Paul Rosolie recounts a harrowing 2024 encounter with the Mashkopiro tribe in Peru, where initial peace offerings were met with violence after loggers were killed and warriors attacked his team. He details the critical mission to protect 130,000 acres of Amazon rainforest from narcos and loggers, describing a life-or-death struggle that evolved from ecological surveys to evading armed drug dealers who placed hit lists on him and his crew. While reflecting on the psychological toll of constant assassination threats and the complex social intelligence of local wildlife, Rosolie emphasizes the urgent need to expand conservation efforts to 300,000 acres to prevent the extermination of uncontacted peoples through disease and violence. [Automatically generated summary]
We're standing there, everyone is waiting because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck and there's people holding shotguns and the anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front and he's going, no mole.
He's going, brothers.
And then it happened.
Then you start hearing people screaming, Moshko, Moshko, and people are screaming and women are lifting children and running into the huts and the dogs and chickens are going nuts and fear.
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his third time on the podcast.
Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest and celebrating the beauty of the natural world.
He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper that you should definitely go pre-order now.
It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new full-on extended encounter with an uncontacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast.
Both the book and audiobook are great.
I highly recommend it.
If you would like to support Paul and his incredible team in their mission to protect the jungle, go to junglekeepers.org.
You can help with donations or by spreading the word or checking out the gala that Paul is hosting in New York on January 22nd in a few days.
They are doing all they can to help raise funds for the mission of safeguarding as much of the rainforest as possible.
And I think it's a mission worth fighting for.
The Amazon jungle is one of the most special and beautiful places on earth.
As an aside, allow me to look back briefly and mention something that I've been struggling with a bit.
For context, I traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Paul a while back.
It was an adventure of a lifetime with lots of crazy twists and turns.
We did record a podcast out there, literally in the jungle, episode 429, if you want to go check it out.
It was awesome.
And we also recorded a bunch of disparate footage of the journey, just for fun.
And I would still love to somehow put all that together into a cohesive video in case it's interesting to someone.
But I've learned just how difficult it is to organize and edit a pile of chaotically recorded footage like that.
So let's see if I can pull it off.
But in any case, this kind of raw vlog style video is something that I would love to be able to do more of as a way to celebrate amazing human beings like Paul and others, including everyday people who I meet on my travels.
So I'll keep trying, tinkering, learning, and I ask for your patience and support along the way.
Now, back to our regular scheduled programming.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosalie.
We've survived a challenging time out in the jungle about a year and a half ago.
And since then, your life has increasingly gotten more intense.
So you've achieved the incredible feat of saving now more than 130,000 acres of rainforest.
And the goal is that you're working towards is protecting 200,000 acres more and doing so while facing extreme danger from narcos, narco-traffickers, so-called cocaine mafia in an escalating drug war.
This is insane.
These are new developments.
Illegal loggers, as we've talked about before, gold miners, and the incredible recent encounter with an uncontacted tribe.
And we'll talk about all of this.
So your new book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of two loggers by the warriors of an uncontacted tribe, the Mashkopiro, in August 2024.
And then you reveal that you had your own dramatic encounter with the tribe two months later in October 2024.
So if I may, let me read the opening of the book.
Far out on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, deep in the Peruvian jungle, a pair of loggers plunged their chainsaws into the buttressed roots of an ancient ironwood.
An ironwood, or Chihuahuaco, of this size is a giant among giants, an emergent sentinel that reaches heights of 160 feet, towering over the rest of the canopy.
I've read that many are over a thousand years old, by the way, as an aside, and you've found ones that are 1,200 years old.
This particular tree had started its life as a tiny sapling in the great jungle, a story that began before the Spanish reached Peru, long before the United States was even a dream, at a time when Leonardo da Vinci was still honing his talents in a faraway part of the world through the Renaissance, the First and Second World Wars, and the birth of our grandparents.
This tree was out there slowly charging upward, anonymous, just one pillar among the billions of others.
But on this day, in August 2024, when the two loggers worked, this witness of the centuries came crashing down through the canopy with such cataclysmic power that it shook the earth.
And then you go on to talk about how the shaking of the earth was felt and heard by the uncontacted tribe.
So you go on to describe how these particular loggers were murdered by the uncontacted tribe of Mash Copiro.
What do we know about these warriors of the uncontacted tribe?
We know that across the Amazon basin, there's still perhaps thousands of clans of quote-unquote uncontacted peoples, people that are living in nomadic isolation in what remains of the intact Amazon basin and want to remain that way.
And so what happened with these loggers was that local people told them, don't go out there.
Don't go into these territories.
And what happens is that people that aren't from this thing with the jungle, people don't believe that it's as wild as the legends say.
And so when they say there's calatos out there, there's wild people out there.
These loggers from another region go, yeah, it's some story.
They don't realize you're dealing with a civilization of people that is still nomadic, still uses bamboo-tipped arrows, still lives naked in the Amazon rainforest, has knowledge of medicines that we have yet to encounter or may never discover, and that they can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters.
And so while you're using a chainsaw, they can sneak up and you will never know they're there.
And so when that arrow passes through your body, you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over.
And so the fact that we're sitting here talking on microphones and that we have airplanes and cell phones and all the things that we have in the modern world.
And there's still, we still live in this age where there's right now at this moment, people living out in the jungle who have been there since before history is an incredible thing.
What are the technologies we modern humans have that the Mashkapira do not?
It's just interesting to think about the kind of technologies we take for granted.
Energy and power, obviously all the electricity generation and grids and batteries and solar panels and electric motors, metals and materials, mass-produced steel, aluminum, advanced alloys, plastics, composites, glass, concrete, all of those things.
Tools, of course, and the machinery, the infrastructure of roads and bridges and buildings and the weapons of war, everything but the spears and the arrows that they have and the medicine and biology.
Of course, they probably have complicated medicines that they've developed for their own that are available within the jungle.
I mean, metal, think you have to be able to excavate into the earth and forge metal.
These people don't even, as one of the local anthropologists said to me, a Peruvian anthropologist, he said, you know, people think of them as Stone Age tribes.
And he was like, they don't have stones.
He's like, they don't, so they don't know that water, they see water that they drink.
They don't know that water freezes because they've never seen it.
They don't know what that water boils because they don't have, they don't even make clay pots.
They just have their bamboo and their string.
And so they're living an incredibly simple life.
So all of that, I mean, even, you know, a camera is a miracle to them.
Like, it's like, yeah, you have to bend your mind to even understand how far back they are.
It's like looking into thousands of years ago, like Stone Age.
I think they view it as like a demonic destructive force.
And when I show you the encounter that we had, we got a few takeaways.
We left with more questions than answers, but one of the things that they were able to communicate across the language barrier was, why are you cutting down the trees?
So, in order to tell you about that encounter, I think we need to orient people into where we're talking about.
We're talking about this river that runs through the western edge of the Amazon rainforest that you know well now after spending time there with me.
It's a high tributary of the Amazon rainforest where you have the main river channel and then smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller tributaries.
And the smaller you get, the less trafficked they are.
And so, this river has remained wild through the centuries.
And even during the 90s, when there was a mahogany boom where people went out for mahogany trees, there's very few people going up this river.
And so, 20 years ago, when I first got to the region, and people were telling me that there's uncontacted tribes out there, it was always in the realm of something, you know, it's like people say there's Bigfoot, or don't go there, it's haunted, or something.
You know, it's like it was like a tall tale almost.
And even the Peruvian government, at the time that I went to Peru first, which was 2006, their official position was that the tribes are a myth.
There's no such thing as the tribes.
That was the official position.
And you just, you would hear these stories of people that got shot.
You'd meet someone high up a river, four days upriver, deep in the Amazon that had an arrow.
And you'd look at this thing and it had this, you know, mega gravity.
And so, as we've created jungle keepers and now we're protecting 130,000 acres of this river, we're protecting the plants and the animals and the ancient trees and trying to preserve the ecosystem and counting the butterflies and conducting ecological surveys.
And what we've inadvertently found ourselves the caretakers of is the fact that these people, in order to continue living, have to remain isolated, want to remain isolated.
That's their one mandate as a civilization, the tribes of the Mashkopiro.
And so in October, we were, you know, as jungle keepers now, we're working with the indigenous people.
What we do is we take loggers and gold miners and make them into rangers and give them better jobs.
And we try to protect the forest.
And those people who live up in the remote indigenous community, they called us on a satellite phone and they said, directors, you've been working with us and telling us you want to help us.
When we got the phone call, it was a mix of, you know, we should keep, because we're over here like trying to get land concessions and doing all this important work.
And part of me was like, that's, it can't be real.
And so two-day boat journey that we're trying to flex in one night.
And so I was at the front with the headlamp, with the torch.
And so the first few hours it was clear.
And that comet, remember that comet that was going, there was that comet in the sky.
I remember looking at the comet and going, somehow I was like, this is it.
I knew this was it.
And the first few hours was clear and the stars was out and it was beautiful.
And then it clouded over and the lightning started.
And then it just apocalypse downpoured.
And from midnight until 8 a.m., it was just the front of the boat with the light.
And it was just Star Wars vision of just, you know, raindrops and galaxies and moths flying in my eye.
And people don't realize you can get hypothermia in the tropics, but it's like as you're going at night, even if it's 80 degrees outside in the rain, in the wind at night, in a lightning storm, you're freezing.
And so by, you know, 2 a.m., I'm convulsively shivering.
And we're using the crocodile eyes, the Cayman eyes on the side of the river as because it was so dark we couldn't see where we were going.
So those shine back at you.
So I was finding the Cayman eyes and then motioning with the light to Ignacio where to go.
And we got there and we arrive at this community where, and it's morning now and the howler monkeys are calling over the jungle.
And, you know, the little naked children are all by the side and everyone's scared.
And we get a hug from this guy, Bacho, who we know.
And they're like, come in, come in, come in.
And they're like, the tribe came out yesterday that we saw a few of them on the beach and they're gone now.
And so we collapsed.
We fell asleep.
Rained the whole day.
That night we went out and we looked for them.
And there was this crazy moment where we're standing on this beach and their footprints were there.
And the local indigenous anthropologist was standing there.
And we're standing at the edge of this beach looking out into the Amazon beyond.
And there's just all this wreckage.
It looked like something very Cormac McCarthy, just dark sky, iron clouds.
And we're standing there.
Everyone is waiting because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck.
And there's people holding shotguns.
And the anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front and he's going, no mole.
He's going, brothers.
There's only a few words that intersect between the languages.
And he's going, brothers.
We're here.
We don't want to hurt you.
He's speaking in the Yin language.
And he's saying, come out.
And you can tell by their footprints, the trackers explain this to us.
You could see it was just the balls of their feet.
So right as we pulled up to the beach, they had run.
So they were there listening to us.
And he's going, no mole, come out.
It's okay.
Lay down your arms.
We'll lay down ours.
No mole.
Just kept saying, no mole.
And nothing happened.
And we went back to the village.
We went to sleep.
We wake up the next morning.
And it's 5 a.m.
And again, we're trying to save the jungle.
We're in a race against time to get these land concessions.
And so my team, like Mosa and Stefan, JJ couldn't come because he was in town actually signing paperwork and interviewing loggers and landowners.
And also, he didn't think that there was any chance this was going to be real because in his entire 50-something years in the Amazon, he's never seen them.
And so we're getting ready to leave in the morning.
We had tents on the boat.
And Ignacio comes up to me and he goes, You're my director, right?
Because we should say, kind of the obvious thing is, as far as anyone remembers, any encounters, any minimal small encounters with these tribes have been violent.
Maybe you can correct me on this, but I read that in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was documentation of encounters with these tribes by the private armies of the rubber barons.
And those encounters were, from the rubber barons' armies perspective, violent.
And so maybe the lesson they learned, the uncontacted tribes, is that any interaction with the outside world is going to have to be violent because they have to defend themselves.
Because even in my lifetime there, in the 20 years I've spent in the Amazon, Ignacio was shot in the head.
My friend Victor survived a violent encounter where they murdered somebody on the beach.
I mean, they've shot numerous people.
They've even shot people who were trying to help them, people.
They're trying to give them clothing and bananas.
They've just, they call it porcupining them, where they find a body on the beach with so many arrows that when they fall over, all the arrows are sticking up.
And so they think, and they'll do it out of curiosity too, where it's like, hey, you're wearing a suit.
That's weird.
We've never seen anybody in a black and white suit.
And then get a clothing.
You know, the way Teddy Roosevelt would shoot a bird for science.
They're like, they'll just what?
They just want to look at you.
And so they're operating on a different, they don't have a moral system that we have or understand.
Because if you ask him, one day I asked him, I said, if you could see the people that shot you in the head, what would you say to them?
And he looked at me with that Ignacio look.
And he said, I wouldn't say anything.
I would kill as many of them as I could.
I said, okay.
He also had a time where he was in a really remote guard station working for the Ministry of Culture.
And they showed up and he knew that they were going to kill him.
And so he climbed up into the peak of the little structure there.
And just like, you know, like a dog in a car, that greenhouse effect in the top at midday with the sun beating down, he was huddled over a mattress while they were walking on the deck, moving pots and pans and looking at our items and artifacts.
And he knew that if he was found, they'd kill him.
But if he stayed up there, he was literally frying to death.
He said he was soaking the mattress.
He could feel himself dying for two hours.
He had to stay there.
And he is constantly making this decision of if I come out, I die.
If I stay here, I probably die.
He's like, probably die is better than definitely die.
So he's terrified.
And so as they're screaming, Mash go, and everybody's running and women are lifting children, Ignacio comes and finds me.
And you can see in his eyes, you can see when somebody has that PTSD response where he's breathing heavy.
He's moving behind trees.
He's keeping me close to him and he's going, look there.
He has a bow.
He has a bow.
And we're looking up the beach.
And there's just this clan of naked men walking down the beach with these seven-foot bows and they're hunched over and they're pointing at us.
They're going, look at that one.
They're going, look, there's a gun there.
And you can see them communicating to each other.
And the butterflies are swirling off the beach.
And, you know, in these moments, you go, am I entering a moment that I is this, is this a one-way door?
Is this not something that is this an irreversible situation?
Because there's an unfolding situation where they're coming towards us.
Are they going to attack?
What do they want?
Is there going to be, I mean, I am soaked in chills right now just talking about it because I remember standing there and going, there's no way this is real life.
It's burned into my memory them walking down the beach and seeing them with the bows.
And of course, you know, Stefana's up there just firing off pictures and Mosin is down getting video.
And the community that we're with, people had, you know, you hear shotgun shells loading home and them loading it.
But they're also, they're getting ready.
And there's this one guy, this anthropologist named Rommel, who has been the only person who has communicated with them peacefully.
He did it in 2013 where he stood on the beach and he spoke to them.
He knows enough of the local dialect that overlaps with theirs that he can speak to them.
And so as they're coming down the beach, the butterflies are flying up and we're all waiting.
And again, shotgun, you're talking, you know, how many meters?
30, 40 meters?
I don't know, accurate.
For an arrow, you loose a seven-foot arrow that weighs nothing.
You're talking about 300 meters easy.
They can shoot you from across the river.
So Ignacio was like pulling me and he was like, down.
He's like, you go down.
He's like, you stay behind this tree.
And he's like, you watch them from there.
He's like, watch out.
That guy has an arrow.
He's like, he was watching everyone because you could see.
It's you're with, you're with, I'm with my two best friends and a bunch of people that I work very closely with, and you're in the middle of nowhere and there's no help coming.
And you're with like, you know, 26 people and there's 50 of the tribe that you can see and you know that they're surrounding us.
There's all men on the other side of the river.
And then we had guns looking back towards the jungle because we knew we were being surrounded.
And so again, this is always, this is always the story of someone's uncle, brother, cousin tells a story that happened and now it's happening.
And it's not happening in the shadows.
It's not happening in the middle of the night.
It's happening in broad daylight.
They're walking out onto the beach.
You know, it's like, it's like the first time they saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
And you are kind of walking on the nice edge of, and it's funny you say this to falls taking pictures because there's two ways to think of the situation.
This is fascinating or this is extremely dangerous.
You know, as the directors of Jungle Keepers, we're working with this community to ensure that their lifestyle can continue.
And they're saying, hey, that's great.
But as an indigenous community, we're dealing with these people that come out and raid our stuff, try and steal our women, that kill our hunters.
And now they're coming out.
We want you to see it.
And so documenting it is part of our job.
We have to show what happened that day.
And so those guys were shooting.
And then, yes, very seriously, it's actually, so Mosen's wife and I, we always joked about like, oh, if the tribe ever comes out, like, you stand in front of him, like, you take the arrow.
He has kids.
And it was, you know, that day, it was like we were strategically positioning ourselves, being like, you know, you down.
You cannot get killed.
And it was, you start in those moments to go, okay, where will I be safe from arrows?
Where can I run to the river if they, if they come over?
And you start planning, okay, if I jump into the river, I was going, okay, I got my bag.
I have a can of tuna.
I have a flashlight.
I was like, if I jump into the river and float down and I live, I'm still days upriver.
And actually, the anthropologists that we've been speaking to post-this event have been explaining to us that Mashkopiro, you know, Piro is the group that they're from, these various nomadic tribes.
And Mashko basically means like wild pyrrhos.
And so the one thing we know they call themselves is nomoles.
And so the first thing, again, you just think of like, you know, the peace pipe in the old stories.
And the first thing is, let's make them an offering of peace.
And so they got a canoe with no motor and we piled it with plantains, like just full of plantains, 16 feet of endless green bananas.
And then, I mean, the ball's on this guy, the anthropologist, he gets into the river, takes the canoe, and it's the dry season, so the river is only about three, four feet deep at the channel.
And so he walks this thing out.
There's one man walking in the face of all these warriors.
And he takes the boat and he pushes it towards them.
And they rush out and they start grabbing the bananas.
And they're not going, okay, we will unload these bananas and use them later.
They're my bananas.
And you're grabbing your bananas.
And they're fighting and they're yelling and they're all grabbing and they're grabbing them.
And then they push the boat back.
And he talks to them a little bit.
And again, it's not a perfect translation.
So he's, you know, he's saying, where have you come from?
What do you want?
Who's your leader?
He's trying to establish these things.
And they're saying things and they all sort of talk at the same time like a flock of birds.
They're not, they don't have, it wasn't like one man speaks.
And there was no women.
The women were, the women were nowhere to be seen.
And actually at one point, as we were preparing, I think it was while we were preparing the second canoe of bananas, there was a moment of absolute panic.
And it happened when there was a noise behind us and you just hear a bunch of shotguns swing behind us.
And, you know, Mohsen goes down.
I go running away from the river now because, again, I want to see it coming if there's an attack coming.
And I'm standing, me and this guy were sharing a tree as cover.
And he's got a shotgun and he's looking back into the forest and peering through.
And what was happening was the women of the tribe had come silentfoot and they were just pulling the yucca out of the ground and taking the banana plants and ruining the farm completely.
But they were raiding the farm behind us while the men were talking up here.
So again, were they peacefully contacting us or were they like, hey, we need some food, so go make a diversion and take the food and respect.
And it's probably fair to say that part of the reason they did, maybe they wanted peace, but part of the reason is they didn't know how deep this goes.
The big trees seem to have incredible significance to them.
They're significant to us in a different way, but to them, it's offensive on an almost religious level to cut a big tree as if you're killing their gods.
Before even coming to talk to you about this, we passed this through anthropologists and ethicists and people.
And we said, look, is it even, can we talk about this?
Because if you talk about this and you tell people there's these uncontacted tribes, people have misconceptions.
They go, they're the last free people on earth.
They're living the real life.
We need to go join them.
We want to see them.
We want to photograph.
There's all this bad stuff that happens.
And all these people want us to be left alone.
So the last thing we want to do is kill the thing we're trying to protect and tell the world.
But at the same time, they're speaking out.
They're saying, stop cutting our trees.
Leave us alone.
And so if we're not successful in the greater jungle keeper's mission of protecting this river, they cease to exist.
And so, advocating for these people requires us to have this conversation and requires us to have this footage and to show the world and then leave them alone.
In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.
You know, we're sitting there this day, and you know, the only thing you've ever seen are these blurry images of someone's cell phone from 100 meters away of the uncontacted tribes.
And we're sitting there with you know, 800 millimeters with a 2x teleconverter and R5s.
And so, this is as we're looking through the farms, anticipating the tribe coming.
I'll put a little bit of volume so you can hear it.
And then you can see this is the moment.
This is us running when they're like, they're out, they're coming down the beach.
And then he's gotten his hands-on Brazil nut sacks, plastic sacks from one of the farms across the river.
And so they just take, they take.
And one of them got a machete and he was walking as they were leaving.
Again, during that period where it got friendly, he was leaving and he had the machete and he was playing with the machete and like swinging it at butterflies.
And one of my friends, the Sky Bacho, he goes, oh, he goes, Deja Mi Machete.
He's like, you know, dropped the machete.
And the guy just looked at him and was like, yeah, come and get it.
You know, it's like, yeah, you cross the river and see what happens.
Yeah, they speak in, they can use animal calls with enough complexity that they can do basic commands.
So they can speak in Capuchin.
They use Tinamu calls.
Some of our rangers were upriver a few months ago.
This is long after this.
This is recently.
Just recently, they were upriver and they found a trail, let's say, Nomole trail, a Mashkopiro trail.
And it was Ignacio, of course.
And he made the, there's like a secret whistle they do, this mouth.
And he whistled out into the jungle.
And he's listening.
And they whistled back.
And so him and everybody on the team just ran back to the boat and got out of there.
But it was like, at least they answered.
They didn't just shoot.
He whistled, they whistled, and they said, out.
And he got out.
But it's like, we don't know where are the old people?
Do they not survive?
What are the marriage rituals?
How is reproduction handled?
There's one or two children in the Amazon that I know of who have, you know, washed downriver on a log and been rescued by communities and then raised and they either learn the native dialect or Spanish.
And then, of course, at some point, somebody will go and say, What was it like when you lived with them?
It's either a really strong NDA or that it is savage that they're living out there in the jungle and that you're eating monkeys and turtles and you're hungry for days on end.
And, you know, your wife might get stolen by another tribe.
Your baby might get stolen.
You know, I mean, imagine the bot flies and the things that they must put up with.
It's just, I mean, what we experienced in what, three days of living out with modern camping gear and headlamps and a sense of direction, and they're doing none of that.
You could be like to the children, they say, this is the monster you should be afraid of, or this could be the most beautiful encapsulation of the outside world.
So now in that 130,000 acres that we have, we know, and this is what we're, we're sort of, we sort of have to come out of the closet with this.
Like, we are now protecting these people.
And the only way to do that is to make sure that they're not contacted, let alone that they don't get machine guns shot at them by the narcos or that crazy, you know, hippie gringos don't go down there thinking they're going to, you know, join, join the, the coolest commune on earth.
Most of the rest, most of that 200,000 that we're still trying to protect is territory that is theirs.
And in order, and in order, people always ask me, they're like, first, a lot of people ask, how could you buy the Amazon?
They're like, that doesn't make sense.
And it's like, well, I have bad news for you.
Somebody already owns it.
And we have to buy it from them so that they don't log it.
And so these landowners are going to sell their forest to the logging companies because owning 10,000 acres of the Amazon doesn't help you if you're a third generation jungle man.
And now it's just something that's up there and you live in the city.
And so they're going to contract either the narcos or the loggers or the miners to go out there and use it and they'll get a little money.
And those people, when they see these people, will kill them.
That's for sure.
And shotguns and machine guns in the end will win, not to mention the germs.
So all the money you're trying to raise and all the land that you're trying to save, it's all towards that.
Protecting the deep jungle.
So when you buy up the jungle, you just want to let it be, let the natural ecosystem come back to life in the cases when it was logged or just flourish if it hasn't.
I always called it the last endless forest because this place is so incredibly remote.
And then the other question I always get is people say, well, why is this river so important?
And for my whole career, my whole time, 20 years in the Amazon, it's been that it's massively intact forest.
Places like the ancient forest where the trees have never been cut.
So it's forest that's been growing since the dawn of time.
And thousands of species can be on a single Shihuako tree.
And it's avatar on Earth.
You can see the sweat come off your skin and rain down and then drink it out of the river and you're part of the chemical physical reality there.
And so it's one of the last places that's untouched.
This changed everything because we realized that along with the butterflies and the monkeys and the jaguars and the trees and the ecosystem, there's also a human culture that will in the next few years cease to exist, that will be exterminated if we don't protect them.
And when you look back at what happened to indigenous cultures all over the world over the past few centuries that they've been wiped out, we collectively now, because we know this, have a chance to undo all of the injustices that happened in the past by at least doing one right, by saying these people want one thing, to just be left alone.
Imagine if we just protected the river.
And then it's not that they're this thing that's vanishing from reality, but they get to continue living that way.
And then if they want to come out and contact us, great.
And if they want to continue living like this for the next 10,000 years, they can.
And that's what we're working with now.
It's become so much more important than just, you know, we're trying to protect the environment.
It's like, no, we're trying to protect, you know, things like Yellowstone and Yosemite and the sequoias that occur nowhere else on earth.
You protect the things that are unique and special, the crown jewels.
And in both a biological way and as well as an anthropocentric way, this has now become a river with global historic significance because this story is going to play out in the next 18 months.
And that's what makes it so beautiful is that this is one of those crown jewels.
This is one of those special places on earth where it's like a time capsule for nature, for human culture, for biodiversity, for climate services, for everything.
And then, you know, I think people get overwhelmed with where you say, okay, we have to save the environment.
We have to save the ocean.
This is one watershed.
It's 300,000 acres, and we're already at 130,000.
We've shown we can do it.
The lagers are happy to turn into rangers.
People all over the world have become Jungle Keeper supporters.
We have several thousand people that every month give us between $5,000 and $1,000 every single month.
And that keeps the Rangers going.
That employs the local people.
So it's not just making a, you know, drawing a line and making a park and saying everybody stay out.
It's like, no, you have the nomoles, you have the indigenous people.
You have a future for the indigenous people where their kids don't have to worry about eating monkeys.
They can be park rangers.
And I get blowback from people right away where I say like, and people can even come see it through the treehouse.
And people go, oh, are you going to bring tourists into the wildest place on earth?
And it's like, man, look at that jungle.
And it's like that, 300,000 acres of that.
And you're talking about on a football field, we're talking about two blades of grass that we access so people can see it, which makes a huge difference.
And so like the fact that we can share it with people, that people, I mean, the amount of people that listens to, look, like since the first time I came here and spoke to you, the amount to which you've made it possible for us to protect this place, the amount of spider monkeys and jaguars and giant anteaters and those ancient millennium trees that you've made it possible to protect is monstrous.
It's been an honor of a lifetime to be able to watch you.
I tell it to a lot of people, there's certain people I'm glad exist in this world because you've educated me and millions of people about the beauty of the jungle and then how important the fight to save the jungle is.
So if you're listening to this, you absolutely must go please donate or post about it, share it with friends, junglekeepers.org.
You're also doing a gala in New York at the end of January.
So if you can, please go and donate to help save the jungle.
And so I guess also I should say it's not enough to speak and communicate the importance of saving the rainforest.
You actually have to have incredible people that are making it happen.
And we have talked and we'll talk more about the dangers and the complexities involved of how to navigate everything.
And one of the things, and the reason I'm really excited about what you're doing is I just got to meet the team.
And this brings a smile to my face.
Several of the people I know who are extremely competent.
Stefan, somebody we've talked about.
Yes, he likes to take pictures of stuff, but primarily the thing he does incredibly well is run everything, organize everything to make sure that stuff happens and happens quickly and efficiently.
All the kind of things that are required to make stuff like this happen in the complex environment that the jungle operates in, the sometimes lawless environment that the jungle operates in.
So the team is incredible, which is why when you sort of connect the money, how does the money lead to the solution of the problem?
You know, because when I met him, I just like a beautiful, wonderful human being.
I just, I'm, I'm, you know, again, I can, I can use a machete to catch a fish, but like his systems knowledge and his ability, I mean, his bandwidth is the size of a country.
It has its own area code.
It's, um, he's, you know, just like JJ opened the door of the Amazon and gave us that local indigenous perspective.
I mean, yeah, okay, I told some stories about it, but like Stefan came in and went, okay, you guys have good ideas, but you're both jungle guys.
You're not helping each other.
And running those systems and making the website and making it possible to connect the people that care with the Indigenous Ranger program and make sure the Rangers have shirts and cans of tuna and that there's a person running the ranger.
And these are things that I couldn't dream of organizing.
I can't even organize my, I can't even make my bed.
Their primary sources of food, I would say, would be monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, and small game like Paca, the large rodent that's like the size of a beagle, capybara, stuff they can shoot.
They don't really fish.
And we know these things because our indigenous trackers and our rangers find their camps.
And so they'll find some of those little thatched structures they make on the beaches.
And we see the bones.
There'll be taper bones.
There'll be turtle shells, which seems like it's their closest thing to a bowl.
The day that we interacted with them, they did find a bowl.
We saw them walking away with it in one of the farms.
And then days later, we found it destroyed.
So they didn't seem like they saw much utility in the bowl.
I mean, they have to be cooking their meat from a parasite standpoint, from everything.
We know that they're cooking their meat.
That we see it, that they've cooked it.
You know, there's not a lot of excess berries, things like berries and nuts and fruits.
The monkeys and the birds and the bats are getting to those first.
As soon as, I mean, that's what fruit does, right?
A tomato is green until its seeds are mature and then it turns red to advertise eat me so that you eat it and then your gut transports that to somewhere else and it gets free transportation.
In the jungle, that happens so quick that we're never getting produce.
There's no reliable global count of how many people eat monkey meat, but available data suggests many millions of people regularly or occasionally consume primate bush meat, especially in parts of Africa and America and Asia.
Now that some time has passed, when you look back at that encounter, which I really do think is historic with the uncontacted tribe, what do you think about what lingers with you?
You know, it's like the fish that, you know, explaining what water is to a fish.
We're part of it.
We depend on it.
And these are people that depend on it 100%.
And as we sit here surrounded by technology and concrete and civilization, they're still out there right now.
And the fact that we've been trying to protect their home without even really knowing that they were in it because they're so elusive, it gives you perspective on where we came from and how far we've come.
You know, I look at simple things.
You know, you board an airplane or you take a picture and you go, this is a miracle.
And I think having that perspective of having interacted with them where you go, you know, how much work does it take to make this?
If me and you were standing in the jungle and somebody said, you have to make this, how many years before we came up with this?
How many rubber trees and where would we get the metal and what would we use as dye and how do we make the spring mechanism and figure out how to make it rotate?
And it's like they are working with the bare essentials.
And so it's an interesting reference point to start at in terms of how incredibly privileged we are.
You know, the other thing is we have written, we have so many different types of text and we have code and we have language and we have music and we can communicate in all these different ways.
And they have spoken word.
They have oral tradition and that's it.
And so they're operating the way our great, time, you know, to the power of what operated and persisting in modern times.
And so I think for me, I come back to the world and I think it moves very fast when I see it because I'm still stuck on, you know, whether or not me and you can drink out of that puddle.
From the perspective of the uncontacted tribe, I think going from the technological world to the jungle, you realize the majesty, the magic of the biological system that is the jungle, that is nature.
But from their perspective, also there is a majesty and magic to the technological world, the human created technological world of the pen and the computer and the light bulb.
That too is magical.
So sometimes we don't give enough credit to both.
The magic of the technological world, all the incredible things humans have been able to build and the magic of the natural world.
I mean, what we've been able to achieve, I think you and I and people that spend large amounts of time in the wilderness, especially somewhere as remote and fundamental as the Western Amazon, have a different perspective on it.
Because I think that when you're born in it, you don't necessarily have the framework to appreciate how far we've come.
You go, yeah, I got on the train today.
You know, I checked my phone, I FaceTimed my mom, and you're like, this is all normal.
And it's like, we found a way to take things out of the ground and mix them together into magic devices that can do anything.
And you actually write in a book, which I really like, I think somewhere in the beginning, quote, given all the death and destruction I've witnessed, it would be easy to slip into the popular anti-human narrative that we are a plague on the planet and there's nothing that can be done.
But my career in conservation has given me a glimpse into an alternate narrative.
I've met people who are proving more and more that something can be done.
I'm talking about real heroes, people who have dedicated their lives to redeeming the evil that is capable of being waged by the human soul.
People who are guarding the flame amidst the storm, proving every day what so many have forgotten, there is still hope.
And that speaks against sort of the cynicism and maybe apathy and the view that humans are a destructive force in the world.
That speaks to the fact that humans with all the technological elements that we have created can actually do a lot of good.
I wrote in my notes here a quote from the great Jane Goodall, the greatest danger to our future is apathy.
So caring about the world, having an optimism for the world, having a hope for the world is the way to help have an impact, help save it.
But on that, I have to ask you about Jane.
She passed away on October 1st.
Some humans in this human civilization of ours can open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and she is one of the best of them.
I mean, when I grew up, you know, my parents, being dyslexic, I couldn't read for a very long time.
And so my parents read to us every night, which was amazing considering how hard they were working.
But they'd find the time to give us, you know, an hour of reading every night, whether it was Lord of the Rings or Sherlock Holmes or Jane Goodall.
And so I grew up with Jane being this figurehead of conservation and of adventure and sort of a living historical figure, this legendary person.
And so then one time, right around the time that I've been going to the jungle for a few years, I got to go see Jane speak.
I think it was at NYU.
And, you know, sitting in the crowd, watched her completely amazed.
And I had, at the time, my cousins had been telling me that I should write down my stories as stories of taking care of an anteater and stories of catching anacondas.
And they're like, right.
You know, these are such good stories.
And so I've been writing them down.
And I just remember after the talk, you know, she did it, you know, at least an hour on stage.
And then thousands of people lined up, at least hundreds of people lined up.
And she sat there and each of those people wants a moment with this legend.
And so she has to take a picture, shake their hand.
They say, you mean so much to me.
She says, thank you.
And then they move on and they say, we'll send you the picture.
Okay, great.
And so I got my moment and we waited in line for a long time.
And I gave her this manila envelope with two chapters in it.
And one chapter was Lulu the Giant Anteater from Mother of God.
And the other chapter was me, JJ, and Pico out on the river catching anacondas and just talking about how amazing the jungle was.
And I said, I'd love it if you could endorse my book that doesn't exist yet.
And I felt like such a loser doing that.
And I felt so stupid because I feel like everyone was probably asking something of her.
And I, you know, it's incredibly draining to talk to that many people, even if it is for a good reason.
And 48 hours later, she got back and she said, You, you know, this is incredible.
I would love to write a recommendation for your book as soon as you find a publisher.
And what happened with that is that Jane, the way I think of it is, you know, she waved her very powerful magical wand in my direction.
And she had the incredible compassion and presence to actually, I mean, you know, after talking to that many people and being on the road 300 days a year and being Jane Goodall, this living legend scientist, to actually do something so mundane as look at some kids' writing.
And of course, when I went to publishers, they said, Jane, who?
Who said that they would endorse your book?
Because everyone had said no.
Every publisher in New York had already said no.
And then after that, Harper Collins took me on and they said, well, if Jane Goodall thinks it's a good idea, then we think it's a good idea.
And it became Mother of God.
And then because of that, you know, Jungle Keepers, Dax, everything else was stemmed from that.
So had Jane not been the legend that she is truly in every moment, my whole career would never have happened, which also means that those thousands of heartbeats and thousands of acres in the Amazon wouldn't be protected because we never would have started Jungle Keepers.
It definitely would say that Jane's, we could do four hours on just Jane, what she did for humanity, what she did for science, what she did for women, what she did for wildlife, the amount of other people that she inspired and gave careers to, everything she did for me.
But to me, that presence of mind when you reach that level to not be like worried about your own travel and your own schedule and busy with getting some rest and that she actually looked at it has informed how I operate.
And indeed, like you say, at this point, as strange as it is, people will stop me on the street and say, Hey, I watch your videos every night with my kids.
And I, you know, or someone will say, you know, how do I get your job?
I've been watching you for years and I'd love to help conservation.
And so it's made it so that, you know, I follow her example where it's like, you stop what you're doing and you pay attention because you don't know that might be the next kid that's out there saving a river or the next person that makes an innovation that makes it possible to clean rivers or whatever it is, whatever their dream is.
But we're, you know, Jane was in the hope business.
She always said it, you know, that not losing hope was key to staying in the fight and that we live at a time when, you know, that apathy is a poison pedaled by the darkness.
They're trying to make you feel disoriented and apathetic and scared.
And fighting back against that and having conviction and passion and fire and hope are the only way that we're going to fight that.
And she understood that and she spent her whole life spreading it, guarding the flame against the storm and tipping her candle to others to light them.
I think the thing that I try to communicate to them, and again, my inboxes are filled with people.
You know, I'm from Finland, I'm from Spain, I'm from Georgia.
I'm people saying, How do I get your job?
How do I get out there and do it?
And it's it really is just that.
It's that you throw yourself headfirst into adventure and it's you just do it.
And and and I remember hearing people say that thing, like, you know, if I can do it, you can do it.
And it's like, I remember thinking how hollow that sounds because I'm like, yeah, you're on a talk show or you just wrote a book and you're going, you know, these these titans of their industries and innovators saying, like, you know, oh, if I could do it, anybody could do it.
But now that we're protecting all this rainforest and that I've, you know, lived with the animals and met the tribes and that it's becoming this global movement, you know, I didn't have a PhD.
You know, there's that quote that someone less qualified than you is is living your dream life and has your dream job right now.
And I am the poster child for that because I went there with, you know, I failed at a high school and started taking unmatriculated college classes and going to the jungle with my friend JJ and just doing it for the sheer love of it for years, almost a decade before anything surfaced.
And the other thing is there was not even a path.
There was no path ahead of us.
There was no, you know, okay, you go to school, you get trained in this, and you're going to become a this.
I went there and it was like, you're never going to be a conservation biologist because you don't have the grades.
You're not, you don't have a PhD.
You don't have family money.
You're not going to, you're not going to be able to protect rainforest.
I said, all right, well, then selfishly, I just want to see it.
And then I ended up getting trained by the indigenous people.
And like what happens so many times, and you could use, you know, like I think a restaurant example is the best one you could use where you might start washing dishes, but at least you're in the restaurant, you know, and then at some point that the manager is going to need you to help with you know restocking.
And at some point after a few years, you're going to be helping the new guy.
And at some point after a few years, you might end up being the manager.
And at some point, you might end up being in the position where you're starting your own restaurant.
Yeah, I wrote that at a time where we were just getting hammered, man.
Funding wasn't coming in.
There was miners.
It was just months and months out in the jungle alone.
And yeah, it's a Tom York track that we've just been listening to again and again.
And I was just so low.
There was then, you know, there was a huge new invasion where they just burned the whole side of the river.
And just, you know, it's never going to come back.
And it's part of the forest that I loved.
And I knew the animals there.
And it's gone.
And so we have to live through that on a weekly basis, at least a day-to-day basis.
And when you take on responsibility for something like this, you go to sleep thinking, yeah, if we don't do it, then worlds burn.
You know, if we don't save it, then every time you said the sadness that surrounds a happy moment, well, it's like, how am I supposed to go to a party and talk with people about anything?
Or how am I supposed to even go to sleep when if we don't succeed at what we're trying to do, if we don't outrace the chainsaws and the roads, then those trees die, those millennium trees, and we're the only ones out there protecting them.
And when you see that black, scorched earth with nothing left, it's just ashes on the ground and all the cacophony of life is silenced and it's just this horrible, violent silence.
It makes you sick.
And so, yeah, there's a lot of weight that comes with that where we're not theoretically doing something.
No, I mean, when they say they say, how do I get your job?
It's like, well, you don't want my job.
You don't want the bot flies and you don't want the dengue and you don't want, you know, don't even inquire what a normal life looks like.
Like, you know, I lived out of a backpack for 20 years.
You know, how many monkey faces I had to eat because there was no other food.
Like, seriously.
You know, that, just that shot, just being alone on the boat in the river and how many days the motor didn't work.
And you sleep out there and you get rained on because you don't have any protection.
You have some leaves over your face.
And then you go home and everyone's got a job and everyone's got kids and everyone's happy.
And they're like, what are you doing down there?
Trying to save the rainforest.
They're like, sure.
And now we're at this point where, you know, I cared a whole lot for a whole long time.
We've had rises and then we've had falls and we've had winds and then we've had failures.
And the last few years, we've had this rolling success of people finding out about our work and coming in.
And we start to go, wow, we've protected 130,000 acres.
We might actually be able to do this.
And so, you know, there's that moment in 300 where they show Leonidas and they say, even the king allows himself a moment of hope that this might be okay right before they get slaughtered.
And someone very dear to me recently said, you know, in celebration of where we've gotten to, that if it happened in any harder of a way, it would have actually killed you.
And if it had happened in an easier way, it wouldn't have been so divine.
And that slapped me in the face because it was like, man, it has been so hard.
Speaking of which, another complexity in all of this, you write about in the afterword of the book about the narco-traffickers that have moved into the river basin.
They're not the loggers that we've spoken about anymore.
They're growing cocoa for cocaine and they're building airstrips.
They're just people who usually have a kid and a wife and they're looking for work.
And so they work with the chainsaw because that's what they know.
And they work for, you know, $30 a day, if that, in very challenging, harsh environments.
And so when we see clearings, I would always go with the drone and fly it over clearings.
We'd get some intel and then we'd go bring that to the police.
And the police, you know, Jungle Keepers supports the police at this point because the Peruvian government has a hard time with resources trying to manage Amazonia.
And there's, you know, when you're three days from civilization, getting cops out there is not the easiest thing.
So sometimes we'll lend boats or gasoline or logistical support.
And there was a moment in March, several hours upriver from, you know, home base.
And I'm with JJ on the boat and I fly the drone and there's this big new clearing and I flew the drone over and we lower the drone.
And a few times I've had people come out and wave at the drone or say like, get away.
And we're out in the middle of the river, just sort of idling, staying in one place.
And I lower the drone and I see these little huts and we're saying, okay, this is a big clearing.
I'm snapping images, snapping images.
These people are on the boat with us, these visitors who had flown in.
And I have my local team.
And all of a sudden, people come running out of the houses and they run straight to their boats.
And we're already above where their boat is.
So home is in downriver direction.
They get in their boats and start chasing us.
And we start driving.
And we're going at full speed.
We have a 60 horsepower.
They had a 40.
And we're driving up these, we're just doing this chase now.
And our guests who are going to be potential funders, you know, at one point, the father looked at me and he goes, hey, this whole, you know, running from the pirates of the Caribbean thing, he's like, it's getting scary.
You're scaring, you're scaring us.
He was like, can we, can we, like, what are we doing?
He goes, when are you going to put the drone down?
And I'm flying the drone at full speed to keep up with the boat.
And I just crash-landed the drone on the side of the river near a big tree.
I just said, fuck it, we'll get it later.
And I was like, this is fine.
This happens all the time.
They get mad.
They chase us.
It's no big deal.
And I smiled at him.
And JJ's smiling.
He goes, it's so bad.
And he's smiling.
And JJ looked at me and the smile fell off him like a mask.
And he looked at me and he was like, this is not good.
And we kept going upriver.
And luckily, there was a camp of police that we've worked with quite a bit.
And I went to a friend of mine.
And I remember we got off the boat.
I shook his hand.
He said, What's going on?
I said, Look downriver.
And there's a boat tearing upriver towards us.
And he did three things.
He got the rest of the guys, they armed up.
They got on the boat with guns.
They put ski masks on.
They got like ready for combat.
They told us to get down.
He also said, Hey, turn on the sat-link, call for support back home.
We turned our boat around.
And as soon as the narcos, which we didn't even realize that these were narcos chasing us, we thought we were looking at loggers.
When they saw the guns and they saw us face them, they turned their boat around and they went back downriver.
So we got escorted downriver.
And I remember shaking his hand, my friend, and saying, thank you for saving us today and telling the other guys they did a good job.
I said, get back upriver.
We'd been brought home safe.
This is hours later.
I said, good job.
Thank you so much.
And they went back upriver.
And then that night, I'm sitting at the station that you know.
And I get a phone call from Stefan.
And he goes, pick up the phone.
And I go, I'm the camp.
In the middle of a conversation, he goes, pick up the phone.
And my friend, who I had just shook his hand a few hours ago, they went back upriver.
And as they were unloading their boat and washing off in the stream, the Narcos did a drive-by and shotgun straight to the chest, shot him in the chest.
And so all of that enthusiasm and we're protecting the biodiversity.
And this is so great.
There's people from around the world.
It's like that scene in the movie where there's just a montage of success and hope and acres and winning, gunshot.
And I could still feel his hand in my hand.
I just shook his hand.
I said, I said, no, you can't.
You're not.
He's, I said, is he okay?
He said, is he okay?
He said, he took a shotgun straight to the chest.
And they're like, he's dead.
Okay.
And so I had to go out to dinner and not show the guests anything and just smile and laugh and talk to them about, you know, whatever and keep that and keep that in, which felt very, very difficult to do.
And so what happened, as you said, that the threat level escalated and we didn't know it.
The narcos had come in and started realizing that there's so much wilderness here that they can operate and there's no police.
And then when we flew the drone, they got mad.
So we realized this.
We communicated with the police and they said, oh, yeah, these are narcos.
Now we realize this is part of the serious drug mafia.
And then I had gone back with the incident that you're referring to at the end of the book.
I had gone back to New York, again, to speak to donors to try and get this work to continue.
And you know how it works.
We're at the station and then you go to that little logging town and then there's a road.
And so our pickup truck had come in on the road and JJ was supposed to come down, get in the truck and drive back to the city.
JJ was on the river and went, I forgot I was supposed to get more stuff at the city.
He goes, you know, I'll go tomorrow.
He went back up and he sent the boat driver down and told our driver, Percy, who was waiting with the pickup truck.
He said, JJ's not coming today.
Go back and come back tomorrow.
Percy starts driving down the road and he sees a tree across the road.
And this is a single lane road through the jungle.
There's nowhere else you can go.
And men with guns come and stick the pistols in through the open windows, gun against his head.
They pull him out and they go, Where's JJ and the Mierta Gringo Boladron?
They said, Where's the where's that shithead gringo that flew the drone?
And if either of us had been in the car that day, they would have killed us.
And we know that because they took his wallet, they took his phone, our driver Percy.
They thank God they didn't hurt him.
But they sent a message to us.
They said, Let him know.
They said, We missed you this time, but we'll get you next time.
They said, We're going to get you.
And so when JJ called me, he called me and he was howling.
He just had the, you know, that adrenaline and that emotion of that it almost happened.
And so that was that changed everything.
And so since then, we've been, you know, it's not counting butterflies and taking ecological surveys.
It's, it's that there's a drug war being fought on our river.
And now when these roads come in, we can't just go out and meet these people anymore and go talk to them because they are actively looking to shoot us.
They know our names.
And then as if all these other things weren't enough indication, the police intercepted a phone from someone they arrested.
And on the phone, in the WhatsApp chat, it said, if you see JJ or the Gringo, anyone in our network, please kill them.
You'll be rewarded.
So we both have a hit out on us.
And life on the river has changed at the moment.
We don't, we can't, you know, I can't just go out walking around and swimming and driving my boat.
And it's like, you have to be looking over your shoulder at all times.
And, you know, you can get as trained as you want with a pistol and sleep with it under your pillow.
And but the way these people work, they'll catch you when you're least expecting it.
They'll wait till you're at a cafe in town.
They'll wait till your motor doesn't work on the side of the river.
It'll just be a quick one and they'll go.
And so that feeling on top of the weight of protecting the ecosystem and the animals and the race to tell people about it and do all this, it's like now we're actively being hunted when we're there.
You know, every time I go to sleep, my dreams are that I'm being shot.
And it, I just, it just, it just, it, it really threw me.
It really, really affected me.
When JJ called me, the, the, the way he was just, he was just shouting.
I don't even remember what he was saying.
He was just, he's, he was just shouting.
They almost got us.
They almost got us.
He was so, you know, terrified and angry.
And, and, and so, yeah, it's, it's, I, there was a day not that long ago that I was swimming in the river and I was just in the river, you know, right in front of the stairs at the station and a boat came around the bend.
And I remember thinking, do I run?
Do I go underwater?
Do I hide?
Do I, what, what the hell do I do?
I didn't have a gun near me.
I didn't have the security people were up the stairs.
It's like, you go, holy shit.
And it's not the danger of, you know, if I jump on an anaconda, it might kill me.
Or if I climb this, I might fall.
These are people who want to kill you.
And on top of it, you have the, you know, the, when you see your, When you see what your friend looks like after three days of floating in a river, what a body looks like of a person you used to know, that's very viscerally terrifying because there's the tragedy of that that person lost his life who was younger than I was.
You know, he was a kid, he was in his 20s.
And then, yeah, it's just it's very hard.
It's very hard to do anything because you're, I mean, like right now, my hands are sweating.
It just, it affects me.
And even in the daylight, if I can go, you know, it's fine.
This is part of the thing, you know, so this is the adventure.
People deal with this all over the world.
You can talk yourself tough.
And then, and then in those quiet moments, you know, that 4 a.m. thing, you wake up and you go, fuck, you know, why am I sweating?
Why, why did I just have those dreams?
Why is my heart racing?
It's like you just have it sinks its way into your subconscious.
And that, you know, Chico Mendez, Dorothy Stanger, the list of people that environmental defenders that are assassinated in the Amazon every year is huge.
There's endless examples of it.
It's staggering.
I forget the I forget the exact numbers, but it's like every year we lose.
There'll be local leaders who are trying to stop an oil company or a drug cartel and they just shoot them because they know that that one person that's able to rally that support, who has that voice, if you just shoot them, usually it'll end the thing.
And then they can go back to doing whatever the hell they want.
And so right now we're working very closely with the Peruvian government.
And people assume that, you know, a Latin American government is automatically corrupt.
But what we've found is that these are really good people that want to help their citizens.
And the police have been working very hard to stop the narcos to protect the local indigenous people because, you know, with the narcos comes human trafficking.
With a team of male narcos that are out in the woods making drugs, they want prostitutes.
And how do they get prostitutes?
They go steal girls from indigenous communities that don't know any better.
And then there's reports that the narcos have made contact with the uncontacted tribes.
And of course, they're going to shoot machine guns at them.
They're not going to have a little shotgun where it's a fair fight.
They're going to mow them down.
And the uncontacted tribes are going to have no idea.
That's why I posted a video of me in the rain saying this is endgame because there was a new road that was coming off the north of our territory above the ancient forest.
They had jumped over because we stopped it at the ancient forest.
They've gone above the ancient forest.
They're trying to cut down to a new area.
And so it looks like this like that.
Yeah, so there's the Transamazon.
Stefan made this map, of course.
But you see the area that we're trying to protect loosely so that we don't give away anything loosely the area that we are protecting.
So the light green is the 130,000 acres.
And then this metastasizing network of roads just reaching out and trying to get in.
And so they're trying to come in from the north where that arrow is.
They're trying to come down.
And so the police are fighting them along this.
And it's a full-on drug war right now.
And so stopping that, securing this northern boundary.
And so when I mean, again, just the power of what we have.
When I posted this, I asked Stefan to make show people the road and where it's going to go.
We posted this video and said we have to protect this 100,000 acres right now.
And all up here is uncontacted tribe territory.
And just from that one post, we got $150,000 in like 48 hours.
And we bought this concession.
We stopped that road.
But now they're up here and they're trying to come down.
So it's like, and this is the thing, again, you said, you know, it's great.
Yes, you get to be an adventurer and you get to live in the jungle, sure.
But it's like there's this mission impossible thing where it's like, you might get lucky enough to pull off your psychotic mission, you know, jump your motorcycle off the train and parachute down and stop the bomb before it goes off.
These amazing people that are supporting the Rangers allow us to patrol and protect this because once we have this land protected, the interesting thing is that the police can go into any of the light green areas.
If anybody's there, just arrest them.
They're on Jungle Keepers land.
They're out.
And eventually that land will become National Park if we're successful.
The problem with the land that's not is it's a gray area.
It's the middle of the Amazon.
Are they allowed to be here?
Do they really have cocaine?
Because they'll plant papaya for acres and a little bit of cocaine behind it.
You know, they'll put the sacks.
They're sneaky.
And so they have to build a case and it takes time.
And then the road comes in.
And they, you know, and in that time, then they'll knock off a police officer.
And it's like, if we were just able to get this tomorrow, the whole problem gets solved.
We can, we could, we could give the police two more boats, you know, and then they could do all the patrolling they need.
First, what they do is they subsidize the poorest people.
And they say, go up this river, turn left at the tree, and just start there.
And they're like, here's a few grand.
And these people are like, I never had a few grand before.
They're like, buy gasoline.
Here's a chainsaw.
Go clear some land.
They send these people up there.
And then when they show up a year later and these people have made an illegal farm out in the jungle, they go, hey, we need a safe house.
Remember that time we gave you the gasoline and now you live here?
You're going to work for us now.
And so they, they're kind of a friend of the people like that.
And they have safe houses all over the jungle.
And then when the bosses come to collect what they're growing out there, I mean, the police busted an arco operation that was in the middle, in the middle of the jungle.
I mean, you know, hiking to the ancient forest, like just days into the jungle.
These people are going on foot with sacks and stuff.
And the way they do their airstrips is you think the canopy of the rainforest is 150 feet tall, 160 feet tall.
And if you clear the interior of the landing strip, the trees are still meeting overhead.
And so you can't fly over and see down, which is the same reason we didn't know about the road that was going to the ancient forest because overhead the trees are meeting.
So you're not going to see it on satellite.
You're not going to see it from a plane.
And these pilots, these bush pilots, fly in and they'll just duck in under the canopy, land their plane, load up, and then they fly out.
You know, they were going, okay, there are drone programs.
I talked to someone that has a different type of drone, you know, a 16-foot drone that uses the thermals to climb up and has solar panels on the wings and flies for two weeks at a time.
It's like a glider that recharges itself and it'll keep constant imagery.
So we'll get up to the almost up to the moment data on disturbances in the canopy.
And it's like, well, that'll be a first-hand alert system.
But then we got to get the police out there, which, as you know, a two-day expedition by boat, and it's the only way.
And so the local police force there may be dedicated, but putting people on a multi-day expedition to go get shot at in the jungle is nobody's idea of a good time.
And me as somebody who is afraid of heights, and I've got a chance to interact with you a bunch.
You're in some sense fearless.
And I've watched you climb a lot of trees.
You've helped me climb a tree.
And there's this wonderful part of the book where you talk about finding the tallest tree in the forest you knew at the time.
And that was something that you passed and thought was impossible to climb.
And you talk about climbing.
You take us through the experience of that.
And that leads you to seeing the Mist River in the rainforest as the sun rises.
I was wondering if you could talk to the story of that, both for at least for me, but even for you at that time, the terrifying process of climbing a tree like that for the first time with JJ at the bottom cheering you on.
And what it felt like to see the mist river that tree, you've met that tree.
And so when you're looking at these giant buttress roots going up, which I'd been doing for 18 years at that point, and I'd always said, man, if I could just climb it.
And I never had the rope skills, you know, and I developed as a rock climber.
I was working on strength.
And I trained for it.
You know, it wasn't, it's like most things.
It's not, you can't just do it.
You know, I'd gone and climbed up, you know, 30 feet and gone, no way.
You know, the trunk of the tree goes vertical for about 70 feet before branches even come out.
So there's just this one big vine.
And JJ and I did it at, I want to say like four in the morning, like really early.
The howler monkeys had just started.
And you start climbing with the rope up this one vine and you have to, it's not a technical climb, it's a strength climb.
You have to gorilla up this vine and it's all back strength.
And so I did it, no shirt, no shoes, straight up.
And JJ had the belay device.
And so every like 30 feet, I would put in a piece of webbing and a carabiner.
So then you go up another 30 feet and you put a piece of webbing and a carabiner and you don't know what you're going to find.
You have to, you'll have to cling to the tree and your feet are smeared against the bark and you're holding on with your toes if anything.
And if you fall, you know, if I put a if you're climbing up, I mean, it's basically trad climbing.
If you're climbing up and you put a safety, which is, you know, a piece of rope with a carabiner, and you put my rope through that, again, as you're doing that, it's dangerous because if you fall, you fall.
Then I do that and then you climb up right before you put the next one.
You're going to fall double.
So if you climbed 30 feet, you fall 60 feet.
And so your head's going to smack against the side of the tree.
As you're climbing, you don't know if you're going to reach into a wasp nest or if there's going to be a venomous snake.
And so when I got up there, now the howler monkeys are going, oh, and the jungle's starting to vibrate.
And you can hear the first macaw starting to chirp.
And everything's starting to turn on.
And in the east, the sun is coming over the jungle.
And so the sun, the first rays get line of sight to the canopy of the jungle.
It starts lifting the mist off the canopy.
All of that moisture starts coming up.
And I'm sitting on this branch at 100-something feet above the ground with dark jungle below me.
And all of a sudden, I see the river.
I see the mist river I'd always heard about.
They say that there's a river above the Amazon, an invisible river that has more moisture in it.
More water is flowing above the Amazon than it's flowing in the Amazon.
And I'd heard this my whole life.
And you think, okay, the fact that there's a molten core of the earth or that black holes theoretically exist is just like one of those things.
You're never going to see it.
And in this moment on this tree, I was sweating and just ripped apart and bleeding.
I was sitting up there and I saw the mist river and it was flowing over the canopy in the golden rays of the morning and the macaws start taking flight and there was monkeys below me that were looking up and you could tell they were confused.
They were looking at me going, what is that?
And I just had this absolutely incredible moment.
I wanted to, you know, it felt like it felt like you're seeing God.
I wanted to share it with everyone.
You know, I felt guilty afterwards for having had a moment like that, but it felt like I had done this insane risk and, you know, risked falling out of the tree or getting strung up on the ropes.
And of course, it's just me and JJ.
So if something goes wrong, no one's going to help you.
And being out there on that branch felt suicidal because even then, if you fall, it's a giant swing back to the tree.
But the beauty that I saw up there was so intense that it, you know, sucked the it sucked the air right out of my lungs.
It, you know, I had tears in my eyes and I'm just watching this incredible process flow over the earth, this legendary thing that I'd heard about that scientists described, and now I'm seeing it with my own eyes.
And you write, now in the branches of the greatest tree in the jungle, I watched as the mist river caught the morning rays illuminating golden currents, swirling as it rushed over the canopy like a stream from heaven.
In the troughs and basins and lower areas, the river was deep blue.
But then as it flowed up and over the taller trees, slow rapids washing over the canopy, the mist river became ignited, electrified in the gold magnificence of the sunlight.
Scores of birds flew up in and out of the churning currents.
The life and breath of the Amazon was flowing from north to south along the basins of the Las Piedras over the jungle.
My God, my God.
I thought of everyone I loved, of every creature contained in the leafy distance.
The jungle itself was like a great being, a monstrous leviathan of warm green might.
What have you learned about relationship and successful marriage from listening to Macaws scream at each other in nuanced different ways that you're talking about?
It's interesting to see two animals sticking by each other's side, and they're both raising a chick.
And at the bottom of the stairs at the station, there is a macaw nest in an ironwood.
And the relationship that you mentioned is that in the jungle, there's a limited amount of macaw real estate.
And those are all ancient ironwood trees, at least 500 years or more.
So they have to be, you know, thick, again, car thickness or bigger.
And when a branch falls off, it creates a hollow, and the macaws use that to reproduce.
And because there's only so many nest sites in the forest, only about 17%, 17 to 20% of the Macaw population reproduces in a given year.
So they have a slow replacement rate.
And macaws are one of the things that people come to the jungle to see.
And so, along with gold mining and logging and all these extractive things, in our region, ecotourism has been great.
It's given the local people jobs as guides and cooks and chefs and carpenters.
And so macaws are a huge part of that because it's one of the last places where you can see these flying rainbows over the canopy, you know, or when you're on a branch from one of these trees and the macaws fly under you.
And again, they'll fly by.
You just hear the you hear the wind in their feathers.
And they just look at you over their shoulder and go, what?
And just keep going.
Just loud.
And they'll just keep going.
And then they'll join up with other macaws and they fly across the horizon.
And so the power on that, when we tried to lift her to measure her, we wanted to bring her up out of the stream and get her over to the side so we can straighten her out and measure her.
And again, we're just trying to take some simple data points and then release her.
And she, at one point, she just decided to flex her body and you just see 10 people fly this way.
And then she flexed in the other way and 10 people fly this way.
And every time that mouth would open, she would just open the mouth and try to, she just reach back and she'd just be like, just let me do it.
And you know that if she gets purchased, once they get purchased, they just wrap you so quick and they'll just crush the life out of you like you're a bag of chips.
And if you ever seen a mouse in a mousetrap when the mousetrap goes down and the eyes come out, and when snakes, anybody that's owned snakes and fed them mice knows this.
Sometimes if they catch it right, the guts will either come out the back end or the front end.
So I'd imagine that the same thing will happen with a snake, you know, that's that big, that's bigger than bigger than I am around.
In the case of elephants, if we ever end up in Africa together, I can get incredibly close to elephants because I've spent enough time with them where so far, every time I've been able, you know, it's always been a mock charge.
And you can be one with the elephant and learn their language enough that you respect their boundaries.
And you also show them that they're not, like, this better be serious.
Because you're either going to have to kill me or you're going to have to just turn around and go back to eating.
And you can have that exchange with them.
And with smaller snakes, I'll be careful and whatever else.
I can tell you with this, that when you have both your hands around an anaconda's neck, I truly, I mean, I've been known to surprise myself with the decisions I make, but this alone would lead to death 100%.
It's like laying down in front of an 18-wheeler with it in neutral.
It's like it's going to roll over you.
This is going to turn into anaconda handcuffs with this thickness.
And then that is going to wrap you with this thickness.
And then six more of those are going to go around your body.
And you will get squeezed and you will turn into goop.
And she will not, and like, just like that guy said, she probably is in defense mode and not food mode.
So she'll probably just neutralize the threat and then go back to sleep.
And you write about Santiago once again, beautifully in the book, of the time when he told you the stories and when your mind and eyes were still fresh and maybe skeptical and more leaning towards the western world point of view versus the jungle point of view.
Santiago's eyes were glowing in the darkness.
He watched the orange embers spark upward to join the celestial river of stars that arched across the night sky as if the memories were written there.
He squinted, his face as wrinkled and weathered as an old map of the world.
Vast experience whispered in the firelight, as ephemeral as the breath that spoke the words, but powerful enough to latch on and sink down into some deep part of me.
This is Pico saying, Papa, tell me about the anaconda on the Blackwater stream.
And he tells a story of that.
He talks about it big and having horns.
And you write once again, masterfully about you at that time having doubts.
It sounds like bullshit.
But now more and more of the things you've seen of the jungle and the things you sense you have not seen yet.
All of those stories seem to be true.
The one he was referring to, maybe 36 feet long, this big, he shows it.
He says that the floating forest is the place you need to go, Gringo, if you want to be liberated of your doubts and skepticism.
So tell me about the anacondas you've encountered in the floating forest.
And in that moment, we were all hanging out by the side of the river, and I said, that's enough.
I stood up.
I was like, come on.
I was like, there's no anaconda that has horns.
And if I've learned anything in 20 years of living with the indigenous people in the Amazon, it's that they're not wrong.
You know, if they say there's a tribe of naked people with arrows out there, they're right.
They're right.
And they know what an anaconda looks like.
So if he says he saw an anaconda with horns, he saw something that ain't a normal anaconda.
And a smaller version of this played out recently where one of the people that works at the treehouse, he came and he said, I found a snake and it was in the water tank.
And he goes, and it had green spikes on it.
I said, there's no snake that has green spikes.
I said, congratulations, you're an idiot.
You know, and I made fun of him.
And I said, I know all the snake species that are here.
I said, none of them have spikes.
There's no snake that has spikes coming off of it.
And he said, no, it had long spikes.
He said, the snake is this big and it had spikes this long on it.
And I said, there's no snake with spikes.
Until finally he came and he got me in the night.
And he goes, the snake with spikes is there.
And I said, well, I'll get out of bed for that.
Let's go.
And I said, I guarantee it's not going to be there when we get there.
And we got to the water tank and I shined my flashlight down.
And sure as shit, there's a snake in there.
And it's got thousands of green spikes coming off of it.
And I could see the snake head.
And then all, and the spikes are coming completely perpendicular out from its body.
And for a second, I really was having this out-of-body experience.
And then the snake saw us, got scared, and swam and all of the spikes collapsed onto its body and became smoothed.
And then I realized snake had been living in the stagnant water for a while and developed algae that was growing off of it.
And so when it was sitting still, all the algae would settle out.
And so if you look straight down on it, it's a water snake that has algae growing on it.
And so it does look like a snake with spikes.
He's not wrong.
It was.
It was a water snake.
It was some sort of helicopse.
But there's always an answer like that where they're not wrong.
So when they tell you something like there's an anaconda with horns and multiple people have seen it, you make an expedition there.
Like if somebody said there's giant ground sloths in this one valley, I wouldn't be like, they're extinct.
I'd be like, where?
You know, you start to listen.
I mean, after the tribe walked out of the forest, you could tell me, I mean, that day, if a Tyrannosaurus rex walked out behind them, I would have been like, makes sense.
Do you ever think about what creatures are in there?
I just had a conversation with Michael Levin at Tufts University.
He's his biologist who creates biological life forms in the lab, but it also studies all kinds of weird, what he calls unconventional intelligences on earth.
And he speaks about that from a perspective of just understanding the incredible intricacies and weirdnesses of biological systems.
So, you know, the soup of organisms that's there in the floating forest is probably incredible.
You ever think about like what kind of weirdness is there?
I mean, if she, I mean, the bite, they swallow, right?
So like once you collapse your shoulders, it's like, you know, if you killed a perfectly good hamburger and it was like in your hands dead, you'd be like, you know, maybe that's, maybe I'll try it.
Speaking of somebody that does have camaraderie, there's this incredible video on your Instagram that people should go watch where the spider monkey was drowning and you jumped in to rescue.
I'm sitting on the boat and I'm wearing my warm, you know, I'm wearing whatever.
I'm sitting on the boat and JJ's like, look, spider monkey.
And I go, great, spider monkey in the river.
Like, that's normal.
And JJ's like, no, she's having trouble.
And I was like, I was like, why is she having trouble?
They swim all the time.
And he goes, no, he goes, you should help.
And so the boat, the boat comes around.
Then, sure enough, what you can't see in the video is that the river was so full that there's these little whirlpools and currents.
And she was trying to get to the side.
And again, all the animal righteous people are very quick to be like, let nature take its course.
You know, let the monkey drown.
Or she doesn't need help.
You're interfering.
Sure, sure, sure.
If you were actually there, you would know something.
And that is that she did need help.
And she was drowning.
Her head kept going under.
And so I saw that JJ was right.
And so we pull around.
I took off whatever I could in the moment, jumped in with the pad with the paddle.
Because now, here again, I trust monkeys, but I don't want her to bite me.
She is going to be scared.
So I thought, instead of there's two ways I can do this, I can grab her by the neck, right?
And like animal control her, grab her by the neck and the tail and take her out of the river, which is going to be scary for her.
And instead, I thought, I know spider monkeys so well.
I've raised so many of them.
And when you raise them, they curl up to your neck.
And they'll like if you have an orphan spider monkey whose mother got shot by poachers and you're taking care of her before we bring them to the animal rehabilitation experts, they'll curl up on your neck and they go, and they'll just, they're just, they'll just talk to you in your ear.
And so I feel like I've, I know a little bit of spider monkey, a broken spider monkey.
And so I pull up next to her and I give her the paddle.
We're in this rushing river and we're moving at 10 miles an hour downstream.
And I tried to give her the paddle and she smacks it away.
She looked right at me, but then she went, she went, no.
She was like, whatever you are, no.
And she went to go back in there.
She was like, I'd rather die in the river.
She was like, I'm so scared and I'm drowning.
And she looked at me.
She got scared.
And she jumped back in.
And then I lifted her up and I went, and I started talking in Spider Monkey.
And she just, there's then like the next moment you see it, she just goes, Sure.
And she just, she wraps her tail.
You see, her tail is around the edge of the paddle.
And she puts her hand around it.
And then I lifted her.
And because I'm taller than she is, I lifted her out of the river.
And so now instead of manhandling her, like, you know, like a raccoon you're catching by the neck, she's holding on in her spider monkey way to the paddle.
And she looks back over her shoulder.
She looks at me.
And I'm sitting there.
I'm over there talking to her in spider monkey.
And she looks at me and you hear her.
She goes, I can't do the sound she makes, but she does this, this whoa, she makes this spider monkey sound like.
And she goes, fine.
And then she, she, she's looking off the front end of the paddle as she's looking at the jungle.
And she looks back at me and she's like, you could just tell.
She's like, I have no idea what's happening.
But she accepted the help.
And the difference is, is that it's because I spoke her language in this case.
And I know that that would sound that would be one of those stories that people would nail me on every time if it wasn't on camera.
You can see the moment that she makes direct eye contact with me and goes, okay.
And then as soon as we get to shore, she jumps off and runs off into the forest.
It's so, I mean, to me, just watching the video is so amazing because she's looking at you like the real, yeah, you can, you can see that there's an actual connection.
That there's like communication like a social, you know, the way humans, when you when you're maybe saving a human being that's drowning or something like this, there's that, that, that connection is beautiful to see, man.
And then I read a little bit that the spider monkeys have uh they're very intelligent, but they're especially socially intelligent.
So they have they have social connections with each other.
So they they understand what that means.
They understand what another entity means.
So, you speaking it in a broken language probably is really important and a powerful way to indicate that, wow, you're in network, like a foreigner, but like, yeah, in like it's like you're in a foreign country and someone goes, helping, helping, like, helping.
Like, you know, you're not, you're not robbing me.
You're helping, right?
But no, they're incredibly, and I'm telling you, I've had orphan spider monkeys so many times, and they wrap their tail around your neck and they hug you.
And you realize that that connection that they have with their mothers when they hold on to them in the canopy, you shoot the lagger shoot the mother, and then I'm taking care of this baby.
They hold on to you, and it's they need that love and that connection more than they need food.
They, if you put food or you put warmth of a body, they'll choose the connection over the sustenance.
You know, it's, it's, to me, it's when other animals show, you know, the times that I've been on a trail and a jaguar has walked by and just been like, what's up?
Keep walking.
And it's like, it's kind of cool of you not to eat me.
Yeah, I thought somebody's walking on the trail behind me and I was doing a camera trap and I put my finger up and I was going to go, could you walk any louder?
And I had my finger up and I'm crouched because I was doing a camera trap.
Jag walked by and he literally was just like, just kicking leaves, just like having fun, mouth open with a, and he just walked by and he looked at me and just went, so never broke stride, but like dead ass eye contact with the bottom teeth out and that jaguar look of just like, hey, I was like, okay.
Now I'm going to have a like full meltdown.
You just start sweating.
You're like, whoa, because they're also so beautiful.
When you actually see a jaguar and it's like bright yellow and the teeth and the all the muscles and it's, you know.
I also smell like an animal when I'm in the jungle, right?
I'm not, I shower in the river.
I don't use deodorant or shampoo or any of that stuff.
So I don't smell, you know, you can just imagine to animals that have a smell that's like four times as good as ours.
That, you know, just your deodorant, just your conditioner, just whatever other products, the detergent on your clothes smell, that we smell like Times Square.
We smell like a fire alarm to them.
You know, they're like, what is this thing?
It smells very foreign.
It's scary.
Everything's scary.
Speaking of scary, the Jaguar was kind of friendly.
He was like, sub.
It's almost like he'd seen me before on the trails.
So he was like, oh, it's just you.
The one time I stood on the forest floor in India with a wild tiger and nobody else was there, the thing that the tiger did that was so unnerving.
And again, a tiger's back is, you know, they're so much bigger than you think.
It's like four jaguars.
They're so big.
She wouldn't look at me.
And it was terrifying because now I'm going to do this to you.
She'd look over there.
Then she'd look like this.
She'd look like that.
Never eye contact.
But it was like, you're as important to me as a stick.
And, you know, when you see two fighters square up and it's all about the eye contact and everything, trust me, you look through a person.
You pretend they're not even there.
That tiger insulted me on such a profound and disarming level that I never forgot it.
It was just like you, you matter as much as a sparrow.
There's just, you're just not one of the things that I care about.
She just was looking around and carried on doing it.
And she was like, I'm going to walk this way.
And I was just like, holy shit, I'm going to run.
You know, it was just profound insignificance from this god of an animal with paws the size of dinner plates.
And it was like, man, if she does, I don't want her to look at me because if she looks at me, I'm going to probably know the end.
So the problem happens when you don't know what you're doing.
So I'll give you an example.
You want a dangerous animal story?
I'll give you one.
I was walking one time and I was trying to be responsible.
It always happens when I'm trying to be responsible.
I get into trouble.
Trying to be safe and you fall down.
I'm trying to be safe and I'm on the side of the stream and there's elephants on the other side of the India.
There's a deep, like a 12-foot thing and then a stream.
And then on the other side is elephants.
And I'm walking and I'm like, I'm going to sit in a tree and I'm going to enjoy these elephants.
I'm going to make notes in my book, like Jane Goodall.
And then I came up against a cement wall and it was the back of a male elephant.
And in India, it's a male elephant that's been harassed and had fire thrown at it and God knows what else.
And he, if I translate what he said, he turned around and he just went, what the fuck?
Like, he just looked at me like, how dare you?
And then just went, just smacks apart the tree, turns around, and then that elephant was trying to kill me.
That was not a mock charge.
I threw off my backpack, zigzagged through the woods.
He broke apart trees.
If I had a GoPro on my back to show you what I saw of just the shrapnel and devastation of this thing just bashing through trees.
And again, every bush that I encounter is a possible trip.
Every vine is a possible hang-up.
And then if they get to you, he'll step on you and crush you.
And so I like threw myself off the edge of this cliff, rolled down into the stream, and the elephant got to the edge of the cliff and almost fell on me, got to the edge of the cliff, and did one of these and then came back down on his hind feet, picked up a stick, threw it at me.
And the stick just smacked down next to me in the stream.
And I remember I gave him the finger because he's like, I'm alive.
I was so excited when I put on your podcast with the dinosaur guy because he was like, when a baby is born, he was like, it learns, you know, elephant, giraffe, T-Rex.
And I was like, holy shit, you know, along with like banana, water, sky is blue.
And somehow you're like, and these are initial things in your first few months on Earth.
These are the characters you're introduced to.
Like, how the hell did T-Rex get there?
They don't even exist anymore.
And it's like, yeah.
It was so, it was just such a fun.
And I could hear your, I could hear you smiling through the mic as I'm listening to it.
And I was like, oh, this is going to be a good one.
I mean, the dinosaur world is incredible, but like the fact that you have such a predator evolve with such a gigantic jaw, so much destructive power is weird.
I think I would love to show you a herd of truly wild elephants in the African jungle.
I think that us going on, I think going on a boat trip through the Amazon, not a hiking one, where we're going through some really those areas where you can get permits to go through areas where no one's allowed to go.
They're completely protected areas.
And you can just go for a week through areas where the animals have no idea what a human is.
It helps me keep track of, it's fun to see your hopes and dreams.
It's fun to record the mundane moments that we all forget about.
And that might be like cooking in the kitchen with your mother.
That might be a fun walk you had with your dog, like little things that you just, you think you're going to remember everything.
You just don't.
And so I have piles of notebooks.
I have just piles of piles and piles of notebooks in my in my room.
And when something happens, I write it down.
And if a cool story happens, I will write down, or if I find a leaf from an extinct tree, I will make an etching of it.
But I just, as anything that happens that I find remarkable in any way, either from my own personal memory or for writing, I'll write it down.
And then when I go back to it later, A, I have a very good memory.
And then B, the facts are there.
And so when something happens, like you rescue a spider monkey or you, you know, something happens that's remarkable in life, you get to spend time with someone that you haven't in a long time.
And you get that feeling of like, oh, that's why I'm such good friends with them.
Like, you know, you write these things down and then it's always there.
And so I feel like whenever I don't journal, that I'm missing out on keeping my life and my memories.
So yeah, I don't, I don't do that.
That Stephen King quote about like, you know, amateurs wait for inspiration and the professionals, we go to work every day.
And he's like 10 pages a day, whatever it is.
I don't do that.
I write when I feel like it.
And I like to, you know, I'll start thinking of like, oh, this is a perfect way to, you know, start this scene because like the moment this happened, I felt so intensely.
And if we bring people in and I'll just be in a car or a boat or something and I'll start thinking about it and I'll go, this is just the thing is you got a carpe Diem.
And I'll go, okay.
And then I'll go, okay, where did that happen again?
I'll go, okay, I'll go to that page and I'll go, okay, so what exactly that happened?
Then you get the laptop.
So it's brain to paper to laptop, always paper in between.
When you're finishing a book and that, I'll never do that again.
So what I'm doing now is this last book, there's so much that it covered.
And I was in the jungle and it'd be like hiking for 10 hours a day, you know, dealing with narco-traffickers, all this stuff.
And then I'd have to edit at night.
And it was like, this is no way to live.
So now what I'm doing is I'm writing chapters as I feel like.
Writing chapters.
When something amazing happens or something remarkable, I go, this is going to be its own chapter.
I write it, edit it and then I send it to my sister, who's an expert editor and and and has lived more in literature than most people live in real life, and she'll let me know if it's good or bad or needs to be tweaked or moved along.
Whatever it else I get, when I get it back from her, it's marked up and then what i'm going to do is i'm just going to put those aside and then the next time I want to write a book, it's not starting from scratch on 300 000 words, it's just.
Well, there's Mother Of God and now there's Jungle Keeper, and then i'm already working on Endgame, because this, I mean, there's so much that has happened.
I mean I think I told you when you were there, but like there's a whole chap right before you came, me and Jj went to the back end behind our river, to this horrible part of the Amazon that's 10 times more lawless than where we are, and instead of having no people, there are people, and you want to talk about Amazonian no country for old men.
It's the oil companies and the missionaries and the newly contacted tribe.
There's something called the.
There's a people called the Nah people and they they're recently contacted and they've been ripped out of the forest and they're standing there with their little bows and arrows.
They're tiny people.
They're standing there at the the, the Nomoles are tall, the Nawa are small and we just we saw brutality and this horrific, horrible.
It's like it's like Sacario, it's like just absolute lawlessness.
I remember the moment Jj looked at me and he said, you know, and we're both, we both think of ourselves as tough, I think, until we get in these certain situations.
And he looked at me and he went, we're not safe.
And we looked at the people around us and you were at this like side of the river port, eight days up this river, and you could tell that everyone that was looking at us was making a calculation about how inconvenient it would be to kill us at this moment and how much money.
They're like camera watch clothing backpack, and they're like that's a nice backpack and like, but you could tell they were just shopping and and Jj and me were like we're gonna.
You know, where are we put in the tent tonight?
I was like we're not staying here.
And then I was like well, we should, maybe we should stay here.
I was like I don't know what to do.
And then, and then one of the little, one of the little Nah, people came over to Jj and was asking for food and he made the mistake of explaining money to them.
They'd never had money before.
So he gave them a piece of money and it was like uh, you know a couple coins.
And he was like oh, if you just go over there, there's like a man that'll sell you something and then you can eat it.
And the guy was like bow and arrow and Jay's like no no no no, give him this and he'll give you food.
And it worked.
And then Jj got sworn by like 60 of these little tribals came in and they all bows and arrows, hands out, and JJ was running with all these like half-naked people behind and just that.
That whole saga.
Right, there is like I was.
That chapter is going to be called River Of The Dolphin fuckers, because everyone we met on the river kept telling us I'd say I'd have my, I'd have my camera with me and I'd go, are there dolphins here?
And they'd go yeah, there's dolphins, and if you fuck one, be careful because they'll pull you under.
I went okay weirdo, to the first guy yeah, and then we got to like, you know, eight hours further, upriver met the next guy and I had my camera out and I'm like hey, are there any dolphins here?
And he goes yeah, he goes, if you fuck any, be careful.
He's like, because they'll grab on and pull you under.
And I was like what?
And then like, four more people told me the same things.
So apparently, on that river they, they were all trying to be good samaritans and warn me about the clear and present dangers involved with amorous dolphin encounters.
I do it depends because because sometimes I want to sink in and flex a little bit, which I don't think people really enjoy, but I enjoy it.
You know like, talk about the, you know, just use all those flowery words and and make these beautiful metaphors um, but what i'm finding more and more is that uh, it's modern readers aren't really looking for that, they want easy read and that, for my style of storytelling people really enjoy and tend to thank me for more of an Anthony Bourdain style where you're like, so we found ourselves on the side of this river and we knew we were in danger, the reason we were in danger,
and you just start telling the story and you know what forget, the forget that maybe once every two pages you can throw in one of those beautiful little zingers.
But also, sometimes you go even more than I don't think Anthony Bourdain did, like Hemingway, like minimal, like you know, like word period word, like that.
That's another way to flex that I really like.
That you do sometimes is just like less and just power and the, the spacing, the silences, the unsaid is what does the driving?
You read like for whom the bell tolls, and you know, the air was crisp and the water was sweet and the, the wine was good and the afternoon was warm.
And you're like I know what that's like, and these are not complicated sentences, but when he puts them together into a paragraph you go, oh yeah, I want to drink wine out of leather, you know, and lay by the side of that stream.
It sounds so beautiful.
And so sometimes you know, I mean, just look at that, look at that fire cracking on this on the horizon there, and it's like sometimes the only way is just these simple statements.
There's a bit of a scary And a sad aspect to the fact that they can generate language extremely well, but something is missing, and it's very hard to put your finger on it.
My question to you is, I can pick out with stunning accuracy when someone sends me a message and they've passed it through Chat GPT.
I know somehow I could tell, and I don't know how I could tell, but I could tell.
I don't know if that'll, so that's one of those things like the images, like we're at the point where we can't tell anymore almost.
I don't know if that's going to go away or if, like you said, there's something like one of the things that F. Scott Fitzgerald does so much is he describes the moment of, you know, like he describes these incredibly human moments with such crystalline accuracy that you go, it must have taken you a month.
You must have studied life so much to be able to put those, string those words together.
I think in a book he writes about someone screaming with such abandonment that at the highest register, her voice like wobbled and cracked.
And you're like, oh my God, I know what that sounds like.
And I wonder if, because you can say, like, you know, write me the jungle book, but make it sound like Cormac McCarthy wrote it.
And it's like, it'll be like, the jungle was dark and stern and the boy was, you know, it's like, it'll do it.
And it's amazing.
My question to you is, at least right now, what are we picking up on on something as simple as a text message?
You reassured me recently because I called you and I said, you know, I said, I said, I come out of the jungle and all anybody wants to talk about is AI.
And I was like, everyone's like, it's like people are walking themselves into the matrix and asking to be hooked.
It's like everyone's just obsessed with this topic.
And you were like, man, human art and human literature is going to actually become so valuable as this other thing happens.
And like, I expected the opposite answer.
I thought you were going to be like, yeah, man, this really is.
We're taking off and everything's going to change.
And you were like, man, like real artists are going to become more appreciated.
That was another one of the Jane's amazing quotes that I don't, I couldn't reproduce, but it's, you know, just that you, you don't realize the degree to which the things you do each day matter, even if it's just to the people around you.
And it's like you are to the people around you their entire life experience.
If they're your kids, your parents, your partner.
So yeah, the things you do.
And if you can manage to put that extra energy, where it's to the point where you do put a little magic on it, where it is fun, you show a poem with something that you got, you know, play with the kids in a way that surprises them.
I had a friend, a good friend of mine, this guy, Vinny, he told me, I called him.
I said, what are you doing?
He said, I'm, he said, oh, I have, I have a whole plan set up.
He goes, it's supposed to be really good stars tonight.
He goes, I'm putting my kids to bed.
He goes, I'm putting my daughter to bed.
He goes, I'm going to wake her up in the middle of the night.
He goes, and I'm going to take her up to the roof to go stargazing.
He's like, but I want her to sleep.
And he's like, you know, remember when you were a kid and you like wake up and it's like, he was curating a magical experience for her to see the stars and like, you know, like making, making warm tea and like all.
And it's like, man, you can just, you can make it so great.
Well, that's sort of the, you know, the way it happened in my life was the one time I quit conservation was right around the time COVID hit and I was going through a divorce.
And I'm like 32 years old and I had no job, no nothing.
JJ was, JJ's mom had COVID.
Don Ignacio, the shaman, had COVID.
Pico's leg was coming off.
It was like nothing was working.
Nobody could go anywhere.
And I called Mosen and I was like, I was like, I quit.
I was like, we're never going to go back to the jungle.
The loggers just went out and we're tearing down everything.
I just, I just said, there's nothing.
I got nothing.
And I, in like this, in absolute black depression, I called him and I said, I quit.
I'm going to go get a job.
I said, I guess I'm just, you know, I guess I've been like jungle Peter Pan and it's time to grow up.
And I was like really embarrassed at the time that I did that.
And then I spent like four days just laying in bed, just with no idea what to do.
The only thing I can do is this.
And I had talked to Dax months earlier, told him my plan for protecting the river, for making a ranger team.
And he'd been looking over the budgets and spreadsheets and everything and saying, seeing if this was real.
He was still forming Age of Union.
And then four days after I quit, the phone rings and it's Dax and he goes, Hey, I looked over the budget, by the way.
He goes, I'd like to make a 10-year commitment to Jungle Keepers.
He goes, let's go.
And of course, he had no idea what I was going through.
And he was just like, let's go.
And it's like, going from that depressed to that inspired and that single conversation, like you could get the bens from that.
You know, in the movie when they're like, they got the gun against their head and they're on the ground and you go, they're not getting out of this one.
And then like someone bursts through the door and saves them.
And it's like, that just happened too many times to me.
And it sounds like bad writing, but it's, it's, it's really good life.
Since you mentioned Stefan one more time, one of the things I forgot to mention, one of my happiest moments in life, and I had many of them in the jungle with you is just talking late at night after ayahuasca, funny enough, chatting with Stefan and Dan and you and giggling and just talking about life and everything.
And Dan is the guy I have to give a shout out to.
You should go follow him on Instagram, LifeWithDan.
He's an incredible wildlife photographer.
I've seen him.
He's worked quite a lot with you.
He has a love of nature, a love of the wilderness, a love of beauty, and is extremely good at taking pictures, but just goes to the edges with you.
He's the only guy I've seen with the two giant cameras to be able to follow you into the darkness.
Well, Dan, first of all, that picture I showed you where I'm in the tree, because I told you this story about with JJ where I climbed the giant tree.
Well, this is years later.
I climbed it with Dan.
Dan was there, and so he flew the drone up and so got me in the tree.
But what Dan's a really good example of is, like you were saying, what would you say to the kids?
It's like, Dan listened to our talk, our first podcast, was living in Singapore, and he's like a young filmmaker, signed himself, again, just get out there.
He signed himself up to come on a Tamindu expeditions with my company, and he showed up on a thing.
And sure enough, their boat broke down.
And I was off doing Jungle Keeper stuff.
And someone was like, yo, their boat broke down.
So we show up and I haul their boat and he comes up to me.
He goes, he goes, I'm such a big fan.
He goes, I just wanted to say hi.
I said, oh, I said, well, great.
I said, hello.
I said, well, let's get you back on the river.
And then, you know, someone came up to me and they said, you know, he's a really good photographer.
And then someone I trust was like, hey, listen, look at his stuff.
It's not normal.
And then I watched a few of his videos and I went, holy shit.
And I went, would you ever think of coming down for a few weeks to film?
And at the time, he was like, no way.
He was like, no way.
And like, he was like so amazing.
And then like, now we're bros.
And we filmed together all the time.
But he put himself in the position where he has the skill, the insane skill.
I mean, some of his things where he's tracking shots of a white-winged sparrow over the water where he's in the boat with an 800 millimeter lens, getting these insane shots.
I mean, he's just absolutely, I've never seen a talent like him with a, with video.
No, I mean, like, even I'm looking on this page that shot of the emerald tree boa there.
He got up before dawn to wait for the sideways light because he wanted to, he had a vision of lighting the snake from the side and then the macaws coming off the clay, like how many days at the clay like till he got the explosion of macaws.
You attract a lot of incredible people because you're because the mission is clear and there's just like there's the vibrancy and energy to the whole thing.
It's exciting.
That's why.
That's why it's the best people come to work with you, come to hang out with you.
But, you know, and that's what, so, you know, and I'm, I'm writing this story as it happens.
And, and, you know, Endgame might be written by somebody else.
Um, or we just got really close and then it all fell apart.
But, but we're 130,000 acres of the way.
If we make it to 300,000, I think I'm calling it now.
I think what's going to happen is enough people are going to learn about this.
It's going to tidal wave.
We're going to make an amazing documentary about how we protected the wildest place on earth.
And then I would love to have a few kids get a PhD, teach, teach other conservationists around the world how to do this to save really wild places, keep inspiring people, keep writing books, keep going on expeditions.
I don't have any problems with that.
I can tell you, I can't, I can't do this much longer because the pressure of wondering if it's going to be okay, I've used all of it that I can.
My Lord of the Rings analogy of like carrying the ring, it's like you can only do that for so long.
And so I'm actually very excited to, I need to know that it's safe.
I want to know that, I mean, those, I mean, that monkey that I rescued out of the river now, you know, the toucan Lucas that who comes back to visit us, Lulu's grant, we just saw a giant anteater not that long ago with Dax in the jungle.
And like, like, I know these animals and I'm responsible for protecting their home.
And it would be so amazing to bring people to the tree house and show them this amazing place and put out documentaries.
So I have no problem imagining a transition period.
I would like to not be, I'd like to transition out of Blood Diamond and go to more of the, you know, the sort of the professor role after this.
I have to say thank you to you because our first conversation changed everything.
It really did.
In this story, it brought so many more people onto the mission.
And I think also lifted me up because as we often acknowledge, this can weigh you down.
And I often do get weighed down and I lose hope myself.
And then I get lifted up by moments like that where someone I'm a huge fan of and who I respect so much reaches out and goes, do you want to come to Austin and do this podcast I do?
And I respond to Lex fucking Friedman podcast.
But, you know, you've really, really changed the narrative and allowed this to be a reality.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
And once more, let me say thank you for everything.