Danny Jones Podcast - #164 - Strange Ancient Discoveries are Being Made in the Amazon Rainforest | Paul Rosolie

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Paul Rosolie is a conservationist, explorer, author, filmmaker, and “real-life Tarzan.” For much of the past 17 years, Paul has lived deep in the Amazon rainforest protecting endangered species and trees from poachers, loggers, and the foreign nations funding them.   EPISODE LINKS  JungleKeepers: https://www.junglekeepers.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulrosolie JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon  Danny  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny Outline 0:00 - Introduction  0:52 - Moving to the Amazon rainforest  3:00 - How the jungles changes you  7:10 - Snakes  20:23 - Getting eaten by an Anaconda  32:53 - Why the Amazon jungle is dying  46:08 - Economics of the rainforest  55:24 - Rogue gold mining operations  59:26 - Piranha  1:06:30 - Uncontacted tribes  1:27:07 - How the Amazon river was formed  1:34:53 - Ancient civilizations  1:44:17 - Pyramids in the Amazon  1:49:44 - Hunter / gatherer chemistry  2:00:37 - Violence & murder  2:13:55 - Human nature & desperation  2:17:06 - Hopeful future  2:23:54 - Cocaine manufacturing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

fascinating life story you have. It's a weird, weird path I chose. How old were you when you decided to officially move to the Amazon rainforest? I was 17 years old when I made the decision. I hated school. I was never good. I was getting into fights with gym teachers. I was getting suspended. I was just failing all my classes. And just my parents are awesome. My parents said, look, just forget it. They said, just forget the last two years of high school, go to college, save up money, do whatever you want. I said, do whatever I want.

So I'll do whatever I want. So I'm getting a plane ticket to the Amazon. What sparked that idea? You read books about people following their dreams and doing all this shit. And it's like, you're just a kid. Yeah. And I was like, I want that. I want to go out and, you know, find something amazing.

And to me, it was like the Amazon is the place that has more terrestrial biodiversity than anywhere else on Earth, not just now, but at any point in the fossil record. And so I was just like, get me on a one-way ticket to there. And then it took, it took like six months of emailing people and calling professors and trying to find a research position there. Because I didn't want to go as like a tourist. I didn't want to like go as like, there's a way people go to like Costa Rica. I don't want to go on like a rainforest vacation.

I wanted to go and authentically be in the Amazon rainforest. And so I found a research position with one of the local indigenous guys. This guy's name is Juan Julio Duran. and he's everybody calls him JJ and uh he had a small plot of land that he was protecting and he was doing that in collaboration with a PhD candidate who was doing research on bird populations in the region and they said look if you come and you do like four hours of bird research every day you can stay for as long as you want no shit and so I went there and it's like you know the first scene in Jurassic Park when they're like they pull up to the park and they have no

idea what they're about to see and then uh uh Dr. Grant sees the, he sees the brociosaurus for the first time and he grabs her head and he turns her head and the music swells and you get chills all over your body and they're like, oh my God, dinosaurs. That's what it was like going to the Amazon for the first time. It's like you, you can't be serious. That there are, there are these millennium trees that are thicker than this room at the base that go up 150, 160 feet that have entire ecosystems living on them. These are things that were like, these were trees that were alive. These were saplings when, Pizarro hit Peru.

When Columbus was still stumbling across the ocean, these things were growing in the Amazon. It's like monster trees, leaf cutter ants, jaguars, anacondas, all this crazy stuff. It was just like, this is a dream come true. It felt like I literally, literally felt like I had unplugged from the matrix and suddenly I'd gotten to the real world.

How did it, how long did you have to spin down there before it, did you, did it actually change you in any way? Oh, it physically changes you. Because we are, well, let's take it like this. You look at wildlife. Wildlife, you know, you have sharp teeth and claws and feathers and camouflage and all this different things that they have,

all these different attributes that they have that make them good at their lifestyle. We are soft. Like most of us have vitamin D deficiencies where our skin is soft. We don't have sharp teeth. We're not fast. You go to the Amazon and the jungle starts working on you. And, you know, the sun. Bakes your skin and then you're cold in the rain and if you're going with local guys the way I was

They were saying like you know let's go out and track some animals and they're like get the shoes off They're like way too much noise with the shoes and so you take your pathetic little You know gringo feet and start walking around the Amazon rainforest where you have 12 inch spikes coming out of the ground where you have venomous snakes scorpions all this stuff um but you start to develop harder calluses on your feet. Your skin tightens and becomes tan. You literally start getting stronger. You start losing weight.

Your strength to weight ratio sky rockets. You literally start changing. The jungle molds you. And then, of course, you're under constant assault from the mosquitoes, the ticks, all the other things that are after you. You're part of that ecosystem. So, yeah, it changes you physically, and then it also changes you mentally in the fact that you,

all these things that are dormant in us while we're living in society turn on. You know, we don't need a lot of the, you know, alarm receptors that we're born with that come standard in our bodies. We don't even know about them. And it's like, you know, the ability to know when rain is coming, the ability to sense the tempo of a forest. You know, the birds, you don't realize it, but when you walk through a forest, the birds will tell you what the tempo of a forest is. And so, you know, there's happy chatter when the birds are all just, you know, chilling and the sun is out and it's the afternoon. And then there's, there's that weird quiet right before a thunderstorm. And then there's other, there's more, there's other shades of it, you know, like if there's like a large

predator or like a snake going by, you'll have birds alarm calling in that direction. And you start to wake up to these little things. And sometimes it's not even a conscious thing. Sometimes you start, you start going, why do I feel like this is about to happen? And then, and then it does. And you go, what am I, what am I learning here? You know, it's sort of, it's sort of, it's sort of, it's of so vast that you can't quite put your finger on it. So mentally, physically, spiritually, it just, the jungle became everything to me. So when you first moved down there and you were doing, working on that research stuff with that guy, JJ, where were you living? What was it, did you have a car? Like, what was life like when you got down there? Oh, it's, I hope that

my local team gets to hear this. I'm going to play it for them because it's so funny because I was just, I was just over in Africa and they were asking the same thing. They were like, so how do you guys like get to the store? And I was like, so the only way to get to our, so JJ had a research station way out in the jungle. And so, I mean, this is a guy that grew up without shoes. You know, he was like out in the jungle. They were like supplementing, I think like 70% of their food came from like bushmeat that they hunted. And so to get to his research station that he chose to be far out in the jungle,

we used to have to leave town with two weeks of supplies. The first day you'd be going on a boat up river, up river, up river, up river, all day long, no matter what. And then you camp on the side of this beaches on the edges of the river and the drier months of the year. And so you camp on a beach and then the next day you keep going up river. And then finally you arrive at the research station, at the bank of the river, and then you have to carry two weeks worth of eggs, two weeks worth of rice, two weeks worth of everything up into the jungle over the staircase, up to the research station. And so it's a, it's a totally different type of lifestyle. So no, we don't have a, we don't have a car

you're out there. And then when you run out of supplies at that, especially at that time, we had like a little like, you know, radio. We could radio for town and they could send a shipment of food, but that would come in like four or five days. So like completely isolated. So and then how did you transition from moving to the rainforest and working down there in Amazon to making TV shows? That's an interesting story. So the thing is, as I started learning from JJ, he started basically, what it is. I mean, this guy knows the, so there's saps running through the trees of the Amazon that are medicinal. Like, and these are not like, you have to believe in it for it to work. This is like heavy chemical compounds that are, you know, recognized by Western medicine. Like, this is real, powerful stuff. And he was teaching me about that. He's teaching me about birds. He's teaching me how to track Jaguars, how to track game species, all this stuff, this stuff that I'm just downloading constantly from him. How did he learn this stuff, by the way? He grew up in the forest. So he was, he grew up,

going on hunting expeditions. He grew up with his brothers who were loggers. He was the only conservationist out of the crew. He has like 17 brothers. And when you say he grew up in the forest, like I'm trying to picture it. Like an indigenous community. He grew up like thatched huts. Like a tribe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The indigenous community. Yeah. Wow. So he, when he, when you have an ear infection, he's like, oh, we need to go get dead os de los mortes. He's like, we need to go get dead men's fingers. And we go get the fungus and they mix it up and they mix a few other things. And they pour it in your ear and your ear infection goes away. If you have a bot fly, they know how to remove the bot fly. It's all these different things.

If you have a broken bone, they have very unique ways of healing a broken bone. And so I was learning so much from this guy. And then the only thing that he didn't know, because they hunt, they log, they use medicines. They have all these things that they interact with the forest. The thing that he didn't know was snakes. And I'd grown up watching what? Steve Irwin. And so I had always been catching snakes.

I've always loved snakes. And, you know, in New York, we had, you know, black rat snakes, garter snakes, whatever. And I had set a goal for myself where I had said I had to catch a hundred non-venomous snakes before I ever messed with a venomous snake. You know, had to successfully catch 100 non-venomous snakes. And that didn't work out because at some point in, I think it was Harriman State Park. I saw some old guy and he saw a copperhead. And he told his wife, he goes, you know, he goes, Back up, honey, I got this.

And he picks up a stick and he was going to go hit the thing. And at like 16 years old, I ran up behind this guy and like grabbed the stick. And I was like, no, you're not. And I pushed him back. And then I just like took a little twig and like got the snake by the tail and like moved it. And I was like, that was my first venomous snake. Like, there we go. But when I got to the Amazon, I'd caught hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of snakes.

And so I was like catching bushmasters and vine snakes and all this amazing, beautiful snake life. And JJ was like, how do you do? He's like, how do you know this? And I was like, I was like, Saints is what I do. And he was like, have you ever thought about seeing an anaconda? And I was like, I would love to see an anaconda. And he was like, well, we go on this one hunting trip every year.

He's like, it's a bit of a ceremony. He's like me and my brothers and my dad, we get in a boat and we pack like two weeks of supplies. And we go way up this river to a point where there's like, there's no, past the point where the features of the land have names, like really wild. And he was like, but every time. we go there, he's like, as you're going up the river, he's like, we see anacondas on the side. And so he's like, do you want to come? And so I went to his parents' house to meet his brothers. And at this time, he was introducing me to them. And these are the people who become my life friends. But it was like, we had a meeting and they said, yeah, join us. We went on this expedition. And like the first

thing we found was this like 13 foot huge female anaconda. And I just jumped out of the boat, grabbed it by the head. It wrapped around my arms. And that was the start of something. And And we started, we were saying, let's start measuring the anacondas on these rivers. Let's see how many anacondas are on which rivers. And like, let's start putting together something that could become a study at some point. And pretty quickly we got into trouble with that because then there was like a 15-foot anaconda this one day. And she was, she was sleeping on this log.

And so what happened was they dropped me down upriver. They took the boat downriver and they said, okay, we're going to come from either side and we're going to surprise her. And so this anacondas asleep is probably as thick as a basketball around. like pretty decent size snake and she's dead asleep and as I'm crouching in and I'm coming in and we're like

we're like wearing like just boxers and what is she laying on? She's laying on this tree by the side of the river and as I'm getting close to her all of a sudden she just like wakes up and I see like the muscles flex and I see she's getting ready and I'm gonna know

and boom she goes into the water and she's gonna just run away so I run forward I grab her, pull her back she strikes at me and as she strikes at me I just grab her head right before it hits my face So I have this snake.

I get another hand on. So once you have control of the head, they shouldn't be able to bite you. So I'm like, all right, good, got control of the head. I start screaming for the guys. I'm like, JJ, JJ, JJ. I'm holding out to the snake. Now, here's the thing that I didn't anticipate.

She wraps a coil around my hands. Suddenly my forearms are tied together. I want, oh. And then all of a sudden, the next coil comes around over my neck. And so now my shoulders and my arms are out of my control. The snake owns them. and this is like 150 pound 200 pound snake and so I get pulled to my knees and then she starts the constricting because as far as she knows I'm a predator attacking her snake starts constricting

my collar bones were inches from touching like my shoulders were just coming together until my shoulders were like I felt everything about to break right at that minute the rest of the guys got there they started unwrapping her you have to unwrap an anaconda from the tail and so they start unwrapping her and I just I just got this breath and it was a little bit of a little bit of like the closest I ever came to getting crushed to death by an Anaconda and that was one of the first experiences I had with them but we returned from that expedition with these photos that made like even the local people were like what did you guys do like are you insane and then that's where gringo loco comes from where they started they all started calling me gringo loco and uh but yeah that's

the long-winded way of answering your question that then when I went home back to new york eventually I had to do like a college semester I'd like show up for a college semester with like bullet ant stings on me and like thorns sticking out of my skin and I'd be like yeah I know I'm 10 days late but I was taking care of a giant ant eater and they'd be like what but eventually you know somebody interviewed me uh the guys at manga bay.com actually I think were the first ones to do an interview and it was anacondas and floating forests the secrets of the amazon and it was just like this thing and then ever since then it's just been this people were just you know kind of just like you're the anaconda guy and then that started that but it was

like that that was a you know at the time we were just barefoot dipsets with you know the machete in the jungle we didn't have a plan we didn't know what you're doing i was just trying to like make up for all the time i felt like school had stolen from me i just wanted to go live a life and have fun and have adventures um it wasn't until later that you know the whole protecting the forest thing came around when you went down there i find it fascinating that they thought you were a psycho for being so obsessed with the snakes because i don't think are those guys how do they feel it? They're not going, trying to like touch or catch snakes. They don't want anything to do with snakes. No, God, no, no, no. I feel like it's something that's ingrained in

human DNA that we are just inherently terrified of fucking snakes. That's a weird question. I've always wondered about it because so many people are so scared of snakes, but two things. One, if you take a child and you show them a snake, and I'm talking, I've done this. I've done this with like nieces, nephews, my friend's kids, where we'll be out on a hike and we'll find like a big black rat snake, a snake that cannot hurt you if it tried. But it's big and it looks scary. Get the kid over and pick up the snake.

And a lot of times you don't even need to hold them by the head. You say, you can touch the tail. And the kid's like, really? That's amazing. And they touch the tail. And it's, there's no fear. And the same thing with when you take, I've had, you know, a 65-year-old woman come with me on the tours I lead to the Amazon

and just say, if I even think about a snake, I'll start crying. And I've done that thing where I catch a snake. I go sit on, you know, at the resource station, I'll go sit on a couch. And I'll say, look, what I want you to do is sit next to me. I want you to sit next to me. And sometimes they can't. But then eventually I'm like, look, your goal is you got to sit next to me.

Sit next to me. I'm just handling the snake nice and calm. And I can calm them down. And then eventually it's, okay, let one bit of the snake go over your finger. And then it's, okay, maybe let your hand on the back end of the snake. and then eventually they're holding the snake, and then a few things happen. First of all, they go, this is an amazingly beautiful animal, which it is. And then next, they feel really accomplished.

They overcame their fear, and they realize, oh, my God, this is nothing to worry about. Because most snakes that aren't venomous, like you take like a garter snake, it's a blue jay could kill it. Like a bird could eat that. They're helpless. So unless it's a spitting cobra or a bushmaster or a rattlesnake, snakes for the most part are just little animals that live near ponds and eat frogs and rats and help us to not have diseases because they control pests.

Is that how you explain it to the indigenous people down there? Yeah, that and then, you know, they would get pissed because we've had a few things. We're like, you know, a snake will come into someone's farm and like eat a goat. You know, and the farmer's pissed. And so we have to go deal with that, hopefully rescue the snake before he kills it. There was one really sad instance where some people had come from a different, they came from a different part of Peru. and this family settled in the jungle

and they let their kid go out fishing in a swamp. And this is, I think he was like a nine-year-old kid and he was sitting there fishing in the swamp, which, you know, anaconda grabbed him by the leg, wrapped him up and killed him, and then started to eat him. And it was almost over his knees, went from the head over the knees.

And then the family showed up and saw it and they all started beating the snake and trying to, they thought they could rescue the kid. But by the time a snake is swallowing you, you're dead. They crushed most of the bones in your body. Right. So that was very sad because they didn't understand that there's dangerous things out there. And so like anacondas are not man-eaters, but, you know, once in a while.

You know, deer are vegetarians, but in the thick of winter, they have been known to eat a baby bird in the spring. You know, it's like whatever, whatever calories you can find in nature. What is an anacondas preferred food? Oh, capybara, cayman, birds, fish. And so the crazy... Really? Like crocodiles? Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Fuck. Yeah. So in the Amazon, um, Anacondas are unique because most species have like a level that they exist in. So you take like a cat like a jaguar is going after like deer and wild boar and things like that. Anaconda is born at like two feet and they're live birth.

They're not an egg. So they're born at like two feet long little thing, you know, just like a thick cigar. This is a little snake though that again like a heron could walk up to the this snake, peck it on the head, swallow it. So they're food for other species. The baby came and are born around the same time of the year. And so the anaconda and the baby came and these little crocs are facing off. So who can eat who? And it's sort of this like arms race, who can grow. And that's why anacondas grow quickly. But what you get with anacondas is that a baby anaconda is starting off with like fish and bugs and frogs. And then it goes up to like shorebirds like the herons and the

crocs. And then it's going up to like packa and rabbits and all these other things. And then at the top of when you get a full-grown, you know, 20-foot anaconda, 26-foot anaconda, you're talking about they could eat tapers. They could eat something the size of a cow. They could eat a human. They could eat a jaguar. They eat whatever they want. They're an apex predator.

So they go, they have this outsized influence on the ecosystem they're in as an apex predator. So they're really a unique species like in that regard. Yeah. It's fascinating when you see different types of animals and how vulnerable they are right from birth. Like humans are the worst. Well, humans are pathetic. A baby human. A baby deer stands up in the first two minutes of the live. A human. A human can't fend for itself in the first four or five years of his life. You know, the parents are all doing adult stuff, you know, whether it's cutting trees or hunting monkeys or whatever they're doing to survive. And then like the kids are sort of like this self-governing tribe

where you have like the 13 year olds and the 10 year olds caring for the younger kids. And like in the evenings, we'd all always be in the river. And it's like you're playing with all these like little naked kids and they're all splashing in the water and it's like, yeah, there's giant catfish in there and there's piranha and there's Cayman and there's Anaconda and like everyone, everyone knows what's going on. They know how to stay safe. They know what the rules are and it's just funny

coming back here and seeing like, you know, helicopter parents when you're like, little Timmy, come here, come here. Don't go over there. Don't touch that. Like put some Purell in your hands and like you have kids over there and they're like skinning a monkey and just like make an eye contact with you. It's like, yeah.

It's so much different here than, I mean, there's different. completely different things you got to worry about with your kids here just like crossing the street i mean well yeah way way more dangerous yeah way more dangerous yeah um so how did that whole video come about of you getting eaten by the anaconda well okay i'll say it like this the first the first step for that that was a reaction to the things that I'd seen. And when you live in the rainforests, you see these ancient trees getting cut. And each time an ancient tree gets cut, you know, you're talking about a skyscraper of life.

You're talking about something where there's reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, lichens, moses, orchids, all this stuff living on this tree. It's taken hundreds of years, centuries to become this giant pillar of the forest. and then somebody comes in with the chains out, the thing goes down. And so they do that, they board it up, send it out, and then they burn with what's left. And so you see that again and again and again. You go, oh, my God, they weren't lying to me when I was a kid.

The rainforests really are disappearing. They really are getting destroyed. And so we started looking for ways to protect the forest, which again, now I'm a 20-something-year-old kid, and I'm having all these crazy. adventures, great. And then, you know, one night around a fire, JJ's father, old badass guy that had been in the Amazon his whole life, you know, we were talking and they said, look, if this place

isn't going to change into something very different from what it is, it has to be protected. You know, we said, well, what does that look like? And so they just said, we need more support. We need, we need, you know, somehow, we need to, we didn't have a plan. And so around that time, I got a call for. from Discovery Channel, and they flew me out to L.A. And they said, look, we want to do a show about anacondas with you. And I said, great.

So let's do it. And I told them how important they are, apex predators, all this stuff. There's such big, beautiful snakes. We had all this incredible footage to show them. And they were like, that's cool, but it's not enough. They're like, we need something more. And so I'm sitting in this room. And then I told them the story about the kid that got eaten.

And then they said, no, no, no, there's no. There's no confirmed cases of a person being eaten. by an anaconda. And of course, we have confirmed cases of people being eaten by a reticulated python, but we don't have for anaconda. And so I said, so what does that mean?

So it's not true. You know what I mean? Like a villager out in the middle of the Amazon, if his mother is eaten by an anaconda, he's not going to go film it with his phone and upload it to YouTube and go on CNN and be like, got it. That's not how they,

yeah. So like, that's not like it doesn't happen. And just jokingly, I was like, dude, I should just like get in some sort of a protective suit and get swallowed to to prove that it's possible because he's,

snakes are huge and the guy was just like, that's it. He's like, you just hit it, kid. And I was like, oh, no, oh no. And then I refuse it. And then I, you know, I talk to everyone, my friends and my family. I asked Jane Goodall about it. I said, you know, I said, should I, she was like, are you crazy? She's, you out of your mind.

She knew anything about snakes? Yeah, no, she doesn't every. She knows everything about everything. Really? She's Gandalf. Wow. She's Gandalf. Like, you think she's like an old lady or something.

She's a badass. but you know everyone told me not to do it but the producers knew um i got an education in like getting screwed by hollywood it's uh you and me both yeah um they basically were like we'll give you a two hour special you can talk about ecology and conservation and do science all that shit they're like just at the end do this stunt and if you do that we'll give you a three million dollar budget. We'll fund your research. We'll do this and we'll do a huge fundraiser for the forest so you can protect the habitat. It was a huge train wreck. They changed everything. They didn't record any of the science. I mean, they did. In the field, they recorded all the science. We got to

the studio. They threw all that out. They just put all the all the, all the, you know, the blood and the craziness and the fear, you know, like one time they called and they said, you know, we need you guys to look more scared. And it's like drama. And it ended up in a huge train wreck and like, you know, I got trounced and like, you know, like, Opie and Anthony were ripping me apart. Jimmy Kimmel told me to have sex with a hippo. I mean, I'm like, um, so where did, where did you film it? And where did you find the anaconda? JJ and his brother Pico and, and we got some of, some of our best and brightest of the young

scientists that we work with. And we did a six week expedition through the Amazon, looking for the largest antacondas on earth. And, uh, you know, and I had producers calling me at one point I had a producer call on a sat phone. I'm like sitting by the side of a river in the middle of the Amazon sat phone. And the guy calls me and he goes, listen, he goes, we need a danger beat. We need a lead out to the commercial. And it was like the day before we just called like a 15 foot anaconda.

And I was like, bro, that wasn't exciting enough for you? And he goes, no, no, no, we need something else. And I went, well, I don't know what you know. We got work to do here, man. And he was like, no, no, listen, kid. He was like, you're going to give me a danger beat. And I went, okay, so what do you want? Next day he calls and he goes, look, we sat around a board.

And this is a bunch of people sitting in a fucking air-conditioned room in L.A. Right. And they go, you're going to be going up river. And you, he goes, don't worry, you're going to look like the hero. Thanks, bro. He goes, you're going to look like the hero. He goes, because you're going up river. And you're going to notice that there's black piranha in the river. He goes, you're going to tell everyone to pull the boat over. And then you're going to take a bucket of blood and pour it into the river. And then you're going to safely bring your people around the threat. And I went, how would a piranha hurt us in a boat? Huh? We swim in the river every day. Next, where am I going to get a, bucket of blood from. And next, and he just went, listen, kid, he was like, unless you think so, in the end what they made us do is they made us get in a stream and pretend that we were having an encounter with an electric eel. Electric eel?

I mean, we've had encounters with electric eels, but we had to fake it. None of us are actors. And so, like, I had my friends, like, up to their chests in this stream. And I was, I had to be like, whoa, guys, hold on. You know, and like, let's get out. And, like, you can see that we're all fucking acting. We're not. Right.

It looks stupid. But that's what. what TV does. They hold the gun to your head and they're like, do what we do what we ask. Yeah. And so that was a huge. And it ended up costing me a lot.

You know, like when you hear people talk about, you know, like I just, I lost like, you know, a lot of scientists didn't want to deal with me. Pita came out after me because they said I was trying to hurt snakes.

And then America didn't like it because I didn't actually get eaten. So like I got it from like from all ends. And then, but what I say now though is like, look, you know, to people. who criticize me for it.

And I just missed out on a big environmental award like six years later because somebody Googled it. And they were like, aren't you that guy that did that thing? And I'm like, yeah. And they were like, all right, disqualified. I was going to win this like big award for like $60,000. Disqualified. And I was like for a show that hurt no animals that tried to protect the forest.

No, you know, crimes were committed. And it's just like what happens when you, I took a swing. You know what I mean? I took a swing and it missed, but you got to try. And like, that's the thing. And that's what I would say to anybody because I'm still, every now and then, it's somebody will still be like, you're the Anaconda guy. And it's like, yeah, how much forest are you protecting?

What's the biggest thing you ever did? What's the biggest thing you ever sacrificed to try and protect something you love? That's the thing with TV, man. It's so, oh, it's so dramatized. Like anything you watch on any of those, I don't care if it's history channel or the science channel or whatever. Every single one of those shows, like, here's the big problem. Most of the times, for example, like on the history channel, they will talk about something legit. Like, they'll go and study something legit.

Like, my best example of it is that Skinwalker Ranch show. There's this crazy ranch up in the middle of, like, the Midwest that supposedly has, like, a lot of UFO sightings and shit, weird shit happening there. And there's, like, actual documented science of that place. Yeah. But then they go make this TV show and they fucking script it to death. And they have all these people, they bring them in, they turn it into this big fucking dog and pony show. And it just ruins it and it discredits the whole entire, the whole entire area, the whole entire topic. It's fucking pathetic.

Yeah. No. So that was, that was a learning experience. So that was like by 24, 25, 26 or something. Yeah. I'd been through that. And then so I pretty much had to like Chappelle myself and go to another country. So I went and stayed in India because like after that it was just like, the media was just killed.

at me. I was getting like death threats in my, because then I made the mistake of saying that I don't think that people should keep snakes in small cages. You know, they're wild animals and I appreciate them and stuff. And then I got, which I never knew existed, the HRP community, it's like a bunch of dudes that keep snakes in boxes and like their mom's basements. And these people came out by the thousands and like, were just like going crazy on social media. Because they love keeping, torturing snakes and small boxes in their mom's basements. They have like, they have like, they have like, filing cabinets filled with amazing snakes from all over the world that never see the light a day.

It's basically horrendous animal abuse. The herp community. Because herpetology is reptiles. And then they'll even go as far as to say, like, oh, we're conservationists because we're protecting these species out of the wild. And it's like, no, you're just a society of tools. What are they actually doing? They just like keeping, like, they'll have like a Sumatran spitting cobra and a Tupperware

over there. And then they'll, like, take it out and, like, show some people. and then like on the internet like on a video or something of them on the internet some of them i've been i've been to these but you know i go and hang out with everybody um i've been to some of these basements and uh there's the most amazing stuff i mean like really rare animals that these guys will get at like reptile shows and then they have literal i mean you look it up you can look it up there's there's um there's a guy on youtube who he's he always has like videos of like reticulated python striking at him he's like a kind of like a older guy with a beard he's kind of heavy and he's he makes he's like

really wacky videos where there's like snakes striking at him but if you look behind him there's like filing cabinets of snakes and i think i think they're like an exotic pet dealer oh okay and so they like there's like a whole dude that's big in florida right is it really oh my god yes you could you can buy anything yeah that's why you guys have burmese pythons here because that's they leaked out do you spend you don't spend any time in florida do you not a lot um florida's the closest thing to the amazon in the u.s dude it's pretty wild it's pretty close right yeah i mean the close comparison to a lot of the other places in the U.S.

I mean, you can go out in a swamp and catch a 16-foot Burmese Python. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. You got the Florida Panthers. There's some really important wildlife here. Florida's no joke. How long has this issue with companies coming into the Amazon and getting these loggers and these miners and all of these various industries? How long have they been coming in and tearing out the rainforest?

This is long before you went down there, right? Oh, yeah. No, this is like centuries, man. Like, we, I mean, like, Darwin was writing about, like, if they keep doing this, eventually it's going to be a huge problem. You got to remember Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir were, you know, trying to protect the sequoias in the North, in the United States. We cut 97% of the old growth forest that existed on the United States when Europeans showed up. 97%.

So all the forests just got cleared and thrown into fucking kilns for the, uh, for the Industrial Revolution. Like we murdered the ecosystems of North America. And then with chainsaws and boat motors, you know, everything in the Amazon is rivers. You move. It's a,

it's a region of rivers. And so once you had boat motors and chainsaws, you could get people out there and they could start cutting down trees. And then, of course, with the modern era in the last 30, 40 years where you have roads going into the Amazon, where you actually have like excavators

and go bulldoze the trees down and then get people in there. And then they can really, start doing some damage. And so we've seen just Amazonian deforestation skyrocket in the last 50 years. And that's corresponded with that all over the world. In the Congo, in Indonesia, we're at this point, suddenly in history where we're losing habitat really quickly. We're losing species really quickly. And that's why they call it the sixth extinction. We're losing species at a rate that's almost similar to when the dinosaurs went extinct. And so that's totally human caused. And since 1970,

we've lost something like over 50% of the wildlife on this planet. And that's not the species, but that's how numerous they are. 50% of the wildlife that was on this planet is gone because of the human activity. Because we control 70% of the landmass that's not under the ice. And we're clearing habitat. I mean, Indonesia, we're just leveling it for palm oil. The Congo rainforests, all that tropical hardwood, they're taking it out. The Amazon, they're cutting new roads.

The trans-Amazon Highway. The Chinese want to come in and do rubber plantations in the Amazon. It's like the threats are unbelievable. And it's so ridiculous because rainforests only cover something like 6% of our planet and have like 50% of the terrestrial life contained in there. And there's so much medicines and indigenous wisdom from the cultures that live there and all the biodiversity that we depend on and those systems that keep us alive. Whether you live in New York or Tokyo, you depend on the climate stability,

that rainforests provide. And so it's like it's one of those things. I went on Fox News once and the guy goes, he goes, you know, it was actually kind of fun. As I get in the studio, he goes, oh, what the hell? I can't remember his name. I think it was Varney,

but he was like a, he was a finance guy and he, I appreciated it because I was still new to doing interviews and stuff. And he leans over and he goes, listen, kid, he goes, the second that green light goes on, he goes, I'm going to come at you like a tiger. He goes, but it's all part of the thing. He goes, I'm supposed to like, it's the type of show I do.

And I said, all right, I said, I'm ready. And like, you went three, Two, one. Action. And he went, you better not be one of these greenies. He's like, your pathetic tree hugger.

And he started like coming right at me. And I was just like, dude, I was like, if you have people in populations that can't breathe the air and drink the water, it's bad for business. So don't tell me that the economy is going to be doing good when, when the ecosystems collapse. And he was just like,

he was like, nice. And then we fought over it for a while. But like, you know, of course his thing was, you know, screw the environment.

Let's, let's keep growing, you know. And I was trying to make the case that, you know, you can't have an economy without nature. It all goes back to, you know, mining and water and trees at the end of the days. Who is making the argument that don't fucking worry about it. We've been chopping down the rainforest since the 50s.

It's nothing's changing. It's not going to change our lives or our grandkids' lives or who's making those arguments? Well, plenty of people are making those arguments. And what is that argument? The argument is like, oh, well, I mean, look, here, I'll tell you this. I stay away from climate change because I do talks all. over the world for businesses or schools, doesn't matter. And I stay away from climate change because when you say, guys, global climate change,

a lot of people go, well, where? How can you prove it? And who are the scientists? And it's a lot of like ethereal sort of fads. And it's difficult. And then some people, you'll get some people come on and go, you know, look, the thing is, it's not what you think. We're coming out of an ice age.

And so then everybody can argue over it. And so what I've done with my conservation career is I stick to numbers. that you can't argue with, like how much we've depleted our oceans, how sharks are becoming in danger due to shark finning, how bycatch is ruining the life. So our fisheries are collapsing. You can't argue with that. That's a fact. Right. The fact that rainforests are disappearing. That's a fact. The fact that we're losing species like rhinos and elephants and things at an accelerated rate that could put them extinct within our lifetimes. Those are facts. and so I try to stick to things that I've seen personally that I can prove with data

and so that's that's really what I what I tend to stick on but I just I've just just recently I was listening to a podcast and it's a shame because so much of what Jordan Peterson is so so fantastic and he's so linguistically gifted and his whole message is helping people and making the world a better place and then he goes but I really don't think there's any problem with the environment and I'm like have you been outside I'm like I'm like, I get it. You've studied the Greek philosophers and the Roman philosophers. I was like, you have a major hole in your understanding, my friend. Like, I love the guy, but man, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, no. He hasn't been outside. I don't think he's been outside. I don't,

I just don't think he has. Yeah, that's unfortunate. That's unfortunate. You know, and, and there's, you know, there's people like him. There's a lot of people who make a lot of smart, you know, concise points or arguments about the economy and the history and the numbers of it and where climate's been, where the economy's been, and the population of whatever it might be. But the hard thing for you is your heart's in it because your feet are on the ground and you've lost your blood to the rainforest and you've had to survive in there. So it's different for you. Yeah.

And so when I hear like Elon Musk be like, oh, I'm worried about depopulation. Bro, we have 8 billion people on Earth. The Earth is choking under the mountain of human shit that is being created. And you're worried about depopulation? Like I want to run up and smack them in the mouth. Yeah. Well, he's talking about birth rate. He's talking about our birth rate is going down at like a tremendous rate.

And I guess if you do the math, our population will be like, I forget the numbers, but I think it'll be like one one thousandth of what it is now in a couple decades. Okay. Or not a couple decades. Imagine the wealth that everyone could have. Imagine the poverty we could alleviate if instead of eight billion people, there was three billion people. Right. And then everyone could have access to doctors and airplanes and Netflix.

accounts and all this wonderful stuff and you wouldn't have to have people chopping down the rainforest because they're starving. Oh my God. Did you see that thing that came out in the New York Times there day? There was a guy that was interviewed. I'm going to text this to you, Austin. You can pull it up. There is a guy they did this feature on in the New York Times that his life has been

devoted to depopulating the earth. And he says he doesn't advocate for suicide. but hold on let me find it real quick yeah well no that's that's the other extreme though because then you get you get these anti-human environmentalists that are like humans are bad right well I mean we are kind of like maggots

eating a corpse aren't we see I disagree with that I think there's a lot of anti-human sentiment in environmentalism and it's like I love humans I love art I love culture I love music I love my family I think that we're awesome. I mean, the shit that we do is incredible. It's just we're so disorganized.

We're so like, we're like an obese, like a morbidly obese animal in the, in the, in the, in the, in the forest, just like eating all the food in reach and shitting all over itself. It's like, if you can just stop that. Yeah, like certain parts of us. Certain parts of us are like that. But certain parts of us are not. like the people that just fucking consume and trash the earth and and and and I don't even I take that back. It's the people that are the most desperate on earth are the ones there.

It's not the lazy people. It's the people that are desperate that are doing that. Like the people that are in the Amazon that I'm sure that are those people I'm sure are just trying to feed their families just like the people in Columbia who are making who are manufacturing cocaine for the cartels. So yeah. So go to this. You just pull the picture.

Pull up his actual Twitter. And then find the New York Times article. But yeah, it's people that are that are desperate that'll do anything they can to feed their families. And the most, the most available thing are these things that fucking kill people or that destroy natural resources. And I mean, who suffers first from a dirty environment? I mean, usually it's the poorest people that still rely on. fishing but still rely on water from a stream. You know, in India, international farming organizations came in and like bought up all this farmland

and sold fertilizer and got them all in debt. And then like 70,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2008 because they needed the land. And American corporations came in and did the farmer suicides. It's like this major thing. And it's like those people were just trying to survive on the land. and it's like the corporations came in and ruined that for them. So it's like we're literally like when I see deforestation, when I see dams on rivers, I see it as self-inflicted wounds. Like I'm not, you know, there's environment, there's environmentalists like those, the losers who are going and throwing Campbell's soup on paintings in Europe right now.

Yeah. They're just like, you know, narcissistic, psychotic teenagers who, again, who've never been outside, who don't understand that all of this stuff is fixable, that you can work with. corporations to be more sustainable. You can put pressure on them. You know, if you say like, okay, Nutella is using palm oil and it's deforesting Indonesia, it's like, well, if enough people just don't buy Nutella for a year, they will listen because it'll affect their bottom line. So it's, it really is in our hands. It's just, it's almost more complex and more simple at the same time than we think, because all we're trying to do is not cut down trees. Yeah. So, I mean, if you look at it the opposite way, basically the reason for all of this is economics.

Right. It's just, it's just economics and money. And there's a lot of amounts. And it's hard to tell people, let's boycott Nutella or let's not use paper. You would have to come up with some sort of competing, something economically that competes with it. And that is more viable and that pays better. Yeah, exactly. You have to make everybody win. So for example, you can't make everybody a social justice warrior. No. And so two things. That's all right. Forget it awesome. We don't need to look at it. Two things that are, uh, that have jumped out to me is like one, one of the things they love to do is,

is like they'll have these like conferences and they'll be like you all need to like turn the water off when you brush your teeth and like remember not to use straws you know and it's like okay so you're telling me that when I go to Dunkin' Donuts I got to remember not to use a straw and that's going to save the world it's like no it's what about stop producing straws or styrofoam or or find something so that we don't have to have millions and millions of plastic bottles you can't put this in the hands even though even a wealthy American who has a family they don't have the time to to if you start okay well i recycle i compost i ride my bike to work i did it by the time you get done being the the greatest green warrior you can be your whole life revolves around that and so it's like

no you need to stop putting the the guilt on the consumer and start you know like when we went from vhs to dvds nobody asked us if we were doing that you just one day you went to blockbuster and you went huh i got we got to get a dvd player because that's what we use now and it's like they we just need to update the technology that we use so we stop putting all this plastic in the medical field, crucial. We need plastic. It's a miracle. Well, that's a great example. The DVDs versus the VHS. Sony came out with DVDs. And then the other company said, oh shit, they got DVDs. We got to fucking do DVDs now. And then that was it. Right. Very quickly, I mean, I remember being a kid and everything was like VHS.

And then all of a sudden, there was like the DVD era. And then very quickly, then like, I feel like Netflix pushed it into the digital. Yeah. And then everybody else followed. And then everyone else followed. Everybody. And I feel like, As late as like three years ago, my mom went, I really like that movie. Can we get that on DVD? And I went, and play it where? Where do you want to play it?

I was like, I could probably find it. That's fucking hilarious, man. So what are the economics driving everything that's killing the rainforest? That the rainforest is incredibly profitable. When you cut down, you know, an old growth mahogany tree,

it's worth sometimes tens, are hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are incredible hardwoods. I mean, look at like, you go to like IKEA. That's all like particle board. It's all like sawdust that they've glued together with resin. It's all crap. But if you're talking about real wood, like hard quality wood that takes hundreds of years to grow,

that stuff is valuable, man. That is valuable. And so you have the logging guys going after that. You have the land grabbers. Like this shit from Home Depot that I got. I got this from Home Depot. This looks like some real wood here. These are pieces.

I got these pieces from Home Depot. and I just stained them. So like when you go to Home Depot, you go to the lumber section. Yeah. Yeah, but this is, this is,

I don't know what this is, but it's nice. Or maybe it's just the stain that's making it look like. It's the stain. No, I stained it. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, they're tearing it up because, you know, in Indonesia, they're literally clearing the forest as if it's a wasteland.

And then they're throwing up palm trees so they could form palm oil to put in Nutella and a bunch of other products and soaps and stuff. And it's like, it's like, it's like burning down the Sistine chapel.

you're ruining one of the greatest representations of beauty we have on this planet. And it's like setting that on fire to like heat up a hot pocket. It makes no sense. Like it's just like us burning down a house right now to cook a meal. It's just like it's not you might, you understand a tenth of the process. And so that's what we're doing. That's what we're allowing to be done. And, you know, it's of course if you go to a building and you break something, it's vandalism.

If you go to a river and you put a dam and kill all the fish and then all the farmers downstream of their can't irrigate their crops and everybody dies, it's just progress. That's the way the world works right now. That's why we're in this problem. Because think about it, if people weren't allowed to stop rivers, if people weren't allowed to burn down forests, if there's actual consequences for this, if people weren't allowed to kill black rhinos, there'd still be black rhinos. They've been here for hundreds of millions of years. and so like that's the thing that people don't understand with with all this stuff you know they go we're losing elephants at a rate that they'll be extinct in our lifetimes it's like no we're not losing elephants they're being shot and

massacred every single day to the point that there might not be any more elephants because we're allowing humans to do that if we weren't there these things would be fine they've been doing this they engineered the world we live in and we are a whole livelihoods to elephants I mean my god they're they're part of their they they they they raised us. They're like our siblings in evolution. My God. They had such a huge impact on the ecosystems of ancient landscapes, like during the last ice age. There were so many other elephant-like creatures and they're constantly breaking things and forging paths through bush. I mean, they are so influential in creating the ecosystems that we call home on Earth. And again, of course, if you

reduce it down further, without those ecosystems, we'd be a dead planet just like everywhere else. Without the plants and the animals, you know, without birds pollinating plants, without plants creating soil. We wouldn't have the physical things. So it's like this, this problem that we're having with, with conservation is actually like almost moronic when you break it down. Because it's like, it's literally we're just, we're just, we're just, we're just, we're just, that's what we're doing. It's, it's, it makes no sense. How, can you explain to me how the government, like the government's Brazil or some of the other countries, how they structure the economics of the rainforest. You were explaining how they take certain sections and they allocate them to certain industries

or you can buy? Can you explain that? Yeah, I mean, there's a, this is, again, this is a complicated thing and it differs from country to country. So the Amazon is in like eight or nine countries. And then of course, you have the Congo and you have Indonesia. But there's all these different rainforest countries. If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, Playoff Hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no one coasts.

The studio crew with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters. the personalities keep things lively. Watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max. But like in Brazil, for example, I know that in the, I want to say, there's a new president there, right? There is a new president there, thank the Lord, because the other guy pretty much hated the Amazon and wanted to burn it, Bolsonaro. Right. Right. Like, he actively said that. Like, he was actively like, we need to occupy.

And so that's a result of that a couple decades ago, whatever was going on politically in Brazil, They were literally learning in school that if we don't occupy the Amazon, someone's going to come take it. And so since it's just land, it could be invaded. And so their thing was occupy the Amazon. And it's such a strange concept because who is going to do that? You know what I mean? But the thing with the jungle is that because you're out past,

well, that's another topic, but it's very lawless once you get out past there because you can't get law enforcement out there. And so like sort of like medieval law resumes, but we can get to that later because there's a lot to unpack there. But like in Peru, where I work, I'm in the Peruvian Amazon, which is the headwaters of the Amazon. And so the government says like, okay,

this plot can be for mining. This plot can be for logging. This plot can be for conservation. But that doesn't work. That's not how a forest works. You know what I mean? There's populations of wildlife that move and migrate through an ecosystem. So if you log this and you mine this,

this and you do that in a bunch of other places and there's a little block here where it's for that's for conservation you've created an island it's not useful to anything this all has connectivity jaguars migrate up and down through central america up and down through south america tigers migrate up and down through india the elephants move across the land like the birds migrate entire hemispheres like these are you can't nature doesn't understand political boundaries or fence lines and the problem is that our whole thing is political boundaries and fence lines and so the way these governments chop this up and they go, we want this land. They look at it and they go, we want

this land to be contributing to the economic productivity of the country. And so one of the greatest problems that we have to solve. And some countries are working on this is like, is that we don't look at a river and see it as a life-giving force. We don't see it as something that's contributing to the economy. How much money are we gaining from the Hudson River by the fact that New York City has beautiful, free, clean drinking water. What's that worth per year? Or the fact that those forests are providing those ecosystem services. It's like that doesn't get considered.

So the default is always that, you know, when an industrialist comes in and goes, I want to build a dam and it's going to create this many kilowatts of power and it's going to, well, suddenly that's, we have to fight that. So environmentalists are always on the defensive because there's always this beautiful river with the salmon and the bears and the wolves and the eagles. and then somebody comes and sticks a wall up there and then all the salmon died and the local people can't fish

and then all of a sudden the predators are starving and then all of a sudden oh we're putting DDT on the ground now the Eagles are going extinct because their eggs because of the DDT is getting into the fish their eggs are finding for it. So DDT was a pesticide that we were using in the US and this is creepy as hell because like people like my parents actually remember

playing in the they used to there was a movie where they showed this too with these trucks used to come around and they used to like spray insecticide through like suburbia. And the idea was we'll help by killing mosquitoes. And what happened was as this got into the water system and got into the fish, bald eagles were eating DDT-laced fish. And the DDT was causing the bald eagles to have their eggs were not as thick.

The shell wasn't as thick. And so when the mother would sit on them to keep them warm, the eggs would break. And we almost lost bald eagles. We almost lost our national bird. And so like in the 70s, right? around the time the EPA was forming and stuff, it looked like we were going to lose bald eagles. And so now the flip side of that is that once we stopped using DDT

and killing the bald eagles, their populations boomed back. And now I have a bald eagle living right next to my house in New York. And the same thing happened with humpback whales. During the whaling times, you had people all over the world and ships just hauling in whales, all kinds of whales, right whales, humpback whales, everything. Humpback whales went from 130,000 global population

around that, down to I think about 7,000. Now again, think about it that if it was your bank account. You know what I mean? Like could you bounce back? And then, of course, they banned whaling. And in the almost a century since they've banned whaling, humpback whales are almost back to pre-whaling numbers. And so again, proving the point that if we stop murdering these species before they can even

reproduce, they'll be fine. They were here long before we got here. And so, like, that's the core. of what I'm trying to spread to everyone. It's like, you know, I've spent time with these species, whether it's spider monkeys or elephants or anacondas or just the forest itself. And it's like I've, at this point, you know,

it started off as let's go on a fun adventure and now it's become, you know, these creatures and these places, they can't put on a suit and go address the United Nations. And it's like, well, you've got to be a voice for them. Other than loggers and, gold miners what other industries are down there

are they all just like rogue groups of guys like showing up with tons of equipment yeah so you have loggers down there and then you have the gold miners and the gold miners they're a tough bunch they will burn your house down because they're

again it's poor people that can't figure out another way of making a living so they'll go and they'll just get like an old motor and a hose and somehow they're getting mercury and in the Amazonian soils which is like so fine that it's almost sterile. There's like no oxygen in those soils. And so especially in the West Amazon, the gold is embedded in the sand. So it's like particulate. So you could just barely see it. You almost need a microscope to see gold in the particles of the sand. So you like wash the water

over the sand in your hand and you just start to see these little crystals, little bits of gold. So what they do is they'll cut a forest, burn the forest, and then they'll dredge it basically and they'll suck the land up through these huge hoses, run it through a whole sluice machine, and then at the bottom they collect the heaviest sediment, and the gold settles to the bottom, and then they mix mercury in with that, and the mercury binds to the gold,

and then what they do is they come out with this thing, this ball, this ingot of mercury that has gold in it, and then they light that on fire, and I've been next to them when they do this, and we all know how bad mercury is for you, and it's like, I literally watched a guy smoking a cigarette, burning with a little blow torch. He was burning this ball of mercury and the fumes are coming up,

going straight into his face, his little like two-year-old was sitting right next to him. He's burning mercury as it's entering the atmosphere to get this little bit of gold that he got from destroying acres of the Amazon rainforest. And now the people in that region of the Amazon rainforests have mercury levels in their own bodies that are about eight times what's safe for humans to have because they're getting it from the fish because it's going up into the atmosphere, if you're joining the rain and coming back down into the rivers, the fish have it, and it's going into the humans,

and now kids are coming out with like six eyes. Oh, my God. And so this is like a perfect example where if you just, so let's rewind that back. How do you stop this problem? Give that guy a better job. And that's what we started doing. I mean, we're, you know, we're small.

We are literally a teardrop in the ocean. But in our region, what we've started doing is going up to these gold miners. and just going, hey, how much do you make doing that? You realize you could just bring guests from all over the world. You could have fun. You don't get chased by the police. And you could make your life doing ecotourism, showing people the rainforest and being a protector of it.

You become a jungle keeper with us. And then, you know, so we try and work with them with that. We try to bring them in. We've done that with loggers. We've done that with gold miners. And so it's really, and a lot of times, these are super nice people. These are people I spent Christmas with the gold miners. last year. Did you? Yeah. Yeah. These are guys that like, you know, now they're like, oh,

you've changed our lives. You know, we're not getting arrested every other week. I was with them when the Peruvian armed forces came down the river. They blew up their gold mining barge. They were arresting them. I mean, they were chasing them through the forest. It was, it was madness. I said, do you like this? I said, is this fun for you? And he goes, no. He goes, my dad was a gold miner. I don't, he goes, I don't really know what else to do. He's like, I got, I got mouths to feed back there. He goes, I got to do what I got to do. And I was like, okay, okay. Okay. I was like, just try ego tourism. It was like there's an unlimited amount of people up north that want to see the rainforest.

Who are they selling this gold to? They go to town and they sell the gold to brokers. So these guys don't make a ton of money. The guys are doing it on the ground, of course. And then those guys sell it to the next guy, sell it to the next guy. And then it makes it to, you know, deeper into the gold market until it gets mixed in with. And I believe it's what's coming out of the West Amazon is not even a particularly high quality gold either. I don't know the details of it specifically.

I've just seen the devastation. I've seen, dude, there was a lake. One of the worst things I ever saw. There was this lake. Me and this guy, Borean, who was the gold miner, we went to this lake and there was this one day, we went and he goes, let's get some piranha. Like the sun was setting.

We're like smoking cigarettes. And we had sticks with, you know, just a stick with a fishing line on it and a hook. And you have to put metal on the hooks that the piranha can't bite off the line. You know, and so you, you catch a first fish and then you chop that one up and you put the hook and boom all of a sudden they love to cannibalize each other so we're pulling piranhas up one after the other one after the other and he's so good at he's got the technique as soon as it bites you just pull it up out of the water and i had his backpack and so i'm just catching piranha boom boom boom catching him in the backpack one after the other we took us like 10 minutes we filled a whole backpack filled with piranha um and then you know this beautiful lake we're watching black cayman swim across the lake we saw places where there was

big anacondas, we saw Jaguar tracks. It was paradise on Earth. It was like the wildest place. It was literally Avatar. And so I went back, called in a group. I was like, we got to show people this.

And I brought a group of tourists there. This was about a year later. And we're going up river. And I was like in this great mood. We were all having fun. We're sort of like yelling and talking on the boat on the way up. I'm like, we're going to go piranha fishing.

You guys are going to love this. It's the wildest place. We go through the forest and we start walking. And we get to the, where the part where the path opens up onto this lake and the lake was gone the the the water was gone and it's just a sand pit and there was a gold mining dredge there the gold miners had gotten to the lake and they wanted to see if there was gold in there and so what they had done was they had pumped out the entire lake they had burned the surrounding forest all the wildlife was gone and this

incredibly beautiful pristine spot on earth was just like deleted and I had all these all these tourists behind me like blinking going wait when when when's when's the fun part and I was like I just had tears in my eyes and I looked at I looked at Borean and he just went minus one lake and just like turned around and walked back and it was like somewhere that he had been fishing for generation like you know his father had shown him and it was like this beautiful spot that'll never come back and it was like Jesus. It was hard to see.

And so we have to deal with a lot of that with what I do because you just see these beautiful places. I mean, it's literally like, you know, people could say what they want about the movie Avatar, but it's like literally the same storyline. It's just, you know. Are piranha any good? Yo, piranha?

If I had piranha for you right now, you would eat it until you fell over. It's so, oh, my God, fried piranha, dude. What could you compare it to? I don't know. It's a bit bony, so you got to, like, fry the shit out of it because you don't want to have to pick through the bones. You want to just eat the bones.

Oh, really? Yeah. So you get them on the hook, you get them, blah, blah. And then you... Kind of like a sardine. I guess, but they're bigger than that, though. You know, they're pretty big. Yeah, they get pretty big.

You got to be careful when you're getting them off the hook, man. You got to have a stick. You got to have a whack stick. Because you get the piranha up on the boat, you got to hit them. Stun them. Otherwise... Oh, is it that there's a little clip in that dark green documentary where you're stunning.

Is that a piranha? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You really got to watch. I know guys from missing the tip of their finger because they just, you know. What, how much, like, how big of a worry are the piranha, like, when you're swimming, like, there's a bunch of clips of you in that documentary. You're just jumping out of the boat into the river.

Like, are they, are they everywhere? Are they pretty much, like, basically, like, jumping in the ocean, worry about a shark. Like, you can swim anywhere in here and you can worry about a shark. Yeah, but also piranha don't. to tend to, they're like eating other fish and doing other stuff. The only time that you get that, that legendary thing where Corona will like destroy you and turn you into a skeleton is like, if you have a lake where the vegetation is growing in and growing in, and that's what happens. So some of these lakes, the jungle will actually start to eat the lake as the vegetation comes in

and eventually it'll absorb it. And you can see it from Google, like from Earth, from satellite. You can look down, you see these depressions in the forest where the vegetation's a little different because it used to be a lake and the jungle's eating it. But right before, that lake disappears, you have this piranha population in that lake that is psychotic. And there's no food because they've eaten everything else. They've eaten all the other fish. Now they're eating each other and they've gone crazy. So if you take anything and throw it in there, they will turn it into a skeleton in moments.

But that's like, that's like you, that's like being like on top of a mountain in a lightning storm with a, with a lacrosse stick in the air. It's just like, it's like, it's not, that doesn't happen. Oh, okay. It doesn't happen. That being said, we do swim everywhere. We swim in all the rivers. But the thing is, like, it does help to know exactly where you are.

We were on an expedition about a year ago, and we stopped by the side of this stream. And JJ gets out. He's like, let's, like, go fishing. He takes some, could we go machete fishing? We just, like, walk around until you see a fish and just whack it and stuff. And he goes, all right, let's go fishing. I go, cool, you start. I'll be here.

I'm going to start getting this ready, whatever else. I threw a few hooks in the river. all of a sudden something starts pulling on my hook and I'm going, this is not a fish. And this thing was really strong. And all of a sudden I just see this huge electric eel like breach out of the water. It's like an eight foot electric eel. And I'm like, JJ!

I never had an electric eel on a hook before. And so he comes back and he's trying to get it off the hook and he doesn't know what to do. So finally he just wax it because I think he also just wanted to see it. But it was like this giant, absolutely monstrous eight foot long electric eel. And so we're like, shit, okay. well glad we didn't like you know get too too deep into this stream so we start walking again and then two more electric eels comes swimming over this rock and then a stingray goes by and we were just like this stream they're like next stream next one like this was the stream from absolute hell like it was just filled with piranha electric eels stingrays like everything in this stream the next hook that came out of the water was this giant stingray about this big and it was just like stabbing upwards and it was just like oh my god yeah God, dude. So we all were like, uh, next.

Next. I don't know what it was with that one stream, but it was like not. This is stream from hell. Yeah, this is not the one. So you could essentially, you could be, you could jump in the water and swim past a school of piranha and be fine. We do it every day. Every day. Every single day in the Amazon, I jump in the water.

Like, that's how I shower. I don't want to smell like. And you're not worried about piranha at all. No. Okay. Not at all. Not at all. Maybe if you had like a cut or something, can they smell blood?

I don't know. I always have cuts. man, I'm always all banged up. But I, I stepped on a crocodile once, barefoot. He was on the bottom. I stepped on his head. And he, like, moved. He was like, stop it.

And I moved to the side. What is the number one most terrifying thing you do not want to run into when you're down there? The humans. There's tribes out there. And so to explain this, there's the, on the internet, if you search, if you, if we can pull it up, if you search like, uncontacted tribes Amazon. Yeah.

There are tribes living out in the Amazon that have been there for centuries. And they are living like that because during the periods of extraction and during the conquistador era, they were the tribes that went back and said, we're not getting conquered. You see, if I go to Peru, everybody speaks Spanish.

It's because of the Spanish. Right. These are the tribes that backed up. Isn't that crazy that they came down here and like that people in South America got Spanish from the Spaniards? Yeah. Yeah. So see that, see that big patch in the lower left-hand corner of South America right there.

We're like in one of the main areas. Yeah, right above where the cursor just was. But we have uncontacted tribes in the region. That's all you got. You can't pull up anything better than that? Come on, get us some photos. There's one photo on Google where they are, they're painted red and black.

There we go. There we go. Right on the top line. Go to the top right there. Like that one. These people are living out there. And what they're doing in that photo is they are trying to shoot the plane that's flying over. No fucking way.

And they don't speak a language that any of us speak. You see that? See the red one? You see that red one? Right by the hut. Yes. Yeah. They use medicinal compounds as insecticide.

And a lot of times that dies their skin. So you get purple ones. You get black ones. You get red ones. That's his skin. That's red? Yeah. But I mean, it's been died.

It's been died. It's like, it's like, so there's a, there's a purple plant down there. You rub on your fingers. It's a leaf and you go like this. Okay. The mosquitoes will stay away from your feet. So these people are living with no clothing on,

with no permanent shelter in the Amazon rainforest. And they've been doing this for a few thousand years. And they're still out there. Oh, my God. And so the scariest thing that you could possibly run into in the Amazon is that. Well, why would they be threatening to other humans? well because the story as I understand it is like

the last contact that a lot of these tribes had with the outside world was during the rubber boom and the rubber boom was at the turn of the century like early 1900s to the industrial revolution we needed gaskets and hoses and factory stuff and so all of a sudden bike tires car tires we needed rubber for the first time

in history and the only place you could get rubber was the Amazon because that's where the rubber trees grew So we sent everybody to the Amazon And we sent these rubber barons Who went down and they just enslaved the local people And they said, You're going to go out into the forest all day long And you're going to harvest rubber forest

And so it was like one of the worst Human Holocaust's on the planet Because they went and just massacred The indigenous populations Is that a rubber tree? Horrendous. That is a rubber tree there See how they score the bark? Yeah.

It'll go into the bucket That's literally where latex comes from. That's how we get it. And so again, like thinking about like how does industry come back to nature? It's like, we got rubber from there. The Amazon. And so during this horrendous period of oppression,

some of the tribes were like, we are not going to be put in chains. We are not going to be set on fire. And they became hyper-weaponized, super defensive, and they moved back as far as they could into the forest. And they became the uncontacted tribes. And so now they speak a language

that we don't really speak. And my first experience with them was that I had heard that they would kill you. So one of the guys I work with, he was a logger. And in 2004, he was working as a mahogany logger. And he's coming down the river. And he sent his friend and his friend's wife ahead to go to the side, get some firewood, start making breakfast. Because they had this huge barge of mahogany.

So they're going very slowly down the river. river. And he sent them ahead to go make breakfast. And so this guy's name is Victor. And as Victor's coming down the river, he's just chilling. What he doesn't know is that this is what happened. They go ahead. They reach the beach. And they're like, all right, let's get some fire with it. They go up onto the beach. And all of a sudden, they hear the war cry from the uncontacted tribe. Arrows start falling. Six foot long arrows. What we think of as spears, they're shooting. This guy gets hit through the thigh and through the front of his leg. And so his leg is locked. He goes down. He tells his wife, he goes, just keep running. Run for it.

She runs because they're coming. They're like running now. There's a bunch of red, purple, black, yellow people, painted all different colors, running out of the jungle, screaming. She jumps into the water, swims for her life. The last thing she saw was them coming down on him and just cutting him to pieces. When my friend came around the bend, he said there was blood all over the beach. They'd removed his testicles. I think they took one of his arms.

They'd opened up his stomach because they wanted to know what he was eating because to them, we're foreign. They're like, what are these people surviving on? They're so far. You know, they have these flying things, and they come by in these loud boats, and they don't understand. So they got the story when they kept going down river, and they found the woman, and she was just holding onto a stick, and she was weeping. And, of course, she was super messed up after what happened to her husband. But there was that massacre on the beach, and that was just in 2004. This August, this August, this brutal pictures were going around, you know, the WhatsApp news network in the region.

some loggers had gone to the wrong beach man and the tribes had showed up and what the tribes do is when they surround you and they don't want to speak in human terms they start using animal calls they start using monkey calls and bird calls to communicate with each other so that the people that they're tracking won't know and so they got and then so they got to get around these people and they start using that type of thing so these guys got scared and they started firing off their guns well as soon as they fired off their guns the tribe took that as aggression. And then somebody found them a few days later when the bodies were all bloated and

disgusting and had been picked apart by vultures. But it was just like, you will be massacred. Absolutely massacred. And so the scariest thing I ever saw in the jungle was them. Wow. So you actually had an encounter with them? I had a horrible encounter with them. It was right around the time, JJ had,

JJ had kept telling me that there were these places in the jungle that like no one goes, that you could keep going past a certain point and then like, you know, there'd be like rocks where the boats can't go and then and then pass that. Well, what's past that? And he's like, well, it keeps going. It's like a stream, but it's shallow, but nobody goes there. And I was like, this is what I was born to do. So there's a company based out of Colorado called Alpaca pack rafts and they make these little rafts that that roll down into like the size of a tent. So I got a pack raft, put my paddles on the outside of my bag,

put like 10 days worth of like nuts and high calorie dry foods in my bag. I had a journal. I had like a little cannon power shot at the time. And I went and I went up with with poachers because those are the only people that were going deep into the forest. And I get dropped on the side of a river. And I said, so I said, just so you guys. So what spot is this? And they were like, not tian nombre.

They're like, doesn't have a name. And then I was like, all right, well, goodbye. And they were like, no, you want to. us to leave you here. And they kept they kept, they were like, no, no, no, you're going to die. They're like, you're going to die. And I was like, you don't get it. I'm like, I'm like an outdoors person. I got this. Just leave me here. This is what I want.

And I really almost like into the wilded myself. But I kept walking past the point where boats could go on the river. So now I'm in literally past the edge of human presence on our planet. I'm in the wildest place on earth in the rainforest where like the canopy meets over the river and

Like the monkeys don't know what a human is. So the wildlife will like come down and look at you. Like it's the Galapagos. They're like, they're like, what's that? They've never seen a human before. And I'm just walking around and I'm camping at night and I'm journaling. And I'm having this amazing adventure. And then this right around the eight day mark, the river was getting pretty narrow.

And I came to a bend in the river. And I see smoke coming up off the opposite side. And like, man, my heart just dropped. And I said, if I don't go. see what this is. I'm never going to forgive myself. And so I went ahead just a little bit. And like as soon as I rounded the bend, there was like three or four of them. And they had their arrows out already. And they were like, they were also sort of peeking around the bend to see like, because they saw, they knew that I was coming. They heard me. They sent something was there. They sent something was there. And it was just they had a little

campfire going on the beach. And they had like a few of their little huts up. They made like these little palm shelters. But they were making dead eye contact with me. Oh, they saw you. Oh, they knew I was there. they had their arrows in their bows already and they were like looking over like this and I saw one say something to the other one. I mean it was a good football field away but it was like they were like there it is and for the first time of my life I was potentially

being hunted by other humans that didn't speak a language that I can speak you can't even beg for mercy and so I just ran down river. Full speed? Full speed jumped in the river floated but it wasn't deep enough it wasn't deep enough for me to float down the river so I got out opened my pack raft they have like an inflation bag I like

inflated this thing in three minutes, got in the pack graft, threw my backpack on my lap, and just started going. And I went for three days without stopping. And the reason I did that was because even when I stopped at night, I mean, I was literally kayaking past crocodiles in the river. I mean, there was fish jumping up out of the river into my boat. I was actually, some of the times I didn't even need to go fishing because there was fish.

At night, you scare the fish. They just jump into your boat. But there was one point where I set up my tent and I was like, I have to get some sleep. It's been 48 hours with no sleep. I'm starving. I'm freaking out. And I like laid down, fell asleep. The first dream I had was that they were around me and I heard all these animal noises. And then all of a sudden they started stabbing through the tent. And it was like, it was more traumatic to be asleep than it was to just keep running. And so it took me a week to get out. But it was like seeing that and knowing the stories from from some of the toughest guys that I know who have like lost loved ones. One of my rangers now. One of my rangers has been shot in the head. He was trying to give them bananas. He saw them somewhere and he tried to push a canoe across the river. And as he's pushing this canoe and he's like here have some bananas and he's trying to show like I don't mean any harm. I'm okay. And they just went fire an arrow at his head. And so

he sees the arrow, six foot arrow coming at his head and he moves to the side. And it scraped him from his temple all the way to the back of his head. It opened him to the skull. Oh my God. And he was he's okay. He's a he's a hard ass man. He works for me now. He's Ignacio. And uh, but like he he's he's also very scared of them. So it's like, and you can't, you can't reason with them. You can't be like, guys, it's okay. It's okay. No, they don't speak our language. And they believe that we are like literally demons that are trying to kill them. Yeah, they believe that we're deep. It must be passed down because of the Spaniards that came down. It must be just a tale that they pass down and they teach their young. And they teach their young that the outside world is, is going to

kill you. So kill them first if you want to survive. I'm sure you've heard of the North Sentinel Island, the uncontracted tribe and that guy who recently went you hear about that that guy went recently and he was like have you guys heard about Jesus and they just stuck an hour Oh yes yes yes The missionary guy that went That meant when you feel all warm

So that there's a crazy fucking story About that about a British guy who went down there Austin I sent you the link yesterday you can pull it up There's all he did this whole Twitter thread about There was this British

researcher who went down there this is a yeah Portman he went down there in 1880 to 1900s to he was some sort of like pervert and he was doing some weird perverted study on like the kids

like measuring their dicks and shit and um he was like taking these weird photos of them and like an old couple died because I guess they caught some sort of disease that he had and they didn't have the immunity built up.

Yes, that's a major concern. Even with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, like our common rhinovirus, a cold could wipe out like a whole tribe. It's happened. Yeah. And eventually they ended up just murdering this guy because he was just fucking

with them. And they, and that's the reason that they have been so hostile to outsiders ever since them. Well, I mean, can you blame them? Right. No, you can't blame them. You can't blame them. And they've been there for like, I think it's like 60,000, years. They descended from Africa like 60,000 years ago and they're still fucking there. Yeah. No. And I mean, if that's what they want to do, let them keep doing it. I don't understand why people have to go mess with these people. And notice the people who go mess with these people. It's always some missionary. It's always some missionary. In Mother of God in my book, it's not my story, but I tell the story of there are some missionaries. And I think it was in Ecuador where they went and they took a plane and they landed in the Amazon, really remote Amazon. And they,

I love this story. They, they landed to this remote tribe, and they got out on the beach, and the tribe was like, wow, you people came out of a flying bird. And the people were like, yeah, nobody could talk. So it was all like hand gestures. And they were like, try on a t-shirt. And they like, it was pretty friendly. They even took the chief of the tribe up in the plane.

And they did it around and brought them back down. Which, like, you might, that might like hurt someone's brain if they've never seen a plane before. And then they said, we're going to come back. We're going to come back and just wait. Okay. So they went back and they have the journal entry of one of the missionaries. And he's going, I just hate that we're spending another Christmas when these poor people won't know about Jesus Christ and the Lord and Savior and blah, blah, blah, blah. He's like, really keeping them awake at night.

So anyway, they go back and I think there's five of them and they land the plane, same beach and they find these people again. And the tribe is like, hey, so look, we talked about it. And the missionary is like, well, hold on, hold on. We have like cotton candy and we have photos from back home. like here's our family and the tribes take one look at it. They look at the photo and they go, wait a second. I see human faces. There's nothing behind this.

And the chief goes, guys, it's black magic. Kill everybody. And the tribe fucking murders all of them right there. And so when the missionaries didn't come back, like a week later, they sent out a rescue mission and there's just dead people all over the beach. And years later, like a decade later, when this tribe eventually was taught Spanish and they were sort of brought, you know, roads reached them. And of course, whenever roads go into a rainforest, everybody gets domesticated.

Yeah. But they were able to interview the same tribe people. No way. And they said, what were you thinking? And they said, how the hell were we supposed to know? They said, you showed us a picture. So we never saw a picture before. They said, yeah, they were flying around in a metal thing and showing us pictures. They said, we just assumed that they were devil.

So we killed them just to be safe. They said, we were a little spooked. That's fucking insane. And it was like a totally like natural move for them. They were just like, you know, these people seemed a little too friendly. Yeah, I think on that thread I was talking about in like 2006, a, a cargo ship ran aground right on the edge of the island and they could see after like a day or so

part of the tribe started coming out from the forest and they were on the beach building boats trying to come out so they had to call in and evacuate a helicopter to come evacuate them and the ship is still there if you go on Google Maps you can just see the skeleton of the ship still there and then in 2014 they went back there again another group of people went back there from I think it's off the coast of like

of like India I think maybe and they went back Austin try to find a video of them giving coconuts to the tribe on North Sentinel Island they pulled up in a fucking boat and they're right there and all these guys are just right there like they're taking the coconuts from them this was like

a couple years ago and like the women and the children and then the guys and they have you can see they have a couple of them had these big metal knives on their wastes. Yeah, this is it. And they say that they got, the only way they have the metal is from that ship

that we're in the ground in 2006. Play it. Skip like halfway through. Oh, he just took her out with the coconut. Yeah, he just took out the pregnant lady. Oh, this is wild. I've never seen this. See that metal, see the metal dagger?

Yeah. Well, that's when the Amazon, when they come, whenever they come and they raid, they raid the villages sometimes, our machetes. Oh, really? Yeah. They want metal. They don't have any. Isn't that crazy? They don't have metal. Yeah, it's fucking insane.

They missed out on the wheel. They missed out on the spoon. The knife. That is not how to use that. Dude, these guys are so lucky that they didn't get massacred. And there's one point where some of the guys start doing, like, these, these tribe guys start, watch what this guy does right here. it's like he's doing some sort of like it seems like a get the fuck out of here type thing wow look at that look at that he's like yep grab that coconut it's pretty crazy that they just decided

to go back and just pull right up like that uh yeah to me i wouldn't be in within i wouldn't be with an arrow range no you're way too close i mean that's like oh my god it's so insane to think that People like that still exist on this earth. Yeah. And then, you know, it's funny because people like romanticize it. They're like, oh, they're the last like truly free people. They don't have like politics or religion. And it's like, yeah, they just have like intertribal war and like, you know, organized

rape and like probably believe a million false things. I've talked to scientists who have like talked about how like some entire cultures have had just like wrong ideas. There's a there's a tribe in New Guinea that believe that. any sickness that happened was from black magic from from neighboring tribes. And so like these people were in constant terror that the other tribes were going to put a curse on them. And like when the missionaries went, these people were living in so much fear. And it was like they had to explain to these people that like basically the whole fundamental fabric of your reality is false.

So like we have to start over again. And it's like, dude, that sucks. You were like living on an island completely misunderstanding life. Yeah. Like that's, that's rough. Yeah, but if a comet were to hit and take out our population, they would be the ones to survive. Oh, yeah, because they'd be fine. They would be the only ones love.

Exactly what to do. That and, like, the two, like, doomsday preppers somewhere in, like, fucking Utah would be like, yeah. The billionaires with the giant underground doomsday bunkers. Yeah, it must be like, it must be like if we must be to them, like what aliens are to us. Pretty much. Or close. Pretty much. We live completely outside of their culture.

We live outside of their contact. They don't understand us. Anything that they get from us is like relics. And so when they go, okay, so, I mean, I've done this. You know, you go out in the forest and you say, okay, I'm going to survive. Picture of somebody said, like, make a bagel. It's funny, but it's like, holy shit. It's like, well, I got to first, I got to get some space.

I got to cut down a tree. How are you going to cut down a tree? Oh, shit, I need an axe. It's all right. Well, you got to get some metal. It's like, okay. So even if you get a field and then you, you know, so you got to get barley. And it's like, well, oh, wait, hold on.

that doesn't exist until humans like breed it and engineer it to be more productive and it's like it's this stuff is so our society is so complex and they're literally living on a basis of like hunter gatherer like they are self-sufficient individuals and that's what makes it that like that they could they could they'd be fine like I'm gonna go catch a fish so you mentioned we mentioned earlier and I talked to yesterday about the it's fascinating to me how the soil in the Amazon is sterile and completely infertile if they're so much vegetation. How is it possible? It's so infertile. And then I want to talk to you too about the terra praida stuff. What do you know about that man-made terra-prada soil? Yeah.

Well, the soil, first of all, the Amazon used to be joined to the Congo. Okay. All right? And so there used to be they used to flow the opposite direction in the Amazon. And then when they split, because the Congo River is flowing let's see, what is it, east to west. And so the Amazon also would

flowing east to west. And then when the continents split, those two things were divided. And then South America hit up against the NASCA plate, which is what sent the Andes mountains up. And they both drain into the Atlantic. And now they both drain into the Atlantic. So the Amazon actually reversed directions. But as that was happening, for a long time, it was this giant inland sea. And so it was still salt water, which is why we still have stingrays, manatees. There's certain like relics that have adapted to freshwater life after being there for millions of years as this transition was taking place. But you're basically talking about like an ocean floor in a lot of cases. And so that's what the Amazon is growing on. Oh, okay. And so, and then, like, in our region, it's clay. And so, like,

when you're digging through this clay, you stick a shovel through this thing. And it is, I mean, think of a lump of clay, like what you would make a sculpture out of. Like, when you ever seen people take that, take that wire and you can cut straight through the clay with it. And it's just like this homogenous gray mass. Well, in the Amazon, it's red. But it's like, there's no space in there. There's no nutrients. There's no soil. It's just clay.

Dense. It's just dense. And so the trees, when you see the rainforest trees, they have these roots that's spread out. It's almost like the base of a rocket ship. And so they're standing there. Think like a chest piece. It's just a big fat bottom sitting at the bottom of these giant ancient trees. And the reason that they have that rainforest tree look is because instead of sending roots down, they send roots out to stabilize.

Oh, shit, really. So if you see a tree fall over on the side of the river, like even like a, you know, 170 foot tall tree, it's only going to have like a four foot taproot that goes into the ground. It's tiny. No way. It's like nothing. Yeah.

I had no idea. And so all of the nutrients is kept in the very, very, very, very top soil. So all the falling leaves, all the branches, all the animal carcasses, all that nutrients is coming from what's alive. And that's all being cycled out so quickly because a fungal mycelium is breaking everything down. If it wasn't for fungus, the Amazon would bury itself in leaves and cease to exist. And then the rains are constantly washing those leaves into tributaries, which is going into the water, which is going into the rivers, and then washing out into the Atlantic where phytoplankton are hitting all of that biotic matter and releasing it into the atmosphere. And so, like, the nutrients of the Amazon is all like, it's a very, like, temporary thing.

It's all just being held by the existing life, which is why when you cut stuff down and burn it. It's like a machine. It's like a machine. It's like a constantly turning death machine. It's been called the greatest natural battlefield on earth Because everything is broken down so quickly From the biggest tree to the termites to a jaguar to us Everything in the Amazon is in like the process of being recycled

Like life is a momentary stasis compared to the constant turning of death In the Amazon like It's just a you really get a sense of it When you see an animal die in the Amazon The body is like decomposed by the next day Wow. I think it's gone. Like if you ever want it to murder somebody, the Amazon's a place to do it.

You just like whack them over the back of the head. They'll be gone. The soil and the plants and everything just eats it. Yeah. You have dung beetles coming in and leaf cutter ants and vultures and everything tears it apart. And it's just like sort of if you do like a time lapse of it, you'll see it like swell up and then like go down. Wow. Then the bones will get carried off by scavengers and just gets spread out.

Really? And then as soon as it rains, the bones get wet and then more fungus. That fungus gets through everything. That fungus will break down a mahogany tree. none of those uncontacted tribes are cannibals right not that we know of um i've never heard of anything like that and there's been a few people in the region it's it's kind of like one of those things we don't really talk about but there's a couple people scattered through the remote villages that we can contact where like there's one guy i think that got washed down river where he was like a child with the

uncontacted tribes and now he lives and speaks spanish and like lives with one of the other communities and I would never share where the location of that is, but he's far from into talking about it, but he sort of knows both worlds. Oh, wow. Yeah, and so, like, someone like that would have said if they were cannibals, but I don't think they are. Now, what is this Terra Prada man-made soil

that I'm hearing everything, all that? I heard that they found it in multiple different spots, and it's been studied, and it's, like, super fertile. Yeah. And it was, there's evidence that it's man-made. Yeah, I think it was Oriana, who was the first person to descend the Amazon, which is a crazy story because the Spanish came in through Lima over the Andes. And then he literally like built a boat, floated down 4,000 kilometers across the entire Amazon basin, had these incredible adventures. He's the reason. He's the guy who told all the stories about all the crazy civilizations in the Amazon, right? And then they went back and everything was gone. Like the guy was fucking lying. Yeah. And also in terms of like survival, like however many guys they started with and ended with. but this dude survived that expedition, got to the mouth of the Amazon, navigated by the stars, and said, I know where we are.

And if we could build a ship, we could get back to Spain and did that. It's one of the most psychotically amazing stories I've ever heard. And he's the reason that the Amazon River is called the Amazon River. Oh, really? Apparently there was a tribe that was very female dominant. And he was hearkening back to the, I think it's a Greek myth of the Amazons, which is a tribe of women who shoot arrows and actually are one-breasted women

so that they could draw their bowstring back. Oh, wow. But that's where that name comes from, the Amazon forest. Oh, okay. I was thinking of a story of a Spanish explorer who went through the Amazon, like the 1500s. And then he reported seeing like tons of tribes.

But then they went back and like 200 years later, they went back looking for everybody. And it was all gone because they had brought smallpox through and killed everybody. Yeah. So this is the same guy that's named after is the guy who was responsible for murdering everybody in there with smallpox? His reports of the Amazon led to it generally being referred to as the Amazon forest, the forest of the Amazon. Okay, gotcha.

He was Oriana, I believe, was his name. I think it was like Francisco de Oriana. Yes, that's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, he had stories of civilizations that had huge sectioned off areas of the river where they were cultivating turtles, the giant Amazonian turtles. And they were living off of that as their primary protein. I mean, this stuff's written down. These people were more, they were more literate than we are.

Wow. I mean, the stuff, you read these guys as journals. Incredible. I mean, you have the journals of Pizarro, the day he touched down in Peru, where he's like, he's like, chuckling to himself. And he's going, this is going to be a really easy conquistador journey. He's like, this one's going to be good. And at that point, he was like, I know six other guys that are like rich conquistadors. He's like, I got these people because the Peruvians came out.

And they were like, here's textiles and gifts. and here's some cocoa leaves and they're like welcome welcome and he was like you people are fucking idiots and then they just got ready to kill everybody like it's in his journal it's absolutely awful he like thought it was funny he's like i can't wait to write home and start this like jesus yes no they were they were on a whole different level um so the terra praida stuff though um is is part of a conversation right now that i think is a huge misinformation thing and really yes because because graham hancock his whole theory on all this yeah These guys, see, what happens is you come out with a controversial theory.

All right? You say, we're living in a simulation. I can prove it. And everyone goes, we are? And then everyone clicks on it. This guy comes out and goes, the Amazon rainforest is a man-made thing. I go, what? I was like, let me listen to this.

Terrapareate it. We found geoglyphs or we found, you know, evidence of human civilizations in the Amazon rainforest. And it's like of the area of the Amazon rainforest, if you actually look at the scientific literature of what these archaeologists found, it's like 0.03% of the actual landmass of the Amazon shows signs of some form of terra prada that they believe was influenced by humans.

And so then what happens is this dude goes on podcasts and writes books and does lectures where he goes, we've been thinking all wrong about the Amazon because he wants his big, you know, he wants to like drop the big bomb. He goes, we've been thinking about it. all wrong. And then I hear him on Rogan going, the Amazon is actually

a man-made garden. They've actually engineered a lot of the forest. And I'm listening to this, ready to fucking flip the tape. Because I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I love what you said. He's going He makes his life as like the Da Vinci Code. Oh my God. He's literally, he

is a fucking child playing he's playing a game where he's like an explorer. Like he thinks he's like Hiram Bigam and he's going to go find Machu Picchu or something. The problem with his story that it's a dangerous story because it changes the narrative and it changes how we view the future. Okay, so he's on there going, well, yeah, you know, there's this evidence all over the Amazon. Now, if you take a football field, you take a handful of quarters and you throw it, and there's,

no, there's quarters all over the field, but are, is that handful of quarters on this whole football field, does that mean that the, you know, what does that mean? You know what I mean? It's a very, very small percentage. And so yes, of course, over the course of history, there's hundreds of thousands of people. Right now, I think there's like 20 million people that live in the Amazon. Maybe more. It's probably more like 30 million people.

Really? Yeah, there's indigenous communities all over the Amazon rainforests. There's cities. There's Manas. There's Akitos. There's Puerto Maldonado. There's plenty of people living. That's when people go, is it too dangerous to go to the Amazon rainforest?

I'm like, bro, I know babies in the Amazon rainforest. It's like, you can go. You've grown ass human. But yeah, I was listening to him. and they're going, oh, yeah, and literally the evidence that they're using to prove their point was absolutely false. And he's going, yeah, we see domesticated species like Brazil nut trees. Okay. We're going to have a conversation about what domesticated means.

All right. Domesticated is like a golden retriever. A wolf is a wild species. And then we bred wolves down and mixed them with things. And we came up with a golden retriever. A cow. You know, we came up with a cat. We took a wild species and we made it produce more milk.

and then, you know, a chicken. We made it so that they produce eggs every day. Those are domesticated species, species that we have bred to be productive for us. Same with bananas, same with apples, all these things. They come from a root source plant that ancient civilizations bred to be more productive. Fine. You know, I once heard someone say about Asian elephants.

They went, oh, do, you know, these are domesticated elephants. No, no, no, no. These are captive elephants. This is a wild animal that is being, that has been, that has. been beaten until it's been kept in a temple or a cage or whatever else, but that does not mean it's domesticated. And so this guy was going on about like, yeah, like you see higher concentrations of domesticated Brazil nut trees around these areas with terra prada.

Brazil nut trees are not domesticated species. Brazil nut trees are one of the pillars of the natural Amazon rainforest. And what people could have done was they could have taken the nuts just like we could take acorns from an oak tree and we could plant them around our farm if we want. on oak trees, but they're not domesticated. Why does he think they're domesticated? I don't know. Probably the same reason he thinks he's Indiana fucking Jones.

And how do we know that they're not domesticated? You can look it up, but it's a wild species. And they're so intricately... Austin, that's your cue? They're so intricately woven into the ecology of the Amazon. You can't actually have productive Brazil nut trees without primary forests. Listen to this. So if you have a 400-year-old Brazil nut tree,

and they're like one of the emergent, giant pillars of the forest. They depend on a species of orchid bee to pollinate their flowers. And before that pollination happens between the male and female trees, they will not produce the Brazil nuts.

And then once they produce the Brazil nuts, those nuts actually fall from the canopy, 160 feet up where we can't get them, to the ground. And then the only animal in the rainforest that has teeth strong enough to make it through this hard, nutty shell of a Brazil nut is something called

an agouti, and it's a rodent. It's a big-ass rodent. I think that's like a shrew. It looks like a, it looks like a, more like a beaver family type of thing. Okay, yeah. And they open them and they bury them just like squirrels do. They bury them all over and then the Brazil nut trees.

Let's see what? Oh, Wikipedia is trustworthy. The Brazil nut is a South American tree in the family of, I'm not even going to try to say that. Le Cidethi. The fruit and its nutshell containing the edible Brazil nut are relatively large. Well, blah, blah. Keep going down. Keep going.

find something about where they're from and how they were made. From both made by Amazon. Jesus. But like, so the thing about Graham is I don't think, I think he just wants, he's just advocating for the Amazon to be studied, right? He's not advocating for, like he, he said that he thinks that money needs to be put into more LIDAR. Yes. Penetrating LIDAR with them to survey, LIDAR surveys on the Amazon. because right now I think it's only been like a very, very small percent of the Amazon has been surveyed by LIDAR, right?

I think that that's a great idea. And I fully support that. The problem is that when you listen to these interviews, when you listen to what is extrapolated from, so when he says, again, I'm going from the interviews that I've heard where you hear them go, okay, there's a lot more human civilization in the Amazon than you think. And they were engineering the forest. And then you literally hear people going, so wait, so the forest? was engineered by people and they go yeah the Amazon was actually a garden and you can look this up on Smithsonian where they go yeah yeah yeah they produced a paper that said this as a hypothesis and then they're like but more realistically there's small settlements throughout the Amazon that correspond with the ancient

civilizations and the Amazon's the Amazon and so what he's doing is then when people co and they say well if the Amazon is a human made thing well then as we as we decide the fate of the Amazon what do we want it to look like, and it very quickly becomes this very dangerous thing where it's, if it's not wild anymore, well, then it's just something else that we can manipulate. And the Amazon is such an intensely complicated web of life that this is not something that we actually understand yet. So to, so to, to, to, if you have a guy like Bolsonaro who's going, oh, well, look, look, the research says, you know, this was manmade to begin with. So we better start chopping it up and turning it into soy farms. It's like, these are dangerous extrapolations that are being

made from that assertation that there's that the Amazon is a is a cultivated garden Austin I can't see there's a giant ad in front of the article the supposedly pristine untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by human like this

over thousands of years native people played a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness published 2017 keep going down this is the Smithsonian okay so yeah yeah this is a good article you read through the whole article and then at the end then all of a sudden they bring it back to reality.

There you go. All right, all right. So here's this other expert, Piperno, also cautions, drawing direct conclusions from the tree data. She points to the fact that some scientists once thought that the Mayan civilization of Central America

heavily cultivated the bread nut tree based on larger than expected numbers of them often found in the Mayan ruins. However, later research found that the breadnut trees also can be spread widely by bats and that the trees may have started growing around ruins to take advantage of the limestone that they provide in nearby soil. Prepare no hopes to see more work done finding an island.

Basically, they bring in this expert who actually says, you know what? This is just a brand new hypothesis. And it doesn't mean shit. Right. So what they're doing here is they're using this headline to hook you. Right. Yeah. Go to that last paragraph.

For future research, Pipponero hopes to see more work done finding and analyzing the remains of plants from prehistoric eras such as charcoal. and mineralized phytoliths and charcoal these are the proxies that need to be relied on papinarosa. So what she's saying

is politely that. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, the crazy thing if there was all those cities there when that first guy went through the Amazon, the first Spanish guy explored through there and then they were gone 200 years later, the Amazon clearly ate like it ate

up everything. Oh, yeah. growth and grew over everything. So there's, there's, if there was a way to fund more LIDAR surveys of the Amazon or cover it and see all the shit that is under there,

it would be fucking incredible. We would learn so much about the history of that, of our species. 100%. And there's actually, I, I know a guy who knows where there's, there's stuff under the canopy that, that we don't know about.

And the scientific we. And the guys on the ground know about it. Like what? Like entire ruins that no one's found. Well, they found pyramids there, right? Yeah. There's all kinds of stuff down there. I know there's pyramids, like crazy geometric shapes they found.

Yep, yep. And I mean, but again, again, it's just like, you know, the thing is not to blow that into, that's fine. And saying that we, that there's more human sites than we thought, like even like pottery. Like we found if you go to like a certain bend in the river Like usually when the interesting thing with the jungle or with any wilderness is that there's sort of like natural law like you stop at certain points like there's like certain points in a river where it's just like a good port it's a good place to stop your boat And it's like you're usually gonna find somewhere near there like some pottery remains or something because then some ancient civilization probably also thought it was a good port And so like yeah there's a hundred percent there was there was millions of people that

that have existed in the Amazon over time, but the danger is, is that then they jump this to the Amazon was created by humans, which is fucking moronic. Yeah, that, I mean, that statement just seems dumb. It's absolutely stupid. And how would people use that? Well, people are using that to...

Then they make articles like this. And then how many people read to the last paragraph? Right. How many people just click on that article and go, look, I saw it. It says it. The Amazon was actually shaped by humans. And that is so dangerous because the ecology there, is so intricately intertwined with each with it.

I mean, these are, we're just starting to scratch the surface of this, of this food chain. Like, you know, if you ever, you ever heard of the thing with the, the wolves in Yellowstone about where they, the wolves have been absent from Yellowstone for 100 years and then they brought back the wolves into Yellowstone. And all of a sudden they saw all these ecological things fall into place. Like, because the deer weren't overgrazing the plants by the rivers, they were moving quicker because they knew there was wolves around. And so all of a sudden the shorelines around the rivers were able to grow up, which, when there was floods meant that there was more roots and more

retention. So the floods weren't as bad. It also meant that because the deer weren't always harassing the plant life by the edges, that little trees were able to grow up, which meant the beavers were able to use them. And so the wolves, the top-down predator ecology, truth is, is that we needed wolves to keep balance in the ecosystem. And it's something very simple, something very similar with elephants. It's like what elephants do for an ecosystem is so crucial. But it's like if we start changing these hard one, I mean, how many years of research did it take to find out these things about the wolves?

You know, it took us exterminating wolves and then bringing them back for us to learn how crucial they are. And then, you know, with the Amazon, we're just starting to learn about how the Brazil nut trees and the rivers and the moisture cycle all works together. And it's like, then people go, oh, no, no, no. it's actually human-made guys you can pave it no yeah no i can't let me you can't i'm not gonna be quiet for that one just because somebody wants to get like a fancy phd and get some interviews right right right no i mean it just sucks that there's not more research being done on it and there's not more archaeology being done down there and there's not more digging you know and and the lidar surveys which i think those are really super expensive to do they are expensive to do because

we're trying to get some LIDAR surveys in our region because it would, there's stuff out there. There's stuff, you know, like, I've been down there 17 years. Like, I have a number of sites that I would love to go do LIDAR over because, like, we can just sort of, this place is where we know that there's some evidence of stuff or, like, we found pottery and it's like, we could be sitting on a massive discovery.

Couldn't we find just some billionaire to just pay for some LIDAR? I mean, I don't see why not. This fucking billionaire is popping up all over the place. And they spend money on way stupider things than that. I mean, like penis rockets. Yeah. Like, what? I see.

I miss a lot of stuff. Like I've missed a lot of stuff. Like I come out of the jungle and my friends will be like, yo, did you hear about like this? And I'll be like, what? Or like I'll see a meme and I'll like, I'll have to like text my friend. I'll be like, what are they talking about? You know, like it'll be like a meme or something. And the last one was like, it was like Biden falling off a bicycle.

And I was like, what happened? Oh, yeah. Okay. And they were like, no, no, you've been in the jungle, man. Like he was fine. It was a joke. It passed. You missed it.

And I was like, okay. Like I miss a lot of stuff. But, yeah, we need. We need to, I came out of the jungle one time and someone was like, you see this guy fucking flying on it?

And I was like, you flew a dick rocket? I was like, I was like, that really happened. I think I missed that too. Holy shit. Yeah, Bezos's rocket could have been designed.

Oh, that could have been designed. I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, because sometimes I come out

and like my friends will almost mess with me and be like, yo, this happened while you were gone and I'll be like, what? Is there a way,

like, do you bring a sat phone with you everywhere when you got that? Not anymore. No? Not anymore. Who are you going to call? Right.

All right. So you get shot through the, through the stomach by an arrow. What are you going to be like, hi, mom? You know what I mean? Like, there's no one to call. What do you do? Like, what do you do if you get seriously injured? It's real life.

Right. There's no, there's no ambulance coming for you. There's no helicopter evac. You know, and you do travel insurance. They sell you, oh, you have like $250,000 of Medevac or whatever else. There's no one to come get you out there. That's one of the fast. things too about some of these ancient

trial or the ancient civilizations that live down there like how long ago was ayahuasca invented like how many years ago was the first the first ayahuasca concocting because it takes two different plants

that are completely different yeah the bush that causes all the hallucinations you could eat the shit all day and you just get a stomach egg yeah but as soon as you mix it with this other plant the vine yeah yeah the vine all of a sudden the magic happens so how did they learn that so many fucking years ago? There's a beautiful book by Wade Davis called One River. And for anybody that's interested in this stuff, you've got to read One River. It's like

this giant, very difficult to read. It's like biblical. But he's following the work of Richard Evans Schultes, who was a Harvard ethnobotanist who went through the Amazon. I think it was like in this, I want to say in like the 50s or the 60s. But he started doing all these hallucinogenics in a research capacity and trying to figure out and trying to really, he was a botanist. But they were saying the statistical improbability of even if you did trial and error over the course of thousands of years, given that there's 15,000 species of trees and then how many species of vines and how many species? I mean, you're talking, the numbers are staggering. It's like, you just got to hear like the interstellar music start playing behind your head as you think about this. And somehow they figured this out.

It's not like, you know, like maple syrup. Like the first person to burn a maple tree was like, oh, that's good. Right. You know what I mean? Like that's one step. We're good. This is a complex chemical reaction that literally opens your mind to other worlds. And for people that have done normal drugs like mushrooms or LSD or something like,

ayahuasca is a totally different thing. I've never done ayahuasca. How is it different from mushrooms? It's very different. I mean, I just feel like. It's considered, it's basically like DMT, right? It's essentially the same thing. Yeah.

I mean, I look, I had done mushrooms in college and, you know, like everybody else and you go for a walk and it's nice. And I can kind of feel, I can kind of like see music. That's cool. And then like, you know, and now there's a lot of people who are like, I talked about ayahuasca with someone recently. And they go, oh, I just did I aweska last week. And I went, you went to the Amazon last week? And they went, no. New York.

Yeah, I did it in a yoga studio in New York. And I was like, I was like, okay. I go, I go back. I tell my local guys that they laugh. They're like, yeah, okay. the thing is it's it's literally from a vine and and then you know you're you're mixing compounds in the jungle and boiling it down and these people live in the jungle and they go on a diet where they just drink that to to and what they're doing is they're connecting deeply to like the forest spirit the truth between the trees and they're trying to absorb that to become shamans and they study for years for that for that privilege and it's not viewed as a drug it's not viewed as something that's like you know recreationally done it's viewed as something that's viewed as something that's viewed as something that's that's deeply medicinal that opens up the spirit world. And so when they hear about people doing it in a yoga studio,

that's like, you know, that's like, it's like someone in the military having somebody be like, oh, I did a tough mutter once. And it's like, okay, cool. Like you ran in a circle. Like, good for you. But whatever you could compare it to, it's like there's drugs and then there's ayahuasca. Like I was unprepared.

The first time I did ayahuasca, I like, I had a notebook. I had like an iPod. I was like, I'm going to listen music. It's going to be cool. I'm going to, like, write down my thoughts. I had no idea. You know, the shaman comes in and we're sitting in a circle, and he lights a single candle, a single two candles in the middle of the floor.

And you're all sitting in a circle and things get real quiet. And you just start noticing the sounds of the jungle. And all of a sudden, you know, like when you're scared, you just start noticing different stuff. And all of a sudden you say, oh, you know, I agree to do this. You go, okay. and you see the look on everyone else's face. You see the local people who are going to do it with you, and you see that they're not joking.

They're like getting ready. Oh, God. And then he beckons to you, and this guy's sitting there, and the candles are in his eyes, and he's got feathers off his head, and he's got monkey skulls around him, and he goes, come, and you kneel before him. Takes a big drag of his cigarette,

and he blows medicinal herbs through his lungs onto the ayahuasca. And then he gives it. to you and he hands it to me. And I was like, everything in me was screaming and saying, don't do this. It was like, I was like, I'm backing up. I'm backing up. I don't want to do it, but you're too far in. You can't do that in front of everybody. I was like, screw it. And I just kicked it back. And then so you go and you sit down and I'm sitting there. And then the next person goes. And the next person goes and we're sitting in the circle. And I remember being like, oh, I think I got this. I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to be fine. And then I like,

I remember I opened my notebook. And it's all dark. And we're, we're under a roof, but there's no walls. And so the jungle is all around us. And so you could hear, and all of a sudden, it started to rain lightly. And I started to notice that the sounds, I started to, I started to, like, tried to wash off my hands that the sounds were coming through my fingertips. And I started to, I started to be very concerned with that the sounds had gotten under my skin and the frogs and the crickets and the frogs and the throbbing of the jungle night. And then the last thing I remember seeing was that I looked down at the floorboards and it was like this. You know, it was just like, and I remember seeing the molecules of the wood as I, as I got smaller and smaller and dematerialized and fell through

the table or the floor, the earth, everything, and down into like unconstructed universe. And I was down there for a very long time. And if I went into it, it would sound so redacted It would be stupid to To retell it, but it's like you go down so deep that you leave your body You're in a different universe. You're in like unconstructed dream space And and it was it was so it was so intense that in like at like 4 a.m. when I came back I just remember being so scared and I'd been through so many different universes and I like the moment I realized I had a hand and

I was so thankful. I felt my hand on the board, and I went, I like was me. I could remember my name. I'd forgotten my name, all this stuff. I mean, you're in, you're in, I mean, literally picture like being a consciousness floating in space with the stars and the nebulous and being able to swim. It was wild. And so I came back and then I looked for the shaman and I see this hammock and he's gone.

So as the sun comes up, we start looking for the shaman and we go, where is this guy? And the guy's old. He's like 85 years old. He's one of the old guys. He's got this face. He's got like permanent like whacked out De Niro face with like, with like hair that sticks up. You can never tell if he's high or not.

And he's always like, ah, and we looked everywhere from me. He wasn't at camp. And then we like later that day, we were like, I guess he left. Like,

I don't know. And then like an hour later, somebody was crossing one of the streams. And they found him laying in the stream naked. You know like an ET at the end when he's not doing so good. Yeah, yeah. In the stream.

They found Don Ignacio. in the stream naked and we wrapped him up and we brought him back and we said what the fuck happened man and he goes oh that was the that was the biggest mistake of my life he goes I overboiled it he goes I've gotten sloppy in my old age and I let that brew of ayahuasca boil too much he goes that was that was I never thought I'd see things like that that was too strong he goes I'm retiring and I was like that's the batch of ayahuasca that you give me I was like thanks for your first time that was my first real ayahuasca trip and so the shaman was like I retire.

And he retired until like next month. Oh my gosh. Yeah, he actually, he was, he was the old guard. He trained the guys that do it now. And COVID took him out. No way. Yeah, we lost our old shaman in the village to COVID. Oh.

Yeah, but it's like, so you lose this guy that knows. And the last time that he harvested an ayahuasca vine, it was like, it was like bigger than a dinner plate. It was a vine thicker than a dinner place. Like he knew where the ones grow that were like ancient. And plants changed. The leaves on a young sycamore are different than the leaves on an old sycamore. When balsa trees are young, they have these giant umbrella leaves.

And as they grow up, the leaves get smaller. They change. And like, plants are complicated. He knew how to find ayahuasca vines that no one else knew how to find. And so, like, when he dies, you just hope that he's imparted that knowledge to the next generation. And there's also, like, a certain type of poison that some of the indigenous communities there have developed. like it's called like carare or something like that. Yeah, curare.

And there's like, I heard there was like something like 11 or 12 different plants. You have to combine to make that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, I heard that like in order to get a monkey out of a tree, like if they want to shoot a monkey. Got it quick. If you shoot it with an air with no curare, it'll like seize its tail and it'll stay up in the canopy. Mm-hmm. Is that true?

Yeah. And if you hit them with the reason they develop the curare poison is so they go limp and they follow the ground. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other crazy one that they have in our region is Barbasco, which is it's a root and you like wrap it in a cloth and then you beat it with like a big heavy stick and it gets it like pulpy. So there's a lot of juice coming out of this thing now. And then what you do is you go to a stream and you find like a pool in the stream and you put a log across one side. Ideally you'd have like a little waterfall or a trickle on the other side where the fish can't easily get up. And then you take this this package of beaten root that you have put it in there.

And then in like five minutes, all the fish that are in that little pool, they'll just float up to the top. And the craziest part is, is that they're only stunned. So you can go through and be like, well, this is good for lunch. This is good for lunch. This is good for lunch. Ah, we don't need any of these guys. He's too small. And then you take the stick away and let the water start flowing again.

And once the water flows, the Barbasco will leave. And then all the fish will start swimming again. So you're not murdering all the fish. That sounds like some black magic shit. And it's like one of the most basic things. Like I like, I know young guys who know how to do it. What? Yeah, that's not even a complicated one.

What is it called again? Barbasco. You could like look at that. Barbasko. Yeah, you could like look that one up. So tell me, what was the story of the, the dude who got kidnapped by the gold miners? I wanted to make sure you told that story. All right.

So I think we missed it. The guy, this dude who we, originally I had gone upriver with a guy from National Geographic. And the idea was that we wanted to find huge anacondas. And so this gold miner who was the brother-in-law of, of the chef that we work with down there. He had a year ago he'd killed this huge anaconda. I mean, I have a picture of his daughter holding this anaconda's head, and it's like the size of an American football.

It's just a huge anaconda head. And so we interviewed him in town. That was the first step. And we said, like, you know, why did you kill this snake? And he goes, well, I wanted to see it. Yeah? You know, I just, fair enough. Okay.

So then we said, well, we want to come up river and we want to see like, you know, you're saying there's other snakes like this is big anacondas. He goes, yes, huge anacondas up there. We go up. This is where, then we saw the military come down, blow up his gold mining thing, and we've said, look, you guys got to go, you got to stop being gold miners. You're going to get killed. You're going to get arrested.

And so he goes, all right, I'm going to be a conservationist. And so this evil gold miner, whoever everyone told us going up this river that we were going to get killed, we become friends with this guy. And he starts bringing ecotourism. He starts trying to do research. He starts trying to be a protector of the forest. That didn't last long. So I'm getting ready to go to the airport one day

and my friends come rushing into my room and they go, he's gone. I go, what do you mean he's gone? The other gold miners didn't like that he flipped to being a protector of the forest. And so these guys bust into his house at four in the morning with rifles against his head. Apparently he was like having sex with his wife at a time.

They like jumped on him, hauled him outside. They beat the shit out of him right there on the ground, put a gun against his head. And now so his wife and his kids are watching in the doorways of the little shableness. that they just built, that he just spent a year building this, like, the most basic ecotourism place that you could possibly build. They have a gun against his head and they go, say goodbye to your father.

And the kids are screaming and the wife is trying to fight. They knock the wife down. He goes, please don't kill me in front of my kids. So they tie them up. They bring them on the boat. And these guys are all messed up and whatever else. But he knows who they are. He knows their voices.

He's borked with these guys before. So they get him on the boat. They start going upriver. And at some point, he told this story when he got rescued, he told me this story with so much enthusiasm that at some point they heard the sound of a motor coming and they knew that he's the best boat driver now so you have they're trying to kill him but he's going if that's the navy coming we're all done for he's like so just let get my hands in front I'll drive the boat and then you guys can at least shoot at them and so they actually were like okay you drive but we'll do whatever

and so he just slammed the boat into a tree they went flying off he jumped into the river and then he ran off into the forest apparently the changes about whether there even was a boat coming down a river or whether he just made them think there was. But he was lost in the forest for three days before we found him. And we hired like five different boats to go up and down the river all day long looking for him. I mean, as far as we knew, it was very scary news to get because we thought he was dead. The last thing that his family saw was guys bust in, guns against the head, say goodbye to your father. And then he never came back.

And so days went by where we were sending boats up and down the... the river looking for him and then miraculously he shows up starving and freaked out and clothing ripped and got reunited with his family but what i mean there's i mean they murder people are my our lawyer's father in the amazon he stood up to gold miners and he was murdered really yes there was a nun in on the border with brazil sister dorothy stang i think was her name she was working with the indigenous people trying to work with them trying to protect the forest in the wildlife. And I think they shot her in the stomach.

And then when she was down, they capped her in the head. I mean, like they just, you know, if you start going against these people, there's a point where they will just say, you're threatening our way of life and they'll move the threat.

You're doing the same thing, though. Yeah. And I had, I made a post on Instagram about illegal gold mining because there's actually, I went with, this guy from ABC News, Matt Gutman, awesome guy.

This guy shows up with the news team. He said he wanted to report on like the most authentic, You know, the front lines in the Amazon. And so we brought him out and we went into the gold mining areas. We went into the logging areas. We saw the Amazon fires. But we went to the... So that when he's running, you guys are like running by this burning area and it's like literally burning you as you're walking by.

That's the one. That's the we actually like that day I actually got scared that like my skin came off because it fucking hurt. It was that. That was crazy. But when we went to the gold mining area, it was funny because the guys pulled me aside and they went, hey, one of the guys went, come here for a second. He goes, you see how all those guys over there are looking at you? And I said, yeah, they go, they follow you on Instagram. I went, because you don't, you don't think, you're in the middle of the Amazon.

You don't think that these people have this. Right. And they're like, they know exactly who you are. And they're like, you should probably stop what you're doing. And I was like, come I get the fuck out of you. I was like, don't worry about it. I was like, meanwhile, they're all holding machine guns and like looking at me. And then, so literally the next thing, because that was the day we were filming there.

And so we filmed this desert in the Amazon rainforest. And literally in the most moist, biodiverse, beautiful, pristine part of the Amazon, there's now a 350-mile scar of sand. You can look it up on Google Earth, and you can see this horrible scar across the Amazon. We went to the edge of that. And so I posted about that the next day. And a few days later, I was actually walking down the street in the town where we were getting supplies to head back out to the jungle.

And a motorcycle pulls up next to me and just was like, the next time we see you post about gold mining, you're going to regret it. Really? And then he zooms off. And I can see what it was because he has face covered. He had a motorcycle helmet on. So yeah, I mean, the threats come through and you just have to be ready for whatever happens.

Are you armed? Most of the time we're not, but it's usually in the city that you're at the most. Because, you know, the thing is out in the jungle, you usually don't need it. Because out in our region, you know who's there and who's not. it's kind of complicated though because you know I had a friend his name was also Paul but his father moved deep into the jungle

when he when they were when they were I think before they were born and they moved like you know it was like four days deep into the jungle and he just wanted to live at the edge of the world and be free and he raised his two boys there and and they had a whole life and I made friends with with Paul and Willie when I was like probably like 22 and they were probably probably like 28 and 30 or so, and they would teach me fishing, and we'd go piranha fishing, and we spent all these days going out together and stuff.

And then one day, the dad needed to cut a tree that had fallen. So he asked a logger, or a gold miner, if he could help them cut some wood. And this guy noticed that they had a chainsaw that he wanted. So he shot my friend in the back and took the chainsaw, and that was it. And because it's the Amazon, there's no consequence. for that. And because these guys were standing up to the loggers, they were standing up to the miners and they were, they were saying, we're not going to

allow our forests to be invaded. So the first statement they made was shooting a 28 year old kid in the back. Jesus Christ, man. So yeah, you have to be, you have to be a little careful out there. It is, you know, because you can't get the cops out there. You can't get the cops

out there. Think about what that means. So whatever happens, happens. If me and you have a fight and, well, this is a true story. If two guys were fighting over Brazil nuts and the first guy went and I think it was that he no the first guy shot the guy the first guy they were having a fight over Brazil nuts this is my Brazil nut tree this is my Brazil nut tree I get to harvest I get to harvest where where does the line go between our properties who knows first guy shoots the other guy takes off half his face but he lives so that guy his

family fixes him up everything else his brothers get together and go fuck that they come back take a few machetes and they hack the first guy to pieces that shot their brother So all of this eventually both families end up in court back in the nearest town. And the judge goes, are any of you going to kill any of you? And they're all like, uh-uh. And he was like, all right, we're good. You're missing half a face and the other guy's dead. He was like, what's there to do?

But this is the way it is in the Amazon. It's like you're out past the- What country was this? This is Peru. This is Peru. Yeah. And that's where my friend's been shot in the head by the arrow. That's where my friend got, Paul got assassinated.

That's where our lawyer's father was assassinated for speaking. out against the lawyer I got assassinated for speaking out against the gold miners it's the body count is high and then there's articles I think manga bay.com puts out articles every year on like how many environmental defenders

get killed across the Amazon each year and it's just like it's just let the bodies hit the floor it's just like what is the biggest threat to the loggers and the gold miners though so like what are they most afraid of that we're going to stop them from logging and gold mining.

Are you a bigger threat to them or like the Navy and... No, the Navy and stuff, but there's regions of Peru where the Peruvian law enforcement won't go. Put it a little bit closer. Yeah, there's places where the Peruvian law enforcement won't go. Okay. So like in that 350 miles scar, can you look up like Peruvian gold, Madre de Dios gold mining? It's terrifying. And like the Peruvian armed forces went in there because they couldn't send the

police in because the police would just be massacred. So finally they sent in like helicopters, Navy SEALs and all this shit and they sent in like full on. But even then they chased everybody out and then it's whackamol. They show up 10 miles that way and they do the same thing. So it's like it's just a constant struggle. It's crazy. And as far as like the the wood,

like you're showing in that documentary there was like these giant trees on trailers, like these tree trunks that are wider than this fucking room sitting on these giant trailers. Where do they go from there? Well, the thing is, whether they're legal timber or whether they're illegal timber, everything is corrupt. So as soon as they come out of the forest, so our forest, I said about the, it used to take us two days to get up to the research station. Yeah, but then Brazil and China and the World Bank got together and they cut the trans Amazon highway across the Amazon. And as soon as they cut the trans Amazon highway across the Amazon, now you have offshoot roads.

So you get one road and then off shoot roads, offshoot roads, offshoot roads, offshoot roads. They call that the fishbone effect because it ends up looking like a rib cage. And then a road builds off a road, builds off a road. And then you just start seeing all the, you can literally watch it year by year. The green starts turning to brown, starts turning to red. And there, there you go. That's what I'm talking about, the edge of that. So guarding the edges of that are men with machine guns, making sure that they can continue to do that.

And what is that? That's where the Amazon rainforest used to be. What is it now? A pit of mercury polluted absolute nothing that will take thousands of years to heal. We're never going to get that back. And that's in the Western Amazon. That's in the most crucial part of the Amazon rainforest that this is happening. God Lord.

Can you just scroll down a little bit to that picture on the lower left right there? Look at that. See that guy? Like this is what we see on a daily basis. You blow that up at all, Austin? Right there, there you go. What the fuck is going on there? You think of what like pristine forest looks like with like towering trees and butterflies

and birds and jaguars and it's like this is what they did. So what is that guy in the in the in the in the in the camo? What is he doing? He's a Peruvian law enforcement Peruvian Marines. Okay. And so like I work with the guy on his knees. I work with a bunch of guys like that. I probably know that guy. I'm sure a lot of these guys are kids too. A lot of them are kids and a lot of their is the funny thing is again like when I post this shit to social media people will comment and they'll be like these evil loggers. They're doing it for greed or these evil miners and like they deserve to be like. destroyed. And I'm like, the first thing I have to go is like, hold up. First of all, if you couldn't feed your family, what would you do to save your family's life?

Cut down some trees? 100% you would. Right. And so the other thing is that I hang out with these guys. They're great guys. Most of them are great guys. Obviously, there's the bad ones that, you know, when they all get around and they start drinking and they start saying, well, this is threatening our whole way of life.

You get that like one psycho vigilante. Yeah. But for the most part, these are good. guys. A lot of the guys on my team are ex-loggers who are now conservationists patrolling the jungle as we speak. A lot of JJ's brothers who taught me the jungle used to be

loggers in the 1990s during the mahogany boom. And now they work for jungle keepers or Tamindu expeditions. And they're like the best guys ever. These are my family. Like they're awesome. So yeah, it's just a matter of, you know, can you give these people a better life?

That's really the simplest answer. Yeah, that's, it's, uh, it's wild that you have the, that you're able to think about it from their point of view. Because yeah, I mean, if you were put in their shoes and you had the decision to make between let me cut down a couple square miles of rainforest or let me let me let my kid starve to death. What are you going to do? I'm going to fucking burn down the rainforest. Well, that's the thing. At the end of the day, any one of us, if you use your kid, your mother, whatever it is, whatever, whatever you care about. You will chew through a human being's face to save that loved one. Yeah. And that's, and that's, and so it's, I'll fucking shoot an elephant in the head to save my kid. That's what I said to Ryan. Like, like, like, you know what I mean? Like, I just, yeah, I agree with you though. I agree with you. Like, it's terrible. It's terrible. And it's like, we talked about this in when he was in Iraq. Yeah. Like these, a lot of these people that are out there fucking in these terrorist organizations, in these terrorist groups or doing things that are evil to you. Yeah. Those people had other people murder their. kids. Exactly.

Well, and that's what turned them into what they are. Like if, if somebody murders your kid, it's going to change you and you're going to become a fucking murderer and you're going to look and it's all about perspective. I mean, look at the tip for tab between like Desert Storm 9-11, the next war. Yeah. We're just, we're just slapping each other back and forth. And like how much of, you know, if you go to work and somebody, you know, and somebody yells at you in the morning and how much more likely are you to go than snap at somebody.

And it's like, I feel like as humans, we all pass. on whatever we experience, whatever trauma we experience. And by the same token, when you meet awesome people that are just full of integrity and sunlight and that are just like, they have your back and you're with a good people, you're like, man, I'm going to, I'm going to do that too. I would never steal or cheat from those people because I would never do that to them. They never do that to me. And it's like, whatever you get. So the unfortunate thing is if people are, you know, born into a gang and, you know, the cannibal warlords of Liberia, it's like, they experience, It's like, you know, eat that motherfucker's heart before he eats yours.

And it's like, that's what you create. Yes. And then, you know, I hope that everyone is lucky enough to have those people in their life where it's like they are just good. Like I grew up like my parents. Like my dad is like literally like it's actually, it's almost a burden how good of a person my dad is. Like just like the nicest guy in the world. Like I've never heard. He's like Atticus Finch.

Like I've like never heard the man lie. Like it's just like there's people who are just like, you go, oh. I could. You brought your dad down to the rainforest? Oh, tons of times. Really? Oh, my God. Yes.

What does he think of everything you're doing? They think it's great. They're really, I think they're really happy that I'm not in jail. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, look, I was failing at a school and I was doing so bad. They were so worried about me. They probably thought I was going to go to jail.

And then, like, now I've written two books. On December 11th, I'll be speaking at the United Nations for the second time in my life. And it's like, I was such a fuck up when I was a teenager that I was. I think that the fact that I haven't been trampled to death by elephants and the fact that I've done, you know, something, protected something on earth. I think my parents are just like, all right, fine. You know, that's incredible, man. Yeah. What other than speaking to the United Nations, like what, what is that going to do?

Like, what is it going to take to actually, to actually, there's so much momentum it feels like. There is. There is. How, how could you possibly, even? even slow that down. Where do you, where do you see any kind of hope or if or do you? No, it's funny because when I started this, when I started out at like 18 years old, I think I was very much like, there's no hope. The world is dying. It was like a very, it's almost, it almost feels good in a way to like resign yourself to this like, it's all going. Um, and I think that a lot of

environmentalists is a lot of environmentalism is based on that like this sort of like tragedy porn of like, oh, the world is such a bad place. Humans are a disease. And it's like, well, what are right? Then I met the people that are actually at the forefront of, of conservation and of science and of a realistic future on Earth. And like literally the wizards who are out there, the people, you don't know their names. They work with large corporations. They have PhDs from major, like major colleges.

And they're doing things to protect huge tracks. They're setting up national points. parks and they're working with companies to do like, okay, well, if you have to drill here, how can we do that sustainably? I work with a guy who, I work with a guy. I've spoken to him a few times and I worship him. But he, he, his name is Adrian Forsyth and he works for the Andy's Amazon Fund. But he tells, he told me this story.

And this is a guy who like when he talks, I mean, he's protected entire rivers. But like when he talks, everyone shuts up and like moves closer and like notebooks come out. but he told me this story about how there was a company that wanted to drill inside of a national park and he knew that they were going to get the permits because the corrupt government was going to give it to them so he went and had a meeting with them and he like took a proactive stance and he's been okay look

if you guys are going to drill in there here's how we can do this in a way that it doesn't ruin the national park because if you guys have a pipeline and a spill it's going to so he suggested the safest possible technology and he said the one thing we can't have you, if you make a road to bring your equipment in, well, then the local people can get in, too. And then we're going to have the offshoot roads. And then the whole national park is going to fall apart.

Roads are kryptonites or rainforests. That's one o'clock rainforest 101. Roads, death. And so what he did was he said, look, we're going to use, we're going to raise funding, and we're going to bring all the equipment in by helicopter into the center of this national park. You're going to set up your rig right there. There's going to be a line going out, but no one's even going to really know about it. and there's not going to be a road around it.

And so they did this and they drilled for a few years and then they cleaned it up and they moved it out. Oh, wow. So everybody won. And in fact, the people that worked on that project from the oil company ended up supporting the conservation efforts because it was such a smooth process. And so like instead of having that like basic, you know, internet Twitter sort of response of being like, you're bad, we're good. The environment's clean. You're dirty. These guys are on a different level.

And I think that that's where we need to move moving forward. You know, that's where someone like Jane Goodall is working a lot with kids because she knows, like, if kids care, you know what I mean, they're going to grow up and become next policymakers. And so what you need to do is instill that love of nature in them. You know, 50% of people across the world live in cities. We have to find a way to rekindle their love of nature. That's why Attenborough documentaries are so important. But I do think that there's a lot of hope. And that's why I tell that story about the bald eagles, the humpback whales.

A lot of things can bounce back. and we've seen things bounce back. And we're actually, the way I look at it in terms of the Amazon is that we're probably the last generation that's going to have the chance to save the Amazon as it is. Because experts are warning that we've lost right now roughly, coming up on 20% of the Amazon has been destroyed. Now, here's a thing. That's a system where the moisture cycle replenishes itself.

The Amazon breathes out moisture and then it comes into the thunderheads and it rains back down on itself. And that system contains a fifth of the water, of the fresh water on our planet, a fifth. And so if we cut too much of that system and it's not, pulls out like a ton of the carbon out of the air too, right? 100%. Like it's a couple metric tons of carbon or like hundreds of metric tons. But if it's not able to breathe that moisture up and then keep the rainforest cycle going, then you're going to have the Amazon dry out. The fires will get worse. The whole ecosystem could collapse, the whole biome. And so we're coming up on that. And so we're coming up on that point where it's like, okay, but you can get frantic about this or we come together

as a global society and say, okay, look, what do we have to do? What incentives? What trade incentives do we have to give Brazil? What does Peru want? What do you guys want? And let's help everybody to have the opportunity and say, look, instead of cutting down this much far, so let's give all those people these jobs. It's not rocket science. It's really not. We have the opportunity to do this. And that's why what Ryan's doing in Africa is so exciting. Because you go, these people going frantic, how do we save black rhinos? How do we save them? It's like, dude, take a bunch of American vets that have the tactical knowledge and put them on the fence line.

Ain't nobody going to shoot a rhino and you got a bunch of ex-marines on the fence line. Like they know exactly what they've been doing. Yeah, that's the perfect thing, right? Because the U.S. fucking failed in figuring out a useful way to put veterans back to work in a meaningful way. that is a fucking incredible idea. It's absolutely incredible. So is that what you guys plan on doing too? No.

Vet Paw. Vet paw works really well in Africa. I don't know to what degree we could do it in the Amazon. I've been talking about that with Ryan a little bit. Sounds like it would work fucking amazing. It sounds like it would work a little bit amazing. I think in a place like South Africa where there's like a population of white people to begin with, it makes a little bit more sense.

but like if there was like a bunch of big like tall white guys and in military fatigues walking around the backwoods of the Amazon I feel like somehow I just don't think the locals would appreciate that very much no no um and a like a lot of the ways I've survived just by like being so in with them like the fact that I'm in with you know bare feet and whatever else um actually you're we're talking about the dangers and I wanted to tell you before I forget that there's one day I was I was coming This was a very non-eventful. I've had solos where I go out for two weeks and the craziest shit ever happens and I come back all banged up. And then I've had solos where I go out for 10 days and come back.

And it was beautiful. And I took a lot of nice pictures, you know. And you don't write a book about those ones, but they're also nice in their own way. But one time I had a very relaxed solo where I was out. I wanted to do the whole length of my river. And I did most of it without going towards the tribes. But I'm coming downriver one day. And this boat is coming.

is like hanging out in like the shallows underneath this tree. And then they like come out aggressively and they come towards me. I'm in like a inflatable pack raft with a backpack on. And all my food had gotten wet the night before. And they pull up to me and they go, you on the boat. And I go, shit. And they got machine guns and shit. And I realized they got they got packages of tarp and like rectangles.

And I was like, oh shit. They're running cocaine. These are those guys. And I was like, hey guys. I was like, what's up? They're like, what are you doing out here? I was like, I'm a photographer. I was like, pictures, see?

I was like, look, I can show you pictures. And they were like, well, where, they go, where's your guide? Where's your guide, Gringo? And I was like, gringo. And I like, in a bunch of, like, really dirty local language. I was like, listen, motherfucker. You think I'm not from here?

And I was like, I gave him that whole thing. And they're like, all right, you talk like you're from here. And then I pulled up some anaconda pictures on my phone. I was like, look at this. I was like, you ever caught an an anaconda that big? And then they were like, whoa! These dudes They put the machine gun behind their back

And they're like Yo, yeah, yo, Hector, come here, look at this. Give this Gringo a brick. Yeah. And then I was like, they're like, do you need anything? And I was like, no. And they're like, no, I'm not lost. I was like, you guys got some smokes?

And they're like, yeah. I was like, all right, cool. I was like, can I go? That's fucking awesome. And I was like, I was like, stay safe out there. And they're like, what do you mean? I was like, don't get arrested. And they're all like, oh, ha, ha.

They're like, so you know. And I was like, yes. But they were like, again, they were the chillest guys ever As long as you're not a threat to them. Right. Guys just trying to feed their families. Yeah. Dude, the craziest thing that they have on our rivers

because the rainforest canopy is so high. You're talking like, you know, 150 feet. So you have, you know, 130 foot tree trunk. And then you have the branches. And so apparently there's this one long stretch of river where you can take a plane down and fly it between the trees. And then they've actually cut out underneath the canopy a long hallway

and they've made the ground flat. And so what they do is they land under the canopy. Oh my. So they stay under radar by staying above the canopy and then they actually land down there. They get resupplied on the Coke and then they fly right back out. Oh shit.

They're geniuses. And you hear them flying at like 4 a.m. Every now and then I'll wake up because we don't have flights. You don't like if you live in New York you hear flights all day long over your head. When you're in the middle of the Amazon

you don't hear planes. But then like at 4 a.m. Every now and then you hear like and it's just this old little tin box little Cessna like going over. Are there like lots of cocaine factories out there in the middle of the jungle? Yeah. Peru is taking. I think Peru took over Columbia.

It's the number one country. I got to check on that one, but I think they... Google that. Yeah. There's like songs about it now. Peruvian cocaine. I just came up on Spotify. Peru overtook Colombia in manufacturing cocaine.

Yeah. Look that up. I think Peru is the number one right now. Okay. Bolivia, Colombia. and Peru. Yeah. Where's Bolivia?

Right below Peru. Oh, it's right below Peru. Okay, so it all comes right out of there. Yeah, and that's all right on the western, you know, western part of South America. Yeah, so that's crazy. There's just like random, like rogue little areas where they're just fucking... Oh, yeah. Mixing the cocoa leaves with gasoline and crate and all that shit.

That's insane. Yeah, and like, cocoa leaves is like a thing. You chew cocoa leaves down there. It's like coffee. It gives you energy, but it's not cocaine. Right, right. Right, right. So it's a totally separate thing. But yeah, down there, that's a big industry.

Ant eaters. Ant eaters. Oh, my God, my favorite. My favorite. You raised an anteater? I did. I raised a baby anteater. Yeah.

So there's this myth in Peru that if you shoot an ant eater, that the bullet will glance off of it and that you will not actually kill the anteater. So a lot of people try to kill them for no reason. They're not trying to eat them or anything. And somebody had tried to do that on our, river and there was this baby anteater and we went to this spot and they had this little tiny ant eater and the thing with ant eaters is they live on their mother's backs for like the first year of their life so they cling on to their mother's back and they have these huge claws and so a giant

ant eater is like think of something that's like a little bigger than a German shepherd with a tail as long as its body so it's like this huge animal and they have to be able to fight off jaguars and so a giant anteater will stand up on its hind legs when you threaten it. Let's say you corner a giant anteater. They'll stand up on their hind legs and they have like wolverine claws on the front. They use those for excavating termite mounds. And they will open your guts.

Like they will slash you open. If you corner them. If you don't, they'll... Have you seen somebody get mauled by one? I've never seen anybody get mauled by one. I've seen a dog get mauled by one. A friend of mine was hunting. He thought it was a taper and he was going around the stream bed.

His dogs ran ahead. and he heard a yelp. And when he got around, the anteater was holding one dog in its claws, and it had grabbed it by the neck and had pinched the neck off. And so the dog was dead. And then the other dog ran up barking, and he just right through the throat killed this dog. And then so my friend, this guy, like, lifted his rifle to try and shoot the anteater.

And this is like a Peruvian guy. So he's like, you know, a jungle guy. He's not very tall. And the anteater started walking towards him with claws out. And he said, the thing was looking at him straight in the face. And he just threw his rifle and ran. for it. And it's like, these things are monsters, dude. They call them also bandetta gigante. So it's bear flag giant because it's just the flag for the tail, bear for the

arms and everything. It's just like a, it's like a composite animal. Um, absolutely fast. Um, they're pretty fast. But again, they would never bother you. I mean, look, I'm sleeping with them in a hammock. Right. Right. Right. They're, they're sweethearts. And she would, she would, you know, she didn't have a mother, so she had to be hugging me the whole time. And then. I would eventually be like, I can't do anything because I got this anteater on me all the time. So I'd lay down in a hammock. I'd fall asleep. And then they have a tongue that's like a foot long.

And so she'd wake up and she'd be like, I want to play. And so she'd take her tongue and she'd start firing her tongue up my nose. And it would like come out my mouth. Or then she'd fire it in my ear and stuff. And it was like just like, blah. And it was just like have to take this anteater off of me. And then she'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. I want to love you.

And she'd like grab onto me with the claws and it would pinch right through my skin. And so I was just like all ripped up and I was like 19 years old and taking care of this ant eater. It was awesome. But I also got to experience the forest from the perspective of an animal because everybody else went home and I was like, I'm going to stay with this ant eater. So I was like going through the Amazon rainforest on my hands and knees raising this baby giant ant eater. And so interacting with animals and trying to teach her how to find ants. And I had to basically become a mother ant eater to this little thing and like raise her until the point that she could go back. into the far. How long do you have the annual year? A few months. A few months. Yeah. Yeah, I missed a,

that was the first time I missed a college semester because I was just like, you know, I went back to town for resupply. I called home and I went, mom, dad, I'm staying. And at what point did you decide to let her go? She started spending more time out in the bush and then she started coming back. So like, when you talk, when you were asking about JJ and like where he grew up, like these little communities, like the little like palm thatched huts over the top and stuff like that. But yeah, these are all the old, all the old days. What the fuck happened to? you hear. That was a antibiotic resistant Mersa infection.

All over your fucking face? Yeah, that was bad. I almost died from that one. Holy shit. How did that happen? I don't know. I went, I think I had Dengay, and then I went to the hospital in town to get tested, and they were like, yep, you have Dengay. I think while I was in town,

you know, these hospitals, they have like cats and dogs running around. Yeah. Dead people on the, like, on the floor. While I was in the hospital, I must have gotten this infection. And then I went back out into the jungle and I kept going, it'll get better, it'll get better, it'll get better. Until one day I woke up and my eyes were sealed shut from pus. And I had all this green scoop leaking out of my face everywhere on my body.

And for a whole day I only saw him black and white. And I had like a horrendous fever. And then I wanted to get out of the jungle. But at that time, there was no boats going down the river. It was the rainy season. And so for like three days, I was just by the side of a river, just like hoping. there would be a boat. And the first boat to come was this poaching boat. And they had all these dead animals. There was a dead mother spider monkey with the baby still alive, like holding onto the

mother's body. And I was just like laying in this like pile of dead animals. And I was practically a dead animal myself. And there's flies all over me. And I got to, I got to town and I called my parents and I just said, get me out of here as soon as possible. And they got me on a flight. And then like I had a hood up. And I was like, I was like putting Vaseline all over my face because it hurt so much. And on the flight home, somebody sat next to me and they looked over at me and I just was like and like the woman got up and left and she must have talked to a stewardess because she never came back.

Oh my. She must have gotten reseeded. And then I get to like immigration in New York and the guy goes, hey, has it going? He goes, you know, passport. Passport. It looks at my passport. And he goes, what are you doing in Peru? He looks up and he goes, buddy, what the fuck?

And I was like, I was like, I don't know. I was like, I'm just trying to go to the doctor, man. He goes, he goes, holy shit. He goes, he stamps the password. He goes, go, go, go, go, go. Please. He was like, for the love of God, he goes, God bless you. He goes, I hope you're okay, man.

I went, yeah. I mean, do you let me in the country looking like that? Jesus. I could have had Ebola virus for all this guy knew. Like, I look at that's fucked up. That is fucked up. Hold that up next to the microphones, but we can see it. Yeah.

This was, this was me dying. Oh, my Lord. That is fucked. Yeah. Yeah, I was convinced at this point that I was not going to recover from that. In my understanding, I was dying. So how do you catch something like that down there? I mean, MRSA is a huge problem.

I mean, we're... Down there it is? Everywhere it is. Very common. I mean, infections are constantly outpacing our ability to create new antibiotics for them. It's a huge problem. I think in, you know, in the medical community, that's a huge problem in hospitals. And so, yeah, some of the Treesaps and the Amazon might be the answer to that because there's some compounds down there that just murder bacteria.

When you come up here, do you have any problems with immune systems or you, you immunity or anything? No, I've actually, I think I've gotten stronger. Really? Yeah. I think I've gotten really, I think it's helped. The only thing that happened was in, in somehow in L.A., I got typhoid. And that just, I used to have a stomach.

Like, I could eat like a dead cat off the side of the road and I'd be fine. And like after typhoid, I lost like 30 pounds. I was like dying. And then I went to the doctor. They were like, you have typhoid. They put you on medicine for it and stuff. But after that, my stomach has been a little bit. more sensitive and like now like i can't if i drink a glass of milk it'll kill me like not kill me

but like you know i'll feel like shit the rest of the day um but that's the only change other than that i feel like the jungle has actually just made me so much stronger well i wonder what would happen to like one of the guys that it was has always lived down there if you bought them up here i wonder if like they would have trouble kind of like adapting they'd like it no they wouldn't like it obviously they wouldn't like the the fucking culture obviously but i'm wondering like like like as far as like adapting to like their immune system adapting to living up here in this pollution like the polluted air and the different food and shit taking one of those guys like what would it do to him i want walking around with no shirt on eating coconuts in the sun all day and then like put them through a new york winter

they're not living by the ancestral tenants up here no what do you think of that guy oh man that poor that poor dude. I mean, dude, look, you don't want anybody to not tell the truth, but at the same time, like, is, are any of these other people and what they're selling? Are they real? You know what I mean? Like, is the rock really not on steroids? Right. Is, is, it was Lance Armstrong really not on. Does anybody for a second look at Liver King with that bloated giant six pack and go natural? No. And now he's like, oh, man, I really fucked up. I'm so sorry. It's like, bro, just keep doing what you're doing. The problem is he went on like a thousand podcasts and when they asked him right to his face. He said, never tried it, never will. Never tried it, never will. It's like, all right. Well, now we found you man. He'll come back stronger from this, I'm sure. Do you see the video he made, the response video?

I saw him going, I really messed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, I am on steroids. I am on human growth. The dude, drinks like two liters of HGH a day. I mean, dude, he's explosive. Like, he's sitting on podcasts. He's literally, like, sitting there backwards, and like his abs are like a mountain range.

They don't look right. They don't look right. I mean, but he's hysterical, though. I mean, like, there's a reason he's, blew up like he's whatever could you imagine putting him in the rainforest um i i when when he had like 400 that would be the best collab when he had like 400 followers i wrote to liver king and i was like whatever you're doing i was like it seems like you like outdoor workouts primal living i was like why don't you come piranha fishing with us and he was like hello primal he was

like i would love to do that he's like but are you on he goes are you on the liver train and i was like what the fuck and he was like do you eat everything and i was like i was like i was like Yeah. I was like, I ate a turtle yesterday with my, you know, when you're in the indigenous communities, you eat whatever they put on the table. And he was like, sounds great, primal, I'll let you know. So it's like, I talked to him briefly in like DMs, but then he got super famous and then doesn't write back. Yeah, yeah. It was just, it was all just a business plan is all it was. It's a business plan. Yeah. I mean, he's, he's a, he's an internet, you know, whatever. He's an influencer. Yeah. Who apparently was already rich before he made his millions and millions off of being liver king. Yeah, that's what he said in his video. He said, yeah, I was rich and anonymous. Now I'm rich and everyone knows me. Yeah. And it is, you know, when people, when everyone knows you and you're like a public figure and all that stuff, it's hard to, it's not good to lie because you're going to get caught in your fucking lie. And the dude had no idea how to navigate that. He had no idea had a lot.

The only thing I say is like when you look at these like Joel Olstein, like televangelist people that are like, you know, send us some money and Lord Jesus is going to bless you with. of things, it's like, okay, there you go. You're not doing steroids, but you're promising people that you're going to fix their lives if they send you money. Right. Like, Scientology. You got a direct line to God. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Come on. Like, so like, Liver King, they'll, do a thing. He'll apologize. And then I'm sure everyone's going to be like, oh, poor Liver King. And then they'll send him, you know, fucking, they'll send him more steroids and then he'll be okay. Yeah, more people will end up buying his liver supplements. Exactly.

And all of his bullshit. He'll be fine. I'm sure. He'll be fine. I'm not worried about Liver King. Yeah. Um, anything else we forgot to cover? Fires.

Um, the fires, dude. Yeah. The, what's going on with the fires? How, how are they like, are they getting worse? Are they getting better? What's, yeah. So the thing, the thing that people don't realize is that in 2019, um, my life changed a lot in 2019. Because, um, the fires were bad in 2019.

And what happened was outside of South Paulo, Brazil, the Amazon fires were pluming up and there was black smoke and it covered the sun. And people were taking pictures of this. and it looked like the apocalypse. So that made it onto the internet. And then the internet was like, well, why is this happening? Oh, my God, because of the Amazon fires. And then it got on the news.

And all of a sudden, we had this hysteria over the Amazon fires in 2019. And so I was, I had just gotten home from the Amazon. And we'd been filming a documentary. And I was just standing in a field filming on my phone being like, this happens every fucking year. You guys are burning down this stuff. And we don't need to be letting this happen. There's animals burning to death behind me.

and I said, welcome to the fucking Anthropocene. And it was the first time I'd ever cursed the what? The Anthropocene, the, like the quaternary, tertiary. Okay. The Holocene was, I think, the last epoch that we were in. And then now they're saying that we're in the period of the Anthropocene. Okay. Millions of years from now, if they were to find this period on Earth,

it would be defined by the layer of human stuff on Earth, you know, in the fossil record. And so I had this video And when I saw the articles on the Amazon fires I was like, this is so stupid It's like it burns every year. Why are people freaking out about this year? Yeah. So I threw this video up on Instagram

And it was kind of like uncharacteristic Because before that it was always like beautiful pictures of the jungle. And I remember because I took my phone And it was on like 100% And I put it on the refrigerator and I went to bed. When the morning I woke up and like stumbled out of bed And my phone's on the floor. I was like, that's weird.

I pick up my phone and it's on 1% battery and there's 40,000 notifications from Instagram and there's like all these missed calls. And I was like, wait, I was like, what happened while I was asleep? Phone call comes in, pick up the phone. They go, hi, is this Paul Rose? I said, yeah, who's this? And they're like, it's MSNBC. And I was like, what? And then that started.

And then as I'm on the phone with them, like CBS called. And then as I'm on the phone with them, I was like, guys, you got it. Hold on. And I was like trying to find a charger. It went viral overnight. And everyone shared it. And then it started blowing up. And then all of a sudden I was on all these interviews for the Amazon fires.

And then actually what happened was then Joe Rogan shared it. And then at that point, it like went mega viral. And all of a sudden we started getting all this support for the Amazon. And then that's where really jungle keepers went from that we were like, we had a couple with like two rangers and we were protecting a little bit of forest. And it's like it connected us to the people that made it possible for us to protect. now we're protecting 50,000 acres of forest. We have 15 rangers. We have numerous boats.

We have a whole, we have a real chance of protecting this entire watershed in the Amazon rainforest. And so now it's like I'm trying to explain to people how you can use storytelling and social media to get the word out. Because when you say like, what can we do? Like is there a way of turning this around? It's like, yes, but people have to know about it. Yeah.

And so like this year, the fires were almost just as bad. I mean, I think it was one of the days in August was the word. day for burning in the Amazon in 15 years. Really? Yeah. We were out there and horrendous, like 70 foot flames, freshly cut forest. It was just burning. Me and my friend Mosin were out there.

And we were sent to document this. And it was like, we were just breathing in. I mean, I couldn't walk for two weeks after that. Like the very, very, very, very poor decision making in hindsight to walk into a forest fire with no lung protection. Right. I was hacking up black snot from my lungs for weeks after that. But, and then it's at one point, at one point, we're in the fires and the Amazon is burning.

And I'm trying to like record video. My phone all of a sudden does that thing where it goes, the phone is too hot. You can't use it. I get like that warning notice. And I'm like, oh, shit. And so I'm like, I'm like, I got to get out of here. And I'm like, holy shit. My skin is starting to burn.

All of a sudden I hear, help. And I go, where are my guys? I was like, where is everybody? And all of a sudden, I just see this huge wall of fire. flame and I start running and I hear help again I hear help and I'm trying to find a way around but everything's burning so it's like I had to go back around and then jump over some stuff and so pretty much like jump through like a vertical wall of flames and as I'm running I see my friends like multi thousand dollar professional camera laying in the ashes and I go holy shit like for I was like this guy's

dead and so I I pick up the camera can't touch it is too hot and so like threw it on the ground just like just outside where the burning was. And I go and I see my friend Mosen and he's on his hands and knees and he's got his face in the ground. And I'm going, what is going on? And he's just coughing and coughing. There's a little bit of water like a little puddle and he just was putting his eyes in the puddle.

And then J.J. comes out of the forest and he takes his shirt off, dips it into the floor of the rainforest. And like the forest is burning next to us. But we just found a little bit of green. And he's squeezing it over Mosen's head. He basically, he took one bad. lung full of air and just went down and then just like got burnt got blinded and just ran for it junked to the camera and so we spent the rest of the day like trying to get him better um and to his

credit he actually like stood up and was like let's start filming again and like switched out his battery and was like fuck it like oh my god and uh we just like had singed clothing and everything and it's like you know you come limping out of this horrendous apocalyptic thing and and you try to tell the world what's happening because every year we're allowing this to happen and what are they going to do with that land they're going to make a papaya farm on it that particular farmer who again big bad destroyers of the amazon we went up to this guy who said are you burning your forest today he goes yep we went can we film it we couldn't stop him from doing it but we said can we film it and he goes I don't give shit goes be careful the flames went up and you see monkeys running for their lives

this there's because you know animals hide in the in the tree trunks you see animals burning in the tree trunks and they try to come out and then they burn and they curl. Absolute horrific, like, devastation. It was like watching the bombing of Dresden. It was just, you're watching the most beautiful biological treasure on earth just get incinerated before your eyes. And so we were doing that in August,

and I've been just this week, you know, sharing videos of that burning and that footage, which I think is what led up to speaking at the biodiversity conference, which is just like, you don't unless you're on the ground you can't see what's happening right you know what I mean if the news isn't covering it it's not happening right and so like that's why we feel like it's our duty to you know to the animals it's like I've spent time living with herds of elephants I've spent time raising a giant ant eater it's like these monkeys these things it's like now we're responsible for millions and millions

of heartbeats in this forest and so when we see it burning like that it's like there's no one else who's going to go do this there's no one else who's going to risk their lives run into here have probably permanent lung damage, but to have the ability to show people what's actually happening and then try to rally the support to say we can actually protect this. And that's sort of, you know, from the old days, it's kind of interesting the way our conversation has gone because we've covered it from the old days to now. And it's like, now it's like, that's the job now. The job is rallying enough. If we can raise like $30 million, we can protect an entire tributary of the Amazon rainforest. And so we just started this initiative because can't wait anymore.

It was funny because my cousin, my cousin actually, who's in the banking world, was, she's like, what's your number? And I was like, about 30 million to protect the whole rainforest. And she's like, that's not that much. And I was like, it's not that much. It's a lot. She goes, no, she goes, that's three hundred thousand people giving a hundred dollar donation. And I went, that's not that much.

300,000 people. That's a few football stadiums. Right. I said, I could do that. She goes, well, get on it. And then so it's like, well, once you realize that you can do it. it. And once you realize that you're only the only person equipped to do it, well, then you have

to do it. And it's like, you know, my life has been changed by these, you know, the local people and the communities that are in the Amazon and by JJ's wisdom and teachings and all these incredible species. And it's like, we have the opportunity to protect this river, but we got to do it in the next few years.

We have to do it in the next two to three years before because now the logging companies are being subcontracted by Chinese logging companies because they want that Amazonian timber because they've used all their timber. So now they want Amazonian timber. Really? And so the pace of deforestation is going up. And so now the pace of what we're doing is going up. And so now it's like, back in the day, it was like, I don't really know what I'm doing. I've just came to the Amazon. I like taking pictures and

finding snakes and seeing cool wildlife. And now it's like we've all just become jungle keepers. And we've had all these people come on to the team. And that's from, you know, from JJ to the guy Mosin, who's a conservation photographer. We have this woman Dina who runs the Ranger program. And then And after Rogan shared that clip, we ended up getting in touch with this Canadian billionaire named Dax De Silva, who he made his money in the tech industry on an app called Lightspeed, which is kind of like a Shopify type of thing. It was going to be like the competitors, Shopify. But then he decided that he's going to use his financial abilities to support conservation. So he's supporting the Sea Shepherd.

He's protecting land in Canada, where he's from. he's protecting us in the Amazon he's working in Africa and so everyone's always like oh why don't these rich people save the world it's like well he is right he's killing it he's making so much conservation work possible and by doing by supporting the people on the ground protecting untold numbers of endangered species and entire cultures of indigenous people that depend on these ecosystems to live and so there's really inspiring stuff happening and it's exciting being at the point where we can actually help that which is also why I really appreciate you having me on here because it gives people the opportunity to learn about that because then they can they can donate to junglekeepers, they can get the t-shirt, they can become a jungle keeper, and then they can also come with us to the field. Come visit the place that they're helping to protect.

It's not like a, it's not like a dream anymore. It's like, no, no, no, we're doing this. We're actually creating a biological corridor between protected areas. That's going to be something that is like a part of earth heritage. Like this is, that's the level of biodiversity that we're talking about. Well, that's fucking incredible, man. It's an honor to have you on here to share these stories and to, you know, elaborate on what is going on down there and how people can help it. Tell people exactly like where they need to go to find you, where they can, where they can donate, what they need to do. Yeah, you need to stop feeling bad about the environment. No more environmental guilt. Go to www.junglekeepers.org. Donate 100 bucks and then get rid of your environmental guilt. That's it. You're helping a team of indigenous people and internet. national experts protect an entire tributary of the Amazon. Every single acre in this place is packed with spider monkeys and jaguars and harpy eagles and anacondas and all these species that we haven't

discovered yet, undiscovered medicines. And so really like most of us can afford that. You know, for a lot of people, that's like your Starbucks bill for the month. A hundred bucks is doable. And then you're part of an organization that's actually doing something, you know, action-based. Let's stop feeling bad about the environment going to hell. Let's protect part of the Amazon. Let's start there. A tangible win and save endangered species. Stop the extinction crisis.

And then, I mean, it's like we're just building a family. We're building a network of support. And so it's like we're past the point where it's a faraway issue that we can't do anything about. It's like, no, no, no. That's the point of jungle keepers. And, you know, the thing is with big organizations. The website's fucking incredible, by the way. Dude, the website.

So sick. The footage that you have, especially from that documentary. that deep or the dark green documentary. Yeah, Stefan, if you're listening, our guy Stefan, who's part of the team, he did that website for us. Thereby proving that all web developers are assholes. Because before that, it was like to get anything done with the website,

they're like, yeah, it's going to be three weeks and like $7,000. Yeah. He's like, dude, I did all the pages of it. I mean, instantly, you know, he just gets it done immediately. He's so effective. He's helped us so much. Hell, yeah. But yeah, like when you donate to these big organizations,

it's like is it going to advertising? Is it going to their corporate payroll? Like you don't know. Like with junglekeepers, it's like we're literally just a team of people in the Amazon protecting forest. It goes straight to local rangers. A lot of them are ex-loggers. It's like we're literally changing people's lives, protecting endangered species. And like you said, those old growth trees protect so much more carbon than any sapling. And we can't get those back. It's not a renewable resource. Once you cut a 500-year-old tree, it's going to be another 5.5. 500 years before we get a tree like that. And so those are the big, important parts of the engine that is the Amazon. Those things are holding all that carbon in the ground. And they're also the habitat for all the species. And so it's like, you know, you'll hear people be like,

oh, we have to plant trees. It's like, no, we have to save the ecosystems that are there now. Right. And that's what we're dedicated to. And that's what I've dedicated my life to. So, well, doing a hell of a fucking job, Paul. Appreciate it.

I really appreciate it, dude. Fascinating stuff.