like, I'm like an outdoors person.
I got this.
Just leave me here.
This is what I want.
And I really almost like into the wild myself.
But I kept walking past the point where boats could go on the river.
So now I'm in literally past the edge of human presence on our planet.
I'm in the wildest place on earth in the rainforest where like the canopy meets over the river.
And like the monkeys don't know what a human is.
So the wildlife will like come down and look at you like it's the Galapagos.
They're like, they're like, what's that?
They've never seen a human before.
And I'm just walking around and I'm camping at night and I'm journaling and I'm having this amazing adventure.
And then, right around the eight day mark, the river was getting pretty narrow.
And I came to a bend in the river and I see smoke coming up off the opposite side.
And, like, man, my heart just dropped.
And I said, if I don't go see what this is, I'm never going to forgive myself.
And so I went ahead just a little bit.
And, as soon as I rounded the bend, there were like three or four of them and they had their arrows out already.
And they were like, They were also sort of peeking around the bend to see, like, because they knew that I was coming.
They heard something was there.
They said something was there.
And it was just they had had a little campfire going on the beach and they had like a few of their little huts up.
They make like these little palm shelters, but they were making dead eye contact with me.
Oh, they saw you.
Oh, they knew I was there.
They had their arrows in their bows already and they were like looking over like this.
And I saw one say something to the other.
I mean, it was a good football field away, but it was like they were like, there it is.
And for the first time in my life, I was potentially being hunted by other humans.
That didn't speak a language that I can speak.
You can't even beg for mercy.
And so I just ran down river.
Full speed?
Full speed.
Jumped in the river, floated, but it wasn't deep enough.
It wasn't deep enough for me to float down the river.
So I got out, opened my pack raft.
They have like an inflation bag.
I like inflated this thing in three minutes, got in the pack raft, threw my backpack on my lap, and just started going.
And I went for three days without stopping.
And the reason I did that was because even when I stopped at night, I mean, I was literally kayaking past crocodiles in the river.
I mean, there were fish jumping up out of the river into my boat.
I was actually.
Some of the times I didn't even need to go fishing because there were fish at night.
You scare the fish, they just jump into your boat.
But there was one point where I set up my tent and I was like, I have to get some sleep.
It's been 48 hours with no sleep.
I'm starving.
I'm freaking out.
And I like laid down, fell asleep.
The first dream I had was that they were around me and I heard all these animal noises.
And then all of a sudden they started stabbing through the tent.
And it was like, it was more traumatic to be asleep than it was to just keep running.
Kayaking Past Crocodiles00:09:05
And so it took me a week to get out.
But it was like seeing that and knowing the stories from some of the toughest guys that I know who've like lost loved ones.
One of my rangers now, one of my rangers has been shot in the head.
He was trying to give them bananas.
He saw them somewhere and he tried to push a canoe across the river.
And as he's pushing this canoe, And he's like, Here, have some bananas.
And he's like, trying to show, I don't mean any harm.
I'm okay.
And they just went, Fire an arrow at his head.
And so he sees the arrow, six foot arrow coming at his head, and he moves to the side.
And it scraped him from his temple all the way to the back of his head.
It opened him to the skull.
Oh my God.
And he's okay.
He's a hard ass man.
He works for me now.
He's Ignacio.
And, but like, he's also very scared of them.
So it's like, and you can't reason with them.
You can't be like, Guys, it's okay.
It's okay.
No, they don't speak our language.
And they believe that we are like literally demons that are trying to kill us.
Yeah, they believe that we must be passed down because of the Spaniards that came down.
It must be just a tale that they pass down and they teach their young.
And they teach their young that the outside world is going to kill you.
So kill them first if you want to survive.
I'm sure you've heard of the North Sentinel Island, the uncontacted tribe of North Sentinel Island.
Yeah, the guy who recently went.
You hear about that?
That guy went recently and he was like, Have you guys heard about Jesus?
And they just stuck an hour around his neck.
Yes, yes, yes.
The missionary guy that went.
That made me feel all warm.
So, that there's a crazy fucking story about that, about a British guy who went down there.
Austin, I sent you the link yesterday.
You can pull it up.
There's all he did this whole Twitter thread about there was this British researcher who went down there.
This is a, yeah, Portman.
He went down there in 1880 to the 1900s to, he was some sort of like pervert.
And he was doing some weird, perverted study on like the kids, like measuring their dicks and shit.
And, um, he was like taking these weird photos of them.
And like an old couple died because I guess they caught some sort of disease that he had and they didn't have the immunity built up.
Yes, that's a major concern.
Even with the uncontracted tribes in the Amazon, like our common rhinovirus, a cold, could wipe out like a whole tribe.
It's happened to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, um, Eventually, they ended up just murdering this guy because he was just fucking with them.
And that's the reason that they have been so hostile to outsiders ever since then.
Well, I mean, can you blame them?
Right.
No, you can't blame them.
You can't blame them.
And they've been there for like, I think it's like 60,000 years.
They descended from Africa like 60,000 years ago and they're still fucking there.
Yeah.
No, and I mean, if that's what they want to do, let them keep doing it.
I don't understand why people have to go mess with these people.
And notice the people who go mess with these people.
It's always some missionary.
It's always some missionary.
Right.
In Mother of God, my book, it's not my story, but I tell the story of there are some missionaries, and I think it was in Ecuador where they went and they took a plane and they landed in the Amazon, really remote Amazon.
And I love this story.
They landed to this remote tribe and they got out on the beach, and the tribe was like, Wow, you people came out of a flying bird.
And the people were like, Yeah, nobody could talk.
So it was all like hand gestures.
And they were like, Try on a t shirt.
And they like, it was pretty friendly.
They even took the chief of the tribe up in the plane and they, Did it, did it around and brought him back down, which, like, you might that might like hurt someone's brain if they've never seen a plane before.
And then they said, We're going to come back, though.
We're going to come back and just wait.
Okay.
So they went back and they have the journal entry of one of the missionaries.
And he's going, I just hate that we're spending another Christmas when these poor people won't know about Jesus Christ and the Lord and Savior and blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like really keeping them awake at night.
So anyway, they go back and I think there's five of them and they land the plane, same beach, and they find these people again.
And the tribe is like, Hey, so look, we talked about it.
And the missionary's like, Well, hold on, hold on.
We have like cotton candy.
And we have photos from back home.
Like, here's our family, and the tribes take one look at it.
They look at the photo and they go, Wait a second, I see human faces.
There's nothing behind this.
And the chief goes, Guys, it's black magic.
Kill everybody.
And the tribe fucking murders all of them right there.
And so, when the missionaries didn't come back, like a week later, they sent out a rescue mission and there's just dead people all over the beach.
And years later, like a decade later, when this tribe eventually was taught Spanish and they were sort of brought, you know, roads reached them.
And of course, whenever roads go into a rainforest, everybody gets domesticated.
Yeah.
But they were able to interview the same tribe people.
No way.
And they said, What were you thinking?
And they said, How the hell were we supposed to know?
They said, You showed us a picture.
So we never saw a picture before.
They said, Yeah, they were flying around in a metal thing and showing us pictures.
They said, We just assumed that they were devil.
So we killed them just to be safe.
They said, We were a little spooked.
That's fucking insane.
And it was like a totally natural move for them.
They were just like, You know, these people seemed a little too friendly.
Yeah, I think on that thread I was talking about in like 2006, a cargo ship ran aground right on the edge of the island.
And they, They could see after like a day or so, part of the tribe started coming out from the forest and they were on the beach building boats trying to come out.
So they had to call in and evacuate a helicopter to come evacuate them.
And the ship is still there.
If you go on Google Maps, you can just see the skeleton of the ship still there.
And then in 2014, they went back there again.
Another group of people went back there from, I think it's off the coast of like India, I think maybe.
And they went back.
Austin, try to find a video of.
Them giving coconuts to the tribe on North Sentinel Island.
Stop it.
They pull up in a fucking boat and they're right there.
And all these guys are just right there, like they're taking the coconuts from them.
This was like a couple of years ago.
And like the women and the children and then the guys, and they have, you can see they have a couple of them had these big metal knives on their waists.
Yeah, this is it.
And they say that they got the only way they have the metal is from that ship that ran aground in 2006.
Play it.
Yeah.
Skip like halfway through.
Oh my God.
Oh, he just took her out with a little bit of a knife.
Yeah, he just took out the pregnant lady.
Oh, this is wild.
I've never seen this.
See that metal dagger?
Yeah.
Well, that's when the Amazon, whenever they come and they raid, they raid the villages sometimes and they steal our machetes.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
They want metal.
They don't have anything.
Isn't that crazy?
They don't have metal.
Yeah, it's fucking insane.
They missed out on the wheel.
They missed out on the spoon, the knife.
That is not how to use that.
What?
Dude, these guys are so lucky that they didn't get massacred.
And there's one point where some of the guys start doing like these tribe guys start.
Watch what this guy does right here.
It's like he's doing some sort of like, it seems like a get the fuck out of here type thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wow, look at that.
Look at that.
He's like, yep, grab that coconut.
It's pretty crazy that they just decided to go back and just pull right up like that.
Yeah, to me, I wouldn't be within arrow range of that.
No.
You're way too close.
I mean, that's like.
Oh my God.
It's so insane to think that people like that still exist on this earth.
Yeah.
And then, you know, it's funny because people like romanticize it.
They're like, oh, they're the last like truly free people.
They don't have like politics or religion.
And it's like, yeah, they just have like intertribal war and like, you know, organized rape and like probably believe a million false things.
I've talked to anthropologists who have like talked about how like some entire cultures have had just like wrong ideas.
There was a tribe in New Guinea that believed that.
Any sickness that happened was from black magic from neighboring tribes.
And so, like, these people were in constant terror that the other tribes were going to put a curse on them.
And, like, when the missionaries went, these people were living in so much fear.
And it was like they had to explain to these people that, like, basically the whole fundamental fabric of your reality is false.
So, like, we have to start over again.
And it's like, dude, that sucks.
You were like living on an island, completely misunderstanding life.
Yeah.
Like, that's, that's rough.
Ancient Amazonian Soil Secrets00:15:46
Yeah.
But if a comment were to hit and take out the, take out our, Population, they would be the ones to survive.
Oh, yeah, because they'd be fine.
They would be the only ones left.
Exactly what to do.
That and like the two like doomsday preppers somewhere in like fucking Utah would be like, yeah.
The billionaires with the giant underground doomsday bunkers.
Yeah, it must be like, it must be like if we must be to them like what aliens are to us.
Pretty much.
Or close.
Pretty much.
We live completely outside of their culture.
We live outside of their contact.
They don't understand us.
Anything they get from us is like relics.
And so when they go, okay, so.
I mean, I've done this.
You go out in the forest and you say, okay, I'm going to survive.
Picture of somebody said, like, make a bagel.
It's funny, but it's like, holy shit.
It's like, well, I got to first, I got to get some space.
I got to cut down a tree.
How are you going to cut down a tree?
Oh, shit.
I need an axe.
It's all right.
Well, you got to get some metal.
It's like, okay.
So even if you get a field and then you got to get barley, it's like, well, oh, wait, hold on.
That doesn't exist until humans breed it and engineer it to be more productive.
And it's like, this stuff is so, our society is so complex.
And they're literally living on a basis of like hunter gatherer, where like they are self sufficient individuals.
And that's what makes it that like that, that they could, they could, they'd be fine.
I'm going to go catch a fish.
So, you mentioned, we mentioned earlier, and I talked to you yesterday about the.
It's fascinating to me how the soil in the Amazon is sterile and completely infertile if there's so much vegetation.
How is it possible it's so infertile?
And then I want to talk to you, too, about the terra preta stuff.
What do you know about that man made terra preta soil?
Well, the soil, first of all, the Amazon used to be joined to the Congo.
Okay.
All right.
So, there used to be.
They used to flow the opposite direction, the Amazon.
And then when they split, because the Congo River is flowing, let's see, what is it, east to west?
And so the Amazon also would have been flowing east to west.
And then when the continents split, those two things were divided.
And then South America hit up against the Nazca Plate, which is what sent the Andes Mountains up.
And they both drain into the Atlantic.
And now they both drain into the Atlantic.
So the Amazon actually reversed directions.
But as that was happening, for a long time, it was this giant inland sea.
And so it was still salt water, which is why we still have stingrays.
Manatees, there's certain like relics that have adapted to freshwater life after being there for millions of years as this transition was taking place.
But you're basically talking about like an ocean floor in a lot of cases.
And so that's what the Amazon is growing on.
Okay.
And so, and then, and then like in our region, it's clay.
And so, like when you're digging through this clay, you stick a shovel through this thing.
And it is, I mean, think of a lump of clay, like what you would make a sculpture out of.
Like, you've ever seen people take that wire and you can cut straight through the clay with it.
And it's just like this homogenous gray mass.
Well, in the Amazon, it's red.
But it's like there's no space in there.
There's no nutrients.
There's no soil.
It's just clay.
Dense.
It's just dense.
And so the trees, when you see the rainforest trees, they have these roots that spread out.
It's almost like the base of a rocket ship.
And so they're standing there.
Think like a chess piece.
It's just a big, fat bottom sitting at the bottom of these giant ancient trees.
And the reason that they have that rainforest tree look is because instead of sending roots down, they send roots out to stabilize.
Oh, shit.
Really?
So if you see a tree fall over on the side of the river, like even like a.
You know, 170 foot tall tree, it's only going to have like a four foot taproot that goes into the ground.
It's tiny.
No way.
It's like nothing.
Yeah.
I had no idea.
And so all of the nutrients is kept in the very, very, very, very topsoil.
So all the falling leaves, all the branches, all the animal carcasses, all that nutrients is coming from what's alive.
And that's all being cycled out so quickly because of fungal mycelium is breaking everything down.
If it wasn't for fungus, the Amazon would bury itself in leaves and cease to exist.
And then the rains are constantly washing those leaves into tributaries, which is going into the water, which is going into the rivers.
And then washing out into the Atlantic, where phytoplankton are hitting all of that biotic matter and releasing it into the atmosphere.
And so, like, the nutrients of the Amazon is all like it's a very temporary thing.
It's all just being held by the existing life, which is why when you cut stuff down and burn it, it's like a machine.
It's like a machine, it's like a constantly turning death machine.
It's been called the greatest natural battlefield on earth because everything is broken down so quickly from the biggest tree to the termites to a jaguar to us.
Everything in the Amazon is in the process of being recycled.
Life is a momentary stasis compared to the constant turning of death in the Amazon.
You really get a sense of it when you see an animal die in the Amazon.
The body is decomposed by the next day.
Wow.
It's gone.
If you ever wanted to murder somebody, the Amazon is the place to do it.
You just whack them over the back of the head, they'll be gone.
The soil and the plants and everything just eats it.
Yeah.
You have dung beetles coming in and leaf cutter ants and vultures and everything tears it apart.
And it just sort of.
If you do like a time lapse of it, you'll see it like swell up and then like go down.
And then the bones will get carried off by scavengers and just get spread out.
Really?
And then as soon as it rains, the bones get wet and then more fungus.
That fungus gets through everything.
That fungus will break down a mahogany tree.
None of those uncontacted tribes are cannibals, right?
Not that we know of.
I've never heard of anything like that.
And there's been a few people in the region.
It's kind of like one of those things we don't really talk about, but there's a couple people scattered through the remote villages that we can contact.
Where like there's one guy, I think, that got washed down river where he was like a child with the uncontacted tribes and now he lives.
And speaks Spanish and lives with one of the other communities.
And I would never share where the location of that is, but it's like, because he's far from into talking about it, but he sort of knows both worlds.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And so, someone like that would have said if they were cannibals, but I don't think they are.
Now, what is this terra preta man made soil that I'm hearing everything, all that?
I heard that they found it in multiple different spots and it's been studied and it's like super fertile.
Yeah.
And there's evidence that it's man made.
Yeah, I think it was Oriana who was the first person to descend the Amazon, which is a crazy story because the Spanish came in through like Lima over the Andes.
And then he like literally built a boat, floated down 4,000 kilometers across the entire Amazon basin, had these incredible adventures.
He's the reason.
He's the guy who told all the stories about all the crazy civilizations in the Amazon, right?
And then they went back and everything was gone.
Like the guy was fucking lying.
Yeah.
And also in terms of like survival, like however many guys they started with and ended with.
But this dude survived that expedition.
Got to the mouth of the Amazon, navigated by the stars, and said, I know where we are.
And if we could build a ship, we could get back to Spain.
And did that.
It's one of the most psychotically amazing stories I've ever heard.
And he's the reason that the Amazon River is called the Amazon River.
Oh, really?
There was apparently a tribe that was very female dominant.
And he was harkening back to the, I think it's a Greek myth of the Amazons, which is a tribe of women who shoot arrows and actually are one breasted women so that they could draw their bowstring back.
Oh, wow.
Um, But that's where that name comes from, the Amazon forest.
Okay.
I was thinking of a story of a Spanish explorer who went through the Amazon in the 1500s and then he reported seeing like tons of tribes.
But then they went back and like 200 years later, they went back looking for everybody and it was all gone because they had brought smallpox through and killed everybody.
Yeah.
So this is the same guy it's named after as the guy who was responsible for murdering everybody in there with smallpox.
His reports of the Amazon led to it generally being referred to as the Amazon forest.
Forest, the forest of the Amazon.
Oh, okay.
Gotcha.
Okay.
He was Oriana, I believe was his name.
I think it was like Francisco de Oriana.
Yes, that's it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, he had stories of civilizations that had huge sectioned off areas of the river where they were cultivating turtles, the giant Amazonian turtles, and they were living off of that as their primary protein.
I mean, there's all kinds.
I mean, this stuff's written down.
These people were more literate than we are.
Wow.
I mean, this stuff, you read these guys' journals.
Incredible.
I mean, you have the journals of Pizarro, the day he touched down in Peru.
Um, where he's like, he's like chuckling to himself and he's going, This is going to be a really easy conquistador journey.
He's like, This one's going to be good.
Like, and at that point, he was like, I know six other guys that are like rich conquistadors.
He's like, I got these people because the Peruvians came out and they're like, Here's textiles and gifts and here's some coca leaves.
And they're like, Welcome, welcome.
And he was like, You people are fucking idiots.
And then they just got ready to kill everybody.
Like, it's in his journal.
It's absolutely awful.
He like thought it was funny.
He's like, I can't wait to write home and start this.
Like, Jesus.
No, they were on a whole different level.
So, the Terra Prada stuff, though, is part of a conversation right now that I think is a huge misinformation thing.
Really?
Yes.
Because Graham Hancock, his whole theory on all this.
Yeah.
These guys, see, what happens is you come out with a controversial theory.
All right.
You say, we're living in a simulation.
I can prove it.
And everyone goes, we are.
And then everyone clicks on it.
This guy comes out and goes, the Amazon rainforest is a man made thing.
I go, what?
I was like, let me listen to this.
Terra Prada, we found, you know, geoglyphs or we found, you know, evidence of human civilizations in the Amazon rainforest.
And it's like, Of the area of the Amazon rainforest, if you actually look at the scientific literature of what these archaeologists found, it's like 0.03% of the actual landmass of the Amazon shows signs of some form of terra preta that they believe was influenced by humans.
And so then what happens is this dude goes on podcasts and writes books and does lectures where he goes, We've been thinking all wrong about the Amazon because he wants this big, you know, he wants to like drop the big bomb.
He goes, We've been thinking about it all wrong.
And then I hear him on Rogan going, the Amazon is actually a man made garden.
They've actually engineered a lot of the forest.
And I'm listening to this, ready to fucking flip the tape.
I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?
And, and, and he thinks his life is like the Da Vinci Code.
Oh my God.
He's, he's literally, he is a fucking child playing, he's playing a game where he's like an explorer.
Like he thinks he's like Hiram Bigam and he's going to go find Machu Picchu or something.
The problem with his story is that it's a dangerous story because it changes the narrative and it changes how we view the future.
Okay, so he's on there going, well, yeah, you know, there's evidence all over the Amazon.
Now, if you take a football field, you take a handful of quarters and you throw it, and there's quarters all over the field, but is that handful of quarters on this whole football field?
Does that mean that the, you know, what does that mean?
You know what I mean?
It's a very, very small percentage.
And so, yes, of course, there were over the course of history, there's hundreds of thousands of people.
Right now, there's just, I think there's like 20 million people that live in the Amazon.
Maybe more.
It's probably more like 30 million people.
Really?
Yeah.
There's indigenous communities all over the Amazon rainforest.
There's cities.
There's Manaus.
There's Iquitos.
There's Puerto Maldonado.
There's plenty of people living.
And that's why people go, is it too dangerous to go to the Amazon rainforest?
I'm like, bro, I know babies in the Amazon rainforest.
Like, you can go, you grown ass human.
But yeah, I was listening to him and they're going, oh, yeah.
And literally, the evidence that they're using to prove their point was absolutely false.
And he's going, yeah, we see domesticated species like Brazil nut trees.
Okay.
We're going to have a conversation about what domesticated means.
All right.
Domesticated is like a golden retriever.
A wolf is a wild species.
And then we bred wolves down and mixed them with things.
And we came up with a golden retriever.
A cow, you know, we came up with a cow.
We took a wild species and we made it produce more milk.
And then, you know, a chicken, we made it so that they produce eggs every day.
Those are domesticated species, species that we have bred to be productive for us.
Same with bananas, same with apples, all these things.
They come from a root source plant that ancient civilizations.
Bred to be more productive.
Fine.
You know, I once heard someone say about Asian elephants.
They went, Oh, dude, you know, these are domesticated elephants.
No, no, no, no.
These are captive elephants.
This is a wild animal that has been beaten until it's been kept in a temple or a cage or whatever else, but that does not mean it's domesticated.
And so this guy was going on about, like, yeah, like you see higher concentrations of domesticated Brazil nut trees around these areas with Terra Preta.
Brazil nut trees are not.
Domesticated species.
Brazil nut trees are one of the pillars of the natural Amazon rainforest.
And what people could have done was they could have taken the nuts, just like we could take acorns from an oak tree and we could plant them around our farm if we want oak trees.
But they're not domesticated.
Why does he think they're domesticated?
I don't know.
Probably the same reason he thinks he's Indiana fucking Jones.
And how do we know that they're not domesticated?
You could look it up.
It's a wild species.
And they're so intricately.
Austin, that's your cue.
They're so intricately woven into the ecology of the Amazon.
You can't actually have productive Brazil nut trees without primary forests.
Listen to this.
So, if you have a 400 year old Brazil nut tree and they're like one of the emergent giant pillars of the forest, they depend on a species of orchid bee to pollinate their flowers.
And before that pollination happens between the male and female trees, they will not produce the Brazil nuts.
And then once they produce the Brazil nuts, those nuts actually fall from the canopy 160 feet up where we can't get them to the ground.
And then the only animal in the rainforest that has teeth strong enough to make it through this hard, nutty shell of a Brazil nut.
Is something called an agouti and it's a rodent.
It's a big ass rodent.
I think it's like a shrew.
It looks like a, it looks like a, like a, more like a beaver family type of thing.
Okay, yeah.
And they open them and they bury them just like squirrels do.
They bury them all over and then the Brazil nut trees grow.
Let's see what, oh, Wikipedia is trustworthy.
The Brazil nut is a South American tree in the family of, I'm not even gonna try to say that, Lysidithyche.
The fruit and its nutshell containing the edible Brazil nut are relatively large.
Keep going down.
Keep going.
Find something about where they're from and how they were made.
From Amazon.
Made by Amazon.
Jesus.
But like, so the thing about Graham is I don't think, I think he just wants, he's just advocating for the Amazon to be studied, right?
He's not advocating for, like, he said that he thinks that money needs to be put into more LIDAR.
Yes.
Penetrating LIDAR to survey, LIDAR surveys on the Amazon.
Because right now, I think it's only been like, A very, very small percent of the Amazon has been surveyed by LIDAR, right?
I think that that's a great idea.
And I fully support that.
The problem is, when you listen to these interviews, when you listen to what is extrapolated from someone, he goes, Again, I'm going from the interviews that I've heard where you hear them go, Okay, there's a lot more human civilization in the Amazon than you think.
And they were engineering the forest.
And then you literally hear people going, So, wait, so the forest was engineered by people?
Hidden Civilizations Under LIDAR00:06:23
And they go, Yeah, the Amazon was actually a garden.
And you can look this up on Smithsonian where they go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They produced a paper that said this as a hypothesis.
And then they were like, but more realistically, there's small settlements throughout the Amazon that correspond with the ancient civilizations.
And the Amazon's the Amazon.
And so what he's doing is then when people go and they say, well, if the Amazon is a human made thing, well, then as we decide the fate of the Amazon, what do we want it to look like?
And it very quickly becomes this very dangerous thing where it's, if it's not wild anymore.
Well, then it's just something else that we can manipulate.
And the Amazon is such an intensely complicated web of life that this is not something that we actually understand yet.
So, if you have a guy like Bolsonaro who's going, oh, well, look, look, the research says this was man made to begin with.
So, we better start chopping it up and turning it into soy farms.
It's like these are dangerous extrapolations that are being made from that assertion that the Amazon is a cultivated garden.
Austin, I can't see.
There's a giant ad in front of the article.
The supposedly pristine, untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans.
Over thousands of years, native people played a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness.
Published 2017.
Keep going down.
This is the Smithsonian.
Okay, so yeah, this is a good article.
You read through the whole article, and then at the end, then all of a sudden they bring it back to reality.
There you go.
All right, all right.
So here's this other expert, Peperno, also cautions, drawing direct conclusions from the tree data.
She points to the fact that some scientists once thought that the Mayan civilization of Central America heavily cultivated the bread nut tree based on larger than expected numbers of them often found in the Mayan ruins.
However, later research found that the bread nut trees also can be spread.
Widely by bats, and that the trees may have started growing around ruins to take advantage of the limestone that they provide in nearby soil.
Preparano hopes to see more work done finding and analyzing.
Basically, they bring in this expert who actually says, you know what?
This is just a brand new hypothesis and it doesn't mean shit.
So, what they're doing here is they're using this headline to hook you.
Go to that last paragraph.
For future research, Pipinero hopes to see more work done finding and analyzing the remains of plants from prehistoric eras, such as.
Charcoal and mineralized phytoliths and charcoal.
These are the proxies that need to be relied on, Papinero says.
So she's saying, is politely that.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the crazy thing, if there were all those cities there when that first guy went through the Amazon, the first Spanish guy explored through there, and then they were gone 200 years later, the Amazon clearly ate up everything.
Like the growth, it grew over everything.
So there's.
If there was a way to fund more LIDAR surveys of the Amazon or cover it and see all the shit that is under there, it would be fucking incredible.
We would learn so much about the history of that, of our species.
100%.
And there's actually, I know a guy who knows where there's stuff under the canopy that we don't know about, the scientific we, and the guys on the ground know about.
Like what?
Like entire ruins that no one has found.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, they found pyramids there, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff down there.
I know there's pyramids, like crazy geometric shapes they found.
Yep.
Yep.
And I mean, but again, it's just like, you know, the thing is not to blow that into.
That's fine.
And saying that there's more human sites than we thought, like even pottery.
Like we found, if you go to a certain bend in the river, like usually when the interesting thing with the jungle or with any wilderness is that there's sort of like, Natural law.
Like you stop at certain points.
Like there's like certain points in a river where it's just like a good port.
It's a good place to stop your boat.
And it's like you're usually going to find somewhere near there, like some pottery remains or something.
Cause then some ancient civilization probably also thought it was a good port.
And so, like, yeah, there's a hundred percent.
There was millions of people that have existed in the Amazon over time.
But the danger is that then they jump this to the Amazon was created by humans, which is fucking moronic.
Yeah, that statement just seems dumb.
It's absolutely stupid.
And how would people use that?
People are using that to.
Well, then they make articles like this.
And then how many people read to the last paragraph?
Right.
How many people just click on that article and go, look, I saw it.
It says it.
The Amazon was actually shaped by humans.
And that is so dangerous because the ecology there is so intricately intertwined with it.
I mean, we're just starting to scratch the surface of this food chain.
You ever heard of the thing with the wolves in Yellowstone about.
Where the wolves had been absent from Yellowstone for 100 years, and then they brought back the wolves into Yellowstone.
And all of a sudden, they saw all these ecological things fall into place.
Like, because the deer weren't overgrazing the plants by the rivers, they were moving quicker because they knew there were wolves around.
And so, all of a sudden, the shorelines around the rivers were able to grow up, which, when there were floods, meant that there were more roots and more retention.
So, the floods weren't as bad.
It also meant that because the deer weren't always harassing the plant life by the edges, little trees were able to grow up, which meant the beavers were able to use them.
And so, the wolves, the top down predator ecology truth is that we needed wolves to keep balance in the ecosystem.
And it's something very simple, something very similar with elephants.
It's like what elephants do for an ecosystem is so crucial.
But it's like if we start changing these hard ones, I mean, how many years of research did it take to find out these things about the wolves?
It took us exterminating wolves and then bringing them back for us to learn how crucial they are.
And then with the Amazon, we're just starting to learn about how the Brazil nut trees and the rivers and the moisture cycle all works together.
And it's like then people go, oh, no, no, no, it's actually human made, guys.
You can pave it.
Balancing The Ecosystem00:02:20
No.
Yeah.
No.
I can't let you.
I'm not going to be quiet for that one just because somebody wants to get like a fancy PhD and get some interviews.
Right.
No, I mean, it just sucks that there's not more research being done on it and there's not more archaeology being done down there and there's not more digging, you know, and the LIDAR surveys, which I think those are really super expensive to do.
They are expensive to do because we're trying to get some LIDAR surveys in our region because it would, there's stuff out there.
There's stuff, you know, like I've been down there 17 years.
Like, I have a number of sites that I would love to go do LIDAR over because, like, we can just sort of, there's places where we know that there's some evidence of stuff, or like we found pottery and it's like we could be sitting on a massive scale.
Couldn't we find just some billionaire to just pay for some LIDAR?
I mean, I don't see why not.
There's fucking billionaires popping up all over the place.
And they spend money on way stupider things than that.
I mean, yeah, like penis rockets.
Yeah.
Like, what?
I see.
I miss a lot of stuff.
Like, I've missed a lot of stuff.
Like, I come out of the jungle and my friends will be like, yo, did you hear about like this?
And I'll be like, what?
Or, like, I'll see a meme and I'll have to text my friend.
I'll be like, What are they talking about?
You know, like, it'll be like a meme or something.
And the last one was like, It was like Biden falling off a bicycle.
And I was like, What happened?
I was like, Is he okay?
And they were like, No, no, you've been in the jungle, man.
Like, he was fine.
It was a joke.
It passed.
You missed it.
And I was like, Okay.
Like, I miss a lot of stuff.
But yeah, we need to.
I came out of the jungle one time and someone was like, You see this guy fly, fucking flying?
And I was like, You flew a dick rocket?
I was like, Are you serious?
I was like, That really happened.
I think I missed that too.
Holy shit.
Yeah, Bezos's rocket.
Could have been designed.
Oh, that could have been designed.
I see what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I, because sometimes I come out and like my friends will almost mess with me and be like, yo, this happened while you were gone.
I'll be like, what?
Is there a way?
Like, do you bring a sat phone with you everywhere when you're down there?
Not anymore.
No, not anymore.
I guess who are you going to call?
Right.
All right.
So you get shot through the stomach by an arrow.
What are you going to be like?
Hi, mom.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's no one to call.
What do you do?
Like, what do you do if you get seriously injured?
It's real life.
There's no ambulance coming for you.
There's no helicopter evac.
When you do travel insurance, they say, oh, you have like $250,000 of medevac or whatever else.
There's no one to come get you out there.
Deep Connection To Forest Spirits00:03:20
That's one of the fascinating things, too, about some of these ancient tribes or the ancient civilizations that live down there.
How long ago was ayahuasca invented?
How many years ago was the first ayahuasca concocted?
Because it takes two different plants that are completely different.
The bush that Causes all the hallucinations.
You could eat the shit all day and you just get a stomach ache.
But as soon as you mix it with this other plant, the vine, all of a sudden the magic happens.
So, how did they learn that?
So many fucking years ago.
There's a beautiful book by Wade Davis called One River.
And for anybody that's interested in this stuff, you got to read One River.
It's like this giant, very difficult to read.
It's like biblical.
But he's following the work of Richard Evans Schultes, who was a Harvard ethnobotanist who went through the Amazon.
I think it was like in the 50s or the 60s.
But he started doing all these hallucinogenics in a research capacity and trying to figure out and trying to really, he was a botanist.
But they were saying the statistical improbability of.
Even if you did trial and error over the course of thousands of years, given that there are 15,000 species of trees and then how many species of vines and how many species, I mean, you're talking, the numbers are staggering.
It's like fucking, you just got to hear like the interstellar music start playing behind your head as you think about this.
Like, and somehow they figured this out.
It's not like, you know, like maple syrup.
Like the first person to burn a maple tree was like, oh, that's good.
Right.
You know what I mean?
like that's one step we're good this is a complex chemical reaction that literally opens your mind to other worlds and And for people that have done normal drugs like mushrooms or LSD or something like that, ayahuasca is a totally different thing.
And I've never done ayahuasca.
How is it different from mushrooms?
It's very different.
It's, I mean, I just, I just feel like it's considered, it's basically like DMT, right?
It's essentially the same thing.
It's, yeah.
I mean, I look, I had done mushrooms in college and, you know, like everybody else, and you go for a walk and it's nice.
And I can kind of see music.
That's cool.
And then, like, with the, you know, and now there's a lot of people who are like, um, I talked about ayahuasca with someone recently and they go, Oh, I just did ayahuasca last week.
And I went, You went to the Amazon last week?
And they went, No, New York.
Yeah, I did it in a yoga studio in New York.
And I was like, I was like, Okay.
I go back, I tell my local guys that they laugh.
They're like, Yeah, okay.
The thing is, it's literally from a vine.
And then you're mixing compounds in the jungle and boiling it down.
And these people live in the jungle and they go on a diet where they just drink that.
And what they're doing is they're connecting deeply to the forest spirit.
The truth between the trees, and they're trying to absorb that to become shamans.
And they study for years for that privilege.
And it's not viewed as a drug, it's not viewed as something that's like, you know, recreationally done, it's viewed as something that's deeply medicinal that opens up the spirit world.
And so, when they hear about people doing it in a yoga studio, that's like, you know, that's like, that's like, it's like someone in the military having somebody be like, I did a tough mutter once.
And it's like, okay, cool.
Like you ran in a circle, like good for you.
But Whatever you could compare it to, it's like there's drugs and then there's ayahuasca.
Unconstructed Dream Space00:04:08
Like, I was unprepared.
The first time I did ayahuasca, I had a notebook.
I had like an iPod.
I was like, I'm going to listen to music.
You know, it's going to be cool.
I'm going to like write down my thoughts.
I had no idea.
You know, the shaman comes in and we're sitting in a circle and he lights a single candle, a single two candles in the middle of the floor.
And you're all sitting in a circle and things get real quiet.
And you just start noticing the sounds of the jungle.
And all of a sudden, you know, like when you're scared, you just start noticing different stuff.
And all of a sudden, you say, Oh, you know, I agreed to do this.
You go, Okay.
And you see the look on everyone else's face.
You see the local people who are going to do it with you.
And you see that they're not joking.
They're like getting ready.
Oh, God.
And then he beckons to you.
And this guy's sitting there.
And, you know, the candles are in his eyes.
And he's got feathers off his head.
And he's got monkey skulls around him.
And he goes, Come.
You kneel before him.
And he takes a big drag of his cigarette and he.
He blows medicinal herbs through his lungs onto the ayahuasca.
Then he gives it to you and he hands it to me.
And I was like, everything in me was screaming and saying, Don't do this.
It was like, I was like, I was like, if I'm backing up, I'm backing up.
I don't want to do it, but you're too far in.
You can't do that in front of everybody.
And I was like, screw it.
And I just kicked it back.
And then so you go and you sit down, and I'm sitting there, and then the next person goes, and the next person goes, and then we're sitting in this circle.
And I remember being like, oh, I think I got this.
I was like, I'm going to be fine.
And then I remember I opened my notebook, and it's all dark, and we're under a roof, but there's no walls.
And so the jungle is all around us.
And so you could hear, and all of a sudden it started to rain lightly.
I started to notice that the sounds, I started to try to wash off my hands that the sounds were coming through my fingertips.
And I started to be very concerned with that the sounds had gotten under my skin and the frogs and the crickets and the frogs and the crickets and that throbbing of the jungle night.
And then the last thing I remember seeing was that I looked down at the floorboards and it was like this.
And I remember seeing the molecules of the wood as I got smaller and smaller and dematerialized into.
Fell through the table or the floor, the earth, everything, and down into like unconstructed universe.
And I was down there for a very long time.
And if I went into it, it would sound so ridiculous.
It would be stupid to retell it.
But it's like you go down so deep that you leave your body.
You're in a different universe.
You're in like unconstructed dream space.
And it was so intense that in.
Like at 4 a.m. when I came back, I just remember being so scared and I'd been through so many different universes.
And I like the moment I realized I had a hand, I was so thankful.
I like felt my hand on the board and I went, I like was me.
I could remember my name.
I'd forgotten my name, all this stuff.
I mean, you just, you're in, you're in, I mean, literally picture like being a consciousness floating in space with the stars and the nebulas and being able to swim.
It was wild.
So I came back and then I looked for the shaman and I see this hammock and And he's gone.
So, as the sun comes up, we start looking for the shaman and we go, Where is this guy?
And the guy is old.
He's like 85 years old.
He's one of the old guys.
He's got this face like, he's got like permanent, like, whacked out De Niro face with like hair that sticks up.
You can never tell if he's high or not.
And he's always like, Ah.
And we looked everywhere from him.
He wasn't at camp.
And then we, like, later that day, we were like, I guess he left.
Like, I don't know.
And then, like, an hour later, somebody was crossing one of the streams and they found him laying in the stream naked.
You know, like, in ET at the end when he's not doing so good, they find him in the stream.
They found Don Ignacio in the stream naked, and we wrapped him up and we brought him back.
We said, What the fuck happened, man?
And he goes, Oh, that was the biggest mistake of my life.
He goes, I overboiled it.
Naked And Lost In Stream00:14:49
He goes, I've gotten sloppy in my old age, and I let that brew of ayahuasca boil too much.
He goes, That was, I never thought I'd see things like that.
That was too strong.
He goes, I'm retiring.
And I was like, That's the batch of ayahuasca that you give me?
I was like, Thanks, man.
For your first time?
That was my first real ayahuasca trip.
And so the shaman was like, I retire.
And he retired until like next month.
But oh my gosh.
Yeah, he actually, he was, he was the old guard.
He trained the guys that do it now.
And COVID took him out.
No way.
Yeah, we lost our old shaman in the village to COVID.
Oh, yeah.
But it's like, you, so you lose this guy that knows.
I mean, the last time that he harvested an ayahuasca vine, it was like, it was like bigger than a dinner plate.
It was a vine thicker than a dinner plate.
So like he knew where the ones grow that were like ancient.
And then, you know, the, Plants change.
The leaves on a young sycamore are different than the leaves on an old sycamore.
When balsa trees are young, they have these giant umbrella leaves.
And as they grow up, the leaves get smaller, they change.
And like plants are complicated.
He knew how to find ayahuasca vines that no one else knew how to find.
And so, like, when he dies, you just hope that he's imparted that knowledge to the next generation.
Wow.
And there's also like a certain type of poison that some of the indigenous communities there have developed.
Like, it's called like karare or something like that.
Yeah, karare.
And there's like, I heard there was like something like 11 or 12 different plants you have to combine to make that.
And it's like, I heard that like, In order to get a monkey out of a tree, like if they want to shoot a monkey, if you shoot it with an arrow with no curare, it'll like seize its tail and it'll stay up in the canopy.
Is that true?
Yeah.
And if you hit them with the reason they develop the curare poison is so they go limp and they fall to the ground.
Yeah.
The other crazy one that they have in our region is barbasco, which is it's a root and you like wrap it in a cloth and then you beat it with a big heavy stick and it gets it like pulpy.
So there's a lot of juice coming out of this thing now.
And then what you do is you go to a stream.
And you find like a pool in the stream and you put a log across one side.
Ideally, you'd have like a little waterfall or a trickle on the other side where the fish can't easily get up.
And then you take this package of beaten root that you have, put it in there.
And then in like five minutes, all the fish that are in that little pool, they'll just float up to the top.
And the craziest part is that they're only stunned.
So you can go through and be like, well, this is good for lunch.
This is good for lunch.
This is good for lunch.
Ah, we don't need any of these guys.
He's too small.
And then you take the stick away and let the water start flowing again.
And once the water flows, the barbasco will leave.
And then all the fish will start swimming again.
So you're not murdering all the fish.
That sounds like some black magic shit.
And it's like one of the most basic things.
Like, I know young guys who know how to do it.
What?
No, that's not even a complicated one.
What is it called again?
Barbasco.
You could look at that.
Barbasco.
Yeah, you could look that one up.
So tell me, what was the story of the dude who got kidnapped by the gold miners?
I wanted to make sure you told that story.
All right.
So I think we missed it.
The guy, this dude who we.
Originally, I had gone upriver with a guy from National Geographic, and the idea was that we wanted to find huge anacondas.
And so, this gold miner who was the brother in law of the chef that we work with down there, he had a year ago killed this huge anaconda.
I mean, I have a picture of his daughter holding this anaconda's head, and it's like the size of an American football.
It's like it's just a huge anaconda head.
And so, we went and interviewed him in town.
That was the first step.
And we said, Why'd you kill this snake?
And he goes, Well, I wanted to see it.
Yeah, you know, I just, fair enough.
Okay.
So then we said, well, we want to come up river and we want to see, like, you know, you're saying there's other snakes like this, there's big anacondas.
He goes, yeah, there's huge anacondas up there.
We go up.
This is where then we saw the military come down, blow up his gold mining thing.
And we've said, look, you guys got to go.
You got to stop being gold miners.
You're going to get killed.
You're going to get arrested.
And so he goes, all right, I'm going to be a conservationist.
And so this evil gold miner, who everyone told us going up this river that we were going to get killed, we become friends with this guy.
And he starts bringing ecotourism.
He starts Trying to do research.
He starts trying to be a protector of the forest.
That didn't last long.
So I'm getting ready to go to the airport one day, and my friends come rushing into my room and they go, He's gone.
I go, What do you mean he's gone?
The other gold miners didn't like that he flipped to being a protector of the forest.
And so these guys bust into his house at four in the morning with rifles against his head.
Apparently, he was like having sex with his wife at a time.
They like jumped on him, hauled him outside.
They beat the shit out of him right there on the ground, put a gun against his head.
And now, so his wife and his kids are watching in the doorways.
Of the little shacks that they just built, that he just spent a year building this, like the most basic ecotourism place that you could possibly build.
They have a gun against his head and they go say goodbye to your father.
The kids are screaming and the wife is trying to fight.
They knock the wife down.
He goes, Please don't kill me in front of my kids.
So they tie him up, they bring him on the boat, and these guys are all messed up and whatever else.
But he knows who they are, he knows their voices.
He's worked with these guys before.
So they get him on the boat, they start going up river.
And at some point, he told this story when he got rescued.
He told me this story with so much enthusiasm that at some point they heard the sound of a motor coming and they knew that he's the best boat driver.
And now, so you have, they're trying to kill him, but he's going, If that's the Navy coming, we're all done for.
He's like, so just get my hands in front.
I'll drive the boat and then you guys can at least shoot at them.
And so they actually were like, okay, you drive, but we'll do whatever.
And so he just slammed the boat into a tree.
They went flying off.
He jumped into the river and then he ran off into the forest.
Apparently, it changes about whether there even was a boat coming down river or whether he just made them think there was.
But he was lost in the forest for three days before we found him.
And we hired like five different boats to go up and down the river all day long looking for him.
And as far as we knew, it was very scary news to get because we thought.
He was dead.
The last thing that his family saw was guys bust in, guns against the head, say goodbye to your father, and then he never came back.
And so days went by where we were sending boats up and down the river looking for him, and then miraculously he shows up starving and freaked out and clothing ripped and got reunited with his family.
But what?
I mean, there's, I mean, they murder people.
Our lawyer's father in the Amazon stood up to gold miners and he was murdered.
Really?
Yes.
There was a nun on the border with.
Brazil, sister Dorothy Stang, I think was her name.
She was working with the indigenous people, trying to work with them, trying to protect the forest and the wildlife.
And I think they shot her in the stomach.
And then when she was down, they capped her in the head.
I mean, like they just, you know, if you start going against these people, there's a point where they will just say, You're threatening our way of life.
And they'll remove the threat.
You're doing the same thing, though.
Yeah.
And I had, I made a post on Instagram about illegal gold mining because there's actually, I went with this guy from ABC News, Matt Gutman.
Awesome.
Guy, this guy shows up with the news team.
He said he wanted to uh report on like the most authentic, you know, the front lines in the Amazon.
And so we brought him out and we went into the gold mining areas, we went into the logging areas, we saw the Amazon fires.
But we went to the so that when he's running, you guys are like running by this burning area and it's like literally burning you as you're walking by it.
That's the one that's we actually like that day.
I actually got scared that like my skin came off because it fucking hurt.
It was that that was crazy.
Um, but when we went to the gold mining area, it was funny because the guys pulled me aside and they went, Hey, One of the guys went, Come here for a second.
He goes, You see how all those guys over there are looking at you?
And I said, Yeah.
They go, You're the, they go, They follow you on Instagram.
I went, Because you don't, you don't think, you're in the middle of the Amazon.
You don't think that these people have this.
Right.
And they're like, They know exactly who you are.
And they're like, You should probably stop what you're doing.
And I was like, Come on, get the fuck out of here.
I was like, Don't worry about it.
I was like, Meanwhile, they're all holding machine guns and like looking at me.
And then, so literally the next day, because that was the day we were filming there.
And so we filmed this desert in the Amazon rainforest.
And literally, in the most moist, biodiverse, beautiful, pristine part of the Amazon, there's now a 350 mile scar of sand.
You can look it up on Google Earth and you can see this horrible scar across the Amazon.
We went to the edge of that.
And so I posted about that the next day.
And a few days later, I was actually walking down the street in the town where we were getting supplies to head back out to the jungle.
And a motorcycle pulls up next to me and just was like, the next time we see you post about gold mining, you're going to regret it.
Really?
And then he zooms off, and I can see who it was because he has face covered.
He had a motorcycle helmet on.
So, yeah, I mean, the threats come through, and you just have to be ready for whatever happens.
Are you armed?
Most of the time we're not, but it's usually in the city that you're at the most.
Because, you know, the thing is out in the jungle, you usually don't need it because out in our region, you know who's there and who's not.
It's kind of complicated, though, because, you know, I had a friend.
His name was also Paul, but his father moved deep into the jungle when they were, I think, before they were born.
And they moved like, you know, it was like four days deep into the jungle.
And he just wanted to live at the edge of the world and be free.
He raised his two boys there and they had a whole life.
And I made friends with Paul and Willie when I was probably like 22, and they were probably like 28 and 30 or so.
And they would teach me fishing, and we'd go piranha fishing, and we spent all these days going out together and stuff.
And then one day, the dad needed to cut a tree that had fallen.
So he asked a logger or a gold miner if he could help them cut some wood.
This guy noticed that they had a chainsaw that he wanted.
So he shot my friend in the back and took the chainsaw, and that was it.
And because it's the Amazon, there's no consequences for that.
And because these guys were standing up to the loggers, they were standing up to the miners, and they were saying, We're not going to allow our forest to be invaded.
So the first statement they made was shooting a 28 year old kid in the back.
Jesus Christ, man.
So yeah, you have to be a little careful out there.
It is, you know, because you can't get the cops out there.
You can't get the cops out there.
Think about what that means.
So, whatever happens, happens.
If me and you have a fight, and well, this is a true story.
If two guys were fighting over Brazil nuts, and the first guy went and I think it was that he, no, the first guy shot the guy.
The first guy, they were having a fight over Brazil nuts.
This is my Brazil nut tree.
This is my Brazil nut tree.
I get to harvest.
I get to harvest.
Where does the line go between our properties?
Who knows?
First guy shoots the other guy, takes off half his face, but he lives.
So that guy, his family fixes him up.
Everything else, his brothers get together and go, fuck that.
They come back, take a few machetes, and they hack this first guy to pieces that shot their brother.
So, all of this eventually, both families end up in court back in the nearest town.
And the judge goes, Are any of you going to kill any of you?
And they're all like, Uh uh.
And he was like, All right, we're good.
You're missing half a face, and the other guy's dead.
He was like, What's there to do?
But this is the way it is in the Amazon.
It's like you're out past the.
What country was this?
This is Peru.
This is Peru.
Yeah.
And that's where my friend's been shot in the head by the arrow.
That's where my friend Paul got assassinated.
That's where our lawyer's father was assassinated for speaking out against the lawyer.
I got assassinated for speaking out against the gold miners.
It's the body count is high.
And then there are articles.
I think mangabay.com puts out articles every year on how many environmental defenders get killed across the Amazon each year.
And it's just like, let the bodies hit the floor.
What is the biggest threat to the loggers and the gold miners, though?
So, like, what are they most afraid of?
That we're going to stop them from logging in gold.
Are you a bigger threat to them or like the Navy and.
No, the Navy and stuff, but there's regions of Peru where the Peruvian law enforcement won't go.
Put a little bit closer.
Yeah, there's places where the Peruvian law enforcement won't go.
Okay.
So, like, in that 350 mile scar, can you look up like Peruvian gold, Madre de Dios gold mining?
It's terrifying.
And like the Peruvian.
Armed forces went in there because they couldn't send the police in because the police would just be massacred.
So finally, they sent in like helicopters and Navy SEALs and all this shit.
And they sent in like full on.
But even then, they chased everybody out.
And then it's whack a mole.
They show up 10 miles that way and they do the same thing.
So it's like, it's just a constant struggle.
It's crazy.
And as far as like the wood, like you're showing in that documentary, there was like these giant trees on trailers, like these tree trunks that are wider than this fucking room sitting on these giant trailers.
Where do they go from there?
Well, the thing is, whether they're legal timber or whether they're illegal timber, everything is corrupt.
So as soon as they come out of the forest, so our forest, I said about the, it used to take us two days to get up to the research station.
Yeah, but then Brazil and China and the World Bank got together and they cut the trans Amazon highway across the Amazon.
And as soon as they cut the trans Amazon highway across the Amazon, now you have offshoot roads.
So you get one road and then offshoot roads, offshoot roads, offshoot roads.
They call that the fishbone effect because it ends up looking like a rib cage.
And then a road builds off a road, builds off a road.
And then you just start seeing all the, you can literally watch it year by year.
The green starts turning to brown, starts turning to red.
And there, there you go.
That's what I'm talking about, the edge of that.
So guarding the edges of that.
Are men with machine guns making sure that they can continue to do that?
And what is that that we're looking at?
What does that mean?
That's where the Amazon rainforest used to be.
What is it now?
A pit of mercury polluted absolute nothing that will take thousands of years to heal.
We're never going to get that back.
And that's in the Western Amazon.
That's in the most crucial part of the Amazon rainforest that this is happening.
Good Lord.
Can you just scroll down a little bit to that picture on the lower left right there?
Look at that.
See the guy?
Like this is what we see on Amazon.
Can you blow that up at all, Austin?
Right there, there you go.
What the fuck is going on there?
You think of what pristine forest looks like with towering trees and butterflies and birds and jaguars.
And it's like, this is what they did.
So, what is that guy in the camo doing?
He's Peruvian law enforcement, Peruvian Marines.
Okay.
And so, I work with the guy on his knees.
I work with a bunch of guys like that.
I probably know that guy.
Vigilantes Burning Rainforest00:03:00
I'm sure a lot of these guys are kids, too.
A lot of them are kids.
And a lot of their.
The funny thing is, again, when I post this shit to.
Social media, people will comment and they'll be like, These evil loggers, they're doing it for greed, or these evil miners, and like they deserve to be like destroyed.
And I'm like, The first thing I have to go is, Hold up, first of all, if you couldn't feed your family, what would you do to save your family's life?
Cut down some trees?
100% you would.
Right.
And so the other thing is that I hang out with these guys, they're great guys.
Most of them are great guys.
Obviously, there's the bad ones that, you know, when they all get around and they start drinking and they start saying, Well, this is threatening our whole way of life, you get that like, One psycho vigilante is going to come.
But for the most part, these are good guys.
A lot of the guys on my team are ex loggers who are now conservationists patrolling the jungle as we speak.
A lot of JJ's brothers who taught me the jungle used to be loggers in the 1990s during the mahogany boom.
And now they work for Jungle Keepers or Tamindu Expeditions.
And they're like the best guys ever.
These are my family.
Like they're awesome.
So yeah, it's just a matter of can you give these people a better life?
That's really the simplest answer.
Yeah, that's it's wild that you're able to think about it from their point of view because, yeah, I mean, if you were put in their shoes and you had the decision to make between let me cut down a couple square miles of rainforest or let me let my kid starve to death, what are you going to do?
I'm going to fucking burn down the rainforest.
Well, that's the thing.
At the end of the day, any one of us, if you use your kid, your mother, whatever it is, whatever you care about, you will chew through a human being's face to save that loved one.
Yeah.
And that's, and that's, And so it's.
I'll fucking shoot an elephant in the head to save my kid.
That's what I said to Ryan.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, I just.
Yeah.
I agree with you, though.
I agree with you.
Like, it's terrible.
It's terrible.
And it's like we talked about this in when he was in Iraq.
Yeah.
Like these, a lot of these people that are out there fucking in these terrorist organizations, in these terrorist groups, or doing things that are evil to you.
Yeah.
Those people had other people murder their kids.
Exactly.
Well, and that's what turned them into what they are.
Like if somebody murders your kid, it's going to change you and you're going to become a fucking murderer and you're going to look and it's all about perspective.
I mean, look at the tip for tap between like Desert Storm, 9 11, the next war, the, We're just slapping each other back and forth.
And like, how much of, you know, if you go to work and somebody yells at you in the morning, and how much more likely are you to go then snap at somebody?
And it's like, I feel like as humans, we all pass on whatever we experience, whatever trauma we experience.
And by the same token, when you meet awesome people that are just full of integrity and sunlight and that are just like, they have your back and you're with the good people, you're like, man, I'm going to do that too.
Drilling Sustainably In Parks00:06:22
Like, I would never steal or cheat from those people because I would never do that to them.
They'd never do that to me.
And it's like, Whatever you get.
So, the unfortunate thing is if people are born into a gang and the cannibal warlords of Liberia, it's like they experience, like, eat that motherfucker's heart before he eats yours.
And it's like, that's what you create.
Yes.
And then I hope that everyone is lucky enough to have those people in their life where it's like they are just good.
Like, I grew up like my parents, like my dad is like literally, it's almost a burden how good of a person my dad is.
Like, just like the nicest guy in the world.
Like, I've never heard.
He's like Atticus Finch.
Like, I've never heard the man lie.
Like, It's just like there's people who are just like, you go, Oh, I could.
Have you brought your dad down to the rainforest?
Oh, tons of times.
Really?
Oh, my God.
Yes.
What does he think of everything you're doing?
They think it's great.
They're really, I think they're really happy that I'm not in jail.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is, look, I was failing out of school and I was doing so bad.
They were so worried about me.
They probably thought I was going to go to jail.
And then, like, now I've written two books.
On December 11th, I'll be speaking at the United Nations for the second time in my life.
And it's like, I was such a fuck up when I was a teenager that I think that.
The fact that I haven't been trampled to death by elephants and the fact that I've done, you know, something, protected something on earth.
I think my parents are just like, all right, fine.
You know, that's incredible, man.
Yeah.
What other than speaking to the United Nations, like what, what is that going to do?
Like what is it going to take to actually, to actually, there's so much momentum, it feels like.
There is.
There is.
How, how could you possibly even slow that down?
Where do you, where do you see any kind of hope?
Or do you?
No, it's funny because when I started this, when I started out at like 18 years old, I think I was very much like, there's no hope, the world is dying.
It was like a very, it's almost, it almost feels good in a way to like resign yourself to this, like, it's all going.
And I think that a lot of environmentalists is, a lot of environmentalism is based on that, like this sort of like tragedy porn of like, oh, the world is such a bad place, humans are a disease.
And it's like, well, what, all right.
Then I met the people that are actually at the forefront of conservation and of science and of a realistic future on Earth.
And, like, literally the wizards who are out there, the people you don't know their names.
They work with large corporations.
They have PhDs from major colleges, and they're doing things to protect huge tracks.
They're setting up national parks, and they're working with companies to do, like, okay, well, if you have to drill here, how can we do that sustainably?
I work with a guy who.
I work with a guy.
I've spoken to him a few times and I worship him.
But his name is Adrian Forsyth and he works for the Andes Amazon Fund.
But he told me this story.
And this is a guy who, when he talks, I mean, he's protected entire rivers.
But when he talks, everyone shuts up and moves closer and notebooks come out.
But he told me this story about how there was a company that wanted to drill inside of a national park.
And he knew that they were going to get the permits because the corrupt government was going to give it to them.
And so he went and had a meeting with them.
And he took a proactive stance and he's going, okay, look, if you guys are going to drill in there, here's how we can do this in a way that it doesn't ruin the national park.
Because if you guys have a pipeline and a spill, it's going to.
So he suggested the safest possible technology.
And he said, the one thing we can't have is if you make a road to bring your equipment in, well, then the local people can get in too.
And then we're going to have the offshoot roads and then the whole national park is going to fall apart.
Roads are kryptonite to rainforests.
That's rainforest 101.
Roads, death.
And so what he did was he said, look, We're going to use, we're going to raise funding and we're going to bring all the equipment in by helicopter into the center of this national park.
You're going to set up your rig right there.
There's going to be a line going out, but no one's even going to really know about it.
And there's not going to be a road around it.
And so they did this and they drilled for a few years and then they cleaned it up and they moved it out.
Oh, wow.
So everybody won.
And in fact, the people that worked on that project from the oil company ended up supporting the conservation efforts because it was such a smooth process.
And so, like, instead of having that, like, Basic, you know, internet Twitter sort of response of being like, you're bad, we're good, the environment's clean, you're dirty.
These guys are on a different level.
And I think that that's where we need to move moving forward.
And, you know, that's where someone like Jane Goodall is working a lot with kids because she knows, like, if kids care, you know what I mean?
They're going to grow up and become the next policymakers.
And so what you need to do is instill that love of nature in them.
You know, 50% of people across the world live in cities.
We have to find a way to rekindle their love of nature.
That's why Attenborough documentaries are so important.
But I do think that there's a lot of hope.
And that's why I tell that story about the bald eagles, the humpback whales.
A lot of things can bounce back.
And we've seen things bounce back.
And we're actually, the way I look at it in terms of the Amazon is that we're probably the last generation that's going to have the chance to save the Amazon as it is.
Because experts are warning that we've lost right now a roughly 20% of the Amazon has been destroyed.
Now, here's the thing.
That's a system where the moisture cycle replenishes itself.
The Amazon breathes out moisture and then it comes into the thunderheads and it rains back down on itself.
And that system contains a fifth of the water, of the fresh water on our planet.
A fifth.
And so if we cut too much of that system and it's not.
It pulls out like a ton of the carbon out of the air, too, right?
100%.
Like it's a couple metric tons of carbon or like hundreds of metric tons.
But if it's not able to breathe that moisture up and then keep the rainforest cycle going, then you're going to have the Amazon dry out.
The fires will get worse.
The whole ecosystem could collapse.
The whole biome.
And so we're coming up on that point where it's like, okay, but you can get frantic about this, or we come together as a global society and say, okay, look, what do we have to do?
What incentives, what trade incentives do we have to give Brazil?
What does Peru want?
Landing Under The Canopy00:04:37
What do you guys want?
And let's help everybody to have the opportunity and say, look, instead of cutting down this much forest, let's give all those people these jobs.
It's not rocket science.
It's really not.
We have the opportunity to do this.
And that's why what Ryan's doing in Africa is so exciting because you got these people going frantic.
How do we save black rhinos?
How do we save them?
It's like, dude, take a bunch of American vets that have the tactical knowledge and put them on the fence line.
Ain't nobody going to shoot a rhino when you got a bunch of ex marines on the fence line.
Like they know exactly what they've been doing.
Yeah, that's the perfect thing, right?
Because the U.S. fucking failed in figuring out a useful way to put veterans back to work in a meaningful way.
That is a fucking incredible idea.
It's absolutely incredible.
So is that what you guys plan on doing too?
No.
VetPaw works really well in Africa.
Okay.
I don't know to what degree we could do it in the Amazon.
I've been talking about that with Ryan a little bit.
Sounds like it would work fucking amazing.
It sounds like it would work a little bit amazing.
I think in a place like South Africa, where there's like a population of white people to begin with, it makes a little bit more sense.
But like if there was like a bunch of big, like tall white guys in military fatigues walking around the backwoods of the Amazon, I feel like somehow I just don't think the locals would appreciate that very much.
No, no.
And like a lot of the ways I've survived is by like being so in with them, like the fact that I'm in.
With you know, bare feet and whatever else.
Um, actually, you were talking about the dangers, and I wanted to tell you before I forget that there's one day I was coming.
This was a very non eventful.
I've had solos where I go out for two weeks and the craziest shit ever happens, and I come back all banged up.
And then I've had solos where I go out for 10 days and come back, and it was beautiful.
And I took a lot of nice pictures, you know.
And you don't write a book about those ones, but they're also nice in their own way.
Um, but one time I had a very relaxed solo where I was out for, I wanted to do the whole length of my river, and I did most of it without going towards the tribes.
But I'm coming down river one day, and this boat is coming, is like hanging out in the shallows underneath this tree.
And then they come out aggressively and they come towards me.
I'm in an inflatable pack raft with a backpack on.
And all my food had gotten wet the night before.
And they pull up to me and they go, You on the boat.
I go, Oh shit.
And they got machine guns and shit.
And I realized they got packages of tarp and like rectangles.
And I was like, Oh shit, they're running cocaine.
These are those guys.
And I was like, Hey guys, I was like, what's up?
Um, they're like, what are you doing out here?
I was like, I'm a photographer.
I was like, pictures, see?
I was like, look, I can show you pictures.
And they were like, well, where they go, where's your guide?
Where's your guide, gringo?
And I was like, gringo.
And I like, in a bunch of like really dirty local languages, like, listen, motherfucker, you think I'm not from here?
And I was like, I gave them that whole thing.
And they're like, all right, you talk like you're from here.
And then I pulled up some anaconda pictures on my phone.
I was like, look at this.
I was like, you ever caught anaconda that big?
And then they were like, whoa, these dudes, they like, put the machine gun behind their back and they're like, yo, yo, Hector, come here, look at this.
Give this gringo a brick.
Yeah.
And then I was like, they're like, do you need anything?
And I was like, no.
And they're like, so you're not lost.
And I was like, no, I'm not lost.
I was like, you guys got some smokes?
And they're like, yeah.
I was like, all right, cool.
I was like, can I go?
That's fucking awesome.
And I was like, I was like, I was like, stay safe out there.
And they're like, what do you mean?
I was like, don't get arrested.
And they were like, they're like, so you know.
And I was like, yes.
But they were like, again, they were the chillest guys ever, as long as you're not a threat to them.
Right.
Guys just trying to feed their families.
Yeah.
Dude, the craziest thing that they have on our rivers, because the rainforest canopy is so high, you're talking like, you know, 150 feet.
And so you have.
You know, 130 foot tree trunk, and then you have the branches.
And so apparently, there's this one long stretch of river where you can take a plane down and fly it between the trees.
And then they've actually cut out underneath the canopy a long hallway and they've made the ground fly through.
And so, what they do is they land under the canopy.
Oh, my.
So they stay under radar by staying above the canopy and then they actually land down there.
They get resupplied on the coke and then they fly right back out.
Oh, shit.
They're geniuses.
And you hear them flying at like 4 a.m.
Every now and then, I'll wake up.
Because we don't have flights.
You don't like, you know, like if you live in New York, you hear flights all day long going over your head.
When you're in the middle of the Amazon, you don't hear planes.
But then, like, at 4 a.m., every now and then you hear, like, and it's just this old little tin box, little Cessna, like going over.
Are there like lots of cocaine factories out there in the middle of the jungle?
Waking Up At Four AM00:08:33
Peru is taking over?
I think Peru took over Colombia.
It's the number one country.
We got to check on that one, but I think they.
Yeah, Google that.
Yeah, there's like songs about it now.
Peruvian cocaine.
I just came up on Spotify.
Peru overtook Colombia in.
Manufacturing cocaine.
Yeah.
I think look that up.
I think Peru is the number one right now.
Okay.
Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru.
Yeah.
Where's Bolivia?
Right below Peru.
Oh, it's right below Peru.
Okay.
So it all comes right out of there.
Yeah.
And that's all right on the western, you know, western part of South America.
Yeah.
So that's crazy.
So there's just like random, like rogue little areas where they're just fucking mixing the cocoa leaves with gasoline and creating all that shit.
That's insane.
Yeah.
And like, Coca leaves is like a thing.
You chew coca leaves down there.
It's like coffee.
It gives you energy, but it's not cocaine.
Right, right, right, right.
So it's a totally separate thing.
But yeah, down there, that's a big industry.
That way a little bit.
There you go.
Perfect.
Anteaters.
Anteaters.
Oh my God.
My favorite.
My favorite.
You raised an anteater?
I did.
I raised a baby anteater.
Yeah.
So there's this myth in Peru that if you shoot an anteater, the bullet will glance off of it and that you will not actually kill the anteater.
So a lot of people try to kill them for no reason.
They're not trying to eat them or anything.
And somebody had tried to do that on our river.
And there was this baby anteater.
And we went to this spot.
And they had this little tiny anteater.
And the thing with anteaters is they live on their mother's backs for like the first year of their life.
So they cling onto their mother's back and they have these huge claws.
And so a giant anteater is like think of something that's like a little bigger than a German shepherd with a tail as long as its body.
So it's like this huge animal.
And they have to be able to fight off jaguars.
And so, a giant anteater will stand up on its hind legs when you threaten it.
Let's say you corner a giant anteater, they'll stand up on their hind legs and they have like wolverine claws on the front.
They use those for excavating termite mounds.
And they will open your guts.
Like they will slash you open if you corner them.
If you don't, they'll.
Have you ever seen somebody get mauled by one?
I've never seen anybody get mauled by one.
I've seen a dog get mauled by one.
A friend of mine was hunting.
He thought it was a taper and he was going around the stream bed.
His dogs ran ahead and he heard a yelp.
And when he got around, the anteater was holding one dog in its claws and it had grabbed it by the neck and had pinched the neck off.
And so the dog was dead.
And then the other dog ran up barking and he just right through the throat killed this dog.
And then so my friend, this guy, like lifted his rifle to try and shoot the anteater.
And this is like a Peruvian guy.
So he's like, you know, jungle guy.
He's not very tall.
And the anteater started walking towards him with claws out.
And he said the thing was looking at him straight in the face and he just threw his rifle and ran for it.
Oh, and it's like these things are monsters, dude.
They call them oso bandera gigante.
So it's.
Bear flag giant because it's just the flag for the tail, bear for the arms, and everything.
It's just like a composite animal.
Absolutely fast.
They're pretty fast, but again, they would never bother you.
I mean, look, I'm sleeping with them in a hammock.
They're sweethearts.
And she would, you know, she didn't have a mother, so she had to be hugging me the whole time.
And then I would eventually be like, I can't do anything because I got this anteater on me all the time.
So I'd lay down in a hammock, I'd fall asleep.
And then they have a tongue that's like a foot long.
And so she'd wake up and she'd be like, I want to play.
And so she'd take her tongue and she'd start firing her tongue up my nose and it would like come out my mouth.
Or then she'd fire at my ear and stuff, and it was like, just like, I was just like, have to take this anteater off of me.
And then she'd be like, No, I want to love you.
And she'd like grab onto me with the claws, and it would pinch right through my skin.
And so I was just like all ripped up, and I was like 19 years old, and taking care of this anteater was awesome.
But I also got to experience the forest from the perspective of an animal because everybody else went home, and I was like, I'm going to stay with this anteater.
So I was like going through the Amazon rainforest on my hands and knees.
Raising this baby giant anteater and so interacting with animals and trying to teach her how to find ants.
I had to basically become a mother anteater to this little thing and like raise her until the point that she could go back into the forest.
How long did you have the anterior for?
A few months.
A few months.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I missed a, that was the first time I missed a college semester because I was just like, you know, I went back to town for a resupply.
I called home and I went, Mom, Dad, I'm staying.
And at what point did you decide to let her go?
She started spending more time out in the bush and then she started coming back.
So, like, when you talk, when you're asking about JJ and like where he grew up, like, these little communities, like, with little, like, Palm thatched huts over the top and stuff like that.
Um, but yeah, these are all the old, all the old.
What the fuck happened to you here?
That was an antibiotic resistant MRSA infection all over your fucking face.
Yeah, that was bad.
I almost died from that one.
Holy shit.
How did that happen?
I don't know.
I went, I think I had dengue and then I went to the hospital in town to get tested and they were like, Yep, you have dengue.
I think while I was in town, you know, these hospitals, they have like cats and dogs running around.
Yeah.
Dead people on the floor.
Um, While I was in the hospital, I must have gotten this infection.
And then I went back out into the jungle and I kept going, it'll get better, it'll get better, it'll get better.
Until one day I woke up and my eyes were sealed shut from pus.
And I had all this green scoop leaking out of my face, everywhere on my body.
And for a whole day, I only saw them black and white.
And I had like a horrendous fever.
And then I wanted to get out of the jungle.
But at that time, there were no boats going down the river, it was the rainy season.
And so, for like three days, I was just by the side of a river, just like hoping there would be a boat.
And the first boat to come was this poaching boat.
And they had all these dead animals.
There was a dead mother spider monkey with the baby still alive, like holding onto the mother's body.
And I was just like laying in this pile of dead animals.
And I was practically a dead animal myself.
And there's flies all over me.
And I got to town and I called my parents and I just said, get me out of here as soon as possible.
And they got me on a flight.
And then, like, I had a hood up and I was like, I was like putting Vaseline all over my face because it hurts so much.
And on the flight home, somebody sat next to me and they looked over at me, and I just was like, and like the woman got up and left, and she must have talked to a stewardess because she never came back.
Oh, she must have gotten reseated.
And then I get to like immigration in New York, and the guy goes, Hey, how's it going?
He goes, You know, passport, passport, looks at my passport, and he goes, What were you doing in Peru?
He looks up at me, he goes, Buddy, what the fuck?
And I was like, I don't know.
I was like, I'm just trying to go to the doctor, man.
He goes, Holy shit.
He goes, He goes, He stamps the passport.
He goes, Go, go, go, go, please.
He was like, For the love of God.
He goes, God bless you.
He goes, I hope you're okay, man.
I went, Yeah.
I mean, you let me in the country looking like that?
Jesus.
You could have had Ebola virus for all this guy knew.
Like, I look at that.
That's fucked up.
That is fucked up.
Hold that up next to the microphone so we can see it.
Yeah.
This was me dying.
Oh, my Lord.
That is fucked.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was convinced at this point that I was not going to recover from that.
In my understanding, I was dying.
So, how do you catch something like that down there?
I mean, MRSA is a huge problem.
I mean, we're down there, it is everywhere, it is very common.
I mean, infections are constantly outpacing our ability to create new antibiotics for them.
It's a huge problem.
I think in the medical community, that's a huge problem in hospitals.
And so, yeah, some of the tree saps in the Amazon might be the answer to that because there's some compounds down there that just murder bacteria.
When you come up here, do you have any problems with immune systems or immunity or anything?
No, I've actually, I think I've gotten stronger.
Really?
Yeah.
I think I've gotten really, I think it's helped.
The only thing that happened was somehow in LA, I got typhoid.
And that just, I used to have a stomach, like I could eat like a dead cat off the side of the road and I'd be fine.
And like after typhoid, I lost like 30 pounds.
I was like dying.
And then I went to the doctor.
They're like, you have typhoid.
They put you on medicine for it and stuff.
But after that, my stomach has been a little bit more sensitive.
And like now, I can't, if I drink a glass of milk, it'll kill me.
Like not kill me, but like, you know, I'll feel like shit the rest of the day.
But that's the only change.
Other than that, I feel like the jungle has actually just made me so much stronger.
Typhoid And Steroids00:03:15
Well, I wonder what would happen to like one of the guys that has always lived down there if you brought him up here.
I wonder if like they would.
Have trouble kind of like adapting.
I don't think they'd like it.
No, they wouldn't like it.
Obviously, they wouldn't like the fucking culture, obviously.
But I'm wondering, like, as far as like adapting to like their immune system, adapting to living up here in this pollution, like the polluted air and the different food and shit.
Oh, man.
Taking one of those guys.
What would it do to him?
I want to.
Walking around with no shirt on, eating coconuts in the sun all day and then like put them through a New York winter.
They're not living by the ancestral tenants up here.
No.
No.
What do you think of that guy?
Oh, man.
That poor dude.
I mean, dude.
Look, you don't want anybody to not tell the truth, but at the same time, like, is any of these other people and what they're selling, are they real?
You know what I mean?
Like, is The Rock really not on steroids?
Right.
Is it was Lance Armstrong really not on steroids?
Does anybody for a second look at Liver King with that bloated giant six pack and go, natural?
No.
And now he's like, oh man, I really fucked up.
I'm so sorry.
It's like, bro, just keep doing what you're doing.
The problem is he went on like a thousand podcasts, and when they asked him right to his face, he said, never tried it, never will.
Never will.
It's like, all right, well, now we found your man.
He'll come back stronger from this, I'm sure.
Did you see the video he made, the response video?
I saw him going, I really messed up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I saw that.
He's like, I am on steroids.
I am on human growth.
The dude drinks like two liters of HGH a day.
Dude, he's explosive.
Like, he's sitting on podcasts.
He's literally like sitting there backwards, and like his abs are like a mountain range.
They don't look right.
They don't look right.
I mean, but he's hysterical, though.
I mean, like, there's a reason he blew up.
Like, he's whatever.
Could you imagine putting him in the rainforest?
Um, I and I, when he had like 400, the best collab when he had like 400 followers, I wrote to Liver King and I was like, Look, whatever you're doing, I was like, It seems like you like outdoor workouts, primal living.
I was like, Why don't you come piranha fishing with us?
And he was like, Hello, primal.
He was like, I would love to do that.
He's like, But are you on?
He goes, Are you on the liver train?
And I was like, What the fuck?
And he was like, Do you eat everything?
And I was like, I was like, Yeah, I was like, I ate a turtle yesterday with my, you know, when you're in the indigenous communities, you eat whatever they put on the table.
And he was like, Sounds great, primal.
I'll let you know.
So it's like I talked to him briefly in like DMs, but then he got super famous and then doesn't write back.
Yeah, yeah.
It was just, it was all just a business plan.
That's all it was.
It's a business plan.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, he's a, he's an internet, you know, whatever.
He's an influencer.
Yeah.
Who apparently was already rich before he made his millions and millions off of being Liver King.
Yeah.
That's what he said in his video.
He said, Yeah, I was rich and anonymous.
Now I'm rich and everyone knows me.
And it is, you know, when people, when everyone knows you and you're like a public figure and all that stuff, it's hard to, It's not good to lie because you're going to get caught in your fucking lie.
And the dude had no idea how to navigate that fucking thing.
The only thing I say is, like, when you look at these, like, Joel Olstein televangelist people that are like, you know, send us some money and Lord Jesus is going to bless you with blessings.
It's like, okay.
There you go.
You're not doing steroids, but you're promising people that you're going to fix their lives if they send you money.
Saving Our Biological Future00:14:04
Right.
Like, Scientology.
You got a direct line to God.
Yeah.
Come on.
Like, so, like, Liver King, they'll do a thing.
He'll apologize.
And then I'm sure everyone's going to be like, oh, poor Liver King.
And then.
They'll send him, you know, fucking, they'll send him more steroids and then he'll be okay.
Yeah, more people will end up buying his liver supplements and all of his bullshit.
He'll be fine.
I'm sure he'll be fine.
I'm not worried about Liver King.
Anything else we forgot to cover?
Fires.
The fires, dude.
Yeah.
What's going on with the fires?
How are they getting worse?
Are they getting better?
What's.
Yeah.
So the thing that people don't realize is that in 2019, my life changed a lot in 2019 because.
The fires were bad in 2019.
And what happened was outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Amazon fires were pluming up and there was black smoke and it covered the sun.
And people were taking pictures of this and it looked like the apocalypse.
So that made it onto the internet.
And then the internet was like, well, why is this happening?
Oh my God, because of the Amazon fires.
And then it got on the news.
And all of a sudden we had this hysteria over the Amazon fires in 2019.
And so I was, I had just gotten home from the Amazon and we'd been filming a documentary and I was just standing in a field filming on my phone.
Being like, this happens every fucking year.
You guys are burning down this stuff and we don't need to be letting this happen.
There's animals burning to death behind me.
And I said, Welcome to the fucking Anthropocene.
And it was the first time I'd ever cursed.
Welcome to the what?
The Anthropocene, the quaternary, tertiary.
Okay.
The Holocene was, I think, the last epoch that we were in.
And then now they're saying that we're in the period of the Anthropocene, where it's like millions of years from now, if they were to find this period on Earth, it would be defined by the layer of human stuff on Earth.
You know, in the fossil record.
And so I had this video, and when I saw the articles on the Amazon fires, I was like, this is so stupid.
It's like, it burns every year.
Why are people freaking out about it this year?
Yeah.
So I threw this video up on Instagram, and it was kind of like uncharacteristic because before that, it was always like beautiful pictures of the jungle.
And I remember because I took my phone and it was on like 100%, and I put it on the refrigerator and I went to bed.
Well, in the morning, I woke up and like stumbled out of bed, and my phone's on the floor.
I was like, that's weird.
I pick up my phone, it's on 1% battery, and there's 40,000 notifications from Instagram, and there's like all these missed calls.
And I was like, wait, I was like, what happened while I was asleep?
Phone call comes in, pick up the phone.
They go, Hi, is this Paul Rosie?
I said, Yeah, who's this?
And they're like, It's MSNBC.
And I was like, What?
And then that started.
And then as I'm on the phone with them, like CBS called.
And then as I'm on the phone with them, I was like, Guys, you got it, hold on.
And I was like, trying to find a charger.
It went viral overnight, and everyone shared it.
And then it started blowing up.
And then all of a sudden, I was on all these.
Interviews for the Amazon fires.
And then actually, what happened was then Joe Rogan shared it.
And then at that point, it like went mega viral.
And all of a sudden, we started getting all this support for the Amazon.
And then that's where really Jungle Keepers went from that we were like, we had a couple, we had like two rangers and we were protecting a little bit of forest.
And it's like, it connected us to the people that made it possible for us to protect.
Now we're protecting 50,000 acres of forest.
We have 15 rangers, we have numerous boats.
We have a real chance of protecting this entire watershed in the Amazon rainforest.
And so now it's like I'm trying to explain to people how you can use storytelling and social media to get the word out.
Because when you say, like, what can we do?
Like, is there a way of turning this around?
It's like, yes, but people have to know about it.
Yeah.
And so, like this year, the fires were almost just as bad.
I mean, I think it was one of the days in August was the worst day for burning in the Amazon in 15 years.
Really?
Yeah.
We were out there and horrendous, like 70 foot flames, freshly cut forest.
It was just burning.
Me and my friend Mosin were out there and like we were sent to document this.
And it was like we were just breathing in.
I mean, I couldn't walk for two weeks after that.
Like the very, very, very, very poor decision making in hindsight.
To walk into a forest fire with no lung protection.
Right.
I was hacking up black snot from my lungs for weeks after that.
But, and then it's at one point, at one point, we're in the fires and the Amazon is burning.
And I'm trying to like record video.
My phone all of a sudden does that thing where it goes, the phone is too hot.
You can't use it.
I get like that warning notice and I'm like, oh shit.
And so I'm like, I, I gotta get out of here.
And I'm like, holy shit, my skin is starting to burn.
And all of a sudden I hear, help.
And I go, where are my guys?
I was like, where is everybody?
And all of a sudden, I just see this huge wall of flame, and I start running and I hear help again.
I hear help, and I'm trying to find a way around, but everything's burning.
So it's like I had to go back around and then jump over some stuff.
And so, pretty much, I jump through a vertical wall of flames.
And as I'm running, I see my friend's multi-thousand-dollar professional camera laying in the ashes.
And I go, holy shit.
Like, I was like, this guy's dead.
And so, I pick up the camera, can't touch it, it's too hot.
And so, I threw it on the ground.
Just like just outside where the burning was, and I go and I see my friend Mosin, and he's on his hands and knees, and he's got his face in the ground.
I'm going, What is going on?
And he's just coughing and coughing.
There's a little bit of water, like a little puddle, and he just was putting his eyes in the puddle.
And then JJ comes out of the forest and he takes his shirt off, dips it into the floor of the rainforest, and like the forest is burning next to us.
But we just found a little bit of green, and he's squeezing it over Mosin's head.
He basically took one bad lungful of air.
And just went down and then just like got burnt, got blinded, and just ran for it, junked the camera.
And so we spent the rest of the day like trying to get him better.
And to his credit, he actually like stood up and was like, let's start filming again and like switched out his battery and was like, fuck it.
Like, oh my God.
And we just like had singed clothing and everything.
And it's like, you know, you come limping out of this horrendous apocalyptic thing and you try to tell the world what's happening because every year we're allowing this to happen.
And what are they going to do with that land?
They're going to make a papaya farm on it?
That particular farmer, who again, big bad destroyers of the Amazon, we went up to this guy.
We said, Are you burning your forest today?
He goes, Yup.
We went, Can we film it?
We couldn't stop him from doing it, but we said, Can we film it?
And he goes, I don't give a shit.
He goes, Be careful.
The flames went up.
And you see monkeys running for their lives.
There's, there's, cause, you know, animals hide in the tree trunks.
You see animals burning in the tree trunks and they try to come out and then they burn and they curl.
Absolute horrific, like devastation.
It was like watching the bombing of Dresden.
It was just, You're watching the most beautiful biological treasure on earth just get incinerated before your eyes.
And so, we were doing that in August.
And I've been just this week, you know, sharing videos of that burning and that footage, which I think is what led up to speaking at the biodiversity conference, which is just like, you don't, unless you're on the ground, you can't see what's happening.
You know what I mean?
If the news isn't covering it, it's not happening.
And so, like, that's why we feel like it's our duty to, you know, to the animals.
It's like, I've spent time living with, Herds of elephants.
I've spent time raising a giant anteater.
It's like these monkeys, these things.
It's like now we're responsible for millions and millions of heartbeats in this forest.
And so, when we see it burning like that, it's like there's no one else who's going to go do this.
There's no one else who's going to risk their lives, run into here, have probably permanent lung damage, but to have the ability to show people what's actually happening and then try to rally the support to say we can actually protect this.
And that's sort of, you know, from the old days, it's kind of interesting the way our conversation has gone because we covered it from the old days to now.
And it's like now it's like that's the job now.
The job is rallying enough.
If we can raise like $30 million, we can protect an entire tributary of the Amazon rainforest.
And so we just started this initiative because it doesn't work anymore.
It was funny because my cousin, my cousin actually, who's in the banking world, was like, What's your number?
And I was like, About 30 million to protect the whole rainforest.
And she's like, That's not that much.
And I was like, It's not that much.
It's a lot.
She goes, No.
She goes, Think.
She goes, That's 300,000 people giving a $100 donation.
And I went, That's not that much.
300,000 people, that's a few football stadiums.
Right.
I said, I could do that.
She goes, Well, get on it.
And then, so it's like, well, once you realize that you can do it, and once you realize that you're the only person equipped to do it, well, then you have to do it.
And it's like, you know, my life has been changed by these, you know, the local people and the communities that are in the Amazon and by JJ's wisdom and teachings and all these incredible species.
And it's like, we have the opportunity to protect this river, but we got to do it in the next few years.
We have to do it in the next two to three years before, because now the logging companies are being subcontracted by Chinese logging companies because they want, They want that Amazonian timber because they've used all their timber.
So now they want Amazonian timber.
Really?
And so the pace of deforestation is going up.
And so now the pace of what we're doing has gone up.
And so now it's like back in the day, it was like, I don't really know what I'm doing.
I've just came to the Amazon.
I like taking pictures and finding snakes and seeing cool wildlife.
And now it's like we've all just become jungle keepers and we've had all these people come onto the team.
And that's from, you know, from JJ to the guy Mosin, who's a conservation photographer.
We have this woman, Dina, who runs the ranger program.
And then after Rogan shared that clip, we ended up getting in touch with this Canadian billionaire named Dax De Silva, who he made his money in the tech industry on an app called Lightspeed, which is kind of like a Shopify type of thing.
It was going to be like the competitor's Shopify.
But then he decided that he's going to use his financial abilities to support conservation.
So he's supporting the Sea Shepherd, he's protecting land in Canada where he's from, he's protecting us in the Amazon.
In Africa.
And so everyone's always like, oh, why don't these rich people save the world?
It's like, well, he is.
Right.
He's killing it.
He's making so much conservation work possible.
And by doing it, by supporting the people on the ground, protecting untold numbers of endangered species and entire cultures of indigenous people that depend on these ecosystems to live.
And so there's really inspiring stuff happening.
And it's exciting being at the point where we can actually help that, which is also why I really appreciate you having me on here because it gives people the opportunity to learn about that because then they can.
They can donate to jungle keepers.
They can get the t shirt.
They can become a jungle keeper.
And then they can also come with us to the field, come visit the place that they're helping to protect.
It's not like a dream anymore.
It's like, no, no, no.
We're doing this.
We're actually creating a biological corridor between protected areas that's going to be something that is like a part of Earth heritage.
That's the level of biodiversity that we're talking about.
Well, that's fucking incredible, man.
It's an honor to have you on here to share these stories and to elaborate on what is going on down there and how people can help it.
Tell people exactly where they need to go to find you, where they can donate, what they need to do.
Yeah, you need to stop feeling bad about the environment.
No more environmental guilt.
Go to www.junglekeepers.org, donate a hundred bucks, and then get rid of your environmental guilt.
That's it.
You're helping a team of indigenous people and international experts protect an entire tributary of the Amazon.
Every single acre in this place is packed with spider monkeys and jaguars and harpy eagles and anacondas and all these species that we haven't discovered yet, undiscovered medicines.
And so, really, like most of us can afford that.
You know, for a lot of people, that's like your Starbucks bill for the month.
A hundred bucks is doable.
And then you're part of an organization that's actually doing something, action based.
Let's stop feeling bad about the environment going to hell.
Let's protect part of the Amazon.
Let's start there, a tangible win and save endangered species, stop the extinction crisis.
And then, I mean, it's like we're just building a family, we're building a network of support.
And so it's like we're past the point where it's a faraway issue that we can't do anything about.
It's like, no, no, no, that's the point of jungle keepers.
And the thing is, with big organizations, The website's fucking incredible, by the way.
Dude, the website.
So sick.
The footage that you have, especially from that documentary, that deep or that dark green documentary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stefan, if you're listening, our guy, Stefan, who's part of the team, he did that website for us.
Thereby proving that all web developers are assholes.
Because before that, it was like to get anything done with the website, they're like, yeah, it's going to be three weeks and like $7,000.
Yeah.
He's like, dude, I did all the pages.
I mean, instantly, because, you know, he just gets it done immediately.
He's so effective.
He's helped us so much.
But yeah, like when you donate to these big organizations, it's like, is it going to advertising?
Is it going to their corporate payroll?
Like, you don't know.
Like with Jungle Keepers, it's like, we're literally just a team of people in the Amazon protecting forests.