Paul Rosolie: I Met An Uncontacted Tribe: They Killed My Friend!
Guests: Paul Rosolie
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
This Burmese Python wants to know what is inside the diary of a seat. Oh my god. Oh my god. Beautiful. Now what are you feeling right now? I'm wondering why the idea is for dating. Have you ever done a podcast with a 10 foot snake across the table before? No, this is my first. Awesome. You know, we'll bring out the next friend. Then they bring it over here. Now just don't move. Cool. What if you spent the last 20 years of your life doing? Living out of a backpack and having Amazon rainforests barefoot with a machete to help the indigenous people save the Amazon.
Whatever it takes. Which means talking out by some snake glass. Very rare diseases hunted by the Narva traffickers like the picture of that guy. That scar is because he was shot in the head by a 7 foot arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes. And this is actually a very important story. I think I have a video of this. Yeah. This is world first footage. So tribe, isolated so deep in the jungle that they've never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus was coming out to make contact.
So we do a two-day boat journey in one night through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. They were scared. We were scared. Because these traps kill people all the time. And they had one question. How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys? You see, these people are being hunted by traffickers and gold miners and loggers and boxed in by deforestation. But if our oceans are rainforests or vanishing, life on earth is not possible. Now it's not too late, but we're the last generation that can save.
Cool. Young kids are growing up attached to screens and loneliness as an all-time high. Is there anything that you learn in those 15 years that a Westerner like me would find useful? A hundred percent. So let's start with purpose. Listen, my team gave me a script that they asked me to read, but I'm just going to ask you in the nicest way possibly can. Thank you first and foremost for choosing to subscribe to this channel. It's been one of the most incredible crazy years of my life.
I never could have imagined. I had so many dreams in my life, but this was not one of them. And the very fact that these conversations have resonated with you and you've given me so much feedback is something I will always be approached above. And I almost carry away a sort of burden of responsibility to pay you back. And the favor I would like to ask for me today is to subscribe to the channel. If you would be so obliged, it's completely free to do that.
Roughly about 47% of you that listen to this channel frequently currently don't subscribe to this channel. So if you're one of those people, please come and join us, hit the subscribe button. It's the single free thing you can do to make this channel better. Every subscriber sort of pays into this show and allows us to do things bigger and better and to push ourselves even more. And I will not let you down if you hit the subscribe button. I promise you.
And if I do, please do. I'm subscribed. But I promise I won't. Thank you. Oh, you live an extraordinary life, a very atypical extraordinary life. What have you spent the last 20 years of your life doing? Trying to find a way to explore the wildest parts of the Amazon and figure out a way to save them. The Amazon. For a lot of people that don't know anything about this part of the world, they'll think of it as a bunch of trees where lots of wild animals live.
What is the sort of central misunderstanding of the true nature of the Amazon? I think it's a problem of scale. People don't understand the importance of the Amazon. This is one of the most crucial things on our planet. It's one of the most physically defining features of our planet. If you look at Earth from space, you see this giant green belt over most of South America. That's the Amazon rainforest. And that's where one fifth of our freshwater is contained and another fifth of our oxygen is produced.
This system is irreplaceably valuable to all life on Earth. And you live in the Amazon? For the last 20 years, I've lived mostly in the Amazon. I've slept more nights outdoors than I have in my adult life because I befriended the indigenous people of the upper Amazon rainforest. And that's what the book is about. I went down there 18 years old because I needed adventure. And then the quest for adventure led for this call to meaning. And then that led to the discovery that we were the only ones who could do anything to stop the bulldozers and the chainsaws from destroying the thing that we loved.
A lot of people have clicked on this conversation for whatever reason. What are we going to talk about today that you think might be interesting to them in their lives? What is the wide variety of things from the conversations you have every single day that compels people? Because I want to give them a bit of a tailed AR before we get into the detail. I think that what people are going to find, and this is what I tried to write about, is that I didn't know where I was going at first.
I just knew what I loved. And so over the last 20 years, it's been following a dream in a direction. And that dream was finding a way to relieve the incredible stress that I felt over the state of the environment. We live in these times where people feel like the world is ending. There's nothing we can do. Our oceans are collapsing. The rainforests are vanishing. Elephants are being hunted to extinction. And I wanted to know, are there solutions to these problems?
Is there a way to change the narrative of conservation and come up with an alternative reality where everything's okay? And do you think your message is more timely now than ever with everything that's going on with technology and AI and this sort of great transition we're in? I think that this message is timely now because whether we like it or not, we're alive at the most important moment in history. And the reason that that's true is because never before as a global society have we been all faced with the same problem.
If our ecosystems collapse, life on Earth is not possible. And we are the last generation in history that's going to have a chance to restore those ecosystems and those sacred cycles before it's too late. And as it relates to mental health, young kids are growing up attached to physical to screens and to technology and all these things. You've lived almost the opposite life, it appears for the last 20 years. I'm wondering if there's anything, you know, because you said today on your way here that you like didn't know how to get out of the Uber.
Yeah, no, it was a, it was a mess getting here. I almost got run over by a guy who recognized me and said, and said, get out of the road and a kind of guy. And then I'd never opened, I guess I'd never opened a door with a button before, but I couldn't figure out how to get out of the Uber. And then I had a whole adventure in the bathroom that should have been filmed. But no, I mean, I have lived, we used to, we could call it the barefoot machete days.
You know, a lot of my early learning in the Amazon took place under the tutelage of indigenous experts. And these are people that like JJ, who I meet when I first go down to the Amazon, he didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old. So he lived a life where if you wanted fish, you have to go to the river. And if you want to eat, you have to go out into the forest, not to the supermarket. And so when you see kids today that are only using their thumbs, it's not too surprising when people are disconnected and disoriented and sort of don't know what's real and what's not real anymore because you go to the mountains and the rain and the sky and the rocks, we'll teach you what's real real quick.
And you all have to agree on it or else you'll die. And the jungle is the same thing. It's sort of when you find yourself with these chemical, physical boundaries, life makes a lot more sense. Have you been able to make sense of the life that someone like me lives more because you've spent time in the Amazon? Do you look at us differently? I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say, but in the same way that people might look at the way you choose to live your life and say this is very, very strange.
Do you look at people that, you know, like me that works seven days a week behind a screen and think that's a very strange life? I just know that I couldn't do it. I depend almost, I'm so reliant on nature. I have to be around trees. I fall asleep to frogs. I mean, even being in a city, I go seek out a place where there's a lot of trees. I am like a forest creature. If you take me out of my environment, I start to stress and die. Don't. There's a part of me that, yes, that starts to die.
If you keep me locked in concrete or if you were to, if you were to relegate me to a, I was just in a hotel last week on the book tour and I realized nothing in the room with me was natural. The carpet, the table, the windows, the television, everything that was in this room with me was composite materials. I couldn't even open the window to get to the outside air and it did occur to me. I said, I wonder if other people feel this type of societal claustrophobia where to me, I have to have my feet in a river at some point.
I have to every night before I fall asleep. I have to look up. It's a ritual. I have to look up and look at the stars. How else can you pray? And so for me, being in a city has become a very different reality to what I'm used to. I mean, just taking a shower. I mean, trust me, it's not as much fun standing in a cold tile box and spraying water on yourself as it is, running through the jungle, diving into the river and swimming in the whole river rushing around you.
It's a whole different experience. And so when I come back, I get a little bit, you know, I miss my, I miss the frogs and the birds and sort of my neighbors of the jungle. Do you think there's like a collective delusion in terms of the way we live our lives? Do you think we're, we've gone a bit crazy? I can like the frog in the frying pan. It's happened so gradually, this sort of technological creep of our lives that, you know, we're looking at young kids that are more anxious and depressed than ever before loneliness and time high, more people are taking antidepressant medications than ever before.
I think that, yes, is the simple answer to your question, that that sort of, we're a species per pet, we're fish perpetually out of water, that is humans, because we've taken ourselves away from forests and away from deserts and away from mountains and the ocean. I mean, we used to be fishermen and we used to be farmers and now the life that we live is so incredibly different than that. If you ask kids where does their meat come from, there are kids that will say the grocery store.
You know, they don't know that chickens exist before it's in the package and, and so, you know, for, for, there was that generation, which I think that you and I are both a part of where it was like, we were the bicycle generation. We might be the last one, where it was like, you went out in the morning and you were on your bicycle or you were running around with your friends and you would come home for dinner. And I was incredibly lucky to have, you know, on the weekends, I would go to the woods.
I would take a steak and I would take one match and I would take my golden retriever and we would go get lost up the side of a mountain and we would just go camping. My rule was no shelter, one match, one steak dog, so you couldn't mess up the match. At what age? I would say 12 or 14 I was doing this, I had a little, you know, a little hunting knife on my side. Not typical for a 12 year old. But I needed it. Why? I don't know. I think because being stuck in a desk and being told, you can't get up and you can't even go to the bathroom and you look down, do what we say, just being controlled was so counterintuitive to my essence.
And so I grew up with this need for adventure and then somewhere along the way the fact that I couldn't drink the streams that I was exploring or the fact that even when I was deep, deep, deep in the forest, I knew that if I really hike for another four hours, I'll come out the other side. I wanted to experience wilderness. I wanted to experience wilderness where it never ended. I wanted to see the really wild places on the planet. And for some reason that was inside me since I was very young.
So how'd you go from there, from being that 13 year old to setting off at what 17 years old with your Amazon research in Peru? You didn't go to university. You were actually really, really smart, are you here? I was smart enough that they had me both suspended and in detention and in American Mensa. I was really all over the place. And the thing is they make you feel stupid when you can't do the assignments. So I'd say, why are you failing math and why can't you read this book and you didn't do your homework?
But I was like, I know I'm smart. And in the forest I was good at tracking and I could survive and I could make it through a weekend and I could build shelter. And so I always just gravitated towards that. And so I spoke to my parents. I dropped out of high school. You can take your GED and get out two years early with a one day test. And I did that. The rule was, I did have to go to university. So I had to start taking semesters, but in between semesters, I was free to go to the Amazon rainforest.
And so I booked the most remote position that I could at a place where it took two days by boat from the nearest city to get to this tiny little research station. And it was run by this Peruvian guy and his partner and his name was JJ. And that's the guy that opened the Amazon for me. He opened the Amazon for you. Well, JJ grew up in the Amazon as an indigenous person. So what he was learning, the first chapter in this book is called The Rareest of Species because he's the only unicorn in the Amazon rainforest.
He's an indigenous person. So he's been learning from his grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's all the way back. And indigenous means, indigenous means his family is from the jungle. They're heritage. They're lineage going back. They are jungle people. They're from the SAH tribe. And so his father don't Santiago there. They knew the medicinal plants. They knew how to fish for piranha. Then he can cut a piece of callus off of his foot and put it on a hook, using himself as bait to catch a bait fish.
He can mash up a barbaco root and put it in a stream and then all the fish float to the surface. He can track a deer. He could track a jaguar. He could track a person. So these people know everything about the forest. And they're the people that I came in with. And because I knew about snakes, he knew everything about the forest. The medicines, the habits of the animals, the systems. The only thing I knew was I said, I know how to handle snakes and he said, I'm scared of snakes.
And I said, I could teach you snakes. I said, you teach me everything else. And he goes, you like snakes? He goes, come with us. He said, we go on a family hunting trip once a year where we go on this expedition 10 days into the jungle where no one's allowed to go, only people with indigenous status. He said, you're our guest. You come with us. And so there I was going up the river into parts of the world that have yet to be named. Into the wildest places in the Amazon rainforest and learning from these guys through experience.
How to catch fish out of the river. How to navigate through difficult parts of the stream when the storms are coming, how to survive them. And then we found out in a condus. And so it was like this, I had this very, very unorthodox training and introduction into the jungle. How big is the Amazon rainforest trying to get my head around the scale of it? I'm bad with numbers. What I do know is that it's larger than the lower 48 states. It's absolutely tremendous.
It's the largest, contiguous rainforest on earth. And are there parts of it that people have never been to? 100%. There are still parts of the Amazon rainforest that are unexplored. There's parts of the Amazon rainforest that no one's ever been to. And if you really want to blow your own mind, the canopy of the Amazon rainforest is about 150, 160 feet up above our heads, which is far. And half of the life in a rainforest exists in the canopy. So you're talking about the most mega biodiverse biome that has ever existed.
There's never been more terrestrial wildlife anywhere on earth than in the Amazon rainforest and right now. In the entire fossil record, we were at the apex, the climax community of the Amazon rainforest. It's that brilliant where the Andes rainforest, Cloud Forest, meet the lowland tropical Amazon. There it is. The most life we know of in the entire universe. And in terms of human life, I hear there's lots of human life there that we've never contacted.
There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon and you have the S.A. Ha and the Mucha Ganga and you have the Yine and then further out beyond all of these, there were always rumors that there were uncontacted tribes. And for the first many years that I was there, it was always someone's uncle, someone's brother, someone's cousin would come back with these crazy stories that someone had seen the tribes and that they were that they were tall and naked and they still hunted with bows and arrows and they would and then every now and then somebody would come back with a seven foot arrow, a spear, tipped with bamboo, a huge bamboo tip, this big razor sharp like a machete.
And that was the only proof we had that they existed until the day we met them. When did you meet them for the first time? So I don't want to explain how we met them. We should probably explain why, where we got to in how the 18-year-old researcher became the director of a major organization. Please. Okay, well, somewhere along the way as we did these expeditions through the Amazon and I became closer and closer with the indigenous people, JJ as a teacher kept telling me, and that's what the first chapter of the book is about is him just teaching me the incredible interconnectedness.
There's this moment that I write about where he's going, look at this beach and tell me the news. And I said, what? Yeah, he said, every day the ground is like last night's newspaper, it tells you what happened. So I look at the beach and there's Jaguar tracks and there's like a mess of Jaguar tracks and some Jaguar scat and I made no sense of it. And he was like, this is where she came yesterday to drink. That's where she pooped. This is where she came today to drink.
You can see the newer tracks. And then he's like, and what you didn't notice, you didn't see the vultures above us. I look up and these vultures above us and he goes, notice they're not looking at us. They're looking at the Jaguar. So they're looking that way. Jaguar had a fresh deer kill and had continued to live and eating and then coming to the river to drink. And so he can decipher all of these incredible things. And so as he's taking me through these worlds of butterflies and interconnected species where there's a mist river flowing over the rainforest, this this avatar on earth.
And then we then they burned it down here, the loggers. And so the first time I saw ancient forest, a place that I love with trees significantly bigger than this room, vanished. There's this cacophony of life, this orchestra, this symphonic roar of life that you get in the morning, especially in the morning in the Amazon. And then at night, there's the night chorus. And when you hear that silenced, it's one of the most horrific things that you can experience because places that we loved, trees that have been standing for a thousand years, species that had never been described by science were all incinerated.
And I said to JJ, I said, how do we, this can't be allowed, this can't possibly be something that's permitted. And I said, isn't there somebody that we can call, we're standing on the side of the river and he leaned forward to look this way and he looked that way and he goes, do you see anybody? He goes, because I don't see anybody. He goes, you have to do something. I said, I have to do something. I said, I'm 19, 20 years old. So what am I going to do?
I said, I don't have a PhD. I don't have a trust fund. I don't have a media presence. I don't have anything. I had a machete and I had bare feet. We both had machetes and bare feet. And so that was the start of the journey where we said the thing we love is being destroyed. We could see the smoke on the horizon, the trees that we had explored and become to love were laying, smoldering on the ground in front of us. And we said, okay, now we have to figure out a way to change the narrative.
The wildest place on earth is about to be destroyed, bulldozed and burned. How do we save it? And so that's where, when you ask the question of, how does life and the jungle sort of translate to what your listeners are going to find interesting. It's taking on a task that's so gigantic that at the start of it, we couldn't even come up with it. We couldn't even conceptualize how it could be possible, even with the right tools. To save the Amazon.
To save the Amazon rainforest. Get a loan for two guys within zero qualifications, bare feet and machetes. And so we started behind zero. And today we're at the point where we've turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We're protecting 130,000 acres of the river. We're on the cusp of creating a national park, me and Jager are the directors of jungle keepers. And we're about to make history because we're going to save the entire watershed and all the trees and animals and heartbeats that are left.
And that's the story that I'm trying to tell. That's the whole reason for my existence. That's why I wake up and do every day. And you've really taken on that responsibility in a very personal way I can tell. Yeah. Yeah. There's a point where I remember, because you grow up, I was born in Brooklyn and then we grew up in Jersey for a while and then we moved to the Hudson Valley. But when you start going to the Amazon for months and months and months out of the year and you come back with scars and stories where Jaguars breathing on your neck and you go out on a solo and you come back and then suddenly standing and making conversation at a barbecue feels different.
It's almost like I imagine I have a lot of veteran friends and sort of you almost get addicted to the action. And then you also get addicted to the team, you know, Sebastian younger rights about this, about the need for community, the tribe and sort of the mission. And I think that that's one thing that people are missing today where they don't know, you know, we've been disassociated from religion and community and immediate sort of connection with other humans.
And so then what else is there? How do you, where do you, what do you, what do you, what's your, what's your purpose? What do you wake up and do every day? And so I think, you know, in the old days, it was like, you know, we have to, we have to defend ourselves from the outside world, from warring communities, you know, or even just providing for your family, we have to bring water every day. We have to chop wood every day. We have to figure out how to survive in the today.
I mean, when I'm here, I wake up and I go, well, there's water in the fridge, so I don't have to do that. And I'm like, the air conditioner is on and I'm like, I guess I'll check my phone. And so I, you know, I think we have, like you said, become somehow, we've got really far away from what we are built for. And one of the beautiful things that happens when you go into the wild, and this can be any wild, is that it starts to change you. And so you go into the wild and you start picking up logs and throwing them.
You start splitting firewood. The first day you're going to have calluses on your hands, but then after a few weeks, you're going to have tough hands. You start walking barefoot, same thing. The sun starts to make your skin thicker and tanner and more resilient, and then the rain will hammer that home and you start to get your eyes start to get sharper and you start to pay more attention to what you're hearing. And so you start going through this whole transformation where you start to be almost become a different animal.
You become the jungle version of yourself, you become the mountain version of yourself, your legs start to get strong again. And so the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation and you become connected to your environment. And then that feeling of disassociation tends to alleviate a little bit. I heard about this particular part of the brain that's changes as well. You talked about transformation. They discovered something not so many years ago called the anterior mid-singulate cortex.
Andrew Huberman, I heard him say that he thinks it was one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last century. The anterior mid-singulate cortex is a part of the brain sitting between your emotional brain and your executive control center that essentially grows when you do hard things. Not when you do things that specifically when you do things that you don't want to do, but you do them anyway. So not running a marathon because you enjoy it, things you don't want to do and you do it anyway.
It went through some of the studies I saw said that younger people that have been brought into this sort of doom scrolling generation have smaller ones. If you are obese, it's smaller. Athletes have bigger ones and people who live longer have even bigger ones and they kind of call it the muscle of the brain of doing hard things and so when you were talking about that physical transformation, I weirdly thought about, I think it's Roosevelt who after losing his mum and his wife on the same day, after his baby girl was born, he went out to the badlands and spent two years doing pretty much what you said, putting himself in intentional discomfort.
And he came back and all of his friends described him as being transformed. He went on to become the youngest president in American history. He got shot and carried on doing the speech. He led the charge, I think it was the Spanish crusades or something like the Spanish war. And the rough riders. Yeah, the rough riders. And they all pointed at the moment when he went out to the badlands, they said it shaped him into becoming a completely different man, that discomfort.
Yeah. 100% and that's why Native American cultures for the initiation of the young men would have vision quests or they would send them out into their wilderness. And there's still different, there's all different types. Aboriginal cultures have similar things and I wanted to put myself through that. And so I went out on, that's what I described in my first book is going out on, that's where JJ taught me enough to survive in the jungle and then I started going out on 10 days solos into place.
I'd have people bring me to the last place that had a name, like I'm talking about poachers and then I would start hiking and I would go so deep in the Amazon rainforest that I was just off the map and I would try and survive out there. And so I had a lot of adventures that I should not have survived, but it was very important to me to put myself through that because I grew up with that discomfort. I grew up with the overwhelming, crushing stress of being told that we're at the end of days.
We are losing, I mean, I saw it at the Bronx Zoo, they said, you know, we're losing our rainforests and they had the sound of the chain saws and you see the trees going over and they said, we're losing elephants. You'd see somebody shoot and the elephant goes over and they just said, everything that you, for me, everything you love is being destroyed and pretty soon we're not going to be able to drink and everything's going to be polluted and our fisheries are being destroyed and I said, wait a second, I said, I have to know if it's really that bad.
So when I got old enough, it's not just that I was inspired to go out on a mission, it was that I wanted to find out for myself because I don't like finding out through a screen. I don't, I don't want other people filtering my information, I want to find out for myself. Is it really that bad? And so I was going out on a quest to understand what the reality was. If I sat 18 year old here at this table, he sat there and you know, this version of you at what, 37, 38, 38, you will sat there, so 20 years difference.
What would the notable differences be between these two men? Well, he didn't know how to fish with his feet, that's for sure, his machete skills would be terrible, but the noticeable difference would be that that 18 year old, his greatest dream was to alleviate the environmental stress that he grew up with, escape the world of rules, find purpose in life, and to just have adventures. My greatest dream was to see the Amazon rainforest. I looked at people like Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Goodall and I said, man, they had such incredibly extraordinary lives and I said, how come my life can't be like that?
I'm over here in detention. You know, I'm over here being told I didn't do my homework and I'm like, I want a chop wood and carry water. I want to go to war. I want to be scared. I want to be challenged. And so for me, it was, I was, that would be the difference is that I would be hungry for all of that. Whereas the person sitting across me today, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars, crocodile bites, tiger bites, infections, times that I've been almost crushed to death by elephants, I've been hunted by the narco terrorists.
And at this point, the responsibility at that kid got to see all the things he wanted to see. We found the biggest anaconda as I lived through the amazing adventures and that's great. The person sitting across me today is responsible for protecting millions of animal lives. And my job is to explain to people that we, that everyone reading this message or listening to this message has the chance to help the indigenous people save the Amazon before we lose it forever.
And so that's the main difference is that at that age, I was just, I just wanted some swashbuckling adventure. And now I found that adventure became meaning I found it along the way. And then now I'm on a whole other journey. Now it's, now it's, can we bring it home? Now it's, can we achieve something that we thought was impossible and change the narrative of how it's done? And I guess this kind of brings us back to this question about the uncontacted tribes.
You said you and JJ were talking about how you might go about saving the Amazon. Was highlighting the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon part of the mission there? No, very much no. That's a great question because what we started doing was we looked at this river basin and we said, okay, we love this one really wild river. And now I said, why has this river been so wild? You know, so you think of the Amazon as a tree of rivers, you have the main Amazon channel and then all these millions of branches.
§02Transcript — part 2
And so the upper Amazon, the uppermost branches of the Amazon rainforests, those tip-tip tops, people are only just getting to them now. The main Amazon channel is a shipping port and then you have these huge tributaries going off of it and you can get in as far as a ketos with a steamship. Like you can go all the way through Brazil, thousands of miles and get all the way to a ketos Peru to the almost the back end of the Amazon. I've been there.
And it's beautiful. We are at the southern edge in the tributaries down there and there's one tributary. What's a tributary? A tributary is an offshoot from a larger river. So a stream is a tributary of a larger stream which goes into, you know, then eventually you reach the Hudson River. So this is a tiny little tributary. And we discovered that the reason people hadn't developed this tributary, the reason other indigenous communities hadn't formed was that for hundreds and hundreds of years, this particular river had been protected by the violent, mysterious, machcopiro nomadic, uncontacted tribes.
And that had kept it wild. They were the original jungle keepers. But by the time I got there, they were sort of just a myth. And so they were something that they said they lived really far up river past the last indigenous community. And when I say indigenous community, I mean, people that we can talk to, people that we can interface with that I can speak a little Spanish to and they'll understand me. I think that's an important distinction. Yes.
Because can you make that distinction between indigenous and these tribes? Yes. So within Peru, you have Lima and, you know, Michelin star restaurants and all this amazing food. And then you travel down to Cusco, you have Machu Picchu and you have the Andes and all of that incredible culture. And then you go down to the jungle and that's a little bit like going to the back end of Alaska. It's where it's like you are very far away from LA or New York like, but it's the same country.
And out there you'll reach these communities where they are indigenous. And so in the reserve that we currently protect as jungle keepers, there's two indigenous communities there. And we work with them to sort of support them because as these loggers and narco traffickers and gold miners come in, they see them as, as a mark. They'll go in and say, oh, there's these helpless indigenous people. How can we exploit them? How can we get their trees, their fish?
They'll go and take those things from them or they'll, or they'll sell them something that's not worth what they think it is. And so we've been working with these indigenous communities to say, do you want the loggers to come in and cut down all of your trees and they go, no. And they go, but at the same time we need a little bit of gasoline because what if we're having a baby move to get our daughter to a hospital in town. And so we've been working with them to provide sustainable jobs as rangers protecting their own land.
It's such a simple solution, whereas otherwise they would go and be loggers to get that cash. And so we're working with these communities. And now they're rangers and boat drivers and guides and handymen. And they called us about a year ago and they said something incredible is happening. And it's going to be dangerous, but you are the directors and you're part of this family and you're part of this story and we need you here for this. But the tribes are about to come out of the forest.
And we were in town and where what we do now is, and we can explain this later, but we raise money and we bring it to the Amazon where the local people have the opportunity to set aside huge acreage of the Amazon to protect it. We're changing the narrative of destruction where we just protect it before they get to it. And so we were in town with JJ, who's now the director of this major organization and we're talking to our lawyers and we're in the office and we get this call that the tribe is out.
The tribe is out. The tribe is out. What does that mean? It means the mythical, uncontacted tribe that when I arrived in Peru, the president Peru had been saying, these are a myth. They don't exist. And it's just, it's the boogeyman. It's been made up as a story to scare the loggers. So their existence was contested. They were almost on the fringes of imagination. Could we not have flown a plane over there or something? This sounds like a dumb question, but presumably we have satellites and we can zoom in.
The BBC did do a piece where they were flying a plane and they were looking at an uncontacted tribe from miles away. And they said, we're being very careful not to disturb them, but there is a tribe in the rainforest that has no contact with the outside world. And you can see these people bending and they're looking at the plane, but the plane's not close enough to really scare them or to cause them any distress. And so we have done that. But then on our river out in the middle of nowhere where no one's heard of the BBC, you just hear stories from loggers who've come down river from three weeks up river.
You can go for three weeks up the river and hit nothing. There's nothing human. It's like the last endless forest. And so when the community called and they said, there's arrows on the beach, the tribe is coming out. It's the first time in 10 years that the tribe seems to be coming out of the jungle to make contact. And so they got the directors of jungle keepers up there. We had to rush to be there. They begged us to be there so that we could see it because they were worried that we wouldn't believe them.
And so we got there and we went all night. And when you go up a river at night, we'd do a two day boat journey in one night. And so the guy right there, the picture with the guy who has the scar in his forehead, that's Ignacio. That scar is because he was shot in the head by a seven foot arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes. He was trying to give them a gift and they got spooked and they scared and they shot him in the head.
And he almost died from that. When we heard that this was happening and he's now one of our best jungle keepers rangers, we said, can you do a two day boat journey in one night and he went, yes, sir. And he put on a headlamp and he got in the back of the boat. We took an open top canoe and we drove from 6 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next day through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. I was on the front of the boat with a flashlight using the crocodile eyes, the camon eyes on the side of the river to navigate because they shine.
The eye shine comes back. The storm was so bad that we couldn't see anything. We couldn't see the side of the river and because of the light igniting the raindrops, you can't even see what's in front of you. So we were using the crock eyes to navigate where the edges of the river was. So I was spotting and telling him which way to go and he drove and we did that all night long. Got to the indigenous community and said, okay, so what's going on? And they said, oh, yeah, they left.
Tribes gone. The only thing that they had was that one guy the previous day had been shot by an arrow. And he had been fishing and he had seen the tribes. So he said, and they had shot an arrow at him. The first thing they had done was shot one of these seven foot arrows at him. And the way it had hit the boat ricocheted and then hit his thick leather belt and blunted the tip of the arrow and he had the arrow. And so he said, so there are people here.
And then a native anthropologist from another region showed up and he said, they know me as the grandfather. I can speak to these people. I speak a little bit of their language. And so we stayed another night, two days deep in the jungle. And the following morning we said, okay, we're getting out of here. There's obviously nothing here, but stories and footprints and arrows and we have important work to do back in town. And did you believe them?
I've learned one thing working in the Amazon always believe the locals, always. If they say it's there, they're not wrong. And that's part of the reason that I've gotten to go on these adventures. You know, when JJ Tell told me, there's places you can go that are so wild that it's like the Galapagos. The animals don't know a human. But you have to go for days on foot to the top most reaches of the rivers to find this. Well, that's why I went on these solos.
And so I ride that's what I'm, that's as a writer, that's what I do is try and take people on these adventures through the Amazon. And so when they said the tribe is coming, Ignacio, the guy who'd been shot in the head, he said, listen to me. He said, you're, he said, you're my boss, right? I said, yeah, he goes, I need to speak to you like a friend. I said, speak, speak, speak. And he said, they're coming. You'd be an idiot till leave. And so we posted up, we waited how he knew.
Yeah, I'm wondering how he knew. He just knew, man, they just know it's like they can, they can tell. And then, you know, I mean, these are guys who know when there's a Jaguar close by by the sound of the birds. They know when a storm's coming before the storm is audible, you know, they, they have higher tune senses than we do. And, and so he said, look, the tribe is coming. There's the arrow there in the region. He goes, and when they come this close, they generally, they want to talk.
And I said, but this is, and sure enough, you hear mosh go and everyone starts screaming. And it was just this moment of absolute panic where women were lifting babies and chickens are flying around in dogs and when there's tiny little indigenous community on the side of a river with hundreds and hundreds of miles of jungle around. And we run to the edge of this, you know, the edge of the river where this cliff is. And across the river, we see them coming towards us.
And they're walking out of the jungle and they're naked from head to toe. They just have some string tied around their wastes. Penis is tied up to their bellies. They all have seven foot long bows and arrows and they're crouched over and they're looking at us. And we're standing there and you go, you sort of like you go, I just, I wanted, I wanted to see this and now I'm not so sure I want to be here because there are warriors coming out of the jungle and they're from a thousand years ago.
So I asked the anthropologist, I said, they're like stone age people and he goes, they don't have stones. He said, they're still in the bamboo age. He said, these people are living such a primitive lifestyle. They're hunter gatherers. And they've been isolated so deep in the jungle for so many centuries that it's like a time capsule. So there was a thousand years between us. We're standing on either side of the river with a thousand years between us and this aperture into the history of what humankind used to look like and these people came out holding their bows and arrows that they had made out of the jungle and they held up their hands and they were talking to us across a river and it was sort of shirts versus skins.
We were just just two tribes separated by a little bit of water and they wanted to communicate. We know what language. With their language. We don't even know really what to call them. For a while they were calling them the Moshko Piro, which means the wild Piro people. And then more recently and partly because of our encounter, they held up their hands and the first thing they said was, no more. We are the brothers. Brothers. And so then our side said the same thing the anthropologist said, no more brothers.
And then this exchange began and it's like as a Spanish speaker when I've been in Italy I can use my Spanish to kind of get through in Italian and I feel like it's like that. The Yine people can speak to the Moshko Piro and there's an approximate translation. And the first thing that they said after coming out of the jungle a thousand years late the civilization was send us bananas. This had sent us food and they demanded that we send them plantains as an offering.
And our side said, you put down your weapons. We will talk to you but we do not want this to end violently. We want this to be peaceful. If you want to talk to us put down your bow and arrows because a shotgun a shotgun only goes how many meters you know it's not even going to go 100 meters, 50 meters maybe bookshot. An Alonbo arrow is going to go 300 meters it's going to go far. And the needless to say they're very good with those arrows. They are very good with those arrows these things will fly.
And so even standing on the other side of the river we were not safe. And so we were all standing behind trees we were watching Ignacio who'd been shot before was watching with the binoculars and he's going whenever you see them walking he said they let you see them and then they clever girl you in the forest where there's one watching you from the shadows and he would grab me by the shoulder and go look there's one and you would see this you know red face paint in the shadows of the forest and he'd have the boat trained on us.
And so while some of them in the front were putting the bows down there was others of them in the shadows that were making sure that they still had support. But we asked the guys in the front to put down their arrows. The anthropologist got in the river and gave them an offering of bananas. I think I have a video here of this. Yeah. This is world first footage. I'll let you you know how to use my pet right there we go yeah. So this is this was this is just a random moment from the earlier days but this is that moment where everyone starts screaming Mosh go and we're all running and this is what I was talking about where they are moving across the beach and you can see the sort of the posture they're using there.
I mean he's got. They have their bows and arrows in hand and then they showed up and see they're pointing. They were worried that our cameras were guns and so they're asking to put down the cameras. They were curious about various members of our tribe and they were all talking at the same time. So it was very difficult to understand what they wanted. What's he doing with his finger though he's doing this yeah I don't know this is the moment that we gave them the bananas and what's haunting about this is the desperation that you see on them where they're all rushing to get the bananas and they're not necessarily taking them like they're going to share later they're taking them like I get my bananas you get your bananas you see this they're all rushing to get this little boat load and these are people that don't have boats and as they're doing this they're all talking at the same time it was like a flock of parrots it was just a coffin of sound and they're all fighting over these plantains and and then once they get them each person held their own they have rope and plantains and this interaction went on for several hours and we negotiated with them and this is this the footage this is the footage that we're allowed to release
right now and this is them moving back off into the jungle there's a lot more that happened and again that's where that's why that's why we're releasing this now I should say that that's why we waited a while to release this footage because footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons a you don't want people to think that we went out and contacted these people that want to be left alone you also don't want to encourage other people to indulge their misconceptions people oh these are the last free people on earth they live perfectly in balance with nature no people will go looking for them whereas for hundreds of years these people have asked for one thing and one thing only to be left alone and they've enforced that kind of like the command cheese with arrows and on this day they said please give us food please give us rope and they had one other question they said how do we tell the bad guys from the good guys and we said what do you mean who are the bad guys and they said some of you shoot at us with the chichiksu with the fire sticks the guns and we're going who who does that we said we are not the bad guys and they said no you also they said we know you cut down our trees they're speaking to all of us there's
nothing there's no like you know white guy brown guy Peruvian foreigners none of that it was just all of you outsiders stop cutting down our trees our trees are our gods it was sort of like you don't do that and then when they left just a few weeks ago we learned that the narco traffickers view them as a threat and there was actually a mass grave found of a similar clan and so these people are being boxed in by deforestation and hunted by narco traffickers and gold miners and loggers and so I think that them coming out of the forest was their way of saying hey we're trying to get a read on what's going on in the outside world who is it who are the good guys who are the bad guys they don't know that jungle keepers is protecting the land that they live on they've never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus or World War Two or the country of Peru and so so they're coming out with so many questions and the only way to care for these people and to give them the the the rights that they deserve is to protect the forest they live in do you know why some of them seem to be touching their nose it's funny I didn't notice that do I think this is this is this is going to be your discovery to anthropology I did not notice that
but it does you see this a lot of them are doing this yeah and the outfit yeah what is this outfit this it looks like there's kind of rope tied around their midriffed with their penises out yeah the the the head of the penis is covered by rope oh they've got the penis up into the right no the head of the penis is up and protected and and that makes sense given the jungle where there's mosquitoes and botflies and sandflies that that's a smart move and then rope seems to be I mean what is it goes like fire rope ladders like I think it's like man's second invention they are obsessed with rope that's how they make their bowstrings that's how they make their arrows that's how they lash things together to make the the limited structures that they make and some of what we know about them is you know we find their camps after they leave so we know what they they primarily turtles and monkeys they don't fish they don't have fish hooks they they don't eat humans today they do not eat humans they're not cannibal tribes that's a rumor people have talked about before people have said yeah there's even a couple versions of my voice in AI saying that on the internet but it is not true and their haircuts they all seem to be have this sort of mullet
still haircut from this it seems like they all grab the front and just find a way to cut it there might be like one guy with a machete who just does the haircuts and for a lot of them this is the first time they've seen a human so actually this was first contact the anthropologists who came to the scene who managed this interaction he said he had met an uncontacted tribe before in the region he said none of these were men that he'd met and the other thing noticed they're all men yeah the women were hidden hidden in the forest and while the men were making a distraction in front of us the women were raiding the farm behind us raiding raiding the farm your farm the indigenous peoples farm our communities farm so the women went to steal while they were distracting you that's right and did you catch the women on tape no no no no no everyone was we were all huddled up very very close I mean this was an incredible encounter but let me explain the prevailing emotion during this entire thing was fear on both sides they were scared we were scared the indigenous people naturally have shotguns anyway everyone had their shotguns out they all had some of them had put their bows on the beach but they had other they had archers waiting
and so everyone was sort of you know it was like put down your guns and we can talk but nobody really wanted to put down their guns and how do you know the women were stealing from your farm because after this was all over and we went to the farm everything had been pulled up all the Yuka all the plantains all the sugar cane the entire farm was ruined how do you know it was the women the women in the village told me it was the women they were that was the women also you see the smaller footprints these men have wide big men they're from walking barefoot their whole lives their feet get on Joe they get really thick and so and I have jungle feet like that now but these guys have almost duck feet at this point like big fat calloused feet that get wider you ever see a farmer's hands yeah yeah but they just they just grow yeah like that they're all young as well where's where are the older people we'd love to know we don't know there's some tribes in the Amazon where the elderly people have more permanent settlements there's been rumors of some extreme tribes where the elderly people if they can't keep up or just left to perish but we saw people between the ages of probably 12 and 45 I don't think anybody looks like they're in their 50s
so we left with more questions and answers they on that day they did get a pot that they they stole from it from you know the community you know they have their their farm and so there was also a machete at the farm somebody just whacked it into a log and so as they were leaving one of the best things that we caught on video that we have we're not able to share yet is that one of these guys and this is at the end after while everybody was going home the anthropologist held up his hands and he said you know no more like brothers going peace and these guys actually asked about me I was the only person there with a big beard and they said there's that one they said show us that one and so I came forward as to the edge of the river which my heart was pounding and the anthropologist said he said hold up your hands show them that you don't mean any harm I held up my hands like this and they held up their hands and they sang there's a no more they knew that I wasn't from the indigenous community and that was an incredible moment of we couldn't communicate but it was just sort of that basic I acknowledge you and they said I acknowledge you and we just had this thing across the river in about a thousand years and just and that was it and as they left
you know one of the guys had a machete and he was he showed it to us over his shoulder like this and one of my friends was going oh you know in the local language he was saying put down the machete leave the machete and the guy just smiled and looked at us like they come and get it come and get it and then at just as they left one of the warriors walked out to the beach put an hour on the string smile that us and just shot it was like ha up into the air just at us didn't general just to spook us and then they all turned on the left and left you know so they have a sense of humor we saw them smile you know we exchanged a little bit of that with them as well they look cold they are cold I mean it's it's it's 95 degrees on that day the other thing is it was cool as they're coming if you go to the part where they're coming across the beach there was millions of butterflies that beach was covered in just millions of butterflies and so as these people are walking out the butterflies are just swarming around them go back to the beginning to that right there if you just notice you don't notice it at first but as they're moving look at that the world is swirling with leopard leopard doctrine colors just just absolute insanity how how
beautiful this scene was and I mean when you see this you know if a tyrannosaurus rex walked out behind them I wouldn't have been surprised it was such a strange literally unbelievable thing to see because you know these these literally are the last people on earth that are still living in this way where a society we have planes trains automobiles iPhones all of this technology we're talking about going to other planets they don't have metal even a knife unless they get it from someone else and so it's just it's just an incredible you know the other thing is they do have medicinal technologies they're able to stay infection free living in the tropical wet jungle that's pretty incredible because that that actually naked I mean essentially naked I think that's that's how they carry their rope I don't think that's so much of clothing as we need rope and that's how we carry it it's very it's very very complicated because the loggers shoot at them the narcos shoot at them people shouldn't be getting into the places that they live and if you think about in the last few centuries how many indigenous cultures have been annihilated by the outside world coming in these there's no shortage of these stories and in this particular case in 2026 when we have
the communication and people are able to hear this story this is why we're releasing this footage because the only hope these people have is if we protect them they can't come on a podcast they can address the United Nations they can't write a petition the only hope they have is if we are able to protect the forest that they live in that's it and that's why we've released this footage now because for a long time we said we can't release it we said what if what if crazy hippie people go down they're thinking that these are the last free people and they want to go live with them that will kill them the outside pathogens that you and I carry on us every day the common cold that we have immunity to could wipe out an entire tribe and how many tribes like this do we believe are in the Amazon rainforest several thousand little tribes little clans that move nomatically through the Amazon were they tool they looked like they were at least you know five nine five ten they were pretty tall especially because the the the Peruvians and the indigenous communities that we work with tend to be on the smaller side they they they are taller than the average some of the other tribes there's another tribe that we ran into down there called the Nawa and those people
were absolutely tiny they were like below five feet all of them these guys were tall yeah and is there a Lida here is someone in charge another great question it seems to be that there's two they look like brothers there seems to be two guys who do most of the talking one in particular who seems to be doing the most gesticulating and he was communicating more forcefully he had a smite that guy hit a smile on his face at certain times this one yeah I think so and and he was the one that would walk the furthest out into the river yeah and he seems well muscled healthy he's the biggest as well be a science by the looks of it yeah okay these tribes have been known to kill people these tribes kill people all the time um the the day after this happened we went down river and one of the people who had been maintaining the peace during this negotiation across the river was my friend George and George kept saying don't worry it's going to be okay don't worry no more there and he said let's get the more bananas and he said you stay behind the tree say hey please put down your camera they don't understand that it's not a gun he was making sure that everyone was calm well George was driving the day after this in the river as he does every day and he rounded one river
bend and the tribe was out again they were further up river and usually when they leave they go deep into the jungle but on this day they had been walking up the river which nobody expected and so when his boat came around the river they hadn't expected it and they opened fire everybody else on the boat was able to get down under the the benches which is made out of heavy thick wood as he was driving he caught an arrow over the scapula came out by his belly button so it collapsed his right lung and cut through his whole body and he had to be helicopter evacuated out of the indigenous community and somehow he lived but he's never going to be the same and there's there's a hundred stories I could tell you of people that have been killed by them but now and more and more the stories of that they are also being exterminated so their violence is in response to the fact that the outside world has been cruel to them and the only way that they can ensure that they survive is by keeping the outside world out this is a might be a bit of a dumb question but there's no consequence to that is there from the Peruvian government or anything the Peruvian government trying to you know if they if this uncontacted tribe killed somebody they're not necessarily going
to go there and try and enforce any kind of like law that's actually a great question because it illustrates something that I think a lot of people fundamentally don't understand about this is that you know if this banana is the last town and then you imagine just our river is the size of a football field right how are you going to get to the other side of it and the jungle it takes you about about an hour to cover half a mile through through dense jungle if me and you were going with machetes right now through dense dense jungle about an hour for every half mile that's with no trail with trail you can go a little faster with the boat you can go a little faster but the police have no jurisdiction outside of the city the only reason the police have powers because everyone has agreed that there's a government and that they have power and that there's a this but it's all made up and when you go out in the jungle you realize that there is no law in the wild it's just whatever happens to has a bigger stick and so they're still playing by that game they've never heard of a law and so they they've been known to find something interesting just the way and you know today if we're interested in the bird we take a picture of it and then we study it or we can
capture it and we can study it you know sometimes people will criticize Teddy Roosevelt for being a hunter but a lot of the species if he saw a new species he would shoot it so that he could study it that was what they did back then but they do this with humans they'll be like that's an interesting pair of pants they seem to think about life and death very differently and I was watching something a podcast that you did where you said that they also speak the same language some of these uncontacted tribes as the monkeys yes so what they do is they will emulate cappuccine calls bird calls the undulated tinium tinium goes the cappuccines I can't do they're called but these guys have it down perfectly cappuccines being cappuccine monkeys and they'll use those sounds and J.J.'s father don't sent the aggo had told us ears and he said we thought he was just trying to scare us he said if you're ever in the forest and you hear the animals sound a little off if you ever just feel like something's not right about the way the animal he said they've surrounded you and they're all watching with their bows and arrows the tribes have yeah and so they'll go and you'll go and he'll go and he'll go and he'll go way away I said you don't hear three
tinnamus in a row that's not how it works that one tinnamu talked to the other tinnamu and all of a sudden I got five tinnamus around me and then you know that you got the tribe around you and so this is where the local people know how this stuff works and to anyone from the outside they go there's no such thing as uncontacted tribes and they don't communicate with you they do and one of my friends was in that exact situation where they were communicating with animal calls in a circle while he was in a stream with his father and unfortunately they shot his father in the stomach and his father died and then he ran for it and he lived to tell the tale and the next day the his community our friends came back and they found this guy who had just bled out through his stomach and why they killed him we do not know so they pretend their animals but well they they use animal sounds to communicate with each other yes because then the prey which in this case might be a human yeah won't know that it's exactly okay so if I'm going if we go okay let's split up and surround we're we're uncontacted tribes now and we go okay there's loggers over there let's split up surround them we'll see how many of them there are and use the monkey language so we use the
monkey language they don't think anything of it they'll just keep doing what they're doing and then when we give the go-ahead everybody we just slice them with seven foot arrows and they're all going down I was I was gonna ask about happiness but I don't even know the context in which to ask the question about that happiness no I think I think that there's some some Cormick McCarthy quotes that would probably do better justice to their reality than the idea of happiness I think that they are living in a world where they're more concerned with calories they're more concerned with how much blood does it cost to walk a mile they're more concerned with stealing the women from other tribes they're not concerned with happiness it's more apocalyptic than uh down to Naby you know it's it's they're they're they're they're in a state of desperation you could see it in their face and that's where there's a further anthropological question of what happens in the future for these people but one thing that we know for certain is that rapid contact destroys them it's happened before all of this has happened before you know when the outside world reaches an uncontacted tribe the pathogens kill them when the outside world reaches even an indigenous community
alcohol outside pathogens money can destroy an indigenous culture and take away their language in a single generation so so these types of severely isolated cultures if they want to come out and make contact with the indigenous communities that are their neighbors that has to happen over time and and they have to have the agency to do it which means their forest needs to be protected and so that's that's and that's all we know you know we don't know what their birth rates are what their infant mortality rates are where their old people are what what what what are their creation myths what are their beliefs we have no idea do we even know where they live in terms of do they live in huts houses do we know that no they don't in fact at this very moment right now i would imagine that there's several of them hunched around a campfire in the darkness beneath 160 feet of canopy you know because when you're in the jungle this there's these these pillars going up but then it's a it's a 4d environment because it's just you're walking it's like you're walking along the bottom of the ocean you're this tiny thing and above you is all of this slithering life and frogs and things moving through the branches and so they're they're huddled down
there in the below the Amazon rainforest and somehow they figured out how to make fire which if i handed you a lighter and a full cup of gasoline and said have all the sticks you want in the jungle you still couldn't make me a fire right now how do you know they can make fire because we see them cook stuff we find their camps but it's also conceivable because they don't have pots it's conceivable that they some of these people haven't seen water boil right they just drink water and it falls on them from the sky they certainly don't know that water freezes on this point of happiness you said you saw desperation in their faces but does that mean that you think they're not happy or do you just think that that isn't even a sort of a paradigm that they even consider it's all about survival i think that we have we're inbuilt to enjoy moments of joy i think that humans enjoy moments of interaction moments of play and not just humans i think that animals in general you look at you know two puppies chasing each other they're having fun you know even on even on this day with shotguns loaded and bows caught and we still found the time to smile a little bit at each other saying give me that machete yeah come and get it and we kind of like you know it's kind of like
you're just as scared of us as we are as you and as it was it it was we were on the same level for that smile you know and i was like oh okay yeah none of us want to do that um so there's there is happiness there but i'm saying you know knowledge comes with benefits you know there's a lot of things that they may believe that i remember when i was in college reading about an anthropologist group that got to somewhere in New Guinea and all the people were hiding in trees because they'd they'd gotten to a point in their civilization where they where they believe that everything what that bad that was bad came from magical spells you know if i fall and break my leg it's because you said a magical spell on me and if i get sick it's because of a magical spell and everybody was so scared of upsetting each other that they'd all just started living in the trees and hunting and they were living in this constant fear state and so you know at times like that you need someone to go okay guys look here's what you know here's what's happening let's get let's get let's get on the same page and they made maybe they would be helped by having a small plantation of plantains and so if they have a bad week of hunting they can just come in and they can they
can take some of their own make get some of their own food they don't need to start being agricultural they can still be nomadic hunter gatherers but maybe having some supplemental food out there in locations that they know about would help but these are things for the local people and for anthropologists to figure out over time i had you say that children from the tribe who raised by outside communities claimed to remember nothing about their time in the tribe it's haunting what what do you mean by that i mean that a child washed down river on a log to one of the rare very remote communities in the amazon rainforest and was adopted by an indigenous community people that speak an indigenous language as well as Spanish and when he was old enough to be asked questions someone said hey by the way when you were living with los calatos with the with the naked people that's what they call them um what was it like and he just went i don't remember i walked away but i mean when he came down he was eight years old you can't tell me you don't remember anything and but it was a it was a it was a it was a guarded i don't remember it was a i don't remember no access denied it doesn't send me you got it you
know and that's what people get wrong where they go all these people still live you know in communion with nature and it's like yeah and there's a lot of rape and murder and warfare and probably needless death from infections and disease and and and they're living a very different lifestyle but it certainly is fascinating that they're out there and i think that it only goes to illustrate that we what we're protecting here is truly that wild because a lot of people will say to me well how come you guys are so focused on protecting this river this thousands of tributaries in the amazon why protect this three hundred thousand acres right there that's like well this is the wildest part john murer took Teddy Roosevelt on a camping trip when he wanted him to protect the osemite valley and the Sequoia trip trees and he said you have to see this and so he took Roosevelt and showed him how amazing it was i mean sequoia trees like that exists nowhere else on earth there's the biggest trees on the planet if he if they hadn't protected them they'd be gone and so the them having the foresight to protect those trees then we still have sequoia trees and so that's what we're doing on this river it's like by protecting
three hundred thousand acres of forest we ensure that those millennium trees the skyscrapers of life continue to have monkeys reptiles amphibians birds mammals that these tribes continue to live out in the far reaches and then again to use the football field analogy in this vast expanse of wilderness we've found a way to use just like a little pin prick to actually bring people and let them see this amazing place and so we you know the whole 99.99 percent of the thing is wild and we that's why we built that treehouse to let you know some of our donors some of our people because now people from all over the world are helping us save this river and the treehouse that was a dream you know there's a there's a mist river that flows above the Amazon that's invisible and it's larger than the Amazon river itself there's an invisible mist river above the Amazon that's larger than the river mist mist okay and so the first time I saw it I had climbed the tallest tree in the jungle which took hours and I was standing on a branch at dawn and I saw the sun illuminate the mist river going across the canopy and I went I have to share this with people and so we built that treehouse on a promontory at the edge of the terra firmer looking out over the jungle
so that people can see the reserve see all the forest that they're protecting because at this point the way we've see this and see that picture below it that's the wasteland that's what happens when you don't protect the Amazon are you at all on some level jealous of how these uncontacted tribes live is there any part of you that wants to go and experience their world for a day or wishes you could spend some time living how they live no no no I really enjoyed hanging out with my native friends like when spending a day piranha fishing but I also really love my camera roll and doing photography and having modern medicine and being able to FaceTime my mom when I'm in the jungle like you know I don't I don't I don't I don't I don't know romanticism about their state that that seems like stress and destiny I don't I don't need to I don't want I certainly don't want to do that now is there anything that you learned or gleaned from them that I know a Westerner like me who's spending a lot of time on nice screens and stuff and the way we live our lives might find useful I don't think that we're at the point where they're imparting lessons I think we're at the point where we're learning which questions we want to ask that was first contact
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can get a 30 day free trial no credit card or payment required I've got so many photos here you got I mean in so many of these photos you're holding massive snakes and why I say massive snakes I don't mean the snakes you guys listening are thinking about I mean anaconda size snakes like oh yeah this was this was me and JJ's first first big anaconda that we big anaconda because only about 12 feet and yeah that one that one this was a great snake because I'd never caught a big snake before I'd always been you know you catch a small snake and I'd learn from steaver when you know you catch a catch a snake by the tail and it might try to bite you if you don't get it by the tail snakes gonna run away every time snakes are not never going to attack you period so I learned you catch a snake by the tail and then it's once you get it by the tail it's gonna come back at you and try and stop you from grabbing its tail great and if you need to you can get it by the head and you got control the snake but if you have the head you have the snake and so that first snake I mean I'm talking about a 12 foot snake that's you know that's at least as thick as my leg and I ran in there and I said JJ you come from that side I'm gonna come from this side we get
the snake we're gonna measure just because we thought it was so fascinating I ran in and I dove and I grabbed the snake by the head big mistake wraps around my arms and the first thing that I realized that I had an anaconda handcuffs now I couldn't I couldn't release the snake if I wanted to because it was around my wrists and then the second coil came around my shoulders and now I'm feeling that I can actually hear my collarbone start to flex the way a stick sounds right before it snaps and JJ grabbed the snake by the tail and pulled the tail off and then his other brother they got to me right as I was about to me literally the eyes are gonna come out of my head it was gonna crush you that's what happens so he pulled that right off at the last second so that was about as close as I came to knowing what it feels like I mean that's not even a big one I think you came a little bit closer yeah nah that's that that's uh explain this to me so if anyone that can't what you can't see I would highly recommend you look at the screen now yeah please look away look away don't listen to him this is a absolutely crazy story what what's going on in this photo and why did you do that sure this is actually a very important story you know you hear these people
talk about how you if you're gonna succeed at anything you have to become very familiar with losing you almost got to learn to love it and and so as we set out on this journey to explore the Amazon and to build relationships with the indigenous people and to study anacondas and to find a way to protect this place at around 24 years old I got approached by Discovery Channel and they said kid we've never seen one like you let's do a show where we take people into the Amazon rainforest and show them anacondas and I said that'd be amazing I said I would love to do that I could teach people about the forest let's let's go they said great don't the only thing is they said you know it's not a good enough show if we just show them the science that you're gonna do because we want to use as the apex predators of the ecosystem they're you know if there's mercury in the system they're bio-accumulating there any toxins that are in the Amazon they're going to absorb it's gonna get into the fish and then into the Cayman into the birds into the anacondas they're the apex predator we were doing groundbreaking research on anacondas they said that wasn't good enough they said imagine if they said no one's you know reticulated pythons of eating people they said no one's ever had
on record anaconda eating a human and I said it happens it happens I know a few people whose grandmother or uncle was eaten by an anaconda it happens but it doesn't happen where people no one's taking a picture of it and so they said well if we make you a really expensive suit will you get eaten by an anaconda I said I'll try I said it's not gonna eat snakes or sweethearts it's not gonna try to eat me and they said but look we'll call the show expedition Amazon send you out there with a team of scientists will film the whole thing long story short I agreed to it because what I thought at the time was I keep seeing forest getting burned I keep seeing my millennium trees go down all of those monkeys and birds and snakes and beautiful animals that are getting incinerated and they're telling me all I got to do to get a TV show that'll reach millions of people and let me get that message out there all I got to do is at the end do the silly stunt to show people the snakes aren't that bad and so we filmed this show for six weeks you agreed to what I agreed to potentially be eaten by an anaconda okay I mean if it wanted if it wanted to I had a breathing tube and I had a it theoretically could have eaten me but I knew it wouldn't because I
know snakes but the producers were very you know these are people that have never left the the office building and have watched too many movies and they wanted to see a guy get eaten by a snake and you volunteered of course I volunteer I would have cut off my foot to save the forest I'll do anything to save the forest and so when somebody gives you a chance like this and it's funny I actually spoke to Jane good all about this I said there's this chance I have and I think I could use I think I can navigate this in such a way that at the you know we take people on an expedition through the Amazon and at the end I'll go I'll get in the pit in a special suit and I'll let the snake wrap around me and I'll show people that anaconda is a really you know the sweet arts and she said I don't think it's going to go well for anyone that doesn't know who Jane good all is Jane good all the famous primatologist the earth shattering scientists who redefined humans from men the toolmaker to what we are now the one who did more for conservation wildlife women science than just about anybody else and she's also the person that quoted on the front of your book saying on behalf of the forests that I love thank you Paul for writing this book Killy from reading through
history she's she's quite a hero of yours and has been for a long long time yeah I mean and going from when my parents were reading us me and my sister they'd be reading us stories at night you know Jane good all in Gombe with the chimps and how she she didn't listen to the rules she named them even though her her colleagues said you never name your study subjects and she said they have names they have personalities they have names she broke all the rules and and so I grew up with Jane as sort of this historical figure but she was still like a living historical figure and so then when I when I when I actually met her it was so incredible because I I met her to talk that she had given and this this informed the rest of my life the the grace and wisdom that she showed changed me as a person because I met her to talk that she was giving a New York City and I had printed out a couple of chapters I'd printed out one of the chapters that became my first book where I'm taking care of a baby giant anteater and I printed out a chapter where me and JJ were looking for our first anaconda this story and I put those together with a little covered letter that's just said hey I love wildlife I've been working on the Amazon for like five years and you've
always been an inspiration to me if I write a book would you endorse it and so I gave this to her in the Manila envelope while there was a line of 500 people and you know we take the picture and she said thank you very much she puts it aside and I said I you know I tried my best and 48 hours later her her team reached out and said Jane read the materials she read the chapters and she thinks that they're wonderful and if you find a publisher let them know that Jane will endorse your book and so then I went to the publishers and I said I have the endorsement of Jane Goodall and they said well that's basically Mother Earth herself and they said so you so that's what got me in the door to become an author with my first book was Jane you know she's she was this titan of conservation this legendary figure and her just first of all for someone that was on the road 300 days a year that's an icon of science and conservation and hope for her to have the presence of mind and the patience and the sense of responsibility to actually read something that some kid handed her that's incredible that's magic to me even to this day and it and it matters to me and it informs how I react even to this day but without Jane sort of waving her wand in my direction I would have no
career there'd be no Paul no jungle keepers no book we wouldn't be sitting at this desk today Jane Goodall saved my life she's an iconic scientist as you say and for a groundbreaking research on chimpanzees and her work generally and globally on on conservation um so you you decide that you're going to be eaten by an anaconda oh yeah that was a tangent yes so is this a wild anaconda is this an anaconda holding captivity how did you get the anaconda to eat you so let me see that next one on the picture this one yeah this is a snake called Eleanor we named her this after my dear grandmother who was an incredible woman and and the matriarch of our family now Eleanor is the largest snake ever measured at the time verifiably scientifically measured she's 18 feet six inches and over over 100 kilos and she was skinny she hadn't eaten in a while but imagine if she'd eaten a capy bar she would have been you know 200 kilos but um my team caught her while we were filming this show and again we were told the show would be called expedition Amazon the call sheet said expedition EA then when we were done doing our research in the Amazon they said look fly to I forget if it was like Kentucky or Louisiana they said fly to some state there's a
§03Transcript — part 3
guy with a snake no one will know the difference we'll blur it out and they said do this little stunt as I'll put it the last five minutes of the show just to show people and then we'll you know wipe it up in the news they're like we got you a lot of handshakes right the day before I was supposed to go on the good morning America show with uh Mr. Matt Lauer who got mad at me for doing push-ups on the set um the the day before I was supposed to go on the stomach again I'm a kid and I'm going I think I think we got it I think we did it we caught the biggest snake ever the footage of us catching that snake is insane we're all jumping in the river and wrestling this crack in and we catch this snake and we learned from her we did we were it sounds crazy but we were developing field methodology for studying the species and we learned all kinds of things about anacondas because we fed her a transmitter we learned how she moves through the environment this is research that had never been done before for context feeding her transmitter is putting a trans an electrical device yeah basically in her throat that she eats she consumes and it stays with her till she dies so you can see what she's doing it stays with her until she defecates it which for snakes
that law thankfully is months okay and so we're doing this groundbreaking research we caught this tremendous snake we'd survived a six-week expedition in the Amazon we had all this incredible footage and the night before I'm supposed to go out on the morning shows they showed me the film it had none of the science it had none of the conservation message that I was promised would be in the show and instead they focused on the stunt at the end and they changed the name of the show to eaten alive and then they sent me out the door to do the shows and the public was mad because I didn't actually get eaten and they felt like they were lied to pito is mad because they felt like I had put a snake's life in danger somehow somehow somehow the animal rights people were furious and then the scientists were mad because I said okay you're just a you know a shock person you just in this for the thrill and you're not really a conservationist so put me out of work for years really yes it set me back about 10 years really I tried I took a big swing because I thought it would help my forest and I hit my side on the ceiling and fell down hard the next day the news I mean you know all of the late night shows are making fun of it Jimmy Kimmel was like you
should for your next stunt you should try having sex with a hippo I mean people the comments were just I went to India and lived with the herd of elephants for a while I had to get out I couldn't I literally couldn't I said my dream of being a conservationist is over I was told by one prominent conservationist not even to come to South America and and again the thing you have to remember through all of this is through the barefoot machete days through going to the Amazon the first 15 years of my 20 year journey I had no support so I was living out of a backpack living out of a boat in the Amazon barefoot with no paycheck no health insurance no security no pathway forward so it was it was very uncertain times you know that you actually I think it may have been on your show there's this great quote where I think it was Alex Hormozzi was saying that confidence comes from giving people irrefutable proof that you are who you say you are and when I heard that quote I thought that's great and then the next thing I thought was well but you have to start building that proof in a direction and for a lot of people I think they find themselves standing on a high hill looking at a set of mountains and you have to choose which direction
you're going in and for me I was a high school dropout who was never going to be a conservation biologist and I was trained by the local people and sort of adopted by their tribe and so I knew how to survive in the jungle and work with snakes and do all these crazy things and I tried I tried to to take that message to television and I got Hollywood at heart I got lied to and I got taken for a ride but that failure ended up being the best thing that ever happened because what it did was it sent me right back to the drawing board said you're not ready yet and so sometimes the things that you want are not the things that you need and it's this beautiful thing where life sort of moves aside I know you want that but I'm going to give you what you need not what you want so this was a case where I really I took it hard I mean at the time it was a devastating loss and it was the best thing that ever happened because it was the slap on the head that sent me back out into the jungle for years and years and years and years of more experience doubled down what do you really care about saving the forest well if you care about saving the forest how the hell you're going to do that and we had to develop a system to do that we had to develop a new technology
as a way to save the forest what actually happened here so we didn't I know you don't want to it sounds like you don't want you don't want to talk about it it's just wasted airtime to talk about because we rolled around on in the mud with a 16 foot anaconda and nothing happened a lot of people will probably want to know why nothing happened and I think part of that is because of what you're wearing no the reason nothing happened is because they had snake handlers wrapping the snake around me while I was in this ridiculous suit I mean the things I will do the things I will do to protect this forest that snake if it was left on its own would crawl off any snake would would if there was a if I had a black mamba in my hands right now and I put it on this table it would slide off the table and find the darkest spot in the room and it would go hide if I had a spitting cobra same thing no snake wants to deal with you they just want to go hide they want to go back to sleep most people have terrified of snakes most people are terrified of snakes and that's why I think you're going to like what I have for you would you mean I brought a friend today you brought a friend I did bring a friend and I want you to meet him now this is a very very small ball python
this is a baby and one of the first things I try to impress upon people when they meet a baby snake is remembering that even if you're scared of snakes you're the large apex predator and this is just a tiny little reptile that is all alone the world they're born and they have to fend for themselves and for some reason ever since I was a little kid I was fascinated with snakes I thought they were beautiful I love the way they moved I thought the way they can hold up their bodies and flick their tongues I find snakes calming and beautiful and fascinating is that snake dangerous you could hand this snake to a baby this snake is so harmless I mean the worst thing that this snake could do if I was to let's just say pinch her and hurt her she could bite me but even that would barely break my skin this is a snake that's going to look for a baby mice little birds maybe a frog and try and grow to a larger size now have you ever held a snake before no you've never held a snake I don't think so oh wow that's wonderful well this is such an easy one to start with and I'll give you a few pointers yeah so a few things is that even a baby baby snake is going to interpret your interstate a little bit if you're very nervous and jittery and the snake is
going to pick up on that but you see how she's sort of just fitting to my hand yeah she's done a few things here she's got her anchor she's got her tail around these two fingers and the next thing is she's flicking her tongue to scent what's going on she's she's looking around but she's also she's not excited she doesn't mine sweat she doesn't mine sweat my hand sweat quite a bit as well and so I'm just gonna place her in your hand nice and easy and what you want to do is let her sort of grab on now now what are you feeling right now let's just see what you feel a little bit tense that's okay you can feel tense now if you feel tense the thing is she's probably going to return to me because she probably knows I love her and she's right yeah and that's okay why don't we just let her do that and then you can get a sense for how she moves and I'm gonna give her a little hole to crawl through like that and so what they do is they have all these muscles running along their body and you can feel that right it's such a beautiful animal I do have to say yeah they're called ball pythons they also call them royal pythons for that beautiful black and gold it's can I can I touch her with my thumb you can they don't love being pet it's one thing about snakes
they don't a lot of people when they come around to suddenly loving snakes they go well I want to pet it the way I want to pet a dog and snakes will retract from that so if you do it touch her with your with your thumb she actually moves away she moves away she doesn't like that so usually with snakes my my rule is you you sort of have to be the tree okay and is she a baby absolutely these are these are these this is quite small and so in the jungle on cold days I'll find snakes like this and literally warm them up in my hands I'll put them in here and just if you can just look at that just look at how sweet she is she'll just stay like that she likes that she likes that she likes the warmth there we are endotherms they are ectotherms like all reptiles they depend on their environment for their body temperature and so on the cold days see that see that move my hand closer she got a little spook she went back into the again this is just a tiny baby there's another one that is a similarly awesome example this is her larger relative same species right so this is a small ball python and this is a larger ball python and notice that both of these there's no risk right there's no there's no danger here it's not like I can't put these near my face again
both of these are sort of the golden retrievers of snakes these are these are snakes that have been handled by responsible snake owners so well that small one grow into the big one are you saying they're the same as with cousins yeah this is a larger ball python this is a smaller ball python so this one would eventually be the size absolutely and this one could could grow to be double that size really I've seen ball pythons be double that size now this one slightly different game for holding but see like that look who's scared here me well and and him and so look at these beautiful so look I'll just give you a sense of look at the power in a python you think pull ups are hard holding on with no no legs no claws just strength and just going to climb back up on onto my arm so what I'd like you to do is hold that your wrist yeah you got this just straight across the table hold that right like that no remember if he does bite and you mean if he doesn't get him kidding just hold him a pie enough that he's not touching the table yeah and then I'm just going to coax on top of he's okay you're okay you're okay you're so he's just gonna just just feel that power as he moves what she will eventually
but see you can feel the power on this snake it's a little bit more of a little bit more musculature they are stunning you see that that's it he's like okay cool you're holding me here they're pretty relaxed animals so he'll go and eat a small prey item go back into his burrow and then digest for a week before going back out and now you which few now if you want you can take your other hand and put it under him to support him and then he'll start to move over both of your hands once try that put your other hand very gently right under his coil right there he got scared of that that's okay or you could put a thumb through the through the loop could do good night yeah you could do that you're loving all these suggestions all right now watch let's see what happens we put him on the table because I bet you anything he doesn't enjoy you feel that power you feel that little bit of power there yeah now that's a snake this big weights we see like with an anaconda or something now a table sort of unfair there's nothing for him to see this he's gonna he's gonna flop a little bit there's they're not supposed to be on a table so this is what I'll do I'll be the I'll be the ground because then see look now he's pushing with all those little belly scales see how
you can cruise that incredible snake locomotion now watch if I take away his lucky he's holds on they don't want to he's got nothing to push off so he's gonna he's gonna do the inchworm thing but you get a sense of how snakes move they need that they need the ground they need pebbles they need rocks now you now catch him oh come on my catch him now no seriously not by the head start by the tail just right here just pick him up and then once you pick him up you can give him to me and then we can be done but but Stephen you have to catch the snake pick pick him up here just pick him up he's not gonna do anything now nice and slowly too because he's a friendly snake you don't want to offend him he seems to be intense I mean he is side eyeing you right now that's what I mean he's like I'm side eyeing him he's side eyeing me but I'm telling you that this snake all you got to do is just pick him up and then when I pick him up just pick him up and hand him to me that's all you got to do and then this is all over oh my god I can't believe this oh my god beautiful right up up up up up up amazing wonderful now I'm gonna take him all right and then I have one more snake that I really need you to meet come here this
this is a different story and this is sort of the closest thing that we're going to get to an anaconda I think the easiest thing I could do here is just let her get around what you don't want snakes to do is to close that gap right you don't want them to wrap around your neck could she kill you she could then they bring it over here why I thought I thought she wanted to meet her too but what if she does something to me no no so this is a different type of snake this is a Burmese python and when you talk about large constrictors those are small constrictors the the ball pythons this is a larger constrictor constrictor and Burmese pythons get to be big these can go up to 18 feet long and now what I think you're gonna really appreciate is the power that these things have when you feel that power and now just don't move yeah now give her your hand take her take her her with your hand good very good now hold this hand out good just like that now be the tree just be the tree that's great you want to come this way okay her tail is hot yeah what why is the tip hot maybe she likes you okay now she's just gonna move behind your head and I just want you to feel the muscles of that snake oh yeah that's
great she is sing she's breathing that's just her breathing because she's holding on she's a ground snake it's not really a tree snake now Burmese pythons they grow to be 18 feet long they can take down deer and so what you have right now is this beautiful granite Burmese python crawling on in shoulders and you're doing great by the way you look very calm breathe don't forget to breathe and she can kill a deer no no she'll grow she's still a baby she's still small she'll eventually be able to kill a deer now I just I don't want her to now here's the thing I think she likes you so when I try to take strength strength yeah she could like break my pinky finger off yeah so let's just see what we do so we know a few things we know that she's not gonna hurt us we know she's not gonna eat that banana and know what she'd like to probably come on you wanna come up yeah see I think they come to me I think they know have you ever done a podcast with a with a 10 foot snake across the table before no this is my first this is amazing I'd such a it's such a joy to be here with a Burmese python there and so I really this is the closest I can get you to an anaconda I wouldn't bring an anaconda here their personalities a little different that personality is different
oh yeah different snake species just like you'd be a little bit more careful around certain dog species than you would others certain snakes now notice look now I'm I'm pulling a good deal here and she's not budging so now what you're gonna do is just just massage the tail what you mean massage I would like you to massage the tail just just maybe rub back and forth on her tail and it's gonna be an instant reaction yep just keep doing that she's not gonna love that whoop she's hissing because there might be something back here she can't see exactly she doesn't want something interacting with her tail she seems to be stuck to my the the diary the diary itself okay okay okay girl she's like that well actually why don't you just lift her lift that coil over up onto the tail you got this just like you lifted the other snake you're gonna have to do this to get through this just lift now to see the part that's hanging over just lift it up onto the table oh my gosh yeah oh my gosh it's so how would you describe it it's like really soft but then like he feels like pure muscle pure muscle yes she's very she's she's there's a very very strong snake it's so heavy I can't even pull it up I need you to try yeah I think she's resisting
come on you're not gonna hurt her just right around the edge of the table just up onto the table I can't it's too like I'm gonna go on you got this you got the believe in yourself pretend we're in the Amazon and this snake is strangling me to death the only way to save my life is to take that snake's tail up but David she's gritting to just take my eyes you're popping out of my I'm being serious she's like she I can't I can't move her off she's like yes you can come on pull her out bring her around you got this look at your arms I know I don't scare you got this you got this believe in yourself come on get her up just just do it there there's no try she really doesn't then I'm gonna make that make me come over to your side of that snake and get her come on you gots yeah there we go there we go that wasn't so bad she's wrapped around the diary she's gonna inside the diary listen the diary has to remain intact girl so yeah this is this is a beautiful beautiful snake but you sort of see how people have a misconception about snakes now what she's trying to do right now even this snake that knows what what humans are she's just trying to say all right get me out of here you know she's going where can I go rest and what what does she eat
when she grows up what do these well Burmese pythons big at big so she's gonna start with rats and birds and frogs and they start small they start just like the ball python but when she gets big you're talking about I mean Burmese pythons deer dogs humans Burmese pythons I don't think are confirmed eating humans reticulated pythons which is actually the longest interesting fact anacondas are the biggest snake on earth reticulated pythons are the longest and they're the only ones that are on YouTube having eaten humans they're confirmed manators but these berms they're just big powerful snakes and they're they're pretty placid it's such a beautiful animal even though it is a little bit scary yeah for some reason yeah I think maybe because we all grown up watching films like anaconda yeah that we think of snakes as being terrifying but it's such a beautiful image of me with a table yeah it's actually really lunch don't yeah all right maybe you were right as this is interesting anacondas have bigger yeah they don't like being touched on the head and they don't like um do you don't like their the end of the day the base of their tail their vent should people be scared of snakes do you think people should be respectful of snakes the
same way respectful of heights go get Steven good girl good girl go get him go get the diary which eat the banana yeah no they are what we call obligate carnivores they can only eat other animals but I mean whatever they can fit unfortunately Burmese pythons have been introduced to Florida and there's no predators in Florida they can handle the Burmese pythons so they're eating the alligators the birds the native wildlife they become a terrible invasive species which is sort of bad PR for Burmese pythons but when they're in their native habitat of Southeast Asia they're just wonderful big apex predators snakes can she bite oh 100% they have big teeth if she was to bite one of us right now would draw quite a bit of blood I mean she has to be able to latch on to her prey right so all the more credit goes to her for not doing that go get Steven good girl good girl I think I think see now what I'm doing is I'm massaging the tail because I know that she's gonna go for you good girl yeah right at him right at now come on come on let her go yes good girl oh so great this Burmese python is wants to know what is inside the diary of a CEO she's trying to hide yeah she is trying to hide and so you know
what we're gonna let her do that she's been a very good sport I'm gonna take her that's fantastic it is it's such a majestic animal like I it's slightly scary but also this message is brought to you by apple card it's a great time to apply for an apple card you'll love earning unlimited daily cash on every purchase that includes 3% daily cash when you buy the latest iPhone airports or apple watch from apple through this special referral offer when you get a new apple card you can earn bonus daily cash to qualify you must apply at apple dot c o slash get daily cash apple card issued by Goldman Sachs banks USA Salt Lake City branch offer may not be available elsewhere terms and limitations apply make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO welcome to my inner circle this is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world we have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown we have the briefs that are on my pad when I'm recording the conversation we have clips we've never released we have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never ever released and so much more in the circle you'll
have direct access to me you can tell us what you want this show to be who you want us to interview and the types of conversations you would love us to have but remember for now we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that joined before it closes so if you want to join our private close community head to the link in the description below or go to d o a c circle dot com I will speak to you then what would you say to a young person who's probably in the pursuit of a completely different dream are there anything that you consider to be transferable for anyone in the pursuit of their dreams that you learn in those 15 years in your bathroom machete days yeah I think that you have to log your time as a beginner in order to earn your time as a master and this is beautiful saying that I start the book with which is that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried and that to me is beautiful and so it's like when I went down there and began and even trying to catch a fish you know I didn't know how to do anything and I would look at these conservation biologists and just think my god I'm never going to be one of them because I'm never going to have the grades to be a conservation biologist now at the point we're at now where we
are we have this global movement around conservation we have this huge conservation organization that's fighting to do something historic I do get messages from kids all over the world let's say I really want your job or I want to get out there and I want to do I want to follow my dream what would you say to them well I had a kid recently that he message me and he said I really want to study great whites and he said but marine biology is so competitive and none of the professors will give me and I said listen forget all that I said do your school get it down I said but go to the doc find out where the preeminent marine biologists are going to go do their great white research go to that doc help them with their bags get off your phone get off the internet stop asking permission get on your feet and go there to the waves and sooner or later they're going to need help with their bags sooner or later they might invite invite you on the boat and after you've been helping with their bags and invited on the boat maybe you take some pictures of a pivotal moment that they use to communicate their work to the world at some point you can find a way to make yourself useful to them and if you do that for long enough you might just end up
being somebody that's a core member of their team people at those family barbecues must have asked you if you had a plan B are you a fan of plan b's I think I actually think that I'm not the example to follow because I went so my I had I burns the boats I had no plan B and and and now as I'm sitting across the table from you it's very easy I remember being younger and hearing these people and you listen to a successful business person go you know if I could do it then anyone could do if it happened to me then shut up you already made it like and it's like if you if you read the pages of that book and how many times I almost died had infections almost fell off a cliff got bitten by animals also the the internal struggle of then being 32 you know 18 they said go follow your dreams 25 they're like yeah that's cool and then something happened when I was around 32 33 that was sort of the the lower point for me right but my dad was dropping me off somewhere one day and and my dad was always always supporting me bringing me to the jungle taking me to the airport bringing me home I didn't have the money to get myself there with taxis and ubers and stuff and but there came this moment where you know I'd written my first book Harper college I got
in a real publisher the book came out and it went nowhere so even that I tried to be you know on discovery channel I tried to write a book I wrote a good book I knew people liked it I had a high rating didn't do anything that didn't change anything I'd start an organization I started jungle keepers I'd turn loggers into and gold miners into conservation rangers we protected like 50,000 acres of rainforest but still there was some feeling like like it just wasn't you know you strike and flint and unlike it's just not the fire is not catching there's something missing it wasn't happened he my dad went you know we love you no matter what I went don't do this he said no no you know you know if you eventually he goes if you need to jump ship and start over he's like you know we'll help you with whatever you need and I said what do you mean start over and he was like well you know I mean what are you gonna do this jungle guy thing forever and I went oh god oh god like no and you know and then he said no and if you do need to do that forever it's okay and it's like but they didn't they couldn't conceptualize it and it was very soon after that that that on that graph it was very very soon after that it was actually right at the point that I quit
right before covid and this is this is sort of the lowest point that I was supposed to never tell anybody and I wrote about it in the book where before covid when covid hit I couldn't get to the jungle our whole team had covid peru was the hardest hit country in the world I mean all of my staff my friends my family and Peru they were all on oxygen tanks whose mother whose sister whose daughter was dying we bankrupted ourselves sending money we the whole we took the whole equal tourism businesses sent all the money to Peru to get our friends oxygen tanks and to keep our family alive and it was also during the time that I realized I've nowhere to go like in this world as like I don't make sense in this world anymore and I called my best friend I called most of my best friend I said and I said don't tell anybody what I'm about to say but I said I'm gonna go get a job I said I've been doing this for so long I tried really hard I tried for 15 years I said I'm out of gas I'm out of I'm out of ideas I have I have been burning so bright I've been making making the fire myself I said I got nothing I got no more ideas and of course he said you shut up he said you inspired me you started jungle keepers you know I don't want to ever hear
this from you getting hung up on me but I said but I told him I said I quit I said I'm out I'm done I'm done I don't have no hope left and exactly a week after I made that phone call where I quit our first big funder reached out a billionaire named Axis Silva had seen my video of saying the Amazon is destroying we have the people we have the plan we have the infrastructure all we need is the funding and we can save this river and the week after I quit in the in the alchemy of the universe that's when he called me and said you know what green line let's do it how about a five-year commitment where I fund jungle keepers and we turn the local ranger the local loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers we get you and some of your guys a salary and we make this whole thing viable and by the way let's protect another hundred thousand acres of forest and if we hadn't spent years and years and years chipping at the same piece of granite just just whether or not you can hammer through granite depends whether or not you continue to whack the hammer and so for me and JJ for most in who was sort of the first iteration the first person that came and and took the photos that allowed us to communicate all of those photos of burning
forest in the wreckage he was the first he came in the barefoot machete days and he said I mean that was at a time I didn't even know anything was ever going to happen and he said you know what you guys are doing here is special we have to show it to the world and so on that graph nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing and then a little blit all of a sudden we had a funder and then once you once you get a funder when when you're when you're doing it all by yourself nobody's rooting for you and then once you once you start once you start to get a little momentum a little notoriety all of a sudden then everybody comes so then then I quit and that was the lowest point and then all of a sudden he rescued us when we started going up and then we started sharing it and then we got to the United Nations and then we got to and all of a sudden we started gaining this momentum and that that that that that magic that Jane had given us with her words also served as as sort of a blessing that carried us forward because people said well if Jane good all gave you this is Excalibur sort of her blessing then then go forth and save the Amazon and everything changed how do people know in the pursuit of their dreams whether they should
throw in the towel or not like how based on your experience there if someone came to you and said look I've been doing something for a long time and I don't know whether to keep going or not is there a framework or an idea that you might offer them I think that in my case if I follow the rational advice I would fail if I was giving myself advice as a rational person I would say after the first 10 years cut your losses and style like what are you doing it doesn't make any sense because then even after 15 years what am I going to do go go then enter the workforce with no skills and no resume and no nothing it just it was getting more and more extreme and I was like okay well I'm just going to be this jack sparrow jungle character I don't know for for for everyone it's going to be different but I can tell you this much if you're not willing to go all in you're not going to win like you have to take that risk to get that reward and so you go okay I've been I've been I've been doing this thing for 10 years and I just well you're 100% not going to get it if you stop but at the same time there's this haunting quote in the in the razor's edge this book where they say many are called and fewer chosen and I think that goes for
whether you're starting a business or a band or trying to be a writer or whatever it is it's you have to know when it's when it ceases to be chasing your dreams and become sort of a sad suicide and then and then you know at what point I was very worried that it was going to become my identity that I was the jungle guy so it's just keep being the jungle guy and then there's no getting out of it and I have to do it because I said I would and so I think for people maybe having an option be is a good idea that might be one of the things that I learned is that having some sort of an option be might be good this is as you've highlighted the great risk of giving people advice when you yeah I like that but it's easy from the top of the mountain to recite how you managed to climb but you you like even when I think about myself as a podcast like if someone came and asked me yeah how do you build a podcast where how do you build a business whatever I probably won't point at the luck and the timing and the fortune as much I'll point at the things that I did intentionally and I'm completely unaware of the fact that actually you know even with the podcast starting a podcast in 2020 when we first came to YouTube was like the perfect timing yeah
and at the time we didn't know as the perfect timing yeah we were just out there on the wave and that as it came into sure and so you but you look at the statistics and go like there's a lot of people that want to be conservationists and there's lots of people that want to be podcasts or entrepreneurs but most of them don't make it yes so they're not sat here talking they're not they're not here now yes because they you know something happened they gave up they couldn't make it the business went bust and there's a really interesting I'm probably going to butcher this but it's an interesting story right about these fighter jets I think it was in World War One and you might have heard the story these fighter jets come back with holes in them so everybody sat there all these engineers said well if we want to figure out how to make better fighter jets let's study where the bullet holes are because then we know where people are shooting yeah so they took the jets down they looked at where the bullet holes were and they said we'll reinforce those sections and engineer at the back and I've forgotten his name but I'll put him up on the screen shout it out shouldn't we look at where there isn't holes because where there isn't
holes yeah those ones didn't come back and this is the whole problem with survivorship bias yes is actually maybe you should be getting advice from the people in the graveyard not the people that came back maybe you should be looking at where the whole the bullets didn't hit because that's the fatal area if that makes sense and I think this a lot it's really in the last couple of years I've got more cautious about giving people advice for the same reasons you said yeah I mean you got to remember every one of the frozen bodies on Everest were once a highly motivated rich person that thought they could succeed and now they're an icicle and so I mean it's surreal to be sitting here especially today on the day that I got the news that this book is a New York Times best seller and again now I'm immediately I'm I'm having that reaction to myself where I'm going don't give advice because they they should not do that that I did very dangerous things there very very dangerous things including risking my life not I don't mean risking my life with anacondas and risking my life with being hunted by narcotics traffickers I mean risking spending my life doing something that would have no benefit risking spending my life simply just being an adventurer great okay well how
am I contributing the whole thing was that I wanted to have purpose I wanted to have a meaning and then change things and so I this is not a blueprint for people to do what I did it's a blueprint of oh look what this person did but people have I mean that's the whole game right that's the other thing we've become very precious about you know curating our lives and making sure but you know what one thing that the uncontacted tribes or reading about the command cheese or watching an animal hunt you know you watch a tiger hunt and in every single hunt that the tiger goes on they are they're betting all the chips like a large deer can kick and split their skull or knock their front teeth out with a hoof and that might be the last hunt that tiger ever goes on but sort of betting the house is part of the game and so that's part of where I got to where where I was so many years in and once once we got to a certain point once we you know there was that there was that that dip where I said maybe I'm not this guy and you have to choose who you are right it's like you know the Oracle told it says a neo she goes you know you're not the one okay you know and I did that to myself I went well I'm not this isn't gun going to work but then once then then a few years later
if you talk to even if you talk to me two years ago I would have said I don't care what happens I'm just gonna keep riding boats through the Amazon it'll be fine I didn't know that it was going to go like this and that now we're all of a sudden now we are the ones responsible for carrying on Jane's message of hope of reminding people that you can turn around a seemingly terminal situation where the entropy of global modernization is destroying one of the largest ecosystems on earth what could one person possibly do we found a way there is something poetic in the idea that you were pushed to your edge of being able to survive and at the moment when you got right to the edge of your own survival yeah the torch of helping the Amazon to survive was then passed to you when I was a kid you learn these stories you hear the old stories where you know the young man goes on an expedition and along the way he meets a a beggar and he helps the beggar cross the bridge and then you know he's going through this way and he meets some bird that's stuck in a net and he helps the bird and then you know then later on when he finds the princess and he's trying to fight the dragon and then all of a sudden the beggar helps and then the bird gets
him out of the thing and it's like oh these people come in and they help though that was the archetypal story that I got and I think that that's also the archetypal story that then I ended up living where it's like you know JJ said we should I'm local and we should protect this forest this place we should protect I was like that's amazing and I watched and he and he had the keys to the Amazon we got to go in adventures and then it was like most showed up and he's like I got the cameraman I could show the world what you do and then we have this guy Stefan showed up and other people showed up and all of a sudden you know you you start to amass this team of Avengers where you go wait wait hold on these people really talent people that have and we didn't realize you know JJ is the jungle man most of the photographer Stefan came in he was running teams at Apple James James the mentor James James the wizard James the Gandalf Jane was the one saying this is what you got to do you got to get the ring to mount doom and uh and then suddenly it happens but but you can't you can't tell people that they're going to you know that that whole thing of in the movies where it's like you know there's 10 guys with guns
and you go how they getting out of this one you know and it's like well I've been in that situation so many times and I think in order to have the luck of getting bailed out you either better be a mega black belt and have some real good friends and they better show up when it counts and so it's like you don't want to give people advice to do that because it's because then you're telling them to take risks they shouldn't be taking but coming from someone who took all the risks who bet my entire life on becoming a jungle keeper and saving a river and who bet my entire life on going on these expeditions and jumping on anachanas and running from elephants when I was in Africa and India I happened to have made it. In my job as a podcaster I meet lots of people who have climbed to the top of their proverbial mountains whether it's in comedy or sports or business or as a conservation list and I think one of the things they do will have in common is at some point in their hero's journey they took a unusual set of actions for an unusual period of time. Yes and so I think about that as a principle maybe that can be transferable is if you do want an unusual outcome whatever that means unusual behavior of some sort is the precursor and actually at moments in my life where I hear
fatigue or things are more challenging I always remind myself of that these days I always say this is probably like why most people don't get an unusual outcome because this was it's the logical moment to like like throw it in pack up the bags and go and when I look at some of my great mentors in the different fields that I'm in that's exactly what they did they just persisted for like an unusual amount of time and I think persistence in your story is such a through line yes I would say relentlessness is the most powerful element if you're trying to achieve your dreams because you're going to get knocked down again and again and you find yourself in the rain lost in the forest and you can't even see the trail I always say that you know we didn't even know where we wanted to go you know and it's like we just kept doing it's like the painter who just goes I don't even know what I'm painting but I'm just going to keep learning how these colors work you know just just keep going because it's an obsession and you can't really you can't really fake an obsession right if you're if you're going to spend 10,000 hours throwing a basketball through a hoop you're doing that because you love it and there's work and there's discipline and
there's times where you're you're going to feel that dip and that rise but if you really doing it if you're even in the game it's because you love it so if you can find something that you love then you can start building that irrefutable proof of who you are because you can go okay well I've logged a certain amount of time doing this thing I love what is meaning to to you in your life what is that is it responsibility is it something else well there's that thing of that you the more mean you your your meaning is directly correlated to how much responsibility responsibility you take on that that we've all heard a hundred times but to me it's it's I've I've lived in a world where things are reduced to such an incredibly basic level it's like I've lived in the mud with a machete and if I want to eat I get a fish and so like the truth of the rain and rocks has become my sort of religion and the way that I connect with God through the very simple chemical physical elements of the universe you believe in God absolutely absolutely absolutely have you always believed in God I think you know everybody goes through that period in their teens and 20s where you sort of go I can believe in whatever I want or I could not believe in whatever I want
and then I think as you as you mature I think a lot of people come back it's also societally it became very very uncool for a while to say that you almost couldn't say it you almost had to sneak your ass to church you know the if the people that wake up and go all this is very unimpressive to me I'm a walking miracle and I think there's no God and I'm unimpressed it's like you you have a lot of delusions my friend we are floating on a rock through space right now not a single person has an explanation of what we're doing here all these incredible chemical processes are happening in the rivers in our veins and in the Amazon when I dip my hands into the river I drink from the river and you hold your arm up in the sun and you watch the vapor come out of your skin the same moisture that you just drank and it joins the clouds rains back on the jungle and becomes the river again and you are part of the cycle you just tend to believe in God because you feel like it's flowing the river and the sky are flowing through you and that's the nature version I mean it can also just be hugging your grandma I wondered if your deep understanding of science and evolution and all these things might have
made you more atheist or agnostic no I think science is the language of God I don't think that they're opposing forces do you believe in evolution and natural and we just not a matter of believing in evolution we have we have we have animals in transitional forms it's very clear through the fossil record that absolutely evolution is happening I just think that everyone I'm not sure where this black and white argument even came from I don't think it makes sense to me then the wild is the church and so when I see trees cut down I feel it I feel like people people are if we have a role as humans and you said what's meaning if we have a role as humans on this planet it is to care for each other and the other things seems like that's the game right there's drugs and addiction and and and cheating and stealing and lying there's all these there's all these pitfalls that you can fall into so easily the game is rigged so that all these things feel really good right real good while you're doing them but you can literally lose the game permanently you know you do a little bit of math because it felt good all of a sudden you're a method and all of a sudden you're dead it's like you can very quickly get you know couple of drinks a day over the course
of a couple of decades and you miss a couple of birthday parties and all of a sudden you know it's like you can you can very quickly in the wild it teaches you the that festitiveness you know if you don't check your boat every day before it rains after it rains make sure it didn't fill with water it's like the line between survival and death is so small and so I think that the meaning I found is that we are floating on a rock in space and there's only so many animals and people here and life is the antithesis to all of the frigid blackness that is the universe and this is the only place that we know for certain that life exists right and we live at this moment in history when we're losing animals like elephants and polar bears and tigers and the rainforests and the ocean fisheries the whales and we saw the chance to save them and if we save them then our children have clean air fresh water beautiful places the world continues to work as it always has and so the relationship that we have to the people around us and to the creatures around us and to the environment around us is incredibly meaningful there's a little meme I saw where it said if you were being if you're overwhelmed by the events of the world go outside and look at the birds you are as meaningless as a
sparrow and I want man as an ecologist each animal plays a crucial role in the ecosystem you know hummingbirds are transporting pollen and the snakes reading the rats and the the the predators are regulating all of the prey animals and the trees are providing shade and the animals are engineering the the forest and the forest is engineering the animals you are not the birds are not pointless so ever wrote that was stupid and the people reading it are pointless either is the point many humans think that we are a dominant more important species than the snake that you just wrapped around my neck or the sparrow in the trees do you believe that's the case do you believe that humans are more important than if you were to remove humans from planet earth everything would get better in like days just like in covid like the national parks the bears are frallicking on the trails and everything if you were to remove ants from planet earth nature would collapse right so if you want to talk about ecological importance we're not that important that you have to think more holistically we're just one of many different species but we were able to you know rule the world because of our intellect but we are the apex are the human brain is the most complex thing
that we know of and so in that way we are the stewards we are the jungle keepers we are the ones that are supposed to be caring for the rest of this and so again whether or not we can I mean there's sort of this this people say that you know that this times are worse than they've ever been and it's like I go I'm down in the jungle right so I'm down there I miss out on a lot I come out I come up here and people are people are I rate about some new news thing right what someone said to someone or what someone and I always come up and I'm like man civilizations rise and fall the health of our oceans the existence of our rainforests we're dealing with a with a one way door in history right now you think world war two was big the ecological collapse of our planet is pending but it's not too late Jane was right there's still hope but we're the last generation it's going to have it and so it's like first of all if you feel meaningless go put your boots on and help you know if church show the day before d day was going oh it's probably not going to work what would have happened and it's like we are alive at the most exciting time in history not only is there a million things that need to be done this people all over the world is doing it so
one of the things I've started telling to young people the advice that I can give is go find someone that you admire go find a master who's doing the work that you want to emulate and put five years in working for them don't go try to start your own private right away don't go try to start saving the world before you know how it works go find the guy that's tracking the snow leopards that's up in the mountains find him follow him learn from him if it's a business go find the person that's doing whatever it is you want to do learn from them I've seen people brilliant people with great business ideas that don't have the people skills go learn those people skills go work with the people that have those people that easy common touch or they can just shake your hand all of a sudden you feel like they're your best friend my whole thing I mean us starting an organization that can protect the jungle me and JJ could could could whack and machete and catch all the anacons we want most of them was taking pictures of them we had this team that was like doing you know the motor could could could could it was going but it wasn't starting and then I mentioned the guy Stefan who was running teams at apple now this guy this man knows how to run a spreadsheet
this man knows how to run teams of people he knows how to organize things so he came in and what do you try trying to do you trying to do this want to do it this way you save a bunch of money by doing it this way and he started running the teams and so we needed we realized we we we needed things that we didn't even know existed and so again the relentless list the relentless list you you survived to another day but for people going out find those people because we learned things from these people that we meet I mean even from DAX he came in and provided the funding but also this is a man that won capitalism as a billionaire he's someone that knows how to run a business he said okay so this is how you're going to run your range of program tell me how you're going to do this just as a friend and consultant you end up learning so much from him the very antithesis of what I saw when you played the video of the uncontacted tribe is some of the things going on at the moment in California and Texas with humanoid robots and AI yeah it's like the opposite yes you know we live in opposite worlds yeah I wondered if you had any thoughts about this world we're heading into where people might have microchips in their brain
and we'll have humanoid robots some they're forecasting there'll be a billion of these humanoid robots in the future and AI is now so intelligent that they're saying within a year or two there'll be AI is that a smarter than every human that's ever lived and even one example of the humanoid robot situation that blew my mind is when one of the robots learned something all of the robots learn it and obviously you were just talking about there about having to learn from mentors with humanoid robots and the future that we seem to be huddling towards it seems like they might be the the apex species I wondered if you thought much about the technological acceleration of the earth and the risk of that and because it's the opposite of everything you're talking about in so many ways it isn't it isn't I mean I like I love living in modern times I think that like heart surgery and and your iPad and the cameras I think like I love so much of modern technology flight my god how I love flight we can go anywhere would it take in the eight months this new obsession that everybody has it not a lot of things get me biblical but it makes me think of the the you know thou shalt not with the false idols everyone is so obsessed about AI
shut up go outside touch some grass don't worry about the robots we don't live in minority report yet and it's like if it's coming first of all we are the engineers of our reality right it's us so where are these robots gonna come from unless we make them and if they're so smart well then get on your knees and pray to them you know it's like do whatever but I think that as as as more and more people like rebel against the AI slop they see in their feeds as more and more people appreciate real human art and what it takes a person to stare at a wall with with some paint and create something that could move you to tears I think that we're going through a period of delirious adolescence with a new technology just like at Y2K everyone is like everything's gonna shut down and nothing's gonna work and it's like okay great I'll be on a hike the world's gonna continue to work and you know they've been saying we're gonna have flying cars for how many years we still don't have them everyone's like we should go colonize Mars it's great fuck Mars though yeah let's fix this planet prove that we're capable of managing it's like the kid going I want to take over the company and the father going get your room clean
I think what you do might be hugely benefited by everything that's going on with technology and I in part because I think people are people's appreciation for community for nature for things that are irreplaceably human is only going to increase yeah I have you know I have a couple of like wild hypotheses and one of them is that people are gonna want to in a world where we no longer need to gather in cities for collective labor which is basically why cities exist in large part they will then want to be out in nature yeah because I'm as low of your need of being out in the trees and the all we get and the mental health benefits are gonna remain the same even if there is robots yeah actually if I don't need to be in a city where would I would rather be in the beautiful nature in the beautiful nature I was saying to my friends that I think people are gonna start buying up farmland and natural places because you notice that whenever one sort of makes it and gets rich enough that they can do what they want they go get a house in the country exactly where they can raise their kids breathe some air not just traffic exhaust and but what I'm what I'm not understanding those why everyone's so worried about it I mean everyone's acting like it's the beginning of Terminator 2 except
no one's catching on right and but but again if you listen to what's the guy's name who runs in video and jensen one yes his I listened to him on on Joe Rogan it was amazing because Rogan has the ability like most like like which is why he's so good at it he asked the questions we all want to ask and he was like what is AI going to take over and jensen was like listen AI is going to optimize how effective humans can be at their jobs right like he was like I think he said with radiologists he goes we thought we'd not need any more radiologists he's like it it made radiologists better at their jobs and it's like I think that the hysteria of like robots taking it's like well that's good let's use some robots to deliver packages like great but I don't think that this this this anticipatory doom that everyone's feeling on these fallen times of everything's about to change again real like literally actually guys go touch the grass like it's I'm serious like it's not I come back from the jungle where I'm fighting to save the trees that make the air that these people are breathing and I'm a little bit a little bit shocked by the the amount of hysteria that I'm seeing and like I'm down there getting hunted by narco traffickers and and and running
from the flames and these people like you won't believe what I saw on the news today and I'm like I got it I'm going back do you consume this stuff are you on social media no do you have apps and social media apps I um it's funny I got into a fight somebody I'm sure that we'll get this reaction for this conversation but people kind of get mad at me about this where I go I don't I don't want to that sort of civilizations rise and fall thing a lot of people get very offended because they're very invested in the news cycle and and they're very hysterical and they almost want to hold on to their hysterics right and to me it's very important I was just sitting at a table with people and they said you know the world's going to shit it's never been worse first of all live with the most peaceful time in history there's better technology we can save your life we can almost you know cure so many different diseases we've never we've have this expanding compassion where our species has learned to be more compassionate that differences don't make us less right and now we're even expanding that's understand like oh wait the other creatures on this planet matter too we've never been more dedicated to compassion I mean I was just at
a conservation conference and I was meeting people who were making period pads for girls in Africa who don't have access to them I know people who are trying to save cheetahs I I'm seeing people doing amazing work all over the news and you know what the news is reporting it was you know that there's an assassination in the Philippines we're tribal we're supposed to only know what's going on in our village not doom scrolling through a thousand tragedies a day that's of course it's going to send your brain on fire so I have I have none of that I go on to Instagram I've curated it so that it's my feet I see conservationists rescuing elephants I see a couple of artists that I really like I have a couple like it just all really cool stuff I never go to that like that page that just shows you the internet I never do that just don't do it just don't do it it's bad for you it's really really bad for you I watch people doing it scary when I did go to the Amazon I went with my now fiance and she wanted to do some plant medicine yes as I said you before we start recording I couldn't do it because apparently I hadn't followed the diet regime properly yeah but I know that you did ayahuasca and for anyone that
doesn't know ayahuasca is a powerful psychoactive brew from the Amazon used traditionally by indigenous cultures how did your experience with ayahuasca change you what happened and how did it change you oh god again I don't know why I'm very because I'm just I'm just in a mood today there's no filter I don't know this is one of the chapters I didn't know if I should put in the book because I got to take people through the whole thing because the shaman that we knew was the old shaman it was JJ's great JJ's old father's best friend and so he's old guy he's been mixing ayahuasca in the forest for decades and learned from the ancient guys now the first time I did it it wasn't such a big deal I saw some geometric patterns I threw up I had a conversation with a tree it was okay the problem is the old shaman at 80 something fell asleep while he was boiling the ayahuasca and it became more intense and its potency and so when we drank the normal dosage we were receiving a mega dose and I went on a trip that I would never ever ask to go on I'm talking about the creation of the universe the big bang I mean I went through worlds I for a while I was shapeless in outer space between solar systems I mean it was like it was horrifying and when we woke up the
shaman was gone you know the people drink ayahuasca they go I'm gonna go on a journey I'm gonna focus on this I want to I have my intentions over here and I want to this was this was just warm holes and explosions and and just just craziness and in the morning we found the shaman and he was laying in a stream naked like the way they find ET at the end of the movie and uh so what the hell happened and he said I overboiled the ayahuasca and he said by the way I retire and he retired as shaman for a whole week but but like that was my experience was that it was so intense that I was just happy to have physical form again I feel I felt like I died and came back it is very very powerful you said in the book I felt changed I felt changed in the sense that I had never you know I'd come close to dying a bunch of times I'd come but I mean to to be removed and you know if you go for surgery they put you out and it's black and then you come back this was I mean who the hell even knew it's like it's like opening it's like you've lived in a gigantic mansion with 3000 rooms your entire life but you've only ever lived in like one and then you take this stuff and all of a sudden you go whoa there's so many rooms and you have access to them and the doors
are all open and you're being sucked through all them at once and so it was like I mean at one point I was I mean you did jungle vibrates through you I took the form of different animals I mean it was insanity I don't I wouldn't recommend it to anybody what did the local people think it is as a compound as a psychoactive what do they think is happening do they think it's a religious experience absolutely that most of them believe that this is the gift of the gods to humans and it is linked between the spirit world and our world and they say that the Amazon was formed when the anaconda god slipped out of the murk the Milky Way and carved the rivers right and if you take the 40,000 species of trees in the Amazon and did trial and error to try and figure out which ones would interact with each other it doesn't really make sense that ancient peoples came to this by accident and so the shamans say that the gods gave this to humans so that we could interact with the other side what is jungle keepers we've used the word several times now and you know it's word on the front of your new book and I see it's written there on your chest but for anyone that doesn't know what jungle keepers is what the mission of it it is how they might be able to get
involved and help what is it jungle keepers is the method we developed to find a way to save the Amazon and what we did was this we worked at the local people we spent years understanding what the reality was on the ground jungle keepers is the system with which we actually are saving the Amazon rainforest it's how we employ the loggers and gold miners as conservation rangers but it's the way that we do that what we've done usually conservation is done through grant writing and government deals we've done this using modern technology using social media for good we've used I mean it was through Instagram that we got our first big funder it was through Instagram and podcasts that we've reached a lot of our smaller funders and today jungle keepers is the most direct way for people around the world to help the indigenous people protect the Amazon and what that means is we have a donor program people go to jungle keepers.org and whether it's for 5, 10, 100 some people do a thousand dollars a month they can directly protect the land and provide jobs for the local people and it's saving more animal heartbeats than endangered species and those entire uncontacted tribes all because people all over the world care and they're willing to
part with the price of a Starbucks coffee once a month so if people have been inspired by this conversation they can go to jungle keepers.org and on the website I'm on there now that you can give once in a small donation or you can give monthly anything from as you said the price of a coffee up to bigger donations if you're able to and there's some superb information and resources and videos on the website that explains more about the work being done. I'm certainly going to sign up to a monthly subscription. Thank you to donate keepers. No it means a lot because it's a shopping cart principle it's like if none of us do it it won't work yeah all of us do it it will work will make history. Well I'm going to sign up right now um definitely I'll give my monthly donation and I implore anyone else that can has the means to also do it because it's such an you know it's such a such an important beautiful part of the world for all the reasons we've discussed in a way that I think is often unappreciated and not not thought about enough because in part these messages don't get out there and most people don't realize that the oxygen we breathe comes from this part of the world and many of the medicines we've discovered and the research
that we continue to do originates from this part of the world I mean there's so many I wanted to talk to you about this there's so many medicines and um sort of medical research taking place in in this ecosystem that is incredible incredible and I was I was hearing I heard you talk about how one day you got an infection yeah antibiotics couldn't touch and someone took you into the jungle gave you some sap from a tree bark and it killed the infection yeah you see this where it looks like as somebody put a cigar out on my arm right there a little smooth bit that was a very rare disease I was living in a mud hut in India trying to track tigers there's only 3,000 tigers left although now it's gone up to five tigers are coming back so you know the success story but I was living in a mud hut in India trying to track tigers and I got this disease called tuliremia and it's so rare that when I got it I brought it back to New York went to the infectious disease doctor when he figured out what it was and I'd been in bed for like a month with this horrible infection in my arm this deep pocket of pus and and I was on antibiotics and he went this is so rare he goes do you mind if I call in my students my fellows he goes that he goes
guys you're never gonna see this again it's a disease that's tick-borne through rabbits and somehow gets into people and manifests with an infection on the right elbow he goes this is one of the rarest ones you're gonna see because this is rare they put me on double antibiotics I had already had a MRSA infection they were like look we got to really kill this thing and it was 2012 and my parents said whatever you do do not go back to the jungle with an infection because the jungle's just gonna make it worse and of course I went to the jungle we had stuff to do or we our station was in danger of dying so I had to go back with JJ and fix it up and I showed up and he looked at me because why is your arm taped up and I said wow this terrible infection said I've been in bed for two months I said I have no energy on all these antibiotics and he looked and he went this is okay and he goes no no come with me we walked out he marches out into the jungle hits this hits the tree with a machete collects the white sap rubs it over this and now this these sap have like a latex quality and when you heat them they they they they form almost like a rubber so it formed a rubber rubber cap over the infection now if you had pushed down
up a four plus with leak out he just went like this until it formed a seal and then he put a little bit into a concoction of leaf juice that he made made me drink that either way next day I woke up and the infection was denatured it was still a wound but it was no longer infected kill the infection one night the antibiotics hadn't been able to kill for two months and so stuff like that where he not only knew what to do he knew where to find it recently when I was stung by a stingray and I was an agonizing pain two of my friends collected bark which was JJ's nephew and brother it's good to be part of an indigenous family um they connect collected two different kinds of bark they boiled it into a poultice and they sucked the venom out of my out of my foot with plant medicine it's incredible and these are technologies we don't have from by the way yeah we're losing physical animals we don't want to lose species but we're also losing indigenous cultures we're losing dialect and and and anthropologists like Wade Davis will say that you know each language each each culture is a different manifest I said he wasn't he's a beautiful quote we said other cultures are not failed attempts at being you you know it's it's each of these is a different
manifestation of the human the different blossoms on the same vine and uh we're losing languages because what happens is roads come in to these communities they'll learn to speak Spanish let's say so they stop speaking essay huh you know and the same thing in India where you guys have seen this happening where like the kids in the village might speak a really local language and then all of a sudden everybody wants to go to the big city everybody has the internet and Instagram and TikTok and wants to make a little more money and they go and these we're losing languages and these each of these languages is a different way of expressing ourselves and so this is just this very interesting shift happening in the world right now where there's a lot of beautiful things that can still be saved and that's why it's like we're at this amazing time where there's there's still the old amazing things and we still have all this amazing new technology flooding in and more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before and so the feeling of apathy I don't get I don't understand how everybody isn't stoked I see you've got a wedding ring on oh this yes I am you know I know you're recently married I like yes two weeks ago two weeks ago one would ask how it's possible
for someone that's been so long living in the jungle to hold down a successful romantic relationship yeah um I think that the same thing happened with this that happened with the career where I said I think right around the time where I gave up I said it's never going to happen because what girl as a what girl could keep up with you know repeated seven months in the jungle and and um all the botflies and infections and anacondas and then forget now that we're being hunted by the narco traffickers and all this stuff now nobody nobody fit into the life and then actually it was on a I was giving a talk about the Amazon in California actually over a year ago and I met this girl and instantly we had a connection and and and it was the same thing it was like we we kind of had both reached that same point where both gone yet it's never gonna work because of our different lifestyles um and then and then it just and then it's just a cart you just when you know you know you got to know each other and then the only way I could know if she was really the one was to take her catching uh we went crocodile catching for cameine catching first night that she arrived she came up the river on the boat and we went out and we caught a crocodile held it together
I got to show her the dictating membrane and the the spikes coming out of it and it was just beautiful smooth friends it came in and then as we were floating down the river up to our next in the black water with the milky way above us and we're just sort of holding hands and I just looked over and I was like oh I think this is it and then I proposed to her in the treehouse so on top of the top of the jungle canopy with all the mist and all the animals singing um but it that um you know that makes me say I'm so I'm so glad that I waited you know it's like you have to wait until the time where it makes sense on that thing you know and I think you probably feel the same where um probably took you a while to find the right person and she comes on these expeditions with you know she's way more than that man I mean look there's like I said there's a lot of things I'm not good at um the planes trains automobiles the human world the ubers the fact you have to push a button the the apparently like I learned to come on my way to you the the Tesla handles work differently um she knows all that and so she's very good at keeping me organized and when we go to the jungle she's very good at being like hey don't forget to thank
those donors hey don't forget you think this is normal it is not normal teach people about those those leaf cutter ants and it's like she's really good at you know so she's totally integrated loves being in the jungle it is just incredible so it's most it's the most wonderful part of the journey so far I'd love to actually um you just mentioned leaf cutter ants and I did watch your video on Instagram about the leaf cutter ants and I think that was the moment I said to you before we start recording that I really wanted to go and do some sort of survival yeah um expedition in the jungle I could make this happen for you I think you I think you might be the guy but uh I did take a moment of pause when I watched this video one of the worst episodes yet of why you think you want my job but definitely don't really right now my tent is being dismantled by leaf cutter ants it's about 2am and I've been trying to sleep and there's about 10 million leaf cutter ants outside of this tent and all that we're doing is cutting leaf size holes out of my tent they are carrying away the nylon into the night and because the leaf cutter ants are working to dismantle every single thing that I own they're opening up holes big enough for me to put my
§04Transcript — part 4
fist through which means everything else in the Amazon is coming into my tent and because of that I keep turning on the lights I just woke up because there's a leaf cutter ant using its pincer jaws to bite my ear to try and carry off a piece and inside this tent right now our ants and termites and mosquitoes some sort of centipede hoppers moths and in some insects that I can't even identify this is one of those times where you know it's four more hours until morning if you get out of the tent you're gonna get destroyed by mosquitoes it's raining outside you're gonna get wet this is what camping in the wild is sometimes you put your tent in the wrong place and it'll be cutter ants and the gods of the jungle decide it's gonna be the worst night ever all I can do is try and get some sleep and I wake up every few seconds to try and slap something off my face or something flies up my nose this is one of those nightmare nights man I didn't think of ants as being the problem the thing that might derail my journey to the jungle but there's a lot of scary things in the jungle that quote you read about life being a moment of stasis among the dead amongst the the churning death march of the every thing you see in the jungle is going to be eaten at some point every jaguar every
butterfly every leaf if the amazon didn't have fungal my sylium growing through everything it would bury itself in leaves and cease to exist it is a recycling machine and so yes every time a baby is born they try to survive you look at that baby snake that baby snake might come out of its egg now that's an african ball python but you say like a baby boa constrictor comes out of its mother starts crawling around the jungle and it might just get eaten by a bird done and this is sort of back to what you're saying about when should people give up on the dream it's like look sometimes you get eaten by a bird right out of the hatch like but in the jungle the ants the mosquitoes the fungus the infections it's all trying to take you down you are calories the leaves which you don't realize the jungles and energy economy right those trees are stretching up to 160 feet because they're trying to reach above the other trees to get to the light because they want the sunlight that tropical sunlight is what gives them the energy to grow those big trunks and then all the other epiphytic plants the orchids and the lichens and the and the picture plants those are all growing on the branches and then down there in the shadows this trees waiting that have no
access to light less than 3% of the sunlight in the rainforest hits the ground and they're waiting beneath these titans and they're waiting for a little bit of sunlight and once a day a little bit of sunlight comes by and they grow that much it could take them and then when one big tree falls over and obviously you have this rush of sunlight capital all these trees shoot up and now those trees shoot up and what's happening the leaf cutter ants are taken there little bits of those leaves that have heavy chemical compounds to stop the leaf cutter ants from doing this but they take it and they bring it underground and they farm it they're one of the only other species that farms they farm fungus off of the leaves and that they eat but the entire thing is this vast interconnected matrix of competition for sunlight energy you carry so much our skin we are these gods of energy where we're a large animal walking through the forest and so the mosquitoes and the leeches and and the jaguar and the like all those things are like man if you died you realize how many animals you'd make happy like the jungle the jungle's saying come here come to me I'll recycle you are you scared of anything i'm scared that people won't wake up quick enough to save the systems
that keep us alive but i also am an optimist and i believe that we're at this point where people feel very lost and things look really dire and then it pulls back you know and i'm a big believer and i mean tigers went from a hundred thousand tigers in 1900 down to just like three thousand tigers now we're coming back up we're up around five or six thousand tigers humpback whales before before wailing you think you're like a hundred thirty thousand humpback whales they went down as low as a thousand humpback whales you almost lost humpback whales then they banned whales wailing and now humpback whales are back almost pre-wailing numbers same thing goes for bald eagles there's been so many conservation success we had a hole in the ozone layer everybody forgets us we had a hole in the in the only thing that protects us from being incinerated by the sun and we found a way to fix it so i'm an optimist not i'm not scared and this is my this is my best computation to the darkness this is my best way of saying look that that title when they told me that i didn't come up at the subtitle the what it takes was say what it takes to change the world i didn't come up with that but i thought it was too hefty i didn't want it it's felt
uncomfortable um but i do think that that the idea that that we can change the fate of things is an important thing to remember in these times jungle keeper what it takes to change the world this book is about the profound power of saying yes yes to one's calling yes to sticking with your dream when it comes at a high cost and yes to taking a stand to save what might otherwise be gone in a generation it's a story of occasion connectedness and hope what a brilliant beautiful rare book i'm gonna link it below for anyone that wants to continue this conversation and wants to learn more and go deeper um you're a brilliant storyteller thank you it's one of your great skills i don't know why you learned it because i i don't think they do classes for storytelling in in the amazon but it's certainly one of your great skills and it's a very important skill to wield when you've got a message you need the world to hear it's a very important story i think i learned it from Tolkien and from Arthur Conan Doyle and from Jane Goodall i mean those were the people my parents read to me growing up we have a closing tradition pull whether last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you
is if you only had three years left to live what would you regret not doing and are you working on that now if no why not if i had three years left to live a very much regret not finishing the mission that i started and so whether we like it or not we're going to we're either going to win and save it or we're going to lose three years would be like just barely able to see it i would regret so much coming so far and then not coming to fruition because you mentioned before the idea of a wave and it's like so much has happened and we have come to this place where so much is possible but we're still in the barrel and we're not done yet so if i had three years left to go i know that all those heartbeats are depending on me and however that's that would be my answer poor thank you it's an incredible work you're doing and i'm so glad that there's people in the world like you that are doing this and if anyone has been inspired by your conversation i really do highly recommend you go and make a donation or pledge support in some way over on the jungle keeper website because not all of us have the means or the ability to go out and do what you're doing on the front line of this issue but as you say it makes a huge amount of difference even people
donating small amounts of money because it compounds into something much more bigger and and those small gestures can save all the heartbeats that you're describing. thank god for it thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you