The Jordan Harbinger Show - 827: Paul Rosolie | Perusing and Protecting the Pristine Amazon

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Paul Rosolie (@PaulRosolie) is a conservationist, a filmmaker, the director of JungleKeepers and Tamandua Expeditions, and the author of Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon. What We Discuss with Paul Rosolie: How Paul Rosolie and his JungleKeepers team showcase sustainable and profitable alternatives to illegal logging and mining for locals — and their descendants — to prosper. Why many uncontacted tribes in the Amazon react to intrusion by outsiders with extreme violence — even when the outsiders demonstrate the best of intentions. How invasive and inefficient gold mining by armed, organized criminals from places as far away as Russia is turning once lush rainforests into mercury-poisoned wastelands. Efforts being made to harness medicinal compounds unique to the Amazon — and the knowledge to use them — and prevent them from disappearing for good. Even if you need to slim down for beach season, Paul doesn't recommend getting lost in the unforgiving Amazon — where he shed a pound a day simply trying to survive before finding his way back to civilization. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/827 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Pay attention to the things that are crawling around. Pay attention to the things that are sleeping in your boots. People find snakes that, you know, we go, is that venomous? I don't know. I've ever seen it. It's not any of the books. You've got to open up its mouth and look for fangs.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional former cult member drug trafficker, extreme athlete or astronaut, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker.

If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, our episode starter packs are a great place to do that. These are collections of top episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion, influence, crime and cults, abnormal, psychology and more, just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start. You can also search for these in your Spotify app and they should pop right up. Today on the show, my friend Paul Rosalie, he lives in the Amazon jungle. Pretty crazy, been meaning to have him on for a long time, but he's always in the jungle.

It's a free-ranging conversation about the Amazon jungle. He actually lives in the part of the Amazon that I traveled to a couple of years ago. So I'm familiar with a lot of the places that he lives in and travels around, and I just thought it was a really fun conversation about everything from poachers and gold mining to psychedelics to getting lost in the jungle with monkeys and glowing scorpions and macaws everywhere. Just a really incredible experience and a fun conversation. So I hope you enjoy this one with Paul Rosalie. We meet people that go to the Amazon and meet people that spend time in weird places, but very rarely is it like, yeah, I split my time between South Beach and the middle of absolutely nowhere

where deadly snakes and spiders could kill you at any second. It's an unusual place to spend your... Do you do it seasonally, or is it just like whenever you have time? No, it's pretty seasonal. Like, I'm originally from New York, and like winters is not my natural habitat. And so I try to make sure that I'm in the Amazon. Also, the rainy season in the Amazon is wildly intense. Like, you have all the destructive, creative forces of planet Earth, just like raging at all times.

The rivers can go up 20 feet, so it's a very exciting time to be in the jungle. and so I try to be down there for that. And then so usually in the year, my time will be like January through June. I'm in the jungle. And so like I've missed things. Like I'll come back and then there'll be like cultural things. Like people like started using the term Karen or there'd be like the, I still don't know. Was it like let let's go the let's go Brandon thing.

I'm like, what are you talking about or like major events where I'll be like, who's Andrew Tate? Yeah. No. Oh God. Somebody other day was like they like referenced a. famous person. They were like, Trace Leipas or something. And I was like, who the hell is that? And he's like, only the biggest artist in the world. And I was like, uh, no.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're talking to the right guy. I also have no idea. But you came back and you're like, wait, Will Smith's slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. That's good. That can't be true. No, they're friends. That can't happen. Will Smith's a nice guy. All of the totally inconsequential crap that we're obsessed with. You're just like, okay, I've missed nothing really. Yeah. Or like, sometimes like I'll just check out. Like, I remember when the election, like when Trump was getting into office, like, I live up in the Hudson Valley, man. I'm like, I saw a Bald Eagle 10 minutes ago. Like, I just went to the Amazon and just spent a month there because I couldn't handle the general climate of everyone. And I was like,

peace. Yeah, yeah, I don't blame you. It is funny, though, that you escape New York winter to go to a place where you could get eaten by something. It's like, well, it's cold. I'd rather go to the place where the river might swell 20 feet overnight in the pitch black and we have no way to actually escape slash Kamens are grabbing me and dragging me under water. I don't know. It seems like, is winter that bad? I guess it is.

I belong in the rainforest. It's my natural habitat, and it's really hard to find good piranha in New York. I saw this guy fishing for piranhas in a video, and he basically just took a chicken carcass, dipped it in the water, and it came up with like 50 piranhas, and he shakes them off in the boat,

dips the carcass again. And he just does that for like 10 or 15 minutes until the bottom of the boat is filled with piranhas. And that was disturbing. But I think the scariest part of it was he was barefoot in the boat with all these piranhas on the bottom. And I'm like, this man plays with fire.

Yes. No. So we're always barefoot because all the guys I learned from are native guys. So we're always barefoot. We're always shirtless. So we're always covered in bug bites. And yes, when you, I've seen them do that with a monkey actually. I was with like some like loggers and they like shot a monkey.

Oh, it's too bad. Why did you just shoot that monkey? And they were like, don't worry about it. And they like, took it by the tail. and they, like, did it around on the thing, and they caught, like, 50 piranha. And I was like, you just killed a monkey to catch yourself lunch? Like, come on. And they're like, yeah, man.

They're like, we didn't have any fishing hooks, but we had a bullet. And I was like, okay. But also, can you not just eat the monkey? Is that not better eating than a bunch of disgusting-ass piranhas? That seems all bony. They are bony, but they're good, man. And when you fry them, their fins get, like, like, chips. It's really nice.

Depends on the monkey. They eat the howlers and the spiders in the communities, but, like, they're not eating, like, dusky tisies and tis. tamarins and little stuff like that. They're very, it's like eating a squirrel. Okay. Yeah, I ate piranha and I was, it was so greasy. But, you know, that's just the cook job.

That's not necessarily the fault of the meat. It's like saying, oh, pork's too greasy. Well, it depends on how you prepare it, right? Yes, and some of us love that grease. Yeah, I guess it, if you're in the jungle and all you've eaten are a bunch of plants and stuff like that, that grease probably is just epic deliciousness. Oh, dude, we fry them up and then I'll take my bowl of rice and I'll just put the fried oil all over the rice. I'm just like calories. Yeah, if you're walking through the jungle and

sweating and eating maybe two good meals a day that aren't just straight veggie stuff and you're burning 3,000, I mean, maybe you need it. Dude, yeah. It's funny because I go to the jungle and I get in shape where I'm like, I'm in shape right now. And then I come back here and I'm like, you can run every day and hit the gym and do tons of road work and like just like be so on top of your shit and it's so much harder to maintain that where it's like there. It's like, yeah, we just walk 16 hours. Of course are in shape. Like, you just, it just, the jungle sculpts you. And like, yeah, your sun burnt and your barefoot. And so your calluses get bigger. You're climbing trees. So, like, you just, whatever working out we do is, is just touching up. It's not the main event. Why are you

climbing trees in the jungle? We don't actually, like, we're not like hunter gatherers. Like, we're out there doing, like, the work that we do with, like, whether it's with the rangers or whether it's science work, we generally bring a chef out there and we have somebody that can cook for us. So, like, finding food isn't usually, like, it's an activity. Like, we'll go fishing at night because that's what you do. There's no. I don't know, TV or whatever people do. We'll just go sit on a boat and catch some piranha and watch the sun go down and look for animals.

But no, climbing trees in the rainforest, 50% of the life is 150 feet up in these trees, never touches the ground. So you have birds and snakes and lizards and mammals and mosses, lichens, cactuses, orchids, all this stuff living up there that we don't have any access to. And so when you're, it's like walking through New York City where you look up at the buildings and it's like, that's a whole other world up there. And it's like in the rainforest, the tops of those trees are so far away. And so like scientists have had a very hard time accessing the canopy.

I actually met somebody at a film festival in France who had devoted, I wanted to talk to him, but he only spoke French. He'd spent a significant portion of his life using hot air balloons to land these giant nets with like padding on the sides. We'd land this huge net on the canopy and just like the surface tension would hold it there. And then it was so big that humans could walk around in the net, reach through in like sample species. And so he had this ingenious way because otherwise I can spend four hours climbing to the top, like basically trad climbing to the top of a tree. You're at the base of this giant tree that's the size of a living room and it's got vines coming down. It's like I can climb up 20 feet, put in some gear.

Climb up another 20 feet, put in some gear. And you do that until you're all the way up. But then at the top, the branches at the crown of that tree, I mean, you're talking about like full grown, mature oak trees, like huge trees. Like we don't even have trees like that. Those are the branches of these trees. It's like Avatar. We can, like, run around on the branches up there.

Wow. And you start seeing animals that, like, you don't see on the ground. I've literally had a monkey look at me and just be like, what? Like, what are you doing? What is this hairless monkey doing here? They're like, how did you get here? Man, the jungle is just absolutely wild. I want to back up a little because people are like, wait, this guy lives in the jungle,

what's happening right now? So you live there and you do, what do you do all day? If you're not just catching food hunter gathering, right? You're not Georgia, the jungle. What's your day-to-day work in the jungle like? I work in the jungle because when I was 18 years old, I went as a research assistant with an indigenous guy who was trying to protect this river. And at the time, I was like, this sounds like a great idea. I did not realize that we would be fighting the global systemic forces of capitalism that are ripping through the region and tearing out the trees. And so we started junglekeepers to try and convince people to stop cutting down the trees, to stop the illegal gold mining. This is the Western Amazon. So it's one of the wildest places on earth. And so you have undiscovered medicines, tribes that have never seen the outside world, more biodiversity than anywhere else. It's the most biodiverse terrestrial habitat that has ever existed on Earth, not just today, but in the fossil record. Wow. So there's

more life here than anywhere else, period. And it's the engine that runs the Amazon. And so we've set up jungle keepers, and it's our organization. And we've basically started employing loggers to stop being loggers and to start being conservation rangers. And so we go up and we do work in the remote communities. We're doing camera trap-trap studies. We're going and interviewing active loggers. monitoring deforestation. So we're moving around the jungle and everything that we're doing is based on either filming

and storytelling to get the message out to the world or studying and proving what an incredible place this is and actively protecting it and working with the communities there. So it's a lot of wildlife and it's a lot of interfacing with the indigenous people there. And the loggers are just down to become range?

Is it like, oh, I just need money. I don't necessarily care about logging. Just need a job and that's the job to have. Yeah, and this is one of the fascinating things that Instagram has taught me because I'll post a picture of like a guy with a chainsaw cutting down a tree and people instantly be like burn that guy alive like human greed that that person's awful and I'm like dude like that's Pedro like Pedro's the man Pedro's doing that because he doesn't know how to feed his family and logging pays him 30 solace a day and if we pay him 60 solace a day and double his income

he'd be happy to because this is the thing logging is dangerous you're out in the jungle for weeks on end this giant tree is falling you're working with chainsaws usually barefoot and half the time it's illegal, so you got law enforcement going after you. And so when you offer them, you're like, hey, look, there's going to be a bunch of gringoes coming. And like, all they want to do is walk around and go, wow, can you help us with that? And they're like, I could help you with that. And then they're like, hey, by the way, my dad taught me all the local medicines and I know how to track Jaguars and I know how to do all this stuff because I've been in the jungle my whole life. And then they have this skill set that they're stoked to share.

And so that transition is actually very easy. If you just offer, I mean, pretty much for anybody, if you came up, to any, I would imagine if you came up to anybody, if it's not their passion project, and you said, look, I'm going to double your salary, but you've got to do this other job. It's easier than the job you're doing now. That's a pretty good deal. And so that's really what we've started doing with jungle keepers. It's just going up to these people, this one guy that works with us, his name is Victor, he was a major logger, man. He knows, I mean, he knows everything. He's been everywhere. He's been shot at by the uncontacted tribes. I mean, he's as hard as they come. And one day,

we were like, we need a boat driver. And he was like, yeah, he's like, I know the rivers. And we were like, all right, let's go. So he drove. And then we were like having so much fun with this guy. And he was, you know, we'd be fishing and he'd be like, the reason that keep taking your hook is because you're not doing it with this knot. And we'd be like, huh? He'd know, he'd be like that. Don't drink that water.

Drink this water. Like, cut this bamboo. It has better tasting water than that bamboo. And we were like, man, this guy's awesome. Like, how long did you spend out there? And he was like, God, my whole life, I've been logging. I've been up on this river and that river and this river. And he gives you all those old logging stories.

And then we gave him the talk. We were like, look, next week we got a crew of people coming out. You know, you pull out your phone and show them some pictures. And they're like, huh. And we're like, could you just drive the boat for us? You know, just take us around. We're going to take them to the waterfall. We're going to take them to the here.

We're going to show them our rangers. And he was just like, yeah, okay, I can do that. Yeah, like, wait, so take a bunch of cute white chicks from Miami into the jungle and, like, roast stuff and tell stories and show off. Or cut down trees and get attacked by stuff and get bit up and maybe get severely injured and then drag this big-ass log back to wherever. No thanks. Yeah, this is a great, like, where do I sign? Yes. That's interesting that you do that. I didn't realize it was like a sales job for you to recruit the locals. Dude, in order to convince people to not cut down the rainforest,

you're basically standing in the way of a lot of people making money. And in order for me to be able to survive doing that, you have to be such a good salesman. You have to, I could sell water to a drowning guy. Like, you have to be able to be like, look, I know that they're going to cut the rainforest down. But if you just help us, if you just give us a little bit of money and if you just give us a little bit of resources, we can protect. You have to, it's such a hard sell on people because you're, you're up against such a huge threat. You're basically fighting the way things are going. Like, we're losing habitats. We're losing ecosystems. And it's like, this is going to be the last decade where we can turn that around. To get people to invest in that kind of, that risky of a thing is

you have to be a good salesperson. And for the loggers, and that's where I think the thing that has set this whole project apart is that a lot of the people that go down there are like, you know, like these PhD students, they all go to the same six places. You know, they go to a couple different like biological stations and they walk around on the trails and it's safe and they would cook and there's regulations. And it's like, we always would drive by those guys and it would be like, we'd be in a canoe and I'd be with the local guys. And they'd have like, you know, a deer that they just shot in the canoe and we'd drive by with like, you know, like guns and bare feet and shit and just like, we'd like wave to them and then you'd just see them be like, huh? But it's like, well, they're doing that and they're writing papers.

I mean, these people come down and they write papers for 20 years on like an obscure species of bat that only lives in one species of palm. And it's like, great, but are you actually protecting the rainforests from being destroyed? Now, sometimes those biological surveys go into a petition that's going to the government that's proving how much biodiversity is in an area. But we've had far better strategic success with really just showing people how incredible it It's like you have the surrounding, in our region, you have the surrounding national parks. You have Alto Pudus National Park. You have Manor National Park. You have the Tamopata Reserve.

You have some indigenous reserves. So we know this place is called the crown of biodiversity. It's called Peru's capital of biodiversity. So we know that. We already have all the biological surveys and our spot is right in the middle of all that. So the ecosystem connectivity, we're drawing from all of those places, which makes our region even more biodiverse. And the thing that kept people away from it was the fact that is dangerous, that there is illegal loggers, uncontacted tribes, goldmines. And so all those scientists who were safe weren't going off the Las Biodas River. And so because I was in with the local guys, we were just going on. They didn't care.

That's so interesting. Yeah, where I was was the Tambapata that you just mentioned. Yeah, yeah, it's beautiful. It was really cool. And there was not a lot of people there. I'll tell you that. I mean, when we were on the boat, we were going for hours and you'd pass an occasional there'd be a little boat and a little something. And they're like, oh, that's another lodge. And it would be really small or it'd be far. But then we start, then we're, we kept going and we're like, wow, there's not any more of those that we saw. It's like, no, no, no, we're three hours away from a lot of these other guys. Even from where we were, we'd go up three hours from the river and they'd say like,

hey, you can't actually even get off the boat here because it's protected. And it's also really, there's nothing to get up. Where would you go? There's no trails here. There's nothing. Yeah, there's no trails. If there's not a trail, you're not going anywhere. That's what people, you can't do anything.

Were you at TRC, by any chance? That's a really good question. I'm actually not even sure. You don't remember. Sure. Yeah. It was where we stayed, the actual quote unquote hotel, and I put that in air quotes, where we stayed was really awesome.

It had all open rooms where there was, like you'd have a door to the hallway, which was open, but your other wall was not there. Yeah. It was just a railing. And the only room that was sort of enclosed was the shower. But it didn't matter because there were still holes in the floor. So you'd go in the shower. This is still giving me the jibis.

You'd go in the shower and there'd be a big spider in there. Oh, yeah. getting a little water. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, I would be like, I would be like, I would be like, I'd have to call the guys and I'd be like, can you get the spider out of my shower? And he'd laugh at me. And then he'd go in the shower and go, wow, okay, that's a real spider.

Because it's like, me as big as my palm, you know, big ass tarantula. We had toilet tarantula for a while. So we actually, in one of the research stations, we actually have, like, running toilets. And there was this tarantula, and she would sit under the seat. Oh, my God. And so what happened is, like, everybody would go in there, guys are going in there and flip the seat up. And she would get scared and just, like, jump over the toilet.

She'd be, like, covering the hole. And, like, you just heard people. You just, no, you just hear the shout. You'd be like, oh, yeah, that's her. Yeah, and then we've had, we've had toilet frog. She's, she was a pain in the ass. She kept getting flush and she kept coming back. Yeah, toilet frogs.

We had toilet frogs. We had I'denaguti in my wall. Yeah. Which is like a giant rat kind of thing. And the way we found that was, I was trying to take a nap. And I go, hey, Clint, can you, what are you looking for? And he'd go, what do you mean? Is that, that, that's not you?

And I'm like, no, are you looking through a bag? and he's like, no, I thought you were looking through a bag. The rustling sound, uh-huh. It was in the wall between our rooms, and then we both immediately could not sleep because we're like, what the hell is between our rooms in the bamboo walls? And we had to call the guys because we're like, that's a real animal in there. Yeah. No, they're big.

They're big. And they got some teeth on them, and they love to just use them all the time. Bamboo rats at goodies, capy bears. I mean, the rodents are well represented down there. We saw some rats that were as big as dogs just walking around, eating stuff. and not at the hotel, but just in the jungle. You're just walking around, and you go, that's a rat. Like, it's a bigger, way bigger than any New York City rat.

New York City rats are pretty big. I mean, everything in the Amazon, anacondas, giant anteaters, black came, and everything is outsized big. I mean, I've seen, yeah, there's some serious giganticism going on out in the jungle. I want to talk about all that stuff. One thing that really freaked me out, though, was in the first night we were there, we had no warning about this. I mean, they're like, oh, yeah, there's monkeys.

Okay. it was probably 4 a.m. As you know, there's no lights. And even the hotel was like, well, we're shutting. It's solar powered. There's batteries, but it's like for the emergency nightlight that you have when you can't find the light that you strap on your head and you have to pee. There's only just that.

And you can't charge your phone or anything from this electricity. These are just little battery operated lights. So there's no lights. There's no light pollution. There's no noise from people. And you wake up and it's like three or four in a.m. and you hear, and it sounds like it's in your room. Yeah, yeah, okay.

And it's a, I forget what is, a howler monkey. And they're just marking their territory, and you just think that is, that must be the size of a gorilla. And it's actually funny because it's not even cool. It's not. No, it's a lot of fun when kids are in the jungle because, like, a lot of people, especially people actually go to the ring forest, like, seem to know

what a howler monkey is, but like, especially with kids, when you go, what do you think that sound is? And they'll just be like, it's a rhinoceros wrecks? Yeah. Something horrendous. Like, is that a dream? dragon breathing fire, like, it sounds so, and it like fills the space, and it's like they're just calling to each other. It's such a beautiful sound. We love that. Yeah, it's a little unnerving on day one.

Yes. By day seven, you're like, ah, feels good. Like, those are just the neighbors. Yeah, well, the thing is, spider monkeys will make sounds that are, it sounds a lot like people being murdered. Like when two spider monkey tribes are fighting, they'll get together in the trees and they'll start screaming at each other. But the sound that they make is very human. And when you're out there, you know, there's the uncontacted tribes, and we've all heard stories of them murdering people and that happens pretty regularly. And there was one day where there was, I had never heard the spider monkeys go out of it. And this was, this was early on. And there was one day the spider monkeys were screaming and, like, everyone at camp pretty much picked up a bag and was like running for

the boat. They're like, it's happening. But this is happening. We're going to die today. And of course, that guy, Victor, the Lager, he told us some horrendous stories of ambushes that, you know, where everybody ended up dead. And so we all have these things playing in our heads all the time. So we heard that sound and everybody was just like, run to the river, save the children. Wow. Full on. Yeah. We were, and then like, JJ walked out and was like, guys, spider monkeys. It's okay. You've mentioned uncontacted tribes quite a few times and how they murder people. What's going on there? Uncontacted tribe is, I assume exactly what it sounds like. Now we have to call them

voluntarily nomadic, indigenous peoples or something like that, but everybody just calls them uncontacted tribes. So during the rubber boom, turn of the century in 1900s, all of a sudden, we needed rubber for hoses, gaskets, tires to fuel the industrial revolution. And the rubber trees were only in the Amazon at that point. So they had to send people down to go extract rubber from the trees. And so what happened was you had these, I guess, American rubber barons going down there. And they tried to farm rubber. That didn't work.

If you make a rubber plantation, if you monoculture rubber trees, it ends up just, there's a leaf blight that gets in and it's like farming problems. it just destroys the whole plantation. So it doesn't work. Henry Ford went down there and started Fordlandia, where he tried to do this on a large scale. Didn't work. Absolute failure. But what they did do was launch one of the worst genocides in human history

where all these rubber barons went down there and they started whipping, burning, raping, pillaging the local people, just shocking them into submission. And then being like, you are going to go out and you are going to get the rubber for us. And they'd send these tribes people out into the jungle and make them tap the rubber trees. And so some of the tribes were conquered by sheer. brutal force. And then some of the more remote tribes were basically like, that is not going to happen to us. These are already tribes that are living in severe isolation, people that from year to

year would see nobody from the outside world, still living naked in the jungle, still had bows and arrows. And what they did was just sort of back up. And they were like, we are not going to be conquered. We are not going to be destroyed. And they moved further back into the jungle, into the like the valleys that nobody can reach by river. And the headwaters of the Lest Piedras is one of the places where that happened. And so these uncontacted, and they're spread out all over the Amazon. We have this. There's just an article in the New York Times about remote tribes being destroyed by gold mining. Yeah, I saw that. I wanted to talk about that. Yeah. It's funny. It came out like a few days ago. Yeah. Here's the interesting thing, because they were treated in a time of extreme violence,

basically war. And so the adults would have told the children, watch out for the outside world. They are trying to kill you. Here are some horror stories that happened. This person was set on fire. entire village was burned. All of this crazy stuff. So those kids would grow up and understand that the outside world is extremely dangerous. They are not us. They are not the same as us. They want to destroy us. And so if the outside world comes to us, like if loggers come in, we shoot them. And the thing is, these people don't have laws. They're out in the wild, living naked. And so there's no consequences. I mean, they've shot people just to see their stomach contents. But last August, and this one did not make it out of the jungle. Like this was on like the little

WhatsApp network just like locally. I think it was three loggers went up a small tributary that no one should be going up because we all know where the tribes are. These guys went up this tributary and the tribes got to them and the loggers had the chainsaws out and they did not hear anything coming. And the tribes will speak using animal calls. They will speak like cappuccin monkeys and they have an extra dialect. They have their speaking voice and then they can actually use animal calls for basic call signs. And they will coordinate and position themselves around you using capuchin, Tindamou, various animal calls, and they surrounded these loggers, shot them full of arrows, and then

somebody flying over actually saw the boat, and of course the people's family. Eventually, like, days later, somebody went out looking for these guys, and what circulated on the WhatsApp network was the photos of the bodies laying on the beach, and they were all bloated, and they've been ripped apart by maggots, and, like, the skulls are coming out. It was brutal. It was absolutely brutal, and his arrows laying on the beach. It's like watching a bullfight. Everybody's hoping that the Matador gets destroyed.

Like, we're all like, you know what? The tribes, they're as far back into the jungle as you can go, and they're only asking to be left alone. So pretty much when this happens, we're all like, yeah, good for them. Yeah, I guess. I mean, it sucks for the loggers, but they also are doing this, and it's illegal. It's illegal. They know what they're doing.

They know they're invading on the tribal land, and that's exactly why they're still big, good trees up there. So all parties know what they're getting into in that situation. And these poor, you know, for these tribes, I mean, if somebody says, look, just leave me alone, I'm moving up to the side of a mountain, and you go up there and start harassing. them. I mean, that's, that's on you. What if you get lost and they find you? Are they just going to be like, oh, let's slice this guy into little pieces? Pretty much. There was a guy a couple of years ago that

had actually made contact with them. And what he would do is he would hike into the jungle and he knew that at a certain time of year they'd be, because they're nomadic. So they're not always in the same spot. But at a certain time of year, they'd be moving through this one area. And so he would go there and he'd leave like two machetes, a shirt and some bananas. And like, it's very hard to get fruit in the jungle, even though there is lots of fruit, the monkeys, the birds, all the animals they get to it first. But this guy would go leave them some gifts. And so he'd leave them gifts, they knew where to come for the gifts. And then when he, like, kind of habituated them to know that there was going to be gifts here, he would be sitting there while they took the gifts and they would see him.

And then it got to the point where, like, people spoke of it in the region that he was able to interact with them. And they don't speak a language that anybody really knows. And so he would, he would sort of just be like using hand signals and just be very gentle. And they have seven foot bow and arrows. Like, they have huge. And they have huge. And they're They use bamboo tips for mammals. They have a serrated palm arrowhead for fish because then it will go into the fish and not come back out. They're very complex. People will call them like Paleolithic Stone Age tribes.

And it's like, no, these are modern tribes by the fact that they're alive right now. They're actually brilliantly smart. They can live naked in the jungle without having their bodies ripped apart by botflies. They have medicinal technologies that we don't even know about. But this guy developed a relationship with them, was leaving them gifts, only being positive to them. He would actually go out and speak about it. He would speak to the Ministry of Culture. He was very respected. And then they found him one day with several arrows sticking out of his body. And he was murdered. Wow. There's no ingratiating yourself with these tribes or anything.

No. And then one of the, this is like, this one like Tarantino would love this. A bunch of, I forget when this happened. And I believe it was in Ecuador, but a bunch of missionaries found an uncontacted tribe. And they landed a plane and they like put t-shirts on them. They took the chief up in the plane and like the tribe was like this is weird like what is going on with these outside people and they were like have you heard about jesus and like the tribe was like ah sure and then these these missionaries had to leave so they took the plane and they left and they have a journal entry from this one guy and he's like i hate to spend another christmas when these people haven't been brought up you know into the warm embrace of our lord and we have to get back there and we have to teach them the way and all this stuff and so they go back

with the plane and they land the plane and they're i think they were like giving them popcorn and shit like they were just like showing them everything from the outside world and they handed the tribe a photograph. And they're like, this is what it's like where we live. And the chief looked at the photograph and was like, I see people, but there's nothing behind this. This is witchcraft and he just wanted to kill everybody. Because he couldn't see.

He's like a two-dimensional person. No, no, this is a window into another dimension. It's going to suck us in there. Murder all these people right now. Kill them all. Oh, my God. And so they murdered like six missionaries, I think. And of course, you know, days later somebody came and.

saw the plane and saw the bodies lay sprawled out. And then like a decade later, these people, you know, roads going to the Amazon, these people were actually contacted, taught Spanish. And somebody interviewed them about this a decade later. And they're like, yeah, why'd you murder those missionaries? And they're like, yeah, that was scary as hell. They're like, we didn't know what was going on. They had this giant flying metal bird. They had photos of two-dimensional freak pictures. They were like, we just decided it would be safer to kill. Yeah. They're like, we were just looking out for ourselves. That's, that's crazy. I wondered how you knew why they got killed, but there it is, right? They've confirmed it. They confirmed it themselves. They were like,

yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It sounds brutal, and I guess that it is, but at the same time, when you live in the Amazon and things can eat you and things eat each other and things are fighting all the time, and there's 10-inch thorns on plants and things are poisonous or put you on a psychedelic trip that you touched or ate by mistake or on purpose. It probably gives you like a little, just you have that sort of primal edge. It's not going to go anywhere. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because it does remind me working in the Amazon and then coming back. It's like when you talk to veterans who've been in wartime situations and it's like the things they talk about, you know, you'll hear, like I'll hear some of my guys like I work with this organization called Vet Paw.

And it's like those guys all have combat stories. And like you sit there going, how is this your reality? Like this sounds brutal. And they're like, this was every day, you know, they just get used to a set of realities that you just, aren't exposed to in suburbia. You know, in the Amazon, it's like, yes. Like, you know, I just told somebody, I was just telling somebody about how Lager is murdered,

a friend of mine, and I said it kind of off the cuff, and they just stopped me, and they were like, wait, like, actually your friend? And I was like, yes. And I was like, yes. And, like, this shit happens. Like, our lawyer's father stood up to the illegal gold miners, and they murdered him. And it's like, there was a nun, not too far.

This was going back a little bit, but there was a nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, I think. And she was, like, working with the indigenous people, trying to convince the loggers not to, you know, destroy everything. And she spoke out about it. And she was really trying to, like, hit the local politicians. And so they just sent, like, a death squad. And they just, like, put two in the stomach, one in the head and then took care of her. Like, they didn't care that she was an old lady.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Paul Rosalie. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these authors, thinkers, creators, these amazing folks every single week, It's because of my network. The free course, I've beaten you guys to death of this thing. Jordan Harbinger.com slash courses where you can find it. I don't want to harp on this one too much. It's a fun conversation.

Let's get back to it. I actually heard about this from our guides at the lodge that we were at, because they all lived in the jungle. These are guys that live in villages nearby. They're not dudes from Lima who, like, come down there to do tours. Because we saw gold miners, and we're like, do you ever interact with those people? And they're like, no. It's a coin flip if they're dangerous, I guess, with the gold mine.

Yeah. Like if they know the guy because he's from a village, their same village or a village nearby, and he just happens to work there, they might be like, oh, hey man, guy that I knew from growing up. But if it's just a guy they've never met, they're like, yeah, we don't know who those guys are. No. They live in a camp nearby. We don't go anywhere near them. They bring their family there. They stay here and they screw up everything. And I don't know, they're armed. We're not going to go, like, chat it up with these guys. No, you got to be very, very careful with the gold miners. Like, you just do not approach them because that's turned into a whole wartime.

situation. I mean, if you go up the Trans-Amazon highway from Porto Moldonado, there's actually, we went up there with Matt Gutman from NBC, and we got allowed into, there was some Russian miners somehow that were, I didn't even know there was Russian miners down there. Russian miners, got a long way from home. Yeah, they were a long way from home, but they got us in past, like, the security gates of the gold mining place called the Pompas, and they, like, it's literally a multi-hundred kilometer desert that they've created in the Amazon rainforests. They've cut down the trees. They've burned the trees. They've sucked up the soil. They've extracted the gold. There's like mercury pollution all over the place. And there are men with machine guns guarding the gates to the

roads that lead to these places. And so we actually got in there. We're flying a drone around. And one of the Russian guys comes up to me and he goes, you are Paul Rosalie, right? And I was like, yeah. And he goes, you should not use Instagram the way you do. And I was like, what? What? And I was like, what? And he goes, those gold miners, they follow you on Instagram. He goes, I just heard them say your name. And he's like, they're looking at you and they know what you're here for. And I was like, great. Oh, man.

And to his credit, he was like, look, why don't you land the drone and we're going to get out of here? And I was like, okay. Yeah. But it was like, they knew who I was. And I was like, this is creepy. Yeah, the wrong kind of fame. Yeah. That's really scary.

Yeah. The gold miners, for people who've never heard of this, because it seems like, oh, you've got this huge hole in the ground or whatever. A lot of these guys, they were just on. Literally what look like six canoes lashed together, it's a tiny barge. There's a conveyor belt type pump thing on it, and they just pump craplodes of soil and dirt through it, and most of it goes back into the water, and I guess they're just looking for gold powder or little nuggets. I don't even know how it works. It looks really inefficient and bad. It is extremely inefficient, and I believe that the quality of the gold that they're extracting

is actually pretty crap. The soil of the Amazon is clay and sand. And so the gold does not come in nuggets. It comes in sediment. You know, friends of mine will get some sand in their hand and just like, they'll look for it. And they'll be like, there's gold in there. And it's like, you can barely see it. So what these guys are doing is, the more land that you suck through that hose and throw

onto that conveyor belt, the more potential gold you're harvesting. But it's a numbers game. You have to cover acres and acres and acres to get just a little bit of gold. And then with the gold falling with the heaviest sediment to the bottom, they use mercury to mix it all up and the gold binds to the mercury and then you get this chunk of gold mixed with mercury and then what these guys do is they use like a blow torch and they burn off the mercury which lets it into the air and then once it's in the air it gets of course the Amazon every day you're just seeing the giant pump you just you can literally watch like the

sweat from your skin come off you you can watch the mist coming off the jungle and it goes up into the thunder clouds and by afternoon it's raining back down into the river and then we're drinking the river and it's coming right back out of our skin and doing the thing you're a part of the ecosystem down there. And so when you're allowing mass quantities of mercury to join that system, all of a sudden you have people that have like three times the mercury level that the EPA says is even humanly possible. Like you have people coming out with birth defects. It's gone through the ecosystem. So this is a major environmental tragedy. And the police in Peru are not able to get into those desert areas because you have machine gun wielding teams of gold miners that have

unionized and organized and the cops know that they'll be murdered if they don't go anywhere near there. So it's a major problem. And then on top of that, because there's vast teams of men marauding across the Amazon rainforest, what do they do? There are scouts that go into the indigenous villages and they'll, like, offer young girls a job in the city. And so it ends up being a huge human trafficking problem where they're grabbing these girls and starting these brothels in the gold mining areas. And so it's complete environmental devastation. It's human trafficking. It's species lost.

It's environmental pollution. It's like it's all concentrated in this area. And it's like as soon as you go there, you can feel. feel it, like in your gut. You just go there and it's like the sky looks darker. We went down the wrong road one time and there was a floating barge and they had some like empty gas cans that were floating some sticks and they had like a shack on there. And there's just these horrendous looking like Amazonian prostitutes with like Leshmaniasis

on their necks. And they're all just like calling out to the men floating in this mercury infested water. It's dark. It's pretty dark. It's like something Vice would do a feature on back when Vice was like still cool. Yeah. Speaking of Leashmaniasis, tell us about what that is because actually, one, it's a super rare flesh eating disease. Is that accurate? That is accurate. But not rare enough because a guy got it on my trip. Yeah, it's weird in the jungle, especially running an ecotourism thing. People are like,

am I going to eating by a snake? I'm like, no, 100%. They're like, am I getting a shot by an arrow? I'm like, no. And I'm like, but you might get a flesh eating bacteria that stays in your skin and you got to get almost chemotherapy to get it out. It's pretty rough, and some people get it, and some people don't. Some of my friends who live there their whole lives, they just don't get it. And then you have, like, I'll have like a tourist come, and then they'll have, like, you know, a little cigar burn-looking thing on their skin, and it'll just keep growing, and then you've got to go deal with the horrendous treatment.

Yeah, this guy got it on his face, which is one of the worst places to get it. And it's a flesh-eating bacteria, and he lived in Panama. He wasn't Panamanian. He's a Chinese dude. But he went to the hospital and they're like, wow, where did you get this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazon. Dude, no, no, no, that's a whole other, like, echelon of street cred in the Amazon.

Because then you come home and you go to the infectious disease doctor, this is the shit that people in my profession talk about. You go to the infectious disease doctor and you're like, when they bring in like the, what do they call the fellows or the interns, when they bring in the doctors and training. Yeah, the residents or whatever. Take a look at this. Yep, the doctor will be like, look, I had, I once had tooler. aramia. And the doctor was like, do you mind if I show this to some people? And I went, no. And he brought in like a team of all these students. And they were all like looking over their clipboards. And he was like, this is the only time you're ever going to see this. He's like, I've never seen it. And he's like, it's a rare tick-borne illness that goes through rabbits, lives in India. And then it manifests with like a horrendous infection on the elbow, on the right elbow. And they were all like scribbling the shit down. And I was like, Doc, what do we do? And they put me on the strongest antibiotics that they had. This is New York City, like the best infectious disease doctors. And they were all. And they were all like, was like in the world. They worked on me for like two months and I couldn't get out of bed. I had no energy. I had this horrendous soupy pit. Like if you took the top off a bottle of Coca-Cola, it was

about that deep in my arm of just green pus. And my whole system was fighting this and I had this horrendous thing and I went back to the jungle. And I remember at the time my parents were like, do not go in the jungle with the horrendous infection. Like you're going to absolutely die. And JJ, who's my indigenous teacher of all things, took one look at me and was like, sick and I was like, yeah, and I was like, look at my arm. And he looked at my arm. He was like, so bad. He was like, okay. He's like, we have to go for a walk. And I was like, I can't walk. I was like, I'm sick. And he's like, no, you have to walk. And we went to this tree and he cut it with the machetee. He collected the sap. He slapped the sap on it and like you rub it and it almost makes

like a latex seal over the wound. So with the friction, it heats up and it changes the chemical composition of the wound. So he created a medicinal seal over the wound. Then he went to the next tree and extracted that. That one had to drink three drops of, three drops from medicine, five drops to kill you. So three drops. And then he went and boiled another plant and they were pouring that over me in buckets. And I kid you not 24 hours later, I was cured. Wow. Yeah. And the point of that story is that, you know, it's not like let's hold hands and say kumbaya and maybe, you know, we're going to cure you with energy or some shit like that. There is heavy medicinal compounds running through the cambiums of these trees and we haven't

discovered them all yet. And the people that are living there for the the past few thousand years have a deeper insight into these medicines than any outside Western medicine does. And so preserving the cultural heritage that these indigenous healers have has become something that we're very, very concerned with doing because they know things like that. Like, I've experienced it. I've seen, I've seen them medically cure something that doctors were unable to do. Just like guys on the side of the river. I guess it makes sense, right? Because if you're dealing with that for generations, you figure out way more than what it is. And these infectious disease guys are like, oh, wow, I've only read about this in a book from a guy who was from

Britain who went here and died from that. Exactly. So they don't really know. No, they don't. And even something like a bot fly, which for anybody that doesn't know, a bofly is this, you know, it's basically a worm that goes and lives in your skin. And the fly catches a mosquito, deposits its eggs. The mosquito goes and finds the host, which is a mammal, nice, warm, soft skin.

And then the mosquito deposits the eggs. The eggs are pretty much microscopic. It burrows down into your skin. and then all of a sudden you'll be sleeping one night and you'll just feel like that twitch. And a lot of time it'll be like, because the mosquitoes go for like your tricep, your back,

you know, behind the leg where you're not going to slap them. So it's like these off areas. And I get them, I was getting them like on my shoulder. And you'll just feel this twitch. And you'll be like, shit. And then the things start growing quickly. And when they're feeding,

you can feel it because they're actually eating you. They're like mining your tissue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they'll grow and I've let them get as thick as like a pencil. As long as a pencil or as thick as a pencil? No, no, no, as thick as a pencil. It's disgusting. long as a pencil.

Shit, though, through your body. Yeah. No, no, no, but they'll go about an inch deep and they get fat.

Like, when they're a pencil thick, like they're fat. So you have like a maggot in your skin, a grub. Yeah, if you ever seen the movie tremors, it's like having a grabboid, like in your skin.

Oh, my God. And they stick up this little proboscis for air and they go back in. So in the Amazon, what we do is like, you get somebody who can take a deep drag of a cigarette and then blow it out and you actually get tar,

like nicotine-laced tar on your hand. You scrape that off. you put it over the hole and the bug hates it. And so the bug will start freaking out. It hurts. And then you slap some either Vaseline or we'll use like a rubber tree. You slap that on top of it to seal it off so he can't get oxygen. And then they'll start coming further and further and further out trying to get oxygen.

And then that's when you rip off the seal, grab them with the tweezers. And then you need a third guy to pinch your skin. You got to get under the bug and like pinch it out. And it's very painful. But this is like what we do at night. Like instead of watching American Idol, we'll like list. somebody flat on the table and try to extract all their bot flies. It's fun because it hurts.

There's a lot of blood, and then you have a hole in you, and then we see who has the biggest bot fly. That's vile. That's disgusting. I wish I'd warned people about that story before you told it, because I think there's going to be people who are like, dude, I... Vomit warm. Listen to that on my lunch hour, you pricks.

I just threw up in my tuna sandwich. Yeah, there's people who are no longer eating lunch after that story. That's disgusting. We're so sorry. Come to the end. Amazon with us. Help us protect the rainforests, and I'll make you a fried piranha. Yeah, and you can get your own bot fly and leash moniasis infection in your face. That's right. You can get your own. You don't need to hear the story. You got your,

you are part of the next story. Come experience it for yourself. Some of the plants, man, must really be, we'll get to the insects too. I mean, we just sort of touched on that. But some of these plants are absolutely wild. You said three drops is medicine, five drops. So kill you. I mean, I'm sure it's a little bit less, well, less exact than that. Not as harsh as that. I mean, that must be something that kills just about everything if you can overdo it with a few drops and you're dead. Yeah. And the good thing about that is like if you get a normal infection, which is the jungle, it's hot, it's humid. You always have cuts and scrapes and mosquito bites that you scratch. So you always have a lot of skin abrasions. And so we do get infections pretty regularly and like

neosporin doesn't cut it. And you can't be living on, you know, cycles of antibiotics. Yeah. And so what we do is we just know it's trees. We have, we've literally planted the medicinal trees now at the research station. And so they have all these machete scars in them because we always go there and it'll be like, oh, I have a mosquito bite that looks funny. There's a little bit of pus coming out of it. And it's like, just go hit it with the machete, collect it in a spoon. You rub it over the thing.

And the next day, it's gone. They have cures for ear infections. They apparently have jungle Viagra. I don't know anybody that's tried it. But the people talk about it. Like, whoa, you better be careful. They're like, it could be too intense. And it's like, they're very, very sure that this works.

And so that's down there. Yeah, there's some crazy shit that they can do. The poisons from some of the insects and animals is crazy. I write in your book, there's a sap you can pour into a diesel engine and it works as fuel. That sounds almost impossible. How does that work? It does sound almost impossible, but this particular tree has sap that's almost pure hydrocarbons and it'll actually burn in a diesel engine.

Then they have other things like JJ broke his arm one time. And this is, I've learned this. Okay, so when I went down, I'm from New York. So, you know, when somebody says, hey, man, do you want to hear my mist tape? You're like, get the fuck away. Like you don't want to, we just grow up not listening to shit. But JJ broke his arm and he wrapped it with these leaves. And then he wrapped it with gauze to hold the leaves on.

And then at some point he was like, hey, could you change the bandage? It's really hard to do with one hand. And I was like, yeah, sure. So I'm unwrapping it. And this disgusting thing falls onto the floor. And I was like, JJ, what just came out of your wound? He was stepping on cane toads and flattening them with his boot. And so he'd step on them from the back.

So they would vomit up their own guts. and then you would take the sack that used to be a toad, and they have a certain type of poison in their glands. And that poison, apparently, when it's rubbed on your arm and allowed to infiltrate, promotes bone growth. Now, I know that that sounds crazy, but there's also plants that elephants use to induce labor. There's also in a type of African frog that if a pregnant woman pees on it, it changes color. So there's some weird stuff out in nature that we forget how crazy it is. So the frog thing, I was like, okay, that sounds crazy. Like as a New Yorker, I'm calling bullshit, but then at the same time, who am I to talk?

Because I've seen them outfox us with medicines, you know, how many times. It does seem like some of it's probably not doing anything, but they don't know. Probably. Because it's like, oh, your body heals up over time if it's healthy. So, yeah, but the cane toad thing, some of it's superstitioned, but some of it isn't. It's like you don't know what's what. You don't know. And that's sort of the thing like with ayahuasca where they say like, okay, so the first, you have to mix

this vine with this root and that, you know, the two things together allow that I don't, I don't get into it. I know a lot of people that are really into ayahuasca and they know the whole chemical process. But what I do find interesting and like ethnobotanists have talked about this, like Wade Davis wrote about it in one river, and Mark Plotkin's really into it. And it's like, the fact that even if you took the, you know, 1,600 species of trees and then the billion species of, you know, other plants and orchids and lichens and all this other stuff that's out there and started mixing and matching chemical compounds in plants in the Amazon, even if you had God's Excel sheet, it would take you thousands and thousands of years to come up with this.

So how did the tribes uncover the secret to ayahuasca? And that's where it gets into the, pretty much everyone that you sort of lift off the ground into the like, well, it's the jungle trying to give us, you know, an insight into the spirit realm. Like the gods spoke to us through the plants. And it's like, however you want to think about it, it's incredible that trial and error would take thousands of years and hundreds and hundreds of dead people to eventually get to this point where you have the right combination to set your mind into other dimensions.

Yeah, there was ayahuasca planted around the area where we were. We know it was that because the guides told us what it was, and there was a little sign that said ayahuasca next to it. Like, hey, maybe don't put this in your salad kind of sign. And there was a lot of really crazy stuff. I mean, when I was walking, I got a photo of this is really dope. It's a shaman headdress that was just laying on the ground. And I was like, wow, look at that.

You know, I'm not superstitious, but I was like, I probably should leave that there. It's a pretty cool find. Someone else could find it. And the guide was like, you don't want to touch something like that because he was more spiritual and he's like, you don't want to touch that. The shaman didn't just forget that. That's there for a reason, you know.

And I thought, that's probably a good point. It's not easy to make something like that. It's laying on the ground. It's there for a damn good reason. He's like, you could take it, but you shouldn't take it. And I was like, I don't need a souvenir. I'd rather leave it for somebody else to discover because it's really incredible. You could take it.

And then, like, a piano's going to fall out of the sky onto your head. And you're going to go to like eight more arms, you know. Yeah, it's going to be some final destination shit, right? Like, oh, look at this awesome souvenir. Yeah, see, that's a thing. I've seen way too many horror movies to try to do that. Yeah. There's always that guy, you know, you get to the edge of King Tut's tomb and there's like a cursed thing over the entrance.

They're like, I'm sure it's fine. You go first. Yeah. You try it. We want to see what happens. Yeah. So the loggers need jobs. The gold miners are there from all over the place, apparently, even also from Russia,

to steal the gold out of the Amazon. We heard there were narcos in the jungle. Obviously, we didn't see any. What are they doing? Just taking the road less traveled so that they don't get caught? What are they doing there? Yeah, exactly. The border with Bolivia is right there.

And we're sort of like at a tri-border, like there's three frontiers. And we have like Brazil, Peru and Bolivia right there. And so like, it's such a lawless region that after that earthquake in Haiti, like, hundreds and hundreds of Haitian people showed up in Puerto Maldonado, Peru. It was weird. It was like being in, like, Alaska and having like a bunch of people from Nigeria show up. We were like, what? Yeah. But there was like hundreds of them all of a sudden, and they were crowding the Western Union, just trying to get all their money from their relatives. And then they were trying to hop the border into Brazil and go because down there's no one to check. You can just go by

river. And so the narcos, they have a couple planes. I know a couple guys that like used to do that work. And they have some planes and we're like, you'll hear him at like four in the morning. And these like, busted little old sessnas, they'll be flying like, you know, 100 feet over the jungle. And they'll come by. But what they do, that's brilliant. And the reason that it's hard to catch them is that they will wait for a bend in the river. So picture this, you have a long stretch of river that's straight and then a sharp bend. And what they'll do is they will deforest the jungle, but keep enough canopy up top that from satellite imagery,

it still looks like there's unbroken jungle, so you can't see their runway. And so they will drop down almost to water level, and they will land under the trees. And you have like 150 foot ceiling in the jungle, so it actually works. Wow. And so they have secret runways out in the jungle, and then that's how they do it. And then they'll come down river by boat. And I ran into them once, and I knew it was because like the loggers don't travel at machine guns. Even the gold miners don't travel at machine guns.

And I came down river in a raft, and I'd been out for like, you know, a week. And I was pretty starving and banged up, and my food had all gone bad. And these guys, you know, they were all like armed to the teeth and they saw me and they were like, you know, Gringo, what are you doing here? And I was just like, do you guys have any food? I was like, or like a cigarette. I used to smoking those. I was like, you guys got any cigarettes? And they were all just like, yeah, we do. And I was like, I can't pay you. And they were like, don't worry about it. They thought it was funny. They were like, what are you doing? And I held up my camera. I was like, national geographic. National Geographic. And they were like, okay. And they're like, you want some drugs? And I was like, give me the cigarettes and the rice. I'm out. They were perfectly nice narco traffickers. Wow. I feel like maybe you got lucky because if you said National Geographic,

they might be like, hey, the CIA guy's here. He's pretending he's out of food and wants a cigarette. Yeah, there's a certain level of busted that you get after being out for a week in the jungle, though they looked him in there like, yeah, he's not a threat. He's not wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He's probably cool. I'm picturing, what was it, the Newman in Jurassic Park with the Hawaiian shirt? He's like being all covert.

Like a Gary Busey guy like, hey, guys, I'm lost in the jungle. What are you doing? Carrying some cocaine, that's interesting. Let me get a photograph. Yeah, definitely not CIA. So it sounds like you've been lost in the Amazon, which is probably a really bad place to get lost. Yeah, you know, Daniel Boone said something like, I've never been lost, but I've wandered for weeks on end or something like that. I voluntarily did some solo expeditions.

And my structure was, it was only possible because of these inflatable rafts that you can carry in your backpack. They're called pack rafts. And there's a company out of Colorado called Alpaca Raffes. And they make these stunning, like you can run whitewater rapids in these rafts that I have. And they're amazing. But you can stick them in your pack along with your tent and your food and your supplies and the only weigh like five pounds. And then you strap your paddles to the outside and you get the paddles that break down into four pieces instead of just two. And you have a boat.

And so I can go for a week into the jungle, go see places that, no one can see, and I don't have to go with a motor and gasoline and other people and all the things that make an expedition into the most pristine parts, almost like sacrilegious. Like you don't want to be changing oil on a motor in some of these pristine areas where no one's been for 300 years or maybe has never been. And so for those areas, I feel like it's more respectful to go alone. And also, when you have skin in the game, when you're out there and there's no help coming, there's no ambulance, there's no sat phone, there's no nothing.

Whatever happens out there happens. You're on a real expedition. It's, you're all in. So when you're out there doing that, your focus, your mental clarity, you learn a lot about yourself. And then also, you start smelling like the jungle and then the animals moving around you and you can get to places where like, just like the Galapagos, the animals don't know what a human is.

So they don't care. Like a jaguar, just walk right by you and just look you in the face and be like, what's up? Oh, wow. Keep walking. They're not scared of us. And so I've been to these places. And then what happens is when you run out of food or you get too scared or you run

into the uncontacted tribes, you go to the river and you can inflate this raft pretty quickly and then you can put your backpack on your lap. And those rafts, I mean, we've covered one time we covered over 400 miles in, I think, five days. And that sounds like a lot in a non-motorized capacity to cover that in an expedition. But maybe you're going like 10 kilometers an hour and it's like, so if you spend 10 hours on the river, you're doing some distance. And so it's just like repetitive days on the river, you can get from very remote back to civilization in like a week, which is pretty cool out in the jungle. Because there's places out there that even with a motor, even with like an outboard motor,

it'll take you three weeks to get there. People don't realize how big the Amazon is. They don't realize it's as big as the continental U.S. Yes, there's defarceation. Yes, there's roads. But there are still pockets out there that are so wild that literally from century to century they have not seen a human. And then there's areas, if you want to go even farther, you can go up this river, sure.

but between the two rivers are 300 miles of completely unbroken rainforest with ancient trees. No one's ever been there. The tribes can't get there because it's too far from the familiar reference points that they have. No scientist has ever been there. You'd have to get helicopter dropped, repel down into the middle of nowhere, and maybe do a biological survey for two days and then come back up, but maybe that's been done a few times in the Amazon. I actually know a guy who does that, but the vast majority of those regions of the Amazon are still unexplored.

And that's something that people have a hard time with. People go, oh, yeah, everything's been explored today. It's like, no, everything's been mapped. We've mapped the earth because we can see the earth. Sure, but it's like, once you get under the canopy, we don't know what's there. We don't know what communities of wildlife populations that we have never seen are still existing beneath those canopies. And until you see it for yourself, it doesn't.

Because I've heard people, like, as a matter of concept, sitting around, you know, a table at the Explorers Club going, oh, they've already explored this, they've already explored that. It's like, no. They've gotten as far as like, oh, yeah, there's this set of valleys in a 300-acre area that exists inside this national park. That's fine. But has any scientist ever actually gone there and looked at what's going on there? Do we know if there are species there that we've never seen before?

I mean, we see species that we've never seen before at the research station every day. I have entomologist friends that I will, I'll find like a crazy-looking bug. There's something that you can't even get it down to no idea what genus the thing is in. And I'll send it to people and they'll write back and they'll be like, yeah, we don't have a name for that. or guys that have been out there for 35 years and they'll go, where did you find this? I've never seen that. And it's like, well, you know, on top of a tree, you know, the deep, you know, six hours deep into this one river and they're like, yeah, no one's been up there. Even where we were, somebody found a bunch of new species of moths. Yeah. They're like, oh, catch moths because we cataloged them and they're like, you might find a new species. And I'm like, yeah, right. Sure. And somebody on our trip found a new species. And then we said, wow, how rare. And they're like, well, actually,

every few weeks we find a new species of moth that nobody's ever seen. Yeah, yeah. Back to that there's this book called One River, and it's about this ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes, who was in the Amazon, and it's by Wade Davis. It's an amazing book. Wade was supposed to go with us on our trip, but something happened if you didn't make it.

Yeah, it would have been something. That would have been really something to go with Wade Davis on a trip. He writes about the fact that, you know, Schultes described, you know, I don't know, a few dozen new species being in the Amazon for all the years that he was, and they're saying if that was any North American botanist, it would have made his career to discover a new species, period. But when you work in the Amazon, it's like, yeah, of course these new species. I mean, the first year I went, I was flicking ants off of a tree and I was noticing that they were, I was looking down and noticing that these ants were gliding back to the tree.

And they have like a fin on the outside of their exoskeleton that allows them to glide, and they can actually get blown off the tree and then glide back. Gliding ants got described that year. So I was like, I kind of made the discovery on my own, and then somebody else who was probably older and more equipped in some. scientifically trained, actually described him. But I was like, whoa, that kind of made it set in for me. It was like, no, pay attention to the things that are crawling around. Pay attention to the things that are sleeping in your boots because they might be things. Like, people find snakes that, you know, we go, is that venomous?

I don't know. No one's ever seen it. It's not any of the books. You got to open up its mouth and look for fangs. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Paul Rosalie. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support one of our sponsors.

Everything's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also ask our AI chatbot for promo codes, any sort of sponsor we've ever had on the show. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com. So please and thank you for supporting those who support us. Now, back to Paul Rosalie. There were so many things even just in our rooms that were bizarre. I went in, I saw this huge grasshopper looking thing,

and I went and got the guys, and I was like, hey, that's been there for like seven or eight hours. Is it dead? And they're like, no, but that's a pretty cool insect. This is a big one. You don't normally see ones that are that big. It'll go away by tomorrow. And they were right, but not for the reasons that they thought.

So overnight, I heard squeaking and crunching and noise. And I was like, that's definitely in my room. It's probably in the wall again. Well, I got up in the morning and that big-ass grasshopper thing was dead on the floor of my room in a pool of gross, gooey blood. and there was an injured bat that was stuck from the bed. And so overnight, a bat had come in and been like, oh, I'm going to eat that thing,

but it met its match because it was bigger than the bat. And the bat had bit off more than it could chew quite literally, and they both died. So the guys are like, oh, we'll get that when we clean the room. And I thought, like, okay, whatever, it doesn't matter if it's on the floor. I'm walking around in sandals because it's the Amazon, I'm not walking around barefoot too often.

They're going to clean it up. They did a pretty good job cleaning tarantulas and other stuff out of room. Because you'd wake up, there'd be like a tarantial on the top of your bed that had died at night and just died on your bed and they'd clean it up or a cockroach the size of your fist. And so I come in and they, I thought, oh, they cleaned it up. But then I realized the pool of blood was still there, but the grasshopper thing was gone. So something else came in and ate the carcass. And what was really gross that I will never forget was in that pool was this wormy white thing. And it was moving.

You really happen to the jungle. Yeah. So I go on. I get the guy and I'm like, what is that? And he goes, oh, it's a parasite that lives in the grasshopper looking thing that was in your room. So when it died and something else ate the carcass, that thing probably slithered out because it was like, oh, the host is dead. So it was looking for something else. And I was like, get that thing out of my room, man. It's so gross. It's like a worm that lives in a thing that died on the floor that was murdered by another

bat that they also had to remove from my room because it was injured and dead, you know, had died overnight. Yeah, those are the nematodes. Yeah. And so when I went to the Amazon, I was doing all this survival stuff and learning from the guys. And I would take those huge grasshoppers, you know, like this big. And just to freak people out. I just take it and bite it and eat it, you know, whatever.

You could just do it. Barrett Grills made a whole career out of it. Yeah. It's just shocked people. It's funny because my uncle's a surgeon and he saw a video that. And he's like, very funny. He's like, no, he's like, just don't do that though. And I was like, God, it's fine.

I was like, everything's clean in the jungle. He was like, no, no. He's like, they are filled with parasites. And I was like, what are you talking about? And then I saw one, the way I learned, which exactly what you're saying was I saw this huge, you know, gargantuan Katie did thing, landed on a candle, got stuck in the wax. And as it was burning, all the nematodes came out of its ass. Oh, my God. And so all these worms started, like, exploding out of this thing.

And we all watched them drop onto the floor. And so then that's now, that's a new pastime. Again, when we get done taking bot flies out of each other, we'll, like, take like a giant cockroach that's half dead from being eaten by something else. and you just dunk it in a glass of water, and then once it gets saturated, the nematodes will crawl out of its body, and so you see who can get the longest nematode. But they're pretty gross.

They're very gross, but they usually don't bother us. Sometimes we get them in our skin. They'll get stuck in your skin, and then you've got to deal with that, which sucks. But yeah, you're part of the life cycle in the jungle, for sure. Totally. It's like, it's alien stuff. Puerto Maldonado is the airport we flew into,

which was pretty funny because it's like, it kind of looks inside, like, oh, it's a decent sort of modernized, airport and then you walk outside and you realize you're just in this crappy metal box where planes land next to it you're literally and it has two rooms leaving and coming that's it what's so funny about this airport you know what priority passes it's like a credit card benefit where you like you can go to like the admirals club when you're at lax or whatever so i walk in and my friend goes i wonder if they take priority pass and as he makes his joke there's this little sign that says priority

pass and i walk up to the woman and i go what is this and she goes oh we have a lounge and i go No way. So I go in there. Porto Maldonado Airport. Yeah, it has priority passed. You go in there and they have an air conditioner. They have a coffee machine and they have a little refrigerator that has drinks. And I went in there and everyone's like, bro, there's an air conditioner in here.

Because bear in mind, we've been in the jungle for like three weeks at this point, sweating our balls off and not eating any, you know, that first cappuccino that you have is just absolutely drugs. So I was like, yeah, I have priority pass and I can take in two guests. I've spent weeks of my life in this airport. I got to go check this out. I had no idea that that was hidden in there. A hundred percent worth it. My drugs is after being out in the jungle for like three weeks, cold. I want cold water, cold beer, cold, anything.

Yeah, that air conditioner, we sat right next to it. They're like, aren't you cold? And we're like, that's the point. That's the point. That's the only thing people say, what do you miss? I'll be out for three weeks in the jungle. And it's like, I don't care. I'll eat rice.

I really don't mind. Like, I come from an Italian-American family. We're very good food. But I don't miss food. If anything, I'm like, Like when I get back, I'm going to really enjoy it. Like, it's fine. The thing that I miss is cold.

I just want to have, like, cold, refreshing. Like, when you just, like, I have to say, when you're in the jungle for a while, though, the streams, the little tiny clear water streams in the forest, it's refreshing, but it's still not that, like, ice cold. I like ice cold water. No, it's not. I miss dry clothes when I was there. I was like, I will do anything.

If just one pair of underwear could stop being moist, I would love it. And so we lit fires, and I was, I was weird because I got a stick and I was basically, like, roasting my underwear over an open flame. And they're like, that's going to smell. And I'm like, you don't want to smell what it's like when it's moist. And it's been on my body for three days. And I'm just rotating. Oh, yeah.

It smells worse. Trust me. Campfire smell is way better. Yeah. Way better. Oh, man. I heard you got stung by a bullet ant. That's the most painful.

What is the most painful sting of any insect in the world? Is that accurate? The reputation is that it's the most painful insect sting of anything in the world. They're bad. the first time I did it was when I was 18 years old and I got to the Amazon and I was sort of being like welcomed into the tribe and these guys they caught a bullet ant with some tweezers and they were like, all right, we want to play the game?

And I was like, what's the game? And they were like, just put out your arm. You put out my arm. The other guy puts out his arm and they drop the ant onto your arm and you put four arms together and you rub and you see who it bites. So it's basically bullet ant roulette. And of course I got stung. And the thing is it's holding on with its feet

and it's pushing its stinger into you while it's biting you with its mandibles, and it's just basically just trying to inflict as much damage on you as it can. It's like Hugo Stiglitz of insects. It's literally just die, die, die, die, die. And so it's bashing my arm against the table to try and get it off because I don't want to touch it,

as scared I was going to get stung on the other hand, and they're strong. They're like big, inch long black. You can't kill them. You just piss them off more. And so I spent, I think, about 24 hours of like a high fever, all your glands swell up. And there's something in their venom

that is very much engineered to make you feel this alarming feeling of like that you might be able to go into anaplectic shock or like that there's something wrong. You'll feel like, no, the blood isn't pumping to the left side of my brain anymore. Like you, it's not just like a bee sting where you're like, oh, my hand hurts, my hand hurts. It's okay. It's waves of pain, I heard. There's like a waves washing over you. It's waves of pain, washing through your body.

So over the years, I think I've probably eight or nine times been stung by a bulletin with varying degrees of intensity. but, you know, some of them weren't as bad, but if they really hit you, it's bad. I was in a swamp, and my friend Mosin got, he, like, looked at me and he just went, dude, I went what? And he goes, I just got hit. And I was like, no. And he's like, no, yeah. And he like, pulled out his pants and showed me his thigh.

And it was like, you know, big red welt. And I was just like, oh, dude, no. And it was like, because we're going to be doing all fun stuff the next few days. And it was like, he was like, oh. And he just, like, turned around and walked back to camp. He was like, I'm done. It rips the motivation right out of you. So by the last, a couple guys on our trip, one got Leash Maniasis.

That actually showed up later. The other guy, he got stung under his watch and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it looked like he had two knuckles under his watch. It was bad enough where it was towards the end of the trip. He goes, if this weren't the end of the trip, I'd take a medical evacuation. And even the guides were like, oh, that looks really bad. That's really, really, really, really swollen and really bad. So we were headed back.

I said, and this is why you never do this in the jungle. I said, I'm so glad that nothing really bad happened to anybody on the trip. And I went to pay my bar tab because there's a bar at this particular lodge, which the bartender was from Venezuela. He was trained as a bartender. I want to say in Venezuela and wherever else, but he was really into mixology. And so he would take jungle plants that you can't find anywhere else in the world and he would infuse vodka and different liqueurs out of it or even ferment them.

So we had amazing drinks that you would pay like $30 for. in a Manhattan bar, but you couldn't even get this particular thing because it was all jungle plants. Yeah. So it was absolutely incredible. Normally, I don't say that drinking is really good on any trip that I go to, but it's somehow in the Amazon the best drinks in the world at this one particular place. And I'm not exaggerating, like best drinks in the world. So I go to pay my bar tab, and I reach into, I have a little pack, backpack.

I reached in there, and I pulled out my wallet, and two seconds later, a bullet ant crawled out of that exact same pouch crawled over the table and the guide goes, oh, bullet ant. And he flung it. And our other guide was like, maybe don't fling it elsewhere in the lodge. Like, get it out of here. So he goes and he picks it up on a paper and flings it actually out of doors. And I thought to myself, I just came really close to having the worst 48 hours of my life. Because I had to travel and leave that day on boat, five hours by boat or whatever. And then another probably four hours or five hours by bus, having gotten stung by a bullet ant, and then a flight home to the United States would have been the worst 48 hours of my life.

It would have been absolutely awful. Yeah. That would have been terrible. The joke was like, oh, the jungle really keeps you on your toes, man. The second you let your guard down, it's like, actually, let me show you the fear of God right now. Yeah, no, it does. The last time I got hit was somebody was like, hey, that's a cool flower. It was like growing on some moss.

And I literally, like, reached over and, like, tried to get the whole plant because we have, like, a little plant. nursery. I tried to like pull it up by the roots and stuff. And as I'm putting my finger down, and I just, and I just instantly, it's like somebody shocks you. It's like it goes through your whole body. And I'm like, come on. And then you have to check to make sure it's not anything worse than a bullet ant. And I looked and I saw it and he was just like flexing over there. Just like, you what? And I was like, all right. Great. I was like, guys, I'm going back. I was like, I'm not. Yeah. And then on the walk back, you start getting lightheaded and stuff. And I took a bunch of Benadryl and slept for like four hours and woke up feeling like shit.

Oh. It's so brutal. And they're, they're, they're lonely. owners and we would be walking, there'd be these little bridges that they built over like muddy, swampy, whatever's on a trail. Yeah. And there'd be a sign or the guide would just say, do not touch the handrail. And you're like, why? And you look at the handrail and it's been eaten through of termites, but not only that, there'll be a bullet ant just walking.

They run solo. So you don't get any warning. Yeah. Like, oh, it's with other ants. It's just hanging out on a thing by itself that you might touch. And that's the end of it. And it's aggressive. they don't chase you, but it's not going to, like, give you a warning.

It's just you get stung and that's it. They're not going to give you a warning. And when you're doing work, like, sometimes, like, we'll be, like, clearing trails or something and you'll be, like, hacking and shit. And it's like, there's so many things that can go wrong. I was out with the Rangers and we were, like, blazing a new trail. We had to make it from, like, this one river to the stream and then back. And it took us four hours to cut through the jungle.

But as you're trying to cut a straight line through the jungle, the jungle doesn't work in straight lines. And we hit this swamp system. and at the edges of the swamp system is this mega dense growth with like thick bamboo and thorns everywhere. And as we're chopping, I'm watching bullet ants rain down on us. And I'm like, we're all just like brushing them off really quick. And like the tension level is going higher and higher. And, you know, someone snaps one thing and the bamboo breaks and goes flying up.

And bamboo is like a knife. When you cut it, it is sharp. I've seen it open a person's face. Like you can see their teeth through their cheek. We're all in this dense, dense, dense vegetation. We're all chopping. And I'm like, something bad's about to have. Like, I knew, you could just tell.

You could, like, hear, like, that sound in the dark night, like, you just knew something's going to happen. One machete stroke did it, and there was a hive of horrendous wasps. And we just instantaneously got surrounded, and everyone was getting destroyed, and we all had to go running backwards. Drop the machetes. Don't run with the machetes. Try not to get impaled on the 10-inch-long thorns.

Run past the bullet ends, and then we all, like, dove into the river, and we're all just, like, trying to be okay, as we have, you know, stings all over our faces and our backs, and they burrow into your hair and they start repeat it singing you on your scalp. They're savage. They're savage. We knew it was going to happen.

We knew something was going to happen. The amount of things that can damage or hurt you in the Amazon is second only to how amazing and beautiful the Amazon really is, right? So it's not just like this savage place that is awful every second that you're in it. No.

It can just kind of turn on a dime and remind you that you're not at the botanical gardens. Yeah, and that's the thing. So like you said, Like we've spent so many tranquil evenings sitting on the river or on the lake fishing for piranha and watching a family of giant river otters and there's beautiful herons. And like you're in like literally paradise. It looks like, you know, this primeval world with this giant jungle. You feel like you're in a dream.

You feel like you're in something that's like, you should, like I shouldn't be allowed to see things that is beautiful. Yeah, you're in avatar basically. Yeah, you're basically in avatar. And then one of the piranhas that you threw in the boat will take a chunk out of your foot. And you're like, I forgot. Right. I forgot. I'm not watching a movie.

I'm part of the food chain. I'm part of the food chain right now. Yeah, you definitely have to. But the good thing with the jungle, with the Amazon, is that none of the animals there actually want to eat you. Like, a jaguar will not bother a person. Like, they just won't. I know there are regions of the Amazon where the jacks have different behavior.

But in our region, there's literally, I think, one story in the last 30 years of a woman that did get a, no, a man got attacked by a very old Jaguar. that had no more teeth and the jag was like, I can't catch deer anymore, so I'm going to try a human. And he jumped on this old farmer. His wife actually beat it off with a shuttle and then they ended up killing it. But the jags don't bother you. It tapers not going to bother you. Black Kaman aren't going to bother you unless you go swimming in a lake at night.

And that's, again, that's on you. That's your fault. So yeah, it's something that's like, you know, some of these other jungles, like you go to India and it's like, there are tigers. There's elephants that are very pissed off at people. You know, Africa, of course. You've got things that will actually eat you. but in that sense, the large things are not what's going to hurt you in the Amazon, like a falling tree maybe. But other than like a mosquito and a bullet ant, there's not much that's like looking for trouble out there.

The falling trees are quite scary. I guess they fall in storms and you see these broken trees that are huge. I mean, they're like 100 feet tall. And all the vines that have grown around them for the last several decades, they rip down too. So if you're under that, it's like a hundreds of feet square or circle or whatever, we'll just fall at one. time. And if you're under that, you're done. Yeah, you could lose a few acres. You could lose a few acres like that. I had some people come down and this couple wanted to go camping and I was like, oh, I'll put you at the base of this beautiful tree. We call it the avatar tree. And I was like, I'm going to put you guys there. And it's going to be perfect. I'm going to put the tent. I'll take you out there. We'll leave you there, whatever else. And everybody started drinking and we're

at the research station and we're all like starting to party. And they were like, all right, we're going to go. And I was like, yeah, I'll take you out there. And I was like, you know what? I was like, I don't know why I did this. I was like, you know what? Go tomorrow night. I was like, let's hang out tonight. And they're like, no, we're partying tonight. It would be so cool.

And then segue into being in the jungle. Be like the perfect date. And I was like, yeah, I was like, I don't feel like going out tonight. Let's go out tomorrow night. And they were like, all right. And so I had the place mapped out where I was going to put their tent. I cleared it with my machete. Like I had it made into a little rectangle.

And not the tree that they would be camping under, but the next tree over fell. And all of those branches. And you're talking like, you know, minivan-sized, branches smashed, destroyed. If they were camping there, those people would have been juice. Like, there would have been nothing left of them. They would have been driven into the soil. And it was pure coincidence and just like the fact that in that moment, I don't know if I felt something and said, it's a bad idea. If I just got lazy, I don't know what it is. But for some reason, I was like, not tonight. We'll do tomorrow night. And they would have been

very dead. The river itself is a little bit scary. We ended up building rafts to just, I don't know why. It was like a competition to build rafts, which is way way, way, it's extremely hard. And then they float like crap, and you're not going anywhere, and you're going upstream, not downstream, whatever, or you're getting spun around in circles. But first, you know, first you don't want to get near the water. You think something's going to eat you. Then you get over that, and then you realize that the current is actually wildly unpredictable because of the rain. So you get in one spot, you're just floating, and you're like, oh, this is great. And maybe you see a little snake or something. It's not going to bug you, but it still unnerves you.

And then another spot, you're drifting lazily along. And then that current goes over a shallow spot and picks you up so fast. You realize there's no way you can swim fast enough to get to shore and break out of this. And so we jumped in. We had life jackets on, obviously. But we were floating. We're like, this is great. And then we just get shot out like a rocket into a larger part of the river.

And the boat had to come get us because a bunch of us just got shot straight out there. And we, it's like, all right, stop trying to swim because you're going to exhaust yourself and die. and the boat just came and got us. But I will say the sandflies, holy shit, those were terrible. You'd go, like, step on the beach for a second until you got to drier area, and you'd have 30 sandfly bites, and they would all swallow up. Oh, it was disgusting.

That's where we think that dude got leash meniasis. Yeah, sandflies suck. That's probably, I would say, if people were going to say, what's the, when is the Amazon own up to its reputation of being, like, bug-infested and horrendous for sandflies? If you have to be by the beach at, like, sundown, like 6 p.m., you get destroyed. And then sometimes we'll be, like, measuring an anaconda or something. Like, we'll have, like, a tape measure and a clipboard, we're like doing work.

And if you don't have a field shirt on, like, if you're just out, like, I'm always, I usually have my shirt off in the jungle. I'm like, you just get destroyed. And you've got to deal with that for weeks because those bug bites aren't going to go away. I've seen some people get really messed up. I'm curious about this giant ant eater. Anteaters are not high in my list of animals that actually sound dangerous, but apparently these are pretty, pretty beasty. Yeah.

A giant anteder is the largest member of its family, and they have these giant hooked claws. I think it's actually the largest claw of any mammal, even a grizzly bear. A giant antedars claw gets larger than that. They're these huge black claws. They're beautiful. And they're peaceful animals. The reason they have those claws is twofold. They use it to defend themselves against jaguars, which is a serious job.

So the anteater will actually stand up on its high legs like a human using its tail for balance and it'll have these claws out and they'll just open their arms. And it looks like they're like, come on, let's go. And they'll let the jaguar come in and then they'll sink the claws into it. And they can literally like rip its ribs out of his body. I talked to a guy who was hunting and he didn't know what he was following, but his dogs picked up the scent and they're running along his streambed. And as they get around the corner, his dog shoots out of sight and then he just hears it

yelp. And when he got around, this guy's really like a little four foot tall man. He's a little tiny Amazonian guy. And he gets around the corner, and this anteater is standing up. One dog is already dead, and its guts out or out on the ground. The other dog, the anteater has grabbed it and snapped its spinal cord at the neck, and it's holding the dog, and it looked at the guy, and he said, looked at me right in the eyes.

He goes, and I put up my gun, and he goes, and then it took a step towards me, and I ran. And so he just, like, ran. Both of his dogs have been killed. And, of course, the anteater was just like, as long as you leave me alone, I'm not going to mess with you. But they're tough. And so, yeah, this mother ant eater had been killed, for some reason, somebody had shot her. They're not, nobody eats that meat. They're not apparently very good to eat.

But somebody had killed a mother anteater and the babies ride on the mother's backs for the first six months of their life. And I would never have thought of ant eaters as an emotionally intelligent animal. But this baby ant eater, as soon as I met her, she came right up to me. She was like living in a village, like under the floorboards, like next to the dogs and the chickens and stuff. she had no mother and so she I was there and for some reason I looked at her she looked at me she walked right over and she like climbed up my leg and like went against my chest and like went to sleep and I was like you know this like beautiful little Pokemon just like decided she loves me like and so I was like no don't worry it was like you're safe with me I was like what's her name and

they're like Lulu and I was like all right well Lulu is mine now how do you want to negotiate this and they're like we don't care and I was like all right cool took her up to the research station I was 19 at this point and so like I was learning the jungle and you'd put her down and she'd freak out, like absolutely freak out. She needed to have that touch, that connection to another body at all times. That's what she needed. And so you put her down, she'd freak out. You'd put it on your shoulder and she'd be happy and she'd go to sleep. Now, anteaters have about, you know, like a 12-inch tongue that they fire into the holes of antinternite nests and sticky. And that's how they pull out rapid fire. That's how they get their food. And then

they go from nests to nest to nest to nest. So I just had to always have this anteater on my chest or on my back, even when I slept, I'd have her on me, but then she would wake up and decide that she wanted to play. And so she'd take her tongue, like, a 10-inch tongue and, like, fired up my nose and it would come out my mouth or, like, fire into my ear. And it were just absolute, like, brain cleaning, just like all the way inside. And one, two, three, before you could even react, you'd be like, boom, boom, boom. And just like, you know, and like, it can search. So, like, you could feel it, like searching through your nasal cavities. She thought, you could tell, she thought this was hysterical because she would do this. And then she'd, like, ha, ha, ha, ha, wake up. And I would wake up. And I would

wake up and I'd throw her on my back and I'd have to like wear like a sweater or something because she'd try and hold on with the claws. Sure. But then I started going around the jungle on my hands and knees with this baby giant ant eater and like interacting with animals as an animal. And so for a while I was, I turned into a mother ant eater. Were you showing her how to eat ants? Was that the idea? Like, hey, learn how to find food yourself. That was the idea. I mean, part of me was like, this is stupid. And then part of me was like, yeah, but then like when they're rehabbing birds, you know, they put on the fake mama bird to teach them. And then they learned to teach it to them.

So I was like, if she's going to have any chance of being a mother at some point, like, I should probably carry her. And so I would do a few hours every day of walking around on the forest floor on my hands and knees, which teaches you a lot. You know, as humans, we're always like, again, it's like the classic thing. It's like we don't realize, like I have this problem with like people that study elephant intelligence. It's like, well, there's 10 researchers and we have an elephant at the Bronx Zoo. And we gave it a key.

And we were seeing if it knows to fit the key in the lock. And I'm like, you're giving it very human problems with a ton of humans or around watching, try walking with an elephant through the jungle by yourself and seeing the problems that they solve on their own, which is different. And of course, there's a logical limit to that type of research because most people doing this research don't have the access to walk through the jungle alone with an elephant. And so, and the only reason I'm saying this is because when I started doing this, I started going, oh, they are way smarter than we think they are. They should have their own, like, government representation. They should be considered like a class

of non-human beings. Like, we need to think about elephants a whole different way. But when I was walking with the anteater, I started realizing that being in the jungle and acting like an animal, like really settling in with them, opens a whole new dimension of the jungle, and it opened a whole new dimension of the jungle for me.

And I've heard of people doing this. I know one guy was trying to rewild a pack of wolves. There's also a beautiful story of somebody who did this with turkeys. And he said turkeys, but it's like he wrote poetry about, you know, the time he's... spent living out in the wild with this turkey that he was trying to rewild with these other turkeys. And so it's like when you have the animals as your guide and you completely stop being human and you act like them, you can access levels that you might not even realize you're there before you

do something like that. So Lulu was the first thing. So the Antieter really, really like unlocked a level of intensity and intimacy with the Amazon that I didn't know was possible. So that was really like, you know, first being learning from the Indeater, guys and going out on hunting trips and drinking ayahuasca with them and learning how to fish for piranha from them learning how to do everything from them and then being a anteater for a while like these things like start to reshape your brain and you start to go okay like your senses change your

body changes and then i've only reinforced that like i said like later on in my career i got to spend time like serious serious time with with elephants that you know and usually with elephants there's either wild elephants or there's captive elephants. And so I had the incredibly rare privilege of spending time with an elephant that was habituated to people but was allowed to live wild. And so I got to walk through the jungle with an elephant that wouldn't kill me. Because, you know, if you go up to a herd of elephants, they're going to run away. Usually it's a female group and they're very suspicious of humans. We cut down their forests. We throw things at them. You know, like in India, the farmers are pretty brutal on the elephants. And so you're never going to be in a situation where

a wild elephant is going to accept you. Unless you're simply. spending, you know, the weeks out in the wild with them, which is really not something that is possible. But I ended up in this situation where I was caring for this elephant and walking through the jungle with him. And he was just doing things. Like the amount of intelligence that they have, the depth of intellect that they have, you know, people be like, oh, my dog knows and I'm sad. And it's like, yeah, the elephants know everything. I mean, I've watched an elephant walk up to a girl that we didn't know, she knew she was pregnant, but we didn't know she was pregnant. And the elephants walked up to her and the matriarch put its trunk against her stomach.

And then, like, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, you had five or six elephants all touching this girl's stomach and, like, conversing with each other about it. Wow. That's straight out of a movie. That's incredible. No, that was, and I was watching this going, oh, you know, and they were extra gentle. I actually, my friend, Niti, who's an incredible conservationist in India, I have beautiful pictures of this, but she had a little tribal boy.

He must have been, like, two years old. But the elephants came through. And again, these elephants, you have to be careful. Like, we were like, pick them up, you know, make sure. But we don't have to be. The elephants are smart. They all walked in and they were a lot calmer because there was a baby. Like, when it's just us, they walk in, they'll shoulder past us.

One of them will pick up the Jeep. So it's only on two wheels and look over it, you and be like, yo, what do you think about this? They'll mess with you. Like, they have a sense of humor, which is also crazy, you know, because dogs, they're authentic. They're smart. They're like, oh, what, you know, frisbee, frisbee, frisbee, but they're not doing jokes. Elephants, elephants, they're like.

knock something over there, we're like, I know you loved that. And then they'll flap their ears. Like, they know. But around a baby, it was so interesting because the mothers corraled their young, because the younger elephants are the more dangerous ones because they're the size of a minivan, but they don't have the respect yet. So a young male elephant, he's got the tusks. He's crazy.

He's strong. But he hasn't been taught how to act yet. So you have to be a little careful around them. But the moms were like, oh, oh, oh, the humans have a baby. Like, be careful. and they like they like pushed their young off to the side and then they were curious and so there was this moment where nithi was holding this little tribal boy and like the kid is leaning over and touching this elephant and the elephant was she wasn't even flapping her ears she was just very much like you can do it she like she knew what was going on she was fully aware it was just like it was just like watching two people show a baby something it was like if you watch like a big burly guy with a beard and like a little baby who's a little scared of the guy and his mom going you know just touch it it's okay she's a beard like it's like it's like The elephant and Nethi were collaborating on allowing this child to touch the elephant. It was like just watching two people be like, oh, yeah, it's okay.

And the baby just reached over, and I was just sitting there clicking just like, this is mind-blowing. You're a man of all jungles, apparently. For those who haven't figured it out, we're not talking about the Amazon anymore. There are no elephants in the Amazon. I've got to let you go for now, but I'm looking forward to the viral video where you run into a giant ant-eater while you're making a documentary or whatever, and it attacks you and licks your face because it ends up being Lulu. Your long-lost pet, ant-eater. God.

That I want. I want that one. The born free of ant-eaters, yes, that would be great. Have you seen that viral video from like the 80s where the guy goes and meets the lions, but he had raised them as cubs, hasn't seen him in years, and they jump on him. Yep. And they're licking his face. It's incredible.

It's so cool. It wasn't that dramatic, but we did have on one of the, so again, animals can smell a million times better than we can. We put camera traps, these automatic cameras that are out in the jungle and have motion sensors on them. We're constantly using camera traps to monitor wildlife populations and get footage of what species are in our area. And so I put out a series of camera traps not too long, maybe a couple years after I'd release Lulu. And this one anteater did come by the camera trap. And you can see her, she smells it, and it must have smelled like me. And then she like turns to the side and she's

got a baby on her back. And then she walks by. And I was like, I have no way of knowing if that was Lulu. I have no way of knowing. But it's the only time I've ever seen an anteater interact with a camera trap and we've forgotten among camera traps all the time but in my head it was and she was right in the right area everything was perfect all the factors support the hypothesis that this could have been Lulu that she did smell a familiar scent stopped by the camera trap and then as she turned she actually had a baby on her back so I'm like that's the way that went yeah amazing well it's a comforting thought in other case man thank you very much for taking the time I know you're usually again in the jungle and we caught you during one of your springtime New York sessions here. So I'm grateful and stay safe down there.

I know in your book you talk about poachers and loggers and gold miners and trying to catch 25 foot long mega anacondas that pull you underwater, which like, no thank you. I'm good on that. Oh, it's so much fun. You got to come try it, man. Anaconda writing is the best time you could have. It sounds horribly dangerous and just getting there. You know, I'm good just watching that on Nat Geo. I think I'll stick with that. No, I could tell you love the jungle by the way you talk about. And I can tell you've been there, which is cool. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good talking with you, man.

That's awesome. I don't know if I could go back. Yeah, thank you, thank you, man. Thank you. As usual, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, I wanted to give you a preview of one of my favorite stories from an earlier episode of the show. My friend Steve Elkins found a lost city in the jungle that most people never even knew existed.

I'm not even kidding. It sounds insane. This has to be one of the most incredible stories I've ever recorded on the show. I know you're going to love this one. The legend of Ciadet Blanca, or White City in English, goes back probably 500 years to the best of my knowledge. People have believed that there is this civilization out there. And the local indigenous people have their own legends.

It has about five different names of which I can't pronounce. About this culture, this civilization that lived out in the jungle at one time. One of the other monikers for the city in current times is Lost City the Monkey God. Maybe there's some truth to this legend. I kind of felt there was something to it. The Mesquedia jungle where it's located in the eastern third of Honduras is one of the toughest jungles in the world, and by accidents of geography and history,

it's remained pretty much unexplored until recently. I have a map made by the British in the 1850s, and on that map, it says Portal del Inferno, over that part of the jungle, and it was called the Gates of Hell because the terrain was so tough. A lot of people have gone looking for it. Some went in and some never came back. A director friend of mine introduced me to a guy named Captain Steve Morgan. And he was a lifelong adventurer, explorer, treasure hunter, raconteur.

Nice guy, pretty smart. And I said, let's go. In 1994, we headed out to Honduras for an unknown adventure looking for the lost city. For more with Steve Elkins, including the details on how they discovered the city and made one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century, check out episode 299 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Paul's got incredible stories. We didn't even get a chance to talk about him waking up with a jaguar next to him when he was asleep with his face, just inches from Paul's ear. I mean, that's why are you alive? That's the question I would have had if we had time to touch on that one. it's amazing how psycho some of these poachers are out in the jungle. I mean, there's loggers that kill officials.

They kill locals by just in brutal ways. They'll light people on fire and make everyone watch. I mean, these are, you think drug cartels are bad. These guys are equally bad, and it's just because they want mahogany. It's incredibly sad. There are so many species in the Amazon. I actually went and researched this because I thought, why are there so many different areas with different species that only live in these very tiny areas?

Well, it turns out, and I'm going to explain this poorly, but here we go. Of course, history is full of ice ages. And what happens in areas like the Amazon jungle is these glaciers move and they cut, and these areas of jungle become islands for hundreds or even thousands of years, and then they join again as the ice melts, and this shift happens over and over and over again. And so you end up with all these different diverse species growing essentially in isolation in these, what were at the time islands, and then as those islands grow into each other

and we end up with the jungle, we just end up with millions of different types of, I guess you would almost call them microspecies at that point. It's really incredible. Again, that's a question for an actual scientist to explain, but I thought it was really fascinating why the jungle has so much biodiversity. Speaking of biodiversity,

I mentioned my friend who had Leishmaniasis growing on his face after our trip to the jungle, which, by the way, kind of scary when somebody on your trip gets a flesh-eating parasite on their face, but Paul also ended up with a crazy face infection. He was actually taken to be helped by poachers. It turned out to be mercer. So that turned out to be kind of a big deal. There's a lot of stuff in the jungle, man. Biodiversity kind of cuts both ways. Poaching is terrible just because of the animal loss, but poaching also hurts tourism because there's less animals,

and then that hurts jobs, which drives locals to extraction industries, like poaching, like gold mining, which of course then hurts tourism even more. So you end up with a vicious cycle and kind of a race to the bottom, and it's really, really sad. Peru actually granted a major concession to Exxon in the area, which thankfully later back down. It's a protected area now. It's the largest uninhabited and unhunted area on earth. So, look, I'm all about economics and free market, but, man, can we just maybe not drill for oil in one friggin' place, the Amazon jungle?

Can we find somewhere else to do it, for Christ's sake? We're already looking at the scope of the destruction in the Amazon, extraction of timber, other resources. The locals have a saying, it's, I think, indigenous or First Nations saying, we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children, which if you think about that and you let that set in, kind of heavy duty, man, we were driving back from our trip when I was down there and we're driving on these dirt roads that go through areas of the jungle. And then you'll just see a clearing. And then you'll see another clearing. And then there's another clearing that's on fire, and you realize that every day they're burning one sort of suburban

household lot worth of jungle, hundreds of different areas probably in the Amazon, to make way for farmland and have their cows graze, and then they just do it again the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and they clear tons and tons of land. You can come out of a thick jungle that you can barely walk in, and then you can see hundreds of meters of just flat ash or grass or nothing, for that matter, because they've used the land and they moved on. It's really, really sad, especially when you think that there's uncontacted tribes in there. And some of these tribes, think about this. They've never heard of the United States. They've never heard of World War II. They don't even know that they live in Peru. They've never heard of that country, even though they live

there. That's how isolated these tribes are. They just have no idea. It's really incredible that that still exists on this planet. It's almost a quaint notion. Paul also likes chasing cryptid, so giant kind of maybe extinct, maybe doesn't exist wildlife. Snakes that are so big, they could probably swallow a person. It's really something. Humans are the most dangerous creatures in the Amazon, maybe also mosquitoes or flesh eating parasites, but man, the gators or crocs, Cayman, and giant anacondas, nothing to sneeze at.

He actually saw one that was something like 15 feet and almost got crushed by it and pulled him underwater. I mean, that's a story that I just sort of firmly keep in the nightmare fuel bank, period. And now you can too. Just imagine being pulled under water by a 15 plus foot snake. No thanks, and you're welcome. Big thank you to Paul Rosalie. All things, Paul, will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Remember to check out our chat gptt bot, which is forever improving over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. You can find any interview, any promo code from any sponsor, any feedback Friday question and answer should be covered by that bot. Let us know if you

find anything weird there. Transcripts in the show notes, videos on YouTube, advertisers, deals, account codes and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I've said it once, but I will say it again. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn, our six-minute networking course, teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty, build relationships, use them for your business, use them for your personal life, use them to get out of prison in a third world country, wherever you might need them. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's a free course. It's not cringy. It's not gross.

It's not schmoozy. And many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty,

Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting if you know somebody who's into the Amazon, wildlife, giant anacondas that can eat you. Share this episode with them.

the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format.

Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting.

So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening you can thank me later