Transcript for #429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God

Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere.

We are in Peru in a very remote part of the Western Amazon basin and because of the proximity of the ND and cloud forest, the low land tropical rainforests, we are in the most biodiversity of Earth. There's more life. per square acre per square mile out here than there is anywhere else on earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record. I can't believe we're actually here.

The thing is, the Amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battlefield on earth because there's more life here than anywhere else, which means that everything here is fighting for survival. The trees are fighting for sunlight. The animals are fighting for prey. Everybody's fighting for survival. So everything that you see here, everything around us will be killed, eaten, digested, recycled at some point. Jungle is really just a giant, churning machine of death, and life is kind of this moment of stasis where you maintain this collection of cells in a particular DNA sequence, and then it gets digested again, and recycled back, and renamed into everything. And so the things in this forest while they don't want to hurt us, there are things that are heavily defended, because for instance, a giant antider needs claws to fight off a Jaguar. A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a serrated knife with venom on it to deter anything that would hunt that stingray, even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor long, staked knife-sized defense systems. Then you of course, the Jaguar is the heartbeagle, the piranha, the candieru fish that can swim up, penis, lugs themselves inside. It's the Amazon rainforest. The thing is, as you've learned this week, nothing here wants to get us with the except for an exception of maybe mosquitoes. Every other animal just wants to eat and exist in peace.

Some incredible defense mechanism. You're talking about 17-foot black came in crocodiles that with significant size that could rip you in half. Anacondas, the largest snake on earth, bushmasters that can grow up to be nine to I think even 11 feet long and I've caught bushmasters that are thicker than my arms.

So Laura, I believe it's the largest viper on earth. Venomus, extremely venomous with hinged teeth, tissue destroying venom, Like if you get bitten by a bushmaster they say you don't you don't rush and try and save your own life you try to save or what's around you look at look around at the world smokey last cigarette call your mom.

Grab it because it's like, even this seemingly beautiful little fern. If you go this way on the fern, you're fine. As soon as you go this way, there's invisible little spikes on there. If you want to. Oh, yeah, I feel that. So like everything is defended. If you're driving on the road and you have your arm out the side or if you're on a motorcycle going through the jungle and you get one of these, it'll just tear all the skin right off your body. It's kind of doing that to me now.

Face to face, this has happened. I have been this nice. I have come face to face with the bushmaster and this two things, the two reactions that you might get. One is if the bushmaster decides that it's vacation time, if it's sleeping, if you just had a meal, they'll come to the edges of trails or beneath the tree and they'll just circle up little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the trail and they'll just sit there. And one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath the tree for two weeks. This snake was just sitting there resting. Digesting its food out in the open in the rain and the sun in the night didn't matter. You go near it barely even crack a tongue. Now, the other option is that you get a bush master that's alert and hunting and outlooking for something to eat and they're ready to defend themselves. And so I once came across a bush master in the jungle at night and this bush master turned to TED towards me, looked at me and made it very clear. I'm going to go this way. And so I did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do and I grabbed its tail. Now, 11 feet later by the head, the snake turned around and just said, if you want to meet God, I can arrange the meeting. I will oblige. And I decided to let the bush master go. And so it's like that with most animals. You know, a jaguar will turn and look at you and just remind you of how small you are.

Is readiness. I wanted to get him by the tail and show him to the people that were there and maybe work with the snake a little bit. As an 11 foot snake, the snake turned around and made it very clear like not today pal.

It was the moment it was the movement and the S of the neck. It was it was it was it was as if you pushed me and I went let's go make my day. Yeah, like he just looked a little bit too. Yeah, too ready. Okay, all right, so you know you just know you just know where is like the Snake you met last night. Yeah beautiful thing such a calm little thing you just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails and things and that snake has no concept of defending itself. It has no way to defend itself. So even though even something the size of a blue jake could just come and just pack that thing in the head and swallow it. It's a helpless little snake. So it's It's really, it kind of depends on the animal, it depends on the mood you catch them in, each one has a different temperament.

But it was... The tongue-flicking was a sign of curiosity. It's trying to figure out what was going on. It's like, why am I on this treadmill of human skin, you know? They're just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get hidden, trying to get away from the light.

I think it's, when you just spoke about it, it was, that's the first snake you've met and it was a tiny little snake in the jungle and you spoke about it with so much light in your eyes. And I think that because we've been programmed to be scared of snakes, there's something, there's something wondrous that happens in our brain, maybe it's just this joy of discovery that there's nothing to be scared of. And whether it's a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to give distance to which you look at it from a distance and you go, wow. or it's a harmless little grass snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child. They're just the strange, legless animals that just exist. They don't even have eyelids. They're so different than us. They have a tongue that senses the air and they, to me, are so beautiful. And I have my whole life been defending snakes from humans and they seem misunderstood. I think they're incredibly beautiful. every color and variety of snakes. There's venomous snakes. There's tree snakes. There's huge crushing anaconda. There's just of the 2,600 species of snakes that exist on earth. There's just such beauty, such complexity and such simplicity. They're just, they're just, to me, to me, I feel like, I feel like I'm, I'm friend with snake and they rely on me to protect them from my people. friend was snake me friends snake me friends snake you said some of them are sometimes aggressive some of them are peaceful is this a mood thing a personality thing a species thing is it what is it so as far as I know there's only really two snakes on earth that could be aggressive because aggression indicates offense and so a reticulated python has been documented as eating humans and a condos although while it hasn't been publicized they have eaten humans Every single other snake from boa constrictor to bushmasters is spitting cobra to grass snake to garter snake to everything else. Every single other snake does not want to interact with you. They've no interest. So there's no such thing as an aggressive snake once you get outside of anaconda in reticulated python. Aggression could be trying to eat you. That's predation. For every other snake, a rattlesnake, if it was there, would either go escape and hide itself, or it would rattle its tail and tell us, don't come closer. A cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say, don't approach me. I'm asking you nicely, not to mess with me. And most other snakes are fast, or they stay in the trees, or they're extremely camouflaged. But their whole ML is just, don't bother me. I don't want to be seen, I don't want to be messed with. In fact, all I want to be do is be left alone. And once in a while, I just want to eat and buy the way. When you see a snake drink, your heart will break. It's like seeing it's the only thing that's cuter than a puppy. Like watching a snake touch its mouth to water. And just you just see that little mouth going as they suck water in. And it's like it's just so adorable watching the scale, the animal just be like I need water.

All right. Baby incovernment. It's a takeover.

They can be at a puddle and they just take it in. Or one time in India, I was with a snake rescuer. And we found this nine foot king cobra, this, this god of a snake. They're, oh, if you'll figure as Hannah is their Latin name, and they're, they're snake eaters. They're the king of the snakes, the largest venomous snake. And the people that call, called the snake rescuer, because that's a profession in India. You know what had gotten into their kitchen or their backyard and so we showed up and we got the snake and the snake rescue or he knew. He looked at the snake and he went to me. He said, you know, why do you think the snake would go in a house and he was quizzing me and I actually went, you know what I don't know? Is it warm? Is it cold? Sometimes cats like to go into the warm cars and the winter and he was like East thirsty. He goes, watch this. He took a water bottle. Pour it over the, now the snake is standing up. Snake stands up three feet tall. This is a huge king cobra with a hood terrifying snake to be around. He leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him. And he takes a water bottle and pours it onto the snake's nose and the snake turns up its nose and just starts drinking from the water bottle. Human, giving water to snake, big, scary snake, but this human understood. Snake gets water, snake gets released in jungle, everybody's okay.

Well, animals live in a constant state of danger. Like if you look at that deer that we saw last night, it's stalking through the jungle, wondering what's going to eat it, wondering if this is the last moment it's going to be alive. It's like the animals are constantly terrified of that this is their last moment.

And so the cats, sometimes you'll get like a greenish or a blueish glow from the cats. The deer are usually white to orange, came in orange. Nightjaws, orange snakes can usually be like orange moths. spiders sparkle and so you have all these different as you walk through the jungle you can see all these different eyes and when something large looks at you like that deer did your first thing is what animal is this that I am staring back at because through the light you kind of get you see the reflection off the the bright light off the leaves and I couldn't tell at first because I actually that those big bright eyes it could have been an oslock could have been jaguar could have been a deer And then when it did this movement, that's the cats do. They try to see around your life. Don't maybe Lex Freedens here. We're gonna get lucky. It's gonna be a jack right off trail.

The big bad black came in, which is the largest reptilian predator in the Amazon except for the Anaconda. They kind of both share that notch of apex predator. They were actually hunted to endangered species level in the 70s because their leather, black, scale leather. but they're coming back. They're coming back and they're huge and they're beautiful and I was I was walking near Lake and I never understood how big they could get except for I was walking near Lake last year and I was following the stream and you know what it's like when you fall on a little stream and there's just a little trickle of water and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other direction on the tree on the stream river otter comes up to me and I swear to god this animal looks me and went hey And I went, hey, he was like, didn't expect to see me there. I mean, turned around. He like, did it little spin, started running down the stream. Then he turned around and he could tell he was like, let's go. And I, you know, I'm not in there for more fizing here. The animal was asking me to come with him. So I followed the river out of down the stream. We started running down the stream. The river out of, looks at me one more time is like, yo, jumps into the lake. And I'm like, what does he want me to see? Now in the lake, this river out is doing dives and freaking out and going up and down and up and down and they're very excited. They're screaming. They're screeching. all of a sudden. And I've never seen anything like this as deferring like Game of Thrones. This croquette comes flying out of the water. All of the river otters were attacking. This huge black came in 16 feet. He had half the size of this table. And she was thrashing her tail around, creating these huge waves in the water, trying to catch an otter. And they're so fast that they were zipping around her, biting her. And then going around in this otter, swear to God, interspecies looked at me and went, watch this. were fucking with this kid. It was amazing. And for the first time, I got to stand there watching this incredible interspecies fight happening. They weren't trying to kill the cameon. They were just trying to mess with it. And the cameon was doing his best to try and kill these otters. And they were just having a good time in that sick sort of hyper-intelligent animal, like wolf sort of way where they were just going, you can't catch us.

Alligators and came in and crocodiles have some of the strongest bite forces on Earth, think of saltwater crocodile winds as the strongest bite force on Earth. And you got to hold about a photo that a four foot spectacle came in. And you got to feel, I mean, you're a black belt in your jutsu. How do you compare the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a human can generate?

And that's where that's where of the four species of came in that we have here. You see differences in their personalities as a species. And so you can like just like you know like generally golden retrievers are viewed as a friendly dog generally, not every single one of them. But as a rule, spectacle came in puppies. You release one in the river and it did nothing. Didn't bite one of your fingers. It just swam away. We dropped one in the river and what did it do? It chose peace. Now I had a smooth front of came in a few weeks ago and this is probably about a three and a half footer. Not big enough to kill you, but very much big enough to grab one of your fingers and just shake it off your body. Just death roll it right off. And as I was being careful, totally different came in than the one that you got to see. This one has spikes coming off. They're like, like, like left over dinosaurs. It's like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never change. They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don't see on the other smoother came. And I tried to release this one without getting bitten and I threw it into the stream gently into the water. I just went, wow, I tried to pull my hands back and as I pulled my hand back, this came in the air turned around and just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one tooth whack right to the bone of my finger. and bone injury feels different than a skin injury. So instantly, and it just reminds you of, that's a came in with a head this big and it hurt. And I know that it could have taken all my finger now if you scale that up to a black came in. It's it's rib crushing. It's it's zebra head removing size, you know, just just meat destroying. It's it's incredible. It's nature is metal sort of, you know, just raw power.

We were doing camin service for years and we would go out at night and you want to figure out what are the populations of black came in, spectacle came in, smooth front to came in, dwarf came in and the only way to see which came in you're dealing with is to catch it. Because a lot of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes at night but you can't quite see what species it is. For instance, this past few months, we found two baby black came in on the river, which is unprecedented here. We haven't seen that in decades. So it's important that we monitor our crock population. So I started catching small ones. In Mother God, I write about the first one that me and JJ caught together, which was probably a little bigger than this table. And probably mid-20s, Bravado and competition with Other young males of my species led to me trying to go as big as I could. And I jumped on a spectacle came in that was slightly longer than I am. And I'm five nine. So I jumped on this probably six foot crock. and quickly realized that my hands couldn't get around its neck. And my legs were wrapped around the base of its tail, and the thrash was so intense that as it took me one side, I barely had enough time to realize what was happening before it beat me against the ground. My headlamp came off, so now I'm blind in the dark, laying in a river in the Amazon rainforest, hugging a six foot crocodile. And I went, JJ, as I always do. But in that moment, before I even let go, I knew I couldn't let go of the crock because of I let go of the crock. I thought she was going to destroy my face. So I said, OK, now I'm stuck here. If I just stay here, I can't release her. I need help. But I was like, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to try and solo catch a crock this big again. I was like, this is this is I knew in that moment. I was like, this is good enough.

Yeah, and that's a spectacle came in. A black came in is a whole other order of magnitude there. It's like saying, like, oh, you know, I was play fighting with my golden retriever versus I was play fighting with like, you know, what's the biggest scariest dog you could think of? The dog from Sandlot, a giant gorilla dog thing, like a, like a malemute, something, something huge. What are they called? Massives.

With crocodiles, you're looking at this mega survivor. They're in a class with sharks where it's like, they've been here so long. When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinctions, Earth's going through all this stuff, the crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before. They're like, man, we remember what that comment looked like. And they're not impressed.

and they're just sitting there in the streams and they don't care. And even if there's a nuclear holocaust, you know that there'd just be some crox sitting there dead-eyed and that stagnant water waiting for the life to regenerate so they could eat again.

Yeah. So the other night, Lex and I were in the river with JJ surviving a thunderstorm. We're in the rain and we had covered our covered our equipment with our boats and the only thing that we could do was get in the in the river to keep ourselves dry. And so we were in the river at night in the dark no stars just a little bit of canopy silhouetted with all this rain coming down. It was such a din you could hardly hear anything and all the way down river. I just see this came and I in my head length light. And I started walking towards it because it's like this is even better. We can catch a came and while we're in this thunderstorm in the Amazon River. And when JJ went, Paul, it's too far. JJ very rarely, very rarely like he'll make a suggestion like he'll usually go like maybe it's far. But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown came in size. He went, Paul, it's too far. Don't leave the three of us right now. Yeah. There were too far out to take risks, which too far out to be walking along the riverbed at night because then, you know, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evaced out where we went. Nothing so so for me seeing those eyes I think I've become so comfortable with so many of these animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel I feel so comfortable with with many of these animals that they just don't worry me anymore I mean you were I I looked at you in a raft while you had a sizeable Probably about 12 foot black came in right next to your raft. I watched it's head on there. The bubbles it was all coming up right next to your raft as he he was just moving along the bottom of the river because he looked at me went under and then my raft passed and yours came over him. So now I'm looking back and your raft is going over this black came in and I'm going I'm not worried at all. I was not worried. I was not worried that the came in would freak out. I was not worried that he would try to attack you. I knew 100% that came and just wanted us to go. So you could go back to eating fish.

I have a few on the river. Um, no, when we see their heads go under, it's just, they're just getting out of the way. We're shining a light at them and they're going, why is there a light at night? I'm uncomfortable. Head under so these came in again you think of it as this bigger aggressive animal, but I don't know anybody that's been eaten by a black came in and the the smaller species moved front of came in dwarf came in spectacle came in they're not gonna eat any but again at the worst if you were doing something inappropriate with a came in like you jumped on it and we're trying to to do research and and bit your hand it could take your hand off But that's the only time I've been walking down the river and stepped on a Cayman and the Cayman just swims away. And so in my mind Cayman are just these, they're peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river and so to me they are my friends. And I worry about them because two months ago we were coming up river and on one of the beaches was a beautiful, about five foot black Cayman with a big machete cut right through the head. The whole Cayman was wasted. Nothing was eaten. But the came in was dead. What do you think that was? Curious humans? Just committing violence. Yeah, just loggers. People who aren't from this part of the Amazon because a local person would either eat the animal or not mess with it. Like Pico would never kill a came in for no reason because it doesn't make any sense. So these are clearly people who aren't from the region, which usually means loggers because they've come from somewhere else. They're doing a job here and they're just cleaning their pots in the river tonight and they see eyes come near them because the came in probably smells fish and then they just whack because they want to see it and they're just curious monkeys on a beach. And again, me, friend of Cayman, I protect from my type.

But not for a little five foot Cayman. And I think that's incredibly speciesist of you.

No, it's like all my friends do the same thing. They go, you swim in the Amazon rainforest, you know, you swim in that river and I go, yes, every day. We, you know, backflips into the river. We've been swimming in the river how many times with the piranha and the stingray and the candero and the came in and the anaconda's all of it in the river with us. And we're just doing it. And what's that for you? So what allows you to do that, to do that, knowing and having researched all the different things that can kill you, which I feel like most of them are in the river, what allows you to just get in there with us?

It strikes me as unfair because humans are we're still in our minds. So programs to worry about that predator, that predator, that predator, what predator we've killed everything. Black camins are coming off the endangered species list. We exterminated wolves from North America. I actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son watch out. Foxes will get you. Foxes. Yeah.

Sure. And if it's in celebration, then I'm all for it because my God is that power. Like the waves of fury that you saw, like when that tail, I mean, you saw the tail of the spectrum of that perfect, amazing thing with all those interlocking scales that works. So it's like a perfect creation of engineering. And then when you have one that's this thick, And all of a sudden that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power. The volume of water, the sound that comes out of their throat, they're such their dragons.

You ever see the the mashup where they put side by side the image of I think it's a falcon and flight next to a stealth bomber and they're almost the exact same design.

Like maybe a tank like maybe even more like Almondillo turtle. Yeah, they may not be a machine a war machine equivalent of a crocodile would have to have like a Big jaw element to it.

Rhinos is after elephants is the largest white rhinos.

Absolutely, but I have to tell you after being around so many rhinos. I have rhino friends. Yeah. Black and white rhinos. Yep. And they're all sweetharts. And I mean, I mean, sweetharts. And I mean, when you look at a rhino, it's like a living dinosaur. I know it's a mammal, but somehow it screams dinosaur, because it seems like place to scenic in it. And from another age with the giant horn, and there's so much bigger than you think, like there's many vansized animals. Like you're, you're, we're not taller than they are. at the shoulder, and they have the strange shape head and the huge horn, and they sit there eating grass all day. So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it's because the rhino is going, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. Don't hurt my baby. And then they're like, you know what, I'll just kill you. It would be easier because you're scared of me. You're too close to that rhino.

And so like there again, I just think it's funny because humans were so quickly to go, which snakes are aggressive? There are no aggressive snakes. You know, rhino can be dangerous. If provoked, otherwise their peaceful fat grass unicorns, you know, like they're really pretty calm. The way these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black came in the rhinos, the elephants, all the big beautiful stuff is becoming less and less. And it almost reminds me of game of thrones. In the beginning, they were like, yeah, they used to be dragons. And it was like this memory. And it's like, yeah, we used to have mammoths. And we used to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long manatees. And it's, there were things we used to have, the Caspian tiger that only went extinct in the 90s, our lifetimes. And that's mind blowing to me. That has haunted me since I'm a child. I remember learning about extinction and I went, wait, you're telling me that I remember being a kid and going by the time I grew up, you're saying that gorillas could be gone. Elephants could be gone. And because we're doing it, and then I just, that, I remember, I remember looking at the nightlight being blurry because I was crying. I was so upset and oh, it was lo and some George that turtle the glass goes toward us where there was one left and they said if we just if we just had a female He could live it. I has a six seven eight year old that destroyed me. We're all just starting to get laid including that turtle including that turtle for a few hundred years

Yeah. You know, there's a turtle that Darwin and Steve are when both owned.

They've seen things. They've seen things that there's a great like. internet joke where they're like they're like accusing him of like being incongruous with modern times to like he did nothing to stop slavery. He didn't find the world worth to like cancel the turn.

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Yeah, so anaconda's have a kind of a I don't like a three point. constriction system where their first thing is anchor. So the first thing is latch on to you.

This is for when you're wrestling an anaconda in just in case.

Don't let him take the back. Yeah. So one time me and JJ were following a herd of collard peckery and JJ is teaching me tracking. So we're following the hoof prints through the mud and we're doing this and I'm talking about no backpacks, just machetes, bare feet running through the jungle. And we come to this stream and JJ is like, I think we missed him. You know, I think they went. And I'm like, no, no, no, they went here. Look, and not because I'm a great tracker, because I can see a few dozen footprints. Hundreds of individual footprints right there. And I'm going, no, no, no, they just crossed here and JJ was like, you know what? We're not going to get eyes on him today. He was like, it's okay. He's like, we did good. We followed him for a long time. And I was like, cool. And then I was trying to gauge, like, can I drink this stream? And I see a colpa. And a colpa is a salt deposit where animals come to feed, because sodium is a deficiency that most herbivores have here. And all of a sudden, I just hear, like the sound of a wet stick snapping, just that bone crunch. And I looked down and there's about a 16 foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed peckery, wild boar. And what this anaconda had done was as the all the pigs were going across the stream. The anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw, swipes the legs, wrapped around it, bent it in half, and then crushed its ribs. And that's what the Anaconda do, whether it's to mammals, to came in, it's all the same thing. It's grab on, they have six rows of backwards facing teeth. So once they hit you, they're never going to come off. You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out. All those backward facing teeth, so they have an incredible anchor system and then they use their weight to pull you down to hell, to pull you down into that water, wrap around you. and then start breaking you and every breath you take you and you you're up against a barrier and then when you when you exhale they go a little tighter and you're never gonna get that space back your lungs are never going to expand again and I know this because I've been in that crush before JJ pulled me out of it and so this pig the anaconda had gotten it and as the pig was thrashing in the anaconda's rapping and I had bent it in half And I just heard those vertebrae going. Yeah. And so if we're came, it's the same thing. They just grab and they wrap around it and then they have to crush it until there's no response. They'll wait an hour. They'll wait a long time until there's no response from the animal. They'll overpower it. Then they'll reposition. Probably y'all in a little bit, open their jaw. And then start forcing that entire. Now here's the crazy thing. is that an anaconda has stomach acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile, where nothing comes out the other side. And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is, that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side. That's insane. And so it always made me wonder on a chemistry level how you can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't harm the anaconda itself.

I know, but my question was how on earth is it physically possible to have this hellish bile that can digest anything, even something as horrendous as a came in scales and bones and all the hardest shit in nature, and then not hurt the snake itself. And I had a chemist explained to me that it's probably some sort of mucus system that lines the stomach and neutralizes the acid and keeps it floating in there, but my god that must be powerful stuff.

When an anaconda is wrapped around you and you find yourself in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing, you are confronted with the vast disparity in power, that there is so much power in these animals, so much crushing, deliberate, reptilian, ancient power that doesn't care. They're just trying to get you to stop. They just want you to stop ticking and there's nothing you can do and there's I find it very awe-inspiring when I encounter that kind of power when you even if it's that you see you know you see a dog run you know you ever try to outrun a dog and they just zip by you and you go wow you know or you see a horse kick and you go oh my god if that if that hoof hit anyone's head it knock him three states over and it's like it's like there there is muscular power that is so far that it like you said that explosive that we we dream of doing it like imagine if like a a moi type kickbox or could could harness that sort of came in power then smash Um, and so it's it's just awe-inspiring. I think it's really really impressive what animals can do and we're all, you know, we're all the same sort of makeup for the most part all the mammals, you know, we all have our skeletons look so similar. We all have like, you know, if you look at kangaroos, biceps and chest, it looks so much like a like a like a man's and if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked chimp, just like chimps with alopecia, Oh shit and so if they look red it it looks like a bodybuilder like it's got cuts and huge huge everything. We can it's got packs and they got that face. It's just like Just let me in.

Well, yes and no, and I have this question, okay. So I, you know, the whole UR which eat thing. Now, we one time here had two chickens. Now, one of them was a wild chicken like from the farm had walked around its whole life, finding insects, and the other chicken was like factory raised. And so we cut the heads off of both of them, started getting ready to cook them. Now, the factory raised chicken was like, a much higher percentage of fat had less muscle on its body was softer tissue a lighter color. The farm raise chicken had darker, more sinewy muscles less fat was clearly a better made machine and so my question is Is that what's happening with us? You know, like if you go see a Sherpa who's been walking his whole life and pulling, you know, and walking behind muscoxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city versus someone that's just been chowing down at I-Hop for 40 years and never getting off the couch like I imagine it's the same thing that you become what you eat.

Yeah. Like you can't replicate that. Like just like that chimp has those from constantly moving through the canopy, constantly using those arms. Just like if you're, you know, if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan.

Why is there so much muscle?

With an anaconda, I really think it's the second one. I do think that they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane. I think they're a very simple system, a very ancient system. And I think that once you hit predation mode, it's going down no matter what. the stupid mosquito. I'm going like this and every time he just flies around my hand like I'm a big slow giant and he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot like I'm like no and then he comes right back to the same spot. It's like it's like he's just going fuck you.

Dude, I flick the wasp off me the other day. It flew back like 12 feet and in the air corrected and then flew back at my face. It made so many calculations and corrections and decided to come back and let me know about it and it was like

This bitch asked kid from Brooklyn tried to flick me and I showed him what somebody had him running.

So, um, the lead authors of that paper, patch campaign and Carter Payne, uh, friends of mine. And what we started noticing for me began at that story. I told you where we were coming across the stream and we saw the Anakanda had, had been positioned just below a copa. and then other people began noticing that anaconda seemed to always be beneath these copas where mammals were going to be coming and that that contrasted with what we knew about anaconda's because what we understood about anaconda's that they're purely ambush predators and they don't pursue their prey. But what we began finding out here and Pat led the process of amazing scientists. He worked with the Katie University for a long time, worked with us for a long time. And he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an anaconda. right around here and we're able to see their movements. And that's what these papers are showing is that they actually do pursue their prey. They do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest to actually do pursue their prey. They actually do seek out food. So I mean think about it. It's a giant anaconda. Obviously it's not, it can't just sit in one spot. It has to put some work into it. And so they're using scent and they're using communication. to use the streams. So you can be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream and see a sizable anaconda looking for a meal.

They borrow quite a bit. And so these large snakes operate subterranean more than we think. Interesting. Like there's times that you'll go with a tracker, you go with a telemetry set, and it'll say, like it will be over the snake. Snakes underground. Snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream. You saw it last night, where all the fish have their holes under the side of the stream. There is a six foot dwarf came in right in the stream, right where we were standing. He had his cave. He goes under there. they know they have their system yeah we walked by it we walked by and he stuck his head out because he thought we'd gone and then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of the line and he just went right back into his cave you guys are not going to touch me And so, yeah, with the Anaconda, it's been really exciting. And in 2014, JJ and me and Mose and Impact, and Lee, we all ended up catching what at the time was the record for UNECTIES Marineists scientifically measured. It was 18 feet six inches, 220 pounds, one of the largest female Anaconda's on record. And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species, continuing to just, again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species. And studying green and agendas in low land tropical rainforest, you've seen how hard it is to move, to operate, to navigate in this environment. And so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them. and then finding out a way to keep tabs on them because even if you get lucky enough to see an anaconda by the edge of a stream to be able to observe it over time to learn its habits or to put a radio transmitter on it or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience. is almost impossible. And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about Mother of God, us jumping on Anacanas and trying to catch them and at first it just seems like something we were doing to learn to just try and see them, but it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on because now it's allowing us to try and find the largest anacondas and people used to say there's no way there's 25 foot 27 foot well there's just that video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot anaconda and so now as we keep going where I'm going will maybe through drone identification we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation and even then how do we restrain them? So that we could measure them and prove this to the world.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's so much that we don't know about this forest. We don't know what medicines are in this forest. We don't know with a lot of the 1500, there's something like 4,000 species of butterflies in the Amazon rainforest and of the 1500 species that are here in this region. All of them have a larval stage caterpillars, right? And each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly to enter the next life cycle. And for most of the species that fill the butterfly book, we don't know what those interactions are. I recently got to see the white witch, which is a huge moth. It's one of the two largest moths in the world. It's the largest moth by Wing Span. Wow. Huge, it looks like a bird. Big white moth. We still, I believe, I believe that we still don't know what the caterpillar looks like. It's 2024. We have iPhones and penis shaped rocket chips. Like we don't know where that month starts its life. Yeah. We still haven't figured that out.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's clearly you've done some some research and you've noticed a lot of them. I haven't even seen them.

Species. You talk about an 18 foot several hundred pound black came in versus a 26 foot 350 pound anaconda. Yeah. I think it's a it's a death stalemate. I think the came in slams Yanacondo bites on to it. The Anaconda wraps the came in and they both thrash around until they both kill each other because I think the the came in will tear him up so bad. And the came is not gonna let go. He's gonna never gonna let go. But then he's gonna he's gonna realize that he's he's also being constricted. So then he's gonna stop and he's gonna he's gonna keep slamming down on that Anaconda. And the Anaconda is just gonna keep constricting. But if the came in can do enough damage before the and it's again, it's almost like a striker versus engine too. Yeah. You know, if you can get enough elbows in before they lock you, how fast is the construction? So it's pretty slow. It's it's no it's it's incredibly it's incredibly quick. So it's it's it's you to you see you take the back and get me in chokehold. It's that it's I have maybe 30 seconds maybe on the upward side if you haven't cinched it under my under my throat, but if you've gotten good position.

It's not unless you have outside health, unless you have another human or another 10 humans coming to unwrap the tail. Help. But for an animal, like if a deer gets hit by an anacons, no way.

Yeah, I don't I don't think a large black came in. Here's the thing. Every fisherman knows this. They're like the biggest fish. They're smart. Yeah. And more importantly, they're shrewd. They're careful. A huge black Cayman that's 16 feet long isn't going to be messing with a big an icon. Like they won't they won't cross paths because while they are technically occupied, the same type of environment. That black came in is going to have this deep spot in the lake and that anaconda is going to have found this floating forest like sort of black stream backwater where it's going to be and they'll have made that their home for decades and they'll already have cleaned out the competition so maybe if there was a flood. and they got pushed together, they could have some sort of a showdown, but almost more certainly is that when they get to that size, that came in at any sign of danger, right under the water. It's almost like, what do you learn when you're a black belt? What do you do with the street fight? You still run away. There's no reason for a street fight. And I think the animals really understand that.

They would have a territorial dispute.

On it dude, nature. Anything could happen. One of the things that me and Pat wrote up was that I saw a yellow-tailed Crebo, which is like a six-foot rat snake eating an oxyropis millenogenes, which is the red snake that we found last night. And just no one had ever, in scientific literature, we'd never seen a Crebo eating an oxyropis before. And so I had the observation in the field. I sent it to Pat champagne. Pat writes it up paper and so it's like it's this really cool That's a really cool system because we're just out here all the time you end up seeing things JJ's dad saw an anaconda eating a taper tapers the size of a cow damn and it's that guy didn't lie You know you trust your sources on that he he saw enough stuff you didn't need to make up stories You know how you you want to love now is when you go to so when you ask people when we were going up the mountain with Jimmy yeah JJ said to him, he goes, have you ever seen a Puma up here in the mountains? And Jimmy goes, they're up here. And JJ went, no, no, no, have you seen it? And Jimmy went, no, never seen one. And you know how most people will go, yeah, that makes me trust a person when they admit, nah, I haven't seen it.

You know, mountain lions, animals, whatever, you know, there's all different names for them. They're distributed from, I think, from Alaska down through Argentina. It's, they're everywhere. It's extremely successful species from deserts to high mountains, everything.

I think it's based in predatory instincts, but I also think there is a playfulness to higher intelligence animals that you don't see in lower intelligence animals. something like a rabbit, for instance, you're never going to see a rabbit come in to check you out. You just, you just, you can't even think of it like that. Like a rabbit, just going to either eat or run away. There's really two settings. When you think of something like a river giant river otter or a tyro, which is a, they call it monko here. It's a, it's a huge, arboreal weasel. And they'll come check out. I woke up at my house the other day and there was a tyro climbing up the side of the house and he was looking down at me sleeping and it's like

I think it's more complex than we. Realize, you go back to that friends to wall book. Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? There's so many incredible examples of controlled studies where the researchers weren't understanding how to shed being so insurmountably human and understand that there are other types of intelligence. And whether that's elephants or cats, so big cats, for instance, We just saw a camera trap video from last night where you see one of our workers walk down the trail and then five minutes later a cat behind them.

So we're out there and there's deer and there's cats and there's a Jaguar and there's Puma and there's all these animals out there. And we're out in the night in the inky black night in this ocean of darkness beneath the trees and we're just exploring and getting to see everything and there's all these little eyes and heart beats. I love the jungle at night, man. It's the most exciting thing.

And just the silence. Everything you hear, the cicadas, the birds, they're all screaming about sex. Yeah, all the time. So they're just trying to get laid. So all of them are making mating calls. Now the trick is to make your mating call without attracting a predator. But at night, what amazes me is that for us, it's so from the caveman logic of it's hard to make fire here. It's hard to even light a fire here. To having this incredible beam of, you know, all of a sudden we can look at the jungle. and walk through that darkness, then we're seeing the frogs on those leaves and the snakes moving through the undergrowth and the deer sneaking through the shadows. It's almost as supernatural as skydiving. It's a strange thing to be able to do the technology allows us to do. We're doing something really complex and we're walking on trails that have been cleared for us that we've planned out. And so walking through the jungle at night, you just get this freak show. of biodiversity, and I'm addicted to it. I truly love it.

How would you categorize? If somebody said, Lex, I think I'm going to go for hike through the jungle. Not on the trail. Yeah. What would you tell him?

Now, just think about this. I think scientifically, because people like to summarize, people like to get really, really, sort of cavalier with our scientific progress and they go, you know, we weren't explored the Amazon. It's like, well, have we? Because in between each tributary is, you know, let's just be between some of them, let's just say 100 miles of unbroken forest. Who's explored that? Yeah. Maybe some of the tribes have been there. Maybe Some areas they haven't been. Now, when you're talking about scientists, whether they're indigenous scientists, western scientists, whatever. So many of the areas in this jungle that is the size of the continent till US still have not been accessed and the places where people are doing research. So I've been down here long enough. I see all the PhDs come down here and they all go to the same few research stations. They're safe. They have a bed. If you get hella dropped into the middle of the jungle in the deepest most remote parts, you're going to find micro ecosystems. You're going to see little species variations. You're going to see a type of flower that JJ has never seen before, like what happened the other day. As you start walking through new patches of forest, you start finding new species and everything here changes. You just go a little bit up river and the animals you see differ. You go on this side of the river versus on the north side of the river, there's two other species of primates there that don't exist here. That's in the mammal paper that we did with the emperor tamarins and the pygmy marmusats at the rangers found.

Once again, the mammal paper patch campaign, the prodigy. He was sort of leading on this with a bunch of other scientists who have worked in the region, including Holly O'Donnell out of Oxford. Myself, I really just made a few observations. The Jungle Keepers Rangers got featured because they're the ones that spotted a pygmy marmuset that had previously been unrequorded on the river. I got to contribute because I had the only photograph that I believe anyone has of an Emperor Tamron on this river. It's the first proof of Emperor Tamron on this river. And that's exciting. It's exciting because, you know, you can post a picture or share a scientific observation or write about something. And then what happens is you get these like couch experts, these armchair experts who will come and say, you know, no, no, you don't get blue in yellow because they're, I can tell from my bird book, it says they're not there. And they'll tell you you're wrong, you know, no, you don't get woolly monkeys or amperchamments, it's like, but we have proof. And so we're coming together to try and add to that knowledge.

If you look up how many trees are in the Amazon rainforest, it's something in the order of 400 billion trees. There's something like 70 to 80,000 species of plants. Individual types of plants here, 1500 species of trees. So vast that it's comparable like the scale is like only comparable to the universe in terms of stars and galaxies and and and for the sheer immensity of it and so were were describing new species every year. And just walking on the trail at night, you and I have seen, you know, you see a tiny little spider hidden in a crevice and has the scientific eye ever seen that spider before. Has it been documented? Do we know anything about its life cycle? They're still so much that's here that is completely unknown. You know, we have pictures of all these butterflies. Somebody went out of the butterfly net and caught these butterflies. Took a picture of it gave it a name, put it in a butterfly book. What do we know? What host plant do they use for their caterpillars? What's their geographical range? What do we actually know? Not that much. So are there creatures out here that haven't been described?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly in the canopy, 50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy. And we've had very limited access to the canopy for all of history. You know, if you wanted to get up into the rainforest canopy, you basically have to climb a vine or with scientists. When I was a kid, I was used to see them with like the sling shots or the bone arrows. They would shoot a piece of paracord over a branch, pull the rope up and then, you know, do the ascension thing. And then you're up in this tree, getting swarmed by sweat bees, getting stung by a wasps. You're trying to do science up there in that environment. It's incredibly hostile. And so having canopy platforms. I actually met a guy at a French film festival who had used hot air balloons to float over the canopy of the Amazon and then lay these big nets over the, over the broccoli of the, of the trees. And the nets were dense enough that humans could walk on the nets and then reach through and pull cactuses and lizards and snakes or whatever. Just take specimens from the canopy. That's how difficult it is that scientists have resorted to using hot air balloons. And so having a tree house, having canopy platforms, having it's starting to get, it's starting to be more and more access to the rainforest canopy. And so we're beginning to log more data. You know, we even observed in our tree house, which is supposed to be the tallest in the world. We're seeing lizards that we don't see on the ground, lizards that have never been documented on this river. Like we're seeing snakes where they're saying we saw the snake inside a crevice on that tree in the stranglething. And we don't know what it is. It's just people haven't been up there.

I mean, you when you wake up in the canopy in the morning, in the Amazon rainforest, as soon as the darkness lifts, as soon as that purple comes in the east in the morning, the Hallermunki start up. Yeah. And then the pirates start up. And then the Tinnomu start going in the McCaw, start going in pretty soon. Everybody's going in the spider monkey groups are all calling to each other. And it's just the whole dawn chorus starts and it's so exciting.

usually for instance violence or implied violence or threat of violence yeah i mean however monkeys in the morning they're letting other groups know this is where we're at we're going to be farging over here you better stay away and so it's a little bit respectful as well there's order in the chaos so just speaking of screaming macaws are like these beautiful creatures

That, that it can be loud and rough and still be loving.

It's all interesting. I mean, there's the anti monogamy crew who's like, you know, we were never meant to be monogamous. We're supposed to just be animals. And then there's the other side of the crew that's like, We were meant to be monogamous. We are monogamous creatures. That's what God wanted between a man and a woman and then other people like, yeah, but I know about these two gay penguins and so that's natural too. And so that everyone tries to draw their Their identity, they're trying to justify their identity off of the laws of nature. So the fact that Macauza and Monogamous really doesn't have anything to do with anybody except for that, it's beneficial for them to work together to raise chicks. It's difficult. They rely on ironwood trees or agua heypoms and it's difficult to find the right hole in a tree. There's only so much Macau real estate and so they need to use those holes. And each one of those ancient trees, it's usually 500 years or more, is a valuable macaw generating site in the forest. And so if those trees go down, you lose exponential amounts of macaws. And that's how you get endangered species. And so that's why we're trying to protect the ironwood trees.

Dude, that's like super smash brothers of the jungle. That's incredible. Yeah. Like bullet ants. If you had a bullet ant, that was the size.

Can it be like a tournament? So everyone is pound for pound ratioed. Yeah. For efficiency. So you have basically like a six foot bullet ant versus a huge black came in versus an anticon versus a loss of the size of Jaguars versus.

I don't know, man. I never thought about it. I mean, bulletin has these giant giant mandibles. It could probably grab the black came in, and then at that amount of venom, you're talking about a blocket of venom going into that black came in black came and it's going to get paralyzed immediately.

Yeah, so like an ant leaf cut around lifting that leaf.

One of the most interesting limits that I heard somebody talking about recently was the reason that dinosaurs didn't get bigger. even bigger because the conditions on earth were favorable towards it was that at some point their eggs reached this physical limits that their eggs reached the size of the eggs were so big that that eggs need to breathe for the embryo to survive and their eggs reached a limit where in order to have a shell that could hold the mass of the liquid and the young dinosaur if they got bigger it wouldn't be permeable anymore. And I thought that was so interesting because the entire size of physical creatures was determined by how thick shell can be before it breaks or before it can't pass air through it.

Given the current size of the jungle, I think that the MVP, the pound for pound, goat is oscillates. You know, you're talking about like a midsize 40, 40, 50 pound cat that can climb, that does unlike a jaguar, a jaguar every time it hunts. It's going after a deer. It catches a deer. The deer could hit it with its antlers. It can tear it with its hooves. It's risking its life for that meal. An oscillat. Oslo's walk around at night and they climb a tree, eat a whole bunch of eggs, eat the mother bird too, kill a snake, maybe mess around and eat a baby came and they can have whatever they like and they're sleek enough and smart enough to get away from predators. They don't really have predators. And so they're sort of occupied as perfect niche where they can hunt small prey in high quantity without taking on big risks. And so if you had to choose an animal to be, it'd probably be like an oscillat or I would say giant river otters, which is so damn cool because they're The locals call them logos der Rio river wolves because they're so tough and they're so social and they're so like us because they're intensely familial groups. They live in holes by the sides of lakes and they swim through the water and they catch fish all day long, piranhas. They eat them just like the scales go flying as they eat these piranhas. And they're so joyous in the way they swim and they have friends and they have family and they I think it would be I think we could relate to being a river out of really because I can't picture being a cat and being so solitary and just marching along a 15 mile route and making sure there's no other cats and coming in on your territory and marking that territory seems it seems very solo and very Cat like so lonely existence and we humans are social be so social it's me River otters is like having a big Italian family you're like constantly eating your freaking out you know just like causing problems with the black came in take down a black him and yeah, it's a family thing you mentioned piranhas yeah

Yeah, not in the mammalian way though. Paranas are in large schools, but I fishers so different. Like if you, I can talk to you all day about how, how much I'd love to be an otter also going back to the fighting thing. otters and weasels muscle a day tend to be very loose in their skin so if you grab an otter it can still rotate around to bite you so it's like if I grab you by the back you're stuck you know like we can't you grab them by the skin yeah they can rotate around and just shred you apart so there they're really cool fighters um prana fish fish I don't I don't you know I don't identify with fish in in terms like that I think living out here has made me think of fish as um kind of rapid food that can't be gotten like, you know, to me, a piranha is just when I see a piranha, I think about how I want it to taste.

They're serious predators. They are serious predators. I found a baby black came and not that long ago and he was missing all of his toes because the piranhas that eaten them off. It was really sad. He just had these stumps and he was swimming around the water and I was like, you are not going to make it. He was like eight inches and he was such a cute little puppy. I do big eyes and I was just like man. You were ready of missing all your toes. It's like just a matter of time. Now he can't get away. So some big origami heron's gonna come and just nail and pop them down as throw. That's the end of that for the came in.

Nature sure shit is metal.

Yeah, but humans are brutal too. Like like that story we heard about that guy the other day who caught a stingray on a fishing hook. Chopped its tail off to make it safe for humans caught a piece of the stingray off so he could use it for bait and then through the live fish back in the river. To me that is incomprehensible amounts of cruelty with with with flawed logic in every direction. Like if you're going to use the thing as bait, use it as bait. If you're going to remove its tail, well, then just kill it all together. Yeah. Or if you want to save the animal and not kill it, then don't name it before you return it to it. It was so weird.

Yeah. So we have, we've been eating Paco. Yeah. And your time here. Fried Paco is great. Fried amazing. It's delicious. Full of nutrients. You could tell it makes you healthy. I feel like we better work out so that we can go harder in the jungle. And so a few months ago, in August, when the river was down, there was a day that the river was clear and a friend of mine, Victor, who's married to a native girl, he said, it's time to go Paco fishing. And at the time, we were stuck out here and we had no resupply. Everybody was busy and so everyone was demoralized. The staff was hungry. We were hungry and it really became this thing of like hey go catch us in Paco. They were working on the trails. They were installing the solar. We were working hard and we didn't have food. And so we went out to the river and what we did was we went up river. We camped on the beach. And in the morning, Victor's wife was canoeing with the paddle dead quiet. Don't let the paddle touch the wooden boat. Nikita was balancing the middle of the thing, pictures on the front with this huge fishing rod. And I'm sitting there and he goes, I'll catch the first one, you catch the second one. And he's got this huge fishing rod in a piece of half rod in meat from the day before. And he's smacking it against the, well, six a.m. He's just letting it smack against the water. And I'm going, and we're floating down the river. And I'm going, this is not going to work. And we're floating, and we're floating, and a half hour passes, and I'm going, it's dawn. I want to go back to sleep. I'm searching, I'm just not a morning person. And all of a sudden, a fish hits that line. Almost pulls his men off of his feet. And he swings the thing in. The fish comes on the boat, and then I realize he's got a big metal mallet on the boat, so that you could try to shut that fish off. And it's this huge or shaped, thick muscular paco. And as soon as I saw that fish, I just thought, wow, the strongest of this species from millions of years have been swimming in this river. and suddenly we've, through this incredible combination of the boat and the, and the, and the cord and the hook, none of which we made, and the skill that he had from knowing how to fish a pocket. Because otherwise, no chance that you're getting that fish. They hide their very, very suspicious of what you're doing. We had gotten this fish onto the boat and plumbed. You hammer it like a caveman, boom, doesn't die. Boom, you have to crush it skull. And now you have this fish and you're holding this genetic material, this sustenance for your life, that has been developing since the dinosaur times. It's so beautiful, the act, the sacred act of eating that, of the fish, of the competition with the fish. And we spent the morning fishing, we got three tacos, three huge giant vegetarian piranha. And I just remember touching them with so much reverence thinking about the incredible history and how that before these rivers existed those tacos were was swimming through the water and and and and trying to survive through through through history through history through history until this until we we took just a few and we did it respectfully and we did it when we needed it most, not at a time when it was just for fun, and it was really, really special.

And did you actually, when you remember we put our backpacks down at that one spot and it was like, the ants got on your backpacks and I said, oh shit, this is that tree. Did you actually get bitten by one of those? Because they're incredibly painful. Yeah.

Yeah, but it's just it's amazing because they live inside the tree. The tree comes standard with holes in it that allow the ants to move and to exist safe and it protects their eggs and they protect the tree. And so we saw that spot where there's a perfect circle around the trees because the ants had excavated the other vegetation so that those trees could have no competition to grow. The incredible calculation of how ants know to guard comprograms to garden that tree and the tree somehow has been genetically informed to have ant habitat within itself. It's it's it's it's mind blowing and it actually is the foundation of a lot of existential confusion for me because how the hell is it possible.

What do you find beautiful about them? Like, as you said, just leaf cutter ants in this jungle, that's forgetting all the other hundreds of species of ants that are in this jungle, but just the leaf cutters, apparently Digest roughly 17% of the total biomass of the forest. Everything, all these giant trees, all that leaf litter, 17% that almost a fifth of this forest cycles through leaf cutter colonies. So they're constantly regenerating the forest. They're huge source. of the, of the driver of this ecosystem. And so to me, when you see them working, it's, again, like I said, you see your friends as you go through the jungle, you see all the K-pop trees, you can eat a tree, you see all of those leaf currents doing what they're supposed to do. And it's, it's just so beautiful. I find them very beautiful. Army ants, they're so tough. They're so ready to fight. They have this huge mandibles. They're just, they're just, they're transporting their eggs, they're moving from here to there. Anything that's in the way is getting eaten, they're just savage. And they're kind of cute for that. Unless you're tied to a tree.

I find that it's kind of reassuring, you know. You want certain things to be tough.

Yeah, a powerful play. But the army ants are so savage. You know, like if you If you step on army ants, they will all come a cause and just attack onto your feet and they'll just sacrifice their own life for the good of the thing and they'll be trying to kill your shoes and There's something funny about that to me. There's something like kind of reassuring, again, unless, unless imagine if you're going through the jungle and you slip and you fall and you twist your knee and you fall in just the right way, but you can't get up. You can't. You're stuck there. And then army ants find you. They will take you apart. There are records of horses that have been tied up and army ants come and they'll take out the whole horse. Imagine the pain of that. It might be raining on us very hard very soon. You want to pause? Nope. I think we'll stay here until the ship goes down.

And we are in the Amazon rainforest.

Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. resonated with a lot of people. That everything you've ever heard of, all the heroes, all the villains, all of your ancestors, every achievement, tragedy, triumph, everything has happened on that one spot. This one tiny, tiny little rock that has life on it. And to me, the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that. As far as we know into the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific brains at their fullest capacity, This is still the only place that we know that has life. and given that the fact that there are still these tropical towering complex ecosystems that we are barely understand crawling and full of the most incredible life. It's just to me it's it's it's so wonderful. It's so incredible. Those are the waterfalls and the birds and the macaws and the jaguar. It's barely believable. Like if you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical alien that I live on this planet and there there's just these places where everything is interconnected everything means something to something else and the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive in each tree is pumping air into the river and there's an invisible river above the actual river and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate and each little tiny leaf cutter and somehow contributes to this giant biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible that is beautiful I love that. And so the brain forest to me or the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest challenge for us as a global society because if we can't protect the crown jewel, the best thing, you know, the most beautiful part, then we're really, really missing the point.

You can write down a calculation on a napkin. You can cite different Hollywood movies. You can point up to the pieces of light in the stars. But if you, if I talk about show me a single cell that's not from this planet. It's still not possible. And so I agree with you that the likelihood is there, all indications point to it, it would be fascinating, especially if it was done in, especially imagine finding a planet of alternative life forms, not necessarily even intelligent. Imagine just a planet of butterflies, whatever, something else. That would be amazing. I'm concerned with the reality that we have in front of us is that this is the spaceship, this is life. And so right now, given that reality, maybe that's the case, maybe there are other planets. Or, or maybe we are the first, maybe life originated here, maybe God, the universe, whatever. Maybe this is the testing ground for something bigger and this complexity and this diversity of life and this life that we have is that important. And I think that part of what we do when we go, oh yeah, but there's other planets where First of all, we're taking an assumption into reality without, I mean, you know, aliens are right now or about as real as Santa Claus. We think they're out there, but we're not sure. Maybe a little more real because, you know, it could make sense. We know what has an alien. No one's seen an alien. No one's even seen cellular life. And so I'm not, again, if they showed up tomorrow, great. Let's study them. But right now, We have this very simple threat going on where we can't stop killing each other and are living environment. And so while some people can specialize in looking to the stars and to other planets and talk about being an interplanetary species, I'm very much concerned with the fact that here in our home turf are living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big and there's McCaw's flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers. Not only do we have a responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this incredible gift that is our entire reality. Seems kind of weird too. At some point, conservation seems kind of ridiculous. Like you're begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive. It's almost kind of silly at a point. But we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers that come standard with life on earth and we're harming the ability of earth's ecosystems to provide for that life and we are the generation that's going to decide if those systems continue to provide life to all the people on earth and all the generations and by the way, all the other animals that exist for their own reasons. other consciousnesses that were just beginning to understand elephants, humpback whales, whatever, families of giant river otters. You not everything can be seen from a human perspective. These are other species that have their own stories. And so I'm more biocentric than anthropocentric in that I think that nature is important, but I also believe that we are We are special. We are the most intelligent animal.

Now, the force that created life is a big one. And then the other thing is, what do you mean by that there's aliens living among us? You mean extraterrestrials? Yes. Living among us.

But that's different than saying that they're living among us. If you tell me that there's aliens living five galaxies over and that they're just out there somewhere, I'm kind of more on your side than that they're here because just like big foot like we have camera traps we have DNA sequencing through through water now like we can you tell me no one found

So aliens in the strict biological sense like like like like horseshoe crabs. we agree that they're not, we haven't found physical aliens.

Yo, there's a moth. The size of a small eagle. Just try to get his 50 minutes.

Lex, I love you. All right, so what you're, wouldn't it be interesting? It would be really fascinating to me. if we found out that there were aliens living among us and we couldn't see them. And what some of the people were calling aliens, the scientists, the religious people were calling angels. And then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens or angels, there are these, there is more way more to the universe than we're realizing. I just, for me, the fact that there's

There's a skull in your hand. There's now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bullet in its head that I found on the floor of an indigenous community where they eat monkeys. I didn't kill the monkey, so save your comments. But you know, in terms of of the animals, I think that when I see space, it, my feeling, and I'm not requiring anybody else to have this feeling, but because we know, because it's the only place that we know that there's life, and we have no idea how it started, I just think it's so important to protect it and, and, and for me, it's just as much about our children as it is about the little spider monkeys and the little baby came in that are in the river right now because life is so beautiful. And I think that there's a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer off of ourselves. If we go, yeah, the rivers are filled to trash. And yeah, extinction is happening. But we have to be an interplanetary species anyway, because at any moment, this could all end from an asteroid and like everything's going to shit anyway. And so it's like, we're fucking up this planet. And it's like, that's, we're just being angry teenagers who are, you know, going God for a while. And it's like, what if you just, World up your sleeves and said, holy shit, wait a second. You know, we can pretty much do whatever we want. We can fly all over the world. We have we can do heart trans plans. We can watch Netflix and the Amazon if we wanted to like we could do all this amazing stuff. We can capture on video or adventures and go back and watch them again and again and again. There's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do and whether we're the richest in history. I mean, we can do everything. We could cross the whole planet in a second and it's like that's an amazing time to be alive and if we just don't fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals we got it made

Yeah, if I were to hold a human skull, it'll give you uh it'll it'll it'll it'll it'll it'll way on you for a second because you look into this the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you go you feel your own cheetah you feel your own skull and you go holy shit you go what is going on it's like taking acid you just go oh boy I forgot that I'm a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating rock but even even a monkey yeah it's like looking at a ancestor

There's something, it's something kind of terrifying about that image to me. Like when I hold that every now and then at night you hold that skull and it just reminds you that you're temporary.

Well, that's what I meant once again. Do you have a lighter? Yeah, bro. You want to light this blunt?

I mean, my favorite absolute favorite animal to interact with is 100% elephants, which there's no elephants here, but I've been incredibly privileged to spend some time with elephants both in India and in Africa and I think that they're so smart and so complex that we do a really bad job of understanding what an elephant really is. I think that most children probably think of elephants as like something kind of cuddly. Most adults probably think of having a similar misconception of them. When you see an elephant, when you see a 12 foot tall bull elephant with bone coming out of its face with huge tusks and those giant, it's an octopus-faced butterfly-eared behemoth that's a survival machine and it'll look at you and just go. do I have to kill you to keep safe and it's just they're so tough and they have they've dirt on their back and they flower petals and that little hair you realize they've hair all over their body and the power to throw a car over to flip it just one of the most impressive animals on earth and I think that I've gotten really good at interacting with wild elephants in a way that's respectful to them. And I think that when an elephant allows you to be in its space, it's because you're showing submissiveness and respect for the elephant's space. and they're so intelligent that they're communicating with seismic vibrations through the earth that they have, you know, a matriarchal society that they can remember the maps of their ancestors and they know how to find water that they can solve problems. There's such beautiful animals and they're so talk about aliens, they're so alien-looking. These big weird heads and the trunks with all those muscles and they're so different than us, but yet I actually think that we grew up together. You know, they kind of raised us sibling species that we've been we've inhabited the same epoch in history and and we've relied on the ecosystems that they've created and I think that they have a deep understanding of humans elephants and I think I see them more like aliens, more like non-human beings that we share the earth with. So I don't see it as we're humans in their animals. I actually see elephants as sort of a separate society, along with humans as one of the dominant species on the planet.

Yeah, I think Wales, I think elephants, I think that there's those higher, you know, no one suggesting that sardines are, you know, somehow need human rights or something, but I think the elephants need representation in governments because they influence their landscape, they engineer their environment, they have emotions, they have families, they have burial rituals, they're so like us. And yet we treat them like they're just oversized cows that we have to be scared of. They're not, they're not the same as domesticated livestock. They're one of the treasures of earth. I mean, look, let's just say a little green men showed up. And you say they said, well, what's earth? It's like, well, there's mountains, there's rivers. It's like, well, how do I do this? You know, there's mountains, rivers, there's elephants. Like it's like one of the first things a baby learns is elephant. Even if you've never seen one, it's just so iconic on earth. Like you said, um, um, Darren Arnowski, Darren Arnowski, um, the elephant walking over the camera. I haven't seen it.

I mean, I mean, elephants, there's something really impressive and why is about them. There's also a beautiful weird that isn't so, that doesn't come with so much grandeur. Like, to me, a giraffe is beautifully weird, but they're just, you know, they're 18 foot tall, camel deer, things with, you know, giant necks and they're strange and they're absolutely serenely beautiful, but they don't have that. deep intelligence that that elephants have. There's something that elephants have.

A lot of people, a lot of the, when I was reading friends to Wall's book, a lot of what he was saying was that, you know, people give elephants human problems to solve in controlled environments and call it, you know, a study on elephant intelligence, whereas if you're watching wild elephants and you're in the wild, you're gonna be watching them in a way that they're looking, you've pulled up in a safari vehicle, or you've pulled over to the side of the road, and the elephants are wary of you, so they're not acting natural. But as soon as you start watching wild elephants, truly in the wild and comfortable with your presence, you see how they start caring for their babies, or how they can get annoyed. I once watched elephants around a water hole, and there's this Warthog and I don't know why, but this Warthog decided you needed to get in. And there was this young male elephant and he kept turning around to this word hog and just being like, don't make me do it. Now this elephant did not need to hurt the word hog. And the word hog was just like, I need a drink, I need a drink much simpler. The elephant was like, you could just tell he was like, watch this. And he just went, and crushed the word hog like it was a big beetle. And crushed his pelvis and the word hog dragged itself away on his front legs and probably went off to die. But this young elephant put out his ears and he like, paraded around his tail off and he was like, look what I did, destruction. And it's like that's a very relatable type of. He was annoyed with the wardrobe. Yeah. And so you see them do these things. I mean, the most magical thing, and I've spoken about this many times, was that I was walking with a herd of semi-wild elephants that were crossing through a village in India because elephants have lost a lot of their territory because there's so much population in India. And so we're crossing through a village which is very delicate because the matriarchs are leading the babies and there's villagers who have no idea what an elephant is and they're watching the elephants cross. and the matriarchs back this girl up against the wall and she was terrified standing there with her back against the wall and the elephant just put her trunk out and touch the girl's stomach and then the other elephants came and they all started touching her stomach and the the the the the the ranger there explained to me just She's pregnant. They know she's pregnant. They can smell, they can tell, and they're curious, and they all the female elephants came to investigate the pregnant girl. And she had no idea what was going on. It's like that stuff. That stuff.

That one is sexy, which that's a bamboo rat calling out for a mate.

Of course. And what I really like is that you said is there a perception of what's right and wrong because elephants have a code of ethics. And so as the simplest example is that as young males begin to grow they start developing these tusks and those tusks are a tool and they use them. So for Indian elephants the females don't have tusks and the males do. The females kick the males out of the herd. The females keep all the sisters in the ants and the cousins together, but the males are their own thing. And so here's the thing. So what you get is these crews of male elephants. And the older males, well, you know, this play fighting that goes on around, you know, two young males can play fight, but the older males, they'll kick some ass. They'll show them how to behave. They'll explain who gets to talk to the females, who gets to interact, who gets to mate, who gets the best vegetation to eat. And so there's an order established, and so young male elephants have to be taught how to act. Just like a teenage human has to be taught, you can't just Hall off and break another kid's nose, you got a there's going to be consequence. Maybe you get suspended or maybe that kid will get his friends and beat the living shit out of you. Whatever it is, society regulates your behavior and elephants have a very strict, very predictable sort of like the males teach the males how to run things and the females which which really have the final say they're matriarchal. They're the ones leading the herd where to go. The males follow where the, where the wise females tell them where to go.

Yeah, for an elephant. Right and wrong for an elephant is not the same as what's right and wrong for grizzly bear. Grizzly bear. If you're a male grizzly bear and you see a female with cobs, you just kill those cobs and then you can mate with that. You can mate with her and put your own cobs in there. And it's like that. It's a whole different type of

And that's why I think I resonate so much with elephants because they're I think they're I think that we're we are kind of matriarchal at least I grew up matriarchal like women were the force in my life. My family and most of my friends' families is women kind of have the final say. I feel like that's the way it is with elephants. You might be bigger and stronger, but it doesn't really account for much if you're not smarter and more emotionally intelligent. You know how to take care of the group.

I think to me, life is something that grows in response to stimuli, like in basic biology 101. I'm fine with that. I don't need it to be more romantic than that, but I think it's actually comical how How do you get from a rock to an orangutan? And our answer for that is primordial soup. Maybe there was just stuff on earth and then the stuff just got up and started walking. Maybe there was nothing happening and then there was all of a sudden there was a cell and the cell had function and then it complexified and then it started reproducing and found male and female parts and what? Like we are so under-equipped to understand how the hell we got here, let alone answer or even bacteria.

Because you can imagine I think that what the earth is four or four point five billion years old and you can imagine just this this rock of a planet with like rain and storms and elements and iron and granite and like just random stuff. It's pretty easy to imagine that. But then I remember that book there. I think we all the same book when we were kids and like they show this like fish like animal crawling out of a out of the primordial soup and it's like, bro, you just missed the most important part, author of that book, bro. And I think the first bacteria came in around three, three, three, point seven billion years ago. So there's like at least like, you know, a bunch of billion years where there's just nothing, there's just a planet. And then we start seeing fossils of the first bacteria.

I can't even get that far. I can't get from rock and sand to cells. That's a huge, I mean, I mean, to everything around us that has It's just, it's wild, even, and I could imagine being on another planet and how incredibly valuable this thing would be. It's impossible to replicate. I'm looking at it through the candle light right now, and I can see all of the structures in this leaf, the incredible structures in this leaf that look exactly like the veins in my arm, which look exactly like the rivers that are flowing across this landscape, and it's like life has this overwhelming pattern that it uses, and it's so beautiful. I just think it's... Yeah, when you imagine that the the days of the lightning and the volcanoes and the primordial soup it's It's there's there's a big gap there and it's it's fascinating to think about and it's fascinating to see how different people's belief systems Leave them to different answers there not to go any spoilers, but postcard from earth so Darren Aroski's film the idea there is there's probes that are sent out from earth.

That's so beautiful and one of the things that I think I want to see that so much and one of the things that I love about Aranovsky's work is the fountain and what I find so beautiful about that is that now here he's saying okay we're sending probes out to other worlds alien civilizations and in the fountain it was sort of what I thought he did so beautifully was braid together those three stories where in one I don't remember if he's in a spaceship or if that's supposed to be like his soul. The other one, he's a scientist in sort of like comparable times to hours and then he's the Spanish explorer. But either way, there's the tree of life. And it sort of braids together all of the major religions. And it made me think of that quote that you hear where it says, you know, God, what was it? Christ wasn't a Christian and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't a Muslim. They were all just teachers who were teaching love. And it's like the fountain the fountain sort of says nature is that that driving force and it's our job to understand that the game is love and that's what that's what the main character and the fountain needs to learn is that it's that it's nature that's going to just that's going to carry your soul through this this this thing and that there's so much you don't understand in the epiphany at the end got to love that movie

I think we got it all wrong. No, I don't know. It seems like they changed it all the time. You know, they say, they say that Easter Island, you know, when I was in college, they were big on telling you that Easter Island, they ruined their environment and, uh, They environments of collapse. And that's why there was nobody on Easter Island. It was a cautionary tale. We could ruin our environment. And now it seems like they've changed their mind on that. And then when humans entered North America seems to be hugely up to speculation. And the Africa spreading that we all spread out of Africa and then the place has seen overkill extinction theory and it's like It seems like every few years they update it, and they change it. And they say, oh, the guys, no, no, no, the guys from 10 years ago actually my new theory is the best theory. Let's write some books and get me on Letterman. And it seems like there's a new prevailing theory that's really always exciting and edgy about how we got here and where we came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political implications. Like how we should use the Amazon moving forward. Like, the Amazon was engineered by people. So, fuck it. Let's just cut it down.

It's confusing to me to imagine like what, I don't even know what, like what ended the, where the Egyptians go, like what happened to it? Yeah, they were doing so good. That's so much cool shit. But I mean, I was reading anthropological stuff in the Amazon about tribes that, you know, just through their societal structures and through their hunting practices that didn't really develop practices that worked and kind of bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger societies. And there's a lot of people that got it wrong. You know, for every explorer that that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America. There's probably 100, 100 more that just die at sea, get eaten by sharks, you know, avalanche and it's just it's so fascinating to me that we all of us really passed our grandparents don't really even know where we came from. Like, do you know who your great, great, great grandparents are like, no.

Oh, God. I love shackles in, but I hate the cold, so I can't even read about it. I hate the cold so much. I can't even go there for fun. I think Percy faucet in the Amazon was was was was was the goat in terms of just sheer. the last of the Victorian era, you know, march forward, go deeper, just stop it, nothing, and then eventually take such big risks that you never come back. It's hard for me to relate to that kind of exploration, because to me, I'm such a softy. I wouldn't want to leave my family behind. I wouldn't want to. Like, even if you told me that I could leave Earth and go exploring, and I could go touch the moon, I'd be like, nope. Absolutely not. Like the highway is dangerous enough. Like I would never risk dying in space. This guy left his home went out into the jungle out there with horrendous gear compared to the camp and gear we have today. No headlamp and just explored for years on end.

And they said he ran into uncontacted tribes and started goofing off. I think he started dancing and singing like the tribes were ready to kill him and he started goofing and doing a song and a dance and just being ridiculous. And the tribes were like, what now? And they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't shoot him yet. That's a funny one. Yeah. they actually he kind of like on a human level used used humor to save his own life on multiple occasions to the point where he deescalated the situation was like look we're not here to fight we're here we have a pile of maps you know all my guys have buried buried den game all area like we're dying out here if you guys just go on your merry way we'll go on our merry way and like incredible he was so tough and then that guy from shackleton's expedition ended up on one of faucets expeditions and you go oh yeah he's a he's a proven explorer he's been through the Antarctic and the guy was like fuck the jungle absolutely fuck the jungle he was like and and there's a great quote where he says without a machete in something you know I don't remember exactly the words he used to be said without a machete in this environment, you don't last. Yeah. And you know that now. Like you, you in that tangle to just take three steps that way, would I would immediately be taking on, I mean, I'm not wearing shoes right now. Yeah, bullet hands, venomous snakes spikes through my feet, tripping over myself. I don't have a headlamp. Unbelievable risk right there. We're sitting on the edge of tragedy.

So this is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying. This is in my hand for 90% of my time. And in the jungle, you really need a machete. There's so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through. And like a Jaguar and Osla, a lot of these other animals. that are more horizontally based and low to the ground. They can make it like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them and it's dangerous. And there's as you hit the bamboo at ricochets and have spikes and then one piece falls and it pulls a a train of vine that has spikes on it and that hits you in the neck and it's just the jungler savage to humans. But if you are a Gucci, a little rodent, or a Jaguar, or a deer, you can kind of slip through this stuff. And the deer have developed really small antlers. They can just kind of weave through, load of the ground. And so for us being these vertical beings walking through the jungle. It really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement at all times. So a machete is just a very, very useful tool. It could help you pull thorns out of your body as you saw last night. We can use it to find food.

You could, well, let's explain it, because the way the machete hit this fish, it kind of took his eyes off and his lower jaw was still there. So it was really just like the brain and the top jaw that came off. And this fish, as the dust cleared in this stream, this fish was I found it very haunting in a very interstellar way. It was just the programming was still there. But the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving and it was going to die. But it was still swimming and it looked like a live fish. It was still trying to catch it.

Because at the time I caught it, it would freak out and then jump back in the water. And I'm programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon that everything can hurt you. So you actually become quite You know, if a moth lands on you, you flick it because it could be a bulletin. And so even the fish here a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them. And so even though I know that fish, I know it's name, I've eaten them many times. As I was holding it, when it would twitch with that explosive power, just like the came and I would I would get that fear response and release it. And so that happened three or four times before I finally said this is stupid. Even though he's slippery, he hasn't got ahead. I can hold on to my put on my pocket and put on my pocket.

That's what mechanism. Strangler figs. Strangler figs as you go across the world's ecosystems that hold belts of whether you're in rainforests and the Amazon, the Congo, Indonesia all across the tropics you have Strangler figs and the amazing thing that this that this species does, it's become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper-influence on its ecosystem wherever it is because they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forests is making it hard for animals to find fruit, to find food, and so the bats, the birds, the monkeys, they all go to the stranglifig, they eat the fruit, and the fruit, of course, is just tricking the animals, the plants are tricking the animals into carrying their seeds to another tree, and so they're getting free transportation. Monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating stranglifig, and then that stranglifig sends out its vines, gets to the ground, and then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients, out compits that tree for a light, grows hyper drive around the trunk of that tree and then eventually that tree will die and the strangler fig will win because it got a boost up to the top. Whereas these little trees down here, they're going to have to wait their turn. They have to wait until the tree falls until there's a light gap and then they have enough food to grow quick. And so this whole thing is an energy economy. Everything is just trying to get sunlight and so strangler figs Yeah, top-down trees growing, or parasitic top-down octopus trees growing over other giant trees. And you've seen the size of some of the trees here.

See, the thing is, those guys didn't go with the locals. They came down here with like mules and they tried to do it their way. And so he's one of the people that wrote about the green hell. the jungle as the oppressive war zone where there's nothing to eat and everything is killing you and it's I think I think that that image is so wrong because as you saw last night we could go if we went out with JJ right now we would machete fish some fish we could start a little fire we do it all in shorts like to JJ it's green paradise And it's intense, but if you know what you're doing, which the local people surely do, well, then just beneath the sand, there's turtle eggs that you can eat. And inside the nuts on the ground, there's grubs that you can eat. And if you really needed to, you could just jump on a came in and eat that, because the tails are pretty full of meat. And it's like, there's actually an ending amount amounts of food here. And so they were pretty, you know, they were strange.

Yes, but we're coming at that with our modern lens because we're coming down here with I've survived how many infections in the jungle were those probably would have killed me before. So my dead ass opinion of the jungle would have been overwhelming and collective murder, as her as dog says. And so Percy Foss, it was coming down here with this view of it's trying to kill us at all time. But we are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability to survive infections. And so it is different for us. It is different. We're coming at this very, very different. But Foss, to me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers like the really batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the into the dark spaces on the map and it's very hard for me to identify with him but with for instance Richard Evans Schulties from Harvard That's someone where you go, okay, now we're getting to the point where I can start to understand. Jimmy just like the conquisitor, and they tell you the conquisitor showed up, and you know, they killed the Spanish killed 2000 Inca on the first day, and then they marched to this city, and they're like, when I hear about that, can you imagine yourself just like slaughtering a bunch of women and children and soldiers, and then just like drinking some wine and doing it again tomorrow? I can't actually wrap my head around that.

Yeah. Like I just, I can't. Like if we saw a car accident, like if I saw a car accident, like, you know, or if you see a little bit of war, some violence, like it affects you, these people were so comfortable with those things. It was such a normal part of there that the Spartans, the, the Commanches, like they became so comfortable with war. So the point that it became what they did.

Meanwhile, half the world right now is messaging me saying my DMs are filled with take care of Lex. Don't lose Lex. Make sure Lex comes back safe. Lex is a national treasure. We love Lex. Make sure he holds a snake.

Richard Evans-Sholtis, I know about him from reading Wade Davis's book, One River, which is this big hefty, you know, five or six hundred-page tone about the Amazon and it covers two stories. Richard Evans-Sholtis, and I think it's in the 40s, I think it's like pre-World War II era, where he's in the Amazon looking for the blue orchard and the cure for this and that and he's pressing plants and he's going to these indigenous communities where they still live completely with the forest and they and they drink ayahuasca and they they talk to the gods and they he learns about how they believe that the anaconda came down from the Milky Way and swam across the land and created the rivers and sort of he came down and and even though he was a western scientist from Harvard he embraced the indigenous perspective on the world on creation, on spirituality, and he sort of resigned himself and gave himself fully to that and spent years and years traveling around parts of the Amazon that had hardly been explored and certainly never been explored in the way he was doing it, in the ethnobotanical, spiritual way of what medicinal compounds are contained in these plants and how do the local indigenous people use and understand them. For example, you know, if 80,000 species of plants in the Amazon rainforest and 400 billion trees in the Amazon rainforest, the statistics of likelihood that through trial and error, that humans could discover Ayahuasca, It's astronomical that one of these trees and a root when put together allow you to go access the spirit realm and see hallucinogenic shapes and talk to the gods. That's almost enough to inspire spiritual thought itself, the fact that trial and error it would take like millions of years or something it's it's it's I forget what the figure is it's incredible but Richard Evan Schultes was one of the first people that came down and saw that and then one river is where weighed Davis comes back I believe in the seventies and the heartbreak of the book is that all of these incredibly wild places with with naked native tribes and these these intact belief systems weighed Davis comes back in a lot of the same places that Schultes went Now there's missionary schools and they're wearing discarded Nike's and you know, whatever. I don't know if there's Nike's in the 70's. But like Western stuff has made it in. They've been contacted domesticated forced into Western society and You know, a lot of them then forget the thousands and thousands of years that have gone into creating the medicinal botanical knowledge that the indigenous possess about how to cure ear infections and how to treat illnesses from the medicinal compounds flowing through these trees is lost in a single generation with the modernization.

I was reading about Ayahuasca and their staying at Sarah Saints statistically. If a bunch, if you put 1,000 humans in the Amazon and gave them villages to live in because humans are communal species, It would take tens and tens of thousands of years, or perhaps even centuries, before even the possibility. It's like that thing, you know, a bunch of chips on a keyboard, because they write hamlet. It's like astronomical odds to get to, oh wait, this and this dose together. And so what the local people believe is that the gods revealed this secret through the jungle to us as a link to the spirit world. And that that's how we know this. Because if they didn't remember it from their ancestors, we would have no idea how to get this information from the wild.

I think that Ayahuasca is... I can only speak from personal experience. And for me, it was, as if your brain is a house you've lived in your entire life, and it's a big house to mention, and there's many, many rooms that you didn't even know exist hidden rooms behind the bookshelves, under the floorboards, rooms that you had no idea were there, and some of them are fantastic, and some of them are terrifying basements. and ayahuasca takes you on a journey through that. At its most effective, you sit in front of the shaman with the candle light, with the sounds of the jungle, and you drink the substance, and after that what happens is the journey is all inside, and the shaman is supposed to be able to guide you through that. But in my experience here, You're so deep inside, like falling through nebulas out in space, no physical form or crawling through the jungle. It's really, really powerful. It's not like the recreational drugs that everyone does. Like where you go, I did mushrooms and I could see, so I could see music. And I was talking to my friends, but no, like your face down on the floor, usually vomiting, sometimes shitting. Um, you know, having dialogues with with the creator and that that that that can be that can be traumatizing as well as amazing.

I didn't even make my bed today.

I want to see you and Jordan Peterson, do I ask it together? I think that's the thing. I've kind of told you about, I've experienced some things that really made me believe that there's a benevolent force around us, but to me, I was like, was a ride through the scariest parts of the universe to sort of be like, here's what it could be like. You know, that's where I came up with my idea that, you know, like deep space or just space out of space. It's just the outside of the video game and this is it because when I was on I was I was I was one of the jungle creatures and I wasn't Paul and I didn't have a name. And for a long time, I saw many things. And I arrived at the spot in the jungle where there was a big tree and all the animals were there. And they were all not in words, not in any language that we can understand. But they were all discussing what to do about the threat. And it was all leaving. It was all flying up. And it was fire. And the jungle was being destroyed. And then after that, it was just space and stars and silence. Like crushing vacuum silence. for years. And that was terrifying. That was fucking terrifying. When I came back and I had hands, man. I could remember my own name.

When you say a video game, it implies that there's a player who's the player.

Oh, so then we're just

boxes in cities far away from nature they've completely lost track of everything that's real and they've started to think that we're living side of the simulation notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks that we're living side of a video game now they all know that it's real because they've had babies on the floor of a cold hut yeah they understand the consequences of life they understand the fish and how hard it is to get them in the basic rules of the wind and the rain and the river and that we all have to play by those and that it's and and you talk to a talk to a grieving mother and ask her if she's living inside a video game and it's like the people to me this this whole thing of a or we living in a simulation to me that's a that's that's the that's the that's the infirmary of of society starting to that to starting to to to to to to to to parody itself it's been people going I have no meaning in my life anymore so is this even real And again, go ask the Sherpa. Go ask the Eskimo. They're not. They're not.

Did you suffer enough to

So that's actually a really good way to, there was this moment that I watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle because we had no water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our hands and our feet and our legs and we were lost in the jungle and it was night time and we didn't know if a big tree was going to just fall on us and mouse trap kill us and there's a lot of uncertainty but I watched something very special happen to you and that was I saw you crouching by the side of this puddle wasn't even a flowing stream so we couldn't drink it and you were just trying to watch the sweat off of your shirt and you you looked at me and you just said the only thing that I care about right now is water And I feel like in that moment we were united in the in the simple reality of the fact that we were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary.

Yeah, there's this thing that they say with all the pleasure and life is derived from the transitions. When your cold warm feels good, when your hot cold feels good, when your hungry food feels good, and when you're that thirsty water becomes God and it's all you want. And also the other thing is that when you're when we're out there it felt so good to be so lost and so tired and so like we're doing levels like like how would you how would you describe the physicality of what we were doing the level of physical like exertion.

And so that's it, you go, I don't care anymore. And you reach out and you're just gonna lean against this tree and then what happened?

And then you have to care.

That was a really adventure.

Well, I mean, we were in the in the river in a thunderstorm, just a next above. We're all laughing our asses off. And I mean, we're in the river with the stingrays and the black came in and the forana and all electric yields and everything. And it's pitch black out. And then what were we doing? We're holding our headlamps off. And there's those swirling moths. Yeah. The infinity moths all making those geometric patterns. And it's like, we're just three ridiculous primates. three friends in a river just laughing. Yeah, because we were safer in that river than we had been in there and we were juicing that that that the thunderstorm was was compared to the war zone that we'd been living in the thunderstorm was safe and it was it really was a beautiful moment.

Man, water and those are those little oranges. Yeah. Those things. And then I would just say like, do you feel like I feel like running like no matter how much I run, I feel like the, like you run, you do a workout and then you stop. Maybe people who do altres feel this, but like I felt like the, we would, we woke up. It was like, you know, wake up at dawn 6 a.m. Let's start walking, you know, break camp, go. And it's like pretty much you just don't stop all day. And it's level 10 cardio all day long. And you're sweating buckets and there's no water. It's like you would never put yourself through that voluntarily. You couldn't, you'd never, you would never have the resolve to, to continue torturing yourself, except for that we were trying to make it to, to freedom, to get out. And it's like the obsession of that with the compass and the machete and the navigating fuck.

Well, I think that what we did was to a pretty extreme level because we left the safety of a river of knowing where we were and voluntarily got lost in the Amazon with very little provisions on a very, now that we're back, now that we experienced what we experienced, I really can't stop thinking about how fucking stupid it was that we did that. Because if we had gotten lost, Pico was saying to me, Even if you guys had one of you had broken your leg, it's, you know, days in either direction. Even if they had sent help for us, help would take how long to scour all that jungle sound doesn't travel. Even even a helicopter, even if they looked for us, they wouldn't be able to see us. How do we signal for help? can't really build a fire, and so it's like, if anything had gone wrong, if we'd gone a few degrees different to the west, would have taken us two more days. If we'd gotten injured, it'd be carry through that. And so somehow only afterwards am I really going, wow, thank God, we got out of this. Thank God, after I see so many people going, make sure nothing happens to Lex Friedman. I'd be the deadest mother fucker on earth.

I think that Jane is like a living historical treasure. Like I think somehow she's alive, but she's she's already reached that level where it's like Einstein, Jane Goodall, like these these these incredible minds and You know, growing up as a child, my parents would read to me because I was so dyslexic I didn't learn to read until it was quite old. My mom was a big Jane Goodall fan, and all I wanted to hear about was animals. And so I would get red to about this lady named Jane Goodall, this girl who went to Africa and studied chimps and who broke all the rules and named her study subjects, even though that wasn't what she was supposed to do. And she became this incredible advocate for Earth and for ecosystems and for, and she seemed to realize as a career went on that teaching children to appreciate nature was the key. because they're going, you know, with that thing, which she says, we don't so much inherit the earth from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children. We're just here, we're just passing through. And so if we destroy it, we're dimming the lights on the lives of future generations. And so she's been really, really cognizant of that. And she's been a light in the darkness. She's sort of in terms of saying that animals have personalities and culture and their own inalienable rights and reasons for existing and that human life is valuable. She's very big on that every day we influence the people around us and the events of the earth, even if you feel like your life is small and insignificant that you do have an impact. And I think that's a really powerful little candle out there in the darkness that Jane carries.

Bad S. The fact that she did what she did at the age that she did at the time that she did is incredible. It's actually incredible. She has that exploring gene and she also has that relentless, relentlessness is like this incredible quality. She just, you know, she travels 300 days a year, educating people, talking around the world, trying to help bolster conservation now before it's too late. and trapping 300 days a year is not fun. Trapping it all can be not fun.

Well, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, you could write volumes on what's inspiring about him. I think that, you know, he was he was a week asmatic little rich kid that that wasn't physically able that had no self confidence and he was very and he and Andy had pretty severe depression. He had tragedy in his life and He was very, at least for me, he's been one of the people, one of the first historical figures, where he wrote about the struggle to overcome those things. And to make himself, from being a week, as Maddock little teenager, to sort of strengthening himself and building muscle and becoming this barrel-chested lion of a guy who could be the president who could be an explorer. one of the rough writers and he's just everything he does is so is so hyperbolicly, you know, incredible. To come out of war and have the other people you fought with go, he, this guy has no fear. I mean, he must have just been a psychopath and had no fear. And then proving it further was that thing where he was going to give a speech to a bunch of people and he got shot in the chest.

And when he was speaking, his spectacle case and through his speech, And even though the bullet was lodged in his chest, this man said, don't hurt the guy that shot me. I believe he asked him why you do it. And then as he's bleeding and in the rain said, and no, no, no, I'm not going to the hospital. I'm going to keep going with the speech. What a badass.

I think it's all there is. If you hear about the people and I think that that is a tremendous metaphor for life because whether you hear about that playing the crash in the Andes and the people were alone and freezing and they had to eat each other and Some of them made it out. Some of them kept the fire burning. And Teddy Roosevelt voluntarily after being president threw himself into the Amazon rainforest and survived. It came so close to dying, but survived. And so perseverance is all of it. I mean, that's I think that's our quality as a human.

I mean, they're they're clearly pressing botanical specimens. They probably shooting birds and and and Roosevelt knew how to. New how to preserve those specimens. I mean he really was a naturalist so he knew exactly if he's seeing these animals to them where was where's will take a picture and identify it they were harvesting specimens taking them with them drying them out. For them it was totally different and and it could be the first you know there's. I don't know, I forget what JJ said. There's something like 70 species of ant birds here. And it's like, so how likely are you to be the first person to ever see this one species of bird? And so for them, you have this bird and so perfectly preserving that specimen. And I think a lot of non-scientific people don't realize that every species from blue whale to elephant to blue jade, asparagus, whatever, whatever species we have on record, their scientific specimens and the first people to see them shot them. And that's the museums are filled with these catalogs preserved birds that these explorers brought back from New Guinea and South America and Africa and then put into these drawers and And now we, we labeled them. And we said, this is, you know, this is red and green because this is Scarlet McCall. This is Brown Crested Ant Bird. And this is, and it's just they're just categorized.

Yo, what the human achievement

That spurred the Peru. It dude cages on pages of two cans and arasaries and hummingbirds and ant birds and and smoky brown woodpecker and and tropical screech owl which we just heard by the way. It's endless. Who knew there was so many birds?

Underlated cinema because in the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk, they're usually the ones that make up what is considered by many to be the anthem of the Amazon.

That's what a unrelated cinema sounds like. And it's usually like, oh, it is getting to be afternoon. It's kind of, it's almost like hearing church bells on a Sunday. It's like, you just, there's something about it. You go, ah, there he is.

I mean, really, but we talked about this, but like, you know, keeping, I have so many holes in my skin right now, if I have a mosquito, there we go. I have so many spots that I've scratched off of my skin because I'm a mosquito bites me and then I scratch it or the other big one is that I worry that I have a tick. Not deliberately, not with my thinking brain, but my, my, my, my, my semi-enbrain just wants to find and remove ticks. And so I scratch and then if my fingernails get too long, I remove my skin and then those beget, those get infected in the jungle. And so staying hyperclean, using soap, like basic stuff, keeping order to your bags, order to your gear, things in dry bags, make sure, you know, we, we explained that we got in the river during a thunderstorm. We didn't explain why we did that because the thunderstorm came when we had eaten dinner, but we hadn't set up our tents. And so we decided to cover our bags with our boats that we had been carrying, our pack rafts that we had been carrying in our pack bags. So all of our gear would stay dry. So the only thing we could do is either sit in the rain and be cold or sit in the river and be warm. And so keeping our gear dry, momentary discomfort for future, you know, that, that, that to me was an incredibly smart calculation to make is you really just you got to be smart out here you can't you know not running out of a headlamp while you're out on the trail and being stuck in that darkness yeah It really takes just being a little bit on your toes. And I find that that necessity of being on your toes is a place that I like to live in. It's just the right amount of challenge here.

No, it's been really funny watching you sort of shed your planning brain like day one. It was very much like so are we gonna and then I could tell I could see your I could see your brows sort of furrow when you I would go I don't know what time we're gonna get there and you go well, we'll just tell me and I'd be like I don't know what the jungle's gonna let us do. Let's record the podcast tomorrow. Okay, but if it rains, if it gets windy, if a free eye, it comes, if there's a Jaguar with rabies, anything could happen.

the size of school buses stacked and connected to other trees with vines so that when they fall, this millennium tree, this thousand year old tree boom, it shakes the ground, pulls down other trees with it. So if you're anywhere near that for a few acres, you're getting smashed. That's the end of you. And so the jungle at any moment that you're out there could just decide to delete you. and then the leaf cutter ants in the army ants and the flies and everything you'll be digested in three days. You'll be gone. Gone. No bones. Nothing. What do you think would eat most of you? I would hope that that like a king vulture with a colorful face would just jump like just get in there like right in the arms just like nature is metal just like when they like walk in through the elephant's ass. I'd want that on camera trap. I think that would be a great way to go.

Yeah, just rip out your intestines and just shake it. Victoria's over your dead body. Well, but also honor a friend. Yes, sure, but you know, you just you'd look so, you know, you're white naked ass land there in the jungle. You'd be like face down, shit.

And it had the GoPro amount to, you know, so it's documented. That's a really mind blowing.

I think he was fun to watch because he had this indominable spirit. He was just, he wasn't there to commune with nature. He was there to win. And he was like, to me, that's the pioneer mentality. He just, he was just, he goes, I'm a hunting guide. I'm out here. I'm gonna win that money. I'm gonna survive through the winter. He wasn't worried. I feel like so many people are like, they worry second guessing themselves. Am I in a video game? I don't know. What's my, you know, just questioning their entire existential identity in this guy was like, you know what? There's a muscox over there. I'm going to shoot it. I'm going to stab it. Now I'm going to make a pouch out of its ball sack and I'm going to live off that for the next few months and win half a million dollars. And that's an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed. Every time he would go, we got to get back to rock house and it became even though he's all alone. It was he had a big smile on his face and what made that season so great was that it was him. And then it was Callie. And Roland had You know, the muscle and could make rock house and then Kelly was was the opposite. She was his girl who, yes, she could hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and and she wasn't using raw power. But what was so endearing about her was that how much she loved being out there as hard as it was in his isolation isolationist as it was. She was smiling every time every time the show cut to her. She was like, hey everybody, it's morning. Can you believe the frost like you've been out there for a hundred days? Amazing opta. I think it was really an amazing show of that the game is all here. The game of life, the game of alone and the game of life because the same thing.

That was crazy, because I think it went in somewhere completely different and it migrated to her shoulder. And the way that understood that is because I said, that's impossible. Because I remember that. She's like, pull it on for sure. And she's like, there's something, and then she's like, pushes it out. And I remember like, I was like, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. How? Yeah. And it was because the barbs once it goes in, as you move and flex your body, it moves on a little bit each time and again, it's in my great. I didn't even think of that shit.

The spots on it. Yeah. She chose not to eat it.

So that's a thing. She was incredible and I thought as as as as as brash and sort of fun as Roland was she represented. Um, a much more beautiful take on on it and it was really heartbreaking when she lost because I mean, and like you said, still a badass.

It's kind of like Forest Griffin versus Stefan, but Stefan. Yeah. Like it was like, it doesn't matter who won. Yeah. You guys beat the shit out of each other like.

Honestly, I've done a, I'm 18 years in the Amazon man. I just, at this point, it's I couldn't sign up for another 100 days. At this point, I don't have that to prove. I've survived in the wild and I wouldn't want to voluntarily take 100 days away from everyone I know.

We're not meant for that. I really love the people I have in my life, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't, and you see it on the show. A lot of the people, big, tough X Navy seals who are survival experts who know what they're doing, they get out there and they go, you know what? I miss my family. And they go, it's not worth it. They have this existential realization and they go, we're only God. I only got so many years here, like let's, let's, this is crazy. It's just some money. Fuck it.

Well, I noticed that when things got especially hard and they did get especially hard when we were out in the wilderness that you would begin filming to share that struggle, but I also think that I've used that at times where, yeah, you go, well, maybe if I, cause if you can tell someone else about it, then you're on the heroes journey. And then it sort of has to make you braver. and it changes how you because you I'm cold and I'm tired and I'm hungry and this hurts and that hurts and I don't know when we're going to make it and how is this going to go and helps you know well guys were we're here going that way and and uh... and then you're like why got to keep going they're still out if you forget you have to step up that's one of the reasons i i want to family i think we have kids yeah you have to be like you have to be the best version yourself like for them all my friends with kids that I've seen them go through where until you have a family, you're just you're just playing around, man. I mean, you could do important work. You can you can have skin in the in other games, but it's once you have a little tribe of humans that depends on you. Yeah. If you take that seriously, if you want to do that right, it's one of the hardest things you could do. And it just it just changes everything.

a kid from New York who always dreamed since I was six years old, maybe even younger of going to a place where animals were everywhere, and there's big trees and skyscrapers of life. And so being dyslexic and not fitting in in school and reading about Jane Goodall and having Lord of the Rings be one of the things I grew up on. I just chose to come to the Amazon and the first person I met. was this local indigenous conservationist, named Juan Julio Durán, who was trying to protect this remote river, the Las Piadras River, which in history apparently faucet referenced either the Las Piadras, but he called it Tahuamano and said, don't go there. It was just a Shirley die from tribes. And so there's very few references to this river in history. It's stayed very wild because it's been a place that the law hasn't made it, that the government hasn't really extended to. Like, you know, we're sort of past the police limit. And so JJ was out here ages ago trying to protect this river before it was too late. And when I met him, I was just a barely out of high school kid with a dream of seat just seeing the rainforest, let alone. seeing a giant anaconda or having any sort of meaningful experience or contribution to the narrative and somehow overall the years that we began working together and sparked a friendship and began exploring and going on expeditions and bringing people to the rainforest and and asking them for help and manifesting the hell out of this insane dream that we had. I mean we didn't even have a boat we would take logs down the river We would have to cut a tree down every time we wanted to return to civilization. We'd have to cut down a ball-sit tree and float down the road. It was madness. It's madness. It's pure madness. And I don't know what made us keep going, but along the way, people showed up who cared and who wanted to help. And if it was a movie, it wouldn't even necessarily be a good movie, because you'd go, oh, please. You just telling me that you just kept doing the thing and just magically people showed up. But yeah, that's what happened. That's exactly the way one. We kept doing the thing that we loved. We said, it doesn't matter if we don't have funding or a boat or gasoline or friends or anything. We just kept going. And along the way, we found someone who could help us start a Ranger program. And then we found Daxa Silva who helped us fund the beginning of jungle keepers. And then people like Mosin and Stefan who are there making sure that this thing actually took flight off the ground. And then right around the time that we were wondering what was gonna happen and if we're all gonna have to quit and get real jobs and if we could actually save the rainforest from the destruction that was coming, Lex Friedman sends me a DM and honestly changed the entire narrative. Because up until then we had been We've been playing in the minor leagues, pretending, trying real real hard. And the listeners of your show in the moments after you published your episode with our conversation. began showing up in droves and supporting jungle keeper is putting in five, ten, a hundred, a thousand. We started getting these donations. And the incredible team that I work with, we all went into hyperdrive. Everybody, everybody started going nuts. We all started spending 16 hour days working to try and deal with the title wave that Lex sent towards us. Just because so many people knew that we were doing this, that was an indigenous lead fight to protect this incredibly ancient virgin Rainforest before it was cut and people resonated with that and so we we got this this this huge swell of support and this year we've we've protected thousands and thousands of more acres of rainforest because of that swell of support so current 50,000 acres what's the goal what's the approach to saving this rainforest since we printed this it's gone up to 66,000 acres it's And as you know, in each of those little acres are millions and millions of animal heartbeats and societies of animals. And the goal here is that we're between Mono National Park, Alto Pudos National Park, the Tambopata Reserve. We're in a region that's known as the biodiversity capital of Peru. One of the most biodiversity parts of the Western Amazon. And we're fighting along the edge of the trans Amazon highway. And so it's just a small group of local people and some international experts who have come together and used these incredibly outside of the box strategies to sort of crowdfund conservation. To go look, we know that this incredible life is here. We have the scientific evidence. We have the national park system. If we can protect this before they cut it down, we could do something of global significance. All these jaguars, all these monkeys, all these undescribed medicines, the uncontacted tribes that we share this forest with, could all be protected. And people have stepped up and begun to make that happen, and this people from all over the world, and it's incredible.

So the approaches that currently the government favors extractors. So if you're a gold miner, or a log, an illegal logger, or you just want to cut down and burn a bunch of rain forests and set up a cacao farm. The government's fine with that doesn't matter. You're not really breaking the law if you destroy nature.

Yeah, it's just wilderness. It's sort of just beyond the scope of it. It's not doesn't or the local people that technically owned the land out here, the local indigenous people. For instance, we fought this year to help the community of Port Don Nuevo who's been fighting for 20 years to have government recognized land. These are indigenous people in the Amazon, fighting to protect their own land. And you know what it was that was holding back? They didn't understand. how the system of legal documents worked to certify that title land. They didn't really have the funding to go from their very, very remote community into the offices. And so junglekeepers helped them with that. And so really all we're doing is helping local people protect the forest that is their world.

If people donate to junglekeepers, what you're doing is you're helping Someone like JJ, who's an indigenous naturalist, who has the vision, who has seen forest be destroyed. He's trying to protect it before it's too late. You're saving Mahogany trees, Ironwood trees, K-Pock trees, skyscrapers of life. Just monkeys, birds, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, this entire avatar on earth, world of rainforests that produces a fifth of the oxygen we breathe and the water we drink, this incredible thing. As far as I know, it's the most direct way to protect that. So the fact that we've You know, we have large funders who give us, you know, $100,000 to protect this huge swath of land. And that goes through things like this and through Instagram, you know, it goes directly to the local conservationists who who work with the loggers to protect that land before it's cut. But one of the most impactful things that has happened this year in the wake of our last conversation was that I got an email from a mother and she said, you know, a single mom and I work a few jobs and I can't afford to give you a ton of money. But me and my kids look at your Instagram often after dinner and they really want to protect the heart beats. They really want to protect the animals and the rainforest. And so we do, we give $5 a month to jungle keepers and it was to me that was so impactful because I used to be that little kid worried about the animals. And I saw how a few million rain drops can create a flood.

If we did, if let's just say some company organization, or if enough people donated it, let's just say we got that 30 million. That money would go directly into stopping logging roads, into creating a corridor, a biological corridor that connects. The uncontacted indigenous reserves with other tribal lands, with Mono National Park, with the Tambopata, which establishes essentially the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest. And what makes this groundbreaking is that we're not doing this in this traditional way, we're doing this, take it to the people. And that's what's been so exciting is that, you know, when he started this, when JJ started this 30 years ago, he had no idea. His father wanted him to be a logger. He didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old. He grew up bathing in the river. He had no idea that a bunch of crazy foreigner scientists were going to show up and But some guy in a James Bond suit was going to come down here with microphones and that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this incredible ecosystem and all those little aliens.

Yeah. I mean, look at Pico. Yeah. Pico used to be a log or full-time log, a long-time logger. Now he loves conservation. That's just like more conservationista. I'm like, yeah.

I think that we have a rare chance to do something against that darkness. I think that this is an example of local people who have taken action, done good work, been good to the people that have visited, harnessed a certain amount of international momentum, and now we're on the cusp of doing something historic. And so for the children in the communities along this river, It won't be being a prostitute in a gold mine. It'll be becoming a trained ranger. Like last month, our ranger coordinator and one of our female rangers went to Africa for a ranger conference. And it's like we're beginning to, this is someone from a little tiny village with attached huts up wherever she went to Africa. to talk about being a professional conservation ranger. And it's like, that's changing lives and her daughters, then she's married to Ignacio at the guy. Sure. Like, her, their kids are going to grow up seeing their parents walking around with the emblem on and go, oh, I want to. And then people like Pico and Pedro and all these guys that work here are going to go, well, we have to, we have to protect this forest. And then they start getting fascinated about the snakes. And then they start caring about the turtle eggs. And then all of a sudden they have a way of life. And nobody needs to go be. Nobody needs to go steal anybody's kids to be a prostitute in a gold mine. That's horrible. And so it's really a win-win for the animals, for the river, for the rainforest for people, where it's biocentric conservation. It's just making everything better.

It's interesting to me that the most devastating destruction of nature, the complete erasure of the rainforest, burned to the ground, sucked through a hose, spit out into a disgusting mercury puddle, like the complete annihilation of life on earth, goes hand in hand with the complete annihilation of a young life. It's like it's all based around the same thing. It's the light versus the dark. That's it's the destruction in the chaos versus a move towards order and hope and and and it is incredibly dark and this region is heavy with it.

There is, in the next year and a half, as you saw in your time here, there's roads working around the General Heapers concessions. All the work that the local people are doing to protect this land is trying to be dismantled by international corporations that are subcontracting logging companies here. And really what we need is 30 million dollars in the next two years to protect the whole thing. You've seen the ancient mahogany trees. You've seen the families of monkeys. You've seen the came in the river. All of this is standing in the pathway of destruction. That road, they're going to come down that road and men with chainsaws are going to dismantle a forest that has been growing since the beginning. This is so magical. Do you see the snake over there? Do you? I'm just going to, don't move. I don't want you to move. I'm going to just, this is one of the most beautiful snakes. in the Amazon rainforest. This is the blunt headed tree. Snakes. I've been hoping that you would get to see this snake.

Let's just let's just let's just go right back into this. Look at this little beauty creation. Let's keep you away from the fire. Look at this little blunt headed tree snake. Wow. Such an incredible.

Harmless little snake. If you put your hand out, it'll probably just crawl onto your hand. Just be real careful with the fire. So look, I'm just going to put them like this. Yeah, let's just snake safety. So he's a tree snake. Yep, nice and slow. Nice and slow. Nice and slow. So you nice and slow. Just really, so just be the tree. Be the tree that he climbs on. And this is like, again, this is a snake that's so thin and so small. There you go. There you go. Nice and slow. Just be the tree, let him crawl around. So he's going to try and do all this stuff. Let me see if I can just calm him down for a second. Let me just see. It's very active little snake. So see like the snake the other night. Okay, just come. Look at this. I can see the light through his body. To me, this is an alien. This is the strange little life form. His eyes are two thirds of his head. I'm not joking. You look at their skull. He's still tiny.

And also for everyone listening, the odds of that as we're sitting here doing this podcast that a snake would just be crawling by in the jungle might sound like something that would happen, but The density of snakes in the Amazon rainforest makes this a very unique experience.

Yeah, just to describe this as we were talking here, it's just a sort of banded white and brown snake with this tiny little head about the size of my pinky nail. Um, two thirds of this snake's head is made up of its gigantic eyes. It's got a small mouth. And it's about about a thirdistic as a pencil. It's basically a moving shoestring. It's incredibly, incredibly thin. The only thing I am thinking like so is that if we have Dan come and just do some shots of.

The snake that was crawling behind us in the jungle that we were talking about jungle keepers and what we could do. And the snake just showed up at that moment. And this is a very active little snake who's out for a hunt tonight and wants to find something to eat. This is a blunt headed tree snake. Totally harmless little literally a moving shoe string. Super beautiful little animal. When you talk about aliens to me, this is this is an alien. Like, what are you thinking? What are you doing right now? What do you think about the fact that we are handled being handled by these giant humans?

I just want you to try holding them and Real gentle. Just be the tree. Yeah. And just just kind of do the same thing you learned last night. Just run nice and gentle. Yep. And see he's holding on to my finger right now. He's just going up there. Perfect. Nice and easy. He's a little erratic. He's a little goofy.

Traffic. Traffic to the jungle. And then, for everyone listening, as we're handling the snake that we found that was crawling by us, like literally by our shoulders as we're talking. a bat flies through no joke eight inches from Lexus year. Like just zips past his head as he's holding a snake while we're sitting here in the jungle. It's just we're just in it now. Now he's going to try and back up. And how do you? Yeah, I want you to want you to encourage him to come back this.

Okay. I'm going to this is what I'm going to do. We're gonna say thank you, Mr. Snake.

And then a resumed normal podcast right now. Because we really are in the jungle. We really are in the jungle. That's one of my favorite snakes. That's one of my favorite little aliens on this planet.

Exactly. To me, I After almost 20 years down here, the people here have become my friends, the came and on the river, the monkeys. When I fall asleep at night, I think about all the different heartbeats, all the different little creatures here that when they bulldoze as far as when they chop down these trees that they've vanished, that we take away their world. And in that very evolutionary historical sense of remembering the primordial soup, it's like this, this little creature is surviving out here somehow and we have the chance to save it. And even if you don't care about the little creature on the pale blue dot, Each of these little creatures contributes to this massive orchestral hole that creates climactic stability on this planet. And the Amazon is one of the most important parts of that. And each of these little guys is playing a role in there.

What I find most fascinating about the uncontacted tribes is that while me and you are sitting here with microphones and a light, somewhere out there in that darkness, in that direction, not so far away is the crowflies. There are people sitting around a fire in the dark, probably with little more than a few leaves over their heads, who don't even have the use of stone tools. who only have metal objects that they've stolen from nearby communities. They're living such primitive, isolated, nomadic lives in the modern world. And they're still living naked out in the jungle. It's truly incredible, it's truly remarkable. And I think that it's because they can't advocate for themselves, they can't protect themselves. It's sort of like, well, we can let them get shot up by loggers and get their land get bulldozed while they hide. They have no idea that their world is being destroyed. But they're sort of the scariest and most fascinating thing out there right now in the jungle.

So from the best I understand it that at the turn of the century industrial revolution, We had sudden immense need for rubber for hoses and gaskets and wires and tires and the war machine and the only way to get rubber was to come down to the Amazon rainforest and get the local people who knew the jungle to go out into the jungle and and cut rubber trees and collect the latex and Henry Ford tried doing Ford Landia tried having rubber plantations but leaf blight killed it And so you had this period of horrendous extraction in the Amazon where the rubber barons were coming down and just reaping and pillaging the tribes and making them go out to tap these trees. And the uncontacted tribes said, no, they had their six foot long long bows, seven foot long arrows with giant bamboo tips and they moved further back into the forest. And they said, we will not be conquered. And since that time they've been out there and it's confusing because in a way they're still running scare to century later and their grandparents would have told them, you know, the outside world, everyone you see in the outside world is trying to kill you. So kill them first. So can you blame them for being violent? No. Is this river still wild? Because loggers were scared to go here for a long time for almost a century late. That's why this forest is still here. Yes. And so, is it a human rights issue that we protect the last people on Earth that have no government, no affiliation, no language that we can explain? We don't know what their medicinal plant knowledge is. We don't know their creation myths. We know nothing about them. and they're just out there right now with boson arrows living in the dark surviving the jungle naked without even spoons forget about the wheel forget about iPhones they got nothing and they're making it work we don't know their creation myths so they have a very primitive existence well do you think their values

This is complicated because the anthropologist in me wants to say that they have a historical reason for the violent life that they have. you know they experienced incredible generational trauma sometime ago and that and because they've been living isolated in the jungle that has permeated to become their culture they've become a culture of violence but yet that the the the contacted modern Indigenous communities that we work with that are my friends that work here. Just the other day, we were speaking to one of them who is pulling spikes out of your hand while he was explaining that he tried to help them. The brothers, they said, Manos, he tried to help them. He tried to give them a gift and what did they do? They shot him in the head.

They shot three arrows at him and one of them actually hit him in the skull and put him in the hospital and he got helicopter evacuated from his community. And so he's brave for surviving, but he's a lucky survivor. They are incredibly accurate with those bamboo-tipped arrows and those arrows are seven feet long. So when you get hit by one, they come out of velocity that can rip through you. And the range on a shotgun is way shorter than the range on a long bow. He's talking about a couple hundred meters on a long bow. and their deadly accurate, they can take spider monkeys out of a tree. And so, their stories of loggers And I've seen the photos of the bodies of loggers who were tracked, who attacked one of the tribes. And the tribes hadn't done anything. But these loggers came around and bent. They started shooting shotguns at the tribe. And the tribes scattered into the forest. And as the loggers boat went around and bent, they just started flying arrows. Took out the boat, driver boats, skidded to the side. And then everybody was standing in the river and you can't run. And the tribe just descended on them and just porcupine them full of arrows.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first 15 years we were doing this, we there would be times that JJ would be busy in town with his family and I would For sheer love of the rainforest, I would have to come alone out here. And we didn't have running water, I didn't have light cell ahead. It was a couple of candles in the darkness in a tent and I was 20 something years old living in the Amazon by myself. Your boat sunk. And yeah, it's incredibly lonely. I had to learn through experience because I thought there's a period, I think when you're young, As a young man, I had this thing, like I wanted to prove that I could be like the explorers. I wanted to prove that I could handle the elements that I could go out alone, that I could have these deep, connective moments with the jungle. And it's like I did that. And that's great. And you know what the kid from into the wild learned right before he died in that bus, that if you don't have somebody to share it with, doesn't matter.

for me it's comforting being out here because I find the the rat race the national narrative the the the the the need to make money that's a worry about war to to be outraged about the newest thing that that politician said and what that actor did and it just there's always just this just unending sort of media storm and and and everyone's worried and everyone's trying to optimize their sunlight exposure and find the solution and buy the right new thing and to me coming out here. First of all, I mean something out here because I can help someone. I can help people. I can help these animals and so I find my meaning out here. But also, you know, there's the losing the madness over the mountains. It's nature has always and for many people been where things make sense. And to me, I think I'm a simple analog type of person that it makes sense that when it rains, you get in the river to stay warm. And you know, you wait for the dawn and you see a little tree snake. And you say, it just, it just, it makes, it makes more sense. And I think that the, the overwhelming, teaming complexity that is inside the, the ant mound of society can be dizzying for some people. And I think that maybe it's the dyslexia, maybe it's just that I love nature. But um, now if I, when I land in JFK, I I feel like a frightened animal. I don't know. It's as if you release like a, like a, some animal that had never seen it until like into time square. And you can just imagine this dog with its ears back running away from taxis and just cowering from the noise. And it's just hustle and bustle and people are brutal. And how much you want it for? Get in the car and screaming over the intercom and just everything, everything, sensory changes. Let's get home. Okay. Let's go. You got a meeting. You got to get to the next place. You got to give a talk. You got to say, out, out here. When we finish up here, what are we going to do? We're going to eat some food. Maybe go catch a crocodile. I'll walk around the jungle and I like it's lower. It makes sense. And and there's that again, there's that deep meaning of of that here where we can be the guardians for good. We can we can we can be we can hold that candle up and and know for sure that we're protecting the trees from being destroyed and it's that simple thing of just this is good. There you go. It's simple. In society, I feel like everyone's always losing their minds and forgetting the most basic of fundamental truths. And out here, you can't really argue with them. You know, when we needed water, it was like shit. If we don't get water, we're fucked. And that's to me, that's where the camaraderie comes from, because no matter what, we can go to the most fancy ass restaurant, the biggest most famous people in the world, doesn't matter.

Well, I don't need more because I've come to believe that there is a benevolent God spirit creator taking care of us and I don't think about my own death. We have a little bit of time here, and we clearly know nothing about what we're doing here. And it seems like we just have to do the best we can. And so it doesn't scare me. I've come close to dying a lot of times. And I just don't think, you don't want to have a bad death, first of all. You don't want to be a statistic. You don't want to find out. You don't want to try out a be the first to try out a new product and oops it crushed you you know that that's that's a terrible way to go or the people that used to you know the gold rush they were using mercury and they're all getting or led it was led poisoning and it's like oh mid you know few million people died that way and it's like you want to You want a good death, you know, you want to staring down the eyes of a tiger, hanging off the edge of a cliff, saving somebody's life. That's something something worthy. Warriors death.

Yeah. That would be fun.

If I have a percentage of Steve or when I would be honored, but I think there's only one Steve, I think that he occupied his own strata of just shining light. Everything was positive enthusiasm, love, and happiness, and save the animals, and do better, and let's make it fun. And that was so infectious that it sort of transcended his TV show, it transcended his conservation work, it transcended business and entrepreneurship, it just through sheer magnetism and enthusiasm. He just, I mean, everyone knew who Steve was. Everyone loved Steve. We still all love Steve. And so it's just, it's just amazing what one spirit can do. So if anybody, you know, makes that comparison, I get, I get really uncomfortable because to me, Steve or when it's like, just, just the goat. And so I'm okay with that.

That is a dark question, but I think most likely I'll get whacked by loggers. I think that loggers are gold miners will take me out. I don't picture myself going from animals, but that would be heartbreaking too. Yeah, it would, but yeah, at the same time though, like the Kurt Cobain value of that, if I died doing what I love to protect the river, that would be so worth so much more a lot, like we'd get the 30 million if I died tomorrow for sure. So we've already already talked about this with my friends. I'm like, if I get whacked, do the foundation, make the documentary, protect the river, protect the heartbeats, call it the heartbeats, jungle keeper, the heartbeats. You know, be ready for it because these these things do happen people get pissed if you get in their way and as many happy people as and who whose lives were changing this also going to be some jealous shitty upset people who are mad that they can't make prostitutes out of young girls and keep destroying the planet and so they might just erase you me

Yeah. Somebody you can live up to this, not as old. Yeah.

That's the thing, I don't, you know, my life has been the United Nations of whatever. Like I just ever, to me, I just, I don't, that's the other thing. You go back to society and everyone's obsessed with, with race. To me, I'm like, look, leopards have black babies and yellow babies. One mother, like they're all leopards. and I'm so color blind and race blind and everything else I've lived in India and my friends approved me and my family we got the Italian Filipino just everything and so I'm so immersed in it that when I find it very jarring and disconcerting how much time we spend talking about different religions and it's just the differences in humans. I'm like, dude, we're we're talking about whether or not our ecosystems are going to be able to provide for us. We're talking about nuclear, what we're talking about this in pretty serious shit on the table. And we're over here arguing over like shades of gray. It's so trivial. And that should drive me crazy. And as does the outrage where it's like, no, you have to care. I've been criticized for not caring enough about that. And I'm like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, the, the, the, the, who cares what the hell I am? Who gives a shit with the hell? I'm a human, we're all human. Yeah. It's not that easy, but it's kind of fun sometimes. And, and we're at a better time and hit, like when you think about like the middle ages, like even if you were a king, you still didn't have that good. You didn't have pineapples in the winter. You didn't even know what the fuck a pineapple was. We have pineapples whenever we want them. We can fly on planes to other countries.

That's sure not everybody has that.

No. But a growing number of people today can feast on pineapple, can feast on pineapple and have toasters and new distracting apps all the way until the grave.

On occasion. I'm trying to survive glaciers and jungles and avalanches and all kinds of shit.

I think the brutality of nature is the chaos. And I think that we are the only ones in it that are capable of organizing in the direction of order and light. So yes, there are going to be hyenas tearing each other apart. Yes, there's going to be war torn nations and poor starving children, but we as humans have the power to work towards something more organized than that.

It's kind of a unifying theory if you think about it. I mean, all of the chaos of history and the wars and the chaos of nature, we through technology and organization, there's so many people more people today than ever before, I think, who are so concerned, who realize that the incredible power like what Jean Goodall says about, you know, how you can affect the people around you, how you can do good in the world, how you can change the narrative of conservation from one of loss and darkness to one of innovation and light. Like we can do incredible things. We are the masters. as humans. And I think that I think that we're on the cusp of sort of understanding the true potential of that. Like I just think, I just think that more than ever people have harnessed this ability to do good in the world and be proud of it and just change the darkness into something else.

I've come to believe that, again, back to that, that Christ wasn't a Christian, Muhammad wasn't a Muslim, and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist, that like the game, the game is love and compassion. And the universe is chaotic and dangerous and nature is chaotic and dangerous. But we, if this is some sort of a biological video game, the reality that the test is, can we be good? And we go through it every day. Can you be good to your parent? Can you be good to your partner? Can you be good to your co-workers? It's so difficult. And we see how people can cheat and steal and hurt and destroy and and the incredible impact that it has on the world, the returning exponential impact that one act of kindness, one act of good can do. And so, I see nature as God. I see the religions as different cultural manifestations of the same truth, the same creative force. Maybe me and you have the same beliefs and your aliens are my angels.

Thank you for being enough of a psychopath to actually just sign on to come into the Amazon rainforest in a suit. And a year ago when you told me that you were going to do this, I truly didn't believe you. So for being a man of your word and for the incredible work you do to connect humans and to create dialogue and to do good in the world. And for all the adventures that we've had, thank you so much. Thank you, brother.