The Checkup with Doctor Mike - The Ancient Medicine of Uncontacted Amazon Tribes | Paul Rosalie

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

I'll teach you how to become the media's go-to expert in your field. Enroll in The Professional's Media Academy now: https://www.professionalsmediaacademy.com/Huge thanks to @Junglekeeper for joining me today! Check out his organization and donate here: https://www.junglekeepers.org/00:00 Intro02:01Treehouse Hotel6:29 Growing Up In Brooklyn12:47 Early Amazon Days27:55 Jungle Failures38:30 Bringing Tourists45:00 Hiring Loggers56:25 Uncontacted Tribes1:13:20 His Best Friend JJ1:23:55 Jungle Bacteria / Dengue Fever1:43:48 Dangerous Animals1:56:09 Space Travel vs. Earth Preservation1:58:44 How To Actually Save The Amazon2:04:12 Vaccines In The Jungle2:12:53 Stingray Attack2:20:10 Reacting To Videos2:28:00 Amazonian Drugs2:38:50 Cliff Fall / Workout Routine2:47:07 Amazonian Women / PhD3:02:40 Discovery Channel DisasterHelp us continue the fight against medical misinformation and change the world through charity by becoming a Doctor Mike Resident on Patreon where every month I donate 100% of the proceeds to the charity, organization, or cause of your choice! Residents get access to bonus content, and many other perks for just $10 a month. Become a Resident today: https://www.patreon.com/doctormikeLet’s connect:IG: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/instagram/DMinstagramTwitter: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/twitter/DMTwitterFB: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/facebook/DMFacebookTikTok: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/tiktok/DMTikTokReddit: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/reddit/DMRedditContact Email: [e-mail] Producer: Doctor MikeProduction Director and Editor: Dan OwensManaging Editor and Producer: Sam BowersEditor and Designer: Caroline WeigumEditor: Juan Carlos Zuniga* Select photos/videos provided by Getty Images *** The information in this video is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images, and information, contained in this video is for general information purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional **

I should have died about 12 times. Forget nine lives. Yes, Paul. You got it, you got it. They're people that live out in the Amazon without contact with other tribes. The narco-traffickers are attacking these people with machine guns. The Chinese companies are subcontracting the Peruvian logging companies and destroying the very reality that they call home,

bulldozing their forests. So in the next five years, they could be murdered. The Amazon has lost an area the size of... Germany and France combined. Nobody cares. I have spent the last 20 years bleeding with the indigenous people and my friends who are experts to create a way that the people who, who like me, care about these species and these wild places and want our world to continue to be healthy

and functioning can have a verifiable way of saving the wildest place on Earth. In 1995, I immigrated from Russia to Bay Ridge, a neighborhood in South Brooklyn. It turns out, just a few blocks away was a kid named Paul Rosalie. I went on to study medicine. He went on to save the Amazon rainforest, or at least as trying to. Conservationists like Jane Goodall and John Muir have filled our textbooks for decades, but what about our new environmental heroes? Paul has become one of the leading voices in the fight to protect the Amazonian jungle,

which is about the size of the entire continental United States from deforestation, to keep its plants, animals, and uncontacted tribes safe from harm. It's unfortunately a life-threatening job, putting him in harm's way to violent drug lords, relentless logging companies, and the countless monsters that prowl the untouched depths of the winding tributaries in our planet's most diverse ecosystem. Fortunately, Paul is more than a machete wielding New Yorker with a cell phone.

He's a man of action who has a very clear, and I think very achievable, plan of saving the jungle from ourselves. You whipped out the notebook. I did. So I know it's about to get serious. It's about to get very serious. Tell me about this notebook.

This notebook has some blood on it. Is that mold skin? Yes, it is. It's got some blood on it. It's got some dead mosquitoes. That's a high level notebook. I have piles of them. What are you writing?

Well, I wrote three books. The last one is a New York Times bestseller called Junglekeeper. Did it start on this? Yeah. Yeah, there's a scene in this where we, We meet an uncontacted tribe, literally people that don't know any language that live out in the middle of the Amazon. And the only way to record these things out there is to write them down. And so I have notebooks on notebooks.

I got a pile of probably 30 notebooks, black screens everything. And what's in it? Just the different, different days. Yeah. Journaling, what happened, what species we find riverine transects where we're driving the boat through miles and miles of rainforest. I mean, I draw species that I don't know. Like if you see a bird and you don't know what it is offhand, like I can kind of just like, soom it goes by and I could photograph, you know,

and just draw what I saw. Oh, see, like this is, this is the tree house that we have in the Amazon. We have the world's tallest tree house. And Stefan, who you met when he came down, I had drawings of this treehouse I wanted to build because I've climbed these. You're an artist, though. These are terrible. I have, I am.

My friend, do you want me to draw a treehouse for you? Can we have a draw off? No, no, no, no. There is no, no, no, there is no, no, there is no, you win instantly. Yeah, no, but he looked at my journal and he saw this treehouse and he's like, what is that? And I was like, well, I climbed the tallest trees in the rainforest and I would love to share what I see up there with people. And so now we built the world's tallest tree house. But then there was the issue of, well, people can't climb up there.

So we made a spiral staircase. And then it was like, well, once they're up there, they're tired. So we're like, we should probably put it in a bathroom. And we're like, they might want, they might need help. So we put in Starlink. And then we're like, you know what? They should just sleep up there. So we made a bed.

It's the world's tallest hotel. we're in Time Magazine's 50 best places to go. It's this beautiful Alta Sanctuary treehouse. So if I go to the Amazon with you, that's where I'd stay? That's where you would stay, 100%. You could watch the mists come off the trees and the monkeys and the macaws. It's like Avatar.

It's like you're in the canopy. One. Oh, it's one room. No, no, it's one room. You are on top of the Amazon. And there's nothing, there's no other places. It's tall street house. I'm scared of heights, though.

Then you'd probably vomit off the tree house. How do you do with heights? I, because of my job, have to be good with heights. I mean, literally you're free soloing trees that are 160 feet tall. And these are a thousand year old trees that have had millions of species on them. And so you're you climb. And even if you have a rope, you're basically climbers and know what I'm talking about. You're basically lead climbing. So you go up 20 feet, put in gear. But as you reach the top of that 20 feet and you're working to put in your gear, if you slip and fall, you're going 40.

And so you're smacking back into the tree. And so it's spooky. Or if you have to do a traverse out onto a branch, that pendulum swing. It's spooky. And if you hit it wasp nest, you die. If you hit a venomous snake if you reach up into a crevice you die there's just a lot of or if you get tangled in your ropes and you're 130 feet up and no one else with you as a climber could be a week before you get help you know who are they going to send that can get a rope up to 130 feet like in the middle of the jungle it's not like you can call the fire department and they'll come with like the bucket and even the bucket wouldn't reach because this is high but once you get up there you're on branches that are the size of they're bigger than the oak trees here and you can walk on them and you see

see a different ecosystem. Some of the species that are up in the canopy of the Amazon, which is 50% of the life in the Amazon is in the canopy and never touches the ground. And so there's a whole different unstudied ecosystem in the canopy of the Amazon. And so that's what we're starting to explore. And it started with the treehouse. Well, it started before the treehouse. I climbed up, the biggest tree I knew of that was close by to our research station at like

four in the morning. So I saw the sun come up over the east. and I always heard that 20 trillion liters of water are pumped into the day off of the Amazon and so there's an invisible mist river going above the Amazon River and as the sun came up over the east at that angle going directly into my eyes

you can see the mist river and so when I saw this it was this life-changing moment and I went I have to share this with people other people have to see this and climbing those trees is one of the most extreme athletic endeavors I've ever done so I was like we have to find a way

that I can show my mom this, that we can bring kids here. And so now at the tree house, we host families and people from all over the world. Wow. How does a guy from Brooklyn end up on a tree house in the Amazon? I grew up with this incredible affinity for animals. But that was like pigeons probably. Well, no. You're from Bay Ridge, right?

Bay Ridge, yeah. Same. There you go. What streets you grow up on? We were like my, well, I, again, when my parents moved out of Brooklyn when I was pretty young. And so we were, my grandmother lived on 10th and 82nd. And so we were there every Sunday for Italian grandma dinner. Right by the subway on 86.

Yeah. And right by, you know, looking at the Verrazano Bridge. And then my aunt lives on Shore Road. And so we're like, you know, down there. And so a lot of Sunday dinners. And but we moved to New Jersey. So I had access to the state line with New York where there's all these amazing state parks. And I used to go to the, I grew up in a four, like going to a fourth.

and just exploring it and walking up streams ram up i don't want to blow it up it's a secret it's not a secret but it's just it's a nice place to walk and that's going to be millions of people going there um that's but they're going to be educated medically conscious uh-huh excitable people but but the whole thing with the woods is you want to keep the people out so it's nice um but i just like love they'd be like do you want this truck to play with like as a toddler and i'd be like dinosaurs. I want to watch documentaries. Can you take me to the stream on the weekend? And I want to walk up the stream and I want to find salamanders. And I want to catch that frog. And I remember the first time I saw a black snake, a black rat snake. And they're like six feet. And I saw it sleeping in

this tree. And my parents are from Brooklyn, right? So I was like, dad, I was like, I have to go touch. And he was like, you are not touching that snake. You are six. And I like just wanted to, I just wanted to touch him, you know. And so I started rescuing animals, working with animals. My parents had to send me to expedition school in the Adirondacks. Were you a Boy Scout? I was not a Boy Scout. Wow. How did that not connect?

Like the wilderness of it all. Clubs, teams. I just like, I was always out on my own. I like to find out where like the deer was sleeping in the grass or where you know because the mother deer will leave and leave her baby, the little spotted babies in the grass or where a mother fox would have a hole and she'd go out to hunt for the day and leave her pups right by the hole. And so like I wanted to learn these things.

And I was reading books like the North Runner and Call of the Wild and all of these things where people go into the wilderness and have these. profound experiences and I wanted to do that and I felt like why do these other people you know teddy roosevelt after the tragedies of his life went out west and sort of reforged himself on the frontier and i was stuck in like middle school and they're like you can't go to the bathroom you have to learn about the main dynasty like you know read this book and i was like this is boring man I was like, I'm ready for adventure. And so I dropped out of high school after 10th grade.

The deal was... In Jersey. Yeah. And the deal my parents made with me was, you're miserable. You're clearly miserable. And they said, if you drop out of high school, you have to go to college right away. And so you can take your... This is for all the kids out there.

You take your GED, a couple hours of testing, and you're out. You skip two years of high school. And then you can go as an unmatriculated student to college. And then they judge your entry into the college based off of how you do in those unmetriculated classes. So it's a little loop around. And I did that. And so that in between semesters, I would just go to the jungle. And so the first time I met, I found this guy who had this research station. This is the story that's in the book. This guy, JJ, who had this research station and he's indigenous SAA native. So he grew up in the jungle, no shoes, his whole life,

eating monkeys, catching fish, learning the indigenous medicines. And he also had, this is the thing. He happened to learn English. So I went down there not knowing any Spanish. And he knew, English. And so when I showed up, I grew up on Steve Irwin. So I grew up catching, I ended up catching all the snakes. I called rattlesnakes and black rat snakes and everything. And I got, I said, I have to catch a hundred non-venomous snakes before I ever catch a venomous snake. And so I learned really well. How did you set that barometer for yourself? Well, because I figured eventually I'm going to have to handle a venomous snake. And so I wanted to make sure that I did it safely. Okay. And so I have. That was the number. That was the number for me.

I mean, you said a lot of things very casually there, like eating monkeys and you just casually after college or in between college went to the jungle. Like, that's not a thing that people do. No, but I had a life. I had like a fire in me. I had something for some reason that I wanted to see the deepest wilderness on earth. When I would go out into the forest, I would do these solos with my dog where we would take a stake, a match, and I would usually build shelter.

And the idea was to go off trail, get lost, side of the. a mountain camp under a rock thunderstorms snowstorms i'd wait for the worst weather to go and i learned to survive there then i went to expedition school and so i just said after i dropped out of high school i went instead of waiting instead i just saw everyone around me just you know kind of living and i want i want my life to be like a movie i want i want it to be adventure and i want purpose i was like i want to do something that matters and uh i had said to my dad when i was like probably 11 we're like sitting in the car waiting for something, my mom to get out of a store. And I said, when I grew up, I'm going to make a lot of money. And then I'm going to use that money to go on

great adventures. And my dad was like, yeah, everybody says that. He's like, and then they start making a lot of money to get a family and then they never go on adventures. And, you know, he was just like talking over the back of the seat, not thinking about it probably changed my whole life. Because I was like, I'm going now. And I would watch it's a wonderful life. And you know, and he's like, he's going, he's like, I want to go to Africa and I want to get out of here. And then like life pulls him back towards his people, and that's beautiful. But I was like, I'm going. And so I went to the Amazon and I went to the most remote place I could find.

And so JJ saw his community go from a place that had birds and monkeys and all this abundant resources, giant trees, to a place that by the time he was 20 that had been logged out, that did no longer had jaguars or monkeys or any of these things, where the people were starving because they depleted their natural resources. The water was becoming polluted. And so he went up this river, the Lest Piedras River, and said, I want to go to the wildest place that you can get to by boat.

And I want to protect that. So he had this incredible vision. And when I showed up, I was so hungry. You know, it's like Jurassic Park. They get there and they're like, it's probably not anything that great. And then when they see the dinosaur for the first time, you get chills down your back.

The first time I got on the boat and there's just these 100 foot walls of trees on either side, and it's like heart of darkness. We had to take a boat from the last town, this is how you gauge where you are in the Amazon, the last shack where you can buy a Coca-Cola. Once you get beyond that, you're out. They sell like bullets, Coca-Cola, and cigarettes.

And once you leave that, you're in like unconstructed dream space. It's the earth as it was the day it was created. It's just ancient forest that no one has touched. And so we went for, you know, the rivers are very windy down there because there's no elevation drop. And you go for an entire day, 10-hour day by boat. Then you camp on the side of the river.

And then you do another 10 hours. And then you have to carry all your stuff through the jungle to this little tiny research station. No power, no electricity, no comms with the outside world. And I was just there for weeks. And it was awesome. So the kid that was rebelling against rules, in school. They went, you have to do McCaw research in the morning after that, do whatever you want.

And I was like, how hard can I go? And they're like, how hard you want to go? Whatever. And I went like, like, I can just go die. And they were like, go do whatever you want. And then me and JJ became friends because I was like, hey, I know how to catch snakes. Can you show me snakes? And he was like, I kill it. Like everyone in my community kills snakes. And he's like, I've never even looked at a snake. He's like without terror. And so I started showing him how to catch snakes. And in return, he'd started teaching me the medicines and the trails and tracking. And so we developed this adventure friendship. And then we started going off, catching, trying to catch, I was like, well, where are the anacondas at? And he was like, well, it's good. Because you're right away going for the next level.

Always. Climb the biggest tree, catch the biggest snake. I mean, at 18 years old, you just want to go nuts and you have no fear. And so, you know, you start with no fear. And then over the years, you go, whoa. You know, I'll ride my motorcycle with no helmet. And then you go, well, I've seen, I'm gonna just, I'll wear a helmet. It's okay. You know, at like 38, you go, I'll just wear a helmet, it's okay. Most people, I could see the tie

and the excitement of the isolation, the exploration, all of that. Does fear not register for you, or do you love the fear? What's your relationship there? I tend to, I'm severely dyslexic, if this has anything to do with it.

I, in school, I had so much pent up, for adventure and for whatever reason when I you know I was thinking if I didn't do this I'd want to go into my you know I thought like I want to be like a Navy seal or something you know or a fireman or something really extreme first responder of some sort because I lock in when there's an emergency I kind of I kind of I kind of get really excited and I have to tone it down when things get dangerous I kind of like I can almost make jokes that make people uncomfortable because I you know

when the wind is howling and the trees are falling and the river is rushing and there's 40 foot whirlpools and everyone's like, oh shit, we might not make it out of this. I'm like, this is what I've been waiting for. Like these are the, and so I've, there wasn't fear. It was, you know, JJ would go, okay, there's a, there's a 15 foot anaconda. There's a snake that weighs, you know, 200 pounds and has so many, it has four rows of teeth. It could eviscerate you, cut you so deep that you bleed out. It could also crush you. I've seen a snake crush a mammal so hard that the guts come out of its mouth and its ass and that its eyeballs pop out of its head. And so you can imagine at our size, if a 15-foot snake squeezes you, that probably the same thing

would happen. And I would just jump on the head, catch the head, and, you know, the mouth would open, and then I'd rely on him to save me. Quite literally. Quite literally. Like, I've been squeezed to the point that my clavicle almost snapped, like, where the shoulders are coming together. The first one, because you grab it by the head, and then it wraps around your wrists.

and then it wraps around your shoulders, and then you can't let it go if you want to, so you're stuck. But now as you're adapting to this fear, does that high leave you? Because you climb the tallest tree, you've seen the deadliest snake. Or is there always a level up? No, and I'm not that kind of adrenaline junkie.

I think like every time I climb the tree, I have this profound respect for it's like, hey, I've climbed this tree 10 times. Maybe I should be extra careful because you only get so many free passes. And then as I'm gonna show you, like some of the things, you know, there's one example from last year where I was climbing this cliff.

There was a, the cliff on the side of the river, there had been the rainy season, so the river went up, and there was an avalanche. And so this is really high cliff, probably 70 feet. And so we're in the boat and I'm like, yo, pull over because I see roots coming out of the top of the cliff. And I'm like, I bet, I just bet that I could run up the mud, catch onto a root, and then climb up

and then get my hand over. And so I did that. And the thing I didn't anticipate was I did all of that. And it required all of my strength, which I enjoyed. But then I got to the top and I'm holding onto this little root this thin. And now I'm looking, you know, it's easy to go up. And I'm looking down and it's 25 feet vertical drop. Then it's another, you know.

And so you know you're just going to spin and probably break everything. And so I start sweating. And you're holding on to this thing. And I reached to the first tree that I could get. but my feet were just eroding the mud like the i had no foot to push myself up with and then i switched hands because my forearms are burning and all of a sudden it was like an anime like it was just there was just rushing color past my head and i went oh this is how it happens i'm dying and then i fell on my rib cage after 25 feet and just tumble rolled down the rest of the thing and i was fine somehow somehow

i was fine and momentum saved you Momentum safety and like, you know, it's kind of like when they land a BMX bike after a huge jump, it's like you just kind of come into it. But that impact on my ribs, that was no sneezing and no sleeping for like two months. Because every time you moved. Laughing was no, boy, no. No, boy, no. It's be very serious.

Yeah. But yeah. So that, I mean, it's just. There's these wake-up calls that. Exactly. And I actually really appreciate when there's a wake-up call not that long ago. I caught a, I caught a Kaman, small crocodile. And as I was releasing him, you have them by the head and the tail.

And you know, you always sort of give them a little boost. Yeah. So that they go in the water over there. Yeah, I do that the same. Right? You always got to do that. And he turned around in midair and slashed my hand. And it was like, hey, thank God that one was three feet and not five feet.

And so, you know, because a five footer will just grab your hand and twist it off. Whereas this little guy just slashed me with a tooth. And I went, ooh, I felt a little bit of that power. I mean, they're made out of cement. those things. Like they are tough animals. And so when you feel that power, you go, oh, okay. All right.

You know. So at what point do you think it shifts and you become potentially less risk prone or you become risk-aversive? There's a quote and I'm going to forget which F1 driver said it. There's a race car driver that was coming to a turn with another race car driver. And one of them had to break first. And one of them was just like, I'm going all the way. And the reporter asked him afterwards, why did you break so late?

How did you know the other guy would break first? He goes, he has a wife and kids and I'm younger than him. I have nothing to lose. So like, does age just slow you down? No, I don't think age slows you down. I think it makes you a better practitioner of it. Whereas I should have died about 12 times. We get nine lives.

Like there's a lot of times that I should have died. That now when I look back as an older person, you go, you shouldn't have done that. Like now that I have... So if you could go back in time to tell yourself, would you say, don't do that? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, doing those things taught me,

thank God, it went the way it went. It's written now. But as kids, you know, I have hundreds of kids messaging me now saying, like, I want to do what you do. And I'm going, please don't do that. Like, I'm not telling... But wait, why would you not tell yourself that same message then? Because then I wouldn't have to...

I mean, look, for every... You know the book and the movie, into the wild. So that kid went out seeking adventure, meaning wilderness. And he went out. and he found it and he also died. And so I went out on these solos and that's a little bit of what this book is about

is like not only meeting JJ, not only discovering the Amazon, but then I wanted to take it to the extreme. So I went on on these solos, right? Have people drop me, forget the last indigenous community. I have people take me to places with no names up these rivers. And then I'd want to cross into other watersheds

and I had a little raft that I took on my back and I'd be camping for days. And, you know, if anything goes wrong, If you break an ankle, if you venomous snake, if you anything, anything at all, if you run out of food, if you get, I mean, diarrhea. Diary, I was just gonna say diarrhea. You can get dehydrated so quick.

And so, you know, looking back, those were suicidal, but at the same time, I took that risk and it gave me this relationship with the forest that I think has become crucial in the work I do of telling the world how important it is and that we have to protect it. However, the end of the end of the end of the end of the end. into the wild thing, I say because for every person that survives,

how many of the race car drivers took that turn and crashed and burned. And so I don't want to tell kids, yeah, yeah, yeah, go do what I did, go out on solos, go jump on giant reptiles. So what is the nuance message then? In what way? Well, being a family medicine doctor, I see patients that are children and their parents ask me, what limits should I set for my children, et cetera. And obviously they're not anywhere near your level.

They're talking about like letting them outside to play or walking. walk home from school, et cetera. And currently we live in a very risk-averse society where people are scared of a lot of things that are overblown risk, usually related to media, social media, scaring them, et cetera. So I encourage them to let their children take some level of risk, calculated risk.

This doesn't seem very calculated. So how do you tell children a nuanced message of take the risk but calculate it? Like, what were you calculating then? What were you not? No, I actually think that I am very calculated. I think, and I kind of point this out to my friends because they'll go, you're insane. And so I was having this conversation with my friend Stefan where he was saying, he goes, you know, the things you do, he goes, they're just so reckless at times that they make no sense.

Like you just have this insanity gene. And I go, but, you know, I say, I'm like, I should have been able to make it up that cliff. And, you know, when I climb the tree, I do it with ropes. And I started on small snakes and non-venomous snakes and worked my way up to anacondas. And, you know, with all of this stuff, I didn't go out on. 10-day solos right away. I worked up to it. And so you can do these things safely.

And I think that my analogy is that it's just like driving. If you take a person where it's their first day driving a car and you stick them on Route 87 and they're driving it 85 miles an hour, it's going to be dangerous. There's trucks. They don't know when someone's just going to change lanes. It could be life-threatening. But if you learn slowly and you become an experienced driver, then you can do all kinds of. So you can drive from here to Virginia, no problem.

And it's really the same thing with whatever you're doing, whether it's climbing or wildlife. You learn that, you know, how, how, how, and this is not in the Amazon, these are in other places, but like, what the signs are that an elephant is going to charge you in a way that is trying to kill you. And what signs are there that an elephant is going to charge you in a way to just say, hey, back up? Or the fact that bears won't give you any indication. Bears will be head down. They won't look at you. and then they'll sprint at you. And so whereas other animals, you can kind of see them lock in on you and you know they're coming.

And so I actually think I'm very careful. It's just I just have a different experience level. And so my advice to kids would be, most of my advice to kids is based around find something that you love. Find someone that's doing it in the way you want to do it. Find a mentor. Find someone where you go,

that person is doing it at the highest level. and I respect them. JJ is that mentor for you? JJ is like that. I would say Jane Goodall was that for me. And in the book, there's a whole chapter about how Jane changed my life. Jane was, my parents read to me a lot

because I couldn't read until as well into the double digits. And so they read Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Rings, Jane Goodall. They read so many things every night to us for me and my sister. And, you know, Jane Goodall was this, you know,

seemed like a historical figure. There's these black and white photos of her with chimpanzees and the findings that she published redefined our view of humans. It always was man the toolmaker. And then she was like, no, the chimps used tools too. And she was a rule breaker. And so then when I got old enough and I'd been working in the Amazon and I met Jane, and she said, what you're doing is really cool.

And she said, if you write a book, I'd be happy to give you an endorsement for it. And that, you know, it's mind blowing where someone that you look up to, so much says, hey, I approve of what you're doing and I'm willing to help you. And so that became a major lesson. And that's an example of someone who, and she's, you know, how much, how much did her life impact the protection of wild places, the inspiration of children, the forces for good in the world? And so that was one of my biggest role models. And so for kids, I say, find someone who's doing something that you love. Find a way of contributing. There's so much good work that needs to be done. And there's such a disassociation right now. And I think a lot of it is,

are distance from nature, where we have this frictionless life where you can order stuff and it shows up. You don't need to do anything. When I'm here, I mean, in the jungle, you have to check your boat and you have to batten down the hatches when there's a storm and you have to look for, you must. And farmers know this. Like, you must. You must go milk the cows. Like, it has to happen.

And parents know this. You have to take care of your kid or else it's going to be bad. And so I think for a lot of people, they're going, well, what is my meaning? What is my path? And you have to go find that. That's the hero's journey. And so a lot of kids are going, you know, should I get into conservation?

What do I do? And it's like, find somebody that you respect. Help them, follow them, study them. Don't run out and try to, you know, everyone's like, I'm going to start an organization to do my, don't start with, you're going to start an organization. Start with learn.

Join an organization for us. Join an organization. Help them. There's people out there who've been working for 20 years to save endangered turtles, bonobos, whatever it is, rainforests. I mean, help. I just met some,

who's sending sustainable sanitary napkins to women in Africa because they need them and in rural places they don't have them. And it's like, this is great work. You know, this is incredible stuff, but learn first. Yeah. Remember Braveheart?

And he goes, I want the sword. And he goes, before you learn to use this, you have to learn to use this. You know, get this. I think that society has a very clear way to get comfortable with laziness. Because of this frictionless experience, it will allow you, if you let it,

to create a loss of meaning, laziness. Why do that when I have this? Why go out and meet someone when I can go online? Why play a sport when I could play it on the video game? You know, like there's a lot of variations in modern life where it can lead you down a path of laziness. And what's interesting is the hope was always that when you get time to be free,

from this frictionless experience, you would use it to do something amazing. Yeah. That's always the idea. Like I'll give you completely unrelated to your lifestyle, but related very much to mine. In healthcare, they say, we're creating this new technology that,

so you don't have to write the note when you're examining a patient. You could just speak to this technology and through AI, ill-document the encounter for you. So you don't have to spend all this time logging. And you would think, oh my God, it buys me time to be with my patient. but then the healthcare system sees it and they go,

oh, well, now you can see like 30 more patients. Ooh. Right? So like, solved the problem and created a new one. And now I have less time with my patients again. Interesting. So it's the same thing that happens and plays out in society where,

oh, social media was meant to connect us because it makes it easier to catch up with friends where there's a barrier. Yes. Yeah. But it could also now be so easy to never see anyone ever again. Never see anybody. Yeah.

So there's these natural instincts in humans. that are very corruptible. And I think that's where modern technology really ruins things for us. And bringing us back to nature reestablishes that law because you can't afford to be lazy in the Amazon. Yeah, and also like the rocks and the rain

have rules that are older than human knowing and that are unnegotiable. It's the chemical physical truth of reality. And so when you're out there, the river or the rain or the mountains, it's like you can't cheat. You can't start at the top of the mountain. mountain. That's not how reality works. What I see because I work with students who come down on

study abroad to now our thriving research station and the tree house. And we do research projects with them, but I see them very scared to engage in things that they can fail at. And they don't understand that secret, sacred formula that you have to fail. And that that will make you stronger. And I think that I did so much failure in the Amazon. I mean, you know, I'm going to go spend my first night out in the jungle, your headlamp dies, you didn't think of that. You spend a night in the jungle in the dark with no tent. It's horrible, but you live, and then you go, okay,

so now I know, now I know. And my friend told me a really interesting sort of parable where he was talking about a tree, let's just call it an oak tree that grows up in a greenhouse and that after 30, 40 years they dismantle the greenhouse and the oak tree has grown up in this greenhouse and so they take down the greenhouse And they say, let's leave the tree because it's such a beautiful tree.

And then on the first day that the tree is out in the wild, it falls over because it hasn't had the wind pushing it, building that muscle. And that's what a natural tree does. And so, again, back to the back to the book, this is a story of all the failures. It's me and JJ going from the barefoot machete days where we were getting injured and we had no idea what we were doing. And we were watching the Amazon be destroyed and saying we want to somehow protect this incredible, Avatar land, this beautiful ancient rainforests. We have to protect it. And there was a point, you know, young and dumb where I went, JJ, isn't there someone we can call who can help us with this? And he looked up river and he looks down river and he goes, do you see anybody? And it was really,

he didn't think it was profound, but he was like, you know, if you want it done, you have to do it. And I think that that's again, sort of the message that I'm giving to so many of these kids, are they like, hey, there's a local stream where I live. And there's, there's a local stream where I live. and they're polluting it or they're bulldozing part of it or they're building it to development. And I'm like, hey, no one else is going to stand in the way of this. You have to figure out a way to affect this. If you want to protect that stream, you better figure it out. And I mean, you know this from becoming a doctor.

It's like if you want to make it through medical school, it's like you better buckle in. Yeah. It's going to cost you. And so I think that that's something that like I earned my abilities in the wilderness through immense trial and error. But it was controlled trial and error. You weren't reckless, as you say. You didn't go in,

and the first snake you wrestled was a rattlesnake or a giant anaconda. You worked your way up to it. It goes your way up. So it's like, look, I hate using the race car analogy again, but when you're taking a turn, if you have a little controlled spin on it,

you know where the limit is now. You know that when you're starting to feel that experience again, you know how to control that. But until you get that little spin happening, you don't know what the limit is. So you were kind of always playing with these limits. And to us, civilian folk, those limits seem scary. I mean, you're a race car driver. You're not that civilian.

But you're taking risks yourself. But no, and I think, again, anybody who's trying to find the limit risks having to deal with the limit. And that's okay. And not everyone needs to do that. You can totally go out into the world and begin doing, you know, research or exploration or all these things without or limiting the risk. You don't need, not everyone needs to be taking risks.

It's not about that. It's about finding your purpose in a world that is increasingly causing this sort of disassociation where people are going, what's real? You know, are we living in a simulation? Like, let me tell you something. On hour 16 of a thunderstorm when it's 3 a.m. And you're freezing cold, bordering on hypothering on hypothermia in the middle of the Amazon and you have no food.

And there's not even a chance that anyone is going to help. you, you have no doubt about what is real and what isn't. And it's beautiful because it breaks down political barriers. It doesn't matter what you believe in. You're all in the same problem. So what are you feeling in that moment? Like obvious discomfort, but you're like, why am I here? Or you're like, I love that I'm here. I love this. Like what? No, I love that I'm there because in those moments, there's always, for me, there's always a reason we're there, right? We're trying to protect this far. So if we're stuck on the side of the river, because the motor broke and, let's, let's Let's just say I'm with three other people.

Well, first of all, it's probably gonna be me and JJ who are the most experienced that have done some sort of wilderness medicine training that know how the local things work. Because again, back to Into the Wild, if you look at what ultimately killed him was that he was able to cross a river to get to the place where he lived in that bus.

And then when he decided I'm starving, I need to go back, the river rose. And he couldn't cross the river. And so these things, you know, you can look at an area of jungle go, oh, this is easy. We'll walk on this trail and then we'll cross the river. We'll use a stick. And then we'll get to the other side and yeah, yeah, sure, that's all great. But if you forget the one thing, you know, oh, you calculated this in the dry season. You didn't think that in the rainy season,

that's impossible. You can, you know, and so you have to make these calculations. And in those situations, I go, this is that you're, you're playing the game of life with skin in the game. I feel like everyone is almost third person analyzing their own life. Like, you know, what should I do? my career be? Who should I date? You know, what's the ideal partner for me? Why do you feel like that's third person? Because it's, it involves you're not, you're not letting, you're not being the author of your life in a fluid way. You're not, you're not embodying the character you are. You're sort of, you're sort of playing the game of life with, with a sort of cautionary. You look at, I just read this book, Empire of the Summer Moon about the Comanchees. And like, they're not, they weren't,

they weren't thinking about like, hey, should we like, you know, what do I feel like I want? They're like, I'm a Comanche, you know, and we're going to defend our land and they knew who they were and what they needed to do and was it savage and brutal and was their civilization being exterminated? Yes, but they were in it and they were immersed in it to the point that there was. And then there's a beautiful passage in Call of the Wild where they talk about the moment, you know, the peak of existence being where you forget that you exist because you're fully invested. And people feel that when they are at the highest level of what they're doing and whether that's danger, whether that's a first response or whether that's a race.

car driver, whether that's me in a storm, where you're so invested in the moment that you are in, that you're not analyzing it. So like this flow state that you're describing, you can't experience that dating, being a stockbroker, practicing medicine? No, I bet you can, but I'm saying, I think that to me, that's the beauty. And I think that nature forces it. I think that if you want a quick fix of that, you can go out and go camping by yourself and very quickly in the middle the night you will feel so humbled and i think that we you know we have our phones and we go should i book a ticket to indonesia you know and we feel very powerful and i've i've sort of lived you know there's a scene at the end of the movie castaway where after he's been on the island for years and years and they

rescue him and he's like in the waiting room and they're going to present him to the press and everything and he just like picks up a lighter and clicks it and there's fire after all the time he's been trying to make fire and after living in the mud we're like if the motor brake we have to carry the motor up the stairs to a dry spot and work on it. And we might not be able to do it. And so, like, today where it's like, oh, yeah, I'll just door dash it. You know, when I'm back here, I'm like, whoa, things are different. And so I'm so amazed at the sort of efficiency and ability of society.

But that heightened state, I think, can happen with whatever you're doing that you truly love. And whether that's playing with your kids or, I mean, sports, I think, give that to people all the time. where if you're if you're if you're if you're just nailing it that day you're locked in and to me that's what I'm always chasing is that that's heightened awareness and for me that's that's that's wildlife that's that's having an encounter with an animal that's you know I've come face to face with elephants where there's sort of this acknowledgement where they'll go I'm not going to kill you but don't take another step closer and you go okay you know and that you sort of walk away from that you know and then you get the adrenaline later where you go oh boy

You know, and sort of, to me, the jungle is church. You brought a lot of people, right, along with you on these journeys. And not everyone is experienced as you. I wonder, do you, like, what percentage of people do it? And they go, I'm so uncomfortable camping here or living in the jungle. I just hate this. Yeah. Do people say that or does everyone fall in love with this mystical experience?

There's two very important things. Most 99.9% of people do not want to do. So there's expeditionary jungle. Okay. Right? And that's like what me and JJ do when we go out into the middle of the jungle. That's the thunderstorm. The thunderstorms and the bot flies and the leaf cutter ants taking apart my tent.

That's a video I want to show you where I'm trying to camp and these leaf cutter ants rip apart my tent. They turn it into a now. There was no, I just got rained on the whole night. The problems you don't anticipate. But over the years I've learned that sharing the jungle, whether it's through social media, documentaries, my books. or bringing people to the jungle. And so what we've done is create the Alta Sanctuary Treehouse where you can stay in a bed that has neatly folded shoes.

So glamping. It's very much glamping, but what it does is it takes people into, and again, if you had a football field that was our section of our watershed, I'm talking about like a sesame seed, like a tiny little pinprick on there that we have made accessible to people

and we take them out there and they stay in comfort. And we've employed people that were loggers and gold miners and all these other extractive things. And we've given them jobs as cooks and boat drivers and guides and all this. So we've created this family of local people. We've given them better employment, better health care and this community. And they get to share their jungle with people from around the world. And so for those people, we have dinner service at night.

There's candles. There's wine. We have guides. And so no one that I know would want voluntarily to go out and suffer. the way we do. But then isn't the tree or can the argument be made that the tree house is antithetical to your experience of the jungle? No.

I think that my experience is the way. Because everything you've painted as a picture of this nature connection has been, the negative made it so valuable. And you're taking that away from people. I'm not. Well, yeah, you're giving a dinner service. I can prove you. And Starlink.

I can prove you wrong. For the 65-year-old birder who wants to take his wife on a really good adventure, they can come with us in a safe way and have dinner with the locals and talk to the locals, see spider monkeys and birds, stay up in the treehouse and get to see the places they could never see. So are you DoorDash of the Amazon? We are the, I don't think so. What does DoorDash do? They deliver food. They deliver food. Can they deliver other things?

Like if you wanted them deliver like a dog, would they do it? Not a dog, but other other items. But if you were like, could you pick me up? I just use DoorDash as a random example to make it funny, but I'm asking it more. So you speak about society creating a frictionless experience and why it's potentially caused harm. Yeah. Right? Are you creating a frictionless Amazon experience?

No, we're creating the most authentic way to do it. So what we do is we bring people that they're with the locals. They're out on the trails with indigenous guides. And so they still have to go on the trails. They still have to be on the boat. and we lead them in a safe way through the things that we love. So walking up a stream, for example, I could do that and I get to see these amazing,

you know, vortexes of thousands of butterflies, all these ancient trees. But if somebody tried to do that without me, without the experience we've created, they couldn't. It would be very dangerous, whereas now we can bring students and they can challenge themselves in a way that's controlled. Now, we have people that have come on two, three, four of our,

trips. For example, I had one girl who was, she did, she did triathlons and she goes, I want to climb that big tree, you climb. I want you welcome to try. I climbed up to the top. I dropped a rope and she tried. And she made it two thirds up. It was incredible. And she was bleeding by the time she gave up. Her name is Terina. She brings students down. She's one of the study abroad coordinators. She went home, trained for a year doing, you know, vine pullups. Came back, climbed the tree. And so in that way, I'm guiding people towards pushing themselves, guiding people towards, you know, again, for the burders or something, being able to see a paradise tanager in the canopy of the Amazon. So no, I think what we're doing is so authentic. Ecotourism gets a bad rap sometimes

because in Africa they've had like, you know, cultural tourism where the people come out and they do a little dance and they wear feathers and like, that's not great. You know, you're paying people to be a caricature of their culture. Whereas what we're doing here is we're saying, you know, the only way that these people are going to earn a good living, not cutting down trees, is by sharing this. And then we help them. They have better jobs and everything. And so I think that doing it with authenticity and honesty in a way that's holistic with the environment, and then a lot of those people, we depend on donations to save rainforests, to buy it before the lagers get there. And that's something I should explain to you is that, you know, once we found this Eden, we saw

the again, it's a cliche, save the rainforest, but we saw the smoke on the horizon. And then this place that I love is being destroyed before my eyes. We saw the burning forest, these millennium trees going down. And so what we've created now is a way, because then when I was a kid, you know, you'd see these WWF commercials or, you know, they'd show you these polar bears on melting ice

and they'd say, please send us money and, you know, we'll send you a little plushy polar bear. And like, but I always wondered, you know, if I send them $5, where is it going? And there's a few organizations that we've looked into where it's like, you know,

they're paying their CEOs $500,000 a year and they're using 90% of their advertising on, they're using 90% of the funding they bring in on advertising. And so what we did was we created an organization

with the local people, indigenous lead, that allows, it's the most direct way to save the Amazon. Because I was that kid watching David Attenborough going, I can't believe

all this stuff is dying because he'd be like, you know, the penguin, soon we'll have no way to live and you're like but i haven't even seen them yet they're part of our world that's so beautiful elephants are going to go extinct in our time tigers are disappearing the amazon's being ripped apart and so now we're working with the indigenous people we've created junglekeepers dot org and people give five dollars 10 dollars a month and that adds up and allows us to go in and

when there's loggers about to destroy 10,000 acres they're going to do that and it's going to take them five years to go through all those trees we show up and because JJ's local, he'll show up and he knows how to talk to them. He goes, hey guys, listen, not to, you know, cramp your style, but you're going to make money over, you know, five or ten years doing this brutal work. Could we just pay you now? We'll pay you now for the land and you don't touch it. And they're like, you want to pay us to do no work? Yep. And then we save this land. And then a lot of the people that do this, I mean, they're paying the cost of a latte a month to help us save millions of animals, wild heartbeats, one of the most important

biomes of our planet where the moisture comes from, where all the ecological systems are still intact. And for the price of a latte a month, if enough people do that, a lot of raindrops make a flood, and we're able to turn those loggers and those gold miners into friends. And so we've created something that's creating real change, and we're on the cusp of making history with that. What would be the history. The history is that first of all, people that are here that are, I mean, there's a lot of people that are concerned about the environment, that are worried about climate change, that the loss of species is the defining issue of our time. And now I have mothers coming to me when I do public speaking events. And they say, look, you know, I'm a single mom. I work two jobs. But we give five dollars

a month to jungle keepers. And I show them your Instagram. And my kids are like, mom, look at the animals that we're protecting. And they are. And we, you know, we publish all of our, you know, you get the skeptics on the comments and it's like, go look us up. What do the skeptics say? Oh, they're just like this guy's full of shit. He's making millions of dollars by asking for your donations. Like, 501c3s, it's all public record. You can see what we're doing. You can see how we use and we keep, there's a, you know, we keep the percentages that like 80% of the funding that we receive goes directly into our Ranger program, buying land. Of course, there's a little bit of administrative cost. And then we don't do any advertising. I come on podcasts. I write books. I do my Instagram. I do my

Instagram and these are powerful things that reach millions of people. And out of every hundred people, there's one or two that go, I love the rainforest. And I could, I could spare $10 or $20 a month. And then they're able to connect with that. And then like after six months, we send them a t-shirt. And then if they, you know, a lot of times, they come see it. And then it's real. And so we're kind of changing lives with that some of these people and some of these kids come down. They're 17 and they're like, I love the rainforest too. And it's a way for them to see it. And then just like Tarina came back and climbed the tree. They come on two expeditions and then we're like, look, so what do you really want?

And they're like, I want to see it. Is it mostly rich kids that are doing this? Like, who can afford to travel to Amazon? It's not. There was just a kid the other day I spoke to. I did an event in Brooklyn. And him and his mother came up to me and she said, he has something to tell you. And he goes, you know, I've listened to everything you've done.

I've read all of your books. And he was like, I'm saving up to come. And he's like, I just got at my first job. And he's like, I'm coming down next year. And I went, deal. I was like, I'll see you in the jungle. And that's, that's fair game. You know what I mean?

He's saving up for his plane ticket. You know, it's a... How does it feel being that kid's Jane Goodall? I don't know if I'm that kid's Jane Goodall. I'm not that cool, but... What do you mean? That's exactly what you are. Jane Goodall is a legend.

She's a generational. This kid said he read everything you've ever done and watched everything you've done. I'm just, I'm not ready to take the weight of that. But the fact that, because I'm just not. That's how I feel, okay? You think it's a bad thing? That's my truth. But you think it's a bad thing?

No, that's a wonderful thing. I just think that it's like, it's just hard to take a compliment sometimes. I mean, that's wonderful if that's really the way he feels. I would love that, just like sometimes people go, you're our generation, Steve Irwin. And I'm like, no, Steve Irwin had global reach and nuclear levels of enthusiasm.

And there's never going to be another Steve Irwin. But thank you for the thought. But the fact that I can, that I know that there's kids reading this book somewhere going, oh my God, I can't believe this kind of adventure is still possible uncontacted, tribes, rivers that have never been explored, species that are undiscovered, and then they get so motivated that they come to an event and that they come to the jungle. That's incredible.

Yeah, I mean, the term influencer has been used predominantly derogatory, right? Like, oh, you're just an influencer. You better not be calling me an influencer. Are you? I'm going to ask you. No, I'm not. I don't consider myself an influencer. I consider myself a conservationist and an author. What do you think you're doing to the kid? I'm posting about my job. You don't think you're influencing him? I think an influencer's primary job is creating content. I'm not creating content. I'm sharing my job. This is like you being a doctor. Did you just rename share the like you use a synonym? Well, I just, I'm not sharing. Okay. If you were, if you were an influencer who maybe wasn't a doctor who went around sharing cool medical facts and making little jingles for TikTok,

you'd be an influencer. But you're a doctor who is sharing medical knowledge with people. So you're a doctor first. and then the social media stuff comes second. And so to me, I'm an author and conservationist, and you could add explorer to that. But my thing, I'm not just going out going, how can I make content today? Maybe I'll list my 10 favorite animals or maybe I'll do a little dance.

Like, no, no, no, no. But why are you against that? Why do you view that at an accident? What if that gets another kid excited about visiting the rainforest or donating money? Like if you did the dance and you got 10 million views on the video

and you raised a million dollars for the rainforest, is not a good thing? It is. It is. But you don't like it. It's just not my style. It's just not my style.

I like, I think in the, in the spirit of Jane Goodall, in the spirit of some of the academic conservations that I've known, I think that for me, for whatever reason, it's important to me. I cringe a little bit when somebody says, oh, he's a wildlife influencer. And I'm like, sure. But I'm not just interacting. And actually, here's why it's important. Because there's a video online that did very well where it was like seven in the morning. We're coming down this river.

And JJC is a spider monkey that's in the river. and what people you can't see in the video is that there's like a lot of back currents and swirling going on. And the spider monkey had jumped into the river and was trying to get to the other side. And so we're coming down from setting up camera traps up river and checking on the ranges.

We're just at work. And we're in the middle of the Amazon. And JJ goes, help her. And I'm like, she's a monkey. She'll swim all the time. They'll be fine. It was like 7 a.m. I was kind of cold.

And I was like, I don't really want to get in the water right now. And then her head went under. And he's like, no, she's drowning. And so I jump in the water. Are you the dedicated lifeguard? Are you the good swim? I was a life card through high school and college. And that's how I funded my Amazon trips.

So I have seven confirmed saves in the river, like real ones. I only count the ones where they would have died if I wasn't there. Do you have more saves in the Amazon or in your lifeguard job? My lifeguard job was at a YMCA pool. I never had to save anybody. I've never saved a life on the lifeguard job. So being a life card saved your life by giving you purpose and sending you at Amazon. Yeah. And then there's a bunch of people that, you know, because we swim in the rivers.

And seven times, I mean, probably 20 times I've helped people, but there are seven times that I can say with honesty and conviction that if I hadn't been there, that person would not have come up. And so this monkey was number eight. You're saving monkeys now. This monkey was number eight. Her head went down. And so I took my shirt off. I grabbed a kayak paddle, jumped in the water. And now I could have grabbed this monkey. Like, I could have just like, you know, animal controlled or just grabbed her by the neck, grabbed her by the tail and then like, you know, swam out.

But then she'd be terrified. So I'm thinking of this monkey's mental well-being as she's drowning. And so I put the paddle underneath her and lifted, and she grabbed it. She was like, oh, shit, here's something to grab. And as she came up, and I'm saying, you've got to also think,

we can talk about this too, different animal intelligences. You know, an elephant is not the same intelligence spectrum as a monkey, which is not the same as a human, which is not the same as a snake, different types. And so monkeys orient themselves.

Which one's the smartest out of that. those. Again, it's a different thing. It's like saying, what's the most venomous snake? Well, again, an elephant, an elephant, it was interesting. They tried to, they had a, the researchers did this thing where they, I think they put fruit in a tree. You got to give me a second to remember this. And they gave an elephant a stick. They were like, here's a tool for the elephant. And none of the elephants were figuring it out. The elephants would take, they wouldn't take the stick and associate it with hitting the tree. I've seen elephants, which again, animals using tools. I've seen an elephant take a stick and they'll scratch their leg with it.

And they're like, you know, like when you want to do it with a fork. They're like. Like one of those back scratches. Exactly. And they'll take a stick and they're like, oh, this is so good. But the elephants will push a box under the tree and stand up on it. And so like the way they solve, I mean, a dolphin is going to solve problems. It's like how there's emotional intelligence, spatial intelligence, all that stuff.

Totally. one of the directors of jungle keepers who I work with Stefan is much more technically oriented than I am. The way he's going to solve a problem is going to involve a lot more analysis and preparation, whereas I'm probably just going to try and smash through the wall. They'll probably neatly cut the wall and find out a better way of doing it. There's different intelligences. So this monkey, I wanted to respect the monkey intelligence. And I've rescued half a dozen spider monkeys at this point where I've had.

had them on me and I've spoken to them and they have a certain way of vocalizing. And so I started, you mean metaphorically. No, I mean like they'll go like and that's like spider monkey talk. And they'll do that. You know, they'll do that. They'll be like, I'm hungry. And they'll talk. So they make sounds. Of course they make sounds. They call to each other. They have whole dialects. But you don't know what they're saying. I mean, generally you know what an alarm call is. You know what an affectionate call is. There's some very simple. The tone. Yeah. And so you learn these over time. And just like if you walk through a forest, you can hear bird alarm calls.

You can hear bird mating calls. You can hear fear responses. And so you learn the same bird is going to have all different calls. And so you learn these things being out in the wild. And so I lifted her up in this swirling river. I lift her up on the kayak paddle and she wraps her tail.

That's why they call them spider monkeys. It looks like they have a lot of limbs because of their tail is so incredibly prehensile. They'll just wrap. And I lifted her up. And she looked at me. and I went, and I spoke to her, and she looked at me, and she responded in spider monkey. Now, I know how ridiculous this sounds, but then I brought her to the edge of the river, and I let her go.

And now the reason that we're talking about this is that then, when I publish that video, because I'm going, I'm trying to save animals and the ecosystem they live in. And then what you'll see is an article written, and they'll go, wildlife influencer interferes with nature, and man handles a monkey. And look, I'm not interacting with that monkey for fun. This is a real article? I mean, these are real things. And the comments for sure, people are going,

why didn't you just leave the monkey? She was fine. Why didn't you just leave the monkey? If she dies, she'll be part of the biological processes of a rotting corpse. I'm sorry, but bacteria existed before we did. That's, you know, like the house always wins. But are these people just trolling?

Yeah, but then, you know, we were. again, we didn't contact the uncontected people. We were doing our work and they came out on a beach. Wait, wait, what happened with that contact? We were up working with one of the indigenous communities where we work. And they are inside of the area that we protect. And so we work as partners with them. So they're contacted?

Totally contacted. These are people we could eat lunch with. They speak Spanish. So why they call them contacted? They are not. This is an indigenous community, right? That's one thing. Now, we're with these people and the unconstitutional.

Uncontacted Indians come out. Now the term uncontacted again right there. Everyone's gonna go, well, they're not uncontacted because you saw them. It's like, sure. They're people that live out in the Amazon without contact with other tribes, without other communities.

They are naked, except for that they make very simple rope, and they use that rope to tie their penises up to their stomachs. For protection? I would guess so that they don't snag it on a vine, on thorns. And they're extremely mysterious when I first went to the Amazon, it was sort of a rumor that they were out there. There's uncontacted.

They'd say calatos. It was like a ghost thing. It was like a ghost thing. The Peruvian government's official position was that these people are not real. It's a myth that they tell the loggers to keep them out. They're not there. Also, if there's this amazing indigenous culture that's out there, then that means that you can't use that land for resource extraction because it's a heritage site.

Anyway, these people come out. So they are real, and they are real. And now they're out in broad daylight. and we're there with DSLRs. And so for the first time, we're getting HD footage of this interaction between the indigenous people

that we work with and our friends and partners with and this uncontacted tribe. And so that was a huge event. And it happened. You thought they were going to kill you or something? We did.

There was a native anthropologist with us who said, please put down your bows. They're known for their arrows. Told them that? He did. He speaks a dialect that is kind of similar to them.

It's like when I speak Spanish to an Italian, Like I can speak Spanish, but when I'm in Italy, I can get by because they're like, I kind of get what you're saying. Not 100%. And so he was saying to them in his broken no mole, he was saying, please put down your weapons and we can talk. We'll give you some bananas. They don't have agriculture. They don't have stones.

They don't have metal. They have none of that. How do we know that if they're not contacted? Because what we do is we find their camps on the edges of tributaries. and they use palm thatching to make these temporary structures. They're nomadic. They don't live in one spot.

And so there's clans of them that move through the jungle and you'll see that they made a fire. You'll see that they cooked a tortoise. We've never found fish bones so we know that they don't really fish. And I think in the murky water that, you know, they don't have hooks.

They don't have metal. There's no rocks in our region of the Amazon. It's just clay. And so they basically don't have stones. And so I often say, I'm like, yeah, they're pre-stone age. They're living a pre-stone age life because they don't have stones. And I'm sort of being playful when I say that. You would not believe the public outcry of why is a white guy ruining these people's lives.

Why is this person contacting them? How dare you exploit them by publishing these videos without their consent? It's like, well, you want to go get their consent? They will kill you. That's not up for debate. Right. And the next thing is by telling the world that they exist, we are telling the world,

we have to protect where they live because they can't do it. They can't come on a podcast. They can't put on a suit and go address the United Nations. They can't hold a protest and put it on TikTok. And so there again,

what I'm doing is my work. It's very serious. People die doing it. And so then when, for recently, published an article where they went, it's an increasing problem that influencers are going in search of uncontacted tribes.

And I was like, don't you dare call me an influence. But are there are influencers doing that? There are. So is what they're saying valuable? Partly, but I get lumped into that. I'm a professional conservationist that's on the verge of creating a national park. So that's why the influencer terms.

I think so. It's just that I keep coming up against that. So now I'm curious about this scenario where you meet this on Contact the Tribe. You have the choice of putting out this content, alerting people that they exist in order to create protections for them. Yeah. Support their issues that are threatening their existence. But on the flip side, you're also alerting people that they're there and now they might

want to go out and try and find them. So like how do you balance that? Exactly. You don't want to, um, there's a, what's that line? And then the King Kong where it's like he killed the thing he loved the most. But like you don't want to do that. You don't want to tell the world and then have them come ruin. in it. And so there's a few things. First of all, nobody can get to where we are. If you were to

fly into the last city and go, I want to go up that river. Well, how? You're going to contact, you're going to get a local person to just motor you up this river. And then when you get all the way up there, what are you going to do? You have no idea who to talk to. It's deep wilderness, not to mention. We have jungle keepers, rangers now going up and down the river, patrolling for poachers and idiot tourists that might come. We've never had anybody do that. But so the risk of like blowing up their spot is not a real risk. The real risk is that the narco traffickers are attacking these people with machine guns. It's that the Chinese companies are subcontracting the Peruvian logging companies and destroying the very reality that they call home, bulldozing their forest.

So in the next five years, they could be murdered. They are being annihilated and they have bamboo bows and arrows against shotguns and bulldozers and machine guns. And so by publishing, and in the book, I write this story with all of its nuance and complexity about how they presented to us, the things that they said to us. Were they asking for something? The first thing they asked for was food. They're starving. And so anthropologically, there's two ways to look at this. You can say, well, they're a very special tribe that lives out in the jungle, and they've been doing this for thousands of years, and we should leave them alone and respect them.

there's another way of looking at this where you go when rubber was discovered at the turn of the century and we needed rubber for hoses and gaskets and bike tires and machinery for the Industrial Revolution there was a horrendous period of Amazonian genocide where rubber barons went down to the jungle and the only way to get rubber trees

you can't plant them in plantations they die from leaf blight and so the only way to get rubber trees was to go out into the jungle find the rubber trees and so these foreigners would come down and just maim the local people, like burn a few of them in front of the village and then be like, you go out and do it or you're going to be next.

And so there's this awful violent period. And so some of the tribes refused to be conquered and went further out. And so these most likely are tribes that were already living very isolated lives and went deeper, splinter tribes, splinter clans. And they've been out there for 100 years. And so you figure a few generations of,

telling their kids, hey, everyone on the outside world is trying to kill you. And they don't have like the Warani, the, the Yanomami, the Esieha. There's so many different tribes that have deep, longstanding hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of years of culture developed. They have dishes. They have ceremonies. These, the Mashko Piro or the Nomoles, as we call them, it's more like they're running scared. They're naked.

They're nomadic. They're terrified of the outside world. And so there's this very complex thing happening where the indigenous communities that are very much integrated with the outside world that still live on monkeys and fish and their environment, but who we can talk to and work with, they're going to have to find a way to negotiate with these tribes what their future looks like. Even if we protect their forest, right, which we're doing, we have to deal with the fact like our friends in the indigenous, in the established indigenous communities, they get killed by these tribes. The tribes raid on them sometimes. They'll come in and steal machetes. They'll come in and shoot our friends. The day after we interacted with the tribe across a river,

there's a whole river between us. It was like shirts versus skins. We were like one tribe versus the other tribe and we were waving our hands at them. Put down your bows, we'll send a boat across with bananas. All we did was help them. And the next day they shot my friend George with a six foot arrow that went in above his clavicle

and came out by his belly button. Why? Unknown. They're not like... They wanted more? We don't know. I saw the boat where he was hit and it was just covered in blood. Somehow he survived.

We got him helena evacked by a helicopter. But it's incredibly complex. And so when I published that, when I put this in the book and then we released the footage when the book came out in January and instantly there was backlash. You know, people saying what you're doing isn't right. They just said, the rights of these people. people and how dare you. Now, I'm trying to understand their core argument.

The rights of those people to not be, like to not be filmed? I don't know, but my, my response to them is very simple. We're protecting, you know, tens of thousands of acres that these people live on that are safe now because of the work that we do. Because of those people who give $5, $10, $20 a month, we're able to, with our rangers and with our land

purchases, and again, all the land goes to Peruvian ownership. It's not like, you know, there's foreigners buying up Peruvian jungle. We're protecting those. So people, there's this outpouring of support where people said, these people need help. And so these big donations came in to protect them. And what's comical is that most of the people complaining about that we're exploiting these people. Yeah, but we're protecting them. And there's no one else doing it. So unless you want to go down there and find a way to protect the jungle, just shut up. Were there any legitimate voices that we're concerned about this? No, no, no, no. We're working with, first of all, we have a team of legal ethicists.

We have the world leading anthropologists on isolated, voluntarily isolated nomadic peoples. We confer with them. We take their advice. And what's their feedback? What do they say is ideal in scenarios like that? Like if those people came, do you give them a bunch of Nike shirts? No.

Do you give them shoes? Like what, because look, outpouring of support, right? Life could get better for them, right? You can get them antibiotics. You can give them shoes. You can give them water, filters, whatever it is. But should you? Or like, what's the line there?

That's an age-old anthropological question. I mean, I, if I'm not wrong, and I might be wrong, but I remember learning about Napoleon Shenyan, who worked with the Yanomami. And I think I'm pretty sure that he gave them shotguns. And like, that changes everything. Because if they were, you know, intertribal warfare was like bows and arrows.

Shotguns? That's totally different. And for these people, I think when they steal a machete, like good for them. They need a machete. Well, you can't go a mile in the jungle without a machete. How they do it, I don't know. If I told you I'll give you $10,000 to start a fire right there

and I gave you a bick lighter, you wouldn't be able to do it. The jungle is soaking wet. So how they make fire, we have no idea. But, yeah, it's just really complex. It's incredibly complex. And so, look, the important thing is, is that they're given the space to exist. And whatever the terms, as they learn about the outside world,

as they learn that there are people, not the outside world, but as they learn that they have brothers in the indigenous communities who are willing to help them, that they need to stop sort of being a war clan. They're almost like the Comanchees, where they shoot first and ask questions later,

but it's like, hey, man, we could help you. You could actually come. We'll make a separate little farm for you. you can come and have bananas. Here's how you plant bananas. They don't have agriculture. And so you don't have to eat turtles every day. But that's the question is, do you teach them that?

And then like, what are the repercussions? But that's not up to me. That's up to the, who is it up to? Because it can be up to you. No, but it's not. It's up to the indigenous anthropologists and sort of the Peruvian experts that are dealing with this. My job as a mouthpiece for this organization and for the indigenous efforts to save the Amazon is to just raise the funds, is to get the word out that there's this very special.

damn it checkmate no but it's it's a valuable position I fine I'll take it I just think that a lot of people have again I opened by saying that the term influencer is usually used

disparaging that's true so as a doctor when people would say that you're an influencer I'd be like I hate it but now my god if there was ever a time to influence people about their bodies and health and science this is a good time to do it yeah I agree

with you. We can debate the term influencer as long as we want. If that's a term that's positive for someone, great. It makes me cringe a little bit because I'd rather be known as, look, there's a lot of people that would say, you know, why are you manhandling that anaconda? It's like, well, because we're doing groundbreaking research on anacondas, publishing scientific literature on anacondas, and the bioaccumulation of mercury from the gold mining and how that goes into an apex predator. But they don't know that. They see the Instagram video of me holding the anaconda. And what I try to explain is every time that I rescue a monkey or every time that we're measuring a giant anaconda, I do make a point of stopping and putting the camera on myself and going, this is this incredible

animal out in the middle of the Amazon living in a swamp. It's basically a dragon. And we know so little about them. And so I want to share that wonder and that awe with people. And so it actually, again, we're sort of taking the defensive position here, but actually it's such a privilege to have something like Instagram that allows me to connect with people all over the world that are saving cheetahs and saving elephants and that have different strategies towards protecting ecosystems and wildlife that are that are that are turning the tide on you know we hear the news cycle and everything is negative you know whereas we technically percentage of population wise we live at the most peaceful time in history we know more technology is better you can travel we've never

had access to more resources and there's people all over the world doing good work And unfortunately, the news will say, you know, there's war in one part of the world and everyone's losing their mind. Whereas in my feed has become this interchange of amazing experts all over the world who are doing great things. And for me, being able to share that with those kids who read the book and then go on my feed and they're like, oh shit, he's really out there. This is cool. In the book, in one of the chapters, I describe how when I first went down and I'm 18 years old, maybe 19, I'm there and we had no food. me and JJ have been living out in the station until we ran out of food. And so we found, we're in a boat and he was like, hey, he's like, watch this.

Takes a knife or takes a machete, goes to his foot and we walk barefoot all the time. He saws off the back of his foot, the callus. I was about to say. He saws off a big slug of callus, like a two inch slug. And we got a little fishing hook. And he cuts it in half, puts it on the fishing hook, throws it in the water, and comes up with a little catfish. Cool. And it's impossible to find bait down there. You cannot, if I told you find a worm, again, you wouldn't be able to do it. It's the most competitive ecosystem on Earth. So everything is

either camouflaged, venomous, or gone. It's just, they're just, you're not going to find them. Even if we want to find like a grasshouse, sometimes I want to show people a spider. And I'm like, I'll throw a grasshopper in the spider web and they can see how it wraps it up. You can't even find one. You can't catch one. And they have spikes. And they can bite you. It's the Amazon. But he caught a small fish. Then he chops a small fish in half, gets a big hook. Puts it on the big cook gets a stronger line, throws that in the river, and we got this big tiger catfish for dinner. And it's like, man, the stuff he knows. Like, it's just incredible.

Yeah. It's just incredible that indigenous wisdom. Um, I have no idea why I'm talking about that story. About influencing how powerful it is. Teaching these tricks. Teaching these tricks showing these people. Oh, that's what it was. So the other day, someone that we brought down, someone who was at the Alta Sanctuary

tree house, was sitting. sitting there with JJ and he was reading my book. And he was like, JJ, can you really, can you really do that? And the funny thing is JJ whips out a pocket knife and just saws a slug of skin. And so I got a picture from the field of JJ smiling holding this piece of his foot. And the kid is holding my book and smiling. And it was like, he just got the real thing. Like he just got shown. Your relationship with JJ seems quite close. When you first met, were there any distinct cultural differences that made it difficult to communicate? No.

I think it was really one of those moments of absolute luck. He was waiting. I think he felt like, you know, he either knew scientists or indigenous people. And indigenous people really want to interact with the jungle in a way that they're pretty functional. They're like,

can I eat it or is it dangerous? You know, and so they're not like, let's go out and find snakes. And then the scientists, you know, that most of the scientists that I've met, the hardcore ones. You know, like they demand that you wear, you know, the rain boots in the jungle.

They, you know, want to be covered from head to toe and long sleeves, a field shirt, maybe even a mosquito mask. And it's taken very, very seriously. And like, JJ was sort of in between worlds where he was like, I've explored a lot of jungle. I'm indigenous. I know all the medicines. I know how to track and thing. And I know all the birds.

But then he worked with the scientists. And so now he can name all the Latin names of the birds. He learned English. So now he's a indigenous scientist. who speaks English. And so there's, there's a chapter in the book called the rarest species.

And it's JJ. And so he, when I showed up, he was like, what do you want to do? And I was like, I want to go out all night. I want to see if we can walk

around this swamp where there's no trail. And as we go, let's go into the swamp at intervals to look for anacondas. Let's not come back till dawn. And he was like, why do you want to do that?

And I'm like, wouldn't it be amazing? And he's like, yeah. He's like, no one's ever asked me to do that before. Let's go. And so we started doing these, these things that, you know, he had never thought of doing.

And then it was really cool because he goes, okay, this kid can survive. And so he took me one day to his mom's house where I met his, he has 19 brothers. And I met some of his brothers and I met his dad. And they were like, he was like, hey, this kid's legit. He wants to see Anacondas. And they were like, should we take him? And they all like, everyone got really serious and everyone leaned in and turned chairs around. And they were like, you want to take them?

And I'm like, take me where? And they're like, let's do it. And once a year, their family would go inside a national park where they still had grandfather rights because they're indigenous. They could go up this stream. And they were allowed to hunt, you know, a couple of wild boar or whatever, a couple of birds. And they did this as like a yearly family ceremony. And they would do it in an open top canoe with this crappy little 16 horsepower motor and go for like 10 days. And they were like, let's go.

So it was me and three of them. It was J.J. Pico and Chito, I think. and all of a sudden at 19, I'm going on these expeditions in an open-top canoe for 10 days at a time when the sun is out, you're getting scorched.

When the rain is on, you can get hypothermia really quick in the tropics. It's funny because the moisture in the air is so, you just get, it sucks the heat out of your body. And so you're getting sunburnt and frozen and sunburnt and frozen.

And then they're like, dude, there's wild boar. Peckeries. They're like, let's go. And the first thing he said, they turned around, they looked at me and they went, why do you make so much noise?

take your shoes off. And I'm like, take my shoes off in the Amazon. He goes, or stay in the boat. He goes, it's your call. But you're not coming and making that much noise with your boots. Take my shoes off. But there's thorns that are 12 inches. There's bullet ants.

There's venomous snakes. There's all, I mean, not to mention, you could just stub your toe and rip your foot open on any feature. And then we're running through the Amazon rainforest barefoot. And again, friction. I've injured the shit out of my feet. I mean, the amount of times I should have gotten stitches, the amount of times I've just slammed that stupid toe

that sticks out in front of your big toe. And then it's purple for two weeks. But I learned how to keep up. This doesn't seem like a very calculated risk. It just seems like a full on risk. They knew what they were doing. Yeah, but as you said, how dry, wet season, things change that are unpredictable.

There happens to be a jaguar where there's not supposed to be a jaguar. I don't know if there's jaguars. That's very good. Most people say leopards. Jaguars. Jaguars will be somewhere where it's not supposed to be because it's displaced and all of a sudden your plan goes to shit. Yeah. That's when that's another thing. And this is something that the wild taught me. And this is also something that I think is an important lesson for the kids just starting. Is that a lot of times when your plans go to shit, that's life taking away the thing you wanted and

giving you the thing you need. And that, I think, is something sacred to understand. Because then when you don't get that job or that relationship blows up or you just don't get the thing that you thought you wanted. It's because the story of your life is going, well, that's just not the way it goes. It's like God going, I'm going to help you on this one. I mean, this is very poetic. Does that mean you never feel sad? It means that I feel less sad the older I get. And that when things don't work out, I go, great. You know, now professionally it's like, you know, when something happens, like, oh, man, are we going to do a collaboration with such and such? And like last year, this major company called up, And they were like, hey, we're going to do a profile of you.

And I was like, I'm stoked. And then they're like, yeah, it didn't work out. I'm like, great. That's great. I don't care. On to the next thing. And so you learn that thing of like, well, that, if I wasn't meant for me, that's great. Expedition-wise, we wanted to go up this river.

And then we wanted to have the boat driver go down, leave us up there and then cross into this other river. Super hardcore expedition. It would have been, we would have seen beautiful jungle that no one's ever seen. And there's also like the swag rights of like, no one's done this shit. And so we were two-thirds of the way up. We're six days up this river that doesn't even have a name. And exactly what you said, the river dropped because there hadn't been rain in a week. It was too low for the boat.

And now we're sitting in the middle of a river in the middle of nowhere. And we can't go anywhere. And now we're just being incinerated by the sun, eviscerated by the sandflies and the bees. Bees started showing up. We're covered in bees. and we had two wild boar in the boat that we'd cut up and salted and that were in pots. And so we're just stuck in the middle of the river for days. And then we had to drag the boat down the river and there's stingrays in the water and piranha and sticks that you can rip your foot open on.

JJ sliced the webbing of his foot so badly on a fishing line that he couldn't walk. And so you're just in this absolute butt, but, but, but the camaraderie that that built between the us that were out there. The things that we learned in terms of being out there. And then, you know, if you're going up a river, are you going up a river with a motor? There's no animals out on the side of the beach,

whereas we couldn't go anywhere for a day, so the jungle kind of silences in around you. And when you're out there, it's kind of like the Galapagos where the animal's never seen a person. So a jaguar will walk out on the beach just looking around. Doesn't care.

He's the king. And tapers will walk out. And the anacondas just sit on the logs on the side of the river. And so you get to experience these things. And you get a, we have something, you know, shifting baselines where, and generational amnesia where, you know, three generations ago you see this incredible jungle. And then it gets a little bit logged out and it's a little crappier and there's not as

much animals and there's not as much rain over that jungle. And then the next generation just sees like a couple of sticks and maybe it gets turned into farmland. And it's no longer a pristine wilderness. It's kind of just someone's backyard. But then someone's like, oh, but it's a nice farm. But it's like every generation kind of doesn't have a window into the magnitude that once was. And so that happens with us where, you know, as developments take over forest, as farmland gets turned into mini-malls.

And it's like as the populations, like there used to be just such, if you read about Teddy Roosevelt's childhood, it's like the amount of life that was in the water around New York City was completely. I mean, it was unbelievable. None of that is there now. We have humpbacks coming back a little bit, and the fish populations are recovering, but we really destroyed them. And so in the Amazon, what's been important for me as a communicator that is helping communicator that's helping to save these last wild places is having, knowing the baseline. It's so difficult to go out there and find an original piece of jungle.

And so this whole river, this whole little watershed that we're working on protecting is that. It's one of the last crown jewels of nature. And that's why we are so committed to saving it. Because we have the chance to save it now. And once that chance goes, that's it. So when I say historic, we have a once in history chance to save something that's been growing for 50 million years, the Amazon rainforest. And we can save this. Sequoia National Park in the U.S., biggest trees in the world, is saved because John Muir brought Teddy Roosevelt out there and said,

President, you got to protect this. And then when he saw those trees, you went, yeah, we're going to protect it. Sounds like a good influence here. He was an amazing inclination. But his thing is he'd stand on the back of trains and you just scream at people. But the trains were his Instagram. Yeah.

Let me ask you this. You made this choice at the recommendation of your friends to remove your shoes, to run through the forest. And the fact that it was difficult that you injured your feet, this made the process special, right? That friction made you love it.

I'm curious, and this could be a very dumb question. Why? when you're in New York, you do wear shoes. Why not bring that experience? You're making that face. Why not make the face in the Amazon? It's worse than the Amazon, no? Okay.

Well, you're a doctor. Germs. You know, there's something about, like, if I took a peanut and I dropped it on the floor of a forest and it landed on some oak leaves and grass, right? I think you'd feel pretty confident to pick it up and eat it. It's not dirty. If I took a peanut and I dropped it on the side of a sub,

and inside the subway, and you know that black sludge that's everywhere, would you pick it up and eat it? No, but I wouldn't also. But I also wouldn't run around the rainforests. All right, but I'm saying in this particular analogy, let's stay within the bounds of this. Is it because you have this thought that nature is clean

and anything man made is not clean? It's not a thought. It's true. Nature is clean. If you swab a subway pole and you swab a tree in the middle of the, Amazon, which one do you think would be more deleterious to your health? Probably the subway pole because it's been touched by more humans.

Exactly. Whereas, you know, if you... But it doesn't mean that the rainforest one is safer. Like, it's safe. I think it is. And actually, that brings us really nicely to our, how we met. Exactly. That's how I was excited.

It's a wonderful tie-in. So I first saw you when you had the audacity to call me out. Audacity. I liked, so you did this video. where you took one of my videos where I'm hanging off the side of a boat and I'm like, you know, getting water in the Amazon's a little easier. Being an influencer. Totally being an influencer.

The only reason for that video was to freak people out. You're right. I will give you that. And I take a coffee mug and I actually like you stop and you go, they have coffee mugs in the Amazon. That was funny. And I fill a coffee mug and I go, it's, you know, Amazon gin. It's like, okay. And then you were like, and I was like, I was like, the water's clean.

And you just went, sir, it's not. And so that's what started it. And then I responded to you and I said, hey, we should talk about it. Yeah, yeah. So tell me about this coffee mug, the water, the roots cleaning the water. So you're wrong and I'm right. And no, it's, you're actually right. You're right.

The water is not something that everyone should be drinking, especially out of the river. So you are right. Your medical opinion was spot on. But in the Amazon, there's a few things that are worthy of note and why me drinking the water is okay. First, the level of coliforms, the, like the fecal matter that's in water, across the world, I think every country has a level of zero. They put, they put, they filter their water for the public. They make sure that the level is at zero. The levels that are in our streams are like between 25 and 50. It's virtually non-existent. For an example, by the water that flows past

to the nearest city, the levels are over 1,000. And so the turbidity in like, which the amount of dissolved particles that's in glacier water is higher than the water that's flowing out of these Amazonian streams because the tree roots, think of it like a really intense sponge. Yeah, the sieve. They are filtering the water.

It's coming off the trees and falling right back down. Now of course it is running off of the leaves and there's a certain amount of small biotic material that's in there. But it's not polluted. There's no chemical compounds. Well, there's definitely chemical compounds. No, but I mean like human-made chemical compounds.

Like there's no like gasoline. Synthetic poisons. Yes. And so in the streams, you also have to think there's 20 million indigenous people living in the Amazon and they drink from the streams. And they poop in the streams, I assume. No, most of them. Clean in the streams.

They do clean in the streams. But when you consider the metric tonnage of water that's going by. I just don't know what's happening upstream, you know. Well, the interesting thing is, on our river, it's one of the last endless forests. You follow our river all the way up, and it goes into another national park that's the size of a small country. And so it literally doesn't end. It goes into tributaries out and tree branches until it becomes just jungle. And so there is nothing upriver, except for those tribes. And like 15, 20 guys pooping somewhere in the

forest, I'll take my chances. Sure. But where I drank that water, it was the mouth of a very small clear water stream and we've tested it and it's it's so clean that it's cleaner than glacial water it's cleaner than the average american stream and which you wouldn't think for the amazon and if you were to take a clear water bottle and put that water in it and just leave it in the sun for a few hours it would actually kill off the very last of the bacteria and it would be safe to drink so you're right that it's absolutely unadvisable but we are in such remote wilderness that you know The risk is okay. The risk is minimal for us.

And also I grew up with now, you know, I am not actually indigenous, but for the last 20 years, I've been living with the indigenous guys. So your GI tract has adapted probably to some degree. Because the GI tract absolutely does adapt. Yeah, majorly. And so initially when you started going, did you have more trouble? Like, because I was playing wilderness my whole childhood, I just drank from the streams wherever I was. It was disgusting. Got it.

But and somehow. So you're just a walking. protozoan at this point. Well, I mean, I've had everything. I mean, that's the thing. I want to show you a few things at some point. And, and one of them, I mean, I've had, I've had denge like four times. I've had tuliramia, which is the rabbit disease. Yeah. And so when it was interesting because I went to an infectious disease doctor in Manhattan, he called in his fellows. He was like, hey, it's a board question. That's why I know it's about rabbits. Yeah. He called in his students. He went, I want you to see this. He was probably the only time you're going to see it.

Did you get it from a rabbit? I got it from, I was living in a mud hut in India looking for tigers. I don't know how I got it. I wasn't handling any rabbits. I could have eaten something. I'm sure it's not only in rabbits. This is some stupid memorization. No, but you're right.

The first thing you look up when you look up tularemia is that it cycles through rabbits, that it uses them for its transmission. Tularemia, all kinds of infections. I've had everything. So, I mean, some of the, again, now this is another one where people are going to lose their mind. And they go, how can you protect monkeys but also eat them? And the truth is, is that when you're at an indigenous village and everyone sits down for dinner and there's chickens over there and there's a shotgun in the corner and they have turtle and monkey for dinner,

you can do one of two things. Either you can grab a fork and dig in or not because it's usually not a fork. But or you can go. You guys have mugs and forks. Well, that's, again, that's at the tree house. So we bring them on the boat. But or you can be like, I'm a gringo. I want to purel my hand.

I'm going to stand back and I'm going to have a cliff bar. And they're going to go, Gringo, you know, say, that's fine. Why don't you go put on some more sunscreen? They're going to look at you a certain way, whereas the way that I have conducted myself is, I'm one of you. I walk barefoot.

You want to see me cut the callous off my feet because I can? And they're like, oh, you are. And I go, yeah, I admire your way of life. And I aspire to knowing the things you know. I mean, I basically have done the same stuff as you. there was a pedicure place one time with like little fishies you put your feet in and the little fishies. Oh, so you know. That's great.

When you get sick with dengue malaria, do you regret putting yourself in a situation where you got that sick? Oh, I think the fever you get from dengue is like nothing else. I think it's better than any drug. I never heard anyone talk about a fever that's positively. No, it's lovely. It's like a bone breaking, lengthy. You feel like you're dying. I get hyper emotional. imagination is great. I feel like a fill a whole journal. Emotional about what? What do you? I don't know. I could just like listen to a song and cry.

It's just like makes you makes me hyper emotional. Like you just think like God, I love my mother. Like you just get you just get so something. This is what happens to me. I mean other people like yeah, it sucks. I love it. Here's what I'm hearing and I want you to reflect on it. When there's mayhem, you calm down. Yeah. When you're in extreme discomfort, you connect to emotions. Yeah. Do you always have to be in this overdrive to feel human? No, I like it a lot. But I think that I would say this.

I would say that most of my life, I was someone that very so badly wanted to have that blazing purpose. And I couldn't see a way of getting there. I was not academically gifted enough. And with dyslexia, I had no chance of being an actual PhD. candidate when I was younger, because now that's on the table through other means. So the conservation biologists, I could never be one of those. And I wanted to find a way of saving the things I loved, but I didn't know how to write grants. And so I just, you know, so I just threw myself into the thing.

And, you know, again, so you're going to the Amazon. I was going to the Amazon for months at a time while my family's back in New York. And my, you know, I'm watching my cousins and my friends get jobs and get married and have kids and I'm like the jungle I'm the fun the the the funcle who goes to the Amazon and comes back with wild stories but at 30 being dirt poor and and having cool stories it starts to lose its luster and so I think I spent so much time sort of with that like desperate sort of depressed disassociation of like am I going to be the thing that I set out to be or am I going to end up being someone that that tried and sort of blew it And so I think I had so much anxiety over that and so much care for, you know,

any given, once I became responsible for the trees, at any given moment, as we're talking right now, they're bulldozing trees. They're burning my trees. There could be moments before I get a phone call that one of my rangers was killed. And so there's that much responsibility. But I would say that the adrenaline junkie stuff came out from that, that fear made me feel so inhuman where I was like waiting to. to embody the calling that I saw and waiting to reach that,

that now that I've reached that, I think I would sort of go, you know, I don't need to jump on that crocodile because I know that I can. And also preserving my fingers and being able to continue doing my work is more important then. But at that point, I wanted to, I also wanted to find out what I was made of. You know, I was like, I've never been, I've never done anything that mattered. Your kid, right? And you're like, no, but like, you know, Winston Churchill, by this.

had already been to war, you know, and you're like, I want to find out, like, you know, am I, am I, do I have courage, you know, real situations. And so some of them are dumb, you know, like climbing the cliff. I was just playing. What taught you that you do have courage? Being through some of those situations. And, and, and you don't, it's a muscle. You don't just have courage or maybe some people do. But the analogy I can give you is, I've seen one person in my life that had a gun pointed point blank at his face. And I can tell you that when you have a gun pointed at your face, you move. It's just like this reflex. You get out of the way. And I watched this one guy just look straight down the barrel. And you went, wow, that's not the first time that's happened.

And you can't fake that. And so being out with JJ and the guys and the first time it's raining and you go, oh, I've reached my limit. I have a fever and I'm shaking. And I'm shaking. And I'm shaking. and it's raining and I'm wet and I have no way of getting dry. And you sort of, there's a certain kind of courage where you say, but I just have to, I have to keep it together.

And I have to just trust that it's going to be okay. And I have to ask for the right help. And you learn slowly or the first time that you see someone drowning and you go, if I jump in that water, well, then I can drown. That happens all the time. Where you see, you see someone drowning

and then you jump in. Well, you're stuck in the same whirlpool. And then you might not, or they might drown you. It's another thing that constantly happens, or they grab you and they push you down. And so then you make it out of that situation where you go, shit, that person would have drowned

unless I pulled them out. And then you start building that sort of self-evidence where you go, it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks, I know how I handle myself. And I think that that was very important to me, where it's like you're searching within yourself to find out what are you? This fear of unknown is something that is innately

installed in humans and these days people are very anxious about it especially when it comes to their health i have a lot of patients who have a mild symptom and infection even when they gets a little bit more serious perhaps a pneumonia they worry oh my god this could get worse and i could die why when you're in the rainforest with a really bad fever with a serious illness you don't worry that you can die or do you worry and you brush it off no sometimes the most informative the the lessons that you learn the most from or when you think, this is the beauty of life, is when,

and again, I'm smiling, but it's like, when you think there's no way out, you go, this is it. This is the one. It's like,

they're, you know, it's like in the movie, you know, it's like I got 40 people with guns pointing me, you go, they're not getting out of this one.

Or like, kill Bill and they nail her into the coffin and you're like, yeah, right. And it's like, how am I going to fit? And sometimes you go,

I'm just going to die. I think it's time for you to see the picture. This image has been traveling for nine. 19 years to make it to this moment. Okay. You were eating a hot dog and got mustard all over your face? That's pus.

I had dungay and I went to the nearest. That's a lot of pus. I went to the nearest town. That's a really bad staff. And your mouth is swelling? There's some. So I had dengue, so I was already compromised. I went to the nearest clinic, which was days away from where I was.

and I think I got a shot. I don't remember. I was like 19, but anyway, I contracted this staff infection. And at the time, I was taking care of this baby giant anteater who had lost her mother. Her name was Lulu.

And I was so committed to taking care of this anteater that as I was going up river, two-day journey, up river, I was going, something doesn't feel right. It's going, I don't know, man. And I had this one pushtual on my arm from a mosquito bite,

and I kept picking at it. And what I didn't realize I was, doing was taking all that bacteria and putting it all over myself. And so I kept picking. I was like, man, that thing's not getting better. It looks terrible. And then at night, it's the jungle. So you go like this on this mosquito by, you go like this. And so I'm spreading this infection all over myself. And I don't really shave anymore. I trim. But back in those days, I dragged a razor over my face and all of those little microcuts. When I woke up the morning before, the morning that I took that picture, I'd been alone in the jungle for two weeks, taking care of my aunt eater, as one does.

And my face, I remember because I woke up, but I couldn't open my eyes. And my face was pus glued to the pillow. And I couldn't open my eyes because the pus was coming out of my eyeballs. And so it had clamped my eyelashes shut. And so I stood up with the pillow and I had to feel my way to the nearest. And I got water and I put the water on my eyelid. And I had to un, because if you ripped it, it would hurt.

I had to detach the pillow from my face. And then when I saw it, that, I said, I'm dying. Clearly I'm dying. Or at the very least, I'm going to be disfigured the rest of my life. And I had no way to call anybody. And so for the next few days, I just had to survive in the jungle with this little anteater and care for her. And at some point, you know, I'd already run out of food. So I was looking for fish. So I tried to go out fishing and at one point my vision went black and white and I passed out and I know I passed out because I woke up on the forest floor and the anteater was pushing me like hey why aren't you playing

with me um wow ant eaters are friendly like that super friendly really they hold on giant ant eaters hold on to their mother they have claw they walk on their claws they have huge black claws to fend off jaguars and the babies ride on their mother's back for the first i think like six to eight months that they're alive and they what i don't what you don't realize is they have this incredibly close emotional bond with their parents, with their mothers. When a mother ant eater sleep, she wraps the baby up in the center. She puts her big bushy tail over them. And so that when somebody shot this mother anteater, but it didn't kill the baby. So I got the baby. She wanted to be hugging me all the time. And so she was always hugging me. And so I had to carry her around on my chest,

on my back. I would go to sleep with her. And then the crazy thing with an anteater is they have like these 10 inch tongues. That's how they get the ants out of the holes. But when you're sleeping with a baby anteater on you in the hammock and she's like, I want to wake up and play. She takes that tongue and your nose looks just like a turn my hole. She fired it so deep. It would come out my mouth. No. Joe, yeah.

And then I'd be like, no, and I'd turn my head like this. And she'd go pounding into my ear just like la la la la, all the way in. And so, and then you go, no. That's like I always wore people by Q-tips, but it's ant-eaters. I should be warning people about the anteater's. They go much deeper. And then you try and pull her off of you. And she's like, though, I love you.

but she would cut you with those really sharp claws. And I loved every second of it except for the dying part. And I remember I wrote a note to my parents saying like, hey, you did an amazing job raising me. I love you guys so much. I'm in the Amazon and I'm going to die. You know, my vision is black and white. My face is leaking pus. I have a very high fever.

I do not know how high. And then I ended up getting on a poaching boat that took me two days to get back to town. And then I called my mother. She rescheduled my flights. on the flight, somebody sat next to me and I had like a hood. I was so embarrassed and it looked disgusting. So I had the hood up and I was like sitting there. And you just saw this woman kind of figure out that something was wrong and she leaned forward and she looked and she just, she stood up and she never came back.

And that seat remained empty. And when I got to customs in JFK, you know, the guy takes my passport. He looks at it. He goes, okay, where are you coming from? I was like Peru. He looks up to me. He goes, buddy, what the fuck? And I was like, I was like, I was like, please let me in.

I was like, I just, I'm so sick and I want to see my parents and I need a hospital. And he just went, he went, go, go, go. Wait, they're allowed to let you in with a potentially communicable disease. This angel of a human being let me in. That's, I have no further questions. That's how the next contagion will start with you being. But literally, the fact that they didn't, like, assault me on the airplane and throw me back. I was so happy that I made it back.

And then I get to the hospital and the lady in the ER, you know how, E.R. As I sat down and she goes, yeah, fill out this piece of paper. She goes, what are your symptoms, sir? And I was like, it's really bad. Look. And she was like, sir, I need you to describe your symptoms so I could put them here. And I was like, look. And she like looked at me and she went, and her mouth opened. And then the next thing I knew, I was in that ET box with a little window. Yeah. And the guys with hazmat suits and they pulled me in. And every, there was a, there was a porthole on my door. And they had me, then they had me isolated. And they went, we don't know what you have. And they, the doctor that got me better who put me on like, you know, double

IVs. Where was that? What hospital was that? That was at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, I believe. That'd be crazy if he came to my hospital because I'm in New Jersey too. Oh really? Atlantic Health. Yeah. There you go. Imagine you ended up under my care. That would have been weird. Well, maybe one time I will. Oh yeah. That would make a great, you know, come to summit. Well, I would say come to the Amazon. I'll get injured. You can care for me. Yeah, I would be the worst person to care for you. But they, they like, you know, pumped me full of antibiotics for a week, brought me back. The doctor said that, you know, he was like another couple days of this. And he's like, that infection had won. You were not going to survive that. You were going to die.

And I just, it was a really bad Mercer infection. But that picture was that was that was the closest he came to death. That's the closest I came to medical death from like a disease, you know, like, you know, an infection. Illness. Yeah, from an illness. Yeah, like denge, you know, danga, dengue, denge. My friend Mosen had hemorrhagic denge where he starts peeing blood. Now that you can die from. That's serious, but that wasn't me. And so that's the closest I ever came from medical death,

other than my appendix bursting when I was a kid, right? I mean, then there's like an elephant almost crushing you. There's almost drowning in the water. I mean, there's a dozen other ones just being lost in the Amazon until you starve. You bring up the elephant as a very dangerous animal. Is that the most dangerous animal? No. There's not, that's not the most dangerous animal.

Like if you had to choose, like final face off, the most dangerous animal in a room, what's the most dangerous animal? Oh, in a room, that's easy. That's either tiger or polar bear. And I would say polar bear because a tiger chances are. You've seen both? No, I have not seen a polar bear. Only are allowed to choose from ones you've seen. There's nothing like a, I mean, look, first of all, a polar bear, you're on, mostly like lions don't, tigers won't,

except for in the Sundar bands, one area. Tigers don't really consider people food. They'd rather eat deer and bison and the other things they eat. You get an old tiger that doesn't have teeth anymore. He's like, I need to eat. So he's going to poach a villager. But I mean, a tiger has a 20-foot vertical jump. They have dinner plate-sized paws with razors on them.

Their tongues have like little shark teeth on their tongue. So they can lick the, if you ever look, anybody that's listening to this, look up what a tiger tongue looks like. They have thousands of little, like you know like when a cat licks your finger and it feels rough. Well, tigers, when they do, it'll take your skin off. So they're, even their tongues have teeth. And then their teeth are huge. They're so athletic that their triceps are like, you know, it's just wild. There's nothing like a tiger. But a polar bear will eat you. Like a polar bear, if it sees you, will run over to you to eat you. It's hilarious. It's, it's what everyone I know that's been around

polar bears has told me that. That if you see a polar bear and the polar bears are aggressive. I don't think bears are aggressive. I think grizzly bears, black bears, everything else. I think they're, I've been, I've done crazy things. Black bears have come and tried to get my food. And I have, I literally slapped one on the ass as he was running. No way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you said sometimes they don't even have to show that they're angry. They look up and they. I'm talking about the habits of individuals. So if you see, I saw when I was like 16, I saw a mother black bear walking with her cubs. And of course I'm 16 and I'm a little like Nikon Cool Picks. and I'm like in the woods and I'm like covered in mud

and I'm like inching closer to this black bear and I'm like she has no idea I'm here. She knew exactly where I was. She could smell me. She knew I was there but she just didn't care. And she's like, she could smell your axe body spray. Oh God.

Italian kid. 16 years old. I mean, that was the vibe. Yeah. And she's eating blueberries and I'm like, I'm so cool. Get really close. And then she just went,

boom. And she like beat the floor with her with her. Oh shit. And it's like, oh, she didn't even let me know that was coming. And so she shocked me out of my skin. And I like, went for it. And, you know, grizzly bears will not, doesn't seem like they'll bother people most of the time until they do.

And then you got big problems. Bears are bears. They're big, powerful. But, you know, in my experience, I know so many people that do bear photography where they're right there on a pebble beach and there's bears. And they're interested in the salmon. You know, sometimes the bear will get too close. Yeah.

There was a recent video. I saw like the bear was eating the salmon right next to a guy on a canoe or something. Yeah. And so you'll hear people be like, that's enough. Hey, bear. You know, they'll be like, hey. And the bear's like, yeah, whatever, you know. But then there's those times where you get a hiker on the trail.

And the bear just balls. And the bear's eating and has his head down. And the hiker gets too close. And a bear just like an elephant is going to go, hey, if you disrespect me, if you make me fear from my life, I'll just kill you. So I don't have to worry. And so, and there's this amazing thing, whether it's a sparrow, a Canadian goose, a fox or a bear, there's a certain limit that animals have. There's like a limit of permissible distance, whereas you're approaching this animal, especially with birds, you can see this where they don't care that you're there.

And this is you can do with like crows. They don't care. But if you go close, you see that they'll notice you. And all of a sudden they're like, okay, you're on my radar. You're something I have to worry about because I can see that you're interested in me. just like if you're not paying attention and there's like deer over there. They don't care.

As soon as you face them, ears turn towards you. They'll look up at you and they'll be very still. And so then as you get closer, you see them go, okay, birds will usually, they'll poop. Actually, butterflies do the same thing. As you get close,

I'll always taking pictures of butterflies. And they'll usually defecate because they're like, I'm going to have to run. And so most animals have a permissible distance that you can come before they go. And for something like a deer or butterfly or a crow, it doesn't matter. For an elephant or a grizzly bear, it matters a lot.

Because they are of a massive and noble race. And if you disrespect them, they will make you pay for it by eating your face off or crushing you. I mean, elephants, I've seen footage of what an elephant can do with its feet to a human. I can show you later, I have the picture. But where it just steps on a poacher and just, you know, the way that you know, you would step on like a bug and just there's just like a long smatter of blood on the street i always thought elephants love people or is this a disney thing that i got it's a disney thing so elephants have been more persecuted by humans than pretty and this the shame is that they're so smart and you know in india

where i spent a lot of time uh south india has the largest remaining population of asian asian elephants and you know they have their old maps that they migrate by and now there's roads in the middle and there's towns in the middle and there's farm fields in the middle so there's not enough food in the jungle and then there's like a pineapple plantation or a banana plantation and so what do the elephants do they're like I'm hungry I got to eat like you know however I forget how many calories a day an elephant needs to eat but it's gargantuan and they'll go all right well it's 2 a.m and no one seems to be around and they'll go eat 20,000 dollars worth of banana. bananas from this farmer.

And then the farmers come out the next day with fireworks and spears and poison and they'll put electric fences up and they go nuts trying to kill these elephants. And then you have an elephant human war. And so then the elephants learn humans are bad. Specifically men. They really hate men. Women, they kind of know that they, you know, they're not going to mess with them. It doesn't seem like the women are usually throwing the spears at the elephants.

So elephants treat men and women very differently. And, but if an elephant can, you know, if an elephant has been abused by humans, they're smart enough to think, well, you know what? Before this happens again, I'm going to take you out. And good for them. That's scary. It's scary, but what's scarier is that on a species level,

they're being annihilated and backed into a corner and that they're smart enough that they really should have representation in government. They are so intelligent and so emotional. And in the terms of you put a human and an elephant in the jungle, you know, elephants can communicate with other elephants at subsonic level. I think it's seismic communication where they vibrate through the pads and their feet. And they can tell other elephants there's water over here. They can communicate over miles.

The fact that they've been recorded using medicinal plants. The fact that they grieve by carrying the bones of deceased elders. There's so much social structure that the older males teach younger males, how to behave. Elephants are one of the most incredible, iconic species on our planet. and we are just absolutely ruining their ability to survive. And if you think about it, you know, we grew, you know, they say that humans all came from Africa. And like across Africa and Asia and Europe, there were so many more species of elephants from woolly mammoths to all these other crazy, different combinations of tusks.

But they are the engineers of their ecosystems, right? They're the ones that have the largest impact next to humans. You know, if you talk to any game manager in Africa, the elephants are pulling down trees and they'll not go over a tree to get to the fruit. And their pathways, their dung sprouts, mushrooms. And the dung beetles are rolling it away. I mean, their entire fertilizers and farmers and excavators of their ecosystems.

And so on a species level, you could almost say, like they raised us. We showed up a lot later on the scene than they did. And what we've done to them is just devastating. And so I, you know, I've lived with semi-wild herds of elephants. I've seen the danger of an angry elephant, a rage-filled elephant that's and abused. And I've seen how gentle, you know, babies and mothers can be. They are. They're beautiful,

but they just, but they kind of have a pretty hard line of don't make me scared. Yeah. I don't want to do that. I've always wanted to meet an elephant. Come. Come. Come on me. Let's go. Where's the nearest elephant? Not close. I would like, so I would never, I don't really believe in keeping elephants in captivity. Like zoos either. I know, I, you know, this, again, zoos have fallen out of favor. But if it wasn't for the Bronx Zoo, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. There was a guy named Alan Rabinowitz who worked at the Bronx Zoo and he was like, my idol. He would go out, first of all, he also had a stutter as a kid. And so he identified with animals in a big way because he's like, they can't speak for themselves, but they have emotions and families and their own reasons for existing outside of our

utilitarian view of them. And so he was like, I got to protect animals. And so he became a wildlife biologist and he created entire national parks and studied jaguars and went all over the world and he used to say he liked dealing with dictators because if you go to democracy you have to like ask all these people and get a consensus whereas you go to the king of Bhutan and you go hey this whole area is very important for tigers it should be a tiger reserve because no one lives there king of Bhutan goes yes well until he says no and then until he says no but if you can convince him that this is great and part of his you know the tiger is a symbol of their natural of their country's national heritage.

And so he had this amazing ability to make all these things. But the Bronx Zoo is where, WCS is where he worked out of. And I would go to the Bronx Zoo as a kid and see the guerrillas. Face to face through a piece of glass. You see a gorilla.

I mean, it's just my, you should go see the gorilla. I mean, it's like, you know what a gorilla looks like. I don't think I've been to the Bronx Zoo. You need to go to the Bronx Zoo. Stop what you're doing. They, when you see a gorilla and like, you know,

good days, bad day, sometimes you go and they're all like somewhere. else, but they give you a presentation about gorillas and then they lift the curtain and there's gorillas, real gorillas. And here's this like humanoid big black ape looking at you. And the first time I went as a kid, you know, people are like making faces doing things. And there was just one and you could just tell the gorilla was just sitting there like, I'm kind of bored. The trainers were throwing frozen watermelon in there so that they would, you know, have to interact. They interact a little bit. and everyone was just kind of quiet watching the guerrillas.

There's some kids running around. This little girl has her face right up against the glass. And she goes like this. She went and closed her hand again. And the gorilla just was like this and looked at her and just went. And the whole room, you know, went silent. Everyone had chills up their spine. It was like, wait a second.

Is this thing an animal like a mouse? Or is this a human that we just, you know, is this, you got the sense of that this is a being that we don't. understand and I think a gorilla is as smart as like a five-year-old which five-year-olds are smart and so you know to me animals are so important so many people like you know I wonder when we're going to find the aliens and it's like cool can what if you focused on protecting lemurs and elephants and all these other intelligences that we share this planet with it's not all about us and so that's the other thing for my job I feel like my job is communicating on behalf of these animals because

for every acre of forest that we lose. My spider monkeys and my ant eaters and my friends, they're getting burned. You know, we're not just losing ecosystems and it's not just global warming. It's massive individual suffering that's happening too. You burn a forest. Well, where do they go? They have nowhere else to go. They hide in their trees that burn.

And so, you know, I've spent so much time with animals that I truly consider it my job to try and change the direction that the, fate of what's going to happen to them because if we just let it go, they'll burn, they'll cut, burn and pave everything. Whereas if we, if we can keep these forests, they will continue to create the moisture that makes the rivers. So are you anti going to the moon, Mars? No, I mean, I just think, I just think clean your room before you start doing other things. I think it's great. Go to the moon. I mean, go on the moon. That was so cool. Like that was so cool. I don't know what he wants to go to Mars or something. Are you pro

his missions? I think it's going to be cool to watch season one if we arrived on Mars when they all die. I think I just think it'll be fun. Not in like a sadistic way. I just think like that's, it's going to be tough, you know, like the first few voyages around the globe. I just think to me, like, I just think that it's so crucial that the systems on Earth are ocean fisheries. I mean, if you really look, like if you go to environmental college and you look,

like everyone's racing around like everything's fine, they don't realize our beds are burning. And if you look at the wildlife populations on Earth have declined by 70% since like the 1980s, 70% of the wildlife on our planet is gone because of us. Well, I thought when I heard that that like the traffic would stop, the newscasters would take out their mind. Like I thought like everyone would be like, we've gone too far, we gotta stop this.

Nobody cares. The fact that we're having like the hottest year on record right now, that the temperature, it's like no longer a thing. We are changing the climate of the planet. Nobody cares. Why do you think people don't care? Why do you think they're not buying it? I think because they feel helpless.

I think because someone goes, okay, you're telling me that elephants are going extinct. Here's another reference to my dad as I was growing up, you know, one time. And I sort of, I sort of would like damage myself with this. You know, I'd go read things on manga bay.com is sort of this like devout conservation website where they only talk about the real. It's like the first source of everything. And, you know, they'd be like, you know, 20 new, 20 rhinos were just poached in whatever country in Africa. and pretty soon the population is going to be gone.

And I was just, you know, you're inches away from crying. And you just go, but like I'm sitting there in New Jersey, you know, empathizing with these rhinos and going, this is so sad. And I, which I've learned not to do with this, all this environmental stuff that I do. But as a kid, I was like a teenager. And I walked in and I showed my dad this thing. And he had just gotten home. You know, he was still driving to Brooklyn to teach all day and then commute home and then get

dinner ready and then read to us at night. And I went in and I was like, dude, all these rhinos just died. And he looked at me and he was like, the sadness on his face was incredible. He was like, that's horrible. And he just shook his head and went and got dishes for dinner. And I was like, but everyone feels it. But what the hell do you do about it? And that's a perfect example.

Like, what's he going to do about the rhinos? And so that's why we created jungle keepers. It was because I was that kid that was devastated. And now I'm saying to people, if you help us, you go to the website. And again, there's that thing of. Am I, is this really, if I give my money, is it really going to? Yup. Come see it.

So if Elon Musk gives you a billion dollars, what will happen? A billion? You could protect like half of the Amazon. You could protect massive amounts of the Amazon. We need $15 million to finish our national park. We're halfway there. And I am, I am running myself thin, telling everyone that we are so close. We've protected 150,000 acres.

I think that's like double the size of Singapore and half the size of Rhode Island. It's getting big. It's really big the area. I mean, it's too much to explore. We need to fly over it now to monitor the deforestation. And it's like, we've come so far with large donors who've given us like 300 grand at a time or more. And then a huge network of thousands of people that give us $10, $20, $100 a month. Now, for all of those people and for everybody watching, if every person or even if just one in 10 of the people that hear this podcast,

podcast went and gave us $10 a month for the next two years, we would finish the project. And here's something else about what we do that's special. We're not trying to save the ocean or the environment. It's not some like nebulous mercurial thing where you're like, well, when do we win? Can we win? There's a watershed. There's a tree of rivers that flow into the main channel. There's the wildest place.

And around that are logging roads and narco terrorists and they're trying to come in and they want to eat it alive. And all the beautiful butterflies and jaguars and the uncontacted, and the ancient trees and the heartbeat of life is going to be silenced. But we can save it. And everyone at home can do that. And all I got to do is, again,

for the price of a friggin' frappuccino a month. Who is your, this is a funny question. Who's your biggest competitor in this space? Who else is doing good work out there? Oh, man, there's so many people doing amazing work. I think, are there any, like, mega NGOs doing good stuff out there? I mean, I think the Nature Conservancy does a great job. I've been to so many reserves in the U.S. that just have a little sign in the front that says this was protected by the nature conservancy.

I've grown up in those places and I am immensely thankful to the work that they do. I think the WCS, again, Alan Rabinowitz and some of the stuff they've done has been incredible. Conservation International is pretty incredible. And a lot of the organizations that are doing the best work are not very public about it. They're not really putting it forward. Doug Tompkins and Yvonne Channard, who are the owners of the North Face in Patagonia, they're good friends. And for anybody starting a business, if you haven't read Yvonne Channard's book, Let My People Go Surfing, great book about how to take care of people as you start a business and not lose your soul.

But these are two billionaires who were rock climbing bums who went and protected wilderness in Patagonia. And so, like, those are people that I really look up to. people that are doing it. I mean, recently we got into a thing with, again, I don't understand this stuff, but Google AdWords and promoting jungle keepers so that more people get the message. SEO stuff, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. And so internet stuff. And again, footfish. It's like wrestling in Anaconda. I get it. Yeah, as long as someone does. Stefan gets it. That's what's important.

Me and JJ, no idea. But we couldn't use the word Amazon. We're like, we're protecting the Amazon rainforest. And Google AdWords was like, you can't use the word Amazon, it's copyrighted. And we were like, what? And they were like, yeah, Amazon copyrighted Amazon. We were like, no, no, no, Amazon rainforest.

And they're like, copyrighted. Peruvian Amazon, copyrighted. And we kept, we're like, but dude. Why is Peruvian? Well, I work in Peru. No, no, but why is that copyrighted? Peruvian Amazon. They're like, you can't use the word Amazon at all.

And so I was like, yo, I got really mad. But then I said, wait a second, hold up. because my friend Lex Friedman told me that he had had dinner with Lauren Sanchez, Jeff's wife, and that she's actually really into conservation. I said, I have a feeling they just don't know. And so one day while I was on the front of the boat, I took my phone, turned it on to myself. And I said, this message is for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. I said, I'm trying to save this.

See the trees? I'm trying to save these trees. Like it's hard enough. We're getting shot at and there's bulldozers. Can we please have access to the word Amazon? and then I posted it to Instagram and I was like, everybody tagged Jeff. And he responded.

And he was like, I'm so sorry, that's absolutely moronic. And he's like, I'll have my team, call your team, and we'll get that resolved. And they did. And it was great. And then I found out that the Bezos Earth Fund has just made two new national parks in Peru. And it's like they're doing good.

It's like, there's all different kind, you know, and people love to hate on, you know, these public figures and everything. But again, so many people can do good. And that goes from the level of the teenager who's signed up for junglekeepers and all he has is a little patch on his backpack and a t-shirt to the billionaire level where they're like, wait, can we just help you to get your message out there? Sure, why not? Like that was very nice of him. Another example of good influencing.

Hey, man, I think when I leave this room, I'm just going to have to admit that I'm an influence. I just didn't realize it before. How's your conversation with Mike? Well, I realize I'm an influence. Well, I changed jobs. Oh, you know what's a question I should have asked? Do you get vaccinated before you travel to these exotic places? Great question.

No. Oh. I got vaccinated when I first went down. Okay. They gave you everything. Are you anti-vaccinated? Is that why? No, no, no, no.

It's just like when, you know, when I lived in India, people would come and get off the plane and they'd be like, oh, yeah, we're on malaria medication. And I'm like, you know, I'm living there with my friends. Yeah, okay. And I'm like, what are we? You're spending too much time there. Yeah. I'm like, what do you?

I'm like, there's no malaria here. Also, where I work in the Amazon, there's not a dense enough human population for there to be malaria. Like if a mosquito bites you, it's not going to be. There's nowhere to go. So we have Dengue. I think the first time I went down, I got yellow fever. Hepe. That's pretty serious.

Yeah, yellow fever. Oh, you got it. I got the mold. It was 20 years ago. So I don't know. I don't know. Tetnis. Well, tennis, I hope you have.

Well, I got to get tetanus all the time. Yeah. I mean, I'm always carrying motors and getting scratched. I have slashes in me at any time. What's your take on folks who are anti-vaccine? You know, I don't get into stuff that I don't know about. When I was a kid, I was taught. I come from a family of doctors.

Mount Glossi is a surgeon. You know, nurses, doctors. I was just taught that you get vaccinated. And that's why there's things like not polio. Right. You know? So I, well, that's right. The anti-vax people were always this fringe group.

And then all of a sudden, I come back from the jungle in the last few years. And they've grown in power. Interesting. It's like that part in Game of Thrones where those like crazy religious people take over the city. And it's like, you're like, wait, why is this happening? Well, there's this fallacy that exists where just because something's natural means it's safe. And that's not, I'm sure you can attest to that probably better than anyone. Natural means it's safe.

How does that apply to vaccines? Vaccines aren't natural, are they? So that's why those people say they're not safe? Sure. But then don't get into a plane. Yeah, but also is nature safe? Or drink Coca-Cola. Nature's metal.

Nature's dangerous, yeah. Right? Nature will kill you. That's what I'm saying. There's hemotoxic, cytotoxic, neurotoxic venom waiting to be injected into you at any given moment by a variety of species. All natural is the way to go. I don't have time.

That's the thing. Living in the jungle, I do, I'm not, I haven't. You're free of those days. I haven't made millions of dollars, but I have achieved a certain level of richness in the sense that I have been able to disregard a lot of the sort of mental contagions that happen to people. Like, you know, when people get really obsessed with something, I kind of come back and I go,

what are we talking about this month? You know, when I was a kid, it was like, you know, Clinton's blood, and OJ Simpson, and then like, I go to the jungle for a while and I come back and everyone's like, COVID. And I was like, oh, like, that was pretty bad. I get it. That's a long gap that you were in the jungle.

I was in the jungle for a long time. 20 years? Yeah. I mean, I just, I missed out on a lot of things. Who did we kill? We killed someone. I remember they were like, yes.

Yeah. And they were like, we got it. I was like, we did. I was like, we got him. I love that you come out of a coma, jungle coma every time. Well, because we didn't have communications out there. So I'd come back and I'd be like, so you have no phone access at all. Now, now, now. With Elon Musk, you have the hookup. Yes. I got in trouble. But see, here, I'll give you another example of me being kind of tone deaf because I'm in the jungle. Elon Musk tweeted, this is a cool tree house. No, I don't tweet. He tweeted. He tweeted. He did. Oh, that's good. That's nice. Well, you would think so. I was like,

oh, this guy who's an inventor tweeted this thing. No, I've never tweeted. But I shared a screenshot of the tweet that my friend sent me on my Instagram. And instantly, I got labeled as being on the wrong side of the political spectrum to be an environmentalist. Oh, interesting. Right?

Because apparently Elon is. And so, you know what I mean? Like, I don't understand. Is Elon popular? Is he not popular? I thought he invented electric cars. Now he's not popular because he's friends with Trump. And it was like, guys, I don't know.

I was like, I just some guy tweeted about the thing I thought it was cool and I got in trouble for it. And it's like, I just, I don't really, I'm concerned with the fact that if, if you can't breathe the air and drink the water, nothing else you're interested is going to, interested in is going to happen. Civilizations rise and fall. History has happened and whatever political thing they're worried about, we have, we are at a moment in history, you know, like World War II, your greatest generation. If they lost World War II, what would the world look like? It's almost incomprehensible. evil would have won.

And right now, like, apathy is winning. And it's like, can we as a human race as a global society say, okay, we're pretty smart. We figured out, like, communications and air travel and all this other stuff. We might go to the moon or Mars, whatever. But can we transcend that to become truly intelligent and maybe not have so many wars and maybe not destroy the free fish that comes standard with life on Earth, the free, clean air that we are continually ruining. The fact that the Amazon, or the greatest, when you look at the Earth,

if that's its face, it's like the Amazon is our Earth's nose. It's this big green thing. It's beautiful. And it's got this tree of rivers going across it. And we just keep cutting it away until it's gone. And it's like all the, 50% of the life of the terrestrial life on our planet is in the rainforest belt. It's like, why are we allowing this to happen?

Why are we allowing people to pollute our water? And so it's probably because of the apathy that you described. It's apathy and it's, look, there's like an entropy of money. It's like, look, if I inherit 70,000 acres from my grandfather and I'm working at a job making not that much money, but I got this land, but I got to pay the taxes on it. And it's like the most likely outcomes that I'm going to go, I want to sell this land. And the most likely outcome is that the person that buys that land wants to devise that land wants to develop that land and subdivide it and make money for himself. And it's like, we're all

me and that guy and everybody else. It's like, well, you can make a few million dollars here. And it tends to go that way. And every now and then you get that guy who's like, nope, it's a conservancy. I'm protecting my forest. But there's not a lot of economic incentive to, you know, ecosystem services don't produce dollars most of the time. Now in New York City, they protected the cat skills and all the different aquifers that are up in the Hudson Valley. And so New York City has some of the best water in the world. But that's because it's protected and surrounded by forest. But we could do this everywhere. It doesn't need to be exploited. The fact that there's giant trawlers out in the ocean trying to trawl for shrimp and also getting dolphins and whales and other species and the bycatch.

It's horrific. The fact that we got down to like there were 100,000 tigers in 1900. 100,000. There were 3,000 tigers while I was growing up. And I always give people the example. If you had $100,000 in your bank account, that was your whole net worth. And all of a sudden somebody knocked you down to three. How hard would it be to recover? Think of tigers. That's their existence.

And now the greatest terrestrial land predator that we have has been knocked down. This iconic symbol of life on earth, the tiger, has almost been exterminated. And so my job is to talk for the animals. that again, the adventure for these kids that are coming up now, the adventure of their lives, and I think the new generation is sort of keyed into this, is that there is so much good work to be done and that it doesn't have to all be about, you know, you. I think we got, I think my generation got very into that, very obsessed with that, where it was very YouTubey and my space and like getting likes and stuff. And I think that I see a lot of people sort of disconnecting

and being like, I want to go back to authenticity. I want to start a farm and help my local community. make beautiful things. You know, it's like you just see people sort of going, you know what, which is cool because this whole like AI thing, I just see people being like, you know what, we're going to go back to authenticity. Like, I'm going to start working with leather, you know, or whatever it is. And it's like, I see kids disconnecting. I've just met a few, I met three kids in the last two weeks. So I said, uh, I said, can I use this picture? They go, yeah. I said, oh, I'll tag you on Instagram. I don't, I don't do social media. Yeah. My nephews are the same way. I love that. I love to see it. It gets me excited. Right. Even though it's like at my expense,

but I'm like, yes, please. Less followers. I'm fine with it. Yeah. But I love talking about science, much like how you do your passions on conservancy. I want to do the same for science and getting people excited about it. It's kind of a similar mission in that you can make better choices when you're in charge

and you understand what science is. What limitations we have, what we don't know. I've heard you talk on other podcasts before using medicine that indigenous people have created and how valuable it is. Take me through what your stance is on that. Okay, I got to tell you a story. So I was, this is last year in maybe April. I'm walking through a stream that I walk through all the time. I love this stream. And I actually had shoes on for once. And I get to this waterfall. This is how things go. I guess this little waterfall and I'm like, all right, cool. I made it through

the whole stream. I know this waterfall as if that means anything. I take my shoes off, take my shirt off. I get in the waterfall. Stay a while. Stingray. Oh. And now this is the thing that I was the most scared of in the Amazon. You say like, are you scared of? First of all, there are stingrays in the Amazon? Okay. So this is a cool fact. Because the Amazon used to be, the Amazon separated off of Africa back when the continents were all together. So there used to be the Congo River used to flow across what is now South America, like proto-Zaire river system thing. And then when South America hit the NASCAR plate and the Andes Mountains came up, it all drained out. And so the ocean water that was covering the Amazon basin over millions of years flowed out as it became the Amazon River.

So it gradually desalinized. And so you have Amazonian freshwater manatees. You have Amazonian freshwater stingrays. You have Amazonian freshwater dolphins. Stingrays, unlike marine stingrays, they have horrific blinding pain. when they sting you. They have, it's a knife. It's a double size.

Yeah, what is the sting? Like what is it, is it poke? When a snake bites you, they have, you know, it's really just like a needle. Yeah. Like, psh, and they just inject the venom. And I always explain to people, you know, they go out their poisonous snakes.

And poison is when you eat it. Venom is when it's injected. And the stingray has always scared me because the one person I had seen, I'd say, seen two people get, the toughest native guy I know, which is one of JJ's brothers named Chiki, he got stingrayed and I've never seen him.

He was just on the ground howling in a way that is haunting. I was just like, this is so terrifying. I can never, I can never tolerate that. If he's like that, I will die. And then one of the people I was with, you know, you said, you know, am I creating a frictionless experience? I said, you guys can walk up the stream with me. And I had a group of tourists with me.

And this guy was walking up the stream with me barefoot. He said, I want to do it the way you do it. I said, that's fine with me. And we weren't walking single. file. So the sting rate, you know, they'll move out of the way. They don't want to sting you, but we were all spread out across the stream. So the stingery had nowhere to go. Nails this guy in the foot. He was howling. And again, I said, oh my God, this looks horrible. And the stingrays in the Amazon have, it's incredibly, it causes necrosis very fast, tissue damage, blinding pain,

inflammation. And so we got him back to the nearest town where they treated him with some antibiotics and then he went back to his country where they didn't really know he didn't walk for two months he had tissue damage and permanent permanent cell damage in his foot so when i got stung by the stingray i'm going oh man going this year is over so the first thing i did was pull out my phone pick up my foot see i knew it was going to happen yeah pick up my foot and i was like i'm in the amazon rainforest and i've just been stung by a stingray and my foot is bleeding from where this serrated high level influencer now. High level. So what this thing did was on the arch of my foot, it went in, okay? And then it wiggled its tail, so it flayed the skin off of my,

off of my arch of my foot. It took like a planar fascia release or something. I just, I can't describe to you. And I've, I have been cut, fallen, bitten, scratched, burned everything. This was the worst pain by a mile. And, you know, it hurt a ton. I sat down, I took a video, I was like, this is really bad. And then JJ's nephew, L.R, he comes up to me and he goes, hey, we got to go. We got to go now. And I was like, yeah, yeah, just let me finish this video. This hurts, this hurts a lot.

You're like, I have an influencer, bro. I was like, I can't, you know. And he goes, no, no, no. He goes, it hasn't gotten bad yet. He goes, we have to go while you're still conscious. And I remember just going, oh, shit. What do you? And we walk out through the jungle.

And they're like, I have bits of memory of, I like, was like lifted my head on the boat. and then it goes black. And then I remember getting to the stairs and looking and like they, and then I'm back at the station and I'm just, you know, you're just making deals with God. You're going, I will, you know,

I'll do anything. I'll wrestle a polar bear. I'll wrestle a polar bear. I'll make donations. I'll go to church. I'll do whatever you want. Just like, please. And then you black out.

And you come back and you're like, and you can't put your foot down, but you can't keep your foot elevated and it's so damn hard to exist. And the local guys went and they they use the machete to scratch the bark off of a setico tree and an amasisa tree. And they scratch the bark off of both of those. They get, you know, so it basically makes like this fluffy sort of material. And then they put both of them together, roll them up.

And then they take a heliconia leaf, fold them into this. And then they cook it on a pan. So they're doing this while I'm dying on the floor. and then they make essentially a hot poultice come in and they slap this against my foot. And now in the video that I have of it, you can see the separated skin. It's all white because it's separated from the, I'm assuming the circulation of my foot. And they put this blazing hot plant material on my foot. And they're like, it's going to suck out the venom.

And I know from snake bites, there's no such thing as sucking out the venom. I'm very skeptical of. So they said, no, this is going to suck out the venom and it's going to neutralize the pain. And sure enough. And it's burning you? It was burning me like, like, which would hurt under normal circumstances,

but somehow when you're in this much pain, somehow the pain, this was actually. Well, it just probably burned your nerve fibers. But that's the thing. It was just helping. Yeah. I mean, this was coursing up my whole body, but right here was the epicenter.

It was just unbelievably painful. And so, yeah, them putting a scalding hot thing, boom, right on my foot, actually felt better in whatever weird logic that is. And then I passed out for about four hours and I woke up and they peeled it off. And it had sucked out all of this black junk. And it was, I don't know if it was like super condensed blood or like denatured cells blood or whatever it was, but it had. And so they were like, there's the venom. I don't know if that's necessarily the venom, but some of the, yeah, exactly. That's like if you put one of those patches on that they sell in the late night infomercials,

they change color because they oxidize and people go to suck out the venom. I really think that for our reaction thing, I think that we should watch these videos because I need to. Wait, there's this video. No, this is what I have for you. I have these videos. I have me falling off the cliff. I have this stingray video. I need you to watch this.

I'm telling you. This is what it looks like when you get stung-up. See? I'm telling you. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's dead skin. Yeah. That's dead skin.

I'm assuming afterwards all of that came off. No. Like, time went on. As time went on it came off, yeah. It's a good thing that most of the guys that I work with are indigenous, and they know how to find plant remedies in the forest. They collected material from several different trees. Then the entire concoction was cooked for several minutes in a leaf pack until it was hot. When the hot poultice is ready, the plant material is applied to my foot and then bandaged into place.

hours later when they removed the bandage you can actually see the blood and venom that the poultice pulled out the stingray barb flayed the skin off the arch of my foot so that's going to take some time to heal but indigenous medicine and having my peruvian family around me is going to keep this woman from getting infected a hundred miles from the nearest hospital and my foot's going to be okay i have thoughts yeah tell me i'm glad your foot's okay thank you this indigenous practice of this type of medicine, its existence and these anecdotes is evidence that something is happening. Of course. But it is not proof. Of course.

So I don't know if I could watch that video and say your foot got better because of what they did. I agree with you because we're coming at this from the perspective of science. And there's a bunch of indigenous things that I would say are, kind of, like when somebody says, like, don't run in the rain, you're going to catch a cold, right?

Like, I always come back to them. I'm like, is there a rhinovirus in the rain? Yeah, there isn't. Yeah, like, no. So, like, I love running in the rain. Thank you very much, grandma. And so with Peruvian medicine, there's so much cool stuff with this.

Now, there's a local system where if you break a bone, which JJ did one time, you're supposed to go find this certain toad. And then you step on the toad really hard. All right? It's like the size of a baseball. You step on it so. hard that its guts go flying out of its mouth. Then what you do, you flip it over. Now, it has

poison glands, right? You flip it over and you put it on your area of broken bone. And then you wrap it with an ace bandage. And they say that the poison compounds go into your skin and promote bone healing. Now, I kind of call bullshit on that one. It doesn't seem. Well, I don't call bullshit. I just say like there's an absence of proof. What does it cause? Causation is. Yeah. What do you say? Correlation's not causation. Correlations not causation, yeah. So I can't say that it's bullshit. I have a high level of skepticism. Oh, I have a, yeah, that's right. And I would much prefer. A more refined way of saying it. Yeah. Well, because there are, there is value in thousands of years of anecdotal experience.

So we cannot write that off. But at the same time, we cannot equate it as proof. 100%. And so the reason that I told you, I strategically told you the story about the other two guys that got, uh, Stingray stung because I watched how badly that was. It was almost the same wound. And I know, I know what you're saying. I know, I understand you need vast instances to come up with science. Well, I'm curious, based on your understanding of it, why do you think it's important that from these two examples, we don't say that this medicine saved your life and prevent it, didn't allow him to walk for two weeks, the lack of it? Why is it important that we don't say that?

Yeah. Because that's not the scientific method. That's not how you can't, you can't prove anything with such a small sample size. However, all I'm saying is that in my, and I'm so skeptical, I'm from New York.

What I would say is if you told me that that, you know, those, that tree bark was going to heal me. I would have said, no, I'm highly skeptical. But in that moment,

I was back on my feet in five hours. From the worst pain I've ever felt and my foot healed so well, where I've seen somebody else. And I can, I'll give you a few more examples. Botflies, a filmmaker I was with,

got a botfly in his back. There was a video said botfly. Oh God. It's a disgusting video of me taking out a pencil-sized bot fly from my body. They were buried deep, right? They're buried deep and you can't get them out.

And I mean that. You can't put like a little petroleum jelly or something, choke them out. That's what we were taught. I picture the bot flies just laughing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They just laugh. I mean, I'm talking to you, man.

I had a bot fly at two in my side at one point. And every, I mean, you just, you can't sleep and you feel this throb because it always gets infected. And you feel them moving. And then I would go to JJ's brother, William. And I'd go, hey, man, like, can you work on me? And he was like, I got you. So they, you're going to like this. So what they do is they take this really local type of tobacco.

They roll a big fat cigarette. They rip on this cigarette. And then they go, and they go. and they blow onto their hand. And what you get, just like a cigarette filter, if you look at a filter, you can see the tar. If you take a big enough hit of a cigarette, and then you blow it through a small in your lips,

you actually get a spot of tar on your hands. That's that I've seen it 100. I could do it for you. Then what they do is with a razor blade or they use a lemon thorn sometimes, you scratch that off of your hand. you have this little gloop of tar, and then they put that over the bot fly hole. And that is incredibly irritating to the botfly.

It's like nicotine crack. And then they put the petroleum jelly over that. And sometimes that suffocates and irritates the botfly enough that it will come up looking for air, come up out of your skin over the course of like a half hour. And then so what they do is, and then they rip the band-aid off and go in with tweezers and things like, no! And it goes back in. Really? Yes. Oh, man. And you're like, now we missed our chance. It's like whack a mole, but whack a botfly.

And then we have to wait until tomorrow. Or like, you know, you have to reset the whole thing. And, uh, I mean, weeks. I'm talking about like two weeks at a time. So this filmmaker got a bot fly, went back to his country in Europe. And the doctors were like, well, we don't know what to do. They tried all of the conventional stuff. And then they just, I don't know what it's called. The circular razor. Punch biopsy? I guess so. They went in with that. It was like, they just went in and punch. biopsyed and just turned it and came out with it. But then he has a hole in his back. Yeah. You throw a little suture in and you're good. Okay. Well, I mean, I just, you know, and we do those punch biopsies for skin cancer checks all the time.

Really? Yeah. It just seemed kind of extreme that, that's what you find extreme. It just seems a little extreme. My friend. It seemed like an overreaction. My friend. Let me tell you something.

You were wrestling anacondas in pitch black at night with 105 degree fever. You drill holes in people. people's backs, it seems a little bit extreme. Come on. I mean, why don't you just hold a piranha to their back and let it take out a chunk? Sicko. Oh, that's great. So, okay, so that, and then, you know, the things, as they're going for the boffla,

they go, and I go, why are you making that sound? Do they have ears? Yeah. And from, you know, the old, because for some reason, you know, the women are used to taking lots of boflys out of the men, so they're good with a needle. And it's always grandma who's doing it, right? J.J.'s mother used to do it for me. They pinch your skin.

and they go, no, no, I'm calling it out. And they put the tobacco and they pinch it. I love it, right? So that's one. Now, the interesting one, and I'm going to refer to my notes, because I don't want to get anything wrong. This is Sangre de Drago. Okay.

Now, Sangre de Drago is interesting. I mean, it's dragon's blood. Oh, okay. And it's in the, it basically, it's a tree that when you cut it, it leaks this, it sap is this red latex. And so what JJ taught me was twofold. One, if you have an upset stomach, which occasionally we get. Oh, I've heard of this.

Yeah. We use this now. I know. There's an FDA approved medicine. Yeah, but it's for like HIV diarrhea. It's for non-infectious, what is it called? Non-infectious diarrhea. Related to HIV.

Related to HIV. Yeah. And it's FDA approved. There's a lot of these. There's a Chilean soap bark tree extract that's used in the shingles vaccine. Yeah. I mean, these natural compounds are the start of a lot of... What people...

Let me just break down for the audience, because this is so passionate of mine, such a big passion of mine, when people say, like, screw pharma, natural's the way to go. Yeah. What really confuses me there is a lot of pharma is from nature. Derive from nature. Like, there's some percentage of, like,

some percentage of pharmaceuticals are from the Amazon even, right? Isn't that true? Like, there's some value to that. And then what science does, what pharmaceutical companies do is they try and scale this to see how we can purify it, to get the least of the immune response, to maximize the benefit, and more importantly, figure out who should we give this medicine to? At what dose? At what dose do we see side effects where we can give less, still see the intended effect, limit the amount of side effect,

or do we need to give more for the intended effect and tolerate the side effect? So pharmaceutical companies, what they do is they standardize and normalize it so we can actually get the benefit without the risk knowing what interactions exist and that costs money. And that makes things expensive. And pharmaceutical companies, in turn, are for-profit companies, they take on this risk in order to, A, bring this valuable medicine to the general public at a way where we can understand it and make a dollar in the process. Where they become shady and I start becoming skeptical of them and call them out is when

they start playing games. Only testing medicines that are really profitable for them. where people need to take for a long period of time. They become very shady, lack of transparency about pricing. Oh, you need this medicine to stay live, so we'll make it more expensive. That's been said. So that's where I hate it. But there is value in the Amazon.

There's untapped value. If I go with you, we're finding the next Viagra. Oh, well, you know, it's funny because JJ says it's out there. Now, this would be a hilarious, you know, YouTube episode or something. Let's go down and find the Amazonian Viagra, because they swear. They swear that if you eat this, whatever it is, root, they're like, they, you know, we told them, we said, you know, with Viagra, they say in the commercial, if you have an erection that lasts longer than four hours, go to the hospital. So we tell them that. We're like, hey, you know what

they say? And they're like, oh, please, this erection lasts for three days. And it's strong. That's not good. That's bad. Well, I mean, this is, I don't. You see, I get excited. I've never seen this work, right? For obvious reasons. Like, I'm just like, higher. But you know what the, the I don't. My JJ could take us out there and show us. He can show you the plant. He also knows something called Barbasco, which this is so cool.

And this is not a myth. You go and you beat this root until like the juices come out of it. And you take this section of tree root and you make a little dam on a stream. And you know, you're talking about maybe like a three foot deep little moment in a stream,

a little bit river bend. And you make a little dam on one side and you throw the Barbasco in and the fish that are in there will float to the top. And then you can actually take the fish you want and then remove the dam and then as as the water the fish die they don't they become stunned and then you take the fish out i've seen it done wow and then you take you know you take the two

biggest catfish and then there's like a bunch of little bait fish you just let them go and they'll wake back up um wow and then okay so but the thing with the sangra diago is that jjadj would so after that bad infection with the diarrhea what oh the face okay with the face you had antibiotic associated diarrhea or something? No. No, but he always used to say if your stomach is upset, he would say take two drops of the Sangre de Drago, put it in tea, and drink it. He would say it'll help your stomach. And if your stomach's really bad, he'd say go on a diet, like go on a diet. He would say, don't eat for, I'm thinking of how they say it in Spanish, he would say don't eat for a few days and just drink this tea and it'll like clear out your stomach. Again, I'm telling you

what they say. Now, the cool thing because it's in the latex family is that when you cut the Sangre de Drago, let's say I have a pustral, which is not that uncommon. And now I'm very, you know, for a while. Because you're like, you are. Now, now I'm terrified of it. And so, I mean, I go down there with antibiotics now. I'm ready just in case it comes. Mercer, you know, you carry it in you. And now what I do is you get the, you clean, you clean it. And then we get the, in the evening is when the Sangre de Drago flows best. You cut it with the machete. You collect it in a spoon. You put it on the wound. And then, then you go like this.

And as it heats up and there's friction, it forms like a latex shield. Oh, like a bandit. Yep. And so it'll go over that. Nature's bandaid. And I know this is proven as good for the, the GI thing.

But it seems like infections don't last long with this stuff. I have not since had a problem with infections. The coverage is also valuable. So a lot of people think when they have like a wound, not in the Amazonian rainforest, but out here, they're like, oh, I'll let it dry up and leave it out covered. Not covered.

It actually heals way better when it's covered. So that's a common misconception as well. So maybe just covering it is giving you good healing properties. I agree with you. But again, I know that I'm not a clinical trial. But putting some neosporin and a band-aid on it has not worked as well for me as this.

And I am way more on the side of skepticism. And I'm not saying neosporan would be the right thing to do either. I'm not like pro-neosporn. But you have to stop the infection. Because in the jungle, it's kind of like the infection is going to win. Yeah, you don't play the game. But it's really interesting.

If you look at, I mean, I was researching before I came to talk to you, I was researching about all of the benefits of Sangreda Di Dago. And it's like, they say it just does everything. That's the problem. It seems like it's good for everything. Yeah, that's the problem. Promotes healing and fibroplasts. And it's really good for GI stuff in relation to HIV.

And it's like, what are you saying then? You know, what doesn't it do? That happens a lot in the supplement world. Yes, except for that this one does seem to have some real medical, Sure. And that's the truth with some supplements as well. Yeah, I'll tell you. So I was, I sang to the drago, we show people, we're like, so, and then the one paper I found that was like, hardcore, I can send this to you.

It said it was proven that it is antibacterial in high concentrations. Sure. Right. I mean, honey is antibacterial. Well, I mean, like, on like the neosporan level of like, it'll kill bacteria. Do you know what we use for diabetic foot ulcers that are antibiotic resistant on patients? Manuka honey. prescribed manuka honey

how does I mean honey who knew I didn't know that that's what I'm saying like we have prescription level manuka honey Manuka honey has it

From New Zealand The special bee That eats this plant I don't know what the Fis Yeah No but it's probably a cool story though Yeah

I mean it tastes great Yeah I don't eat my patients I was gonna say I don't do that I don't do that Um different Dr.

Mike different Dr. Mike Okay so this lady though she came down. Mike is catching shots on a podcast he's not even on. So I showed this. I was like, oh, you can make a bandage out of this, out of this Sangha Di Dago.

And I was like, and it does seem to be the best thing to get your infections or if you have a bad stomach. And this lady who was on the trip, she was like, oh my God, my friend has cancer. I'm going to bring this to her. And I went,

why? And she was like, no, because like, this is healing juice. And I was like, no, no, no, you're not listening to me.

This is how the locals use it. We have reasonable evidence to assume that it is good at these things. Me as a skeptic, I would say I believe in this. And she goes, yeah, but it can't. And you don't have a choice. That's a thing. Well, we have to use it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

And she's like, no, I'm going to buy a bottle. Because in town they like sell it. Of course. And they're like, she's like, no, I'm going to buy a bottle of this and bring it to my friend. She has terminal cancer. And I was like, please don't do that. I was like, don't give her random.

I was like, also like, why aren't you listening to me? This is not cancer medication. And she just, she was like, it's medicine. and it's from the Amazon, so it's magical. Well, that's why it's tough to pull apart the cultural beliefs from some of these things. Yeah, but this was someone from, like, New York. Yeah, but they want culture too.

They want to tie to something meaningful. People will reach for stuff. That's true. I mean, religion does that all the time. I guess so. We just reacted, speaking of reacting to TikTok videos, we just reacted to a gentleman that in service to some Hindu god, I'm like Shiva,

was standing for 12 years. refused to sit and his legs are falling apart. Another gentleman. The fingernail guy? Yep. Raised his arm. Wouldn't lower his arm. So there's all sorts of like self-sacrifice.

Those are very, such an India thing. Is it? Oh yeah. I think all of those guys, I've never been to India. Sadu's in India who, you know,

these holy men who, I mean, it's actually, once you get delve deeply into why they're doing those things, and I'm not the expert on this, but I've lived for like four years in India. And they,

you know, know it's it's basically like you find something almost impossible in reality to do and it's so simple you know it's your stand or define i mean to do this i mean you have to sacrifice your life to do this one thing and there is something beautiful in the impossibility of that again i wouldn't want to do it i want my arm i don't want to spend my whole life walking around my arm up seems ridiculous to me as a westerner but if you get deeply into the philosophy of what those people are searching deeply into that inner space. I mean, even there's, I've met people in India that claim that if you fast for long

enough, human beings have the ability to photosynthesize. Yeah, you know. I mean, you can make a claim about anything. Yeah, sure. But I'm saying it's very interesting. In India, I feel like the line gets blurred to where they're looking at things so differently, these, these holy men. And it's good to look at things differently because then you find stuff out.

Well, I mean, the guy who invented insulin or discovered insulin. I mean, he was trying to cure his wife. Yeah. I mean, Viagra was a blood pressure pulmonary hypotension. Which interestingly, Captopril, which was a blood pressure medication, came from the venom of the Bushmaster,

the Amazonian snake. Look at that. A little blood pressure, there we go. Yeah. A little ACE inhibitor. There we go. Okay, so I want you to see the one where I fall off the cliff

because I truly, as a physician, I think you'll be so concerned that... Fall off a cliff. So see, now I use that as a... Boom. Yes. Right? So it doesn't look that high, but then look.

See, this is a part. My strength is waning. You got it. You got it. Come on. I'm over the edge. I'm over the top. Why is everyone so casual about it?

That was the ribs. What is your skin made of, man? So interesting. How did you not lose a layer? I didn't lose any layer of skin. I, and I'm worried about saying this on this podcast because I'm worried that I'm wrong. but my friend is a like a semi-pro swimmer like a national level swimmer okay uh he's he wins

every race is where you go he had his swim team he's a coach uh my friend partha he brought his swim team to be scanned for like bMI and a bunch of other things and i don't know what the name sure uh you lay in a thing and they give you a readout uh and again right now no but at that point I was 13% body fat. I was lean. I mean and so lean now and uh thank you and but when I came out it was interesting because we had it was we were in India and so we had a few different people with us and a couple of these guys were so so real thin and interestingly their BMI was like their their their body fat was like 20 and I was like you're so much skinnier than me and the guy was explaining he's like yeah but you have a lot of muscle compared to but the thing was and I bring this up because of the

fall the guy looked at the sheet. He goes, I want you to go again. I said, why do you want me to go again? He goes, I've never seen bone density like you. He goes, you're in the like 98.9 percentile bone density. And then he was comparing that with a friend of mine. And he goes, he's in the 45th. And he was like, he has like really light bones.

Super vegetarian kid. But they, according to this, the scan that came out, and I could send you this. My bones are borderline what the guys who do, the hard body training, smashing the bricks, they can increase their bone density up to double. And this guy was just like, look, you have bones that aren't going to break. And so I've taken falls like that,

and I have ripped my skin and healed. And you've broken bones before? Never. Never. No. And I've fallen off of... You just said you fractured a rib. No, no, I said I hurt my ribs.

Oh, you didn't break a rib. No. I've never broken. Did you get it scant? Is it one of those scenarios? Like, I never got an x-ray, so I never broke a rib. No.

I thought I broke a rib on a surfboard and I called my Uncleasi, who's a surgeon. I said, Uncleassi, I broke a rib. He goes, no, you didn't. You bruised the rib. And I said, I'm telling you, I can't breathe. And he goes, go get it scanned. So I went and I got it scanned and sure enough, no break.

I was convinced it was broken. I was like, I broke my first bone. Also, x-rays are not super sensitive for small reperctors, hairlines. You have to do no MRI. As to the best of my knowledge, I've never broken a bone. And I'm talking falls like that, snowboarding accidents, surfing things where I land on this thing.

Also, really strong bones are a medical condition that's bad, called osteopetrosis. Okay. Osteoporosis weak bone. Petrosis is like these stone bones that brittally break. Yeah, I don't have that, but maybe when I get older. Yeah, yeah, you have like the strong version. Very, very thick bones.

I'm quite heavy, too. I sink. I mean, you're also, how do you maintain your gains in the rainforest? I don't have to, I'll be honest with you. It's not, it's not. I work hard, but I don't. I can't with these dudes and their genetics. I don't.

Oh, I just, I'm so diesel and I'm 13% fine fat. My bones are also super crazy. You're not being fair right now. Also my foot like, I got a stingray, fuck it up. And I told the stingray. And I'm so tall and smart. Okay. So, dude, I have ridiculous forearms.

I don't like, but I don't like training forearms. But what do you eat? Where's your protein coming from? I just eat a lot of. This is a result of monkey muscle? I eat a monkey a day. No. How do you, like, do you track your macros in the,

rainforests? I think I got time to track my macros. I don't know, bro. I'm running an organization, writing books, trying to survive Narco. I had a hit out on my head for the last two years a track of my macros. I don't know what a macro is.

In the video, you have this guy with the macros. I don't even know what a macro is. You're holding a giant fish with your ass out. DoorDash bring you a plate of macros. I don't even know what that means. What I can tell you is this. I don't do shit. I, uh, I, I only do body weight.

I do pushups, pull ups, sit up. Daily. Uh, every other day. I do it until I can't. So I do, I have a system. I want to tell you about the system. Oh, tell me the system. So I saw David Goggins running.

I hope we don't, you know, David Goggins running and he goes, you know, he goes, everybody has a little bitch inside of them, you know. So I said, wow. And he goes, you got to kill that bitch. So, okay. So you got to find the little one that lives inside you. Okay. And you go, I don't want to.

I want to, you know. And the discipline that he's talking about. And so my, I just said, wait, I should just make a, like a gauntlet out of this. And so I said for me, 25 pushups, I'm heavy. It's like 25 pushups, 50 to 60 situps. Bro, you're talking about you creating a David Goggins routine and you do 25 pushups. The guy runs like 99,000 miles. No, no, I'm saying he inspired me to do my own version of it.

I'm not saying I'm David Gagins. 25 pushups is your version of David Gagons. He punch you right in the bladder right now. You have listened to the, just like you reading the first sentence of a paper and having no idea. You have no idea what you're talking about. 25 push-ups is extreme? You have no idea what you're talking about because you haven't listened. This is like,

tell me the rest of the gauntlet. This is like you don't know what the movie's about. The gauntlet? Listen to me. You called it the gaulet, then you said I'm doing 25 push-ups. Because you started talking. And 50 said,

because you're from Brooklyn. All right. You got a mouth. I need more. I need more than 25 push-ups. The Brooklyn's going to come right out of me. If you don't, kind of shove a moots on your face.

Tell me the rest of us. All right. 25 push-ups. 50 crunches, 10 pull-ups, 10 pull-ups, and then you have to repeat it 10 times. Okay, there we go. Which, if we did that right now. You saved that for the end purposefully. Yeah.

To make me look at them. No, you just can't, you just started yapping. No, but it's, it's, and that's my workout. That's hard. That's what I do. And to do a perfect 10 of like all the way to crunch, fully extended, to do the, the, all of the crunches and everything. It's a tough.

It's a tough. And then to do, you're doing a whole. 100 chin ups. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot. And the whole chin ups. And so that's my entire workout. And then on the off-dusts-

Do you lose a ton of weight when you're there? I just posted a video today. I was so shredded. Like you can't pinch skin. But you also lose muscle, I'm sure. You just get shredded. Really? I don't, I don't know.

Eggs. You just start eating eggs. It's not a lot of meat in the Amazonian diet. I mean, you should sell that. That would crush. No, what I should do is have fat camp down there. Because you sweat some, like you have people that are overweight that that want to lose their first 20 pounds.

Okay. And what they should do is come with me, walk around. Get a tapeworm. You know, that's, that's, that's discriminatory towards the Amazonian people's. What is the, I didn't say anything about the people. I mean, there's helmets. That's racist. There's helmets that live in.

Helmets. Helmints. I know what you're talking about. Like flatworms. Yeah. Yeah. But no, don't discourage people from coming to the Amazon. My mom comes to the Amazon.

What I'm saying is, have them come to the Amazon. Amazon shadow me for a week or one of my guys, trained one of my guys. They'll be sweating so much. They'll be putting out so much energy and that they'll be eating healthy. That's not a good way to kickstart someone's life. Because once I get back here, it's not realistic. They can't maintain that.

All right, well then screw that idea. I'll stick to saving the monkeys. Okay. Like again, I know one thing. But if you made the monkey diet, that would go viral. No, and I want to, I want to, so I have a video. I was, I have, I'll send you this too. You haven't published it yet?

I have published this part of this video. I'm not a part that I haven't published, but I was babysitting for a six-year-old, and we were in this, like, shack in the middle of the Amazon. She's a really sweet girl, Dira. And I was like, you know, she was like, I want to. She's like, I'm hungry. And I was like, well, you know, there's the food over there. Your parents said this food over there in the bucket.

There's no refrigerator. And she was like, oh, cool. So we lift up the thing. She takes out a monkey head. And she starts pulling on the monkey. You know, she's like, I can't get his ear off? And she's like, can you do it? So I pulled his ear off and gave it to her.

I didn't and and then I was like you know I was like you know I'm a saltaholic and I was like that's not that bad and then she like took a rip of a lip and she like threw it back to me and me and this girl we just sat there by the side of the river just you're eating monkey face I don't know how I feel about that I have mixed emotions you should it's not right I don't condone eating monkeys I'm trying to save the monkeys but again I'm not going to alienate a six year old right what's it like babysitting a six year old in the Amazon is it different like yeah Like a kid here misbehaves. He's like, I want my iPad. And there are they like, I want the Python. So that's a very, very, very cool question. She's six and she has two younger siblings and she carries them and she knows how to change them. Wow. And she knows how to wash.

They have like three dishes. She knows how to wash them in the river. She also like when I'm with her, like her games are, can we throw this stick so that it hits that tree? And she's like, come here. She's like, let me see. And she's like, see if you could do it. I'm like, whoa. She wants to climb a tree.

So it's very interactive and fun. And then, you know, she knows how to cook. She knows how to clean. If you give her a piranha, let's say, catch a piranha, give it a whack. So the piranha's not moving anymore. She can take a knife. Usually you wouldn't give a six-year-old a knife.

She'll sit there and get the scales off of it, cut down the center and take the guts out and throw it in the pot and do the next one. She's very helpful. She also shows me, she thinks it's funny because she grew up eating the squirmie, grubs that have pincers on the front. And so she'll like cut up in a log and take out this big fat like pumba and Timon grub. And she'll be like, no, not really. And then she'll be like, ha ha.

And then she'll eat it. And I'm like, give me the next one. Give me the bigger one. You know, she'll like kind of like, are there distinct gender roles in these societies? I mean, men are hunting, right? Men are usually the boat drivers, but there's a few really excellent. women boat drivers. It's kind of like, you know, I don't know.

Like Uber. Well, because she's growing up throwing sticks and maybe not necessarily taking care of the home. So is it more free in that way or is it no way? No. Actually, we want to get diverted school in the US because she's incredibly, she's that kid in the class where you're like, you are a league above everyone else.

The Amazon, and I'm gonna be careful with what I say here, the Amazon is tough on women. The men are loggers, boat drivers, hunters, whatever. And it's like, you know, out in the Amazonian back country, it's very common to see girls pregnant at 1415. Very rarely have a stable partner for more than six months. And like they kind of end up, you know, weaving baskets on the side of a river.

And I'm like, I want better for that. For someone like Daira, who is a standout kid, an amazing student, I actually for a while she was doing her schoolwork via Starlink in the middle of the jungle. She's sitting there with a pencil while the teacher was teaching them basic math. And she's eating palm grubs while she's doing math off of Starlink. Like it was awesome. If you took this kid and put her in a U.S. school, she would flourish. And I'm saying like, there's a lot of kids.

They're really cute. But like, you know, you're like Timmy over there. It's not the sharpest tool in the shed. Very nice. But this one is smart. She's spent. It would be so much fun to bring her. And then imagine her taking over.

Going back there as a literate. conservationist or doctor or whatever she wants to become and helping her family. That would be really amazing. Well, speaking of education, do you think at all if it would be valuable for you to go back and get your PhD? As you talked about having this new option of not having to read things and maybe make it more of an audible experience? So this is a huge question that I was in the car yesterday debating with my wife because I think

that it would add legitimacy to me. less people would be able to call me an influencer. We're about to create a national park. I think that as we move more into science, which I want to talk to you about our ED and I study in a second, it's funny. I asked Jane Goodall when I was in my early 20s. I was sitting with her and I said,

should I get my PhD? I said, I feel like everyone thinks I'm just like the shirtless anaconda jungle dude. And she was like, don't. She's like, your time is more valuable down there protecting the trees. She's like, while you're up here doing courses, they're going to be burning acres. And she was like,

she was like, General Patton. She was like, I want you, she said this to me. She goes, I'm going to give you an endorsement for your book. And you're going to protect acres. And she was saying, I'm going to give you something really special. She knew what she was giving me.

It seemed sacred. You know, she was like, I'm going to pass you this, this Excalibur sword. And I want something from you. You know, 100 Nazi scalps. She was like,

I want, She's like, I want acres. And so I took that really seriously. And to this day, I mean, running the organization, writing the books, being on the river, coming back, doing podcasts and publicity, I don't know when I'd do it. And also six months of coursework,

I'd have to do six months of coursework. There's this incredible scientist named Dr. Patricia Wright. She discovered a new species of lemur, the golden bamboo lemur. She works out of Stony Brook University. And she was like, I'll do it with you if you want. she's like but you got to be here at stonybrook and i was like so like yeah like at some point i would love to but i would also look to is there anything

positive that could come out of it besides the legitimacy just doing it for others is there any value to you i would love to teach well not to teach but you learning anything in people or that very limited classrooms value there the amazon i'll this with all humility the amazon is a classroom the indigenous people as teachers and the fact that i already get to work with scientists. So when we go catch anacondas and take population data on anacondas, we send it to my friend Pat,

who writes up the paper. When I see a new species of snake, eating another species of snake, I go, is there any scientific literature on these two species having a predation? Nope, write up a paper. And so we're constantly making these observations. And so I'm able to be a, I have my name on scientific papers

and would take part in scientific studies all the time and collaborate, I've become a good photographer because I've worked with all kinds of professional photographers. I would love to, because I've always been sort of outside of the, what, the institutions, like I was bad academics. It would really be cool for me to be, to have a PhD. I would love to teach.

Can you teach without a PhD? I'm sure you can. But I would rather get the, I think you can only be a tenured professor of the PhD. I would imagine. I mean, we get this shit about tenured, not tenure. If you start your own school right now. You're asking me. I don't know.

Yeah, I think you could do it. You got a lot of attitude. I mean, you have a lot of, where do you live now? You still live in Brooklyn? Yes, basically. But you could teach. I do teach. People come to the Amazon and I talk to them.

And I would do a PhD. I mean, I have friends, you could do a PhD in anything. I have a friend to do a PhD in Rattlesnakes. But I would do a PhD. Like what can the PhD of Rattlesnakes teach you who's wrestled rattlesnakes? Well, again, they're not wrestling rattlesnakes. What they're doing is studying the conservation of rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes have been eradicated for most of their previous range.

People still exterminate Rattlesnakes, but they're important. and like valuable species and they're beautiful. And so now in New York, we have rattlesnakes in New York. Oh shit, really? Timber rattlesnakes, they're beautiful. Where are they? Where are they? I don't want to see one.

They only, I will take you and they're so beautiful. And the cool thing. No, they're not. Oh, yeah. They're kill me. All right, now that snake raises them and I got you on that one. You are not getting away with that. That's not right.

Now, I'll tell you what, if there was a rattlesnake in this room, it would curl up into a spiral, it would lift its tail, and you know how I said with the face thing, like when you know, you know. When I was a kid, I'd hear like leaves rattling or something. Like, was that a rattlesnake? Yeah.

And I never, I never. The one day, the first time I saw a rattles, and you're like, that's what a rattles. Like the whole air is shaking with this sound. And you're like, you're fine. You know, you're like, that's a rattlesnake. You'll know it when it happens. So if it was here, what's happened?

It would do nothing. It would, it would, it would. It wouldn't eat me. Sorry, it wouldn't bite you. The reason. they have the rattles, you got to think they developed where there's large underlets like cows and bison. Leave me alone. Saying leave me alone. And that's all they want is for you to leave them alone. And the reason they have the potent venom is so to keep them safe. Because if a snake, and I've seen

this happen, if a snake catches a rodent and it rolls it up, if it doesn't get it perfectly by the neck or something, it rodents with those teeth. If it doesn't roll it perfectly while the snake is trying to crush the mouse, the mouse will just eat through the snake. So it's a tremendous risk for them to hunt and every time they want to eat, they have to risk their life. So what rattlesnakes do is they go up to, they have the heat seeking pits like all vipers and they go up to this, let's just say a rat,

punch it with their teeth. They go whack it with the venom and then the rat takes like five steps and falls over. Or more than that, but you know, the rat is so envenomated that it dies. It goes into like cardiac arrest instantly. And then the rattlesnake can come and eat the rat in safety.

So it's a beautiful, amazing evolutionary thing. Humans, it's funny, if you look up, what do you do when you get bitten by a venomous snake? One of the first things is don't chase the snake. Why? Because people get bitten. They're like, I got to show the doctor. What kind of snake? And like, first of all, most snake bites happen while people are trying to kill the snake.

Snakes don't want to interact with you. Or an accident or something. You run into it. Maybe you're cleaning out your shed and you shove your hand into a hole and the snake gets scared. There's always that. But snakes won't attack you. There's a myth in the Amazon that bushmasters. It's the largest viper on earth.

They are tremendous. They're this thick. And they have like dragon scales, like keeled scales coming off of their bodies. Their Latin name is like he says muta, muta, which is death, death. It's like death squared.

The locals say if you get bitten by one, don't try to live. They say smoke your last cigarette, call your mother, whatever it is. But they're like, just relax. You're going to die. But they say that a bushmaster

will attack you. I've seen a dozen Bushmasters, big ones, and they all are in a spiral by the edge of the trail or in the middle of the jungle. They blend in really well. Now, if you step on them, they might defend themselves. But if they're just sitting there,

they're just sitting there. If there was one right there, it would do nothing. In fact, it might be intimidated and go under that cart over there or under our chairs. They want to be safe. They're peaceful creatures.

Now, the one time a Bushmaster I had some people with me, and I'm the guide. And I was like, that's a big bushmaster. I saw like an 11 foot pushmaster. It looked like in a lift, probably like nine feet, but it was very impressive. And I grabbed it by the tail because most of it was in the jungle and I wanted to show them.

I got a stick. And I grabbed it by the tail. And now what I usually do is I lift up a snake. So I grab it by the tail and I lift it up. You don't got to grab it by the head or anything. I lift it up. So I show people like, oh, you see this really cool snake? You don't have to hurt them.

manhandle him nothing. I go, you see this big, dangerous snake, and I can keep the head, the full length of the snake away from me. This is an amazing bushmaster, put it down. This guy, I grabbed his tail, this bushmaster turned around, came up in an S, came up about a foot and a half off the ground, and their head is big, and their teeth are big. And he got up, and big tongue up and down, and he looked at me, and you could just tell, this snake went, I'm not in the mood, but if you want to meet God, I can arrange it. And he just, He looked so excited. He was like, do you want to make me do it?

And I was like, you know what? I was like, guys, there was a big snake there, but let's keep walking. And I just, I just, I just, and I was like, you just leave him alone. Yeah. It's scary. But you, but I had to mess with him for him to say, hey. But what about when you're sleeping? They don't just like slither.

I've never had a snake come in to my mosquito net. I've had a tarantula come into my mosquito net because they're always prowling around looking for stuff. But they're, they're, yeah, they're not. You make everything sound so peaceful, man. They're so, there's no animal other than mosquitoes. There's nothing that wants to hurt you. No one wants to hurt you. I think it's just ridiculous.

They get a bad rap. Everyone says you go into the rainforest. Everything's trying to kill you. And you're like, no, nothing wants to kill you. Yeah. And you know what? If you go to the south, it's like nice people that live in the countryside. Like my friends in Virginia, they think like that in New York City.

They go, if you go to New York City, everyone's rude, mean, then they're going to try and rob you. And look at us. We're doing fine. I'm just saying that's a little bit discriminatory. I'm not going to say anything else, but you know. But snakes are like, you can't communicate with them. You can't tell them like, hey, snake, I'm just, I'm making a YouTube video.

Hold on, it felt really bad because I can't, I have to be nicer. I'm on a, I'm on a journey to be nicer because I'm really good with the animals. I struggle with the people. I was recently with somebody. I'm an animal too, so it was all good. Okay. I met this woman recently and she goes, hey, so I saw some of your stuff. And she goes, it seems like you can communicate with animals.

And I said, well, yes, I can communicate with animals pretty well, better than other humans. And she goes, like, you can hear their words. Like they do it telepathically. She goes, tell me, I believe in all of it. And I went, that's interesting because I believe in none of it. And then I was like, why did you slap her in the face like that? But it was like, again, as a person that comes from a scientific background, I was like, why would you start with that? I believe all of it.

You just think of that Monty Python thing. Well, because they want to show support for your mission to talk with a spider monkey. No, I think it's just because she lives in a magical dreamland. I just think science, look, I just think that science is how we've helped infant mortality, people that survive diseases. I mean, my whole family would be dead if it wasn't for Western medicine, you know, appendix, heart, diabetes. I mean, you could just name all these things.

My whole family would be gone if their lives hadn't been saved. And so that depends on, like you said, actual research. And so when people are like, hey, is this red tree sap cancer juice? It's like, hey, can you slow down? It might actually make that person more sick. Yeah. You know, and yes, like the uncontacted tribes, you can say, well, they're beautiful, noble savages.

And it's like, or you could say, hey, let's look at this objectively. Like, what's their infant mortality rate? And how do they treat their women? And where are their women? Because we've never seen them. They're always hidden somewhere. And so, you know, we've heard that they do raids. And so I just, I like logic.

I think there's a lot to be said for it. I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes. And so, yeah, I don't know why I slapped that lady so hard. But I'm working. I'm on a journey of, you know, what? Clip that. You're going to clip that? Great.

I slapped that lady, so. Oh, please. I did. David Goggins told me to kill the bitch and then I slapped that lady. Someone's going to put this together. And then I did 10 push-ups. And then I did 10 push-ups. So where can people go to support the journey?

Where do you want folks to go? Thank you for asking me that. And the thing is this, if you've made it this far into this conversation, I would, if you care at all about the natural world, I have spent the last 20 years, bleeding with the indigenous people and my friends who are experts to create a way that the people who like me care about these species and these wild places and want our world to continue to be healthy and functioning can have a verifiable way of saving the wildest place on earth. Junglekeepers.org people can go become monthly donors and again that that has a connotation

where even I go, I don't want to become a monthly. You become a monthly donor to this and you're becoming part of our team. You can verify the fact that. that your dollars are allowing us to save wildlife, jaguars, monkeys, rainforest, and then you can even come down. So it's like the start of an adventure. And for the people that are already supporting us, I keep telling them, like,

if you're giving $10 a month to jungle keepers, get one family member to do it. And we could finish this project, make a national park, and save this whole river, and you're part of the story. And that's what this whole book is about. I got Jane Goodall's,

I got Jane Goodall's endorsement right there, which I still just can't believe how Jane changed my life. But junglekeepers.org, if you want to support junglekeepers, Alta Sanctuary Treehouse, if you want to come stay in the tree house. Yeah, I just, I just, I think what you do is great. I think that the idea of educating people in a fun way. I think this is, this is really cool. I still got a couple of videos that I got to show you.

Well, we have plenty of time for that. The social media handles that people can follow you on. At Paul Rosley. I'm trying to get better at, I want to more, like in a more linear way, tell the story of what I'm doing. And, you know, right now we're coming up against it. Where's Netflix? Where's all these people? Why aren't they talking to?

I get approached by a documentary company a month. I have to be very careful because when I was in my early frictionless. When I was in my early 20s, they convinced me to do this Discovery Channel show where they tried to feed me to an anaconda. It did not go well. It was very stupid. I signed on because I got, you know, young person. Bushytailed. I thought if I could get the platform

of having a Discovery Channel show, even with the stunt, I could convince people to help me save the rainforest. And so I shook a few hands, signed the contract, and learned hard. What happened? Oh, it was a disaster.

No, it was a disaster. It was a silly stunt. PETA came after me. The scientist's scientific community ejected me. It was just like everybody went crazy. You were actually going to get eaten by an anaconda? No, but that's what did. Discovery Channel misrepresented it as that.

But I'm saying I would literally spent my 20s trying to do anything possible to save the rainforest. And now with JJ and the indigenous people, we have figured out a way. Got it. This is so incredibly special. So if you're going to do something, you wanted to be meaningful and avoid these traps that Hollywood sets for people. Yeah. And so like when these, when these networks reach out, it's like, look, if you can tell the story right, the only people that have come down, Matt Gutman from ABC News came down a few years ago

and he literally said, I only want to see what you guys are doing. We don't want to change the story. And so they followed us as we went into the gold mining areas, as our rangers went into the jungle, as we checked our camera traps. And at one point, I lifted a snake off of a bush. And I went, hey, do you want me to like handle this snake for you a little bit?

And he goes, would you be handling that snake if I wasn't here? And I went, no. He went, then no. He was, I only want to report on what's happening. And that won an Emmy for the coverage they did of the Amazon fires. And so that's the caliber that I want to keep it at. We've done such incredible work. And I'm saying that on behalf of my team and the sheer amount of acres that we've protected,

that there's no reason to ever risk it again where they don't tell the story right, or they don't give it the caliber and respect it deserves. This has been such an amazing journey. And that's what the book is about is about me going from this kid laying on the floor watching David Attenborough going to the Bronx Zoo to realizing to sort of coming into the adventure of my life and realizing this is my purpose. I'm going to protect more animals than anyone else. I'm going to save more trees than anyone else. And I was willing to die to do it. And so at this point, it seems like we're going to do it. This is dark, but you just said you're willing to die

to do it. What do you want your eulogy to sound like? Oh, here lies Paul Rosalie. I just, I wanted to be something about the ancient trees and the millions of heartbeats. I want my legacy to be, you know, when you see these thousand-year-old trees, you think that our, you know, ancestors, you know, during World War II, that tree was standing there. During the Industrial Revolution, that tree was standing there. And so our lives are these little, these little things. The human lifespan is nothing. And so I would like to be scattered in the Amazon. And I would just like to, I'd like to say, you know, saved a million heartbeats. I think that, I think that would be my thing is how many animal lives, because I love them so much, they can't stop the bulldozers

and the flames, but we can. And, and watching the swell of enthusiasm of people who have come to help us, to help our team run forward and to actually protect this forest, has redefined sort of how I view the world in terms of viewing it as a, as a really negative place to say, wait a second, there's so many good people out there who are willing to help us who want to save animals, who want to make the world better and change the narrative of what's going to happen. Because instead of we're losing the rainforest and everything is dying, it's like, well, wait a second, let's break this into bite-sized chunks. Let's protect this.

Then we'll protect this. And we come up with a methodology and then share that blueprint. And suddenly we're winning the war instead of losing the war. And so that's a really complicated way of saying, I wanted to say that he saved a million heartbeats or a billion heartbeats. I don't know. I think you definitely want a few fans over in this conversation. So I thank you for that. Okay, well, thank you.

This has been fun. Well done, sir. If you enjoyed learning about Paul's efforts to save the animals of the Amazon, you might enjoy my conversation with Dr. Silva and Hammond, the honest veterinarian, who fights to keep animals safe from pet antivaxers. Scroll on back to find that episode. If you wouldn't mind giving us a five-star review, leaving a comment, sharing an episode with your friend or family member,

it really helps us find new listeners and viewers. and as always, stay happy and healthy.