The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 934: Paul Rosolie on Uncontacted Peoples, the Amazon, and Junglekeepers

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with Paul Rosolie about the Amazon, crazy jungle critters, arguing with indigenous people, dolphin intercourse, Chinese in the Amazon, and more! Find Paul Rosolie’s book, Junglekeepers, here: https://www.junglekeepers.org/store Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Check it out at Firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, everybody, we got an awesome guest right now who knows a ton of stuff about something I wish I knew a ton about. You're a great position right now. You sure you want to learn about it?

Dude, I'm jungle-curious, man. I'm jungle-curious because I've been fortunate to spend... Let me see, let me add it up. I've been fortunate. to spend maybe like eight weeks, I guess. Okay. Scattered out, maybe eight weeks or so in the jungle in South America. Yeah. Just enough to go like, I should have had more of this in my life.

Yeah. Should have had more of my life. And it's like, it's a real miss of mine. Oh, it's beautiful. I don't want to go so far as to say, if I could do my whole North American life over again, I'd move it down to the South America, but I'm way jungle curious. Okay. So I'm going to, I got a lot of animal questions for you. But, uh, Paul Rosley. So Paul's a naturalist, an author. He's a jungle expert. Maybe most importantly, he's a founder of jungle keepers, a conservation organization in the Peruvian Amazon. I'm holding his book here, Jungle Keeper, what it takes to change the world. We're going to talk a bunch about jungles, and we're going to talk a little bit about something

that our listeners are familiar with because it's just, it's thematic through all of our discussions. This is a very North American-centric show. We spend a lot of time on issues that are centered around. that are peripheral to discussions of like what we call, you know, the North American model of wildlife conservation. I think some people hear that and they just get bored just hearing the term.

But it's the system. It's a system that accounts for in the United States, in Canada, right? It's a system that accounts for how can we be so rich and have 360 million people and be like military and tech, technological innovators and still have woods and wild places. Mm-hmm. Right. That doesn't happen by accident.

No. It doesn't happen by accident. We achieve that through a model that isn't always exportable, right? It worked here and it's worked here, but it's, it's a model that, as we discussed before, it's a model that, like, in Africa, there's a different take on that model. Yeah, right? And so I think a lot of people, as we get into this discussion, a lot of people will, as they're thinking about, they'll be like, oh, yeah, for decades, I've been hearing about the Amazon, deforestation in the Amazon, illegal logging in the Amazon, illegal poaching in the Amazon, the Amazon's disappearing. One of the things I want to get in with you is, what does that look like? How does that happen? How does it, how do we stop that from happening, right?

Is our system applicable? Is there another system that's applicable? So we'll get to there. Great. But first, I got to ask you about some of my, can you handle some jungle questions? Uh-oh. Yes. Yes, please.

You don't need your notes for these jungle questions. I was going to say. I was going to know. Okay. Here's junk question number one. Okay. This is like, again, I'm, I've been fortunate to do a little dabbling down in. What country were you in?

Well, so some was in, so I spent some time in Bolivia. Okay. in the headwaters of the Amazon. Yeah. Then I spent some time in what's sort of like cheating to call it the Amazon, but I was just over the ridge line in Guyana. So if I took a piss, it would have flowed out into the Caribbean. Okay.

But if I went a little ways yonder and I took a piss, it would have made its way out the Amazon. Yeah, you're sort of, so you're almost, were you in the Orinoco River Basin? Well, it was the, I'm trying to remember the main, the main system. The hell is that main river? I have to look it up. That's all right. Yeah, yeah.

I get where you were. So Guyana is beautiful. No, it was pretty gorgeous, dude. For some reason, it's like untouched. I actually don't know much about it. We were in some wild country, man. We were in some wild country. It was amazing.

First off, have you been bit by those bullet dance? Oh, as soon as I got to the Amazon and I was like fresh off the boat, you know, fresh, I just, you know, New York kid got to the Amazon. And they looked at me and they went, so you like the wild, right? Yeah, you know, they saw me catching snakes and climbing trees and they went, oh, so you're like a jungle man, right? And I went, yeah. Big jungle guy. And they went, come here. They said, we're going to give you the initiation.

And you take a bullet ant that's this big. And you put it on your forums. What we would do is put it, you know, you just drop it on so it's not upset. And then me and you rub forums together. It's sort of like Russian roulette with a bullet ant. And whoever it stings, it stings. Hold on who's doing this? Me and one of the guys.

He just goes, you know, you want to see what it's like? He goes, let's get this out of the way. That was my initiation. So, hold on me, you're doing it and you're like, who's going to get it? Yeah. So you just rub it between your forums. It's like you sort of just have this little... So he gets pissed and grab somebody.

Yeah. And so they have huge pincers on the front. You know, their mandibles are for cutting and holding. And so he got me with the mandibles, which hurts. And I was like, oh, this is killer. Now, I hadn't stung me yet. And then they sting you. And they use those mandibles to get leverage and get in on you.

And they inject you. I mean, it's a reason they're called a bullet ant. It hurts. Yeah. And the, you know, I've been stung by bees and wasps thousands of times. And I just don't care. this thing, you feel like, it's almost like their venom is engineered

to make you feel like something's wrong. Because it's not just localized at the site, it goes systemic, and then you feel it in your lymph nose, and you feel it in weird places on your back, and you start getting the sweats, and you go, I'm having a bad reaction to this. And the truth is, you just got hit with a bulletin. And that spot's gonna keep throbbing,

and you're gonna have that back of the skull headache. And the first one really got me, like really got me, and I was for like 24 hours, I was feeling it and I felt terrible and I really didn't do much. I mean, now on number, you know, 12 or 13, I think over the years where it's like, now it's like, man,

now my day is ruined. I'm going to be in a bad mood, but it's not the end of the world. So you just ride it out. Yeah. When I had got bit by one of those, I didn't know, I knew it was a thing and I knew it was bad,

but I had the extra anxiety of not having read up on it. So I didn't know what was going on. But then it went away. Yeah. But then I heard about guys doing it like doing it just to do it. The glove. Putting on gloves.

They have the native glove where they make it. It's like a basket woven into a flat glove and they stick their hand in there. And somehow this tribe is able to put their abdomens in the mesh. So all the abdomens are facing in. I don't know how they do that. And then you stick your end. It's an initiation ceremony for the young men. And that's a whole other topic about how we don't.

have those anymore for our young men but they they do that and then as the young men are i mean you i'm surprised that it doesn't just cause you so much you know like anaphylactic shock or something just overwhelm your system but as you're recovering from this and you're you know feverish and laying on the ground they have they pair you up with a young woman who cares for you and it's supposed to be like a yeah so they knock you down and then they let they let you get nursed back to health that's what i understand that's what i remember of it have you ever seen the like just for Listen, can you back up on for listeners what we're talking about here? Sure.

Like, I mean, it's many. I've never seen this. Guys just told me about it. I've seen it, you know, anthropology class in college. I remember they showed us a video of it. And I don't remember if it was a Yamami or the Kayapo or who was it, did it? But I'm talking, I want to say like, you know, over 80 or close to 100 bullet ants, which 100 wasps would put you in bad shape.

Yeah. 100 bullet ants. I mean, I would be worried about serious injury, you know, or systemic injuries. Oh, presumably some dude's got to be, it's got to over time has to have to kill somebody. Oh, sure. I mean, people die from, you know, if you're allergic to wasps, I don't know if bullet answer bad for people that have a wasp allergy. That's another thing, being in the Amazon and I've had people come down and they go, you know,

they get there and they go, you know, by the way, they see a wasp and go, oh, I got to watch out for that. I'm allergic to wasps. And I'm like, you are in the Amazon. Like, you should have not come, you know. And so I always have a, you know, epipen ready to go. On that wasp question, that was one of the things I was going to get to. Yeah.

Well, finish up the bullet ant. You already answered my question, but I'll just get it over with now. Then we'll go back to bullet ants. An observation I had in Bolivia and other guys I was with had it. It's like, like in an American summer. Yeah. Right? Now and then, it's just now and then someone gets bit by a hornet or a wasp.

Like in an American summer. This summer, I got one wasp bite. Okay. Okay. And I could talk about it and tell you what it happened and all that and you know how itchy it was. Right. But to come out of your tent and just have it be that they're getting you like mosquitoes. Yeah. You'd be like, I know that when I walk out of this tent and just go down to get some breakfast in the other tent. I know that when I walk out of this tent, I'll be greeted by a wasp that will bite me. Yeah. You get used to it, man. I don't know. It's one of those things. And that's why the jungle is not for everybody. When I come. North America and I'm doing some backpacking. I'm like, man, this is great. You know, this is great. There's like one or two mosquitoes. You can walk barefoot into some brush and not be worried about anything comparatively. I mean, I just getting stung by a wasp was a daily occurrence. We just covered in wasp and you're you have sweat on you. They are so hungry. Yeah. And so carnivorous. They'll, what I do now is I have a covenant with the wasps. And that is that if they want to sit on me and and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, great. I'll. I'll. I'll. I'll.

be sitting there doing something, and there'll be a wasp on my wrist and I'll be like, fair play. You're not, I'm not going to bother you. As soon as a wasp stings me, I spend the rest of my day trying to get the highest body count I can. I start trying, I've gotten as high as 80, where it's like, I will just start newspaper whacking them and just, you'll slowly have an impact. If you, if you disrupt the covenant, I'm all for peace, but if you disrupt it, I'm coming for your kind. And then I'll, okay, we covered it on bullet. Oh, no, I was going to tell you this about bullet ants. If listeners go way back, we had an episode,

maybe Nate can pull it up the name of it. We had the entomologist Justin Schmidt on. And Justin Schmidt studied venomous, everything, like anything to bites. Yeah. That was his specialty. So insect venom's and all that kind of stuff. And he, the reason I had him on is he famously,

he came up with this thing called the Schmidt Payne Index. The Pane Index. Yeah. Yeah. And he put the bullet. the bullet ant the bullet ant sits at the highest it occupies the highest position on the schmidt pain index and yes he's really descriptive i say i put myself in a word trap descriptive descriptions yeah just descriptions break through the wall of uh the bites yeah you know and his his

description of the bullet end is funny i can't remember what it is yeah but do you agree highest uh yeah i mean the bullet ant sort of has a riveting bouquet of of semi neurological effects and a trembling sort of feverish aftershock and it's it's bad it's real bad however there are some big you know there's a tarantula hawk he talks about that uh that i think it doesn't score as high i don't know i've never been bitten by one but they fly by carrying tarantulas you're just doing something and this giant wasp it's like three inches long You know, they have that suit. It looks terrifying. It looks like a sniper rifle for an insect or something.

It's like that long abdomen with a big, hangy stinger. And it just looks like it's made to cause pain. But what it's made to do is get into a tarantula and then they carry them off. And those just look terrifying. The worst pain I ever felt was there was a big caterpillar with this vertical, floofy hair, and it was orange. It looks a lot like Donald Trump's. hair. And I caught this caterpillar and I knew it was bad news and I had it on a leaf and I was like,

I'm going to be so careful. I'm going to put it in this box and in the morning, I'm going to take a look at it and try and get some pictures of it and figure out what it is. So I got it on this very sturdy leaf and I'm getting it in the box. And right as I got it in the box, the leaf just gave away and the caterpillar fell against my hand. Oh, and that did it. So underneath all that hair were these like Christmas tree spines. And when that hit me, I have never felt of an insect. we're not talking about stingrays but of an insect it was it was

shockingly horrible way worse than a bullet ant bulletin at this point Smith didn't know about that one maybe he didn't know about we might have to call him up I think he might have pat Nate can you figure before I did he pass away well to type in Justin Schmidt

and Tomol passed away in 2023 I will never know you got out produced right there by an engineer um all right here's another one tell me I was with a guy. I was with a guy.

I was with a guy in Guyana. He's Makushi. If you ever heard of Makushy. He's Makushi. He was explaining to me. We're sitting there looking at anaconda on the bank. He says to me, I mean, in all, these dudes that say a lot of things where they're not being, like,

they're not trying to wow you with like weird. stuff it's just like like you know what i'm saying like just a matter-of-fact statement he said if i touched that i was asking him is it okay to poke it okay we got up natural like naturally being like you know in american can i poke that being an american i had the impulse that we poke it to see what happened and he mentions to me he mentions to me that if you touch it with a bow it will die in about 45 minutes And it's a painful death. Wait, hold up.

If you touch an anaconda with a bow. With a bow. Like a bow. His, his bow. Yeah. You touch the anaconda. The anaconda laid my bow on it.

Yeah. It would kill it. It would die in about 45 minutes. Okay. You ever heard this? No. There are different parts of the Amazon. They have completely different local lore.

Sure. And I've heard everything from, you know, if you shoot a giant anteater, the bullet will will ricochet off and it will always hit you back. So if you shoot a giant anteater, you'll die. Sure. I've caught over 90 anacondas in my lifetime, and not one of them has died after. Now, I've never touched one with a bow, but as rational humans, I would understand, you know, if I touched you with a piece of wood right now, there's not a lot of reason that you would die

afterwards. Anacondas are tough. I've also seen from Capi Barra that, you know, rodent family, those teeth. If they get them, you know, on the stomach, the rodent turns around and will go to work just trying to chew that anaconda apart. And that's why they wrap them up like that as much as they can. Yeah. But I've seen anacondas with wounds that would cause us to go to the hospital and need six months.

I don't think, I don't think that the anaconda would die if he touched it with his bow. And I don't even care what I think about it. I just thought I was, I liked and was interested in that he didn't think this, but he knew it. Meaning I didn't feel compelled to it's not my place to go argue with him about what is actually happening. Oh, see, I'm from New York. I would argue the shit out of that. I'd be like, what are you talking about? No, another white dude.

Do it. Another white dude. I've been like, come on. Oh, so what is this? He gets some sort of exemption for being indigenous. No. Yes. Yes.

No, I want to see it proving. You got a huge exemption from me where I'm like, that's great. That's great. Let's not touch it with the bow. Not interested in that. I, so when that. So you'll argue with guys? That's all I do is argue.

And I've learned a lot arguing. they told me, they said, this root, all you got to do with this root is crush it up and throw it in a stream and you can have all the fish you want. I said, how would a root do that? But that's true, though. Well, that is true.

I saw that. Yeah, that's the thing. So that one turned out true. And they picked up, you know, we ate fish for lunch that day because you went, oh, I'm going to show you, great. And then there's less verifiable ones like up this particular river, there's a type of anaconda that's triple the size of a normal anaconda. So instead of being 20 or 25 feet,

they're like 45, 50 feet, and they have ears. I said, okay, produce one in front of me, and then I shall believe it. You know, find me a skull, find me anything. This is what I tell the alien people, too. You know, find me some evidence. And I'll be a lot more amenable to your wacko beliefs. And so far, we're still outstanding on that one. The other one was, if you break an arm, you find a cane toad,

and they're native to the Amazon, unlike. Australia where they're an invasive species you find a cane toad you square it up on the ground and you stomp on it real hard so its guts go flying out its mouth and then you take the this little skin wallet and you put it on the broken bone area and wrap it tight with a bandage and that's supposed to make your bones heal faster now cane toads do have a very powerful poison in those those poison glands on there on their just behind their eyes now maybe there is a compound there that helps you know But until I get a chemist to confirm that, I don't care. And you got, and you're, you're bold enough just to go down and you're like,

you're in their neck of the woods and you're telling them what's up. See, I need to get, I need to get more bold. Well, I'm not telling them what's up. I'm saying I really want to understand your perspective and understand what things are relevant or not, you know, but, you know, growing up, people go, you know, don't go running in the rain. You'll catch a cold. I'm like, go to buds.

You think there's, and also a cold is rhinovirus. So you tell me there's a virus in the rain. Yeah. You know, I run in the rain all the time. I see a thunderstorm. I'm like, bet. I'm going running now. And so these sort of old tales that have no basis in reality.

And I like to undo those because I feel like, you know, science has led us to the place where me and you can get on a plane and go somewhere. A relative can have a heart transplant. And like, there's a lot that comes from this sort of logical way of thinking. And so when you're in the jungle, I want to know, is this true or is this not? People say, you know, a bushmaster is the only snake that will attack you. If you see a bushmaster, it's going to attack you. Okay, so I went out and I found a bushmaster,

a big 11-foot bushmaster. I stood near it and it was all curled up, thicker than my arm, and they have crocodile spikes on their back. So the only snakes I've seen that has like physical feature. It's terrifying, terrifying, that big, angry face. They look like they want to kill you. But he was curled up on the ground, and I sat there for a while, and the bushmaster looked at me, and I looked at the bushmaster,

and he flicked his tongue, and it was like, hmm, it was really peaceful for a while. And then I said, now I got to poke it. Now I have to poke this 11-foot venomous snake. And so I went and I got a stick and I picked them up by the tail. And then the snake started moving in such a way and there's people nearby. And we had to measure them because we were doing a reptile survey. So I got them by the head.

And you have this snake with these giant fangs just out. And your heart, you know, it's one of those things you have to be concentrated because they could also close their mouth and anger and bite through their lower jaw and envenate you. Or as you're holding it, I mean, their skulls are so malleable. If you're not perfectly, if you don't have perfect form, they could, you know, get you. And if you, that's all it takes. So I'm really concentrated on head. And so I have a body going over my neck. This is an 11 foot snake.

And then the most terrifying thing happened. I feel a sharp point piercing my skin, but it's not where I'm looking. It's not at the business end. It's on my other arm. And I had a full body. I just felt my blood reverse direction in my veins. I got so terrified. I was like, I've been envenomated.

And I said, this makes no sense. And I look, and on their tail, again, no other snake that I know of has this, I think it's the males, have a spike at the end of their tail. Most snake tails just end in scales. This guy has a hard spike, like a nail, and it was driving it into my skin. It's like carrying a derringer in your boot, man.

You know what I mean? I scared the hell out of me. I would put that up there with, like, top five moments that I've been truly scared. Yeah. I just didn't expect it, didn't know about it, never read about it. But didn't do anything to you? Is it just a spike? No, no, no, it's just a spike. But it works. Yeah. It works. So if you got to imagine if a predator grabs a bushmaster and it's not able to defend itself with its fangs, well, it's just going to scare

him with this secondary, you know, punch that's a stab. Any logical predator is going to run from that. Not to mention most of the animals in the jungle know that a bushmaster's bad news, just like even elephants, you know, King cobra will raise up its head. I've spent a lot of time in India. A king cobra will raise up its head and look at an elephant. You'd be like, look, if you want it, I'll give it. The elephants know. They know. They're like, yeah, we're not going to step on you. Don't worry. We'll go around. And that's fine. That's why they have the hood. It's to say, back off, just like a rattlesnakes rattle. It's just like, hey, man, I don't want to. I don't want you to meet God, but I can make the introduction.

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Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Medeater and best-selling author Brian Burrow present Gunfighters, a new podcast series about the American West and the violence that made its most legendary figures infamous.

Davis-Tut staggered forward, shouted, boys, I'm killed, and keeled over dead. From notorious killers to blood feuds in Texas, gunfighters strips away the myth to get at the reality. Who these men really were and what they actually did. The first great gunfighter, John Wesley Hardin, killed at least 26 men before he turned 21 years old. It helped you know that he was pretty much a complete psychopath.

Listen to gunfighters, starting off. on September 15th on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and get your shooting irons these stories don't miss you know here's one more we kind of solved yesterday when we're talking about you coming on it was my it was my this is my second the last one is i until yesterday yeah believed uh oh i can't have to make fun of you i until yesterday believed that there's a little teeny catfish that climbs up your packer and lodges into your urethra I believe that's so much

that I was wondering yesterday is this a female problem as well will it lodge itself in the female urethra what made you stop believing in this yesterday someone I was talking to you might have been him was looking online and they're like that's not true I think it is

the candiru is a fish that's him yeah candira so we have large canderos that we catch it's so annoying man when you're fishing and you i know what they feel like now and they're horrible they're just i mean it's a junk fish you can't eat it they're foul it's a parasite fish okay and in the amazon they have these barely eyes they're sort of light sensing organs they're incredibly archaic looking okay and they grab onto your hook and they come up and they make a terrible noise they make a terrible vocalization locals just kill them and throw them in the jungle let's something else eat them uh but apparently there's a tiny species of candiru they

that swims up the gills of fish. So when there's rushing water, they, they can swim up there and latch, like a lamprey. Got it. And then you won't get them out. So apparently in the annals of history, three or four people have been swimming in the Amazon, submerged in the water,

and had one swim up their dick. This has happened. And it is possible for women, although I imagine that the entry is a little more complicated. But it's like, I'm way more worried about getting struck by lightning getting in a car crash getting a bit by venomous snake you like this is about a thousand things i'm worried about not dickfish yeah i like i don't want to overstay how but hearing about it i was i was and i didn't like i would never not go in the water because something like that but in the

water i was definitely always like how serious are people about this yeah the last one i'll hear with i know is not true you know but i loved it is these guys so in belivia these guys were telling me they're like hey, heads up. You know, they're saying this through a translate, but heads up, if you see a beautiful woman, you see a beautiful woman rise out of the water. Oh, no. Yeah. Telling you she's drowning.

Don't go help her. Yeah. She will grab you and drag you under and they'll never see you again. Heads up. Yeah. And so, and that's as far as, that's as far as it went? And it, but it was like this, it was like the sirens from the Odyssey. Okay. Well. Well, when I say that, I mean Homer's Odyssey.

I haven't been fortunate enough to watch the new Odyssey movie. But I want you know this is coming from a deeply literary perspective, not a contemporary film-going perspective. It's like the Sirens in the Odyssey. Yeah. They beckoned to you. Yeah. So, I'm so sorry to have to tell you that that's somewhat true.

Okay. Okay. Because apparently there's, I was on a river where they said, you know, there's pink river dolphins here. And they said every now and then a man will mistake a dolphin for a woman drowning. And you'll see this sort of very human-like skin and he'll rush out into the water and grab this dolphin, which doesn't sound realistic. The dolphins are curious. And again, you know, in the animals of the, on all these tributaries.

And they'll bump you along and push you under. And they'll bump you along and push you under. And then there's at least a few instances. They told me on the river, I don't want to have to tell you this, but they told me on the river. They said, you've got to be careful. We don't know. There could be people in the Amazon right now listening to this. They said, you know, if a dolphin makes advances on you, whatever you do, don't have sex with the dolphin. And I went, thanks for the note.

Noted. Yeah, next river. And then I was like, hey, are there? I want to get a picture of a dolphin, you know. Or I'd like to see you. I never saw one. And I said, you know, are there dolphins here? And the guy goes, yeah, he goes, but if you make love to a dolphin, you have to stay in the shallow.

So he goes, because if they take you deep, you'll drown. and they won't really. They don't want to kill you, but they will out of pure passion. I don't want, how many you were fucking dolphins? I said, why is everyone telling me this? And they all kind of laughed. And they said, no, no, no, yeah,

but at the end of the day, just be careful. And this was serious to them. You know, one guy told me a halfway reasonable story where he said, this dolphin was coming close to his wife and his daughter while they were washing, but then they figured out over time that there was a cadence to it. They figured out that the dolphin was only coming at certain times in the month.

They figured out. It was the menstrual cycle. Got it. So the dolphin was picking up on the smell. Sure. And coming in. And the dolphin was just spending time with them, being really friendly. Or just like swim around to the point they could almost reach out and touch it.

Dolphins being friendly. This freaked this guy out. So he shot the dolphin, which I think, you know, that's the coolest thing in the world. You have a friendly dolphin coming by. There's certain this, I don't think there's any records of dolphins, you know, attacking humans in a predatory way. At least the Pink River Dolphin. But the locals definitely have a complex relationship. And there's always been this sort of, you know, whether it's seals and silks and, you know,

the sirens in the ocean. Yeah, yeah. You know, when you're out there and you start hallucinating, I think pretty much anything can look like a woman. Is that, is that river dolphin, that pink river dolphin, are they moving in and out of saline water? Or can they live their whole life and never touch salt water? Great question. So apparently, when the continents were connected. the Amazon and the Congo were touching.

Okay. And so the original watershed flowed from east to west in this sort of proto-congo river system. The continents separated and then South America hit the NASCAR plate, which tilted the whole end up. You got the Andes Mountains. Yeah. And then now it had, it was still a basin and so it had salinated water in it. I see.

And then as that started draining out before the jungle ever formed, as the jungle formed, you had these species like freshwater stingrays, manatees, dolphins that gradually adapted to desalinated freshwater life. Yeah, that's real interesting. All them damn stingrays running around are is crazy, man. Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the ocean, stingrays. Oh, no.

I mean, they're just jungle stingrays. And they're beautiful. Okay. But, but they've figured it out. They totally, totally unrelated. I mean, where I work is thousands of miles away from the ocean. It's about as far away from an ocean as you can get. There's only a few places where you're that far from an ocean.

I mean, where you know, near there are. Because you think you start in the Pacific, you're over the Andes, down into the Amazon, and then it's like four thousand, at least four thousand kilometers to Rio. You know, it's like you're, it's the whole Amazon basin to the Atlantic. Yeah. So the animals that are living up in the little tiny tributary headwaters, like where you were in Bolivia, chock full of stingrays, no access. I mean, totally freshwater species for millions of years.

You don't even need to comment on. on this but i just invite you to think about it i can't remember what the distance is over so over a hundred miles away from where the mississippi flows into the gulf of mexico okay it's both the bottom of that river is below sea level how is that possible you know we have a is this like a deep a deep trench that it just hold that in your mind okay yeah i don't know yeah we're gonna interview a guy that we're gonna interview a guy that knows a lot about this subject though Yeah. Because in the Amazon, from the headwaters where I work and where you visited, to the Atlantic,

it's only a few hundred meters drop. Like, it's not like thousands of meters over the whole continent. You're going thousands of miles, and it's nothing. And that's why the rivers are squiggling like that. That's why they s up like a snake, because when there's a steep decline, the river's going to flow straight, the easiest path. When the landscape's that flat, it's kind of just finding the easiest path, along the way and that's why you get those you know as the crow flies in the amazon you go

that's just 60 miles well if we're going by boat it could be 300 models you know totally different crow flies versus river miles a completely different thing down there all right let's get let's get more serious not that what not that this problem with these ladies dragging the hunter serious serious and dolphin we'll get more serious help me help me and others that haven't been lucky to explore this area much. When we say the Amazon, yeah, what are we talking about? I mean, it's a river, it's a jungle, it's like all these different countries.

Like, help us understand what the Amazon or the Amazon jungle? Like, what does that mean? Oh, boy. What I can tell you is this. When I was a kid, I grew up, you know, my parents, they said, you're not allowed to watch anything, nature documentaries is all right. So I got to watch nature documentaries. And I would always gravitate towards the ones.

or about the rainforest. It was guerrillas. But the Amazon, it was like, they were like, this is the largest contiguous rainforest on Earth. When you look at planet Earth and you see South America there, it's this giant green patch. And so in my mind, I said, man, this is the largest wilderness, some of the largest wilderness areas where there's just no people.

And you say that system has been developing for 55 million years untouched. And so you talk about old growth. This is original growth, never touched in much of the Amazon. And you talk about species. You know, rainforests hold about half of the species, terrestrial species on Earth, and they're only on 6% of the landmass. Half of the species on Earth on 6% of the landmass. Oh, I got you.

Along the rainforests. Half the species on Earth crammed on 6% of the species crammed on 6% of the space. It's wild. And so they're so mega biodiverse. And in the Amazon basin, so, you know, I just always had it in my head that it was almost mythical. And when I grew up, that's what I have in mine.

Yeah, it's sort of, you know, just mist and giant trees and undiscovered species and, you know, brightly colored birds and super dangerous insects and giant anacondas. And we think of, we'll get to this,

but, you know, top-down predator ecology, you're talking about murderers row. It's not one. You got harpy eagles and giant river otters and anacondas and Cayman and jaguars. And there's several in,

any given spot in the Amazon of these major predators. And then just the millions and millions, you know, you think of a 160 foot tall tree that's a thousand years old. You do a time lapse on that tree from the time, from a thousand years ago to now, and that tree's been sitting out there. Thousand-year-old trees. You think of all those historical events. You go just go to World War I, World War II, our great, great, great-grandparents. That tree was standing out there in the middle of the jungle. And if you do a time lapse on that sapling, as it grows to be a tree that's bigger than this room, thousands and thousands of species moving up and down that thing

as all the years pass by. And so this single tree that has thousands of species that have lived on it, and each of these trees are sort of a bio-water pump, pumping water up. And so trillions of liters of water every day are coming off the Amazon rainforest and forming that weather system that makes it a rainforest. And my brain loved the ethos,

just like we love the feeling, of the mountains and antlers and clear water and sort of, there's a feeling that comes with the American wilderness, that feeling of the American wild. And everybody knows what that's like, even if you've never been there. And with jungle, there was sort of this drumbeat feeling of like raindrops and arrow frogs and really sheltered green. You're underneath 100 feet, 120, 140 feet of canopy.

And it's a 3D environment. You know, you're not just walking on. walking on a trail and you can look around. No, you're walking on a trail and you're on a little trail that's a tunnel. That's a great point, man, yeah. Some of the 50% of the animals that live in a rainforest live in the canopy or off the ground in branches and never touch the ground. So that's a whole 3D environment where all the wildlife is and you don't have access to it. That's a great point. Here around here, everything occurs at eye level. Yep. Everything is at eye level. Yep. Yeah. And so it's trippy. You're almost at the bottom of a green ocean. Yeah.

That's a great point, man. So getting lost out there feels incredibly claustrophobic. And so people say, what's the most dangerous thing in the Amazon? It's honestly just the size of the Amazon. Because you get off a trail, you have no navigational points. You're just dead reckoning through the jungle, which most people can't do. And even if you are good, you come to a treefall where there's two acres of trees that have come down. And you can't make it through there.

And there are wasp nests and venomous snakes and thorns. it's and then you got to make it around that which is a you know let's say a mile long detour potentially and then you hit a swamp and then you got to make it around that and all of a sudden you're going miles in the wrong direction or your other your only other alternative is to hack your way through that dense thing open old growth forest the the canopy is so dense that it is kind of open in the in the lower under the understory but man you just hit play i've hit places on solos where for one or two days, you feel like you're never going to get out.

It feels like you're under just this impenetrable mess of branches. And it's kind of terrifying. One of the things that struck me is, especially in the evening or in the early morning, is, you know, the stress of having just too loud of noise? It's all, when you think, when most people think about that, you're always associated with, like, music being too loud.

or a building having poor acoustics and it's too loud. But such loud animal noise. Yeah. Especially you throw in the holler monkey and everything. Such loud animal noise, I would just catch myself sometimes wanting to go like, Shut up! Everybody has to shut up. Because, like, bewildering amounts of noise.

Yeah. I mean, that's the dawn chorus and the Amazon. It's funny because at night, you go, you hear, you hear, the frogs going except times a million and then there's this really quiet period around 3 30 to 4 a.m. Things get a little bit quiet and then all of a sudden you'll hear that first bird that goes and then all of a sudden you'll hear a set of macaws on the horizon howler monkeys just before dawn at that purple purple point oh you're like oh there they are and then the other group will start answering and the jungle starts rumbling and you hear the tinamoo's popping up and the macaws and the

mop-mots and everybody starts turning on spider monkeys start calling and all the all of a sudden the jungle turns on, sun comes over the horizon, and it's just a party. And then everybody's up, and everybody's trying to get to, it's great. Same thing in the evening,

you get down, and again, somehow it's the Tindamoo's at the crepuscular transitions. The undulated Tindamu's side, it's sort of the anthem of the Amazon, and you get to this point, you're like, wow, that was a beautiful, we get to a high point, and go, that was a beautiful sunset.

And then you hear that first, wah, you hear that first frog, and then you hear something else answer, and you're like, oh, man, they just, it's like someone's switching on the lights at night. So I don't. We just switched over to the nocturnal chorus.

And it's really beautiful. If we were in a swamp in the rainy season when the frogs decide to mate, I would have to be screaming in order for you to hear me. Yeah. It's like stressful. I'm sure you used to it. I actually find it very, it's like a blanket.

It's falling asleep to that. Yeah. You know, people, people I find, when I come back, people, you know, people like, oh, this is my noise machine. And I'm like, I'm going to throw that out the window. I've fallen asleep to frogs my whole life. and and and i love it it's kind of like a blanket when i come and stay in a hotel room and all you can

hear is an air conditioner or that building sound i i get i find it very i'm the guy that'll put on rainforest sounds to go to sleep you know i got kind of used to it let me let me ask you about the amazon in a different way um i mean you're you're you talking about what it's like to be in it is is puts you there and it's beautiful but like let me let me try to express my question this way would be if you talk to Americans, you say, let's say you go, the Rockies. Yeah. Okay, the Rockies, right?

People have, a picture comes in their mind. A picture, a mountain landscape comes in their mind, right? But then it'd be like not many people that have visited the Rockies, it invokes an image in their mind, right? They might think of skiing. They might think of elk, whatever. They think of something when you hear the Rockies. But not many people would be able to come and say,

from other parts of the country would be like, well, you know, the southernmost, right? They sort of begin, whatever, I don't know, I don't even know. They sort of begin in New Mexico, right? The spine runs up. There's these ancillary chains coming off them.

They go up into British Columbia, whatever hell it is. Like, we know what it means, but we don't know what it means. Yeah, the average person. So lay out for me in sort of a, like in a layout for me in, not geologically, but like geopolitically with country boundaries or whatever.

Like how big is it? What do we mean? So I always forget that there's so many numbers, you know, 20 trillion liters of water come off the Amazon every day. And well, look, I'll give it to you the best I got it. Brazil contains 60% of the Amazon. It does. It does. Okay. That's helpful.

That is unfortunate. And so they're not who you want to have 60%. Well, the problem, and we're learning this right now. I'd love to ask you questions about it. But in conservation, they say that the victories are temporary and the losses are final once you lose that old growth. And so, you know, the thing is, you can say, well, all this is protectable.

Then the administration changes. And they come in and they go, well, actually, we're going to use it all for oil. And so Brazil, you know, the last few presidents, we had Lula who said, he got in and he said, protecting the Amazon is part of my mandate, my mission as a president. And then you had Bolsonaro that was going,

we have to open up the amazon we got to make new roads i want to develop i think that you know try he was i mean this guy was coming out this guy was coming for him he was going you know tribal people are a relic of a time passed and we need to we need to get them to catch up he wasn't like oh you know the warani and the zingu people and all you know these are great assets to our country uh amurindian nations that need to be respected and into you know respectfully integrated into our ideas a national as a country he was like we got to get rid of him got it it and he was saying it publicly yeah he had a very like yeah very like aggressive mid-1800s view yeah no it was strange it's spooky to hear it and he did a lot of damage okay and then lula got in and it calmed down a

little bit but now i think there's a either another balsanaro or the same balsanaro almost running again it's always terrifying for the amazon okay uh so that's that's they got sick okay i didn't realize that so they got 60% of what we what when i say the amazon jungle and i'm picturing the the scene you laid out They're sitting on 60% of that. Just this big basin. Colombia has some, right? Colombia has a tiny bit. They got a little corner of the Amazon, the upper Amazon.

Ecuador has a significant portion. Peru has the next to Brazil. You have Peru. And Peru, if you're looking at a map, Peru has the headwaters of the Amazon. Okay. So, you know, this John Heming described as the tree of rivers. You know, you got the mouth in the Atlantic. And then you have this giant, you know, just lay a tree down.

You got the headwaters. Sure. have this huge artery coming down. We, I work in the upper branches. I'm all the way up at the top of the tree. Okay. And because of geological features and isolation, you know, you've got the Andes Mountains that are extremely, you know, incredibly intense to navigate.

And then you have all this jungle that was always impenetrable. And so, you know, people could, you could take a ship from the Atlantic and drive straight up into Manouse. You could keep going into Loretto, Peru, which is, which is, I think, several, thousand might be the the the furthest inland shipping port on earth that's i remember that's a super lot of i heard but it's like there are tankers going in along the main amazon channel now then from there if they're from makitos then it branches out into a lot of smaller tributaries they do not connect to our part of the basin they're separated you know there's different

drainage just like you said so where i am we're in the madde de de de los which is which is you know you have the manu river and you have the tempelpada river and the madde de de los river and so these are these are other major rivers. He's all Peruvian rivers. These are all Peruvian rivers. And so the Amazon is this giant basin where everything is connected. It's this huge rainforest. And when I say everything is connected, I mean that the rivers all connect through political boundaries. The Heath River runs between Peru and Bolivia, and they've protected it on both sides. I believe it's Boeh-Hasana National Park in the Tambo Pada and then Madidi on the other side. And they share the river as a border. Both countries have agreed that that is some of the most pristine rainforest on earth that has to be

protected which is which is rare and um so like that level of protection so so in this all these countries that hold part of it Bolivia holds part of it yeah and and they have done they have done forward thinking yeah protections in alignment with a neighboring country and that cooperation is rare that cooperation is very rare yeah there's so many examples that I could think of where you have this beautiful national park, and then you have a boundary. And then on the other side of it is complete destruction. I see.

And now the other note on Brazil is I, in college, I did a study abroad with Columbia University. And we were out in the Atlantic Forest. And most people you say, what does that mean? Exactly. And so the Atlantic, you know, you think of the Amazon, and to the north you have the Orinoco River Basin, which is another incredible rainforest river basin.

And then here, below the Amazon, southern, in southeast, you had the Atlantic forest with a high endemism, a lot of species that occurred there and nowhere else. You had the golden lion, tamarine, all these other species. Different ecosystem in the Amazon. There's something like 4% of it left. Of that ecosystem. Of what that Atlantic forest was?

Yeah, it's gone. 4%. And so you have, you know, Rio and South Paulo. And sort of Brazil, the country is developed in that area. That's where they developed. That forest is wiped out. There are, you know, there are conservation areas and little islands of biodiversity.

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About exactly how it is But I also know that there's quite a bit of forest Right outside of Rio I know it's from documentaries where they're like Sort of that boundary with like here's the city And then there's boa constrictors and macaws And like I don't you know It's completely foreign to me

But when you think of this giant rainforest, it's really hard not to just wax poetic about this, but it's not just something that's held in seven or eight Latin American countries, but it is this undeniable geographical feature where everything runs together, where the rain that comes off, the mist that comes off the canopy creates the rain that makes this whole rainforest possible. And when you're there, I mean, you've seen it, but it's this whole system is water, water and forest and water and forest. And in the morning there's all this mist coming off the the the the the canopy and so with the amazon the aside from the fact that the you know there's undiscovered medicines and more species than anywhere

else 15 hundred no four thousand species of butterflies that we know of across the basin is that right highest number of dragonflies spiders you know there's there's there's per i think peru has more birds than any other country uh so birding is huge there and then you know harpy eagles macaws everything tan i saw one of those harpies yeah yeah they're very hard to see see. Yeah. Because they stay in the canopy. Yeah. We saw, I mean, I wanted to see it. We saw it, and it was regarded as that we were lucky. Yeah. By the guides we were with, it was, we were lucky to see it. I think it's sort of, Harpy Eagle is sort of like a Wolverine where it's like, you're not, they're uncommon throughout their range. A visual encounter with one is not

something you can guarantee. And I mean, we only see, I'd say maybe one a year. And that's when we're living out there. And, but the Amazon is such a system, and it's so, complex and on every acre there's millions of species and such complex botany and the trees that as these Latin American countries begin to eat into the Amazon, the challenge here is that we've already destroyed 20% of the Amazon. And so as a as sort of a global society. That's the current estimate, 20% of it's gone. Roughly. It's hard to I would have almost, I would have expected you to say a higher number. You know, 20% is the established normalized number that we say.

Yeah. You know, it could have been higher in the last few years. But I would think that with, you know, sort of satellite mapping and everything, we have a pretty clear view of that. Got it. Maybe it's 22% or 18, you know. With the Amazon, the worry is, and there's a lot of scientists warning about this, this is a pretty simple equation. If you don't have enough forest to keep that massive amount of moisture coming up off the trees, well, then you're not going to have as much rain. And if you don't have as much rain,

that forest is going to start to dry out and in a snowball effect. And they're worried that we can pass a threshold that there is absolutely no going back from, a sort of one-way door where we've removed too much of the rainforest, and no matter what we do, it's not going to replace that amount of moisture.

And then it's not just the Amazon creating its own weather system. It's also there's sand from the Sahara that's coming over the Amazon and delivering nutrients to the forest. And so there's sort of this interchange between Africa and the Amazon. And these, I just, you know, I've become so immersed in these complex systems and in the beauty of deep wilderness that to me, when I hear about what's happening to the Amazon and when I watch what's happening to the Amazon on the ground, where areas of forest that I loved, that I grew up exploring in my 20s, get incinerated to the ground. those thousand-year-old trees turned over burned i'm talking about million-dollar mahogany trees just burned because they're just building a road they're trying to get access they want to they want to do

cattle farms or grow papaya or cocaine or whatever it is they just want land and the jungles in the way and for all of history it was the impenetrable jungle the heart of darkness now they have excavators and they have the funding and the chinese just built a giant shipping port in lima because they want to start getting into the Amazon. They want to start extracting resources. And so they're talking about building a railway system either through or over the Andes to start sucking on the Western Amazon, which is terrifying. Because whether you care about nature or you don't, we need this system. I'm sure that everyone that listens to this podcast knows that it without clean water and clean air, nothing else you're going to know, nothing else you're interested in is going to happen. And the Amazon,

it seems like it sort of puts it on a global challenge this is not up to us it's not about like whether you believe in it or not you know do you think that we should protect this monument to no no it's about survival too yeah this is not just is it pretty it matters to our health it the the point you're making i never thought about it at landscape scale but there's this idea like take the passenger pigeon which went extinct in the early nine well officially extinct in 1913 or something but there's an idea that there was no version where you could have a few interesting you had to have all of them or none of them meaning their whole their whole system right how they functioned and operated relied on there being millions yeah and there there wasn't a way to

have a hundred no and so to hear you talk about the amazon as being that maybe you can't have a little. Yeah. Because the thing that generates the rainforests, at a point, it's either you've got to have X amount or none. Yeah. You can't just have a little patch down the road. No, and we can't turn it into an archipelago of, like, protected areas and desert,

not, I want to say desert wastelands, but just wastelands. Yeah. And so where we are. Maybe it has to be big. It has to be big. That's the thing. It must be. And so, you know, where we work in the Amazon, illegal gold mining, there's gold in parts of the Amazon. But you don't get gold nuggets.

You get, you get sedimentary gold. Like in the sand, you have to put it on your finger. And then you go, oh, there's a little piece of gold. You know, it's much better with a magnifying glass. But if you were to cut down the forest, burn the forest, remove the forest, flood it. Even better, do it to a lake, drain the lake, and then use a hose and a motor to just suck the ground up. and then get the gold out of that. Placer mining, yeah.

Using mercury, and then you burn off the mercury with a blowtorch. You're left with this little bit of gold, but you have to deforest and destroy unbelievable amounts of land. And so not too far away from where I am, there's hundreds of kilometers that have been denuded and destroyed, turned into a wasteland. And I was down there with ABC News, and we literally saw tornadoes of dust.

There was a dust storm. in the Amazon because that part has been destroyed so badly. And that sandy environment, the sun is beating down on it, the mercury to pollution. You're not, you know, and even if you were to leave it,

thousand, thousand years, a few thousand years before it becomes jungle again, like this is irreparable damage we're doing to the earth. And, you know, when it's plentiful, you know, in the areas that I protect with jungle keepers, then you dip a hook in the river. Try not to come out with

fish you know it's just it's so it's original growth forest and i think that you know i've heard different accounts of how many what the populations of animals were in the u.s you know prior to 1700 the numbers are staggering you know what there was yeah when there was habitat everywhere and in the amazon it's like man just to you know you were in the bolivian headwaters i'm sure it was the same thing was like there's just animals everywhere you know and it's beautiful to have that I mean, but it's not an issue of whether or not it's beautiful or preferable or some people want it. In this case, the system depends on that purity. You can't remove all of these things.

And that's, it's very dangerous. I think the information wars are very interesting where people go, like you and I were just speaking about this before we got on, where someone goes, you know, we could make an access road into Yosemite. And it'll be great because then more people can experience Yosemite. And it's like, you, sir, are trying to destroy. destroy Yosemite. Like we're already having traffic jams like you're just trying to get your resort access to Yosem. No, they play it. Yeah. They play it.

They play a word game where axe, people, hunters, whatever, anglers, people out in the outdoors, like access is a positive word. Yeah. And so they, they, they rebrand certain efforts to be that it's access and hamps.

Right now we're going through a thing where they're rebranding a lot of efforts as fire mitigation, which is necessary. But they're doing things that don't service fire mitigation, but just talking about that part. Because that part's necessary. Or being like, oh, no, it's access. I thought you guys loved access. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Road building is access. Well, it's also, it's real easy to sell, like you said, like people don't really know what the Rockies are. And so when you're selling America on an idea of what can be done in a wilderness area, you say, well, yeah, we got to make these. these fire stopping roads, and it goes, well, I want to stop fires, that sounds great, support it.

And it's like, yeah, no. You know, so you can tell people that have never been there, you know, we have to do that, you know, in this, they're not gonna, you know, I could say in the, there's just so much rainforest, never stops raining. You know, if you want, if you ever want to have the sun come out, it's like you could just, you could sell it a certain way if you wanted to, but fact is that we're at a very

dangerous point in the history of the Amazon in 55 million years, where the future of it is uncertain, and I am not a climate, alarmist at all. But the Amazon rainforest does so much to stabilize global climate and to influence, I mean, what we're getting up here with hurricanes and what's happening on the ocean levels, there's such a tremendous influence that comes off the Amazon and those moisture systems that supports the agriculture all over South America and those economies, which influence our economy, that to mess with this system is suicidal. Yeah. And so what I've been doing over the last 20 years is

working with the local people. You know, it's funny. Just the other day, I posted something about this new road that's coming in and threatening the reserve that I'm trying to create. We're trying to make a national park. And there's this road that's racing in and there's our protected land. And they're trying to get around us and in before we, before we're able to protect this land. And so it's a race.

Can we raise the funding to protect this land before this road comes in? And someone commented and they went, if only there was a way that we could join the indigenous people and collaborate and get them the funding they need to protect that land so that it doesn't get destroyed. And I was like, that's what junglekeepers is. Like, I've been doing that if only there was a way. If only there was a way that I could walk without always injuring the bottoms of my feet, like, bro, you're going to love shoes. And so I, but that's what we've done. I met this guy, Juan Julio Durand, who is, he's an SAA Indian. And so he grew up, no shoes. tell me tell me what that means the you know can can you hold that for a minute someone

asking you you mentioned something yeah no i i i really want to get to your work but i got another thing that i wanted to ask you about it because this will help explain your work too you mentioned um illegal like illegal mining yeah came here from legal mining illegal forestry legal logging i need you to help me understand that like here the there might be an unpopular mining project or an unpopular logging project. Yeah. Right. But it's not illegal, right?

It's, it's, so I have a hard time understanding the sort of logistics in scale of, like, it would be laughable that someone would sneak out into the national forest, the United States of America and start hauling out truckloads of logs illegally. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. be a policy position that you don't like, but there's a way this happens. So help me, help me get like logistically how it could be that you're filling ships with logs illegally and in some version of a cop or whatever isn't able to go, but where do the, where are these logs from? Yeah. Like, how does this happen? It's, that's a great question and the answer's fun. In the

Amazon. So you fly into Akitos or you fly into Puerto Maldonado or you fly into Manas. You fly into an area with an airport. Okay. And then you go three days by river. And you end up at the last place with a town. The last place, I mean, once you leave the last place with an ATM, let's say, right? Okay. You go sort of off the grid. And then you end up at the last place that will sell your cigarettes and a Coca-Cola. I got you. And then you're just in the wilderness. And that might be three days by river. That might be three days by river. And then you're just off the map in the sense that there's no one out there. And there's really no one out there.

And so, you know, if you get into a dispute, if me and you get into a dispute, whatever happens, happens, because that's it. There's no, there are no cops out there. There's cops three days back that way, but they don't have the fuel, gasoline, or inclination to come out and mix it up with us. And so that's why you have the Amazonian backcountry, you know, the West is still being one. It's wild.

So they might be within the territory of Peru or the territory of Brazil, but you're way past society. You're out in unconstructed dream space. But you're producing a product that's huge and it needs to be exported. Yeah. They have an answer for that. They take the chainsaws. And I think we call it an Alaska mill, but down there they just, they get those long steel

chainsaws and they put a rig on either side and they have the frame. And so they cut down a log where the trunk. is standing nine feet high yeah and then they'll just start ripping boards and they'll sit out there for a month ripping one tree get it into boards okay i mean what these guys do is just and this could be mahogany or something mahogany ironwood are i a lot of people in different countries have different trees that they call ironwood it's just a common name got it got it got it we have dip dip dip dirix micrantha and it's just they've just been going through a a horrible period of extraction they did the mahogany boom about 20 years ago where they got every mahogany that was within you know two kilometers of the

river just hunting them down just hunting them down they'd send out local local tribe guys who really could walk in the forest with no map real the real guys barefoot and they would go out there and they would go okay i know i know where most of the mahogany trees are and then the logging crews would go out and there'd be like one guy with a chainsaw and they're milling them they're milling on site i see on site so they knock them down they sit out there in the jungle eating turtles and monkeys and piranha for three, four weeks at a time, living in the jungle. And I'm talking about in a way that would make any American outdoorsman cringe. People, you know, I post stuff where I'll go, oh, man, my boat sank. And we have a 30-foot canoe.

You get crazy rain for 40 minutes. It fills up the boat, and the boat literally just sinks. Yeah, yeah, while you're taking an app or something. Yeah. And people go, why don't you cover your boat? With what? You know, the nearest store is two days away. And even if I bring down a giant 30 foot tarp, it'll work for two months.

And then what happens when it, you know, it's like it's just nothing lasts in the jungle. So there's a reason we do things the way we do them. And the local guys, you know, your clothing's just going to get wet. And then when it gets wet and sweaty and you hang it over a stick at night, the moths and the mosquitoes, they're going to lay botfly eggs on it. You're going to put your clothes back on and you're going to have botflies burrowing into your skin. So you know what? forget the clothes. It's easier to just go bare shirt, bear chested. And so you just,

you live out there and there's certain things that the ecosystem dictates. It kind of pushes you towards being naked, weirdly enough. Got it. Got it. And so we go up to these logging camps and a lot of my local friends, either are loggers or have been loggers at some point. And that's part of my work is turning them into Rangers, giving them better pay. But a logging camp is an amazing thing because they're sitting out there with, you know, three chainsaws, a bunch of shots. shotgun shells one you know backyard shotgun where like they bought a pipe and they they figured out a trigger and they have the the shells but they've made the gun you know and so i refuse to shoot i did it a few times and then i'm like you know what for the sake of my eyes

no there's a lot of output right by your face of course and they're just living out there for weeks and so they mill the wood up into these giant boards that you know 12 foot 15 foot long boards then they carry them on their backs and i'm talking about a 350 pound piece of wood that's 12 feet long they carry them on their backs to the edge of the river where they pile them up and now this could take another two weeks so now you're talking about two weeks to cut it two weeks to load it to the edge of the river and then they cut down a few balsa trees or they'll use like a big oil drum with no oil in it and they'll make this float and then they attach they take one piece and they'll they'll drill through it make a hole and drop a motor in there

and they'll literally make a logging boat with these big flat beams of timber. Ship it down. And they go, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they'll go down river slowly. And so if you run a ground and you have 17 tons of timber, you have to figure out a way of winching that off the ground back into the channel.

And these rivers are not deep. Yeah. And, you know, or if you get stuck, if it's the rain, they generally don't log in the height of the rainy season, but in the height of the rainy season on those river bends. I mean, sometimes you get a 40-foot whirlpool that if you drive into it can be very bad news, very quickly. That can flip a boat. And so these guys have spent another week going downriver with these logs where they'll get to the nearest place that has Coca-Cola cigarettes and shotgun shells.

And there, then they unload it onto the dirt, and there there, there's trucks waiting. And those trucks will load up the wood, take it out on one of those roads, those access roads, that are just kryptonite to the Amazon. and then when they get to the trans-Amazon highway, now what you're talking about is like, how is someone not finding out that this is illegal? Well, what they do is they'll just put, you know, tree species like K-Pock or something that's just, you know, a pulp wood that's not important.

It's not an illegal, you know, mahogany at this point, it's illegal to cut mahogany. They'll just put the legal wood on top of the illegal wood. And it's so heavy, you know, that the, not to mention. And by then you've wheezzled it into where there is legal, transport there is legal you've weasled it in and then there's just slipping the guy a hundred bucks yeah just saying don't worry just sign the papers they sign the papers and it goes and so everyone's making money everyone's happy and the logs are just flying out and we see these logs coming out of the jungle

and sometimes they're in milled boards and sometimes they have these ancient trees these giants piled onto the back of these trucks and it's just horrifying it just drives me crazy to watch this Because each of those was a thousand-year-old story, or at least a 500-year-old story with all these animals living on it. And it's just being ripped out with no regard for, you know, I explain this to the locals where I go, you know, we still have deer in New York because we have a system. You are allowed to hunt a deer because they monitor how many deer there are. You know, we know there's a certain sustainable take and we manage the populations. Here, it's just unregulated. Yeah.

And so then, you know, that's logging. Then, you know, illegal gold mining, if we, if me and you go far enough out, let's go six days out there. We'll set up a logging, a mining rig. We can work out there for seven months. From year to year, nobody's going to go out there. Got it takes an expedition and sort of a serious expedition, boats. So in the mining, there's just the remoteness gives you an immunity.

Nobody can get to you. Yeah. And then the other thing is that in the areas in La Pampas, where they, where they have, you can see it from space. There's a big scar on the Western Amazon. It's just this sand pit. And now they've developed this power where they're like, we have machine guns. We have, we guard the boundary of what we're doing.

So when the Peruvian police, police are, you know, that's hilarious. We'll just kill them. Got it. You know, if the military comes in, they can go bag a bunch of these people blow up their mining rigs. but even then then they leave you know and we come back so they operate with a with the might of a like a funded organized criminal enterprise in some cases yeah yeah and peru's been trying to to peru's credit they've been trying to figure out how to get this under control because it's not just the forest destruction it's not just the mercury contamination it's the destruction of watersheds that provides stability to the

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It helped you know that he was pretty much a complete psychopath. Listen to gunfighters starting on September 15th on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And get your shooting irons. These stories don't miss. So I want you to explain jungle keepers, but I guess within that explanation, as you're considering, how you'd explain it i have this question it'd be if they're if they're rogue and illegal anyway

and you are able to start an organization that buys land right um how do you deal with the how do you do with the illegal elements they don't care who owns the land they don't care if jungle keepers owns land so like within your explanation i mean it's two part right

like again just to keep bringing back for an um for you know for Americans listening who understand law like land ownership and stuff. A problem in the U.S. is not that you own land, but you can't control the people on your land, stealing your wood, mining your gold. You know what I'm saying?

It's like it's just, it's hilarious. Yeah, you can just make a call and it would be done. There's plenty of things wrong, but that's not a thing that's wrong. Yeah. So,

so people have this misconception where they go, well, nobody owns the Amazon. I go, we got to buy this land and protect and you always get those like sort of bunny huggers that go you know nobody owns the amazon and i'm like is it an imaginary place in your in your mind you know it's not it's not avatar it's the amazon it's it's on earth and so what peru has done has gone through and drawn these giant grids and i guess in some situations just squiggled with a pen good and been like hey let's because you know the idea that wilderness is not economically productive was a it was a problem in all kinds of places but they went

through back in the day and they assigned lands to various stakeholders okay so let's just say uh we we we give you uh 10,000 acres make make it 20,000 acres and you go great i'll pay you six dollars for who am i that has you're a proving guy you went when when the when the government formed you went into the office and said hey you know this this land between the river so-and-so and the river so-and-so is really mine you know i've kind of always used that land and they go great well here that's a concession that's yours government owns it you have a leave Because I'm part of the political class? No, no, no.

They gave it to local stakeholders. They really did. And they said, you guys can, you know, farm Brazil nuts. We have some mining and logging concessions. I have an interest here. I've been here. And they're like, now that we're assigning ownership, it sounds like you have basically squatters rights and we're going to formalize it.

That's huge in the Amazon. Okay. And so indigenous nations like everywhere else have to fight for their titled land. So the community that JJ might, one Julio, my friend, the guy that I've started jungle keepers with, he's from this community where he grew up barefoot and they were local fishermen and bows and arrows and all this. Now, the introduction of the shotgun and the chainsaw, which only happened 50 years ago, changed that.

And so he watched, they had stable population of peckeries, they had stable populations of spider monkeys, howler monkeys, all the game species like taper and fish, abundant fish in the rivers. and he watched his community go from this abundant place to all the big trees getting taken out, all the game species being annihilated because there was no bag limit. It was just like, we're gonna go out and like we see a herd of 70 peckery.

They're like, let's just surround them and get them all. So you're annihilating herds, you're not taking one or two, you're just wiping them out at that point. And so he watched that happen. He watched a climax ecosystem become a silent forest, secondary. And so he said, I want to protect the wildest place, so he went up this river and chose a spot now out there in these really wild spots and he's tribal obviously he he he's from an indigenous tell me the name of his his his essay ha s a ha es e dash e j a i think

dyslexic i can't spell it's in there it's in the book um you asked me to spell restaurant i still couldn't do it um but that's admittedly a tough one that's a tough one or camouflage um but so out there to answer your question is is you know if if it's a little bit If your family at some point was awarded 20,000 acres, and JJ's father, for example, had several thousand acres in an area that became a national park. Okay. And because they're local tribal indigenous,

when they got grandfathered into the national park. Okay. Fair. And so what I grew up doing, when I say, I mean in my 20s, was going on these amazing hunting expeditions with these Amerindian guys.

There's JJ's wild family. He's all these brothers. And we'd go for 10 days. is upper river into the middle and nowhere they'd be like oh that's remember that bin that's you know that's uh you know Rio tuncho that's this and then we'd get past the point where i go jj what's that stream called and he'd go we got names for it it's just we're just out there now okay and so we'd go hunting peckery and fishing for catfish and just surviving out there open top canoe and we would get to the land that j jay's father owned okay and i'd say how do you know that this is the

that your father owned. They go, we've been coming here our whole lives. We know the river bend. You know, we just know it. Okay. And then we'd make camp. We'd always hack a new camp. You know, there's not like an official camp.

We'd hack a new camp, set up two sticks, make a roof shape, stretch a tarp over it, put our tents under that. Yeah. And spend a few days there, walking trail, you know, there's like little game trails that were also sort of, you know, you could see a few machete breaks on them from last year. and so we grew up doing that. So that was Santiago's land. That was JJ's father's land.

That's inside the national park. It's never going to be touched. Okay. Now, in the rest of the Amazon, there's these huge parcels of land. And so if your granddaddy got that land, and, you know, he used to be a trapper and a fisherman and a jungle man. And then his son, your father worked the land a bit, maybe collected some Brazil nuts, did some light timber, but never really into it. Now you got it. Actually, one, even better.

Your kid got it. you're dealing with a 25-year-old Peruvian guy who's probably by now moved to the city. I see. No longer cares to be eaten hand to mouth, does not want to eat a spider monkey, has been integrated into sort of more modern society, has a TikTok account and a bank account. You know, it's like, you know, this guy, you're going to eat. You want to go eat some turtles and he's going, no, I want to go to a restaurant in Lima. And they're like, but you own 20,000 acres out there.

Well, he's going to do what everybody else does that owns land. he's going to go, well, how can I make money off of it? Call the developers, call the loggers, call whoever. And so what they do is they'll talk to the loggers. The loggers go, hey, you own that land that's way up, up there? Yeah. He goes, it's completely illegal to log up there. And I can't, but who the hell's out there?

So, okay, I want 30%. You guys can go to my land, log the shit out of it. Well, then they got to go make a road. So then the road starts. And then they talk to the various landowners. And so it's just a race between the loggers. And us, because we've gone to landowners, and me and JJ, because, you know, he's the indigenous guy.

There's, these people, and I've seen this in Virginia, where it's, you know, are you one of us? Are you local or are you from outside of here? Because we know how things work here. And there's a skepticism to people from outside. Yeah. And it's kind of beautiful. And in the Amazon, there's that same thing.

If I show up as a foreigner, they're like, what does this gringo want? You know what gringo's want, and it's never good for us. Yeah. That's what they know. And so when I walk in with JJ, it's there. You know, I say, oh, la, whatever else. Then JJ is the one that'll sit down and go, so, and it'll be the, usually it'll be the loggers.

And we'll sit down at a logging camp, but he'll go, oh, you shot a Pukukukunga, Spix's Guine. And he'll go, give me a leg of that. He'll sit there. He'll eat their food. He'll go, hey, I brought you. What is that animal? A Pukunga. It's a Spix's guan.

Oh, a bird. A bird. Yeah, it's kind of like a turkey. Yeah. Very beautiful bird. It's dumb as hell. It's an indicator species because if you are going hunting, if anyone is hunting in this patch of forest,

it's the first thing to go. I got it. They're loud and slow and terrible flying. I was with some guys that got a guan, but I didn't remember. I didn't know the name for it. That's interesting. That's funny to be like,

if he's around, no one's been through here lately. No one's been through here. They're kind of comical for that. We love him for that. They're the ones that tell us we're in good forests. And we'll sit down with the loggers and go, what are you doing?

And they go, oh, you know, we're going to be here. There's about 35 ironwood trees that we're going to get over the next two years. So we're going to just live here and they'll have kids running around. And they'll go, we're just going to live here and cut the wood. And we have a deal with so-and-so. And we'll go, oh, you know, Sanchez and JJ, go, oh, yeah, my dad knew his dad. And that's that link. That link you can't duplicate.

And so I could never do that because they'd go, who the hell are you? And then they'd shut down the conversation. Whereas JJ is like, yo. And then you go, okay, Sanchez, yeah, you got to get it. Okay. And then he goes and talks to Sanchez. He'll go find Sanchez in the city and go, okay, hey, I saw the loggers on your land. They're just starting out.

And the guy will go, yeah, you know, I don't go out there. I figure I'll make some money off it. And now with jungle keepers, what we do is we go out there and we go, how much is your land? 20,000 acres. How many years is it going to take you to get those ironwoods out of there? Six or seven years. I'll probably make a few hundred grand.

Great. How much? $350,000? Great. How about you get that today? By the way, here's some paperwork. You want it today. You're saying today instead of over five years, today.

You know, we just pay him, get the land. And then we go back out to those same loggers that were there. You go, guys, thanks for the Gwan the other day. The Pooka Cungo was delicious. Now you've got two options. You either got to get out of here and get your next logging job or because we like you guys, and you seem to be jungle people.

do you want to just come for work for us and they're like what's that like and i usually have some jungle keepers rangers with me at this point we go well we're going to give you a super cool t-shirt and you're going to get to drive a jungle keeper's boat and your job is going to be to make sure that people are not cutting down the ironwood trees and they're like do i still get to fish and we're like yeah you can still fish and they're like what does it pay we're like three times what you're getting paid now and you'll have medical benefits and you'll be part of a team and we're going to teach you a whole bunch of stuff and you're going to teach us a bunch of stuff because you probably grew up native and they're like i don't have to use a chainsaw all day and we're like no

and so your family's going to be better provided for you can come in out of the cold or you can stay out there we might build a ranger station you already cut down some trees we might as well build an outpost out there and we've done that a bunch of times because for our rangers being two days up river it ain't great it's much better if you have a little you know a deck and a roof for them to stay at And so this is what we've been doing. It's sort of this secret sauce that we figured out, which is like, these aren't bad people. They're not evil people. They're poor people that are logging, working for a larger enterprise, who's probably connected

to a Chinese who's selling stuff to the Chinese companies that are taken out all of this timber. But if you stop it at the micro level, right down there on the river, we can stop it. So we're working on the last P-address River, which is this incredibly wild watershed. Okay. And the reason it remained unexplored and undestroyed, is that there's a lot of uncontacted tribes there. And that's when I say, you know, the West is still being one. These are the Comanches.

Got it. These are people that would just as soon kill you as shake your hand. You know, we've had situations in the Madre de Dios where anthropologists have tried to make contact with them. We've had situations where loggers have gone around the wrong river bend. And, you know, there's, uncontacted is a, is a stupid word for them. That's just like their common name in society. But they're the Moschopiro.

They're voluntarily isolated nomadic people. People, they're tribes that have chosen over the last few centuries to have as little contact as possible. That's a pretty important distinction there. And that's something that I've kind of come to understand. Yeah. Is that, and maybe you can tell me this, that at this point, point were kind of beyond the idea that there would be people living in the amazon who are sort of

unaware that that would be unaware of the fact that you know civilization is out there and that there's cities and you know cities and economic interest encroaching on their area is it that they don't know or that some don't really understand that they don't know that or is it that they're like no i i know that very well but i'm just choosing to not take part no it's it's the it's the weirder one it's that they've been out there for so long so the rubber boom industrial revolution there were rubber barons going down to the amazon we needed you know hoses and gaskets and tires and all this new stuff for the for the industrial revolution and the war effort and and so we sent these people down and the only way to get this was latex trees and those only grew in the amazon and they only grew deep out in the forest and

Henry Ford tried to make Fordlandia make a giant plantation of rubber trees and didn't work because of a leaf play. I got to plug the movie Fitzcaroldo in here by one of Herzog so when it was gone. Exactly. And that's exactly that time period. And he used like Machiganga Indians for that. He used the real deal. He went and talked to a bunch of my friends and said, you guys want to be in a movie? And they were like, hell of yeah.

You know, he's, and if you ever saw the burden of dreams. Yeah. Herzai was on this show. Oh, really? Yeah. I got to watch that episode. Yeah, I interviewed Herzog at his house, but what's so hilarious just for people,

we'll get off this pretty quickly. But Herzog made this incredible move about the rubber barons in the jungle. Yeah, yeah. And it's called Fitzgeraldo. And there was a movie about the making of Fitzcrawledo, which is almost better. Yeah, which is, yeah, it's the same thing

with Apocalypse now in the movie of the making of Apocalypse now, which is hearts of darkness. And it's hard to tell which is better. It's hard to tell Fitzgeraldo, or burden of dreams is better. But in it, the funniest part about it is, one of the funny parts about it is, Herzog is the director.

And he's working with a very volatile actor, Klaus Kinski. And Herzog is always fighting with his actor, his lead actor. The indigenous people that are on set know that Herzog writes the checks. And so at one point, a guy comes to Herzog and says, I see how much this guy upsets you.

Would you like me to kill him? Yep. He's like, no, please don't kill him. Please don't actually kill him. We're just disagreeing. I mean, but that, for people, if you go watch that, though, it's like that is the world that is still there. Where there's these indigenous people, I mean, there's a scene in Burden of Dreams where they wanted there to be a moment where these people come up on sort of untouched tribes and they cut the trees and they're falling into the river. I mean, it's just so incredible.

But these uncontacted tribes, I'm just going to call that for convenience. These people still live. So during that rubber period, there's a lot of tribes that got, if not annihilated, severely abused. It was a horrible moment in human history. And they were to shooting people. You keep using the Wild West, but it was like, it was very similar to us coming out in the 1840s, 1850s into the West. It was very, very bad. I mean, there were, there's a quote from one of the priests, you know, these missionaries that were down there where they said,

it's it's untenable they said these rubber barons would come in round up the village and be like y'all are going to be working for us and the village would be like no we're not like we're we're absolutely not going to be listening to you and they were just set a few people on fire in front of them and be like you want you all want do you want the more you know and we're going to take your wives you know this is this is this is not a joke you're going to listen to us it was horrible and so during that time there were some tribes that said not us and they moved deeper into the forest And so since that time, you say since the turn of the century, they've been living out there.

And these are probably tribes that, what were they doing before that? Living out there. I see. And then they had this one horrible interaction with the outside world. Okay. And they learned, the outside world is trying to kill you. And they are savages. They will light you on fire and send you out for work for no reason whatsoever.

Let's stay out here and you kill whoever comes because it's safer to kill them than to see what they want. So the uncontacted tribes have been out there for ages, and some of the land that we protect now has them on it. And exactly what you were saying, they, you know, there's not really even planes that fly over where I work. It's so big. We've had a few narco-trafficking, like little old Cessna's with a piece of duct tape on the wing.

But even that, you know, imagine these tribes they watch it go by, if they could even see it through the canopy. Sure, yeah. They know there's other types of people out there. but the idea that they don't know about buildings or the internet or, you know, the fact- Legitimately like today. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, there's, in the book, there's pictures of these people because we were up working with a very normal, contacted indigenous community that we work with, that we patrol with and interact with, our friends and colleagues. And this uncontacted tribe showed up on the beach. And they showed up with bows and arrows. I'm talking six foot bows, six foot arrows with bamboo tips that are 18 inches long. And so when they fire these arrows, they'll go straight through a person. And they can hit a spider monkey, you know, at wild angles as the spider monkeys going through the trees.

So they're deadly accurate with these. Yeah. And they don't know. And they don't speak a language that that directly translates to any outside language. Got it. The guys that I was with, the community that I work with, they speak Yine. they were speaking yenay to to the tribe but there was a little bit of still a barrier they're they're related so in the area you work i'm guess these people are nomadic to some degree

to a to a extreme degree they move they don't have houses got it so in the area you work and the areas you're trying to buy and and just to point out to people like you're buying areas willing seller willing buyer yeah somehow when i say buyer both sides get upset the bunny huggers get upset where they go, you can't buy the Amazon? And then I'm like, no, no, no, we're conservationists and it's indigenous led. Like JJ and the local people are the people that are doing it.

I'm the mouthpiece that can come up here. I'm from New York. I can talk all day. And I've been down there and I'm amazed by it, and so I'm helping. Yeah. Right. And so that's-

When I say you, I didn't mean you. No, no, no, no. And that's okay. I'm just, I'm slicing into it because sometimes I do a public speaking gig, and someone will stand up and I'll go, you know, on my river and someone will stand up and go, well, it's not really your river. And I'll go, well, is it really your house or is it just your turn in that house? And it's been there since the 1700s. Yeah. You know, and it's like, that's just how we talk. Yeah. And we're not buying,

people go, well, then, you know, a white foreigner buying land in the, I'm like, listen, this is an organization that's Peruvian led where we secure the land from the people that are trying to destroy it. And join it with the indigenous reserve. that's protecting a watershed. So let me re-approach my question. You're totally fair to clarify that. You hear what I'm doing here, yeah. No, I do, and it's totally fair.

Yeah. And the areas where jungle keepers is active, there are nomadic, there are nomadic groups of what we're, and you did a good job of explaining it, nomadic groups of what we'll agree to call uncontacted people passing through these areas. Yeah.

And you don't go, you, your partner, other or other indigenous employees, members of the organization, you don't need to go and say, hey, you're cool here. No, no, those shoot you in the neck. Okay, yeah. No, you can't do that. It was really funny. We were planning a gala as a fundraising event in New York City.

And it was funny because the plan, a great, great human being. We put on an amazing event, but who goes, you know, is there any way that we can get one of one of those uncontacted tribe to come here and represent. I was like, it's really hard to explain. But when you see the pictures of these people that I have in the book or some of the footage that we've shared of them, they're so wild. They're naked, they have their penises tied up with string.

It's really the only thing they wear. They have bracelets. They like rope. They don't really fish. You know, it's funny because I do see comments on the internet where someone goes, you know, I said, we never find fish bones in their camps

because we find their camps you find like a little fire a few palm leaves like this that they've sat under in the rain on the beach they love turtle eggs so you see all the things that they've been doing you find a few skulls a few bones and a bit of fire

and so we know a lot from that we've never found fish bones and when I say we I mean me and the indigenous trackers I work with who know what they're looking at who know what they're looking at and so they go these people don't eat fish they don't have access to them.

Think about it. And that muddy water, how are you going to find fish? We have mud water where we are, brown water. And- He's not using metal hooks. They don't have metal. They may have stolen a few machetes from loggers that they killed

because they do kill loggers. Yeah. There's been a few instances where loggers are working. You're not going to hear some dude. You're not even going to see them. They're, you know, right out of the forest. Loggers are dead. And then they're like, we'll take the machetes.

we have no idea how that hellish chainsaw works leave that there they don't even want the clothes they're just like you know they'll take what they want we uh i shouldn't say we the local people so i stay out of trouble um you know they said to them said what do you want they said first of all please put down your bows and what do you want and the we were on one side of the river and the other side of the river we were short of the shirts versus skins we were over there saying what do you want and they were on the the other side we said put down your bows first of all you know we had we had a ton of shotguns but that was for self-defense they're over there you know looking at us with bows and we're like look put your bows down we had a guy a local anthropologist who could speak to them he said we're not

talking to you unless you put your both down so they put their bows down they came out to the river and they're clapping and they're talking to us and they're gesticulating and they're and he said what do you want they said we want plantains we want rope and so their wants are very basic. So we pushed a boat with plantains and rope. We added in some sugar cane for good measure. And so they're all like eating the, you know, they're like taking the plantains and, and they're deconstructing the rope. That was so interesting. We get what they got with some nylon paracord, you know, pile of it. Instantly they start deconstructing it, bringing it down to the fibers and expertly weaving it into, you know, to do, to do their fledchings. Oh, I got it. You know,

they just start making bow and hours right there in front of us. Like as they're talking, They're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, send us some more. And they're making them. Yeah, that internal line inside the she, not the pere cord. And they were expert at it. It was amazing. Got it. But they, they, you know, we had this exchange with them.

And the indigenous natural anthropologists were saying, you know, you don't have to be violent. Like, we're friends. Yeah. You know, and they're going, ah, we don't know about that. They're going, some of you cut down trees. We know some of you cut down trees. We know you got those chainsaw things. Then they were like, why do you cut down the trees?

For them, they're like, what are you doing with trees? with trees you know what could you possibly want with these giant trees we don't like that that was that was their that was their main message so we's had this three hour long interaction with them which was incredible i mean absolutely you know it's like seeing a woolly mammoth or something it's like you just you just go this is something that i thought was from a different time and and you're seeing people that are living like the way that people would have lived to do the thousand years ago, you know, naked in nature with no,

what do you do without a blade? What do you just have a peckery tooth? You know, how does that work? They don't even have rocks. There's no rocks in that part of the Amazon. And so, you know, we left that day. They went back into the forest and we went back to the community

and nobody had died. It was a huge success. Me and the other directors of jungle keepers head down the river. There was a whole bunch of other, you know, secondary and tertiary things that had to happen now because the Peruvian government was like,

okay, this tribe came out and there's reactions. And they had taken all of the, the, the, the yucca and the plantains from our friends in the indigenous community. So we had to get them supplies because now they were like, we don't have food. Like, yeah, we catch fish and stuff, but like our carbs totally gone. So we were like, let's get back. Let's get a boat up as quick as possible. It's going to take two days.

We were doing all that. One of the guys that we were literally with the day before, my friend George, he was driving a boat up the river and the tribe came back out. But this time he was driving a boat and we don't know what happened. I had a bunch of other friends on the boat, but the tribe was on both sides of the river this time. And they started loose in arrows. These six foot arrows start flying on the boat. And everybody else got under the edges of the boat. So they were sort of safe from these arrows. And he's driving though. So he's sitting up on the back of the canoe. And an arrow went in just above his scapula and came out by his belly button, straight.

through his lung. Oh. And so they took him out of the boat and I saw the boat later on and it was just just blood everywhere. And they took him up to the nearest spot they could take him and then we actually got a military helicopter to go up and evac him. He survived? He lived. No way. With a pole through him. Somehow he lived. I mean, he's never going to be the same, but he lived. And so it's like, that's the thing. You can have a friendly encounter with these tribes and they still, they're not getting it. They don't know about the outside world. They don't know that if they would just be friends with the next indigenous community, they could teach them how to grow plantains. They don't even have agriculture. And so that's a complicated relationship that's going to have to play out.

It is. And I was going to ask you like a half smart assy question just to have like an intellectual wrestling match about it, which would be, well, you answered it already. Oh, okay. But it would be I'm devil's advocating. I'm playing the devil's advocate role in something. Would be if you have an uncontacted group or a barely contacted group and they want stuff, is it fair to say, I'm not going to give it to you because I like how I like thinking about you how you are. And even though you want it, I don't want you to have it because it's going to upset my view of you as an ancient one. Yes. And it's fun for me to know that you're out there without this stuff. Yeah. And I was going to, like I said, devil's advocate that idea. But when it gets into, when it gets into a people that a people, peoples, that I don't want to integrate. Like, I don't want anything to do with you. I want to have, yeah, I want to like, I want to be here with my family, my people. I want you to stay out of my area. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I want to have. I want to like, I want to be here. I want to be here. I'm not. I'm

coming to you for these things and i think it's different and i think it's like it's noble to respect it right unless you have something to say about the devil's advocate position is like is it our place to tell people they can't have stuff they want uh hell no and it's funny it's funny because this would cause so many people to go nuts this sort of politically correct thing of you know uh this is like another culture coming to us and going well i thought americans drove you know used horses and and drove across the planes and wagons. You know, you guys had, no, no, no, you should still be Americans, like go back to that.

And I was being like, what are you talking about? We've grown in this direction. And, you know, I mean, look, I think every- That's a funny point, right? And it's like everybody wishes, or at least I really wish, that, you know, America formed and then the Comanche's still had so much power over so much land. Don't you just wish that they just stopped at that?

And said, you know what? You guys maintain control over that. We got the coasts and like, you know, No, there'll just be the United States with a few less, and you guys, you guys keep it. It would just, we'd have command sheet. It would just be cool. And like, what's happening with the Moschopoe,

or a picture talking to Native American people today who's, you know, saying, why don't you only live in Buffalo skins? I like, I like that, go do it. It happens to native people all the time here. No, I know. Oh, yeah, like you want to hunt whales, why don't you do it with a, you know. You know, with a, you know, you can only do it with a stick. Because I don't need it.

to. We have other ways of hunting whales now. There you go. And then it seems like the only way that that gets through is when they go, well, it's better, it's more humane for the whale to not be spirit death. But I think that here, there's a few tribes in the Amazon, like the war oni and the Kayapo, I think, you know, who have, who have done, and the people in the Zingu River, who've done amazing jobs of maintaining their tribal heritage and still sort of like adapting their, adapting their clothing to more modern, still a lot of feathers, and they really, you know, they still do their fate. Women wear makeup.

They wear their tribal, certainly for ceremonies. And they've really proudly maintained their indigenous heritage as their main thing. And they've even embraced ecotourism. And they're like, we're going to bring you out there. And we still do wear feathers and we're experts. And we always have been experts. And we've, but they've had the luck. These are the few tribes that have had the luck of getting.

some of their members educated enough in Western ways to come in and make that jump before the damages done. I see. Because what usually happens is you have a group of indigenous people that are living out in the forest, and then one road comes through, one missionary comes through, and it goes, I don't want you, I don't want you believing in whatever you believe in, you need to believe in our God, in our way, and we're going to start,

put down the bows, you're going to start eating pigs and chickens. because that's what we want you to do. And they strip them of their indigenous ways, which is just horrific. And what happens is that alcoholism, the, how to say it, like the tribes that I work with have a very strange relationship to money. They're like, why are you going here instead of just going in a straight line? Like I want meat, so I should go get meat.

Why would I have to work for the meat or then I just go out and shoot the meat? Yeah. You know, and then when they get them, money they're like well i you know i'm gonna get my family some soda and a thing and a thing and they kind of like well they'll spend all the money yeah and they'll be like shit now i need more money i don't have any gasoline i got to get somewhere it's like that's because you got to save the money and then they save some money under their mattress and it gets stolen and it's like well this is this isn't working you know it's like this is not a great system for you so so with the with the uncontacted tribe

which is such a such an extreme example of this some people say they've been running scared for you know a few centuries or at least a century, someone should go bring them in. Okay. Now that's happened in different places and it doesn't go well. There's one place where a child washed down the river in a remote part of the Amazon and they picked him up and he was one of them, one of the Moscow. Washed down alive. Washed down alive.

Okay. They picked him up and, you know, he never went back. He stayed in this tribe who speaks Spanish and their local. dialect and uh i the the anthropologist that i work with he went and he spoke to this kid he said well what was it like when you lived out in the forest with the nomadic tribes he said i don't really remember he got he got a trauma response he got like i just don't worry about it you know it's okay there's a there's a wall of of silence it's not you know when you think about what are their infant mortality rates what how are their women treated you know is their intertribal warfare what are

their wrong beliefs you know you want to talk about like what things do we believe any scientific method you know are they saying that you know all illnesses are bad spirits and so you know every time that you look at me funny it's i should kill you it's like you just don't know what they're operating on one i mean after seeing with them after interacting with them and my interaction with them was very simple you know holding up my hands and they held up their hands and we kind of just kind of smiled at how different we were you know and that was this very human moment at you know almost almost across centuries because you go, man, you have, I have no idea what goes through your mind.

You have no idea what goes through my mind. And it's just sort of like, you know, basic, hello. And so, so interestingly, now coming back to our world, I come back up here and I write this book about the work that I'm doing with the local people and there's these tribes and all this wildlife and I'm just trying to protect it because the butterflies and the jaguars and the ancient trees should be protected.

And I even want to protect the indigenous people. the uncontacted tribes. And then you get articles being written online where people go, you know, Paul Rosley comes back from the Amazon and releases footage of uncontacted tribes without their consent. And this is horrible. And you see, you know, the comments of people going, look at this. Another white guy using this to sell his book and to push his organization.

He's probably making millions. And what we did was after that, most of it was people just, just, experiencing awe at seeing this footage. Sure, yeah. But they were the detractors. What's great though is that through jungle keepers, we raised enough money to protect another 20,000 acres, and that's land that the tribe lives on.

So now they're safe from loggers and gold miners and narco-traffickers because we're protecting their land and they have no idea. And nor will they. Because if we have it our way, if they want to come out, they'll come out. But otherwise, it's their choice. And it's not that we want them to stay like that.

It's that they've made it very clear they don't want us. On a trail, if you're walking and the Mosco Pier are there, they put an X over the trail. They'll cut two sticks and put it over the trail. And you know, you go past that, you're going to get shot. Fair. Like, that's great. And so, you know, they have their own respect system. You just don't want to surprise them.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I could go on all day. about horror stories about that. But they're very, very happy to engage you violently if it'll mean that they're not in danger. The Hard Rock Bet Casino app is here, Ontario. It's safe, secure, and crystal clear with fast payouts and 24-7 local support.

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a complete psychopath. Listen to gunfighters starting on September 15th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And get your shooting irons. These stories don't miss. Is there a, with Jungle Keepers,

Is there a direct relationship, like an infinite direct relationship where dollars in, yeah, dollars in will continue to be acres secured? Or is it, or is it that there's a finite amount of available acreage? So, because you just keep going and going and going and going? Great question. And this is what makes jungle. There's two things, I think that, three things, that make junglekeepers different than anything that I grew up on.

When I was a kid, you know, you had these big organizations that are going, send us donations and we'll send you like a, you know, a stuffed polar bear, you know, a teddy bear. But where's my donation going? Which project? You're saving the environment. Where is it going? So if I send you $5, $100, $5,000, $5,000, where?

And so first thing about junglekeepers is that our whole plan was developed by indigenous strategies to protect their land. Second, we developed a donor program that allows all the kids like me that are sitting at home wanting to save the Amazon, they can go join our team, which is giving $5, $10, $50 a month. And there's all these people, I keep telling people, for the price of a latte, once a month, you're helping us protect. You know, a lot of raindrops make a flood.

You're helping us protect all these acres. Yeah. So the fact that normal people, and we have our large donors that are going at the $100,000 mark. And so we're getting all this land and we're allowing people around the world because that's the thing. These Latin American countries would say it,

you want us to protect our land. Who are you? You know, several thousand miles away and your other country to tell us what to do with our land. Help us. And so what we're doing is we're helping them. We're improving the lives of the local people.

We're educating them. We're improving their standard of living. And we're doing this by asking all the people up here that go, yeah, I really care about species in the rainforest. Well, great. you know you subscribe to netflix well help do something important with your money doesn't have to be a lot but give us the consistency and that allows us to keep blocking out pieces of this river and it's not a

forever project and that's the difference okay we're not trying to protect the ocean or the environment there's one watershed this last pia dress watershed that we have identified as one of the wildest places on earth original growth superlative biodiversity nomadic uncontacted tribes and just this intact ecosystem, this rare crown jewel on earth. And so once we're at, we're at about 160,000 acres right now, if we can double that, we need about $15 million to do this. We got $15 million tomorrow. We could do it, which is, that is the mission I'm on.

That's why I'm in the U.S. right now, is I'm talking to large-scale funders and also trying to talk to people like you who have these huge audiences. Because out of the people that listen to you, there's going to be those people that go, you know what? I want to protect the greatest wilderness area on earth. I want to be part of establishing it. And that's what we're doing.

We're doing something historic. And so if we got that $15 million tomorrow from one donor, we could finish the park. We've had politicians in Peru. We spoke to what, the Department of the Interior, Department of Labor, where they said, look, if you do all the hard work of securing the land and get it, we're never going to do that. But if you guys can do it, we'll sign it over. Do you trust those guys? So incredibly, everyone assumes that everyone in Latin America, like the police are corrupt.

Man, no, no, no. I don't assume that at all. No. I don't assume that at all. Politicians. No, I'm just saying, does your vision, right, like, if it's a national part, you're sort of handing the deed over to a agency. Yeah. And agencies, missions change.

I'm not implying corruption. I'm just saying, gotcha. All right. Political wins. Yeah. I'm saying like is do they have let me let me put it dark so I definitely don't want to imply that like oh it must be some banana republic and they're crooked I mean is do they do a thing in other places that you look at and you're like yes I want them to do that thing here yeah okay so they're already doing they have a they have a template for what you'd like to see yeah my new national park which is right near us is sort of like just the neighbor over okay is a unisco world heritage site incredible national park you know there's a little bit of of issues at the borders but it's a roadless area no one's allowed in i mean there's a deep deep deep research station in there that you can get to

if you really want to see manu you can but there's not there's not you know you can't drive through it got it you got to go by river which means you got to be approved yeah so really that's the only way to access it yeah so there's like a thing oh peru has a great national park system yeah so that's why i say i want it to be a national park and if that means something yeah that means something that's not just a paper that's like a thing that's not just a paper park yeah yeah now in the tambopata there's been temple potta national parks there's been a recent flare up in people that are piercing past the park boundaries and illegally mining now the question of is there boots on the ground is there enough of a park service to go out and stop them not really

because it's guerrilla warfare because if you know the park service shows up with their little badges and says guys you can't be here you need to come with us They're going to say, yeah. We got more guns than you do. What? And so that's the problem with the Amazon. It's very Wild West. If you want to go in and arrest people,

you better come with a lot more guys and better guns. Got it. And so if we can establish this as a national park, it will be safe. And if by political wins, let's just say in six months or 18 months, we get there and we do this, and it's better as a private reserve,

well then we'll put it as a private reserve and and have it as that whatever whatever works to protect the river you could yeah like you can you could choose that it wasn't the right yeah we'll work with wasn't the right time i mean look as we've seen administration changes and even the things you thought were locked away and sacred can be unlocked and that's terrifying we're going through that right now that is terrifying and uh and so for us the danger right now is we're in a race against time because we have roads coming. Right now, there's a road on our northern boundary that, you know, if we got at the beginning of the year,

we got a lot of funding because I was doing a lot of press. And that's what happens. I do a lot of press and a lot of people reach out. And if, you know, $5, $10, $100 a month, great. But then you get those people that are like, we're going to give you $300,000. We're going to give you half a million dollars. Go get that piece of land.

Let's just do it. So we get these funders on all levels. And then things quiet down. And so we have to, and so we have, have the landowners on another 100,000 acres. The pen is the contracts are drawn up. Our lawyers are waiting with the pens. We just got to get the funding.

15 million is not that much money. You need to be able to go like you did in that story you told where you're like, no, no, I'm talking today, man. Yep. Yeah. And so right now there's a road coming and we don't have the money for that land. So we're a few million dollars short of that. That's, that's emergency right now money.

And so we're just scrambling right now. And it's funny because the last year at this time, the narco traffickers decided they were going to kill me and JJ. That's what they figured. They said, well, this is, you're making it very difficult for us to work out here. We're going to kill the two of you. And there was actually a day that JJ was in a car and they actually showed up asking for both of us. Sorry, it was a day that our car was driving, our driver was driving.

They showed up asking for us and neither one of us was in the car because that would have been it. Yeah. We've dealt with that situation by collaborating. with the Peruvian authorities. That's no longer a problem right now. But last year, we were dealing with that, and it seemed like everything was going to, everything was going to die. Then we got some donations.

We got some help. We worked to the Peruvian police. We removed the narco threat. We got a bunch of land. We got them out. Great. Now this year, we have this road. And it's like every year, something is coming.

And it's like, if we could just, I mean, I just met somebody who they were renovating their cafeteria at a zoo. And he said, we just spent $25 million. on this new cafeteria and I went, oh, that was so casual. Can you please tell me where you found that money? Because $15 million to protect the wildest place on earth, I'm shocked that I have to work this hard to get it. Like I'm writing books and I'm going on podcasts and we're bringing people down there.

We own the tallest tree house in the world. We put it up in one of those thousand-year-old trees. And so people can come to this luxury tree house and watch the mist and the macaws and the monkeys and the Amazon. So it's not even like you give the money in the, no way to see it's like people you can come with us and so we're my job right now is to just go find the person that's willing to go you know what i want the park named after me i don't you know that what's the thing that someone said they said you can get just about anything done if you don't care

who gets the credit i don't care who gets the credit i'm my gravestone i wanted to say that i protected more heartbeats than anybody else that's it you know and and i'm not doing this i know your audience i'm not doing this from a bunny hugger perspective i'm i i love the abundance And I want to be able for the local people to be fishing and hunting and man fishing is good in the Amazon. But if we don't protect it, we're going to ruin it. And I think it's really interesting being up here right now because, you know, hearing what's going on in Yosemite and what's going on with the roadless areas. And, you know, growing up, me and my dad when I was 18, we went to, I think it was called the Women Neuch Wilderness Area. and just learning that they and we did a you know multi-day trip and just learning that there are these

areas in the u.s that people before i was born said this should be protected these mountains these ecosystems these forests should be protected and we've put roads and and and stores and polluted the crap out of everything but let's just pick a few spots on the map you know what it is 2% 2% is federally designated wilderness area. And is roadless even less than that? Rolledless is. Roaldless.

Yeah. I don't want to get into this too deep, but there is a thing that federally designated, like, congressionally approved, like roadless areas. Like wilderness with the capital W, 2%. We also have a lot of areas that happen to be roadless.

Yeah. And there's a debate right now about do we sort of codify that rolelessness and recognize it and keep it that way and it's been that way for 25 years or do we say never mind there is no sort of like de facto protection of a roadless area but the 2% that is wilderness with the capital w is very well protected uh we could potentially grow that percentage if we choose to do that got it but but that That is such an important thing, I think, to so many people. It's of, and I like to knock around in those places,

but I would argue that it is of economic, it's economically imperative that we protect these places. Yeah. Because my gamble, my investment gamble, is that these places will prove to be of incalculable value in the future for future generations. yeah um so anyways and not just on on a on a on a on a appreciation level but on a on a as a country just yeah i don't mean that we're gonna i don't mean to do them later i just mean that um as more of the

world yeah gets developed and laid over in concrete yeah and polluted and and and spoiled those places that are like that will be will look and we'll continue to say like we say of Theodore Roosevelt and all those will continue to say, what genius? Yeah. What genius did that? Yeah. And so that, you know, that's what we're aspiring to with this jungle keeper story. And so what the book is about is, you know, going from a kid that was born in Brooklyn

and grew up in New Jersey and started doing solo expeditions in the Adirondacks and the Catskills. And I kept coming out on the other side. You know, I'd go into a 4,000-acre state park with my dog, you know, and like, go looking for bears and foxes and just you know just tracking and having fun and camping and developing my bushcraft but i was sick of coming out the other side and i hadn't really been out west yet i didn't realize how big things were and that there's a lot up here but but my love of specifically animals and poking them just like you you know very i really want to interact with them um i was just like man the amazon is it i got to see this before i go and then and then the urgency of

like the rainforests are disappearing, I'm skeptical. You know, if a local person tells me, if I touch this with a stick, it's going to die, show me. And if someone says the rainforests are disappearing, we're losing 700 football fields a day, it's like, all right, I want to see. Is that true? What's really happening on the ground? I don't trust anyone.

I want to go see for myself. And I went down there and I was like, oh, shit. This is bigger, more beautiful and complex and incredible than I could have ever imagined. And the first few years was all just expeditions and, you know, climbing trees and getting to know these guys. You're just playtime, wilderness playtime, hardcore wilderness expeditions.

And then we saw the road, the damn road, and the smoke on the horizon. And then we realized, I realized, you know, said to JJ, I said, who do we call? Because I'm from the U.S., right? So I said, you know, who do we call this? It's going to show up and stop this. This will not stand.

I want to call the proper authorities and stop this. Yeah. And he, and his incredible beautiful, beautiful, you know, almost perfect English. He went, you know, he goes, you see anybody? He goes, look that way. He goes, look this way. He goes, we're the only people here.

He goes, you want to do anything you gotta do it. And then that ended up being the call to adventure in our lives. Like that ended up being the narrative. This is all I've ever done. I've never done anything else. I've never had a job, I've never, nothing. I've been living in the Amazon collecting botflies and scars and stories. and just trying to convince people

to protect this one wildest place on earth. And unlike every other, you know, yeah, I started an organization, but we're totally accountable. You said dollars to acres, 80% of every dollar that comes in, 80 cents on every dollar goes directly to land. Got it.

And then there's, the rest is Rangers and admin and gear. That's a really high. That's a great nonprofit percentage. That is a great percentage. Because a lot of them are like 80% goes to advertising and the rest goes to, you know, paying the CEOs. 80% to mission is commendable. I mean, it's good.

Yeah, it's really good. And we're very transparent. And we're, you know, are the people that become part of our team and a regular donors, a lot of them come down. Which I also think is really cool because it's not just sort of a faceless thing that you give to a second. No, no, come down. See what you did. Some people, one guy, he, you know, he did a quarter of a million dollars, $250,000, $250,000. to protect this huge piece of land.

And he was like, I gotta see it. He was, let's go. We took him on this canoe top expedition out there to see it. And it was such a beautiful thing to see. He goes, it was always just an idea in my head. And he said, I just one day said, I want to be part of something important. And I said, look at all these animals. They're all here because of you.

This whole thing would be gone. And so the fact that it's not a forever project, if we can protect this river, this watershed, then we've done something incredible. and even better, we've come up with a blueprint that can be replicated in other rivers in the Amazon, in rivers in the Congo, in Indonesia, whatever, how to mobilize the indigenous people and empower them

to connect with people around the world so that you can just save these rivers. We don't need to have this common narrative that every beautiful, wild thing, every pristine stream, every great, you know, the salmon runs that somehow it seems like there's always a developer. There's always a mining project. there's always something trying to destroy the beautiful thing.

Yeah. And it's like, well, what if we just, you know, made it a little bit easier for people around the world to protect that thing, especially when it's their indigenous. And we use the word indigenous, whatever. When they're the local people that live there and depend on that ecosystem, they deserve to be able to fight those powers that come in from other places and go, well, we just, we're going to put a factory upriver from you. You can't drink your water anymore.

that's just it just can't be that way forever yeah i feel like we can grow out of that and i want to be part of that movement well man thank you um i i i'm probably guilty of me i sometimes describe myself as like an environmental nationalist i'm like you know like a deeply patriotic american and i look at most i look at conservation through through that lens in some ways i'm very focused on america i think we're the same on that I'm very proud. But what you're talking about in the world you're describing, like I said, I've dabbled. It's gorgeous.

I think what you're doing is a great thing for people to support. I wish you the best of luck. Thank you. And again, man, everybody out there. Well, thank you. And Paul Rosalie, check out the book, Jungle Keeper, what it takes to change the world. It was New York Times bestseller. Congratulations.

I'm shocked by that. For a kid that didn't do very well in school, that was a huge, that was a huge thing for me. But for people listening, you can come down and visit it. You can get, we'll give you a native guides. And I mean, you should, you should come. Dude, I'm already planning on hitting you up. Yeah. Tallest tree house in the world.

And this, this thing, you know, like I said, we can either get one big donor that lets us make the National Park tomorrow or we just reach so many people. Yeah. That we just let the people do it. And so if, you know, junglekeepers.org, we get enough people, then I, then I can stop doing this. Then I could just go explore the, explore the rainforest, describe some species. And I meant to tell you that you had this guy on that I listened to when I knew I was going to be on your podcast.

The guy was doing top-down predator ecology. He sounded like an old-timer. He was talking about like coyote populations, how turkeys lay eggs. I was riveted. Like that stuff. I just want to be out there collecting that stuff. I want to be learning. Yeah, be a man of the woods, man.

Oh, yeah. All right, one last time, Jungle Keeper by Paul Rosley, and check out the organization, Junglekeepers. Yep. All right, junglekeepers.org. All right, junglekeepers.org. All right. Help these boys out with some cash.

All right, thanks, man. Thanks, Steve. Meat eater and best-selling author Brian Burrow present Gunfighters, a new podcast series about the American West and the violence that made its most legendary figures infamous. Davis Tutt staggered forward. shouted, boys, I'm killed. I keeled over dead.

Listen to gunfighters, starting on September 15th, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.