Paul Rosolie, a former logger turned conservationist, recounts his Amazon adventures—from nearly being crushed by an 18-foot anaconda to surviving threats from uncontacted tribes and armed gold miners exploiting the Trans-Amazon Highway. He highlights the rainforest’s untapped biodiversity, like harpy eagles preying on monkeys, and the dangers of invasive species, such as Burmese pythons wiping out 99% of Florida’s mammals. Rosolie’s indigenous-led project, Junglekeepers.com, transforms loggers into rangers while preserving ancient survival skills, like fire-making and medicinal plant use, to combat ecosystem collapse before it’s irreversible. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey Marshall, come here buddy This is one of the rare times that Marshall's been in studio during a show Come here Bubba, say hi to everybody Come here too Here you buddy He's the best.
I remember being a kid and going to the Bronx Zoo and looking.
They had an exhibit.
I think it was in the House of Reptiles where there's all these scientists and they're holding a giant snake and they're doing research and they're protecting these places.
And so I always had it in my head that I want to see these places before they're gone.
I grew up with a lot of environmental stress.
I really felt like this message of we're losing the rainforest, we're losing elephants.
My parents would read me Jane Goodall's books as a kid, and again, things like the Bronx Zoo, Steve Irwin, and You know, and I loved, I grew up, you know, and having access to, like, New York and New Jersey.
I grew up like, you know, and then like you, by like 13 years old, I was like, you know, I had like a hunting knife and I would do one match and I'd bring my golden retriever into the woods and we'd do like a mini solo, two nights, you know, and I have to make a fire with that one match.
I always just rivers, streams, forests, tracking bears, trying to figure out where the fox's hole is.
I liked spending time with animals in nature, and then it just drove me crazy that no matter how deep I would go in eastern forests, you always come out the other side.
And I always was just like, I want to find somewhere where it's truly wild, where there's no limit to it.
What's the max?
What's the highest you can turn this thing?
And I was terrible in school, failed all my classes, severely dyslexic, all that.
Actually, my wonderful parents were like, you do know that you can take a GED, skip the last two years of high school, and go straight to college.
And I was like, I did not know that.
So I did that.
And then as I was doing that, I just said, you know what?
I was like, I'm going to go to the Amazon rainforest.
I had a professor that showed me a piece of wood, and he made a joke like, oh, this is probably like teak from the Amazon.
And I was like, oh, yeah.
I was like, I got to get down there before it's too late.
I mean, it's like they're telling you that there's Jurassic Park.
There's literally anaconda dragons in these monster swamps, and there's harpy eagles taking howler monkeys, and there's all this incredible bustling life, and it's all vanishing.
And I was like, well, I want to see it before it's gone.
And again, the jungle is a place where there's a lot of stories.
And so like you always hear stories about like who got bitten by a snake and this happened, who got, you know, and so like they have the snake Loro Machaco, which is they know it's a green snake.
That's all that like the average logger or the average gold miner knows.
I was just like literally two weeks ago I was out in the jungle and I was out and it was raining and there was a Loro Machaco next to my head with flicking its tongue next to my head and I was like oh cool I gotta bring this back and show them so I very carefully caught this viper and brought it back and they were like that's not it that's the boa and I was like oh god I can't help you people.
I'm literally showing it to you.
But the rule is just kill every snake.
And so I've always been this ambassador for snakes trying to get people to be like, you know, you have black snakes and gopher snakes and garter snakes and you show them to kids.
I went down there as a volunteer just to experience it.
And then basically, as I became friends with JJ, he was like, could you come back?
He's like, you have access to gringos and people that travel.
He's like, bring us tourists.
He's like, we're trying to protect this river now while it's still completely pristine.
And at the time, I was like, well, that sounds great.
So I started bringing people.
We started Tamandu Expeditions.
And so it was like small time, just bringing some tourists to the jungle, showing them around, taking them on night walks, doing stuff like that.
But there wasn't a plan.
I knew what I loved.
I didn't have a plan.
I wasn't like, I'm going to be a jungle keeper.
I just went down there and was like, this is amazing, and I want more of it.
And then at that age, people were like, what are you going to do for a job?
And I was like, I don't know, but I'm going back to the jungle.
And then as we saw more of the forest getting destroyed, The Trans-Amazon Highway cuts straight across the Amazon rainforest.
You can drive from like Rio all the way to Lima.
And so for the first time in history, they opened up a land trade route through the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
And the final segment of the Trans-Amazon Highway was over the Madre de Dios River, which is right where we work.
And so we saw the amount of cars in our region go from like 400 a day to like 800 a day to 2000 a day and all of a sudden these offshoot roads and all of a sudden the burning and all of a sudden places that used to be pristine and wild, all of a sudden we're seeing this horrific burning.
Ancient trees cut down, entire ecosystems wiped out.
And so then at that point I'm going, okay, it's not a joke anymore.
We someone's got to do something about this and then you know you look And you realize you're in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
There is no one there's no help coming like these these ecosystems are gonna be bulldozed if nobody does anything so What regulations if any are in play obviously there's people that are gonna violate those but are there regulations that are designed to protect those areas is there is there like some sort of a process that someone has to go through before they start cutting logs like and The thing is, there's national parks, there's protected areas, there's indigenous reserves.
And as we've found out now, even when it is in their jurisdiction, half the forestry department just got arrested in Peru for actually helping the loggers.
They had sort of like infiltrated.
Yeah, and then of course, down there you still have uncontacted tribes and you have places where there's giant anacondas and you have different territorial reserves.
It's just like, it's such a weird landscape that the idea of like enforcement, like when we've had problems, when we've had issues where we have to bring law enforcement out there...
We have to bring them out there.
We have to get the boat, the gasoline, the food, provide them with...
We have to basically take them on a tourist trip out into the jungle and then be like, now go do police work.
It's very difficult.
And so when you hear this stuff, which again, eventually we have to tell the people this story.
And, excuse me, I threw up a video of me in the fires just like screaming and crying and being like, this is happening every fucking day and screaming.
And it went viral.
It went viral and at that time we had created jungle keepers and we had tried to protect, we had a little bit of rainforest we were protecting.
I think we had like one or two rangers.
And then you shared it on your Instagram.
And then it hit this level, it like went to the next level of virality.
I remember because my cousin Michael called me and he was just like, Joe Rogan just shared it!
And I was like, that's not, there's no way that happened.
And he's like, no, it did.
And the amount of attention that we got from that led to eventually people reaching out.
This guy Dax De Silva reached out.
And he was like, hey listen, you guys every year with the burning forest and the loss of habitat, he's like, I want to help.
I'm not going to be able to stay here long because this fire is spreading, but everything behind me right now is the forest that I've been working to protect for the last 13 years.
It's burning like this every day.
There are literally millions of animals in this forest that cannot escape right now.
And if you think our planet can survive this every day in the Amazon, you have another thing coming.
We have all the resources to protect this, to stop what's happening behind me right now, and people let it happen every day.
A lot of it is, they call it like Brazil nut concessions where it's just like areas where like you're supposed to be harvesting Brazil nuts.
But a lot of times it is private land, but people, there's people coming from other parts of South America and they're just coming in and they're clearing these areas and it's happening fast.
No one's going to pay you to go out into the wildest places on Earth and protect these things, for the most part.
It's very difficult.
You can go get a job as a conservation biologist.
You can go study things academically, but to go and actively do the work of protecting a rainforest or protecting a marine area that's sensitive, that's crucial to species, it's And so that's why that whole story was so important was because I was, you know, By that point, I was like 14 years into doing this with no support, no funding, no backing, no nothing.
It was just me and the local guys, machetes, and bare feet.
And then after that video went viral, after you shared it, we got contacted by Dax.
And then he basically was like, look.
He started a company called Lightspeed, and then he transitioned into conservation.
And so now he's helping the Sea Shepherd, and he's helping the Nature Conservancy in Canada, and Jungle Keepers was his first project.
And all of a sudden we could actually do it.
And so now these local people who used to be loggers and gold miners, we were like, yo, do you want a job protecting this forest?
And so guys had been cutting wood for the last 15 years.
Guys had been fighting the uncontacted tribes.
All of a sudden we were like, do you want to just help us patrol?
Just protect it.
Do nothing.
And they're like, do nothing and we get paid.
And benefits.
And it's a huge success.
We were protecting 50,000 acres now.
Millions and millions of heartbeats in there.
Like spider monkeys, troops of giant river otters, jaguars, harpy eagles.
I mean, just more biodiversity than you could list.
And we need to protect 300,000.
I need to protect 300,000 acres in the next year.
Because now there's Chinese machinery coming in, where they're coming in with those giant earth-moving things that take out the trees.
And so it's just like this race against time, because we have this incredible treasure trove of biological...
Incredible wealth.
Medicine's running through every one of these things.
You go out with the local people, and if you have something wrong with you, there's a sap for that.
They can cure an ear infection.
They can cure whatever it is.
If they want to go fishing in the stream, they have barbasco.
They have a root that they can crush.
Throw it in the stream, it'll stun the fish.
You take the ones you want, you take it out, and the other fish will swim away.
It's like they have a pharmacy that we don't have access to.
Yeah, he went with them and they did that thing with the fish where they grind up the plants and they throw it in the water and the fish just get conked out.
In the case of gold mining, there's a picture in there, Jamie.
I think it just says gold mining.
I went down there with Matt Gutmann.
And we did a thing where we got into the gold mining areas, where that's a whole other thing, where they're clear-cutting the rainforest for gold mining.
And so, yeah, you go there, there's like sort of this machine gun limit where, you know, you drive towards this area and then they have guards.
And inside there, they have these, see there's that big hose going out.
They have to cut the forest, burn the forest, suck up the land, and then the gold comes in the sediment in the sand.
And so they have to use mercury to bind the gold out of the sand and then they burn that off, which then is going into the atmosphere and raining back down.
I mean, this is like this is this is horrendous.
And the police can't stop it because you have to go in there with like the military.
The police will just get killed if they go over there.
Yeah, I mean, for a second I was like, is it happening?
Right.
Because the way they pulled up, you know, I was like walking on the street and they like, you know, cut me off.
You know, and they were like, hey, Paul Rosely.
And I was like, oh.
And our lawyer, or the guy that used to be the lawyer for Jungle Keepers, his father was very vocal locally about the gold miners and standing up to them.
A really good friend of mine on the river, his father had moved out deep into the jungle like 20 years ago and raised his two boys out there.
And then when this Trans-Amazon Highway came through, Uh, they saw the logging and the burning and that, you know, they wanted to live at the edge of the world.
They wanted to be deep in the jungle.
And so, uh, old man Satuko was like, you know, we're, we're gonna, we got to figure something out, either move deeper or move away or whatever.
And like, they were trying to figure out what to do.
And there was this one summer I spent a lot of time with his son.
His name was also Paul.
And, uh, he got, he got murdered by gold miners too.
And so it's just a war zone.
And then you have some of our guys now who are conservationists who used to be loggers who have shot at the uncontacted tribes and been shot at by arrows.
One of my rangers has a scar on his head from a seven-foot arrow from the uncontacted tribes.
Yeah, so they use the river cane, and then they take bamboo, and they get an incredible edge on the bamboo, and they can, it's like they temper it over the fire.
So the river cane doesn't weigh anything, so they make these monster arrows, and they can actually, like, nail a spider monkey out of the trees from, like, you know, 40 meters.
Yeah, someone's got a picture of it when it happened, but he was saying they were trying to...
They were trying to push bananas, because these people don't know.
These people are out there, and they're naked, and they're in the jungle, and they've been there for a few hundred years.
And he was there, and he was actually working for the Ministry of Culture, and he was like, let me try and be friendly.
Let me try and extend an olive branch.
And so he was trying to push a boatload of bananas towards them.
And the scariest thing was they didn't want anyone to understand them, and so they were actually speaking in Capuchin monkey calls.
And he's out in the middle.
He's brave, this guy.
And he went out to the middle of the river and he pushed this thing and he said he saw the arrow coming straight at his eyeball and he just moved his head to the side.
And it just gave him that, cut him right to the skull.
Yeah, there's that one and then there should be one more where he's just looking right at us.
But yeah, he's lucky.
He's really lucky.
He's got worse stories than that too.
One time he was at a remote guard post and the tribes came and he'd already gotten, I think he'd already gotten shot.
And he said he went up into the roof and like hid in the rafters like and wrapped himself and he said it was the middle of the day and he was baking and he said he could hear the the uncontacted tribes underneath him and he was like trying to make the decision of do I kill myself like a dog in a car in this heat like he knew he was gonna die or do I go down and let them rip me apart and it was like it was just the most terrifying story but yeah like that how did he get out of it he waited it out I mean he'd already been shot in the head so he was like I know what's gonna happen if I go down there Also then,
I'm also going to get, I'm going to get, everyone's going to come after me for calling them uncontacted.
Apparently that's an outdated term.
Apparently the correct parlance these days is voluntarily isolated indigenous nomadic persons.
It's weird because these guys, they don't have boats.
And so they don't have the wheel.
All these simple inventions.
They don't work with metal.
And so I believe that the current theory says now that...
Basically, these people were living extremely isolated around the time of the Industrial Revolution.
They were already very remote.
And then when you had the demand for rubber, the Amazon was the only place that you could get rubber.
And Henry Ford found out when he did Fordlandia, you can't make a plantation out of rubber.
It'll get leaf blight and die.
So the only way to get rubber was to start a full-scale genocide where they sent down these rubber barons that beat and whipped the native people and sent them out into the jungle to go collect rubber from the rubber trees for gaskets and hoses and everything that we needed.
These are the people that fought.
These are the people that remained unconquered, stayed back further in the deepest parts of the forest.
And so you think these people's grandparents' grandparents must tell them that those outsiders will set you on fire.
They will skin you alive.
If you see one of them, kill it before it kills you.
They have a couple of machetes that they stole off some friends of mine.
Like they sacked this village one time and they took pots and machetes.
They killed all the animals.
Yeah, they're very strange to deal with.
Like, there was a guy who had started leaving them, like, bananas, and then he left them, like, a shirt.
You know, he would just very carefully, because they don't, they can't speak, they don't speak Spanish, they don't even speak, like, Piro, like, or anything, like, or Yine is the dialect that we deal with on our river, and...
They murdered him, too.
And, like, he was friends with them for a few years, and no one has an explanation.
I just spoke to an eminent anthropologist about this.
You're out in the Amazon for a week by yourself and you're camping on a beach and you wake up and you walk upriver and you camp on a beach and you wake up.
To me, it was almost like the world melted away.
It was like that Will Smith movie where you're the last person on Earth.
It's like you are in this jungle paradise where there's macaws and there's jaguars and the animals up there don't know what a human is.
It's like the Galapagos.
You are in a place where animals are unfamiliar with the shape of a human, so they don't mind.
And there's giant anacondas.
Like, it's different.
It's different out there.
There are still places where from century to century nobody goes.
And the animals have no idea.
And when you're out there, it gets really freaky.
Like, I noticed my brain losing touch with, like, I would start to get worried, like, was this just my reality now?
Could I go back?
You know, you're so far out there.
And the Amazon's friendly.
The jungle itself, there's nothing that's going to eat you.
A jag's not going to eat you.
Unless you go swimming in a lake at night, a black caiman or an anaconda's not going to mess with you.
And it's like, piranha tastes good.
That's how you survive.
So it's pretty chill as a wilderness experience until something goes wrong.
Until you get a big thunderstorm and the river rises 20 feet and there's Yeah.
And actually, somebody recently sent me a video of you and Forrest Galante talking about this, about how big can an anaconda get?
Me and JJ were out on this place called the Floating Forest one night, and...
I was thinking about getting on the cover of National Geographic.
I was thinking about getting attention at that time.
But we had gone deeper down the Amazon rabbit hole than anyone had ever gone.
We found this place, the Floating Forest, where you're walking on rafts of floating grass, and you're walking past treetops.
So there's a forest underneath the lake.
Wow.
Because they can sit on these grassy islands, and if anything comes, the whole thing is like a giant tympanic membrane.
As soon as something takes a step, they're like, threat, and they go down.
And just like any big fish, just like any ancient giant crocodile, those shrewd old motherfuckers that have been there for a century, that's where they live.
And so we were out there at like 2 o'clock in the morning, and we're walking on these grassy rafts.
And JJ's going, this is anaconda.
And I went, that is not anaconda because the grass was pushed down, but it was like, it was this big.
And I was like, this can't be anaconda.
He's going, this is, he goes, if it was a crocodile, he goes, you'd see the, you know, the feet.
And I was like, it just can't be.
And then at like middle of the night, The stars are shining in the black water and everything.
We're in the canopy of a forest on top of a lake, and we see two anacondas.
One of them is so big that I would say it was probably 24, 25 feet.
Gigantic.
That was an 18-footer.
Then there was another 16-footer on it, and my first response was, we have to catch this snake.
There's a shot coming up where we kind of have her stretched out for a second.
But with this one, we put a radio transmitter down her throat, and we were able to track her movements to learn about the home range as a female anaconda.
They eat a lot of monkeys, and so one of the ways to tell when there's a harpy eagle around, like we'll be walking through the jungle and you just find a pile of bones.
Because up in that nest, 150 feet up, they're just dropping monkeys and sloths and the babies are ripping them apart and then they just chuck the bones out.
So you'll see like a little bone yard in the jungle.
I mean, first of all, the sun coming up in the east, and you have red apocalypse, beautiful mist coming off the jungle, and you have spider monkeys excited, because that's a ficus, and so everyone's excited to eat.
So all the animals are coming to the treehouse, and so you have howler monkeys, spider monkeys, capuchins, squirrel monkeys, I can't even name all the birds for you.
It'd just take too long.
It's cacophonous.
I couldn't talk to you because we wouldn't be able to hear each other.
You have to scream.
And there's fruit falling on you and animals are shitting all over the place.
And there's leafcutter ants are starting up their day.
And then there's bullet ants fucking around me.
I'm like, who can I take down today?
It is wild.
But it's like, that's why we were like, okay, we gotta...
Because otherwise you climb up on a rope and you're like holding onto a branch and you look around and you go down.
This is like, now you can go up there and like take it in.
And it's a whole other world.
It's wild.
And we put it like right in the middle of the 50,000 acres.
And so it's just mega remote wilderness and you're actually comfortable.
And the people that do want to do it, ask them in the morning if they still want to do it.
They don't.
And so making it so that people can actually come and see the Amazon rainforest in a way that's safe and bug-free and air-conditioned and everything else.
And it's like, you can just wake up and look at it all.
They also pulled a spearhead out of a, I want to say a right whale, where the same thing, and they dated that spearhead back to, like, the 1830s or something.
Emotionally, I think it was worse than the pain, because the pain gave her some Benadryl, and she like slept it off, but like, she was just like, God, it was so horrible.
She was like, I was like slapping my leg, trying to get this thing to stop biting me, and it was just getting more scared, so it was biting her more.
This is, again, one of those places where you're way past the edge of civilization.
And we found this swamp.
And again, it's always JJ that finds everything.
He goes, oh no.
And I went, what?
And he goes, look at these.
And there's like a drag mark, huge black caiman, like monstrous, like a two foot thick stomach.
And then these monster hands on either side, you know, the feet as it's walking.
And we're like following this thing and it comes to the water and floating in the water is the bodies of all these dead peccary, all these dead wild boar floating in the water.
And I'm like, What am I looking at here?
And we got a stick and we brought him in and we realized a whole herd of pigs had tried to swim across this water.
And this monster-ass Godzilla black caiman had just gone and just took down like 10 of them.
It says it's because of pythons, but it could be a few.
Look at that.
A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the sightings of medium-sized mammals are down drastically as much as 99%.
In some cases in areas where pythons and other large non-native constrictor snakes are known to be lurking.
Wow.
So the people that I know that have been there over the last few decades is drastic.
That's the thing about the invasive species that get introduced into an ecosystem that you know nothing's there to eat them Which is crazy these Python hunters that are finding these massive pythons and in the Everglades is a It's so crazy to watch how many of them there are and how they keep finding them.
I don't think it's a problem that you can really solve.
Because you get those big ones, but then it's like they're so cryptic.
Snakes are so cryptic.
Again, what we've learned about anacondas is like, They can be around you and you don't know it.
They'll go in the sand in a river and they'll stick their nose up and they'll just be resting and they'll be like, I ate last week, I'm just going to chill here.
And so we'll be walking up a stream and if that snake, once snakes have radio transmitters in them, we're like, oh my god.
We have none of the equipment required to find them.
So the babies, they're in the leaf litter, they're in the swamps, they're like, we're never going to get them out.
That's just the way it is now.
I totally think that they should try as much as possible.
Uh, apparently a fly catches a mosquito and lays its eggs on the mosquito or moths.
We think it's the moths in our region because usually every time I get bot flies, it's when I'm doing such intense work that I don't have time to wash my clothes.
It's directly linked to how clean you are.
Because, like, I'll take off a sweaty-ass shirt, throw it over a stick, go to bed, wake up, and then be like, boom, throw it back on, and go.
And then, like, a week later, you get botflies.
And it's, like, because the moths are covering your shirt at night, and the mosquitoes are all, they're all, like, this sweat.
And so you see all these bugs at night all over your shit.
There's a great book on parasites where they said something like, the number of parasites for every species on Earth, how many parasites exist specifically for that.
And it's like, there's more parasites than there are animals on Earth, and it's...
I mean, look, the Amazon's so important that it's like to me, of course, as a conservationist, I'm like, we need all of these crazy creations to be doing that, to create that ecosystem.
It's like...
So, like, to me that's very comforting.
I'm like, let all that crazy shit be there.
If you don't like it, don't live there.
Like, you know what I mean?
Don't live in Connecticut.
Like, whatever.
But, like, the wilder it is...
Like, you go to the jungle in January and you go into a swamp and it's just a freak show.
It's just all of that.
And you just go through the swamp and there's all these frogs and snakes and night monkeys and anacondas and black caiman and all this shit.
And you see eyes looking at you through the darkness and it's jaguars.
It's like you really just have to learn your bushcraft.
You have to learn how to navigate in the jungle.
And it's like...
Which is pretty much, you have to get just amazing at dead reckoning and remembering your course.
Because it's so dense that we play with people.
We go, see if you can go from here to there.
It's like, they can't.
They can't go there.
They can't do that.
As soon as you leave the river.
So I had gone out on this solo, gotten lost, gotten scared, and then been like, oh shit, what if I just into the wilded myself?
What if now I'm going to be the next kid that went and died in the Amazon?
Yeah.
I like slept in the hammock but this is like as I was learning so I didn't realize that the hammock that I had bought had a mosquito net on top but the back was not mosquito proof so they could stick through so my back was being destroyed by mosquitoes as I'm trying to sleep and like a couple of nights of that and so I finally fall asleep and I wake up in the middle of the night and I hear breathing right next to my face and I like wanted to turn my headlamp on and I just hear like Right
here.
Like I could feel her breath.
And I was like six inches away from a jaguar's face.
You have to keep your skin clean or else you just get infections.
But, like, for the most part, like, my clothing, everything, like, I don't use anything that's scented because of that, because I want to be out there and...
And just blend in.
And that's whether I'm out in the field with elephants or whether you're out in Africa or India or whether you're in the Amazon.
I want to be sort of like included.
I want to blend in.
And so like not that long ago I was checking a camera trap and I heard, I thought it was a, we had students at our research station at the time, and I heard like the leaves going, and it was like September, so the jungle was dry.
And I turned around, and I was going to scare this person, because I was going to be like, who walks that loud in the jungle?
Like, have you never, you have no respect?
And I turned around with my finger up, and this jag walked right by me on the trail, and just went, what's up?
I just kept walking, and I was like...
I took that as good because at least my scent trail was so that he didn't know I was there.
And I think they're, you know, with big cats, the mothers teach the young how to hunt.
And I think they're so oriented, like with tigers, they're so oriented on horizontal, you know, get the neck from underneath, break the neck from up top.
And it's like when they see a vertical animal walking by, I think they're like, first of all, I don't know what this is.
Second of all, it smells weird.
Third of all, where do I even, you know, you got to be desperate to take that risk.
I don't think that they...
Lions are a different story.
But with jags, with tigers, with leopards, I've never, ever felt any fear of being around a jaguar.
So, JJ's dad used to tell us, he said, if you're ever out in the forest and something doesn't sound right, he was like, get out of there.
And he was like, because they will use the tinamoo calls.
Like, the undulated tinamoo is like...
But, like, we know what that sounds like, but we also know what it doesn't sound like.
And so, like, every now and then you'll hear one that's, you know, different.
And, like, we all get freaked out because we're like, that's how we do it.
That's how J.J. taught me to do it.
Like, if there was a bunch of tourists right there and J.J. wanted me to come over and, like, chill with him and we wanted to go hang, he would just do that and get my attention.
And, like, I know that it's not a tin of mine.
I know it's J.J. And so it's like they've taken that to a whole other level where they can communicate.
And so there was a group of guys who was upriver, and they got surrounded.
They heard monkey calls coming from different directions.
And they realized that they were completely surrounded.
At least one of the guys was telling it to me, he got in the water and crawled like a turtle and escaped.
And then the tribe showed up, and there was this whole showdown where they actually shot one of the community members.
And then one of the guys who knows some of their language was saying that they...
It looked like they were mad with...
The guy that shot the guy, they were mad with him.
They were like, why did you do that?
Now there's going to be retaliation.
Why did you shoot him?
And there was a whole discussion happening while these people were huddled in the stream waiting to see if they got killed too.
So it's like, I don't really, you know, because when you get these loggers going in there, it's like, yeah, we'll pay you to protect the rainforest.
I'm like, you don't have to do this.
You don't have to be going into these areas that are that dangerous.
So yeah.
So at this point now, though, through all of this, though, we've established jungle keepers.
We have 50,000 acres.
We're trying to do 300,000 acres.
And if we can do that...
We'll basically be helping to establish one of the largest protected areas in the Amazon rainforest, which will encompass these uncontacted people and they can stay uncontacted and they can stay safe and do whatever they want to do in the jungle, guarding the secret pyramids and the giant ground sloths or whatever the hell it is that they do.
It's not universal, and there was someone in our region who, like, captured a child from the uncontacted, raised them in a very remote community, and people have tried, anthropologists have tried, they've been like, hey, so what was it like when you grew up?
And it's like, it's dark.
He's just like, I don't remember.
Like, no one's been able to get any information out of him.
Then last year, some loggers went to a place they shouldn't have gone, and they got whacked.
Sort of like the WhatsApp underground in Peru.
Everyone was sending each other pictures, because one of the cops sent to his family a picture of what the bodies looked like on day six, laying on the beach with arrows in them and shit.
And it was like, oh my god.
It makes you stay in bed at night.
You're just like, I'm not going to.
But I mean, yeah, it's a complicated topic because there's people that want to contact them.
There's people that want to leave them alone.
And then, of course, there's missionaries that are like, they need the Bible.
Saying how he was like, yeah, and he goes, you know, the jungle is basically a human-made garden.
And then, of course, I went and talked to, like, every scientist I knew because I was like, come on.
And they're like, look, you know, in the areas around the rivers, there were complex, there was no debating it.
There were complex civilizations, sometimes larger than we think.
But in those areas, you see a higher prevalence of like, like he said, like they'll plant Brazil nut trees, they'll plant, you know, whatever.
I don't think bananas were there at that point, but where there was some gardening happening.
But what worried me then was then like Smithsonian came out and put out like an article and they're like, is the Amazon created by humans?
And it was like, oh, God, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Because like then you're changing it from a designation of like this incredible, complex, wild, ancient ecosystem to if people don't understand the context of what he's saying, that people engineered it in places.
And then the headlines went to, the Amazon was made by people.
And then you have people like Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, who's no longer in office, but just being like, well, if we made it, we can manage it, right?
Let's go take it out.
And I was like, oh, God.
I was like, be careful.
I was watching him on your show, and I was like, oh, be careful, be careful, be careful.
Dude, I mean, you find pottery in places, but it's always near the rivers.
Like, there's evidence of ancient civilizations.
You want to hear the craziest thing.
One of my guys found a stone axe head.
Now, here's the thing.
The uncontacted don't have rocks.
You won't find a rock on our river.
There's clay.
There are no rocks.
They found a stone axe head in the jungle.
At a site from the uncontacted, but what that means is that the uncontacted tribe had a stone axe head that they've been holding on to since Inca times.
And someone forgot it at the camp.
And so you're talking about civilization carrying around something from a previous civilization that they don't know where they got it from.
So the thing about the lost city of Z was that there was a previous expedition that had encountered these cities and these incredible, beautiful, complex cities.
And they described how elaborate their clothing was and their culture.
their agriculture.
And so then when the next expedition went back, there was no one there because they had killed everybody with diseases.
Yeah, and I mean, Oriana was the first person to go descend the Amazon, which the thing that always drove me crazy about that was that they came down the Andes, made their way down the entire Amazon, and then looked at the stars, figured out where Spain was, built a whole other ship, and sailed home.
You know, what's smart is your ability to use information correctly.
Now, what information do you have?
Like, they had information that we don't have because they needed to be able to navigate using the stars.
And they didn't have to deal with the kind of night pollution that we have.
The light pollution that we have at night is...
It's one of the greatest tragedies about modern civilization is that we've blacked out one of the most spectacular things you could ever see.
The thing that really centers us and humbles us, which is the view of the stars.
I went to the Keck Observatory a few years back.
I went last year, but...
It was really good last year, but not this one time.
The Keck Observatory is in Hawaii on the Big Island.
And you go way, way, way up through the clouds.
And the view of the cosmos is like you are in a spaceship with a clear glass windshield.
And you see everything.
There's no light pollution on the island because they have diffused lighting for all their street lights.
Specifically designed so that it doesn't fuck with the telescopes.
And so when you're up there, I'll never forget it.
The one time that I went, which was at least 15 years ago, maybe 16 years ago, that one time was so spectacular that it changed my view of, like, Earth in the relationship to the cosmos.
Just by seeing it.
Because you see the Milky Way.
You see everything.
You see all the stars.
It just took my breath away.
I couldn't stop staring at it.
I was like, this is insane.
And then I was thinking, God, this is everywhere.
This is what the ancients used to see before we figured out electricity and blunted it all and ruined our relationship with the cosmos visually.
Because that's what every city does.
When you look up at the night sky, you don't see jack shit in New York City.
You see a star.
Oh, there's the moon.
That's it.
What is up there is literally the most spectacular thing that humans could ever witness.
And it's there every night if you don't have light pollution and cloud cover.
It's like it genetically bottlenecked them so quickly because over the last hundred years, The humans were all going for the big tuskers, and now these monster tuskers, like the really big ones where they touch the ground, there's only a few of them left.
I feel like there's a thing about mountain communities, ocean communities, where you're confronted with nature that's on such a scale of beauty and magnificence that you're overwhelmed by it.
You're automatically humbled just by your environment and your surroundings.
There's the same thing about oceans.
It's so humbling because it's so immense and there's so much power and energy in life.
There's a relationship that we have to the cosmos when you look up that is like, okay, yeah, this is the real mystery of life and of existence, that we fly through infinity.
And it's like you are so connected to nature there.
It's so apparent that you can't not be in absolute awe.
And again, we're out there.
We see the stars at night like that.
Where it's like you can see the Milky Way.
It's a belt across the sky.
And there are these animals and these consciousnesses moving.
And it's all working together in this giant orchestra of the most complex life that's ever existed.
And it's like...
When you come home, when you go back to a city, you go, you guys are really missing out.
You feel so connected and locked in.
Like you said, it puts you in your place.
It reminds you how insane this reality is.
And that we're on this planet that we are so incredibly connected to.
And then you start to understand what happens when people get removed from that and how far off perception can go.
Because when you're not...
What the jungle does is it brings you back to those chemical physical truths.
It removes the cataracts of society from your eyes so that you're confronted with whether or not the river's rising, whether or not the sun is going to be...
When we're on an expedition, it's like it rains for six hours and we freeze.
You can get hypothermia.
Then the sun comes out, but the boat keeps moving.
And it's like, well, now your skin is peeling off.
And it doesn't matter what you believe in or who you are.
It's like we all have to deal with the same reality.
We gotta survive.
And that's where I feel good.
The rules of the game are the same.
There's no debating it.
It's like we all have to deal with the facts that nature is putting forward for us.
And it's like the world makes a lot of sense when you're out in the wilderness.
It's definitely saving water is a purpose of them.
And so what we do is we can, when we're out in the bush, it's like you just, you cut off one of those canisters and so you have like a sweet little bamboo cylinder and then you tie it with balsa and throw it over your back and it's like you're carrying a map.
It's like you just have this, like a water bottle from the jungle.
There are ways of getting things done.
Then, what you do is, what JJ will do, we'll go and you take a serrated knife, and when you walk barefoot, you get that big callus on the back of your heel.
You cut the callus off your heel, stick it on a hook, catch a few piranha, cut them up into pieces, catch some more piranha, and then stuff the piranha into the bamboo, take some leaves, salt, stuff the leaves in the bamboo, and then throw the bamboo canister filled with piranha onto the fire, Really?
You can go up to the edge of the river with your headlamp and curious fish come and you just whack them with a machete.
There's that.
We also just, you know, I mean, usually we had now, whether we're on a scientific expedition or whether we're bringing, like, tourists into the jungle or whether we're out with the Jungle Keepers Rangers, whatever we're doing, we have a chef with us.
We have a cook with us.
We can't always be cooking for ourselves now and doing our work.
To be honest, living off the land is something that we do when we go out on these ceremonial hunts or when we go out on expeditions to really uncharted places.
We practice that.
And the elders in the community, we lost the guy who used to do the ayahuasca ceremonies in JJ's community.
We lost him during COVID. But it's like he knew things, he knew methods that the younger generation doesn't know.
Dude, I told you, gold miners follow me on Instagram.
And that's a security risk for me.
Yeah.
But, like, J.J.'s father once apparently killed an electric eel, removed the nerve.
Again, I don't know anatomically if this makes any sense, but this is how the lore goes.
That he killed the electric eel, removed the nerve that generates the electricity, then cut his own arm open, put the nerve in it, and slapped a dead frog on top of it, and then bandaged that up.
And he said that that would give him strength until the end of his days.
He lived to 87 years old, alive in the jungle and healthy, and he died one day at a barbecue just like...
He just like leaned over on his grandson, smiled, and died.
I was doing some stuff with tigers in India, and I picked up a disease called tularemia, and I had this horrible patch of pus on my elbow.
And I went to every doctor.
I came home from India, went to doctors in New York, and for two months I was in bed, and I had no energy, and they put me on this antibiotics, and that, and this, and that.
And these, again, New York City infectious disease doctors couldn't heal this thing.
I went to the Amazon.
JJ takes my arm, looks at it, and goes, oh, so bad.
Look at this.
He goes, come with me.
We go into the jungle.
He cuts a tree, takes the sap, says, drink some of this.
Not too much.
He was like, one drop of this down your throat.
I felt like it was going to close my throat.
And then he took the rest of the sap and he rubs it onto the wound.
And this is like a disgusting pussy thing that had been plaguing me for months.
Now think about how many thousands of years are needed or at least centuries are needed in order for him to have that knowledge.
How many people living out in the jungle had to try how many things to have that medicinal knowledge handed down through the generations and then to be in the presence of a person that has that type of knowledge and to have access to it and to witness it working.
I think, what was it, Captopril they made from Bushmaster Venom in the 1990s and I think it was Pfizer.
I don't know who it was.
One of those companies made like a few billion dollars off of it.
But what happens is...
People will discover a compound in the Amazon and then export it.
It'll be like thousands of years of wisdom from ancient cultures handed down and then someone will give that knowledge out to a corporation and they'll Take it, profit off of it, and then that's it.
But it's like we, at this point, one of the things we're trying to do is work with the indigenous communities to try and help them to preserve that knowledge.
Because we're also seeing now that as the roads come in and you have the problems with the fires and it's changing, you know, at the edge, at the edge where the jungle is being destroyed.
They, the younger people have to decide, do they want to live the way their parents lived?
Fishing, hunting howler monkeys, eating howler monkeys, or do they want to go out into the world and do something else?
And it's like, well, then you start with like, well, what else?
You know, it's like, it's very, very complex being at the edge of living in like a tribal subsistence community and then being confronted with like the modern world.
And they have like a cell phone.
And there's definitely a feeling, you can definitely see a feeling of like being like left out.
Like they feel like, oh, we're just sitting here in a river.
Whereas I feel like people from our world would go like, God, they have it perfect.
Well, some of the guys on my team that run jungle keepers are super native but also kind of worldly.
One of my guys, this guy Roy, he's a conservation chef and he's almost famous.
He's been to Italy, he's been to Virginia, but he runs jungle keepers.
JJ, I mean, speaks perfect English and does interviews with me on ABC News.
So these guys have...
Roy came to New York City.
Dude, the craziest one is this guy.
There's a story about an anthropologist.
I think it was Kenneth Goode.
I can't remember what his name was.
But he went to the Yanomami, married one of them, brought them to the U.S. She couldn't handle it because she was like, I want to go back to the jungle.
But they had had kids together.
And I heard this legend.
Like when I was a kid and then that she had gone back to the jungle but that this anthropologist had had like Yanomami children that he raised on his own in the US. And then last year I was at a dinner party and I met David Good who is that guy.
He's the kid.
And so now he's going back to his people in the Yanomami villages.
Yeah.
He went to go back.
He had to go find his mother and the first time he saw her she was naked.
Yeah.
I was sitting at a dinner party and he was like, yeah, this was...
That's what makes him so interesting, is that he's doing it and he's working on it.
But think about how much we're losing in terms of, like, what you said, the connection to the stars and then the realization on a daily basis that we're part of, like, this massive march of life and that we're connected to these systems and the rivers and the rain and, like...
It sounds so cliche to almost say it, but it's like when you're down there and you remember these original truths, and then you go...
There's such a dissonance between when you wake up, there are certain things you have to do.
When I wake up in the jungle, you have to go check the boat, because the river might have eaten it at night.
You have to go work on your water system.
You have to go on the trails and clear them.
There's things that nature demands.
Farmers know this.
You have to wake up and milk the cows.
I feel like what's happening, so many people, it's just like, you know, you wake up and you're like, what do I do now?
You know, it's like you get so disconnected from the systems that we're a part of.
It's like, it's amputating us of the thing that connects us to whatever is running this machine, like the gears that work the game.
And that's what these people still remember.
They're still connected to that reality.
None of these people are going, are we living in a simulation?
They know what reality is because they're living in it every day.
So I think that preserving these last wild places while they're still here, I truly believe that we're at the most crucial moment in history, not because of nuclear war or anything like that, but because never before has there been a global threat.
Right now, we're on the cusp of we're going through this extinction crisis, and you can talk about climate change, but our rivers and our ecosystems are being tested to the point where our oceans are collapsing, our rainforests are vanishing, we're losing species faster than we can even count.
And we have all the knowledge and technology and ability to stop it.
We've seen that humpback whales, they were up at around 120,000 pre-whaling, and they went down to 5,000.
And then we banned whaling and now they're back up to like 115,000 humpback whales globally.
Like, they're back.
Bald eagles, they're back.
If you just stop annihilating these animals and murdering their habitats, they will continue to make the ecosystems that have been our home on this planet for millions of years.
Like, they literally have made our lives possible.
And so, like, to me, there is nothing more important.
And I think that when I was a little kid, I actually think I had some semblance of an idea that my mission was, I'm here to protect rainforests.
That's what I'm here to do.
And that's why I had to get there quickly before it was too late.
And I had the incredible luck of meeting a teacher who could unlock that world for me.
And now we have the chance, the historical chance, you talk about those sharks, there are trees on the river that were there before the Spanish touched South America.
So the World Wars, everything that we know, our grandparents, all of this, that tree was a sapling standing there in the Amazon rainforest while pretty much everything that we're familiar with took place in history.
And we have a chance to protect the incredible complex ecosystem of thousands of species that are living on this tree.
That can never be replaced.
You're talking about a millennium tree with leafcutter ants and reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, mosses, lichens, cactus, everything living on this skyscraper of life.
And we can cut it down for nothing and grow some papayas or we can protect.
And we have the chance to protect it and no one else is gonna have that chance and as a global society it's like we can protect black rhinos before they go extinct.
This incredible ancient monstrous megafauna animal that we have the privilege of experiencing.
There's no reason for this to happen, that people falsely believe that their horns are medicinal when they're not.
And so it's like, I think we are at the most exciting time with the most exciting opportunity because the natural world, you know, we could get through this and people will look back on our time and just go, what were they thinking?
You know, like the way, like when the Industrial Revolution came around and they put all the kids in the factories and they were getting like crushed in the gears and choked out by smoke.
And it was like, we just made regulations and fixed it.
It's like, we don't need to be killing life on earth.
Well, this podcast, I'm sure, will energize that even further.
So what can anybody do if they're hearing this?
I mean, obviously, this resonates with everyone.
Your story is so incredible and just this calling that you have to that and the fact that it really has happened and you've become a part of protecting it.
We have ways to get involved with the local people that are now protecting their rainforest.
This is totally an indigenous-led effort.
I don't know how these other organizations work.
What I do know is that when I went down there and JJ was like, we have to protect this, we started Junglekeepers as a way to just take guys that were loggers and give them a different job.
Give them a better life.
It's like everyone's winning.
We're saving the ecosystem.
We're giving these people better life.
When people support Jungle Keepers, like we have monthly donors and people, they come and visit us in the field.
Some people don't.
Some people give us money and they're like, look, I don't ever want to go anywhere near the jungle, but I'm glad it exists.
Now we're trying to take people up into the canopy and even that, we're providing people with jobs as chefs and boat drivers and guides and taking a small, sustainable amount of people into a really beautiful place.
Instead of ruining it with trails and people and garbage, it's like we're just going to do it right and keep it pristine and keep it wild.
So we're doing everything we can.
We're studying this place.
We're working in every way possible to save the millions and millions and millions of heartbeats that are in every square acre of this rainforest.
It's just like it's that feeling.
I get that feeling every time where it's like you said with the stars where you look out there and you just go, this is… It's so incredible that you feel like you've just been energized by some other force.
You feel completely connected to everything.
You're tapping into the mains.
You're connecting to the thing that vibrates it all.
You know, like if you're going after something and it's like in terms of being productive, in terms of just continuing to chase the thing.
And it's like when you start something like trying to stop the global march of destruction of wildlife, it's like you are going to fail.
The fact that we, in this tiny little place, are notching a wind, that is incredible.
But it takes an extreme toll, having so much uncertainty that I'm going to leave here and fly back down there and go running into the Amazon fires and just broadcast that to everybody because that's what gets people excited.
That's what gets people to understand what we're losing.
Because you have to show them the beauty and then show it being destroyed and be like, we can stop this.
And so my plan is I want to, in the next year, protect the rest of this river.
And maybe their father was a logger or maybe their friends was a logger.
And so they go out and there's not a lot of stuff you can do out in the Amazon.
You're either a fisherman or a logger or something.
But if you're living that half-life where you have to make your living off the jungle but then go buy a house in town – It's like, well, that's a hard thing to...
Or you could just sell it all and go get an office job or something.
There's not a lot of great options for that.
They are in a tough position.
And that's the other thing that I'm in grand plan trying to look for.
It's a way of...
First of all, getting conservationists paid because I know incredible conservationists all over the world who are doing this work, protecting species, and no one's paying them to do it.
They're just out there doing the work.
and then allowing local people to find a way of like being supported in that transition so that you don't have to be you know taking somebody that used to be a rhino poacher and making them a ranger you know how the rhino poaching works let's let's go catch rhino poachers how fast can we turn people around to that and then make protected areas that are beautiful enough that we can bring people and then have them have jobs and it's like there's a there is a solution to this and And so finding that solution and exporting it.
So if we save this river, if we're successful in saving this river, the true change then will come in sort of applying that to somewhere else.
Well, then maybe there's a river in the Congo where that's going to happen.
We're going to lose all the beautiful, pristine medicines and wildlife that's there and the herds of elephants.
Well, we can figure out how do we do it here?
Let's do it there.
It's like this can catch fire.
And it's like people more and more and more through this storytelling, through social media, through all this stuff, it's like we're getting more and more support because people want to help.
Nobody – I don't think if you asked anybody, if you said like, what do you think about polar bears?
I don't think anybody would be able to, you know, be like, I hate polar bears.
I want them to go extinct.
I don't think anybody's on, you know, not too many people are going to say that and say, look, we can save the ecosystems and all the beautiful things.
I mean, it's not that difficult.
All we're doing is asking people to not cut down trees.
And the exciting thing is that now we're actually having success with that.
And it's because people are helping us get the message out.
It's because people are, like, sharing it and taking action.
That's why I asked you about Slash, because he's been...
He actually reached out to Jungle Keepers, and he was like, dude, I want to protect the rain.
She's got super eclectic, interesting taste in music, and she's always listening to new music.
That's one of the cool things about things like Spotify.
You get suggested other songs.
You listen to a Bad Company song, and all of a sudden they're suggesting a Pink Floyd song, and then you're listening to all this stuff that, as a 13-year-old with modern playlists, you probably wouldn't be Really introduced to.
It's like, what a beautiful creation, but also so strange that we have subverted nature in some bizarre way that's turned this predator, this hunting pack predator, into Into this family creature that's like literally one of the family.
It's so weird, but at the same time, I think it's great that we can have this incredibly loyal, like, I was just reading something that chimps don't take IQs from humans.
Like, dogs, you know, you look at your dog, you just look at the leash, you look at the door, and the dog's like, really?
They are so locked into us.
And, like, no other animal does that.
And, like, I've seen an elephant identify a pregnant person.
I saw an elephant walk up to a woman, touch her on the stomach, and then, like, call the other elephants and be like, yo, this one's pregnant.
And they all started, they knew shit that we don't know.
I think that, yeah, well, like you said, your intelligence is the ability to interact with your environment and survive in it.
And it's like they've gardened all of the habitat that they exist in.
Like when you watch an elephant twisting branches and creating that environment.
And they're going and grazing around on everything and moving that forest.
And there's mushrooms growing out of the piles of shit that they leave.
And it's just like there's so much elephant dung and there's so much complex structure.
And the thing is, as a human, usually what we do is we watch...
Either we watch elephants in the zoo, where you're looking at basically like a mentally deranged elephant that's been kept in a box its whole life, or you're in like a game drive vehicle and you drive up to elephants in the field and they're like, ah, shit, humans, and then they like walk off.
Very rarely do we get to see elephants alone in nature problem solving.
And so like, then you'll get these articles where scientists will be like, we gave elephants like a key and a lock and so many of them couldn't figure it out.
It's like, well, that's, you're giving elephants a human problem to solve.
You're not giving them an elephant problem to solve.
One time I had a jeep and it had a whole thing of bananas in it.
And I was working with this elephant.
He was a bandit.
He had been mugging banana guys.
There was a road that went through the jungle and this elephant was going out and he would stop them.
He would stop the truck and then the other elephants would come and they would mug the banana guy.
So by the time he got to where he was going...
He wouldn't have any bananas.
So the Indian Forest Department had to show up and they shackled this poor elephant.
His name was Dharma.
And they threw him in elephant jail.
I have a picture of elephant jail on there.
But one day he caught me with bananas and he came up to the Jeep and he was like, yo, bananas.
And of course I'm looking up at him.
I'm like, hey, I'm a good boy.
Good boy.
He pushed me to the side.
He was like, you don't call me good boy.
That's elephant jail.
But yeah, he took the Jeep and he shouldered it, put it up on two wheels, made dead-ass eye contact with me and he was like, you going to give me the bananas or not?
And I was like, just put the jeep.
Suddenly I was in an argument that I couldn't win with an elephant.
I was like, please put the car down.
He put the car down.
And then I was like, come on, come over this way.
Eventually I had to give him the bananas.
And he was threatening me.
He pushed it up just enough and stopped and looked at me.
I think what I'm struggling to get out here is that you can train a dog to do very complex tasks, like a sheepdog, or like that guy who has like 400 different things and he goes, you know, get the ball, get the sponge, get the thing.
But like that to me is still a gimmick, whereas like the fact that they have...
Culture.
The fact that elephants have taught other elephants that you can chew on this when you need to have a baby.
They have shit that we're not realizing.
We just look at them and we're like, oh, they're giant grass-eating octopus face things with butterfly ears.
Cool, why not?
But it's like, if we spend that time or the fact that they do the low vibration communication where they can communicate through the earth, where they rumble, And they can send, like, you know, there's water over here.
We were talking about the things we eat in the jungle, and I was talking about the bamboo and the things and the other things, and I wanted to show you.
Let me just set this up for you.
This is one of my friends who used to be a logger.
This is one of the guys that's been at war with the Uncontacted Tribes.
This is his daughter, and she's six.
This was the other day, and I found her sitting there.
And I said, what is your favorite food?
And she went, this.
And then I just watched her rip into this thing and just...
I mean, that, not very good, because they just throw it on the fire.
But they like it.
If it's prepared, okay.
And again, I always get a barrage.
I get that thing where people, it's like, I've devoted my life to protecting the rainforest, and then people are like, how could you pick up that snake?
You were torturing it.
And it's like, you've got to deal with those people.
And it's like, yeah, we eat monkeys, guys, in the jungle.
When you're hanging out with local people, they eat monkeys.
And if you're at their house, you eat a monkey, too.
But no, somebody handed me a plate not that long ago.
We got to this community.
We actually went with Jungle Keepers.
We get to this community and they come out with macaw feathers and robes on and shit.
And they give us this bowl and they're like, welcome, eat.
And the bowl, we looked at it, we were all, like, side-eyeing each other, and we were like, oh, shit.
And it had a monkey hand, it had a piece of a taper, it had a piranha, and it had the foot of a yellow-footed tortoise, which looks like Bowser's foot from Super Mario.
Like, it was this big, scaly, gnarly thing with rice.
And so we're all just like sitting there in this really, really remote community worrying about getting shot and just like playing with all the different animals in our bowl.
She actually, I saw her, the last time I saw her, she was, she took an axe and she like broke open this log and she pulled out this grub that was bigger than my thumb.
And she was like, eat it.
And I was like, I don't want it.
And she was like, why not?
And I was like, you're six.
I was like, because I don't want grub right now.
And she just took it and bit the pincers on the face of it.
She like bit the pincers off.
She's like, what about now?
And I realized this kid was like, you afraid to eat a grub?
So then, of course, I ate like 10 grubs and I was like, there, okay?
The worst thing about a grub is that if you don't cook them, or when you start to cook them, when the nematodes come out of them, when the parasites that are living in the grubs come out.
It's my pleasure and I thank you for what you're doing and I thank you for coming here and I hope more people understand and more people get involved now because of this conversation.