Danny Jones Podcast - #235 - The Amazon Jungle Saved My Life: Encounters with STRANGE Creatures | Harry Turner
Aired: 2024-04-26
Duration: 02:38:12


=== Suicide Attempt in the Amazon (07:10) ===

[00:00:07]  Your documentary is amazing.
[00:00:11]  It was, I love the way you give a really unique perspective on the Amazon and what you guys, you and that girl, what was her name again?
[00:00:21]  Sam?
[00:00:21]  Yeah.
[00:00:22]  What you guys were doing down there, rehabilitating those animals.
[00:00:26]  And, you know, after talking to Paul Rosalie about the Amazon, I had this like really dark, scary picture.
[00:00:35]  Of that place and like what it was.
[00:00:36]  But after watching yours, it was like, oh no, this place is nice.
[00:00:40]  It's not that scary.
[00:00:42]  It seemed kind of fun.
[00:00:43]  Yeah.
[00:00:44]  I don't know.
[00:00:44]  People kind of make their own decisions on how it is.
[00:00:49]  And if you haven't been there, it's kind of hard to kind of read other people's kind of ideas of it.
[00:00:54]  Like it is hard, it is scary.
[00:00:56]  It can be this mean and ferocious and vicious place, whether you're struggling with mental health or whether you're struggling with.
[00:01:07]  Leishmaniasis or dengue or malaria, you know, like any of these things that can make the jungle awful, but at the same time, it can be one of the most incredible experiences that you ever, you know, have.
[00:01:22]  And I remember being kind of scared before I went down there.
[00:01:28]  I was like 20, coming on 21 when I first went down there.
[00:01:34]  I kind of went down there for a reason I went down there to commit suicide.
[00:01:39]  And I ended up just like falling in love with the place.
[00:01:44]  But, you know, prior to that, I was thinking, like, damn, like, I don't know anything about this place.
[00:01:49]  And you hear all these things about, you know, dangerous people, loggers, miners, all these things, you know, and, you know, and they are dangerous, don't get me wrong.
[00:02:00]  But, like, once you're there and you wake up to the howler monkeys and the birds, and you can kind of, like, I don't know, bathe in the sunlight through the canopy and just, like, You can close your eyes and be barefoot and just feel so peaceful.
[00:02:18]  But at the same time, you know it's a dangerous place.
[00:02:21]  And I think that, you know, depending on who you speak to, they'll tell you many, many different things.
[00:02:27]  But if you've spent a lot of time down there, you'll find the beauty in it 100%.
[00:02:32]  So we should let people know right up front about your documentary, Wildcat, that won an Emmy.
[00:02:38]  That's correct.
[00:02:39]  And what year did that movie get released, what, two years ago?
[00:02:43]  That's correct.
[00:02:44]  Yeah.
[00:02:44]  So I had been filming it for.
[00:02:48]  Well, to start off, I didn't film anything for a documentary.
[00:02:51]  I was just filming because I was young.
[00:02:55]  I was walking with these wild cats.
[00:02:57]  I was struggling with my mental health.
[00:02:59]  And I thought, you know, if I do make it out of this place alive, I want to have some memories to show potential children in the future.
[00:03:07]  I want to have some footage to show my family when I get home, if I go home, if I get home.
[00:03:14]  And I was filming all these things because I was like, man, like, I don't know anyone that's, you know, my age who I went to school with who's doing this.
[00:03:21]  Like, this is just.
[00:03:22]  Crazy.
[00:03:23]  And I was like writing down diaries of everything that I'd done that day.
[00:03:27]  Like, you know, I woke up at this time and I went to, you know, check the boat and I went to go do this.
[00:03:35]  And, you know, then I went out with the ocelot and then I, you know, caught a lizard and I fed this, you know, lizard to him.
[00:03:41]  And I was just, you know, documenting whatever I could because I was like, this is really cool.
[00:03:46]  Like, nobody apart from me has ever reintroduced an ocelot into the wild.
[00:03:54]  And documented it.
[00:03:55]  There could have been people, you know, native people who have, you know, hunted an ocelot and they found the kittens and they were like, yeah, whatever, we'll just like raise it and let it go back out into the wild.
[00:04:06]  But no one's ever documented it.
[00:04:07]  So I'm the first person in the world to do that.
[00:04:11]  And so, of course, I wanted to, you know, document it.
[00:04:14]  And I just continued to do this and continued and continued.
[00:04:17]  And after years and years and years of just collecting footage and collecting hard drives worth of stuff, had enough stuff to.
[00:04:26]  Make a documentary.
[00:04:28]  And yeah, and apparently that was enough footage to win an Emmy.
[00:04:36]  Did a film crew ever come down and film with you guys?
[00:04:39]  I mean, a lot of the footage is just self shot, right?
[00:04:43]  I could tell that you filmed it on, I don't know, a GoPro or something like that.
[00:04:47]  But at what point did a film crew come down and start following you guys around?
[00:04:52]  Yeah, so about 75% of the film is actually just filmed by me.
[00:04:57]  And.
[00:04:58]  A film crew kind of came down after the first Ocelot, and there's actually a previous guest of yours, Paul Rosalie.
[00:05:07]  He introduced me to a guy called Trevor, and he was a Nat Geo photographer, and you know, all these things.
[00:05:17]  Paul was like, Show some stuff to Trevor, and I was like, You know what?
[00:05:21]  I don't really care.
[00:05:22]  Like, I'm this is my footage, you know, it is what it is, yeah.
[00:05:26]  And then I Basically, it was just like, yeah, okay, all right, I'll show, you know, some footage.
[00:05:33]  And I showed him some stuff of like Khan killing the caiman and all these things.
[00:05:37]  And he was like, this is really good.
[00:05:41]  Like, we need to make something out of this, you know, for whatever reason, we just need to do it.
[00:05:47]  And then, yeah, it was just like about a month after we were about to like plan to do something, the second ocelot came into my life.
[00:05:57]  And it was like, send me down a bunch of stuff and I'll film because I, you know, lived there for years and years.
[00:06:04]  And the film crew would come down every now and again and they would kind of get like snippets and they would do like update interviews and they would do all these other bits and pieces that were important for the film.
[00:06:13]  But they were never really like 100% there.
[00:06:18]  You know, they'd come forward and backwards and they'd bring hard drives and we'd back things up three or four times because humidity can kill anything in the jungle.
[00:06:27]  Yeah.
[00:06:28]  And yeah, and then that's how we got into making the documentary.
[00:06:33]  Did you meet Paul down there?
[00:06:35]  Yeah, so actually, one of my first trips, I was down there and he was doing a tour with Tamandua.
[00:06:42]  I was with another group called Fauna Forever.
[00:06:45]  I just, you know, gone down there to help for a month with reptiles and amphibian surveys.
[00:06:50]  And I remember seeing this dude.
[00:06:52]  I didn't know who he was at the time.
[00:06:54]  And he was just an absolute asshole.
[00:06:57]  And I was like, oh my God, who the f is this dude?
[00:07:00]  Like walking around with his top off, like doing press ups and like chin ups in the trees.
[00:07:04]  And I was like, what?
[00:07:05]  And.
[00:07:06]  He didn't say a single word to any of us.
[00:07:08]  I think the only thing he liked, he just dead eyed stared at us.
[00:07:11]  And it was because there was a mix up between the two companies.
[00:07:14]  He was meant to do his tour there.

=== Meeting Paul Rosalie (16:18) ===

[00:07:17]  We were meant to have moved out, you know, and I didn't know any of this.
[00:07:19]  I was, I'd just gone down there to volunteer.
[00:07:21]  So he was angry at the organization, but not individuals.
[00:07:26]  Then when I went down there the second time, you know, I'd had this epiphany my first trip that I was like, I don't want to die anymore.
[00:07:37]  I love this place.
[00:07:38]  This is really incredible.
[00:07:39]  I love the jungle.
[00:07:40]  What can I do to help this?
[00:07:41]  So I went home, I sold absolutely everything that I could, my car, you know, everything, and came back and basically worked and volunteered with this other group.
[00:07:53]  And I met Paul again during that.
[00:07:56]  And I was like, yeah, I met you that first time.
[00:07:57]  He goes, oh, sorry, I was such an asshole.
[00:07:59]  Like, I didn't really mean to, I was mad at the organization.
[00:08:03]  I wasn't mad at you guys.
[00:08:04]  And I was like, yeah, you know, like, it's what it is.
[00:08:07]  And then, yeah, like, for the, you know, duration of my time on Las Piedras, I, you know, would see him quite regularly.
[00:08:16]  That was amazing.
[00:08:17]  Yeah.
[00:08:18]  So, going back to the first time you went down there, What can you explain, like, what was going on in your life, like, before you decided to go down there?
[00:08:30]  And what made you want to join the military?
[00:08:34]  And how did that all play out?
[00:08:35]  Yeah, so I was born into a military household.
[00:08:40]  My dad was in the Navy, he was a chief petty officer.
[00:08:43]  He served 12 years.
[00:08:47]  And so, you know, I was always bouncing about from, you know, place to place, barrack to barrack.
[00:08:54]  I guess that was just kind of like installed into me.
[00:08:56]  My great uncles were in the military.
[00:09:00]  My granddad was in the fire service.
[00:09:02]  So everyone has always been, you know, kind of either like a first responder or a military person.
[00:09:09]  And my dad had come in.
[00:09:10]  Like, my dad's very, like, he's not disciplined to a point of where it's like, you know, scary, but he's like disciplined to the point of where it's like you don't want to like do anything wrong or you don't want to like, you know, cross boundaries with him because, you know, You've got to be respectful that this is his house and I'm living under it rent free, and you know, all these things.
[00:09:31]  And so I was sat on my bed one day, like listening to some music.
[00:09:36]  And my dad came in and he was like, You're going to be 18 soon.
[00:09:41]  Like, what, you know, what are you going to do with your life?
[00:09:44]  And I was like, I don't know.
[00:09:48]  You know, at this point, I'm just skateboarding, smoking weed, and working at like some restaurants.
[00:09:53]  And, you know, I'm just like earning a little bit of cash here and there just to pay for some weed.
[00:09:59]  And uh, some skate trips, and that's about it, that's about enough.
[00:10:03]  And um, he was like, I'm not like joking about here, but like, why don't you join the navy?
[00:10:08]  And I was like, I'm not gay, I'm not joining the navy, I'm not gonna be like stuck on a submarine with like so many blokes with nowhere to go.
[00:10:17]  I was like, you've done that, like, and you know, we had a laugh about it, and uh, we joked about it.
[00:10:23]  And um, he was like, but no, in all seriousness, like, I didn't know what to do when I was younger, so um.
[00:10:30]  And, you know, my dad spent a while actually trying to get into the Navy.
[00:10:33]  He kept failing some of his tests because he wasn't, you know, like clever enough or smart enough to, like, pass these initial first tests, what you have to pass to get into becoming an officer.
[00:10:45]  Right.
[00:10:48]  And, yeah, and he was like, well, just think about it.
[00:10:51]  And I was like, okay, so I'm a mama's boy, right?
[00:10:54]  I didn't really listen to my dad much, but I'd go and speak to my mum.
[00:10:58]  So afterwards, I was like, Mom, like, dad spoke to me about this.
[00:11:02]  I don't know.
[00:11:03]  She's like, You don't have to do that.
[00:11:04]  Like, that's fine.
[00:11:05]  You can, you know, do whatever you want, but like, it's a route that you could go.
[00:11:11]  And it doesn't have to be the Navy.
[00:11:13]  You could join the Air Force.
[00:11:14]  You can join the Army, like, whatever, Marines.
[00:11:16]  You can do whatever.
[00:11:18]  So I thought about it and I was like, Do you mind coming with me to like take me to the Army kind of like sign up place and just like talk to them?
[00:11:27]  Because I know I'm good at a few things.
[00:11:30]  I'm good at being on time, I'm good at running.
[00:11:34]  And I'm good at just being like this person, which, you know, just is adventurous.
[00:11:42]  When I was younger, I used to like run away from home to like climb trees and like, you know, there's not much to do in England, but I would always find a way to get outside.
[00:11:51]  Always find a way to go to the local park and find snakes and find frogs.
[00:11:56]  And, you know, I caught this like crazy spider, which was, you know, not meant to be in the area and all these things.
[00:12:03]  And I would like always do this research.
[00:12:04]  And my grandparents were always kind of like recording things on VHS for me.
[00:12:09]  And I'd like go around and watch like Komodo dragons in like Indonesia.
[00:12:12]  And I was like driven to be outside, you know.
[00:12:15]  And I was like, if I do join the army, maybe I'll spend way more time outside and I'll get paid for it.
[00:12:22]  So I went to the recruitment center and I spoke to them.
[00:12:25]  You know, they want to recruit anyone.
[00:12:27]  I looked like I was, you know, 12 years old.
[00:12:29]  And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:12:30]  You know, like it's perfect, you know, child labor, basically.
[00:12:34]  So I was 17 at the time.
[00:12:36]  What year was it?
[00:12:38]  This was in 2010.
[00:12:40]  Okay.
[00:12:41]  Yeah, 2010, 2011.
[00:12:42]  Okay.
[00:12:44]  And they said, you've got to do this barb test, then you've got to go do these, you know, physical tests, and then, you know, we'll, you know, see what you're able to do and you can go off and do whatever you want.
[00:12:54]  So I did the barb test and I honestly, like out of a hundred and something jobs, I could have done like 85 of them, you know.
[00:13:01]  And I hated school.
[00:13:03]  I hated any of that.
[00:13:04]  I was never good at any of them things.
[00:13:05]  So for me to be like way above board on all these things, I was like, damn, like I actually could be good at this.
[00:13:13]  Like this is crazy.
[00:13:15]  There was dog trainer, there was, you know, medic, there were, you know, all these things, mechanic.
[00:13:21]  Obviously, I chose infantry because.
[00:13:25]  I was naive to the fact that, you know, war was this horrible.
[00:13:30]  You know, I was just naive.
[00:13:32]  I was 17.
[00:13:35]  I did all my tests.
[00:13:36]  I turned 18.
[00:13:37]  Two days later, I went to Catterick, ITC Catterick, which is up north in England, and I spent six months doing basic training there.
[00:13:46]  It was some of the most brutal training I've ever done.
[00:13:50]  You know, and I was young and I was fit and I could do all these things, but the intensity and the.
[00:13:56]  Mental break you down to build you up again, and the you know, everything that was going on, it was absolutely brutal.
[00:14:04]  Like, I could definitely do it again, don't get me wrong, but it was mentally so taxing.
[00:14:12]  It was really, really hard.
[00:14:14]  What kind of stuff did the guys have you doing?
[00:14:17]  It was, you know, up at five in the morning, going to bed at like one o'clock every night.
[00:14:21]  You would, you know, make everything as neat as possible.
[00:14:25]  You would do your bed, they would come in at like six in the morning and absolutely just trash everything.
[00:14:31]  Every day.
[00:14:32]  And if someone was, you know, doing something wrong, they would stand there and we would get completely beasted.
[00:14:39]  Like it would be like two in the morning.
[00:14:40]  It would be running hills in like minus two, you know, Celsius.
[00:14:45]  And it was like, it was like just six months of just horrible, brutal shit.
[00:14:53]  And I was, I, you know, I did my passing out parade.
[00:14:56]  I, you know, completed it.
[00:14:57]  I was, I won an award actually for best fitness because.
[00:15:04]  I even though I was small, even though like I'm not a big person, I have this like drive in me to just be the best that I can when I'm like doing something physical.
[00:15:16]  And I got to a point where they realized how good I was at running and how good I was at carrying like my own weight and running, that I would be the one in charge of the person that was slow at the back, and I would have to carry them with their weight and my weight, and I'd have to run.
[00:15:33]  And I Would do miles and miles like carrying these people, and it was physically very, very demanding.
[00:15:44]  Passed out.
[00:15:45]  I did my, you know, six months.
[00:15:47]  I did all that.
[00:15:48]  And I, you know, I was going to my battalion.
[00:15:52]  And when I got to my battalion, I just saw these buses leaving.
[00:15:58]  And I was like, what the f- where is everybody?
[00:16:02]  Well, they were already on their way to Afghanistan.
[00:16:05]  And I couldn't go to Afghanistan yet because I had to do like a week's or two weeks' worth of like.
[00:16:14]  Desert training.
[00:16:15]  So I had done all this training for the six months in my recruitment, but that was for like cold warfare.
[00:16:28]  I then had to do all this training of like, you know, sweeping for IEDs and all these different things in like a hotter setting in my mind.
[00:16:37]  So I did two weeks of that and then they flew me to Afghanistan.
[00:16:40]  So now this is, I mean, forgive me because I don't know the names of all the different divisions of military in England.
[00:16:47]  So, like, what is it?
[00:16:48]  What is the proper name of the division of the military that you're in?
[00:16:51]  Well, I was in the British infantry, the Royal Anglian Regiment.
[00:16:57]  Okay.
[00:16:58]  And so I, yeah, I had, you know, completed my training, which was a training of basically a whole variety of different things to then go to my battalion.
[00:17:09]  And the battalion was the one which was my infantry regiment.
[00:17:13]  And that's the one I was going to be serving with.
[00:17:15]  Really?
[00:17:16]  So, how many, how many, uh, English troops were in Afghanistan?
[00:17:22]  Throughout the years, I couldn't tell you.
[00:17:25]  There was a lot though.
[00:17:26]  Really?
[00:17:28]  See, when I always thought about those wars, I always thought it was just American troops.
[00:17:32]  I didn't realize that a bunch of our allies sent boots on the ground there too.
[00:17:37]  Maybe I'm just a little bit.
[00:17:38]  I worked with American soldiers on the ground.
[00:17:41]  So I actually went to Afghanistan as a battle casualty replacement.
[00:17:46]  So I went to fill the boots of someone who was either injured or dead.
[00:17:51]  And when I went there, I was this 18 year old boy, one of the youngest to ever go to Afghanistan.
[00:18:02]  And I was there, dropped off in the middle of nowhere, basically, as a battle casualty replacement to then just join this, you know, family of brothers.
[00:18:14]  I didn't know a single one of them because I had my military training ended as they were leaving.
[00:18:21]  So I didn't know who I was meant to, who was going to have my back.
[00:18:24]  They didn't know if I was going to have their back.
[00:18:26]  They had no idea who I was.
[00:18:28]  I was this like black sheep, like I was this outcast.
[00:18:31]  And it was as an 18 year old kid going to Afghanistan, one, not knowing if you're ever going to see your family again.
[00:18:38]  And then two, joining this, you know, brotherhood, but you're not a brother was, was, that was hard.
[00:18:49]  And then within the first five days, I saw someone get shot in the head.
[00:18:52]  And I was just like, what am I doing here?
[00:18:55]  Like, I.
[00:18:57]  I was holding this guy's hand and I was just like talking to him.
[00:19:02]  And he was an Afghani soldier, but he was working with us as like a translator, holding his hand.
[00:19:07]  And I was like, Are you okay?
[00:19:08]  Like, and he was talking to me, but you could, you, you, I couldn't even like replicate it because it was just mumble jumble.
[00:19:16]  Like, he was dead, but he was still living.
[00:19:21]  His brain was completely gone because he'd been shot in the head, but he was still holding my hand and he was still trying to talk to me and he was still alive.
[00:19:31]  But I knew that he wasn't there.
[00:19:33]  His soul was leaving.
[00:19:35]  And I just remember kind of like sitting back and being like, what am I doing here?
[00:19:42]  Why did I?
[00:19:42]  I had all of these jobs that I could have chosen, and I chose infantry.
[00:19:47]  Why did I choose infantry?
[00:19:50]  And I just remember, like, I went to the bathrooms, like, there were these big shower blocks, and they're basically like shoe shipping containers.
[00:19:58]  And I remember going in there and sitting on the toilet, and it just stinks of shit.
[00:20:02]  And it's just, like, so hot in there because it's, like, it's hot.
[00:20:07]  It was, you know, in Fahrenheit, I think it was like 110, 115.
[00:20:15]  That was outside, inside the shipping container, it was even hotter.
[00:20:18]  And so I'm sitting there just dripping with sweat.
[00:20:20]  But I'd just seen someone die, you know, and I was just like, I couldn't, I couldn't like place myself.
[00:20:28]  I was just like, what the, like, what am I doing here?
[00:20:30]  I just remember sitting there thinking, like, my friends are at home just having beers and chilling out, you know?
[00:20:37]  It's like, why am I here?
[00:20:41]  I just, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't figure out what led me to this point.
[00:20:47]  And then I did another, you know, so my tour was six months long.
[00:20:51]  I then, you know, I saw some horrible stuff and.
[00:20:55]  What kind of things were you doing?
[00:20:57]  Like, what kind of tasks were you doing?
[00:20:58]  Yeah, so I worked with the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army.
[00:21:02]  And my job there was to teach these people how to run their police and army better so that when the British and the US troops left Afghanistan, they were able to kind of like do their job without the assistance of, you know, Obviously, that didn't really work.
[00:21:23]  And it's sad, you know, because like I was training these troops to, you know, do these different things which were going to help their country.
[00:21:36]  And at one point, I was doing like weapons training and we had AK 47s and we were on the range.
[00:21:43]  This guy turns around, points the AK right in my head.
[00:21:47]  And starts talking, and the translator's like, Whoa, like, calm down.
[00:21:53]  And, you know, I was just like, I'm dead.
[00:21:56]  I'm going to die.
[00:21:57]  And what had happened is they had recruited someone who was Taliban.
[00:22:04]  And so we're training these people how to run their army and police, but we're training the enemy.
[00:22:10]  So now the enemy knows all of the freaking tactics that we're meant to be training them.
[00:22:15]  It was chaos.
[00:22:17]  How did what?
[00:22:18]  And he pointed the gun at your head.
[00:22:19]  Then what happened?
[00:22:20]  Translator kind of.
[00:22:21]  Told you know, hey, like he has nothing to do with this.
[00:22:24]  I don't know what they said because you know they were talking in different tongues, and I was just like, once again, what the am I doing here?
[00:22:36]  Like, I'm 18 years old, I am being put in situations which are just chaos.
[00:22:43]  Nobody knew what they were doing, right?
[00:22:45]  Nobody was doing anything correctly.
[00:22:48]  We were going out, there was uh casualties all the time, that there was you know.
[00:22:55]  And it was collateral damage.
[00:22:56]  It was people doing things and, you know, innocent people.
[00:23:02]  Exactly.
[00:23:02]  I can't tell you the amount of dead children I saw.
[00:23:06]  And that is one of the things which haunts me the most.
[00:23:09]  And it's one of the things which caused me to have the most severest PTSD that I've ever been through.
[00:23:16]  And it's the reason why I went to the jungle to commit suicide because I couldn't face the fact that I had been a part of a huge genocide.
[00:23:26]  Even though, you know, I didn't, even though I didn't kill thousands and thousands of people, I was part of that.

=== Survivor's Guilt and PTSD (04:25) ===

[00:23:35]  I was part of the British Army and I was working with the US Army and I was doing horrible things to potentially try and make this country better.
[00:23:48]  And I've spoken to people in different countries.
[00:23:52]  I've spoken to Afghanis.
[00:23:54]  I've spoken to a lot of people.
[00:23:56]  And there's actually an operation called Operation Snow Leopard that I've helped volunteer with, and they bring Afghan nationals to the US who are seeking a better life.
[00:24:09]  This last year, I think I spent like $600 on this family who came over and they had nothing.
[00:24:16]  I went and bought them all brand new clothes.
[00:24:17]  They had a brand new baby.
[00:24:18]  I bought them brand new baby clothes because they had nothing.
[00:24:21]  And I think it's survivor's guilt.
[00:24:24]  I really do.
[00:24:26]  But I wanted to do something to help them.
[00:24:29]  And when I spoke to him, I said, Look, I'm going to be straight up and honest with you right now.
[00:24:34]  I went to Afghanistan and I was in Ob Herrick 16, you know, in 2012.
[00:24:39]  And the Afghani man said to me, he was like, It's not your fault.
[00:24:45]  You were there trying to do your job, but our country was not able to accept the help.
[00:24:53]  And that made me feel a lot better, you know, because he knew that his country was messing up this opportunity to seek help.
[00:25:05]  But then again, if you look at it on the other hand, like I don't judge anybody really, but.
[00:25:11]  You look at it on the other hand, if a country came over to my country, whether it be in the UK where I used to live or the US now where I live, and they were driving tanks through places, they'd killed my uncle, they'd done all these horrible things.
[00:25:30]  You'd probably be putting bombs on bridges too.
[00:25:32]  Right, exactly.
[00:25:34]  I would be mad if someone killed my uncle or if someone killed my mom or dad or my sister.
[00:25:41]  I'm not saying that the US or the UK.
[00:25:44]  Military did that.
[00:25:45]  But what I'm saying is that there have been bad people and there have been bad things happen in the British and the US military overseas.
[00:25:57]  This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Verso.
[00:26:00]  Have you ever tried fasting or intermittent fasting?
[00:26:02]  If so, you may be aware of the sizzling energy and mental clarity that you get if you do it long enough.
[00:26:08]  The scientific data validating the health benefits from fasting for weight loss is overwhelming.
[00:26:13]  But what doesn't get talked about enough is the longevity benefits you get from fasting.
[00:26:16]  When you fast, your body turns on all its defense mechanisms to help your body hunker down to fight off illness and disease.
[00:26:23]  But the problem is, it takes three days of starving yourself to activate this process.
[00:26:28]  Scientists like David Sinclair have recently discovered molecules to help your body turn on this process without having to fast.
[00:26:34]  If you've ever heard this podcast before, you've heard me talk about Verso many times.
[00:26:38]  And I've had world renowned nutritional scientists like Dominic D'Agostino on the show, who was the guy who actually introduced me to Verso.
[00:26:44]  And I've been taking it every day for the last three years.
[00:26:47]  Cell being is always the first thing I take in the morning after dragging my carcass into the kitchen.
[00:26:51]  Which wakes me up and gives me energy.
[00:26:53]  I even use it for pre workout.
[00:26:54]  And Clean Being is the product I use every night before bed.
[00:26:58]  After taking Clean Being for some time now, I have actually noticed a huge improvement in not only my hormone regulation, but my vision has improved.
[00:27:06]  I know it sounds insane, but this stuff actually can improve your vision.
[00:27:11]  My lipid regulation has gotten better.
[00:27:13]  And another huge thing is all of a sudden, I don't get affected by all the pollen in the air, I don't have any of these reactions.
[00:27:20]  And Clean Being has actually been scientifically.
[00:27:22]  Proven to alleviate these things.
[00:27:24]  Other clinical trials have proven healthier skin, less inflammation, healthier hair, lipid regulation, enhanced cognitive function, and improved metabolism.
[00:27:33]  On top of that, Verso always publishes third party testing on each batch produced to guarantee you're getting exactly what you pay for.
[00:27:40]  So if you want to check out Verso and support this podcast at the same time, go to ver.so forward slash Danny and use the coupon code Danny at checkout for 15% off your first order.
[00:27:52]  Again, it's ver.so forward slash D A N N Y and use the code Danny at checkout.
[00:27:57]  It's linked below.
[00:27:58]  Now back to the show.

=== Verso Sponsorship Announcement (15:14) ===

[00:28:00]  I would be mad, you know?
[00:28:03]  I would be.
[00:28:03]  Well, for sure, innocent people died.
[00:28:05]  Yes.
[00:28:05]  And for sure, people died.
[00:28:06]  People lost their loved ones.
[00:28:07]  Yes.
[00:28:08]  And kids lost both their parents.
[00:28:11]  And what happens to those kids when they grow up?
[00:28:14]  Like, how, what is their view on America?
[00:28:17]  And what is their view on the UK after they come after this huge army comes in with all these tanks and airplanes and weapons and your fucking family dies?
[00:28:27]  Now you're all alone.
[00:28:28]  And it's not just over the last, you know, 20, 30 years.
[00:28:31]  This is over centuries.
[00:28:32]  You know, the British army were there and, you know, I can't remember the exact dates, but they were there hundreds of years ago.
[00:28:39]  I was actually in a forward operating base called Shorecap, and there were like these, you know, it's this really cool place, you know, 400 people could live there, and they had in the center like this huge rockery.
[00:28:55]  It was this huge, you know, mound of rocks, and it was really cool.
[00:28:59]  And inside, you know, there were these caves, and the bats every night would come flying out of it.
[00:29:06]  On duty, I would sit there, you know, and just watch the bats and the birds fly in and out of them caves.
[00:29:13]  And I remember thinking, like, that cave isn't natural.
[00:29:16]  Like, where is that cave from?
[00:29:18]  And I went and spoke to somebody, and they said, yeah, like, back in the day, the British military came here and they'd use these places to sleep at night.
[00:29:27]  And I was like, well, you know, being 18 as well, I had no idea that they were there hundreds of years ago, but they were there killing innocent people again.
[00:29:37]  And it's like, if you are brought up in a country where foreigners have come over and they have killed your family and killed your loved ones and caused you madness, are you going to love them and you're going to respect them?
[00:29:48]  And are you going to, if you can, get into their kind of like Afghan National Army and police and try and, you know.
[00:29:54]  Yeah, it's got to make it hard to progress and develop as a culture and a society when that keeps happening to you.
[00:30:02]  Yeah, definitely.
[00:30:05]  Yeah, and I left Afghanistan and.
[00:30:08]  I just remember thinking that I had failed in what I'd set out to do.
[00:30:13]  And I didn't set out to do anything really.
[00:30:15]  I'd set out to go and serve my country and I'd set out to try and change another country.
[00:30:23]  I've always seen the world as this like.
[00:30:25]  Did you ever feel any sense of purpose or mission when you were there?
[00:30:31]  Or did you just kind of feel like you never really got your.
[00:30:34]  Never really figured out.
[00:30:37]  Like, did you ever feel like you were a part of.
[00:30:41]  That group or that brotherhood when you finally got there and spent some time there?
[00:30:45]  And did you ever have any kind of like drive or motivation to get this done or, you know, get this mission completed and save these people or whatever it might be?
[00:30:56]  Or was it all just kind of like a whirlwind of you questioning everything?
[00:31:02]  Feel is a hard word because I honestly don't think I felt anything when I was there.
[00:31:07]  I didn't cry the whole time I was there, even after seeing, you know, People die and missing family and all the and not knowing if I was ever going to make it.
[00:31:16]  I didn't cry once.
[00:31:20]  I did feel like I became part of the brotherhood because after some time, after some time, you know, you're spending every single day with one another.
[00:31:32]  You're seeing guys 24 7.
[00:31:35]  You're walking with them 24 7.
[00:31:37]  You're making sure that they've got water.
[00:31:39]  You're making sure that they've eaten.
[00:31:41]  You're making sure they're all right.
[00:31:42]  You're making sure they're showering.
[00:31:44]  I had this one dude that slept next to me, he fucking stunk.
[00:31:47]  The guy just never.
[00:31:49]  Afghanistan guy?
[00:31:50]  No, no, no.
[00:31:51]  He was a British guy.
[00:31:52]  Nasty dude.
[00:31:54]  But he stunk.
[00:31:56]  And I was like, look, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, like, I don't know what you're going through.
[00:32:02]  He'd already done a tour as well.
[00:32:03]  He'd done one tour before me as well.
[00:32:05]  So I can't judge him.
[00:32:07]  I don't know what he's dealing with.
[00:32:08]  But I was like, look, dude, you are making this fucking tent stink.
[00:32:13]  And we need to be hygienic in this place.
[00:32:16]  Like, this is one of the, this is our safe space.
[00:32:19]  When we're out there, you can stink all you want.
[00:32:21]  But when you're in here, we need to be clean.
[00:32:23]  We need So, after I'd kind of like put across, like, I'm not this guy that's just going to come in and be a burden.
[00:32:33]  I'm this guy that's going to come in, and yeah, I do look young and yeah, I do look innocent, but I've got a head on my shoulders.
[00:32:39]  I'm going to try to help you out where I can.
[00:32:41]  I'm not saying I didn't fuck, I fucked up a few times, you know, but I was 18.
[00:32:45]  It's trial and error.
[00:32:46]  I'm in a new country, I'm in a new place.
[00:32:48]  I don't know what I'm doing.
[00:32:49]  I'd spent the last six months of my 18 years, you know, of life.
[00:32:55]  Learning a different terrain.
[00:32:57]  And then I come to this desert and I'm like, what am I doing?
[00:33:00]  You know, this is crazy.
[00:33:03]  And I think the reason why my PTSD really, really hit was because during my 18th birthday and, you know, doing my tour and all of these different things and turning 19 and doing, I didn't stop for a minute.
[00:33:19]  I was constantly on the go, constantly.
[00:33:21]  Like I celebrated my 18th.
[00:33:24]  I got absolutely obliterated.
[00:33:26]  I went to, Training, I did my six months of training.
[00:33:29]  I went to my battalion, they did two weeks.
[00:33:31]  I went to Afghanistan, I did six months.
[00:33:33]  I went to my barracks afterwards.
[00:33:35]  And then, you know, we had RR and we were just like rest and recovery.
[00:33:40]  And we didn't do anything, we stopped.
[00:33:44]  And then when it was like, you know, get on parade, you know, we're all dressed up and we're, you know, we're in a parade.
[00:33:51]  And yeah, we don't have anything for you today.
[00:33:54]  So just go back to your rooms, play your PlayStation.
[00:33:57]  I'm not a gamer.
[00:33:58]  I'm not all these types of things, you know.
[00:33:59]  So I went back to my room and I just sat there.
[00:34:02]  And I was like, what?
[00:34:04]  Like, how am I meant to process what I've just done for the last 18 months when I'm just, you know, not doing anything?
[00:34:14]  I started drinking heavily.
[00:34:16]  I would wake up and drink vodka.
[00:34:18]  I'd go to bed, drink vodka.
[00:34:19]  You know, like I was drinking heavily because I didn't know how to deal with it.
[00:34:25]  I hadn't been taught how to deal with it.
[00:34:27]  I was struggling with the things that I had done.
[00:34:31]  I was struggling with the things that I was.
[00:34:35]  Battling in my own head.
[00:34:38]  And I then got medically discharged.
[00:34:41]  They said it was recurrent depression.
[00:34:45]  I went to a specialist after I actually got discharged, and they were like, No, I've seen this time and time and time again.
[00:34:51]  You have PTSD, but if the military discharge you with PTSD, they have to pay you out.
[00:34:57]  If they discharge you with recurrent depression, they don't have to pay you any money.
[00:35:04]  And so I was like, Okay, like, The British Army has just, you know, fucked me over again.
[00:35:11]  Pull the old one, two on you.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:14]  And I just, I was just lost.
[00:35:17]  I was so lost.
[00:35:18]  How many guys that you were with down there really wanted to be there?
[00:35:23]  And how many of them were kind of like you?
[00:35:26]  It's a good question.
[00:35:27]  I think I'm a very sensitive human.
[00:35:31]  So not many people were like me.
[00:35:35]  I would say there was a lot of people that wanted to be there, there was a lot of people that wanted to kill.
[00:35:40]  There was a lot of messed up humans that.
[00:35:44]  Younger guys or older guys, or what group?
[00:35:47]  You know, they couldn't be any younger than me.
[00:35:49]  So they were all within, you know, the 18 to 25 to, you know, around 18 to 30 age range.
[00:35:59]  I had one guy who, he was like in his late fouries, but he was kind of a reserve.
[00:36:07]  And he was like the dad of the group.
[00:36:09]  He was this, you know, Tom Fleming, his name was an absolute legend.
[00:36:14]  I just loved that guy.
[00:36:16]  He was the rock of the group.
[00:36:19]  And the rest of them, they either didn't know why they were there or they wanted to do damage.
[00:36:27]  And I was having this conversation the other day.
[00:36:32]  When you are taught that these people who dress this way, who look this way, who have this facial hair, who speak this language, these are the enemy.
[00:36:43]  When you are taught that from training, and you're taught that, and you're taught that, and even when you're in Afghanistan and you're with interpreters, And you're with these people who are the same.
[00:36:53]  They have their facial hair.
[00:36:55]  They pray.
[00:36:56]  They do all these different things.
[00:36:57]  They have this religion.
[00:36:58]  And you're taught these are the enemy.
[00:37:00]  These are the enemy.
[00:37:01]  You've got to kill them.
[00:37:02]  And no offense to anybody who's listening to this.
[00:37:04]  And you're working with those guys, right?
[00:37:05]  Like you guys are working side by side with the Afghan army, right?
[00:37:07]  Right, right.
[00:37:10]  And no offense to anybody who is listening to this.
[00:37:12]  But when you're being told, kill these fucking and kill these fucking and all these things.
[00:37:21]  Something inside you is like, why are they telling me to do that?
[00:37:25]  Like, what have these people done wrong?
[00:37:27]  But then you're like, oh shit, someone's shooting at me, kill these, you know?
[00:37:34]  And it's a hot, dude, it makes me sick.
[00:37:37]  It's horrible.
[00:37:37]  Like, you're brainwashed to do these things.
[00:37:43]  And that brainwashing really, really took a toll on me.
[00:37:47]  And yeah, I was about ready to kill myself.
[00:37:51]  I was done.
[00:37:52]  I didn't want to be on this planet.
[00:37:53]  I didn't want to be surrounded by people who were as sick as that.
[00:37:56]  I didn't want to be kept with the memories of dead children and dead people that I'd held hands with.
[00:38:03]  I just.
[00:38:03]  How often did you think about that stuff?
[00:38:06]  Every day.
[00:38:07]  Every day.
[00:38:07]  You just couldn't escape.
[00:38:08]  That's why I started drinking so heavily.
[00:38:13]  I haven't really told anybody this, but I had this reoccurring nightmare.
[00:38:19]  And sorry.
[00:38:23]  It was me walking into this like mud hut, and there was like this state of the art oven.
[00:38:32]  The light was on, and I would go over to the oven and I would try and open the door, but I couldn't open the oven door.
[00:38:40]  And I would just see this kid screaming inside, and he would put his feet up against the glass, and the feet' skin would just melt to the glass of the oven, and I would wake up just screaming.
[00:38:53]  Let's have you.
[00:38:59]  And like, I had that dream all the time.
[00:39:05]  And it's because I saw so many dead kids.
[00:39:10]  And how's an 18 year old mind?
[00:39:15]  You're not even fully developed.
[00:39:18]  How am I meant to go through life just seeing that hate?
[00:39:21]  You know, it's just.
[00:39:23]  Yeah.
[00:39:24]  Yeah.
[00:39:25]  It's just horrible.
[00:39:26]  And so I didn't want to be here.
[00:39:28]  I was done.
[00:39:31]  I just wanted to die.
[00:39:33]  But the thing is, I was so set on dying.
[00:39:38]  I went to the jungle to kill myself.
[00:39:40]  But the reason why.
[00:39:42]  I went there because I didn't want my little brother at the time to see his younger brother dead.
[00:39:48]  I didn't want to put my brother through what I'd gone through.
[00:39:51]  I wanted my death to be a mystery or I wanted my death to look like an accident.
[00:39:59]  And I went to the jungle after being medically discharged from the military.
[00:40:06]  And for every single day, I woke up and I said, Today's the day you're going to kill yourself.
[00:40:11]  It's going to be a venomous snake bite.
[00:40:12]  It's going to be a.
[00:40:14]  Fallen tree, you know, it's going to be getting lost in the jungle, go cut your wrist somewhere, drown, whatever.
[00:40:21]  Whatever presents itself, it's going to be the day.
[00:40:25]  You wanted to be by the wildlife to take you.
[00:40:30]  I wanted my death to look like an accident, and I thought the Peruvian Amazon would be the best place for that.
[00:40:37]  And, well, the Amazon, but when I was doing my research online, I just found this one place that was, you know, working in Peru, and it just so happened to be.
[00:40:49]  Last Piedras, the river that Paul would work on, the river that I'd spent time with Andrew Uchals, you know, that first initial place.
[00:40:55]  I had no idea what this river was going to do to transform my life, but I went there and I said to myself every single day, Today's the day you're going to kill yourself.
[00:41:05]  Today's the day.
[00:41:07]  And no joke, and I'll get onto this topic in a little bit about my nonprofit and what I want to do with veterans.
[00:41:17]  But the jungle had a way after 14 days of telling me.
[00:41:24]  Don't do this.
[00:41:25]  Don't kill yourself.
[00:41:26]  You don't, you belong here.
[00:41:28]  You still have, you know, light at the end of the, you have to be here.
[00:41:33]  And I was sat on the front of the boat and the birds were changing with the bats.
[00:41:39]  And I just, you know, it's just this beautiful memory that I have.
[00:41:42]  And my feet were hanging over the front of the boat and we'd just been fishing.
[00:41:46]  So, you know, we caught dinner.
[00:41:48]  And I just remember just smiling and I was just so happy, dude.
[00:41:52]  And I was like, Don't kill yourself, man.
[00:41:55]  You've got so much to live for.
[00:41:57]  You have family at home.
[00:41:58]  You have jungles to protect.
[00:42:00]  You have animals that you've not yet seen that you're going to see.
[00:42:03]  You have all these things.
[00:42:05]  And I remember going back and I remember like writing in my diary, like, you know, today's a day that things are going to change.
[00:42:14]  Took two weeks of me not being on my phone, not being surrounded by internet.
[00:42:20]  There was no internet, there was no nothing.
[00:42:22]  Solely being in nature.
[00:42:25]  That saved my life.
[00:42:26]  Wow.
[00:42:27]  Two weeks was all it took for me personally to then realize I don't need to end my life today.
[00:42:39]  And it's a crazy feeling.
[00:42:43]  Absolutely crazy.
[00:42:44]  Like, I can't even express that gratitude that I had for the jungle at the time, you know.
[00:42:53]  And I just remember that night I got back and I ate this piranha that I'd caught.
[00:42:59]  I went out on a night walk and I saw the, you know, I saw all these incredible animals.
[00:43:04]  And I'm talking like night mammals, like Kinkajou, tapir, you know, you can see these tracks and you can smell these things.
[00:43:12]  And dude, like everything before that was gray.

=== Quitting Alcohol for Good (05:56) ===

[00:43:15]  Everything before that was just stagnant, static, like horrible.
[00:43:21]  And as soon as I had that kind of uplift in my spirit, the greens were greener, the sounds of all my more like vibrant.
[00:43:32]  I could smell again, I could taste food, like I could do all of these things that I thought had just gone.
[00:43:38]  And it's just, and don't get me wrong, I wasn't cured.
[00:43:42]  I wasn't healed.
[00:43:43]  I wasn't by any means, you know, healthier physically, you know, or mentally.
[00:43:50]  But something had changed in that moment.
[00:43:53]  And I was like, something is alive in me that had died.
[00:43:57]  There was maybe an ember left in me.
[00:43:59]  And now that ember has become a fire again, you know?
[00:44:04]  And yeah, dude, I can't tell you what it feels like to be so down and then to feel so lifted.
[00:44:11]  Wow.
[00:44:12]  Two weeks, man.
[00:44:15]  What were some of the other big changes you noticed in yourself just being exposed to the nature and being completely cut off from technology and having your life change that drastically?
[00:44:26]  The first thing was that I was able to wake up.
[00:44:30]  I was able to go to bed and I was able to wake up.
[00:44:34]  Beforehand, I would lay in bed, not be able to sleep.
[00:44:37]  And then when it was time to get up, I would be this zombie.
[00:44:41]  I couldn't.
[00:44:44]  The energy that it took to get my head off of the pillow and to take myself out of the duvet and to get up and go for a piss.
[00:44:52]  Like, it would be like the type, you know, when you're in bed and you've just gone to the toilet, but you need to go again and you're like, damn, I really need to go to the toilet, but like, I don't want to get up.
[00:45:02]  It would be that for hours, but I wouldn't even need to go to the toilet.
[00:45:05]  I would just be like, I need to get up, but I can't.
[00:45:07]  Just can't.
[00:45:09]  I had no appetite.
[00:45:11]  So when I became a little bit kind of like more mentally strong, um, I started eating a little bit more.
[00:45:19]  And by the way, at this point, I'd stopped drinking.
[00:45:21]  So you detoxed in the Amazon?
[00:45:24]  No, it was before that.
[00:45:28]  Kind of jumping forwards and backwards here.
[00:45:30]  But before I went to the jungle, I had this horrible experience where I was drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking.
[00:45:39]  And I was at this house party, and everyone was doing Coke, and everyone was just getting absolutely obliterated.
[00:45:46]  Never really touched drugs, you know.
[00:45:47]  So I was like, I'm staying away from the drugs, but I'm just going to get absolutely blacked out drunk.
[00:45:52]  And I remember just like seeing all of these people doing everything and then just feeling so ill inside.
[00:45:59]  And I was just drinking and drinking and drinking.
[00:46:02]  And I got to a point where I was like, fuck this, I'm leaving.
[00:46:06]  And I went outside and I fucking, I had this brand new car that I'd bought from like from Afghanistan money.
[00:46:12]  And I was just punching the shit out of my car and I walked off.
[00:46:15]  And the girl I was seeing at the time, Noticed that I wasn't at the party and I'm like blacked out drunk, walking up a you know, kind of like a highway.
[00:46:25]  And I hear someone running up behind me.
[00:46:28]  And as soon as she grabs me, I didn't know it was her.
[00:46:31]  I'm you know, I'm still struggling with my mental health.
[00:46:33]  I turn around and I'm about to fucking knock her out.
[00:46:39]  Didn't know who it was.
[00:46:40]  I was just in my mind, it was fight or flight.
[00:46:43]  And I'm not fighting at any moment, I'm fighting.
[00:46:45]  Like, this is the anger that's in me is that I didn't have any flight, it was just stand your ground and fucking throw.
[00:46:52]  I turn around and I go, a puncher, and I instantly realise who it was.
[00:46:57]  And I just, whoa, like it was this weird moment of sabre.
[00:47:02]  I just instantly got sober and I was like, oh man, I almost hit you.
[00:47:06]  Like, I'm really sorry.
[00:47:07]  And she's like, drunk as shit.
[00:47:09]  And she's like, why did you punch a car?
[00:47:12]  I almost got hit by a car on the way here because I crossed the road.
[00:47:14]  And I'm like, I don't give a fuck if you almost got hit by a car.
[00:47:18]  I need some time.
[00:47:19]  I need some space.
[00:47:20]  Please leave me alone.
[00:47:22]  And, uh, and, um, awful, awful night.
[00:47:26]  It was just toxic and horrible.
[00:47:29]  And then the next day I went to a guy who, a guy's house for a barbecue who I'd been in the military with and he froze me a beer and I, And I open it up and it just, and I'm like, oh my fucking God, that stinks.
[00:47:41]  And I was, I just, it didn't smell like beer.
[00:47:46]  It smelled like toxic, you know?
[00:47:49]  And I just put it, I just gave it to him and I was like, it was a rough night last night, you know?
[00:47:54]  I didn't know what was happening, but I was like, it was a rough night last night.
[00:47:57]  I'm just going to drink water today.
[00:48:00]  And he wasn't the type of military person that was like, nah, just get fucking drunk.
[00:48:03]  He was like, okay, I understand, you know?
[00:48:06]  And it just smelled like regret.
[00:48:09]  And it was at that point where I was like, I'm going to stop drinking.
[00:48:12]  That was the 7th of July.
[00:48:14]  And so this July, I'll be 11 years sober.
[00:48:17]  Wow.
[00:48:18]  Not a drop of alcohol.
[00:48:19]  Did you ever talk to your parents or your dad particularly about any of this stuff and any of these feelings that you're having afterwards?
[00:48:25]  No, but they knew something was up.
[00:48:28]  Yeah.
[00:48:29]  They know now.
[00:48:30]  My dad kind of wrote me a letter and kind of spoke to me a little bit.
[00:48:35]  And, you know, obviously after seeing the documentary, he was like, oh, missed out on that.
[00:48:41]  But.
[00:48:44]  He kind of blames himself for a lot of stuff.
[00:48:48]  When I was younger, we would always go running and he would make me do these like military obstacle courses.
[00:48:53]  He was like, I blame myself for you joining the army.
[00:48:56]  I blame myself for not seeing how mentally unwell you were.
[00:49:02]  I blame myself for, you know, all these things.
[00:49:06]  He's like, I should have seen it when you started selling your car and when you started, you know, selling your shoes to leave.

=== Family Conflict Over Army (05:31) ===

[00:49:11]  Like, I should have seen that you wanted to die.
[00:49:14]  But, I guess I just didn't want to see it.
[00:49:18]  He knew deep down that I was unhappy and that I didn't want to be on this planet, but he didn't want to believe it.
[00:49:25]  Who does?
[00:49:26]  Who wants to have a child and have them for a long time?
[00:49:31]  19, 20 years is a long time.
[00:49:38]  And then who wants to see their child die?
[00:49:42]  They want their best for their kid, especially my parents.
[00:49:45]  My parents are incredible.
[00:49:46]  I don't.
[00:49:48]  Don't tell that to them enough, actually.
[00:49:50]  But my parents are incredible and I love them to pieces.
[00:49:54]  And I guess I didn't have a lot of support from them, but the support that they showed me growing up gave me the strength to really know that I had support from them.
[00:50:08]  You know, it's just.
[00:50:09]  Yeah.
[00:50:11]  Yeah.
[00:50:11]  So when you were down in the Amazon, what kind of animals were you rescuing at first?
[00:50:17]  Or like what sort of.
[00:50:19]  Things were you guys doing down there as a part of that group?
[00:50:23]  Yeah.
[00:50:24]  So when I first went down there, I was just kind of like catching snakes and frogs and, you know, measuring them and, you know, checking temperatures of like the environments and stuff like that.
[00:50:36]  It was just like a very kind of like small thing.
[00:50:37]  I wasn't rescuing anything at the time.
[00:50:40]  And, you know, after a few years of being down there, it was just kind of like I was doing transects and I was working with tourism and I was, you know, just, Being there, I didn't.
[00:50:50]  So, was it like a job, or were you kind of just like volunteering?
[00:50:53]  I had no money, I had no nothing, I was just there because I didn't have anywhere else to go.
[00:50:58]  And they fed you and stuff and gave you a place to sleep.
[00:51:00]  And you just kind of like did your thing.
[00:51:02]  I kind of dosed about from like organization to organization.
[00:51:06]  And they were like, yeah, as long as you kind of cut trails and you guide for us, you can stay here and we'll feed you and stuff like that.
[00:51:12]  I was like, cool.
[00:51:13]  Like, don't have anything else, you know?
[00:51:17]  So then I started working for the organization that is featured in the documentary.
[00:51:28]  Don't want to talk too much about them because they are.
[00:51:31]  Not very nice people or company.
[00:51:36]  But I then was just kind of like doing the same old, you know, doing tour stuff, doing, you know, bits and pieces here, there.
[00:51:45]  And then one day this worker messaged me and was like, there's an ocelot which is in the local community just upriver.
[00:51:58]  And I was like, huh, okay.
[00:52:00]  So, like, I was there and I went over and spent like seven hours trying to convince these people that this cat would be better off in my care.
[00:52:12]  And they were like, give me like $200.
[00:52:14]  And I was like, I'm not giving you any money.
[00:52:16]  They were like, yeah, but we took this animal and this is our animal and we fed it for the past few days.
[00:52:23]  And they were taking it to the town so they could sell it to the black market.
[00:52:30]  And someone from.
[00:52:31]  These were like indigenous people or.
[00:52:34]  Yeah, they were native Peruvians.
[00:52:37]  And what they do is when they go and cut down trees, they get pennies for that.
[00:52:43]  Nothing, you know, because the companies get paid when they sell it to the US or to China.
[00:52:49]  You know, the people that are cutting down the trees don't make much money.
[00:52:53]  The poor people, yeah.
[00:52:53]  Right.
[00:52:55]  But when they cut down a tree, these trees are the life to so many animals.
[00:52:58]  These trees, from the root systems, the mycelium, the insects, you know, the invertebrates that, That use it, the bird life, the snake life, the mammalian life, anything, you know, these trees are life.
[00:53:16]  And in the film Avatar, it makes it very, very apparent that these trees really do connect to absolutely everything.
[00:53:25]  Very underrated film, actually.
[00:53:27]  But I saw this time and time again where people would go out and they would be logging and they would just kill.
[00:53:37]  Mother howler monkeys, so they could eat the meat, but then they would also keep the baby and they would sell the baby and they would sell the baby sometimes for even more money than they would make from the tree.
[00:53:49]  Wow.
[00:53:50]  So when you've got an ocelot and you kill the mother, or you cut down a tree and you find two cubs in the tree, you eat the mum if you've killed her, which is horrible to me.
[00:54:04]  Take the pelt, sell the pelt for money.
[00:54:08]  Have the kittens, sell the kittens for money, and you've made three times what you would from cutting down an endangered species of tree.
[00:54:20]  And so I was trying to have this broken Spanish conversation with these people.
[00:54:24]  This cat is going to be better off here, and they're like, pay me.
[00:54:27]  And I'm like, no, but what I will do is I'll buy you dinner because you've paid money for the milk and you've paid money for the rice and gasoline and la la la.
[00:54:37]  So I. After a while of shotguns and machete conversations, and you know, I did.

=== PXG Golf Driver Review (03:13) ===

[00:54:43]  I was like, my dad definitely kind of like called this one.
[00:54:46]  He, before I left one time, he was like, So, if you do get abducted, you know, what should the ransom be?
[00:54:51]  And I'm like, Dad, just let it be.
[00:54:53]  Like, if I die, I die.
[00:54:56]  But, you know, he called it.
[00:54:58]  He knew that I was going to be putting myself in danger for the safety and security of this forest and the animals that call it home.
[00:55:06]  And I remember taking the ocelot after about a seven hour conversation and a dinner date and went and slept in my hammock.
[00:55:15]  And I just put him on my shoulder.
[00:55:17]  And he'd not felt that love since he'd been taken from his mum.
[00:55:24]  You know, he'd been kept in a Box, he'd had a string wrapped around his neck, you know, and he was just this absolutely beautiful creature.
[00:55:34]  And as soon as he felt my heart to his, you know, body, and as soon as he felt at the time, I hadn't had a haircut for God knows how many months.
[00:55:43]  So as soon as he felt my hair and he just snuggled into my hair and he could feel my heartbeat through my neck, there was a connection instantly.
[00:55:51]  It was this, I remember sitting there, like laying there, sorry, in my hammock.
[00:55:57]  And it was getting pretty cold.
[00:55:58]  It was like four in the morning, but I was getting up every hour to, you know, feed him milk.
[00:56:03]  This episode of the podcast is brought to you by PXG.
[00:56:07]  When PXG says nobody makes golf clubs the way they do, they're not lying.
[00:56:12]  My personal experience with buying golf clubs and using different brands of golf clubs is I always thought the more expensive golf clubs were, the better the quality.
[00:56:22]  But my new set of PXGs has blown that perception out of the water.
[00:56:26]  And when I heard about their new Black Ops driver, The driver that promises you don't have to sacrifice distance for forgiveness, I absolutely had to try it.
[00:56:34]  Last weekend, PXG invited me out to one of the high end golf courses out in Tampa so I could get a custom fitting with their new Black Ops driver.
[00:56:43]  And it was incredible.
[00:56:44]  One of their golf pros spent an hour with me helping me dial in all the little measurements and all the little tweaks in the golf club to make sure that I had the perfect fit for my driver.
[00:56:55]  This PXG Black Ops driver is a breakthrough in driver technology, it's a complete and total victory.
[00:57:01]  In golf club engineering, something like you've never seen before.
[00:57:04]  Black Ops drivers are adjustable to deliver a combined MOI of 10,000 plus for unreal forgiveness.
[00:57:10]  That's ridiculously high.
[00:57:11]  And the higher the MOI, the more forgiving the club will play, meaning you don't have to square the ball perfectly for it to go straight and to get distance.
[00:57:20]  Add PXG's new advanced material phase technology, and you get incredible ball speed that pushes distance to the absolute limits.
[00:57:27]  That's more forgiveness, more distance, and no sacrifices.
[00:57:30]  The term game changer has been thrown around so much that it's lost its meaning.
[00:57:35]  But trust me when I tell you, the PXG driver is a true game changer.
[00:57:39]  Learn more and get free shipping on all PXG equipment by going to pxg.comslash Danny and using the code Danny at checkout.
[00:57:48]  That's pxg.comslash Danny and use the code Danny for free shipping on all equipment.
[00:57:53]  It's linked below.
[00:57:55]  Now back to the show.

=== Harpy Eagle Night Walks (15:10) ===

[00:57:56]  And I remember thinking, this guy is a survivor.
[00:58:00]  He's going to survive.
[00:58:02]  And I don't know what the plan is for him.
[00:58:04]  I was thinking, That maybe I'll take him and I know somebody who knows somebody who knows something about reintroduction and they can do this.
[00:58:11]  I didn't want him to go to a zoo.
[00:58:12]  I didn't want him to go to any other kind of like facility where he was just going to be like a sperm donor or it was just going to be like a piece of entertainment.
[00:58:20]  That was, he was going to go back into the wild and I didn't know how it was going to be done, but I knew in my heart that I was going to be the one that was going to help this situation.
[00:58:30]  And I remember thinking there and I was thinking, I don't like boxing, you know, I like fighting and stuff like that, but I'm not a big boxing fan.
[00:58:37]  But there was this.
[00:58:38]  Like, thought in my head of like Amir Khan, he's like a British boxer.
[00:58:42]  Um, and I was just thinking, like, Khan, like, Khan is such a good name for him.
[00:58:47]  Like, he's a fighter, he's small, he's scrawny, you know.
[00:58:50]  Like, and Amir Khan isn't like huge.
[00:58:53]  And then I was thinking, like, you know, Khan from the Jungle Book.
[00:58:57]  And I was thinking, and I was like, this is him.
[00:58:59]  And then he was just.
[00:59:01]  And for the next, yeah, the next close to a year, I just spent every single day with him, every single minute.
[00:59:11]  You know, I was with him side by side, hunting, killing, fighting.
[00:59:18]  I. How did you know?
[00:59:21]  Like,.
[00:59:23]  The ways to train him to catch food and like the types of animals to train him to hunt and like what time of day to bring him out and walk him through the woods.
[00:59:33]  Like, it seemed like you were doing it every night.
[00:59:34]  You would take him on night walks.
[00:59:35]  Like, how did you know all this stuff?
[00:59:38]  I knew that ocelots primarily were nocturnal.
[00:59:41]  I, it was, you know, when, when you have cats and you've got, if, if you have a cat at home, you know that at night time, them cats are going to be going crazy.
[00:59:49]  Most cats use the day to rest and kind of do a few bits and pieces and they use the night to really kind of like utilize that.
[00:59:56]  The reason why I have such big eyes, the reason why ocelots actually have white around their eyes is so it absorbs more moonlight so that they can see even clearer than an animal which just has dark around its eyes.
[01:00:10]  I didn't know what I was doing, but, and I can say this for a lot of people as well, is that when you spend a lot of time in nature, things become natural.
[01:00:22]  And I didn't know specific details, I just knew what felt right.
[01:00:28]  And I knew that when I was walking, and I didn't wear bug spray because he would lick the salt out of my sweat.
[01:00:34]  So I didn't wear bug spray.
[01:00:36]  I didn't, you know, when I showered, I would just use kind of like a very neutral soap.
[01:00:44]  I never really used shampoo.
[01:00:46]  I just, I was just very bare.
[01:00:48]  And I went out and I was just very natural in nature.
[01:00:52]  And being this, Natural kind of presence there and seeing things happening, I was then able to piece things together.
[01:01:03]  And I was then able to be like, okay, he's hungry.
[01:01:07]  I can tell he's hungry.
[01:01:09]  He's crying with like a higher pitch in his tone.
[01:01:15]  We need to go and we need to hunt.
[01:01:16]  How are we going to hunt?
[01:01:18]  Okay, well, he feeds mainly on rodents, he feeds mainly on reptiles and amphibians and birds.
[01:01:25]  You know, that's kind of like the three main.
[01:01:29]  Things that he's going to eat.
[01:01:30]  If he can eat carry on, then he might eat carry on.
[01:01:32]  If he can eat, you know, something which is a little bit larger, potentially, you know, with like baby pigs.
[01:01:41]  They catch fish?
[01:01:43]  I have seen ocelots catching fish, but to try and teach that is very difficult.
[01:01:50]  I was teaching Keanu, the second ocelot, how to try and catch catfish that would sit.
[01:01:59]  Dormant in the mud until the rains came and then they would come out into these little pools.
[01:02:04]  But to try and teach a cat that, it's very hard.
[01:02:09]  But I've seen it in the wild where ocelots will walk up and down the stream and they'll pounce on fish.
[01:02:15]  So they do eat fish, but it's hard.
[01:02:18]  It's really hard.
[01:02:19]  How big do they get full grown?
[01:02:21]  Males and females are different.
[01:02:24]  So females will be a lot smaller, pounds and kilos.
[01:02:29]  You had this issue with Andrew.
[01:02:30]  Yeah, yeah, we had this issue.
[01:02:32]  But with Pounds, I think that the females can get up to like, you know, 36 pounds max.
[01:02:39]  Okay.
[01:02:39]  Whereas a male can get up to like 45 to 50 pounds.
[01:02:43]  Like they can be quite a big, you know, small cat.
[01:02:48]  And they.
[01:02:50]  How are they different from jaguars?
[01:02:53]  So, the size difference is the main thing.
[01:02:57]  Okay.
[01:02:58]  What you do have is you have, you know, they're a lot more, so they're a terrestrial cat, but they're semi arboreal as well.
[01:03:07]  So, they'll spend a lot of their time in the trees and they're actually very, very good in the trees.
[01:03:11]  Whereas jags aren't very good in the trees.
[01:03:13]  They're too heavy, they're too bulky.
[01:03:15]  These are a lot more slender, a lot more elegant, a lot more, they're faster.
[01:03:22]  You know, their diet is different.
[01:03:25]  If you look at them and you kind of like look at them from, you know, ocelot to jaguar, you would say, you know, oh, it's just a small jag.
[01:03:32]  And a lot of people actually do confuse them, but the rosettes are different.
[01:03:37]  You know, it's just they're a very, very different species.
[01:03:41]  But, you know, the reason why they have very, very similar patterning is because that is the most camouflage underneath the canopy.
[01:03:48]  Right.
[01:03:50]  As you can see, they have the white around their eyes.
[01:03:53]  Jags also have the white around their eyes because they.
[01:03:57]  Use their eyes at nighttime and they are so good.
[01:04:00]  If you also look at the backs of the ears of ocelots, they have like white tips to their ears.
[01:04:09]  I didn't know why they had white tips, I just thought maybe it was a camouflage thing.
[01:04:15]  Once the ocelots had got older, I started realizing that it was a way of communication.
[01:04:22]  I would be walking behind them sometimes.
[01:04:24]  Sometimes I'd walk in front of them, but when I was like walking behind them, I would just watch them and just watch and watch and watch.
[01:04:30]  And I would notice that they would twitch their ears to which direction they were going to be going.
[01:04:38]  And they were telling me where they were going to be going.
[01:04:41]  So they would see a rodent that was on the right and they would twitch their ear on the right and they would be very, very stealthy and they would go that way.
[01:04:52]  So what I then realized was how can I increase the amount of food that he's eating on a night walk?
[01:04:59]  Well, I was reading their ears and I was then doing.
[01:05:04]  What they wanted me to do.
[01:05:06]  So, if there was a huge log and I saw a rodent on one side, they would twitch their ear on the right.
[01:05:13]  So, I would go round on the left and basically cause the rodent to see me.
[01:05:19]  The rodent would run up on the log or run behind the log, bam.
[01:05:23]  Wow.
[01:05:23]  Then the ocelots would start, and I started hunting with them.
[01:05:27]  Then, once you get to that part, you start to realize okay, this is how they hunt.
[01:05:32]  How can they hunt other things?
[01:05:34]  So, you start taking them out during the day.
[01:05:35]  You start going to areas where you know there's lizards and you know there's snakes.
[01:05:39]  You just watch and watch and watch.
[01:05:41]  And I was downloading this information 24 7.
[01:05:45]  Wow, dude.
[01:05:47]  And, you know, when you don't speak to anybody, when you are just, because I was alone the majority of the time that I was out with these cats, I didn't want anyone to interfere with them.
[01:05:56]  So, there were times where I'd go months without seeing people.
[01:06:01]  And when you've only got the ears of an ocelot to really kind of like communicate with, and you can communicate verbally as well.
[01:06:09]  But damn, it was just like this download of information.
[01:06:14]  So, long story short, to answer your question, I had no idea what I was doing when I went there.
[01:06:20]  What about like going out at night into the jungle seems like a terrifying thing to do.
[01:06:25]  Like, what about bigger animals?
[01:06:28]  Like, what kind of animals prey on ocelots?
[01:06:31]  And did you ever come across anything on your night walks that scared the shit out of you?
[01:06:39]  Nothing scared me more than humans.
[01:06:42]  Humans are the worst.
[01:06:44]  With animals, you can read animals.
[01:06:47]  If so, on one night walk with Khan, I um, it had been raining for days, and this one night it just kind of like um, it just stopped and it was just this really silent but like quiet, hot night.
[01:07:05]  And I was like, right, this is the night where everything's going to be coming out.
[01:07:09]  I know that everything's going to be coming out because they haven't eaten properly for a few days, so I went and got Khan.
[01:07:16]  And we went on a walk and we were hiking, and I, you know, I'd seen a few little snakes, nothing major.
[01:07:23]  I'd seen a few frogs, but the ones I'd seen were, you know, toxic for him.
[01:07:29]  He was catching a few little insects, and he would eat insects as like little, you know, kind of like granola bar snacks.
[01:07:35]  And we got to this area, and there was like a few rodents running about, and I was like, cool, this is, you know, this is it.
[01:07:42]  And so he goes after something, and I'm like, Oh, okay, cool.
[01:07:47]  Maybe he's going to catch a rat and that'll be his dinner, and we can continue, hopefully, find a sleeping bird or whatever.
[01:07:54]  And he's in front of me, and I'm sat down on the forest floor, and I just hear this kind of like, and I was like, that's not calm.
[01:08:09]  I don't know what that is.
[01:08:13]  My heart started racing, you know, and I wasn't fearful, but I was the adrenaline.
[01:08:18]  Was pumping.
[01:08:19]  And so I did have my light.
[01:08:21]  So I was like looking around and I was like sniffing and like trying to.
[01:08:24]  I didn't want to use my light because I didn't want to interfere with Khan hunting if that's what it was.
[01:08:29]  And then I heard like a snap of like a twig behind me.
[01:08:35]  And I'm like, right, okay.
[01:08:37]  So I'm like, I have to turn my light on.
[01:08:39]  And as I turn my light on, I look round and there's a puma, like a mountain lion, which is about.
[01:08:48]  I would say it was about 20 feet away from me.
[01:08:51]  Whoa.
[01:08:51]  And so it's, you know, stalking me in a way, but it also, yes, but it also knows that I'm there.
[01:09:01]  It's curious, right?
[01:09:03]  And all of a sudden, I get these claws going up my legs, up onto my shoulder, and it's Khan, right?
[01:09:09]  Because he knows that he's there.
[01:09:12]  So Khan is on my shoulder.
[01:09:13]  He's trying to get to the highest point of the safest place, and the trees aren't going to protect him.
[01:09:18]  His dad is going to protect him, right?
[01:09:20]  So I'm like, oh, here we go.
[01:09:21]  So.
[01:09:23]  I don't make any noise.
[01:09:24]  The worst thing that you can do is run from a big cat because they're going to be like, game on.
[01:09:30]  So he's on my shoulder.
[01:09:31]  Khan's on my shoulder.
[01:09:32]  And I just have my machete in my bag and I'm just walking.
[01:09:36]  And I keep turning around and I keep seeing him and he's just following me.
[01:09:40]  And I look at the time and I go, okay, right.
[01:09:43]  I'm about an hour's walk away from where Khan's enclosure is.
[01:09:48]  This cat could follow me for definitely as long as that.
[01:09:51]  But, you know, we'll see.
[01:09:53]  If it gets too close, I'll just have to kind of shout.
[01:09:55]  But just walking.
[01:09:58]  I was walking in the jungle with an ocelot on my shoulder and a mountain lion following me for 20 minutes.
[01:10:07]  And I just remember the adrenaline that I had.
[01:10:10]  And I was looking around and I was thinking, he's still there.
[01:10:13]  He's keeping his distance.
[01:10:15]  He's just curious.
[01:10:17]  You know, curiosity kills the cat.
[01:10:19]  And he, if I was any other person, I had a gun, like that cat probably would have been shot, you know, because.
[01:10:27]  You know, you hear all these stories about mountain lions were doing this and, you know, doing that.
[01:10:31]  And they're just curious animals.
[01:10:33]  They're very, very, you know, intrigued in the smallest of things.
[01:10:39]  And, dude, I just remember thinking, fuck, this is nuts.
[01:10:43]  I've got two major cats that I love, and they're within, you know, 10 feet of me.
[01:10:52]  So he just kept following you and eventually got back?
[01:10:54]  Just kept.
[01:10:54]  Just left you alone?
[01:10:55]  No, just kept following me, kept following me.
[01:10:56]  And then as soon as I got to this, like, intersection on the trail, I walked down one and I was expecting him to go off.
[01:11:03]  He just carried on walking up.
[01:11:05]  He just was like, no, there's no food there for me.
[01:11:07]  Just passed you.
[01:11:08]  Yeah, I'm not going to waste my energy.
[01:11:10]  He, what he would have done, he would have killed Khan.
[01:11:13]  But because I was there, he realized that the threat was, you know, major.
[01:11:19]  He was like, there's no way I'm going to get that ocelot.
[01:11:23]  And no joke, I had these big scratch marks in my shoulder and in my leg where he like clawed his way up.
[01:11:29]  And he was just sat there and just like wide eyed on my shoulder for 20 minutes.
[01:11:36]  And he wasn't super heavy at the time, but like, dude, it was exhilarating, but terrifying at the same time, you know?
[01:11:44]  Oh, wow.
[01:11:45]  So, mountain lion puma will kill ocelots.
[01:11:50]  You also have bigger eagles like the harpy eagle.
[01:11:54]  And I've been fortunate enough to see.
[01:11:56]  Harpy?
[01:11:56]  Yeah, I've been fortunate enough to see seven of them.
[01:11:59]  And a lot of people will go their entire lives without seeing harpy eagle.
[01:12:04]  And they are just absolutely.
[01:12:06]  Oh, look at that thing, man.
[01:12:08]  And that thing's wild looking.
[01:12:10]  Yeah, you see that one on the right there?
[01:12:14]  That one there with the dude.
[01:12:16]  That harpy eagle had actually been shot as a baby, and it's only got one eye.
[01:12:20]  And this dude here, he actually lives in Puerto, where I used to live.
[01:12:24]  And he rescued this harpy eagle, and he basically just can't go back into the wild.
[01:12:29]  That's an enormous bird, man.
[01:12:31]  Yeah.
[01:12:31]  So they're actually sloth hunters.
[01:12:33]  They will take sloths out of the trees, and they will take monkeys out of the trees, and absolutely incredible.
[01:12:41]  But they also will take ocelots if they have the opportunity to.
[01:12:45]  Anacondas.
[01:12:47]  If they get big enough, they will take ocelots.
[01:12:49]  You have big caiman.
[01:12:51]  I think you saw in the documentary where Keanu was on the back of that caiman.
[01:12:55]  That was scary as hell because one, you know, one misstep and a wrong jaw will take a leg off, you know.
[01:13:06]  Right.

=== Keanu vs The Caiman (02:58) ===

[01:13:07]  And so he needed to learn lessons.
[01:13:11]  Yes.
[01:13:11]  I couldn't wrap him to the wall.
[01:13:13]  He had to learn the hard way.
[01:13:14]  If he was going to get smacked by that caiman, he was going to get smacked by it.
[01:13:19]  Yeah.
[01:13:20]  If he was gonna, you know, be killed by this cayman, I wouldn't have let that happen.
[01:13:26]  I would have intervened, but he needed a snap on the nose, you know?
[01:13:29]  Right.
[01:13:29]  And he did.
[01:13:31]  He got that.
[01:13:31]  And if you haven't seen the documentary yet, you'll see it and you'll hear me shout.
[01:13:37]  And they actually had to edit somewhere.
[01:13:39]  I was like, holy fucking shit.
[01:13:42]  You scared the shit out of me.
[01:13:44]  But it was, you know, scary.
[01:13:47]  But I had to let these animals live a wild life.
[01:13:50]  Yeah.
[01:13:50]  What were they gonna do when I left?
[01:13:52]  Yeah.
[01:13:52]  And I eventually had to leave my physical, my mental.
[01:13:56]  There's only so much time that you can live alone in the jungle.
[01:14:03]  You can do it for a very long time.
[01:14:04]  You can do it.
[01:14:05]  But when you're, you know, alone, not speaking to people, not having, you know, conversations, not getting the right medical attention when you're sick, not eating the right diet, you know, all of these things, you start to deteriorate.
[01:14:24]  And I think that, you know, you can kind of agree with me that you saw me kind of like slowly dipping in my mental health towards the end of the Keanu because I was ecstatic that he was going to be like free, but I was also so ill and so drained and so.
[01:14:45]  I was on cloud nine, but the storm was above me as well, you know?
[01:14:49]  It was like this.
[01:14:50]  Were you just scared?
[01:14:52]  Were you dreading the day that.
[01:14:55]  He was going to just go out to the wild and not come back and leave you alone?
[01:14:58]  Or what was it about that that made you?
[01:15:01]  I was petrified that he was going to go and he was never going to come back.
[01:15:05]  I was never going to see him and never get to say goodbye because of death, disease, you know, whatever.
[01:15:11]  But I knew that that was going to happen.
[01:15:13]  And I think what my mental state was, was I was.
[01:15:25]  It's hard to say this.
[01:15:25]  I think that I was leaning on Keanu for a redemption of Khan.
[01:15:30]  And obviously, I don't want to say too much about Khan and everything that went on with that because, one, I don't really like talking about it.
[01:15:39]  And two, I want people to kind of like read into this story a little bit more.
[01:15:42]  I want people to know about Khan and I want them to, you know, know about how Keanu helped me get back on my feet after Khan.
[01:15:51]  But I did not want to be.
[01:15:55]  The failure that I was with Khan with Keanu.
[01:15:59]  I think that was the biggest feeling of fear inside me.
[01:16:02]  Well, it wasn't really your fault what happened to Khan, right?

=== Seeking Redemption Through Khan (06:38) ===

[01:16:06]  No.
[01:16:07]  First of all, I had no idea that people set up trigger traps with shotguns on trees.
[01:16:16]  What is that about?
[01:16:18]  Who puts those things there?
[01:16:21]  Anyone who wants to try and get a quick meal when they're cruising the river.
[01:16:25]  So they're essentially shotguns that are mounted to trees at a low level with like.
[01:16:30]  Trip wires?
[01:16:30]  Is that what it is?
[01:16:32]  Yes.
[01:16:33]  So, um, the one that he initially, you know, the one that he had found, um, was this kind of makeshift piece of shit that was a metal hollowed out bar with wood, a mousetrap.
[01:16:52]  Um, you basically put the shotgun shell into the metal bar.
[01:16:57]  The mousetrap is set and the nail, which is attached to some fishing line, is basically.
[01:17:05]  The hammer to, you know, to set the shotgun off.
[01:17:10]  And so the fishing line basically goes across the top of the, what would be this, you know, the scope.
[01:17:20]  And it's set across a trail so that when an animal or when a human, because I almost got hit by that, I was only about three feet away.
[01:17:30]  When that fishing wire gets triggered, it snaps, shoots, and whatever's in front will then.
[01:17:37]  Either be injured or killed.
[01:17:39]  Majority of the time injured.
[01:17:40]  Just injured, right?
[01:17:41]  Yeah.
[01:17:42]  And this can be for anything.
[01:17:44]  When you're setting snares, you set snares for like rabbits and packer and agouti because snares are going to be going on specific trails.
[01:17:51]  They're specific heights.
[01:17:53]  They're detailed to that type of thing.
[01:17:56]  The animal will either go through it and get its neck caught and then strangle itself to death, or it'll put its foot through it and then get caught until the poacher will then come down and then.
[01:18:08]  You know, do whatever it has to do to kill it or.
[01:18:10]  And they're doing this just because they want food?
[01:18:12]  Just food, yeah.
[01:18:13]  Because they're usually just wanting, you know, bushmeat.
[01:18:17]  With shotgun traps, you don't know what you're going to get.
[01:18:20]  It's not a snare.
[01:18:21]  It's not on a trail that is used by specific mammals or rodents, you know.
[01:18:26]  It's a shotgun which then will just obliterate anything that triggers it.
[01:18:34]  And it could be me, could be Khan, could be absolutely Tapia.
[01:18:43]  You know, a tapia is basically just, you know, a big jungle cow.
[01:18:47]  If that gets shot in the leg, it's going to survive, but it's going to die a miserable death of infection and, you know, all these.
[01:18:54]  Different things, and they're absolutely incredible animals.
[01:18:56]  I've walked side by side with you know so many of these.
[01:19:00]  It's kind of like an anteater, yeah.
[01:19:04]  They've got this crazy little nose, a little dick nosed jungle cow, but um, they're incredible, incredible animals, and they're great for the ecosystem.
[01:19:13]  Um, and you know, if one person sets up a trap and shoots the leg off of that, right, what's that gonna do to the rest of them?
[01:19:26]  A tapir has like an 18 month gestation period.
[01:19:29]  Then, damn, then the infant will stay with the mother for two years and then they're not sexually mature for another two years.
[01:19:40]  So, if you shoot a female, you've just taken out eight years worth of stuff.
[01:19:46]  And animals are clever, they will only kill and eat the oldest and the sickest.
[01:19:54]  So, I've literally have seen.
[01:19:57]  Wild cats on camera trap and in person with tapir next to them.
[01:20:02]  They don't want to be there, but they kind of cross paths and whatever, you know, they've just done their thing.
[01:20:06]  These tapirs are great smelling, but their eyesight is horrendous.
[01:20:11]  They don't have great eyesight.
[01:20:14]  They use their nose primarily to travel through the forest, whereas cats will use their eyes and, you know, they'll use their smell as well, but their eyes are their primary, you know, way of hunting.
[01:20:27]  So you'll see these.
[01:20:28]  Animals crossing paths, and if that's not sick or if it's not an older individual, that's a large meal, they're not going to waste that, you know.
[01:20:35]  That's that's you know, one of them things.
[01:20:38]  Um, but they're this, they're crucial.
[01:20:43]  Every animal is crucial to the ecosystem of the rainforest, yeah.
[01:20:47]  And when people hunt, they take out crucial elements, and they might not think it, but they're taken out, especially in the rainforest, they're taken out.
[01:21:01]  Real important parts of the rainforest every time they hunt.
[01:21:06]  And hunters will go in and they'll take out, you know, three, four pigs and they'll take them back to the community.
[01:21:13]  And it's devastating.
[01:21:14]  The only animal that I know that actually does well from hunting is an animal called a packer P A C A.
[01:21:23]  And they're like this small jungle rodent, stripes on them, kind of like a young tapir, actually.
[01:21:30]  Really, really cool, nocturnal.
[01:21:33]  But just absolutely incredible.
[01:21:35]  They taste good as well.
[01:21:38]  But once they find out that, you know, one of them has died, the females will go into this frenzy of just breeding and breeding and breeding.
[01:21:47]  Yeah.
[01:21:47]  It's like coyotes.
[01:21:48]  Kind of like coyotes, yeah.
[01:21:49]  And so once they know, oh, the local male that, you know, was around, he's not here no more.
[01:21:57]  I'm going to find the next male.
[01:21:58]  I'm going to have, you know, how many little pups of, you know, Packer.
[01:22:02]  And they are probably the only animal.
[01:22:06]  In the jungle, which, you know, does well from hunting.
[01:22:12]  I'm not going to say benefits because nothing benefits.
[01:22:14]  You know, that's ocelot food and that's, you know, jag food.
[01:22:18]  But they do well in a way.
[01:22:23]  It's so strange, man.
[01:22:25]  It's like out of all of the wildlife in the Amazon, there's nothing remotely close to humans, right?
[01:22:34]  I mean, even in the world, right?
[01:22:35]  I mean, you got primates, you got monkeys, but it's still so far away.
[01:22:40]  Yeah.
[01:22:41]  It's like.
[01:22:43]  We don't belong there.

=== Eerie Jungle Drumming Sounds (04:06) ===

[01:22:44]  No, we are this incredible thing, but we're also.
[01:22:49]  The cancer of the world, as well, you know.
[01:22:51]  We don't fit into the ecosystem, not anymore.
[01:22:56]  Right?
[01:22:59]  We can't.
[01:23:01]  One of the things I actually love is like watching survival shows, like Alone, and just seeing these incredible men and women that go out there and they try to survive in a cold environment and they just cannot, you know.
[01:23:17]  And they do well, don't get me wrong.
[01:23:18]  Like, there's people that survive like a hundred days or whatever, but.
[01:23:25]  We are so, we so need our creature comforts.
[01:23:29]  We so need our homely kind of like comforts to thrive.
[01:23:34]  And if we weren't clever enough to make a table or a chair or a microphone, you know, where would we be?
[01:23:44]  There, did you ever run into any uncontacted tribes down there?
[01:23:49]  I never ran into any, but I know that I was in the presence of some.
[01:23:54]  I found an arrow once.
[01:23:56]  A six foot arrow.
[01:23:59]  And I was doing this, I was doing the car, so with Khan, and I remember like waking up one morning to like this booming.
[01:24:10]  And I was like, what the hell is that?
[01:24:14]  And I was pinpointing it to like this direction from where it was, you know, and it was just like, what is that?
[01:24:22]  And it was like 10 minutes would go by.
[01:24:25]  And I know that capuchins will like break.
[01:24:28]  Castania nuts onto the trees, and they will do all these things.
[01:24:31]  But this was rhythm, this was time, this was something that I was.
[01:24:39]  I never got an eerie feeling from a capuchin making a drumming sound, right?
[01:24:44]  Because I just knew that they were like breaking something open.
[01:24:46]  They tried to, you know, use tools or they're clever.
[01:24:50]  This was this eerie, eerie feeling.
[01:24:53]  And I remember going out off trail trying to find like where this sound was coming from.
[01:25:00]  And I saw snapped branches across the trail.
[01:25:05]  And when you see snapped branches, you know that it's a sign, don't go here.
[01:25:11]  And then I heard boo, like, and then I never heard it again.
[01:25:18]  And I spoke to, I went up river about seven months later, I think.
[01:25:25]  I went up river and I was speaking to this local community.
[01:25:29]  And I said, I just have this question like, I know some of your elders here.
[01:25:33]  Have spoken, they speak the language of the uncontacted, and I know they're on the river.
[01:25:39]  Can I talk to you about this thing that I had experienced?
[01:25:43]  And they were like, Please, let me know.
[01:25:45]  And I was like, I was, you know, it was early in the morning.
[01:25:48]  I woke up and I heard this drumming.
[01:25:50]  It sounded like it was on the buttress of these huge kind of like Lapuna trees.
[01:25:55]  It sounded like it could have been a monkey, but then like it was two, it was like every like two minutes on the dot, and it was like very precise and it was very like.
[01:26:06]  It had a lot of rhythm.
[01:26:09]  And he said, Did you hear any other sounds like whistling, knocking, any of these things?
[01:26:15]  And I said, well, I could hear something like in the distance, but I couldn't hear what it was.
[01:26:20]  He goes, yeah, that's how the uncontacted communicate.
[01:26:23]  If they don't know where one another is, they will bang the roots of these big trees to let them know in what direction that they've gone.
[01:26:30]  Because what they've done is they've used the stream systems, because at this point it was wet season, right?
[01:26:37]  So they'd used the stream systems, which were a lot higher, to kind of kayak down with their kind of like dugout canoes.
[01:26:43]  They had probably found something that they had killed, and then they were telling each other like where they were.

=== Uncontacted Tribe Communication (05:11) ===

[01:26:51]  Wow.
[01:26:51]  And I was like, holy shit.
[01:26:53]  Like, this was about 400 feet from where I was.
[01:26:58]  That's wild.
[01:26:59]  And I went and I said, oh, you know, I saw the snapped branch.
[01:27:04]  Okay.
[01:27:04]  Did you go past it?
[01:27:05]  I said, fuck no, I didn't go past it.
[01:27:07]  It was like, I know what that means.
[01:27:10]  And they were like, good, because you probably would have died.
[01:27:12]  They were like, we know people that take two steps past that and they get shot.
[01:27:16]  Yeah.
[01:27:17]  They were probably watching you.
[01:27:18]  That's definitely the most dangerous thing out there, right?
[01:27:20]  Are those tribes, those uncontacted tribes.
[01:27:22]  It's just so bizarre that.
[01:27:24]  That the one thing, that the one animal species that they will absolutely kill on sight are other humans.
[01:27:32]  That's because we're a threat.
[01:27:34]  Not because we have machetes and we have weapons, but because we carry disease.
[01:27:40]  If we come into contact with them and we've had our injections and our inoculations and we've had our, you know, COVID vaccines, or, you know, if you haven't, then good for you.
[01:27:49]  But like we have had these things in our system.
[01:27:53]  We've taken antibiotics and we've got past these.
[01:27:56]  You know, infections and diseases.
[01:27:59]  If we go anywhere close to them, they're dead, they're wiped out.
[01:28:02]  Right.
[01:28:03]  There was a thing in Brazil, actually, where people were like, you know, the uncontacted had come out and they were like, look, we're struggling with, you know, the climate change and everything.
[01:28:14]  Like, you know, they didn't say climate change, but they basically said, with these odd seasons, we are struggling to get food and we're struggling to do this and the mosquitoes are worse and our families are getting sick and la la la.
[01:28:26]  Can we get some help?
[01:28:27]  Mm hmm.
[01:28:29]  Scientists came in and tried to give them help, and it basically wiped out like 80% of them because they basically got like.
[01:28:36]  I don't know what the diseases were that they gave them, but it was kind of like.
[01:28:39]  When was this?
[01:28:41]  I think this is like 2016 or something.
[01:28:44]  Really?
[01:28:45]  Yeah.
[01:28:46]  Yeah, there was like a.
[01:28:48]  In Brazil?
[01:28:48]  It was in Brazil.
[01:28:49]  Brazilian tribe was kind of like taken out by human diseases.
[01:28:56]  Not sure, but what it was, you know, that killed them off, but.
[01:29:03]  It definitely made a lot of people think, like, wow, we really are messing up the world, you know?
[01:29:11]  It is just so bizarre to me that you can have people running around naked in the forest with bow and arrows at the same time you could have people driving around in autonomous electric vehicles.
[01:29:21]  Yeah.
[01:29:22]  And you know what's even crazier is that we see these kind of like, you know, in our minds, we see these kind of like uncontacted tribes as like these small jungle kind of like, you know, jungle people.
[01:29:37]  Mm hmm.
[01:29:38]  They're extremely tall.
[01:29:39]  They have huge feet.
[01:29:41]  The reason why, you know, native South Americans, you know, are the way they are these days is because the Spanish came in and the Spanish were a lot smaller.
[01:29:49]  And then, you know, things kind of like progressed with.
[01:29:53]  But these six foot arrows are nothing compared to these people.
[01:29:57]  Whereas if you compare them to the majority of the size of people in Peru, you don't get many people that are over the size of 5'10 in Peru.
[01:30:05]  They're a lot smaller because they have the Spanish influence in them.
[01:30:08]  Right.
[01:30:09]  These uncontacted people are.
[01:30:12]  You know, six foot plus.
[01:30:14]  They need to be in the jungle.
[01:30:15]  They need to be tall to see things.
[01:30:16]  They need to, you know, their feet are absolutely massive.
[01:30:20]  If you kind of like, there's a, there was something as well on a documentary that I watched where this scientist put his foot next to the size of an uncontacted tribe's foot and it's way bigger.
[01:30:34]  So that's something you guys don't have to worry about where you're at.
[01:30:36]  They just don't come around where you guys are in your camps.
[01:30:40]  If they do, I believe they don't see a threat.
[01:30:44]  Okay.
[01:30:46]  I'm a where I was with the ocelots was a little bit further down river.
[01:30:50]  Down river.
[01:30:51]  Um, if you go further up river, there's two communities.
[01:30:55]  Um, they actually came from uncontacted tribes and they know of uncontacted tribes in there.
[01:31:01]  And what they do is they sometimes come in and ransack the place.
[01:31:04]  They'll take their machetes, they'll take their clothes, they'll take everything.
[01:31:07]  And the communities can't do anything about it.
[01:31:10]  You mean they're descendants of the uncontacted tribes or they're people that broke away from them?
[01:31:14]  Broke away.
[01:31:15]  Really?
[01:31:15]  And, and, uh, When I was last there, there were two elders that spoke the native tongue.
[01:31:20]  And so when they would be across the river, they would be talking to them and they would be talking back, talking to them, talking back.
[01:31:26]  And they say, Yeah, they just want us to leave them alone.
[01:31:29]  You know, someone was, you know, driving, you know, using a boat motor and it was scaring away.
[01:31:34]  They, you know, they want us to be quiet.
[01:31:36]  They want us to do all these things.
[01:31:37]  But these local communities, which are upriver, have grants and have all these things from the government because they're, you know, a local community.
[01:31:47]  So they have these grants to buy these, you know, Kind of outboard boat engines, and they have these, you know, full lights and stuff.
[01:31:57]  And sometimes they just get so fed up, they'll come in and they'll just ransack the place and take all of their machetes, take everything.

=== Music Brings People Together (03:07) ===

[01:32:02]  What does the language sound like?
[01:32:05]  It's a very.
[01:32:07]  So it's not Spanish.
[01:32:09]  It's more of like a.
[01:32:14]  It's hard to describe, honestly.
[01:32:17]  It's a mix of kind of like.
[01:32:20]  It's like sounds?
[01:32:21]  It's not sounds.
[01:32:22]  It's not like an African kind of like dialect where they kind of like click and pop.
[01:32:26]  Oh, really?
[01:32:27]  It's more of a like repetitive.
[01:32:31]  I don't know.
[01:32:33]  This is really hard to kind of like describe.
[01:32:34]  Yeah.
[01:32:35]  It's a very.
[01:32:36]  I can imagine it as a very simple language, very repetitive in the way that they sound and say things.
[01:32:42]  I can imagine it as a very kind of descriptive language.
[01:32:47]  But then again, you know, it's.
[01:32:49]  I had no idea what they were saying when they were talking.
[01:32:51]  Do you remember, Steve, do you remember when we had Luke? Cabrons on here, and he was showing us the videos of those tribes.
[01:32:58]  I forget where they were, but they were like communicating with music or whatever.
[01:33:04]  And there was this whole sort of village of people, and they were all sort of participating in this song somehow.
[01:33:12]  It was pretty insane to hear.
[01:33:14]  Music is just this incredible thing that we have accomplished.
[01:33:18]  Yeah.
[01:33:18]  It's incredible.
[01:33:19]  And it's one of the things that's actually helped me with my PTSD and helped me with the writing of my book.
[01:33:25]  Oh, really?
[01:33:26]  Is just music.
[01:33:28]  Music can calm me when in an anger fit rage.
[01:33:32]  It can lift me up when I'm sad.
[01:33:34]  It can set the tone for my day.
[01:33:37]  It can help me get creative and just think that, you know, years and years and years and years ago, people were just making music around a fire by clicking and singing and humming.
[01:33:51]  Man, that stuff just fascinates the hell out of me.
[01:33:54]  That's okay.
[01:33:54]  I found it.
[01:33:55]  It does something to you.
[01:33:56]  It does something to you.
[01:33:57]  It connects to.
[01:33:59]  Yeah, this is it.
[01:33:59]  I think this is it.
[01:34:05]  Where are they?
[01:34:07]  South Papa.
[01:34:08]  South Papa.
[01:34:12]  These guys obviously aren't uncontacted, but.
[01:34:16]  That's just beautiful.
[01:34:17]  Yeah, it is.
[01:34:18]  It really is beautiful.
[01:34:19]  Like, there's nothing more.
[01:34:22]  There's nothing more settling than just like listening to some like music and, and I don't know, brings you to a place where you need to be or you want to be.
[01:34:32]  You know, music can help that in a great way.
[01:34:35]  I actually did a podcast with a good friend of mine, David, and he, uh, He struggles deeply with depression and he goes to a lot of like heavy metal gigs and just lifts him, you know.
[01:34:49]  It just like makes him.
[01:34:50]  He's actually doing a documentary right now on how heavy metal music has helped him in his mental health state.
[01:34:56]  Really?
[01:34:57]  Was he deployed in overseas or something?
[01:35:02]  Was he in the war?
[01:35:04]  He was in the Navy for a while and he's actually a U.S. Marshal now, just getting out.

=== Connecting With Local Guides (10:37) ===

[01:35:09]  Oh, wow.
[01:35:09]  Very.
[01:35:10]  He's got a lot of stories, dude.
[01:35:12]  A lot of stories.
[01:35:13]  Yeah.
[01:35:14]  Struggling a lot at the minute, so I've been keeping tabs with him just seeing how he is.
[01:35:18]  But, um, didn't know him before the podcast, and now I feel like I'm best mates with him, you know.
[01:35:22]  Oh, really?
[01:35:23]  It's just really kind of like I guess it's music, music brings people together, yeah.
[01:35:28]  I guess podcasts, you know, brings us together.
[01:35:31]  Like, never would have met you if it wasn't for you know this, and yeah, I feel like just the connection of humans is so great, but at the same time, we're disappointing this world so much, you know.
[01:35:42]  Yeah, we got to get back to uh connecting with nature.
[01:35:47]  For sure.
[01:35:47]  I think technology is good.
[01:35:50]  It's definitely good.
[01:35:52]  And we're good at creating technology.
[01:35:54]  But when you lose touch with nature, I don't think that's good.
[01:36:01]  No.
[01:36:03]  Talking of creations, I actually created a nonprofit called Emerald Arch.
[01:36:10]  And that's about nature.
[01:36:13]  Emerald Arch is a 501c3 based out of Washington State.
[01:36:17]  That's where I'm currently living right now.
[01:36:20]  And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be buying land in Ecuador.
[01:36:24]  It's been a place that, after Peru, I went to Ecuador and I just fell in love with it.
[01:36:28]  It's an incredible place, but it's being hurt deeply by mining and oil.
[01:36:36]  And so, as Emerald Arch, we want to.
[01:36:37]  Can you pull up a map of Ecuador?
[01:36:39]  As Emerald Arch, we want to buy land in the jungle.
[01:36:44]  And via our nonprofit, we want to help veterans go to the jungle so that they can take a few steps in my shoes.
[01:36:52]  And in just healing in nature in general.
[01:36:55]  Yeah.
[01:36:57]  And it's just this beautiful country.
[01:36:58]  You can drive from the coast all the way to, you know, Yesuni National Park of the Amazon rainforest in 10 hours.
[01:37:06]  And everything you need is there.
[01:37:08]  It's an incredible space medicine, like the plants.
[01:37:12]  You can get everything from the plants.
[01:37:14]  Yeah.
[01:37:15]  So the mountain.
[01:37:20]  So everyone talks about how the Amazon rainforest needs to be protected, it needs to be saved, it's going to be our life and death.
[01:37:25]  You know, all these things.
[01:37:26]  But what they are missing out in a lot of these conversations is it's actually the foothills of the Amazon.
[01:37:33]  So the Andes runoff, so in the middle of it, you can see the Andes, which is that huge kind of like white line.
[01:37:41]  If you go down on the east side of that and you kind of go into like Coca and Yasuni, and there's, you know, all these different areas up there.
[01:37:53]  If you go into that, it's actually the trees which are in the elevated parts of the Amazon which are absorbing way more.
[01:38:00]  Of the carbon that we're putting out into the world.
[01:38:04]  And so, trying to protect all of these little areas which are being deforested because they're in the mountains and they're good for cattle and they're good for all these different things is actually way more important than saving the Amazon itself.
[01:38:17]  Although, saving everything is great, but the carbon that the foothills of the Amazon is absorbing is like 40 times more.
[01:38:27]  Really?
[01:38:28]  The higher the elevation.
[01:38:29]  Because the canopy is so thick down there and it's just all flat.
[01:38:34]  When you go up in.
[01:38:37]  In elevation, you have layers which can absorb different amounts of carbon.
[01:38:41]  Oh, wow.
[01:38:42]  Interesting.
[01:38:42]  Yeah.
[01:38:43]  So, we're looking at a place called Napo.
[01:38:47]  We're looking in like the Sucumbios region, but we want to buy some land and we're fundraising at the minute to buy this land so that we can not just protect and preserve, work with community members, community outreach, you know, do scientific research.
[01:39:03]  If another ocelot needs help, then, you know, who knows?
[01:39:07]  But to take veterans and to take people who are struggling with mental health to the jungle, because I know firsthand that it can save lives.
[01:39:15]  And I know that if we try and protect the Amazon rainforest and if we try and protect our, you know, our spirit of this world via these trees and via this land and via these animals, we can save so many people.
[01:39:31]  22 veterans a day in the US commit suicide.
[01:39:36]  If I can change one person's life, I'm going to fucking do that.
[01:39:39]  Right.
[01:39:40]  If I can change 22 people's lives, I've saved a day's worth of suicides from the US alone.
[01:39:46]  That's not even the UK.
[01:39:47]  The UK has the highest rate of male suicides in the whole of Europe.
[01:39:54]  And is that in general or is that veterans?
[01:39:57]  In general.
[01:39:57]  But a lot of them are veterans because, like me, what do they have?
[01:40:01]  Nothing.
[01:40:01]  They work in a factory or they go to the war.
[01:40:05]  The UK is such a small place crammed with so much.
[01:40:09]  So many people and not a lot to offer.
[01:40:13]  Male suicide rates in the UK are above what they should be and what they've ever been.
[01:40:19]  And then US suicide rates are continuing to grow.
[01:40:25]  It's one of these things which I think Emerald Arch is going to try to help as much as we can.
[01:40:31]  It's not just going to be a place where we take tourists, it's going to be a place where there's psychiatrists, it's going to be a place where you can go and you can feel like you're about to commit suicide and you're going to work through it.
[01:40:41]  Are you going to recruit some of these guys to sort of help with the conservation and help with preserving the rainforest?
[01:40:50]  Absolutely.
[01:40:51]  And I'm also going to work with local people.
[01:40:55]  I don't think that you can do this as a Westerner without the help of the local people.
[01:41:00]  And, you know, I want to get a bunch of dudes in tactical gear running through the rainforest and do event courses.
[01:41:06]  Crabbing ocelots?
[01:41:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:41:08]  You know, I want that to be a part of it, but I want them to learn from the best.
[01:41:13]  Right.
[01:41:14]  And they can do.
[01:41:16]  25 years worth of military training, they can do anything that you want, you know, nothing's going to prepare them to know the depths of the jungle.
[01:41:27]  You can learn and you can, you know, be a survivalist and you can camp and you can do all these things, but the heart of the people in the Amazon rainforest is one that you can never replicate.
[01:41:38]  Right.
[01:41:39]  And you need people to be able to teach.
[01:41:41]  And the thing is, and what I found, you know, I have a good friend called Hilva and I have a great friend called Carlos, and they work in the Amazon and they love to learn.
[01:41:51]  And they love to speak to different people and they love to know different things.
[01:41:57]  My friend Carlos has never been on an aeroplane.
[01:42:00]  He's never been on a helicopter.
[01:42:02]  He's never done anything other than fish on that river and drive boats for tourists.
[01:42:10]  And I was in the jungle with him at one point, and this helicopter flew over.
[01:42:14]  It was a military helicopter doing something.
[01:42:16]  He was like, Oh man, that's my dream to go on one of them.
[01:42:19]  I said, Wait, you never been on a helicopter?
[01:42:22]  Like, just ignorant, you know?
[01:42:23]  Because I was kind of joking with him as well, but never been on a helicopter?
[01:42:26]  He goes, You have?
[01:42:28]  Like, his eyes lit up.
[01:42:28]  I said, Dude, I was lying, like, 20 helicopters in Afghanistan, and he was like, Oh man, I showed him some photos of me in helicopters, and he was like, What was it like?
[01:42:40]  You know, just he wanted to know, but at the same time, what was I doing?
[01:42:45]  I was wanting to learn from him as well, right?
[01:42:47]  And I would go out in the rainforest, and he would be like, This is where you know these coral snakes are found, and I would be like, Oh, okay, and I'd you know pick one up because you're a crazy white dude, why are you picking one up?
[01:42:57]  And I'm like, You know, this is just what I love, and I'd teach him, and I'd you know.
[01:43:02]  This snake here, you know, this, this, and this.
[01:43:04]  And he's like, thanks for teaching me.
[01:43:05]  I said, thanks for teaching me where it was, you know?
[01:43:08]  Yeah.
[01:43:08]  Give him a big hug at the end of the night.
[01:43:10]  And dude, they're just incredible people.
[01:43:13]  Yeah.
[01:43:14]  The native people will never, ever be able to be replicated by any other soldier or any other person that's never lived there.
[01:43:24]  Going back to when you were working with Keanu and trying to reintroduce him into the wild, it was crazy towards the end of the documentary.
[01:43:32]  You were like, he would come back.
[01:43:33]  Yes.
[01:43:34]  And you were like trying to scare him away and like yell at him and get him to leave.
[01:43:38]  And that was sad to watch, man.
[01:43:40]  Horrible.
[01:43:42]  Towards the end of that, and leading up to the time when you actually left, how often was he coming back?
[01:43:51]  And did you like how accustomed to the wild did he get?
[01:43:55]  And was there still this connection with you that he maintained while he had like one foot in, one foot out?
[01:44:00]  It's kind of tricky on a documentary to fit, you know, two years worth of work into 140 minutes.
[01:44:05]  Right.
[01:44:06]  So he would go for seven, eight days and he would be gone.
[01:44:10]  And I would just be sat there twiddling my thumbs, you know.
[01:44:14]  Okay, I'll make lunch.
[01:44:15]  He's not come back.
[01:44:16]  Right.
[01:44:17]  Okay, I'll go check the boat.
[01:44:19]  All right, it's nighttime.
[01:44:20]  I'll go on a walk and I'll see if I can either see him or find something cool.
[01:44:24]  And you also had cameras everywhere.
[01:44:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:44:27]  So I was like, I had my camera traps up and he would come back and then he would go away.
[01:44:35]  And sometimes he would come back and he's skinny.
[01:44:37]  And it was like, oh, he's not done well.
[01:44:40]  So I would go out with him and I would hunt with him and I would kind of give him a little pick me up.
[01:44:47]  I'd give him a few little eggs and I'd find a rat and I'd, you know, just absolutely just destroy this rat and just, you know, give him what I could.
[01:44:56]  And as soon as he was kind of full up, he'd come over and he'd kind of like give me a nuzzle.
[01:44:59]  There's one on my Instagram actually of a photo of him.
[01:45:02]  We're kind of like face to face.
[01:45:04]  He seemed a little bit more clumsy than Khan, at least in the documentary.
[01:45:10]  Yeah.
[01:45:10]  Uh, yeah, so kind of like that, but the thing is with Khan, Khan was very vocal, okay.
[01:45:18]  Whereas Keanu was very much like, I'm just gonna kind of like hit you, you know, like right, but we would kind of just lay together and hang out together, and then he would then just kind of okay, I'm gone, and he would just walk off, and I would walk back, and then I would be like, you know, going by seven, eight, nine days, and I got to a point of where I was losing my mind because I wasn't doing anything with him.
[01:45:42]  Right.
[01:45:42]  So I was like, I need to leave.
[01:45:44]  I need to, you know, move on with my life.

=== Forest Fire Concerns (16:05) ===

[01:45:47]  Yeah.
[01:45:49]  I, yeah, just, yeah, it was, yeah, it's way, way down, dude, probably.
[01:45:54]  Um, yeah, here we go.
[01:45:57]  Moving into some stuff here.
[01:45:59]  And then once you left, when did you leave?
[01:46:02]  This was the end of 2019, end of 2019.
[01:46:05]  Yeah, so I came out of the jungle, went to the UK, and then the pandemic hit.
[01:46:11]  Oh, okay.
[01:46:12]  And that was even harder for me because I'm like traveling, traveling.
[01:46:15]  I want to do this, I want to do that.
[01:46:17]  I want to, you know, like probably would have been better off in the jungle, dude.
[01:46:20]  Seriously.
[01:46:20]  And I found a loophole, I actually flew to, um, Ecuador, there was like five days where they were letting a bunch of people in, and I went and spent six months in the jungle just during the pandemic.
[01:46:32]  Nobody, no tourism, no nothing, you know.
[01:46:35]  Wow.
[01:46:35]  And it was great.
[01:46:37]  Did you ever get COVID?
[01:46:39]  I never tested positive.
[01:46:40]  Right.
[01:46:42]  Yeah, neither did I.
[01:46:43]  No.
[01:46:44]  I went to Brazil when it was at the highest, and I remember feeling a little crappy, but I was, you know, miles away from a test center, and by the time I went there, I was like, I'm feeling fine.
[01:46:56]  I'm not.
[01:46:57]  So, when you left in 2019 and you went back to the UK, did you ever go back and try to find him?
[01:47:04]  So, I actually went back in 2021 to the jungle, but it was actually to do a filming gig with an organization called Age of Union.
[01:47:15]  I don't know if you know Age of Union.
[01:47:17]  So, Dax DeSilver is.
[01:47:19]  Okay, yeah, yeah.
[01:47:20]  I know who he is.
[01:47:21]  Yeah.
[01:47:22]  He helps out with jungle keepers and, you know, he's a huge part of conservation.
[01:47:27]  Incredible.
[01:47:27]  One of my best friends.
[01:47:28]  He's an incredible human being.
[01:47:31]  This great guy who made his fortune in his 20s by coding.
[01:47:36]  He started the company Lightspeed.
[01:47:40]  He then used some of that money to do conservational projects.
[01:47:45]  And now he's focusing more on conservational projects than, you know, really anything else.
[01:47:51]  Yeah, because he's got more money than he knows what to do with, right?
[01:47:53]  He was doing stuff with making films.
[01:47:58]  He loves to make films.
[01:47:59]  He loves to educate.
[01:48:00]  He was then donating money to different projects.
[01:48:03]  He was doing all these things.
[01:48:04]  But.
[01:48:05]  He's just an incredible guy.
[01:48:07]  And yeah, he just, he's got a big heart, a big heart.
[01:48:13]  And he just has this passion to, he's a businessman.
[01:48:21]  And he is a very good businessman.
[01:48:23]  And he knows how to make money and he knows how to donate money.
[01:48:27]  And we need more people like him in the world.
[01:48:30]  Because if Jeff Bezos or if, you know, anyone with that amount of billions did good with it, We won't be in the situation we're in right now.
[01:48:41]  Dax is a change maker.
[01:48:46]  He is an incredible person.
[01:48:50]  It's rare that you find people with that amount of resources and wealth that aren't just trying to use that wealth to make more wealth, right?
[01:49:01]  Like when people make billions, it's just like they want more.
[01:49:04]  It's never enough.
[01:49:06]  It's very rare to find somebody who's willing to just do that and do.
[01:49:10]  Stuff that's good, but what he says is that's not going to make them more money, more profit.
[01:49:15]  What he says is the more money I can make, the more forests I can save.
[01:49:19]  That is a drive and that is a motivation to make money.
[01:49:23]  Is right, right.
[01:49:25]  More you can make, more you can save.
[01:49:28]  And yeah, it's a good way of looking at it.
[01:49:30]  I was in California with him last month, and we were just talking.
[01:49:37]  He was like, I'm really, you know, I went down there to go see him for like a week.
[01:49:41]  Me and my wife went down there, and he was like, I'm really sorry, I gotta leave.
[01:49:44]  I've gotta go back up to Canada to go to all these meetings, and you know, all this shit is happening.
[01:49:52]  And I was like, man, like, you know, it is what it is.
[01:49:54]  It's work.
[01:49:55]  And he goes, I need to go back because I know that I can make this company more money.
[01:50:00]  And I know that via this, I can save more land, save more animals, and do better for the environment.
[01:50:07]  That's the type of person that he is.
[01:50:12]  And, you know, he's side by side with poor Rosalie.
[01:50:15]  Yeah.
[01:50:16]  And that's probably how you've probably heard of him because of Jungle Keepers.
[01:50:20]  No, I heard of him because of Ryan Tate.
[01:50:23]  From Bedpa came on here.
[01:50:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:50:27]  And Ryan reached out to me and my friend Julian Dory at the same time.
[01:50:32]  And he was in New York.
[01:50:33]  So he went on Julian's podcast and he just brought Paul with him when he went to go do my friend's podcast.
[01:50:38]  And he was just sitting there in the room and then started having a conversation like, what?
[01:50:43]  Like with my friend Julian.
[01:50:43]  Like, you did all this.
[01:50:44]  Like, you were the guy in the show that caught the snake and all this stuff.
[01:50:47]  Like, you're living in the end.
[01:50:48]  Like, found out his story and it's like, you got to come on the fucking podcast.
[01:50:51]  Then Paul came down here and came on my podcast.
[01:50:53]  Then I learned about Dax.
[01:50:54]  Yeah.
[01:50:55]  And all that stuff.
[01:50:57]  Yeah.
[01:50:58]  But yeah, the stuff that Paul talks about in regards to all of the people coming down to the Amazon and burning down huge swaths of land for farming and for the trees seems like what Paul's really dedicated his life to doing and saving it from all of these industries coming down and just basically ravaging.
[01:51:28]  the forest for profit.
[01:51:30]  And I think you said a lot of the industries are funded down there by China.
[01:51:37]  That's correct.
[01:51:39]  Especially for the logging.
[01:51:42]  Yeah, there's a lot that goes on.
[01:51:45]  You know, sometimes you hear about forest fires.
[01:51:47]  I think in 2018 was when the Amazon burn was the big thing.
[01:51:53]  You know, that happens every single year.
[01:51:55]  He's got videos like in the middle of this fire where he's standing there.
[01:51:59]  Yeah, it happens every single year, but people just don't take it.
[01:52:04]  Take it seriously.
[01:52:07]  And it's not really people burning large swaths of land.
[01:52:11]  Type in Paul Rosalie after that.
[01:52:12]  You'll find the video of him.
[01:52:16]  It's people burning small bits of land, but then it's so dry because of the droughts that everything else catches fire and it just kills off so many, so many different things.
[01:52:29]  Yeah, this is it.
[01:52:31]  Oh, no, that's not it.
[01:52:34]  But yeah, no, I met Paul in 2014 for the first time.
[01:52:41]  And yeah, just ever since I met him, I've just been like, this guy just has a mission.
[01:52:46]  Oh, he really does, man.
[01:52:47]  Yeah, this is the video right here.
[01:52:56]  He's such a camera slut.
[01:52:57]  He loves being on camera.
[01:52:59]  He is, man.
[01:53:01]  He's like, I'm just going to take my top off and my nipples are going to sweat.
[01:53:11]  So they're burning this down for what?
[01:53:13]  Cattle farming?
[01:53:15]  For any farming.
[01:53:16]  The majority of the tribes out there will not actually kind of like do it for cattle, but they'll do it for like papaya and all these things.
[01:53:24]  Unfortunate thing about papaya is that all of these different fruits will suck up out.
[01:53:30]  All of the nitrogen in the forest.
[01:53:33]  So after five years, after four years, they then have to reburn another plot of land so that they can get, you know, good, better soil so that they can regrow these things.
[01:53:46]  And they haven't learned how to reuse the same plots of land.
[01:53:50]  So a plot of land will be used for three, four years.
[01:53:53]  They then know that after the fifth year, it's going to get bad.
[01:53:55]  So they burn another plot of land.
[01:53:57]  They start growing on that.
[01:53:58]  Then this one goes bad.
[01:53:59]  And it's just a Bad cycle, you know.
[01:54:03]  Yeah.
[01:54:04]  So, yeah, it's unfair that people are, you know, a part of.
[01:54:13]  It's crazy the people that are doing this, that are destroying these rainforests, the people that are like boots on the ground cutting these trees down are the natives.
[01:54:24]  Yeah, but.
[01:54:24]  Because they need, I mean, I understand it though.
[01:54:26]  I do understand it.
[01:54:27]  Like they're poor.
[01:54:28]  They need money.
[01:54:28]  You need to feed your family.
[01:54:30]  It's the most, it's the easiest way to make money.
[01:54:33]  It's education.
[01:54:33]  If you don't know what, Your effects are what the effects are that you're going to be doing, you know.
[01:54:40]  Like it's right, but if I'm poor and my kid's starving, I don't give a fuck what the effect is.
[01:54:45]  I want to feed my kid, you know.
[01:54:46]  And that's why I've seen people hunt monkeys and I've seen people hunt different things and I've seen people cut down trees because they want to put food on their plates for their families.
[01:54:55]  That's it.
[01:54:57]  If they knew the alternatives, then maybe there could be a different route.
[01:55:02]  But education is just not big.
[01:55:05]  The government don't care about their people, they care about.
[01:55:09]  Well, they're incentivized by the corporations that are exporting all of that stuff, right?
[01:55:15]  Right.
[01:55:15]  And the government.
[01:55:17]  It's the government of those countries that are allowing the exports to come out because they're making billions of dollars from these trees being cut down.
[01:55:24]  And it's just like all the way down the chain, you just have these poor, deprived people who are going to do all that dirty work for them.
[01:55:35]  Yeah, it's tricky.
[01:55:35]  I don't know how you stop it.
[01:55:38]  It's a good.
[01:55:40]  Question that I've found myself thinking about a lot.
[01:55:43]  How do you stop it?
[01:55:45]  Places like Costa Rica and places like even Ecuador is pretty good at it.
[01:55:53]  They're good at it?
[01:55:55]  They're good at it.
[01:55:58]  So Costa Rica doesn't have a military, it doesn't have any of these things.
[01:56:01]  Tourism is like one of the biggest things in Costa Rica because it's.
[01:56:05]  Costa Rica is like America 2.0 now.
[01:56:08]  It's so.
[01:56:09]  It's pretty.
[01:56:09]  When I was last there, actually.
[01:56:11]  No, I shouldn't say that.
[01:56:12]  A lot of the stuff there is owned by.
[01:56:14]  European Europeans.
[01:56:15]  When I was last there, I was there over Thanksgiving, and like every shop had like Thanksgiving turkey.
[01:56:20]  Yeah.
[01:56:21]  And I was like, what the hell?
[01:56:22]  Like, this is not right.
[01:56:24]  But they use tourism as a way to protect.
[01:56:30]  Because if they have an influx of people that come in and want to spend their money to go see a sloth and to do all these things in a natural reserve, and they have guides and they have all these people, then they're making more money from tourism than they are from selling their wood.
[01:56:47]  Right.
[01:56:48]  What other countries haven't figured out yet is how can we make money from tourism in these huge places?
[01:56:55]  Because Brazil, I don't know how many Costa Ricas you can fit in Brazil, but I can guarantee it's about 30 or 40 or so.
[01:57:00]  At least.
[01:57:01]  And how do you protect everything in there, especially when, you know, that's where they get all their money?
[01:57:08]  They get all their money from beef.
[01:57:10]  A lot of the beef that comes up to the US is from Brazil.
[01:57:14]  And where are they going to make, you know, where are they going to have them cows?
[01:57:18]  Well, Brazil is predominantly forest.
[01:57:20]  So they're going to have to slash and burn the forest to then have these cows so that then they can send it to the US so that then they can get money.
[01:57:27]  But if they.
[01:57:28]  We were able to bring people from the US to Brazil for tourism that made more money than beef, that's when it would happen.
[01:57:38]  And I'm not saying that, you know, go vegan or anything like that is going to save because they're still going to continue to slash and burn because they need their families to eat.
[01:57:50]  They're going to slash and burn and they're going to grow crops and they're going to do all these different things.
[01:57:57]  You know, if you are vegan, then that's great.
[01:58:00]  You know, everything helps.
[01:58:02]  But at the end of the day, it's not.
[01:58:04]  Going to stop the deforestation of the rainforest.
[01:58:06]  Right.
[01:58:08]  We were talking about before we went down this rabbit hole.
[01:58:11]  I asked you if you ever went back to that part of the jungle where you let Keanu go free.
[01:58:19]  I went back in 2021.
[01:58:20]  I went down to film with Dax and do a small documentary for Age of Union on Jungle Keepers.
[01:58:28]  So Paul Rosely was there and Dax DeSilva was there and we had a few other people.
[01:58:33]  And when I was there, I spoke to my girl.
[01:58:36]  She's my wife now, but she was my girl.
[01:58:38]  At the time, and I said, Look, I feel like I need to stay here just for a little bit.
[01:58:43]  I don't know why, but I just, I've come down for this documentary, and now I have a few more months where I can stay here.
[01:58:53]  Bearing in mind, I was flip flopping between the US and wherever because of my visa.
[01:58:57]  I was only allowed here for 90 days at a time.
[01:58:59]  So I said, Let me just extend this out so that I can spend the majority of time in Peru and whatnot.
[01:59:06]  And so when I went there, I was working with Jungle Keepers.
[01:59:11]  And I was patrolling and I was working with my friend Neri at the time and, you know, Dina and all these really cool people.
[01:59:19]  And I was finding really cool animals and I was camera trapping and I was photographing all these different things.
[01:59:24]  And the thought of going across to try and see Keanu, because on the land that I was working on at the time, we were kind of near the edge towards the end.
[01:59:37]  And with territories from male ocelots, they have to move territories if they're being pushed out from another male.
[01:59:41]  Otherwise, they're consequently going to die.
[01:59:44]  I knew that he went.
[01:59:45]  Into a jungle keeper's land or concession.
[01:59:49]  So I said to Neri, I was like, I want to go on this kind of hike with you.
[01:59:54]  It borders where I used to work and where I'm working now.
[01:59:59]  And if he's there and he knows I'm there and he comes out to me, great, but I do not want to say anything.
[02:00:05]  Because if I go there and I start going, Keanu, and you know, start, you know, growling towards him and all these things, like, come here, like, I've got eggs for you.
[02:00:18]  I'm potentially putting him back in his reintroduction.
[02:00:22]  That's if he's still alive.
[02:00:25]  I did everything I possibly could to make him as wild as he possibly could be.
[02:00:28]  So I hope that he's still alive.
[02:00:30]  And if he's not, he has offspring somewhere and he has gone on to do whatever he had to do.
[02:00:35]  Right, right, right.
[02:00:37]  I did not want to jeopardize the fact that I had done all of this work and I had said the hardest goodbye I'd ever had to say to then just.
[02:00:49]  Peel that scab off.
[02:00:50]  Be like, I'm back.
[02:00:54]  Like, hi.
[02:00:54]  And he's like, You got me any fucking eggs, dude?
[02:00:56]  And I'm like, No, I don't.
[02:00:59]  Right.
[02:01:00]  So it was a hard decision.
[02:01:02]  I wanted to call out his name so bad.
[02:01:06]  But at the end of the day, I was like, Why did I do all of this?
[02:01:09]  Right.
[02:01:09]  Did I do this for a good reason?
[02:01:13]  Or am I going to jeopardize it?
[02:01:15]  You know?
[02:01:15]  Right.
[02:01:16]  Right.
[02:01:18]  What I did was the right decision, I thought.
[02:01:20]  Yeah.
[02:01:21]  Yeah, I think so too.
[02:01:22]  You see people who, you know, have done reintroductions and they go out and, you know, These animals come flying back to them.
[02:01:29]  They're not truly wild.
[02:01:31]  Right.
[02:01:32]  And Keanu, when I let him go, was ferocious.
[02:01:35]  Like, I have scars all down.
[02:01:38]  Like, these ones are self inflicted, but I have scars all over my arms and legs.
[02:01:43]  Someone, you know, just.
[02:01:45]  If he wasn't happy, if he was, you know, just in a bad mood or he wanted food or I got in the way of him, he would fuck me up.

=== Reintroduction Decision Making (13:35) ===

[02:01:53]  He bit me so hard through the leg once that I. Like, there was a trap nerve for like three weeks, and I couldn't get it, and it just kept bleeding.
[02:02:02]  Oh, fuck.
[02:02:03]  And in the jungle, it's a hard thing, you know.
[02:02:05]  And I've had diseases.
[02:02:06]  I've had Leishmaniasis.
[02:02:07]  I've had dengue.
[02:02:08]  I've had, you know.
[02:02:08]  Oh, really?
[02:02:09]  I've had so many.
[02:02:10]  You know, I've had all these horrible things, but being attacked by a wild animal, because, you know, he is, at this point, he's wild.
[02:02:19]  He isn't, you know, just this little kitten that sleeps on his back.
[02:02:22]  Is that him right there on your neck?
[02:02:23]  This one is Khan.
[02:02:24]  That's Khan, okay.
[02:02:25]  Keanu is the pattern that goes all the way down my back.
[02:02:28]  Oh, they duplicated the pattern on your back?
[02:02:30]  I took a photo.
[02:02:31]  He was sat one day just perfectly on the trail, and I just got above him and snapped a photo and was like, That's really cool.
[02:02:39]  Like, I really love how it's kind of like unique, but at the same time, it's camouflage.
[02:02:43]  And I love the color of the orange and the leaves and his orange of his coat.
[02:02:48]  And while I was in the jungle, I had so much time to think about my tattoos.
[02:02:51]  I was thinking, Right, I haven't got my back done.
[02:02:53]  I think I'm going to, you know, my whole stomach is Lord of the Rings.
[02:02:57]  And so I was like, Should I continue Lord of the Rings on the back?
[02:02:59]  Should I get the Balrog?
[02:03:00]  Should I do all these different things?
[02:03:02]  And I was like, Could do that.
[02:03:04]  It's a bit geeky, but I could do that.
[02:03:06]  And then I just remember just continuously looking at this photo and being like, I want to replicate that.
[02:03:13]  It goes from the top of his head down to his tailbone.
[02:03:16]  I have that space.
[02:03:17]  Like, why don't I do it?
[02:03:18]  Right.
[02:03:19]  So when I got back, my good friend Brad was like, huh, I guess, I guess we're doing this.
[02:03:24]  And he spent six hours just blacking out my back.
[02:03:27]  Good lord.
[02:03:28]  Yeah.
[02:03:30]  I got to take a leak real quick.
[02:03:31]  Let's take a quick break.
[02:03:31]  Yep.
[02:03:32]  Have you ever seen the videos of people?
[02:03:35]  On Instagram, that like keep those big wild cats in their apartments, you know, I think with my algorithm mainly being wild, I've only ever come across like a few of them.
[02:03:46]  Um, there's like some I don't even want to kind of like boost his name out there, but he's this like handsome looking kind of dark skinned dude that basically just has like all of these like animals, and I'm like, why, you know, like I just don't get it.
[02:04:03]  It's so weird, I just don't get it.
[02:04:05]  It's so weird.
[02:04:06]  There's one we were looking at before you came in here.
[02:04:08]  We were recording like a little Patreon pre show.
[02:04:11]  And there's this guy who has, I don't think it's an ocelot.
[02:04:17]  It's a little bit bigger than that.
[02:04:18]  It's got huge ears.
[02:04:20]  Oh, like a serval.
[02:04:21]  Yeah, I think so.
[02:04:22]  It was called.
[02:04:23]  It was a serval.
[02:04:24]  Pull it up, Steve.
[02:04:25]  It was called Striker the Cat, I think.
[02:04:27]  Yeah.
[02:04:27]  I just don't get that.
[02:04:28]  He gives the thing like full raw chickens.
[02:04:32]  And the thing's like growling and hissing at him and dragging this dead, just raw chicken across the floor.
[02:04:40]  Yeah.
[02:04:41]  The exotic animal trade is one of the most disturbing things, especially if you look at Africa and look at what they're doing with ivory and pangolin and all these different things.
[02:04:56]  And then when you see this animal here, it looks to some degree healthy.
[02:05:01]  It looks to some degree somewhat content, but it's in the wrong place.
[02:05:07]  It's in a fucking apartment, dude.
[02:05:08]  It's in the wrong place.
[02:05:09]  And it's like, why?
[02:05:11]  And the majority of people that have these animals will de claw them.
[02:05:14]  So they'll take their claws out and they'll grind down their teeth.
[02:05:17]  The ocelots that were captive in Peru, that would be in people's homes, they would rip their nails out from their nail beds and they would grind their teeth down and they'd be just chained up and they would feed them like rice and whatever.
[02:05:30]  Oh my God.
[02:05:31]  How depressing is that animal's life, you know?
[02:05:35]  Like it's just.
[02:05:36]  But the thing is, idiots online will look at that and be like, that's fucking cool.
[02:05:41]  Right.
[02:05:42]  I want to get one.
[02:05:43]  Right.
[02:05:43]  And it's like, you are a part of the problem.
[02:05:47]  Yeah, I was trying to figure out like what kind of person wants this massive fucking wild animal in their house.
[02:05:55]  That is, it's not anything like a house cat, right?
[02:05:58]  This thing, it's super inconvenient to have this thing living in your house, feeding it raw chickens all the time.
[02:06:03]  Yeah.
[02:06:04]  It's either just like an Instagram thing to like get more of a social media following or like.
[02:06:08]  Well, how many followers does that thing have?
[02:06:10]  Probably a few hundred followers.
[02:06:11]  It's got millions, I think.
[02:06:12]  Go back to the page, Steve.
[02:06:14]  Click on the, yeah, right there.
[02:06:16]  800,000.
[02:06:17]  812,000 followers.
[02:06:20]  And that's 812,000 idiots that just are vicariously living their dream exotic animal.
[02:06:28]  Or it could be people that are just like me looking at this.
[02:06:31]  And I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
[02:06:35]  And I'm sharing it.
[02:06:36]  I'm like, look at them.
[02:06:37]  I show, I send my friends, I'm like, look at this.
[02:06:40]  How weird is it that these people want this thing in their house that's hissing at them and like growling at them all the time?
[02:06:48]  And it's wrong.
[02:06:51]  But it's that sense of superior kind of like feeling, you know?
[02:06:58]  Is that what it is?
[02:06:59]  It must be.
[02:07:00]  Why would anyone want a tiger or a liger or anything?
[02:07:04]  It's because you feel like you're better than everyone else.
[02:07:09]  Yeah.
[02:07:11]  And it's just sad.
[02:07:14]  Oh my gosh, those pumpkins are full of chicken pieces.
[02:07:16]  Feeding it raw chickens.
[02:07:18]  It's like a little presence.
[02:07:21]  Gosh, it's so hissing at them.
[02:07:23]  So bizarre.
[02:07:24]  It is so bizarre.
[02:07:26]  Idiots, dude.
[02:07:27]  Shit.
[02:07:28]  Oh, my God.
[02:07:29]  So, I wanted to ask you, how did you meet Andrew Uchals?
[02:07:32]  Yeah.
[02:07:34]  So, I was down doing the Khan project, and Andrew came out.
[02:07:39]  He was on a quest to catch so many different animals, dude.
[02:07:44]  He just wanted to catch them.
[02:07:46]  Oh, yeah.
[02:07:47]  Yeah, he just wanted to catch them, film them, film him.
[02:07:50]  You know, this was when his YouTube days were kind of sliding off the edge, but.
[02:07:56]  And he'd just gone through all of that crap with.
[02:08:00]  The network where they kind of like gave him three episodes and basically told him off.
[02:08:05]  Yeah, he came out and he was like, I tell you, Harry, don't fucking trust an American, don't do this.
[02:08:12]  They're all fucking, you know, he just was a loose unit at that point.
[02:08:18]  And uh, I was out there doing the calm project, he was out there because he had spoken to Paul, I believe, and Paul was like, Yeah, come out, and you know, so I just lived with him for like three months and um.
[02:08:33]  I helped him film.
[02:08:34]  I helped do all these different bits and pieces.
[02:08:36]  Dude, I've got so many stories about this guy.
[02:08:42]  He's wild, dude.
[02:08:43]  I didn't even watch all of his YouTube videos until after he came in.
[02:08:47]  I watched more.
[02:08:48]  And he's got like videos where he finds a dead what was it?
[02:08:53]  It was an emu.
[02:08:54]  A dead emu.
[02:08:55]  Catches kangaroos.
[02:08:56]  Guts the emu, wears the dead emu over his body, and then fucking catches a kangaroo.
[02:09:01]  Honestly, like, as crazy as he is, he has a heart of gold.
[02:09:06]  I love him to death.
[02:09:08]  But some of the things I've had to go through with him, like the first time I went to, so I met him in Peru.
[02:09:14]  We did a bunch of filming.
[02:09:15]  We did a bunch of stuff.
[02:09:16]  Then, after the loss of calm, I needed some rest.
[02:09:22]  I needed to get away from that place.
[02:09:24]  It was toxic to me.
[02:09:25]  And I messaged him and I was like, I don't know what to do.
[02:09:28]  He said, Come out to Australia.
[02:09:29]  I've got you.
[02:09:31]  I said, Okay.
[02:09:32]  So I flew out to Australia and I spent six months in Australia just.
[02:09:39]  I spent about three months with him.
[02:09:42]  But for the rest of it, I just basically used his truck.
[02:09:47]  He had to go to Thailand.
[02:09:48]  He was like meeting some girl in Thailand and he just got his foreskin cut off or something like that.
[02:09:53]  It was like some weird three months.
[02:09:54]  I didn't know what he was doing, but he was just.
[02:09:56]  Doing foreskin cut off?
[02:09:58]  Oh, yeah.
[02:09:59]  The guy's got a massive dick and he just couldn't use his dick because his foreskin was too tight.
[02:10:05]  What?
[02:10:06]  So he went through this whole fucking process.
[02:10:08]  His foreskin was too tight.
[02:10:10]  Oh, yeah.
[02:10:11]  It was strangling his dick.
[02:10:12]  Dude, and like there were so many times where I'd go into the truck and I'd go get something, and he just had like a flashlight just like hanging out, and it would like drop on me, and I'd be like, Oh, a flashlight?
[02:10:25]  Yeah, dude, the guy is a sex addict.
[02:10:28]  Oh my god, but he's not just an animal at heart, he's an animal in the bed as well.
[02:10:35]  I bet, but he uh, dude, I spent so much time with him, and we went fit, you know, we do it, we did everything, we went catching snakes, we.
[02:10:44]  Like I told you before, this, we were catching cane toads just so that he could, one, they're invasive and, you know, they're bad for the ecosystem.
[02:10:53]  But two, he wanted to make shoes out of these cane toads.
[02:10:56]  So he would kill them, dry them out in the sun.
[02:10:59]  We lived by this like water hole for like a whole week just catching cane toads, drying them out, making shoes.
[02:11:07]  Just like it was just, it was, you know, he's the correct amount of autistic, you know, like he's just this perfect.
[02:11:17]  But he can be too much at times.
[02:11:18]  Yeah.
[02:11:19]  And we've got a good friend, a mutual friend of ours called Dingo.
[02:11:23]  And it's just like me and Dingo just shitting on Andrew Ukals and Andrew Ukals just shitting on himself because he just knows that he is crazy and he knows that he's, but he's just, he's such a nice person at the same time, you know?
[02:11:40]  And so I spent a lot of time with him in Australia.
[02:11:43]  And then I left for Australia and I went back to Peru and then I did the Keanu project.
[02:11:48]  And then after that, just, Kept in touch with him constantly.
[02:11:53]  You know, he goes off and does his adventures, and I don't hear from him for like four or five months at a time.
[02:11:57]  But, you know, I know that he's just, if he dies, he dies doing what he loves.
[02:12:03]  And if he reaches out, he's done something that no one's ever done before.
[02:12:08]  Right.
[02:12:09]  First time I ever caught a wild donkey with him was one of the most intense situations.
[02:12:15]  We were driving down the road and we find this possum.
[02:12:18]  This possum's crossing the road.
[02:12:19]  So he runs out.
[02:12:21]  The car is still like, it was like in third gear or something.
[02:12:26]  He just jumps out of the car, just stalls.
[02:12:29]  I'm like, what the fuck am I doing?
[02:12:31]  He runs out and he's just running shirtless.
[02:12:34]  He grabs his opossum.
[02:12:35]  He goes, oh, it's an opossum.
[02:12:36]  I was like, I saw it on the road.
[02:12:39]  I didn't need to see it like this close.
[02:12:42]  No wonder you get rabies scares all the time.
[02:12:45]  Oh my God.
[02:12:45]  And then we're driving and we've come across a bunch of, you know, lizards and snakes and frogs and salties and freshies and, you know, all these things.
[02:12:56]  And he goes, Oh, mate, there's a fucking donkey.
[02:12:58]  And I was like, Oh, okay.
[02:13:00]  And he goes, You want to catch it?
[02:13:01]  I was like, I guess so.
[02:13:05]  He goes, All right.
[02:13:06]  And the car keeps it on, headlights are on full beam, and he just starts sprinting.
[02:13:14]  Like, and he's a fast guy.
[02:13:16]  Like, he, if he really put his mind to it, he would be like up there with the top in the world.
[02:13:23]  Like, he is really fast.
[02:13:24]  Even with the dick slowing him down, even with that just slapping his legs.
[02:13:28]  Like, he is so quick.
[02:13:31]  And so he's, you know, so far ahead of me.
[02:13:35]  And I'm like, okay, like, I've got my phone and I've got this.
[02:13:38]  I want to take some photos.
[02:13:40]  If we, he's like, Grab it.
[02:13:41]  And I was like, uh, and he's like, just fucking grab it.
[02:13:45]  And I was like, uh, so I'm like, okay, like, I guess.
[02:13:47]  So I go around it, fuck, boom, tries to fucking kick him.
[02:13:51]  Whoa, always fucking kick me in the dick.
[02:13:53]  And I was like, okay.
[02:13:54]  And he just grabs it, puts it in a headlock and just like pins it to the ground.
[02:13:58]  Wow.
[02:13:59]  And I was like, okay.
[02:14:02]  He's like, oh yeah, I do it all the time.
[02:14:04]  I was like, let it go.
[02:14:07]  All right.
[02:14:07]  He goes, do you want a photo?
[02:14:08]  And I was like, okay, he goes, just grab it by the head and just, so I'm just like there, just like holding this donkey, like, what the fuck?
[02:14:14]  Fuck, am I doing?
[02:14:15]  Like, this is just nuts.
[02:14:17]  And for three months solid, we were just out on the boats.
[02:14:21]  There was this one time he was like, you know, as he said, you know, saltwater crocodiles are the most dangerous in the water, which they are.
[02:14:28]  And we'd see them on the bank sometimes, and sometimes, like, they would be massive.
[02:14:33]  And they would be so big that they wouldn't even budget an inch because they would be like, fuck it, I'm standing my ground.
[02:14:40]  Like, I'm coming up here.
[02:14:41]  He would be like, let's play a game.
[02:14:42]  And I'm like, what's that?
[02:14:43]  He goes, I slapped the croc on the ass, whoever can do it.
[02:14:47]  So he'd run up and just slap a croc on the ass and he would fucking sling around and try and get him.
[02:14:51]  He's like, Harry, you do it.
[02:14:52]  And I'm like, dude, like, you're going to fucking die.
[02:14:56]  He goes, do it.
[02:14:56]  And I was like, all right.
[02:14:57]  So I run up, I slap it on the ass and I come back.
[02:14:59]  I was like, oh, you're nuts.
[02:15:03]  Yeah, he's a maniac.
[02:15:04]  But he's a fucking legend.
[02:15:05]  The story about that he told me on the podcast about him trying, staying all night trying to catch a honey badger.
[02:15:14]  Yeah, for like two days.
[02:15:15]  For like two days.
[02:15:16]  No cameras.
[02:15:17]  He wasn't trying to make a video or anything.
[02:15:19]  He just really genuinely wanted to catch a honey badger.
[02:15:23]  Yeah.
[02:15:24]  No evidence, no proof, just wanted to fucking do it.

=== Dead Panther Roadside Discovery (16:03) ===

[02:15:28]  The thing is, like, a lot of the stories that we all have as, you know, conservationists and as, you know, nature people, a lot of the time you don't have time to film things.
[02:15:39]  And so the time where I had gone out with Khan and the mountain lion followed me.
[02:15:46]  I didn't have my camera because for the days previous to that, it was dumping with rain.
[02:15:52]  And I wasn't able to film because I didn't have waterproof stuff.
[02:15:55]  So I was like, it's probably going to dump.
[02:15:57]  There's so much rain.
[02:15:58]  So I went out, and it's the times where you don't have your camera, it's the times where you don't have the equipment that you need, it's the times that you get these incredible encounters and incredible things.
[02:16:09]  And like I said at the beginning of this podcast, I didn't do any of these things with the intent of making a documentary.
[02:16:17]  I did these things because I was just doing them and I was filming what.
[02:16:20]  I could at the time, and it was just, you know, these fun, unique insights into kind of the life that I was kind of living.
[02:16:31]  So, I and I believe it.
[02:16:33]  I spent a lot of time with that dude, and I believe that he sat there for two days just sitting there, not eating.
[02:16:40]  He probably was worried to go for a piss because he was like, if I stand up, it's going to run.
[02:16:44]  Right.
[02:16:44]  And he gets so locked in, you know.
[02:16:46]  But he's a legend, legend.
[02:16:48]  And I've spent some good time with him in the bush.
[02:16:51]  I spent some good time with him in the jungle.
[02:16:52]  Have you ever been to that place, Arnhem Land?
[02:16:55]  We did.
[02:16:56]  We went to a place called Owen Pelly, which is kind of like the border of Arnhem Land.
[02:17:01]  And I remember we were like.
[02:17:03]  Running up these rocks looking for dingoes.
[02:17:07]  And we went into these like kind of like rock holes.
[02:17:13]  Like they're kind of like caves, but they're just like slits that you can just about fit in.
[02:17:18]  And I remember going in there.
[02:17:19]  I didn't have a light with me.
[02:17:20]  I just had like my phone and stuff.
[02:17:22]  So I put my light on and I just like step on something and I'm like, whoa, what was it?
[02:17:27]  It didn't feel like wood or I didn't feel like rock or anything.
[02:17:30]  And I step back and it's someone's leg.
[02:17:34]  And the Aboriginal people would put.
[02:17:38]  Their dead relatives in these areas.
[02:17:41]  And so we were like looking for dingoes in like these burial sites in Arnhem Land and like finding all these like really cool paintings of like kangaroos and crocodiles and all in these caves.
[02:17:55]  And it was just like, I know that I'm not the first person to go there because people have been there, but I felt like the first white person to ever see these incredible things.
[02:18:05]  And it's just like in this, yeah, this place called Owen Pelly was just like absolutely just.
[02:18:12]  One of the most beautiful places.
[02:18:13]  We sat, me, Dingo, and Andrew sat up on these rocks and we could see this storm coming in like miles away.
[02:18:21]  And we were like counting down like when the lightning was going to strike.
[02:18:26]  And we were just watching like this lightning striking and like you could just feel the vroom like all in your body.
[02:18:33]  Right.
[02:18:34]  And so I've been to Arnhem Land, only sections of it because, you know, legally permits, you need to have them.
[02:18:42]  Luckily, we knew someone via a friend of ours.
[02:18:45]  Aaron Connolly, who knew, you know, of someone who was a ranger there, and they were like, Yeah, you can go in there, but just don't get caught type thing.
[02:18:53]  And we weren't doing anything, you know, outrageous or anything.
[02:18:55]  But, yeah, to walk across it, that's.
[02:19:01]  Yeah.
[02:19:02]  And the way he had to, like, survive by catching, hand catching water buffalo and.
[02:19:07]  Stabbing their jugulars, like, yeah.
[02:19:10]  Brutal.
[02:19:11]  Yeah, he's a menace.
[02:19:14]  But, yeah, man, I've, you know, during my time, you know, doing.
[02:19:19]  The Ocelot projects and everything like that.
[02:19:20]  I've met some incredible people.
[02:19:21]  I met my wife in the jungle, actually.
[02:19:23]  Oh, really?
[02:19:24]  She came out to do a project and the project kind of fell through because permits were needed.
[02:19:29]  She was going to reintroduce monkeys at the time, but, you know, it didn't work out.
[02:19:33]  And so she was camera trapping and she came and stayed with me.
[02:19:36]  She actually met Keanu.
[02:19:38]  Keanu followed her to the bathroom one night and just pounced on her.
[02:19:42]  And I was like, he's just smelling the pussy if it's good, you know?
[02:19:47]  She's going to hate me for that comment.
[02:19:48]  It's hilarious.
[02:19:50]  But yeah, no, like I met.
[02:19:52]  Some are my best friends I've met in the jungle.
[02:19:56]  And it's because when you're there, you don't have any connection to the outside world.
[02:20:01]  It's just you and your thoughts and your friends and your conversations.
[02:20:06]  And you really get to know the true person when you're face to face with people like that.
[02:20:11]  And I think that that's one thing that we're lacking in this society is really finding the trueness of people.
[02:20:21]  When you're constantly behind a camera, when you're constantly in.
[02:20:24]  Front of a camera, when you're constantly posting things that aren't true, when you're constantly kind of like trying to be better than everyone else, or when you're in the jungle, you don't have anything apart from your conversation and your, you know, your trueness, your rawness.
[02:20:38]  Right.
[02:20:39]  How often do you go back?
[02:20:41]  At the minute, because I got married, I'm in the middle of my green card, so I can't actually go anywhere on my visa apart from inside the US.
[02:20:49]  Oh, really?
[02:20:49]  So I've just been doing a lot of trips.
[02:20:50]  A lot of the stuff that we've kind of like scrolled up and down on have kind of been like Florida and Arizona trips that I've been taking.
[02:20:56]  Okay.
[02:20:57]  Living in the Pacific Northwest is pretty difficult for my mental health because it's quite cloudy all the time, rainy all the time, you know.
[02:21:03]  So, move to Florida, man.
[02:21:05]  You both said that this is Australia 2.0.
[02:21:07]  Oh, it is.
[02:21:08]  It is.
[02:21:10]  But I don't know, dude.
[02:21:12]  My wife loves the family that she has up there.
[02:21:18]  And I love her family.
[02:21:18]  Her family are fantastic.
[02:21:21]  And they're just Pacific Northwest through and through.
[02:21:24]  And I compromised with her and said, when we get married, you know.
[02:21:30]  If I need to get away from the Pacific Northwest, I can go on a trip.
[02:21:33]  I can go on a guy's trip.
[02:21:34]  I can go do, you know, all these things.
[02:21:37]  And yeah, I get to travel a lot during this moment.
[02:21:42]  But once it's cold up there, too.
[02:21:44]  Oh, it's cold.
[02:21:45]  But once my visa's through, you know, I'm allowed to do all these different things, I'll be forwards and backwards from Ecuador.
[02:21:50]  I'm planning on doing six months in Ecuador, six months in the US.
[02:21:56]  Yeah, but for now, I'm just kind of doing some stuff here.
[02:22:01]  I have a project actually in.
[02:22:03]  The Everglades, where I'm camera trapping Florida panthers.
[02:22:06]  Oh, really?
[02:22:07]  I have a project in Peru which I'm helping with with a friend of mine who is camera trapping down there.
[02:22:14]  I've actually bought a few more cameras down so that I can do a few more camera traps this trip.
[02:22:20]  I actually fly back in five days.
[02:22:24]  And so for that, I'm just going to be out catching snakes, photographing snakes, doing like different things.
[02:22:29]  By yourself?
[02:22:30]  You got people you're meeting?
[02:22:32]  A guy actually that lives in Hendry County who.
[02:22:35]  Has also spent a lot of time in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
[02:22:38]  His name's Sean McHugh.
[02:22:40]  He's one of my best friends, great guy, and he lives and works with the Seminole community in Hendry County.
[02:22:47]  And he says, Anytime you want to come down, come stay with me.
[02:22:50]  So every time I come down to Florida, I just go and live with him and we go out and we catch cool things and we just reminisce about all of the things that we've done.
[02:23:01]  And he is an incredible biologist.
[02:23:05]  He's worked with Florida Fish and Game, he's done a bunch of stuff.
[02:23:08]  With that.
[02:23:08]  He's now working with the seminal communities.
[02:23:10]  He's working with, you know, transects and kind of like different pieces.
[02:23:16]  He's doing crested kara kara surveys and he's like helping, you know, seminal people euthanize pythons, which are, you know, destroying the ecosystem of the Everglades.
[02:23:28]  Right.
[02:23:29]  Pythons and I think iguanas.
[02:23:30]  Iguanas, yeah.
[02:23:32]  But the pythons are the big thing because they're actually taking the number of bobcats and Florida panthers down because they will take a kitten out easy.
[02:23:40]  Really?
[02:23:40]  And so, you know, That ecosystem is very fragile at the best of times.
[02:23:46]  I can't even remember the last time I saw a Florida panther.
[02:23:49]  I have never seen one alive on my Instagram.
[02:23:52]  You can probably see a little bit lower than that.
[02:23:55]  I actually found a dead one on the side of the road.
[02:23:58]  Oh, yeah.
[02:23:58]  You just passed it.
[02:23:59]  I saw that.
[02:24:01]  And it was heartbreaking.
[02:24:03]  Look how big that paw is, man.
[02:24:05]  It was heartbreaking.
[02:24:07]  I came here and this was my first day.
[02:24:11]  And yeah.
[02:24:13]  That's so sad.
[02:24:14]  Absolutely.
[02:24:14]  What a beautiful creature.
[02:24:15]  Absolutely killed me.
[02:24:17]  And so now, because of this, I've been putting cameras up to see if cats have this disease which causes their hind legs to lock up.
[02:24:27]  So that cat, that individual was found to have this disease which basically.
[02:24:34]  This one?
[02:24:35]  This one was found to have this disease which basically causes their spinal cord and their back legs to lock up.
[02:24:41]  And so what they're thinking is a lot of the cats which are found dead on the roads might not be able to evade the car because they basically get like a temporary paralysis.
[02:24:50]  Oh, shit.
[02:24:51]  And I've actually got camera trap footage of bobcats in Pacific Northwest who have it, where basically their back legs are like super stiff.
[02:24:59]  And so, with the project that I have, it's only a small one.
[02:25:02]  I'm just trying to do my little part here, but I'm working with an organization called F Stop as well.
[02:25:07]  And they do a lot of camera trapping throughout the Everglades.
[02:25:10]  And basically, trying to get video evidence of if these panthers are struggling.
[02:25:17]  And if they do struggle, and we can ID them.
[02:25:21]  Florida panthers are very hard to ID because they don't have any rosettes.
[02:25:24]  They don't have any patterns.
[02:25:26]  So you can't ID one from the other very easily unless it's male, female, size, injury, scar, you know, all these few things.
[02:25:36]  If we have as many cameras up filming these animals as possible, then we're hoping that we can, you know, ID if one gets hit by a car, did it have this?
[02:25:48]  Did we see that it has this?
[02:25:49]  Does this have, you know.
[02:25:51]  What are they getting this from?
[02:25:52]  I. Couldn't tell you how it's transmitted from one side.
[02:25:56]  No idea, no speculation.
[02:25:57]  It could be in their genes.
[02:26:00]  There's also, I think there's a few videos or even just photos of panthers that I've caught on my camera traps.
[02:26:07]  If you go up.
[02:26:09]  Florida Panthers?
[02:26:09]  Florida Panthers, yeah.
[02:26:11]  So that's a jag from maybe up one.
[02:26:15]  Yeah, there's a panther on the right that I got on my camera trap.
[02:26:19]  I got a video of this female and it just walked straight up to the cameras.
[02:26:22]  And I just have, you know, this.
[02:26:26]  A lot of people come to the.
[02:26:27]  Everglades and they want to see a panther or want to see these things.
[02:26:31]  I don't know whether it's my time with these cats in the jungle, but I came down for the first time camera trapping.
[02:26:37]  I put a camera up, and within three days, I got a Florida panther.
[02:26:41]  I knew where to put the camera because I could smell where the cats were.
[02:26:45]  I'm not joking, you could smell where they were.
[02:26:48]  They mark their territories all the time.
[02:26:51]  And the smell of a cat's urine is, you know, and if you go around to a friend's house or if you've got cats yourself, you know that their urine is very fragrant.
[02:27:00]  You know that if you leave it, it carries diseases and it's smelly.
[02:27:05]  With cats in the wild, their smell is just, you can hardly smell it.
[02:27:12]  But when you get a hint of it, you can kind of like.
[02:27:15]  And I was tracking these tracks for a while.
[02:27:18]  And I knew that this tree would be good because I could just smell that there were cats in this area.
[02:27:23]  And I've had five different individuals walk past this one camera track.
[02:27:27]  Wow.
[02:27:28]  And there's only about 180 to 200 left in the wild.
[02:27:31]  180 to 200.
[02:27:33]  That's the rough estimate.
[02:27:34]  All in Florida?
[02:27:35]  Well, Florida panther is the subspecies of the North American mountain lion.
[02:27:42]  Okay.
[02:27:43]  And the main thing that's taking them out is the pythons.
[02:27:48]  Main thing that's taking out the adults is traffic, like collisions with vehicles.
[02:27:53]  Main thing that's taking out the cubs is most probably the pythons.
[02:27:58]  Wow.
[02:27:59]  Have you heard of a guy named Carlton Ward?
[02:28:01]  Yes.
[02:28:02]  Yes, he's got some incredible photos, and he made an incredible documentary as well.
[02:28:06]  Pull up his Instagram, Steve.
[02:28:08]  He lives like five minutes away from here.
[02:28:10]  Yeah.
[02:28:12]  And yeah, he's been a big shot photographer around here for a long time.
[02:28:17]  And I think he used to be like a surf photographer.
[02:28:22]  I kind of fanboyed a little bit when my video of the panther that was dead on the side of the road was getting all these views.
[02:28:30]  And he kind of like followed me and reached out.
[02:28:34]  And I was like, really?
[02:28:35]  That is something, you know.
[02:28:37]  Even though I don't really like the whole social media side of things.
[02:28:40]  Keep strong.
[02:28:41]  It really is this incredible thing where.
[02:28:43]  Someone who is so prolific in what they do reaches out and looks at what I've done.
[02:28:50]  Yeah.
[02:28:51]  That's a good feeling, even though it was a horrible thing.
[02:28:54]  But yeah, him and his documentary, and he's done some incredible things for the Everglades.
[02:29:02]  What is that right there that looks like a scuba diver?
[02:29:05]  He's probably under the water in the.
[02:29:07]  Oh, yeah, look at that.
[02:29:08]  What a wild scuba diver.
[02:29:10]  Probably got some manatee photos or some alligator photos or something.
[02:29:15]  Yeah.
[02:29:17]  But yeah, man, there's a lot of things in the Everglades which I would happily move here for.
[02:29:23]  Yeah.
[02:29:24]  I would.
[02:29:24]  I'm just going to get the whole family to move down, man.
[02:29:26]  Oh, I know.
[02:29:27]  I know.
[02:29:28]  That would be an expensive trip.
[02:29:31]  But yeah, while I can, I'm here and I can't, you know, last time I was here, I found the pygmy rattlesnake.
[02:29:36]  I found the Eastern Diamondback.
[02:29:38]  I found the cottonmouth.
[02:29:39]  Look at the freaking head on that thing, dude.
[02:29:43]  But yeah, I come down here as often as I can because the wildlife in this state is, man, you can't be here.
[02:29:51]  Yeah.
[02:29:51]  You can't beat it.
[02:29:52]  Like, on one night, I went out for two or three hours and I found 11 snakes in two hours.
[02:29:59]  Really?
[02:29:59]  I go out looking for snakes.
[02:30:00]  You know, my main reason for going to the jungle the first time was one, suicide, but two, to do stuff with reptiles and amphibians.
[02:30:07]  Right.
[02:30:07]  It's what I live for.
[02:30:08]  I travel to Arizona.
[02:30:09]  One of my friends, Roger Walker, is actually coming down from Arizona today.
[02:30:12]  I'm picking him up from the airport and we're just going to go do four days of just hard, like, looking for snakes.
[02:30:18]  He's never seen an alligator, he's only lived in like California.
[02:30:22]  California and Arizona, you know, and he lived in Germany before that.
[02:30:25]  His dad was in the military.
[02:30:28]  But he's only ever lived in states where there's been no crocodilian species.
[02:30:32]  So he is just ecstatic to see his first alligator.
[02:30:36]  That's impressive.
[02:30:36]  And so.
[02:30:37]  Have you ever been bit by a snake?
[02:30:39]  Oh, yeah.
[02:30:40]  Really?
[02:30:40]  Really poisonous ones?
[02:30:42]  I've never been bitten by a venomous snake.
[02:30:44]  I have been bitten by a rear fang venomous snake, which basically can kill people, and there have been cases of people being killed by rear fang venom, but the majority of the time that venom is used to basically decompose.
[02:30:56]  The harder scales of lizards and fish that they eat, right?
[02:31:01]  So, the venom and the toxin that they put into a human's body isn't necessarily enough to kill them if you're a healthy person, but if you do get anaphylactic shock, you then could potentially die.
[02:31:13]  And then, with non venomous snakes, I've been bitten multiple times, but I have this respect for snakes and I'm not going to jinx anything, but when I see a snake, I can kind of tell if it's in a good or bad mood.

=== Respect For Venomous Snakes (06:41) ===

[02:31:31]  It's a really weird thing.
[02:31:33]  And so I know if it's going to be in a good or bad mood, I can keep my distance or get as close as I possibly can to it.
[02:31:41]  And with my photography, I actually use a wide angle.
[02:31:47]  So I have to get pretty damn close because I want to have the kind of backdrop to it.
[02:31:52]  I use a diffuser as well, which kind of lights it up because the majority of the snakes that I find are usually at nighttime.
[02:31:59]  And so I just go and.
[02:32:03]  I don't know.
[02:32:05]  This passion of mine has been here since a kid.
[02:32:08]  I have ran wild looking for animals.
[02:32:11]  And now that I'm living in the US and I can't leave, I'm just exploring what I can with US native and invasive species that I've never seen before.
[02:32:24]  I have like a checklist, you know, and I try and just check off as many snakes as I possibly can, as many animals as I possibly can, yeah.
[02:32:35]  But yeah, man, I just love my photography.
[02:32:38]  It's not even for, it's not even like, it's just a passion that I've got.
[02:32:41]  And I just love finding an animal and being able to take a photo and being able to show my nephews and being able to show my little brother.
[02:32:49]  And, you know, just being able to educate people on the fact that, you know, yes, this snake may be venomous, but it's only going to bite you if it's fearful for its life.
[02:33:03]  It's only going to bite you if you corner it and you start messing with it.
[02:33:07]  God, it just gives me the chills looking at that, man.
[02:33:09]  I, I, I don't drive well with snakes.
[02:33:12]  I'm not a fan.
[02:33:13]  You should come out.
[02:33:14]  We'll go catch some.
[02:33:15]  No way.
[02:33:15]  I don't want nothing to do with any snakes, bro.
[02:33:17]  I'll fuck with crocs, but no snakes.
[02:33:21]  My buddy Manny hunts crocs with those things.
[02:33:25]  Yeah.
[02:33:25]  Not crocs, gators.
[02:33:26]  Gators.
[02:33:27]  Yeah.
[02:33:28]  That's.
[02:33:29]  He hand makes those tridents.
[02:33:31]  They're crazy.
[02:33:32]  He got bit by a rattlesnake and lost his finger.
[02:33:34]  Yeah.
[02:33:35]  That would do it.
[02:33:35]  Yeah.
[02:33:36]  Yeah.
[02:33:37]  The neurotoxin.
[02:33:39]  Yeah, man.
[02:33:40]  He said that they weren't going to amputate his finger.
[02:33:43]  He was going to.
[02:33:43]  They were going to keep it.
[02:33:44]  They gave him all the antidote or whatever for it.
[02:33:47]  And he went back home and he said he just had like the worst pain in his hand and his arm for like months.
[02:33:54]  For like three months, he had this just stabbing pain.
[02:33:57]  Like his whole arm was on fire.
[02:33:58]  And then he went back in and they were like, We just got to amputate your fingers.
[02:34:01]  They cut off his, I think it's his middle finger.
[02:34:05]  And eventually the pain subsided like six months later.
[02:34:09]  Snake venom is an incredible thing.
[02:34:12]  I know someone that got bit by a bush master.
[02:34:14]  Which is one of the largest ground viper in the world since it's found in the Amazon rainforest and it can kill people in four hours.
[02:34:25]  They're just an absolutely incredible snake, but very powerful.
[02:34:31]  And this guy that got bit suffered with gallstones all his life, like all his adult life.
[02:34:37]  As soon as he got bit by that snake and he survived that bite, he never had an issue.
[02:34:41]  Really?
[02:34:41]  Got rid of him.
[02:34:42]  No way.
[02:34:44]  Whoa, dude.
[02:34:47]  I wonder why.
[02:34:48]  I wonder what that does to your body.
[02:34:50]  Oh, that photo back, the one just above with Chris Gillette, he lives in Florida as well.
[02:34:56]  He would be a really good person to have on the podcast because he has a sanctuary now that rescues animals up in.
[02:35:03]  It's like three, four hours north of here.
[02:35:08]  Oh, really?
[02:35:09]  But he used to work in the Everglades.
[02:35:11]  He used to, you know, he's got a big following on Instagram and all these different things.
[02:35:17]  TikTok, I think he's got like millions of followers because he just like.
[02:35:20]  He educates people on alligators and just a very, very intelligent biologist and just, yeah, has just found the niche to freaking get everyone to view his stuff.
[02:35:33]  Oh, that's cool.
[02:35:34]  Yeah, he's a good guy.
[02:35:35]  He goes to Peru, I believe.
[02:35:38]  He goes to Peru a bit.
[02:35:39]  And yeah, I met up with him one of my first ever times coming to Florida.
[02:35:44]  And he's such a good guy.
[02:35:47]  Such a good guy.
[02:35:47]  He's a great dude.
[02:35:50]  That's incredible.
[02:35:51]  Well, thanks again, man.
[02:35:53]  This has been fun.
[02:35:53]  I appreciate you coming down and doing this.
[02:35:55]  Thank you very much.
[02:35:56]  Yeah, it's been awesome.
[02:35:56]  Where can people find more of what you're doing and find more about your nonprofit and all that stuff?
[02:36:01]  Yeah, so the nonprofit is Emerald Arch, and you can find that at www.emeraldarch.org.
[02:36:07]  We're going to be doing a fundraising this year for buying the land in Ecuador where we can take veterans and protect the rainforest and do all these things.
[02:36:18]  I'm usually mainly active on Instagram, and that's harry underscore underscore Turner.
[02:36:25]  But yeah, I love to spread this message.
[02:36:29]  I love to spread the word of Wildcat and the things that I've done with these ocelots and some of the crazy stories that I've been through.
[02:36:36]  So, It's been a pleasure being on the podcast and being able to tell my story to a few other ears that haven't heard it yet.
[02:36:42]  Hell yeah, man.
[02:36:43]  Next time you're in Florida, don't forget to hit me up.
[02:36:44]  We'll do another one.
[02:36:45]  We'll follow up on your Florida adventures with the Florida Panthers.
[02:36:49]  And I got to get down to the Amazon eventually.
[02:36:52]  Oh, we'll do it.
[02:36:52]  Once Emerald Arch is completely up and set, you've got a place to stay, dude.
[02:36:56]  100%.
[02:36:56]  That video that Paul Rosalie posted of that treehouse that they built is insane.
[02:37:01]  Yeah, that's crazy.
[02:37:02]  That thing is, I don't know if I'd want to stay up there because it's so fucking high up in the sky, but it is badass.
[02:37:09]  It's like, yeah, pull up a little video of it real quick.
[02:37:13]  Treehouse.
[02:37:17]  Type in images, maybe, and you'll see it.
[02:37:20]  Yeah, there it is, top left.
[02:37:22]  Yeah, it's a cool space.
[02:37:23]  Oh my goodness.
[02:37:27]  Look at that, dude.
[02:37:30]  Are you safe up there?
[02:37:33]  I've not been up there, so I wouldn't know.
[02:37:35]  Are there any animals up that high?
[02:37:38]  Oh, there are.
[02:37:39]  Obviously, there are animals, but.
[02:37:41]  Up there, though?
[02:37:42]  We have mosquitoes.
[02:37:44]  You have so many, like, once you go higher in the canopy, is when you get all the bees and all the wasps, and then you've got the, you know, birds.
[02:37:51]  But nothing's dangerous, you know.
[02:37:53]  Right, right.
[02:37:53]  It's only as dangerous as you make it.
[02:37:56]  But yeah, I believe that the people who made that are, you know, very good with that.
[02:38:03]  Right, right.
[02:38:04]  Yeah, it's a beautiful treehouse.
[02:38:06]  Well, cool, man.
[02:38:06]  Thanks again.
[02:38:07]  Absolutely.
[02:38:07]  I appreciate it.
[02:38:07]  I'll link all your stuff below.
[02:38:09]  Thank you very much.
[02:38:10]  And yeah, I appreciate it.
[02:38:11]  Appreciate it, man.
[02:38:12]  Goodbye, world.