Julian Dorey Podcast - 😳 [VIDEO] - Paul Rosolie EXPOSES Ancient Amazon's Uncontacted Tribes • #124

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Paul Rosolie is an explorer, author, award-winning wildlife filmmaker, and “real-life Tarzan.” For much of the past 17 years, Paul has lived deep in the Amazon rainforest protecting endangered species and trees from poachers, loggers, and the foreign nations funding them. His 2014 book, “Mother of God” is revered by many among the int’l conservation community (including Jane Goodall) –– and his wildlife work has stretched across 4 continents. Donate To Paul’s Organization, JungleKeepers: https://www.junglekeepers.com/ Follow Paul on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulrosolie/ ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Paul Reveals the Truth about getting anaconda on Discovery Channel 18:49 - Paul’s origins with the Amazon; There are no laws in the Rainforest 36:05 - How Paul’s friend was almost murdered in the Amazon; The Uncontacted Tribes 50:10 - Why you can’t replace the trees foreign governments are cutting in the Rainforest; Who’s buying & who’s funding? 1:02:09 - Paul experience with the insane fires burning down the Amazon every day; The Rainforest’s tipping point 1:19:12 - What we can do to solve the Amazon Rainforest problem; What Paul’s org (JungleKeepers) does 1:34:06 - Paul tells insane stories about the Uncontacted Tribes 1:42:10 - Why the “Man-Made Amazon Rainforest” arguments are BS 1:55:51 - Why the loggers are well-funded; The Amazon Rainforest is eerie once you enter it (for real) 2:05:43 - Paul recounts living off the land; Crazy Species in the Amazon; Paul raised an Anteater 2:18:04 - Paul & Julian discuss their friend Ryan Tate (Episode 117) & his organization VETPAW 2:29:03 - Paul explains how Congo and South America used to be attached millions of years ago; The Boreal Forest in Russia 2:38:49 - Julian brings up the farthest north inhabited places; Paul tells a story about running out of food in the middle of the Amazon 2:54:38 - The Lost City of Z; The Amazon’s Secret Pyramids ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up guys, 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. that are out there. And so he'd leave them a machete and some bananas and they'd come take it. And then after like a year, he would start being there when they came to take it. And then after some time, he was actually able to interact with them. And he couldn't, he could only speak a few words of their language. This one-

What do they speak? They're called the Mashkupiro tribe. And so they speak some sort of, some dialect of the Yine language. But this guy who was interacting with them, one day they found him, they call it porcupine. Arrows sticking up out of his body, like several arrows. We don't know why they found him they call it porcupined arrows sticking up out of his body like several arrows we don't know why they killed him paul rosalie good to see you man welcome back thanks you were here once yeah i was just here

with ryan from vetpa and we i i didn't even know you were coming that weekend and so i would have just done both that weekend but i like how this worked out because now we put out that podcast we spread them out a little bit because you guys are doing really cool shit on opposite ends of the globe as well yeah and listening to you guys that day i learned a lot about ryan i got to see how you roll that was cool i actually enjoyed just listening to that that was nuts yeah it was actually it was a different vibe because we had you left the studio after like 40 minutes and we're sitting right out there but we had like four people in here at one point and then we had on the side like the commentary i've never had that before where like someone can like add something in there. It's fucking awesome.

So the question I had asked on that one right when we introduced you at the front because you were sitting in here was what the fuck makes you want to get eaten by an anaconda? I really need this cleared up and everyone else does too. got and that's that's a perfect lead-in because it's so crazy that that has become such a such a huge thing because i have spent the last 17 years my entire adult life doing one thing trying to protect the tributary of the amazon rainforest that's it and so when discovery channel came in i think i was early 20s maybe 22 24 years old and they said look um we want to do a documentary about anacondas and i said cool we'll show you all the science we'll show you how ecologically relevant they are we'll do everything and they said that's awesome they said but it's not enough they're like we want we want more and i was like what do you want like anacondas with tits on them like how do you want to take this and they were

like we they were they were they were flying me to la they were talking about it a lot and then finally one guy goes you know how many people have been eaten by an anaconda and i said i mean the only person i personally know that got eaten by an anaconda was my my friend's father-in-law was he alive no he got eaten by an anaconda i was gonna say i didn't know if he did it like you know only one person did what i did no he got he got legitimately real world nature eaten he went down to the river he was drunk at night and he tried to get a drink never came back they looked for him everybody was partying in the morning they went looking for him real world nature eaten. He went down to the river. He was drunk at night and he tried to get a drink. Never came back. They looked for him. Everybody was partying. In the morning, they went looking for him and there was an anaconda and they can't dive when they've just eaten. So there's this huge anaconda with a human shaped lump in its body. So he actually got eaten

by a snake. What an awful way to go. That's a terrible way to go. I've come extremely close to that. Once I got wrapped, we were trying to study the snake. We're trying to measure it. I got wrapped. And the thing is you grab it by the head you got to control the head and then it wraps my arms and now my forearms are pinned together and then it wraps my shoulders and now my collarbone my shoulders are coming closer together as this snake's coils are coming in there's like a 300 pound snake how long this is about a 17 foot snake jesus huge snake we're talking like thicker than a basketball like dinner plate sized all the way down this How long? This is about a 17-foot snake. Jesus Christ. Huge snake. We're talking like thicker than a basketball, like dinner plate size all the way down. This thing's wrapped me.

I'm losing oxygen. I'm trying to scream for my friends. Nothing's coming out. And so these guys are running in just as my collarbones are about to crack. They grab the tail. And the only way to unwrap it is to grab the tail. I still had the head, but I was completely out of control. If they didn't show up, that snake would have crushed every bone in my body and then gone back in the water. He wasn't trying to kill me. Holy shit. But he was going to remove the tail i still had the head but i was completely out of control if they didn't show up that snake would have crushed every bone in my body and then gone back in the water he wasn't trying to kill me but he was going to remove the threat i mean as as the researcher i had to

control the snake and so he was viewing that as that i was attacking him she was viewing it actually was a female anaconda the females they have sexual dimorphism so the females are significantly larger than the males with anacondas really i didn I didn't know anything about that. But this wasn't your idea. I didn't know that. This was their idea. Well, I was telling them all this shit, and then they came in and they went, well, what if you prove to everybody that it can be done?

And I was like, why do we need to prove that it can be done? And they were like, how great would that be? And so then they started this conversation where they were like, look, if you get eaten by an anaconda, we'll give you a two-hour special, multi-million dollar budget. You could talk about all the nature tree hugger shit you want to talk about but at the end you got to do this stunt and they go it's just hiding the vegetables he goes you bring people in for the meat and the cheese he goes but just hide the

hide the research he goes we'll give it to them i said okay i said fuck it i'll do it now you you went in there though this is the crazy part about the strength of the anaconda. Obviously, it's not like, for people listening who haven't seen this, maybe I can, we'll see if I can put it in the corner of the screen if they're not going to demonetize it. But, like, you're not going in there just like, hey, I'm here, eat me. You're going in there with, like, a full suit and everything. Like, what did they put you in?

They put me in this crazy-ass, like, Kevlar suit with a breathing apparatus and communication device. And so I had oxygen involved in case the snake actually ate me. The stupidity of this stunt cannot be overstated. This is a moronic idea that we knew there was a one in a million chance it was going to work. And it was mostly to bring in the viewers to teach them about the ecology of the Amazon. Because how do you make protecting trees sexy? How do you get the public to pay attention to the fact that we're destroying the natural world so this was done out of pure frustration and insanity i said if you this is what it takes to get those ratings to get all

those people to look then i'll do it did you talk with or did they have you talk with like experts who said here's the percentage chance that even with our team all there to come in here's the chance you don't make it out alive like was there anything like that oh my God yeah they went through all of this stuff um you know and the thing is with a snake no snake wants to harm you you know if you're dealing with a kid if there was a king Cobra in the room right now really we would be in no danger really absolutely not rattlesnakes have a rattle so they can rattle and say don't step on me Cobra has a hood so it can hood up and say, back off. Don't make me do this. And that's what they're saying. That's why they have those warning systems. And so an anaconda, if it's

in the room, it's going to find the darkest spot. It's going to look for water and it's going to go there. They're not aggressive animals. They don't usually view humans as prey. It has to be the right situation. It's like when people get attacked by coyotes. It's like, well, it has to be starving coyotes in a situation where they're, you know, they don't have any other food option. And so. A question though, why wouldn't they view humans as prey? Because I know less about what an anaconda likes, but I do know the whole concept of they try. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.

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they stick it in their stomach and then it can last them for months. So what's not to love about a human? I mean, look, an anaconda is a very simple animal. It's going to sit in a swamp and wait for predators. And actually, we've been doing research in the Amazon that has shown us that they're not just ambush predators. They actually are going after prey. They're going along stream systems into the forest looking for predators. And actually, we've been doing research in the Amazon that has shown us that they're not just ambush predators. They actually are going after prey. They're going along stream systems into the forest looking for prey. But an anaconda has grown up eating what?

It's eating fish, it's eating crocodiles, caiman, it's eating birds, it's eating small mammals. And the thing with anacondas is they start at a very small length. You're talking about like 16 inches. You're talking about a little snake that a heron could eat. And baby caiman are eating the anacondas. And so they're actually feeding the ecosystem as well as being predators in the ecosystem. And so most animals have a certain niche where they exist. So like a jaguar is going to eat jaguar food. A bird is going to eat fish, insects, whatever. An anaconda is starting small, and then they're turning into this apex predator. So they have this disproportionately massive effect on the entire food chain of the amazon how long does it take them to go from baby anaconda to say like 15 feet or something depends how much food they have if you feed a

baby anaconda regularly every week that anaconda starting on frogs and then going up to rabbits and then going up to capybara and then pulling down a taper once in a while i mean that anaconda is going to grow into a dragon wow very quick especially if it's a female the males you get like 11 feet females you're talking about 23 26 feet like huge snakes and yours was still 17 right my ours was said we caught a we caught an 18 18 foot six inch snake That's a 6 meter snake, 220 pounds, and she was on an empty stomach. Okay, so you guys went and caught it. In the Amazon, yeah. And then you put it, like walk me through

what they did. You put it in a space and then you just walked in with pig's blood all over the suit or something? No. We went down to the Amazon, we did our research, we caught this huge snake, and then it became clear to us that we're like, we're not going to put a wild animal through this thing, so we wanted to work in a controlled environment so the end of that show and this is where the controversy all came up was that the end of that show was filmed

in the u.s they just they had tight shots it's total bullshit i mean discovery channel they've had documentaries trying to convince people that mermaids are real and so at the end of this most hollywood thing ever it was absolutely awesome um awful where in the u.s la i forget what state we're in i want to say like tennessee or something so they just brought in anaconda they just brought in this huge anaconda that some guy named larry had in his basement i'm not i'm not making this up i'm not making this up i wish i was and then they're like dude get suited up it takes like an hour to get suited up and then this poor snake's laying in the mud and it's like i want to go say i want i want to go like relax a snake wants to go be hidden be safe and uh you know i walk up to

it and the snake's just like i have no interest in this like i picked up the snake and she's you know she's flicking her tongue she's like what's going on and i was like hey nothing and i was like do you want to eat me like it was just the stupidest thing in the world so what i was planning was that you're wearing a full suit You're wearing a full suit though. You're wearing a full suit. You're wearing this crazy suit. No. And also they wanted to have like a link between the head and the shoulders so that the snake

could slip over my body. Again, what are the odds of this happening? You know? And so what it, it, it really speaks to how broken the wildlife entertainment industry is that like, we can't get ratings for a legitimate wildlife film but they'll put all of their resources into something where some guy gets eaten by a snake and then pull all of the ecological information out of that film now you were talking as you said you were miked up during this whole thing though so when you watch

the scene and of course they like dramatize all the angles and everything but it actually is like i mean you're getting fucking squeezed by now i don't know man i was in like a bulletproof suit i mean you could like you could hit me with a two by four and i would have been fine so like dealing with a snake and i mean i deal with snakes every day with my with no you hold your you know no shirt on um dealing with this with a kevlar suit and a visor and all this stuff i mean what's gonna happen but it's still it was crushing because it's so strong at one point it was wrapped around me but again this is a heavy amount of movie magic I mean there was there was not a lot of authenticity of this and that's why

when this film came when this film and I'm calling it a film when this shit came out I was supposed to do I think good morning America the next day and I watched this in my hotel room and I went I am NOT promoting this and they had one of the discovery channel handlers call me and they were like look if you're about to go on national tv and not be part of the narrative then we're going to have some legal conversations and i was like but i we had we had a bit of a thing so now i've that's i split with discovery channel after that because it was absolute bullshit because you were in there and and you sit like on the on the scene or in the scene you're like oh shit It's it has my arm pin. I got to get out was that all like I mean

It was at the point where I'd been in the suit for hours And they're like I was hours and hours in because they're like the snake doesn't care And then they're like have somebody put the snake on him. They're like lay in the mud. Let's put the snake I mean it was pathetic. It was absolutely crazy and so a few things happened um the mainstream media was pissed that i that they called it eaten alive and i didn't get eaten alive because the average person wanted to see a dude get eaten by an anaconda the pure in its mouth though right i wasn't i wasn't it never even bit it was just she never even actually bit me intentionally okay um pita was up in arms

because it was animal abuse apparently rolling on the mud with an anaconda is harming it somehow still not sure about that one and then the scientific community um in the conservation world was like this kid's clearly a moron and i lost a ton of job opportunities and like sort of professional contacts because people were like you have no no respect for animals. And so all of the, all of the research that we were doing, all the conservation work, all of the relating anacondas as an apex predator to mercury contamination in the Amazon, all that stuff got thrown out. They- That sucks. Yeah. They changed our voices to say different things on the film. I mean, yeah, it was,

we got hoodwinked hard. And then I ended up taking the shit for it being on Jimmy Kimmel. And he was like, maybe for your next stunt, you could have sex with a hippo. And I had this zinger about like, yeah, it was better than your wife. And I was like, let me just not say that. Yeah. Oh, that would have been cut from the edit for sure.

But no, it really, so I had to go out and smile for the cameras while we were just getting stripped of all the good science that we'd done. And so, yeah, that one didn't end well. But I tried. And that- You tried, yeah.

Yeah, you tried. And you hear these people, you hear like these, you know, you hear like Goggins or something talking about like, you just got to accept failure. Any CEO, they'll be like, just accept failure. I mean, Churchill said, what's the definition? You know, you got to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. And it's like, dude, I took a big swing. This was a while ago now.

This was like 2014. It was 2014 2014 but people still bring it up i just got denied for an environmental like conservation award because they i was in the final running i was in the top three people for a major award and they went are you the guy that got eaten by an anaconda and i went well yeah but and they were like no disqualified disqualified for a tv show you, this is why it's important you do shit like this. Yeah. And when people are also way bigger than me, because you have to have the narrative out there that also happens to be the truth.

I mean, yeah, that and the fact that people are tuning in to watch Discovery Channel, where they're telling people that mermaids are real. They're telling them, they're promising that a snake is gonna eat someone. Yeah. I mean, come on. We used to, when we were kids, Discovery Channel used to be something you could watch and learn from.

And I feel like that's been... When I was a kid, they had good stuff on. Come on. Maybe. Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. We used to watch Steve Irwin, Jeff Corwin. That's true. Those guys were great.

They used to have actual documentaries. I mean, I remember they had a thing. I think it was Discovery Channel. They had like Mission to Borneo. They had like, they'd go with actual scientists. And then, you know, Shark shark week they'd play stuff up but it's like the actual ridiculous like just ratings hunt yes just whoring themselves out for ratings like i am now the poster child for that i went to hollywood and learned hard um what happens when you go along with a major studio like that yeah it's kind of the it's it's

one of the downsides of of i guess capitalism in this way because you're always look even if capitalism is is a better system than the alternatives which i would absolutely agree you know there's always going to be some like some loose end that can't be tied and when you have when you have public or even private corporations that need to be able to get a bottom line in order for everyone to subsist they're going to find a way to make everything juicy and it's like look if you can make something juicy honestly fucking do it do it i'm here for it but like when you're telling me now i had no idea that was like going on for a few hours while you were filming that oh my god and like the way they made it look oh it's it's like something about that's so wrong because you are, especially like looking at your own life arc, you're somebody who is like legitimately the dude, the Tarzan down in the Amazon.

Well, I tarred and feathered myself on this one, man. I'll give you another example, though, of what we were dealing with. So we were in the Amazon and we got all of our local indigenous guys there. We have scientists from around the world. I compiled all like, you know, the A the a team of all the best people i had and uh we're like on week three or four of filming and we get this call on a sat phone in the middle of the jungle from this like producer sitting in an air-conditioned room in la when is this this is as we're filming so earlier in 2014 summer 2014 14 and uh he goes look look man we don't have a danger beat he's like we need a danger beat i was like what do you want us to do i was like we're

literally like up to our necks in the swamps in the amazon hunting for anacondas we've caught anacondas you've it's been exciting and the guy was like no no we need like a lead out to a commercial so we need you guys to look shocked and i was like yeah but these are professionals like we're not we're not actually shocked and scared we're we're in control i mean that's like asking a bunch of firemen to just freak out and run out of the building it's like we're not going to do that it's not not how we roll. It's not how we present ourselves. And they were like, basically, they hung up, we got the call back and they're like, look, we figured out a way for you guys to look shocked. And this will be a great commercial

lead out. You're traveling down the river and Paul, you discover that there are black piranha up ahead. And so you tell everyone to pull over in the boat and you pour a bucket of blood into the river and then you safely go around the piranha and i was like bro you pour a bucket of blood a bucket of blood i'm like where am i supposed to get a bucket of blood in the jungle we got that how would how would anacondas uh so how would piranhas hurt us if we're in a boat and i was like this is fucking stupid i was like i'm not doing it and they went we'll shut down production oh so in the end they made us act out this ridiculous scene where where we had to pretend that we were being shocked by an electric eel this is the stuff that they're feeding people

well i mean the crazy thing is i'm sitting here and as you're telling me it like some of it just sounds more shocking than the last thing but But when you sit back, like everyone listening right now, this is the reality TV age. Like none of this should surprise us. It's just something about the fact that it's like raw documentary supposed to be content like in nature with like animals and shit. You don't think like, oh, the Kardashians. But that's literally what it is. It's literally the same thing. It's the Kardashians in the jungle.

They literally at one point they were like, hey, could you guys have a a little can you turn that argument up a little bit we have like an argument about like whether you use like a piece of gear you know could you would you guys would you guys ever like really argue about that and we were like theoretically i don't know the guy's like just do a little more get pissed and storm off we're like no just no no no you got the dude with like the fake british accent from america tied around his neck like i need some more drama it was tropic thunder this motherfucker's dead wow so i mean again it's it's great to start with that because i think that encaptures the the the fact that the battles go far beyond just the awareness because you never know like you can when you're passionate about something like you are you're gonna look for every possible angle you can get and that's

all you were doing here and so yeah let's dispel some of that shit now i think that's a great clip right there to go through that for people to see like oh this is what paul rosalie's about you know yeah because it's still that that definitely the the stigma of that still follows me around but yes when you go into it it's how much burning forest do i have to see how many dead animals smoking on the ground that used to be the amazon rainforest do i have to see before i come just screaming what do you do when you're at the top of your lungs and no one's listening we've been screaming for decades about this i grew up i went to the bronx zoo the with the thing that propelled me into what i do today is that i saw those pictures in the bronx zoo and they said when there's a road it kills a rainforest is that i saw those pictures in the bronx zoo and they said when

there's a road it kills a rainforest and they showed all the pictures of the timber coming down and they said these environments might not be there by the time you're grown up and that's what sent me i dropped out of high school i got my ged i went to college and i started going to the amazon rainforest at 18 years old i was going to say like how how does a sicilian from brooklyn end up down in the Amazon I guess that's a simple one day I was on 13th Avenue but you were just passionate about it yeah you wanted to learn more it sounds like in the nature versus nurture it's hard to say because when I was a kid I was that kid that like my parents would be like what do you want to do this weekend I'm talking

like three years old and I'd be like I want to go to the stream like i want to go catch frogs i want to see snakes i want to go um so they would take me to do all that stuff so they nurtured my nature and that's cool yeah it was amazing new york city i mean it's like you know yeah and so then we lived in jersey for a while growing up and so i was in like upstate new york and in in i'd like to go to the forest on uh like summer thunderstorm days because it looked dark like jungly and then as a teenager i was going out into the into the forest and i would bring a steak like i'd bring like a i'd save up i'd get like a ribeye and i'd bring my hunting knife and my golden retriever no no shelter one match and that's the whole weekend and you got to just build

shelter find your way survive in the forest and you have your dog and so it's fun you were into you were clearly like yeah so i was yes so i was in survival situations i was tracking animals from an extremely young age i'd say from like 11 years old i was out on my own so once again though when you were 18 was it you didn't you got into a program or you just waited to go to college and went down there first or what was the no when you're that age you especially it's it's amazing how different it is now 17 years later but um at that age i was trying i was trying to look for the most um official way of going down i don't want to go down to like costa rica as a tourist i wanted to go to the amazon rainforest and be a part of either research or some other project that was actually important and so i asked everybody and

everybody said no you got to be like a grad student to do this and you're 17 years old they're like go finish high school and i'm like i'm never going back you can't make me um how much did you know like about the amazon before you went the stuff i'd seen on documentaries i mean the stuff that you know david attenborough and steve irwin and you know it's it's you you you know they have those rainforest books in the library, like those big, you have like Franz Lanting and all these photographers that would put out the rainforest books.

And we just look at them like, oh my God, look at the mist coming off the jungle and look at these species and the arrow frogs and anacondas, jaguars. And there's always that thing looming over your head when you love rainforests is like, is it even gonna be there by the time I get to see it? And so for me, I was a kid that I hated school, wasn't good in school,

was constantly, constantly getting in trouble. And so I just, I mean, my parents were so supportive. They said, look, you can leave after your sophomore year, get your GED, which for all the other kids that don't like school, want to get out in the world, you don't have to do it. Oh, you left high school after sophomore year i left high school i never never never went back never told them they were calling us um for junior year they were like yo you're not showing up it was like we never even said anything my apologies if you said that i was just making sure i had your video because i realized it was on the other file so i was a little out there for a

second but no yeah so wow that i didn't realize you went like that was even no i just left shit i was just like i i felt like from from middle school to high school i was like i am so bored from sitting at a desk and i've been in trouble so many times and i was reading all these books of people like jane goodall and all these incredible people that teddy roosevelt that like go out there and do stuff and i was like at what point does that start for me you know like on the weekends i can go camping camping in Harriman State Park up by myself. But if I walk for three more hours, I come out the other side and I'm still in suburbia. And I'm like, at what point can I go to a place in nature where you can drink the water?

Where is it like still pristine? Like to me, it was like we've, we've, if you look at the East Coast of the US, I mean, it's all humans, you know? Yeah. And so I wanted to go to a place that was like truly wild and when you look at everywhere the amazon rainforest is the biggest contiguous rainforest on earth the western amazon has more biodiversity than anywhere else on earth and so what for people out there when you say biodiversity are you referring to pretty much everything as far as like plants and species. Yep, the whole ecosystem.

So you have the tropical Andes, which is like the cloud forests at the edge of the Andes Mountains. And then you have the lowland tropical Amazon rainforest. And when those two mega biodiverse biomes meet, you have more plants and animals than has ever existed, not just on earth, but in the entire fossil record. So we're alive at the most species-rich moment

in terrestrial biology it's mind blowing I always tell people like you look at like you watch the movie Avatar and it's it's like that yeah like you literally there are giant trees they are connected by mycelium networks and there's animals pollinating all this stuff it is the most complex ecosystem you can imagine it's absolutely mind-blowing and it's a place so few people go it's it's like kind of like that i don't it's not forgotten because people do know the word rainforest and they say it and don't really think about it here but it's not like there's not as much of an emphasis on like crazy tourism at least like from the u.s to go down there it would be

really cool if people had the opportunity to do that yeah i mean we do that that's how i started i went down and met the local guys and then we started bringing tourism because at the time they were like this is how we can work not as loggers right you know you're born down there you only do a few things you're either a gold miner you're a logger um or you work in ecotourism and so i mean you have to pretty much the jungle is the resource and you have to find a way to make a living off the jungle and so i started they were like look we're trying to protect this little piece of forest and they're like but we don't have access to gringos we're always out in the jungle so i was like you want gringos i was like it's like new york city got some gringos i was like i can bring you people and so i started going back and telling my friends stories about i'm in the jungle and this jaguar was smelling

my head while i was asleep at night and i you know an anaconda and we caught a caiman and people like what are you talking about i was like come with me i was like i will show you yeah i was like this place will change your life what what i really want to do today is not just educate on the actual rainforest and what it's comprised of and stuff like that and i'll be putting maps in the corner i'll point out like when you're talking sometimes when i'm putting one in the corner for people to see on the screen but like you know the the whole thing is it's almost like i i love how you use the avatar example because it almost has like a like a breathing life of its own as a whole like that's how i visualize it in my head and i think what a

lot of people don't realize is that there's like three or four thousand Indigenous communities down there that live on their own away from the various nations They're in a lot of people don't and again Well, I'll put I'll start with the first map right now A lot of people don't even know like where the rainforest is fully comprised like which countries it's in It's in everybody thinks it's just in Brazil countries or something. There's nine countries in the amazon yeah so what's crazy is that the rhetoric that we are used to hearing from growing up that perhaps clearly we don't put enough emphasis on is that oh my god it's going to be gone or like it's burning and or they're they're cutting down trees and we're going to

lose this ecosystem what people don't really get and i'm also speaking for myself here is exactly like to what effect it is now gone because we're like well it's still there they were telling us it wasn't there 10 years ago yeah but it's burning fast and also why that's so important like you blew my mind when we were out to dinner the first time you were here with ryan talking about the use of trees like in architecture and stuff and how it's not just as simple as yeah just plant a new tree at all yeah um i mean there's there's so much to unpack in the questions you just asked but it's right now the amazon rainforest i mean it's producing it's one of the largest physical features on our planet let's start there you look at planet earth it's something you can see from space it's huge it dominates the top of south america

and you have more plants and animals there than anywhere else you have medicines coming out of there you have endangered species you have all this hardwood you have a river system that holds a fifth of our planet's fresh water yeah so that's producing all of this moisture that's in the clouds that's stabilizing our global climate so in terms of things because the amazon is keeping carbon in the ground the amazon rainforest is breathing in all that and so you have this major climate regulation system that comes standard with life on earth and we're like let's just destroy it and they're doing the same thing in indonesia they're doing the same thing in the congo it's just it's so tempting to cut down these trees

and use them for hardwood floors for whatever and it's like these get exported to china to america to europe we're losing one of the most important things we have and like literally the cure for malaria came out of the amazon rainforest um we we have so many medicines flowing through these trees i mean i've been with the late local guys for 17 years they don't go to the pharmacy they go to the trees there used to be an apple campaign they used to say we have a we have an app for that um whatever you need we got an app for that and it's like my guy down there jj anything that happens you're like i got an eye infection he's like i have a sap for that right he'll take you into the forest and cut a tree and whether he has to boil it or

mix it with something else but like they have compounds and this is not like you got to believe in it for it to work this is these are chemical compounds flowing through the trees there's one tree in the amazon that's its sap is so rich in hydrocarbons that you could cut this tree collect the sap pour it into a diesel motor and the engine will run holy shit like it's there's some wild shit down there we found saps that murder infections like you cannot have an infection you cannot have that bacteria in a petri dish it will destroy it and it's like infections are a major problem in the health industry like across america i think that i heard something like i don't want to get it wrong but it's like i heard something that next to car accidents infections kill more americans

every year like it's a major thing now like and especially that we're getting antibiotic resistant infections like MRSA people are like we're constantly at a battle where our antibiotics have to combat the ability of bacteria to adapt and so it's like when you have compounds like this that murder this stuff it's like that's a major thing these are medical breakthroughs hidden in the Amazon waiting to be uncovered as we're burning it down and why are people obviously there's trees being cut down everywhere I'm not naive but why is it so heavy in the amazon or like where another rainforest is in like the congo and stuff like that like why do of all the places where loggers have to like say all right we're gonna cut down a fuck ton why are they going to

these places i think the reason i mean look we've lost 95 of the original tree cover that was in the north in north america before before Europeans reached the continent. 95%. Like, good luck finding old growth in North America. I believe that. I mean, they pretty much just came to the continent and shaved it. You know, and you have like a few patches that were protected by people that could see this happening, like the sequoia trees and the redwoods. But in rainforests, what happens is you have these vast areas that are completely impenetrable.

And so a lot of times like you're past law enforcement, you're, it's so remote and it becomes this wilderness area. And so when you get a road going through there, people see it as just a free for all, whether or not somebody owns that land. It's so vast that like when we're down there in the Amazon, like you, someone will cut a road, like for instance, Brazil and China and the world bank just cut the trans-amazon highway through the amazon scar right across the amazon rainforest a road from sao paulo all the way out to lima i'm gonna guess that was kind of run by china yeah and that was i thought i believe the the former head of the united nations called it the single most detrimental human cause project on the environment ever the single most detrimental human-caused project on the environment ever.

The single most damaging project to the environment in human history. Funded by the CCP? Get on set. And so now what we're seeing is all these offshoot roads, all these offshoot roads. And so now for the first time, people can get into the rainforest.

And oh, look, we got chainsaws now. So in history, you couldn't actually, I mean, if me or you was dropped in a rainforest right now it's like you can't cut down a tree that's three times as thick as this room yeah with a machete no but when you got a six foot chainsaw and you could do some damage and so now they could take down these huge trees and get tens of thousands of dollars for an individual hardwood tree you take down a spanish cedar you take down a mahogany, those are big money. And why do they want to build that road? That's what I really want to know.

Well, if you build the road, you can extract all this resources. You can take out Brazil nuts, you can go, you can, well, you can cut down the trees, you can get the timber, you can cut down the trees, take the timber, burn everything else, and then start a cattle farm. And then if that doesn't work, you can suck up the land in the amazon in the west amazon the gold particles are in the sand so in order to mine for gold you have to cut the forest burn the forest and then suck up the earth with water and run it through a sluice and have mercury to bind the gold in like sediment and then you have to burn off the mercury, releasing it into the atmosphere and you get a very small quantity of poor quality gold. And so they are destroying-

That's way different than a lot of places. It's way different. You're not finding nuggets of gold. And so you can actually look at the Amazon from space and see these huge scars right in the West Amazon where gold miners are just destroying the forest. And it's not even like cutting down the forest and then leaving.

They're cutting down the forest and then destroying the earth. And it's polluted with mercury so now that mercury is polluted with mercury with mercury because they're using mercury to bind the gold out of the soil oh shit yes and so why do people have this access to mercury we don't know i mean it's literally the the the photos of this it's like an absolute war yeah let me see if i can pull one up while you're talking yeah type in um like gold mining amazon rainforest i mean the peruvian government went in and tried to get control and basically the cops got turned around because it was it was a zone they couldn't enter when you say okay so you and i have talked so i think i

understand that but even i might not when you say it's a zone they couldn't enter, is that because it's an official indigenous territory and because the landscape doesn't allow for human beings to be able to navigate it? No, it's a zone they couldn't enter because when you go into these gold mining zones, you're outside of sort of the jurisdiction of anywhere. I mean, like society breaks down. I mean, what are the rules of society?

There's the things we agree on and then we all abide abide by when you're out in the middle of the rainforest it's who's got bigger guns and how many of us are right and so apply law yeah it's it's literally natural law it's who's got more firepower and so the police literally are scared to go into these regions because they're owned by mafias of gold miners and we're talking about child trafficking for brothels in there they steal children out of the indigenous communities and bring them to the mining areas and then when by mafias of gold miners and we're talking about child trafficking for brothels in there they steal children out of the indigenous communities and bring them to the mining areas and then when the police go the cops can't do anything about this the cops will get shot the cops will go in there and get murdered they find people are the the lawyer i work with in the amazon his father

stood up to the gold miners publicly and was murdered for it one of my close friends who i used to go fishing with all the time stood up to the loggers and was and was sort for it. Fuck. One of my close friends, who I used to go fishing with all the time, stood up to the loggers and was sort of vocal against gold miners. They shot him in the back of the head while he was like tying his shoes. Who are these gold miners? Like, where are they from? What are they about?

They're local people who have no other resources. So that's where it gets interesting. It's like you come down, I came to the Amazon because I wanted to protect wildlife. And you end up having to deal with the social impacts because trees trees aren't going to cut themselves down and you know when ryan was here it's like they're trying to stop people from shooting elephants like well elephants aren't going to go extinct

they were here a long time before we were unless we murder them every day right in the hundreds of thousands and it's like we this the whole thing with the environment is like people like we're losing species we're losing our forests we're losing our ocean we're not losing anything we're doing it we're allowing other people to murder this shit it's not the earth isn't dying it's being killed but the i want to stay on this coal miners thing example for a second and by the way is that what you were looking for that image behind you that stuff but no i'm gonna send you pictures pictures because they tried to go in there, and there was like a police effort where they got the military. And they went in with like military, and you see these guys in like full swag here. Okay, got it.

But what we're talking about, though, is that's what it looks like, though, when they're done with the mercury and the gold. I was just there with ABC News last year. I'll put that in the corner of the screen so people can see it so what what i'm what i'm seeing on that picture is that used to be a densely tree populated rainforest and now it's this that used to be the amazon rainforest and now when we were there there was a sandstorm like if that doesn't make you feel like you're in a fucking post-apocalyptic movie we were in the amazon rainforest with the news and a sandstorm blows up and there's tornadoes of dust in the most important part of the amazon rainforest like people don't realize how bad it is down there wow and it's it all all of this is is people that need better jobs so i went down there with the

ecotourism stuff and i we went i went with a guy from national geographic we were going up this river for anacondas actually and And we were with this gold miner. This whole story just blows my mind. Everyone said we were going to get murdered because we were going up river with gold miners. And so while we were up there, the Peruvian Navy actually came down in full fatigues, you know, rifles. They blow up this guy's gold mining barge. I mean, the explosion was terrifying.

There was chunks of metal everywhere. And I said to this guy, I was like, what are you going to do now? I was like, I mean, the explosion was terrifying. There was chunks of metal everywhere. And I said to this guy, I was like, what are you going to do now? I was like, I mean, we're hanging out with the illegal gold miners. We're sitting there and he's like wiping his forehead. And he was like, I guess I'm going to go get another motor. And I was like, what if you just did what we've been doing? I was like, why don't you like, we could bring people.

You live in a beautiful patch of forest. I was like, we could show people this forest. You'd actually earn more money as a conservationist than you would as a gold miner. So he switched. He built a whole lodge with his own two hands. We started bringing him people from all over the world and everything was going great until the gold miner showed up at 4 a.m. with their rifles, with masks over their faces. They dragged him out of bed. They put him on the floor. They beat the shit out of him. They took his kids out of the house and they said with a gun to his head they said say goodbye to your father this is my friend this is a guy i've worked with for years and he stood up to the gold miners and now he's got a gun against his head and so he said please don't shoot me in front of my kids please so they stand him up they tie his hands and they bring

him on the boat and they start driving up river so his family as far as they know that's the last time they're going to see this guy he's driving upriver with the gold miners his hands are tied behind his back and then they start hearing the sound of another motor and so this guy's thinking how do i get out of this situation his name is borian he's going i'm going to die today how do i get out of this situation and so um as they're going upriver they hear the sound of another thing they have to start preparing things in the front of the boat to actually try and escape from the Peruvian armed forces that are coming downriver for the gold miners. He goes, just untie my hands. He goes, I'll drive the boat for you because we all have to get away.

And so this like kind of united them for a second. They at least let him – they tied his hands in the front. So now he's driving the boat. He crashed the boat, jumped in the river, floated downriver, and then for three days survived in the forest with his hands tied. He was like scratching him on vines. I get a phone call that this guy's missing. And we had to get support from the U.S. to send a rescue crew up there. Holy fuck.

He made it out by the skin of his teeth. He had a rifle against his head. They were ready to kill him because he stood up to the gold miners but what's the craziest part about all this is before you even get in that story you're talking about something we're going to talk more about which is that you can there's a way in conservation which isn't exactly you know a wall street high-end executive job there's a way to pay these people more than they're making in the gold mining because they're trying to subsist and survive and make money yeah but those are the people who you're talking about who are doing the potentially killing here so who's funding them

in the case of the gold miners nobody in the case of the loggers literally chinese companies have come into into the amazon and they've given them the heavy machinery that they need to go in and build these roads to bulldoze trees and then to extract that timber and take it to asian markets and they're cool with the loggers don't ask don't tell if you're killing people that are getting in their way they don't care what they don't care they don't care at all they just say go in there and do it now here's the thing how are the gold miners not rich though if no one funds because they're the bottom level they're pulling this out of the out of the earth they're working i mean and because it's distributed in the sand the more you work the more earth you suck up into that hose the more you

earn as a gold miner and so the it forces them to work endlessly day and night and so and then when they go to sell it they get a small price for it and then it's only when it hits the international market that it actually goes up in price the guys on the ground are getting it's like blood diamond yeah you know the guys digging with the shovels in the pit, they're not making money. They're just doing it because their family's starving and they have no other option. And then when something threatens that, it's like, well, desperation breeds hostility where they're going, this is my family. And so what we've, what the story taught me was, you know, by befriending one of these gold miners, by working with him, this guy was a great guy. He's so much fun. I mean, we bring tourists to see him, you know,

he's involved in research now. He's actually an activist against the gold miners because he sees that his life is better now that he's not doing that anymore. And then the repercussions come. And in the Amazon, they are murdering activists. I mean, all over the world, environmental activists. If you stand up to the powers that are sucking these resources, you're standing up to major global forces. And you can't – I mean, you talked about like, for example, a Peruvian military team coming into the forest to attack these guys or whatever. But the problem at the core of it is that so often these – this stuff is happening in places where they can't even get to because it's too dangerous but the people that live there like these gold miners these aren't the indigenous people no um most of the indigenous so this is an interesting um nuance yes and a lot of people because we have a ranger team now and and people really focus on our indigenous rangers but

there's a lot of people in the region that are Peruvians. They just live in the region. They're not from an indigenous community though. And so there's a difference there in terms of the people that are from a truly indigenous community or the people that are just part of the population of the country. And so there's a little bit of a thing, you know, I'm an American, but I'm not a native American.

And so like for understanding that, most of the indigenous communities are much more conservation minded i mean indigenous communities are by far the best stewards of the rainforest because they don't speak regular languages and stuff some of them do some of them yeah some of them are very i mean the i think it's the kayapo i mean there's definitely some some groups in other countries where they're running complex tourism things they're doing huge efforts with conservation these people know what they have and they want to protect their land and they live on it and they depend on it and they know that having fish in the

river means that they'll always have food and that keeping the trees growing means that they'll always have fruit and it's like they understand that simple thing that if you can breathe the air and drink the water life is possible and they don't have obviously electricity they don't have guns and stuff like that ah at this point most of them do they do most of them do but the one you were telling me about then i guess is an exception where you were telling me another story about like being shot by a bow and arrow yeah yeah that's different okay so there's some that are like that though oh yeah that's the uncontacted. I mean, if you want to like split hairs, I mean, are they uncontacted tribes

if they've raided other camps and stolen a machete or had some sort of contact? No. But are there people that are completely isolated living out in the Amazon rainforest, naked in the jungle, who still live with bows and arrows, barefoot? Yes.

They've been out there for over, at least over a hundred years in that state because when the rubber boom hit, another extractive period at the turn of the century. The rubber boom? The rubber boom. When the industrial revolution hit and we needed hoses, gaskets, bike tires,

all of a sudden rubber became this huge thing. Now, where did rubber come from? The Amazon rainforest. It's another thing that we got from the amazon before it was stolen and brought to asia but henry ford actually went to the amazon and created fordlandia he tried to actually make this giant rubber plantation that failed because you can't make a plantation out of rubber so what happened was again there was this huge demand for rubber it sent all these people from the north down into the amazon and what they did was the only way to get to all these trees was to get the local people to make them to do it. So what you got was basically a Holocaust where they went down there and they beat the local

people into submission. The missionaries were begging people. They were like, this is just ungodly amounts of suffering. They were lighting people, just shock and awe, just lighting people on fire, being like, you'd do exactly as we say. And so you had these rubber barons collecting rubber and they would go to the communities, make slaves out of the people and then send them out into the jungle. And of course, keep their children as ransom. I mean, the worst shit you can imagine. And so these tribes are a result of that. These are the tribes that there's a book called The Unconquered because these are literally the tribes that said no they said they pointed their arrows at the at the threat and said we're going to keep backing up into the forest and so they've been out there i so they may have once had more contact with some of the other communities but they've been isolated and once you isolate a population their their mythology their generational knowledge comes down to that the outside world is dangerous the outside world is trying to kill us and so these are still extremely hostile tribes um numerous people in our region have been shot by arrows um three loggers just uh last month three loggers were

shot and the the police actually finally came out to review the bodies and like sort of on the whatsapp you know interweb we we got we got photos of it it was just these puffed up bodies with arrows in them on the beaches and it was just loggers who came around to bend and they shot at the tribes and the tribes shot six foot arrows at them what are the arrows made out of bamboo tipped you take bamboo and split it and it actually splits with a razor edge and so they know how to do that and then cure it over the fire and then they attach that to these pieces of giant river cane it's just like a fat grass it weighs nothing how long is it about six or seven feet and so they're launching spears that they can shoot a spider monkey at like

100 meters and so when when loggers come around they're shooting a shotgun a shotgun's range is what they're at 60 feet accurately that's gonna that's gonna do any damage and you have these guys that can launch these arrows huge distances and these are like steak knives and so you have right now in the amazon there's a slow war playing out between the extractors between loggers gold miners and the unconf the last truly free people on earth that is it's like you know what it doesn't sound real you're exploding my head today because i have so many questions and you are throwing out so much information i'm sure people at home are like oh my god like yeah because you know what you've been down there for 17 fucking years

for the most part right and it's like you know the the idea that even just that right there, where you have gold miners and loggers who are at least people of society, but they happen to live in the rainforest. They sell phones. Right. Chainsaws. I don't want to use this word, but just for the sake of argument, we're going to say more normal, like modern day humans. More relatable, yeah. And then you have all these indigenous tribes in there, and they're all fighting their own little war, right? That's on one hand.

Then on the other hand, you have outsiders like you coming in trying to save stuff who are fighting a war with the loggers and the gold miners, sometimes where you're just trying to convince them, other times where they're literally shooting at you and killing you. And then in the meantime, you have the indigenous tribes, some of them that are like, oh, you're an enemy too. It's like this – you can't win. No. I think it was – I can't remember who said it. Some author called the Amazon the greatest natural battlefield on earth because – It's perfect.

Per acre, I mean, just from the spider level, you have spiders eating frogs and praying mantises eating butterflies. And it's just everything in that ecosystem is in constant competition and has been evolving for millions of years to be predator and prey. And because of the denseness of the biodiversity, there's just everything is eating each other all the time. Life is actually this moment of stasis that's the antithesis to the constant churning death of the Amazon. I mean, it's just a meat grinder.

Things are alive for a moment and then they die. Every single thing in that forest is going to be eaten from the biggest tree to the jaguar to you. I mean, that's why you walk through the jungle and there's bot flies inserting their larva into your skin. A dead body decomposes in like two days. The termites, ants, maggots, dung beetles, everything will come in and just rip apart that body. When an animal dies in the forest and we watch it, it literally like puffs up and then goes down in a day. It just sucks life. And just fungal mycelium is running through everything, breaking down. As soon as those trees fall, think about it. If the Amazon rainforest didn't have fungus to break down the leaves, would bury itself all those falling leaves

constantly it would just end up becoming this thing it's constantly churning through life the rivers are sucking all that out and it's actually um it's actually at such a quick rate that you like you you can't leave like if there's no way to store food in the amazon which is a lot of the reason that a lot of these cultures rely on like daily hunting daily fishing where are you going to put it you catch a fish you got to eat that fish because by tomorrow it's bad there's other things living in it or at night something came and stole it it's like you it's a it's a fast-paced survival right there trying to think like off the top of my head other places around the world that are relatable to this and other than what you said about like certain parts of congo where there actually are a couple rainforests is there anything there is i mean like indonesia another place is getting ripped apart by palm oil um the indonesian

rainforests next to the next to brazil and the amazon and the congo indonesia has some of the most beautiful rainforests on earth and some of the most ecologically significant rainforests on earth. There's this thing called the Lesur ecosystem. It's the last place on earth where there's tigers, rhinos, elephants, orangutans, all living in the same jungle. It's like a wonderland. Incredible forest, huge carbon sink, stores tons of forest. How big are we talking? It's not tremendous, this one area, but they But they're just every year, they're cutting it. And I'm talking about clear cutting it and putting up palm oil plantations. Palm oil plantations?

Palm oil. It's literally the kryptonite of the rainforest. It's in so many products. It's in chips. It's in shampoos. It's in skincare products. And they're leveling the rainforest for it. And so here's the thing.

At the end of the day, people get very, I mean mean you're talking to the biggest environmentalist on earth yeah i've devoted my life to this but people spend so much time crying about it when there's truly practical solutions if you could knock out the timber industry who's buying those those those old wood trees they'd find something else to do so same with palm oil before we go all the way down this i think a really effective thing that you explained to me that we hinted at earlier i don't know if we got all the way into it was what like for people at home just thinking themselves well why not just plant new trees or some shit like that you're talking about like we use wood for all kinds of shit but probably the number one thing is forms

of architecture and perhaps even paper right and so let's start with paper if i take out an 8 by 11 page that i'm gonna put in a printer this thing needs to be sturdy right it can't like tear rip apart softly and shit like that i mean of course you can tear paper easily but it needs to be like it can be sturdy and then if you look at a house and you're building the foundation of a house, well, some houses you're planning on let's let that shit be there for 300 years. You need to make sure that it also is sturdy such that it doesn't fall in on itself. So as you explained to me, when they're cutting down these trees in the rainforest, for example, they're cutting down trees that are at least several hundred years old, usually thousands of years old. And you can't use replanted trees after 10 or 20 years because apparently the wood does not have that foundation such that paper will tear apart and houses will have to be rebuilt in 5 to 10 years. There's so much stuff that old growth forests offer so yes um like like now

they're going in the us they're going and repurposing the big old beams out of barns because we don't have trees that big and that strong anymore they don't exist we cut them already and so our old growth forests are already in our architecture they're gone and so in the rainforest is not it's not only that that's the smallest aspect of it is that when you have this giant tree that's the size of a living room. And again, think the home tree in Avatar, just giant buttress roots, branches that spread out. This is like 150, 160 foot tree in the Amazon rainforest. It's covered with thousands of other species. It's a skyscraper of life. And so when you have, you know, a 10 year old little sapling in the tree, it hasn't developed those complex communities yet.

It doesn't have the mosses and lichens and mycelium. It doesn't have birds and mammals and monkeys living in it. It hasn't lost branches that make holes in the tree that create habitat for other species or have strangler figs growing on it. These trees become these incredibly complex worlds of life. And so when you're cutting a 600-year-old tree or a 1,000-year-old tree, we will never get that back in our lifetime. Even if we plant a tree right now, what my great-great-great-grandkids might see it, like it's not – these forests have been growing for so long and are so complex. That's actually one of the biggest things that pisses me off because there's all these organizations out there right now that are like, and again, different places, different strategies. You know what I mean? Like California, there are wildfires.

The Amazon does not burn. People can't seem to separate those two things. And, you know, with the old growth thing, it's like, no, it's not about planting more trees. Recently, a guy did a stunt where he jumped out of a plane with a bunch of seeds and he like skydived with like seeds all around him. And it was like, great. Once again, you're doing nothing. You're just a dipshit getting eaten by an anaconda for no reason. What we have to do is protect the old growth trees. The thing that we can't get back. That's my mission. That's what I've been working. And when I say my mission, I have to like say this out loud is that everything I've done in the Amazon rainforest has been through the lens of that.

I met the local people and they said, please help us protect this river. Anything that I've done, there was recently like, you know, every now and then you get, I do these interviews and you get like a, like a title on an interview and I'll say like, meet the man trying to save the Amazon rainforest. And it's like, sure. Here's an analogy to that that that puts it into perspective imagine you're a parent and you take your kid fishing you get in your car you bought a fishing rod with the money you earned you get a hook you get a worm you put the worm on the hook you drive them to a stream you put it in their hands and then they go i caught a fish and it's like yeah you did but with a lot of help and so like anything anything that I, you know, if anything that I do in the Amazon

is because I have the teachings of the local people, because we've lived as family for 17 years. And it's like, as a team, this is what we're doing. I happen to be up in North America and I can go to New York and LA and I can speak fluent English so I can do this stuff. They're the brains behind the operation. I mean, everything I'm doing is just at there. These are people trying to save their environment. Well, how soon did that come

together? Like you went down there when you were 18. So it's been 17 years. But like, when you first go down, it sounds like you're more or less like, getting your bearings exploring, like trying to understand what it is. At what point did it turn to like okay now we're going to create a clear objective here's how we can start trying to accomplish this objective and and here's where we want to be in 25 years or something yeah um yeah you're absolutely right when i first got down there it was really just like this is incredible it was like the first time i saw leaf cutter ants i was like these are real yeah you know a leaf cutter ant a leaf cutter i mean you grow up you see this stuff on you know planet earth know. A leaf cutter ant? A leaf cutter ant. I mean, you grow up, you see this stuff on, you know,

Planet Earth documentaries, you see leaf cutter ants. And it was the first thing I saw was a giant anteater. And I saw leaf cutter ants and there was macaws in the sky. And leaf cutter ants are again, what part of the regeneration of the forest. They recycle, I think up to 17% of the biomass of the forest. Like of all the trees, animals, everything in the Amazon,

if you took all the living biological matter and dried it out of the forest, like of all the trees, animals, everything in the Amazon, if you took all the living biological matter and dried it out of the biomass, they recycle 17%. Wow. Major, major forest. I'll put a picture in the corner of the screen for people. They have cities underground with complex air intake

and ventilation systems. And so anyway, I went to the jungle, made friends with these guys, and we started going on these crazy adventures. They invited me on indigenous hunting expeditions. So we'd be out in the jungle for three weeks at a time into the most remote, unnamed parts of the Amazon rainforest. And that was all well and good. And I started bringing people. So I had a reason I was coming and I felt like I was contributing to their livelihoods and allowing, helping them to

protect a little bit of forest. But it was when the Trans-Amazon Highway came through, the last link of the Trans-Amazon crossing the madre de dios bridge the mother of god river in peru i put that in the corner i'm going to pull that up for you and so we saw this bridge as it was being constructed and at that time the road was just this little dirt track but they finished paving it while i was there and we started to see all these offshoot roads coming off the trans amazon highway and all of a sudden our river where we had once places it had once taken us two days to get to by boat they would cut a road and then you can get there in a few hours and then the chainsaws start coming in and then the gold miners and the loggers

and then my friend got assassinated and then it's like your friend got assassinated yeah it's the guy that said they shot in the back of the head the miners and he was yeah no i mean these are people that wanted to live out there because they love the forest because they lived in symbiosis with the forest and then all of a sudden you get these outsiders these extractors coming in they don't want to hear anything about that they don't want to hear resistance to their to their trajectory and so we started saying okay this is getting serious. We're seeing forest go down. We're watching forest burn. What are we going to do? And that's when we said, okay, look, we need to create something bigger. And so we had this meeting and it was like all the local guys and they were like, this is not enough. We need to do more and faster. And so at that time I was

actually in a, in college in New Jersey and there's something in the Hudson Valley called the Hudson River Keeper. And they protect the Hudson Valley and the endangered sturgeon that are there, the fish populations. And I was like, what if we were the jungle keepers? What if we were the jungle keepers? Such a sick name. Yeah, like, I mean, you could literally have like a superhero group, the jungle keepers. But they were like, look, whatever you can do, whatever you have to do, they're like look whatever whatever you can do whatever you have to do they're like we have to we want to protect our home we want to protect this incredible river

and our river sits between some major like there's like four or five national parks and protected areas and indigenous zones and this river cuts it's right through the center so the national parks and protected areas are patchwork what do you mean patchwork it's a patchwork there's a you you take this table you throw a national park over there great what about the rest of the table right so the amazon because that was my question like how much of it does it really cover percentage-wise i think like i think like i think almost 50 of the amazon is contained in either indigenous reserves or national parks it's a significant amount a lot of conservation work has been done by governments by scientists

by indigenous activists i mean there is a huge global concentrated effort to protect the amazon it's just that the forces against it are so pervasive so legion that they that was my question do they break the rules all the time we go in there of course okay so let's say actual national park let's say let's say we slap a 40 000 acre national park right there it's like okay cool but who's gonna stop you from going in there unless you have guys on the ground with monitoring equipment and guns and resources like gasoline to take their boats up and motors and i mean my rangers right now our rangers are surviving in the jungle right now as we speak um they're living out there every single day through the rainy season the river going up 15 feet the river drop and they just patrol all day they patrol all day

and their job is to listen for chainsaws their job is to see if there's areas that are being deforested and report back and this is on the ground so is this happening on all national park territory where they are or is it they're also venturing outside that this is the problem is that we're trying to establish an ecological corridor because and so here's the significance of what country for people we're in we're in southeastern peru so we're in the western amazon and again the western amazon is the top of the drainage so all of these little tributaries are flowing towards the main amazon river so anything that happens up here is more significant because you're in the place that creates the amazon rainforest and so we're actually

because we're between parks we're trying to unite the parks. And if we can do that, we'll create the largest protected area in the Amazon rainforest. What do you mean unite the parks? Because somebody created this park over here, Park A. You have Park B over here. Like countries created it. No, I'm saying within Peru, you have like Alto Purus National Park, you have the Tambopada Reserve, and then you have Manu National Park. And these are all, this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This has been funded by research from major Ivy League colleges. And you have all these prestigious capital of biodiversity, the most important places on Earth, but they're islands. So why doesn't the Peruvian government step in and unite? Because the Peruvian government just elected a new minor as the president. So the minors are a major part. And so when you have a peruvian politician that doesn't support the miners you get riots in the streets you get burnt out storefronts you get murders i wonder who funds that exactly and so the loggers the miners these are the

extractive industry is literally running the government well let's let's also not overlook our own too because i don't know these stats like what how much of the problem is still coming from america yeah we're buying it we're buying all these project products we're buying the gold we're buying the timber so of course no wonder they're interested in selling it but you're saying it's more funded by like china and other places china right now so the recently the logging the last year has gone up significantly and we started seeing because it was always guys and little trucks and they'd go out as far as they could, and then they'd walk into the forest with their chainsaws, cut some wood, and float it downriver. Float it downriver?

Yeah. They take the wood out of the jungle. They push these huge logs. They'll push them out into the river. They'll mill it right there in the forest. They'll take two chainsaws and join them, and they'll just rip boards right there in the rainforest. They know exactly. And just push it. And they just push it out in the forest. They'll take two chainsaws and join them, and they'll just rip boards right there in the rainforest. They know exactly. And just push it.

And they just push it out into the river. They make these huge barges, and they'll put like 60 feet of timber together, and then they'll put floats. They'll put balsa wood floats underneath it, and then they float it down the rivers until they can get to the nearest town or city where they can load it onto a truck.

Then they take it into the city where corruption, even the illegal wood is stamped as legal. And then it's exported to China, the US, doesn't matter. Because the easy answer right away before you say that is, oh, why don't they just have the military waiting for it when it comes? Just have a guard post. It's nice and easy. And then that person will get shot. But they're all bought off.

Yeah. So it's an absolute war zone. And then with the fires every year i mean i just got back from the fires the fires are so bad this year can i show your video yeah the one you did this is so good we we played it at the very end of ryan's episode oh really but we yeah it was like it was like after the uh kind of like the last 10 minutes of that we were just saying like how to donate and i had forgotten to get to it so it was like i think it was with like three minutes left or something i finally pulled it up so i want to make sure i show this because this was

this was what like 2019 maybe when you did this this video yep okay so i'll put it in the corner of the screen and then once it's done playing i'm gonna have you explain the i'm not going to be able to stay here long because this fire is spreading but everything behind me right now is the forest that i've been working to protect for the last 13 years it's burning like this every day there are literally millions of animals in this forest that cannot escape right now and if you think our planet can survive this every day in the amazon you have another thing coming we have all the resources to protect this, to stop what's happening behind me right now, and people let it happen every day.

Welcome to the fucking Anthropocene. Images are just nuts. And this is, to me, this is hard-hitting journalism. This is what people gotta see. Because this clip, before you explain actually what's going on this went viral it got shared in the u.s a lot yeah and you then had and this has

happened sometimes in your career where then every morning show wants to talk to you but you got to do that again and then people kind of forgot yep yeah so 2019 i'd filmed that uh before i left the amazon i got home and the news was going starting to go crazy because what was happening was the fires that year were blowing over Sao Paulo, Brazil. And so people were taking these apocalyptic images where the sky was going black and turning all kinds of colors and they were uploading it and they were like, this is it. The Amazon rainforest is being taken apart and we're watching it before our eyes. And what are all the causes of that?

Like all the potential causes. Cattle ranching cattle ranching soybean cacao farming whatever it is it's just land clearing for farms it's just they're treating it's it's basically it's it's bulldozing your house and burning it to cook a sandwich that's the logic it's let's go and destroy one of the greatest things that we have on earth so that we can like have cows eating grass. It's just space. This is just another angle. Like we're talking loggers, miners, and now we're talking like farmers and space. Yeah. It's just farmers and space. I mean, 60% of the deforestation of the Amazon is caused by cattle farming, which is why they'll tell you don't eat beef. But we were running through the fires trying to save burning animals, watching millennium trees go down. I mean, through the 70 foot to save burning animals watching Millennium trees go down I mean

through the 70 foot flames I mean you you you it is terrifying what's happening and uh so I get home and I see this start to trickle out onto the media and then uh I just I went to bed and I threw up that video on Instagram and I wake up in the morning and my phone had vibrated off the table at night and i had like 40 000 notifications on instagram four different news organizations were already calling me how they got my number i do not know um that was actually pretty impressive but yeah i mean before i knew i was in a car on my way to 30 rock to give interviews and it was oh they even brought you up here for that too oh yeah i forgot about that oh yeah no I was like in studio and for three weeks, the entire world was focused on the Amazon rainforest. It was the Amazon rainforest fires

of 2019 and everyone was doing all these things. And I kept saying it again and again, this happens every year. Every year in the dry season, they cut the forest, they wait a month or two, and then they burn it because you can't cut the rainforest. You can't burn the rainforest. You throw a match on the rainforest, nothing. You throw napalm on the rainforest nothing but if you cut it and leave it in the tropical sun cut the circulation out of those trees and let them dry out then you throw a match on it and you have the biggest bonfire on earth and so that's happening every single year and if you think that video is bad i'll give you this one to throw up for everybody that's not going to load right now but like look at just what that image looks like it was absolute i just got back from i must stick this in the

corner screen while you're talking about it without the volume because we don't this this is what we saw in two weeks ago was absolute annihilation of life on earth it it was i mean i've been coughing blood and ashes i mean because we were like we have to document this it's not in the news like everything that we've done down there is dependent on us being able to bring these stories back you know being able i mean they always put the they always put the reporter out in the hurricane you know and the rain's going sideways and it's like i don't believe a damn thing until i see it for myself which is part of the reason that i went to the amazon and it's like while the media

is distracted with all this other shit that the rainforest is burning this year and on i think it was august 15th there was higher there was more fires in the amazon this year on any given day than there was in the last 15 years and so the rates are right now are higher than they were in 2019 when you got back yeah right it was just kicking off walked into it yep and you go to people in the city and you say hey how are the fires this year and they're like what are you talking about because from the city all you can see is like storefronts and you can't see these fires they're out in the forest just like people don't realize the problems happening with bycatch in the ocean and the massive dragnets that they do that are just pulling all of the life out of the ocean. Because we're not out in the middle of the ocean.

That's not where people live. And so these problems are playing out. These are stupid easy fixes. Make it impossible for people to burn the Amazon by either giving them better jobs or increasing enforcement, put cameras on ocean liners so that these giant fishing trawlers, so that they can enforce whether or not they're using sustainable fishing practices. I mean, again, all we're asking is for people to not cut down the systems that keep us alive. Literally. I mean, we're literally harming our children by doing this.

I mean, we're just taking apart planet Earth. There's no reason for it. We're literally, right now, there's never been a more important moment in history because civilizations rise and fall. This is the first time in history that we have to worry about the living environment collapsing. And that's the defining issue of our time. Whatever else you're interested in is secondary to the fact that we're losing our ecosystems we've lost since 1970 we've lost half of the wild animals on this planet there's serious consequences and we're at that breaking point because if we cut down too much of the amazon and that moisture cycle gets broken then you have drying then you have the the amazon start to collapse as an

ecosystem and that's why i'm so pissed at those people that are going around saying that the Amazon is a man-made garden. Oh, that's a whole nother thing. That's a whole nother thing. We're going to get to that for sure. But let's back it up to the actual broad point of what you just started laying out there to really put results or results we don't want on it for everyone out there who who is trying to understand like okay the problem i've always heard this is a problem but why and what what does it do so you you talk about like the collapse of the ecosystem essentially if the rainforest goes you're also pointing out these fires and everything so like

for example people will want to know like all right when one of these fires burns how far does it usually go how much gets damaged what can't be undone like how does it get stopped eventually like is it just rainfall that does it that's a whole separate silo but like when when you're saying the rainforest going is going to cost us our ecosystem what does that mean how much of it is gone already and how much more is d-day like we're we're well that that's a great question the right now we've lost about 17 percent of the amazon so round up and call it a fifth of the of the amazon rainforest is gone okay at what point you know if you're if you're you know you picture a plane flying and you start taking screws out the wing of the plane is one going to do it no is 10 going to do it maybe not

but at some point that wing's going to come off and the whole plane's going to crash and so we're reaching that point in the amazon now where every year we're deteriorating the amazon rainforest and we're weakening its ability to continue providing life-giving services to the planet. All that fresh water, all that climate stabilization, all that carbon storage, all the biodiversity, the medicines, not to mention home for millions of indigenous people. I mean, this is such a crucial thing and it's so easy to protect it. It's literally, I mean, if you don't cut down the trees, they'll still be there,

but we're letting people every year flood in here. And that's why what we focused on is giving indigenous people better jobs. We've taken people literally that are loggers and gold miners and hired them as rangers. And we're sending them out to protect their own environment.

On that, the plane visual is great because everyone can understand that. But like you said, it was 17%, so let's call it 20, of the rainforest gone. Is there a point at like where maybe 40% of it's gone and then it's similar to like animal extinction where you cross a point where now you can't return? You see what i'm saying like is there is there something like do we have any science back like where it is yes the tipping point is what everyone's talking about right now we don't know where that is that's the problem and so how close do you want to get to the tipping point you know can't undo it you can't undo it because you can't go back and that's what's so scary and so if we if we end up having seeing the amazon rainforest dry out how is that going to affect global weather patterns how is that going to affect agriculture and economies all over the world i mean this is a major ecological event

unfolding right now that we have the ability to change in a positive way it's not too late that's the other thing a lot of environmentalists love this like tragedy porn view of everything where it's like oh everything's going downhill it's so everything where it's like, oh, everything's going downhill. It's so dark. And it's like, yeah, great. You go listen to Nirvana and cry. It's like, let's go do something about it. It's not too late. I mean, humpback whales were taken down to, I think there was like 8,000 humpback whales at one point.

They were almost extinct from the whaling industry. And then when whaling was outlawed, they're back up to, I think globally, we're looking at about 135,000 humpback whales. Holy shit. Dude, they're back. When was that? We're doing at about 135 000 humpback whales shit dude they're back when was that we're doing great that was like i think it was like 90 years ago i think it was the international commission on whaling holy shit because they realized we're losing whales on earth and also the industry shifted they used to use whale oil more significantly back in whaling times but they were so effective that we came close to losing one of the most beautiful charismatic species on the planet bald eagles were going extinct because of uh ddt was was ddt ddt was a pesticide that was used um widely and it was a it was getting into the fish populations and the

eagles were eating it and then their eggs were coming out too fragile to last the parents would sit on the eggs and the eggs so bald eagle populations were plummeting about 40 years ago and then with concentrated efforts now i mean i got three bald eagles living around my house upstate i mean so fixed it and that shows you that we can fix these things we saved humpback whales bald eagles just bounced back in a few locations like india has a great tiger program nepal bhutan there's actually places where we're bringing back endangered tigers tigers went from a hundred thousand tigers in 1900 down to like three thousand tigers think about that picture if you had a hundred thousand dollars in your account 97 of them went to texas yeah the tiger king guys are throwing them in the oven

awful yeah awful but you know what, though? That's so important to paint that picture of hope like you're saying. And like even your friend Ryan Tate, like shameless, great, not shameless, great plug here. When he went there, it's only been eight years of vet Paul. And the first year or two, he's like meeting people, right? They're not even doing the work they get to do now yet. And it's like he went there. rhino population in africa was around it was in the ballpark of like 15 000 rhinos and today it's in the ballpark of like 27 28 000 yeah in no small

part because that paul's lost zero animals along the way that's one team one team only you know they cover a lot of land but they don't cover all of africa no and look at what they did thing there's teams all over these countries working there's so many indigenous conservationists and there's so many different methods and so like africa like you know i know people who were working with using bees as a deterrent so that elephants don't go into native communities and raid their crops because elephants will come and rob you that's for the next podcast i'll tell you about the the the bandit elephants i've seen that before yeah um that was in that documentary the the ivory game they had one of the elephants where it was coming and getting the farms and the and this is

the one part where it wasn't poachers and you kind of you feel for those people but they're just farmers yeah they're like they're stealing my livelihood if they do it again i'm gonna have to kill them and to the credit of the conservationists they're like they're stealing my livelihood if they do it again I'm gonna have to kill them and to the credit of the conservationist. They're like we do have to fix this Yes, that's fair. Yes, just like you know, I mean you talk about like when there's like you have a tiger conservation area It's like well as soon as you have one every so often you get a man-eater you get one with a cracked tooth that can't Catch here anymore and they're like dude those humans are super easy Once you get a man-eating tiger, I mean you got to put it down You can't have a tiger going out and eating people. Yeah. And that's fair.

And that's where there's like just balance it. You know what I mean? Like we don't have to, you know, I feel like people with the environment, you either have like on one side you have like crazy bunny huggers over here that are like we have to play Mozart for turkeys that we rescue from Thanksgiving. That's right. Yeah. And then over here you have the people that are like I'm going to shoot everything that moves and'm a conservationist how do we get there yeah we gotta get right there right in the middle science what do you know i mean look i mean we actually have sustainable deer populations in like new york and new jersey i mean they're actually like i see deer all the time they don't have any

predators in fact you could argue there's too many of them there there actually are they're like you have to have hunters you have to have hunters And so I just think that that to me, in the work that I do, I come across these people once in a while where they're like, no animal should die ever. And I'm like, listen to me. When I go to an indigenous community and they give me a plate of spider monkey,

do you think that I turn it away and go, I'm a vegan? No, you take a bite of it. Because the gringos that come into their community and go, I can't eat that. They're like, yeah, because you're a fucking gringo. Go put on some more sunscreen. They think you're a joke. But if you can walk barefoot with the local people,

if you can swim in the river and drink the river, if you can eat what they eat, then all of a sudden it's different. Then you have a different relationship with them. And that's what a lot of the, I see a lot of these PhD students come down there and they want to study bat you know to get their to get to pub to get up their first published paper and stuff and like the local people looking at them just watching them just slathering themselves and deet and just poison

their bodies and like the local people like these people they just sit there laughing like and that's the other thing too because you have you know some of the other people going down there they're not going to respect but like a dude who literally lives among them in the middle of it and it's just like a savage like they gotta like i'd imagine the first time you went down there probably wasn't like that but eventually they're like oh this guy gets it oh no they beat the out of you to try to get you that the first time i went down there there's this thing called the bullet ant and it's widely known as the most painful insect bite on earth and it's this giant one inch long beast of an ant um bullet ant stings they sting you with their they hold on with their jaws and they'll sting you with their abdomen and the locals we played bullet ant roulette they went

all right they went all right rocky they see an italian guy from new york they go all right rocky and they were like you put a bullet ant on one person's arm, and then you rub arms with them. And whoever it stings, it stings. And so I spent like two days sweating with a fever because I got bitten by this bullet ant. Like, it puts you on your ass. It's called a bullet ant because it's like getting shot.

They're awful. I've had like five or six of those over the years. At this point, I've walked barefoot so much with the local people that I have like rhino skin on my heels my heels and so there's a trick you can do again because the amazon is such a complex ecosystem there's not like you can't just like turn over a rock and find a worm there's no bait sitting around everything is either eaten or hiding and so you have a fish hook and you want to get some bait you got to come up with that and so you either need to catch a smaller fish with your machete we go machete fishing at night and then we'll throw that in

the river but if you're really legit and you walk barefoot you take your machete and you can actually saw some of the callus off your heel and i have i can show you this i can send you a video of this shit so i saw the my skin off of my foot and stick that on a fish hook and throw that in the river. And you catch your first fish, little six-inch fish, and then you chop that in half, stick that on a bigger hook, throw that in the river. You work your way up the ecosystem, and then by midday, you've got dinner.

You catch a bigger fish. But you start with yourself because everything in that ecosystem has to be eaten. So you start with a little bit of payment from your own body. That is the circle of life on a whole different level right there it sure is but we we were starting this talking about like the identify or not identifying like trying to figure out what the quote-unquote tipping point was and you were saying it's it's it's hard to say as far as like what can be done though you know the other point

in there about like having the hope on it is so important unfortunately though we do live in a world where tragedy conflict and disaster is what motivates the proper actions so you do still have to strike a balance with it i mean i i probably said this at least six or seven times on different podcasts here. But if you look at the example, send out an email saying, hey, congratulations. We dipped drunk drivers by like 20% last year. Great job. People at home read it and they go, oh, it's going well. And they're not motivated to want to solve the problem.

That's right. So instead what they have to do is they have to paint the, oh, my God, 700 accidents happened yesterday with a drunk driver that killed somebody and then people were like holy shit i gotta i'm motivated now to spend money on it and so i think you know i empathize with that first of all because like especially like in that situation it's like a mom against drunk drivers is somebody whose kid got killed by a drunk driver of course you're gonna feel strongly of course but you know how do we get it in a way so that people do see videos like what you showed in the one, just the one we put up here with the smoke and everything and also bring it home? Because, like, I'll stay with the Moms Against Drunk Driver thing. When people see that, they're like, oh, that's another American that could have been, you know know my kid or my brother or something whereas when people see the burning forest

the cynics like Unfortunately may think of their head. Wow, that's awful Huh and go about the rest of their day because they're not thinking about what that does to everything You know and so I try and stick a balance with that where I try and like, you know I literally try and unlike social media I'll try and like do one, you know one day on one day off with the you know, I literally try and on like social media, I'll try and like do one, you know, one day on one day off with the, you know, because the thing is, if I post, you know, here's an ecosystem that's in full bloom and here's a beautiful picture of a pristine river. You're talking about like a one hundredth of the likes. Whereas if you post something where you're covered in ashes running through a burning fire and screaming about the end of the world, people are like, holy shit, I can't believe this.

And everybody shares it. And so it's like, well, how do you get that message out? And so it is a frantic message. But I think that for anybody that looks a little bit deeper, more and more from organizations like VetPaw, from organizations like the Andes Amazon Fund, I mean, there's all these amazing indigenous initiatives. People are doing work to save the environment.

We have those success stories like the whales, like elephant populations that have jumped back. There's so many times where if you can just remove the thing that's killing it, then nature will take care of itself. It's really that simple. I mean, we have humpback whales back in New York now. You see them off the coast of Rockaways well that that points to the other problem though and that is that the world is big and different countries and different peoples have different cares right so you know we look at some of the climate initiatives and everything and certainly there's some level of stuff that that

you know let's say like corporations try to beat in for their own game it's not actually really helping stuff but then when we look at like oh yeah we're trying to sustain this planet which a lot of people care about yeah it's very hard to then say all right we're going to govern ourselves to do this and then know that like china and russia don't give a about that yeah you know and there's a lot of where the and then like corporate like the the the culpability with environmental issues they keep trying to pin that on the consumer to keep being like refuse straws when you get a call you know nice coffee and it's like that's you can't ask people to so what are you saying you're saying that every single person united has to not buy straws for five years until the company stopped

producing them so that's not how it works you have to make regulations that you know outlawing styrofoam that something is always going to be there limiting plastic um you know when we when we switched from vhs's to dvds nobody asked us we didn't like have to petition for that they're just like this is a better technology we're going to do it if it's in the interest of people i mean like anti-smoking ads i mean it's like if you want to increase your risk of heart disease and cancer and everything else smoke cigarettes if you If you don't, don't. And they've removed cigarette ads. They've taken action against that because we know how to stop it.

And so it's in so many capacities. We've proved that these things can be done. It's just very hard to move vast numbers of people. And there is a lot of us. Yeah. Yeah, but the point you're making about the Styrofoam example versus the DVD example, when it went from VHSs to DVDs, you're right. It was a corporate moved thing because it's like, well, this is better. It's higher quality. It weighs less.

It's all this different shit, so it's a better product, so people want it. When you're talking about some of the other stuff, the reason that Styrorofoam for example exists is because it's easy to make it's convenient and people can throw it out easily right so then right so then when you're talking about oh but let's do recycled sustainable blank blank blank whatever yeah now it's it the difference with the dvd is that it's less convenient for everyone including the end consumer who doesn't get as good of a product yeah like that's a tough problem straw that biodegrades in your drink before you're done with it yes um no but i mean in in so many senses though it's like are we smart enough to realize that when we deteriorate ecosystems we're literally hurting ourselves i mean like and again it's a social issue too because who are the first people

affected it's always the poorest people that still live close to the ecosystems, um, in low income communities, indigenous communities where they're still catching fish out of the river to eat. So if those are getting polluted by mercury, or if those are getting, um, if there's an oil spill from Chevron, who are the people that are suffering? Those people, people in New York city don't care. All their shit comes wrapped in plastic. Right. And so it's like, it's extremely difficult first to make people care next to actually affect any kind of change and so like that's what we're dealing with and that's why conservation is so multifaceted you need people that are doing podcasts you need people that are

web designers you need lawyers you need scientists you need indigenous people you need activists you need so many different people to be on board with this um and honestly even like the fact that celebrities have come out i mean dicaprio has been doing a great job of like really putting himself out there as like a spokesperson for environment he was there i think he raised he actually went he went and flew and met with putin dicaprio actually went and met with putin this is before the war oh this was this was like 10 years ago. Yeah. And he sat down and he goes, let's talk about the pussy tiger.

And I think there was something that, I want to say his plane had an engine misfire and had to land and Putin knew about it. And so by the time DiCaprio showed up there, he was like, you were pretty much in a plane crash and you still made it to this meeting. And he was like, Mr. Dicapitate, you're a real man. But no, I remember that they had like an affinity for each other. And then DiCaprio came back to New York and raised, I think it was $25 million in a one night auction at Christie's. Wow.

And so it's like using that weight, that star power to actually, and then it looks cool. Well, that's the other thing. Like he actually does, people give him shit sometimes about using like the private jet when he's all into climate change and shit but leonardo dicaprio for a lot of the environmental issues really does put his money where his mouth is yes and and including on on some controversial stuff that you wouldn't by the way you wouldn't think someone attached to hollywood would be willing to put their name behind but i guess he's just that big like he doesn't have to give a fuck. No.

And he's, he's, he I've seen, you know, he's been on the ground with different conservation organizations. He's been in Indonesia and that less sewer ecosystem. And the what? The less sewer ecosystem.

It's that, that place in Indonesia and Sumatra where they have the rhinos, tigers, elephants, and orangutans all living in the same, in the same forest. And so he's supporting these efforts and that's huge because then it becomes culturally um people start focusing on

it people start you know and then you get like i didn't actually see it but i know like zach effron did some sort of environmental um series like you know everybody starts trying their hand at it and then it sort of filters down into where it's like oh it's cool to be environmentally conscious and then that then it starts manifesting and then you hope it doesn't get lost in like identity politics and like who's holier than thou with you know i'm a vegan and i don't use straws and i bicycle everywhere and in fact i threw out my bike because he uses metal and now i you know crawl everywhere and it's like you gotta you gotta manage caring about the planet without making your life into a living hell and that's also why someone like you is such a good potential face for this globally because

you're not the pita guy you're not the you're not the like you're drinking milk that came from the wrong cat like you're you're like you're sitting here fucking eating meat doing your thing and recognizing that like the ecosystem exists for a reason and that's so so important because you're real you're like a real person and people with with too many and that's with ryan too right with too many people that happen to be in this space sometimes it just comes across as like all right cool it with the tree huggery yeah you know what i mean virtue signaling it's just like it's just like i you know and it becomes a competition and to those people i always you know i'm like how much of your blood is in the amazon rainforest right now and how many acres have you projected shut up i don't want to hear it you know what i mean and we can all at this point we're connected enough that we

can all contribute and and i agree definitely being a more sustainable consumer definitely electing officials that actually know science and care about the environment i mean so hard i mean every administration it's like we protected the arctic national wildlife refuge we're going to drill the shit out of it we protected it again no we're going to drill the shit out of it and it's like it just flip-flops and that's why in conservation they say the victories are temporary and it's the losses that are final yeah all it takes is the first person to be like oh no we can let that that contract go. Yep. Let's absolve that national park. We don't need it. And I do think, and this is just my opinion, but for things, if I were you or someone else working in different levels of conservation, I would not even have on my drawing board politicians because the moment you win one, you're going to lose one too.

And it just, you're never going to get anything there. It has to come from the people. It has to be motivated. And that's why we got to put a face on it and everything. But like one of the things that I was so impressed with for Jungle Keepers and what you're doing specifically is that you know or you seem to know at least when i asked you about it like exactly what is needed and so for people out there who have been listening you to you go through the amazon and we're going to keep going on that with a lot of stuff today but before we get there like on the ground you had mentioned that you are converting miners and loggers and stuff. But what goes into that?

And like day to day, you and your rangers who are armed and dangerous everywhere you go, like what are you doing? Like what is this money that goes into jungle keepers? What is it funding exactly? Yeah. And that's a very important point because a lot of people want to support conservation. They want to do something that makes an impact. But if you throw a donation out to one of these major conservation organizations where's it actually going because i see billboards i see high paid staff members i see all this stuff and you don't know whether that money that you're

giving them is just going to this vast machine that is a press machine or is it doing on the ground tactical conservation and that's one of the great things with jungle keepers is that we can very clearly trace i mean you you donate five dollars you're talking about food for a ranger you're talking i mean down to the boots down to down to like literal gasoline for the motors to take them on patrols and so we're the good thing is at this stage that we're big enough that we're protecting a lot of forest we're small enough that every single donation goes directly towards employing local rangers to protect their own heritage and so these people are going around so i've been going around with the local guys for years and years and years at this point jungle keepers i mean we've built this

incredible team and so we have people from all over the world a lot of a lot of people from montreal are with us um and we're actually there's a there's a tech entrepreneur named Dax DeSilva who got in touch after the last Amazon fires. And he has like his company Lightspeed that he founded is the competition for Shopify. And so he got in touch and he was like, look, what do you guys need to actually make this a reality? And he wasn't just talking with us. Dax was talking with conservation organizations around the world. I mean, this is a guy that sort of won the game of capitalism and he's going okay now how do i help that's great this is someone that loves nature deeply and he's going because everyone's going

why don't the billionaires fix everything well this guy gets on the phone with me and he goes what do we need to actually protect this river let's start and so we started actually hiring more rangers and getting more boats and then sending them out and now we have a bigger area that we can protect and you don't really have to work with governments because like you said these are the places where the governments don't even go and everything goes exactly this is literally one of the most lawless places on earth like when we want to bring if we have if we have invaders on a piece of land and again it'll be like the locals will call us and be like look we just got no notice that there's loggers and they've cut down like three ancient trees and they're you know they're doing all this stuff

if we try and get the local authorities out there the corruption is unbelievable first of all they'll notify the loggers that were coming next you have to wonder if they're going to try and you know take bribes i mean it's so difficult to get this work done but on the ground we just keep hitting it and keep hitting it and keep hitting it and keep working with the local guys. A lot of the people that we're seeing now are guys that used to be loggers and they're so hard. I mean, this happened with like Teddy Roosevelt. He was a hunter and then he started to see how quickly this stuff was vanishing. And he's like, yeah, I was a hunter, but I love it. And so when you see the hole start to drain, start to go away you go no

no we got to protect it and so a lot of these old amazonian guys that grew up being loggers now they're in their 70s and they're like look i cut a lot of trees in my time but what's happening now is wholesale destruction and they're like how can i help and some of them are landowners and they're like can i add my land to your reserve and they want to help create this corridor because they see their way of life going how How many people do you have now? We have, I think right now we have 11 rangers. And we have two indigenous female rangers. We have a few different, we're working with the local communities.

We have a couple guys that used to work as loggers. It's really an awesome team. And that's where one of our guys, he's from this community that's further up river. And he was actually shot in the head by an arrow. Is this the, you sent me a text. So you're down there away from signal sometimes. So you were here and then you were back down the Amazon in August. And I wanted to check in maybe like three weeks later.

And I sent you a text. I get a response back like three days later. And it said, I was just like, how's everything going down there and you're like it's insanity near the cities the burning continues but i'm out in the farthest reaches messaging on a sat link out here two days back the uncontacted tribes killed three loggers their six foot arrows have a greater range than the logger shotgun i mean i don't know what to say to that like you just said what's up man i'm sitting there i'm like oh right wow so i guess the arrow went into that guy's head fuck okay cool yeah no so yeah and that i mean i was out like i could show you on the map where i was and it was the middle of nowhere and they had a sat link and so like i just like turned my phone on and like connected

to the wi-fi and like two things came through and it was like you can't load anything but it's just you can send out an sos or something and somehow your text message slipped through and the middle is hilarious but that i mean that's the kind of you guys are are dealing with because again like you were saying earlier just because there's so much info going on i want to make sure people don't forget some of the stuff but it's like some of these tribes like they've never been talked to so you are everyone's their enemy anyone who's a human being is their enemy so you got to be on head on a swivel with them yeah and even so there was a story where um on the outskirts of manu national park this guy local guy um started going into the jungle and like leaving them piles of bananas because they're they're hunter-gatherers they're they're they're

nomadic through the forest and so he started leaving them piles of bananas and maybe like a machete you know they don't have they don't have metal they missed out on the wheel they've never held a spoon these are people that are out there um no shoes no clothes and so he'd leave them a machete and some bananas and they'd come take it and after like a year he would start being there when they came to take it and they would see him and he would see them and then after some time he was actually able to interact with them and he couldn. He could only speak a few words of their language. What did they speak? The guys on our river speak, they're called the Mashkupiro tribe.

And so they speak some sort of, some dialect of the Yine language. And, but this guy who was interacting with them, one day they found him. They call it porcupined. Arrows sticking up out of his body, like several arrows. We don't know why they killed him. He was only there to help them. He absolutely loved these people, was advocating for their rights. He did something, or they interpreted something he did as a threat, and they killed him instantly.

One of my best friends down there, um, in 2004, was coming down a river as a logger. He's now a conservationist, but at that time he was working as a logger. So he's from down there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. One of the local guys. Real hard ass. This guy named Victor.

And they ambushed some of his people. And by the time he got there, his, I think it was his brother-in-law was on the beach flayed open at the stomach they'd removed his testicles they'd cut off his arms and they'd opened his stomach to see what he was eating and his wife had been with him when this happened to see what he was eating to see what he was eating because we're that foreign to them they don't they don't understand and just like a fish they're like let's see what it was eating and there's no laws out there so they shot him in the leg they started the battle cry they started running out of the forest and he knew he wasn't going to run fast enough to reach the river so he told his wife just run for it she ran jumped in the river and just floated down the amazon he got ripped apart on the beach and so when my guys

showed up they found him there's blood all over the sand and when they found his wife she told them what happened and so they just had to like pick up the pieces of them and go and there's blood all over the sand and when they found his wife she told them what happened and so they just had to like pick up the pieces of them and go and there's arrows all over the beach for nothing just to because they were curious because they're scared of outsiders and again you can't really know it's a human they know it's a human but you can't really fault these people for for this type of action either because they're coming from times where they were so persecuted right um so you have to think that how has that mythology like intensified over the years where like you know grandparents telling their grandchildren we remember like if you if you get one thing from me before i die remember that if those outsiders get to you you're

dead kill them first shoot first and it's a tight enough community that that can actually work you don't have zero access i mean like how big are the average uncontacted tribe that lives in i assume like one place only like what like their base like how big is it i mean most of the ones that we deal with are nomadic and so like i think as much as as many as 20 or 40 in a group in a clan but like there's a lot of questions how are they staying there's only 20 to 40 in a community it's it's the thing is everything's under the forest the amazon is the great concealer of everything so like we see them when they come out onto the beaches and so when they come out onto the beaches how many of them are still in the forest they're communicating using capuchin monkey calls

and this is another thing one of my guys that's not their language that's not their language but they have like this like this like shorthand where they can actually communicate using different animal sounds and they know what these different calls mean and they have they have like a parlance between them different animal sounds at the same time and patterns or like are they going to stick to like just the sound of x animal i can't i can't believe that we lost this video but this guy had a he had a video when they they had made contact and the tribe was there and they had their arrows and they're pointing their hours across the beach and the guys in the community are trying to send them a canoe filled with bananas because they're like look we're friends and they're trying to make an offering like stop the killing so they tried to send them a thing and you can hear the tribes and they're talking using monkey calls and

we know what a capture monkey sounds like and there what does it sound like i can't do it well but but they're using these calls in the video on the beach and they're like communicating with each other and the other scary the scary thing is that if you're ever camping alone in the forest which is something that i started doing when i was young there um if you ever hear animal sounds that are not quite right at night you get up and leave because if they're getting close to you and you don't they don't want you to hear human sounds they'll start communicating in animal voices and so yeah there's a few guys that were out there and uh they started hearing like sounds that were just a little bit off you know you hear like a laughing falcon sound and he was like that doesn't actually sound like a and then he heard the capuchins from different areas and

usually capuchin monkeys are going to be all together in one spot and he heard it from different directions and he was just like he said he climbed into the river and crawled like a turtle out of that he said he went for hours and just to escape it's like uh i'll go back to the original example you use because it's just spot on it's literally like we're sitting here in fucking new jersey yep with all this you know yeah the the off amazon or whatever you know i'm i've never been at amazon i don't know how this works but not that far away you know whatever it is maybe like six to eight thousand miles whatever it is there is a world that is essentially on a level of avatar yeah yeah with and and i say that with because recently somebody called me out saying that was

racist comparing it I got called out you know what don't just keep it moving don't worry about all right they uh good good call anyway the that movie to me did a very good job of communicating how like energy flows through an ecosystem and showing how beautiful it is and of course it's pumped up for the movies but it's a perfect analogy because that's what's happening in the amazon you have you know the rain is falling into the river you drink the river and then you sweat and you see the steam coming off the trees and it gathers into thunderheads in the afternoon it rains back down it's like we have people up here being like do we live in a simulation meanwhile down there you can see that you're a part of nature it's visual it's running through you now you had said this i don't even care if we're

jumping around today because everything's interesting it's coming out great to me so it's coming out great to people too but like you had said maybe 20 minutes ago 30 minutes ago something like that mentioned about the whole i guess controversy around the man-made amazon and this is actually as far as like how serious it is and the whole like intellectual debate this is something that you and i were talking before this and i was not really aware of but apparently there are a significant number of scholars and people that study the amazon or whatever who are trying to say – make the argument that there's all kinds of evidence that the Amazon was basically built by man because all these civilizations that were somehow or another wiped out made it like this. And we have evidence that those existed such that their argument – this is the craziest part to me, not necessarily like the scholars saying it, but maybe some of them too,

but the argument of the scholars is then being used by corporations and by governments and countries who don't give a fuck about this stuff to be able to say, well, it's man-made, we can build it again. Exactly. That's absurd. Yeah. They actually, that was the clip that was on Rogan

where the guy's explaining to him and he's like, yeah, there's all this ancient civilizations, way more than we thought. And they're using um he said the brazil nut trees are a domesticated species which is incorrect brazil nuts are a wild species how do we know that's incorrect because brazil nuts are a wild species that grows in the amazon and they're one of the emergent species they're one of the keystones of the ecosystem but how could how can we prove that it wasn't like bananas which are like human engineered because we can tell that human bananas are human engineered if

you you can easily look up what what species we deal with that are human engineered and domesticated like a cow or a golden retriever these are things like a wolf was the original and then we get a golden retriever you have wild bison and then we bred cows to produce more milk we can direct um an apple or a banana to have more fruit and to be sweeter we can breed those things but there are wild species as well and how but what besides just like the proof of like what someone wrote down like a researcher that we can look up like what makes it so definitive that what's it called a brazil nut tree yeah what makes it so definitive that like yo that was here fucking 30 000 years ago yeah i mean and longer than that because um i mean i just looked it up i was just like are brazil nuts um

a bred species it's not it's a wild species it's a naturally occurring species that's deeply tied to the functioning of the amazon rainforest. Right. That's what I'm looking for. So how so? Because, okay, this is a crazy one. Here's the interconnected stuff. Okay. So you have a mature Brazil nut tree, which, again, is thick as this room, up 150, 160 feet. And they produce these pods.

Now, macaws are eating these pods. Monkeys are eating these pods when they're young. As they get older, you get this, like, cannonball. It's, like, bigger than a grapefruit. And it's got a bunch of brazil nuts in it but it's got this hard woody shell and so these things fall naturally out of the tree and hit the forest floor the only animal in the amazon that has the jaw strength and the teeth to open those pods is something called an aguti it's basically a large rodent just Just like a squirrel, it opens up these pods, takes the seeds, buries them. Forgets 95% of the ones it buries. So it's pollinating and spreading the seeds

of the Brazil nut tree, but here's where it gets crazy. In order for the Brazil nut tree to produce that fruit, its flowers need to be pollinated by orchid bees. And so the bees pollinate the trees between male and female trees to make it actually produce fruit. The fruit falls to the ground, the agoutis actually spread it. This is a tree that is intricately braided into the ecosystem of the Amazon.

So there's really no way. There's no. No, no. And so you have these people that are saying, you know... Why do they say that then? Because then they get to pretend that their life is the Da Vinci Code, and they say, there's, you know, read my read my book because i discovered the fact there's a hidden civilization

and i get to go get all this funding and all this attention and look they get press i mean i just i just looked it up before we did this interview because i wanted to make sure i wasn't crazy um but smithsonian magazine in 2017 put out an article being like is the amazon a man-made garden and you have this it's one paper it's one paper this guy came out and suggested that the amazon is actually a man-made garden engineered by humans and then at the end of the article they cut it back and they go yeah but it also might not be and they're like they bring up another example again this is 2.7 million square miles yeah it's bigger than the continental U.S. Man-made garden.

It's ridiculous. It's absolutely. Also, just the complexity of the ecosystem. It's an absolutely crazy claim. Were there indigenous cultures in much higher numbers than we thought? Yes. Yeah, we're going to get to that. But scattered around the jungle does not mean that the Amazon rainforest, that's a gross misinterpretation of a very small set of facts.

We can't even invent a way to make new trees sturdier today no and we're and they're trying to say that like a bunch of people with fucking not even forks and knives we're building a goddamn 2.7 million square whatever it is it's big it's crazy and also our interpretation for things changes i mean there was one thing where they thought um i know that they thought that a certain, around Mayan civilizations, that there were certain tree species that they cultivated more closely around civilized sites.

And so they thought that, but then they realized, oh, those seeds could also be pollinated by bats. And it's like in the Amazon, it's the same thing. When you walk around the jungle at night, there are bats carrying ironwood tree seeds because they have a fruit on the outside of the nut and the bats carry the seeds. here's the crazy thing the bats will will bomb you with them they'll bomb you with them they'll like literally a bat bat this big

will fly by you carrying a seed and to make you go away so it can keep eating it'll actually release the seed with the planned trajectory so it hits you in the face oh fuck that i'm going out there with a helmet if you ever take me out there you're coming that's the whole like see like that's what i was saying to ryan i'm like ryan in africa it's all in front of you like it's the open valley terrain okay you see what's coming yeah in the amazon it's like you know no do i need to bring a gun like what are we doing you won't know what's around you until you physically see it or touch it. You're so dense. I mean, if you're walking off trail, you're surrounded by plants.

You're an ocean of plants. And you're 150 feet under the canopy. So you're, like, under this vast cathedral ceiling of green. And then the understory. And then the vines. And then you're finally where you're walking, this tiny little human. You're so insignificant. It's absolutely

crazy but these people saying that the there really is a huge danger there with these people you know one person can come out saying we think there's more civilizations than we previously thought and then that changes into the amazon was engineered by humans which that changes into well then we can engineer it further let's just keep cutting it down let's adapt it more it's not true these are complex ecosystems how far back do they say um i think right now the agreed upon arrival of humans into the amazon is roughly 10 000 years ago which is not that long ago i mean oxford university is over a thousand years old but it is too because like we think not compared to africa though or somewhere you have like 30 000 years of human habitation like it gets once the numbers get up there it gets like so stressful but yeah in the context of like world history it's fucking nothing it's nothing there's nothing like how old

is the world supposedly again like there's a range but it's i'll get the number one if i even i don't want to try because that's not my uh but it's all it's a lot more than that it's like i mean human presence on the planet they keep changing they keep moving the the goalposts they keep saying oh we you know humans have been around for you know 10 000 years 100 you know the the number keeps changing based on archaeological findings and then they'll say we discovered a mummy you know in the hills of mongolia that completely changes everything and now we have to change the date that humans first existed and it's like yeah because we're still learning so you can't base how you manage one of the most critical resources on the

planet based on somebody's hypothesis about what may or may not have happened in history not to mention that anybody with common sense you walk through the amazon rainforest and it's clearly not an a human engineered thing if we saw banana plants all over the amazon rainforest well then fine you say okay i understand that but bananas came from asia it's a whole other thing but um it was just it's just when you read something like that after being on the ground and seeing how complex the ecosystem is it's just such uh a huge slap in the face to reality and it just shows you how quickly the narrative can change and how quickly just like you get into these into these things where people are pulling you in a direction for their own agenda and to me that's just somebody saying fund my career read my book i want to go play you know

hiram big i'm going to go explore you know find the next machu picchu and yeah there's there's there's sites all over the amazon where you find bits of pottery and stuff because people have been there for thousands and thousands of years but that does not equal the amazon was made by humans all right yeah while you were talking there i was actually pulling up a couple articles on this because i think there's actually an even better argument to make here just rather than simply looking at these guys wondering what the they're talking about would break breaking down all the different trees that could have been created or something like that and that is the fact that they are arguing for actually such a small number of things so if we i'm going to pull this over to the other screen so we can see it there's two but essentially what i mean by that

is let's even say for a second these guys are right, the ones who are trying to argue that and make money on it or whatever. Even if they were right, it's such a small percentage of everything that's in the rainforest. It's like a grain of sand on a beach. It's like, oh, look, this grain of sand was made by a man. Well, who fucking cares? The rest of it's not. The point is because they can say it's like a little lie can become a giant fire, because they can say, oh, look, this was man-made. Then the narrative to the average person like me who just hears that, like, oh, the rainforest was man-made.

And it travels far enough that people are like, oh, the whole thing's fake. And it's not. Here, I'll take your analogy. You take 20 grains of sand and spread them on a soccer field and then your hypothesis is because I found 20 grains of sand on this giant soccer field, this used to be a beach. It's like they're inferring this massive result of completely insufficient data. Right. So I'm going to read straight off this article behind you just so that people can hear what i'm talking about but was it really unless rhapsodical rhapsodical verse scholars in the past quarter century have shown that the mythical image of untouched nature is just that a myth see how they paint that like oh it's a myth the whole thing like humans everywhere native americans shape their

environments to suit them through burning prunt pruning tilling and other practices and the amazon is no different look closer and you can see the deep impressions the humans have made on the world's largest tropical rainforest scientists reported yesterday despite its vastness the amazon stretches more than 2 million square miles and has an estimated 390 billion trees this rainforest is hardly the untamable unstoppable force of nature that the romantics opined about says jose iriarte an archaeologist at the university of exeter in fact humans have inhabited the amazon for roughly 13 000 years which is similar to what you said and have been domesticating plants for at least 8 000 years so it goes on to say that there there's a number in here somewhere like farther down in the article where they talk about

like 80 identified 85 or something different i guess like tree species and stuff like that that could have been molded by humans number one that doesn't change that it happened a long time ago so the trees are old as fuck and number two that's such a small number 85 tree species that have been in some way bred where you're talking about 16 000 tree species in the amazon rainforest it doesn't make any sense it makes no sense that might have been in the other article i remember the number 85 was somewhere but either way whatever it is people don't even go with that number because i can't pull up where it was i think the point remains it's it's all about the narrative like how do you not paint the narrative based on what these people are saying and you could even as you did

you could even argue the argument in its entirety like wait how is some of this stuff how could that even be that a human changed this like genetically to form this plant again there's lots of there's tons of examples of us engineering i mean corn tomatoes potatoes bananas apples everything that we that we really have as mainstream products we've engineered in some they're domesticated they've that we've improved their productivity but we do know that there are also natural species not everything is engineered and so they're incorrectly identifying some tree species as engineered which they are not and then they're saying that the the prominence of these species means not that it could mean that

in those test areas that people planted them sure sure. And there might be a higher prevalence of them there. But across the Amazon basin, it seems that they're lacking an understanding of how much space they're dealing with. Were there ancient civilizations? Absolutely. Does that equal the Amazon as a garden made by humans? No. That's an insane logic train. Yeah. That's an insane logic train. Yeah, and I think also like when people are looking at it in the context of the whole capitalism structure on top of it that we've talked about a bunch of times today. able to use that argument all it takes is not having enough people speaking up to to call that

out for what it is just like this to allow that to continue but even more than that it's like how do you incentivize the people who they're paying to do this not to do it and that's why you guys are out there saying hey we'll pay you more money through our funding and stuff to help us stop this versus actually like cutting down the trees or mining the gold. Yeah. No, it's literally what drives someone to go be a logger is usually that they've been pushed out of their indigenous lifestyle. Let's start there. So they're already victims and then they have no other options. They're not good at integrating into Western society. And the things that they know are the forest. They know the know the trees they know the animals and so what you can get a chainsaw you can go I know how to identify these tree species you tell them I can make how much I can make three

years salary in like a month let's do it and then of course most of these guys what actually happens is that they don't make as much money because access is so difficult you need that heavy machinery and so you have these big companies coming in and subcontracting where they're giving them the funding to bring in that heavy machinery they cut down the trees they bring it out and by the time it all gets figured out most of the loggers in our region only make about 40 peruvian soles per day how much is that which is like 15 jesus per day for back breaking like brutal work dangerous work and when you cut down one of these trees it's like cataclysmic watching it come down but some of these people like plenty of them the danger you've been talking about is like they'll shoot at you

i mean that's when you're really far out there in the areas where the where the uncontacted tribes are but there's plenty of areas in the amazon where you're not at risk of coming into contact with those people so you just walk up and talk to them and try to convert them. Oh, yeah. No. And again, that's what I'm talking about where not being perceived as a sunscreen gringo where it's like if you're surrounded by a team of local guys who have credibility down there and you roll up on loggers, well, we can walk in there and just be like, oh, you

guys got a drink? We're not trying to – our thing is never confrontational. We don't want – we're not trying to go down there and be like, you guys got a drink you know we're not we're not trying to our thing is never confrontational we don't want we're not trying to go down there and be like you guys are bad no if anything we're gonna sit down we're gonna be like hey what are you guys doing how much you earning who you working for i mean just uh a few weeks ago one of the loggers actually stopped by our research station at night and he wanted to charge his phone because he was actually keeping gps data on like what trees he was i mean these are like these guys trees he was on. And these are like, these guys are connected. Like, and they were like, are we allowed to charge here? He was like, would you guys like give us some, we're like, sit down.

We're like, come have some coffee with us. And it's like, we made an ally that night. We hung out, we shared some whiskey with him. And it's like, now I told him, I told him straight to his face. I was like, look, I'm a conservationist. I'm trying to stop the logging on this river. And he's like, yeah, it's a real problem. He was like, it's what I'm doing, but it's a real problem. And then's a real problem and then i was like look i was like can you uh i was like if

you guys are going to be milling any stuff i was like can we come in and see it and he's like dude come on over like totally chill hearts and minds hearts and minds why would you make enemies when you can just make friends and then now that guy knows he's like yo they let me charge up that time i needed it they gave me some whiskey we're friends and then so when we come in there and we go hey um can we actually protect this land instead of you cutting down these trees? We've actually had it before where the guys have been like, we're happy to do that. And we'll tell you this. You should get this piece before they cut that because they're looking at that one next. six months of back-breaking work surrounded by venomous snakes getting rained on starving in the forest and risking getting killed with these falling trees when we could just work with the

conservationists literally it's easier it's safer it's better for them we give them health insurance um it's literally taking them out of the shadows of the forest and bringing them into somewhere where they're professional protectors of the Amazon. Is it that hard though? I'm just thinking like a sinecure because you kind of have to assume that's like if China wants to keep funding this because as you've pointed out like they're a huge problem whereas like the US for example our issue in them in the Supply chain here is that we're buying it right and we're not asking questions about that which we deserve blame for but like on the on The actual funding it that's where it's more from china and some other places and china's just

the biggest so let's stick with that example like how hard is it for them to economically just re-incentivize these people to be like oh fuck that you're working with the conservationists now we're going to give you this um i think our biggest challenge is scale you know we're doing this over you know 55 000 acres but it's a teardrop in the ocean. It's such a small – the Amazon is so damn big. How many miles do you personally cover when you're down there? It's hard to say because of the way the river goes, but I mean 55,000 acres is a significant amount of land. That's a huge – I'm trying to think in terms of how many

Manhattans that is I'm gonna do acres to miles and YouTube so my miles miles is gonna is gonna shrink us significantly because square miles are gigantic yeah square miles that's still 86 square miles yeah and you're an 11 man team that's a big area yeah but that's nothing it's nothing nothing if you look at it if you zoom out on google earth so you could see the whole amazon and you look at the parcel that we're protecting it's all do that i'll put google earth absolutely yeah i'll give you the map so you can see it like highlighted in orange and then when you zoom out and just when you see the 350 000 acres that's been deforested by the miners and then our our little tiny thing but on that little tiny thing are in that little patch

of protected forest are millions and millions of wild heartbeats entire families of spider monkeys and endangered giant river otters and black caiman and jaguars and macaws and all of that incredible life and animals that we don't know the names of that science has not discovered or really absolutely there's new species discovered every year like big or very small both i mean there's some big species we haven't yet discovered oh my god dude there's there's 40 species of fishing bat in our region that have fishing bat bats that rely on fish they they fly low over the water and they pluck fish out of the out of the streams and so there's 40 species that we know of of fishing bats in the Amazon.

And that's just that we know about. And then how many ant species, termite species? And then when you start breaking it down into all the different phyla and genuses, it's like there is so much life out there. And don't forget, people, just like the deepest parts of the ocean, people have not had had access to the canopy it's incredibly difficult to get up into the canopy of the amazon so people what do you mean by the canopy of the amazon i mean the tops of these trees are 160 feet in the air so if you're a little oh fuck that five foot nine human you're talking about like a literally a skyscraper and so there's scientists that have made hot air balloons and then they have like these big net floats where they put it down on the canopy because it's literally it's like how do we go to different

spots of canopy and then here here's where it blows exponentially out because even if you have let's say you have a river and then you have a research station next to the river and so let's just say over the course of 50 years you have a certain amount of scientists going to this one spot but when you fly like in a Cessna over the Amazon and you can go for two hours without seeing any break in the forest in time and like the really wild parts, when you think about the fact that no one has been to the center of that spot, you know, 30 minutes by plane from one river and you say drop a scientist right there, keep going another 30 minutes by plane until you hit another river. No one's been there. No one knows what species. You know who's been there? The Nazis after World war ii they buried their shit there that's where they are fucking teeth they just fucking threw it out they took one of those like ss leftover sesna

shits or whatever the fuck it was called and they they got a longitude and latitude and there is literally half the world's wealth sitting down there i'll bet hidden under you gotta get some lidar gotta get something get some light i gotta scan under the jungle but that's see that's like that's foreign to me like you explain i visualized it right like i've seen movies right i'm thinking like lord of the rings or some shit like that but it's really like it's right there like you it's crazy to me that like you will fly down from new york to miami take a flight to peru you know land at an airport in a regular old country with roads and people and shit, governments, all that.

And then take a little drive and boom, you're in it. Yeah. You drive off the edge of human presence on our planet. That's it. Just in the, and it's, and it's crazy because again, like that you leave society. Like we literally, sometimes as we're going on an expedition, we'll like look behind us and you, you go, the world could have ended. it could have been 9-11 it could be nuclear war and you're out in the middle of the amazon for weeks on end and you know nothing about the outside world and there's actually this weird

sort of thing that creeps up on everybody where we start to like get like stressed about it you almost start to you almost start to forget because it's so real and your life out there in the wild is predicated on such like tangible facts it's like you and your life out there in the wild is predicated on such like tangible facts it's like you have to get clean water from the streams you know when it rains you have to go if it's the middle of the night and you wake up and it's raining you have to go check the boat because the river is going to raise 15 feet and so you have to there's a lot of things that you have to do and we're used to in society that like i could go to the store i could not go to the store i could go later i could be a. I could go later. I could be a lawyer.

I could be this. And it's like, you can make a lot of decisions. We have all these decisions at our fingertips because of the society we live in. And when you're in the wild, your, your, your life is governed by like the original set of chemical physical rules. And so like you're playing at the most essential level and it's like you have to do these certain things if you don't protect yourself at seven you know 6 30 p.m when all the mosquitoes come out you're going to be bitten to hell you're going to get infected bug bites you're going to die

then you're going to get digested by the amazon and it's like there's just this set of like things and a lot of i'm not the first person to to like discover this it's like when you're out in the wilderness there's just sort of this this and a lot of people find it it helps with like that that chatter that uncertainty that depression that people feel the anxiety and it all goes it all melts away when you're in the jungle because in the jungle you're in this you're in this world where all of your senses are demanded at all times so you're concentrated have you spent time not even necessarily alone but i'll even ask that but maybe with a couple other people or something living off the land yeah well that was one of my that was what i

wrote about my first book was that i started doing solos in the jungle which now looking back you know like when you look back and you just go why the hell did i do that i mean you're killing dinner and shit um i actually at the time i was trying to not because look what i'm doing i mean i could if i needed to but i was saying like i'm voluntarily going out into the jungle and surviving for days on end so to me it's like if i'm killing game for that it's like it's still it's still not it's still not something i need for survival i theoretically could pack my food so i did i brought like dry noodles nuts whatever. And I would bring like 10 days worth of that. But 10 days in some of the, I would get dropped past the last place with a name. What do you mean dropped? Like I would ask loggers. I'd go up to some loggers, find them,

but go real remote, go like three days out into the jungle, past the last village, past the last place with the generator. You find some loggers working out in the real deep spots because that's where the big trees are. And you go, guys, guys look is there any chance that you could drop me as far as you're going drop me there and they're like what and they're like yeah sure they're like so you're you're gonna commit suicide no i'm not gonna commit so i got i got a i got a pack raft that i can pop out there's this company in colorado called alpaca rafts they make rafts that'll pack down to the size of a tent and so i pop that in my backpack i got food supplies i got a camera i got my notebook all that shit and i would go out into the jungle for weeks at a time and launch these huge solos one

of the first ones i did i was lost in a swamp for three days i'm talking like a huge swamp i'm talking like a the the the northern side of new jersey types like a swamp where they bury bodies like huge and um yeah i had i woke up in the middle of the night and i felt something warm on my neck and i figured i'll turn on my light and see what it is and i moved my hand and this jaguar just boo just just growls right into my ear her face was right here and so i'm sitting there i'm dead still in a hammock in the center under 160 feet of canopy in the night and this this animal this jaguar is three inches away from my head and she's going just don't move she goes i'm in control and she was just smelling me she's just she'd never smelled a human before because there's

no humans there and when she was done i literally i just could tell that she had left i couldn't hear her breathing anymore and then after about 20 minutes when like my heartbeat slowed down and i was like okay and i i moved a little bit more the slightest motion i turned on my light she was gone but this thing was three inches away from my head middle of the night in the jungle how big was it i don't know i never saw her i mean she must she must have she must have been big she must have been she was a big one i mean i'm saying she i don't know what it was i mean it was a could have been a male could have been a female but it was a jag that voice is unmistakable it's like it's like god's voice it's like thunder um what what did they obviously like their carnivores but what do they usually feed on see a jaguar has a limitation

because they're they're larger predators so they have to they want to take down a wild boar they want to take down a deer so they're going after peccary they're going after brocket deer whereas an ocelot which is a smaller cat an ocelot think of like a like two times a house cat not quite a jaguar o-c-e-l-o-t they're like the the pound for pound champion of the Amazon because they they can go in the trees screen yeah they can they can feed off of lizards snakes birds you know anything they want to they can eat and a lot of it it doesn't come with a risk for them they look like a cat yeah they're beautiful it's like a little it's like a miniature Jaguar yeah yeah they literally

look but they look like a they look like a cheetah skin leopard skin cat that's my friend that's your friend right there yeah that's funny um no but they're literally that pound for pound they're probably the most successful predator in the amazon because they can hunt everything everything and it doesn't come with a high danger value for them like a jaguar if you're going after a deer you got to worry about antlers you're going after a wild boar you got to worry about tusks these guys they can just pop off birds bats lizards whatever and just like a cat they're just the ultimate predator what are some other cool species people don't ever talk about from down there giant anteaters man giant anteaters are so cool i ended up raising

one and you raised a giant i raised a giant anteater one of my first years down there was 19 years old and this giant anteater, they're huge. They're bigger than you think. It's like a German shepherd with like, yeah. I got out the corner of the screen once again. Fuck. And on the ends of those feet, their nose is very delicate. It's like a cartilage nose.

And they have this long tongue and they can eat ants. On the ends of those arms, though, they have like these big popeye forearms and then just like wolverine claws and so if a jag comes and tries to eat a giant anteater it'll stand up on its hind legs open its arms up and just start slashing and it'll like poke poke in the stomach and just open that thing up so the jags often won't mess with them but also when a giant anteater stands up on its hind legs it's almost five feet tall so i've had guys who've been hunting with their dogs thinking they're going after a game species and they come around to bend one guy his dog went after this giant anteater grabbed the dog by the neck snapped the neck with its hand with the claws they walk on their knuckles snap the neck the dude comes around the bend with his shotgun

anteaters looking at him eye to eye with its claws out staring him in the face and starts slashing at him he He ran for his life. Giant anteaters are incredibly badass animals. Wow. And they only eat like ants and shit though, right? Ants and termites, yeah. And so I had one. Some farmer had actually killed one by mistake.

He thought it was a taper. He shot it. And the baby's right on the backs of the mothers. And they're like intensely bonded to their mothers. And so, I was left with this baby and she needed to hug me all the time. So, I had to carry this anteater on me like a mother anteater for weeks. And I was living in the jungle at 19 years old

with this baby anteater taking naps because I literally, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't like go do the other stuff I had to do because this baby was like, I need to be holding someone all the time. Oh my God. So, if I fell asleep, then to be holding someone all the time. Oh, my God. So if I fell asleep, then she'd take the ant tongue, fire it into my ear. She'd do things where I would wake up and I'd have an anteater tongue up my nose coming out my mouth.

Because they have like a 12-inch tongue. And she'd be like, wake up, wake up. I want to play. Pencil? Pencil and super thick. But you had to be careful because her claws are sharp. So if you got her excited, she literally could rip through you like rip your skin but uh it was one of the greatest things i ever did because a this animal had such a deep love like this animal was just the most

emotional little thing um she went everywhere in the jungle with me and then also i got to experience the forest through an animal's perspective because a lot of days it was just me and her and so it was just me and this little anteater walking through the forest and she didn't like it when i was walking up like standing up like a human my face was too far away from her so she wanted me on my hands and knees oh you'd have to crawl so i'd like crawl next to this anteater and we'd be walking through the jungle together like finding different things if she got scared she'd come back to me she'd try and crawl up on my back. I literally had to act like a mother anteater for weeks and weeks.

And then did you eventually go to the wild? Eventually she rejoined the wild. She started going out for longer and longer periods until she stayed out. It was pretty cool. It's kind of sad though too. Like one day she just doesn't come back. I mean, but that's what you want.

That's the best case scenario. You want to return a wild animal to the wild where they belong. That's, you know, it's always hard, but it's like, you know, even if you're, you know, when I was a kid, we used to, my parents used to train seeing-eye dogs. You want them to go become a seeing-eye dog. And that sucks because you raise this puppy, but they're going to go on to do their thing. It's such an important thing, though, too.

I've known, my aunt and uncle raised some seeing-eye dogs. And it's like so sad when you got to give them up in, like, a year or whatever. But it's an amazing thing you're doing for somebody else. They're going to, like, change someone's life. Exactly. Yeah. And it's, like, incredible. Like, we think about the things we can see all the time, like, in normal society away from the rainforest.

We think about, like, dogs and cats and all that. But, you know, all these different animals around the world the of course they all have different habits behaviors and and you know ways they go about living but there's there are some key emotions that even on on the ground level tie everything together like including us and like with that anteater which i've never i'm probably seen an anteater at the fucking zoo like when I was a kid. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

They're hard to care for because you've got ants. But it's like you had such a human experience through that, like through an animal, through something that none of us have ever even really been around. Yeah. No, and that's what shaped a lot of my work. And so we end up talking about the climate and the Chinese interests and the local people and all this crazy shit. And it's like, at the end of the day, the time I've spent raising a giant anteater or the time I've spent living with a herd of elephants. And it's like, I won't even get started on how intelligent they are. Um, but it's, you know, we're not the only species on this planet. And my entire life, like the things that I have, the moments that have made me truly like just filled

with wonder have all been because of these species and getting into that level where you like see them in the wild and where you have interactions with them. And they can't throw on a suit and go address the United Nations. I can't, they can't speak to us. They can't be like, stop cutting down our forest. And again, I'm not the first person to say this. A lot of the great conservationists from Alan Rabinowitz to Jane Goodall have said this. Steve Irwin used to say it, that you have to be a voice for the voiceless. And it's like, in the case of wildlife, it's like, if a herd of elephants could talk, what would they say? Fuck you. Actually, though, actually, though.

Like, actually. Yeah, I wouldn't blame them. They have, I mean, they have burial ceremonies. They have PTSD from seeing violence. I mean, these, I mean, I once watched an elephant pick out a pregnant human. They know, I mean, think, so just like they have seeing eye dogs, they have dogs that can alert a person. My sister's a type 1 diabetic. And so you could, you know, you always have to monitor your insulin.

And so they have dogs that are trained they can actually sense the chemical changes in your body and they'll wake you up in the night if you drop too low now an elephant smell is far superior to a dog smell it's just like a dog's is far superior to ours but they did a study where i think it was there was a they did they had two jars there was one jar with 100 sunflower seeds and one with 117 sunflower seeds. And the elephants have like enough olfactory knowledge that they could tell which one, just by the smell, which one had more and they could grab that one.

I've watched an elephant walk up this, we were living with a semi-wild herd of elephants and this elephant walks out of the forest and there was like three people in a row. She said hello to one, you know, they tap you on the forehead. There's a whole greeting system with elephants. and then her trunk went straight to the stomach of this one girl who was like recently pregnant and then all the other female elephants came in

and they were all touching her stomach because they knew that she was pregnant and they all were interested in it and they were getting information that we can't even understand. They're, they're interpreting things that we have no access to. And so, you know, we judge animal intelligence by these laboratory tests. So, you know, can a, can a chimp solve a Rubik's cube or some, some stuff like that. But it's like in their environment, they're solving problems that we can't solve. You know, if an elephant has to travel, you know, a 100 kilometers to find water it's like well they can smell it we can't they literally have talents that we don't and it's like I've spent my entire adult life the last 17 years so immersed in the animal world that I that's become and that's why I've only done one thing is try to protect this River and that's why working with

Ryan and seeing the work that they're doing is so crucial to me because it's like these are such important species and they're so close to being extinct and the fact that people are willing to you know devote their lives to protect it it's like knowing that there's a network of people around the world who have made that decision that saying we're you know it stops here we're going gonna protect these species like to me that's that's what keeps me going see we gotta get and also actually side note would you mind is your phone on airplane mode i forgot to ask you that because it's it interferes with that cloud lifter all right cool because i didn't know if i was hearing something in my headphone i don't want to find that later

and have it all fucked up but anyway like if you think about like what ryan does with the elephants at that point it's not just elephants it's rhinos it's giraffes gazelles yes but what's the one not armadillos there's another there's a more rare yes that's it like the most trafficked animal on the planet yeah right so you see all the stuff he protects the thing that elephants have that makes it so powerful when you tell it to you know somebody sitting at a desk in in virginia yeah is that you know we they're the biggest mammal yeah they have eyes you can see them you can you can go online you can watch a video and see how majestic they are i mean the idea of like killing one of those things to me it's inconceivable it is totally inconceivable and it's and that's a whole separate

argument with the poaching and all that which we covered in episode 117 and we'll continue to talk about but not to go too deep on that more focus on like what it is it's like you know they're they have not only tremendously better memories than we do i mean we have the phrase in a memory like an elephant right never forgets and we and but they also they they have some of those things you talk about they have the burial ceremonies they they that you can see their emotion i mean i when i was putting together some content for for some clips from ryan's episode you know there's a bbc video of when there was like some sort of drought or whatever in Africa

and they captured it on camera where a mother has to make the decision like her baby's not going to make it. You know, and you see this animal go through it just like a human being mother goes through when their little one's going to die and everything. And it's like, you know, that's how you put a face to it

and i think some the battle you fight the reason i bring that up is because the battle you fight down there is at the high level similar to a guy like ryan because it's over there somewhere else right it's not here we have to bring that to the people right so you both have that battle that's a hard battle but then you have a second layer to it. The Amazon is exactly like that image you put on it with the Cessna above the trees. It's this enclosed place. It's not like open. It's bright and beautiful and amazing and like Atlantis in there.

But it's closed off to the world. So people, you know, they can go to youtube and watch a video of an elephant walking through you know a field or a lion walking through a field or some shit with the amazon it's like i'm sitting there like wow what is in there like i've heard stories and stuff but how do you put the eyes on it like for trees and that's the best example because that's the thing they're cutting down that's the whole fucking forest you describe it as one of these trees with 200 feet into the fucking air or whatever has thousands of species living on it not just termites and shit you're talking you're talking like you could have you could have literal like clans of like monkey communities living in

there you can have communities of jaguars like like like a skyscraper like i said like different floors different people but people when they're thinking about it and even when they see the video they're still thinking of trees and trees are so important aren't as empathetic as elephants exactly they don't have eyes they don't have eyes so how do that's my question how do we put eyes on what you do it's not like there aren't eyes these other jaguars have eyes you know these other species have eyes but how do we have the power of like seeing a tear from an elephant on what you do because it's every bit and it's like i don't want to say one's more important than the other but we're talking about something that literally regulates our ecosystem of the fucking planet yes and it's and you're right instead of one big like charismatic star

like an elephant or like lions or rhinos or something but especially elephants um with the amazon it's a thousand small things and so that's what we try to do is like show people a lot of times like i'll cut together these montages of like the spider monkeys the jaguars the river otters the butterfly clouds i mean there's just there's 1500 species of butterfly just in our region of the amazon and it's like it's so colorful and so diverse it's just you got to just show people what the overall effect is and then get them to fall in love with that yeah I'm thinking on it from like a and I know what you mean I was thinking because I'm passionate about like getting to know you guys and

talk with you with you off-camera and everything over the past couple months and seeing the work you do and you know that gives me an extra attachment to it you know it's like wow this makes so much sense and yet it's not something like i said it's something you hear about in school when you're growing up like oh yeah they're cutting down too much in the rainforest it's like wow it sucks and then you go about life you know you have to have that you have you have to have this and not everyone who's listening gets to have you on speed dial and talking to them and you know see what you're doing the best they can get is right now but the important thing is is that you see what

you're doing though you're using this podcast using your platform to help tell people about that yeah and so like i always try to tell people it's like there's a lot of people that can't travel to the amazon you know some people i've had people message me and they're like i can't give a lot but we're going to give five dollars a month or something it's like great that's serious for the for the rangers down there like that's actually helping us and then you know if you if you tally those up the each of those people each every person that's helping us do this is just as important as any one of us on the core team is because we couldn't do it without that support i could be here all day long telling every story about animals every showing you everything and burning things but if people

didn't actually support us then it then it wouldn't be worth anything i'm just some guy telling stories and at least like you've had a lot of success like like actually not early on like you've been at this for a while but i'm saying like yeah you know you're not coming here operating off a budget of zero with no awareness like you've been around your face has been all over the news at different points and you've you have solid revenues of money coming in but it's like you know we're trying to cover 2.7 million square miles of of space it does take it does take funding the the crazy thing to me is that it and I said a similar thing about Ryan stuff it's like it takes a lot less than you think it takes a lot less than you think because these people aren't making a ton of money out

there and the more every time you pick somebody off and you convert them from like a logger to helping you you are now planting a seed within their community to where they can kind of convert other people and spread like the emotion of it oh yeah dude great story off of that so this guy the the same guy that um the the the story where someone was killed on the beach by the tribes this guy this logger victor so when i met him he was a logger and we needed a boat driver like quick our boat driver couldn't make it so we hired victor and we uh we loved him awesome guy um real hard ass had been through so many survival situations in the amazon had been through the military in peru and uh the thing is he just he had this one bum leg his like his knee was calcifying and he couldn't walk and so as time went on he started

working with us more and more he was like this work is so much better than logging we invited him into like he was just became part of the family but as his leg got worse and worse he literally couldn't walk like he couldn't carry a motor he couldn't provide for his family and so we did this we ended up doing a fundraiser on instagram raising 15 grand and we flew him out of the jungle to the capital of lima where the doctors gave him knee replacement surgery and then we brought him back and so now he can walk around in fact I watched him play football the other day oh wow so we for a guy that has to walk around the Amazon for his livelihood we really did something to help this guy's life and now when we roll into an indigenous community we

got Victor on our side he's like these guys are here and they mean it yeah these guys changed my life and it's like when you invest like that in people where you really i mean you know they say biocultural conservation um when you really but what that means on the ground is like literally making those human connections i mean each of these people that i work with are you know any of the guys that i consider part of my core team are guys I've worked with for like 10 plus years and that's see that's the value of the fact that like you know you're not just somebody who got passionate about this learning about it and said oh I'm gonna go down there with this plan and that plan and we're gonna start we're gonna get funding behind it and do it you went down there without a plan you went down

there as a kid effectively. And you made relationships. You also learned the terrain yourself. And then over time, some of those relationships, some of which it's like you're converting people from wanting to do that. Other times it's people who already feel the way you feel. Now, it's almost like over the years, and I mean this in a good way like you backdoored it with with jungle keepers and what you do because it's like wait a second we've already kind of been doing this i'm just going to put the name of something on it now and now i need all you who aren't necessarily going to come down here but in places like america where we have people with some financial means i need you to

help us do this so that all the things that you're enjoying whether it's you know that using that paper in the printer today or you know building that, it's going to be up for the next 300 years. You can continue to do that and not worry about it because what you don't realize is it's running out. Yeah, no, I definitely did had, had that. No, I ran into it because it was what I loved. I loved the rainforest. I loved the guys down there. And it was years before we, we slapped anything onto it before we like realized that we could just the other thing when you're starting out you say the problem is so big you're talking about like a global planetary ecosystemic systemic problem the destruction of

the amazon and it's like you don't think as a as an 18 19 20 year old that you can have any effect on that but then having that awesome local team spending those years of just not even trying to have a direction we were literally just like bringing people to the jungle trying to support ecotourism and just we just built this clan and then that was what able enabled us to go out and say okay wait can we get organized can we bring in more people can we get some people who can actually help us? Because I learned to walk barefoot and carry a machete and I learned how to take data on species and film. Those are my skills. I'm a wilderness guide. These guys are local indigenous people. They don't know how to work spreadsheets. They don't know how to do all kinds of, all of the work that you need to do to actually

be an organization. So we had to bring in people. had to get funding we had to find the people that could make that dream a reality but it's like without that original investment of time with the people on the ground you know if i'd showed up with a plan if i was some prestigious phd student that's you know or professor that shows up and goes this is how we're going to create this national park and it's a different thing this is starting from the local people and going out and that's why the story that we're going to create this national park and it's a different thing this is starting from the local people and going out and that's why the story that we're telling to the world that's why we have that authenticity that we can be like look your donations are going right there our acres are going right here it's like we know exactly what we're doing and uh having having the local team

behind us is just like the coolest thing in the world how much of like the history of the amazon like it's in in its entirety have you really focus on because like everything we're talking about is is you and it's clear you definitely have a worldview on it i asked that kind of knowing the answer but not all the way it's like everything we're talking about is you focusing on what's happening there right now and focusing on the resources that do exist and why we got to save it but like the rainforest itself we read off in an article a little bit ago that you know they're saying there could have been people there like 13 000 years ago but like how do you know a lot about like how long it took this thing to form or how much different it might

have looked 2 000 years ago like um civilizations that we know have been there i mean again the civilizations thing is a is a is a fraught topic because there's so many different you know you had the incas on the on the in the andes you had the incan civilization and of course they were interacting with the with the amazonian tribes but if you go further back if you look at south america and africa they actually fit together yes and so the congo river used to flow into the amazon and the amazon used to flow in the opposite direction this was before the continent split before south america hit the nazca plate and threw up the andes mountains how many years ago are we talking about like hundreds of millions of years ago and then you know at that point the

amazon would have been an inland sea have salt water and that's why we still have freshwater stingrays because over millions of years as the amazon drained you had dolphins manatees stingrays a lot of saltwater animals that ended up staying and adapting to freshwater life and then as the jungle formed and the crazy thing is that you still have sediment from africa blowing up and being carried by the wind across the atlantic ocean and falling on the amazon so you literally have this this this conversation happening between africa and the amazon and then the moisture cycle of the amazon then going and contributing back into global climate the sediment makes it across

the atlantic Ocean each year it travels across from Africa from the sands of the Sahara travels across the Atlantic Ocean and the rainy season it gets brought through the clouds and rain down fertilizing the Amazon rainforest and then you'll hear people be like oh the Amazon isn't really the lungs of the earth it sure is because all that bio biomass that's falling all the leaves and sticks and twigs all that detritus is getting pulled up by the river and brought down in those river systems and carried 4 000 miles across the amazon basin and then the mouth of the amazon rainforest which is 13 miles across just vomits just picture like a dragon wait the mouth the oh the mouth of the river like where the amazon river is the Atlantic yep and it pushes

water out I think it's about 40 miles into the Atlantic before it mixes with the saltwater and yeah I've always wondered actually that's it that's a good question I've always wondered how that works cuz like you'll talk about rivers and they'll be like some of them like sometimes if it's a small one and like Jersey maybe that's a bad example or like Florida like the Indian River something it's saltwater yeah this is like small it's right there but like then we talk about these other ones like the amazon where it's fresh water i never understood why the salt like this is a really dumb question i'm not a scientist but like why the salt from like the big basin doesn't just fucking mix with the fresh you know because river this is that's a great question actually so a

river is a drainage and so you say why does the ocean have salt and rivers are fresh water um rivers let's just say start at start at the rocky mountains and so you have like rocky mountains and you have precipitation coming down in the form of rain fresh or glaciers you're fresh water and that's going down these little tiny mountain streams and then it'll come down and hit a bigger stream and then that'll go into the colorado river and then you have it running through the grand canyon and if humans didn't it up and make dams um you would have this giant river running to the ocean and it would be bringing all of those minerals and grabbing tiny particles of salt over the course of millions and millions of years depositing that salt into the ocean which is why we have salt

water oceans so like if i were swimming with a taste tester down the amazon and i started at the back of it like closest to where it touches headwaters yeah i get it you're using the terms i don't know but if i start at the place where it's like stopping on land and i was tasting it's fresh as fuck As I get closer to the ocean, it starts to get a little saltier. No. No? I want to get so fucked up in the comments. It flows in one direction. So the Amazon is... All right, I'll make this easy for you.

So you have the Andes Mountains right here. I'll do it your way, actually. Okay. This is the Andes Mountains. It's flowing down off the Andes Mountains through the little streams, and then it hits the Amazon Basin. And then that's when you have rivers like the little Las Pras like mine and then up here you have a ketos and they all move across the basin and they join up around i would say like around like manaus they

have all these larger and larger rivers and then finally you get to the amazon proper yes and amazon proper is a giant river i mean it's the i think from the mouth of the river into a ketos it's like the largest inland shipping port like it you can bring ocean liners in there but when you reach the mouth of the jungle all of that water is charging out into the atlantic for 40 miles before it even mixes with the salt water that titanic mass is just the inertia just takes it out into the ocean so the mouth which meets a bay and the atlantic so like just picture picture pouring water picture pouring like coffee straight into like a pool it's just like it's just yeah charging in but there's none of the pool water is coming back into the coffee so now i'm getting really technical with this but i think people will follow

so i'm making like a v like it's the mouth of it right yes it's flowing literally let's say there's a house on the corner of where the mouth meets the river okay right and then there's a beach just to the right of it like literally 50 yards that way sure if i go swimming on that beach that's the atlantic ocean that's right that's right so it's literally like a line almost pretty much yeah wow and so other than like the eddies and the the little the mixing that happens on the side that that river current is charging out into the atlantic and all of that again the sticks and leaves and the mixing that happens on the side, that river current is charging out into the Atlantic. And all of that, again, the sticks and leaves and the detritus, all of that biomass that the Amazon is releasing in the rainy season is coming out of that mouth into the Atlantic Ocean where phytoplankton is finally releasing all that. Phyto what?

Phytoplankton. That's a SpongeBob character. Plankton. And that's how the oxygen is actually finally being released into the atmosphere um so the amazon is quite literally breathing out like it's exhalation from the mouth of the river is what's pumping oxygen into our atmosphere and this shit used to touch the congo shit used to touch the congo and what's the river there the congo that's where they made like hearted darkness or like that's exactly yeah exactly that's that's the the the other jungle

wow and they're literally like sisters of each other and everything in the amazon is very feminine based i mean look the reference the river amazon is based off of the i think it was a greek mythological tribe of women who the amazons the single-breasted women who had the bow and arrows because they um and even for the native and that's more of a that's more of a european sort of mythology and then for the native uh creation origin stories you have that it was the anaconda mother that carved the shape of the rivers across the land and again the anaconda everything is the females the big the life-giving the mother um so everything everything in the amazon is very feminine sort of like god god is a woman sort of yeah the amazon it's very it's it's that's just the energy of

the jungle and even for when you're on ayahuasca or something um that's where that's that's the voice in which the amazon speaks it's and and it goes back to like the top level of it too like we call it mother nature yeah right and when you think of mother nature it's actually it is kind of like make up a word here but like oxified by something like like a like a being like the rainforest like that's probably 2.7 million square miles i'm trying to think of like other natural resource like areas in the world i mean that's got is there anything bigger than that i think the boreal forest in russia is the single biggest forest of any type is there fucking anything in there though uh yeah i mean dude

they got they got siberian tigers and well i was gonna say like where is it like is that all are you talking i'm talking i don't know where that is like picture on the on the level that like alaska's on like that level in russia like high up there yeah yeah yeah like that forest um on the far east of russia and like kamchatka there's i mean dude if you ever want to read a crazy non-fiction book the tiger i think it's by john valiant or velant um but like there's there's a boreal forest where they have like snow leopards um no yeah they have snow leopards they have the siberian tiger and then there's like wolves and grizzly bears and it's like you have tigers and bears and wolves all competing in the same

ecosystem and there's snow it's one of the wildest places on earth yeah when i say like is there anything in there i'm like i'm thinking from like a number of types of species oh no absolutely no no no yeah it's gotta be smaller because it's not dude i have i have a map i could show you where it's like it's planet earth coded for vertebrate species diversity and so in a place like that where you have like 16 miles of forest before there's like one raccoon and like in places like that it'll be like cool blue it's almost like um what's it called thermal imaging and then when you get to the amazon it's like bright red because it's the amount of species per square acre is just unbelievable but it's just species on

top of species on top of species i don't know how this ties into sustainability of the planet like this science there when i'm getting to like what i'm about to say is confusing to me like because i haven't heard people talk about this but a few weeks ago i don't know how the fuck this happened but this happens because i have add like i'll sit there and this random rabbit hole will form and the one that formed was if you look at like the maps i started going on like google earth i think it was because like i saw greenland or something like i saw something like oh such and such like denmark owns greenland or some like that i was like wow why the is that and so then i was looking at the greenland like like uh what's the what's the term like where they show the

terrain where you can see like a topographical mass topographical map exactly i was looking at that i'm like a whole thing snow yeah and so then i started looking like all along the northern latitudes and i'm like i wonder what the farthest towns up that like exist are and i found some at like 88 degrees latitude but for the purposes of arguments everything above 70 yeah like i'm looking at this sometimes you could like look the little yellow man on the google map i'm like looking at the town like once you do street view and i'm like people live there i know and there's like you know a hundred people but then i started looking at all the land and i'm like look at all the unused land on this earth

when we figure out how to heat that without ruining the planet and i'm talking maybe that's tens of thousands of years from now the The world population and the resources potentially, and now you're getting way above my pay grade, is going to be absurd. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Explain this one. So you said when we can heat that. I'm talking tens of thousands of years from now. See, I disagree with you 100% there on this one.

Good. I have no idea what i'm talking about so i really feel like um one of the things that we've lost is that is the understanding that the the earth you know people have like gaia and stuff like that but gaia gaia is like the the idea that earth is like a single large living organism and just like we have like a um a microbiome in our stomach like and that we have bacteria living in our skin like we're we're not just a human we have lots of other like tiny organisms living in us um but that the the the earth i think that we we've gotten to this place where we've we have such a customizable life that we've started to think that everything on earth is customizable and that's why again i feel like where people are getting

they're like losing the plot because if you talk to a villager in rural Africa, they, they don't have any sort of any of this sort of like modern identity crisis. They, they know exactly what, what, where the boundaries of reality are and they, and they live comfortably in that. And they tend to live in a way that's a lot less anxiety ridden than the western lifestyle and i think that the fact that you need to have a clean river to drink the water is like a simple fact we can all agree on that one um you know and when it's filled with salmon and once a year they come up river and lay their eggs and then they die and then they they fertilize that entire ecosystem and then the plants grow and then you have better life and you can you can fish for salmon you have food there and it's like we've forgotten that these things are not actually like yeah we can make a theme park we can put an indoor skiing place in dubai like sure but in terms of like warming up

places where there's snow i don't know if that's ever gonna happen all right that's a little bit of a weed thought but still like i did say tens of thousands of years tens of thousands of years from now when we all have jetpacks and neural link and that's what i'm saying because one thing about humans they love colonizing man that never ends they love when they once here's the thing though there has to be a reason for them to do it yeah so like no one's gonna go colonize a desert because there's fucking nothing there well go talk to elon he's obsessed with with colonizing mars a dead planet he's allegedly he's like we have to oh yeah allegedly because we've only seen one side of it um but yeah no he's he he said that he had this quote that i loved he goes we have to go colonize mars he goes it's no different than when the explorers went out to find

new continents first of all the explorers went out to find new continents there were already people living there and there was already ecosystems and resources and clean water and animals to eat and crops so it's not the same thing there's no native americans over on mars there's no there's no one to take care of you on mars but that's where that's what there's 100 people living in quinnip something they're up at 88 latitude there are 100 people there dude you ever watch like alaska state troopers like oh my god there's a i think it's a national geographic show but they literally it's like cops but in alaska and they'll get a call and they'll be like yo a polar bear just ate somebody uh get up here and like these cops will have to take a plane to this village and

actually more often than a polar bear it's usually just like a domestic violence dispute and they go to these godforsaken villages where there's like a couple of people living in trailers at the edge of the world yeah on the edge of the ice and you know there'll be like an inuit community that's what i'm saying i'm like what do you do there was one there was seals that's all there was literally like a long john silvers there i'm like what the fuck like what it was like a roy rogers or something like you just see this town of like a hundred people there's nothing within a thousand miles of it it's crazy right and there's like a business there and a ups store i'm like yeah i think like a gallon of milk is like 27 who the fuck is flying there like there does money

even exist is it a thing dude there's a lot of people that live out in these crazy places i mean the the guys some of our rangers and bringing it back to the amazon that live in communities where like to get from the nearest city out to that community takes five days by boat and so how fast 30 miles an hour 25 let's call it 30 miles an hour okay um and it's like that's you are so far out there you're talking about like a broken bone or any other i mean i was there just a couple weeks ago a woman had a baby and like she just had a baby like it just it came out and it was on the ground and they like put a towel down and actually at first i think the at first she didn't know she was giving birth at that moment it was kind of a surprise and they just like the baby was just laying on like these

sandy boards of wood just like rainforest trees just cut into boards and the mother they were she was dealing with herself and it was so different from what we have because we have like doctors and nurses and the baby comes out and you have to get it on the mother and we have to do all these things they place the baby on the ground this baby just got born shut the up and i i distinctly i was like i was like is this i was like is anybody i was like standing next to this baby he's like nobody step on this baby and i like she was like going like this and i like reached out and touched her finger and i was like i'm the first person that she said hello to i was like holy god like but they were the mother was like yeah she's like all right she's like i had the baby and she called and all the men came in but she was very like she wasn't like oh my god i just

did this thing she's just like guys it's done you can come in and everyone started pouring drinks and walking around and it was like then they picked up the baby cut the umbilical cord and it was just it was so the umbilical cord and it was just it was so the umbilical cord still chilling oh dude i'll show you the picture it's like the umbilical cord's coming out of this baby and the placenta is laying right next to it yeah no um but it was just it was so different it was not like treated with the the this wild reverence it was just like dude yeah we had another kid it was just like another it was just different it's not even like this stuff is an island either like we can all think of cast away with tom tom hanks he's on a island somewhere like oh you're but like

you go deep in the amazon it might as well be yeah exactly oh yeah you're 100 you know you better if you want to get out of there you better just plan to start walking like your forest gump another tom hanks guy right there for 20 days and hope that you don't get eaten along the way like that's your best shot i'll give you this example i was we were living out at the research station and out there for like three or four research stations so the guy that i started working with this guy jj juan julio um his the original thing that we had was this little tiny research station and we used to have scientists come there and we'd allow them to do research in the jungle and we bring ecotourists there um but i was staying there for weeks on end doing a camera trap study and uh we had like a sack of rice and we had two like we had like two dozen eggs and then you have like some onions but

it's like how long can this stuff last there's no refrigeration and so like week one you're living large you're living great you still got fruit and everything but in the jungle you got species of weasels that'll steal all your avocados we have an avocado tree but as soon as they're ripe the animals steal them the monkeys come and steal all our oranges and so it's like we don't have any any say over this and so by like week two you're pretty much eating rice and eggs yeah you cook some rice in a pot you add some salt to it and you crack an egg you got rice and an egg okay got your carbs and your protein by week three a rat got into the rice and like swam around through this bag of rice and just contaminated it and then it all it all got moldy because he took a shit in the

rice no nice and so by week three there was no more food and at the time we didn't have a boat the boat was coming on week four and so it just was this like steadily declining and then we started we were like okay we have to stop doing the work we're doing like the research and we got to start surviving and so we started fishing and it's like but then it rained a lot and the rivers flooded and the fish don't bite when that happens and so like little by little like we're on an island we just started seeing our food go down and down and down and finally we ate like the last two cans of tuna that we found under a bed somewhere and then like literally the last three days there was no food did you have a gun with you no you're a sicilian from brooklyn and you didn't have a gun in the

middle of the fucking amazon come on no we had no gun with us and so what we did in the end was we literally took an axe and cut down a balsa wood tree which is just a you know quick growing pulpy tree that floats a pulpy tree that float wait hold on so you ever see ever hear of a balsa wood plane no okay well balsa wood is a is a a type of wood that has a lot of air in it it's very light like you could pick up a big log and you look like you're crazy strong you look like you're like the hulk because it's like a log is bigger than a bigger than a dinner plate like if that was an oak log like an eight foot log you couldn't lift that for shit you couldn't even lift one end of it this you can like throw it up and down it weighs nothing but it floats really well and that's what the local people make their rafts out of and the crazy thing is this comes with this, it comes with

free rope. So you cut down a balsa wood tree and they grow quick. So there's like, there's lots of them by the riverbank. We cut this balsa tree and you rip some of the bark off and then you could tie them together and you could like make a raft. And so we took two logs from this one tree, cut the tree in half, put the, doubled up the logs, tied them together, took our our bags our backpacks and put them into garbage bags and then me and jj held on to the balsa wood raft and floated down the amazon river for eight hours until we got to the nearest community and then there we were like hey guys and then we got on a boat and then we got in a car but it was like there is no transportation out there you are literally in an island of jungle and what if the wind starts going the other way well the river flows in one direction that's good oh it's not the ocean yeah right um the river just

the river from jersey man listen rivers in jersey are not a good thing i've had terrible experiences with rivers in jersey you're gonna you're you're gonna need to watch me when i when i come down there because anything that moves i'm shooting shooting it i'm not dying in the amazon it's it's just so cool to me though because like i i haven't built this podcast from like just an idea you know you get more and more just wide-ranging people in here doing crazy shit and it just dawns on me like when you were coming in today i'm like shit you know we had ryan in here who's like on the ground in africa every day now i got a dude who just flew in today i'm like you know we had ryan in here who's like on the ground in africa every day now i got a dude who just flew in from the amazon like a week ago and he

lives down there it makes this big world and it it puts it in new jersey like with me at a table at the same time though it's still so foreign you know it's like a great paradox because you tell me this and like we laugh because i have no concept of it i'm like trying to i'm doing my best to picture you're doing a great job but you know everyone out there listening chances are most of the people they're with me they're like this sounds fucking wild no and that's why showing people that's why social media has been such a huge tool for us because it's like unless i mean look at what i'm saying like oh the mountains and then the river goes this way and then it mixes with the salt over here it's like unless let me look at what i'm saying i'm like oh the mountains and then the river goes this way and then it mixes with the salt over here it's like yeah and then the tree has another type of tree that eats it and then the monkeys live in that and it's like it's too much abstract weirdness

for people to unless you show them and so that's what you know being on the ground with the guys and being like look this lager named victor can't walk if everybody gives five bucks, we could raise all this money. We raised 15 grand in like 10 days. Yeah. And we got this guy that started training. It's like, you show people the monkeys that we're rescuing. You show people the ancient trees. And it's like constantly being able to communicate with people.

That to me has been a huge help. That's how you reach people. It's like constantly putting out that stuff and showing people, yeah, the Amazon really is burning. We really can save it. And here are the ways we can do it and it's like just boom boom boom and just hitting around with that and so now it's like at this point i feel like i'm at a phase where i'm probably going to be spending less time in the jungle and a lot more time doing this which is getting the news i have to at some point because i've spent the last 17 years down there

and i'll tell you like at this level it just becomes like when you're in the field it's like there's just just messages piling up and there's just like opportunities to talk to people that can fix there's so many people with resources out there yes um it's just a matter of reaching enough people i mean look at like if we get if we reach you know what 300 000 people and get them to donate a hundred dollars each it's like that's $30 million. Fuck yeah. We could protect the entire river for $30 million. I know you want to be down there all the time.

Like if it were up to you, you just do that. But to me, if you can strike a happy balance of it and actually see the effect that that gets to have by doing things like this and talk not just not just going up to all these rich people and be like give me money you know what I mean like actually putting like a face to it telling the story and then getting that to happen I think the gratification of when you are down there and get to go do it it's just times 100 because there's like you can feel it you can feel like you're coming down there with like a fresh a fresh sack of hope every time when you're coming down there with your funding to add resources to the project it's a great thing and there's pretty much limitless potential to do this the only

variable is how many people know about it because the more people that help not everyone's going to help out of 100 people maybe one will help that's big but it's like but there you go there you go that's all you need and it's like we can and have to do this it's like it's just can't sleep at night man i have like i have dreams of trees going down i've seen it happen too many times yeah you you kind of like you have the vibe of someone who like when i talk to people who spent years at war in different war zones you have a similar vibe like seeing some shit man like oh yeah i mean but you're still fighting you know what i mean like you have that like just soldier mentality with it it's pretty cool yeah i mean i sometimes i like fantasize about doing

anything else because it's like i've only ever done one thing yeah you know i talked to my friends and like oh i used to do this and then i went to this job for a while i lived in this place for a while it's like i've just done this one thing thing. I've been like, guys, stop cutting this down. Stop cutting this down. Please stop hurting my friends. Like, and I mean the animals, like just on and on and on. But yeah, it's not good for the human brain to feel like the things that you care about are being dismantled and burned at all times.

And so like, yeah, so it's not not it's not a super healthy way to spend your time but the the benefit of what gets protected is worth it saving the world potentially but i mean i've said this earlier we're gonna have to do another episode with you at some point to even try to scratch the surface of some things but one thing i did want to ask about today and we can talk about it more in the future but i didn't want to get you out of here without at least trying to get some background you knew, was that Lost City of Z. Yeah.

I was asking about that right before we were on camera and we stopped. How much do you know about that, and can you tell people what that is? Lost City of Z was this book that came out. The author was David Grin, and it told the story of Colonel Percy percy faucet who was this legendary like the last of the of the victorian explorers and he just would go out into the amazon and he

was running into these uncontacted tribes and he would like fearlessly walk up to them they'd literally like shoot an arrow and he'd like dodge it and then like do a funny dance or like sing at them and like he would he kept getting through these situations he was convinced that he was going to find the lost city of z this golden city in the amazon and this is again tying into those stories that we were just talking about where people have this they have this eldorado myth stuck in their head that they're out there there's this city and we're gonna get rich and it's like he was the poster child for that and he went on a series of intensifying expeditions um where he'd go back to the uk and raise funding and then he'd go out on these monster expeditions for like months or

years at a time with just a few native guys and himself and then finally on his final expedition he went out on his own um with his son and that was it and i think over 100 people have actually died going looking for him because over the years it's become this myth now where it's like what happened to percy faucet they got him they must they must i mean honestly a tree could people say what's the most dangerous thing in the amazon it's a tree falling on you those trees fall all the time so either a tree fell on him he was finally shot by natives something happened but he didn't make it back and then over the years scores of people have gone looking for what happened to percy faucet and so that's just that's he was a very charismatic and sort of the last of like those great you know forge out there and just and actually he was if i remember

correctly he was actually like not someone that was oppressive to the local people like he would like get the local guys and go on expeditions with them and he was tougher than everybody so it doesn't matter where you're from there's there's one guy i think his name was murray i don't want to get it wrong um but there was one guy who had like been out with shackleton with ernest shackleton so he'd been on like other adventures and he went out with faucet in the amazon and like after like a few days was like absolutely this he's like this is awful like he's like i'm used to sitting on a boat and charging through the arctic he's like we are walking through the jungle and there are bot flies eating the mules that are carrying our food that's rotten and everyone's

like dying of you know typhoid and it's like miserable and for some reason percy fawcett was able to just keep walking keep walking keep walking and just longer than everybody just had this constitution he wouldn't his mosquito bites wouldn't get infected and it was like he just kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it until one day he didn't come back fuck yeah it was a crazy story that's that's a that's a good one i wonder what they are like we talk about the people who might be making shit up for their own gains and stuff. But another thing we can definitely talk about next time is, like, digging deeper into some of those civilizations and stuff. And, like, to see if there actually is still some untapped things out there, like something underground.

I don't know. Well, I'll give you this. I'll tell you this one if you want to know. Let's hear it. I shouldn't say this one but i'm going to um the we love that we went up this river and uh the name the name i will not say but we went up this river and we get to this really remote community and uh we're there and the guys take us to this this one spot and there's you know there's fossils and there's bits of pottery they know and so this is the thing you travel for hundreds of miles through the through the amazon there's nothing

the natives in this one spot they're like oh we know where it is they're like there's some stuff out there and we were asking them we were like so what is it was there like a camp and they're like this is like pre-inca shit this is like old stuff like from you know from the original people um they had an axe head that was made of stone. There's no stones in our region, because you're thinking, remember I said, it used to be an inland ocean. So it was just-

Oh yeah, there's no rocks and shit. There's no rocks on our river. You can't find a rock. That was wild to me. And then they kind of smirked and they were like, so yeah, if you ever decide you wanna die, let's go see the pyramids. And we're like, what are you talking about, the pyramids? Andids and they're like oh yeah they're like out there about four hour walk they're like there's two canopy level pyramids just under the jungle they're like nobody knows

about them but they're like we went there one time and they're like we could take you there and you didn't go we couldn't go because the uncontacted tribes were in the region if you go there you will literally get shot by seven foot arrows oh that's the aliens i'm telling you that's the fucking aliens all right so the uncontacted people are guarding the alien communication devices that are under the jungle we're gonna leave off right there because that we're gonna talk off camera and next time we're going deep on that i'm getting a conspiracist in here with you something like we gotta figure that out that's wild shit but dude this podcast was one of the harder ones I've ever done because there is so much on the bone at all times. The work you're doing is amazing, though.

I appreciate that. And I'm so glad to give you the platform and to really, like, I mean, it's educating me. So I'm hoping it's educating a lot of people listening to you talk. But for now, where can people donate to Jungle Keepers, and where can they find you on social media? Social media, at paulrosleyjunglekeepers.org. You can find the Jungle Keepers Project on paulrosley.com. We're going to be doing a concentrated effort,

a big push to try and protect the rest of this river in the next 18 months, because what I saw the last few weeks, and I'm going to give you that footage. I'll let you blast out some of it for the first time, but that stuff is worse than I've seen in 17 years. So it's like now we got to hit this now. And it's like, I'm committed to that. Cool. Well, every little bit helps when people get five bucks, it's huge.

It goes, and we know exactly where it goes to. It goes right to you to basically be able to go to loggers and people on the ground there who aren't helping the environment and convert them and then allow them to be funded to be able to carry around some weapons and go through and keep converting the most effect direct way to get money to the people on the indigenous people on the ground protecting the amazon rainforest perfect all right well we will do it again so much of course of course and thank you for being here much appreciated man all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace