Paul Rosolie, a jungle conservationist, details his work protecting uncontacted Amazon tribes like the Nomole, who begged for food while armed with six-foot bows and seven-foot arrows, and questioned outsiders about deforestation. His efforts to create a national park face threats from loggers, gold miners, and narco-traffickers, including China’s infrastructure push and a confirmed BBC report on a four-lane highway cutting through rainforest for COP30. Rosolie highlights indigenous survival skills—like venom-drawing plant medicine—versus modern civilization’s ecological detachment, arguing that 20% of the Amazon’s destruction risks irreversible collapse. The episode underscores how urgent, hands-on conservation clashes with industrial expansion and societal indifference to nature’s fragility. [Automatically generated summary]
There's one guy in the community that kind of speaks a little bit.
They speak in the community, they speak Yine.
The Mashko Piros speak a derivation of that.
And so they're speaking in broken terms across the river.
So they were sort of shirts versus skins.
We were on this side of the river.
They were on that side of the river.
And then, I mean, the courage of this guy to get in the river and go, you know, 10 feet from them and push the canoe.
There was no contact, no physical contact made.
But he gave them these plantains, and then you notice when they take them, it's not like, oh, yeah, let's take the plantains, we'll go back in the jungle and divvy them up.
It's like, what I get, I get.
They're fighting over them, and they were all screaming and fighting over them.
And so right now what we have is we have the loggers and the gold miners coming in.
And so since like the last time I saw you, we were nailing all these successes, adding acres to the reserve, because what we're doing is trying to create this corridor, which is going to become a national park.
We're trying to save this one river in the headwaters of the Amazon.
And we had been on this success run, you know, from people hearing the stories, from things like this, people coming in and helping us do that.
And then it started to change where we realized, okay, we're protecting so much land that the logging mafias and the narco-traffickers started pushing back.
And so now it's getting more serious.
As we're getting closer to the finish line, it's getting harder because they're going, we want this to remain wild.
And we're going, we're trying to protect this.
And the local communities are going, this is our forest.
And the loggers and the narcos and the miners are coming from other places and they're cutting down this forest.
And so it's just, you know, I mean, everyone knows the Amazon is the lungs of the earth.
Everyone knows it produces a fifth of our oxygen on our planet.
It contains a fifth of the oxygen of the fresh water on our planet.
So it's vital to global planetary stability.
But we've already destroyed 20% of it.
And so we're seeing the moisture cycle get broken.
Cattle ranching accounts for 60% of Amazon deforestation.
And then it's just development, roads.
China has a new shipping port in Peru that they want to create, I think, a railroad over the Andes Mountains or through the Andes Mountains so they can start getting access to the Amazon for Asian markets.
A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.
Oh, my God.
That is so crazy.
It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will help climate.
At one point in time, people are going to wake up.
And I think that that's, you know, that's sort of, as I've been, I've just started this book tour and everything else.
And it's the thing I'm trying to impress, I was just talking about this the other night, is like we've had world wars.
We've had great famines.
We had the dust bowls.
There's never been a time in history, though, before where we're looking at, is there going to be ecological collapse?
The thing that I'm talking about with where they've cut 20% of the Amazon, scientists are warning that if we cut too much of the Amazon, that moisture cycle, I think the thing was that 20 trillion liters of water every day are pumped into the air from the Amazon, and that becomes the cloud system that rains back down and creates the Amazon rainforest.
If you cut too much of that, you break the cycle.
And that forest has been growing for something like 55 million years.
I believe it formed in the Eocene.
And so we are the generation that's going to decide, do we find a sustainable way to keep the Amazon rainforest functioning, or are we going to break that cycle?
It's like we have the ability to organize incredible.
I mean, if you can organize an airport, you can figure out a way to protect a forest.
But the fact that it's in numerous Latin American countries, Brazil wants to develop.
In Peru, you have the illegal gold miners coming in.
And now you have the pressure from the Asian markets.
And, you know, we found that if you just, I mean, that's what we've been doing over the last 20 years is going to these gold miners and loggers and going, how much do you make?
And they go, $20 a day.
You go, do you want to make $60?
And you get a cool shirt and you get health benefits and you get to ride a boat and you get a team.
And they're like, yeah, that sounds so much better.
It's just crazy that it takes a person like you and your organization to put some sort of a dent in this.
This isn't some sort of a gigantic global effort, that there's not a lot of people that are recognizing this issue and saying, hey, this is a huge problem if this goes away.
I think, though, that there I see in the world that I exist in, I see that all over the world there's people doing conservation projects and that we are at this point where there's enough happening where, I mean, you had E.O. Wilson advocating for the half-earth policy where it's, you know, at least half of the earth has to remain ecosystems.
If you break too much down, if you ruin our ocean fisheries, if you cut the rainforests in the forest, you're going to ruin the weather.
The stuff that comes standard with life on earth is going to be depleted.
And so I think, you know, you see tiger numbers going up in India.
You see that there's actually been an increase in forest cover globally, but in some of the most important areas, like the Amazon, it's just wild.
And I mean, that's what we're doing is, you know, the guy JJ that I work with, who's local, he's been trying to, he's been saying this for years.
I mean, since we saw each other, he got, which I don't know how this happened.
I don't know how some of this stuff happens, but we got an email one day from Time, and they were like, we're selecting our, you know, 100 climate leaders of 2024.
And they're like, JJ is one of them.
And I have no idea how the people at Time select this, but they chose this.
I mean, JJ grew up in an indigenous community barefoot.
He didn't have shoes until he was 13.
And it was because he saw his forest get destroyed and because he saw the fish vanish from the rivers as nets came in.
And then as chainsaws came to the region, he saw the trees go down.
He went, we got to protect the next river.
And so he's the one that, you know, when I went down there at 18 years old, he's the one that was like, look, you got to help me protect this.
And of course, at 18 years old, I was like, how?
How do I do that?
How on earth is that possible?
And then when we started seeing the smoke on the horizon and we started hearing the chainsaws and it got more urgent, I started telling these stories and then the Anaconda stories and everything else, the first book that I wrote.
And little by little, Jane Goodall, people helped along the way.
Well, I'm happy to get the word out because I mean, it's kind of insane that it's happening.
But it's also that place is such a magical place.
And it has such an insane history that we're just starting to understand the history of the people that live there.
I mean, through the use of LIDAR, they're just starting to understand that the entire place was massively populated and that a lot of the plants that exist in the Amazon are actually agriculture plants that went, you know, went rogue when the people were depopulated because people brought in smallpox.
But that these plants that they grew for agriculture were the ones that had, you know, once people stopped tending them and taking care of them, they overwhelmed the rest of the forest.
Yeah, a friend sent me a clip, and I think you were talking to Tom Segura, and you went, you know, and the crazy thing about the Amazon, and you went, it's largely man-made.
And I was like, threw something, and I was like, no, let's find out why we said that.
Estimates suggest that roughly 10 to 15 percent of the Amazon standing forest shows clear signs of being man-made, or strongly shaped by long-term indigenous management, not planted as uniform tree farms, but modified over thousands of years.
Much of the Amazon that looks wild has been influenced by pre-Columbian indigenous agroforestry, soil enrichment, Amazon dark earths, that's terraprata, and species selection rather than being a purely untouched wilderness.
These systems differ from modern plantations.
They are diverse, semi-natural forests, enriched with useful trees and crops rather than rows of single commercial species.
So the idea of the terraprata was that a lot of the Amazon soil is not good for agriculture.
When it separated from Africa, the Congo and the Amazon used to be joined in some sort of proto-Congo system.
And then when they separated, the Amazon South America hit up against the Nazca Plate, the Andes Mountains shot up, and then the salinated water drained out.
And that's why we still have inland freshwater stingrays, manatees, pink river dolphins.
But the thing that This theory about the Amazon is even human engineered is wrong.
Because when you look at the size of the Amazon, you look at that 2.7 million miles, it's that they've said that what they're not getting is that in the areas that these people have been studying with LIDAR and through this anthropological digging, they're saying it's more than we thought.
There's certainly more human settlements than we previously thought.
There maybe were a few million people there before Pizarro and the explorers came.
But when you know, what you don't realize is that between the rivers, between each river, which is the majority of the Amazon, is this terra firma giant jungle with hundreds of miles between the rivers, nobody's been there.
And so I just was reading a scientific paper.
It was saying they went out and sampled those areas and it showed absolutely no sign of human engineering.
Well, the good thing with the LIDAR is that they fly over.
And so the LIDAR confirmed that over those human areas, like you get like a river confluence where two rivers are coming together, there'll be a human settlement there.
And in those areas, they find that the terra praeta, they'll find that the plants occur in different abundance and diversity than in the other places.
But that this message that the Amazon itself was engineered by ancient humans or prehistoric humans is not actually accurate.
I think they're saying it because people build their careers on, you know, if you come out and say, I have a new theory about how this formed, it gets attention.
There's even a, and nothing against, what's his name?
Graham Hancock.
For a while, everyone's like, oh, Paul Rosalie needs to debate Graham.
No, I got nothing against Graham Hancock.
He's great.
But it's just the messaging is becoming that the Amazon was kind of man-made.
And so what happens is you get leaders like in Brazil going, well, if the Amazon was really man-made, then we can manage it now.
And it's just not accurate.
If you look at the, and even Smithsonian did an article where they said, these are the current things that are coming out.
These are the theories.
And then it went, yeah, but these theories discount the fact that 95% of the Amazon rainforest has not been surveyed in this way.
And most of it shows that these are just wild ecosystems that have been growing since the dawn of time for the last 55, 30 million years.
And it's just been speciating and growing and evolving on its own.
And it's only in these tiny areas that humans have done this sort of engineering.
Where there were tribes, the first one to come down the Amazon, he mentioned that there were tribes that had sectioned off parts of the river and they were growing the giant river turtles.
And so we're working, these guys are, you know, working with us as rangers and we're building this develop, developing this relationship with the local communities of saying, how do you do you want to continue living this way?
Do you want your kids to live this way?
And the answer usually is yes, but with better health and education.
They want to continue that way of life because it's the only thing they've known.
I mean, have any of these people ever gone to like any of these other cities that are fairly close or that they could reach and seen what that life is like?
They were having trouble with the Peruvian government getting recognized as an indigenous community.
And they were having this trouble for 15 years.
And we used, you know, now we have lawyers and people and we have an office and all this stuff in Peru.
And so we went and sat down with them.
We said, okay, why are you having this trouble?
I mean, you clearly are an indigenous community.
What's the holdup?
And the holdup was that it takes two days for them to get to the nearest town.
When they get to the nearest town, they're scared of the traffic.
They have no idea what to do with paperwork.
They have to sit in an office.
I mean, these are people that are like putting their bows and arrows and guns down and walking into an office and sitting there in the air conditioning.
And they're like, next, and they're like, sit.
And they're like, do you have form like I-227B?
And they're like, I totally.
And they're like, what's your social security number?
And they're like, ah.
And, you know, they got some like fish shells in there.
And so what we realized was that they were just having trouble with the administrative part.
And so we put our lawyers on it and we got them their indigenous titled land.
And so now no one can take that away from them.
And so for that, we brought them all to the city.
We had a big conference and we had a big celebration about it.
And they all had the feathers on their head and they were all celebrating.
Like, is there any like political influence by the whatever it is, miners, ranchers, anyone who tries to stop that from happening, bribe people to try to take over the land of these people?
And so you have, I mean, the miners, if anybody tries to protest the gold mining, they kill you.
So one of the lawyers that I was working with, his father had come out and said, look, as a local Peruvian person in the jungle, I want this to stop.
They can't, they're destroying, there's a, Jamie, there's a photo in the folder that says, I think it says sandstorm or something, but it's just, it's not even, again, deserts are actually ecosystems.
This is a wasteland.
They've destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres in the Peruvian Amazon.
You can see it from space.
It's this horrible scar, and they've cut the trees, burned the forest, and then they've sucked the land up.
And then they take the bottom of the sediment and they use mercury to bind the gold out of the sediment.
And then they burn the mercury off the gold, releasing it into the air.
People talk about, you know, we're losing ecosystems.
And it's like, it's not just about us.
These animals live there.
They have nowhere else to go.
And so there's massive individual suffering for millions of animals on a single tree.
And so then when you have these fires where they cut the forest and just burn everything, this, I mean, those trees would have been filled with monkeys and birds and the snakes, you know, they get scared.
They burrow deeper into their hole and then it burns.
This was invaders on our river that come in from other places.
They set up cows, they set up papaya.
And I mean, this is what it's supposed to look like.
It's supposed to be this lush, verdant, ancient rainforest filled with wildlife.
I mean, the cacophony of sound when you're going to sleep in your tent at night and you're out in a place like that, it's just this throbbing, pulsing symphony.
It's incredible.
The magic of that place, of real wilderness, is wild.
I mean, that particular shot was, we had to go for days to reach that spot, you know, all day on the river camp, all day on the river camp.
You know, you're going up rapids, you're going up the waterfalls to get to these places that nobody can go.
And there's an example of, it's, that was specifically a location where they've studied and they've found that there's never been a human settlement there.
I just think that right now the problem is that it's getting grossly overstated how much of the Amazon, if you take it as a football field and you go, man, I thought it was only in this much of the football field, you know, in a few inches of it.
And then you find out there's actually 10 feet of the football field that was, there's still the rest of the football field is still wild.
Like, imagine if you were looking for a coyote and you had to look through the entire, like there was a thousand coyotes in the center of the United States.
And you started in Pennsylvania and you were hiking your way.
Like, I don't see any fucking coyotes.
But there's a thousand of them that are in North Dakota.
And you have to talk to the people that actually know.
Well, this guy was trying to do that, but there was this one scene of exasperation where he was like sitting down saying, did I stake my entire reputation on horse shit?
No, but I think that's that's the truth is that it's it's people think it's like you can just go find this stuff and it's that the the secrets in this world are hidden for a reason.
And even if there is a tribe that knows about the giant ground sloths, they're not going to tell us.
Estimates typically say that about 25% of modern pharmaceutical drugs are derived from rainforest plants.
And many of those known examples come from the Amazon, but there's no precise peer-reviewed percentage just for the Amazon alone.
Most popular figures, you see, like 25% of medicines come from the Amazon, actually refer to all tropical rainforests, not specifically the Amazon.
But the thing is, like, how much of the Amazon has not been explored and how many potential pharmaceutical drugs or, you know, here's that's the term, right?
Pharmaceutical drugs.
What about natural remedies exist in the Amazon that aren't you don't need to patent them and sell them at a fucking pharmacy?
And so I had gotten it, and so I have a tendency now.
I've been a little bit compromised in terms of infections because living 20 years in the jungle.
And so I had already gotten it.
So chances are that's where it doesn't exist.
And that's the thing you see in the wild jungle, you don't have malaria, you don't have rabies, you don't have dengue because the human population is so low that it doesn't spread.
A mosquito bites you here, the next person that's going to bite is me or Jamie.
Mosquito bites me in the city, and then I go out into the rainforest.
There's no one else for it to bite.
It's going to bite an anteater.
And so it's not going to spread like that.
Whereas if we have a town of loggers, that's why when you go to these logging and mining camps, the diseases, they're just, I mean, there's this thing called this type of flea called a peaky that burrows into your feet and lays eggs.
There's leishmaniasis.
There's malaria, dengue, what's the bird zyka virus?
There's all these crazy things, but we don't have that out in the jungle because, I mean, the ecosystem, the frogs eat most of the mosquito larvae.
The mosquito larvae, like bromeliad cups or puddles.
Well, bromeliad cups and puddles are filled with tadpoles.
And then, of course, there's turtles in the puddles eating the tadpoles, and then there's other things eating the turtles.
Everything's eating everything.
The ecosystem regulates it.
When you ruin that, so then you cut down the forest.
Now you have puddles sitting in the sun, and they're all twitching with mosquito larva.
So then you have tons of mosquitoes.
And so that's how nature, they say, you know, mangrove forests will stop tsunamis from destroying a town because they'll stop the rush of the water.
Well, forests will keep you safe by not only producing rainfall that'll come down on your crops, but also making sure that the ecosystem's not out of balance so you're not covered in mosquitoes and parasites.
When I lived in LA, I moved into a house in Encino that I was renting, and no one had lived there in quite a while, and they had left the water in the pool.
And when I was going out to look at the pool, the pool was completely green, and there was things swimming in it.
Like, I mean, like school swimming.
And I go, what is that?
And the guy goes, that's mosquito larva.
I was like, ooh!
Like, no way.
And he's like, yeah, we have to kill them.
We have to drain the pool.
I was just thinking about how many times I was going to get bit once these things hatched.
And I'd seen one guy get stung by a stingray, and he had nerve damage, a systemic infection up his leg and his whole body, and he didn't walk for months.
So when I got hit, I felt, this is what I felt.
I felt, in the flash of a second, I felt the stingray barb go into my foot and it wagged its tail under my skin.
So it flayed the skin off the arch of my foot and came out.
That pack there, they went to two different trees and they removed compounds from the tree.
One was the bark and one was the fiber and they put it into a leaf pack and they cook it on a pan and they heat it and it makes this plant poultice and they put this boiling hot piece of plant material.
It's like a fish cake and they put it against the wound and even that burned but it felt better than the venom and it starts to suck out the venom.
And so when they took it off my foot after like, this is them getting the getting the plant material, they know the medicines and that's been handed down through the generations.
So now all that black stuff is all the denatured blood that came out of my foot.
And so for about four hours, I was in this state of just level 10 pain, just white-hot pain.
I couldn't talk to anybody.
I couldn't do anything.
People were coming to me and they were like, what can we do?
And I was like, just leave me alone.
I was like, I don't want you to look at my face.
You know, I was coming in and out.
And then by nighttime, it had gotten.
This was at night where I was like, okay, the pain had subsided, but I didn't get nerve damage and I didn't get a huge infection because they had this indigenous plant medicine to save me.
I mean, I've stepped on stingrays before and you feel them flutter.
And I one time I even felt the barb go like past my foot, but it didn't penetrate.
I do not know how.
I mean, it must have been a small one or something, but it just right up through the through the arch of my foot.
And what's funny is that just I would never walk barefoot ever.
Well, I walk barefoot all the time, but but but just days before, not days before that, about a month before that, I'd fallen off of something like a 50 or 60 foot cliff and just rolled down and bruised ribs and gotten all banged up.
I'd climbed up this cliff thinking I could, I was like, oh, I see this root up there.
I can get up to the top.
And at the top, my strength just ran out.
And my feet were pedaling and I had no footholds.
And I just went tumbling down this thing.
And I just went, you know what?
I said, I've had infections.
I've had crocodile bites.
I've had dengue.
I said, I got a week left in the Amazon.
I'd been in the Amazon for six months.
And I was like, I'm doing nothing dangerous.
No tree climbing, no anaconda hunting, no crock diving, none of that stuff.
But if you did go to the hospital, I mean, the guy that went to the hospital didn't walk for two months, had the necrosis, and had a huge infection that he had to go get treatments for.
I mean, he went back to his home country and had to continue being treated for months.
I felt terrible.
And him, too, watching someone roll back and forth in that type of agonizing pain, like brave heart pain, like when they're just like opening him up.
I mean, I just didn't know there was pain like that.
You know, I mean, I've ripped open every part of my body and this was, it's from the inside and it's pulsating.
And you just go, the other thing is, you go, how much, how much of my year did I just miss?
You know, am I going to, it's like the one time I almost chopped my knee.
I almost cut the tendon that holds your kneecap on.
And I was just like, man, did I just take myself out of the game for a year?
You know, just like, come on.
And so when that happened, I was like, this is going to be so bad.
Their father taught them and their mother taught them and their grandparents know.
And so that's the thing with knowledge, indigenous knowledge all over the world.
If you listen to authors like Wade Davis, who writes a lot about indigenous wisdom, you know, this is stuff that's been one at a time gleaned from nature.
And, you know, you, you know, better than most.
You know, you're living out there.
Who's the first person that figured out ayahuasca?
The prevailing thing is that science and sort of like the statistics of trial and error are incomprehensible given 40,000 plant species and all the different flowering and orchids and trees.
And so it would take millennia if you did trial and error.
And the cost of human life to any civilization would make it too high.
And so when they say that the gods gave us ayahuasca, that's the prevailing best thing we got, is that it's a link between our world and the spirit world that the jungle gave us.
And the other thing is like how much of our senses have atrophied by modern civilization.
Like what kind of communication do you actually get from the forest?
Like is there instincts, intuition?
Are there senses?
Is there a feeling that you get where you get an understanding of combining two things because the jungle's actually got a way of communicating with you that's a non-verbal way?
I think the jungle, I mean, I view it as almost a, you know, it's like it's godlike.
It's almost like a giant, complex, sentient being.
And so if you listen to, if you watch, you know, if you walk the jungle with JJ, an indigenous tracker, he'll tell you, you listen to the birds, they'll tell you how fast you're allowed to walk.
You know, just when I take people in the woods, if people have never hunted before, they're stepping on branches, snap, snap, kicking rocks over, talking loud.
You know, it's like if you've never been, you don't understand.
But I mean, I would imagine it's that times a million in the Amazon.
And then all the different things that are communicating.
One of the things that they found out with monkeys is that monkeys have some sort of a language where they can say a sound that means an eagle is there.
Yes.
And that they will play tricks on other monkeys so that they can get to fruit.
It's African vervet monkeys that I've read about that they have different calls, different words for land predator, lion, eagle, and they can communicate these things.
Yeah, I mean if you if you sear it first and then you I mean it's kind of if you sear it first yeah right because like just boiled chicken to me just like you think of white like just eating it.
And, you know, it's like you were saying also, they don't have a sense of wildlife conservation.
It's not like, hey, we have an accurate assessment of how many baboons are here or how many deer are here or dikers or whatever the animal is that they're hunting.
They just eat whatever they can and sometimes they eat them almost to extinction and then they have to move on to baboons.
And baboons were like the only thing that was left.
And then there's also like other people have encroached and settlements and, you know.
That's the way my guys, because we have a lot of wildlife in our region.
And people from other regions will come as laggers and they'll go, oh my God, my dad told me that it used to be like this where we were.
And now we have people from other watersheds in the Amazon, like, you know, 150 miles away coming to us and they're going, can you guys bring jungle keepers over?
And they don't understand, you know, we're killing ourselves just to protect this river.
And they're going, can you do this where we are?
They're like, we have no more food because they don't have any regulation on this.
And so what we're doing with the tribes in our area is just teaching this basic thing of like, you know, don't hunt, you know, at these times of year when they're having their babies.
One of the older guys said to me, he goes, man, it's so sad.
He goes, we grew up, he goes, you could just pull fish out of the river and there was monkeys in the trees and there was turtles.
He goes, you could eat whatever you wanted out of the forest.
He goes, now he goes, we're eating sparrows.
And he was like, we've eaten everything down to the smallest birds.
He was like, it's just destroyed.
And it was, where he is is like something, it was like Cormac McCarthy's nightmare.
If Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I would show him the, I went to a part of the Amazon that really no one goes to, up this horrible river.
And there were recently contacted, uncontacted people, just this tribe that had just come out of the forest and they still had their bows.
And they had no idea.
Me and JJ went for like a three-week expedition, plane to plane to plane to three days on a boat to two days on a boat to finally reaching this last settlement.
And the missionaries had pulled this tribe out of the forest.
They'd tricked them.
They said, just come with us for a ride.
Pulled him out.
But then they said, well, if you want to go back, you've got to pay for your gasoline.
And the tribe was like, well, how do we pay with what?
And they were like, money.
And the tribe was like, what's that?
And where do we get it?
And so these little people were standing.
These were not tall people like the Mashkapiro.
These were little tiny people.
And they were standing there with their bows.
And so we showed up with our tents and our gear.
And we were trying to go up this river in our boat.
And these little people came up to us and they were like, they were making the gesture for food.
And so there's some loggers over there.
And so JJ just didn't think.
And he was like, you want some food?
You got to go pay for it.
He was like, money.
And, you know, he's through a guy.
He was translating.
And these people are going, but we don't have any money.
And JJ took some coins out of his pocket and was like, just go buy some bread.
And he gave him some coins.
And they went and they tried it.
And they got some bread.
And then all of a sudden, there's 50 of them coming at us.
And they were surrounding JJ and they were grabbing at him.
And they were like, he's the guy with these tokens that allow us to eat.
And we had to get out of there because it was causing a problem.
This was, again, a hunter-gatherer tribe with no food.
With no food and no way of getting back to forest where they could be a hunter-gatherer tribe.
Now they were in this wasteland where the loggers and the gold miners and the oil companies, there was even a barge with oil.
And it was like, this is where the Amazon is being eaten.
And it was out of sight.
You have to go for days just to get there.
There's no foreigners there.
Actually, they did say, we were talking to one logger, and he said, a few years ago, he goes, we saw some rafts coming downriver, and then they stopped at this beach upriver and they made camp.
And he's like, so we all talked about it.
And we said, well, we have a feeling they're organ harvesters.
don't know that must be a thing that gets i don't know but But the dude I was sitting with told me, he goes, you know, we got real scared sitting around the campfire.
Everyone was telling these stories.
And he's like, so we figured the safest thing would be to go kill them.
So they went and they killed them.
And they were a couple of European hikers on a mega expedition in the Amazon.
And they just got murdered by the locals preemptively in case they were dangerous.
And so like the communities that I've worked with in my region of the Amazon, they're all, you know, you show, I've showed up on a pack raft and been like, hey, and they're like, where did you come from?
And I'm like, I'm just this foreigner who does work here.
And I talk to them and they're like, oh, camp here.
You'll be safe.
They're really nice.
They're caring.
They're families.
This place that we were at was this outpost and it was all extractors.
It was all gold miners, petroleum people, loggers.
And it was like all the men who were in the dark bit, the black market people were all in the same place.
So there was like a brothel.
There was these displaced natives.
And then there was like this one really scary missionary.
This man looked insane.
He had crazy eyes and he wouldn't come anywhere near us.
And these poor people are sitting there and you could see them like they were all like breastfeeding their babies and like trying to eat rats.
And it was just, we stayed there for one night and we didn't sleep.
We slept back to back.
We were just in our tent, just awake all night.
And then the next day we got in the boat and we kept going further upriver and we finally made it into the into past the edge of human civilization into into just uncharted jungle.
But it was really dark.
And so at least where we are, it's like we're working with these tribes to make their lives better, to educate them.
And there's this feeling, this is good feeling.
We have jungle keeper shirts.
I mean, now we're on the river and we see jungle keepers boats going by.
We had gold miners just a few weeks ago.
We had gold miners.
Everyone, the whole team was calling each other.
We sent our ranger team out there.
We brought the police.
They arrested the gold miners.
They brought them to town.
They offered them jobs.
And they said, you just can't be doing that here.
And so they only cleared like half an acre of forest.
And that clearing that we originally found, they were actually Pradeo's sacks of white powder.
The Peruvian military went in and actually raided that camp, arrested everybody.
It was so big that the American DEA knew about it.
They were notified.
And so this is now what's happening on this river, where it's because it's the last wilderness, they're coming.
And so we're trying to, you know, we're relying on the Peruvian authorities to stop this from happening so that we can create this park before it's too late because they're also blazing roads.
They're bringing in loggers.
They're smart.
They bring people and they'll send the loggers ahead of them.
And then when the loggers clear the land, they'll just start growing coca.
And so it's gotten scary.
I texted you when it was at its, when I first started having to travel with security.
I remember texting you because I was like, this is a different game.
It used to be like we're counting the butterflies and we're...
Well, the thing is, the police intercept off to one of the people that they arrested on the phone, it said, if you see JJ or that shithead gringo that flies the drone, they said, if you kill them, we'll reward you.
They showed it to us and they were like, you guys have a hit on you.
And then a few days later, JJ was supposed to get in the car at the side of, you know, you take the boat downriver to the car and he was supposed to get in the car and go back to the town.
He actually came downriver in the boat and they went, I forgot, I forgot that I wanted to finish up something at the station.
Take me back.
He went back to the station.
So our driver, Percy, started driving back along this little dirt logging road by himself.
And they had trees across the road.
Masked guys with guns.
They put the guns in the windows.
They pulled him out and our windows are tinted.
And they said, take JJ and Paul out.
They were going to do it.
And so it just so happened that JJ wasn't in the car.
Just by pure luck, he was not in the car that day.
And so they go to the communities and they tell them, hey, your daughter is very pretty.
She'd be a great waitress.
You know, we can educate her while she trains and helps people.
And then they never see him again.
And so it's all that darkness.
And at the same time, what we're doing is bettering the lives of the community, making friends with these people.
We have these amazing rangers.
And I mean, we have different ranger stations along the river.
And if we make this into a park, like Teddy Roosevelt, no, John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip and showed him Yosemite and like Sequoia and all this stuff.
And he was like, we got to protect this.
Like, it's special here.
Look at the size of these trees.
Look at the beauty of this valley.
And then they protected it.
There's nothing as wild as this river on earth today.
And so if we protect this now, the 200 indigenous people that live on this river get protected from the narcos.
They continue having abundant fish and resources.
And then they'll work as park guards and educators and chefs and boat drivers to maintain this gigantic protected area.
And then Peru will have this crown jewel of the Amazon.
Peru, I think, has become, if not on the same level as Colombia, I think they might have surpassed Colombia in terms of cocaine production.
They're not doing great with that right now.
And so we're at this very, very crucial juncture there.
But, you know, it's funny because in doing all this, you know, with even with the book coming out, and I've been talking to people, and people go, well, you have narcos now.
They're like, so you're going to fail.
And it's like, man, you're not even the one on the ground.
And the police have been successful at clearing them out.
And it's getting better.
Just like the whole thing with, yeah, the Amazon's disappearing, but we can still stop it.
It's like, you got to, you think like before D-Day, if Churchill was like, I will probably lose.
Like, you can't have that mentality.
And so it's very, very encouraging seeing the local people stand up for what they believe in.
And the job is dangerous.
There's a video on there that I think it says Sandra Tree Crush.
But I got woke up a few weeks ago and one of my managers came running at like 3 a.m.
I see a flashlight coming through the jungle.
And so I'm thinking the worst.
And then he comes, he's going, Paul, he goes, a tree.
And I told you the last time I was on here, I said the most dangerous thing in the rainforest is the trees falling.
He said, a tree fell on the ranger station.
And it's raining.
And I'm talking about rain.
You know, when you're at the airport and you hear that sound where it's like, there's no sound louder.
Your ears can't handle it.
It was raining so loud.
And he's screaming into my ear that this tree fell on the ranger station.
He goes, and one of the rangers was crushed.
And I'm going, but dead or alive?
And he goes, we don't know yet.
And so it's 3 a.m. and we get in this boat and we're going upriver and there's lightning flashing and there's rain falling and I'm looking with the flashlight and I'm navigating by the crocodile eyes because we don't know where the edges of the river are because they shine.
And so we have footage of this and we arrive at the ranger station and sure enough, this tree had fallen, crushed the roof, all the beams and all the scaffolding under the roof and fallen on this woman's face while she was in bed.
And so she was crushed under this and she couldn't even scream because it was raining so loud.
And so we get there and I stick my hand into the rubble and I hold her hand and I'm like, are you okay?
And she was like, hey, Paul, she's like, I have no idea.
And she was amazingly like, like, buoyant.
She was like, I have no idea if I'm okay.
She's like, but I'm alive.
I was like, we're going to get you out of here.
And we started chainsawing, I mean, like 16 feet of tree debris over her and all this gnarled roof material.
And we had to pull her out of there and she had a scratch on her ankle.
I remember sitting in school and being like, why did like you read about like Roosevelt and Jane Goodall and like these people had these amazingly adventurous lives.
And I was sitting in school getting detention after detention and getting yelled at and being like, can I go to the bathroom?
And I was like, why do they get to do that?
And I have to do this.
And then, like, you know, everyone around me was like, you know, when you get a job, then you're really going to love your desk.
One of my friends' moms said that to me.
She goes, you think, she goes, you think you hate your school desk?
She goes, wait till you get your real desk.
And I was like, oh, man.
And so, yeah, riding on the boat at 4 a.m. with the lightning is incredible.
And it's like, it's so wild that you just, you feel better.
You feel healthier.
And again, you know, that whole thing of what's that thing they say, like a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace.
And it's like the beauty of that, you know, you drink from the river and then you sweat it out and you watch your sweat join the steam and rain back down onto the jungle.
You are connected to your environment.
And every single day, you don't know what's going to happen.
You know, I opened, there was one day where I was like, okay, I'm going to stay on the station.
I'm not going to do anything.
I've been hammering myself in the swamps for a week.
And I was like, I'm just going to drink coffee and like do office work on my computer.
And so I was like at the station.
And my team comes running.
They're like, Anaconda.
And I was like, where?
I was actually annoyed.
I was like, where?
How big of an anaconda?
And they're like, no, it's a pretty big anaconda.
As we go down to the thing, and sure enough, there's a big ass anaconda on a log, like 11 feet, you know, not a monster.
But so then I started doing this thing where I was like, because they were all like, be careful.
And I was like, of what?
And they're like, it could bite you.
And I was like, it's asleep.
I was like, she's just trying to get the sun.
So I started, I took out my phone.
I started doing this thing.
I was like, people are scared of snakes.
And I was like, I was like, if you're scared of snakes, I was like, there's an 11-foot anaconda.
No, It's a type of large rodent because David Tell used to have a TV show called Insomniac, and he went out at night one time with them in Louisiana and they're hunting these things that they're an invasive rodent, a giant rodent.
And it was like Dave would do his shows and then after it was a Comedy Central show.
It was a really good show.
And then he would find things to do in the town because he can't sleep because he's up all night.
And so he went out with these people that were, God, I can't remember what the animal was, but it's a large invasive rodent that exists in the South.
They have like molars and then like a few like front teeth.
And so we go with this 10-foot pole and nobody can make a sound on the boat.
You're just floating with the river.
You're like invisible.
And you wait for a feature in the river, like a rock or a place where the water's rushing, and you smack it against because they like that falling, falling fruit or falling seeds.
And when they hit that, I'm talking about like a four-inch hook.
When they hit that hook, this is the thing because you're doing this for you doing it for an hour and you're like, all right, there's no Paco in here.
Well, guess what?
When they do hit it, they'll pull you right out of the boat.
I mean, I've been dragged straight across the boat where you got to use one hand to stop yourself, and the other hand's holding this pole.
And then your friends got to pull you back.
You get this fish on the thing, and it's going, boom, boom, Flying that you're catching them.
And Lex was walking around in circles for two hours.
And he comes up to me and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, I came all the way here for you.
He goes, now you do this for me.
He goes, don't leave me alone in the dark.
And I went, God, I said, all right, I'll do it.
And we drank right next to each other.
And the guy's smoking his pipe and, you know, he has the feathers on and he's singing to us and you're drinking and you're going deeper and deeper into the hole.
And God.
It was interesting, though.
We both, the shaman said that, you know, he was talking about what Lex was going afterwards.
He was talking about what Lex was going through on his journey.
And he goes in and does this deep work of the things he sees coming off of you.
And this is a guy, the shaman I've known for 20 years.
He's like my uncle.
And so he would come up to me and he'd go, I'd be laying down.
You can't get up.
And he'd come up to me and he'd go, one more cup?
And I'd be like, sure.
Like, why not?
And he'd like give me like a kiss on the forehead and throw it down my throat.
And then he'd go to Lex and go, one more cup.
And Lex would be like, yes.
And then, you know, give it to Lex.
And he said that, he said that he wasn't worried about my spirit.
He said, I was there to protect Lex.
And he said, Lex was there to do some real work.
And so what's interesting is that we both reached this sort of, we both reached the pinnacle of what was happening at the same time where I felt myself about, I felt it coming.
I was like, oh no, I'm going to throw up.
I'm going to throw up.
And all of a sudden, my consciousness lifted six feet above my body.
And I was looking down at me and Lex.
And I got this overwhelmingly calm sensation.
And without speaking, the shaman said to me, he said, you're not going to feel this.
I know you don't like it.
Said, you're just here to support him so you can vomit now.
And so Lex started vomiting, and I started vomiting.
But I was watching myself and I was watching him, and I was just like, this is fine.
It doesn't hurt a bit.
And it was very, very comforting.
And then he came and he started with the, you know, shaking the leaves and singing louder and really cultivating, making sure we gave everything that we purged all of it.
And then he brought the crescendo down.
And then he calmed and then he began singing.
And then we settled back into the symphonic throb of the night.
And then the trip went on for some time, but it was interesting that things heightened at that moment and that we went through it together.
You know, and then and then, you know, it was very interesting watching Lex go through his journey because he, by the end of it, he just got happier and happier.
He just liked it more and more.
And around, I think, cup six, I tapped.
After the vomiting, after that thing, it was sort of, again, there's energies floating around.
And he's singing.
It's great, you know, understanding a little bit of the language because he's singing to his grandfather.
He's singing to the spirit of Santiago and the spirit of the Anaconda and using the old words for them.
You know, not even saying anaconda.
He's saying the other things, Amarumayo, and he's saying shiwa wako, and he's talking about the, so he's doing this and shaking his thing, and you hear the frogs throbbing, and it's all moving through your skin.
And so I, yeah, I tapped out after a while, and Lex kept going.
Because he's kind of like, so did he, it seemed like, at least I don't like, I wasn't really following his career, but it seemed like he came in like an assassin, did some big stuff.
Like I said, the heaviest thing I lift is my body weight.
I do every bodyweight stuff.
I do a lot of chin-ups and dips, and sometimes I do it with a vest, you know.
And I do, you know, but with kettlebells, like the heavy, occasionally I'll throw around a 90-pound kettlebell, but the heaviest I really train with is 70.
And I was multiple times state champion in Taekwondo, and I won a bunch of national tournaments.
And I was really good.
I was really good at Taekwondo.
Like, I had fought at a very high level.
And I have a lot of really good instruction that I got from, I got very lucky.
And I stumbled upon a school in Boston called the Jai Hun Kim Taekwondo Institute.
Just randomly walked in the door one day, and it turned out to be one of the best taekwondo schools in the world.
And so I had trained with some of the very best people in the world just by fortune.
And I was physically gifted.
I was very lucky in a lot of ways.
A lot of natural power.
And I learned technique, which is the most important thing, like perfect technique.
And so when it was funny, it was because it came about because of John Donaher.
I had a conversation with John Donagher, who's George's Jiu-Jitsu coach, who's maybe the greatest martial arts coach in the world, maybe of all time.
Really, legitimately, like a brilliant man.
He was a philosophy major from Columbia who got, I think he was a professor for a bit, but then he got obsessed with jiu-jitsu and was just teaching jiu-jitsu and training jiu-jitsu and sleeping on the mats.
And like literally, literally.
Literally teaching all day, training all day and sleeping on the mats, but a brilliant man.
And we were having dinner one night, and he's like, George needs some help with the finer points of the spinning back kick.
Do you know anyone who can help him?
And I said, this is going to sound crazy.
I go, but I have like the best spinning back kick you're ever going to see in your fucking life.
I go, I know it sounds crazy because I'm a comedian.
We know short-faced bear, a bunch of different animals that they find their bones in Alaska, and they know that they probably made their way down through North America.
It just stands, it just makes logical sense that if you have a variety of different megafauna, that probably one of those primates or a bunch of those primates lived in the Pacific Northwest, which is the area where they would be, right?
And then you have incredibly dense forest, right?
So Jane Goodall won't rule out the existence of...
Well, you know, you got to realize this is a lady that lived with primates in an inaccessible area where there's very few human beings and she had these interactions with them.
I don't agree with her, but I think that it existed at one point in time.
One of the other reasons why I think it exists is that different Native American tribes put this into perplexity.
How many different Native American terms were there for a hairy wild man or Bigfoot?
And I know, it's true, because everyone wants to know, and you're controversial.
And so I always go, he's the nicest fucking guy in the world.
I go, I said the first time I came, you sent me a message and you said something about like, hey, don't worry about a thing.
Like, I'm even going to bring my dog.
Like, it was very nice.
It was a little pat on the back.
Because you go, Jane Goodall, I went to a talk when I was like 22, something, and I was just writing chapters of my first book, Mother of God, which didn't even have a name yet.
And I had chapters in a manila envelope, and I went to a talk that Goodall was giving.
And I mean, I'd been read stories and seen the black and white pictures.
So this is like, you know, like Einstein, the Abe Lincoln, Jane Goodall, like a living historical figure.
And so now she's talking in front of me.
And I had brought these chapters and I wanted to ask her because I'd already sent the chapters to publishers.
And they'd all been like, kid, none of this is true.
You know, no way did you jump on a giant anaconda.
No way did you raise an anteater.
They just didn't believe me.
And then when it was my turn after hundreds of people, I get to her and she goes, hello.
She goes, takes a little picture with you.
And I said, would you read these chapters?
I said, I would love it because I loved your stories as a kid.
And she goes, thank you.
And she puts it to the side.
48 hours later, her staff gets in touch and they go, Jane actually read what you gave her, loved it, and said, finish the book, get a publisher, and I will write you an endorsement.
But I do think, not Bigfoot, but I do think that it's entirely possible that there is a small, hairy, primate-like, human-like primate that exists still.
That's like the Hobbit people from the island of Flores.
It was a very small-like hobbit-like creature that was a type of primate that was bipedal, that was like a little tiny, hairy human being that lived at least on the island of Flores, but most likely lived in many other places as well.
And there's a possibility that it still exists.
And it's not me saying this.
It's like some actual anthropologists that believe that this thing might still be alive because you're dealing with incredibly small populations.
I mean, let's pretend that you saw a wolverine in the Montana woods, like dense Montana woods, and it's 100 yards away.
You see it briefly for a second, get your phone.
You're not going to, you might have seen it.
You might have seen it traveling between the trees.
But, like, how are you going to get it off your phone?
You're going to have to, unless you have a Samsung, where you have a really good Zoom, you're not going to be able to zoom in enough.
You know, like, you'd have to have a few phones that are good.
Yeah, you're not going to get good footage, but we know that wolverines are real.
But finding a wolverine in the woods, I've talked to, God, I've talked to hundreds of men who spend a giant portion of their life in the woods, and only a few have seen wolverines.
You know, that's the reaction we got with the tribes: if you look at uncontacted tribes, I mean, my whole life, you look at photos of uncontacted tribes, it was like blurry, crappy, because who was out there?
I showed it to an anthropologist and he was saying, you know, Stone Age isn't necessarily accurate here.
He said, because they're not using stone.
They don't have clay pots.
He goes, this is something.
This is.
But I mean, then think about it.
It's actually like a time machine because you're, and we were standing across the river, look talking to these people, and it's like, you guys are a couple thousand years back.
And so it's like, this is such a strange aperture into history.
In fact, while we were watching them out front, there was a terrifying moment where we heard something behind us, and it was, which we never saw them, but the women came lightfoot in behind, and they pulled up all the yucca and the bananas and they were raiding.
And so for a second, we were like, there's an ambush.
And everyone was like turning the shotguns away from the river.
And they were like, we thought there was going to be arrows flying.
So like, my guy Ignacio grabbed me and like put me down.
And we were hiding behind trees waiting for it.
And it was like, no, no, no.
They're just stealing all of the fruit and all of the crops.
But I really, I really did feel like, you know, like you, you go, imagine what it would be like to go back and see the Comanches, watch them riding across the plains after the buffalo.
But I mean, other than them, the thought of the most uncontacted people is North Sentinel Island.
And North Sentinel Island, the interesting part of that is one of the reasons why they're so distrustful of people is because they had been contacted in the 1800s.
A cargo ship named the Primrose ran aground on the coral reef surrounding North Sentinel.
The crew radioed for assistance and settled for a long wait, but in the morning they saw 50 men with bows on the beach building makeshift boats to swim out to them and fuck them up.
Yeah, I mean, they have a severe distrust, obviously, of people.
And if you want to feel like you fell off the face of the earth, you go to the Andaman Islands.
First of all, beautiful.
You can only, I think if you still like this, you can only get there from the Indian city of Chennai or Calcutta because it's an Indian territory.
They limit who can travel there.
And there's, I mean, they've brought elephants there because they didn't used to have bulldozers and stuff.
So the British brought elephants by boat, and there's these old archival photos of them lifting off of like pirate ships, lifting elephants on the rigging, and then putting them in the island.
But when you go from one place to the other place, exactly what you said, because they don't want human safaris, because they want to protect these indigenous people, you have to go with a police escort to cross the island because you have to go through an event.
What is fascinating to me when people are trying to save things, and by saving things, they don't realize that they're actually fucking things up far worse than saving them.
Well, there's a good example.
I think it's the Mojave Desert, where they just now, California and all their infinite wisdom, decided to build this immense solar farm out in the desert.
I saved it.
I'll send it to you, Jamie.
It is so crazy.
So they decided to build this immense solar farm.
It turns out this solar farm, because it's got mirrors that point towards these solar panels, it's incinerating 6,000 birds a year, incinerating 6,000 birds a fucking year, which is like, what does that even mean?
I mean, when you realize there's something that everybody has wrong, or you realize that there's something that the amount, because then you got to get the message to everybody.
And it's like I'm in this unique position because I'm contacted now all day long by people that want to help us protect the rainforest, people who want to use that blueprint to do it somewhere else.
And we're on the cusp of doing this.
So I'm surrounded by, I get a lot of positive people with innovations, people with ideas, people.
I mean, even, you know, everyone says, oh, why can't the billionaires?
And it's like, we get people who have money and they come in and they're like, I'll help you get that piece of land.
And so they find meaning in activism or in pseudo-activism and yelling about things online.
And then maybe going out into the street and screaming at people.
And they think that that gives meaning to their life.
You know, there's a lot of people that just feel like really lost.
And this strange concrete culture, concrete and electronic culture that we've created, it doesn't give you the fulfillment that the natural world does.
I mean, I'm sure it's one of the draws that you have to the jungle is that living out there in nature is wildly fulfilling because it's normal.
It's like it fills in all the slots that you have evolved to have, like as a human being.
So there's a disproportionate amount of severe catastrophic injuries that come out of San Francisco, and their training facility is right outside this power station.
I mean, it's look, EMF signals we know disrupt human beings.
But to what extent?
Like, to what extent does LED lights, and to what extent?
Is it minimal?
Do you feel it?
Is it not?
Does it have a long-term effect?
Does it take forever until it actually compounds?
But they're looking at the data from this one training facility.
So you could find something on it.
Because a lot of stories have come out this week about it where people are starting to gather up all the data and they're like, hey, this is not normal.
This is a much higher percentage of severe injuries from this one camp, which doesn't make any sense.
Well, it's like that Aaron Brockovich thing, where it's like you find a place where a lot of people are getting the same kind of cancer, and it's like, there's a reason.
I mean, in environmental college, that was there's numerous giant class action lawsuits for people that were living under high-tension power lines.
And I mean, I actually knew someone who, I mean, I've been to the places where I did for my senior project I was doing where we went to the areas where they were fracking.
Remember that documentary where they were lighting the water?
There's some limited evidence, a small increase in childhood leukemia risk, very close, high-voltage power lines.
But overall, the lick is weak, not clearly causal.
And typically, residential exposures are considered within safety guidelines.
See, the thing is, it's like, who is one of the things about Perplexity or any large language model is you've got to get the information from online and who's publishing this information.
So it's like there's only so much of it that's available, but possibly carcinogenic is a weak category.
So parcel, so it says International Agency for Research and Cancer classifies extremely low frequency magnetic fields like those from power lines as possibly carcinogenic to humans, mainly because of the childhood leukemia data.
I mean, when you find fossils in the wild, there's nothing like finding fossils.
I remember the first time I found like a little shell.
And then, like I said, not that long ago, we found like a seven-foot turtle shell, thick, thick, thick, like black, fossilized in the river basin in the Amazon.
The river was especially low, and it was just, you know, it was half out, like a crashed alien spaceship.
Like, it was just this huge thing.
And it was like, you get this sense.
You get that tactile, visceral sense of like, whoa, these used to be here.
Grapefruit-sized dinosaur egg from a fossil bed in China.
Gave paleontologists a huge surprise.
Rather than a dinosaur embryo or sediment, it was filled with sparkling crystals of calcite lining the inner shell.
A natural dinosaur geode.
A rare occurrence provides researchers with unique information on the structure of the shell.
In this case, a never-before-seen ooze species, O-O-S-O-O-O species, species of egg named, oh boy, good luck pronouncing that.
Identified in 22 paper led by paleontologist Quing Hei of Anhui University in China.
Not only that, it's among the first dinosaur eggs or evidence of any dinosaurs for that matter found in the roughly 70 million year old Upper Cretaceous Christian formation of the Kuishan Basin.
I'm glad you're out there, and I'm glad you're still alive because you freak me out every now and then when you send me messages that I'm worried about your safety.