The Joe Rogan Experience - #2441 - Paul Rosolie

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Paul Rosolie is a conservationist, filmmaker, author, and founder of Junglekeepers. His new book, “Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World,” is out now.www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/783873/junglekeeper-by-paul-rosolie/www.youtube.com/@Junglekeeperwww.junglekeepers.orgwww.paulrosolie.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast, checking out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Hello, Jungle Man. What's happening? Good to see you, my brother. That's been a while. You got books.

You got notes. I got books. I got this for you. A little note in there you can read later. Yeah, the brand new. That's what, back from the Amazon with that. Nice. Marshall, say hi to everybody.

I love that you bring March. Have you, has Marshall come on other podcasts or is it just? He's been on a couple. You're a good boy. You're good boy. We should... I just have to keep him from going under the water. A little buddy.

Yeah. I got to keep him from getting under the water. Come on. Come on. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. He's the best.

He is the best. He's a big sweetie. He's soft, man. He's got amazing coat. Big sweetie. Well, he gets groomed. Oh, thank you. Thank you for to kiss us.

Okay. Lie down, please. Lie down. Lie down. So, oh my God. You released that video. I saw the video of the uncontacted tribe. Yeah, hitting send on that was scary.

Woo! Yeah. Wild. I sent you a message that day. Yeah. When that happened. Yeah, he did. That is crazy.

I've showed it to a few people, but we never showed it live. But it is so, Marsha, you got to lie down, buddy. He can't be climbing under the wires. Lie down, Bub. Sit, sit, sit, sit. Come here, good boy, go boy, go boy. That experience has to be so. insane to contact like legitimately uncontacted people there they are yeah yeah gentlemen do not look at

their dongs do not well i mean you know but also maybe take a style tip from them and tie them up weird how they got their waist wrapped up but they don't have their dongs wrapped up or their butthole well it seems like they're trying to protect or they're trying to keep lots of rope i think rope is like their main things that's how they carry all their rope interesting They carry the rope around their waist. They carry their rope around their waist, and they just want rope. They want rope and bananas. Do bananas grow in the Amazon?

So bananas don't grow unless people plant them. So there's certain human settlements where you can find old bananas growing. But plantains really is what this is. And they were requesting them. What you see happening here is... They request them? Yes. They come out.

And, I mean, these are people coming out a thousand years late to society, and they're out on the beach holding up their hands saying, no moly we are the brothers no moly means brothers and so now we actually think that they call themselves the brothers whoa and their first thing was we want bananas and so the local anthropologists that we were with we were just there to to work with the communities that we work with and these these guys came out across the beach and you see them they're holding their bows and those bows are six foot bows seven foot arrows and we were said you know the anthropologist was saying put down your weapons put down your bows before you talk to us.

This does not need to be violent because their first instinct is to defend themselves. And so there's maybe 20, 30 of us and the local guys had a couple of shotguns just in case for protection because we were not initiating contact. That's the thing I've been explaining to everybody. We were just there working in the community. They came out to us. So they knew you were there and they came out to you. And how does someone speak their language? There's one guy in the community that kind of speaks.

a little bit. They speak in the community. They speak yenay. The Mashko Piro speak a derivation of that. And so they're speaking in broken in broken terms across the river. So they were sort of shirts versus skins. We were on this side of the river. They were on that side of the river. And then I mean, the courage of this guy to get in the river and go, you know, 10 feet from them and push the canoe. There was no contact, no physical contact made. But he gave them these these plantains. And then you notice when they take them, it's not like, oh, yes, take the plantains, we'll go back in the jungle and divvy them up. It's like, what I get, I get. They're fighting over them. And they were all screaming and fighting over them. So there's desperation there. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess food is

fucking hard to come by, right? I mean, the jungle is filled with life, but it's still, it's got to be difficult to source. And you've got to do it every single day. Every single day. So to feed. There's no refrigeration. There's no preservation. No, so everything is instantaneous. You shoot a monkey. You got to cook it. You know, you get a turtle, you got to eat it, you got to open it and eat it. And so there's, I mean, you can see there, there's, there's more, there's that, that questioning look on their face. They don't understand who really, who we are and the really, the only communications that we

got was we need, we need more food and stop cutting down our trees. They wanted to, they said, who were the bad ones? They said, of you, who are the bad ones? Why are you cutting down our, our biggest trees? Well, not just cutting them a tree. but also killing the indigenous people that protest it, that get in the way of it, if their tribe is centrally located in an area where they're chopped down the trees that kill those people. Yeah.

Yeah. And so right now what we have is we have the loggers and the gold miners coming in. And so since like the last time I saw you, it was we were nailing all these successes, adding acres to the reserve because what we're doing is trying to create this corridor, which is going to become a national park. We're trying to save this one river in the headwaters of the Amazon. And we had been on this success run, you know, from people hearing the stories, from things like this, people coming in and helping us do that. And then it started to change where we realized, okay, we're protecting so much land that the logging mafias and the narco traffickers started pushing back.

And so now it's getting more serious. As we're getting closer to the finish line, it's getting harder because they're going, we want this to remain wild. And we're going, we're trying to protect this. the local communities are going, this is our forest. And the loggers and the narcos and the miners are coming from other places and they're cutting down this forest. And so it's just, you know, I mean, everyone knows the Amazon is the lungs of the earth. Everyone knows it's got a, it produces a fifth of our oxygen on our planet. It contains a fifth of the oxygen of the fresh water on our planet.

So it's vital to global planetary stability. But we've already destroyed 20% of it. And so we're seeing the moisture cycle get broken. 20% of the whole Amazon rainforest. That's insane. And that thing is 2.7 million square miles, and I think the lower 48 is 3.something million square miles. Wow. It's gigantic.

Wow. And they've already killed off 20% of it. 20% of it's already gone. Is it mostly cattle running? Like, what are they doing it for? Cattle ranching accounts for 60% of Amazon deforestation. And then it's just developed. development roads. China has a new shipping port in Peru that they want to, you know, create, I think,

a railroad over the Andes Mountains or through the Andes Mountains so they can start getting access to the Amazon for Asian markets. Is it true they carved out a giant pathway through the Amazon for a climate change conference? You know, I've been trying to figure out if that's true. I saw that go all over the internet. But it's one of those things. It's like, who knows if that's real? That and then the other one is they're like a Swedish billionaire bought this much of the Amazon and it's like, but what's his name? They keep saying that and I'm like, I don't. Well, let's put it into perplexity and find out if that's true. The, uh, whether or not they carved out a pathway through the Amazon for a climate change summit.

Because that sounds like horseshit. That just sounds too, too ridiculous. There's no way they would do something that stupid. I don't know, but I did see people. Also, why would they have a climate change summit in the Amazon? You're going to do it in a tent? No, I think they did it in Manouse. I mean, there are cities in the Amazon.

There's Akitos, there's Manos. Right, sure. But you can fly into those cities. You don't need to carve out a fucking pathway. But I remember seeing a video of this guy and he was saying like, this is where the jungle used to be. And now it's just this big road. And I was like, but again, who in charge of the climate, unless they were going to have a climate conference and just local administrators and politicians said, well, we better get ready and clear this area. And like maybe it wasn't intentional.

I don't know. I mean, if they have pictures of. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace makes building and managing your website ridiculously easy. They give you everything you need to showcase what you do and get paid all in one place. And with cutting-edge design tools, anyone can create a custom site that truly fits their brand. Head to Squarespace.com slash Rogan for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

it. Whoa, it's on the BBC. Amazon Forest fell to build road for climate summit. There you go. Oh, my God, it's real. Oh, my God. A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém. Oh, my God. So it wasn't in a house. That is so crazy. It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will help climate. It's easier to drive when there's no trees. Which are most more than 50,000 people, including world leaders at the conference in November. The state government touts the highway sustainable. I love to use that term.

Sustainable is one of those wonderful terms. You can just throw on things. Sustainable credentials, but lacks local and conservationists, but some local and locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact. Yeah, duh. That's crazy. Yeah, look at that. You're chopping down trees to process. protest chopping down trees.

It's fucking insane. Sounds amazing. I just, you know. At what point in time, people are going to wake up? At one point in time, people are going to wake up, and I think that that's, you know, that's sort of, as I've been, I've just started this book tour and everything else, and it's the thing I'm trying to impress, I was just talking about this the other night, is like, we've had world wars, we've had great famines, we had the dust bowls.

There's never been a time in history, though, before where we're looking at, Is there going to be ecological collapse? The thing that I'm talking about with where they've cut 20% of the Amazon, scientists are warning that if we cut too much of the Amazon, that moisture cycle, I think the thing was that 20 trillion liters of water every day are pumped into the air from the Amazon.

And that becomes the cloud system that rains back down and creates the Amazon rainforest. If you cut too much of that, you break the cycle. And that forest has been growing for something like 55 million years. I believe it formed in the Eocene. And so we are the generation that's going to decide do we find a sustainable way to keep the Amazon rainforest functioning, or are we going to break that cycle? And once we lose it, it's not going to come back.

It's so crazy. It's so crazy that people are so short-sighted. They're like, we want them. Have cattle ranches. It is disorganization and apathy. It's like we have the ability to organize and credit. I mean, if you can organize an airport, you can figure out a way to protect a forest. the fact that it's in numerous Latin American countries.

Brazil wants to develop. In Peru, you have the legal gold miners coming in, and now you have the pressure from the Asian markets. And, you know, we found that if you just, I mean, that's what we've been doing over the last 20 years is going to these gold miners and loggers and going, how much do you make? And they go, $20 a day.

You go, do you want to make 60? And you get a cool shirt. And you get health benefits and you get to ride a boat and you get a team. And they're like, yeah, that sounds so much better. And they're happy to come over. But they need the opportunity. We've talked about you doing that. I think that is really amazing.

It's just crazy that it takes a person like you and your organization to put some sort of a dent in this. This isn't some sort of a gigantic global effort. That there's not a lot of people that are recognizing this issue and saying, hey, this is a huge problem if this goes away. I think, though, I see in the world that I exist in, I see that all over the world is people doing conservation projects. and that we are at this point where there's enough happening where, I mean, you had E.O. Wilson advocating for the half-earth policy where it's, you know, at least half of the earth has to remain ecosystems. If you break too much down, if you ruin our ocean fisheries, you cut the rainforests and the forest, you're going to ruin the weather.

Right. The stuff that comes standard with life on Earth is going to be depleted. Right. And so I think, you know, you see tiger numbers going up in India. You see that there's actually been an increase in forest cover globally. but in some of the most important areas like the Amazon, it's just wild. And I mean, that's what we're doing is, you know,

the guy JJ that I work with who's local, he's been trying to, he's been saying this for years. I mean, since we saw each other, he got, which I don't know how this happened. I don't know how some of this stuff happens, but we got a,

we got an email one day from time. And they were like, we're selecting our, you know, 100 climate leaders of 2024. And they're like, JJ is one of them. And I have no idea how the people at time select this, but they chose this.

I mean, JJ grew up in an indigenous community barefoot. He didn't have shoes until he was 13. And it was because he saw his forest get destroyed. And because he saw the fish vanish from the rivers as nets came in. And then as chainsaws came to the region, he saw the trees go down. He went, we got to protect the next river. And so he's the one that, you know, when I went down there at 18 years old, he's the one that was like, look, you got to help me.

protect this and of course at 18 years old I was like how how do I do that how on earth is that possible and then when we started seeing the smoke on the horizon we started hearing the chainsaws and it got more urgent I started telling these stories and then the anaconda stories and the everything else the first book that I wrote and little by little Jane Goodall um people helped along the way Joe Rogan helped along the way well I'm happy to get the word out because I I mean it's It's kind of insane that it's happening. But it's also that place is such a magical place. And it has such an insane history that we're just starting to understand the history of the people that live there.

I mean, through the use of LIDAR, they're just starting to understand that the entire place was massively populated. And that a lot of the plants that exist in the Amazon are actually agriculture plants that went, you know, went rogue when the people were deep. populated because people brought in smallpox. I got to push back on that. That's, I feel like that's a theory that's been becoming prevalent as a theory. Well, sure, there was a jungle before. Because even in the Lost City of Z, I mean, even the talk, what is it, Percy Fawcett? Yeah, the people that went there, they talked about the Amazon being a lush rainforest.

Yeah. And these enormous cities that were incredibly complex. Yeah. before the jungle swallowed them up. So it's clear that there was some form of jungle there already. 100%. But that these plants that they grew for agriculture were the ones that had, you know, once people stopped tending them and taking care of them,

they overwhelmed the rest of the forest. Yeah, a friend sent me a clip, and I think you were talking to Tom Segura, and you went, you know, the crazy thing about the Amazon, and you went, it's largely man-made, and I was like, And I, like, threw something. And I was like, no, it's not. Well, let's find out why we said that. Let's pull that up, run that into perplexity and see what articles we get.

Because what they're saying is that these plants, the number, if I believe, if I'm not misstating, the numbers that they exist in are not natural. But that's only around these ancient sites. And so I went and did a deep dive into this. And the sites that they've studied are along the watersheds. And so in the Amazon you have terra firma, which is sort of dry forest, and then it dips into the river basin and you have floodplain. Most of these cities existed on floodplains. And so where the scientists are able to go is up the rivers and they go to the edges of these floodplains where they find ancient human settlements.

And that's where you find terrapareda soil, which is human engineered. And that's where you find there'll be like a higher incidence of certain trees or certain plants. What are these trees? And so like bananas, for example, or sometimes they'll plant a higher amount of Brazil nut trees. it is our sponsor, perplexity, which is always accurate. Estimates suggested roughly 10 to 15% of the Amazon standing forest shows clear signs of being man-made, are strongly shaped by long-term indigenous management, not planted as uniform tree farms, but modified over thousands of years. Much of the Amazon that looks wild has been influenced by pre-Columbian indigenous agroforestry,

soil enrichment, Amazon Dark Earths, that's Terra Prada, and species selection, rather than being a purely untouched wilderness. These systems differ from modern plantations. They are diverse, semi-natural forests, enriched with useful trees and crops rather than rows of single commercial species. So the idea of the Terra Prada was that a lot of the Amazon soil is not good for agriculture. Is that correct? It's barren.

There's only one UFC 324 this Saturday and on Draft King Sportsbook, the number one sportsbook for live betting. Once it's over, you're shot to get in on. the action is gone. Draft King Sportsbook is built for live betting, not just pre-fight picks, because in the UFC, one moment can flip the entire fight, one punch, one kick, one takedown.

New to Draft Kings, new customers bet just five bucks to get $300 in bonus bets if your bet wins with the code Rogan. Download the Draft King Sportsbook app and use the code Rogan. That's code Rogan to turn five bucks into 300 in bonus bets if your bet wins in partner. partnership with Draft Kings, the crown is yours.

Gambling problem, call 1-800 gambler. In New York, call 8778-8-8-Hop-N-Y or text Hope-N-Y-4-669-369. In Connecticut, call 888-78-9-77-7.7. Or visit ccpcpg. On behalf of Boothill Casino-win resort in Kansas, pass-through of per-wager tax may apply in Illinois. 21-and-over. Age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction, void in Ontario. Restrictions apply.

Bet must win to receive bonus bets which expire in seven days. Minimum odds required. Four additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.com slash audio. Limited time offer. It used to be a vast inland sea. Crazy. Yes.

When it's separated from Africa, the Congo and the Amazon used to be joined in some sort of proto-congo system. And then when they separated, the Amazon, South America, hit up against the NASCA plate, the Andes Mountains shot up,

and then the salinated water drained out, and that's why we still have inland, freshwater stingrays, manatees, pink river dolphins. Oh, that, makes sense. And so that happened over millions of years as the salinated water. So over millions of years, the saltwater dolphins adapted

to fresh water. Exactly. And is that why they became pink? They became pink, I think, because they've lost their pigmentation. They've terrible eyesight. They almost don't need to see because in that sediment-rich water, they're using sonar.

Whoa, that's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So they've become almost blind? All the fish. You pull out these giant catfish, they hardly have eyes. They have like light sensing organs. Whoa. You can't see. I mean, there's, there are clear rivers in the Amazon, which I would love to, I've never been to one. And I know, like, the streams are clear, but the Amazon river itself is nothing. Everyone's like, oh, you should bring a GoPro in the river with you. And I'm like, for what? You're not going to see anything. It's just sediment. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing that, that, that the, that this, this theory about the, the Amazon is even human engineered is wrong. Because when you look at the size of the Amazon, you look at that, you look at that, you look at that.

2.7 million miles. It's it's that they've said that what they're not getting is that in the areas that these people have been studying with LIDAR and through this anthropological digging, they're saying it's more than we thought. There's certainly more human settlements than we previously thought. There maybe were a few million people there before Pizarro and the explorers came. But what you don't realize is that between the rivers, between each river, which is the majority of the Amazon.

this terra firma giant jungle with hundreds of miles between the rivers, nobody's been there. And so I just was reading a scientific paper. It was saying they went out and sampled those areas and it showed absolutely no sign of human engineering. And so most of the forest. In terms of the growth of the plants, but did they do LIDAR to see if there's previous structures? Well, the good thing with the LIDAR is that they fly over.

And so LIDAR confirmed that over those human areas, like you get like a river confluence where two rivers are coming together, there'll be a human settlement. there. And in those areas, they find that the Terra Prada. They'll find that the plants occur in different abundance and diversity than in the other places. But that the, this message that the Amazon itself was engineered by ancient

humans or prehistoric humans is not actually accurate. It was a wild jungle. So do you think they're saying it for clickbait? Did they make those articles for clickbait? Because people build their careers on, you know, if you come out and say, I have a new theory about how this formed, it gets attention. There's even a

and nothing against what's his name? Graham Hancock. For a while, everyone's like, oh, Paul Rosalie needs to debate Graham. I got nothing against Graham Hancock. He's great. But it's just, the messaging

is becoming that the Amazon was kind of manmade. And so what happens is you get leaders like in Brazil going, well, if the Amazon was really manmade, then we can manage it now. And it's just not accurate. If you look at the, and even Smithsonian did an article where they said, these are the current

things that are coming out. These are the theories and then it went, yeah, but these theories discount the fact that 95% of the Amazon rainforest has not been surveyed in this way. And most of it shows that these are just wild ecosystems that have been growing since the dawn of time for the last 55, 30 million years. And it's just been speciating and growing and evolving on its own. And it's only in these tiny areas that humans have done this sort of engineering, where there were tribes, the first one to come down the Amazon. He mentioned that there were tribes that had sectioned off parts of the river and they were growing the giant river turtles and that was their prime

source of protein so they figured out how to get a giant river turtle oh tremendous they're like three or four feet across from the carapace show me a giant river turtle jamming oh they're huge they're monstrous absolutely we don't have them where we are like bigger than sea turtles like sea turtles like sea turtles sea turtles sea turtle size they're huge they're absolutely monstrous and then we found fossil over there we're on a beach we found fossils of an eight-foot river turtle Yeah, but see like that. Okay, so just like the ones you find in Hawaii. Those sea turtles are like, if you go to the big island, you could swim with them.

It's pretty dope. Yeah, these guys don't have flippers, though. They still have claws. Okay. Those are monster turtles. Massive. And so they were growing them, farming them for food. They were farming them.

And so in areas like that, you're going to see agriculture. You're going to see pottery. You're going to see things where there was a small civilization by the edge of the river. and then in the other 98% of the Amazon, no one's ever been there. Have you had sea turtle before? Have you, this kind of turtle, whatever it is? Have you eaten it yet? Oh, sea turtle, no.

This turtle? Yeah? Absolutely. What is it like? It's kind of slimy. It's not like anything. It's very strange because they cook it and just, you know, everyone always go, how could you be a conservationist and eat the animal?

Because when you go to someone's house and they live on the side of a river and they go, we're having dinner, that's what they're serving. You got to eat with them. You got to eat with them. I wouldn't do that, man. You're ruining the earth. How could you? Let me throw paint on it. Let me glue myself to the shell. Yes, that's what I'm going to do next time.

And I showed you that video where I'm sharing the monkey head with the girl. I was like, I was babysitting a six-year-old and she was like, it's lunchtime. And I was like, well, what did your parents leave you for lunch? She like opens this pot and pulls out a monkey head. And she was like this. So we put it on the fire, warmed it up. And then we both sat there just like rip it. I would like rip off a piece for her because I was stronger and give it to her.

And then she was like, no, no, no. ear and she would rip off the ear. Like we just sat there eating a monkey face. And so the turtle, they cook it in the shell. They'll just like, you know, they'll just like slit its throat, throw it on the fire. And so it cooks in the shell. Then they part the shell. And then you kind of just

like, it's like a slow cooked like when the meat falls off the bone. Oh wow. You just throw a little salt on there. And it's kind of how do they get their salt? So that's something they trade? They trade for it. They trade for. I mean, the people I'm dealing with have access to the outside. Even the really remote communities that are two days upriver, they

they trade with the outside world. They have some interaction with money. And so that's one of the things that we're doing as an organization is saying, okay, what do you want your future to look like? Because right now you have a couple shotguns, you got a couple chainsaws, you got a couple boats,

and those things make you want money, but you also want to eat fish out of the river every day. Right. You also want to eat monkeys every day. And these are your staples. And they're like, you know, if you cut down more of these trees, there will be less monkeys.

If you shoot too many, like it's not like they have deer tags where it's like a monitored thing. They're not understanding. You know, when it was a bow and arrow, it was kind of a fair game. Right. Now the shotgun, it's like you can go shoot whatever you want. Yeah, every time you pointed a monkey, it's dead. Yes. It's not a tricky hunt.

And so these guys are, you know, working with us as Rangers and we're building this, developing this relationship with the local communities of saying, how do you want to continue living this way? Do you want your kids to live this way? And the answer usually is yes, but with better health and education. So we want to. Yes, but. That's interesting. So they like that way of life. They want to continue that way of life because it's the only thing they've known.

I mean, have any of these people ever gone to like any of these other cities that are fairly close or that they could reach and seen what that life is like? Yeah, we brought one of the communities. They were having trouble with the Peruvian government getting recognized as an indigenous community. and they were having this trouble for 15 years. And we used, you know, now we have lawyers and people and we have an office and all this stuff in Peru. And so we went and sat down with them. We said, okay, why are you having this trouble?

I mean, you clearly are an indigenous community. What's the holdup? And the holdup was that it takes two days for them to get to the nearest town. When they get to the nearest town, they're scared of the traffic. They have no idea what to do with paperwork. They have to sit in an office.

I mean, these are people. They're like putting their bows and arrows and guns down and walking into an office. sitting there in the air conditioning. And they're like next. And they're like sit. And they're like, do you have form like I-227B? And they're like, I-2-B-B.

And they're like, what's your social security number? And they're like, ah. And they got some like fish shells in there. And so what we realized was that they were just having trouble with the administrative part. And so we put our lawyers on it. And we got them their indigenous title land. And so now no one can take that away from them. And so for that, we brought them all to the city.

We had a big conference. and we had a big celebration about it, and they were all had the feathers on their head, and they were all celebrating, and now they're safe. Is there any pushback? Is there any political influence by whatever it is, miners, ranchers, anyone who tries to stop that from happening, bribe people to try to take over the land of these people?

Absolutely. I mean, the Amazon is a war zone of influence, and so you have, I mean, the miners, if anybody tries to protest the gold mining, they kill you. So one of the lawyers that I was working with, his father had come out and said, look, as a local Peruvian person in the jungle, I want this to stop. They can't. They're destroying. There's a, Jamie, there's a photo in the folder that says, I think it says sandstorm or something. But it's just, it's not even, again, deserts are actually ecosystems. This is a wasteland. They've destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres in the Peruvian Amazon. You can see it from space. It's this horrible scar. And they've cut the trees, burned the forest. and then they've sucked the land up, and then they take the bottom of the sediment and they use mercury to bind the gold out of the sediment,

and then they burn the mercury off the gold, releasing it into the air. Oh, great. Oh, yeah. So then in the rain, it comes down as mercury rain, which gets into the fish, which gets into the people. And then also the miners must be getting mercury poisoning. The miners all have mercury poisoning, birth defects,

health problems, respiratory issues. I mean, it's Yeah, that's some of the fires That's that's That is me That is me running out there with my So you're right there Yeah

I mean as soon as we see forest burning We run towards it And it rains there a lot Right so like how long does this forest fire last? Well they do it in September When the It's like July through September When the forest is at its driest

They come in and they cut the forest And they leave it down What was that picture you just showed me Jamie? That's a hard horrible picture. That's that animals burned alive on a tree? Two baby jaguars that were burned alive. Oh, God.

Yeah. And so people... And they just stuck on the tree burned alive? That's crazy. People talk about, you know, we're losing ecosystems. And it's like, it's not just about us. These animals live there. They have nowhere else to go.

And so there's massive individual suffering for, I mean, there's millions of animals on a single tree. And so then when you have these, these fires where they cut the forest and just burn everything, this, I mean, those trees would have been. filled with monkeys and birds and and the snakes you know they they get scared they borrow deeper into their hole and then there then it burns and so this is all for gold mining this was this was this was the this was for cattle ranching this one this was invaders on our river that come in from other places they would they set up cows they set up papaya and i mean this is what it's supposed to

look like it's supposed to be this lush verdant ancient rainforest filled with wildlife i mean the cacophony of sound when you when you're when you're when you're going to sleep in your tent at night and you're out in a place like that it's just this throbbing pulsing symphony it's incredible the magic of that place of real wilderness is wild i mean this is play that that that particular shot was it's we had to go for days to reach that spot you know all day on the river camp all day on the river camp you know you're going up rapids you're going up the waterfalls to get to these places that nobody can go and there's a there's an example of it's that was a a specifically a location where they've studied and they've found that there's never been a human settlement there.

It's just a corner of the Amazon, ever. Have they done LIDAR in these areas where they say that people have never been? I don't know for sure. That's where it gets weird, right? Because, like, they've done LIDAR on some of these places that were, like, very lush and tropical, and then they find these structures underneath it. Absolutely. They find these areas that clearly had, you know, some sort of pathways and, like, geometric patterns that indicate foundations of buildings.

buildings. Yeah. No, I mean, those are there. I just think that right now the problem is that it's getting grossly overstated how much of the Amazon. If you take it, take it as a football field and you go, man, I thought it was only in this much of the football field, you know, in a few inches of it. And then you find out there's actually 10 feet of the football field that was, there's still the rest of the football field is still wild. Right. Right. And so what I think that's the message that's getting lost is they're going, there's a lot more here than we thought. That doesn't mean the whole thing. I watched a documentary once on this guy was losing his mind. He was a scientist who was a biologist who's convinced that the giant sloth still existed in the Amazon and they couldn't find it.

And that these people who lived there were telling him, we see them, we know what they are, we have a name for them. And this guy had been there for years and he was losing his mind because he couldn't find it. And he sort of staked his academic reputation on the idea that this sloth existed. Couldn't find anything. But it doesn't mean. it's not there. It doesn't mean it's not there. Because there's so much. There's so much. And the locals are never wrong.

Like imagine if you were looking for a coyote and you had to look through the entire, like there was a thousand coyotes in the center of the United States and you started in Pennsylvania and you were hiking your way like, I don't see any fucking coyotes. But there's a thousand of them that are in North Dakota. And you've got to find this like that's essentially. That's a great way of thinking of it. It's the same thing with. rattlesnakes when I was a teenager, I was exploring the mountains of New York.

And I was going, it says there's rattlesnakes here. So I was just walking around, finding every kind of snake. I'd be like, well, where are the rattlesnakes? And you don't realize that wildlife occurs in populations. And so the rattlesnakes were all near rattlesnake dens. And so then I started making friends with other guys that were into snakes. And they're like, yeah, we know where they are. It's only, you see that mountain right there.

It's like, it's on the side of that. Go to that in the morning when there's sun and you'll see them basking. It's like you got to go to where they live. Right. And you have to talk to the people that actually know. Well, this guy was trying to do that. But there was this one scene of exasperation where he was like sitting down saying that I stake my entire reputation on horse shit, you know.

Did he, did he? But do you have to pee? He keeps getting up, which is unusual for him. Can he tell Jeff to come and get him? See if he could. He might have to pee. He's generally, he's happy to chill. Yeah, I'll just lay down.

He keeps getting. up and he's huffing. Yeah. Which is like he communicates that way. Like when he wants to eat, he comes up to me and he huffs, you know? My buddy, he's the best. No, but I think that that's, that's the truth is that it's, it's, people think it's like, you can just go find this stuff.

And it's, the, the secrets in this world are hidden for a reason. And even if there is a tribe that knows about the giant ground sloths, they're not going to tell us. Right. They're not going to tell someone from the outside. So it might be like one, one. one valley between two mountains where there's still a population. Just take a bathroom, bring them back in here. I'm pretty sure he has to go.

Thanks, Jeff. I wouldn't, you know. I mean, there's got to be a bunch. There's so many plants that they find there. This is an interesting statistic. Find out what percentage of pharmaceutical drugs that compounds emanate from the Amazon. It's an enormous percentage. Yeah, yeah.

A lot of the base drugs, quinine came from the Amazon. Amazon, the first cure for malaria. I know capypril, which was a blood pressure medication, came from Bushmaster Venom. That was in the 90s. There's so much. I mean, I just got whacked by a stingray hard. I saw that. It got your foot, right?

It was brutal. What was that? That was brutal. I mean, that in... Bro, you've been hit by everything. I had this... Dude, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars. Do you ever get checked for parasites?

Because you must have all of them. I do. Estimates typically say that about 20% of... 25% of modern pharmaceutical drugs are derived from rainforest plants. And many of those known examples come from the Amazon, but there's no precise peer-reviewed percentage just for the Amazon alone. Most popular figures, you see like 25% of medicines come from the Amazon, actually refer to all tropical rainforest, not specifically the Amazon.

But the thing is, like, how much of the Amazon has not been explored and how many potential pharmaceutical drugs or, you know, here's that's the term, right? Pharmaceutical drugs. What about natural remedies exist in the Amazon that aren't, you don't need to patent them and sell them at a fucking pharmacy and. Yeah, I mean, look, so we have, you know, we have, we have neosporin. You got a cut. It looks a little infected. You put neosporin on it. It might work. Down there, we have a tree that if you, we tested this and it, it murders bacteria. It's like a hundred times more potent than Neosporne.

What's it called? The Sangre de Drago. It's not even a big secret. Like people know about this. Every time I post about it, everyone's like, yeah, we know about that. We use it. No, kidding. But no one's ever turned it into a cream.

Can it grow in Austin? Probably. Can I get some sundry. How do you say it? Sangre de drago, the dragon's blood. Sangre de drago. Sangre de drago. Yes, dragons.

I'm watching Game of Thrones again. That sounds like something Kalee would say. The mother of dragons. And by the way, Carl Drago could have used that as he died of an introduction. I mean, right, the thing that took him down. That didn't make any sense to me. I thought that was a plot hole. No, see, there it is.

Dragon's blood. Sangreid to Drago. Wow. Yeah, but is it good? Is it sourced well? Right. It's probably made by some asshole. It's probably like 1%.

The rest of it's corn syrup. Because we just go, we just hit the tree with the machete and then you have a spoon. Right. And then you put it on your thing. And actually, exactly that. When I saw that, I thought the opposite. I was like, oh, this great warrior. I was like, that's such a great plot twist that just a Nick killed him.

I mean, I just had a staff infection in my leg from one mosquito bite that just got itchy. And then it spread and it spread and it spread until I had to be on double antibiotics. They cultured it and it was Mercer. And it's like, Marcia in the Amazon. Well, I got Mercer years ago at, I had Dengay and I had gone to a clinic in the city, which Mercer usually lives like in the hospitals and the human areas. Right, because it's a medication-resistant staff infection. Exactly.

That's what Mercer stands for, right? Yep. And so I had gotten it, and so I have a tendency now. I've been a little bit compromised in terms of infections because it's living 20 years in the jungle. And so I had already gotten it. So chances are that's what it doesn't exist. And that's the thing you see in the wild jungle, you don't have malaria, you don't have rabies, you don't have dengue, because the human population is so low that it doesn't.

spread. A mosquito bites you here. The next person that's going to bite is me or Jamie. Mosquito bites me in the city and then I go out into the rainforest. There's no one else for it to bite. It's going to bite an anteater. Right. And so it's not going to spread like that. Whereas if we have a town of loggers,

that's why when you go to these like logging and mining camps, the diseases. They're just, I mean, there's this thing called this type of flea called a piki that burrows into your feet and lays eggs. There's Lechmeniasis. There's malaria, dengue. what's the bird Zika virus?

There's all these crazy things, but we don't have that out in the jungle because, I mean, the ecosystem, the frogs eat most of the mosquito larva. The mosquito larvae like Bramelead cups or puddles. Well, Bramelead cups and puddles are filled with tadpoles. And then, of course, there's turtles in the puddles

eating the tadpoles, and then there's other things eating the turtles. Ecosystem. Ecosystem regulates it. When you ruin that, so then you cut down the fall. Now you have puddles sitting in the sun and they're all twitching with mosquito larva. So then you have tons of mosquitoes.

And so that's how nature they say, you know, mangrove forests will stop tsunamis from destroying a town because they'll stop the rush of the water. Well, forests will keep you safe by not only producing rainfall that'll come down on your crops, but also making sure that the ecosystem's not out of balance. So you're not covered in mosquitoes and parasites. When I lived in L.A., I moved into a house in Encino that I was wrong. renting and no one had lived there in quite a while and they had left the water in the pool and when I was going out to look at the pool the pool was completely green and there was things swimming in it like I mean like school swimming and I go what is that and the guy goes that's mosquito larvae I'm like no way and it's like yeah we have to kill them we have to drain the pool

and went like I was just thinking about how many times I was going to get bit once these things hatched. It was crazy. It was like watching little fish swim around, little hatchlings. Yep. And then thank God for dragonflies, because they'll lay their young in the same thing. And dragonfly larva will go murk those things. They're savage. And then you get tadpoles. Got a wild kingdom right in your pool. Right in your pool, right in your little cup. But when I got stung by the stingray, it was crazy because, so the, I had been walking, I had been walking with shoes in this stream. I took my shoes off because it's like, oh, I'm at a waterfall. I know this waterfall. I love this waterfall.

playing in the waterfall, and man, it's the one thing, bullet ants, came in bites, snake bites, I've had it all. The stingray bite was the one thing. Worst than bullet ants? A hundred thousand times worse. Really? Yes, and I'd seen one guy get stung by a stingray, and he had nerve damage, a systemic infection up his leg in his whole body,

and he didn't walk for months. So when I got hit, I felt, this is what I felt. I felt, in the flash of a second, I felt the stingray barb go into my foot, and it wagged its tail under my skin, so it flayed the skin off the arch of my foot and came out. And it has venom? Yeah.

So there, all the skin is... Oh, man. Yeah. Nasty. So I... Did you put the skin of the dragon or whatever the hell it is? Better. So I sat and, of course, my first thing was, I was like, okay, I got to document.

Oh, man. I'm unconscious. I'm unconscious at this point. You're in that much pain. Yes, I was blacking out. Marsh was freaking out. He's like, what is that? Yeah, I mean, I was literally, I knew people were filming.

And I was like, I didn't, you know, you want to be tough. You want to be like, all right, I just got bit by a stingray. It's going to be fine. I was not tough. It says, I don't remember any of this. Yeah. So that first thing right there, I started taking the video. My friend comes up to me and he was like, hey, man, he's like, we got to, you got to stop.

He's like, because in a minute you're going to go under. I was like, what do you mean I'm going to go under? And he's like, once the venom hits your system, he goes, you're not going to be able to walk. And we're still a few miles from the river. And he's like, we got to get you to the boat and we can't carry you. Whoa. And so they got me back to the station. I don't remember any of it.

They had me laying on my back and I was in so much pain I couldn't put my foot down. I mean, I was making deals with God. I was going, if you just make the pain go away, I was like, I'll go to church every day. I was like, I'll never smoke a cigarette again. What is that thing on your foot? So that's the plant medicine. That's where I'm going with this. I never smoke a cigarette every day.

That's funny. They, that pack there, they went to two different trees and they removed compounds from the tree. One was the bark and one was the fiber and they put it into a leaf pack. and they cook it on a pan and they heat it and it makes this plant poultice and they put this boiling hot piece of plant material it's like a fish cake and they put it against the wound and even that burned but it felt better than the venom and it starts to suck out the venom and so when they took it off my foot after like this is this is them getting the plant material where they know the medicines and that's been handed down through the generations so they're just shaving it off with a knife yes you see this few different colors cake of all this stuff. Uh-huh. Wow. And then they heat that up until it's scalding.

Press it against your foot. And you've been in the Amazon for a long time. This is the first time that's ever happened to you? You've been stung by a stinger arm? This is the first time. Now, how does it happen? You just step in the wrong place? JJ's nephew.

So he knows he's got the indigenous training. He knew exactly what to do. Wow. Yeah, and so that's all the venom. So now all that black stuff is all the denatured blood that came out of my foot. And so for about four hours, I was in this state of just level 10 pain, just white hot pain. I couldn't talk to anybody. I couldn't do anything.

People were coming to me and they were like, what can we do? And I was like, just leave me alone. I was like, I don't want you to look at my face. You know, I was coming in and out. And then by nighttime, it had gotten. This was at night where I was like, okay, the pain had subsided. But I didn't get nerve damage and I didn't get a huge infection because they had this indigenous plant medicine to save me. Wow.

The last guy that I knew that got it, he'd went straight to the hospital. and they'd had no idea how to deal with it. The locals know how to deal with this stuff. Wow. Look at that. That's crazy. That's tree medicine. That's crazy.

So what happens? You just stepped in the wrong spot? That's all it is? I mean, I've stepped on stingrays before and you feel them flutter. And one time I even felt the barb go like past my foot, but it didn't penetrate. I do not know how. I mean, it must have been a small one or something, but it just right up through the arch of my foot. And what's funny is it just...

I would never walk barefoot. I walk barefoot all the time. But just days before, not days before that, about a month before that, I'd fallen off of something like a 50 or 60 foot cliff and just rolled down and bruised ribs and gotten all banged up. I'd climbed up this cliff thinking I could, I was like, oh, I see this root up there. I can get up to the top. And at the top, my strength just ran out. And my feet were peddling and I had no footholes.

And I just went tumbling down this thing. And I just went, you know what? I said, I've had infections. I've had crocodile bites. I've had dengue. I said, I got a week left in the Amazon. I'd been in the Amazon for six months. And I was like, I'm doing nothing dangerous.

No tree climbing, no anaconda hunting, no crock diving, none of that stuff. And I was just swimming in a waterfall. Bam. Just put me out of the game. That was actually in April. I waited to post it until now. But everyone's messaging me going, how's your foot? And I'm like, it was months ago.

But I was like, it is better. How long did it take before it was better? Honestly, two days. I was on my feet in two days. It was fine. Yeah. And if you went to the hospital. I did not go to the hospital.

But if you did go to the hospital, how long would it take? The guy that went to the hospital didn't walk for two months, had the necrosis and had a huge infection that he had to go get treatments for. I mean, he went back to his home country and had to continue being treated for months. I felt terrible. And him too, watching someone roll back and forth in that type of agonizing pain, like brave heart pain, like when they're just like opening him up. I mean, I just didn't know there was pain like that, you know?

I've I've ripped open every part of my body and I just this was it's from the inside and it's pulsating and you just go the other thing is you go how much how much of my year did I just miss you know am I gonna it's like the one time I almost chopped my knee I almost cut the tendon that holds your knee cap on and I was just like man did I just take myself out of the game for a year you know just like come on and so when that happened I was like this is going to be so bad and meanwhile a couple days later you're walking around because they understood the medicine The local guys know. Yeah.

Wow. That was awesome. Did you ask them how they know this stuff? Yeah. Their father taught them and their mother taught them and their grandparents know. And so that's the thing with indigenous knowledge all over the world. If you listen to authors like Wade Davis who writes a lot about indigenous wisdom, you know, this is stuff that's been one at a time gleaned from nature.

And, you know, you know, better than most. You know, you're living out there. who's the first person that figured out ayahuasca? You know, if we take this and this, we take this and this, and we boil them together. How many trials and errors? How many dead guys were there before one worked? Right. And what was the motivation?

And what was the motivation? They said the jungle taught them how to do it. They did. The prevailing thing is that science and sort of the statistics of trial and error are incomprehensible given 40,000 plant species and all the different flowering and orchids and trees. And so it would take millennia if you did trial and error. Yeah. And the cost of human life to any civilization would make it too high.

And so when they say that the gods gave us ayahuasca, that's the prevailing best thing we got. Is that it's a link between our world and the spirit world that the jungle gave us. Right. And the other thing is like how much of our senses have atrophied by modern civilization? Yeah. Like what kind of communication do you actually get from the forest? Like, is there, is it instincts, intuition, are there senses? Does, is there a feeling that you get where you get an understanding of combining two things?

Because the jungle's actually got a way of communicating with you that's a nonverbal way? I think the jungle, I mean, I view it as almost a, you know, it's like it's godlike. It's almost like a giant, complex, sentient being. and so if you listen to, if you watch, you know, if you walk the jungle with JJ, an indigenous tracker, he'll tell you,

you listen to the birds, they'll tell you how fast you're allowed to walk. And what he means is you're walking through the forest on a sunny day, it's the afternoon and everybody's chirping

and making tons of noise, and all of a sudden, everything goes quiet. And then you got to figure out, you know, is that because there's a weather system coming in and we're about to be in a thunderstorm,

or is there a jaguar right over there? And everything around me knows. And it's like, The birds are the messengers of the forest. And so even that, you start to become attuned to the frequency of the forest. And I notice when I bring people in that, you know, I've never been in the wild before, they walk loud, they're talking the whole time. They're not paying attention to that sort of, you know, holistic view of where you are. You know, modern civilized life has made us so clunky when it comes to the woods.

Yeah. You know, just when I take people in the woods of people have never hunted before, you know, they're stepping on branches. snap, kicking rocks over, you're like, do-da-da-da-da, talking loud. My favorite is walking in front of you

and then when the stick snaps back, like having the sensitivity to like, they don't catch it. Yeah. They don't catch it. Like, come on. Just get smacked in the face. Yeah.

Thanks. Well, it's just a lack of awareness. You know, it's like if you've never been, you don't understand. But, I mean,

I would imagine it's that times a million in the Amazon. And then all the different things that are communicating. One of the things that they found out with monkeys, is that monkeys have some sort of a language where they can say a sound that means an eagle is there.

Yes. And that they will play tricks on other monkeys so that they can get to fruit. Yeah, yeah. So they will say that an eagle is there when an eagle's not there and then they'll go and steal the fruit. Yeah.

So they will lie about an eagle being there so they can get access to fruit. Lying monkeys does not surprise me. It's African vervet monkeys that I've read about that they have different calls, different words for land predator, lion, eagle, and they can communicate these things. So, I mean, they're speaking. Yeah. They're speaking. As are crows, I'm sure. Oh, God, yes. Yeah. Oh, yes. They're super intelligent. Yeah. Oh, I don't know how we pull this up. I have it on

YouTube, but there was this thing where we were coming down river. It was like seven in the morning. We've been up at our, this is communication with monkeys theme. As we're coming down river, it's like seven in the morning and I'm always cold. So I'm sitting on the boat and I'm cold. I'm just like listening to music or something. And JJ's like, look, look, look. He's like, there's a spider monkey in the river. And I was like, there's always a, you know, spider monkeys cross rivers. That's okay.

And he's like, no, no, no, the river's high right now. And there's all these whirlpools and currents. And so, yeah, I jump into the river. To save the monkey? To save the monkey. She couldn't get to the side. So I give her my paddle and she looks at me and she goes, no. She's like, I'm scared to you.

And then I spoke to her in Spider Monkey. What did you say? Like that. Well, she thinks she's going to eat her. She thinks I'm going to eat her. eat her, but as soon as I started going, look, look, she's looking at me because I'm making the sound, and all of a sudden she goes,

wait, wait, wait, you speak me language. Whoa. And then... Do it like you would do it. See, I'm making it right there, and she's looking at it. We're talking right to her. No, no, no, no, no. And then I'm like, look, it's okay, and they like the tail to be supported. Wow, that's crazy, dude.

She let you hold on to her. And so now she's relaxed. That's crazy, dude. You saved a monkey. only because I spoke her language and I learned her language from some of the orphans that I've rescued. That's crazy. And then she was like, well, if you let, because I could have grabbed her like, you know, like animal control, like grabbed her by the neck. And I was like, you know what? Look, she's looking at me because I keep talking to her.

And then you got her over to the shore? Yeah, got her over to the side. And she kept looking at me like, what is what? What have when you put her down? I put her down. She ran away. She just ran away. Yeah, yeah.

But not fast. She didn't run away like she was in terror. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that, when I first did, I went, and she looked at me and she went, she looked at me and she, like, responded. She was like, what? That's crazy.

You speak it. That's crazy. And that's one of those stories where if it wasn't on video, and I said, I spoke to a spider monkey and she responded. People were like, yeah, bullshit. Right. I saved a spider monkey like, bitch, that was your pet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That looked like a pet. That looked like you had a relationship with it. Like, as you're holding onto the tail, like it knew you. When she was looking back, I mean, she was like, hey, thanks for the branch. You know, I was, she was drowning. We saw her head go under a few times. She was really struggling.

She was exhausted. And I know that the spider monkey, their tail is their fifth limb. They have this incredible finger pad that's like 12 inches long. And so it just, it just wraps. They always had their tail anchored on a branch. And so I held her tail. And I was like, I got you. Now hold on to the stick.

I was like explaining it to her. And she's looking at me going, how the hell are you? That is so wild It was really cool That was a I originally I was like JJ I was like I don't want to get wet She'll be fine

He was like go get it Go catch you I was like okay Wow That was great You've eaten spider monkey haven't you Well sure That doesn't mean

I don't want to save him Right I would save a deer Hmm There you go But it does it feel It must feel really weird Eating a primate

I wish I could say it did I don't care Really? No I mean, we've become very callous to certain things, but I mean, when people serve turtle now, I'm like, well, which one is it? You know, it's like, I don't really, you know, it's like rib eye or teabone. Like, what are we, what are we eating? Is turtle good?

Like, would you, like, order it at a restaurant? All right. So the problem is that the way they cook it down there, these are people that live hand to mouth, right? And so when they cook a turtle, if you get salt, you're lucky. It's not like they're sprinkling some cilantro on it and, like, marinating it. It's, you know, so if you're cooking. just like took a chicken and threw it on a fire and then like ate a piece of it it's not great and so a lot of times that you eat this this food way out there in the bush i mean i've been there where they've

shot a spider monkey grilled it up and i've been like to you know i'll just eat rice and i'm like i'm gonna be i'm gonna be tired tomorrow there's no protein i'm like give me an arm you know you just like eat the hand and it just tastes awful just tastes like charred my friend steve ronella who's in the amazon with uh yonumami Yeah. And he said that that's their preferred food. Yeah. Yeah.

And I see no conflict between, you know, we're trying to protect the ecosystem and save the monkeys. And I love the monkeys. And I've rescued a lot of them personally. But again, when you're when you're in Rome, you know, if you don't eat with them, they go, that gringo, you know, they think that they're. Yeah. Whereas they're like, oh, you're one of us. Right. You have to.

You know, you know how. Mm-hmm. You know, little things or. Must be chewy as fuck, right? It's kind of smooth. It's kind of like if it's well cooked, it's kind of like mutton. This episode is brought to you by Armour. Every week there's some new wellness hack that people swear by.

And after a while, you start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies? That's why Armour Colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and has hundreds of these specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, etc. I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this.

If you want to try, Armora is offering my listeners 30% off plus two free gifts. Go to armor.com slash Rogan. It's gamey. So you have to slow cook it, long cook it? Is that what it is? Ideally, yes, but a lot of times it's just they tie it to a cross. Like it's a little monkey Jesus and they throw it on the fire. Yeah.

When I saw them cook it, they sin. the outside. They singed all the hair off. And then they cooked it. I think they cooked it inside banana. See if you can find Steve Ronella eats a monkey. I think they, and then they boiled some of it in like a soup. I don't enjoy boiled meat.

I'm never excited by boiled meat. But stew, right? Isn't stew kind of? Beef barley stew is good. Yeah. I mean, if you sear it first and then. And then you, I mean, it's kind of... If you sear it first, right?

Because, like, just boiled chicken to me. Just like, you think a white, like... Just eating it. Yeah, so here he's just eating chunks of it. Yeah, see, like, they're, like, having a really good time. Yeah, initially he was like, I'm not doing that. Yeah. And then once they started doing it, it was like, okay.

He said it's, it tasted like smoked turkey. Yeah. My boy, Janus. Yeah, it is, uh, it's interesting because if you live there, like, uh, my friend David Cho, he was in Africa and he hunted, with the hodza and they eat baboons and he said one of the craziest things is when you hit the baboon with an arrow they grab it like a person yeah like if a person goes shot with an arrow and he's like dude it's fucked yikes yeah but that's what they eat they don't have a lot of food and you know it's like

you were saying also when they don't have a sense of wildlife conservation it's not like hey we we have an accurate assessment of how many baboons are here or how many deal or here at dikers or whatever the animal is that they're hunting. They just eat whatever they can. And sometimes they eat them almost to extinction. And then they have to move on to baboons. And baboons were like the only thing that was left. And there's also like other people have encroached in settlements and, you know.

That's the way my guys, because we have a lot of wildlife in our region. And people from other regions will come as loggers and they'll go, oh my God, my dad told me that it used to be like this where we were. And now we have people from other watersheds in the Amazon, like, you know, know, 150 miles away, come into us. And they're going, can you guys bring jungle keepers over it? And they don't understand, you know, we're killing ourselves just to protect this river. And they're going, can you do this where we are? They're like, we have no more food because they don't have any regulation on this.

And so what we're doing with the tribes in our area is just teaching this basic thing of like, you know, don't hunt, you know, at these times of year when they're having their babies. Right. Don't overhunt. Monitor how many monkeys you're bringing into the village. And so we're trying to develop this with that. where if you're going to keep eating monkeys, do it in a way that they're keep being monkeys.

Especially once they've gotten firearms. Especially once they've gotten firearms. One of the older guys said to me, he goes, man, it's so sad. He goes, we grew up. He goes, you could just pull fish out of the river and there was monkeys in the trees and there was turtles. He goes, you could eat whatever you wanted out of the forest. He goes, now he goes, we're eating sparrows.

And he was like, we've eaten everything down to the smallest birds. He was like, it's just destroyed. And it was, where he is is like something. It was like Cormick McCarthy's nightmare. If Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I would show him the, I went to a part of the Amazon that really no one goes to up this horrible river. And they were recently contacted, uncontacted people, just this tribe that had just come out of the forest, and they still had their bows.

And they had no idea, me and JJ went for like a three-week expedition, plane to plane to three days on a boat, to two days on a boat, to finally reaching this. last settlement and the missionaries had pulled this tribe out of the forest. They'd tricked them. They said, just come with us for a ride. They pulled them out, but then they said, well, if you want to go back, you got to pay for your gasoline. And the tribe was like, well, how do we pay with what? And they were like money. And the tribe was like, what's that? And where do we get it? And so these little people were standing, these were not tall people like the Moschopiro. These were little tiny people. And they were standing there with their bows. And so we showed up

with our tents and our gear and we were trying to go up this river in our boat. And these little people came up to us and they were like they were making the gesture for food and so there's some loggers over there and so jj just didn't didn't think and he was like you want some food you got to go pay for it he was like money and you know he's through a guy he was translating and these people are going but we don't have any money j j took some coins out of his pocket and was like just go buy some bread and he gave him some coins and they went and they tried it and they got some bread and then all of sudden there was 50 of them coming at us and they were surrounding jj and they were grabbing at him and And they were like, he's the guy with these tokens that allow us to eat.

And we had to get out of there because it was causing a problem. Oh, wow. But, I mean, these people think they're with their bows and arrows and there's no more animals to hunt. And no one's going to give them money. And they live at the edge of the world. And they're probably tiny because they don't have any protein. Yeah. Wow.

It was horrifying. It was one of the worst things I've ever. I've seen poverty all over the world. This was, again, a hunter-gatherer tribe with no food. With no food and no way. of getting back to forest where they could be a hunter-gatherer tribe now they were in this in this wasteland where the loggers and the gold miners and the oil companies there was there was even there was even a barge with oil and it was like this is where the amazon is being eaten and it was out of

sight you have to go for days just to get there there's no foreigners there actually they did say we were talking to one logger and he said it was you know a few years ago he goes there was a we saw some rafts coming down river and then they stopped at this beach up river and they they they made camp and he's like so we all talked about it and we said, well, we have a feeling they're organ harvesters. And they, they were scared of these, of these incomers, right? The organ harvesters visit the Amazon? No. And so, but that's what they were, they're sitting around the campfire and someone was like,

what if they're organ harvesters? Why would they think that? I don't know. That must be a thing that gets, I don't know. But the dude I was sitting with told me, he goes, you know, we got real scared sitting around the campfire. Everyone was telling these stories. And he's like, so we figured the safest thing would be to go.

kill them. So they went and they killed them. And they were a couple of European like hikers on a mega expedition in the Amazon and they just got murdered by the locals preemptively in case they were dangerous. Oh God. And this dude was like yeah, we fucked up.

Oh man. And I'm talking to him. I was like, so who did the killing? Was it? You know, I was like, shit man. But I mean this place was dark. You know, in the next book I write, I'm going to have to do a deep dive into this. one because it was just it was heavy and we also we knew we for the first time you know when you're in the jungle we're like we're safe this place it was like people are looking at you and they're like that's a jacket and a watch you know like a camera and a tent and a packraft they're like you like if we killed him we get all kinds of stuff they're looking at you like man that's a it's a lot of opportunity and you could just see them being like well let's separate him from the herd oh yeah it was rough it's like you think like the cowboy days like when it was really wild like blood marrilla Well, not only that, but there's probably a ton of stories about people that have come down and done horrible things.

So it's not like you're thinking like these are wonderful people that come to give us plantains. No. No, you're thinking these are the type of people that would do horrible things to us. Yeah. So we have an opportunity to get something from them and pure desperation. Pure desperation. And so like the communities that I've worked with in my region of the Amazon, they're all, you know, you show, I've showed up on a pack raft and been like, hey, and they're like, where did you come? from and I'm like I'm just this foreigner who does work here and I talk to them and they're like

oh camp here you'll be safe they're really nice they're caring their families this place that we were at was this outpost and it was all extractors it was all gold miners petroleum people loggers and it was like all the men who were in the dark bit the the black market people were all in the same place so there was like a brothel there was these displaced natives and then there was like this one really scary missionary this man looked insane. He had crazy eyes. And he wouldn't come anywhere near us. From where? Where is he from?

I couldn't tell where he was from. But he was dressed in the robes. It was like the mission. Except he was evil. Like you could tell he, you could tell he looked at us and just vanished. And he had this little settlement that he had cleared. And he was bringing his children in and pulling them out of the forest. Was he a white guy? He looked like a white guy. But it was hard to tell. He looked at Rasputin.

Oh, wow. And these poor people. are sitting there and you could see them like they were all like breastfeeding their babies and like like trying to eat rats and like it was just we stayed there for one night and we all we didn't sleep we were we slept back to back we were just in our tent just awake all night and then the next day we got in the boat and we kept going further up river and we finally made it into the into past the edge of human civilization into just uncharted jungle but it was really and so at least where we are it's like we're we're working with these tribes to make their lives

better to educate them and there's this feeling, there's this good feeling. We have jungle keeper's shirts. I mean, now we're on the river and we see jungle keepers boats going by. We had gold miners just a few, just a few weeks ago. We had gold miners. Everyone, the whole team was calling each other. We sent our, we sent our Ranger team out there. We brought the police. They arrested the gold miners. They brought them to town. They offered them jobs. And they said, you just can't be doing that here. And so they only cleared like half an acre of forest. And then we got them. So they didn't destroy anything. And so that's how we're keeping the river. hired them to mine gold, right?

So that's the thing. No one hires them. They get it in their head. They go, you know, hey, to their cousin, they'll go, why don't we go make some money? Let's go up there and see if there's gold. And they'll launch a little expedition. They'll bring like a 16 horsepower motor and go for three days. And they'll sneak past us on.

I mean, now the government's getting involved because we've been having the success. We're going to get a park guard station on our river. So we're not going to have this problem. But they'll go up the river. And they'll just set up and they'll, you know, they'll start panning and they'll go, I see a little flake here. And they're like, cool, let's burn some forest and then we'll start sucking it up. We'll run it through the big motor. And they'll bring their wives and their kids.

And it's artisanal. They're very, and so what they do is they get the gold and then they have to take it in their little boat back to the town. And then here's the problem. There's one store where you go to sell the gold. And guess who's waiting outside that store, the people that rob you at gunpoint and take your gold and then give it to the actual people. And so it's really sad artisanal gold mining. They're not organized. And it's the same with the narcos.

We've been having a problem with narcos. And everyone's like, dude, you can't mess with the narcos. Like, you're going to lose the fight. And it's like, yeah, but these are people that are like, we're just going to grow a little bit. And then trying to sell it. Coca. I mean, we busted, we helped the police bust a, a, a, we saw a clearing on deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, way up river. days up river. There was a clearing out in the jungle. And so we sent our rangers. The rangers came back

and we're like, we can't deal with this. There's something scary going on up there. And so we told the police and the police were like, yeah, we'll try and get up there. Now, at the same time, I'm with JJ one day. And we always do the same thing. When there's, there was a bad patch of deforestation along the river. And we said, how the hell did this happen? They did it so quick. And so I put up the drone and I flew it over and I'm so going, who, you know, who are these people? They loggers. We're just trying to get a sense of what's going on. Fly the drone down.

And usually when we see loggers, they'll run into these little palm-thatched huts. They'll run into them to hide from the drone. That's crazy. They didn't know what a drone is. Well, these people came running out. And they had guns. And we had already on the river, we had passed their settlement and flown the drone back. Their boat came out after us.

And we started going. And I was like, JJ, you could just talk to them like normal. And he looked at me and he went, not this time. and we had a 60 horsepower and they had a 40 and we were just blazing ahead of them and I had the drone in the air and so this is a $5,000 drone and so I'm driving the drone

and I was like can we can we like I gotta get this drone and they're like we JJ looked at me he's like we're not stopping and it dawned on me that was like we're if we get caught we're getting killed oh man and we arrived at our at this point nobody on the boat had a gun and so we arrived at a place where the police

were camped out where the guard they had been dispatched to go check out that other site and so we arrived and the police force that we work with was there and we pulled up and we're like yo we got bad guys coming in and they they masked up loaded up they got on our boat we turned around and then as soon as they saw us coming back at them they left and then days later they went to that same police force and assassinated one of the guys oh man so the narcos are different the narcos are scary And that clearing that we originally found, they were actually predae of sacks of white powder. The Peruvian military went in and actually raided that camp, arrested everybody.

It was so big that the American DEA knew about it. They were notified. And so this is now what's happening on this river where it's because it's the last wilderness, they're coming. And so we're trying to, you know, we're relying on the Peruvian authorities to stop this from happening so that we can create this park before it's too late because they're also blazing roads. They're bringing in loggars.

They're smart. They bring people, and they'll send the loggars ahead of them. And then when the loggars clear the land, they'll just start growing coca. And so it's gotten scary. I texted you when it was at its, when I first started having to travel with security, I remember texting you because I was like, this is a different game. You know, it used to be like we're counting the butterflies and we're. Yeah, you wanted to learn where to train.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because it's scary walking around. Well, the thing is, the police intercepted off to one of the people that they arrested on the phone. It said, if you see JJ or that shithead gringo that flies the drone, they said, if you kill them, will reward you. Oh, man. So they found this message on WhatsApp. They showed it to us.

And they were like, you guys have a hit on you. And then a few days later, they, they, JJ was supposed to get in the car at the side. You know, you take the boat downriver to the car. and he was supposed to get in the car and go back to the town. He actually came down river in the boat and then went, I forgot that I wanted to finish up something at the station, take me back. He went back to the station.

So our driver, Percy started driving back along this little dirt logging road by himself. And they had trees across the road. Masked guys with guns. They put the guns in the windows. They pulled him out and our windows are tinted. And they said, take JJ and Paul out. They were going to do it. And so it just so happened that JJ wasn't in the car.

Just by pure luck, he was not in the car that day. And they roughed up our driver. They took his driver's license. They took his cell phone. And they just said, just let them know. We missed him today, but we'll get him soon. Oh, man. And so we went, of course, we went to the police and we're like, look, we're going to need a lot more protection.

They're like, it's getting, I mean, we're just trying to save the rainforest, man. Like we're not trying to. And these people are going, well, we're just trying to grow drugs. And we want to do that where there's no police. And the wilderness is only, the wilderness is becoming a finite thing now. So it's becoming this battle for battleground. Jamie, on there is a map. I'm wondering if you could pull up the map because I could explain to you.

What's the status of this right now? Are they still after you guys? They are still after us. But it's been for about eight months, it was really bad. It was really scary. It was horrible. Like every day. Anytime JJ called me, I'd have a panic attack.

But you see the yellow on the right is the Trans-Amazon Highway. That's the big, that's the big artery. That's what the Chinese and Brazil built. But then that smaller thing going up, that's the roads that the loggers and the narcos are making. So that big red arrow, they're trying to make a road that goes in through there. And so the white line outlines what we're trying to protect. And that light greenish blue is the. area that we have protected. That's that 130,000 acres that we have protected. And so that's what

we're doing right now. It's a race against time. If we can fill in that area, if we can fill that whole thing in, we save the land. And once it's ours, once it's under jungle keeper's protection, it's indigenous protected. All right, we're back. Yeah. So where are they growing the drugs in this map? So right at the upper tip of that arrow, sort of the outside, they had cut a little, a little road filament into there. And again, these little tiny trail roads, they go under the forest. The forest is 160 feet tall. Is there a way you can communicate with these guys saying you're not trying to stop this? I mean, right now what we're doing is putting signs on all of these little tiny. I mean, these are jungle roads where just to go on the road. You're going out to where, you know, if anybody finds you

out there, they'll just kill you. And your body will be decomposed and recycled within 48 hours by the jungle. So you're past where there's police. This is just earth. It's the wild west. More than the wild west, right? Because the wild west was never this dense. Well, it's the wild west and you can't see 10 feet in front of you. Right. That's what I'm talking about.

This is more wild than the wild west. I guess so. Yeah. And you still have, you have Indians with arrows. And now you have these narcos that are straight up evil that are coming. I mean, they're taking girls from indigenous communities to work in their brothels. They're growing cocaine. They're brothels up there?

You got men working out in the jungle. And so they go to the communities and they tell them, hey, you're talking. your daughter is very pretty, she'd be a great waitress. You know, we can educate her while she trains and helps people. And then they never see him again. And so it's all that darkness. And at the same time, what we're doing is bettering the lives of the community, making friends with these people.

We have these amazing rangers. And, I mean, we have different ranger stations along the river. And if we make this into a park, like Teddy Roosevelt, no, John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip and showed him Yosemite and, like, Sequoia and all this stuff. And he was like, we got to protect this. Like, it's special here. Look at the size of these trees.

Look at the beauty of this valley. And then they protected it. There's nothing as wild as this river on earth today. And so if we protect this now, the 200 indigenous people that live on this river get protected from the narcos. They continue having abundant fish and resources. And then they'll work as park guards and educators and chefs and boat drivers to maintain this gigantic protected area. and then Peru will have this crown jewel of the Amazon. So they love it.

But how can you protect them from the narcos? I mean, it seems like the amount of money that's involved in trafficking cocaine would make it a real problem. But the good thing is that these are the little artisanal ones. These are the guys that go, these are not like mafia bosses. This isn't like the Mexican cartel. These are like these little clans of people that go, you know what, we could just grow some cocaine. And then we'll sell it to the big guys. And so they're just, they're like.

Like mom and pop cocaine growers. But they're also murderers. Well, of course. And so when the cops go out there, the cops just arrest them and take them straight to jail. And so the cops have been support. Everyone assumes that Latin American police, no matter what, are going to be corrupt. And like the police force we've been working with has been keeping us alive. And they want this park protected as much as the indigenous people do.

It's amazing how many good people are out there. They're actually helping. And how many narco organizations? artisanal narco organizations are out there? Peru has become, it's not great. Peru, I think, has become, if not on the same level as Colombia, I think they might have surpassed Colombia in terms of cocaine production. They're not doing great with that right now.

And so we're at this very, very crucial juncture there. But, you know, it's funny because in doing all this, you know, with even with the book coming out and I've been talking to people and people go, well, you have narcos now. like, so you're going to fail. And it's like, man, you're not even the one on the ground. Like, I'm the one on the ground. I'm telling you we're not going to fail. And the police have been successful at clearing them out.

And it's getting better. Just like the whole thing with, yeah, the Amazon's disappearing, but we can still stop it. It's like, you got to, you think like before D-Day, if Churchill was like, I will probably lose. Like, you can't have that mentality. And so it's very, very encouraging seeing the, the local people stand up for what they believe in. And the job is dangerous. There's a video on there that I think it says Sandra Tree Crush. But I got woke up a few weeks ago.

And one of my managers came running at like 3 a.m. I see a flashlight coming through the jungle. And so I'm thinking the worst. And then he comes, he's going, Paul, he goes, a tree. And I told you the last time I was on here, I said, the most dangerous thing in the rainforest is the tree's falling. He said a tree fell in the ranger station. and it's raining, and I'm talking about rain. You know when you're at the airport and you hear that sound where it's like,

there's no sound louder. Your ears can't handle it. It was raining so loud. And he's screaming into my ear that this tree fell on the ranger station. He goes, and one of the rangers was crushed. And I'm going, but dead or alive. And he goes, we don't know yet. And so it's 3 a.m.

And we get in this boat and we're going upriver and there's lightning flashing and there's rain falling. And I'm looking with the flashlight. And I'm navigating by the crocodile eyes because we don't know where the edges of the river are because they you know the eye shine and so we have footage of this and we arrive at the ranger station and sure enough this tree had fallen crushed the roof all the beams and all the all the scaffolding under the roof and fallen on this woman's face while she was in bed and so she was crushed under this and she couldn't even scream because it was raining so loud

and so we get there and i i stick my hand into the rubble and i hold her hand and i'm like are you okay and she was like, hey Paul, she's like, I have no idea. And she was amazingly like, like, buoyant. She was like, I have no idea if I'm okay. She's like, but I'm alive. I was like, we're going to get you out of here. We started chainsawing, I mean, like 16 feet of tree debris over her and all this gnarled roof material.

And we had to pull her out of there and she had a scratch on her ankle. Wow. Got this great video for her sitting in a hammock at like 6 a.m. And she's smoking a cigarette. She's like, I'm alive. She's going, I'm alive. And she didn't quit. She's still a ranger.

And it's like she's out there right now driving up and down because she wants that forest protected for her kids. And it's like these people care. It sounds like the adventure of this is very addictive to you. This is what I'm getting. I think you love it. I think you love the forest. I think you love protecting it.

But I think there's something about the danger of it and the chaos and the wildness of it all that seems to me, I'm looking at your eyes. you're smiling because you know I'm right I know yeah I'm not gonna I'm not gonna deny that that's when I was a kid I remember sitting in school and being like why did like you read about like Roosevelt and Jane Goodall and like these people had these amazingly adventurous lives and I was sitting in school getting detention after detention and getting yelled at me like can I go to the bathroom and I was like you know everyone around me was like you know when you get a job then you're really going to love your desk one of my friend's mom said that to me she goes you think you're you're like you know She goes, you think you hate your school desk. She goes, wait until you get your real desk. And I was like, oh, man. And so, yeah, riding on the, on the boat at 4 a.m.

with the lightning is incredible. Showering in the river. Navigating by crocodile eyes? Yeah, man. I mean, with a wind in your hair and the, I mean, you know the magic of the mountains. Yeah. And the jungle has its own vibe. You watch that mist snarling up off the canopy.

And it's like, it's so wild that you just, you feel better. feel healthier. And again, you know, that whole thing of, of, um, what's that thing to say, like a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace. And it's like the, the beauty of that, you know, you drink from the river and then you sweat it out and you watch your sweat join the steam and rain back down onto the jungle. You are connected to your environment. And every single day, you don't know what's going to happen. You know, I opened. There was one day where I was like, okay, I'm going to stay on the station. I'm not going to do anything. I've been hammering myself in the swamps for, you know, I opened. I opened. I was one day where I was like, I'm going to

for a week. And I was like, I'm just going to, like, drink coffee and, like, do office work on my computer. And so I was, like, at the station. And my team comes running. And they're like, anaconda. And I was like, where? I was actually, like, annoyed. I was like, how big of an anaconda? And they're like, no, it's a pretty big anaconda. As we go down to the thing. And there's, sure enough, this big ass anaconda on a log, like, 11 feet, you know, not a monster. But so then I started doing this thing where I was like, because they were all like, be careful. And I was like, of what? And they're like, it could bite you. And I was like, It's asleep.

I was like, she's just trying to get the sun. So when I started, I took out my phone, I started doing this thing. I was like, people are scared of snakes. And I was like, if you're scared of snakes, I was like, there's an 11 foot anaconda. I was like, do I appear to be in danger yet? And then I kept getting closer and I was like, how about now? How about now? And then I was like, she's not waking up.

So I get on the log with her. And the anaconda still doesn't get up. And so I turned around and her coil is here and her head's like, you know, 10 feet over there. and I just put my head on her. Now I'm laying on the snake. And I'm still taking a video and I'm going, see, this snake doesn't care that I'm here. And even if she wakes up, you know what she's going to do? She's going to jump in the water.

She's not going to bite me. And she never woke up and I figured, you know what? Why bother her? She never woke up when you rested your head. She woke up. She moved her tongue, but she never freaked out. Well, they're the king. Yeah.

It sounds like they don't really have any natural predators, right? Do they? When they're small. When they're small. Crocodiles, right? The crocodiles, the herons, the piranha. You forget that, like, pelicans and herons can eat, like, a baby alligator. They'll just, like, throw it back.

Sure. Just take it down their throat. Herons are crazy. Herons are, they're amazing hunters. Pelicans are disgusting. The way they'll take, like, a whole bullfrog and just glut it down. So you know that things, like, alive in their chest. I've seen videos of them doing it to pigeons.

or seagulls? Yes, the one where he swallows the seagull. Hole. And the seagull's like getting smaller as it goes down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you realize, like, that crazy mouth that they have is just so they can swallow things alive. Yeah.

I mean, it's weird looking funky thing. You're like, oh, that's a monster. That's a monster that just swallows things alive. Yeah, you don't think of birds as, as savage as they are. What are you laughing at, Jamie? Pictures of pelicans trying to eat shit on the screen. I'm trying to eat a dog. Oh.

Oh, God. Come on. Marshall. Oh, wow. Trying to get a cat. He's trying to get a cat. Oh, my God. Yeah, they basically can eat almost anything that's near their size.

Good Lord. That one just fly out. Wow. It's too late. Oh, man. Yeah, they're monsters. I'm trying to eat another. God, that's, I call bullshit on that one.

No way his pelican was trying to eat a bear. I believe that, though. I've seen that video. What are those things called again? Those are baby capy bears. Capy bears, right. Those are They've

Are those the things that have made their way into No, it's a different animal That's made their way into like Louisiana And they have to go out and shoot them Havilinas No no no no no no it's a type of large rodent Because David Tell used to have a TV show Called Insomniac

And he went out at night one time with them In Louisiana and they're hunting these things That they're an invasive rodent A giant rodent And it was like Dave would do his show and then after it was a Comedy Central show was a really good show and then he would find things to do in the town because he can't sleep because he's up all night and so he went out with these people that were kind of can't remember what the animal was but it's a large invasive rodent that exists in the south I mean Nutria that's right yeah yeah and people eat them yeah yeah I mean the rodent I mean Cass even find that video because it's kind of crazy because they're out there hunting them with 22s With 22?

Yeah, I mean, they have to. They're completely invasive species, and they're huge. They're like a small dog. That's something I left off the list. We eat those all the time. We have something called a packa. It's like a small capy bear with spots. And those, I mean, you know, it's like squirrels.

But they're big. They're like, you know, cat-sized and fat. People eat them all the time. Those are delicious. What's your favorite thing to eat in the jungle? Piranha. Piranha. Piranha?

Fuck, yeah. Really? Oh, my God, they're delicious. And when you fry a piranha, you know, you slit, you know, make the slits along it, you just fry the whole thing. You just pull it right off of its skeleton. And the fins become like chips, like little salty chips. Oh, they're so good.

You just put salt on it and fry it. We just, just a little bit of salt and then fry it up. And then better than the piranha is the Paco, the big vegetarian. And the piranha species, yeah. Those are invasive species in America as well. Yeah. People catch them all the time. Oh, they're so good.

Yeah, they catch them in there like 40 pounds. They're huge. Yeah, someone caught a world record. Powerful. Really powerful. Pacu. Pacu, right? Yeah, yeah. I want to say in Georgia?

Georgia or Florida, somewhere in there? And fucking huge. Yeah. No, they're powerful. We fish for them. You have like a 10-foot pole with a rope on it. Yeah, there's a Pac-U. Yeah.

Yeah, look at the size of that thing, man. That's crazy. 50 pounds. World record-sized Pacu caught in Florida. There it is. 50 pounds. That's nuts. Dude, those are so, they're so nutritious.

When you eat them, you feel like you're just gaining muscle. Really? Yeah. Like, you still eat a lot of elk? Oh, yeah. Like, don't you feel like it's like a superfood? Uh-huh. Yeah.

This is how I feel. Oh, it's wild. Yeah. I feel like I just... You live on piranha. Yeah. Piranha and Pacu. Yeah.

Wow. How do you catch the Pacu? Ten foot pole. You have a piece of rope and you put like a piece of, like, last night's dinner. You just like a piece to tie a bunch of rancid chicken. You leave it out in the sun. make it smell bad. You go out at six in the morning.

So they're not vegetarians? Well, they'll eat anything. They specialize on the nuts. That's why they have the human teeth. Oh. Those are the ones that have the human teeth. When you open their mouth, they have like molars and then like a few like front teeth. And so we go with this 10 foot pole and nobody can make a sound on the boat.

You're just floating with the river. You're like invisible. And you wait for a feature in the river, like a like a rock or a place where the water's rushing. And you smack it against because they like that falling, falling fruit or falling sea. And when they hit, I'm talking about like a four-inch hook. When they hit that hook, this is a thing because you're doing this for, you're doing it for an hour and you're like, all right, there's no Paco in here. Well, guess what?

When they do hit it, they'll pull you right out of the boat. And I've been dragged straight across the boat where like you got to use one hand to stop yourself and the other hand's holding this pole. And then your friend's got to pull you back. You get this fish on the thing and it's going, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, flying. How big are they? You saw, they're big. You're catching them that big?

Yeah, they're huge. And then you got to have a hammer because you got to shut them off somehow. Right. You got to crack them right on, you know, between the eyes. Because otherwise, they'll just either jump out of the boat or injure somewhere. It was the other thing. We were going upriver a few months ago. We're at night.

We're all just quiet in the boat and we're going to go up to this tributary to explore it. And I had a group of tourists with me. And this girl was sitting on the front and all of a sudden I feel something go past me. There's something. And all of a sudden I got, I got wet. And then all of a sudden I hear, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. in the boat. What the fuck is going on? Turn on my headlamp and there's a paco in the boat.

And the girl that was sitting on the front her head is bleeding. One of those huge ass paco's jumped out of the river in the night, hit this girl in the head and then fell into the boat. Whoa. And so we just grabbed, yeah, we just ate it. But I mean, that paco was in the middle

of the Amazon at night, just jumping around enjoying itself and it just jumped in the wrong boat. Wow. Wow. Two foot fish flying through the air. And that's your favorite thing. to eat. Absolutely. What else is really good to eat? There's these little cup mushrooms that are really good. You fry them up with garlic. You do that and Paco. Now you're talking good. My friend Roy is a chef. He's really, he's one of the jungle key. He's the president of Jungle Keepers right now. He's a local guy,

and he focuses on Amazonian cuisine. And so he goes and he picks all the right flowers and funguses, and he'll take Paco, and then he'll flavor it with a type of orchid thing. And like, all of a sudden you have this amazing food. And like Lima, they have, You know, Peru's become this amazing place for food. Peru is great food. Wow. He does the jungle version. Wow.

So it's not like nasty monkey soup. Not turtle. It's the curated, you know, five-star version of jungle cuisine. So that's number one. Paco's number one, 100%. I mean, even right now. I think I tried alligator once, but it didn't leave an impression on me. I haven't really.

Also, I feel like they're my friends. Really? Yeah. How so? I like them. just because they're cool? Well, I mean, I work with them a lot. I'm always catching Cayman.

I always see them on the side of the river. You know, nobody's serving me. If they were serving me, Cayman, then it would be just like the monkey where it's like, all right, I got to eat it. But nobody's serving me, Cayman. So that's not a staple of their diet. No. In the north in Nikitos, they eat a lot more Cayman, so you don't see Cayman.

On our river, there's still, there's a Cayman on every beach. There's Jabby Roos, there's just cacoy herons. There's just so much life. It's Avatar. It's just pulsing life. Wow. It's incredible. Did you find that video of Davidel?

No. It weirdly is like not online. I found a picture of the episode but not a video of it. Yeah. And they're just... Shoot Nutria. Yeah, I think... At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments

are built on a foundation of good health. From the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body check-up that provides a clear picture of your health today and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. A healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today.

Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. They eat them too, but I can't find it. Yeah. And he was actually on the episode just right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a long time ago. This was back when Dave was drinking.

So this is like Dave's been sober for, I want to say 15 years at least, somewhere in that range. Yeah. And this is back when, you know, he would just drink at the comedy club and then stay up all night, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee. Never end. Yeah. I mean, he's the most unhealthy and also the most hilarious guy alive. You've stopped drinking, right? I drink a little every now and then now.

I went like eight months with no drinking and I started having like a glass of wine with dinner. and a cocktail or two but I have not had more than like two drinks in a night. Yeah. Feels good, doesn't it? It was a good break. Yeah.

The eight months I felt really good. And I was convinced I was never going to drink again. And then I drank a glass of wine. I was like, ooh, I like this. I miss this. Well, that's the one thing. The wine is good. Yeah.

Wine with a steak. Oh, red wine? Yeah, a little, I think it was important to just recognize that I was doing it. And it wasn't an alcoholic. I was just, I have a club. I'm there all the time. And, you know, you're out with friends.

You want to drink? Yeah, sure, let's have a drink. Yeah. Go to dinner, have a drink, have another drink. It just got to a point where I was like, I was feeling like, and I'm too healthy. I work out all the time. And I was like, why am I doing this to myself? Yeah.

You know, but now I realize, you know, it's a little moderation. It's not bad. But drinking is essentially fun poison. Fun poison. It's weird. After Lex ruined drinking for me. Lex gets saucy. Well, this is the thing.

When he came to the Amazon, he goes, I want to do ayahuasca. And so we called, you know, JJ's oldest brother is 70-something. We called this shaman in. And he's like, you know, with the Lex voice, he's like, brother, you have to do this with me. And I was like, I am not drinking ayahuasca. There's a chapter in the book about when I did it with the old master and he overboiled it. And we all like saw God in the unit. We were there for the Big Bang.

It was awful. It was hard. No. It was not. No. No. Why? It was like taking a mega dose. It was like, sure. It was awful. It was traumatic. You don't like to get scared? I was terrified, man. No. So I was like, I have retired. I was like, I'm not doing it. And Lex was walking around in circles for two hours and he comes up to me and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, I came all the way here for you. He goes, now you do this for me. He goes, don't leave me alone in the dark. And I went, God, I said, all right, I'll do it. And we drank right next to each other. And the guy's, smoking his pipe and, you know, he has the feathers on and he's singing to us and you're drinking and you're going deeper and deeper into the hole. And God. It was interesting, though, we both, the shaman said that, you know, he was talking about what Lex was going afterwards.

He was talking about what Lex was going through on his journey. And he goes in and does this deep work of the things he sees coming off of you. And this is a guy, the shaman, I've known for 20 years. He's like my uncle. And so he would come up to me and he'd go. I'd be laying down. You can't, you can't get up. And he'd come up to me and he'd go, one more cup.

And I'd be like, sure. Like, why not? And he'd, like, give me like a kiss on the forehead and throw it down my throat. And then he'd go to Lex and go, one more cup. And Lex would be like, yes. And then, you know, give it to Lex. And he said that he said that he wasn't worried about my spirit. He said, I was there to protect Lex.

And he said, Lex was there to do some real work. And so what's interesting is that we both reached this. sort of, we both reached the pinnacle of what was happening at the same time where I felt myself about, I felt it coming. I was like, oh, no, I'm going to throw up, I'm going to throw up. And all of a sudden, my consciousness lifted six feet above my body, and I was looking down at me and Lex, and I got this overwhelmingly calm sensation. And without speaking, the shaman said to me, he said, you're not going to feel this. I know you don't like it. He said, you're just here to support him so you can vomit now. And so Lex started vomiting and I started

vomiting, but I was watching myself and I was watching him and I was just like, this is fine. It doesn't hurt a bit. And it was very, very comforting. And then he came and he started with the, you know, shaking the leaves and singing louder and really cultivating, making sure we gave everything that we purged all of it. And then he brought the crescendo down. And then he calmed. And then he began singing. And then we settled back into the symphonic throb of the night. And then the trip went on for some time. But it was, it was interesting that things, heightened at that moment and that we went through it together. Wow.

So why did he think that you were there to protect Lex? It was just like something he felt. That's what he said. That's what he said to me. You know, and then, and then, you know, it was very interesting watching Lex go through his journey because he, by the end of it, he just got happier and happier. He just liked it more and more. And around, I think, Cup 6, I tapped. After the vomiting, after that thing, it was sort of, again, there's this.

energies floating around. He's singing, it's great, you know, understanding a little bit of the language because, you know, he's singing to his grandfather. He's singing to the spirit of Santiago and the spirit of the Anaconda and using the old words for them. You know, not even saying Anaconda. He's saying the other things. Amaru Mayo and, you know, he's saying Shuawako and he's talking about the, so he's doing this and shaking his thing and you hear the frogs throbbing and it's all moving through your skin. And so, yeah, I tapped out after a while and Lex kept going. He's got an amazing constitution. I think that's the Russian thing.

But since then, I can't drink. Really? I can't drink. I could have a cup of wine maybe. If I have more than that, I feel sick. Interesting. Like, I feel damaged. I have not been able to drink.

I haven't had a beer since two years ago. So what do you think it is? Just like let you know what it's doing to you? I have no idea. It's just a weird side effect. I keep trying it. I used to love whiskey. I'll like, I'll like, smell some whiskey.

I'll, like, smell some whiskey, and I'm like, blah. Really? So, we cracked a bottle right now? Turned off. I don't have any in here. You would, it would make you feel sick. I mean, I could take a sip of it, but my body would be like, no. Red light, red light, no.

Yeah, well, your body's correct. Yeah. But it made me super, maybe hypersensitive. I noticed from that moment onwards. Did it have the effect with Lex? No. I don't think so. You can still booze it up.

I don't think so. Lex goes hard. I'm sure he's. We went to Andrew Schultz's wedding with Lex. Yeah. And then we had a float. We flew with Whitney Cummings, was doing a gig in Vegas. And we said, we'll go with you.

So it was me and my wife and Whitney and Lex, we flew to Vegas. Yeah. And then we hung out with David Gagins. I called him up. I was like, come meet us at the hotel. Was he party? No. No.

No. He and Lex were doing push-ups. They were doing drunk. Lex was drunk. And David wasn't. Uh-huh. Lex wanted to have a push-up competition. With Gagins.

With Gagins. That's amazing. I mean, but that's why he's Lex, right? At the encore. Because he's willing to try everything. Yeah. Oh, he's an animal. I mean, the fact that push up competition with David Gagins.

He's just silly. That's hysterical. He's quite a character of that, Lex. He told me he's going to Dagestan to train. He's going to go to Dagestan and train with like Khabib's team. Yeah. Good Lord, dude. You're like 42.

How old is he? Lex's got to be in his 40s. But early 40s. I think he's still very young. Yeah, but like you're going to go there and. trained with savages. How old is Khabibb? Well, Khabibb's retired, but he's

probably 35, if I had a guess. You know, somewhere around there. Yeah. You know? But it's a different thing. He's the, let's talk now. Yeah. Let's talk now.

Well, he's training those guys now. He's training, you know, Islamakachev and Umar and Nirmikamatov, his cousin. He's training some of the best guys alive. He's running a camp down to dad. Because he's kind of like, so did he, it seemed like, at least I don't, like I wasn't really following his career, but it seemed like he came in like an assassin, did some big stuff. Well, his dad died. Okay.

His dad died during COVID. Okay. And after his dad died, he promised his mother that he was going to stop fighting. Got it. Yeah. His dad was his trainer. You know, his dad was a legendary, legendary trainer. and trained Islam, trained Khabib.

And when he died, Kabib made a promise to his mother. He fought Justin Kachie, beat him, defended his title, and that was it. Done. But, I mean, he's very well regarded now for his accomplishments in fighting, right? One of the greatest of all time.

Yeah. I mean, there's an argument of who the greatest of all time is. It's very subjective. Sure. But he's certainly in the conversation. Yeah. You know, of, he's one of. I don't think there is a, maybe John

John Jones is the greatest of all time just based on his accomplishments and also undefeated, but also the time that he's been. I mean John won a world title at 23 and is still like up until he relinquished his heavyweight title recently. He's 36, 37 now. No one's beating him. Crazy. That is wild. No one's how to run like that.

That's insane. How big is it? How big is he? John's a heavyweight. John, I think, is 6.3 or 6.4. You know, and now he's about 240-ish, but he used to fight at 205. That was his main weight class. That's some crazy.

Yeah, and so, you know, the conversation of who is the greatest of all time. In my book, Mighty Mouse is in that conversation, too. Who's a mighty mouse? Mighty Mouse is Demetreys Johnson. He was a flyweight. The problem is he was a very small guy, and so a lot of people disregard the smaller guy. the smaller guys in that conversation, but skill-wise, in terms of the expression

of mixed martial arts excellence, I put Mighty Mouse in his prime right up there with everybody. Do you think that, now, your arms are significantly bigger than mine, and I feel like the guys who are good at striking have smaller arms. Mike Tyson, giant arms.

Giant arms, there you go. Yeah, that's not it. Don't you feel like you're swinging around some weight? Well, you are, but you also have a lot more power behind it? Yeah, yeah, so when you do connect, that's just It's conditioning, you know, like the whole thing of swing. It's like did you develop those arms just doing bicep curls? Yeah.

Or did you develop those arms doing functional things? Like constant training that gives you muscle endurance. You know, it all depends. But if you see like a big, bulky bodybuilder guy, yeah, that's not good. No, but for like our level where we're still athletic and stuff, I'm going, but man, I don't want to put on more, I want to get stronger, but I don't want to put on mass. Yeah, I don't do really anything to try to put weight on. Yeah. I don't lift anything heavier than 70 pounds.

So many dudes just want to look big. Yeah, I don't do anything like that. Like I said, the heaviest thing I lift is my body weight. You know, I do a lot of body weight stuff. I do a lot of chin-ups and dips, and sometimes I do it with a vest, you know. And I do, you know, but with kettlebells, like the heavy, occasionally I'll throw around a 90-pound kettlebell, but the heaviest I really train with is 70. Yeah. But that's plenty.

But I don't, like I said, I don't train for size. I just train for function. strength and function, yeah. Yeah, it has to me, it's silly. If I don't have range of motion and function, like, what am I doing? I don't, yeah, I'm a martial artist. Like, my whole thing is to being able to use my body. Yeah.

It's not to make it look like I can use it. I'd rather be smaller and more functional than bigger and just look like a big goofy toad. Yeah, I bulk too easily. I actually try to put on this way. I only do. Yeah, I mean, we're Italian Irish. I mean, come on. You get thick.

Yeah, you get thick quick. Yeah. You got to watch the pasta. Long line of people. Long line of thick people. Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Can I take a quick? Yeah, yeah. We'll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen. You've been murdering it. Like, you've been to have just tons and tons of people. Do you do them every day? I just keep, I mean, it's not any different pace than before.

Yeah. It's usually four a week. It seems, it's just, I feel, you know, maybe it's because I'm in the jungle for a few weeks and then I'll, like, come back and look, and I'm like, whoa. Whoa. Yeah. Like Johnny Knoxville and Matt Damon and like bang, bang, bang, bang. The key is just keep going.

Yeah. You know, like you've run a thousand miles, right, but you didn't run a thousand miles in a day. Yeah. You know, you run 10 a day and then days go on and on and on. It's incredible, though. You get to meet everybody. You meet a lot of people. Yeah.

You definitely develop a better understanding of human beings. Because, you know, you're limited by the amount of human beings you interact with, your scope, your understanding of people. The more you can talk to, the more different people, the more you get a different sense. Yeah, well, you're in a very unique. I mean, again, I always go back to the bee lady. Remember that? Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

She's cool. Yeah. And then you have people like Knoxville on and you guys are talking about when he gets, when he got hit by the bull. I was always wondering if that was real. And then I remember the first time I came in here was asking you and Jamie, I was going, the one question was the David Blaine thing. Because he had you shove that thing through.

I was like, come on. Yeah, that was real. I was going, come on, they got it. That can't be. Nope, that was real. Yeah. I mean, because I did it once and I hit a nerve. And he had to restart it, right?

Yeah, he may be back out and shove it right through. But it's not a trick, you know. It's just pain. Like, I could do that. If I wanted to do that, I could do that. I could shove a needle through my arm. How bad do you want it? I don't want to do that.

Yeah. I don't understand why I would do that. And I feel like that's a little bit of what Knoxville was saying where he was like, look, he's like, I got a response. And he's like, this is what I started doing. You know, and it's like one way or the other, how you're going to get the attention? I mean, that's what brought him to the dance is just getting hurt all the time. But when he told me he had been knocked unconscious 16 times.

And then the last one, that's really bad. And then the last one was the bull one that he landed on his head and he was depressed for months and he had to get on medication. I am very averse to head injuries, which is kind of hypocritical because I'm a combat sports commentator. It's weird. And I've also been hitting the head a bunch of times. But I just think it's really fucking bad for you overall. I stopped sparring when I was in my late 20s, really, kickboxing sparring. Yeah.

And then I did it a little bit when I was supposed to fight Wesley Snipes. I went back and started sparring again. Did you fight Wesley Snipes? No. Wesley Snipes was... It was in my mid-30s. I was like this is the last chance I get to do something like this. And then I got contacted by Kenner.

Campbell McLaren, who was one of the producers of the early UFC. He's like, this is going to sound crazy. But Wesley, he was in tax problems. He wound up going to jail for tax evasion. Apparently, he had some crazy guy who was telling him, you know, you don't have to pay taxes. You know, there's those guys that are like, what do they call them, sovereign citizens? Is that what they call them? There's a lot of people that give really bad advice, you know.

And they got in with someone like Wesley Snipes. Uh-huh. And, you know, they tell you, like, they can't prosecute. cute you it's not in the constitution and he believed it because he didn't have access to other people i never talked to wesley i don't know i don't have anything against him you sure he just wasn't scared to fighting you so he made up this whole story no i think wesley also might have been embarking on a journey of cocaine oh which gives you a very distorted idea of what you can and can't do everything yeah you think you can do everything i don't know if that's the case i think it might

have been just well he's a very legitimate martial artist i mean wesley if you look at his like skills like from the movie Blade and yeah like he's a really good martial artist he knows how to fight yeah you kind of have to be to do those movies yeah yeah um but my thought was just I'm gonna grab him and choke the life out of him like he's gonna stop me

yeah like also I know how to stand up like I was awesome it was a kickboxer that would have been awesome if you could uh if you could fight one person dead or alive full fight I don't want to do that I wouldn't need no the problem with it it really but like theoretically not you as Joe Rogan the dad and like just Joe It would not be one person.

What it would be is start fighting again. It would be fight whoever. The whole thing would be competing. But obviously I'm 58. That's never going to happen now. I'm saying like, but like Wesley Snipes, it's like, you know, you say like, oh, I'd want to fight. Well, I just thought it would be an adventure.

Yeah. And I trained for like six months. I was training with Rob Kamen, who was a legendary kickboxing, a Dutch kickboxing champion. So he was my kickboxing coach. And so I was training with him in the mornings and I was training jiu-jitsu at night. It was hard. It was really hard. I was doing it for six months. I was trained twice a day for six months. It was really brutal. And I was so tired. I was tired all the time. And that's where you got those leg kicks that you were teaching George St. Pierre? Nah, I learned how to do that when I was a kid. Now, my question is now he's such a legendary MMA guy. Like, he was, did he not have? Well, I was a Taekwondo specialist.

Okay. You know, and I was a multiple-time state champion in Taekwondo, and I won a bunch of national tournaments. And I was really good. I was really good at Taekwendo. Like, I had fought at a very high level, and I have a lot of really good instruction that I got from. I got very lucky. And I stumbled upon a school in Boston called the J. Hunt Kim Taekwondo Institute. They just randomly walked in the door one day, and it turned out to be one of the best Taekwondo schools in the world.

And so I had trained with some of the very best people in the world just by fortune. And I was physically gifted. I was very lucky in a lot of ways, a lot of natural power. And I learned technique, which is the most important thing, like perfect technique. And so when it was funny, it was because it came about because of John. Donaheher. I had a conversation with John Donaheher who was George's Jiu-Jitsu coach who's maybe the greatest martial arts coach in the world, maybe of all time, really legitimately, like a brilliant man. He was a philosophy major from

Columbia who got, I think he was a professor for a bit, but then he got obsessed with Jiu-Jitsu and was just teaching Jiu-Jitsu and training Jiu-Jitsu and sleeping on the mats and like literally. Literally. Literally teaching all day and training all day and sleeping on the mats. But a brilliant man and we were having dinner one night and he's like George needs some help with the finer points of the spinning back kick do you know anyone who can help him and I said this is going to sound crazy yeah I go but I have like the best spinning back kick you're ever going to see in the fucking life I go I know it sounds crazy because I'm a comedian I go find a bag I could show you

yeah I can show you what I could do and then I brought there's a video of me oh I saw it okay The sound is imprinted in my mind. George, this is when we're at Legends, Legends MMA in L.A., which is where I trained. It was where Eddie Bravo had 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu. And, you know, I go, okay, let's go downstairs to the Muay Thai part and I'll show you. And then I kicked the bag and he's like, mine, what the fuck, can I film this? Milt. And he's filmed with a flip phone, which is crazy.

Like, that's how long ago this was. That's crazy. I don't know, it was probably 2005 or something like that. I had hair. And it was funny because it was like this thing. It's like, because I don't do it. Even back then, it wasn't like I was training in kickboxing. I wasn't training in Taekwondo.

It was just, I just still had it in me. Yeah. You still, do you keep it? Did it today. You did it today? Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

That was an impressive video and you just go, Jesus, he's, if he's showing this to George St. Pierre, How good is he at this thing? It's like, you know. I used to be really good. Yeah. I believe you. But I realized when I was like 21.

Well, I realized when I was 19 that I was going to have to stop. Because I fought in California. I was living in Boston at the time. I was traveling all over the country and fighting. And I fought in the nationals in California against this guy who is the Illinois State champion. And I knocked him out really bad. It was really bad.

I hit him with a wheel kick in the head. And my heel was sore. for days afterwards. Like I had a hard time walking from his fucking head. Yeah. And he never got up. He went down face first, was snoring. And back then my thing was, if I knocked anybody out, I would just act like it was no big deal.

I was just turning to where I walk away. No celebration. I just walk away like that. I'm going to do that to all you guys. Yeah. And so I walked away and then I turned to my friend Junk Sick, who was my corner guy. I said, is he getting up? He's not getting up.

He's not going to get up. He's out and and then they took him and they put him in a They took him and they put him in a stretcher and then they were taking care of him and for like a half hour He was still unconscious. Yeah, and then they took him to the hospital. I have no idea what happened to him But I realized it was so bad it was because he came forward So what happened was he did you know what a switch kick is? No Switch kick is you're standing with your left leg forward and you switch legs and you come come like with the left kicks you think he's repositioning and then he's moving forward

being telegraphed it and it's his left leg so I saw that his left leg was coming this way so I spun with my right heel and I hit him in the head as he was running forward so it's like multiple the force itself of a wheel kick is so powerful yeah and then when you're running into a wheel kick it's like two cars driving at each it's like getting hit with a baseball bat that fucking you know, Mark McGuire swinging. Yeah. It's crazy how much power there is in it. Because it's your legs.

Your legs carry you around all day. And the torque of your whole body, you're whipping around, and you're hitting it with the heel. And, you know, there's no padding on your heel. And it's not right. I hit him right on the fucking cheek, like right on the side of his head. He went out. And then I came back to my instructor.

And he wasn't there at the tournament. I went back to Boston. He's like, he goes, I heard you had a really good. good knockout and I said yeah I said I was it was scary I go I thought he was dead he goes sometimes they die and then he walked away from me and I was like fuck man yeah sometimes they die I'm like that's me I'm like I'm and I had no health insurance I was 19 I was broke I was training for the I wanted to be on the Olympic team yeah that was two years from there and I lost a lot of my steam at that moment because I was like what am I doing I'm fighting for free yeah

I don't have any money. I have no insurance. And I'm doing this thing. And I knew back then I was getting some brain damage for sure. Yeah. And then I started kickboxing, like, right after that. And then I really kind of lost my feeling for Taekwondo because I realized it was so limited. You know, that like when I was sparring with kickboxers, I was really, I got my hands are so limited.

So then I started working with this guy, Joe Lake, who was a boxing coach. And that's when I was doing a lot of boxing and a lot of kickboxing. And I was like, man, I'm getting my brains beat in. And I don't know why I'm doing this. And I'm like, there's no professional. It wasn't like the UFC existed at the time. I got offered a kickboxing fight for $500. And I was like, $500.

So for $500, I lose my amateur status. I can never fight in the Olympics. And there's no money in it as a professional. I'm like, what is my future? Am I going to be one of the? And then I'm new guys in the gym. that I used to train with like when I was 19 and then by the time I was like 21 I was seeing brain damage in these guys Yeah, I was seeing them slur in their words

Yeah, forgetting what they were saying repeating themselves the weird thing is they they'll tell you a story Yeah, and then they'll tell you the same story Yeah, like two minutes later and like he just fucking told me that story like they don't remember They don't remember anything and and now but now now now now George St. Pierre is a good example of someone I feel like he made it out of fighting before Yes, like he looks very healthy he's fine. He's fine. He's fine he's fine he's fine He's fine. But he's, you know, he's a very intelligent guy. He also does a lot of things to keep his mind very active.

He plays chess, you know, and he's very, like, proactive about it. Yeah, but he seems like even like I've just seen him on social media where he's like, hey, guys, this is how I do. Like, he's just like a very, seems like a very positive fun, you know, does not seem. He's the best case scenario for both another guy in the argument for the all-time great. Yeah. For an all-time great MMA champion who has a success. and happy life outside of it. Didn't end up with the shakes.

No. No, he's fine. I mean, I've hung out with him a bunch. I've hung out with him recently. He was great. He came to the comedy club. He's actually playing my friend James McCann. They were playing chess in the green room at the comedy mothership. It was so cool.

We're filming it. The last time I came, I think he had been in there the night before. And I was like, ah, that would have been a trip to meet him. He's amazing. But he's such a sweetheart of a guy. You would never imagine that he's this fucking killer inside the Octagon. Yeah. He's such a sweet.

guy. But it's just like for him it was just this incredible challenge and he was really good at it and he just figured out a way to express himself that way and you know as a legend. Like I don't imagine that he was big on like the trash talk before fights and everything right? He was

probably just like look where he was going to... No there was no trash talk he was very respectful. Unless someone was disrespectful to him and you know and even then he wasn't trash talking. No he always seemed like he was cool. He was just doing his thing. No he was He's one of the best representatives of the sport of all time, if not the best.

No, I like that. He's classy. He's crazy. Outside the Octagon. Yeah. Never, you know, was never drunk driving or beating people up and, you know, just a great guy. And if I would have to tell people who he is. Like he would, he's like, who's your friend?

I was like, what do you think he does? Yeah. What do you think my friend does? And like, I don't know. He seems cool. How big is he? He's one of the, uh, he's about five, nine, five, five, five, five, 10 maybe and now he probably weighs 180 pounds, 185 pounds maybe, fought at 170.

Okay. You know, he's not like a scary looking person. I'm like, that's one of the greatest fighters. Yeah. It's ever walked the face of the earth. Like, no way. I'm like, yeah. I mean, he's like, hey, how you doing, man?

What's going on? He doesn't seem rough. He's like jovial. No. Yeah, he's a sweetheart. No, he's not trying to intimidate. Like, you know, Kabib looks like he's, you know. He's really smart.

I mean, he's really, he's always like watching documentaries and reading books. He's fascinated by ancient history and dinosaurs and really into aliens. He loves dinosaurs. No, it's just crazy, man. You've gotten to this. You've met everyone. Do you ever have Jane Goodall on here? No, I did not, unfortunately.

I wanted to make that happen. I wanted to make that happen. She's gone, right? She just died. I wanted to talk to her about Bigfoot because she was convinced that Bigfoot was real. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was convinced that Bigfoot was real.

Yeah, yeah, she did this interview. Find me. Of the curtain of it. Yeah, yeah, we'll find it. Jamie, see, you find that. I, not that I don't believe you, but I just don't find Jane Goodall. I know, I know, I know. I was stunned.

I was like, what? And this is by the time I had been convinced that Bigfoot was fake. Yeah, I'm in that camp. There's camera traps. But this is the camp. There was an animal that co-existed with human beings for sure that was called gigantopithecus. Yes. You know the whole story.

Yeah. So gigantapithecus, they found bones in an abeynithicus. apothecary shop in China in the 1920s or 30s. And an anthropologist found these molars and said, where did you get this? These are primate molars and they're fucking enormous. Yeah. Like whatever this thing was was absolutely huge. So they went to the site where they got it.

They found mandible bones that indicated it was bipedal. So it was an upright walking primate that was eight to ten feet tall. Like what the fuck? is this. And so I'm sure you've seen the images of what a gigantalpithecus looked like in comparison to a human being. It's in the orangutan family. And so that thing existed and also existed in Asia, right? So you look at the Bering Strait and you look at the Bering Land Bridge that we know existed during the Ice Age. And so we know that humans migrated from Siberia into North America. We know that for a fact. You know one of the reasons that's we know that for a fact? Because Mormons were convinced that Native Americans were part of the lost tribe of Israel. Yeah. So some rich Mormon guy did a DNA test on Native Americans and found out that they emanated from Siberia. Yeah. And so it was incorrect. So we know humans came down from there. Why wouldn't other animals?

Sure. We know they did. We know short-faced bear, a bunch of different animals that they find their bones in Alaska. and they know that they probably made their way down through North America. It just makes logical sense that if you have a variety of different megafauna, that probably one of those primates or a bunch of those primates lived in the Pacific Northwest, which is the area where they would be, right? And then you have incredibly dense forest, right? Yeah. So Jane Goodall won't rule out the existence of it.

But no, no, no, find the video where she says, I'm convinced. I'm convinced. Yeah, because she was talking. I didn't seriously say that. Oh, no, no, I've heard. I come on. Okay, just find it because it exists. It doesn't exist.

I can't listen to the videos. No, no, no, go to video. Dude, she would have been awesome. You should, I'm so sad. Jane get all on how Bigfoot might be real. That's it right there. Put the headphones on. Headphones.

Here we go. I climbed into the hills. Oh, there's Jane. This was where I was meant to be. I wanted to talk to you about something that some would say is fictional, but you would say, hold up, we don't know for certain, and that's Bigfoot. Everybody talks to me about it. I'm romantic.

I would like Bigfoot to exist. I've met people who swear they've seen Bigfoot. And I think the interesting thing is every single continent, there is an equivalent of Bigfoot or Sasquatch. There's the Yeti, there's the Yari in Australia, there's the Chinese wild man, and on and on and on. And, you know, I've had stories from people who you have to believe them. So there's something. I don't know what it is.

I've always open-minded. What about other mythological creatures? Pause for a second. So they're saying that to her. He's saying that to her, and she said that in reaction to a previous interview that she did. In the previous interview that she did, she said, I'm convinced that it exists. I don't know. Well, you know, you've got to realize this is a lady that lived with primates in an inaccessible area where there's very few human beings and she had these interactions with them.

I don't agree with her, but I think that it existed at one point in time. One of the other reasons why I think it existed is that different Native American tribes put this into perplexity. How many different Native American terms were there for a hairy wild man or Bigfoot? And I believe there's more than 80. That's wild. Now, they don't have a lot of mythological creatures in Native American culture. Yeah. Right.

And so in different tribes, right? But they have a name for this hairy, wild, giant man that lives in the woods. A wookie. Yeah. They also have the other thing that's really fascinating. is giants. There is a lot of ancient cultures have stories about giants and Native American tribes have ancient stories of giant red-haired men, which you know, God, it's in the Bible, it's in a bunch of, okay, 40 to 50 separate terms across different languages and regions.

Harry Wild Giant Man, no single agreed upon count, but dozens of distinct Native American names for Harry Wild, Giant Man Banks easily over 40 to 50 separate terms across different languages and regions. Interesting. I still, I would love to see the clip eventually of Jane Goyle saying I believe in Bigfoot because she's saying there, she's like, I'm open to the idea of it.

She's saying that and as the reason why he's asking that is because he had, exactly. Because he had seen the previous interview. See if you can find another interview with her talking about Bigfoot. She was, she was awesome. She was awesome. She, she's the reason I have a career.

Really? Her being awesome. I always, there's two stories I tell people. If I go, first of all, because everyone goes, what's Joe Rogan like? No, it's true,

because everyone wants to know. And you're controversial. And so I always goes, the nicest fucking guy in the world. I said, the first time I came, you sent me a message and you said something about like,

hey, don't worry about a thing. Like, I'm even going to bring my dog. Like, it was very nice. It was a little pat on the back. Because you go, Jane Goodall, I went to a talk when I was like 22, something.

And I was just writing chapters of my first book, Mother of God, which didn't even have a name yet. And I had chapters in a manila envelope, and I went to a talk that Goodall was giving. And I mean, I'd been read stories and seen the black and white pictures. So this is like, you know, like Einstein, Abe Lincoln, Jane Goodall. It's a living historical figure. And so now she's talking in front of me, and I had brought these chapters and I wanted to ask her, because I'd already sent the chapters to publishers. And they'd all been like, kid, none of this is true. You know, no way did you jump on a giant anaconda. No way did you raise an anteater. They just didn't believe me.

And then I, when it was my turn after hundreds of people, I get to her and, you know, she goes, hello, she goes, takes a little picture with you. And I said, would you read these chapters? I said, I would love it because I loved your stories as a kid. And she goes, thank you. And she puts it to the side. Forty eight hours later, her staff gets in touch. And they go, Jane actually read what you gave her, loved it, and said, finish the book, get a publisher, and I will write you an endorsement. Whoa. She waved her magical wand in my direction and gave me a career.

That's so cool. And what's really great is that earlier this year, I emailed her, and it was because this book was coming out. And I, you know, I said it would be amazing to have, I mean, I said at this point, no one's, you know, the conservation, the voice of Mother Earth. And she just, you know, she just said, you know, just keep protecting the Amazon. That's your mission. She was always very, it was like, you know, Luke, believe in yourself.

It was like, you know, she was just like you, your job is to protect this forest. And it was incredible. That's amazing. And so, yeah, right, right, you know, about six months ago, I got to tell her. I was like, look, because the last time I'd spoken to her, we were protecting, I think it was like 100,000 acres. And then in the last year, we added 30,000 acres to the reserve. And so I said, you know, we're making strides forward. And she just, it was good that I got to tell her that.

And then, you know, recently we found out that she died. But what a legacy. What a legacy. What a legacy. Yeah, I mean, we know so much about primate behavior because of that woman. We so know so much about, I mean, man the toolmaker. Before her, we said there was humans that use tools. And now we know that, you know, cappucc monkeys use rocks.

We know that otters use rocks. I mean, I've seen elephants use a stick to scratch. I've seen, I've seen camera trap footage for an elephant. using a tree to knock over an electrical fence. Like, animals used fools. Oh, yeah. She was the first one. I mean, she went out there when she was, what, 20-something years old,

middle Africa, blonde girl. Crazy. And then spent the whole rest of her life. But the lesson that I take away from that is that even as famous as she was, that she was traveling 300 days a year, I mean, she'd been, you know, an icon for decades, and that she still took the time to actually read something that some kid handed to her.

That's unfathomable grace to do that. And then literally, if that didn't happen, I never would have published Mother of God. I never would have started jungle keepers. I never would have been protecting the rainforest. She empowered that. She did that with her magic. And I think that that's incredible.

That's so cool. Absolutely incredible. Did you find any other? No. I guarantee it exists. Yeah. But it's okay. You have to trust me.

I don't think she's correct. But I do think, not Bigfoot, but I do think that it's entirely possible that there is a small, hairy, primate-like, human-like primate that exists still. That's like the Hobbit people from the island of Flores. Yeah. You know, there's the thing called the Oring Pandek. Have you heard of that? No.

The Oringpandek, I think Indonesia, perhaps Vietnam, there's a bunch of places that have this creature that gets cited on multiple occasions. And they used to think of it as like just silly legend. But now because of the discovery, which was, was it in the 90s that they discovered the Hobbit people on the island of Flores? You know about that, right? I've heard of them, yeah. Yeah. Homo. And those are real.

Those are real. We have their bones. Very real. Very real. It was a very small, like, hobbit-like creature that was a type of primate that was bipedal, that was like a little tiny, hairy human being that lived at least on the island of Flores. But most likely lived in many other places as well. And there's a possibility that it still exists.

and it's not me saying this. It's like some actual anthropologists that believe that this thing might still be alive because you're dealing with incredibly small populations. But are those, I mean, are those islands so small that know, like unlike the Amazon is gigantic, but how could there be a population? They're incredibly dense, incredibly dense forest

and no one's going into. They're just down in their bushes. Right, it's like the Tasmanian tiger. I was just going to say that, like the thylacine where it's like they're just hidden. Exactly. Exactly. Like small population, like there's a lot of sightings of the thylacine, you know.

Yeah, but somehow all these sightings, it's never on a, it's never clear. No, no. That was the- It's also, there's no one there. Yeah. Here's the thing. I mean, let's pretend that you saw a Wolverine in the Montana woods, like dense Montana woods. And it's a hundred yards away.

You see it briefly for a second, get your phone. You're not going to, you might have seen it. You might have seen it traveling between trees. But, like, how are you going to get it? off your phone. You're going to have to, unless you have a Samsung where you have a really good zoom you're not going to be able to zoom in enough. You know, like you'd have to have, like, this is only a

few phones that are, yeah, you're not going to get good footage, but we know that Wolverines are real. But finding a wolverine in the woods, I've talked to God, I've talked to hundreds of men who spend a giant portion of their life in the woods, and only a few

have seen Wolverines. I would love to see a Wolverines. How about mountain lions? They're everywhere. I've only seen three of them my entire life. That's wild. But I've probably been around a hundred of them and not known it. You know, that's what, that's the reaction we got with the, the tribes was that if you look at uncontacted tribe, my whole life, you look at photos of uncontacted tribes,

it was like blurry, crappy, because who was out there was like a logger. Right. Right. Or it was somebody running. Right. And even when I saw them the first time, when I was out on a solo, I was 10 days deep in the jungle, I saw them and I ran for my life. And everyone went, you didn't see him.

I mean, I don't mind that. If I have picks or it didn't happen. Right. Right. And so with this, when we started, when we started actually showing people what we had, it was like, this has never been. It's like a vision into the stone age. Right. I mean, like really not even the Stone Age.

Not even the Stone Age. They're using stone tools. They used sharpened sticks. Yeah. I showed it to an anthropologist and he was saying, you know, Stone Age isn't necessarily accurate here. He said because they're not used. using stone. They don't have clay pots. He goes, this is something, this is, but I mean, then think about it. It's actually like a time machine because you're, you're, you're, I mean,

we're standing across the river, look, talking to these people. And it's like, you guys are a couple thousand years back. And so it's like, this is such a strange aperture into history. Maybe not even a couple. Maybe like 30, 40. Maybe. I feel like, I feel like they, I feel like, I feel like somehow to me the number seems like two. But it's like, you know, we were, we were like little tribes. Yeah, but 2,000 years ago, the Egyptian pyramids were already 2,500 years old. That's true. That's true. But I mean, again, the civilization isn't homogenous, right? Like different, different, you know. Well, obviously, there's uncontacted tribes still right now. Yes. That's what's crazy. Yeah. It's like a man with a cell phone from the future. Yeah. Filmed people that's what I'm

saying. It felt like that. It felt like this was like a back to the future moment where it's like, you know, this is, they have no idea. And my people, thinking of everyone else back home, I was like, don't realize that these people are still out there in the jungle living like this. Right, and probably in the dense, dense, dense forest, there's probably many more of them. There are many more of them. In fact, well, we, yeah, well, we were watching them out front.

There was a terrifying moment where the, we heard something behind us, and it was, which we never saw them, but the women came lightfoot in behind, and they pulled up all the yucca and the bananas, and they were raiding. And so for a second, we were like, there's an ambush. And everyone was, like, turning the shotguns away from the river. And they were like, we thought there was going to be arrows flying.

So, like, ooh. My guy, Ignacio grabbed me and, like, put me down. And we were hiding behind trees waiting for it. And it was like, no, no, no, they're just stealing all of the fruit and all of the crops. And they just raided our whole village. Wow. But I really, I really did feel like, you know, like you go, imagine what it would be like to go back and see the Comanjis. Watch them riding across the planes after the buffalo.

And it's like, we can't. But in this case, they were right there. Right. Right. And now, now that these videos are going out across the world, it's like, look, we're trying to explain to people. You know, first of all, there's a lot of those, you know exactly what kind of people are like, leave them alone. And it's like literally where the people trying to make sure that they get left alone. Like, that's our job.

Yeah, you got to ignore those folks. Yeah. Especially you. You're not the type of person that's interfering with their life at all. No. By giving them the bananas, you're literally helping them. Well, and again, I was a witness. That was happening between the tribes and the tribes.

Right, right. And so, but, you know, for all the, all the indigenous cultures that have been destroyed in the last few centuries, we can do it right for once. We can actually respect these people. If they want to come out, they can come out. If they want to adapt, they can. But they need to have forests to live in in order to make that decision. Right. And so that's where it's like, how can they make an informed decision?

How could they had how can they adapt? I mean, I think it would be very slow. I think it would be very slow. I think it would be a few more banana exchanges Maybe without the the the arrow shot afterwards and then maybe it starts to be like, okay, you guys can come here maybe maybe the the communities teach them how to grow bananas Maybe they don't want to come, but they want a few things right you know maybe they want a couple of machetes because it'll just help You know and they want to keep to themselves maybe But I mean, other than them, the thought of the most uncontacted people is North Sentinel Island. Yeah. And North Sentinel Island, the interesting part of that is one of the reasons why they're so distrustful of people is because they had been contacted in the 1800s. And it was bad.

Yeah, by a fucking pervert. There was a guy named Commander Maurice Vidal Portman, who was a like explorer slash pervert. And the reason why I say that is like, this guy had like weird. journal logs where it's like this one has testicles the size of a sparrows egg like you would dress them up like Roman soldiers and take pictures of them they kidnapped a few of them and then they gave a bunch of people the flu and a bunch of people died and so they had this immense distrust for people because of this guy and his explorations onto that island that island and other islands like it so they they don't have a written language right these people there's no evidence they have

fire. So there's this story of these, because it's incredibly wet environment. Yeah. So they, they have these stories that they probably have these oral traditions of these white people that come and fuck up everything. So when someone shows up on a boat, like there's been a few instances where people were killed. Obviously that missionary a few years back. Yeah. But not just him. There was a boat that sank there. So it washed ash ashore and sank. And they were headed to go kill those people when they were rescued. And now we've spotted them, we, people have spotted them with metal. And they believe the metal they got was salvaged from the boat.

So they got pieces of metal. Yeah. So this is the boat that shipwrecked in 1981, a cargo ship named the Primrose ran aground on the coral reef surrounding North Sentinel. The crew radioed for assistance and settled for a long wait. But in the morning they saw 50 men with bows on the beach. building makeshift boats to swim out to them and fuck them up.

Yeah, I mean, they have a severe distrust, obviously, of people. So I was on the Undaman Islands, which is right next to these. That guy, respectable lawyer on Twitter, he's the one I got the information from. He documented the whole story of, if you scroll all the way up,

he'll talk about that guy, Maurice Vidal. See, look how he dressed, that's the guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that fucking creep. Look at him. He looks like a perfect.

So he's hanging out with these guys. He was a pervert. Look at him. Look at a Louis dress. Wonderful testicles. They probably didn't want to profile. Yeah. So that's the dude.

Yeah. He's from the English Royal Navy. Yeah. Portman. Maurice Vidal, Portman. Yeah. Dude, those guys look built. Look at these guys fucking thrown.

Those guys be doing some sit-ups. Well, they're out there hustling, you know. I went to the Undamon Islands, which is right out there. That's where he originally landed. Yeah. And if you want to feel like you fell off the face of the earth, you go to the Undermont Island. First of all, beautiful.

You can only, I think if you still like this, you can only get there from the Indian city of Chennai or Calcutta, because it's an Indian territory. They limit who can travel there. And there's, I mean, there's, they've brought elephants there because they didn't used to have bulldozers and stuff. So the British brought elephants by boat,

and there's these old archival photos of them lifting off of like pirate ships, lifting elephants on the rigging and then putting them, and now the Andaman islands have elephants. Whoa. And there's still people riding around on the elephants, you know, like moving trees off

the road and doing things. That's crazy. But when you go from one place to the other place, exactly what you said, because they don't want human safaris, because they want to protect these indigenous people, you have to go with a police escort to cross the island because you have to go through and I meant the police watch you like a hawk. And I, you know, I take a picture of everything. I take 300 pictures a day on my phone.

And, uh... Look at that. No, see if you can see elephants being like a hawk. lifted off of ships. There's a bunch of pictures here that are crazy. They're pulling logs. I mean, but this is, you know, elephants moving logs happens all the time, but there's literally a picture of the elephants up on the riggings.

Wow. And, uh, but man, you drive through areas where there's just these tiny little people with bows and arrows and they're still out there. Um, I, I got to go swimming with an elephant there. Yeah. Wow. That's so dope. Look at the elephant swimming.

How cool is that? Yeah. Wow. That's fucking awesome. There. There you go. Whoa, that's them. Lifting the elephants.

Like, what the fuck am I doing in the air? Yeah, look at that. You have to blindfold them? No, he's not blindfolded. He's just painted. You know, they probably should have. But back then, well, maybe the elephant would freak out. Elephants, boy, it takes so much for an elephant to freak out and fucking kill people.

There's a horrible video of this guy's abusing an elephant. Like, he's a trainer and he keeps walking the elephant. And then the elephant goes, that's enough. and just stomps him into a pancake. Yep. Or that video I sent you with the tiger that went to the tiger. Which one? Where the tiger malls the guy and you're like, that's terrible.

He kills him. And then the second shot is they show the guy and he's still alive, but he's got slashes down to his skull. Just don't. I mean, these animals are, you just don't push them. Yeah. Especially not an elephant. Well, human beings just want to fuck with everything. That's part of why we're on every fucking square.

inch of the earth practically. We want to fuck with everything. We're the weirdest animal ever because we're on every fucking continent. We're everywhere. There's not another animal like us. No. And, you know, all of us came from Africa,

which is even nuttier, right? So we emanated from Africa and just spread out all over the world as soon as we figured out how to float. As soon as we figured out how to hike and how to wear warm clothes, we just kept moving. And now are we going to figure out how to not destroy the systems that keep us alive.

Right. And now we're talking about doing the same thing on other planets. We're talking about it. But way before we start worrying about other planets, I want to make sure that this planet works. I mean, I'm just, I'm so, I'm just, it drives me crazy how quickly everyone's going.

I just in the, in the, when I come back to society, so quickly we're like, it's on people's minds. They're talking about this stuff. And I'm going, guys, the ocean is filled with trash. Like the Amazon is burning. I'm like, can we just, fix this. And there's areas where we have. I mean, you know this. Like they brought bulls back to Yellowstone. Like New York's waters are getting cleaner. The humpbacks are coming back. But everyone's so, I mean, but we haven't actually, when we get to Mars, talk about it all day. But it's like until then, I just feel like we are so overwhelmed with serious problems here and the last chance in history to fix those problems. So there's an amazing opportunity. And I feel like people are so like this modern nothingness that people feel. where it's like, oh, it's the end of times.

And it's like, dude, this is the most exciting time. You can fly everywhere. You got information at your fingertips. There's more people than ever before working to make good in the world to help people, to save animals, to restore ecosystems. And it's like, so I get confused when I come back from what I feel is like battle.

And I'm on this mission for 20 years to do this one thing. And people are like, I'm just scrambled and delirious. And I'm like, go outside. Yeah, get up your phone. Put your phone down. Go to do this one. the mountains. That John Muir thing, you know, to the mountains, the mountains are calling it, and I must go. Go, go. Close your phone. Go touch grass for a while. Actually, that was one of the

favorite. I forget what I, I posted a video of me with this huge anaconda around me, and I'm holding her head as a 20-foot anaconda. One of the comments was this guy, he was like, dude, you've touched enough grass. Go back inside. Go watch Netflix. Yeah, he's like, that's enough. You're the opposite. You've got too far. You've got too far. You've touched too much grass. Interesting use of free will. What is fascinating to me when people were trying to save things and by saving things, they don't realize that they're actually fucking things out far worse than they're saving them.

Well, there's a good example. I think it's the Mojave Desert where they just now, California and all their infinite wisdom, decided to build this immense solar farm out in the desert. I saved it. I'll send it to you, Jamie. It is so crazy. So they decided to build this immense solar farm. It turns out this solar farm because it's got mirrors that, like, point towards these solar panels.

It's incinerating 6,000 birds a year, incinerating 6,000 birds a fucking year, which is like, what does that even mean? Like, how is that even? So it's a death ray. A fucking death ray. God, I know I saved it. Where did I save it? I got it, though. Oh, you got it?

I mean, I don't know which article you had. It's okay. Pull up any of the articles. But, I mean, when you look at it, it heats up to a thousand fucking degrees. The Mojave Desert. Yeah. Well, they just shut it down. So it's concentrated sunlight.

Solar power towers use mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver, creating extremely high temperature. The problem is they're fucking killing birds, like a motherfucker. Just like those ugly windmill farm. Those things are, I blight on the face of the earth. When you drive to South Texas, a buddy might have some ranch down there. Look at that. A Mojave Desert Solar Plant kills 6,000 birds a year. I think that too.

That's for 2016. They just recently shut it down. They've spent billions on this fucking thing. And it's not generating nearly an amount of solar power that they were hoping. It turns birds into fucking fireballs, like instantly. But when you drive down to South Texas, they have these, that's what it looks like. Isn't that crazy? Look at that. Isn't that nuts?

Yeah, we got to stop spreading out. We're so stupid. We got to stop spreading out. But that's like, who said that's a good idea? And counterintuitively, nuclear power is like the best for the environment. Yeah. Which is people think, no, three mile island, no. They got to just call it something else.

If you just, if you just rebrand it, stop calling it nuclear. Well, they just have to realize that the old, like the Fukushima plants and they fuck the whole area up forever. Those are old. That's a plant that, I think, went live in the 1970. Like you know the new technology you can have solar power and it's or excuse me nuclear power and it's clean But I think people are scared of the word nuclear. I'm saying if you came out and you called it like a something something plant They got to get over it we got to get over that that hump you know but that's it's just Human beings but this is constant battle right there's a battle of good and evil yes there is and there's also a battle of ignorance and information

And it goes back and forth. And the only way to educate people is sometimes you have these brave people that are responding to this intense amount of ignorance. And they have to go out there and say, no, that's not it. It's this. And this is huge societal narrative, this huge cultural narrative that they have to fight against. Which is almost impossible to undo. I mean, when you realize there's something that everybody has wrong. Right.

Or you realize that there's something that, I mean, the amount, because then you got to get the message to everybody. How do you do that? Right. Then you got to make them care about it. Right. And I mean, it's just, it's wild to. But that's us. That's the battle.

There's always this, like, I think you need those things in order for us to push progress. You need something to fight against. Like, think about where you would be if you didn't have this thing to push against. Like, it's not that the thing is good, but it is bad, but it creates good people that push against it. And this is the constant battle of the human spirit. We're always engaged in this battle to write wrongs and to figure things out and to make things better that are bad. And then to realize that, oh, we're making it way worse. Someone has to come along and course correct.

And then, you know, it's usually a few brave people that are pushing back against this tidal wave of negativity and ignorance. The tidal wave of negativity is wild. The grief is just, it's like it's like a poison peddled by the darkness. It's like they want you sad. and disoriented. And I just feel like so many people now, when I come back, they're down-trodden by the, just the buzz of the news and everything.

And I'm like, listen, like, choose something that you care about and work on it. Yeah. Or just pick that one thing. Be the good you wanna see in the world. Be the good you wanna see in the world. And it's like, I'm in this unique position because I'm contacted now all day long

by people that wanna help us protect the rainforest, that people who wanna use that blueprint to do it somewhere else. and we're on the cusp of doing this to me. So I'm surrounded by, I get a lot of positive people with innovations, people with ideas, people. I mean, even, you know, everyone says, oh, why can't the billionaires? And it's like, we get people who have money and they come in and they're like, I'll help you get that piece of land. That'll be protected.

So I get reinforced all the time people go, the world's going to shit. And I'm like, the world's amazing. People are helping. Yeah. You know? And it's like, I've seen so much good done. It really is all what you're focusing on. If you're focusing on that.

That's the very unique thing about today is that you're inundated with so much information. And we generally tend to gravitate towards the things that are terrifying and the things that are dangerous that scare us. And so you're paying attention to the news of literally 8 billion people. Which is not natural. It's not normal. We're supposed to know about our village and maybe the next village. Right. And so like that's one thing.

You know, I had a friend, you know, did you hear about the first? flood that happened in Bangladesh. I was like, what do you, you know, my sympathy, but like, there's, there's always a flood happen. The world is gigantic. There's eight billion people. Right. And so like, you know, there's only so much you can pay attention to. So much you can pay attention to. But if you have a phone, all the bad stuff is coming into your pocket. Yeah. And I think a lot of the, it's funny because a lot of the people, like the adults are, people are worried about the kids. I think the adults are worse. Yeah. A lot of them. Yeah. And a lot of them, they're searching for meaning.

And so they find meaning in activism or in pseudo activism and yelling about things online. And then maybe going out into the street and screaming at people. And they think that that gives meaning to their life. You know, there's a lot of people that just feel like really lost. And this strange concrete culture, concrete and electronic culture that we've created, it doesn't give you the fulfillment that the natural world does. I mean, I'm sure it's one of the draws that you have to the jungle is that living out there in nature is wildly fulfilling because it's normal. It's like it fills in all the slots that you have evolved to have like as a human being.

we have always lived in coordination with nature up until fairly recently. You know, if human beings have been alive in this farm for half a million years, how long have we been in cities? In cities? How long have we been in even agriculture, a few thousand years? Temperature controlled rooms. Yeah, it's crazy. With a little noise box constantly stressing us out.

Also, Wi-Fi and EMF signals. I was just reading this fucking crazy thing. Have you paid attention to this, Jamie, about the 49ers? About San Francisco? Is that fucking nuts? It could be, yeah, go ahead. They think it's real. So there's a disproportionate amount of severe catastrophic injuries that come out of San Francisco,

and their training facility is right outside this power station. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, way more Achilles tendon blows out, blown out, way more knees blown out, way more catastrophic ligament and tendon ruptures. And they've been talking about it since, like, the play. Players started talking about it in like 2012, I believe. And people like, oh, that's nonsense. And now the stats are in and you're looking at the amount of injuries that come from this area.

It's like it's not normal. No. And so you think what? They're getting weakened by the water, by the electricity. Electricity. Yeah, by the EMF signal. I mean, it's like, EMF signals we know disrupt human beings. But to what extent?

Like, to what extent does LED lights and to what extent? Is it minimal? Do you feel it? Does it have a long-term effect? Does it take forever until it actually compounds? But they're looking at the data from this one training facility. So you can find something on it. There's a lot of stories have come out this week about it

where people are starting to gather up all the data. And they're like, hey, this is not normal. No. Like this is like a much higher percentage of severe injuries from this one camp, which doesn't make any sense. Well, it's like the Aaron Brokovich thing where it's like you find a place where a lot of people are getting the same kind of cancer.

And it's like, there's a reason. So what does it say here at the top of the article? What's the article say? Just about the whole thing. It explains. So is it true? What is this from? How long ago was this?

Two weeks ago. Yes, two days ago. Okay. The injury conspiracy theory, and is it true? So what is this? This is USA Today, which is like, hmm. You know? I just skipped ahead to the...

The so-called mechanism, not been established. Many of the experiments are contradictory. Many of the experiments have exposures that either don't relate specifically to 50-60-hertz magnetic fields. It's a topic that will likely resurface or any major injuries during the Super Bowl

at Levi Stadium February 8th in Santa Clara. Is Santa Clara near there? That's where they play the game. That's where they play the game. But is that the training facility? The idea is that it's near the training facility. Right. And I don't, that's again, this is...

So that's where the electrical substation is. and there's the field. I mean, cut the shit. Whoa. That can't be good. So it's literally radiating onto them. That can't be good. But I don't think it's going to affect the game.

You know what I'm saying? I think it's like being there all the time, practicing there all the time is what's going to weaken their bodies. Without checking, I don't know, unless that's where they practice, I don't see a large practice facility. Well, look at the fucking multi-use fields. I know they don't practice on those fields generally. Right, but they use the fields.

I mean, they must practice there. It could just be a park. That's why I got to look up where they practice. Right, right, right, right. Daily Rams don't practice next to Sofi stadium. I can't imagine it's good for you. I mean, there's also, okay, we'll find this out. Is there any truth to power lines and people living under power lines having increased rates of cancer?

Because I've heard that that's true. Yeah. I mean, in environmental college, that was, there's numerous giant class action lawsuits for people that were living under high-tension power lines. and I mean I actually knew someone who I mean I've been to the places where I did for my senior project I was doing where we went to the areas where they were fracking. Remember that documentary where they were lighting the water on fire? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gasland. Yeah.

Great documentary. Yes. Yeah. And those people were screaming. They're trying to get the attention to say this is not good. And of course the companies come in and they go, we'll give you $2 million before you deal at us drill on your land. And these are people that could need the money. Right.

And then a few years later, all of their kids have cancer. Pull that back up again, please? So we put it into our sponsor perplexity. There's some limited evidence, a small increase in childhood leukemia risk, very close high voltage power lines, but overall the lick is weak, not clearly causal, and typically residential exposures are considered within safety guidelines. See, the thing is, like, who is... One of the things about perplexity or any large language model is you've got to get the information

from online and who's publishing this information. So it's like there's only so much of it that's available, but possibly carcinogenic is a weak category. So it says international agency for research and cancer classifies extremely low frequency magnetic fields like those from power lines as possibly carcinogenic to humans, mainly because of the childhood leukemia data. Fuck that, dude. That's wild. Yeah, just fuck. I would never buy a house near them. What are you looking for?

I just realized that is. It's a molar. Yeah. I just realized what that is. This is from my buddy John Reese from Alaska. That's that guy. Yeah. That's incredible.

Yeah, actually, no, this one is from colossal. So that's a, this is a company that's bringing the William Mammoth back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those guys. This piece is from my buddy John Reese. That's a molar. That's cool. Yeah. That's a tooth.

That's gorgeous. But that's how many of them they have that they can turn into art. That they're just starting to make it into art. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have a pool queue that has. woolly mammoth ivory in it. Dude, look at that. Look at that texture.

And that is so beautiful. Something 10,000 years ago, used that to mash down vegetables. Wow, that is a gorgeous piece. You know about the Boneyard, right? Yeah, no, you were the first time you told me all about it. Incredible place. Shout out to my boy John Reeves.

Yeah, that, that, I would love to go there. Oh, you should, dude. I would love to. That's just so fascinating. Yeah, the colossal guys have been up there. Quite a few people have been up there to explore. I think either Grant, no, Randall, did Randall, did Randall Carlson go up there? I think he's either gone there or is going there.

Yeah, you got to make the intro for me. I would love to go see that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll set that up. He's always trying to get me to go out there too. I just don't have the time. But what a phenomenal play. By the way, he's found a new site. He's found a new site up there that has more bones.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you're talking about an area that's only about four to six acres that he's been exploring. And he's got others. Deposits, right? It's like a massive. deposits, thousands of animals, including animals that weren't even supposed to be there. Yeah. That's so cool. Crazy.

And a thick layer of carbon that indicates that fucking place was on fire. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you find fossils in the wild, there's nothing like finding fossils. I remember the first time I found like a little shell. And then, like I said, not that long ago, we found like a seven foot turtle shell. Thick, thick, thick, like black fossilized in the river basin. the Amazon. The river was especially low and it was just, you know, it was half out, like a crashed

alien spaceship. Like it was just this huge thing and it was like, you get this sense, you get that tactile visceral sense of like, whoa, these used to be here. You know if they found in China recently? What did they find? They found dinosaur eggs that the inside of them is all crystals now. Oh. It's crystallized. Is it like a crystallized baby velociraptor? No, it's just basically all crystal. Just crystals like a geo. Yeah. Yeah, but it's a dinosaur egg. It's just over millions and millions of years. They're probably making art out of that right now.

I don't know what they're doing with it. I think it's fairly recent that this discovery, at least the article that I read was fairly recent about it, but it's just crazy shit, man. Oh, so much cool shit. Oh, so much cool shit in the world. We're on such a cool planet. So here it is.

70 million-year-old dinosaur egg contains a sparkling crystal surprise. Isn't that nuts? It's turned into a crystal. That was a dinosaur egg. Grapefruit-sized dinosaur egg from a fossil bed in China gave paleontologists huge surprise. Rather than a dinosaur embryo or sediment, it was filled with sparkling crystals of calcite lining the inner shell, a natural dinosaur geode. A rare occurrence provides researchers with unique information on the structure of the shell. In this case, a never-before-seen O-O-S-O-O-O-S-O-S species, species of egg named, oh boy, good luck pronouncing.

that. Identifying a 22 paper led by paleontologist Quinghay of Anhui University in China. Not only that, it's among the first

dinosaur eggs or evidence of any dinosaurs for that matter found in the roughly 70 million year old upper Cretaceous Christian formation of the Qishan basin.

Wow. That's insane. Fucking a man. Dinosaur eggs that are filled with, look at that, crystals. Beautiful. It looks like a geode.

Mm-hmm. It's a dinosaur egg. Nuts. That's wild. Yeah. The world's a wild place, my brother. The world's a really, really wild place, my brother. The world is a really, really wildness.

You know more than anybody. Well, that's what. I've been trying to see as much of it as I can and save as much of it as I can. It's been, it's been a day. Well, I'm glad you're out there, and I'm glad you're still alive because you freak me out every now and then when you send me messages. Don't worry about your safety. And I need someone to train me to use a gun.

I'm like, oh, Jesus. Christ. Oh, we're dealing with the narco people. Oh, Jesus Christ. Well, we're closer than we've ever have been. Thank you for how much you've been able to help us get that message out. This book is 20 years of the wildest shit. It's the story of Jane and how we went how I met JJ, how we found the anacondas, all the, everything that led to this. I mean, how, I mean, you talked about when you started out. I mean, just being a kid and you have a dream. And I mean, I went to the Amazon. I just wanted to see the Amazon. That was that was the dream. I never a million years imagined that I'd get to go on these adventures, see these animals. And then now that we're on the cusp of protecting

an entire river, I mean, the wildish dreams that me as a kid had couldn't even touch this. And so it's a fun book to be sharing with people. Pretty fucking dope, my brother. And the book is Jungle Keeper, what it takes to change the world. Paul Rosalie, available now. Thank you, my friend. Good, thank you. Always great to see you. It's the best. Do it again. Thank you, brother.

Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.