Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Paul Rosolie: Ancient Amazon Disaster, Graham Hancock Theory, Murderous Gold Mining Cartels | 192

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. What's up, everybody? It is a beautiful morning here in New York. I don't think that camera does it justice, but my friend Sean Ryan always does these intro videos where he's out in nature doing cool stuff, so I figured we'd give it a try. I always love that. But today I have an amazing guest for you. Not only a great guest, but a great friend of mine as well, Mr. Paul Rosalie. If you did not see our previous episode from November 2022, that's really one of the things that got this podcast going. So in addition to the amazing work Paul does in the Amazon that he's been down there for 19 years doing, saving the world's most precious biosphere, I also owe him a great debt of gratitude for helping this podcast get to where it is today. It would not be here without him

Starting point is 00:00:51 and without you guys who made that episode go nutty and then got him on Danny Jones, Lex Friedman, and Joe Rogan after that. So thank you to everyone out there who was a huge help with that. If you haven't seen that previous episode, the playlist link is gonna be in the description below. So go check it out. And if you haven't seen that previous episode, the playlist link is going to be in the description below. So go check it out.

Starting point is 00:01:07 And if you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe. Please hit that like button on the video. It's a huge, huge help and enjoy the episode. It's very intimidating because you sit down in a circle and everybody's in a circle and there's candles and it's all dark. And you can hear the jungle out there in the darkness. You kneel in front of the shaman and, you know, he's got the feathers and he's smoking a cigarette.

Starting point is 00:01:26 And so he draws the cigarette and then he blesses the drink with the smoke. And he says a prayer over the drink and the smoke flows over the liquid and then he gives it to you and you drink. As soon as I drank, I was very aware of that that was a one-way door. I had just made a decision that I couldn't take back.

Starting point is 00:01:40 You're listening to the throbbing, insects throbbing and the frogs throbbing and all of a sudden you just feel it start moving under your skin. And all of the sound of the jungle starts moving under your skin. And when it takes you, I dematerialized. I started from a consciousness with no ability to speak. I stopped thinking in words. We think in words.

Starting point is 00:01:59 We don't realize we do, but we actually think in words. I stopped thinking in words. And... do but we actually think in words i stopped thinking in words and paul rosalie welcome back sir good to be back it's fucking great to have you back man and i gotta say seeing you finally get the respect you have long deserved to work on the only thing you've ever worked on in your adult life has been beautiful to watch over the past i guess like 14 15 months since you were last here and it is it is so well deserved man it's been it's been wild and it started with you man it started right well not right here but on this show beautiful beautiful beautiful new spot by the way that you know thank you thank you that that and by

Starting point is 00:02:50 the way can you move a little this way by the way that sticker is there you go but that whole weekend when ryan brought you with him to yeah he was like we're going to jersey yeah just do it like last minute shows up and he's like hey i hope you don't mind i got my friend paul here i'm like paul rosalie he's like yeah i'm like fuck yeah let's go and then to see you i i could not figure out how you had not been on every podcast in the world and now i'm thinking and i think you were the first podcast yeah yeah you were the first podcast i ever like went on yeah yeah and i've definitely never i think anything else had ever been like a zoom interview or something like that like i'd never actually physically gone and sat with somebody in a room and done a podcast before ever that was crazy i mean because it was i was talking to you for about 15 minutes when when we got there at chicken pizza and i'm like how the fuck this

Starting point is 00:03:37 makes no sense wait also yeah because i came with i came with ryan right we came with ryan we did ryan and then i and then i came back you came back and i came back and that's what it was like in my memory i merged those two days and i'm like oh we just did both yeah yeah i mean i was glad we waited too because i wanted to get a chance to look at some more amazon stuff before he came in because there's just so much there i mean when we recorded last time it was like we could have gone all day with that but i remember feeling like your story dry mouthed and just dead brain to me like dude i want to tell him so many more things i was like but but anyway let's let's get right into it you were in africa recently with vet paul oh yeah what are you doing with them these days and can you tell people out there who haven't seen

Starting point is 00:04:21 ryan's episode with me what that ball does so vetpaw is this incredible organization of post-911 veterans who are working to protect endangered elephants black rhinos white rhinos all this incredible african wildlife and the founder of vetpaw ryan tate called me up one day out of the blue i did not know him he just called me up one day and was like yo man first of all we're friends second of all you come in africa and i was like really you're just like get on a plane and it took him a while of convincing i was stuck i was in the amazon when he called me and uh it was it was another year and a half before i was able to actually go but man when i stepped foot in africa for the first time i remember i got out at they took me and it was like by the time we got there and got onto the reserve and then started driving

Starting point is 00:05:02 and like ryan and trevor took me out onto the reserve and we get out there and it's like this golden grass and there's just a rhino standing there like like i never thought i was gonna see a rhino with my with my real eyes in real life holy and you had spent a lot of time in india with the elephants but you hadn't spent time with rhinos ah yeah and whether it's a rhino or whether it's a you know obscure species of tree snake i guess this i get this thing when i see wildlife like where it's just like you've seen it in a book you've seen it in a documentary and then it's there it's really there and it's it's such an unnegotiably amazing thing like a rhino we we're so close to losing rhinos how many people that you know have seen a rhino like if you go out on the street right now and just like start asking people how many people – like have you seen a rhino?

Starting point is 00:05:48 Like no one's seen a rhino. Unless they've been to a zoo. Yeah. And some zoos don't even have them. And zoos don't count. They don't. They don't. That's true.

Starting point is 00:05:58 If you're in the wild and you – to be in the wild and to see a grizzly bear is not seeing a grizzly bear at the zoo. Oh, no. No. That's like seeing a person that's been kept in a tiny cage their entire life and force-fed, like overfed and just like sat there. It's like they're like a real strong – they haven't built up that. But no, but vet paw. What they're doing changed the way that I viewed conservation. Cause I, when I remember when I was in college

Starting point is 00:06:26 and I was thinking, I mean, environmental college just teaches you, you know, we're polluting the planet, everything's dying. We have to be stressed and worried. And, but then when you go out into the world and right now, there's so many incredible organizations doing amazing work. And when I saw the guys at vet pod, they were like, yeah, see that Rhino and the Rhino didn't run away i mean i know i know wild animals you see

Starting point is 00:06:48 a wild animal runs these rhinos are just eating and they're like yeah these are safe these rhinos are safe they've never known danger i was like whoa is there protecting them because they're protecting yeah and it's incredible and that's it's one of the greatest things ever that phone call that first phone call from ryan was actually a life-changing phone call I always tell people pick up the phone yes I always I always have this argument with people I see people they get it they get a call from a number they don't know they put the phone in their pocket and like pick up the phone you don't know who it could be I have been picking up more of those recently because I get so many it's like every fucking calls from a number you don't know and usually it's like this is jam with the fire department in jersey and you gotta hang up but i thought about that

Starting point is 00:07:28 because you had talked to me about that with some of your some of the media opportunities you were able to get over the years strictly because you're like fuck i don't want to do it let me answer it you know what i mean yep no i mean i could i could i could do a whole it'd be a fun little essay of all the times that i've picked up the phone and it's been an amazing opportunity um yeah no i mean then of course you know what if i was i always tell my friends i'm like what if i got in a car accident and my cell phone fell you know off a cliff and i asked the next stranger for their cell phone and i'm calling you like pick up your phone right so i'm just like when my phone rings i'm just like maybe this is this is the one this is the one. This is the phone call. Imagine the one time you don't pick it up. It's like Joe Rogan.

Starting point is 00:08:07 You're like, fuck, I missed him. And he goes, never mind. Yeah. And that was cool because I know like that – like you're such a prime topic that would be of interest to him. So to see him put support behind you long before you ever went on his podcast was also pretty cool yeah but over in africa obviously vet paul has done a ton of work in stopping the poaching i mean we've laid it out when they got there in 2013 when ryan started there were around 15 000 white rhinos left which was pretty close to being able to be declared extinct because their gestation periods

Starting point is 00:08:44 would have been too long. They're critically endangered, yeah. And now they're up to near 30,000 as a result of a lot of their protection. But, Paul, it's not like they protect every spot in Africa. So outside of the places where they are, which some of them they can't talk about, others like Kruger, they can say they're there. But outside of there, what has happened? What's the latest with poaching in maybe the middle of the continent? Is it still pretty heavy at the moment? The middle of the continent, I actually can't speak to in an educated way because the Congo

Starting point is 00:09:16 is so insane that, you know, just to go to the Congo, just to go as a tourist is not an easy undertaking. Just to go to Virunga, the closest I just to go to the Congo, just to go as a tourist is not an easy undertaking. Just to go to Virunga. The closest I have to experience with the Congo is that, I can't remember his name, but the guy who was in charge of Virunga National Park, he came to the Explorers Club and gave a talk. And halfway through his talk, he actually like, you know, it was like a movie scene. Somebody like came, whispered in his ear, and he was like, he's like, guys, I got to go get on a flight. He a flight he's like one of my rangers just got killed and it's like that is an all-out war zone he literally tried to come and give one talk in new york he tried to educate people talk a little bit probably get some funding and he was just like i gotta go middle of the talk he was just like i'm

Starting point is 00:09:58 out and he he himself has been shot he's lived through assassination attempts verunga is from what i understand it it's basically an island of jungle surrounded by millions and millions and millions of poor people that all want firewood they all need bushmeat that all want to take that forest and then there's rebel groups that want to assassinate the gorillas because they figure if they assassinate the gorillas then people the conservationists will stop caring about the forest because this is the last place these gorillas exist and so it's it's the worst case scenario and they're doing this incredible job of defending this place against the tide of humanity that wants everything from this jungle well it's foreign governments too funding it which is a huge problem and then you have literally sometimes actual terrorists doing the work on the ground, which is a great misconception that people like me had about this until Ryan explained it all to me.

Starting point is 00:10:53 But then I do have a friend who's in – I'll just say he's on like the intel side within parts of the US government. I'll leave it at that. But he was telling me all about it because one of the things he does is track ISIS and Boko Haram. He was telling me all about their involvement in Africa with poaching and how real it is. He's like, no, they're literally doing, they're not just funding it. Like, they're not just taking funds to then fund people on the ground to do it. They're literally doing it themselves sometimes yeah no no it's definitely and again you have to consider that rhino horn and elephant tusk is now worth more than gold and a rhino horn is worthless as far as what it can be it can't be used for anything uh a rhino horn is worthless

Starting point is 00:11:36 scientifically yes that's what i mean yes if you're using your imagination and you believe it's going to cure your whatever's ailing you um but but it's it's just it's it's amazing how that has persisted though that that's still a problem like you think that after 20 years of education 20 years of anti-poaching um it just hasn't stopped the only the only thing i can think of that i thought was very interesting was that we've seen a huge decrease in the amount of people that are demanding shark fin soup and so i remember seeing 10 years ago that there was a lot of there's a lot coming out about shark finning where they would catch the sharks cut the fins off and throw the entire animal back in the ocean and they there was just these heartbreaking photos of where it would

Starting point is 00:12:19 be like this entire rooftop covered in shark fins tens of thousands of shark fins and that was tens of thousands of sharks and i know that they had yao ming working as right that's the basketball player um they had him working on like an education campaign to be to explain to people you don't need shark fin soup oh that's cool um gordon ramsay did a beautiful piece where he went and he actually he did the whole thing he went he ate shark fin soup which he's cool um gordon ramsay did a beautiful piece where he went and he actually he did the whole thing he went he ate shark fin soup which he got criticized for but he wanted to understand he was like is this really delicious and he was like no he's like i could do this with any other type of fish then he went around and interviewed people who were eating shark fin soup

Starting point is 00:13:00 in the restaurant and he was like what's the deal and they're like oh this was always you know like traditionally this was what we did when we were celebrating okay and then he would you know then he tricked people with shark fin soup where he'd be like try my shark fin soup and then they were like oh it's delicious and he'd be like it's not even shark fin soup and so he did it from every single angle and what he came to at the end was there's absolutely no reason for this it's just branding it's just brand yeah people just want to they want to touch the the coffee this it's just branding it's just brilliant people just want to they want to touch the the coffee when it's just too hot that maybe it'll hurt their finger but you know what i mean yeah that entire thing was was basically which which was beautiful to me because it showed that

Starting point is 00:13:34 that people can get educated to the point where they just stop killing these things yeah they're you're not kidding no there's the yamina on the screen there good guys ex-nba star yamina yeah what was that documentary sea spiracy where they showed a bunch of this in east in east asia where they kill these sharks they just like call them into gullies and just it's horrible yeah no and there's just there's just there's just puddles not not puddles. There's like wide ranges of blood just covering the top of the water. It's just red. The Cove, Sea Spiracy, Cow Spiracy, any of the spiracies, any of those environmental documentaries that are that devastating, I just chalk it up to I've seen enough in the Amazon that I'm not watching it. I'll watch the trailer.

Starting point is 00:14:24 I get the point. And then I got to like give it a break at some point. seen enough in the amazon that i'm not watching it i'll watch the trailer i get the point and then i gotta like give it a break at some point well i saw i saw a video you put up i guess maybe like a month ago two months ago whenever you were in africa but you were in the dark and i'll put the video on the corner of the screen oh yeah you were in the dark literal feet away from a black rhino white rhino it was a white rhino and you could like i couldn't even see it when the video is coming on but you can like oh yeah like right there oh yeah and that thing wasn't afraid of you no so what happens is first of all again you have rhinos that have

Starting point is 00:14:58 grown up in the beautiful golden grass of buffalo klof on the reserve, protected by vet paw. So these are rhinos that have never known danger. And then they're used to coming to this one area and there's actually a stone wall. So immediately after I posted that video, I got messages from people being like, how dare you take such a risk? How dare you?

Starting point is 00:15:21 And it's like, dude, the worst thing that could happen is that the rhino kills me. i pose no danger to the rhino and so of course you know 300 angry messages about my rhino video um you can't make everyone happy you just can't make them happy anyway it was an amazing night so we were all there the reserve owners were there war, Warren and Wendy, Ryan was, the vet pod guys were all there. And then everybody went to bed and the rhinos were just hanging out outside. And I woke up and it was probably midnight and it was raining and I went outside

Starting point is 00:15:55 and I'm sitting on this concrete wall. So I'm safe. The rhinos really, there's no reason for a rhino to come that close, but they were just eating the grass and they happened to be feet away from me and I'm listening to those vocalizations and I'm watching these animals that I never thought I'd see in real life and if you see by the end of that video I'm like I got tears in my eyes I literally I couldn't finish saying I was like gonna be like here I am with rhino I couldn't do it as soon as that thing got it just it just went straight up my spine and i just i was like okay

Starting point is 00:16:27 i can't and i just sat there and i watched them it was incredible it was absolutely magical and then it was only then and then it was like two hours later i tried to i tried to go to sleep i couldn't sleep knowing that they were out there i just wanted to watch them the whole night where are you sleeping uh in a in house, in a structure. I was going to say. They were like right next to, yeah, in the reserves. So yeah, you're all good. But then I woke up again.

Starting point is 00:16:52 And this time I was like, oh man, the rhinos are still there. And I'm looking at the rhinos in the dark. And then I'm like, oh shit, those aren't rhinos. And these two hippos had come. Oh shit. And they were fucking with the rhinos. And so these hippos are trying to get some of the grass that the rhinos were eating and then the rhinos were fighting with the hippos,

Starting point is 00:17:07 but then these two hippos- Were they going at it? No, no, no. So the rhinos, the hippos know that the rhinos will win. The rhinos just have to look at a hippo and the hippo knows they got the horn. Oh, just because of the horn? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:20 I mean, that horn is big. Have you ever seen hippos fight though? Well, that's what happened. The rhinos eventually left and the hippos opened their mouths and started fighting. And I'm not kidding you. I was standing behind, again, it was like a concrete pillar of this house. And there were two hippos 10 feet from me having the most savage battle. And they're like, ah!

Starting point is 00:17:38 Like, mouth open, where they, like, attack each other like that. Like, ah! Dude. It was terrifying. The earth was shaking we got to pull up a video of a hippo fighting a hippo not a hippo versus a rhino no hippo versus rhino is disgusting because the rhino just gores the hippo yeah i forgot how powerful that just thing that's such a that's such a cheat code having that hippo the second one the second one angry

Starting point is 00:18:00 hippos fight for mate this is it dude this is fucking nuts cut to like cut to like a minute in cut to a minute in the intimidation oh shit i should have given you the mouse bro this is painful cut to like a minute yeah yeah right there right there right there right there yep yep that's what it looked like yeah that was happening 10 feet away from me and i was safe because i was standing behind concrete and they didn't care that i was there oh my god i was like i could spit at them i've always wondered why they take that angle they don't like try to go in right away because like they'll eventually start trying to cut across right like perpendicular to the mouth but when they first start they just like go four tooth on

Starting point is 00:18:42 four tooth it's kind of weird it's just face to face it's just look at the blood Pablo Escobar used to fucking feed people to his hippos actually oh yeah yeah it's actually a big problem all right that's that's good Chris thank you brother it's actually a problem right now in Colombia they're trying to figure out yeah because now they've all fucked each other and like had long generations yeah so they have a hippo problem and so they're trying to figure out what to do with them i don't know if we can pull up an article on that but the the colombian government was talking about like people are like well don't euthanize them and then they're like well can we repatriate them to africa or some but yeah colombia government pablo escobar they need to take a they need to

Starting point is 00:19:26 take like a a nationwide census in colombia and just see like do we want to keep the hippos or not because i'd imagine half the people love the fact that there's hippos yeah let's click that first one cbs news oh sterilizing yeah eventually there'll be no hippos right colombia on tuesday began the sterilization of hippopotamuses, descendants of animals illegally brought to the country by late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the 1980s. Two male hippos and one female underwent surgical sterilization. Environmental authorities said it was part of a larger government effort to control the population of more than 100 of the mammals that roam around unsupervised in some rivers. The plan includes sterilizing 40 hippos each year, transferring some of them to other countries and possibly euthanasia.

Starting point is 00:20:08 So let's hope it's the first two, but specifically, if they're that upset about it, do the second one. You can afford to do it. You're a government, right? Yeah, I mean, the sterilization is a really passive one. It keeps everybody happy because then they just won't make more hippos.

Starting point is 00:20:24 Hey guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. It doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show, and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that, and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. That's like a really easy way to do it. guess because what's how's the hippo population doing in africa these days pretty i don't think i don't think i think can you look up the conservation status of hippos i would guess least concern i i don't think that hippos are because really

Starting point is 00:20:56 anywhere there's water i think they're happy i don't think anybody's poaching hippos and they don't breathe underwater too contrary to popular belief like like they they can just swim under there for a long time oh they are vulnerable two types of hippos the common hippo and the pygmy hippo are listed as vulnerable and endangered respectively can we click that well is this from a sometimes like these organizations will overdo it a little bit but hippopotamuses hey hey i'm just saying that you know i get it you know they want to make sure people are scared so that we don't get it wrong but you know i just tried to check it hippopotamuses the third largest terrestrial mammal

Starting point is 00:21:33 continued to decline due to widespread poaching from meat and ivory from the hippos long ivory cane oh i forgot about that ivory canine teeth meanwhile human encroachment into hippo habitats have decimated their historic range that's what's doing it and the species have already gone regionally extinct in three african countries currently hippos are confined mostly to protected areas over the past 10 years their populations have declined seven to twenty percent the two types of hippos the common hippo and the pygmy hippo are listed as vulnerable and endangered okay you are a good reader my friend yeah i'm trying my dyslexic ass can't read at half that speed. Yeah, I forgot about that.

Starting point is 00:22:06 You had to – because like if people haven't read your book, Mother of God, it's fucking incredible, number one. Thank you. Number two, you're an unbelievable writer. It's almost too good. It's almost like, all right, take it back a notch there, pal. I try. You have this huge, unbelievably descriptive vocabulary. How did you learn how to do that if you grew up so dyslexic?

Starting point is 00:22:26 My parents read to me every night. Wow. I literally couldn't read. I just remember the other kids. I remember like asking my friends to write things down. I remember being like, hey, could you read me this? And like my friends would be like, yeah, yeah, that says this. And I remember being like 10.

Starting point is 00:22:42 And it was very laborious. It was very difficult for me to read to sit down and read there'd be like homework assignments that i just couldn't do and so my parents would be like you know read more you're in trouble if you don't read all that all that stuff they tried to incentivize reading but when that didn't work every night regardless they'd be reading us books so the entire lord of the rings the chronicles of narnia jane goodall everything you could think of they read it and they put in that time and so writing is easy for me the use of of language from from listening but it's very it comes in much better auditorily for me and so with mother of God I had to now

Starting point is 00:23:18 again I send my editor uh a few chapters and that they have just it's just why it's funny watching somebody that's never worked with me before because they'll be like wait a second so you can construct this beautiful paragraph but you can't spell restaurant like they're like and uh hey hey that they think they think i'm fucking with them they think i'm being lazy because i just i'll hand in i'll hand in what looks like messy writing. And that's what I do. So even watching you read that, you are reading at 10x the speed that I can actually decipher those characters at. I'm much slower. That's the thing.

Starting point is 00:23:56 My dad always goes, you blame everything on dyslexia. And I go, no, it's real. There's a reason. People send me a spreadsheet, and I'm like, nope. I'll call my friend. So do you literally, your eyes, try to see it right to left? It's not, it's not exactly backwards, but I mean, first of all, if you, I guess, I guess, would you have a, would you have trouble spelling hippopotamus or is that easy?

Starting point is 00:24:19 Spelling is hit or miss for me. Sometimes I'm really good. Sometimes I'm like, wow, that was, that was bad. Yeah. No, sometimes spell check can't figure. Sometimes I'm really good. Sometimes I'm like, wow, that was bad. Yeah. No, sometimes spell check can't figure out what I'm trying to do. Like I'll be like, I'll have it written in my notebook, but I'll spell it however I want to spell it. And then I'll be like sitting there with my notebook trying to get this onto the page. I mean, I'm writing now.

Starting point is 00:24:35 So I'm sitting there doing this and spell check is like, we don't know what you're trying to say. Like because my spelling is that far out. Like I'm just sounding out the word. Wow. Yeah. You would never know just sounding out the word. Wow. Yeah. You would never know that, reading that book, just because the mastery of the language. I mean, once you could, it sounds like when you were young, like, reading at all was a problem. It was tough.

Starting point is 00:24:56 But once you actually could read yourself, did you do that a lot when you were maybe in high school? Oh, yeah. And today, like, I don't go anywhere without a book. Right. Anywhere. I know that now but yeah i mean in the jungle in the airport it doesn't matter where you are it's like the book is the one thing like you don't got to recharge it like it's and they can't tell you to turn it off like it's just you can always have a book it's your best friend i mean

Starting point is 00:25:18 i have a kindle so they can sure that's why i love my pages what did you besides the you were telling me what your parents read you growing up but what did you eventually get into once you started reading yourself like what types of things interest you okay so there's a steve mcqueen and dustin hoffman movie called papillon papillon it says it's butterfly in french i don't know oh my god watch this steve mcqueen and dustin hoffman and dustin hoffman it's the best movie you haven't seen obviously i haven't seen this it's a true story uh this guy henry cherrier i'm probably butchering his name is probably henry cherrier but um this guy henry cherrier uh he gets he's a safe cracker but he gets accused of something worse. He gets accused of murder.

Starting point is 00:26:05 And they send him from France, where he lives, to French Guyana in South America. So they shackle him. They put him on a ship, and they send him to prison. And they send him to one of those prisons that's like on an island, out in the jungle. There's no way you're ever getting out of there. And the whole book is him going, I have two goals. One is to not. He goes, even though I hate everybody I hate the

Starting point is 00:26:26 prisoners I hate the system I hate the fact that I was wrongfully convicted he determines that he's not going to become an evil person that's his first thing and it doesn't sound like a lot but in the situation he's in you could just become a psycho killer because you'd be like I hate everybody and he decides he's gonna escape and the whole book is him escaping, and it's bananas. The book is even better than the movie, but Steve McQueen, it's worth it. Pretty good stuff. It's worth it. I got to read the book, too.

Starting point is 00:26:51 And then at one point he escapes. And again, they held a huge tribunal because this book came out, and it went mega global success. And then they were like, there's no way any of this is true. So they went in and they checked this book, and they had a huge tribunal. They checked it. They went and found the prison guards they checked dates against places and and people that he said everything checks out they couldn't disprove a single one of this guy's

Starting point is 00:27:11 stories and like one of his escapes he lived on an island with a tribe where he was actually married to these two sisters for a while and then after a while he he escaped off of there it was it's it's it's it's ridiculous it's absolutely incredible what this guy did and what he endured and kept being a good person. He didn't just turn and just go psycho, which a lot of the prisoners around him were just becoming, oh, and then they put him in solitary confinement for two years. They put him in a box with no- That'll do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:41 Like crazy, crazy stuff. Do you still like to read a lot of fiction? I like to read a lot of fiction. I like to read a lot of fiction. I like to read a lot of nonfiction. I try to – I try – actually, I usually have both. It usually depends what mood I'm in. Yeah. So like, you know, usually like if I'm like traveling and moving around and stuff, like I'll just like be reading nonfiction.

Starting point is 00:27:57 And then when I can like settle in, when I have a dog and a couch or a hammock, then I can get into a story. I started getting into fiction a little bit more because I've always read nonfiction. I love nonfiction. I love learning about things and stuff. But I think it's really good, especially for a writer, to constantly be reading people who have to paint the story from scratch. Because there's just something so majestic and beautiful about that that you can't make up yes and i love when non-fiction is written like fiction like when you catch a non-fiction writer who's writing beautiful prose yes so the book the tiger which i um i gotta get you a copy of this book it's about this tiger that gets that decides it becomes a man-eating tiger in Siberia and starts hunting humans.

Starting point is 00:28:46 And so the tiger conservationists in the region realize they have to kill this tiger, or as it's going from cabin to cabin killing people. If they don't get this tiger and people realize it's a man-eating tiger, then it's going to spur everyone to go out and kill all the tigers and they're already so endangered. And so to save the tigers, they have to kill this man-eating tiger then it's going to spur everyone to go out and kill all the tigers and they're already so so endangered and so to save the tigers they have to kill this man-eating tiger and it's this insane hunt and the writer does this amazing job of painting the ecosystem in this wild eastern edge of africa of africa of russia one of the best non-fiction books i've ever read i got absolutely incredible who wrote that john valiantaliant or Valiant. I don't know how to say his last name.

Starting point is 00:29:27 You sold me on that. Yeah. And if you go look at the reviews, it's literally one of the best nonfiction books ever written. Have you made a movie out of that yet? I don't... Okay. I don't know how you would make a movie out of this book because the main character is a 900-pound tiger.

Starting point is 00:29:42 Oh. So does he tell it through the eyes of the tiger itself at all no but with like if you watch a movie there's a movie i forget what the movie is it's with anthony hopkins and alec baldwin but they're in the wilderness and there's a bear fight where anthony hopkins fights a bear and it's incredible because there's a real bear it's part the bear that the same bear that was in legends of the Fall, it was in White Fang, it was... It's a harrowing bear fight. It's absolutely savage. And then when you cut to...

Starting point is 00:30:12 the Revenant, where you have a digital bear... Yeah. It's not the same. And so, I don't know how you could carry a movie, maybe you could make it like an adult animation or something. But to me, having this incredibly beautiful, gnarly environment of Russian Kamchatka and the rivers and the eagles and the snow leopards,

Starting point is 00:30:35 and then you have a computer animated tiger walking around, it's just not gonna work. I think one way they could do it, and I haven't read the book, but I'm just thinking out loud here. One way they could do it is the drama't read the book, but I'm just thinking out loud here. One way they could do it is the drama of the unknown. Don't show it. Don't tell the story through the eyes of the humans who witness it and the humans who are struggling with the back and forth of we kill this tiger to save the rest.

Starting point is 00:30:59 You could get away with that for a lot of it. And I think, I don't know what the rules are on filming with animals, but you could definitely, because some of the amazing things that this tiger does, because they say it got shot. It doesn't kill a tiger that big. Really? If you shoot it in the heart? I mean, if you shoot it in the heart, maybe, but even a pretty large caliber to a 900-pound tiger, they could take that in the shoulder. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:23 And so this tiger just realized humans were always the thing that were threatening it so then then it started hunting humans but then it started realizing where do you find humans in their cabins and it would smell them because the bed smells like humans the most so these people would be out in the remote wilderness they'd go into their cabins and there'd be a tiger on the bed last thing they ever saw yep gone there's one yo in the beginning of the book there's a scene where they're describing they're tracking and they're looking for they know this guy got eaten by a tiger because there's blood all over the snow but they're looking at the tracks and the human tracks are running you can see this there's a big spread the human tracks are running

Starting point is 00:31:59 and then all of a sudden they just stop gone Gone. Gone. Because the tiger hit him from the side and took him 18 feet that way. What a way to go. As they're tracking him, they bring you through that they're like, wait, the tracks end. And then they're looking 10 feet, 15 feet, neither direction. They're like, there's nothing. It's just like in the Da Vinci Code when the cane tracks. Have you run into anyone? That's an inside joke sorry people the last time paul was in here you were you were going off about some of the people who are trying to reinvent the amazon

Starting point is 00:32:34 and claiming the whole thing's man-made and running with these headlines and you danny jones me crack up over that line you're like i asked you i'm like why why do you think they're doing this and you're like i don't know because they think their life is the fucking da vinci code i got so mad but i understand like i've talked with a lot of people on the podcast since then yeah about how some of these things can spread because maybe someone for example like graham hancock doesn't say oh the amazon was man-made but when he says maybe there's evidence that some of the Terra Prada or some other stuff could have been, the problem is – and I actually empathize with him in this scenario because he's taken out of context. But it then creates the headline of the Amazon is man-made. So then you can have politicians be like, oh, it's man-made.

Starting point is 00:33:21 We can keep knocking it down. We'll fucking rebuild it. Yeah, and so that comment – now we have to explain it to everybody. That comment, I was going off on it and they were like, this guy Graham Hancock. And I'm like, well, whoever he is. And I went off on him. I had no idea who he was. And then I found out that half of planet Earth absolutely loves Graham Hancock.

Starting point is 00:33:37 Yeah, yeah. Everybody loves Graham Hancock. And so I went in and did my research. And then I actually listened to what he was saying. And you're right. Graham hancock never said that he said there's more here in terms of ancient civilizations than we first thought then some dipshit reporters went and said some archaeologists just said the amazon was made by humans how do you stop that you don't that's humans because they're just gonna do that that headline sells yeah but that's you know then that's that's the jump. You don't. That's humans. Because they're just going to do – that headline sells.

Starting point is 00:34:05 Yeah. But that's what you get for the news. Yeah. That's the news. When was the first time you read about the Amazon when you were a kid? I'm trying to think. I can remember almost everything from being a kid. I have like an incredibly photographic memory.

Starting point is 00:34:23 I remember catching my first snake. I remember the first time I saw a bear i remember everything um i don't remember the first time i came online with the amazon i remember being so small that i was um that i had broken pieces off the christmas tree and like stuck them in the rug and and i had dinosaurs and i was pretending it was the amazon and then i got in trouble for breaking things off of a christmas tree That was it. I mean, that was the first time I remember thinking about the Amazon, but I was that young that I was still playing with dinosaurs. So it was probably like 17 or something. And when you landed in the Amazon for the first time, was it anything like you had thought? I thought when I was on my way to the Amazon, I thought that I would get there and it would, I don't know what to expect. I thought that maybe i would get there and it would i don't know what to expect

Starting point is 00:35:06 i thought that maybe i would get there and it would be cool really that that was my best that was my from when you from from from brooklyn yeah i mean really yeah i'm like fuck but um i i wasn't ready for you know when you break through the clouds and the first time you see it, you see jungle to the horizon. You see nothing but jungle. I was glued to the window of the plane. If I could have crawled out of it, I would have. I was, my heart was rattling against my ribs. I was losing my mind when I saw that jungle for the first time and I was going, holy shit, there's really jungle it's just to the edge it's to it's too as far and you're flying over it for

Starting point is 00:35:48 a while and then you come in and you land you see some deforestation and stuff and then a day later i'm on a boat and i'm going up river and this is just these giant walls of jungle like heart of darkness jungle and then there's you know you can you learn how to distinguish what primary forest is jungle that's never been cut there's a different there's differentiation in in the in the the vegetation types you have like palms and giant hardwoods and you have river cane and all this different stuff but it's a varied canopy if you see like a homogenous canopy if you see like one species or if you see like a lower canopy you know that that's been cut by humans and it's grown back yes and then it's like all cecropia trees or something what i was going into was primary forest like towering ancient

Starting point is 00:36:30 forest and it's that's the stuff that you never get back once it's gone and so i i went up that for two days and then literally the second that we we parked the boat and like all right we all got to carry our stuff and you got to carry your stuff a quarter of a mile into the jungle to the research station. And you're with Emma and JJ? I'm with Emma and JJ. And I dropped my pack immediately because I was so amazed that there are leafcutter ants. I'd only seen leafcutter ants in planet earth. And suddenly- Can we call it the leafcutter? There's leafcutter ants in front of me. They're actually carrying the leaves. It was just like, I was like

Starting point is 00:37:05 on my stomach just amazed watching these leaf cutter ants and you could pick up the leaf and they just keep running they're like they have no idea they're just like their job is to carry that leaf in this direction they're following a pheromone Trail and that's what they're doing and I was so amazed and of course instantly they were like why aren't you carrying the bags man we see leaf cutter ants every day dude it's a leaf cutter ant it's like it's a squirrel you're like i'm in heaven right now guys i was losing my mind and then i saw like the first big tree and i like tripped and fell over the jungle absolutely shut down my brain because when you're coming down on the plane and you're looking down into the jungle it's kind of like that first

Starting point is 00:37:38 shot on the last podcast intro we used where remember that where like the clouds are above the i'll show you after but you're not you can't see this is a misconception i think a lot of us have you can't see into it because it's completely blocked you just know it's down there the sunlight almost barely it looks like a field of green broccoli right you can't see and then 150 feet below that is the ground it's like a human human's tiny like a human is minuscule does it feel like it's daytime down there when you're in it yeah it feels like daytime it's and and there's beautiful spokes of sunlight like coming through but they say only about three

Starting point is 00:38:17 percent of the sunlight that hits the top of the canopy actually reaches the floor of the animal amazon three percent and so that's why the turnover rate of the trees you have these ancient hardwoods and so some of our iron woods are like a thousand twelve hundred years old like ancient trees but then you'll also get a sapling sitting in the forest so the seed falls sapling grows up to about here and it'll just wait. And it'll wait for 10 years sometimes. They're waiting for a branch to fall or a tree to fall. They're waiting for a light gap. They need more light than that to grow. So that entire jungle is just an energy economy.

Starting point is 00:38:53 Everything is pushing each other down and shoving each other over. The trees are all fighting to get their canopy up into the sun. Everything is an energy economy. It's all trying to get to that sunlight. And so if you're growing on the forest floor, you're not getting, you're not able to get the amount of sunlight you need to invest and to stack out and to make that giant kind of like a trunk,

Starting point is 00:39:15 like a Kapok tree, an ironwood tree, a Brazil nut tree. They put all of their effort into building this monster column, this huge trunk. And then you have something like the vines, which we, I forget how something like the vines which we i forget how many species of vines there are in the jungle but it's one of the major things that's holding the whole jungle together but the vines cheat the vines produce some fruit animals eat them they jump to another tree take a in the canopy of the tree and then the vines are up in the top they have access to the sunlight and so there's all these different methods that the plants are using but everybody's just trying to get to the sun how fast can that vine grow they grow fast they grow fast but a

Starting point is 00:39:48 strangler 50 feet to get up get all the way up there no no they get they get deposited up in the crown of the tree you think where the monkey goes here and then takes a right here so that the vine is starting from here yeah yeah but then it's going to drop a tendril down and start pulling nutrients from the ground but then it's going to shoot up some some some leaves up here and so you have it getting the sunlight but it already got it's like major major boost and how old are the trees that haven't been cut down like the top of the canopy trees do we do we have a idea it's hard because in the so up like if you were to go cut an oak tree right now in the forest, you would have rings. You have tree rings.

Starting point is 00:40:26 We have a lot of features in the wood we have on this table. Sorry, the Amazon for this table. This is not – What do you mean? This is not from the Amazon. What? This is pine, dude. Yeah, it's from the Amazon.

Starting point is 00:40:38 It's from North America. This is what something I have to – It's from Amazon.com. People try to get me excited. I have one friend. He wanted me to get me excited i have one friend he wanted me to uh this this guy got me a bunch of books and he kept telling me did you did you read the books i got you i said no he goes i'm gonna kill a butterfly every day this is how and actually this is what when danny jones had like a moment of silence for the wood while we had it on the

Starting point is 00:41:00 ground we were building it in this room we're like we're very sorry to paul rosalie what do you think for this tree now make the fucking table yeah what you don't know is that when i take you to the jungle i'm gonna tell the trees well right when right when he's on ayahuasca i'm gonna be like jungle do you know wait no no i'm not doing ayahuasca right before we go into the jungle for the first time whoa okay first of all i keep having this conversation with everybody when i tell my local team the guys that brought me into the jungle, the guys who taught me everything I know about the jungle, when I tell them that there are people who do ayahuasca not in the jungle, they throw their heads back laughing. They're like, the only place you can do it is the jungle because it comes from the jungle. Is that just like a meta thing or is that scientifically you know

Starting point is 00:41:46 well i mean you can you certainly can you can you can take the substance and you know go do it in a yoga studio in la if you want to um that is a thing that you can do i'll bet um but if you speak to the medicine men and the shamans and the villagers in Amazonia, they would, they would say what they have told me is that we wouldn't, they wouldn't, they don't even want to go to the outer city limits to do it. You want to be completely surrounded by the jungle. And so the time that I did ayahuasca, the shaman who was doing the ceremony was Don Ignacio. And he was about 80-something years old at this point. So this is someone that's lived out in the jungle for months of his life. You wrote about this guy in your book, I think. I think he's mentioned. I didn't mention it.

Starting point is 00:42:37 I know I didn't cover it. At the time I was writing it. Oh, Don Santiago. Don Santiago is JJ's dad. This is Don Ignacio. They were friends. Kind of the old the old guard the old the old guys um but you know it's it's very intimidating because you sit down in a circle and everybody's in a circle and there's candles and it's all dark and you can hear the jungle out there in the darkness and you know you think like

Starting point is 00:43:02 you're doing mushrooms or something i was like oh, oh, I'm going to have a notebook. And I was like, I have, you know, some cigarettes. And I was like, this is going to be great. And I thought I was going to be able to move. You kneel in front of the shaman and, you know, he's got the feathers and he's smoking a cigarette. And so he draws the cigarette and then he blesses the drink with the smoke. And he says a prayer over the drink and the smoke flows over the liquid and then he gives it to you and you drink and as soon as i drank as soon as i drank i was very aware of that that was a one-way door i had just made a decision that i

Starting point is 00:43:36 couldn't take back and i went and i sat down i took my place and then somebody else went and then they drank. And for the maybe five minutes I was sitting there and going, okay, no, it's gonna be okay. For about five minutes I convinced myself that it was gonna be okay. And then you're listening to the throbbing, insects throbbing and the frogs throbbing and all that.

Starting point is 00:43:59 And all of a sudden you just feel it start moving under your skin. And all of the sound of the jungle starts moving under your skin. The sound of the jungle moves under and all of the sound of the jungle starts moving under your skin the sound of the jungle the sound of the jungle starts moving with your blood like the vibration of it you know in the matrix when he touches the mirror and then he takes his fingers back and it's on him yes i picked up my hand and the jungle was moving up my arm and when it takes you i dematerialized i fell straight through the

Starting point is 00:44:26 atoms of reality i spell like through the planet and i spent years in unconstructed dream space i was down there years i hated it i was so scared i mean you you what ayahuasca has the ability to do is to literally open up the jaws of the universe are you sitting like in the real world though are you sitting down this whole time oh in the real world your face is against the deck and you're drooling in the real world you look ridiculous um but in your head um you are flying through other universes you are you are through wormholes nebulas ancient civilizations, other planets. You are through insane... I spent a very long time... in space. This is what you experience. You experience being in complete blackness.

Starting point is 00:45:13 I started from a consciousness with no ability to speak. I didn't... I stopped thinking in words. We think in words. We don't realize we do, but we actually think in words. I stopped thinking in words and was just... How do you stop thinking in words we don't realize we do but we actually think in words i stopped thinking in words and was just how do you stop thinking in words you drink ayahuasca i know but but what so when you're seeing things though you could know what that is without calling it in your mind what that is it was it was the experience of being an awareness um i was aware that that

Starting point is 00:45:43 i don't even know how to explain it now that i'm not an ayahuasca we should have some um you're you're i was aware that i was there floating black and i could i could see stars very far below um and then you know you just you go through so many things there's so many stages There was the deep space stage where you had no physical form. At one point, I got to experience being a snake and moving through the forest. And so the trees were like skyscrapers. The trees were 10 times the size of these trees. And you're moving through leaves and going over obstacles through the forest.

Starting point is 00:46:20 And then, I mean, there's just endless stages. I could honestly fill the podcast with all the crazy shit that i experienced but it's how long were you under approximately five or six hours but it's a while it's a long time it's a long time and so the the the trip ended with that you know the the snake form was i was very very excited to have physical form again and so i was able to go through deep jungle. I was able to see places where the forest was burning. I was able to communicate with the other animals. And then I came to a place where the animals had all met and there was this light coming from the forest and they were deciding what to do.

Starting point is 00:46:58 The jungle was like holding a conference where they're trying to decide what to do. And I was this tiny snake in the corner what animals are there do you remember every every every conceivable animal had come out to this clearing there's this glowing light and they were communicating with whatever the leader was do you remember do you remember it doesn't it didn't have form it was just everyone was there to listen to the guidance of this one thing. All of the animals. It was light. There was just light. And then at some point after that, I found myself talking to a beetle, this giant beetle with jaws.

Starting point is 00:47:37 I mean, this is a beetle the size of a tractor trailer, like this giant epic beetle. And it just said, give it to me. And I was like, what do you want? And then the trees started falling like like 9 11 trees started falling like that like imploding and everything started falling apart the natural world was dying in this beetle i was going what do you want and i'm standing in a desert and like my clothes are blowing off and everything's flying and it just goes give it to me and it opens its jaws and i start vomiting a rainbow and i went back through every wormhole

Starting point is 00:48:05 every nebula i went through like a thousand years and landed smack on my body lifted up my face and then just explosive vomit for about maybe a half hour and so when we came back oh my god from all of that we came back from all of that i was thanking god that i had hands it was so amazing to have a hand again to know hands to remember your name were people watching you no it's sober it's the middle of the night it's only the shaman and and people on a trip now he's not on a trip though yes he is oh he is he has to go with you he guides you through it so who the fuck is shepherd okay well you're sitting there like leo and waltz wall street like but you're like tripping balls and no one's there like so you're in the amazon so so after we drank he comes around and he's he's he's going to each person he's supposed

Starting point is 00:48:54 to check on you and guide you and so at like four in the morning we're all coming back we're like relearning the fact like we're trying to learn how to walk we're all like holding on to each other's shoulders we're all like oh where the fuck is don ignacio and we start looking and i like wake up jj i'm like jj and jj's like yeah and i'm like where's don ignacio and he's like he's fine don't worry about it i was like all right so like we fell asleep right there on the deck we all wake up again now it's light out and there's a hammock where he's supposed to be but there's no one in the hammock so we start like a search party looking for the shaman and we found him you know in et when et escapes and they find him like in the

Starting point is 00:49:41 stream like laying there we found him just like that butt ass naked and uh we picked him up and we wrapped him in a towel we said don ignacio what happened and he goes fuck he goes i i've been doing this for you know 50 years i've been drinking ayahuasca he goes the spirits punished me last night they punished all of us yeah because i overboiled it and i was like that's great that was that was the trip that i chose to go on the worst one that retired the shaman i'm just trying to picture forget being a snake seeing a giant fucking beetle with its huge tweezer mouth open yeah it was like screaming it was like four elephants big huge that give it to me that is fucking terrifying it was terrifying like i was i was it took me weeks to feel normal again i saw so much i feel like were you

Starting point is 00:50:31 when you did this 20 something i feel like i feel like i mean for for for the shaman for the the most respected shaman in the region to go that that was some heavy ayahuasca that was a a heavy heavy heavy trip i'm still i'm still um my dreams have never been the same since that time there's certain times where all of a sudden i'll get like wormhole linked back to one of the places that i was it's very strange what do you think that is? and all the other orchids and bromeliads and chemical compounds that are contained in the Amazon. If you just were to walk into the forest and say, well, I'm gonna try this and I'm gonna try this, well, then you're probably gonna die first. So that guy dies.

Starting point is 00:51:33 How many years does it take before you get to the guy that figures out if you boil this and you skin this and put it together? And that's why if you go into indigenous medicine they'll very quickly tell you this was a gift from the gods how they say how else could we know about this this was given to us to maintain our connection with the spirit world how much do you think i don't want to ask this question when it comes to some of the saps and some of the natural medicines that they're able to make out there what percentage of it is it scientifically does

Starting point is 00:52:16 solve whatever affliction they're going after it is versus they also believe in it it depends what your sample size is because if your sample size is just everybody, like I've seen, I've seen, so I feel like we come at things from a very clinical direction. You know, if somebody tells me this will work, this will cure your cold,

Starting point is 00:52:37 this will make you taller. It's like, okay, show me, prove, show me where your studies, you know, I want to see the data. And so with the jungle, when I got there and they were like, oh, this mushroom will cure an ear infection. I was like, yeah, okay. And I figured that a lot of it was the fact that they just believed in it.

Starting point is 00:52:55 And what we found out once we started doing the work that we're doing now, like we bring Radford University to the Amazon. We can actually have students medical students with petri dishes and microscopes test some of these tree saps and we've put bacterial cultures into petri dishes and we've seen that some of these saps murder infections like it's not a joke like these saps have saved my life multiple times that picture you know that picture where i'm all for oh yeah yeah yeah we'll put that in the corner of the screen like that doesn't happen anymore because now we have access we have that jungle knowledge we know how to stop stuff like that um so no there's a lot of stuff where it is there's an element of what we would call

Starting point is 00:53:34 um where you kind of have to believe in it for it to work there's plenty of that out there but the pharmacology of the amazon contains some of the most powerful compounds on earth medicinal compounds that are contained in the plants and that's according to western medicine that's not a joke that you don't have to but it doesn't matter if you believe in it like certain saps will do what they say they will accomplish like you know if you there's a there's a root called barbasco and that's we've all heard of this but you can take in a stream, you can crush up this root, throw it into a pool in the stream, and you just put a stick on one side and you put a stick on the other side. You kind of slow down the stream. What happens is all the fish that are in that particular section of the stream will float up to the surface.

Starting point is 00:54:19 You pick which ones you want. We want the wasako and we want the catfish. We take those, throw them in the bag. We're going to eat those for lunch and then you remove the sticks and you remove the barbasco and the barbasco will stop poisoning the water the fish will eventually re-oxygenate their lungs and nobody dies whoa yeah so humans figured that out somehow that's indigenous knowledge and that's something you can't fake it yeah so if they said oh this works it's like well it either does or it doesn't you can't make fish float to the water without some pretty serious chemical compounds it feels like there's there's almost these hacks like these nature hacks according to species where you could almost like like the story of of jj showing you how to catch a crocodile for the first time

Starting point is 00:55:01 where they where they like stick you stick the i guess like the bamboo down and suddenly it wraps itself around it and comes up you know there's something to that like why does why does the crocodile respond to that and another species doesn't oh i mean if you go species to species there's all kinds of interesting stuff like that um right now i'm reading this book i think it's called are we smart enough to know how smart animals are it's by franz de wall it's an incredible book and it's all about how human studies of animal intelligence can just repeatedly fall short where it's our intellectual limits that are prohibiting us from understanding the depth of intelligence of animals how do they argue that oh it's a the guy does it for hundreds

Starting point is 00:55:44 of pages it's incredible you feel like you feel like a moron by the end of the book um but what's some of the main like takeaways simple simple stuff like they'll they'll say okay do our animals self-aware so they'll take a mirror and they'll stick in front of an animal and they'll say does the animal touch itself well most animals don't care you know like a bear is going to react to a mirror bear is going to see another bear and it's either going to have it's either going to fight or flight it's either going to run away or it's going to fight the bear our cats and dogs which are domesticated animals so this is different but they've learned to not really care about mirrors so much golden retrievers do if you

Starting point is 00:56:16 have a puppy they'll growl at it but then after a day they're like they don't care they learn very quickly now what they did i think it was in the Bronx Zoo, they painted an X on one of the elephants' foreheads. And instantly, she went, she looked, and she went like this. She knew it was her. Whoa. Yeah. And so they've done this with a bunch of animals. And I think that there's some species of magpies that recognize themselves, some of the greater apes, gorillas, chimps, bonobos, like those things.

Starting point is 00:56:45 It's very, very small. Dolphins. Dolphins also pass the test but again it's it's it's so often like is knowing yourself in a mirror is a mirror a natural you know what i mean like oh the other thing the elephant did that was really cool is that the elephant opened her mouth think about it you've never seen the inside of your mouth with your own eyes you can't and the first thing she did was try to get a look inside of her mouth she was trying to i was like whoa you really get this mirror um but there's just study after study where they were they i can't i can't recall them like that but it's like they where you'd const he has all these examples where researchers you know gave the monkeys this and then you go yeah but the monkeys compared to the kids and then they'd be like yeah but the monkeys are in like a sterile clinical environment

Starting point is 00:57:29 where they're you know their neck is is in a piece of plastic and they're terrified and harassed and they're dealing with a member of another species humans administering a test and then you have hum human kids and the human kids and they're like all right listen timmy can you see can you put the pencil through the hole and he's like yeah duh like well in order to replicate that test well then you need to have a monkey that's raised by people very calm in control that you can communicate with so like these things where they have to realize like you can't just put them in a sterile environment if you put me in a like a in a white you know research environment and shine some bright lights at me and told me to do math problems i would you know

Starting point is 00:58:11 you you would think i was half dead i mean it's like it's like taking a cat and a fish and throwing them both in a pool and then being like which one can swim it's like are we just doesn't match up are we going to be able to do some sort of scientific experiments maybe we already can at this point but at least in the near future though where maybe you chip an animal in the wild and then that chip that they don't notice just measures their brain activity and what and how it is what it responds to what it responds to i think they do a lot of that i mean with rats i mean they they have you know exactly but the rats dream about tomorrow or the things they're scared of i think they recently said the dogs dream of of uh of thing you know things they're excited for

Starting point is 00:58:54 um but but when it comes to intelligence it's so fascinating because we don't know we really don't have any way of knowing it's very very difficult to penetrate one of the stories they told was that they gave they hung something from a tree and then they gave they put sticks on the ground and so like human kids were able to go and take the sticks and then knock knock the treat out of the tree and then they gave the sticks to the elephants and the elephants did not use it but it was too tall for the elephants so it's the same trick they're supposed to use the sticks but they didn't but then they repeated the thing but instead of giving them a stick they gave them a box and the elephants knew to move the box stand on the box they could get up higher elephants don't want

Starting point is 00:59:37 to use their trunk to hold a stick that's not how they just not how they do things that's not elephant intelligence and so you're not they're not they're testing they're testing animals on on human intelligence like for a while we thought that domesticated dogs which is very not the case were smarter than wolves why did we think that because the researchers had access to domesticated dogs and domesticated dogs have learned as you know to watch exactly what we're doing if they can't solve a problem they turn around and they look at us yeah i can't get it i can't get i need help they look at us for everything wolf they encounter a problem they don't think of a what you're doing no wolf is on a totally different way they're totally different

Starting point is 01:00:21 and so even there who has access to wild wolves that have grown up problem solving in the true wild? It's like how do you test that intelligence? So same thing goes for elephants. Like the time that I've spent with wild elephants. I'm so jealous of you for spending so much time with them. I wish I could just like transport back to like 16-year- and be like dude it's just wait yeah just wait um it's so you know because usually when you see elephants you you pull up next to them in a truck and there's people taking pictures and the elephants are kind of you know they're not thrilled about being watched usually every now and then you

Starting point is 01:01:00 get that one individual um when i'm out with vet paw, there's this one. Dingane is awesome, beautiful, huge elephant. He's one of the, he's one of, there's a problem happening right now where, I've got to get this right or else people come after me. Poaching has brought down the size of African elephant tusks to the point that some African elephants don't even have tusks. It's a huge genetic problem. It's a huge genetic problem. It's a huge genetic problem. In the last century, yeah. An elephant without tusks is a huge problem.

Starting point is 01:01:28 That's a terrible shame. And so, on Buffalo Kloof, where they're doing such incredible work, they've brought in Dingane to mate with the matriarchs of these other herds. And he carries the big tusk gene, the huge tusks. So, we really want to have him pass that on. So he was young and he came to the reserve with a collar on, a transmitter, so they could always know where he was.

Starting point is 01:01:51 In case he broke out, instantly there'd be people trying to kill him. So for his own safety, he had to have that collar on. And last year, not that long after I talked to you, a couple months after I talked to you, we went to Buffalo Clouf we were out with the vet pa team and we got the chopper in the air and this was a collaboration between jungle keepers and vet pa where we said we're gonna get ding on his collar off mm-hmm and so now Buffalo Clouf is the reserve this is where this elephant exists this is where all the other elephants exist and so they have helicopters they they have their own helicopters so they got the chopper have their own helicopters. And so they

Starting point is 01:02:25 got the chopper in the air. We went out, they darted them. Dr. Will Folds is incredible veterinarian. The entire team, all the staff from Buffalo Clouf, all the vet paw guys, everybody comes in, they take the collar off. We do some checking of the vitals. Everything that needed to be done veterinarially got done on Dingani. Everybody gets out of there this elephant stood up and we had this huge elephant ears out just beautiful without the collar and so he's free now we got that was that was one of the most amazing things that i've ever gotten to see but he's one of the few elephants that he'll come up to the car and just hang out like if he's over there and we stop you know because you don't go on foot you you can pull up you can look at an elephant that's fine but out of respect and out of safety you don't get out of the car

Starting point is 01:03:08 it's dangerous he's one of the few elephants that'll just like come up he'll just hang out he'll pull up some grass he'll chew he'll like look at you guys you know very curious elephant very friendly elephant he actually like goes near where the uh the owners of the reserve have their house on the hill in the reserve right in the center of everything and he'll actually just like go up to their house and just start breaking branches off their tree and they have to like chase him away and like he enjoys it you know he's just he's just being a pain in the ass he just likes the attention so the human the humans he's come to know are ones who are kind and let him go where he wants to go help him out obviously

Starting point is 01:03:43 like they're very smart so they're able to figure that out but there's still a lot of elephants that you know the most dangerous thing that can happen in the wild is being head to head with an elephant you're done you know and there's a lot of elephants that understandably so because of the brutal slaughters that they have been put through over the last century or so you know they they don't with humans no they don't with humans um we were we were on this road and we're watching the females and the babies and there's a light rain and we're taking pictures and we're all kind of chill and we're kind of like you know sitting up on the doors and taking pictures and the elephants know

Starting point is 01:04:16 we're there they're right up against us and then uh connor at vetpa was just like uh guys guys guys we look down the road and the biggest bull on the reserve this this bull kester is coming it became like a black cloud it looked like a thunder cloud this thing walked down the road and everyone it was just like get in the car we might have to back up it was just you just don't know is it staring at you he's looking at us his ears are out you know he's just like this is my road why you want you know you're you're so at their mercy if they want to flip the truck they flip the truck they want to crush your skull they crush your skull you feel the control we every day we're like if i want to go do that

Starting point is 01:04:54 you no longer have you want you're in a situation where whatever happens next happens next and again he's a he's a good elephant he's not he's not a violent elephant but you're on your best behavior. Oh, yeah. It's actually a very humbling experience being around an elephant like that, a big dominant male. Actually, I believe that he killed another one of the males. I forget if he gored him or pushed him off of a cliff. Oh, that's nice.

Starting point is 01:05:18 Yeah. And that was another one that they had brought on with the big tusk gene that they were really hoping was going to mate and make the elephant population there grow and everything else. And this guy was just like, no, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen. I'm king of this jungle. Yeah. Have you, besides that one you just laid out though, have you personally, like when you've been on the ground, not in a truck, had any close calls with elephants in India or Africa? Not in Africa. In Africa, I've always been extremely responsible and always followed the rules um but india but india um yeah i was i was out one day and i was i actually was trying to be

Starting point is 01:05:54 very very careful um i was already very aware of how dangerous elephants could be and in india you have wild elephants living in between human society of a billion people and elephants the south india has the largest remaining population of asian elephants so there's a lot of elephants crossing roads oh yeah moving through towns raiding farms and of course the villagers come out and throw fire at them they're literally trying to electrocute them poison them it's it's a war it's literally a war can we pull up some video of that chris type type in elephant lifts truck or elephant throws truck yeah there's an elephant that got sick of being a temple elephant that one no no no no uh go to videos there it is top one flipping 27 vehicles in india so it no so see the guys on the top look he just he just threw a motorcycle

Starting point is 01:06:46 oh they like did a whole but yeah they he they tried to make it like a circus animal they tried to make him do the parade thing for the temple oh yeah this this is actually a very tragic thing to see because this elephant is has reached his limit oh my god look at him just fucking oh my god that's just rage at this that's a sizable dump truck too look i'm just he's throwing that thing around like a rag doll he threw a motorcycle at those people with his trunk and and these aren't even as big as african this is this is not a big they're not these these elephants in in asia are nothing like the size of an african this is this is not a big they're not these these elephants in in asia are nothing like the size of an african elephant imagine that yeah in a second i mean just think how strong their tusks are that that isn't breaking a lot of times he's lifting that entire truck on one look

Starting point is 01:07:35 at this look at this on one tusk holy and notice he's not he's not trying this is this is the heartbreaking thing about this he's not trying to do anything here he's just lost his mind he's sick of being told what to do he's sick of wearing a costume it's horrible it's terrible you know what they have to do to them to make them do that they have to break them they have to have to break them they have to they have to beat them until they listen so you have to take a baby elephant and say you have to do what we have to what we say so they raise this elephant yes that that elephant was probably either born in captivity or stolen from the wild yes so there's no like like a golden retriever is something we've bred a cow a chicken these

Starting point is 01:08:14 are all domesticated animals an elephant is a wild species and so when you have a tamed elephant it's an elephant that in some capacity has been corralled trained whatever by humans and of course there's a spectrum of some people can adopt a baby elephant that needs a home and maybe they can't get it back to their herd and you know let's say we did it right we gave it you know acres and acres to live on and we gave it food and we never hurt the animal fine but then there's beating an animal making it march in a procession, street, you know, like being on the street with horns and sirens and people and crowds and other elephants. And then that elephant has just lost its mind. That's just rage exploding out of an animal.

Starting point is 01:08:55 You see the people on its back are too scared to even jump off because if they jump off, they'll be killed. You know, everyone gets, not everyone, but a lot of people think about the things that aren't on this earth and you get stressed about it you think about what happens after death you think about why everything's here people think about aliens all this stuff and it's wildly interesting i do too but sometimes i wonder if our relationship with nature as a whole there's some biblical reckonings that happen there you know because like this planet it's been around a long time and there's creatures that have died out naturally and then there's creatures that maybe humans have caused to die out and then there's creatures that should be

Starting point is 01:09:36 incredible because of their intellectual abilities and and how they look too like an elephant and yet somehow the top of the food chain man does things to these creatures that karmically sometimes i wonder about that coming back around i mean nature is a brutal place but i think we like we as the sentient beings as the most intelligent animal on this planet have a responsibility and i agree with you where sometimes you can almost get very biblical with it where is it you know are we on this rock to reconcile the differences between species and the intelligences and i mean we have struggled with it enough within our own species um and then recognizing you know sort of expanding the compassion to realize that life is so rare. You know, for all the talk of UFOs

Starting point is 01:10:32 and for all the fun that we have with it and, you know, those hearings recently where some guy said that he spoke to some guy about some, we have no evidence. Show me one person right now. Show me. Just like medicines in the Amazon. Prove it right now.

Starting point is 01:10:49 Yes or no? No. The physical evidence. Physical evidence in my hand. If it exists in the government. I'm from Brooklyn. Put it in my hand. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:58 Then no. That's what Michio Kaku says. He's like, for God's sake, steal a pen. Steal something. If you see a UFO crash. Yeah. He's right. We don't have, as we know right now yeah i'm very open-minded to it but i'm very open-minded we don't have hard evidence you're telling me that no one in siberia found you know a piece of busted wing or a dropped pen the egyptians don't have that what do you mean if they could

Starting point is 01:11:22 simulate what if what if what if what if you had higher beings from somewhere far away who are so advanced they could simulate something disappearing upon sure being seen you know i mean that's fine but then then that that almost gets but look at what we're talking about we just got to beings that we can't see with dematerializing objects i'm very much like look we have elephants that need our help we have children that are hungry i'm like i want to work with the things i can see hear touch and fix that are happening now and so i want i'm not i want to go back to that story though the elephant so now that we saw the rage of that elephant the wild elephants from the time their calves they've had fire thrown at them they've had parents electrocuted they've had tragedy in their lives and then elephants feel

Starting point is 01:12:11 trauma they hold on to it and they and they and they they have that emotional rage the way we do they have vengeance and so uh i was in a part of the forest where not that long ago there was a car driving with park guards and the park guards were coming down the road and this mother elephant came out onto the road got scared for her calf came up to the the car they didn't respond correctly she knocked the car over and started just smashing it with her feet the car is upside down and so these guys it was like jurassic park flipped the car over and started smashing on the bottom of it. And the only thing that saved him was when they hit the horn, she got scared by the sound and retreated. But she was

Starting point is 01:12:49 just on a, this car threatened my baby. I'm going to kill this car. So she just flipped it. You know, it was like a little like I-10 or something. It was nothing. Yeah. There's a video. I was just having Chris pull it up. There should be a newer one, Chris. It's like elephants having a funeral or something like that. But this gets me every time when I see this because it's exactly what you were just saying. They can feel things. There's a couple videos like this. There's the one where they're having the funeral.

Starting point is 01:13:20 Yes, that's it right there. I want that one. Now go cut like a minute in cut farther farther farther farther right here yep yep 160 play that yeah this is this this is nuts just play the volume's good but they all like take and this isn't even the one i was i was thinking of but they all like take a minute over the corpse and like you can see their expression change yeah yeah look at them with the trunk up so and it's so you know nature takes it away in an instant because everything eats it obviously but you can just see that you can see their their ability to feel to feel real pain i mean look at

Starting point is 01:14:12 even how they're holding the leg delicately over it you know caressing it yes it's amazing and then there's another one chris if we can pull it up of mother elephant baby dies oh this is so sad but you see that you can see like the tears yeah the top one right there basically this in africa this this baby is is not going to make it she's she's tired and and isn't taking down food you gotta play it and the mother is there making the decision of you know survival like i i gotta leave her behind and it's it's just brutal to watch cut ahead to like three minutes is that is that a real shot yes this is a real shit i'm gonna give you the i'm sorry chris i took this away at the beginning this is gonna make your life way easier that fucking thing sucks see that it's like now it's yeah i see i don't want to see it but i'm saying it's on the ground seeing it because you're showing and the mother's just like trying to comfort it

Starting point is 01:15:16 and then cut like 30 seconds ahead chris right there yep and now it's coming to the realization that she's going oh my god every time like as a human being you watch this and i feel the same way i do about human beings you watch this poor little elephant taking its last breaths and the mother's there to witness it i wonder what it's dying of it was dying of like starvation see and that's why i'm not a wildlife filmmaker look at that shot man oh and like i know some people they'll get on i'm like how could you just sit there and capture this and not go help look it's nature you can't go in you you capture this so people can see what it's like out there yeah you capture this to tell the story and show what these animals are made of and you see this this mother basically like holding a mourning ceremony as as her baby takes its last breath it is fucking heartbreaking man look at the tears yeah i mean if that's not i don't know how you

Starting point is 01:16:17 look in the eye of a creature like that and kill it i don't care who you are no i just it's unfathomable to me again the term non-human beings they are they are as complex as us they're they're incredible that's a horrendous video um i would have the minute i saw that thing struggling i would have been like i'm no longer a wildlife filmmaker i take care of this elephant now i just that's like my person that's actually my achilles heel is that i wouldn't be able to make it through that i would just like put my camera down hand my hat and be like guys i live here now taking care of this baby elephant see i'm i'm with you i think it's important that we do have people who are able to stomach it though so so you can see it i agree we need both

Starting point is 01:16:58 we definitely need both but um for me i yeah if i saw that no no, no, no, no, no. Crazy. That's terrible. The other one that gets me is whales. They're so fascinating to me. I've never seen a whale. I've never been out there. It's definitely something I want to do. But learning through Dax, who we had in here, your buddy, who's awesome, he obviously has done a lot of work with Sea shepherd and paul watson who's now separate

Starting point is 01:17:26 from them and you know it's pretty crazy paul basically really yeah paul basically saved some of the whale species i remember last podcast i had you on you talked about that i never put two and two together back then but it was basically like him who did it through some of these whale war stuff are you sure about that he's separate from cc shepherd now now he is really yes there was like a i don't know what happened there dax is still friends with both of them but i didn't ask because i i mean i don't i don't know those those guys that much uh the sea shepherd people but i know that i thought i'm pretty sure he was one of the founding members of greenpeace yes right that's right now i know he got kicked out of there and then i know is i

Starting point is 01:18:10 think he was the founder of the sea shepherd i don't really know what i'm talking about here but then i think you're right again kicked out of there too they they had some sort of there was some sort of disagreement on where i think where some money was going and i think but i didn't really ask that for details yeah i wouldn't even want to know those details that's like and that's like uh that's like that episode of succession where the kids try to take out the father it's like no you don't you don't you don't do that hey guys real quick if you're not subscribed to our other youtube channels we have three total channels besides this one, Julian Dory clips, best of JDP and Julian Dory daily.

Starting point is 01:18:50 They all have different content on it from the podcast. So the links are in the description below. I'd really appreciate it if you gave them a subscribe as well. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, that guy has been at it forever, man. We have a video up here, Chris. I was just telling them to get it up.

Starting point is 01:19:05 But this is for people who don't know. Press play right there. It's perfect. This is like the kinds of things they would do, get in the middle of these boats that are trying to go whaling and kill these whales, which is really brutal. But you see these boats. It's fucking awesome. These boats are like trying to attack them with water. I mean, to actually do that though to take your vessel and to smash into another vessel on the ocean with the ocean moving dude it's insane i mean you watch it in a video and it just never

Starting point is 01:19:37 like if you were on there you'd be shitting your pants oh my god look at that look at how much it's moving but this is what they did. They were incredible. And they still do it to stop these people. That's the Bob Barker. From killing these. Do we have a video of the eye of the whale, Chris? I don't know if we have that. But look what it takes.

Starting point is 01:19:56 Look what it takes. You can write letters. You can petition. You can beg. You can plead. But look what it takes. Yeah. To stop them from murdering wildlife

Starting point is 01:20:07 murdering this right here press play they're gonna shoot a harpoon into that look at this thing like that's it's the same feeling with an elephant how do you look at that in the eye yeah and kill it it could swallow you in one gulp and you're just going to be like yeah i'll extinguish you from this earth for your blubber you know look at that lower jaw with all those folds that it can expand when they just take in that mouthful of fish have you done any underwater work at all i have not done it i've been honestly i've been so in the jungle that i haven't traveled anywhere for leisure and i haven't done any underwater work. I would love to surf.

Starting point is 01:20:46 Yeah. Even before that. I have so many friends that have gotten really good at surfing and I'm just not there yet. I'm always on the ground. I'm always – Got to go hang with Danny Jones. He'll teach you. Yeah, man.

Starting point is 01:20:56 He's good at it. I would love to see you do that though. I think you'd – I mean I want to go swimming at some point with some of these animals just to observe it. So I have a friend who takes people free diving with whales. So you're with a snorkel and you're swimming. This is like out in Fiji. And you're in the water with the whales and you're not – you're just on the surface of the water with your snorkel looking down. And the whales choose whether or not they want to come up to you.

Starting point is 01:21:23 Like sperm whales or – No, humpbacks,backs which usually more friendly and so but she said these whales come up to the people and here's the thing if the whale starts talking to another whale when they sing the volume and the all of the water is vibrating with the whale song and she said that it vibrates every molecule in your body and she said people a lot of times have to stop what they're doing and come up for air because they instantly start crying because the vibration moves through them and it's so overwhelming and it's so beautiful that they can't handle it it just immediately emotionally breaks you feeling the whale song

Starting point is 01:22:01 go through your body wow i was like that's that's almost extraterrestrial i was like i want that yeah i want to go do that i want to yeah sometimes late at night six feet from a humpback whale late at night if i'm like really baked i'll just watch orca videos it's like an obsession of mine i'll just watch these fucking things and orc is obviously the killer whale like these are some they know how to get some lunch and dinner right dude when they go still go under the oh yeah yeah it's fucking like and they're so smart yeah and they're so like when when you get and you can't experience it through a goddamn tv anything like when it's there but it's even amazing through the tv when they get the underwater footage of them talking from like,

Starting point is 01:22:46 I'll forget some of the distances, but sometimes like a mile or two away. Yeah, yeah. And they can completely have this conversation with each other to find each other. There was some reporter, it's all getting mixed up now, who like embedded himself with the orcas on one of the, what's the island between africa and antarctica down it's like halfway i forget the name of it maybe we can look it up chris but he like embedded himself with this orca community and they and they filmed i think it was scientists yeah through him

Starting point is 01:23:20 were filming and following this family for years and years and years and the things like they watched this this family of orcas grow up and everything and and obviously that that taught us a lot about what their abilities are but i still feel like we haven't even scratched the surface no of what they can do no and the thing that freaks me out the most recent thing that i saw that was very confusing to me was that there was one thing where an orca comes and asks people for help. I forget how it went. This orca came and was like swimming around this boat and they just got the message somehow. They're just like, you know, they're like, okay, yeah, let's go. And this orca was like, come on, let's go. Brought them and the mother orca had her tail caught in a fishing in a fishing net and then they called in the coast guard they called in experts they went in they cut her off but this younger orca knew that the humans could fix this human problem and went to somewhere

Starting point is 01:24:17 completely out of sight to go ask the humans for help think of the implications of that they know that they're walking around with that knowledge swimming around with that knowledge that's that's that's scary if they know that much think about that like oh and then if it turns on us because of what we do to some of them well now they're fucking with the boats yes now they're eating they're literally eating through the goddamn motors do we have a video of this orcas eating through motors of boats i'm not i don't know a lot about this so maybe i shouldn't be there no is it funny or they like merkin people too or they're just kind of messing up property are they like vandal vandal look vandal orcas this this one

Starting point is 01:24:56 go right there right there right there see they start like coming up and they've learned how to eat through to where – I'm going to get my terminology wrong for all my boating people out there. I'm sorry. But they learn how to eat through like where the rudder meets the engine or something. Or are they just biting off the rudder? Well, the scientific implications – it's all happening by the Strait of Gibraltar. That's where this has happened a bunch but the scientific implications are that they're wondering if orcas are teaching other orcas pods around the world yeah how to do this almost like sharks what are they what are they getting from it though i don't they're not getting

Starting point is 01:25:37 fish off these people well i think it's the the implication is that perhaps they're pissed at humanity. Still too early to tell, to be clear. I would buy that they're mugging us. You know, like elephants. Elephants will mug the banana guy in India 100%. They'll stop him on the road, push his truck over, take all of his bananas. What can he do? They do that all the time. They do it in Thailand too.

Starting point is 01:26:02 That's awesome. And then I've spoken to fishermen who like, you know, they put those long lines down and they have like you know fish on on they have like like lines of hooks and i know the orcas come and they raid those and they know exactly how to do it and they know how to do it without getting the hook in their mouth they'll like grab the fish and just twist it off and leave the head and like they're so smart so my question is why attack a boat why risk injury why pursue i mean i know that they have fun but what at the end of the day if there's not fish on the boats you think it's just a generalized revenge for i mean it's scientifically way too early to say i just wonder speculatively if that is a possibility

Starting point is 01:26:43 like that elephant they're just like you know what fuck you yeah i wonder about that because we know how intelligent they really are i mean they certainly are teaching i mean that's the other thing that people don't realize that animals have culture like one of the most classic examples the first one the first time i ever actually heard of it was that the there's certain dolphins that'll chase the fish up onto the beach and then the the dolphins will come up and hydroplane onto the sand and catch the fish and if they don't teach that method to other dolphins then other dolphins don't do it and so by definition it's culture it's it's a it's a it's a way of doing something it's a it's a habit

Starting point is 01:27:21 that you teach others and then they keep doing it. It's something you pass on. And it's not something that's just a naturally occurring, encoded, instinctual thing that just all dolphins do. It's something a few dolphins learned how to do and now they're telling all the other dolphins. It's crazy. It's crazy how fast some of that can happen too. What's the smartest animal you've encountered in the Amazon? Smartest animal in the amazon the thing is in the jungle you don't get the type of interaction that you have with animals is very very brief so um not that long ago

Starting point is 01:27:59 we were watching an anaconda that had just swallowed something and it was in a stream and we're filming this anaconda and we're like i bet he ate you know like maybe it was a young capybara maybe it was a paca where it's trying to feel like gauge the size of this lump and we're trying to see how big the anaconda is and we're trying to keep our distance not to scare it and then we hear this like big rush of air onto a branch look up there's a juvenile harpy eagle this big sits on the branch pure white looks right at us looks at us looks at the snake looks at us look at the snake and i was like holy shit you know just like take a picture you're like this is never gonna happen again and then

Starting point is 01:28:38 i took out my phone and because i'm so sick of people being like that never happened picture didn't happen so i took out my phone oh fuck those no no no because you know what it's everybody after i did all the podcasts i'll take 400 i'll take that never happened for 400 alex that and uh no i literally i went to a family barbecue this year and one of my uncles my godfather first thing he goes he goes but does any of this shit actually happen to you he goes any of this shit true godfather's a youtube commenter um so i i took my phone and i went anaconda harpy eagle anaconda harpy eagle i was like same video because no one's gonna believe it no one's gonna believe did you post that one i i posted on your subscribe channel right i did i think i i i saw that one i don't know if i have that actually no i just put i just put some harpy

Starting point is 01:29:23 eagle up on the main feed. That's what it was. Yeah. If we – well, if you can – you're not going to find that video, Chris, because that's on like a private page. But if we could just pull up Harpy Eagle, can people see what that is? They're huge. They're absolutely huge. How big do they get?

Starting point is 01:29:39 They get huge. So their wingspan, six and a half feet, two meters. And what do they feed on? They can lift howler monkeys out of the trees. They can lift sloths out of the trees. And sloths are bigger than you probably think. And so these animals are lifting and tying. Look at the talons.

Starting point is 01:29:58 Whoa. Like, look at that guy's fist. Chris, do you see the one with the guy's fist down almost like lower center? There's a man's fist. Oh, yeah, yeah, one with the guy's fist down almost like lower center? There's a man's fist. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. That's what people don't realize about a harpy eagle.

Starting point is 01:30:10 Whoa. Do we have a video of a harpy eagle hunting? Snatching. Harpy eagle snatches sloth. How big does sloths get again? Sloths get big. I was going to say,

Starting point is 01:30:18 they're not small. No, it's not like a cat. It's like, it's big. Harpy eagle kills sloths. It's like a small kid. It's like a three-year-old. Perfect, yeah. Click that one.

Starting point is 01:30:27 When was this filmed? Oh, it's coming through. Oh, I love sloths. This is so hard to watch. Oh, yeah. Nature is mean. Boom. Boom.

Starting point is 01:30:38 Yo. Is it dead on shot? Like, does it kill it with its claw, or is it still alive? I hope so. I mean, you saw the size of those claws. Imagine just... So that's like straight in. Imagine you're a sloth.

Starting point is 01:30:50 You get just scooped. You're still alive and now you're being dragged 200 feet in the air. Yeah. Clawed to this eagle that's going to go... I would very much want to be dead by the time I got to the nest, though. Oh. Because then they're going to take that razor blade and they're just going to start doing surgery on you and pulling things out of you no they're savage so they eat monkeys too they monkeys they sloths they'll take whatever um

Starting point is 01:31:14 i actually know someone a local who he was rehabilitating uh he adopted this baby howler monkey and this howler monkey was with them and you know they're very affectionate when you take in a howler monkey they they cling to their mothers and they they wrap their tail around your neck and they want to stay warm and you adopted one too i've done that yeah yeah and so this guy was was working with this howler monkey and came to love it and as the howler monkey started because you know when they first leave their mothers they get malnourished they get emotionally distressed and so it wasn't doing well and so he put a ton of work into constantly being with this howler monkey and feeding this howler monkey sleeping with this howler monkey getting it back to good health and so one day he took it on a walk and they were

Starting point is 01:31:53 out in sort of a clearing and he let the howler monkey walk up this tiny tree it was just a sapling so he knew it would be safe because it was just a sapling it was right there and this harpy eagle murked the monkey and flew away with it that's the jungle oh it's so difficult man it's uh that's that is so neat because they're like little humans oh yeah they're so adorable they're like little humans yeah i just sent that picture over to chris there's you with the howler there was a video that's a spider monkey that was a little spider chris i'm using your computer over here today because we had to hook mine over there but yours like is stuck to the left so i can't pull up videos but if if you can use mine and go to paul's page and go under the subscriber tab

Starting point is 01:32:34 there's a ton of videos in there there's one of you yeah under reels i guess it doesn't let you do subscriber on on the computer on the computer that sucks but there's one with you walking with the howler yeah that was i think on the subscriber list yeah that sucks because you know what happens if you if you touch an animal someone complains about it so it's like i've gotten to the point now it does no no you know what though you know what though because then what happens is one of those people works on the board of whatever, whatever organization. And then they actually find a way. I'm just saying when it comes to holding animals have actually been, because then also people misunderstand it.

Starting point is 01:33:18 Some people go on vacation then. And then there's a guy with a monkey on a leash. And people can't see the difference between this person adopted this animal lives in the jungle with it and is trying to rehabilitate it just long enough that it can get back onto a tree that's story a they can't differentiate that or being at a resort and there's a guy on the beach that has some captive abused monkey on a leash i'm going to take a picture with it so i can get a picture with a monkey and so that people have a really hard time differentiating this is professional wildlife conservation work and i just want a picture with a monkey it's it gets so i under i understand that

Starting point is 01:33:54 but when you have a red when you're someone like you and you have the resume you do you've lived in the amazon since you were fucking 18 years old there has to be a line somewhere and the fact it does bother me that you have to get bothered by some of it because we talk about this offline too like you're constantly like wow i gotta be careful how that looks and you shouldn't have to say that at all you know you're i know your intentions anyone who listens to you and knows any of your story knows your intentions. And if someone doesn't, how do we solve that? Like how do we change that culture? We just got to all start doing whatever.

Starting point is 01:34:29 I mean, you know, if you're doing good work, the last thing you should have to do is answer to people complaining from their mom's basement about the work that you're doing. Agreed. And that – you get tons of that. You get absolute tons of that. I think Bill Maher just did a piece on Mr. Beast, people criticizing mr beast because he's building wells in africa and like people being like how could you go in there and just try to fix everything he's like well i'm doing what i can i'm doing what i can do to help yeah yeah um so yeah but no that's we don't worry about it too much it's just with social media it's just and that's And that's why it's so much fun having the subscriber thing

Starting point is 01:35:07 because it's a little bit more like I feel like the people that are there are people that want to be there. Of course. You don't get the Karens. Nobody there is ever like complaining at me about where the main feed now, I don't know how you deal with the numbers that you deal with, like the amount that your channel has grown. Do you ever get sucked into you ever do you ever get

Starting point is 01:35:25 sucked into it do you ever get sucked into like a comment section on youtube i answer all my comments do you really they're all useful yeah 80 of them are negative but i get the engagement so i respond back and then they give me another comment it's great oh so you're harvesting something off of them very much yeah okay i might as well use them how was our last one we got we must have gotten a lot of comments yours was actually i think we got very very positive right and then the ones that weren't good were funny they'd be like i'll take 400 for that shit never happened alex stuff like that but nah yours were yours were pretty positive some of them get you know every viral video i've ever done yeah the comments are 90 negative it's kind of funny yeah it's there's different ways you can

Starting point is 01:36:05 respond to it as long as you get something off of them but it's also easier for me though too because i'm literally just a content creator i do a podcast it's not that serious you have an organization you have a mission you have a 501c3 essentially right you need people to not only recognize the importance of your mission also have complete awareness about as much as you can so that you get more of the of the former right there and also your reputation within the community unfortunately is very important so p and i say unfortunately because people can decide to run with a narrative about you as they did in 2014 with eaten alive and then it costs your it costs

Starting point is 01:36:45 your bottom line and it costs you to be able to do what you righteously want to do yeah pisses me off um no and conservation is savage i mean if that's true that paul watson is not with the sea shepherd anymore that's that is crazy yeah that's crazy um and so yeah you do constantly with in in this world you constantly have to there's a lot of of – you would think that everyone that's trying to protect the earth would be like, shit, man, we're up against like a global systemic problem. We got to just join together. And it's the opposite of that. It's game of jungles. It's all the different conservation organizations are trying to jockey against, which is why conservation is so unsuccessful in a lot of places because it's individual organizations and

Starting point is 01:37:25 so you know julian's conservation organization doesn't make friends with paul's conservation organization and so that's why what dax is doing is so cool because he's somebody with the resources he's somebody with the vast networks and everyone's always going oh how come the billionaires don't do something it's like well here's one that is yeah he knows exactly what's wrong with the planet and here's what he does he listens he goes in says, okay, you've been protecting whales for 50 years. What's the most important thing we have to do next? What are you working on next? What's the most crucial thing that'll save the most amount of cetaceans?

Starting point is 01:37:54 They tell him, he does it. He goes with them. He goes on the ground. He goes out onto the ocean. He came with us to the jungle. He figures it out. And that's what's so important. That's where I think he's really groundbreaking because I haven't seen that type of support before. I've seen people writing grants to organizations and they spend years and thousands of hours putting together

Starting point is 01:38:17 these huge grant proposals. Whereas Dax has the ability, Professor X style, to just come in and pick out the best, to go up to someone like Jane Goodall and go, okay, look, you know, how can I help? Or to come down to the Amazon and go, okay, how do we protect this river? And to that type of- It's good leadership. It's incredibly leadership. I guess he brought that over from, I mean, he already, with what he did with Lightspeed, I guess you sort of have to learn that type of leadership to create like sometimes the scale of what he did doesn't occur to me until like and i go back and i go like you know you really look at what he did and what he built to get to the position that he got to and now he's actually

Starting point is 01:39:00 using that he's putting all his resources into what he cares about it's yeah and and i wish we saw that all the time with people it's like with great power comes great responsibility and you know he seems to be all over the board across conservation like it's not any one type he's doing everything from you to sea shepherd to i'm not gonna there's another one he's looking at right now with a friend of mine i'm not gonna say what that is but totally different right yeah and i i think that that's important but what's also important is that that type of example builds that culture because you're kind of in a lose-lose right you either try to get attention on things and have everyone scream well that's the only reason you're doing it to get attention on this oh look at me with an animal or you don't get attention on things because you're afraid that that's what's going to happen,

Starting point is 01:39:48 and no one fucking knows about it, and no one cares, and you don't get any money in funding. Yep. That, you know, it bothers me. I can imagine how much that's got to bother you. Yeah, but in the last year, just coming, I mean, after I did your podcast and then everything that happened as a result of that, we've seen such an inspiring, massive result of people going,

Starting point is 01:40:14 this is how we can help, then let's do it. Nobody wants polar bears to go extinct. Nobody wants the Amazon to disappear. Everybody theoretically wants to help these things, but doesn't know how to do it. And so connecting people to these problems, giving them a way to help. And that's what we've been doing with Jungle Keepers. Our monthly subscribers have gone up by so much. And there's people all over the world now that are literally directly allowing us to protect forest. I was down there

Starting point is 01:40:39 two weeks ago and we literally went to, we found, we were up going up river and we found this horrendous spot where they had hauled like i want to say like 30 ironwood trees out of the jungle they'd they'd cut everything to the ground they had a logging mill going heavy machinery and uh his instagram chris keep going and uh yeah first video that heavy machinery that stuff has never been there before like this one like this this that that people don't realize that's that's that's a new road look at it it's barely even like flat yeah the trees were cut the land was burned and now they're smashing it out with that thing and then people are going to come in with chainsaws and they're going to do worse and so we went up there and again for people that are listening for the first time jungle keepers we work with peruvian indigenous conservationists it's totally peruvian

Starting point is 01:41:30 led and peru has some of the most important part of the western amazon and so we go out there and we talk to these guys and we actually said so what are you doing why you know can we is there any way that you will stop murdering as far as they actually said you know what they said timber prices have been dropping we cut all these trees and we really don't want to do this and they were totally open to the idea of stopping and actually jungle keepers is taking over the operation we just added 2 000 new acres to the reserve like this is the thing instead of treating these people like enemies instead of looking at loggers and being like they are evil we go have a beer with them yeah and then we make friends with them hearts

Starting point is 01:42:10 and minds yep and then we find out that they're not making that much money and that it's really dangerous logging and that we could pay them more to be a ranger and so we build a ranger program and then we tell people all over the world i come on podcasts people find out about jungle keepers and we're protecting 50 000 acres of the rainforest and we need to be protecting 300 thousand that's what i'm saying we need to add another zero to that yeah because the rainforest is like roughly 27 out of 31 times the size of america something like that it's like it's damn near the size of the u.s continent it's mostly the size of the continent right so we're how many square miles is it i forget off the top of my head chris how many square miles is that i know this amazon

Starting point is 01:42:50 rainforest the estimate is 400 billion trees i know that 400 billion all right yeah 2 million point seven two point seven million square miles so you want to protect at least 500 000. that's a nice chunk i want to protect 300 000 acres which is, which is actually a teardrop in the ocean. But still, that's one-ninth. That's one-ninth of the – or wait, no, no. You said 300,000 acres. 300,000 acres. I was thinking miles.

Starting point is 01:43:17 Sorry. Much smaller. Much smaller. It's one river. We're trying to – I'm a big believer in pick one problem solve it yes then move on to the next problem and so my entire career from age 17 until 36 has been protect this river that's it and so the last year the madrid videos the las piedras river that runs through the madrid videos yeah and so this last year we've made a lot of progress forward a lot of right it's been our

Starting point is 01:43:44 biggest year what does that look like when you a lot of progress forward, a lot of, it's been our biggest year. What does that look like when you say we made progress forward? It means hiring rangers. It means working with loggers to stop logging operations. It means jumping in and talking to some indigenous landowners that are trying to protect their forest. You have indigenous people. One guy was protecting this area, 22,000 acres, and he'd been protecting it for 30 years and a bunch of people came and we didn't know why they came they started cutting forest they cut maybe six or seven football fields of forest and so we went you know i go with jj and we get we get there and these

Starting point is 01:44:18 people are there and and you can see them scurrying as as we're walking up they're hiding the chainsaws and they're doing all this stuff and they throwing on some you know native looking stuff and they take out their bows and arrows but still we're like are we about to get shot at with bows and arrows and so i i put the drone up and i wanted to see what we were dealing with and so we go over them to see how big it is see if they have weapons whatever else and they start firing bows and arrows at the drone okay okay so that's what we're dealing with and then we fly the drone up and we see that not just we thought it had been you know maybe like you know several acres that they deforested and then behind there are just all these patches that

Starting point is 01:44:58 have been ripped out of the jungle just boom boom boom so we finally we go up to them and only because you know we have an indigenous team leading in the front we go up to them and only because you know we have an indigenous team leading in the front we walk up to them and they they got their bows out and they go welcome to our village welcome to your village thanks and we have the landowner with us he's got the deed to the land welcome to your fellow okay where are you guys from from a thousand miles away okay what are you doing here and they said no this is this is our village. Where are you guys from? They're from a thousand miles away. Okay. What are you doing here? And they said, no, this is our village now.

Starting point is 01:45:29 What are you doing here? Okay. So we had to come in and support that local landowner. And what happens is that it's the narco traffickers. The narco traffickers realize that if they take poor people, because when we said we, the math didn't add up. It's kind of like the tight. Wait, are you talking not Mexican narco-traffickers? No, no, the Peruvian ones.

Starting point is 01:45:51 Okay. We were right on the Peruvian, Bolivian, and Brazilian border. So we're right, we're on three frontiers. And what wasn't adding up was why are these people coming out into the jungle and cutting down forests now think about it hold on so let's just say it takes seven hundred dollars worth of gasoline to get from town that deep out into the jungle and then it takes fifteen hundred dollars to buy a chainsaw and it takes all of a sudden you're up at thousands and thousands of dollars and you're looking at these people and they're living in a grass hut and you're like why how why are they

Starting point is 01:46:22 the narco traffickers realize that if they have outposts deep in the jungle with people that support them it's much easier to move contraband and find safe houses so what they do is they start establishing these networks and then it's double it's double secured under oh well they're just they're just loggers there's lots of illegal loggers why are you gonna go after them and it's like ah and so we realized what this was we spoke to the peruvian police and they were able to help the situation but you literally have indigenous people fighting to protect their land and no one's out there to help them because you're past the point of law enforcement you're so far out in the jungle that it's just whatever happens it's just no

Starting point is 01:47:01 country for old men whatever happens next happens next there's no help coming like how far into the jungle for example is your research station it used to take us you would leave from town and go by boat and you'd have to travel you'd have to leave at five in the morning and then around six o'clock at night you'd have to stop all day on the boat sleep on a beach on the side of the river in the jungle. And then go, same thing the next day. Two whole days by boat. Going upriver just to reach this research station. That's how deep in the jungle it was. Then they cut the Trans-Amazon Highway and a logging road over it.

Starting point is 01:47:36 And now we can reach it in like five hours. Roads change everything. Roads are kryptonite. But that's also the problem because they're... Oh, no. I hate that road. That road is the worst problem because they're oh no we i hate that road that road is the worst because they're cutting everything down what when they so what's the name of that road again uh the trans amazon highway okay so the trans amazon highway how

Starting point is 01:47:56 long is it right now approximately goes across the whole continent the whole continent yeah i mean you could literally drive from lima to sao paulo you can it crosses south america this is the first time in history that there's a land trade route from the heart of the amazon to asia yeah it's been called the single most detrimental human project that has ever happened this is it right there it's got like bridges and shit i think that's probably closer to some city i don't know that's probably on the brazilian side i've never seen that when i see it it's just like a it's just a road how wide is it like a regular road here it's a two-lane road it's a two-lane road that goes for

Starting point is 01:48:36 thousands of miles but that's thousands of miles of trees they're cutting down trees they're cutting down and then to make the road they had to bulldoze into the virgin amazon rainforest and so as they're it's a virgin amazon i'm saying think about this 30 years ago when the world bank and brazil and china got together in the imf and they all decided let's just have like a global planet eater summit and they forged out into the amazon they were going into places that no one had been before and so as they're bulldozing their way through it it's basically it's the movie avatar there would there would be indigenous groups and they would just you know shoot them or they'd shoot them yeah or they'd bulldoze past them and then the indigenous

Starting point is 01:49:12 people would throw rocks at the bulldozer and then they'd shoot them are these uncontacted tribes you're referring to or some of them were just just native indians and they just shoot them yeah but the violent i mean there's definitely examples where loggers on our river are shooting at the uncontacted. I know that what I read about the creation of the Trans-Amazon Highway was that as they made this highway, that people then were flooding in behind the heavy machinery and those people wanted to get land. And so again, it turned into like sort of this manifest destiny thing where it was like, we're going to come out here and we're going to occupy this land. And so the as as as the story always goes there'd be indigenous people out in the jungle and all of a sudden this heavy machinery would show up in a bunch

Starting point is 01:49:52 of guys with guns and they'd be like this is our land and they'd be no it's not and then a lot of these cultures would be so sensitive they would have such um they would have lived in such isolation that they would have immune systems that had no defense against what we have living in the western world connected to the modern economy we've been in new york city subways we have an immune system that people living on a remote island aren't going to have so they have not built up that immunity and so what happened was which actually goes right back to graham hancock um entire tribes were wiped out from like during the building during the yeah during the building of the trans amazon highway yes and that's why they've many people have called it the single worst human project on nature that's ever happened the amount of trees wild heartbeats

Starting point is 01:50:40 indigenous cultures actual human lives absolutely horrend it's in the middle look at that picture of all the logs i actually want you to save that picture for me uh down to the left a little bit left yep right there what is that that's what we see that's what i see oh yeah yeah i've seen you take videos of this yeah because because then off of the main road they call it the fishbone effect you have these little dirt roads that come off. And once you build a road. Like estuaries, yeah. Yep.

Starting point is 01:51:07 And once you build a road, then everybody can get in. And once they can get in, because if you take a person and try to have them go through a jungle, it's impossible. Yeah. That's actually something I wanted to ask you about. And you describe it in your book. Sometimes there's like trails, right, that you're in. But then other times you know you read about percy fawson and stuff it's just a grown jungle into it into itself so you got a machete

Starting point is 01:51:30 your way through that shit right yeah i i was out with uh i had brought some people to the jungle um you know me and jj we have tam and do expeditions we we bring people to the jungle and we do everything from you know we have the world's tallest luxury tree house to some people are like literally they sign up for like paul where they're like, we want to go do what you do. So I've just been like, yeah, come with me. And so we were out on the, out at night with these people and we're out on this trail. And one of the guys was like, yeah, you know, the jungle isn't that bad. He was like, I thought it was solely, he just started like, and I was like, okay.

Starting point is 01:51:59 I was like, cool guys, we're going to cut from this trail to that trail. I was like, so we're going to be off trail for a minute. And it was, you could just, I could just hear the people behind me in the dark. Because when I go, I'm not going to hack through the, I'm not going to, we're in the dark. It's, you have 150 feet of canopy above you and I'm walking through the jungle. You'll be a fucking jaguar right there. And I don't use a machete because we're, you know, we're in a conservancy. We're in an area where we're protecting the rainforest.

Starting point is 01:52:21 So I'm, on the trails, I use a machete to maintain the trails, but this is not trail i'm just doing this for fun so why am i going to go hacking so what are you using your teeth no you just walk through like an animal so when they went and so um i got a i got a tail of 10 people behind me like ducklings and so everyone's at night in the jungle and now all of a sudden there's vines on them there's caterpillars falling out of trees there's leafcutter ants there's bullet ants there's snakes and all of a sudden they're not on a trail anymore and the the tempo of the group like the happiness level of that group yeah balls oh yeah yeah then we made it out to the other group now this is the thing is now why did i enjoy that so much that's you you you love seeing people out of their element because they you know so much and you know all of us are sitting here pulling our asshole out to the sunlight at 5 a.m every morning you know and you're like come on bro

Starting point is 01:53:13 just get out in nature actually come see this shit you know i do think i do think though that one of i think i think that this is it i think that i spent so many days especially as a teenager where i would go out, and today made me think of it because of the way it's raining, but like, if I wasn't here right now, I would be,

Starting point is 01:53:32 it's like hurricane flooding all over like the tri-state area, right? I would be out in the woods. The mountains are just exploding, like the streams, I could literally see places where there was like cars parked because they wanted to see if the bridge was going to hold. Like the rivers like the streams i could literally see places where there was like cars

Starting point is 01:53:45 parked because they wanted to see if the bridge was going to hold like the the rivers and the streams are going crazy right now today's a perfect day get your backpack little backpack you get one sleeping bag you get one book of matches and you get a flashlight and a knife now go out into the woods and make it till tomorrow and try to make fire and it's such a good meditation it's such a good humbling experience because it doesn't matter who you are how good at surviving you are getting a fire started today very difficult finding shelter today very difficult on a day whenever the wind is blowing and the rain is falling and you're going to spend one horrible wet sleepless night on a rock somewhere and then it's going to teach you

Starting point is 01:54:26 and that's an important perspective to remember it makes you feel better about your life every day it makes you appreciate your couch a lot more yeah absolutely yeah so sometimes i give that to people in an environment like that though around here if you had to do that how would you spot a place to sleep well the cool thing here is that there's rocks and mountains you know i mean up in the catskills actually finding shelter you could you could you could fashion something with pine or find an outcropping of rock you could probably find a dry area i to me surviving in the you know know, Eastern North American forests, uh, would be even in the rain, even in December, I think I'd be quite happy with that. Easy. There's no, you're not going to sleep on a

Starting point is 01:55:10 bullet ant. I'm happy. In the Amazon though, it's a whole different matter because you have your, you pitch your hammock and stuff, but then you got to get a mosquito net. You're sleeping in the middle of fucking Jaguars and all these animals. How do you, is it possible to pick a spot where you're like, ah, this is safe? No i put you on the jungle if i do put you on the jungle right now and give you a machete which again i'm bringing i'm bringing a 45 sorry it's gonna help you what are you gonna do shoot a tree oh no i'm gonna shoot the fucking jaguar if it comes at me that's you're gonna you're gonna be shooting at ants because what's gonna happen is you're gonna get lost you're gonna get tired your flashlight's gonna run out of battery after

Starting point is 01:55:48 like four or five hours most flashlights start blinking i'll bring my charger bring your charger okay and then you're sitting underneath a tree now and you realize i can't sit still because the mosquitoes and then you're going to spend a few hours walking around in circles and you know maybe you make it to the next morning and you don't stop walking. But at some point, you got to sleep. And that's where the jungle starts to be the jungle because the first time I got lost out there, I fell asleep underneath a tree. And my flashlight was on its last legs and I cleared out underneath the tree and I slept there. And you're just covered in ants and termites and mosquitoes and flies.

Starting point is 01:56:25 And then, oh, and then you get bot flies. And they lay eggs on your skin that burrow into your skin. And then you have worms in your skin. And now you're just a host and the jungle's eating you. And you're just like. I like this podcast, dude. Yeah, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:56:37 I had six bot flies across my stomach for most of May and June. And. Just live in there. Oh, we couldn't get him out you just like wake up in the morning be like morning uh yeah they wake you up in the morning because they start eating so they start twitching it's awful what are they eating your skin they're eating your skin that's why they live in you it's warm in this food oh are you immune to a lot of this shit now like are you not necessarily that but like mosquitoes and shit do they still bother you when you're out there mosquitoes don't leave a mark anymore sandflies

Starting point is 01:57:09 don't leave a mark anymore i've like jj also like we've kind of evolved to the point that our skin has a doesn't doesn't get upset by the mosquito bites but the bot fly if you could pull up what a bot fly looks like coming out like close-up of a bot fly coming out of human skin it is awful and you wake up to that how big are these things uh anything from like uh like a raisin that middle one right there oh yeah that's it the the if you see the video of that oh it's in it it's in the skin no click on it because that's that's actually a video and this thing is pulsing out of this human skin. So the mosquito lands and it drops these. Is that it?

Starting point is 01:57:50 This is a bot fly? Hit that. All right. Cut ahead. Right there, right there. Right there, right there. So that's a bot fly. What we saw was that it was its head.

Starting point is 01:58:03 So this thing is going to catch a mosquito in midair deposit its eggs onto the mosquito and then let the mosquito go find a host whether that host is a bird or a human oh yeah yo you ever see the movie tremors no maybe that sounds familiar giant underground things in Kevin Bacon. See, look. This is what happens. Oh! And then they burrow into this.

Starting point is 01:58:35 Oh, my. Oh, no. So, look, look, look. Nope. This is how I would wake up every day for two months. Nope. Nope. I'm good. That is fucking disgusting. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. You can't do that. JJ, what about like a match?

Starting point is 01:58:47 Can you just like burn your skin? You can do that. You can spray Raid on your skin. That'll sometimes kill them. Yeah, that seems healthy. That's great, right? Yeah, it seems awesome for you. I've sprayed a lot of Raid before, never on my fucking self. It's awful.

Starting point is 01:59:01 I read about a bug. I think it was in David Grand's book. The Kissing Bug. Lost City of Z. Where there's – yeah, the Kissing Bug. Is that what they call it? Where it will literally fucking land on human lips, sting you, whatever it does. You're like, ah, and then you're good.

Starting point is 01:59:19 And then randomly 10, 15 years later, you're fucking dead. Yeah. Like this is what you're up against in there that's that that's terrifying how many of those things exist though how many of those things are fucked around on my lips while i'm while i'm asleep yeah you're gonna i'm just gonna fucking die right here is there like an antidote we can get for that or something or can you check if you've been kissed by the kissing bug i don't remember if you i don't know if you could like take a take a test and be like okay i'm gonna drop dead in about six minutes like i think that was the implication you

Starting point is 01:59:48 can't check it no i believe that you cannot check it how many how many insects do we not even know about in the amazon millions millions millions that high okay so at some point we had to talk about it the the treehouse so everything you're about, and I'm going to plug this thing because it's so damn cool. Everything that you're saying about the Amazon and how do we survive there, there's, so you have this, on the one hand, you have beautiful wildlife. And then you have the extreme conditions. And so we were saying, how can we find a way for people to be able to see the beautiful wildlife without experiencing the extreme conditions? And either you turn it into Epcot, which sucks sucks and there's plenty of places like that where you can go and go to a big lodge where you don't get to really experience the jungle or like what you

Starting point is 02:00:33 just clicked on we made the world's tallest luxury tree house which is amazing up above the canopy 110 feet looking out over the jungle keepers reserve you have air conditioning running water toilet everything you need how often even hot water oh me and my girlfriend spent like a week 10 feet looking out over the jungle keepers reserve. You have air conditioning, running water, toilet, everything you need. How often? Even hot water. Oh, me and my girlfriend spent like a week up there.

Starting point is 02:00:50 Oh, that sounds. Oh yeah. Like we're like, we just, we didn't even sleep inside the structure. We just never left. We never.

Starting point is 02:00:56 Yeah. In the daytime, you, in the daytime, you want to go down. Oh, and it even has a mosquito thing around it. Yes.

Starting point is 02:01:02 You're in an air conditioned room with the mosquito net. So you're like triple safe. So you're fucking without the mosquitoes that's good you're not you don't have mosquitoes there but we were not in the room now i put it oh you went i want to see this i want to see the stars man i want to see the stars this is fucking amazing how long did it take to build? About three months. That's it? To build that thing all the way up there? But we have a team right now that's insane. Who's your team?

Starting point is 02:01:33 Spider-Man? JJ, Mohsen, Stefan, my friend Lee. We all just brought in this team of guys that builds tree houses all over the world. We got Pico, Victor. They built the staircase, went up in a spiral the first half of the cost of building this thing was the it was like it was like building the pyramids we had to bring it from the river up to the thing and then it this spiral staircase started going up towards the canopy did the wood weigh fucking 12 tons uh i did try carrying one of the beams that they used to make the staircase and it was a 15 foot i want to say six by six of tropical hardwood

Starting point is 02:02:12 15 feet is like this room there yeah but this this wood right here is very similar but six by six this is a two by six right so you're talking about like a pillar right that thing weighs like some noah's ark 300 pounds and these guys were putting it on their back single at a time and carrying it up up the spiral staircase no no not the spiral staircase but up from the river up because it's like a promontory above the river what uh this is a place where the terra firma forest ends and then the land drops down into the river basin. Okay, in English. The reason this tree looks out across the rest of the jungle is because it's at the edge of a cliff.

Starting point is 02:02:51 So it's not that high up. It is. It's a very high tree. It's high up, but it's not high up off the ground below it. It's double. So here, look at this. Here's the jungle. Here's the tree. But then the jungle does this. We just chose a big tree that was 140 feet tall.

Starting point is 02:03:06 So, yeah. It's a huge tree, but it's at a spot where the jungle goes down. Nope. This is even scarier. So, my question is, though, did they use a crane to fucking build up there? Or they built a staircase and walked up to the top and started hammering? No. This was all ropes, pulleys, people.

Starting point is 02:03:23 We had like an ox cart that we had. We had an amazing team. Did they have a platform up there that they could standing? No, this was all ropes, pulleys, people. We had like an ox cart that we had. We had an amazing team. Did they have a platform up there that they could stand on? No. The first time we climbed the tree was just ropes. The first time that tree was climbed...

Starting point is 02:03:33 You people are out of your fucking mind. Dude, we had to climb up the vines on the tree to get to the top. You like Tarzan climbed up vines? Yes. Yes. 100%. That's how we got up to this tree.

Starting point is 02:03:44 This is Darwinism at its finest. I don't know how you guys aren't dead. There's actually an even bigger strangler fig in the forest. And we were out on a hike a few weeks ago, actually. And I had never seen this tree before. I found a new tree. And this tree completely covered in strangler fig. And I look at this tree and I'm like, oh, my God.

Starting point is 02:04:02 It's so easy to climb. Like, it's big juggy handholds plenty of footholds and i go from zero to the canopy 150 feet up um on um on the same eye level as spider monkeys i literally get up there and the spider monkey looks over at me you can just tell he's like wait what the spider monkey like did this double take he's like what are you fellas they can climb oh shit um but it's it's just crazy because some of these trees have such and i you know as i'm climbing too i'm going okay this is like i'm like free soloing a amazon tree and i'm going is this you know i'm at to what degree am i putting my life in danger right now and i said this tree this particular tree was so easy to climb it was like a ladder i mean yeah it's 150 feet but you

Starting point is 02:04:47 know two points of contact you don't get afraid of heights i get afraid of heights if i'm not in control now if i stuck my hand in a hole and bees came out into my face am i dead probably but if nothing goes wrong you just you know if you sneeze you die no but this this is completely safe the uh the guys who made it made the the the architects made it so that the spiral staircase is completely closed in that everything's at regulation height the this you could bring you know toddlers up there this is anybody could go up to the tree house and that's the point and that's the point is that a lot of the people that want to visit the amazon and don't want to suffer through the bugs and the mud and the blood, you go up here, you go in the air conditioning, get brought coffee in the morning, you take some pictures of macaws flying across the sunrise and like it's a much chiller way. And here's the interesting thing.

Starting point is 02:05:36 We've never had access to the the canopy of the rainforest, you had to shoot an arrow with a piece of like fishing line over it, pull your ropes, climb up to the canopy. You're on ropes, you have helmets on, you're swinging between the trees. It's something you can only maintain for a few hours. This is a time now you can actually sit in the canopy, spend time up there.

Starting point is 02:06:01 So the information that we're gonna get, the, we're already seeing, I can't actually talk about it yet, but we're seeing species up here that we're going to get the we're already seeing i can't i can't actually talk about it yet but we're seeing species up here that you don't see on the ground you can't talk about it no because we haven't code of silence because we haven't published anything yet we're seeing species up there that we don't see on the ground i'll tell you off air okay but we're seeing things i'll make sure the recorders just we don't even know what they are we're finding we're adding tons of bird species this was just every morning now if you had like a logger terrorist who was pissed at you and they wanted to come cut down this tree how fast could they cut through the trunk down there and everyone up top is dead if they had a like a

Starting point is 02:06:34 really nice yeah like a nice one like a nice terrorist i got a lot of money um like any respectable one um probably four hours i It's a big goddamn tree. You'd be able to get down before they did it. The bottom of that tree would not fit in this room. Like the bottom of that tree, you'd be like four of this room. That would have been a real hole in your tourist attraction. So like, yeah, how's this for a headline? That is crazy though.

Starting point is 02:07:00 That view is... That view, when you wake up to that, or also the Milky Way. Is that a painting what why does that look like all right it's happening live everybody julian dory is calling bullshit on my treehouse i'm wondering if that's a real picture then then someone like painted oh no no no it's just it's a drone shot and i think it was very low light early morning so the picture is smooth don't you have a video of it i somewhere yeah somewhere there's i don't know where but it's there all right we'll find we'll find is there a video on youtube of it bullshit um no i wasn't calling bullshit i thought someone had painted that for

Starting point is 02:07:37 no no nobody painted it interesting yeah that that wow no it's really it's really insane i've never seen again it's like a new it's a new level unlocked we never we never i've i've been to canopy platforms and you walk up in the middle of the day and it's hot it's 3 p.m and you're standing on this thing and you're sweating and you're like oh my god like this is amazing you look you walk okay great you go back down the wildlife is out at dawn and at dusk most of the wildlife in the amazon is crepuscular and so what so there's nocturnal diurnal and crepuscular nocturnals at night diurnals in the day crepuscular is in the in-betweens and the transitions so so it's they don't identify as nocturnal

Starting point is 02:08:20 exactly um for the in-between species um like a like a leopard is crepuscular they're active at dawn and dusk that's their that's their their prime time and that's most species because that's when in the in the in the morning you get the rush you hear it at like 4 30 in the morning all of a sudden the howler monkey boy your howler monkey's going off and all of a sudden the parrots start up and then the macaws and the toucans and it's just like everyone starts turning on and you hear all the calls coming across the jungle it's insane we would wake up and there'd just be that red sun coming up the over the horizon that's and the whole jungle's turning on it's just like a symphony it's so exciting the first day i woke up i like woke up and like we'd put the alarm and i was like yo we'll get up at like

Starting point is 02:09:05 like five in the morning right yeah nobody wants to wake up at five in the morning and i like open my i like looked and i went holy i like we like look at the sunrise like the sun it's a whole different thing it's a whole different thing what the are we doing every day we wake up we wait until it's 9 00 a.m before we get outside it's like when you look at the sun coming around planet earth it's got to release some amazing hormones in your brain also it's like again what world are we in like we forget listening to all the birds wake up you're like yeah it's like roll call it's like all right morning toucan macaw fly catchers like everybody's sounding off everybody's starting to communicate with each other the monkeys you hear the the branches start shaking because the monkeys are moving everybody's all of a sudden the whole jungle turns on and it's like holy shit the lights just went on on

Starting point is 02:09:52 planet earth and everybody starts moving yep and the crazy thing is at night you can hear when when things start winding down and you start hearing less toucans less macaws you start hearing less cicadas and then all of a sudden you hear that first you hear the first frog and you're like it's night time it's coming and then like the tinnimous will come and they're like a type of whistling bird and all of a sudden you're like oh they just changed shifts and went from day shift to night shift it's so crazy the jungle you can hear that change happening that's incredible it's absolutely insane what's what is the macaw again that's the one because the largest of the parrots macaw is just a big colorful parrot i believe there's about 16 they can say some words but i don't i don't actually think that

Starting point is 02:10:37 that rate's really high on the list of animal intelligence because that's just really just mimicry they are very they're very intelligent very intelligent birds because parrots like aren't very smart parrots are very smart but it's not like primary yeah but it's cetacean or wow so so that's you just shown that to me and not said macaw i said oh that's a parrot well they're the largest of the parrots so all i thought i i misheard you i thought you said like all parrots are macaws but not all macaws the parrots so all i thought i i misheard you i thought you said like all parrots are macaws but not all macaws or parrots no that that's the that's the inverse don't listen to me on that one anybody they are beautiful they are beautiful that's a red and green blue and yellow what do they eat nuts they'll eat a lot of brazil nuts um they're also

Starting point is 02:11:21 endangered pretty much throughout their range so we used to have macaws like through Mexico and Belize and down through Costa Rica. And of the 16 species, 16 or 17 species of macaws, I think most of them are endangered or extinct. Spix's macaws, which is like the movie. Why is that? Because as soon as people realize that they, I mean, native cultures have always used those feathers.

Starting point is 02:11:43 Christopher Columbus actually brought a few pairs of macaws back to the queen of spain to show that he had come to the new world and ever since then people have been obsessed with their plumage there's i mean it's such beautiful feathers you got these you know two or three foot long beautiful tail feathers and so people want macaw plumage is there anything that guy didn't kill um the other thing that we're seeing on our river right now is that they're cutting down the ironwood trees and so these macaws the red and green macaws nest almost exclusively in these ironwood trees and so you have a thousand year old ironwood tree uh just look up a red and green macaw it's the first one that you pulled up red and green macaw ironwood tree uh you could try that yeah probably i feel like i'm the only

Starting point is 02:12:23 person on the internet talking about it's probably just going to be um yeah there it is first one yeah the first top left is an ironwood high-res yeah dipteryx microanthia whoa yeah and so you but you need an ancient ironwood you need a giant massive thousand year old 500 year old ironwood tree because that's the type where the branches break off and it makes a hole and the macaws nest almost exclusively in that hole but now once they identify that as a nesting site generations of macaws will use it and each year only 17 to 20 percent of the macaw population reproduces because there's limited real estate So when a logger comes in and cuts an ironwood tree that has a 700-year-old macaw generating hole in it, they've cut generations of macaws down. And so the population is exponentially affected.

Starting point is 02:13:17 And so there you go. That's something we see all the time in the Jungle Keepers Reserve. We'll see healthy ancient ironwood trees that have macaws just coming out of them so sometimes i have trouble picturing this because i'm not there and i can't see it but unfortunately you've seen a million times over yeah a tree get cut down out there and these trees 150 feet tall all kinds of species living in it

Starting point is 02:13:41 how much of it is creatures die on the fall of the tree because they're stuck in the tree and boom, they're dead versus creatures die because their home is taken from them and then they have nowhere to go? It's both. I mean, if you have an ironwood tree like that, you have literally thousands of species living on it. Reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, lichen, leafcutter ants, bees, wasps, everything. There's so many things living on it reptiles amphibians birds mammals lichen leaf cutter ants bees wasps everything there's so many things living on this tree and you got to think if that tree is a thousand years old when columbus world war one world war two doesn't matter whatever you can really think of happened that tree was standing in the forest and so that complex ecosystem has created this skyscraper

Starting point is 02:14:27 of life that, and this is where once we lose the old growth forest, first of all, that's where most of the carbon of a forest is contained in the ancient hardwoods. That's also where most of the biodiversity is. And so once you cut that, it's going to be 500 years before you get another one of those. And so that's why protecting the forest that's already ancient before it's too late. You hear people about, oh, we have to replant the forest. We have to reestablish. That's fine. And that's important.

Starting point is 02:14:55 In a lot of places, it's important. But you're never going to get back what you had. It's like your family dies in a bus accident. Somebody goes, oh, we'll get you some more humans. It's like, it's it's like your family dies in a bus accident somebody goes oh we'll get you some more humans it's like yeah but also i and i've repeated this on so many podcasts since you've been in here because i think it's something we all need to think about that i was unaware of until you told me about it when you're talking about the wood that is used when they're taking these trees down and then you know it's being used in product, you had said you had one guy who is a donor towards jungle keepers, who's a major contractor,

Starting point is 02:15:32 and he's talked about how if you used new tree woods, so trees planted in the last 30 years, you'd have to and you used it for a house, you'd have to replace the base of that house within a decade, whereas it's the old trees that actually will hold the house up forever or for a very long time. And so even if you are planning new trees back, you're planning trees that take a long time to grow, a long time to form strength, and you're not solving the problem of, oh, now here's trees you guys can come knock down because they're still going to go knock down the old ones because those are the ones that are actually most vibrant for them to be able to do what they want to do

Starting point is 02:16:10 yeah unfortunately they're valuable for the humans and the wildlife that's the problem we both want the same thing just like in south india human humans need a lot of space elephants need a lot of space it's the same thing it's a clash of but that's where i have to say after 17 years on the front lines in India, Africa, Peru, in the Amazon, at this point, there's so many people doing such incredible work that we can fix a lot of these problems. If you can, at this point, if we can't shut down the ironwood tree market, we can't stop people from going out into the Amazon and cutting down massive... If you look at an ironwood tree market we can't stop people from going out into the amazon and cutting down massive if you look at an ironwood tree if somebody said cut it down it's not easy and by the time we have a video of someone trying to do it if you try it i don't know let's go to youtube and try someone if you if you're cutting down ironwood tree in amazon or yeah or just cutting down giant tree in the amazon i don't know I bet you there's not a video of it

Starting point is 02:17:10 killing the forest is faring under deforestation ABC News is Matt Gutmann yeah that's a good guy thanks for hooking it up with him. Yeah. We'll get him on at some point. I was going to say, did he come on? No. We had a conversation about five days before the Israel war broke out, and then he got sent there. So I was talking to him right when he was trying to get there. They had shut down the airport, Ben-Gurion, in Israel for a while. He was at one point until they opened it back up a few days later that first weekend abc sent him there right away he was stuck in jfk then they sent to miami then back to jfk when he's talking with me he was like the last plane or one of the last i think it was the very last plane that landed and then they opened it back up like three

Starting point is 02:18:00 or four days later i think i forgot about that because the other what happens i go into the jungle and then it's like the wormhole i forgot that i put you guys in touch yeah and then yeah he's he's insane he's amazing yeah and you know what sucks for him is that he just came out with a new book he like published his book and everything is like promote you know when you publish a book you got to be on it you're trying to make them do a times bestseller list you're trying to promote your book and they're like goodbye so like his first month book out he was on a huge assignment and also like it's again i'm not even going to start with being involved in a war but to to voluntarily leave the safety of your home to go witness it to tell that story he's amazing a certain type of person yes i I mean, that dude covered the second Intifada and all those years in the early 2000s.

Starting point is 02:18:48 Obviously, you came across him because he goes into some of these wild danger zones. Yeah. And that was like the ultimate compliment too when you were talking about him. Like, hey, this guy is actually good. Because you've come across so many people who are like, hey, happy to be here. But he's like legit hands in the dirt with it. I've worked with so many, everything from Discovery Channel to just every type of interviewer, podcast, news outlet, everything over the years. And first of all, most of them can't handle it.

Starting point is 02:19:20 Him and his team, he came with like three of his close friends. Like if they were in the room right now, we could chill with with them like they came out and they were like what are we doing like they're like we want to go see burning forest let's go see burning forest we like just go out we would look for smoke on the horizon and then just start gunning it for that we just try and find a road that got us to the burning forest no fear just film whatever else and the thing i really loved about them was i said uh i caught a snake you know checked what species it was and i was gonna put it back on the tree and i was like oh guys i was like i could just put it on this you know thing so you can get a shot of it and matt looked at me dead straight in the eyes

Starting point is 02:19:52 and he goes would you put it on that tree if we weren't here and i went no i want you to get a shot of it and he goes no no he goes we're here to film what you do if you're not and it was it was something as minorly cosmetic as i'll just put it here so you get the shot and he was like no do not change what's happening love do not alter reality and that commitment to that type of realness is just that's that's cool and he and his book i i have to read i bought it but his book apparently is all about from being in all these different zones the some of the horrible like post-traumatic stress he has from it and yet he is able to center himself to continually still do it and go capture this yeah um yeah and it's it's really interesting knowing him and being

Starting point is 02:20:39 friends with him because he's we're like children together like we're absolute goofballs like if you look at the like we'd be like out there like you know and and we were out with like russian gold miners with you know machine guns out in the desert where the amazon rainforest used to be seeing this horrendous shit that does stay with you and enter into your dreams and give you ptsd all that stuff and then we'd be like you know he'd like look at me and we'd be you know he'd be like we would be like waiting for a car and he'd be like bet you i could do more push-ups than you jersey guy yeah we had a jersey guy don't forget that he's a jersey guy oh yeah but what were we pulling up here an ironwood tree video did we find there's a video of anybody

Starting point is 02:21:20 actually i'm telling you there's not going to be a video of them cutting down a giant why i illegally cut down trees in the amazon right yeah click that one with a brazilian tree guy a brazilian logger god damn look at all that's all trees they took out there yeah so this is what we see this is like this is every day and as you said that's why i love what you yeah there's the top like you're talking about you no that's you're gonna say that that guy seems kind of reasonable though right what's he what's that guy shooting you're you understand that a lot of these people they don't necessarily like the people who get hired to do it they don't necessarily mean hard they're trying to make a living and so you treat them like a human and you've turned a bunch of them

Starting point is 02:22:20 into working with you guys yeah and that's what this guy does i look at this guy and you see just look at his hand gestures he's a hard-working guy it's not easy look at him he's like i just want to trying to defend everyone just trying to defend our point yeah he doesn't you don't you don't look at this go wow this guy's evil no he's got kids like he's just trying he's just trying to put food on the table and if if you went to him and said, look, we'll double what we're paying you. And you don't have to cut down trees, but make sure this forest is protected. That guy? He'll protect it.

Starting point is 02:22:52 And I guarantee you, he doesn't live out there because he hates the nature. Most of these loggers, most of these loggers, you go, yo, stop logging. They go, stop logging. You go, well, what do you want to do tomorrow? They go, let's go fishing. And then when you are fishing with loggers, that's what they do when they're not logging and so you like go fishing with them and it's like going on this amazing hunting trip with like some some new friends and it's like they love the jungle they love tracking animals they love looking for fish they love finding big trees

Starting point is 02:23:18 they love watching me climb trees they don't climb the trees but they love they think you know they think it's funny when gringo loco catches a snake or climb the tree they're always like oh gringo loco look serpiente go get it i go jump on a snake and they think it's really funny i love how they call you gringo loco it's it's kind of on brand for you um that happened because i brought this one guy in a swamp we were trying to release an anaconda and uh this anaconda had been caught in town it had been going after some of these chickens this wasn't't Larry's anaconda, right? You remember that story. No, this anaconda had been going after some people's chickens

Starting point is 02:23:51 and we got in touch with them. And actually even better, they got in touch with us. They reached out. And so we had this anaconda. We took it out into the jungle. We're going to release it in a swamp. And so, again, I had clients with me. People would just come to see the jungle,

Starting point is 02:24:02 see what we do with jungle keepers. And I also had this Peruvian guide, this guy, not JJ. JJ was like, Paul, you take him out, do your thing. JJ was like, I'm going to relax. I'm going to put my feet up tonight. I said, all right. He goes, take this guy Anderson out with you. And I said, okay. And so he comes out with us. Fast forward to, we're all up to our necks in a swamp at night. And I'm getting this anaconda, feeding this anaconda out of a bag and we get attacked by wasps in the dark oh that's nice so wasp lands on my head stings me and i'm like don't freak out like everybody shut your lights they're attracted to the lights so we shut

Starting point is 02:24:36 our lights but now we're all up to our necks in the swamp at night in the dark pitch black where there are literally tarantulas walking across the surface of the water with an anaconda and this dude who's been a guide like his entire life he starts climbing a tree in the dark and i could just hear him and he's going that that he was out and so we got back to the station he uh jj was like you know like in his like pjs chilling at the station he was like so how'd it go guys we? We're all wet. We're covered in shit. We're covered in bites.

Starting point is 02:25:08 And this dude Anderson just looked at JJ and he was like, es hermoso, pero es peligroso. Eso no es para mi. He was like, that's not for me. And he was like, ese es gringo loco. He was like, I am not going out in the jungle with that guy again. He's used to walking on a trail with his binoculars, with a med kit and a walkie talkie.

Starting point is 02:25:24 Like he's a different type of, but then after he said gringo loco now they all think it's fucking fun gringo loco gringo loco and what's we had talked a lot about the or excuse me not that much about the gold mines last time we we touched on it and everything but i don't know if you can pull up some of that video do do matt gutman gold mine gold mineine. Oh, great. Let's go. Goldmining Amazon. Yeah. So essentially, I had in another woman, Elle Scott. But that was a lot of the influence of the outsiders coming in and basically telling them, well, you got to do this now. And so some of the things that has happened to a couple of the tribes in the past past really kind of pushed i think these two over the edge and said

Starting point is 02:26:05 absolutely not we are not having any contact and the other problem is the youth that are being born into the shuar community and tribe are getting glimpses of the bigger cities and leaving she was in episode 144 and she spent some time out in the amazon last year and talked about when they came across the gold mines and how nasty some of the gold miners were i think some of that she talked about on camera too but this is like you want to talk about taking out trees and barrening the entire land yeah yeah just type in amazon after that it'll come up there you go that first one right there all right so some we're gonna have to talk over this because it'll be copyright cut forward like uh like a minute yeah no no yeah yeah right there that's good yep so this is this

Starting point is 02:26:58 is in the amazon this is the desert where the amazon rainforest used to be this is a spreading scar where is the western amazon this is peru we we were there this was the day we were dude that was all trees this we filmed this on the road this is the trans amazon highway this is our shit this is what we do that's your video me and matt were right there yeah that's that's dude dude how many miles of land have they taken out for these gold mines now a lot like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres 17 of the total amazon rainforest has been destroyed dude yeah so look at the scale of that and think and here's the thing i go straight to think about how many animals are in that forest when you wake up in the tree house and you hear

Starting point is 02:27:45 how many animals are in that forest and you realize it takes years to realize it and then when you see that you go oh my god that just it's you're losing so many heartbeats is that the trans amazon so this is the offshoot this is the trans amazon is actually paved i'm driving matt's next to me and so we're actually going towards the Les Piedras River here. We're in this beaten up old Hilux. But this road just... See, that's a single Brazil nut tree out there in the distance because they're not allowed to cut Brazil nut trees.

Starting point is 02:28:14 Oh, so they leave one tree. Thanks. Yeah. Appreciate you. Which a Brazil nut tree won't produce Brazil nuts without orchid bees. So that doesn't work anyway. But how much... So there's basically like a lot of

Starting point is 02:28:26 untapped gold like a fuck ton of it and so okay so the gold here first of all is is terrible gold it's also how do you have terrible it's not like i don't i don't either it's not high carrot gold like it's not high quality gold um but it's also it's in the soil as powder so if you dip your hands into the bottom of a stream and like swish the water around, you come up with like some gold dust on your skin. Like in the creases of your skin, you can just barely see this gold dust. So what they do is they cut the forest burnt through this. I actually got scared at one point that like our skin was going to melt off. It was so hot.

Starting point is 02:29:02 And so they burn the forest down to do this. Yeah. And then they burned the forest down to do this. Yeah. And then the fire spreads. And then the fire spreads, especially this year, it was very dry. And this year actually scared the shit out of me because I just read this New York Times article about how the Amazon could get to a point where the moisture that the jungle creates that makes the rain of the rainforest, you break that cycle because you've cut too much of the forest. And so they're worried that if we keep burning it, we're at 17 to 20% of the Amazon gone, turned into pasture land. If that cycle gets broken, when you wake up in that

Starting point is 02:29:43 tree house every single day you see i've heard this too that over the amazon river which is the largest river by volume on earth over the amazon river is a river of water in the air there's literally a river in the sky over the amazon river yep look look it up so here even over our river even over this river every morning the mist that's produced by this river in the shape of a cloud in the exact shape of the river is moving over this so each tree is pumping gallons and gallons of water into the air every day pulling it up out of the ground pumping it into the air that's all collecting into rain clouds and then raining back down in the jungle so above the amazon rainforest is a larger invisible river in the sky that sometimes we can see in the form of clouds.

Starting point is 02:30:30 Whoa. And you talked about that before. We don't know. It's tough with all this. And you're talking about the one example with the moisture right now. But we don't know, for example, what the percentage of no return is. But your question is how close do you want to get to whatever that is to take your chances not close that's the point look at this

Starting point is 02:30:49 look at here this is one of the trees this is an example you won't see someone cutting a tree like this that's an ironwood that is a kapok tree holy shit look at how big yeah oh my god is it that whole thing yeah it's so big look to get a shot of it you had to this was very stressful getting the shot that's an avatar shit that thing takes me about like two it took me two hours to climb it the first time i got to the top of that tree you climbed it yeah i did like with a rope i did bring a rope i climbed it like the way you rock climb like every 20 feet putting putting gear wait are you attached or could somebody was belaying me from below so as long as you go what do you belaying so with lead climbing you says it's like i'm gonna know

Starting point is 02:31:30 this shit so if we're lead climbing i'm gonna get this wrong now if we're lead climbing i go up let's say 20 feet and then i put a carabiner into into the rock or in this case on the vine i would put a piece of webbing around and then put a carabiner and then i would string my rope through the carabiner so now if i fall let's say you're belaying me you got my rope so you have this 30 feet of rope and then i put some gear and now you got me i could sit back and let go of the tree but then i climb up another 30 feet again i wrapped a piece of webbing around the tree put a carabiner put my rope through it and so i inchworm my way up the tree but you're always down here belaying me so you're feeding rope as i'm going up and up and up the tree so if i stop paying attention though we got a problem yeah if you stop paying attention

Starting point is 02:32:12 we got a problem and then eventually you get to the top of this tree and you're standing on i'm talking about like the oak but you could drive right now and try to find the biggest oak tree you could find you will not find a tree that's even close to the size of one of the branches of that tree. Oh, no. Like branches so big, like this table, you can go walking on these branches. And it's crazy. So then I get up there. And then so now I have the end of my rope.

Starting point is 02:32:36 And then what I would do is set the system up so that then you start climbing. And so then I belay you from above. So then as you climb, I have you and I'm tied to the tree tree and then eventually we're both on top of the tree which is going to happen i just told you a story about your future no thanks i'm good i'm good i'll stay i'll stay down i think that that's gotta happen i'll stay on the ground with uncle jim and our and our weaponry and shoot anything that comes at us now but look at this you see what a good job they did though this is this is an amazing report we'll put this link in the description so people can see it yeah but the when they do we know how they set these fires they just like literally start a match

Starting point is 02:33:17 and let it go how do they do it yeah so me and jj um we again jj just everything we said and we're gonna get to jj and the whole backstory there for people who haven't followed that. But you did describe who he is a little bit. But I want to get to that later. But keep going. We see these burning fires. And here's the weird thing. Out of sight, out of mind.

Starting point is 02:33:36 If you go to somebody on the street and you go, if I'd say to anybody in town, if I go to one of my guys and I go, hey, how bad are the fires this year? And they're like, they're not. They're fine. Because you're in town. You're walking past pharmacies and coffee shops and whatever else you're in this little gold mining town you literally don't see over the buildings to the fires it's happening out in the jungle and so i said to jj i was like listen you know everybody i said find me someone that just cut down their forest and is like gonna burn it and that they're gonna burn it because they want to plant so they got to burn all the trees on it so one of his relatives relative of a relative had recently leveled this huge thing of forest and so one of the guys on my team is a conservation

Starting point is 02:34:13 photographer named mosin-kazmi and so we went with me mosin jj we go to this place where they had just knocked down all these trees we're literally standing there it's like 4 p.m the guy just takes a lighter holds it to the ground the rainforest does not burn you could napalm the rainforest and it won't burn but cut it down and let it bake in the tropical sun for a month all the moisture gets sucked up out of the trees so this dude this farmer guy he just took a normal bic lighter it's like propane held it to the ground and the largest campfire you've ever seen within two seconds dude we were there first of all our dslrs were like flatting out like i've never seen a dslr stop working it was so hot that they were like melting to our hands the drone wouldn't work it

Starting point is 02:34:56 was 70 foot flames it was it was catastrophic in moments and of course even though the jungle's been cut all the animals think they can keep living in the trees. So all the downed trees still have lizards and birds and snakes and mammals living. Even when it's on the ground. Even when it's on the ground. So you hear the animals running. Some of them just, a lot of animals, their instinct is to hunker down.

Starting point is 02:35:20 If you chase a snake into a hole, the snake's instinct is this bird or this fox or this predator can't get me in this hole. So I'm just going to stay here and you can't get to me. A lot of the smaller mammals will do the same. Is it like that old experiment with the frogs that they talk about where if you boil a frog, it'll stay there and not leave because it gets – it doesn't realize it's getting too hot? Is it a similar effect with animals like they don't have – with of the ones you're talking about they don't have that fight or flight when the burning tree is on the ground they're like i'm going to stay in my hole and then it gets too hot and they die yeah i think i think what happens again i think a lot of animals depend on camouflage i've literally watched a lizard be like you can't see me you can't see

Starting point is 02:35:59 me and then the flames just take over and then it's just charred like it's literally it's like it's like you know independence day when they when they nail the yes the statue of liberty in the goes at the empire state building and just this just once that once those flames go and then so the crazy thing is we watch the flames go up and there's this horrible shot i got with jj he didn't know i was filming i was he thought we were filming the forest and i turned back at jj and i caught this candid moment of of this man who's devoted his entire life to protecting the Amazon. And he's just got his hands on this log. And he's watching the Amazon burn.

Starting point is 02:36:33 And I just had it on his face. And in the video, he sees me. And then he walks out of frame. But he was just having this moment where you could just see him taking in the destruction. And it was hitting him and watching those flames go up. And then, you know, I'm, I'm concentrated on getting my shots and most is concentrating on getting his shots. Most it's awesome by the way. I follow him. Yeah. Most, most in those situations is only one person that I'll work with. And so we're, that's like our thing. We'll, we'll go out and do firework together.

Starting point is 02:37:01 It's very, very, very intense. And you really have to have the type of relationship with someone where you just, you know, you get to that point where you play off each other. It's gotta be that thing where you don't really got to talk. Like I'll see something that's interesting and he'll already be circumnavigating around me and like grabbing it against the sunset and understanding the angles. And he's, you know, a real photographer. I point my camera at things and I try to get a good picture. He's actually making art in those intense moments. But on that particular day, you lose people. 70-foot flames and there's exploding trees. The sap heats up inside these trees. And so you're walking around and all of a sudden, boom, and this entire tree will shatter. And so there'll be shards of eight

Starting point is 02:37:43 foot splinters flying through the air. Everything's burning everything is ash there's no oxygen in the air you take one breath of smoke like that type of smoke and you're down like i understand what firefighters go through like if you get hit with one blast of smoke it will take you out i say this because it's happened to me what do you guys do like because when you're near this we run we run we try to get our pictures and run on this day though the fire did like this v-shaped formation and i was looking over to the left and i all of a sudden i heard like one shout and i just knew and i go running and like you know i'm running over this log and there's just huge fires i don't know where jj is but i know that Mohsen's in trouble. And as I'm running, his camera's on the ground. I don't see him.

Starting point is 02:38:28 Pick up his camera, keep running. He got blinded by some smoke. I think inhaled some smoke. Went running blind out of the fires into the forest, found a swamp, dove into it. There was basically just swampy, muddy ground. And he just put his face in to just take the heat off of his face ripped his shirt off and then me jj we all came in and like he was trying to remain conscious as we're squeezing muddy water onto his back and just like trying

Starting point is 02:38:56 to cool his body like it's and anybody that works anywhere near fire is cringing right now because they're going above a bunch of inexperienced people like you're going to die doing this um but i mean that day we gotta capture it though you gotta show people what they're doing but that's the thing if we didn't do this now granted we could have some better gear we could do this with gas masks and probably survive a lot longer because um that'd be good for content not gonna lie what paul rosalie with a gas mask out in the middle of the end. Do you think that would work? Yeah. Yeah. I do. I do. Well, I got to do something because every time after we do those fires, we're like, that just took like three years off of our life.

Starting point is 02:39:36 Like you just, you feel it. You feel like less of a, that last one, it was like, I would say it was a month before I was walking properly. Because we're out there and it's like, you got to get that footage. When was that one again? The day I'm talking about with Mohsen, that was a couple of years ago. Dak sent us down. That was the first flight after COVID. And we were like, it was two of us on the plane.

Starting point is 02:39:57 And there was nobody else on the plane. We were on masks. We had double masks and a face shield. Oh, no. I watched the stewardess. I watched the stewardess, I watched the stewardess. You survived in the Amazon for 16 years and you're double masking and face shielding on a plane.

Starting point is 02:40:10 You couldn't get on the plane. You had to be like quadruple vaxxed. You had to have like a vaccination needle sticking out of your neck. You had to have a double mask and then you had to have this face shield. It was Peruvian policy. And so, and then what I loved the most was I watched this.

Starting point is 02:40:23 Oh yeah. No, so me and Mohsen, we're sitting sitting next to each other but you can't hear anything because the plane is loud you got your mask on and then you have the face shield that completely all the sound is out so we're like writing things down showing it to each other we're using our phones to communicate because it's too loud on the plane and you're like shuddering through the andes and then i watched the stewardess and this guy is going like you know in spanish he's going can you get me a drink and the stewardess is like what he's like can you get me a drink and their faces are getting closer and closer and closer together and finally he just takes all the masks off and just goes get me a drink he's like projectile spitting into her face it was awesome i was like this is working yeah that yeah i'm not even gonna let it don't even don't even linger there were wild times

Starting point is 02:41:11 god damn wild times but yeah i do think if you did like some gas mask stuff that gets people's attention um do you remember and get the the documentary gas land that dude josh yes because he played the banjo while wearing a gas mask yes i think he was just standing outside but i think uh the the two-pronged gas mask has that certain toxic look to it that if you're in because it is look what they're doing to this thing because when they set this fire like the guy with the bick fire lighter like he's doing this to wipe out all these trees at once so they can have barren land to mine for gold but they don't know where the fire is going to end it's just going to go where it goes they have absolutely

Starting point is 02:41:48 no idea where the fire is going to go they have no clue like they light it and then they just let it go how does it stop it burns out eventually i did meet one woman though one time we're one time we were at the fires and I lose my mind. I start just running like crazy. I'm looking for animals that we can save. I'm just like – I'm trying to do videos where I'm talking directly to our funders or to whatever. This stuff, this is how you tell people this story. So I'm trying to get the most insane moment of me in the fires, in the forest. Trying to find these animals before they're burned

Starting point is 02:42:26 to death because sometimes you find like an animal that's scalded and just needs a little bit of direction and help and one time i just this bird was actually fine it was i think she probably like flew into some smoke and hit the ground and i just picked up this bird and just threw it like a baseball and it just kept flying oh that works it worked it worked perfect um but yeah there was actually there was there was local peruvian firefighters there and they're like pumping water by hand out of this like little red truck and it's like spraying water and at least they're trying they were trying and there was this woman there she was the next farm over and she was going

Starting point is 02:42:59 what about the animals how far is this from civilization uh i mean there's like the little city of puerto maldonado and then all around that it's just this giant human footprint and then every year it spreads yeah but how far the ones that they're doing right now where they're where they're burning down trees would go how far from what's it called puerto maldonado how far all around it and the problem is is that is it it's it's you know it's the footprint is spreading so it used to be that the jungle was this table and then this would be humans that little spot and then now the humans is spreading and the jungle is getting smaller and then this this area of humans is spreading too and then eventually all of those footprints start to get wider and wider and wider.

Starting point is 02:43:47 And the jungle becomes less and less and less until it's not humans in an ocean of green. It's tiny islands of green in an ocean of humans. And that doesn't work. And who – you had mentioned something about the cartels and like coming upon the village where they're like, oh, this is our village now. And they're using these as safe house places to basically like make their coke and ship it. Are they involved with the gold business though too? The gold mining, the logging, it's all wrapped up together. Because the more – I mean the gold mining is its whole thing.

Starting point is 02:44:19 The gold mining because they go out there and they basically establish a place that cops can't go. That's what, you know, when we went out with Matt, we went past. There's literally guys with machine guns. There's one road that goes to that area. There's guys with machine guns at the door. You can't get past them. We made contact with some miners. They were Russian miners, not peruvian miners yep

Starting point is 02:44:45 and they got us right through the doors they said come with us we got on their truck you come now yeah you come with us because you are paul rosalie right no he didn't yes he did actually no he's a really he's actually a really nice guy um this is named vlad tell me it's not vlad um despite the fact that they're miners um we were out there and he did that. He did exactly that. We're standing there. Matt's getting ready for his shot and talking to his team. And this guy comes up to me and he was like, is your name Paul Rosalie?

Starting point is 02:45:12 And I was like, I went. This is how it ends. Yeah. I was like, this is how it ends. No, he was being nice though. He goes, listen, I'm not going to do it in the accent the whole time. But he goes, you see those guys over there? He goes, you see those Peruvian minors, those rough looking motherfuckers over there he goes i just learned your name off of them he goes they know exactly

Starting point is 02:45:31 who you are and he was like so be careful and so he actually was doing something very nice he's gone i just met you today but watch out yeah you told the stories last time about like someone i think it was your friend's dad was like filleted on a beach but well there was the there was the uncontacted tribe ones but also oh i know what it was it was the guy the gold miners took him up boat in the river yeah and then he was tied up and then they were getting chased by something and so they made him drive the boat and he jumped off the boat and swam and they were going to go execute him yeah they he just said not in front of my kids and so they were driving him up river and who was that again i don't want to say his name but he's a guy that we work with um and that's another one it was very

Starting point is 02:46:15 entertaining looking at the comments that video because everyone was like there's no way that this happened and it's like there's no way that somebody kidnapped somebody to go kill them in the fucking amazon it's not there's no laws there's no laws i mean kidnapped somebody to go kill them in the fucking Amazon. It's not. There's no laws. There's no laws. I mean, plus, I mean, look at what's happening all over the world right now. Like this shit does happen. Oh, yeah. And we know that this happened because he went missing and his hysterical family came to us.

Starting point is 02:46:38 And you can't fake that kind of trauma. You know, his kids got woken up at gunpoint and were told that they were never going to see their father again. Why had he pissed them off again? Well, because he started, first he was a gold miner. Then we made friends with him. Then we said, you should build a lodge. You should start doing ecotourism. We converted him. He's a super nice guy. I was with him when the Peruvian special forces came down and they blew up his gold mining equipment. And as it, there was like hot metal raining down from the sky. were like sheltered under a piece of sheet metal and i was like why don't you just do conservation he was like all right i'll give it a try i was like um but no super nice guy but then then he started helping us call in where there were gold mining sites so he actually turned

Starting point is 02:47:22 into like a narc for the gold miners they didn't like and they didn't like that and they figured out who it was pretty quick and so then they just ambushed him in the morning and he was like literally in bed with his wife they like burst into the door pulled him out by his hair like but the whole story happened these guys know who you are though and you show up to the scene when they're fucking doing it why don't they kill you uh because i always show up with their friends. I'm saying anybody that like, anytime I'm going to put myself around gold, let's say we're going to go up river and we're going to go talk to gold miners. Well, I'm not going to just go. I'm going to do my research first. First of all, chances are that one of JJ's brothers is married

Starting point is 02:48:00 to, or has been married to, or knows somebody who's married to a gold miner now you talk to that guy and you go now do you know anybody on the such and such a river that's doing gold mining yeah of course i do okay let's go talk to him you go talk to him in town and something about being in town you can call the police you can share a coca-cola there's like civilization people act more civilized when there's pavement there's something about the jungle right away everybody's you know so you can talk to a gold miner in town take him out to coffee say listen i would love to come out and see what you're doing and half the time they're like you're going to cause any trouble no i just want to take pictures what do you do i'm an environmental journalist you go yeah but

Starting point is 02:48:40 then you're going to cause problems for gold miners yeah in my country not here not here you know we want to shut down the system and get you guys better jobs he goes i do have a terrible job i can't keep doing this we work all day long all night long my kids have to do it there's mercury we have to kill the whole forest he's like you know come out you have to make that human connection with them if you show up if me and mosin walk into a gold mine with our cameras and we just start shooting then we're going to get shot you know 100 so it's all about how you approach it i think that um the the the places that we went with matt there's no chance you're getting in there without someone high level which we had um but like our guys that we've converted not you just you got to know that that's that's that's

Starting point is 02:49:25 whatever again everything that we've done all these stories i'm telling anything i know about the jungle is only because i am best friends i would say family with a group of indigenous people that know their that's it and i always give the example um you know you take a kid fishing you drive them to the stream you bought the fishing rod you found the worm you put it on the hook and you found the deepest part of the stream and you hold their hands and you put it in the river and they catch a fish it's like that that's that's all we do we take pictures of burning forest we do all this stuff because they say protect our forest here's what you need to know this is where the macaws nest that's where the anacondas stay i'm

Starting point is 02:50:03 just reporting the things i've learned from them and so it's without that without that leadership without that sort of wisdom guiding us we would you know none of this would be happening who's funding the gold mining business in particularly you said it's attached at the hip with logging so who where's the to the logging the logging is is chinese right now okay so is it the same on gold mining then no gold mining i think stands on its own i actually don't know i don't want to speak to things i don't know i don't know where the finances of the gold mining comes from i see i see it on the ground where i see them i mean i've seen i've held them in my hands these big chunks of gold you know i've been out with the gold miners and again we're all just chilling

Starting point is 02:50:43 they'll burn the mercury off the gold which you know airborne mercury is really good for you um we're all like standing there like um but they'll have a lump of gold in their hand i'll be like yeah this is it you put it in your hand you go wow that cost us 16 acres of jungle holy and you're just holding this now here's the other thing this is the amazing thing when you're sitting in a shack in the amazon rainforest and everyone's got guns and there's a scale and there's gold on the scale and a weight on the scale and they trust you you know but they reach out and they dump this thing of gold into your hand, the room, the shape of the room changes. There is something about gold

Starting point is 02:51:29 where we all understand the front brain, the surface. They're like, yeah, we're friends. You can hold my gold. It's fine. But if you think that everybody in the room, that their pulse didn't go up just a little bit, depending on who's holding the gold, where the gold goes, that everyone doesn't know exactly whose pocket the gold. It's just strange. Humans have this connection to gold.

Starting point is 02:51:56 I can think of it as sitting in a dark room. It's very strange. I've never seen that before you see the the dirt and the destruction and the burning forest and they're working with mud and they're through the sloughs and mercury and then all of a sudden you after all that work you just have this incredibly brilliant thing we're in this dark hut it's just this glowing piece of gold it was like they get it right in indiana jones when he finds that little statue yes with the sandbag that he does it's like when he comes up to it it's kind of reflecting on his on his skin you can kind of see it on his

Starting point is 02:52:28 face it's like when when he goes do you want to hold it i was like precious i was like yeah i want to hold it it's there's something about the fact that it's been sold as the story of wealth since the beginning of the human history that we know but also there's a level to it of what you're getting at which is you get something that beautiful from shit to get there that's that ugly yeah not just the way they get it i'm not even talking about what they're doing like for example to the rainforest just to be able to do this stuff i'm talking about like you're digging with mud all over your face you're you're maybe you're cold because you've been in the water all day trying to get to it and suddenly in the middle of all this must and mold and whatever boom it's like yeah well

Starting point is 02:53:14 it's also it also isn't a re it is a reality bender because look you you have to go so it's very difficult to find it's scarce so it's valuable if you can get your hands on it it can accelerate how much wealth you have so you might have to work for three years to amass that much value that you're holding suddenly in the palm of your hand it's literally bending the laws of reality for you as a poor farmer in the Amazon rainforest and so all of a sudden your brain can't help but wonder... Could I kill all the motherfuckers in this room? Power. Yeah. Instantly, you understand an age-old human equation all of a sudden. Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Starting point is 02:53:57 All of a sudden, when you see the gold and you see people reacting to the gold, everyone's thinking the same fucking thing. Now, to us, a small amount of gold we're gonna there's a few thousand dollars but to them oh it's like a new world it's a new world that you can get your entire family out of poverty you can get your sick kid the medicine that will save her you can all of a sudden it matters and that and literally it's like you just feel everything bending in towards the gold because they're maybe there's people in the room the main gold miners going yep this is a great piece of

Starting point is 02:54:27 gold throws in his pocket wants to go get it you know change it into cash in town great maybe there's somebody in the town in the in the room that has a dying relative it's gone i need that fucking gold if i could get that gold if i could just get that gold it's like it's like the briefcase in no country for old men it's like it's cursed it's laying out there you can take it but it's like the briefcase in no country for old men it's like it's cursed it's laying out there you can take it but it's it's going to come with the price it was what's funny is it's almost like it used to be the other way around you talk about it now like hey you and me from america we say we're like oh wow cool you feel something but it's not the same as the people there feeling like that changes their whole life when in reality the way this all started when the new world came over there it was the new world came over there it

Starting point is 02:55:05 was the new world who looked at it like that and then allegedly i have to say allegedly but allegedly you had these cities across south america that were built of nothing of gold and the people it was just a part of life it's like oh yeah there's there's our gold there's our el dorado right i mean i think that whether it's you know the aztecs or the incas i think that gold was still very special it was still reserved for the highest members of society. It was still prized. But it was more omnipresent. The way Europeans – but again, it was the same thing.

Starting point is 02:55:34 The conquistadors got over there and they went, we have armor and we have swords and they don't. And we could take their gold and go back to where we're from and all of a sudden our lives get better. Let's just fucking kill everybody. And again,'s an accelerant it bends the rules of reality you can go from being you know some lowly guy that they send out on a ship to go exploring to you could go back and be the count of monte cristo i come back with a ship filled with gold yeah and so what did you do what did they do it turned them insane they turned into psycho killers and murdered everyone they saw i mean columbus if and, Columbus, I may get this wrong, but I remember reading some journal of Columbus where they literally touch, they see land and they come gold and the guy's like i don't speak your language like what and he's like beat the out and like they're like destroying this guy in the first five seconds of meeting him so that dude and it's like

Starting point is 02:56:32 stories of that guy they're yelling at him in a language that he doesn't understand asking him where the gold is and he's like what's that you got to think he's a coastal tropical person maybe never saw gold maybe he's not an inca king you know it's like they're interrogating a guy for something they have no way of communicating like it's madness they just showed up and they were like give it to us back to independence it's like when they said to the aliens what do you want us to do and they just go die it's like yeah i mean what do you want gold it's like the it it's the symbol of of conquering right just just like i mean we're talking about poaching earlier that rhino horn is really worth nothing now if you believe it's worth something medicinally knock yourself out but there's there are businessmen let's say in a certain part of

Starting point is 02:57:18 the world that will buy the rhino horn and stick it on the middle of a table before a giant corporate meeting and it's just known as this symbol of power and that's why they did it they don't care that that fucking creature had it hacked off of it had its horn hacked off in 45 seconds it was left there dying to bleed out in front of its little calf they don't care about the habitat that they're ruining that's not a part of their country or their continent for that matter by the way way. But it's this thing. It's like, I have it, you don't. I am above you. Status symbol. Yes.

Starting point is 02:57:51 Now, I wonder, because these are highly educated people that are working in a complex office environment, finance. I'm wondering, just like the gold miners, if there's a way to appeal to their humanity, where if you took that guy from that board meeting who knows brought him out to the savannah brought him out to vetpa out to buffalo clove and showed him a dying mother rhino and said do you want you still want the horn yeah 50 50 they don't have to see it just like just like if i went and bought this wood from the amazon which you told me today i didn't so i feel better about myself but if i bought this wood from the amazon i didn't have to stand there while they cut it down i didn't have to watch all the animals

Starting point is 02:58:35 die i go to home depot it says 25 bucks for a piece of wood let's fucking go let's build a table then and it's that's what i'm saying like that one's more evil because they know a creature was hacked to death to do that right so there's something different there but there's other things that we take for granted and i myself included in day-to-day life that we're like we don't stop to think damn i wonder where we got that and how we got that oh yeah but that's i mean the the classic one is everyone talks about where we get our cell phones from oh yeah fucking cobalt mines and everything else and then the other one i love is everyone you know when i was in college it was we need the electric car to save the environment and then now we have the electric car it's part of the car economy but what are those batteries made out of and where

Starting point is 02:59:21 does that come from and where does the power come from that goes into the electric cars oh it's the same shit we're using fossilized sunlight we're still we're still just like the trees in the amazon we're still just trying to get that sunlight we find a new way to be destructive even when we think we're being lost i do i do think that this is adolescence though i think this is a what do you mean i think it's a as a global society, we're going through a period of adolescence. There was like the dark ages and then there was a renaissance. And then now we're going through this period where it's like, okay, humans are global. We can communicate with everybody. And notice we're exactly global at the time when human rights stuff, we're really starting to like the humans are starting to recognize that, oh, we're all the same. And there's a lot of people fighting

Starting point is 03:00:05 to just make that a universal truth. Now there's still pockets where that's not understood, but gradually humans are, because in the past, these are untouchables. These people are slaves. These people are that. Okay, but now we're coming to this new spot

Starting point is 03:00:19 where humans are humans. Okay. And now we're starting to realize, okay, wait, we actually depend on the ecosystems if we have clean water then we can have free fish it comes standard with life on earth and it's like if we can just okay so the industrial revolution we were like whoa we have bicycles and we have motors and we have all this stuff and we could shoot at each other and it's like we just discovered a bunch of really cool stuff and i feel like right now what's happening is people are

Starting point is 03:00:44 buckling down and going, wait, how do we maintain a world where we can continue to have awesome medical care and planes and entertainment and all this amazing stuff that we have now, but just not kill the living world around us? It's a pretty good deal. You get to have everything in modern society, but you just got to let the earth continue to provide for you. It's really not a bad deal. But you got to show people what the cost is. It comes down to education. It comes down to connecting to people on that human level. It comes down to guys like Dax who are at the top of the finance game going, okay, we're going to push these projects that so badly need that support that never had it to the next level. And then it comes down to guys like you being like,

Starting point is 03:01:26 what are we going to spend our time talking about? We're going to entertain people with what? You know what I mean? Like we could be talking about the Kardashians right now. We're talking about Ironwood trees and macaws. And it's like, and people will tune in and watch it. And it's like,

Starting point is 03:01:38 just the fact that people will come away from watching the Julian Dory podcast going, I never knew that, you know, even just the idea that you could take a guy like a gold miner and just fucking be friends with them yes dude it's a human that's the thing i think people most people want to do good yeah sometimes you just gotta point them in the right direction and i'm so serious when i talk with you and ryan about

Starting point is 03:02:01 this all the time i really want to do more with getting conversations on here with people who are around the world in different places doing important shit. Because one of my favorite things about you is you have such a realist view on stuff. You're not one of these guys saying drink your Hydro Flask and take your fucking shitty straws and that's going to save the turtles. You're out here going, all all right let's be realistic let's figure out how we can get people to want to be a part of things rather than take away things from people all the time and that's those kinds of voices because some you know how it is sometimes sometimes you get people who may have the right intentions with conservation efforts and they're like we have to stop we have to sell our houses live in they like yeah people aren't going to listen to that no but we got to – I want to bring through the people.

Starting point is 03:02:46 I want to bring through the Paul Watsons of the world who have been there on the front line. I want to bring through the Paul Roselies of the world and the Ryan Tates of the world who are doing it. I want to talk with these people because also let's call it what it is. At the end of the day, we sit down for a few hours. We do a podcast. It's probably going to end up being two today with how long we're talking. But like I sit down with any of these people the people who are listening they also get entertainment out of it yeah and when you mix entertainment with a good cause great things happen period end of story yeah

Starting point is 03:03:14 i mean in the last year we've seen such an uptick and again for anybody that's just tuning in now or just hitting this as a clip jungle keepers the organization that I represent that I founded with the local indigenous partners that I work with in the Amazon our mission is to protect pristine Forest that is filled with millions of endangered species wild habitat heartbeats and this has actually been how we reach people we tell stories on podcasts we do interviews with you know like News, but getting the message out for every hundred thousand people, three of them are going to go, you know what? Let's support that. That's it. And then you get three people. And some of those people are single moms who have two kids and they

Starting point is 03:03:53 go, you know what? I got a message from a mother. She said, I'm a single mother. I can't give you guys more than $5 a month, but I'm going to give you guys $5 a month because my kids love wildlife and we love your Instagram. And I'm like, I'll try to curse less. I was like, shit. No, you're fine. No, I know. But those were some of the coolest comments on our last episode. Those are some of the most amazing things. People like, I don't have a lot of money, but I just gave $10 to Jungle Keepers because of this.

Starting point is 03:04:17 I'm like, that's all you got to do. Thank you. Because I remember growing up, I've been on both sides of it. I remember being like, you know, eight, nine, 10, 12, fifteen years old and seeing the the heartbreaking commercials on tv where they'd have like you know sarah mclaughlin and a dying polar bear on her oh my god oh my god and i'd have to leave the room you know like it really affected me like holy shit and they'd be like you know polar bears are gonna die unless you send us twenty dollars and get this stuffed animal and i was like but where is the money going you know what i mean? That was always the hang up to me. And honestly, so many people come to me and they go,

Starting point is 03:04:49 how do I know where it's going? What was the first, when we had the, I like to call it the great chicken Pete summit of 2022. You, me and Ryan, the night before we recorded with him, what was the first thing I asked you at the table? I looked at both of you and I asked you one by one, the same question. I don't remember.

Starting point is 03:05:04 You'll remember it when I tell you. Tell me i said okay i wave a magic wand how much money do you need to solve the problem you are currently working on you immediately both had a number for me at the time and then i said okay i give you that money where exactly does it go you both had a full answer right there to the point. This is exactly what it is. This is where the cause will go. And here's how much we might have left over to attack the next thing. So many people can't do that with their different causes. Well, because I think a lot of times it's not problem and solution based.

Starting point is 03:05:39 It's sympathy based. Yes. For example. Yes. I mean, I just came back out of the jungle and everybody's sharing. I had to, I had to throw my phone because the shit that people were sharing from like the war stuff that people were sharing,

Starting point is 03:05:53 I'm sure you've seen the same shit. It's like, Hey, this is, this has to be the first time that footage like this has come in history. Like where we can just like, we're sitting here seeing this footage and it's like, we are suddenly so connected to everything.

Starting point is 03:06:06 Yeah. And so a lot of people, what I see is like people latch onto these causes where it's like, you know, we have to protect the environment. Well, what environment? Which part of the environment? Do you want to protect the river? Do you want to protect the air? Do you want to protect birds?

Starting point is 03:06:19 What do you want? Yes. What environment? That's too broad. Let's save the earth from what? Good luck. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:06:27 That's why I enjoy the Jordan Peters thing where he goes, make your bed. Because half the people haven't made their bed and they're complaining about what world leaders are doing to protect the world. And it's like, if you start with that, by that logic though, if you look at, okay, I want to do something to make things better. Well, what things do you want to make better? And then you go, you look in your own backyard and it's like a lot of the people doing very inspiring conservation work. And I try to stick with the things that I know. You see people planting native species of plants.

Starting point is 03:06:56 And why is that so important? Bird migrations, hummingbird migrations, insect migrations, the bees, the monarchs. There are animals moving all across the landscape transporting seeds and nutrients we depend on them and as we build roads and bridges and towns and cities it gets in the way of that so just the simple act of learning what species grow in your region because people you know harried people come to me and they go what can we do the whole world is dying we want to do something it's like start in your backyard chances are you got kids and a job start in your backyard if you can send money to jungle keepers i can promise you that that money is going to go directly

Starting point is 03:07:32 to protecting the amazon and we'll send you updates but if you can't do that start in your backyard don't buy products that that harm the environment vote with your wallet and do something that helps native wildlife. And I always tell people like, um, instead of having a cornfield, what about wildflowers? Like, it's like very simple stuff. If you look at the amount of life, like up in the Hudson Valley, my parents have some acres and just the amount of bird life, the amount of foxes. I know where a coyote lives now. And I go hang with him sometimes he like he'll cross he'll cross my you hang out with a coyote i mean like i've i can be in the same space what do you do

Starting point is 03:08:09 like pull up and say hey buddy how you doing usually it's checkers dude they love checkers they love what no fuck you i bring a board game no um no but it's like if you if you can learn you know you you look at a piece of land that's the other funny thing about back to animal intelligence where you look at like, you look at a stand of trees and you're like, ah, it's some trees. You keep walking and like, oh, shit. Yeah. It's like birds living all through there. There's trees that have been totally, you see all the holes from the woodpeckers eating grubs out of them. And then it's like, this is where there's a fox den.

Starting point is 03:08:40 It's like the forest is just filled with stuff. You just don't realize. We're so, it's so difficult for is just filled with stuff you just don't realize we're so it's so difficult for us to see this stuff takes scientists and people in hides with cameras like you know camera traps for months and months and months to find where these animals live but then you got to communicate it well and that's what you do great it's what i try to do it's what i spend all my time doing a great job let's let's take a break. I think this is going to be the end of podcast one. I want to come back, talk about your whole journey into the Amazon at the beginning when you were first going in with JJ and Emma, how you got connected, that whole story. I think that's really important to go through.

Starting point is 03:09:18 And then I have a million other questions about some of the things going on in the Amazon. So we will see you guys for the next episode. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe. Hit that notification bell. So you find out when the next one's coming out like this video as well. And we'll see you for round two. Also, if you haven't seen Paul's previous episode with me from November, 2022, that link is at the top of the description. So check that out. And finally, if you're not following me over on Instagram, you can get me on my personal page at Julian D. Dory and on the podcast page for daily content at Julian Dory podcast.

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