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How was getting stung by a stingray?
It was wonderful.
I loved every second of it, because people pursue ice plunges and ayahuasca journeys and people are constantly looking for the edge.
And I found the edge, right?
I thought I was tough.
I thought I'd been through pain.
I didn't know anything.
I was making deals with God.
I was in so much pain.
And you don't think you know.
You think like your chest cavity or your head.
You don't think that your foot could throw you into agony.
I got, you know, so it stung me in the foot.
And what happened was- Tell me this, where were you?
So I'm in a stream in the Amazon rainforest and I had my shoes on just because I'd been hiking.
I reached this waterfall and I said I'm going to take my shoes off to enjoy the waterfall and swim around.
As I'm playing in the waterfall, you instantly know it.
It's like you got shot in the foot.
I stepped on the stingray, and it stuck its barb.
It's the size of a steak knife.
It sticks its barb in through the skin and the thing is, it wagged its tail under the skin, so it flayed the skin off of the meat of the foot.
And then swam out.
So just what does a- In a split second.
What does a stingray, because it's flat.
Yeah.
And it's just the tail.
So have you stood on the tail or has it been looking for you?
No, no, no.
It's flat, flat.
The whole thing is flat.
And then if it gets scared, it stings to make you go away.
Oh.
They're not trying to attack you.
They want to be left alone.
I stepped on him.
It's my fault.
I couldn't see him.
And then the tail came up.
Tail went straight up.
And the arch of your foot is sensitive.
And so steak knife to the arch of the foot, injected a ton of venom as it flayed.
The skin off, pulls out.
And so I'm like, I'm like, look, this hurts, but the flesh wounds don't hurt that much.
And I'm like, that hurt, getting stabbed hurt.
And so I'm over there, I'm about to film and I'm like I'm in the Amazon rainforest and I just got hit by a stingray.
My friend comes up to me and he goes, we don't have time for this.
He's like, you're going to pass out soon.
And when you pass out, we can't carry you to the river.
And I said, how do you know I'm going to pass out?
He goes, it happens to everybody.
And sure enough, the next thing I know, I'm on a cart getting wheeled through the jungle.
I don't remember the boat ride at all.
And then they got me to the research station.
And I was in so much pain.
I was making every deal with the universe.
If you just make this stop, I promise I'll do it.
You know, just everything.
And luckily, I was with the local guys.
So they were scraping the trees, gathering medicinal barks. that they baked in a pan.
They wrapped it in leaves and they baked it into a poultice.
And they put that on the wound boiling hot poultice, which actually, weirdly enough, felt good boiling hot, but the skin was already off.
They put that on and then they wrap it to your foot and they leave that there for a few hours.
And that sucks out the venom.
But for about four or five hours, it was the worst, most blinding pain, like level 10.
You know, the doctor goes, you know, what are you, what are you feeling at a two or an eight?
And I was like, this was a 10.
I can't imagine more pain than that.
It's like being just the venom.
It's like having an electrical wire shoved into your veins.
But the last guy I know that got stung by a stingray.
He went to a hospital and he had permanent nerve damage, didn't walk for two months, had a systemic infection because he went with the Western medicine way.
The local guys are like, dude, we know how to deal with this.
We have trees for that.
There's a sap for that.
They have it.
They know.
They've learned from their grandfathers and grandmothers.
My God.
You know that Post Malone song?
I got a guy for that.
I don't think I've ever heard a Post Malone song.
It's impressive that you managed to evade it.
That's actually also made of bark and herbs.
Oh, I thought you were going to say this is also made of Post Malone.
It probably is.
Um, no, there's a, he's got a, uh, he's got a song called, I got a guy for that.
And the indigenous people of the Amazon have, I've got a tree for that.
Yeah.
That's their equivalent.
Yeah.
And um, Apple used to have an ad campaign.
You know, if you, if you need it, we have an app for that.
Yeah.
Amazon, we go, we got a sap for that.
Very cool.
Yeah.
Um, what's the reason for the paint extending for so long, is it?
The particular type of toxin is unusually yeah, the venom is unusually massive amount of venom right, and the people that get stung by coastal saltwater stingrays they're like oh yeah, you put something hot on it, it gets better.
That's not the way it works with these guys.
It's much, much worse.
The venom is much more intense and again you're getting.
I mean, just look at a steak knife next time you're eating a steak and just imagine just stabbing yourself through the foot with that And while it's in there it's gone like this.
And then it swam away.
It's an electrical steak knife filled with venom.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was great.
Um, but, but again, the, the whole experience was so visceral.
The only, the only part that I was truly upset about was I was.
You know, as I'm laying, there was the anticipation.
We suffer more in an imagination than we do in life.
I was just going, how much of my year is this going to cut out?
Am I going to be off my feet for three months?
Yeah.
I was on my feet in two days again.
There's no point in worrying about it.
Are you conscious of the finality, the finitude of life?
Is that something you think about a lot?
As someone that i think has come close to dying more than most people?
Very much so, very much.
So yeah i i, i and i i've i've, i'm not like, i want to live very much because i want to be around my family and i want to experience things, but Scared of death, no.
Not even a little bit.
But conscious of time.
Conscious of time.
Not worried about it.
Conscious of time in that how long am I going to be off my feet?
How much of my life am I going to maximize or potentially lose from this sort of a thing?
Yes, but only because I want to.
I need to be saving the Amazon.
I need to be running around.
I need to be helping other people.
I don't want to be off my feet.
What am I going to do?
What am I going to do then?
I'm useless off my feet.
Surely ever being barefoot in the Amazon is dangerous.
We are always barefoot in the Amazon.
The only reason I had shoes on was because I was doing an ad for Vivo Barefoot and I put them on to film because they're like a barefoot shoe company.
And then I was like, all right, that's enough with shoes.
I took them off.
I walk around barefoot.
I learned from the natives, right?
And so when you go hunting with the native trackers, you were wearing boots.
In the jungle it makes so much more noise clunk clunk clunk, clunk.
The leaves, the report, the amount of sticks that you break the slurp in the mud.
It's just, you know, if you go barefoot now you're moving quiet and you can hit over vines and things.
You can pick out the rocks much easier.
You also have tactile balance control.
Your toes become balancers and so you're much better off barefoot.
The only problem is in the amazon you have thorns that are 10 inches, 12 inches long.
You have bullet ants, venomous snakes, stingrays, and the list goes on and on.
Bullet ants or fire ants, the most painful venom that that gentleman who did?
You see that guy that did the self-study on himself where he allowed all of these different animals to bite him or inject him with venom and he described the sense of it happening like a sommelier would the notes of wine.
And he would talk about sort of dull, smoky textures and sort of sharp, fiery electrical senses and stuff like that.
I'm pretty sure that bullet ants are fire.
Bullet ants are at the top.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, they're horrible.
And even now, I'd say they would end the day.
If you were me right now in the studio, you know if it was a bullet ant crawling up your leg and hit you good.
You know, you didn't brush it off quick if it got you good.
They sting you.
They hold on to you.
They grab you with their mandibles.
They have these chopping mandibles.
They grab you with the mandibles.
So they grab you with their, with their face and then they drive that stinger home.
Oh, so they don't inject the venom through the, through the mouth.
They have a stinger, like a wasp.
And so they hold onto you and they think and if you smack them, that's not, you can't kill them with your hand.
You need like a hammer or a shoe.
You can't kill them with your hand.
No, you slap a bullet ant like that.
They'll just sting you harder.
100%.
And it will hurt enough.
Your glands will swell up in your armpit and your groin and your neck.
You'll get a fever.
Immune system's going crazy.
And the most creative thing of that venom is that it makes you feel like something's going wrong.
You go, something's not right.
Something's going to happen.
It gives you this panicked feeling.
You're fine.
I mean, I've always been fine.
I've been bitten by them like 12 or 13 times.
But um sort of impending doom yeah, it always gives you this really stress response where you're like, oh man there's, i have a blood clot, or you know.
It's like it makes you think that the, the venom, is causing damage and you, you just.
But that's the point.
The point is to cause you debilitating stress that you go away.
And it's the same thing with wasps, i mean, they come and they just sting the shit out of you so that you leave their nest.
It's so ingenious, isn't it?
It's so ingenious and i also love the wasp philosophy of.
I think it's a good philosophy to embody in our own lives as well, as we are peaceful here.
We are in our nest.
We're attending to our babies.
Do not fuck with us.
And if you do, we're going to chase you.
And it's kind of this like warrior peace thing where it's like, you know, you see a wasp nest, you go, I'm not going anywhere near that nest.
And if you do, if you by accident hit it with a machete, they're going to chase you all the way to the river.
Like they're going to make sure they make their point.
What is the, fuck, there's a ton of wasps coming after me?
Water, that's the solution?
Water, but then, see, in the jungle, you can't see 10 feet in front of you, right?
Because it's dense.
So when you're running from the wasps, that's the most dangerous part.
Because as you're getting stung, you're making bad decisions.
Because you're running forward and there's vines and there's spikes, and there's other bullet ants and there's snakes.
And so, as you're running, you're in a high likelihood of getting into more trouble.
It is kind of insane that anybody is able to not be killed in the Amazon.
It sounds like there's, it's just filled with things that could kill you pretty easily.
It's, it's not as bad as we're so far.
We've started talking about all the worst things.
We started talking about stingrays and bullet ants.
But I mean you could totally.
There's most of the time I'm there.
I'm walking barefoot through beautiful forests on trails that are quiet, with macaws above me and frog singing.
And it's, it's, it's not, It's not as bad.
It's really just those moments.
You go through six weeks of wonderful, and then you step on a stingray.
The jungle is actually very, very serene.
It's very calm.
There's no honking car horns.
You're not going to get mugged.
The most dangerous thing is falling trees.
Is it ever silent?
No.
And I don't know what rage against the machine song it is.
He says something about silence makes me sick.
And I always think of that when I have to come stay in a hotel room, because I fall asleep to the throbbing chorus of frogs at night.
And so I come and you get into a room and there's silence.
Nature is not silent.
At least the jungle is not silent.
It's loud.
In the morning, there's howler monkeys and macaws and birds and everything's going crazy.
You hit 4 a.m., the jungle explodes into song.
It's loud.
And at night, you go in the swamps, the frogs are all coming down from the canopy and mating.
I'd have to scream to talk to you right now.
No way.
All that.
I'd be screaming at you like, look at this one.
It's so loud.
No, it's incredible.
It's magical.
It's absolutely magic on Earth.
You know what it makes me think about?
That humans have survived in pretty ancestral environments in very varied ways.
And how different the nervous system set point of somebody who grew up in the jungle versus somebody who grew up on the plains.
Yeah.
Because the plains presumably would be much quieter.
You know, there's big, big chunks of space, nothingness between animals.
And there might be some wind.
There might be the blowing of, you might be able to hear something, some birds over the far side.
But I spent a good bit of time in Zambia.
And that at night, apart from maybe the sounds of some buzzing of like a few insects and stuff, it's pretty fucking quiet.
Interesting.
No, the jungle is almost its own super organism.
And it's like it has a consciousness.
And when you're inside of it you have to imagine a human being know it, let's just say, for six feet, and below your the jungle is 160 feet tall in places.
So you're, you're not, it's a three, it's a 4d environment.
You're underneath.
It's like being at the bottom of the ocean, but the ocean is made of tree branches and leaves and animals and you're under all of it.
So when you're walking on a trail, there's most of what's around you, like a cathedral is above you, and so you walk around at night.
You have this little headlamp here, this tiny little orb of light walking below this throbbing teeming, murdering mass of of wildlife that's all around you that you can't see.
There's frogs and snakes and night birds and kinkachus and jaguars and all of this stuff moving around you, and so it's very, very loud, very loud, and i i think that to me is comfort.
You know people, I don't know to me to fall asleep to that.
People come to the jungle and they're shocked by the fact that the sounds of the jungle are calming.
You put your head down and you hear all of that and it just lulls you to sleep.
I mean, as a kid, it was the cicadas in the summer.
You know, the summer sound, that throb.
I love it.
Winter, when it's quiet.
Didn't you try to get eaten by an anaconda?
Some producers at discovery channel tried to get me to do that.
Yes.
And I did do it.
I did try to get eaten by an Anaconda because they said that if I tried to get eaten by an Anaconda it would get us such high ratings.
Cause I said, look, we're going to do research on the biggest Anacondas on earth, right?
We're going to do something no one's ever done before, but sitting at a desk in Hollywood, they were like that's not good enough.
They're like, we want to go bigger.
How about we make you a space suit?
And we feed you to an anaconda.
And you have a breathing tube, so you'll be fine.
And snakes regurgitate all the time.
And so at the time, I knew the snake wasn't going to eat me.
And so in the room, you shake hands and you go, sure.
And then they told me the show would be called Expedition Amazon.
And again, I'm 24, right?
And they're telling you, you can go to the Amazon.
You have millions of dollar budget, can take all your best friends and expert scientists and start research that's never been done before.
The only thing that you got to do is pay the piper by doing this one thing.
And so at that age, at that time, i went how else do we tell the world that we have to save this river?
Because it was just starting to crystallize in my head that if if, if me and jj, my local friend if we didn't start to save this river, that nobody was going to do it.
And so i said this seems like the opportunity.
This was my first experience.
I was young, i had not learned yet, i was not yet a jedi.
Um, i shook, shook the hands and they said don't worry kid, we're gonna take care of you.
Okay, they called it expedition amazon and while we were in the jungle they had.
You know, they were like we need danger beats, we need you to be scared.
I said, scared of what?
And they were like we need you to be chased by piranhas.
And i was like i'm in.
We swim in the water every day.
We shower in the river.
We're just playing in the river, backflipping into the river.
Uh, yeah.
Anyway, at the end, right before I was supposed to go on the today show or the good morning show or whatever it's called, the Matt Lauer show.
Um, they called me, they showed me the show and they said we're changing it to eaten alive eaten alive.
And I said, but I didn't actually get eaten alive.
And they said, but we're going to tell everybody you did.
So they watched the show and I said, you can't do that to me.
So they did me hard and uh, i had to exile to india.
The hatred was so bad i'd be in the street and people would be like yo, fuck you man, why talk shows?
Uh, because the pita was mad, because they thought i risked the life of a snake.
The american public was mad because they thought that they were gonna see a guy get eaten by an anaconda.
Everybody was somehow outraged, like all, like the late night shows.
Um kimmel was like oh, for your next stunt, you should go have sex with a hippo like.
It destroyed my career professionally.
No way destroyed it.
So every scientist that i work with, every legitimate conservationist i mean someone actually said you're not, you're not welcome in brazil.
I was supposed to do work on a giant anteater project like and so i took.
And this is where you know.
You hear people say you know what's the winston church.
She'll go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
This was a big one, right?
I'm in my mid-20s and I went from thinking I'm going to have this opportunity where it's like me and my team we're going to get to have the chance to save the rainforest and carry on that Steve Irwin legacy of being on Discovery Channel.
And then it goes to everybody hated it.
It was a complete disaster.
You got lied to.
You got cheated.
And in fact, you should probably get out of here.
And so for years, that set us back years because then we weren't taken seriously.
And then if we wanted grants to protect the rainforest, if we wanted to work with other organizations, everyone would just go use that on anaconda guy.
I mean to this day.
I think my Wikipedia still says Paul Rosley is an American who was the host of eaten alive.
It's like, it just, it's like you got branded with it.
It's like that's the guy that got eaten by the anaconda and it won't.
It wouldn't leave for a long time.
And so that was a very, very informed that.
I mean at the time, it was true.
You can only see the tragedy of it at the time, right at the time.
You know, six months after that, i was just devastated.
I didn't know what happened.
It's like a car crash.
You wait wait, hold on.
We, we caught the world record anaconda.
We started research that no one's ever done before.
We put together an amazing film that they, they chopped up and they ruined.
But um, the backlash.
And then the professional backlash.
And then, But then it's funny because now, all these years later, that was what, 2014.
So more than 10 years later, that was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Because now I know how to, I can spot that false handshake a thousand miles away now.
When we do deals, we learn through those experiences.
The successes are easy.
It's those failures that teach you.
And then you become confident because you've survived.
If you can survive those, that thing of, you know, it doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.
Yeah.
Unless, unless, unless it maims you.
Um, but you know, cause that does happen, whether it's mentally or physically.
But if you, if you survive enough of those hits the the, the confidence you have going into the hunt, then you know exactly what it's going to do.
And so, you know, I think of it from an animal perspective.
You, you know um, You know, you think of a lion going after a gazelle.
I've seen a cheetah going after a gazelle and I've watched cheetah cubs learn.
You know, the mother will maim the gazelle and let the cheetah cubs sort of finish it off.
So they learn and you see them get poked as they're learning by those horns.
They'll come on from the back and they'll get poked.
It's like, yeah, go down for that windpipe on the other side.
They learn.
And some lions, you know, some cheetahs, some predators don't learn.
They'll get that straight through the eye and that's the end of it for them.
They'll get that infection.
And so that professionally the discovery thing was great because it was a huge train wreck, destroyed everything I had going on,
And so I had to just exile it to go live with elephants.
I had to go spend more time in the jungle.
And so I couldn't do, if I had gotten a TV career at that point, it would have been terrible.
I wasn't ready.
It would have been the worst thing.
That's a perfect example of life not giving you what you want and instead giving you what you need.
I was being moved.
I was going, I want to go this way.
And God went, no, this is where you're going to go.
And I'm going to spank you for it.
It was great.
And I got all these experiences that I never would have had otherwise.
I went and lived with a herd of semi-wild elephants.
I went out on solos in the Amazon rainforest by myself at led to a long period of isolated reflection and years of then I said okay well forget, forget trying to.
You know, at that time in early twenties, you know you want to.
You have that, that young man's sort of need to prove yourself and to go I'm the guy.
And so then when you get, you get knocked on your ass and then you go okay, I'm just going to do the work.
And so we just started doing the work.
We said, okay, what are we really trying to do here?
We're trying to save the forest.
How do we do that?
And there was a day where we saw smoke on the horizon.
Me and JJ, who's this local conservationist who grew up in the Amazon, didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old, has been working his whole life to protect the forest.
And we saw smoke on the horizon.
We have 300,000 acres of jungle behind us and we see the destruction coming.
And I was like, there's gotta be somebody we can call.
There's gotta be somebody, this can't be legal.
We're watching these millennium trees go down.
It's like Avatar.
We're just watching this destruction.
And I said, there must be someone who can stop this.
And he looked up river, he looked down river and he goes, do you see anybody else?
I said, no.
But I said, but then how, how can, how on earth can we have anything to do with stopping this?
And so we had to start from beyond zero.
How do you stop people from cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest?
How do you start an organization?
How do we find rangers?
Who can be rangers?
And so we had to answer all these questions.
And so it was just years of just being in the jungle answering these questions.
If we want to protect those monkeys and those birds and those millennium trees and the ecosystem that creates climactic stability on our planet, How do we do this?
Or are we supposed to just watch this get destroyed?
Are we part of the last generation that's going to have functioning ecosystems on this planet?
And we're doomed to watch the ecological apocalypse.
And that was the question.
And there's that quote that said you know, the search for meaning is only valid if you're willing to take action on what you find.
And it's like, when I was a kid, I grew up with the extreme environmental stress.
They tell you the world is ending.
They tell you we've lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet.
The elephants are going extinct.
We're going to lose gorillas in our lifetime.
And I couldn't deal with that.
I couldn't sleep.
And so I left.
I dropped out of high school two years early.
I got a plane ticket to the Amazon.
I was like, I have to go out and see it for myself.
That was how this started.
That was how all this started.
My mom, my parents made the huge mistake of they read me Jane Goodall.
So it's a perfect storm of, so I'm severely dyslexic, right?
So I can't read well.
I couldn't read until I was probably 11.
But my parents, incredible, they would finish their day as parents and then read us.
They read me and my sister, Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Rings, Jane Goodall stories, James Harriet.
And so I got my hero's complex hero's journey from Lord of the Rings, got the need for adventure and wildlife from Jane Goodall, got the love of animals from James Harriet and all this stuff.
And then sometime around teenager years when you're getting detention detention detention, detention.
Why didn't you do better?
Why didn't you do homework?
Because I don't want to do any more homework.
And I'm going.
Why did Teddy Roosevelt and Jane?
They got to lead adventurous lives and I'm stuck in a desk asking permission to go to the bathroom.
And I was like, why do they get to do it and I don't?
And so I literally just Again, amazing parents.
I said, I hate this so much.
I was so depressed.
I was so frustrated.
And my parents just said, why don't you just leave?
Get your GED.
Leave high school.
We want you to go to college.
So you have to go to college.
But in between semesters, you can go wherever you want.
I bought a ticket to the Amazon, went down, met JJ.
And it's like the first scene in Jurassic.
When you saw the jungle for the first time, it's like the first scene in Jurassic Park.
They arrive and they're like okay, this is going to be.
You know, it's going to be cool.
They said, there's some stuff here.
It's like the first time they see the dinosaurs.
The first time I saw a millennium tree 160 feet tall leaf cutter ants carrying leaves down from the canopy into their thing.
And macaws going across the sky.
I was like, that was like the start of the movie in my life.
That's like the color came on.
I was just, I went, this is where, this is where I belong.
I was like, this is incredible.
Just limitless things to learn.
Limitless Wilderness to explore.
Just incredible.
That's why I said we should do the... One time you got to come down and we got to hang out.
I'm going to come and see you.
I'm going to come and see you.
Let me get Australia, New Zealand, and Bali out of the way and then you're next on my list.
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What is it, what is it that drove you from those early days?
Because, talking about conservation as a young man in his teens most young people aren't that selfless.
They're looking to be driven by the need for status and recognition, people that they admire accumulating wealth or chasing goals or doing whatever.
What were the contributing motivations to this?
It's a great question.
I've always loved animals.
When i was a child, i would go, and it was specifically wild and people get this confused.
You know, domesticated animals is a different thing cats dogs cows, chickens we've made those.
Those aren't wild animals.
There's something beautiful to me.
Wild animals on earth have formed our ecosystems.
They're our wild brothers and sisters.
We grew up in the ecosystems that they created.
And people think that animals live in the forest.
And the animals make the forest.
They carry the seeds.
They pollinate the flowers.
The trees grow because the animals move them.
And so I was, even from the time I was this big, I said to my parents, take me to the streams.
I wanted to find frogs.
I wanted to find snakes.
I liked places where there was – I always liked big trees, like the parts of the forest where there were poplar trees and big old oaks.
So I was born in Brooklyn and then for a while we were in North Jersey and so I always had access to these lower New York forests and it was just beautiful trees.
But my motivation was not selfless.
Everybody confuses that.
My need to save the rainforest is extremely selfish.
I like it.
I think that there should be a continuing world.
And when I look at the fact that the Amazon formed in the Eocene 33 to 55 million years ago.
And so this cycle of speciation and these trees growing has been happening for millions and millions of years.
And for us to break that cycle to the point that it no longer works.
You're destroying part of the system on earth that makes life possible.
A fifth of our planet's oxygen comes from the Amazon.
A fifth of the fresh water on our planet is contained in that system.
And that system produces the moisture that rains back down on the Amazon.
So if you cut too much of it, you destroy the Amazon rainforest.
And for that reason, we've lost 20% of the Amazon.
We're the first generation in history that has a planetary crisis on our hands that we can stop.
So we're the ones.
All of history has taken place.
We're the first ones where we're looking at 20% of the Amazon is cut.
If we go past that threshold, there's a tipping point that we don't come back from.
They've cut too much of the Amazon.
It dries out.
It's no longer the Amazon rainforest.
So then the tropical sun bakes it.
Human degradation destroys it.
And then you're looking at post-apocalyptic nightmare.
So it becomes a feedback loop?
A snowball feedback loop, because once you just dig into it, can you just dig into that a little bit more.
Sure.
So every day the Amazon rainforest trees produce lift up off the out of the ground and into the air 20 trillion liters of water.
It's.
There's a larger invisible mist river above the Amazon rainforest than is on the ground in the Amazon river, held in the trees.
Floating through the sky.
The trees each morning.
And so I've seen this from the branches of the tallest trees.
And when the sun comes up in the east, you could just see it for a few minutes.
It illuminates the mist river that's flowing over the Amazon.
And so there's this invisible, particulate mist river that's larger than the largest river on earth, flowing through the sky.
There's more water in the air than there is on the ground.
In the river.
Holy shit.
In the Amazon.
That's the largest river on earth.
And, at the same time, it's also being it's also being fertilized with compounds from the Sahara desert.
So the Amazon and Africa are exchanging nutrients.
And so when people say that the earth is connected like you don't, you don't realize the degree to which it is.
And one of the things the locals down there that we've done is you know you have this, this thing we do.
It's kind of like a, a physical form of prayer.
It's a bit of a natural sacrament.
You, you cup your hands and you drink from a clear stream.
You hold your arm in the sunlight and you watch the vapor be lifted off your skin.
It'll, the Sun will lift the sweat right off your skin and you can see it joining the vapors coming off the leaves.
You watch it become thunderclouds in the afternoons and then it rains down and then you drink it again.
You're part of the cycle.
It's flowing through you.
The river and the sky are flowing through you.
And so that 20 trillion liters of water that's coming off the Amazon rainforest, which is bigger than the continental United States.
It's tremendous.
So globally, it's this huge force.
And so in the last century, because of chainsaws deforestation, expanding countries agriculture, we've lost 20 of the Amazon rainforest, this system that is the heart of our planet.
And so the scientists are warning now that if we lose more, we could cross a threshold where that mist river, that 20 trillion tons of water, liters of water, gets broken.
So if that's not coming up off the ground because there's not enough trees to produce it, then the rain stops.
And if the rain stops, the forest dries.
And if the forest dries, then it burns.
And then we lose the Amazon rainforest.
And that's a reality.
It's a realistic possibility right now.
Is the reason that there is a tipping point here, because there's a critical mass that's needed in order for rain clouds to form.
I'm trying to work out.
If you cut 50 of it, why wouldn't you just have 50 of the water that would go up and you would have 50 of the trees that would need watering.
So surely it would be self-limiting, but it seems like there's a tipping point here.
No, what we've seen in practice in reality is that there is this tipping point.
Even with the 20%, we're starting to see the droughts get worse.
And another huge misconception people have is They say wildfires in the Amazon are out of control.
There are no wildfires.
There's no fires in the Amazon.
Super hard to start a fire in the Amazon.
You actually can't start a fire in the Amazon.
You could napalm that forest.
I mean, there's been times where we're trying to start a fire when we're camping.
You start a fire.
You try and start an authentic fire.
No chance.
All the sticks are wet.
You try and find some tinder.
You hack into a stick. even the center of the stick is wet.
So then you get the gasoline, you pour it all over your fire.
You light that, the gasoline burns and the sticks are wet.
So then you just eat.
You know, you have like a ramen noodle pack, you dip it in the river until it's a little moist and cold and then you just eat it and you just sprinkle this stuff on top.
It's great.
Um, or you just eat the fish.
A lot of times we have fish that we can't cook.
So you just, just eat the fish out of the river like it's a Snickers.
But I mean that, that, Amazon tipping point, the extinction of species.
I truly believe that this is the defining issue of our time.
I think that we were born in the most important time in history.
Civilizations rise and fall.
Nature has always been a constant that we have existed within.
And for the first time in the story of our species as a global society, we have to contend with the fact that we have to decide what the future of earth is going to look like because if we destroy the amazon past the point that it can be repaired then they're all then we're cursing all future generations with those actions who owns the amazon who owns most of the amazon uh sixty percent of the amazon is contained within the territory of brazil uh the next largest country is peru which is where i work and that has the headwaters of the amazon the headwaters is the most important part because you have the edge of the andes mountains And then you have the lowland tropical Amazon.
And the Andes cloud forests are considered a mega biodiverse biome.
That ecosystem is considered mega biodiverse, tons of plants and animals.
The lowland Amazon is also mega biodiverse.
And so at the confluence of those two, where I work, it's also higher up.
If you think of the Amazon rainforest, the main river is a tree.
And then all the millions of tributaries are the branches.
Where I work is on the tip, tip, tip, tip, tip, tip top of the branches.
High tributary.
And that's why it's the wildest place on earth because people haven't been able to access it.
There's been no access to this place for until now.
And so it's still this forest that's been growing since the dawn of time untouched.
And so you think some of these trees were saplings when they were painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel.
Some of these trees were already giants when World War I was happening.
When World War II was happening, they were towering 130-foot.
Now you're talking about 160-foot trees.
Me and you could walk around on the branches of these trees.
Some of the branches that come off the trees that I climb are as big as this room.
With bromeliads growing with the size of a Volkswagen bug.
There's species in the canopy of the rainforest that have never been seen.
Because many of the species, 50% of the life in a rainforest occurs in the canopy.
Think about that.
50 of the life in the most biodiverse place on Earth occurs in the canopy, which is 160 feet off the ground.
So it's one of the least explored things on the planet.
Yeah.
Even if a scientist can climb one tree, you got to know the ropes.
You got to get up there.
You got to survive the bees and the wasps and the height and the gravity and everything else that's going to happen.
I guess you couldn't even send drones, because they're just going to clink clink clink clink, clink and then fall down.
Yeah, and animals hate drones.
It just looks like a predator.
It's like a giant wasp.
Birds are terrified of them.
Elephants hate drones.
Oh, my God.
Spooks them.
Really scares.
Well, they're scared of bees.
Elephants don't like bees, right?
Like David and Goliath relationship.
It's proper Tom and Jerry thing.
They have sense that this is where now we're moving out of the Amazon for a second, but, but yes.
And in my experience, uh, they're very, they have sensitive skin.
They don't like, even though they can.
They can move through thorns and they actually had.
In one sense, they have very thick skin.
They don't like bee stings.
And there's something about the buzzing of bees.
They actually are using bees in parts of Kenya on the borderlands of Marshall.
They put?
They put bee boxes on the edges of farms to keep the L because the elephants are like look, we're just not going to go to the border colleagues of the elephant world.
The sheepdogs of the elephant world just hate them.
That's funny.
It's making me think about a wonderful analogy that you made about, um, the ocean.
And it's almost like the rainforest is the inverted ocean.
We talk about.
Well, how little of the ocean floor has ever been where you're talking about the canopy?
Isn't that cool?
So sick.
Okay, so canopy, 50%.
50% of the life in a rainforest is in the canopy.
And so a lot of the species that are born up there never touch the ground.
What are the...
What is the bulk of those species made up of?
What are the sorts of animals that are in the canopy?
I mean, you have spider monkeys, howler monkeys, sake monkeys, capuchins, macaws, harpy eagles.
I mean, there's hundreds of species of different birds.
I think there's 50-something species of ant birds.
There's all the toucans and arisaries and unbelievable amounts of birds butterflies dragonflies, millions and millions of just unbelievable amounts of wildlife, undiscovered medicines orchids bromeliads cactuses reptiles amphibians birds, mammals.
It's just teeming.
And so you think of, again, back to this sapling that started a thousand years ago.
I think what the world looked like a thousand years ago.
And that sapling today is this millennium tree with these giant branches as thick as this room.
And how many.
If you time-lapse that over a thousand years, How many species, how many millions of species have lived on and in and around?
One tree.
One tree.
And there's 400 billion trees in the Amazon.
How many grains of sand are there on earth?
You know, it's like this, this place defies.
And then, and then, when you, when you see all this magic and you, you know the, the sky and the river are flowing through you and everything's interconnected and there's this energy exchange, and you suddenly understand sunlight hits, the leaves, goes into the trees, the animals eat the leaves and then they hunt each other and everything makes sense and keeps rolling and it all produces oxygen.
It makes our lives possible.
Because of them we're here, without them we couldn't be here.
And then you see the bulldozers and the chainsaws and the black smoke and they're literally erasing all of the beautiful color, all of that avatar, riotous grandeur the, the cacophony is silenced In order to get rid of 20 of 400 billion trees.
That's a big operation.
Yeah, but we've taken a century to do it.
Right.
But still.
But it's accelerating now.
I mean, you know, that's a high-velocity operation to be able to get that to happen.
It must be a really, really big industry.
Well, I mean, you have to think.
You know brazil's formation, the deforestation that's occurred in peru, the various sources of it.
There's illegal gold mining, where they have to cut the forest, burn the forest and then suck the land up through hoses to get the sediment, because the gold is not in nuggets, it's in, it's in the sand.
So they have to completely destroy the earth, like or get tiny shards of tiny tiny minuscule, almost microscopic pieces of, And you can see this scar from space across the Amazon.
You can see the Amazon.
It looks like it caught mange.
You see human roads moving across the southern Amazon.
And so I mean just to summarize it for the people that don't know.
I've been working with the locals for 20 years to find an answer to this.
Because either we say we're going to have ecological collapse, we just give up on it.
Because life on Earth used to come standard with fish in the oceans air, oxygen in the air and water that you could drink.
And now we're ruining those systems.
And so we're the last generation that's going to have a chance to save the Amazon rainforest.
And what we've done over the last 20 years is we found a way to do that.
All right.
We started asking our enemies, the loggers and the gold miners, if they'd like to join our team.
The people that were cutting down the rainforest, we would go have a beer with them.
The people that we thought were our mortal enemies, that were causing all of the death and destruction and flames and silence.
JJ would just go, let's go see how they are.
We'd go and sit down and have a beer with them and go, how are you doing?
They go, good, how are you doing?
They go, well, we moved down here from another part of the Amazon There's no trees there.
So we came here cause you guys still have really old trees.
I go, cool.
How much you make a day?
I go $15 a day.
They go, you like that work?
And I go, no, the trees falling is dangerous.
We get bitten by bullet ants and stung by things and it's hard and there's no food.
And $15 a day really isn't worth it.
Once you subtract the gasoline, it takes to get all the way five days away from town.
Okay.
I go, you guys want to be jungle keepers?
We'll pay you three times that you get a really cool t-shirt.
You get medical benefits, a steady paycheck and a community and we'll take care of the boat.
And instead of your chainsaw, you have to carry binoculars.
It's a lot lighter than a chainsaw.
And now you protect the forest instead of destroy it.
And they go, where do I sign?
And that's it.
And so we've been doing that.
We've been converting loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers, giving the local people opportunities that they didn't have, because what we discovered is that the reason they're destroying the rainforest is because they don't have anything else they can do.
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How much of this is bottom up them doing it on their own to then try and make a profit to sell?
And how much of this is, top down, a company going in recruiting locals in order to do an operation on behalf of a bigger organization?
50, 50.
Right.
So the second one is going to be much harder.
The second one is going to be much harder.
If you go and take away worker number three and make him work for you, then guy from the street becomes working number three.
Yes.
And they'll continue to recruit.
But the good thing with that side is that you can, you can put pressure on those companies, right?
You can come and lobby restrict.
Yeah.
That's accessible where we are.
We were so remote.
It used to take two days to get to the research station that I started working at deep in the jungle.
And so when you meet these people, it's the bottom up guys, it's people that just have a chainsaw And they're driving their little tiny motor through the Amazon rainforest.
They know where to sell the sediment, or sell the tree, or sell the whatever it is that they're going back with.
Yeah.
I mean, JJ grew up, his father, his brothers, they would go out for three weeks at a time.
They'd go 10 days up river.
They'd find mahogany trees.
They'd fell them.
Then they would spend time in the jungle, milling them into boards.
Then they would pile the boards in the river on balsa wood that floats.
And then they would float it down the river.
They'd put their motor on the wood and use the wood and they would just and they would pilot that down through the Amazon and it would get stuck in places.
They got to get in the water and pry it out.
Brutal work.
And then when they finally get to town, they get paid practically nothing for that wood.
And then when that wood hits the international market, a mahogany tree goes for a million dollars.
And so the people on these poor people on the ground, they have no.
And if you go, what would you do if you weren't logging?
And fish, you know, hand to mouth live out of nature.
And so it's not, there's not a lot of opportunities.
And so, by giving them the opportunities to protect their forest, to attend classes, to become park rangers, to become boat drivers chefs guides, we're just changing the narrative in this place.
And so now we've protected 130000 acres of the Amazon rainforest, which is like I believe it's nine times the size of Manhattan Island.
It's more than half the size of Singapore.
And the Peruvian government has taken notice.
And they've said, if you guys can protect 300,000 acres, we'll sign it over into a national park.
So we're almost halfway.
Wow.
We're almost 20 years in.
20 years ago I left home because I wanted to see for myself if it really was an emergency in the Amazon rainforest, like I had heard.
I wanted to see for myself if what I had heard was true.
And when I got down there, I found something more magical than I could ever have imagined.
And 20 years later we have an organization and we have a global movement and there's people all over the world that contribute monthly that make it possible for us to pay these rangers and protect this land and keep it safe from the loggers.
And we found a way to change the narrative of conservation.
Where can people go if they want to help donate money?
Well, we have junglekeepers.org and It's the most direct way to save the rainforest.
And so I have people tell me that traditionally with organizations, they say I made a donation to an organization to protect nature, but I don't know where it went.
And so the thing that we started doing was just showing people, this is where your money went.
Land acquisition, ranger pay, little bit of admin, that's it.
And if you look at most of these NGOs, what we started realizing was that expensive C-suite private playing their CEOs 500000 a year and the next 10 people 500000 a year.
And if you look at the breakdown, their pie chart, 90 of their donations going towards advertising.
You take the top 10 environmental organizations, you could name 90 of their donations go towards advertising to further their brand.
The money that we get, I think 85% goes to land acquisition and ranger pay, direct action.
And so some people will come to us.
Somebody reached out to me on Instagram not that long ago.
And he goes, I just made a donation to blank, huge organization that we all know.
And he goes, I have no idea where my money went.
And it's really driving me crazy.
He goes, I saw you on a podcast.
And he goes, I really want to help.
He goes, what are you working on right now?
And I said, well, we're actually in a state of emergency right now.
There's a road coming in.
The narco traffickers are attacking us.
I said, there's this sector on the northern boundary of the park.
And he goes, well, how big is it?
I said, several thousand acres.
I said, but it's like $250,000 and we don't have it right now.
He goes, I got you.
This guy, Michael, he reached out.
He goes, it'll be in your account tomorrow.
He wired us $250,000.
He spoke to me for a half hour.
We'd never met each other.
We took the money, went to the landowner.
We said landowner, do you want this road to come through your rainforest?
And they're going to completely cut it down.
Old guy, he goes, no.
He goes, I don't want this.
He goes, but they're going to hurt me if I don't do it.
We bought it and we got the cops to come in and we completely protected over 5000 acres of rainforest like that.
How much are you fighting against crime?
When I think South America, sometimes there's going to be some organized crime floating around in there.
You're talking about the dangers of The urchin or the, the worries of the bullet, and so the Jaguar.
But what about the modern human concern?
That's the scary thing.
That's the scary part is like the loggers and the gold miners, the local people in Peru.
The local people in Peru are incredibly kind.
The people of the Madre de Dios of Peru are rural people.
I rock up in a raft or in my boat and they'll let me camp at their house.
It's like these people live in thatched huts.
They eat monkeys and turtles.
They're wonderful rural people.
We also have narco traffickers coming in now and they are not local.
They are not from there.
They heard that there are extremely wild parts of the Amazon where the police can't get to. deep deep deep deep jungle and so what they do is they launch expeditions deep into the jungle and they figure no one's going to come out here but what are they doing why would you want to be okay they're what growing cocaine growing cocaine growing coke so it's like farms yeah plant but again it's the artisanal guys it's not the big crime bosses it's like a couple of brothers that got together and went hey man you know what we should do we should go grow some cocaine it's the equivalent it's it's the equivalent of being a weed farmer in california like 30 years ago yes but doing it with cocaine in the amazon yes and the difference is like the weed farmers i feel like you know i don't feel like they'll shoot you there's something about the cocaine grower culture so this is even though they're more small time more grassroots they're still kinetically protected yeah and so when it comes to the uncontacted tribes when it comes to us they've made it very clear uh if we get the chance we'll kill you they say it they they've we the The cops actually intercepted, uh, one of the people that they arrested.
They said that gringo and JJ, they said to anyone in our network, if you see them, take them out.
Talking about you.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
How does that make you feel?
Very unsafe.
I mean it's very stressful trying to do anything, because it used to be that we'd drive around with our boat.
I would just have machete, no shoes, which would be driving on my boat through the Amazon.
And now you have to be very careful.
And then even passing through a city, you can't sit down.
I can no longer sit down in a cafe and have a coffee.
You just think someone's going to come up behind you.
That's how much of a hit list you're on now.
Oh, yeah.
No, I travel with a huge security team when I'm there now.
The security team is not to protect you from the animals of the Amazon or even necessarily, the uncontacted tribes.
None of those things are going to try and shoot me in the head.
It's just the narcos.
And so yeah, I have a circle of armed men around me at all times, outward facing because of the- You're like the president.
You're like- Yes, a very, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not at all.
But no, I hate it.
And so the good thing is that the Peruvian police have been working on this narco problem and And really just they just came in.
And so they're starting to just move them out.
There was a small group of them and they're starting to move them out.
So we're hoping that that calms down.
Because again, it's when people hear, oh, you're 50% of the way to making this national park.
That's incredible.
Then they hear narco traffickers.
And it's not even like they're the ones in the Amazon rainforest.
And they go, you're going to fail.
Nobody can beat the narcos.
And they stopped donating.
It's a bit of a buzzkill.
They stopped helping us.
And which I think isn't like I mean cowardice on a level they can't even imagine.
It's like it's not like i'm asking you to come fight, i'm just saying just, just just help us.
And they're like nah, it's a lost cause.
It's like no, we're fighting, we're not giving up.
Why should you give up?
What is?
Is there a time in your mind that sticks out as the most fear that you felt, the most afraid that you've ever been?
I wonder whether it's come from threats from humans, or threats from jungle, or threats from something else.
The most afraid I've ever been.
I mean, I can give you the most afraid I've ever been from an animal.
I can give you the action version.
But the most afraid I've ever been was when I was young and starting out and didn't know.
I was dreaming so badly that we'd be at this point one day.
I saw it 20 years ago.
I wanted to do this.
And and from that, And at that time you know if you wanted to, if you wanted to protect species and save rainforest, you had to be a conservation biologist.
And I didn't have the grades for that.
I hadn't even finished high school.
Did you go back to college in the end?
I did.
I did.
I finished college.
You kept the promise to your parents.
Yes.
By the skin of your teeth.
By the skin of my teeth.
I would show up late to a semester because I was raising an anteater.
You know, my great, didn't I hear that you nearly died because of raising an anteater?
Well, I got a really bad staff infection.
I got a MRSA infection across my whole body.
My whole face was rotting off, but I kept, I have this really bad habit of trying to walk it off.
You know, horrific things.
I almost chopped for the tendon that connects your kneecap.
Um, I, I chopped most of that tendon and I was like, I'll walk it off.
You know, the stingray went, I'll walk it off.
And so I got this horrific infection.
I kept going, well, at some point it must, at some point it's got to get better.
Right. no, an antibiotic resistant staph infection will eventually kill you.
And so I was taking care of- From an anteater?
Absolutely not.
From a hospital.
I had dengue fever and I'd gone to the hospital to like get a shot.
So what's this got to do with the anteater?
It just happened while you were looking after an anteater?
Well, because the only reason I didn't go home and get help was because I had this baby anteater that needed me.
So I kept letting the infection get worse weeks and weeks and weeks.
My body was- So that you could look after the anteater?
She needed me.
You know who else was a massive fan of anteaters?
Salvador Dali.
Yes.
That picture of him coming out of the subway.
Do you know why he said that he loved walking an anteater through the streets of Paris?
No, I do not.
He said because anteaters are never in fashion.
He just loved the idea of, I'm researching him for my next live show.
Um the number of stories that he's gotten, one of them being yeah, he walked an anteater through the streets of Paris.
Cause he said they're never in fashion.
He also sued a man for dreaming about him and said, because the subconscious belongs to me.
Oh boy.
So cool.
So sick.
Anyway.
So you've got the worst Mercer of your life.
You nearly, that was, and that you were young.
Yeah, I was 19 at the time.
And I remember like writing a journal entry to my parents and being like, goodbye.
Thank you for everything.
Sweet life.
Yeah, like I really was saying, I really was sad.
I also said, even if I live, I couldn't imagine I'd ever have a normal face.
So I really thought it was the end.
So I've lived through my own death many, many times in many different ways, whether it's being chased by an elephant or laying on the side of the.
That time I had to wait three days just for a boat to come by.
That's how remote in the jungle I was and there was no one else.
So when I finally realized I was in trouble, I said, I got to get a boat.
Well, there was no boat.
So you lay by the side of the river and you have all these pustules of infection boiling out of your skin.
And so the flies are feasting on you.
And I lay in that state for several days.
Before I, the only boat coming down river was a poaching boat stacked with the carcasses of animals.
So more flies, dying spider monkeys crocodiles macaws, all things destined for the illegal pet trade.
And I laid on that boat for two days on the way back to town.
Finally got to the remote, the first town, with a telephone and called my mother and I said you got to get me out of here.
She got me a plane ticket.
And the next day I got on a plane.
Everybody moved away from me at the airport.
It was like, it was like fish moving away from a shark.
People would look at me and they'd hide their children.
I mean, I was leaking out of my face, yellow and green pus.
I had my hood up like a freak.
And I, I, I, somehow they let me on the plane and I arrived at JFK.
The Port Authority cop looks down and he goes, okay, Paul Rosely.
He goes, yeah, where were you traveling?
He goes, holy shit, dude.
He goes, what happened to your face?
And I was like, that's why I'm home.
I need to go to a doctor.
And he just stamped it.
He goes, go, go, go, go.
He was like, please go.
And I went to the hospital and spent like four or five days on full IV antibiotics to kill the infection and bring me back.
And the doctor said If you'd waited just a little long, a few more days, they said we wouldn't have been able to bring you back.
The infection would have been so, so established.
But you know, in those early days, my reasons for doing these things were were I wanted so badly to be, to follow in the footsteps of someone like Jane Goodall, or some of the conservation heroes like Alan Rabinowitz, people who have made national parks.
And I wanted to save these things, but I also just selfishly wanted to have adventures.
I felt so.
I felt so meaningless as a kid, feeling like oh so I'm going to finish this and I'm going to get a good job.
And I was like, but there has to be like, I want, I want like, like the story adventure.
I want to go out on an adventure.
I want to find some stuff.
And, and so the Amazon was that the Amazon was just, you know, horizon to horizon of jungle.
And they said there's these uncontacted tribes out there and there's, There's animals you've never heard of, and there's all these rivers that no one's explored.
And so I said this is where I can live out my life here, even if I can never hold down a normal job.
And if I can't be a conservation biologist, at least I could just go on amazing adventures.
And so that's how it started.
But the scariest part to me was that longing of knowing what I really wanted and thinking I would never, ever have it.
Knowing that I wanted to be an author one day.
You know, and writing these little chapters you know in my journal and thinking no one's ever going to read this.
No one's ever going to.
You know, and I even had people, you even have people in your life that say I even had someone you know tell me, say you're crazy to publish a book.
You know how hard it is to publish a book.
They're not going to, that's never going to work.
And you have people, you know, you notice the people who encourage you and who disparage you.
My friends, my housemate George calls them sofa friends and treadmill friends.
Some people, after you've spent time with them, you need to go and lie down on the sofa.
And some people, after you've spent time with them, you want to go and run on a treadmill.
Yeah.
And his goal is to spend as much time around treadmill friends as possible and a little time around sofa friends as possible.
To get rid of the sofa friends.
Yeah.
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Well, you've also got a new book, which people can go check out.
I have a copy of this for you.
Oh, very cute.
Yes, you need to... Jungle Keeper, what it takes to change the world.
And so this is the whole story.
This is from the frustrated kid to...
And it's crazy because I wish I had a time machine now to go back because, 18 years old, getting on the plane for the first time, leaving for the Amazon, never in a million years would I imagine that we would have caught the biggest anaconda and met the uncontacted tribes.
And now that we're actually protecting 130000 acres of rainforest and on the cusp of making history by saving a whole river.
And you've got one of the heroes that inspired you writing a blurb.
On behalf of the forests that I love, thank you, Paul, for writing this book, Jane Goodall.
Dude, that's so amazing.
I'm so proud of you.
I'm so proud of you.
Jane taught me something very incredible, which is the grace of attention.
Someone who's as luminary and famous and busy as she was.
I came up to her to talk.
When I was in my early 20s with chapters about the anteater that I was taking care of.
I lived in the rainforest with my anteater and I took care of her and we did this and we did that.
And I waited in line with hundreds of people after a Jane Goodall talk in New York City.
And I handed her a manila envelope.
You know, you have two seconds with her.
Hello, you're so inspiring.
She goes, yes, everybody says the same thing.
And she takes a picture with you and then you move on.
And I just said, I've been living in the Amazon rainforest and I have a story I think you'd love.
And I had included a message in there and I said, my dream is to become an author.
And it would be, it would mean the world to me because you're one of my heroes.
If you would endorse my book.
And she incredibly, actually read the material i gave her.
This random kid out of hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people, she would travel 300 days a year.
She actually read it and had her team get back to me and said as soon as you find a publisher, tell them you have.
Jane got all his words, let's go.
Dude dude she she, she waved her magical, very powerful wand in my direction and gave me a career and by giving me a career, handed me the excalibur sword to go and actually start jungle keepers and protect an entire river.
And so what she did was she empowered others.
She wanted to save nature.
She empowered other people to do it.
It's interesting that, of all of the things that you've done, of all of the terrifying situations that you've been in, not fulfilling your dream by far is the thing that gave you the most terror.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's a state That's chriswillx.com books.
That's a state of, you know, that, that young attracted as well.
Right.
It's like drawn out over time.
It's the bar being in your foot for decades.
Yeah.
It's the state you live in.
And it's the, it's the existential question of am I going to have these ambitions and never see them to fruition?
Which, what, which, you know, there's the, there's that line.
Many are called fewer chosen.
That's the other thing.
Am I going to invest 20 years in this and then fail?
And there's a part in the book and there's a part in my life where, after the Discovery thing and after I'd been going on expeditions with my local friends in the Amazon for years and so I already was the guy in the Amazon, but I had tried
I'd written the first book.
I'd done the Discovery Channel thing and failed.
I'd gone and lived with the elephants.
I'd even started Jungle Keepers, but it wasn't working yet.
There was something missing and it was like kept trying and kept trying and kept trying, year after year after year.
And there was a point where my dad, we pulled over somewhere in the car and my dad went Hey, before you get out, he said I just want you to know we love you no matter what.
And I went, what?
And he went, you know, you just keep doing this jungle thing.
Did he think that you were doing it to try and prove your worth to your parents?
No.
What he meant was, even if none of this works out, it's okay.
He was like you know what you're doing.
You're not making any money doing this.
You just keep going to the jungle and getting new injuries and and and and.
You know, we see you trying real hard.
And he was like it's okay, it's okay, he sounds like a good man, he's a.
He's the best man.
My parents are angels on earth.
They were there, they were the best parents and they're just very good people.
But the horror of that moment was him saying you know, it's okay if you, just If.
This is all there is.
And I went, no.
And so, you know, because I went, it's happening.
You know, you're 32 years old.
And I go, I've been doing this since I was 18.
And, you know, so slowly you learn that relentlessness is the greatest skill you can learn.
Because there are so many opportunities to give up.
I have a slightly contrarian opinion on consistency and relentlessness.
For a very long time, I always said that my superpower is consistency.
I've slightly changed my opinion on that recently.
I think it's stubbornness.
I think that stubbornness is functionally the same, but much more accessible to a lot of people.
Consistency sounds super sexy.
There's a really famous visualization by my friend, jack butcher, from visualize value, and uh, it's a, a graph that explains my life and your life and a lot of other people's lives as well.
Yes that's, that's my life.
How'd you know that, man?
For the people that are listening, it's a, it's a bar chart and it's very, very long and it's completely flat yes, and there's a little arrow pointing to a point where it's completely flat, saying this is pointless, and then bar chart starts to lift off in a exponential curve.
That is the first 17 years of my adult life and the last three.
That's exactly what happened.
Yeah, you felt like you had that as well, i think, for at least the, at least a good bit of what I was trying to do, what I've been trying to do with the show.
And it comes in waves.
It's interesting with the way that sort of uh momentum occurs on the internet.
Uh, for a very long time.
I think it took five, 400, 500 episodes for us to get to a hundred thousand subscribers.
Yeah.
It's like you know uh, four or five hours of I was booking every guest, researching every guest, sitting down with every guest, doing the edits for every single audio episode, doing the ad reads for pennies, because I wanted to keep on going and I wanted to do this thing.
And I didn't care because I just, I kind of liked it.
So it was less mission driven.
My outcome was not to get to a stage where it was.
It was simply sort of the doing of the thing.
But if you were to look at the trend on a graph, there is a, this is pointless.
Yeah, exactly.
And as you start to zoom out a little bit, everything looks puny in comparison and you realize that for every conversation that you have now, the impact can be greater and the opportunities and so on and so forth.
And uh yeah, the the stubbornness to stick something out when it seems like it isn't working.
But the thing that you've got, the confluence of what you were interested in, what you were inspired by, what environment gave you the opportunity to do?
The people that were around you, chance meetings with heroes and opportunity, all the rest of the stuff that jj, even just the fact that you found a guy that has stuck with you for so long yeah, that is sort of the genesis of obsession.
I've been thinking a lot.
I wrote this week a really i think it's an interesting article about the relationship between discipline, motivation and obsession.
So the relationship is to do with friction.
Discipline is friction accepted.
You accept that there is an amount of friction that's going to be bestowed on you and you're going to use effort and habits and willpower and patterns in order to move through it.
Motivation is friction removed and there is no longer the friction.
You want to do the thing, so discipline i will make myself do the thing.
Motivation i want to do the thing.
Obsession i can't not do the thing.
So obsession is friction inverted.
Yes,
And it pulls you into it and it causes you to stay awake at nighttime and it ruins your relationships and it destroys your sleep and it causes you to forget your health, and it does all of these things.
Um, but the problem is discipline is relatively easy to engineer.
Motivation is tough, but can be engineered and obsession is impossible to engineer.
You cannot engineer obsession.
And this is why the whole thesis of the argument is if you have an obsession that's worth something, allow it to climb inside of you and stare out through your eyes, because most people, for most of their lives, don't have an obsession that's worth anything at all.
And it's destructive or pointless or or just simply is not going to move them in the direction that they want to.
What they're obsessed with is politics, or the toxic ex, or porn, or gambling or some sort of you know what i mean.
Like the, the obsession is just not moving them in direction that they want to go to.
And if you're one of the people, that's being gifted with this and the coolest thing and it is a gift yeah, the coolest thing is that when you look at most people as they age through life people who are serial obsessives they have this period of obsession that's maybe a few years or half a decade or multiple decades, and then What you see after that cools and hardens is something that looks more like identity.
So you look at someone that Dorian Yates, bodybuilding guy who now continues to go to the gym.
The gym is no longer his obsession, but his.
What looks like discipline from the outside is just the echo of an old obsession.
Wow.
So it's what cool, what happens?
Discipline is often what happens when it cools into identity.
And, uh, he's the guy that goes to the gym.
He's just the guy that goes to the gym.
So I'm the guy that records the podcast.
I'm the guy that wants to sit down.
I'm always looking for people.
It wouldn't be cool to talk to.
Wouldn't that be a good idea?
It's like, it's just what I do.
And that's, if you deny yourself what you did, yes, you're still obsessed, which is great.
But much of what you're doing now is you're just the guy that goes to the Amazon.
I'm just the jungle guy now.
You're just the jungle guy.
Except yes.
And now, but all, it's so funny how many of those things are just the hero's journey.
So like you've been through it.
I've been through it.
The ruining of the health, the constant obsession, the graph going nowhere until it goes somewhere.
I mean you have to have the experience and, in a way, have those stories and have that knowledge and have those failures so that you're able to play the game at an expert level.
You have to put in your 10,000 hours to the point that you know what you're doing.
And so yeah it's, it's now.
The thing though, here is that even if I wanted to get off the train now, I can't, because now we're responsible for protecting millions and millions of heartbeats.
Now, those anteaters and those monkeys and all those, all those ancient trees would be blackened to earth if we stopped.
And, and. coming and talking to yourself and, and, and writing a book like this.
And now we're.
We're spreading this message to so many millions of people and we've created a way for them to, because so many people care about the Amazon rainforest people, this I get messages from fans.
I get messages.
This classically, I tell this story, a mother messaged me and she said, you know, I work two jobs.
She's like, I can't donate a lot.
She goes.
We give 5 a month to jungle keepers, but I tell my kids they're part of saving the Amazon rainforest.
And that means so much to me.
And so, whether it's a billionaire giving a few hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars, or it's a mother giving 5 a month, the fact that people have the opportunity to change the narrative of destruction and actually make the world a better place, that is to me that's such a crucial thing that in these fallen times where everyone seems so disassociated, the modern nothingness wave that everyone seems to be feeling,
Um, the antithesis of that, or the antidote to that, is radical action, is that there are people out there who are making things better helping people, finding water for people that don't have it, fixing ecosystems and improving technology and the way the world works.
And it's like, we've never lived at a more exciting time.
Drinking water.
What is the state of drinking water in the Amazon?
Can you drink the Amazon water?
I wouldn't drink from the main channels.
There's a lot of sediment.
And also, most again, even in the Amazon rainforest that a lot of us imagine to be very, very wild, there's boats and some gasoline and, like rivers, anywhere humans go gets polluted.
But the river that we are on, the river that I work on, is so remote and so pristine that we drink straight out of the river.
You can bend down to a waterfall and drink.
And, uh, that's a rare thing on earth these days.
You know, I don't, I don't know in the U S how many waterways they would recommend that you drink.
I've been in national parks and I've had the Rangers tell me you know, whatever you do, don't drink out of the streams.
And I'm like, we're in the Rockies, you know, like what's, what's polluting.
I would have imagined that there would be maybe some dangerous parasites.
Well, there are, there's Giardia.
I think a lot of, a lot of, a lot of it is, you know, you, At some point, you just start.
You go, I'm going to fully embody.
I'm going to play this game on full.
We're going to walk barefoot.
We're going to go on that adventure.
When you get to the scary part and there's a waterfall, you go, let's just go over the waterfall.
Sometime along the way, they say, play the game like you can't lose.
And it's like, I think I apply that to just about everything in life.
You just go, it's going to work.
And if it doesn't work, you die.
That's okay.
I mean, do you think of a comanche warrior going out on horseback with their, with their bow and arrow?
They might die or they might win.
How did we get so soft that everyone's worried about their little 401k and what their?
You know their feelings and their journey.
Go try.
I think they would have been scared too.
I think the comanches would have been scared before they left home.
They've got wife, they've got kids.
When the mission calls yeah, they go and they do the thing.
When it's time to go, you go.
But the problem is that there is much more time to consider going and much less time that's spent going now.
Yes.
And I think that the edge of anticipation and action is interesting.
Action is the antidote to anxiety.
It always is.
And unfortunately, there is way less action.
There's less opportunity and there's more time to consider.
And that means that you vacillate and ruminate and talk yourself out of doing what it was that you were going to do.
Yeah.
And I mean, and that goes, you know, the, the, the, the, the warrior analogy of that.
And then there's also the execution of whether it's starting that business, or it's pursuing that relationship, or it's moving to that country or whatever it is.
It's yeah, you might, it might not work out, but that's okay.
I've been playing with chat GPT backgrounds for my phone.
And, uh, currently the one, yes do it anyway do it anyway do it anyway do it scared do as high as do it scared yeah do it scared do it tight do it uncertain right do it do it uncertain that's a big one yeah for a lot of people do it anyway okay so that was the existential fear what about the kinetic fear sure i would say that the the the the two times i've been the most scared i'll give you two One, I, because of this existential fear of not having adventures and not having a meaningful life, I said, I want to go out like the great explorers did, but better.
I want no porters, no guides, no nothing.
I learned for a few years, I trained in the Amazon and then I went out on solo expeditions.
And so I took a boat three days deep into the jungle with some poachers.
Then they left me on a beach.
And then I walked another few days into the jungle along the river.
Totally on your own.
Totally on my own.
Camping at night under the stars.
Backpack.
I had a raft with paddles.
So if things got bad, I could get to the main river channel.
Fishing and eating.
And that was the first time.
I was told that this tributary was so remote that there was nobody on it.
I wouldn't see a human.
It was just wild nature.
And sure enough, the animals, it was like the Galapagos.
The animals were so unfamiliar with humans that jaguars would walk out on the beach and there'd be.
You know, the animals just don't care.
They don't know what you are.
They don't care.
Jaguar doesn't care.
Tapirs and capybara and caiman and just incredible amounts of life.
These are the experiences that I wanted to absorb, because I wanted to see what raw nature looked like before humans touched it.
So this was an incredibly important thing for me.
And I was out there enjoying this.
And then I went up this one tributary.
I pushed a little bit too far.
And it just happened to be where the uncontacted tribes, nomadic tribes, a small band.
They had a campfire on the side of the beach.
And these are naked people who are pre-stone age.
They don't have stones.
They've been living out there for thousands of years.
They've missed the Sistine Chapel and the World Wars and everything else that's ever happened.
And they don't even know the name of the country they live in.
They've never seen a spoon.
And now they're looking at me.
You're on the water.
I'm on the side of the river and they're on the other side of the river.
And they see them, see me, and they're holding bows and arrows and they're naked and they have face paint.
And they're staring at me and I'm staring at them.
And I know that any help is about three weeks away by foot.
And I just ran for my life.
And I ran for my life through the jungle for about as long as I could.
And then I opened up my pack raft.
I inflated this raft.
It's a pretty durable raft.
And I started paddling.
And for the next few days, I didn't stop.
Because even if I stopped, I would go to sleep or put up my tent, fall asleep.
And the first dream you have is that you hear the voices, that they're coming.
Because these people are pretty famous for They have seven-foot arrows.
And they don't have modern, much like the Comanches, they're a warrior clan.
So they don't, it's okay if they kill you.
They don't care.
So if they think your shirt is cool, they'll shoot you in the leg because they don't want to ruin the shirt.
And so to them it's a whole different, and also they've been, as a society, traumatized by the things that happened in the past, like the rubber boom, where outsiders came to the Amazon, and the industrial revolution and made slaves and basically had this massive genocide making people go out and tap the rubber trees that only existed in the Amazon.
And so these tribes have learned the outside world is trying to kill us.
So they're very happy to shoot first.
So that was fear on a level that was like the the, the fear equivalent of the stingray thing, the idea of being hunted in the deep wilderness.
It wasn't a, a paradise expedition through the rainforest anymore.
All of a sudden I was like, wait, I have a mother.
I have people that are going to be broken hearted when I disappear or that I just into the wilded myself.
This is stupid.
And then I was days of running scared and pack rafting all night.
Although I'll tell you this, when you're pack rafting at night with a flashlight in the Amazon and you're sort of going down river with the crocodiles and the anacondas, it's a, It's an incredible ride.
What's the difference in the Amazon between day and night?
Apart from the fact that it's light and dark.
How does it feel?
Does it feel different?
It's a totally different world.
The daytime in the Amazon, again, every moment is different.
Every dawn is like the world is being created again.
When you're in the mountains or the desert or the jungle, when you're somehow living outdoors, you end up seeing the sunrise.
And I think that that's something that we lose with modern society, where you end up experiencing the sunrise and seeing when the light is coming directly into your eyes and the dawn chorus.
And then dusk, you hear it switch over to the night chorus.
Nighttime in the Amazon is wild.
I mean, the Amazon has been called the greatest natural battlefield on Earth, because everything is eating everything else.
Everything in that vast ocean of forest and branches and jaguars, and everything will be digested at some point.
So in this churning energy transfer, life is a momentary stasis in the entropic march of recycling.
It's just an eating machine.
And it's just marching and marching for thousands of years.
And so when you're there, you start to feel it.
You go, you know, you get one mosquito bite, two mosquito bites.
Some wasps land on you.
They start eating your skin.
It's like the jungle wants to eat you.
It's like, give me your carbon.
Give me your energy.
You're decomposing while you're still alive.
They want you to.
They want to start you.
The wasps will land.
They'll start pulling pieces off you.
They can eat.
Like if you leave a piece of meat out, they'll tear it apart.
Flying piranhas.
They're like flying piranhas.
And the worst thing is that the bullet ants sometimes grow wings.
I saw a bullet ant with wings the other day.
But no, so running from the tribes was the most scary thing.
The other most terrifying thing happened actually not in the Amazon in India.
I set out to see a wild tiger.
Now, you can go, in the turn of the century, 1900, there was 100,000 tigers on Earth.
When I was growing up, there were 3,000 tigers on Earth.
So tigers are almost completely extinct.
We almost lost the greatest predator that we have on our planet.
And then the Tiger King came along.
Well, there's more tigers in captivity than the wild.
And what people don't realize is, People go, well, at least there's tigers in captivity.
What they don't realize, though, it's a one-way door.
Unless a tiger has its mother to teach it how to hunt, you can never take a tiger that's born in a zoo or in captivity and release it.
It's never been done.
Never.
You can do it with a rhino.
You can do it with a deer because they'll go eat grass.
A tiger has to learn how to stalk, how to hunt, what things to hunt.
It's functionally useless.
It's functionally useless.
So the fact that there's 6,000 tigers in captivity across the world, useless.
I think that might just be just in the U.S.
They're good to stay in captivity and breed for captivity.
They're good to entertain people, educate kids at zoos in the best possible case.
It's like a genetic dead end.
For that, for that type of animal.
Yeah.
It's irreversible.
Okay.
So you want you to go and see one.
So I went actually wild.
I wanted, I had a dream of seeing a tiger said there's only 3000 tigers left on earth.
This is the greatest predator that we have.
This giant striped thing that you know I mean.
They they're they're, they're shoulders so much bigger than you think.
You think of them as like, kind of like a great Dane.
It's like, no, it's like a horse.
They're gigantic.
I mean, their paws are dinner plates.
And it was just, you know the, when I finally years and years of walking through forests and hoping, and hoping, and hoping.
And when that moment came, that I was standing on my own, two feet, in the forest, alone again, just as I had always imagined it you you you, you work towards these things and and then, all of a sudden, it happens and there's a tiger standing there and this giant thing just looking.
And the tiger did the thing that scared me the most, which was that I was not acknowledged.
If you take a step, a raven will react.
A deer will stomp a hoof.
Tiger didn't care that I was there.
Tiger looked straight through me.
Tiger didn't once make eye contact.
I was irrelevant to her majesty and just kept walking.
Would that not have been less scary than going, No, it was so, that almost would make sense, right?
Because she would look at you and go, oh, I'm scared too.
Or I'm taking notice of you.
This was.
You're a sandwich I don't want to eat today.
Yeah.
You're irrelevant.
You're a blade of grass.
And it was like the power in that statement was, was, was wild.
That sort of disdain.
And now I've used that in the human world too.
If you really really want to mess with somebody, somebody you really are trying to insult, you shake their hand and look right through them.
Just move straight on.
Yeah.
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What's the most unpredictable or dangerous animal in the Amazon?
Unpredictable or dangerous animal in the Amazon.
The thing is the animals in the Amazon is they're all sweethearts.
I mean, my Jaguars, um, they sound like tree tigers.
Jaguars sound like tree tigers.
They are.
The jags, okay, so the jags, they call them the pit bulls of the big cats.
They have the strongest bite of the big cats.
They're 250 pounds.
They're thick.
They're muscles.
Leopards are very lean and lithe.
Slinky.
Yeah, they're way more about jumping up into the trees, get away from the lions.
A jaguar is heavy.
They think nothing of jumping onto a caiman and biting its skull.
They have this crushing bite force.
And so you look at that thick face of a jaguar, they can just crush everything.
But Whenever you see, whenever I've seen a Jaguar in the Amazon, it's always, it's peaceful.
It's always this kind of.
It can't be that peaceful if it was that hungry.
You look like a nice meal.
Yeah, but they're never their mothers again with the big cats.
Their mothers teach them.
See that deer.
You can eat that deer.
Don't go after porcupines.
The baby caimans are safe. the mother would have taught the baby what to eat.
And again they're thinking about jumping on the back and biting the neck, or they're thinking about coming underneath and closing the windpipe.
They've been taught to go after horizontal prey.
Now suddenly, this vertical thing that smells like deodorant and conditioner and all this weird stuff that they've never smelled before.
This quite large vertical animal is walking around.
They're usually curious.
They come and they do the bob.
They look at you from side to side. and then they're gone.
And even that most of the time you won't see them.
Most of the time a big 250 pound yellow Jaguar.
I have literally been in one's presence and not been able to see it because the pattern disruption of their spots somehow blends them into the forest, the dappled light in the forest.
And you, you know, you're just looking around and you go, you have this moment of realization.
Or one time I was checking a camera trap and I was down on my knees you know, arranging this camera trap and i heard loud footprints footsteps, and i turned around with my finger up to tell whoever it was.
I thought maybe it was one of my friend, to be like walk quieter in the jungle.
I'm out here being quiet, you could be.
There's a jag just walked by, look to me, kept walking, never even broke stride.
It was just like hey, tongue out, big teeth out, And I was like as close to him as I am to you.
He walked right by me.
Didn't care.
Didn't care at all.
Wow.
So is it rare that humans get attacked by jags?
In our region of the Amazon, no one's ever been attacked by a jaguar.
There was one old, old, this was 20 years ago, one old jag, you know, their teeth go.
With big cats, usually the first thing is their teeth.
And, uh, One old jag attacked an old farmer.
He attacked an old man and his wife defended him with a shovel.
And they ended up shooting the jaguar.
But it was such a feeble old jaguar that it said, the only thing I can go after is a human.
And there's that classic story of, I think, Jim Corbett was the guy that eventually got it.
But there was a tiger that was in North India and was killing hundreds of people.
This one tiger, she's preying on hundreds of people.
And, you know, a tiger has to eat, you know, about a deer a week to live.
And so this tiger started eating about a person a week.
And so she went to her first hundred people and they brought in hunters to try and get this tiger.
And she was smart.
So she moved over into a different village.
And then she, another few years went by.
Like the Osama bin Laden of tigers.
I mean, she just, she was just hungry.
But for some reason she figured out people.
I could just run into it.
They said one woman was working in the field and this tiger came, grabbed her by the waist right and just ran off with her like a sick, like a, like a, like a, like a dog, running off with a squirrel.
That's how big and powerful they are.
And so another hundred people got eaten over here.
And then, and then finally they burned the forest down.
They just surrounded the forest and burned it down and she managed to escape again.
So they hired expert hunters.
They got hundreds of elephants.
They surrounded the forest with elephant back hunters.
And they had this, this hunter, Jim Corbett, and they They burned, and they had drummers on the elephants and they flushed her into a ravine.
And finally, they finally got to see this tiger and he shot her.
And they realized the reason this tiger had been eating people was because, when she was just a sub-adult, barely above being a cub, she had been shot and it had taken out her canine teeth.
And so she hadn't been able to hunt deer and wild boar.
And so she had to eat people.
Poor tiger had been shot, so she was just trying to survive.
But that made her the most legendary and prolific man-eating tiger, I think, in history.
The full circle of this situation from Genesis background.
I remember watching some David Attenborough documentary one of the newer ones and the final episode was how Wildlife are starting to interact with uh human civilization metropolises.
And is it maybe India, where some big cats have learned to hunt orphans, that the kids who are orphans on the street have learned to become nocturnal?
Yeah.
Because if they sleep in the day and stay awake at night, they're less likely.
But there was a bunch of cats that were going down into the city because there's, you know, these little meals on short stubby wheels.
They can't really run that fast.
And, uh, the orphans can never run that fast.
Poor orphans.
Uh, um, so I've, I've spent significant time in India while I was tiger hunting in Mumbai.
There's beautiful photos of the leopards that have begun living in the city of Mumbai.
And what's really cool is people's security cameras on their house.
I haven't heard about the orphans, but I've heard about the dogs.
They love dogs.
There's literally videos of the dog curled up asleep on the porch outside someone's front door and the leopard coming up completely quiet and just biting this dog on the neck.
And again, they have that bite for us.
That's it.
You're mine now.
You're shut off.
They just break the spine.
And for them, domesticated animals are easy.
The difference between a wild animal and a domesticated animal is unbelievable.
For example, handling an anaconda that somebody has in a terrarium, that has been raised in a terrarium.
Anaconda has never done anything athletic in its life.
It's never hunted in its life.
They're soft.
They feel soft.
If you go to those guys that have the boa constrictors and you hold them, they're soft.
You find the same snake in the wild.
It's like holding a giant steel cable.
It's a different thing.
It's a totally different thing.
And yeah, it's very fascinating.
Even the same thing goes for the chickens.
We've noticed that if we bring a chicken from you know they say you are what you eat, but you are what you do.
And it's on a very physical level.
The chickens that we bring from the town, same chickens, yeah?
The chickens that come from an enclosed area.
When you process a chicken and get it ready for dinner, the meat is soft and there's fat on the bones.
When you get the farm chicken that's been running around its whole life and hunting bugs and running away from jungle cats.
They're lean and they're cord-like and their meat is not as good to eat because it's more gamey and tight.
And it's like you literally – it's the same animal.
They could have been born in the same clutch, but they – You are what you do.
You are what you do.
What's your sense of spirituality in the jungle?
Something more transcendent than mission, which is still on the physical, but a connection to something even greater.
Well, I think that humans have been given this planet – where all of these miracles are happening.
And first of all, if you think a single one of us knows the answers, no one does.
No one's ever come back.
I think the jungle to me is where I feel God the most, where you feel this incredible proliferation of life.
And life is the antithesis to the majority of the universe, which is black nothingness.
And we're on this glowing example of, beautiful life where there's this this concert of biological organisms that create a living biosphere that allows us to be doing this and so to me the jungle is church to me the mountains the ocean but specifically the jungle because it's the it's the apex of life there's nowhere there's been nowhere it's the greatest proliferation of terrestrial biodiversity on earth Not just now, but in the entire fossil record.
Really?
Yes.
There's never been more life on Earth in one place than the Western Amazon.
And then we have to remember that, no matter how much we want to think about aliens and Mars and everything else, this little blue planet is the only place where we know for a fact that life exists.
And I feel like we've gotten into an age where people are very quick to go.
You know oh, but soon we're going to go to Mars.
Okay, sure.
You know, and the aliens, okay.
Santa Claus is going to come at Christmas as well.
But what I'm saying.
If you want to talk about whether or not we're able to breathe, whether or not we're able to eat, whether or not our children have an impoverished world, there's a great Jane Goodall quote where she said she said we're stealing stealing, stealing from our children.
And it's shocking.
And it's the idea that We borrow the earth from the children of the future.
We're the stewards.
We're the ones passing this on.
And we can pass on a destroyed reality or one that's healthy.
And so in this particular case of do we want a world that doesn't have elephants in it?
Do we want a world where there are still healthy ocean fisheries that are filled with millions and millions of fish, where life and biodiversity is thriving?
We do.
Nobody should want the... I mean, we're in a period of extinction.
They're calling it the sixth extinction.
And so this is a human, this is an anthropogenic extinction because we're taking up too much land.
We're destroying ecosystems too rapidly for wildlife to adapt and keep up for things to regenerate.
And so becoming aware of that is crucial.
So that's why what Jungle Keepers is doing by saving this river.
What I hope is that it can become a blueprint for on how other peoples we can save rivers in Africa, we can save rivers in New Guinea and India and other places, because everyone's fighting the same fight right now.
They're going, okay, human civilization is moving up.
Population is moving up.
These poor people in these rural areas are realizing that in order to get the gasoline to provide for their families with the boat, even if they just want to do some basic farming, they need money.
And if they need money, they need to go get timber or gold or wildlife products.
So how do we get them out of poverty so they can start becoming stewards of protecting the natural environments that they're a part of?
You've got to align the incentives.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I think one of the saddest things is going to be if there isn't sufficient intervention to protect tipping points being reached with stuff like this.
What you end up with is a world where—.
In future, where there's significantly fewer people.
I think population's going to peak at about 2090 2100, something like that.
We might just kiss the bottom of 10 billion people-ish, just about.
And then it is going to be a very precipitous drop.
It's going to be lower.
I would guess that in 200 years, it'll be significantly lower than it is now.
South Korea, 96% fewer people in 100 years' time.
For every 100 Koreans, there's four great-grandchildren.
Interesting.
Because demography is destiny.
You know how many one-year-olds there are and you can't make any more.
And you know how many two-year-olds there are and you can't make any more.
And population is increasing while birth rates are going down because people are living longer.
Yeah.
And the saddest thing would be if this brief swell, this brief fat bit in population caused damage that this thin bit and whatever continues the rest of time then inherits.
William McCaskill, who was the youngest tenured philosophy professor in history.
I think he's a Scottish guy, the youngest maybe that was alive right now.
He wrote a book called What We Owe the Future.
He's got this philosophy around long-termism.
I think you'd really like it.
It's a pretty accessible read.
It is what it sounds like, that we kind of have a duty to unborn humans.
And it is this ethical inheritance.
Ethical inheritance.
Yeah.
My words, not his.
No, that's a good term.
Because there's something called generational amnesia with nature.
Where you know, growing up in the forests of New York, I would, I would go.
These are.
You know, it's a beautiful forest, but I grew up there was no bald eagles.
There's no wolves.
And it's the trees that I was growing up in.
They were small.
I didn't know that.
You know, within the last 50 years that forest had been cut and those are oaks and maples that have been growing for a certain amount of time, but it wasn't an original forest.
No old growth.
There's no old growth left on the East coast.
And so old growth forest was something i said.
Wait a second.
So so what i'm seeing is already an impoverished version of reality, where somebody else already shaved these mountains and this is just what grew back, and so that's.
It's beautiful, the woods are beautiful, but they're not.
They're not the original woods, and there's with nature is there's this authenticity that you can't replace a thousand year old tree.
Well, i i not to bring it back to fucking demographics, but it's a really wonderful, much more long, much more highly invested illustration of exactly what you're seeing when it comes to birth rates.
And that's not to say that you need to have uh, as many people as possible, but what it means is that you can't create any more ones that have already.
You can't make any more hundred year old trees.
You can only make zero year old trees and give them a hundred years.
Yeah.
And, uh Yeah, this view of long-termism, trying to zoom out and give yourself a little bit more perspective and think if you knew what was coming, is this how you would behave?
If you were going to stick about, especially given that people are living longer, I would have assumed maybe, given that people are extending their lifespans, that we would have more long-termism, but it doesn't.
It doesn't necessarily seem to be that way.
Again, i think it depends on i think it's getting better.
I think it is getting better.
I think people are understanding that, if we can again i'm coming at this from the environment and and from the wildlife conservation i feel like i am the voice for animals, for the trees, and we, what we want to do, is make it through this period of, of of adolescence as a global society that's a good way to put it where our technology is stabilizing, our population is stabilizing, so do we want to make it through those periods without losing polar bears right, without costing the lives of the other things that we share our world with?
And, i think, reparable damage, irreparable damage, because you know if, if elephant populations dip and then come back, because you know, for a while there was a lot of habitat used and then they come back well okay great, but we don't want to wipe out elephants.
That would be tragic.
And the same goes for tigers.
Thank God tigers have gone from 100,000 down to 3,000.
And I think now we're back up to about 5,000 or 6,000.
Countries like India and a bunch of other countries Nepal, Bhutan are working to get their tiger numbers up.
It matters to people that we learn to, that we find a way to live in symbiosis with them.
Have you seen what Ben Lamb's doing at Colossal?
I heard about the colossal guys.
Yeah yes um, so one of the things that might be interesting for you to look at, he's trying to bring back the dodo bird.
The first one that he's trying to do is to bring back the woolly mammoth.
Uh-huh, i can see there's a face being made here.
Let me give you the people just listening i'm making a face, you're making a face.
Yeah um, here's the reason that i think what he's doing with the dodo bird aligns with your uh worldview, the reason that he wants to do the dodo bird.
Yeah,
Is that the dodo bird was killed almost exclusively due to, um, human expansion.
Yeah.
And what he wants to say is to basically use this entire project of the dodo bird.
Yeah.
Look at how much work and technology had to go into undoing the encroachment of human civilization on natural animal habitats.
Yeah.
This is what we had to do just to get one thing back.
And what is it, 50% of biodiversity in the last however long has been lost?
Since 1970, we've lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet.
Not in terms of species, but in terms of abundance.
Overall number, right.
Okay, so maybe not biodiversity.
But I understand that People assuming that there's just a command Z like undo button on extinction probably isn't great.
But I think, the way I spoke to Ben a long time ago and have kept in touch with him, I don't think that that's what he's trying to do.
And the prospect of him saying look at how fucking arduous and all the technology and all the rest of this stuff to bring back this thing that we destroyed.
Let's stop doing the fucking ecology thing that breaks down these habitats.
I think could be an interesting marketing campaign.
Yeah, i mean the idea that they're trying to theoretically help extinct animals i suppose aligns with a conservation viewpoint, but until i see a woolly mammoth, i don't care.
We're trying to save the animals that are here and i find it highly suspicious the idea that, because every scientists that i've spoken to and this is going to get me in trouble because everybody loves this idea no everybody, everybody loves this idea.
And when this came out um, i did an instagram post about it and i said you know, even if you can clone grandma, it's not the same person and the meatballs won't taste the same and she's not going to remember you and you know the fact that you can genetically engineer a gray wolf to be white or whatever they did.
And you know, or a wooly mammoth from an Asian elephant, which is yeah make, make a genetic freak of a, of a of an Asian elephant that has some hairy traits, or whatever.
What you're doing is fundamentally misunderstanding what an animal is.
You're fundamentally disrespecting what a species is.
And you're fooling people into believing that you can resurrect dead species and you can't.
You're not going to get a dodo bird.
You're going to make something that you think is a dodo bird.
That looks like it.
Now, Saeed, I don't disagree.
And I think that he would also say, or most of the guys at Colossal would also say this woolly mammoth is the closest approximation from us filling in some bits of gene code with Asian elephant and all the rest of it.
That being said, I'll sort of stand the ground for at least the first time he told me about his idea of of explaining to people this thesis.
We're going to have to jump through all of these hoops technologically to make something that's the closest approximation we can to something which was driven to extinction by the expansion and the dismissal of the fragility of ecosystems.
Stop doing it.
Think about what you're doing now that is causing that to happen.
Yes.
I think that's where we align.
I think that that that's the intersection, the intersection between your two things.
You mentioned uncontacted tribes.
You recently just found another one.
We were.
We're so, as of right now, we have employed numerous local indigenous people, conservation Rangers, people that were maybe living in the Amazon.
They grew up eating monkeys and turtles and and, and.
Then, as they grew up, they said well, I need to provide for a family, and so they got a chainsaw and they might go out and become loggers.
We've said hey, instead of becoming loggers, work for us.
So we're working with these communities to figure out how they want their future to be, because they live five days from civilization deep out in the jungle And they're now working with jungle keepers.
And so the donations that we get from people around the world go to their salary and towards protecting land.
And so we were at one of these remote communities with our friends planning for the future, making ranger patrols, doing all this.
And we got news that one of the uncontacted tribes was approaching.
Now for all of the time that I saw the uncontacted tribes.
When I was on the solo, nobody believed me because I wasn't taking pictures.
I ran for my life.
All the pictures that you look at on the internet.
Traditionally historically, it looks like pictures of Bigfoot.
Somehow they're always blurry.
They're always far away.
And there's a reason for that because the people that are seeing these these, these naked warriors coming at them, aren't sticking around to take pictures and chances are they're long.
Just wait there a second.
Yeah yeah, no eyes eyes, just eyes over here.
For me, don't shoot yet.
Yeah, i want to just get this picture.
You're out of focus yeah um, and they're probably loggers, you know, because the only.
It's not like you're getting uh, photographers and phd students out six days into the middle of nowhere.
They're, they're at the, they're at the usual research station eco lodge um, but we were off at the end, world's end.
And uh, these people came out across the beach and we had this incredible moment where, you know, you see them with their bows and arrows and you see them stalking across the beach, looking at us, and there's maybe 30 something of us.
And there's over a hundred of them and they're moving through the forest.
And there's at different times there's different amounts of them that we can see, but they came to the side of the river.
And we were at the other side of the river.
So it was sort of shirts versus skins.
And they were all naked, penises tied up, rope around their waist.
And we're all standing there waiting.
What are they going to say?
They put up their hands and they said, Nomole, Nomole's brother.
Nomole, they said, we are the brothers.
Nomoles, we are the Nomoles.
Traditionally, they're called the Mashkopiro. which really means the wild Piro people.
Nomole seems to be what they call themselves.
But what's crazy is you're in this moment and we all say I wish I could go back in time and see the world in the 1800s.
I wish I could go see the Comanches riding across the plains 200 years ago.
But this is people from a thousand years ago at least walking out of the jungle because they've been in this natural time capsule. human beings from another age stand across the river from us and we're we're sitting here i mean we have iphones and airplanes and and and we had professional i had professional photographers with me my friend mosin and stefan um who are also jungle keepers directors and and so we're watching as this you know so very need to be very clear on this they came out and contacted the local the indigenous community we happened to be at we didn't make contact They came out and they started asking for things.
So they came out of the jungle a thousand years late to the show.
And they said, we want bananas.
And they asked for plantains.
Someone's able to communicate in a language that's close enough.
There's enough of a overlap between the Yine language and whatever the Mashkapiro speak that they can communicate at a percentage.
So there's a good degree of miscommunication as well.
And uh, but but one thing they were able to make very clear is that they wanted gifts.
They wanted food.
And so the anthropologists put bananas in a boat and pushed it across and uh and they, they fell on the boat.
And and as the as this happened we, you know, we were shooting the world first ever clear footage, the uncontacted tribes, and and since then we've released that footage and it's become controversial because people go should you be releasing this footage?
What if?
What if they want to be left alone?
Leave them alone.
And it's like listen, we are the only people on earth jungle keepers.
The local people and the international experts on our team are the only people that are actually tactically fighting to save these people's forests.
And if you look at what's happened to indigenous cultures through the centuries and how much has been wiped out,
This is one chance, again, to get it right.
These people are living in isolation, and it seems like the one thing they want to continue to do is live in isolation.
That was their second message.
We want bananas and stop cutting down our trees.
They didn't want to come close to us.
They didn't want to join us.
They didn't want anything.
They stole a machete.
They're like, this will be useful.
My friend was like, oh, how many machetes?
He's like, put down the machete.
He's yelling across the river.
Go back and get it.
Yeah, yeah.
That's exactly what they said.
He smiled.
He went, yeah, you come.
And then, right as they were leaving, one guy walked out, looked at us real proud, put one seven-foot arrow on his bow and shot.
Not at anybody.
Just shot an arrow.
Be like, that's that.
He walked off into the jungle, but like proud.
And so the prevailing anthropological strategy on these guys is leave them alone.
They want to be left alone.
We leave them alone.
But now, with jungle keepers in that 130000 acres that we're protecting and the 300000 that we're ultimately trying to protect well, they exist in that territory.
A lot of that territory is land that even our rangers we can patrol the border of it, but the interior of that these people live somewhere in there.
And I don't think that generally people understand how large of an area we're talking about, but it's so vast you couldn't explore it.
If I said walk from one side of our reserve to the other side of the reserve through the jungle where you can't see 10 feet in front of you, it would take you years.
And by yourself, you'd never make it.
And so the fact that these people live in this tiny, nomadic life under that ocean of canopy, and the fact that they came out once i mean even the anthropologist who the local anthropologist he said it had been 10 years since they had come out and he'd never seen this clan before it was first contact and so he was you know he was trying to tell them you know we are also nomoli we are also your brothers brothers he kept saying nomoli he's the foreigner yeah they did they asked about that they said you and they like they like pointed they go we want to see that guy And I think I'm a little bit taller than most of the Peruvians that were there.
And I'm the only person that's a little bit built.
And he's got a beard.
And they called me forward.
He goes, show them that you don't mean harm.
And I put up my hands.
I put up my hands.
And they sang nomole back.
And I just had this moment of sort of the most basic form of communication with these people.
What did that feel like?
It was beautiful, actually.
Cause cause they were, I think when they came out.
It was very terrifying seeing these people come out like stone age warriors with their and there's no way to communicate a reason with them.
And you have people around you with shotguns in case we get, in case.
This is an ambush slaughter.
You know, there's a moment where you go is an arrow going to come through the air and go through my neck, you know.
So that we're we were very on edge the whole time.
And so right before they left, when I was able to raise my hands and go, And then they sang back and it was sort of easy.
And I said, oh, wow.
And also just there's something about the uniqueness of a moment that it's 2024 at that point.
And how many... you know, we're old men.
Is this still going to be the case, that there are still uncontacted tribes, or that will be a thing of the past?
And it was just, it felt like a, like a, like an aperture into history.
It felt like something historically significant to communicate.
It's almost like you were communicating through a time machine.
You're just, just waving and they wave back.
And then, and then they took the bananas and they took the machetes that they had gotten on their backs and they hiked off and just just vanished into the jungle.
And And then, the moment that they were no longer visible, we all were rubbing our eyes going did that really happen?
Check the tape.
Yeah, you check the tape and you're like, did it really, really did happen?
And of course, there's an arrow sticking out of the sand on our side of the river.
So it happened.
Are the locals scared of them?
Terrified.
Okay.
Terrified because they will murder you without thinking about it.
Do you think the uncontacted tribes are aggressive or scared?
They're scared and defensive.
And so but that.
But that manifests itself in like a lot of people, like my friend, was fishing with his father when he was a child and uh, they surprised a group of uncontacted and the the, the Moscow shot the father in the stomach just impulsively, seven foot arrow.
Guts fell out.
I mean, it's like a knife.
It's a big knife.
It's like a machete.
What's it made of?
Bamboo.
Single piece of bamboo?
Single piece of huge bamboo, but it's this big at the base, and then it comes down like this.
Has it got flights?
How does it fly?
Oh, because it's tapered.
Well, no, no.
It's a big piece of bamboo.
That's the arrowhead.
Right.
Oh, okay.
Then there's a seven-foot shaft.
Uh-huh.
Then they use vulture feathers for the feathers.
And they even twist them so that the arrow spins.
So when it hits you, it's, it's a huge knife wound.
And so as a gut shot, it spilled his guts on.
So my friend had to watch his father's guts fall into the stream and they were surrounded by the tribe and the tribe was arguing.
And again, they understand my friend understood enough of what they were saying that some of the tribes people were like kill the kid, kill the kid.
And the other ones are going, why did you kill him in the first place?
You shouldn't have shot him.
Now they're going to come shoot us.
And like they were, they were having a discussion, but it wasn't like the biggest deal in the world.
It was like man, why did you, you know, drop the shopping bag like you shouldn't, you shouldn't have done that, like um, and uh, he was some piece, got away from that situation and went back to town and um.
And then, of course, there was a response from the community where they came out with guns and chased the uncontacted tribe and were shooting at them, and so there's this violent exchange as well.
So then, when they come for these, for these semi peaceful exchanges, no one knows what's really going to happen.
It could end in violence at any moment.
And sure enough, the next day after we had gone back, my friend George, who was one of the ones putting the bananas on the boat for them he was driving the boat and 200 of the tribe came out onto the river and started firing rain of arrows.
So everybody got down onto the benches in the boat and because he was driving he couldn't take cover.
And the arrow went in just above his scapula and poked out just by his belly button and went straight through his body.
So he got shot with a seven-foot arrow and went straight through him.
And somehow he lived.
But, you know, if you could ask the tribe, like, what were you doing?
We just helped you yesterday.
What do you think they'd say?
They'd probably say the motor spooked us.
It's very hard.
There's also another story where...
This one man was very peacefully, very calmly contacting them by himself.
This was over near Manu national park.
He was a local guy, jungle man, and he knew he would see the footprints.
And so he would start leaving some bananas in the forest, and the tribe would come and take the bananas, unseen.
Then he would go and leave some rope and some sugar cane and the tribe would come and take that and he would never see them.
And then after some time he would wait.
And the tribe would come and he would see them, acknowledge them.
They would acknowledge him, take his gifts and they would leave.
And then over time, he began to talk to them.
This very, very, very slowly, very slowly.
And then over time, over years passed and it became that he was kind of friends with them.
He could mingle with them.
They would show up.
He would have some gifts.
They would give him some stuff.
They'd give him some meat.
He'd have some clothes for them.
And so he developed a relationship, hand gestures and a few, a few exchanged words, and then one day they found him face down with so many arrows in his back that they said he looked like a porcupine.
Zero explanation.
What's strange about it is that, although it's the same species, the environment has sort of crafted and time and inability to communicate and so on.
Yeah, it's crafted such a net like we're trying to.
It's like saying why did that horse bolt?
Yeah it's, what is it what?
What is it that caused that to happen why?
If you were to ask them, why would they say that they had shot in that way?
And what's particularly sort of strange is that you're saying this about an animal that is you that functionally, all of the if that, if that person, if that person who fired that arrow and hit your friend, had been born in Brooklyn, they would have had the exact same language that you do and and ability to write and and all the rest of this stuff.
And would have been domesticated.
Yes.
In the manner to which you have.
Trained the way we have.
And the skills and the communication.
All of the things.
I mean, even if you're in the middle of the most foreign country you can imagine, and somebody points a gun at you and you're like whoa whoa whoa, whoa.
I don't mean any harm.
Unarmed.
All good.
You know, unless they're just trying to murder people.
Oh, okay.
You know, well, we'll get on the ground then.
You know, it's like you can, you don't need to speak the same language.
It's the most wild that humans can be.
Yeah.
These are the wildest people on earth.
And again, we don't know if that's necessarily good for them.
Some people are like, they're free.
You have to leave them that way.
But if you talk to the anthropologists, they'll tell you say, the rates of infant mortality, the fact that they're all clearly starving, the intertribal warfare.
God only knows what things they don't know, you know?
I mean, I remember hearing that during the gold rush, people were using lead to stop up.
They would open cans of beans or something and then they would use lead to to to plug the hole.
And how many thousands of people died of lead poisoning because they didn't know?
And I've read anthropological studies from.
I think it was in New Guinea where they found a tribe, and the tribe had misconceptions that almost every time anyone got sick or injured it was because of a spell that was cast by somebody else.
And so These people were in the trees living scared.
Their whole culture was based around fear on stuff that was made up.
And so there is a certain amount that education helps to humans to live well.
Yeah, I suppose the problem that you have there, the storytelling animal that we are, as Will Storr says, if those stories don't get corrected by fact And you're just, they're allowed to, it's what it is basically like the, the most extreme echo chamber that's never penetrated and allowed to persist for many many, many generations.
And then and then you end up with yeah, people who live in trees, or this is where superstitions would have come from, or rain dances, you know these.
Well, it's like this.
No, but I mean, at least a rain dance, you're trying to call in the rain.
It's a, it's a positive ceremony.
It's a cultural ceremony.
This is like the Salem witch trials forever.
Yep.
Yep.
She's a witch.
Burn her.
Yep.
And then the whole society becomes based on that.
And no one steps in to correct it.
It's like, yes, she was a witch and we should have burned her.
And actually we should burn more.
And actually the reason.
And you're a witch and you're a witch.
I mean, my God.
And then.
And there's no corrective.
I mean, it's like the word, it's like the joke they were making in Monty Python, but turned up to.
2000, yeah and so.
So a lot of anthropologists will say you know, what we want is for them to their right, is to remain isolated, but in order to that, we have to protect their forests.
Then, once their forest is protected, which is what I'm working on with jungle keepers, if they want to start interfacing with their nearest neighbors, which are the indigenous people of the Amazon, If they want to, they can.
But that's their right.
Well, hang on.
It also is a responsibility of the indigenous people who keep on getting fucking shot.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It's not a costless interaction.
No.
What you're asking of the indigenous people in order to educate the uncontacted tribes is to put themselves on the line.
Well, that's what they would say is incredibly accurate.
They would say, you know, we...
Fuck you, dude.
I don't want to do this.
You're telling me it's not only is it my obligation to live in the jungle and to help you protect it, but also to potentially be kabobbed by the fucking local tribe.
Well, to be fair, these communities have not been there as long as the tribe has.
So if they've been there for 30 years, the tribesmen there for 300, 3000, feel free to fuck off.
And this tribe is very happy to do full on warfare.
Whereas these are more, more domesticated people that have been taught.
It's bad to kill.
And it's like, so they're like, well, we're not going to just shoot them on site.
The same may not be true in the river.
It's not true in the reverse.
And so now they're living here and they're friends of ours and they are part of the Jungle Keepers thing and they're going okay well, cool.
Now that we live here, I mean, they've said, you know, can we have like a safe house?
Because they live in thatched huts.
There's no real protection.
They can't lock a door.
Give us a steel box.
Yeah, exactly.
Bring us a container.
Give us a big steel box.
With a lock.
You know what the solution might be?
More t-shirts.
More Jungle Keeper t-shirts.
More t-shirts could be.
A question I have is Of the work that you're doing.
You're trying to get to 300000 acres protected.
And if that happens, the Peruvian government will denote it as a national park, which would make it give it even more protection.
I have to imagine, in order to, in order to do what you think needs to be done for the entirety of the Amazon.
Yeah.
How many Paul Rosalie's do they need?
Ha ha ha.
Um, well, how many jungle keeper operations do they need to be?
Well, okay.
So this is the thing is like the Peruvian government.
We, we do this as the blueprint we lead by example.
And so if we're successful and we create the we you know we're at 130000 acres protected right now.
In the next 18 months, we have to rate, we have to raise 20 million more.
It's only, only $20 million to protect the next, the rest of the national park.
We get the national park.
We had $20 million tomorrow, national park tomorrow.
We have lawyers waiting, the landowners ready to sell.
We have the Peruvian government willing to do it, but they're like, we don't have the resources.
Um, if we can establish this, that's part of an already.
There's already a huge legacy of conservation.
There's Alto Puros National Park.
There's Manu National Park.
There's the Tambopata Reserve.
What, what, what, what does the national park thing?
How does that help calling it a national park?
What does that mean?
Because then it's officially protected, because there's a lot of land in the Amazon that's sort of just land in the Amazon.
It's someone's land.
And so what happens is you inherited 20,000 acres from your father, who was a real jungle man.
But now you kind of live in the city and there's 20000 acres on there and you got to pay taxes on it once a year.
And you never go there and you don't want to, and it's dirty and dangerous and there's bullet, ants and jaguars.
And then your friend comes to you and goes, yo, I'm getting into the logging business.
I was thinking, could I go on that land you got?
And take down some of the ironwood trees and clear some stuff for farming.
He goes, yeah, I don't care.
I don't care at all.
And they're like, cool, I'll throw you a few bucks.
And so then they go out there and they do that.
So if we go talk to you and we say, actually, can we buy that land?
How much was he going to give you?
We'll give you double that.
Give us the land.
And so we've just been doing that.
We go into land acquisition.
And again, as an organization, what we do is there's something called a 990 that you have to file with the IRS when you're a 501c3.
So when people donate, You can see where the money goes unlike every other organization on earth.
When people donate, we protect the Amazon rainforest.
When people donate, we hire more rangers.
And so it's like bang, bang, bang, bang.
And so all these people are coming out of the woodwork as heroes.
It's large and small.
It's, it's it's the masses, as well as some huge donors who have helped us along the way with with large chunks of land.
And so if we protect this though, it shows.
A model where those indigenous communities can work as rangers.
And then you don't have the problem of narco traffic.
They don't become narco traffickers.
And so then the Peruvian government's happy.
The Peruvian government says, well, our citizens are taken care of in that region.
Well, this is great.
And we have clean water flowing out of that region that feeds this city and this city and this city.
And that's good.
And so it's a win, win, win, win, win all around.
So then you go, why don't we do that over here too?
How many times do you need to say, why don't we do that over here?
How many of it is it?
3,000?
Is it 200?
It's thousands.
But so much of the Amazon already exists protected in indigenous territories.
The easiest and best way to protect these natural areas is just Hand it over to the people that have it.
So the area that's protected by the Yanomami Indians, the areas that are protected by the Machiganga there's different tribes all over the Amazon.
If you look at a map, there's yes, there's national parks, but they're not as big as the tribal areas.
And so and so.
What we have to do though, is is unfortunately, work with world leaders on a large-scale level to make slowing deforestation a priority, so that we get past this huge population boom and this adolescence as a global society.
But you can't protect the whole thing from the start, but you have to start somewhere to protect the whole thing.
And so a lot of people have said that to me, like, oh, you're great.
You're going to protect 300000 acres in the Amazon.
You'd You'd have to replicate that a million times in order to be yes okay well, great.
It's better to do something than to do nothing.
And we've risked our lives and spent 20 years in the mud and the blood and the mosquitoes trying to do this.
And now we're getting this groundswell of people that want this to happen.
Are you going to be sad?
To have to move on to a new area that needs to be protected after spending so long becoming intimately familiar with this one.
No, because I don't think it's ever going to end.
I think that we're going to protect this and turn it into a national park.
And then comes the fun stuff.
You know, if we weren't fighting to protect, I don't want to do this job.
I would have so much more fun being like, man, why don't we go up that stream and find out?
We'll do a biological inventory of that stream, you know.
And so, as directors of the national park, we can have education, we can.
You know?
So what they did with sequoia national park, which was very similar to this, where john muir took teddy roosevelt on a three-day camping trip i think that was for yosemite and he was like look, we have to protect this because it's so beautiful.
And then they did, and so today we still have the yosemite valley, we still have sequoia trees.
I mean, imagine missing out on the biggest trees on earth.
They could have been cut forever and we'd never get them back.
And so this is the same thing.
But know once, once we, once we save it.
Oh, so it was saying what the what they do with sequoia was, because then again, people worry.
They say well, if it's the wildest place on earth, how could you be bringing people there?
Imagine a football field i'm talking about.
It's so big that we're talking about maybe 10 pieces of grass are the area that we access to show people and the rest of its inaccessible wilderness.
And so we built the world's tallest tree house that I keep inviting you to.
And we do some little tourism using local guides, which helps employ the local people and keeps the rest of that giant football field, the rest of the 300000 acres wild.
But I think that once we cross the finish line, if we make it and we're not assassinated by the narco traffickers and if all these- Or the animals or the insects or the pathogens or the anteaters or the MRSA or the elements.
Yeah.
Or the, yeah. we make it, if we make it, then no, I don't think there's an end.
I think that we study it and we celebrate it.
And then I can consult on other areas and help other people to realize their dreams.
I mean, just like good all did for me she, you know she, she tipped her candle to mine and passed on that light.
And I think that that's that's a that, that was the lesson you know.
You just got to keep that going and then we can.
We can make all the change we need to.
Dude, you fucking rule.
You absolutely rule.
Well, I'm very glad that the world has you.
I can't wait till you come to the Amazon, man.
I'm ready, dude.
I'm ready.
Give me a few months, maybe later on this year, I can come and ride.
I've been looking forward to speaking to you and it's epic, dude.
I'm really, really excited to see what you do next.
Please keep yourself alive.
Yeah.
Please keep, uh, please keep having these amazing conversations.
I love listening to them on the wild.
Yeah.
Even if I'm not there with you, I'll be there in your ears.
Yeah.
Be there in my ears, Chris.
Thank you, man.
Thank you.
